My subthread with Mare is continued here: [url]http://www.pirouzu.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8179&p=150075[/url]

By all means, continue postin' yr songs!

[quote="Marekenshin"]I've been wondering if I ought to start using Winamp or something again. Should probably look into that.[/quote]
I've been using Winamp for yeeears. It's by far my favorite media player, although, to be fair, I haven't really tried any new ones for a long time.

Unfortunately, Winamp's support has been discontinued, but it did recently get bought and may see an update.

Anywho, I like Winamp because it has amazing community support, it's reliable as fuck, it's simple, and [i][b]supports global hotkeys[/b][/i] so I can just map my keys to Alt + z,x,c,v,b to go back a track, play a track, pause a track, stop a track, and go to the next track without having to switch windows and shit.



Fuck VLC. What a shitty media player.

I use Foobar2000. It's built on some kind of jscript derivative that's very straight forward so i've been slowly working on my own skin for the past couple of years and this is the result.

I love album art, so I built the theme around a catalogue view with covers that sorts alphabetically by album title. I have a traditional list view as well, but most of the time i'm either using shuffle or straight-play so it dosen't really matter.

[img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1244235/Hosted%20Files/newfoo_1200px.png[/img]

Spike, (don't) stop posting such ridiculous examples of good aesthetics, you're making the rest of our computers and music practice rooms embarrassed.

Picked up a keyboard to start composing stuff on because, even though I don't play piano, I find it easier to write stuff on it than anything else. On Spring Break currently, hoping I'll be able to record something while on break. Have a rough draft of a little piano tune I composed, but 1) I'm not done and 2) I'm actually not good enough at it to play it at a decent speed.

We've got a new EP coming next month. Two goodies on it. Stay tuned.

https://soundcloud.com/midnight-down/to ... ustics-etc

I think the only thing that had me sitting on this one for so long without calling its structure complete was trying to figure out what I wanted to play on the first bridge besides just chords.

So for the past 4 years, I've played drums for this band called Slums of Utopia, which is mostly just me and a friend from college who writes songs and plays rock guitar. We started out as a very Chili Peppers-influenced band, but have branched out into more varied flavors of alt rock over the years (there's some Queens of the Stone Age, Incubus, Guster, and Mountain Goats influence thrown in there... plus a touch of pillows influence from yours truly ).

The band's been in flux, with several lineup changes over the past couple of years (our longtime bassist just moved away a few weeks ago, so now we're seriously shorthanded - it's only me and the guitarist/singer now). Plus, there are still some "known issues" with our material/performing that we want to work out, and once we have a stable lineup again we're hoping to record an actual EP (or maybe even an album, we'll see). Still, I figured I'd show you guys some of the musical stuff I've been working on the past few years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLFY22kjdKU
This is a live recording from a show we just played a few weeks ago, and one of our newer songs. (The drums for the verse were heavily inspired by Nobaranai Taiyou!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-ohUobfrIQ
This is from a couple of years ago, back when we had a lead guitarist (who left the band about a year ago). This is probably our oldest song: it's the song that our singer originally showed me that convinced me that I wanted to play music with him.

[quote="Marekenshin"]https://soundcloud.com/midnight-down/to-the-moon-acoustic?in=midnight-down%2Fsets%2Fold-demos-acoustics-etc

I think the only thing that had me sitting on this one for so long without calling its structure complete was trying to figure out what I wanted to play on the first bridge besides just chords.[/quote]

I liked your singing! I like chords you used here in the intro. I also liked the quiet to loud and slow to fast dynamics between the sections.

[url]https://soundcloud.com/curtis-pea/betrayal[/url]

Even though I've written and co-written 77 songs, I wanted to start from the bottom and then move my way to the top.

Hey, speaking of cool chord progressions, I like the pattern on this one. Did you record with just a single mic? Sounds as though the vocals change in volume/clarity in some spots (which I feel like I always get when working with my laptop). Most of the better single-recording-input takes I get these days are done with my smartphone and then transferred over to the computer.

[quote="CARNVAL372"]I also liked the quiet to loud and slow to fast dynamics between the sections.[/quote]

Thanks! This is actually something I really like a lot but some people don't; having a bit of looseness to the tempo to accentuate emotional dynamics a bit more. It works much better with just the acoustic/vocal style, but my dream is to someday have a band that plays songs in a mix of tight and loose timing constantly lol.

[quote="Marekenshin"]Hey, speaking of cool chord progressions, I like the pattern on this one. Did you record with just a single mic? Sounds as though the vocals change in volume/clarity in some spots (which I feel like I always get when working with my laptop). Most of the better single-recording-input takes I get these days are done with my smartphone and then transferred over to the computer.

[quote="CARNVAL372"]I also liked the quiet to loud and slow to fast dynamics between the sections.[/quote]

Thanks! This is actually something I really like a lot but some people don't; having a bit of looseness to the tempo to accentuate emotional dynamics a bit more. It works much better with just the acoustic/vocal style, but my dream is to someday have a band that plays songs in a mix of tight and loose timing constantly lol.[/quote]

I could with my smartphone but the clarity wouldn't be that great. I also prefer to use a DAW so I have more options to do on the recording. I used my old USB mic to record everything. The guitars were recorded separately from the vocals. I seem to have horrible mic techniques as of now, trying to fix this problem, which is the reason my vocals don't stand out.

