Reflecting on the passing of Ray Manzarek – keyboard player for The Doors.

I remember being 14 years old and playing Light My Fire in the School rock band – it blew my mind! During this session the rainfall pattern from Riders on the Storm kept wanting to come out – so I let it.

Thank you Ray.

When life throws you lemons, here’s what you do:

• Place them gently on the ground, preferably a solid and stable structure – like a road
• Stamp vigorously on the little yellow bastards while shouting “Die Lemon, Die!”
• Laugh maniacally at the result

There – that should do it.

Oh and after you’ve done that – you’ll feel a lot better and you’ll be able to get back to the books and studying will be a breeze.

See – not only music but awesome life advice too – you should probably subscribe…

This is me in reflective mood – riffing off Wendi’s theme and the opening of Frustration 2 – playing with overhead positioning of the camera and different color blocks.

I think I need a balance between “overhead” and “side” in order to get the maximum effect – will re-position the camera again and see where it takes us…

Made it before the end of April! Here is the piano track for the forthcoming piece – Frustration 2 – presented in full glow stick beauty on YouTube ;-p

You can read the full liner notes here.

So the strings weren’t quite right but the piano track was pretty cool. This is the side perspective from the small camera and only has the piano track; we’ll be working on this same piece of music to develop the visuals from the overhead camera – I really like the color block and can’t wait to see how it all looks

This is the final theme of the piece – the strings are pretty close to where they’re supposed to be although there’s some overlap in this cut.

More to come….

OK – so you can “see” the clear development here – it starts off with just two or three glow sticks and before you know it – it’s a frickin’ rave!!!

This was the first experiment with surgical gloves and sticks running parallel with my fingers – and bizarrely enough – I think it came it our pretty cool.

This is just the piano track and doesn’t have the rest of the strings but I’m thinking that if we re-cut this and color block the piano – say all in Blues and Greens and then record the Cellos with red glow sticks, the violas in Orange and the Violins in yellow – then superimpose these tracks on top of the piano track – it’s going to look pretty damn cool indeed.

More to come….

Saturday’s work – playing with video – thinking about finger-less gloves with glow strips sewn into them – and yes – I’m off to the rave shop for more…

March has been a freaky ass month.

Seriously …freaky…

However, it has come to an end and things are better than they were at the beginning, so – we can live with the freakiness for now.

I’m off camping for the next week- we’ll be a little dark – but – here’s Friday’s work – I’m digging it.

Much more to come too….

Edit April 14 – that wasn’t the final track – it could have been but it wasn’t “quite” right and anyway – the core file got lost in the hard drive failure – so I’m guessing – it wasn’t the final track after all…

After a few weeks of hacking it out – here is the final piano track for Frustration 2. We’ll be adding strings etc over the next few weeks – but I do like how this has progressed since the beginning of the year.

We’re also enjoying the instant feedback from YouTube – this picked up 250 views in the first 24 hours which bodes well for the completed track.

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Image: /doh by striatic
Artwork: “sunrise illusion” at artbysky.com

…playing with Vine