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Album-a-day #25: everylyyly everyy must it & & than an
(04 Jan at 15:44) |
Happy New Year! Please enjoy the bold studio music sound of my 25th solo Album-a-Day, called everylyyly everyy must it & & than an.
Tom 7 album-a-day #25: everylyyly everyy must it & & than an
Like last time I got a massive response to my request for song title suggestions, using the Facebook. Thanks everylyylyone! Of course I couldn't use them all, but many of these are based on suggestions, and also there are many that made it as lyrics, or that I make oblique reference to in the lyrics. Hear it for yourself by putting the bold studio music sound in your ears, but you'll probably have to wait until tomorrow for me to post the lyrics, cuz I don't have internet at home due to a billing mishap which is a separate story.
Song key:
Why we don't allow eleven year-olds to run mining operations. Love this one. In these intense guitar-detuning and partial capo configurations, it's a miracle to be able to be able to find multiple parts with different feels, like the major-key chorus. Lucky. One regret is that I didn't let the improvized coda go on longer; I should know better because these often become a favorite part of the song (e.g. Poison Control.)
Sane clown posse ‽. I like the verse motif in this song. I wish it had a more distinct chorus, but I can only blame myself. Would have been called "hot interrobang" (interrobang is the ‽ symbol, which is like a contracted !? only used by nerds and tasteless typographers) by popular request, but I wanted to make sure that my favorite line in the song made sense, so it needs help from the title.
Once upon a tonic clonic. Techno dance party.
A mundane baking event that became a dessastert/confectastrophe level incident. Based on a true story from New York City that Copix or Spoons can tell you about.
Prophet solves the case (it was easy). I felt like this one was a little bit too sparse to be an instrumental, but too spacey to be filled with words, so it has the odd quality of having an instrumental "chrorus", but that doesn't make it less snoozy.
Sistema de entretenimiento de Tomas Siete. Sing me Spanish techno?
My brother's cat which is called Dr. Turtledog, Ph.D.. Mike and Erin are getting a cat and they've already decided to call it Dr. Turtledog, Ph.D., which was my idea.
Regretted purchase. If I was allowed to axe songs from Albums-a-day, this would be the one I'd axe, though it is not entirely without merit.
Watermelon Town, technically Watermelon Township. Okay, here you can really tell I'm making a logorrhea joke in general, because there's just no reason to clarify the incorporation status of this fictional township in the title, especially since that's never referenced in the song. But I do like the logorrhea jokes.
Mr. Natural vs. the Clothes Fascist. At the piano roll recently I have some ailment regarding triplets and polyrhythms. This worked out fine in Once upon a tonic clonic, but this song has at least three failed experiments crammed into it. Likable for a dumping ground though.
Wrecking the ghostlines. This mysterious title was Amy's suggestion. I like writing songs around mysterious titles because it helps me avoid my undesired tendency towards literalism.
* This asterisk coming up is a footnote, which should read "Actually I do endorse these two."
As always, the Tom7.org Foundation would like to remind listeners that the opinions or events expressed in lyrics do not represent the official position or behavior of the lyricist or singer-man (same), and that the Foundation does not endorse drug abuse (prescription or not), improper disposal of handguns, flouting of mining statutes, illegal fireworks or nudity*, or baking with the wrong equipment. Safety is the biggest rush. | |
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Song, scissors
(13 Dec 2009 at 10:18) |
 Here is another new T7ES song, Theme from alaplantine.
Also, remember those mega scissors from post 976 that allow you to shred important papers quickly and easily? Probably not. I do, though, so when I'm at my friend's house for dinner and he's like, guys, mystery time: WTF are these mega scissors that I found in the drawer and what are they for? I know the answer. And then I shredded an important credit card, which was not easy:
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New T7ES song: 12% of 360kb
(22 Nov 2009 at 17:37) |
New Tom 7 Entertainment System tune, 12% of 360kb.
