Hello everyone! It's time for some new music! This piece is called Critical Structure Corruption and it features two guitars, bass, drums, and synthesizer. It was written to celebrate my brother-in-law Austin Schue's recent birthday. Happy birthday, Austin!
Once again, my lovely wife Jessica has contributed her artwork for the cover of the sheet music. If you look at the green lines a certain way, you can see every letter of the title. If you look at the blue lines similarly, you will find Austin's name. Pretty nifty!
This piece was quite fun to write but extremely challenging to record. It wasn't that it was too difficult to play, although there were a couple of sticky parts. I decided to try a new DAW when recording: Cakewalk. (which is anything but a cakewalk to operate...that's another story entirely though...) It did a good job when I could get it to work, but there were a few gremlins I could never quite get around. Moral of the story: don't change DAWs when under a deadline. I came pretty close to missing this one.
Regardless of DAW issues, the piece has some cool tricks thrown in to keep things interesting. For example, on the clean guitar tracks I used a panning effect that made the guitars constantly move left and right between the speakers at different rates. This adds a nice touch of depth, especially coupled with the delay and reverb from my Red Panda Context pedal. I applied the same panning idea to the synthesizer as well. To record the guitars, I used a Zoom H4N Pro. I was shocked at how well it did, even on distorted guitar tones. The rest of the instruments are MIDI, but I found some great VSTs to use. The drums are the MT Power Drumkit. All I did was add a bit of reverb and a bit of pitch shifting to add a couple more toms to the kit (it only comes with 3). The bass is Ample Bass P Lite. It's super realistic, even letting you add finger noise and fret buzz. Finally, the synthesizer patches are all from DEXED, a free synth editor that emulates the Yamaha DX-7 very well. I highly recommend all of these MIDI VSTs.
The name Critical Structure Corruption actually came to me totally by chance. I was working on the computer when suddenly I get the blue screen of death. Critical Structure Corruption was the error that appeared on the screen. As far as I could tell the computer still worked fine, so I decided that the piece should be named after the very unsettling error message. I mean, those just look like three words you'd never want to see on a blue screen. Oh well, I got a free name out of it. Thank God for computer glitches, I suppose!