Category: Music

New Song: Fine Red Wine

I’ve been working on a new song called Fine Red Wine. It’s basically a love song, and I came up with the idea for it last fall shortly after Jeannie and I celebrated our Twennyversery. So the lyrics are heartfelt and fairly straightforward. For the music, I wanted something accessible, soulful and bluesy. It has a neat little intro with a descending figure in the bass under a constant onstanato, which creates some interesting chords. After that it it’s basically a classic R&B kind of groove and the changes are all based on the 7th chords. It’s a fun number to play, and I put a full horn section arrangement on it. Also some cool two-note figures in the bass.

I started working on it in the early spring. It’s been slow going due to other commitments, but it’s almost ready now. I got the vocals in a couple of weeks ago, and this last weekend I spent tracking the horns. That was a lot of fun. Basically all that’s left is to lay down the solo, then I’ll be ready to share.

This is the fourth song in my current recording project, and when It’s done I’ll have a logical album side or virtual EP. I have another set of tunes ready to start in on, but I want to take a break, so I’ll probably mix and master this set before starting in on the next batch. So watch this space. Meanwhile, here are the lyrics.

…

Fine Red Wine
by John Szinger, 2007

I love you woman
We’ve been together for a long time
We’ve had our ups and down
River flows like fine red wine

Woo-hoo!

I remember the night we met
Sharing tequila and partying on
Well times they sure have changed
But I believe the best is still to come

The River!
Wheel turning round and round

I remember the day we wed
The look in your eyes just said it all
I knew you love me too
You are so beautiful

Big wheel keep on moving along

I love you woman
River flows like fine red wine
We’ll have our ups and down
Let’s be together for a long time

Tequila!
Let’s go get Mexican food

Hello Spring

Well, spring is here. In fact it’s April already. The nights are still cold but the days are getting mild. It’s been a few weeks since life has returned to normal WTR the work week, but I feel like I’m still catching up. Haven’t even had time to go shopping. Been trying to catch up on some random purchases. Been getting back into biking and rollerblading regularly again. We *did* manage to finish tiling and painting our bathroom (more on that in a previous post). Also last weekend we started getting the yard going for spring. Raked off the leaves and debris, and uncovered the fig tree, and started planning what we want to do this spring.

Been making progress on the new Mac. Every new thing is an adventure. After we discovered that Boot Camp won’t work if there are three partitions on the drive, we basically started over. We got a new external hard drive (which we were planning on anyway for backup) and put a 10.5 partition on it, and then put a 10.4 and a Win XP partition on the main boot drive. I went back and installed proTools on 10.4 and it worked, and so did the drivers for my MIDI interface, and so the whole MIDI rig. So far so good. Last week we installed VMWare, which involved calling up Microsoft to talk numbers with a phone robot. Tons of fun. My friend Blick, who is a Mac ProTools guru, came over to help me out last weekend with my music setup. Still after all that SampleTank still doesn’t appear in the list of plugins. So it looks like I’m gonna buy the new SampleTank upgrade for intel macs and see how that goes. At least I always have the option or running PT under windows now.

Been making progress on a new song. The song is gonna be it’s own post when it’s ready but for now I’ll say it’s a kinda prog-ish r&b number and I’m working out the horn arrangement. I realized as I was tracking it that I don’t really have funk chops on the bass, so I went for something I’ll call the funky rock approach that seems pretty good. Now I’m up to penciling the horn section.

And I did get a bit of a spring break, a few comp days. We took the kids up for a day of hanging out in the Catskills with my brother Martin and his fiancé Kathleen at this quaint Victorian era lodge. Sort of like camping but without sleeping out in the cold. The place had a Teddy Roosevelt kind of vibe; thematically consistent with the Museum of Natural History. It was built kinda like a castle into the side of cliff on a small lake. We went hiking and ice skating and swimming, and had a blast. Pictures to be posted sometime in the indeterminate future. The next day M & K came back to our place, and we hung out and played Wii and Settlers of Catan. Our friends Steve and Alice from Texas (yo!) also popped by for a visit.

I’ve also been making progress on diagramming my origami turtle (hope to be ready in another few days), but overall I feel like I need to devote some time to new origami designs, and haven’t yet had the opportunity. I have a bunch of ideas in my head I need to work out in paper.

Jammin’

Last Saturday night I had the opportunity to hang out and jam with my friend Erik. It was a good time. I miss playing with other musicians; it’s something I should do more often. I was always playing in one or more bands from 10th grade until Lizzy was born. Hopefully soon the kids will be old enough that I can think about putting together a group or regular jam session again. Meanwhile I practice regularly to keep up my skillz, and I have my recording project and the occasional jam like this to get by on.

