Forgery League

Ahh, I needed that. New song-a-day track.

Bassline first: Fury thru POD, then software auto-filter; various loops processed to death; drums (Roland); FM pad; guitar thru POD; Alesis lead; rattling metal, treated, in place of a fill.

2007_0531_theology_cobra.mp3 (1′29)

I’ve been thinking: next time I get paid, it’s really time I got that Evolver I’ve had my eye on. But then I thought: wouldn’t it be more interesting to get a kit to build my own Paia 9700 system, for about the same amount of money?

Evolver: cute, tiny, patch editor allows “evolutionary” programming, can be used as a processor for external sound sources, doesn’t have to be assembled by hand

9700: insanely customizable, immediate and hands-on, has MIDI-to-CV outputs, can be used as a processor, external devices could be used to generate or modify control voltages

Something to think about.

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.

After a few weeks of non-stop construction at the new office, and every other kind of work at the old office, Sean and I took a sanity-mending holiday-in-town this weekend. I realized not long ago that these days we mostly see each other at work these days - I mean, at least we do get to see one another during the day, which I’m grateful for, but we’re seldom at our best.

Among other things, we caught up on some movie watching. Highlights: part one of a PBS series from the ‘80s about Joseph Campbell, which Sean’s mom sent him as a birthday present. Also Triplets of Belleville, which was loopy fun. I could have done without the, uh, frog scenes, but I’ll forgive those for the scenes of crazy old ladies (the Kickass Granny is one of my personal favorite archetypes) playing music on very do-it-yourself instruments…

Saturday dinner was at the Pomegranate, a lovely Persian restaurant on College St, and the food was beyond wonderful. I’m getting shivers just thinking about it. Really.

Sunday afternoon we trooped back to our office-to-be to do more drywalling and mudding. It’s turned out to be one hell of a project, this. But it’s going to rock.

And this evening J and I did some more planning for our upcoming CD, and tried out some new arrangement ideas. And I got back on the Song-a-day wagon:

Signals (1’13”)

I had iTunes pick out some tracks at random for inspiration. One was basically a bunch of random beeping by the BBC Radiophonic workshop, similar to what ended up in today’s song, and also echoed in the “signals” theme in the lyrics. The other was a folky tune by a friend of mine. The resulting song is rather similar to “Margins”, another Song-a-day from this past summer… they’d graft very neatly together.

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.

Muffy and I once recorded a wacky little number called “Song For A Sad Cat”. It was to be a dirge inspired by the sound of Ms Sukie Binbay Purr (I hope I’m remembering her name) meowing plaintively at the door… but it didn’t quite turn out that way.

Well, here’s the Song-a-day sequel:

Song for a bored cat (0’50”)

It started out with a recording off my phone - it has a “Voice Memo” function that I’ve used in desperation when inspired and without any other recording device, and the memory was full, so tonight I snagged it all onto my hard drive. The slightly out-of-time lead guitar is the first snippet to get used in a piece.

Now. There is no door on the upstairs studio, just a baby gate to keep out M’s cat Cobweb so he won’t pee on things. It doesn’t keep out the more athletic cats in the house, and our two cats usually try to take over my lap whenever I’m working up here, at least during the colder months.

After recording the basic tracks, I was setting up the microphone to possible record a very quiet vocal part when Tarquin sauntered in and started chattering at me. So I recorded him instead. He then proceeded to get real friendly with my lap before I got fed up and ejected him. That took about three tries, and he was replaced in short order by Gomiya. My primary function in life is to serve as furniture for pushy black cats.

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.

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).

Two recent song-a-day pieces, the latest in celebration of my new monitors. Of course, it was recorded at one in the morning when civility required I keep the volume down, so I haven’t yet heard it through the new monitors, but hey.

(And of course, now that I’ve got everything assembled, I’ve discovered that the Mbox2 emits a soft, high-pitched whine on its monitor outputs whenever it’s getting a digital audio signal from the computer - the data stream, presumably. Grr. I’ll have to see if a better-shielded USB cable helps.)

mobile (3’51”)

This one got me some dubious looks from my SO. Investigating the possibilities of Logic’s bundled FM synth - run through delay, reverb, EQ, filter, compression, trem and distortion, not necessarily in that order. Partway through it started to remind me of a bass clarinet piece by Evan Ziporyn, which plays with intervals and distortion in a similar sort of way… but in a purely acoustic way, by playing and humming simultaneously, so it’s much richer and more organic. (It’s called “Tsmindao Ghmerto”, if I recall correctly, and it’s on an album by the Bang On A Can crew.)

