Something Unreal

I tried to remake this thrash metal track originally made by my brother, as a MIDI for the Roland Sound Canvas synth! …Then, I realised that he still hasn’t uploaded it himself yet. Maybe I’ll have to poke him to do that so you can hear what my sucky attempt at recreating the guitar solo was supposed to sound like. It also has screaming vocals, but yeah, that’s not going to happen in a MIDI file.

[Watch in HD]

I got to try something I’ve never done before – a “compressed” effect on the percussion to make it sound more powerful, by turning down the cymbals when the kick and other bassy percussion plays. Because all those curves spam up the view of control changes at the bottom of the screen, I hid those ones at times in this video.

My brother’s music channel is here. He was kind enough to give me access to the individual layers in his track, so I didn’t have to struggle to hear notes hidden underneath other notes, which is what I normally have to struggle with when making MIDIs. He even gave me the original drum MIDI track, but that meant I had to set up my own user drum kit for the SC-88Pro that was compatible with the drums software he uses. The fact that the synth only has 2 discrete overdrive channels means that it sounds a little awkward during the transitions to/from the guitar solo. Plus, solos are always hard to transcribe anyway.

All in all, it was a fun challenge! I ended up only using 8 MIDI channels (3 for percussion), which is the least ever in a MIDI I’ve made for this synth. I usually end up using at least 15 out of 16. As for the video itself, there are several fails because my old laptop died and I’ve clearly not got stuff set up correctly on my new one yet.

(Thanks very much for the project files, bro! I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have even attempted the solo without them.)

I got a new lens for my Lumix G3 camera. Its aperture can open as far as F1.7, so I wanted to try it out in the dark. However, driving was a stupid idea as the lens doesn’t have optical image stabilisation to reduce the shaking thanks to the well-maintained British roads. I tried to reduce shaking a bit in software afterwards, but it’s more distracting than helpful (I should build some kind of stabilising rig). After 02:45, there’s no software shake reduction. I was focussing manually throughout the video, which isn’t easy at F1.7 as the depth of field is so shallow.

[Watch in HD]

Colours are also corrected in editing. At 00:39, I attached a UV filter, which unintentionally added lots of flares from bright lights. I thought they looked nice at the time, but I got annoyed with them after re-watching the video for the 5th time.

My brother was driving, playing some music of his. You can find the music he’s made here. This particular track is “Remember This“.

Steeeven1 (my brother) is working on a new metal song (as always), and he decided to let me record a bit to show how he does what he does (I suggested a few things too). =D

[Watch in HD]

This was a sort of behind-the-scenes and preview video, because the song was not yet finished. It’s called “Arcadia”, and is up on his channel, here.

Since I haven’t posted anything for a while, and since this is appropriate for the time of year, here’s a little something my bro just made after me giving him the MP3 literally only a few hours ago.

Please visit the YouTube page here to comment, instead of commenting here, since it is his video after all.

Here’s my brother (“Steeeven1″ on YouTube, at far left on vid) playing 3 songs with his band at a gig which was held yesterday in Hemel Hempstead (in Hertfordshire, England). I was only told the spelling of the band name the morning after I made and uploaded the video. -_-’

Songs (already mentioned in the vid, but oh well):
“Warriors of the World” by Manowar
“Phantom” by Phantom
“Paranoid” by Black Sabbath

You don’t need to tell me that the feedback is nasty – it’s not their fault either. The sound assistant got it right in the sound checks, but for some reason felt the need to fiddle during the actual performance.

Oh, my camera skills are non-existant too.

Oh look, YouTube converted it to mono. Why am I not surprised? High-quality stereo MP3s of Phantom playing these songs:

- Warriors of the World

- Phantom

- Paranoid

We’re just amateurs, and WE KNOW WE’RE NOT THAT GOOD, so a hundred comments saying that we suck is something we can do without. This is my brother and I attempting to play the song which was originally by ‘Machine Head’.

We do this for fun, that’s why we often laugh a little when we mess up. We just want to share with people our little attempts of recreating music.

More info in the video!

Please attempt to enjoy! ^^

Recorded only with my camcorder, so there was a lot of noise in the audio originally. I’ve removed as much noise as I can. Any more and the music would get messed up too much.

I’ll put a higher-quality MP3 available for download even though I don’t think there’ll be much demand:

Here’s the link.
(7.04 MB, 3 mins 56 secs)

That MP3 is in stereo, at 256kbps. It is the audio stream of the video which you see here, so it has silence at the beginning.