Tom 7 Entertainment System - 12% of 360kb | |
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Sick Day video
(26 Oct 2009 at 09:31) |
Behold! A new music video by my band, Sick Ridiculous (&c.). Nels and I filmed this a few weeks ago and I just finally got the time to put it all together this weekend. The song is Sick Day, which is sort of our band theme song, and easily one of my favorites. Watch: Please consider watching in HD at Vimeo, or even downloading the 1080p original from that page. This is some life-size pro shit we're talking about here. The recording is new, too; get the Sick Day MP3 for your growing collection.
Also: We are playing this Thursday at Smiling Moose in the South Side, upstairs. We're opening for Sound Of Urchin (and others), who themselves opened for Tenacious D on a recent tour. Yes, we are now in the Six Degrees of Billy Joel territory. If you're in the mood to rock, come see us! The Facebook event has all the deets. Costumes encouraged. | |
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Death Row Candyland
(12 Sep 2009 at 11:32) |
Here's a new Tom 7 Entertainment System song, Death Row Candyland. It's possibly most ambitious one ever, except for the cover art:
Tom 7 Entertainment System - Death Row Candyland
I couldn't figure out how to easily get that diagonal candy cane stripe look in 10 minutes, so instead purely vertical bands which are like their own mini prison inside the letters.
Now you want to hear me overanalyze? This song is kinda like theme from rt2i in that I spent a lot of time on it (like multiple nights), a lot of which was on texture. This is highly unusual for me. I'd go back and listen to it and think, hmm, this particular transition seems to lose too much bass, and then fix it. I didn't stop until I listened through the whole thing and thought there were no undesired jarring moments, cheesefest notes, boring off-pace repeats, or missed opportunities. (Usually I just crap it out in an hour or two binge with all default settings, and hope for the best.) I like the song better than rt2i though because I feel like the basic tune is more sound. I started with what you hear in measures 1–28 (intro, intrigue theme, main echo theme) which loop so nicely and which would easily have been the whole song in 1999-era T7ES. I really liked the twisty uneasiness of the chords and (especially) the echo theme. So I decided to embrace and extend, and the end product has at least 5 distinct parts, and maybe counting the counterpoint something like 9 or 10.
Another way this is similar to rt2i is the way that the melody from the main echo theme shows up in 3 totally different places, changing its meaning each time. I am in love with this trick these days. (For sure it's in Zürich bigtime.) It is a good challenge to pull it off (usually it means adjusting something rhythmically or melodically, and can easily lead to a muddle if clumsy) and I think that the self-reference is so damn satisfying. IMO the part in the coda where the echo theme comes back (gently telegraphed in the square waves in the prior pattern) is completely fucking epic. To me in the narrative of the song it's like something odd but familiar finally making sense. | |
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Crapversity Marching Band – Upright Base
(06 Sep 2009 at 23:58) |
One of my longest time buddies (since I think 1998) Jason (aka jcreed) is leaving Pittsburgh tomorrow, having graduated and now needing a post-doc. In the spirit of doing things that we should have done a long time ago, we had a One Night Band, which was actually two nights, to write and record a song. Our band is called Crapversity Marching Band for our dream to some day make a university formed upon Crap Art philosophy and then to be its marching band. Here is our album cover:
caption: man plays drum with butter knives illustration: jcreed
MP3: Crapversity Marching Band – Upright Base
The song is called Upright Base. We wrote the chords together, me using the guitar and my illiterate florid language to try to try to describe what I was getting at chord-wise, and him with the keyboard eptly naming those funny fingerings and then being like, "Oh well if we have B♭m6 then obviously Dadd9 will go next," which is funny and also really useful when you get stuck off in chord lala land. Today we wrote the words and recorded it. Jason did the keyboard playing (basically improvising all that fancy shit on the spot) and I did the guitars and the singing. Jason was going to do some singing too but then he started guts-clutching like always and it was getting urgent since he needs to get up at 7am to drive to Philadelphia. So just me on sings. I think it came out pretty well.
Two more new recordings for other projects in the queue. | |
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Lausanne... Jealous?
(26 Aug 2009 at 23:12) |
Lausanne... Jealous? by Sick Ridiculous & etc. Photo Marcus S.
