Anthologies and Musical Experiments
Up for preorder now and coming to ebook first on May 21,
It’s a rock-infused pulp party of an anthology hosted by the indispensable Mistcreek Publishing and author N.R. LaPoint!
If' you’ve been on the scene for any length of time you’ll see plenty of familiar names within. It’s more talent than you can shake a stick at! Be careful if you do, though, because these are the kind of authors who stick back.
Along with the stories, LaPoint has put AI to one of its best uses: creating sci-fantasy power metal and rock tunes to go with each tale! Naturally there was a flurry among contributors and Twitter frens at the reveal, and what I found when I listened through was that I actually liked my track.
All other thoughts of AI aside, I quickly caught the bug to write music, and my heart landed on the idea of a cover song. Initially I thought to use my Changebringer persona to do a chilled out dungeonsynth style version of the song, but the power metal energy turned out to be infectious and it ended up being more of a ‘synthmetal’ ‘chiptune’ kind of a thing.
So I saw it through, gave it a bit of the old Changebringer lofi vibe, and now it’s up for whoever to enjoy!
Listen here:
The Experiment
I learned a lot about what music AI is doing along the way, as I’ve now probably listened to this AI track more times than almost anyone else on the planet has listened to a single AI track.
It was a really interesting process bringing the coherent but still sort of illusory, impressionistic metal music into greater clarity. In many places, if you stop and just listen to a moment of the music in time, you realize how much that moment isn’t truly mimicking the sound of a recorded band, but strongly suggesting that any given instant of heavy metal is actually happening.
In some places, there weren’t even any clear fundamentals to transcribe notes from, but this turned out pretty interesting in each case, leading the cover version off into slices of melody or solo that stray from the original but remain grounded in the song overall.
Until the last 45 seconds or so, the structure of the song itself is legitimately excellent, with killer fills, drops, and shifts in the groove. Then the repeated choruses go off for a bit too long and you feel like you’re in the 90s again! So Changebringer just cut it short and dropped in a new ending and called it done.
It was a really fun project, and has me distracted from writing with the need to make more synth metal (and maybe some funk too—don’t ask me why).
So now I face that age-old dilemma—go to bed like I should, or sit at the computer I’ve already worked at all day and make some sick beats.
What would you do?
