I had a few quiet hours this evening while my wife and children were out, and so I recorded this.
It's an instrumental version of the Rush song "Different Strings," from the Permanent Waves album. Permanent Waves is the less-famous cousin of its successor, Moving Pictures. Where Moving Pictures is more coherent and polished, the songs on Permanent Waves are a bit more varied, from the big rock anthem of "The Spirit of Radio" to the epic prog-rock "Natural Science" -- but there is also "Different Strings." It's an unusual track for Rush, a soft and minor ballad, with piano, and a slower feel; it's in a lower vocal range. It also features one of the loveliest chord progressions I've ever heard. I recorded this in an attempt to capture the feel of that progression from the original song. It isn't a complete song; there's no vocal; it isn't perfect, as there are some timing gaffes -- but I think I did what I set out to do.
There's a book I own called Guitar Techniques of Rush -- it seems to be long out-of-print and copies scarce, but it's great, and contains a perfect transcription of Lifeson's solo called "Broon's Bane," which is on Exit, Stage Left. The book's claim to fame is that it features transcriptions "prepared under the supervision of Alex Lifeson." The transcriptions are great. They are not the overly fussy, often obsessively detailed, yet often inaccurate, transcriptions you find in tab books; they are structured by and for actual musicians. They don't show you every note of every overdubbed track, but they show the basic parts in extremely accurate tab and notes. I've been struggling a bit with this song, particularly a couple of chord positions that are hard on my hands (I have relatively small hands).
I recorded this using my Godin nylon-string SA guitar, one of the models with the narrow neck, and my Adamas 12-string acoustic. The bass is my Steinberger XP bass from 1985. All the instruments are run into a Radial JDV direct box, then to an Apogee Ensemble, and put together in Logic using Izotope Alloy and Ozone, and I think that's about it. The play-throughs are pretty rough. I had to chop up and edit the nylon string guitar far more than I would have liked, but I'm working on it. The 12-string is buzzing here and there because my left hand was too fatigued to get a good grip. Oh well. I gauge my progress, sometimes, by recording.
Note that the original song is copyrighted and so I am probably breaking all kinds of laws. This is why I normally record only Creative Commons-licensed material... I just don't want to deal with trying to record covers of copyrighted material. It's just too fraught with peril, especially after recent incidents in which someone used our public Wi-Fi and gained me a DMCA warning letter from my ISP. Sigh.
Showing posts with label Adamas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adamas. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
The Start of Songwriting Season
So life has been busy. Crazy busy. We had a new baby. That's kid number five. I've been working crazy hours for the day job. I took only one day off for the birth of the new baby because I was working on such a critical deadline, that is all I felt I could spare. We've been trying to keep up with a house we're barely getting used to; we haven't even finished unpacking. Money is tight; things keep popping up to derail my plans, like car breakdowns. Part of our back fence collapsed due to the blizzards. The kids keep damaging stuff I wouldn't have even imagined they could possibly break, like tearing wallpaper off the walls, plugging our footing drains and flooding the basement with the garden hose, peeing in my shoes, or ripping keys off a keyboard. Our two-year-old is really a handful.
Et cetera, et cetera, Peter Cetera even.
Many days go by where it wasn't even really a question to get some quiet time for recording. I've been fortunate to get any time to practice guitar at all.
In the midst of all this I made the decision to sign up for the SpinTunes songwriting contest again, because it has been so valuable to me to have this incentive and occasion and support group. It's been invaluable, really.
The first challenge was announced 09 June 2011 and was due the evening of June 19th. The challenge was to "write a happy song about death." I thought I'd certainly be able to find a few hours during that week. I had been working a lot of overtime for the previous ten weeks or so, and was working very hard to hit a second deadline. If I had hit it, I would have tried to take three work days off in comp time. It was going to take me practically a full day just to get the office and studio cleaned up enough to work in there, leaving me a couple of full days to record a song. I had managed to get a simple lyric written and had a couple of very rough ideas.
That didn't pan out; I didn't get my build working, due to both my bugs and other people's bugs; I had to do two all-nighters; I had to travel to Lansing twice.
On Saturday (the day before the deadline) I blocked out about four hours. I thought that might be enough to record a sketchy demo. What happened instead was that my Apogee Ensemble went crazy. It had been behaving in a degraded manner. The week before it would occasionally reset itself, or start spitting bursts of ear-splitting noise through the speakers. But this was worse; Logic was locking up and crashing; the software meters wouldn't show any input data; the controls in the Ensemble control panel inside Logic showed crazy levels, like -454 dB. Apple's Audio MIDI Setup application was locking up and crashing; the Apogee Maestro application wouldn't talk to the Ensemble; I was seeing a non-stop string of errors in the Console. I reinstalled its firmware, and reinstalled its drivers, and rebooted. In this manner I managed to use up my entire time window in frustration. Apogee tech support is not available on weekends.
I thought that it was likely my Ensemble had fried itself in the extreme heat in the studio -- early in June we had a crazy heat wave and it was baking in there. I'm fortunate I didn't lose a hard drive. Our central air conditioning just doesn't get up there, apparently; we have to figure out how to improve the airflow. It's quite an old house, and many of the vents that we ought to be able to open or close can't actually be adjusted. The whole system needs some attention from professionals.
