Been Busy

Since the kids went back to school, it feels like we’ve been continually busy every day every waking moment for the last nine weeks. Working all week and every weekend something going on. It’s gotten to be the time of year already when it’s still nighttime when I get up in the morning, which is never much fun. I feel like I’m several weeks behind in writing about what’s been going on, so here’s a general update, to be followed by some more specific posts.

Work has been busy for me, building a major new application while learning a new language. More on that later. Lizzy has been busy too. Third grade is a big year. She’s building skills and discipline. She needs to memorize her multiplication tables, so we made up some flash cards and I’ve been drilling her every night. It’s been paying off, but requires persistence. She also started flute lessons, so we have to make sure she practices, which requires supervision too. She’s been at it a few weeks, and about a week ago had her first big breakthru, where she was able to consistently get a good tone where the pitch is not overpowered by the should of breathiness. She was very proud, as well she should be.

It’s been an unseasonably warm fall until this week, but now fall is finally here. I’ve been both raking the leaves and then mowing the lawn cuz the grass is still growing. Wearing shorts and no jacket. Now we’re getting into the heavy part of leaf season, so hopefully we’re done mowing for the year.

I’ve also been trying to keep my outdoor workout going as long as possible into the fall, even though we’re now into the dark half of the year. I had been going out rollerblading 2 days a week after work, more and more into the twilight as the weeks went on. Then I decided to switch to biking, since that’d be safer and easier in the dark. (I don’t jog cuz of an ankle injury from years ago.) I found the old clip-on headlight for my bike, and was happy to discover it still works. I find it hard to exercise enough in the winter, so hopefully I can keep this going a while longer.

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.

Fotoz 2007 Summer I

It’s that time again. I just put up two new photo galleries from this summer, June and July. I probably have about 3 more galleries to post to get thru to the end of the summer.

http://www.zingman.com/fotooz/2007-02
http://www.zingman.com/fotooz/2007-03

These galleries are meant for friends and family, and are password protected. If you think you are friends and/or family, and need a password, please send me an email.

Also, I created an index page for the public galleries, since I now have more than one. You can expect that to grow in the time ahead, albeit in a more random fashion.

http://www.zingman.com/fotooz_public/index.html

Meanwhile, here’s a sampling of the pix.

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.

Figs and Roses

Happy October, everybody. Or should I say Rocktober! We’ve been so busy of late I missed mentioning some important markers of the change of season. So, happy fall equinox. Happy harvest moon. Happy birthday Martin!

This may be the mildest September I can remember since leaving California. We haven’t turned our heat on yet; we haven’t even taken our air conditioner out of the window yet. But now there’s more darkness than daylight. Pretty soon I’ll have to stop going rollerblading after work. I guess the good news I tend to do much more origami in the winter.

Almost at end for the yard and garden too, apart from the copious raking in the weeks ahead. The first leaves are just starting to fall. Our new grass has come in nicely. Our fig tree’s best year yet.

Lego Cruise Ship

So as I was saying, one day last week I came home from work and Lizzy greeted me with a copy of the new Lego magazine, and showed me a contest they’re having where you can win a weeklong cruise for your family by building a Lego cruise ship. While the idea of cruise doesn’t particularly appeal to me, it seemed like a great challenge, so we spent some time over the weekend building ships out of Legos.

A few years back I gave Lizzy most of the my Legos I had from when I was younger, so we have alot of bricks, but they’re pretty random: lots of spaceship parts and some medieval and other themed pieces, plus a few sets she got as presents. Still, there always seems to a shortage of big generic bricks, and you always have to mix colors and make the best of what’s on hand.

We started by making a hull. We had made a boat once before using her house set, so we had an approach that we knew would work. But this one would be bigger and better. The boat would be scaled it for minifigs, so we started stacking on decks. Soon the ship started taking shape, but it was kind of tall and not-so-sleek compared to a real, modern cruse ship. The design of the hull makes the ship a bit wobbly in a good, authentic-feeling way. More than anything it reminds me of the boat from Peter Jackson’s King Kong.

