Sulk in Moonlight

I've been tinkering with an alternate guitar tuning. Here's the first thing to result from that experiment.

Sulk in Moonlight

(The tuning is E G# E G# A# D#)

Also, check out the drawings I've been posting to twitter.

http://twitpic.com/1r14yd

Extremely Minor Tips For Better Living

It is a well-established fact that the first Traveling Wilburys album is better than the second, whether it's due to the randomness of inspiration, the loss of Roy Orbison, or some mysterious magical chemical that must have been floating around the atmosphere in 1988. But if you listen to both albums together on shuffle, the differences disappear and you have one big chunk of good old-fashioned enjoyable music.

DS-10 Exegesis

I've been tinkering with Korg DS-10, the generally awesome music creation app for the Nintendo DS. It has some limitations, but it's a surprisingly powerful tool for its modest platform and the touch screen allows for direct input in the style of Korg's Kaoss Pad device.

The method I've been using with DS-10 is to construct loops and instrument/scale sets and then improvise with them. You can hear some of the more interesting results of this work here: DS-10 Exegesis

There will be more of this in the future.

Irrational Planet - The Electronic Album

Get it Here.

I have a compulsion to follow my muse capriciously, leaving things unfinished. But with work on my newer projects stalling, I resolved to devote one last flurry of edits to the group of tracks I had long envisioned as belonging to my first album, to be named, as is this blog, Irrational Planet. Some of these I've published before, albeit in different forms. Some are being released for the first time. 

(Technically, I suppose my collected improvisations to date would be my first album... But that seems like a different sort of creature that lacks a specific name.)

Dacrylagnia

Is one of my favorite words that I learned from the internet. It's a whole story in one word. I haven't gotten around to actually writing that story down, but it seemed a good title for a twisted little tune.

Also present in this virtual B-side is the opening piece of my new project. It's a mind-massaging bit of 11/4 rhythms and tone clusters that I put together just today. It's a funny wine, not what you're expecting, but you may like it.

Dacrylagnia

Three New Improvs

I've been sitting on these for a while. One in particular needed editing. But if I start cutting and pasting I have trouble deciding when to stop, and there's only so much of that I can do and still call it improvised. So mostly I leave them alone even if I meander for a while in the middle. With each one of these it gets harder to come up with things that sound new. But I'm still tinkering with interesting effects to try out.

I am planning to record some things that are actually composed. Until now I've left my compositions to the computer to perform for me, but I have something I've been working on that I can do by myself.

Strangelet Soup

Autumn into Winter

Here.

This is a companion piece to Chrysalis. There's a basic chord structure in Autumn that's reversed in Chrysalis. It's emphasized most clearly during the swing-waltz sections. I started writing Chrysalis because I realized that the chords from Autumn would work just as well in reverse.

I originally wrote the first and last parts of Autumn as different pieces, but they grew and met each other in the middle. It's fun to write arpeggio-based pieces like this. You can use subtler and stranger progressions than you could with block chords.

Here is Things

New things. Yay!

I meant for the alternate version of "Hopeless Love" to be last on the playlist, but Archive.org decided to put it first for some reason. Aside from that chiptunes rendition, I've used a more new agey sound here. I think it's nice.

Click for things

Negative Lad part 1

At first, I didn't think I would put this up. These recordings were made as a test to see if I could get a good sound out of the piano and mike. The results were mixed - I was happy enough with the sound, but the piano needs tuning and you can hear lots of noise from the keys and pedals. The performance is also easy to criticize, showing off my dumb left hand and my sociopathic glee in sustaining chords into a stew of dissonance. But nitpicks aside, there were enough "keeper" moments in this improv session that I decided to go ahead and post it.

I only added significant effects to the middle section, which was already pretty weird anyway. The first and last bits just have minor tweaks to liven up the sound.

Negative Lad
1 - I'm A Big Fish 
2 - In An Empty Pond 
3 - Better Learn To Walk

If I were a less lazy person I would devote more time to practicing piano, because I do love it as an instrument.

Ps. Negative Lad is my superhero identity. Don't tell anyone.

Off to the Festival of Steel

Today I'm heading out to West Virginia to attend the Mannette Festival of Steel so I won't be updating for a couple of weeks.

The Mannette Festival is emblematic of how good it is to be involved in steelpan. Many of the world's foremost players and composers come to the festival to perform with students and amateurs.

