New Song:  Sandcastle Kingdoms

Here’s a rough mix of Sandcastle Kingdoms, the second song for my forthcoming album Spellbound. I don’t really remember too much about writing this one.  It’s mainly one of “mine” with me sings lead vocals and having a keyboard part as the spine of the track.  I guess I was feeling restless and forlorn at the time, and tapping into that for the lyric. 

Musically, it’s pretty much a power ballad, with a repeated 8-bar verse and a bridge.  I was aiming for some level of terraced dynamics, building up layers of parts throughout the song.  And there’s alot of parts.  In addition to the piano bass and drum, there’s a string/brass synthesizer and the guitar. Of course the piano is double-tracked with a Fender Rhodes and the Juno’s Polysynth 1 patch.  The drums are midi and samples for now, but I’ll put down real drums later one.

The lead vocals are drenched in effects, although I’ll probably dial that back later.  This song was really high in my range and has some really long sustained high notes.  It took me a few takes to really nail it.  If I were writing this song now I’d probably shift it down to an easier key.  But once I found my voice up there it sounded really good, so I kept it.

The synth part is a blend of four patches, two each of synth strings and synth brass, and one of each of those being an onboard sound of my protools rig and the other one from the outboard Juno, being the sounds used on the original recording.  I was going for something nice and rich and fat.  I still need to go in and add some fader moves to make the brass predominate in the louder sections and the strings in the more delicate parts.

This is the first song where I tried to replicate Martin’s guitar part.  Martin didn’t sing on this track and the guitar seemed to be his only contribution. Martin’s sound – the phrasing and the tone – always had a certain magic to it, even from these early recordings.  I’ve been listening really close and trying to capture that, but ultimately found it’s elusive and I’m having to make it my own.  I’m using a whole different setup, different guitar, amp and effects that sounds like me.  But I’m learning alot about how use effects to get different kinds of guitar sounds.

In any event, I copped his solo fairly faithfully because it fit so perfectly in the song.  I also paraphrased his riffs in the intro and outro.  I even added some new riffs on the the bridge.  All this is on a lead guitar track.  On the original track Martin also did a bit of noodling around in the verse, but I didn’t duplicate that.  Instead I added a second guitar track, low and overdriven with alot of sustain, deep in the background to give the track some fullness and weight.  This is the kind of thing Martin used to call “guitariness”.  Getting the right sound for this was a learning experiment too, and I’m not finished yet.

So here you go, enjoy!

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/spellbound25/Sandcastles27.mp3

Bungle in the Jungle

Been busy.  The rain continues.  I went for another long bike ride last weekend despite the rain.  This time I did 16 miles in an hour and 8 minutes, which is two minutes better than last week, and an average speed of 14 mph.  Also got around to trimming the neighbor’s willow tree that hangs over into our yard.  I swear that thing gets bigger every year.

Saturday I taught an Origami Connect event.  I taught my model Gladys the Platypus, which uses my hex base.  It went well and was alot of fun.  Also helping me get my head in gear for the upcoming OUSA convention in July, thinking about what to teach, what to exhibit, and try to get some new stuff finished.  On a related note, I’m down to my last two boxes of old origami to consolidate.

Got my performance review at work: “Exceeds expectations”.  Man, I really overshot the mark.  I was hoping to get laid off with a nice fat severance package so I can get an early start on retirement (just kidding!). In a way I’m a bit surprised because last fall when I was deep in my grief, it felt like there were lots of days when it was pretty hard to focus and function at all, let alone be all creative and innovative and super sharp and tech leadership-y.  On the other hand, I did kinda lean into work as something to do to keep me going.  Anyway, I guess that’s mostly behind me now.  And on the plus side, Data Rights Protocol 1.0 has shipped, and that was my main project since I started this job.  Then I successfully transitioned over to a new project on the Experimental Engineering group, and that’s going well so far.  Using AI software to write AI software, such irony!

Our D&D campaign has been very entertaining lately.  We’re playing The Isle of Dread, which an Expert D&D module from the 80’s that I’m running using 5th edition rules.  There’s alot of trekking thru the jungle on the way to central plateau, where there’s an ancient evil temple on an island in a lake in a crater of a dormant volcano.  Along the way the party befriend a tribe of flying monkeys and fought a next of evil, magic-using spiders, where they gained a cache or strange magic items.

More recently the party had to cross a river to get to the plateau, and chose a shallow swampy location.  Safy and Bart decided to hop across on a chain of small grassy patches sticking up out of the water.  Nyx flew across with Skrill on her broomstick as a passenger, left him on the northern shore, and returned to ferry the others.  I rolled a Hydra as the wandering monster encounter.  I didn’t realize it, but the 5th Edition Hydra is alot more powerful than the old version, and I feared the party might have met its match.  Midway on her way back, Nyx was attacked by a five-headed hydra, but she was able to fly away in the nick of time.  Combat ensued.  Skrill, alone on the far shore, was attacked and  almost immediately incapacitated.  The Hydra lost two of its heads but regenerated them next round.  The party rallied and cut off several more of its heads, although still more grew back. In the end, Aliana the sorceress found a Fireball spell on a scroll and used it to inflict massive damage and finish the beast off.

The party decided to try and ascend to the central plateau by crossing a rope bridge high over the gorge, when they were approached by three pteranodons, a kind of flying relative of the dinosaurs.  Bart charmed and befriended one, while Skrill attacked another.  The friendly one landed on the bridge, causing Luna, Aliana and Safy to loose their balance and get thrown over the side.  Ali and Safy hung on, but Luna plummeted.  Nyx threw her broomstick to Luna, who caught it and was able to fly away safely and avoid getting smashed up on the rocks far below.  Safy climbed back onto the bridge but Aliana remained hanging.  Two pteranodons attacked Skrill, while the 3rd one let Bart and the rabbit climb on its back.  Next round, one of the pteranodons attacked Ali, and she fell, but was saved by Luna, after casting magic missile.  Safy finished off one of the flying dinosaurs with some holy damage spell.  Now we’re at the bottom of the round, with one pteranadon flying away with Bart on its back and Nxy in its claws.  Luna and Ali are flying around on a broomstick.  Skrill has hooked the last remaining winged beast with his fishing rod and is attempting to reel it in.  Safy is hanging out on the rope bridge, looking cool for the moment.  I wonder how this will all end.

Top 40 Prog Rock Songs

Here’s this summer’s playlist.  The theme is my top forty favorite prog rock songs.  This may or may not actually fit with a summertime backyard barbecue party vibe, but it’s what’s been on my mind recently as I’m putting together the Spellbound record and looking for songs out there to compare to.  So I thought I’d give it a shot just because it’s hard to find the time to sit down and listen to music.

The roots or prog of course are in 60’s British psychedelic blues and pop jam bands, so that’s where we start.  I actually had a whole bunch more 60’s songs on the list which I jettisoned to make room for more core proggy stuff in the 70’s and beyond.  As with previous playlists, I decided to have only a single songs per band, although King Crimson tempted me to make an exception because the different versions over the decades were essentially different bands.  Nevertheless, some musicians like Bill Bruford, Tony Levin and John Wetton appear multiple times since they’ve been in a bunch of different bands.  The other rule I had was to avoid full album side length tracks.  The one exception to this is Iron Butterly, the original long song from a heavy 60’s jam band. As it is, this playlist is almost as long as other that have twice the number of tunes!  Also there’s a good handful of songs that are considered canonically essential, but I skipped them because I never dug them.  As the 70’s get into the 80’s and beyond, the list gets a little more idiosyncratic as the genre rubs against adjacent styles like metal, techno and jazz fusion.  Hopefully I did a good job representing the re-emergence of prog in the twenty first century as it continues to the present day.

