Jazz and Classic Pop Music

Redoing “Up All Night”

shufflocity — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:53:13 +0000

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.

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Redoing “One Last Squeeze”

shufflocity — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 21:22:50 +0000

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.

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Last New Tune of 2011

shufflocity — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 17:26:08 +0000

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.

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2011 Holiday Music — Lo, How a Rose Ere Blooming

shufflocity — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 18:42:15 +0000

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

shufflocity — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 23:12:52 +0000

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)

Christmas Album

shufflocity — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 11:18:04 +0000

My first ever Christmas album is now on sale. It is available from:

Recording Acoustic Guitar

shufflocity — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 16:00:27 +0000

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:

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Borrow or Rob?

shufflocity — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 14:20:25 +0000

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.

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We Few

shufflocity — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 17:41:11 +0000

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”.

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Studio Upgrade Part 6: As the Summer Winds Down (b)

shufflocity — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 19:36:40 +0000

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.

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