RCCNY

In case I haven't made it clear, the Russian Chamber Chorus of New York will be performing on Prairie Home Companion this coming Saturday, the 19th of December. Show starts at 6pm. Check your public radio listings.

I've been working with the Russian Chamber Chorus for several years now. And each time they perform I'm elated with the brilliance of their performance. Watching Nikolai Kachanov rehearse with the chorus is like a master class in conducting.

Ranting

"Oh I really liked him when I was growing up so everything he did was perfect." STFU and get some critical distance. Michael Jackson sucked. He made bland MOR pop songs and sold a lot of records just as "independent promoters" were at their most powerful. Big deal. The Beatles? Changed pop music forever.* Michael Jackson? Nothing. Anybody thinking knew that then and knows that now. Hell, the Dead Kennedys were VASTLY more influential than Michael Jackson...

Don't get me started on "punk rock"...

*Specifically, they made artists write their own music and they made the recording of the music just as important as the songwriting to the experience of the music.

More Notes

Gardentone is one of those mixer-less recording studios. It's in Williamsburg. Part of 3rd Ward which has metal and wood shops and artist spaces, all of which would be very interesting to those building sets (ahem...)

Variety of Sanguine

Second Variety was the Phillip Dick story they made into Screamers. I always thought that Screamers was ALMOST a good movie. Oddly, they seem to have taken out many of the cooler and more cinematic things from the book. Note to self: normally you want to go the other way on that. There's now a sequel to the movie, Screamers: the Hunting.

Pleasure for the Empire notes:
Glass Stone is the answer to x.
Suite of Blue is useless.
One of Those Days is a variation on x with a pedal and the melody played in the alto range.
Walruses in Love and Old Turks aren't really worth anything.
Wide Sargasso Sea really isn't anything.

Clonehunter notes:
Due to the incredible weirdness of our rendering situation, this is what I've come up with as a possibility for our opening shot. I have lost all sense or objectivity on this shot. I'm sorely tempted to not even do the move.

Echoes

Influences.

I just finished reading Nick Mason's Inside Out A Personal History of Pink Floyd. The book is fascinating if only because Mr. Mason's view of the amazing history of this seminal rock act is (admittedly) one which only the drummer, trained as an architect, could have. On occasion the details of the wattage of projectors is accompanied, a few paragraphs later, about "super groupies". Or perhaps it's the other way around.*

One thing that's clear is that they all worked very hard at what they were doing. Nick downplays any exciting drug use the band (with the exception of Syd) might have been involved with during the psycadelic era, but that sort of makes sense. It's hard to actually produce very much on 'shrooms and acid. Those are strictly consumption-level drugs.

There's a kind of tragic sadness in the story in that in many ways it's about a bunch of school friends who over 40 years had a big falling out. I suppose that's basically true of most all rock bands. At least two of them are still together and Nick seems to be on good terms with Roger, who does come off as a bit of a prick in the book, even though he presumably proof-read it (!). Now that band, which was begat around when I was born in 1965, has lost its keyboard player due to illness, and arguably two of it's leaders due to insanity (can you tell I've never been that big a Roger Waters fan?) still occasionally releases records and some of them are even good.

*************

In the early 80's I saw pretty much all the rock movie midnight screenings at the Menlo Park movie theater with my friends Scott, Todd, and Ed. Looking back it seems somewhat funny because the three of us had and have fairly divergent taste. Todd was then more of a "classical snob" (and I mean that in only the most loving way) of the four of us, although his Beatles and The Who collections were nigh on complete. Ed was (and let's face it: "is") an Elton John fanatic. I think that Scott was really into ELP at the time.

I was particularly taken by The Beatles, The Who, and Jethro Tull (and Bach and Beethoven, never having much time for anything by Mozart other than the occasional requiem and a couple Queen of the Night arias). Which doesn't mean that some of the much wiser of my elders did not do their best to persuade me to change my old-rock lovin' ways. (In particular an incident when I was a sophomore and two seniors [including Peter Cenedella] took me into their room and played for me 1. The Residents, 2. The Dead Kennedys [I remember "California Ueber Alles"], and 3. some crazy new band that no other high-school kids knew about called Talking Heads.)**

I suppose that Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii was rather formative to my thinking of what a rock band could/should be. I spend a good many years with bands trying to make some kind of cohesive (and theatrical, but that would be the Jethro Tull influence) show.

I remember my guitar/composition teacher pointing out to me (this would have been sometime in 1982 perhaps?) that Nick Mason is one of the most controlled and disciplined drummers in rock or some such. I interpreted this to mean that every note, every drum hit means something. And boy does it. The control is really a driver of the music, the fills really turn you around into the next section (something which "machine gun" fills notoriously do not tend to do.) In a way he's the opposite of Keith Moon. Instead of the frantic energy of classic Who, 'Floyd goes for the big solid groove that allows for those glacial chord changes.

