Media - audio

• Phew, that took a bit longer than intended because on subsequent listening I didn't like the keys instrument I was using. Also the song itself is called "Power Chords in D Minor" because that's what it is and I'm shit at coming up with cool song names. 😅

  But I'm very happy with this one, I started with the drums playing along to a metronome because a couple of friends and I were doing some collaboration mucking around, but they both have small children that precluded them doing anything quickly so I decided to take the drum track and come up with a song around it while I was waiting. I played drums, guitar, and bass guitar, and the piano track on top is from Toontrack's EZKeys 2 plugin (both the actual notes being played and the sounds, though I picked out the specific grooves to use from EZKeys' big library and also came up with the chord progression), and I'm pleased to report that I once again didn't need to do any quantisation to put my drums, guitar, or bass in time. Ironically though, I needed to apply the tempo from the drums to the global tempo track and then have the piano track follow that, because while the tempo only varied by a maximum of about 2bpm across the whole song and I was playing in time with the drums for the guitar and bass, the piano track was exactly on the beat and it clearly sounded off. 😛

  music drums audio bass guitar neuraldsp fender made in japan hybrid ii telecaster

  Posted on 14 June 2026, 11:25

• I have finished my song! 🎉

  It's titled "Factory" because the keys sounds are from the EZKeys Dark Industrial expansion, and I chose a more raw metal-sounding kit for the drums (plus the user interface for the Dark Industrial expansion is really cool and looks like a steampunk keyboard). The guitar, bass guitar, and drums are all played by me, the only thing that isn't is the keyboard sounds (and looking at the MIDI files they're simple enough that I probably could manage to do most of them myself as well, but ehhh).

  Really really happy with how this turned out, I did a bunch of reading and watching about how to EQ and master songs and the whole principle of making sure each instrument has its own space in the track and doesn't end mushing into other tracks and ending up muddy. I'm also very pleased that I once again didn't need to have flex-and-follow turned on on the guitar or bass to keep them in time, and the only tweaks I made to the drums were to fix just a couple of bits that weren't quite in time, to make a couple of the fills flow a bit better, and to slightly improve the feel of the final chorus at the end. And I didn't need to spend a ton of time re-recording the drums to get them right, it was probably only half an hour or so in total!

  music guitar drums audio bass guitar ibanez jiva10 neuraldsp

  Posted on 13 February 2026, 19:07

• Three years ago around this time of year, I recorded a short song that was just me playing drums along with my then-new Ibanez JIVA10 guitar. That song popped up in the Memories page on my website earlier this month and I listened to it and thought "Hmmmm, I kind of like that but it's a bit shit, I wonder if I can make a new version that's better." (I wasn't great at keeping in time between the drums and guitar, I messed up the chord changes on several occasions, and managed to put a drum fill half-way through a bar so the whole song after that is half a bar off. Plus the drums were using Logic's built-in drum kit sounds which are awful, and the guitar tone is too bright.)

  So I sat down and tried to figure out which chords I had actually been playing in the old song, then did a bit of playing around and came up with a decent chord progression that's kind of similar to the original. After that it was a case of recording everything, and I'm extremely stoked to report that there has been zero quantisation or flex-and-follow to tweak the timing in this song, it's entirely me staying in time without help! The chugging palm-muted section in the middle required a few takes because I've not really done much by way of palm muting before and I'm not very good at it, but the two main distorted chord sections were one and done. 💪🏻 This was the first song I've done with my shiny new Telecaster, and I had picked up Neural DSP's new Archetype Misha Mansoor X plugin for half price during their Black Friday sale at the end of last month so I had a lot of fun tweaking all the parameters in that and seeing what sounds I could get out of it. For the drums, in the section towards the end of the intro I managed to mess up the timing and ended up like a beat off just until the fill leading into the first verse, but thanks to the magic of MIDI drumming I was able to just shift those handful of notes across to where they should be. I also made a couple of additions in the form of just a single snare hit to a couple of the fills to improve how they flowed. If I hadn't messed up the transition from the first verse into the chugging section on the low tom, the drums would have been one take and done too.

  Lastly the bass... I'm not very good at coming up with cool bass lines as it turns out, but I went with a very simple half-note root then fifth for the first half of the song, then switched to straight-up chugging eighth notes for the palm-muted section onwards and I think it worked well!

  After the recording I did a lot of tweaking and fiddling to get the mix to sound right, including using Klevgrand's Korvpressor compressor plugin that I got for free from having bought my USB audio interface, and am extremely pleased with the results. When I listen back to my older stuff, it's a lot more obvious how far I've come with my musical skills!

  music guitar drums audio bass guitar neuraldsp fender made in japan hybrid ii telecaster

  Posted on 20 December 2025, 15:48

• I have finally gotten back into doing a bit of music! 🎉

  There was a video from Justin Guitar about taking the common open chord shapes and moving them around the neck, and one of the things he said that's super valuable to try is to just play an open chord and then try lifting a finger or two up from some of the strings and see how it sounds, and "If it sounds good, it is good." I did some mucking around with the open position A minor chord, lifting a finger up, moving things around, and adding some hammer-ons in as well, and and am seriously stoked at how this came out. (The drums aren't actually me, I dropped some grooves in from Superior Drummer 3 and will do some recording myself when my arm is better and once I've expanded this out into a full song.)

  One stumbling point came when I decided I should add bass to it, because I realised I had no idea what the actual chords were that weren't just the open shape and some of the notes I was playing on the bass were really off-sounding. 😅 I did some searching and came across this ridiculously handy website that lets you plug in the strings you're playing and on which frets, and it'll tell you what the chord is! So I was able to figure out the chords and then add some simple bass to it that actually sounds good as well.

  (For the record, the chords in question are apparently Am, Esus, Dsus2, and the heavy strums at the beginning of each bar in the last four bars are A7sus2.)

  music guitar audio bass guitar neuraldsp

  Posted on 13 August 2025, 21:44

• Back in June of last year @[email protected] tagged me into a conversation that some folks from metalhead.club were having about putting together an anthem for their server, they had guitars and bass and vocals and such, but no drummer. I figured why not, it might be fun, so I said yes and they invited me to their NextCloud server so we could more easily collaborate. The guitars came down first so I played along to the first draft of them, though it was 140bpm and it turns out I can't actually play decently that fast. 😅 So I ended up doing double time instead so I could essentially play at half the speed. We went back and forth with some tweaking of what I was doing to fit the song better, then the project kind of fell off for a number of months thanks to real life getting in the way for several people. It was started up again at the beginning of this year, we ended up getting a new vocalist and then everything really hit full speed and here we are!

  I'm absolutely amazed at how well this came out, and you really can't even tell I was playing the drums at essentially only half speed compared to the rest of the song, it feels like your brain fills in the missing hi-hats or something. @[email protected] has written a much more in-depth blog post about the whole process here.

  music drums audio

  Posted on 30 May 2025, 18:24

• I have written another song! This one is called "Highland Fugue" and I'm super happy with it, I also bløgued about the process too!

  music drums audio bass guitar ibanez jiva10 neuraldsp

  Posted on 14 April 2025, 15:20

• And the song is finished! I wrote up a full blog post with the details: https://blog.virtualwolf.org/sans-metronome/

  guitar drums audio bass guitar midi keyboard ibanez jiva10 fender player ii stratocaster neuraldsp boss me-90b

  Posted on 12 January 2025, 21:03

• As part of our #LPlatePlayers collective, our esteemed leader @[email protected] wanted to write a Christmas song for #RememberingGeordie since he was such a mad fiend for all things Christmas. It was very collaborative, she did the base song with vocals and details of the key and chord changes, and then the rest of us piled in for the various parts and she pieced it all together and mixed it. I offered to do both bass guitar and drums, and am so impressed at how well the song turned out!

  I'm definitely getting a feel for the drums at this point, for the song it was pretty much free reign other than wanting to ensure there was an open/close hi-hat at the last beat of the bar, and of my original take there were only a couple of minor improvements that @[email protected] suggested (well, that and a bit of quantisation needed), plus some back and forth figuring out how the intro should go. For the bass guitar, my timing was quite good and there was only very minor quantisation needed. For both instruments, I ended up recording it in sections rather than attempting to go through the whole song in one go, and that made it FAR more manageable.

  I'm also going to get the original stems for the song and see if I can turn it into "I'M STAYING HOME THIS CHRISTMAS (DEEP TECHNO MIX)". 😈 (Or at least, some sort of electronic version anyway; we'll see how good my Logic Pro skills are. 😛) I did something similar a couple of years ago and it was great fun.

  music drums audio bass guitar

  Posted on 23 November 2024, 14:50

• I made another short little song! This one is 100% me playing all the instruments (guitar, bass guitar, drums, keyboard) rather than doing it via loops, and I'm very pleased to report that I didn't need to quantise the drums at all, I smashed the timing (the same can't be said for the guitar and bass guitar, they both need a little bit of nudging, though I didn't realise they needed it until I had recorded the drums).

