Lost At Sea

Virgil's The Aeneid and Coronet Films' The Powers of Congress sampled over a breakbeat, with some chopped-up classical music thrown in.

I have to emphasize that this is my first time ever, ever, doing something like this. Really, I am a neophyte in the extreme. So any advice, critiques, (compliments?), would be much appreciated.

All of this stuff is sampled from the public domain, but I wanted to provide links for the curious.

The Aeneid recording is a LibriVox recording of the old John Dryden translation. It's book three, when Aeneas is describing his haphazard voyage from Troy to Carthage (this is where I got the name of the track from).

The Coronet film is part of the Prelinger Archives. It's really worth a watch, no matter what you think of the track.

The high-pitched beats were taken from this Musopen recording of an Edvard Grieg piece (not an expert here, just liked the song).

pdsounds gave me some good samples, including a great clip of a wave crashing over a pebble beach, and the fireworks you hear late in the track.

I have to stress how new I am at this, so I hope you enjoy it. Thanks for listening!

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posted by hiteleven (2 comments total)

I think the main drum track might be a bit too high. I guess you wanted to give it "punch", but perhaps you can turn down the volume a little bit and play with the EQ in that track to maintain the heavy bass without having it on top of everything, because that can get a bit tiring.

Also, if you add another track of say, shakers or any minor percussion, it might hold the beat all the way through, help with the "punch" and it wouldn't change the overall feeling of the song.
posted by micayetoca at 4:16 AM on February 13, 2010

Man, I don't know why exactly but this is killing me right now. For a first go this is pretty solid.
posted by cortex at 4:26 PM on February 13, 2010