Hot Head Bop, New Equipment, And Delfino Plaza

Hot Head Bop is now live!  This project took a long time, mostly because I really wanted to use a harpsichord for the pattern that plays behind the main melody, so I spent a lot of time looking around for a university that had an unsupervised harpsichord lying around.  I finally found one, and I was able to sneak into the university with all of my equipment and record the harpsichord without incident.

New Equipment

I mentioned in my last update that I was looking into buying a harmonium, and after doing a ton of research on reliable shops to purchase from, I finally bought one!  Check it out!

This was one of the cheaper harmoniums that I could find, and I am extremely impressed with how well it is crafted.  And more importantly, it sounds amazing.  It works very similarly to an accordion, only the pump is attached to the back of the instrument, which you have to unlatch when you are ready to play it.  Then you can pump air into the instrument with one hand while you press the keys with the other.  The sound is quite similar to the accordion as well, which is cool, because I’ve always loved the sound that the accordion makes, but I’ve always found it a bit impractical to play, what with the keyboard being right in front of your chest and completely vertical, and the constant pumping action that’s required.

It also has several different stops you can pull out, which change the way the instrument sounds.  Some stops open up different reed banks so that you can play in different octaves, and some stops activate a drone note, which sounds out while you play a melody on the keyboard (kinda like a bag pipe I guess).  Also, there’s a switch on the right of the keyboard that you can engage which will automatically press down the key that is one octave higher than the key that you’re actually pressing.  And lemme tell ya, it’s pretty cool to press down a key on one end of the keyboard and see the keys on the other end of the keyboard seemingly moving around on their own.

Overall, this is probably one of the coolest instruments that I own, and I can’t thank you all enough for making it possible for me to purchase this thing.

I originally intended to use the harmonium to record Gruntilda’s Lair (which I am still going to do), but after playing with it for a little while, I realized how perfect it would be for Delfino Plaza, so I decided to record that first instead.

Also, I bought this little cube timer in an attempt to improve my productivity.

All you have to do is tip it over, and it will automatically start counting down from the number that is facing up.  This particular timer has intervals of 5, 10, 20, and 30 minutes, but it’s available in a few different varieties.  I’ve been using it by assigning myself specific tasks, allotting myself an amount of time to finish the task in, and then challenging myself to finish before my time is up.  So far it’s been pretty effective in making me focus on a task without getting distracted.

Delfino Plaza (Unmixed Audio)

Here’s a preview for Delfino Plaza!  I’ve been wanting to record this for a long time, but I wanted to wait until I had the right instrument for the job for those accordiony parts.

https://soundcloud.com/user-789983357/dp-premix/s-p7lbH 

Oh, and I just now remembered while I was writing this post that I surpassed 30,000 subscribers a few weeks ago, so I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for helping me to reach this milestone!  With your help, I’ve been able to achieve a level of quality that I am quite happy with, and on top of that, I’ve been able to take on a lot of projects that I would have been unable to afford to record otherwise.  So thank you!  I truly appreciate your contributions.  Now that I’ve uploaded Hot Head Bop, I’m going to start working on an update video that will include some information about the song request I promised in my previous update video.