{"id":143,"date":"2008-10-17T14:34:59","date_gmt":"2008-10-17T19:34:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zingman.com\/blog\/?p=143"},"modified":"2008-10-17T14:34:59","modified_gmt":"2008-10-17T19:34:59","slug":"new-song-who-can-fool-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/17\/new-song-who-can-fool-me\/","title":{"rendered":"New Song: Who Can Fool Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who is the greater fool, the fool or the fool who follows?<\/em><\/p>\n

I’ve been working on a new song called “Who Can Fool Me?” It’s a defiant and bitter song, a reaction to the constant lies and manipulation coming from the media and the forces of power in our society, and how everyone seems to go along with it rather than maintaining the sovereignty of one’s own mind and judgment. Or something like that. I came up with the basic idea for the song a few years back, and refined it this fall.<\/p>\n

The arrangement and feel of the song is tense end edgy, and takes a cue from old-time cartoon jazz, but sort of warped and twisted and blended with modern electronica. Structurally, it’s basically a C minor blues, played in a stride style, but in 7\/4 time. The basic blues chords are embellished with upward chromatic harmonic movement.<\/p>\n

The recording came together pretty quickly. It looks I’ll be done with it in less than two months, which is much better than the 3 or 4 months some of my other songs took. Admittedly those were longer songs and this one is only three minutes but still, I may be getting better at this! At this point I’m pretty much done except for two things. One is editing and mixing the vocals; I have an effects treatment in mind.<\/p>\n

The other a synthesizer solo. I have a virtual orchestra consisting of a synth mellotron, a synth string section, and two real saxophones – a tenor and a soprano. The lead synth, combines with the 2 saxes is designed to evoke the classic horn section of a trumpet, clarinet and tenor sax, as used by for example Raymond Scott. So I want the synth to sound something like a cross between a gutbucket trumpet played with a plunger mute and wah-wah guitar on overdrive.<\/p>\n

This gave me occasion to plug in my venerable Yamaha VL-70 wind synthesizer. It is a very cool piece of technology that produces sounds thru physical modeling. The sounds are responsive to multiple realtime continuous controls, and the unit is designed to work with a wind controller such as Yamaha’s WX-11. The combo of the WX-11 and VL-70 is very playable, and feels alot like playing a real saxophone. It’s been years since I’ve played this thing, I spent most of my last session simply getting used to the instrument, and paging thru the presets (256 of them) to see what I liked. I found several patches that fall either into the “brass” or “guitar” category, but no suitable morph of the two.<\/p>\n

I finally settled on a muted jazz trumpet patch just to lay down a rough take to have something to listen back to on the train. Amazingly, that patch sounds almost too real. I just ran the audio out of the VL straight into protools, but next time I think I’ll capture the MIDI instead and pass it back out to render the audio like an overdub. This will enable me to do multiple passes with two different patches. Over time I’ve found it’s usually quicker to get a particular sound by blending two patches than by going nuts twiddling the knobs and programming your custom sounds. (Believe me I’m not lazy, I’ve spent plenty of time twiddling knobs!) And although the solo is fine, the part as a whole is unusable because I was seriously overplaying. I need to be much sparser, take more space and interact more with the other instruments. Usually I don’t worry too much about planning out my solos in advance, as I kind of work it out subconsciously as I’m writing and arranging. But this one needs a bit more work. Still all in all it was a successful experiment, and I feel set up to nail it the next session.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

Who Can Fool Me?<\/strong>
\nJohn Szinger, 2004 – 2008<\/p>\n

You can’t fool me
\nThis time won’t be same
\nI see you play your game
\nI’ve heard it all before
\nThis time I’m keeping score and
\nYou can give me the runaround but<\/p>\n

You can’t fool me
\nYou’re pretty good at lying
\nI’ll give you points for trying
\nThis time my mind’s made up
\nIt’s rain in a paper cup and
\nYou can try to steal my sound but<\/p>\n

You can’t fool me
\nAlthough you make rules
\nBut still I know what’s true
\nYeah I’ve been there and back
\nThis time I’m keeping track
\nYou can try to lead me on but<\/p>\n

You can’t fool me
\nAlthough you’re so much stronger
\nYou’ve been around much longer
\nYou want to push me ’round
\nI’m gonna stand my ground and
\nYou can try to knock me down but<\/p>\n

You can’t fool me
\nAnd now you’re playing cupid
\nYou know I’m not that stupid
\nYeah I can see right thru
\nI know what I have to do and
\nYou can try to make me dance but<\/p>\n

You can’t fool me
\nI don’t buy your fantasy
\nLeave me alone already
\nYou fooled me once before
\nI’m hungry for some more and
\nI might even take that chance but<\/p>\n

You can’t fool me
\nNo, you can’t fool me
\nOnly I can fool myself
\nSaid I can fool myself
\nYou can’t fool and honest man and
\nYou can’t fool me<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who is the greater fool, the fool or the fool who follows? I’ve been working on a new song called “Who Can Fool Me?” It’s a defiant and bitter song, a reaction to the constant lies and manipulation coming from the media and the forces of power in our society, and how everyone seems to … Continue reading “New Song: Who Can Fool Me”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}