A quick update as we slide around the long backside of summer. The weather has been great and I’ve been having a good summer for biking. Last Friday I took an epic ride up to Scarsdale on a combination of roads and trail, over thirteen miles. They have some nice houses on the shore of Lake Isle. Sunday I took a ride for twenty-six miles, which is a long as a marathon. It was my longest ride so far this summer, and I did it in an hour and fifty minutes. My goal is to get up to thirty miles sometime this fall. I’ve gone over 500 miles now this season, and the only counts the rides I’ve measured. I often forget to turn on the app or to bring my phone, especially for the shorter rides. I’m averaging 50 or more miles a week these days, usually six days a week. So I’m probably closer or 800 miles by now. Hoping to hit a thousand before the end of the season.
Author: Zingblog 2
Adirondack Adventure Plus Jazz
Just got back from a wonderful and relaxing vacation in the Adirondacks with our good friends Mark and Kelly. For whatever reason, Jeannie and I didn’t feel like traveling far away by plane this summer, so we kept it relatively close with a road trip within New York State.
We packed Friday night and drove up Saturday. We got lunch on the way in Lake George Village in a restaurant on the waterfront. By the time we got up there it was mid-afternoon. Lizzy and Josh happened to be spending the weekend in Lake Placid, so we met them for dinner at some nice restaurant there. Fancy cocktails all around, and yummy food. Lizzy remembered Mark and Kelly from when we used to vacation up there when she was a child, so that was a fun reunion. I think the last time she was in Lake Placid we went to see a Harry Potter movie in the theatre there.
Sunday the main event was an epic bike ride. There’s a rail trail going in either direction from Saranac Lake to Placid one way and Tupper Lake the other. Last summer we did the ride to Placid, so this time we did went towards Tupper. We didn’t get all the way into town but it was a good long ride, over twenty miles. We stopped and turned around at a park and campground at Clear Lake Pond (I think it was), where there was a nice beach for swimmin’. On the way back we stopped for lunch at a place on the side of the trail. All in all this took the better part of the day. We spent most of the evening hanging out and listening to music. Mark turned me on to a group call Tin Hat Trio. Neat stuff, sort avant-garde gypsy jazz combined with Americana and twentieth century modern classical. Excelling violin and accordion player. Mark also showed me his guitar pedal board. He’s been collecting pedals and experimenting with multiple loops and delays. Great sound and he’d getting quite good at it.
Monday was the start of the main event, a three-day camping trip to Pine Island (I think) on Lower Saranac Lake. We spent the morning getting our canoe, food and supplies together, then we drove out to the boat launch. Everything had to be brought in by canoe. Mark and Kelly have two small, single-person canoes, which Jeannie and Kelly rode, while Mark and I paddled the larger, two-person canoe. We had to make two trips, since our load shifted right when we set out, and one of our coolers slid into the water! Luckily it floated. It was a pretty long paddle, about a mile and a half, took about forty-five minutes. Mostly thru twisting bays and channels, but the last part was out in the open waters of the lake. After paddling out and back and out again we were pretty tired.
One we set up our tents, the rest of the time there was pretty mellow and blissful. The weather was hot (Jeannie and I seem to bring the hot weather with us whenever we go up to Adirondacks, Thousand Islands or Montreal) so we went swimmin’ every day. Also more canoeing, exploring the other islands on the lake, some light hiking, and hanging around making campfires and cooking. The second night we all went out to the swimmin’ rock to watch the Perseids meteor shower. Saw lots of shooting stars, and even a UFO, all glowing and swirly in the night sky for several minutes. We later learned was a detached booster from a rocket launch, falling back to Earth and burning up in the atmosphere.
Wednesday morning it was time to go. The trip back was much lighter. We’d consumed most of our food and firewood, plus Mark and Kelly left their tent since they were planning on coming back on the weekend. We had planned on hanging out on our little island until after lunch, but there was a thunderstorm coming so we packed down and lit out rather quickly. Good thing too. As we made the boat trip the looming clouds came a-rumbling in, but by the time it actually started raining we were putting our boats on our cars.
Wednesday night Mark’s band Crackin’ Foxy had a gig at a bandshell in a park over in Tupper. The band is soft of a mix of dixieland jazz and and old time country. The rhythm section is Mark on banjo accompanied by a tuba, and the horn section is a trombone, trumpet and soprano sax. All excellent players and a fun sound and repertoire. They recently lost their lead singer so everyone in the group sang a few songs. Mark invited me to sit in, so I brought my saxophone along. Funny thing, everyone else in the band except the sax player is named John, so to bring me on stage, Mark asked the audience if there was anyone out there named John who plays sax. The song I sat in on was the standard Comes Love.
Thursday it was time to head home, and we had lunch in Lake George again. Thursday night I had rehearsal with my own band. Friday was a rare complete day off, so Jeannie and I ended up unpacking our camping stuff, and doing laundry and other random tasks, but at much more relaxed pace than we would otherwise.
Saturday Jeannie and I went for a bike ride on our local rail trail. I did twenty-two and a half miles again. Jeannie’s brother Denis was in town came up to our place Saturday and came out to our gig.
Saturday night was the Spacecats’ gig at the Green Growler. We debuted about six new tunes, three originals and three covers or standards. The group is really connecting and sounding great. We’ve gotten to the point where we have our own distinctive sound, even with a wide variety of material across the spectum of jazz, funk, soul and prog. Everyone is really dynamic and interactive on the stand, listening and feeding ideas to one another. We probably have enough new material to record a second album, and may very well do so in the fall. Only problem is, we need to find a way to get more people to come out to our gigs! The place was only half full, and half of those were friends and family. Ah well, it’s August and everyone is away. Still, the music is happening, and so they’ll come eventually. Meanwhile it’s time to start reaching out to other venues so we can build the thing that way.
AI Goals
It’s goal setting time at my day job again. Upper management at my company is all a-tizzy about the AI hype going ’round these days, so this year they asked everyone in the organization to submit an “AI Goal”. I thought I’d have some fun with it and have an AI help me write it. Here’s what we came up with:
Everyone is worried about losing their job to an AI. So the first goal obviously is to not get replaced by an AI. Failing this, a reasonable backup goal would be to get laid off with an adequate severance so I can retire in comfort and style. Of course it’s not just software developers who should worry, it’s everyone who makes their living using words. As a bonus goal, maybe it would be fun to see whoever thought up that everyone should have an AI goal get replaced by an AI.
Second, vibe coding is all the rage these day, but why stop there? Let’s start doing vibe configs, vibe deploys, vibe QA, vibe PRDs, vibe project management and vibe roadmapping. Maybe even vibe goal setting!!!
But seriously, I work in AI every day; using AI tools to build AI products is central to my job for the coming year. What could go wrong? Well, even as AI (in the present day usage of the term to mean conversational chatbots driven by LLMs) presents opportunities, it has its problems too. It is massively overhyped right now, widely misunderstood in terms of its capabilities, and replete with fundamental flaws including unavoidable inaccurate and false information, massive theft of other people’s intellectual properties, and vast wastefulness of electricity and other resources, to name a few. Better to approach these things with a sense of calm and rationality. Also try to be less snarky and sarcastic.
AI represents a potential existential threat not just to [our company] but to everybody who values thoughtfulness and truth. I’m starting to suspect that [our vice president’s] secret genius plan is to get over the hype bubble and “poisoning the well” problem as quickly as possible by leaning into AI, and then other side [our company] will emerge as source of true, accurate and reliable information, which will be valued at a premium as never before.
My manager liked it and signed off. Hey, at least we weren’t asked to come up with crypto/blockchain goals.
Origami USA 2025 Convention
July 22, 2025
Just got back from the Origami USA 2025 Convention. Lots of fun, lots, of folding, lots of friends. The big news this year is that Jeannie joined the convention committee and helped run everything on site all weekend, including leading the registration and check in. This being a volunteer organization, lots of people including myself were quite happy she stepped up to join the leadership.
