I am sitting here listening to one of the Lilly Pad recordings, specifically the one made Monday night, May with Jacob playing an acoustic bass guitar that he had gotten the very same day.
The reason I haven't posted to this blog in perhaps going on a week is that I have been waiting until I could make it a "musical" post, by including one of those very recordings that I made at the Lilly Pad...well...
Here's an analogy.
Let say you get a call late at night from one of your friends. He is at some club and the band on the stage has connected to him on some cosmic level. They are strumming his past with their fingers, singing his life with their song or some bullshit, and so he has called you, thinking that you've just have to hear them.
So, you listen, and hopefully you can even make out enough to agree that they would probably sound good, if not coming through a phone.
This would represent me posting up a clip of the Lilly Pad recordings right off my phone to this blog.
But, you tell your friend you are going to be up and so he should swing by after he leaves the club and he does. He has the recording of the band on his phone, and you plug his headphone jack out into the auxiliary input on your amazing home stereo with a frequency response from what only birds and cats can hear, all the way down to the bass notes that only snakes can hear.
It sounds a lot better, and now you can even tell that there is a bass player in the band...(and a bird, wtf?) and this makes for a pretty good listening experience, and you might even listen to the whole recording, especially the rendition of "Whole Lotta Love," the Led Zeppelin song at the end, where the Tibetan throat singing group takes it to a final crescendo.
But, you will still be able to tell that it was recorded on a phone. This is because of what I found by looking at the "spectrum" of the sound recorded using my LG Aristo smart phone.
Trying to get notes lower than a certain frequency through a phone's speakers would just be counter productive. There is, I guess, a reason that it requires at least a 4 inch in diameter speaker to play music that doesn't sound tinny.
The spectrum revealed that the very low and very high frequencies dropped as if off of cliffs at each end. It also revealed that the pitches that make human speach more audible to other humans have been boosted, with the 1,000 hertz range like a spike on top of a turret.
So, you might tell your buddy: "Hey, Let's run these through my Cecelia "ear bending sonics" application which you do, and in so doing, find that, by boosting the grave frequencies ridiculous amounts and cutting back on the human speech frequencies, your buddy makes the comment of: "Wow, that sounds just like it did at the club!"
This would represent me posting up the clips of audio from the Lilly Pad, in the current state that I have them in. Which I am thinking of doing.
But, now more delays, because now that I have them sounding "just like it did at the club," I have to go through and pick the best performances at the quietest times when the phone was positioned the best to capture the sound, etc.
Those best performances each have some small glitch in them -me dropping the pick, then picking it up before resuming, is a good example- and by spending a few minutes editing, I can have the songs back up and running.
It's just that I have (never mind the 36 days worth of my own music elsewhere) about 4 hours of myself playing at the Lilly Pad to go through, trying to decide what is worthy of being put on the blog.
But then, to extend the analogy. Let's say you have a brainstorm and you get up at 4 A.M., unable to sleep because of the creative juice in your veins, and, by moonlight you begin to work, and 18 to 36 hours later, you invite your friend over to show him how you used the Tibetan throat singers to create pads and rhythms and you layered these together underneath a hiphop beat played on a drum kit, as well as additional percussion, guitars, back-up vocals (the icing on the cake) and even your cat meowing, and then rapped over the result etc.
And your friend say's "That's amazing!" and then you both stare silently into space, each pondering whether or not the monks might sue for copy write infringement.
That would represent me waiting even longer to post any of the Lilly Pad recordings on this blog, so that I could do the above mentioned type of things to them.
Head In The Cloud
A funny thing happens, after you post something to Soundcloud, and then you see that someone out there in the vast universe has heard the song and has left a comment on it.
Realistically, what I get from comments to the effect of, "this is a cold-stone rocker, keep doing this stuff!" is a slight sense of suspicion that somebody is compiling a "channel" and wants their channel to be a, the-bigger-the-better database of recordings just like mine.
The channel master might even, in candor, say something like "It's not the best music, but it's all made by people on their tablets in their bedrooms" type of thing.
With a little bit of investigation, I found out that I have indeed been "loved" by a group just like that. That is their niche.
This is not to say that that particular network of people wouldn't be in a position to promote something that was truly worthy of them making it their contribution of the month.
But, now I have to follow up the piece that they loved with something night and day different, nothing "electronic" about this one. The "keep doing what you're doing" crowd will feel rebuffed.
But, I am going to try to at least put one of the things up with this post. This seems to be a hurdle in the way of posting at all...
Their pitch is to say something like "have your music heard by thousands of people."
But, that is kind of deceptive. It is more like, have your song in our ever expanding database of them, sinking further into oblivion with each passing day.
Jacob and I were able to jam along for what amounted to a 3 and a half hour session.
Along with that recording, I have another one of about a half hour in length, from the Friday night prior. That one has a lot more background noise, plus it was done before I got the selfie stick for the cell phone, using which I can prop the thing right in front of my face.
The decision for me now is, am I going to post any of these recordings to Soundcloud, without adding things like my snare drum, other percussion instruments, and, why not backing vocals. Backing vocals are the "icing on the cake" for a lot of songs I love, now that I think of it.
On a song like "Girl," by The Beatles, for example, it is John Lennon singing "tit-tit-tit" in the background which I consider the hook in that song.
These recordings are invaluable as far as giving me an indication of exactly* how I sound out there.
*By boosting the bass response a ridiculous 40 db, which is the maximum amount using the "bass and treble" function on Audacity plus, sending it through the same effect again for another 9 or 10 db.
When I get back from busking in about 4 hours, I might try to post up some music.
The reason I haven't posted to this blog in perhaps going on a week is that I have been waiting until I could make it a "musical" post, by including one of those very recordings that I made at the Lilly Pad...well...
Here's an analogy.
Let say you get a call late at night from one of your friends. He is at some club and the band on the stage has connected to him on some cosmic level. They are strumming his past with their fingers, singing his life with their song or some bullshit, and so he has called you, thinking that you've just have to hear them.
So, you listen, and hopefully you can even make out enough to agree that they would probably sound good, if not coming through a phone.
This would represent me posting up a clip of the Lilly Pad recordings right off my phone to this blog.
But, you tell your friend you are going to be up and so he should swing by after he leaves the club and he does. He has the recording of the band on his phone, and you plug his headphone jack out into the auxiliary input on your amazing home stereo with a frequency response from what only birds and cats can hear, all the way down to the bass notes that only snakes can hear.
It sounds a lot better, and now you can even tell that there is a bass player in the band...(and a bird, wtf?) and this makes for a pretty good listening experience, and you might even listen to the whole recording, especially the rendition of "Whole Lotta Love," the Led Zeppelin song at the end, where the Tibetan throat singing group takes it to a final crescendo.
But, you will still be able to tell that it was recorded on a phone. This is because of what I found by looking at the "spectrum" of the sound recorded using my LG Aristo smart phone.
Trying to get notes lower than a certain frequency through a phone's speakers would just be counter productive. There is, I guess, a reason that it requires at least a 4 inch in diameter speaker to play music that doesn't sound tinny.
The spectrum revealed that the very low and very high frequencies dropped as if off of cliffs at each end. It also revealed that the pitches that make human speach more audible to other humans have been boosted, with the 1,000 hertz range like a spike on top of a turret.
So, you might tell your buddy: "Hey, Let's run these through my Cecelia "ear bending sonics" application which you do, and in so doing, find that, by boosting the grave frequencies ridiculous amounts and cutting back on the human speech frequencies, your buddy makes the comment of: "Wow, that sounds just like it did at the club!"
This would represent me posting up the clips of audio from the Lilly Pad, in the current state that I have them in. Which I am thinking of doing.
But, now more delays, because now that I have them sounding "just like it did at the club," I have to go through and pick the best performances at the quietest times when the phone was positioned the best to capture the sound, etc.
Those best performances each have some small glitch in them -me dropping the pick, then picking it up before resuming, is a good example- and by spending a few minutes editing, I can have the songs back up and running.
It's just that I have (never mind the 36 days worth of my own music elsewhere) about 4 hours of myself playing at the Lilly Pad to go through, trying to decide what is worthy of being put on the blog.
But then, to extend the analogy. Let's say you have a brainstorm and you get up at 4 A.M., unable to sleep because of the creative juice in your veins, and, by moonlight you begin to work, and 18 to 36 hours later, you invite your friend over to show him how you used the Tibetan throat singers to create pads and rhythms and you layered these together underneath a hiphop beat played on a drum kit, as well as additional percussion, guitars, back-up vocals (the icing on the cake) and even your cat meowing, and then rapped over the result etc.
And your friend say's "That's amazing!" and then you both stare silently into space, each pondering whether or not the monks might sue for copy write infringement.
That would represent me waiting even longer to post any of the Lilly Pad recordings on this blog, so that I could do the above mentioned type of things to them.
Head In The Cloud
A funny thing happens, after you post something to Soundcloud, and then you see that someone out there in the vast universe has heard the song and has left a comment on it.
Realistically, what I get from comments to the effect of, "this is a cold-stone rocker, keep doing this stuff!" is a slight sense of suspicion that somebody is compiling a "channel" and wants their channel to be a, the-bigger-the-better database of recordings just like mine.
The channel master might even, in candor, say something like "It's not the best music, but it's all made by people on their tablets in their bedrooms" type of thing.
With a little bit of investigation, I found out that I have indeed been "loved" by a group just like that. That is their niche.
This is not to say that that particular network of people wouldn't be in a position to promote something that was truly worthy of them making it their contribution of the month.
But, now I have to follow up the piece that they loved with something night and day different, nothing "electronic" about this one. The "keep doing what you're doing" crowd will feel rebuffed.
But, I am going to try to at least put one of the things up with this post. This seems to be a hurdle in the way of posting at all...
Their pitch is to say something like "have your music heard by thousands of people."
But, that is kind of deceptive. It is more like, have your song in our ever expanding database of them, sinking further into oblivion with each passing day.
Jacob and I were able to jam along for what amounted to a 3 and a half hour session.
Along with that recording, I have another one of about a half hour in length, from the Friday night prior. That one has a lot more background noise, plus it was done before I got the selfie stick for the cell phone, using which I can prop the thing right in front of my face.
The decision for me now is, am I going to post any of these recordings to Soundcloud, without adding things like my snare drum, other percussion instruments, and, why not backing vocals. Backing vocals are the "icing on the cake" for a lot of songs I love, now that I think of it.
On a song like "Girl," by The Beatles, for example, it is John Lennon singing "tit-tit-tit" in the background which I consider the hook in that song.
These recordings are invaluable as far as giving me an indication of exactly* how I sound out there.
*By boosting the bass response a ridiculous 40 db, which is the maximum amount using the "bass and treble" function on Audacity plus, sending it through the same effect again for another 9 or 10 db.
When I get back from busking in about 4 hours, I might try to post up some music.
The reason you're not posting daily, putting up a Patreon link, selling customized guitar picks, etc is that you've smoked so much pot your ambition is gone.
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