  The guitar was a bit frustrating to get right, I had most of it but the little "solo"-esque bit in the middle required quite a few takes. I also subsequently realised that if you have the loop mode on and are recording something, it'll just keep looping over and recording the whole looped section as a different take, so I did that for the drums and ended up recording it like nine or ten times through then listened to them back and picked the best. The guitar and bass sounds come from Two Notes' "Genome" software, I had quite a bit of fun dialing in the sound, and I used my Epiphone SG Standard rather than the JIVA for a bit of change.

  guitar drums audio epiphone sg standard bass guitar midi keyboard two notes genome

  Posted on 5 May 2024, 15:05

• And the finished product! (Full disclosure, this was done by way of Logic Pro's Live Loops and recording the performances as I switched scenes. The only instrument I'm actually playing here is the bass guitar, I used the keyboard to noodle around with initially and get a melody but put it into Logic Pro's step sequencer once I'd figured it out, and while I did a lot of tweaking to the drums to get them sounding how I wanted, they're ultimately the "Drummer" track.)

  Even with the caveats above, I'm super-happy with this one. As I was listening to it and fiddling, I realised I needed a "simple" and "complex" version of the melody so there was a bit more variation during the song, and I'm ALWAYS a sucker for a song with good build-up.

  music audio bass guitar

  Posted on 3 March 2024, 11:50

• Both my guitar AND bass guitar course have simultaneously gotten into learning about chords and songs "in the key of" and it'd been a while since I'd tried to record anything, so I did some noodling! Pretty happy with it, I used my bass amp plugged into the audio interface along with Two Notes' "Wall of Sound" plugin, and for the guitar I plugged straight into the audio interface and gave Two Notes' new "Genome" plugin a bit of a go. Clean for the rhythm guitar and an edge-of-breakup one for the lead.

  (My timing is definitely getting better, but I still used Logic Pro's quantisation function to pull everything FULLY into time instead of constantly recording it over and over until I got it right. 😛)

  music guitar drums audio torpedo wall of sound bass guitar ibanez jiva10

  Posted on 11 February 2024, 18:58

• Granted I was already mostly done when I took that last photo and it mostly just required tweaking and mixing, but I present to you the finished product! Very happy with how this came out, and I'm even happier with the fact that Logic Pro's quantise functionality also works on audio files to get them into time as well. 😅

  I called this "Alchemy" mostly because the genesis of it was me playing around on my MIDI keyboard with the "Alchemy" plugin when I discovered that female choir preset. I also played around more with getting the reverb right, added compression for the first time (I'd never really played around with that before), and made very good use of the new "Mastering Assistant" feature that came with latest Logic Pro update, it really made a hell of a difference in how good the final mix sounded.

  drums audio torpedo wall of sound bass guitar midi keyboard ibanez jiva10

  Posted on 22 November 2023, 22:29

• And the finished product! Very impressed with how this turned out, and particularly stoked with my drumming efforts. 😁

  music guitar drums audio ibanez jiva10

  Posted on 8 November 2023, 20:43

• I did some more musical mucking around last night and today and recorded this! I did the guitar first, then bass, and finally drums, and it was a lot easier to fit the drums to the guitar tracks first than the other way around. I made more use of the guitar pedals this time, I had nearly everything on! Reverb and analog delay as always, but I also had the SD-1 Super Overdrive on and feeding into the DS-1W Distortion, plus the flanger in front of everything, and I quite like how it came out. I did the same thing as last time with the scooped mids, partially because I love the tone but also because I haven't figured out the best settings for a good crunchy tone yet.

  It's funny how I can mostly play drums along to the track fine, but as soon as it comes to actually RECORDING I keep overthinking things and being overly nervous about fucking it up, and end up not doing nearly as many fills as I mean to. This was my first time recording a "skip note" (the extra snare hit right before the kick drum on beat 3) and I missed a bunch of those, as well a lot of the open hi-hat hits right at the end of the bar too.

  (Yes, this is still using basically the same handful of notes that my last song did, in much the same progression. 😛)

  music guitar drums audio epiphone sg standard bass guitar

  Posted on 13 May 2023, 20:16

• And the end result! 🎉

  I used the "dirty" channel of my amp, with both the amp EQ and the EQ pedal with scooped mids so it sounds a bit more on the metal side, and I actually ended up recording a whole different guitar track today from what I was doing originally because the first one was very boring (I realised upon playing it back that I was just playing on every quarter note with basically zero variation). I also had to go in and copy/paste in a handful of sections in the bass track fix some cocked-up notes on the bass guitar that ended up being REALLY obvious when playing it back, oops.

