Demo quality was the best I could get, this one was a real fight.  It’s not too bad on a system with enough bass.

Vampire of Steel

Black number one
flowing off his head,
the kind of love
that makes a woman
wish that she were dead.
She only wants to dance
with a bad romance.
But when mortal affection
proves fleeting,
the devil has a cure
for her leaving.

Vampire of Steel!
You can’t drive a stake
into a heart turned
to coldest steel!
He already hung on your cross
Half of his life was a total loss!

Vampire of Steel!
You can’t drive a stake
into a heart turned
to coldest steel!
He already hung on your cross
Half of his life was a total loss!

No more lonely Valentine’s Day,
The vampire is come, you won’t get away.
She may be damned, but she’s here to staaaay!

She.

hates.

me.

Suspended dusk worked out better than they say.
A lover’s bed is more comforting
than a grave.

Vampire of Steel!
You can’t drive a stake
into a heart turned
to coldest steel!
He already hung on your cross
Half of his life was a total loss!

Vampire of Steel!
You can’t drive a stake
into a heart turned
to coldest steel!
He already hung on your cross
Half of his life was a total loss!

Life killed him too soon
but he came back for the wolf moon!

I made a few tribute songs to artists who are no longer with us.  This one is for Pete Steele, who gets a trilogy.

It’s surprising how many of the 90’s artists didn’t make it.  How many of them are still around?  Billy Corgan is one of the few I listened to when I was young who is still alive and has some relevance.  I’ll have to get back to him in a minute.

Type O Negative was fairly successful in the mid 90’s, with the song Love You to Death getting regular airplay.  Their best songs were usually too long for radio though, and IMO they lost most of what was great about them when they switched to shorter, radio friendly pieces after the album October Rust.   The music became too depressing after October Rust as well.  I’ve been through their entire discography, and don’t remember anything from the last three albums – but October Rust is easily one of the best albums of the era.

Pete Steele was a guy with everything going for him.  He was a 6′ 8″ muscle bound rock star with a good face and a big dick (well, I haven’t seen his Playgirl pics, but the topic comes up when people talk about him).  He died with his cat.  If I remember the story correctly, he needed to go to the hospital, but his cat was dying, and he chose to stay with his cat instead of getting help for himself.  So they died together.

I watched an interview where he said his girlfriends always left him because he had a smothering style of affection, which is the inspiration for the Vampire Trilogy.  When you’re a vampire, they don’t get to leave.  He was so close to the answer . . .  Some women can’t be loved, until they’ve been “Loved to Death.”

I put him in the same category as Tesla and Newton – super geniuses who are too different for the love of mortal women.  If Pete hadn’t been a physically impressive rock star, he probably would have been as loveless as they were.  I suspect the common thread here is Aspergers.

Anyway, I wanted to get back to Billy Corgan, because he’s been making a claim lately that the CIA and MTV collaborated to kill rock music and prop up rap music.  Through most of my career in the entertainment industry (I have worked professionally), I believed that success was a matter of having the right idea and being able to perform well.  Also, that some artists are so much better than others that they can sit on a spike of wealth and fame while 99.999% of everyone else who is trying is down on a flat line.  In recent years, I’ve come to bitterly accept that the western entertainment industry is just propaganda used to push destructive ideas on the masses.  The superstars were the ones who agreed to be part of that system.  Vanilla Ice wasn’t a “one hit wonder,” he saw what the industry was about, and walked away.  Lizzo wasn’t a real star, she was propped up to push harmful health choices.  But something has changed, and her new album only sold 2,600 copies.  And rap has taken a nose dive –  No Rap Songs Are in the Billboard Hot 100’s Top 40 for the First Time Since 1990. 

So what does the entertainment industry really look like?  I’ve got decisions to make.  I went back to college to get an engineering degree with the idea that manufacturing would be coming back to America, enough to compensate for my age, but one (or both) of those things hasn’t turned out to be true.  It looks like I will still be facing an uphill battle after graduation, instead of a slam dunk.  However, the traffic for this site has shot up, which is making the webcomic seem like it has potential (that it probably doesn’t actually have).  I’ve got about two months before college starts – should I bump up the plans for this comic, in the hope that it will be something by the time I graduate?  I don’t own a camera or a microphone, except for what’s in my cheap phone.  It wouldn’t be wise to invest hundreds of dollars into video making, without knowing if the site’s traffic reflects real interest.  It may be people searching for something else and bouncing.  So I need to establish fan interaction before investing to create content that fans (who really exist) might not even want.  The music is something that can be fun for me to do, but it doesn’t appear to be working for anyone else.  I don’t want to make another mistake like that.

Another entry in the metal section, six more to go.  Zeruel isn’t great as a stand-alone piece of music, but it could work as an opening piece at a concert.  Something that plays while band members come out and get ready, then segs into another piece.

Another metal tune, this version has an extra bit on the end I don’t remember.  Hmm. Well, you get to hear it here.  I’m preparing for an exam, and I need to bolt.  No time to go look for the other version.  I’ve got to say though, that I continue to be blown away by the traffic this site has been getting lately.  This isn’t a big comic by any means, but it sure got bigger.  Toocheke seems to be treating the non-SSL traffic as if it’s real, which means we’ll be over 5,000 uniques this month.  But even if those are ghosts, and only the SSL traffic is real, it will still be over 2000 uniques.   AWstats is only detecting 23 bots, so the bulk of the traffic either isn’t bots; or the bots are passing as real people most of the time.  I may be feeling more positive than I should.  After all, easy come, easy go.  I’m probably boring everyone with the traffic comments, but how does the SSL traffic increase by seven times in two months?  Especially in the summer months, when webcomic traffic is supposed to plummet.

Here’s a western metal sound.  It’s the song I used for the webcam intro video on YouTube.  “Suck It” is genuinely great (IMHO).  Ironically, it came out of an attempt to find the sound for the first version of “R Kelly in P Major,” which was a Jpop track.  That song did suck, but this one doesn’t.  Metal won’t be the band’s main sound, but it may show up every now and then.  OM-MINUS uses up most my energy for metal though, and has been getting all of my creative time lately – which isn’t much, but the great thing about making music with A.I. is that it can be done on the side of most computer jobs.

While I’m on the topic, let me show a screencap of one of my tracks in Audacity –

It’s possible to write a script that pumps out 300 mediocre tracks per day, and it’s possible to get ChatGPT to write lyrics within an established genre, then plug the lyrics into an AI program and get a generic, but decent, track from that genre.  Getting A.I. to make a type of music that doesn’t exist in the material it has trained on is a different matter entirely.  Images too – I wanted an image of a steam engine that derailed and rolled over on its side for the cover of the Way of the Waifu album “Little Engines that Couldn’t,” but I couldn’t get any of the A.I.s I tried to generate a steam engine on its side.  Only upright.  I don’t give up easily, but that one beat me.  Maybe I should have taken one into GIMP, put it on its side, and told the AI to fix the lighting and perspective on my edited image.  That’s similar to what my music making process is like.

The top greyed-out track is the output from Treblo (formerly Sonauto, they rebranded for reasons that make sense to them).

That output was not directly generated by a prompt in Treblo.  It is a few generations of descent away from a not-so-great track generated in Udio before Warner Music Group inserted themselves.  I’ve been trying, and am currently trying, to make a good version of that track in Treblo; and along the way Treblo is spitting out bits and pieces that can be expanded into other tracks (like “Suck It” was).  Growing those tracks might result in a section good enough to also be spun off into another track.  This has been more productive for me than prompting with words.  A.I. in general, and Treblo in particular, are very good at ignoring word prompts.  Treblo can be very good when fed music though, but it usually needs some help from a DAW (Audacity, Soundforge, etc).

The 2nd track is empty space I added to the front of the first track.

Come to think of it, the top track has already been edited in Audacity. I used the envelope tool to fade the end out better, then cut a section out of the intro because it was too long, then cut out the intro and fed it back through Treblo to fix the skip where I cut the unwanted section out.  I made a dozen or more “fix” generations, and took the three best back into Audacity.

The second track from the bottom is the full track with the original intro cut off.

The third track from the bottom is one of the “fix” intros, which was still missing a little something.  The bottom track is a copy of the third track from the bottom.  I shifted the bottom track over because there was a part that could repeat, and used the envelope tool again to silence the parts of the track I didn’t need.

This process can be repeated again and again and again.  The track currently following this one (but only as of this morning, so it could change), is a more extreme example.  It started as a vocal section in a piece of total garbage, that was cut out and regenerated a few times.  It was extended many times, things were cut out in Audacity and replaced with other things, then run back through Treblo, then back to Audacity.  Over and over again.  I can’t even publish my music on Treblo, because Treblo doesn’t recognize it as music created in Treblo.

In the end, A.I. is just another tool in the tool kit.  It can either be used amateurishly, which will show; or it can be mastered – and that will also show.  The right answer isn’t to ignore it and pretend it will go away.  It won’t.  The right answer is to use it to do more.  Don’t make a song, make an album.  Make an album, and the videos, without having to sell out to a studio.  More fully realize a unique personal vision that can’t be made any other way.  There aren’t many artists who get to work without studio interference, or who don’t have to compromise on the vision with the other members of the band.  Now it can be done.

I tried a couple J Metal tracks.  I like J Metal, but it won’t be one of the band’s main sounds.

A pleasant instrumental intro for the B-side album, “B-Sides and Spiritual Beings.”

“Spiritual Beings” is a reference to Nine Inch Nail’s “Ghosts” albums, which are collections of pieces created while searching for a sound for the next studio album.

I tried a few different genres on this album to see what would fit with the group.  While their signature sound is a mix of surf rock and shoegaze, they can dip into anything.