I Warned You About Stairs - Commentary
2.8k words across 11 entries.
I Warned You About Stairs I Warned You About Stairs (album commentary) Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube, YouTube (playlist), Spotify, Apple Music
Compilation album of a bunch of the Homestuck tunes I've released over the past few years, from 2020 onwards, plus a few brand new ones. All freshly mixed and mastered. Made with lots of heart.
Raid: (Bandcamp credits blurb)
Composer: Rude Custard
Arranger: Rude Custard
Producer: Rude Custard
Recording engineer: Rude Custard
Drums and percussion: Rude Custard
Upright piano: Rude Custard
Keyboards and synthesizers: Rude Custard
Electric guitar: Rude Custard
All other instruments: Rude Custard
Mixing engineer: Rude Custard
Mastering engineer: Rude Custard
Photographer: Rude Custard
unless otherwise specified."Doctor" by George Buzinkai, Clark Powell, and Michael Vallejo.
"Beatdown" by Curt Blakeslee.
"Black" by Toby Fox.
"Mother" by Erik Scheele.
Raid:
Raid:
Out of Breath Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music
Raid: (YouTube description, excerpt)
It's April 13!!!! Here's the Homestuck tune you were promised. I present to you Out of Breath, a tune I worked pretty hard on. It's got real electric guitars, a little chiptune intro, some intense drumming, a lot of quoted material from songs I like, and an 80-bar piano solo. There's a LOT of piano in this tune. It's very piano-centric, for reasons apparent to anyone who's ever read the comic.
This is the first of the three new tracks to be released on my upcoming compilation album of all my old Homestuck music, titled "I Warned You About Stairs". The album will come soon-ish.
Raid: ("album progress, out of breath, and more" blog post)
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Yo! Update time. I've finally begun listening to my old Homestuck tracks and polishing the mixes to get them ready for I Warned You About Stairs. I've got some preliminary mixes done. And lemme tell ya, they sound so much better now that I actually somewhat understand what I'm doing. I released the first versions of these tunes years ago. Some I released as far back as 2020 or 2021. And back then I didn't know a damn thing about mixing. I was just recording myself playing the instruments and then smushing all the tracks together and exporting the whole mess and calling it a day. It's not like I'm a mixing gneius now, either, but at least now I know how to work a highpass filter (at the very least!). And I understand the basic principles of mixing multitrack recordings. So expect the remastered versions of these tunes that will appear on the album to sound a lot better, a lot clearer, a lot smoother.
So. "Out of Breath". It's a tune about that one time John got stabbed through the chest by Bec Noir and died. He came back to life soon after, but for a brief moment, he was... Out of Breath. cue uproarious applause
This tune was a lot of fun to make. It took me forever, and so much blood and sweat and tears was shed. But I'm proud of the end result. A lot of stuff went wrong because I tried to expand my horizons. You know how it is. I'm always wanting to try something new, and grow, and learn, and all that jazz. And that usually results in me making a lot of mistakes and getting a lot of stuff wrong and learning from the experience. I've never incorporated electric guitars into a tune this extensively, for one. Mostly because I only recently learned to play electric guitar at all. Recording guitars is hard in ways I wasn't prepared for. Fret buzz, string noise, feedback, amp hum, improper muting... ugh. Guitar is hard. Mixing is hard too. Music in general is hard!
I'm also working with a new kick mic for my drum kit. You can see it in the video, actually, right at the start. Can you hear the difference? The snare and kick may jump out at you a bit more, and everything may be a little more defined and clear.
'Least that's how it sounds to me. That must be the new kick mic and new effects bus I threw together during mixing. I had to spend a while working on the effects for the drums. But I think the drums here sound better than ever.Composing Out of Breath didn't actually take that long. I've always fucked with Heir Conditioning kinda heavy, so I knew I wanted to draw inspiration from there, and there were hella other homestuck/j-rock/osu! songs I wanted to quote melodies and progressions from because I'm a fucking nerd.
And neither did recording. I'm very familiar with the key of C minor on piano, so coming up with ideas and playing stuff and improvising other stuff was pretty straightforward. And the drumming was (relatively) simple and fun to make happen.
None of that took very long.It was the mixing that took forever. I hate mixing. I'm just sitting at my computer, hunched over, tweaking knobs on effects, wondering if my tune sounds too "muddy" or "boxy" or "harsh" or if the piano's low-mids need a slight cut (they do). Staring at the damn thing until my eyes glaze over. I already sit at a PC all day for my day job, so you can imagine that I'm not too enthusiastic to get right back in front of one.