So I went for a walk with my Sony PCM-D1 digital recorder and recorded this podcast episode. I put that together later in the evening on the Mac Mini in the family room. Sunday was booked solid, with plans to have guests over, and a big backlog of basic chores I needed to catch up on, like grocery shopping. I pretty much had to announce I was going to be eliminated in round 1 by forfeit. It wasn't a good feeling. I knew that I had done everything I could, but still, it felt like establishing a work/life balance is what I had failed at, not just missing a deadline.
I put in some more work time and managed to get my code debugged. I was not working at peak efficiency and making dumb mistakes due to simple overwork and lack of sleep. Yesterday I got permission to take those three days off as comp time, a week late. And so the plan was to try to do what I had wanted to do a week ago.
Today I started by getting on the tech support chat with Apogee to see if I could get an RMA# for my Ensemble. The plan was to remove the Edirol FA-66 from the downstairs computer and bring it upstairs. I wasn't sure I'd be able to afford the out-of-warranty repairs for the Ensemble, and that was making me nervous. That box cost almost $2,000. If I had to shelve it because I couldn't afford to fix it, that would be a lot of money tied up in something I couldn't even sell. My head became filled with backup plans -- could I pay enough to have it fixed, then sell it on eBay, and track down an older Rosetta 200 with a PCI card to use instead as a simpler but perhaps more reliable and higher-quality setup? But the Apogee support person asked me to try uninstalling the Ensemble driver completely using a separate utility, then reinstalling it, not just running the installer again.
I thought I was just going through the motions to try to prove that the device was exhibiting a hardware failure. But for reasons not entirely clear to me, that worked. I'm not sure just what might have happened to the existing driver, but there it is; if you have an Ensemble, and it starts misbehaving, give that a try. Years ago I wrote a MacOS X IOKit audio driver, so you'd think I'd be able to diagnose a problem like this myself, but no -- it really seemed to me like it was very likely to be a hardware failure.
I've got a ventilation fan in the office bathroom window, pulling some cool air from the rest of the house, and that helps a bit. The plan is to get a portable air conditioner that vents to the window as soon as I can. Of course, if I'm going to record vocals, I have to shut everything off, and the heat builds up pretty quickly.
I often start to feel like I'm failing to do creative work for various reasons -- due to my day job, or due to the family. That mindset tends to lead me into thinking of my day job and my family as problems. That's a painful over-simplification. I didn't quit my day job like Jonathan Coulton, to produce songs. I didn't, and still don't, have the performance and songwriting and recording experience that had gotten him to that point yet. My life is not his life. I'm supporting a family of seven. My wife is a stay-at-home mom and we chose that arrangement.
Merlin Mann likes to ask the rhetorical question "what couldn't you ship?" He's asking people in business, particularly in software, to ask themselves how and why they've failed, and to address the root causes honestly. He talks about people who never ship anything -- who think they have big ideas for software projects, or writing projects, or music projects, but who are too busy, who have too many other priorities, and a lot to juggle, but still have time to watch TV every night, and don't even consider that to be negotiable.
I've shipped a hell of a lot. My entertainment time is highly negotiable. In the last ten weeks or so I negotiated away a lot of things, including a great deal of sleep and a great deal of time with my family. I wrote a server, in about five thousand lines of C++, to a rapidly changing spec, without the ability to debug it on the hardware platform it was designed to run on at all. It features three hierarchical state machines, a dozen threads, several message queues, and something like 70 methods. We shipped that (well, version 1.0 at least; there will no doubt be more features, more bugs, more maintenance).
I also completed a substantial revision to a piece of DSP code written in C. In this revision, through some simplifying and refactoring of a complicated piece of state machine code I managed to add features while removing almost 500 lines of code, or about 10% of the total program. I struggled for a few days with dumb bugs (most bugs turn out to be dumb, but occasionally I run into a bug that is truly fiendish). My boss happened to have possession of the debugger that I might have used to catch bugs right on the hardware, and it wasn't available for me to use this time, so debugging this involved some gritted teeth and a helpful co-worker with fresh eyes who read the code with me. I finally managed to extract the last obvious bug with the help of a separate test bench program, written in Visual C++, that allowed me to exercise most of the features of the program in an environment with a source-level debugger and the ability to log exactly what is happening. So that's shipped. My weekend was almost relaxing after over two months of this.
So I do ship, but the problem is that I'm often not able to ship what I'd most like to ship, and not able to work steadily on the projects I'd most likely to work on -- my creative projects. The creative projects have to fit into the cracks and between the teeth of the gears, without actually jamming them. That can be tricky. They're a luxury and yet I'm considering them to be more and more of a necessity as I get more burned out on this kind of work, and wonder how much longer I can keep doing this as a career. It seems now that there is not likely to be an upgrade path, if that makes sense.
So, with all that as prologue, today I recorded a song. I started with the snare drum that I was unable to record last week. It came out better than I expected. I used my matched pair of Rode NT-5 microphones in an X-Y pattern. With such a loud sound source, the exhaust fan in the other room didn't really matter much, so I left it on. I don't really know how to play drums, but I've manage to sort of teach myself just a tiny bit of stick work on a snare. That actually started with playing upside-down food storage buckets as drums during protest marches, particularly marching in solidarity with striking Borders bookstore workers in 2003.
I also recorded three improvised guitar parts on my Adamas 12-string, into the Radial JDV direct box, and then into the Ensemble. I put the capo on the fifth fret to make it sound a bit like a mandolin. It did not turn out at all like I had heard it in my head last week. I had been imagining something upbeat and Celtic-sounding, like a reel, with a dance-like beat. It didn't sound much like that -- it sounded minor and Middle Eastern. But I was trying to do a one-day wonder, so I had to press on.
