Ship Dixon

Dec
22nd

Tue

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waiting for my plane…

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Nov
30th

Mon

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Happy B-day mom

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Oct
23rd

Fri

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Like french house

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Aug
31st

Mon

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drum lops

One idea what do with the drum loops below.

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Aug
28th

Fri

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drum loops

Finally something that showcases what Ableton can do in about 15 minutes. I don’t know what I’ll end up doing with these chopped up loops (add filtered bass? soul samples? house a capella?). Check back for more.

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Aug
13th

Thu

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Dreamy guitar pop audio memo recorded with my iPhone - sounds suprisingly good.

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Aug
4th

Tue

The 12, but loosely related, articles that comprise Sound Souvenirs are divided into 4 main subject groups (Storing Sound, Auditory Nostalgia, Technostalgia and Earwitnessing). They take the reader on a colorful tour of sound-culture phenomena as divers as - to name about half of them - mix tapes (Bas Jansen), the rise and development of mobile music listening in post-war Germany (Heike Weber), the personal auditory nostalgia practiced by iPod users (Michael Bull), doo-wop concerts in New Jersey (Timothy Taylor), the use of vintage gear and instruments by (pop) musicians (Trevor Pinch and David Reinecke) and the revival of the Theremin (Hans-Joachim Braun).

— From “Sound Souvenirs: Music Out Of The Moon” via SOUNDBLOG

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Jul
30th

Thu

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Turn around

As promised a day late - sorry.

Thanks to the suggestion of Thomas Patteson (his blog, Acousmata, is a wonderful read and an engaging listen), I added a comments feature to this blog. Discuss at your leisure.

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Jul
28th

Tue

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Bring the beat back

I made a few songs a year ago that consisted of me saying the first thing the popped into my head when I thought of house music. “Bring the beat back” was the result. The organ is a sample but the rest was programmed or played by hand.

I’ll post the other the song, “Turn Around” tomorrow.

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Jul
27th

Mon

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Bedroom Experiment 2

During an interview for my on-going vintage gear project, an informant described at length how he writes a song. This excerpt captures perfectly how I (and I would venture most self-taught musicians) write music:

That is how I kind of do songwriting. I’ll haul out this old Gretsch amp and play it. Oh, there is something I never would have thought of because this sounds pretty good with this amplifier. Somehow, at least for me, I just have this inspiration to do something different because I am hearing something that is different and I come up with this riff relative to this sound. […] An outside person doesn’t know what motivates the song but I do.

In the case of this song (“Bedroom Experiment 2”…I’ll post the first one later), I just got a new guitar (a Danelectro Hodad in beige) and thought to plug it into my 1970s Fender Champ, running through an Electro-Harmonix Deluxe Memory Man. The result was pure tonal heaven and this song popped out pretty quickly. All I have right now is this so-so USB mic so excuse the levels, I haven’t bothered to find its sweet spots yet.

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Jul
26th

Sun

Here it is - the famous scene from the first episode of Miami Vice that cemeted the era of good feelings between MTV and primetime television. I can’t possibly express how inspired this scene really is. But let’s do a blow by blow.

Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight”: This song is strange: subdued analog synth pads mixed with drum machine set to what must be “minimal rumba” followed by a classic Phil Collins’ hollow tom mega fill. Phil Collins may be an an easy man to hate, but this song fits so well and lends an immediate structure to the scene.

Sonny: It was real? Wasn’t it? (Collins’s voice swells in the background: “Well I remember!”)

Caroline: [Pause] Yeah, it was. (Collins: “I remember, don’t worry”) You bet it was!

Sometimes I call up my friend Phil and ask the same probing question. Onto the next point…

Sound editing: Like a true music video, the diagetic sound (sound within a scene) is kept to a minimum. All we hear is Phil Collins as Crockett and Tubbs speed into the night, wind coursing through their hair (but no wind sound). The shots of the car, the hood, its wheels are so powerful because of this - minus any engine noises, Collins’s strange synth dirge resonates perfectly with neon reflected across the car’s black exterior.

Marketing: Miami Vice was a terrible show despite (or perhaps because of) Michael Mann’s continual effort to make it edgy, over-sexed, and ultra-violent. What eventually sold Miami Vice was the Italian suits rolled up to the elbow, the flashy cars (especially after the first season when they really got a real Ferrari, instead of their Corvette which passed as one), and the music like Phil Collins here. My dad, who was a fan in the 80s, said that every week they’d announce the guest stars and music for the upcoming episode. The series was clearly a vehicle for selling lifestyles, not crime dramas. Nowadays, it is common for popular songs or upcoming hits to be plastered all over our primetime television (Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” deserves a special mention). This was pioneering stuff in Miami Vice’s day, especially when it was done so effectively.

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Jul
13th

Mon

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Guitar Test

One of the hardest things for me when I started recording was breaking the two-minute mark. I remember I had a series of songs that for some reason always hovered around 1:30-1:59 but never quite made it to two minutes. Well it turns out the reason is that most songs are really an ensemble of several ideas with well executed transitions. Most of my songs were just one idea iterated. I never really bothered to borrow existing compositional strategies to break this barrier. The classic “verse/chorus, verse/chorus middle 8, verse/chorus” structure of just about every 50s and 60s pop song, for example, would have helped me immensely.

But I could rarely think in these terms. Often I started a series of chords, a simple riff, or a cool sound and worked organically from there. A lot of my early songs were essentially fragments that were never assembled into something better, longer, or more interesting. Nowadays it is easier for me to think of a song as moving from a different textured place to another to break this compositional/mental barrier, but every once and a while I still make little songs.

This is one of my favorites. It started with a pretty dull chord progression (on the faux electric piano) and this drum loop I found in Garage Band. Things got interesting after Cayce layered on this Vangelis-inspired synth lead on top. The structure for the song actually came from the lead. I had Cayce record probably five minutes of her soloing and took the best parts. I noticed about halfway through one take, the lead takes this dramatic shift and slows down (around 30 seconds). I loved it and decided we’d break around then and then build the song back up from there quickly. I whipped up a bassline, added more drums (I like the ride cymbal during the breakdown), and some pads in the background and there you have it - another wonderful sub-2 minute song-fragment. I don’t know why we called it “guitar test”.

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Jul
11th

Sat

Like most young males who picked up the guitar, I was entranced for years by unbridled virtuosity. Only recently have I come upon new (well, old) stuff that recalls my early face-on-the-floor reactions to Jimmy Page’s solo in “Heartbreaker” or Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption”. No I haven’t gone back to listening to classic rock. I’ll do you one better - I’m listening to country music!

Few genres enshrine virtuosity like older country-western music. Country has always made room for instrumentals, showcasing the latest in guitar technique and audio production. Jimmy Bryant, Chet Atkins, and Roy Clark (seen here) all supplemented their careers playing such tunes with no other purpose than to discourage people from ever picking up the guitar. This video is a wonderful introduction to jaw-dropping skill involved in playing “traditional” music. Part of Clark’s charm here is the conspicuous difficulty of his playing (or so he wants us to think with his tongue hanging out as pigs dance by). If there is any question of the talent involved, well the song cuts out at opportune moments to let Clark keep doing what he does best - flatpick bluegrass-style on electric guitar.

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Synth Poppers

I had Nu Shooz’s “I Can’t Wait” on repeat all day before I sat down to write this one (in about 12 minutes). It really shows in the bassline and the synth lead. The rest is run-of-the-mill house and disco music - vamping piano, octave bass, cutting the snare out and bringing it back in.

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