Deju Vu: Day of the Do-Over

Today is the Deja Vu Blogfest!

Organized by my good friend, DL Hammons, with Nicole Zoltack helping out this year, the purpose is simple -- to allow bloggers to revive a favorite post from the past year and give it a do-over. To offer one of their neglected, overlooked, and under-appreciated posts a new chance to shine. As DL says:

"On December 19th, anyone who decides to participate will re-post their favorite blog offering from earlier in the year, or one that you believe failed to receive the exposure it deserved." 

I considered several older posts for my Deja Vu do-over, but finally decided on this one, where I offer my first piece of music with the "Forgotten Voices" theme -- "Streak of Moonlight."  Even after two later entries ("My Name is Romance" and "The Bell Song"), I still consider this to be the 'best' one, and it remains one of my most favorite musical creations.

I hope you enjoy this (slightly edited for presentation) post from 4/8/2014:

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Streak of Moonlight

(image from wikimedia commons)

What do you know? It's been less than a month between my posts!  :)

Today I want to share with you my most recent solo, non-wikiloops, musical piece.  I call it "Streak of Moonlight".  I've uploaded it to my SoundCloud page and you can also listen to it HERE, or right from this blog by clicking on the embedded player below.  I hope you like it -- you can read more about it below...

I hope you enjoyed it!

This piece is all me -- I put together the drum tracks from editing and combining some MIDI drum loops that I found, then I added some simple keyboards, bass, rhythm guitar, more keys, lead guitars, a smattering of ambient background guitars.

But there's something else about this piece that was a new experiment for me -- hear the voices?

I've realized that the human voice can add a tremendous amount of emotion and focus to a piece. But I don't sing -- trust me on this.  So what to do?  Well, I don't want to sample vocals from another musician, and I don't want to deal with copyright infringement, and I'm not going to spend money on what's basically a hobby, and I'm still  a little too insecure about my own pieces to try and get any singers I might know to record something for me, so my choices are pretty slim...

Enter the wonder of recordings of old, forgotten radio programs -- I'll stay away from any of the well-known classics.  So hopefully in the case of the things I use, the artists involved are long gone and if there were copyrights, they've likely either expired or been shuffled through so many hands that they've essentially been lost.  Plus, at this point, what I'm doing is not a commercial endeavor -- I'm not making any money off of this.  I'm giving it away for free.  So if there were still a valid and tracked copyright that I've unintentionally infringed on by using short samples of radio broadcasts from 70 or more years ago, there are certainly little if any damages, and I will gladly give full and proper attribution or comply with any 'cease and desist' orders should they ever come my way.

So, there you go.

This piece is called "Streak of Moonlight" because the vocal samples come from a episode of a 1936 radio romance which was entitled -- you guessed it -- "Streak of Moonlight."  The snippet of strings is also from that recording.

I took my time putting together this piece.  Each layer assembled was done slowly, and I like how this turned out.  There's still some of that 'jam' feel to it (especially in the double guitars during the third lead break), but it has some nice structure to it, too, I think.  It also has a bit of a "chill" feel with some ambient, delay-heavy guitars in the background and my simplistic keyboard drones mixed in.

I really hope you enjoy this, and I'd love to know what you think.  Feel free to comment and let me know...

Thanks for listening!

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Thank you so much for stopping by during this blog-fest and re-visiting my blast from the past!

I also encourage you to visit the other bloggers taking part in today's Deja Vu blofest. There is a Linky-List at DL's blog listing all of the participants -- check it out HERE, and take a tour of all the do-overs going on around the blogosphere!

Introspection, Music, and BOTB Results

 

(Rodin's 'The Thinker' -- Image from wikimedia Commons) 

Introspection

I've been doing some thinking lately.

Nothing Earth-shattering; just some ideas about how best to focus and apply my creative impulses and ways to use my limited free time.  I'm not sure if thinking about creativity can be considered creative thinking, but I'm at least trying to be creative as I think of creating new ways to highlight the things I've created.

Got that?

Anyway --  I've made some decisions and set some goals that I want to accomplish in the upcoming new year.   And since my I consider this blog to be geared toward "the creative outlet" of your humble author, all these decisions and goals will eventually impact what you see here. Again -- nothing major, but looking ahead, I want to give you a heads-up that I have some new things planned for my blog.