I shut off the fans, improvised a vocal melody to my lyrics, recorded a few takes of that to get a reasonably clean one, and then did a few more takes to double it. I sang into the Oktava MK-219 at close range without a pop filter and it didn't seem like it needed one. I used Alloy with various presets on each channel. Now it definitely wasn't Celtic per se. Instead of a reel, it came out more like a dirge, even with the basic rhythm at 130 bpm. The combination of a fast beat with a very slow-moving vocal is odd. Still, like all my songs I at least like how bits of it came out.
I decided to ship it anyway. Sometimes you have to get a not-so-good song out of your system so you can listen to it and think it over and perhaps learn something from the attempt and try again, or just move on to something different. I haven't and written recorded very many complete original songs yet; this is number six, or thereabouts. If I get to a dozen I'll start to feel like I'm beginning to accumulate real experience at this.
I'd like to buy a copy of Nectar, the new vocal processing plugin from Izotope, since I really like Izotope's audio-processing tools, but that will have to wait. I have to remind myself that the right plug-ins might -- emphasis on the might -- help me to tweak a vocal found until I like it more, but no matter what microphone or plug-in I use, it isn't going to be work miracles on my vocal performance. I enjoy the sound of heavily processed audio tracks, even putting things like ring modulation or spinning speaker effects on vocals, but a lot of folks are a little more basic in their approach.
Merlin Mann would probably ask me whether that is really going to keep me from "shipping" -- from completing the project. The answer is no. The presumed-broken Ensemble consumed some of my valuable time, but it didn't keep me from shipping either. In fact, it seems that there isn't much that will.
The song, Today is Not That Day, can be found on Bandcamp here. It's not great. I'm not quite sure what I think of it yet. It always takes me a while to figure that out. I'm calling this Version 1 because, depending on what happens tomorrow and Friday, there's a good chance I'll record another version. While I was recording today I shot some video of the takes I put in the song, so maybe tomorrow I'll throw together a quick video. Goodnight all!
Et cetera, et cetera, Peter Cetera even.
Many days go by where it wasn't even really a question to get some quiet time for recording. I've been fortunate to get any time to practice guitar at all.
In the midst of all this I made the decision to sign up for the SpinTunes songwriting contest again, because it has been so valuable to me to have this incentive and occasion and support group. It's been invaluable, really.
The first challenge was announced 09 June 2011 and was due the evening of June 19th. The challenge was to "write a happy song about death." I thought I'd certainly be able to find a few hours during that week. I had been working a lot of overtime for the previous ten weeks or so, and was working very hard to hit a second deadline. If I had hit it, I would have tried to take three work days off in comp time. It was going to take me practically a full day just to get the office and studio cleaned up enough to work in there, leaving me a couple of full days to record a song. I had managed to get a simple lyric written and had a couple of very rough ideas.
That didn't pan out; I didn't get my build working, due to both my bugs and other people's bugs; I had to do two all-nighters; I had to travel to Lansing twice.
On Saturday (the day before the deadline) I blocked out about four hours. I thought that might be enough to record a sketchy demo. What happened instead was that my Apogee Ensemble went crazy. It had been behaving in a degraded manner. The week before it would occasionally reset itself, or start spitting bursts of ear-splitting noise through the speakers. But this was worse; Logic was locking up and crashing; the software meters wouldn't show any input data; the controls in the Ensemble control panel inside Logic showed crazy levels, like -454 dB. Apple's Audio MIDI Setup application was locking up and crashing; the Apogee Maestro application wouldn't talk to the Ensemble; I was seeing a non-stop string of errors in the Console. I reinstalled its firmware, and reinstalled its drivers, and rebooted. In this manner I managed to use up my entire time window in frustration. Apogee tech support is not available on weekends.
I thought that it was likely my Ensemble had fried itself in the extreme heat in the studio -- early in June we had a crazy heat wave and it was baking in there. I'm fortunate I didn't lose a hard drive. Our central air conditioning just doesn't get up there, apparently; we have to figure out how to improve the airflow. It's quite an old house, and many of the vents that we ought to be able to open or close can't actually be adjusted. The whole system needs some attention from professionals.
So I went for a walk with my Sony PCM-D1 digital recorder and recorded this podcast episode. I put that together later in the evening on the Mac Mini in the family room. Sunday was booked solid, with plans to have guests over, and a big backlog of basic chores I needed to catch up on, like grocery shopping. I pretty much had to announce I was going to be eliminated in round 1 by forfeit. It wasn't a good feeling. I knew that I had done everything I could, but still, it felt like establishing a work/life balance is what I had failed at, not just missing a deadline.
I put in some more work time and managed to get my code debugged. I was not working at peak efficiency and making dumb mistakes due to simple overwork and lack of sleep. Yesterday I got permission to take those three days off as comp time, a week late. And so the plan was to try to do what I had wanted to do a week ago.
Today I started by getting on the tech support chat with Apogee to see if I could get an RMA# for my Ensemble. The plan was to remove the Edirol FA-66 from the downstairs computer and bring it upstairs. I wasn't sure I'd be able to afford the out-of-warranty repairs for the Ensemble, and that was making me nervous. That box cost almost $2,000. If I had to shelve it because I couldn't afford to fix it, that would be a lot of money tied up in something I couldn't even sell. My head became filled with backup plans -- could I pay enough to have it fixed, then sell it on eBay, and track down an older Rosetta 200 with a PCI card to use instead as a simpler but perhaps more reliable and higher-quality setup? But the Apogee support person asked me to try uninstalling the Ensemble driver completely using a separate utility, then reinstalling it, not just running the installer again.
