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.