Geek Versus Guitar

Falling, a Nightmare in Three Acts

2012-01-28T09:01:00.000-08:00

So as I mentioned earlier, my SpinTunes 4 round 1 song is a bit... unusual. It's almost five minutes long, in 3 "acts," with no chorus, with piano, fretless bass, environmental sounds, no percussion whatsoever. It's sort of artsy... like "Natural Science" on the album _Permanent Waves_, or something from a Pink Floyd album, or Thomas Dolby's "Mulu the Rain Forest," or an extended Kate Bush track from Aerial. Not exactly what I set out to make, but this is the song that asked me to make it...

Here's the track on Bandcamp.

This is the first time I've had someone else master one of my tracks. I sent Rich Wielgosz a .WAV file at 24-bit, 96KHz and he dripped it through some nice analog vacuum tubes and iron transformers (I think; I'm not entirely sure what he did) and sent it back mastered. Mastering involves compression, EQ, and maybe other tweaks to bring the file up to snuff as far as hearing as much musical detail as clearly as possible -- basically, it makes it sound louder, and clearer, and when it is done right it should do this without ruining what nuance is present in the dynamic range. He did a great job -- the remaining deficiencies in the audio are mine, not his. More info about Rich can be found here

My notes, the "song bio" if you will:

So, the SpinTunes 4 Round 1 challenge was to write a song about "a childhood nightmare." I think some people might just be able to pick a nightmare and write about it, but I don't really remember any details about my childhood nightmares. I remember one very vaguely - I was being chased, and at the end I was falling, and when I landed I woke up with a violent muscle spasm, my heart pounding, soaked in sweat.

I did experience a real-life nightmare, though. My parents divorced when I was three years old. My father left, and my mother moved my one-year-old brother and me from Seattle, Washtington, to Pennsylvania. I saw him rarely over the next ten years; for most of that time, he was only an occasional letter or voice on the phone. My mother's father became a sort of surrogate father for me, and role model, but he died of cancer when I was ten years old.

So, that's the material I've got to work with. With the original dream so vague, I'll need to "take it and turn it." What if I misunderstood the nightmare? What if I wasn't being chased at all, but I was chasing my father, and the nightmare is that I can't ever reach him, and fall? So this song is about that nightmare of separation, and waking up and realizing that it is not actually a dream.

Maybe that's a lot to try and convey in a song, although there is probably a single word for it in German. But I hope it works in some sense.

These lyric concept started with one very long and extremely fast first draft, although I have trimmed and revised it. I realized as I wrote it that it was actually a bit like _Green Eggs and Ham_ -- Dr. Seuss wrote that book with only fifty words, on a bet. Similarly, as I wrote this I realized that there seemed to be a special power in repeating a few words and phrases and varying them, almost as if it was the vocabulary of a child chanting a rhyme. In that context a truly consistent rhyme scheme also seemed somewhat unimportant.

I had imagined a very dramatic song with a heavy metal-style guitar accompaniment, and I messed around with a grinding heavy-metal guitar sound, but when I tried singing it, the song started to come out much, much differently. So it's been a process of heavy revision. I've never tried a serious multi-track project that didn't have a fixed beats-per-minute count, or recorded instruments without a click track. To employ "rubato," part of the challenge, I had to be able to vary the tempo freely over the course of the song.

To get pieces lined up I would play a piano sound with a guitar synthesizer, to produce a MIDI piano part, and then record bass and vocals to accompany that, part-by-part, in a very painstaking and time-consuming way, recording take after take, looping parts over and over in my headphones while recording in order to get a precise feel for the timing. There is very little use of the "flex" feature in Logic because I felt that it would be too tempting to spend hours and hours of my limited time tweaking parts rather than recording better takes.

Some of the audio directly from the guitar synthesizer can be heard as a horn part. There's a MIDI piano, and a MIDI Turkish oud lute, and then my unusual Steinberger Synapse 5-string fretless bass. The guitar I use to trigger the guitar synth has a piezo and humbucking pickups as well, so it is possible to record the audio from the guitar synth, MIDI notes, and two different audio signals from the guitar all at the same time. Then of course these can go into different amp models and effects. In practice I only ever used two or three of these at once. For vocals I got out my ribbon microphone, which I haven't used in quite some time. The environmental sounds I recorded in 2008 in Grand Marais, Michigan.

This challenge had its own challenges. I actually took three full days off of work, in order to give myself some time without distractions, and went into the studio like I usually go into my home office. But the extra time just seemed to encourage me to do something more ambitious, and there were plenty of distractions: our hot-water heater failed, and the subwoofer for my studio monitors failed (it was replaced before due to a design defect). Fortunately, and somewhat surprisingly, I used Logic heavily for days and days without any of the usual crashes, and bizarre behavior was minimal. Apple seems to have Logic reasonably well debugged by now, at least the features I rely on. As I write this I'm winding up day 3, and I still need more time. There's never enough time! And so everthing winds up a compromise, full of flaws that make me grit my teeth, but hopefully good enough to make someone else like it; and maybe I'll even like it, once I can get some distance from it, and come back and listen with fresh ears.

If I had to cite some specific influences for the style of the song, I'd pick out Peter Gabriel's song "Family Snapshot," as well as some Kate Bush sounds from her album _Aerial_. I've always loved the sound of fretless bass; for some of what I was trying to achieve, take a listen to "Mulu the Rain Forest" by Thomas Dolby.

I've never written, or really spoken much, about my parents' divorce, or talked about it with a therapist. As I worked on this song I found myself going through an emotional tunnel, and feeling far more tense and upset than just the song deadline could account for. I see this process as somehow therapeutic, although I'm not sure the result will be very pleasant to listen to, and I don't think as some sort of great breakthrough. My father and I are on good terms now; he is still alive and living in California. But my understanding, and my lived experience, is that it just isn't possible to ever truly "heal" this sort of early loss, or replace those years of parenting; the experience reshapes a child's whole being. There's a great lyric by the band Everclear, from their song "Father of Mine" that really captures this:

I will never be safe 
I will never be sane 
I will always be weird inside 
I will always be lame

If you don't know the lyrics, look them up; they are terrific. That song, though, is angry, and for me the feeling has never really been anger, although I've had a lot of people express anger on my behalf. It's more a sort of mourning.

Paul R. Potts, aka Common Lisp
Saginaw, Michigan
25 January 2012

Act One: The Dream 

Ambient nature sounds (wind) 

Spoken: 

"Sleep that knits up 
the ravelled sleeve of care 
The death of each day's life 
Sore labour's bath; 
Balm of hurt minds, 
Great nature's second course, 
Chief nourisher in life's feast." 
- Shakespeare 

Note: guitar is down-tuned 2 half-steps, so I play these 
chords on guitar as Dm, Gm, Dsus4, Gm, Am7, C and Bbmaj7. As heard it is in the key of C minor (relative minor to Eb)... I think. I'm not so great with the music theory. 

1a. 
Cm 
I've been here before 
Fm Csus4 
I can't see where I'm going 
Cm Fm 
There's darkness behind me 
Gm7 Bb Cm 
Darkness ahead 

1b. 
Cm Fm 
There's a man in the shadows 
Gm7 Fm 
I can't see his face 
Cm Fm 
I thought he was chasing 
Gm7 Bb 
But it turns out I'm running 

1c. 
Cm Fm 
It turns out I'm chasing 
Gm7 Bb 
The man in the shadows 
Cm Fm 
But my legs are so tired 
Gm7 Bb Cm 
I know I'm not strong 

1d. 
Csus4 Cm 
Why won't he wait? 
Bb Gm7 Abmaj7 
Did I do something wrong? 
Cm Fm 
I can't catch my breath. 
Gm7 Bb Cm 
Don't leave me alone. 

Spoken: 

To sleep, 
perchance to Dream; 
Ay, there's the rub, 
For in that sleep of death, 
what dreams may come, 
When we have shuffled 
off this mortal coil, 
Must give us pause. 
- Shakespeare 

Act Two: The Nightmare 

2a. 
I will not cry 
I'm running, not crying 
I can't catch my breath 
My lungs, they are aching 

2b. 
The man in the shadows 
Is gone and I'm calling 
Not crying but screaming 
Screaming and trying to 

2c. 
Run and I'm slipping 
The path it is crumbling 
I'm screaming and gasping 
Falling forever 

2d. 
I scream in the silence 
Too frightened for crying 
Falling for ever and 
Ever and falling 

2e. 
I'm sitting bolt upright 
And sweating and shaking 
Down the hall mom is crying 
Her heart must be breaking 

2f. 
The man in the shadows is 
Gone and I'll always be 
Missing his love, I'll 
always be aching 

Act Two: The Waking Dream 

Ambient nature sounds (beach) 

Instrumental break: shifts key to C major, I think. 

Cm Fm Csus4 Gm7 
Abmaj Gm F7 
Cm Fm Csus4 Gm7 
Abmaj7 Gm F7 
G7 Am7 E F 
C 

3a. 
F C 
When I was small, so small 
C G 
I rode on your shoulders 
F G 
My hands felt your beard 
C F 
It was scratchy and warm 
C 
When I was small 

(Ambient sound: wind sounds return) 

3b. 
F C 
Now you are gone, gone, gone 
F G 
In the sun on the beach 
F G 
We were laughing and playing 
F G 
In the grass on the dunes 
F G 
You ran and I chased you 
G F 
On a day long ago 
C 
And then you were gone 

3c. 
C G 
Gone from your children 
F G 
Gone from your wife 
C G 
Gone from my brother 
F G 
Gone from our lives 

3d. 
G 
And though I've awakened 
And though I've awakened 
I'll always be aching 
I'll always be aching 
I'll always be runing 
I'll always be runing 
I'll always be chasing 
I'll always be chasing 
I'll always be falling 
I'll always be falling 

Spoken: 

All men whilst they are awake 
are in one common world: 
but each of them, when he is 
asleep, is in a world of his own. 
- Plutarch

Spintunes 4

2012-01-21T14:01:00.000-08:00

I'm participating in the SpinTunes 4 songwriting challenge. My round 1 song is due January 29th. My intent is to post "song bio" material here as I'm able. Last time, I had to drop, because real life was just too crazy to allow me any free time at all to work on a sing. I'm trying to make things happen differently this time, but whether I'll really be able to do this or not remains a bit unclear. Stay tuned.Song Fu is also running again, but in a very different form than it did before. I was considering trying to get a song done for Song Fu's "bioluminescence" challenge as well, but I just don't think I can get both done.

Say That We'll Be Nemeses

2011-11-22T07:03:00.001-08:00

I've been falling behind again! I haven't posted anything here in quite a while. I have been playing guitar, but not as regularly as I'd like.

It was a hell of a summer and fall and we're heading into a holiday season, and what will likely be a harsh winter. Our home gets quite cold, and to avoid thousand-dollar heating bills we are keeping the temperature set low, and supplement with some small space heaters, wool socks, long underwear, and hats. I typically wear fingerless gloves I made by cutting the fingers off of knit glove liners. It can become difficult to play guitar with cold fingers, and we've been dealing with a string of minor but annoying viral infections that make my singing voice even worse than usual. It's time to seal up the windows, get the humidifiers going, and put all the acoustic guitars in one room with a humidifier going, to make sure they will make it through another winter without needless shrinking or even cracking.

Anyway, you may have heard that Jonathan Coulton released a new album, and since he is sort of an unofficial, unknowing guitar teacher of mine, there's new material to learn, and with each song I learn, I get a little better at accompaniment playing.His song "Nemeses" is short and sweet, but there's quite a bit to work with, in addition to an extremely clever lyric.

For my starting point I'm taking his more-or-less live video version, which is simpler than the album version. It's pretty clearly written around a guitar riff. The chords don't involve any particularly difficult fingerings; it's sort of an "easy intermediate" song in that respect. But it's fast, and the strumming hand is very active. Note that in the chorus as he plays the chord "walk up" the neck he's heavily syncopating the guitar line (hitting upstrokes on the offbeats).

It's also not so easy to sing along with, in that the accompaniment is often changing out from under the sung melody line in challenging ways; listen especially carefully to the way the guitar hammers on underneath the bridge lyrics, "The hidden blade, when you pretend that you don't even know my name -- well played." That's not so easy to sing and play, and will require some careful practice.

In the official video Coulton is singing harmony on almost every word, while hammering out the guitar part, which blows my mind just a little, with John Roderick on iPhone handling the melody. The song is in a bad key for my vocal range (I think it is in E, although it almost never lands on an E major chord), but given the way it is arranged around open strings, transposing it might not be so easy, unless you just wanted to down-tune a to D, or capo it up to G (I might try that, and sing the melody an octave lower).

It has a lot of very "acoustic-y" half-open chords: chord structures that are not in first position, and in fact move right up the neck, but feature open strings. To play it cleanly, which I don't do all that well yet, you have to do some careful muting, and make sure you are not hitting all six strings when you aren't supposed to, and that they aren't ringing accidentally. I use a combination of palm muting on the main riff, muting with unused left-hand fingers, and for some of those half-open walk-ups, wrapping my thumb around the neck to mute the E string (although I'm not very good or consistent about my muting yet).

For this to sound right, your guitar must be very precisely in tune. But not just in tune -- the intonation must be very accurate; if it isn't, it might sound right on an open C major, but a half-open chord well up the neck will sound off, or vice-versa, and the opening riff, which uses the open E string combined with the A string fingered way up the neck, will inevitably sound out of tune. This is also one of those interesting cases where, when you learn to trust your ear a bit, you might finding yourself bending the strings just a bit on the fly, to bring certain fingerings into sonority.

I recorded a doubled acoustic part, and made it into a karaoke video for YouTube. It's not too bad, and I especially like the way the doubled guitar sounds, although there are a few spots where my muting isn't perfect. I don't play the rhythm exactly like the estimable Mr. Coulton does; I'm still polishing it. And I accidentally left out a repeat of the opening riff between the bridge and the third chorus. Oops. I'll re-record it when I get a chance, and perhaps get the muting better and the rhythm closer to the live version.

Oh, there's just one more thing -- my own live cover. My singing is pretty bad in this, and my playing kind of rough, in part because Joshua was grabbing at my strings and would not sit still, but I thought it was still cute. And I really need a better webcam; the frame rate and audio synchronization I am getting out of the Blue Eyeball running into an Intel Mac Mini just doesn't cut it.

You can find Suuuupaadave's fantastic transcription here. Note that he also produced an instructional video, which is incredibly helpful.

A Little Instrumental: Different Strings

2011-06-29T20:31:00.000-07:00

I had a few quiet hours this evening while my wife and children were out, and so I recorded this.

It's an instrumental version of the Rush song "Different Strings," from the Permanent Waves album. Permanent Waves is the less-famous cousin of its successor, Moving Pictures. Where Moving Pictures is more coherent and polished, the songs on Permanent Waves are a bit more varied, from the big rock anthem of "The Spirit of Radio" to the epic prog-rock "Natural Science" -- but there is also "Different Strings." It's an unusual track for Rush, a soft and minor ballad, with piano, and a slower feel; it's in a lower vocal range. It also features one of the loveliest chord progressions I've ever heard. I recorded this in an attempt to capture the feel of that progression from the original song. It isn't a complete song; there's no vocal; it isn't perfect, as there are some timing gaffes -- but I think I did what I set out to do.

There's a book I own called Guitar Techniques of Rush -- it seems to be long out-of-print and copies scarce, but it's great, and contains a perfect transcription of Lifeson's solo called "Broon's Bane," which is on Exit, Stage Left. The book's claim to fame is that it features transcriptions "prepared under the supervision of Alex Lifeson." The transcriptions are great. They are not the overly fussy, often obsessively detailed, yet often inaccurate, transcriptions you find in tab books; they are structured by and for actual musicians. They don't show you every note of every overdubbed track, but they show the basic parts in extremely accurate tab and notes. I've been struggling a bit with this song, particularly a couple of chord positions that are hard on my hands (I have relatively small hands).

I recorded this using my Godin nylon-string SA guitar, one of the models with the narrow neck, and my Adamas 12-string acoustic. The bass is my Steinberger XP bass from 1985. All the instruments are run into a Radial JDV direct box, then to an Apogee Ensemble, and put together in Logic using Izotope Alloy and Ozone, and I think that's about it. The play-throughs are pretty rough. I had to chop up and edit the nylon string guitar far more than I would have liked, but I'm working on it. The 12-string is buzzing here and there because my left hand was too fatigued to get a good grip. Oh well. I gauge my progress, sometimes, by recording.

Note that the original song is copyrighted and so I am probably breaking all kinds of laws. This is why I normally record only Creative Commons-licensed material... I just don't want to deal with trying to record covers of copyrighted material. It's just too fraught with peril, especially after recent incidents in which someone used our public Wi-Fi and gained me a DMCA warning letter from my ISP. Sigh.

The Start of Songwriting Season

2011-06-22T21:14:00.000-07:00

So life has been busy. Crazy busy. We had a new baby. That's kid number five. I've been working crazy hours for the day job. I took only one day off for the birth of the new baby because I was working on such a critical deadline, that is all I felt I could spare. We've been trying to keep up with a house we're barely getting used to; we haven't even finished unpacking. Money is tight; things keep popping up to derail my plans, like car breakdowns. Part of our back fence collapsed due to the blizzards. The kids keep damaging stuff I wouldn't have even imagined they could possibly break, like tearing wallpaper off the walls, plugging our footing drains and flooding the basement with the garden hose, peeing in my shoes, or ripping keys off a keyboard. Our two-year-old is really a handful.

Et cetera, et cetera, Peter Cetera even.

Many days go by where it wasn't even really a question to get some quiet time for recording. I've been fortunate to get any time to practice guitar at all.

In the midst of all this I made the decision to sign up for the SpinTunes songwriting contest again, because it has been so valuable to me to have this incentive and occasion and support group. It's been invaluable, really.

The first challenge was announced 09 June 2011 and was due the evening of June 19th. The challenge was to "write a happy song about death." I thought I'd certainly be able to find a few hours during that week. I had been working a lot of overtime for the previous ten weeks or so, and was working very hard to hit a second deadline. If I had hit it, I would have tried to take three work days off in comp time. It was going to take me practically a full day just to get the office and studio cleaned up enough to work in there, leaving me a couple of full days to record a song. I had managed to get a simple lyric written and had a couple of very rough ideas.

That didn't pan out; I didn't get my build working, due to both my bugs and other people's bugs; I had to do two all-nighters; I had to travel to Lansing twice.

On Saturday (the day before the deadline) I blocked out about four hours. I thought that might be enough to record a sketchy demo. What happened instead was that my Apogee Ensemble went crazy. It had been behaving in a degraded manner. The week before it would occasionally reset itself, or start spitting bursts of ear-splitting noise through the speakers. But this was worse; Logic was locking up and crashing; the software meters wouldn't show any input data; the controls in the Ensemble control panel inside Logic showed crazy levels, like -454 dB. Apple's Audio MIDI Setup application was locking up and crashing; the Apogee Maestro application wouldn't talk to the Ensemble; I was seeing a non-stop string of errors in the Console. I reinstalled its firmware, and reinstalled its drivers, and rebooted. In this manner I managed to use up my entire time window in frustration. Apogee tech support is not available on weekends.

I thought that it was likely my Ensemble had fried itself in the extreme heat in the studio -- early in June we had a crazy heat wave and it was baking in there. I'm fortunate I didn't lose a hard drive. Our central air conditioning just doesn't get up there, apparently; we have to figure out how to improve the airflow. It's quite an old house, and many of the vents that we ought to be able to open or close can't actually be adjusted. The whole system needs some attention from professionals.

So I went for a walk with my Sony PCM-D1 digital recorder and recorded this podcast episode. I put that together later in the evening on the Mac Mini in the family room. Sunday was booked solid, with plans to have guests over, and a big backlog of basic chores I needed to catch up on, like grocery shopping. I pretty much had to announce I was going to be eliminated in round 1 by forfeit. It wasn't a good feeling. I knew that I had done everything I could, but still, it felt like establishing a work/life balance is what I had failed at, not just missing a deadline.

I put in some more work time and managed to get my code debugged. I was not working at peak efficiency and making dumb mistakes due to simple overwork and lack of sleep. Yesterday I got permission to take those three days off as comp time, a week late. And so the plan was to try to do what I had wanted to do a week ago.

Today I started by getting on the tech support chat with Apogee to see if I could get an RMA# for my Ensemble. The plan was to remove the Edirol FA-66 from the downstairs computer and bring it upstairs. I wasn't sure I'd be able to afford the out-of-warranty repairs for the Ensemble, and that was making me nervous. That box cost almost $2,000. If I had to shelve it because I couldn't afford to fix it, that would be a lot of money tied up in something I couldn't even sell. My head became filled with backup plans -- could I pay enough to have it fixed, then sell it on eBay, and track down an older Rosetta 200 with a PCI card to use instead as a simpler but perhaps more reliable and higher-quality setup? But the Apogee support person asked me to try uninstalling the Ensemble driver completely using a separate utility, then reinstalling it, not just running the installer again.

I thought I was just going through the motions to try to prove that the device was exhibiting a hardware failure. But for reasons not entirely clear to me, that worked. I'm not sure just what might have happened to the existing driver, but there it is; if you have an Ensemble, and it starts misbehaving, give that a try. Years ago I wrote a MacOS X IOKit audio driver, so you'd think I'd be able to diagnose a problem like this myself, but no -- it really seemed to me like it was very likely to be a hardware failure.

I've got a ventilation fan in the office bathroom window, pulling some cool air from the rest of the house, and that helps a bit. The plan is to get a portable air conditioner that vents to the window as soon as I can. Of course, if I'm going to record vocals, I have to shut everything off, and the heat builds up pretty quickly.

I often start to feel like I'm failing to do creative work for various reasons -- due to my day job, or due to the family. That mindset tends to lead me into thinking of my day job and my family as problems. That's a painful over-simplification. I didn't quit my day job like Jonathan Coulton, to produce songs. I didn't, and still don't, have the performance and songwriting and recording experience that had gotten him to that point yet. My life is not his life. I'm supporting a family of seven. My wife is a stay-at-home mom and we chose that arrangement.

Merlin Mann likes to ask the rhetorical question "what couldn't you ship?" He's asking people in business, particularly in software, to ask themselves how and why they've failed, and to address the root causes honestly. He talks about people who never ship anything -- who think they have big ideas for software projects, or writing projects, or music projects, but who are too busy, who have too many other priorities, and a lot to juggle, but still have time to watch TV every night, and don't even consider that to be negotiable.

I've shipped a hell of a lot. My entertainment time is highly negotiable. In the last ten weeks or so I negotiated away a lot of things, including a great deal of sleep and a great deal of time with my family. I wrote a server, in about five thousand lines of C++, to a rapidly changing spec, without the ability to debug it on the hardware platform it was designed to run on at all. It features three hierarchical state machines, a dozen threads, several message queues, and something like 70 methods. We shipped that (well, version 1.0 at least; there will no doubt be more features, more bugs, more maintenance).

I also completed a substantial revision to a piece of DSP code written in C. In this revision, through some simplifying and refactoring of a complicated piece of state machine code I managed to add features while removing almost 500 lines of code, or about 10% of the total program. I struggled for a few days with dumb bugs (most bugs turn out to be dumb, but occasionally I run into a bug that is truly fiendish). My boss happened to have possession of the debugger that I might have used to catch bugs right on the hardware, and it wasn't available for me to use this time, so debugging this involved some gritted teeth and a helpful co-worker with fresh eyes who read the code with me. I finally managed to extract the last obvious bug with the help of a separate test bench program, written in Visual C++, that allowed me to exercise most of the features of the program in an environment with a source-level debugger and the ability to log exactly what is happening. So that's shipped. My weekend was almost relaxing after over two months of this.

So I do ship, but the problem is that I'm often not able to ship what I'd most like to ship, and not able to work steadily on the projects I'd most likely to work on -- my creative projects. The creative projects have to fit into the cracks and between the teeth of the gears, without actually jamming them. That can be tricky. They're a luxury and yet I'm considering them to be more and more of a necessity as I get more burned out on this kind of work, and wonder how much longer I can keep doing this as a career. It seems now that there is not likely to be an upgrade path, if that makes sense.

So, with all that as prologue, today I recorded a song. I started with the snare drum that I was unable to record last week. It came out better than I expected. I used my matched pair of Rode NT-5 microphones in an X-Y pattern. With such a loud sound source, the exhaust fan in the other room didn't really matter much, so I left it on. I don't really know how to play drums, but I've manage to sort of teach myself just a tiny bit of stick work on a snare. That actually started with playing upside-down food storage buckets as drums during protest marches, particularly marching in solidarity with striking Borders bookstore workers in 2003.

I also recorded three improvised guitar parts on my Adamas 12-string, into the Radial JDV direct box, and then into the Ensemble. I put the capo on the fifth fret to make it sound a bit like a mandolin. It did not turn out at all like I had heard it in my head last week. I had been imagining something upbeat and Celtic-sounding, like a reel, with a dance-like beat. It didn't sound much like that -- it sounded minor and Middle Eastern. But I was trying to do a one-day wonder, so I had to press on.

I shut off the fans, improvised a vocal melody to my lyrics, recorded a few takes of that to get a reasonably clean one, and then did a few more takes to double it. I sang into the Oktava MK-219 at close range without a pop filter and it didn't seem like it needed one. I used Alloy with various presets on each channel. Now it definitely wasn't Celtic per se. Instead of a reel, it came out more like a dirge, even with the basic rhythm at 130 bpm. The combination of a fast beat with a very slow-moving vocal is odd. Still, like all my songs I at least like how bits of it came out.

I decided to ship it anyway. Sometimes you have to get a not-so-good song out of your system so you can listen to it and think it over and perhaps learn something from the attempt and try again, or just move on to something different. I haven't and written recorded very many complete original songs yet; this is number six, or thereabouts. If I get to a dozen I'll start to feel like I'm beginning to accumulate real experience at this.

I'd like to buy a copy of Nectar, the new vocal processing plugin from Izotope, since I really like Izotope's audio-processing tools, but that will have to wait. I have to remind myself that the right plug-ins might -- emphasis on the might -- help me to tweak a vocal found until I like it more, but no matter what microphone or plug-in I use, it isn't going to be work miracles on my vocal performance. I enjoy the sound of heavily processed audio tracks, even putting things like ring modulation or spinning speaker effects on vocals, but a lot of folks are a little more basic in their approach.

Merlin Mann would probably ask me whether that is really going to keep me from "shipping" -- from completing the project. The answer is no. The presumed-broken Ensemble consumed some of my valuable time, but it didn't keep me from shipping either. In fact, it seems that there isn't much that will.

The song, Today is Not That Day, can be found on Bandcamp here. It's not great. I'm not quite sure what I think of it yet. It always takes me a while to figure that out. I'm calling this Version 1 because, depending on what happens tomorrow and Friday, there's a good chance I'll record another version. While I was recording today I shot some video of the takes I put in the song, so maybe tomorrow I'll throw together a quick video. Goodnight all!

The Right Leg Rest at Long Last!

2011-04-27T09:36:00.000-07:00

I finally came across an eBay seller who was selling an original Steinberger USA leg rest. My 1985 XP bass now has the correct leg rest. Yay!

I'm going to try to be even more careful with it this time. These parts are just incredibly scarce and I'm all too aware that a young child can do a lot of damage in just a brief moment of inattention.

It came with aluminum inserts (not needed) and 7/16th Filister-head machine screws (pretty exotic and hard to find). Note, _machine_ screws, even though they are going into solid maple. They went in without too much difficulty, although a little flake of paint came off. But fortunately that spot is covered by the leg rest mount itself.

The main difference between these originals and the later ones used in the Spirits and Gibson-produced instruments seems to be the way the holes are drilled. The originals have a deeper carved-out hole that allows the entire head of the Filister screw to sit flush.

You can see an entry I wrote about the difficulties in finding and repairing these guitars here, The Steinberger Parts Dilemma. Here's a bit about the XP Bass. I am still hoping to one day get my hands on a matching XP guitar (not a Trans-Trem model, though; that's another parts nightmare I don't even want to contemplate!)

A Squier Super-Sonic Wiring Diagram

2011-03-29T22:27:00.000-07:00

I had a request on YouTube for a wiring diagram for the Squier Super-Sonic. It just so happened that I had one I had made myself a while back lying on the floor of my extremely cluttered office, and had been stepping over it for weeks, each time thinking, "you know, I should scan that in case someone might find it useful, and then I can recycle the original." So here is a good excuse to finally get that done!

Anyway, there it is. Click for a larger version. I hope this is clear enough. The Super-Sonic is a bit odd: it has two humbuckers, a 3-way switch (neck, bridge, or both pickups), and two volume controls, but no tone controls. The volume knobs are in the positions opposite to the ones you might expect: the one closer to the bridge pickup controls the neck pickup, and vice-versa. If you don't like this, it ought to be a pretty simple matter to open up the control cavity and swap the two pots on the control plate (and that should be an easily reversible change if someone wants to put them back to the original "backwards" arrangement).

Anyway, the basic wiring idea is that the jack and the pots each have one two-conductor wire running to the toggle switch. At the toggle switch, all the shields go to the ground point and the other conductors go to the 3 other switch points. The jack has the shield ground attached to the inner (sleeve) conductor. The volume pots are wired like volume pots typically are wired, with a short bit of wire grounding the pot's 3rd connection point to a ground point on the pot shell itself, and the wires from the humbuckers and switch both connected to the first two connection points with their shields connected to that same ground point on the pot shell itself. It's not very complicated as guitar wiring scheme goes; I wouldn't want to have to diagram a Parker Fly with piezo and coil tap! Don't forget to connect the ground wire from the bridge to the first pot (the one that isn't next to the output jack). Don't worry, if you get a ground point wrong it will buzz terribly to let you know.

Both pots are both 500KΩ. The original humbuckers both use two-conductor cables, although I think if you wanted to substitute one wired with 5 conductors there is a way to tie the conductors together; if I recall correctly, replacement pickups from (for example) Seymour Duncan come with instructions on how to do this.

There are basically 5 wires in my Super-Sonics. Fortunately the body cavities are not super-small like on a Mustang, so there is a little room to work, and there is enough slack in the wires to wiggle things around. All 5 of these wires run through the hole between the control cavity and the pocket for the neck humbucker, so make sure they are threaded through there before you solder both ends. These guitars are not very well shielded and if you are doing one, you might consider shielding the cavity, although this tends to be more noticeable with single-coil pickups than with humbuckers. The original components aren't the best. The 3-way switch is a Korean part and an identical replacement is available from Allparts:

http://www.allparts.com/Korean-Toggle-Switch-p/EP-4366-000.htm

Note that many common toggle switches that would fit a Les Paul are too big to install without drilling. A short version of the Switchcraft 3-way might fit. If you replace the pots, which would probably improve the sound as the originals are pretty cheap, keep in mind that to fit the holes in the control plate you will need a mini pot. I don't have an exact part to recommend but I think if you look for "500K mini pot" on Allparts you should find some options.

I'd like to replace the pots and switches but I've been putting off this project because I know my soldering skills aren't great. The last time I did this to a guitar, I screwed it up so badly that I had to get professional help anyway and ruined some switches. I might try again -- if I do, I'll take pictures and let you know how it goes!

2010 Roundup, Part 2: Travels with Joe (and Now Featuring Denise Too!)

2010-12-29T11:30:00.000-08:00

I would be remiss if I did not take some effort to specially thank the people who collaborated with me. Since I didn't do any kind of real attempt to document all this at the end of 2009, to explain it all, I'm going to have to go back into 2009 to play catch-up, so bear with me.

I may not correctly recall all the details, but I think I first became aware of Joe "Covenant" Lamb when I was working on "Skullcrusher Mountain" with the Mandelbrot Set virtual cover band, a collection of folks who met each other in the forums on Jonathan Coulton's Web Site. My kind thanks to all the Mandelbrot Set folks for collaborating -- that was a lot of fun!

I was working on tracks and a mix for "Skullcrusher Mountain" and Joe did both a spoken-word and sung version, and also submitted a vocal track sung by his daughter, Charlotte. I was editing and mixing this huge pile of tracks, and it was a big challenge for me, as I was just barely beginning to learn how to edit, EQ, mix, and master. Joe was very patient with advice and tips and steady encouragement.

The end result was not that great. The source tracks varied a lot in audio quality (independent of the quality of the performances, which tended to be pretty good), and there are a lot of things I would have done differently -- for example, it would have been better not to accept any source tracks in MP3 format, because of sound quality issues. But lossless files grow pretty big pretty quickly, and we wanted to conserve space on Box.net. But Jonathan Coulton did mention it in his blog and that encouragement helped me keep going, work on more covers, and eventually start entering songwriting contests myself. The Mandelbrot set did a couple more songs but seems to be on an enthusiasm hiatus, at least for now.

