Learning Bastion’s OST on the Guitar
Bastion is a game by Supergiant Games. If you haven’t played it yet, you really should.
The music playing in the background? It’s a pleasant mix of spaghetti western plus modern electronica. Darren Korb, the in-house composer, says he used Logic (and I can hear some Apple Loops in there, too) to sequence it. That gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling, being a fellow Logic user. However, there are two spare tracks, just guitar and voice, that really cut through the thick morass of distorted guitar, snappy synths, and breakbeats. They are technically simple, but they resonate emotionally, much more than the rest of the soundtrack. They’re also the only songs that one person could conceivably perform by themselves (the one exception being the track where the narrator hums the first piece’s melody).
Watch this video to see one of them, as well as a third piece that’s a mashup of the first and second one.
Darren plays these songs in an open tuning, really giving them their characteristic “open-ness”, a sound that rings out because of all the open strings sustaining constantly. Now, I learned to play the two main songs, “Build That Wall” and “Home Sweet Home”, in regular tuning, mainly due to Internet tabs written as such and laziness on my part, and they still sound fine. You hear the music and sing the words, and you get the gist. For a quick accomplishment and bout of satisfaction, it gets the job done. Such renditions are not really “authentic,” though. You miss out on certain notes that shape the music in a distinctive way when you play them this way.
Retuning your guitar to play a couple songs is annoying, though, right? 99% of the popular music out there is written with the good ol’ EADGBE, and that makes it versatile when you just want to play a bunch of songs. I just want to be able to pick up the guitar and play a bunch of stuff without having to think about changing string tension. However, alternate tunings do mix up your way of thinking and can make you write and play differently. I think my first real dip into the world came via Soundgarden in the late 90s, a band that often writes things in alternate tunings. Whether this contributes to their unique sound or not is debatable, but it makes you think about composition in a new way. Each alternate tuning is like a portal to a different world of musical possibilities.
Years later, I wrote a song called The New Standard, which is written in open C tuning. I don’t play this song a lot when I’m noodling around. Can you guess why? ;-P It’s a great song, and something I never would have written in standard tuning, but needing to retune 5 out of 6 strings just to play it? Not going to happen often. This is the inherent risk in writing something in a non-standard way, no matter how fresh or novel the tune might be.
To sum up my point, Bastion’s spare guitar songs are beautiful. They’re largely beautiful because they lay a bare framework for a fantastic and melancholic voice. The guitar parts can be played in standard tuning, and I don’t think the fundamental core of the songs are lost. Playing them in their original open tuning, on the other hand, is what makes it truly distinct and will remain the only true, authentic versions.
That being said, I think I’ll stick to standard tuning for the time being.
State of the Michael, Circa Now
AT THE TOP OF THE HOUR
General status level: good. Also, Happy Birthday to anyone who is celebrating today. With ~7 billion people in the world, many of you probably are.
FAMILY
We’ve had our rough collie, Penny, for over 2 months now. We haven’t taken her back this time, so things are going well, I guess. The lowest moment so far, besides the (still present) anxiety of moving from crating her every night to sleeping in our room, was when we met with an animal behaviorist. Penny is still not crazy about going outside and can be anywhere from concerning to exasperating depending on our current mental state. A neighbor recommended someone to us and we finally took her up on the suggestion.
At the end of a 2+ hour consultation, the behaviorist seemed quite worried and gave us a few options:
- Get a more confident dog to act as a “service dog” for Penny, since she seems to follow other dogs for leadership when outside more than she follows us
- Allow the behaviorist to take her to her ranch and do intensive flooding training, so as to continuously expose her to new environments, in the hopes that she’ll become less scared
- Get rid of her :(
Obviously, she hesitantly brought up the last option, as it’s the most emotional. Still, the fact that she thought the training needed to “fix” our dog was probably outside our grasp due to our work/lifestyle was pretty sobering.
It’s been almost two weeks since our meeting with her and we’ve only decided on nixing 1 and 3. We’ve vacillated on 2 the whole time. Sure, it will probably help her, but it’s a big commitment, both emotionally and financially. And when she returns we’d have special training we’d need to do and get her other handlers (parents, dogsitters) to follow. It’s a lot to take in for someone who’s never had a dog before!