I thought I was just going through the motions to try to prove that the device was exhibiting a hardware failure. But for reasons not entirely clear to me, that worked. I'm not sure just what might have happened to the existing driver, but there it is; if you have an Ensemble, and it starts misbehaving, give that a try. Years ago I wrote a MacOS X IOKit audio driver, so you'd think I'd be able to diagnose a problem like this myself, but no -- it really seemed to me like it was very likely to be a hardware failure.
I've got a ventilation fan in the office bathroom window, pulling some cool air from the rest of the house, and that helps a bit. The plan is to get a portable air conditioner that vents to the window as soon as I can. Of course, if I'm going to record vocals, I have to shut everything off, and the heat builds up pretty quickly.
I often start to feel like I'm failing to do creative work for various reasons -- due to my day job, or due to the family. That mindset tends to lead me into thinking of my day job and my family as problems. That's a painful over-simplification. I didn't quit my day job like Jonathan Coulton, to produce songs. I didn't, and still don't, have the performance and songwriting and recording experience that had gotten him to that point yet. My life is not his life. I'm supporting a family of seven. My wife is a stay-at-home mom and we chose that arrangement.
Merlin Mann likes to ask the rhetorical question "what couldn't you ship?" He's asking people in business, particularly in software, to ask themselves how and why they've failed, and to address the root causes honestly. He talks about people who never ship anything -- who think they have big ideas for software projects, or writing projects, or music projects, but who are too busy, who have too many other priorities, and a lot to juggle, but still have time to watch TV every night, and don't even consider that to be negotiable.
I've shipped a hell of a lot. My entertainment time is highly negotiable. In the last ten weeks or so I negotiated away a lot of things, including a great deal of sleep and a great deal of time with my family. I wrote a server, in about five thousand lines of C++, to a rapidly changing spec, without the ability to debug it on the hardware platform it was designed to run on at all. It features three hierarchical state machines, a dozen threads, several message queues, and something like 70 methods. We shipped that (well, version 1.0 at least; there will no doubt be more features, more bugs, more maintenance).
I also completed a substantial revision to a piece of DSP code written in C. In this revision, through some simplifying and refactoring of a complicated piece of state machine code I managed to add features while removing almost 500 lines of code, or about 10% of the total program. I struggled for a few days with dumb bugs (most bugs turn out to be dumb, but occasionally I run into a bug that is truly fiendish). My boss happened to have possession of the debugger that I might have used to catch bugs right on the hardware, and it wasn't available for me to use this time, so debugging this involved some gritted teeth and a helpful co-worker with fresh eyes who read the code with me. I finally managed to extract the last obvious bug with the help of a separate test bench program, written in Visual C++, that allowed me to exercise most of the features of the program in an environment with a source-level debugger and the ability to log exactly what is happening. So that's shipped. My weekend was almost relaxing after over two months of this.
So I do ship, but the problem is that I'm often not able to ship what I'd most like to ship, and not able to work steadily on the projects I'd most likely to work on -- my creative projects. The creative projects have to fit into the cracks and between the teeth of the gears, without actually jamming them. That can be tricky. They're a luxury and yet I'm considering them to be more and more of a necessity as I get more burned out on this kind of work, and wonder how much longer I can keep doing this as a career. It seems now that there is not likely to be an upgrade path, if that makes sense.
So, with all that as prologue, today I recorded a song. I started with the snare drum that I was unable to record last week. It came out better than I expected. I used my matched pair of Rode NT-5 microphones in an X-Y pattern. With such a loud sound source, the exhaust fan in the other room didn't really matter much, so I left it on. I don't really know how to play drums, but I've manage to sort of teach myself just a tiny bit of stick work on a snare. That actually started with playing upside-down food storage buckets as drums during protest marches, particularly marching in solidarity with striking Borders bookstore workers in 2003.
I also recorded three improvised guitar parts on my Adamas 12-string, into the Radial JDV direct box, and then into the Ensemble. I put the capo on the fifth fret to make it sound a bit like a mandolin. It did not turn out at all like I had heard it in my head last week. I had been imagining something upbeat and Celtic-sounding, like a reel, with a dance-like beat. It didn't sound much like that -- it sounded minor and Middle Eastern. But I was trying to do a one-day wonder, so I had to press on.
I shut off the fans, improvised a vocal melody to my lyrics, recorded a few takes of that to get a reasonably clean one, and then did a few more takes to double it. I sang into the Oktava MK-219 at close range without a pop filter and it didn't seem like it needed one. I used Alloy with various presets on each channel. Now it definitely wasn't Celtic per se. Instead of a reel, it came out more like a dirge, even with the basic rhythm at 130 bpm. The combination of a fast beat with a very slow-moving vocal is odd. Still, like all my songs I at least like how bits of it came out.
I decided to ship it anyway. Sometimes you have to get a not-so-good song out of your system so you can listen to it and think it over and perhaps learn something from the attempt and try again, or just move on to something different. I haven't and written recorded very many complete original songs yet; this is number six, or thereabouts. If I get to a dozen I'll start to feel like I'm beginning to accumulate real experience at this.
