Day: April 20, 2007

hello.music — King Hippo

hello.musicI exported the song tonight to Live and added the extra space I wanted in between the first chorus and the third verse. Did a bit of primary mixing and panning and some volume editing to add a bit of shape to the song. I also pulled back the twinkly music box guitar until I can retrack it with more clarity.

Here is version 1b of “King Hippo.”

[audio:https://hellocomein.com/soundbox/hellomusic_mike/KingHippo_v1b.mp3]

Things I still need to do:

1) retrack vocals to be more clearly defined melodically, the chorus catchier sounding and still in tune while still maintaining the spirit of the cracked grittiness. it would be nice to have a female vocal line here harmonizing.

2) retrack a bit of the music box guitar trying not to overuse. slide guitar also?

3) add some pianos and keyboards and general fullness to the song’s instrumentation

4) perhaps some drums from Greg? some bass from Aryn? perhaps some other instrumentation I am not thinking of here?

5) anything else besides general mixing and mastering of the overall sound? that distorted peak in the middle could use some better orchestrating.

UPDATE 4\24: Made some changes. You will notice that I pulled the vocals out for now since I plan on retracking. Also added some drones of synths and organs here but I might pull those back down in the mix as they seem a bit too hot.

Thoughts on version 2?

[audio:https://hellocomein.com/soundbox/hellomusic_mike/KingHippo_v2_novox.mp3]

Newish old things that are new to me: Look Around You

I love stumbling onto brilliant things that I never knew existed. Yesterday during my daily internet trolling session, I ran into this series of videos that resembled the old 80’s school instructional videos I remember as a student. They have that style down to the “T” and the complete and utter missinformation that they are basing this science on is fantastic. So to relate to music we can start with Synthesizer Patel:

[youtube]6cv1_Bw_sBo[/youtube]

And another favorite on video games:

[youtube]cBcrTucxiRc[/youtube]

I absolutely love the synth interludes they use, the terrible experiments, and the delivery. If you look closely you can see some of your favorite comedic actors, i.e. , and from “Shaun of the Dead” and (the first two) from the awesome fake trailer “Don’t” from the recent Rodriguez/Tarantino release “Grindhouse”. Also is Olivia Colman who made a brief appearance on the UK version of The Office.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: I just found the entire music episode, check it out here: