Tag: Buzzy Tonic

Plutonium Dirigible is Live!!!

Here it is at long last, Plutonium Dirigible, the new album by Buzzy Tonic, available on all your favorite streaming services. Buzzy Tonic is my home studio project, and the new record features nine new original tunes.

This record is dedicated to my brother Martin, who started Buzzy Tonic with me years ago, contributed a song to the record, and will always be a part of the creative spirit of the project.

Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/album/5zyYCVFrVi6U4BYPKD8PDW

Apple Music:
https://music.apple.com/us/album/plutonium-dirigible/1777655404

Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DLLMJ657

For more info, check out the album’s web page at:
https://zingman.com/music/plutoniumdirigible.php

Enjoy!

The Brothers Zing

Martin and I have been making music together from the time we were little kids. I’d always dreamed of putting together a live band with him someday to perform our original songs. With the upcoming release of the fifth Buzzy Tonic album, now is a good time to look back the first Buzzy Tonic album, called The Brothers Zing, a collaboration between Martin and myself. Actually, the album was originally called Buzzy Tonic and the name of the group was The Brothers Zing. (I retconned it just like certain film directors add a subtitle like A New Hope to their movie after it’s been out in theaters a while, then years later try and play it off like the subtitle has always been the actual title. But I digress …) I should mention that Martin came up with the name Buzzy Tonic, meaning both a description of the sound, consonant yet distorted, and also some kind of intoxicating libation that staggers the mind.

Back in 2004 or so, twenty years ago now (wow!), I was in a sort of musical hiatus and looking to do something new when Martin approached me. The idea was to do a virtual collaboration, which was unusual at the time. We built matching ProTools based recording studio setups, and we’d send files back and forth, building up a song track by track, changing things around and refining them as we went. We wrote, arranged, preformed and produced eight original songs in a period of about a year.

For me it was a big step forward in many ways. It was the first time I’d really written rock songs with a lyric (I’d previously written mainly jazz instrumentals up to that point, and I’d done a whole lot of computer and electronic music) and focused on an actual album of songs, with the aim of producing a professional quality record. He gave me alot of confidence to step up with my writing and singing. He also wrote a computer program called Guitar George to help him figure out how to play guitar voicings for all the crazy jazz chords that appeared in my songs!

Obviously it was fun and successful, and I’ve kept on making records, getting better with each one. Martin had to drop out of the second record due to other commitments, and I sort of took it over as a a solo project. He remained very generous, contributing one song for every album (except the jazz instrumental one), and often adding vocal or guitar parts to my songs, and giving constructive critical feedback along the way. In fact, I kind of think of all the Buzzy Tonic records as being in a way by The Brothers Zing. And don’t worry, we’ve done other project before and after, so there’s more music from the two of us in the offing.

Meanwhile, you can hear the songs here:
https://zingman.com/music/#BeeZee

And learn all about the the songs and making of the record here:
https://zingman.com/music/beezee.php

Enjoy!

Plutonium Dirigible

It’s been another fun and busy week for music.  Last Thursday I saw the current touring versions of the classic prog bands Yes and ELP at the Capitol Theatre.  It was a really good show.  The only surviving member of Emerson Lake and Palmer is Carl Palmer, and he did an ELP tribute show that combined live musicians with canned tracks and video from ELP’s 1992 tour.  It was pretty effective.  They opened with Karn Evil 9 1st Impression Part 2.  Both the bass player and the guitarist had midi pickups on their instruments.  Once the singing part was done the bass player played the organ solo, and then the guitar player did the synth solo.  Very impressive.  They did one new tune with no legacy tracks, a pretty cool instrumental prog jam.  The only thing I didn’t love was using vocals from old fat 90’s Greg Lake rather than from the 70’s when the band was in their prime, but I guess they didn’t have isolated tracks they could use from way back then.

Yes was actually Jon Anderson with The Band Geeks, a Yes tribute band he apparently saw on the internet and asked to tour with him.  They were very good, actually better than some versions of real Yes I’ve seen.  The bass player and and guitarist in particular leaned heavily into the classic sounds of Chris Squire and Steve Howe, with the the same instruments, and every nuance of every riff lovingly memorized.  The set was entirely the big numbers off The Yes Album, Fragile, and Close to the Edge, with one new song that fit right in.  Jon can still really sing and lead that great vocal harmony sound.  And, sitting on 12-string acoustic guitar for And You And I was special guest John McLaughlin!

Then on Saturday night I saw my friend Erik play a set of rock covers on the patio of a bar next to parking lot in Hastings.  I haven’t seen him since before the pandemic.  Good to get together and talk, even if only briefly.  I’ve been trying to connect with friends again recently.

Also, I biked twenty-six miles in an hour and forty-five minutes on Sunday, a personal best for the season.

But the big news for tonight is the tracks for the new Buzzy Tonic record, Plutonium Dirigible, are complete! 

You can hear the tracks here:

https://zingman.com/music/#beezeevee

And learn more about all the songs and the whole project here:

https://zingman.com/music/beezeevee.php

All that remains is the album artwork and to submit it for publication. So watch this space for the release of the album on CD and streaming services in a few weeks.

New Song – Sisyphus Blues

This is a reworking of an older song, with a new melody and updated lyric. Because life is like that. Enjoy:

…

Sisyphus Blues

(D minor, drop D tuning)

Just when you think that life’s looking up
And you might drink from that flowing cup
Then comes the day when it all turns around
Just then you think that life’s looking down
Climbin’ up that hill
Slidin’ down that hill

Life’s looking up then it’s looking down
Ramblin’ up that hill
Tumblin’ down that hill

You might drink from that silver cup one day yeah but now you’re
Holdin’ on to what you will
Ridin’ on up and down that hill

Then comes the day when it all turns around yeah
Holdin’ on to what you will
Ridin’ up and down that hill

New Recording – A Plague of Frogs

I had a very nice Thanksgiving weekend.  Michelle came home for a visit, and we all went out to Long Island Thanksgiving day, and the rest of the time played some games and watched some movies and slept in every day day caught up on a bunch of random tasks. Among them…

I finally finished the song that could not be finished is finished.  A Plague of Frogs is probably to most complicated song I’ve attempted to record, arrange and produce, in the terms of number of interlocking themes, changes in sound and tone, overall length, and sheer number of tracks and layers.  In the end I made it a battle between sax vs. synth rather than sax vs. guitar, and I really leaned in to the bloopy, buzzy sound of the synthesizer to create an alien vibe.  After I did the synth solo I had to put it aside for a while.  I was in a phase of listening to heavily layered 80’s records like So, Synchronicity and Power Windows and had a bunch more ideas to further develop the arrangement.  But then I got to a place where the build up in the middle section was satisfying, and after that there was nowhere else to go.  I found myself sculpting the sound by taking things away rather than continuing to add more parts, and once that realization hit it was pretty quick to finish up the song and get to a good mixdown.  The rest of the kitchen sink will have to wait for other songs.  

So here it is. 

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/plutoniumDirigible/PlagueOfFrogs54k.mp3

I hope you enjoy!

New Song – A Plague of Frogs

The concept for my new song is a battle on the planet Mars between the humans and an alien invader from another solar system.  It’s sort of a mash up of By Tor and the Snow Dog by Rush and I.G.Y. by Donald Fagen.

I’ve been working on this one a while.  In fact I started it during the sessions for Elixr, two albums ago.  And the intro riff has its origins in a piece I did called Futbol Anthem, way back when I worked for an ad agency in the ’90s.

It’s very much an in-the-studio creation, and it takes advantage of ProTools’s ability to make arrangements you’d probably never do with a live group, with shifting meters, stacked synth and drum layers, etc.  Still, the goal is to make a song that’s enjoyable to listen to for the whole nine-plus minutes, an entertaining ride, sorta like a movie for the ears. 

My friend Dazza agreed to do the guitar solo.  In solo section in the middle, the sax represents the humans and the earth, while the guitar represents the aliens on Mars.  They battle it out, trading riffs and building intensity, something like a boss fight in a video game.  Then on to a big unison riff section.

But we’re still recording all that, so for now here are the lyrics.  Enjoy!

…

A Plague of Frogs (International Space Year)

Peace on Earth – war on Mars!
Epic conflict among the stars
Space invaders from afar
Challenge the humans to keep the red planet ours

Cosmic war – a plague of frogs!
Now descend the Tobes of Zog
Encroaching frozen dessert canyons
Entrenched so they evade our scanners
Vile scourge of the solar system
Even our best star lasers missed ’em
Space ranger battle scarred
Earth needs a new hero to win back dusty crimson Mars

(solo – sax vs. moog)

Peace on Mars – and love on Venus
Humanity at last victorious
Vanquished foes warp back to their home world
The frogs of Zog retreat with their tails curled
Our spaceships free for more peaceful uses
Our scientists can again court their muses
Peace on Earth and victory
But victory is temporary

Humanity in victory
But victory is temporary
Yeah victory is temporary
Oh victory is temporary yeah

– jfs

New Song – All of the Above

I started this song a while back, when I was in a phase of writing singer-songwriter style things on guitar.  The original idea of this one was an uptempo boogie shuffle number in the mold of Can’t Get Enough by Bad Company.  As I developed it, it became slower and bluesier and a bit less glib, since I’m not so young anymore and my relationship goals aren’t that same as a teenager’s.  So it’s a bit more retrospective, looking back on young love from a distance.

Musically, it’s alot more pop than my last song, but still with some interesting twists.  The meter shifts from 4/4 to 6/4 throughout, but is more easily expressed as 2/4.  I had the basic arrangement of guitar, piano, bass and drums, with the bass kinda channeling Geddy Lee in the verse.  But I felt it needed something more.  To finish it off I added a horn section of tenor and bari sax, and an ’80’s style lead synthesizer.  It took a little while to get the tone and dynamics right on the synth.  Lastly I added some real cymbals, played with mallets, to the intro and outro to support the guitar and bring some warmth into supplement the midi sample drum kit.

I now have six complete songs for my new album, whose working title is Plutonium Dirigible. That’s about twenty-eight minutes of music.  I have another close-to-ten-minute epic about halfway tracked, and one more song to record after that.  Hope to have the record out by the end of year.

Here it is, enjoy!

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bzvr/AllOfTheAbove33.mp3

…

All of the Above

I wasn’t lookin’ for a true love
I was just lookin’ for a new love
I wan’t lookin’ for a long love, strong love
Yeah yeah yeah no, none of the above

I seen you out dancing last Saturday
Monday you’re in my class in chemistry
Now I’m thinking ’bout you and me
Let’s get together for some history

If I invite you backstage tonight all right
We just might dance and party all night
Okay day by day into brave and new love

Now I ain’t waitin’ on no old love
An’ I ain’t wastin’ time on slow love
Tonight I’m wakin’ to some fresh love new love
Yeah yeah yeah yeah, all of the above

And maybe if the love grows who knows how it goes?
A few more shows electric glide power slide
Side by side into a tried and true love

So now I’m sowing seeds of strong love
Maybe grows into long love
It all started with a fast love new love
Yeah yeah yeah, all of the above

So tonight it’s fast love new love long love true love
Yeah yeah yeah yeah all of the above
Oh fast love new love long love true love
Yeah yeah yeah yeah all of the above
Hey fast love new love long love true love
Yeah yeah yeah yeah all of the above

– JFS 7/19

Elixr (2022 Remix/Remaster)

Among my recent musical projects has to be remix and remaster my 2018 album Elixr.  I was listening to it back in the spring, and although it was a big step forward for me in terms of musical production at the time, my mixing chops have improved substantially over the last few years and I decided I could do it better.  In the end I decided to get a small batch of CD’s made, and so it took some time to do the artwork and get it printed and all that.  Now the new version of the record is on all the major streaming services, so go ahead and check it out!

Spotify . iTunes . Amazon

New Song – My Ol’ Broke Down Truck

I wrote a country song!  Well sort of at least.  The second in my guitar singer-songwriter experiments, My Ol’ Brokedown Truck is pretty much a traditional country song, although with different lyrics and chord voicings it might be something like a jazz standard from the great American songbook.  I wrote it around Christmastime when I was visiting my parents and my Mum asked me to explain to her Nashville notation.  I did so by way of demonstration, starting by writing down the title and eight bars of chord changes, and then a bridge, and suddenly I had the beginnings of a song. The lyrics also came quite quickly and naturally, and I liked it well enough to to finish it.

I recorded a basic track with guitar, bass drums and vocal. The guitar sound may take liberties with the conventions of the genre, bringing in some energy of bands like Cake or the The Black Keys. The vocal has a low and high harmony part, and I decided it’d sound better with a female voice doing the high harmony. I asked my sister-in-law Mary, who has been in a number of singing groups over the years, if she’d like to do the part. She came in and nailed it, and lifted the song to a whole ‘nuther level.

The hardest thing was to get the right sound for the solo on the intro and middle eight. A sax was definitely not appropriate, and I don’t play pedal steel guitar or fiddle, or banjo or mandolin, and the chords modulate so a harmonica won’t work. I experimented with various synthesizer sounds, trying to harken back to a rare moment in pop music where pedal steel guitars played side by side with analog synths, as exemplified by songs Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Billy Joel’s The Great Suburban Showdown, or Jackson Browne’s The Load-Out. But the right tone eluded me. I ended up using a melodica (a funny little keyboard instrument that you blow into) run thru a boxy amp simulator, spring reverb and tremolo effect.

Enjoy!

…

My Ol’ Brokedown Truck

My brokedown truck and my rotten luck
Have left me here stuck by the side of the road
With my bleeding heart I will make a new start
But first I must get my body home
We’ve made many miles together
Sure in sunny and stormy weather
Well I could trade ‘er in for some shiny new tin
But you’ll never find peace while you roam

(solo)

We’ve rode many roads together
Fast through foul and fair weather
And I might go far in a brand new sports car
But then how can I carry the load?
So I’ll wait here stuck with my rotten luck
And my ol’ brokedown truck

– John Szinger, 2022