The Reburial
And, I Drew Another Sketch
Click here to hear "Artifacts," Daniel McKenna's second attempt to make a song entirely out of sound samples
Yesterday evening after I had gotten home and had played the the "Unearthed" song that I put on yesterday's post, I was disappointing by the fact that the Cecilia 5 produced drums were so prominent in the mix.
I had thought it sounded better with the drums more in the background, and thought that I had mixed it that way, and was a bit embarrassed as I listened back with no way to go online and fix it.
So, I was surprised to see an actual positive comment made by Alex In California. I had been thinking "Well, now he is going to have a field day with his criticism; I should have listened to it before posting it..."
But, I guess that might mean that the piece that I have just spent 12 hours on, he will probably hate.
This is what the taxpayers get in return for subsidizing my housing, I guess...give me a room, and this is the stuff that will come out of that room. Now I can just download samples of a black caped night heron squawking, and you wouldn't know I wasn't recording under a wharf by the Mississippi River.
I relied upon my ear, for the most part, which is how Burial, supposedly achieves his "organic" sound. Though...
I remember, as a kid, that there was always something hypnotic about a vinyl record that was warped.
A lot of mine were, because I liked to bring my Panasonic phonograph player, with the full range 4 inch oval speaker, out into the back yard in the morning, where I would sit in the shade and listen to The Beatles "Red" and "Green" albums and others, over and over; round and round.
Until the sun came up high enough to usher in the eighty degree, summer vacation, heat that us Massachusetts people sweltered in, which would drive me indoors, but not before I shut the phonograph player off, to save electricity.
This was penny-wise as far as the few cents of electricity saved, but dollar-foolish as far as the damage done to expensive ($4.99 a pop, back then, plus tax) albums that I may not have rescued before the sun broke the plane of the treeline of the woods behind our house and landed full force upon them from straight down out of the sky.
Listening to a warped vinyl album can be like being rocked to sleep in a cradle, because the warped part comes around at a steady 33 and a third times a minute, and adds its own underlying rhythm to everything.
I could Google it real quick, but I believe there is actually a "warped record" effect that can be applied in digital audio workstations, and I wouldn't be surprised if "Burial" doesn't use something similar.
Otherwise, he would have to be an audio genius to calculate the change in pitch that would be produced by the needle having to travel further over the hump in the warped part of the record, since the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, or in this case the needle staying on a steady plane and not having to travel up and over a hill, taking ever so much longer to cover the same ground. At the very top of the warp the plane would level out, so for an un-measurable length of time it would be in pitch, but then it would start to descend the other side of the mound.
That would present quite a complex problem of trigonometry whereby one would have to find the tangent at the top of the warp and then measure the slopes on each side of it, taking into account that they would be rounded and not linear...and well, yeah, I just don't think some video game addicted nigga with a laptop would have been able to figure that out. Call me prejudiced.
"Artifacts"
About the samples I used, I suppose I'm supposed to remain mum, so that a legion websites and forums can spring up, devoted to people who like to hunt down such things.
But, I will say that the "drums" came from a less than ten second clip of me playing guitar and fake bass (made by lowering the guitar an octave or two) and some of them were made from taking single syllables from words, such as the "k" in the word "kratom," doctored into a snare drum.
There is a sample of Steve Miller inhaling before singing a verse in his song "Jet Airliner," and the whole thing started with me playing a short melody on the guitar and then dropping it down 2 octaves by slowing it down at the same time, which became the bass line.
I guess I have a leg up on those less educated in music theory because I was able to take pieces from anywhere and then find their pitch on the guitar so I knew how much to raise or lower them to work them into the C minor that the song is in.
There were too many happy coincidences for me not to think that my musical ear guided me some.
For example, the blast of full orchestra which can be heard as an "accent" was taken from a movement in a Robert Schumann symphony -one that starts out with a bang, with the whole orchestra hitting a staccato blast. I heard it and thought it might go well in "Artifacts," and it was indeed an E-flat minor chord, and after lowering it 3 tones to make it a C minor, I benefited from the side effect of it thus having become unrecognizable as that chord from that symphony. Harder for the London Symphony Orchestra to sue me that way..