Ultimately Meddle is probably my favorite record -- if only because of Echos and One of These Days. I'm a big fan of Shine on You Crazy Diamond (which my crazy first roommate played all night long on the first night I spent in boarding school. Sheesh!) and Great Gig in the Sky. Basically my preference was for big and bigger Pink Floyd but not so much of The Wall variety (with the obvious exception of Comfortably Numb.)

************

Otherwise it seems like the inside of Pink Floyd was somewhat like what I experienced when I worked at the Wooster Group. Dysfunctional. Nick Mason comes off pretty well (after all, he wrote the book) but he even describes himself as being being un-confrontational to a fault. The petty cruelties the band inflicted one one another and on those around them seems to have made them pretty miserable.



*Technically this isn't true, I believe the references were in different chapters.

*But when I was a freshman a fellow named Doug Visthdom (sp?) played Sex Pistols, The Clash, and The Kinks for me.

Overblogging

Man, I have been overblogging lately. If only I could get started shooting a movie, I wouldn't be overblogging. 

To make your band's album cover, do the following:

1 - To get the name of your band, go to Wikipedia and hit “random” or click here. The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - To get your album title, go to Quotations Page and select "random quotations" or click here. The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your album.

3 - For your album cover photo, go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click here. The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4. Use Photoshop or something similar to put it together.

Tell me that's not how they're doing it already. "Merriweather Post Pavillion"? Please, give it a rest. (This coming from someone who had/has a band named "Prague Spring" which released an album called "Pleasure for the Empire". But at least I had the guts to actually use a random band-name generator for my album title.)

The picture is from.

Red River Academy.

*************

Pay no attention to Queen of Mars notes below:

The two lead characters should have their motivations swapped. She should be gung ho and he should be reticent. 

The different characters should all have unique voices. It might work if she had a really dirty mouth but used archaic terms for everything.

Can the cat be a hologram of a cat?

Open Source Music

Wikipedia has a bunch of open-source classical music in the ogg format. The quality of the performances has a wide variance. Some of it is pretty good. It almost always needs a bit more reverb to smooth things out. Or maybe that's just me.

The Fulda symphony orchestra has some CD's online here.

Musopen seems to be a central warehouse of open source music. The trick is that typically the music itself has to be in the public domain and the recording has to be "copyleft" or "open source" of some type.

I actually have a little bit of music which could become open source. I should release it that way.
I should at least contribute some of the sound effects I've recorded to freesound.org.

Jamendo has some open source music. As far as I can tell most of it wants you to distribute derivative works with the same license. I presume that these tracks by Piotr Pawlowski are "sample orchestrated" rather than recorded with a real orchestra, but they're rather good.

I'm using some Dvorak to "compose"* some music for Mac Rogers' Universal Robots.

I can't wait to get my violin bow so I can pretend I'm Jimmy Page play some guitar col legno for horror sequences in Alien Uprising.

*I know, I know, lots of people compose with loops of classical music. If I really end up doing something complex I may call myself the "composer". If it's just loops of bits of music then I think we're really only "music editing" here.

Easy target

Drummers are so easy to make fun of. "What do you call a guy who hangs out with musicians? A drummer!" Get it? Ha HAA!

The irony is that the drummer in a band has to be better than anyone else in the band has to be. If you have a suckky drummer, the entire band sounds like poop. But if you're a sloppy guitar player you can join bands like Yes or Led Zeppelin. A sloppy drummer? Nope, not allowed.* Sloppyness in a guitar player is style, man. And it works if you have a rhythm section which is tight. In fact, the tight rhythm section makes you seem like you're so much better a guitar player.

That's the reason, I think, that drum machines became so popular. They couldn't do very interesting work, but they stayed in-time (which is one of the hardest things a musician can do.) Plus too, finding a drummer who's stable mentally as well as tempo-wise is a big trick. Believe me, I've been in a band which went through 11 drummers in 2 years. The really good drummers just go on to paying gigs because they're so valuable.** Drum machines work cheap and they don't have drug problems, or "I slept late because I stayed up all night trying to teach my cat to bark" problems.

I got on this subject when reading the manual to the Peavey Vypyr amplifiers. I uploaded the manual to Box.net because it is (for some reason) such a pain in the butt to download from Peavey.com. The first instruction in the manual is to point out the input jack. The description of the input jack is "If you don't know what this is then please put the amp back in the box and get some drumsticks."


*You can only play with Emerson Lake and Palmer.
**The first drummer I ever played with, Earl Harvin, went on to play for Seal, Pet Shop Boys, Air, and MC 900 Foot Jesus. Crimean vole! Earl not only has a Wikipedia entry, but an interview in Tamadrum.com.jp. He doesn't mention that he played in the band Nocturne with Scott Hirshon and me while in high school. ;-)

Sequencing

I'm kickin' it old-school. Or rather, I came very close to kicking it very old school and rehabilitating my Amiga 500 computer and putting it in my modern edit suite next to my dual quad-core Mac.

