Schala’s Theme Early Access, New Equipment, and Hot Head Bop Preview

So I submitted Schala’s Theme for distribution to iTunes/Amazon/Google a week ago, but for some reason it’s still not live on any service except for Spotify, and I don’t want the video to go up on YouTube before the MP3 is available, so I’m just gonna give y’all early access to the video for now.  I’ve emailed DistroKid about my problem, so hopefully it’ll be resolved soon, at which point I’ll push the video out to the rest of my subscribers.

Anyway, sorry for my brief absence! I was at the SXSW film festival for a week, and then I spent another week or so installing my door (and I thought that I was going to be able to get it up within a day, lol).  But it’s finally up, and it works amazingly well!  It’s about 2.5 inches thick, and it has acoustic seals installed all around the door stop and floor.  So far I’m very impressed with how much sound it’s able to keep out.  I was able to record the audio for Hot Head Bop in ~3 days, whereas normally a project like that would have taken about twice as long due to noises seeping into my studio and ruining my takes.  So now I have no excuses for not finishing my audio recordings in a timely manner (which sucks).

New Equipment

I’ve spent the last several month’s worth of money on making some much needed improvements around my studio, so now I’ve gotten to the point where I can try to save up your contributions for some more significant upgrades.  I’ve actually been looking around at some cheap harmoniums so I can possibly record Gruntilda’s Lair and maybe a few other Banjo-Kazooie tunes.  But here are a few minor purchases I’ve made recently:

A document clip!  This is another one of those things that probably seems pretty trivial and boring, but this thing has made it a lot easier to edit my videos, as I no longer have to look up and down between my desk and my computer screen while I’m editing.  Now I can just clip up my storyboard right next to the screen, which makes it a lot easier to keep my place on both the storyboard and on the menus in DaVinci Resolve.

This is a can of Atmosphere Aerosol, which I used to achieve the hazy effect that you see in the background of the video for Schala’s Theme.  I was trying to figure out the cheapest way to create some light background fog, and I think this is probably it.  This stuff also greatly improved my efficiency, as I had to concentrate really hard to get each video clip finished in as few takes as possible so I wouldn’t have to waste more of my canned fog.  Maybe I should use this stuff for all my projects.

A bucket and a tube!  Hooray!  I bought these to create the bubble sound effects in Hot Head Bop.  I usually don’t include ambient noises in my recordings, but I think in this case the bubble sounds were intended to be a part of the composition, so I decided to try recording them.  It took a bit of messing around with an equalizer and a pitch shifter to get the bubbles to sound more like molten lava and less like a toilet backing up, but I think it’s getting there.  I’m definitely going to mess around with the sound a bit more when I start mixing.

Hot Head Bop

I was perusing the comments of Mining Melancholy, and a lot of people were requesting more Donkey Kong music.  Forest Interlude seems to be the most popular request, which I’d like to take a shot at eventually, but it has some really gnarly passages comprised entirely of 32nd notes that are beyond my abilities, so until I can figure out a creative way of reproducing those, I decided to just record Hot Head Bop.  Here’s a link to an unfinished version that I’m working on:

https://soundcloud.com/user-789983357/hhb-unmixed/s-Tq6U6 

This is unmixed, and I think I might replace a couple instruments, but that’s the gist of it.

That’s all for now!  I’ll probably switch back to another Chrono Trigger track after Hot Head Bop, and hopefully I’ll be able to finish my videos a little more quickly now that I’ve got a little more silence around here.  And as always, thank you for your support!  You guys are awesome.