Category: Music

OK Computer

You might recall I bought a new computer, an iMac, about a year ago. The plan was to use is as the centerpiece of my recording studio. But ProTools didn’t run on 10.5 so that led to a big OS reinstall. I finally got ProTools, my Box and my MOTU MIDI interface all working together on the Mac under 10.4, only find out that SampleTank, which is my main onboard sampler, wasn’t compatible with Intel Macs and I’d have to get a whole new (as opposed to an upgrade) version of SampleTank. So that kind of bottomed out here. I did manage to install Boot Camp and Windows XP, but by the time I was done with all that I just wanted to get on with making music, so I went back to using my laptop again.

Well that laptop has been acting funny, and I don’t know why, and I went thru all kinds of pain to replace the hard drive last month. So over xmas vacation I finally got around to installing ProTools, SampleTank and all my samples, and the MIDI software on the XP partition of my Mac, and doing all the authorization rigaramole.

All was looking good, until I went to work on some actual music. Then to my dismay I discovered that after a few seconds the thing came to screeching halt. I tried again and it was the same thing. It was completely unusable. So I googled “protools xp bootcamp” and found lots of other people experiencing similar problems. Well misery loves company I guess. I learned that I probably needed something called the “microsoft dual core hotfix” so I googled that and it led me to this link:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896256

Shawnuff I installed the patch and now everything is working splendidly and completely copasetic. The one caveat is I have to turn off wifi on the mac, which is something I never had to do on my laptop. The good news is that mac is a way more powerful machine. Mixes that would max out my old machine are only using about 40 percent of the CPU. Also, with the big monitor, I can display a full 24 tracks worth of faders without having to scroll! So a longstanding goal has been realized and I’m back in business in the recording front.

And it’s a good thing too. I’m in the middle of a new song called “Earthbound”. Or maybe it will be called “Perihelion”. After a month of downtime I can finally get back to it.

The next problem is that if the machine sleeps while XP it kinda crashes when it wakes up, and then reboots in the MacOS. I think Microsoft has a fix for that too.

New Recording: Who Can Fool Me

The other night I finally put the finishing touches on my new song Who Can Fool Me. It’s been mostly done for a while, but I ended up doing a number of takes of the synth horn solo. In the end I think song turned out great. So enjoy!

While I was at it went back and made some newer mixes of a couple of my other songs, Fine Red Wine and The Nine. So enjoy some more!

And also I update some pages in my music site with new project notes, audio files, and lyrics.

New Song: Who Can Fool Me

Who is the greater fool, the fool or the fool who follows?

I’ve been working on a new song called “Who Can Fool Me?” It’s a defiant and bitter song, a reaction to the constant lies and manipulation coming from the media and the forces of power in our society, and how everyone seems to go along with it rather than maintaining the sovereignty of one’s own mind and judgment. Or something like that. I came up with the basic idea for the song a few years back, and refined it this fall.

The arrangement and feel of the song is tense end edgy, and takes a cue from old-time cartoon jazz, but sort of warped and twisted and blended with modern electronica. Structurally, it’s basically a C minor blues, played in a stride style, but in 7/4 time. The basic blues chords are embellished with upward chromatic harmonic movement.

The recording came together pretty quickly. It looks I’ll be done with it in less than two months, which is much better than the 3 or 4 months some of my other songs took. Admittedly those were longer songs and this one is only three minutes but still, I may be getting better at this! At this point I’m pretty much done except for two things. One is editing and mixing the vocals; I have an effects treatment in mind.

The other a synthesizer solo. I have a virtual orchestra consisting of a synth mellotron, a synth string section, and two real saxophones – a tenor and a soprano. The lead synth, combines with the 2 saxes is designed to evoke the classic horn section of a trumpet, clarinet and tenor sax, as used by for example Raymond Scott. So I want the synth to sound something like a cross between a gutbucket trumpet played with a plunger mute and wah-wah guitar on overdrive.

