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…

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!

Motown Guitar Sounds & the May Queen

  I decided to work out those high treble dyads on keyboard for the next seven songs I’m working on guitars for, and that composing work came out pretty good. One idea I came back to a few times was a dissonant treble chord over the bass for the “V7” dominant chord, which in the key of F, when the bass note is C, the dissonant treble chord is “a#+e”, which has a nice metallic clang to it, and when it works with the melody, it really  ratchets up the musical tension.

  I got guitar “treble chinks” done for two of the songs, using the UA 1176 Compression pedal at 4:1 ratio, and the Boss RV6 Reverb on the “Spring” setting, into that Acme Motown DI box.

We had talked about how that Motown DI box was made to be an exact replica, down to the original electronics including a rare transformer, and how the Motown DI takes the Guitar or Bass sound and transforms it into having no “elastic slack” at all, stiff and cutting, and really brings the presence up too…I was reminded of one description of EQ Midrange from the Mesa Boogie Rectoverb manual: “Mid: changes the feel dramatically in softening or stiffening the way a sound feels to play. Over 50% starts to add Gain in midrange frequencies, adding cut and punch.”

So basically, the Acme Motown DI box can inspire you in the sense that it will be obvious if your Guitar part or Bass part needs work, and you’ll know that it’s you who has been slacking, rather than your instrument strings.

  The UA 1176 has been giving me good results this round on the “single compressor” mode, and I’ve been tweaking the Attack and Release as per those tempo-based formulas, but it can end up sounding super-harsh and aggressive, rather than musical, if the Input is anywhere above 25%.

  I was listening to “Still Water” by the Four Tops on and off again this week, and noticed that the Spring Reverb on the “treble chinks” totally cuts off before the next hi-hat hits (after the snare), so I made sure to dial it in to that specification on the Boss RV6 Reverb going into the Acme Motown DI box.  

  I’ve been looking up some sheet music this  week I search of more guitar ideas; I noticed “piano dyad” chords on low strings that work around d the melody in the music of both Soundgarden and Def Leppard, so that was interesting to note how the concept applies across pretty much all genres – 1960’s Rock and Motown music placing those dyads on high strings & the same dyads appearing on “heavy rock” on low strings.

  I picked up some sheet music books at the library this week too….found some interesting guitar ideas in the “Randy Bachman Official Transcriptions” (from “The Guess Who” and “Bachman Turner Overdrive”), those electric guitar “treble chinks” in the intro and verses of “These Eyes” always caught my ear (great hi-hat sound on that one too), and the breakdown in the chorus, which starts out with five strums of C major and on the sixth strum hits a “C5+major7” chord, then that pattern gets transposed up to “D”, “E”, then the chorus ends with some strums of F# & G.

  Some interesting riff ideas in the other songs too, “American Woman”, “No Sugar Tonight”, “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”. I picked up another book of Chuck Berry sheet music, with a thorough introduction chapter on the history and development of Boogie Woogie & Chuck Berry, written by Fred Sokolow.

  Fred is a cool guy, I met him one time at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica CA, and he really knows his 50’s Rock N Roll guitar stuff; I’m not totally crazy about Chuck Berry, if you hear 20 of his songs, they all sound the same & you’ve had enough for awhile, but I’m looking forward to reading that analysis by Fred Sokolow.  

Did you see that story in the news about Country singer Randy Travis? Apparently he had a stroke ten years ago and lost his voice, now this week, he put out a song using an A.I. recreation of his voice, as a “comeback single”! The publicity stories are saying “Randy got his voice back!”

Imagine that, a guy who can’t sing anymore, basically pressing a button and saying, “Listen to my Robot sing for you.” It would be more legitimate for Stephen Hawking to put out a Techno song with his Voicebox device. I even prefer to hear the fake Elvis A.I. sing “Baby Got Back”:  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjErj74wg7g

Or fake Hank Williams singing “Straight Outta Compton”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YhRO7ezEJE

Went up to the range again last weekend, looks like my accuracy is improving, I hit the targets 11 out of 18 shots. Not too much progress with the CDL thing this week, just waiting for the retest date.

I’ve been developing a deeper relationship with Mary the Mother of God as a spiritual mother a bit more lately, in prayer, and reading a book called “The Glories of Mary” by St. Alphonsus Liguori:

I attended a “May Queen” crowning ceremony the other day & the children began singing a nice little acapella song, so I switched on my phone video & captured most of it, might be neat to work that into the ending of a future song.

New Marshall Amp

Worked on some Bass demos for that 90’s Grunge idea of “5th note to start chorus”, I found four songs that would work well with, so I’ll be re-recording the Bass for those coming up.

  Also working on more Guitar demos…it’s a little tedious doing the “trial and error” bit of running through the list of ideas, but quite necessary for variety and supporting each  song; I hope to do some more recording this weekend though.  

I’ve been doing weekly workouts for a couple months now, it’s going pretty well for getting back into shape. Usually I play side one of Weezer’s debut album, it’s high-energy and good guitar sounds. Having gotten more interested in those guitar sounds of the debut albums for Weezer and the Rentals (the Bass player from Weezer started his own band but used the same guitar sounds); I found an article describing their technique:

“ran through Mesa/Boogie Mk1 (atop a Marshall cab). The impact of the gain-heavy tone was exemplified by Sharp and Cuomo playing constant downstrokes on the guitar and bass, locking together both high and low-ends with a rock-steady momentum.
“We try to keep all the voicings really low to give us a crunchy sound…Cuomo and Ocasek opted to record the amp volume at a surprisingly low-level, with the gain (and microphone level) dialled up high, this resulted in the resultant bulky but still ultra-crisp tone.”

  I was friends awhile back in my college days with an Albany NY Pop-Punk band called “The Last Year”, who were striving to sound like “The Ataris”, and I first played a Marshall amp at one of their rehearsals. They had asked me to write a song for them, which I did, called “Heather”, but then shortly after they split up, so I’ve had the song for awhile.

  After that I bought a Marshall amplifier called the Marshall JCM 2000, I kind of liked the high-gain option but it kind of had a one-dimensional sound, and the “clean” channels didn’t sound musical at all, with the Bass tone knob seeming to be a dummy knob that never increased the low end. Eventually I pawned it off in Denver, but then later on came to realize that it was a “solid state” amp with no tubes in it, which was why it didn’t sound musical enough. So I got to perusing some music equipment websites and saw that a certain Marshall tube amplifier, the DSL40CR, was on sale for $150 off!

  So I hooked up the deal with my preferred dealer and got a price-match going on, just got the amp in the mail today, jamming on it and having a rocking good time.

This particular Marshall amp has a “Resonance” knob too, which has a similar Bass-Boost function to the low-end Gain knob in the Mesa Boogie Rectoverb, making the low-end sound either more “tight and snappy” or more “loose and flubby”. 

Here’s a good video review showing the range of sounds this amp has:

  Now I can do pretty much 20 kinds of two-amp combinations as well, between the Fender Twin Reverb, the Vox AC30, the Orange Crush Pix, the Mesa Boogie Rectoverb, and the Marshall DSL40, using eight electric guitars of different tonewoods!

The whole world of Rock music is literally at my fingertips!

Fender Twin Reverb +	Vox AC30	Orange Crush Pix	Mesa Boogie Rectoverb	Marshall DSL40
Vox AC30 +	Fender Twin Reverb	Orange Crush Pix	Mesa Boogie Rectoverb	Marshall DSL40
Orange Crush Pix +	Fender Twin Reverb	Vox AC30	Mesa Boogie Rectoverb	Marshall DSL40
Mesa Boogie Rectoverb +	Fender Twin Reverb	Vox AC30	Orange Crush Pix	Marshall DSL40
Marshall DSL40 +	Fender Twin Reverb	Vox AC30	Orange Crush Pix	Mesa Boogie Rectoverb

  When I record guitars for “Heather”, I’ll probably do a combo of the Marshall DSL40 with either the Fender Twin or the Mesa Boogie Rectoverb…the song is on the border between surf-rock and grunge and Buddy Holly. 

  I’ve been enjoying the Louis Jordan “jump blues” song “Caldonia” this week; Louis Jordan was the idol that Little Richard was trying to copy for his whole career.
I can relate to it this song, because with the way Jazz music gets on my nerves, I’d probably be screaming in my songs like that too, if I had Jazz music in the background.

  I didn’t really understand Little Richard’s screaming until I experienced the sheer nerve irritation of this background Jazz music in Louis Jordan’s songs. “Caldonia! What make your big head so hard?”

  Watching the “Joe Pickett” show on Paramount Plus, it’s pretty interesting, I’m on Season 2 now.

Adventures in Reverb Layering

  Adventures in Reverb Layering: I’ve been carefully considering how to record guitar for the song I started on last week, which is a five-minute epic closing song for an album of traumatic & dramatic material; the song is an account of an emotionally healing dream where I met a woman (or angel?) on the beach, and the things she said that helped me move forward from that situation.

The chorus could use a sustaining part though, but the song won’t sound right with a Hammond M3 Organ for instance, which sounds like a fuzzy caterpillar (in a good way), since it is a song from a “dreamscape”. Here is a good example of a song with Reverb and Fender Twin amp, “Blankets of Night” by Hammock:

  The first night I worked on recording the Gretsch Duojet electric guitar, my fretting hand ended up kind of crippled, liked a gnarled monkey’s paw, due to the guitar’s neck tension and grabbing tough chords in the key of F.  

But afterwards I held onto an ice pack and took some ibuprofen, then did a little “muscle rehab” by grabbing a small cup and rolling it back and forth, then woke up with the hand pain-free and stronger than the day before.

  The darn strings kept slipping out of tune as well, so eventually I replaced a string and tightened the tuning-screw. I find myself wondering if “Grover Tuners” are the ultimate, and if people with Grover Tuners never have string slippage problems. The Gretsch has certainly been an ornery guitar to wrestle with for the last two weeks, which would be understandable if it was a no-name Chinese manufactured guitar, rather than a name-brand.

  I was looking to do a large amount of Reverb on the guitar track, and then double it; I recalled something about Pearl Jam having done “Reverb Layering” on their debut album, meaning they recorded a guitar with a certain amount of Reverb, and then doubled it with a different amount of Reverb.

  The main Reverb setting I liked was to have the knob on the Fender Twin Reverb amp at 4.5; for these set of songs I’m also strumming the electric directly in front of an AKG Condenser to pick up the string sound.

When I went to double it up, things got funky; at first I tried the Reverb at 6.0, which caused a lot of nutty “microphonic” feedback squeal sounds in real-time, which did not seem to show up in the microphones (possibly some malfunction in the amp), but then the extra crazy thing was to hear how distant the amp sounded from the Reverb into four mics and yet the electric strings strumming where immediately present to the ear! Scrapped that take. Finally I changed a string out and tightened that tuning-screw, and did a doubled take at 1.5 Reverb (Take 112 was the keeper…lots of false starts).

  I listened back to that SMAP song “You’re Yours” & found that I liked the Tambourine hitting on the 8th beat, so I recorded a similar Tambourine part for this song, then threw in some Zils on the outro, kind of like “In My Room” by the Beach Boys.

Added a 2nd guitar part using the Oceanburst Agile Limba guitar and a Volume-swell pedal, which came out pretty well. Here’s an audio sample of the chorus:   

https://bennettwilliam.bandcamp.com/track/10-14-instrumental-for-chorus

Grunge “5th in the Bass”:  I’d been wondering about the “catharsis” effect of Grunge song choruses since last year, and happened to hear an interview with the Bass player from Nirvana talking using the 5th note in the Bass as part of his “bag of tricks”:

So I looked over some sheet music I have and noticed that the Gin Blossoms used this move at the beginning of each chorus for their two biggest hits, “Found Out About You” and “Hey Jealousy”:

  I remember getting that Gin Blossoms CD single in a box of Cheerios or Shredded Wheat in the early 90’s…those guys were definitely the prototype for the Goo Goo Dolls.

So I am sort of rethinking if I should redo the Bass for those “Rolling Stones – Grunge” type of Garage-Rock songs that I’ve recorded Drums and Bass for, based on maybe switching that first Chorus note to the 5th of the chord; I’ll demo it out on a case-by-case basis, but I’ll be working on guitar for those songs next month for sure.

  I’ve collected a bunch of Nat King Cole CD’s and DVD’s from the library this week, I’ve always considered him to be the greatest singer I’d heard, but why?

This year I had come across an old popular book from the early 1900’s that cited the importance of emphasizing the letters “m, w, b” in public speaking, and lingering on them to the point of sounding like “mm”, “ww”, “bb”. Listening through the songs of classic Crooners like Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and Nat King Cole, you can definitely hear the “mm”, but having studied a good quality DVD on “Stage Presence” in recent months, I found several of the lessons are strictly on Vocal Technique methods that are rarely mentioned in standard singing lessons, and I’m finding considerations of where the theatrical method is to “soften your voice” on keywords, and then finding that same effect in Nat King Cole’s singing style.

https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Stage-Presence-Present-Audience/dp/B07K8WHMC2/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3RBM8LWEZPCY7&keywords=stage+presence+melanie+long&qid=1708022799&sprefix=stage+presence+melanie+long%2Caps%2C99&sr=8-1

  Another interesting characteristic to the vocal resonance of Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Elvis, and the Beatles, comes from a type of microphone called a “Tube” microphone, specifically the Neumann U47 distributed by “Telefunken”:

“The microphone we used the most back then — and which was excellent — was the [RCA] 44 [ribbon mic]. I used it for Nat Cole’s vocals and all of the early Capitol stuff, but it had a mellow character and we couldn’t get the brightest high end out of it. Well, when we got the U47 and used it in place of the 44 — on, say, a sax section — all of a sudden we had the sound in the studio that we’d wanted all the time, with a rising characteristic to the mid-range and a bright high end. We didn’t have to do anything else, and after we got a few more U47s, we started using them for vocals.”
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/classic-tracks-frank-sinatra-got-you-under-my-skin

  Unfortunately those microphones are $25,000 and up! But there are a few other companies that make Tube microphones which they claim are precise replicas of the U47, so I might add one of those to my shopping list for the future.

  I’ve been enjoying the CD “Nat King Cole Live at Sands”; the show closes out with a hilarious satire on Rock music called “Mr. Cole Won’t Rock N Roll”, definitely check that one out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cm816WvFx8