Dark Fun

Tonight I am chiseling away at the meat of Thursday, a song I refer to in May 4th's post. After meandering through a couple of light verses, the composition takes what I hope will be a surprising turn into a dark, percussive alley with hollow metallic sounds and earthy, hypnotic drum patterns. Needless to say, it has been a fun night.

In the spirit of Found Sound, I swished a fork around a (dirty) cereal bowl and banged my metal bulletin board with mallets. Both rhythms were captured in one take and will indeed make their way onto the final recording.

The clock to the left tells me 176 days remain until the Redline Project album launch. You may have gathered by now that I am moving ahead with all the speed and gusto I can muster so I might wrap up much sooner. In around two months, I will travel with my wife to South Korea to receive our son and bring him home. How lovely it would be to share all of this final music before that day comes. I am not nearly confident enough to subtract from that clock's sum just yet. Stay tuned.

Recording the Rain

Precipitation meandered through metro Atlanta today as it should this time of year. The atmosphere was mostly a haze of clouds and mist punctuated by brief, dramatic startles of cracking thunder and the incessant pounding of voluminous rain. For a handful of magnificent minutes, spiders of lightning fragmented the sky into sharp shards as plinks of hail nipped away at shingles and shutters.

Sprawled on the carpet with mostly shut eyelids, the sounds of the storm whispered calmness to my inmost parts. The symphony of the moment was nothing shy of perfection; how thrilled I was to have the ability to capture the audio and remember the event.

I strung a cable from my mixer to a condenser microphone pressed against the open windowsill, clicked a few buttons in Logic, and let the tape roll.

The storm track carpets some sparse synth music in the scratch recording below. The looped music is on the ambient side, perhaps even a touch dental. If you listen carefully, you may be able to pick out the high-pitched taps of hail at certain points.

Massive Milestone

What would probably be a measly accomplishment for most professional recording artists feels downright monumental to me. This morning at 11:00 am, I wrapped up a preliminary song track for the Redline Project final recording.

Is the song actually finished and ready for mastering? Hopefully not. I intend to learn a massive amount between now and the album's final mixdown, and I anticipate looking back at this track with loathing at some point during the project's course.

So why the jubilee? This first complete track represents what I once considered all but impossible. A mere three months ago, I hadn't the vaguest sense of how to get the music of my imagination into listenable form. As I type today, I am hearing the tangible decibels of a song I wrote and recorded. Each instrument (about 15 total) heard is something I played, and the vocals, though heavily edited, are mine too. What a buzz.

The complete song is called Barefoot Commons. Its story portrays a girl and a boy from dramatically different backgrounds who discover equally intense pains and joys in life. Here is a selection of phrases:

Little black boy from Roxbury Station
Little white girl from the highrise on the hill
Black hand, white hand, gripping each other
Fifteen miles, a world apart
Drink the moment at the barefoot Commons

For complete lyrics, click here.

The song's characters are children from the city of Boston. Beyond the traditional instruments utilized in the recording, I selected sonics that reflect the playfulness of childhood and speak of the urban setting, including the percussive banging of kitchen pans and a carefully-placed elevator bell sound.

Any elation I feel in this moment is met with great trepidation as I consider my next steps. If I am to accomplish the release of a full-length album, I will have to walk this winding road at least a dozen more times during the next six months. This seems a good thought for tomorrow; today I shall bask in the bliss of this small but significant step.

Long Overdue

From the earliest days of the Redline Project, Found Sound has been an important concept. Decibels can be heard in the 'Scratch Recordings' column that emanated from cups of water, canned vegetables, U.S. currency, a nose-hair trimmer, paper tearing, and even the flush of a porcelain bowl.

It is hard to believe I made it this far into the project without laying down some good old pots and pans for a percussion fest. When I was in fifth grade and wanting desperately to own a drum set, my room was always littered with metal implements from the kitchen. It was these bang-a-thons (along with a few other circumstances) that finally caved my parents' wills to keep drums out of the house and out of my life.

During this fertile time of musical development, these were the sounds I was hearing and creating. Tonight's exploration was a throwback to the artistic explorations of my teenaged self that put a bounce in my step.

I rummaged through the cupboards tonight and found a few items with sonic possibilities. The sounds paired with a delicious riveted cymbal like bordeaux and brie. I hope you enjoy the quick scratch recording posted below.

Something about the Redline Project makes me feel like I am 12 again. Maybe this is inspired by rapping on items that clearly are not drums, or perhaps because I have shirked laundry duty for days in favor of working out some tunes.

Royal Flush

Here's a quick post to accompany an equally brief audio experiment. A further exploration in the concept of found sound, today's scratch recording features a variety of morning tones not commonly associated with music.

The recording commences with a brief sustained tone for each sample, and then the madness ensues.

In addition to digging further into the found sound concept, the recording available below represents my first sampling effort in Logic Express.

The basic plot of sampling:

1) Collect a variety of sound samples. In this case, all samples are new recordings, but sampling can utilize pre-recorded material as well.

2) Assign the samples to keys on a midi instrument. I routed these eight sound bytes to eight notes on my M-Audio Keyrig 49.

3) Play just as you would any keyboard instrument like a midi piano or drum set.

So simple, yet so brilliant. Logic Express, you continue to astound me with your seemingly endless capabilities.

Without further preface, I am serving up an aural slice of my latrine and kitchen: a shaver, a nose-hair trimmer, a faucet, a toaster timer and bell, and yes, the porcelain throne all resonate in symphony for your listening pleasure.

I trust that you will find the result fascinating and perhaps a touch grotesque. Bon Appetit!

Coining a Term

When a person types a blog, the clicks of the keyboard seem to echo into a digital abyss. The feeling of releasing paragraphs of personal pontification is like sending Moses down the river in a basket, on a much smaller scale of course. Is anybody going to stumble upon that which was written, and if so, will the time be taken to read it? Digest it? Respond to it?

Now that I have entered the ranks of those putting digital thoughts onto remote servers, I am painfully aware of the silence that follows the push of the 'publish' button. So to the score or so of you readers who have taken the time to drop a line in response to what you have read or heard here, you have my sincere appreciation.

To that end, most of the responses trickling into my box have expressed interest in the two scratch recordings that appear in previous posts. That is a good thing, because ultimately, this project is about music, not about words on a screen.

The comments have been mostly encouraging, though an alarming percentage of them have come from my mother, who suffers from an illness of the mind called blind love. To illustrate this point, let's suppose I got a sharp knife and cut up some hunks of crusty bread. Undoubtedly she would say something like, "Oh honey, those slices are beautiful, just perfect really. And I'm not saying that because you are my son. You wield that knife with such precision, such fervor, such finesse. Sure, we've all heard of sliced bread before, but I had no idea of the glories that could become of it when you grace the procedure with your touch."

Thanks mom for the affirmations, inflated as they may be. Lots of love to you, perhaps my most avid reader.

But there have been others, some of whom I have never met before, and everyone seems to be enjoying the sounds that emanate from objects typically thought unmusical. With decades worth of history as a percussionist, it is only natural for me to bang on boxes, scratch on screens, tap on tulips (okay, clearly an overuse of alliteration). And it is amazing to find, and now start to collect, an obtuse array of sonic possibilities created from a random scattering of stuff.

I have always been fascinated by the the yet to be known. What would a fifth food group contain? What colors might appear past ultraviolet or infrared? It makes sense that my two scratch recordings both draw sounds from everyday objects.

I'm officially coining a term today, and here it is: Found Sound.

The be-all and end-all of knowledge, Wikipedia, only has one brief reference to the term in an article entitled 'Found Art.' So without any regard for actual research about it, I don thee Found Sound to be an official term of music referring to the art of assembling sounds from everyday objects into coherent musical compositions.

Collecting gear for the Redline Project fits well into the Found Sound concept. So far, I am using a microphone from a buddy's closet and a mixer from an ad on CraigsList, and I just received word that I can access an electric guitar currently doing time as wall art in a friend's living room. To some degree, this concept will hopefully become one of the hallmarks of this developing project idea.