I like to blog about my jam sessions but I haven't been jamming much lately. I was thinking of starting a unity dev blog. I wonder if it matters if I start posting them here...
Since most of my work of late has been in game development I thought I should try to post a weekly blog about my indy game dev projects. I had this ridiculous idea that I could try to write a new game each week, kind of like a weekly game jam. I would focus mostly on VR I guess but I've considered writing desktop and mobile games as well. Here are some examples of what you might see.
Color blending game:
This is kind of a tech demo. I was trying to figure out a good way to blend paint colors. Through my research I discovered that there are additive and subtractive methods of blending colors. But to blend the way paint blends you need all sorts of crazy math like in this pdf:
Here's a video of the game that I started to develop to test a simple rgb linear interpolation method of mixing colors:
Beez VR game:
The most ambitious game I'm trying to make is called Beez. I tried to make this in a weekend but I put it down and kept working on it during my spare time. The current iteration has lots of audio and paddles so you can smack the beez and kill them.
I still need to figure out how to turn this into a game or maybe I'll just clean up the graphics and make it into a silly experience for free download.
Wed October 4, 2017 It's already wednesday of my first "official" week of game-a-week and I wasn't sure if I would have anything new to show. But I came up something that looks promising. This is an idea I've had for a very long time. It's based on one of my favorite classic horror films, Scanners. Basically I spent a few hours downloading animations from mixamo and tried to come up with a way to make the heads explode.
Scanners head explosion:
Saturday October 7, 2017
Hi again,
I'm going to wrap up this post with one last video of my current progress on the psychic head explosion game. I think I'll start a new blog for my weekly game dev posts. The first post will be more focused on this head exploding game and what I learned etc... I made this game for VR and I've been testing it on the GearVR with my Samsung Galaxy S6, but this video is captured on my mac using the mouse to simulate VR gameplay. By the way, all of the animations and the character model were downloaded for free from mixamo.com. Dang, I should have added some original music...
Well, I can't sleep so I'm drinking beer and writing a blog post. This is something I plan to do pretty regularly now since I'm more-or-less unemployed. Well, I mean I quit my full time job of 15 years at Blue Sky Studios so I can make video games. But I did join a VR startup so I'm not just picking my nose all day...
What have I been up to though? Here's something recent... I woke up one morning and decided to try and replicate the old vector displays via a script and shader in Unity. This is what resulted. I was able to convert a mesh to a lineRenderers and apply a cool shader to the lines. Add a little bloom and it kinda feels right...
On the music front, Jamie and Eric happened to be in town a few weeks ago so we managed to squeeze in one jam session at Astoria Soundworks. I will be posting those mixes sometime real soon...
Well, it's been almost a year since my last post. This is because I haven't been very active with music except for maybe the Blue Sky Talent Show which took place in the evening of Nov 16, 2017. So, to keep this blog semi-on-topic here's footage of my one-week-a-year band, The Dead Pigeons. We had months to prepare for the talent show but I was on hiatus for 6 weeks concentrating on learning game development in Unity3d (more to come). So, I came back after my hiatus and we all got to rehearse for about a week while still trying to do my job. Here's video of the The Dead Pigeons performance:
I also performed in a recorder ensemble and played a saxophone solo. When I get around to digging up that old video footage I'll post them here as well.
So yeah... By the middle of 2016, all of my regular jam buddies had left New York to work out west in sunny California. I guess what happened was I had all this free time so I decided to start developing video games. I've been hungrily consuming tutorials and I even attended a weekend VR Bootcamp where I got my body scanned and put into an AR Business Card app. This is me testing it with a Metrocard:
Anyhow, fast-forward to a couple weeks ago, 4/1/2017... I really wanted to try to do something impossible, which is to make a video game from scratch in one day, or over a weekend... Earlier in the week I had chatted with a co-worker about a funny game idea involving bumblebees. The idea would be you're in VR and a swarm of bees is surrounding you and you need to try to keep still and try not to get stung. An alternate version of this game would involve shooting them with a bazooka or something.