I'll give you more details on the results of my introspection as we get closer to 2015.

Music

And speaking of introspection:

I recently took a (post-joyful-and-gluttonous-family-feast) free moment on Thanksgiving two weeks ago to download another very cool jam from wikiloops and to lay down a simple rhythm guitar track over it. Then, the next day, I quickly added two more guitars and came up with this piece, I call, "Thanksgiving and Introspection." 

I loved the mix of drums, flute, and keys that "MrAdamOnDrums" had set up in the jam, and found it a very fun thing to play over. I think the result end up being a little spacey and...  um, introspective?

Feel free to click on the link in the title or on the StratoRaptor icon to the left in order to check it out. I'm very thankful for you taking the time today to listen!

BOTB Results 

And speaking of today:

This is December 9th! 

Did you know that 49 years ago, on this day in 1965, A Charlie Brown Christmas made its TV debut on CBS???

I've twice used music from this wonderful Christmas special in previous Battle of the Bands (BOTB) posts -- last year for my first BOTB post, and in my most recent one from last week. There, I pitted two live guitar renditions of "Linus and Lucy" against each other.  Gary Hoey played one and Danny Gatton the other.

I'm glad that both versions received some votes, but I'm also not surprised that Danny Gatton got more.  To my ears, it's easily the better version.

Yes, I gladly admit that Gary Hoey has talent -- he has chops galore and does a rocking, somewhat interesting version -- framing the piece with the Hendrix-esque opening and closing riffs, adding room for the bass and drums to add fills, and offering plenty of wah-wah shredding.  But somehow, it just doesn't quite grab me. It feels too pre-canned, too generic, too artificial. From saying the song is, "by Charlie Brown" (I think you mean "Vince Guaraldi," Gary -- Charlie's a cartoon character) to blandly pointing at the drummer during every break (okay -- yes, that's a video criticism, not an audio one, but it matches the effect I get from the lackluster interpretation), it just seems put-on to me. It's like Gary's not really feeling it -- it's flashy, but he's just going through the motions. No, I can't fault his technical ability and respect him for it, but the delivery still seems blase.

(Danny Gatton -- from DannyGatton.com)

On the other hand, Danny Gatton seems to be riding a wave at a break-neck pace, teetering on the edge of disaster, careening around those frets with heartfelt abandon. It feels like even HE doesn't know what note's coming next.  I picture him smiling with a, "Whoa! Did I just play that?!?!" expression on his face. Maybe that's not the case -- he might have played that ending medley a gazillion times exactly the same way -- but it SOUNDS like it's new and exciting.  It feels to me like he's serving it up with his heart and soul in every measure of the tune. And the playing is exemplary as well, even more-so than Gary Hoey -- Danny's is fast, expressive, and full of nuance, even at blinding speed. Gatton's not just regurgitating the riffs he's drilled into his subconscious through rote repetition -- he's fully in-the-moment, expressing a range of emotion, and having fun with the audience.

Even if Danny Gatton was less proficient on the guitar than Gary Hoey (and I submit Danny is clearly much MORE proficient), I'd still vote for feeling over flash.

So -- just in case you couldn't tell, I'm adding my vote to the Gatton group to seal the win:

Danny Gatton -- 8;  Gary Hoey -- 4.

Thanks for visiting! 

I invite you to come back on the 15th for another Christmas-themed, special Battle of the Bands.

Forgotten Voices: The Bell Song

(Radio Digest from 1931 with Lily Pons on cover)

I haven't posted much music on my blog lately, but I've just finished another piece in my "Forgotten Voices" collection and I'd like to share it with you (you can also see "Streak of Moonlight" and "My Name is Romance" for the other pieces in this collection so far).

"Forgotten Voices" is based on the idea of using voices from old radio broadcasts of the 1930s as the foundation for new music I create.  I don't sing, so I think this is a fun way to get some human voices into my pieces without worrying too much about infringing on copyrights (see my BOTB post with The Verve for good reasons why it's best to avoid sampling material with protected copyrights).

In searching for some vocal material to use for a song, I came across a recording that just said it was from a radio broadcast of a piece called "The Bell Song" aria from sometime in the 1930s. I loved the haunting voice and started to build a tune around some samples from it.  I chopped and rearranged, adjusted timing, added MIDI drums, some keyboards, bass, some bell sounds, and nine or ten guitar tracks (rhythm, fills, and leads).

