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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)
Originally published at The lesser mabinogion. Please leave any comments there.
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.
Originally published at The lesser mabinogion. Please leave any comments there.
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.
Originally published at The lesser mabinogion. Please leave any comments there.
...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.
Originally published at The lesser mabinogion. Please leave any comments there.
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.
Originally published at The lesser mabinogion. Please leave any comments there.
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?
Originally published at The lesser mabinogion. Please leave any comments there.
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.
Originally published at The lesser mabinogion. Please leave any comments there.
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.
Originally published at The lesser mabinogion. Please leave any comments there.
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).
Originally published at The lesser mabinogion. Please leave any comments there.
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….
Originally published at The lesser mabinogion. Please leave any comments there.
Tonight’s effort is sadly a little bit on the bitter and angsty side, it’s also probably the most pop rock like piece I’ve ever done.
However, despite all that, I rather like it – it came together really easily, starting with the chorus melody on the guitar. From there the chords for the chorus came fairly easily, and then I only had one false start with the verse before settling on the key change to Am. The variation at the end just fell into place too.
Even the vocals and lyrics weren’t too much of a trial. The only thing I’m not entirely happy with is the transition from verse to chorus – it’s a bit too abrupt, and the contrast between the half time minor feel of the verse and the bouncy major chorus is too great. However, it’s as good as I could get it.
The vocal part writing process I’ve used in the last few pieces is this:
I start well and truly with the music first – I’ll have the chord pattern figured out, and pretty much everything recorded. Then I listen to it a few times to get a feel for what sort of effect I want to achieve. Next I record a dummy vocal track – I just sing syllables – like da or ahh and try to see what sort of melody will work. After doing that a few times until I’ve got the melody down, I’ll transcribe it to a MIDI track. Then I’ll mute the dummy track and start a new vocal track. I’ll listen to my new melody and certain sequences of notes will suggest phrases or words – so I’ll record those words. This might leave me with a couple of words scattered here and there without even a complete sentence, but usually once the obvious phrases have fallen out, I can then find a theme in the words and use that to actually write the full lyrics. There’s still an awful lot of pain in the actual lyric writing process, but it’s not half as bad this way compared with just starting with a blank piece of paper.
Finally, I want to note that I wasn’t actually trying for a Country solo after the first chorus. That was a most unfortunate accident.
Originally published at The lesser mabinogion. Please leave any comments there.
Quick download link.
I came very close to finishing this on Tuesday night, but by 1:30 I could see there was still an hour or so left, and didn’t want to be up till 4 again, so I left it for later.
Later being today.
I think I learnt a fair bit doing this one. I’m really trying to get to the point where the production work is pretty just a case of tweaking some volumes here and there, so I need lots of practice in figuring out how to get the overall sound right. To that end, I used some reference pieces to give me an idea of where my sound fit in the scheme of things. I then listened to those pieces through the speakers in the music room so I had something to compare with. The reference pieces I used were Iron Maiden: The Trooper, Fates Warning: Point of View and Queensryche: Anarchy-X. All three of them had quite different balances of sounds and very different uses of effects, but are from roughly the same period of time and genre. As a result I think I’ve finally managed to produce something that doesn’t sound way out of place compared to everything else in your playlist.
Other things I did differently this time are:
The drum thing was actually probably the most significant change – the one thing I noticed with the pieces I listened to was just how much sizzle there was in the cymbals, and how much reverb on the snare, and how well the bass drum kicked through. With one track you can only achieve a medicore compromise between those things, but by separating them out I had much more control over the final sound.
The only thing that didn’t quite work, was that the whole thing came out rather quiet. I tried using Boost11 to deal with that, but it screwed up the sound so much that it wasn’t worth it. In the end I used the Leveller effect in Audacity, which was surprisingly gentle with the sound. It’s still not as loud as the reference tracks though – which were all produced before the current “compress it to death so that it sounds louder” era). More time to fiddle with the mix would probably have solved it, but I’ve spent way too much time on this one already. Time to move on and clear my head for the next one.
I won’t have one this Tuesday, as I have Caitlin, but I may make an attempt on Thursday.
Originally published at The lesser mabinogion. Please leave any comments there.
This week’s piece is a fairly lively rock piece with orchestral backing.
I tried something different when recording this one – I had a vague idea of what I wanted in my head, but rather than try to play it, I recorded myself singing it, and then used that track as a base around which to form the idea. More or less like a musical equivalent to a sketch. It seemed to work rather well, and saved me the usual pain of spending so long trying to play exactly what’s in my head that I forget what I’m doing. So I think I’ll use that approach again in the future.
Other than that there’s nothing particularly special about this piece – the usual couple of improvised solos. The second solo caused me pain though. Literally. I spent more than an hour trying to find something that worked, and that wasn’t too rambly, or too much like every other solo I ever do. I think in the end I came up with something I’m happy with (excluding a minor mistake here and there) – but my fingers will probably never forgive me.
Originally published at The lesser mabinogion. Please leave any comments there.
I keep missing so many that I can’t keep track of the number I should be up to any more, so from now on I’ll just refer to them by their filename – which is the date they’re written.
This week’s effort is very short (40s), but it achieves the goal I had for it. I wanted to record a piece with Recorder, Flute and Clarinet. So this is a small wind quartet piece for recorder, flute and two clarinets.
Most of tonight’s time was wasted fighting with technology. I was going to use Harmony Assistant (an excellent, cheap piece of score editing software) to write it, and then print the parts out so I could record it in Sonar. But for some reason HA didn’t want to work. It’s worked fine on my laptop in the past, but not tonight. It’s probably significant that I’ve installed SP1 since the last time I used it.
Anyway, after giving up on Harmony Assistant (about an hour wasted), I then wrote the piece directly in Sonar, exported to midi and attempted to load it into one of the score editors in Ubuntu. Good theory, but thwarted by how absolutely universally bad NoteEdit, MuSE Score and GNU Denemo are. None of them imported the Midi file correctly, and I couldn’t figure out how to correct it in any of them either. I tried loading the midi into Rosegarden, and exporting as MusicXML, which nearly worked, except that Rosegarden’s MusicXML export was badly formed XML. A little bit of manual editing later, and I could load the file into the other programs, but still had no luck getting the correct results. In the end I installed Harmony Assistant in a copy of Windows running in VirtualBox, with the hope that the problems I had earlier were confined to my laptop.
Thankfully they were, so after some fiddling around with HA (I don’t use it often enough, and its interface is a little bewildering at times) I was finally able to print out the parts.
Time wasted – an hour and a half.
It then took me a couple of hours to record the parts to my satisfaction – it’s amazing just how long it can take to record 40 seconds. Mostly that’s because my playing on all of those instruments is not of a high enough standard, which really shows when you have a piece full of long notes. Fast stuff is easy to fudge your way through, but long notes have to be perfectly in tune and steady because if they’re not, it’ll stick out like a sore thumb.
Interestingly I achieved the best results from the instrument that I thought would be the hardest – the recorder. I put that down to having a nice wooden one, rather than one of the horrible primary school plastic recorders. That and the fact that no one really expects a recorder to be in tune anyway.
The flute caused me the most trouble – I’ve never figured out how to play it without emptying my lungs in a couple of bars. With any other wind instrument I can manage a good eight bars without a problem. I also had some problems with the intonation, which I guess is mostly due to not enough practice. In the end I had to record it in four bar blocks, as I needed to stop and catch my breath after each one.
The clarinet parts weren’t too bad, I did a lot of takes, but it was always due to silly little glitches rather than general incompetence.
Even after all that time, things still weren’t perfect (or even particularly great), but there reaches a time when you just have to make do, and let technology handle the rest.
Sonar includes Roland’s V-Vocal tool, which allows for all sorts of manipulation of vocal (and other solo) tracks, including pitch and timing correction. I made some use of it to make up for what my actual ability couldn’t manage, and the results are pretty good – it seems to work much better with solo instruments than with vocals, as you can’t detect any of the horrible artifacts that you hear all too often in modern pop music.
For comparison, here’s the piece with V-Vocal turned off.
Originally published at The lesser mabinogion. Please leave any comments there.
Ok, so I’ve got excuses…
First I was in New Zealand, then in Sydney, and now I’m sick (and also anticipating with not insignificant disfavour the prospect of a 4:30am start on Thursday).
So at this point it’s looking like there won’t be anything till next week.
Originally published at The lesser mabinogion. Please leave any comments there.
I know, I’m breaking my own rules, and doing it more often than I should. But despite a promising start, my inspiration and motivation hit the same brick wall at once, and whilst I could force my way through to completing something, it’d give me another 4am finish, so all in all, I choose sleep.
Maybe next week.
Originally published at The lesser mabinogion. Please leave any comments there.
It’s Tuesday! (or it was, four hours ago) and I actually have a piece ready!
This was another 11 hour marathon, though I actually had all the ideas in place in the first hour. I’m not really sure what happened to the hours between 8 and 12…
Anyway – this one’s a song, for the first time in a while, and it’s another step into an unfamiliar genre – though I’m not exactly sure which one. But probably one that involves eyeliner, bad hair, and never, ever smiling.
I’m pretty happy with it, all in all – I got a chance to use the clarinet, I managed to write some lyrics (though I have no idea what they mean), and I played real chords on the guitar.
There’s all the usual roughness that results from one of these sessions – the bass gets bodgy near the end, there’s a few places where the levels fight me, and I will always, always hate my voice, but none of that matters because of two things:
1. Baby Ducks.
2. Explosions.
Yes. Baby ducks, and explosions.
I will now leave you with that thought, and collapse in bed.
Originally published at The lesser mabinogion. Please leave any comments there.
Ok, so I skipped one again. At some point I’ll probably clean up the skipped ones and post them.
Anyway, this one was about ten hours work – way, way, way too long. Mostly because I spent about three or four hours fiddling around with orchestration for the first four bars, only to decide that just piano was fine.
That meant that it was after 2am before I decided that I should just end it by repeating and fading, and rushed through the mixing stages. As a result of that and the fact that I was working in an unfamiliar scale the guitar solo at the end has more wrong notes than I’d usually let through.
I’m still suffering from the inability to develop a theme properly – just repeating it with different instruments doesn’t count. The problem is a combination of lack of inspiration, lack of music theory and it taking too much effort to get ideas down and play with them. However, having said that, this one is still an improvement over some of my other attempts.
Originally published at The lesser mabinogion. Please leave any comments there.
...if one’s thoughts take the form of Facebook status updates?
Originally published at The lesser mabinogion. Please leave any comments there.
Since updating to Ubuntu 8.04 on my laptop, and doing some research into my problems with wireless and the Cisco VPN client, I am now fully able to work without wires once more.
In 7.10, when using wireless (intel 4965 chipset) or using a USB broadband modem attempts to use the VPN would result in a kernel panic and a hard freeze, with just the numlock and capslock lights flashing. Wired usage was fine.
On updating to 8.04, it looks like I can use the VPN with a broadband modem now – I managed half an hour of usage before I stopped, whereas previously it’d be less than a minute before the crash.
As for the wireless – that still causes the crash, but on doing some further research it appears that Cisco don’t support SMP. It happens to work with some network drivers, but not with others. So the workaround to that is to disable one core before connecting to the VPN via echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online.
Obviously that’s not an ideal solution – but it’s probably the best we’re going to get, and most of the time I’ll have access to wired network anyway. This just means that if I do feel like sitting on the couch to work, or sitting outside in the sun, I can.
In fact, I was going to exercise my new found freedom today by heading down to the lake for a bit, but in the end I decided it’s probably just a little too cool for that, and I’d just disrupt my current run of semi-productivity.
Originally published at The lesser mabinogion. Please leave any comments there.
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