Here Wii Go!

In yet another weekend spent with family and out-of-town guests, my brother- and sister-in-law Denis and Sarah came to visit us with their little girl Carrie. They’re great people, and just as geeky as Jeannie and I when it comes to computers. We all sit around with our laptops when they come over; it’s pretty funny. Friday Jeannie bought a Nintendo Wii for us, and another for Denis and Sarah, as they happened to be in stock at Costco. So we had a big Wii party all weekend. Tons of fun. Even 4-year old Michelle got a few strikes at Wii bowling. “Up, ‘B’, back, Wiiiiiiii”. Great fun.

Sarah made me a hand-knit sleeve for my iPod, which is very nice. Thank you Sarah! She has a blog and a number of interests including photography and knitting. I don’t knit myself, but I have noticed some crossover between knitting people and origami people. Anyway, here’s a link to her blog. Enjoy.

Heat Wave Rough Mix

For all who are interested, the weekend was a great success. Lizzy proudly and joyously communed, we had a super party and saw a bunch of family and friends. Jeannie’s dad brought a whole bunch of Mexican beers. My parents came into town for the weekend, as did my brother Martin and his girlfriend Kathleen. Thanks to Martin for lending me his bari sax. I’ll be sure to put it some use before I return it. I can think of a song I have that would make a good bari feature. A sort of Duke Ellington meets Alice In Chains number.

The only downside of late has been the absolutely beautiful, perfect spring weather. Oh the irony! My allergies have been so bad that I’ve been measuring the time I spend outside. I gave up on trying to fix my car Sunday it was so bad. Even in midtown Manhattan, where you’d think nothing green is growing, I can feel it. It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, which ought to bring some relief, and if past experience is any guide, it’ll be tapering off soon.

The main topic for the week is that I’ve posted a rough mix of my new song Heat Wave. You can listen to it here. It came out pretty good if I say so myself. At this point the tracking is done, except for maybe a wee punch-in here or there, and the levels and effects are roughed in. Still todo is the actual mixing — riding the faders to bring up and down the different parts, and finalizing the effects. The point of this is to sculpt and shape the sound, make the voices blend where they should and stand out where they should.

I might also add one or two more keyboard tracks. One would be to replace the synth part with a take that’s a bit more jamming. The other would be to add something like a clav part, to help fill in for the lack of guitar. But on the other hand, maybe the arrangement is thick enough and it doesn’t need that. I’ll give it a few listens and decide.

It’s a pretty fat mix as it is. I think I used twenty two tracks, plus effects buses. A lot of stuff is double tracked. The drums are on six tracks, with the kick on one, the snare doubled on 2 and 3 with two different samples, cymbals on 4, hihat on 5, and hand claps on 6. Since the drums are all MIDI, I could conceivably do it all on a single track, but this gives me the kind of control you’d have over real drums, to bring up and down and pan the instruments of the kit. I ran the bass guitar direct, and doubled it with a synth bass.

The piano, which anchors the tune, has a left hand part that doubles the bass at times, so there’s a good big heavy bottom. I layered the paino with two rhodes samples, one with more of an overdrive and the other more of a flange sound. I have a nice sample bank of rhodes presets, and I find doubling them up and adjusting the balance is a lot easier than running a straight piano thru an effects box.

I did a similar trick with the horns. The main tenor sax part is double tracked, and backed up by a synth horn arrangement (I had decided a real horn arrangement was a lot more trouble and not really necessary.) The synth horn is doubled and layered with two rather different sound patches to give a nice blend. I recorded the sax solo on it’s own track, to make it easier to pull it up front in the mix.

The lead vocal track was cut together out of 3 different takes done in rapid succession. I also cut a second vocal track to double it in the verses. In the choruses I’m doing full harmony, which is another 3 tracks worth of vocals. All the backing vocals and saxes (except the sax solo) are on the same effects bus to save CPU power.

So there you have it, enjoy. I have another song I’m ready to start on (a sort of ELP meets Kieth Jarrett number), but it looks like the summer is almost here, and I predict the amount of time I spend in the studio will diminish in the time ahead. Ah well. I’m hoping to do 4 songs this year. We’ll see how it goes.

