New song, someday

I started work on a new song today. I'm not going to say too much about it right now other than, if it ends up sounding as good in the real world as it does in my head, it should be fun. They never do, though. Or, they never end up sounding the same when they're done as they did in concept. They tend to take on a life of their own once I start to work on them. I don't have too much control over the finished product. At the rate things are going, it should be done by 2011, give or take. Hopefully, I will have solved the hosting problem by then. Unfortunately, I'm using new software (Logic,) due to the fact that the version of the software (ProTools) I had been using is now obsolete. Fortunately, it should be easier to learn this time around, but it is a more complicated program which should, ultimately, even though the learning curve is rather high, allow me to do more stuff more easily and with less expense. We'll see.

Impeach the Moron

In the event that anyone cares, I thought it might be interesting to give some background information about the music I put up here. If this is painfully dull, someone please tell me and I won't do it anymore.

I'll start with Impeach the Moron. This was the first real attempt I ever made at multitrack recording at home using a computer based system. It was a painfully long process since I could only work on it when I wasn't at work, a band rehearsal, gig, kid's school event, etc. Furthermore, there were four people in the family competing for the one computer we had at the time and I had to learn how to use some fairly complicated software and was constantly forgetting how make certain things work.

I wanted to do something to illustrate what a total imbecile we have in the White House and decided that The Moron, himself, could make the point much more eloquently than I could. That meant hours searching for audio clips. Some were easy to find (the White House website was one of the best sources) and some not so easy. For instance, the "I'm a war president" line was one that came from his Meet the Press interview. I knew it was out there somewhere, I knew the date it was broadcast, but I just could not find an audio clip anywhere. I got the feeling that someone, somewhere, didn't want me, or anyone else for that matter, to have access to it. I did find it eventually (thanks to On Lisa Reins Radar.) Then more hours sifting through them, cutting out the parts I wanted to use, arranging them so they sounded like a song (at least to me) and trying to match volume levels for each clip.

I started the whole business with a little piece I had written on acoustic guitar, but accidentally played it much slower than I had originally planned, but I ended up liking it that way. Then I added some percussion sounds. I used a large mixing bowl for the bass drum sound, hand claps, a little lizard-shaped percussion thing that Ms. Ether had given me, a doumbek, and wood blocks I had made for my kids from scraps I scavenged at work. A bass guitar track followed, then two more guitar tracks. Somewhere during this whole process I started dropping in all the Bushisms, continually adding, deleting and rearranging. When I though I had finished, or at least decided that it was time to call it finished, I enlisted Michael Massey, an immensely talented professional musician friend of mine and extremely nice guy, to help me mix it all together and show me a few tricks and short-cuts. Of course, it sounded fine in his studio, but after further scrutiny on other sound systems, I realized something was not right in the bass frequencies. There was a constant low-end rumbling that no one else seemed to notice, but once I heard it, it drove me crazy. I didn't really want to impose on Mike's time any further, and I think he may have thought I was having audio hallucinations, so I went ahead and tried to figure out where it was coming from. It ended up being on the original guitar track upon which the whole piece was built. The A-string was vibrating any time it wasn't being fingered. So I wiped out the track and recorded it over again differently, remixed it and that's pretty much it. I've sent the song around to places like Air America, but not many people have responded, so I don't know if they even bothered to listen to it. A member of the local chapter of Veterans for Peace asked me if they could use it at a rally and Greg at In Your Face Radio, an internet station, asked for permission to play it, but that seems to be all the interest it has generated to date. All that work! But it was fun, so what the heck. On to the next.

It worked!

It worked! "Impeach the Moron" will now play at the proper speed! Tomorrow, the world! You can hear it by clicking the triangle-shaped play button on the Quicktime player on the sidebar. If it doesn't work for anyone, it may be that you don't have Quicktime on your computer. If that's the case, you probably ought to have it and you can get it here.