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Day off

It is early November, and seems like the first proper winter days are here. The temperature is below freezing, after a light snowfall the ground is covered with a touch of white. Earlier this autumn I had marked Thursday and Friday of this week as day off, planning to visit Sami. A good friend of mine promised to take care of the animals while I am away.

I arrived at Sami's on Thursday evening. We had food and beer and discussed everything what has happened since we last met. We agreed not to have any strict plans for this session, as this is the natural flow of the game development cycle. After months of Sami's intensive coding the latest update of UnReal World is at the beta-release stage. This is not a time for working bigger future plans, nor time for coding any new features - the beta release stage is mostly about bughunting and minor polishing here and there. Luckily, the current beta stage has been running rather smoothly, there hasn't been too many nasty bugs to be hunted.

On Friday, instead of any bughunting we focused on the soundtrack of the next Enormous Elk video. We shot the footage in the summer, and now the video still lacks the soundtrack, and needs some serious fine-tuning in the cutting. We had previously tried the video with Morricone music playing on the background, and sure the music makes a lot of difference. But, composing and playing a morricone-style score of our own would be a pretty ambitious task. The way I see it, the trick is to seek inspiration in the work of great masters, and then momentarily set it all aside and to create a new piece of music based on what we can play, what instruments and resources we have available. And here time sure counts as a resource. On we went recording, and Sami experimenting with editing the soundtrack on the fly. And, almost magically, out of the initial chaos a structure started to emerge, and before the night we had the basis of the soundtrack. We called it a day and went to relax having a sauna bath.

On Saturday morning, after the coffee and breakfast we went for a short walk to catch some sunlight and fresh air. Sami had some further ideas for the video soundtrack, so we returned indoors to record a few more takes playing a jaw harp. All in all, this kind of days always are so refreshing! Now I am back at my home, after yet another sauna bath. Hehe, I think I had some grand thoughts for this blog post, but somehow they all are happily washed away =)

Sami edits, I drink beer
Sami edits, I drink beer
walking
walking
driving home
driving home
tags: 
diary
programming
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Comments

Cool. I want to get a jaw harp.

I would be interested in learning more about your musical process. And I look forward to hearing the final result. :D

Hehe, I was thinking about replying something about the details of our musical process - but soon my mind was flooded with enough material for a blog post or two =) So, instead of stuffing it all in the comment section, maybe I'll write blog entries later on. Not today, now I'm too tired after a long day of work.

Since people sometimes ask about the jaw harp, I shot a Let's Play video =)

I have often thought that it would be interesting to do a collaborative pass-around music project on the internet. Like the person to start it would decide on a chord progression and record a track with one instrument. Then he could pass it on the the next person, who would record another instrument (or vocal or whatever) track to go with it, and so on and so forth. And then finally the conglomeration of tracks could be passed out to everyone who participated, for each person to mix down into whatever final mix they are happiest with. :D

Quite an interesting idea! Projects like that could produce surprising creative results, and seems doable with all the modern technology. This reminds me of mail art which started already in pre-internet times.

Hehe, you do have regular follower on your own YouTube channel - why not try to initiate such a project announcing it first to your own followers, asking them to pass the project further on to their own contacts?

I might sometime! I don't think many are musicians, though. Hehe.

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