Tag: amateaur

My Favorite Thing to Do with Music – by Ben Levin

If you’re looking to learn more about music or want to consume some eccentric YouTube videos about music you need to check out Ben.

Garage bands, guitars, notebook paper

Sharing a fun story about a garage band I did as an unconventional back-to-school piece. Teenagers are still teenagers. 🙂

Garage bands, guitars, notebook paper

“Pisces” by Jinjer – A Hasty Music Review to Support the People of Ukraine #Music4Ukraine

I’ve been doing this series for several days now and I’m really loving learning more about the music and people of Ukraine. I hope those of you who read this blog are listening to the tunes and recommending them to your friends. Hopefully we can send these tremendously talented musicians a little support through our viewership.

Typically in these posts I give a brief description of what you’re about to hear and try to encourage readers to listen to songs based on similar Western artists. I’m not going to do that this time. I could draw parallels to some important and beloved artists, but this time I’d rather just encourage all of you to listen to the track below. (If you’re the type of creator that is inclined to do a Reaction Video, please record yourself as you listen for the first time. I promise, you will thank me for giving you the heads up.)

A logo I created using artificial intelligence by using the prompt “heavy metal logo Pisces symbol.”

“Pisces” is an absolutely hauntingly beautiful and brutally powerful song that needs to be experienced. I will warn you that it gets pretty heavy, and some of you may not normally be inclined to listen to music like this but please listen through to the end. It is a musical rollercoaster and it is absolutely worth the ride.

If you like this song, please check out more tracks from Jinjer. I’ve been listening all week and I keep finding more and more to love about them. “Judgement (& Punishment)” is one that I highly recommend. The reggae influence is unique in metal and in my opinion it is something other artists should consider experimenting with.

Also, I found a few clips of them talking about the war that you may want to check out.

Some of you may be trying to support Ukrainian musicians with the #Music4Ukraine Challenge, but maybe you don’t know where to start. I’m here to help. The playlist below has tons of great songs you should check out from a variety of musical styles. When you find something you love, please share it with others!

A Lil’ Freaky Fun For The Songwriters…

If you’ve ever written a stinker of a song before you’ll get this. Enjoy!

Bridging the “Chasm” – Overcoming the “Leave of Presence” & “the Big Dum”

March 14, 2022

I was very hesitant to abandon “Amnesty for Asking” before I finished my demo, but I just wasn’t making progress and I’m determined to keep this project moving in the right direction. Hopefully, this blog will help me keep track of the song, and when I’m ready to give it a good performance I can record that guitar part. I’ve got hundreds of half-complete demos around and very few that are complete. I need to become a closer.

In the meantime, I decided to move on and listen to some of my early demos and pick a new target. I chose to work on a song that was tentatively titled “Chasm – Leave of Presence.” It’s a rock song about how sometimes people are absent from your life, even when they’re still in it. My rough demo had a Logic Pro AI Drummer that played the same beat through all sections of the song. I have an A section, B section, C section, and some intro/outro material. I also noodled through some lead guitar parts that weren’t terrible. Most of the pieces of a song are there, minus the vocals. These ideas were just a series of loops that I had cut/pasted. It sounded very robotic.

Like “Amnesty for Asking,” I rearranged to order of the sections to what I think might be more reasonable (Intro, Verse, Chorus, Verse Chorus Bridge, Chorus Outro). I’m not sure that this is the right format since I haven’t the many lyrics yet, but I don’t see any reason to do anything revolutionary with the format for this song other than my boredom with that overdone form.

Unlike “Amnesty,” this song is easy to play. So I laid down a rudimentary bass track and re-recorded most of the guitar (except for the lead guitar- the rough demo is good enough for now for that). It was effortless this time, especially because I used my HX Stomp as an interface. I pulled used some basic presets to get rough tones using USB input 1 and I recorded the DI signal using USB input 5 (this is a useful trick). This way I can go back and create unique tones later and not have to worry about the performance. I find this to be the best workflow for me because I like to separate the engineering tasks from the musician tasks as much as I can. This way, I can concentrate on my performance when I’m doing the musician work, and I can concentrate on recording when I’m in engineer mode.

I still have the basic drum tracks in there for now, but I can come back to those later. Logic Pro seems to have a lot of ways to tweak the drums and I’m looking forward to digging into those a bit more.

Also, while I was reviewing my other demos I found a quick burst of inspiration for a newer tune, tentatively called “The Big Dum.” This demo is just a chord progression with a rudimentary drumbeat. Unlike most of the songs I have right now, I have a rough cut of lyrics written so I laid down a very rough vocal track. I’m no singer, and I still need to come up with a strategy about how to handle vocals. I’ll probably need to get a series of guest singers, or maybe I’ll experiment with the Vocaloid plugin (I heard about this on Ben Levin’s Youtube channel – check it out.)