No Mercy

In which I make noise. Me jamming a bit prior to packing away the music equipment for my move.

-- Badtux the Musical Penguin

When I was young

Eric Burdon and the Animals from 1967, "When I was Young".

Little known fact: This was the inspiration for my song "When I was Younger", even though it's absolutely nothing like this song, it just set off some neurons firing in my head. I still don't have a good recording of the song because I've been busier than a beehive full of bees, but here's the imperfect take that has a buncha flubs in it that I posted some time back...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Working on a new song...

I put #10 Elixirs on my Duo-Sonic, and have been playing with drop-D tuning and all my new gear, including the cheapo effects unit built in to the new Behringer mixer. What I've come up with is a *very* heavy sounding song that doesn't sound like anything I've ever done before, taking advantage of the easy bar chords available with drop-D tuning. It's called "No Mercy", and as soon as I play it through about 20 or 30 times to the point where I don't keep falling off beat or missing a transition (hey, I didn't say it was an *easy* song to play) I'll try to record it for you, but it might take a while because I haven't devised the drum and keyboard parts yet though I pretty much know in my head what they're going to sound like...

- Badtux the Songwriting Penguin

Back in the music bidness

I went shopping this evening. First I stopped by the Indian grocery and bought the bag of red lentils for $3.50 and the box of curry powder for $1.50, then I stopped by the Korean grocery and got all those Korean veggies for around $12 total (that's several meals worth of veggies), then I stopped by the Mexican grocery and got the bag of corn flour for making corn tortillas. Tomorrow I'll probably cook curry lentils and corn tortillas for lunch, with some Korean veggies on the side. I love living in the SF Bay area where you can do fusion cooking of this sort ;).

The final piece of my music puzzle to replace all the blown-up stuff came in today too, the PreSonus Firebox. I hooked it up to the mixer (the Firebox's pre's don't have enough headroom for dynamic mikes without a boost) and to the guitar, and hooked up the MIDI in/out to the keyboard. Then I made sure I could get both my guitar and my vocals mike intoApple Logic (my Digital Audio Workstation or DAW software, used to record music to hard drive). That worked. Then I created a software instrument track and told it to use the external keyboard as its source, and recorded some piano off the keyboard via MIDI, then played it back to my keyboard via MIDI, then re-routed it back to the software instrument and played it back through my mix headphones. And *that* worked. So all that works, but it does look somewhat like a mad scientist's workshop with all that stuff plugged in... The towel on the chair is to catch any cat puke (sitting in cat puke is *ick*!), the towel underneath the keyboard covers the keyboard when I'm not using it for exactly the same reason. And one reason I still have that ratty old desk is because the keyboard tray slides up under the desk when I'm not using it so that my keyboard doesn't serve as a cat puke receptacle. Cats. Sigh!

I also found out today why I've seemed somewhat clumsy recently. I had an eye exam and found that my left eye, my "strong" eye, no longer is. So I was basically seeing out of one eye rather than in full stereoscopic vision, thereby leading to stumbling into things that I didn't realize were so close to me. And there I was, thinking I was just getting old and clumsy... nope, it's my dadburned glasses ain't right! So I'm going to get that fixed, hopefully tomorrow...

-- Badtux the Busy Penguin

Highly technical language

The following is from the manual for the Behringer 1002B mixer:

DO NOT turn the FX knob on that channel up at all! Your sound system will become haunted with screaming banshees.

Yes, that is the actual text on page 7 of an actual manual included with an actual commercial product :).

-- Badtux the Amused Penguin

13

Well, the new song that I wrote decided it didn't want words, so I added some Irish whistle to the guitar track instead and left it as an instrumental.

Why is it named 13? I have absolutely no idea. It just happened.

- Badtux the Songwriting Penguin

New guitar

My old Yammy was utterly worn out. Frets worn down, divots in the fingerboard, the works. So I replaced it with this new Yamaha FX335. Just a cheap plywood guitar, but has a pickup and sounds decent for what it is.

Song is "Everything Turns To Shit", from my White Trash Blues cycle back in the late 1990's. This was an experiment to see how well the new guitar sounded plugged in. Answer: Decent. Too bad the mook singing into the microphone doesn't sound anywhere near as good as the guitar.

-- Badtux the Songwriting Penguin

Uninspired

I moved the lyrics of the new song around into an order that worked better for what I was attempting to do, but I'm not happy at all with the result. Oh, I like the guitar work. Great drone, and now that I've played it another ten-fifteen times I hit it pretty much every time -- but the lyrics aren't ominous enough to go with the guitar work. Back to the drawing board, because the musical accompaniment is what I was aiming for as far as the general tone of the song (ominous and mysterious), but clearly I need to start over on the lyrics side.

