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 next topic out - double win! The Guitar Talk Sample Challenge! The theme is month is to Sample Something - another topic reallllllly open to creative interpretation...? The Sample Something Challenge: Do what you want, but include audio from somewhere else. This can be another song, old sci-fi a la Rob Zombie, a poem being recited etc. If you don't want to include the audio directly you can play/perform/recite it, as long as it is recognizable. ? Entries Close: Sunday, 7th July, 23:59PM ?Rules: Only one rule, no more than three (3) minutes in length. The rest I'm going to leave it open to interpretation - again, because of the topic, we're gonna have covers - try and make it your own somehow - and bear in mind we are a guitar fopum, so guitar-y entries will likely get more votes than - say- a trance tune! To encourage more peeps - we'll potentially have two voting groups - One for Home Studio recordings (mutl tracked, etc...) and the other for field recordings (Cellphone recordings or other handheld device). And yes, vocals are welcome! Collaborations are strongly encouraged, either with a fellow GuitarTalk member or friends/family/etc... ⁉How To Enter: Record your entry, sign up or log in to SoundCloud, post it there. Then grab the SoundCloud link and reply here with the link pasted in your reply. ?Prizes: The fame and glory of winning a GuitarTalk Challlenge. And the increasingly dubious distinction of choosing the next challenge. Anyone can enter this competition. You just need a guitar and a phone. But any other recording equipment is fine too.

NorioDS

Thanks gents ☺ I'm sure I'll be fine soon enough ?

V8

So I'll think we'll got with soundcloud as plan A for entries and box.com as plan B if you hink you'll have issues with soundcloud?

Box probably won't embed nicely as SC does - but it's one click and it'll play on box - well that's how it used to work!

daveo1977

V8 Great, signing up for Box to submit my entry.

daveo1977

https://app.box.com/s/43ds9fwpctko6loz8tc5deux45352eyd

guidothepimmp

daveo1977

Not sure if there is a problem. I cannot seem to open anything with that link. Jusy a fyi. Maybe it works for others

V8

daveo1977 Nicely, I can view without having to login (but I did anyways to dbl check, non-box users get the same file).

Do you have any blurb (inspiration/motivation) to share (purely optional!)

guidothepimmp

guidothepimmp dont mind me. Created an account and now i can access it. Nicely done bud!

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 ?

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

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.

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