AHHH

So I was in Chicago this weekend, as I mentioned before, and couldn't really get much done in regards to cleaning up my stuff, recording or mixing. 

And I also find out, as I was getting ready to leave, that I lost my fucking flash drive that actually DID have anything I recorded on it. 

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Gdamnit. Well... let's hope I can find my flashdrive... or that I can work with the random stuff that MIGHT be saved on one of my school computers where I was recording. :(

Nevertheless, I plan on submitting SOMETHING to Dan by Tuesday. I'm going to be kind of pissed if I can't submit everything I have been working on. I was actually pretty excited about it. Oh well. 

Done-ish

Well, I'm basically done with my album. Just a few more songs to mix. Even recorded a guitar solo last night (rare for me).

This album...was very...very hard. I had to cut ANOTHER song, and wrote an instrumental track to end the album. I'm down to only about 24 minutes, and there won't be any more. I'm not particularly happy with myself, but the songs I have are good, and I think people will like them.

I also spent the last 2 days doing lyrics and recording vocals. Possibly to the dismay of my friends at the Intercontinental Music Lab, I think this album is space-themed as well. Other than that, I really have no idea what it's about.

I'm a little down about this album...I really wanted to raise the bar set by my last album, but I'm not sure I did. This is my last album in college, too, and I think I'm a little disappointed with it. Still, it sure sounds good.

Either way, I can't wait to hear everyone else's albums...hopefully I should get the majority tonight!

iLyricise Version 1 complete

Ding ding. That's the sound of my lyric writing machine being switched on. It's worked out alright in the end.
I've set it up so that you tap a word into a box, hit a button, then it goes off and tries to write a song about that subject.

The way it works:
It looks up the subject you typed in on Wikipedia. It grabs all the words from the main page about that subject on Wikipedia (so if your subject isn't on wikipedia it won't work).
It then ranks the words based on how many times they appear on the page, and lists them in reverse order of popularity (meaning you don't get a list consisting of "if", "and", "or" etc. which wouldn't be very inspiring. I'm pleased with it but will work on a follow up version which has a stab at sentence structure.

iLyricise: http://tinyurl.com/asjhxz

I've really enjoyed being involved with Record Time this time around and will definitely compose some music next time round. Now I'm off to finish off my track for Superheroes of Space.

Days 3 and 4?

A lot has happened in the past few days.

I finished writing my music. I wrote 6 songs, and hit 32 minutes. Then, I decided to do something drastic: I cut one of the songs! I'm back down to 25 minutes, but I don't care...the 5 I have are fantastic, and I didn't want a mediocre 6th song dragging the album down. Also, I kinda like the idea of having 5 songs...this CD will be sort of the evil twin brother to my Mass album, which also had 5 songs.

I did bass and keys today...now I've got everything done but lyrics/vocals. I don't know what they're about yet, but I think I know the album title, and I have a song called Cherry Blossoms and a song called Super Dude.

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but this album sounds almost too good. The compression on the drums just makes this whole thing absolutely rip. It is teeth-shatteringly heavy. I think with this one I have pushed my MBox 2 to the limit...I'm going to go ahead and say this is as close as you can get to a big-studio sound with a 2-input, $300 inteface (well, 1 input now, the other one died).

Anyways...I like this one. A lot. I'm pretty excited...but still pretty sick. It's a good thing this album is not a happy one, because the vocal performance you hear may involve a good deal of physical pain.

Pipes and Dappers

Well my automatic lyric generating project is sending me off in all sorts of directions. I may end up just scrawling down the full concept onto a piece of paper, scanning it in and uploading it. There's now way I can work out how to do the stuff I've been thinking of. In the meantime here's a Yahoo Pipe which outputs words selected from a random article on Wikipedia whilst ignoring common boring words, and, amongst other things, any word with "a" in. The list of words seems to refresh every 5 minutes.I've taken the link away as it linked to an old broken version of iLyricise which I've now deleted.

Day 4.

I hope to finish alot of my work Thursday.  I'll finish layering some tracks so my friend will be ready to sing a little jazz tune with the lyrics she wrote. After that, i'm hoping to finish a little instrumental piece I composed.

Day... 3?

All I have is the three songs I wrote like last week.
I have some "lyrics" written down... don't know if I'll actually turn them into a song, or spoken word, or just keep it as written poetry.

I'm kinda screwed this weekend because I'm going back home to Chicago from Friday until Sunday, sooo I don't really have any way to work on my music. Well, that's a lie. I suppose I can mess around on my piano and see what happens.

I'm supposed to collaborate via internet on a few songs with a friend of mine, so I hope he sends me his guitar tunage soon.
I also gave my hip-hop-ish song to this dude in my sound design class to see if he would lay down some sweet percussion beats for me, and he liked it... so that's a start!