In the last week, however, I’ve walked her home from a dog park, and walked her to a major shopping center and back, with only sporadic trouble (pulling, spooking, etc.). In other words, with a little confidence in myself to be the leader and control her better, things are looking up. She’s still not exactly happy to be outside and I’m sure intensive training would help alleviate it, but I feel like by just being confident with her she mirrors my energy.
In other words, we haven’t made any decision on what we’re going to do, but we’ll both keep trying for now. Having a dog around the house is still somewhat weird, in that this “presence” is constantly around, being somewhat unpredictable. Everyday is a little better, but it’s hard to say whether I’ll ever be 100% fine with it.
READING
I read the Steve Jobs biography and enjoyed it. The criticism that it doesn’t always paint an in-depth picture of Jobs, but instead merely reports it, is somewhat valid. You see the good and the bad of Steve, but you never really know why. Even when pressed, he doesn’t articulate why he can be such an asshole, or why he felt that was the only way to get people to do great things. He controlled through fear instead of love, I guess. It was a great History of Apple at the very least.
Robyn started reading the Ender’s Game series at my behest and apparently loves it! This is surprising, but awesome. I got her all of the initial quartology for our anniversary, so she should be good for awhile.
ANNIVERSARY
Speaking of which, Robyn and I celebrated 2 years happily married last Monday. For lunch, we went to the Seaside forum, just as planned. We went to the new cafe on the second floor, which was just an empty construction hazard when we got married there. Both of us had very interesting sandwiches, she a butternut squash pannini, and I a tuna melt with red onions and carrots in the mix. For dinner, we hit up the 94th Aero Squadron, mainly because the 5 restaurants we tried before it were all closed on Monday evening (wtf?!). We had a nice, low-key meal while watching some ducks near the airport waddle around. I love her very much and am so glad to spend my life with her.
GAMING
The last major game I played and finished was Dead Island, a really engaging and visceral zombie eviscerating simulation that takes place on an infested land mass surrounded by water. I actually got really sick (food poisoning or flu, not sure) over the holidays and was playing it at the same time, making it all the more real. I did not eat anyone’s brain, however.
Long-form gaming is in the guise of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I waited a while for this to get cheap, but it’s worth full price. The MGS-style gameplay is fun and it’s rad to sneak around enemy encampments and try not to rambo it up. It’s a little choppy on my 2011 MBP, which detracts from the flow a bit, but still doable. Short-form gaming (the chaser, as it were) is Dustforce. Think Super Meat Boy, but with less emphasis on barely beating the level and instead more emphasis on beating the level with style. It’s a bit on the punishing side of the difficulty scale because it forces you to get reaaaally good at a few initial levels before opening up subsequent ones, but the gameplay (with a controller) is fun and almost Sonic or Tony Hawk in nature with its never-ending (if you’re good) combo mechanic.
On the iOS front, Hero Academy is devouring my soul. Take Dungeon Defender’s crystal guarding and add in a chess-like tactical game mechanic and you’ve got something I’m constantly checking on my phone. I’m so addicted I’ve got about 10 games going right now, half or more with random strangers. Asynchronous multiplayer on a portable device is perfect for my gaming style.
As far as board gaming goes, my friend Jawn came down from NorCal for a weekend and brought several from his ever-burgeoning collection. The main event was surely Eclipse, an epic space war. It took us about ~5 hours to get through it, which was about 1 hour per person, plus an hour of explanation. Games like this are experiences for me, meaning it’s fun to do once, but the thought of spending so much time on one game again feels kinda rough. Any game that complicated and with a million pieces to keep track of feels like it would work better as a video game. Still, hanging out with friends is paramount, so I’ll do it again if it comes up.
PROGRAMMING
The desire to do any programming that isn’t required by work is currently dead, just like it’s been for a while now. I have no idea when it will come back.
