FORGERY LEAGUE

Sunday 1 April 2007

Lodged

The other day carlos_G at the Immersion Composition Society announced the Lime Gecko Virtual Lodge - an all-day music composing marathon. The goal is to record as many pieces of music as humanly possible in one day. I started a bit late in the day, but managed seven:

2007_0331_01_habanerique.mp3 (1’57”)

11:30 am. Oh crap. I’ve started doing a pseudo-Cuban piano number. What am I doing? I don’t play piano. I do my best to fumble my way through a drum part as well.  conga (only one conga today; the head on the other one suffered water damage thanks to a leaky roof up here) - piano - J-bass - drums - guitar (added later).

2007_0331_02_ShootForTheMoon.mp3 (3’07”)

Better start this one in more familiar territory, namely on the guitar. Then clumsy Roland drums - J-bass - lyrics - experimental 1+3+4 harmonies on chorus - keyboard. Me and the celestial imagery again.

2007_0331_03_Lander_beeswax.mp3 (2’10”)

Kept the keyboard on that same patch and did a lazy, introspective instrumental. Then I decided to change it up with a big stompy beat. Rolannd thru FilterQueen - Apple Loop processed heavily - re-recorded keyboard part - 2x electric through POD’s volume-swell.

2007_0331_04_Processional.mp3 (1’22)

My eyes settled on a recorder lying on the shelf. And the tin whistle. Which to play? Why not both? Doofy pseudo-folk. For the record, it is a pain in the ass playing a bag of marbles in 5 without a click. Both the conga and the warped head off its twin make an appearance.

2007_0331_05_Uh_oh.mp3 (0’53”)

Uh, there really isn’t any excuse for this one.

Perhaps I was subliminally affected by the message board, where lodge dude Nick Dobson had suggested, “why not squeeze off a speed-filler song when you’re done with this one?” and carlos_G had added something about “glad to hear that things are moving…” Oh dear.

2007_0331_06_Beyondah.mp3 (2’19”)

Spy show theme. Needs a breakdown. Fury bass through POD.

2007_0331_07_Sunday.mp3 (0’57”)

Starting to wrap up. Wasn’t sure what to do with this so I wrote some stream-of-consciousness “lyrics” and said them.

Edit: here’s the ICS forum thread where today’s Lodge was organized - you can find commentary and other people’s music there.

Tuesday 28 November 2006

Lodge training

As mentioned previously, I’ve been all excited about setting up an Immersion Composition lodge. Enough so that last night, I did a mini-session on my own. It lasted about four and a half hours, during which I recorded these three pieces:

Not In Nine (1’19”)

As I was walking home to start the session, I had an odd-meter groove going in my head, but by the time I started recording, I’d forgotten it. I thought it was in nine, but this turned out to be in seven and four and extremely Phleg Camp-y, particularly the 6+6+4 section at the end. I seem to end up aping them whenever I bring out the Fender Jazz bass. This one earned me the “trying very hard to say something positive” look from my SO.

How’s About You (0’35”)

Drums -> title -> lyrics -> chords -> done. Self-explanatory I think.

Frost (1’55”)

My keyboard-written songs tend to either be in a particular vein I’ve followed since high school, or these more lyrical things that wander from one melody to another. I’ve just realized that this is more or less a restatement of a piece I did a while back called “Dawn River”, right down to the clicky percussion. I can’t escape myself!

All in all, a fun exercise and most worthwhile.

One and a half hours per song. Too much futzing and trying to get parts “right” (especially the slap bass on #1) and take down some of the hiss that crept in somewhere. I’m still very much getting used to my new setup: Logic on a laptop, equipped with a very finicky Mbox. Before I try another one of these, I have to get a few specific cables, figure out the ideal signal path into my computer, and set up some new Logic templates so I don’t have to mess with setting things up on every song.

Edit: more discussion of this mini-session on the ICS discussion forum.

Tuesday 21 November 2006

The latest

Snagged a copy of The Frustrated Songwriter’s Handbook, which so far is a more colourful and detailed retelling of all the Immersion Composition Society’s super-sekrit learnings about creativity.

ICS co-founder Nicholas Dobson on the first ever “composer duel”, wherein he and his friend Michael Mellender locked themselves away in their home studios to record 20 songs in 12 hours:

By the end of the day there were cords and gear tangling and zig-zagging all over my room, and the floor was littered with empty, destroyed junk-food packages. My left eye was twitching, and my session had devolved into a quest to find out what is the most annoying noise a person can make with their mouth.

Then Michael was knocking on the door. He had a cassette tape with his session on it, a six-pack, and more junk food. He stomped around my living room, said a bunch of stuff I don’t remember, and then collapsed on my couch. He said something along the lines of, “I want to do this every day, and never leave my house.”

I said, “Me, too.”

It’s very similar to Scott (Understanding Comics) McCloud’s original 24-Hour Comic duel, some ten years previous - and many other “speed creation” challenges (plays, films, novels, and so on). There’s great fun - granted, in a slightly mad, masochistic way - in setting yourself such a lunatic goal, setting aside all else for the sake of creation. I like to call it “the romance of the all-nighter”.

I suspect that the ICS’s songwriting version may be more fruitful, for a few simple reasons:

• Granularity. Songs are short (usually), and you can keep churning them out. If you really do hit a dead end with one, you can always work on another instead. Conversely, in a comic challenge, every page commits you further to the story you’re working on. Churning out a 24-page book in a day is a great badge of honour - if you succeed. If you don’t, you fail big. With songs, failures aren’t as devastating, and successes, while smaller, are still delightful, and they’re cumulative.
• Regularity. The “lodge system” encourages you to create lots, and often, where as a comic is such a Herculean effort that you’re not likely to attempt it very often.
• The creation of a circle of friends committed to making music regularly and supporting one another’s creative efforts. The ritual is important to this - ordeal and hard work, followed by a rewarding night sharing food and drink and art.

Of course, nothing in this is inherent to music - you could do it with comic strips, or one-pagers, that sort of thing. I expect some creative writing circles have done this sort of thing since forever, but I can’t say for sure.

So it’s time to put all this theory to the test. I’m going to start the Forgery Lodge up again, this time “for real”. Maybe even two sub-Lodges, on an alternating schedule - a face-to-face Lodge here in the music room, and a virtual, long-distance Lodge for further-flung people I know. It probably won’t happen until the new year, but I’m already planning it. One Saturday a month, let’s say…

And in the meantime, tonight’s Song-a-day.

Roller (1’18”)

Started with the organ patch, now that I have the cables to bring in external audio, and added real live bass and guitar too. Didn’t want to wake the roommates, so sadly there are no vocals. I definitely had “Higher Ground” in the back of my head from earlier in the day, and that other piece that sounds like it that I can’t remember now that I could swear has something to do with a vegetable or the word “electric”. God I need to sleep.

Monday 20 November 2006

Speed composition

I tidied up the studio today, hung a couple of pictures and found a new spot for the bodhran, put all the guitars in a corner where they won’t get toasted by the sun, and tended to the plants (the landlady’s money tree, which had been quietly dying on a dark landing since long before we moved in, is making a comeback).

I was also delighted to discover that the Immersion Composition Society web site is back up - when it vanished a while back I was worried that they’d packed it in - but they’re back, they’ve added a MySpace page, and they have a book, which I’m hoping to pick up or order at my local independent bookseller tomorrow.

The ICS consists of several autonomous “lodges”, each essentially a group of musicians who hold songwriting days on a somewhat regular basis. Each member gets up in the morning and independently composes as many pieces of music as humanly possible, records them, and brings them all to a listening party in the evening. It’s a crazy task that’s yielded some brilliant results.

We actually held such a songwriting day, almost two years back now, and I picked the preliminary name “Forgery Lodge”, which I went on to steal and change for the name of this site. It was all pretty cool, and though we haven’t done it again since then, it did inspire me to start the Song-a-day project - the less frenzied, solitaire version, if you will.

introspect (1’38”)

Speaking of which, here’s tonight’s endeavour. It’s very 1980, all analoguey synths and such, all of them Logic instruments again. The strings here use the ES1 plugin, which has pulse width modulation on it - a sound that takes me right back to the Commodore 64 days. And the whistly melody harkens back to a certain sort of pastoral synth wispiness that I think I imprinted on big time as a kid. There was one Shadowfax piece in particular that I’ll have to track down some day…

I always like to figure out my own built-in rules and prejudices and subvert them, and this week it was my “no pads” rule - hence those strings. I think partly it’s because I’m becoming a bit more comfortable playing keyboards (I got to play an actual Hammond organ last night, and it was a blast).