And therein lies the secret of "the creative process" -- 1 part inspiration, 9 parts perspiration. Unfortunately the 1 part inspiration isn't with me today. Siiiigh!

-- Badtux the Songwriting Penguin

Covers

One of the things any band has to do when starting out is to do covers. First, that's what people expect when they go to hear an unknown band in the bar. They're okay with the band doing a few of their own songs, but they want to hear covers of their favorite songs too. But also, there's the simple fact that you have to know how songs are put together before you can write songs of your own, and the best way to do that is to listen carefully to other songs and deconstruct them and put them back together again in your own style as you play them.

You haven't heard any of the songs that I cover for the simple reason that I'm in no mood to worry about ASCAP, which has started trolling websites looking for covers so they can get the mechanicals due to the original songwriters. Besides, it's pointless -- given my (lack of) singing voice, you're better off listening to the original. Still, a list of lyrics printouts in my pile above my screen that I've played recently might give you an idea of what's at my fingertips influences-wise:

• The Animals/Traditional: "House of the Rising Sun"
• Steve Earle: "Goodbye"
• Pete Seeger: "Where have all the flowers gone"
• Steve Earle: "Ft. Worth Blues"
• Lucinda Williams: "Drunken Angel"
• Drive By Truckers/Jason Isbell: "Decoration Day"
• Cat Power: "The Sleepwalker"
• Bruce Springsteen: "Downbound Train"
• Townes Van Zandt: "Pancho and Lefty"
• Oasis: "Wonderwall". (Okay, I only learned this one because everybody else was covering it, so why not me? ;).

And of course a bunch of my own songs that get played from time to time when my fingers get itchy and want to play with my guitar. When I get the urge to play something, I print out the lyrics and prop them up against the drawer unit above my computer so it's at eye level with my microphone (I don't need to print out tabs or anything, I already know what the song sounds like, it's the lyrics I don't remember). Then when done, the printout goes into the pile above the screen. Thus my reference to a pile...

-- Badtux the Songwriting Penguin

And if you're a masochist... a quicky bounce of a *very* rough take of 18, this is about the fourth time through and I'm still deciding what I like and don't like so I can change it to be what I like.

18

I was listening to some new stuff on my iPod on the way to and from work today, and there was a song that made me stop and replay it a number of times. It was a very mysterious song that went around in circles back to a few key lines that repeated in various places and making more sense each time, almost a dirge, but slowly I picked out those critical lines, remembered some personal background on that artist, and figured out what it was maybe about. But thinking about it, I was like, wow, that's a really cool way to put a song together.

I've previously noted my biggest failing as a songwriter -- I'm basically a storyteller, not a poet, so I want to tell a story. But a good poem -- and a good song -- are as much about what they *don't* say as what they *do* say. The goal is to leave some ambiguity, some mystery, so that the listener can create their own story. It is as much about engagement with the listener as it is about saying something specific. So anyhow, "The Promised Land" wasn't a good vehicle for trying out that technique because it has a specific story to say, so instead I sat down and did a first rough cut of a new song called "18" tonight. No mp3 yet because parts of the lyrics are still "mumble mumble mumble" because I couldn't think of anything to fit there while I was just blurting out lyrics into the microphone (but I have no shortage of ideas of what to put there so that'll get resolved) plus the chord sequence and melody are going to change because I used one of my basic all-purpose sequences to avoid having the music get in the way of creating the lyrics while I was trying to put that together, but it'll go through the same process as usual -- I'll write down lyrics, try them out again singing them into the microphone, some of them won't "feel" right and I'll change them, wash, rinse, repeat.

As for someone who asks, "where do you get your ideas?", ideas are not something I'm ever particularly short of. In this particular case, it is a song about something that I read in the newspaper combined with something that happened to someone I know. The subject matter of the song I kept hitting the "repeat" button on knocked it loose, though it's an entirely different subject matter. The problem is too many ideas, rather than a shortage of them, and the only reason I don't get back to work and finish that desert novel is because of a time shortage, it's a lot quicker to write a song than a novel.

-- Badtux the Creative Penguin

Next new song...

"The Promised Land". Sort of a bluesy song about looking for it, finding it, and losing it. And a bit more. Basically just making this note to myself so I don't forget what I was working on when I come back from work tomorrow...

-- Badtux the Haunted Penguin

Bridges

Not a happy song. But by and large I am happy with what I accomplished with the song. I took the prior attempt at this song, which had grown to novel size, and consulted the gurus of simplicity to strip it down to the fundamentals and got it down to 3:40 in length. I abandon VCV but don't abandon repetition entirely, it serves a valuable purpose in a song to highlight the things you want to highlight.

