Massive

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GEEX Music

August 1, 2010 in Music, Video Games | 5 comments

I only wrote two pieces of music during the GEEX 2010 Game-in-a-day. Considering I had 24 hours to do it, a lot of people would say I did great, but I probably could have pulled off another game if I didn’t want to actually see the convention.

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The first piece I did was for my team… Have I mentioned I’m totally in a hip-hop mood, lately? If this doesn’t prove it, I don’t know what does. Also, I tried to incorporate some Akira Yamaoka style guitar in there.

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The second piece I did was supposed to be a Victorian Era piece that reminded the player of the sea. I got to use Bellows by Detunized.com in this, and I’ve gotta say, I’m really happy with it.

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Huge!

February 17, 2010 in Film, Music | No comments

HUGE! from Brandon Thomas Irwin on Vimeo.

This video easily signifies my greatest work, to date.  Brandon gave me a spoken-word version of the poem over a year ago, and asked me to write music, because he was going to make a video for his girlfriend, Abbey.  He didn’t know, at the time, that he was going to propose, but I knew exactly what it was going to be when I listened to it.

I haven’t talked about this, because it was supposed to be a secret.  I’m still not sure how Brandon got Abbey to be in a couple of the scenes without her being wise to it’s end purpose, but I’ve gotta say, it’s pretty awesome.

Eric Santoro played drums, but, otherwise I wrote, sequenced, and recorded all the music.

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One Hour Audio pt. 2

December 28, 2009 in Music, One Hour Audio, Uncategorized, Video Games | No comments

Tonight’s One Hour Audio was a bit of a disappointment, at least to me. A bad choice of synths to work with, a major key (C Major at that… the cheesiest of all keys), and an attempt at something with a little more structure all lead up to me writing something I’m pretty sure will hit the scrap pile.

As always, let me know what you think.

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ReWire Project

November 28, 2009 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been battling my computer… specifically, Komplete 5, and Sonar LE.

The issue with Komplete was my own fault; I opened (at least) one of the instruments as a plugin before I opened it as a stand alone version. I don’t remember that being written anywhere obvious in the installation manual or anything, but it’s what happened. And, admittedly, I’ve been fighting with this since the day I got Komplete. That is, until two weekends ago when I started the LLLOOONNNGGG process of uninstalling all NI products, and reinstalling them, opening them, updating them, and opening them again. It’s taken 2 weeks, because I have a life away from this particular computer (though you’d never know it.)

The issue with Sonar is simply this: it’s a demo version, and it’s not made to run in Vista. Yeah, I run Vista. So, it crashes unexpectedly, and without consistency. Luckily, it’s that time of year where both Christmas and my birthday fall, and hopefully I’ll be able to move away from demo products, or at least some of them.

Well, because of the battling, while I’ve been doing all this mucking around to get my computer back to where I can work on Violet Kiss (which I’ll be doing minutes after I hit Publish, get a beer, grab my guitar and stuff from the car, and… well… about 30 minutes to an hour after I hit Publish), I’ve been playing around with Ableton Live (Live Lite, to be honest… another demo product, but with A LOT better support).

I’m still not a Live expert, but I no longer hate the program now that I know 3rd party Live Sets exist. But one thing I can now do is ReWire Sonar and Live together, which opens up a new realm of possibilities — Live Lite is limited to 8 audio tracks, which just isn’t enough for large projects, but it IS enough to bring a smattering of Live-exclusive sounds into a larger, Sonar-hosted, project.

So, this is my first experiment with ReWire.

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All melodic instruments are played in Sonar, while the percussion is in Live. Sonar was the Master, Live the slave, though the only thing that really changed there was which program I used to bounce this down.

The music box sound is from Kore, and so is the reverse delay; The bass is from Massive. There are 3 different drum kits used, Carbonized, Latin Percussion, and a Bright British kick… everything but Carbonized was ran through a delay, and Carbonized has it’s own.

Also… regular listeners to this blog will recognize the melody from the Churches – New York track. I’ve been kicking this melody around for awhile, and I initially intended it for a PARPG song, which is where the music box tracks came together. Now I’ve pretty much kicked this melody around to the point of never being able to use it again (which isn’t a bad thing.)

As always, let me know what you think.

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Monkey Egg

November 3, 2009 in Uncategorized | No comments

Recently, a friend of mine from the local IGDA and Utah Indie Game Dev groups and I have started a game development “company,” if you will.  Our focus, right now, is to create portfolio pieces for us and everyone involved, which will get us more exposure in the future.