Pan is a marvelous instrument, and a marvelous movement in culture worldwide. It is still an infant in accoustic musical instrument years, and much of its potential remains to be explored. It combines the possibilities of rhythm, melody, and harmony into a complex but accessible whole. The classical canon of pan, or the nearest thing to it, is calypso, a genre not so long gone that we can't still understand it and dance to it. Even the most intense competitions of skill on the instrument are festive occasions. All music has the power to move us, but perhaps none is so blatantly fun as steelpan.

It is probably for these same reasons that pan is not often taken seriously. In America we typically hear the instrument as a soundtrack for "Girls Gone Wild" commercials late at night, as generic Caribbean atmosphere in "Under the Sea" and "Kokomo*," and occasionally in synthesized form in the Super Mario games.** It's not that pan is even counterculture; it's simply viewed as a novelty if it's recognized at all. It is a shame for the instrument to be overlooked. It is a great way to get people into music - especially young people.

I'm reminded of how lucky I personally feel to have discovered this instrument. I spent a number of years without a direction in life or any connection to people outside of my close circle of family and friends, and pan played a big part in turning things around. I'm still looking for a way to sustain myself with my creativity, but I feel, for the first time, confidence and satisfaction(and this blog has become a significant aspect of the process).


*A song which mentions some ten different Caribbean islands yet manages to overlook Trinidad and Tobago...

**Not to say that these things are equally disreputable. In fact, as Mario stands for both fun and a high standard of quality, I don't object to that association at all.

Fear the Groove

I haven't posted a finished electronic piece for a while, so here's a newly polished one.

Because They Fear the Groove

This tune started with a bluesy bass-line in E-flat minor. I added layers to it while consciously avoiding giving much concern to the usual rules of harmony. The result was quite cool but a little too simple for my taste, so I added a coda in B-flat phrygian dominant to spice up the overall experience. A neat trick that results is that when the "B" section reoccurs at the end, you hear it in the context of the new tonality. This ambiguity isn't fully resolved until the final chord(B-flat).

New Music

Three new things, here.

Rediscovering The Beatles

Recently, thanks to the Purple Chick remasters, I've been listening to the Beatles a lot. I heard them in my childhood but never seriously listened to them until the recent Love album. I have an early memory of hearing songs like Rocky Raccoon and Piggies, thinking they were really about animals.

I'm more of a Pink Floyd guy - more instrumentals, more keyboards, more earnest lyrics - but there's no doubt that the Beatles were the best at what they did. Their humor often surprises me. I tend to take music at face value, so I don't immediately notice when a song is supposed to be a parody(I thought the strings in Good Night were lovely rather than comically over-the-top). Pink Floyd's humor tended to be either acidic or incomprehensible.

I think that Come Together is my favorite Beatles song, because it accomplishes so much with a cool rhythm and a small selection of modal chords, and the lyrics are so wonderfully surreal. Other times I'm more attracted to Because for opposite reasons, but the two are definitely top of my list.

One of the great things about the Beatles is that so many of their songs are one of a kind - unique within their catalog and elsewhere - and yet, if you had only the one song to go on, you might think that the band sounded that way all of the time, because they make it seem so natural and practiced. It's fun to imagine parallel universes where, for example, a song like Because might have been the basis for an entire album. I'd really like to visit those alternate worlds and bring back those albums. But then, maybe it's better to leave them to the imagination.

Voice of Wind

For the past week or so I've been wrestling with editing an aimless 15 minute improv down to a reasonably sized collage of the best parts. Eventually I realized that I was trying very hard to turn a spontaneous event into a composition, and that perhaps this was foolish, or at least more trouble than it was worth. So I gave up on that and slapped together something new in just the past few hours.

Voice of Wind

It's three pan instruments playing in distinct ranges and each in a different pentatonic scale(adjacent on the circle of fifths). The result is more of an unchanging soundscape than my solo recordings, although paradoxically it took more planning and arrangement.

Accompanying it is a bonus track of the same piece distorted in amusing ways.

Devonian

My girlfriend had been saying for some time that "Devonian: The Age of Fishes" would be a good title for a piece of music. After composing the basic melody for this piece, it seemed quite old and fishy, so I used the name.

Devonian

This piece is in the Phrygian mode, which can be found by playing the natural notes from E to E. The trick to composing for modes is to find alternative ways of expressing tension and drama, because they lack the dominant function chords that most western music is based on. Here, I've used tone clusters that contrast with the sparse harmony of the rest of the piece. The hardest part was coming up with a drum part that provided the right amount of structure and syncopation without calling too much attention to itself.

Composing this was pretty quick and easy, as it's a relatively simple piece - it can be played on piano using only the white keys. I tend to be suspicious of pieces like that. I can't help thinking that people have been writing tunes like this for thousands of years, and surely someone has used "E-B,C-F" as a melody before. Then I remind myself that if I really cared about total originality, I would have to do something crazy like throw out all my instruments and design new ones around weird tuning systems. I have to believe that the things coming out of my brain have a certain flavor to them that's original even if the ideas aren't entirely new.

Chrysalis

Sorry I haven't posted much lately. I've been sick.

Today, I'm putting up a sort of demo version of a piece that I think is my best work in composing via computer. I've been tinkering with it, trying to find a sound that works, but that was becoming very complicated, so instead I've just put up the most recent version using the sounds that I composed it with - all bell-based synths.

Chrysalis

I hope someday to record a version of this for steelpan orchestra but in its current state I fear that the arpeggio parts are unplayable due to their speed and complexity. The cello voice is wonderful for arpeggios but the size and layout of the instrument makes it very physically demanding to play complex lines without rest.

Climb the hill in my own way / Every day is the right day

Recently, I've been thinking that the process of developing one's musical skills is like climbing a mountain, except that everytime you think you've reached the peak, it turns out to be a small summit, and the true peak remains hidden in the clouds. For every moment that you think, "Yeah, I'm really good," there are countless moments when you think, "I'm not good enough," and this seems to remain true no matter how long you work at it.

Case in point - Making these rough, formative recordings has been a humbling experience. Most of my experience has been in playing live as part of a band, which takes a somewhat different skill set than recording. Being in a band is a social experience. You bond with the other players, and support them just as they support you. You have to be able to listen as well as play, which may seem easy and obvious, but is actually one of the elements of that nebulous concept that is talent. Recording is different. It's kind of solipsistic, especially solo recordings. There's nothing but your sound versus the empty space. And empty space has a way of making you look bad, instead of holding you up the way a good drummer does. Empty space just sits there, daring you to come up with an idea that's better than blank Zen perfection.

As a result of all this, it seems that with each of these recordings I make, I get more critical and demanding of myself. Which is good, really. Once I feel like I've finished with this project, I'm going to have a lot of pent-up energy ready to spend on more structured compositions.

Summer

New steelpan noodling.

Summer

One of my favorite things to do when playing pan solo is to run up and down giant chords, as you can hear in this recording. The tonality is ambiguous; rather than use the diminished chord that normally occurs in major/minor keys, the chords here tend to escape into foreign areas of the circle of fifths. There's a sense of alternate major-minor-ness going on into infinity. The occasional emphasis of the Lydian #4 tonality adds further mystery.

For some reason, the images that came into my mind while I was editing this noodle were of hot summer days outside in the sun when I was young. A feeling of innocence and passing time.

Phrygdom

Another of my musical experiments is online. More steelpan improvisation.

Phrygdom

This time, I've applied an effect that makes it sound kind of like a weird keyboard... If you played a keyboard with sticks. I like it. I need to figure out how to apply the effect in real time so I can run it through an amp and hear it as I play. It'd be a cool stunt to bring out during gigs, and it might blend with other instruments better.

The scale this time is phrygian dominant, which is heard in flamenco, klezmer, and Indian and Middle Eastern music. It's one of the most dramatic scales, as it has the dark, bold energy of the minor key dominant chord but without ever falling back to the subdued minor tonic.

My plan with these recordings is to keep doing them until I have roughly an album's worth. Since they're improvised, it's not going to be my best work, but the point is to make myself learn more about recording in Logic by doing it. I have some more electronic compositions that are nearly ready to post, too.

Archive.org derives a variety of formats for the files I post, but in the process the ID3 tags are lost, so download the 160kbps MP3. That's the format I upload it in.

The Pentatonic Scale

Pentatonic scales are fun, pure, simple, quick to learn and easy to remember. Their blessing is also their curse - the lack of dissonance in these scales can make them bland. They're very sweet and pleasant. They don't have the attitude of blues scales or extended chords. But they're a great tool for soloing and composing.

One handy cheat is playing the pentatonic scale of the dominant over every chord in a major key - For instance, G A B D E over C major chords. This almost always works, and avoiding the tonic note makes the scale more interesting.

If you want to get clever, you can throw chord changes back in and modulate to the pentatonic scale a fifth up from every chord that occurs. It's a tactic for going "outside" that I've been playing with recently. After playing G over C, for example, you could play D over G, bringing in the foreign note F#.

When I fool around at the piano I love to play pentatonics with big stacks of fifths for harmony. The pentatonic can be seen as five consecutive perfect fifths. The G pentatonic scale, for instance, can be organized as G D A E B. Fifths played like this on the piano create a towering open space of harmonic layers. There's a sense not of chord-ness but of ancient, natural polyphony.