Composing, rehearsing and recording all the instruments by myself takes a fair amount of time, and then coming up with a video, an eternity. Hard work is easy when you love what you're doing, so I'm not complaining. In The Crack Palace, I use an old school Tascam 24 track digital recorder, which operates like a tape machine. No editing on a screen or cutting and pasting. I prefer to play more music and spend less time with data entry. Every once in awhile something comes seemingly out of nowhere. That was the case with "Even Stranger Things".
For this computer, I had recently downloaded REAPER recording software and some free plugins. I was watching YouTube tutorials, and figuring out how to navigate with a keyboard controller when I came up with the synthesizer parts. Everything else was edited, assembled, cut and pasted together in a couple hours. That's Nick Cave saying, "Hands up! Who wants to die?" For the video, I found an old movie in the public domain downloaded from the Internet Archives. The whole thing was done in a day.
REAPER is an amazing program, and it's great having more than one process to work with. While I love torturing myself and real instruments for weeks at a time on music composed from scratch, it's a nice change of pace experimenting in the abstract.
Last year I put an ambient album together by manipulating sounds mostly generated by me on musical instruments. I shouldn't reveal too much about the magical trickery involved. Suffice to say, the sources have been carefully altered beyond recognition.
Have a great day, and see you tomorrow with something completely different.
-BBJ
4 comments:
You missed your calling as a film composer, my friend.
Danny Elfman should be worried.
Really great stuff, BBJ. The older i get the more I appreciate ambient music, gets the bees outa my head. Bookmarked your YouTube feed for further exploration.
Forty years ago, I messed around with a super 8 camera and an archaic editing machine (cut and tape) and made several videos which I put to music. Had a great time and to this day, when I watch them (after transferring to DVD... which is also becoming archaic), I am proud of the results, even though they are extremely rough and amateurish.
That being said, I can really appreciate the work you put in to your videos - great to watch!
Randy
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