Stuck in China with a Zither

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 previous songs indicated they seemed chained to a particular tempo. I was still working with GrarageBand 2 at the time which doesn't let you change tempo within a song. So I thought maybe you could create an illusion of a tempo change with rhythm.

I opted for a basic but slow blues beat using Asian percussion instead of a trap set. At first I drag out the beat using two layers of percussion, moving in a staggered fashion from whole notes to half notes to quarter notes etc. until everything is double-time at the end. This, I hoped, would give the illusion that the tempo of the song was increasing even though, as far as the computer was concerned, it was the same tempo throughout.

Thinking about other instruments, the story forming in my mind was that B.B. King was stuck in some city in China (hence Zigong) without his band or his guitar. So he sits in with a local group and plays a Chinese zither. For a bass I use a Chinese erhu violin. In the real world, it's a rather high-pitched instrument with a textured tone. But through the magic of MIDI, I'm able to play it impossibly low, giving it a kind of deep, eerie, scrapey tone.

Along with the zither, the other lead is a Chinese flute. I start out with lead melody being carried by the zither and the flute repeating a simple line in the background. Later, the flute takes over the lead and brings the song to a climax. I'm imagining the local Chinese flutist trumping B.B. King.

Why is this song my most downloaded? One reason is that one of the guys who cowrote the now seemingly defunct blog, Black Sweater White Cat, found the tune while rooting around archive.org. So he posted it in the blog and, what's more, played it on the associated radio show at a small community station in Great Barrington, MA.

Woo hoo, I'm famous!

RP Rides Again

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 fit well and used some sythesizer buzzes, beeps and swirls to create a basic outline of a song: intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-outro-extended outro.

I passed this along to Vincent Knobil who was sufficiently intrigued to sing the lyrics and add electric piano and guitar melodies. The results surprised me and work rather well, I think.

Surfing & Civilization

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 & Civilization was born.

Starting out, the key was to find the right guitar sound. I searched for awhile, experimenting with the different software guitars that I had. I never got to that classic surfer sound but one of Logic's stock guitars was sounding pretty good to me and, toying around with it, I stumbled on a set of chords and riff that really rocked. Close enough, I thought, I began to build the song.

I divided the song into two parts, the quiet section and the rockin' section. The quiet section is supposed to represent choppy surf and the sort of melancholy waiting around for the big waves. The rockin' section is the big waves coming in. (Disclaimer: I've never surfed a day in my life.) There's a key change between the parts and I use a solo bass run to make the transition. I had to work hard to get the bass to sound just right and be able to carry the song through both parts.

The drums are recorded live -- many takes with the best bits turned to loops then spliced together. This is how I got good at making audio loops with Logic. Curiously, despite all the time I took tweaking the guitar sounds, adjusting the bass and creating drum loops, it's the driving organ that steals the show. It was the clear choice for the big solo at the end.

Rubicon - Have you crossed yours today?

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 kind of like that of an old horror movie score. To top it off I went to a trumpet section building to a high pitch with cymbals and kettle drum rolls.

Not wanting to pursue the piece as some sort of kitsch classical work, I crashed it into a kind blaring, droning rock riff with bass, two guitars and drums, still using the same notes above. One guitar playing echoy single notes and the other playing the chords: F#-A-C# followed by F-Bb-D. (Here I'm adding the Bb which seems to fit the group.)

At this point, I really didn't know where to go. I named the piece "Rubicon." I had in mind that the song would start out tense, chilling and abrasive - apprehension, angst, etc. before crossing the point of no return - then become mellower, a kind of coming to terms with the crossing. But this strange set of notes didn't seem to want to resolve itself into anything. I ask Greg (the music major). He said I was using what's called chord colors and they tend not to resolve themselves.

So I cheated or maybe cheaped out. I ended the big guitar riff with drum fill and a crash going into a drum beat solo. Then using a kind of staccato bass riff, I hurl the song into a D major key (with kind of minorish feel) and take off from there. I switch the lead instruments from electric guitars to electric piano, flute and dobro. I climax the tune with a double-time beat and flute riff that sounds a little like foot-stompin' Celtic music.

Rubicon clocks in at close to 6 minutes. I'm not sure if this rambling progression of stuff really works but it was certainly an instructive piece.

High Space Drifter

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 being some sort of future variety that was reminiscent of traditional instruments but not quite the same.

Which brings me to a point about virtual or software instruments. Here I worked hard to get them to sound like they may have been blown or plucked (as opposed to tapping the melodies out on the keyboard). I think I made strides in improving my technique but I also realized the project of recreating the richness of an expertly played guitar or trumpet is probably hopeless and certainly not worth pursuing.

I think the value and fun of virtual instruments is to use them on their own terms and not try to pass them off as the real thing. I offer High Space Drifter as an example of doing that. Some of the results are little surprising. There are a couple of guitar licks at the end that may well be impossible to play on a real guitar (unless you have three hands).

Sound Environment & Paris Jungle

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 were all playing in the same environment, or room.

The main tool for this these days seems to be reverb. You introduce a varying level of reverb to each track so all the instruments sound like they're in the same space. On some tracks you might not add any, say drums recorded in an open space. But to get a guitar that had been close mic'd to sound like it was playing in the same room, you'd need to add a little reverb to it.

Zappa didn't say much about that but he did mention another method, that of introducing a track of low-level white noise which would produce an illusion that all the tracks were in the same space. That made me think that a candidate for that would be a ride cymbal (think of those wonderfully unified old jazz recordings).

With that in mind, I came up with a quicky bass line and then recorded my drums to that using a quick but simple back beat and keeping the pulse on my ride cymbal (Zildjian 20" ping ride), playing the middle, not the bell. Then I added a kind of cheesy electric piano ditty and a bongo track. I believe it worked. The white noise of the ride cymbal had the effect of unifying the instruments even though I made no reverb or equalizer adjustments to the tracks.

For fun, I decided to change the environment. I went to a more driving rim-shot percussion (still playing the ride) with a slapped bass with echo effects. And I added some distortion to the electric piano. I also introduced some reverb to each track. I had gone from one environment to another. Then I did it again with more echo effects, reverb and heavy distortion on all tracks. The result is rather severe and intense. I ended the song by fading back into lighter environment of the beginning.

The song is called Paris Jungle.

The working mental image I used was that of some French girl riding a Vespa through the streets of Paris and narrowly escaping a collision with other traffic. I'm still working with GarageBand here and the drums are still pretty lo-fi.

Remote Possibility

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, Matt sent me some lyrics with a vague notion that it would be a countryish truck-diver song.

I liked the lyrics and fiddled with a software banjo until I came of with a line that resembled an actual banjo. I then bracketed it with a dobro bit. I set these to a quickly worked-up bass line and click track. It was very up-tempo, about 200 bpm. I added some talking lyrics (I can't sing) and sent it to Matt. He liked the instrumentation but struggled to come up with a vocal melody. So he shopped around for someone to do the vocals.

Well, the project sat around for a month or more until suddenly, Matt's friend, Vincent sends Matt a workup of the whole song complete with vocals, effects, piano, harp and guitar. I was tickled by it. But, being a budding sound engineer, I wanted to remix it. Fortunately, Vincent's individual tracks were available for download. I re-did the bass and drums and came up with a mix that, apparently, everybody was happy with.

Here it is ... Coked Up in Kentucky

The artist here is Remote Possibility, Matt's online band brainchild. It appears that some of the stories about the band may be fictionalized.