tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-50088674493831927992011-07-07T15:31:40.608-07:00An intrepid amateur bravely explores creativity by making music-like noisesMurffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.comBlogger241100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-66558934243304911202009-07-13T19:14:00.000-07:002009-07-13T19:15:37.915-07:00

After a several month hiatus, I'm back with a new tune: 44 Magnum Love For some reason I developed a minor obsession with the .44 magnum so what better way to nurse the obsession than write a song about it. I do the "singing" in the best backwoods drawl I can muster. The character is rather despicable but he gets what's coming to him. For the song I recorded an actual .44 magnum revolver. In the

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-40892516248121055512008-09-24T20:15:00.000-07:002008-09-24T20:17:44.390-07:00

The latest output of Remote Possibility, Canis Horribillis, started out as an early instrumental effort of the virtual band called "Ummmm," which has some trippy xylophone and percussion effects and a compelling, if innovatively tuned, guitar riff by Vincent Knobil. But the ever churning mind of Matt Love, aka IcePac, dreamt up some lyrics for the tune - kind of mixture of "Hell Hound on my Trail

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-27448854083266836662008-09-03T19:21:00.000-07:002008-09-03T19:26:20.578-07:00

Here's a simple tune I call Walking the Crags. It started out, as usual, as an exploration of various chords on virtual piano where I came up with a back-and-forth triplets riff using E flat and A flat minor ninths. Per my MO, I used the chords to create a scale with interweaving clarinet and vibraphone solos. The drums are minimal but live, I played them straight through and there's no editing.

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-69165105756829170972008-08-12T20:18:00.000-07:002008-08-12T20:20:02.232-07:00

Awhile ago I read a prose translation of the Odyssey by T.E. Lawrence. In it Odysseus has to sail between Scylla, a multi-headed giant snake/lizard thing, and Charybdis, a sea monster who sucks ships into her maw by creating a giant whirlpool. I got it into my head of a modern day ship encountering Charybdis which inspired my new song, Dance Charybdis.Musically it's quite simple. It starts out

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-78082368699805778382008-06-08T18:51:00.000-07:002008-06-08T18:53:11.923-07:00

Grozny Gamble is a tune I produced about a year ago. I was dinking around with a Middle Eastern percussion software kit and I was coming up with some rhythms I liked that had a near eastern feel to them. I started imagining a little combo playing in a coffee shop some place and opted for a zither and flute to carry the lead and chords, and an oud to carry the low end. Looking for something to

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-78296675422377754282008-05-12T20:35:00.000-07:002008-05-12T20:40:22.837-07:00

Let the Crow Soar represents my singing debut (no laughing allowed). The title is a play on the former Attorney General John Ashcroft's Let the Eagle Soar but the resemblance to that classic stops there. It's just that I thought crows needed a song too. Why should eagles get all the glory. My crow actually doesn't do much soaring, mostly he grabs shiny objects and pecks at roadkill but, hey,

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-49026113837119855482008-04-27T18:40:00.000-07:002008-04-27T18:42:23.883-07:00

Taking a little break from yacking about my stuff ...One of the great things about archive.org is the serendipitous chancing upon some hidden gem. (Although this is getting more difficult as the amount of stuff being uploaded has become so vast and the browsing capabilities of the site are limited.) One such gem is a tune called Din Don Dub, a wonderfully layered combination of nature sounds and

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-89395078478196143052008-04-15T20:04:00.001-07:002008-04-15T20:07:07.406-07:00

Here's one I put together about a year ago - Pondicherry Cutie. It's my first full song with Logic, basically learning the ropes of it's FM synthesizer. After I had gotten the theme down, it struck me as something I'd heard before. Then it came to me, it reminded me of Horace Silver's "Calcutta Cutie." Side by side comparison revealed it wasn't really a rip-off, just a similar feel. Hey, it's not

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-68992317961616247272008-04-10T18:55:00.000-07:002008-04-10T19:24:19.049-07:00

For some reason, an old (year and half) song of mine is attracting a lot of downloads at archive.org: Salty. In the last month or so it's gone from around 20 downloads to 160, making it my third most downloaded song after Zigong Blues (656) and Bad Buddhist (394).Don't know why exactly. It's a pretty low-fi GarageBand effort. It's a simple arrangement around a bass loop with piano and trumpet.

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-39989063032095085132008-03-24T19:57:00.000-07:002008-03-24T20:04:16.377-07:00

Continuing with my animal stories thing, although I'm not sure where it's going, I came up this song, Beaver Crossing. (Note that you can now stream the latest song with the player to the left.) It was influenced by two records I've been enjoying lately. One is "Colossal Youth" by the Young Marble Giants which is a very minimalist and subdued, sort of proto-post-punk, recording put out in 1980.

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-45229977117185643922008-02-10T18:46:00.001-08:002008-02-10T18:50:42.780-08:00

I just posted my latest, Doby Coyote, a running eight-bar bass line built on a B-flat seventh chord with drums and various instruments providing the melody. The bass line doesn't change throughout, a habit I've tried to move away from, but somehow this one has a compelling, rolling quality that resisted my efforts to add variation. (I may perhaps be reaching the limits of my current skills.) When

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-88999145172421690762008-02-03T15:46:00.002-08:002008-02-03T15:50:41.528-08:00

My next most popular tune, and one that's generated the most positive feedback, has been Bad Buddhist. It also was featured as a BSWC One-a-Day and played on the associated radio show. It has the distinction of being the only song I've written to date with lyrics.I've long cultivated an interest in Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism (along with Taoism), although I don't think I can claim to be a

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-703309944344533112008-01-22T20:09:00.000-08:002008-01-22T20:11:27.996-08:00

I suppose I should writes something about my number one online hit (approaching 500 downloads on archive.org as of this writing): Zigong Blues.I created this song about a year ago. I was messing around with a software kit of Asian percussion and came up with a cool sort of cricket-chirp rhythm. So I decided to build a song around it. One thing I was interested in was tempo. Feedback on my

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-75342646242531637572008-01-12T15:48:00.000-08:002008-01-12T15:51:29.730-08:00

Another hit from the virtual band, Remote Possiblity. This one's called Vacancy.Matt Love, our glorious band leader (although he denies being the leader), provided some lyrics about a lonely guy lamenting a missed opportunity with a budding online romance. This put me in an electroniky-synth mode so I cobbled some stuff together using new software drum kit I'd acquired, found a bass sound that

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-41986460231525316752007-12-23T18:28:00.001-08:002007-12-23T18:30:57.586-08:00

In the great, epic expansion west that marks American history, some may think it ironic that it all culminated in only one truly new experience for Western civilization: surfing. I'm inclined to think it was worth it.I penned the paragraph above in my journal some time ago, clearly in a Hunter Thompson state of mind. When I reread it later, I decided I need to create a surfer song. Thus Surfing &

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-82219223199132514352007-12-09T16:03:00.000-08:002007-12-09T16:05:32.457-08:00

This one started out with me messing around with the symphonic software instruments I'd obtained recently. Using a string bass section I came up with a brooding riff that didn't seem to have any direct reference to a standard key or chord - F#-A-C#-D-C#-F. Then I added French horn crescendos using combination of the notes above followed by a violin section playing notes in tremolo. The effect is

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-60497864930706695912007-11-27T08:34:00.000-08:002007-11-27T08:37:42.774-08:00

Continuing with the theme of creating a sound environment I came up with this ditty: High Space Drifter.Here I was imagining a band of vagabonds playing in a nearly empty hold of some space cargo freighter. Needless to say I used a bit of reverb on this one. Also, I used effects filters (echo, flange, etc.) to alter each of the instruments: guitar, horn, bass, percussion. I imagined these as

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-65727047263265525112007-11-07T19:13:00.000-08:002007-11-07T19:22:15.943-08:00

A little more than a year ago, I suppose, I was reading Frank Zappa's autobiography, "The Real Frank Zappa Book." In it he talked a little about creating a sound environment for his studio music when he mixed it. That was something I hadn't given much thought to. Generally, the idea Zappa was pursuing was, given that many of the instruments were recorded separately, to make them sound as if they

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-38423503499748400772007-10-30T20:10:00.001-07:002007-10-30T20:13:34.448-07:00

A couple of months ago, out of the blue, a guy named Matt Love contacted me via email about the possibility of some kind of online collaboration. He went on with some spiel about how on Last FM, our music had earned the rare designation of "abnormal." We exchanged some joking emails. I was amused and intrigued and thought what the hell. So we hemmed and hawed about how we would do it. Finally,

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-64677717981108620012007-10-24T20:08:00.000-07:002007-10-24T20:13:35.420-07:00

One of the great things about making and mixing music with modern software is the role serendipity can play. With CO2 Scrubber I was messing around with an echoey synthesizer patch which was sounding nice with a drum & bass line I'd come up with. Looking for a counterpoint, I played a plucking mandolin line. It just so happened the echoes of the synthesizer syncopated perfectly with the mandolin,

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-23500673117843966352007-10-11T21:01:00.000-07:002007-10-11T21:03:10.152-07:00

Jumping to the present, I just uploaded a new one: Sputnik Tears.This effort began with wanting to learn how to extract a sample from an existing song and turn it into a loop. I wanted something in the public domain, not wanting to worry about copyright issues, so I thought something from Django Reinhardt's 1930s recordings might work. I listened to quite a bit of stuff before I came across

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-3283022782627402072007-10-02T19:18:00.000-07:002007-10-02T20:39:22.918-07:00

My current obsession with making music probably started a couple of years ago when I met a guy at work, Tom, who played bass and guitar. We hit it off pretty well and our jamming session re-awakened my enthusiasm for making music.Things really got going, though, when I bought my iBook which came loaded with GarageBand. Suddenly there was this possibility of creating and recording music that

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-9102785112712943182007-09-26T17:51:00.000-07:002007-09-26T18:51:23.502-07:00

With this post I was planning to go over one or two of my early efforts and explain how I got going on this music thing. But I just posted a new one to archive.org, Elevon, and thought I'd talk about that since it was fresh in my mind. Setting out with Elevon, I was looking for a quieter, minimalist sound. But it does reflect my basic MO -- dink around with a couple of chords or a scale with

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5008867449383192799.post-85240704917733906542007-09-23T19:13:00.000-07:002007-09-23T20:28:16.364-07:00

It's kind of a silly pun/name that I thought of years ago when dreaming about becoming a rocker. I don't dream about that any more. In fact, the idea of being a rocker doesn't seem all that attractive. For one thing, since I'm a drummer, lugging my drums around to different gigs does not appeal. But I do love to play.And, as it turns out, I love creating music.My current excursion into music

Murffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06460464378786287348noreply@blogger.com0