But I didn't.

This is how the story goes:

Sometime back in the mid-late 1980's I bought the cheapest sequencer system I could get which would sync to tape. There were a number of sequencers on the market at the time but the least expensive (including computer) which could actually sync to tape was the Commodore - 64 based "Keyboard Controlled Sequencer" (KCS) by Dr. T's Music Software.

I was warned by the salesman "that program is hard to use" and blah blah blah. But it was about $500 - $1000 cheaper than the next least expensive system which could sync to tape. So I bought the software, the hardware, and the computer, and started reading the manual.

Yes, KCS is complicated at first because it's so open. I mean, get a load of the editing screen. You're looking at data there boy! But it's also simple and to me it just sorta makes sense. It was perfect for the way I like to work and the way I compose. Maybe I learned to work and compose from KCS?

Don't get me wrong, KCS was a bare-bones interface and it worked with a totally different paradigm than the "tracks" based sequencers which everyone else uses (with the notable exception of Ableton's Live).

So it's somewhat hostile perhaps but once you figure it out it becomes amazing and clear and powerful. It's fast, too.

The fact is that KCS was hands down the best sequencer ever made. And when they updated it to the Commodore Amiga I bought an Amiga 500 and now I could chase to anywhere on the multitrack tape (and use 3 1/2" floppy discs! Much more high-tech!) It was fast too, it could hit a position with SMPTE - striped tape better than anybody.

For a while there I was a sequencing god. Seriously, I sequenced MIDI tracks practically every day for many years. I got good at it. I was quick and precise.

********

I kept using my Amiga into this century. (Man, what a good computer that was. All that time it had three processors! I mean, I only got a quad-core PC last year!) In any case, the Amiga was just getting too long in the tooth and I finally had to retire it. Unfortunately, I didn't have a good sequencer but I sorta relied on an old version of Cakewalk and actually used the sequencer in Samplitude (which tells you a lot about how desperate I was.) But for the last several years I haven't done that much MIDI sequencing so it hasn't really mattered all that much. I even composed the score to Solar Vengeance mostly on electric guitar...

But there comes a time when I really need to be able to do some detailed work -- where I play something into a sequencer, then I modify the data (because I'm not a keyboard player anyway, much less the really good keyboard player I pretend my computer is) and play different sounds with that data back onto a computer.

And I hate all the other sequencers that are out there. I don't want "tracks" I want to record sequences and then modify the data. And sometimes I want a sequence to modify another sequence and so forth. (Not so much anymore, but if I want to do that I want to do that.)

I want to do retrograde inversions. I want control. I want the sequencer not to send a dang patch change message at the beginning of the piece! I want it to do what I tell it dag nab it!

I want Keyboard Controlled Sequencer back.

So a couple days ago I fired up my old Amiga 500 and... bleh. It no longer boots. Probably the power supply, I recall those being troublesome back in the day. I don't know what to do. Should I buy another used Amiga off of eBay? Should I buy an Atari ST off eBay? (KCS was also made for the Atari). Should I try to get an emulator to work? What should I do? I got nuthin'. I need to do some electronic scoring.

I was so frustrated that I wrote to Emile Tobenfeld, the founder of Dr. T's Music Software, and... he wrote me back!

Well it turns out that this brilliant dude actually released KCS as shareware.

Oh man. That made my day.

It's available from Atari Users as the "Omega" version of KCS for the Atari. And it works on the PC with full MIDI implementation with STEem Engine Atari emulator. It was very easy to set up my quad-core Gateway computer with STEem and KCS. (It took an additional 5 hours to sort out various problems with my monitor and with the silly ASIO drivers on my Apogee mini-Me on my old dual-core Dell, but those issues had nothing to do with the sequencer, just my general computer frustration level.)

So I'm going to Pay-Pal Mr. Tobenfeld for his fantastic shareware. I've already worked on some tracks for Alien Uprising with it - complex multi-percussion stuff for the firefight scene.

And my computer looks really funny with that old looking OS and interface. ;-)

Words and Music

Today I got a first draft of a new screenplay from Montserrat Mendez but he doesn't want me to actually read the thing 'till he does another pass at it. I may just have to read it. He owes me the next draft on Wednesday! ;-)

You can listen to some music by Jonathan Newman to his blog where he has a link to stream audio from his Climbing Parnassus.

Pavlov Across America

Pavlov and the Drooling Dogs (a wholly inappropriate name for the kind of quasi - progressive act we were) playing in Metuchen New Jersey at Hands Across America (May 25, 1986).