Let me start off with what’s been going on. Due to the studio computer going down we had to add all of our musical notation archives back to the computer. However, we decided to try to simplify things with a better file structure. We had to move of files over to the Blissful Misery area anyway so we decided to go on and do this update now. The restructure took us two days, and synchronizing the files between our studio desktop, laptop, and backup flash drive took another two days.
We really had a lot of files. We deleted probably about 1,000 to 2,000 duplicate and out of date files already, but we decided to go on and get the file structure setup instead of continuing to delete files. Every day now we are going to go weed through at least one directory in attempts to reduce our archive from around 35,000 files to something more easily managed. Yes, I did say 35,000 files, but anyway on to the other parts of our update. UPDATE: I was wrong that’s 40,000 files!
One of the main reasons we wanted to do a restructure and file weeding is we upgraded to Guitar Pro 6 for our Notation Software. While I have very mixed feelings on the program, it was the best thing to do. After testing out things and learning the new format I am very confident our backing tracks will sound amazing and fit perfectly with our music and tones.
However, there are a few very shitty updates that took the program backwards from GP5, but overall there’s only one thing I really hate about the program. In GP5 you could switch instruments via instrument mixer right in the middle of a track. So writing or playing along with a song was extremely easy to do as you didn’t have to watch different tracks in the middle of a song. Now in GP6 you have to put new instruments on a different track.
For anyone lost… When a guitarist playing an electric guitar through an amp wants to switch sounds they step on a box to change from clean to distortion or cut on different effects. It’s still only one guitarist, but the program now acts like you have a different guitarist for every single change other than pickup position basically. This was a very stupid decision on the GP company’s part.
Anyway, let me stop rambling about that. Due to this new format in GP6 we have to take every single one of our songs and tweak every thing about it to get it to work right. I don’t mind as I love playing with the editor, and working on music all the time. We have decided to go on and convert what we have of the main originals and covers that we are playing as they are. However, as we come to songs we are looking at them, and figuring out our grand plan for them. That takes us to… Remembering…
I just happened to pull up Remembering as the first song to convert. I was trying to think of something with more than one tone for a single guitar so I could get the hang of doing the conversions. While doing the conversion, and tweaking the hell out of the score, I just had string ensembles playing in my head. I know that I don’t want anything overpowering at all in this song, but I’ve find some keys / synth string parts that I’m loving. For now the keys are following along just adding a little extra padding to the acoustic guitar track, which really really sets it up nicely. I will definitely be doing an acoustic and strings version without the clean, second, guitar part.
I am also going to be throwing in some vocal melody ideas as I progress through the song. I already have pre-existing melodies for the first verse and chorus, so it shouldn’t take much to finish them up.
Woah.. Anyway, I’ve been on here writing for almost 30 minutes now. I need to get back to writing. I’m going to be trying to do shorter updates at a faster pace from now on. Trying to tell about 4 or 5 days worth of stuff really makes me long winded.
\m/ Keep it Metal!
