{USE HEADPHONES FOR BEST LISTEN}
i really love this album and thought i'd be able to do this song.
not gonna lie this turned out so much better than i expected it to and i'd call it my best cover to date

When The Sun Rose Again (Alice In Chains)

best heard with headphones!! recorded the guitars binaurally... how could i not when doing a track from the album "Binaural" lol. anyways it sounds cooler in stereo using headphones/earbuds :)

Light Years (by Pearl Jam)

Spiderbite (by Jerry Cantrell) [shortened]

Home Depot Theme cover

Dirt acoustic (Alice In Chains short cover)

did this in maybe an hour and a half (the guitars were one take only, the vocals and mixing are what took up all that time lmao)

Words I Might Have Ate (Green Day cover)

made in ~4 hours with just an acoustic guitar, my voice, no metronome, my best memory at how all the parts go, and the determination to have fun lol

Can't Change Me [Chris Cornell cover]

This piece was foremost inspired by Thom Yorke's solo work - I really like the way he builds percussion loops and wanted to try my hand at layering a bunch of percussion and creating something out of it. A lot of the sounds are created "in the box", save for the percussion in the latter half, which I recorded myself using a hi-hat, a cowbell, and a clock. I created the original percussion layer and piano chord progression on the 30th of January, and spent the entire day on the 3rd of February adding the rest of the elements, with a little bit of touching up on the 5th. I've been so caught up in other projects since then that I nearly forgot about it, but I'm glad to finally share it. Not sure if I'll make more songs in this vein in the future, but I had a lot of fun experimenting with loops and recording to a grid with digital sounds while keeping it organic and imperfect.

It's not often I'll consider the "meaning" of an instrumental piece, but my dad came in and heard me working on the track and his comments about it changed my perspective on the whole project - and now to me it does tell a story, without even saying a word.

Intermediary

Cascading

I recorded the instrumental for this cover on the 8th of November, 2024, but didn't ever finish it, and nearly forgot about it over the next couple months. I am a nerd who keeps a calendar of album anniversaries (manually inputted!) and so when I saw that today (the 4th of February, 2025) was the anniversary of my favorite Offspring album (Ixnay On The Hombre), I had the idea to dig up the project files and finally finish the cover and share it today. I was actually very surprised at the quality of the instrumental tracks I'd recorded, as my general memory of them was as being not that great. The vocals were very challenging to record as they push the upper limits of my range, but overall I am quite pleased with how it turned out!

Amazed (The Offspring cover)

On the 24th of July, 2024, I wrote and recorded a nearly six minute instrumental track, originally under the working title “Seventeen”. The idea came to me around 11:00 in the morning when I was bored and decided to play some piano. Conscious that it was the last day before I turned eighteen, the idea came to me to come up with something in… 17/8 time? Could this be done? I ended up using two bars of 5/4 and one bar of 7/4 to create a mixed meter of 17, and before long I was inspired to try to make a whole song in that time signature, and to do it all in one day to mark my last day of being seventeen. I wasn’t sure that it could be done, or if so, what it would even sound like.

I fiddled around, recording drums, piano, various guitar tracks, and bass parts, and mixed the song the next morning, to share with family and friends. More about the process on my Bandcamp page!

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Last month (December 2024), I opened up the session for the first time since July, hoping to re-export the mix to upload it here, and after not hearing it for so long, I was able to hear a bunch of inadequacies with my original mix that I thought I could improve, so over the past month I've been working on and off to make a new and improved mix, that hopefully stands up better over time.

It's not perfect, but it's one of my favorite works of mine to date. I hope you enjoy!

-Zayne Thompson // 2 January, 2025

6,574

My friends have an ongoing season of Music League — a game of sorts where a pre-decided theme dictates the kind of song each participant should submit from their personal collection to contribute to a playlist, which we all then listen through and vote for our favorite songs by doling out points to each.

Around 4:00 in the afternoon on the 25th of November, 2024, I thought of a fun little idea — 'what if I made songs that fit the rounds of the music league as we went along?' And I was so intrigued by the idea that I quickly sat down with a keyboard and messed around until this track existed...

The lyric and title take inspiration from this round's theme (which was songs that are exact minute durations, or ending in :00) — I've called it "Exactly" and it's a 3:00:000 long song that was almost entirely improvised (I took several takes on the vocals, but the melodies and rhythms were improvised first) and everything but my voice is done using the keyboard one of my best friends kindly gifted me earlier this year (thank you Sam!) And, ironically to the title, the song is very loosely timed — I had a metronome for the initial strings track but nothing is programmed or edited to a grid or any of that jazz.

All in all, it took me about three hours to create. For the first time ever I'm pleased with the first version of the mix (which is what you hear). That being said, I still think it sounds best if you are able to listen using headphones or some nice stereo speakers!

Exactly

https://zayne.rocks

Disclaimer: "extreme music nerd".
Drummer / guitarist / bassist / pianist / vocalist
Also: design, photography, art, writing

Limited edition 01/01

Zayne Thompson

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