More changes on the Website!
This time is the music section – we had all our music on the server so whenever we have a lot of traffic it would suddenly use up all of our bandwidth and the web would go down!
It’s no than elegant and professional but say hello to our new embeded Bandcamp player!!!
Scary Chinese kids – even their movements are planned and in sync! They’re like little robots!
There is a reason why I chose to put as much music in the pilot episode as I possibly could…
For those who haven’t noticed, each piece of background music is themed on Dutch Courage song.
All of the tracks use the main melody line from Dutch Courage, or use the same chord structure..
My idea is to get the viewer familiar with the end track of the episode Dutch Courage by subliminally playing its melody line and chords in the background music, throughout the episode. So that when they hear Dutch Courage for the first time, they will already have, sort of, heard it before. Hopefully making it stick in the brain better.
It’s just a little experiment that I wanted to try out… So next time you watch the Jayme G-Show be sure to listen for the Dutch Courage melody line, in the background! There are about 23 different tracks, by the way!
So anyway, getting back to where I left off…
Now we’re in the theme park, with the big boot.
Originally I was going to have the music playing on a background fairground barrel organ, so I wrote a simple piece on the organ to simulate that.
It didn’t work as well as I thought because in order for the music to sound like it’s coming from a distant barrel organ I needed to turn it down to the right level and put a long delay on it, leaving the music very faint and well in the background. But, in order to be able to hear the melody well enough I would have to turn it up quite a lot, making it sound just horrible and confusing :s
So I scrapped that idea but kept the organ part, without the delay, then added some drums, bass, e.t.c,.. and just used it as background music.
I planned the music to end just when the shutter goes down.
Something that I am realizing now is that I have forgotten to talk about the sound fx.
It was another VERY involved job. And from now on I think that I’m going to start to point out a few.
For example; in this particular scene the footsteps on the gravel that occur when the boy crosses the screen are fake! I did them! The are also panned, starting off far left and then going over to the right, following the boys position.
I also added some background children’s voices and some fairground rides too.
The tramps footsteps on the gravel were also done by me.
Joe! played the part of that tramp. I think he sounds a bit like Bob Hoskins XD
At the end of the scene the shutter goes down and that sound was actually the plug re-wined mechanism on our vacuum cleaner. It was just the sound I was looking for, plus it meant that I didn’t have to leave the studio!
For those of you who are running cubase on a HP laptop and wondering why you are getting this message come up, even when you’re only recording one track, I think I might have the answer you are looking for.
A while ago, me and my brother (Joe!) were filming a pilot episode, for a series that we want to do, called ‘The Jayme G Show’.
Seeing as we didn’t have any money to fund it, we couldn’t afford to buy the proper equipment for the job, so we had to be creative with what the equipment we already had. Luckily ‘Joe!’ recently got given a boom mic for his camera, as a birthday present. But we still needed something to record the audio on to, and plugging it into the camera’s mic input means that your boom-mic guy is tied to the camera man.
So, seeing as I already had a portable audio interface (the one that we did the video about) ‘The Session I/O‘, we decided to use my laptop.
Here is my setup:
As you can see I have two bags; One with the audio interface in and the other one with my laptop in.
I would set up a project in Cubase, using the ‘Session I/O‘ as the audio device, then press record, shut the laptop and put it in the bag.
The first time I tested this setup, I ran in to a little problem…
After doing a short test recording, I opened up the laptop to see how it went. I then saw an error message in Cubase; (I can’t remember exactly, but it was something like..) ‘Error-too many record tracks’.
What does that mean?
It means that too much information is trying to be recorded at one time for your hard drive to handle.
Now, when doing multi-track recordings it’s understandable for this to happen because if you have a lot of tracks, recording at a high bit rate and sample rate, it can be too much information for the hard drive to handle. (depending on the speed of the hard drive)
But this seemed crazy, I was only recording one 24 bit mono audio track @ 44,100 Hz! That’s nothing!!! How slow must my hard drive be!?
So I started looking for information on the hard drive that I have in my laptop, to see if it was actually this ridiculously slow or if it was something else…
It was something else.
Upon reading up on my hp hard drive I found out that it has a built in:
HP ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection
This little thing does this:
“Built-in HP ProtectSmart detects if your laptop has been dropped, and during that split-second journey to the floor, it automatically locks your fragile hard drive. This safety mechanism helps prevent the loss of your files and media library from damage caused by the fall.”
