Moved my blog

I decided to cough up the few dollars a year for a domain name and some webhosting, so I've moved my blog here.
The address is http://awesomerocket.com in case you want to know it for some reason.

I won't post anything here anymore. I'll just leave it up so anyone who might have stumbled on here can find their way to my new and improved blog.

Bye.

Still Alive; New Song, "Rubberized Cigarettes"

So I live in Hawaii now. I don't know why. Well, yeah I do. 'Cause my wife always wanted to live here and it's a good place for her and my son's cold-induced asthma. But to me it's a culture shock moving here. I lived in Japan for 5 years, which obviously took some getting used to, but at least there you'd expect culture shock, so it felt normal, whereas in Hawaii, you don't expect it as much since you're still in America and people still speak English (for the most part).

Anyway, I got a part-time (substitute) gig with the Royal Hawaiian Band, the country's only municipally-funded symphonic band, but full-time work is hard to come by. I'm not highly employable to begin with, and with the economy as bad as it is and having no connections here, it's even worse for me. We'll see how long we can hold out on our savings. Should be a fun ride! I also met some people to play in a reggae/rocksteady/trojan skinhead reggae band or whatever the fuck they call it. It's all basically the same to me--not a whole lot of rhythmic or harmonic variation in the material--,but at least it gives me the chance to get into a rehearsal studio and blow my guts out after being afraid to play loudly here at home 'cause of this douchebag Japanese neighbor who complains when I play. Well, no, let me be more specific: he came over to complain once that I was playing jazz. Oooh! No, not jazz! Never mind the fact that I don't really play jazz in any conventional sense very much (partly 'cause I'm not good at it). I was less concerned that he was complaining about the noise than the fact that he didn't have the musical sophistication to tell that what I was playing at the time, while improvisational, wasn't using any of the complex harmonies that jazz is known for. I was just working with a Spanish phrygian-like scale in sort of an alap, but he came to complain about the "jazz" I was making. I'm still thinking of buying him a set of earplugs and attaching a note that says "Take these out when you get some culture, you jive-ass motherfucker."

Yeah, so I also did a new song. I had it gathering dust in a folder on my hard drive for a while, so I just threw some shit on it and played a bit over it. Nothing too amazing, but it's the first thing I've made since I came to Hawaii, so it's a start. Here it is:

new song: "drunk potato harrassing a fine woman"

haven't had much time to do music these last couple weeks. i'm back at my parents' house for a bit until my wife, son and i move out to hawaii, so it's a fairly busy/stressful time and will probably continue to be so for a while. but i did manage to get a song done that i started before i left japan.

the trombone part was just improvised by itself first and everything else added later. i always record trombone with my clip-on mic, and while the freedom of not being tied to a mic stand is nice, you're still limited somewhat in that you can't just wander around the apartment aimlessly while recording... unless you put your zoom h4 in your pocket with your clip-on mic plugged into it, which is what i did. the trombone also obviously has some pitch-shifting going on a-la jon hassell. i was also into half-valves with my f-trigger around that time, so a lot of that showed near the end of the solo.

for the other parts, i mostly just messed around with some loops pitched down a few octaves, used arcdev's et-200 delay as i often do, etc., but i also got out an udu i have here at my parents' house and laid down a slammin' track with that. i was never a terribly skilled percussionist, but i think it added something nice to the song. i also doubled it with a pitch-shifter an octave down to add a little bass.

so yeah, enjoy this song or suffer the consequences.

new song, "japanese toilet"

one thing i never quite got used to living here in japan is the old-style, japanese toilets. most places have the western toilets we're used to, but older buildings and schools still have the old kind. it's not exactly clear at first to the un-initiated how to use them, but when you gotta go, you gotta go. once you figure out which way is front and how the mechanics of the whole are gonna play out, there's the fact that most japanese people, for whatever reason, seem more comfortable at squatting for long periods of time on their heels, whereas to us fat-ass westerners, it's not so comfortable.

in any case, it's a totally different experience actually seeing your shit as it plops down into the bowl underneath you. and the turds are exposed to air in raw form, unsubmerged in water, so they give off a more pure smell. it's pretty much the same as shitting out in the woods, except in the woods, you're surrounded by you know, nature and shit, so the rawness of watching your own shit fall down between your legs doesn't seem much of a stark contrast to your surroundings. but in a japanese toilet, you might be pinchin' a loaf that falls just inches from your $400 pair of python boots in a fancy old restaurant that serves up fugu for $500 a plate. not exactly the situation where you'd expect to encounter raw dumpage that close to your ankles.

anyway, about the song. pretty simple, really. i added some slapback echo with dubstation to the vocals, and added an octave-down double to the trombone part to fatten it up. nothing too special production-wise.