This is roughly the fourth time through with these general lyrics. In fact, the lyrics I'm singing aren't exactly the lyrics on the lyrics sheet that I'm looking at on the shelf above the camera, I changed a few things to make it feel right (just as I'd done during the previous take, which again changed things over the *prior* lyrics sheet). Forgive the camera angle and the mix (which puts my voice way out front), this is a rough take on a work in process. Everything is going through the computer-attached mixer so I can hear the guitar and voice parts through my monitor headphones so all I did was hit the "record" button on iMovie to actually record using my laptop's camera while all this is going on.

As for what the song means... well. All I'll say is that it is fiction, part of my Bottomlands cycle, and the rest is for you to think about.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Bridges

Working on yet another song, titled "Bridges". It's a love story. Sort of. And too damned long -- my first take was almost 7 minutes long, though granted probably a minute of that was a long solo that can be easily cut. I have to also put more references to bridges into the early part of the song, for reasons that become obvious by the end to the song.

I admire people who can write these mysterious songs about things you're not quite sure about. Me, I'm like a friggin' hammer. My stuff is generally about as subtle as a slap in the face, and tells a story, a vignette of sorts. I guess I'm more out of the Tom T. Hall school of songwriting, which maybe isn't a bad thing, but definitely has its own limitations. Chalk it up to hearing too much country music growing up, I guess.

The main problem with that style of songwriting is that it tends to sprawl. If you want to do VCV (verse-chorus-verse) it sprawls even further. Add in being a bit woozy with a cold, and that doesn't help the sprawl at all. So anyhow, I have a first cut, I know what the song is about, some tentative lyrics... now I just need to actually do the hard work of lassoing this lassie and cutting her down to size.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Next rev of my depressing Christmas song

Yet another revision of my depressing Christmas song. The lyrics are getting close to final. The musical arrangement, however, is in flux (if you don't have the old one around you'll notice they sound nothing alike, other than the fact that the lyrics are about 80% the same). This is the first time through for the new arrangement, you'll notice a few flubs here and there. This is pretty much a clean take except for a teensy bit of compression and EQ on the vocals and massive reverb on the lead guitar track. I think it has promise but needs to be played through a couple dozen times then do a drum track and a clean take of the rhythm guitar track on top of that, at which point I can layer on vocals and lead guitar and anything else I want to put on there.

Only other news is that I switched microphones yet again in my continual quest to find a microphone that sounds good with my crappy vocals. This one is a Behringer condenser microphone usually used to mike drums, with a two-layer puff filter in front of it (otherwise all you'd hear would be "pufff... puff... puff..."). Given that my voice is almost a percussive instrument, I thought it was worth trying. Sounds better than that crappy SM58 that the previous take used, anyhow...

- Badtux the Songwriting Penguin

I'm a ray of sunshine

With clouds and rain and shit. Yeah, I wrote yet another depressing song. This one must be the most depressing Christmas song ever. What can I say, Christmas is a season that gives me the blues.

Yet another quicky bounce. This is about the third time I played the song through, and I was still tweaking lyrics. There's still a few parts I need to fix before I consider it "finished", and I would definitely need to make a good recording rather than this quick bounce, but it's definitely a good start given that I started writing it tonight. (But started thinking about it several days ago).

Just my new guitar and my creaky voice.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

The new guitar

Just finished writing a song (that I started yesterday) and recording an initial version. Flubbed a couple of lines because I've only sung it through maybe three times and this is the first time with that particular version of the lyrics, oh well! But you can at least see what the new guitar sounds like.

Nice and clanky and slinky, yeah! Note that the only effects on the guitar is mild compression, I could put it through amp simulations or do other such things to it but it's "clean" right now.

Oh yeah, the song is named "Neocons", and here are its current lyrics (definitely subject to change):

Rape and kill and maim destroy
Daddy's got a brand new toy
soldiers plastic marching on
jet airplanes all dropping bombs

and nothing dies and nothing kills
it's just a game just one more thrill

grey men in undisclosed locations
pushing pins around a map
just a game to play with nations
while money piles in great big stacks

rape and kill and maim destroy
gotta use up all our toys

corpses they pile high and deep
but they never smell that reek
in bunkers hidden far below
from blood that along gutters flow

and profits pile up hipbone deep
while on the street broken men weep

so let's all praise our neocons
for profits they make selling arms
children piled in shallow graves
all rise to sing their lowly praise

rape and kill and maim destroy
it's all a game to neocons

Empty Dreams

In which I abuse my equipment drastically. I'm surprised I didn't have smoke coming out of it at the end of this. Was just interested in the clipping effects from overdriving analog amplifiers beyond their limits. They're... interesting. I'm using standard acoustic instruments but you wouldn't know that from this result. Now to put lyrics to it...

