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!
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
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
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
SpinTunes 2, Round 4 Reviews
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.
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.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Sherman's Lament (Acoustic Arrangement)
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.
Chords to follow shortly.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
SpinTunes 2, Round 3 Reviews
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.
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.
Monday, November 8, 2010
Sherman's Lament Featuring Duality
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.
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.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Peabody's Boy, (Hopefully) Final Lyrics
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)
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
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)
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)
Monday, November 1, 2010
SpinTunes 2 Round 3 Shadow, Continued
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
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
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
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
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...
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...
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Today's The Day
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.
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.
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