Thursday, May 31, 2012

Scotlandstill

My "60 hours in Scotlandville, before returning
Their Songs would be played in Scotlandville, one day...
to New Orleans," has been semi-productive.''
I realized how tired I was Tuesday evening, when I needed to catch up on some sleep. I had been up until at least 2 a.m., each of the three nights in New Orleans, and had been distracted by Sue's presence the first night, and then woken up by her the third morning, pretty early "Aren't you going to get up early and do some things? Come on, rise and shine!" 
Wednesday (yesterday) was to be "studio" day, when I was determined to record all day, which I did; forgetting to eat, actually (having to build a fire first is a deterrent) 
My first project was a failure. I thought that I had the right drumbeat, but, as I started to do the song, the beat just wasn't right. I tried to modify my rhythm to fit the drums, but that made it a song that I never intended to write; or to scrap, which I eventually did. Lesson learned at a cost of only about 5 hours on Wednesday afternoon. 
Then, in the evening, I decided that I wanted to make a sidebar on this blog of my "20 best busking songs" and try to represent them there. 
So, I did one of them in the evening; woke up in the morning and scrapped the vocals and most of the "wah-wah" effected guitar -as that isn't representative of how I sound sitting on Bourbon Street- and redid the vocals after dropping the song one whole step in pitch.
Ocinero Gets Its Debut
I added the ocinera, an instrument that Alex in California sent me a long time ago, now, as a survival tool. 
If my guitar was ever stolen, I could (yes, actually) go out on Bourbon Street and play my guts out on the ocinera and, I wouldn't starve... Some people might think that my music is "case in point" that you can do just about anything and make money on that fabled street. 
But, here is my song, The Ballad of Richard Corey, which was a Simon and Garfunkel song originally, but I first heard it played by a local guy in Fitchburg, Massachusetts when I was an impressionable teenager, and I do the song more like that guy, whose name is Eric (and I can't spell his last name) than I do Simon and Garfunkel. 
When I eventually heard the S. and G. version, I had to smile at how much Eric had made it his own. 
Well, now it's both of ours, as I give you: 
The Ballad Of Richard Corey (click here)
  • Acoustic rhythm guitar (the part I would play on the street)
  • Second acoustic guitar, "doubling" the first (as this is a luxury of a muti-tracking studio
  • Ocinero (I don't play "my guts out" on it, because I have lost some of my confidence, lately)
  • Vocal
As close as I could get to what I probably sounded like, playing that same song for the guy who asked me if I knew any Simon and Garfunkel -just as well that he wasn't familiar with the song, as it is more Eric, the guy from Massachusetts* than any Simon or any Garfunkel...
I eschewed the bass guitar part (played on the acoustic and then dropped an octave, using the "pitch change" function on Audacity) because this song would require a really tasty bass part, like on a Steely Dan recording, that would take me another week to compose.
I also skipped the 5-gallon-bucket-hit-with-a-stick, though, just barely.
It was sounding really good; the bucket; but recording it was a problem...the level meters don't respnd fast enough to tell you that your bucket is too loud and is clipping the input. By the time the meter is ready to give you a bunch of red warning lights, the bucket hit has passed, and the meter has missed it.
Maybe it's a blessing (for listeners) in disguise that I wasn't able to capture the bucket at 3 in the morning by the boarded up building; but I was gettin' on it!

The Guy Who Blew Off John Lennon
*Eric Ellijoquist (sp?) is someone who was a local singer/songwriting "great" in Fitchburg, Mass. when I was just taking up the guitar as a teenager.
His voice is a cross between Van Morrison and Paul McCartney.
He was in New York in the mid 70's and John Lennon walked into the club where he was playing.
After listening a while, John invited Eric to his studio, where he was recording "Rock And Roll Music" (or a similar title).
Eric decided NOT to go to the studio....becoming "the guy who blew off John Lennon."
Eric was paranoid and thought (and probably still thinks that) the C.I.A killed Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and...lo and behold, about 6 years later...John Lennon, because of the "messages" in their music.
He didn't want to become involved with John because he had an intuition that the guy was going to be assassinated because of his politics.
That's the guy whose version of The Ballad of Richard Corey I am doing above. It's a song that won't draw any heat from the feds, I'm assuming, since it is Eric-approved.

4 comments:

  1. The grill is in!

    The Internet let me listen to "The Grill Is Gone" just now.

    It sounds like two hobos and a wino.

    First, you have two hobos with guitars, one's playing lead and the other one's bangin' away on rhythm. They get it together briefly, then sort of stay within arm's reach of each other, rhythmically speaking. The wino makes a funny noise, throat clearing maybe? The sort of involuntary "ugh" that comes right after a swaller of Popov? Someone is tapping on a beer can with some gravel or something in it for the beat. Then the wino starts in, in his wino-voice, about how well, the grill is gone.