This piece took a long time to make, but I like how it turned out.  Take a listen and then I'll talk a little more about the source vocal samples (HERE's the link ot it at SoundCloud if the embedded player below doesn't work):

Thanks for listening!  I really appreciate that, and I hope you enjoyed what I did with this.

But, as I mentioned above about those vocal samples from the radio:

While recording this (it took a long time to put all the pieces together), I did some searching and discovered, that "The Bell Song" is actually a well-known aria from an opera called "Lakme" written by Leo Delibes in 1882. It was performed many times during the 1920s to 1940s by the famous opera singer Lily Pons. It became her "featured piece" and was strongly associated with her. She even did it in a 1935 movie starring Lily Pons and Henry Fonda called "I Dream Too Much".

And I'm pretty sure that's Lily Pons singing in the samples I've used in my re-imagined "The Bell Song".

Which this brings up the questions:

Is a "famous" singer doing a well-known aria really a "forgotten voice?"  Also, one of the points of using old radio "forgotten voices" is to avoid infringing on copyrights -- so how loose of footing am I on here?

Well, I think the first question may be valid, but it's still been around 80 years or so since the samples I used were originally recorded, and Lily's been deceased since 1976. And I think there's likely a good percentage of people who've never heard of her. So I'll give this question a, "not preferred, but acceptable" answer. While I really enjoyed making this, in general I'd much rather use truly unknown or "forgotten" voices.

As to the copyright:  That is definitely a valid question.  But after some thought and research, here's what I think.

-- With recordings, there are actually two areas of copyright.  The written song itself and the recording of a particular performance (that's why the Verve had to settle out of court twice).  Here, the actual song was written in 1882 and I'm pretty certain it's now in the public domain.  I doubt if the estate of Leo Delibes has any qualms about me using samples of the aria from his opera.

-- But the recording could be an issue.  For example, if the download I sampled was from the soundtrack of the 1935 movie, then RKO Pictures could still own the copyright or it has passed through a legitimate and legal chain of ownership since.  But after listening, I'm pretty sure the samples I've used are NOT from that soundtrack.  Plus, there are also tons of other versions of Lily Pons doing this aria out there on the Internet, and to my ears, it doesn't sound like I've used any of the ones that I found on YouTube.  Like I said, it was her "signature piece" and was performed many, many times by her.  So I'm acting in good faith that the version I've used was recorded specifically for a radio broadcast and that the origin has been lost through the years.

-- However, just because I don't know exactly where a recording of a radio program comes from it does not technically remove me from any legal obligations to the true copyright holder. But that's a risk with the whole "Forgotten Voices" concept -- In all of these songs, the original source recordings and copyrights are potentially lost through the years, and so I'm doing my best to not intentionally infringe on anyone known (or likely to even still care).

-- Also, with the "Forgotten Voices" pieces, I'm only using small samples and am clearly adding my own "new" material, So it is obvious that I'm not trying to just reissue and profit from someone else's work -- I'm hopefully adding enough of "me" that I'm creating entirely "original" material.

-- Finally, I'm also clearly not trying to profit from anyone's work because I'm not -- you know -- making ANY profit.  I'm sharing these freely and not charging a thing. This points to the "intent" of using these samples. What I'm doing may not cleanly fall under the "Fair Use," guidelines, but I'm at least definitely trying to minimize damages to any potential copyright holders who may still be out there somewhere.

So that covers my legal thoughts -- but what about my recording itself?

Well as always -- I really hope you enjoyed it, and I'm happy to hear any feedback you might care to offer.

Thanks again for listening!

My Name is Romance

Today, I'd like to offer you another musical piece in my evolving "Forgotten Voices" series, like my earlier Streak of Moonlight, which I shared back in April.  This is one I call My Name is Romance.  I've uploaded it to My Soundcloud Page and I eagerly invite you to take a listen either from using the link above, or right from this blog by clicking on the embedded widget below:





Like Streak of Moonlight, everything on this piece was performed by me.  I edited the MIDI Drum patterns and played bass, keys (including the keyboard melody), and many, many guitars.  The only things that were not me are the samples from a 1930's radio romance program -- vocals and some short clips of strings.

