The Guitar Talk - "Sample Something" Challenge!

V8 · 2019-06-19T09:34:43+00:00

Thanks to @klaasvakie svakie winning the super challenge, we've our fourth challenge of 2019...and well done to klaasvakie for being real quick on getting...

The Guitar Talk - "Sample Something" Challenge!

V8

guidothepimmp . I cannot seem to open anything with that link. Jusy a fyi. Maybe it works for others

I've tried from my desktop with chrome and firefox - both worked for me - does take a little while to buffer the file, but plays fine.

daveo1977

V8 I forgot!! This one's called "You want this party started, right?" It was inspired by those radio DJ intros you sometimes hear. There's a bit of 90's nostalgia in there – C+C Music Factory, EMF, Beastie Boys & System Of A Down. Put together in Ableton. I made album artwork, please excuse the big pic:

daveo1977

guidothepimmp Thank you kindly!!

guidothepimmp

and here is my humble submission.

Struggled with the sample bits but basically stuck it in as a preamble to a song my old band from 10-13yrs back used to do.I am sure you can figure out the sample.. it is rather obvious. The band tune oddly I cannot remember the name of.. i changed out the rhythm guitars and bass to make them a bit more aggressive, and also to fill space. listening back to the recordings of our practices it sounded a bit empty now. funny how that happens. I wrote some words but as I cannot sing, so attempted to voice over rather than actually sing. my throat was killing me after 2 takes.

V8

One from the archives (5yrs ago, originally for the GFSA 'Action' challenge). More than a little bit of old skool gaming nostalgia with every Duke Nukem sample I could find, some car samples and a couple DJ vox samples.

Although it's a previous entry :-0 I did make some changes for this one - the intro 45s is similar but mixed with far more delay tails and glitchy bits, middle bit never made the entered edit and the last 1m is pretty much the same, but a bit louder.

RCVN

My first attempt at using MIDI - More specifically, my Korg Nano Key.
Also had some fun with a drum app - Cant use my bongo for everything...

Vox was a debate but ended up using it, i really need to get a proper recording setup.

Iconic throwback songs in a bit of a mashup.

Enjoy ?

klaasvakie

Trashed the first idea, this is the second.

RCVN

I've remembered quite the interesting video on the making of "drunk" - Sungazer.

In the video they explain their use of samples throughout the song in quite an awesome way.

klaasvakie

So here's how I came up with my entry:
I knew I wanted to to do something with Mortal Kombat and I wanted to try to do something easterny sounding (kung fu-ish) maybe with some interspersed "eee-ya" fighting sounds or the like.
I came up with a easterny sounding riff which went like so:

I liked it and then decided to toughen it up a bit so I added a driving rhythm guitar which sounded like so:

But then when I tried to play my easterny sounding melody over the baseline, it just ended up sounding blues-rocky and very pentatonic:

I spent some time trying different things to keep the easterny feel, but failed miserably, so I switched gears to some more metal-y sounds.
The only metal song I've learnt recently is South of Heaven by Slayer, I slapped most of the main riffs into this little track:

Playing with the intro riff, I came up with the main riff of the metal combat entry:

And then the main rhythm riff was changed a bit as well. This track has the Slayer riff first, and my modification second:

So then it was just a question of turning the various bits into a song. I was hoping for the BPM to be a bit faster, around 150bpm or so, but I realised I can't reliably tremelo-pick 16ths above 120bpm, so 120bpm it was. Youtube for "120bpm metal drum track" yielded the drum track (the fourth or fifth hit has a good double-kick that I liked), and then Youtube for "Mortal Kombat Sounds" yielded the samples to lay on top.

I wanted to put in a part with two guitars in harmony --- the timing is bad and it doesn't sound great, but I left it in just because I must've blown 30+ takes on it and I didn't want to bin it.

I played the bass using an electric guitar with an octaver. The bass is super-boring, I would like some tips from the djentmeisters amongst you.

So that's the story! I hope it's useful for at least some of you, I quite enjoyed mapping out my thought process.

RCVN

klaasvakie

Sounds Awesome. I think the bass line fits the bill perfectly imo. Simple yet effective. You could maybe add a slide in there. There's always room for a slide xD

V8

klaasvakie The bass is super-boring, I would like some tips from the djentmeisters amongst you.

I think the bass works just fine in the final track - If anything, I'd have hit a open E and let it ring out for one or two bits, but otherwise I'd have done much the same as you did.

Metal bass (Unless you are Fieldy in Korn ?) tends to support the guitars & drums and make them sound fatter and meaner. At least that was my excuse for keeping it simple in the the last band (prog djent).

If you do want to djentrify (heh) the track, you'd want to start by de-tuning at least to a low B or lower. That just takes the sound into a realm that a std tuned guitar can't match. We had Julian on a 8 stringer (octave below std tuning) and that thing sounded beastly warbling away on the open low E string.

