tunes-i-like

Firebox Studio

About a month back I bought a FireBox from PreSonus for doing some home recording.

The Firebox

I finally got it all set up and had a chance to play around with it. Here is a picture of my luxurious studio, which now includes my new FireBox.

My Studio

Between the FireBox and my computer is a new air filter for our house. I was using it to block some of the noise from the laptop. I know this is not ideal but I was really just experimenting.

The FireBox has two microphone/instrument preamps, which means that I can record two tracks at once. Since I only own one condenser mic I decided to try an experiment. I plugged my mic into one input and I plugged my guitar, which has its own internal pick-up, into the second input. The result was that I was able to record two tracks simultaneously. Below is a screen shot of Cubase LE, the mixing software that is bundled with the FireBox. You can see the two tracks at the top part of the image.

cubase

Due to the fact that they were very different inputs the result was two tracks of entirely unique tonal quality. The track that was created from my pick-up has a much more electric feel and a very full bass sound whereas the mic’ed track sounds acoustic. I mixed the two together to achieve the final result. I am not a recording engineer so I feel I still have quite a learning curve ahead of me with regards to understanding how to mic and mix this stuff.

The tune I recorded for this experiment is called South Wind. I have also seen it called Martinmass Wind. This is my adaptation of John Renbourn’s beautiful version that I ripped off from his lovely Wheel of Fortune album, which through the years has remained as one of my favorites.

wof

I am playing in a DADGAD tuning whereas John plays it in DADGBD.

tunes-i-like

Castaway

Like many artists I tend to be protective of my work until it is complete. Picasso toiled for seasons and changed painting styles several times before unveiling the most grotesque masterpiece the world had seen in El Bordel, later renamed to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

avignon

Like Picasso, I’m aware that critics are part of the creative game and I generally have no interest in attracting them until the work is complete lest a novel idea be diluted with the thoughts of others. The question, then, is this; when is a piece of work complete? Some critics argued that Picasso’s mockery of modern art was, indeed, incomplete, which implies that maybe completeness is all about personal perception. How can a critic say that Picasso’s painting was incomplete when Picasso himself had packed up the paint and cleaned the brushes? It seems fair to say that, overall, Picasso’s work was not complete but he would not continue that work on the canvas of El Bordel.

Mozart’s Requiem, on the other hand, marked the end of the line for the great composer. His death made sure that there was to be no more work. And yet the world wonders, was it complete? It is common knowledge that Mozart’s friend and pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr ‘filled in the holes’ for his dying friend. Had Mozart lived longer would we have a different masterpiece? Completion was a result of his death and not a desire of the composer to move on to new work.

While all this talk about ‘completeness’ is interesting to ponder, the fact remains that the world is a better place with great works like Requiem and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Their level of completeness doesn’t change what they are or the enjoyment they give us.

With my own work, in which I am certainly not intending to draw any parallels to the aforementioned geniuses, there are pieces in various states of completeness. In particular and as I mentioned in a previous post, I recorded a number of tracks over the course of a few months in early 2000 at a little place called Melville Park Studio. I have kept them hidden away from any real critics because they were incomplete. I have not changed a flawed note on these roughly-mixed recordings since 2000 so it is with great trepidation that I have decided to cast them away and move on. In my mind they are unfinished because they ultimately don’t sound as I intended them. For example, this track has some tuning issues that were to be reworked and I had hoped to add percussion. But they represent a time in my own musical development that I have hopefully passed and I think it would be a disservice to my own work to go back and change anything with the ideas I have today. Therefore, they are complete. Besides, what good will they serve if nobody ever has a chance to enjoy or criticize them?

So, here is the third track, not that they are in any particular order, to Castaway. The track is made up of two traditional tunes. The first is called Devany’s Goat and the second is called The Morning Star.

In keeping with the theme of incompleteness, I whipped up some cover art for this internet album.

castaway

I don’t really think the image has much to do with Castaway except for the fact that it was a picture that was taken of me a couple years prior to these recordings. The photographer’s name was Jessica Strauss.

In addition, some have asked if it is possible to buy this recording. It is not. It has never been printed and I don’t really expect it ever will be.

general

Firehouse Photo Essay

My buddy Dan…
dan

… recently moved into an old one engine firehouse that, at one point, was converted into a dance club and now is his home.
firehouse

It has all sorts of character such as the stained glass that shines above his front door…
stained glass

…and this risqué firewoman painting he found under layers of drywall.
painting

It is a great place for The Ancient Mariners
am

…to practice …
practice

… so that when we get onto the street we’re all walking, generally speaking, in the same direction.
drumline

Incidentally, if you have never seen The Ancient Mariners perform, we like to clear the parade route with a cannon…
cannon

and a mutinous prisoner…
prisoner

People ask me all the time, ‘Is the prisoner crazy?’ Yes, yes he is. Why else would he not be wearing a shirt and shoes on March 11th in New England? Still not convinced? You should see him during our Christmas parade!

