Category: Music

Two New Songs: Rocket to the Moon and Sea of Tranquility

http://zingman.com/music/mp3/buzzyThird/RocketToTheMoon35.mp3
http://zingman.com/music/mp3/buzzyThird/SeaOfTranquility20.mp3

Here’s the rough mixes of two new songs: Rocket to the Moon and Sea of Tranquility. I’ll bet you thought I forgot all about Rocket to the Moon, after posting the lyrics a while back. Well what happened is it took me a while to finish it, and while I was deciding what to do I went ahead and made a second song. I find that it’s sometimes better to work on songs in pairs.

Rocket to the Moon is a straight-up, upbeat, uptempo, rockin’ number. The arrangement features electric guitars (a first for me) and now a horn section consisting of a bari sax and two tenors. The original concept was to go for something reminiscent of classic Chicago, but once I got into it the sound morphed into something like the Mighty Mighty Bosstones or They Might Be Giants. Anyway here it is and I think it sound really good.

Sea of Tranquility is sort of companion piece, a b-side if you will. (Do they even have those anymore?) And, apart from being just about the same length, a bit over three minutes, it’s a study in contrast. It’s an instrumental, soothing and hypnotic, based on a minimalist piano ostinato that begins in 5/4 time but dances around different meters throughout the piece. Meanwhile the orchestration builds slowly but insistently, as in a bolero. The first half is just piano and percussion, then the second time thru the instruments enter one by one to create a layered effect. In addition to piano, guitar, and some synthesizers, I used a saxophone quartet, with each voice double-tracked for a full ensemble sound. To top it off, Lizzy appears a guest artist playing the flute.

These songs are pretty much complete. All that remains is put some EQ and compression on the tracks and do the final mastering. I’m planning on releasing these songs on iTunes as singles for digital download, rather than wait for an album’s worth of songs to be completed. This means I have to figure out what software or technology I want to use for mastering. I think for a first pass I may just run my stereo mixes back into protocols and see what I can do with them in there.

May Flowers

Back to the ol’ grind grind. Turmoil at work. Ah, the impersonal slings and arrows of working for a large corporation. I lost my private office recently in yet another reorg, and moved to a new location. Which is fine as far as it goes: I’m in an open area now with my actual colleagues, so the arrangement makes sense and is more social and congenial than it was before when people were scatted all over several floors. And we’re on the sunny side of the building. The thing is, my location has a built-in desktop that was several inches too low (I’m 6’6” tall). Before I left on spring break, the building services people came by and said they’d raise my desk, but when I got back they’d done nothing and closed the work order, declaring the problem solved. So I had to go after these people, which was a drag. When pressed they refused to fix it as a matter of policy. Picking up a screwdriver would cross an uncrossable line it seems. So I moved to another location nearby with an adjustable desk, causing lots of annoyance to my neighbors I’m sure.

Some good news: it was a lovely weekend. The first really warm weekend of the spring, with hint of summer. The girls had their dance recital on Saturday, and both did really well. The studio puts on a really nice show every year with acts and costumes and music. Sunday we did some more yard work, planting and edging, and I went skating and took the Mustang out for a ride, and we made a barbecue.

Also: getting used to the new car. At first I was just relieved to be done with the car shopping ordeal, but now I’ve driven it a few times, mainly to the train station and am starting to get a feel for it. It’s certainly much quieter and less falling-apartish than the old car. Plus the color is really nice. Blue with hints of purple and green when the light strikes it the right way. The stereo is weird. It has subwoofer, so the bass tends to be muddy and indistinct. Also all the bass is coming from the back of the car. It took some time, but I adjusted it to sound better. Next up is figuring out how to set the clock and the radio presets.

I figured out “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” on guitar. Don’t ask me why. The song’s been stuck in my head since the 70’s. Needed to get it out. Lizzy asked my why all songs about disasters are so long (she’s heard me play American Pie too). I figured out the secret for WotEF: it never resoloves. The first and last chord is an A sus, so you never know if it’s in a major or minor key. There’s not a C or C# anywhere in the tune, just a void.

