This post is going to be a little bit of a departure from my normal posts about the RC car, there's some details at the end.
Music Recording
I've finally broken out my audio interface and I've started recording some guitar. I've been toying around with releasing cover EP's and stuff within this year and I really hope I meet my goals. As I may have mentioned before (?), I'm planning on working on a 4 song tribute cover EP to an artist I enjoyed when I was much younger. I was lucky enough to have found some drum tracks online for some of the songs that I plan on covering. I have 3 of the drum tracks mostly laid out and associated bass tracks as well. One of the tracks was made more so from scratch so the rhythms will by slightly more different from the original track as well. I'm making these tracks in Guitar Pro 6 which features an acceptable software instrument sound engine, and I've used these tracks on previous projects I've had. What's so easy to do though however is to make a bunch of tracks sound the same in terms of the style, and I feel like I need to spend some time thinking about how to approach each track. I have most of the first track's guitar finished which is super exciting. I also have some thoughts about more things to cover later too.
Recently, I went to Karaoke with some Chinese speaking friends and I was inspired further. Farther down the line I have aspirations to cover some Chinese songs I'm more familiar with. One of the things in my opinion though is a lot Chinese songs have some good melodies, but they don't "Rock", or more specifically "Punk Rock. I kind of want to do a 2 song EP later down the line of 2 songs I know.
Even farther down the road, I think I also want to release an EP of original songs. I recently listened to my song "Delusional", and I felt it could probably do with a face lift. I think the tempo seems a little bit slow, and I think the rhythm guitar parts could be improved as well? This also means I need to write another song because if I didn't, it'd be a single not an EP right? I've jotted down random ideas over the years ever since high school (most of them are crap, but I think there's a few workable nuggets) but they need a lot of work if I want them to ever be songs.
My current fear is that I have all these aspirations, but I'll never actually follow through. To avoid that, I think I should set some hard deadlines and also plan for myself to reach these goals? So, I think for my next blog post I should post an intended schedule for myself to finish this first EP.
Even farther down the road, I think I also want to release an EP of original songs. I recently listened to my song "Delusional", and I felt it could probably do with a face lift. I think the tempo seems a little bit slow, and I think the rhythm guitar parts could be improved as well? This also means I need to write another song because if I didn't, it'd be a single not an EP right? I've jotted down random ideas over the years ever since high school (most of them are crap, but I think there's a few workable nuggets) but they need a lot of work if I want them to ever be songs.
My current fear is that I have all these aspirations, but I'll never actually follow through. To avoid that, I think I should set some hard deadlines and also plan for myself to reach these goals? So, I think for my next blog post I should post an intended schedule for myself to finish this first EP.
RC Car Updates
So I guess I fell off my productivity train? I did get some stuff done with my EP stuff mentioned above, so I guess that's not the worst? The main achievements I made since my last post were as follows.
- I bundled all the wires up and actually put everything on to the RC car.
- I was able to actually put the thing on the ground and drive it around with the previous crappy joystick controls.
The one major thing I ran into was the voltage drop of the original power source causing the Arduino to brown-out. I fixed this problem by throwing another powerbank on to the robot purely for the Arduino, lulz. Another problem I have is that the powerbanks will often shut off if not enough current is going through them, so I may need to think of a solution down the line to drain current from the powerbank to not have the motor power die. I think another troubling problem is also I noticed some potential packet loss to the Arduino over rosserial? Occasionally the last command would latch on the robot and you'd have to mess with the joystick again to change the value. Apart from those problems I could see myself attempting to add some control loops to this platform and trying to do something interesting with it?
Anyway, below are some nicer photos of where my hardware platform is.
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