I knew making this game in 1 or 2 days would be impossible since I had never really tried anything like this before, but I just needed to see how far I could get. So this is what happened:
I drank lots of coffee and looked like this for most of the day on Saturday:
10:00AM - 12:00PM 4/1/2017
Yeah, I stayed in my pajamas for most of the day...
And then some time after lunch I had built a bee hive, and a funky looking bee out of sphere primitives and then I taught the bee hive to shit the bees out like this. That's the thirdpersoncontroller standard asset running that is intended to be the target for the bees:
2:17PM 4/1/2017
I realized that the bees were spawning too fast and the rigidbodies were colliding with each other causing them to repel each other resulting in this funny scene.
4:44PM 4/1/2017
So then I tried to make the bees fly using purely rigidbody forces and I got them moving in an almost natural way but they were kind of wobbling around as if someone is pulling them with string.
7:23PM 4/1/2017
I guess I got bored with writing the bee flying script so I added sounds. This is me going "zzzzz" into my MacBook Air. I manually looped the audio in the Sound Studio App. The pitch shifting is pretty rough but it was a good start and I felt very encouraged. My hope is to always remember to add sound as early as possible when prototyping a game. It just brings everything to life don't it? Plus, it's the sound of bees that makes them really scary in my opinion.
Late into the evening I refined the flying and targeting algorithms. I made some audio tweaks and also stabilized the rotation of the bees. One of the rules I gave the bees was not to get within a certain range so some of the bees revolve around the character because their targets are inside the illegal area. This was an accident but it made for some pretty cool behavior.
11:51PM 4/1/2017
The following video that I captured on Monday morning represents my final tweaks that I added on Sunday. I had big plans for Sunday but I was so burnt out from the previous day that I just tweaked the code for a couple hours. For the most part I was trying to get the bees to behave in a particular way that would seem natural and maybe be a little terrifying in VR. In an attempt to make it feel like a game I made the bees die if they collided 5 times. As a sort of indication of aggression due to bumping into things I made the bees get larger after every bump. Kind of goofy, but I wanted a quick visual representation of their mental states in a manner of speaking. Maybe they're bees with some pufferfish DNA thrown into the mix? Oh, and after 5 bumps they die and scream. Yeah, that's the infamous "Wilhelm" scream.
7:55AM 4/3/2017
I had plans to make it into a VR game but I'll put this down for now. This was a great learning experience in developing a flying / targeting behavior. I was pretty happy with the sound design for the bees and the pitch shifting that I linked to the bees velocity. I like that I got the bees to be very stable in their flight patterns but now I need to make them go a little more crazy.
This video was shot at the end of a 2-day jamboree that I was calling Fuzz Camp. What was the occasion for this extended jam you ask? Well, our fearless Judge Fuzz himself, guitar player extraordinaire, head bobbing barefoot pedal stomper, Eric Maurer, was packing his house up and preparing for a move to the west coast, officially ending our 5 year run as Fuzz Bucket. But we've been jamming for a lot longer, since like 2008 or something, 8 or 9 years perhaps... Some of it has been blogged here but almost all of it is archived in a stack of hard drives 2 feet high. I always joked that we have enough data to keep us remixing our stuff well into retirement, I guess I can get started on that stack now. Oh, boo hoo. Let's talk about this jam.
So, we invited our good friend Brian Dean who brought his Black Magic 4k Production Camera and this fancy lens: Rokinon Cine CV35-C 35mm T1.5 Aspherical Wide Angle Cine Lens with De-Clicked Aperture for Canon EOS DSLR 35-35mm, Fixed-Non-Zoom Lens
He also brought lights and a tripod and a few other amazing things. Oh, and talent. We have the tools; we have the talent! (what movie is that from?)
After the jam session I wasn't terribly motivated to start working on the next video, I mean, that was our last jam session, man... A few weeks went by and the duder (that's what we call Brian) finally gave me a terabyte drive jam packed with 4K frames, totally filled the sucker up! So, I had to get on Amazon.com and order some new drives so I could have enough space to start a new video project. Another week went by and I got the drives before hitting the next stumbling block, dealing with 4k footage.