I'd like to buy a copy of Nectar, the new vocal processing plugin from Izotope, since I really like Izotope's audio-processing tools, but that will have to wait. I have to remind myself that the right plug-ins might -- emphasis on the might -- help me to tweak a vocal found until I like it more, but no matter what microphone or plug-in I use, it isn't going to be work miracles on my vocal performance. I enjoy the sound of heavily processed audio tracks, even putting things like ring modulation or spinning speaker effects on vocals, but a lot of folks are a little more basic in their approach.
Merlin Mann would probably ask me whether that is really going to keep me from "shipping" -- from completing the project. The answer is no. The presumed-broken Ensemble consumed some of my valuable time, but it didn't keep me from shipping either. In fact, it seems that there isn't much that will.
The song, Today is Not That Day, can be found on Bandcamp here. It's not great. I'm not quite sure what I think of it yet. It always takes me a while to figure that out. I'm calling this Version 1 because, depending on what happens tomorrow and Friday, there's a good chance I'll record another version. While I was recording today I shot some video of the takes I put in the song, so maybe tomorrow I'll throw together a quick video. Goodnight all!
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Ghoul Tide Guitars
I've mixed together most of the guitar tracks (Babicz 6-string acoustic and Adamas 12-string acoustic) I recorded for Joe "Covenant" Lamb's song hilarious and horrifying holiday-ish song Ghoul Tide. You can find it in the form of a little instrumental ditty on Bandcamp. There are also some bits of Logic MIDI instruments I used as placeholders the little Christmas song quotes.
This song also features the Steinberger XQ-4 bass. The version I mixed for Bandcamp is my playing; my son Isaac also contributed a track, and Joe actually used a bit of both in the final song. You might be able to tell the bits apart because Isaac is used to playing an upright acoustic bass, and so plucks a lot more heavily (you can probably hear this even after volume leveling and compression are applied; I had to turn down the input levels for his parts because he was clipping the A/D converters!)
I'm finger-picking a 12-string on this track. It's a little rough! Also, apologies for my whistling nose. I haven't figured out how to record an acoustic guitar part into a mic without getting some breath noises. I guess I have to hold my breath when I'm sustaining a long note or chord and time my breaths with strums!
This song also features the Steinberger XQ-4 bass. The version I mixed for Bandcamp is my playing; my son Isaac also contributed a track, and Joe actually used a bit of both in the final song. You might be able to tell the bits apart because Isaac is used to playing an upright acoustic bass, and so plucks a lot more heavily (you can probably hear this even after volume leveling and compression are applied; I had to turn down the input levels for his parts because he was clipping the A/D converters!)
I'm finger-picking a 12-string on this track. It's a little rough! Also, apologies for my whistling nose. I haven't figured out how to record an acoustic guitar part into a mic without getting some breath noises. I guess I have to hold my breath when I'm sustaining a long note or chord and time my breaths with strums!
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Ghoul Tide
So, last week I worked on this track with my buddy Joe "Covenant" Lamb. Joe resides in Dundee, Scotland and we have never met in person, but we have wound up collaborating on music projects. I'm considering it sort of an apprenticeship in songwriting and recording -- he can write original songs, and I've never done it! It's good experience for me.
This is his entry for Song Fu 5, round 3. The challenge was to write a song that sounds like a holiday song, but which is not really about the holidays. Warning: it's kind of gruesome! Funny, but gruesome!
If you like it, consider donating to Joe, or buy some of his other tracks. (Voting for round 3 is over).
Joe plays guitar himself at an intermediate level (he says he can't play barre chords), but he is having painful problems with his shoulder, so was having a terrible time recording even a simple guitar part. He was kind enough to give me credit right in the song title itself.
On this song, I'm playing the Babicz acoustic, strummed and with some very simple finger-picking of the same chords, into one of the Rode NT-5 mics. I also gave Joe a very simple bass track, in which I'm playing the Steinberger XQ-4 v2, direct into the Apogee Ensemble. I also recorded my son Isaac (age 15) playing a bass line. Isaac's more of a bass player than I am, and plays upright acoustic bass in his high school jazz band, but he's not used to recording, and his timing was a little rough. Joe says for the final mix he used parts from both our tracks.
I laid down two tracks on the 12-string Adamas as well, strummed and finger-picked, and at least one of them is in there. And, finally, I transcribed Joe's demo into notes in Logic and had it play them using some virtual instruments. I think harp and glockenspiel are the ones that made it into the final mix. That was pretty tedious -- since I'm not much of a keyboard player, and my guitar synth is on loan, I started with my DX-7 but put in most of the notes by hand. MIDI note quantization in Logic is still a bit of a mystery to me.
Collaborating this way was a pain! Joe is 5 hours ahead of Michigan. We tried using Skype, and it worked once, but then on the second try Joe couldn't hear me, I could only hear him. We finally determined that Joe's tuner had malfunctioned, which meant that everything he had recorded was based on a concert A at 430 Hz, not 440. Joe's download speed was terrible. Then he changed his mind about the track tempo after I had recorded my parts twice. This all meant it took about three times longer and required three times more aggravation and retakes than it should have for such a simple part.
If we had been in the same studio we could have nailed all the tracks in an hour or two. At one point we were reduced to arguing about which beats the chorus chord changes should fall on by using _text messages_... talk about the blind leading the blind! I'm sorry to say that at one point I may have threatened to fly to Scotland and kick his rear end... sorry Joe! But I think all the pain was worth it. Next time, assuming we do this again, I hope we can figure out how to do it a lot more efficiently!
