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.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
The Start of Songwriting Season
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!
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!
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
The Right Leg Rest at Long Last!
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!)
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!)
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
A Squier Super-Sonic Wiring Diagram
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!
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!
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
2010 Roundup, Part 2: Travels with Joe (and Now Featuring Denise Too!)
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!
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!
Monday, December 27, 2010
2010 Roundup, Part 1: The Year in Fingerpicking
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!
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!
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Sherman's Lament, Live Video and Chords
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
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
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