Monday, May 23, 2005

your chance to fvck with the flvxx

Please respond to this post with any remixes, covers, additions, enhancements, improvements, worsenings, or other modifications you might make to Flvxxvm Florvm songs. Especially Butt-Ass Blues, but the entire canon is an open target.

To kick things off, Scott's Hammond organ added to Could-a, Should-a, Didn't-a.

Michael should be working some wonders on Sunset Limited. (btw, who can tell me what that song is named after without using google?)

Comments:

Given your fetish with trains, I'd guess that Sunset Limited is named after Amtrak's "Sunset Limited" train service. I haven't listened to Butt-Ass Blues yet, so I can't give any suggestions there. I'll try to give it a listen this weekend.

-Lee
Ok... It the timing doesn't all match up prefectly, due to some of the more arrhythmic bits, but at times it is spot-on. I'm sure this qualifies as a "worsening" but it ups the obvious factor. Maybe I went overkill on the theme...

Also, I have to say, that when I asked myself what this song needed, the very first thing I thought of was "A GONG!"

I call this the "Long Dank Train Mix" as a play on an Underworld song.

Here it is.
Wow. At times it's hard to believe the guitar is acoustic. The mix of distortion, echo, and occasional feedback over the drums makes me think about classic 60's raveups like "Train Kept a Rollin" (Yardbirds, Aerosmith, the first song Zeppelin ever played together even though they never recorded it) and "Baby Please Don't Go" (Amboy Fukes version on Nuggets with Ted Nugent directly quoting from Hendrix).

Is that drum track a Garage Band built-in, or did you play it, or what?
Dukes, that is. Maybe the "Amboy Fooks" were another predecessor band to Flvxxvm Florvm like the Sourbelly Trio and Ch.A.o.S. (Chosen Assholes of Satan).
I was actually quite proud of that drum track. I don't know if this is a standard GarageBand trick or not, but what I did was to find a drum loop that I liked, it was actually called "Train Shuffle Number-Something-or-other". I couldn't play a shuffle-beat like that to save my life, though I'd love to be able to. The loop came from GarageBand Jam Pack 3 or 4... probably 3, since that is "Rhythm Section" and 4 is "Symphony Orchestra."

To get that echo, I duplicated the whole drum track, and shifted the copy 1 beat to the right. I can probably post a screen-shot of what it looks like in GB, but that'll have to wait until I get home.

For the "boom-boom" sound that I meant to sound slightly like a train whistle (whoo-whoo!), I actually recorded that bit by creating a new MIDI track with the same drum kit as the gong, and recording 4 measures. Then I stretched those 4 measures all the way across the song.

I'll also let you know what I did to the guitar when I get home.

Like I said, some of the timing is off. Particularly in the middle bit. The beginning and end seem to mostly line up.

GB doesn't let you change the tempo during the song (yet, at least), but your song does have a gong in it now.
I'd be interesting to hear what sound effects you might add to the classic Flvxxvm Florvm cannon:

http://www.cba.ua.edu/~matt2/flvxx

Can you clean up "Flvxxvm Florvm is the Devil" so it doesn't sound like it's on AM radio anymore? It's not noisy because it's a crappy MP3, the original cassette really sounded like that.
Ok, here are the pictures. They are probably best viewed at a minimum of 1280x1024.

Pic 1 shows the whole song in GB, zoomed all the way out.

Pic 2 shows zoomed in version of the beginning. Note the two tympani tracks are slightly askew. The "5" on the bottom tympani track shows where I tried to shift the pitch up as well. That didn't seem to have any effect on the tympani, but I forgot to turn it off.

Pic 3 shows what processing I added to Jeff's guitar. In this case, I added "Auto Wah", distortion, and a crap-load of reverb.

I really don't know what I'm doing with that. I just kept experimenting by turning on different options whilst the song was playing... GB adds the processing in real time.

Curiously enough, if you do something stupid, like turn on overdrive or distortion for a drum track, it doesn't have any effect.

The sound I finally settled on sounds to me, a lot like Alex Lifeson's sound during the part of "2112" where Geddy is singing "Don't deny us further!", only a little more fuzzy.


Pic 4 shows the GB Loop Browser with all of the buttons visible. The two expansion packs I'm using take up a total of about 20 GB for loops and MIDI insturments. This pic shows that you can also search through the loops pretty easily.

Unfortunately, I must not have saved the final version of my "source" because my "whoo-whoo" drum track is missing. I should be able to add it back fairly easily since I did it on a lark anyway.

As for FF is the Devil... I'll see what I can do next week to clean it up, but I'm a complete newb when it comes to that sort of thing...