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.

Song: Secretly

Secretly
Mix 7
July 3-October 6, 2007
[2:35]


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Lyrics:

Secretly I've been wondering why I was waiting here so long
When all the faults I found are gone.
It seemed to me that the way in life was to do it as I'm shown;
I might go crazy on my own.

Yeah, recently I've been wondering why I was waiting here so long
When all the faults I found are gone.
It seemed to me that the way in life was to do it as I'm shown;
I'm going crazy on my own.

Influences: John Lennon (guitar).
Instruments: Squier P-Bass Special, Kramer Focus 111S, FL Studio BooBass, Boss VT-1 Voice Transformer, Drum Samples.

The bass line and some of the words to this came to me in a dream in the middle of 2003 — although at the time, it sounded more like '90s skate punk.

By August I had finished writing out the refrain, but I couldn't really think of anything else to go with it. I had plans for combining it with another song idea that never took off, and so it ended up on the back burner for about four years. Finally, I caved and decided to just record what I had and try to make the most of it.

Rather than be overly creative and try to write more lyrics, I said to hell with it (as I often do!) and made the song just be the refrain repeated several times. If it hasn't sunk in by the fourth repetition... well, that's why we have the "loop" toggle on music players.

So, there are three vocal lines -- one low octave, chill vocal; one higher octave, slightly manic vocal; and a female vocal (sounds a little weird because it's run through the VT-1) jumping between unison and harmony with the higher vocal. And I must have been thinking about John Lennon's scratchy guitar — featured at the end of the songs "I'm Losing You" and "I Don't Wanna Face It" (the version on Wonsaponatime) — when I did this.

Mmmm... Oh, the "bwah" drum is a DNC kick sample with some sine modulation fx added in FL Studio.

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).

Song: Lose It

Lose It
Mix 3
December 3, 2006
[2:42]


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Lyrics:

Sometimes the words just won't come out of your mouth and then you lose it.
Sometimes you think you know exactly what to say and then you lose it.
Well, you still stumble along and keep the conversation moving.

Sometimes you find you know how everything works but you can't prove it.
Yeah, you can argue your way, but now you know you're gonna lose it.
Why bother anyhow? There's nothing you can ever say to prove it.

So lose it.
So lose it.
So lose it.
So lose it.

Sometimes it looks as though everybody knows what they are doing,
While you just tumble around and hope they notice you're still moving.
Don't you get caught up where you walk — just make sure that you keep moving.

Influences: Chantigs, George Harrison, The White Stripes.
Instruments: Yamaha CG-130SA Classical Guitar, Dean Exotica QSE Acoustic/Electric Guitar, Martin Backpacker, Washburn Cumberland 12-string Acoustic Guitar, Johnson UK-120 Soprano Ukulele, Squier P-Bass Special, Epiphone Wildkat, MeanBeat Percussion Samples, DigiTech RP100 + Microphone.

Sometimes the words just won't come out of MY mouth, and then I lose it. What, I can't be autobiographical once in a while? Write a song the kids can relate to? Crazy!

Given the subject matter and how it's obviously just a word-for-word quote of my internal monologue, it should come as no surprise that the song was written in one night, as opposed to many others which sit on the back burner for months or years at a time (because I'm pretty bad at coming up with lyrics). The only trouble was that I wrote this as more of a poem — I didn't have any music in mind, and it took me several months before I bothered trying to put it to music.

I decided to go all out with this mix, bringing in most of the acoustic stringed instruments I owned at the time for the backing chords. As for the slide guitar solo, I purposely designed it around the flanged microphone feedback effect I had coaxed out of my DigiTech RP100 and recorded previously during a bout of experimentation.

Structurally, this is a good example of twelve-bar blues. Compare, for instance, the classic "Shake, Rattle, and Roll", or "I'm Finding It Harder To Be A Gentleman" by The White Stripes, or even the theme from the 1960's Batman series.

