Wednesday, May 23, 2007

New Track City

I'm never really sure what to write when releasing a new song into the wild... maybe a haiku?

This is my new song
I think it has potential
But is it finished?

Wow, that should totally be my new track release haiku every time! Thanks ancient Japanese lyrical forms!

Haiku stated then, here it is:

Your Eyes Sparkle When You Cry

I've been sitting on a mostly-finished version of this for quite some time now, and I decided today that it had stagnated long enough and that I'd better get the damn thing out into the world. A few tweaks and some rewrites and bam! I think it's close to finished, though I feel like it still has a lot of really nice melodic opportunities that I haven't explored yet. Maybe they'll see the light of day on a rare 7" of B-sides once I'm famous and need a few extra bucks to polish the Maserati riding mower or something. Until then though, I think this initial version is a nice exercise in ebb and flow, with some good melodies thrown in to boot. Not to mention that chest pounding 808 bass drum! The 80's never died!

As usual, comments and criticism would be very much appreciated. Enjoy!

5 comments:

Sowmya said...

Oh I like this a lot! Seems more aggressive than the others - but that's not a bad thing =). I'll let others write more analytic comments =).

Sowmya said...

Didn't really mean to =) twice.

Anonymous said...

Oh, that rhymes with New JACK City! I get it!

houlette said...

Very nice. It feels like there's a lot of movement - that wonky little keyboard panning back and forth almost makes me dizzy, in a good way.

I happened to be playing some of your tracks in a real-time analyzer (a habit from the critical listening class I'm taking), and I noticed that everything above 16kHz (or sometimes 18kHz) is truncated -- is that just the range of your samples? Not that I can actually hear the difference, I was just curious. Most acoustic instruments usually show higher-end harmonics all the way up to 22kHz.

John Brian said...

Thanks for the comments!

To Ryan: I'd be really surprised if every instrument in my tracks peaked at 16kHz (or even 18kHz)- my best guess is that the effect you're seeing has something to do with the MP3 compression I've used. I have read that MP3 encoders sometimes low-pass around that range, so that could be the problem. Barring doing it myself, I'd be happy to send you some uncompressed .wavs to test that hypothesis.

Keep 'em coming!