1960’s
The Beatles – Strawberry Fields Forever
The Beach Boys- Good Vibrations
The Nice – America
Iron Butterfly- In a Godda Da Vida
The Allman Bros Band – Whipping Post
Frank Zappa – Peaches en Regalia

1970’s
Gentle Giant – Giant
Emerson Lake & Palmer – Take a Pebble
Yes – Starship Trooper
Led Zeppelin – Four Sticks
The Moody Blues – I’m Just a Singer (In a Rock’n’Roll Band)
Jethro Tull – Living in the Past
Deep Purple – Highway Star
Uriah Heep – The Magician’s Birthday
Chicago – While the City Sleeps
Pink Floyd – The Great Gig in the Sky
Supertramp – School
Queen – Ogre Battle
King Crimson – Starless
Camel – Air Born
Genesis – Dance on a Volcano
Kansas – Point of Know Return
Rush – Xanadu
U.K. – Thirty Years
Styx – Renegade
Bill Bruford – Hell’s Bells

1980’s – 90’s
The Police – Behind My Camel
Asia – Wildest Dreams
Alan Parsons Project – Gemini/Silence and I
Iron Maiden – Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Spinäl Tap – Stonehenge
Marillion – Pseudo-Silk Kimono/Kayleigh
Gowan – You’re a Strange Animal
Dream Theatre – Pull Me Under
Ozric Tentacles – Astro Cortex
Liquid Tension Experiment – Paradigm Shift

2000’s – Now
Tool – Lateralus
Porcupine Tree – Trains
Spock’s Beard – On a Perfect Day
Tame Impala – Let It Happen
Sons of Apollo – God of the Sun
King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard – Dragon

New Song – Strange to My Mind

Here’s a rough mix of Strange to My Mind, the first song for my forthcoming album Spellbound.  As previously mentioned, Spellbound is based on a project Martin and I did together in January 1990 when were on winter break from school, using a borrowed 4-track cassette recorder.

Strange to My Mind was the first rock song I wrote to completion.  At that time I had a jazz fusion group Event Horizon, and was mainly focused on instrumental music that combined composed sections with opportunities for free improvisation.  I had some sketches of ideas for lyrics but had never seen thru to the end the process of fitting a lyric to a melody and working it up to sing and perform it.  I learned alot about what worked for me and what didn’t and it gave me a foothold into a whole new realm to explore.

As far as it goes, the ambition wasn’t super high.  The lyric and chord progression are pretty simple and the form is straightforward, with an intro riff, verse, chorus, repeat, bridge, solo, and recapitulation of the verse and chorus.  Still, that’s enough for a satisfactory three-minute pop song.

At the time I was mainly writing on piano.  I had a Fender Rhodes I’d bought for something like $175, and a Roland Alpha-Juno synthesizer.  I didn’t have access to a real piano and in those days synthesizers did not have very good piano sounds, so this rig became the basis of my sound.  Meanwhile Martin was playing a cheap Ibanez electric guitar with a a couple of Boss pedals for chorus and distortion.  We didn’t have a bass for the project; I did all the bass parts with my left hand along with the keyboards in the right, like Ray Manzerek of The Doors.  The drums were added at the end, played by my friend Mark along to the tracks and recorded using a single mic.

For this version of the recording I brought it more into line with my standard way of doing things nowadays, while trying to capture the spirit of the original.  I used an electric piano as the spine of the tune.  It was fun figuring out the part I made up long ago.  It had a fairly busy left hand, since that was the bass part.  Also it has a pretty cool hook with the chord progression going from G to Bb to D, with a little jazzy modulation in there.

To this I added an electric bass guitar and a midi drum track.  For this project, the big new thing is to use real drums, but I haven’t gotten that far yet, and that journey is a whole ‘nuther story.

At the time I was leaning heavily into a sound on my synth called Polysynth 1 for the general comping and rhythm playing.  I deemed this essential to the song, so I fired up my old Juno synth and was delighted to find it still works after all these years.  I doubled the piano part on the the synth and blended it in. 

Oh, and of course the sax solo.  I played it on alto at the time, but on the new version I use a tenor.  I’m wondering, though, if I should have stuck with the alto.  Even though my tenor sound is big, with a Dukoff mouthpiece and all, it’s maybe still a bit dark and smoky compared to the searing high register of the alto. 

Listening closely, it appeared that there was no guitar part on the original version and Martin’s sole contribution to the completed track was some harmony vocals.  Nevertheless, I added a rhythm guitar part for some more depth to the sound, and overdubbed his vocal parts a second track after my own lead vocals.

Anyway here it is.  Enjoy!

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/spellbound25/StrangeToMyMind17c.mp3

Here Comes that Rainy Day

Well summer had begun in earnest, but so far the weather had been mainly cool and rainy.  I don’t think we’ve had more than two days in a row without rain since April.  Despite that I’ve been getting most of the yardwork done, and even went biking on the rail trail two weekends in a row.  This last weekend I did my usual sixteen miles.  The weekend before I did nineteen, my best so far this season.

Last week Jeannie and I went camping with Michelle, and with Kathleen and her kids, a bit of a mini vacation before Michelle starts her job.  Martin and Kathleen have been going camping with us every summer since they were dating and our kids were little.  Michelle first went camping when she was three months old.  Last year we had to cancel our plans, so it felt good to reestablish the tradition.  The year before that we had torrential rains and had to break camping and leave the last evening instead of the following morning.  Michelle didn’t come with us that time, so when Jeannie and I arrived home unexpectedly late that night, she was all like “I didn’t know that was a thing you could do!”

The weather was great for this trip, the only three-day stretch with no rain so far this summer.  It even got hot the second day, as we all went for a long hike up to Bad Man’s Cave.  It was a little over four miles but very hilly and rocky, and took a bit over three hours.  We went mid-week, so alot of the other campsites were empty.  And, going early in the summer meant the creek was full and gurgling along.  We brought our bikes up, and I biked around the campground with Charlie, Matthew and Abbie.  In the mornings and evenings we made campfires and cooked and hung around played games and just talked.  All in all a very nice trip.

Back at home, Michelle and I have been watching the Avengers and the other early Marvel superhero movies from that era – Thor, Iron Man, Captain America and all that.  It’s hard to believe they’re all around fifteen years old, and amazing how well they hang together and still hold up.  I guess enough time as gone by that I can appreciate them.

I’ve been doing more origami the last few weeks.  I’m currently perfecting my Dimpled Icosahedron, which resembles a great dodecahedron with the triangle facets sunken.  This is an inverse or complement to my semi-sunken Icosahedron, which resembles a great dodecahedron with the pentagon facets sunken.  However it involves a completely different geometry and folding sequence, and starts with a pentagon instead of a hexagon.

I’m also doing and Origami Connect event this coming Saturday, June 14, at 2pm Eastern time.  I’ll be teaching my model Gladys the Platypus.  You can go to the Origami USA web site (orgiamiusa.org) for more details.

New Lyric – The Silent Hour

This is the first song of the Spellbound project that was mainly written by Martin. In fact when we recorded it, it was just him singing and strumming along on guitar with no other instruments. My new version follows that arrangement. The feel is a sad and beautiful folk ballad, although played on an electric guitar. Very stark. The subject is about how winter is a kind of death of the world, maybe even a gateway to another realm, told from the point of view of a guiding spirit offering a choice of returning. This was probably the first song Martin wrote to completion and worked up to perform. His writing was full of deep and surprising imagery from the beginning.