I can’t really tell you much more, because there’s not a whole lot out there, but I’ll get something up eventually.

In other news, financial troubles have shut off my internet at home, which has shown to be a problem on the composing front: Native Instruments’ products, which I rely on fairly heavily, check their registration every time you start them up via their Service Center… basically, without the internet at home, my products only show as unregistered, and aren’t working.  (If any of you know a solution to this, I’d love to know.)

So, my music, at least computer based, has taken a back seat to writing, which only requires a pencil and paper.

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Churches, Finale

July 28, 2009 in Film, Music, Uncategorized | No comments

Creative Commons License
This Entry by Dave Matney, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Breathe.  I can finally breathe again.  And sleep, at least for a little while.

I don’t remember much of this weekend, to be honest; starting Thursday at 7:00, I spent almost EVERY waking hour on music.  Fifty three hours, to be exact. Seven to ten Thursday at practice, ten to one after that on composing, six thirty Friday morning ‘til ten playing guitar behind my friend Perko for a local news show (we played probably less than 5 minutes on air, and even then the sound was pretty awful; we sounded great live, and on air you couldn’t tell), then after a quick lunch I spent the next six or seven hours troubleshooting my computer so I could then stay up ‘til one again working on music.  Saturday was straight through; seven AM to one AM.

Sunday I played guitar at church, then went home and had an unplanned break (my wife –who was in Idaho 2 hours away from me– was in the ER the night before, nothing major, and she was pretty much dead to the world in pain and on pain meds, so I hung out with my son. Then I was so exhausted I couldn’t stand up from laying on the floor; I don’t remember going to bed.)

Back to work on Monday, at 8 am, and when I got home at six thirty, I started pounding away at music, until 3 am. 3 out of 5 songs finished, and that’ll have to do.  1 song completely scrapped, and rewritten twice in the previous week, the last time started just before one am.

That was last night; back to work at 8 am this morning, and I think my body realized when I was done with my morning appointments that, hey, I don’t have an immediate deadline looming.  I don’t have anything that’s forcing me to keep going, so now I must rest.

And rest I will, just not yet.

So… what all came from this?

Churches – New York

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This track, I feel, is the best track of all the ones I worked on this weekend.  I feel I need to clarify that this isn’t the production track; I cut apart and spliced together a different version to go below the film, and later I’ll clean this up for my portfolio. Just not yet.

I wrote, programmed, and recorded everything in this track.

Churches – Florida 2

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This track was built over the weekend, using an idea I started six or so months ago.  Everything within it was written by me, except the drum march;  I don’t remember which Gershwin tune I took it from, but I found a few MIDI files of Gershwin marches, took one, cut up the snare part into a loop that I liked, layered another snare part on top of it, and threw a kick below it.  So… TECHNICALLY Gershwin wrote the march… but only as much as the original photographers design elementary school collages.

Churches – Florida 1

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With Brandon throwing out ideas left and right, I wrote and recorded this song in two hours, with the first notes being struck just before 1 AM.  It’s intentionally sloppy.  The drum parts are Midi loops by Groove Monkey.

To write these, I used Sonar LE, various parts of Native Instrument’s Komplete and their Kore Player, Line 6′s PODFarm, and Make Music’s Finale.

Please, critique these.  And I’ll let you know when the videos that they’re for make it online, if they ever do.

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Electric Tech-Hop

July 6, 2009 in Music | No comments

Over the weekend, my wife was awesome enough to let me take advantage of Native Instrument’s “Kompletely Insane Deal!” (Komplete 5 for a third of the price; my apologies if you miss it), loading my DAW with 65 gigs of professional-grade sounds.

To be honest, I’m a bit nervous about the complexity and potential of Absynth, Reactor, Massive, and most importantly, Kontakt, but that’s never stopped me before. And it didn’t! As soon as I had the samples loaded, I started pounding away at my keyboard, listening to the new sounds, and I must say, I was impressed. The stock sounds are of a quality I’ve never had on my computer, and I feel it will be quite awhile before I’m fighting with my software to get it to sound the way I want.

Speaking of sounding the way I want, as I was dabbling through Massive, I found a bass sound that I was completely inspired by, and I had to get the inspiration into Sonar ASAP.

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The drums are mostly a preset kit from Battery, with a single thing changed, bass from Massive, the guitar I recorded with Line 6′s Pod Farm, and the compton-esque lead is from the Kore Player.  It’s REALLY basic, and rough, but it marks a style of music that I’ve been unable to write, previously, so I’m excited.

Keep an eye out for the next steps, as I finish it.

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