This took a long time to put together and went through several revisions.  I also changed my opinions as the piece was slowly put together -- I started out really liking it, then thought it was crap and set it aside half-finished, and then revisited it and thought it wasn't so bad.  Now I have come full circle to liking it once again. Nothing like the temperamental artist, huh? ;)

Now that it's finished, I enjoy the mix of moody, distortion-laden rhythm guitars, spacey echo fills, the keyboard melody, and the leads (including a backwards one that turned out much better than I thought it might).  All-together, including each vocal sample, there are over 30 separate audio tracks in this piece, many of them just little fills that come and go in the background.  This is not my usual recording method -- I'm typically much too impatient to let something sit and stew and keep slowing adding and revising over a long period.

Take a listen and see what you think!  And then feel free to let me know -- I'd love to hear your opinion.

Thanks for listening!

Update: Upbeat about the Upswing

Writing Again...*

Wow -- it's been a while since my last post, hasn't it?  As happens far too frequently, I've once again left this blog to gather dust while I've been off doing other things.  But since this is a blog that is supposed to highlight my creative output, I suppose I should... um, highlight something or other.  Or at least give an update on what I've been up to lately -- if you're up for it.  So let me touch on my writing and musical activities lately:

Writing

The good news is that I'm writing again -- pretty regularly.  I'm quite happy about the upswing in the amount of words I've been getting onto the page lately. For one thing, I've revisited an older, oft-rejected short story, and have had some insights on ways to breathe new life into it.  I'm radically restructuring it, altering the story arc, and hopefully increasing the tension and conflict.  I'm also trying to give it more of a self-contained story feel.  While it could still serve as the introduction to what could perhaps become a much-larger science-fiction novel, I'm optimistic that this finished version will be better able to stand on its own as a short story.

I've also been busy heavily researching a detective mystery set in the 1940's Detroit area.  This is actually using an old serial piece I once wrote for the now-defunct Creative Copy Challenge website as its inspiration, but altering the timeline (1940s instead of 1950s), tweaking the characters, altering the plot, and expanding the story for a novel.  I have the basic story already set in my head and roughly outlined, and I'm eager to see it come together.  I've had two other novels that fizzled out before they were finished -- I consider them part of the necessary process of honing my writing skills. the time spent on both was extremely beneficial in helping me learn how to structure a novel and improve my writing, but I think my writing ultimately outgrew both stories before they were finished.  Someday, I may revisit them, but for now, I think of the many incomplete revisions of both to be like the stepping stones needed to get to this book. This novel could also serve as a launching point for what might very easily become a series of books, with a captivating character and a setting of the drama-filled time of WWII and the 1950s, in a city that was "The Arsenal of Democracy" and one of the most segregated areas in the country.

And I've also signed up for an online critique group with my good friend DL Hammons, whose WRiTE Club 2014 kicks off next week.  I'm excited to see how this group evolves -- I'm also hopeful that it will help keep my nose to the grindstone writing-wise.  I don't want to be the weak link of the group who never has anything to offer.  And by the way -- in case if anyone was wondering -- while I'm definitely looking forward to another fun year of WRiTE Club, I have not submitted anything myself.

Plus, I've found a site that is geared towards a quick dose of inspiration and a short burst of output -- the site Type Trigger.  It's evidently been around a while and appears to not be too heavily maintained, but it's a fun place to spew out some impromptu morsels of writing.  I'm posting there under the name of StratPlayer.  You can use the link to see what I've written so far.  It's kind of fun -- Each short prompt allows you up to 300 words, and the prompts come and go several times a day.  but once you submit, there's no going back.  You can't edit it.  I've missed typing in some words in a few prompts I've posted, and now they're stuck.  But still, the concept appeals to me.  It reminds me of what Bill Evans wrote in the liner notes to the all-time classic Jazz album Kind of Blue by Miles Davis:

"There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere.

The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see well find something captured that escapes explanation."

Each prompt has a short life of a few hours:  You're faced with a limited amount of time to be creative on any given prompt.  Then what gets posted is locked -- erasures or changes are impossible. It find that it forces me to be in the moment as a writer (although I evidently need to hone my proofreading skills).   I'm not exactly sure why, but I've found that it somehow inspires me to dabble in Haiku-like responses, with variations of 5-7-5 syllable structures. Probably because others do it too, plus there's also that association with the "Japanese visual art" Bill Evans mentions...

Music

Yes, I realize that it does take a certain amount of chutzpah to transition from a mention of Kind of Blue to my own music, and I certainly don't mean to suggest that my hobbyist recordings are on a level with Miles, but I would be remiss in not including some mention of my musical activities as part of a "creative output" update.

I haven't done much jamming at wikiloops lately, but I'm working on finishing up another piece in my "Forgotten Radio" collection, like Streak of Moonlight, which I posted here back in April.  However, it's not quite done yet.  I've also played in the worship team at church three out of the last four weeks, and that took a chunk of my musical efforts (practice Thursday, run-through and service on Saturday, and then run-through and three services on Sunday). Plus, this current piece I'm working on has undergone kind of a weird transformation -- several edits and revisions, and at one point, I nearly scrapped it.  But now, I'm liking it. We'll see how the finished piece turns out and how I feel about it then -- I'll post it as soon as it's done.

But I can't let you go without at least offering you something to listen to, now can I?

So here's a piece from several months ago that I call "Drone."


This was a quick piece I threw together back when I was just starting to mess around with my new bass.  The drums are just a basic beat loop, and the chord progression is just a simple two-chord drone.  But I like how the first guitar morphs into the rhythm and I think the distorted lead guitar worked out surprisingly well.  For much of the same reasons as I like the idea behind TypeTrigger, I like this -- it was done off-the-cuff, with no editing, erasing, or changing.  I hope you enjoy it also.

Thanks for reading and for listening!

*(Original image from Wikimedia Commons -- modified by Chris J. Fries)

Streak of Moonlight

(image from wikimedia commons)

What do you know? It's been less than a month between my posts!  :)

Today I want to share with you my most recent solo, non-wikiloops, musical piece.  I call it "Streak of Moonlight".  I've uploaded it to my SoundCloud page and you can also listen to it right from this blog by clicking on the embedded link below.  I hope you like it -- you can read more about it below the link...



This piece is all me -- I put together the drum tracks from editing and combining some MIDI drum loops that I found, then I added some simple keyboards, bass, rhythm guitar, more keys, lead guitars, a smattering of ambient background guitars.

But there's something else about this piece that was a new experiment for me -- hear the voices?  I've realized that the human voice can add a tremendous amount of emotion and focus to a piece. But I don't sing -- trust me on this.  So what to do?  Well, I don't want to sample vocals from another musician, and I don't want to deal with copyright infringement, and I'm not going to spend money on what's basically a hobby, and I'm still  a little too insecure about my own pieces to try and get any singers I might know to record something for me, so my choices are pretty slim...

Enter the wonder of recordings of old, forgotten radio programs -- I'll stay away from any of the well-known classics.  So hopefully in the case of the things I use, the artists involved are long gone and if there were copyrights, they've likely either expired or been shuffled through so many hands that they've essentially been lost.  Plus, at this point, what I'm doing is not a commercial endeavor -- I'm not making any money off of this.  I'm giving it away for free.  So if there were still a valid and tracked copyright that I've unintentionally infringed on by using short samples of radio broadcasts from 70 or more years ago, there are certainly little if any damages, and I will gladly give full and proper attribution or comply with any 'cease and desist' orders should they ever come my way.

So -- there you go.

This piece is called "Streak of Moonlight" because the vocal samples come from a episode of a 1936 radio romance which was entitled -- you guessed it --"Streak of Moonlight."  The snippet of strings is also from that recording.

I took my time putting together this piece.  Each layer assembled was done slowly, and I like how this turned out.  There's still some of that 'jam' feel to it (especially in the double guitars during the third lead break), but it has some nice structure to it, too, I think.  It also has a bit of a "chill" feel with some ambient, delay-heavy guitars in the background and my simplistic keyboard drones mixed in.

I really hope you enjoy this, and I'd love to know what you think.  Feel free to comment and let me know...

Thanks for listening!

Music: "Snow Day"

(image from wikimedia commons)

My intent for this blog is to have a place to share my creative work -- my music and my writing, primarily.  But recently, I've unfortunately been unable to post a much as I would like to on this blog, and a lot of my most recent posts didn't really adhere to this core intent.

