Taxi Listing:

NEW LISTING — DUBSTEP INSTRUMENTALS a la Skrillex, Deadmau5, Skream, etc., needed by a former VP of A&R working with a prolific Los Angeles based imprint/management company on high profile video games and movie trailers. Tracks should remain TRUE to the genre and provide the perfect element of DARK, TIGHT, and SYNCOPATED rhythms that give this unique genre its appeal. Be SURE to show off your “wobble bass” – a manipulated low frequency that provides a futuristic-style sound that is synonymous with the genre! The BPM should be around 137-142. AUTHENTIC Dubstep is needed, please don’t submit ’90s-style House, Drum&Bass, Trance tracks, etc. Broadcast Quality is needed (great sounding home recordings are fine). Please submit one to three instrumentals online or via CD. All submissions will be screened and critiqued by TAXI and must be received no later than Monday, February 27, 2012.
TAXI # S120227DI

So now that I have a decent amount of youtube subscribers, i’d love to get more videos uploaded but they all take forever. So I’m thinking about doing the acoustic song thing… no frills, just webcam, acoustic, and singing. That way I can get videos uploaded way more often.

Opinions?

This was actually a pretty quick video to put together! I finished Portal2 a couple nights ago, and thought the ending song was really well written… I love how Coulton changes keys from verse to chorus. I thought I’d take advantage of the catchy tune and lack-of-youtube-covers to try to cover it. I decided to do it on piano, and since I had my camera, Tay’s camera, and Troy’s camera, I was able to film three angles all at once.

Here is the original version, but I do have to warn you, the lyrics are slight spoilers, so if you are hyper-sensitive, i guess you shouldn’t listen.

But you should.

VideoPrep

Today I started working on some test shots for the video i have in mind for “Can’t Even.” Can you tell it involves multiple “me’s” playing together? The test is to try to make it look like we’re actually in the same location playing, even though it’s just a plain white background.

Believe it or not, it’s just one 1000 watt work light I picked up from home depot for $30 lighting the backdrop. The camera was set to f/2.8, 1/80 shutter, and ISO 1000 @ 24fps. Space is definitely an issue. I barely fit on the backdrop with the bass and guitar, and even then you can see the bass headstock falls out of scope for a little bit.

Then there are the drums. I was only testing the shot using the rockband drums, but a real drumset takes up way more room! Ugh! So that light i mentioned earlier was set to camera right, behind where i was standing, but directly parallel to where I was sitting at the rockband set, so you can see how much light is bouncing off me and overexposing me. It may look cool in the long run though.

And no, the video is NOT just going to be me just playing with myself (har har). I actually have a story line in mind.

I was also messing with luma-matting to try to mask out myself so I can have some overlap, although at this stage of my experimenting I have some problems with translucency when say, my bass guy covers up my guitar guy. You can see through the bass to the guitar guy behind him. Any video gurus have any ideas as to how I can auto-mask myself out of a white background without these translucency issues? Please don’t say rotoscope.

Will have to do another round of tests tomorrow.

Tracking

So today was my first day of spring break and all my lessons were cancelled so it was genuinely a day off. I was pretty productive though. If you’ve been following my tweets and stuff, you’ll already know that I started writing again. Which is good, because I’d been struggling with writer’s block for a while now.

Anyway, chorus melody and bridge riff came to me while i was in the shower last week, and I finally sat down to write it last Thursday. Since then I’ve managed to track everything except for the background harmonies, most of the work was done last night and today during the day.

To avoid being loud late at night, I tracked the guitars directly into the computer. This was good because the waveforms are much easier to see and decipher than when they’re compressed and blown out after you run your signal through your amp. The only downside was it was kind of a guessing game as to how my tone would sound in the end. But, at least I got to track guitars at 1 AM at night.

Today I re-amped the signals through my Mesa Boogie F100 and my Jet City 30 watt head using both an SM57 and a 421 to mix the sounds. The drums are DFH Superior 2 (of course) and the bass is direct through the ampeg svx plugin.

