Not only was gaming an exercise in personal freedom that was becoming less a staple of my pastimes, but with my increased dive into the modding communities I would run into programs like Milkshape 3d and eventually an illegal copy of 3d Studio Max. I'd even later get my hands on a legal version of Maya - Personal Learning Edition, and from here on out I'd be utterly fascinated by 3d. Working with Valve's Hammer editor I would make maps with a buddy of mine and we would play them on Private Lan get-together on occasion just to see who could beat who on who's map.
Art would continue this year to become even more prominent as I wanted to pursue anything and all things art. Delta College didn't however at the time offer any sort of audio or music production; but with my parents pushing me so hard to get A degree I ended up having to work hard to focus on the general ed. courses.
Instead of exit exams we had senior projects which allowed us to explore something new and had to write an essay about our experience, documenting it, as well as build or do something. I chose to build my own guitar amp.
Most of the actual labor and work on the project didn't come until end of March that year. I still have all my old project files and documents including the essay that was required. This project cost just shy of 3 grand in total as my parents were EXTREMELY generous helping me buy all the parts as well as the rack gear I wanted to use for the amp head! I was so excited to finally get a piece of gear that had tube power behind it, and my dad even mentored and helped supervise the building of the cabinet with his power tools.
In March, my parents helped me get that used amp-head setup: A Mesa Boogie Triaxis, and SimulClass 2:90 power amp to accompany my cabinet. The items were worn and definitely showed signs they had been toured with. Still, even used they weren't cheap!
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| Mesa Boogie Triaxis |
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| Mesa Boogie Simul-Class 2:Ninety |
I was also taking a great liking to Photography class and learning how to shoot and develop my own film, and make print enlargements. I loved getting to experiment with light and my dad also helped me with some of the setups I wanted to do.
My private collection of creative writings was growing pretty fast. By the end of 2003 I had written over 54 poems and lyrics. Most were crappy and I never published them but a few of my poems I actually got the courage to post on my Deviant Art account like this one:
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| Historical Relics on Deviant Art |
As for my audio projects? I was playing around with Acid 3's new features. The biggest change I had noticed was the layout now had plugins pre-inserted on each audio track. By default it would insert it's own Track EQ already enabled and zero'd out.
(I'm going to just mention now that otherwise noted, all screenshots from Acid are taken from opening the old projects up in Acid Pro 7 - the latest version.)
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| Bass Test |
On this one I didn't know much about automating plugin parameters so I simply applied a different method for applying the reverb effect to one track and then copying the track and removing the reverb effect to fade between the wet and dry versions. Noize Loops was used extensively, but the bass was just a straight experiment.
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| As viewed in Acid Pro 7. |
These two tracks I played on a friends nylon guitar and recorded with an SM57 straight into my sound card. I didn't know how to control the proximity effect that was happening because of the acoustic phenomena that occurs when putting the mic directly next to the sound hole. This marked a point where my curiosity about how people get better quality recordings and learning about how sound works would later lead me to pursue a higher audio education. Both tracks were basically just the main riffs featured and no real arrangement. I just played live for as long as I could.
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| One Shameless Step as viewed in Acid Pro 7. |
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| Acoustic Improv |
The whole song idea was almost completely impromptu as I hadn't come up with any of the riffs beforehand except the very intro concept. I just played and figured it out as I went.
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| Attention to Detail |
Attention to Detail layered drum loops from Sony's Fast Breaks (another library that came with the Acid Pro program), along with some synth drums I had stumbled upon in Buzzmachines and rendered out, chopped into loops and started using in various songs. I had started playing with the "double track" feature on my amp as a setting for messing with the timing and panning of the guitar into the different virtual amp setups (you could have 2 discreet setups) to create a stereo guitar track with a single guitar. The end result was a really unbalanced stereo signal and at the time I didn't think to create dual mono tracks and record each track independently and mix in later in
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| Reclaimed |
Finally getting into some more complex recordings and fuller ideas. Still favoring to do single passes straight through the songs. This was also the first time I attempted to record with my Mesa-boogie Triaxis. The Triaxis has specific record outputs directly from the preamp and this I just picked a setting I liked and played my NJ Supreme through it to my sound-card.
I started spending more time crafting my own drum patterns in modplug and just using samples from other trackers' track files such as Ice Lizard. I would take those patterns and render them out and bring them into Acid Pro and chop them into loops, then layered those chopped loops with another track I extracted the drum samples from.
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| Modplug Track programming |
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| Modplug Track drum programming |
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| Contemplation |
I couldn't understand at the time how Buzzmachines BPM and Ticks Per Beat really worked to arrive at the timing signature that ran the audio back then so I just worked the track as best I could.
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| The Age of Today |
Getting even more complex with my ideas and thinking more about layering, and playing around with panning for guitar layers. My inspiration kept growing from the Sevendust Animosity album, especially the song Solitude. the arrangement and everything about the song really connected with me. I loved how they moved in and out of harmony and melody into the harsher parts so fluidly. When I set down to make this track it was really just drawing out a drum beat to play along to, and jamming.
Messing with synths and reverbs to create this orchestra vibe. I unfortunately don't have the Buzzmachines project file anymore (lost to time of course). It took me a while to get the hang of this tracker and composing in the matrix (no pun intended). It's still not something I feel completely comfortable with as having to think about things gets in the way of trying to think about the idea. I eventually brought the loop into Acid Pro and extended it out.
