i warned you!
i warned you!
Mixing and mastering is really hard and time-consuming. That's really all there is to say about that.
Anyway, I just made "I Warned You About Stairs!!!!!!!!", a very guitar-and-bass-heavy tune I had a ton of fun composing, arranging, performing, & recording.
I actually mostly finished this one up two months ago and just sat on it until June. I got the jump on it. Having finished this tune and video early, with two months to spare, you might be wondering what I spent those two months doing. Hah! Stressing out about all the mixing/mastering/adjustment work I'm going to have to do for the rest of the album and how I'm going to compose and arrange and record the final new tune, of course!
When I was mixing this one I was listening to songs from Asian Kung-Fu Generation's Sol-fa and Sol-fa 2016 and trying to sculpt my sound in such a way that it didn't sound like absolute trash when played next to tunes from Sol-fa. I listened to "Shindōkaku" (振動覚 Resonance), "Rewrite" (リライト Riraito), and "Re:Re:" a bunch. I used them as reference tracks, in other words.
The idea for the introductory drum solo came to me in a dream. No, not really. I just love stop-time, which is the thing that I'm doing there when all the instruments hit a sparse, accented rhythm together and then drop out so the drum solo can cut through. I just think stop-time sounds really fucking sick. So I decided to have everyone do stop-time while I played a drum solo.
I played this one to a 150 BPM click. Sometimes I like doing that and sometimes I don't. I usually prefer to play freely, without a click, which makes playing feel better in some ways and worse in others. It definitely helped around 0:18, when I just started spamming notes on the snare, floor tom, and bass drum as fast as I could, knowing I could easily hop back on beat because I had a click in my ear. That's something that's a lot harder to do well without a click. I dunno if I could do it well without a click.
And all these J-rock quotes! It's now very clear how much J-rock has been influencing me lately. I've always kinda sorta liked J-rock and anime music ever since I was in high school, but it's only recently (over the past 2-3 years) that I've gradually come to REALLY love it. I've watched my fair share of anime, but it's mostly older stuff. I haven't watched a lot of new shows. So if you can recommend me a new anime to watch (that's actually good, because I'm not wasting my time watching some fucking garbage), go for it in my YouTube comments somewhere. And say that this blog post sent you there.
The next and last new tune from this album will come out sometime between now and 10/25. It will be quite different than what you've been getting, and yet, somehow, sort of similar. Stay tuned for that.
2024-06-12 Update: You hear the Persona OST quote in the guitar solo? Fuckin sick, right?? Just letting you know, I've never actually played the game. The reason I know the tune is because I played a Five Night's at Freddy's parody fangame called Five Nights at Fuckboy's in 2016 or so, and that tune from Persona was used as battle music. And for some reason, I remember the melody of the tune, 8 years later!