Nik Furious: Brilliant Shower: Invisible

Nik Furious - Brilliant Shower
Brilliant Shower artwork by Shawn Atkins

Invisible is one of the oldest songs on Brilliant Shower. It's also the first time I ever sampled myself.

I wasn't a music major in college, but I was fortunate enough to get into some advanced sound recording classes. The techniques I learned have been invaluable to me as both a musician and podcaster. (Thx, Riccardo Schulz!!!)

I'm not a great drummer by any means, but I can hold a beat. We needed someone to play drums for one of these classes, and so I volunteered. I played a few different beats, nothing spectacular. And when all was said and done, I got to keep the recordings of my performance.

INTERMISSION! Invisible on SoundCloud.

A few months after I graduated in 2004, I pillaged all of my old recordings to try and find the best songs I made while I was in college. After the Wink was one of those. Try This was another. And in the process of drudging through my old stuff, I found the ProTools files of my aforementioned drumming.

I tried looping full bars of my drums, but I couldn't get anything that sounded tight. So I went through and I sampled individual hits. One tap on the high hats. One on the snare. A couple of kick hits. And then I proceeded to lay out the beat in ProTools just like I was using my drum machine.

Nowadays, I understand the concept of sequencing (despite the fact that I still don't do it... nothing against it -- I've just never tried it). Back then, I had no idea or otherwise I would have tried out something like that.

Anyway, I did things the hard way but I built a drum beat I'm still proud of to this day. Obviously, I also laid down some bass and synth at some point... which, if I recall correctly, happened months later when I was living in Brooklyn.

Invisible is currently the theme for the HyperComboCast, a fighting games podcast I co-host on the AudioShocker.

NEXT: 9.5 minutes of purple.

One Response to “Nik Furious: Brilliant Shower: Invisible”

  1. [...] pieces and reconstructed into a badass Frankenstein rhythm! Learn more about this song's creation here. This entry was posted in Beatcast, Podcast Episodes and tagged Nik Furious, Then and Now by nick [...]