Masquerading as a Musician

I almost always have some song bouncing around in my head; usually it's something I just heard on the radio.  But every so often I get a certain drum beat stuck in my head with no song to back it up.  I don't know if it's a fragment of something I've heard before or just inspiration, but one day I decided to do something about it - I opened up my copy of Guitar Pro and wrote it down.  It took me a little while to transfer the beat from my head to musical notation, but eventually I got it figured out.  What follows is the result (click for a larger image):

Then one day about a week or two later I was screwing around in Guitar Hero and remembered that they had a song creation mode that they call GHTunes.  So I decided to try and transfer this drum beat that I wrote to a custom song in GHTunes.  After some tinkering I got it how I wanted it, then decided that wasn't enough.  So I laid down a bass track to go with it (which was surprisingly simple).  I thought about doing a rhythm guitar track, but given how the song sounded so far, I thought it would be best to skip that.  Then came the challenging part - the lead guitar track.  I am not a guitar player.  I have a general sense of what I think sounds good in regards to lead guitar, but trying to write something new was a completely different story.  

Basically here's how the process went:

1) Write an intro

2) Write a main riff

3) Write a bridge

4) Spend two hours tweaking the intro so that it sounded right, even though it's like 10 seconds long

5) Decide that the bridge and the main riff should be switched

6) Decide that the intro sucked and that the bridge would be the new intro

7) Decide that I actually liked the intro and rewrite it from scratch

8) Spend two more hours tweaking the intro AGAIN

9) Accept the fact that I don't know how to write guitar parts and move on

To elaborate on steps 4 and 8, I basically spent 5 minutes writing a simple version then 2 hours doing things like "move this note up one step (like from D to E)" and see how it sounds" and "move this note forward by one eighth-triplet of a measure and see if that sounds better".  It was actually pretty interesting trying to get it to sound how I wanted it to sound.

At this point the track was about a minute long, so I copied the main riff a few times and added an outro (which in my case is the same as the intro, but at the end) and called it good.  I would venture to say I spent at least 4x as much time on the lead guitar part as on both the bass and drum parts combined.  The result is here:

Link to YouTube

If you can't see the video for whatever reason (boss walking by, slow connection, etc), here is a link to an audio-only version of the song (and don't forget to put headphones on if you're at work!).  The lead guitar sounds terrible in that version, but I think you can get the essence of the song.

I have since started two more songs that are soundly in the "rock" genre rather than whatever the hell this one is, and I will post them when I finish them.  So that's how I have been spending my time the last few days - attempting to write some songs.  Please let me know what you think of the first one, I'd love to hear your comments.

Too Young to Die

Well, I figured I'd make it official (nothing is official until it happens on the blog) - there is no band anymore.  I kept lying to myself saying that people were just too busy or sick or whatever, but eventually I admitted what I had known for awhile - it just wasn't going to happen.  One thing that I consider to be an essential truth of life is that people make time for what is important to them, and it was clear to me that people just weren't making time for the band anymore.  I think also one of the band members didn't like another's musical style, so this person may have just quit and I wasn't informed, but my way sounds a lot deeper and more romanticized so I'm sticking with it.

I think I would like to try and join another band someday (one that will last for longer than two months), but for now it's just not realistic.  I don't own an acoustic drum set and probably can't buy one until I move out of the apartment.  At least I can keep practicing in the meantime on the e-kit.

It's unfortunate, but I have still been playing video games to get my drumming fix.

The number jumped up quite a bit since last time (276 songs) for two main reasons - there are ~50 songs in Guitar Hero:Metallica (GH:M), and I finally downloaded the 20 free songs for RB2.  However, I have still been buying new songs in Rock Band as well.  Some recent additions of note are "Stupify" by Disturbed and "Smooth Criminal" by Alien Ant Farm (remake of a Michael Jackson song).  I'm also still making up my mind about a live version of "School's Out" by Alice Cooper.  Classic song, but not very interesting on drums.  As a side note, Smooth Criminal is SUPER fun on drums.  It would immediately be in my top 10 except it gets really hard during the guitar solo (yes, the drum part gets hard too) and I need to use overdrive so I don't fail.

So if anyone out there wants to play Rock Band or GH:M, you're welcome to stop by the apartment and play.  I will certainly make time for that.

A New Look

I decided to get artistic one day so I bought some construction paper and got to work.  I just thought it would be fun to label my drums with colors the way you see it on a standard Rock Band drum set.  Here is the result:

This is what I call the "Rock Band labels".  I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but I also added another crash on the right side there (neatly labeled with green construction paper).  If you ignore the left crash, you can kinda treat the kit as having "zones" that make it very similar to a RB kit.  That is shown below:

As an interesting sidenote, the kit looks a little intimidating to play on, but it's fairly straightforward to play it like a regular RB kit if you so choose.  Just ignore the cymbals:

That's actually what I do on some harder songs.  Well, I still use the ride (blue) and crash (green) cymbals, but sometimes I ignore the hi-hat (yellow) because it's easier to play hard sections without crossing my right hand over my left.  I also made some more cymbal-shaped pieces of paper for the "Guitar Hero: Metallica" setup.  That particular layout is shown below:

It's slightly awkward because the yellow tom doesn't have an analog in the GH:M setup.  In Guitar Hero games, the yellow note is always a cymbal - sometimes hi-hat and sometimes a second crash.  It's essentially useless, except when (as mentioned above) I want to be lazy and play the yellow tom instead of the hi-hat.

Anyways, that's how things are now.  It's pretty fun to play with everything labeled this way, even though it doesn't help me much anymore.

The Highest of Hats - Part 3

Time to wrap up this series of posts about the hi-hat.  This last one will be short - it's just a demonstration of me using the hi-hat pedal within the context of Rock Band.  Here is a video I took of me playing Radiohead's "Creep".  Watch for the single blue notes within a long string of yellow notes - that's where I lift up my foot to switch the hi-hat from closed to open and then back again:

First - the audio track is not the same as the note chart, so it won't quite line up when I miss a note.  Second, special thanks to David Shek of Wounded Soul - he suggested the song, did the editing and put in the intro.  He and all the other good people at Doc's Rockband Mods are amazing.

A few more notes about the video -

1)  In case you didn't notice, it's actually two separate runs spliced together.  I only have one camera so I had to record the chart and the pedal separately.

2)  The long stretches of blue notes (like the ones that start at 1:22 and 2:25) are not the hi-hat - they are the ride cymbal.  That's why my foot is still down on the pedal - I'm playing a different cymbal.

3)  I can't believe I missed some easy parts in this song.  0:26 and 3:02...wtf.  Nailed the fill at 3:05 though - I was happy about that.

4) The hard part at 2:20 when I try to hit an open hi-hat and a kick pedal - that takes some coordination that I don't really have yet.  On a brighter note, if you watch the pedals during that part (the hi-hat pedal and the beater of the kick pedal), I did actually hit it correctly and kept my combo there on the pedal run, just not on the chart run.

So that wraps up my 3-part series on the hi-hat (my hi-hat trilogy, you might say).  I hope you liked it.