Song: Secretly

Secretly
Mix 7
July 3-October 6, 2007
[2:35]


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Lyrics:

Secretly I've been wondering why I was waiting here so long
When all the faults I found are gone.
It seemed to me that the way in life was to do it as I'm shown;
I might go crazy on my own.

Yeah, recently I've been wondering why I was waiting here so long
When all the faults I found are gone.
It seemed to me that the way in life was to do it as I'm shown;
I'm going crazy on my own.

Influences: John Lennon (guitar).
Instruments: Squier P-Bass Special, Kramer Focus 111S, FL Studio BooBass, Boss VT-1 Voice Transformer, Drum Samples.

The bass line and some of the words to this came to me in a dream in the middle of 2003 — although at the time, it sounded more like '90s skate punk.

By August I had finished writing out the refrain, but I couldn't really think of anything else to go with it. I had plans for combining it with another song idea that never took off, and so it ended up on the back burner for about four years. Finally, I caved and decided to just record what I had and try to make the most of it.

Rather than be overly creative and try to write more lyrics, I said to hell with it (as I often do!) and made the song just be the refrain repeated several times. If it hasn't sunk in by the fourth repetition... well, that's why we have the "loop" toggle on music players.

So, there are three vocal lines -- one low octave, chill vocal; one higher octave, slightly manic vocal; and a female vocal (sounds a little weird because it's run through the VT-1) jumping between unison and harmony with the higher vocal. And I must have been thinking about John Lennon's scratchy guitar — featured at the end of the songs "I'm Losing You" and "I Don't Wanna Face It" (the version on Wonsaponatime) — when I did this.

Mmmm... Oh, the "bwah" drum is a DNC kick sample with some sine modulation fx added in FL Studio.

Instrumental: T-mbourine

T-mbourine
August 5, 2007
[1:52]


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Instruments: FL Studio 7: 3x Oscillator, BooBass, Percussion Samples; QWERTY Keyboard.

In FL Studio, there is an option to use your computer keyboard as an input device for instruments. The keys are mapped so that Z, X, C, V, B, N, M, comma, period, and forward slash make a set of white keys, with Z representing a C note; Q, W, E, R, T, Y, U, I, O, P, [, and ] represent the next octave (and a half) up, with Q representing a C note. S, D, G, H, J, L, semicolon, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 0, and = represent black keys.

For the purpose of this instrumental, I wanted to come up with a tune that stayed within a scale on the white keys. Therefore, I started looking for common words that stayed within the two sets of "white keys" on the QWERTY keyboard. Using familiar words gives the player the opportunity to experiment with new sequences of notes that can be easily repeated on the fly. I finally settled on the word "tambourine", which I chose to represent as "t-mbourine" because the letter A does not trigger a note in FL Studio. All the letters in the word are given equal length except the initial T, which is double length to make up for the missing second letter. The resulting riff is repeated for the duration of the song.

With the letter T (which would be a G note on a piano keyboard) as the root of the scale, and with extra preprogrammed backing, the tune ended up being in the Mixolydian mode (a scale formed by running from G to G on the white keys of a piano keyboard). The note sequence of the lead instrument (a high-octave BooBass with lots of effects piled on) was improvised by using other words that fit within the set of white keys, combined with more random improvisation. For example, the beginning of the lead sequence was typed as follows: "z poetry petry utyrterw" (spacing provided for clarity). Other words included in the song are "return" and "erotic", interspersed with improvised riffs. The second half is more abstract and not based on any particular familiar words.

In the background you hear a heavily modified vocal sample of me, Ray N, and Kevin S discussing how different English-speaking areas have their own different (and, for the record, totally made-up) terms akin to "poppycock".

GSnap Messing

GSnap Messing
May 24, 2007
[2:02]


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Instruments: GVST GSnap + FL Studio, Whistling, Vocals.

I can't remember what my original motivation was for getting GVST GSnap — other than the obvious use it could have for tweaking vocal pitch flubs, though as it turns out I'm too heavy-handed of a producer to do something so subtle. So, in order to explore what I could actually do with GSnap, I made this. First I laid down the droning vocals in the background — a good old "ohhhhmmmwaaahhoohhmmwwwaah", technically describable as modulating the formant spectrum of my voice by slowly wembling my lips. Those were run through GSnap and pinned to one invariant pitch.

So, whistling ended up kind of cool. Very world-music sounding. Not immediately obvious that it's human whistling. I started out with the whistling locked to a couple pitches, then switched it up to an F major scale.

