Bicycles in January

Today I took the training wheels off of my daughter’s bicycle. Oh, she’s past due — she’s eight going on nine, and really should be braver about taking spills and learning how to ride for real. She got pretty good about jumping off right before it fell over, though.

But why she picked a chilly January afternoon, all overcast, right before it started raining, I have no idea. She and her friend Julia took over the cul-de-sac, and I split my time between chasing the bikes and going back inside to work on a little riff.

Well, the riff turned into a tune. Sort of a rough jam, really. Called “Bicycles in January,” naturally enough. Click play or download it — free music!

Have fun. Let me know what you think. Be gentle, the whole thing is only a few hours old and might fall apart if you look at it funny. It still needs training wheels.

Misc stuff only musicians will care about:

The recording has on it drums, bass, and acoustic guitar. The bass is tuned down to a D, and the guitar is tuned in DADGAD. On top of that, I mangle the poor guitar tuning further by taking my Kyser capo and putting it on upside-down, for a 3-4-5 partial capo at the 5th fret (meaning, leaving open the low D, capoing the next three strings at the 5th fret, then leaving the two highest strings, A and D, open). This results in a tuning of DDGCAD.

The basic guitar riff through most of the piece is played exclusively with slaps, taps, hammer-ons and pull-offs. The trick is to learn to do the run up the string and then over to the next string really fast. Gives a nice, liquid sound if you can manage it.

I did the drum parts (three of them) on a drum machine… I also double-tracked the bass in a couple of places. The guitar part I panned out to both sides in a few places and added some chorus to get it a bit fuller. I use ACID 4.0 to do this stuff… Since the whole guitar part was mostly improvised over the bass and drum track, I did a little judicious snipping to excise the truly noodley bits. I can’t remember ever doing this with a guitar instrumental before… usually I play the whole song straight, but since this was more of a vamping riff than a song, really, who cares.