Meanwhile I spent the week before the convention trying to advance some ideas I had for new models. I kinda had a hard getting back into doing origami this year. Martin passed away just two weeks after last year’s convention, and it took me until the winter to unpack my stuff, and this led to a whole reorganization of my studio. I threw out several boxes worth of old origami, and as I went thru them I rediscovered a bunch of ideas I’d been working on. I finally got out of my rut in springtime when Ilan asked me to make a video for an upcoming online event. The model was my Semi-Sunken Icosahedron, which is composed of triangle and sunken pentagonal pyramids in the shape of a ball. I perfected some internal details of the folding sequence and closure. This led me to also perfect my Dimpled Icosahedron, and a variation with hexagons and pentagons like a soccer ball.
I was on a roll, so I dusted off an idea that I had never finished before, a Dimpled Dodecahedron, where the sunken triangles make the overall form that resembles an icosidodecahedron. The dodecahedron is a very hard shape to fold, for a few reasons. First, it’s made of pentagons, and so requires a fivefold geometry throughout. Second, unlike squares, rectangles, rhombi, triangles or hexagons, pentagons do not tile the plane, so one must use a non-repeating quasicrystal pattern for the layout. Third, once you get into the 3-D part of it, the faces come together in threes, so there’s no straight lines on the internal layers that develop. They always have to turn a corner, which can get awkward and difficult.
I’d folded a version this shape before, using a layout that has the middle of a pentagonal face at the center of the paper (a.k.a. the north pole), and five flaps from the edges of the paper coming together to form the lock at the south pole. This layout works well for models such as my Stellated Dodecahedron and Great Dodecahedron, where there’s a vertex in the center of what would other wise be a pentagonal face. But it’s unsatisfactory for the Dimpled Dodecahedron, because one of the faces is not smooth but has the five pinwheel flaps coming together.
So I’ve been trying to work out a new layout where the center of the paper is a the vertex of three pentagons, and the lock is also three pentagons coming together with tabs in a spiral. Unfortunately, this layout is even harder. For one thing, it requires a decagon rather than a pentagon as the starting shape, since the central point has three wedges of 3/10 coming together for the pentagons, and a gap of 1/10. Then this gap becomes an internal ridge that has to get folded away in a zigzag fashion to get to the south pole. I folded a number of studies, but but had not worked out how to close the model by Friday afternoon when it was time to head into the city for convention.
Jeannie had gone in to the city in the morning by train, and Michelle and I drove in after she got home from work. Once we arrived it was the usual chaos and buzz of setting up my exhibit, meeting up with friends, going out to dinner and returning for late night folding. We stayed at the hotel Friday and Saturday nights since Jeannie had be there early to run the registration desk.
Saturday morning I ended up in the exhibit space talking to people the whole morning. For lunch a group of us found a Mexican restaurant that was serving breakfast burritos along with margaritas. In the afternoon I taught my first class: my Flying Saucer and Retro Rocket, two of my favorite models from my spaceship collection. Each is foldable in ten to twenty minutes. That evening a bunch of use went to an Irish pub for dinner.
When we got back I showed John Montroll my progress with my dodecahedron and explained the difficulty with the hidden layers of paper. I know he’s spent alot of time thinking and working on one-sheet polyhedra, having written several books on the topic. He took one look at my CP and immediately spotted a troublesome confluence of pentagons. He suggested an alternative layout where three pentagons come together and the negative space between them forms a sort of double fork, which can be collapsed symmetrically, thus sidestepping the turn-the-corner problem. I modified my design to take advantage of his insight and began folding a new study. This was a three-quarter sphere (nine pentagons instead of twelve) to see if the layout would work in practice before I dealt with designing the closure and the lock. Shawnuff it was a big improvement, although it took me until Sunday afternoon to get far enough to demonstrate it.
Sunday lunchtime I ran the Paper Airplane contest, this time with the help of Michelle and Paul Frasco. It’s really alot of fun and amazing how people get so into it. The space we use has a spectator gallery, which adds to the excitement. This year, in addition to the usual prizes (gift certificates for the origami store), Boice donated some high-end supercomplex books from Japan as extra prizes.