Which is great if you’re a cluts with an expensive piece of equipment, but not so great if you’re trying to record audio with the laptop in a bag that keeps setting off the damn ‘HP ProtectSmart‘ because of the movement!
So that was it! Cubase must have thought that the hard drive wasn’t recording fast enough, because when the hp protection thing was triggered, the hard drive wasn’t spinning at all! So it must have assumed that it was because of too many tracks being recorded at once!
All I had to do then, was go to; start menu, control panel, Hp 3D Drive Guard and then disable it! (And also be extra careful not to bump or knock the laptop much, while it was disabled!)
Hope someone finds this useful.. 
So the next scene would be Jayme and Joe! in the pet-shop. The music starts off again in the previous scene, which ends with another gag. But this time, instead of the drums complementing the joke, I went for a short guitar lick.
The music then stays the same until Jayme and Joe! are inside the pet-shop where the music then cross-fades into the background shop radio.
The handy thing about the pet-shop that we filmed in was that it had no animals in it!
They sell pet food, dog collars, e.t.c, and also wash dogs.
Having no animals meant no noise pollution! So we didn’t have to worry about cuts! You see, when you’re only filming with one camera, you can’t record all of the camera angles in one take. So you have to record it in bits and then put it all together in the editing.
But the problem with having background audio over the actors voices is that when you cut to a different shot the audio in the background also changes (because it was recorded at a different time), so when filming this way, it’s best to have just the actors audio and put the background sounds in after, in the editing.
I would just like to take the time to say thanks to ‘Paco’, the real pet-shop owner, who very kindly let us record in his pet-shop (Snoopy Mascota, in Jaén) and came in extra early to open up for us. Thanks Paco!!!
I love my helmet hair in this picture!! XD That’s Paco, on the far right.
Anyway…
The following piece of music had to have a bit more thought put in to it…
Seeing as the next scene is a flashback, with a joke between the boss and a car mechanic, I decided that the music should resolve in that same scene. So when the boss is coming up to the punchline, the music is also coming to the last bar. I think that it wraps up the scene nicely.
So, in order to write a piece of music so that it has 4 bars and finishes exactly where you need it to, it’s just a case of doing a simple sum…
Here’s an example, working with a time signature of 4/4 (4 beats to each bar):
Length of the scene = 13 seconds
4 beats x 4 bars = 16 beats
So, we go…
13 ÷ 16 = 0.8125 seconds (that’s how long each beat needs to be, to fit 16 beats into 13 seconds)
So now what we have to do is work out how many beats there are in 60 seconds, to get the bpm (beats per minute):
60 ÷ 0.8125 = 73.846 bpm
Hurrah!!!
Now that I have the bpm, I can start writing a piece of music that fits perfectly!!
There are lots of other ways to fit music perfectly to a scene, you don’t always have to do it in 4 bars, but for this particular piece that’s what I wanted.
I also ended the music on the penultimate beat, to give 1 beat of empty space (simulating an awkward silence, between the boss and the mechanic).
After that it’s back to the pet-shop radio and then to a bit of dramatic score.
“Don’t feed the exotic animals!!!”. This scene needed to give of a feeling of urgency so I decided to use drums, starting off slow and then gradually getting faster and faster as Joe! get’s nearer to the cage, simulating a ticking bomb, making you feel like you’re running out of time. But just using drums wasn’t enough, it needed more instruments to feel more busy.
So I put in some discordant strings that detune upwards, to make it feel like something scary was about to happen if he didn’t get the the cage in time.
The next bit (where you see the chimp eating something) needed some suspense, because Joe! failed to get there in time, so now we’re waiting and wondering what’s going to happen… That’s fairly strait forward; just some slightly discordant sustained strings.
In the next part, where Joe! feeds a monkey for the first time, I put together a short snippet of radio where I am the DJ, saying; “…that, but anyway, it’s one thirty and you’re listening to radio, one, derr” and then I play a record (which is the same song used for the montage, later on).
When the boss also says “DON’T FEED THE EXOTIC ANIMALS!!!” Joe! was shocked. So I used a lot of really discordant strings and drums, making it sound messy and horrible to be there.
After the flashback Joe!’s looking at the cadge and something is starting to happen the the chimp, so rising strings and more drums seemed to give the impression of something growing, or starting to happen…