Redoing “Up All Night”
Up All Night is another ten-year-old tune, the title song from my first album in 2003. Like the new arrangement of One Last Squeeze, this is re-done with a quartet setting.
Redoing “One Last Squeeze”
One Last Squeeze is a tune I actually wrote almost ten years ago, and released on my very first album, “Up All Night“, back in 2003. I’ve always thought this is one of my better compositional efforts. I decided to have a go at redoing it using the quartet format that I’ve been working with for the past couple of years. As I’ve been doing recently, I played the guitar and bass parts and programmed the keyboardand drum parts.
The guitar is my recently acquired Ibanez GB10.
It took a surprisingly long time to develop this arrangement, but I think it works pretty well. I’m always interested in comments. Of course I really like positive feedback, but honestly you do me a favor if you let me know if you think it doesn’t work.
Last New Tune of 2011
It’s called “Puff Up”. Nothing too profound here, just some easy-listening smooth jazz with maybe just a little bit of harmonic adventure. The setting is guitar, keyboard, bass and drums. The guitar is my recently acquired Ibanez GB10.
2011 Holiday Music — Lo, How a Rose Ere Blooming
This is a track from my recently released Christmas Album. It is a beautiful carol written by the German composer Micahel Praetorius (1571 – 1621) titled Lo How a Rose Ere Blooming.
2011 Holiday Arrangements – In the Bleak Midwinter
Every year I try to make some new arrangements of seasonal music. It is a limited universe, so I do sometimes wind up repeating myself with respect to the selections. I have a trio arrangement of In the Bleak Midwinter from a few years ago. This one is very different — a traditional jazz chord-melody setting.
The guitar is a 1983 Ibanez GB-10, played through an Acoustic Image Clarus 2R/Raezer’s Edge Stealth 12.
(In the Bleak Midwinter - arrangement notation)
Recording Acoustic Guitar
Since 1999, I have owned a very nice Martin OM-28V. I bought it new from Mandolin Brothers in NYC. I’ve recorded with it a bit in the past, but that was always touch and go. I am not very good at microphone recording and don’t have many to choose from. Plus, my studio is just my living room with no soundproofing and I have a large and loud German Shepherd who has been known to bark at inopportune times.
So, after all this time, I purchased a setup to allow direct recording. It is a Fishman Ellipse Aura, which combines an undersaddle transducer pickup with some digital enhancements. This setup required only minimal modification to the guitar and could easily be completely removed leaving nothing to reveal it had been there except for an enlarged strap-button hole. I had Mannella Guitars install it for me.
I took the output from the guitar and ran in into my Yamaha AG Stomp, which provides good EQ control and also allows a little reverb and echo to be added. This went straight into an Mbox and into the MacBook Pro to ProTools.
This entire process took about two minutes. I spent zero time tweaking. I think the sound is very good. I would not hesitate to put this “out-front” in a recording. See what you think:
Borrow or Rob?
Back to rock. This one came together fairly quickly. I started it Friday afternoon, finished the composing and arranging Saturday afternoon, recorded the bass Saturday evening, and recorded the guitar Sunday morning.
It’s called “Borrow or Rob”, a palindrome title that seemed appropriate considering the readily apparent influences.
The tune is straightforward enough. I played around a bit with phrases of various lengths to keep things a bit uneven feeling. The feel is straight rock, and the instrumentation my familiar guitar, bass, keys and drums with the guitar and bass parts being actually played and the others programmed.
We Few
It is something of a challenge to find time to compose and record during the school year when I am teaching as much as I do. However, the need (urge?) to make and create music remains, and on occasion becomes too strong to resist. When that occurs, everything but getting ready for the coming week of classes gets set aside so that I can compose and record (and getting ready for classes might get pushed into the latter stages of the weekend).
I started this little project last Thursday morning in Sibelius. The composition process lasted through the end of the day yesterday (Saturday), at which point I transferred it into ProTools.
This morning I recorded the bass part and after lunch the guitar part.
I had some very specific things in mind with this composition and arrangement. In particular, I really wanted to do a tune where the lead guitar tone was clean, undistorted, and without effects (other than some reverb and echo). I also did not want it to be a fat, straight jazzy archtop top tone, which is my usual alternative to a rock-based sound.
Fortunately, that worked out very easily. The guitar is my Anderson Short T. Dialing in the tone took about 5 seconds. The guitar pickup setting is the treble/middle “quack” position and it went straight into my POD Pro which was set to the clean channel on the Dumble emulation.
So here we have the result. The song is called “We Few”.
Studio Upgrade Part 6: As the Summer Winds Down (b)
I am still trying to get new material done before the fall semester starts in four days. Here we have a completed version of what was my “First Experiment”, referenced in an earlier post. This is the first thing I composed in Sibelius.