Auto Motive

Well this week I’m in the middle of a lot of things. Kids parties last weekend and next (pictures coming soon!), and work has been really busy. I worked on Sunday, and on top of that allergy season is in full effect now, so it’s making me a little cobweb-headed. So I feel like it’s the wrong day of the week. Logical Thursday, but really Wednesday. Must keep it straight. Ah well, soon a big ol’ web site redesign to share with all y’all.

Sunday was a beautiful perfect day, and I decided to take my old car for a ride. You see I have a classic ’60’s muscle car, a red Ford Mustang. It’s 40 years old, older than me. I bought when I lived in Palo Alto, a little over 10 years ago. I’d been living there for about 6 months and commuting to work on rollerblades, and then I bought a bike because the trip was rather hilly and I thought, as I cruised down the big slope behind Hewitt-Packard approaching the speed of cars, that I really ought to get a mode of transport with a brake (I’d taken the brakes off my skates for hockey) before I spill and hurt myself. So I bought a bike, which was a big improvement, and rode that all summer. I noticed a little neon sign in the window above Palo Alto Bicycle Shop at the time that said “Google”. Hmmm, I said to myself, an internet startup. I wonder what they do?

At the end of summer (October out there) I knew the rainy season was coming, and that I’d need a car. The way it played out was that I only had one weekend to find a car, and didn’t have a lot of money to spend. So I bought a paper and started looking thru the want ads. My budget was only a few thousand dollars, basically as cheap as possible but still reliable, and there were a lot of 10- or 15-year-old Nissan Sentras and that sort of thing. But there were a handful of classic older cars in my price range, including some Cameroes and GTOs, and 4 ’60’s Mustangs. If you’re from the Northeast like I am it’s a bit surprising, but it’s just a California thing, all these classic cars still on the road. I decided to concentrate on the Mustangs and check them out. The first one I looked at was in good shape, no rust, sound mechanicals. It was red and with a V-8, the perfect image of what I thought that kind of car should be. It has some minor dents and the paint was pretty dead on the roof and trunk. The next one was blue, a ’66, in perfect shape. I mean absolutely beautiful. But the thing is, it was a 6 cylinder, so not that interested. Plus it was the most expensive of the group. The last 2 were in bad shape; one had a Lincoln Versailles engine and other franken-parts, the other was half bond-o.

So I went back I bought the first one, which was actually under my budget limit by a few hudred. It turned out to be a great car. I drove it every day for years, all around Silicon Valley and up to San Francisco for band practice and gigs. Replaced the alternator once, and some other minor repairs, but that was it. The engine, powertrain, etc., never had any trouble. I did replace the weatherstripping and, believe it or not, the driver’s seat. The main thing it needed and still needs is a new coat of paint, and I was all set to do that in ’99. But then we moved back to New York rather abruptly, baby in tow, so that got postponed.

I couldn’t bear to part with the car; it represented one of my favorite aspects of life in California. Moving it back east probably tripled its value, since cars like that are basically nonexistent in this part of the country. I ended up keeping the car in my brother’s barn in upstate New York for a couple of years. There was no point in moving it to Brooklyn; it’d just get stolen. And car insurance in Brooklyn is so expensive that our insurance premiums actually went down when we put the Mustang on as a second car parked somewhere else.

When we bought our house I drove it down here, where it sits in the garage, an anachronistic absurdity, still cool but mostly harmless. In this day and age of trendy hybrid cars it seems a bit, uh, decadent. Although to be fair, it’s fuel economy is not too bad, because the car is light and even though it has a big engine, it revs really slow. In any event, I still like it and drive it on nice days in the summer, and still dream of fully restoring it and driving down the road listening to ZZ Top on the radio. Of course real life being what it is, it’s pretty far down on my todo list. So I took it out Sunday, the second time this season. The first time was the weekend before, and it ran great. Except that it needed a jump cuz the battery had died over the winter. I was hoping a week later it’d still have some charge.

When I got it out on the highway, traffic was all backed up, so I couldn’t even get up to a cool 55. On top of that, I noticed the pickup wasn’t all that great, and it seemed to hesitate when I stepped on the gas. I got it home to look under the hood, and there was gas dripping out from the around the throttle lever in the carburetor onto the intake manifold and engine block. Oh no, potential fire hazard! After a few minutes it stopped and I cleaned it up, but from the look of it I really ought to get it fixed. I once tool apart and rebuilt a carburetor, but it’s not really something I’d do for fun nowadays. There is a great garage down the street from here, so I guess I’ll call ’em and see if they can do that kind of work on a car that old. I don’t think new cars have had carburetors in about 20 years.