The 4K footage came in 2 forms, a compressed .mov file and the original 4K images. I started editing with the compressed videos but Brian complained about the gamma or some shit so I started experimenting with importing a 4K image sequence into Final Cut Pro X on my little MacBook Air. Damn, that took all night and part of the next day just to transcode, and it barely played at all so I had to write out my own compressed video just so I could edit. The new footage did end up looking nicer and I was able to crop it to full screen like the GoPro footage. But for some damn reason I had issues with sync. The 4k footage drifts ever so slightly. I shouldn't have told you because now that's all you're gonna see. You can't unsee the drift!
So, this jam was pretty cool but I've listened to it so many times I'd like to rip my ears off every time. The parts that annoy me the most are the repetitive bass lick (I've heard it way too many times, I can't take it anymore!) and some of the weak sax lines (they're just terrible). My favorite bit is from 1:43 to about 2:05 when we just let loose. Pretty cool stuff. That's when I think the improvisational nature of our jams really pays off.
But most kudos go to Brian for the beautiful shots of us. This is by far the best we have ever looked in our basement jam videos. Check out his blog here: http://www.brianpdean.com/ and send him money because he recently quit his job to pursue his dreams and apparently to play a game called Un-sharted? Something like that. Maybe he blogged about it. Check out his blog, bro!
This jam session which was from March 18, 2016 (I got the titles wrong on the video) was pretty special. For starters, Jamie was in town for the weekend so we had our full lineup. I had the 4 gopros and my vsn mobil v.360 camera so there was plenty of footage to cut an interesting video. Since this was at Astoria Soundworks and not in Eric's basement we recorded on Eric's and my Edirol recorders, 2 4-track recorders linked so we could get 8 tracks sync'd, which is just about right. I'm not so impressed with the 360 footage but at least you can see the whole room in the one view. By the way, you wouldn't believe what a pain in the butt it is to stitch that footage together. I'll have to write up a whole blog post about it.
Anyway, I'm not a fan of long jam sessions because they run out of steam pretty fast, but maybe it's just this idea I have of the short attention span of the average consumer of Internet things. Because in reality, whenever I've worked on this video it usually went by pretty fast. In my head it feels like a 6 minute jam but when I look at the counter I'm pretty surprised to see that it's about 10 minutes long.
So, when you listen to this try to imagine the 2 or 3 times that I was trying to steer the jam session toward a winding down sort of ending. I tried as much as possible to use cues to wrap things up but unfortunately it's very difficult to communicate when you're playing sax. I guess I could have stopped playing for a second but I've ruined jams that way. So, all I can do is express myself with my eyebrows and by what I'm playing... I think my frustration helped me lose myself a bit toward the end and play a little more playfully which I think produced some really cool stuff.
But... Ultimately what impressed me the most was the cool little lick I came up with, or is it a riff? It's a very simple 5 note repeated phrase that once I heard myself play it once I couldn't stop trying to revisit it from time to time. Basically, (I don't know what key I'm playing so I'll describe it in A minor since it can be expressed without sharps or flats) it is something like E C, E C, G ... E C, E C, G... Just so cool that it ends on the leading tone. Which, now that I think of it, makes up basically a minor 7th chord. Sorry, I'm doing all this in my head and I'm too lazy to run to a guitar or keyboard to confirm my music theory...
So, now that I feel foolish and it's way past my bedtime, I think this post is way overdue. I might have to revisit this track later to analyze it some more...
Here's the video:
or if you just want the audio here it is on soundcloud:
This past December some friends of mine organized another talent show at Blue Sky Studios. I have been a performer in six talent shows and each year I seem to be more involved than the last. This past year I played in two acts. One was a solo on soprano saxophone and the second was with The Dead Pigeons.
