Category: News

Last May I impulse-bought a Roland VK-1, which is a synthesizer designed to sound and be controlled like a tonewheel organ (such as a Hammond). Yesterday I finally started putting it to work on Fight Songs, along with a Pigtronix Rototron Leslie speaker simulator.

In a side-by-side comparison it won’t fool anyone into thinking it’s a real Hammond and Leslie. But it does sound good, even great in a track, and at something like 20% of the price and weight of the real thing I consider it a steal.

I’ve been attempting to channel my inner Steve Nieve (with moderate success, though you’ll be the judge of that). I’m not riding the drawbars live yet, but I’m dialing in a unique timbre for each track, switching Rototron speeds, and sliding up and down. Maybe too much sliding. (You’ll also be the judge of that. It’s very Nieve-y, though!)

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I should have written this back in September when it was fresh, but here we go; a deep dive into how I wrote one song.

Below, on the left, is the original sheet for what has become “March Four Hundred and First” from my upcoming Fight Songs.

This song started by accident, as they often do. I was playing guitar through my Eventide TimeFactor delay on the multi-tap algorithm, and came up with some parts I liked and vocal melodies with scratch (i.e. to be replaced later) lyrics to go with the guitar parts. I recorded a rough instrumental demo of the guitar parts and wrote out the vocal ideas on this sheet.

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So much music! Not a lot of blogging :\

• Fight Songs – Lead vocals are done. Getting the mixes into shape to send out to collaborators and for writing backing vocals and keys
• Night Mode – Two albums (companions) out to Drew and Damon for review/approval/release. Third album Only Mostly Dead probably finished and ready for art / CDs
• Got weird and just made a noise project over the weekend, probably coming within a week or two under a new name. Might be a one-off, listening to it now!
• SP-404 – Collaborative album with DrumBrute jams x Royce Diamond vocal samples coming together quickly. Seven down, two to go. Remix beat tape also progressing. Can’t decide which order to release them in
• ESR Graphic Fuzz variant – On hold while I sang. Still thinking about it
• Ampeg V4 – Back from the tech. Need to plug it in just for fun, probably tonight
• LPLP – Returning soon! Nate’s been working on some refreshed logistics to make things easier for our guests

I think that’s most of it? Santa brought two new modular… modules… and I’m still figuring them out, but I’m sure I’ll make a record with those soon in the vein of Thinking About The Meaninglessness…

This noise thing is niche, but really cool, I think.

Part 1 –

Jimbo Mathus & Andrew Bird, “These 13” –
https://open.spotify.com/album/5e7me68eSPsVkbQoGdpEkh

Cedric Burnside, “I Be Trying” –
https://cedricburnside.bandcamp.com/album/i-be-trying

Til Willis, “Promise of Wishful Thinking” –
https://tilwillis.bandcamp.com/track/promise-of-wishful-thinking-2

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In randomized order, here is the best music Howie heard in 2021.

Abul Mogard, “In Immobile Air” – The varieties of ambient music continue to surprise me. Mogard (a pen name, almost certainly) combines simple pitches and noise like sculpture, crafting installations I seem to approach, wander around, and gently walk away from.

Nala Sinephro, “Space 1.8” – Sax and synth sound like they were made for each other in Sinephro’s cosmic, jazz-inspired explorations.

Nao, “And Then Life Was Beautiful” – Nao’s singular unification of vintage and modern R&B styles. Taking her debut EPs together she’s one record away from acing the Five Album Test, and I don’t doubt she’ll get there.

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Picking up from my last post, here’s my live-blog of listening to Crash after 13+ years of not listening to it.

So Much To Say – Been a minute. This feels good. Cool riff, love the horn lines.

Two Step – Classic. I’m realizing for the first time how different the production is from UTTAD. The hard-panned guitars are gone, the layers of morphing pads and sustaining violin and whatnot are gone. This sounds more like a big, clean, natural-sounding 70s record, but hi-fi. It’s probably a better sound for the band, though the immersive murkiness of UTTAD works in places. Fade out is a bummer, write an
ending you fools!

Crash Into Me – Unfortunately, this has not aged well. The song and recording are fine, but it’s not escaping its own overplayed-ness to my ears. My poor mom had to overhear me play this so many times :( :(

Too Much – Wow, and we’re jamming again, “Crash” really killed the energy.

41 – Dual electric guitars! Cool new atmosphere. That sax ostinato does it for me. It’s wild how much of this I hear in V for Voice, from the writing to the playing to the mix, which was not on my radar at all. Just that formative, I suppose. I was completely chasing this album in the V for Voice production and had zero idea that’s what I was doing.

Say Goodbye – Dave is such a cheeseball here but it’s a little charming. A little.

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This, from the recent Pitchfork review of “Crash,” hit hard:

Crash helped give a generation of upstarts permission to do whatever they wanted with their own music. That sort of broad philosophical inspiration was altogether different than what Nirvana, Pavement, or most every other rock act cooler than the Dave Matthews Band supplied at the same time.