Lizzy started to figure out where things would go: the first class cabin, the restaurant, the pool, etc., and started making furniture. Meanwhile I added a bridge and a crow’s nest, and radio and radar gear and lights and flags and stuff. I guess I got carried away.   When I was done she took one look and pronounced it “too pirate-y”.  She also said the monkey would have to go.

The pictures you see are from this incarnation of the boat, but then the crow’s nest came down and was replaced with a princess-pink forecastle. I’m sure other improvements on the way, as she want to give the whole thing a makeover. She has until the end of October to submit her entry for the contest, so I’ll be posting an update sometime soon.  Meanwhile, enjoy the gallery.

Subterranean Home Repair Blues

One day last week I came home from work and Lizzy greeted me with a copy of the new Lego magazine, and showed me a contest they’re having where you can win a weeklong cruise for your family by building a Lego cruise ship. This post is not the story about that, since that story involves pictures. Instead, it’s more boring stuff about home repairs.  Friday evening I got started on patching the hole in my ceiling, the aftermath of the leaky pipe. My friend Peter gave me a scrap of sheetrock, which was nice of him. I prepped the hole and put some plywood up in there to screw into, and cut the piece to size, only to discover that piece was too thick: it was 5/8″ and I needed 1/2″. So I declared we were S.O.L. and we were done for the day, and would figure out what to do the next day.

Lizzy: What’s “S.O.L.” Daddy?
Me: It means we’re out of luck, honey.
Lizzy: Oh. Hey – wait, wouldn’t that be O.O.L.? What does the S stand for?
Me: Uh, nevermind. Do you wanna play Legos?
Lizzy: Ya!

Later that very night Jeannie and I were playing D&D online with some friends online (yes we’re total geeks I know, but the campaign has gotten really interesting. She’s a Sorceress with some pretty kickass spells, and I’m a Barbarian with an axe who can deal ludicrous amounts of damage, and our party includes another fighter specializing in whirling two swords around at once, and a Cleric who is the Prophet of Holy Mysteries, the motivating McGuffin for the whole quest. Anyway, we’ve been in the castle fighting wave after wave of nasty undead, and then we found a magic blue key, and — oh, yeah I’m getting off topic here. I’ll probably blog about it again soon, as we’re coming up on the end of a major chapter.)

Getting back to the home fixit thread, I left the garage door open a few inches because earlier I had patched a few holes and rough spots on our garage floor with the leftover patching cement from the foundation project, and the biggest of these was under where the door came down. So at the end of the night I went down to shut the door and I hear a noise in the garage. Critter trouble! I spotted a skunk in the corner, hiding behind a pile of stuff. He looked pretty scared and didn’t want to come out of his hiding spot, so it took a while to *very* carefully unstack the things around him until I could get a broom in there and coax him to make a run for the outside. Whew!

Saturday we spent a good part of the day running around on errands including looking for a piece of 1/2″ thick sheet rock. We went to the dreaded Home Depot, which was a complete and utter zoo. They refused to cut a piece of sheet rock for me, even thought I was willing to buy a whole piece just to take home a bit. So we left without buying anything. Went to our neighborhood True Value to get paint, even though we knew they wouldn’t have sheet rock. They recommended a place called Pelham Lumber, who were fantastic. They wouldn’t sell me less than a full panel either, but would be happy to cut it. Better still, when I got there, they said I could take a look around the yard and if I found a piece of scrap I could use I could just have it. So problem solved, and I put the piece up there and did the whole tape and joint compound thing.

Sunday I sanded it and put on another layer of joint compound, and took the rest of day off to do stuff like go mountain biking, have one last barbecue and play legos with my kids. Last night it was time to paint over the patch. The paint matched perfectly cuz we brought a piece of the old ceiling to the hardware store and they matched it with a machine. Amazing what they can do lasers or spectrographs or whatever they use these day. While I was at it, there was a spot in the hall I thought I’d touch up. It was then I realized that the ceiling of the laundry room is the same color as its walls, not the rest of the ceilings. Everything in our house is shades of white and off-white, you understand, except the ones that are bluescreen blue. The bad news is we’re gonna need to paint the ceiling of our bathroom after we do the tiles in there, and it would’ve been good to have a match on that paint.