Anyway, I mainly played piano and sax while Erik played guitar and piano, and even some drums, and we both sang. We jammed and jammed until we were too tired to play anymore, and then we watched Concert For George to top it off. Here’s a partial list of songs we covered:

Let It Rain (Clapton)
Fire On the Mountain (Grateful Dead)
(some Little Feet song)
Hey Nineteen (Steely and the Dans)
Black Cow (Steely and the Dans)
Home at Last Steely and the Dans)
Oh! Darling (Beatles)
For No One (Beatles)
The Long and Winding Road (Beatles)
Naima (John Coltrane)
Mr. P. C. (John Coltrane)
(drums and sax jam)
Because (Beatles)
You Never Give Me Your Money (Beatles)
I Want You (She’s So Heavy)
Whiter Shade of Pale (Procal Harem)

Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More (Allman Brothers Band)
What Is and Should Never Be (Led and the Zeppelins)
The Rain Song (Led and the Zeppelins)
All Of My Love (Led and the Zeppelins)
All Along the Watchtower (Dylan)
Too Many People (Paul McCartney)
Maybe I’m Amazed (Paul McCartney)
I’m Only Sleeping (Beatles)
Beast of Burden (Rolling Stones)
(some U2 song)
Can’t Find My Way Home (Blind Faith)
Low Spark of High Heeled Boys (Traffic)
Lady Madonna (Beatles)
Waiting Room (Blick original)
Let It Shine (Blick original)

Sour Apple Blues

So around Christmastime I got a new computer, a shiny iMac. I think I’ve mentioned that I haven’t had a new Mac in over 10 years, since back in the says of System 7. But I was seduced by the image of hipsters on white backgrounds poking fun at hapless corporate types, and repulsed by the prospect of running Vista, so there you go. The plan was to make the Mac the new center of my home recording studio. I’ll bet you’re wondering how that’s been going, moving into the new machine and all. Well, let me tell you.

First of all, I’ve been really busy lately, working 60+ hour weeks for a product launch at work, plus a couple trips. So it’s been taking a while. I didn’t really have time to do much over the Holidays other than plug the computer in and tour some of the built-in apps. I don’t even have email on it yet! And then I was in the middle of a song (The Nine) which I wanted to finish before I switched my rig.

But a couple of weeks ago I finally got around to it. I successfully downloaded, authorized and installed PT 7.1 on the Mac. I use an MBox for audio I/O, and the ProTools upgrade was free, and worked just great, and the DigiDesign website was about as painless as you can expect that sort of thing to be. To give it a test drive, I recorded 2-track demo of She Came in Thru the Bathroom Window. Voice and piano, recorded live, which was kinda cool cuz I’d never tried singing and playing at once before; I usually overdub the vocal. I had the Rhodes in one input and the mic in the other, and it worked fine. With the wireless Mac keyboard I can start and stop the music sitting at the piano. Only problem is I have to turn around to see the screen, but for pressing play it’s great.

Now the current version of PT is 7.4, and I have no idea what’s new in last .3 revs. I’m told there’s a lot better MIDI support for things like time stretching. I wonder to what extent I can move files back and forth between my 2 machines now. Also, PT is officially not supported for OS 10.5, but it seems to work just fine.

Next I installed SampleTank, but PT couldn’t see it. I thought maybe it’s because I haven’t loaded any samples yet, or maybe I need to authorize it, I dunno. So then the project veered off to cruising IK Multimedia’s website and getting in touch with their tech support. After a couple weeks of back’n’forth, I learned that my version of SampleTank (LE 2.08) doesn’t work for Intel Macs, although it’s not clear what the issue is. IK want me to pay $300 to upgrade to a new version of SampleTank, and it’s not also clear how compatible it would be — how much work it’d be to import my old songs with the same patches and everything. So getting to the bottom of that and deciding if I want to do the upgrade is a whole research project.

I figured before I went too much further I’d see how the Mac likes my MIDI interface. It’s a MOTU MIDI Express XT, and MOTU’s web site says it’s plug and play for the Mac, and shawnuff I can see it in the list of USB devices. But when I bang on the keys of my synth, PT doesn’t get the events. So now the question is what software do I need to get ProTools to talk to my external MIDI interface? I’m pretty sure there’s no OMS anymore.

I found drivers for the XT for Mac OS on the MOTU web site, so that seem like a good place to start. Then I discovered the Audio and MIDI settings panel in the Mac OS. Unfortunately when I open the midi panel, it said it couldn’t load due to an error. It suggested I uninstall any recent drivers and try again. I did this but got the same error. Debugging this will be a whole nuther research project.

So in light of this I’m now thinking of installing Parallels or VMWare and running my whole music rig in XP, since I know everything works with that and I have all the software, drivers and everything. This kinda make the whole new Mac thing seem like a waste and failure, but I guess I can still cross over in time, once I get the MacOS issues worked out. Still it’s gotten to the point where it’s holding me back from working on new songs, so I just want to get back to making music. So for tonight I’m going back to my old laptop, and maybe I’ll be in XP via BootCamp on my Mac next weekend. At least I’ll be able to look at 24 tracks of faders on the widescreen display.

New Song: The Nine — Rough Mix

I have new song called The Nine. It’s actually a new incarnation of a song that I had written years ago, but I liked it enough to want to revisit it. I had previously recorded it with the duo Flip|Hippo, but we did the recording under enormous time pressure and I was never really satisfied with the sax playing. Plus I wanted to do something new with it, much like the song The Beat Is Red on the Buzzy Tonic emerged from an older demo.

The Nine is based on a nine-note ostanato played by two pianos. The pattern phases every nine bars. On top of is layered the rhythm section and melody. It is both flowing and machine-like, sort of relentless and melancholy, but my new version highlights the dramatic tension of the song across the choruses. I added a break in the middle, and a lyric. I also double track the saxophone, blending in with the synth part.

The lyric was in a way inspired by the recent Led Zeppelin reunion. There was a time when the Zep was my favorite band of all time. I haven’t listened to them in years, but was inspired to go back and play all of their records, and they still sound awesome to my ears. There’s a lot of really subtle stuff going on that sets their sound apart from other 70’s bands that I never picked up on as a kid. >Still, I don’t play guitar like Jimmy Page or sing like Robert Plant, or drum like Bonzo, so there’s not much I can take and apply to my own work. Ah yes, there’s on thing. It’s cool to pepper your songs with references to Tolkien.

Actually, I just finished reading an unpublished novel my brother Martin wrote quite a few years ago. It’s quite good. It’s set in a swords & sorcery milieu, so I might write a lyric incorporating ideas from that. No one would know what it’s about but I don’t think that would matter. Lots of traveling thru the woods in the snow.

The other thing about this song is it’s kind of heavy on the synths and effects. I mainly use software synthesizers nowadays, but there were a couple sounds on my 90’s version I really liked. So I fired up my venerable Kurzweil K2000RS synthesizer/sampler and dialed up the a patches. I haven’t used that thing in years and have forgotten what a great sounding piece of gear it is. I’ll have to remember to use it in more of my recordings. I may go back and add some pads on Angel or Alien using that.

Meanwhile, let me say what an enormous pain is to do both midi and audio simultaneously on my set up. I was getting all kinds of hum and noise on the line in when the outboard midi was hooked up. I finally figured out that the problem was my port replicator. I do all my studio work on my laptop, on the USB ports on the dock are not properly shielded, or so it seems. When I moved the jack for the midi to a port on the side of the machine, the problem went away. Fortunately, I got a new Mac a month or so ago. The idea is to use it as the center of my recording studio going forward, but I wanted to wait until I was done with this song before I switched over. Hopefully the problem with the port noise will go away. But moving into the new machine is a whole ‘nuther project and a whole ‘nuther post.

Anyway, here’s the link.

Tea With Warriors – Quiet Revolution

Hello world, I’m back from Thanksgiving break. Four and a half days of getting caught up on rest, enjoying the company of family and friends and getting some work done around the house. Sleeping in, going to bed early. Lovely to just sit around in the morning and listen to the birds.

…

when you wake up feeling
in your empty space
are you in a rush to fill it
and let the outside take its place?
sit back and feel the rush of the machines
as they fill the spaces in between

lead a quiet revolution
beating wings
are part of your solution

Over the weekend I received a copy of the CD Quiet Revolution by Tea With Warriors from my friend John Neumann. Congratulations John! It sounds great. If you’ve checked out the rough mixes last time I blogged about it, John has added some guitar parts, polished the vocals, and taken the to level and EQ everything quite nicely. The album is now for sale on CD Baby, so check it out.

And while you’re there, pick up a copy of The Brothers Zing – Buzzy Tonic!

…

Today it’s back to work getting up early and waiting in the cold rain for the train, and then running the gauntlet of relentless New Yorkers, trying to avoid getting poked in the eye with an umbrella. Coming down with a cold. My project has to ship by Christmas. Fun fun fun.