Anyway, the mix that I finally declared "final" is my "Too Many Monkeys" mix. You can find versions elsewhere but to get the best audio quality you should download a lossless ALAC (Apple Lossless) or FLAC file from my Bancamp page here. In true open-source fashion Joe made his own mix, which he prefers, and uses on his streaming JoeCasts, and you can find that one here.

More recently, I assembled a much different mix, in which I attempt to showcase a blend of all the originally submitted vocal tracks, here. But my personal favorite, after all that effort put into mixing vocals, is actually my updated instrumental mix. Somehow it just seems easier to get instruments played across countries and continents and time zones to "cohere" a little more easily than singers.

There are some more Mandelbrot Set mixes on my Bandcamp page. The tracks I've assembled there are ones that I worked on; there are others out there. See the track notes. My personal favorite of these is my own instrumental mix of Creepy Doll.

Anyway, in late 2009, Song Fu 5 was running and Joe was in the running -- of course, he would eventually go on to win Song Fu 5 and gain the coveted title of Master of Song Fu! I wanted to collaborate with him and he was kind enough to risk his contest standing by letting me contribute guitar tracks. These contests have very short deadlines -- a week, or maybe a week and a couple of days, to finish a track, from the announcement of the challenge to completed mix.

The first was the infamous Tom Furby. This was stressful for me. If I recall correctly, Joe was not using a metronome in his original drafts, which I then had to try to match. This is possible, though tricky, if I'm matching a completed track; it's like playing live, but without being able to see the other musicians' movements. But it presents a real problem in editing. Without a click the tempo inevitably wanders a bit. Let's say that you then take track A and edit it, adding an extra chorus. Track B was synchronized to the original Track A with the wandering tempo. If you take a chunk of track B and try to repeat it over the added section, there will be an inevitable synchronization problem. You can hear this slight timing train wreck in the final song.

Joe was also using a guitar tuner as his pitch reference, but his tuner had gotten accidentally set to "A=430," if I recall correctly, and so our tracks would not sound in tune with each other. I did multiple takes; I tuned my guitars to try to match Joe's tracks, but they always sounded out of tune, and then I had the problem of trying to record a 12-string in tune when I had been adjusting the pitch over and over. (They do not take kindly to this treatment; it's hard enough to get a 12-string guitar in tune once for a recording session). Add in the 6-string and ukulele. You can get a somewhat rhythm- and tuning-challenged sense of what I was trying to achieve, with a big triumphant sort-of-Celtic-sounding chorus of strings, here. I was so pressed for recording time that, if I recall correctly, I recorded and uploaded all those parts in the space of about an hour, while my wife was parked outside with the kids in the car, and the car running, waiting for me to finish so we could go somewhere (most likely, it was to Saginaw).

If Joe and I ever get an afternoon free in the same studio, I would love to re-record this song with him. Still, it won, warts and all, so I can't complain too much! And I learned a few things about how to do better collaboration in the future.

We next collaborated on Joe's song Ghoul Tide. I was able to take a little more time with this. I'm pretty sure he synchronized his sleigh bells rhythm track to a metronome click this time. I made a MIDI track out of Joe's vocal which allowed me to synchronize parts more tightly and add synthetic instruments in Logic. The difficulties we had with this one were agreeing one the rhythms the guitar accompaniment should follow. A few minutes on Skype would have helped enormously, but due to some kind of technical problem we were pretty much unable to hear each other on Skype. We had to resort to ASCII art to try to indicate the syllables where the chord changes would fall and what the strum pattern would be like. I had the idea of doing the guitars as a sort of multi-tracked smooth jazz thing, but Joe didn't really latch on to that idea. The parts I finally sent him sounded more or less like this -- a little rough, a little pressed for time, but at least they weren't notably out of tune! Joe used pretty much all of it, so I was very happy. If I recall correctly, my son Isaac is playing parts of the bass line while I'm playing some other parts.

Let's see... somewhere along the way Joe was looking for people to sing on this song. So my daughter Veronica and I are in there.

When I finally got the nerve up to enter Song Fu 6 myself, Joe was kind enough to assist me on my first complete original song, Polly Loves the Rain. He did a great job, probably never suspecting that I was going to harmonize with him, the poor bastard. (I did not plan to originally; it just sort of came out while I was messing with the track). I can't sing nearly as well as he does, but still, I like the way it came out. There's a video which, if I recall correctly, has the original mix submitted for Song Fu, before I polished it up a little bit.

And finally, for my original song Sherman's Lament, recorded as a shadow entry for SpinTunes 2 after I was eliminated, not only did Joe record vocals for me, but Denise Hudson, part of the duet with Joe known as Duality, recorded vocals, a Rhodes electric piano part, and some synthetic violins. I've been getting to know Denise and her music a little better and I'm really impressed with her mad skills. I have a vague plan to try covering her song "Spanish Lessons" early in the new year.

Along the way, I've also sent Joe some guitar parts for some songs by Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm. They tend to be a little rough, since I have been using these songs as challenges to try to improve both my playing and recording technique (for example, for "I'm Your Moon," I wanted one complete take with no editing so I could have a corresponding YouTube video). He took my guitar part for I'm Your Moon and made a full song out of it. Here is my version. He took my guitar part for "I Crush Everything," now available here and made this cover. Here is another version with my own vocal (it does not actually use the same guitar part; I've re-recorded it tuned down). He took my guitar part for Paul and Storm's song Live and made another cover. These are all a bit rough but playing covers, especially of songs with complex guitar parts, has been good practice.

To apply a little more organization to these tracks, I now have a separate album for parts of Creative Commons-licensed songs recorded specifically to encourage collaboration. I'll be adding to that in 2011. Any requests?

Oh, there's a little more we've recorded that I can't share with you. Joe and I both have a fondness for Rush. If you want to hear that, though, you'll have to hear us play live one day!

There's probably something else I've forgotten. My apologies in advance! It's freezing in here and my brain is stuck in first gear.

Anyway, my fondest thanks to the Mandelbrot Set folks, and to Joe, and to Denise, and to you too for listening and reading. Here's to lots more music in 2011!

2010 Roundup, Part 1: The Year in Fingerpicking

2010-12-27T20:42:00.000-08:00

So, we're winding up 2010 and I wanted to do a quick recap of what I've worked on.

Sometime around fall or early winter 2009 I set out to focus on fingerpicking and discipline myself, but not in a mean, self-abusive way. It turns out that fingerpicking is really great for people like me who are a little obsessive-compulsive, especially in the dark winter months, and I was encouraged by some early progress. So, at the start of 2010 I decided to make it the "year of fingerpicking."

I started with the book The Art of Contemporary Travis Picking by Mark Hanson. (It's a great place to start and I highly recommend it -- I have two more of his books as well, but have not gotten into them yet).

I diddled a bit on songs like "Dust in the Wind," but really wanted to work on songs like Jonathan Coulton's "I Crush Everything." Fortunately, the song largely follows the same basic Travis picking patterns outlined in Hanson's book, and the combination of these exercises, the tab, and
Suuuupaadave's incredibly helpful lesson video allowed me to make progress, which I documented in a series of quick practice videos (one, two, and three). I did a more polished play-through of the doubled part, with some editing, in this video. The audio is available here.

Joe "Covenant" Lamb took this guitar part and added a lovely vocal track, creating his demo. On my to-do list is "re-record the guitar part now that I can play it more smoothly now," but inevitably it tends to be more fun to play live, work on a new challenge, or record something new than to re-record something old. I'll probably get to it when I get to the point where I can play it dramatically better than I did for that recording.

Anyway, my ultimate goal is to be able to fingerpick this song while singing it live. I've done it for small audiences of family and friends. It is certainly easier to do without the camera or recorder running, which invariably makes me screw things up a bit, but I did manage to record this live version. I also discovered that I liked the sound of the song drop-tuned down a whole step, and recorded this version which used double-tracked guitar and vocals, but a minimal number of takes and minimal number of edits, and was recorded on my Mac Mini setup with the Roland FA-66.

Of all these, the best version is probably the drop tuned one. There's an audio version of the song with a fretless bass line; the bass line is not complete yet and will get revised when I get some more quiet time in the studio (and maybe some more practice on the fretless).

When it came time to polish up my original song "Sherman's Lament," I naturally started playing the chords using Travis picking patterns, and the result can be seen here (audio version here).

Just a few weeks ago, I decided to start working on Paul and Storm's song "Live," since it is also a finger-picked song. The patterns are a little step up in complexity; where in "I Crush Everything" the basic Travis patterns predominate, "Live" uses a lot of variants with little melody bits added. Fortunately, Suuuupaadave has made very detailed tab that covers all the patterns, and also done a two-part video lesson.

So, I've got some practice videos again (one, two, and three) showing my progress. I recorded the song on my nylon-string Godin guitar. My playing was a little rough yet, so I was not able to get a complete take, but I pieced together this recording, again with the intent of polishing it up later (it's still a little rough, particularly in the bridge and right at the ending). But I mentioned it to Joe and just a couple of hours later he sent me this, with another gorgeous vocal part, so I thought "well, good enough for the time being!" and suggested he just upload it to his Bandcamp page. Paul and Storm even noticed us on Twitter! (After I barraged them with several tweets, that is...) Their tweet read:

@JoeCovenant [P] Got it. BTW, nice job on the "Live" cover, you and @paulrpotts. :)

Squee!

So, there it is -- evidence of some real progress. Growing out and maintaining my right hand nails, with all the care then needed to avoid breaking them off, is a pain, but fingerpicking is really fun. I feel like I've discovered a secret way to sound like a much better guitarist than I am. Practicing finger-picking is relaxing and fits right along with my somewhat OCD personality. Playing the worked-out, polished parts is really fun, but what is even more fun is being able to take a basic song -- for example, a Christmas song, and improvising a finger-picked accompaniment for it, starting to come with not just the basic patterns, but melodic additions and variations on the fly. I did this for some small family get-togethers over the weekend of Christmas and got compliments on how cool it sounds. So for 2011 the plan is to continue: play, record, lather, rinse, repeat: not just finger-picking, but other styles. I just picked up a video of Merle Travis playing some of his famous songs, for inspiration. And my resolution, announced here: start doing it in front of an audience. (I'm getting nervous already!)

Also resolved: to learn bass in a more systematic way; to continue to make progress on freless bass; to enter at least one more songwriting contest; to record at least six more original songs; to record more instructional videos. I'd also love to get my hands on an Ovation USA-made mandolin and start learning how to play one of those as well. And more ukulele. And maybe a slide guitar. And and and and!

Sherman's Lament, Live Video and Chords

2010-11-28T00:48:00.000-08:00

I've made a new video for my original song Sherman's Lament and deleted the earlier one.

The new video can be found here.

A fully produced version of this song is available here.

Note that the chord changes I hit in the accompaniment on that version are slightly different, but not dramatically so.

If you want to play it, this song should not be too challenging as long as you can quickly transition between basic chords and you can do a little Travis picking. There are a few little grace notes and fills here and there but they shouldn't be difficult (and I never manage to play them quite as I intended anyway; the solo guitar arrangement is still pretty new to me). The verses and choruses are all basically the same with the exception of the bridge and coda, so I have only put chord notation on the first verse.

Please note that in the live video I am DOWN-TUNED (D to D) so if you want to play along with the video, you'll either have to down-tune or transpose the song. The guitar is my Babicz Identity Jumbo.

   C
I've spent my career teaching history
   Dm7 G
But my colleagues always mock me
   Dm7 G
My papers are rejected
   C Em - F - G
My letters to the editor never selected

   C
My memories of those days are mostly a blur
   Dm7 G
Of crudely drawn animation
   Dm7 G
With our horn-rimmed glasses, we'd explore
   C Em - F - G
The pasts of many nations

   C
His bowtie he always kept impeccable
   Dm7 G
The puns were completely unacceptable
  Dm7 G
I tell you this without much joy
   Dm7 G C
For I'm no longer Peabody's boy

CHORUS:

   F Em
My life has been so ordinary
   Dm7 G
Since the day he went away
   Dm7 G
Now it's been almost fifty years
   Am C
And I am old and gray
   F Em
I've never stopped believing
   Dm7 G
That he'll come back for me
   Dm7 G C
My master, mentor, friend Mister Peabody

VERSE 2:

I followed Peabody's detailed instructions
To make sure our history functions
Fixing problems in our past
We righted wrongs and we had ourselves a blast

When our show got cancelled, he took it really hard
We heard him howling in the yard
On that fateful day, he broke his chain
And with nothing but his big brain

He trotted right through the door of his machine
We'd know where he went, but he broke the view screen
The government men took it away
Now how can I... get back... to yesterday?

(REPEAT CHORUS)

BRIDGE:

   Bdim
Cartoons can live forever
   Cmaj7
But not so human men
   Bdim
I'm hoping that he gets here soon
   Cmaj7
So I can see his fuzzy face again
Bdim
Maybe he traveled forward
   Cmaj7
And in some very different when
   Bdim
Some clever future doctors
   Cmaj7
Can fix me and make me young again
   Bdim
Now night is fast approaching
   Cmaj7
But if we meet up one day
F G Dm7 G C
We'll be dog and boy like it was yesterday

VERSE 3:

I had to pack up and go back to school
Which felt so very cruel
The history books all seemed strange
It's not nearly as fun when it can't be rearranged

Me, I just got older, and I discovered girls
But they never seemed to like me
Maybe the dog tags put them off
Or maybe they saw me scratch a flea

I never got married and I never had friends
I really hope this isn't how it ends
I hope my master won't forget me
And I'll make history with Mister Peabody

(REPEAT CHORUS)

CODA:
   F Em
Now you might think I'm just confused
   Dm7 G
And age has left me in a fog
   Dm7
But I never minded playing second fiddle
   C
To a dog

SpinTunes 2, Round 4 Reviews

2010-11-23T08:51:00.000-08:00

I did not submit a shadow for this round, but as a contributor I was given the opportunity to submit a vote. So I'll just go ahead and review the entries. Since we're down to the finals, this time there are far more more shadows than officially competing songs (of which there are only four).

The challenge was to write a song from the perspective of a character in a video game. The drawback of this, from my perspective, is that the song will assume that the listener has played a specific game, or is at least very familiar with it.

I do like video games and I've played quite a few of them over the years, going back to home Pong and Motocross consoles, through the heyday of arcade games (my personal favorites included Ms. Pac Man, Tempest, Gyruss, Burger Time, Robotron 2084, Pole Position, Tron, and Reactor) and early Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore 64 games. Scott Adams Adventures, Flying Saucer, Pyramid, Asylum, the original T80 FS-1 Flight Simulator (loaded from cassette), Castle Wolfenstein... pretty much the entire Ultima series, including the Ultima Underworld games... M.U.L.E... Seven Cities of Gold... Root Beer Tapper... I had a serious fondness for the Infocom series (are text adventures actually video games?)

I don't play any MMPORGs, I've played very few modern PC games (I think that last one I played was Alone in the Dark), with the recent exception of Half-Life 2 since Steam was released for Mac. The last games I've completed were for the Nintendo 64 and GameCube -- Paper Mario and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. I like (and still have) some of the more obscure Nintendo 64 games like Space Station: Silicon Valley, Rocket Robot on Wheels, Tonic Trouble, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Kirby: the Crystal Shards. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask and The Ocarina of Time sucked up enormous amounts of my time almost a dozen years ago...I got pretty far along in Mario Sunshine and Pikmin for GameCube. I played some serious Pokemon games with my son.

But my proudest moment was beating the evil duck jack-in-the-box boss in Donkey Kong 64 -- that was a hard, hard fight! Although I couldn't be bothered to finish the game -- it just seems to go on forever. Apparently it can take upwards of 100 hours or more to finish, at least if you're a perfectionist like me and want every point. And these days I hardly have enough time for even an unbroken hour of gaming, much less a hundred.

I tend to prefer game console games to PC games and intermediate or advanced kid-oriented games, oriented around puzzles, platform jumping, or racing, to "adult" games. Back in the day I played a lot of Doom and Quake and other first-person shooters like Goldeneye, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Perfect Dark, and similar, but I've mostly lost my taste for first-person shooters as they've gotten increasingly realistic.

So what were we talking about again? Oh, yeah, reviewing songs! All this is by way of saying that if you are considerably younger than I am, or you had different consoles than I had, or were a big PC gamer in a different decade, there's a good chance I know nothing at all about the game you're writing about. So how much "research" should I do in order to understand the context and try to judge your song as if I was familiar with the game? Well, as I'm not an official judge I'm not going to do very much. I'll be judging these songs mostly for how much fun I think they are to listen to and how well they stand up even if I haven't played the game.

1. Zarni DeWet - The Bleeding Effect

OK, so right off the bat I'm confronted with a song where, apparently, there's a hugely complex back-story described by paragraphs and paragraphs of text on the Bandcamp song page. Honestly, I get that these games can be very compelling and one can be really drawn in to the storylines -- I know this especially from the many nights I spent solving Infocom games "back in the day." (Did anyone else cry when the robot Floyd died in _Planetfall_?)

But I'm not going to read all that if she can't be bothered to edit it down to a couple of paragraphs. Even if I managed to put it all together, it wouldn't have much emotional resonance.

What I will say is that Zarni's vocal performance is gorgeous and impassioned here and I like the instrumentation. It does leave me feeling a little bit on the outside looking in, though, so I can't really rate this one as my favorite. It's too long for so few lyrics, for one thing. There's a long stretch of silence at the end of the track, too, which is a pretty big technical flaw.

I listened to all these songs three or four times. I initially rated this one the lowest of the four, but now I've changed my mind and I rate it best of the four, mostly on the strength of the vocal performance. Isn't that weird? Basically, it's because as I listened to this album over and over, I found myself thinking "oh, cool, I get to listen to that song again!" Initially I thought that the storyline was a little too self-contained to the video game world, but as I listen to it I think the lyrics stand by themselves more than I initially gave it credit for. I think that was something she carefully worked at, and not accidental. It reminds me a little bit of the lost '80s band Quarterflash, with their song "Harden My Heart."

Is that fair? Who knows?

2. Mitchell Adam Johnson - In Another Castle

This one is fabulous -- the instrumentation is fun and bouncy. Here we have a song that requires less R&D to understand; the whole Mario storyline is much more embedded in general pop culture. The video game sound effects work wonderfully in this track. We get a storyline told from the POV of Princess Peach. The lyrics are simply hilarious -- Princess Peach is supposed to be the carrot, but she's also the stick -- kind of an obnoxious tease, don't you think? The song captures that perfectly.

It's a damned tight race, but I rate this second of the four.

3. Rebecca Brickley - Where I Am

The recording here is a little odd (a very hollow tone, especially on the vocals, and some strange distorted sizzle on the hi-hat). The intelligibility of the vocals suffers just slightly for that. I had to read the notes to determine who the song was about. It's Carmen Sandiego, which (I think) has sunk into popular culture enough to be recognizable. Am I over-reading it to think something else about Carmen Sandiego is being implied by the phrase "playing for the other team?"

Nice swooping vocal performance, fun song, but it gets third place of the four. No, it's not really fair, and it doesn't reflect the fact that it's a fun song. It's just got slightly lower replay value for me, if that makes sense, and it's mostly because of the character of the recording. These songs are mostly really close to each other in quality so it's hard to decide.

4. Chris Cogott - In Bright Falls

I have no idea what this song is about without reading the notes. Oops, there's nothing about what the song is about. Who is Alan Wake? Huh. Google. Apparently it's the name of a game for the XBox platform, and a very recent one (released only five or six months ago). I've never played an XBox, and what with moving and working from home since May I have, in fact, been living under a rock, so it's no wonder I've never heard of it.

The production is fantastic. It sounds very much like "Paperback Writer" and very much like Brian Wilson was involved in the production somehow. This one is definitely the best produced of the four, although it's a little loud and the overall EQ and compression situation grates slightly. It's a very tight decision but it gets last place, mostly because the lyrics don't really click with me. It's not fair. Or do I want to give it third? Or second? Dammit. No, last place. Sorry. I'm sorry about everything. I'm going to feel bad for the rest of the day now. Crap.

Now, on to the shadows.

5. Charlie McCarron - The Pac-Man Duet (Shadow)

This is the funniest of the whole bunch. I think it is technically too short to meet the requirements, but it is absolutely-freakin'-hilarious. I'm hoping that Charlie's voice is electronically processed in some way. If he can sing like that without plug-ins then I'm both stunned and confused. And maybe slightly aroused. But mostly confused.

6. Mark Humble - I'm Q-Bert, Babe (Shadow)

I'm sad that this is a shadow. This is as good as the songs actually in competition this round. The integration of the video game sounds into the track, and the overall mix, are just great. Mark just seems like a music nerd after my own heart, perhaps a better producer than a performer. It's a little short, time-wise. Some of his rhymes are painful (what would _you_ rhyme with Q-Bert?) Still, really nice effort.

7. Brian Gray - Hard to Get (Shadow)

I think this pretty clearly about Donkey Kong, unless I've missed some games. The use of backing vocals is great and I like the bouncy keyboard track. I feel like if you're going to write a song about one of the classic platformers, it had better be bouncy, or you've failed to capture the humor and energy of the originals. This one does. The lyrics are funny and he came up with some excellent rhymes.

8. Boffo Yux Dudes - Floating Away (Shadow)

I'm not sure I get what game this is about. Who is Major Tom? The sound effects seem to be from Asteroids, if I'm not mistaken. Did the original Asteroids have some reference to the name of the avatar character actually piloting the spaceship? The song's a little hard to listen to with the layers of booming voice, but I like the slightly ethereal feel and the mournful lyrics. The vocal performance is actually pretty strong and actually feels like it wants to break out of the constraints of the "novelty song" it's stuck in.

9. JoAnn Abbott - Go For the Eyes (Shadow)

Again, I don't know what game this is referencing. The lyrics are funny but without context I'm not quite sure what is going on. The weird lyrics contrast oddly with the perky music and performance. I Googled "miniature giant space hamsters" so I guess this is from Baldur's Gate? But I've got no idea what that game is like.

10. Boffo Yux Dudes - One Level Down (Shadow)

I love the way the volume and beats per minute keep ratcheting up -- a perfect "form follows function" structure, and it completely captures the way the old Space Invaders game sped up and sped up until it became simply traumatic. Are video game songs the perfect niche for the talents of the Boffo Yux Dudes?

11. David Ritter - Pitfall (Shadow)

An ethereal, acoustic-guitar oriented song about Pitfall is very strange. Very pretty instrumentation and vocals though.

12. Boffo Yux Dudes - Elf Shot the Food (Shadow)

Wow, we have a third shadow from the Boffo Yux Dudes. This one is really funny and made me smile, even though I don't think I ever played the Gauntlet arcade game much.

13. Caleb Hines - The Writing on the Wall (Shadow)

Interesting -- actually a Caleb song, but sung by JoAnn. I have to confess that I've never actually played Portal, although of course as a Jonathan Coulton fan I know at least something of the storyline. The lyrics are funny. JoAnn doesn't seem terribly into what she is singing.

14. Governing Dynamics - One Four One (Roach) (Shadow)

I've never played any of the Call of Duty games so this one doesn't really resonate. Travis has gotten good at boiling storylines down to their lyrical essentials. This isn't one of his most compelling songs but like all his recent songs it grows on me the more I listen.

15. Inverse T. Clown - I'm Tops (Shadow)

After some Googling I think this must be from Mega Man 3 for the old Nintendo Entertainment System, which I confess I've never played. Inverse's sarcastic lyrical style works really well here in the "mouth" of a video game character and the all-electronic production works well for this as well. There's a harmony vocal that fits nicely in the track and makes me want to hear more layers of Inverse singing. This song works very well overall and it's not only one of the best shadows, but fairly competitive with the competing tracks.

Sherman's Lament (Acoustic Arrangement)

2010-11-21T21:49:00.000-08:00

I'm working on an acoustic arrangement for "Sherman's Lament." Here's a murky-looking video of a performance for no one (no one, that is, but you, the viewer) in my family room.

Chords to follow shortly.

SpinTunes 2, Round 3 Reviews

2010-11-17T21:56:00.000-08:00

OK, I'm a bit behind reviewing these. They've already been judged, and all but four of the entires eliminated. But I'm still going to review them.

The full album can be found here.

Here are the results.

I commented in the chat that I had mentioned in the previous rounds that I didn't envy the judges. For this round -- I really, really, really didn't envy the judges. These tracks are uniformly anywhere from pretty good to fantastic, and they had to pass four and eliminate eight of the twelve.

1. Governing Dynamics - Los Alamos

I have a confession to make. When I first saw pictures of Travis Norris, aka Governing Dynamics, I thought he was probably about twelve years old, and maybe in Junior High School. I did not really feel like I could connect with his music. I didn't like the way he recorded his guitars or the style of it. We didn't have the same influences. Somehow I didn't quite get it.

How things change. Travis was born in 1983, so he's not yet 30. In related news, I'm old. My opinion of what he's doing has completely changed. This is a seriously great song. It's more-or-less in a late-90's grunge-tinged style. I had somehow developed the impression that Travis couldn't really play well, and that's why his guitar parts sounded a little sloppy and dragging. This song proves that I was completely mistaken. He's playing them exactly the way they are supposed to sound. They are layered, but not in a wall that is intended to hide sloppy playing. It's a clean, sweet wall of tone.

The guitars on this song remind me, just a bit, of one of my favorite bands -- Gang of Four -- in that they are uncompromised and there is no concession to sweetness and pop. They don't sound like the Beatles. They're dark and deadpan. The vocals are gorgeous. The lyrics are great. He did indeed, as he put it, pull out all the stops.

2. Inverse T. Clown - I Have a Leap

This is pretty similar to what I've come to think of as a "standard" Inverse arrangement. The lyrics are about a Quantum Leap episode, imagined or otherwise, and a real historical event. It's clever and competent enough but it doesn't grab me. There's something again a little dry about the canned-sounding instrumentation.

3. Charlie McCarron - Queen of Heart

After his odd round 1 entry I was mostly baffled by Mr. McCarron's style of music. His round 2 entry I found much more promising and downright fascinating. This is a cool song. I wish I could play as many instruments as he seems to. The lyrics are understated and pretty.

4. Ryan Ruff Smith - The Driver (Dallas, 1963)

An oddly upbeat, melodic retelling of Kennedy's assassination over a finger-picked guitar and shaker, with a police scanner-style radio in the background. It's an odd choice. It works pretty well with the chorus lyric "as long as I keep driving, none of this is real." Gets me into the shocked mindset of the day. I'm still note entirely sure how I feel about this song.

5. Edric Haleen - I Was There

Edric's piano part here is a little darker, atmospheric, and dissonant. His vocal performance seems a bit odd, but when he doubles himself, it really takes off nicely. Could have run too long, but ends precisely when it should.

6. Ross Durand - Ivan Vaughan

Just a hint of an accent at work here that very effectively captures the idea of a friend of the Beatles. The guitar is pretty, the chorus is catchy, and it's nicely sung, but the lyrics seem just a bit short of ideas.

7. Chris Cogott - Final Flight

A wall of echoing guitar harmonics remind me of '80s psychedelic revival -- a beautiful production, and I appreciate that there is still a little dynamic range and the compression isn't flat-lined. Great guitar solo work.

8. Mitchell Adam Johnson - Pictures of Love

Another Beatles story -- this time about the breakup. Also just a bit psychedelic-revival. Beautiful guitars and a harpsichord sound in the background. Nicely produced. Songs like this remind me just how much I still have to learn about producing fully realized songs.

9. Steve Durand - Cuban Missile Mambo

This is truly the oddity of the competing entries. It would be hard to imagine a goofier song. Seriously -- Castro's barber? A mambo about one of the most frightening confrontations of the 20th century and the defining crisis of Kennedy's administration? Truly, Steve has balls of solid brass. Not entirely successful in tone, and the vocal performance is a little underwhelming, but quite funny.

10/11. Rebecca Brickley - Oh Mercy

For some reason Rebecca was not able to get the judges her final polished track in time, and so we have two versions. The "remix" version is polished and gorgeous, while the "judge's mix" is more demo-style, with some screwy compression and phasing going on, but they are the same song, and the demo is still pretty damned good, so I actually think the difference in production quality probably wasn't a large factor in the judging. These lyrics are just gorgeous. She's really imagined something cool here. The whole cadence of the song has a very cool martial, marching feel to it, although it's not quite coming from the percussion or the piano in isolation, but somehow more from the breathless style of the vocal performance. I'm so pleased to hear a song about an American war that isn't schmaltzy or cliched: the protagonist admits he "just wanted to make his poppa proud / he didn't much care what the war was about." And 'twas ever thus.

12. Zarni DeWet - Eric

This is a risky song. This got me into a debate with another listener, and I had to clarify what I meant by that -- the "risk" is simply that the listener won't really be able to go there, to empathize with the narrator and feel the emotional weight of the story, but will instead just scowl at the premise, and so not give it a fair shake. Are we ready for a song about Columbine told from the point of view of the mother of the shooter? Apparently, we are. This one made my spine tingle and it still does several listens later. It's just this side of pathos here and there, but it doesn't shy away the gut punch, and that works for me.

13. Gweebol - She Said, As She Handed Him The Telephone

The premise here is the historical oddity that Alexander Graham Bell's wife was apparently deaf. I love Gweebol's voice, but this song seems to meander a bit.

14. Duality - Columbia (Shadow)

The production sounds very similar to a number of other Joe "Covenant" Lamb songs and failed to entrance me. It's perhaps not his very finest vocal performance but it's way up there. More importantly, there's a new level of lyrical sophistication here. I didn't quite put the story together on the first listen. It's well worth a second (and third).

15. David Ritter - Portal of Doom (Shadow)

A bit of an oddity, the music is funky and jazzy, while the lyrics are dark and funny. Clever and nerdy -- "there's a frickin' black hole in the room." A bit fluffy, though, and ultimately a little forgettable.

16. Duality - Historical Verity (Shadow)

I don't claim to understand the whole context here. It's a funny song and I love the interplay between Joe and Denise's voices. There's something more serious going on, though, about the nature of war as seen from the level of the common man.

17. JoAnn Abbott - Candle in the Dark (Shadow)

I'm not sure JoAnn gets the difference between sentiment and sentimentality, but I could sum up my opinion on the matter by simply saying that there's actually no such thing as conservative art. Real art always subverts the dominant paradigm, tells the untold story. If it doesn't, it's not art, it's kitsch, like a painting of a fluffy kitten at a flea market or a flag airbrushed onto the side of an RV. It's expected. On the plus side, it's nice to hear Caleb's impressive keyboard work here.

18. Duality - St. Andrew's (Shadow)

A dark and minimalist song that shows us a side of Denise's vocal talents we don't hear nearly enough of. As I heard this in the online listening party, I went into a genuinely dark and frightened place! Denise, please let your demons out to play more often! Also: fantastic concept and lyrics.

19. Common Lisp (featuring Duality) - Sherman's Lament (Shadow)

Has it been long enough that I have enough distance to review my own song? Production first: there's some crackling on the transients that sounds awful. I'm not quite sure where it comes from. It seems to either be the transition from 24-bit to 16-bit, or the MP3 compression. I wish I knew how to get rid of that. Dither, no dither, limiter, etc.

I may be over-compressed here. I never seem to get the mastering quite right.

I guess I'm most proud of my lyrics. I think Joe and Denise did a good job with it, but somehow the smooth instrumentation and voices all together seem to lack energy. Too slow? The style of instrumentation just doesn't fit the concept?

As Doctor Lindyke pointed out, the song doesn't quite meet the challenge because it doesn't point out a connection to an event in history. I also heard the message that folks didn't really like the samples. I could attempt a remix, I guess, but it will probably have to wait until I've gained yet more distance and can be a little more objective. I might try a a "folksier" recording that is just guitar and my vocal.

I'm disappointed not to have more reviews; I've gotten almost no useful feedback on this song. My wife didn't really think much of it. I finally sang the whole thing to her a capella and she laughed at the intended places so I guess the lyrics ultimately did work for her, even if the whole mix did not.

20. Duality - Triangle (Shadow)

The most abstract, dark and dissonant thing I've ever heard from Denise. I don't quite know what to say about this track. It's nicely sung, but seems a little shy of lyrical content.

Postscript

So, it's Wednesday night and at this point it doesn't look like I'll be doing a shadow entry for round 4. These contests are hard on my family, and my mood and energy level have been sinking a bit into a usual late fall downturn as the days get shorter. Also, the round 4 challenge has almost entirely failed to inspire me with any ideas. I had one, but it required a piece of music software that resides on my iPod, which seems to be lost. So barring sudden inspiration, I'll be sitting this round out.

I've really enjoyed SpinTunes. It's been great practice and great experience.

That said, now that the final round will be arriving shortly, I feel like the playing field is barely clinging to life, as far as any sense that amateurs are involved. Rebecca Brickley's is the only survivor that sounds like an artist who might be still learning how to do this, rather than one who already has it entirely mastered and down to a routine. I guess it just reinforces my feeling that I don't really belong in this competition any more, which is a disappointing feeling -- and one I didn't experience in the my (brief) experience in the somewhat more freewheeling Song Fu. It reinforces the sense that I should have started doing this earlier and gotten more practice in.

Sherman's Lament Featuring Duality

2010-11-08T09:56:00.000-08:00

My shadow entry for Spintunes 2 competition is finished. The listening party is tonight. The track is here.

I debated whether I wanted to record a shadow after the sleep deprivation and stress involved in the last round. I finally decided to go forward, but this one was going to be quicker, lighter, recorded in an acoustic "demo" style with a lot less work put into it. I even had visions of recording it on my portable recorder, accompanying myself on finger-picked acoustic guitar, with no overdubs or processing it all. Quick. Easy. Fun. Relaxing, even.

Cough, cough, ahem BULLSHIT cough, cough.

The final mix has 25 tracks:

1. The audio clips from the old show

2. Joe's full lead vocal

3. Denise's unison vocal for the verses

4. Joe additional chorus vocal

5. Yours truly on chorus vocal

6. Yours truly on bridge vocal (left side)

7. Yours truly on bridge vocal (right side)

8. Yours truly on bridge bass harmony vocal

9. Tambourine

10. Shaker

11. Fish (a little hollow wooden fish, a toy hand-held percussion instrument)

12. A studio percussion sample from Logic's library (the little "transition" sounds between verses and into and out of the bridge; I'm not even sure what they look like or what they are called; it sounds a bit like a rain stick).

13. Electric bass (my Godin Freeway 4-string with flat-wound strings)

14. Electric guitar (my Godin LGX-SA on the neck pickup with tone rolled down and a chorus effect)

15. Nylon-string guitar for the bridge (my Godin SA)

16. Nylon-string guitar for the last verse (the effects are different so it is on a different track)

17-19. Violins (played by Denise on keyboard), left. Originally one track, now actually 3 tracks because of the way I had to slice them up and fade the segments into each other.

20-22. Violins, right.

23. Denise's chorus vocal (unison)

24. Denise's chorus vocal (harmony)

25. Denise's Rhodes electric piano sound

The song is in C, not for any great reason, but mostly because when I recorded the original MIDI melody reference bits I played it in C; I'm not very good on keyboard so it is easier for me if I only use the white keys. I could have easily transposed the MIDI but I thought it was a reasonably good range to sing.

The chords on the verses (for guitar) go C, Dm/G, C, G, C

On the chorus it is just C G F Dm Dm F G C

On the bridge, it goes Bdim Cmaj7 repeated, then Dm G C with a little picked figure at the end.

The song originally had no bridge, and the verses were all longer (they contained the "coda" stanza). I wound up cutting out those stanzas for choruses 1 and 2 and saving them for the end, and inserting the bridge.

My original vocal recordings were so noisy that I was in despair for my vocals -- not that I couldn't sing it on key, but that the recording itself was just technically awful-sounding. That's basically when I thought it would be fun to recruit Duality to sing! I have my studio room partially treated with acoustic panels, but it needs a lot more. Apparently the way the mic was placed put it pretty much in an "anti-sweet spot" for reverb, and it just sounded terrible. Moving the whole rig (Reflexion filter and all) and angling it away from the wall slightly produced a huge difference, which I discovered last night, so I went ahead and recorded my own voice for some backing bits.

Even ignoring the room acoustics, I am becoming very dissatisfied with these Oktava microphones -- they actually sound pretty good when I turn the gain down and sing loud from a bit of a distance. But when I gain them up a bit and try a more intimate-sounding vocal, where I want a little proximity effect, they have this ugly resonance at some midrange frequency. EQ can't entirely get rid of it. It isn't sibilance or popping, exactly. Apparently there's a modification that is supposed to help, but I'm a little stymied by the question of whether it might possibly be more valuable to put $300 into a microphone I got for, if I recall correctly, under $100, instead of just tracking down some other used microphones on eBay to experiment with.

I just really need to try out more microphones on my voice. It might even wind up being a fairly cheap mic that sounds good. I am strongly opposed to buying Chinese-made microphones, though, which means most of the super-cheap mics are off-limits. I don't have much in the way of budget for that at the moment, since what money I am setting aside for the studio is earmarked for acoustic treatment, which will also no doubt help to improve the vocal sound.

Anyway, my bass vocal on the bridge is a bit of an experiment. I've recently discovered that my range is pretty much exactly a traditional bass vocal range. (That may seem like an odd thing to "recently discover," but I've never really approached singing in a systematic way or really figured out, on a keyboard, where my range lies; I also used to have considerably more range at the top, and much more falsetto. Aging, I suppose...)

I had endless technical problems putting together this track. For some reason, Logic decided it wanted to repeatedly lose my automation settings -- over and over. So I'd bounce a track, and the violins would be gone, or all my percussion would be gone, although I had not deliberately touched them. All those automation points had been deleted.

And either there is some major weirdness in the way that Logic handles anchor points in samples, but only part of the time, and unpredictably -- or I really don't understand the feature. This seems odd, since I've used this feature on at least a dozen tracks in the past. I have seem some oddities before, but never anything remotely like this degree of trouble.

My regions were constantly getting shifted on the timeline. I would drag the same region to the grid four times, for example to lay down the shaker audio in repeating sections, and four of them would line up at the anchor, and the fifth would not, and the anchor point in the region itself would be reset. Sometimes when I dropped a fourth or fifth or sixth instance of a region onto the timeline, I'd think I was aligning it to the grid on its anchor point, but it would abruptly shift, its anchor point would be reset, and all the copies of that region to the left of the one I was dropping would shift to the right and align themselves to the timeline at their left ends instead of their anchor points.

Something similar happened to the bass line, which was composed of at least a dozen carefully aligned regions. I would almost swear in court that I didn't touch the regions themselves in the audio bin or on the timeline, but yet suddenly they were all misaligned. The anchor points were very close to the left edges of the regions, so it was a subtle change, and I didn't notice it immediately, but the bass just no longer sounded tight.

Both of these shifts had probably happened right before I sent Joe a bounced reference track for him to use in singing his vocals. And so part of his vocals were an alignment train wreck with me scratching my head wondering what the hell had happened.

I had only one crash, but I also had some strange "ghost automation" where the volume envelope on a track was set to zero, but I'd still hear the audio pop up when I played it. This seemed to have something to do with the mysterious fade files that Logic sometimes creates.

Trying to slice up Denise's original Rhodes piano and violin parts and reassemble them after rearranging the verses and bridges was supposed to be relatively straightforward. I made note of the exact way the original regions lined up on the original track, and figured exactly which measure and beats they were now shifted to in the revised track. Unfortunately in practice it didn't work out like that at all. I had things shifted half a measure off, and in some cases just a fraction off. Nothing would align! The aforementioned problems with region anchor points kept biting me. I spent at least eight hours -- eight hours that I wasn't able to use working on guitar or vocal or improved percussion parts -- screwing with just the realignment of these parts. I'm sure it didn't help any that I was doing most of this while exhausted and over-caffeinated.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have applied that Logic update, although the release notes mentioned some stability improvements that I was hoping would keep the crashes away.

Anyway, this one was rough.

Looking back on this past week, the experience of recording this track was kind of like this. Imagine that you are watching a hot air balloon getting ready for takeoff. It's pretty; the crew is excited; the sun is lighting up the brightly colored envelope in gorgeous shades of gold and blue and orange; it's a perfect fall day. You give a cheer as it lifts off into the cloudless sky.

Suddenly, the crew looks nervous. The basket starts to tip alarmingly. Something is very wrong! You try to run, but you're frozen in horror. The whole thing comes down, down, slowly down, the basket tipping on its side, and all the spectators are covered with the balloon fabric. But it isn't light-weight nylon like it appeared. It's ice cold, and damp, and metallic, and shockingly heavy. You're covering your face because it is heavy, and pushing you down, and you're struggling to get it off you... the other spectators screaming and fighting to get out from under this lead balloon!

A cry goes out. More people rush in. Folks come running from their homes and the nearby picnic area. Many hands grip the balloon and push it. Soon there are a dozen people hoisting it. A couple of strong guys right the basket. The crew are bruised but not seriously injured. Slowly, ponderously, it begins to rise as the crew cranks up the heater to maximum. There is much creaking and pulling on ropes and many shouted, and sometimes contradictory, instructions.

A ragged cheer goes up. It is only a few feet above the ground, but rising very slowly. It doesn't look like it is going to clear the trees! The basket drags horribly against the upper branches, and you're gritting your teeth, convinced that it is all going to come down again -- but after taking out a few branches, it finally has open sailing ahead. It isn't gaining a lot of altitude, but at least it isn't about to crash anymore!

Wasn't that fun?

Did I mention this one was rough? You know you've not hit that sweet spot when your own wife tells you "I'm sorry, honey, but this one really doesn't do anything for me."

This is supposed to be fun. This is supposed to be fun. This is supposed to be fun. Why is it so not-fun?

I'm reminded a bit of flunking a college French class. In retrospect, I really enjoyed that class, and I feel like I got a lot out of it. I learned a little French. But I failed all the quizzes. The teacher was very kind... at one point he said "well, this one was a little better -- you almost passed!"

I don't regret taking that class, but it certainly wasn't much fun at the time. The kind of failures I like and appreciate, in retrospect, are the ones that teach me a lesson. That's apparently the best way to learn. But I'm not sure exactly what lesson I can glean from "Logic wasted twenty hours of my time this week with its seemingly-random misbehavior." I don't even want to become a Logic guru, I just want to learn it well enough to make it reliably do what I want, so that I can spent more of my time on the creative side. Some research is in order, apparently. Some quick Googling reveals that I'm not the only one who has been having trouble with inexplicable behavior involving region anchor points. Maybe I should try one of the older versions of the application that the installers and upgraders left on my drive.

Anyway, thanks to Joe and Denise for their great performances and patient re-takes. You guys have made this song much better. It sounds much better. Also, special thanks to Denise for encouraging me to go ahead and put my own voice on it, even when I was doubtful that I could get a recording that met my quality standards. If she hadn't have, I wouldn't have.

If it's not a good song -- and I'm in no way able to judge that at all at this point, it's all way too raw -- it's despite, and not because of, your contributions. Working with you guys was the pony in the mountain of horseshit that this week dumped on me! But, sadly, I have a feeling that this one isn't going to be popular.

I mean, doesn't everyone know that Sherman... tanks?

Update: I have released a podcast episode that is basically a narrative-free "documentary" on the making of this track, showing some of the tracks, warts and all, and how they are processed and assembled into the final mix. Find it here.

Peabody's Boy, (Hopefully) Final Lyrics

2010-11-02T10:13:00.000-07:00

VERSE 1:

I've spent my career teaching history
But my colleagues always mock me
My papers are rejected
My letters to the editor never selected

My memories of those days are mostly a blur
Of crudely drawn animation
With our horn-rimmed glasses, we'd explore
The pasts of many nations

His bowtie he always kept impeccable
His puns were completely unacceptable
I tell you this without much joy
For I'm no longer Peabody's... boy

CHORUS:

My life has been so ordinary
Since the day he went away
Now it's been almost fifty years
And I am old and gray
I've never stopped believing
That he'll come back for me
My master, mentor, friend Mister Peabody
Now you might think I'm just confused
And age has left me in a fog
But I never minded playing second fiddle...
To a dog

VERSE 2:

I followed Peabody's detailed instructions
To make sure our history functions
Fixing problems in our past
We righted wrongs and we had ourselves a blast

When our show was cancelled, he took it really hard
We heard him howling in the yard
On that fateful day, he broke his chain
And with nothing but his big brain

He trotted right through the door of his machine
We'd know where he went, but he broke the view screen
The government men took it away
Now how can I... get back... to yesterday?

(REPEAT CHORUS)

BRIDGE:

Cartoons can live forever
But not so human men
I'm hoping that he gets here soon
So I can see his fuzzy face again
Maybe he traveled forward
And in some very different when
Some clever future doctors
Can fix me and make me young again
Now night is fast approaching
But if we meet up one day
We'll be dog and boy like it was yesterday

VERSE 3:

I had to pack up and go back to school
Which felt so very cruel
The history books all seemed strange
It's not nearly as fun when it can't be rearranged

Me, I just got older, and I discovered girls
But they never seemed to like me
Maybe the dog tags put them off
Or maybe they saw me scratch a flea

I never got married and I never had friends
I really hope this isn't how it ends
I hope my master won't forget me
And I'll make more hist'ry with Mister Peabody

(REPEAT CHORUS)

Peabody's Boy, Revised Lyrics

2010-11-02T07:50:00.000-07:00

Getting there... but they still need some work.

VERSE 1:

I've spent my career teaching history
But my colleagues always mock me
My papers are rejected
My letters to the editor aren't selected
My memories of those days are mostly a blur
Of crudely drawn animation
With our horn-rimmed glasses we'd explore
The pasts of many nations
His bowtie he always kept impeccable
His puns were completely unacceptable
But I tell you this without much joy
For I'm no longer Peabody's... boy

CHORUS:

My life has been so ordinary
Since the day he went away
Now it's been almost fifty years
And I am old and gray
I've never stopped believing
That he'll come back for me
My master, mentor, friend Mister Peabody
Now you might think I'm just confused
And age has left me in a fog
But I never minded playing second fiddle...
To a dog

VERSE 2:

I followed his every instruction
To assure our history correctly functioned
We righted wrongs and we had a blast
Fixing problems in our past
When our TV show was cancelled
He took it very hard
You could hear the poor thing howling
Out in the backyard
He broke out of his kennel
And went through the machine
We'd know just when he went to
But he'd broken the view screen
The government men came and took it away
Now how'm I going to get back to yesterday?

(REPEAT CHORUS)

BRIDGE:

Perhaps he went to Egypt
Or maybe prehistoric times
He always had impeccable timing
But I'm getting old and I'm tired of rhyming
Cartoons can live forever
But not so human men
I sure hope he gets here soon
So I can see his fuzzy face again
Maybe in some far distant when
They can fix me and make me young again
Maybe he's waiting in the future
And I'll catch up one day
And we'll be dog and boy like it was yesterday

VERSE 3:

I had to pack up and go back to school
Which felt to me so very cruel
The history books seemed strange
It's not fun when it can't be rearranged
I got older and I discovered girls
But they never seemed to like me
Maybe the dog tags put them off
Or maybe it's just the fleas
Peabody's the only friend
That I ever really trusted
I hope when he's finished writing history's wrongs
He'll come back to the life he busted
He'll come back for his old comrade
And we'll be history
I hope Mister Peabody won't forget me

(REPEAT CHORUS)

SpinTunes 2 Round 3 Shadow, Continued

2010-11-01T22:44:00.000-07:00

So, I'm working as fast as I can because I once again have very little time to work on this round. I've got a verse and chorus melody. I'm having the same problem I usually have, which is that my verses differ slightly, in that the exact melodic phrasing I use on the first verse doesn't seem to work on subsequent verses and I can't seem to make the natural sung rhythm of the words forced into such an iron-clad mold. It's at this point that I realize I'm not really certain how to write songs. I know a lot of songs I admire have verses where the meter of some parallel verse lines don't quite match up, but they tend to come back to matching pretty closely. Mine aren't quite working this time and I need to do a little rework.

I've got a recorded melody for verse 1:

I've spent my career teaching history
But my colleagues always mock me
They don't believe my first-hand stories
About Beethoven, and the Nazis
My papers are rejected
My letters to the editor aren't selected
But the truth is, I've met Newton
Galileo and Leif Ericcson
But I tell you this without much joy
For I was Mister Peabody's... boy

And a recorded chorus:

My life has been so ordinary
Since the day he went away
Now it's been almost fifty years
And I am old and gray
I've never stopped believing
That he'll come back for me
My master, mentor, friend Mister Peabody
Now you might think I'm just confused
And age has left me in a fog
But I never minded playing second fiddle...
To a dog

And a second verse, but the meter strays a lot from the first verse and I find myself putting in rests in awkward places trying to force it to match the melody:

My memories of those days are mostly a blur
Of crudely drawn animation
With our horn-rimmed glasses we'd explore
The pasts of many nations
His bowtie he always kept impeccable
His puns were completely unacceptable
I followed his every instruction
To assure our history correctly functioned
We righted wrongs and we had a blast
Fixing all the problems in the past

So that needs, I think, some rework. With just those two verses and two choruses I'm at about 2:30. But I've got more lyrics I want to try to fit in somehow. Maybe I can rearrange individual lines and tweak verse 2 by using some of these lines. Can I get all the ideas (not necessarily the wording, that's fungible) into one more verse, and maybe a bridge? Maybe I need to gut verse 1 and throw out some of the lines that don't really pop. Heavy revision is kind of the bane of these tightly timed competitions (even though I'm not technically competing this round, I still want my shadow entry to be at least reasonably good as a demo).

When our TV show was cancelled
He took it really hard
You could hear the poor thing howling
Out in the backyard
I had to go on back to school
Which felt so very cruel
It seemed so very strange
History's not as fun when it can't be rearranged

He broke out of his kennel and entered the machine
We'd know just when he went to, but he'd broken the view screen
Perhaps he went to Egypt, or maybe prehistoric times
I could speculate some more, but I'm running out of rhymes
Maybe he's waiting in the future, and I'll catch up one day
And we'll be dog and boy like it was yesterday

I can't make the machine work for me -- the vacuum tubes are busted
But Peabody's the only friend that I ever really trusted
I only hope when he's finished writing history's wrongs
Whenever he has gone
He'll come back for his old comrade and take me into history
I hope Mister Peabody won't forget me

Time traveling dogs can live forever - but not so human men
Maybe in the future they can make me young again
I don't really want to die here, stuck in 2010
I hope he gets here soon, my genius friend

SpinTunes 2 Round 3 Shadow

2010-11-01T10:41:00.000-07:00

The challenge involves writing about a "secondary historical figure." I'm out of the official running, but the idea did pop into my head that I should write about one of my own personal favorite historical figures.

Very rough draft lyrics in progress... they don't even rhyme properly. I'll let you figure out who the narrator is.

He always knew just what to say
A horrid pun, a deadpan look
I did all his grunt work
He introduced me as his boy

When the show was cancelled
He took it really hard
You should have heard him howling
Out in the backyard

I had to go back to school
It seemed pretty strange
History's not quite so fun
If you can't rearrange it

He broke out of the kennel
And went back to the machine
And vanished into history
I hope that one day I will see
His furry smile again

I discovered girls
But they never did discover me
My life has been so ordinary
Since the day he left me
I'm living in mom's basement
We got rid of the fleas
I still wear his dog tags 'round my neck
It's been forty years
I watch our old movies
And play video games blah blah blah blah
There's not much left to expect
When you've spent your childhood
Playing second fiddle to a dog

Wrapping Up SpinTunes 2 Round 2

2010-11-01T08:27:00.000-07:00

Well, it was not entirely a shock, and a bit of a relief given the sleep deprivation I've had to undertake to complete entries, but I've been eliminated from the SpinTunes 2 contest. I have to say, being eliminated is a considerably less fun that a good elimination, if you get my drift.

I've mentioned this before and I don't bring it up again by way of defense, but perhaps by way of explanation. I work from home eight hours a day. I've got four kids. One of them is two years old and still nurses in our bed with us, often loudly. He's more difficult than any of the others have been; he is gradually getting more of a vocabulary, but his most typical style of conversation still involves shrieking at the top of his lungs. At 5 a.m. He has figured out remarkable ways to wind up taking up an entire king-sized bed. My wife is a stay-at-home mom. We homeschool. We recently moved into a a new house and are still very much in the process of adjustment (hell, we haven't even unpacked most of our things).

She's pregnant (yes, we're having a fifth) and sometimes needs extra breaks and assistance. A poopy diaper will occasionally make her throw up. Oh, and I can't make coffee because although when she's not pregnant she loves coffee, when she is, the smell makes her queasy. (These things will improve; by the third trimester she'll be more energetic and not queasy at all). So I get by on tea these days, but I'm well below the US RDA for caffeine.

I had, basically, four late evenings, starting from 10:30 or 11 PM, when the kids were finally down and quiet, to whenever I finally had crashed and had to give up in order to get a few hours of broken sleep. That was typically 3 or 4 AM. This just doesn't serve to get out my best musical thinking or performing. It was very frustrating trying to record at 2:30 or 3:00, having been up since before 7 a.m., waiting for the heat to go off so it was quieter in my studio room, and constantly forgetting my own vocals. Or, playing back my tracks and realizing that my singing was way off pitch, and not because I'm not a trained singer, which I'm not, but because I was so tired. Or playing back a keyboard part I had painstakingly edited to use as a reference, and realizing that it wandered into another key, and I hadn't caught it because my musical "ear" was shot for the night. Or worrying that I was going to get sick again, feeling that burning itch in my throat and wondering if I was going to lose my voice.

This past round, my wife was gone for the entire 3-day weekend and so I had to be single dad. I was unable to work on my track at all for that entire weekend. I knew I had to finish early. So I did as much work as I could possibly do in the first few days, and then just had to spend Thursday evening polishing what I had, with many ideas for the track still only in the larval stage.

So it was a relief to turn my song in early this round, on Thursday, but also frustrating because I knew that there was still a lot I could have done to improve it. Fortunately I was mostly able to let it go and feel as if I had done all I could, but it's still an unpleasant feeling, knowing that the work you've submitted doesn't really represent the best you could do, under better circumstances.

I am planning a shadow entry for round 3, but I'm not going to lose as much sleep over it.

I'd like to use this forum, such as it is, to publicly thank Spin for putting together such a fun and engaging contest.

I'd also like to, at the risk of further alienation and burned bridges, address the judges.

I feel for you guys -- I haven't been a judge in this kind of context, but I have done something that, I believe, probably feels similar, and that is serve as a manager, and write employee performance reviews. It's amazing how, suddenly, when you have a little authority over people, what you thought were friendly relationships can grow a little cold and you suddenly realize that this job, though necessary, really isn't any damned fun at all, and managers can't actually have employees as friends.

Thank you all for your hard work. For the most part, I really appreciate the insights you provided in your comments. That is something that the Song Fu structure, based entirely on online voting, couldn't really give me, and it's priceless.

Dr. Lindyke wrote of my track:

I think perhaps the mistake here is in trying to replicate the new wave techno-pop sound and missing. The first thing I think one should notice about the style Dolby used is that that the effects and shouts are tightly arranged instrumentation... there's nothing random about them

And he's dead on target. I got caught without enough time left to focus on the accompaniment parts. I had some rough drafts of intro and bridging synth lead, bass, and chorded parts but, simply put, ran out of time to polish them and had to just try to "close up ranks" with the existing segments that I had.

It didn't help my nerves any when I found that Dolby himself had tweeted about the project and I had a bunch of Dolby fans following my progress. I became fixated on the quality of my vocal performance and spent two of my scarce late-night sessions tweaking the melodies and recording and re-recording and re-re-recording my vocal takes.

I am much quicker at guitar than synth, so I quickly put together the backing rhythm guitar part. It isn't entirely distant from the original track, which had some rhythm guitar accents (by Andy Partridge of XTC, no less), but yeah, it wasn't quite how I originally intended it all to fit together -- by a long shot. The original was mostly supported by synth melodies with rhythm guitar accents. Mine is kind of the other way around now. If I get inspired I will see if I can do some further work on the track.

This sort of brings up an interesting point about these contests. What are they measuring, exactly? In the real world, most musicians that I know collaborate with other people. They play with other musicians; they do recording with people with other skill sets; they are produced and mastered by people with yet further skill sets. Thomas Dolby in 1982 did not write, arrange, record, produce, and master his song entirely himself, and he certainly didn't complete the track from soup to nuts on his own in one week. Jonathan Coulton has proved that he can do this sort of thing on a tight timeline, but he would be the first to admit that not all his "things a week" turned out stellar. In this regard this process seems like it may tend to reward musicians who do what they know best, writing and recording songs that sound like covers of themselves, if that makes sense, and don't try to push themselves into new territory, whereas the challenges are all about new territory. Anyway, I clearly don't have it all figured out yet.

Glen Phillips wrote:

The mix is terrible. The groove is herky jerky and nearly the opposite of a groove. I do think this is inventive. I enjoyed the variety of timbres that weave in and out of the song. The cadence of the vocal speak-sing is painful. The melody is barely existent. I actually enjoyed the synth solo at 2:24. Although it just outlined the vocal melody. The rhythm guitar sounds like it’s in a different song. “The band” is not playing together. They’re all doing their own thing. Challenge is met well.

Glen has distinguished himself in the reviews so far by using the rudest language of any of the judges. He may think that he's just being refreshingly honest, but what he's really doing is mostly undermining his own credibility and alienating the contestants.

I don't believe he's generally wrong, and I don't even entirely disagree with mots of his comments, but looking at the tone of most of his reviews, it feels to me like he hasn't been around the internet long enough to realize that sarcasm and tongue-in-cheek don't work very well in plain old ASCII (or even Unicode) and that by 2010, we've hopefully left behind irony-for-the-sake-or-irony. Either that, or he just has a more severe case of Asperger's than I do.

In particular, he seems to be biased towards mistaking incompetence for lack of effort, and weakness for carelessness. Case in point: his comments about Danny, which can only be characterized as "vicious."

His reviews also don't give me a lot of useful information. I'm puzzled by his comment that "the melody is barely existent" -- the verse and chorus melodies are presented three times, both sung and partially expressed by the vocoder parts, and even played an octave down by a synth bass line, three times. And if the melody is "barely existent," how can the solo reprise it?

It doesn't feel to me like Glen put a lot of time and revision into his comments. It feels to me like he spent what time he did spend on them rubbing his hands together and cackling at his own clever insults. I would like to suggest that Glen not be invited to judge in future SpinTunes competitions.

Kevin Savino-Riker wrote:

Boy oh boy, this was a challenge to undertake. This is a faithful tribute in addition to being a sequel, but there’s something working against you: the original is so incredibly catchy that all I can do is think of this song as less catchy than the original. But you’ve got some terrific ingredients here. You have a good melody and a great limericky batch of lyrics. One problem, or maybe two directly-related problems: the spoken word delivery has a bit of a clunky cadence and inflection to it. I think this song wants to be a good 15-20 bpm faster, and I bet if you sped it up, all the problems would disappear. The monologue would bounce better, and the added energy to the melody would make it instantly more catchy. After I finish writing these reviews, I’m gonna try a little experiment (hah hah) on this song and see if I’m right.

I want to thank Kevin for his very constructive comments. Since the cadence of the spoken parts were called "herky-jerky" and "clunky" I have to believe there's something wrong with this part, but I'm still a little bit at a loss as to what it is. I spent quite a bit of time aligning these parts so that they syncopate (hit on and off the beats) the way I wanted them to, dragging clips around and even time-stretching them. This is one of those times when I feel like it would have been really helpful to have someone to collaborate with on this track -- not long-distance, but in the studio. I've got a good ear for some things, musically, but apparently rhythm isn't my strong point.

The suggestion about BPM is an interesting one. I thought the original was at 120 bpm, but perhaps it isn't -- or perhaps the modern ear just wants a faster techno beat. I deliberately didn't listen to it before I started, so as to avoid accidentally cribbing a melody or synth part wholesale.

Jeff MacDougall wrote:

Challenge: A - Fantastic. Instantly knew what the original tune was.

Lyrics: A – Great lyrics. Keeps with the writing style of the original.

Structure: B – Not bad, but a little odd. Which I would have gone with given the nature of the song... Except that it caused me tilt my head like the RCA dog a few times.

Melody: B – Nice but didn’t stick with me.

A great technical effort here. I was smiling through the whole thing.

Helpful and supportive, but not a lot of detail. The impression I get from these shorter comments are generally that the judges realized something wasn't quite right, but they didn't have a clear idea on just what would make it better, which is quite understandable; it often isn't all that clear, and can only be resolved by experimentation and fiddling. (Hell, I wrote it, and I don't know just what to do with it either...)

Zach Scott wrote:

It really doesn't hold up to the original. The original was catchy, and although this sequel captures some of the novelty and vocal flourishes, I can't overlook that it seems a bit like a mess.

I can't really disagree with the "a bit of a mess." Still, some more detail would have been helpful.

Len Peralta wrote:

I know what he’s trying to do here. However, I don’t know if he totally pulls it off though. While pulling from the original Thomas Dolby song, the song suffers because all I can think about is how good the original song was. You know when a TV show can’t get the rights to an original song, so they create their own version? This is like that. Plus, it could have been about a minute shorter.

Thanks, Len. "Knowing what [I was] trying to do and [not] totally [pulling] it off" is pretty much the name of the whole game for my entry this round, especially that disappointed feeling that tells me if I'd only had more time to put into it, it would have been considerably better. At a minute shorter, the song would have come in at 3:09. The original was 3:42. In hindsight I can figure out places where I could trim the monologue bits and bridge and lose maybe 15 seconds. I already trimmed at least 10 seconds of monologue. I don't think I could lose a full minute; at 3:09 I don't think it would feel right, and would be considerably shorter than a typical pop song. If I lost a whole verse and chorus that would do it, but I'd want to rewrite and maybe expand the existing verses to salvage some of my best lines, which would have meant rewriting the verse melody, and that would have been surgery I just didn't have time for. The question then becomes, would I try changes that major if I did pick it up and work on the song more? Should the solo go, or at least part of it? I'll have to consider it.

Spin himself wrote:

I definitely hear a lot of references to the original. My only real problem with this song is the spoken word sections. They seem to drag, and leave me just waiting for the singing to start again. (did I just say that about Paul?) Those sections just seem to put everything on hold, and it's an unwelcome interruption when someone is ENJOYING the song. Overall nice work, but I fear for you in what was a tough round.

Helpful comments. If I do work more on this track I will definitely do major rework of the spoken word sections. I think more accompaniment instrumentation and some revisions to the way the guitar parts work would likely help this as well -- so that the different parts don't feel so disjointed. (Disjointed seems to be a theme of my previous entry, "Leaving Ann Arbor," as well).

Now...

I was actually surprised by what judges didn't comment on. No one commented on the drums. I wasn't really satisfied with my use of a loop -- a loop I made myself rather than a canned one, but a loop nonetheless. I was quite pleased with my little percussion fills and splats and boops, and there were no comments on those parts. After the last round of reviews I was very nervous about my singing. There wasn't much comment about that at all; maybe my untrained voice wasn't as grating as in my last entry? Did the vocoders help or hurt that? There were no comments at all, positive or negative, about the vocoders -- and I really, really expected them to be kind of divisive, as in "I hate vocoders" or "I love vocoders."

Also, every person I've played this for in person has made comments about my lyrics: "did you just say dildonics?" (And also re: my other doubles entendres). It seemed odd to have no feedback on whether the judges thought those fit or didn't fit. I guess they didn't stand out, which is a bit of a shame, because I feel that my lyrics are one of my stronger points as a songwriter, if not the strongest.

And finally...

I have really enjoyed SpinTunes, but I must say that I feel like the "field" of entries, with the eliminations in this round and the previous round, have somehow lost something.

It's hard to articulate precisely what I mean, except that I'm kind of imagining living in an interesting neighborhood, full of eccentrics. There's the guy down the street with the broken-down cars in his front yard who makes those weird metal sculptures. There's the bag lady. There are the young kids. There are retirees. There are black families. There are the Hispanic families. There are those Asians who no one is sure where they come from, except that they made that weird dish at the neighborhood picnic. It had something to do with raw squid marinated in something that smelled horrible. When you got up the nerve to taste it, though, after it spent ten seconds on the grill -- wow, it was weird. But really delicious, too.

And, you know, it's noisy and weird in this neighborhood, and there's alway some damn crisis going on, but you wouldn't really get rid of any of them.

Well, maybe you'd get rid of that house full of college kids who always have their stereos turned up really loud -- you've had to call the police on them three times now, and they throw beer bottles all over the damned street. And there was that time where that one passed out on the front lawn and you thought maybe he was dead. OK, so you're glad that they are gone.

Oh, and that one guy who you are pretty sure was dealing drugs. It's good to have him gone.

Oh, and that crazy guy who used to shout at everyone's dogs.

Oh, and the people with dogs. You're pretty glad they are gone, too, and at least their damned dogs won't dig up your rose bushes and crap in your lawn any more.

Oh, and then there were the foreclosures. The blacks and Hispanics are gone too. The neighborhood is awfully white now. And that Asian family moved out too. No one really knows what happened to them. Some kind of immigration issue.

But you know what? It's gotten kind of quiet around here lately. I mean, you can get a good night's sleep now, without all that barking, and partying, and loud music, and breaking glass, and the police haven't had to come around much. But, still -- it's a little too quiet, don't you think? And maybe, just maybe, not as much... well... fun as it used to be. And that's a shame. That guy with the big guitar amps in his garage is still there, but that's hardly enough fun folks for a really great block party.

But more seriously -- it does feel to me that the remaining field has lost much of its amateur character. Its quirkiness. If I want to listen to music that is performed, recorded, and produced by professionals, and which doesn't take interesting risks, I'll turn on the radio. Er, no, on second thought, I won't. Pretty much not ever.

I'm not sure exactly what this means, except that it may have something to do with the economy, and a situation in which really polished musician/producers, with degrees in music and actual training and stuff, who ought to be selling albums and touring, and busy becoming part of the so-called "music industry," are now reduced to entering songwriting competitions with goofy amateurs like me. And while the results have been interesting, I'm not sure that really is the right place for any of us.

And on that, I'll wind up my long-winded comments and get back to my own little field of dreams where I can pretend that one day I'll be Jonathan Coulton, when in fact I'll most likely just be that crazy guy down the street. You know -- the one with all the loud kids, who never quit his day job. He writes those smutty lyrics. His wife must have the patience of a saint. I can't imagine how he thinks those are appropriate songs to sing around children. He wrote that nasty protest song about Dick Cheney, rest his soul. I really can't approve of that. He built that home studio, but never had the money and time to take more than a few lessons. No, he never plays in public. But if you go visit him he'll insist on singing them for you, every chance he gets...

Today's The Day

2010-10-28T08:03:00.000-07:00

I'm a little late arriving at this party, but last night I recorded a cover of Inverse T. Clown's song "Today's the Day." Because the Too Much Awesome community site is now defunct, I was unable to track down the original song before recording it, so I worked entirely from other people's covers. Edric Haleen had made a PDF of the song scored out, but it didn't really resemble a lead sheet (no chord notation, many, many pages long, piano in treble and bass clef) and I can't really sight read well enough to play that in any reasonable amount of time.

So, I made up my own chords... it's in G major (at least, my version is; I'm not sure about all the others), and the guitar part is basically crunchy 5ths (major chords without 3rds). I played the main guitar part on my Fernandes Telecaster copy with some extreme processing. The level going into the amp model was (accidentally, because apparently the input gain on the Ensemble got reset) very low, which resulted in weirdly horrible break-up. Which is exactly the sound I wanted. Come to think of it, this might be the song that finally calls for me to break out the Gonkulator. Well... OK... maybe not.

I kind of like the way my vocals came out on this one. I hit the mic extremely hard, and it was gained up pretty high, but the Apogee has a "soft clip" setting that kept this from turning into digital clipping. I now have three sound-absorbing panels up in my studio and they are helping to dry up the reverb I get when singing. (I will get more eventually, but I'm doing this as I can afford it, bit by bit). The panels seem like a pretty basic thing but they have a big effect on the way the vocal track sounds when it hits the EQ and compressor, even when these things are all virtual, and how it sounds in the completed mix. It also seems to be easier for me to stay on pitch when I'm hearing less natural room reverb in my headphones. I experimented with a second microphone lying on the floor in the corner but didn't actually use that track in the mix, and after applying Flex time to help align the two vocal takes, it would be really hard to synchronize it.

Oh, I made a really quick video. It might make you dizzy.

I started out with a doubled solo recorded on the Fernandes, but it was pretty weak, so after the kids were asleep I went back in the studio and played a new doubled solo on the Parker Fly, screwed around with various compressor and mastering settings, and bounced a new track. Hmmm... if I had known I was gonna use a second guitar, I would have tuned the first one...

Here's my video on YouTube.

Here's the full-resolution track on Bandcamp. (I've also added bass and screwed around with the mix a little more; the bass is the Steinberger XP...)

Some link rot has occurred since the original project happened... but:

Here's the intro page on the blog which has an embedded player for the original song.

Here's the full blog feed. I'm particularly enamored of Kevin's, Joe's, and Jeff's videos.

Here's a link to the original on Dr. Lindyke's Bandcamp page as a backup.

"Mad props," as the younglings say, to Mr. The Clown for writing such a fun song and allowing people to cover it. (Note that releasing a recording under a Creative Commons license is not necessarily the same thing as releasing the intellectual property of the words and music under the same license). It is the way I intend my original tracks to be released as well, but it seems to me to be a bit of a gray area unless explicitly pointed out.

SpinTunes 2, Round 2 Reviews

2010-10-25T21:16:00.000-07:00

Three contestants who were eligible to continue in round 2 failed to get songs in by the deadline, so the judges have only five, instead of eight, songs that must be eliminated this round. However, so many of the entries are so very polished this time that I'm afraid that some of the more "quirky" artists -- and I count myself among them -- will probably be cut.

This one will be a particular challenge to judge because the judges will need to be at least moderately familiar with the original songs, in order to determine how well they have met the challenge. I have to admit, I don't know all the songs that these tracks refer to. I will see if I can track down a few more of them to listen to -- so these notes should be considered very preliminary. I'm forgoing grades or ratings at the moment.

UPDATE: doing some more listening; second impressions in italics.

1. Governing Dynamics - Melt In The Sun (So Many Pretty Ways)

This is a really intriguing effort from Travis. I'm not familiar with the original. Oddly, Travis sings quite well on this track, but Joe sounds like he's a little bit out of his element as he reaches hard to hit some of the high notes on the chorus. I'm not so sure that his presence on this track really adds to it. The walls of guitars I find gorgeous, especially on the solo. A strong contender, although not one of the most polished.

Second impression: the main vocal really is decent; he's not hugely strong on his pitch (I'm not either), but the raw feel seems appropriate for the song. The churning quality of the whole thing, the mood of the bridge (where the guitars drop away), and the volume swells really make it pretty. Travis really knows how to build a mood with guitars. I definitely expect this one to do well.

2. Danny Blackwell - Like A Family

For some reason I'm hearing this mix entirely in the right speaker, which is a pretty big technical SNAFU. I've confirmed that the left channel of the MP3 is silent. The instrumentation is intriguing -- is that autoharp? I think this one will probably wind up eliminated, a little unfairly perhaps, but there it is.

Second impression: listening to this in mono to bring the mix louder; it's a really a very pretty song -- and there's a dry humor to the lyric and performance that makes me grin. If the judges mix it to mono, double the volume to compensate for the lost channel, and give it a fair listen, it has a good chance. I'm still not sure I can bring myself to listen to the Spice Girls in order to see how well it meets the challenge. Might make it; I hope it does.

3. Ryan Ruff Smith - Baby, We're Through

The reverb is a really nice nod to the original -- and I love the vocals and surf guitar. This reminds me strongly of something that would have been on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. Nice organ sound. A bit of a ringer again, this one? Likely to do very well, I think.

Second impression: the reverb-y "sha la la" backing vocals and bass-heavy piano and guitar riffs, low in the mix, definitely make the track work. Will definitely make it.

4. Common Lisp - Science (In The Service Of Beauty)

It's very hard to appraise my own tracks with anything resembling objectivity. I think my lyrics capture the feel of a sequel to the original, and the track also throws out some ear candy that will be familiar to anyone who knew the original. But it doesn't have a really strong synth bass line and although it has a fairly strong melody, it may not be "synth-poppy" enough. There's not as much guitar in the original, where it is used mostly as an accent here and there. As for my singing -- well, obviously I'm still developing as a singer. The picture I posted with a copy of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Singing is not really a joke -- I did buy a copy, mainly so I'd have the accompanying CD of exercises. I'm lining up voice teachers to consider working with.

Anyway, I'll sadly predict that my track will fall below the cutoff and will be one of the five to be cut. In other words, I'll actually be pleasantly surprised if it does make it. (Or maybe I'm just faintly hoping to get out of the stress and sleep deprivation of round 3...)

Second Impression: eh, I still can't listen to this objectively... but perhaps it's not quite as bad as I thought. It really could have used an intro synth riff, maybe some backing synth chords, a riff under the spoken parts that doesn't just following the melody of the verses and chorus. I had some bits sketched out but basically had to finalize it because I was running out of time. My vocal isn't too teeth-gritting; it only really goes flat in a couple places. Could have been mastered a little hotter, as befitting the style, although I usually like to keep more dynamic range. Nicely edited, at least... still hard for me to judge how it will strike the judges (especially since I was surprised by the generally low opinion of my last track).

5. Inverse T. Clown - Hey, Jessie

Funny... but gets surprisingly dark! Perhaps this is a little out of character with the original. Probably will not make the cut (3 of 5).

Second Impression: the instrumentation is funny, but the Casio keyboard demo feel doesn't quite fit the original. The flow of the song is nicely one. I'm still furrowing my brow at the grim tone, since Springfield always struck me slightly campy. Still don't think it will make the cut.

6. Mitchell Adam Johnson - When Donna Came Back

Fantastic. The recording and compression style seems just slightly too modern, but it has a great vintage feel.

Second Impression: "mmm... mmm... mmm..." still really enjoying this track. Never thought I'd say this about a song, but the guitars and bass are a little too loud in the mix, and so it sounds just a little muddy, with the vocal slightly under water. Definitely feels over-compressed; the reverb can't really "breathe" that way. But still a fine entry.

7. Ben Walker - When I'm A Hundred And Two

I'm pretty certain this track would achieve the judges' highest rating. However, Mr. Walker has noted that "When I'm 64" was never released as a single and so did not chart, and is thus not eligible. So I'm gritting my teeth as I write this, but this track will likely be disqualified and the contributor out of the running. I suppose I should be happy that that gives me a better shot at making the cut for this round, but I'm really not -- if I could pick the songs I wanted to lose to, this would definitely be one of them and I salute Ben's talent and skill in putting this together. (4 of 5 to be eliminated)

Second Impression: it just makes me want to cry that this one didn't meet the challenge. It is so very nicely mixed and the chorused vocals and doubled and guitars are just gorgeous. Really nice use of dynamics. At least he's got a really strong track for his portfolio or a future album release.

8. Edric Haleen - O! Say Can You See?

Leave it to Eric to come up with something totally unexpected that technically meets the challenge (apparently the national anthem did chart, in a rendition by Whitney Houston). It's beautifully performed -- it sounds like it comes from a musical based on the War of 1812 (and Edric is just the guy to produce it!) However, it goes so over the top that I'm not sure it can even still see the top from there. May be cut on the grounds that it is just that bit bombastic and the judges didn't seem to appreciate Edric's humor in that regard last round.

Second Impression: this track starts to get on my nerves as it goes on, especially the hammered chord at the end.

9. Charlie McCarron - Over The Bridge

Intriguing -- the original was fairly plaintive and soulful, and this one is quite jazzy. Beautifully recorded, it seems like a very impressive song in its own right, but how well it meets the challenge may be a bit open to debate.

Second Impression: Charlie's voice is growing on me. I like the open feel of the mix. The bass line and drums are superb. I'm starting to think this is a really strong entry.

10. Zarni De Wet - Stacy's Dad

The original was a power pop song, and this isn't quite in the style; like Charlie McCarron's song, it's more jazzy and abstracted. But very evocative lyrics, and quite professionally produced. Maybe it doesn't quite gel. The straight-up references to the melody of the original notwithstanding, perhaps it isn't quite "hooky" enough?

I love the lead vocal and the cleverness of the lyrics -- especially the sentiment, written from the perspective of someone with a "trophy wife." It feels a little post-feminist -- or perhaps I should say neo-feminist -- to consider the dilemma of a man who plays second fiddle to a gorgeous wife -- and whose own daughter also exists in her shadow. There's more emotional depth than is evident at first listen. The mix isn't quite all that it could be. As for the reuse of part of the melody of the original -- well, I was afraid to do it. I think it works without lapsing into a real copyright violation, but I don't really know what the judges will make of it.

11. Duality - Mars Ain't The Kind Of Place

Joe's singing in this one is again impassioned, and Denise's playing atmospheric. I'm impressed by the flowing feel they achieve, and the lyrics are gorgeous. I like the intriguing little bell tones tinkling out of nowhere. If I had to guess, though, given the judges' reactions to Duality last time, I think there's a good chance this one will also be eliminated (5 of 5).

Second Impression: Joe's vocal performance here really is very nuanced and lovely. Like their last track, though, my ear starts to crave a change of some kind -- a change-up in instruments, maybe. If I were producing it, I'd try fading out the piano on the bridge-ish section, while keeping the bell sounds, and bring in a fretless bass, and add harmony vocals there -- just something to keep the ear interested.

12. Brian Gray - One More Cloud

Big reverb'ed drums and moaning guitars... big close-mic'ed vocal... very promising but I can't judge it yet; need a few more listens.

Second Impression: the lyrics are strong, but the vocal performance is perhaps a little fatiguing. Perhaps relies on reverb a little too much.

13. Ross Durand - Folsom Breakout Blues

Another very strong contender -- certainly in the top few as far as production goes. Great guitar tones, bouncy drums and bass.

Second Impression: bass could be EQ'ed a little better. Very tightly edited.

14. Steve Durand - Miranda

Clever and funny. If I had to guess, a slightly off-key vocal might result in this one sliding down to the point where it is eliminated (I've already suggested 5, though, so perhaps it gets in with low marks?)

Second Impression: I'm pretty sure the vocal's "loose" relationship with the key is deliberately done, for camp effect. I love the backing horns. Sung from the perspective of Fernando? Rhymes are a little off; lyrics do a great job of continuing the story. Now noticing the backing vocal which is on key tighter. The real stories never end, do they, Mister Frodo?

15. Gweebol - Thank You Mr. Postman

Beautifully done -- slightly lacking in musical hooks, but the backing vocals really capture the original. Great lyrics.

Second Impression: beautifully produced, but yeah, the jazzy melody and accompaniment takes some odd turns. By the time it hits the solo, I find myself looking at my wrist (where I don't wear a watch.) Doesn't feel like the original, and the melody doesn't have much of an "earworm" quality. Lyrics are very clever, though.

16. Rebecca Brickley - Elderly Dream

I can see the references to the original, and it is competently done and tells a story, but I'm not sure some of the phrasing really pops as well as it could.

Second Impression: this one has grown on me a little -- I especially like the chugging rhythmic feel and the simple goofiness of a single hand clap and shaker for percussion. The feel of a demo, but doesn't suffer for it.

17. Chris Cogott - Roadward Bound

Gorgeous guitar and vocal sounds. Nicely produced.

Second Impression: everything about it really channels Simon and Garfunkel. The close harmony, and the way the percussion kicks in, are both just beautiful. The lyrics are nicely done and growing on me.

Adding Shadows

18. Duality - Today

Joe's acoustic guitar tone always seems slightly off pitch to me. A demo feel. This seems like a country song. The blend of soloing chorused guitar and keyboards has some harmonizing problems. If I can ever get Joe and Denise into my Batcave (er, studio) I'd like to take a stab at producing this. Joe plays guitar better than he claims to, but it needs to be recorded and EQ'ed a little differently. The mix is somewhat poor.

19. Danny Blackwell - La Reina

Again, only in the right channel -- but this song is hilarious, especially the Spanish, which he then translates (I had a couple of years of Spanish -- which has faded, but not so much that I can't laugh at this!) KEY CHANGE la... la... la... This song makes me want to jam with Danny -- preferably after doing shots of tequila. And I don't even like tequila...

20. David Ritter - Cage of Love

A big, boomy song. It references "Every Breath You Take" primarily through the chord changes. Gets a lot of credit for recognizing that the original lyrics are creepy and mentioning "restraining order..."

21. JoAnn Abbot - Georgia Morning

Nice to hear JoAnn with instrumentation (Is this Caleb on MIDI?) I'm not familiar with the original but apparently it was a grim tale! The lyrics seem quite strong although like the previous one, probably could use to be edited a little tighter (showing, not telling, and all that).

SpinTunes 2, Round 2 Completed

2010-10-21T10:55:00.000-07:00

I've done a little more tweaking. I haven't managed to do quite everything I had remaining on my to-do list, but I found that because my wife is going out of town earlier than I expected. It's due Sunday night, but I have to get to a stopping point sooner than I thought. So, rather than delve into any new synth parts or re-recording vocals yet again, I'm calling it finished. If my notes are correct, I put in most of last Sunday, and then 3 late-night recording sessions of four or five hours each, so I'm guessing I've got about 30 hours into it, in total.

I cut out one of the short spoken word breaks to bring the total running time to about 4 minutes. It's about 30 seconds longer than a typical pop song, and people are very well-programmed these days to expect songs to end pretty much at exactly 3:30, but I hope it doesn't feel excessively long.

You can find the track here on Bandcamp.

I've uploaded a little work-in-progress video on Vimeo.

I'll try to come up with a video next week if possible.

Here are the final lyrics:

SPOKEN:

I am a scientist, true. But define "mad."

VERSE 1:

Once I was blinded by beauty
That I mistook for technology
I loved to play with electronics
Producing all kinds of crazy sonics
But these days I'm a nature lover
Give me a human under the covers

CHORUS:

BEAUTY mistaken for
SCIENCE in the service of
MONEY producing new
TECHNOLOGY
Connections, rejections
Maybe too much introspection
Too much to handle
It can't hold a candle to you

SPOKEN:

Goodness, Miss Sakamoto! Is it really you? Do come in.
My, my, you haven't aged a day!
May I offer you a cup of tea?
You've heard, perhaps, that my little inventions have made me a wealthy man?

VERSE 2:

My meters are all a-quiver
Your touch gives me the shivers
Now let's conduct an experiment
Oh never mind, it's completely irrelevant
My vacuum tube's overheated
I've lost my cool, I'm completely defeated

REPEAT CHORUS

SPOKEN:

ThinkPods and GeekPads
and things that warm up
Devices that vibrate
chips that make music
Psionics, dildonics
Good old telephonics
Machines that go "bing,"
Science chthonic,
Glowing rectangles
And cables in tangles
Just hop on the network
You don't need to do legwork
To find my location
You won't need cogitation
Texting is peachy
But pheromones can't reach me
Your webcam is online
But that's not in real time
Come over to my place
I can't feel you in cyberspace...

(SYNTH SOLO)

SPOKEN:

I see your teacup is empty!
Oh, dear, we've run out of sherry as well
Please be careful where you step; the laboratory is so cluttered.
It's very hard to find qualified help these days.
What? You say you might be interested in assuming your old... position?

VERSE 3:

Now your machinery's in order
You can trust me, I'm a doctor
You know that science is dandy
But come on honey, give me some candy
I want to study biology
In specific, your anatomy

(REPEAT CHORUS)

SPOKEN (on drums/fadeout):

It was so good to see you, Miss Sakamoto!
Do come back and see me again soon.
Perhaps next time, you might care to have a look at my etchings?
My door is always open.

I've determined that Bandcamp's preview and MP3 downloaded files sound considerably better if I feed it source tracks that are down-shifted to 16 bits without using dither, so that's what I'm doing now. It also appears I could just give Bandcamp 24-bit files, and some of my projects are at 96KHz, so maybe I'll experiment with that when I get a chance. Almost everyone will be listening at 44.1KHz, 16-bit, so I'm not sure if there is any big benefit to be had, unless Bandcamp's sample rate conversion and world length conversion algorithms are somehow magically superior to mine.

SpinTunes 2, Round 2, Process Notes 4

2010-10-21T00:03:00.000-07:00

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 19:20 -0400 (EST)

Done so far this evening: tracked rhythm guitar for chorus and verse. Reasonably happy with the results.

Up for tonight: MIDI tweaking for 3rd verse melody; record 3rd verse vox tracks; re-record 2nd verse vox tracks; see what I can do with the bridge lyrics.

"Tweaking" is the single biggest time consumer, probably even more so than vocal tracking. It involves everything from touching up edits of audio files, trying to keep everything synchronized on the beat, adjusting mix levels, or just cleaning up train wrecks.

New EQ on vocoder output smooths some things out.

Made a quick and dirty video showing some of the work in progress. It is still in the queue on Vimeo. Couldn't get it to upload to YouTube, for some reason -- iMovie claims it uploaded it, but doesn't give me an URL, just a link to my user page, and it never shows up in my list of uploaded movies.

Wed, 21 Oct 2010 02:46 -0400 (EST)

Progress!

After getting the kids to bed and into the studio about 10 p.m., I started tweaking guitar parts. I determined what key the song is in (Bb) and made some adjustments to the chords I'm using (dom 7 instead of m7 in one place), tweaked guitar effects and levels, and worked on getting the rhythm guitar part to synchronize more tightly with everything else. The result was impressive -- it sounds much better! I'm playing the Fernandes Telecaster copy from, I think, the mid '80s. I love this guitar -- got it cheap at the local Guitar Center. I don't usually like Telecasters, even expensive custom shop ones, but this one is more comfortable to play and sounds great; it intonates really well. It's been hacked up a bit (has some better-quality tuners). I'm considering replacing the bridge with a Babicz "full contact" bridge (it is supposed to be a drop-in replacement including the location of the screw holes).

I gave up on sending the doubled vocals that I recorded for the vocoder out panned left and right and decided to focus on more of a performance-like vocal that will be centered, so it's less likely to sound either off in terms of alignment or tuning. My vocal is still far from perfect but it sounds better. I used an Izotope Alloy preset with some tweaking that seems to work better on my voice as well.

Recorded verse 3 and chorus 3 vocals... guitar backing to the bridge (which may be temporary)... tweaked melody for verse 3... tweaked vocoder fades...

For length reasons I cut out some bits of the dialog and the whole song now is about 4 minutes even. That requires moving a lot of pieces. I'm getting better with Logic but there are still a lot of shotcuts and features I could no doubt make better use of.

I have a draft that I could live with. It needs to be mastered a little louder, but if I wasn't able to do anything else I could live with submitting this one as my SpinTunes entry.

Here's my to do list:

- Gain all track mix levels up by one or two dB?

- Gain everything up by a few dB into the mastering plug-in, play with limiter settings

- Try not dithering when I export a WAV? (Supposedly this makes the generated MP3 file sound better)

- Guitar synth solo to replace the solo I have now after the bridge?

- More guitar synth, maybe in the bridge section?

- Tweak drums further

- Try tweaking volume automation more tightly to track vocal level?

- Bass synth part for breaks/under bridge? Some backing synth pads?

- Look at the final bounce in Soundtrack Pro to verify that it's hitting the compressor/limiter at the levels that I want.

So close! Yet I'd still feel like I failed if I didn't put my absolute best effort into it.

SpinTunes 2, Round 2, Process Notes 3

2010-10-19T23:13:00.000-07:00

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 22:09 -0400 (EST)

I don't have a lot of time to work on my song tonight, since I need to get a reasonable amount of sleep -- with only a few nights left, I have to pace myself so I don't crash early.

So far tonight, I revised the verse and chorus MIDI melody tracks to better fit my singing range (and just to sound better). I'm going to try to track all new verse and chorus doubled vocals tonight.

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 02:07 -0400 (EST)

Tracking clean vocals with good pitch control is still my Achilles heel, but after many takes I have a verse 1 and chorus 1 that I think I can live with, especially given that I just don't have the time for endless retakes.

I got a scratch take done for verse 2, which will need to be replaced, but it helped me figure out the MIDI notes for the vocoder feeder tracks, and tweak the alignment of various spoken-word clips. The track is still really sparse -- I'm sort of putting my faith in the idea that I can flesh it out with backing instruments pretty rapidly when the vocals are done. That's been the case with my other songs -- I'm better at that part than I am at vocals. I hope that I'm not just deluding myself! But if I get only the vocals done, it's still a track I can submit and it will meet the length requirements.

The vocoder plug-in is behaving for me now! The EVOC 20 Polysynth is my BITCH! It helped when I got a cleaner, better-leveled and better-aligned vocal track to feed it. I was just too tired last night to figure out what was wrong with the source tracks.

Logic just crashed while I was dragging a region to the arrange window (sigh) -- but fortunately it seems to have saved everything. It's crashing now only an average of once per project, and I haven't lost any work since I upgraded to Logic Pro 9. Considering that's 40 or 50 hours spent editing in an immensely complex application, I think that's actually not a bad record.

Bedtime for tonight. I'll be woken up in about 5 hours by my wife getting ready to take our oldest son to school, and likely before that by a cranky baby, but I may be able to get an extra hour or so of sleep in before I have to start my work day. Eyes... stinging... carpal tunnel... acting up... I'm too old to stay up this late night after night!

SpinTunes 2, Round 2, Process Notes 2

2010-10-18T20:47:00.000-07:00

Monday 18 Oct

This evening I played with the synth melody for the first verse, and recorded some vocal takes for the first verse that I'm not really happy with. But they are there anyway -- if I'm going to finish this, I have to not obsess about quality as I go along, but get all the major parts completed, at least in draft from, and hope I have time to re-record and polish bits later. This is known as giving myself "permission to suck." (And oh, my singing can suck, so very, very hard!)

I added a vocoder, doubled the vocoder using two different vocoder synth sounds, and added a doubled verse vocal -- it's still really rough, but it's getting there, and maybe it will be good enough. I'm hampered a bit by the fact that I don't really play keyboards per se, and never studied keyboard formally. I've always been more interested in programming them than performing on them. I'm sticking to the white keys. Because of my, er, disability, I have to record keyboard bits a short phrase at a time, and clean up the resulting MIDI data. That's very time-consuming. Will my "ear" make up for it? We will see! (I also have an old Roland guitar synth and guitars I can use to trigger it, so it is possible I could play some synthesizer parts on guitar, but that usually doesn't work quite as well as one might hope, and the MIDI data generally also requires extensive cleanup. It might sound a little more "humanized," though).

So now I've got a scratch mix called "scratch_bounce_first_full_length.wav" that basically tells the story, intermixing spoken and sung bits, with a mostly complete first verse and placeholders for most of the rest. That tells me I'll come it around the right length.

I edited the lyrics some more on the computer -- it seems to fit my process best to start off drafting the worlds on paper, and move to the computer as it starts to settle down into the final form.. Here's what I've got -- this is probably close to final (but often times I find that I have to edit single words or lines to better fit the actual singing rhythm).

As is usually the case, most of the best bits came from the revision process.

"Science (In the Service of Beauty)" (er, working title)

SPOKEN:

I am a scientist, true. But define "mad."

VERSE 1:

Once I was blinded by beauty
That I mistook for technology
I loved to play with electronics
Producing all kinds of crazy sonics
But these days I'm a nature lover
Give me a human under the covers

CHORUS:

BEAUTY mistaken for
SCIENCE in the service of
MONEY producing new
(beat) TECHNOLOGY
Connections, rejections
Way too much introspection
It's too much to handle
And it can't hold a candle to
(beat... beat... beat... beat...) you

SPOKEN:

Goodness, Miss Sakamoto! Is it really you? Do come in.
My, my, you haven't aged a day!
May I offer you a cup of tea?
You've heard, perhaps, that my little inventions have made me a wealthy man?

VERSE 2:

My meters are all a-quiver
Your touch gives me the shivers
Now let's conduct an experiment
Oh never mind, it's completely irrelevant
My vacuum tubes are overheated
I've lost my cool, I'm nearly defeated

REPEAT CHORUS

SPOKEN:

If I might ask a personal question, what's that intoxicating scent you're wearing?
Oh, dear me, my mistake; you're not wearing perfume.
I was so sorry to learn of the loss of your husband.
I see the tea is gone -- would you care for something a little... harder?

BRIDGE: (spoken)

ThinkPods and GeekPads
and things that warm up
Devices that vibrate
chips that make music
Psionics, dildonics
Good old telephonics
Machines that go "bing,"
Science chthonic,
Glowing rectangles
And cables in tangles
Just hop on the network
You don't need to do legwork
To find my location
You won't need cogitation
Texting is peachy
But pheromones can't reach me
Your webcam is online
But that's not in real time
Come over to my place
I can't feel you in cyberspace...

(SYNTH SOLO)

SPOKEN:

Oh, dear, we've run out of sherry as well
Please be careful where you step; the laboratory is so cluttered.
It's very hard to find qualified help these days.
What? You say you might be interested in assuming your old... position?

VERSE 3:

Now your machinery's in order
You can trust me, I'm a doctor
You know that science is dandy
But come on honey, give me some candy
I want to study biology
In specific, your anatomy

(REPEAT CHORUS)

SPOKEN (on drums/fadeout):

It was so good to see you, Miss Sakamoto! Please do come back and see me again soon.
Perhaps next time, you might care to have a look at my etchings... my door is always open.

Update

It's now very late Monday evening/Tuesday morning; it's after 3 a.m. and I need to sleep. Tonight I was able to record doubled verse 1 vocals that don't suck too badly, and probably could stay as they are if I get desperate. I reworked the vocoder setup, composed a melody for the chorus, and recorded a doubled chorus vox that I most likely have to throw out. There is something wrong with the way the vocoder plug-in is triggering -- it seems to go all detuned sometimes; I can play the track in Logic repeatedly and get different results. There is something not quite right about the synth waveform I'm using; it seems to detune itself and so the vocal I tracked against it then seems to go off pitch. Is this a problem with my captured pitch bend data? That doesn't seem to be it. Maybe the synth has tries to emulate an old Moog a little too closely, in the way their oscillators would drift out of tune?

I recorded all new spoken word parts to matched the revised lyrics. I don't have a good idea yet how I'm going to render the bridge -- sung or spoken? Vocoded? To what melody? So, I don't know exactly how long it will be.

The arrangement is still really sparse; I haven't gotten any guitar or bass done, and I've stripped the drum down to the barest beat. It stands now at very roughly 4:30, assuming the bridge takes about 24 seconds, and assuming I keep a synth solo that is about 30 seconds long and plays the verse melody. I'm thinking I might be able to combine them somehow, or maybe one of the other will have to go...

Update 2 Tuesday 19 Oct, Morning

I got about five hours of somewhat broken sleep (four kids, three of them very young, including a 2-year-old who sleeps in the bed with us; he makes life interesting!) Lack of sleep is not really the best thing for vocals, I'm finding. But I have to work around my day job, and I really can only record while the kids are either out of the house or asleep.

The esteemed Mr. Dolby himself tweeted a link to my previous blog entry! Very exciting! No pressure! (Did he do it wirelessly, I wonder? From the Nutmeg?)

I did a quick edit, update, and cleanup of that entry and this entry. Hmmm, now I'm linked to Dolby's tweet which is linked to my blog. Is it all going to recursively implode?

In an effort to provide some links I watched the original video and listened to the song for the first time in quite some time. I figure now that I have my own verse and chorus melody, such as it is, I'm in less danger of accidentally appropriating his. (I'm going for style and tone here, maybe with a few little shout-outs to the original, not a remix; I'm not using any samples).

I have no hook, and no real riffs to speak of. Sigh... I can only do my best -- it is what it is! And the clock is ticking. Thanks, everyone, for your encouragement!

SpinTunes 2, Round 2, Process Notes 1

2010-10-18T12:49:00.000-07:00

So this challenge, announced late Friday night, is to produce a sequel to a famous song (one which made it to near the top of the charts). Erm. Um. Wow.

This one is a little tricky to me. The first step, of course, is to pick a song to continue. And while good songs are supposed to tell a story, in theory at least, that you could pick up ten days, a year, or 30 years later -- in truth an awful lot of songs that actually charted are pretty static and closed; very often, they don't describe a story, they describe a situation, and it's usually a pretty bland version of romantic love. Not that's love isn't all well and good, but to quote Gang of Four, "I don't think we're saying there's anything wrong with love -- we just don't think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded in mystery."

Besides, the songs that charted that I enjoy seem to tend towards folk, techno, new wave and punk, and I'm not sure they chart, for the most part, do they? Did The Orb's "Little Fluffy Clouds" chart? How about a sequel? Big raging tornadoes? I wrote down "Don't You Want Me, Baby" by The Human League -- that one seemed potentially promising; "Tainted Love," "Jack and Diane," and "Steppin' Out" by Joe Jackson. And went to bed in mild despair.

Saturday I didn't get much time, but I played with the idea of covering "Don't You Want Me, Baby." I didn't record anything, but I played around with some synthesizer sounds. It wasn't really going anywhere.

On Sunday Grace took the kids out to their grandmothers, so I had a chunk of time. I determined that in fact Thomas Dolby's song "She Blinded Me With Science" did, in fact, chart in June of 1983. I was a huge Dolby fan, collecting all his vinyl albums (including the European release of Golden Age of Wireless), EPs, and albums and EPs of collaborators including Lene Lovich and Adele Bertei. I recorded Dolby's King Biscuit Flour Hour concert off of K104 radio in Erie, PA. I remain a Dolby fan, and a few years ago I took my son Isaac to see him play in Detroit. Now he's working on new material. I think it will eventually be on a new album, but if you join his online fan club you can get access to the songs he's finished.

Anyway, "She Blinded Me With Science" is pretty much Dolby's silliest and least meaningful song, but it is pretty recognizable, and it does have the germ of a plot, at least as I see it: a mad scientist with a beautiful lab assistant. He has a love-hate relationship with her because she's "tidied up and [he] can't find anything! All [his] tubes and wires -- and careful notes! And antiquated notions." Despite the line "and now she's making love to me," I always thought of that as kind of his fantasy -- I imagine he's just too nerdy to do much but nervously dance with her at an office party and fantasize from afar. (Maybe I should go watch the very silly video).

So now it's almost 30 years later. Our mad scientist is semi-retired, and immensely successful. One day he gets a knock on the door. Why, it's his old lab assistant! And their positions are somewhat reversed -- he's gone ruggedly handsome with age. She's still beautiful -- his archetype of female pulchritude, in fact -- but alone -- and she needs a job.

I scribbled down these lyrics (actually imagining that these parts are spoken):

Goodness, Miss Sakamoto, is it really you? Do come in!
My my, you haven't aged a day!
May I offer you a cup of tea? Or maybe something a bit stronger?

And a scrap of a verse:

Once I was blinded by beauty
In the guise of technology
But these days I'm a nature lover
Give me a human woman under the covers

I inserted:

I loved to play with electronics
Producing all kinds of crazy sonics

I'm that, like in the original video, the mad scientist was a thinly disguised version of Dolby himself. And Dolby himself, after Wireless, took an interesting turn -- although he had injected a lot of humanity into his electronics, he became something rather different on some of his later songs: a jazz artist, sometimes singing white soul ballads, although of course he still loves his studio gear and fat waveforms and ear candy. So I imagined the mad scientist is much less nerdy in his old age -- not to mention rich.

So I started riffing in Logic with drum loops, grunts, squeaks, hiccups, shouted words, and keyboard parts that sounded vaguely like the Moog sound Dolby used in the original. But -- while I refereshed my memory of the original lyrics -- I did not listen to the original. I didn't want to accidentally recreate a melody too closely, if that makes sense.

Before I went to sleep Sunday night I had two little test bounce files that seemed to be promising enough to go forward. (I won't be able to work on this one much this coming weekend, so I have only a few evenings, whatever scraps of time I can get, to finish it -- and it's going to go really fast; there's no time to change approach radically or start over).

I wrote down the following revised and fleshed out lyrics:

Once I was blinded by beauty
That I mistook for technology
I loved to play with electronics
Producing all kinds of crazy sonics
But these days I'm a nature lover
Give me a real human under the covers

I imagined this next bit as a chorus, but I think it is going to be a bridge instead. Here is what I wrote on paper and recorded as a scratch vocal, mostly to determine timing (fleshed out and edited a bit from my paper notes):

BEAUTY mistaken for
SCIENCE in the service of
MONEY producing new
(beat) TECHNOLOGY
ThinkPods and GeekPads and things that warm up
Devices that vibrate, chips that make music
Psionics, dildonics, good old telephonics
Machines that go "bing," Science chthonic,
Rectangular screens that glow
so many things you can know
Connections, rejections
Way too much introspection
It's too much to handle
And it can't hold a candle to
(beat... beat...) you

The song might not have a true chorus, but will instead bounce between verses and spoken-word sections. Here are a few more scraps of verse:

My meters are all a-quiver
Your touch gives me the shivers
Your machinery's in order
Every system in working order
You know that science is dandy
But come on honey, give me some candy
I want to study biology
In specific, your anatomy

Although that's not quite right, it's too long, and I need a third verse. But Dolby's becoming a bit of a dirty old man in real life (as am I, apparently). If you've followed some of his recent songs, he is often quite suggestive. It seemed appropriate to have his "mad scientist" avatar behave the same way.

So that's how it stands now.

Now, it only needs:

Revised and tweaked percussion with ear candy and shifts as the song changes section
Rhythm guitar that hints at the original
Re-recorded verse 1 vocals
Finished verse 2 and 3 melodies (mostly the same as verse 1, but it needs to track exactly
Recorded verse 2 and 3 vocals
Bridge melody
Recorded bridge vocal
Synth bass
Perhaps some synth chords/pads to flesh out the backing
Harmony vocals if and where I can manage
Some percussion hits for kind of an outro that suggests the way the original ends
Oh, yeah -- A title

That's all. And a video, if I can manage it. Good Lord, I'm in hell again! Why do I get myself into these things?

In my fantasies, Dolby gets wind of this one, doesn't immediately sue me, likes it, tweets or blogs about it, and it goes viral.

Errr... perhaps I'd better lie down for a moment until reality returns.

If I keep doing this, though, it does seem at least plausible that at some point, one of these songs might gain some serious eyeballs and earholes... but for now, I'd settle for just making the cut of round 2. Please don't suck... please don't suck...

Update

If you're visiting due to Mr. Dolby's tweet, thank you for following my progress!

I'm competing in the SpinTunes 2 songwriting contest, round 2, having passed the round 1 judging by the skin of my teeth.

My track will be posted in this Bandcamp album by midnight Sunday, and available until I run out of free downloads. It will also be part of an album of this round's entries (to be announced).

I'm an amateur, doing this in my spare time -- so please, don't set your expectations too high, and be kind!

SpinTunes Round 1 Aftermath

2010-10-17T00:39:00.000-07:00

So, I should be working on round 2, but I'm not really gonna be able to concentrate on that until I've "debriefed" a bit from the round 1 ratings and reviews.

After listening to the 28 submissions, my impression was largely that there were about 5 or 6 "ringers" who are either pros or semi-pros, whose tracks had a professional "sheen," and who would clearly be rated much more highly than I was. These included Mitchell Adam Johnson, Rebecca Brickley, Ryan "Ruff" Smith, Ben Walker, and Brian Gray.

I figured Edric would slot in right beneath these along with Steve Durand, Duality, and Chris Cogott.

Below that I expected we'd start to hear from the folks who either couldn't produce or couldn't perform their songs quite as professionally, but who still had something compelling to say with their words and music despite some flaws -- like Austin Criswell, Ominous Ride, Governing Dynamics, and me.

Below those, I expected to see the ones that were essentially promising demos: just guitar and voice, like Russ, but that these would likely still make the cut, until we got to some tracks that I just didn't think were that good for various reasons, like wait WHAT and Swatshots, which wouldn't make the cut.

I thought I had a sense for these things -- I know my track has its flaws, but thought I managed to get it to stand out in some ways. The instrumentation, I thought, came out very nicely. I felt that I met the challenge well. I was aware my verses didn't have the most compelling melody. I expected to be somewhere in that mid-pack.

Apparently, I was a little over-confident: I did make the cut, but I barely squeaked by! There were two ties, for fourteenth place and seventeenth place. The one entry that made eighteenth place was the last to make the cut. I am tied for seventeenth with Joe and Denise, which just baffled me.

I expected Joe and Denise to place far better. Their ranking is almost incomprehensible to me! It is a beautiful song, and I feel that something is rather wrong with this contest if a beautiful song just barely squeaks by. I just wish I could better understand what that something is.

I was quite startled by both how much I disagree with the judges about some tracks, and also how much they disagree with each other about some tracks. That is strange to me. I wasn't expecting everyone to agree, but I thought the bulk of the tracks would be pretty non-controversial, as far as scoring went.

Governing Dynamics was rated the highest by Dr. Lindyke, barely made the cut by Kevin Savino-Riker, was judged about mid-pack in those that made the cut by Glen Philips, was near the bottom (failing to make the cut) as rated by Jeff MacDougall, and was ranked third by Zack Scott. That seems a bit bizarre for what, to my ear, is a pretty and competently done track -- a decently structured and written song -- with a performance that dragged it down a bit.

Ominous Ride was third according to Dr. Lindyke, but ranked very low by the other judges, only making the cut (just) in one other case. This wasn't my favorite track -- but, really judges? A skillfully played, produced, and sung rock song that has a bouncy and fun feel to it rates so low?

Ben Walker failed to make the cut only in the opinion of one judge, Glen Philips, and that was on the technicality of using too much of the "Cheers" theme song. I would have thought that would bother more of the judges a lot more.

Edric, who I thought would obviously be in the top four or five, was all over the map, although did average out ranked reasonably well. I can't come up with any rational explanation for this.

I was surprised that four judges rated Wait WHAT mid-pack or better.

Gweebol did fairly well by all the judges, which also surprised me, because I feel like the song, while very nicely produced, did not (or barely) met the challenge.

Zach Scott's opinion of Steve Durand's track was a bit of an outlier.

I'm not enough of a statistician to be able to determine this, but it would be interesting to calculate exactly which songs were the most "controversial," which judge was the biggest outlier, and which opinions of particular songs by particular judges were outliers. It would be equally interesting, perhaps, to see which songs inspired the least controversy.

Anyway, what did they think of my track? Did they write anything I can learn from?

Zack Scott wrote "Clever lyrics, and the skill is apparent, but the sleepy song didn't do it for me."

He didn't mention the shift in the bridge. I agree that the verses and chorus feel a little sluggish. I'm at a bit of a loss how to avoid that, other than just increasing the BPM. (The rap section and the verses and chorus have the same BPM). Maybe just a faster rhythm, shorter notes, a little more staccato performance? There was some reason why the lyrics inspired me to sustain those notes; I guess I was trying to convey a sense of peacefulness in the verses. Ann Arbor is a tree city, after all, and I generally felt very peaceful there, whether walking downtown or biking out Huron River Drive.

Jeff MacDougall wrote extensive comments: "Challenge: A - Clearly about Ann Arbor. Lyrics: A - Some very clever rhymes and interesting phrasing. Structure: A - The basic structure isn't bad but a little odd. Took me out of the song a few times. Did enjoy the rap break though. Melody: B - Solid melody in the chorus but the verses left me wanting more. This song gets extra points for the rap break. If it had a better melody during the verses, I would have ranked it a bit higher. This stands out as the most original effort in this contest."

I'm not sure exactly what he meant about "took me out of the song." Distracting because of the long second verse? The rap section? The spoken words or sound of the car leaving at the end? I can only agree with him about the verses. It's nice to be called clever and definitely nice to be called most original. (I'm actually not sure I agree, though; I thought Charlie McCarron's song was much quirkier, with his looping falsetto vocals and intriguing instrumentation).

Kevin Savino-Riker also wrote very detailed comments: "Starting out as a stylish sing-songy guitar pop-folk piece, you have a nice lead guitar lick and great interplay between the guitar parts and bass line... but then the gear change into a fully-produced prog-rock rap track caught me off guard. It was sort of a “we now interrupt this song to bring you... THIS OTHER SONG” moment. The transition back to the pop-folk outro felt much more natural to me, though, so I’m not sure how to suggest a better way to lead into the rap segment. The lyrics throughout the song are great; this whole song is an awesome frustrated kiss-off; you got some great digs in there. The sound bites are a nice touch. Taken individually, I love each part of the song. The intro and outro lyrics are wistful and sweet, nicely matching the softness of the music, while the rap interlude completely rocks and the lyrics accordingly take on that great pissed-off edge. Taken as a whole, if the transition were a little less abrupt, I’d be less inclined to want this to be two separate songs."

That's a great critique -- I struggled with that transition. I did what I could to put a drum break in there and ramp up the volume. I'm not quite sure how I could have made it better. His comments about the interplay between guitar parts and bass is very gratifying, since I worked hard on that (although no one seemed to get that the main "guitar" part is a ukulele). And I'm also very gratified by his comments about the lyrics.

It's interesting to note that no one so far has criticized my singing, which I've felt is one of my main weak points. Maybe it's not as weak a weak point as I feared?

Glen Philips rated me quite low, barely making the cut, and wrote "Ouch. Painful rhymes. I get it, that’s the joke, but I’m not laughing. Ah a change up! BTW I’d kill for a $250K house, triple that for San Francisco Bay area prices. I like the lazy acoustic riff. I don’t care for the vocals. The overly cheeky affectation is not fun. You met the challenge very well, it’s just a tough song to get into or care about much. I should say good production! At least I’m not distracted by production issues and can focus on the song and performance. At least the bridge has some life, but I don’t care for it either."

Given that I've gotten so much support for my lyrics and rhyming, I'm going to basically have to see his comments as an outlier and chalk it up to "I can't please everyone." "Cheeky affectation?" If ever I could sing a personal song honestly, this would be it, so I really don't know how he could think it is "affected." Perhaps because of my very mixed feelings about the city I struggled to succeed and feel secure in for twenty years? How to make it more personal or easier to get into or care about? Maybe that's a matter, in part, of the vocal performance? "I don't care for the vocals" sounds like a pretty clear opinion about my singing.

Dr. Lindyke wrote "OK, do this... go back and listen the spoken portion of this song, and compare it to the rest. It's as if they were written by two completely different people. One is hip and solid and edgy, and the other is lost and looking. Now go back and listen to "Polly Loves the Rain" from Song Fu 6, round 1. DAY-um! Paul... spoken word is your forte. You're GREAT at it. Keep the rap, replace the song."

Erm. Not sure quite what to do with that. I wrote all the lyrics in the same day or two, and I'm the same person as myself. The bridge changes mood because I had some more angry and bitter feelings I wanted to get out. It's supposed to be kind of an emotional journey. I guess the transition is a problem.

Should I just pretty much try to give up on singing or writing melodies? I really admire musicians like MC Frontalot, but I'm not sure I'm ready to be entirely a nerdcore rapper. I don't really know and love rap enough to feel like I can do that. Replace the sung part for just this song?

I'll give round two a shot, although I'm not nearly as sanguine about this competition as I was for round one. I have much less free time available this round; Grace is going to be out of town next weekend, so I pretty much have to be done Friday night, since I likely won't get much time at all on the weekend.

This challenge seems like it is going to be quite difficult. There are some songs that I'd love to write and record sequels to, but I don't think most of them qualify because they didn't chart high enough. I can imagine needing to try at least one or two before I find one that clicks. I don't really have time for any false starts. And i don't feel like I'm quite musician enough to really carry off an homage to the instrumentation and style, especially singing style, of very many artists, with the possible exception of something like Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me With Science" or After the Fire's "Der Komissar." And -- those songs don't feel to me like there is any sensible sequel to be written! Hmmm... maybe something Beatles?

SpinTunes #2 Round 1 Reviews

2010-10-15T10:56:00.000-07:00

One of the things I'm really digging about SpinTunes is that it isn't settled by a web page vote, but by judges, and the judges are writing reviews. I am excited to read them and hoping to gain some insight from them. That's oodles more meaningful to an aspiring songwriter.

I'm a contestant, not a judge, but I thought that in the spirit of the thing I'd write my own mini-reviews of the 28 official entries. You can find them in the SpinTunes #2 Round 1 album. Note that if you download the songs, Travis would prefer that you download the whole album rather than the individual songs. The reason for this is apparently that Bandcamp counts each individual song download against the free 500-download limit, but treats the download of the full album the same way. (If Travis runs out of free downloads, he will have to start paying to provide more).

If I were actually a judge, I'd be asked to pick 8 to eliminate, so I'll do that, too.

It may be interested to see whether my picks match or don't match the picks of the official judges. Note that I have not read any of their comments yet.

So -- headphones on -- here we go!

1. Danny Blackwell: "A Song About Woodsetts"

The production is a little crude; there's a lot of computer fan noise or other hum, and the guitar is too loud in the mix with respect to the vocals, and clips here and there. The lyrics are very pretty though, the singing is nicely done, and the picking and slides are well-played. Lyrically, it feels slightly incomplete. It sounds like this was done live, demo-style, rather than tracked and mixed. However, it also feels very personal, and I like that. I give it a B.

2. Ben Walker: "Oxford"

The mix is EQ'ed a bit too bass-heavy. The lyrics are excellent, for the most part, although not all the metaphors really pop ("a roll of bubble wrap" doesn't quite work for me.) The singing is top-notch and the vocal track fits quite well into the mix. I really like the tango-inspired middle section. I have a BIG problem with this track, though, on an intellectual-property basis. I feel like the inclusion of the famous chorus from the TV show Cheers, is too big a musical quote. Quoting one line or one melody phrase would be funny, just like The Huey Lewis song "I Want a New Drug" quotes "Purple Haze" in the guitar solo, and Rush's 2112 Overture quotes the 1812 Overture. But this takes four of the most recognizable bars from another song and uses them verbatim. I think that's probably not justifiable, fair use or not; if this were a commercially produced song, I can guarantee a Verve Pipe-style lawsuit would be in the offing and Mr. Walker would owe all his royalties for this song to Viacom or whoever owns that bit of intellectual property. So: A-, but disqualified -- and thus ELIMINATED. (That's 1 of the 8).

3. Austin Criswell: "Mt. Holly"

Beautiful ambient singing: this reminds me of a long-gone band called Galaxie 500. The production is a little boomy and distorted, but not unbearably so. The lyrics are pretty. It's short and sweet. A-

4. Inverse T. Clown: "The Pinpoint Accurate Telling of the Origin of Salem, OH"

There's nothing in the rules that says the song about your hometown has to be truthful. So from Inverse, we get a funny fantasy with a fat bass-heavy electro beat. It's competently done but it feels slightly flat and pasted together, without a lot of emotional interest. B-, but it doesn't get eliminated.

5. David Ritter: "Fired"

The whole mix is over-compressed. The lyrics are funny, but it sounds to me like this was a song that was about something else, but which was hastily repurposed to be about a town by mentioning where it happened. Competently performed and produced for the most part, but I'd disqualify it, were I judging, for failing almost entirely to be actually about a town. So -- ELIMINATED. (That's 2 of 8).

6. Governing Dynamics: "Stars Over Avalon"

I'd like to start off by saying that I would love, love, love to have the chance to play live with Travis of Governing Dynamics. As a guitarist, naturally, I just love his churning guitar lines. This one reminds me a little of Sonic Youth. It's mournful and atmospheric. That said, it's also a little sluggish, and feels too long. I like the phrases "what we might lack in artificial light -- at least we can look up and see the stars at night." But the lyrics need a little more life and a little more editing, it feels a little unfocused, and it tells me very little about the town. Another B.

7. Duality: "To the End of the World"

Joe's singing on this one is downright operatic, and it complements Denise's flowing river of arpeggios beautifully. When Joe hits the chorus and his voice is doubled, it gives me chills. "Although I've loved this town, it's time that I learn to fly -- leaving behind all I've known." On paper, the words sound like too much speech and not enough melody to work -- but it does work, very nicely. There are a couple of slightly off notes in the accompaniment, and some places where the aligned vocals don't entirely align, so I have to ding it just a bit. It also could have used a change in the arrangement, say for a chorus break, to change things up slightly over the course of the song. But it gets an A-.

8. Edric Haleen: "Lansing, Michigan"

I expected Edric to go over the top, and I wasn't disappointed --- his barbershop quartet with himself is amazing. The lyrics are gently humorous in a way that, as a sarcatic pessimist myself, I can admire but just simply can't pull off myself. He's very likely simply more emotionally well-adjusted than I am. He may even have had a happy childhood -- the jerk. Edric deserves perfect marks for this one. A+.

9. wait WHAT: "LBC"

The production is excellent here, but it drags, it feels like a very stock instrumental accompaniment, and I don't really have any appreciation for most of the jokes. (A gay bar that has upside-down barstools? Fellatio jokes? Really? Are we in 6th grade here?) C. And what the hell is LBC anyway? (The song should tell me; I shouldn't have to Google it). That's kind of indicative of the way in which this song feels like an inside joke. ELIMINATED. (That's 3 of 8).

10. Brian Gray: "South Bend Aid"

This is both beautifully sung, and hilariously funny -- probably the best one so far. My only gripe, and it's a small one, is that the backing tracks all feel a little bit like a "band in a box." But I can't complain too loudly since I use Apple Loops and Logic-supplied drum samples for my own percussion sometimes. I do love the modulations, so I wouldn't cut the breakdown part or the end, but I would shave a little bit of the middle bars and make it a hair shorter. A-.

11. Charlie McMarron: "Stillwater, MN Air"

The instrumentation in this one is downright weird -- Philip Glass-like looping, rolling piano arpeggios and clarinets doing very odd things. Is that a recorder or a slide whistle? I think this is referencing something but I can't quite figure out. As soon as I feel like I start to get a handle on what the song is doing, it's over. Interesting, I guess, very pretty at times, but it just doesn't quite work for me. B-.

12. Emperor Gum: "Cheltenham"

Clarinets again, and what is that bass instrument? Even more Philip Glass-like. the vocal is very poppy (as in a badly placed, overloaded microphone) and distorted, and that makes it a bit painful in the headphones and a bit hard to understand. The lyrics are elliptical to the point of being almost incomprehensible. A recitation of things in a sculpture garden in Cheltenham? The clarinets sound nice. C. ELIMINATED. (That's 4 of 8).

13. Common Lisp: "Leaving Ann Arbor"

The instruments are pretty and nicely recorded. The vocals are a weak as far as pitch. The verses and chorus feel like they needed to be a few bpm faster. It's a love/hate relationship, apparently -- it really takes an unexpected turn into a funk/rap section with a heavy bass line the lyrics turn into a dark and angry rap, and then finishes on a spoken word conversation and a gentle fade out with a Zappa-esque kazoo bit to lighten the tone again as a car drives away. (I'm not going to give myself a grade -- I'll let the judges do that -- but I'm also not going to eliminate myself, because of course I want the chance to try the next challenge!)

14. Mitchell Adam Johnson: "London"

A band-in-the-box production again? Nope, at least not the guitar and bass. This sounds like something done in a full-service studio with real money behind it. The words are beautifully sung, but the lyrics weren't quite compelling for me. B.

15. Rebecca Brikley: "Here"

Beautifully done. Beautifully sung. Moving lyrics and a fantastic performance -- very warm and personal and human-sounding. Fantastic piano. Isn't there a rule about keeping this contest open only to amateurs? Because this sounds like someone with several albums under her belt. A+

16. Charlie Wolf: "I Love LA"

Very nice bass sound, a guitar that sounds ever so slightly out of tune. The vocal is decent, but just a little weak. Poignant lyric, but having spent a summer in Los Angeles, it raises the question: can anyone actually love L. A. without sounding phony? A little short, a little unmoving, and doesn't stick in my head very well. B.

17. Ominous Ride: "San Francisco"

I love the slightly raw-sounding guitar -- is that a chorus effect on a piezo-equipped electric masquerading as an acoustic? The lyrics are just slightly overwhelmed and a little hard to understand. The percussion needs to be something that is EQ'ed a little differently. As the song goes what sounds like a second guitar gets a little out of sync here and there with the main guitar and drifts out of sync with the percussion, and the main riff gets a little stale. B-. It just doesn't consistently sound good. ELIMINATED. (That's 5 of 8).

18. Swatshots: "Level"

The instruments start out with a lot of reverb and buzzy low synth, like something you might hear in the soundtrack for The Crow. But this is muddy, I can't understand the vocals, and the vocal performance is heavily distorted and mostly just sounds bad. It's like a bad version of The The or His Name is Alive. I guess they are channeling Joy Division, but even that was better recorded. I appreciate the anger in the lyrics but not the production, and it just gets worse as it goes on, like a high school kid with his first 4-track. This is one of the only ones I don't even want to listen to until the end. C-. ELIMINATED. (That's 6 of 8).

19. Russ Rogers: "Song for St. Michael"

Russ Rogers is part of the duet Godz Poodlz. The lyrics are a decent effort but the production is unfortunate; it sounds like it was recorded on a mono cassette recorder. So, it's a demo, and a badly recorded one at that. Not quite sure how to evaluate it fairly; am I supposed to judge the song as it is, or as I imagine it would be if it were given a proper production? (This question becomes critical later, when I get to JoAnn's track). It's too bad; I get the impression that Russ just didn't get enough quiet time to put into it (and wasn't able to do a multi-track recording at all). The lyric seems decent enough. B-.

20. Chris Cogott: "Fairfield"

A big fat power pop anthem. Nice! The chorused guitar is excellent. Slightly bland, though. A-.

21. Ross Durand: "From There"

I like the ringing, boomy guitar and bass contrasting with the delicate picking. I like the lyrics and the production and vocal performance is quite good. A.

22. Ryan "Ruff" Smith: "Golden Valley Sunday"

Jazzy electric and acoustic guitars! It's a bit of a relief after all the power chords. This is beautifully done. Impeccably recorded vocals and instruments. The ironic contrast between the lyrics and the performance is just marvelous. Another ringer? A+.

23. JoAnn Abbot: "Not in Copiague"

Like Russ' track, it's a little frustrating to review this one. JoAnn is an excellent singer who here sings this one as a single voice entirely a capella. It's a pretty melody. She's a good singer. But it doesn't even qualify as a demo. It's not even to the point where a musician collaborator could honestly play her an accompaniment part and still call it her work, because she hasn't even sketched the barest hint of accompaniment.

It seems to me that the challenge of a songwriting contest is to come up with a complete song. To my way of thinking, this means, at a minimum, instrumentation playing explicit or implicit chords to accompany the vocal melody, and stating or at least implying a rhythm. Without that, it's like comparing a black and white pencil drawing to an oil painting, and I don't feel that it is fair either to JoAnn or to the rest of us to compare them on the same playing field. For a song to feel complete, it generally needs accompaniment to act as backdrop, set the mood, either match or contrast with the tone of the vocal and lyrics, and hold it all up.

Now, some folks might think I'm being too narrow in my thinking of what constitutes a song; after all, there's nothing in the rules to disqualify JoAnn's song. Some songs deliberately eschew all accompaniment -- Billy Bragg's song "Chile, Your Waters Run Red," as he sings it live, is a beautiful example -- but you could argue that he's working with the reverb in the hall, and even with the sound of the audience, in fleshing out the song, and it's an artistic choice. And it works because of the power of the lyrics and the plaintive singing style. His song isn't lacking anything.

To me, trying to judge this song is like test-driving a car that has a running engine but no wheels or seats -- would Car and Driver rate it on what they imagine the cornering and comfort of the ride would feel like? No, that wouldn't be fair to the other car companies that engineered and build the whole package.

So, either this song is barely a D, for what it lacks, or gets a grade of "Incomplete," which would make me eliminate it anyway -- which is not really fair to what JoAnn actually has done here, which is to sketch out a really quite decent lyric and vocal performance -- or it shouldn't be considered a qualified entry. Rather than insult JoAnn, or make a mockery of all the effort that the other competitors have put into their instrumentation and production, it makes more sense to me to say that it isn't fair to pit these songs against each other on the same field of battle. I'd disqualify it. Would I want a rules change that says that entries may not be plain a capella recordings? I'm not sure about that -- I'd hate to rule a future "Chile, Your Waters Run Red."

I'd be very interested in your opinion. Does this make any sense? Am I being too hard on JoAnn?

If I were just to judge it as I imagine a completed arrangement to be, I'd have to say that the melody is a little repetitive and it has a few too many lines (if fully worked out as an arrangement with a chorus and instrumental break of some kind, it would be at least five minutes long). But I don't want to give it a letter grade. I like JoAnn, and I like what she's doing, but out of fairness to the competitors, I feel that this has to be one of the songs that gets ELIMINATED. (That's 7 of 8).

24. The Boffo Yux Dudes: "It's My Hometown, Syracuse, Baby!"

This is a funnily bland band-in-a-box (perhaps a mighty Casio or Yamaha?) backing track, with a lyric and vocal that is decently recorded. It's lacking in dynamics a bit. B.

25. Gweebol: "Darktown"

This sounds like Frente (does anyone remember Frente?) Or maybe Tori Amos on acid. It gets a lot of points for originality. The vocal is nicely recorded. It seems to only use the actual name of the town in passing, though, which seems a little odd. I'm not quite gonna disqualify it, but I'm tempted. B.

26. Zarni DeWet: "Where I'm Gonna Go"

A breathy female vocal and piano, recorded a little poorly but with a performance that makes up for it. With not much change in the meter or instrumentation (no bridge per se) it risks starting to feel a little repetitive, and that's what happens at about 1:40. Does it mention the actual town name? It seems to mention several, but it isn't clear which one it is about. A-. ELIMINATED for not clearly meeting the challenge (that's 8 of 8).

27. Heather Miller: "Fairfield"

I like the tinny guitar, played slightly ineptly with string scrapes, with the full kick drum -- it's a little odd, but it shows that there was some thought about EQ'ing things so that the instruments and vocals don't stomp on each other. The vocal performance is nicely done, with a country feel. I wish I could sing as well as she does. The lyrics have occasional funny bits. It's a little hard to distinguish the verses from the choruses. The nostalgia feels slightly forced. Is there nothing at all bad to say about the town? A.

28. Steve Durand: "In Paradise with You"

One of the more bizarre songs in the pack, this is a Hawaiian slack-key guitar ballad. The singing is just ever so slightly bad, but mostly in a good way. It takes the album out on a slightly silly note. Tape hiss. Is this recorded on a real cassette four-track? I get the feeling that the artist is doing a lot with very little. Not my favorite style, but very nicely done. A.

And now for the shadows:

Duality: "I Just Can't Find a Virgin"

I wish Joe and Denise had chosen to make this their actual entry! It's hilarious. It might need another reference or two to actual things in Dundee to really bring it home. Is this Joe attempting an American accent? It would be insulting, but Denise is in Austin, so they get a pass. The harmony is just delightful.

Via Satellite: "From Home"

Mournful, muddy, and hard to listen to. The lyrics are buried. There's a lot going on in this track, but I would have definitely eliminated this one had it been in the competition.

Bram Tant: "Living in the Countryside"

I wish this one had made it in under the deadline, because it shows a lot of promise, and I'd like to hear more. It's a little crude and unpolished, but the lyrics are appropriately descriptive and sardonic, and it definitely feels original and personal -- both things I value a lot, you may have noticed. I'm not quite sure how he's getting that odd droning guitar sound -- an alternate tuning?

The Steinberger Parts Dilemma

2010-10-13T11:03:00.000-07:00

Previously on this blog I've talked about my Steinberger basses and the difficulty in finding proper parts for them. Here are a few details on what I've learned in the hopes that it helps someone else.

The first thing to keep in mind is that there are many versions of the famed Steinberger bridge, and they tend to all be slightly incompatible in size and fasteners used to attach them to the bodies.

The older bridges that I've seen -- from the Newburgh-manufactured era -- use somewhat exotic and hard-to-find black "Filister head" screws: #6, 3/4" in length. I had to resort to trial and error, mail-ordering several different types until I found the correct screws to attach the 4-string bridge to an XQ-4 body.

Looking for a correct original replacement bridge? Good luck. You can probably find one for a Synapse, a Nashville-era instrument, or a Spirit, but bridges for Newburgh-made instruments are hard to come by.

I found out the hard way that the clever Steinberger "kick-stand" leg rest is functional, but has a rather critical design flaw: they are fragile. I made the mistake of putting my XP bass down on a bed leaving the "kick stand" unfolded, to attend to something, and turning my back on one of my children for just a moment. The instrument got pulled off the bed and onto the carpeted floor. With maple bodies, composite necks, light weight, and a 5-bolt neck attachment, these instruments aren't all that fragile, and the instrument itself would have suffered no damage at all. But the leg rest is essentially a little lever made out of rather thin aluminum, and it snapped off like a dry twig.

After I beat the child in question severely (KIDDING! I'm KIDDING!) Although I'm ashamed to admit that some angry yelling was involved... OK, I mean "after I calmed down," I thought OK, no big deal -- newer Steinbergers have the same leg rest, so I ought to be able to get a replacement, right? Er, not so much. The originals use "Filister head" machine screws. But not the longer Filister head wood screws like the ones that were used to attach the bridges. They are countersunk differently. The head shape and width is very important because they fit flush, so you don't snag your clothes on them. These screws use a 7/64" drive -- another somewhat rarely-seen dimension.

Left: Filister head machine-threaded screw that was used to attach the leg rest; right: Filister head wood screws that was used to attach the bridge (and which I did successfully find replacement parts for, but it wasn't easy).

By the way, if you ever need some of those Filister head wood screws on the right, to attach a Newburgh-era bridge to the body on something like an XQ-4 bass (and don't ask me exactly what other models they might have been used on), I have a whole bag of them now. Drop me a comment, and I'll mail you some, so you don't have to go through what I had to go through to find them.

Anyway, now that a short story has become hopelessly long, the screws weren't broken, so I thought I'd be able to reuse them, but I picked up a couple of replacement leg rests and the original screws don't fit. Fun, huh? (In other words, the "Licensed By" leg rests aren't quite the same as the originals.

I could go on a quest for machine screws that are the same in all other respects except the head, I suppose, but I know from my previous efforts how hard it can be to find exactly matching screws.

It leaves me wondering if it is possible to remove just the head part of the folding leg rest and swap it with the leg part of a newer one, or drill out the part a bit to accommodate the heads of the screws. It is possible, of course, to play without the leg rest: just put on a strap and stand. But my "use case" is to use this thing mostly in the studio while sitting at the computer. Maybe I will just leave it off and make the XP the bass I always play standing up. (In fact, that's just what I did for "Leaving Ann Arbor").

The situation with bridge parts is worse. I wrote about the damaged bridge on my XQ-4 v1 bass. It got worse, such that the D string tuner no longer works at all. It was almost impossible to get the D string off, but it is now sitting here unplayable.

It needs more attention than I can give it, especially since the last thing I want to do is screw up an original Newburgh-era Steinberger bridge.

I went so far as to buy a replacement bridge, but it doesn't fit. The Nashville-era XQ-4 bridges aren't quite compatible. On the bright side, I suppose, I have a spare Nashville-era XQ-4 bridge that fits the white Steinberger, should that one ever become hopelessly damaged as well.

I asked Peekamoose Guitars in New York if I could send them the bridge to repair. I expected either a "yes" or "no" answer, or maybe a "no" with an explanatory note along the lines of "we only repair complete instruments." Instead I got back a surprisingly ranty note about how they have to test the instrument under playing conditions, saying that there "are some aspects of how components behave which cannot be replicated by substitute means. The only way to prove beyond any doubt the instrument's parts are working correctly for that instrument alone, is to test, measure and play it at the adjustment specs we know are dead on the money..."

Yeah. Erm, thanks for the lecture, but methinks thou dost protest too harshly. you could have just said that it isn't profitable enough for you to work on a part without being able to charge for a setup too. That, I can understand, and I don't really object to it -- luthiers deserve to get paid. But don't tell me a shop that does a whole lot of repair on Steinberger bridges couldn't fix a screwed-up tuning machine without my whole instrument. Luthiers tend to keep scratch bodies and necks around. They make little jigs and test apparatus all the time so they can do things more efficiently and easily without constantly putting the parts back on, or taking them off, the instruments in question. Hell, just attaching the bridge to the end of a two-by-four, with a nail at the other end to hook the string's ball end onto, would serve to establish whether a the tuning machine works smoothly under tension. It probably would take a luthier less time to make that jig than it did to write the e-mail I got in response. And I don't need them to do the setup. I enjoy doing that part myself.

I might still send it to them -- they've pretty much got the market on Steinberger repairs cornered at this point -- but that exchange left just a slightly bad taste in my mouth. And I've got to consider cost of shipping -- this is a heavy bass. This doesn't encourage me to ask them if they've got a replacement leg rest I can install on the XP bass. It's the kind of situation where I might hold on to it until the next time I'm actually in the neighborhood, maybe as part of a vacacion trip to the area, and see if I can drop it off in person.

I also attempted some minor superglue finish repair on the XQ-4, and it was a bit of a disaster. The instrument has a few spots of leprosy in addition to the broken bridge, where the repair is worse than the original ding. The superglue I used was not good stuff -- it dried yellowish, looking far worse than the superglue Stewart Macdonald sells for drop fills. It works really well for Dan Erlewine, and he explains and advocates for the technique in his book, but I'm clearly not him. And this isn't even my first attempt. My advice to you: don't try. If I do send it to Peekamoose I'll ask them if they can do anything about the finish. My expectation -- not a lot, but maybe some of the more egregious leprosy can be polished out a little.

There's one more thing -- both my Newburgh Steinberger basses came only with gig bags. I'd like to get hard cases for them. It's hard to find a hard case that will fit the small "Flying V" body of an XP bass. There are, though, companies that will take a tracing and a few measurements and build you a custom case that fits your instrument snugly. I might look into that.

Meanwhile, I'm still keeping an eye out on eBay for a matching Steinberger GP guitar, maybe an R-trem model without the Trans-Trem. These models are quite rare. They either don't come up, or they are extremely expensive, and I don't have a lot of money to put into the guitar collection at the moment. Maybe someday!

UPDATE: I finally got the right replacement leg rest! An eBay seller just happened to post one for sale, and my automatic search caught it for me. See: http://geekversusguitar.blogspot.com/2011/04/right-leg-rest-at-long-last.html

Leaving Ann Arbor

2010-10-13T10:52:00.000-07:00

I'm in the SpinTunes 2 songwriting contest, and I've completed the first challenge: a little ditty called "Leaving Ann Arbor."

You can find the tune on BandCamp, complete with lyrics, here. I made a quick lip-sync'ed/finger-sync'ed video for YouTube which you can find here.

Here's approximately what my studio-in-progress looks like now:

On this track, I played the Applause ukulele, the black Steinberger XP bass, and added a few accents in the form of chorused guitar chords played on the Parker Fly. All the guitars went through the Radial JDV direct box, which did just what I was hoping it would do -- loaded the pickups, both piezo and electric, the way they should be loaded, and made the instruments sound the way they are supposed to sound. I haven't been able to do a direct comparison between this box and some other direct boxes I was considering -- for example, the Summit Audio TD-100, which also has a variable load control -- but I definitely don't have any regrets about buying the Radial box. I'm very satisified with the way the instruments came out.

As for the vocals -- well, I think they are still kind of my weak spot. I did as many retakes as I had time for. My recording time is very limited. If the kids are in the building, and awake, I can't really record vocals. I did most of my tracking very late at night, after the kids were in bed and there were no lawnmowers, jackhammers, or leaf blowers running in the neighborhood, and no traffic on our street. I had to give up a lot of sleep working on this song. I've discovered that singing (or playing) when I'm very tired really doesn't produce the best results, but that's the time I had to work on it, and it is what it is.

It didn't help that I chose some intervals in my melody that were a little tricky for me: for example, on the line "One cafe was all I needed," there's a minor second interval on the word "cafe." Apparently I'm terrible at singing half steps, at least in that note range, and I just couldn't hear that bit of melody in my head correctly in order to sing it accurately. I finally had to put together a track of MIDI keyboard just to listen to in my headphones, as a pitch reference, to get it anywhere near correct, and it's still pretty loose. And all this is double-tracked, so I had to sing it twice, synchronizing the takes as well as I could.

The instrumental accompaniment was kind of picked out by ear -- I'm not even really certain what key the song is in, and there's something that is, to my ear, not quite right about the way they fit together. Had there been more time, I might have been able to fully write out the melody and chords and listen to them as MIDI parts to make sure they fit together the way I wanted. But again: tight deadline, late-night recording, and a lot of takes; it is what it is.

If you're interested in the process, my scrawled notes kind of illustrate some of how it went. First, I had to pick a town. I was born in Seattle, but only lived there for three years. spent the ages of 3-10 or so living in North East, PA, then moved to Harborcreek, PA and lived there until I left for college. I spent four years of college in Ohio, then most of a year in an internship in the same place, then moved to Ann Arbor in (if I recall correctly) June of 1990. I lived in Ann Arbor until June 1st of this year. So I've lived in Ann Arbor longer than anywhere else, and having just left, it was definitely uppermost in my mind -- and I was full of mixed and conflicting feelings about my time there, viewing it both warmly and with disgust, and seeing it as both a success and a failure.

I started with the beginning of the first verse in my head. The silliness of the first verse was intentional -- I wanted to do the silly wordplay and artificial word breaks to force a rhyme:

Ann Arbor / You haven't got a harbor
But you've got a big arbor-
etum... and enormous U-
niversity...

So I had the first few lines in my head. Every Sunday we take the kids over to my mother-in-law's house, and I usually bring a guitar. This past Sunday I took the ukulele, since I had the vague idea that I wanted this song to have uke accompaniment. I got an hour or two where the kids were mostly out of my hair, with the ukulele, to try to come up with a melody and an accompanying ukulele part. I wrote out that riff and some chords (just picked out by ear, written down in ukulele tab, without really knowing what chords they all were), and that's my first page of notes:

Then, basically, another session or two of scribbling ideas for possible lyrics (both literal rhyming phrases and words/phrases that didn't fit but which I hoped I could eventually make fit). I think I wrote some of these out while waiting for my son to finish his Hapkido lesson. (As a parent, I've got to take what down time I can). Note that at this stage I feel that it is pretty important to write things down on paper, in pen, instead of typing them on the computer -- for one thing, I can do that anywhere, and for another, there is no deleting -- although lines are scratched out, they are still readable. You never know when you might want to go back to one of your original ideas and refine it. If you delete that line on the computer, doing editing on the fly, it is gone. (Of course I'm ignoring the idea that you might use version control, but most people don't do that, and you want to resist the temptation to delete anything you wrote even if you deleted it immediately, on the fly, between saving separate versions).

The first thing I recorded was the ukulele, and the first vocal part I finished was the chorus. I recorded a separate ukulele track of the melody for the chorus for reference when singing. I didn't have a melody for the verses for some time. In a later evening session I finally picked out a melody and recorded the first verse on ukulele for reference. The song sat like that until the next night, then I did a scratch vocal of the second verse with the kids screaming in the background, and of course realized that the second verse didn't exactly match the first verse. Despair, editing backing uke loops, retakes!

Then in preparation for actually recording the full vocal, I started transcribing what I had into a text file on the computer and editing that:

A few lines got cut: in the chorus I was considering using the lines "I once adored you / I now abhor you" before "I just can't afford to love you anymore," but it didn't really work. I had some extra verse lyrics: "I didn't have a lot of cash / At the Fleetwood, I ate hippie hash / I grew long hair / I was full of hot air" but the second verse was getting too long, but yet I didn't feel there was justification for a third verse.

The rap part was originally going to be sung, but essentially I wasn't having any luck coming up with a melody for the bridge. When it came about, I did it very rapidly, with only one or two takes of both the spoken voice tracks and the bass line, and assembled in an hour or two. The drums were Apple Loops. The keyboard part I never actually played -- I is just not even true chords, for the most part, mostly just two-note intervals, drawn in Logic's MIDI score window after picking out a cool-sounding synth sound. When I pieced it together I removed that "You'll be a renter once more" line because it had the wrong tone, but also because the section was getting too long. I liked the rap section quite a bit, but it was lacking a good sense of transition into and out of it. I eventually patched that together with more drum fills, tightening up the editing.

In one of these evenings I tried to add a 12-string guitar part, and that was the point where I tried to write out some chord names (and, I discovered later, screwed some of them up). The chord names below the arrows are transposed into my 12-string tuning, which is down a full step. So this is the closest thing I've got to a lead sheet for the song, and I know it's at least partially wrong. (That "Still Needs" checklist at the bottom rapidly expanded on the last day).

There was supposed to be a third verse, but the song was getting pretty long, so I improvised the outro part instead. The kazoo idea had been in my head from the beginning -- I went out and bought a kazoo especially for this song -- but the kazoo and shaker were recorded very late in the process. The kazoo came in a kit with shakers, a wood block, spoons, and a little tambourine and I recorded all those, but would up using only the shaker and kazoo.

I uploaded a "finished" track for safety, in case I screwed it up badly. After it was supposedly done, though, it took at a twelve-hour session hours of just cleanup and tweaking: mixing, mixing, mixing, setting volume envelopes on each track, adding bass line to the parts where it was lacking, coming up with an electric guitar part, re-tracking vocals, aligning vocals, re-tracking vocals again, aligning vocals again, tweaking plug-in effects, choosing mastering settings, bouncing some test tracks. During this time, I also went out and recorded Grace driving the van away. I also dug up the clip from one of our podcast chats.

This part is a bit of a blur. Basically, I worked until I was dizzy with exhaustion and had to stop. I uploaded one more version that I called "Final," and tried to pick up the remains of my weekend with the family -- and despite being so tired, slept very badly and started out the week feeling like death warmed over.

And I screwed it up in one respect: the final version that went to the judges had levels set way too low. I had been playing with the mastering plug-in settings, and had taken compression ratios way down so the quiet parts would sound more open, and so there would be a big volume difference between the verses and the rap section. I also set the downward expansion ratios in the multi-band compressor settings to unity, because I didn't want quiet ukulele bits to be faded downward when there was nothing else happening in that EQ band -- I wanted there to be some quiet space that wasn't silence, if that makes sense.

But when I did this, I brought down the overall volume of the track, and I was neglecting in not actually compare it, level-wise, to the way most pop tracks are mastered these days, even ones where limiting is used more judiciously than, say, in Metallica's famously loud mixes. Compression and limiting has been a bit of a thorn in my side -- I don't like a lot of modern pop mixes because there is no dynamic range left -- but when I have to listen to a CD in the car, I appreciate the fact that I can actually hear the details over the engine and road noise. So I try to walk a middle ground.

In the listening party I realized my experiment had resulted in a mix that was just way too quiet -- people just wouldn't expect the track to have such a wide dynamic range. So I had to quickly bounce a new one with more usual compression settings and with gain added going into the multi-band compressor, and with the final limiter stage (Izotope's "Loudness Maximizer") set to start working a few dB lower.

Now the rap section has a "haircut," without being totally squared-off buzz-cut, while the verses are still not hitting the limiter to speak of, which I suppose is a compromise I can live with, since I do want people to be able to listen to the track in real-world environments (in the car, on their iPods while riding the bus, etc., instead of just in soundproof listening rooms).

But of course I was very upset during the listening party and for hours afterwards, feeling like I had done so well until I blew it with a mix no one could hear. Had I gotten more time, I might have tried to do more of the volume correction on the original tracks -- but then again, maybe not, since it doesn't quite make sense to me that a delicately picked ukulele should be as loud as a snare drum hit.

It was too late to get that revised version to the judges, but it is the one on my Bandcamp page and in the SpinTunes album.

That's kind of how it goes with me: there's an idea, and a few words. It seems to be very important to my process to capture something at this stage, and then sleep on it. There's an expansion, and then a contraction. it's important to get out as much as I can before I start editing it down. The process for me is very much like writing an essay or short story.

Grace sees me stress out about this, and asks me once in a while "are you at least enjoying this?" To which I really don't have a satisfactory answer. It is stressful, it is exhausting, and it is miserable. But it is also very gratifying at times. The best I can say is that I enjoy having done it, especially when I can go back to a track after a few weeks of distance and assess it a little more fairly, and think, hey, there's some good-sounding stuff in there!

Re: Your Grains

2010-09-16T08:26:00.000-07:00

I've put together a new song: this one is a simple parody of Jonathan Coulton's "Re: Your Brains." This was a "one-afternoon wonder" since I wanted to finish the song in one afternoon while my wife and kids were out of the house. So: not a lot of retakes; get one that sounds reasonably good, even if it has a few little glitches, and move on, no second-guessing.

Currently it is only on YouTube. When I get a chance I will put it up on Bandcamp as well, possibly after re-recording some parts. It's a very silly little parody and a little sloppy, but overall I'm pretty happy with the way it came out. It is encouraging to realize that this is evidence that I'm getting gradually better at this sort of thing!

I'm mentioning it here because it features some interesting guitars. The main "jazzy" accompaniment part is a Peavey Firenza, a version equipped with P-90 pickups, and set up with 11s.

These guitars don't have fancy flame maple tops, but they sound great, aren't too heavy, the necks are really nicely playable, they are built like tanks -- and, most importantly, you can sometimes find them used for bargain prices. Most of my guitars like the Squier Super-Sonics work best with 10s, but this one seems to work best with 11s. Also, if you practice on 11s and get used to them, when you go back to playing a guitar with 10s, it will feel effortless.

For the solo, I'm playing the black Squier Venus. I've written about these guitars before. I think I recorded that solo line with the very bright-sounding bridge humbucker. It's going into some kind of Auto-Wah Logic guitar rig. The tone reminds me a little bit of Jerry Garcia's live sound with the Grateful Dead, circa a couple of concerts I saw around 1990.

Both of these guitars were recorded going directly into the Edirol FA-66, which is an inexpensive FireWire interface that I got used on, you guessed it, eBay. They go for a pretty low price used. The plan had been to use it for live streaming. My expectations for the preamp quality weren't very high, but it actually sounds pretty good, even recording vocals, and I've been using it both for singing and spoken voice. It isn't perfect: it's hard to set levels on knobs that aren't calibrated to anything; the phono plug inputs clip really easily; sometimes when it has sat for a while the audio stream is garbled, and I have to mess with the sample rate to get it to work right again. But in general, it works pretty flawlessly, and I think this would make anyone a fine starter audio interface for a basic home studio.

I bought the Edirol box intending to make it part of a more portable rig, and it is velcroed down next to a Mac Mini on a shelf in a 6U rack case.

It's very awkward to get cables in and out; I have to use a flashlight. It really could use a patch bay. And it is currently on the floor, which is murder on my spine. But this rack setup has one other great advantage for recording vocals, and that is that the Mac Mini is extremely quiet. I don't feel the need to ever run my vocal tracks through Izotope RX to take out background fan noise.

I'm just guessing here, since I haven't used one, but I suspect that it probably even sounds, quality-wise, somewhere in the ballpark as the Digi002 rig that Jonathan Coulton uses. That setup has been good enough for him to record some amazing tracks. He does work extensively with an outboard channel strip, the dbx 376, and his Pod Pro and Behringer rack unit for guitar and bass. I've considered more outboard hardware, especially an outboard channel strip for vocals, but I'm not so big on the idea of rack hardware for guitar tracking. I don't think I'd ever be willing to give up Logic's amazing range of tools for guitar and bass for the simplicity of outboard hardware. I especially like the ability to change the effects setting after recording the track (the channel strip settings are not "printed" on the track, which is recorded on the hard drive entirely dry). I did put some money into the Radial JDV, but that is by way of trying to get cleaner and clearer pictures of the original instrument than the Hi-Z setting on either of these boxes can give me alone, not to color the sound.

In fact, the Edirol box sounds good enough that it is making me wonder whether I should just sell off the Apogee Ensemble and just work only with the Edirol box. But it does seem to be a help to have a second, more powerful rig for mixing and editing, especially when I want to do something CPU-intensive like noise reduction or bouncing tracks, and the Mac Mini just can't compete with the Mac Pro with 8 cores and several extra built-in hard drives.

Finally, there is a third guitar part: I recorded a bass line using my Steinberger Synapse 5-string fretless.

This bass is fun to play but it is a little problematic. I have some difficulty getting good tone out of it when I record it. It is driving my Radial JDV direct box, and from there running into the Ensemble. I was getting hardly any signal out of it, for some reason, despite trying the special impedance setting for piezo pickups. I had to add a lot of digital gain even after considerable gain on the Ensemble's input, and it came out sounding strange. Is the battery dead? It shouldn't be; I changed it only a few months ago -- to a Lithium 9-volt -- it should only be "on" when plugged in, and I rarely use it.

Add to this the fact that you can't get strings that fit the bridge properly and this is another gear I'm thinking of getting rid of. It looks damned cool but as far as being able to drop a track effortlessly into a mix, it is a far cry from the XP bass or XQ basses, even the Nashville one that my son plays. (With those basses I have the opposite problem -- they put out a lot of voltage!) But neither of those are fretless. If I had the money available I'd try to find a 5-string Pedulla fretless. I watch them go by on eBay, and they are gorgeous, but quite expensive. I'd also consider a Godin.

There's another piece of new gear; I tracked this song with a pair of Audio-Technica ATH-M50 headphones that I picked up on the Labor Day sale at Guitar Center, along with the aforementioned Reflexion filter. These are great headphones, and work better for tracking than the Sony MDR-V700 or Pioneer HDJ-1000 cans I've been using -- more natural-sounding bass, and better isolation. Again, recommended. In retrospect I should have spent the money on these earlier. I still do prefer the DJ headphones for general music listening, especially if I'm listening to the built-in amp on my laptop, where the EQ can use a little emphasis, and actual DJing.

If it isn't obvious yet, we've moved, and into a house that provides us with much more space than our cramped apartment in Ann Arbor. I have a separate studio room now, as well as an office. However, there are lots of logistical challenges left. The rooms don't have any acoustic treatment yet, and they are all wood.

I added a Reflexion filter to my mic for recording vocals, and that helps some:

The Reflexion is basically a curved wall of audio-absorbing material behind your mic. It comes with a very elaborate rig of clamps and blocks to secure it to a microphone stand along with a mic. It's quite fiddly and takes forever to set up, and it's kind of cantilevered, with a center of gravity that's hard to center on your mic stand -- that's why it is clamped to the extension arm and not the stand itself. And although I have a pretty heavy-duty tripod stand (and I wouldn't recommend trying to set it up on one of those round-based mic stands), and it probably won't come crashing down, doing some major damage on the way, I keep having the feeling that it might. I think a separate, purpose-designed tripod-style mic stand for it would have been a better idea. Also, as it is, I don't have any place left to clamp my pop filter, so that's on yet another mic stand in front. And if I want to read a lyric sheet or a story or something with the whole rig in place, that's a little problematic. So, my feelings on this thing are a little mixed. It does definitely dry up my vocals, though, and that's a big help.

And finally, I have no furniture to speak of in here yet, besides a couple of garage-sale chairs. The general plan had been to have desks custom-built by one of two carpenter friends of the family, but various moving-related projects, like replacing the damaged flooring in the family room, went so far over budget that there isn't really any extra money available for that in the short term. So, for now, the gear is set up kind of unceremoniously on the floor. I'll probably be cobbling something together out of sawhorses and scrap wood but the odd shape of these attic spaces really needs something custom, and I'm not a carpenter. Right now everything is awkwardly placed and very hard on my spine and hips to work with. In related news: I am getting old. But I'm trying not to let that serve as an excuse not to keep playing and recording.

So what's the future of the Potts House studio? Well, after I get myself set up with something resembling desks where I can actually sit to work, and get the gear off the floor, I want to address the acoustics of the room. I don't really want to go whole hog here, but a few panels on the walls, and maybe a few diffusers on the curved ceiling, would probably give me noticeable improvement.

As far as gear, there isn't that much I'm still burning for. I'd like to consider an outboard mic preamp, like a Grace Design unit. I could use that with either audio interface. I've got my eye on USA-made Ovation mandolins. I want to have some of my guitars fixed up and fine-tune the collection, getting rid of some and adding some. I haven't quite figured out the best way to do that yet. I'm always interested in trying out some different microphones, although for now I think I'm interested in sticking with relatively cheap Oktava models, particularly if I can get them modded. I'm contemplating putting a little more effort into a decent pedalboard and PA for live playing.

Does anyone know any carpenters in the mid-Michigan area who would be willing to trade their labor for a guitar or two?

Ghoul Tide Guitars

2010-02-11T22:29:00.001-08:00

I've mixed together most of the guitar tracks (Babicz 6-string acoustic and Adamas 12-string acoustic) I recorded for Joe "Covenant" Lamb's song hilarious and horrifying holiday-ish song Ghoul Tide. You can find it in the form of a little instrumental ditty on Bandcamp. There are also some bits of Logic MIDI instruments I used as placeholders the little Christmas song quotes.

This song also features the Steinberger XQ-4 bass. The version I mixed for Bandcamp is my playing; my son Isaac also contributed a track, and Joe actually used a bit of both in the final song. You might be able to tell the bits apart because Isaac is used to playing an upright acoustic bass, and so plucks a lot more heavily (you can probably hear this even after volume leveling and compression are applied; I had to turn down the input levels for his parts because he was clipping the A/D converters!)

I'm finger-picking a 12-string on this track. It's a little rough! Also, apologies for my whistling nose. I haven't figured out how to record an acoustic guitar part into a mic without getting some breath noises. I guess I have to hold my breath when I'm sustaining a long note or chord and time my breaths with strums!

Common Lisp and Song Fu 6

2010-02-11T22:26:00.000-08:00

I was fortunate enough to be able to record two original songs for the Masters of Song Fu competition, under my nom de (Ken) plume, Common Lisp.

For Round 1, the challenge was:

Write a song that is about (or at least has key to the central narrative) RAIN (the meteorological phenomena). At some point (or throughout) the song, you must utilize an instrument (or vocals) that represent the rain...

My entry was a sort of nerdcore science rap called Polly Loves the Rain. There it is, my first ever complete original song. Joe "Covenant" Lamb was kind enough to track the sung vocal part for me. I added some backing and harmony to his part. My vocal in the the original upload that appeared on the competition page was a little rough, but I managed to record a slightly smoother version and tweak the mix a bit.

There's a video here, based on that earlier mix.

I had a great time recording this song and am very grateful for all the people that told me they enjoyed it! The drums are all from Logic's library, pieced together into a MIDI track; the bass line is my Steinberger Synapse fretless; the keyboard part is again a MIDI track, pieced together using my DX-7 as a keyboard controller; the guitar parts use a Squier Super-Sonic. The microphone I used for this one is the Oktava ML-52 ribbon mic (mine is actually branded an Electro-Harmonix EH-R1).

For round 2, the challenge was:

Write a song that does not rhyme.

CLARIFICATION: Your song can be in any style, but must not contain any rhymes of 2 dissimilar words within a traditional verse structure. Exact repetition of a phrase or word is permitted...

Some challengers were very clever with the premise, writing songs that mocked the concept itself, poking fun at Ken, or implying rhymes. I wasn't nearly that clever -- instead I wanted to write an anthem inspired by a David Feldman gag; in one of his podcasts he made the joke "It's 2010, and I'm still writing 'Dick Cheney is a War Criminal' on my checks."

After his daughter Liz decided that the best thing she could do with her time was to contribute more overheated rhetoric -- attacking Justice Department lawyers for representing Guantanmo detainees, portraying them as sympathetic to Al Quaeda -- I wanted to try to bring the conversation back to what I thought it should really be about: the fact that the men who lied us into Iraq still walk free. I wanted it to be in the style of, kinda sort, The Clash. So here is War Criminal, my second original song. There are some things I might tweak, especially the drums, but overall I'm pretty pleased with the way it came out.

On that track, the drums are again all from Logic; the guitar parts are the Parker Fly; the bass part is, if I recall correctly, the Steinberger XP. For vocals, I used a newly arrived Oktava MK-219 condenser (I picked up two of these at a very low price on eBay; the plan is to have the Michael Joly electronics and capsule upgrades applied at some point, but I like the way they sound on my voice). Everything is direct into the Apogee.

Unfortunately, I had to drop out for Round 3. The round 3 competition involved writing a song that featured a recipe. I was sketching out a few ideas involving water, barley, yeast, and hops, in the style of a Celtic reel, but I developed some kind of bronchial infection. I couldn't sing, had a fever, and was just too washed out to work on the song. I saw my doctor, and confirmed that I didn't have anything dangerous (it wasn't pneumonia), but still, what with our somewhat stressful home life (4 kids and a lot of chaos), I lost a number of work days, and it took me over a month to completely recover. By that time Song Fu 6 was long-done. At some point I'd like to try to complete my round 3 song.

Overall I was very happy to have finally gotten a chance to compete, as I had been considering it for several previous Song Fu competitions but hadn't quite worked up my courage yet. I really enjoyed my interactions with the other competitors. I'm disappointed that I had to drop out. The future of Song Fu remains slightly unclear after several prominent rounds fell apart due to masters who bailed out. That's a shame, but even if it isn't Song Fu under the same name and management, there will be more of this kind of thing -- the idea is too much fun to die. I am looking forward to a future excuse to write and record songs!

Herd Mentality, Part 2: the Second Dozen

2010-02-10T16:17:00.000-08:00

13. A 4-string Steinberger XP bass. This one was featured in Guitar Pron 11.

14. A Steinberger XQ-4 version 1 bass. This one was featured in Guitar Pron 8.

15. A 5-string Steinberger Synapse fretless bass. I don't have any photos of this bass, although I have used it in a couple of my YouTube videos. I'll feature it in an upcoming installment of Guitar Pron. These discontinued basses are interesting but I don't actually recommend that anyone buy them.

There is another Steinberger bass -- the white Music Yo era XQ-4 version 2. This one was featured in Guitar Pron 3. However, I gave this one to my son, so it isn't officially part of my herd any more.

16. A Godin LGX-SA. This guitar was featured in Guitar Pron 2.

17. A Godin SA nylon-string. This one is on loan. I'll take some photos of it when I get it back.

18. An Adamas 12-string acoutic guitar. This guitar was featured in Guitar Pron 7.

19. An Ovation USA Elite with Tribal Flame finish. This one needs good pictures.

20. A Babicz Identity Jumbo. This guitar was featured in Guitar Pron 12.

21. An Ovation Applause tenor ukulele.

22. An Ovation Applause Soprano ukulele.

23. This one is not very photogenic; it is a Jag-Stang that I have horribly abused over the years, practicing my repair and upgrade skills. It turns out my luthier skills aren't so hot. It has a custom Warmoth neck with stainless steel frets, Gotoh vintage locking tuners, a 3rd-party pickguard, and upgraded Seymour Duncan pickups. However, it still needs a lot of assembly work, and so right now really is a parts guitar!

24. A Parker Fly Classic, which I haven't yet photographed.

It's possible I am forgetting one!

Update 11 Feb 2010

Oops, yep, I am. #25 is another Peavey Limited, this one an HB (dual humbucker) model, with a blue flame maple top. You can hear this guitar on this unused concept from Joe Covenant's song http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/ghoul-tide-unused-guitar-idea. That's the neck pickup, with the tone pot rolled off just a bit.

The Herd Mentality, Part 1: the First Dozen

2010-02-09T20:25:00.000-08:00

So, I have quite a few guitars now. Most of them have come from eBay, and most of them were bargains. I have a little problem, though; I can't actually tell you exactly how many I have, because I don't know. It's time to take inventory. Here are the first dozen.

I don't have enough space to keep them all at home, so at any given time, a rotating selection of instruments is in a climate-controlled storage unit. I try to keep them all in hard cases wherever possible, which protects them from getting knocked around, but also helps protect them from sudden humidity or temperature shifts. That's the theory, anyway. The guitars in storage look like this:

I recently pulled them out to check on them, photograph them for insurance purposes, and record the serial numbers. Here are the cases lined up:

That's a dozen, plus a couple of gig bags that I wanted to save. Here's a roll call:

1. Squier Super-Sonic, silver sparkle. I actually have three Super-Sonics; this one is A016447. Two of the Super-Sonics, were featured in Guitar Pron 5. This one is in excellent condition with no issues, as is the blue one; the other silver ones has some electronics issues and currently has its guts hanging out waiting for me to finish fixing it.

2. Squier Venus, black. Set up with 10s. Featured in Guitar Pron 10. No issues; this guitar is in excellent shape. It is one of the best-sounding guitars in my collection, especially with the single-coil pickup.

3. Squier Venus, sunburst. Set up with 10s. This one has some minor electronics issues and is waiting to go up to Elderly. I need to take some outdoor photos of both the Venus guitars; they just don't photograph well with a flash.

4. Godin LG. Featured in Guitar Pron 9. I have a new bridge for this guitar, to replace the chewed-up bridge height screw. I think I can do that repair by myself without any trouble; I just haven't gotten to it yet. (Are you sensing a recurring theme here?)

5. Peavey Firenza, USA model, with two P-90 pickups. Set up with 11s. This is an amazing guitar. It's built like a tank, and the pickups sound absolutely fantastic. I'd put it up against any Gibson with P-90s. I'll have to do a write-up about it, and record it. I'm keeping an eye out for another one of these, preferably a minty tobacco sunburst model. This one needs some minor fret work; it's been played heavily, but has no serious damage at all. It's a gorgeous guitar, although this photo doesn't really do it justice:

6. Peavey Limited HB, natural flame maple top. This guitar was featured in Guitar Pron 6. It is probably the prettiest instrument I've got, and it sounds great too.

7. Peavey T-60, natural ash body with rosewood neck. This one is a somewhat battered player, but it is an earlier T-60, built incredibly well, and has been beautifully maintained, and sounds and feels great. In fact, the action and "play feel" is the best of any guitar in my collection, with the possible exception of the Parker Fly. With scratches and buckle rash, though, it isn't all that photogenic. Here is a shot:

It needs a new output jack. It's one of the long through-the-body types, and the wiring on these is elaborate and delicate, so it is going up to Elderly.

8. Peavey T-60, natural ash body, maple neck. This is the most common kind of T-60. This one is in pretty good condition, but I'm just not a big fan of the maple-necked T-60s. They don't feel quite as nice to me as the models with the rosewood fretboards. I'd consider selling this one (via eBay) at some point. The glue holding the interior velvet-colored panels in the case has deteriorated and so it needs some kind of restoration work on the case. I might try to hot-glue it. I still watch T-60s go by, but I'm also keeping an eye out for just the right T-15, or T-27, or even a T-40 bass.

9. Squier Jagmaster. I have a love-hate relationship with this guitar. It has a neck pocket issue; the fit and finish just isn't quite up to the standards of the other members of the Vista series. Some of the Jagmasters have the truss rod adjustment at the headstock, like the Super-Sonics, but this one has one of those traditional Fender necks where you must partially remove the neck to get to the truss rod. I really don't like that. When I removed the neck, a big chunk of finish alongside the neck pocket came with it. It's also got an overly heavy body. However, it sounds really good, and I love short-scale instruments. Like I said, a love-hate relationship. I'm keeping my eyes out for another one, with the truss rod adjustment at the headstock. I've seen several go by on eBay, but they are either very damaged, have been heavily modified, or are priced far too high for me.

10. Godin Freeway 4-string bass. I'll have to write this one up too; they are real bargains. It would be a great first bass for a student. This one is set up with flat-wound strings and has a very nice mellow tone.

11. Peavey Limited ST, tiger's eye flame. This guitar was featured in Guitar Pron 1.

12. Peavey T-60, Iced Tea Burst. This guitar was featured in Guitar Pron 4.

That's it for now. More later!

Guitar Pron 12: Babicz Jumbo Acoustic

2010-02-09T19:45:00.000-08:00

During a recent trip around New York and Connecticut I stopped in Troy, NY to visit Cathedral Music, where I came across this intriguing thing, the likes of which I had never seen before:

Jeff Babicz is a former employee of Steinberger sound during the Newburgh years. From what I hear, he may even have helped build one of my Steinberger basses. He seems to have made it his mission to bring some fresh ideas to acoustic guitar design, while retaining the best traditional elements.

The Babicz Identity series acoustics look a little odd -- the most striking thing is the "fanned" strings. But it isn't just for looks -- it's a functional design element. Basically, the strings are not anchored to the top of the guitar at the body in the usual sense. There's no major single point of strain where the entire pull of the strings is yanking sideways on the middle of the delicate top. Instead, they pass over the bridge and a kind of anchor, where they then fan out to anchors attached around the perimeter of the top. These apparently transfer the strain to the curved body which, being an arch instead of a flat piece, is better-equipped to handle it.

The net upshot is that when you tap on the top, next to the bridge, it sounds like a bass drum. The top resonates much more freely, and so the guitar produces very rich and resonant bass. But there's more to it than that -- apparently the floating bridge is not even glued to the top, but bolted to slots cut in the top, such that the bridge can be loosened and moved to change the intonation as the guitar ages.

There's one more really intriguing innovation: the neck itself is not actually attached to the soundboard. It's attached to some kind of special internal block with a mechanism that actually will raise and lower the neck with respect to the soundboard, as a whole. This has nothing to do with the truss rod, which is to set the neck relief -- it sets the position of the whole neck with respect to the bridge. All you do is stick an allen wrench in this little hole and give it a turn or two. The guitar actually came with an allen wrench fastened to the back of the headstock. However, the adhesive holding the little plastic holders to the back of the headstock had gotten a little old, and it was coming off, so I removed it and cleaned the adhesive off with a little vegetable oil. It came off just fine, and the allen wrench is now in the case.

The movement of the neck is so accurate and clean that you can do this and change the action on the fly, and it doesn't even put the guitar out of tune. That sounds hard to believe, but it's true!

This jumbo, smaller than a dreadnought and a little better suited to finger-picking, has a spruce top and rosewood back and sides. The top is not one piece, though, and it is made in Indonesia. You can also get a hand-made guitar built by Jeff Babicz himself. I'm setting aside a little money in the hopes that one day I'll be able to order my hand-built dream guitar from Jeff.

This guitar has no electronics. There's a black model with built-in electronics, called the Spider, that looks very nice. There is also a hollow-body electric version. I'm keeping an eye out for one of those! I've never owned a jazz box, and it looks like just the slightly offbeat but great-sounding instrument that I would really enjoy playing. Jeff has apparently prototyped a 12-string version acoustic-electric model that is flat like some of the Godin models. That sounds amazing. I don't think these are in production, though.

My mic technique is not the greatest, and my finger-picking technique is not the greatest; my nails had not grown out properly yet, and I was just getting used to playing using my nails instead of fingertips. But with that caveat, that the flaws are mine and not the guitar's, you can hear me play this guitar in this video. (The guitar track is doubled, but it will give you an idea of what it sounds like).

Song Fu 6, Round 1

2010-02-07T13:30:00.000-08:00

My entry is here. I guess maybe you'd call it nerdcore -- I'm a big fan of MC Frontalot -- but it is also inspired, perhaps, by They Might Be Giants songs about science. Given that I'm mostly a guitarist, my first impulse was to grab my guitar, but I decided I wanted to try something different, and so didn't compose on the guitar at all, but started with the lyric and percussion, then added a melody for the choruses in Apple Logic.

I started off with a different lyric and completely different song, which sounded like a mournful, slow early Peter Gabriel track. I decided partway into that one that it wasn't really doing it for me, and fortunately this lyric popped into my head as fast as I could write it down. It got a rewrite, but there isn't a lot of time in Song Fu for rewrites, especially after I had abandoned one concept already -- you've got to freeze your ideas in the form of real tracks quite quickly.

Joe "Covenant" Lamb was kind enough to sing a vocal track for me, which I then mixed with my vocals.

Given the realities of life with a day job and small children, I only really had one afternoon to record vocals, although I was able to get a few hours in the evenings earlier in the week to work on the lyrics, MIDI instruments, and bass and guitar parts. It just so happens I've had a sore throat for a couple of weeks now, but I did the best I could, given that I was rapidly running out of time.

Despite all this, I'm quite pleased with it -- it came out better than I was expecting. I was concerned that I would just freeze up solid and draw a blank, given that I've never recorded an original song before (aside from some instrumental improvisations), and I don't really know a lot about writing melodies and accompaniment parts.

There's a video to go with it.

I'm playing the Steinberger Synapse 5-string fretless bass and the Squier Super-Sonic on this track. It's more-or-less in the key of G. If you're a guitarist, you may be wondering what I'm playing in that "rain" harmonic riff. It's a little cheat. For that riff, the Super-sonic is tuned to an open E7 chord. Then, I have a capo on the 3rd fret to make it an open G7. The harmonics are then all octave harmonics at the 15th fret. To make this sound right, you have to tune the guitar very carefully after the capo is applied.

Guitar Pron 11: Steinberger XP Bass

2010-02-07T13:03:00.000-08:00

Up for your consideration today is a relatively rare Setinberger instrument from 1985, a P-series 4-string bass with passive, low-impedance EMG pickups (unlike most Steinberger pickup systems, these don't require a battery). They are the best-sounding bass pickups I've ever played, hands-down, usable over the whole tone range. I've been looking for one of these for a while. They are not as collectible as the all-synthetic L-series instruments -- this model has a small V-shaped wooden body -- but they definitely have that Steinberger tone and mojo. Steinberger made these with various styles of pickguards; one of the most common was a "pebbled" pickguard with a rough, textured finish and a white stripe around it. I actually like this all-black version best, although my camera always has trouble with reflective black instruments.

Unfortunately, Joshua pulled this bass off the bed only a week after I acquired it, and it fell on the floor. The only real damage was to the leg rest, which snapped off. These are fortunately replaceable, although original parts are getting harder to find; Music Yo and Gibson no longer sell parts for vintage Steinbergers.

I'm keeping my eye out for a matching P-series 6-string guitar. I'd love to have one of those. These instruments even had a brief film cameo; they are the guitars that Rufus (George Carlin) gives to Bill and Ted at the end of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

I'll definitely be recording this bass as soon as I need a fretted bass part for a song!

Rugged Construction, Kinda

2010-02-07T12:51:00.000-08:00

So, I have this Carvin SX-100 amplifier that I got cheap from the local Music-Go-Round after doing a listening test with several different amps. It sounded the best with my Ovations.

I used it for exactly one gig -- our Halloween/birthday event -- and then Joshua grabbed a my guitar cable that was plugged in the jack, and gave a sideways yank. The jack shattered. Upon taking it apart, I found that it had been broken before, and airplane-glued back together. This picture shows the little board the jack was mounted to.

"No problem," I reasoned. "I'll just contact Carvin and find another one of those little jack boards. They made them replaceable for just that reason."

Not so much. Carvin doesn't sell that little board. It doesn't appear they ever did sell it separately. But -- they do sell replacement jacks (that's a dance music group -- "Replacement Jaxx!") They had two types. I couldn't figure out exactly which part would fit, but they were only a couple dollars each, so I bought one of each. Note the history of a part. "A lot of these are breaking -- can we get some kind of reinforcement on this part?" "Yeah, OK, we'll put a metal sleeve in it." A couple years go by. "A lot of these are breaking -- can you beef up that part?" The result is the part on the right with the steel barrel. Unfortunately the part that screws onto it to mount it into the front panel of the amplifier (far left) is still plastic. They don't seem to sell a more rugged version of that.

I'm not that great with a soldering iron, but fortunately I have a co-worker who is. So, problem solved. Assuming Joshua doesn't break anything else. Note to manufacturers: "rugged construction" has to apply to every single part of your product, or it is a pretty meaningless term! And make high-wear parts replaceable by end users without a soldering iron!

Ghoul Tide

2009-12-17T12:03:00.000-08:00

So, last week I worked on this track with my buddy Joe "Covenant" Lamb. Joe resides in Dundee, Scotland and we have never met in person, but we have wound up collaborating on music projects. I'm considering it sort of an apprenticeship in songwriting and recording -- he can write original songs, and I've never done it! It's good experience for me.

This is his entry for Song Fu 5, round 3. The challenge was to write a song that sounds like a holiday song, but which is not really about the holidays. Warning: it's kind of gruesome! Funny, but gruesome!

If you like it, consider donating to Joe, or buy some of his other tracks. (Voting for round 3 is over).

Joe plays guitar himself at an intermediate level (he says he can't play barre chords), but he is having painful problems with his shoulder, so was having a terrible time recording even a simple guitar part. He was kind enough to give me credit right in the song title itself.

On this song, I'm playing the Babicz acoustic, strummed and with some very simple finger-picking of the same chords, into one of the Rode NT-5 mics. I also gave Joe a very simple bass track, in which I'm playing the Steinberger XQ-4 v2, direct into the Apogee Ensemble. I also recorded my son Isaac (age 15) playing a bass line. Isaac's more of a bass player than I am, and plays upright acoustic bass in his high school jazz band, but he's not used to recording, and his timing was a little rough. Joe says for the final mix he used parts from both our tracks.

I laid down two tracks on the 12-string Adamas as well, strummed and finger-picked, and at least one of them is in there. And, finally, I transcribed Joe's demo into notes in Logic and had it play them using some virtual instruments. I think harp and glockenspiel are the ones that made it into the final mix. That was pretty tedious -- since I'm not much of a keyboard player, and my guitar synth is on loan, I started with my DX-7 but put in most of the notes by hand. MIDI note quantization in Logic is still a bit of a mystery to me.

Collaborating this way was a pain! Joe is 5 hours ahead of Michigan. We tried using Skype, and it worked once, but then on the second try Joe couldn't hear me, I could only hear him. We finally determined that Joe's tuner had malfunctioned, which meant that everything he had recorded was based on a concert A at 430 Hz, not 440. Joe's download speed was terrible. Then he changed his mind about the track tempo after I had recorded my parts twice. This all meant it took about three times longer and required three times more aggravation and retakes than it should have for such a simple part.

If we had been in the same studio we could have nailed all the tracks in an hour or two. At one point we were reduced to arguing about which beats the chorus chord changes should fall on by using _text messages_... talk about the blind leading the blind! I'm sorry to say that at one point I may have threatened to fly to Scotland and kick his rear end... sorry Joe! But I think all the pain was worth it. Next time, assuming we do this again, I hope we can figure out how to do it a lot more efficiently!

Getting Creepy Again

2009-12-05T18:11:00.000-08:00

I had a little quiet time this afternoon. The plan was to record guitar parts for Creepy Doll, but I decided to try a vocal track. That quickly became five or six vocal tracks. I didn't get around to the electric guitar part yet, but did a couple quick tracks using the Babicz acoustic. All the tracks were recorded with the ribbon mic. I recorded the vocals using the back side of the mic -- ribbon microphones tend to have a different frequency response from the back (they usually have a figure-8 pickup pattern). The result was interesting! I may never record vocals with a condenser mic again. I'm not really any better at singing tightly on key, and I didn't apply pitch correction, but layering the tracks seem to help this a bit. (And, after all, it is supposed to be creepy).

Video clip here.

Furby Guitars

2009-11-21T23:02:00.001-08:00

So, just for fun, here is a rough mix assembled from some of the very raw (and even somewhat out-of-tune) tracks I put together hastily for Joe Covenant's Song Fu Round 1 entry.

On the left are 3 tracks of ukulele; on the right are 3 tracks of 12-string acoustic guitar. I wasn't really intending for all of them to be used together! I was fully expecting Joe to pick and choose and edit (which he did).

This obviously isn't very polished; as I explained in a previous entry, I was extremely rushed. At one point, my family was waiting in the car for me to finish recording the 12-string chords so we could jump in the car and drive to Saginaw. But still, I think it sounds fun. For those who enjoy watching sausage being made. Out of furbies.

My Monkey

2009-11-21T21:41:00.000-08:00

This is the Mandelbrot Set's final mix of Jonathan Coulton's tune "My Monkey" -- on box.net. I have several tracks in here: fretless Steinberger Synapse bass, finger-picked electric guitar, and some layers of acoustic guitar. The gang is getting better! I did not mix or master this one. I put some concentrated effort into the guitar part quite some time ago -- I think it was back around the beginning of 2009.

I've put together a track of just my contributions, mixed and mastered, including an unused synth track I recorded (which, in the final, I think was replaced by a recorder part). When recording these tracks, I made an effort to clone Jonathan Coulton's source tracks as closely as possible, just to see how good a job I could do. I think my completed parts actually sound more polished, but I had an advantage: I wasn't trying to finish recording for a Thing a Week deadline. The only part that is really different is that I decided to use a fretless bass. The part is basically the same, just with that fretless feel. While I think I got the intonation reasonably good, using quite a few takes and a lot of editing, I'm still pretty much a beginner on the fretless and have a lot to learn yet.

So what's in the track? There are 3 separate complete takes of the entire electric guitar part, recorded direct into Logic via my Ensemble. I can't remember for certain which guitar I played, but I think it may have been the T-60. The guitar part goes into an amp modeler, an EQ, a Logic plugin called Ringshifter which provides the phaser effect, and then a compressor. There are two acoustic guitar lines: one is basically the same chords as the finger-picked part, and the other is the same chords played with a capo seven frets higher, or a perfect 5th up. The acoustic is my Ovation acoustic-electric, also directly into the Ensemble, through EQ, compressor, a sample delay plug-in, and Space Designer, using a room model called "Slap Chamber" for that slap echo. The synth parts I recorded by using my DX-7 as a MIDI controller rather than an audio source, doing a little editing of the resulting piano roll data in Logic, and then playing it back using a software instrument synth pad called "Glassy Ascent."

If you are interested, you can see a sloppy YouTube clip of the bass part here, and a mini-lesson for the finger-picked electric guitar part here.

Listening to it almost a year after recording these parts, I can hear some timing flaws; there's an issue where the chord changes at the end don't match the original song perfectly. However, I still am proud of the finished product!

Song Fu: Vote for "Tom Furby"

2009-11-18T09:16:00.000-08:00

Please go here and vote for Joe "Covenant" Lamb's song! And whoever else's songs you like best.

Ukuleles Aren't Cool

2009-11-15T21:34:00.000-08:00

Or so Joe "Covenant" Lamb says. But yet... wait... Joe! What's that on your Song Fu #5 round 1 entry? Could it be... your friend Paul playing 3 tracks of ukulele? And a few more tracks of 12-string guitar?

The uke is an Applause model, Ovation's lower-end brand, made in Korea. I have it strung up with Aquila "Nylgut" strings that work great, although like all nylon strings they stretch, and stretch, and stretch, and so have to be constantly re-tuned. It's a tenor-sized instrument. They are tuned the same as a soprano, but with a longer scale, which means higher string tension, but also wider fret spacing. That's a bit plus for me since I'm so used to playing guitar; I have a hard time playing on the tiny fret spacing on my soprano uke. But the real feature I like best about this uke is that you can plug it in -- it has a built-in piezo pickup and EQ. So I was able to record both the 12-string and the uke direct.

The back story -- I collaborated with Joe on the Mandelbrot Set's version of Skullcrusher Mountain. He lives in Dundee, Scotland, which makes it a little tricky to organize a jam session, but I've been trying to find a way to collaborate with him on one of these songs for a while now; usually I've been unavailable in time, since the Song Fu entries always have a short deadline.

On Saturday I chatted with Joe online briefly about this track -- he was having trouble getting a harmonizing guitar part that really worked well. He sent me a track with his vocal plus drums. After the kids were asleep I hauled out my tenor uke and came up with a track to go along with the song's melody, and then a couple more tracks to harmonize with it. The song really called for a mandolin. I don't have one of those, but after this experience I might consider getting one.

Recording this was complicated a bit by the fact that Joe's vocal seemed to be in Eb; I'm not quite sure how that came about. So I had to play the uke melody and harmony parts in Eb. It also just never seemed 100% in tune with Joe's backing guitar, so I was messing around with tweaking it by a few cents, and wasted some time with that. It was getting pretty late, so I very quickly bashed out some accompaniment chords on the 12-string guitar too, again playing in Eb with a bunch of barres that didn't sound very good, partly because my hands aren't really strong enough to do good barres on the 12-string, at least not after all the playing I did on Friday night.

Anyhow, we got everyone up and out, took the kids to dim sum for lunch, and then were planning to go up to Saginaw to visit Grace's mother. I left everyone napping in the car and came in to see if there was anything else I could help Joe with, since I think today was his deadline. He asked me to re-record the 12-string, so I spent about an hour getting something better recorded on the 12-string. Ten minutes of that was retuning it to Eb. Fortunately the Adamas has extremely stable tuning so I was able to retune it and quickly lay down several tracks without worrying that it was going out of tune while I played. I recorded chords for the choruses, then a sort of harmony line, and then realizing I was very short on time, one more track of little scraps of harmony, in the hopes that Joe would be able to find something usable. I uploaded those, shot Joe a quick note, and we headed out.

We got back late, and I saw via Facebook that Joe had posted his song, and really made my guitar parts sound great. I think he used both the original and new 12-string chords, judiciously edited and doubled. I'm pretty sure he used at least some of almost every one of the seven tracks I sent him -- maybe even every track. He did some editing that is so tight I'm not even sure exactly what he did. Even some of the bits and incomplete phrases that I left on that track of "extra scraps" made it in there. It gets doubled and then doubled again and pretty wild, but it all somehow works together, with only some minor timing flaws. With more time I could have done retakes or time-aligned the attacks, but given the material he had to work with, I'm very impressed with the way he put it all together!

It helps that the song is so funny that I nearly wet myself when I first heard it. I hope you will listen to it, and more importantly, as soon as voting is open, vote for Joe!

See the Song Fu page round 5 page here. Check back to see when voting is open.

I'm Your Moon (Jonathan Coulton Cover)

2009-11-14T00:17:00.001-08:00

I wasn't quite sure if I was going to put the lyrics onscreen for a karaoke track, record it on the 6-string, or record it on the 12-string. This isn't quite what I had planned to do. I wasn't even going to try singing it at all. But I think it came out pretty well! Especially for something recorded with sore hands, and in a couple of hours.

Paul's Cover of "I'm Your Moon" by Jonathan Coulton (YouTube video).

Working on the Moon

2009-11-08T21:43:00.000-08:00

I've been working on Jonathan Coulton's song "I'm Your Moon."

Just a year ago this song was just out of my reach as a guitarist. But while some of my friends are probably sick of hearing my play Coulton and They Might Be Giants tunes, there is a madness to my method: my playing is improving. I'm able to grab chords faster and more accurately, I've memorized more chords, my right hand technique is better, my ability to sing along without wandering off key has improved, and I'm better at staying on something resembling a tempo. I've also learned a lot of convenient walking bass notes to add to chords. Coulton uses these a lot, and it's a great technique for acoustic playing.

This song is still pretty rough, but I'm gradually improving. It's an interesting song for a guitarist: there's a repeating set of chords that you play as picked arpeggios, and it sounds more complex than it is. It's really just two fingers nailed to an Asus2, with a bass note changing around it. It's useful when learning it to try playing just the bass note, so you can get used hearing it as part of the figure. The following bit of tab is borrowed from the tab on the Jonathan Coulton Wiki:

   A/E     B7/D#     Bm7/D   FMajb5
|------------------|-----------------|
|------0-------0---|-----0-------0---|
|----2---2---2---2-|---2---2---2---2-|
|--2-------1-------|-0-------3-------|
|------------------|-----------------|
|------------------|-----------------|

The hard part is not playing this riff; once you get into position and figure out the basic moves, it's easy. The hard part is jumping into it and out of it smoothly.

The song initially appears to have a big wad of additional chords to learn, but upon a little study, they aren't as hard as they look. There's a barred C#m, and a B major based on the second fret. I usually play this with just fingers 1 and 3, which means bending my third finger backwards. It might be time to break that habit and get it so I can consistently grab it with all 4 fingers, in order to help ensure that the first string rings clearly.

There is also F#m/C#, which sounds complicated until you realize it is just a barred F#m played in the normal way but without the 6th string. This allows you to emphasize the C# bass note. There's an E/A, which I just noticed I'm still playing wrong. Then there's this little trio of E major-based chords: Esus4, E, Eadd9, E. The jump to the Eadd9, fingered 024100, is a little tricky; I have to swivel my hand position so that Iift my third finger off the fretboard and reach with my pinky for the 4.

Aaug/C# is not difficult to play, but the Bm/Bdim switch I find tricky, and Bm to Bm7b5 (x2323x) is also tricky. I have finally gotten better grabbing the Bm7b5 chord shape, but just because I can go pretty reliably from from a D major open fingering to Bm7b5 doesn't mean I can reliably and quickly grab it when going from Bm. It's all about rearranging the fingers quickly, so quickly that it's pretty much a reflex action. The Bdim and Bm7b5 shapes are worth getting used to, though, since they appear a lot in less common chord voicings.

Finally, there's this little riff:

|0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-|
|2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-|
|1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2-|
|0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-|
|----------------|
|----------------|

Coulton plays this when he sings "round and round." It's a clever little phrase and one of his little musical puns where the sound matches what he's singing.

Here's a quick video clip I recorded of yours truly practicing "I'm Your Moon". It's too dark, it's backward, and the sound isn't great, but it's what I could manage today; I had one baby sleeping on the bed a few feet away and another listening down next to my feet (and occasionally making comments).

I'm hoping to continue polishing it a little bit and recording a better version in a few days. I've set an additional challenge for myself, which is to play it on my 12-string. Those suspended chords sound gorgeous on the 12-string, but it's hard to get the little arpeggios and the barred chords and especially that Bdim to ring out cleanly on the 12-string without any buzzing and without hitting any unwanted strings. My fingers feel like I've been working them out on a cheese grater! If I can pull it off, though, it will make a beautiful recording.

This is one of the more wistful and gorgeous of all Coulton's compositions. I particularly like his use of suspended chords to make the song sound like it hovering somewhere between major and minor; those arpeggios also contribute to the feelings of circular movement and timelessness.

If I can get this song down cold, I think "Blue Sunny Day" would be a worthy next target. That song is just loaded with interesting voicings and really gets you jumping around the neck! And then of course I really still need to do some heads-down work on my fingerpicking; I'd like to be able to play "Millionaire Girlfriend," "You Ruined Everything," "I Crush Everything," and "Summer's Over." None of them seem out of reach of my left hand, but I've got to train my right hand to get those fingers picking!

Squier Venus Single Coil Demo

2009-11-05T21:36:00.000-08:00

Here are a couple of recordings I made using the the black Squier Venus. If this experiment works you'll be able to hear what I consider so appealing about the tone of these guitars and why I just picked up two of them.

I ran the Venus running directly into my Peavey Mini Colossal 5-watt tube amp, with the power soak (output volume) turned all the way down so it doesn't drive the speaker at all (it's late, after all). I'm feeding my Apogee Ensemble with the XLR recording output of the Mini Colossal. It's going into Logic 9, into a virtual channel strip with a noise gate (the single coil pickup needs it), a pedalboard containing a compressor and chorus set relatively low, and then through a channel EQ and channel compressor. The whole track is then run through Ozone 4 using a 3-band tube saturation mastering preset, which isn't really doing that much except applying the multi-band compressor with the overall gain rolled down a bit.

The first tune I'm playing is Jonathan Coulton's "Chiron Beta Prime." I dig how this guitar's single coil pickup puts out quite a bit of throaty bass and mids. The volume control is rolled down to about five, and the three-way switch is set on the single coil neck pickup only. Your taste may vary, but I like the slightly laid-back tube crunch together with the chorus. I'm doing some palm muting and there are a lot of seventh chords that would sound very dissonant if the tube distortion was cranked up to heavy metal levels, but as it is they seem (to me) to just give a spray of harmonics that are bright but not shrill. But then, I'm probably going deaf, so your mileage may differ.

Just to do a little comparison and contrast, I also recorded "The Future Soon" using pretty-much identical settings but with the pickup selector switched over to the humbucker. I brought the guitar's volume knob down just a little bit more to keep the volumes at least approximately comparable. Note that the Venus has no tone control. The humbucker is loud and jangly. I prefer the sound of the single coil when recording a lightly distorted guitar part like this, but I think both of them actually sound pretty good. The humbucker is probably better suited to either a clean tone with EQ rolling off the highs, or heavier distortion to smooth it out a bit. Clearly more experimentation is needed!

If anyone cares, I played both using a Herco Flex 50 pick, which gives quite a bit of "snap."

Working on the Venus Guitars

2009-11-05T19:55:00.000-08:00

So, today I got some screws I ordered from Stewart-MacDonald, and it was time to see if I could get the sunburst-finish Squier Venus back together. It needs height-adjusting screws and springs for its bridge pickup, and the pickguard is currently off. I also need to solder the ground wire back onto the output jack, since it popped off when I removed the pickguard.

It will look something like this when finished (well, plus strings). You can see why I am eager to get it put back together; it is a gorgeous guitar!

Unfortunately, neither type of screw I ordered today will fit the hole in the pickguard. I've already taken one of the originals to Stadium hardware, and they couldn't match it. I have a set of "Metric Hum Ht. Screws" on order from Allparts, along with some pickguard screws and pots, and we'll see if they fit. If not I'm at a bit of a loss; I may have to take apart the black one to get a sample of the correct screw and see if I can get it measured precisely. Here is one of the Stewart-MacDonald screws, not fitting.

Meanwhile, I got the black one intonated for tens and it sounds fantastic. I've raised the bridge slightly to give it slightly higher action. I'll see if I can make a quick recording of this guitar. It's got a lot of gorgeous hollow "scooped" woody tone, especially from the single coil. Joshua prefers to use the bridge pickup, though.

He also likes to turn the volume all the way up.

Here's one more guitar porn shot of the unusual bridge and pickguard design.

Screwed by Screws

2009-11-03T08:21:00.000-08:00

So, I'm trying to get back to a project that has been on hold -- finishing up the final tweaks and repairs on three Squier Super-Sonics.

Super-Sonic number 1 is in storage, and is about as mint as possible, showing only slight finish aging that actually makes it look very pretty.

Super-Sonic number 2 also has some small bridge issues, and I've been trying to fix them. It looks like a previous owner stripped out some bridge saddle height adjustment screws and replaced them with some screws that weren't hex, and so they were a fugly mix that clearly was not original.

To fix this, I ordered a Fender set of replacement saddles. But here's where the story gets stupid and becomes all about metric and American parts. The saddles on the Super-Sonic look like traditional stamped Strat saddles, and are even stamped "FENDER." But although the saddles themselves are nearly identical to the USA parts, the screws are not. Of course, this isn't immediately obvious -- they are very close. Close enough that you can screw the USA screws into the Japanese saddles, but they are a little too loose. And if you try to screw the Japanese screws into the USA-made saddles, they won't fit, and since the metal of the saddles is so soft, you can easily ruin the threading. And the Japanese intonation screws also wouldn't fit into the USA-made saddles.

Anyway, as usual when screwing around with these Japanese parts I wasted a lot of time. The upshot is that the Super-Sonic now has Fender USA saddles, height adjustment screws, and intonation screws. It's nearly identical except that the screws are American gauges now. Does that constitute some kind of crime against authenticity that will ruin its vintage value? I don't know. I just know that it is a huge pain to try to find matching parts.

The next thing wrong with Super-Sonic number 2 is that the pots are really corroded and crackle and cut out very badly. I think they may be beyond cleaning. I have some nice new CTS 250K split-shaft pots to replace them with. But, of course, the pots on the original are smaller. The replacements won't fit through the faceplate, and the shaft won't fit the Mustang-style knobs. Ugh. What's my alternative? Cracking the pots open somehow without removing the soldered-on wiring so I can get in there with some spray contact cleaner? Get non-matching knobs and find someone who can widen the holes in the faceplate?

Super-Sonic number 2 also has some really poorly-behaving tuners. I have a set of locking vintage tuners that are supposed to be drop-in replacements for the Klusons... but I'm not optimistic that they will fit. For one thing, the holes in the headstock were drilled slightly too large, even for the tuners that are already in there. The bushings tend to fall out when you remove the strings. What's the repair that keeps the guitar as original as possible? I'm not quite sure.

The last thing wrong with Super-Sonic number 2 is that all the pickguard screws are corroded and need to be replaced. Pickguard screws ought to be as common as dirt, but I'm still looking for an exact match for the originals. They don't match the common Fender or Gibson sizes.

Super-Sonic number 3 has some more issues: the 3-way switch was cut down to a little stump by a previous owner. No 3-way switches I've been able to find will fit the very short body cavity, not even a special "short" Switchcraft switch. I think the answer is a switch from Allparts they call a Korean 3-way that looks like a match. If that fits then it's just a matter or careful soldering.

Super-Sonic number 3 also is missing its original string trees, so I'm trying to find string trees that match the Super-Sonics. They aren't quite the same screw size as any others I've been able to find, and use little white plastic spacers. If I want it to look original I have to find something that matches. Allparts has something that looks about right, but the Super-Sonic uses two different sizes of white plastic spacers. It's maddening.

I've also got a screw issue with one of my Squier Venus guitars -- it needs humbucker height adjustment screws that don't seem to match humbucker height adjustment screws from any other humbuckers I've seen. My local hardware gurus at Stadium hardware, which boasts a selection of thousands and thousands of screws, couldn't help me.

It would help if Allparts actually had measurements on all their parts, instead of blurry little photos.

This is not a hobby for the impatient!

The Halloween Set

2009-10-30T19:56:00.000-07:00

I'm performing tomorrow night with my son Isaac, my friend Jim, and (if she can make it) my friend Ann, at a private Halloween/birthday/anniversary party. While this was not quite the original plan, I have spent most of my vacation (I've had the past two weeks off from work) polishing up these songs and rehearsing them with my friends. In fact, between rehearsals, working out parts, working on arrangements, scrounging last-minute gear purchases, and getting sheet music and lyrics together for everyone, it's been pretty much all I've been doing for the last ten days. My wife has been watching nervously and asking "you're enjoying this, right?" I am, mostly, but I'm also using it as an excuse to drive myself and try to push my playing and performing to that elusive next plateau that musicians are always seeking.

My rotator cuff is blown out from strumming and my calluses have calluses, which are now peeling off. I'm going to have to take a few days off after this!

I'll be playing 6- and 12-string Ovation and Adamas acoustic guitars and Applause ukuleles. I can has endorsement contract?

The set is an, er, eclectic mix of children's songs, humorous songs, and two classic spooky folk/rock songs.

SOLO SONGS

Beck -- The Golden Age

Robyn Hitchcock -- The Ghost Ship

Paul and Storm -- Nugget Man

GROUP SONGS, SET ONE

Jonathan Coulton -- The Future Soon

Jonathan Coulton -- Chiron Beta Prime

Jonathan Coulton -- Still Alive

They Might Be Giants -- Fake Believe

The Eagles -- Hotel California

They Might Be Giants -- I C U

They Might Be Giants -- Particle Man

(BREAK)

GROUP SONGS, SET TWO:

They Might Be Giants -- ZYX

Gordon Lightfoot -- The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Jonathan Coulton -- Creepy Doll

They Might Be Giants -- Dead

Jonathan Coulton -- Re: Your Brains

Jonathan Coulton -- Skullcrusher Mountain

Elvis Presley -- Jailhouse Rock

I don't think we'll be recording this set, but I'll be making videos of some of these songs in the near future, particularly the ukulele and guitar parts. I'm down-tuning for some of the songs: I can sing Skullcrusher Mountain much more easily in C instead of E, and The Future Soon much more easily in B flat. I may eventually wind up setting up some instruments specifically to keep down-tuned. It's kind of like, as one Twitter friend commented, a "reverse capo!"