Here's Julian doing a playthrough for the instrumental track "Doggo Mlerm" - whats cool is you can hear & see him laying into that low e string. Part of the djent sound (imho) is that the open strings really get a chance to warble as you're hitting them HARD and letting them ring out and then muting aggressively. Try South of Heaven (fav riff of mine too) de-tuned a step or three and let the open e string that you start the riff off with warble while you play the rest of the riff - deeply satisfying ?

klaasvakie

V8 Here's Julian doing a playthrough for the instrumental track "Doggo Mlerm" - whats cool is you can hear & see him laying into that low e string. Part of the djent sound (imho) is that the open strings really get a chance to warble as you're hitting them HARD and letting them ring out and then muting aggressively. Try South of Heaven (fav riff of mine too) de-tuned a step or three and let the open e string that you start the riff off with warble while you play the rest of the riff - deeply satisfying ?

Thanks for posting this. Glad the camera spent some non-glitchy time on the fretboard so its easy to what he is doing. Yeah, I'll give south of heaven a go with my guitar detuned --- sounds like fun. I think I'll have to spend some time getting the muting right.

Also thanks for the advice w.r.t. the bass. Listening to my entry again, I think I would give the bass a more dirty tone (not sure my little modeler is up to it) and maybe put it a little less loud in the mix (at least while the bass drum is not double-kicking).

I just gave all the entries another listen, I think my favorite bit of yours is the rhythm change ~1 minute from the end. Love it, and it fits the song so well.

@RCVN That Lonely/Sickness mashup has a lot of potential, but I think they go so well together, the tricky bit is figuring out where to add your own original bits. W.r.t. your vox, I don't have a real issue with the recording quality, I think it came out OK, but it does sound like you are straining to reach the high notes though, maybe it will sound more natural a half-step or whole-step down? Anyway, I'm no vocalist so take it with a pinch of salt.

@guidothepimmp There is some nice technical guitar playing in there, I think your entry was for sure the hardest to play. Your previous band must've rocked pretty hard, what were you called, did you ever record anything? Love the megaphoned vocals, the section from ~40 seconds to ~1 minute defs has some battery9 vibes.

@daveo1977 You nailed the DJ intro vibe, I can easily imagine a "mornings with blablabla" voiceover going on top of your track.

RCVN

My process:
So my initial attempt went something like this. Would've liked to add vox and/or iconic voice samples.

Got stuck and didn't really want to publish a daw only project..
It did teach me how to match different bpms into one song at least.

For my actual project, the whole idea came from practicing Billy Jean on the bass. A great finger exercise and I couldn't even make it halfway through the song without running out of stamina at the start. After playing it over and over for a week or two,I decided that I might as well use it.

Went online and searched for songs with a similar bpm, found Ice Ice baby. It was easy to match the rhythm section of Billy Jean - was considering abbreviating the name..- to the rap sample, I just had to shift the chords on the bass a bit, and run the drums accordingly. I used Hydrogen Drum Machine to assemble the drums and recorded the bass with a UMC22.

The next step was adding my own vox, once again I used my cellphone to record, and once again it sounded quite sheit.

For the Synth/Midi layers, I used a nanoKey2. I think that there is about 5 layered instruments on the track regarding the midi. I needed to fill the space to ease the sound of my vox. It sounded like I was in a tunnel stepping on a lego or something.

I would really appreciate advise on mixing badly recorded/ badly sung vocals. xD

Great learning experience! Nice challenge Mr. Vaakie

V8

klaasvakie I think my favorite bit of yours is the rhythm change ~1 minute from the end. Love it, and it fits the song so well.

May I tip my hat to you Klaasvakie, you are the only person yet to mention the rhythm change in that section - each time the car rev's - the bpm goes up by 5-10bpm. Thought that section needed a big bump up in Bpm (+/-20) to make the guitar riff interesting - which had a chunk o' vibrato on it to give it a bit of flavour.

guidothepimmp Per V8s suggestion

Sure, blame me...? Love RATM!

klaasvakie Thanks for posting this. Glad the camera spent some non-glitchy time on the fretboard so its easy to what he is doing. Yeah, I'll give south of heaven a go with my guitar detuned --- sounds like fun. I think I'll have to spend some time getting the muting right

Cool to see up close them strings flapping away on a 8 stringer. I've tried to play that beast a good few times. The fretboard is literally two std guitars wide. Ridiculous. And left hand muting is such a part of the sound, took me 6mths to get a decent feel muting left hand. Nice thing is that technique is useful beyond metal/djent. Turned out to be essential for funk bass, which was a nice bonus for me.

DO try de-tuning, you'll be amazed at how heavy things sound in D std, even more so when you tune further down. Though on a std scale guitar (24.5 or 25.5) strings get a lot flappy past D std if you don't up the gauge of the strings. That 8 stringer has a 28.5 in scale to keep some kinda tension in the strings.

RCVN I would really appreciate advise on mixing badly recorded/ badly sung vocals. xD

Think the vocals have a lot of promise - but if the recording source is poor, you're fighting a losing battle (imho). It'll always sound like you've got loads of reverb (recorded in the hall/bathroom effect).

