Category: Music

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.

You Can Fake Talent But You Can’t Fake Effects

That was our motto in the band Infinigon back in the day. I was reminded of it over winter break when I saw my friend and collaborator John Neumann. This weekend I did a new batch of mixes on the tracks for my forthcoming record, continuing to drill down on the vocal mixes and effects, tweaking the reverb and chorus, and getting a consistent sound between tracks. I think I’ve gotten to the point where they are pretty much there: good to listen too, nicely blended but not too muddy. The new mixes can be heard here:

HeatWave60.mp3
Earthbound60.mp3
WhoCanFoolMe52.mp3
FineRedWine61.mp3
TouchTheCeiling37.mp3
AngelOrAlien60.mp3

As I’ve mentioned before I’m going to do the final mixing and mastering at my friend’s studio, and toward that end I’ve been writing software for him in exchange for studio time. I’ve been busy working on an updated version of his music library player the last few weeks. It’s almost done so there’ll be a post about that soon.

Meanwhile the deep cold continues outside. I’ve found that if I can keep my feet warm I’m pretty happy. My kids got me a new pair of slippers for xmas, which helps a lot, and Jeannie got me some nice warm socks too, which helps more.

Recording Project: Seven of Nine

I’ve reached a milestone with my recording project. I have seven out of nine of my songs ready for final mixdown and mastering. The are: Who Can Fool Me, Fine Red Wine, The Nine, Touch The Ceiling, Heat Wave, Angel Or Alien, and Earthbound. I’ve been cleaning up all my mixes, doing things like soloing the drums and bass and editing out little clams or bits of noise, blending the layers of keyboards and synthesizers, adding fader moves and refining the effects.

I’ve been focusing in particular on the vocals, drilling down, singing one phrase at a time until it sounds as good as I can make it, really concentrating on phrasing and intonation. My method is to lay down whole vocals track up to 5 times, and then cut together the best performances to make the track, and used the spares for thickening. Tedious but effective. I ended up completely overdubbing three songs: Fine Red Wine, Angel or Alien (which I think I am going to rename “U.F.O.”, and Earthbound. Earthbound in particular has a lot of lyrics and backing vocals, so it was a fair amount of effort.

It makes me feel better to know alot of the pros (Sting, Paul McCartney, etc.) worked this way. The problem now is, the better the takes get, the better my ear gets, and so now I’m thinking about going back to make punch ins on some tunes that I had previously thought were good enough. For the few weeks I’ve been listening to alot of Beatles music, mainly Sgt. Pepper’s and the White Album in heavy rotation. The White Album is now my workout music, which is kind of weird cuz I usually use something strongly uptempo throughout, but it’s a record I know really well and it’s musically interesting so it works. But now I’m hearing little flaws in John and Ringo’s singing on some tracks (never Paul’s) and I’m thinking to myself maybe I’ve gone far enough.

I burned a CD to listen to in my good stereo upstairs over the holidays, shuffled in with other albums. I do most of my listening back over the ipod on the train, and between the mp3 compression (really mangles cymbals and flange effects in particular), the cheap headphones and the environmental noise, there’s alot of fidelity I’m missing, although it’s great for hearing if the mix is good enough to withstand all that and still come thru.

The two remaining songs still need work in the arranging department. One of them is Making Miles, and I’ve decided to follow Martin’s arrangement more closely and give it an instrumental section and a reprise of the chorus, bringing up to near 5 minutes from the current 4. It’s gonna build throughout the song so it comes in like a full band midway thru and gets really huge just before the end, where it will scale back for the outro. I’m looking at adding bass and more drums, more keyboards, and maybe even guitars, as well as redoing the vocals. I’m also gonna cop the harmony vocal line on the chorus from the Shade tape.

