New Song: Rocket To The Moon

My new song, Rocket to the Moon, is coming along. It’s a short (under 3 minutes) and fast, sort of fake-punk song and it’s the first song I wrote on guitar. At one point I had hoped to submit it to NASA’s space shuttle song contest, but It’s been a long time coming, between being busy with other projects and getting up to speed with my new studio setup.

The song has a really cool bass part, much too active and melodic to be real punk. At first I was playing just straight 16th notes on the root, but that got kinda boring, So I asked myself, what would John Paul Jones do? I ended up using a combination of thumb, fingers and two-hand tap just to get the lines out. Sounds killer but hard to play a such a fast tempo.

I laid down the lead vocal and an electric guitar part on my last session. Need to figure out what kind of effects to put on the vocals, and if I want any backing tracks.

For the electric guitar I had been using a little stomp box amp simulator that my brother gave me, but the thing bit the ghost and now I have no FX. I tracked the gtr using a combo of direct inject and miking the amp, which provided a bit of reverb and overdrive and fullness, and layers nicely with the acoustic gtr and is not too bad as-is. Martin has offered to lend me some more of his unused FX to experiment with, which is both kind and cool, but I don’t want to go back and retrack this gtr part if I don’t have to, so meanwhile I think I’ll explore the gtr fx in proTools.

So the song is on it’s way, but I still need to figure out how to fill out the arrangement. There’s some question as to the structure. There’s a middle eight that’s not doing much that needs some kind of solo or something. Maybe a bass solo? And then there’s a jam out on the ending, that also needs something. Martin suggested a kind of Tom Jones-esque horn section, while Neumann proposed a Morphine style sax riff. Both seem to agree it’s something over in saxophoneland, so I think I’ll give that a go. John also mentioned a half-time section. This is intriguing, but I like the short, fast, high-energy thing the song has going, and wonder if this might take it into a whole nuther direction. This is the kind of thing that’s almost easy if you have real band. You can just try out a few ideas in rehearsal. But in the studio it can be rather painstaking to lay down the tracks, listen back, decide and iterate. I had originally hoped this would be a quick song to record, but there’s alot of experimentation.

…

Rocket To The Moon
By John Szinger

Some days – I feel so far away
I move – so fast
To be with you at last

Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon
Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon

Tonight – I’ll make it home alright
To be – with you
You know what we can do

Yeah we’ll rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon
Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon
Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you, for you soon

Some days – I feel so far away
Tonight – I’ll make it home alright

And we’ll rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon
Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon
Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon
Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you, for you, for you soon

Like a Lion Fighting an Angry Ram in a Wet Cardboard Box

Feeling the first hints of early spring. The weather has been more mild lately. Traded snow any bitter cold for rain and heavy winds. Cold comfort for change.

Work has been busy; big deadline looming at the end of March. Jeannie has been having dental work the last few weeks and has a few weeks more to go. We’ve begun researching cars. Lizzy got accepted into honor band for middle school, which starts this week.

We’ve been painting again. This time it’s the baseboards, door frames and trim. We’ve done two sessions two weekends in a row. The downstairs is done, and the stairway (huge amount of work) and the kitchen and living room. Still to go are the hall, bedrooms and bathrooms, plus some window frames and doors. Most of time is laying down tape. Hope to be done all this by the end of March so we can concentrate on outdoor stuff when spring come in April.

Snow Crash

Last weekend we went on a family ski trip up to Vermont with Nick and some friends of his. It was mostly great. The skiing itself was awesome. The snow and the mountain were perfect and we all had a great time with the skiing. Michelle is really coming along, and Lizzy is doing good too. We stayed in a condo right on the mountain with Nick and his family, and that was a good time. Watched The Empire Strikes Back, Jeannie’s favorite movie of all time. On the other hand it was really cold the whole time, especially sitting on the lift as it approached the summit.

The big downer is we got into a bit of a road accident on the trip up. We got caught in a pileup on an off ramp. Luckily no one was hurt, but once we were done feeling relieved over that, the hassle factor set in. We had to wait an hour and half for the police to show up and get everyone’s statements. So we got up there pretty late on Friday. And we’ve been dealing with insurance and paperwork ever since. At first I thought the Jeep had only minimal damage; I just lost my license plate and maybe the fan was a bit noisy. The car in the middle, a Mini, seemed to fare the worst, with both bumpers (the flimsy plastic kind) cracked. The car in front, the cause of al of it, was another SUV and looked to be totally intact.

Close inspection later revealed a piece of framing behind my bumper was bowed. It did its job and bore the brunt of the impact. There’s other assorted minor damage, probably mostly not worth fixing on account of the car being so old. It’s safe and drives okay. I’ll take it to my local mechanic and get his opinion on the minimum necessary repairs, put the license plate back on myself and be done with it.

I guess I’ll start looking to replace the car this spring. I had hoped to keep it another year or so, since we just got a new car for Jeannie. It’s certainly good enough to get to the train station and back for a while, but longer term it’s transitioning to the beater category. Luckily time is on my side and I can research cars and wait for sales. Too bad cash for clunkers in no longer in effect!

Did I mention that the skiing part of the trip was really great? An since we’ve been back in town, it’s gotten really warm, like spring and almost half the snow from January has melted. On the way home from Vermont we saw another car crash at the exact same spot. I’m sure the police keep statistics as to how many accidents occur at the ramp. It’s be interesting to know.

A Little Thaw

It’s been up above freezing the last few days, a big relief and a tease that spring is not far off. Still plenty of big piles of snow on the ground though, even in midtown Manhattan. Even if it keeps on melting at this rate it’ll be another month before I see my lawn again.

Folding Pentagons

I’ve been working on an origami e-book that is on track to come out this spring. (More on that in a future post.) One of the models in it is my Fivefold Rose, which I’ve updated and improved. It’s based on a pentagon and the question of how to fold a regular pentagon from a square has been an age-old problem in origami. I know a few methods for approximating a regular pentagon, and with practice I’ve gotten good at eyeballing it so it comes out every time.

I recently discovered a new method in an old book from Japan from the 60’s. It’s been on my shelf for years, and I was on the verge of throwing it away and thought I’d flip thru it to see if there was anything worth saving it for, when I came across this little gem in the back of the book in with the classic bases. It’s based on the trick that the cosine of and 18 degree angle is within one percent of a 1:3 slope.

I’ve digrammed my own version of it, revising the steps to be clearer and more accurate, and making the folding sequence of subsequent steps reduce rather than amplify any folding errors. It’s pretty easy to get a perfect pentagon every time. The diagrams are essentially the first few steps of the new Fivefold Rose, thru forming the pentagon and some precreasing for the base.

The center of the pentagon is the center of the paper, which is useful for some applications. The tradeoff is that top corner of the pentagon is truncated (although you could just as easily fold a slightly smaller pentagon). For this model it doesn’t matter, and for alot of my pentagon-based polyhedra it doesn’t matter either. In any event it could easily be adapted to making a pentagon with the apex at the center of the top edge of the square by first folding the two long diagonals that would form the top point of a star embedded in the pentagon. I’m also exploring another method that uses the trick of the cosine of a 36 degree angle is very close to 4:5.

I showed it to John Montroll, the only other person I know who cares about this kind of thing like I do. In is book Origami Polyhedra Design he has a method for folding a golden rectangle from a square. The first time I saw it I immediately though there must be a way to use that to make a pentagon. It’s been in the back of mind ever since, but now I can forget about it. John has solved the problem and come up with a really elegant, mathematically perfect method for folding a pentagon in just 11 steps. Blew my mind when I saw it. Unfortunately you’ll have to wait for his next book to see it.

Have an Ice Day

You’d think that by now I’d have something else to talk about besides the bad weather. And I do, I swear. Origami and music stuff, but it’s all work in progress.

The bad weather is neverending. But even so it hasn’t run out of nasty new surprises yet. Today it was freezing and everything iced up bad. In my driveway an 18” high icicle formed sticking straight up like a stalagmite, from water dripping from the power line above. I went out to shovel, which meant mainly breaking up the ice, but left the icicle. Jeannie ran it over with her car.

For some reason Michelle was really excited about Ground Hog’s day. She woke up before daylight and brought her stuffed animals out to the couch to camp out and wait for it, like it was Xmas morning or a space shuttle launch or something. As I was getting up she’d already woken up Jeannie and the two of them were finding the feed from Punxsutawney, PA. So I witnessed the rodent prognosticate an early spring. Oy. Wait until she finds out the rodent doesn’t know jack.

Let It Snow

Yep you guessed it, more complaining about the weather. We had a good 2 feet of snow over 24 hours earlier this week. I worked at home Wednesday and went out about 4 in the afternoon shoveled out about 6 – 8″. It was pretty fluffy and took about 20 min with the snowblower, and another 20 so shovel the steps and clean up. It started snowing again after dark and by Thursday morning we had another 15-18″. Jeannie and the kids had the day off, and I worked from home again. Jeannie and the girls went out around 10:30 and I joined them around 11:30. This snow was much heavier. Even with the snowblower we didn’t get done until after 1:30.

The good news is it’s all cleared now. The temperature got above freezing this afternoon, and I’ll take snow over extreme cold any day. I guess I’ve adjusted to the cold. And I definitely picked the right year to buy a snowblower. The bad news is we’re not even halfway thru the winter. Already it’s the 5th snowiest winter on record for NYC, and the snowiest January by a factor of 50%. The last winter that came close was ’96 and that was one big storm and two moderate ones. It’s already snowed 5 or 6 times down here. And more snow in the forecast. Also this year January has five Mondays, which is cruel and unusual. If I were King of America I’d make the fifth Monday of every month an automatic day off.