Here’s a rough mix of Strange to My Mind, the first song for my forthcoming album Spellbound. As previously mentioned, Spellbound is based on a project Martin and I did together in January 1990 when were on winter break from school, using a borrowed 4-track cassette recorder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Strange to My Mind was the first rock song I wrote to completion. At that time I had a jazz fusion group Event Horizon, and was mainly focused on instrumental music that combined composed sections with opportunities for free improvisation. I had some sketches of ideas for lyrics but had never seen thru to the end the process of fitting a lyric to a melody and working it up to sing and perform it. I learned alot about what worked for me and what didn’t and it gave me a foothold into a whole new realm to explore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As far as it goes, the ambition wasn’t super high. The lyric and chord progression are pretty simple and the form is straightforward, with an intro riff, verse, chorus, repeat, bridge, solo, and recapitulation of the verse and chorus. Still, that’s enough for a satisfactory three-minute pop song.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the time I was mainly writing on piano. I had a Fender Rhodes I’d bought for something like $175, and a Roland Alpha-Juno synthesizer. I didn’t have access to a real piano and in those days synthesizers did not have very good piano sounds, so this rig became the basis of my sound. Meanwhile Martin was playing a cheap Ibanez electric guitar with a a couple of Boss pedals for chorus and distortion. We didn’t have a bass for the project; I did all the bass parts with my left hand along with the keyboards in the right, like Ray Manzerek of The Doors. The drums were added at the end, played by my friend Mark along to the tracks and recorded using a single mic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For this version of the recording I brought it more into line with my standard way of doing things nowadays, while trying to capture the spirit of the original. I used an electric piano as the spine of the tune. It was fun figuring out the part I made up long ago. It had a fairly busy left hand, since that was the bass part. Also it has a pretty cool hook with the chord progression going from G to Bb to D, with a little jazzy modulation in there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To this I added an electric bass guitar and a midi drum track. For this project, the big new thing is to use real drums, but I haven’t gotten that far yet, and that journey is a whole ‘nuther story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the time I was leaning heavily into a sound on my synth called Polysynth 1 for the general comping and rhythm playing. I deemed this essential to the song, so I fired up my old Juno synth and was delighted to find it still works after all these years. I doubled the piano part on the the synth and blended it in. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oh, and of course the sax solo. I played it on alto at the time, but on the new version I use a tenor. I’m wondering, though, if I should have stuck with the alto. Even though my tenor sound is big, with a Dukoff mouthpiece and all, it’s maybe still a bit dark and smoky compared to the searing high register of the alto. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Listening closely, it appeared that there was no guitar part on the original version and Martin’s sole contribution to the completed track was some harmony vocals. Nevertheless, I added a rhythm guitar part for some more depth to the sound, and overdubbed his vocal parts a second track after my own lead vocals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyway here it is. Enjoy!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nhttps:\/\/zingman.com\/music\/mp3\/spellbound25\/StrangeToMyMind17c.mp3<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here’s a rough mix of Strange to My Mind, the first song for my forthcoming album Spellbound. As previously mentioned, Spellbound is based on a project Martin and I did together in January 1990 when were on winter break from school, using a borrowed 4-track cassette recorder. Strange to My Mind was the first rock … Continue reading “New Song – Strange to My Mind”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[51],"class_list":["post-6523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","tag-spellbound"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6523","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6523"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6523\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6525,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6523\/revisions\/6525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}