The other song is Green Glove, which I sort of arranged in the studio, adding layers experimentally with no clear plan. It sort of sounds like a mess now, and it needs a tear down and rebuild. I might scrap it altogether, although I’d like to give it one last chance. It was a cute idea and the piano solo is pretty smokin’, and the groove could be really hot. So I have to think of a way to salvage the song, rethinking the horns, vocals and rhythm section. I’ll need to retrack the vocals anyway. I think I’ll start by just muting the horn section.

If I do scrap it I’m gonna replace it with a new song “Rocket To The Moon”. This is the first song I wrote on guitar and I’m fond of it, plus it fits with the rest of the songs thematically while offering some new musical ideas. I figured my fist guitar song would be something like a Greg Lake style ballad something like Lucky Man, but this is pretty different. It’s a sort of uptempo fake-punk thing that I came up with when I was learning Message in a Bottle. It’s short, probably less than three minutes. It’ll be interesting to see if the rhythm guitar part will carry the tune, also to see how it goes recording the acoustic and adding effects in ProTools.

So now I’m hoping the record will be done by the end of the winter. You can hear the latest tracks on my music page. Let me know how they sound to you.

Blues Forever

Back in the day my brother Martin decided to teach himself how to play guitar. Once he got the basics together it seemed that almost out of nowhere he started writing a stream of songs, all of them quite good and some of them really powerful and beautiful, and some surprisingly dark. In short order he put together a band named Shade and started gigging out with the material. Sort of an distortion-guitar-driven post-prog pop vibe. I was an instant fan. We even played a few double bills with my band and his.

Shade broke up and Martin went on to commit these songs to tape using a four-track cassette recorder, very advanced technology for the day. He recently digitized the songs and put them online as The Shade Songbook. You can hear the tracks here. The songs hold quite up well and I’m really having a blast listening to them again. (I suppose they could use some modern EQ and tape hiss removal, but Martin made no attempt at such twenty-first century revisionism). Favorites include At The Show, Blues Forever, Just Another Heart Attack, Frozen Ocean, Making Miles … well there are alot of songs. You can get Martin’s take on the project here.

Fall Down, Part II

Seems that this is the time of year for work in progress. Here’s an update on a bunch of project. You can skip it if you find it boring.

My job has entered a new planning cycle. I’m trying to figure out how to deal with a manager who’s making it difficult for me to accomplish what I need to do. I want to moving forward with a major new feature set of my product, and he’s not getting it together to provide me with usable requirements. I working on him to see that it’s in his best interest to let me take over some things, but he is reluctant to give up control even though he’s spread too thin.

In music, I’ve been finishing off my album Face The Heat. I updated the page, including links to the newest mixes. I’m in the final phase, really focused on the details of the mixes now. Probably one or two pass at each song remains, but I find after I do a mix I have to take a few days and listen to it.

But in the sense that I want to finish my record to make time for origami, so far it’s kinda backfired. I have a trip coming up to California next month for the Pacific Coast Origami Conference, and I’d like to have something new for that. I took the summer off from working on my book, but now I have to get back into it. Last winter I was in a groove of diagramming over a model a month, but that’s a pretty heavy pace. So far this fall I made some corrections to my Lizard and began diagramming my Medieval Dragon, which will be probably over 70 steps! I also have a bunch of models in development, including some insects: a new butterfly, a dragonfly, and maybe another crack at the ladybug. And then there’s the batch from June that need further refining: the Blimp, the Sphere and the Orb UFO. So I’ve been doing some origami, just not as much as I’d like. Ah well I still have a month.

I’ve also made progress on the Foldinator, my origami software. It is now generating the paper procedurally using the drawing API. Also I‘ve defined the various lines weights and colors the application needs. I have a bit further to go before I release the next demo, however. I want to draw the initial state of the paper based on what it says in the xml file for the model. This requires a bit of plumbing so that the paper is aware when the model is loaded. After that I will probably go on to the non-folding operations, namely flipping and rotating the paper.

I’ve realized that I am long overdue in updating my origami site with pictures of my 2009 models. The web site redesign is probably far enough along that I should shift gears and take care of this before carrying on with that. The photography and photoshop is a whole little project in itself. While I’m at it, I should update my general photo gallery with pictures from the summer before it gets too far behind.

New Recording: Touch The Ceiling Rough Mix

Here’s a rough mix of my new song Touch The Ceiling. As mentioned previously this was an original from the prog rock party band Infinigon, written by our drummer Mark Colicchia. My friend John Neumann, the original Infinigon bassist helped me with this song, contributing the bass and guitars, backing vocals and some synthesizer textures. It was a lot of fun collaborating with John. He had a bunch of new fresh ideas that expanded my idea of what the song could be.

The arrangement was true in spirit to the original version, but updated as well. The major difference is now we have all this machinery making modern music where back in the day we had to cover all the parts live. The spine of track is my Fender Rhodes part, on top of which I layered a lead synth that was fairly faithful to the original. On top of that we layered a few more synths. John broke down the guitar part into layers and built it up track by track, and in the end I had six tracks of guitars to integrate, a veritable guitar army!

Mark was one of the best drummers, if not the best drummer I ever worked with, and I tried to do justice to his style, energy, and chops in my drum track. I record my drums using the “four finger” method. I use a general midi drum kit layout and the left hand covers the kick drum and snare and the right hand does the hi-hat and cymbals. Then I go back and punch in and/or hand edit anything extra I need. I don’t typically use a lot of fills, but in the song it seemed like a good idea. There’s even an eight-bar drum break after the guitar solo that was a lot of fun to do.

My vocal on this song was delivered in a more hard rock style than usual. I was inspired by John’s suggestion to listen to David Lee Roth on some classic Van Halen. John later claimed he was joking, but I think the vocal is quite successful. I even added some spontaneous lyrics in the ending jam, as all chaos breaks loose among the synths and guitars. There’s going to be a fade out in the final version, but for now it just runs out to the end of the jam.

So this is it for the songs on my new record. Next I’ll be going over them one by one with an ear to fine tuning the levels and effects and cleaning up anything I might’ve missed, in preparation for the final mixdown and mastering.

New Song: Touch The Ceiling

I’ve been working on a new recording of a song called Touch The Ceiling. This is the last song for my current forthcoming album, whose working title is Face The Heat. Like the last number Making Miles, this one is a cover of sorts, a blast from my own past. Way back in the 1980’s I was in the prog rock group Infinigon. We did mainly covers by bands like Rush, Yes, Genesis, and ELP, but we aspired to write our own original songs.

Touch the Ceiling was one of the best. It was written by our drummer Mark Colicchia, crafted by contributions from the whole group. The song is a good expression of Mark’s philosophy as well as a really good song with a strong melody and groove, some interesting twists, an atmospheric middle section and a jamming ending. I recall contributing a few ideas to the arrangement.

I’m doing this new arrangement in collaboration with John Neumann, the original Infinigon bassist, who is now a fellow recording studio artist and the driving force behind Tea With Warriors. He’s playing the bass and guitar, singing the second parts, and contributing some cool synthesizer textures. Meanwhile on my side, I’m doing most of the keyboard parts, and this song involves more drum programming that usual, as there are a few different rhythms, a couple of drum breaks and a good handful of fills.

My friend Erik came by last night and I ran him though my mixes, and we worked out a strategy for bringing them over to his studio. The main thing is he doesn’t use SampleTank, which is my main onboard software synthesizer, so I’m going to have to take all my drums and keyboard tracks and render them out as audio. So I’ll be getting going on that as I finish this song.

Things have been hectic for me this week with work, the car and all, so it may be a couple weeks still until I have the rough mix up. Have to finish up the drums and the synth solo at the end, and drop in John’s parts. Meanwhile, you can enjoy Mark’s lyrics.