This is his entry for Song Fu 5, round 3. The challenge was to write a song that sounds like a holiday song, but which is not really about the holidays. Warning: it's kind of gruesome! Funny, but gruesome!
If you like it, consider donating to Joe, or buy some of his other tracks. (Voting for round 3 is over).
Joe plays guitar himself at an intermediate level (he says he can't play barre chords), but he is having painful problems with his shoulder, so was having a terrible time recording even a simple guitar part. He was kind enough to give me credit right in the song title itself.
On this song, I'm playing the Babicz acoustic, strummed and with some very simple finger-picking of the same chords, into one of the Rode NT-5 mics. I also gave Joe a very simple bass track, in which I'm playing the Steinberger XQ-4 v2, direct into the Apogee Ensemble. I also recorded my son Isaac (age 15) playing a bass line. Isaac's more of a bass player than I am, and plays upright acoustic bass in his high school jazz band, but he's not used to recording, and his timing was a little rough. Joe says for the final mix he used parts from both our tracks.
I laid down two tracks on the 12-string Adamas as well, strummed and finger-picked, and at least one of them is in there. And, finally, I transcribed Joe's demo into notes in Logic and had it play them using some virtual instruments. I think harp and glockenspiel are the ones that made it into the final mix. That was pretty tedious -- since I'm not much of a keyboard player, and my guitar synth is on loan, I started with my DX-7 but put in most of the notes by hand. MIDI note quantization in Logic is still a bit of a mystery to me.
Collaborating this way was a pain! Joe is 5 hours ahead of Michigan. We tried using Skype, and it worked once, but then on the second try Joe couldn't hear me, I could only hear him. We finally determined that Joe's tuner had malfunctioned, which meant that everything he had recorded was based on a concert A at 430 Hz, not 440. Joe's download speed was terrible. Then he changed his mind about the track tempo after I had recorded my parts twice. This all meant it took about three times longer and required three times more aggravation and retakes than it should have for such a simple part.
If we had been in the same studio we could have nailed all the tracks in an hour or two. At one point we were reduced to arguing about which beats the chorus chord changes should fall on by using _text messages_... talk about the blind leading the blind! I'm sorry to say that at one point I may have threatened to fly to Scotland and kick his rear end... sorry Joe! But I think all the pain was worth it. Next time, assuming we do this again, I hope we can figure out how to do it a lot more efficiently!
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Ukuleles Aren't Cool
Or so Joe "Covenant" Lamb says. But yet... wait... Joe! What's that on your Song Fu #5 round 1 entry? Could it be... your friend Paul playing 3 tracks of ukulele? And a few more tracks of 12-string guitar?
The uke is an Applause model, Ovation's lower-end brand, made in Korea. I have it strung up with Aquila "Nylgut" strings that work great, although like all nylon strings they stretch, and stretch, and stretch, and so have to be constantly re-tuned. It's a tenor-sized instrument. They are tuned the same as a soprano, but with a longer scale, which means higher string tension, but also wider fret spacing. That's a bit plus for me since I'm so used to playing guitar; I have a hard time playing on the tiny fret spacing on my soprano uke. But the real feature I like best about this uke is that you can plug it in -- it has a built-in piezo pickup and EQ. So I was able to record both the 12-string and the uke direct.
The back story -- I collaborated with Joe on the Mandelbrot Set's version of Skullcrusher Mountain. He lives in Dundee, Scotland, which makes it a little tricky to organize a jam session, but I've been trying to find a way to collaborate with him on one of these songs for a while now; usually I've been unavailable in time, since the Song Fu entries always have a short deadline.
On Saturday I chatted with Joe online briefly about this track -- he was having trouble getting a harmonizing guitar part that really worked well. He sent me a track with his vocal plus drums. After the kids were asleep I hauled out my tenor uke and came up with a track to go along with the song's melody, and then a couple more tracks to harmonize with it. The song really called for a mandolin. I don't have one of those, but after this experience I might consider getting one.
Recording this was complicated a bit by the fact that Joe's vocal seemed to be in Eb; I'm not quite sure how that came about. So I had to play the uke melody and harmony parts in Eb. It also just never seemed 100% in tune with Joe's backing guitar, so I was messing around with tweaking it by a few cents, and wasted some time with that. It was getting pretty late, so I very quickly bashed out some accompaniment chords on the 12-string guitar too, again playing in Eb with a bunch of barres that didn't sound very good, partly because my hands aren't really strong enough to do good barres on the 12-string, at least not after all the playing I did on Friday night.
Anyhow, we got everyone up and out, took the kids to dim sum for lunch, and then were planning to go up to Saginaw to visit Grace's mother. I left everyone napping in the car and came in to see if there was anything else I could help Joe with, since I think today was his deadline. He asked me to re-record the 12-string, so I spent about an hour getting something better recorded on the 12-string. Ten minutes of that was retuning it to Eb. Fortunately the Adamas has extremely stable tuning so I was able to retune it and quickly lay down several tracks without worrying that it was going out of tune while I played. I recorded chords for the choruses, then a sort of harmony line, and then realizing I was very short on time, one more track of little scraps of harmony, in the hopes that Joe would be able to find something usable. I uploaded those, shot Joe a quick note, and we headed out.