I also tracked piano and vocals today, and even managed to get a rough mix to share with you all. It’s at the top of this post, however I’m getting rid of it once the official version is done! I ordinarily wouldn’t even share this version, but I know there’s only about 25 – 30 people who read this anyway, so… I don’t see any harm in it!

Anyway, you can tell things are still unbalanced, and it’s missing harmonies, but it should be done pretty soon! I even have a video idea, I will keep my fingers crossed that I can get it filmed this week too. This is definitely the fastest turnaround I’ve had with a song from conception to completion. Under a week… so far!

Here’s an overhead shot of my desk. Such is my workstation… I’ve labeled everything to be helpful. Hah. ^_^

My Desk

This One’s For You

Tonight we had a show in Middleburg, VA for a community 80’s night party. Everyone seemed to have a good time, and I must say, Middleburg is quite the quaint little town. It’s about 45 minutes away from Falls Church down rt. 50, and it’s like a different state. It’s like you’re transported to this little southern town… pretty charming. There were tons of great photo locations on the way there, so I can see myself making my way back there sometime this spring.

Anyway, Tay came along with us to take photos and hang out. After we finished setting up I quickly borrowed her Rebel t2i so I could snap my photo of the day. It’s of Berry hamming it up for the camera right before sound check. Tay took a bunch of great photos, I hope she gets them edited and uploaded before too long.

Here’s another shot I took. More of an amusing shot than anything. The green light was on Phil in this picture so i turned it black & white, because green on skin = gross. When you don’t have time to eat, you gotta eat while you sound check!

Phil

Well, I started this within 4 or 5 days of my Katy Perry iPad video, and it took my until now to finish it. Honestly, i was like 85% finished about 3 1/2 weeks ago, but I just couldn’t find the spare time to get that last little bit in… until this morning.

This song is way more intricately arranged than the Katy Perry song. Significantly more time went into figuring out how to replicate all the instruments I heard, especially in regards to figuring out what sounds to use for each one. Turned out that the best sound for that one shaker part was the salt-shaker app.

I ended up splitting up the piano part into two different apps, as it was too difficult to try to squeeze all my fingers onto one and play it the way that was needed to play. And the guitar strum, well… there is no good way to strum a guitar on the iPad, so I put some delay on the fake guitar sound and played it as you see in the video. The delay kind of makes for a good “strum” sound. Kinda.

I was really stumped regarding what sounds to use for the vocals. I ended up settling on the NES video game sound, and decided to play it on the game-pad instead of the keyboard (which the App offers). But since I couldn’t switch octaves fast enough, I split the melody into three parts which I played separately. You see, the Cat piano doesn’t have the option to change octaves, so luckily all of Katy Perry’s song stayed in the same octave. Cee lo… not quite the same.

Unfortunately it’s been so long that I’ve even forgotten one or two of the apps I used to make it. Except for, obviously, the panda piano…

NESynth – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nesynth/id323362982?mt=8
Salt Shaker – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/salt-shaker/id303186136?mt=8
Music Studio – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/music-studio/id328608539?mt=8
Drums! – http://itunes.apple.com/app/drums/id311549739?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D2
Synth – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/synth/id364905862?mt=8
Magic Piano – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/magic-piano/id356416346?mt=8
Tambourine! – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tambourine/id343819796?mt=8
Dog Piano – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dog-piano/id322005897?mt=8
Panda Piano – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/panda-piano/id368328295?mt=8

Under the Tracks

Well, I’m actually posting this the day after. We had a gig in Richmond for a SCAN fundraiser (Stop-Child-Abuse-Now), and this is actually the 3rd or 4th year we’ve done it (I believe last year was cancelled due to snow). It’s always a good time. We get fed good food, and lots of young hip people come all decked out in their finery to support a good cause. It’s also held in this pretty sweet old-school train station in Richmond. The picture i took is where we load in, right underneath the railroad tracks.