So I'd like to remedy that by posting a recent musical piece I created.  I call it "Snow Day" because it was created in January during the height of the polar vortex, when we were basically snowed in at home for a couple of days.  The roads were closed, work and schools were closed, and there was a good two feet of snow in our back yard.  Not to mention sub-zero temperatures and wind-chills near 30-below zero.

I took a lot of the time to make some music, and this piece is the main one I came up with during that time.  It is not a wikiloops piece -- the only musician involved is me.  I played bass, keys, and (of course) guitar, and even created my own drum loops from editing some free ones I'd found and adding in some of my own MIDI drum patterns.

It's not too involved of a piece compared to some tracks I've made, but I like the overall effect -- the vibe kind of has that 'trapped in the snow with nowhere to go' kind of slow vibe, I think.

Feel free to have a listen and see what you think:



I welcome any comments or thoughts you might like to share.

Thank you very much for listening!  I'll see you again with my next post which will be...  at some point in the future, but hopefully not to far in the future.  ;)

Pray, Pay, Display, Play, and Sunday

Today's post is meant to touch on a variety of things -- I want to give you a head's up on some blogging and writing events taking place, share an update on some writing I'd submitted, offer another snippet of music, and invite you to stop back for a another blog series I'm going to be joining.  Let me break it down for ya:

Pray

A Blogging Head's Up:   On December 24th -- Christmas Eve! -- Mark Koopmans is hosting the  Fifty States of Pray blog event.  Mark says the idea behind it came to him as, "Why not set aside a moment to reflect on the year that was and share some hopes for the next year?" Well, why not? Mark hopes to get a blogging representative from every state in the U.S., and as many international bloggers as possible.

I think it's a great idea, and I will be posting as a representative from Indiana.  However, I have to say that my post will almost certainly be scheduled in advance -- Christmas Eve is a big family time for me, and I may not have much time to surf the blogosphere.  Still, if you get a chance over the holidays, I would welcome your visit, and I'll also invite you to use the link to also visit some of Mark's other participants. The link to the sign-up list for the blogging participants is HERE.

Pay

A Writing Head's Up:  David List is using KickStarter to try and fund the artwork, editing, and publishing for his upcoming fantasy novel, "A Sawmill's Hope."  I know David from WRiTE Club at DL Hammons' blog and I think his book has tremendous potential.  I would encourage you to check out the thought, time, and effort David has put into this project, and to make an offering to support it.  Pay whatever you can spare. David's KickStarter project is HERE.

Display

A Writing Update:  A while ago, I posted that I'd submitted two entries to "The Prehistoric Week" at Tim Sevenhuysen's 50-Word Stories.  Well, if you were paying attention, you probably noticed that the week came and went and that my stories were never published.

There's a possibility that Tim may still use one or both of them at some point in the future, but I thought I'd go ahead and post them here.  They're not more Og and Oona stories -- these two instead visit some dinosaur dilemmas. I'll display one here today, and save the second one for next week.  Today's is something I call "Emily's Extinct Fan".  I hope you enjoy it!

=====

Emily's Extinct Fan

The meeting of the dinosaur book club degenerated into raging argument.

"'Wuthering Heights' is the greatest novel ever written," Dino screamed at Barney. "You're an idiot if you can't see it!"

Rex tried to intervene. "Settle down, Dino. We can have differing opinions. Don't be such a Bronte sore ass."

=====

Play


A Musical Offering:  I haven't posted a musical selection in a long time, so I think I need to get another one out.  I have a couple of new things I'm working on at the moment (normal hectic Christmas schedule notwithstanding), that I'll share with you once they're done.  But for now, I'll offer another piece I added some guitar to on the Jam site Wikiloops.  This is an electronic piece started by wikiloops user Dogbass originally called "Electrohive".  User tron12 added some bass, then I added two guitar tracks, and called it "Zonin' in the Hive,"  because it was kind of some trancy, zoning playing against this 'hive' track.

Unfortunately, I mistyped the name when I uploaded it and it's displayed as "Zonin' in the Hie."  I didn't realize it until it was already all uploaded.  Then I thought about it. "Hie" is an old word meaning to go fast or 'hasten' and I said, 'what the Heck?' The track is kind of fast and so it sort of fits.

