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Hey Josh and Eric - what kind of process did you use to arrange your song?
i recorded the gameboy with my old firestarter LSDJMC2 into Ableton (to keep the tempo steady) - then i sampled a couple tesla coils with Audacity (recording the stereo mix of my computer), after that - I loaded the samples into live's midi instrument, Simpler, and composed a midi track next to the gameboy instead of my guitar w/ the pedals and junk. Basically i was trying to approximate the coil - i didn't account for the extreme volume change per Octave. Maybe i should upload my approximation? Kinda sounds like a shitty tesla coil slash Amiga instrument over the GB track.
Last edited by animalstyle (May 16, 2011 6:09 am)
I did a lot of research into ways of somehow producing direct MIDI output from the existing LSDJ work, but in the end just tracked two channels' worth of the song from scratch as MIDI sequences. My programming style was pretty conservative, since I was operating in the dark about the nuances of the "instrument" — favoring longer sustained notes over short ones or rapid arpeggios, and avoiding pitch-wheel commands because, as I understand it, there's not a uniform pitch-bend range implemented across MIDI instruments (standard seems to be a lame 2 half-steps from what I can tell) and I had no idea whether the bend range could be user-defined through CC commands or what (and even if they could, whether a non-standard instrument like this would honor that sort of command). Anyway I tracked the song out, doing my best to approximate the original song while also adhering to the Tesla coils' limited pitch range. It was definitely a shot in the dark. I noticed that some of the notes I programmed rarely seemed to fire; these notes tended to be A: at the lower end of the stated acceptable pitch range, B: fairly short (eighth notes maybe), and C: routed to the red Tesla coil. Don't know if it was any one of those factors in particular, or some combination of the three, that made them seem prone to getting missed, but I definitely noticed their omission. Thankfully they seemed relatively nonessential and the track seemed to come off OK in the end. Definitely curious to know more about the responsiveness of the coils.
Would love to hear the sampled Tesla arc demo of your track!
Hahaha, didn't give it nearly that much thought. I used that song because its the only one on the album I already had MIDI for (it is pretty much all FB01 with a couple channels of drums and vocals), so I just consolidated what I thought would work onto 2 MIDI tracks and used the album final mix for the backing track. There was really only a couple sections that didn't come out how I pictured, but I don't really care because overall it was pretty fucking sweet and just cool to see it and be a part of it. I actually felt a little tingly from watching all this raw electricity happen and imagining what it would be like to be in that room with em.
There is a song somewhere in the middle of that video that was really cool with lots of pitchbends and stuff, I think the guy wrote it specifically for this so it came out nice.
Last edited by animalstyle (May 16, 2011 7:19 pm)
Insane. I like how it turned out; the notes produced makes it seem a bit more chaotic. Great job guys!
Last edited by an0va (May 16, 2011 7:01 pm)