Friday, July 18, 2008

The Future Soon Guitar Parts and Rough Cover

The first somewhat odd fruits of my little collaboration with Mr. Coulton (of which he remains blissfully unaware so far, lucky him!) are ready.

These tracks are made available under the same license terms as the original: Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial 3.0.

Here's the dry guitar track (no reverb, no effects, flat EQ).

And here's a "wet" version with a little compression and chorus.

Here's a version with my 13-year-old son Isaac singing the vocal. I'm calling this a rough cover version because it isn't reallly EQ'ed and mixed properly, and the vocal track was really just one take without much practice and without any editing.

Now, one more version. I recorded a fretless bass line. I'm not a very good bass player, so this was quite painful because I had to assemble it from numerous takes; it's still rather imperfect. There's a light flange on the bass line but nothing else done to it. The guitar is run through an amp simulator that dirties it up just a bit and a spatial effect. For this version I also applied the "Cher Effect" to the vocal -- unnatural-sounding pitch correction and chorus. It seems somehow appropriate on a song where the narrator imagines himself becoming a cyborg.

I'm uploading MP3 files, but here's an offer: if you would like to use my guitar track in a some kind of cover under the same license terms, I would be very happy to collaborate with you. I could send you an uncompressed original file, or re-record it at whatever BPM you specify (well, within reason). I am not great at recording to a click track at an arbitrary beats-per-minute rate -- my attempt to turn "Chiron Beta Prime" into a ballad by slowing it down to 90 beats per minute was not entirely successful, but I'll do my best. Or, if you want to record a vocal track along with the track as it is and send it to me, I'd be happy to take a shot at mixing it, although I don't claim to be a true pro at this kind of thing yet.

1 comment:

Jam Handy said...

As I peered upon the TAB with my robot eyes, I noticed a few things I could add using my cyborg brain. So... I set the servo's whirring in the space between my bionic ears and did a little musical wizardy of which my maker programmed me well...