…

The Silent Hour

Hello, I’m glad you made it here tonight
With your creased and folded paper body
And eyes still shining bright
Relax, you’re one of us now
Join us in this inner circle embrace the silent hour

And you see how the wind can blow at night
Opens your eyes to the dreaming silver starry sight
And now you know why the winter comes our way
Giving freedom to the souls too tired from the day

Away, you’re time is rushing by
Like freezing water thru your fingers
Or softness from the sky
I know, the child has gone away
But if your heart can’t bear to follow I will let you stay

And now you know that pain can make you cry
Smiling eyes and sadness in you for all of us must die
And now you see what makes the winter cold
All those payin’ must leave the fold
A goal to make them old

Arise, the leaving time is near
To take it from this fading world
The wish that brought you here
Goodbye, the story now is told
Lay your head upon the snow and let your body fold

And now you see the pains you used to fear
Closes your eyes to the dreaming leaving with the year
And you know you’re one us now
Listen to the world sleeping listen and embrace
Listen to the world sleeping listen and embrace the silent hour

— Martin Szinger, 1990

Summertime Blues

It was a fairly low key long weekend. Traditionally Memorial Day kicks of the summer, but the weather has been mainly cold and rainy again.  Sunday it got up to 65 and cloudy, and Monday was 70 and partly sunny, so at least we had a little barbecue.  Jeannie and I went for a bike ride on the local trail.  This time I did sixteen miles in an hour and ten minutes.  My time does not seem to be improving much.

Mostly we spent the weekend catching up on our rest after all our travels, and doing random tasks. Michelle bought some new furniture, mainly bookshelves, and I help her set them up.  She’s acquired a fairly extensive comic book collection in college, so I’ve been reading some classic X-Men comics such as The Dark Phoenix Saga.  I’d forgotten how much then they are.  Also I put a new battery in the Mustang because it wouldn’t start.  Now it’s happily running again.  And of course trimming the shrubbery and other yardwork.

Most years this time of year I put together a new playlist for summer backyard hanging out.  This year I think the theme will be my Top 40 Favorite Prog Rock Songs.  Fewer songs than usual, but it’ll probably be just as long.

One longstanding task I finally got around to was a video tutorial for an origami event I’ll being doing with CFC this fall.  The model is my Semi-Sunken Icosahedron.  I practiced folding it a couple times and really drilled down on the details to perfect the folding sequence.  I’m pretty happy with the resulting model, and the video.  This also got me back into doing origami, which I haven’t really done much of in the past year.  It’s a good thing too, cuz there’s a convention coming up soon, and I’d like to have something new to teach and exhibit.

Continuing to defrag my studio.  I’m up to the last major task: sifting thru and consolidating my many old boxes of origami.  I’m throwing out alot of stuff, but also finding lots of cool ideas and works-in-progress I’d largely forgotten about.

I don’t have my drum mics plugged into my new DAC yet, but I’ve gotten up to rough mixes for the first batch of four tunes on the Spellbound project.  I’ll be sharing those soon.  Meanwhile, up next is another lyric.

New Lyric – Sandcastle Kingdom

Here’s the lyric for the next song on the forthcoming record Spellbound.  This is another one of “my” songs, with the lyric and arrangement mainly by me, as well as the singing on the original track.  This one is basically a power ballad, which is a style I don’t really write in anymore.  I don’t remember much about writing it, other than not being totally satisfied with either the lyric or the chord progression at the time.  Listening back now, I think both hold up quite well.  Thematically, it’s about longing and yearning for the future, like alot of the songs on the record.  Musically I seem to recall trying to work in some jazz chords but never really finding a place for them. There’s a pretty cool lift from G major to E7 in the middle that made the final cut.

…

Sandcastle Kingdom

Passing time
But somehow I don’t seem to mind
As if I had some time to spare
Never a day left to share
With you but why then don’t I care I’m getting left behind?

Once long ago
Although now you’d never know
I held the flame that burned so bright
It lit the sky up in the night
But then somehow I lost the light I wonder where’d it go?

[guitar solo]

Loose your dreams
It’s not as painful as it seems
Imagination all dried up
Fought the fight and gave it up
Waiting for a change of luck to open some new streams

Well they might have been castles I built inside my head
Seemed real enough when I lay dreaming in their bed
But as a change of the tide will wash old sands away
The time to build new ones comes with a new day

Gone a year
But now I feel the time is here
Don’t wanna put my faith in fate
You know there’s not much more I’ll wait
Because tonight is growing late tomorrow’s drawing near

— John Szinger 1990

Life is a Series of Hellos and Goodbyes

Just got back from a road trip up to Buffalo, for Michelle’s graduation from college.  She got a Bachelor of Civil Engineering, and has a job lined up starting in a couple weeks working on train bridges in the Bronx.  We’re all very proud and she is quite psyched.  Now she’s moving back in with us for the summer and maybe beyond. 

We did a few things on the trip.  Jeannie and I left New York on Wednesday night and drove up to Ithaca, so we we could do some hiking on Thursday.  We picked a hike called Buttermilk Falls, which was quite scenic, and the weather was perfect, sunny and warm, after a long run of cold and rainy days.  We arrived in Buffalo Thursday evening and went out dinner with Lizzy and Josh, and met Josh’s parents Rita and Ryan.  They’re very nice people and we all got on well; it was alot of fun.  It seems like this means Lizzy and Josh are getting pretty serious. He just graduated with a second degree, and tomorrow they’re going on vacation together.  I wonder if he’s gonna propose to her soon. 

Friday we kinda had a day off.  Jeannie and I went to the Buffalo Botanical Gardens, a place I’d heard of but never been before.  It’s a 19th century greenhouse modeled after the famous Crystal Palace of Victorian London, all glass with great domes and galleries.  Lots of tropical jungle and desert plants, palms and cacti, and an impressive array of carnivorous plants.  Afterwards we went up the Michelle’s apartment to help her pack and bring some things back to Orchard Park.  That evening we met up with Larry and Jackie for the Hamburg Music Festival. Larry is a band director at Hamburg High School and some of his students were playing in small woodwind ensembles in a park right downtown.  Afterward we walked around the neighborhood, where various bands were playing in all the bars.  We ended up in a park with a beer tent watching a The Tragically Hip tribute band.  Fun night.

Saturday was the graduation.  There was a bit of last minute drama that Michelle might not be able to walk with her class because of an AP class that she never got credit for.  But it all got straightened out.  Technically she’s not graduation until September because she switched majors and needs to complete the last of the electives this summer.  But she did the ceremony, and it was great and the Engineering and Applied Sciences school is huge, over 800 students graduating.  Beforehand we went out to Board Point and took a bunch of pictures.  The weather was windy and threatening but it didn’t actually rain.  Afterwards we took Michell, Lizzy and Josh to a nice restaurant downtown.

Sunday morning we spent some time talking with my Mum.  She’s been feeling kinda down, knowing she and my Dad are getting older, and wondering how much longer they’re going to be able to keep driving and doing other things, and what that will mean for their ability to get around and all that.  No easy answers, I guess.  Then we went up to Michelle’s apartment and helped her pack and load up all her stuff into her car and my SUV.  It was a long drive and by the time we got home and unloaded it all, it was late and we were all pretty tired.  Luckily we all had today off to relax and unwind and get ready for the next adventure.  Today Michelle is looking to buy furniture.

Spacecats at the Green Growler

Here’s announcing the next upcoming show for my jazz group Spacecats, a triumphant three-peat return engagement to the Green Growler in Croton, NY, on Friday, May 30 at 7pm. The Growler is one of our favorite places to play, with a relaxed and comfortable vibe, and always a good crowd.  The group features John Szinger on saxophone, Josh Deutchman on piano and synthesizer, Ken Matthews on bass and Rick Arecco on drums. We play a blend jazz and funk, originals, standards, and pop songs with our own unique twist.  We’ve been jamming some fun stuff lately and will probable debut two or three new originals, as well as changing up the mix of standards and covers.  Should be a great time, so come on down!

Spacecats – Jazz and Funk
Friday, May 30, 7 to 10 pm
at
The Green Growler
Croton-on-Hudson, NY 10520