Bari Town

After listening to my last mix of Heat Wave, I decided the tenor sax didn’t really need support on top in the form of an alto, but instead it might sound really cool to add in a lower voice from the bari sax. As luck would have it, my brother Martin loaned me his bari a while back, and it’s been just sitting there. I haven’t played bari since high school, and Martin warned me that he had intonation issues with the really low notes when we were working on the BZ album, so I was a bit hesitant to use it up till now. Well, I noodled around on the horn for a while, and found it very playable, with a good tone, and once I was warmed up I was able to get the low notes quite solidly. Easier than my tenor in fact, no leaky pads. My intonation issues were actually with the notes in the top half of the stack, G to B, but maybe that’s just a question of where I tuned the horn. Anyway, the part went down fairly quickly and came out great, and added just the right reinforcement to the horn section, and now here is a new mix. Thanks Martin!

I think this first batch of tunes is pretty much in the can now, until it’s time for final mixdown and mastering. I’ll be starting a new batch of tunes soon, but I think I’m going to change gears for a while and concentrate on origami for a spell.

Tracks Updates

Before I launch into the next set of tracks for my new album, I thought I’d take a listen to what I have so far. I find it’s good to this to a group of songs. So burned a CD for the car and uploaded them on my iPod for the train ride. Listening to mixes on inferior systems in noisy a environments is a good way to make sure it degrades gracefully, as important features of the music can’t be heard. Overall it’s sounding good, but I made a new batch of mixes.

Marfa My Dear being a cover is not really destined for the record, but it still seemed it could stand some improvement. I mainly reduced the level of chorus on the vocals, reduced the effects on the piano, and boosted the sax and the bass guitar. Added a peak limiter to the master out.

Letter From Home, also a cover, and therefore an oddity for the hypothetical box set. This one was just an effects tweak too:  reversed the order of the chorus and delay in the effects chain on the horn, and it’s a good deal nicer to my ear. Also boosted the bass guitar a tad and added a peak limiter to the master out.

Heat Wave is the first original song in the new batch, and I put it aside when I got to the first rough mix. Now I’ve come back to sharpen it up. Now I’ve added a clav part to the chorus and bridge to give a little rhythmic counterpoint to the piano and bass. I also cleaned up the sax part and added some effects for the sax solo, and adjusted the levels of pretty much everything. For a while I had been thinking the horns weren’t bright enough, and maybe I should double the part on alto. But not the tenor sounds a bit more on top, so that may not be necessary.

Angel Or Alien of course is the song I developed over the summer. I made one more mix that cleaned up the lead synth and added some percussion in the middle section. I did a few experiments after that with backing vocals and more percussion but wasn’t satisfied with the result. I have one more thing I want to try, adding some drum fills in the tutti section, and maybe some atmospheric synths in the very beginning and/or end.

So enjoy the new mixes. Now I’m trying to decide what to work on next. I have lots of songs that are partway developed, but I narrowed it down to two that are pretty are along and also relatively short.  One is an instrumental in 9/8 in the key of E minor; I did a demo of it years ago. Another is a sort of bitter twisted stride number in 7/8 in C minor that I wrote in 2004 or so. But then just today I wrote a new song. I’ve been looking to do something really simple, in contrast to all these crazy chords and meters I’ve been doing. I came up with a riff I like based on the change C, Em, F in a classic R&B soul groove.  Today as I walking back from lunch I came up with a lyric and melody, and nice love song to Jeannie. So I’m excited about this and think it’ll hop to the top of the queue.

Music People People Music

Last weekend we went upstate to visit my parents and brother. The lovely weather continues in the northeast, with temperatures in the 90’s for the ride home yesterday, and some good fall foliage viewing along the way.

While we were there we had a chance to catch Martin’s band, the Jennerators. Martin plays sax and guitar and sings. They’re very good, playing Motown and party rock with excellent harmonies and solid musicianship. It’s material everyone knows, so for a group like this it’s all in the delivery, how much they make you wanna get up and dance. The lead singer Jenn has a great voice for material like Janis Joplin and Aretha Franklin, and the band is tight and solid in the groove, and they really carry it off and have fun at it. You can check out their web site and upcoming gigs here. Apparently Martin has also begun sitting in with The Rebel’s Posse, the Jennerator’s lead guitarist’s other band.

Meanwhile, my friend John Neumann is getting ever closer to releasing his new album Quiet Revolution. He’s named his “group” Tea With Warriors, and set up a web site for the project. You can check it out here.