There are samples from at least 3 Steely Dan songs. I was going after the first staccato note from the song "Hey Nineteen," which I intended to somehow put in a loop, but never got to it, having come across the opening notes from the song "Josie," while looking for it, which became the most recognizable thing in the piece.
The samples from "Bodhisattva" are better disguised, and the example of another happy coincidence as, after lowering the pitch one half step to make it fit with C minor, the resultant change in its speed made it fall right on top of the beat and gave it a triplet feel.
I had such good luck that it seemed apt to put the sample of Fiona Apple from an old interview talking about how "a lot of it was luck," when discussing her meteoric rise, back in the early nineties.
I slowed her voice down, making her sound less like herself, and then added a heavy "bathroom" reverberation, making her sound less like herself in a bathroom...
Enjoy.
I'm going to listen back to it before I leave the Uxi Duxi, in case I made some bonehead mistake, like uploading the wrong song.
The Guy Who Plays Late At Night On Canal Street
This video, I made on my phone last week and forgot to post until now...
From last week:
So, this guy, I hear maybe 4 or more nights a week.
Always on Canal Street, and playing through an amp, loud enough to be heard as well as in this video shot from about 50 yards from him. I would describe him as the guy seen sitting with the guitar in the center of the shot.
He has a kind of Chubby Checker, or Fats Domino aspect about him; always dresses nice, but almost always 1950's style.
His playing is a lot like what he is doing in this 51 second clip, but I will append, in his defense, that he had noticed me sitting there with my guitar on my back. I know he has seen me around, but I have never checked him out up close.
He might have been conscious of me shooting a video; and that is an issue that some buskers go so far about as to have a sign that reads: "If you shoot a video, please leave a tip."
The guy plays very smooth music which comes from what would fall into the "gospel" category, though the line between Motown artists who grew up singing in churches and the music sung in churches has become blurred.
Now that I have listened to the thing, I wish I had made a longer recording of him; I guess I assumed that the microphone in a cell phone would produce garbage, and so I cut it short.
And, I Drew Another Sketch
Click here to hear "Artifacts," Daniel McKenna's second attempt to make a song entirely out of sound samples
 |
| Move over, little doggie, a mean ol' dog is movin' in... |
I had thought it sounded better with the drums more in the background, and thought that I had mixed it that way, and was a bit embarrassed as I listened back with no way to go online and fix it.
So, I was surprised to see an actual positive comment made by Alex In California. I had been thinking "Well, now he is going to have a field day with his criticism; I should have listened to it before posting it..."
| Move over, little doggie, a mean ol' dog is movin' in... |
This is what the taxpayers get in return for subsidizing my housing, I guess...give me a room, and this is the stuff that will come out of that room. Now I can just download samples of a black caped night heron squawking, and you wouldn't know I wasn't recording under a wharf by the Mississippi River.
I relied upon my ear, for the most part, which is how Burial, supposedly achieves his "organic" sound. Though...
I remember, as a kid, that there was always something hypnotic about a vinyl record that was warped.
A lot of mine were, because I liked to bring my Panasonic phonograph player, with the full range 4 inch oval speaker, out into the back yard in the morning, where I would sit in the shade and listen to The Beatles "Red" and "Green" albums and others, over and over; round and round.
Until the sun came up high enough to usher in the eighty degree, summer vacation, heat that us Massachusetts people sweltered in, which would drive me indoors, but not before I shut the phonograph player off, to save electricity.
This was penny-wise as far as the few cents of electricity saved, but dollar-foolish as far as the damage done to expensive ($4.99 a pop, back then, plus tax) albums that I may not have rescued before the sun broke the plane of the treeline of the woods behind our house and landed full force upon them from straight down out of the sky.
Listening to a warped vinyl album can be like being rocked to sleep in a cradle, because the warped part comes around at a steady 33 and a third times a minute, and adds its own underlying rhythm to everything.
I could Google it real quick, but I believe there is actually a "warped record" effect that can be applied in digital audio workstations, and I wouldn't be surprised if "Burial" doesn't use something similar.