…

Touch The Ceiling
by Mark Colicchia

Light side of summer ready to roll vivid perfect day
Song playing over the radio with nothing to day
Land upon the lunar surface streets and I’m on my way
Going out to spend tomorrow’s half of next week’s pay

You gotta go with the feeling
Avoid disbelieving
If you can’t touch the ceiling
Reach as high as you can

Waiting for the weekend takes so long then it’s gone too soon
Young night lit by ancient stars and pie-graph moon
Strange invitation you go it alone and the evening seems to loom
Searchlight eyes meet a similar gaze from across the room

You gotta go with the feeling
The moment revealing
If you can’t touch the ceiling
Reach as high as you can

Work live for paper pagan reward it’s the modern way
Stress cynicism all from the game what a price to pay
Plan for tomorrow but don’t forget to enjoy today
Do what you know is right in your mind it’s the winning play

Making the scene what does it mean what does it say?
Too many flaws plaguing the laws that we obey
Don’t let the sights of golden lights lead you astray
Life can be hard sometimes the cards fall where they may

And go with the feeling
Avoid disbelieving
If you can’t touch the ceiling
Reach as high as you can

Deep Summer

Well it’s the second half of the summer now, and we’re getting our first real heat wave. It’s been in the 90’s since last week, with no rain for a change, and no end in sight. We’re getting peppers and tomatoes from our garden daily now. And even though we’ve been busy, we’ve had some time to enjoy summer activities. We took the kids to Playland last Friday evening and the kids enjoyed the rides and we saw fireworks. Michelle is exactly 4 feet tall, which was the cutoff for a lot of rides, and it some of the ride operators were being extra picky. They wouldn’t let her on the big rollercoaster (too short), and then later they almost wouldn’t let her on some the kiddie rides (too tall)! They wouldn’t let me on the bumper cars for being too tall. The park has a bunch of old, classic rides from the 1920’s. The carousel had a genuine calliope, sort of a player piano crossed with a pipe organ and robot percussion section, that was fascinating to watch and listen to.

We went to beach on Sunday, which was great, except for on the ride home the car started making trouble, one of the brakes was overheating and seizing up. It’s in the shop now, but the car has just about 100,000 miles on it, so we’re starting to think about how long we want to keep it and keep repairing it. There are a lot of things I like about the Jeep, and over all it’s in pretty good shape, so it’s tempting to just keep it running. On the other hand, that’s the strategy we’re following with Jeannie’s car, so we don’t want to be in the situation where we need to replace both cars at the same time. And of course to replace it would be a whole research project to figure out what kind of vehicle to replace it with, and it’s gonna take a whole lot of precious time to do it right. Since I’m so tall, most of the cars our there are not good for me to drive, and even a lot of larger SUV’s are not well designed for tall people. Right now is not a good time for it’s since we have a camping trip coming up this weekend, and another road trip a couple weeks after that. Still, I think we better start looking into it so we’re prepared.

I’ve been making progress on a bunch of side projects. Luckily we’ve had no major home repairs or other projects of necessity for a little while, and things are at an even keel for the time being with my job, so I’ve been doing fun stuff. I’ve basically taken the summer off from working on origami and my book, since I was jamming on it really hard back in May and June. But it’s getting close to the top of the list as other things get done. I dusted off the Foldinator and began development of version 2.0. I worked out a format for Origami XML, and posted a first build. The second build will be along in a few weeks. I stated redoing my web site in PHP to support dynamic pages, and have implemented the first set of scripts. Still on the todo list is take pictures of all my new 2009 origami models, which will happen sometime this fall.

I’ve been making great progress with music. I bought a guitar a few weeks ago, and have been playing it enough that I’m starting to get somewhere. I’m think of writing a guitar based song even, something in the approximate style of Greg Lake. That will be on a future project, as this one is nearing the end. My friend Erik has agreed and to help me mix and master my record, which is great news. And I finished a complete song in record time in July. Now I’m working on the ninth and final song for my record, with the help of my friend John. More on that in a future post.

Kickin’ the Guitar

Hey! Who’s that playing?
Hey! The guitar?

Last weekend we went camping with a bunch of friends and families. Cooking over fires, drinking beers, singing songs around the campfire. Ah good times. We were pretty lucky with the weather. It rained heavily Friday on the drive up, but stopped by the time we got there. Most of the trip was sunny but not too hot. It started raining again the last morning, just after we finished packing down the tent, and by the time we were on the drive home it was pouring again.

We went for a rocky and muddy hike up a mountainside. The kids did really well, Michelle in particular. Even as the more sedentary adults began whining, she was hopping from rock to rock, happy to keep going with great energy and enthusiasm. Lizzy lost a sandal in the lake, playing fetch with Seth’s dog Nula. We burned the giant U.F.O. I folded back in June for the oversize origami competition. My friend Nick has some powder to sprinkle into the fire to make it burn all kinds of crazy colors. We put it on the flying saucer and it was just the thing. Video coming soon.

But the main topic for today is about singing songs a playing guitar. This dude Joe brought his guitar and we had some jams. He also brought a stack of lead sheets he printed out from the Internet, which was a great help. I usually memorize the music I play, but everyone knows different songs. So it made it easy to follow along with a song you basically know but haven’t played before. And there are hundreds and hundreds of songs easy song like that. Next time I’m gonna bring some printouts of my own.

I got motivated to get back into practicing guitar. Actually, last year around this time I went thru a spell of playing guitar and trying to learn some tunes from my big Beatles book and a Neil Young book. I tried to practice two or three times a week for a half hour or so. I picked a couple tunes that were pretty challenging for me, such as “I Will”, and was making progress, but had to put it aside after a few months. I felt like I my progress was slowing, and I wanted to make time for other activities, and besides, my guitar playing would never rise to the level of my saxophone or piano playing.

Another factor is that even thought I have two guitars, neither one is very good. One an acoustic that I traded for a boom box many years ago. It has the dubious virtue of being made almost entirely not of wood. The body is plastic, a great big Ovation-style round back, and the neck is aluminum, wide and flat. It never is quite in tune and takes a lot strength to barre chord on it. At least it’s loud. And it’s great for camping cuz it’s well nigh indestructible and it doesn’t matter if it accidentally gets wet or dirty.

My other guitar is a bit nicer. It’s a Guild electric that I bought many years ago off my friend Mark (Yo Homeslice!). It actually has pretty good sound and action, and a nice two-pickup setup with a three-way switch and tone knobs. The main problem is the intonation. The joint between the neck and the body is not tight enough, so you end up doing Adrian Belew style tremolo effects every time you shift your balance.

Still, you can’t take a piano with you into the woods and you can’t sing while playing a sax, so I got motivated again. This time the focus is on easy rock and folk songs. I’ve just been googling lyrics and chords and finding pretty much every song I think of. It’s actually pretty funny how the same ascii tab charts that were floating around newsgroups in the 80’s are still out there circulating. One not-so-easy song I decided to tackle this time around was “Suitcase Blues”, a great ballad by Rik Emmet of Triumph.

And so, today I bought myself a new guitar. I knew I wanted an acoustic-electric (acoustic with a built-in pickup) so I could practice without and amp but could plug it in if I ever want to use it for recording or gigging out. After looking online, figured I could probably get a decent on in the $300 ballpark. I went to the music store on my lunch hour and it was nice and quiet, so I took some time and auditioned about 6 guitars. In the end I picked a Yamaha APX-500. It has really good sound and action, and a bunch of details that I like. The body has a nice shape and is thinner than other makes, so it’s more comfortable to hold, but still has a nice full sound. The neck is thinner and flatter than a lot of acoustics, but not as much as your typical electric. The jack is in a convenient place. It has a built-in tuner and 3-band equalizer and a slider labeled “AMF” that I’m not sure what it does. Its scale runs from 80 to 10K, so maybe it sweeps the resonant frequency for the middle band of the EQ. Finally, it has a really nice tobacco sunburst finish which is just gorgeous.

So now I’m totally psyched to learn a bunch of new songs. Too bad it’s too nice to take camping.

Here’s a picture of the guitar next to Michelle’s ukulele.