Brownie points to you if you appreciate the delicate art of rhyming a word with itself.

Song: Sever (Ballad of The Leg With Gangrene)

Sever
(Ballad of the Leg With Gangrene)
Mix 4
October 5, 2006
[1:34]


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Lyrics:

Sever me! Sever me!
Sever me! Sever me!

Let me go! Let me go!
Let me go! Let me go!

Help! Help!
Help.

Influences: Meg White (drums), George Harrison (volume pedal).
Instruments: Pulse Pro Jr. Drum Set, Squier J/P-Bass, Epiphone Wildkat, Kramer Focus 111S/Volume Pedal.

This song represents a series of happy accidents, starting with a recording of several fairly uninspired practice drum jams using the Pulse Pro Jr. set. Following my normal procedure at the time, I named each separate drum jam after a random word from a random Wikipedia article. As I was naming what would become the backing drums for this song, I came across the keyword Sever, referring to various Portuguese parishes. I thought the name sounded cool, and the drum beat wasn't half bad, so I went with it.

The next step was to pull the two bass lines out of the blue (allowing the whim-based changes in drumming to guide key changes) and record them — the low, left-speaker one first, followed soon after by the higher harmonizing right-speaker line. After letting that stew for a while, I decided to move forward and quickly threw together the rhythm guitar, using the Epiphone Wildkat recorded acoustically to get that sharp, trebly sound from it. Finally, I decided to make use of the volume pedal I had owned for nearly a year, and which had served me well with one of the two bands I was in during my last semester at William and Mary the same year. Pairing the Kramer Focus 111S with the volume pedal, I quickly kicked out the last instrumental portion of the song.

After mixing all the guitars and the drum track together with FruityLoops and letting a few people listen to it, I started to fancy (in no small part due to the random name that had been tacked onto the drum track) that the volume pedal/guitar was trying to say something... "Help me, sever me, sever me, let me go, etc." So I decided to sing that into the can and hook it up to FruityLoops' vocoder along with a copy of that guitar line. Although I had recorded vocals for the entire length of the song, I elected to confine them to the climax.

Despite how quickly this song went from a throwaway drum practice recording to a full-blown quadruple-guitar instrumental complete with frivolous vocoder-steeped pleading, I consider this to be the closest I've come to achieving the kind of music I'm truly aiming for: a pure emotional wave — first shocking you to attention, then slowly drawing you towards the absurd but eerily believable climax, and finally letting you back down to the ground — where, if you're like me, you realize that at only a minute and a half long, you can afford to ride this wave a couple more times — and maybe a little louder next time...

Song: Turn It On

Turn It On
Mix 4
February 18, 2006
[2:23]


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Lyrics:

Everyday I wonder how living would be
If you gave a little more than a damn for me;
You've got pictures of your friends pinned up on the wall,
And am I the biggest, the biggest fool of them all?

Come on and turn it on...

Well I get so lost when I don't know where I stand,
But then I don't need no one here to hold my hand,
And so the news starts spreading around;
If you've got a minute then I'll show you just what I've found.

Come on and turn it on...

Though I don't know what I want, I'll tell you one thing I've got,
I've got a handkerchief round my neck,
And I'm ready to go with just a knock on the door,
And then you won't ever have to think of me no more.

Come on and turn it on...

Influences: They Might Be Giants, The Strokes.
Instruments: Dean Exotica QSE Acoustic/Electric Guitar, Palms & Thighs.

During my last week of finals in December 2005, I woke up one morning with the words and riff of the refrain to this song repeating OVER and OVER in my head. I kept mulling it over while getting out of bed, and in the shower I started to think about lyrics that would fit as verses to go with the refrain. The first thing that came to mind was a line from "Spooky", a song by Classics IV. Just then I thought about how sometimes They Might Be Giants would incorporate bits of lyrics from popular songs into their own songs (such as in the song "The Biggest One" which borrows lines from the song "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor), and I figured I might as well try that out and see what happens.

I ended up borrowing lines from "Spooky" for what became the second verse and following it closely by a less-obvious borrowing from Jet's song "Get What You Need". Then I started working out the first verse and managed to borrow in a line (and a rhyme) from "Take Me To The River" by Talking Heads. Finally, I borrowed a little bit out of the song "Geek Stink Breath" by Green Day to introduce the third verse. However, despite borrowing lyrics and, to some extent, vocal melody from those songs, I managed to kind of rearrange their meanings from their original contexts and combine them with my own lyrics into a theme of getting tough on a failing relationship. (Autobiographical? Hardly.)

I recorded this version of the track as a demo to the band I was playing with during my last semester at William and Mary, called The Adventures of..., A.K.A. "Bro Party". (We didn't ever actually perform the number.) There are three recordings of my Dean Acoustic/Electric Guitar (plugged in as an electric) in the track, one covering the low end with palm-muted power chords, and the other two providing more rhythm and chords. Both the foreground and background vocals were recorded against a slowed-down version of the instrumentation and pitched up one semitone to get a different sound. To round out the track I did some leg-slapping for percussion.

Not much more to say. Don't sue me.

Instrumental: The News

The News
Mix 8
August 27, 2005
[1:16]


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Influences: Super Smash Bros. Melee, Wing Commander: Privateer, Nine Inch Nails.
Instruments: MIDI Strings, MIDI Xylophone, MIDI Tubular Bell, MeanBeat Percussion Samples, Kramer Focus 111S.

After deciding to go onto WCWM as a DJ for my senior year (2005-2006) at William and Mary, I had every intention of making bogus news reports for the beginning of every weekly show. Indeed, so inspired by my friend Andrew, I had prepared a number of full-length newspaper-style articles by plugging real news articles into MegaHAL or cutting them up physically or digitally and scrambling them. However, laziness got the best of me and I never delivered any reports on my show, but I did create this nice backing track for that very purpose.

When conceptualizing this music, I had two elements in mind: First, the newsy music, for which I had a basic model in my head, which was influenced by the menu screen music from Super Smash Bros. Melee, with the weird pitch-changing tubular bell as a small touch influenced by ambient music from Wing Commander: Privateer. Then, after some guitar-feedback build-up, there is the climax, for which I considered the drum solo in Nine Inch Nails's "The Perfect Drug" to be an influence, even though it doesn't really sound that much like it. Since I'm not really an electric guitar virtuoso by any stretch, I had to play the lead guitar more slowly, five semitones lower in pitch than the backing track, and then I pitched it up in the mix.

Below, for your enjoyment, are the aforementioned news articles (seven total).

Flaa Sish Ne Khun

Flaa Sish Ne Khun
("Incense And Peppermints" by Strawberry Alarm Clock)
August 13, 2001
[13 sec]


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Incense and beh-o-mints, meaningless nems,
Turn on, tune in, turn your eyes around,
Look atcha saalf, look atcha saalf..

Instruments: Kramer Focus 111S.

At some point during the summer of 2001, I had the sudden urge to cover an entire song using "reverse backmasking" — listening to the song turned backwards, memorizing it and singing it backwards, then reversing the result. This can be attributed to something I heard in Paul McCartney's song "The World Tonight", where in the bridge of the song he appears to be pronouncing the words "I can see the world tonight" forwards by actually singing something else backwards. As it turns out, Paul may have actually done something a little bit sneakier than I originally thought, since when you turn that part of the song backwards he appears to be saying "Save animals' fur, Linda Eastman, ya."

So anyway, I figured Incense and Peppermints would be suitably psychedelic for the purpose, so I recorded the backwards vocals, sped them up using a winamp plugin until I got to the key of E, then recorded the electric guitar to go along with them. However, I never got much further than this recording and a couple short instrumental intros that never went anywhere.