Saturday was a full day. So full, I guess, that I have spent most of Sunday sleeping it off.
I suppose I could still beat last night's arrival time at the Lilly Pad of about ten minutes before midnight, should I go soon.
Time Slips Through Mis-Management
Saturday, I was up around noon, and soon Jacob was texting about us jamming at his house. We were ostensibly going to record a song for Erin, to be given to her as some kind of going away gift at the Uxi Duxi, that evening.
I grabbed up my stuff, and then could not find my keys to the apartment, on the way out.
I had been in the place for just about 24 hours, having not played Friday night, because it was in the high forties, temperature-wise.
It took me at least a half hour, while Jacob sat in his car outside, to find the keys.
I had gone out to the car and informed him that I would just leave the place unlocked, since the possibility of a skeezer trying the door was pretty minimal, as I have never, in the three years that I've been in the place, heard someone attempting to turn the door knob.
Jacob then asked me if didn't want to grab the picture I drew of Erin, since we might wind up going straight to Uxi after recording at his house.
It was upon returning to the apartment to grab that picture, which I had stuck in the window to amuse Jacob, that I found my keys.
They were in one of the three holes in a brick which I had been using as a book-stop, but which I had rotated to the position where the holes in it would be vertical. This was so I could stand up and light one of the candles that I had found somewhere in my travels, as part of the constant variety of things found laying around in New Orleans.
And, for some reason, in some state of mind which may have been the "not thinking" state of mind, I had thought: What an excellent little cubbyhole to use to put my set of keys in!"
Buskers, and I suppose this goes for everyone, I implore you to always put your set of keys in the exact same place every time you enter your place after having used them to get in.
Nail a peg into the wall near the doorway.
Don't hide them in one of the holes of a brick, for this will make them totally invisible to a casual glancer. And, if the brick had lain on its side for a couple years and had thus, never been used as a cubbyhole and, as a result held no association to one in the mind of a person who might put the keys there, and who might smoke pot, don't ever put them there.
This cost me about a half hour, as stated above.
But, then it wasn't over.
We went to Jacob's house and kind of brainstormed ideas about what kind of song we could make for Erin.
I suggested taking "The Wreak of the Edmund Fitzgerald," by Gordon Lightfoot
and changing it to something about the sacking of Erin the barista.
"The legend lives on from the Pontchartrain on down to the business they call Uxi Duxi...
As businesses go, it was gayer than most, with the captain and crew all well semen-ed..."
But, Jacob was very unfamiliar with that AM radio staple of my youth, and so most of the humor was lost upon him.
We wound up sort of jamming, and I did one of my songs and then tried to make up some lyrics about the sacking of the Erin the barista, but this was recorded only on Jacob's phone, and deemed by him to not be the kind of grand production that he had had in mind.
My argument was that Erin was going to know that it was just us grabbing our guitars and keyboards and making something up on the fly, but, we decided to return to the Uxi Duxi with only the charcoal drawing of her, and a bag of caramels that I was to grab at the Walgreen's on the way there "in and out real quick," which I wound up waiting in a line another 20 minutes for.
Plus, we had popped in on Bobby "in and out real quick" so that Jacob could buy a bit of bud of the "gorilla glue" boutique strain of pot, as another offering to Erin.
Bobby had just gotten a new Fender amplified, and so it seemed natural for us to dote over it, play through it, and comment positively about the tone of it, at least at the maximum volume of almost to the "one" on the dial, that Bobby is relegated to playing at.
Why he is so in search of a guitar tone that can only be achieved by turning the amp up to the level where you can feel the hairs on your arms moving, is beyond me. But, at least another half hour was killed checking out Bobby's new amp.
So, it was quite a feat for me to have maintained my sense of purpose and kept an eye on the time, so that, after Jacob dropped me off a little before 11 PM, at the apartment, I was in the mind to just grab my stuff and hop on the bike and keep the evening rolling, to the tune of making 21 dollars in about an hour and a half.
Still, though, this had me returning home so late in the morning, that, the prudent way to make sure that I could make it to the Saint's game, to play outside that venue, would be for me to try to stay up for it.
Maybe a younger Daniel would have, but after having eaten a split yellow pea and peanut butter dish that I made, in conjunction with a huge cookie that I made from using a mix for chocolate chip cookies and then adding more rye and wheat flour to it and increasing the amount of butter and water, so that the resultant cookie was much less sweet and cloying than Betty Crocker's recipe, it became apparent to me that I was dozing off on the couch, as I listened back to some recordings I was messing with.
I have been digging up old recording of myself where I might have played for 21 minutes, jumping from one idea to another, and have been isolating sections where a chord progression was played all the way through without a mistake.