Vocal Mic technique is a thing and I'm useless at it myself. A Shure SM58 is the standard for live vocals, though for home projects I'm not really sure what I'd try. I had a AKG 1000S which I got some half decent takes out of, though something cheap n cheerful like a Samson C1 condenser would work well too - all three would be a improvement over a cell mic.

guidothepimmp

My blurb. I have a bee in my bonnet to want to record my old band tunes.. and i was busy with that one when the challenge came up. Similarly.. i checked for songs with similar bpm and in d tuning. There were quite a few.. but killing in the name of is one of my favourites, so opted to use that.

Per V8s suggestion, looked up some stems for it, and surprisingly found some too. Imported them into cubase and basicallt chopped them up into bite size chunks.

For the track itself, i used mt powerdrums to construct a basic drum pattern. Imported into cubase and adjusted the bpm. Embellished a bit on the drum beat using the midi controller i picked up. Then ran 1 guitar part dry. Changed up thw rhythm and laid that down and canned the dry run. Done the bass line. then done a second bass line but with some melodic runs.

Tracked all the other guitars and harmonies and applied the models. I used a boosted jcm800 and a mesa model in line 6s podfarm. Bass was straight up clean.

For vocals.. wrote a few lines and voiced them over through a megaphone model.

Shifted things around until it kind of fitted. Then mixed and applied fades.

Thats it. Learnt about stems, importing tracks, changing bpm, and discovered vocals models..

All in all.. fun time had.

guidothepimmp

klaasvakie thanks. Yeh we thought we were all the rage as bands do ?. Not sure if they are still going or not. i think the rest of the band eventually broke up at some point, but im not close to that detail. Will drop you a pm with deets.

@V8, thanks for the feedback. agree. Hate the sound of my voice on recordings and juat need to get over myself.. posting the stuff is half way to getting there?

V8

Not much to say about the process behind the Duke - though there are a few 'fun facts' ?

It's only four tracks (1xdrums, 2xguitars, 1xsamples) - was back in the day of the four tracks only challenges. The automation with delay's, effects 'n things is a total nightmare - especially as there are 3 'parts' to the 'tune'. The 8bit Duke Nukem samples were a PITA to use. So much pitch shifting, compression, etc... on them that I never, ever want to try that again in a single track.

The guitar bit, while super simple (took me all of 4s to remember it 5yrs later) is actually a strat and tele kinda doubling each other - but not quite - they do slightly differing things during the fills. That Tele (Fender Deluxe, ex Parlourtones :shock/horror? just cuts through the mix in the way my strat couldn't. I wanted to get the sound of string on frets, and nothing I tried could like that tele. Wish I had 15k at the time to buy it. Easily the sweetest tele I've played. And yes, it really was gigged and recorded in the Parlourtones...

Individual track comments below:

@daveo1977 - I'm not sure why you didn't enter your final EMF mix? That was really, really good - not that I didn't like the SOAD sample (Love that tune), it was just a tad jarring to drop from the one to the other?

@guidothepimmp - Dug the way the Killing dropped into your old band track - very cool. Some super tasty playing in that track too! Couldn't really hear the vocals under all the fx, you hid yourself well there ? Vocals are soooo subjective and I seriously hate the sound of my voice - but we learn (and gain confidence) by trying - I say to anyone who is learning a instrument - if you can sing it, you can play it. Not being overly self conscious if half the battle!

@RCVN - Great mashup, Ice Ice Baby and Beat it - who'd have thunk it! Your vocals were a nice touch, definitely got a good enough voice to upgrade your setup too - using cell vocals are a pita (I know!) Really enjoyed the creativity in this track - super.

@klaasvakie - Loved the idea (of course I would - me is a old skool gamer). Think you could have gone nuts with Mortal Kombat samples - and using a Slayer tune as the basis was sneaky as f**k - it bugged me that I couldn't place it until you mentioned it. Great riffage!

Tough choice between Ice Ice Billy and Metal Kombat, both very creative - dug both tunes. I'd want to vote for both if I could.

Great topic choice @klaasvakie!

nick_D01

hey guys ? . congrats and well done on all the entries ? . whats great is hearing about how you guys went about things, composing and putting your ideas together. really interesting.

V8

guidothepimmp Hate the sound of my voice on recordings and juat need to get over myself.. posting the stuff is half way to getting there

+100, I frigging hate recording vocals. Only once did I get anything I thought was usable - but there's something to trying and getting it out there.

I've been spoilt playing in bands with grrreat vocalists - adds soo much to what we was playing, I have no delusion/illusion of fronting up a band, but maybe a little backing here n there to add some flavour - always dig it when there is a range of vox in a performance!

V8

A beeeeg thank you to y'all who entered and a special thank you to the voters & listeners - muchly appreciated, 15 voters is a great turnout!

Next challenge topic is up for a vote here : https://community.guitartalk.co.za/d/27211-vote-next-challenge-topic