Strong Week

  Finished up the fifth and sixth performance videos (out of seven I’ve been focusing on), pretty much sweating my face off working on them during these 94″ degree days.
I did learn that I should do one totally “over the top” take to get more loosened up and wild, then figure out where to go from there, it really helps the process move forward.

 

I reviewed some video footage of live shows from awhile back, and posted some of those; I had played about 200 shows in cafés around the Albany NY and Tristate area, but they were sparsely attended, and rather than play showcases where we might get more notice, my duo partner wanted to keep doing the same old thing, so I’ve preferred to mostly focus on writing and recording since then. But here are some highlights:  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlvFQ4G0v_ktG49TSKyl5wW7KsiSji9u5

  I got to write three new song melodies this week, and as I was working in the “1950’s style” of Pop, I was struck by how there is a complete absence of the F# chord in my empirical study from about sixty songs of that period. In my harmonic system, F# is equated with anger, so I got to reflecting on how that interesting time period of American culture does in fact seem to be characterized by what could be called “the absence of anger”. Veterans and their families were trying to build up a positive façade beyond the horrors of World War II, forced smiles and denial of dysfunction, which actually gave the Beatnik counterculture fuel to work with, then that led to extremes in the other direction, and it still has ripple effects into today’s culture.

  I’ve been digging this old Bob Seger song “Shame On The Moon” this week, bit of a “tear in my beer” type of song, which made sense since I had just finished a pint of Coors Banquet when it came on my itunes, but the song was well done:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuYCX5XK_So

  I was tossing and turning last night, and ended up thinking a bit more about a concept I call “Bass Symmetry Chords”, where you can take four notes from a “box” shape on the fretboard and make them into many combinations; I’ll try to express the two boxes in tab here:

Box one, notes of: f-g-a#-c (makes 24 combinations: 18 in major or minor and 6 in Mixolydian)
g——————————-
d——————————-
a—1—3———————-
e—1—3———————-

So you can start on any of these notes as your “root chord”, and build something that will sound pleasing to the ear, due to their “symmetry”.

Box two, notes of: f-a-a#-d (makes 12 combinations in major or minor)
g——————————-
d——————————-
a—1—5———————-
e—1—5———————-

  I discovered one of the combinations was the “Doo Wop ballad” formula of I-vi-ii-V (supposedly derived by them from Hoagy Carmichael’s “Heart And Soul”), so the “Bass Symmetry Chords” do go back at least that far, the idea shows up in a handful of Beatles songs, then I noticed it featured in 90’s music and some current songs.

Here are some other examples:
-Beatles “Help!” verse: A – C#m – F#m – D
-Pixies “Where Is My Mind”: E – C#m – G#m – A
-Weezer “Say It Ain’t So”: C#m – G#m – A – E
-Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit: Fm – A#m – G# – C#
-Weezer “Only In Dreams” verse: G – C – Am – D
-Billie Eilish “What Was I Made For: C – Em – F – Am

  I saw a good deal for a membership to the video lectures site “Masterclass.com”, it was $60 for 12 months access, which is way down from their previous asking price of $250 and up, so I signed up to check it out. The format is kind of like “Ted Talks”, but with celebrities and doctors; I was surprised when the site offered, for $120 more, “Talk about your problems with an A.I. version of a celebrity.” 

  These A.I. developments sure pop up in unusual places this year; so for instance, I watched the drumming lecture by Ringo Starr, and let’s suppose I wanted to talk to Robot Ringo on an iphone video call about my problems…”Robot Ringo, it’s 11pm at night and I had too many sugar snacks. WTF?” Even if they had uploaded Ringo’s entire brain, what kind of advice would he give, “Peace and love. Drop some acid and it will all be groovy”? Not exactly the wisdom of Solomon…on the other hand, I could do a conference call between A.I. Bill Clinton and A.I. George Bush, and talk over the merits of voting Bigfoot For President…

  Irish Folk songs group is going fine, making connections with some nice guys there, and apparently all of my jokes are hilarious to them, which is nice to get that appreciation. The group leaders asked me to hold down the rhythm by stomping on an unusual wooden board with a piezo pickup attached to it; sort of sounds like knocking on a door.

