Media - music - Page 2 | virtualwolf.org

A wide-angle photo of my standing desk in its standing position, my laptop and main displays both have various parts of Logic Pro showing, there's a MIDI keyboard on the desk in front of my regular keyboard, and sitting alongside the wall to the left is a bright orange guitar amplifier and an Ibanez JIVA guitar sitting on a guitar stand.

Aww yisssss. 😎

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Posted on 22 November 2023, 21:51

Old Dead Modem Blues '23

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

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Posted on 8 November 2023, 20:43

A photo of my Roland V-Drums electronic drum kit with my laptop open on a stand behind and to the left of the kit and my iPad being used as a second display for the laptop on the stand in the middle of the drum kit between the cymbals so I can see where in the song I am without needing to look awkwardly over to the left.

Recording part two: let there be drums! I listened to the in-progress mixdown from @[email protected] and used Logic's "Split" function to be able to name the sections of track (Intro, Verse 1, Chorus 1, etc.) and MAN that made it so much easier to follow along and know when to hit the fills!

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Posted on 5 November 2023, 19:00

A photo of my standing desk in its upright position, with an Orange guitar amp and a pedal board with a number of guitar pedals on it sitting at the left and a guitar sitting in a guitar stand on the right. My computer has Logic Pro up on the main display.

Current status. (Recording some tracks for @[email protected] to splice together into something excellent.)

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Posted on 4 November 2023, 21:02

A photo of a Roland A-49 MIDI keyboard in white sitting on my (also white) desk. As the name suggests it has 49 keys, and has a number of buttons and knobs on the left hand side.

It look longer than expected, but it's finally here! 🎉 The keys are _very_ nice-feeling, there's a really good weight to them. And I haven't read the manual yet so I have no idea what this is about, but the very lowest key is marked "Panic".

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Posted on 27 October 2023, 14:59

A photo of a Suhr "Reactive Load / I.R." load box. It's a chonky metal box with curved edges along the top, and several silver dials and switches on the front, plus two seven-segment red LED displays at the left marked "Bank" and "Cab".

First new bit of guitar kit in a while! I already have a load box, but the problem with it is that there's no headphone output which means I need to plug it into my USB audio interface which _does_ have a headphone output but is all wired up to my computer setup, which in turn means I can't play my tube amp anywhere except our home office. This new Suhr one has a headphone output and can be powered from my pedal board power supply so I'll be able to take the amp and pedal board to the front of the house and play with my full setup there, AND it has an auxiliary input as well so I can plug my iPad into it and play along to music or just use GarageBand's backing dummer functionality to have a drum kit to keep in time with. I have to say, though, this thing is significantly larger than I was expecting!

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Posted on 5 October 2023, 14:53

A product shot of the Roland A-49 MIDI keyboard in white. As the name suggests it has 49 keys and has a number of buttons and knobs on the left hand side.

I've decided to continue my musical journey and get a MIDI keyboard and actually learn how to play it! 😁 I actually had an M-Audio something-or-other keyboard ages ago (nearly twenty years in fact: https://virtualwolf.org/media/posts/1423) but in a similar story to my guitar from 2007, due to the lack of decent learning resources I never actually stuck with it. It turns out that the "Melodics" app I use for learning drums _also_ includes a whole course for keyboard as well so I'm going to take full advantage of it! I did a bunch of looking around and settled on this, the Roland A-49. The reviews are all glowing and apparently the key feel is very good as well. I could have gotten the black version and probably had it in my hands this week because the white one doesn't seem to be in stock anywhere, but I think the white looks far cleaner and sleeker.

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Posted on 2 October 2023, 19:42

A photo of me, a white man with an increasingly-scruffy-looking red beard, holding a bass guitar and smiling at the camera. My friend is sitting behind me holding a guitar and looking at a large TV where the basic chord progression for Metallica's Nothing Else Matters.

We had our combination barbecue/jam session today, it was great fun! It was hilarious though, my friend's younger brother is an actual muso and can legit play, to the extent that he's actually playing a gig tomorrow. He kept trying to tell us stuff (like "So you want to start with a diminished fifth" or whatever) and it was just WAY over our heads and I kept saying, "Look, you're very much overestimating how much skill and knowledge we both have." 😂

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Posted on 3 June 2023, 22:08

Metal Tones

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. 😛)

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Posted on 13 May 2023, 20:16

Dirty Orange

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.

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Posted on 29 April 2023, 16:23