A few weeks ago our friend Donna successfully defended her thesis and threw a party, even waiting until a Tuesday night so that Nels and I could play at that nice party, so of course we wrote a song for the gig. It is called Lausanne... Jealous? because Donna is about to take a post-doctoral position at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. More than usual—which is saying a lot—this song is loaded with detailed in-jokes and difficult puns. I will provide some hints, since we received positive feedback about the fact that we did this before playing the song at her party. There are three national languages in Switzerland: (Swiss) German, French, and Italian. The Swiss invented the Swatch watch, which you are encouraged to wear multiple of on your arm, for fashion. (Nels and I predict a Swatch fashion resurgence, soon.) They also invented the Swiss Army knife and cheese. Donna always serves mostly cheese at her parties because she has a gluten-free diet. Donna's dissertation is about some objected oriented programming stuff. At EPFL she'll work on Scala, a maximalist language which combines all known programming ideas into one Java-like syntax. It was made by Martin Odersky, who also made a Java extension once called Pizza. That's probably enough to get you started.
Still in queue: ICFP contest report (very soon I'll even be able to include the final results, heh), new T7ES song, Pac Tom update, pics from various events. Shame. | |
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Sans Pellegrino and a bug
(23 Aug 2009 at 17:21) |
Here is a new T7ES song called Sans Pellegrino.
Tom 7 Entertainment System - Sans Pellegrino
— ❧ —
Related: I have been working on several different pieces of audio-generating software and hardware. One of my favorite things about doing this is the crazy ways that stuff can fail, and the unexpected sounds that result. My most current thing is some microcontroller-based sound generation for secret project EG. As part of testing it I created what I think is my first actual chiptune, in the sense that the music is generated by a microchip dedicated to the purpose, not some software emulator or hi-fi MIDI synthesizer. Here is Sensations (chip error); the sound quality is very bad because the only way I have to record this is to hold a mic up to a speaker. It starts out fine but goes to shit pretty soon. What's actually happening is that I'm not making the realtime deadline for emitting samples (chip is only 12mhz) because I'm doing too much computation when there are more than 2 notes sounding simultaneously. Because it's basically deterministic and only generating sound, this actually just slows down everything: the length of the notes and their corresponding pitch, by a factor depending on how many simultaneous notes there are. I had a good laugh about this.
I'm usually very careful when programming microcontrollers because it's way harder to debug than in a regular computer, if you get it wrong. I'm proud to report that this was compile/flash/test #2; the first didn't do anything because I forgot to increment the index into the song; the third worked exactly as I wanted. More on this project soon, I think. | |
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Theme from Zürich
(18 Jul 2009 at 15:05) |
Hi! Right now I am on a broken-cars adventure to Erie PA to run in a half-marathon on an island. I will definitely suck, even not wearing a costume. But then on Monday I am going to Zurich. So I wrote this Tom 7 Entertainment System tune called Theme from Zürich. It is pretty weird chord-wise but especially for its superposition of triplets and power-of-two rhythms. I also think it is kind of catchy.
irony alert: I know that Swiss Miss is not actually Swiss. (For example its logo would probably be in Helvetica) | |
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Album-a-day #24: Baking about architecture
(04 Jul 2009 at 22:47) |
Good day! It's a long weekend in the USA and like last year this time I recorded another album-a-day. It's called Baking about architecture. In music I only believe in one kind of cover:
This was a sort of interesting one. It was my first AAD with my new guitar, and also a new mic and preamp. I also more than usual scheduled this one mentally, somewhat in advance (and then withheld guitar from myself so that I'd be itching to go). The weirdest thing is that typically the first song or two I crap out is pretty bad and then later on I have these moments of inspiration. But this time the first was Eating buildings and then some one-minute throwaway thing that became A tribute to attributes and then Text me like where's Rite Aid at. Eating buildings and Text me like... are easily my favorites on the album (if you only listen to a few songs, make it those two.) I got excited by these early successes and spent a long time on them, particularly on lyrics, and then after five hours I was like jeepers I've recorded less than four minutes so far. After that I was a little burned out and had to pick up the pace. I have a new strategy, which is when I feel like a song isn't going so well, I just cut it loose, meaning I finish it but as quickly as I can and don't sweat it (0xCAFÉBABE), so that I can save time for those critical moments.