  I got that CDL-A “unrestricted” license today, so I can drive any type of vehicle on the road throughout all of America, which is pretty exciting. I’m looking into some recommended companies and considering the new job options now…

  I got a couple more performance videos done, I was aiming for five, and had rehearsed the five songs to some extent, but do the most I can with the time and energy I have.

Hopefully I can wrap those up over the weekend or by early next week, and get back to recording guitars. I’m still undecided about focusing on the Brit-Pop style songs, Surf-Rock style, Rockabilly, or 1980’s style.

  I came across an interesting podcast that was talking about the music technique of “Counterpoint” and it’s history: https://musicstudent101.com/34-counterpoint-pt.1.html

Apparently there is some obscure yet somewhat-known Renaissance-era textbook by Johann Fux, “Gradus Ad Parnassum”, which features very stodgy rules for composing “classical” melodies which totally explain the format I’ve been repeatedly seeing in the National Anthems songbook, and also gives a more clear delineation as to how European Classical did not evolve into our modern American Pop music, which grew independently from the Colonial Folk songs into “Tin Pan Alley” and then Rock N’ Roll, and so on.

Here is a quote from his online bio reviewing the book “Gradus Ad Parnassum”:
“Haydn largely taught himself counterpoint by reading it and recommended it to the young Beethoven. Mozart had a copy of it that he annotated.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Joseph_Fux

  Some of the stodginess comes from Fux insisting a main melody can only move stepwise with no repeated notes (which is actually sort of similar to 1980’s Pop), but also requiring everything to be built on a previously existing Gregorian Chant melodies (called “cantus firmus”). I had once read that the music of grunge band Alice N Chains was based on Gregorian Chant melodies; that group is known for their good vocal harmonies, and have called themselves “the Satanic Everly Brothers”, so I’m guessing that once I sit down to test out the ideas for writing the “harmonizing” the melodic lines using Counterpoint rules, I’ll find more vocal harmony concepts to play around with.

  One critic of Elvis noted that his backup singers’ harmonies kept everything really bland in order to make his vocals seem more impressive against a bland background, so there could be some downfalls to the Counterpoint rules as well.

  Of course there were other Folk melodies popular in Europe prior to the “Classical” style of mid-1700’s; for instance, the song “Greensleeves” can be dated back to at least 1597, since it is referenced in Shakespeare’s play “Merry Wives of Windsor” when character Falstaff says, “Let the sky rain potatoes! Let it thunder to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’!” The Folk music of Europe and America will always be by definition the true “popular” music; but one key feature of Folk song was that no one knew who the original author was, and these you’d be quite hard-pressed to find a new Popular song with no author credited, so those traditions of “true Folk songs” are pretty much out the window.

  I’m getting a bit more writing done on the screenplays, that rewrite is 10% complete now, finished polishing up about 38 of 360 pages.

  We had to drop off a car for inspection at the dealership the other day & I took my wife on a stroll around the dealer’s premises, they had a bunch of vintage cars inside one of the buildings, and we liked their Chevrolet Bel-Air the best. Hard to beat those classic designs, right?

https://www.carolinamusclecarsinc.com/vehicles/842/1956-chevrolet-bel-air

Clever Bridges

  Worked on some performance videos this week, those are coming along well. 

I carefully smeared some vasoline on the lens with a q-tip, then wiped most of it off with the dry end, but it’s added an interesting “white aura” outline affect, so that’s been a fun feature. 

  I had seen an old Rock N Roll movie recently called “The TAMI Show” (on DVD from the library) where the director has straight-up globs of vasoline gooping up the lens, which looks like a mess-up, but this more subtle approach of using a light coating definitely gives it that “classic” quality found in black-and-white films. 

If you get the chance to check out “The TAMI Show”, James Brown’s wild performance is possibly the best music performance ever captured on film, and he definitely set the bar for R&B dancing and singing for the next 30 years after his performance. 

  As I’m working on finalizing some melodies for those performance videos, I’m continuing to explore the National Anthem melodies a bit more, and finding some interesting ideas here and there for unique “jumps” to try in my melodies. Not every Anthem is great though, and some feature unusual jumps into high falsetto for one note, but in a more awkward way than, say, the American song where they sing “and the rocket’s red glare…”

  Maybe “The Star-Spangled Banner” is a prototype Anthem that some other nations try to emulate? I do see the highest note appearing once at the end and being held out on several occasions, but sometimes it’s poorly written. 