Sunday I taught another class, this time my Narwhal, which don’t believe I’ve taught before, and haven’t folded in ages. I’m kind of amazed how many people still like my book Origami Animal Sculptures, and come up to me to say it’s one of their favorite books, and ask to me sign it for them. A surprising number of people also asked me about when I’m going to publish another book. I’d love to, and indeed I have enough models for three or four books. But diagramming is alot of work, and so is pulling everything together to make a complete book out of a collection of diagrams. Right now I don’t have a publisher, so I’m looking at self-publishing on Amazon, and that’s a whole ‘nuther level of work. Not to mention that my we site is fiver year out of date for just photographing my models and posting the pics with a basic blurb.
Sunday evening a bunch of us went out to dinner at a Raman place. I ended up sitting next to Robert Lang, and he told me about his current plans and progress around rebuilding his house and his studio, both of which burned down earlier this year in wildfires. Everyone in the community is concerned for him and very supportive, and I must say his resilience and positive attitude are remarkable. His eyes lit up when he described how he’s going to build a new dream origami studio expressly for his needs. Of course it’ll be a couple years before it’s all done and ready to move in. Meanwhile he and Michael LaFosse made a stack of Origamido paper incorporate the ashes from his old studio and his countless lost origami models.
Sunday night was the Giant Folding contest, and I helped Marc Kirschenbaum judge the entries. More great fun and alot of very cool models.
Monday was pretty chill. Jeannie and I slept in late and arrived around noon, and went out to lunch with Eric Ma and Brian Webb. I spent most of the afternoon hanging out with John Montroll (his new collection is Gnomes, which are adorable and a ton of fun to fold!), Brian Chan, Jon Tucker and a few other people. Talked guitars and music with Marc Kirschenbaum. I successfully folded a full model of my dodecahedron. It’s definitely supercomplex and takes some time. But the layout clearly works and it all collapses nicely. All that remains to arrange to tabs for lock to close the model.
I talked to Nicholas Terry for a little while. He hasn’t been to OUSA in a few years, but he was special guest this year, coming over from France. He also asked about when I planned to publish another book, and after I explained my situation he offered to help. Wow, awesome, we’ll see if anything comes of it. In any event he won’t be back home for a few weeks. He brought his family out to the States and they’re taking a month-long vacation around the American west. Very cool.
So even as the convention recedes, I feel freshly motivated again. Hopefully that will translate into making time to do origami every week like I do for music. Designing, folding exhibit-quality instances of my models, photographing, making CPs, posting to my web site, diagraming, page and books layouts, etc. Eventually I’ll get into a rhythm and the results of my efforts will begin to accumulate.
Sunny
A week went by and now it’s July. To celebrate my birthday I went and saw Sungazer at the Blue Note in Manhattan. This was a different configuration than I’d seen the before. The core group of drums, bass guitar and keyboards was accompanied by not just a single sax player but by an entire big band! It was pretty mind blowing. They did big band arrangements of a bunch of their songs (plus a Duke Ellington number), which I’d describe as jazz-adjacent prog rock jam band. My kind of weird for sure. With the addition of the big band the sound was somewhere between Steely Dan, Zappa, and Joco’s Word of Mouth. I must say the band was awesome and the arrangements were great, but my only criticism is the band played just over one hour. I mean, I know how much work it is to compose, write out and rehearse all those parts, but you could’ve thrown in a drum solo and some stuff like that.
The hot weather continues, but not as hot as before. Last week I did couple more ten-mile bike rides. Trying to get out early in the morning these days to beat the heat.