UPDATE: it turns out we did get video of the performance. Not very good video, but video nonetheless. See my YouTube feed. Watch them quick before YouTube takes them down for copyright violations, since we covered a number of different songs. Personally I think a strong case could be made that these short excerpts fall under the fair use exception to copyright, but I don't run YouTube.

Ann did not show up, so we had to make do without her. Fortunately we had planned for this possibility and rehearsed with other folks leading the songs. Jim did a great job on a few songs. Isaac did a reasonably good job on Still Alive. The rest were up to me. I didn't sound too bad for some of the songs, especially after I was warmed up. Everyone seemed to have a good time. But I know I'm not a terribly strong singer -- vocals are still sort of my achilles heel as a musician. I'm not just awful, but I just have a tendency to drift off pitch, even when singing something in my range, and especially if I'm singing solo while accompanying myself on guitar. If I have other folks singing to calibrate myself against, I do much better.

I've had numerous suggestions for voice lessons, and I'm considering it, but -- well, I stopped taking guitar lessons after child #4 was born because I just couldn't guarantee any practice time, and since we juggle one car, relying on my wife to help me get to lessons on time was just not going to fly. I may still be able to find a teacher who can accommodate weekend times or something like that. But our lives are very, very busy now, so it may have to wait a little longer -- at least until we no longer have two in diapers.

Guitar Pron 10: Two Squier Venus Guitars

2009-10-29T22:49:00.000-07:00

The Squier Venus is an interesting design. Like the Super-Sonic (see Guitar Pron 5: The Squier Super-Sonic), this one was made by Fender Japan in the 1997-1998 time frame. As one of the "Vista" series instruments, it is built considerably better than the "Squier" name might seem to imply. Also, although the Jagmaster gets more respect, these Venus guitars are better-built (although the workmanship is not what I'd call fantastic, only good; there are almost always minor fit-and-finish issues on these instruments that remind me that they didn't get a lot of attention in the build process).

It has an extremely flat body, and it is made of (I think) basswood, making it very light. The body has wide "hips," and a very, well, curvaceous pickguard design. It's definitely a feminine take on classic electric guitar design. The lighter body makes it kinder on someone a little smaller. This instrument may be made for a woman, but with that jangly tone it is also strong enough for a man! The scale length is 25.5 inches, the same as a Stratocaster. I wonder why Courtney Love didn't design a short-scale like the Jag-Stang?

Note also that it is a hardtail, which is unusual in a Fender or Squier instrument that isn't a telecaster. And not only that, but it has a tune-o-matic bridge and string ferrules running through the body. And yes, that neck is bound!

These instruments came with gig bags, not hard-shell cases, and so they are usually pretty dinged up. It's a bit tricky to find a case that fits this wider body design, although some generic cases will fit. With the very flat body, you may want to put some kind of extra pad inside so that it is not hanging by the neck (storing it this way long-term might tend to cause the neck to warp).

I recently came across someone selling two of them locally, and not through eBay, so decided to make an offer on both. Both of them are in good condition but needed a little work. The black one needed a good cleaning and setup, and the neck was misaligned a bit. That was easy to fix, though. It's now set up with 10s and the action is raised a bit, and it plays wonderfully. There's no tone control -- it's got very basic electronics, just a humbucker, a single-coil, and a 3-way switch. Courtney Love was allegedly fond of just the Seymour Duncan Little '59, which is interesting because that's one of the pickups I chose for my heavily modified Jag-Stang -- another project I need to complete someday.

I apologize for the quality of these photos -- it's hard to get a good view of a black instrument. I did not get a chance to set them up against a photogenic background like I did with the Super-Sonics. I'll try to get some better shots of these after I finish up the rest of the minor repairs.

There is also a sunburst model that is in even better condition, but for some reason is missing some screws and springs on the pickups. I also have to re-solder some wires, but that is not too difficult. I don't have a photo of the sunburst one put together yet. I'm sorry the color is so bad in these photos -- this classic burst paint job is actually very nicely done and not garish at all. I'll try to get some shots in natural daylight after I get it put back together and set up.

There is another color commonly seen, and that is sea-foam green. I'll give that one a miss, thanks. It may be a classic surf color, but it's just too ugly for me. There is also a relatively rare Venus 12-string that I'd like to try -- I've never played a 12-string electric. I'm also still looking for another Vista-series Jagmaster, preferably one with the truss rod adjustment at the headstock.

Guitar Pron 9: Godin LG

2009-10-29T22:33:00.001-07:00

Godin has some guitars out now that represent incredible bang for the buck. Assembled in the U.S. out of Canadian parts, the lower-end of the range, the LG, is really a tremendous instrument. This one is a lovely red over mahogany, with the grain visible, and black hardware.

While a pretty basic guitar, the sunken bridge and very comfortable body contouring give it a little extra style.

The design is very reminiscent of some of Gibson's offerings, particularly the classic Les Paul Junior. I'm not fond of the heavy Les Paul designs, but the Les Paul Junior is one of the few Gibson guitars I might consider actually buying one day. However, with instruments like this LG available with decent build quality and a more comfortable playing experience, it's hard to get as enthused about the Les Paul Junior anymore.

This is an older LG, with the "tetrad" pickups, and pulling on the tone control engages a coil tap.

The only design elements I don't really like are these grooves into the body to allow the strings to reach ferrules that run through the body, for extra sustain. They just seem slightly cheesy, and the ferrules have some problems: they are a little fiddly when trying to thread the strings, and they introduce a sharp edge where the strings tend to break.

The only other thing I'd change is to provide a truss rod cover; even on a basic model, this should not be really considered optional. But despite these minor shortcomings it's really a very attractive and playable package, and I'd whose-heartedly recommend a used LG to any student looking for a decent and economical instrument, but I also wouldn't hesitate to play a real gig with mine.

Guitar Pron 8: Steinberger XQ-4 Bass (v1)

2009-10-24T21:20:00.000-07:00

The recession has hit musicians pretty hard and so I've had the opportunity to pick up some instruments on eBay recent at prices that would have been unheard of just a few months ago. I have long wanted to own an older Steinberger (ideally, one of the L-series basses and a P-series guitar), but they tend to go for crazy money. This one came along for a price that I thought was actually reasonable, though.

In a previous installment I reviewed a v2 XQ-4 made recently in the "Music Yo" era: see this blog entry.

This one is older; I don't have a precise date, but looking at serial numbers, it probably comes from around 1990. The Gibson buyout was in 1986, at least according to Wikipedia, which means this one was produced somewhere in that transitional period. I think the neck was likely made at the Newburgh plant, but I'm not entirely certain of that. I am certain that it is a "v1" Q-series instrument; the lines are a little different, the body is thicker and heavier (maple instead of swamp ash), and it has a few little design issues that were improved upon with the v2 design. It won't fit in a form-fitting case made for the v2 models.

But I'm also sure, after playing it, that it is a better instrument. It lacks the stacked HAZ Labs EQ, although the active EMGs do use one 9-volt battery. Some of the details feel a little off. When it arrived, the nylon strap peg on the butt end was broken. It sticks out a little differently than the pegs on the v2 model. Fortunately I happened to have some black locking tuning pegs that look very similar and which fit perfectly. I'm not enough of a purist to try to find originals, if the originals are flimsy.

It has some finish cracks, and a number of dings and scratches; the battery holder had come loose and was rattling around in the compartment. That's an easy fix. There's a cringe-worth little gash in the neck itself, but it doesn't affect the playability. The sound of this thing is unmistakeable, and fantastic.

While the instrument with the Moses Graphite neck sounds nice, and has some punch to it, it also can be described as sounding a little "warmer" -- more like a wooden-necked bass. Apparently that was a deliberate design decision and the Moses Graphite necks are "tuned" to provide a woodier tone. There's nothing very natural-sounding about the old-school Steinberger tone. It's metallic; it doesn't sound at all like wood. "Harsh" is not too strong a word, but you could also call it "pure." EQ it down, and it could make a decent jazz bass; pop a string, and you've got Dave Stewart playing a crazy funk bass line in a Eurythmics tune. The sounds it makes are absolutely iconic, and I grew up with them, so they are also nostalgic. My bass playing is not really good enough to do this thing justice, but I'll have to make a recording, just to show it off. There's just something different, and fascinating, about these instruments.

The bridge on this thing feels a little more solid, even though it lacks the steel insets of the V2 instrument. It has a neat down-tuning feature: an adjustable lever that can be popped up to lower the E string down to a D. I'm not sure I will use it much, since changing just one string like this screws up the scale patterns in my head, but it may find a use. Impressively, the string stays perfectly in tune.

The only thing I really am unhappy with is that this instrument didn't come with a hard-shell case; it came with only a flimsy gig bag. Since it's relatively heavy, that's just not adequate; a lot of the dings on the instrument, and the broken strap peg, could have no doubt been avoided with a good case.. So I will be keeping an eye out for one, either a case made for this model or one I can adapt to fit it.

However, I also feel pretty certain this thing won't be staying in its case very much. That's the real reason that all the "vintage" Steinberger basses you see for sale are so beat up. The owners just couldn't keep their hands off of them!

Update 17 Dec 2009

Ed Roman writes of this model that it has excellent tone, but is not balanced very well. He's correct -- the body is awkwardly heavy. It wouldn't be my first choice to wear on a strap for a live show. However, the Nashville v2 XQ-4 I have has the opposite problem -- the body is too light compared to the neck. There probably exists somewhere an XQ-4 with a Steinberger Blend neck, HAZ Labs EQ, and a swamp ash body that is just right; I'm keeping an eye out for it.

He also says they have a "horrible appearance (my opinion)," and, well -- yeah, the combination of some sharp edges together with some rounded edges make it a little weird looking; the "design language" is inconsistent.

I've done a little recording of this thing and it sounds fantastic. The active pickups do push out quite a bit of voltage, though -- the difference in voltage between a light pluck and a hard string pull is huge. I have to be careful not to clip the input to my Apogee Ensemble. My son plays upright acoustic bass, and has larger hands than I do. I had the input level set perfectly for my playing, but when I handed it to him to play, he plucked the strings much harder, and the levels were blowing out all over the place! I am still planning on trying some kind of active direct box such as the Radial JDV Mark 3, which lets me select the exact loading for different kinds of pickups.

I have just completed a "Buy it Now" on an XP-4 bass, and it should be arriving soon. The P series were a short-lived model with small "flying V" shaped wooden bodies and Steinberger Blend necks. Per Mr. Roman again, these "sound great" because of the wooden body -- better, he claims, than the L series. I have 3 days approval to decide if I want to return this instrument for a refund, so I will be examining and testing it very thoroughly. I would also love to find a P-series guitar with the S-trem (a hard tail, which I'd really prefer, apparently was never offered).

I'm not really interested in the Trans Trem -- I'd probably waste way too much time fiddling with it, trying to get it to work perfectly in tune. Since I am very picky about tuning, it would probably frustrate me no end. It's an intriguing invention but, to my mind, just slightly impractical in implementation; some versions seem to work better than others, and they all seem to require a lot of maintenance.

I am also scratching my head and pondering whether I want to try to acquire an L series (all-composite "boat oar") Steinberger, if I can find a good one at a great price. They are considered the most collectible of the bunch and were tending to go for crazy money, although the current economy has apparently created a buyer's market for guitars of all kinds. It gets at the question of exactly what I am doing. Some of my instruments are for playing and recording, and some are for investing. Would I buy a "boat oar" instrument strictly to invest in, knowing that it isn't going to be one of my personal favorites? I guess it depends on how much confidence I put in my own taste and judgment!

Update 22 Dec 2009

The P-series instrument has not arrived yet, but last night I tried to change the strings on this XQ bad boy. I discovered that the bridge has suffered some abuse. The D-string tuner seems to be missing a spring and possibly some little spacers; the knurled knob grinds right up against the bridge and has chewed a semicircle of exposed aluminum. The threaded rod for that tuner may be slightly bent; it turns much harder than the others. The E string tuner, which has the detuning mechanism, also seems like it may be missing a spring, and the knob was not staying put on the threaded rod but coming right off the end. It took me some time and a lot of aggravation to figure out how to expand the tuner and get the knob clamped back on. The E string tuner had 3 little spacers so I borrowed one to put on the D string tuner, which helps a little, but I have no idea if that how it was originally put together. It's an ingenious design, but a little fiddly, which is the same complaint I've read about the transposing tremolo. The jaws apparently have a tendency to break, and the saddle blocks have a tendency to wear badly and cut the strings.

My best guess is that a previous owner (perhaps the guy who sold it to me, perhaps someone else) took it apart and some springs, and maybe some spacers as well, went flying. I discovered myself that the tiny spacers are awfully easy to lose.

I also discovered that two of the four screws that mount the bridge to the guitar body were missing. I can't imagine why, since the screw holes in the body are not stripped, and those screws seem pretty important. Did someone cannibalize this instrument to repair another one?

Anyway, I called Ed Roman guitars. They have the 4-string DB bridges in stock, but they want $240 for one. I'll have to think that over. This one works, but not as well as it should. It might be wise to get a replacement bridge now, while they are still available. New-old stock Steinberger parts are getting scarce; Music Yo no longer sells parts from their stockpile.

Anyway, Ed Roman Guitars told me they don't have screws that match mine. The screws are an odd shape, wood screws with a high, rounded head, and black. Once again, screws are the bane of my existence as a hobbyist luthier. I'll have to go screw-hunting once more; if I find some screws that are close, maybe I'll just paint them black.

Update 08 Feb 2009

The P-series bass arrived just before Christmas -- see photos here. I decided not to make the same mistake I did with this one, so I had a new set of strings ready for it, and changed them to verify that the bridge worked as expected. It did -- the new instrument is in great shape. The P-series bass sounds fantastic. The passive EMG pickups were only used in those instruments, and a relatively small number of P-series basses were made.

The v1 XQ-4 is still disassembled. I have found screws that will work to mount the bridge to the body -- they are rather exotic "Fillister head" black wood screws. Your local hardware store is very unlikely to carry these. The originals were Philips drive, but I couldn't find exact matches anywhere. The ones I finally ordered are slotted for hex (Allen) drive. The important thing is that they fit the bridge and the existing screw holes in the body perfectly! There must be a story behind Steinberger's use of such an exotic fastener.

I just sent Peekamoose guitars a note asking if I could send them the bridge to rebuild, without shipping the entire bass. I'd rather not buy a new-old stock part, since then I'd be left with a slightly damaged bridge that I couldn't sell. I'd really prefer to get the original parts working properly. We'll see what they say. If I have to pay to ship this very heavy bass both ways, it might be more cost-effective just to buy that new-old stock bridge.

Guitar Pron 7: Adamas 12-String

2009-10-24T20:42:00.000-07:00

Here is another eBay find -- a near-mint Adamas 12-string acoustic guitar with a woven carbon fiber top. This one seemed perfect for me since the cobalt blue top is one of my favorite colors.

The "epaulets" are made of a series of different hardwoods.

12-string bridges always look almost comical, and this one is no exception.

The neck looks a bit like the neck on a Peavey Cirrus or a high-end Carvin guitar.

12-string guitars are almost aways top-heavy, due to the massive tuner hardware involved. These tuners are particularly fine.

The real thrill in this thing, though, is the way it sounds. The top is incredibly resonant, and it projects a ridiculous amount of volume if you dig in with a heavy pick. I almost can't use it to accompany my vocals without a mic and PA system. It could really project to the back of an auditorium. Go a little lighter, and it is as expressive as a brush on a snare. The sound is not woody, like a Martin, but brassy and metallic, almost electronic sounding. In fact, it sounds a lot like a Steinway piano, or a harpsichord.

The action is low, and it is easier to play than just about any 12-strings I've ever used, although I don't think my hands are really ever going to enjoy playing sustained barre chords up the neck of a 12-string, and even my guitar teacher, whose hands are stronger than mine, gave up with a laugh when he tried to bend the strings. The sound isn't for everything, but I do love the sound of a 12-string!

Guitar Pron 6: the Blonde Limited

2009-08-13T21:13:00.000-07:00

So, my collecting has slowed down a bit, but I'm still scanning eBay listings for guitars I believe in at great prices. That means I watch quite a few auctions, and when the price becomes too high, drop out. Sometimes if a listing has a "Buy it Now" option, I'll make a lowball offer near the end of the auction -- the worst the seller can do is say no, or ignore my offer. That's what usually happens. But sometimes they say yes.

In this particular case, the seller's asking price was pretty high compared to the selling price of other Limiteds. I made an lowball offer. The seller made a counter-offer, which was still a little high for my taste, so I split the difference and made a counter-counter offer just before the end of the auction. The seller accepted my offer.

I have a couple of Peavey Limited guitars. Every Limited that I've seen has had a flame maple or quilted maple top stained with a dye: Tiger's Eye, Margarita, dark blue, or rasberry red. I came across this one on eBay. I believe it must be a fairly rare bird -- it may have been made for a NAMM show or originated as a custom order. Or, maybe the luthiers in Leakesville just happened to have some wood that they thought would look prettier without a colored stain.

The flame maple top isn't as flashy as some of the PRS "ten tops," but then I consider some of those to be too flashy for my taste. This one is just a subtly gorgeous piece of wood, with a rippling 3-dimensional quality.

It has all the basic attributes of the other Limited models. This is a dual humbucker "HB" model. I'm still keeping an eye out for a "VT" model, with 3 hand-wound single-coil pickups, but those seem to be as rare as hen's teeth.

The "zebra" cream-and-black humbuckers go particularly well with this top.

The back shows off the mahogany body.

There's a little bit of corrosion on a couple of the neck screws. This kind of corrosion is probably caused by someone sweating against it -- the salt corroded the screws the same way it does a car. But it's nothing serious. I had to do a bit of adjustment to the neck position; it was slightly off-kilter, indicating that maybe the guitar took a knock in shipping, even though it was well-packed. The other possibility is that it may have spent too much time in a dry environment, allowing the wood of the neck pocket to shrink slightly, so that it was no longer making firm contact with the neck. In any case, this was not a difficult adjustment -- I just loosened the neck screws a bit and applied a little force to shift it into the right position, then held it there while I re-tightened the neck screws. It does require a certain degree of experience to know how much force you can apply without risking damage to the neck or neck pocket. It shifted back into place nicely and now the instrument is perfectly playable and the tuning is stable again.

The frets need a little bit of light touch-up work, so I'll take it up to Elderly the next time I go. But besides that, it doesn't need much of anything. It has that nice light weight, body contour, and woody, hollow tone that is characteristic of this series. I'll very likely be using this one to record.

If you're wondering what the difference is between "flame" maple -- this guitar's top -- and "qulited" maple, check out my earlier pictures of another Peavey Limited, which has a "quilted" top:

Guitar Pron 1 (a link to another entry in this blog).

My understanding is that "quilted" maple looks more wavy and irregular, like ripples in water, and the pattern may be larger. But don't quote me; I'm not an expert.

Mandeville Ward (Demo)

2009-08-08T11:11:00.000-07:00

So, I was going to record an acoustic demo, but it is raining hard today, complete with thunder. That's a lot of background noise to be working with when recording an acoustic guitar. So I decided to try something else. Along the way I got the idea to start with some loops played through the Vestax VCI-300. Also, I revised the lyrics still further for length and meter. I don't entirely have the hang of editing with Logic 9 yet. Anyway, it's done. Start-to-finish time, about 3 hours.

One of the samples is from an industrial instrumental created by Braindouche, from her podcast episode entitled Not Dreamy. There are a couple more loops, my vocal, and a guitar part, and that's about it. The vocal isn't very good. I don't have the right kind of voice for this kind of track, but I went for it anyway.

MP3 File

Update: the person who contributed the original lyrics asked to be credited as "Aidan Galea." So there it is -- words by Aidan Galea, music by yours truly with samples from Braindouche!

Lyrics in Progress

2009-08-07T12:06:00.000-07:00

Someone I know only through Twitter -- who may or may not be a high-school aged person in Melbourne -- posted a link to a lyric. I thought it had a lot of promise, so I offered to try recording it. S/he approved the idea.

First, I needed to make it flow more like a song. The original reminded me of two songs: Pearl Jam's "Jeremy," and The Verve Pipe's "Freshmen." I can't quite make sense out of the story, especially I don't even know if the protagonist is male or female, but maybe the ambiguity is actually a virtue.

So, I worked over the scansion a little bit, turned some of the text into a chorus, and dropped a verse that I didn't think would fit. Here's the text as I'm going to try recording it. Unless I hear otherwise, the text is copyrighted by anonymous in Melbourne. My recording will be Creative Commons-licensed. I have no idea what the licensing state of this lyric should be, given that it is a revised version of someone else's work, but for now let's just say that the lyric continues to be copyrighted by anonymous.

Mandeville Ward

Lyrics by Anonymous, revised by Paul R. Potts

You’ve got the whole world fooled
While you hide in your slumber
Our friends are pacing, scared
To the nurses, you're a number

We never really thought that things could go from bad to worst
You promised if they did, you’d try to tell us first
Now you're covered in tubes and you’re covered in blood
You left us all a letter saying that “Enough is enough”
You said “We're 7 billion people, and we’re all just the same,
so why should I matter, if everyone's in pain?”
Won't you tell me?

CHORUS:

I remember the day when this whole thing started;
The worst was yet to come, even though we had parted our ways.
Parted our ways...
But here I am...
And here you are...
in Mandeville Ward

I never should have left you -- you were good enough
I tried to tell you you were perfect, but you called my bluff
I meant every single word that I said from the start
But my words aren’t enough to make the blood pump 
   through your heart

Now your brother's out front and he’s smoking again
He says "I didn’t lose a brother, I also lost a friend"
And your parents are thinking that they are to blame
But no matter what happened, it would have turned out 
   just the same
At two o' clock this morning, your father pounded on my door
With tears on his cheeks he cried "What's it all been for?"
Won't you tell me?

CHORUS:

I remember the day when this whole thing started;
The worst was yet to come, even though we had parted our ways.
Parted our ways...
But here I am...
And here you are...
in Mandeville Ward

(SOLO)

The last time I saw you, you told me I was to blame
You shouted, "I still love you, but it can never be the same"
You were like a different person, playing a different part
You said "I can't see you any more," and my whole world 
   blew apart

But here I am...
And here you are...
in Mandeville Ward

Guitar Pron 5: the Squier Super-Sonic

2009-05-23T17:48:00.000-07:00

Back around 1998, the Fender factory in Japan was making Squier-labeled guitars from the Vista series that were better, apparently, than Fender HQ was comfortable with. Sold as lower-priced instruments, the workmanship on these instruments rivaled the Fender USA instruments and certainly beat their other overseas-built guitars, although some of the parts, particularly the electronics, are somewhat sub-standard. The Squier Super-Sonic is one of the best of this series, although I also own a Jagmaster and have played a Venus and both also are pretty well-made guitars that outshine most instruments built in their price range.

The Super-Sonic is a short-scale instrument, with a 24" scale. It's got a belly cut (which comes in handy, in my case) as well as the forearm contour. That makes it is a very nostalgic-feeling instrument for me because my first electric guitar was a Fender Mustang, a Competition model in red with the racing stripe and painted headstock, which had a similar body shape. With a 24" scale length, the Mustang fit my relatively small hands nicely. (I can play a Stratocaster-scale instrument, but it always just feels slightly awkward to me, even decades later). I'm not sure why short scales are always aimed at the low end of the market, as student or entry-level instruments; I think some experienced and even professional guitarists would also appreciate short-scales, if they were as finely made as this one.

Anyway, the Super-Sonics can be had at pretty low prices, or at least they could; I haven't seen very many go by on eBay recently. They were made in black, white, silver sparkle, and blue sparkle. For a year or so I stalked eBay looking for the instruments in excellent condition and good prices. I watched a number of them go buy without bidding on them, and bid on a few and watched the price go up past my comfort zone. But after some careful bidding I own three of them, two in silver sparkle and one in blue sparkle.

This silver one is in the best shape: the body and hardware are nearly perfect. The poly finish has yellowed very slightly, which gives the whole thing a slightly gold look. The blue one is in second-best condition; the finish is excellent, a brilliant blue yellowing slightly to aqua, but it has needed some bridge parts replaced and has more troubles with the knobs and electronics.

As a young teenager I didn't really appreciate what a finely-built instrument the Fender Mustang was, although it was sold as a student model. And I never could get the tone I wanted out of it. Now I understand that with its low-voltage single-coil pickups, the Mustang was built for twang and surf, not emulating Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. It was a hand-me down from my stepbrother, and since it came cheap, I didn't really understand its value. I'm trying not to make that mistake again. A word of advice for guitarists: if you have a guitar and you don't like its tone, after experimenting with different amplifiers, don't modify the guitar by replacing the pickups; it could ruin whatever collectible or resale value it may have had. Find another guitar that comes closer to the sound you want. If you do decide you must change out the pickups, find exact physical replacements so you don't have to do any routing or drilling, find pickups that give you similar but better-quality tone, and save the original pickups in case a future owner wants to put the instrument back to stock. And remember: most of the tone you get from an electric guitar is in your fingers and your amplifier, not the wood. I'm not joking when I say this, although some gearheads may think I am.

The Super-Sonic has an interesting design: it looks like a left-handed guitar played right-handed. The word is that it was inspired by Jimi Hendrix's use of right-handed guitars left-handed.

The body is basswood and the neck is maple, with a "skunk stripe." The truss rod is the bullet style, which adjusts at the headstock. It is a godsend to be able to adjust a truss rod without removing the neck.

An aside: I also have a Jagmaster which needed truss rod adjustment and it had a poorly-fitting neck pocket, and also a shim, which fell out when I loosened the neck to adjust the truss rod; it still isn't right. The neck pocket on these Super-Sonics seem tighter, by comparison. And another quick aside: I'm still keeping an eye out for one of the Japanese Jagmasters with the bullet truss rod; apparently a few were made, but they are scarce. I'll do a photo spread on the Jagmaster at some point, although it is not quite as pretty.

These instruments are much easier to maintain. They have vintage frets -- tall, narrow fret-wire. The frets wear pretty quickly. The silver one needs to have the frets leveled and crowned, but they aren't too bad -- I don't think any frets need to be replaced. I'm planning to run it up to Elderly Instruments and see what they can do with it.

The electronics of the Super-Sonic have an odd layout: it has no tone controls. Those are both volume controls. And oddly, the one closer to the bridge controls the neck pickup, and vice-versa. The only rationale I can think of for this odd arrangement is that if you're playing a solo on the bridge pickup, you can use your pinky to do volume fades.

The last oddity to comment on is the strap peg. The one on the butt end of the guitar is normal, but the other one is actually mounted on the neck plate. I think the idea might have been that you could move it to either horn and play the guitar right or left handed -- one of mine has been modified like that. But I actually kind of like it where it is.

There really is a lot to like about these guitars, but a few things not to like. The tuners are a bit flimsy, so I've considered replacing them with drop-in replacement vintage locking tuners from Gotoh, but I haven't done it yet. For some reason the headstock holes in the Vista series guitars tended to be drilled just slightly too large, which means that when you go to change the strings, the tuner bushings sometimes fall out. That's sloppy. The string trees tend to bind up on the strings and tuning these instruments is a little tricky; despite my best efforts at nailing down the tremolo, with extra springs and tightening down the tremolo screws, heavy bends still tend to pull the other strings out of tune a bit; if I were to use them live, I'd probably have to re-tune quite a bit during a set, where some of my other instruments -- the Ovation acoustic, the Peavey T-60s, the Steinberger basses, and the Parker Fly -- hold their tuning much more securely. I may see if I can get Elderly to block the trem on one of them, for the sake of tuning stability, although it affects the tone a bit.

I've got these two set up with 11s, with the truss rods and tremolos adjusted accordingly. I adjusted the intonation with a Peterson virtual strobe tuner, and they sound great. The only problem is that the bridge saddles don't slide far enough to intonate the low E and A strings perfectly. So I might wind up going back to 10s. I think they may have been set up for 10s in the factory.

Despite these minor quibbles, I love these instruments. They are a blast to play -- low action, short scale, tone out the wazoo, easy string bending, and a really striking look! If you can still find one in good condition for a decent price, I recommend you give it a try.

Oh, how do they sound? Well, a couple of my YouTube videos feature me playing the Super-Sonics, but I'm not really happy with the sound quality that results after YouTube gets done compressing my video files. When I get a little more free time -- hah! -- I will try to record something a little higher-quality for you to listen to -- mabye just audio, or maybe my first-ever video clip on Vimeo, which claims to provide better video and sound quality.

Guitar Pron 4: Peavey T-60 Sunburst

2009-05-10T18:47:00.001-07:00

I have several T-60s. This is the one that is in the finest condition. The exact date of manufacture is difficult to ascertain, but it may be from 1981. Whatever the exact date, this instrument is almost 30 years old, and when I received it I was very impressed that the eBay seller had not been exaggerating when he called it a "closet classic" and claimed it had scarcely been played.

The Peavey T-60 was an attempt to capture some of the best design elements of the Stratocaster and the Les Paul and blend them together, along with a few special touches dreamed up by Chip Todd and Hartley Peavey. The weight is in between the two, and it has a flatter, more comfortable body like a Gibson SG. The price was considerably lower as well.

Take a look at the superb solid steel bridge with string-through design. Those saddles give you an enormous amount of leeway in adjusting intonation, and the bridge feels totally bomb-proof.

The T-60 has a 3-way pickup selector, a pickup switch (which, of course, only changes the sound when both pickups are active), and separate volume and tone controls for each humbucker. The tone controls have an unusual feature -- when you bring them all the way up, they disable the humbucking wiring and the pickups get brighter (and slightly noisier), acting as single coils. This gives you an even wider range of tones. The T-60 can do a very good impression of a classic strat, and the neck pickup with the tone control rolled down gives a nice jazz tone. I've got mine set up with 10s, but you could use 11s or perhaps even 12s with no trouble, especially if you down-tune.

I don't generally like the "classic" sunburst finishes very much, but this one is a very restrained burst that is almost an iced tea color, and less reddish or orangish than many burst guitars. I'd call it "iced tea burst" instead of tobacco sunburst. In any case, it's a gorgeous spray job, and the finish over top of the dye is in fantastic condition.

The body wood of this guitar is Ash -- not the light swamp ash tonewood a lot of recent instruments are built from, but a dense and heavy northern ash with a lovely grain.

The neck is maple -- a very nice, fast neck, with wide jumbo "schoolbus" profile frets with almost no fret wear. It even has a little flame of its own that you can see in the picture. You might notice that the neck is glued together from two pieces. That's how they installed the truss rods. The T-60 had some (for the time) amazing advances in guitar manufacturing, including CNC machining of the bodies. Necks were carved with a machine originally designed to carve gunstocks.

The nut is aluminum, and perfectly cut. This one has a rosewood fretboard. Having played a T-60 with a plain maple neck -- literally, with frets driven directly into the wood with no separate fingerboard unlike some maple necks -- I believe the less common T-60s built with the rosewood freboard give the neck additional tuning stability. My maple-necked T-60 with the always feels to me like the neck is slightly too flimsy, and when you apply any pressure at all to it while playing you can hear the pitch shift. But perhaps they aren't all like that; mine may just need some work. The rosewood also seems to darken the tone up a bit, which is a matter of taste and the style of music you like to play.

The inlays are not very attractive on this instrument (they are "mother of toilet seat"), but you can't have everything. Another one of my T-60s has real mother-of-pearl on a rosewood fingerboard, and while much more battered, the inlays are prettier.

The tuners are among the finest I've used on any guitar -- very tight and stable. I left this guitar in a climate-controlled storage unit for six months, and when I pulled it out to play, it was still in almost perfect tune. The only instrument I've got that has even more tuning stability is my Parker Fly, and that guitar's neck isn't just wood, but has a shell of fiberglass and other exotic reinforcing materials.

I really like the Peavey Limiteds, and some of the other Peavey designs, but for sheer quality of craftsmanship, playability, and durability, the T-60s are tanks. I like to say that T-60s are the guitars that, quite literally, could smash the competition.

While a bit heavy by modern standards -- back in the day players equated weight with tone and sustain -- these instruments still sound great and and very well-suited for blues, classic rock tones, or country. They won't give you that overloaded DiMarzio metal tone with octaves of squealing harmonics, and of course they are hardtails so if you love to dive-bomb, you'll be out of luck. But they are still very versatile, and it would take a lot to pry this instrument out of my hands!

If you'd like to find one of your own, start looking now. Peavey made a lot of them, and there are quite a few on eBay every week. But collectors are starting to realize just how nice these instruments really are, so prices are going up, especially for the instruments in the nicer finishes (including the somewhat rare white) and those built with rosewood fingerboards.