Blink

What was "28 Weeks Later" is now Blink.

It sounds like the vocal volume is a bit erratic, but you get the idea.

I added that nice little synth when the drums hit. I really like that.

I have no desire to leave my computer, but I've been a bit of a shut in the last few days and have been ignoring my friends. Tomorrow is rehearsal for Kurt's recital all day. I'm going to see if in between sets I can get some lyrics done so that I can at least record them on Saturday. All things considered, I shouldn't really be complaining that I only got two demos finished today...

Keep your fingers crossed that I remain this motivated through the classes of papers I have to grade by Monday. If this is any indication of how productive I can actually be, methinks it's going to be an interesting summer.

Event Horizon

Strike while the iron's hot, I've heard. I know it isn't a new song, and if you see me somewhat regularly, the vocal part for this is quite old, but I reworked it much like I reworked "Slight of Hand" yesterday. New vocal recordings, some new parts, and a slightly varied arrangement.

You'll notice (if you haven't already) that I'm starting to work little intros into each song. While these may not stay, the idea is to give me an idea how some of the tracks may flow together. When the album is finished, I really want it to be a seamless listen from the first track to the end.

Now, "Insult Comic Dog" will be known as the far more formal Event Horizon.

According to Wikipedia.org (a website that students should not use as a direct source on any research papers), an event horizon is "a boundary in spacetime, most often an area surrounding a black hole, beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer. Light emitted from beyond the horizon can never reach the observer, and anything that passes through the horizon from the observer's side appears to freeze in place, with its image becoming more redshifted as time proceeds."

In unrelated new, I sent Kurt the multitrack file for "Dotted Lines and Whispers" last night. I'll be sure to post up any new sort of creation that comes out of it.

I think I'm going to take a walk. The weather seems like it's finally catching up with the calendar.

Slight of Hand

What the heck. I just had some delicious tacos, so why not post another song?

I had vocals done for this one a while ago, but I redid some of them and tweaked the arrangement today.

What was once "Hot Quiznos" is now Slight of Hand.

I wonder if this song will be forever lined to delicious foods.....

Dotted Lines and Whispers

I'm going to get over myself and start posting songs with vocals. As I may or may not have mentioned, these are demos, and there are going to be vocal issues, particularly with rhythm and pitch. If I feel the inevitable mistakes don't get in the way of giving you a decent impression of where the song COULD go, I'm not going to kill myself trying to get the perfect take.

What was "Hundred Year Nap" is now Dotted Lines and Whispers.

The picture seemed appropriate, seeing as it's my spring break and it's been snowing.

I think I'm going to try to get some vocals on an old one, "Sunday After Frank," that I wrote long before I started the blog. It's one that I've always felt had something worth uncovering in it. We'll see.

Vocals (EDIT)

This weekend, Maybe Bomb had a live rehearsal again; Kurt played drums, and my brother Jim and I played keys. In addition to the standard trio, Ken from West Gate was hanging out, and we got him to play keyboards with us so that we had less to back track. The ease of this process can almost solely be attributed to our new understanding of MainStage, a program that we foolishly thought was a throw-away that came with Logic. It took this video for us to see the light. The concept of actually performing this material live has never been so real.

Towards the end of practice, I played Ken some of the tracks he hadn't heard yet, including some with vocals. He got very excited and encouraging, and, to make a long story short, really lit a fire under me to actually finish more material.

I did a count the other day and realized that, musically, I have almost 30 songs completed, but only two have vocals. Since this is a project that I want to be performed as live, non-instrumental tracks, I have virtually nothing complete.

I'm actually doing something about changing this now. I'm focussing almost eclusively on writing and recording vocal parts for songs at this point.

I was, and continue to be, fairly hesitant about putting up these next two tracks. The vocals and lyrics were written and recorded hastily, often with my room mates trying to sleep or watch football in the background; the quality of the recordings and performances are all over the place, but they were just created to make a sketch of the songs.

It's interesting the way that I feel fine about putting really anything instrumentally on this site, but as soon as they have vocals and are (Animal Bop excluded), it becomes exponentially more personal to the point where I need to defend them and really question whether or not I want the world to have access to it.

I suppose the point of this website was to show you, kind reader, every stage of the music-writing process though, and, as self-conscious as I may be, being picky at this point would be a bit hypocritical. With that said, hopefully when the album comes out, you can look back fondly at how you heard it first and you heard how far it came along.

On that note, to encourage myself to keep them, I'm making public some New Year's Resolutions:
1- Finish an album plus worth of material
2- Record a Maybe Bomb album
3- Print the album
4- Make the album available through digital distribution (iTunes, Magnatune, etc.)
5- Play a minimum of five live performances (and pay-to-play none)
6- Get the music into the hands of personal influences and professionally influencial people in the music business

Here they are:
Hot Quiznos doesn't have a title yet, but 28 Weeks Later will now be known as Blink.

Like I said, these vocals are demos. They can and will be changed. Consider this square one.

In other news, I've gotten some complaints about the Yahoo music player that is embedded in this page. To be honest I don't know why it's there; I think it's kind of built in with Blogger when you have MP3 links on the page. If you want to download the songs, you can still do that- just right click the tracks (or control click if you're using a Mac... like you should be) and click save as.

(EDIT)
Color me a hypocrite, but I took the links down. Values-0, Self-consciousness-1.

Insult Comic Dog

For those of you who have been checking out the iLike page, you may have heard Insult Comic Dog (named after went from "Triumphant" to "Triumph" then insult comic dog - Conan O'Brien anyone?). If you haven't, I suggest you check it out in its instrumental form before you go much further.

I've had some really rough vocal concepts laid down for this song for a while now, so today I finally laid down some newer versions with some tweaks. As of right now, I'm really happy with the vocal parts I have. The recordings themselves could be better, but that's what demos are for. The first two verses and their lyrics are set. The third, as of this demo, is just a copy of the first to be a place holder. The bridge, where I repeat "It's just a dream" over and over, still has room for a more prominent vocal part between the repetitions. Maybe that part after the bridge will have a solo. I had a temp one, bt I could easily see this turning into a guitar solo live. I think Kurt and I tried that last time we got together and it sounded good.

I had fun using the vocoder on this track. Also, ultra-auto-tuning for that Cher effect is fun when you are going for the robot feel. Thos choruses, by teh way, have three part harmonies doing "Rainbows in a red sky falling down." Then I doubled those tracks to make six background vocal tracks, and then I doubled the lead and added an additional dropped octave of the vocal lead. Nine vocal tracks on a chorus. That's probably a personal record.

By the way, the harmony vocal part in the verse was Kurt's idea. He rules.

Enjoy.

Insult Comic Dog.