Mandalay-Box Bay City - "Divination By Lightning" - (Railboard & Fractals)



Not my usual style of music, but I wanted to do something a bit mellow and restrained (at least in the keyboards). The fractal video has consumed me for a solid three weeks. I've not put as much time or effort into any other video in the 300+ I've done (not saying that it's my best--just the most difficult and the one I've spent the most time on.)

I went through an entire terabyte of data to make the 6 minutes and 7 seconds of the video. I went down many different paths and then burned them behind me and started over again. I did the original in HD size, and then took another week to make it 4K. I played with AI denoising and embiggening, and After Effects CGI wizardry, and green screening and masking and a bunch of other techniques I won't list. But man, as difficult and as a pain in the butt as it was to make, I learned a heck of a lot to apply to future videos.

Ah, but to the Railboard: I swear to you that I can play most of those lines with just my left hand and lots of hand movement. I'm happy to demonstrate, to prove a point. But I like to play two handed on each side of my Sticks, like it's one big 8-fingered hand, and I've been doing it for about (exactly actually) 1758 days this morning. Especially when I record, I get much better tone and results using two hands than just one. And I'm all over the board and it's just easier to have two hands spaces apart. That's the last I'll apologize for my playing style.

But this is me playing direct into the boards. The keys came first, but were about 9 minutes long, and so I cut out many chunks of the keyboard, and thus the keyboard video. Then I blocked out the fractal video to the tune of just keys, guitar, and percussion, and audio-synced the video to the beat. Then I played the video with the backing music and recorded video and audio of the Railboard over it in one take. I cut in a measure or two of the Railboard from soundcheck, when I got lost for a second and flubbed a couple of notes. But otherwise, this is me playing and recording.

I hope you enjoy it and the tune is not actually even complete. There needs to be a strong lead line over the whole thing or perhaps vocals. But this is what it is today.

Cheers! Down in Fractal Rock!

Mandalay-Box Bay City - "Divination By Lightning" - (Railboard & Fractals)
https://youtu.be/L5TyA0jkpn8

Wow, Steve! Lots going on there, nice work!

Can't say I've ever seen 2160p show up under the Quality options on YouTube, either. Sheesh, my internet could barely handle it in full screen. Now I have something to take to CenturyLink to beg them for more bandwidth (I live on the edge of nowhere)..."I need more, man. I can't play Steve's killer videos straight through without stopping to buffer!!!"

heck yeah, Steve! That is really wild man! Nice work, and excellent playing... (Work and play can co-exist, right?)

Awesome creating, dude!

Well done! Love the video inserts too. The music matches well with the amazing visuals. I also love the bass sound - how did you process it?

Great to encounter one of your fractal cities again. Been a while. Starts with an elaborate blueprint, then the foundations, then futuristic and utilitarian buildings and finally all the embellishments from waste disposal system to powered grid to high gardens.

"I go to prepare a place for you and where I go there ye may be also", and there he is as written in St. John, Steve the creator himself playing live, nicely superimposed in his own cityscape via greenscreen. Maybe he should have an enlarged still frame from the video behind him, just to show he's really there and waiting.

Did it have to be a planet wide city? There are so many of us living and dead. Will be crowded. Hmm, could use a bigger planet.

Victor! It's great to hear from you! Yes, I pretty much only do 4K video now. It helps to (slightly) limit my video output, so I can catch up to it with my music output, and I now have the equipment to do all my videos in 4K.

Everybody needs fatter pipes. Internet pipes especially. You could just watch it in glorious HD 1080, but that 2160 is nice if you can get the full stream. And the actual video is about 3-5 times with more bandwidth than YouTube will handle. You could REALLY blow out your internet pipes with the Vimeo version, that's an even higher bitrate.

https://vimeo.com/430097070

I've even got some 8K video, which is just crazy ridiculous. It was cool to do something so massive. But I don't have an 8K TV to see it on.

The master Fractalist, Julius Horsthuis, does fractal light shows at planetariums all over Europe. Now that'd be cool to see! Something for me to shoot for. Thanks, Vic!

Thanks, so much, Scott! I was this close to having you make a lead line and plop yourself right in the middle at the bottom there with your own green-screened performance. But we totally need to do that! I love watching your performance vids--just give me a track and a shot of you doing it in front of a green screen, and I can put us both in our next SINKERR gig. Which I've got some ideas to send you anyway, but we'll rock that out offline. Thanks, Scott!

Thanks so much, Jeremy!

Okay, bass sound. I switched over from Mac to PC, and all of my DAW software (Pro Tools) switched with me, and all of my plugins (Native Instruments, Waves, and some Izotope stuff mainly) switched as well. But I lost all of my plugin settings. For a while, I didn't have to futz with my sound hardly at all: I had a Rosewood best setting, a Railboard, an NS/Stick patch, etc. All of my beloved piano EQs and patches were saved as well. So I kind of started over with the settings but the same plugins.

My effects chain for the Railboard bass side is in order, 3 Waves plugins:
1) Waves Bassrider (Clean & Dynamic patch) for volume leveling.

2) Waves CLA (Chris Lord Alge) Bass. All the settings at default value (just on but no patch selected). The Clean Shake patch sounds pretty good with the other two plugins and their settings, but it was used with all effects in the middle position. #2 here is not needed and could also be used more, for chorus or sub-bass or EQ tweaking or compression. I used to have an awesome NS/Stick patch for CLA Bass and don't remember the settings anymore. I'll have to recreate that for the NS.

3) Waves SSLG Channel, an EQ and Low/high-bandpass Filter and Compression plugin. I use the Joe West (West Bass Growler Aggro or West Bass Growler Smooth) patches. #3 here is the most crucial for that growl sound--that the Railboard already has in it. It barely needs any encouragement. But Joe West Growler Aggro or Smooth is my go-to money maker lovey-dovey secret sauce. I swear it is Growler Butter in one little plugin.

Some of the other settings really rock on the SSLG--try the Chris Lord Alge Guitar patch 1 or 3 (not 2). I use that at the end of Scotty's wall of sound guitars sometimes to glue it all together. I love that SSLG Channel--my absolute favorite little tone shaper at the tailend. It also works well as a low and high band pass filter to keep the tracks from stepping on each other (that's a whole master level of mastering beyond just quick tone shaping).

The Waves stuff came with their Mercury or Platinum set and about a million different Waves plugins, about 5 years ago, but it's largely unchanged. I'm sure there's more Waves goodies I've not stumbled upon yet. But these three work very nicely together for me!

And then the Railboard straight into the board with phantom power on. Honestly, I could have, and usually would have, recorded two or three takes and then cut and pasted from each track. But then I was worried that the video and audio wouldn't match. So you got the first take plus a few notes from soundcheck. And I missed the very first G at the very beginning, and had to redub that. But I just used the G from the soundcheck, which is on tape, so actually it just got slightly shifted.

And that's the sound. And thank you Jeremy for asking!

I'll get to Emmett in just a bit; a long reply there, but hi for now!

Hi, Emmett! I hope you and yours are doing well in these trying times. It's good to be back here and rocking it out with everyone.


I had in mind that Mandalay-Box City exists in some kind of biome in space, with its own atmosphere and lighting system, and environmental controls and the like. Or something out of Larry Niven's Ringworld series, which was highly influential to me as a young lad.

Or like one of these 70s ideas of the future:


So if there are several thousand or even million of these little cities, with their own forests and vegetation (largely not done in my video. That's possible though.), then there's plenty of room for humanity out there. And then park some arks around the galaxy, and spread humanity around! (Assuming we're worthy of both surviving this little ball of mud, and then propagating around the universe.)

And then you need some sort of system to travel between these little cities, or perhaps, they are individual pleasure palaces, or extended familial group and clans and tribes. The end of the video is intended to be Mandalay-Bay Temple Casino and Worship area, where the alien intelligences of the galaxy gather together to play.

My future worlds are a bit cleaner than Star Wars and a bit dirtier than Star Trek. I'm also heavily influenced by the Culture series of books by Ian M. Banks, who had giant intelligent ships that humans lived in that looked like worlds on the inside, complete with oceans and reefs and beaches, and mini-suns, yet could achieve faster-than-light travel between the stars. And these giant ships would both visit each other and be visited by smaller ships skipping between the larger ships roaming through the stars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series

Lots of stuff going on here, Emmett, and I love that you always have such a vast imagination and capacity to grok and dig these fractal scenes. Thanks so much for hanging out and commenting! I have another video to share here in a bit.
Cheers!

Great visual and auditory work there Steve.

It "feels" like "Metropolis" and "Blade Runner". My two favorite "atmospheres" in movies...