  The guitar track is still a bit repetitive since I'm playing all of three notes on each of the low E, A, and D strings — I guess four if you count the open string as well — but in my defence I'm still working my way through the basic chords part of my guitar course and haven't done ANY of the play-awesome-lead-guitar parts yet. 😛 I definitely notice I'm getting much better at keeping in time now too.

  music guitar drums audio bass guitar ibanez jiva10

  Posted on 29 April 2023, 16:23

• First recording with my new bass guitar! 😁

  The Orange Crush Bass 25 amp I have doesn't have a direct output but it DOES have a headphone jack with a speaker cabinet sim built in, so I plugged it into the audio interface and recorded through that. This is the same song I posted back in December but with a shiny new bass track now. It's definitely a different feeling strumming with your fingers versus doing it with a pick like I do on the regular guitar.

  music guitar drums audio bass guitar ibanez jiva10

  Posted on 25 April 2023, 15:20

• I recorded another thing! It's a slower, swing kind of thing, with the guitar just plugged directly into the audio interface rather than going through my full amp+pedal board setup because I couldn't be bothered getting it out. 😛

  I'm aware I cocked up in a couple of places, and this is after I rejiggered a couple of parts of the drums because I realised I was starting the fill in the middle of a bar, oops.

  music guitar drums audio epiphone sg standard torpedo wall of sound

  Posted on 12 March 2023, 22:18

• And then of course, I had to spend like two hours playing around in Logic Pro turning this into an electronic song. 😁 I duplicated the guitar track three times and applied different effects to each one, very pleased with the result.

  The drums were slightly annoying because apparently my Roland drum kit uses different MIDI notes than the defaults than Logic uses for a bunch of the individual pieces. I always end up having to manually edit the drum kit within Logic Pro so a quarter of the notes are even playing anything at all, and then I need to change another quarter of them because things like the toms and crash cymbal have ended up being weird effect sounds instead.

  music guitar drums audio ibanez jiva10

  Posted on 10 December 2022, 21:35

• I made another song! This time it was just straight up recording a track on the drums, then playing guitar over it. Definitely doing significantly better in terms of staying in time now. 😛

  For the guitar, I used my new Ibanez and switched it to the split between the bridge humbucker and the middle single coil, and it's SUCH a nice sparkly sound! I added some reverb after the fact in Logic Pro as well, since I don't have my reverb pedal yet, and man it's amazing how much of a difference it makes. The whole guitar just sounds more... open, I guess? It's hard to describe but it's quite a noticeable difference.

  music guitar drums audio ibanez jiva10

  Posted on 10 December 2022, 18:59

• I did a song!

  The initial track that comes in was just me putting notes manually onto the MIDI view in Logic Pro, but the drums and guitars are both me playing the actual drums and actual guitar. I recorded them as loops and dropped them into Logic's Live Loops view, and then recorded each section as a scene, which is FAR less stressful than trying to play the whole thing in one take.

  Also, check me out actually playing in time with the drums this time. 😛

  music guitar drums audio

  Posted on 5 November 2022, 18:15

• I know I said this before but MAN this delay pedal is fun! Have a listen to this, I'm just playing quarter notes but the pedal adds so much extra rhythm. (The drums aren't me, I just chucked a drummer track in in Logic Pro.)

  music guitar audio epiphone sg standard

  Posted on 24 September 2022, 21:43

• There we go, I present to you "My First Song (Electro Mix)"! 😁

  music guitar drums audio epiphone sg standard

  Posted on 26 August 2022, 21:21

• My guitar amp simulation software of choice has been BIAS FX 2 on my iPad and it's pretty great, but I'm starting to get the point where I'm outgrowing the iPad for what I want to do, I think. I've bought a selection of BIAS FX 2 stuff on desktop, and it comes with Audio Units plugins that you can use in GarageBand and such. It turns out you can get a 90-day trial of Logic Pro, so I'm giving that a red hot go and we'll see if I can manage to make some sort of song! I recorded some drums yesterday today but my biggest issue there is keeping in time, even with a metronome going. 😛

  But today I recorded my first song in Logic Pro, with me playing both guitar and drums! 😁 Granted it's less than a minute long and is pretty repetitive, but whatever. Yay!

  Big thanks to @[email protected] for pointing out Logic's "quantize" functionality that will automatically move your slightly-out-of-time notes to be back in time, very helpful for getting a good drum track. The drums were was just recorded straight into Logic then quantized, rather than playing back again with any of the built-in Roland drum controller kits that the drum kit comes with (I haven't even looked into how that's done yet), and the guitar was recorded with one of Positive Grid's "BIAS Pedal" effects.

  music guitar drums audio epiphone sg standard

  Posted on 15 May 2022, 15:49

• I made my first drum recording in GarageBand! 😁 Very short, but whatever. I've been mucking around on the guitar with that as the backing track, haha.

  music drums audio

  Posted on 22 April 2022, 18:40

• I haven't been posting much about it, but my guitar learning is coming along pretty well! This is the riff from Judas Priest's "Breaking the Law". (I should clarify that this is the entirety of what I know from that song).

  music guitar audio epiphone sg standard

  Posted on 15 October 2021, 20:22