Witchyworld, New Suggestion Box, and Preview of Underground

Hi!  I hope everyone is staying safe out there!  I’ve been spending a lot of time inside, so I’ve been making progress on a lot of my videos, but I also keep jumping back and forth between projects, so I haven’t finished anything until right now.  But Witchyworld {from the Suggestion Box) is finally live on YouTube!  I also have some news about new Suggestion Box forms, as well as some previews of the Underground and Bonus Game themes from Yoshi’s Island.

New Suggestion Box!

I’m very excited to announce that I’ve finally gotten around to renovating the Suggestion Box!  Now that I’ve been receiving more entries, I was starting to outgrow the old Google Forms/Spreadsheet setup, so I’ve upgraded to a new system hosted on my own website so that I can have more control of how I manage entries and display the data.  Check it out!

As you can see, the new Suggestion Box is a little more visual, and each entry links to a YouTube video of the suggestion so that you can easily listen to the ones that you’re not familiar with.  The backend is also a lot easier for me to manage and allows me to fully customize how the submission data is displayed and sorted, making it a lot easier for me to tally up votes and mark which entries I’ve already processed.  I’ve also updated the look of the forms that I send out!

The forms now contain a list of radio options of every entry that’s currently in the Suggestion Box.  The old method of allowing a free response in order to vote or suggest new tracks was resulting in a lot of invalid entries, so this new list of radio buttons should be a much more reliable way of collecting responses.  Patrons in the $3 and $5+ tiers are of course still able to pull up a text field if they’d like to suggest something new.  Best of all, both the Suggestion Box and the forms pull data from the same database, so there is no need for me to manually update the list of options each time a new track is added.  So give the new forms a shot, and please let me know if you encounter any problems!

New Instruments

I’ve been working on a lot of projects simultaneously, so I ended up with a pretty big haul of new instruments.  Here are some recent additions to my studio.

The instrument that I’m most excited about is this new wooden Kawai toy piano.  This is an upgrade from my old plastic toy piano from the same company, which you might remember from some of my past YouTube videos.  The only reason I decided to upgrade was because I needed the extended range that is offered by the wooden model, but I was very surprised to see that the other differences between the two pianos are not just cosmetic.  In addition to being beautifully constructed, the wooden version of the toy piano has a much richer tone, and the notes resonate much longer than the notes on their plastic counterpart.  The keys feel a bit different as well, as they seem to have less travel than the plastic version’s keys, and they have offer a little more resistance when you press them, which makes it less likely that you’ll accidentally press down neighboring keys while you’re playing.  The keys also produce a much more satisfying click or thud when they are depressed compared to the plastic model.  I was a bit worried that this purchase would end up being a bit redundant since I already own the plastic toy piano, but the differences between the two versions are substantial, and I’m excited to own a toy piano that has a more professional feel and sound.

Here’s another recent purchase!  My old acoustic bass was basically the cheapest bass I could find on eBay at the time that I bought it, and I’ve been wanting to replace it for a long time, but I usually prefer to spend money on increasing my variety of instruments rather than upgrading instruments that I already have.  However, I use my acoustic bass in nearly project I work on, so I figured an upgrade was long overdue.  I ended up purchasing this Ibanez, and although it’s one of their cheaper models, it’s tone is leaps and bounds better than what I was accustomed to with my no-name bass.  It has a nice, meaty low end, and I loved the tone so much that I decided to go back back and re-recorded a bunch of bass parts for all of my projects that are currently in progress.  It’s also very comfortable to play, and I don’t have any issues with fret buzzing like I did with my old bass.

And finally, here’s a Stylophone that I bought specifically for recording Fear Factory.  Fear Factory has some electronic sounding beeping noises that I couldn’t figure out how to generate with an acoustic instrument, so I decided to just pick up a Stylophone, which I’ve been actually curious about for some time now.  The controls on this thing are simple, but you can create some pretty neat sounds with it, and you can adjust the range of the keyboard by turning a dial on the back panel.  My favorite feature is the ability to choose between playing distinct pitches by using the keyboard or playing glissandos by using the little strip above the keyboard.  I was ultimately able to get the sound I was looking for, and I may even be able to use the Stylophone again for an arrangement of the Pokemon Red/Blue main theme that I ended up shelving many years ago.

Underground Preview (Work In Progress)

Here’s another track from the Suggestion Box!  I’ll probably have one more Suggestion Box track after this one, and then I’ll return to my personal list for a couple videos.  I was a bit hesitant to work on Underground, as it’s a fairly short track, and I wasn’t sure how I would work it out to be a full length video, but I eventually just decided to tack on a surprise track at the end of the video like I sometimes do.  This time I decided to create a short arrangement of the Bonus Game theme from Yoshi’s Island, which was actually pretty fun to work on.  It ended up being a small reed ensemble comprised of a harmonium, an accordion, and two different melodicas.  Anyway, here are some links to the previews!  All of the instruments have been recorded, but I still need to mix the audio properly.

Underground

https://soundcloud.com/user-789983357/u_premixr/s-okg3921jw0T 

Bonus Game

https://soundcloud.com/user-789983357/bg_premix/s-0MRqcIxu7Rm 

And that’s all for now!  A huge thanks to all of you who are supporting my videos during this time.  Being indoors so much can be a bit stressful at times, but being able to work on my YouTube videos has given me something to focus my energy on over the past several months.  So thank you, I truly appreciate your support!  I have a lot of projects that are on the verge of completion, so hopefully a new video will be coming soon.  So until then, stay safe!  Cheers.