We call ourselves The Dead Pigeons, we have custom t-shirts, and I swear we convinced ourselves that we were a real band. Well, *I* convinced *myself*. We even made up special pigeon names for each member of the band. We were only together for two weeks but I think of them as family. I know it sounds corny but when you perform with a group and have this much fun, things tend to get corny. Well, I didn't want thing to end after the talent show so I decided to try to get the band together to shoot some "interview" footage for a fake documentary I would be making. So we got drunk on some christmas vodka, commandeered an empty office and kept the camera rolling for an hour (or maybe two). Some of that good stuff ended up in the end credits of this video.
I really loved editing this video and I love watching it. The end credits sequence cracks me up every time. Oh yeah, the songs... We played Crash by The Primitives and Government Center by The Modern Lovers. We also snuck in some Linus and Lucy in the middle of Government Center. A nice little mini set. I played a Hello Kitty guitar on Crash and then I played bass for Government Center and Linus and Lucy.
Since I tend to expose the "nuts and bolts" of the things I'm working on, I should admit to tampering with the audio track to improve the multimedia experience. When KT, a.k.a. Jowls, was setting up the bass rig he accidentally dialed the level knob on the overdrive pedal down a few notches so the bass track was pretty difficult to hear on stage and in the video. (You can see KT checking the cable and volume knob during Crash.) So, I cheated it by overdubbing the bass track from the comfort of my living room. I think it sounds freaking awesome, but that's just my opinion.
It's funny how our rehearsal progressed from one song, Crash, to two, to two and a half but practically three songs as we kept on building up the second song which turned out to be a whole coordinated performance. So, in a way, the first song was like a warmup or appetizer for the main event which was Government Center / Linus and Lucy.
I think there was some magic in the performance of Government Center and Linus and Lucy. (here comes a long run-on sentence...) For starters, during the switch between songs where I grab the bass from KT, Josh (guitarist), starts playing the whistling song from Disney's Robin Hood, then KT came up with this cool intro and the drums kick in, and the song just keeps building and building to the chorus where Karyn and Cortney sing and then the song comes to a stop which creates all this great tension, which KT milks perfectly and we all come back in (rather sloppily but awesomely), but then the song sounds like it's about to end and we go into the Linus and Lucy bit (which just happened to be in the same key), then comes a false ending with a short applause break and Bryan counts us in for the big ending. Woohoo!
In a previous post, I think it was titled "face melting guitar solo" or something like that, I posted this track, Hologram of Childhood, by a co-worker of mine named Sinba. It's a cool track with a mixture of influences and a face-melting guitar solo played by yours truly. Here it is in case you missed it:
More recently Sinba heard one of my video clips where I was practicing on the soprano saxophone. So, he came up with an idea to write a new piece of music featuring my sax playing. So here it is! It was a challenge for me to work outside of my comfort zone of free improvisation but I'm quite happy with the results. It was also my first studio recording of saxophone. A lot of the credit goes to Sinba for his editing which combined the best parts of my many takes into one. He also got me to play some bluesy guitar on this one as well.
This video is our first attempt to record a jam session in 3 passes. So, with 2 people that means I played drums, tenor saxophone, and then soprano saxophone. Eric started on Novax CH8 (bass/guitar) and then played a lead guitar track followed by another guitar track providing background ambience.
I don't think it's one of my favorite jam sessions but it is musical enough and we didn't hit any sour notes (none that I could hear anyway), there's just nothing that stands out, except for the fact that in the video you see our clones, so I guess that's kind of cool. It would have been cooler if Eric had shifted seats for the third pass, if the sax cam could have been rotated left to get more of the soprano playing... But the most disappointing thing of all is the fact that the vsn mobil v.360 camera failed during the third pass because the battery had drained. We hadn't noticed that it turned off because it was plugged in. I had to hack together a custom tripod mount that left room for the usb cable. The v.360 wasn't designed to be charged while it is in use so I can't really complain too much. What I can complain about is how that thing has a mind of its own and no on-off switch. So the previous night even though I had switched it off via the iphone app I guess it decided to wake up and do summersaults all night so that it was drained before the jam even started.
I went with black and white because the colors looked pretty bad even with a heavy dose of color grading before I gave up on it. I think wearing black was a big mistake, but also recording in the daytime created another problem. I think the dynamic range was drastically reduced to deal with the bright hits where there was sunlight. And that crushed the blacks and removed any definition there might have been on my black shirt. So, I'm reduced to floating head and hands and saxophones. Well, I think it looks okay in black and white, I'm just disappointed that I couldn't get it to look good with color.
The audio mix could be better. There were too many tracks to try to keep them separate and I didn't think it was worth the time to automate the track levels to focus on individual instruments when they showed up on camera. Wow, is there anything redeeming about this video? Just a bunch of clones... I should have named it "gimmick", anything would be better than fuzz-simile. What was I thinking? The next video will be much much better... I hope.
For the latest jam video I got a new camera. It's a 360 degree camera called a VSN Mobil v.360 Sports Action Camera. I bought the camera because the specifications seemed to be pretty well suited for our jam sessions and one thing I've been trying to figure out is a way to get better coverage of all of the instruments. With this thing I can get an alternate camera view of each instrument and it also gave us a great shot of Eric playing Novax and guitar in the same shot.
The best thing about the V.360 camera is the price. It's cheaper than a gopro. But after running some tests, you end up getting what you paid for. Basically, it ends up shooting a lower resolution than any of my gopros. But one limitation is actually one of the things I like about this camera. It seems to handle low light in a clever way. It doesn't have a very fast sensor so low light performance is pretty bad, but instead of shooting extremely noisy footage at a high fps, it reduces the frame rate and shoots longer exposures. And this produces pretty satisfying video footage.
My favorite feature of this video is the shot of the two Erics playing next to each other. At first I was disappointed that Eric staged himself so that he would overlap. This meant a lot more work for me trying to composite the images together. But I ended up having a blast animating the masks, basically frame-by-frame because the end result was just so cool. But I did make a mistake by animating the mask for the whole video instead of only dealing with the footage that ended up on screen (which was very little). I would have saved myself so much time... lesson learned.
It was nice having Eric's kids in the background looking silly and cute. It's short and sweet and I love the way this came out.
This jam happened on 1/29/2016, just a couple weeks ago... This time we tried a couple things differently. Eric mounted the gopro on the body of this guitar during his solo overdubs. Pretty cool view. I also selfishly aimed 2 cameras at myself for the sax tracks, one on the mic stand and the other mounted on the bell of the horn. I'm really digging the static mic camera but it's hard to give up the weird sax-mounted camera.
For this jam we recorded drums/novax first and then quickly recorded the overdub take on sax/guitar. My sax playing was heavily influenced by the Sonny Rollins DVD I was watching at work all day.
For some reason in the video edit I chose not to use borders between the split-screen views. Something tells me the borders will be back in the next video. Overall I'm really happy with the track and video.
Another jam video from the 1/15/16 sessions. The unique thing about this jam session is that it started as a sax/drums jam which was followed by sax/Novax CH8 (guitar/bass), where I played both sax tracks and Eric played drums and novax. So, if you think about it, the entire rhythm section (guitar, bass, and drums) was performed by Eric.
Unfortunately the bass track wasn't recorded so I had to pull the bass out of the room mic. One cool thing about this video is that I was able to composite Eric playing novax into the same shot where he's playing drums. Anyway, I hope you like the improvised saxophone harmonies and one-man rhythm section.
Final Cut Pro X 10.2.2 technical problems for anyone who might be interested:
I ran into an interesting issue with FCPX while editing and mixing the audio in another application. I like to keep all of the footage I'm using consolidated into the FCPX library file so it's basically portable. But sometimes while I'm still mixing the audio I like to keep the audio mix as a link so that whenever I do a remix it automatically gets updated in fcpx. And when I'm done mixing I just consolidate all of the files into the fcpx library file.
The problem I ran into was when I updated the audio twice in quick succession fcpx froze up for a long enough time that I decided to force-quit the application. So, what I think happened was that FCPX saw the first update to the audio and started processing the changes. While FCPX was busy with that, I started a new update and this put FCPX into some kind of endless loop where the spinning beachball cursor kept spinning and spinning.
After hours of experimentation this is how I fixed it. I renamed the audio file that was responsible for this endless loop and then re-opened the fcpx project. Now the audio file is missing but you get the interface back so you can fix it for real.
The next thing I did, and this is where my memory is a little foggy, I think I used the relink feature to link the audio back to the renamed audio file. Relinking to a new (or renamed file) was the key because simply restoring the missing file using the same name caused it to go back into the freezing behavior.
This is the first jam session where we were able to record an overdub right after an improvised rhythm track and capture both takes on video. I think it's some of our best work and a new way to make our 2-man jam sessions more productive. I also think my video editing is starting to look a little more mature. Pretty sure the audio mix is cleaner than previous jams. I accomplished this by using only single (mono) tracks of each instrument except for the drum overheads and Eric's lead guitar track. Eric likes to record everything in stereo and I finally put my foot down and muted the extra tracks that I think were getting in the way.
The Video:
Improv Jam with overdubs
Recorded in Greenwich CT on 1/15/16
Eric Maurer - Novax CH8 (bass/guitar), Electric Guitar
Dan Shimmyo - Drums, Tenor Saxophone
Nuts and bolts:
Video capture:
This video was shot
on 4 GoPro HD Hero 3+ Black Edition cameras (and sometimes you'll get a
glimpse of grainy footage from the original gopro hd hero, but probably
not...)
Each camera was set to shoot in 1920X1080 resolution
at 24FPS and I recently switched them all to the wide setting (down from
superview) because I thought it would look better.
Switching
from SuperView to Wide meant that our heads might get cut off so i had
to use the gopro app on my iphone to connect wirelessly to each camera
to double-check the framing except for when Eric switched from one
guitar to the other we didn't check the framing but he nailed it.
Editing - my current workflow:
For
editing I'm using Final Cut Pro X on an 11 inch MacBook Air. The reason
I'm editing on such a small computer is because I can do it almost
anywhere. The theory was that I would get more work done, and it's working so far.
One of my favorite things is the
multi-cam editing tool in FCPX which syncs all of the tracks based on
their audio and gives me basically realtime switching between cameras by
clicking the mouse on the view that I want during playback. Then I go
back and adjust the cuts to tighten up the timing. I have it set to switch the video track without changing the audio which I like to play uninterrupted.
I
also love that with FCPX I can nest clips within clips within clips.
All of the split-screen views are "compound clips" containing multiple
copies of the original "multicam clip" where each multicam copy is set
to one of the split-screen views then scaled and translated to create
the split-screen effect. Since the multicam clips are all the same
length you can just snap them together and they will be in sync.
Then I have another copy of the multicam clip and add all of the splitscreen compound clips into the new "uber" multicam clip.
Then I do all of the multicam camera switching and cross fades in another "compound clip".
And finally, I bring that compound clip into a "project" where I trim down the video, add some freeze frames, titles, and sometimes credits.
One note about color grading.
I ended up adding all of the color grading inside of the second
multicam clip. Inside of that clip I selected each video track and
applied color settings. The problem with doing it this way was that the
split screen clips were color-graded as a single view which was not
ideal, and the black line separating the views also got color-graded
which was not what I wanted. In the future I might create a compound
clip for each unique view and do the color grading there. Then I might
take each of those clips and create split-screens from them. And
finally, bring all of those new clips into a new multicam clip. This
way you can adjust the color on each individual view and the changes
will cascade through all of the multicams and splitscreens.
Jamie was in town for the holidays so we got the trio back together for one jam session. This track, Platypus, started with me on the drums and then came to life when Jamie started thumping a cool bass line. Eric's guitar completes the vibe. He wasn't happy with his sound so he spends part of the jam fiddling with his knobs but I like it. And then I flubbed the ending...
Gear:
Eric: guitar, rack of filters and lots of knobs
Jamie: Novax CH8
Dan: Drums
Video specs:
This time I set the gopro cameras to the "wide" setting instead of "superview" which is what I used on previous jams. I think I prefer the way this looks except we should have framed the cameras a little better. Also, the drum cam died before the end of the jam but the position of Jamie's camera captured the drumming anyway so it worked out.