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| Dieselfactory |
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| Nine Stopping Time |
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| Relive |
Most of these tracks revolved around just playing guitar all the way through without stopping, mistakes or no mistakes. This track, like most of the others, were chances for me to just jam and improvise the song. I've never been a "soloist" but being able to play lead parts was.
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| Anixiapolis 19 in Modplug Tracker |
The simplest way to get the drum track by itself was to just go into the sample window and delete all samples that weren't percussive. While I really wanted to try and create my own drum patterns with the samples from this track, I loved the drum pattern so much once I had deleted the other samples, that I just rendered it out and chopped it up.
A lot of trackers could be really clever (or really sloppy) with their event placement across the various channels. Essentially you could trigger a note that references any sample at any position in any channel. So, often trackers would have their note triggers placed randomly across the channels that it made it very hard to find and mute that channel to isolate an instrument. Not all though, some were actually pretty good about organization.
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| Into The Open |
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| Modplug drum pattern. |
You can even see in the Acid screenshot above sections where the main rhythm track at the very top gets louder and softer on the bottom waveform view in the stereo track.
On the right you can view the basic pattern being constructed. After rendering it out I would chop it up separately but for this track I decided to keep the entire sequence as a single wave file, and in Acid I just duplicated the clip to make the whole arrangement longer.
The final bit to layering the drums is at the very bottom where I used my samples I had created from a buzzmachines project I had experimented with creating synth drums. I just chopped up the pattern to fit with the beat on this new track.
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| New Shit |
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| Fearless Now |
Summer was reaching an end. High-school graduation came and went, but not nearly as fast as I had wanted. I was tired of highschool and a lot of the drama that was going on at the time, I loathed the idea of leaving one school only to be stuck in more educational dribble, but at least now I had the freedom to choose more elective courses, and they had lots of arts programs.
I had started taking Graphic Arts classes at Delta Community college, my first semester as a college student (officially). While in class I was messing with Photoshop and even purchased Photoshop CS educational version from the college to start using it at home.
I remember starting several art programs. Drawing was one of them, graphic arts had a whole series of courses all centered around Photoshop, In-design, Illustrator, and Go-Live. So in one of my first photoshop classes I started learning the brush tools, and digital painting. I started with a sketch I had on paper for some tribal look. Later that day in class I had completed my assignment and started painting in photoshop and came up with the figure below.
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| Flooded |
Acid file is corrupt unfortunately so I have no screenshot of this one. The hip-hop style drums were loops from Data Becker sample library that had come with another program my parents got me a while back that I never was able to use, called Music Center Pro. Their loops were coming in handy though!
3 layers of guitar as you can guess, the first 2 are the NJ through my Vetta, the lead is through the POD 2.0.
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| Points of View |
I had started being introduced to the likes of Linkin Park and their use of melodies and heavy sounds contrasted beautifully with Chester's voice being the glue that made it all work. Hybrid Theory was a wonderful album!
Art Class in September, we were moving beyond muscle memory practice and starting to practice with foreshortening concepts and light and shadow. We would have to do a series of sketches of people in different poses throughout the class period, and it was fun to try and quickly sketch 10 or so of these out in a matter of minutes.
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| Pencil and eraser sketches practice for Art 33A Homework. Scanned into photoshop |
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| Acoustic Shock |
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| The One Before |
I had dug up some of my old recordings from 2002 with my jamming buddies and put this track together. Mike Perez a buddy of mine actually wanted to play along too and so the discreet left and right guitar loops are both him and me doing our thing, and he did the crazy outrageous solo.
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| NoisePop |
In love with industrial. Noizeloops again, as well as Futurist Drum and Bass. Stupid simple idea I started and never came back to.
Through November I was loving to learn more about the image processing effects in Photoshop. I would even just open a new blank document and start creating these from scratch:
Art class end of November, we started moving in to human anatomy and proportions, learning some formulas for the facial features. Just rough sketches at first, this was the best attempt I had done back then. Looks kind of like a criminal profile sketch...
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| Pencil sketch scanned into photoshop. |
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| LRS Intro as viewed in Acid Pro 7. |
All I had at the time were game sounds I had taken apart from various video games. So I set about putting together ambience and then trying to place impact noises that felt like they gave a good sensation for the impacts happening in the video. There you have it, My entire year in 2003 was starting to get all over the place.
I even started following artists on Deviant Art which was already a big community but growing extremely rapidly. There were other exclusive artist community sites I liked to follow and wished I could get in to so I could learn how they were doing things: those like Rasterized.org (now defunct). These artists were doing a lot of really dark, macabre, and devious things with photo-manpiluation at the time I felt was paving the way into an industry where now you have some pretty big artists doing wonderful things with it.
Now, there's a lot less artists I follow, but the likes of Justin Maller, ekud as he is known on Deviant Art; to Neil Blevins for his CG work; and a bunch of others.
I find it ironic that I had managed to cultivate this passion and interest in spite of an extreme lack of community in real life even back before the internet had really "boomed" and become the cultural and social centerpiece of our lives that it is today. Sure I had the tolerance / support of my parents and family, but interest of pursuing actual band adventures never took flight. the garage band was a fleeting group gathering and as we all grew apart throughout high-school it would appear as if I grew more reclusive, when in reality I had tapped into a new-found resource: the internet.
Even today, there is a minimal presence of any sort of culture or community for music or the arts where I live. It's funny how times can change so much, yet so little. Perhaps I'll touch more on this as I continue this time travel experiment.
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