#weeklytrack — Public Fediverse posts

#WeeklyTrack : Three Treatments of a Theme in D Major

I missed last week entirely; it was kind of an off-week creatively.

For some reason, I thought I had already posted this; maybe every time I considered it, I found myself thinking "eww, no, too sloppy" and then deciding not to.

Either way, this just illustrates why I needed to start keeping track of all my releases -- so I made a table on my wiki's music page.

Also at: BandCamp

P.S. The cover image preview looks fine in the text editor, but all squished in the upload editor -- which won't let me modify it. I wonder what the actual post will look like. (Update: yeah, squished... but at that size, you can't really tell.)

P.P.S. (8/26) This was recovered from a cassette dated "1988-01-28", which I think is the day I started using it -- so the three selections which comprise this piece were probably mixed down early in 1988. They may have been recorded earlier, however.

Instruments: Moog Rogue, generic acoustic guitar, Tokai electric guitar

Cover image: courtesy of @flameReactor

#WeeklyTrack catch-up #1

As You Were

I improvised this on the Ensoniq Mirage probably in 1988 or 89. As with several other pieces, I started with the idea for the opening theme, but the rest happened on the fly.

Listening closely to this in headphones for the first time in years, I was surprised to note that the sound is quite definitely stereo -- but the Mirage only puts out one channel, and there were no overdubs, so...? I can only think that I must have added additional tracks using a mild chorus or differential delay that causes some frequencies to resonate differently in each ear; it certainly doesn't sound like one ear is delayed, or like "fake stereo" where you use EQ to explicitly boost some frequency-ranges into one ear and some into the other.

Anyway, several people IRL have told me they like this one. Yay!

• Audio source: TDK MA-C90 (pretty good quality)
• Artwork: me, early 2000s? pencil on art pad

stream / FLAC download: BandCamp

#WeeklyTrack (still trying to play catch-up and almost getting there!)

Rhodes & Horns

This was recorded during the same time-span (and with the same set-up) as "Rhodes & Strings", which I posted on BandCamp back in 2022.

I don't know why I never posted this one, which always felt like a sort of companion piece, except maybe I had my perfection-threshold set too high (the Rhodes is definitely a bit clanky).

I will eventually find the source tracks, sand down the rough edges, and put up a "finished" version, but for now this is from a collection of tracks I mixed for @Harena in or before 2002, sometime before I was living up here permanently.

As with Rhodes and Strings (iirc), the Rhodes was played first and then I overdubbed with the Opus 3.

(cover art: a pencil doodle I did in ~2007, at a meeting or an appointment or something)

higher-quality audio: BandCamp

Here's last week's #WeeklyTrack, finally; I'll try to have another one later in the week to catch up...

"Antarctica"

This started as basically an improvised piece with an orchestral string sample on the Ensoniq Mirage. My memory is that it was recorded at 69 Carrington in Prov, so that would have been 1988-89.

The horns, dark voices, and Moog were added next; I can't remember which one I did first.

See how many mistakes you can catch!

This mix is from a cassette mix on pretty high-quality tape (with digital tweakage at the beginning and end); eventually I'll find the original 4-track reel recording and digitize/remix that... but not today.

Higher-quality version: BandCamp

Cover image credit: @flameReactor

Weekly Track for 2024-07-09

"Distortion" (instrumental)

I'm pretty sure this was actually recorded with the Sony portable (in the cover photo), unlike the "Stereo Piano" track (Feb. 5)*, probably using the mic that came with it, probably on the same grand piano in the Dana Auditorium rehearsal room. (If I find the original 5" tape at some point, that will confirm this theory.)

If memory serves accurately, I then took that mono recording and transcribed it onto three tracks on the TEAC 4-track, physically slowing down or speeding up the reels as needed to keep it more or less in sync.

The point of that was to make it stereo -- but it also results in a swirly phasing effect which I like. (I used that technique again a decade later on MoG's "Electron Emotion", but that's another post.)

Then I recorded the guitar solo on the fourth track. I wasn't quite happy with the results, so I did another take on the same channel (wiping out the first take, because I was out of channels and didn't want to lose even more audio quality doing a mixdown-bounce to cassette) -- but it was worse, and I eventually realized the first take was actually pretty decent. Lesson learned. :-|

...so anyway, I don't have that solo anymore, so I can't remix this to bring it out any better. (Maybe there's a GenAI tool which can extract it, but my first attempt didn't work.)

* I've updated the cover-image on the BandCamp listing for that one, but MastoGlitch won't let me.

#weeklyTrack

higher quality (ha!) at: BandCamp

Let the #weeklyTrack thingy resume!

Track for 2024-06-30

This is my first-ever finished musical piece -- an instrumental built around 3 piano themes, all of which I later realized were kinda derived from music I had been listening to but @Harena insists that this is okay.

See if you can guess what they are! One was #15 on the US pop charts in 1981, and the other two are non-single tracks from albums by popular groups. One of the albums was very popular, the other one was the first album by a group which didn't really become well-known until their 4th album or so.

I was pleasantly surprised by the way a Moog Rogue waveform with a slight random modulation fed through a spring-reverb can sounds like a real violin ensemble playing in unison. (The polyphonic stuff is all the Opus 3.)

Also stream at: BandCamp

Credits

• piano recorded at Dana Auditorium downstairs rehearsal room, Guilford College, 1983ish
• piano solo (at end): Mike Hoover
• cover image: @flameReactor

I think I'm going to hold off on doing a #WeeklyTrack for this week, because it's getting too hard to find material where I still have a lossless (WAV or FLAC) copy. I need better tools for organizing my files, and I need to do more transcription...

(Bandcamp wants lossless, which I approve of -- and although I could convert MP3 to FLAC, it just seems very wrong to do so, somehow.)

#WeeklyTrack #11 - 2024-03-18 - "Through the Night"

This has words, but I haven't yet decided if I'm okay with them or not (and if I am ok, how they should sound when sung).

I'm not sure exactly when it was recorded. It seems like a 1990-91 kind of thing, but there's a particular sample I use near the end which I think is from a Fender Rhodes, and I didn't have that until later -- but possibly it's that "Echoes" sound again, which I did earlier. Doesn't sound breathy enough for that, though. Maybe the main tracks were 90-91 and that one was overdubbed later? One of these days I'll find the reel tape again... but I wasn't always good about logging dates back then.

The piano sound was one which came with the Ensoniq Mirage. It's a bit clanky but for an instrument not costing many thousand$ in 1984-ish, it was pretty good. I did, however, find that I liked it better when I removed the samples for the lower keys and just let it pitch-adjust the upper-end sample downwards. More resonant, less... well, clanky.

(I could get into an explanation of how that all worked, if anyone is interested.)

I'll note that this is the same sample used a fair amount by the late great Karl Wallinger on many of World Party's early recordings, most notably "Put the Message in the Box" -- but he used the lower keys sound as packaged. De gustibus non est disputandem or whatever, I guess... :D

#WeeklyTrack #10 - 2024-03-11 - "keyhammer jam"

This is an idea I've been noodling around with since the 1990s. It feels like it wants to be part of a larger piece, but that hasn't materialized yet.

I recorded this version in 2013 on the keyboard shown in the cover photo ($550 from Costco, iirc). In retrospect, there really needs to be a little Moog as well...

#WeeklyTrack #9 - "bouncy pop harpsichord songlet"

The "harpsichord", "piano", and fake drums were all played on the Ensoniq Mirage. There's also a real electric bass, very low in the mix -- from a bass guitar which one of Tigger's friends had found left in a dorm room when doing cleanup after all the students moved out, and gave to me. (Student property abandonment also resulted in my acquisition of a rather interesting-sounding keyboard, except I found that one in a dumpster...)

Time-wise, I can pin this track down by the fact that the Ensoniq's output is buzzing noticeably (I've used denoising to ameliorate this substantially, but you can still hear it a bit) which means it was recorded after that started happening but before I fixed the problem by adapting a PC power-supply.

...which would put it at Amy St. in Providence, 1987-88.

The PC power-supply was connected externally with a DIN plug -- I drilled a hole in the Mirage's metal casing and another hole in the PS's metal casing, and mounted sockets on each so there wouldn't be any dangling cables to deal with.

I later learned why DIN isn't a good choice for power-delivery when one of the wires in the cable came unsoldered from its pin and, due to the lack of electrical isolation in the DIN shell, touched an adjacent wire and fried the Mirage's CPU.

(Spellcheck insists that "unsoldered" isn't a word, and I must mean either "soldered" or "undersold".)

I obtained the EPS/M as a replacement not too long after that... but I was without the Mirage for at least one MoG performance.

