The creative outlet of Lord Cecil McBumFlaps of LoonyTown – musical genius, Photoshop whiz, writer of words, climber of trees, dreamer of dreams, sayer of stupid things, breather of air, thinker of thoughts, walker of legs, hearer of ears, and looker of eyes
Here is my latest music video. Musically, the idea was to create a synth version of the kind of lead harmonies that you sometimes get in heavy metal music; in particular, the harmony lead lines in the song Alexander the Great by Iron Maiden, and For Whom the Bell Tolls by Metallica. It’s not meant to sound like heavy metal though, just inspired by those kinds of lead harmonies.
I deliberately kept the number of “instruments” to a minimum, so there are only 5 of them in this piece: - Drums - Synth Bass - 2 x Synth Lead - Synth Pad Sound (to pad out certain sections)
Have you seen Ricky Gervais’s recent series Derek? Yes, me too.
Recently, someone created a video which had the character Kev repeating the phrase “hand pump after hand pump” over and over again for 10 minutes. Ricky challenged people to create their own dance mix of it. I know I went a bit beyond that here, and went all musical and everything, but never mind. If this doesn’t provoke some kind of reaction in you, you’re not human. It might make you laugh, you might like the music, it might disgust you, it might freak you out a bit, or it might just irritate you. It’ll do something though.
The title of this post comes from the lyrics to the song “I Will Always Be Your Constant” by Leitbur. I recently discovered Leitbur on LastFM, when I heard the song “Old Life”. I loved it so much, I found the official Leitbur YouTube channel, which has all their songs on.
Here I’m going to showcase my 3 favourite songs. The 1st and 3rd songs are from the 2012 EP “Think of Tomorrow”. The 2nd song is from the 2010 album “You and I Could Rule the World”. I’ve been listening to these songs almost endlessly for the last couple of days. I’m probably going to end up playing them to death.
There’s a clear difference in style between 2010 and 2012. The vocals on the 2012 songs have more of a distant, atmospheric sound to the vocals, and the 2010 songs make more use of auto-tune, which is the only thing which irritates me a bit. But apart from that, these songs are fantastic. Speaking as someone who makes music myself, I can really appreciate what he’s done here with the songs. The tunes are actually quite simple, but really nicely put together, with wonderful mixing. The songs sound full and nicely padded out.
I Will Always Be Your Constant
I love the distant, atmospheric sound of the vocals here, and the dreamy lyrics.
A Girl From Mexico
“One night in july a year ago, I danced with the girl from Mexico, and it was, ohh-ohh, it was wonderful…” – hahaha, I realise we’re probably getting into soppy boyband-style territory here, but somehow this tune really got under my skin.
Old Life
With lyrics like “a whisper from endless summer” and “weekends, we fly” , and vocals that dreamy sounding, how could you not love this?
When I’m making music, my natural tendency seems to be to take ages to finish things. I tend to spend weeks or months chipping away at things in the quest for perfection. It gets on my nerves sometimes, and sometimes I feel like I’d really love to just do something quickly and be done with it.
I wanted to see if I could force myself to abandon my perfectionist tendencies and finish something much quicker. So I decided to challenge myself to make a new piece of music in just 2 hours.
I started up the music software at 6pm, and by 8pm I had created what you hear here (minus the computerised voice at the end, which I added the following day, but that’s not actually part of the music anyway).
I knew I wanted some time towards the end to work on the mix, so I decided that whatever I’d done by 7:30 would be it, and I spent the last 30 minutes working on the mix, then finally saving it to a WAV file and converting it into an MP3 file. I only just made it in time.
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I did a remix of a piece by Rencis. By the way, last time, when I uploaded the remix Rencis did of my piece Born to Fly, I referred to Rencis as male. Rencis is actually female, but I didn’t know that at the time, as we’ve only just started collaborating and still don’t really know each other.
Anyway, here is the original “Wild Birds part 2″ by Rencis:
This is a first ever for me, having one of my pieces of music remixed by someone else. I like the minimal sound he’s gone for here. It gives a different angle on my original idea.
Here is the original version again, to compare:
Here is his YouTube channel, with a few of his pieces on:
![youtube-icon[1]](http://laughingatthesky.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/youtube-icon1-e1364239620690.jpg)
![flickr-icon2[1]](http://laughingatthesky.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/flickr-icon21-e1364240108775.jpg)