I've been trying to add more beats to my music so I can be able to fit the lyrics, it's hard to do but worth it because the vocal melody flows a lot better this way. I did this technique with Tim which originally had a narrower meter. I exented that meter so I can be able to fit the lyrics.

Yeah writing songs in a loose manner makes things interesting, it creates interesting time signatures, it also adds polyrhythms to the melody (hear Bubbletown's Happy Zoo), and the lyrics seem to flow better too. John Lennon was a big fan of this technique, listen to Happiness Is A Warm Gun for this example. I haven't gotten myself to write in this style because A, I write the music first and then the lyrics later, and B, I record everything separetely.
But I've adding the loose style slowly to my songs to be able to fit the lyrics in my songs. But it's also hard to do it this way since I would have to rerecord the song again with the added beats at different sections in mind, and then record the vocals over it to see if I added enough beats to fit the lyrics.

Part of the issue may also be the USB mic, though. You basically want to be able to get enough sound boost from the mic that you can avoid singing forcefully and exert maximum over your vocal tone, which a better mic could probably help with. Different mics have different ways of taking in sound and different effective ranges/sensitivities, so sometimes it's more finding the right microphone for YOU, imo. Truly good mic technique is actually pretty tricky, though, at least for me (still learning to sing consistently with a mic live).

Also, I did notice the thumps on the guitar in that track, which I also liked. I'm just recently starting to think about how to play the guitar in a more rhythmically accentuated way, but haven't really taken to knocking or tapping on the guitar for effect yet. I should try adding that into things.

[quote]I write the music first and then the lyrics later.[/quote]
I tend to start with just the guitar and vocals and then come back later on to add the other instruments for a full band arrangement. I find that approach lets me polish and evolve the song over a longer period in that loose way if I want to, whereas before I used to focus on laying down discrete sections. Nowadays, I may work on a song with just the guitar and vocals for months (up to half a year or more!) before I really consider it "ready" for a band arrangement.

You can also make multiple arrangements across the course of a song's development, of course, although like you said that does require a lot of extra recording and mixing work. I'm super lazy and hardly record anything aside from quick demo sketches of a song when I finally feel it's reached it's mostly-finished form, and again if it reaches a more finalized form later, haha.

[quote="Marekenshin"]Part of the issue may also be the USB mic, though. You basically want to be able to get enough sound boost from the mic that you can avoid singing forcefully and exert maximum over your vocal tone, which a better mic could probably help with. Different mics have different ways of taking in sound and different effective ranges/sensitivities, so sometimes it's more finding the right microphone for YOU, imo. Truly good mic technique is actually pretty tricky, though, at least for me (still learning to sing consistently with a mic live).

Also, I did notice the thumps on the guitar in that track, which I also liked. I'm just recently starting to think about how to play the guitar in a more rhythmically accentuated way, but haven't really taken to knocking or tapping on the guitar for effect yet. I should try adding that into things.

I tend to start with just the guitar and vocals and then come back later on to add the other instruments for a full band arrangement. I find that approach lets me polish and evolve the song over a longer period in that loose way if I want to, whereas before I used to focus on laying down discrete sections. Nowadays, I may work on a song with just the guitar and vocals for months (up to half a year or more!) before I really consider it "ready" for a band arrangement.

You can also make multiple arrangements across the course of a song's development, of course, although like you said that does require a lot of extra recording and mixing work. I'm super lazy and hardly record anything aside from quick demo sketches of a song when I finally feel it's reached it's mostly-finished form, and again if it reaches a more finalized form later, haha.[/quote]

Yeah I have a better mic than my USB mic, but since I don't have an audio interface other than a mixer which is useless since it doesn't have a USB jack to connect to my laptop, i can't use it. I might still have my old audio interface somewhere in my house but I don't know where. But my dad said he will let me know if he finds it. So right now I'm stuck with USB mic as is.

I listened to my track and I'm wondering where you hear these "thumps" at. Lol I'm doing nothing sexier than just strumming at some parts but mostly just downpicking like I'm playing it like an electric guitar. Lol And I'm playing each chord per beat in the meters. Though I did play two chords that were off beat after the first chorus.

I tend to prefer to finish a song as quick as possible which usually is done in 2 hours. After 2 hours of working I would feel exhausted, so the idea for me is to cut off time asap during writing, mixing, and recording. Though if it's a left field project then probably a few days. The polishing comes later and the arrangements also come later. Though I have done arrangements during a song's development in the past but I haven't been doing it lately because it just it takes too long.

I'm super lazy about the writing process and try to only do it when I feel like it and such, but I also just like to slow-simmer things for as long as possible these days as a personal preference to see what deeper nuance I can wring out of a thing that I may not initially see. I mean, I'm still writing super simple bullshits, but I think giving myself extra time and space to slowly shape the songs has been good for getting results that please me.

Also, the thumps I mentioned were just when you tapped the 1-2-3-4 at the end of various sections. Simple but nice.

Now that I have some music recording equipment, I have been able to experiment. Here is an album I finished up a few days ago. I'm still a little novice when it comes to editing and recording...

https://augustlives.bandcamp.com/album/coned