Honor Band

First day of spring, and this morning we had snow, turning to cold slushy rain. It was really nice over the weekend, however, and we did lots of stuff. Last Friday it got up to seventy degrees. On my lunch hour I went for a walk down the water where the Intrepid is parked. Felt great. Jeannie was home and raked out the flowerbeds, where the first bulbs are coming up, and uncovered the fig tree.

Saturday did a bit of car shopping. Checked out the Honda Pilot and Chevy Traverse. The Pilot seemed really nice to sit in, and had a bunch of things that I like about it. But they didn’t have one to test drive, and I’ve heard it’s underpowered, so I want to drive one and see for myself. The Traverse seemed nice too, but upon reflection it’s not the car for us. For one thing, it’s really long (over 17 feet!) and I know I’ll have to part it in Manhattan one day. For another, it’s not available without that annoying onstar thing. I don’t want a car that has to phone home to the mothership. Ever. No network computers! So it’s between the Explorer and the Pilot now, pending the test drive of the Honda. Since the Pilot has been around for years, getting a used one is potentially and option too.

The main thing that happened this weekend was Lizzy had her concert for Lower Hudson Valley Honor Band on Sunday, put on by the group that runs the band program at her school, the Paul Effman School of Music. It’s kids from all different middle schools in the area playing in one huge band. Mainly 7th and 8th graders but Lizzy was one of the 6th graders. I was really impressed with how good they sounded, and also how fast they got it together. Lizzy brought home a thick packet of music (nine songs I think) about three weeks ago and I spent an half hour or hour a couple evenings running the songs down with her. I thought it was fairly advanced music for middle school kids. From there she seemed to pretty much have it together. The group rehearsed two evenings a week for two weeks and the day before the show and that was it. They totally nailed it!

New Song: Rocket To The Moon

My new song, Rocket to the Moon, is coming along. It’s a short (under 3 minutes) and fast, sort of fake-punk song and it’s the first song I wrote on guitar. At one point I had hoped to submit it to NASA’s space shuttle song contest, but It’s been a long time coming, between being busy with other projects and getting up to speed with my new studio setup.

The song has a really cool bass part, much too active and melodic to be real punk. At first I was playing just straight 16th notes on the root, but that got kinda boring, So I asked myself, what would John Paul Jones do? I ended up using a combination of thumb, fingers and two-hand tap just to get the lines out. Sounds killer but hard to play a such a fast tempo.

I laid down the lead vocal and an electric guitar part on my last session. Need to figure out what kind of effects to put on the vocals, and if I want any backing tracks.

For the electric guitar I had been using a little stomp box amp simulator that my brother gave me, but the thing bit the ghost and now I have no FX. I tracked the gtr using a combo of direct inject and miking the amp, which provided a bit of reverb and overdrive and fullness, and layers nicely with the acoustic gtr and is not too bad as-is. Martin has offered to lend me some more of his unused FX to experiment with, which is both kind and cool, but I don’t want to go back and retrack this gtr part if I don’t have to, so meanwhile I think I’ll explore the gtr fx in proTools.

So the song is on it’s way, but I still need to figure out how to fill out the arrangement. There’s some question as to the structure. There’s a middle eight that’s not doing much that needs some kind of solo or something. Maybe a bass solo? And then there’s a jam out on the ending, that also needs something. Martin suggested a kind of Tom Jones-esque horn section, while Neumann proposed a Morphine style sax riff. Both seem to agree it’s something over in saxophoneland, so I think I’ll give that a go. John also mentioned a half-time section. This is intriguing, but I like the short, fast, high-energy thing the song has going, and wonder if this might take it into a whole nuther direction. This is the kind of thing that’s almost easy if you have real band. You can just try out a few ideas in rehearsal. But in the studio it can be rather painstaking to lay down the tracks, listen back, decide and iterate. I had originally hoped this would be a quick song to record, but there’s alot of experimentation.

…

Rocket To The Moon
By John Szinger

Some days – I feel so far away
I move – so fast
To be with you at last

Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon
Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon

Tonight – I’ll make it home alright
To be – with you
You know what we can do

Yeah we’ll rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon
Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon
Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you, for you soon

Some days – I feel so far away
Tonight – I’ll make it home alright

And we’ll rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon
Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon
Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon
Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you, for you, for you soon

Darkness

You know how (if you’re a musician) when you start drinking, long before you’re too messed up to drive you start to loose the edge needed to play at a virtuoso level? Well today I worked at home cuz it was a cold, dark January day and I’ve been nursing a sore back all week. So when five o’clock rolled around I figured rather then get on the train for the trip home I could just have a drink or two and play me some piano in my extra found time.

My backache was alleviated, but I couldn’t play about half the tunes in my set. But it’s not just a question of speed. I couldn’t play my Monk stuff, for example, but I could play a bunch of stride-adapted Beatles songs. The diff is complex jazz harmony vs straight triadic harmony. But some kinds of tunes really work. I ended up playing Darkness by The Police until I was able to do all three parts (bass, ostonato and vocal) together, then an interpretation of Miami 2017 and Erik Satie’s 1st Gymnopedie, none of which are in my usual lineup.

Stratification

I’ve been back to work for two weeks now an already it’s back to full-on busy business. It’s also been cold, dark and snowy. We got a good foot of snow earlier in the week and it’s only been up in the 20’s in the daytime. I’m predicting I won’t see my lawn again until March.

Last weekend Martin came down for a visit. Just before xmas he contacted me asking if I’d like some spare parts for my Rhodes piano cuz there were some for sale on Craigslist. The guy was asking more individually for the parts that I was really interested in — the hammer mechanism, the rack of tines, and the pickups — than for the whole thing, so basically I ended up buying a complete Mark III Rhodes sans legs and pedal and with busted electronics. Martin came down last weekend, and we had great fun fitting the parts back in the original cabinet, destined to be stashed away somewhere until. And Jeannie didn’t even complain!

We spent most of the afternoon jamming, which was great fun. Martin mainly called the tunes, from the songbook of his now defunct band. A good handful of interesting 80’s tunes I hadn’t played before, but totally in my zone, by the likes of Sting and Joe Jackson. While we was visiting he gave me a primer on how to use the multi-effects box he lent me in the fall. And best of all, he lent me his old Stratocaster guitar! Martin mainly plays 12-strings now so he’s not using it. Plus he lives in an apartment and Charlie is at the age where he’s getting into things, so partly is was for the sake of guitar’s safekeeping. I hadn’t really been considering a strat, but hey, awesome!

It’s funny too, because my friend Mark, who years ago sold me my old electric guitar asked if he could buy it back. Which is cool, so I asked him for his thoughts on what to replace it with. His advice was to up my budget a few hundred bucks and focus only either a genuine Fender or Gibson guitar. (“Then you’ll have a great guitar that will keep its value.”) Martin’s strat plays and sounds so much better, so now I have a basic of comparison of what a really good guitar sound like for next time I go back to the music store. And when I sell my old axe I’ll have a little extra money for better new one.

Studio Upgrade

You’ll be happy to know I did get my new mBox 3 Pro. I ordered it from Sam Ash because they claimed they had it in stock but I had a bad vibe about the order. They screwed up the shipping and sent it fedex home instead of fedex ground so I had to cancel the order after they failed to deliver it three times. At least the Sam Ash people told me where to get one at a local music store.

While I was there I had a chance to audition a bunch of electric guitars. I liked four of them well enough to write down the model numbers. Two were Epiphones and two were Ibanezes. The first Epiphone was a Gibson SG knockoff. Dual humbuckers, mahogany body, maroon finish. It played nice and sounded nice. But one of the knobs was missing so I wouldn’t buy it. The next was an Epiphone hollow body modeled after another classic Gibson. Dual humbuckers, four knobs, also maroon finish. It didn’t play right cuz the string for the sales tag was wrapped around the two top strings. But the hollow body felt and sounded good, and reminded me of the main guitar John Lennon played in the late 60’s, a cream colored Gretsch. They had what looked to be a reissue of that guitar for about $2500, way out of my range. So I moved on and saw a nice Ibanez. One was a les-paul style but lighter and with a more agile feeling neck. Played really nice, nice cream color. The last was another hollow also in a cream color and looked alot like that John Lennon guitar, and is my current favorite.

I was surprised to find I really like the sound of those hollowbodies. Playing one feels closer to an acoustic. But I’m not sure if that’s the guitar I want because it seems alot less versatile than a regular electric guitar. For one thing the necks tend to be a bit flatter and wider, which can be both good and bad. For another it seems like some styles would be sort of off-limits with an axe like that. OTOH I don’t really see myself playing metal anyway. I’d rather have a guitar that gently weeps than loudly screams. Anyway people like John Lennon (Revolution, e.g.) and Neil Young have been able to get really hard rocking sounds from hollowbodies. Still, I also like bands like Rush and other that have a more modern guitar sound. (My friend John pointed out that Alex Lifeson played a hollowbody on a number of songs.)

Anyway, I got home from the music store and began to set up the mBox. I did the OS upgrade to 10.5.8, installed ProTools8 and hooked up the hardware on xmas eve. It works great! Michelle helped me get things going. Now she wants to be my apprentice engineer, which is awesome, cuz she has a good head for computers already. So I had her just make some noise into the mic and she decided to sing Away in a Manger. The sound is so good. When I went to play it back, I told her to stop singing now so I could hear the playback. I looked up and she wasn’t singing and I *was* hearing the playback! Later Lizzy came down and did aO Come All Ye Faithful. The new MBox has 2 headphone jacks, which makes this sort of thing alot easier.

Starting to learn PT8. There’s alot of new (to me) stuff in there. Project templates with built in click, nice and handy to get started quick. The built in FX have been upgraded. The basic compressor now has a nice little realtime input/output graph. Lots to explore.

I did a little side project for my mother-in-law she had an old 45 r.p.m. EP of girl scout songs from the 1950’s or 60’s that she asked me to make into a CD. (I’m the only one in the family with a working turntable.) The record was in pretty bad shape with lots of scratches and a few skips. I was able to eliminate a lot of the noise thru a combination of EQ (cut out everything over 4k) and compression (hard limiter to reduce the transients because the the pops were louder than the music) and it sound a good deal better. Still todo is edit out the skips, break the sides into tracks and burn the disc.

Studiowise, next step was to re-attach my midi rig. The new mBox has a single midi in and out, so I could get input from a single controller if all else failed. I have an 8×8 MOTU box that’s been an integral part of my. Last time I tried hooking it up to ProTools on the mac was about two years ago when 10.5 was new, and I totally struck out after lots of hassles. This time it plugged right in and totally worked. Woo-hoo! The other thing was to get SampleTank going again. I downloaded and installed sampleTank for mac 10.5 a month or two ago when I was trying to get up and running with Reaper but no dice. This time it opened in ProTools but my trail had expired. I had a bit of headache with the authorization but I finally got there.

So now I’m up and humming. Began work on Rocket to the Moon tonight. Got a click track and scratch MIDI bass part. I thought I’d lay down a scratch guitar part too using direct inject, but I ran into latency problems. There’s a good 8th or more note delay between the time you play a note and when you hear it in the headphones. Completely unworkable for live tracking. I messed around with the various input buffer dialogs, but to no avail. I’m pretty confident this can be solved if I just find the right control, because for years my old mBox was rock solid with no perceptible latency. I’m wndering if I should deactivate some plugins. Anyway, once I figure it out I’ll let you know.

The plan going forward is to upgrade to 10.6 and PT9 although I’ll probably wait until I’ve completed a song or two in the new setup. I’m also considering getting the digidesign expansion bundle that includes an AI drummer and detailed drum synth/sampler, a virtual analog synth, a fender Rhodes simulator, and some other stuff. Lots of fun ahead.

New Song: WSFBPLAU

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.

Tafari

Here’s a blast from the past: a friend recently posted this pic, an album cover from the band Tafari from the early 1990’s, of which I was a member. Tafari was a summer party band and we were only together for a few months, but in that time we gigged out a lot and even managed to record an EP of four original songs. The set was mainly Bob Marley and Steely Dan plus a bunch of reggae-influenced originals and a smattering of other stuff in the summertime party vibe. It was a large group consisting of a singer, drummer, percussionist, bass, two keyboards, two guitars and a three piece horn section. We were kind of an all-start lineup of the Kenmore music scene at the time. Led by Jim Parry, members included Bill Ross, Joe Quebral, Mark Colecchia, Chris Sierzchula, Matt Cline, Mark Hofschneider, Dan Jablon, Paul Bernstien, and your truly. I had thought Martin had sat in on a show but he says no. We pretty much used the money from every gig to buy beer for the next rehearsal.