Richmond Train Station

Unloading

Anyway, it was fun, and we were totally killing it until technical difficulties befell us… our Guitarist Kenny (not to be confused with our soundguy Kenny) blew his amp fuse. But everyone still seemed to have a good time.

Okay, I guess I’ll be posting again tonight with Day 63. Crazy, see you then!

Soundguy Kenny

Guitarist Kenny

Bass Player / Male Model Philip

Yep… Mike.

My POV

Well, I finally finished it. As I said in an earlier post, adding video to this whole recording business makes everything take 3x as long… and THEN you have to edit the video. Although I learned a couple things.

I set up two cameras for each take, which added to the length of recording ’cause i had to mess with two cameras the whole time. I pretty much only used one angle for each instrument… pretty much. So next time I do something like this, I may not do as much with the cameras. One angle is probably fine.

I didn’t do much to the song. You’ll notice it’s a couple of clicks slower and has a modern spin on the sound, but it’s pretty much the same ol’ beatles track. I actually started working on this song before the Teenage Dream ipad cover was even an idea in my head, but due to it being a pain in the butt to record I put it off until now.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy, and for reference, here is a link to the original song: YouTube

Well, another year has come and gone. It’s really amazing how fast the years seem to fly by nowadays. This year is significant because it has now been 10 years since I graduated from high school in 2001. It’s another one of those milestones that always seems so far away, yet is suddently upon me.

I don’t feel old though. So that’s good. Actually, some girls (and I emphasize girls) thought I was 17 at the show on New Years. I think that’s a bit of a stretch…! I should have been like: “Yeah, I’m still in high school… as a teacher.”

Speaking of New Years, Judo Chop played the annual Falls Church NYE celebration called “Watch Night.” I was speaking to Gordon, a supporter and organizer of the event, about how my high school band “7 Past 6″ played at a special teen stage back in… 2000? He made some remark about how that was probably the first year that Falls Church ever did the event. Which does make me feel kind of old!

It was a really crazy day though. Very long. I got out and about early enough to catch lunch with my old friends Liz & Roger. You can see some photos from that excursion in my previous post. After that it was rush home to get my gear together so I could get to Gordon’s office by 3:00 to set up.

On the docket for the evening was an acoustic performance at Gordon’s medical practice from 7 – 9 PM, and then the main stage from 9:15 – 11 PM. The only problem with those time slots is that it doesn’t leave much time to get ready. So we went out to do a little pre-emptive set up at Gordon’s at 3:00, and then left to get our set lists in order and grab a bite to eat since we definitely wouldn’t have time once the main stage was set up.

So we hung out for a bit at the Hunan Cafe while we waited for the police to shut down the street, and then headed over to set up our stuff at the main stage. Whew, it was pretty hectic, but we got it all set up. We started unloading at around 5 PM, got everything soundchecked by around 6:45, but the entire event was supposed to start at 7 and we had to move all our gear aside so the opening acts could get their stuff on stage! We barely had time to set up lights, but Ken stayed behind while we ran over a block to play acoustic and finished setting up our lights.

We took advantage of the acoustic set to play songs we don’t usually play. We actually drew from the list of songs I typically teach my students since I knew most of them already. It was easy enough for Berry and Lumer to follow along, and we had some fun in the low-pressure acoustic situation.

Mood Lighting

Nevermind the Creepy Drummer Behind Me

As soon as we were done, we threw our gear in the basement of Gordon’s medical practice and ran over to the main stage. When we showed up, there was a dude playing his spoons and singing on stage, so we got some cushion time to set up behind him and make sure everything was ready to go.

All in all, I think we played pretty well and we seemed to get a good response. I had family there to support of course!

And they had this awesome dragon thing that I wish I could have gone on…

Awesome.

Here are some shots of us playing, courtesy of Gretchen (using my lens and Tay’s camera).

Happy New Year!