Category: Music

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.

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