Slab mapped, bug fixed

Okay, got Slab tempo-mapped ... in doing so found a bug that didn't come up when I did Cheap Thrills. That's why you have to test extensively, kids!! Turns out if I had several regions (between "key beats") in a row that were all exactly the same length to the sample, my interpolation algo would inadvertantly cause a division by zero. Can that really happen on a human performance? It certainly can if there's any editing done beforehand! So I'm glad this happened; glad I caught it early and fixed it.

Overdubs, using the mapper

It's always pretty nice to devote a day to doing something you've been meaning to do for forever. Yesterday I devoted a whole day and night to redoing the bass line for Cheap Thrills. It's pretty much note-for-note what the bass line already was, except now instead of being played by hand on a synth, it's sequenced using my sampled bass, which is actually my real electric bass sampled as individual notes and ... this is very important ... exterraneous finger/string noise. Also, I used a program I'd written to help map out the tempo from Jeff's wildly fluctuating drum track, this way the timing of the bass part is dead-on and locks perfectly with it.

It's kind of relevant to Slab of Clay, in that my remix of that in its current state does not have the synthesizer chords in it yet, and I'm going to need the mapper program for those as well. The new version uses, as I've found to be very effective in many other songs in the past (including Cheap Thrills), "stolen" drums from other peoples' sessions. I've got all these reels and ADATs of multitrack sessions with Jeff, Garrett, the Peachies, and so on, and the various tracks in isolation come in quite handy (*cough*) as raw material to be used in my own stuff. Drums in particular are great because you can pretty much use any drum track for any song, provided it's anywhere in the ballpark tempo-wise. Often times it's an improvement because fills and accents happen in places I wouldn't have thought to put them.

When I re-do a song to a new drum part, like with Slab, sometimes I'll want to use some of the tracks from my original version. The tempo won't be perfectly matched up, so I'll have to use time stretching. This involves some math. The new Slab is quite a bit faster, and I'm particularly pleased at how clean I've managed to keep the sax solo sounding even after smooshing it to fit. Same for bit guitar things that come in here and there. I'm keeping Kim's vocal and the guards' vocals (done by me), also nicely time-adjusted -- but will be re-doing my main vocal part.

The synth, which is really the backbone of how the song was written, will be done using the same sound on the same instrument, the old Casio CZ-1 leaning against the dining room wall, all beat up with half its hardware gutted out and various stickers and pictures taped to it. For the timing, I will use my program again to map out the tempo. This one is a lot less erratic than Cheap Thrills, but it was good to start with that song first because it's the ultimate test that the program is working correctly.

I still have no idea what will appear in the film.

Hello again.

I'm going to actually start posting here. Watch out!

With all due respect to my friends on LiveJournal, it's not a place where I can comfortably go on and on about a project. It's just a different atmosphere, different mindset. So I'm going to make this blog into a "production journal" (see Exhibit A). If that kind of thing bores you, I'll no longer have to worry about being invasive on your "friends page". If you're semi-interested and want to check in once in a while to see where I'm at with things, then of course bookmark this. (And hey, if you're obsessive and have no life and want to stalk me, then set it as your homepage -- or hell, write a script to reload it every five minutes, more power to ya.)

Here's the skinny. I want to get back to working with other people on stuff. I want to involve everything that I already do in with that: the generative art, the rock opera, the doodles, and so on. Chit-chatting with the guys at Animatus helped to narrow things down a touch for a first goal. They told me that to get into most film and animation festivals you want your piece to be less than ten minutes, preferably less than eight minutes. So that makes the idea more of a reality right there ... one song. Bingo. Pick the song.

I'm leaning towards Slab of Clay. Not the version on the CD, or on any of the bootlegged demo versions floating about. I have a better version in progress. There's something about that song that's damn amazing to me and hasn't gotten "old" to me after all this time. Mostly I'm in love with the chord progression. But I haven't recorded it to my liking yet.

A title like "Slab of Clay" would inevitably imply to people at an animation festival that they are about to see a claymation, which they are not. So I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I once told a friend it would be a great idea to release a CD in a 12" x 12" cardboard sleeve, so that people would assume it was a vinyl record. Again, an idea that can be great and also backfire. Only I don't think the "clay" confusion will cause angry mobs to demand their money back.

As for "working with other people", this first one I'm going to have to climb solo, period. Once people see a finished thing, then they might get a better idea of where my head is, and want to be involved. Nobody wants to rush to become involved with a thing that there's no tangible evidence of. And the first person that I have to get interested in this is me; so having at least a tangible goal, i.e. "animate Slab and get it into some festivals", is definitely a solid step in that direction.

Incidentally, Slab was not written for the rock opera, it was written before it and worked in. So it kind of is the only song on the whole thing that actually is a song in and of itself. It did evolve a little with the whole big intro, and the extended section with the guards coming in to arrest the protagonist, etc., so I don't know at this point if I would include those sections in project #1 or just keep the core for now.

One positive thing about only doing the core for now: if and when I ever do the opera in its entirety, it's a given that certain songs can be in a radically different style as an "escape" from the narrative, including Slab, and it would allow me to postpone commitment to a look and feel for the main narrative thread. Whereas once the guards burst/bust into the library, I want it to kind of revert to the predominant style of the movie, and to animate that section I'd have to properly design and build the characters as they would appear through most of the film. Sticking to only the "core" of the song (the "hit single" version, heh heh) for now would allow me to just go wild and not worry about final designs for the characters yet.

Besides, if I do get other people involved in the larger film, it would be nice to have some design decisions still unmade so that they can have input.