Guitarmageddon

For whatever reason, the music videos are flowing right now, so there will be another one to post in this blog. The song is 'Guitarmageddon', not the fanciest title, I admit. It comes from 2007 although this is a remix from 2016. Since it is along jam with three guitars blasting away - one playing the hard rhythm lick, one doing the slide and a third going through a wah pedal - the differences are when I switch back and forth between layers, staying quiet and laying low for some of it.

It was also called 'Randy Spirit' sometimes. Being an instrumental, it is easy to give a song multiple titles. I've done this a dozen times - sometimes even I am surprised at a title of one of my own songs. If the tune has words, it usually has a name that sticks. My favorite instrumental title of all time is of a tasty quiet jazz piece that Frank Zappa named 'I Promise Not to Cum in Your Mouth'. It completely subverts the song yet remains meaningless, which the song title to an instrumental normally is, being an appendage.

In 2007, I was still completely dependent on using drum loops. Finishing my first home recording project, I thought that I was hot poop. Since I wasn't singing yet, the emphasis tended to be on creating 'hot' guitar instrumentals. Having just transferred jobs around this time, my work moved over to an Apple platform. Imagine my delight when I saw that it too had a music loop creation program.

My new job was strange at the beginning. There was a lot of down time, sitting around my studio waiting for something to happen. Naturally, I started fooling around with Sound Studio, which was similar enough to Adobe Audition to make an easy transition. There was a huge new batch of drum loops to play with, as well as many excellent filters and other tools to explore. The drums on 'Guitarmageddon' came together quickly, and I managed another half dozen loops. Surprisingly, many of then are very long.

I will admit that there was a vague influence of Randy California, particularly his 'Kapt. Kopter & the (Fabulous) Twirly Birds' album. Some day I will go into greater depth about Randy, whom I consider the most under-rated guitarist in rock, ever. Suffice to say that he was playing lead guitar for Jimi Hendrix when he was sixteen years old, back in 1966 when both were scuffling around Greenwich Village. He had a great career both on his own and with the band Spirit, and Led Zeppelin famously ripped off 'Stairway to Heaven' from one of his songs.

I wasn't trying to do a Jimmy Page here and rip Randy California off myself. Instead, I used feel and general chord structures to create something different, a long slow jam that was about as far-out psychedelic as possible. If you ever play an electric guitar and get a decent effects pedal board together, you too may find yourself doing flying saucer and helicopter sounds one day. Randy did play in a style that I like to call 'Hendrix-light', and that is what I took away from his playing.

The video itself was mashed together from some footage of an American Indian ceremony that I filmed, along with a heavily manipulated cartoon from the Prelinger Archives as well as the usual battery of special effects and eye candy. The real highlight of the entire song for me is hearing myself get very funky indeed on the bass guitar. I had finally purchased one right after Xmas 2006, disappointed with my low end the year before. I am really hitting the low notes with a vengeance on this one, quite effectively too.

Here's another long music video from around the same time, 'Red Light Green Light Rock', perhaps moving towards 2008. More drum loops from the Mac and more near heavy metal, this time with even more emphasis on funking up the beat. For a change, I played the guitars through an amp to get the long feedback swoops. This drum track took perhaps up to forty hours to complete; I was very meticulous in trying to get something happening, relying heavily on ring oscillators and other filters to keep things interesting.

Strangely, all the guitar parts as well as the bass were done in less than two hours. I needed the house to be empty to start screaming with feedback, so when the wife left to go shopping, I plugged in and let it fly. Considering how tight the interplay between the three instruments are, it was all done spontaneously. The bass was last, all done in one take, impressing even myself with that one.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time on the video, combining all kinds of material together. The dancing girls inspired the video; when I came across them, I realized that you'd have to be literally blind not to be able to make a good video using them as an element. Most of the rest was stuff pulled from archives.org, a wonderful collection of everything copyright free gathered in one place. Time lapse driving videos, mostly from Russia, as well as all other kinds of stuff was packed into that one. I think it came out rather entertaining.

The last one I'll feature today also has one of those Macintosh drum loops. Again, it is interesting that all three of these were so long. This song is called 'Science Marches On', again from around 2008. Musically, it was more of a techno thing, based on the wah bass. I was still using my old Casio keyboards which generally sounded like shit. It did have a decent calliope sound, which I exploited here. This time, the dynamics in the drum sound were so extreme - and I was unused to dealing with sub-sonic bass frequencies - that it was tricky getting a decent mix.

The above version is the original 2007 take, but I did go back and remix it. I also remixed 'Red Light Green Light Rock', but while there was only a small improvement; it wasn't worth going back and redoing the video. "Science Marches On' became a different song, as I treated the drums even further to create the introduction and coda. It was one of the few songs that I was willing to mess with the existing structure during the 'Big Addendum' project, mostly due to the amount of post-production on the original. Either version works well.

I am especially proud of the video that I created for this last song. It utilized more footage from the Prelinger Archive, which is an on-line collection of mainly old industrial and government films. I manipulated a Reynolds Aluminum  promo with the song to create a vaguely threatening feeling, and towards the climax I throw in the infamous 'This Is Hormel' film, which could turn a shark vegetarian. This may be the most subversive thing that I have ever created, and I am immensely proud of it.

Each of those drum tracks took a lot of time and effort. Eventually I switched to playing the electric drums, a little less volume and space required than a real kit. It took a few years to develop any skill at the instrument. It is fun to revisit some of the earlier tracks, seeing how I developed songs on top of the beat, instead of the beat inside the song. These three turned out pretty good, don't you think?