But of course the episode brings up the whole existential question of the value of material possessions. Should I get it fixed or just sell it? If I sell it, it’d be worth more if I fix it up first, but then if I do that, there won’t be any point in getting rid of it. Round and round …

Meanwhile, the pollen from the trees has been so thick these days that my current practical-for-all-seasons-on-the-East-coast everyday car is coated with a sticky golden dusting. Trying to clean my windshield I discovered that my squirts were broken. I could here the little squirter motor going, but the windshield remained dry. But I open the hood and there was washer fluid dribbling under the car … the hose must’ve come loose. But it looks like a nontrivial operation to take off enough plastic to get at it. Still, it’ll probably be simpler than fixing a carburetor.

So dribbly automotive fluids abound. Ah well, I have Friday off cuz I worked on Sunday. Maybe I’ll have time to get it then.

Kitchen Tile Project, Part 2

I’m happy to be able to say that we’re done with our kitchen tile project, and it’s a success. Lots of steps involved, the tiling, grouting, sealing, caulking, and finally touch-up paint. But that’s all behind us now, and nothing left but a nice looking kitchen. Later this year we’ll see about the bathrooms …

Section the first.

Section the second.

Section the third.

Detail of the fancy tiles above the oven.

Happy Spring, Again

A couple weeks ago I thought spring was here but then it turned cold and stormy, and we had lots flooding in our neck of the woods. (The federal and state governments both declared our county a disaster area, but apart from a temporary pond in the neighbor’s backyard, the storm had little impact on us.) The last few days it’s been absolutely perfect. Such a joy. I spent some time last weekend on our yard, raising up some stones on our garden path that tend to get washed out with mud when it rains. Big lower back day. Toward the end of the week we had a pretty good rain, and it appears the project was a success because no mud washed up on the stones. BTW, this is part of the larger leveling-the-patio project that is coming up. I’ll take the opportunity to tell the story of the patio project when the time comes.

Meanwhile, check out our flower bed.

New Recodings: Heat Wave

Meanwhile, back in the insular isolation of my home recording studio I’ve been working on a new song called Heat Wave. Here’s the story.

Last summer I took a vacation in Florida. The first part of the trip was a visit to Treasure Island on Tampa Bay, and consisted of me and my family, along with my cousin Peter and his wife Kim, hanging around and rotating from the pool to the beach to the bar to the restaurant and back in a loop for 2 or 3 days. The hotel was literally right on the beach, so by the time we were done with that we were pretty relaxed.

The next part of the journey was centered on Orlando, so on the drive up I had the Van Halen song Beautiful Girls going thru my head. I turned on the radio and, perhaps predictably, found a central Florida nonstop party rock station. You know, all ZZ Top, Steve Miller Band, that sort of thing. Even some Rush! Within 20 minutes they did a Van Halen song, Running With the Devil I think it was.

So I was inspired to write a high-energy summertime party rock song, and came up with a number called Heat Wave. Of course as I developed it, it became a bit twisted, with a 7/8 time signature, and copious use of upward chromatic movement, jazz chords, allusions to John Coltrane, and an environmentalist subtext. But it sure is high energy.

I started recording it in January, but this one has been taking a long time. It took a little while to get the arrangement together, and then doing the drum parts was fairly tedious on a sequencer. Which is ironic, because the whole point of it to make it sound free and spontaneous, and above all really grooving. At least the bass went down fairly easily, played live and in real time. From there I’ve been experimenting with the arrangement. I had originally thought of doing it in a Brothers Zing style, with a horn section and guitar, sort of a prog soul vibe, and that I’d ask my brother Martin to play guitar and bari sax. But he recently bought a new house and dismantled his recording studio for the move, so that was not an option. I reconceptualized it for tenor sax and a synth horn section, and layers of synths instead of guitars. Still some work to do, but I like the direction it’s going.

