Tonight we have a very loud, raw piece, aiming very squarely at early 90s grunge. There’s nothing but bass, drums, guitar and voice, and there’s a grand total of four chords used. It didn’t require a whole lot of ability to either write or play, but it was fun.
enjoy (with the volume UP)
Tonight’s piece marks the first time I have recorded a piece with Saxophone in ten years. My old Sax had started falling apart, and the potential cost of refurbishment along with the Progressive Metal focus of the Cumulo-Nimbus years meant that I just never got round to doing anything about it.
But now I have – I’ve bought a new sax, and have finally got round to recording something with it. This is a straight 12 bar blues piece with Tenor Sax, Clarinet and Flute plus Guitar, Bass, Drums and electric piano.
It’s been way too long since I’ve done any recording – or even any practice, because this simple improvisation has taken me two nights to get down, and is rather rough, but I think it makes a pretty good re-entrance piece for the Sax.
Tonight’s piece is a collaboration between Caitlin and me.
Whilst the performance you hear is entirely me, I’m playing the bassline and chords that Caitlin wrote, and we only didn’t include her bass performance because I accidentally deleted her first (not quite right, but probably passable) take, and subsequent ones tended to get worse, not better.
This simple piece came about via Caitlin deciding she wanted to play with the bass. I showed her the general idea of how to play (fingered, not picked), and some basic notes (E, G, A, C, D), and she came up with a simple bass line and chord pattern by fiddling with those notes. Then we added the other parts, with the artistic direction being all Caitlin – I’d just show her what was possible, or what ideas I had for a particular part, but she decided what to actually use.
It’s shortish, and simple (an 8 bar pattern repeated 4 times – fading out the last time so you don’t hear the abrupt stop), but it’s not bad for 3 hours work, written and directed by a 10 year old.
...give or take a day or two.
In a parallel universe, it’d be cause for celebration.
In this one….
...well, there’s not much more to say, other than I’m still here, and I still make cups of tea.
The first one for 2009 is just a quick piece of fun with a delay effect.
Four parts – Dums, Bass, Guitar and Organ, the organ part basically an improvisation.
Not much more to say about it really – it doesn’t really say anything, but it was fun. It’s the sort of thing that you could jam on for hours, but I limited it to three minutes for the sake of your sanity.
Yes, 2006. This was one I started the first time round, but didn’t really finish. Tonight I was poking through old stuff and came across it, and figured it really deserved some better treatment. Most of what you hear is the original 2006 recording – I only added the synth, the second and lead guitars and the recital.
I have no idea why I stuck a Coleridge poem in the middle – it just seemed to go. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the lyrics, but who really pays any attention to that sort of thing anyway?
Ok, so here it is, my first composition and recording on my 1840s Broadwood Square Piano.
Apologies in advance for it being so mournful and dirge like, and my playing being so wooden – I never claimed to be a pianist. Lack of piano ability is what makes this one so slow and short. I had to be able to play it right through in a single take. No multi-tracking, or splicing different parts together, and definitely no fixing up bad notes afterwards….
The tuning isn’t great – but that’s because the strings on it are very old. The full restoration will involve replacing all the strings, but it’ll be a couple of years before I can afford that.
Been a bit quiet lately – between Conflux and work pressures I haven’t really had time to get any music done.
Tonight continues the trend.
However, it’s not all bad – I recently purchased an Edirol FA-101 Firewire sound module, which will hopefully make recording easier, and I also bought the Edirol Super Quartet softsynth, which gives me a nice set of Piano and Electric piano sounds (and guitars, basses and drums, but it’s the pianos I most wanted). Unfortunately, it didn’t work with Vista, and Roland have no intention of making it do so.
Fortunately it wasn’t the plugin itself that didn’t work with Vista – just the installer. A cracked version of it installed and works fine.
Yes – pay attention Roland / Edirol: I had to pirate your software which I legally purchased, in order to be able to use it.
Also, next Thursday I will be finally taking delivery of my 1840s Broadwood Square Piano, so hopefully I will have something that evening from that instrument.
I didn’t think I was going to get anything done at all tonight. I spent most of it battling with installing the EastWest Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra Silver PLAY Edition (which is even harder to say than it is to type). I already had EWQLSO, but a few months ago they offered a $99 upgrade to the new “PLAY” edition, which is based on a new and potentially better softsynth technology than the NativeInstruments based player for the copy I already had. Unfortunately it also comes with new and improved copy protection – in the form of a Pace iLok USB device. For which I had to pay an extra $US40. Then to add insult to injury, the drivers for the stupid thing wouldn’t install. I’ve had the thing for about three months and haven’t been able to use it – meanwhile, those who refuse to pay for their software are probably quite happily making use of it.
In the end I must’ve made an offering to the correct god, or tried things in the correct order, as it finally installed.
While I was waiting, a little fiddling around on my keyboard gave me a nice little piano idea. I figured I’d try it with the piano instrument included in EWQLSO. When using the Standalone player, it sounded brilliant, with no latency whatsoever. Unfortunately, when I attempted to play it in Sonar (after another hour’s battle getting Sonar to find the plugin), there was some very noticeable latency. Noticeable enough to be too distracting for me to play. Another hour of fiddling didn’t fix it, so I gave up in disgust.
Fortunately I came back and gave it another go – but recording without any softsynths, just straight MIDI from my keyboard. Not quite as inspiring a sound, but by then I’d figured out what I wanted to do anyway. Once recorded I could switch it back to using the Softsynth, and so here’s the result.
A very short, simple little piano piece, using the Steinway piano from the EastWest Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra PLAY Edition softsynth (it probably took me longer to type that than for the piece to play).
Tonight’s one has the distinction of being probably the quickest I’ve done since I started – it only took 4 hours. Most of the reason for that is that it’s not very imaginative, and the performances are pretty rough. But that kind of suits it.
It’s lazy, but loud. Very loud. it sneaks up on you and dumps you in an ocean of noise and the leaves you washed up on the beach half drowned.
It’s kind of a psychedelic progressive hard rock blues jazz thing…or something.
It was also fun, but I’m not sure how much scope there is in future pieces for more distorted flanged flute with wah pedal….