(real) tools of the trade, part 5: plunger

plunger. it's not a vst, but it's very much a "tool of the trade." sure, it unclogs your toilet after a night out eating burritos and mexichimitacoladas at del taco. it also makes for a great weapon when you have to fight off an intruder or steal-guy, 'cause no one wants to be on the receiving end of a shit-stained rubber suction cup. but to a trombonist, it's a weapon of a different kind. we use it to make the trombone go "wah-wah" or "wheeee-owwww" or "bluh bluh bluh" or "duuurrrrr." my favorite plunger-er is roswell rudd, but he's pretty much my favorite tromboner overall.

one thing about plunger, though, is that it tends to be played one or both of two ways: 1) loudly, 2) bluesy. to get some good, meaty, nasty, vocal-like sounds, you have to blow hard, and plunger really is suited much more to minor pentatonic, horizontal playing than top speed 8th-note runs, so you get loud and/or bluesy. i admit that i occasionally get overwhelmed by roswell rudd's massive balls on plunger and try to do my best impression of him, but in the last several months, i've been trying to focus on playing plunger both non-loudly and non-bluesy. of course, you have to give it some juice to get a sound past it, but i've been trying to not give it more juice than is needed (my juice is precious). i guess i'm going for a sound on plunger that's not so much musical as it is deranged. i have images in my head of people with various physical disabilities twitching uncontrollably and contorting their bodies or faces when i do plunger. i think this image came about several months ago when i watched an interesting documentary on tourette's syndrome.

anyway, i was messing around with it today, playing over a loop of the first 4 bars of coltrane's "syeeda's song flute" (pitched down a minor 3rd) and figured i'd put up part my playing for the hell of it. so here it is, turd-breath.

new song, "nice night for a cat fight"

did a another new, not so amazing song. i think i'll be taking a short break from making songs for a while until i find a different angle. as much as i like playing over these kinds of songs, they're all starting to sound a little mundane. i probably won't be making much the next few weeks anyway since i'm moving back home from japan and i'll be busy as fuck. so anyway, about the song...

these stray cats where going nuts the other night down below my apartment (i'm on the 8th floor), so i set my recorder on the balcony for a while to record them near the end of their romp. kind of far away and hard to hear, but i thought they added nicely to the ambience of the warm spring night.

i also had some samples i recorded of me playing a kerosene heater with my brushes a few months ago. the grill around the heating element made some cool sounds, so i brought my recorder when no one was around and recorded me banging on stuff. there was also a broken-down drum kit in the storage room, so i recorded some shit on that, too. i've had these samples around for a while and wanted to use them on something, so i thought i'd throw them all together over this spring night ambience and see how they sounded.

next, i put a single, sustaining note on this hammond organ vst called "nubi plus" and automated the drawbars to fade in and out randomly to make a nice drone. hammond vsts aren't normally used like this, but they're basically just crude, primitive additive synths, so they're fun to mess around with in odd ways.

for the trombone, i used a scale that i think is from bali, though i'm not sure. even if it is, they probably tune it microtonally in bali, whereas i just snap all the notes to their closest western counterparts 'cause i already have enough trouble with intonation as it is without having to think microtonally and shit. in e, the scale is this: e, g, a, c#, d, e. this scale is cool 'cause it sounds like a minor pentatonic but has a major 6 instead of a perfect 5 to make it sound a little brighter or something. mmm... i like major 6ths these days. they give me a chubby.

i also did something i've never done before with the trombone part. i used a delay with the dry sound panned hard right and the delayed sound panned hard left (or was it the other way around?). i delayed the left side by about 200ms to make it sound obvious. this isn't like a big amazing trick or anything, but i'd just never gotten around to doing it on trombone. i like how it seems to make the trombone part sound outside and disconnected from the rest of the sounds.

yeah, so that's it. nothing super amazing musically or producation-wise on this one, but it's kinda nice. enjoy it or die.

new song, "passion fruit nightmare"

got a new song done. the song itself isn't anything really special or different than what i've been doing the last several months, but i like my playing on it. i also wanted something to put behind some ambient sounds i recorded at horyu temple, so i came up with this. i used dubstation as i do a lot these days to get some glitchy sounds from a simple acoustic guitar sample, and i used the delay in reaper to increase the rhythmic complexity of the sound over time of the cowbell from the main loop. that delay, called "readelay," is an as-many-taps-as-you-want delay, so i just made several and slowly faded them in one by one. multi-tap delays like that are really great for making complex rhythms out of otherwise simple rhythmic figures. now that i think about it, maybe i'll work more with that in my next song. from just playing some simple, stocatto phrases on trombone, i should be able to get some steve reich-like stuff going on in an improvisational way.

i again used the scale i came up with for the improvisation i did with the temple bell at horyu, the lydian dominant with a flat 2nd. i really like this scale. it has the first three notes of the spanish phrygian but the rest is lydian dominant, which is nice, because although i like the spanish phrygian, it's too easy to sound like you're playing klezmer or wanna-be "arabic" music with it. as much as i love john zorn's masada stuff, that's not what i'm going for. plus, the spanish phrygian seems more suited to fast, intense blowing whereas whatever scale i stumbled on these days, with its sharp 4 and major 6, seems better suited to the kind of slow playing i'm into.