Then there were the vocals. It took me a few tries to really nail it, cuz the part is fairly high in my range, and it’s fast and has some longish phrases with some subtle intervals. I finally got a good vocal take last night, so soon I’ll be editing up the first rough mix. I still have to do the sax part, and I’ve done a couple passes at that too. It’s a challenging solo , a bebop vibe in an out time, and again I want to really nail it, so I’ve been woodsheding that a bit too. It’ll be worth it.

I had hoped to get two songs tracked and in the can this spring, progress toward my eventual next album, but at this point I’m thinking getting just this one finished off is more realistic. Heat Wave is a longish song, over 5 minutes. It’s funny, you think you’d get some economy on a longer song with repeated sections and all, but it really the same amount of work as 2 two-and-a-half minute songs.  I have more songs written and ready to go, so maybe I can find a short one that I can polish off without much effort.

Anyway, I’ve gotten to the point where it’s shaping up nicely. Of course it’s impossible to get across the essence of a song by describing it; words can only describe so much. But a mix will be coming soon. Meanwhile, here are the lyrics.

…

(Here Comes That) Heat Wave
by John Szinger

Ev’ryone is in the sun and having fun
Dance and sing and party all day all night long
Tomorrow’s gonna get up to a hundred and one (Tum tee tum-tum)
As a rule we hit the pool
But the beach ain’t out of reach
Anyway girl you look so fine having a good time
And Santa Claus is swimming cuz the North Pole can’t be saved

Cuz it’s heat wave, yeah a heat wave
C’mon heat wave, here comes that heat wave, look out!
Here comes that heat wave, hey a heat wave
Yeah it’s a heat wave oh yeah

Ev’ry fool is out of school and stayin’ cool
No one’s gonna work today whatcha gonna do
Tomorrow’s gonna get up to a hundred and two (Shoo-be do doo)
Think I’ll have an ice cold drink
Not too far hit the bar
Anyway girl you look so good that I know we could
And Santa Claus is drinking cuz the North Pole can’t be saved

Cuz it’s heat wave, oh yeah a heat wave
C’mon it’s a heat wave, here comes that heat wave, look out!
Here comes that heat wave, yeah a heat wave
Hey a heat wave yeah yeah

You and me time to party feelin’ free
Oceans rising endless summer come to be
Tomorrow’s gonna get up to a hundred and three (Shoo-be do bee)
And Santa Claus is swimming the North Pole can’t be saved

Cuz it’s heat wave, oh yeah a heat wave
C’mon it’s a heat wave, here comes that heat wave, look out!
Here comes that heat wave, yeah a heat wave
Hey a heat wave yeah yeah

Baby baby …
I feel the ice is slowly melting …
Sometimes I feel I want to run away …
Your love is like a heat wave …
Yeah!

Jammin’

Last Saturday night I hung out and jammed with my friend Erik and his friend Thomas. It was a good time. I mainly played piano while they played guitars. Thomas had a bottleneck slide which was pretty cool. We covered a pretty broad range of material, which was quite satisfying. I realized somewhere in the second half, as I was starting to get tired, that it’s alot of work to cover the bass parts with my left hand and so my soloing was sort of limited as a result, especially on tunes I hadn’t played before. I mean it was alright, but I really wanted to take flight. I think I told them at one point I don’t know any jazz numbers on piano, which isn’t true, but I was getting tired and didn’t have anything mentally queued up that I knew I could pull off. If there’s a bass player that sort of thing becomes a lot easier, because you don’t have to hold down the bottom. Ah well, something to work on. It’s funny too, cuz I’ve gotten used to playing solo piano, so although the low end was solid, I haven’t spent a lot of time on comping or improvising lately. Even so, its good to stretch out in a different direction.

