A good friend and I have been traveling around the USA, seeing the sights and eating the foods. Earlier this year we went through Utah, Nevada, California, Arizona and New Mexico. I made a video for that too, but it's kind of long. It's not paced very well either since there were days where I recorded a bunch and days where I recorded absolutely nothing. That was Road Trip 1. That's the past.
This blog is about Road Trip 2: Trip Harder: Origins. This time we went to Wyoming, South Dakota and Montana and saw Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Memorial, Custer State Park, Bear Country USA, Devil's Tower, the Smith mansion, Yellowstone and Grand Teton.
Here are a few photos from the trip taken by Chris as most of my photos turned out really shitty.
Gallery
The trip was a lot of fun and probably won't be the last trip we have this year either, as we keep finding new things to go look at. I want to do a trip where we go to each state and have their signature food item, like Philly Cheesesteaks in Philly. That sort of thing.
If you know of any neat locations in Colorado or an adjacent state, lemme know. I learned about the arches in Rattlesnake Canyon today, so that's on my list of things to see, alongside "The Fang" and the Kremmling Ammonite Fossils.
I've brought music...and it has a style of drum track I don't do often. It's four-on-the-floor. It's dancetastic. It's danceable. It's also rock. Like, Electro Rock shoo-bop shoo-bop. There's also a marching band in there...and African percussion...and stuff.
It's got synths too. Lots of synths. Ones that sound like bees and stuff. Oh and guitars, for the rock stuff. You know what, you should just listen to it.
I really wanted to get vocals on this track, got the lyrics written and everything - they're about space monsters - but I did a couple tests recordings and they weren't working out. Maybe some day you'll hear this again with vocals over it.
Well, not the whole soundtrack, just one track. It is from Duke Nukem 3D though. And I don't know if Chill-O-Ramavision is someone's trademark already. I didn't plan on using it anyway. I just needed it for this blog post. It's a dumb name anyway. It doesn't make any sense. I don't know why I'm still going on about this. Let's move on.
So, Bobby Prince. Maybe you've heard of him. He did the music for DOOM. He also did some of the music for Duke Nukem 3D. This is my take on one of his tracks.
What we've got here is some chillout ambience, everything awash in reverb, blips and bleeps, a solid beat with fast-paced fills and a fat sub bass. I more-or-less continued from where I left off with the Reveal remix from a few blogs ago.
This video took longer than usual as all of the cutscenes from the game were taken straight from the movie of the same title, causing the video to be blocked worldwide. So, I had to recreate all of those scenes with hand puppets and After Effects so that it wouldn't be blocked again.
FEZ:
Oh, I also played FEZ. 64 cubes worth of FEZ. That's all over here in this convenient playlist: Hamst3r plays FEZ
FEZ was fantastic. Really top-notch all around with tons of variety and interesting ideas. Legit mind-benders, yo.
TWIN PEAKS:
All that game playing nonsense aside, I watched both seasons of Twin Peaks. What the fuck was that? I like David Lynch movies. I don't like soap operas. But...I kind of liked David Lynch's soap opera.
I was not a fan of the music, but perhaps I'm predisposed to be extra picky about such things. Or maybe I just hate good music and I'm a horrible ogre.
While my feelings on the series as a whole are mixed, the best part about having watched Twin Peaks, is that I now recognize all the references to Twin Peaks in other things. All of the owls and lodge with red curtains stuff in FEZ, the entirety of Alan Wake, and my memories of the Deadly Premonition Endurance Run. They have all been taken to new levels in my mind. Fuck, dude.
MOVIES YOU SHOULD WATCH:
I watched all of these fairly recently and they were like whoa and I was like whoa and it was like whoa:
eXistenZ
Departures
Django Unchained
Karate-Robo Zaborgar
Harikari
Tyrannosaur
ParaNorman
Perfect Blue
Looper
Amelie
Bedevilled
MUSIC STUFF:
If you wanna hear music stuff, you should check out my previous blog.
VINE CRAP:
Lastly, I've been making stupid Vine videos. Like, this one and this one.
You read that right. Four. Not because I'm proficient or anything, but simply because I haven't posted a blog in a while. How lame.
I'm going to put them in alphabetical order, which just so happens to also put the two tracks with vocal noises in the middle.
