Round Two……. Fight!

Thanks for coming back to another volume of my behind the scenes series, where I break down my debut album, track by track, and provide commentary on the process, what went into it, and who collaborated on it (if anyone). I wanted to try something different this time. I have been learning how to use Adobe After Effects to create animations and graphics for my music, and I wanted to give a new technique I learned a try!

Initially I was going to make this video for the entire 4 songs I am sharing today, but the render times are something serious. My machine was going to take over 30 hours to render all that! So, I narrowed it down to just one song, which is uploaded to D tube. The other three songs I am going to provide bandcamp links again for you. I plan on upgrading the RAM on my computer soon, so that should allow me to render animations in a reasonable amount of time.

Track 5- A New Darkness

This is an instrumental track that Justin Macasero helped a lot in developing as well. He came up with the super fat bass, most of the arrangement and synth. I came up with the crazy samples and the initial layout of the song. It’s been so long I completely forgot what vinyl I sampled, but I feel like it was a Duke Ellington record I have. When I sample, I tend to change the sound so much that you can’t tell where I got it from, and I tend to use it in a completely different way as well. I would be impressed if anyone could tell where any of my samples came from (consider that a challenge!). This song got a trippy video I created awhile back, and it got about 40k views on facebook. Not bad! At the very end I experimented around with recording myself filling various graduated cylinders with water very quickly, and adding tons of reverb to it. I like reverb. Mmmmmmmmmmm

A New Darkness- Click the picture above!!!! Or this

Track 6- A New Realization

An instrumental, that was almost all completely composed of samples. Again I forget the vinyl (will get better about that), but I doubt anyone else will be able to tell either! I had some fun with the synth in this song, and this one has a little breaking point at around the half way mark. The weird noisy/ambient sounds you hear came from some samples I downloaded off the official NASA soundcloud. They have a lot of sweet royalty free sounds to check out!

A New Realization

Track 7- La Sabana Blanca (feat Andy Renz)

Another crowd favorite! Everyone loves Andy’s voice, and for good reason. That girl wails! This song is quite unique because I wrote the song for her lyrics/voice, and usually I work the other way around. I play the guitar, bass and (of course) the beat for this one, and there is a special guest. A person I have never met, Ben Ireland, of Denver, plays the trumpet on this one. He is a friend of a friend, and I’ll always be grateful to this mysterious person for laying down some sexy sexy trumpet that is exactly what the song needed. Andy sings in Spanish on this one, and apparently the lyrics are about how Mexico’s problems get over looked and only the good things are spoken of. Something everyone can relate to!

La Sabana Blanca ft Andy Renz

Track 8- Veracity of Satisfaction

This instrumental track starts out with me reading a line from Nicollo Machiavelli’s The Prince, as I am a huge fan of the philosopher. There are little tid bits of audio that represent my philosophies spread throughout the album, and this is another example of one. For the vocal samples, I chopped up some audio from Andy Renz, added tons of reverb, and had a blast. The bass you hear was played live using my custom bass guitar.

Veracity of Satisfaction