And Now For Something Really Stupid

And by that I mean the song titled Something Really Stupid, of course. Duh. I mentioned it a while back. I know I did.

One day I heard that weird recording by Frank Sinatra and his daughter Nancy called Something Stupid, and I thought, "Well, it may have been stupid, but it wasn't really stupid, just sorta stupid."  And the next thing I knew I was filling the niche.

This song is an innocent victim of the turnover in my drum machines over the years. The drums were originally sequenced for a Kawai drum machine that was definitely not set up anything like a GM drums arrangement. I really liked that drum machine.

Needless to say, it was stolen. 

Next I traded some guy for a different drum machine, which used its own, completely different and non-GM arrangement. And the drum part was now completely wacky and I never got it completely normalized for that machine. At any rate, I sold it some time back.

Or maybe it blew up, I don't remember.

And now I'm using a software drum instrument, which started off as GM but has been mutated to fit my own purposes. And when I tried this song, the drum parts were wackier than ever. I was able to make parts of it usable, but it was just too messed up to deal with. If you listen to the part of the song where every line starts with "I don't know..." you can hear sets of four hits that were originally supposed to be drums. They're not drums. They're wood blocks. At some point I just threw my hands in the air and embraced the wrongness.

Also in the warm embrace of wrongness is my vocal track. This song was always a struggle to sing, since it was at the very top of what I humorously refer as my "range". I don't really have a range. More of a hotplate. At any rate, now that I'm less younger than I was, when I strained to hit - OK, to approximate - the high notes, I used to sound, well, strained, which was the point of the song. But now when I try it, I sound like a wheezy old man.

Something Really Stupid (3.56MB mp3) Download from MediaFire

What's the Signal-to-Noise Ratio for a Recording of Noise?

Note: Fixed broken download link. Sorry.

Continuing my quest to recover the crappy songs I recorded back in the day, we come to a personal favorite, Whipping Cream. Not a favorite because it was any good, but because it was, how can I put this, really goofy.

Following the example of the Beatles, for a while I was filling all four tracks of my tape recorder with parts, then bouncing those down to another tape recorder, giving me more space to record on. The Beatles did two things differently than I. First, they bounced down to only one track, leaving three to work with but mushing the original tracks to mono, whereas I bounced to two tracks, only leaving me two more to work with but leaving the originals in stereo. The other thing they did differently was being the Beatles. Still not convinced that's relevant.

So I had two tapes with this song on - one with the final four tracks, and the other with the original four backing tracks. Sadly, the final tape was one of the ones that was totally destroyed by moisture. "No matter," I thought cheerfully to myself. "I can start with the backing tracks and just try to recreate the other two!" Imagine my shock and horror when I discovered that while the sound on the backing tracks was clear, the tape had become stretched out oddly over time, and now had wildly uneven speed. Impossible to work with.

Crucially however, it also had the sound effects in fairly clear condition. Sound effects, you ask? Yes, sound effects. Well, mostly voices stolen from old dictation training and children's records. I said it was goofy.

So I had to recreate the whole thing. At least I could listen to the drum, bass, one keyboard and one guitar part for reference, but the rest I had to try to remember or just make up. I remembered the lyrics off the top of my head, which is pretty good for something I wrote 26 years ago. There's another song on the same tape that I only remember the first two lines for, so you probably won't have to suffer through that one.

Whipping Cream (2.66 MB mp3) Download from MediaFire

Say Hello To My Little Friend

You know that saying, "Idle hands are the Devil's workshop"? Well, that doesn't apply to me. Unless the Devil specializes in taking bits of junked, crappy guitars and putting them together to make even junkier, crappier guitars that is.

Is the Devil's real name Hondo? Wait - don't tell me. I don't want to know.

Speaking of bits of junked, crappy guitars, a few weeks ago my daughter's boyfriend brought over the body of an Epiphone acoustic guitar that had been found while cleaning out his mom's house. Just the body. Unlike every normal (i.e. good) acoustic guitar, it was designed to take a bolt-on neck, kind of like a Fender electric but not compatible. I looked online for information of repairing Epiphone acoustics with bolt-on necks, and the first thing I found was someone asking about the same model. The reply was that those guitars were so very, very bad that the best way to fix one was to throw it out. So that was encouraging.

Looking at the second picture, you can see the bizarre damage on the neck side of the soundhole. Under the original overhanging fretboard, the top got smooshed not only towards the bridge but also in toward the interior of the guitar, and on either side the top bulges out dramatically. All of this is possible only with an El Cheapo guitar made from layers of paper-thin wood and tons of plasticky glue and urethane. Try that with a quality guitar and you'll have a broken guitar.

I should mention that there's another guitar behind it in the first photo, which creates a bit of visual confusion there, sorry.

Anyway, I had the aforementioned idle hands a while later, and I started trying to put various other guitar bits together with that junky body. For obvious reasons I wanted to keep this project as cheap as possible. The neck I ended up using I picked up years ago - it's a three-piece short-scale bass neck and the glue had failed, leaving the three pieces of wood to curl apart in an amusing fashion. Way back when, I glued it back together, tore out the frets, and tung oiled the wood. And then forgot about it for a decade or so. Almost everything else was either taken from a junked guitar or something I'd had lying around for ages.

I did have to run to Home Depot to buy some screws, nuts, etc., and two brass air-hose fittings that were necessary to adapt the bridge to work with a separate tailpiece. The local Hobby Store supplied a thin sheet of white plastic which I cut into strips and glued in as fret markers. And after I put it together I had to buy a string tree for the headstock.

That string tree pushed to total cost of this here thing over $20! So much for keeping it cheap. Oh well, it may have cost money but the final result is definitely cheap. Actually it plays pretty well and sounds nice, sort of a cross between an electric bass and a string bass. The bridge is literally screwed on into 1/8" thick plywood though, so no using this one as a club.