Here’s a partial list of songs we covered …

Martha My Dear (The Beatles)
I Shot The Sheriff (Bob Marley)
Locomotive Breath (Jethro Tull)
Isn’t It a Pity (George Harrison)
My Sweet Lord (George Harrison)
I Want to Tell You (The Beatles)
Little Wing (Jimi Hendrix)
Red Wine (?)
Blues Jam
I Wish (Stevie Wonder)
Sir Duke (Stevie Wonder)
Contusion (Stevie Wonder)
Canteloupe Island (Herbie Hancock)
Funk Jam
Blue Bossa
(some other Bossa)
(some Little Feet song)
Just My Imagination (The Temptations)
Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head
Don’t Let Me Down (The Beatles)
Oh! Darling (The Beatles)
Home at Last (Steely Dan)
Taking Care of Business (Bachman-Turner Overdrive)
Let It Rain (Eric Clapton)
Layla (Derek and the Dominoes)

It’s been a while since I’ve played out with a band, or even jammed with other musicians. It’s something I miss very much. I played in bands pretty much constantly from high school until a few years ago when I had kids. Now that they’re no longer babies I think it’s time to start looking into getting a regular jam going…

Origami Butteryfly Diagrams

Well it’s been a busy week. We got the tiling and grouting done in our kitchen, so we’re over the hump on that job, and it’s looking really nice. Still have the sealing, caulking and some touch-up painting to do, but each of these tasks is small compared to the work so far. I’ll take some pictures of the completed project and blog about it in a future post.

Meanwhile, the other bit thing is I finally completed diagramming my butterfly. I aim to do a full diagram of one original model a year. Because of the level of work involved, that’s about all I have time for, although I’ve been making more and CP’s of late. I blogged about this model previously, when I posted pictures of it. I mentioned at the time that I mainly developed it at last year’s OUSA. Well, I began diagramming it way back last summer, but then I got busy with work and put it aside for a while, and changed jobs around New Year, and so it took a while to get back to it.

And now here it is. I’d consider this an intermediate level model. I can make a nice looking one from a 6″ square, in about a half hour. The diagrams are only forty-something steps. It does have a rather advanced closed sink. People who don’t like closed sinks might like this one, cuz it doesn’t matter if you do a good job making the inside neat. I posted it online at:

http://www.zingman.com/origami/oriPics/butterfly/butterfly_diagram.swf

The diagrams are done in Flash, using (the current version of) my Foldinator tool. I’ve done a bunch of diagrams in Flash this way and it works pretty well for me. One of the things I like best is that the vector drawings scale up smoothly, so you can get a lot detail into the drawings and it won’t be lost. At some point I’m going improve the Foldinator to include a more generalized representation of the model, animations between frames, and eventually and authoring tool. But for now the next feature will probably be non-sequential access to the steps. In any event, the Foldinator project has taken a back burner for me of late, despite requests from the Origami community. Since I write software all day, and I’d rather spend my origami time making origami than writing more software. Now if I could get a grant or something, that might change the picture…

I submitted this model to this year’s OUSA Annual Collection, so if you want a printed version, look to see; it may appear in there.

Also, soon I will be updating my main origami page to include the Butterfly pics and diagrams, as well as other new models. I’m sort of waiting on that until I have a chance to take some nice pictures, set up with lights and all, rather than just the snapshots I’ve been posting here.

Kitchen Tile Project, Part 1

Lately we’ve been working on putting up tiles in our kitchen. When we bought our house we made a list of thing we wanted/needed to do to fix it up, and putting tile in the backsplash area was in the plan from the start. Right when we moved in I painted a good part of the house, including the kitchen, but left that area unpainted, figuring I’d get around to it soon. Well five years went by, and we were busy with other things, but last Thanksgiving we kinda messed up the wall carving the turkey, and discovered the limitations of cheap paint (it can stain) so it was time.

Now neither Jeannie nor I had ever done any tile work before, although I’m pretty handy and she’s an expert in stained glass. Still it seemed pretty daunting to get started. But we bought some books, and made some trips to the tile store and figured out what tools and materials we needed, and finally picked out some tile and bought everything.

We put up about half the tile last weekend. Honestly the prep work, planning measuring and cutting takes more time than the actual laying the tile. Here are some pictures of our kitchen as a work-in-progress. Hopefully I’ll be able to report back in a week or two that we’re done it was a great success.

A bit of tiled wall, with our tools.

As you can see, we’re about half done.

We have something special planned for the area above the stove. Jeannie picked out some nice accent tiles.

We have 7 electrical fixtures to contend with in this small space. Making these U-shaped cutouts was tricky. Luckily Jeannie came thru with the glass grinder!

I had to pull out a tile because a screw on the electric box was sticking out and the tile wouldn’t lay flat.