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My My Hey Hey: Using Harmonica as a Vocoder Device
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Back when I was making the transition from recording-only, sound collage maker guy to futurist space-folk performer, I was looking for a way to maximize the sounds I could make with the smallest ammount of extra gear to lug along to coffeehouses. In addition to the core elements of guitar, slide and voice, I settled on two items: my two-second Digitech delay/looper and a harmonica.
Well, several harmonicas actually, because you need different ones for different keys. And since I tuned my acoustic down a half step to D# and used heavy strings to give the music a little more low end ‘oomph’, the keys I was looking for weren’t carried by most music stores, who usually just carried the four or five most popular keys of G, C, D and E.
So I decided to just get harps for my songs in ‘G’ (F#) and ‘D’ (C#), and finally tracked down some Hohners at the big store downtown on Newbury, and set about the task of learning to play them while strumming the guitar. I’d messed around with kazoos and wooden flutes and harmonicas before in my recording exploits, but usually just as non-melodic sonic ephemera put through guitar effects units, and never while trying to simultaneously play the guitar.
After I got the hang of it, I started incorporating my noisemaking era’s techniques of vowel-shaping, talking and adding undertones by humming notes through the harp that were different from the notes I was playing on it. The harmonica was transformed into a kind of poorman’s acoustic vocoder/talkbox and it immediately got used in one of my sci-fi folk numbers called ‘Visited A Farm’, opening and closing the retro-future tale like a robot narrator trying to speak.
Swervedriver: Never Lose That Feeling
Almost fourteen years after the mighty guitar band Swervedriver was put ‘up on the blocks’, here they were again in 2012; plying their stomp-box enabled brand of space travel rock and roll, debuting a new song, digging deep into their catalogue for some live rarities, and actually even appearing on national television.
It seems that more of the world is finally finding out about, and acknowledging, this great undiscovered treasure of the 1990′s a full two decades after their Creation Records debut. As formulaic rock and machine-generated beats continue their dominance of the airwaves, and ‘professional’ entertainment and contest shows (along with rock schools and “Glee”) reduce the performing arts to confident calesthenics and TV-ready sanitized deliveries, it’s nice to be reminded how potent a force untrammeled guitar rock is for your inner under-nourished soul.
Experiments in Writing and Recording Music: Using Limits, pt. 1
As noted in the intro to this series, there are a plethora of ways to tackle an impasse in the writing and recording process. I tend to advocate for an experimental solution rather than a ‘standard’ (read: boring and safe) solution. Try something that you or your band haven’t tried; not for the sake of novelty, but for the things you can run into during the discovery process.
The benefit of thinking outside the box is exactly just that; you learn to approach problems and solutions from a different angle. And with the pace of today’s technological advancements, there seem to be an infinite number of options at your fingertips. Getting used to considering all the possibilities on how to finish that song or find that one neat sound that makes the record come to life can help you overcome musical impasses more quickly in the future the more you get used to doing it.
Once you’ve allowed yourself to be open to all the directions that that song or sound search could go in though, there also arises the conundrum of sifting through the myriad of choices you’ve dutifully considered. How do you select the best idea out of a hundred? It can be overwhelming if you’ve really done your homework and truly considered all the options available. So my first rule of action when confronting these kinds of problems has always been the one that almost seems counter-intuitive (at first): use limits.
The Lyrics Slowly Enter the Fray…
After a bit of a delay this month, I’ve finally made a template that I’m satisfied with for displaying the lyrics/prose that will slowly be making their way onboard. There are a dozen or so on the lyrics page now and soon there’ll be a slider carousel so you can flip through them a little quicker. There will be some lyrics posted for songs or spoken pieces which I don’t have a good recording of, but still may yet find. And in some cases, it might be more fun anyways to just read the lyrics; especially if a certain unnamed someone may have sung a tad out of tune on a particular selection ;-). I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. Here’s “Wire to the Sky” and “Engineering Our Escape” to start things off:
Video: “All Blues/Set the Controls….”
Cover tunes are a great way to improve your chops and timing, learn how songs are put together, and can be a fun inclusion into a live set or album. During periods where I’m not writing and practicing my own stuff, I always have a song or two in mind to play along with so I can get out of my set patterns on the fretboard and maybe commit some new chord shapes or finger patterns to muscle memory. Many times those newly learned chord patterns can give you some ideas for your next batch of tunes. Other times, it can be a comical act of futility (“Siberian Khatru” from Yessongs, anyone?) where you’re just left flabbergast at the level of talent and genius in some people’s playing.
