Studio Recap: Day Five

On Friday, it was time to evaluate our progress. Granted, this project is mad and ambitious, but when we sat down to make our to-do list I must admit I was awed by the sheer amount of work that remains for the next week. Luckily, we have an in-house drill sergeant (Joseph) who keeps us forging ahead:



Joe cranked out an accordion part for the pump organ song - now entitled either "Sunday" or "Sunday Looked Down" or suchlike - while Jonathan pounded out some drum ideas and I looked up types of frost formations on Wikipedia in the service of lyric writing.

The accordion work apparently was a breakthrough for Joe's lyric-writing and arranging of "Sunday." We also tried to record some backing vocals (I sang some multitracked ooh-aaahs), but we may discard them.

I finished a draft of the lyrics for "Slinkitzer," and threw down a scratch vocal that turned out rather well in my estimation. I may post a clip of the demo later today. Putting vocals on the track sparked some ideas for further work on the song. It is exciting when things start to come together.

We will start working later in the evening today, so I am going to try to write a post on songwriting, or maybe just lyric-writing. We'll see how it comes together.

Studio Recap: Day Four

Yesterday started with a bang because Joey found a violin. It only had three strings. (violins normally have four?) None of us know how to play, but we never let things like lack of skill prevent us from doing things that are awesome. Things like forcing poor violins to make beautiful awful sounds.

We also took some time to make some structural choices regarding the Wurlitzer-based song we started on Monday. It is useful, I have found, to decide which chord progressions will comprise the verses and choruses (and pre-choruses!) in order to facilitate the writing of lyrics.

But we also had to take a lunch break, and after lunch we were sleepy. Jonathan and I took refuge in our laptops:



Joe was working on music, apparently, whilst we basked in the screen glow.

I ran off to live room B to work on lyrics for the aforementioned Wurly tune provisionally titled "Slinkitzer." Jonathan usually gets to pick the working titles for the songs, which seems only fair, because the final names almost always come from the lyrics that Joe and I write. This way Jonathan gets some naming glory, but we also have to call the songs things like "Slinkitzer" (or "Slinkitizer," or "Slinksville") until we come up with the titles.

When I returned to the control room, Joe was ready to enlist all of us in vocals for the number he'd been working on. Even Jonathan sang!






Thus concludes the day four recap. Today I have made a list of everything we need to do in the next week and a half, and it is terrifying. So back to work I go.

Studio Recap: Day Three

Yesterday we spent our entire eight hours of studio time on the pump organ piece we started Tuesday night. First we made structure choices; we decided which parts would be called things like Verse, Chorus, Bridge, and my favorite, Pre-chorus. When the dust settled, we were happy to find that we had cut a 14-minute jam down to less than half its original length. Then the boys played some drums. Then Jonathan played some guitar. Then Joe tried some lyrics. Feeling good about it.

Here's a short clip:

Convey Demo by Listing

Studio Recap: Day Two

We started around 11am yesterday with Joe on drums. Accordion/guitar/wurlitzer jam in the afternoon. Took a break in the evening, then went over to Nick Sibley's studio and played the pump organ for a while. Productive day all in all - two or three potential new songs....

Studio Recap: Day One

Yesterday was our first day back in the studio this year. This is how we spent it:

Played with slinky
Kidnapped Wurlitzer
Bamboo tubes
Goof wheel guitar
Drums
Brainstormed words for lyrics
Bent Casio

Key words for the day were:
Capillary action
Propulsion

We worked for about nine hours, and at the end of the day we had a meandering noise jam. But if there is anything we learned from last January, it is that our songs never end up sounding like the first recordings. The slow sludge jam is expected to evolve into a short, sweet, and nasty little pop song.

We're off for day two shortly. Will post progress.

Soundwalk: Brooklyn Botanic Garden (Work in Progress...)

Soundwalk by Meg Kramer

Here's the current version of my soundwalk project. The music in the first track is an early demo of one of the Listing tracks...and that's me trying to overcome my congestion and recent laryngitis in the voice-over. I haven't really achieved my ideal here, but I'm getting closer. Here's what I wrote in my intro for my classmates:

In this version, I decided to take more control over the listener's encounter with this space.

I used the following strategies:

* I used the physical experience of the soundwalk form to alter the listener's consciousness in the space of the garden. The use of personal headphones creates a dissociative effect in the listener; the audio information they are receiving contradicts the evidence of their other senses. The movement through space at a predetermined pace creates an interesting tension between the active physical state and the passive - following instructions - mental state.

* I borrowed from radio ballad methodology by using found texts. In this case, rather than using the news, I used history, literature, and scientific writing as the building blocks of my script. The listener experiences the space physically, but is also placed in historical and cultural context.

Ideally, these strategies will result in an active, yet meditative, experience for the listener.

The Process

Sometimes I wonder why I am not a more prolific creative person. After all, I have ideas, drive, and a smattering of discipline.

Today, I believe I have figured it out. It's because my creative process looks like this:



and it works like this:
1. Write a bunch of stuff down.
2. Lose everything.
3. Find some pages, but not of what I'm looking for.
4. Acquire scissors.
5. Cut pages into pieces.
6. Explode them all over the room.


I bet Dickens didn't write all of his novels by cutting up little pieces of paper and exploding them all over his habitat.