Here are a few of the other characters from this years Saint Patrick’s Day parade in New Haven, Ct…
bobbyclintkevjoed & calbob

So, now that you’ve waded through a bunch of photos of people you don’t know, here is a recording of a tune we ran through at Dan’s firehouse over the weekend. The tune is called Katy Hill. It was originally a 2/4 but the Mariners decided to play it first as a 6/8 and the second time through as 2/4. This does not feel like any old 6/8 as you will hear. It really is rudimental drumming at its syncopated strangest, which is why I like it. I also like how you can hear people talking during the first half of the tune. Those aren’t bystanders you hear, it is the drummers debating.

tunes-i-like

Music comes from the strangest places…

Diana Deutsch is a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego, who studies sound and how we perceive it. Specifically, she is interested in musical illusions and paradoxes. You could think of these paradoxes as being the auditory equivalent of an M.C. Escher drawing.

Relativity

Diana has performed a variety of interesting sound experiments over the years including a fascinating one where she demonstrates that pitch and tone may be stored by our brains in locations that are separate from where speech is stored. In other words, the sounds of someone talking is not stored in the same region of the brain as music regardless of the fact that they are both made from the same elements, pitch and tone.

I’m not a psychologist nor a neuroscientist but it seems logical to me that as we are perpetually bombarded with a cacophony of sounds, such as speech, our brains are probably most concerned with our basic well being and survival versus our enjoyment. For example, there are two very different ways to listen to an oncoming train: Hear it and get the hell out of the way; hear it and feel the grove. Feel the groove before establishing your safety and your likely to become track pizza. Conversely, it stands to reason that while basking in the glory of a Bach concerto the fight-or-flight department of our brains is at rest while the sit-back-and-relax department takes over. But once your safety has been secured what happens to the rattling of that train in your head? Can it morph into music?

Diana stumbled upon a compelling auditory phenomenon demonstrating that seemingly arbitrary sound can, in fact, morph into music without any changes being made to the sound itself. In a story she conveyed on NPR, she described how one evening she was working with tape loops of recorded speech. She started with the following recorded bit of speech:

The sounds as they appear to you are not only quite different from those that are really present, but they sometimes behave so strangely as to seem quite impossible.

She then created a tape loop consisting of the following fragment:

sometimes behave so strangely

At some point she got up to take a break from her work, maybe get a cup of coffee, and forgot about the running tape loop. A while later, she spontaneously started hearing the faint sounds of music and eventually realized that the audio loop playing in the background had transcended from mere speech into melody. Most strikingly she found that when listening to the snippet of speech, placed back into the context of the sentence from which it came, it still retained it’s melodic qualities, as though being sung, while the rest of the speech was heard as being normal.

What happened here? My humble guess is that at some point her brain stored a copy of the speech loop in the sit-back-and-relax department and, consequently, gave her noggin the opportunity to make music from it. To be clear, this music was made not by the speaker but by the perceiver!

Making that synaptic leap is the sort of thing composers do well, which may be part of the reason they are what they are in the first place. One of my favorite stories of spinning arbitrary sound into something beautiful was conveyed to me by the late great composer of fife music, mentor and friend Roy Watrous. For many years he worked in a machine shop where he would hear the repetitive sounds of the machines chugging away at their mechanical tasks. The sounds of these machines were seared into his brain and he eventually heard them as melodic in the same way we are fooled into believing that the looping speech in Diana’s experiment was sung. Those machines were Roy’s inspiration for a wonderful tune he entitled ‘Billy Budd’. The tune, and many other classics, can be found in The Watrous Book. Here is the notation to Billy Budd as written out by Roy:

Billy Budd

So, take a listen to Diana’s sounds that Behave so Strangely. Listen to it twice. I guarantee the second time you will hear it differently. After that, sit back and relax to Roy’s classic ‘Billy Budd’ as played by The Ancient Mariners on their American Fife & Drum Music album from 1981. Can you imagine the machines?

tunes-i-like

The Call and the Answer

hammered dulcimer

Have you ever heard a song for the first time an yet it felt like you’ve known it forever? I guess you might call it ‘love at first listen’. Well, the hammered dulcimer player at John Stone’s, whom I’ll refrain from naming in this post, sang a song a couple months back that fits that bill. I was able to convince her to sing it again at last night’s session. Man, what a beautiful song. Once she finished singing it I asked her to sing it again. She ignored my second request, and rightfully so. Who really wants to sing a song twice in a row? But I would have listened. And today, it’s all I could do to get the melody out of my head. Or at least my fading recollection of what the melody was.

So, here is the deal. I spent a couple hours recording a melody that is probably not at all what the melody actually is but instead how I remember it. I can get away with this because, after all, it is folk music. Besides, that is how these things evolve. What I recorded is really just a sketch, a placeholder, impromptu harmony and all, until I can convince our hammered dulcimer player to show me how to really play it and record it with me, which I also requested.

The name of the song is ‘The Call and the Answer’. What I have dug up on the song is that it seems to have been written by Phil Colclough, whom I honestly know nothing about. It was recorded by De Dannan on an album called A Jacket of Batteries, which I don’t own and have never heard. So, I suppose I can not truly endorse that album, although I do generally respect De Dannan as very talented so I’m sure it is probably quite good. In any case, here are the lyrics for the chorus. Take a listen to my interpretation of what I heard and I hope to have a guest recording sometime in the near future by our hammered dulcimer player.

You are the call, I am the answer
You are the wish and I am the way
You’re the music, I the dancer
You are the night and I am the day
You are the night and I am the day

tunes-i-like

Banks of the Bann

This track exemplifies everything I love about the fife. I learned this traditional tune from a John Renbourn album called Traveller’s Prayer, which is a lovely album. I added a couple of voices and recorded this back in 2000 at a studio called Melville Park just prior to my first child being born.

Here is a link to the chart:
Bann 1

This and other recordings from that time period were my second failed attempt at recording a solo album. I believe I am now starting my third attempt. Anyhow, I’ve decided to publish music from those recording sessions under the internet album title of ‘Castaway’. The title feels appropriate to me since these recordings have essentially been cast away, never to be finished and now they will be Podcasted away. Anyhow, enough, here is Banks of the Bann:
Banks Of The Bann by baconworks

new music

Calliope House / Stone’s Mongrel

Home recording has never been easier. Recently I have been experimenting with some equipment and have found the audio quality to be quite stunning. The experiments have looked something like this:

recording

I record in my basement in between the furnace going on and off, which is a real pain since it has been so cold lately. Nothing like a perfectly good track ruined by the boiler firing up.

The track at the bottom of this post is made up of two tunes. The first is called Calliope House and is a tune that was written by Dave Richardson of ‘The Boys of the Lough’.

The second tune is one I wrote in January of 2007. I have been attending a session at a pub called John Stone’s Public House. After hearing lots of A minor jigs this tune fell out of my head on the way home from the session. I am quite sure it has to be a mix of all the tunes I had been listening to. The thing I like about the tune is that the A strain has ten measures … two more than is typical.

Stone’s Mongrel

For those interested in the recording details, I used the following equipment:
AKG C1000S microphone ~$200
into a
Pesonus TUBEPre preamp ~$100
into an
Echo Indigo IO ~$150
into the pcmcia slot on my laptop, which is not at all optimized for recording. It has a Pentium M processor, 1500 MHz and 1 GB of RAM.

I used free software called Kristal Audio Engine for mixing tracks, adding reverb, EQ and such. I also added additional effects such as compression from Kjaerhus Audio. They provide a set of free VST plugins.

announce

Ancient Mariners to Perform in Switzerland in 2007

The Ancient Mariners are heading back to Switzerland to perform a concert with our brothers, the Swiss Mariners in the village of Augst on August 14th, 2007. Augst, Switzerland’s oldest city, was built by the Romans in 44 BC and was home to roughly 20,000 people. We had the pleasure of performing in the amphitheater in Augst, back in 1990. Since then it has gone through a lengthy excavation and renovation. We are really excited to be heading back to this great location.
Augst

In preparation for our concert, we have been working on some of our old classics as well as thinking about new music. I have been trying to convince the Mariners to play the well known slip jig ‘Kid on the Mountain’ on fifes and drums. Dan, one of our drummers asked me to send him a recording of the melody so that drumming could be written. I was going to send him a simple penny whistle track but I got a bit carried away.

tunes-i-like

Tunes I Like…

One of the things that I thought would be nice to do with this blog space is to do some real simple recordings of tunes I like. These are tunes that I did not write but play frequently enough and enjoy them to the point where I would like to share them. I am not giving any guarantees about my interpretation of these tunes as I tend to drift away from the way I originally learned them as the years go by. They are simply tunes the way I play them. When possible I will try to include a link to the sheet music or a reference to where I learned the tune.

The first tune I have selected just rocks. It is called Colliers’ Reel. It seems that this is a fairly well known tune but, man, it can cook. The version I play is a bit different than the version found at thesession.org but it is the same in spirit. I learned my version from a book called Smoke in your Eyes, which you can get from my friends over at cooperman.com:
Smoke

I like to play this tune into another popular tune called The Earl’s Chair, which I will leave up to you to find.

Here is the mp3: