Category: Music

Squirrels, Concerts, Cartwheels and Fireflies

When I was kid all squirrels were grey. Then one day we went up to visit my cousins in the suburbs outside of Toronto and we saw something new: a black squirrel. It turns it was a mutant strain, but a successful one, and over the years the black squirrels have spread out across the northeastern part of North America, to the point where now in the 21st century, they are common in Westchester County, NY. We have a champion elm tree in our front yard, and in it lives a family of squirrels. One Saturday morning a few weekends ago I was sitting on the couch sipping my morning coffee when the new family of young squirrels came out to play. I called the kids over and they were knocked out by overwhelming cuteness of all those squirrels frolicking in the trees, on the power lines and on the ground. I counted nine of them, some black and some grey. Then I saw something new I’d never seen before: a black squirrel with a red tail!

I was out rollerblading earlier this week and I saw another one. That’s two. I wonder if this a new variety of squirrels, and if it’s going to become common in a few years.

…

Last Friday was Lizzy’s spring band concert. I’m happy to say that the school band is getting a lot better and Lizzy in particular is sounding quite good. This is important to me as a parent and musician, because school band was a big part of my early musical training and experience. Two years ago (Lizzy’s first year in the band) the teacher quit at the end of the year, and about half the band graduated the school. So last year it was a new teacher and a ragtag group of beginners. So as you might imagine, they sounded pretty rough. But the teacher, Mr. Quinn, was quite dedicated and patient, and the kids have been steadily improving. This year was a dramatic both in terms of the material they could handle and the level at which they played it. This year they did a dress rehearsal at the school, which by all accounts was a big success and instrumental in recruiting new kids into the band.

Lizzy had a solo too, the Hunter’s Chorus by Weber, and I’m happy to say she nailed it. And at the end of the concert the band director told me he’s inviting Lizzy to join the honor band next spring. This is a band formed from the best players from a bunch of schools in the area. It’s made up kids in grades 6 – 8, and Lizzy is just going into 6th grade next fall, so that’s pretty cool.

…

This is the time of year when the evenings are really long. This kids are all excited about summer vacation and me, well, I have a couple long weekends coming up. Lizzy had the end of her gymnastics class last weekend, complete with a demo competition. It’s something she’s been working to master, so one night this week she was out on the lawn doing cartwheels back handsprings and asking me to spot her. Michelle was out too and as it started getting dark the fireflies came out. Firefly season is always special since it’s so short and only comes when the evenings are long. The kids caught a bunch of fireflies and but them in a jar, although I persuaded them to release our little glowing friends when it was time to go inside. It was a nice shiny moment of serenity.

Source Control as a Service

I’ve been doing software development for my friend Erik for a while now. It’s been going well, but I’m sort of bound by time constraints (I have a day job and kids, as well as commitments to developing my art in music and origami) and he’s been budget bound (small business owner). We worked out an arrangement to trade studio time for software development, but since my record is nearly done so is that deal. Erik had the idea to begin outsourcing the development, which would put me in the role of architect/designer/team lead and (potentially/hypothetically) triple our output as far as software dev productivity goes.

As a prerequisite to sharing the code, we needed to get the project under source control. I remember a few months back my friend Nick blogging about how to set up a GIT server. I thought this might be something I could do, but what a time suck and a hassle. As it turns out Erik is a big believer in the whole software-as-service thing. He’s using a service (odesk.com) to line up offshore developers, and he’s even trying to convince to use a service to help on my next album.

The thing is, he’s not really into my drum sounds, which is not too surprising, since they’re all redended MIDI parts, jammed using the four-finger method and/or step recorded by yours truly. They sound a heck of a lot better than say They Might Be Giants, who used a similar technique back in the day, but fall short of a really good real drummer. And the cymbals in particular are a bit thin samplewise. So Erik is like, “Man, somewhere out there is a drummer who’s just killer, who will nail your tracks and bring a whole new level of energy. You send him a file of your song, and he’ll send you back an amazing drum part.” And this really sounds not far from the truth. I’ve had good experiences collaborating over the net with my brother to create our last album, and on this album with my friend John, who’s just recently hung out a shingle to do mastering as a service over the internet.

As to the question of source control, Erik had a friend who turned us onto source-control-as-a-service at cvsdude.com, a.k.a Codesion. The cost is pretty low — on the level of your basic web hosting service, and they have an admin interface to let you set up source repositories, bug/feature tracking, and to add users and set access control. Totally worth it as far as the time it saved for me not having to do all that by hand. I was able to fairly quickly create a repository, upload the source, and set up version control in my IDE on another machine to confirm it works as advertised, then checkout the source, make some changes and commit the new version. So it’s all humming along quite nicely.

Of course the project up to now has just been living on my local machine, so there’s a whole cycle of organization, cleanup and documentation ahead before some third party developer can jump in. And the other thing is, before y’all get all drooling over the idea that the day of software-as-a-service has really arrived, Codesion is still just another scrappy startup trying to get by like the rest of us. At first I was taken in by their slick web interface and their more-human-than-human support/sales bot, but the illusion was soon shattered. I had signed up for a trial account to see if they were legit, and then Erik went ahead and creates a permanent account. The problem is, for some reason (like a flaw in their database design) they don’t’ allow the same email address on two different accounts, so every time I tried to log in I got an error and a nastygram from their server to my inbox. Their tech support cleared it up by nerfing my trial account, but this is disappointing because at some point I’d like to get the Foldinator under version control, but I don’t want to get a new email address just to appease these guys.

Batch o’ Tracks

My recording project has gotten to a place that I would call “very close to done”. After going into Erik’s studio one night every week or two, we’ve gone thru all the tracks to create really awesome sounding mixes of every one of them. While we’ve been working I’ve been reading an excellent book about John Lennon in New York, written by his personal photographer. Learned a lot of stuff I didn’t know, plus it’s full or great photographs including the iconic “New York City” picure.

There might be a couple tweaks on one or two tracks, but for seven of them or so, I’m ready to pronounce them complete and perfect (or at least as good as we can make them). As for the other two, I need to give them a few more listens, but it’s basically there. The only step remaining on this project is the final mastering, and then its on to the cover art, liner notes and then printing and selling some CD’s and tracks online. Here’s the rundown of tracks:

Heat Wave – 5:30
Earthbound (I Wanna Fly) – 5:10
Who Can Fool Me – 3:20
Fine Red Wine – 4:45
Making Miles – 5:10

Touch the Ceiling – 6:30
Green Glove – 3:45
The Nine – 4:10
Angel Or Alien – 8:15

I already have enough material for more than half of the next album, but once this project is done I’m going to take a little while to upgrade my recording studio. More on that as it develops.

New Recording: Green Glove v2

Here’s a new version of the song Green Glove. I wasn’t satisfied with the sound of this song when I had finished it last fall, so I retracked quite a bit of it. I redid the lead and backing vocals. I changed the bass line and added a guitar part. I changed the horn section arrangement around and added a flute part (played by Lizzy) as the top voice. The final thing I did was to re-track that bari sax. The original take was out of tune and made the whole thing sound a bit off. The new version is spot-on, plus has a great feel and energy.

I had been waiting to redo that part because the baritone saxophone is such a giant beast. It’s heavy and takes a lot of strength just to hold it and a good deal of power to play. I’ve been getting over a back injury, but last week was the end of my physical therapy and I’m pretty much better. I’ve changed my whole workout around to incorporate the exercises my therapist gave me, and have mostly worked most of my old exercises back in. It will still take a while to be completely back to a hundred percent, but I can do most everything normally at this point. Still I was a bit hesitant about doing the bari part. It turned out well enough, but after an hour of playing I could really feel the gathering soreness in my lower back. I felt fine the next morning, so I guess that it was OK.

So this is it. All the recording is done for my record; just the finishing remains. The mastering sessions are past halfway. We’ve done five of the nine songs, including the two longest ones, or about 27 out of 47 minutes worth of music.

New Recording: Making Miles v2

I have new version of the song Making Miles. You may recall that last summer I recorded it with just piano and vocals, but after listening back for a while I decided it needed something more. The new mix retains the heartfelt simplicity of the first one but evolves into a something much more powerful. I redid the lead vocals, added some harmonies, drums, bass guitar and synth pads. I expanded the song with a solo section and reprise of the chorus, making it closer to Martin’s original arrangement. For the solo I used the Yamaha woodwind synthesizer. That thing has such great sounds and is a lot of fun. The solo started off as an improvisation, but with each take I converged a little more on what became the only solo it could be.

Now eight songs completed in terms of arranging and tracking. The last one, Green Glove, just requires a few punch-ins on the horn section and it’ll be good to go too. I’ve gotten back into doing mixdowns at my friend Erik’s studio this week too. We had to take a few weeks off while he built out a new mixing room to take on a new client. But now we’re back at it and have four songs polished off. I will post these mixes soon too. Soon it will be time to start thinking about finishing the album: the track order, cover art and that sort of thing.

Concert — Emerson Lake and No One

One evening last week Jeannie and I saw a rather unique concert. Keith Emerson and Greg Lake, of Emerson, Lake and Palmer played a show of mainly unplugged material, interspersed with stories about their songwriting and touring and that sort of thing. More intimate and laid-back than polished and high-energy, but it definitely had a few special musical moments. Most of the songs were altered or adapted to fit the format. They opened with “From the Beginning” which featured an expansive jazz intro by Keith. Next came an adaptation of the King Crimson classic “I Talk to the Wind”, played in a similar style. Quite nice and surprising. Then Greg switched from guitar to bass and it was on to “Take a Pebble” with a piano solo that segued into a mainly solo piano rendition of Tarkus. I think I preferred it to original. You could hear the piano ideas a lot more clearly, and it didn’t sound so bombastic or repetitive, and I think they tightened it up a bit and dropped a solo section or vamp here and there. Toward the end Keith fired up the Moog and did a combination keyboard and knob-twiddling solo, which left the machine in a state of generating automatic weird noise to ride out the song as he returned to the piano. Very nicely done.

The second set included a versions of “Ces’t la Vie”, “Bitches Crystal”, a semi-successful jam that took off from Blue Rondo a la Turk, a rendition of “Pirates” not quite as good as Tarkus but admirable nonetheless, and even a bit of “Benny the Bouncer” (which Keith claimed is his favorite ELP song), and of course closing the show with “Lucky Man”. At one point they opened the floor to questions from the audience and woman requested to lie down on the stage under Keith’s piano for a song, so he indulged her and spun out a fantastic improvisation for a few minutes. It was nothing I’ve ever heard before but it was reminiscent of several of his compositions, and fairly structured in its use of ostanotos, rising and falling lines and stabbing chords, and I feel like I have some new insight into “how to sound like Keith Emerson” now. All in all an interesting and enjoyable experience. I wish them the best for their plans for a reformed ELP tour this summer!

Change in the Weather

Rewinding a bit, St. Patty’s day was sort of an unusual day. We’d had a lot of stormy weather, and it was really cold that morning, and I had to get up early for physical therapy. The road there was still closed from the big storm, so I had to take a different route. By the time I was on my back home, it was already warming up outside and turning into the first really nice warm spring day. I’d been waiting for a while for my back to start feeling better, and that turned out to be the day. Such a relief.

My train was late, and when the door opened it smelled like booze. Partiers headed into the city to enjoy the parade. I was probably the only one in the car going to work. Some guy on the train noticed me folding a color-change stellated octahedron that I’ve been working on. “Dude, is that origami? Cool! Did you get that from youTube?” The parade goes right thru my neighborhood, and it’s like that the whole day, drinking and partying, like it’s Mardi Gras or Halloween or 1999. At least I was able to cross 5th Ave. without any altercations with the police this time.

At work it was all about deploying the first release candidate of our project to the Q server. This is a major milestone on what has been a really long strange trip. I was mired in config files all day, or as I’ve come to call it, configgy pudding. Our company has a mandate to try and do more thru configuration and less thru code. But it’s already becoming hard to manage, and we haven’t even deployed to live. So I need to write a config management tool so we can have instant congfiggy pudding. Anyway, we got it working, and deployed to QA, where we’re already finding bugs.

After work was a corporate happy hour function at a hotel bar which was smack in between two Irish pubs. I made friends with a management consultant who was part of a team engaged by our overlords to hang around and analyze out office’s dysfunction and presumably figure out who to fire. She seemed pretty smart and interesting/weird with a possible MIT vibe. She told me, “You don’t look old enough to have been writing software in the 90’s.” Hell, I was writing software in the 70’s. Hopefully this means I won’t be the one who gets sacked.

