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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.)

Posted on 13 August 2025, 21:44

Metalhead Club Anthem

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

A selfie of me, a white man with a short red beard and short brown hair—although both are getting a bit scruffy—smiling at the camera. I'm holding a guitar and standing in front of my standing desk, which has an Arturia MiniLab 3 MIDI keyboard in black sitting on the desk. On the main computer display is Logic Pro with Arturia's Analog Lab plugin window open, and on my laptop's internal display to the left there is Toontrack's Superior Drummer 3 plugin window showing half of a frankly absurd number of cymbals and toms, partially covered by the window for Neural DSP's Archetype PliniX guitar amp software showing a cool-looking black amp with a red glow coming from inside it.

Current status: feeling inspired. 😎

(Of course, it's probably going to end up being another couple of months before I actually finish this thing. 😅)

our house selfie me music darkroom guitar midi keyboard

Posted on 18 May 2025, 20:47

Highland Fugue

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

A photo of my Roland TD-17KV electronic drum kit sitting in the corner of a room. My laptop sitting on a music stand to the left, and there's a 13-inch display set up in the middle of the kit above the high and mid toms so I can follow what I'm recording in Logic Pro without looking awkwardly over to the laptop at the left.

I gave my drum setup a bit of a rejiggering this morning! A few months ago I'd sent a photo of my cymbal upgrades to my drum teacher and he asked why the kick pedal was so far off to the right, I replied saying it was because that was where my foot naturally fell when I was sitting there. He said on an actual physical drum kit, the high and mid toms are physically attached to the top of the bass drum, which I'd never actually noticed before, and the snare drum sits off to the side a little, so you end up with the bulk of the kit actually off to your right.

I didn't think I had enough space in our back room to do that, but I decided to give it a go this morning anyway, especially because the drum kit at work is set up more closely resembling a real kit (i.e. how my drum teacher had said physical kits are laid out) and I didn't want to keep having to rejigger it when we have our after-work music jams. It turns out we DO have enough space, and as a bonus I've got a bit more space with my left hand on the snare and right on the hi-hat so I'm getting less tangled now. I also moved the smallest cymbal that I'd kept from the stock kit to underneath the right crash and ride because it was awkward to hit being above them, and with the moving around of everything it actually slots in quite nicely there now..

our house music darkroom drums

Posted on 22 February 2025, 12:06

A selfie of me, a white man with a relatively short but getting somewhat scruffy-looking red beard and short brown hair, wearing a black Fear Factory t-shirt. I'm holding a white Fender Player II Stratocaster electric guitar and smiling at the camera.

You'll have to speak up, I'm playing a guitar. 😎

I finished the bass line this morning, I've got the broad strokes of the rhythm guitar down and just need to record the rest, so now I'm mucking around with the lead. I recorded some lead earlier in the week but listening to it again now I realised it doesn't go, especially with the increased energy of the new bass track, it was just too slow.

our house selfie me music darkroom guitar

Posted on 5 January 2025, 21:26

A photo of my Christmas presents: a Boss Katana Go headphone amp, Shure SE215 noise isolating earbuds, a little wooden holder for my guitar picks, and a bottle of "Lucky Sod" liqueur that says it's honeycomb and sticky toffee mixed with Irish whiskey.

A photo of sliced roast beef, roast potatoes and pumpkin, and a chicken leg sitting on a white dinner plate.

A photo of a black vinyl record on a turntable.

Hope everyone has had an excellent Christmas! Got some good presents, had a delicious roast lunch, and listened to Alice In Chains on the record that the seventeen year-old asked for as a present, haha.

christmas music darkroom mum and dad's presents alcohol

Posted on 25 December 2024, 14:52

A photo of my standing desk in its upright position, with a bass guitar sitting to the left of the desk, an electric guitar sitting to the right of the desk, a bass guitar multi-effects pedal with a whole ton of knobs and dials on it ON the desk, and Logic Pro showing on the main display.

Doing some more mucking around with my song, I've redone the bass line now. My problem is that each time I come back to the song and listen more I decide I'm not happy with something and need to change it. 😅

our house music darkroom guitar bass guitar

Posted on 24 December 2024, 17:09

A photo of my standing desk in its upright position, with a Yamaha BB-434 bass guitar sitting to the left of the desk, and Logic Pro showing on the main computer display.

Current status: totally ripping off @[email protected]'s chord progression from I'm Staying Home This Christmas for my own song I'm noodling around with. 😁

our house music darkroom bass guitar

Posted on 19 December 2024, 21:13

I'm Staying Home This Christmas

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