Music Comic: How You Use It

 

We had the OBon Holidays here mid August, and our son and his family visited us for some 5 days. Great to see our grandson again. Not so great we got sick after they left, possibly from grandson or son. My symptoms were mild covid. Cough, slight fever.  The medication I received for it was what you get for covid, and it took me almost 3 weeks to get over it.  The medication made me groggy, mostly snoozed.  I got to finally listen to Frank Zappa music during much of that.

Fine now I think, and back to normal programming...

I have been listening a lot to Ola Englund's Chug Projects and, as usual, Mattias IA Eklundh. Both are Metal, but Ola is of the much heavier, instrumental variety. Also looking over the TABs of some of their material.

I really love what they do. Been thinking I want some heavier tracks of my own recently. I have the drums and guitars and tone for it, but what comes natural at the moment is something else. The above is a music comic about it.  Yes, I know guitar has a missing "i" in it, but couldn't be bothered fixing it.

This started as a G Lydian practice thing. Just adlibbing.  I remember Allan Holdsworth in a guitar tutorial video where he had graphic printouts with all the scales, all modes on the fret board. Like this below I did for for 6/8 string guitar (the way I tune the 8). I do these in CorelDraw, they way I do my illustrations.

Of course he was about memorizing all of them, like he did.     

If this had a few fast arpeggios, scale runs and two handed tapping in a solo, it would far more "metal", but this is more slow simple melodic lines. It is how I felt doing it. 

Ola's Chug project is a way for him to force himself to weekly play guitar and make original music. My own Music Comics are like that too, but I don't have an audience waiting for mine. I do them for myself about recent thoughts.  I generally keep them under 60 seconds so I can just throw them on Xwitter, where almost no one sees them, and even if they do, the chances someone will stop scrolling and play them is very low. Doesn't matter though. The click thru on X is so poor, even compared to Facebook.

The Reaper project:

This has Drums Against Humanity, uses their BLACK METAL midi pack. Guitar is just the Harley Benton R-458 8 string with a Metal Zone pedal and a cabinet IR called ML Sound Lab's BEST IR IN THE WORLD.wav

I didn't put a bass track on this.  Just one of the things about this not being a standard arrangement.

I also put it in our Assorted Bits Album on Bandcamp.

I find it interesting that the ingredients can be so metal, but the result isn't. It is all "How You Use It" that makes a difference.

And unless you misunderstand that I can't or don't do heavier stuff, I think this was pretty heavy:

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