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.