Monday, January 28, 2013

A Time Travel Experiment (Week 3)

2002 was filled with games, guitar, and audio exploration, my creative side started to open up and drawing and creative would have sporadic moments. I just tried to capture my ideas coming out of my head as best I could.  2003, then, would just explode as I would venture into as many facets of art as I could.  My last semester as a senior in high school started in 2003.
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.
My senior year was super easy as I had a large portion of my morning periods dedicated to being an ROP instructor assistant for CISCO academy (which was fun and easy), Photography, and Architectural Drafting.  I had my drafting teacher look over my senior project designs as I came up with my own guitar speaker cabinet (arbitrary specifications and no real research).  With the help of my instructor I was learning how to use AutoCad 2000 to design the cabinet.
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!
Mesa Boogie Triaxis
Mesa Boogie Simul-Class 2:Ninety
Only much later would I find out the rig was used by the guitarist from Systematic which defined their guitar sound not just live but in the studio with their debut album produced by Lars Ulrich, another band I had been introduced to in 2003 as well.
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.



The coolest shots I got to make were when I brought out a fog machine and started playing around with the smoke in our garage with the same light source we used in the photos above.
Toward the end of the final semester in high school my photography teacher had selected a couple of my photos I had enlargements of to showcase after school at the school's art presentation.  both photos even won some awards.
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:
Historical Relics on Deviant Art
A lot of the time during classes in high school I would finish assignments early and just start writing down ideas, ended up starting 4 different story concepts that I would touch on throughout the years.  One of those has become the novel project that I've been working on whenever I can lately.  I liked the core idea of what I had started and started to completely re-write it from the ground up.  The last 2 years or so I've been building a full length epic sci-fi fantasy novel.

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.)



Bass Test
First track I started to use the built in processing. I was starting to gain a better understanding of just how EQ's and compressors and reverbs and delays all affected audio and it was like the next big revelation to me.  I started adjusting and messing with effects plugins like crazy.


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. 
As viewed in Acid Pro 7.
I also discovered the group bus abilities.



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.


One Shameless Step as viewed in Acid Pro 7.
Played on my NJ Supreme through the Vetta combo, direct outs as usual.  I didn't use a metronome or click track, so I did come out of time in places.  The overdubbed guitar is just the sustained chords running through a different setting on the amp with the Reverb mixed in at 100% with no dry signal.  Still no click track or metronome.


Acoustic Improv
Same as the earlier acoustic tracks I had borrowed my buddy's nylon guitar and setup the mic in a similar position but this time I had managed to not get that booming low-end distortion from the microphone due to changing the angle of the mic in relation to the sound hole.
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.


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

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.
Modplug Track programming
Modplug Track drum programming


Contemplation
The Issue I had with this track was in the timing.  Buzzmachines clock works differently than that of Acid Pro for some reason.  If I specify 126 bpm in Buzzmachines it ends up not quite 126.  The track felt odd because of that plus the fact that I didn't take the time to figure out that the length of the patterns I set up in Buzzmachines were 63 lines not an even multiple for division.
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.

The synth seems to throw everything off time but nevertheless I tried to record guitar and tried to focus more on the drum loops for timing reference and just listen in to the synth to keep track of chord progression.


The Age of Today
NJ Supreme through Pod 2.0 direct out.  Drums again taken from the same chopped up tracks from Ice Lizard's tracker songs - From This Day, and Mayhem.  Ibanez SDGR bass direct in.
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.

Dieselfactory
Starting to get back to chopping up guitar riffs.  NJ Supreme through a distortion pedal I borrowed from a friend and ran direct in to my sound-card.  Drums I chopped up from playing around with samples taken from 2 tracker artists: Teque/Trauma and Gross National Produkt, the scratching and crowd FX were also from some of their samples I extracted.


Nine Stopping Time
Experimenting more with recording free-form, no metronome or beat or rhythm.  Playing straight through and not stopping even if mistakes were made.  All recorded with my NJ Supreme through the POD 2.0 direct out to my sound-card.


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.
Anixiapolis 19 in Modplug Tracker
The Drumtrack I ended up just extracting from a modplug track called Anixiapolis 19 by Pro-XEX.  I just jammed to the track with guitar and started layering the guitar and bass, recording straight through, just kept the first pass I did; never tried to re-take anything. 
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.


Into The Open
Modplug drum pattern.
The guitars were done with the NJ Supreme through my Vetta cab.  I used the low octaves on the guitar through a distorted setting to try and emulate the "bass".  Came back to the clean setting and overdubbed during the 2nd half.  The drum programming was my favorite part as I had a cool basic pattern built in Modplug.  After building the sequence I copied it over for several "pages" and did some alterations to some of the pattern for louder clap hits during the would-be chorus sections.
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.


New Shit
I took apart Quake 2 and was playing around with their sounds.  I was really digging a new band I was introduced to by the name of Meshuggah.

Modplug drums programmed with a growing library of samples this time, unfortunately I'm missing the modplug project file for this one.  Recorded with NJ Supreme through Vetta Combo direct out.


Fearless Now
Those re-occuring chopped loops from my earlier modplug uses appear again here, this time with the help of Pocket Fuel.com's free loop packs they were doing back then.  Quickly constructed the beat arrangment to start recording guitar over and ended up playing my NJ through my Pod 2.0 as the prominent guitar track, and the Vetta combo as a backing, layered track with the delays and reverb to help fill in the sonic texture.
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.

I had even taken the sketch I had done on printer paper and scanned it in class and then proceeded to alter it in Photoshop to lay over the painted character. 


Flooded
I mentioned in my last blog post that Sevendust Animosity was the first album from them that I had discovered.  There was so much about their sound I fell in love with that when I came across this drum loop I liked the beat but it was really dry and raw sounding until I applied Acid's compression plugin and found that sweet spot.  These were the kind of punchy drums I was after, and even with the layered modplug track drums over the base beat, they would feel forever weak in comparison to what I could get with these recorded drum loops I found online.


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.


Points of View
Sony's Futurist Drum and Bass, N.Y. Dance Vol. II, Phat Trax, and Sonic Mayhem's Noize Loops were all used to build the rhythm section up, and that allowed me to focus on the guitar and bass. NJ through the Triaxis and the Vetta again,  bass direct in but this time I wanted the bass to be more aggressive in the track and ended up putting a distortion effect on it.
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.
By October, the teacher had started giving us more complex homework studying geometric shapes and trying to apply what we had been taught in class with basic art concepts for creating illusions of volume and 3-dimensional form. Art class in October - sketch homework:
Pencil and eraser sketches practice for Art 33A Homework.  Scanned into photoshop

Acoustic Shock
Sony Futurist Drum and Bass, Noize Loops, Data Becker's Rock-Pop, and more modplug tracking goodness paved the way for me to start laying down some guitars.  The guitars were that Marshall half-stack a buddy of mine let me play around with again, SM57 straight in to sound-card.


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.


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...
Pencil sketch scanned into photoshop.

LRS Intro as viewed in Acid Pro 7.
As I had mentioned at the beginning of this article, I would eventually get my hands on 3ds max, and one of the first things I did with it was render out this animation sequence that came with it in one of the basics tutorials.  It took my computer almost a full 2 days to render it back then and I proceeded to import it into Acid Pro to play around with sound design.
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.