We did the record Wiser Than Forest of Owls toward the end of the summer. Matt Cline and I did the cover art. Somehow I lost my copy over the years. If anyone has one, I’d love to hear these tracks again. From what I remember it came out quite well, and I even player clarinet on one song.

Music Update 4: The Question of Electric Guitars

So you wanna be a rock’n’roll star
Then listen now to what I say
Just get an electric guitar
And take some time and learn how to play
And if you make the chart
In a week or two the girls will tear you apart

If you’ve been following this blog (it turns out both Captain Hammer and the LAPD read it), you know I got me an acoustic guitar about year ago and have good fun and success in learning how to play it. I seem to have settled into a mode of mainly the folk and rock songs that are good to sing and play rhythm to. I even wrote my first song on guitar a while back and want to put it on my next records. It’s called Rocket To The Moon, and is an uptempo pseudo-punk number (although it has far more than three chords. Eight or nine I think.)

So I’ve been thinking about how to record this song. At one point I had hoped to get it done by Xmastime to submit to NASA song contest for the final space shuttle flight, but that’s looking unlikely right now due to repeated delays of the ship date for the mbox 3 pro. In the interim I took a look at Reaper, the FOSS DAW, but ran into so many issues with the setup I decided to punt for the time being and go back to the original mbox with PT7 to record my last song on the old rig.

It’s a short cover with a long title. I’m trying to do a really stripped down arrangement with just voice and piano and get it done quickly. But it turns out it’s not so easy to have a simple arrangement and make it come across with power and emotion. So I’m kinda woodshedding it now. Still hope to have it done in a couple of weeks, and by then the new box will be out and it’s on to the big upgrade.

Meanwhile in guitarland, Martin lent me a guitar mutli-FX box and amp simulator. I have an old electric guitar and I hooked the two of them together and gave it a whirl. The box is fun and interesting, and has a lot of cool sounds. But the interface is obscure and I don’t have a good handle on how to do more than move thru the presets, adjust the input gain, and select an amp simulation. This gives a good amount of range in available sounds, but there’s a whole effects block I haven’t cracked, with reverbs and tremelos and wahs and flanges all kinds of groovy stuff. Martin is coming for a visit sometime soon, so hopefully he’ll have the time to show me how the thing works. The other issue I have with the effects box is so many of the sounds are heavy metal megadistortion. I’m mostly playing rhythm and strumming, so this is completely wrong. I just want to embiggen my sound a bit. I wouldn’t mind getting a kinda slinky 70’s sound like George Harrison or David Gilmour either.

My electric guitar is an old Guild with dual humbuckers,. It’s okay but not great, so I’ve been thinking of getting a new one. I was also thinking of selling it and thought I might get a couple hundred for it. Then I went on ebay and saw the same model listed at $450 up to $1100. So I guess I should try and find out how much mine is worth.

Picking out a new guitar is a daunting task, cuz it’s not really my area and there’s just so many choices. I’ve been looking online and checking out the guitar section every time I go to Manny’s to see about the mbox. I’ve divided the product space into three main subtypes: Gibson, Fender and other. They seem to go from $300ish to as expensive as you wanna get. One friend thinks I should check out a Telecaster and another recommends Paul Reed Smith guitars. I’m leaning towards a Gibson GS, partly cuz I like the look and partly cuz of the humbuckers. I really need to just go to a music store one day an play some guitars. I tied to a couple weeks ago when I had a day off from work, but I ended up going to buy a snowblower instead.

So for now I think I’m gonna punt on the whole electric guitar thing and record Rocket to the Moon on acoustic and build the arrangement around that. I have another song ready to go after that called Seven Is Magic, an instrumental which I’m gonna do with a sax quartet. I might rename it Sea of Tranquility (or Valley of Serenity) to fit in with the whole moon concept.

I also came up with a bass part for RTTM. Remember what I said about the bass being easy? Well the only thing that’s really hard for me is fast repeated 16th notes on the same note. This is not a pattern I usually favor, but it seemed like I should try it for this song. It didn’t really work so I said to myself what would John Paul Jones do? So the new pattern is based on a rotation of fast moving riffs, a la Good Times Bad Times or Dazed and Confused.