Instrumental: Sunderland

Sunderland
June 22, 2011
[0:57]


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Instruments: FL Studio 10: Convolver plugin, Open Instrument Cable, Tambourine Sample, Hofner Bass Guitar Sample, 12 String Guitar Samples.

No organic instruments were harmed in the making of this track.

FL Studio has a plugin called "Convolver", which loads an audio sample and triggers it continuously according to the levels of an input sound source. In this case, I used tambourine, bass, and 12-string guitar samples as the samples to be triggered. For the triggering sound source, I used an open-ended instrument cable, tapping rhythmically on the end with my finger. When you have the cable plugged into an amp, this creates an abrupt buzzing noise which stops as soon as you let go of the end. It was this staccato buzzing that triggered the samples. Variations in impact force and friction created variations in the final sound of the samples.

For the chords being played, I ran together an octave's worth of separate Convolvers with 12-string guitar samples and mapped the notes to a MIDI keyboard. I fudged the chords with one hand while triggering the samples with the instrument cable in the other hand. It was fun.

P.S. The "rain" and banging/thunder/explosion sounds were produced the same way as everything else. Just, like, different samples. Secret percussion samples.

Instrumental: Dunderhead!

Dunderhead!
June 16, 2011
[3:38]


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Instruments: FL Studio 10: Convolver plugin + vocal sample and electric guitar.

FL Studio has a plugin called "Convolver", which loads an audio sample and triggers it continuously according to the levels of an input sound source.

So here, the sample I am triggering is an old (like, 2003 old) clip of me singing a Weird Al song, "Since You've Been Gone", backwards, backwards. That is, I took the line "Well I'm feeling like I stuck my hand inside a blender and turned it on", listened to it backwards, sang that, and turned the result backwards, arriving at a really goofy sounding version of the original. The words "blender and" came out sounding more like "dunderhead!", thus the name of this track.

The input source for this track was an electric guitar (now I can't remember whether it was the Kramer Focus or the Epiphone Wildkat; I'm leaning towards Kramer Focus). I just jammed out whatever popped into my head. The more trebly and staccato notes result in more obvious triggering of the speech sample; however, the sample really is triggered by every note, which is why there's so much ambient "reverb" and glitchy effects.

Here's the full original vocal sample from 2003 (apologies in advance for your poor ears):



P.S. If you know where I might have ripped off the main chord progression from, let me know. I keep thinking it reminds me of Harry Potter music.

GSnap Messing

GSnap Messing
May 24, 2007
[2:02]


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Instruments: GVST GSnap + FL Studio, Whistling, Vocals.

I can't remember what my original motivation was for getting GVST GSnap — other than the obvious use it could have for tweaking vocal pitch flubs, though as it turns out I'm too heavy-handed of a producer to do something so subtle. So, in order to explore what I could actually do with GSnap, I made this. First I laid down the droning vocals in the background — a good old "ohhhhmmmwaaahhoohhmmwwwaah", technically describable as modulating the formant spectrum of my voice by slowly wembling my lips. Those were run through GSnap and pinned to one invariant pitch.

So, whistling ended up kind of cool. Very world-music sounding. Not immediately obvious that it's human whistling. I started out with the whistling locked to a couple pitches, then switched it up to an F major scale.

Ah, this might explain part of my motivation. I heard a song by They Might Be Giants, called Bastard Wants to Hit Me that used Auto-Tune (or something akin to it). So when the vocals come in on this, around 0:56, the line "He says he knows me, but I don't know that guy..." is from that song. Then I switch to singing the first verse of another They Might Be Giants song, Hope That I Get Old Before I Die.

Song: Nuclear Spin (Man Will Never Fly Version)

Nuclear Spin (Man Will Never Fly Version)
Version 2
February 18, 2007
[2:17]


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Lyrics:

Alright, I think we've got everything we need here,
Where's the uh.. oh...

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.
Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.
Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.

Instruments: Oscillators; Pulse Pro Jr. Drum Set + Hi-Hats; Kramer Focus 111S; Hands, Feet, and a Chair; Kramer Baretta 5-string Bass (plunk, slap, & slide); Clock Chime; Sofia Mari SM3448 Accordion.

Not a far cry from the version mixed the previous day, this is a stripped-down mix with no acoustic guitar and only one vocal sample from the archives (my friend Andrew saying "Alright, I think we've got everything we need here..."). The intro is also different from Version 1 — instead of a glowing, ambient oscillator sound, here we have a gritty, low buzz that hangs for a few seconds and then jolts into the guitar riff.

Oscillators come back for revenge during the last repetition and then taper off at the end. A sample taken from a chiming clock in my house is also snuck into a couple spots.

For more info on this track, check out the blog entry for Version 1.

Song: Nuclear Spin (Hello)

Nuclear Spin (Hello)
Version 1
February 17, 2007
[2:32]


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See also: Nuclear Spin (Man Will Never Fly Version).

Lyrics:

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.
Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.

Die schönsten Früchte ab von jedem Baum...
Baum...
Thuswise ends the bonus track!

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.
Do you think man will ever fly?
No, come to Hotel One, it's the best prime number...

... and it's not divisible by its own bowls.
Alright, I think we've got everything we need here,
Where's the uh.. oh...

That's awful... forty-nine minutes...
Do you think man will ever fly?
Die Luft ist still, als atmete man kaum...

Instruments: Yamaha CBX-K1XG MIDI Keyboard + Oscillator; Hands, Feet, and a Chair; Percussion Samples; Epiphone Wildkat (played acoustically); Pulse Pro Jr. Drum Set + Hi-Hats; Kramer Baretta 5-string Bass (plunk, slap, & slide); Kramer Focus 111S; Dean Exotica QSE Acoustic/Electric Guitar; Sofia Mari SM3448 Accordion.

This is basically a glorified instrumental, intended mainly as a let's-get-things-started sort of number. Like Sever (Ballad of The Leg With Gangrene), this song was named by looking at Wikipedia articles at random until a phrase came up that I liked. The riff is a fairly straightforward loop, only really distinguished by the strumming rhythm. The conservative drumming draws from when I practiced the song a few times playing the guitar and drums at the same time, meaning I could only use three feet and no hands to play the kick, snare, and hi-hats. In this mix, however, the drums were recorded individually and mixed in later.

The intro to the song is marked mostly by the ambient glowing sound created by running my MIDI Keyboard into a slightly detuned oscillator in FruityLoops and smushing my whole arm down across all the white keys (fortunately, the song is in the key of C). The staccato percussion in the latter half of the intro was the metronome I used in recording the song, derived from an abbreviated sample of a song by The Strokes.

The muffled vocal samples scattered throughout the song are simply a device to break up the repetitive cycle of the instrumentation. They all come from recordings sitting around in my archives. Some bits came from friends and dormmates I lived with in the Japanese House at William and Mary: the two German bits (Jen), the weird backwards ambient chatter during the second "Hello" part (various people), and the "Alright, I think we've got everything we need here..." (Andrew). "Do you think man will ever fly?", "Come to Hotel One", and "Forty-nine minutes", as well as the "soy soy, hoy hoy" mumblings in the last part come from Ray and Kevin, with whom I have periodically recorded jams. "Thuswise ends the bonus track!", as well as the mumble at the end of the intro, come from a drum-n-guitar demo I recorded recently before working on this.

Trivia:

This is the first time since 2001 that I've played the Kramer Baretta bass (the first bass guitar I owned) in a recording.

This is NOT the first time I have inserted the timekeeper sample, used to synchronize recorded tracks, into the final mix — the muted strumming heard throughout version 2 of The Thawing Song up through the fade-out was the timekeeper I used for that song.

Finally, the backwards double-speed acoustic/electric guitar parts were originally recorded in July 2003 against an instrumental called "One And Only", also in the key of C, composed by Ray Naegle.

See also: Nuclear Spin (Man Will Never Fly Version).

Demo: The House (Oh No)

The House (Oh No)
Demo
November 1, 2006
[3:03]


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Lyrics:

Well, the room was bare,
Too clean when I woke,
Though I swore I'd stay awake through it all,
They're gone. They're gone.
The moon was burning through that night
When they left me.

Not a strand of hair was left in the bed;
Not a web was left on the floor,
Oh no. Oh no.
I tried to warn them,
Tried to stop their poor mistaken souls...

But an angry dog was left in the yard..
Couldn't leave for fear of the dog,
Oh no. Oh no.

So I sat and stared, and watched as the walls
Didn't move. The floor didn't creak,
Oh no. Oh no.
And nothing special passed behind me..
Nobody slammed a door...

When the sun came up
The house was all mine,
And the hound had gone.
It's warm and it's calm.
It's fine. I'm fine..

Influences: Masato Nakamura, The Flaming Lips, Sarah Slean.
Instruments: Martin Backpacker, Praat.

Just your run-of-the-mill tale of apocalyptic abandonment, with a touch of cynophobia and non-hallucination.

Here's how it came about: So, while taking a quick trip back in time to play Sonic The Hedgehog 2, I figured on getting some kicks out of the old sound test screen. After chewing on a few tracks, I popped it up to track 10 (hexadecimal 10, mind you) — the by-now niche-famous Sonic 2 tune that never made it into any actual levels. Wouldn't it be cool if this tune had some lyrics? Alright, let's do it.

So I let that percolate for a while...

Hey, and now there's this song sitting there, waiting to be recorded. Okay, that should be easy!

Ack. This needs a female vocalist. I hain't got one on hand... Hey, I know! Let's be all progressive and experimental and use Praat, a speech analysis/processing program, to up the pitch and timbre some.

Hey, that's got a nice texture to it. But it's kind of hollow sounding. But hey, backwards reverb is cool, and should cover some of the imperfections. That was a technique used by The Flaming Lips from time to time in their early albums. You can hear an example in the song "You Have To Be Joking (Autopsy of the Devil's Brain)" from their album Hit to Death in the Future Head.