Recent Happenings

Last weekend, I attended a rally protesting the passage of Proposition 8 in California.

Some video I took:

Forgive Me, For I Have Not Posted

Things are busy, in a good way. Band rehearsals are ramping up a bit. This is the first time we've gone weekly, rather than every other week. The momentum has been sufficiently in the "forward" direction to make it seem useful to press on a little faster.

Gotta take a look at my expenses ... the rehearsal studio time is NOT cheap and weeklies may be more than I can afford. Then again, for now, I can do it.

Even though we're using the larger rooms with the better PAs to give Eric and I *some* prayer of hearing our vocals over the din.

I'm trying to decide whether to spring some new material on them tonight, even without song charts .... or see whether I thought to draft any song charts over the last couple of weeks. I'm itching to get on with it, though to be honest, having gotten as far as we have with only three or maybe four full-band rehearsals, to be getting this far along on 6-8 songs, is nothing to sneeze at.

I'm just itching to do even more. ;-)

Vocal Rehearsal

One thing that came out of last week's full band rehearsal is that Eric's upper range was working for him a lot better than lower down. This seems to be a bit of a rule of thumb for singers anyway: that a lot of people start off feeling "more comfortable" in the lower part of their range but SOUND better higher up. If you're not Johnny Cash or Stephin Merritt, don't go too low. I've had to learn the same thing myself. My first solo show featured several low-baritone songs as warmups and EVERYONE who commented on my singing said I was better later in the show.

So we took some time last night to work out some more vocal arrangements for Eric, so that he can do harmonies in a part of his range that works better for him and sounds better overall. And that came together quite well.

In fact, a couple of songs in which I consciously chose not to write too many lyrics for the choruses, concentrating on holding long notes and vowels, had been suffering from a bit of tedium with just my voice. With just one harmony, the choruses start to pop again. This is very yay.

There's another song in which the second verse is twice the length of the first and third, and what I've been trying to do is go up an octave in the second half of the verse, for dramatic effect. Problem is, my falsetto isn't robust enough to be reliable. I'm okay in rehearsals if it's one of the first things I sing, but if I've overextended myself at all, forget it. Well, guess who can sing the part? Indeed, he'd been thinking of suggesting to me that he take it, even as it had been occurring to me to pass it to him. If I can work on my chops to the point of getting up there myself, maybe we'll double. If not, I'll stay in the original octave and we'll harmonize. WIN.

Doug was going to try to make it later on but didn't show. No problem ... however, I happen to have heard Doug sing and I'm pretty sure he will add something very good when he gets the drum parts down and joins in vocally as well.

Audio Hardware

I posted a somewhat giddy note in my LiveJournal yesterday about the really nice rehearsal I had with a full band a couple of nights ago. The material works well in that setting and I'm looking forward to rehearsing them more.

THIS post is just a quick note that I ordered a piece of useful audio hardware the other day, and it arrived in the mail last night.

An old buddy of mine pointed out that some of my mixes suffer from being done on headphones; he noted that you get a false image of the stereo field that way. Thing is, my iMac outputs on a stereo 1/8 port (female) and the mixer I drive my monitors with take 1/4 or XLR inputs, mono. Guess what was hard to find in the shops? A cable with a 1/8" stereo male end that splits to two 1/4" outputs, male or female.

I'd have preferred a longish cable with two 1/4" male ends but settled for a short cable with 1/4" female ports to which I can plug standard cables. Haven't tested it out yet, but got TWO of them. Figure next time I mix, I can do an even better job.

Continuing MIDI Geekery

My comment to Alan this morning was "the simpler they make the software tools, the MORE enticing it is to spend entire days composing and arranging."

I forced myself to get out of the house yesterday and catch a film ("Iron Man," for future reference--enjoyed it) just so I wouldn't keep fiddling with new tracks that benefit from the new controller.

Besides the "Cuddleslut" song (which got a thumbs up from a buddy) I've been working on a backing track for the DE track "Land Line", which I've been promising both Eric and Ryan I would hash out better. That was yesterday's big effort.

This morning I've been working on a version of Book of Love's "Boy". Eric and I have both been wanting to cover that, and Eric may actually sing lead on it, to give me a break in the set.

Late last week, though, I was actually working on Numan's "Airlane," which is one of the close inspirations for "Cuddleslut."

That's four, count 'em four, pieces in the works in the last few days. None of which I worked on at the office. I've been busy enough with real work, there.

I keep meaning to get back to "Good Men" so I can give Ryan more ideas for lead riffs, too. He's been out of town the last few days and has said he probably won't have more parts worked out for this coming Tuesday. That's okay because we'll probably be breaking in a drummer ... but I feel as if I'm not getting enough done for my sidemen.

Yeah, even though I've worked out a full backing track and have a cover song half-tracked for my bass player. ;-)

The sun is shining and I am feeling noshy, so I think I will get myself OUT the house.

Because I'm spinning ABBA's The Visitors and the drum pattern for "Soldiers" is caaaaallllling me, begging to be stolen. MUST. RESIST.

Numanoid

I referred to my new little synthpop ditty as "shit" the other day, but it was in the sense of "shit like that is easier to write with the new keyboard controller."

In fact, it's not shit at all. It is very simple, but that's what I was going for.

So many of my favorite pop songs are built on very simple foundations. I'm attracted to muso stuff where there's fifteen bazillion chord changes and modulations and whatnot, or a little bit of modal play, but then I go back to the Hunters and Collectors catalogue, or early synthpop, and hear how much musicality people can cram into a I-V progression.

I am loving this little piece. Mostly I-V, a little vi-IV. Not only could Gary Numan have written it, it's got those long drawn-out held synth notes a la early Icehouse, where I'm just playing with letting the timbres have at your ears. I wasn't deliberately going for a "Great Southern Land" vibe, but I got there. (YES all my references and touchstones are from 1977-1983). (Except Hunnas!)

After Themes For A Defunct Leather Bar I wasn't sure Dirigible Ego was going to do a lot more instrumentals (I have another project for experiments and instrumentals) but this is definitely a Dirigible Ego song. An instrumental. Maybe I should just have at least one an album, no matter what, kind of like Simple Minds in the early days.

Gotta work on the drum kit ... especially the snare sounds, which are a little too uniform and wimpy.

But overall, wow. I have surprised myself again. Can't stop listening to the damn thing.

Working title has been "Numanoid" but I think I will rename it "Cuddleslut." It just has a happy vibe like that.

MIDI Controller

In all this time (about two years now) that I've been playing with GarageBand, I've never really used a regular piano-style keyboard to input musical notes. The little "piano" graphic window you can use the mouse with in GB is fundamentally useless, but the "musical typing" window is just useful enough that I went with it.

I'm pretty sure I could use my fancy, expensive Roland keyboard as a MIDI trigger source instead, but I don't think I ever have. The instruction manual for that thing is endless, even after three years I find it a bit daunting. When I want to use the Roland, I run it in as an *audio* source, not a *MIDI* source. I just don't want to have to keep another USB connector around and figure out which device to turn on first and all that crap. (My brain is oddly Luddite about such things.)

What I've wanted for a long time is a MIDI input keyboard. I saw one at about the same time that one of my professional colleagues gave me my first introduction to GarageBand (he raved about how good it was; I'd been assuming it must be a toy).

But every time I looked at the price tag on a MIDI keyboard, versus what I thought I needed to accomplish, I kept convincing myself it wasn't really going to be worth it. I could hack along with the "musical typing" function and then drag the notes around in the program window if the timing was off. Which it always is, I'm far from a great keyboard player.

A recent conversation with Shannon Grady convinced me to give the M-Audio product line another look. What could be simpler than walking into an Apple Store and just getting a two-octave MIDI keyboard?

I really really should have done this long ago. My compositions just took another little quantum jump.

Here's the thing. I've gotten much more fluid about using looping to rehearse draft ideas for songs and then lay them down. But although the Roland can loop, if the major part of the song is in GB and then I have to attach the Roland to start practicing keyboard parts on top of that ... too many steps for my Luddite brain.

I mean, frankly, the programming interface on the Roland is just clunky. Compared to a full fledged GUI like GarageBand. I know there are GUI tools for the Roland (I've even loaded them, once, in the distant past, despite being a Luddite) but my dim recollection is that GB is still superior.

So here I am with my new toy and it makes it EVER so much easier to rehearse keyboard lines and then record them RIGHT into the program when basically satisfied. The only drawback (and it is a real one) is that I can only trigger the sounds native to GB. The Roland does have 768 nice sounds, about 150 of which I think I actually LIKE. So there is more to do with the interface.

But the M-Audio unit has semi-weighted keys (which the Roland does NOT), and it collects genuine MIDI attack and aftertouch information (which the Roland does, but then it dumps it to that little information window which is SO difficult to use fluidly).

I got a great deal more done just yesterday than I have in a while.

******

Now it may be time for a little more discipline.

Part of the reason I'm doing all this composing at home is that rehearsing a band is time consuming. When we go into the studio, it quickly becomes apparent that even *I* don't recall all the chord changes and melody lines for my songs perfectly, and I live with the things much more fully than my sidemen do. It takes time to get everyone rehearsed, work things out, make choices about parts, and so on.

Meanwhile, although my creative burst from circa late March and April has been tailing off a little, the juices are still flowing. So I keep coming up with new song bits.

In addition to the two songs I blogged about last week and the week before (which now carry the titles "Monday Morning" and "Sun Breaks Through") I've got a couple more things in the crucible .... another one generated out of looping some fumbly acoustic guitar arpeggiating, like "MM" and "SBT"--and that one has some draft lyrics--and then a pure, simple synthpop song in a vaguely Gary Numan tradition, which is 100% an artifact of this new MIDI keyboard, which allows me to compose that kind of shit EVEN faster than before.

Thing is, I could speed up the process of band rehearsals if I didn't spend QUITE so much time hacking at new songs.

Ryan has come up with some great ideas for lead guitar parts, but that said, it's obviously a bit of a slog for him at times, and I think it's partly because I'm not giving enough guidance. He came up with a descending figure in the verses of "Good Men" that made me wet myself with glee. I think he also repeats it basically the same each time he hauls it out. Perhaps, as the composer, it's up to me to step in and say "here are some variations I want you to make on your brilliant riff."

What I *ought* to do with this new MIDI controller is work on some of those ideas.

Same with Eric's bass lines. He's pulling out some GREAT stuff. It's also clear that I need to give him more time to rehearse, and a better beat to play with. Our rehearsal last week featured NO drummer--because I still haven't talked to Doug--and NO beat track--because I forgot my Nano with the beat tracks at home, heading out to the studio in a rush.

This is my gig. I have to be more prepared. Hacking away on new material is fabulous and great, but not if I set things up so that my sidemen don't get enough attention from my for the stuff I'm asking them to do.

So there's a bit of planning and preparation remaining to do.