Now all I have to do is learn to play fretless, and how hard can it be? There aren't even any of those pesky frets getting in the way!

Casual Recordings: Don's Boat Number Four

The whole inedible saga of the Don's Boat recordings can be found here.

Well, I finally ran out of excuses for not doing one of the even-numbered songs and decided that since this tune was already pretty rock-y, simply recording it with guitars would be enough of a change for this one. And I think I was right. Which is remarkable in itself.

This is another song that I wanted to do as a vocal number, mainly because when I was working on it, I was hearing lyrics in my head. Sadly, I never got past the couplet So call me a cannonball / I'm flying right into the ground, and eventually I just gave up. Just as well I expect.

Don's Boat Number Four AKA Cannonball (2.29MB mp3) download with MediaFire

Casual Recordings: Don's Boat Number Seven

I already covered the saga of Don's Boat last year, so I won't repeat myself.

Here is Don's Boat Number Seven AKA Hi, my name's Ben (3.28 MB mp3, Download from MediaFire). If you were paying attention, and know your numbers, you may suspect some sort of pattern at work: First Numbers 1, 3 and 5, and now 7? So, what up? Heck if I know. Those are just the ones I thought were most promising. I swear there's a #4 I'm thinking of doing, but I can't figure out how to make it sound different.

Like the previous three, #7 sounded like BMBPDJ (Bad Marching Band Plays Disco Jazz), and, well, now it doesn't. I had actually done most of this right after numbers 1, 3 and 5, but as a vocal number. At the time there was an amusing phenomenon on the Intenet concerning an apparent attempt to create a viral publicity whatsis for a bodybuilder who wanted an acting career, or something. It was all very confusing as no one was taking responsibility for what they were doing and for all I know it could have been some sort of weird conceptual art piece done using a piece of found video.

At any rate, while I was working on #7 I suddenly heard words being sung to it, as happens now and then, so I started doing it as a vocal piece. And then a whole lot of Real Life happened and I didn't get back to it until now and I don't feel like doing the vocal any more. But you can sing it if you like, as I'm including the lyrics. Just sing along with the acoustic guitar (except for the first half of the second verse, as I was apparently planning to do a solo there).

It was gonna be called Hi, My Name's Ben.

Hi, my name's Ben
You may have seen me at the five and ten
Or where I used to work at the A&P
I still go in there now and then
But I'm on...my way
Don't wanna waste another day
In this life I'm living.

My name is Ben
And I've been awesome since I don't know when
Just look at my handsome smiling face
I'm like a walking 8 by 10
I'm like a sun ray
You can't look the other way
Even if you want to.

My wheels are spinning round and round in this
two-bit nowhere place
I'm gonna find my fame and fortune and
next time you see my face
You're gonna know who I am.

(solo?)

Hi, my name's Ben
Say hello to my little friend
You better not make me angry yeah
or you could come to a sticky end
It's like a nightmare
But it's finally coming clear
What I gotta do now.

They've been ignoring my existence in this
godforsaken place
I'm gonna be all over the nightly news
And next time they see my face
They're gonna know who I am.

Casual Recordings: Don's Boat Nos. 1, 3 & 5

Edit: For those who have trouble with Rapidshare, I've added links for using MediaFire to download the songs.

Way back in the olden days - I don't know exactly when, but I was doing my MIDI sequencing on an Atari ST computer - some siblings-in-law, who were into amateur video making, asked me if I would provide some music for a video they were making about Don, another family member who was a competitive bass fisherman. Without having seen the footage, or having the first clue about making effective score music for that matter, I eventually tossed off a dozen or so tunes, gave them catchy titles like "No. 01", sequenced them for the drum machine and synths I had on hand, and recorded them straight to a cassette which I mailed to them. I don't remember if they actually used them.

Anyway, time passed and in 2008 I needed to get a file off the old Atari, leading to a few days spent recovering as much stuff as I could off the old dusty disks. I recovered most of the MIDI files from the Boat video and played them for the first time in years.

Boy, were they bad.

No, not all bad, but a lot of them sort of sounded the same: 120 beats per minute, bouncy synth bass, and (since I had just gotten a sample player that had decent horn sounds) lots of horns. It sounded like a bad marching band trying to play disco jazz.

Anyway, since I'm getting back into recording after a long hiatus, I thought it might be amusing (for me anyway) to take these songs and see if I can't make them sound very different, and also replace all those freakin' horn samples with, I dunno, guitars maybe? And so here are three of them, all MP3, 128kb.

Don's Boat Number One - 3.9MB
download from MediaFire or Rapidshare
I'd been messing around with a bit of quasi-Hawaiian slide playing, so I decided to slow this one way down and try to make it Hawaiian. Well, so much for that. I actually had it even slower than this, but I wanted a quick-and-dirty substitute for the bongo track I had sequenced, and I found a few bongo loops at this speed, so there you go.

Don's Boat Number Three - 4.3MB
download from MediaFire or Rapidshare
Well, this one had a very happy sound to it, so the logical response was, 'I wonder if it will still sound happy if I do it with super-overdriven guitars?' I believe the answer is Yes. And the cheesy resolve is still cheesy! Hooray! Longest fade ever.

Don's Boat Number Five - 4.6MB
download from MediaFire or Rapidshare
This one was all bouncy bass and trombones, with a muted-trumpet lead that was me trying to do a Miles Davis thing, although Miles would've used about 1/3 as many notes, and, you know, been good. Nothing to do but take the bounce out of the bass, ditch the trombones, and play the trumpet part on a guitar, even thought the notes don't really sound right on a guitar.

mood: spearmint