Where WSFBPLAU equals (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace Love and Understanding by Elvis Costello. As with all my covers, I chose this song for a few musical and other reasons. First off, although it’s not exactly a holiday song, it’s about peace love and understanding so it’s seasonal in a more abstract sense. (I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to convince my kids that Imagine is not a Christmas song, although it comes up right after Happy Christmas on our John Lennon album.)
Back when I worked at Fox Sports and built their Fantasy Football app, I’d do things when I was testing it like draft a team mode up of all guys names Smith, or of the players with the longest names in the NFL to see if it breaks the software. Similarly, with music I’ve thought for a long time it might be fun to do a set of songs with really long names, like Daddy Don’t Live In That New York City No More, What Is and What Should Never Be, Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey, and of course the inimitable When the World Is Running Down You Make the Best of What’s Still Around. If nothing else, it points out the weakness of current technology, because (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace Love and Understanding.mp3 doesn’t fit on the screen of my iPod, plus it’s out of alphabetical order and the non-letter characters come out all messed up.
The main reason I chose this song was to do a number with just voice and piano. I had attempted this with Making Miles on the last Buzzy Tonic album, but with that I ended up adding a rhythm section at the second verse and synth solo later. This one remains stripped down throughout. Usually the tendency is to go ballad. I once worked up a piano version of the Chili Peppers’ Knock Me Down that goes in that direction. But WSFBPLAU rocks out, thanks to a propulsive 8th note rhythm in the left hand.
I wanted to see how quickly I could make a song. I’ve been waiting for the MBox3 Pro to become available and did this song partly to fill the void. It took me four sessions of a couple hours each. The first session I set up the project and laid down a piano part. I hadn’t really worked it up, I just banged out the chords like when I sang. The next session I did the vocals, which went down after just a couple warm up takes. Then I went back and redid the piano part with a bit better voice leading and the aforementioned 8th notes in the left hand. The last session was to mix it and add effects.
So here you go. Happy holidays everyone.
John Neumann
Great vocal! I wish I could sing in tune like that.
You should experiment with reverbs and treatments on the vocal. I have nothing in particular in mind, but you could give the song a lot of different flavors that way.
John Szinger
Totally. For alot of earlier stuff I used to double track the lead vocal. But I’ve been getting away from that and working on perfecting my Type 1 Rock Vocal Setup. I started on this with Touch the Ceiling, and watched Erik really get that sounding good. Since then I’ve been reading about the concept in my mixing books and trying things out with the effects I have.
The key is to combine a reverb and a delay. The delay has to be really short, and should be timed with the tempo of the song (1/8, 1/16 or even 1/32 note). Of course there’s alot of interaction with between the two effects, and the order of the effects matters too, so there’s alot of sounds in there.
2 seconds ago · Like
John Neumann
Great vocal! I wish I could sing in tune like that.
You should experiment with reverbs and treatments on the vocal. I have nothing in particular in mind, but you could give the song a lot of different flavors that way.
John Szinger
Totally. For alot of earlier stuff I used to double track the lead vocal. But I’ve been getting away from that and working on perfecting my Type 1 Rock Vocal Setup. I started on this with Touch the Ceiling, and watched Erik really get that sounding good. Since then I’ve been reading about the concept in my mixing books and trying things out with the effects I have.
The key is to combine a reverb and a delay. The delay has to be really short, and should be timed with the tempo of the song (1/8, 1/16 or even 1/32 note). Of course there’s alot of interaction with between the two effects, and the order of the effects matters too, so there’s alot of sounds in there.
2 seconds ago · Like