Zing Blog 2

You might recall I got a new electric guitar a few months back. It’s an Epiphone semihollowbody, and I play it paired with a Roland JC amp, which is great if you want a clean jazzy tone. But what if you want a different tone? I’ve been practicing and learning new songs and I figure it’s time to expand my sonic palette.

Even though I’ve played guitar for many years, it’s been mainly acoustic, with a focus on rhythm and accompanying myself singing. But lately I’ve become more interested in using it for writing, arranging and recording. Still I’ve never really gotten into the whole electric thing. Mainly it’s because the instrument is not just the guitar, but the combination of the the guitar, the amp and the effects. Every guitar player has their own pedalboard set up in their own unique way for their own personal tone that’s, as David Lee Roth says, the ultimate expression of who you really are. This is just too much for me.

I actually have a couple old Boss stompboxes from the ’80’s. They’re both classic effects, Chorus and Overdrive. I used them as part of my synth signal chain back in the day when synthesizers sounded pretty thin live. These days if you look around there are about 1,000 different distortion pedals, blue tone and brown tone and everything in between, for just the right sound, like a wall of exotic hot sauces at a Mexican restaurant. And then another realm of delay, reverb, and modulation to season your tone further. But some odd building blocks do not a temple make. In any event most of my effort in this direction goes toward honing my tone on saxophone, and a close second is learning my way around all the knobs and sliders on the myriad synthesizers I already own.

So I’ve had my eye on a digital multi-effects processor for a long time. Last time I checked in with this space was years ago when Martin lent me one of his Zoom boxes, and I could never really figure out my way around the thing. More recently, Vinny, the guitar player for G-Force, had a single box that was a programmable multi effects board, and he used it to great effect (heheh) on a wide variety of songs in different styles.

So I looked around. I didn’t want anything too complicated. Boss makes one for about $300 with maybe a dozen or twenty knobs, four footswitches and an expression pedal. Seemed like the one to beat. Then they announced a brand new one with maybe forty or more knobs, for about $1000. Definitely moving in the wrong direction.

The one I zeroed in on is the Stomp Lab by Vox. It has only 3 knobs, 2 footswitches and a pedal and is under $100. It arrived the other day, and turned out to be just the thing. Super cool and super fun. Very small but well built with a metal shell and and heavy duty moving parts, made to be stomped on. It’s one to select the patch, one for pre-amp, and one for output gain, plus the expression pedal. Easy peasy! The presets run the gamut from light to heavy, old to modern, all the styles, with varying degrees of things like flange, echo and reverb. You can even program in your own sounds: it’s a full-on amp simulator and mutli-effects modeler. But I bet I can get pretty far just learning my way around the presets. With the knobs on the box plus the ones on the guitar there’s alot of space to color the tone.

I must say I’m really happy that modern digital gear generally sounds really good. I remember when it all had a “digital” sound, that generally meant thin and harsh on the ears. Nowadays even a cheap little FX box sounds killer. I mean, just the guitar and the amp sound great as-is, but it’s that jazz guitar sound. With the FX it’s anything from psychedelic to heavy metal and it’s frickin’ amazing. It’s also super loud! I gotta turn way down.

One big difference between applying effect in post on the computer and doing it live is that the amp makes it interactive. My guitar is very resonant, so it’s easy to get a ton of feedback. Totally changes the way you play. It’s very satisfying to just chug along on a simple riff and let the amp fill in the sound. So it should be fun to explore. Hopefully some new song ideas will come out of it.

Meanwhile I’m practicing sax every day for a half hour these days to seriously memorize all the material for our next jazz gig, in two weeks. For the new rock band we’ve started picking tunes and I’ve been woodshedding those too. And, I bought a new pair of rollerblades last night. More on all this coming soon.

You’re probably thinking hey John, it’s been a long time since I’ve heard about your recording project. What’s going on with that? Well I’m glad you asked.

First of all, all my bands have been on hiatus for the month of August, because everyone in the band is on vacation sometime during the month, usually two or more of us.

Ken and I are putting together a new group and we’ll start rehearsals in September. As you know the old rock band broke up back July when Gina quit in a tantrum after escalating bad behavior. The direction for the new group is fairly open right now, but we both agree we’re tired of playing the same old bar covers and want to do something a bit more experimental. Rush and Steely Dan are high on our list of influences. The drummer is gonna be Steve, who sat in on our last gig. Vinny the guitar player, who is anti-experimental by nature, and pro-play-the-same-songs-over-and-over, decided to play bass in a heavy metal band.

But we found a new guitar player, this dude Glen. He actually auditioned with us about a year ago and had a great sound and energy and fit in with the group, but left after one or two rehearsals. He randomly ran into Ken not too long ago, and explained the reason he didn’t stay with us is that he couldn’t stand Gina (a trend emerges; there was a drummer before Adrian too …) but if there’s ever a new opportunity give him a call.