Ah, this might explain part of my motivation. I heard a song by They Might Be Giants, called Bastard Wants to Hit Me that used Auto-Tune (or something akin to it). So when the vocals come in on this, around 0:56, the line "He says he knows me, but I don't know that guy..." is from that song. Then I switch to singing the first verse of another They Might Be Giants song, Hope That I Get Old Before I Die.

Song: Nuclear Spin (Man Will Never Fly Version)

Nuclear Spin (Man Will Never Fly Version)
Version 2
February 18, 2007
[2:17]


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Lyrics:

Alright, I think we've got everything we need here,
Where's the uh.. oh...

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.
Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.
Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.

Instruments: Oscillators; Pulse Pro Jr. Drum Set + Hi-Hats; Kramer Focus 111S; Hands, Feet, and a Chair; Kramer Baretta 5-string Bass (plunk, slap, & slide); Clock Chime; Sofia Mari SM3448 Accordion.

Not a far cry from the version mixed the previous day, this is a stripped-down mix with no acoustic guitar and only one vocal sample from the archives (my friend Andrew saying "Alright, I think we've got everything we need here..."). The intro is also different from Version 1 — instead of a glowing, ambient oscillator sound, here we have a gritty, low buzz that hangs for a few seconds and then jolts into the guitar riff.

Oscillators come back for revenge during the last repetition and then taper off at the end. A sample taken from a chiming clock in my house is also snuck into a couple spots.

For more info on this track, check out the blog entry for Version 1.

Song: Nuclear Spin (Hello)

Nuclear Spin (Hello)
Version 1
February 17, 2007
[2:32]


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See also: Nuclear Spin (Man Will Never Fly Version).

Lyrics:

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.
Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.

Die schönsten Früchte ab von jedem Baum...
Baum...
Thuswise ends the bonus track!

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.
Do you think man will ever fly?
No, come to Hotel One, it's the best prime number...

... and it's not divisible by its own bowls.
Alright, I think we've got everything we need here,
Where's the uh.. oh...

That's awful... forty-nine minutes...
Do you think man will ever fly?
Die Luft ist still, als atmete man kaum...

Instruments: Yamaha CBX-K1XG MIDI Keyboard + Oscillator; Hands, Feet, and a Chair; Percussion Samples; Epiphone Wildkat (played acoustically); Pulse Pro Jr. Drum Set + Hi-Hats; Kramer Baretta 5-string Bass (plunk, slap, & slide); Kramer Focus 111S; Dean Exotica QSE Acoustic/Electric Guitar; Sofia Mari SM3448 Accordion.

This is basically a glorified instrumental, intended mainly as a let's-get-things-started sort of number. Like Sever (Ballad of The Leg With Gangrene), this song was named by looking at Wikipedia articles at random until a phrase came up that I liked. The riff is a fairly straightforward loop, only really distinguished by the strumming rhythm. The conservative drumming draws from when I practiced the song a few times playing the guitar and drums at the same time, meaning I could only use three feet and no hands to play the kick, snare, and hi-hats. In this mix, however, the drums were recorded individually and mixed in later.

The intro to the song is marked mostly by the ambient glowing sound created by running my MIDI Keyboard into a slightly detuned oscillator in FruityLoops and smushing my whole arm down across all the white keys (fortunately, the song is in the key of C). The staccato percussion in the latter half of the intro was the metronome I used in recording the song, derived from an abbreviated sample of a song by The Strokes.

The muffled vocal samples scattered throughout the song are simply a device to break up the repetitive cycle of the instrumentation. They all come from recordings sitting around in my archives. Some bits came from friends and dormmates I lived with in the Japanese House at William and Mary: the two German bits (Jen), the weird backwards ambient chatter during the second "Hello" part (various people), and the "Alright, I think we've got everything we need here..." (Andrew). "Do you think man will ever fly?", "Come to Hotel One", and "Forty-nine minutes", as well as the "soy soy, hoy hoy" mumblings in the last part come from Ray and Kevin, with whom I have periodically recorded jams. "Thuswise ends the bonus track!", as well as the mumble at the end of the intro, come from a drum-n-guitar demo I recorded recently before working on this.

Trivia:

This is the first time since 2001 that I've played the Kramer Baretta bass (the first bass guitar I owned) in a recording.

This is NOT the first time I have inserted the timekeeper sample, used to synchronize recorded tracks, into the final mix — the muted strumming heard throughout version 2 of The Thawing Song up through the fade-out was the timekeeper I used for that song.

Finally, the backwards double-speed acoustic/electric guitar parts were originally recorded in July 2003 against an instrumental called "One And Only", also in the key of C, composed by Ray Naegle.

See also: Nuclear Spin (Man Will Never Fly Version).