Epic "Nemo" Tank and Sea Turtles @ Kelly Tarlton's

To kick off 2018, I've just spent a few hours cutting together a bunch of some of the clips I filmed while on vacation up in the North Island earlier this month, pairing the footage with a little taste of the music I recorded last year while in the midst of writing my thesis.



Originally, this was going to be just a video of the clips I'd filmed of an epic "Nemo" tank they had - complete with heaps of Clownfish, Blue Tangs, and Anemones - but to make the clips flow together, and to fit the soundtrack I'd found from my collection, I needed to include a few other clips I'd filmed as well

Hope you enjoy it!  It was fun putting this together with the Blender Sequencer - though it was really sluggish with the HD footage, meaning that I had to rerender it a few dozen times to get the timing of the fades down (though it's perhaps not such a great idea with a laptop on a hot day ;).

Over the coming months, I look forward to gradually releasing more of the 3+ hours of music I recorded/composed last year while writing my thesis (with the backing track here being just the first track of "Album 1" ;)  I'm still working through a plan and the mechanics for doing that, so stay tuned!

Start of Autumn - Music

Here's a bunch of lite tracks I recorded this afternoon - the first weekend of Autumn here (sob). It's been a sunny (if mild) day, though it's clear that Summer has ended...



My favourite is the second one (especially that light rhythm in the background), as it echoes some of the cool music out there in various non-Western-classical music traditions (i.e. all the very cool stuff)

PS.  After a few long weeks, I've finally finished data collection on my last experiment for my thesis. Yay!

Port Hills Fires - Violin Layering Tracks

Last week, a series of out of control wildfires raged across the Port Hills to the south of Christchurch, destroying houses, sending massive plumes of smoke billowing into the sky (and visible from space), and leaving thousands of hill-suburb residents temporarily homeless (after often getting only minutes to evacuate).

Feb 22 - Violin Layering Tribute

Today marks 6 years since the devastating Feb22 quakes here in Christchurch. Here are a bunch of tracks I recorded to commemorate the event this year.

Violin Layering Highlights - January 2017

Over the past few weeks, I've continued playing around with my "Violin Layering" series of improvised recordings. Here is a collection of some of the highlights from this month. Hope you enjoy :)

Violin Improv - Moody/Atmospheric Tracks

Today's latest set of tracks:


It's been a while since I've had a chance to have some fun and do this (between being sick and catching up on all the work I'd had to put aside during that time). Once again, everything is just me improvising each track by overdubbing them a few times. Overall, I'm quite happy with how this set turned out - they turned out quite thematically similar (apart from the last one, which was an interesting exercise in seeing what sort of random special fx I could come up with).

Violin Layering Songs - 20160730

Here's another bunch of songs I recorded for fun (and a break from "work-like" things) this afternoon.



This time, I tried to keep things a lot more "tonal" than in previous recordings, so hopefully more people will find it less unsettling to listen to. Another thing I was playing around with here was tweaking the left/right balance and relative volume levels of each track (apologies in advance if one or two are a bit on the "loud" side) - I ended up optimising for headphones (tracks "8" and "3" in particular really sound a lot better this way; in particular, "3" only seems understandable this way).

My personal favourite of this set is the first one on the playlist ("8 - Horse Riding"). While there may have been a few places where the timing isn't quite perfect enough, the overall effect is quite nice, and really gives off that equine "galloping" feel to it :)

The Sea - Music inspired by a visit to the beach

It's taken a few weeks to get around to it, but I've finally gotten around to uploading the set of tracks I recorded for use as a soundtrack to a bunch of clips I filmed while spending some time out at Sumner beach watching the waves. You can see one of those clips (a real-life homage and fan-art for Pixar's "Piper") and the track I specially recorded for it here.



It was really relaxing spending time just staring out at the waves as them came crashing in to the shoreline. While the picture above shows the tides as they started to recede, they were initially much higher, and would come in thick and fast.

Seagulls vs Waves Clip

Keeping with the theme of "fan-art" of sorts, here's a little video I put together from footage I shot while out a Sumner beach on Saturday afternoon...



From the video's description:

A pair of seagulls hunting for food along Sumner Beach, between the receding tides. Filmed yesterday during a relaxing stroll along the shoreline out at Sumner, after a great lunch. The sea yesterday looked as I've never seen it - the water level was really high, and the waves just kept coming in thick and fast.

The scene reminded me a lot of Pixar's amazing short film "Piper" (showing in front of Finding Dory). It's one of my absolute favourite shorts! Great story, wonderful animation, amazing rendering, and OMG cuteness overload!

While this shaky phone-cam (at reduced resolution to save disk space) doesn't hold a candle to that, this clip is still very much in the same spirit!

The soundtrack here is a little track I recorded specially for this footage. It's done using the "Violin Layering" techniques I've been playing around over the past month of so - basically, I recorded the first pass of the music watching the video (via my phone), and then worked on recording extra tracks for it while keeping in mind the general mood I was going for (in addition to the key beats of the clip). It's not quite 100% there yet, but as a first attempt at doing this, I'm overall happy with the results!

Sunday Afternoon Doodle (+ Additional Music Mashup)

Just a random doodle on a cold and dreary Sunday afternoon, playing around with Krita's Multibrush tool... It's quite bizarre using this tool, yet sometimes, you can get some funky effects (like the middle bit, which was quite captivating to draw).

Violin Layering Experiments - 20160706

Earlier today, I had another fun session playing around with making overdubbed violin recordings. This time, I was mainly playing around with the order in which I recorded the tracks (e.g. "3 - Delicate" and "5 - The Last Moose" had the melody line recorded first, while "D-F-A" was an experiment in layering things up with layers hovering around each of the notes in a standard D-minor chord). The result is a set of pieces that I've found are quite nice for listening to while working, especially when played in the order I created the playlist in (hopefully it appears the same for everyone else... for reference, it's: 3, 4, 7, 1, 2, 5, 6)



Some of the dissonance in the tracks is still a bit unsettling (I'm working on it! It's getting better in general I think) and as a result may not be everyone's cup of tea, though on the whole, I'm again quite pleased with these tracks :)

Violin Layering Experiments - 20160629

Today, I played around with some more "layered" recording. Here are some of the better results:







This time, I nailed down my tech setup a lot better - laptop lid up (to not muffle the sound - I usually keep it closed nowadays as I exclusively use the external monitor), and headphones on for playback (it turns out I need to fully extend the cord and to actually have the band flat on top of my head to get the cords out of the way). As a result, there's a lot less "bad noise". Judging from these clips, I might be getting the hang of this... then again, you haven't heard the rejects instead :P

One of the biggest challenges still is keeping track of all the other "sync points" in the other tracks to avoid creating some nasty muddy/confused/out-of-sync clusters that just sound horrid and messy. It's particularly bad once the track count starts ramping up and it's no longer possible to show everything on screen at once. Maybe that'll be the next little "fun hacking experiment" :)

Turbulent Autumn Storms - Violin Improv Session

Letting off some steam on a rainy autumnal-Saturday afternoon with some crazy violin bashing mixed in with some calmer/mystical elements. As usual, everything was fully improvised on the spot with no prior practice/planning, unedited... just whatever crazy noise I felt like making with my violin at the time.

The recording quality is a bit crappy - I should look into getting a standalone mic instead of using my laptop's one with the lid closed! Ah.. hindsight!

Violin Improv - 20150625

It was so good to have a nice long session of bashing out some of these this afternoon. Such a nice change from the rut I've been in the past few days setting up systems to power some upcoming experiments. Here are most of the clips from this afternoon, in reverse order (since they seem to work well in that order too - from good to bad). The first clip though I've not uploaded (20 minutes) as that would clog up the remaining space on my account too much...

Violin Improv - 20150516

Just some more crazy random violin playing this afternoon for a bit of fun before bunkering down again to try and get this bloody project that I've been busy with wrapped up :)



This is one of the longest continuous recordings I've put together to date...

Violin Improv Melody - 20150428

Wow, the past two days have been amazingly productive! There's still lot's to do still - far too much that I'd like to work on, but don't have the time or number of hands + brains needed to tackle them all - but at least I'm making some decent headway into this writing project I'm working on, without any of the annoying writer's block that was frustrating me last week :D

Here are just a few quick improvised recordings I bashed together tonight, based on a little melodic fragment that came to mind in the shower. No doubt it's probably easy to tell what it is once you've listened to them :)









Usually I try not to play anymore in the evenings and/or when other people are around, but since I felt compelled to try these out tonight, these were all done with a "light touch" to avoid making too much of a racket. Hence why you may need to ramp up the volume a bit to hear these (and also why there's a lack of dynamic range in general).

Violin Improv Recordings - 20150422

Just messing around a bit this afternoon, on another rainy autumn day... (The silvereyes have been avoiding the tree today... well, until I closed the curtains, and a plump one promptly arrived and started performing acrobatics)

Violin Improv Clips

This afternoon, I spent a bit of time mucking around with my violin for a while. It's been quite a while since I've played (probably several months from my recording logs), but today the time seemed right to do this. As with all these recordings, these are completely improvised on the go, and without any warmups/practice/whatnot in ages...

Violin Improv Recordings

This afternoon, I took some time off from hacking like a madman on some projects I've got going on at the moment to play around with my violin for the first time in several months. Another disclaimer is that these little recordings were practically made up on the fly vs being anything "formal" - TBH, I no longer have any appetite for playing "formal + serious" western music in concert settings. Anyways, disclaimers aside, here's some music that I had fun bashing out!














PS: Why I never thought of recording myself playing/practicing back in the days when I was still obliged to play this still baffles me. Having done it a few times in the past few years, I've been starting to pick up on things I never did before; certainly, if I were to pick up teaching now, this is something I'd recommend my students to do!