I am working on this to expand it into a more meaningful piece. Man, that GI takes ages to render! So stay tuned.

Moody

Yes I suck as naming my music, my brother knows about all too much  This one starts out as trip-hop influenced piece with bluesy guitar solo and then progresses to a more upbeat bass-heavy track while still maintaining the blues element. I use a GarageBand’s Electric Piano sound for the affirming chords that piece is based on and distorted it slightly with the overdrive effect, with the gain turned up just a notch. For the guitar sound I had been experimenting quite a bit, trying come up with a nice tone which could be used as a clean tone with the guitar’s volume knob turned down. And I was also trying come up with a tone which sounds like the delayed sound John Petrucci uses in Dream Theatre’s Presense of Enemies Pt 1 which you can also see here. The bass tone is pretty generic and the drums were just drum loops which come with GarageBand.

Classic Rock Riffage

This one’s definitely a work in progress. It utilises pretty much the same guitar tone used in Moody except the volume knob in the guitar is turned up completely so that there is maximum gain. The main riff is reminiscent of the classic rock and hardrock riffs during the 70s. The bass is also made to resemble the bass sound in the 70s. It was played using a pick instead of fingers the way I normally like to play bass. The middle section solo is placeholder for a future vocals hopefully and a shorter solo.

Deeper Within You (just a random name)

My attempt to use a clean arpeggio with a distorted guitar lead sound. Kind of sounds like Pink Floyd a little bit, just a little part of it. The later part just a riff I came up with earlier which I just plugged in. I like it in metal when there isn’t any backing guitar when they play a guitar solo and you can hear the bass real nice. It becomes like an interlude. Dream Theatre does it so does Pantera. And that’s what I’ve tried to do for the solo at the end.

And on a different note, I’M GOING TO WATCH DREAM THEATRE LIVE. I bought the tickets yesterday from Ticketek, and I can’t believe I’m gonna see them live. The concert is on 5th December at the Hodern Pavillion, will be a nice early christmas gift for myself. Haven’t convinced anyone to go with me at the moment. I don’t have anyone who shares my passion of Dream Theatre in my circle of friends but looking forward to meeting other Dream Theatre fans at the event. Dream Theatre rocks! I need to get myself the Live in Budokan DVD for warming up. LOL!

And my collection of Wired Magazine. I’m a big fan of this magazine but I since I live in Sydney, Australia (and Wired is published in San Francisco, California) I have to either pay $18.70 and buy the same month’s issue (shipped via Airfreight) or pay $11.95 for the last month’s issue (shipped via snailmail). I usually choose the latter, and read Wired News (online version of the magazine) with I wait for it. My collection has grown quite a bit. This isn’t the complete collection, I have more scattered around the house, which I should consolidate soon.

The broad categories my books fall into are: Design, Music, Science/Technology, Biographies, History and Lifestyle. Some books fall under more than one category. Missing from here are: D-Day: From The Normandy Beaches to the Liberation of France which can’t keep in the shelf because its too big for it, it HUGE, Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose, How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill and Catcher In The Rye by JD Salinger. The latter three I forgot at home in Kathmandu when I went there in January 2009.

Meeting myself through my books, I have found out that my head functions in phases. And these phases dictate what kind of books I will read. However. unlike my brother who hasn’t yet decided on a major (or a self-designed concentration as they like to call it in Hampshire College) I know what I’m doing and will always be reading books areas of motion design and VFX. For everything else, I go through phases. I was in a biography phase once and kept reading biographies of people whom I admired, Ar the moment I was reading the Brief History if Time by Stephen Hawking, a book I wanted to read since grade 10 but didn’t for several reason. Having been reading that it got me very interested in reading about our universe, its origin, its fate and and its mechanics (superficially ofcourse, I do not plan to go into theoretic physics) and among other things I have been reading include a university paper written by a friend of mine (with other people) on several topics on the universe and cosmology which he wrote as a part of his assignments in the first year of his Aeronautical Engineering Degree at USyd. Anyway, so that’s me!

I have had this book in my possession for quite a while now and due to lack of time and distractions had failed to go past the basic first couple of chapters. Now that I have little for time I really want to nail the art of matchmoving. The whole subjects quite dry to be honest, but as Tim Dobbert who wrote the book calls it, it’s an invisible art which is an essential part of teh production pipeline. The result that you get is a real motivator ofcourse. I’ll post some of matchmoving experiments up, which should be quite interesting.