  I had read an interesting reference last week to “the 8 bar blues”, and after again confirming how boring the “12 bar blues” progressions sound, I decided that if you chop off the first four bars, and start on the subdominant IV, it might sound like a decent Pop diversion for a Rockabilly bridge now and then. 

  It also explains an aspect of Rockabilly and Country where I’d be wondering why there was a “random” II7 chord in a progression, but now it makes more sense that the starting point is not a “tonic root” I, but rather that “II7” is actually a “V7” when things begin on that subdominant IV. We talked about how that “V7” shows up in nearly every single song of the thousand that Elvis recorded. 

  So I perused some of my “Rockabilly” type of songs and found that this “8 bar blues” Pop progression could work as a bridge in two songs, which is good for a switch-up since both of those songs have 6 line verses and are each about four minutes long so they could stand to have a little more variety thrown in – the progression is “IV – I – V – I”, and then I don’t have to repeat the “I” chord in the follow-up after the bridge either, since those choruses both start on the “vi” six minor.

  I saw a new documentary on Disney+ about The Beach Boys, but they did the story is a bit “Disneyfied”…they neglected to mention how The Beach Boys recorded some songs by their friend Charles Manson, and how Brian became convinced that Phil Spector was stalking him, etc etc. One interesting thing was how they mentioned that Brian Wilson became fixated on the Four Freshmen records, and from there (“Rhapsody In Blue” by Gershwin), and finally the music of Bach (taking his chord progressions and basslines). 

  I did an internet search on Bach’s composing methods, one piece about a Bach museum in Leipzig Germany mentioned that he kept musical bells on his writing desk, and used them late at night in working out his scores onto sheet music.

  I looked up some videos of musical bells for sale, and they all sound most irritating, Pavlov’s dog might throw up if he heard bell music from these. I might get some desktop chimes though, might be fun to play with and reference different sounds on hand without having to set up an instrument.

  I was walking through a Target store the other day and heard “Every Little Thing” by The Police over the loudspeakers, I had always liked the verse music, but thought the chorus was not as good. Anyways, the Bassline hit my ears coming down from that different ceiling angle, and I realized how much it contributes to the song’s mysterious tension quality on the verses, while at the same time the Bassline sounds very direct and straightforward. 

  Also the concept of two-chord progressions ending on the dominant fifth interval had been bouncing around my mind for a couple of days, so I was pleasantly surprised to look up this particular progression and find that it is two such chords, G – A – G – A (in the key of D), and each time the chord changes the Bassline moves up a note, playing g-a-b-c#.
Chords: G – A – G – A
Bass:     g – a – b – c#

  Clever progression! I saw a preview of a video where Sting mentions he is a Bach devotee as well, so maybe the concept came from Bach? Personally I still like Tchaikovsky and Mozart the best. I’m sure “Every Little Thing” reaches the “tonic root note” of D in the chorus, but I didn’t bother to look up what went wrong there. 

  Anyways, I think I found a good match amongst my “80’s style” batch of songs where I could apply this concept to the verses, but in a much moodier key, same Bass rhythm was already on the verse, and my chorus stays as it was…so I redid that Synth Bass track tonight, and updated the verse melody by only changing two notes, so it came out pretty good.

  I checked out the new Star Wars show “The Acolyte” on Disney+, it’s pretty good so far, they released the first two episodes.

Anthems

  I finished up the final guitar track for the “Motown R&B” style songs, at first the verses were mostly featuring “5+8” dyad chords, on the ‘a’ and ‘d’ strings and then two more chords on the ‘d’ and ‘g’ strings. 

  But when I listened back to the whole context, with the Bass, melody, and other guitar unmuted, the “5+8” chords on those ‘d’ and ‘g’ strings caused the song to totally take a melancholy turn, when I was aiming for a more energetic sound to highlight the sense of adventure and excitement in the song. 

  That was a baffling result, and the song is along the same lyric lines as the disco song “I Love New York” by Metropolis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAU0-z7tfsc ,

so maybe songs about New York are just inherently depressing, and need a lot of “sheen” added? It’s that old “Nature versus Nurture” question, I guess.

Anyways, I decided to revise it by not playing any chords on the ‘d’ and ‘g’ strings, but instead switched those two chords to “X5” punk dyads, basically the full progression of “F / Am – Dm / C” was originally set up into inversions as “C4 / E4 – A4 / G4”, but that sounded melancholy for whatever reason, so I switched it to “C4 / E4 – D5 / C5”. 