Update at 1:34AM: Okay, I have vocals now. And synth. And drums. Unfortunately I messed up the timing in the original recording in a few places where I flubbed a chord change while trying to hear the current chord through all the distortion, so the drums sort of skip from time to time as the guitar gets out of time. Very minimalist song, playing with getting away from VCV while retaining a hook. What, you say, I have 5 tracks mixed down into the bloody thing and it's minimalist? Well, it would work with just my guitar and voice too, but then the minimalist nature of the lyrics that I improvised this evening would be quite obvious, as would the fact that I'm circling three chords around in a circle with a circle around back through a fourth chord occasionally.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Experimenting...

Tried an experimental version of "The Bottomlands". My compositions are generally fairly hooky verse-chorus format, which is what the original version of "The Bottomlands" (or, rather, the two verses and chorus that I have at the moment) are. But with "The Bottomlands" that format always seemed wrong because it required doing a reveal up front that I don't really want to have happen until the end for the effect I want. So I went back and started pulling apart some lyrics to songs that go for a minimalist effect, lyrics that seem almost anti-lyrics in their refusal to adhere to conventional structure. Call it anti-folk or whatever. These are songs that shouldn't work, but do, and I can't figure out why. So I'm experimenting with my own song to see if I can figure out WTF is going on here, and chose one that was giving me trouble because after all what better way to experiment?

Still waiting for this weekend for a block of time to do all this...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

The creative process #2

So now I have the general notion of the song down and an idea of where I want it to go. I have fragments of lyrics here and there and an idea of which verse is going to be about what part of the situation I'm imagining. Now what?

Well... now I sing "Ghost in the Mirror" all the way through, trying to fit the lyrics to the tune I'm playing. The end result is not going to be the final song, because some of the lyrics are going to be mumbled or fumbled and I'll think of some other things I want there too, but mission accomplished -- I now have a song. It's 4:30 long so obviously I have *too* much song, but that's why they invented this thing called "editing"... now I get to prune the lyrics down to a nice comfortable 3:00 or so that's easier for me to remember than that friggin' novel, not to mention making it more enigmatic and general. Then I can record the final version of the song.

And yes, we songwriters often *do* deliberately make the songs deliberately obscure, the general goal is to give people room to fit the general emotions of the song to their specific circumstances or to situations they can more easily imagine than the exact situation I was imagining when I wrote the song. It is that whole Bob Dylan vs. Phil Ochs thing again, where Bob said to Phil, "you're not songwriting, you're reporting." Bob is still around. Phil is not, and is largely forgotten outside of former tie-died hippies. There are very, very few topical songs that hold up well, and usually they're deliberately made general in order to have wider applicability, such as the Dixie Chicks' "Not Ready to Make Nice" which is about making choices and accepting consequences, not just the specific choices they made that caused a furor. I still am chuckling over the time that a drug-abuse campaign asked if they could use one of my songs. The song was not about what they thought it was about, at least not for me when I was writing it. But if that's what it's about from their perspective, well, my job is done ;).

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Sorry about turning this into a music blog for a few days, music is what I've been doing for the past couple of days. So here, have some Dixie Chicks...

The creative process

a) Have idea for song. b) decide the basic verse-chorus structure of what you want to do. c) write fragments of lyrics. d) decide chord progressions and basic harmony. e) babble some lyrics into microphone while playing chords to see whether you can fit what you want into the basic chord progressions, then bounce a crude mix with a bit of compression and EQ to see whether the general sound is what you want.

Hmm. Not bad. The vocals seem a bit too warm, but that can be adjusted at the EQ control and it doesn't sound bad, exactly, just a bit muffled. And as usual, my guitar sounds great with just a bit of compression to even out the dynamics once I hit the chorus with its harder sound. So now I get to take all the verse fragments that I've been scribbling and actually fit them to the music. After I've played it through a few times, then comes the joy of recording. First I'll lay down the guitar track while quietly humming the melody/lyrics to myself so that I get the timing right, then record the vocals track with the monitor headphones on playing back the guitar track while I'm recording. Then I'll add tracks for whatever instruments I decide on -- harmonica makes a nice mournful sound, recorder makes a soft gentle sound, a bit of piano or organ, some electronic drums? And finally, the final mix-down... and mixdown... and mixdown... and re-recording of parts that won't mix the way I want... and mixdown...

You hear about people going into the studio for three days, and three days later there's an album. I have absolutely no idea how they do that, unless they're counting only the recording part, not the mixdown part. Getting all the parts mixed correctly is incredibly annoying and tedious...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin