Snoozeking Music

I’ll say it right now: I would like to party with Dave Grohl. I can’t think of anyone as famous that appears to be just having a goddamn ball doing what they love. Not to mention that he rocks.

Oh, and has a highly entertaining sense of humor:

Take my first band's album... please!

I’ve been trying to clean up the studio (you know, to make room for new gear, heh heh). In the process I’ve come across a couple boxes of unsold Foonspeeders and drunkdude69 CDs.

Foonspeeders was a band that Mike, his brother Maury, our friend Scott Haumesser and I were in in the mid-to-late 1990s here in Cleveland. We released our first record “Who Are the Foonspeeders?” near the end of 1998, and we played pretty regularly around town. We had a good time, but didn’t really sell many of the 1,000 CDs we had manufactured. Even after ruefully throwing away a number of boxes of CDs, I still have a couple dozen lurking around.

DD69 is a band that Mike and I started after we moved on from the Foonspeeder days. When we finally finished our first DD69 record in 2008 we had CDs manufactured, but this time we only ordered 300. After all, times have changed – do people even buy music anymore, let alone buy CDs? We’ve done a little better moving the DD69 music, but I still have a stack of the “Funk Out With Your Junk Out” CDs here.

I keep  looking for opportunities that seem like a good stylistic matches for any of the music that I’ve been involved with. One of these days I’ll get a song placed somewhere that generates some interest from a wider audience. And maybe then I can finally make some more room on this shelf.

A happy place

I was very close with my maternal grandparents. They were a big part of inspiring and enabling my love of art and music, as briefly described here.

My grandmother was an artist: a painter, penciler, seamstress, creative cook. I spent my summers with she and my grandfather, and she and I often went to the lake with sketchpads and fishing poles to spend the day drawing and trying to catch the teensy fish in the lake.

It’s been ten years today since she passed away. I miss her every day. I wrote this song (“Painting Pictures”) shortly after she died. It’s not as hard to listen to it now as it was when I recorded it, but it still makes me sad. I’m hoping to get some friends together and record a live version of it this year, if I can perform it all the way through.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

After coming up with the lyrics for the chorus of an upcoming song, I brought it up on studio night. Mike, Kenny, Jeff and I all suggested ideas for words, phrasing and melody.  I had old lyrics from another song that were unused and seemed to fit the concept of minute by minute change, so we used those as a starting point:

seconds pass into unseen places
can’t outlast it, and can’t outrace it
one way trip, might as well just face it
step right up, the next minute is here

The issue I had with those words was that, with all those syllables, the lines didn’t contrast with the lines in the verses at all. And it made it more difficult to fit the music and have a distinctive melody. The one thing that did work was part of the last line: the next minute is here. It fit perfectly with these rhythmic stabs at the end of the chorus music.

So we whittled down syllables and tried out some melody ideas and harmonies. Less syllables meant longer notes, and we came up with some harmonies that took me by surprise (reminiscent of King’s X) as you can see in the vid below:

The working chorus lyric at that point was:

Seconds
Passing
Can’t out race the fear
The next minute is here
One way
Ticket
Might as well just face it
The next minute is here

As we let that stew for a couple days, Jeff asked me to post a rough mix of the song. Before I did that, I wanted to fix a couple details. As it sometimes happens, while I was fixing some things I came up with some changes that I liked a lot better than what we were using.

That was the feeling that’s been eluding me for a long time: the sudden rush of inspiration, like you’ve finally gotten a big, cool drink after working all day in the sun. It felt just as refreshing. I think I’m addicted to that feeling because I always want more.

So as of right now Jeff Beam and I have fleshed out the chorus harmonies, and Jeff Endemann and I have worked on guitar solos and some harmonies for the bridge. I’m still trying to find the words for the bridge, but once those are finalized, the songwriting is done. And once we track the vocals and some assorted noises and the like, the tracking will be done as well.

And we finally have the title: “(The) Next Minute”.

More to come…

Its significance is its insignificance

Happy Groundhog Day!

As is usual, I will join a select few others on an exclusive pilgrimage to an undisclosed location to celebrate the holiday this weekend.  It’s a chance to go underground, so to speak, and get off the map.

There will be ukuleles involved.

Studio night Strat

Hard to believe that we’re already into the second month of 2011. January went by in a snowy blur here on the north coast, but it wasn’t without some musical progress.

As mentioned previously, the second Thomas Reed Smith album is finished, and should be back from manufacturing in a matter of weeks. Tom and I are really happy with the music and the design, and we’re hoping to set up a CD release gig or two this June.

drunkdude69 is well into the 3rd DD69 album, tentatively titled “As Big As You Can Get It”. We have several mixes completed, and we’ve been working on finishing up the tracking and mixing for several more songs. We’re also working on writing new material, and finishing some older songs that need lyrics and/or musical parts.

The last bit is what has me excited the most. I feel like I haven’t written anything new for a long time – mainly since most of my attention has been on getting old material out of the “pipeline”. Recently we started working on completing a song (working title: “Reigning”) that had music and most tracking done, but was still missing lyrics. The words can often be a sticking point for me because I want to write something that is meaningful as opposed to jibberish. (I know, why bother, right? It’s just a thing I feel compelled to do)

I had some rough ideas, you know, middle-of-the-night-after-a-couple-cocktails ad libbing. Most of it was useless. I was trying too hard for the “Tolkien” Middle Earth vibe, all “going up to the mountain” and stuff like that. Yes, weird, but inspired partly by the music, which has a very Led Zeppelin meets Rage Against the Machine at a Queen concert. The initial take was something like this:

Went out to the mountain
‘Cause it wouldn’t come to me
Didn’t want to keep looking
But knew I had to see
After all this time I find
That I still don’t know a thing
I came up here a poor man
But someday I’ll leave a king

Meh. Wasn’t really doing it for me. Scratch that.

Mike’s brother Maury was here for a few days and offered the seed of an idea for some words for the song. We went back and forth with the concept, which I liked very much, and started refining it. It was about the way things can change in the space of a minute, and the delivery we came up with seemed to fit the musical style well. It was a repeated set of phrases with stronger emphasis each time:

One minute she’s alive, next minute she’s not
One minute it’s fine, next minute it’s not

After chewing on the idea for a while, I came up with a set of four lines for each verse. Each set would get repeated twice using increasing emphasis. I even got a little bit of the “middle earth” flavor with the king/pawn line:

One minute you’re high, next minute you’re not
One minute a king, next minute a pawn
One minute you’re fine, next minute you’re not
One minute you’re alive, next minute you’re gone

I pulled the work in progress up on studio night a couple weeks ago and we all hashed around a little bit with some ideas for words and melody and phrasing for the chorus. I had a particular line that I wanted to keep, which defined the songs and led to the title.

To be continued…

The disc design for "Out On Your Own"

After many years of on-and-off work, the Thomas Reed Smith Band’s album “Out On Your Own” is finished. As I type this, the mastered album is on its way here via the good old U.S. mail.

This album is a follow-up to Tom’s first record “I Need A Change” which we released around 2000. Yep, your math is correct – it’s been over 10 years. Why did we go up against “Chinese Democracy” for the longest time taken to make an album?

Well, in a nutshell, shit happens. After we finished “I Need A Change”, we continued to play out and promote the album for about a year. At the same time I had gotten involved in playing with another Cleveland band, and of course I was working my day gig as well.

We started work on the new songs, and did a fair amount of tracking, including some sessions at Closer Look studios with Jim Evans on drums and Mike Holloran on percussion. Work stopped in 2001 when I had family issues to deal with. Then I lost my job, moved across town, and holed up for a while. Mike Adams went back to school for a couple years, Jim moved to Nashville, and Tom started his own business.

Time goes by fast, sometimes. For several years I hardly worked on any music – my head was just somewhere else. In 2006 or thereabouts, we started a regular studio night here, which we continue to this day. We initially worked on finishing the languishing drunkdude69 album “Funk Out With Your Junk Out“, which we finally completed in 2008.

Through 2009 we worked on the DD69 follow-up record “Wigs & Liquor“, which we recently completed. At the beginning of 2010 I decided Tom’s project had been on the shelf for way too long, and I somehow coaxed him into coming here and doing the final guitar tracks last February.

I finished the mixes in November, and we sent the songs off for mastering in December. As of today, the design is finished, and once the production CDs arrive, we’ll get the manufacturing process started. It’s a very good feeling to finally have it done, and we’re looking forward to making it publicly available after all this time.

A while ago, at the request of my friend Moondog the Cleveland Cavaliers mascot, I put together some music for a short video created for QTV.  QTV produces the entertaining content that is shown on the huge scoreboard screens during Cavs basketball games.

This particular piece was done to the tune of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man”, so I had to lubricate my pipes before I cut this vocal.  Overall I was happy with the result.

Then Moondog invited me (and Charley from DD69/Skinny Moo) to join in the video shoot.  We went down and had a great time mugging for the camera as referees wearing big old glasses.

Thanks for all the love Moondog.  Here’s the vid:

That's a lot of little windows...

I just got a copy of BFD2, which is a virtual drum instrument.  I’m using it as a plug-in in Pro Tools, mainly to demo out drums and get a decent idea of how a song could sound.

I’ve got some songs that are written with very specific drum parts in mind – the kind of thing where I want all of the rhythm instruments to be locked together.  At a recent studio night, my friend and drunkdude69 collaborator Mike suggested that for those songs we just use the BFD2 drums as the permanent tracks rather than doing a session with a live drummer and “making the drummer play like a drum machine”.

He’s definitely got a point.  I think in those cases it makes sense (financially and production-wise) to get exactly what I’m after without putting my drumming friends through an irritating studio session.

Now I just have to learn how to use BFD2. Lots of parameters and control, which is awesome, but which also translates to a steep learning curve.

Apologies to Frank Zappa for the title of the post, but I couldn’t resist.

I got a new garage door opener a couple weeks ago, and it came with a 9-volt battery. I appreciate it when the batteries are included, but in this case I had to chuckle. Yes, it was a strange and wonderful off-brand battery called “Golden Power” direct from China, apparently.

Probably won't last an hour (on the tower of power)

It reminded me of a recent conversation with my pal Jay, who sings in Skinny Moo. He was talking about writing a book that would profile generic brand items and either recommend them (to save money) or warn you not to use them (because their quality is crappy).

One of the inspirations for his idea came from some off-brand batteries that he was using for his in-ear monitors. The monitors allow him to hear his vocals and the rest of the band while performing, and there’s nothing quite like being in the middle of a song and having the sound just disappear. Normally a Duracell or Energizer battery will last for several 4+ hour gigs.  The generic battery crapped out after about 15 minutes.

So Jay, this golden power’s for you, and for anyone else who uses lots of batteries. My recommendation: trash the off-brand battery and go with a name brand.