Extra drowsy Formula

Half Empty Waltz

MetaFilter’s own es_de_bah takes over vocal duties on this one — I didn’t feel like I was the right person to sing it, and so I spent some time going through the “Music Collaborator” Mefi Wiki page until I found someone who would be. (It was his excellent song “a perfect preservative” which made me consider him in the first place.)

In addition, my dad plays trumpet; I play Magnus chord organ, flute, and interesting percussion. It’s a waltz.

Technical notes: The chord organ is this one. Emily found it out in an alley with someone’s garbage; it just needed a new power chord, is all. You can hear the fan whirring up to speed just before it comes in.

There are two trumpet tracks — one played with a mute, one without — and I think three flute tracks (they sort of mush together). There’s also a piano in there but it may be a little difficult to pick out unless you know what it’s playing already.

The percussion: there’s a cymbal hit while sitting on the floor and then slowed way down, a triangle pitch-shifted and distorted, and a stalk of celery being twisted in half. It’s fun to make your own noises.

Thanks again to Rob (es_de_bah) for agreeing to work with me on this one. Enjoy!

By request, I recorded a cover of “The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side” by Magnetic Fields.  It’s over here.  Listen to the original here.

Download high-quality version here.

I played toy piano and marimba on a cover of Yo La Tengo’s “My Little Corner of the World” by an Argentinian fellow named Alantl, whom I met through MetaFilter.  Listen to the song over here.

Here’s a song that I sing to my cat, who, like the song, is named Henry Pants. Because he has a lot on his plate and a short attention span besides, this song is less than a minute long. It features autoharp, glockenspiel, and the “Min-O-Matic” rhythm box.

Fun Facts:

1) The “choked” autoharp in the beginning is achieved by holding down two chord buttons at once, so that the only undampened note (F, in this case) is the one common to both chords (F and Bb). Mechanics!

2) I slowed the song down a little bit in order to sing the harmony part. (I sped it back up again afterward.)

3) Everything in this song is hard-panned. The lead vocals are up the center, autoharp all the way to the left, and everything else all the way to the right. (There’s a little bit of autoharp on the right, too, because I forgot to unplug the monitor speakers when I recorded the harmony vocals.)

4) This is a fun song to sing. You can sing it to your cat (or dog! or…hamster?) if they have a name that rhymes with “Pants.” If you are not so fortunate, I guess you can sing it to this picture of Henry Pants, himself.  Here are the words.

Just in time for Election Day! “Which Would You Rather Be?” is a nice song to sing on your way to or from your local polling place. (If you sing it at the polling place — or at work, or really in any polite company — you will be frowned at, at the very least.) If you’ve already voted, that’s okay — you can sing it while watching the returns, or simply learn it for next time. If you’re not in the United States, that’s okay, too — it will probably still apply.

This is what I did on Sunday, mostly, and finished up just now.

Autoharp, vocals, “Dr. Groove” drum machine, and the Alesis Micron for bass & organ. (I’m using my Shinybox ribbon mic for vocals and I’m pretty happy with it so far.)

The words are a couple of years old but apart from a vague melodic idea this is all new as of last weekend.

Inspired by Brutalist architecture, here is a Lullaby for Stalin: “Treehouse“

I never intended to record this song — the lyrics were tosed off on a lark ten years ago — but due to a “write a children’s song about bugs” challenge over on Metafilter, I wrote some new music and whipped this together in a few hours.

That’s the fastest I’ve ever recorded a song, I think, and it’s made me think about the value of stripping down the arrangements and actually getting things done.

Autoharp, drum machine (pitch-shifted or distorted or something, I think), and 4 vocal tracks, all recorded with the Copperphone.

“Too Late to Sleep” is perfect for your next narcoleptic dance party. It may be the only song in the world to feature both the Stylophone and the Violin-Uke.

This song (but not this recording, which is new and fresh) dates back a decade or more; I recorded an early version on 4-track cassette out at the farm. The drum track is actually from that cassette — it’s a drum machine, recorded on the flipside of the cassette and then flipped back and played backward, and now sampled off the cassette and looped. It’s actually in stereo, with one side offset by half the loop length, but it’s a little hard to tell.

When I originally recorded this song, I made extensive use of a hypnosis record that was kicking around. I’m not sure where it is now, so I decided to make my own. My friend Peter Gunn (not the fictional one) recorded the hypnotist’s voice and I added record pops and keyboard.

There’s also piano (a real one! but, again, looped) and Autoharp, of course, run through a Gibson Skylark tremolo amp. The Violin-Uke (which is neither) shows up in the bridge and the Stylophone appears soon after.

The vocals are recorded through a Copperphone mic,which has a nice old-timey quality to it that I am really enjoying. Words are here.

Warm up some milk and enjoy.

Over on MetaFilter Music they’re having a “cover another MetaFilter-ite’s song” challenge this month. Here is my contribution.

As I say over on the MeFi page:

The rhythm track is the “Rock 2″ preset on the Realistic Concertmate-200 (a clone of the Casio VL-1). Other keyboards used include the MicroKorg, Korg Poly-800, and Kawai X40. Oh, and a marimba.

This also marks the debut of my new EWI 4000 (which I bought with my stimulus check — thanks, Mr. President!), a MIDI wind controller — it’s like a synthesizer in the shape of a soprano sax. So, yeah, I used a sophisticated electronic instrument to make a sound like a cheap, distorted tin whistle — that’s how I roll.

To hear the original, click here.

“When We Were Small” has been kicking around for several years but I could never get around to finishing it. Then I bought a marimba and a vibraslap and it finally mostly came together.

There’s also autoharp and various percussion — fingersnaps, rolling dice — and Sue sings the la la las.

At the very end there’s a Pling Plong, which is a sort of do-it-yourself music box.

Words are over here.

Most of the songs I write tend to have a I-IV-V chord progression. I write songs away from any instument at all, at when I pick up the autoharp, hey! it turns out that it’s I-IV-V. I’m well aware that this is a limitation.

To combat this, I bought a book called Chord Progressions for Songwriters — it’s a list of tons of chord progressions, and it gives examples of songs that use them and classifies them — “folk,” “blues,” whatever.

I flipped through it and found a “Doo-Wop” chord progression — I-VIm-IV-V — not too different, but the addition of that VIm chord, sure enough, sounds like an old Doo-Wop song. So I started playing it (in this case, F-Dm-Bb-C) and making up silly words about sock hops and stuff. And one of the things I sung was the line, “when my baby was mine.”

That, I thought, has to be the name of a song already. But I couldn’t find evidence of it existing. So I figured I should write it. Here it is.

I would normally never write a song called “When My Baby Was Mine.” But this messing around with a — for me — totally new chord progression tumbled me in a direction that I would normally never go. I deem this Experiment #2 — force yourself to find a new chord progression. See where it leads.

Instruments include autoharp (one fairly clean, one distorted and pitched down an octave), drum machine, and a Q-Chord during the bridge. Words are here.