Instrumental Songs by Nik Furious

Nik Furious: Brilliant Shower: Wallcrawler

Monday, November 5th, 2012

Nik Furious - Brilliant Shower
Brilliant Shower artwork by Shawn Atkins

The creation of Wallcrawler was a lot more straight forward than most of the other cuts on Brilliant Shower. In fact, if you've been following this blog for more than four months, then you may already know most of the story.

In 2005, I made a stupid video called Spider-Man vs. Xandu. It was the early days of video sharing sites, and I wanted to make a parody that people could get excited about. But I didn't even know a good place to share the video at the time because YouTube wasn't even officially public!

Here's me working some of my mysterious magic as Xandu.

However, MySpace was at the height of its hype and I thought it'd be fun to write a track and share it on one of my music profiles. I teamed up with my roommate Scott to craft the theme song. You can listen to the Spider-Man vs. Xandu song here.

Wallcrawler is just the instrumental version of that theme, albeit with a slightly different mix. That, and it's got me saying "my Spidey sense is tingling!" in the middle of it, as inspired by some of my favorite surf rock songs of the 60s.

INTERMISSION! Wallcrawler on SoundCloud:

I'm a bit hazy on the details now, but to the best of my memory I wrote the music for the song, Scott and I wrote the lyrics, and then I did everything on the recording save for one of the rhythm guitars and the lead vocals. Honestly, I'm not sure if Scott played guitar on the track. But I think he did!!

Composing this song was fast and easy. I've been writing rock music longer than any other genre, and it tends to go quickly for me. The only obstacle I encountered was the solo section. I'm not too good at guitar solos. But this song sounds like it would really benefit from a nasty one! After experimenting with guitar riffs, I gave up and decided to try a synth solo instead. I'm pretty happy with the result.

NEXT: The collected edition of Brilliant Shower, including a ZIP file download of the entire album. And then my next album, 7 Star Sky Flash Kick, in 2013!

Nik Furious: Brilliant Shower: Uncanny

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012

Nik Furious - Brilliant Shower
Brilliant Shower artwork by Shawn Atkins

Each time I record a new song, I try to push myself and experiment with an element of the composition. With Uncanny, every element was an experiment.

The idea for Uncanny came from a song I sampled for one of my beats called Click Clack. The sample featured Hawaiian percussion that sounded like a combination of wood sticks and stomping.

I loved the chaotic beauty of that Hawaiian rhythm and I wanted to emulate the sound with my drum machine. After playing around for a couple of hours, I cobbled together a loop that I liked. This was the first time I used electronic drums to capture the sound of a different artist's recording.

After that, I created a few simple drum loops with some deep knock to act as foundation for the track. But when it came time to lay down the bass, I was stumped. I had no idea what to do. Playing along with the beat sounded like crap.

I decided to work against the beat and use the bass as a syrupy accent, droning through the main riff until the very end of the loop when it sped up and matched the rhythm of the digital sticks for a few brief moments.

Then shit got real weird. I plugged my acoustic guitar into the compressor mic input on my microKORG synthesizer and ran it through a vocoder setting. I loved the haunting, robotic moan it produced. Mixed with another mic to pick up the natural tone of the guitar, I knew I had the sound I wanted for my song.

Buuuuuttt... I had no clue what to play. Without any distinct ideas for a melody, I looped the drums and bass for about 10 minutes, hit record, and improvised some bluesy licks.

At the time of the recording, I didn't care for any of the melodies that I caught on tape. But when I went back to the song a few days later with a fresh set of ears, I easily selected my favorite moments to become the funky loops of Uncanny.

INTERMISSION! Uncanny on SoundCloud:

Proud of my experiment, I put Uncanny up on my MySpace page (it was 2005 -- that's how we did things back then). A few months later, I moved from Brooklyn back to Pittsburgh and began to aggressively hunt MCs to buy my beats.

I never ended up selling any because I didn't know what the hell I was doing when it came to business, but I sheepishly gave a free master copy of Uncanny to a Pittsburgh rapper named Ron Noodles. We were buds at the time but had a falling out not long after, and -- as far as I know -- Ron never rhymed over the track.

Fast-forward two years later and I launched my podcast website, the AudioShocker. I decided to use Uncanny as the theme song to our flagship podcast series and it stuck. Even when I changed the theme for a few months, I had to go back to Uncanny because by then it'd become the sound of our show.

NEXT: The final song on Brilliant Shower is... electronic punk?!?

Nik Furious: Brilliant Shower: Summers

Tuesday, July 17th, 2012

Nik Furious - Brilliant Shower
Brilliant Shower artwork by Shawn Atkins

In high school, I studied a bit of music theory. In college, I studied some sound recording. And I also took a class about the physics of musical sound.

With Summers I was able to merge all three studies into one weird track.

I know it sounds kinda stupid to say that I required music theory, sound recording, and the physics of musical sound to create Summers. It's not like this song is the incredible result of all three. Still, I never could've created it without them.

Most of that knowledge is lost to me now, but I'll do my best to retrace my steps. In music theory, I learned about notes and their relationships to each other. In sound recording, I learned ProTools and digital editing. And by studying the physics of musical sound, I came to understand hertz, semitones, and more -- basically, the properties of sound waves as they apply to music.

In early 2005, my friend sent me an audio file of himself playing the electric guitar. Just guitar. That's it. I dragged the recording into ProTools to see if I could put some digital drums behind it, but that didn't work.

However, I'd recently begun sampling music with electric guitars and I was beginning to understand how to slice up guitar into individual chords (which is faaaaar different from sampling plain drums, for example). I cut my teeth chopping up guitar-heavy samples for beats like Got Laid, Proton Cannon, and Rawk.

Using that new experience, I decided to see if I could slice up my friend's guitar riff and turn it into a beat. I isolated one especially sweet sounding chord and I started digitally shifting the pitch of the chord in ProTools using my knowledge of semitones. Soon, I'd created a tiny guitar orchestra from a single chord.

INTERMISSION! Summers on SoundCloud:

Honestly, I think I'm exaggerating the virtuosity of what I did to craft Summers. There are hordes of digital musicians who perform similar feats on a daily basis. But regardless, I'm proud of the sound I captured here.

I tend to view Summers as the least popular track on Brilliant Shower. I just don't think the sound clicks with most people, or at least not enough for them to say anything about it. Maybe it's the drums, which are pretty repetitive... or maybe the pitch-shifted guitar is grating to some people... I dunno!!!

NEXT: Running an acoustic guitar through a vocoder yields some funky results.