I still feel like there's a real song to be built around this...

Cover image courtesy of @flameReactor , with a bit of additional manipulation in GNU Imp

#WeeklyTrack #8 - 2024-02-25 - "Dana Auditorium, 3AM"

Recorded in 1982 or 1983 at Dana Auditorium, Guilford College, Greensboro NC, on a Steinway concert grand which was apparently there temporarily for a show. I was almost certainly not supposed to be playing it, though I don't think I quite realized that at the time.

I went in with only the basic idea -- the arpeggio and main chord sequence -- and the rest just kind of happened.

I foolishly only set up one mic, so it's in mono. I tried to do some overdubs, but they were mostly fluff and useless.

This is the more basic mix, with only one brief overdub near the beginning: I left it in because it sounds (to my ears) so much like a bent note on a guitar, but it was actually played on the same piano, and I thought that was kind of nifty. (The version on Bandcamp includes a bit more of the overdubs.)

I wonder if I could make a good case for being the Dana Auditorium Ghost -- I was certainly there at weird hours of the night, when the main doors were locked, on several occasions. :ghost_pip:​ >.>

So! A couple-few nights ago, I finally got the 4-track hooked up to transcribe some more tapes for #WeeklyTrack postings and whatnot, but some of the channels didn't seem to be working.

Then I noticed that some of the simul-sync (I'll explain this below, because it's kinda neat) switches on the head assembly felt kinda wobbly, and some of them weren't making a signal...

...and then I remembered that time when I had left the deck in a position which I hadn't realized was precarious (being used to my own physically cautious ways) and a rambunctious child bounced on the floor a bit too near it and the whole thing toppled on its face, leaving a nice little dent in the hardwood floor and cracking the tape-head circuit board.

Apparently I had previously made mostly-successful efforts to repair the board (with a jumper wire), but in the process I had somehow left out a standoff cylinder which was necessary for keeping the whole thing stable and also ensuring that the jumper-wire made good contact.

Somehow (by some miracle 🌩️), the missing standoff was found (must have been not long after) and I taped it to the deck, so that I could reinstall it.

Seven and a half million years later (i.e. the present day), I finally took the headshell apart again, installed the missing standoff, and put the whole thing back together again.

I'm not sure all the meters are working, but after some initial uncertainty and much working of dusty switches, I managed to get signals from every channel.

...but the tapes I tried sounded very muffled. I was worried for a bit that maybe I had left them too close to an active electrical circuit or something and they had both gotten partly erased (the high end goes first), but then I remembered that de-magnetizing the heads isn't the only maintenance that might need doing -- i.e. the heads also need cleaning.

...and indeed some very brown stuff came off when I gave them a good rub with alcohol, and now the sound seems (tentatively) much better.

I'm still nervous that there are other issues, but... good progress so far. This might be usable!

P.S. Hey @scanlime -- I'm doin' 'lectronics!! 😸 💡 🔌 (...or, at least, did some about a decade ago, when I soldered this. That counts, right?)

P.P.S. See reply-post for explanation of "simul-sync".

#WeeklyTrack #7 - 2024-02-19

The vocals are too quiet on this, but I haven't yet located the mixing session files so I can fix that. The basic tracks (EPS/M click and drum loop, Rhodes, vocals) were recorded in the 1990s*, and then I added the other pieces (the ones that come in after the first chorus) in 2004 using a $200 Yamaha keyboard (possibly from Costco) -- shown in the cover photo -- and Cool Edit Pro.

* I have contradictory information about when I recorded the original tracks. On the lyrics page, I said it was recorded in 1994 -- but I thought I remembered buying the Rhodes later than that (c.1999), when I came back from Wisconsin and had plenty of money. Then again, it was only $200 (I remember that much), and I might have decided it was worth getting even if I couldn't really afford it (because $200 for a Rhodes 73 in decent condition was, even then, a very good deal).

As noted on the lyrics page, I'm not totally happy with the lyrics, so maybe it's just as well that they're a bit low.

#WeeklyTrack #6 - 2024-02-11

Flight of the Gastropod

This was another 1990-ish recording that happened because of the Ensoniq Mirage's very limited sequencing ability.

As with everything in that era, this was recorded on the TEAC A-2340SX 4-track reel deck and bounced down to the TEAC C-3RX cassette recorder.