Mixing isn't very fun. Playing my instruments? Now that's fun.Now let's talk about the future, about the other upcoming tracks, and about the album's release. As is the case with most things in my life... I didn't really plan this out. I just kinda announced that I would be compiling all my old Homestuck music, applying a fresh coat of paint, remastering it all, and composing a couple new tunes, and then wrapping all of it up into a nice neat little package and releasing it as an album. My first ever "real" album, I guess. I think I will shoot for a release date of 10/25. Because what other date would I possibly pick? Plus I've got to give myself time to get everything ready. I still need to figure a lot of stuff out. I'd rather give myself more time and get everything right, and not rush it and mess it all up.
On 6/12 I will release the next of my newly composed tunes. This is the tune that a lot of people seemed to get excited for. It was the tune that played during the announcement/teaser video that hyped people up! What's it called? What kind of tune is it? What does the whole track sound like? You'll just have to wait until June 12th.
I Warned You About Stairs!!!!!!!! Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music
Raid: (YouTube description, excerpt)
It's 6/12. Have some Homestuck music. From the composition to the arrangement to the performance to the mixing to the everything, I really like how this one turned out.
This is the title track off of my compilation album of HS tunes coming later this year, "I Warned You About Stairs."
Sometimes the video doesn't match up perfectly with the audio because I went back and re-recorded a part and didn't bother filming myself playing again, but who cares. Who cares about whether or not the video is synced up. The music is what matters. That's how I feel.
The guitar solo isn't very fast or flashy. I'm still a guitar newbie, mind you. But I spent a long time practicing, and I played it with heart!
Raid: ("i warned you!" blog post)
i warned you!
Mixing and mastering is really hard and time-consuming. That's really all there is to say about it.
Anyway, I just made "I Warned You About Stairs!!!!!!!!", very guitar-and-bass-heavy tune I had a ton of fun composing, arranging, performing, & recording.
I actually mostly finished this one up two months ago and just sat on it until June. I got the jump on it. Having finished this tune and video early, with two months to spare, you might be wondering what I spent those two months doing. Hah! Stressing out about all the mixing/mastering/adjustment work I'm going to have to do for the rest of the album and how I'm going to compose and arrange and record the final new tune, of course!
When I was mixing this one I was listening to songs from Asian Kung-fu Generation's Sol-fa and Sol-fa 2016 and trying to sculpt my sound in such a way that it didn't sound like absolute trash when played next to tunes from Sol-fa. I listened to "Shindōkaku" (振動覚 Resonance), "Rewrite" (リライト Riraito), and "Re:Re:" a bunch. I used them as reference tracks, in other words.
The idea for the introductory drum solo came to me in a dream. No, not really. I just love stop-time, which is the thing that I'm doing there when all the instruments hit a sparse, accented rhythm together and then drop out so the drum solo can cut through. I just think stop-time sounds really fucking sick. So I decided to have everyone do stop-time while I played a drum solo.
I played this one to a 150 BPM click. Sometimes I like doing that and sometimes I don't. I usually prefer to play freely, without a click, which makes playing feel better in some ways and worse in others. It definitely helped around 0:18, when I just started spamming notes on the snare, floor tom, and bass drum as fast as I could, knowing I could easily hop back on beat because I had a click in my ear. That's something that's a lot harder to do well without a click. I dunno if I could do it well without a click.
And all these J-rock quotes! It's now very clear how much J-rock has been influencing me lately. I've always kinda sorta liked J-rock and anime music ever since I was in high school, but it's only recently (over the past 2-3 years) that I've gradually come to REALLY love it. I've watched my fair share of anime, but it's mostly older stuff. I haven't watched a lot of new shows. So if you can recommend me a new anime to watch (that's actually good, because I'm not wasting my time watching some fucking garbage), go for it in my YouTube comments somewhere. And say that this blog post sent you there.
The next and last new tune from this album will come out sometime between now and 10/25. It will be quite different than what you've been getting, and yet, somehow, sort of similar. Stay tuned for that.
Raid: ("i warned you!", blog post edit)
You hear the Persona OST quote in the guitar solo? Fuckin, sick, right?? Just letting you know, I've never actually played the game. The reason I know the tune is because I played a Five Night's at Freddy's parody fangame called Five Nights at Fuckboy's in 2016 or so, and that tune from Persona was used as battle music. And for some reason, I remember the melody of the tune, 8 years later!
On Still Wings Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music
Raid: (YouTube description, excerpt)
I present to you On Still Wings, the tenth track and final new composition on I Warned You About Stairs, the compilation album of many of the Homestucky tunes I've made over the years (coming October 25th!!!).
It took me a while to record this one because I diced my fingertip off like I mentioned in the video, meaning that I couldn't play guitar or piano for over a month as the wound healed. Eventually I decided to suck it up and play as much guitar as I could without using my left index finger, and as soon as the wound was like three-quarters-healed, I decided to suck it up even harder and play through the pain.
Well, now that I've finished recording this track, all that's left for me to do is mix and master all the tracks on the album and prepare for release! October 25th. Save the date.
I've also got a video with more information about the album coming out at some point. I may release that video before or after I release this video. I dunno.
Raid: ("on still wings + album progress" blog post)
An egret descends on still wings.
I just dropped On Still Wings, the final new track on I Warned You About Stairs. I've wanted to make a track like this for a while. Tough, angry, villainous, and a little ominous. I really like how it turned out, especially considering that I jumped into recording the instrumental parts with only a half-baked idea of how I wanted the tune to go, and composed and arranged most of it as I went along 😵. That's not actually a good idea, by the way. You should have your shit planned out before you get to recording. Don't do what I did 😵😵😵
I'd wanted to make a tune like this for a while, and I was 90% there, but what really gave me that last 10% of motivation and pushed me over the edge was when a friend introduced me to an album called "Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven" by a group called Godspeed You! Black Emperor. There's only 4 tracks on it, but the tracks are long, dark, atmospheric, moody, and god they sound cool. I was especially blown away by the buildup to around 16:00 on track #2, titled "Static." The sense of urgency, the gradual acceleration, the harsh timbres of the instruments.. all colliding and crashing, washing over me like waves against a cliffside. Shit blew my mind. After hearing that album I thought "alright, it's go time" and got down to business.
The title of this track, "On Still Wings," comes from a poem by Taiwanese poet Hu Yun-Shang, who went by the pseudonym Lin Ling. It's a beautiful poem. Taken altogether, it made me feel quite melancholy, and the imagery of the bird descending on still wings and the two people crossing paths and climbing to distant summits stuck with me. And made me feel wistful and made me long for the past. But that wasn't all. For some reason I can't quite put a finger on, the imagery of the bird descending on still wings also gave me an ominous, sinking feeling. As though something was wrong. Like there was danger close by. Maybe it reminded me of how a vulture might quietly circle its dying prey, or how a hawk might swoop in for the kill. I thought of that feeling when deciding on a name for this track. And it fits quite beautifully.
I've included a translation of it by Kenneth Rexroth and Chung Ling below, from "The Penguin Book of Women Poets."
Footpaths Cross in the Rice Field
You are horizontal.
I am vertical.
We divide the heavenly bodies
And the four directions between us.
We come from the place of becoming,
Pass by here,
And encounter each other
In this final meeting
In a flooded rice field.
An egret descends on still wings.
We quietly chat about the weather,
And say, 'I'll see you again.'
Quietly make an appointment,
Climb to far apart hillsides,
And look back from the summits.
A pure white feather floats down.
As the feather floats down,
Oh, at that moment
We both hope that happiness
May also be like a white bird,
Quietly descending
We hope—
Even though birds
Are creatures with wings.the tune and the album and other stuff too
To get that ominous, villainous tone, I tuned my guitar's lowest string down to Eb.
That actually served two purposes.
- First, a lower note results in a thicker, meaner guitar tone, especially when playing power chords. That Eb power chord is sickeningly, disgustingly powerful when it comes through the rhythm pickup. I love it.
- And second, tuning the bottom string down a half step allows me to play power chords very comfortably without needing to use my left index finger! Super helpful, considering I recorded most of the rhythm guitar parts while a third of my fingertip was detached from my body.
So. About my finger injury. I already talked about it in the description of the video and the video itself, but in case you missed all of that somehow: I sliced off part of my left index finger in late July when I was cooking. The wound has been healing steadily, but it delayed my recording process for this tune a little bit, and it still kinda hurts when I play guitar using my left index finger. I hope the pain goes away at some point. It's really bothersome. Especially because I'm a musician! The use of my left index finger is crucial for like every instrument I play!
This is the last of the original tunes that'll wind up on the album. From here on out, the only thing left for me to do is remix and remaster my old tracks and assemble the album. I've never done something like this, and I'm learning everything as I go along. I hope it turns out alright.
I plan for this to be the last Homestuck tune I make for a while, because I've been pumping out Homestuck related stuff every single 4/13, 6/12, and 10/25 for like, 7 years straight, and I would like to wholeheartedly dedicate my time and effort to some other stuff that I've put on the back burner for a while.
But fear not! Homestuck is special to me, Homestuck music especially, being one of the primary motivating factors behind my decision to start recording my own music as a teenager all those years ago. The melodies and instrumentation and styles of Homestuck composers have become a permanent part of my musical vocabulary. Homestuck has inspired me endlessly. It'll always be a part of whatever I do! Nothing can change that.
I'm pretty sure I'll return to making more Homestuck music sooner rather than later. I'm just tryna take a short break from that for a while so I can compose other kinds of music and release other kinds of videos.
I Warned You About Stairs
Track list (1–10)