Tone Row

A few weeks ago Michelle was watching a video online by that girl who does those online videos about Fibonacci numbers and fractal dragons, but this one was about Schoenberg-style tone rows. I was exposed to serailism in college, but never thought it was particularly tuneful or interesting, although I must say the girl did a really haunting Mary Had a Little Lamb based on the idea. Anyway Michelle and I had a good discussion about music theory and composing, and I gave her a few straight triadic ideas to play around with.

Recently I’ve been going updating my web site so the whole thing uses style sheets. This is a long overdue endeavor and I’ve dusted off some old pages I haven’t looked at in a long time. One was about The Perfect Shuffle, so naturally I wrote a tone row based on the perfect shuffle sequence of a twelve-card deck. I kinda always thought all tone rows were more or less the same, but I played this one on the piano and it sounds pretty compelling. It goes like this:

C Db Eb G D F B Bb Ab E A F#

It has the interesting property that the second half of the pattern is the same as the first half, but flipped upside down. It also has the property that the intervals between the notes are pretty varied from narrow to wide. In fact I think just about every interval from a semitone to a Major7 appears once, and a tritone appears twice.

Now I’m thinking about how to use this riff compositionally. One idea is to generate a bunch more patterns based on perfect shuffles of different sized decks, and arrange them into a kind of phase fugue. I wonder how that would be to listen to.

Leftier Hookier

Left Hook is announcing it’s second show coming up on May:

Saturday May 9. 9:00 PM
Dudley’s Bar & Marina
94 Hudson Park Rd. New Rochelle

This is a cool place down by the water, with really good food too. Should be a great time.

Meanwhile here’s a reminder to come see us this Saturday April 11 at The Fisherman’s Net in Pelham.

Also, I’ve updated out web site at lefthooknyc.com and created a new facebook page at facebook.com/lefthooknyc so you can go and like us an receive info about upcoming shows.

Buzzy Tonic Unplugged

I was going thru my archives and found some video from a gig Erik and I did at a Froyo place a few years back. This was the first live show I did for an audience in over ten years, and it’s the one the made me want to get back into playing live again. It’s not the best sound, or the best venue, or even the best performance, but it’s still interesting, if for nothing else than to see how things have progressed.

We did two set, each consisting of half covers and half originals. I must say I haven’t thought about Erik’s originals (part 2) in a long time but they’re great songs and it’s great to hear them again.

Part 1 . Part 2 . Part 3 . Part 4

Taking the Easy Way Out

A bunch of news on the music front. First, it’s time to say goodbye to the Day Trippers, at least for the time being. Here’s one last video from our inaugural gig last August at Heights Fests in Berkeley Heights, NJ.

http://zingman.com/music/daytrippers/DT_HF_montage01.mov

Second, it looks like originals band, Buzzy Tonic is actually getting off the ground. I jammed last weekend with Charlie Guitar, and brought in young Wolfgang on bass. We got thru four songs together and all agree the songs sound good and the project is worth pursuing. Charlie calls Heat Wave “the crazy one”, but Wolfgang had no trouble keeping up. Now it looks like we may have a drummer to complete the lineup. Charlie reached out to a friend of his who listened to my demos and likes the songs, and agreed to come by next session, which will be next week. Not sure how long it’ll take to get a set together, but it’ll be fun. I suppose to really do justice to the records I’ll need to add a sax player, but that’s still down the line a ways.

Third, with Left Hook now getting our set together and looking for gigs, I put together a web page for the group:

http://zingman.com/music/lefthook.php

This part of a new round of updates to my site. Much more exciting stuff soon!

The Return of Origami from Space

Well my busy spell at work has ended a bit sooner than expected, so I have some time now to get caught up on a bunch of long-standing projects. First off, I’ve been thinking about a second origami book, and tossing around ideas for a topic or theme. One of the more promising ones is to expend my repertoire of Origami from Space models with a constellation of related models. The other night I came up with a concept for one. I’m not sure whether to call it Space Probe or Radio Satellite, but over the last few days I folded several versions, experimenting and refining it.

Here’s two of the best so far. One version uses a 12×12 grid and the other 16×16. This model is a but unusual for me in the that it starts with a grid and uses some box-pleating, but it’s appropriate to the subject. The base is similar to my War Elephant, in that it embeds a Hydrangea tessellation in the middle of the paper and proceeds from there. Some day soon I hope to take some pictures on a black background with some salt sprinkled on it to simulate outer space. Meanwhile I also have an idea to fold a Sputnik.

Talent Time

Last weekend was the talent show at Michelle’s school. This was in lieu of the usual musical production that they’ve been putting on the last few years. The main difference is that this format doensn’t have the pre-K thru 4th grade, so logistically it’s much easier. For the older kids it’s not that much different; they have to audition, but then they can do an act of their choosing. Most are music, some are comedy or dance.