I have a bunch of new/different equipment and tech now, so I'm interested how you think it sounds from a production standpoint. Obviously I am really cranking the levels as usual; I am just trying to do my part in the dynamic compression arms race. If you are keen to this kind of thing you will notice a lot of punching in and out, which I hate the discontinuity of, but this was part of my expedient process of recording my lyric ideas and melodies as I was writing them so that I didn't have to put them down on paper/emacs so much or rerecord when I'd screw up one bit.
Production notes:
When I set out to make an album I sometimes solicit song titles and lyrics ideas. This time I did it on Facebook and got loads; there were too many to use but lots of these are named by suggestions. Some made it in as lyrics, too.
Eating buildings.  I really like this one and it's an obvious opener. Lotsa good lines, and probably the best-recorded guitar one. Eating Buildings is the team name we usually use for puzzle competitions, but this song is more literal.
A tribute to attributes. The only two redeeming things about this song are the title (though not really that clever) and the part where I list some things and their attributes, which depending on what circles you roll in you may be able to figure out. I sandwiched it between my two favorite songs so that you get it over with quickly. (Also then the first 3 are in chronological order.)
Text me like where's the Rite Aid at. Everything really came together for this one. I discovered a new music fact: Triplets are super danceable, particularly when syncopated with some "regular" power-of-two stuff (the "you were so beautiful..." part).
It's so mutual. You can tell when I'm starting to feel impotent on the guitar because I start detuning it, but then you get these drone zone ditties where it's impossible to be catchy. It's not bad, just a snoozer.
Love, train & rust, wrench. Usually during the course of the day at some point I'll pick up the guitar and a song will come to me without any obstacles or anything. These are always refreshing. Max gets credit for the best line, "Sacajawheel-'o-fortune". Note that all of the electric guitar parts in the last 4 songs I've posted on T7 Radar are extremely blaring. I do know how to turn it down, but it's currently set up that way and I just think it's so funny!
Helpy, Invert, Soft Pinky & Flexoid. As my synthesizer ages (now about 15 years old, making it almost vintage) it's interesting to see how useless its once hi-fi General MIDI patches have become. I spend all my time in the extended zone mining it for delightfully ironic fake-sounding stuff like "Tron Flute" featured prominently here.
I'll be acquitted. This is this week's songfight. In songfight, internet people all write a song with the same title and then the songs "fight" with voting. A whole week to write a song is way too snoozy for me, but I like those guys and sometimes do the songfight song when making an AAD.
Mosquito romance. This song was built around this musical element seen in the first bar, which is an increasingly thick series of chords (1 finger, 2 finger... 7 finger) followed by an abrupt faint simplicity. It works great right before the switch to "Malaria..." but the rest of the time it just makes the individual parts seem disjoint so that the song doesn't flow very well. I still like this one.
0xCAFÉBABE. This was the most painful one, when recording. I just couldn't come up with any lyrics or melodies beyond the opening "Cafe babe!" which is annoying after pretty much the first time. You can tell when I just start doing 59th St. bridge song stuff, barely even trying. (Listening back, it's not really that bad.)
You mean FIRENZE?. This was a song title suggestion, which means I don't know if it's an overzealous correction about the local name of Florence (I imagine some high schoolers on a big trip for their Italian language class and there's the one kid who insists on speaking even English in an Italian accent when over there, and has even taken up smoking for cultural accuracy) or whether basically the same image but about Harry Potter fandom. Features my signature 2K+-era sine wave add-chords, a style I like to call "DTMF Jam".
Why won't it melt?. Speaking of Def, about a month ago I first realized what "Mos Def" means. The best science pun in this song, which is ungettable unless you read the lyrics or I tell you now, is about the Mohs hardness scale.
Themes (gotta catch 'em all): Non-human creatures in love Things being black Car crashes Love perimortem French words Sudden abrupt quiet during techno
Now get album. | |
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