My playing on this is not what I'd consider my best, but it was done as a 'jam' with two "as-close-to-live-as-possible" tracks, recorded in one sitting and then given some psycho fading.  One guitar is some spacy background (zonin') and the other one's an edgier up-front guitar (hie?). All in all, I think it worked out OK, and it at least shows another side of my musical experimentation.

You can listen to it HERE.  And, of course, you can always check out all of musical offerings under the "My Music" tab at the top of the page above.  Thanks for listening!

Sunday

Joining Another Blog Series:  This Sunday is the fifteenth and I will be posting my first entry in the blog series, "The Battle of the Bands".  This is a series started by Stephen T. McCarthy and FarAwayEyes in August of this year, and now has several other bloggers who take part, including Arlee Bird and Robin (even Ninja Captain Alex Cavanaugh takes part occasionally).

The blog event occurs on the first and the fifteenth of each month and features posts with two (and sometimes more) recorded versions of the same song.  The blog readers then get to vote to decide which performer did a better version of the song. 

I think it's a lot of fun and have decided to take part, so Sunday will be my first offering.  Since it is the Christmas season, I am going to feature a couple of versions of one of my absolute favorite Christmas songs.

I hope you will come visit and vote for your favorite!

Well, that's it for this hodge-podge of a post.  Thank you very much for reading!  Feel free to offer whatever thoughts you might have on the above because, after the Pray, Pay, Display, Play, and Sunday, it's now time for your Say!

OK?  ;)

Wha Da Funk?

(Image from Wkikimedia Commons)

For another musical piece to share on my blog, let me offer the latest thing I've created.  This is something I call "Wha Da Funk".

It started as another wikiloops jam -- the original drum and bass track was done on wikiloops by members "Baer" and "FunkT." It's an older track I found when I was looking for something to jam against.  The original backing track on wikiloops is HERE.

I loved the beat and that slappin' funk bass by FunkT, and thought this would be a blast to jam to. So I downloaded the track a while ago and started messing around with it.  But my original intent to just add a guitar track or two kind of expanded.

In the end, I came up with this -- take a listen:




(Note that if for some reason you cannot play the embedded SoundCloud mp3 above, you also can go directly to SoundCloud and find the track HERE, or listen to it on wikiloops HERE.)

So do you hear a lot of different guitar parts?  You should -- there are eleven distinct tracks of them:

1. First rhythm guitar -- lots of chorus and heard in the first bit of the song.
2. Second rhythm guitar -- doin' the wah-wah funk rhythm, transitions over from the first rhythm.
3. Base melody guitar -- at the beginning, and returns for the other times the melody line is heard.
4. Third rhythm guitar -- long chord strums deep in the mix, but also does melody an octave lower.
5. "Metal" section first rhythm guitar -- mixed to the right channel.
6. "Metal" section second rhythm guitar -- mixed left.
7. Delay-heavy 3rd melody -- heard 2nd and 3rd time of melody, and before the metal section.
8. High 4th melody -- highest octave part, distorted, at 2nd and 3rd time, also adds fills before metal section.
9. "Metal" lead -- freak-out guitar soloing over the "metal" section.
10. First lead -- doubles melody parts and also does the cleaner lead parts.
11. Second lead -- also doubles melody. The reverb-heavy distorted guitar lead parts.

There is a lot of mixing and fading in and out going on in this piece. But I hope it's not all just a mass of sonic confusion -- there's never more than three or four guitars heard at the same time.

As you can probably tell by now if you've listened to any of my other musical pieces, I love to blend different parts and add a variety of tones to a song to make it interesting.  Adding a heavy freak-out guitar section to a funky track like this might not make sense to everyone, but it does to me. :)

Yet I also wanted to have a cohesive, unified feel to this piece, which is why I created that melody line that is returned to.  And the lead guitars come and go, but both return at the end. I think this helps tie everything together.  So the overall feel is hopefully one of exploration and unexpected twists, but also with a sense of resolution and completeness.

So what do you think?

As with probably everything I'll ever do, I hear parts that I could perhaps "make better" (see my previous IWSG post), but as a whole, I think this tune worked out pretty well.  It was certainly a lot of fun to put together.

I hope you like it, but if nothing else, I hope the power of da funk comes through enough to get your toe a'tappin'...

