A Creative Exercise: Music-Comics

 

For many weeks I have been regularly making some short piece of music that I can pull out an under 60 sec clip from to use as the soundtrack to one of my Music-Comics.  60 seconds is the limit to upload to X/Twitter, which is by far the simplest way of showing the 1 or 2 people that could possibly want to read/ hear them. Pretty sure most who view them have the sounded muted anyway. 

But I really do them as a creative exercise for myself. Making stuff keeps me a "Happy Camper" and these are not massively time consuming things to do.

Ola Englund: Sunday With Ola, weekly opening music was a way for him to force making music into his schedule, and sub sequentially release his CHUGG PROJECT albums.  This is something like that, but not as regular, or for any real audience.

The music is made in Reaper with guitars and synths I have, The video is all made in MOHO Pro12 from a small collection of stuff I have made to do these with.  Mostly all first take things.  Make something, release it, move on.  Getting the 8 string increased my output for a while, as I practiced and got used to it. I always record and practice into Reaper anyway.

Of course I like some better than others.  All depends on what comes to me as I do one. 

I originally started just making square format YouTube shorts, as that is what YouTube encouraged, but they are undiscoverable by anyone doing that, and how many people get to see them is up to YouTube putting one in 10 peoples feeds for some hours after being uploaded, seeing if any play them to the end to determine if they show it to someone else (and taking into account what your subscriber numbers are and some other random stuff). 

So YouTube is all a "why bother" situation for me. I am not a fan of the portrait or square format either. I just prefer square to portrait, and if you upload a less than 60sec video that isn't like that, it isn't considered a "short".  

So this is what a Short Format looked like:

The other problem with shorts though, is they are 99% garbage. That seems to appeal to the largest audience, but not me. 

So what is this Music-Comics about?

Just trying to combine my interest in making music, with my interest in comics, and my dislike of doing time consuming animation, and rendering. Hate waiting for rendering.  The comics are really fast and easy to do in MOHO. This being the project for the Cubism thing at the top of the page here.

I currently have the waveform of the music as the background, and show the red playbar a wave player has. 

To the front of that is just something I feel like saying today.  Like a 3 panel comic strip in a newspaper, doesn't take long to read, and could say something that makes you think.  As far as I know, nobody else has done this format before. 

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology