Enter The Matrix Using Particular 2

I was recently asked to create the Matrix “raining code” effect, but the only help I could find was a 40 minute tutorial which was not very helpful, because it was layer based and very time consuming. After thinking about it, I thought, “Why not do it in After Effects with Particular?”. I gave it a few tries, and voila, it worked. After that I created this tutorial. I hope you enjoy it, and will learn something.

Tutorial

Download Tutorial .flv

File size 75MB


Core Art Skills: Part 3, Life and Figure Drawing


The study of the figure is the corner stone of art skills, its disciplines trickle down into all areas of work. It’s also the area that takes the most effort to master. In part three of Core Art Skills, Ben Mounsey will show you how to confidently draw from life. You will learn about the key concepts of figure study and how to draw what you see.

Continue reading “Core Art Skills: Part 3, Life and Figure Drawing”

Seven Steps To Writing Memorable Melodies – Part 1

One of the most common questions I get asked by my students is ‘How do I come up with a really good melody?’ The answer, as with all million-dollar questions, can’t be given as a simple “You do it like this…” However, over the years, I’ve developed a series of techniques and tips which can be used to help beginner song writers and composers come up with stronger melody lines.

I’ve listened to a lot of songs in my time, many of which have been composed by amateur performers and music enthusiasts. I’m sorry to say that the a lot of the song writers seem to forget about the most important element (in my opinion) – the melody – and concentrate far too much on instrument selection, production effects, lyrics and so on. The melody simply becomes an almost random selection of notes at worst, or a very dull and ‘obvious’ melody line at best. Without a strong melody line, a song is rarely going to make it on to someones iTunes playlist!

So, how do we transform the oh-so-common, and dare I say ‘boring’ melody line, to be something that is pleasant to the ear, interesting, memorable, and capture the heart of the listener? In this short series of tutorials I’m going to offer you my seven steps to writing a memorable melody, where you’ll learn how to create a melody a little something like this…

Download audio file (audio-full-example.mp3)

The example audio above and those throughout this series of tutorials were played on piano, as unfortunately I haven’t been blessed with a singing voice that’s worth sharing ousite of my own car and bathroom. However, I’ve accented the melody notes (the highest notes) so that you will easily be able to pick them out from the backing chords and accompanyment. The example song is one I simply played within a couple of minutes of sitting at the piano, it could have turned out very differently depending on my mood, the day, the weather or whatever… but each version would all have one thing in common. They would all follow the basic steps outlined in this series of tutorials.

I shall give various examples during this tutorias. Each will show the musical score / notation, plus an audio file for those who don’t read music so well. Just be aware that the score is written in it’s simplest form with the accompanyment or backing being displayed as straight forward chords. Where as the audio breaks these chords out a little to provide a similar sound to that of the original example audio track that we’re building up toward.

Step 1: Understand The Interaction Between The Chord And Melody

This is arguably the most important of all the tips and thankfully is the simplest to achieve for any new song writer. The essential aim is to ensure that at various intervals during the song (such as the first beat of a bar, or the end of a musical phrase), the melody note ‘lands’ on one of the notes that is being played in the chord. What do I mean by this? Well, if the chord that is being played is C Major, then, the melody note to feature should either be C, E or G (the triad that makes up the C Major chord). If the chord being played was G Major, then the melody note to feature should be either G, B, or D.

Lets take the example of the following common chord sequence.

C -> G / B -> Am -> C / G -> F -> Em -> Dm -> G

(If you’re not familiar with this standard method of writing chords, then C means the C Major chord, Am means A Minor. G/B refers to a G Major chord, with a B as the bass note – instead of the normal G bass note. You can learn more about chord notation here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_notation).

If we were to write a melody to this chord sequence, using only the advice from Step 1 in this tutorial, we’d get something like this.

Download audio file (audio-1-1.mp3)

Here you can see, the first melody note is E, which is played with the C chord, because the C triad is C, E, G. I could have selected C or G and it would have sounded equally correct, but this time I decided to use E. In the second bar the chord is G and I have chosen melody note G (from the triad of G, B, and D). In the third bar, the chord is A minor (A, C, E), so I’ve selected melody note C.

Ok, having played this back, I realize that, purely by accident is already sounds like a rather famous melody from a classical piece of music (Pietro Mascagni: Cavalleria Rusticana – Intermezzo, about 1minute 40 into the piece). Despite this similarity to an already existing famous piece of music, what is clear is that it’s very easy to listen to and pleasant sounding. It doesn’t sound like someone picking random notes out from the chromatic scale, there’s some structure to it. That’s because each melody note sits within the basic chord being played at the time.

It doesn’t matter which of the notes in the chord we choose. Here’s another example where the melody still conforms to the guidelines in Step 1, but using a different melody note for the G chord in the second bar.

Download audio file (audio-1-2.mp3)

Again this works really well. (And, if you notice, this is also by complete accident similar to a very famous piece of music, Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major from about 20 seconds in). As long as you understand the notes of the chord being played at any one time, you can start to piece together the ‘main’ or ‘featured’ notes of your melody line.

Step 2: Making Use Of Other Notes In The Scale

Once we’ve found some of the chord notes (Step 1) to feature in our melody, it’s time to think about adding some melodic movement and interest to the melody line. But how do you choose which notes to add?

Well, the most obvious thing to do is work out what key signature your song is in, and then ensure you only use notes from that scale. This will ensure you don’t get any ‘clashing sounds’ that are unpleasant to the ear. (Of course there maybe times when a melody purposefully uses notes from outside of the songs key signature, but, for simplicity we’ll ignore such melodies for now.)

In the previous example, the song was in the key of C Major. Knowing your key signatures is a critical part of writing a good melody. If you don’t know your key signatures, then I suggest you learn them (there are numerous websites and books to help you do this). C Major has a key signature where there are no sharps or flats; on a piano keyboard, no black notes. As such, when composing a melody for a song in C Major, we should focus only on the ‘white notes’ of the piano to ensure we get a pleasant sound.

Ok, so now we’re going to use melody notes from the key signature C Major, either going up or down the scale, as we move around to each of the featured chord notes (as decided in step one).

I’ve used a fairly simple movement around the notes in this next audio example, using the tips from steps 1 and 2, to produce the melody line as follows.

Download audio file (audio-2-1.mp3)

Clearly adding the extra notes from the scale as we moved from the E in bar one to the G in bar 2 has added some more interest to the melody. Again, it didn’t matter which notes of the scale I played, I could have move down the scale instead, and it would still have sounded pleasant. Try it yourself and experiment a little. What is important is that I used only the notes that are in C Major (no sharps of flats) to get me from the featured melody note of E (in the first bar) to G (in the second bar).

Review Stage

Using steps one and two above will get you to what I termed in my introduction as an ‘obvious melody’. What I mean by this is the western ear is ‘trained’ to readily accept these kinds of melodies over the given chord sequence and they’re fairly simple in their structure. They don’t jump around much and have a fairly limited technical involvment.

In part two of this series, we’ll look at more techniques to add further interest to the melody line and develop it in to something a little more unique.


Workshop #94 Disco Siren by Bigibang

At Audiotuts+ we irregularly put up a reader track for workshopping and critique (find out how to submit a track). This is how it works: you upload your song, and every week or so we’ll publish one here and step away from the podium. The floor is yours to talk about the track and how the artist can fix problems in and improve upon the mix and the song.

This track has been submitted for your friendly, constructive criticism. They have put their track (and their heart and soul) in your hands to learn and get useful feedback.

  • Do you enjoy the song or track itself? Does it have potential?
  • Can the arrangement be improved?
  • How did you find the mix? What would you do differently?
  • What do you enjoy about the rhythm track? What can be done to improve it?
  • Is the choice of instruments relevant and effective for the style/song?
  • Are the lyrics (if any) effective? Does the style, arrangement and genre of the song suit them?
  • Can you suggest any specific techniques that might improve the track?
  • Do you have any other constructive feedback?

Disco Siren by Bigibang

Artist’s website: soundcloud.com/bigibang

Description of the track:

Adding some funk in this electro song. :)

Funky Sirens by Bigibang

Terms of Use: Download, stream or whatever. Just don’t make any money on it.

Have a listen to the track and offer your constructive criticism for this Workshop in the comments section.

Submit Your Tracks for Workshopping

Need constructive criticism on your own tracks? Submit them using this form.


Freebie: 12 Grungy Bokeh Textures


The word bokeh is derived from the Japanese word boke. It’s a term used to describe the deliberate and creative use of lens blur in photography. In design, bokeh photographs or textures have many uses. They can be used as background images or even to draw interest to a specific part of a design. Today, we are giving away several unique grungy bokeh textures for you to use in your work for free.

12 Free Grungy Bokeh Textures

This pack includes 12 grungy bokeh textures that were created by Nick Merritt from Thedigitalyardsale.com. Feel free to download these textures and use them in your work!

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Create Abstract Landscape Art From a Photograph


Photographs are excellent tools to show you how something looks. Tracing photos to create artistic pieces however doesn’t teach you much about shape, volume, lighting, and color. Today, I would like to demonstrate an alternative way to create abstract artistic pieces using a photo merely as inspiration. We will start by choosing and simplifying its components and then proceed to apply a retro-futuristic look. Let’s get started!

Resources Used

Step 1

For this tutorial we need a photo of a landcsape that contains both natural and architectural elements. Any photo will do, really, provided the composition is potentially interesting. I say potentially because we are going to do a lot of interpretation and guesswork therefore we can improve on the initial composition if need be.

I chose a shot of a lake from the EUR neighborhood in Rome (1a). While the photo itself is nothing special, the composition has potential: the shoreline is interesting, there’s a curved bridge coming in from the left, a bunch of buildings in the middle, a couple of low rises on the left and trees on the right. When you analyze the photo, take notice of any element, not just the physical ones: there are triangular reflections on the water, we’ll definitely use those! (1b).

Step 2

Grab the Brush Tool (B) and start blocking out the shapes you see using random but contrasting colors (2a). This is the first phase of the simplification process: choosing what to preserve from the plate. Block out the low-rise buildings on the left (2b), the bridge and the tall buildings (2c), the shore and the hill leading up (2d). Eventually you’ll have the entire photo blocked out into shapes. Introduce some variation by crosshatching over the vegetation. Keep it simple and clean and you’ll be all right (2e).

Step 3

Now we can get rid of the photograph and put a black background behind the sketch (3a). Before analyzing the composition, though, we need to eliminate the colors because they might distract us. To do that, create a black layer above the sketch and set it to either Hue or Saturation mode (3b). Now the colors are gone and we can evaluate the composition better (3c).

Step 4

I’ve drawn arrows to show the ideal paths formed by our shapes. It’s a good idea to have the composition lead the eye towards the focus point, in this case the center buildings (4a). As you can see we have three groups of shapes that pull towards the tall buildings and these in turn point upwards. We need to add a contrasting direction: that’s what the background and the empty spot at the far right are for. We’ll probably create a background pattern made of slanted stripes and we’ll put irregular shapes next to the rigid buildings (4b).

Step 5

Start building shapes using paths, going directly over the sketch. For now keep the original colors (5a). When you’ve traced everything (5b) do all the tweaking you want, moving points, changing colors to group shapes chromatically and, most importantly, eliminating the smallest shapes that only add confusion to the composition (5c).

Step 6

Let’s examine the final composition: a couple of low buildings seen in perspective on the left; a curved bridge coming in from the bottom left corner; a couple of roofs and a ramp leading up to four tall buildings placed roughly in the middle, strongly pulling upwards; a hole at the far right of the image, to be filled with organic shapes. This abstract landscape is the result of interpreting a plain photograph (6a).

We will start shading the tall buildings. Apply a bunch of layer styles to the shape layers: everything is editable and scalable at any time. A gradient overlay to make the top of the buildings lighter (6b), an Inner Glow with noise to create texture (6c), Outer Glow (6d). Since these buildings are the focus of the image, it makes sense to give them a bright appearance (6e). Apply the same layer style to the other buildings, changing the colors appropriately (6f).

Step 7

For the roofs and the ramp we are going for a “neon and space dust” look. It’s just a matter of using layer styles in a slightly unorthodox manner to achieve interesting results. Take the first roof (7a) and turn down the Fill to 0%, effectively making it disappear: only the layer styles will be visible. Apply a Stroke and make it bright by choosing the Linear Dodge blending mode (7b). This is neon enough. The space dust effect is accomplished by turning on noise for both Outer Glow (7c) and Inner Shadow (7d). See? (7e).

Step 8

Apply this layer style to the other roofs and ramps, each time adjusting the colors to match those of the parent shape. Tweak values like the amount of noise and the size of the glows to add variation and to suggest perspective: farther objects have less noise.

Step 9

The green buildings on the left receive a strong blue glow from the adjacent building so add it with a noisy Inner Shadow (9a). Use the Size and Distance values to tweak the effect to your liking (9b). Since these are secondary elements I’ve decided to desaturate them from green to a pale water green (9c). Remember that everything you see on the screen is vector shapes and layer styles so you can change shapes, colors, effects and image size at any time without losing sharpness. There are pixel limits to layer styles, though, keep that in mind.

Step 10

To make the green buildings more recessed in space let’s erase them partially. To do that group the layers and add a blank mask to the group. Click on the mask and paint with black on the areas you want to hide, using a soft brush (10a). Make the buildings fade behind the high-rises (10b) and out of the left side of the image (10c). Layer masks are raster elements so they’re not scalable but it’s easy to paint them again if you have to scale the image up for printing.

Step 11

Hide the black background, leaving everything else visible. Hit Cmd/Ctrl + A (Select All), Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + C (Copy Merged) and Cmd/Ctrl + V (Paste) to flatten all the elements on a single layer. Turn the background back on. The image is pretty dense as it is so we won’t add any stripes to the background. Instead we will place the grungy paper texture in the document, resizing it appropriately (11a). Desaturate it (Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + U) and invert it (Cmd/Ctrl + I) (11b). Change the blending mode to Lighter Color and lower the Opacity to 25%. Now the texture is barely visible, giving a subtle variation to the boring flat blackness of space (11c).

Step 12

You can color the texture by adding an Adjustment Layer to it. Check the Colorize option and move the sliders around until you find a suitable hue (12a). I chose a faint red tint, taking a hint from the triangular shapes at the bottom of the image (12b). This might be a secondary space dust made of finer particles that reflect the glow form the light objects. Always have a story to go with your illustrations!

Step 13

We have to take care of the glaring hole on the right. Let’s put some slanted billows of smoke there. Select the Brush Tool (B) and enter the Brushes window (F5). Pick a textured preset (13a). Turn on both Size Jitter (13b) and Opacity Jitter (13c). You can control the values with a tablet (Pen Pressure setting) which I recommend. Tablets are not cheap but they are indispensable. Paint vertical lines in white on a new layer, varying their length, thickness and opacity (13d).

Step 14

Rotate the smoke layer 45 degrees, scale it down and place it next to the high-rises (14a). Erase the parts that overlap the other elements (14b) and smudge the ends with the Smudge Tool (14c).

Step 15

The final step is to color the smoke. Add a Color Overlay style to the layer (15a). Choose the color you want. I picked purple because it contrasts nicely with the bright yellow of the objects surrounding the smoke and it recalls the thin purple building in the main cluster (15b). You’re done!

Conclusion

In this tutorial I’ve shown you how you can use a photograph as inspiration and a base for an abstract landscape. By interpreting the elements we see in the picture we created a highly stylized version of it which we then transformed into a totally unrelated image. In particular we have created an abstract space scene entirely out of vector shapes and layer styles, thus making the landscape scalable and tweakable. Unorthodox settings for mundane layer styles gave us an interesting "space dust" look that blends well with popular light effects. I hope you had fun and learned a useful workflow. Now go flip through your vacation photos and turn them into unique landscapes!

Post Events On Online Calendar

Hello, this project is to post a certain type of event into an online “events” page on a social network. I will give you a login to use.

You must have persistent internet access to copy the info from other websites. You must put the fields in properly, such as location, event host, event dates, etc.

I also need the logo for the event or host organization uploaded with the listing. Please don’t put the same event in twice.

I need 25 events in United States posted. For example, it might be “physician conference” so you would search for 25 “physician conferences” occurring in the U.S. and post them with the logo for the host organization.

I am looking for someone to begin this immediately. Will NOT consider bids over $15, sorry.