It felt good doing something that’s all textural, without any beat to it. When your recording software is always thinking in terms of bars and beats it’s sometimes hard to get out of that mode of thought yourself. I find it’s usually hard to combine the two methods of working - especially so since piling on all those effects eats up practically all the processor time.

If I do more like this I’ll try different tunings too.

awning (1’32”)

I still don’t totally get the Environment screen in Logic, but I’ve figured out enough to run my external MIDI devices (gosh, that was a fun day, let me tell you). Unfortunately, I don’t have the right cables to run their audio back into my computer yet, so I had to use all softsynths again.

The drums are picked out of Apple Loops (shhh, don’t tell), then distorted, compressed and gated all to hell, as seems to be my thing lately. Mostly it’s a quick and easy way to unrecognizableize a beat. And similarly, I like sounds with really short release times, that you can play like you’re sending Morse code. Ended up sounding a bit like a ‘90s remake of an ‘80s song, really…

I can’t post the latest Song-a-day pieces, because (1) the sound quality on one of them is terrible, not to mention the playing, (2) the second one’s not done, and (3) they’re part of secret Hallowe’en show plans. Not that it’s that big a secret, I suppose. Regardless, I’m quite proud of them both.

We don’t have time to pull it off for this year, but the secret plan is this: for Hallowe’en - or perhaps some other show, just for the heck of it - we come on dressed as a completely different band, and play our own material in a different style. Of course, knowing the two of us, New Wave seems the most logical and fun choice. I’ve spent the past half hour trying to sing like Neil Tennant.

I mentioned the premise to a friend, who had a related idea: musical improv. Not just improvised music, not just an improvised musical, but improvised drama featuring the players in a band. The audience could throw out suggestions for what style they should perform and the soap opera dynamics that are going on between all the musicians. It’d take a good deal of skill and chutzpah, and no small amount of preparations. But it could be really cool.

On another related tangent, I’ve been tossing around ideas for a while about doing a story-with-songs - not quite a musical, but a narrated story with songs performed by a band, or more than one band (they could change during the story breaks). My chief inspiration was Harry Nilsson’s The Point, which is fun, but it’s by someone else, and it’s not really his best work.

As I type all this, Tarquin is on my lap, pawing at it in a way that’s frankly rude. He’s been really pushy lately about wanting to own my lap and/or chair, and if not, to climb up on my desk. I may have to employ him in my music making (inspired also by this YouTube video, which was passed along to me by Ms Urnash; warning, contains adorable kitten).

I guess you’d call that ailurotoric composition?

When we moved into this place a couple months back, the idea was that by now we’d have the music studio all set up and be in the midst of recording our next CD. But just before we made the move, I discovered that my Windows machine had been doused with cat wee, right through the back grille, and its hard drive controller was getting flaky in a scary sort of way. So I commandeered my SO’s old PowerBook G4, and got me a copy of Logic Express (a belated birthday present). It’s taking a while to get everything back in gear - not for nothing does Ronan Chris Murphy write that “Home Studios are Killing Music”.

It’s a complicated piece of machinery, is Logic, so as a way of getting my bearings while also getting a few creative ya-yas out, I’ve decided to start up the Song-a-Day project again. One track every day, or at least a few a week. Length doesn’t matter, but they usually average about a minute and a half. Sound quality isn’t as important as the ideas in the piece, and most important is learning from the experience.

So here’s the first: 2006_1009_Scales.mp3 (1.2 megs)

Still very much getting the hang of the way Logic handles regions and quantization and such. At some point I’ll read a manual.

I was excited (read “squealed like a girl”) to discover that alternative tunings are available just by picking them out of a menu - I’ve wanted to do pieces using just intonation (or some other non-even tempered scale) for a long time. There are literally dozens of them included, and you can define your own as well. Right on! So this one’s in a 7-limit JI, since I’ve always loved those rich, flat-flat sevenths. Other than that, there’s nothing so remarkable about this one, except maybe that I used a pair of scissors for percussion somewhere in there. Synths are the subtractive and FM ones bundled with Logic.