PDF Level 2: The Musical

(This is one of those things where the Facebook folks will have to punch “view original post,” otherwise this will make el zilcho sense.)

I felt like maybe I was “in the zone” tonight, so I had a go at doing some music for the next PDF DVD. Here, reduced to a low bit rate (and needing some serious equalization), are the better pieces I came up with. Below each clip, for your amusement, are my timing/tone notes where I laid out what I needed in terms of length, hitting any specific cues, and what it needed to “feel” like.

RCA Studio LIV (approx. 2:15)
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/rca54.mp3]

No shorter than 1:57. Mid ’70s flavor, no big accents.

(I dunno how “mid ’70s” this really sounds, but I was aiming for a kind of spacey early Alan Parsons Project instrumental feel. It really kicks in about halfway through and gets a little hypnotic.)

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Jupiter II (approx. 0:45)
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/jupiter.mp3]

No shorter than 35 seconds. Spacey.

(I really liked how this one came out – a bit like some of the spacier, more sedate stuff from Paddy Kingsland’s music for the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy TV series.)

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Spike’s Odyssey (approx. 0:50)
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/spikey.mp3]

No shorter than 41 seconds. Big kerpow at 38 seconds for year intro.

I did a couple of other tracks not heard here; in all, it represents nearly four hours of work.

This was the first time I’ve “spotted” before going in to create some new music – the previous PDF DVD was tracked entirely with instrumentals I had already written and recorded, in some case nearly 10 years before the DVD came out – so we’ll see how it all works. I thought it was an interesting challenge to have some fairly rigid structural notes to stick to – hit a big sound effect piece here, and no sooner, that sort of thing. I generally made about 5-10 seconds more music than I absolutely needed, but not much more than that – what you hear is what you get.

I know that for some folks – including me – none of this material will ever even come close to replacing the cool 8 Bit Weapon stuff that was heard on the 2004-2006 version of the DVD, i.e. the version that I could show off, but not sell. Incidentally, I had 8BW’s permission to use their stuff on that edition of the DVD, so it’s not like a big scandalous secret, but I couldn’t exactly sell a version of the DVD that was crawling with their music either. So, as with everything else on the DVDs, it’s kind of a direct transmission from my brain: graphic design, writing, editing and even music. Scary thought there, eh?