Latin Good Lovin'

Wow, we're already to post 3 of the Good Lovin' project, and it only feels like post 14 or 15! 

Sometime in the 60's someone decided that everyone should have an electric organ in their home.  This was much to the dismay of the American middle class family, who had only managed to cough up the $4000 for an upright piano a few years before.  But, advertisements made it clear that there was joy to be gained from the electric organ that the piano could never provide:

Look!  Even grandma and Old Yeller have joined the party!  Plus, the electric organ wasn't just for family gatherings; it was the ultimate social multi-tool.  It could provide music for any social gathering.  There were song books with heavily boiled-down versions of everything from American folk songs to official state songs.  Some of the later models even had built-in drum machines and chord players that would help you play marches, fox trots, bossa novas, swings, and waltzes in your living room.  In the present age of computers, we take for granted the luxury of instant music.  But long ago, many an under-privileged child had to march in their living room in utter silence.  It was a pitiful scene. 

So, clearly the point of all that was bossa nova.  International treaties declared that all organs with rhythm generating capabilities include a bossa nova setting.  Digging far too deep into music history, we find out that bossa nova began its existence not as an organ option, but as an actual musical genre.  Shortly after high school, I remember hearing a recording of Astrud Gilberto singing Antonio Carlos Jobim's bossa nova tunes in Portuguese.  The songs were beautifully written and Astrud's voice was strikingly bare, with no vibrato.  There were elements of jazz, but it was so different from the hot and agitated American big band and bebop jazz.

As I was playing with the chords in "Good Lovin'", I decided to make the key minor, but preserve the chords otherwise.  After a bit of tinkering, some of the bossa nova influences surfaced, and I ended up with a nice Latin cover of the song.  I almost chickened out and just recorded an instrumental melody line, but Sarah insisted that I record vocals instead.  Sarah agreed to watch a movie with headphones on, so I could feel at easy trying out some Latin crooning in the music room.  I managed to translate the lyrics to Spanish (sorry, Antonio, I don't know Portuguese), but the translation's not great.  Instead of trying to translate it back, just be content to hear it and think "ooooh, it's foreign!"

Good Lovin Dec 5 by are.kay.more

Wire organ

In the late sixties, Wendy Carlos released an album of Bach music played only on a large Moog modular synthesizer.  Modular synthesizers were large panels of separate electronic modules (oscillators, filters, etc) that could be connected together to produce sounds.  Here's a picture of one:

It was really all just electronics lab equipment tweaked a bit for sound production.  Electronic music was a child of recording technology.  Once it was possible to convert sounds to electrical signals for storage later, it was only a matter of time before someone would try to make sounds starting with just the electronic signals.  Here's a link to Wendy Carlos' version of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3:



While it seemed shocking to some music aficionados at the time, it was a pretty natural use of the synthesizer.  Bach had written a huge body of work for the organ, and the pipe organ is very much like the synthesizer.  It's got different ranks of pipes made from different materials in different shapes to mimic orchestral instruments.  The names of the pipe styles even come from the German names for the different instruments that they mimic.  I recently built a single-voice synthesizer from a kit designed by mutable instruments.  Here's a picture of the Shruthi-1:

It's not nearly as imposing as the Moog modular, but it's still a lot of fun.  Here's a recording I made of a Walczynski organ prelude that I mad on my Shruthi-1:

Organ Donor

Everybody used to have an organ in their house.  It was kind of ridiculous.  I've written about this before.  As those things started to land in garage sales and thrift shops, though, people figured out some fun things to do with them.  They've got keyboards, tube amps, foot pedals, and bunches of other goodies just waiting to be re-purposed for cooler musical projects.

About ten years ago one such organ fell into my lap.  A move out of state meant I had to get rid of it, but not before I removed a rotary speaker cabinet out of it.  Back before the reign of the transistor, it was easier to add effects to musical instruments with motors and baffles than with extra gain stages, and practical real time digital signal processing was beyond everyone's wildest dreams.

This Leslie speaker has a 6-8" speaker behind a large styrofoam baffle that spins in front of it, changing the direction of reflection.  It adds a tremolo (amplitude modulation) and a bit of vibrato (pitch modulation).  I use a light switch to turn on the single phase motor which spins the baffle.  I'm a bit embarrassed, but I was done with engineering school before I learned about using diodes or RC filters to suppress (snub) switching transients on motors and solenoid coils.  I've added a little board with an RC snubber to the speaker to eliminate that loud electromagnetic interference pops that occur when I switch off the motor otherwise.  Here's the little board that I made up for the snubber:

It's a series resistor (240 ohm) and capacitor (0.05 microfarad) in parallel with the motor to give the transients a path to ground after the switch is opened.  A schematic may be overkill, but here it is:

Here's a little video to demonstrate how the speaker sounds:

4 something something, 3 something else, 2 blah blah blah...

It's late, people, but I decided I would finish a recording and post it tonight. So I'll upload the tune, write a witty post, and then I will crawl into bed for five hours.

Let's see...wit...

There was a young lady from Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger.
They came back from their ride
with the lady inside
and the I JUST WANT TO GO TO SLEEP! WHY DID I MAKE MYSELF DO THIS TONIGHT?!?!?

Why, you ask?

Well, my little padawan, it's quite simple.  It is a fundamental law of physics that if Uncle Reeree does not finish the 12 Days of Good Lovin' before Christmas Eve, Santa Claus will turn into a werewolf and eat all of the world's children.  I know, I know, you've never heard that before, but it's because I've shielded you from the harsh truth all these years.  It's a puppy-eat-puppy world out there and people need blog posts to frighten potentially ice-age-inducing asteroids away from the earth. 

So...this one doesn't fit into a genre as tidily as the last two.  I wanted to play with a vocoder, which is a device (or a program) that applies the shapes of my vowels and consonants to the sound of another instrument (an organ in this track).  The result is an organ that sounds like it's talking.  Neat, yeah?

Good Lovin Dec 9 by are.kay.more

Audio sketchbook

Here's another short instrumental track.  I don't know what these things are really.  Some instrumental music is very deliberate, like a sonata or a symphony.  Other pieces are a vehicle to show instrumental prowess, like a jazz combo playing an instrumental of a familiar song.  These are just kind of mood sketches.  Maybe they're background music for movies that won't ever be made.  They remind me of the 30-second filler instrumental tracks that some bands put on their albums.  I always thought those sounded like the band just messing around in the practice space.  Maybe that's the primordial soup that gives birth to the more popular songs that come later.

This one has got acoustic guitar, fretless bass, hammond organ, and ukulele.  There's a bit of rumbling at the beginning as the worn-out tubes in my ancient organ crackle through the spring reverb tank.  It was recorded on one of the cool, rainy evenings we get in the South in December instead of snow.  The video shows my view from the Reaper recording software.  This is what I see as I adjust track levels, add effects, and hunt audio gremlins.  

Dr. Whatsit

My sister and wife have gotten hooked on a silly British show about a hipster who travels through time in a phone booth.  Now, the opening theme features a theremin, which I can appreciate, but the show itself is an odd mix of sci fi and humor.  I watch it with them sometimes, just to make fun of it, of course...I don't actually like it...I've got far more important things to do with my time....you didn't really think I liked it, did you?

Well, at Sarah's request, I've played around with the Dr. Who theme a bit tonight.  theremin and synthesized strings have been replaced with Hammond organ and lapsteel.  Enjoy:

Dr Whatsit by are.kay.more

Bite-sized

Here's a little bluesy morsel of audible junk food.  I had fun playing for a bit the other night on the Hammond organ, guitar, drums, and synthesizer.

For those of you with more appetite, feel free to check out a recording from a trio that I recently played in with my friends Scott and Kim Ripplinger:

A bunch of other great recordings from church buddies who played in that same concert are here.

Paraphonie

It's a nice fall Sunday morning.  I built a vaguely organ-like paraphonic patch on my modular synth with Yarns, Jove, Peaks, and Shelves modules.  Here it is:

Goldcrush

My friends Matt and Treesa Gold play in an amazing band called Goldrush.  Last week I got to hear them live for the first time, which was a real treat.  They're sound isn't what you'd expect to get from a double bass, violin, guitar, and drum set.  Prabir's songwriting is intelligent and playful.  The guitar work is very good, but understated,  giving plenty of space for the violin and double bass.  The resulting voicing is more sparse than I'm used to, making the actual chords and movements between them less obvious than normal, like some tantalizing harmonic strip-tease.  But when I say "sparse" and "understated", don't think I mean "delicate".  As they play, they control you.  They'll kick you around and you'll like it.

Here's a link to iTunes where you can get their first album, "Greatest Hits".  You're a good person.  You deserve to have their music in your life.  And here's a picture of them doing their thing:

Just like after any good show, I returned home wanting to play.  I started on a cover of their song "The Exit Song", using a very different instrumentation from the original, but the project proved too ambitious for the time I had and I got less than a minute's worth done.  It was fun, though, so I'm posting it anyway.  I made it using a tack piano (piano with metal thumb tacks in the hammers), Hammond organ, fretless electric bass, ukulele, lap steel guitar, cracklebox (one of these things), Shruthi-1 synthesizer, tambourines, and a wooden plank that I slapped with my hands, since I don't have any drums. 

Break it down!

When most of the people I know hear "Break it down!" the first image that comes to mind is probably this:

For a few of you, it might actually be these guys, the Kidz In The Hall (the rap group, not the hilarious Canadian sketch show).  The video for their single "Break It Down" appears to be advertising black lingerie for anorexic women.  No, you don't need to watch it, just believe me.

For a few others of you, this might actually be what comes to mind first:

<shudder>

Well, I'm not referring to any of those things.  I'm talking about the song "Break It Down Again" by the New Wave band Tears For Fears.

What's "New Wave" you ask?  Umm, well, it's kind of like one of those you-had-to-be-there jokes.  If you've got to ask, it's probably not worth finding out.   They wear sweaters in their cover art.  That should tell you something, right?

I thought that it would be fun to cover one of their electronic songs using mostly acoustic instruments.  Included in this track are guitar, mandolin, bass, alto and soprano recorders, piano, organ, and some percussion toys.  I gave up after the first verse and chorus.  That was enough for me to see what my experiment would sound like so I moved on to other projects.   Hope you like it: