Music

Stuff about music, either mine or stuff I am listening to.

The Sunday Song: Pick ‘Em All Up

 Posted by (Visited 7821 times)  Music
Apr 222007
 

My home office has had some misadventures lately: first replacing some faucets in the adjacent bathroom, then there was an unrelated flood which required moving everything out into the living room, then I found that the tile dust from the faucet replacement had almost killed my CPU fan, causing my computer to overheat and crash quite regularly (thanks to m3mnoch for helping me get running again!).

So today I got the recording stuff all set up again for the first time in ages. And this tune was the result. The recording is a bit muddy, and a bit messy — I didn’t actually write parts for anything other than the mandolin, so everything else is just improv and more than a bit rough, since some of the parts stomp each other or collide. But what the hey, it’s dinnertime and I have been working on it for around 6 hours, so I am posting it.

Given that I overdubbed virtually every instrument I have, Kristen said it should be called “Pick ‘Em All Up.” So it is. However, the ukelele and the mountain dulcimer did not in fact make the cut. But you can hear the old 1894 banjo in there — my banjo debut! — as well as the ’62 Gibson acoustic.

Apr 082007
 

This is an old instrumental I wrote and recorded a very long time ago now. It dates to maybe ten years ago — I recovered it off analog tape. The recording has some blips and clicks in it, sounds like I bumped into the mic at one point, and I think you can hear the fish tank burbling in the background and possibly even a child or two.

You’re supposed to listen to this imagining big ol’ lumbering cartoon elephants stomping through the jungle, even getting excited and partying at one point.

Then there’s a mouse.

Weird guitar tunings for $100: this is in DADGAD, then I capoed at the 10th fret only on the top four strings. The mouse is played on the strings below the capo.

Exploiting the space

 Posted by (Visited 10294 times)  Game talk, Music
Mar 272007
 

We’re all too ready to do things in familiar ways. You know, when we were working on music systems for Galaxies, we thought very much in terms of loops and whether we could get all the sound to synch up. But maybe this video of the Reactable music prototype shows that instead, a multiplayer music system might be better suited towards soundscapes.

When I look at what they did here, I say to myself, “they exploited the uses of a table.” What are core characteristics of a table? It’s usually large enough to handle multiple people. It is a surface on which objects are placed, and interesting things happen in terms of what objects, where, and how they are positioned relative to one another. Using the traditional metaphor of musical instruments would never get you this instrument. Instead, you’d end up with light-up piano keys on the table surface.

What are the core characteristics of virtual worlds, and how do we exploit the space in a way that simply wouldn’t otherwise?

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Feb 042007
 

It feels weird to try to follow up “Ode to Code”, which is easily the most popular poem I have ever posted on the site. Most of the Sunday Poems get a few dozen reads, and that one has crested 1500.

Well, here’s a song that is in some ways similarly geeky. After all, it’s about orreries, sextants, Dava Sobel’s wonderful book Longitude, determinism, and even name-checks Aristotle. It also has a shipwrecked sailor hallucinating, of course. For those who don’t know or haven’t read the book (which I highly recommend), before John Harrison developed his clock, longitude was fiendishly difficult to calculate, which led, of course, to sea travel being extremely dangerous and unpredictable.

I ended up making it the title track on that “full band” CD that I still haven’t finished after all these years (it’s been since 2001!). I should probably just call it “done” and put it up somewhere. Oh well. Read on for the lyrics and also how to play it on the guitar:
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