These, I cause to "loop" repeatedly, replacing the cycles through them that came before and after, which might have had errors in them, by using, say 16 repetitions of the same perfectly played chord changes, rather than the 16 that I might have originally played, where maybe I slowed down a bit in one spot, taking precious milliseconds to think of a word that rhymes, or something.
I can then take these 8 second long bars and zoom in see if every note I played landed right on the beat. If not, sliding the note over digitally so that it does land right on the beat can actually make the riff sound "tighter."
The 8 seconds, that might represent 4 bars of music, can then have drums added to them, using the same method of placing say the bass drum at "zero," and then the snare hit at exactly 250 milliseconds, the next bass drum at 500 milliseconds, and voila! a drummer emerges who is playing right along with the guitar, right down to the millisecond.
This can be repeated so that other instruments can be quickly added to the same 8 seconds of a chord change, auto-corrected to the nearest beat, and then when the "repeat" effect is used to make it go through a whole verse of a song, the drums and bass and other things will repeat flawlessly.
One of my methods is to cause every drum in the kit to sound on every 16th note. This causes the bass drum, toms, open and closed high hats, ride cymbal and snare drum all to sound in a machine gun-like manner, four times a beat throughout the whole song. Then, it becomes a matter of deleting the drums that you don't want to sound on any particular beat. Addition by subtraction. This exposes the ears to what each instrument would sound like on any beat. It might not otherwise occur to a non drummer that an open high hat would sound awesome on a certain off-beat, for example, but with the whole drum kit rat-a-tat-tatting away like a machine gun, it is easier to keep what is sounding good and mute the rest.
This overlaps into the same technique that I have "discovered" when drawing with pencil on paper. Rather than trying to shade in the low spots to suggest shapes, it is easier to darken the whole area and then erase the high spots. This can be done more gracefully than trying to coax the graphite to shade lighter and lighter by pressing softer and softer....Addition by subtraction....
As far as any danger of a song coming out sounding machine-like, this can be overcome by having at least a voice or two on the track winging it, liberated from the strictness of time that keeps the rest of the framework in place, but obvious to the listener that it isn't just "a computer" they are being subject to.
So, it was cool that I made 21 bucks, stemming the hemorrhaging of money that flowed during the cold days last week. But, I sort of "have to" go out as soon as I finish this and attempt at least a repeat of that. It is Sunday night.
I didn't make it to the Saint's game, but I can certainly make it to the after hours party at Lafitt's Blacksmith Shop Bar and Tavern...
When I get back home, I will put my keys on the refrigerator...
I suppose I could still beat last night's arrival time at the Lilly Pad of about ten minutes before midnight, should I go soon.
Saturday, I was up around noon, and soon Jacob was texting about us jamming at his house. We were ostensibly going to record a song for Erin, to be given to her as some kind of going away gift at the Uxi Duxi, that evening.
I grabbed up my stuff, and then could not find my keys to the apartment, on the way out.
I had been in the place for just about 24 hours, having not played Friday night, because it was in the high forties, temperature-wise.
It took me at least a half hour, while Jacob sat in his car outside, to find the keys.
I had gone out to the car and informed him that I would just leave the place unlocked, since the possibility of a skeezer trying the door was pretty minimal, as I have never, in the three years that I've been in the place, heard someone attempting to turn the door knob.
Jacob then asked me if didn't want to grab the picture I drew of Erin, since we might wind up going straight to Uxi after recording at his house.
It was upon returning to the apartment to grab that picture, which I had stuck in the window to amuse Jacob, that I found my keys.
They were in one of the three holes in a brick which I had been using as a book-stop, but which I had rotated to the position where the holes in it would be vertical. This was so I could stand up and light one of the candles that I had found somewhere in my travels, as part of the constant variety of things found laying around in New Orleans.
And, for some reason, in some state of mind which may have been the "not thinking" state of mind, I had thought: What an excellent little cubbyhole to use to put my set of keys in!"
Buskers, and I suppose this goes for everyone, I implore you to always put your set of keys in the exact same place every time you enter your place after having used them to get in.
Nail a peg into the wall near the doorway.
Don't hide them in one of the holes of a brick, for this will make them totally invisible to a casual glancer. And, if the brick had lain on its side for a couple years and had thus, never been used as a cubbyhole and, as a result held no association to one in the mind of a person who might put the keys there, and who might smoke pot, don't ever put them there.
This cost me about a half hour, as stated above.
But, then it wasn't over.
We went to Jacob's house and kind of brainstormed ideas about what kind of song we could make for Erin.
I suggested taking "The Wreak of the Edmund Fitzgerald," by Gordon Lightfoot
and changing it to something about the sacking of Erin the barista.
"The legend lives on from the Pontchartrain on down to the business they call Uxi Duxi...
As businesses go, it was gayer than most, with the captain and crew all well semen-ed..."
But, Jacob was very unfamiliar with that AM radio staple of my youth, and so most of the humor was lost upon him.
We wound up sort of jamming, and I did one of my songs and then tried to make up some lyrics about the sacking of the Erin the barista, but this was recorded only on Jacob's phone, and deemed by him to not be the kind of grand production that he had had in mind.
My argument was that Erin was going to know that it was just us grabbing our guitars and keyboards and making something up on the fly, but, we decided to return to the Uxi Duxi with only the charcoal drawing of her, and a bag of caramels that I was to grab at the Walgreen's on the way there "in and out real quick," which I wound up waiting in a line another 20 minutes for.
Plus, we had popped in on Bobby "in and out real quick" so that Jacob could buy a bit of bud of the "gorilla glue" boutique strain of pot, as another offering to Erin.
Bobby had just gotten a new Fender amplified, and so it seemed natural for us to dote over it, play through it, and comment positively about the tone of it, at least at the maximum volume of almost to the "one" on the dial, that Bobby is relegated to playing at.
Why he is so in search of a guitar tone that can only be achieved by turning the amp up to the level where you can feel the hairs on your arms moving, is beyond me. But, at least another half hour was killed checking out Bobby's new amp.
So, it was quite a feat for me to have maintained my sense of purpose and kept an eye on the time, so that, after Jacob dropped me off a little before 11 PM, at the apartment, I was in the mind to just grab my stuff and hop on the bike and keep the evening rolling, to the tune of making 21 dollars in about an hour and a half.
Still, though, this had me returning home so late in the morning, that, the prudent way to make sure that I could make it to the Saint's game, to play outside that venue, would be for me to try to stay up for it.
Maybe a younger Daniel would have, but after having eaten a split yellow pea and peanut butter dish that I made, in conjunction with a huge cookie that I made from using a mix for chocolate chip cookies and then adding more rye and wheat flour to it and increasing the amount of butter and water, so that the resultant cookie was much less sweet and cloying than Betty Crocker's recipe, it became apparent to me that I was dozing off on the couch, as I listened back to some recordings I was messing with.
I have been digging up old recording of myself where I might have played for 21 minutes, jumping from one idea to another, and have been isolating sections where a chord progression was played all the way through without a mistake.
These, I cause to "loop" repeatedly, replacing the cycles through them that came before and after, which might have had errors in them, by using, say 16 repetitions of the same perfectly played chord changes, rather than the 16 that I might have originally played, where maybe I slowed down a bit in one spot, taking precious milliseconds to think of a word that rhymes, or something.
I can then take these 8 second long bars and zoom in see if every note I played landed right on the beat. If not, sliding the note over digitally so that it does land right on the beat can actually make the riff sound "tighter."
The 8 seconds, that might represent 4 bars of music, can then have drums added to them, using the same method of placing say the bass drum at "zero," and then the snare hit at exactly 250 milliseconds, the next bass drum at 500 milliseconds, and voila! a drummer emerges who is playing right along with the guitar, right down to the millisecond.
This can be repeated so that other instruments can be quickly added to the same 8 seconds of a chord change, auto-corrected to the nearest beat, and then when the "repeat" effect is used to make it go through a whole verse of a song, the drums and bass and other things will repeat flawlessly.
One of my methods is to cause every drum in the kit to sound on every 16th note. This causes the bass drum, toms, open and closed high hats, ride cymbal and snare drum all to sound in a machine gun-like manner, four times a beat throughout the whole song. Then, it becomes a matter of deleting the drums that you don't want to sound on any particular beat. Addition by subtraction. This exposes the ears to what each instrument would sound like on any beat. It might not otherwise occur to a non drummer that an open high hat would sound awesome on a certain off-beat, for example, but with the whole drum kit rat-a-tat-tatting away like a machine gun, it is easier to keep what is sounding good and mute the rest.
 |
| The Favela Chic job...still thinking about it.... |
This overlaps into the same technique that I have "discovered" when drawing with pencil on paper. Rather than trying to shade in the low spots to suggest shapes, it is easier to darken the whole area and then erase the high spots. This can be done more gracefully than trying to coax the graphite to shade lighter and lighter by pressing softer and softer....Addition by subtraction....
As far as any danger of a song coming out sounding machine-like, this can be overcome by having at least a voice or two on the track winging it, liberated from the strictness of time that keeps the rest of the framework in place, but obvious to the listener that it isn't just "a computer" they are being subject to.
So, it was cool that I made 21 bucks, stemming the hemorrhaging of money that flowed during the cold days last week. But, I sort of "have to" go out as soon as I finish this and attempt at least a repeat of that. It is Sunday night.
I didn't make it to the Saint's game, but I can certainly make it to the after hours party at Lafitt's Blacksmith Shop Bar and Tavern...
When I get back home, I will put my keys on the refrigerator...
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