Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts

January 1, 2016

1/1/16 - Carol of the Bells (Final)

The final video and music track!


Happy New Year, everybody!

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGVHYebYTP0

December 20, 2015

12/20/15 - Carol of the Bells (Part 2)

Fine-tuning a second rough sketch, along with a color comp.  And more progress on the music track itself.



December 18, 2015

12/18/15 - Carol of the Bells (Part 1)

Well, I decided painting fruit was a little too intensive for my daily practice with this blog.  I was getting too detailed with it, and with each post averaging about an hour, it was a bit too much.  I might resume it in the future if I just do really rough versions, but for now I'm gonna try other things.

I have a few new ideas coming up, but for now I'm going to begin a small project much like the one I completed near the end of Halloween: painting a background image for a new music track I'm going to try to create, "Carol of the Bells".  I've been meaning to create my own orchestration/rendition for a few years now and I've just never gotten around to it.  But now that I'm doing this blog, trying to stay active and creative… what better time!  I've always loved the tune of the song, probably my favorite of all the wintery/Christmasy songs for its adventurous and faintly mysterious atmosphere, and it's the perfect track to practice both my musical AND digital painting skills.

And so that's what I'm gonna do for these next few posts: show a bit of my progress on the music track, as well as the background that will be featured alongside it.  I won't explain my steps so much this time though, since I already did that for my "Halloween Gothic Castle" posts.

Anyway, without further ado… my first step:  A bunch of rough sketch ideas for the image, and a basic melody for the track.

(Click image for higher resolution)

November 2, 2015

11/2/15 - Blogspot Video Test

Another test before I get back to my normal posts.  This time it's all about video, which (if it works) will broaden the scope of my blog to include daily practice of editing, visual effects, complex animations, animatics, etc. (as opposed to just simple gif loops)

Blogspot Video:


YouTube Embed (same video as above):


Blogspot Video (for Audio) #1:




Blogspot Video (for Audio) #2:

Attempted to crop the video to a very thin horizontal size to give it more of an audio track feel, rather than video.

(DIDN'T WORK)


FINAL RESULTS:

AUDIO: (YOUTUBE EMBED) I don't think I'm a fan of Blogspot's own video system (it doesn't have a progress bar while uploading, and my internet is slow, so it's kind of a pain to work with), but it does work.  Although, I'm thinking that just uploading everything to YouTube will be the easiest for me.  Also, that would link it to my various YouTube channels (at least to more knowledgeable users), which is definitely a plus.  I'll probably upgrade to SoundCloud in the future though, cause that was my favorite for an audio experience (but it costs money, so yeah).

VIDEO: (YOUTUBE EMBED) As mentioned before, Blogspot's own video upload system was kind of a pain to work with.  For today's test I compressed the video down to 10 MB, and that took FOREVER to upload, with no indicator that it was even working or not.  It did work in the end, but YouTube will be a much easier system for me to work with.

Anyway, I guess that means I'll be able to do more with this blog!  :D

November 1, 2015

11/1/15 - Blogspot Audio Test

Going a really different direction for today's post.  This time I'm just testing around with how to upload/embed audio files on Blogspot.  If it works, I'll be able to broaden the scope of this blog to include daily practice of music composition, piano practice, sound editing/sound design, etc.

I couldn't just upload an mp3 straight to Blogspot (there is a video option though, which I'll test in a future post), so ultimately it came down to these two options:

SoundCloud:



Google Drive:

(DIDN'T WORK)

I like the look of SoundCloud's better (and how it links any future viewers/listeners to my SoundCloud music account), but there's a finite amount of minutes I can upload to SoundCloud and I'd rather save that for polished works.  173 minutes left with SoundCloud before I would have to upgrade, and nearly 15 GB with Google Drive left before I would have to upgrade.  So I think I'll stick with Google Drive for now.  But if I someday feel like spending $15/month I'll use SoundCloud's "Pro Unlimited" plan, which would allow me to upload as many of these daily practices as I want.

EDIT: Google Drive didn't work, but I was able to convert the track into a video file so I'll be using that for audio/music files instead.  SoundCloud is still my favorite though, so it may eventually become that.