Dance Charybdis

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 with two notes back and forth, D and Bb, then goes to a four note sequence, D, Bb, G and A. (Near the end I add F# and Eb for some dissonance). Sonically, it's complex because there is so much sound and I'm using a lot of reverb, phase and amplifier effects. It was tricky to get the balance right and not get too much clip distortion.

It's a horror tune, I suppose, and the idea was to be ominous and scary. I've been pecking away at this thing for three months and I'm still not sure it's right but I decided I needed to put it to bed. The narrative image of the song is a freighter chugging along, encountering Charybdis's whirlpool and trying to escape its current. I use quite a few different intermingled voices representing the ship and the monster.

Grozny Gamble

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 name the song after, I found Grozny on the map and "Grozny Gamble" had a nice ring to it.

Backgammon is a popular game in that part of the world so it occurred to me to open the song with dice rolling. To achieve the effect I used a felt-lined guitar case and suspended two microphones above it about two feet apart. I recorded several dice rolls (and the shaking of the dice in leather cup) and picked the version that sounded best. Because of the two mics and their position above the board I was able to achieve the effect of dice rolling across the sound stage (between the stereo speakers).

Most of my time was spent sequencing the percussion. I wanted to give it a natural, dynamic feel. Tinkering around with one of the oud's bass lines, I discovered I got a nice ominous sound with a synthesized bass played an octave lower. With that the idea occurred to me to transition from a kind of acoustic belly-dancing theme to a heavy techno sound. The scene I imagined was man moving from the combo playing inside to a war-torn environment outside. Grozny is a very war-torn city. The transition from inside to outside is done in a slow fade-out/fade-in. The Oud gradually turns into the synthesized bass and the percussion morphs into pulsing techno with a gun-cocking sort of back beat. I then introduce distorted, metallic versions of the zither and flute.

Let the Crow Soar

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, that's what crows do.

Before this tune, I hadn't attempted to sing anything since, like, grade school (not even karaoke). So I used every trick I could think of to make my voice at least listenable. I have an electric piano backing the vocals note for note to help with the illusion that I'm hitting the notes (or at least near missing). I've also pumped the vocal track through a software amp, eq'd out some of the low end and added compression and reverb. I just got a new reverb plugin for Logic from a company called Wave Arts. It sounds pretty good. In this case, I was going for an outdoor feel and I wanted to keep it rough on the edges.

Another thing I did to get the best vocal performance possible was to sing one line at a time. I would loop the backing tracks, sing the same line about a dozen times and pick the one that sounded best. Then I pieced the lines together.

The other melodic elements are electric guitar, bass and electric piano. I spent considerable time working on the sound. I wanted each to retain some kind of character of a crow squawk. The electric guitar, however, is the real squawker.

I brought in a couple of friends, Kim and Greg, to sing backup vocals. After a few glasses of wine, I managed to get some pretty good stuff from them. No golden voices but this isn't a song for golden voices.

I built the song around a couple of drum loops, but once it was arranged, I played the drums straight through. Admittedly I did a little splicing and editing but mostly it's a single performance.

Here are the lyrics:

Black, black in flight
A shadow in the air
Here it comes, diving down
Snatch that ribbon from her hair

On the wing, pressing up
A talon clutching gold
Flying high, headed home
But there’s something in the road

A plunge, a swoop, a dip
Alighting on the ground
Pecking flattened furry meat
Dancing all around

With a steel smile and glowing eyes
A roaring monster comes
Flapping hard, a blast of smoke
The crow was nearly done

Chorus:
Tumble, flail, squawk
Rolling in the wind
Tumble, flail, squawk
The crow takes flight again

Refrain: Pecking flattened furry meat, dancing all around

Din Don Dub

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 electronic effects. It has a slow-paced, syncopated rhythm. It sounds as if the audio signal of much of the drums and other elements is reversed. Sometimes that technique comes across as gimmicky but here it works to excellent effect, giving the song a non-human yet organic feel.

There's no information on the artist, Gery Petit. The CC license is French and a quickie Google search reveals that maybe he's music producer in the French film industry.

Beautiful, hypnotic and haunting, I think the tune touches something that's difficult to describe. Enjoy.

Pondicherry Cutie

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 like Steely Dan when they stole Silver's bass line from "Song For My Father" and used it in "Rikki Don't Lose That Number."

Salty

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. Mainly I wrote it as an exercise to help improve the timing of my drumming. When I started recording against loops, I had discovered my tempo keeping was pretty weak. The computer doesn't lie. With Salty, I would come down to my basement studio, load up GarageBand, hit record and do a take or two. Eventually I got a pretty solid version which is what you hear on the song. However, at the time I was still recording with a cheap stereo mic and my old kit so the drums lack clarity and punch. The fills came across pretty well though and they have nice retro sound and feel.

I do like the song. I wouldn't have posted it otherwise. But why the sudden interest? A Google search doesn't reveal any cites of the song in the blogs or someplace. Not that I mind. Just curious.

Beaver Crossing

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. It's got great texture and resists all temptation to move into some "big sound." (A temptation I rarely can resist.)

The other influence is a wonderful CD called "Jin Jin/Firefly" by Takashi Hirayasu and Bob Brozman. It's very different from "Colossal Youth" in that it's melodically and harmonically complex, but it shares the minimalist feel in terms of instrumentation. In this case, two guitars and occasional percussion. The sound is surprising mixture of Okinawan and Hawaiian folk and Western pop. Both Hirayasu and Brozman are acoustic guitar virtuosos.

So with Beaver Crossing, I chose an electric bass that's got a bit of a plucked sound (resembling Young Marble Giants' bass), a software kit of African percussion, a ukulele and one of my software instrument favorites, the Chinese muon moon guitar where I make full use of its note-bending capabilities. I settled on using A & B sixths chords and add F# later on. This pretty much puts it in the key of F#. The ukulele strums chords mainly while the Chinese guitar picks the melody. The sound kind of has a bluesy Hawaiian flavor.

In keeping with the minimalist theme, there's only four tracks and no fancy effects. Or almost none. Using tip from the latest issue of EMusician magazine, I set up four bus tracks for reverb panned to the opposite side of their respective instruments. For example, the Chinese guitar is panned to the right but its reverb is panned to the left. The reverse is true for the ukulele. I kept the reverb low-key so the effect is subtle but I think it adds a nice depth to the overall mix.

The effect is pretty much lost when streaming. To hear it, you'll need to download the mp3.