  Next problem was that the guitar’s rhythm was dragging the energy down; I was skipping the second beat in the bar and playing 1-()-3-4, but finally I got the idea to make that 4th beat strum into “dead notes”, which is a technique from Bass playing, where you keep the string(s) off the fret while your fingers are in position on the string(s) totally stopping the strings from vibrating, then you pluck or strum the “stopped” string for a percussive sound. 

I had found this works well for increasing energy on Bass tracks particularly where I was playing the rim of snare drum, so it was worth a try here, and it worked out to the right chords and right rhythm to give that energetic effect I was going for. 

  I was annoyed at how subtle the final guitar track had become, especially since for the whole chorus I’m palm-muting the strings while following the Bassline. When it came time in the recording to play the melodic low-string solo, I had a lot of pent-up energy that came through in the sense of dynamics and phrasing, so it ultimately worked out fine in the end.

  I’ve been studying some National Anthem melodies now and then, looking into what makes them different style-wise from other songs: https://www.halleonard.com/product/311633/national-anthems-from-around-the-world

It will be instances of, say, I find a song melody of mine in the key of F needs work, then I’ll transcribe two of the anthems in the key of F, and look for new ideas.

So I was looking at the Barbados National Anthem, and I liked one line that was alternating between the ‘f’ note and other notes. When I listened to a recording of it,
I suddenly realized that the melody seems to have been almost entirely taken from the hymn “O Little Town of Bethlehem”!

“In Plenty And In Time of Need” (1966):

“O Little Town of Bethlehem” (1868):

The Wikipedia history of the Barbados anthem says the composer was “partially blind, and assisted by his daughters in the composition”, and that he was eventually paid $500 for the anthem.

The composer for “O Little Town of Bethelehem” had a better story, a hundred years earlier, “But I was roused from sleep late in the night hearing an angel-strain whispering in my ear, and seizing a piece of music paper I jotted down the treble of the tune as we now have it, and on Sunday morning before going to church I filled in the harmony. Neither Mr. Brooks nor I ever thought the carol or the music to it would live beyond that Christmas of 1868.”

  I’ve been reviewing some old performance video footage, it’s pretty good, I’ll post some stuff when I finish going over it. There are some audio enhancement things I can do, like cut down on crowd noise by High-Pass Filter EQ at 100 Hz, cut out tape hiss with a Lo-Pass Filter at 8,000 Hz, and using a sound-field plugin called “K-Stereo” that can uncover / recover more stereo and depth to the sound as well.

  I’ve been listening to a Nat King Cole concept album called “Wild Is Love”, the title track is the best song on it, but the rest are in an interesting format – he starts most songs a monologue narration, and his voice echoes as if he were standing on  stage in an empty theatre. 

  Some of his concept albums, like “Where Did Everybody Go?”, end up sounding like he was chasing after Frank Sinatra’s successes with “In The Wee Small Hours” and “Only For The Lonely” – there was some resentment after Sinatra had lured away one of Cole’s top arrangement collaborators, Nelson Riddle – but Nat King Cole’s “Wild Is Love” is pretty unique.

  On the holiday we went out to the Vernon Downs Racetrack to see some harness racing. They had set up a bouncy house for kids, so my little girl joined two kids already inside. I was sitting nearby watching, when after about ten minutes I saw the wind starting to lift the back on the bouncy house up, so I hurried towards it to have the kids come out, when suddenly the whole thing tipped forward and they all fell eight feet down onto the concrete. I had arrived and grabbed it and stopped it from moving forward, and was able to lift it up so the kids could get out. We were all shaken up a bit. All of our horses lost for five races too…worst day at the track ever.

This week I drove the CDL Road Test course perfectly, but these DMV people are so petty, the examiner said “You took a left turn too slowly for the Rush Hour traffic, and then you ALMOST made a mistake later on, so you fail.” Wow. Well, I’ll keep hammering away at them coming up.    Wednesday I went down to the pub with the Irish folk singing group, and ended up sitting next to Shameless Shamus, so we had a few laughs. The group leader mentioned that he’d like me to do an extra feature on his Acoustic Bass coming up, he described it as being operated by foot, and being a “heart-shaped wooden frame”! Sounds intriguing.

