Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Weekly Discoveries - On Location Guitar Awesomess, Create your Own 8-bit Music and a 9 Minute Rock Fest

The last couple weeks have been crazy, so here's a twofer: last week's Weekly Discoveries and the week's before. Enjoy!

Apparently dragging a guitar, amp and other equipment out to a beautiful location and playing ambient music is a thing. And it's an awesome thing at that. Check out these examples: Ambient Song #22, AMBIENT GUITAR XIV - Garden #3 and Your Head is a Living Forest. You'd think that once you heard one droning guitar in the wilderness you heard them all, but this isn't so. These videos are both relaxing and quite interesting. It's a genre worth checking out.

Along this theme, check out Arli Ambient Guitar Soundscapes Looping Pedal Demonstration, which shows how one guy can make incredible sounds using a guitar, looping pedals and a few accessories. His on the fly creation is quite remarkable.

I know it's so mainstream, but I'm loving Thunder by Imagine Dragons. OK, the video is a bit too wacky for my taste, but the song is awesome. They keep producing awesome rock-out-music. How do they do that?

Apparently I'm a sucker for clever dancing music videos, and K.Flay's High Enough delivers in that department. The fact that the whole video plays out in a cramped camper only increases my respect for the dancers involved.

I'm not using a fan of 9 minute songs packed with guitar, keyboard and drum instrumentals, but Death of a Coyote Woman by All Them Witches is getting me to re-think my position. This song rocks. It shouldn't work for me, but it does.

You should really take the time to listen to all of Chuck Cannon's songs over at EOP Live. There's plenty of creativity in his songs, and he's got the voice to make them sound great. It was a toss up as to which song to add to last week's Weekly Discoveries. Ultimately, I chose Money Don't Matter, but I could easily have picked half a dozen others. At the moment, Money Don't Matter has 35(!) views. In a universe where a song can have millions, if not hundreds of millions of views, it's easy to forget that there's plenty of music out there that isn't getting much of any love at all.

This last week's discoveries include two videos that talk about creating 8-bit music. One takes the approach of using a JavaScript library, and the other uses beepbox.co. If you're interested in creating 8-bit music (of course you are!), then these two videos provide a simple, non-musician friendly way, to get in the game. Beepbox.co is an especially clever solution, because all you need is a browser window and you're off an running. See, here's what you get if you spend 20 seconds creating a tune. Cool, right?

Check out all the discoveries here and here:

No comments:

Post a Comment