We got back late, and I saw via Facebook that Joe had posted his song, and really made my guitar parts sound great. I think he used both the original and new 12-string chords, judiciously edited and doubled. I'm pretty sure he used at least some of almost every one of the seven tracks I sent him -- maybe even every track. He did some editing that is so tight I'm not even sure exactly what he did. Even some of the bits and incomplete phrases that I left on that track of "extra scraps" made it in there. It gets doubled and then doubled again and pretty wild, but it all somehow works together, with only some minor timing flaws. With more time I could have done retakes or time-aligned the attacks, but given the material he had to work with, I'm very impressed with the way he put it all together!
It helps that the song is so funny that I nearly wet myself when I first heard it. I hope you will listen to it, and more importantly, as soon as voting is open, vote for Joe!
See the Song Fu page round 5 page here. Check back to see when voting is open.
The uke is an Applause model, Ovation's lower-end brand, made in Korea. I have it strung up with Aquila "Nylgut" strings that work great, although like all nylon strings they stretch, and stretch, and stretch, and so have to be constantly re-tuned. It's a tenor-sized instrument. They are tuned the same as a soprano, but with a longer scale, which means higher string tension, but also wider fret spacing. That's a bit plus for me since I'm so used to playing guitar; I have a hard time playing on the tiny fret spacing on my soprano uke. But the real feature I like best about this uke is that you can plug it in -- it has a built-in piezo pickup and EQ. So I was able to record both the 12-string and the uke direct.
The back story -- I collaborated with Joe on the Mandelbrot Set's version of Skullcrusher Mountain. He lives in Dundee, Scotland, which makes it a little tricky to organize a jam session, but I've been trying to find a way to collaborate with him on one of these songs for a while now; usually I've been unavailable in time, since the Song Fu entries always have a short deadline.
On Saturday I chatted with Joe online briefly about this track -- he was having trouble getting a harmonizing guitar part that really worked well. He sent me a track with his vocal plus drums. After the kids were asleep I hauled out my tenor uke and came up with a track to go along with the song's melody, and then a couple more tracks to harmonize with it. The song really called for a mandolin. I don't have one of those, but after this experience I might consider getting one.
Recording this was complicated a bit by the fact that Joe's vocal seemed to be in Eb; I'm not quite sure how that came about. So I had to play the uke melody and harmony parts in Eb. It also just never seemed 100% in tune with Joe's backing guitar, so I was messing around with tweaking it by a few cents, and wasted some time with that. It was getting pretty late, so I very quickly bashed out some accompaniment chords on the 12-string guitar too, again playing in Eb with a bunch of barres that didn't sound very good, partly because my hands aren't really strong enough to do good barres on the 12-string, at least not after all the playing I did on Friday night.
Anyhow, we got everyone up and out, took the kids to dim sum for lunch, and then were planning to go up to Saginaw to visit Grace's mother. I left everyone napping in the car and came in to see if there was anything else I could help Joe with, since I think today was his deadline. He asked me to re-record the 12-string, so I spent about an hour getting something better recorded on the 12-string. Ten minutes of that was retuning it to Eb. Fortunately the Adamas has extremely stable tuning so I was able to retune it and quickly lay down several tracks without worrying that it was going out of tune while I played. I recorded chords for the choruses, then a sort of harmony line, and then realizing I was very short on time, one more track of little scraps of harmony, in the hopes that Joe would be able to find something usable. I uploaded those, shot Joe a quick note, and we headed out.
We got back late, and I saw via Facebook that Joe had posted his song, and really made my guitar parts sound great. I think he used both the original and new 12-string chords, judiciously edited and doubled. I'm pretty sure he used at least some of almost every one of the seven tracks I sent him -- maybe even every track. He did some editing that is so tight I'm not even sure exactly what he did. Even some of the bits and incomplete phrases that I left on that track of "extra scraps" made it in there. It gets doubled and then doubled again and pretty wild, but it all somehow works together, with only some minor timing flaws. With more time I could have done retakes or time-aligned the attacks, but given the material he had to work with, I'm very impressed with the way he put it all together!
It helps that the song is so funny that I nearly wet myself when I first heard it. I hope you will listen to it, and more importantly, as soon as voting is open, vote for Joe!
See the Song Fu page round 5 page here. Check back to see when voting is open.
Friday, October 30, 2009
The Halloween Set
I'm performing tomorrow night with my son Isaac, my friend Jim, and (if she can make it) my friend Ann, at a private Halloween/birthday/anniversary party. While this was not quite the original plan, I have spent most of my vacation (I've had the past two weeks off from work) polishing up these songs and rehearsing them with my friends. In fact, between rehearsals, working out parts, working on arrangements, scrounging last-minute gear purchases, and getting sheet music and lyrics together for everyone, it's been pretty much all I've been doing for the last ten days. My wife has been watching nervously and asking "you're enjoying this, right?" I am, mostly, but I'm also using it as an excuse to drive myself and try to push my playing and performing to that elusive next plateau that musicians are always seeking.
My rotator cuff is blown out from strumming and my calluses have calluses, which are now peeling off. I'm going to have to take a few days off after this!
I'll be playing 6- and 12-string Ovation and Adamas acoustic guitars and Applause ukuleles. I can has endorsement contract?
The set is an, er, eclectic mix of children's songs, humorous songs, and two classic spooky folk/rock songs.
