{"id":83,"date":"2008-01-14T00:24:09","date_gmt":"2008-01-14T05:24:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zingman.com\/blog\/?p=83"},"modified":"2008-01-14T00:24:09","modified_gmt":"2008-01-14T05:24:09","slug":"new-song-the-nine-rough-mix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/14\/new-song-the-nine-rough-mix\/","title":{"rendered":"New Song: The Nine — Rough Mix"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have new song called The Nine<\/strong><\/a>. 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<\/strong><\/a>, 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<\/strong><\/a> on the Buzzy Tonic<\/strong><\/a> emerged from an older demo.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Actually, I just finished reading an unpublished novel my brother Martin wrote quite a few years ago.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.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong> using that.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Anyway, here’s the link<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “New Song: The Nine — Rough Mix”<\/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-83","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83","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=83"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}