Meanwhile the jazz group actually rehearsed once without Gary, and with Steve on drums (I think they rehearsed once without me too) so it was pretty much a jam session. I actually brought my alto sax to get in shape on it. Why you ask?

Ah, well back to the recording project. 2018 was a very productive year for Zing Man Studio, having mixed and released a jazz record Haven Street, and completed the third Buzzy Tonic record Elixr, which was eight years in the making. In early 2019 I completed and released a remix and remaster of the previous Buzzy Tonic record Face the Heat, with greatly superior sonic quality.

Since then I’ve been writing, arranging and practicing new material for the fourth Buzzy Tonic record, and I have more material than I can use, so there’s some decisions two be made. Side two will be drawn for a set of songs that cluster thematically, and are a bit unusual for me in that the lyrics are more worked out than the music. In any event I don’t want to start recording until I can sing and play thru the songs on the piano and know them well.

Closer in is a set of songs that may become side one. Two are covers: The Story Lies by Martin, and Who Speaks on Your Behalf by the Cheshire Cat. More on these as the are further along, but you should know I usually do a couple songs I didn’t write between albums, just to try my hand and something and see what I can learn. It also helps me overcome the limitation that whatever I write always sounds like me. So it’s a chance to bring in different sonic and songwriting ideas. Sometimes these make it on the record, sometimes not. Martin has always been very generous about letting me use his material; there’s a least one song of his on every Buzzy Tonic record.

The Story Lies is a song Martin wrote a long time ago, one that I always liked, with a dark and funky vibe, great chords and a great lyric. Speaks on Your Behalf is my favorite song by The Cheshire Cat, a sort of power-prog-pop anthem. The Cat were the best band to come out of Buffalo in the late 80’s and early 90’s, who somehow despite all their talent never got famous. Ah well. Both these songs feature pretty heavy electric guitar, so I might reinterpret the guitar parts on the keys, or I might try and record some guitar parts of my own.

The third song is a new original Plague of Frogs. I can best describe it as a sci-fi battle mini epic, sort of equal measure Bi Tor and Snow Dog by Rush and I.G.Y. by Donald Fagen. Yes, seriously. It’s gonna be about ten minutes long, and the other two are five each, so that’s an album side.

But then along came the wildcard, a song out of the blue, that I’ve now been working the whole year, and it looks like it’ll take me to the end of the year to finish it. It’s another ten-minute song, so I’m actaully on pace to do about twice my usual recording output.

The song is Sun of the Son, and even though it’s not a cover, it might as well be. I wrote it thirty years ago (wow!), in the late ’80’s for Event Horizon, my prog-jazz-fusion band at the time. When Event Horizon performed it, it grew to be a twenty-minute epic with long improvised sections within a larger end-to-end structure including odd meters, exotic modes, and some tricky unison passages. It just grew and grew into a real magnum opus. I played synth along on it with Scooby, as well as the sax, and Mark played bells as well as drums.

We recorded it around Christmastime 1992, or maybe in the new year of 1993 as part of our second album. By this time the band had broken up and I had moved to New York City to go to grad school for computer art and media, since was pretty clear none us were gonna make as rock stars and it was time get on with life. As luck would have it, just before I left town I was in a recording session with another band and the studio had a barbecue with a raffle, the prize being ten hours of free recording time.

Believe or not Jeannie won the raffle and so became executive producer for the record. We had no money so we had to get the entire project done within the ten hours. I was home on break and we got the band back together for a couple rehearsals and went in and laid down the tracks in a marathon session staring around midnight (that was the catch with free studio time, you had to do it when the studio was available.) No overdubs, no edits, no nothing. I left two hours for mixing and mastering, so that pretty much consisted of setting some levels on the tracks and master compressor and letting it roll down to two tracks. Bam, done!

The band was together for about five years, so we all knew the material well and got some great performances. But obviously it was not as tight or polished as it could have been if we, well, had more time. For Son of the Sun, we actually did two takes cuz there was a train wreck around the fifteen-minute mark of the first take. Man that was hard to pull it together and start over at 5:30 AM.

So anyway, this song as been with me all these years. Last year I tried to bring it in to my new jazz group Haven Street. My idea was to recast into more of a Latin montuno feel. Some of the guys liked it, some though it wasn’t really our sound, and in any event we could work up three or four other songs in the time it would take to do this one. I could see that, so I tired to cut it down but couldn’t see how without losing something vital. I ended up writing a new song, Wolf Whisper, which came out of experimenting with how to make the middle section of more amenable the sound of the new group. The new song sounded nothing like it, but being made for the group, the guys like it much better. Life goes on.

Then one night when I was going thru old files on my computer, sifting thru all the old half-written fragments to see if there was something I could use to go with all the lyrics I have (see above), I came across an old MIDI rendition of Son of the Sun that I must’ve laid down sometime in the ’90s, when electronic music was my day job, that I’d totally forgotten about.

It wasn’t that great musically or sonically by my current standards. All the instruments were MIDI, and the bass and drums sounded pretty stiff. But it did capture the entire complicated structure and was a workable foundation for a new version. I had to go for it.

On thing I did was trim it down to half its original length, from 19:30 to 9:45. I cut out a long, atmospheric intro with a bells solo, and I brought the jam sections in the middle down to a minute or two each. This still left quite a bit of music. Then I re-tracked the piano part, which is the spine of the song, to sound less mechanical, and re-tracked a second keyboard (my part back in the day) which is now basically vibes.

Then I focused on the drums, giving them more human feel and dynamics and changing the groove and hits where necessary. I’ll probably take one more pass at that once the other instruments are in place. I learned the bass part on actual electric bass and recorded that. I’m not at the level of a cat like Jim Wynn, who played on the original recording, as far as free expressiveness goes, but it’s solid and has a good pocket. Still to come is a new synth part, which will pull together several synth pad, bass and lead parts from the MIDI demo.

Next is time for the sax part. I wrote the song on alto. But I must say I never really dug my alto playing and was always drawn to the tenor; it just felt more like my natural voice. Also being in Eb is a pain; it kinda feels like driving on the wrong side of the road or writing in a language without types. For another thing I went to the same high school as Jay Beckenstein and was tired of people comparing us to Spyro Gyra when I was trying to do something much heavier.

In 1992 was was finally able to afford a tenor because I was moving to NYC and had sold my car. Once I got it I never looked back. (That horn turned out to be a great investment BTW, a Mark VII Selmer, and I still have it.)

But the saxophone is a weird instrument, very asymmetrical to play across different keys, and you have to decide whether to play in a higher or lower register when moving to a different horn. (Playing Charlie Parker on the tenor has the same problem.) When I adapted SotS to tenor, there was a part that required me to go into the high altissimo range for a fast, tricky run of 16th notes that modulates midway thru. I came close on the record, but didn’t quite nail it. Then there’s another section I have to play down the octave cuz it’s even higher, and I never liked that way that changed the sound.

So I was never quite satisfied with the recording for that reason as well. Now when I went to practice it on tenor I still couldn’t nail that one riff, so I decided to give it a go on alto.

I’m happy to say that my alto sound and feel is much better than I remember. I guess this is not too surprising. My alto sound is the prototype for my tenor sound, and was as big and loud as I could make it, with a wider bore Dukoff mouthpiece and number four reed, to go head to head with an electric guitar. (Kieth played a Les Paul thru a Marshall amp with a Rockman effect unit and the last band he was in before he joined us was a Metallica cover band.) It turned out to be the right move going back playing alto for this song, and I’ve been having great fun woodshedding. I’m well on my way to laying down the definitive take.

In fact, I have all the composed sections down, and am now in the question of how to approach the solos. Doing this song I’m actually breaking a longstanding rule of mine, that is not to try and do jazz on the computer. The thing that makes jazz work is the live interaction between listening, responsive human musicians in the moment, and that’s just impossible to recreate. At worst it comes off like a bad CG fight scene in a superhero movie. At best of course it’s a creative opportunity.

So I’m searching for alternatives. Ken and Erik have both offered to lay down tracks for me on the bass and drums respectively. But even though they’re both great players, doing it overdubbed onto an existing track may not work out so well.

One thing is I’m letting myself be influenced by Kamasi Washington. All his records have a very textural, layered, groove-oriented sound that might be a useful touchstone. As for other influences …

As luck would have it again, the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock Art and Music Festival was last weekend. Jeannie watched a documentary on it that focused on the behind the scenes planning and logistics, and the narrowly-averted humanitarian crisis due a crowd an order of magnitude larger than planned for showing up.

Someone made a playlist on Spotify reconstructing the entire concert from the bands’ setlists. Where there was no concert recording available from Woodstock they substituted another version. I got thru a good chunk of it, up to Santana, and listened to alot of great music I’d never heard before.

The thing that caught my ear was Ravi Shankar, who I’m familiar with but haven’t listened to in depth in a long time. (Mark from Event Horizon was a big fan and had studied Ragas and the Tabla.) I went on a deep dive, and this led me to Terry Riley, who was one of those guys I’d always heard about (e.g. as the Riley in The Who’s Baba O’Riley) but never really knew well. He’s considered one of the godfathers of electronic music composition. In the 60’s when he did alot of his pioneering work, he said his goal was to combine Indian Ragas with Miles Davis style modal jazz, using electronics. Here was the perfect template for computer jazz, and very compatible with the Kamasi vibe too.

So we’ll see how it goes, but I think at this point it’s just a matter of laying down the tracks and finishing it.