Two new – and very very different pieces.
Porch Blues – you know, marginal blues from the front porch… if your porch has a piano like mine does.
Intractable – A sort of light jazz/funk confection with lots of vibe and a flugelhorn.
Read more… it is a fun story.
I don’t recall how Intractible started… but it ended up sounding “cool”. So I had to come up with a cool name for it. A name that people would convery the coolness – just by the title. So… what’s cool… what’s cool… ?
Aha! Computational Complexity Theory! Everyone knows that stuff is pretty cool!
An Intractable problem is a kind that we should be able to solve… but can’t.
Oh, originally, I had an alto sax on the lead line, but it turns out that a flugel is much more forgiving in this context. (it has a mushier attack characteristic)
—
Ahhh… Porch Blues. Here’s the story: It is 1:10am localtime, and I get an email from Australia.
Hi Kevin,
I’m making a short student film, and Im in great need of a slow blues
track..sort of that “on the porch” feel. You dont have anything like that
do you (or know where i could find one)? It would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Josef
Well… no, I don’t have one. I offered to do a piano solo, but he was thinking guitar and harmonica.
Knowing it wouldn’t work for the guy – I needed a break and decided to try to make a blues piece.
Step 1) Record piano.
Step 1a) Throw out recording due to it being terribly out of meter.
Step 2) Attempt to find a Blues template. (why is this so hard?)
Step 2a) Settle for what the application labled as “Blues”, put in some chords, export.
Step 3) Import into the real application.
Step 3a) Throw out all the chords, leaving a Blues “click-track”.
Step 4) Record guitar part.
Step 4a) Fix my bad guitar part.
Step 5) Record piano part… a few times.
Step 5a) Fix piano part.
Ok! Now I have a not-at-all porch-sounding piece of blues. They just don’t make a good harmonica synth.
So… Aha! Tenor sax! I put that in. Twice. Fixed it. It just sounded terrible.
I hunt around the house for a harmonica. Woohoo! I gots one! In the wrong key! G harmonica… ok, transpose the project to D.
What step is this? 14?
I finish it off with a couple of takes into the condenser mic (this is more step than you’d link because I have to reconfigure the entire computer’s sound to switch from ASIO Midi to analog recording.)
Delete remaining vestage of the drums; Add reverb; Mix Levels; Send Email; DONE!
Elapsed time: 53 minutes.
You’ve been such a cool guy, and your music has saved my movie twice now (I was
ready to give up, seeing how much the production music libraries charge for
their low quality music).
Well… That was fun!
Signed,
Your local, worldwide lightning composer.