I sent the review to Cory, who said:

I still listen to that and “Under the Table…” from time to time! Especially if I want some thoughtful serenity. “Under the Table” makes me feel straight-up better and think-ier and more hopeful which is why I like it better. “Crash” makes me feel kind of the same but also weirder? They were definitely the easiest band to clown on in the ’90s. SUPER successful hippies in a band who wrote radio-friendly songs that were seemingly un-scandalous but often pretty horny! But those records are great and unlike anything else I can think of.

Do you still listen to those guys from time to time? I’m going to put “Crash” on now and hike my skirt up!

I had not listened to either album since importing them to iTunes in 2008, so I started to, and I live-blogged my reactions, now posted below.

The Best Of What’s Around – Oh my god there is so much going on in this mix! Like a moderate number of parts, but they’re all busy AF, and the hard-panned acoustic guitars doing fairly different things is wild.

What Would You Say – This still sounds pretty good. Funky & poppy, like Toad The Wet Sprocket but also Prince could sound cool covering it?

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I broke the ice on lead vocals for Fight Songs over the long Thanksgiving weekend. Three songs down, eleven to go.

Practicing over the past few weeks has really paid off. (Shocker!) I was really struggling to find notes and maintain steady pitches when I started. Singing for an hour three or four nights a week for about three weeks has put me in a pretty good place at this point.

I’m starting with the songs that are lowest in my register, and will work upward. There’s no rush but I’m aiming to finish around New Year’s Eve.

From there I’m not sure what I’ll do next; organ, percussion, or backing vocals. We’re in year 13 of Fight Songs production, I guess there’s no rush.

During my first trip to Ghana, I bought and had shipped home a player-grade djembe made by a guy named Brain. (Yes, Brain, “a-i.”)

Mike Morris liked the drum and wanted one, I remember. I told him I could get one, and as I recall I took his money, and sent it to Brain with an order.

After that, my memory is unreliable. Over the years I’ve had a growing sense that the drum never arrived, to the point that I’ve wanted to see Mike and talk about it. As a younger person my attitude was that doing international business in cash transfers entailed risk, and this risk was disclosed; buyer beware. Now I feel more like I put my word on a deal and need to square up on it, one way or another.

But here’s the twist; I saw Scott last weekend (to return his Rhodes to him; whole other story!) and he has a drum made by Brain. One that I didn’t know about (or knew, and completely forgot – entirely possible!)

He said his folks gave it to him as a surprise in the fall of 2003. That would have been right when I left for my second time in Ghana. So we have a mystery:

1. How many drums did the Morrises order? One, or two?
2. Did I never find out that one drum was delivered? I was out of touch for three months after it was delivered, then didn’t move back on campus, then graduated and moved to Minnesota. We practiced and played a few shows, but they were all electric, with a drum set (not djembe). We didn’t record. And it went to Scott, not Mike (who I’d taken the money from)
3. Or did I know, and forget entirely? I’m about 50/50 on never knowing vs. forgetting
4. Do I owe Mike anything?

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Here’s the song “Swell” from the Night Mode album Sea, with photos and a slide show that tell the story of the album.

When I first started recording, I got an inaccurate understanding of compression stuck deep in my mind. I only really started to exorcise it a few years ago, and I still think the way compression is often explained is confusing. (Maybe I’ll post a follow-up on The Compression Conspiracy, or maybe it will come out here.) I’ll attempt to explain compression clearly and simply, touching on limiting and clipping along the way.

Compression is automatic volume reduction, or “variable attenuation” if you prefer. Compression is not soft clipping or peak reduction*.

* Peaks will be reduced in the course of automatic volume reduction processing, but since the whole signal is being reduced it’s confusing to call that result “peak reduction”

Compression is like having a gremlin enthralled to your instructions, whose hand is on a volume knob. You can tell the gremlin how fast to turn the volume down when your input signal gets loud (compressor “attack” time), how fast to turn the volume back up when the input signal gets quieter again (compressor “release” time), how loud is “loud” to you (compressor “threshold”), and whether you want your gremlin to turn down the volume a little, or a lot (compressor “ratio”).

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The world of guitar (and synth, and bass…) modulation effects overwhelmed me at first, but I’ve learned that most pedals and plugins are based around just a couple of ideas.

	Time-based effects	Filter-based effects
Base version	Chorus	Phaser
Variations	Flange (chorus with feedback) Vibrato (chorus with no dry signal)	Uni-Vibe or “Vibe” (phaser with mis-matched filters)

Time-based effects are created by 1) copying the input signal, 2) delaying the copy by a small amount (a few milliseconds), 3) automatically changing the delay time (say, from 27 ms to 33 ms and back), and then 4) mixing the input (or “dry,” or “not delayed) and delayed signals together (typically at a 50:50 ratio). The resulting sound is a pseudo-doubling effect with a bit of pitch going up and down, some frequencies of the input signal enhanced, and others diminished. Boom; basic chorus.

Flangers operate on the same principle, with shorter delay times and feedback in the delay signal path (just like a delay or echo pedal), resulting in a more pronounced effect. Flangers with knobs for feedback amount are often great modulation pedals because they can cover a lot of territory from subtle near-chorus to crazy flying saucer flange.

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