    See? You have your very own Lester Bangs. Since I can't seem to get practice time in much less actually FRIGGIN' PLAY ANYTHING, I shall critique and critique.

    OK lemme read your post for today

    ReplyDelete
  2. OK "Richard Corey" wow, that brought back a feeling of nostalgia. My older sis had all the S and G records and that was on one of 'em.

    Not bad for a street bum, not bad at all, at first you were making it happen. The "special effects" near the end messed it up of course, I'm not sure if you meant that mess there or that's the Internet adding its own layer of suck to the mix.

    Now, you can go out on the street and sing about Richard Corey. I, right now, don't know the words well enough, don't have a guitar or know the chords, and my voice would get tired-out and become a whisper in no time. So keep in mind my critiques are about as meaningful as the twitterings of a bird unless I actually come to be able to do better, in *your* arena.

    And I am beginning to think that the only way I'd become a busker, good bad or indifferent, is if I voluntarily became homeless and lived such that, other than the rounds to the food stamp office etc., I had nothing to do but busk, busk, busk. The only other road to musical skill I know of involves being a middle-class kid whose parents send 'em to lessons for years, and almost against their will, they become good at an instrument. No matter how homework, girl/boyfriends, other interests try to intrude, the lessons are a holy thing that must be attended.

    This "other road" is what it is looking like I will resort to. A 50-year old junior college student, enrolling in the fall in piano and voice, maybe theory too. By just chugging along, I could possibly end up with, after years, an useless but maybe fun to obtain, music degree from the local state college.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The "special" effects was actually me forgetting to adjust the latency on one of the vocal tracks, I haven't found a way (yet, hopefully) to change volume on a track ie. make it quiet during rhythm and then crank it up for the solo; in that case, I was singing and then threw in the lead guitar (which sucked and I should have done over; but I was SO close to having the project complete and the sun was coming up, so I didn't actually leave it there; I covered my ass by selecting it and clicking on "Wah-wah" (the classic late sixties effect) hoping that it would turn it into something interesting; that could be what you are referring to, or it could be the vocals on the last verse, which I moved to a different track so that I could turn up the wah-wah guitar independently of it; and then forgot d'oh! to adjust the latency, and then wound up with two voices 40 milliseconds apart -ok if one of them IS actually adjusted to the beat; and ok if you want to sound like the way they recorded The Brady Bunch, singing "Time To Change" -heavy, out of phase chorusing- so that when their note wavered, the echo from when it was actually on pitch would carry over and blend with it, and then by the time the little bit off note echoed, they had gotten on pitch and the two blended...the result is; well, what you hear on the last verse, when it sounds like some sound engineer is doing his best to make "the guy" sound as good as possible...
    But, yeah, I have a bad habit of; when I'm near the finish line and have the song almost finished, I'll throw in the last few parts almost like an after thought, and those could be the ones that ruin the overall effect; when nobody is going to notice the ABSENCE of a tricked up heavily effected guitar playing garbage because the guy just wanted to jam something into that empty space, but they are certainly going to notice the presence of same...It's easy to say "let me add a tuba to the mix," without thinking, yeah,but did I work out a tuba part and then practice it 20 times, or am I just going to add a tuba, any tuba; just a tuba; I want a tuba sound...
    But, I was impatient to get something posted, now that I got the latency problem solved, I "released" it one day too early; could have spent Thursday on just a guitar solo to add...the blues jam had some passages that I think were enough to compensate for the low spots; and, funny you mention it; just this morning I got the idea of recording the sound of a 24 oz. Steel Reserve can being opened ("Pffooshh!) and then pasting it into a drum track in place of the snare; and then using it for a song about either hobos or bums or maybe a jingle for Steel Reserve, with lines like: "You may be homeless, but after a few of these, you might not even realize it.."
    Off to post...a friend of mine got his art degree at an "advanced age" he works for an auction house and does very well (they trust him to courie 2 million dollar oil paintings from one location to there other...in his '83 Ford Pickup, nonetheless...he told me that he would be sitting at a red light with the 2 million dollar painting wrapped up and sitting on his passenger seat and, looking around, would think, all these pedestrians and other drivers; I wonder what they would think if they knew I had a 2 million dollar painting sitting next to me!"
    Then, he added "I could probably just leave it sitting there unwrapped and nobody would be the wiser...oh, that's pretty cool, did you paint it yourself...?
    No Titian painted it 300 years ago, but, I'm glad you like it...
    But, yeah, get your degree...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thank you ever so for you post.Really thank you!

    ReplyDelete

Only rude and disrespectful comments will be replied to rudely and disrespectfully. Personal attacks will be replied to in kind, with the goal of providing satisfaction to the attacker.