Started shooting more videos of our jam sessions. What a great way to get motivated to share my music. Something about seeing it performed makes it so much more interesting, don't you think? Anyway, this is a jam where Eric and I played as a duo. This was our first jam of the night. It is a great example of what we strive to create. It's creative, melodic, it flows, has harmony. Anyway, we enjoyed making it.
I'm now playing with a new KB neck from KB Saxophone Services. It has really opened up my sound. As always, I'm playing a TM Custom and Eric is playing a Novax CH8.
I'll post some new music stuff soon. Got some fuzzbucket jams, just audio. I'll try to shoot some video in the near future. Until then, how many biebers can you take in a fight?
So, this should be a quick post... A couple months ago a co-worker who had heard me play guitar at a talent show a few years ago asked me to record a guitar solo for a track he was producing. So, I spent about 4 hours on a hot Saturday afternoon in June and recorded several takes into my computer and emailed them to Sinba.
The next morning I received an email from him with the subject "DUDE!". He loved the solos.
The cool thing about this is that it has been a very long time, almost a year, since I played guitar seriously. I'm just too busy working on my saxophone playing. So it was pretty special to get the guitar out and use my new isolation box for the first time with a serious project. I plugged my Wampler SLOstortion pedal into my Vox Night Train amp and let loose.
This song is very mellow and silky smooth. I think it is designed to put you into a trance state but then kick you in the face with a drum fill and then attack your face with a facemelter guitar solo. Or maybe it'll just get your adrenaline pumping. It gave me goosebumps the first time I heard it. Now I'm seriously babbling which means it's time to play some music! Check it out!
Line-up:
Dan Shimmyo - Saxophone
Eric Maurer - guitar & Novax CH7
Jamie Williams - drums
So, Fuzz Bucket is on a sort of hiatus because Jamie has moved across the country with his family. Meanwhile Eric and I still occasionally jam but not nearly as often. Most recently Eric booked a gig with his friend of many years, Tony Fasce. I saw them perform at the Les Paul Big Sound Experience in Mawah, NJ, just a few weeks ago. I think it's the best I've ever heard Eric play and Tony is an amazing drummer. If I had thought of it I would have brought the gopros and captured the whole performance. Oh well, missed opportunity...
I have also started practicing on the Soprano Saxophone lately. For years I've been obsessed with improving at that instrument. It has been tough though... In my obsession I've switched from a vintage selmer metal mouthpiece to a more modern version and I've also switched reeds to a lighter gauge. I think the current setup works the best for me at least until my technique improves. Just for fun I started posting silly videos of my practice sessions on instagram. I'm not sure if there's a way to embed an instagram video but here's one that I liked: https://instagram.com/p/4AzlpMq2DO/?taken-by=shimster13
Okay, so let's talk about this jam video. There are a few things that make this jam unique.
1) It starts out with Eric cranking up the feedback causing a sort of droning noise which usually prompts me and Jamie to refill our drinks. Instead Jamie and I started playing along with Eric's knob turning oscillating noise patterns. Very cool stuff!
2) Eric then picks up the guitar and plays along with us with a pretty heavy sound which I love. The really interesting thing about this jam is the lack of bass guitar. But it still works!
3) Ultimately what made this jam successful was that we didn't sit around discussing what we were going to play. Instead we let the music and atmosphere in the room dictate what the music was going to sound like.
4) This jam just transitions all over the place and even though it leaves you scratching your head for a bit I think it comes together just enough in places reminding you that we are still listening to each other.
5) My epic chin. The most unflattering camera angle and maybe Friday donuts have conspired to give me a chin that reminds me of Jabba The Hutt. Oh yeah, playing saxophone has a way of messing up my face a lot. Especially those low notes.
Well, here it is! The video of my chin. Hope you like it!