Making Sound Choices in the Cloud

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

As part of my "creative outlest," I like posting some of my musical creations here, and I certainly hope you like it too. But I do have to confess that I don't want to have to make a video every time I want to post an mp3 file into a blogger post, like I had to do with my first music post ("First Thoughts").

So I needed some other way to get an mp3 file linked or inserted into a blogger post.

In a comment to an earlier music post I made, David List suggested using SoundCloud as a site to host my music mp3 files so they could be inserted into my blog posts.

So I checked out some potential music hosting sites, and compared their offerings, and you know what? David was right. SoundCloud offers the ability to upload two hours of tracks free, provides a slick interface, gives a central site to point people to, and also offers a cool widget to be able to insert the mp3 right into this blog.  I don't have to send you away to another link in order for you to have a listen.

Evidently there's also a huge community of other sound uploaders, and -- as with almost every form of social media -- you could spend all your time interacting with other people there.  But for me, all I want at this stage is just a bucket to store my files in so I can use this blog to share them and discuss them.  And SoundCloud seems to fit the bill extremely well -- thanks, David!

I've uploaded an mp3 of "First Thoughts" as well as another track -- something I recorded shortly after that first piece I did on the PC. For this one, I found some free MIDI drum loops and used a couple of them as the basis for this piece.  I chose two that were pretty far apart -- a metal beat and a jazz shuffle -- and I decided to try and merge them together. I like the idea of juxtaposing radically different things and trying to unite them in a creative way.

I called the piece "Choices".  Have a listen:



Everything besides the MIDI drum loops is my multi-tracked guitar.  I was going to use a MIDI track to insert some bass but instead I ended up making a track with an octaver effect on my guitar.  At this stage in my recording experience, it's easier.  I don't have either a bass or a MIDI keyboard to work with, but I'd very much like to get both eventually. I'm rapidly discovering that tapping away at the Q-W-E-R-T-Y keys to try and record a MIDI track is not the best way to go.

"Choices" seemed like a good name for this piece -- the tune seemed to evolve out of the idea of contrast, and juxtaposition, and hard versus soft, and even making choices about how to get a dang bass track on the piece.

Feel free to let me know what you think.

Oh, and also -- in my last music post, Alex commented that his musical tastes weren't very jazzy, so I'm hoping that at least the framing parts of this tune are more like the musical choices he might make.  ;^)

Thanks for listening!  And if you want to stay up on future tracks I add to SoundCloud, just visit my page HERE.

Music: "First Thoughts"

So since I'm going to use this blog to highlight my music as well as my writing, how about a music sample?

I've never been a digital guy when it comes to guitar effects, but as part of the process of getting back into it and joining the church band, I needed to upgrade my effects.  I wanted something small and compact that could give me multiple effects; be able to offer headphone, amp, and direct out; not break the bank; and give half-way decent tones.

I looked around, compared several options, and ended up buying a Zoom G3X last month.  I'll talk more about this later, but suffice it to say that for $200 it's a great deal, and it also came with the ability to plug it into a PC via USB, and they even threw in a free copy of Steinbeg's Sequel LE.

Wow -- the ability to do multitrack recording on my PC?  Sounds awesome!  Let's try it out!

Well, this was my first attempt.  I put together a short drum loop, added a backwards fade-in to the beginning, and repeated it 4 times with a 1-bar pause in between. Then I messed around with some MIDI bass (MIDI -- that's a whole new thing for me) using my PC keyboard as, well, a keyboard. Then I threw up a quick rhythm guitar and slapped on some lead parts, including a backwards-delay effect track -- I told you I had a new digital multi-effect, right?

So then I had my first PC-recorded multitrack thing.  Nothing too amazing in terms of playing -- I'm a little rusty -- but still a lot of fun.

This is is.  As a video.  For some strange reason Blogger won't let you upload an MP3 into a post, but you can upload a video.  So I had to experiment with Windows Movie Maker to put this together. The sound quality is compromised a bit from uploading it to Blogger, but you can still basically hear all the parts.

So, to summarize what I've been up to creatively in the last month or so -- a dust-off of the old guitar and playing enough to start building back the calluses, a new guitar multi-effect to play around with, the new ability to record digitally on my PC, new programs to learn (Sequel LE and now Reaper -- MUCH more powerful), the world of MIDI to explore, and now even a new toe-dip in video making.

No wonder I haven't done any writing... :)

Thanks for listening!