weimerhead

Gday fellow soldiers in the eternal struggle of the Blog.

My group has continued making baby steps towards the improvisation project that we will perform one day not so soon. This week I brought in my laptop and played a few drum loops I composed in Sibelius and played them in Reason 3. Both Dave and Ben seemed to take a liking to them; might I quote Dave who remarked, “shall we go with that for this Rhythmic basis.” (Or something similar). This was fairly encouraging, especially because I know the drum loops would be heaps better if I had spent more than twenty seconds on them. Apart from this part of the session, we continued listening to people moan about technological disabilities of studio 5 and Dave’s (awesome) guitar playing. Adrian’s computer bit the dust so we may have to wait some time before hearing anything from him and SuperCollider. Dragos was away, so still pretty uncertain about what he is doing. Ben seems pretty enthusiastic about his vocal/effects contribution, and the other day I was listening to “Intergalactic” by the Beastie Boys and thought of how this may offer him some inspiration (‘another dimension, another dimension, new galaxy’). We also welcomed a new member to the group, Albert. I was less than excited by the thought of adding yet another instrument to melange of sound we have at the moment, but going by his usual attendance, I do not think I have to much to worry about (needless to say, I will be glad to be proved wrong here).

Next up, a few more students presented their work in the new Tech (“now like Jazz and Classical students”) Forum. This commenced with Henry Reid who played ‘Lucky’ a song written about his Grandfather’s life. After the initial excitement of how this form of song writing has recently produced favourites of my own like Tool’s “10 000 days part 2 (Wings for Marie)”, I was a little bit disappointed with the final product. This dissatisfaction mainly stemmed from one instrument which played throughout in what I can only call a lame synth tone, because the rest of it was pretty good I think. Daniel played a recording by his band ‘Enemy Of?’ and I have to say it was pretty good. I intend to record a Heavy Metal later this year, and I am pretty intimidated by their two guitar, bass, drums, vocal line up. Daniel mentioned how he used a program other ProTools to record the drums. After this I was left thinking- there are other programs than ProTools: WHAT THE HELL?!?! Anyway, one day if I am feeling social enough, I would like to talk to him about this program and what his thoughts are on recording heavy music. One thing I really want to learn to do is make good drum recordings. More than anything else. Getting back to Daniel’s piece called, “When you say the heaven you mean the gates of hell” I was overall quite impressed with the song, but the recording did not have the edge (not surprisingly) of a professional recording. But why? I feel like we have all the equipment there to do it. Maybe I will figure it out one day if I stop playing video games…