Time

[Rainmak3r]

Hi all,

I recently found hidden in a closet a little toy I didn't remember I had, and I put it to (good) use in this track:

https://soundcloud.com/lminiero/time

Specifically, I bought a Sonuus G2M guitar-to-midi converter probably 10 years ago, and for some reason I never really used it, and forgot about it. Digging around it popped out, and since I was curious, I started playing with it: it worked surprisingly well, and definitely much better than I expected! Monophonic only, of course, but definitely good fun for playing some parts, especially considering it even detects bendings and stuff I wouldn't have expected it to. Since I had a couple of ideas for a track that didn't feel that interesting, I decided to use them to play a bit with it, and this weird 80s inspired thing came out.

While I like the end result, it's probably one of the laziest efforts I ever shared, though. As anticipated, I didn't feel the music ideas particularly interesting (you'll probably find the chord progressions pretty predictable), but as a playground I liked them enough. The main idea I started from was the "ostinato" arpeggio, that gave me the idea of a running clock and time flowing away, thus the name and the silly sound effects: it was supposed to be a muted guitar arpeggio, but since I couldn't get the timing right, I wrote a MIDI part for them instead, and used one of the muted guitar Giga Samples from FlameStudios instead (told you I was lazy!). Everything else was done as usual, with the exception of bass, where lazyness won once more and I only used a single track instead of three, but using a Guitarix preset to give it a "fatter" sound.

For solos and melodic parts I used my guitar to record both some "traditional" 80s inspired shredding, and the MIDI parts. I used the Sonuus G2M to plug my guitar and feed Yoshimi, which allowed me to go to town with some crazy effects. Not all the MIDI parts came out great (some I had to clean up), but I still think the G2M did a really good job with those (even though I didn't go exactly crazy as I did for the solo guitar itself). I'll definitely play with it more in the future, that's for sure!

Hope you'll enjoy this!

[folderol]

Quite like this

[Tenaba]

Cool track! I The rhythm guitar sounds really heavy, especially palm muted. Did you make your own guitarix preset for that? The solos are nice too. I like the second one lining up with the synth, and the first one reminds me a lot of older power metal solos.

[Rainmak3r]

Quite like this

Thanks, glad you enjoyed this!

[Rainmak3r]

Cool track! I The rhythm guitar sounds really heavy, especially palm muted. Did you make your own guitarix preset for that? The solos are nice too. I like the second one lining up with the synth, and the first one reminds me a lot of older power metal solos.

No, it's been a while since I've only used my POD X3 Live for guitars. This is actually the same preset I've used in Call of the 80s, Man with a Clan, Frozen Ground and others: it's a preset that mimics the Marching Out sound by Malmsteen, that I tweaked a bit to my liking (mostly removing reverb and delay, since I use Dragonfly later, and adding more drive). I think it sounds quite cool now: it still sounds more like an 80s distortion, but has more punch too, even though I think I would like something even a bit heavier (as I wrote in the Frozen Ground post, my ideal would be the Iced Earth sound).

Most importantly, though, it's not mudded. I've found myself quite disappointed with Guitarix recently in that regard: all presets I used to like sound way too muddy, and end up being too fuzzy on the low end, while higher notes don't come through. I've tried tweaking those too, but unfortunately I'm not skilled enough to understand what I'm doing. At the end of the day, using the preset on the POD X3 Live makes my life easier, so that's fine.

Anyway, if you liked how it sounds here, my guess is you'll love the track I'm working on now, and that I hope I'll be able to publish soon (assuming I can fix the crash I'm getting in Ardour all of a sudden!)

[Tenaba]

Cool track! I The rhythm guitar sounds really heavy, especially palm muted. Did you make your own guitarix preset for that? The solos are nice too. I like the second one lining up with the synth, and the first one reminds me a lot of older power metal solos.

No, it's been a while since I've only used my POD X3 Live for guitars. This is actually the same preset I've used in Call of the 80s, Man with a Clan, Frozen Ground and others: it's a preset that mimics the Marching Out sound by Malmsteen, that I tweaked a bit to my liking (mostly removing reverb and delay, since I use Dragonfly later, and adding more drive). I think it sounds quite cool now: it still sounds more like an 80s distortion, but has more punch too, even though I think I would like something even a bit heavier (as I wrote in the Frozen Ground post, my ideal would be the Iced Earth sound).

Most importantly, though, it's not mudded. I've found myself quite disappointed with Guitarix recently in that regard: all presets I used to like sound way too muddy, and end up being too fuzzy on the low end, while higher notes don't come through. I've tried tweaking those too, but unfortunately I'm not skilled enough to understand what I'm doing. At the end of the day, using the preset on the POD X3 Live makes my life easier, so that's fine.

Anyway, if you liked how it sounds here, my guess is you'll love the track I'm working on now, and that I hope I'll be able to publish soon (assuming I can fix the crash I'm getting in Ardour all of a sudden!)

Oh I see, well it sounds great! If you're on Ardour 6.6, I've been having frequent crashes as well. Downgrading to 6.5 stopped them in my case.

[Basslint]

Reminds me of Dream Theater and Queensryche! Very nice track with a rockin' feel!

[Rainmak3r]

Oh I see, well it sounds great! If you're on Ardour 6.6, I've been having frequent crashes as well. Downgrading to 6.5 stopped them in my case.

No, I'm still on Ardour 6.5, but the weird thing is that it's only crashing on this new project, which is basically the same process I've always followed. I can replicate the crash consistently, though, and I've already reported this (no answer yet): https://tracker.ardour.org/view.php?id=8655

It looks like for some reason there are too many file descriptors open, which go beyond the maximum number FD_SET supports (1023) and cause a buffer overflow. No idea what can cause that, as file descriptors can be anything from a socket to a pipe to whatever else and I'm not familiar with the Ardour internals, so I don't know what I can change in the project to mitigate this. The problem is that now I have serious issues recording the last missing parts, so until that's fixed I won't be able to finish it.

[Rainmak3r]

Oh I see, well it sounds great! If you're on Ardour 6.6, I've been having frequent crashes as well. Downgrading to 6.5 stopped them in my case.

No, I'm still on Ardour 6.5, but the weird thing is that it's only crashing on this new project, which is basically the same process I've always followed. I can replicate the crash consistently, though, and I've already reported this (no answer yet): https://tracker.ardour.org/view.php?id=8655

It looks like for some reason there are too many file descriptors open, which go beyond the maximum number FD_SET supports (1023) and cause a buffer overflow. No idea what can cause that, as file descriptors can be anything from a socket to a pipe to whatever else and I'm not familiar with the Ardour internals, so I don't know what I can change in the project to mitigate this. The problem is that now I have serious issues recording the last missing parts, so until that's fixed I won't be able to finish it.

Mh apparently I managed to fix this... I suspected part of the issue was the fact I do a lot of takes, since I'm a clumsy player: basically there's a lot of "CTRL+Z and retry" any time I record a part, and that can happen A LOT. As such, I wondered if Ardour was actually keeping all that, e.g., to allow for an infinite undo of sorts: it turns out it basically does, and everything I recorded (even those short things I cancelled right away) were still on the disk and tracked, and in fact my project folder was 2.5G(!!). Searching around I found the "Session->Cleanup" feature, which I used, and that removed ~1.8G of unused files, and after that Ardour doesn't crash when starting a recording anymore.

Not sure why unused files and/or undo should have an impact on file descriptor, but apparently it does: I'll update the issue I opened on their tracker. The important thing is I can finally get back to that track

[milo]

I quite like this piece. It makes me want to clean out my closet and see what I can find. But I'm pretty sure I don't have a guitar to midi converter.

[jeanette_c]

Ha, I like your sense of humour! Silly is good!
The Yoshimi solo had a really interesting sound, in the beginning I wasn't sure whether that was a guitar part with interesting processing or your G2M. Good double kicking there, very un-machine like.
One thing I noticed in the parts with the piano, was that there were some dissonances in the bass frequencies. Perhaps just overtones or some slight detuning in the two very prominent sounds.
It was a fun song to listen to!

[Rainmak3r]

Reminds me of Dream Theater and Queensryche! Very nice track with a rockin' feel!

Hah, I wish!

[Rainmak3r]

I quite like this piece. It makes me want to clean out my closet and see what I can find. But I'm pretty sure I don't have a guitar to midi converter.

Well, you won't know until you start digging
Jokes apart, for what it costs (I think it's about 80/90$ now) it really is a fun device to play with! I feel it will open to even more intriguing ideas and opportunities in the future, so I'm definitely looking forward to what I can use it on next.

[Rainmak3r]

Ha, I like your sense of humour! Silly is good!
The Yoshimi solo had a really interesting sound, in the beginning I wasn't sure whether that was a guitar part with interesting processing or your G2M. Good double kicking there, very un-machine like.

Thanks! The synth solos do sound a bit quirky when you pay closer attention in the headphones, and that's probably because I was trying to be more expressive than just hitting the notes: the converter probably translated all that to some wobbly notes at times, but I do like the "organic" feel. The Yoshimi effect was a cool Tremolo lead, and only one in a ton I would have liked to use: there was one that reminded me of the synth that pops in at about 25s in "Lines in the sand" by Dream Theater which I always liked, but felt a bit out of place here, and didn't sound great in the mix unfortunately.

One thing I noticed in the parts with the piano, was that there were some dissonances in the bass frequencies. Perhaps just overtones or some slight detuning in the two very prominent sounds.
It was a fun song to listen to!

You're right, I did notice that. I did want the bass frequencies of the piano to hit there for effect (the main inspiration was the intro for "Right now" by Van Halen), but while they sound fine on the first chord, on the others they're too muddy. I'm sure it's because all the notes in the chord are too close to each other in the lower spectrum, which was a bad choice: I should have kept the root note there, and used at least an octave higher for the others, to give them some distance and make each pop out more. Lessons for the future!

[psyocean]

Why do they say that time is running out? It comes and becomes ours even when it goes away. Our soul is enriched with experience and impressions. Time passing through us fills us and empties and fills us again. The year that has passed - highlighted a large mass of elements in the memory, they came to life in us, so time is not a loss, it is a gift, an acquisition, even if the hair has turned gray. The body, yes, burns out, but the soul preserves in eternity. There are no objections to the music, it is perfect.