The mild weather continued and by the weekend we were able to get started on the spring yardwork and enjoy the season’s first barbecue. I was really tempted to get on my rollerblades or see if I could start up my Mustang after a winter of sitting in the garage, but neither one seemed like a wise idea given the condition of my back. After the weekend the weather reverted to a more typical state of dreary cold and rain, which is pretty much how it’s been for the past week. I’ve gotten a bunch of new exercises from my therapist, and have developed a new workout routine to incorporate those along with most of the stuff from my old workout. I’ve been able to bring back most of the exercises now, and am back up to 70 percent of the weight, and some of them still have limited mobility. I did go ice skating that past Saturday with my kids, and did fine, as my back continues to improve.

The kids are going thru a Beatles phase right now, which is fun because they’re one of my all-time favorite bands. It started back in January when we were watching Anthology. Then Jeannie found the DVD’s for A Hard Day’s Night, and Magical Mystery Tour on sale. (Yes MMT is as bad as everyone says. Three or four excellent music videos and an hour of filler showing people riding a bus.) At first the kids were into all the early boy-band pop stuff like “She Loves You” and “Please Please Me”. Now they progressed to the weird John songs like “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” and “I Am the Walrus”. Michelle learned how to play “All Together Now” on the ukulele.

Daylight Again

Well we’re moving into the second half of winter. It’s still plenty cold, but at least the days are getting longer and it’s the daytime again when I get up in the morning, which is helping with the seasonal blues.

We went ice skating this last weekend, which was a fun time. We had planned on going skiing but Lizzy had to have a tooth pulled on Friday (baby tooth hadn’t started to get loose yet, but the tooth under started growing and pushing up), and wasn’t feeling up to by Saturday evening, so we decided to skating instead, since it’s closer to home.

Been making progress with the music. Last week Erik and I went to do another mixing/mastering session at his studio, but his car broke down on the trip into the city, so that was kind of a bust. Still, I worked on my own on “Green Glove”, on of the two songs that still needs to be completed. This was originally supposed to be a quick, almost throwaway song, a fun little idea to round out the record. But then there were problems with the arrangement, so I’ve be brining a new level of detail and precision to it. I redid the bass part and added rhythm guitar, and then I changed the horn arrangement and retracked the vocals. One important thing I did was to pan the backing vocals to one side and the horns to the other. This gave the whole mix a lot more space and clarity. So it’s getting there. Hope to get it finished next weekend.

We watched the movie “Anvil: The Story of Anvil” over the weekend. Inspirational odyssey of a starving artist. The band is from Toronto. A couple scenes of the film took place in McKellar, Ontario, on the shores and waters of Lake Manitouwabing, where I spent I bunch of time as a kid.

As for other random tasks, I’ve even gotten back to making some progress on my origami book, although not as fast as I’d like. And now that I’m done with the updated music player, I can concentrate on the next cycle on the Foldinator. I still haven’t made any progress on the winter home improvement agenda, but then I guess getting the new appliances can count toward that and other projects deferred.

Mix Master

Last week I had the first mixdown/mastering session with Erik in his studio working on one of my songs. It was a really good experience. I never realized what a totally skilled producer he is. He pretty quickly and systematically moved thru the song, adding little bits of effects here and there, mainly EQ, compression, pan and volume, plus a bit of reverb, and sometimes something else on specific tracks. I learned alot just by watching him. He really separated the instruments, putting everything in its own space and still blending it all together well. He EQ’d the bass, piano and kick drum so everything in the bottom end is clear, distinct and strong. He also has a ton of professional grade effects, and knows them well. He did a setup for the vocals (not sure what FX exactly) to make the sound really good. In the end there are a ton of effects on the song, but it doesn’t sound effects-heavy.

The song is maybe 90 percent there, just a couple tweaks to go. I’ve listened to it on my iPod and it’s definitely better than my mix even on those cheap headphones. I can hardly wait to listen on my good stereo. We just got our new dishwasher Saturday and our new fridge today, so now the kitchen/dining/living area is free of the dreadful grinding sounds of dying appliances (really it did not sound at all good) and the way is clear.