Otherwise, he would have to be an audio genius to calculate the change in pitch that would be produced by the needle having to travel further over the hump in the warped part of the record, since the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, or in this case the needle staying on a steady plane and not having to travel up and over a hill, taking ever so much longer to cover the same ground. At the very top of the warp the plane would level out, so for an un-measurable length of time it would be in pitch, but then it would start to descend the other side of the mound.
That would present quite a complex problem of trigonometry whereby one would have to find the tangent at the top of the warp and then measure the slopes on each side of it, taking into account that they would be rounded and not linear...and well, yeah, I just don't think some video game addicted nigga with a laptop would have been able to figure that out. Call me prejudiced.
"Artifacts"
About the samples I used, I suppose I'm supposed to remain mum, so that a legion websites and forums can spring up, devoted to people who like to hunt down such things.
But, I will say that the "drums" came from a less than ten second clip of me playing guitar and fake bass (made by lowering the guitar an octave or two) and some of them were made from taking single syllables from words, such as the "k" in the word "kratom," doctored into a snare drum.
There is a sample of Steve Miller inhaling before singing a verse in his song "Jet Airliner," and the whole thing started with me playing a short melody on the guitar and then dropping it down 2 octaves by slowing it down at the same time, which became the bass line.
I guess I have a leg up on those less educated in music theory because I was able to take pieces from anywhere and then find their pitch on the guitar so I knew how much to raise or lower them to work them into the C minor that the song is in.
There were too many happy coincidences for me not to think that my musical ear guided me some.
For example, the blast of full orchestra which can be heard as an "accent" was taken from a movement in a Robert Schumann symphony -one that starts out with a bang, with the whole orchestra hitting a staccato blast. I heard it and thought it might go well in "Artifacts," and it was indeed an E-flat minor chord, and after lowering it 3 tones to make it a C minor, I benefited from the side effect of it thus having become unrecognizable as that chord from that symphony. Harder for the London Symphony Orchestra to sue me that way..
There are samples from at least 3 Steely Dan songs. I was going after the first staccato note from the song "Hey Nineteen," which I intended to somehow put in a loop, but never got to it, having come across the opening notes from the song "Josie," while looking for it, which became the most recognizable thing in the piece.
The samples from "Bodhisattva" are better disguised, and the example of another happy coincidence as, after lowering the pitch one half step to make it fit with C minor, the resultant change in its speed made it fall right on top of the beat and gave it a triplet feel.
I had such good luck that it seemed apt to put the sample of Fiona Apple from an old interview talking about how "a lot of it was luck," when discussing her meteoric rise, back in the early nineties.
I slowed her voice down, making her sound less like herself, and then added a heavy "bathroom" reverberation, making her sound less like herself in a bathroom...
Enjoy.
I'm going to listen back to it before I leave the Uxi Duxi, in case I made some bonehead mistake, like uploading the wrong song.
The Guy Who Plays Late At Night On Canal Street
This video, I made on my phone last week and forgot to post until now...
From last week:
So, this guy, I hear maybe 4 or more nights a week.
Always on Canal Street, and playing through an amp, loud enough to be heard as well as in this video shot from about 50 yards from him. I would describe him as the guy seen sitting with the guitar in the center of the shot.
He has a kind of Chubby Checker, or Fats Domino aspect about him; always dresses nice, but almost always 1950's style.
His playing is a lot like what he is doing in this 51 second clip, but I will append, in his defense, that he had noticed me sitting there with my guitar on my back. I know he has seen me around, but I have never checked him out up close.
He might have been conscious of me shooting a video; and that is an issue that some buskers go so far about as to have a sign that reads: "If you shoot a video, please leave a tip."
The guy plays very smooth music which comes from what would fall into the "gospel" category, though the line between Motown artists who grew up singing in churches and the music sung in churches has become blurred.
Now that I have listened to the thing, I wish I had made a longer recording of him; I guess I assumed that the microphone in a cell phone would produce garbage, and so I cut it short.
"Unearthed" sounds better than "Artifacts" because there's less of it. It kind of sounds like an interlude the band "Man Or Astro-Man?" would put between songs.
ReplyDeleteBoth are the best I've heard on here because if your guitar's in them it's so distorted you can't tell, and there's none of your voice.
The Guy Who Plays Late At Night On Canal Street (have I got the name right?) sounds great.