1. Cerberus
I'll try to ease you into all this with Cerberus. It starts off innocent enough, all nice and chill - just a solitary guitar and some droning noise - eventually transforming into some chunky metal riffs and orchestral fanfare. This is perhaps the longest buildup I've ever done in a track, but I think it works.
Now it's time for some Drum 'n' Bass with wubs and whirrs and forever-vocals. A pretty straight-forward track overall, with some glitches and short change-ups here and there to keep things moving along. Oh and this is the theme song for Audiosurf Air and stuff, so whenever that is released, you'll probably be hearing this song again.
3. It's Gonna Be Alright
This is the newest of the bunch. I've never made a proper ambient rock song before. At least, until this track. This track is just that very thing. It's all hopeful and uplifting like a soft fluffy pillow of reassurance. Cuddle it and it will cuddle you back.
4. Reveal (remix)
This is in fact the oldest of the bunch, being the first track I made this year. It's a remix of a piece of music made by a dear friend of mine. It's a fairly old track of hers too, but it has a nice melody going on and I wanted to rework it into a different style. The original is all trancey.
All four tracks have string ensembles in them, because that's how I roll.
Anyway, there you have it. Four new music tracks from this side of the bullet-proof enclosure.
So, I've been playing some Sega games. Yeah. My family never had any Sega consoles, we were an Atari and Nintendo household, so I only ever got to play Sega games when visiting friends. As such, I missed out on a lot of good Sega stuff. To remedy this, I'm going to play through the SEGA Genesis and Mega Drive Classics Collection, which is available on Steam.
I picked it up a while ago when they were offering all four packs that were out as one purchase. There are 46 games in total - so far I've played through and recorded about half of them - which will be featured in videos that go up daily.
Come along on this retro adventure with me!
1. Altered Beast | Comix Zone | Crack Down
2. ECCO The Dolphin | Gain Ground | Golden Axe
3. Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi | Shinobi III | Sonic 3D Blast | Space Harrier 2
4. Vectorman | Alex Kidd | Bonanza Bros. | Columns | Mean Bean Machine | Ecco Jr. | Eternal Champions
5. Fatal Labyrinth | Galaxy Force II | Kid Chameleon
6. Ristar | Sonic Spinball | Super Thunder Blade | Alien Storm | Bio-Hazard Battle | Columns III | Decap Attack | Ecco: The Tides of Time
Part 7. ESWAT: City Under Siege | Flicky | Golden Axe II | Sonic The Hedgehog | Sword of Vermillion | Virtua Fighter 2
Part 8. Gunstar Heroes | Landstalker | Light Crusader | Sonic The Hedgehog 2
Part 9. Sonic 3 & Knuckles | Streets of Rage | Streets of Rage II | Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair
The next video is the start of the 5th and final pack of the collection.
Fly'N, it's a game. It's not really about flying, as in airplanes or birds, but you are a little bug thing that can float. Also, although it's not actually stated in the game, the developer's blog says the blue bug thing is named Flyn. Get it? get it? Huh huh?
It doesn't stop at the blue bug though, there's also a green one, a black one and an orange one. They can sing, stick to surfaces, bounce and dash in mid air, respectively.
My initial impression of the game wasn't too favorable towards it, but it's since ramped up the difficulty and become more interesting overall.
Anyway, I'm playing through it right now and here's what I got so far:
Quite a while ago, a friend and I embarked on a quest to make a music sequencer for the XBOX 360. In this quest, we succeeded and ezmuze+ Hamst3r Edition was born. It grew, it survived and overall did quite well for itself.
So, we started in on a follow-up for it. This was several years ago. It ended up taking about a year and a half longer than we anticipated. But, now it's available! You can go get it and poke at it. Really.
In short, it's an easy to use music sequencer that comes with around 1000 music loops. You can drop in some loops, chop 'em up into itty-bitty pieces, rearrange them and otherwise mangle them pretty good. It also has automation effects, like trance gates, lowpass / highpass filtering and a bitcrusher. There are also, "Trigger FX" which are things like reverse, stutter, tape stop, pitch shift and such.
So yeah. Man. It feels good to have it done and out there. Now all I hope is that nothing horrible happens, such as some weird bug or failure that turns this from a success into a living hell.
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