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!

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!