Subsequently I moved it over to ProTools and completed the recording today. I have given it a new name: “Camp Mac”, in honor of my MacBook Pro, which is where I run ProTools.
This is by far the most “Smooth Jazzy” of the things I have done using my upgraded studio. The lead guitar is my Orchid archtop, and the overall feel is pretty relaxed. As the others, it is a guitar, bass, piano and drums setting where I played the guitar and bass and programmed the other parts.
Studio Upgrade Part 5: As the Summer Winds Down…
…I am trying to get in as much composing, arranging and recording as I can.
Today’s result is a tune called “Tube Debut” (no, I have not run out of Palindrome song titles yet).
This one is a bit more on the smooth jazz side of things, featuring my Orchid archtop as the lead instrument. Everything else follows form from recent months: a guitar, bass, keys and drums group where I play the guitar and bass parts and program the others.
As with my other newer material, the composition/arranging work was done in Sibelius and the recording in ProTools. In ProTools, everything was done internally using plugins.
Studio Upgrade Part 4: An Almost Total Break from the Past
This is an all-new composition and recording. The tune is called “Stack Cats” (yes, another Palindrome title). The style is what I would call jazz-rock, set for my standard guitar, keys, bass, and drums quartet. As usual I actually played the guitar and bass parts and programmed the others.
What is new here is that this recording was done entirely using Sibelius and ProTools. I am still struggling a bit with them both, but am making progress.
On the Sibelius side, I’ve decided it works better for me on Windows than on the MacBook — largely due to the missing numeric keypad on the portable.
On the ProTools side, everything for the recording itself was done in ProTools after importing the midi file that I exported from Sibelius. Rather than using my Yamaha Motif ES Rack for the drum and keyboard sounds — as I have been doing for more than 5 years, I exclusively used plugins within ProTools for this purpose. The drums were done using EZ-Drummer and the keyboard using one of the soft-synths that comes with ProTools. I also used the reverb and compression plugins.
The quality sounds good to me, and there were no performance or latency issues — even with all the plugins loaded up.
For those of you interested in such things, for the guitar tone I used my Ethos Overdrive pedal.
See what you think:
Studio Upgrade Part 3: 2nd Recording Completed with ProTools/Sibelius Studio
This time, in the interests of spending my time focused on learning the recording studio tools rather than the writing process, I chose to record an arrangement of John Coltrane’s “Impressions”. It is structually and harmonically very simple. This tune was something of a “next step” after Miles Davis introduced the concept with the composition “So What” — which had only chord changes — no real melody. “Impressions” has a tune, however uncomplicated and repetitive.
I’ve also found that these “progressive” jazz tunes from the fifties and sixties take pretty well to being “Rockified”. I took a similar approach with Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage” for my album “Drawn Inward” — arranged for guitar, keys, bass and drums over a driving rock beat.
Here are the links to listen:
Studio Upgrade Part 2: First Recording Completed with ProTools/Sibelius Studio
I figured the best way to go about my first real test of the new studio software was not to write and record an all-new song.
Rather, I chose to recycle one of my previous tunes. I first wrote it for my 2006 album “A Step Along the Way“, where it received a highly-produced smooth jazz setting. I re-did it for my 2008 album “Just the Three of Me“, arranged for guitar, bass and drums trio.
This version falls between in the two, a fusion-ized approach for guitar, bass, drums and keys (my current format). I am pretty pleased with the musical result, given that the main motivation for doing this was to get to learn my way around the new software in my home studio.
The original title was “Just the Three of Us” — here I’ve retitled it as “Just the Four of Me” to reflect the quartet setting and the fact that I played or programmed everything myself (as always).
Studio Upgrade Part 1: Sibelius
The sudden death of the PC that was at the center of my home recording studio led to a dilemma: was it time to move into the Macintosh world for recording? The Mac is the Pro standard.
So, I got myself a new MacBook Pro and along with it, ProTools, which is the standard for recording, and Sibelius, which — along with Finale — is the standard for composing and scoring.
Getting the MacBook set up was a piece of cake. As with all Apple stuff, it just works. Adjusting to OSX is taking very little (but still some) adjustment.
I still have a long long battle ahead to get Protools working right, but after about 10 days of tutorials and trial & error, have gotten Sibelius working with my other studio gear and I am making progress in learning to use it.
No doubt it is super-powerful and puts the scoring capabilities of my prior PC-based software to shame.
Here is the first result of my work in Sibelius — a little tune called “First Experiment”. The first link is the the lead sheet generated by Sibelius. I think it looks pretty good: First Experiment – Tune.
This second link is a recording as it plays in Sibelius: http://home.comcast.net/~drahcir.nilknarf/music/FirstExperiment.mp3. Note that this is all straight midi — no live performed tracks or anything — so it is a bit stiff.
Still, I’m overall pretty happy with how this is going.
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