My Mixdowns

Tonight I'm starting from scratch on my DAW. It's accumulated far to many extra programs and really isn't performing like it used to. I'm going to load up a very specific, very precise set of required programs and then swear off all my tinkering on that machine from now on. It's going to be my DAW and nothing else.

However, before I do that, I'm installing Mac OSX. I've always wanted to do this to an x86 pc, so I'm taking this oportunity to try it out. Don't rat me out, I just want to learn about Macs a bit. (Plus I have a legal copy of OS X ;)

One result of this decision is that I need to move and back up all my important data. I have a seperate drive in the machine for backing up projects, but there were also some files on the desktop and my docs.

One of these folders was a full set of all my recent audio project mixdowns. I never really intended to use or release these, with the exception of the few I placed on my MySpace artists page. Since I moved these between machines anyway, and I'm trying to waste time while the OS X installer runs, I thought I would share them here for posterity. These are in order of how much I like them as well as their production quality. One important note, these are not distribution quality songs, so the gain hasn't been maxed out on them. Translation, they're quiet, so turn it up a bit past normal volume.

Rawk This is my best attempt at a fast-paced metal-ish rock out song. It's a five-piece band set, drums were done in Reason, like all my drums, and there are three quitars and a bass. Okay, it's not really a bass, it's a guitar processed and dropped an octave. Plus, it's got a rockin quote at the beginning.

Imitation Is The Greatest Form Of Flattery If this title is true, then Brandon Rogers must be flattered. This is a barbershop quartet style song, in tribute to Brandon's "I've Got A Job". You should go listen to his too, since it's the original and makes more sense than mine. Technically this isn't a quartet, because I had 7 tracks and up to 5 running at once. Whatever, I just wish I had broger's quad-vocal chord set.

Rawk 3 The latest, greatest, cookie-cutter copy of the original Rawk. Has some really marginal tapping though, and a good pre-song quote, which is the hallmark of an awesome hardcore song. (Please see Analog's "Childhoods End" on "The Contention" if you do not believe me.)

Sleepy Eyes I wrote this one and played it a few times with Ryan and Smith when we were going to make a branch off band. I really love this song, and I fully intend to clean up, re-record, make up the rest of the words and post it to myspace someday.

All Guitar
Believe it or not (go listen first) this song is simply 4 guitars. No drum machine or keyboard. Although to be fair there is lots of really processed harmonics and an analog sequencer used to pulse the volume on one guitar for the "drums" section.

Diadem This was actually a song I wrote and played with Never Luke, but it was a tad repetitive and boring so we dropped it. This isn't a great version, mostly I was syncing up my drums part so I could record a "good" version for myspace. As such the guitars are a bit nasty sounding, and there are some ugly "improvisations" on the lead track.

Rawk 2 Awful. Really, I don't know why I saved this. At around 0:42 a "solo" starts that is just wrong. It's not even in the right key, or really even all that cool anyway. Bleah.