MUSICAL
December and January have not been productive, compositionally or recordingly. To be honest, having a puppy around takes up a lot of my time and mental space, leaving little for musical ambition. Penny seems pretty sensitive to music/sound and the one time I played guitar she actually growled and barked at me! Maybe she can get more comfortable if I play more, but I haven’t been in the mood to test the waters. I believe I’m going to make a more concerted effort in February (at least on the weekends) to try and get her used to it, but that remains to be seen.
One way or another, I’m going to be releasing the soundtrack to the indie game I scored last year in March 2012. I need to polish some stuff before saying it’s “done”, but for the most part it’s pretty solid (in my mind, at least). Look for it for cheap on Bandcamp around about then.
FOR THE ROAD
I began a massive decluttering of stuff in the music room downstairs recently. There’s junk all over the place as I reorganize and rid myself of things I’ve been keeping and moving from place to place for no real reason besides packratdom. How many black, grounded power cables does one person really need, anyway? And yet, it’s hard to just throw something away when I could put it in a container, all nicely zip-tied up. This is the disease, people. Learn to fight it! Keep only what you need, not what you think you’ll need some day in the year 6545 when you’re DEAD.
01.5.12Zoetic Update: New Tracklist
I keep toying with some of the track names on my upcoming instrumental rock album Zoetic. Some names just seem right from the get go and others never quite seem right, changing a lot in the process as I listen and work on them. All-instrumental albums are like that: fluid until the time I call it “done”.
The current list is as so:
On the whole, it’s changed significantly since last time. A few songs got name changes and a few even got lopped right off. They didn’t actually get removed, but instead repurposed, something I do quite a lot. Other projects come up that need inspiration, or a song doesn’t work within the overall context of the album, so it gets stripped off as a single. When you write music so haphazardly, these kinds of things will happen.
A nice solid ten tunes for one album always feels nice, even if one of them is kind of a cutesy “throwaway”. I still enjoy listening to the rough drafts, even after repeated listenings, which means that Zoetic is pretty solid. Jamming a couple of them with friends worked out well, so I think I got something good here. There’s always parts here and there that I need to improve, which I will…eventually. Mixing and mastering is a pain for me, too. I hope to get it polished off to a tasteful shimmer before mid-March.
01.5.12The Last Few Weeks, Visually
Blogging with words doesn’t come as naturally to me anymore. I feel that the community once engendered by LiveJournal, of which I was a proud member and contributor for many years at one time, does not exist on the Open Internet. We are scattered all over the place, micro-bloggingly and macro-bloggingly. Comments are few and far between and there’s no cohesiveness to the whole thing.
The hardest thing is just letting go and blogging for the sake of blogging. When I know there’s a very small chance I will get any direct feedback, my mind wanders and my focus wanes. I imagine myself speaking into a dark, empty cave, hearing only myself and the boredom and tedium of my thoughts.
For now, I will simply post some pictures that both sum up and don’t sum up at all the last few weeks, which encompassed my birthday, Christmas, and New Year’s.
Seeing Everything Again For the First Time
Taking care of a puppy is not the same as taking care of a human baby. The level of responsibility is very different. However, both activities really make you rethink and reevaluate things.
Our collie, Penny, sees and reacts to the world in a different way than we do. Right now, she’s very skittish when outside. Outside has a bunch of unknown variables. Keeping her to a simple routine when we go on our walks, taking her along the same route to the same places, helps to keep her calm (relatively), but is no guarantee. Planes, cars, bikes, people, and other dogs are just some of the things she tends to tense up around.
When she’s calm, she walks at a constant pace, stopping sporadically to sniff and look around. When she’s in panic mode, triggered by something strange she can’t quite process, she walks much faster, tugging on the leash, heading back to our house. She won’t make eye contact and she’s not interested in treats or petting.
It all takes you back to being young and new to the world. There is so much stuff going on at all times, guys! In life, it seems like we just grow better and better at filtering out what we’re not focused on. Penny, on the other hand, does not seem to currently possess that ability. It takes little to freak her out, much like someone who is simply fearful of the unknown. It can be frustrating for her owners who are not flinching at every horn honk or vent noise.
Hopefully, this is a growing pain and she’ll be less terrified of the world outside our home some day soon :-)