Category: Music

Last Saturday night I had the opportunity to hang out and jam with my friend Erik. It was a good time. I miss playing with other musicians; it’s something I should do more often. I was always playing in one or more bands from 10th grade until Lizzy was born. Hopefully soon the kids will be old enough that I can think about putting together a group or regular jam session again. Meanwhile I practice regularly to keep up my skillz, and I have my recording project and the occasional jam like this to get by on.

Anyway, I mainly played piano and sax while Erik played guitar and piano, and even some drums, and we both sang. We jammed and jammed until we were too tired to play anymore, and then we watched Concert For George to top it off. Here’s a partial list of songs we covered:

Let It Rain (Clapton)
Fire On the Mountain (Grateful Dead)
(some Little Feet song)
Hey Nineteen (Steely and the Dans)
Black Cow (Steely and the Dans)
Home at Last Steely and the Dans)
Oh! Darling (Beatles)
For No One (Beatles)
The Long and Winding Road (Beatles)
Naima (John Coltrane)
Mr. P. C. (John Coltrane)
(drums and sax jam)
Because (Beatles)
You Never Give Me Your Money (Beatles)
I Want You (She’s So Heavy)
Whiter Shade of Pale (Procal Harem)

Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More (Allman Brothers Band)
What Is and Should Never Be (Led and the Zeppelins)
The Rain Song (Led and the Zeppelins)
All Of My Love (Led and the Zeppelins)
All Along the Watchtower (Dylan)
Too Many People (Paul McCartney)
Maybe I’m Amazed (Paul McCartney)
I’m Only Sleeping (Beatles)
Beast of Burden (Rolling Stones)
(some U2 song)
Can’t Find My Way Home (Blind Faith)
Low Spark of High Heeled Boys (Traffic)
Lady Madonna (Beatles)
Waiting Room (Blick original)
Let It Shine (Blick original)

I just finished updating the Music Page of my website. I created a page for my new work-in-progress album, which for now is titled Face the Heat. I recorded three songs for it in the last year, just one short of an album side, so it’s progressing along nicely. I also created a page for the song lyrics. Be sure to check back periodically for new tracks.

I have new song called The Nine. It’s actually a new incarnation of a song that I had written years ago, but I liked it enough to want to revisit it. I had previously recorded it with the duo Flip|Hippo, but we did the recording under enormous time pressure and I was never really satisfied with the sax playing. Plus I wanted to do something new with it, much like the song The Beat Is Red on the Buzzy Tonic emerged from an older demo.

The Nine is based on a nine-note ostanato played by two pianos. The pattern phases every nine bars. On top of is layered the rhythm section and melody. It is both flowing and machine-like, sort of relentless and melancholy, but my new version highlights the dramatic tension of the song across the choruses. I added a break in the middle, and a lyric. I also double track the saxophone, blending in with the synth part.

The lyric was in a way inspired by the recent Led Zeppelin reunion. There was a time when the Zep was my favorite band of all time. I haven’t listened to them in years, but was inspired to go back and play all of their records, and they still sound awesome to my ears. There’s a lot of really subtle stuff going on that sets their sound apart from other 70’s bands that I never picked up on as a kid. >Still, I don’t play guitar like Jimmy Page or sing like Robert Plant, or drum like Bonzo, so there’s not much I can take and apply to my own work. Ah yes, there’s on thing. It’s cool to pepper your songs with references to Tolkien.

Actually, I just finished reading an unpublished novel my brother Martin wrote quite a few years ago. It’s quite good. It’s set in a swords & sorcery milieu, so I might write a lyric incorporating ideas from that. No one would know what it’s about but I don’t think that would matter. Lots of traveling thru the woods in the snow.

The other thing about this song is it’s kind of heavy on the synths and effects. I mainly use software synthesizers nowadays, but there were a couple sounds on my 90’s version I really liked. So I fired up my venerable Kurzweil K2000RS synthesizer/sampler and dialed up the a patches. I haven’t used that thing in years and have forgotten what a great sounding piece of gear it is. I’ll have to remember to use it in more of my recordings. I may go back and add some pads on Angel or Alien using that.

Meanwhile, let me say what an enormous pain is to do both midi and audio simultaneously on my set up. I was getting all kinds of hum and noise on the line in when the outboard midi was hooked up. I finally figured out that the problem was my port replicator. I do all my studio work on my laptop, on the USB ports on the dock are not properly shielded, or so it seems. When I moved the jack for the midi to a port on the side of the machine, the problem went away. Fortunately, I got a new Mac a month or so ago. The idea is to use it as the center of my recording studio going forward, but I wanted to wait until I was done with this song before I switched over. Hopefully the problem with the port noise will go away. But moving into the new machine is a whole ‘nuther project and a whole ‘nuther post.

Anyway, here’s the link.

Before I launch into the next set of tracks for my new album, I thought I’d take a listen to what I have so far. I find it’s good to this to a group of songs. So burned a CD for the car and uploaded them on my iPod for the train ride. Listening to mixes on inferior systems in noisy a environments is a good way to make sure it degrades gracefully, as important features of the music can’t be heard. Overall it’s sounding good, but I made a new batch of mixes.

Marfa My Dear being a cover is not really destined for the record, but it still seemed it could stand some improvement. I mainly reduced the level of chorus on the vocals, reduced the effects on the piano, and boosted the sax and the bass guitar. Added a peak limiter to the master out.

Letter From Home, also a cover, and therefore an oddity for the hypothetical box set. This one was just an effects tweak too:  reversed the order of the chorus and delay in the effects chain on the horn, and it’s a good deal nicer to my ear. Also boosted the bass guitar a tad and added a peak limiter to the master out.

Heat Wave is the first original song in the new batch, and I put it aside when I got to the first rough mix. Now I’ve come back to sharpen it up. Now I’ve added a clav part to the chorus and bridge to give a little rhythmic counterpoint to the piano and bass. I also cleaned up the sax part and added some effects for the sax solo, and adjusted the levels of pretty much everything. For a while I had been thinking the horns weren’t bright enough, and maybe I should double the part on alto. But not the tenor sounds a bit more on top, so that may not be necessary.

Angel Or Alien of course is the song I developed over the summer. I made one more mix that cleaned up the lead synth and added some percussion in the middle section. I did a few experiments after that with backing vocals and more percussion but wasn’t satisfied with the result. I have one more thing I want to try, adding some drum fills in the tutti section, and maybe some atmospheric synths in the very beginning and/or end.

So enjoy the new mixes. Now I’m trying to decide what to work on next. I have lots of songs that are partway developed, but I narrowed it down to two that are pretty are along and also relatively short.  One is an instrumental in 9/8 in the key of E minor; I did a demo of it years ago. Another is a sort of bitter twisted stride number in 7/8 in C minor that I wrote in 2004 or so. But then just today I wrote a new song. I’ve been looking to do something really simple, in contrast to all these crazy chords and meters I’ve been doing. I came up with a riff I like based on the change C, Em, F in a classic R&B soul groove.  Today as I walking back from lunch I came up with a lyric and melody, and nice love song to Jeannie. So I’m excited about this and think it’ll hop to the top of the queue.

Well it’s not all been home improvement projects of late, so shifting gears here: My new song, Angel or Alien, is getting close to done. It’s a quasi-autobiographical number, a sort of sci-fi reverie based on contemplating the wonder of the night sky, combined with some speculation about things that can be seen but not readily explained.

As mentioned before, it features an analog-style synthesizer solo in the middle section. Now in the old days I would have played this on a real synthesizer and twiddled the knobs live. I’m particularly keen on sweeping some lowpass filters and adding some big FLO here as an effect here and there. But my setup has gone all digital and fully computerized, so I ended up using a software synthesizer inside proTools for the patch, and the keyboard I played has only the basic pitch wheel and modulation control. So I’m hoping I can map some continuous controllers to the software synth model and either perform these moves as essential an overdub, or just pencil them in.

More importantly, I finalized the lyrics in the last week and laid down a vocal track just the other night. I normally do several takes on my vocals and edit them together to form a master lead vocal track. As soon as this is done, I’ll post a rough mix. Still to do is possible backing vocals and sweetening instruments (backing synths, etc.), and the aforementioned lead synth knob twiddling. But I want to listen to the song a few times before I get to that, so it won’t stop me from posting the first rough mix.

Meanwhile, you can meditate on the lyrics.

…

Angel or Alien
by John Szinger

Walking home alone the other night
When looking up the sky ahead I saw a light
I quickly identified it at as a UFO
But what it really was I don’t know
Was it an angel or an alien ?
Or was it something else again ?

Hover above the world we weave with our machines
One giant step or small leap it’s of our means
For what could be more human than to
Make a thing to do the thing you do?
But is it a demon or is it a dinosaur ?
Is it something more?

Walk on said the man in the moon
Why do the stars in the sky ?
Walk on said the man in the moon
Moonchild teach me to fly
They know you’ve walked miles alone
All that has shone upon soon will be shown
Walk on said the man in the moon
Go home, go home yeah

Twelve thousand years that they’ve been gone
An outer orbit on that big wheel one time ’round
But they’re on their way now, yeah they’re coming home
The stars are aligned man in the moon will leave his light on
All night long

And do they come to enlighten and set us free ?
Or to blind us with bling and enslave us with TV ?
And will they bring death to the world of illusions
Ideas categories ambitions confusions
A shooting star is a sign in the sky calling
So is it a meteor or just a metaphor falling?

Look up said the man in the moon
How can the stars in their turn?
Look up said the man in the moon
Moonchild teach me to learn
They know you’ve walked dark years in dreams
Look deeper and see that it’s not what it seems
Look up said the man in the moon
Go home, go home yeah