Michelle sang Don’t Cry for Me Argentina with her friend accompanying her on piano. The did really well and I was amazed how high the vocal part goes on that song. Some of the other acts were really good, and some sort of just there, but everyone had a great time. This year there was no orchestra, just either piano or karaoke depending on the song. I did the sound mixing for the event, which was a good chance to try out some of my new PA equipment.

Then on Monday Lizzy’s song a theatre group did a show with a rock band theme with a similar format. A bunch of kids, including Lizzy and a group of her friends, did songs with various adults (professional musicians) accompanying them, and were really good. Some of the other kids did full-on rock bands, but they weren’t ready for prime time, and worse they had three songs each!

At least the time was well spent for me. I’ve been thinking about ideas for my next origami book, but I’ve been too busy to fold anything lately. One idea I had was to expand the Origami from Space concept into a full book. So I came up with a model I’m calling Space Probe or maybe Radiosatellite. It’s a spaceship with a radio dish, boom antenna and some solar panels. A bit like V’ger but not quite. I folded one out of the program, and then last night while I was working on code, during compile time. Pics coming soon.

The Return of the Debut of the Left Hook

The debut show of my rock band, the Left Hook, was scheduled for last month but postponed due to the weather. We now have a new date: Saturday April 11. We also have a new bass player, Ken “Dr. Pluto”, replacing young Wolfgang Skywalker.

Left Hook remains a really smokin’ group, a real knockout. We have a great sound and loads of great material including funk, soul and classic rock, and are even better rehearsed than before. I’m playing sax, piano and singing. We have three strong vocalists and lots of harmonies, plus a slammin’ rhythm section, tasty guitars, everything you need. We have a new poster too. Here’s the info:

…

LEFT HOOK
Music with a punch!

Westchester’s newest classic rock funk & soul party band
appearing live

Saturday April 11, 9:00 PM
at The Fisherman’s Net, 129 6th St. Pelham, New York

Change in the Weather

It’s been a long, cold stormy winter. Snow day after snow day all thru the second half of January, all of February and even three more snowfalls the first week of March. Enough already! And then suddenly two or three days ago the sun came out and the temperature rose above freezing. Now the snowpiles have dimished from five feet high to three feet, and you can even see a bit of lawn here and there. On the other hand, the remaining snow is black slush from hell and the potholes are in full bloom. Still, it feel like spring is finally here!

I spent most of the winter intensely busy at work. My previous project ended around the new year, and now I’m making the next-generation content management platform. It’s a whole new technology stack, with HTML5, AngularJS, JSON, Git, Gulp, Lint, Less, Vagrant, Karma, Protractor, with Scala and Akka on the middle tier, and lots of other good stuff. Also a major upgrade to our processes and best practices, including full-on test-driven development and continuous deployment and integration. So there’s been a lot to put together and come up to speed on in a short time. We also have a new and expanded team, including four people from my old group and three new guys with more one the way.

Our team is distributed, with guys in Italy, Poland, Nova Scotia, New Jersey, Queens and Westchester, so I’ve been working from home alot more. We have daily video conferences that include GIT pull requests, code reviews and design and planning sessions, which sometime go on for a half a day. Been also putting in alot of late nights and weekends. Still, I guess the best way to learn something new is to jump in the deep end with full immersion. It looks like I’m past the steepest part of the learning curve now. We have a big milestone demo coming up a couple weeks and it looks like we’ll actually get there.

New Song: Soul on Fire

I realize that I never shared the rough mix of my last song, To Be a Rock. That’s because I sort of parked it once I got the vocals down. It still needs some synths or guitars or something to really make it work. Still not sure exactly what, so instead I decided to put together the next song and bring it up to rough mix too, and then finish them off together.

This one is a jazzy, dancy number, sort of hybrid of swing, funk and disco. The main musical ideas I’ve had hanging around for a while; it just had to be hammered into shape. I did teach myself to play a pretty groovin’ walking bass line for the middle section. The lyrics are just something to sing that sounds good over a song that sounds like this. More or less about watching someone in the audience dance to the music while you’re playing sax at a gig. Inspired I suppose by the funk bands I was in in California. Still, I laid down the vocal track the other day and the performance brought the whole thing up a level. I did three takes straight thru with no overdubs, took less than an hour. Now of course this one needs the arrangement fleshed out too before I can share the track.

…

Soul On Fire

She don’t wanna hear no DJ
She wanna come and see the band play
Ah listen what the man on the stand say

She like a dancin’ and a bumpin’
Ah the room is really thumpin’
Listen then man on the stand tell you somethin’

Spirit in the night
Blinded by the light
In the midnight hour
When my soul’s on fire

She dance till dawn and the devil himself may care
Smoke in her eyes and fire in her hair
Spice in her smile and snakes stare in her glare

She got the groove
Yeah she got the moves
She got the legs
She even got the shoes

I got the horn
And I got the news
I got the sound
I even got the blues

She don’t wanna see no DJ
She wanna go and hear the band play
Listen what the man on the stand say