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.

profiles in awesome, part 1: alva noto

i'm gonna start writing about musicians who i think are really great (not necessarily in order of their greatness). the first one who popped into my head today was alva noto. if you don't know who he is, go here and find out, idiot. come back here after you read up on who he is, 'cause i don't feel like explaining everything to you, you lazy jerk.

alva noto's stuff is pretty goddamn noisy sometimes, and while i don't dislike that stuff, it's not the stuff i'm into... and stuff. the stuff of his i like is the stuff he did with that other guy who's made lots of stuff, ryuichi sakamoto. the album i particularly like is "insen." a good video of them performing music from this album live is here. watch it then come back so you can keep up with the discussion from here on, lazy-ass. jesus, i'm getting tired of having to explain everything to you.

so anyway, the reason alva noto popped into my head these days is that i'm finding myself glitching on trombone. on long, sustained notes, it's become a habit for me to do a tongue-less, "fa-fa-fa-fa" articulation (listen below) as if to imitate some stuttering, glitchy sound i've heard in noto's work. i think i've liked stuttering, glitchy sounds for a long time. i just didn't realize it until i heard alva noto. by the way, the melody in the example is jobim's "triste." you should know that already, and if you don't, you fail. good job, loser.

this kind of playing is similar to the kind of playing in my last post about things that stutter. the difference here is that i'm making these stuttering sounds manually with my embochure, which allows for more flexibility, albeit at the cost of not sounding quite as glitchy, mechanical and nowhere near as fast as with a plugin. i guess when i glitch manually, i'm going for the sound of a skipping record rather than a skipping cd like with plugins.

so yeah, you're welcome.

example:

tools of the trade, part 4: things that stutter, episode 1: the prequel

according to the dictionary of shut-your-face written by me, stuttering is the effect whereby a piece of audio is repeated numerous times in a row. the piece of audio is often short (far less than or around a couple seconds) and is often repeated in a rhythm that fits with the tempo of the song. this effect is everywhere. djs do it, electronic musicians in lots of genres do it, and apparently paul hardcastle did in in a totally slammin' 80s song about the vietnam war.

stuttering is probably most often used on vocals and drums, but it works well on anything, especially instruments with a natural fade out like piano or guitar. despite the fact that trombone doesn't have a natural fade out like this, stuttering its sound still produces interesting results (listen to the example below).

there are tons of plugins these days, many of them free, that chop up audio, glitch it out, stutter it, etc. many of these plugins fall into the fsu category. even plugins not originally made to stutter can be made to stutter. a delay set to a short delay time with the feedback at 100% will stutter if you feed it short sounds and are careful to shut off it's input while it's stuttering so you don't blow up your shitty apartment with feedback through your shitty speakers. as i think i've mentioned before, audio damage's dubstation does this well with its "loop" button.

anyway, the plugin i used to make the example below is called "stretch," and it's by a guy who calls himself "dblue." he's the author of perhaps one of the best known fsu plugins in the vst world, simply called "glitch." glitch does indeed kick ass in its own right, but sometimes it's more than you need, so dblue has released a couple of its features as individual plugins. stretch is one of them. it was originally designed to be a glitchy time shifter, but it has a hold feature, which makes it great for stuttering stuff. like i said, there are lots of plugins that stutter, but i think stretch's simplicity and lack of parameters make it one of the easiest to use to get some basic stuttering happening.

fantasy trombone trio and new song, "i wanna see her naked"

i've had a dream for a while of making a trombone trio consisting of drums, trombone and vocals. maybe the singer would double on bass, too, and play slammin' bass lines like geddy lee. but no guitar, no piano, no chordal instrument. this band would be very improvisational but also would perform mostly my original songs, songs which i create from the random perverted, sexually immature, sexually discriminatory things that pop into my head throughout the day. most of the songs would be about women's breasts, rumps, my imaginary sexual prowess, sexual dysfunction and absurd-to-the-point-of-comical sexual fantasies. the songs would be performed somewhat poorly with me playing simple bass/guitar lines on trombone, the singer improvising lines or screaming randomly, and the drummer struggling to keep time. in other words, this band would smash your shit up.

anyway, sometimes i put these songs together by playing all the instruments myself. for drums, i use my padkontrol and samples of cheesy 80s drum machines. i'm going for a sound that's somewhere between shit and ass with a little bit of retard mixed in, maybe a shit:ass:retard ratio of about 1:2:3. the lyrics for this latest song popped into my head while i was walking around the station and saw a very attractive young woman and thought to myself, "i'd like to see her naked." before i knew it, i'd written pretty much the whole song in my head while riding the train. that's what happens when genius strikes.

normally i use very few if any effects on these songs besides reverb, some compression and eq, but this time, i decided to try out fretted synth audio's safron2-va. what the fuck is that, you ask? well this guy, frettedsynth, has been making audio-synth plugins for a while now. not audio-to-midi (although they can output midi), but rather plugins with the synth built in so you get a much more flexible, responsive sound than with audio-to-midi. i've messed around with them the last couple years on trombone here and there, and although they were always fun, i never felt they were quite up to the challenge of accurately tracking trombone (they're made to track guitar). but the latest one, safron2-va, does a good enough job that i thought i'd go ahead and put it in this song to double the trombone part an octave down for a little more fullness. i should probably do a "tools of the trade" post about safron2 since it's pretty damn cool. i'm sure frettedsynth would be happy to know his plugin is being used in a song, but i don't know how thrilled he'd be that it's being used in a song about something as immature as wanting to see a naked girl performing numerous mundane tasks.

anyway, here's the song:

new song... sort of.

this isn't so much a song as it is an exercise to try to improvise for more than 10 minutes to the sound of a large, long-sustaining temple bell being run 12 times, so i called it "rings twelve times at twelve." it's probably best listened to at night somewhat quietly when things are calming down and you're just laying around zoning out on the internet or smoking the "refer" or whatever you damn kids do these days.

i went to horyu temple in nara the other day. it wasn't the first time i'd been there, but this time i came prepared: i brought my zoom h4 to record the sound of a somewhat large bell which is rung every hour on the hour a number of times equal to the hour at which it's rung; thus, at 12 noon, when i was there, it was rung 12 times. the dynamic range of the bell was quite large. standing about 5 meters away from it, the sound would vibrate your body when initially struck and sustain for over a minute as it faded into the background, putting out a constant, slowly-beating sine wave around 155 hertz.

anyway, since i love playing trombone to all sorts of things (i once got a book of artwork from the library and improvised to the paintings inside!), i couldn't resist playing along with the recording i made when i got back home. the rolling sine wave was almost a d-flat, so i messed around for a while in d-flat and eventually settled on a scale i liked that's a lydian dominant with a flat 2 (in d-flat, it'd be d-flat, d, f, g, a-flat, b-flat, b). i considered using the indian purvi thaat, which is similar to the lydian dominant b2 i settled on, but i couldn't get comfortable in that one. i also considered just playing totally free and not sticking to any particular scale or anything at all, but it's kind of fun to put limitations on yourself in these situations to see what you can do with them. that way you end up focusing on one thing and doing more with it rather than focusing on lots of things but not doing much with them. it's like mr. kai, an old skirt-chasing japanese teacher i used to work with, once told me: "in japanese we have a saying: if you go after two rabbits, you won't catch either.' so you should focus on just one" (for anyone who reads japanese, it's 二兎追うもの一兎も得ず). of course, he was talking about trying to score with women half his age, but still... i'm reminded of that idiom here, and i never pass up an opportunity to mention mr. kai's philanderous exploits.

you're welcome.

new song, "sidebar preferences"

i was sick with a cold most of last week, and while i still felt well enough to put the horn to my face and blow, nothing very worthwhile came out until i started feeling better over the weekend and finally got around to making a new song.

this song started off with 3 pipes i have running through my shower. as far as i can tell, one is the drain pipe from the shower above me and the other two are who knows what. but i discovered a few weeks ago that rapping on them with my knuckles gives nice distinct pitches, almost like hitting a balafon with hard rubber mallets (or so i would guess since i have neither a balafon nor hard rubber mallets). to save my knuckles, i used the hard rubber butt end of my drum brushes and improvisationally played the 3 pipes while i recorded for a bit (along to a metronome so i wouldn't lose too much time). i'd originally planned just to leave the natural ambience of my bathroom for the reverb, but once i got the recording in the computer, i couldn't resist fucking with it and added some delay, reverb and a little eq to bring out the fundamental pitches of the pipes. from there i just added this and that here and there, put a nice repeating organ part in, and played my brushes on a cardboard box i had sitting around. i used dubstation with trombone and set it to a fairly long delay time so the delayed part swirled around to create a nasty mess of ambiguousness.

as happy as i am with how this one turned out, it didn't turn out like i'd expected it would. one thing i often think when i'm starting a new song is "this time, i'm gonna use reverb very sparingly if at all and keep things simple!" but then i decide "oh, maybe just a little reverb here," and then one there, then a couple delays, an fft filter somewhere, a pitch shifter on the trombone, some fsu stuff over there, and before i know it the song is taxing my cpu like crazy. i really gotta cut that shit out. i need to do some songs that are 100% reverb-free. the other effects i don't mind so much, but i gotta try some stuff without reverb just for a change of pace. dead, lifeless, and unnatural. like the music is coming from within your head. that'll be next. be looking forward to it, jerk.

tools of the trade, part 3: avocado

yes, it's a delicious way to make guacamole. but it's also the name of a plugin that'll fuck your shit up good. avocado is only available as a js effect, which means you'll need to download reaper to get it. but since reaper is available for a free 30-day trial, has a very relaxed purchasing scheme, and doesn't rape your computer with a bunch of bullshit that takes forever to install and uninstall, there's no reason not to give it a shot. but that's for another thread.

avocado is a glitch plugin, or, as many people fondly say, an fsu plugin. for the uninitiated, "fsu" stands for "fuck shit up," since that's what these plugins are generally built to do. they make normal, pretty sounds sound completely unrecognizable and often produce unpredictable results. there are tons of fsu plugins around, many of them available for free in a place like kvr's database. i've tried out lots of them over the years, but i guess i'm too tame in my fsu tastes, so few of them really caught my fancy. one that does, though, is avocado (you can see a thread about avocado here).

there are lots of plugins that will store your audio in a buffer, mangle it up someway and repeat it back to you later, but to get the most out of them, you have to be modifying the parameters in real-time. with trombone, though, that's not really possible since your hands are busy doing something else. the cool thing about avocado is that it has up to 16 buffers that it records to and plays back from in random order, so if you improvise along with it, the audio that comes back out could come from 100ms in the past or 10 seconds in the past or anything in between. this keeps you on your toes as you're improvising and provides a "partner" who responds somewhat to your playing. it also has pitch, repeat, and other parameters to mangle up the audio in random ways.

here's some free improv i did with it. mangled plunger sounds sound particularly great, so i used mine.

tools of the trade, part 2: audio damage dubstation

i'll probably write some other time about using delays in more "normal" ways, but these days i've been messing around with audio damage's dubstation after not using it for a while and have rediscovered its awesomeness.

there are other plugins that model bucket-brigade or tape delays, some of which will kick your nuts just as hard, but the cool thing about dubstation is the loop function. at 2 seconds of full delay time, it's not really cut out for looping long, slow passages, but for shorter, glitchy sounds, it slams tits. you don't have to worry about finding the sweet spot on the regen knob that will sustain the sound infinitely without building too loud and blowing up your shitty-ass speakers. you just set the delay time short, turn on "loop," and flick the input level up and back down real quick to get instant nasty repeats. fiddling with the delay length knob and reverse and 1x/2x buttons will dirty things up even more, so do that too and make weird-ass noises.

dubstation is, as the name betrays, made to sound like a delay you'd find in dub music (although i thought king tubby and those guys used tape delays back in the day, not bucket-brigade; but what do i know). since i don't have a background in dub or pretend i do, i don't really make much dub music, but sometimes it's the little features (like the loop button on dubstation) that open up a whole new bunch of sounds to make music with even though they probably aren't the main draw of the plugin. if you're into finding new sounds, exploiting these little features is a great way to find them.

here are a couple clips of dubstation with me messing around on trombone. the trombone parts were recorded first and the dubstation parts manipulated in real-time after. play them both at the same time for double the slam!

ex. 1

ex. 2

heavy metal bonin'

trombone isn't usually thought of as a heavy metal instrument. guitar works well in metal 'cause it hangs down near your crotch, which is where metal comes from, but trombone requires you to operate a lubricated slide in a circus-like fashion while pinching your lips like you just ate a sour plum. plus, metalists tend to have names that reference drugs or violence, which are both big parts of metal, whereas trombone players tend to be called "dave" or "pete" or have cute nicknames containing the word "slide." if metal was about proper breath support, good posture, posing for a goofy photo in a tuxedo while holding your instrument, having a clean-cut hairstyle and keeping your cellphone in a cellphone holder on your belt, trombonists would be kings of the metal world.

so how can we as trombonists keep up when it comes to playing metal? one route some people take with electric trombone (including me when i first got into it) is to slap on distortion, a wah pedal, flanger, play through an overdriven amp, etc., essentially mimmicking the setup guitarists use for harder sounds (listen to ex. 1--it's loud!). i have mixed feelings about this. on the one hand, it's fun and sounds pretty cool at first, but on the other hand, even if the novelty of distorted trombone like this might impress your friends who think that "heavy metal is cool," it probably won't get you very far opening for cannibal corpse. i still muck around with it sometimes since it's fun, but it gets old and gimmicky after a bit. i guess if i were a real metalhead it never would, though.

i guess the big problem with mimmicking a guitar setup with trombone has more to do with the people playing it than the setup itself. like i said before, metal comes from your crotch, and most trombonists don't have much crotch (though some of them do sport nice camel toe). i would love to see a trombonist whose life is all about metal devote himself to playing it on trombone, 'cause he'd probably have so much crotch it'd be pouring out his eye holes.

one way to get around this without resorting to being a wannabe metal guitarist trombonist is to get into free improv. well, certain kinds of free improv. for instance, peter brotzmann's classic free improv album "machine gun" will give you a pretty good kick in the face if you play it loud enough. granted, not a single trombonist in that group and not heavy metal, but it's a starting point and it sounds a lot more inspired and raw than a douchebag playing metallica through a distortion pedal.

by the way, the plugins i used in ex. 1 are this and this.

you're welcome. bye.

ex.1

tools of the trade, part 1: dtblkfx fft plugin

i've decided to start recording some short samples of cool sounds you can make with free (or cheap) vst plugins. i used to be somewhat of a plugin whore, i.e., i used to download every free plugin i could find but waste time fiddling with them rather than making music with them. i still do this to an extent, but the difference is that now i know right away if i'll be able to do anything cool with a plugin or if i should just dump it and forget about it. i guess you could call me an older, mature plugin madame, instead. some of the plugins i'll cover are probably old-hat to anyone who frequents a place like kvraudio, but trombone players wanting to do wacked out shit with trombone probably won't know about any of these.

that being said, the first plugin i'll cover really isn't one of the most well-known even on kvraudio. it's called "dtblkfx" and it's an fft plugin. if you don't know what fft is, google it yourself... then come back and tell me 'cause i don't completely understand what it is myself. i just know it makes things sound awesome... in a bad way... which is good.

now that i think of it, dtblkfx is probably the worst plugin to start this "tools of the trade" series with. it's hard as fuck to understand unless you struggle through the manual, it makes things sound harsh and nasty most of the time, and you can't use it in real time. but i was thinking today how i haven't used it in a while and felt like messing around with it, so bite me. anyway, here's a clip i recorded with it playing "nefertiti." i used no other effects besides dtblkfx, so it's completely dry besides that. i made up a few different presets, the first of which sounds kinda cool and the rest of which sound nasty.

make your music dirty

i think i was in 11th grade or so when i started taking trombone lessons from this dumbass trombone player whom we'll call "burt." he was the bass trombone player for what we'll call "a symphony orchestra somewhere in colorado." he had facial hair in the style which we'll call a "goatee." he also had an approach to playing trombone and music which we'll call "fucked in the head."

at the very beginning of my first lesson, "burt" said something along these lines: "we want every sound that we make with our trombone to be beautiful, so when we play trombone, we should only play when we're ready to make beautiful music. even if we're just warming up, we should concentrate on making beautiful sounds." i didn't know any better so i was like, "oh yeah, totally. i totally agree. beautiful music. yeah, that's what i think, too."

i didn't realize until many years later how fucking stupid that is.

when i was in college, i saw a post on the online trombone forum in which someone had written how he wants to make "music so beautiful with my trombone that people will weep when they hear me play." i remember thinking at the time, "well that's retarded. who wants to make shit like that. i'd rather make music so awesome that it makes people puke their fucking guts out, followed by their heads exploding in a cumbath of awesome. fuck 'beautiful.' i want my music to sound like a pair of fat, sweaty ass-cheeks squishing around in shit-stained drawers."

as i started getting into free improvisation and found all sorts of weird, nasty, awesome sounds to make on trombone, i realized how stupid it is to talk about how music should always be beautiful. sometimes music should be dirty. even if you're playing a slow jazz ballad, you can just blow your fucking balls off like roswell rudd and slam the shit out of that ballad in the ass rather than take it out for a date to get ice cream with sprinkles like bill watrous would. when you have a long cadenza in jazz band where you're free to play whatever, you can take it to the park for a bike ride in matching blue helmets followed by over-the-shirt light boobie-fondling like tommy dorsey would or you can kick that cadenza in the tits and molest its asshole and play like paul rutherford. personally, i'd probably be a douchebag and play 2 short farting noises followed by a sustained out-of-tune multiphonic if i had a cadenza like that, but i'd rather do something like that and have big hairy balls than have a bunch of dumbasses who have no idea about anything go "oh, listen to that lovely trombone solo. mm... so beautiful. yes, what a talented performer he is. mm-hmm... just lovely."

you're welcome. the end.

new song, "turtles on fire"

this song started originally with a loop being put through reaper's fft plugin in a way that let only the fundamentals of the bass and rhodes piano and a little bit of the snare drum through. i also used a really high fft window size, which smears everything together. for the trombone sound, i did something i've never done before, which was to reduce the stereo width of the sound post-reverb to make it dead center. usually i like the trombone to be full and stereo and engulfing, but there's something cool about having a sound with lots of reverb completely mono in the center. it feels lo-fi, distant, and pulls your ears directly to that sound. i think i'll reduce the trombone's stereo width to some degree in more songs from now on. i used ariesverb for the reverb as i do often these days. while it lacks fancy pre-delay and high-pass frequency settings and all that shit, it gets me exactly the sound i want everytime, whether it's adding what to me is a good-sounding room reverb or something long and spacious for ambient stuff. plus, it has a buffer-freeze function which i use extensively on improvised ambient stuff sometimes.

i also played some simple quarter, half, triplet quarter and triplet 8th notes on different pitches with my ukulele then sliced them up with dblue's glitch and mucked them up further still with audio damage's dubstation, putting the buffer-loop function to good effect there. i also used dubstation's buffer-loop effect on the trombone part. audio damage's stuff is pretty great. check it out.

lastly, i recorded some ambient noise off my 8th floor balcony outside with my zoom h4 and put that in the background of the song. this is something i started doing a few months ago to add air to these kinds of songs. just adding some low-level background noise of traffic, birds chirping, kids playing at a playground or something really helps to make sort of a framework for all the fake reverbs and delays to sit in. also, i often have trouble getting enough high frequency content in my songs, so a little noise from outside takes up that space and rounds out the frequency spectrum nicely. i also high-pass the outside noise around a few hundred hertz so the bass doesn't muddle things up. oh, i almost forgot. i also made a bass drone with synth1 widened up with ariesverb and just let it play the whole song.

that's it.

almost got my shit back

i finally got around to making my first new song in a couple weeks. it's not that i hadn't been trying; it's more like i'd fallen out of the groove i was in when i was putting out a couple new songs every week earlier this year. at that time, i was listening to jon hassell non-stop and was totally into that type of music and playing, but then i got a small dent in my trombone slide which demanded repairs, forcing me into a weeklong break from playing, and when i got my horn back, the spirit of jon hassell had fled. plus, i'd shaved my beard in that time, so it was strange to adjust to playing on bare naked lips. but i've since regrown my beard and finally am getting back to where i was before my slide was dented. i really hate my tone playing with no lip bush. it makes everything feel and sound too clean, too pretty and refined, like i'm trying to be a legit jazz or classical player or something dumb. i really prefer a much dirtier, raspier, breathier, less clear tone. having hair limits my high range a little bit and makes it sound more pinched up high, but it's a sound i've really come to like. sometimes you need a little dirt in your playing... or in my case, a LOT of dirt. that reminds me of something i should write another, more aggressive blog about.

anyway, i'll put up my song and some notes about the plugins i used and stuff in the blog after this.

welcome to my blog

my name is "jeff." i play the trombone. i'm interested in playing a whole bunch of different kinds of music (which i won't bore you with a list of), but i've spent a fair amount of time over the last 10 years or so finding interesting ways to use electronics with the trombone. when i was younger, i wanted to play trombone like a jazz-rock fusion guitarist, so i used distortion, auto-wah, chorus, etc., but that got old and lame after a while, so i eventually got into using pitch shifters, long reverbs and delays (preferably with freezable buffers), loopers, fft effects, fsu plugins, etc., all in vst plugin forum. the music i make with these effects is sometimes ambient, sometimes dubby, sometimes fourth-worldish, usually slow, usually improvised, and probably boring to most people (especially other trombone players) because it puts them to sleep. but little do those dumbasses know that that's my goal. idiots.

when i first started thinking about using electronics with trombone a long time ago, the internet wasn't what it is now, so i couldn't find other people doing what i wanted to do. even today, there really isn't much information online about trombonists using electronics other than robin eubanks using an auto-wah and delays to make his trombone more "funky" or people here and there using distortion to make wanna-be heavy metal or something. well... if that's what they wanna do, then more power to them, but i'd rather try to make new kinds of music with electric trombone than just try to copy what guitarists have been doing for the last 40 years by slapping on some chorus and distortion and wah and jerking off all over myself. plus, listening to how cuong vu and jon hassell use electronics with trumpet has really opened up some ideas.

anyway, this blog will be mostly about the music i make with trombone, what plugins and effects i use for electric trombone, thoughts about my approach to trombone playing and music, etc., and sometimes about completely non-trombone things (i'll try to keep those from turning into rambling rants about stupid shit no one cares about). and also, i use bad words sometimes, some you've been warned, assface.