MSTmusic

Click here to listen to my song “Stars Fall”

This is my newest song! My composing/recording/mixing process is getting increasingly complicated, so this took forever to finish. I hope I can get more efficient in the future.

Anyway, I’m happy with the result. Hope you enjoy.

UPDATE: There is now a feedback thread at ultimate-guitar.com for this song.

(The image above was borrowed from here.)

My friend Tristin has opened a new site that is intended to promote unsigned bands that he likes.  I’m on it along with one other guy, and more will come.  Check it out!

Click here to listen to my song “Eyes of the Moon”

This is my second original song.  It took a while to complete, and I had to fight my perfectionistic impulses to get it out the door.  In total, I was working on it for about a month or so.

As you will see (hear), it turned into quite an epic  It’s over 6 minutes long and consists of a few different parts.  I’m pretty happy with the result, and I hope you are too.  (And, by the way, the song doesn’t end after the first fade-out!)

UPDATE: I ended up continuing to add to this song after putting it up.  There’s now a new version with more going on the the second half.  Also, check out this feedback thread at ultimate-guitar.com.

(The above image was borrowed from here.)

Click here to listen to my song “One”

*drumroll please*

This is my first “real” song.  It’s a simple little ditty I came up with a couple weeks ago.  (Well, maybe “ditty” isn’t the right word.)  The name “One” is a placeholder, since I haven’t come up with a real name yet — I’m not paying homage to the Metallica song of the same name!

I spent about a week recording the guitar parts, coming up with drum and bass parts, and mixing it.  Everything in the song (guitar, bass, and drums) is original except for the crazy drum fills at the end, which I took from a collection that came with EZdrummer (you will know them when you hear them ).

I hope you enjoy the song.  It’s interesting to see what kind of music you come up with when you just play what comes to mind.  I’m pretty happy with the result, and I’m looking forward to working on the next one.

Click here to listen to my cover of Dark Tranquillity’s “Hours Passed in Exile”

This is a full cover of “Hours Passed in Exile” from Dark Tranquillity’s Damage Done album.  Damage Done came out in 2002, so this cover takes this blog into the ’00’s.  I think this is probably my favorite song from the album.

This song has been a journey for me.  When I started learning it 2 to 3 months ago, I couldn’t play it–it was just too fast.  After practicing a lot I gained enough speed that I was able to play it semi-comfortably, and I started the recording process about a month ago.  Recording took a while because, at the beginning at least, the song was still fast enough that it was hard for me to play through without mistakes.  Some parts are still a little sloppier than I would like, but I am declaring it done anyway.  This is it!  I’m pretty happy with the result.

Thanks for listening, and comments appreciated!

Details: The process for this recording was substantially more complicated than for my previous ones–probably because I’m getting more perfectionistic as I gain more experience.  Once again I used the Line 6 POD for the guitars and Logic as my recording software.  To replicate the sound of the original song, I tuned my guitar down 1.5 steps to C# for this recording.  This was my first use of EZdrummer, which is a nice piece of software for generating drum tracks.  The drums sound quite a bit better than those in my Opeth cover, if I do say so myself.  I could have tweaked the timings and velocities endlessly to get the drums to sound even more lifelike, but I decided I have more important things to do.

I spent a while adjusting the EQ for the various tracks to get everything to mix together well.  The drums are quite a bit thicker-sounding than when I started, and the guitars are more defined than they were originally.  The piano and the cheesy synths that play during the interlude were done using software instruments that come with Logic.  I used stereo delay to cool effect during the “interlude” to get the clean guitar to sound more interesting.

One more thing: this song has a solo near the end, but I didn’t bother to learn it.  Maybe I will do that at some point, but for now I really want to move on to something new!  I left out the noisy intro as well because I don’t know how to recreate that sort of thing at the moment.

Check out the original version of the song on last.fm here.

Click here to listen to my cover of Dark Tranquillity’s “Insanity’s Crescendo” (intro only)

This is a cover of the intro to “Insanity’s Crescendo” from Dark Tranquillity’s The Mind’s I album (released in 1997).  I’m not going to do the full song because it’s pretty long and I already have my hands full with other stuff.  The intro to this song is beautiful in a sad way; it always affects me when I hear it.  The original was done with two acoustic guitars (playing the same thing) and a female vocal part.  My version is vocal-less and uses electric guitars instead of acoustic ones.

Details: I’m now using Logic 8, which has a much better interface than Logic 7.  I’m recording direct with a Line 6 POD, so no microphones are involved.  For the guitars, I used a moderate amount of chorus and reverb, and I applied a small amount of compression later in Logic.  Note that I played the song with a pick (rather than fingerstyle), which means that some right-hand acrobatics were necessary to play the bass notes.

Click here to listen to my cover of Opeth’s “The Night and the Silent Water”

This is a cover of the first 3 minutes of “The Night and the Silent Water”–great title!–from Opeth’s Morningrise album.  Morningrise came out in 1996, so this song is over a decade old now.  I love the dual guitar harmonies in Opeth’s earlier work.

Details: I sequenced the drum and bass parts in Logic.  The drums are pretty cheesy sounding, unfortunately, but the bass sound is decent.  I recorded my own playing of the electric and “acoustic” guitar parts (the “acoustic” parts are actually electric in my recording, as I don’t have a good way of recording an acoustic guitar right now).  I’m pretty happy with how this turned out.

Click here to listen to my cover of Katatonia’s “Brave”

This is a full cover of “Brave” from Katatonia’s Brave Murder Day album (released in 1997).  The quality is pretty low, so don’t expect too much.  I took the drums and bass from a Guitar Pro tab, and I recorded the guitars on a 4-track tape recorder.  The experience convinced me to use recording software from now on

This song is minimalist and quite repetitive, but that is kind of the point.  The atmosphere is very much plodding doom-and-gloom.  I love the whole album this comes from for the strange and ambiguous emotions it evokes.  My favorite part of this song starts at 5:15.