Suva Blog

Great news arrived about a week ago when Renoise finished it’s another development cycle. This time the release bears the version number of 2.1 and as most important feature, brings rewire support. Those who are not interested in rewire, including linux users where rewire is not available anyway, won’t be left dissapointed either: amongst other things Renoise 2.1 brings cool new live performance features, which are also extremely useful for arrangement development and idea testing. Real creativity booster in my case. Linuxers are also given JACK transport support, which replaces some (before missing) features from the Rewire support on other platforms.

So I thought to look into the software for a bit and give my opinion about it.

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I am going to start off with guitar practice tutorials for beginners. As experienced guitar player as I am, I can tell you lots of inside secrets in many different genres of guitar play. Let’s start off with the king of the guitar music, the Black Metal.

This guide is a step by step tutorial into the world of Black Metal guitar play and will definitely be a big eye-opener for many black metal beginners.

First step: Corpsepaint

Before you start your regular practice routine, the most important thing is to apply corpsepaint. First, start off with covering your whole face with white paint. Let it try a bit, and then draw sad face with black paint. Add some finishing touches like random lines over your face and maybe pentagram, 666 and few reversed crosses. If your corpsepaint doesn’t look like shown on figure 1.1, then smear the paint all over your face and say that you like Primitive Pagan Metal better anyway.

Fig 1.1: Correctly applied corpsepaint

Step two: Set up the sound

Pick up your guitar and connect it to amp. Turn the gain all the way up. Turn bass all the way down, treble up. Make sure it’s loud and screetching enough.

Step three: Play guitar

Strum one (or two if you are more advanced) string as fast as you can while looking grim and necro. You can change chords if you want to, as long as you don’t do them too often. For beginners, playing open string will do just fine and gives specially primitive, grim and evil sound to your music.

Additional tricks

To add more evilness into the music, scream as loud as you can with high pitched voice. This technique is known in black metal circles as “Vocals”.  If your guitar playing doesn’t sound too good, then scream louder! If your hands get tired of constant picking, take a sip of beer, scream: “SATAN, GWAARRRRRR, SATAN!” or something in that direction, then stare at the wall for few seconds with grim face, say “GWARRHH” and continue playing.

That’s it. By following these directions, you should be up on the stage in no time, and let’s not forget the crazy parties at the backstage with chicks and booze! Although, black metal people don’t get too many chicks… But they are too grim anyway to want any, there will be lots of booze though!

I have developed a word called “sub-noise” which is what I call some my creations. The ideology behind this is pretty simple, and unfortunately nothing to do with subwoofers. Basically… Take some form of harmonic noise, not pure white noise, but for example, distorted string pad synth, make it cover some stereo spectrum for coolness. Now, add another layer of bit different kind of noise, finetune it until it starts playing with the main noise. Simplest example is the phaser effect when you play same sample twice with one of them slightly detuned. But this is relatively boring, with more complex samples, stereo mangling and all other kinds of fancy stuff, you can create pretty interesting end results which build impressive soundscapes. Continue reading