Line-up:
Dan Shimmyo - drums
Jamie Williams - Novax CH7
In this jam session, Eric stopped to take a break. I put down the sax to play drums and Jamie and I just started playing. It began as a bit of a Charlie Hunter rip-off which is pretty tough for me to play but I managed better than usual. Then I changed the beat because my arms couldn't handle playing at that speed without derailing very soon. I know it doesn't sound that fast but something about that tempo is hard to keep up, especially since I don't practice drums very often. This video picks up right before the tempo change.
So I transitioned to a moderate rock beat which Jamie followed seamlessly with a pretty cool indy groove (indy? My musical lexicon is pretty limited). I suppose it's difficult to hear the bass behind the kit which is one excuse I make for looking so serious and making strange faces.
One thing I've learned from making videos of our jams is how funny we look. I hope we are conveying the amount of concentration it takes to improvise musical sounding jams without any preparation.
Anyway, here's our latest "fuzz duo" jam warts-and-all which is how we like it!
(This photo is from a previous jam session that I haven't posted yet. I was having fun pulling frames out of the video. Apologies to Jamie for the grimace photo but it was too funny!)
Musicians:
Dan Shimmyo - Tenor Sax
Jamie Williams - drums
Eric Maurer - Novax CH7
Last Monday night after generating CG fur on animated characters all day I drove over to Eric's house with my Tenor Sax and 4 GoPro cameras. Eric's basement is already set up with microphones and recording gear. He handles the audio recording and I handle the video recording.
GoPro cameras setup:
3 X Hero 3+ Black Edition cameras:
I'm pretty sure this is the first time I tried recording 24fps instead of the standard 29.97fps. I'm doing this because I believe it shoots a sharper image and still gets the same low light sensitivity and same battery life, although strangely it uses up more disc space. They're all set to shoot in SuperView (ultra wide) mode.
1 X HD Hero Original
I set this camera up to record in PAL. I'm hoping by recording at 25fps I'm decreasing the shutter speed and allowing more light sensitivity. But the footage doesn't look too hot so maybe the resolution is still too high (720). I mounted this camera on Eric's guitar but fortunately in this video he's not playing it.
Descension
Out of the 90 minutes or so jam session I chose this clip for the video after Eric and I both independently chose this clip to post on soundcloud. I think we liked it because it was a reasonable length, feels like it has a beginning, middle, and end. Usually we like to end on single note concisely but instead we kind of let it trail off. Well, we make this stuff up on the fly so we don't always communicate our intentions clearly...
One of the things I like about this video is that you can tell that we're having fun. Yeah, there are some rough parts where we're all stumbling a little but overall we found a few cool grooves and transitioned into other cool parts.
I chose not to use split screen effects because it seemed like too much work. Actually, I think it's a lot cleaner without splitting the screen. I also like to be able to split time from one musician to the other to hilight what they are playing. When I thought my sax playing was a little too sloppy I even switched to one of the other cameras to take your mind off the sax.
Well, if I haven't scared you off, please check out this video of 3 CG Animation nerds playing improvised music in the basement.
And here's a teaser from our next jam from this Monday the 4/27. I was looking for funny faces and I found a bunch in the drumcam footage. Enjoy!
Can't believe a month has gone by since my last post. Well, it was worth the wait. I taught myself how to edit video and I have something to show for it. Here's the first video I ever produced (not counting the "outtake" video below. This jam from 3/12/2015 was so good and the video footage looked pretty cool that I had to make this fancy edit and post it as soon as possible.
I'm kind of blown away by seeing us play in this form instead of just in an audio file. You can almost see us reacting to each other and wondering where the next note will lead us. My favorite thing is seeing spit shoot out of the valves on the saxophone except I don't think it's visible in this edit. I might have to make an alternate "spit take" haha! I'll talk more about the making-of the video in the next post.
Here's a video of us recording a saxophone loop to get a jam started. We end up arguing a little and there are a couple funny moments:
It's on facebook via this link
I'm a guitarist, drummer, bass player, and I sometimes play keyboard. I also play saxophone. I've worked in feature animation and am trying to make it as an indy game dev.