Vasoline & Vibrators…

  It’s been a crummy week for recording guitars, with the humidity and the heat having gone up to 93″ for several days, the guitars keep falling out of tune during each take.

I’ll have the perfect energy in the take, a strong ending, set the guitar down and listen to the playback with the Bass on, then find the guitar is sticking out like a sore thumb compared to the in-tune Bass, and grudgingly pick up the guitar again and slog on…when I get it sounding perfect & have a perfect performance going, it gets nerve racking playing the final chorus, but it’s exciting. 13 done out of 14 planned guitar tracks for this R&B style; I’ll be focusing on video performances for next week or two, and I might experiment with an old film technique of putting Vasoline on the camera lens to make it look like a “dreamy” sequence, we’ll see how that goes.

  As I’ve continued working with the Acme Motown DI Box, I’ve found that some of the sonic limits seem to be informing my chord choices; for example when I had my Stratocaster capoed at the 2nd fret, and was strumming through some full chords, the “A” chord (in G major shape) made the recorded result sound like a “boxy” Banjo!

Eventually I found that by adjusting the chord to not playing the lowest string & taking my finger off the ‘a’ note of highest string on 5th fret (becoming an “A6” with 3rd in root), I was able to get a decent sound.

  Apparently just strumming all six strings gets a mangled sound out of the box, so it must have affected the original Motown guitar players chord choices as well.

That reminds me how the Supremes did an entire album of Beatles cover songs, called “A Bit of Liverpool”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOBQBOua3LI&list=OLAK5uy_ki8MdILxt8L0qDGm_OO7vJ_mRSK-ICFQU

  That album sounds like they took a Vox AC30 amp and had different session players than the usual ones just strum full chords, and it’s not as good as the originals, but I think if they had the regular Motown guys reinterpret the Beatles songs within the constraints of what the guitars can do in the Acme Motown DI Box, it would have definitely come out more interesting.

I had another show with the Irish folk singing group, that went fine, it’s good to be part of a group with so many strong singers…we totally end up sounding like the Mitch Miller Gang from the 1950’s too.

  I was contemplating an article I had seen about four years ago that talked about how scientists were experimenting with a chemical spray that could make wood less dense by causing the molecules to be more hollowed out, which would increase the resonance, and, to their thinking, be a shortcut to a “Stradivarius” sound for violins. I thought it might apply to guitars, but it looks like they made no further advances with it – also, my concern would be, when will that “hollowing out” stop? I’d be concerned that the guitar would end up brittle and fall apart.

  So as I was researching, I had another idea that vibrations could also naturally “hollow out” the wood and increase resonance. But if I bought a vibrator and threw it in the guitar bag, wouldn’t that rattle the screws and hardware as well? 

I don’t know anything about vibrators, but suppose they only operate at the US electric standard of 60 hz (A#) and the guitars became super-responsive to that one note and dull for the other notes? So I discarded that idea too.

  Anyways, I came across this other product, which the music press has been strangely quiet about, but it seems like it has interesting potential for conditioning instruments with vibrations by a “hi-fi” speaker that attaches to the instrument, “the tone traveler”: https://www.drherringbone.com

  I corresponded with the company owners, and they stated that the most dramatic results could be heard in acoustic instruments, but there would be some kind of change with electric guitars as well, but possibly to a lesser degree; they only experimented on one “pre-cbs” Fender Stratocaster, so I’d like to see what this product could do with some of my denser tonewood guitars, like the Swamp Ash telecaster, the Basswood and the Poplar. 

  I came across a bunch of old videos of my cafe shows from 2009 and 2010, it’s some pretty good material, so I’ve been reviewing and formatting that a bit this week too.

 I got the news the other day that a member of my old Rap group died this week, Ray McDonald aka “Milk N’Cookies”. We recorded about 30 demo songs together, then we kind of lost touch during the time I was away at college, and he was taking a different route in life, being locked up for the second time. But in recent years, he had turned things around and just started his own business as an independent Trucker down South, so that was cool to see him succeeding. RIP Milk!

  The Tractor-Trailer driving practice is going so well, that the instructor has even been showing me advanced tricks of skipping through gears while downshifting (it’s a Ten-Gear Manual system). I’ll finally have the Road Test next week, but I’ll be taking it during Rush Hour traffic…challenge accepted!