This gave me occasion to plug in my venerable Yamaha VL-70 wind synthesizer. It is a very cool piece of technology that produces sounds thru physical modeling. The sounds are responsive to multiple realtime continuous controls, and the unit is designed to work with a wind controller such as Yamaha’s WX-11. The combo of the WX-11 and VL-70 is very playable, and feels alot like playing a real saxophone. It’s been years since I’ve played this thing, I spent most of my last session simply getting used to the instrument, and paging thru the presets (256 of them) to see what I liked. I found several patches that fall either into the “brass” or “guitar” category, but no suitable morph of the two.

I finally settled on a muted jazz trumpet patch just to lay down a rough take to have something to listen back to on the train. Amazingly, that patch sounds almost too real. I just ran the audio out of the VL straight into protools, but next time I think I’ll capture the MIDI instead and pass it back out to render the audio like an overdub. This will enable me to do multiple passes with two different patches. Over time I’ve found it’s usually quicker to get a particular sound by blending two patches than by going nuts twiddling the knobs and programming your custom sounds. (Believe me I’m not lazy, I’ve spent plenty of time twiddling knobs!) And although the solo is fine, the part as a whole is unusable because I was seriously overplaying. I need to be much sparser, take more space and interact more with the other instruments. Usually I don’t worry too much about planning out my solos in advance, as I kind of work it out subconsciously as I’m writing and arranging. But this one needs a bit more work. Still all in all it was a successful experiment, and I feel set up to nail it the next session.

…

Who Can Fool Me?
John Szinger, 2004 – 2008

You can’t fool me
This time won’t be same
I see you play your game
I’ve heard it all before
This time I’m keeping score and
You can give me the runaround but

You can’t fool me
You’re pretty good at lying
I’ll give you points for trying
This time my mind’s made up
It’s rain in a paper cup and
You can try to steal my sound but

You can’t fool me
Although you make rules
But still I know what’s true
Yeah I’ve been there and back
This time I’m keeping track
You can try to lead me on but

You can’t fool me
Although you’re so much stronger
You’ve been around much longer
You want to push me ’round
I’m gonna stand my ground and
You can try to knock me down but

You can’t fool me
And now you’re playing cupid
You know I’m not that stupid
Yeah I can see right thru
I know what I have to do and
You can try to make me dance but

You can’t fool me
I don’t buy your fantasy
Leave me alone already
You fooled me once before
I’m hungry for some more and
I might even take that chance but

You can’t fool me
No, you can’t fool me
Only I can fool myself
Said I can fool myself
You can’t fool and honest man and
You can’t fool me

Still In the Middle of Things

Let’s see… Sorry if this post is a boring one, all work and no play. But you can skip it if you want.

Michelle’s room is basically done. Very nice pale yellow. It’s been really humid all weekend so we’re giving the paint a while to dry before we put everything back.

Made progress on my new origami page. Will have something to show soon.

Made progress on my Moose diagrams. Almost there.

Made progress on my new song, Who Can Fool Me. Rewrote the lyric last week and re-tracked the vocals last night. I had some weird noise in my system that made it impossible to record cleanly. Rebooted my system and it went away. I filled out the arrangement some. I added some mellotron-style synth strings. Still to tweak the arrangement a bit, but it’s getting there. I experimented with a double-time arpeggio voice in the second half of the song to keep the energy level rising throughout. Has potential, but isn’t there yet. Also still have to add some horns and the solo synth, which will sound something like a wah-wah guitar or gutbucket trumpet.

Did not get a chance to finish the Rollercoaster of Cheese Flash animation with the girls.

But Lizzy is becoming a stronger chess player all the time. I’m playing against her with all my pawns, king, queen, a knight, a bishop and sometimes a rook.

Happy Autumn, Part II

More works in progress:

I’ve started work on a new song, “Who Can Fool Me?” Sort of an angry and defiant song, inspired as a response to how people in authority use lies and manipulation to maintain their power: the government, corporations, the media, etc. It’s basically a jazz blues in C minor, played in a stride style. But it’s dressed up by a 7/8 time and lots of chromatic harmonic movement for a sort of tense, edgy feeling. It’s coming together relatively quickly, which is nice. Got the arrangement worked out, got rhythm section down, and a MIDI sketch of a horns and strings, and did first pass at the vocals last night. I will do one more pass at that as I am still finalizing the lyrics.

Work on my origami book continues. I’m close to being done with diagramming my moose. This is a long one, over 60 steps so far. It’ll probably end up just a few short of 70. This one will present some new challenges when I do the page layout, since the size and shape of the individual step drawing very greatly, I’ll need to expand my palette of layout templates. I’m folding a moose as I do the diagrams. I had folded my previous mooses out of Wyndstone Marble paper, but that is no longer available in the United States. So I’ve been searching for some new and different kinds of origami paper recently. For this one I ended up using a piece of paper called Tant that I ordered from Nicolas Terry in France. It’s working out very nicely. Very strong and reasonably thin, very workable, and it comes in largish (35cm) sheets. I would love to be able to get the stuff even larger (like 50cm). Anyway, you check out Nicolas’s origami shop and order the stuff here.

Another project I’ve decided to start on this fall is to redesign the origami section of my web site. I’ve been wanting to do this since the summer. I had a big burst of creativity last May and June, and came up with eight new models in that period, and since then of course I’ve decided to so a book. The big problem with this is my web site is really old. Parts of it date back to 1995, which is truly ancient in internet time. I’ve added on it over the years, but the core is flat html. So the origami galleries don’t scale well, and every time I add a new model it’s a fair amount of hand coding. I want to completely redo it, with a more modern looking, CMS-backed, Javacript-driven front end. Maybe something like this. BTW, Giang Dihn is my favorite origami artist out there right now. His stuff is so lyrical and flowing, so beautiful.

But that’s a rather large endeavor, beginning with researching available code libraries and seeing how they fit in with my design concept. So it will have to wait. Meanwhile I’m overhauling the current set of pages on last time. I swear this is it. The most labor-intensive part of this is I have to photograph all my models and bring them into photoshop to size the images. This is something I’ll need to do anyway for my book. But the more I do it, the higher my standards get, and I’m starting to realize I need a better camera or better lighting setup, or maybe just need to become a better photographer. Ah well another bridge I’ll cross when I get there. For this rev I’ll just use the pictures I have.

Lastly, I spent some time last weekend with the girls on the movie Rollercoaster of Cheese, their little timeline animation project. Created the soundtrack by editing together and layering 3 takes of our the voiceover. Showed them how to use Audacity, a simple but reasonably powerful audio editor for the PC. Brought the soundtrack into Flash. The next and last step is the actually animation, using the library of drawing they built up.

This led to us exploring some old multimedia pieces I have on my web site. So here’s some shockwave stuff from a few years ago. Enjoy!

http://zingman.com/mmedia/index.html

Summer’s End, and More Fun With Chess

We finished the summer with a long weekend on the beach, swimming in the ocean every day, going out to seafood dinners on the boardwalk and the bay, as well as doing the rides on the amusement pier, hiking with the wild ponies on the national seashore (where we saw the washed-up exoskeleton of the largest horseshoe crab ever, a good two feet long! Pics coming soon, I promise.), and even a day in the water park (awesome!). Heard alot of classic rock and dance music on the various sound systems at these places. Interestingly, I think every song I hears was from an American band, except one by Andy Gibb (does he count as American, British or Australian?) and one by Yes. The weather and the waves were great; I taught the kids to boogie board. Finally have a decent tan. It was a great way to end the summer. Now it’s back to work, back to school, end of summer vacation season.

I’ve gotten into playing chess with Lizzy again, after she read a post about it on my blog from last summer. We’ve been playing a game or two pretty much every day for the last week or two. She’s excited about it because there’s going to be a chess club at her school this fall. I usually play with a handicap: all my pawns but just the queen, king and sometimes one bishop. It’s a pretty balanced match and she can beat me sometimes if I’m not concentrating and I make a careless mistake, which is not too uncommon. She’s definitely getting better, and is learning to plan and execute tactical attacks and trades, put up some pre-emptive defenses, and just generally make plays that make sense. For my part, I’m exploring how much you can do offensively with pawns and your king, which is pretty interesting. Some of the games are pretty exciting.

Camping, Storms, Guitars, Cars and Rest

We finally had a weekend with no travel and no commitments, and hung around the house and relaxed and got a bunch of things done. So now’s a good time to bring all y’all up to speed.

Last weekend we went camping. It was our second camping trip of the summer and it was a big group of people. Us, Erik and Jen and Ellla, Max and Miguel, Shannon and Shawn and their three kids, Bob and Lisa and Jimmy and Lisa and Emily and Lauren. Wow. We left Friday afternoon, although some of the other families waited until Saturday morning because of the threat of rain. And sho’nuff it started raining just as we were packing the car, and by the time were on the road it began raining really hard. We actually pulled over and discussed whether to turn back, but we were able to get a weather report on Jeannie’s blackberry that said it was clear up in the Catskills. So we went head and passed thru a wave or two of heavy storms. Later we found out that there was some serious flooding and even tornado warnings in Westchester, and they closed the Hutch, Saw Mill and Bronx River Parkway shortly after we got out of town. But after an hour the sun came out, and we got to the camp site and set up our tents and got the fire going, before a scattered shower that went away after half an hour or so. The rain came again after dark and the kids were asleep in the tent and Jeannie and I were watching the fire. Another scattered t-storm rolled thru and after that we still had to put water on the fire before we went to bed. Saturday and Sunday were clear and all in all it was a beautiful trip, although they always feel too short. Got some nice canoeing in, and the girls got to play on the beach and catch salamanders. We got home there was a good amount of leaves and branches on the ground, but no real damage.

I spent some time jamming on guitar on the trip. Guitar is maybe my fourth best instrument, which is to say I know the basics and never practice. Most of what I know I picked up from watching guitar players in my various bands over the years. I can play a good number of Neil Yong songs (Powder Finger, Heart of Gold, Mr. Soul, etc.) and some other tunes, just accompany myself singing, no prog or jazz chops. I’m not very good at bar chords so there are a lot of songs I can’t play. So I decided to start practicing guitar for a little while and see if I get any better. And its so far so good. I know the chords so came up with a few little exercises to cover them in all keys. And then I picked a handful of songs to work up, with some of the new chords. I have a good number of music books. I’m practicing Burned, Down to the Wire, Broken Arrow by Neil Yong, and I Will and Mother Nature’s Son by the Beatles. When I get those down I’ll pick some others. Right now I can only practice about a half hour every other day because it’s hard on the fingertips.

I actually own two guitars. One is acoustic that I traded for a boom box many years ago. It has almost no wood in it (plastic body and metal neck, an ovation knock off), and is kinda hard to play cuz the action is high and the intonation isn’t great, but it has a good resounding tone and is a great guitar for camping. The other is an eclectic, a Guild solid body with two humbuckers, which has great action and good tone, and is a nice versatile electric guitar. However the tuning seems to drift and I have to tune up after every song. Ah well maybe it’s just that the strings are old and I haven’t played it in a while. Anyhow, I’m thinking I want to get a new guitar, a better quality acoustic, and with a pick up so I can use it for recording. I’ll give myself a month or so to see if I’m gonna want to keep on practicing (this also means I’m going to have to cut back on piano), and if the answer is yes, I’ll start looking for one sometime this fall. Luckily the big music store district is only a couple blocks from my office, but I have a feeling they’ll be pretty expensive there.

I also fixed my car over the weekend. There had been a leak in the exhaust manifold, where a clip to attach a heat shield, which had been welded onto the pipe with a different metal, had rusted thru. My local mechanic gave me an estimate of $1600 or something outrageous like that to replace the manifold. So I just kinda let it be for a while, but the noise has been getting worse. So I got one of those muffler fixit kits. Basically it’s a bit of aluminum foil and special wrap that bonds to the pipe from the heat of the engine. I put it on and seems to have done the trick. Only problem was that the directions say to use a piece to tape to temporarily attach the wrap to the pipe, and then run the engine for a while to heat it up. Well Sunday all the kids in my neighborhood were hanging out in my driveway which made finishing the job difficult. So I left a bit of tape on, and this morning drove to the train station. The tape has some plastic in which started to melt and burn. I checked it out when I got home this evening and it looks ok, there’s just a little black stripe left on the pipe.

Heat In The Jungle Street

We saw King Crimson last Thursday night at the Nokia Theater in NY. My second rock show in 2 month, how about that! The Nokia is a weird little theatre in the basement of my building. KC of course is once of my all-time favorite rock bands, giants in the prog pantheon, with their layers upon layers of guitars and percussion, copious use of dynamic contrast, dissonant chords and out meters, all resulting in an oeuvre of epic, angular anthems.

I’ve seen these guys a few times, as a quartet and a double trio, but this is first time I’ve seen them in a five-piece lineup, and I’d say it was the best version of the group I’d seen. It was Fripp and Adrian Belew on guitars and the inimitable Tony Levin on stick. He really is fantastic! In addition they had two drummers. Neither of them was Bill Bruford, but between them they made just about as much racket, and did some really nice back-n-forth polyrhythmic phase jams.

It was their 40th anniversary tour, but as usual they didn’t play anything from the Greg Lake era, or even any non-instrumentals from John Wetton era (understandably so, even though that is some of my favorite stuff and it would’ve been a treat for the fans.) They did some instrumentals off of Lark’s Tongues, Starless and Red, leaned heavily on material from Discipline and Three of a Perfect Pair, and Vrooom/Thrak. Thela Hun Ginjeet, Indiscipline, Frame By Frame Elephant Talk were some favorites. Lots of dual drum solos, and did mention that Tony Levin is fantastic?

A few downsides: One was the venue, which was a bit weird to get into, down a super long escalator. It felt claustrophobic and did not have well marked fire exits. Next was that Fripp basically hid behind his rack the whole show. I know he likes to be weird, but come on Bob you’re there to put on a show! Stand up once in a while and move. This is rock’n’roll after all. Third was that there was no opening act, but the band only played for an hour and forty-five minutes. I mean, they should’ve gone on another hour. They have enough songs after 40 years already!

New Lyrics: Vikings!

Before it recedes too far too fast I want to mention how Steely Dan reminded me about another show I saw not very long ago. It was a year or two ago, another one of those sultry late June evenings, I saw Keith Emerson at a theater in Tarrytown very similar to the Beacon, decedent with post-vaudevillian anachronistic art-demo splendor. Like the Steelies, I saw ELP once before, in a large outdoor summer concert setting, but this show was much smaller and more intimate.

Keith Emerson is one of my all time musical idols, and the only person I know of who ever led a rock power trio on keyboards instead of guitar. His piano playing, organ, not to mention his pioneering work in synthesizers. Wow! He put on a really good show, revisiting alot of classic ELP material, plus a good helping of newer stuff. He even had is Modular Moog all set up and used it to reproduce a few critical solos from various songs. To this day Karn Evil 9, 2nd Impression remains one of my favorite tunes to play on the piano.

Around this time we were finishing up the Buzzy Tonic record and tossing around ideas for songs for a follow-up. I thought it might be fun to an album-side-length prog epic, in the grand tradition of Tarkus, Karn Evil 9, 2112, Hemispheres, Close To The Edge or one of those. If you’re a prog fan you’ll know what I’m talking about. But what topic? I’ve always had a thing for Vikings, so the night of the concert I came home and came up with a lyric. The only problem is it pretty much turned out as a recapitulation of the plot of the classic Terry Jones movie “Erik The Viking”. Well I could do worse I suppose; at least it was suitably epic. However, the task of arranging and recording a twenty minute song was rather daunting; as much effort as four or five normal sized songs. So the odds me actually getting around to it any time soon are slim to none. I might do a demo of it someday, but meanwhile, I thought I’d share the lyric with you.

…

 

Vikings!


I. Overture: Looting and Pillaging

(instrumental)

 

II. Freya

Young men only interested in fighting and killing
But has it always been that way?
An axe age a storm age an ice age
Brother against brother in hatred and rage
Until the world is destroyed

Look, what do you see?
I see the world, Freya
I see the world

The winter is gone, the summer has come
Yet Fenreya the Wolf still covers the sun
So the old legends are all true
Once as a child in a dream the sky was blue
It was blue

So this is Ragnorok
What must I do, Freya
What must I do?

And will the dead ever return?

 

III. Vikings!
(including Erik, What Are You Doing?  Thorfinn Just Said That Sven’s Grandfather Died of Old Age! and Harald the Cleric)

Erik, What Are You Doing?
Thorfinn just said that Sven’s grandfather
Died of old age!
He’ll have to kill me!  He’ll have to kill me!
No he didn’t he died in battle!
Now he must kill me!  Now he must kill me!
He died of old age!
He’ll have to kill me!  He’ll have to kill me!

No wait!
There is another way!
I’m not afraid of anything

…

Harald the Cleric no warrior he
Sandals treading in the snow

Harald the Cleric doesn’t believe
In violence and revenge
Asgaard or Valhalla
Cuz he believes in something else
One god or many?
What does it matter?
He seeks serenity transcendence and wisdom
Forgiveness salvation
Yet no one will listen

Harald the Cleric pilgrim missionary 
Sandals treading in the snow
He’s sure got a long way to go

 

The Voyage
(including Sven the Berserk vs. The Dragon of the North Sea and Thorfinn Doesn’t Know the Meaning of Fear)

Earnestly Erik with Harald the Cleric
And Leif the Lucky too
Sven the Berserk and Sven’s Berserker Dad
All join in the crew
Kietel Blacksmith, Thorfinn Skullsplitter
Even Ivar the Boneless and Snorri
Start on their quest in their open long boat
That’s the last we shall see of old Norway!

Many cold days pass on rolling waves
Puke, puke, puke, puke, puke
Pursued by Halfdan the Black –
There’s no turning back
The dragon attacks!
The long ship cracks!
Frame by frame death by drowning
On the Devil’s doorway

The dreaded black sails are drawing near
But Thorfinn doesn’t know the meaning of fear
The battle is joined and Erik brings
The magic from the daughter of the King
Now you see me now you don’t ha ha!

Thorfinn falls, Sven rages on
The day won under the sun, but now
Loki shows his face, has yet to play his hand
What does fate have in store for poor Snorri?

 

V. Hy-Brasil
(including The Tee-Tum Song)

Welcome, welcome we always welcome friends
Everyone is friends here in Hy-Brasil
Being nice to each other is what it’s all about.
Here in Hy-Brasil
A thousand years of peace and love
Here in Hy-Brasil

Tee-tum, tee-tum, tee-tum
Tee-tum, tee-tum, tee-tum, tee-tum
Tee-tum, tee-tum, tee-tum

We come from a land where there is no music
Where men live and die by the axe and the sword
Where Fenreya the Wolf covers the sun
Far from Hy-Brasil

Tee-tum, tee-tum, tee-tum, tee-tum
Tee-tum, tee-tum, tee-tum

And so human blood is spilled
And the land begins to sink beneath the sea
Murder tragic disenchants the island’s magic
The end of Hy-Brasil

Stay calm, stay calm this is not happening
I repeat, this is not happening
Save yourselves! Save yourselves!
Panic mongers!  Who do they think they are?

It’s all a question of what you want to believe

Tee-tum, tee-tum, tee-tum

 

VI. The Horn Resounding

You do know how to play the horn d’you?

The first note to take you to Asgaard
The second note to awaken the gods
The third note to bring you home

The first note to take you to Asgaard
Over the edge of the world
Over the edge of the world

Once you’re in the spell of the horn
Hatred will destroy you
Hatred will destroy you

And she said,
You don’t have to love me
But do you believe that I love you?
Then let go, let go
Let go

 

VII. Bifrost Asgaard Valhalla (and Home)

(instrumental)

Bifrost – Asgaard  – Valhalla!
Bifrost – Asgaard  – Valhalla!

The second note to awaken the gods

Bifrost – Asgaard  – Valhalla!
Bifrost – Asgaard  – Valhalla!
The gods awake!
Better look out!

Bifrost – Asgaard  – Valhalla!
Bifrost – the rainbow bridge
Asgaard  – the hall of the gods
Valhalla – the destiny of the great warriors
Yeah we’re the lucky ones!

Now Fenreya the wolf is gone
But the fate of man
Is in man’s hand

The realm of earth is not for you
You’ve crossed the rainbow bridge
And will the dead ever return?

…

The third note to bring you home

Harald the Cleric, blows the horn
He doesn’t believe but he wants to go home

Look, what do you see?
The sun … !