The Obvious Exit

New songs in progress

Jon — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 23:59:58 +0000

Here are several that went up in the last few weeks:

Lurk Dye

Jon — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 17:03:39 +0000

New composition added yesterday. I’ve been experimenting with synth tones and lengthier and less repetitive kit phrases. Check it out:

Update to the sidebar music player ->

Jon — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 18:51:06 +0000

I’ve added a handful of music to the side bar mp3 player. All of these are wip compositions but I’ve listed them here because they’re in a fairly listenable state – I also wanted an easy way to share them without forcing someone to wade through all of the Kompoz pages. Enjoy.

Dead POD XT resurected

Jon — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:16:52 +0000

I was reading some forum posts last night on dead Line 6 Pod xt units and noticed there seemed to be a trend toward switch failure on the units. I had some time, so I opened up mine and bridged the switch posts – boom dead unit came to life. I decided that I can’t be bothered with hunting down, purchasing and installing a new identical switch, so I just soldered in the bridge.

Slouching Galaxy

Jon — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:37:05 +0000

Here’s a new starter track I put up last week. It could almost stand alone but I think it would be greatly enhanced with a good bass track and some strings. Where the heck are all of the viola players that want to collaborate with rock musicians anyway? One thing that’s sorely lacking with at least Kompoz’s collaborations is the constructive criticism that’s so important for crafting really good music. It’s difficult to establish that sort of rapport with individuals from such a large community and I think that online communication is often prohibitively cumbersome when trying to hammer out creative differences when you have such a limited interface.

Exp Drums Track – update

Jon — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 21:06:15 +0000

I find myself drawn more and more to electronic compositions as a starting point for collaborative pieces rather than traditional guitar-based pieces. I usually feel comfortable really stretching out creatively – sometimes adding sounds and play styles that fall outside of traditional guitar play. The parts for this piece aren’t too far outside the box, but there’s a nice mid-section use of heavily over-driven and palm-muted harmonics. The opening single note line is played through a medium resolution vocoder which gives it a funky ’80s sounding electric viola on steroids. I played the rhythm under it using a snappy thumb and middle finger-style attack. The melodic single note section is played through a Boogie heavily driven by a bass distortion pedal. I like the sound of this the most. It gives the notes a great whistling sustain that almost sounds like an Ebow. Check it out here:

Update – new vocals:

Shellshock

Jon — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:13:42 +0000

This one came together over the course of about an hour this evening. I haven’t really given the mix time to fully bake, but I opted to post it anyway for feedback. Crimin ill is the author of this tasty nugget with guitars by yours truly.

Power Tab and Guitar Pro

Jon — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:34:41 +0000

Last week I decided that I’d like to have written notation of some of the musical arrangements I’ve been creating. I decided to try Power Tab since the software is free. After using it for a while though, I became frustrated with the user interface and some of its quirks. I switched to Guitar Pro and I’m quite happy with it. It has highly customizable midi playback interface and it generally much easier to iterate over and play notated sections. It also checks and warns you if a bar length is incorrect based on the time signature.

Some things I like about Guitar Pro:
It has a feature called RSE which better shapes the midi output based upon user settings. You can specify guitar types and modeled amp sounds or choose from a large selection of other instrument and percussion sounds.
Ease of adding notation is improved over Power Tab and is especially improved by tear off notation menus and good hot keys.

I have begun to make a list of features that could be improved:
Guitar Pro includes a speed trainer feature that allows looping over a selected area of the score. The selection highlight disappears once playback begins, but it would be nice for it to continue to display. Also, adding the ability to edit during looped playback would be a great productivity tool.

There a quite a few features that I have used yet, so I keep the post update. Here’s a section notation from my recent Kompoz collaboration:

Gramatically Orthogonal

The Factory

Jon — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:49:27 +0000

Just posted this near-complete mix yesterday. As always, we’re in need of drummers to contribute tracks. Many thanks to Sid Armstrong and Mike Patterson for contributing great parts.

Blackleg Visor

Jon — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 01:03:54 +0000

Gosh – I almost forgot about this one. Funny too since this is one of my favorite recent events over at Kompoz. Wire-and-Wood just contributed vocals to the very first track I uploaded to Kompoz (well over a year ago.) This guy’s got great vocal styling and after listening to it several times I recalled a hard core band from the ’90s that had similar vocal styling – Bad Brains. This was created from a single take guitar track. Check it out: