Dreilide kicks off the rock section of the mini-album with this song, which was inspired by the realization that “The Dukes of Hazzard” is an awful lot like the real life story of NASCAR driver Richard Petty, and the Petty family. I originally called it “They Ripped off Richard Petty,” but then it developed this “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” story structure, where Richard Petty plays the devil, hunting down the Duke Boys for running moonshine in his territory.
I could be happier with the music on this one. The guitar tone isn’t my favorite, but I was glad to get it. A.I. makes music as one piece, so if you like the vocal but not the instrumental, you often have to throw both away. I’m not thrilled with the vocals either, but, whenever things tended to get dramatic, Udio usually added some nasty vocal doubling effect and dropped the sound quality down. After that, the vocals on each additional section would get worse and worse. I actually hired a professional singer for this, but I was defeated by Udio’s ducking. With real music, when a song is mastered, the volume of the music is dropped a bit whenever the singer is singing. From what I’ve seen, the instrumentals will get dropped evenly during the duration of a word. The reduction looks like a flat line. With A.I. music, the reduced area looks more like a waveform, closely following the tiniest rise and fall in the vocal. The singer I hired matched the A.I. vocal’s timing closely, but it wasn’t enough. The vocal still didn’t fit the A.I. ducking right. So I generated a new version of the song, working from the end to the beginning, and somehow got a version with a vocal that didn’t fall apart. But it’s not superb, all this stuff is only demo quality. It does a few creative things though. I love how Dreilide runs out of breath after holding a note for too long, at the end.
In other news, I’ve made a bunch of changes to the website. If clicking play on a song or video was advancing you to the next page, it shouldn’t do that now. If you loved the infinite scroll feature, that’s gone, but the comment section is visible.
New comic page on Tuesday. These blog posts may be getting out of hand. I don’t like the way the comic reads now, there are too many interruptions by posts like this one. Something I’ll be thinking about.