Since I started writing and performing my own stuff 20+ years ago, I’ve only done around seven or so cover tunes live or in the studio; and most of those were only done once. All but one of those (June’s “Lena Champagne”) got recorded and will be in the online sound files. The only two that got played more than once were two that I paired together into a medley to end the set with; kind of a ‘chaser’/treat for the audience, lol, after having survived an hour of fractured pop and no holds barred space rock/noise. It was fun to play, and I think we put our stamp on it as well; turning Pink Floyd’s “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” from a multi-verse song in 4/4 time (a 3/3/2 feel) into a 1.5 verse abbreviation with pitch-shifted and echoed vocals done in 3/4 time which still retained a heavy psychedelic impact. Then we nestled it in between a rock-flavored impression of Miles Davis’ “All Blues”, already in a 3-based time signature (6/8), transposed to the key of A to start and end the number. Although not the best version we did (I had mis-set the vocal effects knobs in the dark and had to fix them mid-song), one night it was caught on video, seen above. Cover tunes are always a good option to keep in mind; whether for that extra song in the set, or as a learning tool to help you improve your playing and arranging skills.
You might not get back…to the Muse
Some writers and lyricists have a muse; others just go solo or have a co-writer to bounce things off of and consider the process a much more practical and grounded affair than do the muse-poets. Some only write when inspiration strikes or they feel compelled to do so; others adhere to a schedule. For myself, I’ve found that the writing music bit has worked well using just about any method, but the writing of many lyrics and spoken word pieces has actually been a muse-assisted process, and I’ve never really been certain how much of it to attribute to the relationships first described by Robert Graves. But by sticking to the habit of writing lyrics and poems only when inspired, I didn’t burn out; forcing words or turning it into a rote process.
Sure, I would always jot down good ideas or lines when they appeared, and could obviously finish up a piece that was mostly done when not feeling the ‘connection’ to an external source. But for what felt like more serious endeavors, especially multi-hour writing sessions once or twice a year, there did seem to be someone or something that would kind of ‘hold the door open’ across the Arch for my imagination. Then it was all up to my felt-tip pen to madly scribble it all down before the curtain closed.
Many times the inspiration, or fuel, was my earthly muse; and that (devotional?) mindset combined with the poet’s sharp eye in some kind of intense primitive or pre-Bakti ritual. It was pretty amazing; some of those days I cranked out four or five completed song lyrics and three or four spoken pieces in their entirety in one sitting. It really felt like a not-just-me experience, and many of those songs ended up being among my best ever, without having to add or edit a single word. Other days, you’d struggle just to get a decent verse or song title. So I don’t think people can just dismiss the muse-poet theory out of hand, but it’s obviously not how everybody works.
Video: Emergency Dessert Landing; World’s Largest Bundt Cake
What a crazy flight home we had after the holidays…
Our World in 2012
After some holiday visits and such, I’m back at my desk with some posts to round out the year. Today’s post is a neat encapsulation of the planet’s population and stats showing what our world would look like if we were reduced to 100 people representative of our current makeup. The site I’m referencing from, 100people.org, bills itself as a global educational toolbox and has a lot of neat info, pics, videos and stories of our planet’s now 7 billion human inhabitants. You can view the stats page here. The info has been updated and there are many surprising changes just in the last five years. Here’s what they’ve come up with:
If the World were 100 PEOPLE:
50 would be female
50 would be male26 would be children
There would be 66 adults,
8 of whom would be 65 and older83 would be able to read and write; 17 would not
7 would have a college degree
22 would own or share a computer77 people would have a place to shelter them
from the wind and the rain, but 23 would not
Experiments in Writing and Recording Music; intro
If no one ever experimented or tried new stuff out, we’d be a sorry lot living in caves with bare walls throwing rocks at animals to get ourselves dinner. No bows and arrows, no wheels, no electricity, no computers, no space travel, no web conference calls discussing neutrinos, no s’mores. There’s also a lot of utter crap we wouldn’t have to deal with as well: pollution, cluster bombs, advanced marketing techniques for someone’s useless trinket, GMO’s in your organic brown rice, PR firms and microwavable s’mores.
This applies to music, arts and philosophy just as much as it applies to technology, science and commerce. There will be inspiring innovations, and there will be crap in its wake as well. The larger point is about moving forward through exploration, curiosity and creativity. You’re not going to learn how to ride a bike until you try; and that includes some scraped knees and elbows along the way. But you’re not even going to be able to do that until someone’s curiosity and ingenuity invents the tires, spokes, handlebars and metallic frame first.
Experimentation in the arts isn’t generally viewed as being as crucial to humanity’s fate as advances in medicine, food development and technology are. C’est la vie. But some of the earliest attempts at communication (and all arts are at their core simply a form of communication), from wall paintings, carvings and music to storytelling, constellations and early attempts at written symbols have generated more than their fair share to our general welfare and advancement. And if you’re an aspiring artist, writer or musician, or even an established pro in the creative arts, at some point in your development you’re going to have to try new things or new ways of doing things as part of the learning process.
