Musical Mondays

OK. Let's just make it official. Musical Mondays is on hiatus for the near future. I'm spending so much time preparing for my MCSE certification exams, I haven't even picked up my guitar in 3 weeks. So, rather than continuing to make lame excuses, I'll just say that we'll return when we can.

In the meantime, go listen to some music you really enjoy and make yourself happy!

As today is Memorial Day, there will be no new musical posting this week. Please check back in next week for more new music.

Thanks.

Due to unforseen circumstances, there will be no new posting to Musical Mondays this week. As next week is Memorial Day, there will be no posting then, either. Tune back in on the first Monday in June for the next new music posting.

Thanks.

Ladies and Gentlemen! Simultaneous Pancakes Media is proud to present a brand-new release from Green Chili Burp and the Aftertaste - "The Tissue Song." It's been 12 years since the last release of new music from Green Chili, and while I was putting this one together, it just had to be a Green Chili song. It really didn't belong anywhere else.

"The Tissue Song" is actually one of the first complete songs I ever wrote. I've made numerous revisions since its first incarnation, but the core elements are still the same. This is the first recording of "The Tissue Song" and you can be the very first to hear it here.

I first got the idea for this song from reading Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451. In the book is this passage: "Well, after all, it is the age of the disposable tissue. Blow your nose on a person, wad them, flush them away, reach for another, blow, wad, flush. Everyone using everyone else's coattails." I summarized this statement in a school book report by describing the setting as the "blow, wad, flush society" where everything is disposable. Eventually, I (somehow) got the idea that some relationships are like that, too, where one of the participants is involved simply to use the other, treating them as completely disposable. So I wrote lyrics to that end.

As I said, the song has gone through a number of revisions, both lyrically and musically. I set down what I thought would be the "final" lyrics in 1990. When I started working on recording the piece this last week, though, I took another look and made some additional changes. Some of the rhymes I didn't quite like in retrospect, and I think I made an improvement in the overall pacing of the lyrics. I also completely changed the chord progression in the bridge, and it works much better this way. The harmony lines in the chorus and bridge are completely new as well.

As with the post from last week, this is a draft mix. As I was doing the final mastering on this track, I noticed a couple of things that I missed doing the initial mixdown. Plus, the EQ is still completely out of whack. I've really got to flatten this room and quickly. Or find a studio with the same 24-track digital recorder I've got and do the mixdown there.

At any rate, I hope you enjoy "The Tissue Song." 1,000 points to the first person who correctly guesses what the original name of the song was before I changed that, too, this week.

Today's post is another all-new, all-digital recording. This track will be the closing track from the upcoming CD from "Not Quite Munch" entitled "The Message." This is a project I've been creating in my head, and now I've started getting it written and recorded.

"The Message (Part 2)" is actually a reworking of a piece I did several years ago, called "The Message." The original version was all synth and percussion, the introduction to a performance piece I was working on at the time. That notion has gone by the wayside, but the music remained, and I pulled it out once a year or so to keep it fresh in my mind. Once I arrived at the concept of "The Message" for "Not Quite Munch," I knew this piece would be one of the cornerstones, but would not be included in its current form. Instead, I'm going to rework the original sequence of "The Message" into an overture, which will include thematic ideas from the entire CD. I won't be able to finish the rework on that until I get the rest of the CD written, so I've shelved it for the time being.

But that lead me to thinking about including a variation of the original piece as the closing element of the CD. But I didn't want to just "remix" the original and call it the closing track. Instead, I got the idea of re-orchestrating the entire piece on the guitar. Essentially, each element of the original sequence would be redone on guitar, essentially creating an all-guitar "orchestra."

When I started rearranging the piece, I realized that I wouldn't get the type of sound I was wanting by going all guitar, so I retained two elements from the original sequence - the organ and the chimes. The rest of the arrangement built around those two elements, along with the percussion, and over the weekend I finished up the first draft of the piece.

This recording IS a draft recording, and so has not been fully mixed. Upon listening to it on a few other devices outside of the studio, I've realized that the chimes are still a bit hot in the mix, and the overall EQ is still a bit off. I am still working on reshaping the EQ in the studio after getting the new digital mixer in place, and I'm not quite as far along as I thought I was. Still, I've got this first draft to a point where I can take a few weeks to listen to it in different situations and locations and see what else I want to do with it. I may want to tweak with some of the guitar lines some more (guitar is not my primary instrument, and while I've come a long way over the last few years, I still consider myself a novice), and I'm still learning how to manipulate the digital effects loops in the mixer. But I met my goal of having this track in a presentable format for today's issue of "Musical Mondays," so take a moment to listen and see what you think.

As always, I welcome any feedback you may choose to share, but anything of the "you suck" or "don't quit your day job" variety will be cheerfully ignored.

Enjoy this week's contribution!

We're back after the unexpected one week hiatus. For those who are curious, my eye is doing fine. No trips to the ER this Monday.

This week's selection is the first all-digital production from Simultaneous Pancakes studios. I've finally got the new mixer hooked up and fully integrated into the setup. Now the entire recording/mixing/mastering process is entirely digital, and this is the first piece I worked with in this new, all-digital environment.

The reason I chose this piece as the starting point is because it's short. Hey, at least I'm honest! "Fanfare" is a 25-second musical tag that I originally put together back in 1992 when Mark Thacker and I worked on the first video for Green Chili. I needed some background music to go along with the closing credits for the movie clip (which you can watch here, but beware, it's about 44MB), and I decided that like most major movie studios, I should probably have some sort of musical tag to add to all out major productions. So I spent a couple of hours with the keyboards and the sequencer, and "Fanfare" was born.

I've got a couple of different mixes of "Fanfare," but all of them were analog and horribly noisy. So when the time came to get started with the new mixer, I chose "Fanfare" as the first track because I knew it would not take long to record, mix, and master to see how the all-digital processing came out. Not bad. Not bad indeed. In fact, this was the quickest mastering I've done yet because I only needed a single pass through the noise reduction process (the noise level from the mixer internals was very minimal and very predictable so it was simple to remove) and I did not have to do any EQ on the final master to adjust sound quality or bass levels, which I regularly had to do with my analog recordings. Therefore, I was able to focus all my time on getting the mix just right while preparing for this week's posting.

So, even though this week's entry is yet another brief sample, I'm now ready to start working on all new material in an all digital format, which will seriously cut down on my mixing and mastering time. Check back in next week for another musical entry.

There will be no new post in Musical Mondays today. Check out the latest post in The Q Continuum for details.

See you next week.