It’s goal setting time at work, and in addition to the usual stuff, they want everyone to come up with and AI goal. Let’s see if I can have some fun with that…
For fourth of July we went up to Buffalo for a few days to visit my Mum and Dad. Kathleen and the kids were there, and Lizzy and Josh came over too. I must say my Mum was in much better sprits than she was back in June. My brother Jim and my nephew William came out to visit them for a couple weeks in June, and helped out with a bunch of things, so that made a big difference. Kathleen’s kids got me some awesome birthday presents. Charlie made me a 3-D printer dice jail in the form a castle, using a very cool filament that glows iridescent green blue and purple when you look at it from different angles. Way cool! And Abbie drew me a card with a picture of a Mimic that unfolds to show the teeth and gaping maw of the monster. Also Lizzy got me a pair of drumsticks from the Rock’n’Roll hall of Fame, and Michelle got me a comic book: Godzilla vs. Thor #1.
We drove up the evening of the 3rd and arrived late, stayed in a hotel in East Aurora, a cool little artsy town. I’ve always wanted to take some time to check it out. The day of the fourth we basically spent the whole time going the the park and sitting on my parent’s back porch drinking beers and barbecuing and listening to class rock. Perfect. In the evening we went to the fireworks show, which was great.
We got home last night and everyone was pretty tired. Today I had a much needed day off, but my list of thighs too is growing longer faster than my free time. Today my replacement MBox arrived and I plugged it in an it just worked with no additional hassles, at least for playback, so that’s lucky. Tomorrow I’m going to test out the recording side.
New Song: Flock of Fools, Part I
Here’s a rough mix of the last song from the first batch of tunes for the upcoming Spellbound record. This brings us up to twelve minutes of recorded music in six months, a blazing pace for me. That’s less than a third of the total running time of the record, but more than half in terms of the number of songs. Two of the remaining three songs are about another twelve minutes combined, and the last one is most of an album side. This one did not appear on the original recording, but I added a couple of songs to bring up to the length of a full-length LP record. I wrote it around the same time the Spellbound songs, and fits in thematically.
Flock of Fools was a song idea I had for my prog rock band Infinigon, which was active from 1986 to 1988. We mostly played covers of bands like Yes, King Crimson, Rush, ELP, Pink Floyd, Genesis and others. We also had aspirations to write our own material, but little experience at it, so it was slow going and took up lots of rehearsal time. Flock of Fools was long and complicated song with a lyric and all, but we never worked it up to be able to play it out. I continued to work on it after the band split up, and at one point in the early 90’s must have made a midi demo, which is the basis of this track. This is only part 1, a heavy drum and organ instrumental to serve as an extended intro to the main song. I’ve subsequently taken pieces from some of the other sections and reworked them into other tunes including Angel or Alien, and King’s Hex. I don’t think I’ve ever done the main section of the song, but may someday.
This is the shortest tune on the record, under two minutes. I’m thinking of using it as an intro into another song now, possibly to the eighteen-minute epic that comprises most of side two. It’s about the misfortunes of a sailor who goes off the sea the world and look for adventure, and is itself a continuation of the two-part suite that opens the record. If I do this, I may rename the track Tempest Fugitive.
Like the other songs so far, this track uses patches from my venerable Roland Alpha-Juno, most notably the Rock Organ 42, layered in with sounds from my onboard SampleTank software synth. There’s also a swoopy bloopy synth intro/outro that utilizes layered patches from the Roland as well as my rarely-usedMoog Phatty. This was knob jam that cannot be created in midi.
I added a lead guitar part that was not in original track in the spirit of “what would Martin do?” Inspired by his solo on Sandcastles, it turned to be fairly Frippy, with lots of compression and sustain for a heavy overdrive sound, mainly on long high notes. It was good to be able to explore this kind of thing without having to cop a specific part.
I was hoping to one more mixdown after listening back, but unfortunately, my MBox, the heart and soul of my recording studio, bit the dust sometime last week. (Maybe coincidentally, my garage door opener started glitching right around the same time.) The lights light up and it communicates with the computer, but it doesn’t output any sound from my DAW. Oh tragedy! The thing is about fifteen years old, and connected to an equally old computer, running an equally old version of ProTools. I’m hoping I can find a replacement MBox and be able to plug it in and it all just works, but if not the whole system may be kaput. Too bad, I had it set up in a way that really works for me, with effects plugins and synthesizer sounds that I’ve gotten to know very well, and I think of as part of my sound, to say nothing of being able to pull up twenty years worth of recorded songs if I want to remix them or anything like that. Ah well, all things must pass.
Indeed, I’ve been planning a replacement and major upgrade to my studio for some time now. I have modern-era computer that has Logic Pro and Reaper installed on it, and I have a new 8-channel audio interface I bought in the wintertime, along with a set of mics and stands to mic up my drum kit. Only problem is I haven’t had the time to get it all wired up and configured.
Last summer I was planning on producing an album of Martin’s songs, and I was going to use Reaper, since that’s his DAW software package of choice. And he was gonna help me get to know his favorite effects and sounds and all that as part of the process. Obviously that did not come to pass. When I finally regrouped and decided the next record would be the Spellbound project, I decided to use my old rig one last time, at least to start with, just to get making music as fast as possible. The plan to record live drums requires using the new rig, so that will get me a pathway there. I’d figured I could compare the two ways of working and find comparable sounds in the new system.
The other thing holding me back was after last July’s origami convention, my studio, which a combination origami and music studio with a finite amount of space, was just plain full up. There was no place to put away new paper or any more folded models. There were no clear work surfaces. It was upstairs all over the dining room too. Around Thanksgiving I had to clear the dining room table, and the situation became clearly unsustainable. Around Xmastime I started reorganizing my studio, throwing things out to make more space, and all that. It was a much bigger job than I anticipated, and I’m still not done yet. Mostly there though. And we have a long weekend coming up. Soon, soon.
Anyway, after all that rambling, here is the track Flock of Fools, Part I. Enjoy!
https://zingman.com/music/mp3/spellbound25/FlockOFools16a.mp3
Halfway Up and Halfway Down
Well the year is half over. I guess I’ve done about half the things I wanted to this year. I certainly got alot of stuff done, and there’s certainly still alot of stuff to do.
One thing in the last half of June is finally stopped raining and went straight up to 100 degrees. It’s been above ninety most days the last week and a half. Last Saturday, right at the start of the heat wave, we had a barbecue and a party, but everyone stayed indoors until early evening when it was time to light the grill. Luckily (or by good planning) we put in the front air conditioner the night before. Kathleen and the kids came down, and so did Lizzy and Josh. Nick and Lisa and Geo and Sara came out from Long Island, and a couple of Lizzy’s friends and their boyfriends turned up too. Burgers, dogs, chicken, salads and desserts, beer and booze. Built a fire once if got dark. A great time.
Jeannie and I both had last Friday off, and it turned out to be the one cool day, so we got back into doing long bike rides. I did my usual sixteen miles, and for the first time this season broke 14mph as my average speed to reach 14.1! Probably because it was less crowded than on a weekend, so I didn’t have to slow down as often. Overall I’ve been feeling good physically. I don’t know if it’s because of the heat, or massive doses of vitamin D every time I go outside, but I’ll take it. For the last year or so I’ve been having low-grade pain in the joints of my shoulders, elbows and fingers, and that’s suddenly gone away. I think part of the reason is the handlebars on my new bike are better ergonomically. Anyway, I’m back up to 115 lbs. on my free weight dumbbells and 196 on bench press. Hoping to reach 120/200 by the end of the year.
Sunday we finally got a beach day after a couple times when the situation wasn’t right. Jeannie and I took our bikes with us and Michelle came along but mostly worked on her tan. We went to Robert Moses State Park on Fire Island. We wanted to go East from the bridge and check out the inlet, but there was no way to get there by bike, only by car on the highway or walking several miles on the beach. So we went to opposite way, past the lighthouse and biked around Kismet, a cute little beach town where they don’t have cars. Fun and interesting perceptive.
Now we’re well into summer and trying to make our plans for July and August and beyond. This weekend I made the schedule for the upcoming OUSA convention, using software I wrote with Robert Lang a few years back. I think we pretty much have all the kinks worked out by now, and everything went smoothly.
New Song – The Silent Hour
Here is a rough mix of the third song for my forthcoming album Spellbound. Unlike the others so far, this one was mainly written by Martin, and the original version of this song was just him singing and accompanying himself on a single electric guitar with no other instruments. I didn’t sing or play anything, but I still get a songwriting co-credit because that’s what we agreed on for all the songs in the project. So for this version, my main task was to learn the song and guitar part. It’s not a particularly hard song, in fact it was probably the first song Martin ever wrote and the chords are very basic. But there’s alot of nuance that I wanted to be sure to capture.
The vocal was pretty straightforward. Martin and I have a similar vocal range and sense of phrasing, and this song was neither very high nor very low in my range. The guitar on the other hand, well let’s just say I’m learning alot about how to record electric guitars. Martin’s original take was just a six-string Ibanez thru whatever amp he had at the time. I don’t believe there were any effects on it other than the tone of the amp. So my first pass was using my PRS six string and my Roland Jazz Chorus amp, and it produced a warm and satisfying sound, definitely in the zone. Being such a sparse arrangement I wanted the gutiar sound to really shine. But it was a little muddy and the low end was uneven, so I got in there with some EQ and compression, and even added an amp modeler as a sidechain effect. Oh the joys of digital production and the endless tweaking it affords.
I added a second guitar track to give it some more depth. (I often double track my keyboard parts.) This one was a 12-string. Martin switched mainly to twelve string sometime in the nineties, and the guitar I used was one that used to be one of his. This time, however, I went direct inject and mixed it into the same sidechain amp effect. All in all it sounds pretty good but I’ll probably continue to tweak it. I might even try again using the 12-string as the main guitar.
But for the time being, here’s the song. Enjoy!
https://zingman.com/music/mp3/spellbound25/TheSlientHour08c.mp3
New Song: Sandcastle Kingdoms
Here’s a rough mix of Sandcastle Kingdoms, the second song for my forthcoming album Spellbound. I don’t really remember too much about writing this one. It’s mainly one of “mine” with me sings lead vocals and having a keyboard part as the spine of the track. I guess I was feeling restless and forlorn at the time, and tapping into that for the lyric.
Musically, it’s pretty much a power ballad, with a repeated 8-bar verse and a bridge. I was aiming for some level of terraced dynamics, building up layers of parts throughout the song. And there’s alot of parts. In addition to the piano bass and drum, there’s a string/brass synthesizer and the guitar. Of course the piano is double-tracked with a Fender Rhodes and the Juno’s Polysynth 1 patch. The drums are midi and samples for now, but I’ll put down real drums later one.
The lead vocals are drenched in effects, although I’ll probably dial that back later. This song was really high in my range and has some really long sustained high notes. It took me a few takes to really nail it. If I were writing this song now I’d probably shift it down to an easier key. But once I found my voice up there it sounded really good, so I kept it.
The synth part is a blend of four patches, two each of synth strings and synth brass, and one of each of those being an onboard sound of my protools rig and the other one from the outboard Juno, being the sounds used on the original recording. I was going for something nice and rich and fat. I still need to go in and add some fader moves to make the brass predominate in the louder sections and the strings in the more delicate parts.
This is the first song where I tried to replicate Martin’s guitar part. Martin didn’t sing on this track and the guitar seemed to be his only contribution. Martin’s sound – the phrasing and the tone – always had a certain magic to it, even from these early recordings. I’ve been listening really close and trying to capture that, but ultimately found it’s elusive and I’m having to make it my own. I’m using a whole different setup, different guitar, amp and effects that sounds like me. But I’m learning alot about how use effects to get different kinds of guitar sounds.
In any event, I copped his solo fairly faithfully because it fit so perfectly in the song. I also paraphrased his riffs in the intro and outro. I even added some new riffs on the the bridge. All this is on a lead guitar track. On the original track Martin also did a bit of noodling around in the verse, but I didn’t duplicate that. Instead I added a second guitar track, low and overdriven with alot of sustain, deep in the background to give the track some fullness and weight. This is the kind of thing Martin used to call “guitariness”. Getting the right sound for this was a learning experiment too, and I’m not finished yet.
So here you go, enjoy!
https://zingman.com/music/mp3/spellbound25/Sandcastles27.mp3
Bungle in the Jungle
Been busy. The rain continues. I went for another long bike ride last weekend despite the rain. This time I did 16 miles in an hour and 8 minutes, which is two minutes better than last week, and an average speed of 14 mph. Also got around to trimming the neighbor’s willow tree that hangs over into our yard. I swear that thing gets bigger every year.
Saturday I taught an Origami Connect event. I taught my model Gladys the Platypus, which uses my hex base. It went well and was alot of fun. Also helping me get my head in gear for the upcoming OUSA convention in July, thinking about what to teach, what to exhibit, and try to get some new stuff finished. On a related note, I’m down to my last two boxes of old origami to consolidate.
Got my performance review at work: “Exceeds expectations”. Man, I really overshot the mark. I was hoping to get laid off with a nice fat severance package so I can get an early start on retirement (just kidding!). In a way I’m a bit surprised because last fall when I was deep in my grief, it felt like there were lots of days when it was pretty hard to focus and function at all, let alone be all creative and innovative and super sharp and tech leadership-y. On the other hand, I did kinda lean into work as something to do to keep me going. Anyway, I guess that’s mostly behind me now. And on the plus side, Data Rights Protocol 1.0 has shipped, and that was my main project since I started this job. Then I successfully transitioned over to a new project on the Experimental Engineering group, and that’s going well so far. Using AI software to write AI software, such irony!
Our D&D campaign has been very entertaining lately. We’re playing The Isle of Dread, which an Expert D&D module from the 80’s that I’m running using 5th edition rules. There’s alot of trekking thru the jungle on the way to central plateau, where there’s an ancient evil temple on an island in a lake in a crater of a dormant volcano. Along the way the party befriend a tribe of flying monkeys and fought a next of evil, magic-using spiders, where they gained a cache or strange magic items.
More recently the party had to cross a river to get to the plateau, and chose a shallow swampy location. Safy and Bart decided to hop across on a chain of small grassy patches sticking up out of the water. Nyx flew across with Skrill on her broomstick as a passenger, left him on the northern shore, and returned to ferry the others. I rolled a Hydra as the wandering monster encounter. I didn’t realize it, but the 5th Edition Hydra is alot more powerful than the old version, and I feared the party might have met its match. Midway on her way back, Nyx was attacked by a five-headed hydra, but she was able to fly away in the nick of time. Combat ensued. Skrill, alone on the far shore, was attacked and almost immediately incapacitated. The Hydra lost two of its heads but regenerated them next round. The party rallied and cut off several more of its heads, although still more grew back. In the end, Aliana the sorceress found a Fireball spell on a scroll and used it to inflict massive damage and finish the beast off.
The party decided to try and ascend to the central plateau by crossing a rope bridge high over the gorge, when they were approached by three pteranodons, a kind of flying relative of the dinosaurs. Bart charmed and befriended one, while Skrill attacked another. The friendly one landed on the bridge, causing Luna, Aliana and Safy to loose their balance and get thrown over the side. Ali and Safy hung on, but Luna plummeted. Nyx threw her broomstick to Luna, who caught it and was able to fly away safely and avoid getting smashed up on the rocks far below. Safy climbed back onto the bridge but Aliana remained hanging. Two pteranodons attacked Skrill, while the 3rd one let Bart and the rabbit climb on its back. Next round, one of the pteranodons attacked Ali, and she fell, but was saved by Luna, after casting magic missile. Safy finished off one of the flying dinosaurs with some holy damage spell. Now we’re at the bottom of the round, with one pteranadon flying away with Bart on its back and Nxy in its claws. Luna and Ali are flying around on a broomstick. Skrill has hooked the last remaining winged beast with his fishing rod and is attempting to reel it in. Safy is hanging out on the rope bridge, looking cool for the moment. I wonder how this will all end.