The good news is that it’s the same color as our family room, so I suddenly was able to touch up the spot where there was water damage from a crazy thunderstorm once, and where the futon crashed into the wall as someone was opening up into a bed once, and the place where my nieces drew on the wall once, and so on. One thing kind of led to another and I ended up doing a substantial amount of touch up, a random task that’s been on my todo list for a long time. Finished that up tonight and am enjoying a well-earned beer. Next up: lego cruise ships!

Angel Or Alien: Rough Mix

Okay, here it is, my new song:

http://zingman.com/music/mp3/roughMixes/AngelOrAlien0734.mp3

Thanks to John Neumann for rendering out the midi of my synth solo on his Nord Lead synthesizer, providing an extra dimension of analog wow. It’s mixed in with my software simulated Moog.

Still have to do the actual mixing — you know, the faders and pans and most of the effects, but the arrangement is there and the idea certainly comes across. I will probably add some vocal harmonies in the chorus and some percussion in the second half of the synth solo, and possibly a few scifi synth effects. Other than that I’m not sure if the song needs much else.

Enjoy!

New Recording: Angel or Alien

Well it’s not all been home improvement projects of late, so shifting gears here: My new song, Angel or Alien, is getting close to done. It’s a quasi-autobiographical number, a sort of sci-fi reverie based on contemplating the wonder of the night sky, combined with some speculation about things that can be seen but not readily explained.

As mentioned before, it features an analog-style synthesizer solo in the middle section. Now in the old days I would have played this on a real synthesizer and twiddled the knobs live. I’m particularly keen on sweeping some lowpass filters and adding some big FLO here as an effect here and there. But my setup has gone all digital and fully computerized, so I ended up using a software synthesizer inside proTools for the patch, and the keyboard I played has only the basic pitch wheel and modulation control. So I’m hoping I can map some continuous controllers to the software synth model and either perform these moves as essential an overdub, or just pencil them in.

More importantly, I finalized the lyrics in the last week and laid down a vocal track just the other night. I normally do several takes on my vocals and edit them together to form a master lead vocal track. As soon as this is done, I’ll post a rough mix. Still to do is possible backing vocals and sweetening instruments (backing synths, etc.), and the aforementioned lead synth knob twiddling. But I want to listen to the song a few times before I get to that, so it won’t stop me from posting the first rough mix.

Meanwhile, you can meditate on the lyrics.

…

Angel or Alien
by John Szinger

Walking home alone the other night
When looking up the sky ahead I saw a light
I quickly identified it at as a UFO
But what it really was I don’t know
Was it an angel or an alien ?
Or was it something else again ?

Hover above the world we weave with our machines
One giant step or small leap it’s of our means
For what could be more human than to
Make a thing to do the thing you do?
But is it a demon or is it a dinosaur ?
Is it something more?

Walk on said the man in the moon
Why do the stars in the sky ?
Walk on said the man in the moon
Moonchild teach me to fly
They know you’ve walked miles alone
All that has shone upon soon will be shown
Walk on said the man in the moon
Go home, go home yeah

Twelve thousand years that they’ve been gone
An outer orbit on that big wheel one time ’round
But they’re on their way now, yeah they’re coming home
The stars are aligned man in the moon will leave his light on
All night long

And do they come to enlighten and set us free ?
Or to blind us with bling and enslave us with TV ?
And will they bring death to the world of illusions
Ideas categories ambitions confusions
A shooting star is a sign in the sky calling
So is it a meteor or just a metaphor falling?

Look up said the man in the moon
How can the stars in their turn?
Look up said the man in the moon
Moonchild teach me to learn
They know you’ve walked dark years in dreams
Look deeper and see that it’s not what it seems
Look up said the man in the moon
Go home, go home yeah