The Dripping Of My Kitchen Faucet

• 7 Days Before Food Money Comes
• 7 Days Without Busking
• Weed Induced Paranoia/Fear Of Busking

The past week, I have found 7 reasons for not going out to play each night, along with 7 things to distract me from posting to this blog.

It has been sprinkling lightly the past couple nights (Friday and Saturday) but not too cold to play; I could have been out there; had I been ambitious.

My sleep schedule has gotten flipped around.

I have woken up just in time to grab my stuff and be on the right trolley, but have been dead tired, after having stayed up working on, mostly music, this week.

One glance out the window to see little droplets disturbing puddles that had accumulated in the parking, had been enough to prompt me to lay back down.

Bobby's Weed

I need to find some ambition soon.

Blog Readership Hits All Time Lull
(left)
I know I haven't been doing the things I would need to do to boost my readership.
I suppose it all starts with "good writing" as the key ingredient.
But the drop off in the number of readers affirms my fear that my life has indeed become more boring.
I'm tossing around a few ideas. One of which is to rewrite and condense past posts, so that, in the place of 30 daily posts, I might put one long one that tells the story of the whole month in a nutshell; and would have some kind of foresight built in; since I now know "the rest of the story."


Bobby, my friend in building C, has been giving me buds of the weed he has been getting. It is super potent medicinal weed that has confidence sapping, insecurity triggering, paranoia producing properties to it, I'm convinced.

Last night, I started messing around a bit after midnight with a recording of Harold the cat meowing to be let outside. The recording had the squeaking and groaning of the door being opened to let him out on it.

These sounds, I looped and stretched and slowed down and sped up and changed the pitch of, reversing some and overlapped others on top of still more; until I had a symphony of sounds which were all adulterated "meow"s and door squeaks, to begin with.

5 Hours?!?

I think I worked on it for about 5 hours, my head in a fog of Bobby's weed, feeling slow and heavy and kind of in a stupor, as I worked.

Maybe Ben will give me a few bucks

for letting him stay.

..
There ar a hundred things you can do to doctor the sound of a cat meowing, and a door creaking.
One of my favorite effects is called "paulstretch," and was probably invented by a guy named Paul, and allows one to radically stretch out time so that one second of sound might take 30 seconds to play out. Stretching a meow out to 15 times its original duration is cool.

Add to this the fact that Harold has an arsenal of tones to his meow which he uses to indicate differing levels of urgency, of which I managed to capture 4 distinct ones, and it is easy to see why a stoned guy might spend 5 hours playing with each sound.

But, 5 hours(?!?) spent on a cat symphony that lasts less than 3 minutes...when I had originally set out to work on something entirely different -something which I had already worked on and made inroads into? A real song that might go on the CD? Really?

Something got shoved onto the back burner after a bowl of Bobby's weed inspired me to work on a symphony for cat meowing and door squeaking, instead. That is one of the troubles with weed.

"The CD" project is moving along at a snails' pace, it would appear.

However, when I get back home later on this Sunday evening, I could actually make a song out of the thing. Maybe I can tune the guitar to the pitch of Harold's meowing and put chords behind it...

Or maybe I'll smoke a bowl and then decide that it is really more important to spend the whole evening making a song where the dripping of my kitchen faucet becomes the "drumbeat."

Still More New Techniques Discovered

Through the miracle of cutting and pasting and repeating measures, I have made great progress in being able to do things like taking a 16 bar section where the guitar plays mistake free, and then making those 16 bars repeat, say 32 times. Then playing a second guitar along with it, until I hit a stretch where it plays flawlessly for 16 bars; then cutting that out and repeating it, say, 32 times.
I would then have 2 guitars playing flawlessly and synchronized to each other for 32 bars.

Then the same process can be used to add more instruments.

All I would need is to hit a stretch where the instrument being added plays nicely for 16 or 32 bars over the perfect existing instruments, then I can trim off everything else and then...repeat the 3 instruments playing together perfectly and add more parts. Pretty soon I would have a 5 minute song with maybe 12 voices, all in perfect harmony...

Subsonic Boom

Another breakthrough that I've had is in the recording of the "fake" bass guitar.

I had always dropped the notes of the guitar down one full octave. This was one too few.

This meant that I could play right along with the existing music, using the bottom notes on the guitar to play a bass line, which I would then drop down one octave, to make it sound more like a bass.

The breakthrough came when I decided to drop the guitar down 2 octaves, for "grins and giggles," since doing so is as easy as putting "-24" half steps (instead of -12) in the appropriate box on the pitch shift effect.

I suppose I had never tried this before, thinking that, if I was having so much trouble getting the fake bass which has been dropped one octave to sound less fake, then going down two octaves would seem to potentially double the problem, and come out sounding like crap.

In The "It Took Him This Long To Figure That Out?" Category

But the truth is that dropping it just one octave wasn't giving me the range that a real bass guitar actually plays in. D'oh!

I had been trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ass; wondering why no tricks of equalization were giving me a nice bass sound, when the notes were just too high to begin with.

I played a bass line the other night, and then dropped it 20 half steps using the pitch shift effect.
Voila! It sounds much more like a bass guitar (even though it is technically that much more "fake," due to the more drastic dropping of pitch).

It looks like the CD is going to wind up having a bunch of random sound clips, and perhaps songs that go through a couple verses and then fade into other random things, only to return to the same song, different verses, and maybe different beat; maybe even done on a different day, etc...

I have about 2 hours worth of Travis Blaine talking non-stop about himself, that I'm thinking of using to make some kind of sound collage or maybe a song. I never set out to eaves-drop on the guy, but the tapes resulted from my having started to record a song, a short ways into which Travis can be heard entering the room and embarking upon an hour long lecture about the artist whose music I was trying to play. I left the recorder running on a couple of those occasions.

I might just make a bell sound every time he utters the words "I," "me," or "my."

Come to think of it, I've got some audio of Louise, another nightmare guest, ranting and raving about how despicable it is that she doesn't get an apartment like mine, nor a free flu shot, which was the theme of the "free flu shot rant," that I have a recording of.

Calling Dorise

My current plan is to ask Dorise Blackman if she has any properties that I might use as a vocal recording studio -maybe an apartment that hasn't been made ready to rent yet; doesn't have electricity or running water, perhaps, and that she might let me have the key to, for a few days at least, maybe...

Someone has re-affixed some of the screws that I took out of the plywood covering the door to the abandoned rectory. This tells me that someone does indeed periodically inspect the place; and inspect it close enough to have noticed a few loose screws. Whomever it is now knows that someone made an attempt to get in there, and I don't feel so good about cutting my way through the door now; that would be vandalism and a misdemeanor of some kind...

To bad, though, I could really see myself belting out some good vocals on the third floor of the place. No telling how cool, and inspiring, the view might be from there...