I think all the parts were played on the Mirage, and most of them were original samples (made from Rhodes and guitar noises). The exceptions are the piano and, arguably, the fuzzy ping sound which is the opening note of "Meddle" (Pink Floyd), from vinyl.

This file was digitized from DAT, but I think that was actually a later transcription from the final cassette mix.

cover image courtesy of @flameReactor

#WeeklyTrack #5 - 2024-02-05

I was at first thinking this was recorded on the Sony portable 5" reel deck shown here (cover art), but it might have been recorded with the TEAC 4-track, possibly lugged from my dorm room on a skateboard. I need to work out some tools for keeping track of my tracks...

Anyway, I performed it on the grand piano in the large (downstairs) practice room at Dana Auditorium, Guilford College, 1982-3.

The stereo pre-echo effect was kind of a happy discovery -- I was messing with effects on the aforementioned TEAC (after transcribing, presumably) when I happened to play it back with one of the channels in "overdub" mode -- which uses the recording head to play back, instead of the playback head, causing that channel to play a fraction of a second sooner.

crossposts: Bandcamp, Patreon

#WeeklyTrack #4 - 2024-01-29

I had another thing in mind to post but then I couldn't quickly find a non-lossy version of the mixdown so I went looking around for other bits... and found this, which is a chord sequence idea I was noodling around with in July 2014.

The main instrument is the Fender Rhodes 73 I got in Athens circa 1999, and which (poor thing) got shut up in its case not long after I recorded this, for lack of space to set it up, and has been there ever since.

(Anyone got a few dozen square meters of space they can send me? 🥺)

This was actually recorded all digitally -- in CoolEdit Pro, but mixed with Audacity 3.3.3.

Thumbnail image by @flameReactor

cross-posts: BandCamp. Patreon

#WeeklyTrack #3 - 2024-01-21

The Track

I'm trying not to automatically hold myself to some standard where each post has to better than the previous one.

Here, therefore, is a recording on very cheap cassette tape ("Astrosonic" -- they were, I believe, $1 for a packet of 3 at Kroger, no cases) of me noodling around for a few minutes on my first Fender Rhodes 73 (with the slightly more sluggish action than the one I got later) and Moog Opus 3.

The cassette was dated 1983, so I would have been 17 or 18. I don't remember if #JennyHypertwin had disappeared yet.... but my memory of the session is that the keyboards were under the loft-bed I built after she went missing (I don't think there would have been room, otherwise), which means it must have been after my birthday and I would have been 18.

Administrivia

After having done two of these, I'm noticing two things:

[1] The hard part is not finding things to post; the hard part is finding something that feels like I won't spend the rest of the week thinking I should have posted something else.

[2] I actually have quite a lot of stuff, and could probably go on for quite awhile even posting more than once a week. ...but a more frequent schedule runs the risk of missing a deadline (I've come increasingly close to this for the past two weeks).

So my thought is this: one week is the maximum interval. If I feel like I want to post something before then, I'll do it -- and then the week resets from that point. That way I can make best use of posting-energy when it strikes. 🌩️

#WeeklyTrack #2 - 2024-01-14 - "Monorail to Nowhere"

Today was a bit of an overwhelm day so I'm only now getting around to posting this...

This is actually kind of a finished track? It was on the demo cassette I put together in 1992ish; this is probably from my DAT copy of that tape.

I started to try to rebuild it digitally about a decade ago, but could only find maybe half of the source-tracks; I'm reasonably sure I have the rest of them, but there's a lot of reel tape to go through.

It was recorded at the duplex on Arnette St. in 1991ish -- mostly on the Ensoniq Mirage (xylophone, "ah"-vox, clinky piano), with some guitar (electric and acoustic) and a few other bits of miscellany. (Bonus: see if you can spot all the backwards bits.)

I'm going to try posting something every week, regardless of whether it's finished or what.

This was entirely played on a cheap Tokai electric guitar ($200 in 1983ish), plus foot-tapping. One guitar is at normal speed, the other was recorded at half-speed (and is therefore double-speed on playback).

This was probably done at Amy St. (Durham) in 1990-91. I'm pretty sure there's a version with some keyboard-drums added, but I haven't found that yet; this is a cassette mixdown, probably used for that overdub.

I feel like there's a lot more that could be done with this, but I don't know where to go with it. (This happens a lot.)

#WeeklyTrack