Category: Music

Music Site Update: Elixr

Back from xmas break. Had a brief trip upstate to visit family and friends. Heavy weather driving both ways. Great to see everyone and glad the everyone is doing well. My dad got eye surgery and for the first time in my life doesn’t need to wear glasses anymore. Discovered the Hamburg Brew Pub.

The new year is off to a cold and snowy start. Last night we had a foot of snow, canceling my band practice. Both the kids had no school today, extending our xmas break. Took a good hour and change to shovel out, even with Lizzy’s help. Luckily the snowblower started right up after not being used for almost a year.

I’ve been updating the music section of my web site at zingman.com/music. I’ve added a link for The Relix, and added links to the new tracks on the Buzzy Third page, Is It Safe to Go Outside? and Black Swan, which prettty much bring me up to an album side. I changed the working title of the third Buzzy Tonic record to Elixr. It’s an anagram of Relix and also a play on the whole Buzzy Tonic theme.

I also came up with a logo, which makes a much better place holder for the eventual album cover than what I had before. This particular task has been on my todo list for a whole year; indeed made a sketch last xmas vacation. Constructing something like this in the computer is extremely tedious for me, so instead I drew it by hand and traced over in sharpie to get the right combination of precision and looseness. This is a technique I used a lot in college when I was studying design and architecture. Then I scanned it and played around with filters in photoshop until I caem up with something I liked. It’s been a long time since I used photoshop this way. I was able to achieve a rich look buy building up lots of layers of effects with varying transparency, a lot you’d build up layers using paint.

Even though I like how it turned out the colors don’t particularly match what I had going on the BZ3 page. Like I said it’s a placeholder for the eventual album cover, so I’ll continue to play with it. Meanwhile enjoy!

New Recording: Is It Safe?

Just in time for winter, I finally finished a rough mix of Is It Safe to Go Outside?.

Musically it’s sort of a power-pop song, but with some clever interplay of parts and a bass line that seems to turn the time around. The song was written by Martin and my version is based on his demo. In fact I kept his original guitar and bass parts. The song has been mostly done for a while, but it took a long time to track the backing vocals and piano parts. My velocity on the recording project is down this year, because first I was finishing my book and then I joined a band was focused on learning new songs and upgrading my gear. Now that’s all done and hopefully progress will level out again. I have a few more mostly finished songs that I hope to polish off soon, and then a few halfway-written ones to dig into in the new year.

Reindeer Games

Rewinding again to catch you up, and like I said we been busy. Thanksgiving day we woke up and realized for the first time since Labor Day we have a stretch of four or five hours where no one had something they needed to do or anyplace they needed to be. We had TG dinner out on Long Island with family. A very nice day. Next day we declared Slack Friday, in which we all laid around the house and played videogames and that sort of thing, and diligently avoided the mall. Jeannie turned me on to Candy Crush. Finally something useful I can do on my Android thingie.

Last few weeks have been busy at work. Year-end reviews. Planning. Strategic planning, technical planning, roadmaps, many meetings. It looks like the whole middle-tier project is a go. More on that as it unfolds. We’ll be taking the ring to Mordor in a fellowship of nine companions. Hope we don’t run into any spiders.

We only have three weeks between TG and Xmas this year, compressing the whole works. Getting the tree up and all the decorations, doing the cards, shopping for gifts. We’re up to twelve nieces and nephews this year, as well as two wonderful kids, and a wife and siblings and in-laws and everyone else. I guess that’s a blessing if there ever was one. The good news is we figured out good gift ideas for almost everyone by now and have most of them bought.

We’ve gotten snow three times now in the last week, mixed with a bit of sleet and freezing rain. We have a good 6″ on the ground now, maybe more but not yet a foot. Also our front yard is full of giant logs. The tree people finally came to chop down our elm tree, but they only did half the job. They cleared away the minor branches, left all the big limbs on the ground and the trunk is still standing. It’s amazing how tall that tree is. Still over 100 feet without the crown. I wonder if I can sell the wood for lumber.

They’ve been canceling and rescheduling the kid’s event left and right cuz they’re all very skittish about the weather. Up in Buffalo they get three feet of snow and they just carry on, but not down here. Last night Lizzy had her Christmas show, rescheduled from Saturday, with her group Young at Arts. They’re very good and do fairly highbrow stuff like Benjamin Britten and Aaron Copeland, and some pop stuff too. Lizzy is in the a capella group, whose performance of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah was to me the highlight of the show. They had the whole hall spellbound. Michelle was in the Xmas pageant at ICS tonite, which was carols and the nativity story, very warm and festive. Saw lots of friends from school I haven’t seen a while.

Three more days until vacation. One more big demo deadline. We’ve all been extremely busy and can use a break. The big thing I’ve had to let slide is my ongoing recoding project. Over the weekend I finally finished tracking Is It Safe?, adding some backing vocals. I have three songs pretty much ready for mixing: Is It Safe?, Now and Forever, and Black Swan. In addition I have three older songs that I want to tweak/remix: Rocket to the Moon, Sea of Tranquility, and Karn Evil 9, 2nd Impression. This will give me an album side, with the ELP tune as a bonus track. My goal is to have this done by the new year and start in on a batch of new tunes in January.

Relix Rewind

Rewinding a bit, The Relix played two shows the week before Thanksgiving. Both went well and some great moments, but revealed some things we need to work on. For the first show, we had some feedback issues with Lee’s hollowbody and pedalboard interacting with the PA, and some issues with the vocals not being loud enough. Lee’s gonna start bringing his rig to rehearsal rather than use the house setup until he has some better control of his sound. Also we’re gonna do a vocal-only practice soon and set up our PA and see if we can make sound killer or if we should replace it with a newer board with better reverbs. The other issue is we need to figure out how to draw a bigger crowd. The Thanksgiving Eve show was kinda disappointing because we all knew it’s a good bar night, but the weather – freezing rain mixed with snow – kept people away. Still it was a good show on a musical level and a fun time.

Here’s a video montage of the show at Victor’s.

And here’s some pictures, mainly of gig at Seaside.

After Thanksgiving half the band was sick and one guy fell off a ladder putting up Christmas decorations. I’ve been fighting a cold and sore throat on and off. Not enough to knock me out but enough to make my singing kinda croaky. This week we finally got together for a rehearsal. We spent about half the session tightening up endings and transitions, and the rest of the time on new material. We ran down six songs, all of which feel like keepers: Domino by Van Morrison and Touch Me by the Doors were both suggestions of mine. Domino is just a great feelgood song and gives us another horn-oriented 60’s tune while getting away from the Motown thing. Touch Me has some really weird changes when you try to work ‘em out, and one of the all-time classic sax solos. The others were Are You Gonna Be My Girl by Jet, a bit of change of direction for us, and Runaround by Blues Traveler, which has a great harp part for Paul, and Devil With the Blue Dress/Good Golly Miss Molly, which is right in our core zone.

Origami Site Update

Yikes! It’s late November already. Winter coming soon. Tons of leaves all over nowadays and the trees are mostly bare. Hoping to get the Mustang out one more time. Run baby run.

Lots going on. Work had been busy with deadlines, planning and releases. I worked part of last weekend, and I’ve been slammed all week this week, but there’s the holidays coming up. Also the plus side, I’ve been learning Scala, which is the first really new thing I’ve done at work in a while. On the downside, I ran out of time over the weekend and didn’t work on my recording project. I’m getting close to finishing two songs, Is It Safe? and Now and Forever. Guess they’ll have to slide one more week.

I taught a Special Session at the museum last Sunday. My dog Timber and cat Sophie. Class went well. One of the students was a total whiz kid, and another was her dad, who’s not a folder but still did really well, although I had to explain everything in much more detail. I dropped off my models for the Holiday Tree and gave myself a quick tour of the museum while I was there. The dinosaurs and the whale room remain essential highlights.

I’ve been getting ready for a pair of gigs coming up with The Relix. We added a few new songs and have been sharpening up the ones we already have. Trying to get from a run-of-the-mill bar band to a truly awesome bar band. I think we have what it takes but it’ll take time to get that tight. Right now we’re in the better-than-shitty category. Looking forward to the shows. Should be a really good time and I expect we’ll get better each gig. So ya, lots of practice. I’ve been working especially on my singing.

This last practice our bass player was sick so I had to cover all the bass parts with my left hand. It went pretty well, in that my left hand has gotten pretty solid and I was able to cop a fair imitation of most of the bass lines. However, the sound wasn’t the same, and I don’t know all the songs as well as I’d like, so there were a few “I’m thinking” clams, especially when I was singing too. Nevertheless it went pretty well, and Mike will be back for the show, and I got an interesting new perspective on the songs. I’ve been practicing soloing in Light My Fire over the bassline, and I’m glad I did cuz I was able to keep it together and still pull off a pretty good solo.

But the main news for this post is that I’ve started making new updates to my web site. The first thing I did was to update my origami pages to include my new models from 3013. I have nine of them, and there’s still a month and change left in the year, so there may even be one or two more. I also update the page for my book now that I have a cover image and know the real title, which BTW is now Origami Animal Sculpture and not Origami Untamed. There’s even a link to preorder it.

Beyond that the big change in the offing is to add some kind of slideshow or multi-image capability to the pages for the models. Once that’s in place it’s on to the music site, hopefully just in time to line up with a new round of songs. As I mentioned I’m getting close to finishing two more songs. I’ve also taken on doing an upgrade to the Relix site, so watch for that.

Speaking of updates, I finally got the second proof of my book this week, so there was a mad scramble to review it and get feedback to the publisher. The good news they fixed most of the layouts for the diagrams, and got rid of the GoOfY CaPiTaLiZaTiOn thing they were doing. The bad news is, for some reason they didn’t fix all the layouts, so there’s still one more round of reviews ahead.

In completely unrelated news I found out today that John F. Kennedy grew up just a few blocks from my house, up the hill on Pondfield Road.

New Recording: Black Swan

Here’s a rough mix of my new song, Black Swan.

I’m really happy with the way it turned out, a sort or Steely-Crimso vibe and pre-postapocalyptic sentiment. I realize it’s been over a year since I posted any new mixes because I’ve been busy with other things including finishing my book and joining a working band. Enough time has gone by that I need to take stock of the record as its shaping up. Some of the stuff I have is going to be moved into the bonus tracks stack. I still have a pretty big backlog of partially written songs, plus at least one all-new number I wrote just recently. In any event it’s good to be moving again. Look for updates soon to the BZ3 page.

Pickin’ and a-Grinnin’

After the last gig, the focus of the band is on learning more tunes and booking more gigs. On the learning more tunes front, we’ve been tossing around lots of ideas, and it’s been fun. Everyone has songs and bands they love, and songs and groups they hate, or at least don’t want to play for one reason or another. And then there’s the question of what makes a great song vs. what’s a good song to do in a bar vs. what’s a good fit for us. Last practice we learned Long Train Running and China Grove by the Doobie Brothers. These were both suggestions from Mike our bass player. Everyone dug these songs and they came together fast, and we pretty much nailed it. Also looked at I Can’t Help Myself and Devil with the Blue Dress. I got a couple songs on the slate, including Touch Me by The Doors, which I picked party for the sax and drum thing at the end, and Domino by Van Morrison (who it turns out is some kind of distant cousin of Jim Morrison). But I didn’t get any support for any Steely and the Dans, so I’m gonna have to keep campaigning on that front.

Meanwhile, I put together an edit of highlights from our list show to try and help us get more gigs. Enjoy!

From Zero to Rock’n’Roll in Sixty Days

Saturday was my first gig with the Relix, and it was a lot of fun and a big success for a number of reasons. For me it was my first paying gig with a rock band at a bar since Lizzy was a baby. Not only that, it was my first gig ever where they had valet parking once I unloaded my car. It was a nice place and a big room, and a good crowd, right in downtown White Plains.

I suppose now is a good time to mention the lineup of the band. On lead vocals is Paul, who is also a wicked harmonica a player. The rhythm section is Mike on bass and Gus on drums. Both are really solid and also sing backup. We have two guitarists. Frank is more straight-ahead rock and solos on the heavier stuff. Lee has more of a twangy sound and plays either a hollowbody or a twelve-string.

As mentioned before I was playing sax and keyboards and singing. For me it was a drastic improvement from nothing at all back in August. For the band it was an incremental improvement, but the consensus was that I brought the whole thing up a notch with my contribution. It seemed to go over well. Indeed, three different chicks offered to buy me a drink.

We did three sets that spanned a diverse range of material. First was a lot of classic soul by artists like Sam and Dave, Otis Redding, Wilson Picket, The Temptations, Marvin Gaye, and Martha Reeves. These were mainly sax tunes for me. Then there was classic rock by groups like The Zombies, The Doors, Deep Purple, Traffic, Ten Years After, and Creedence. These were mainly organ and Rhodes tunes. Got a few nice organ solos in on Light My Fire, Hush, and Give Me Some Lovin’. We had some eighties stuff like Tom Petty, Greg Kihn, Tommy Tutone, John Cougar and the Romantics. Not stuff I would have picked, but they’re fun to play and go over well with the crowd, and I got to sing a couple of these. Then there’s a bunch of surf stuff from the likes of the Venutres and Johnny Rivers. For this I played alot of sax to try and give it a Tequila/Comanche sound.

The set was not perfect, but I was pretty satisfied overall. The energy was there and the crowd response was really good, and there were some excellent musical moments. The parts that I was worried about seemed to pass as barely noticeable from a audience perspective. For the most part it was hesitation over segues in some of the medleys, but that can be fixed with some more practice. For my own part, up until now I was mainly concerned with learning all the music. I had to learn fifty songs in two months! I only stopped using sheet music the last rehearsal before the show. I got thru the show without forgetting any parts or getting lost, although there were a few clams here and there. From here on I can concentrate more on performing the songs, listening to band and really taking it to the next level.

Nowhere is this more true than the songs where I was singing lead. I sang lead on four songs, and got thru them all without forgetting any of the lyrics. Now I need to focus more on connecting with the audience, being loud and clear and not looking down at my hands as I play. It’s good to have a chance to improve my singing and performing. From here things can only get better.

http://zingman.com/music/relix/vintagelounge101213/relix_soul_medley_2.mov
http://zingman.com/music/relix/vintagelounge101213/relix_light_my_fire.mov
http://zingman.com/music/relix/vintagelounge101213/relix_breakup_song.mov