SOLO SONGS
Beck -- The Golden Age
Robyn Hitchcock -- The Ghost Ship
Paul and Storm -- Nugget Man
GROUP SONGS, SET ONE
Jonathan Coulton -- The Future Soon
Jonathan Coulton -- Chiron Beta Prime
Jonathan Coulton -- Still Alive
They Might Be Giants -- Fake Believe
The Eagles -- Hotel California
They Might Be Giants -- I C U
They Might Be Giants -- Particle Man
(BREAK)
GROUP SONGS, SET TWO:
They Might Be Giants -- ZYX
Gordon Lightfoot -- The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
Jonathan Coulton -- Creepy Doll
They Might Be Giants -- Dead
Jonathan Coulton -- Re: Your Brains
Jonathan Coulton -- Skullcrusher Mountain
Elvis Presley -- Jailhouse Rock
I don't think we'll be recording this set, but I'll be making videos of some of these songs in the near future, particularly the ukulele and guitar parts. I'm down-tuning for some of the songs: I can sing Skullcrusher Mountain much more easily in C instead of E, and The Future Soon much more easily in B flat. I may eventually wind up setting up some instruments specifically to keep down-tuned. It's kind of like, as one Twitter friend commented, a "reverse capo!"
UPDATE: it turns out we did get video of the performance. Not very good video, but video nonetheless. See my YouTube feed. Watch them quick before YouTube takes them down for copyright violations, since we covered a number of different songs. Personally I think a strong case could be made that these short excerpts fall under the fair use exception to copyright, but I don't run YouTube.
Ann did not show up, so we had to make do without her. Fortunately we had planned for this possibility and rehearsed with other folks leading the songs. Jim did a great job on a few songs. Isaac did a reasonably good job on Still Alive. The rest were up to me. I didn't sound too bad for some of the songs, especially after I was warmed up. Everyone seemed to have a good time. But I know I'm not a terribly strong singer -- vocals are still sort of my achilles heel as a musician. I'm not just awful, but I just have a tendency to drift off pitch, even when singing something in my range, and especially if I'm singing solo while accompanying myself on guitar. If I have other folks singing to calibrate myself against, I do much better.
I've had numerous suggestions for voice lessons, and I'm considering it, but -- well, I stopped taking guitar lessons after child #4 was born because I just couldn't guarantee any practice time, and since we juggle one car, relying on my wife to help me get to lessons on time was just not going to fly. I may still be able to find a teacher who can accommodate weekend times or something like that. But our lives are very, very busy now, so it may have to wait a little longer -- at least until we no longer have two in diapers.
My rotator cuff is blown out from strumming and my calluses have calluses, which are now peeling off. I'm going to have to take a few days off after this!
I'll be playing 6- and 12-string Ovation and Adamas acoustic guitars and Applause ukuleles. I can has endorsement contract?
The set is an, er, eclectic mix of children's songs, humorous songs, and two classic spooky folk/rock songs.
SOLO SONGS
Beck -- The Golden Age
Robyn Hitchcock -- The Ghost Ship
Paul and Storm -- Nugget Man
GROUP SONGS, SET ONE
Jonathan Coulton -- The Future Soon
Jonathan Coulton -- Chiron Beta Prime
Jonathan Coulton -- Still Alive
They Might Be Giants -- Fake Believe
The Eagles -- Hotel California
They Might Be Giants -- I C U
They Might Be Giants -- Particle Man
(BREAK)
GROUP SONGS, SET TWO:
They Might Be Giants -- ZYX
Gordon Lightfoot -- The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
Jonathan Coulton -- Creepy Doll
They Might Be Giants -- Dead
Jonathan Coulton -- Re: Your Brains
Jonathan Coulton -- Skullcrusher Mountain
Elvis Presley -- Jailhouse Rock
I don't think we'll be recording this set, but I'll be making videos of some of these songs in the near future, particularly the ukulele and guitar parts. I'm down-tuning for some of the songs: I can sing Skullcrusher Mountain much more easily in C instead of E, and The Future Soon much more easily in B flat. I may eventually wind up setting up some instruments specifically to keep down-tuned. It's kind of like, as one Twitter friend commented, a "reverse capo!"
UPDATE: it turns out we did get video of the performance. Not very good video, but video nonetheless. See my YouTube feed. Watch them quick before YouTube takes them down for copyright violations, since we covered a number of different songs. Personally I think a strong case could be made that these short excerpts fall under the fair use exception to copyright, but I don't run YouTube.
Ann did not show up, so we had to make do without her. Fortunately we had planned for this possibility and rehearsed with other folks leading the songs. Jim did a great job on a few songs. Isaac did a reasonably good job on Still Alive. The rest were up to me. I didn't sound too bad for some of the songs, especially after I was warmed up. Everyone seemed to have a good time. But I know I'm not a terribly strong singer -- vocals are still sort of my achilles heel as a musician. I'm not just awful, but I just have a tendency to drift off pitch, even when singing something in my range, and especially if I'm singing solo while accompanying myself on guitar. If I have other folks singing to calibrate myself against, I do much better.
I've had numerous suggestions for voice lessons, and I'm considering it, but -- well, I stopped taking guitar lessons after child #4 was born because I just couldn't guarantee any practice time, and since we juggle one car, relying on my wife to help me get to lessons on time was just not going to fly. I may still be able to find a teacher who can accommodate weekend times or something like that. But our lives are very, very busy now, so it may have to wait a little longer -- at least until we no longer have two in diapers.
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