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NEW: album-a-day #16: Isabel "Refuses to Weaken"
(14 Sep 2003 at 21:47) |
I have another new album up. This one is called Isabel "Refuses to Weaken" and I made it in about 7 hours total.
I also just found the site Song Fight! which is a similar idea to album-a-day, except that the participants get a lot longer to make their music. |  |
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| Why would you use Isabel when you have Twelf? |
| Heh heh... I hadn't even thought of that interpretation. |
| For some reason, Dance reports itself as one length (217 seconds in my winamp) but when you actually play through it, it turns out different--only 153 seconds long. (You've listed it as 227.) |
Indeed, VBR mp3 files screw up winamp's length estimation (and other players I've used). It was showing up as over 10 minutes on mine until I started playing. Perhaps it starts with a really low bitrate frame, so it assumes the rest of the file is encoded similarly.
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| Do you have somewhere that explains how to decode your chord info? Mainly I'm confused what the less-than-six-digit numbers are. (And how do you make a partial capo on only the DGB strings?) |
Oops, sorry. I recorded this album as fast as I could, so I almost didn't bother writing down the chords. I think that if there are just a few numbers, then that means that the rest of the strings should be xxxxx. Sometimes it might just be adjustments to the previous chord. If you care enough about a particular song I'd be glad to figure it out again and fix it up!
To do arbitrary partial capos, you need one of these:
http://www.thirdhandcapo.com/devices.html
Elderly instruments sells them for like $3 bucks, and I highly recommend them...
There are also "short" shubb-style capos that you can use to hit a few adjacent strings, but these are more versatile and also easier to play "on top of." |
| I guess you pronounce "$3 bucks" as "three dollars bucks." |
It was more an "I am curious" than a "I'm actually trying to learn these songs"--I just had noticed the same thing (less than 6 digits) in the previous album's notes too, so I was curious.
Ok, that Third Hand Capo is cool. Clearly you want two so you can capo different strings at different frets. Or maybe three. Or four. |
| Yeah, I got two. Usually that and a regular capo is all you could possibly need... |
| By the way, good one on Font of Wisdom. I fully appreciate 32768NO. |
I like this new AAD real good. Mostly all good songs, and some super good, and only a couple sucky.
My favorites (in order of most favoriteness) are: Dance!, Takin' Picturez 'N Da Dark, Eat Anything, Catz (Condensed 4 Luv), Beauty Queen Cigarrette, Same World, Fifth, Back 2 Western.
Dance! is mega favorite.
Only Drink Netscape and Cinaminimum suck (especially Cin), but at least their really short. |
| Oh, and Da New F-Zero is funny, I like that one. And I meant "at least they're really short" above. |
Oh yeah, and speaking of how Dance! rox, how deh fuc do I figure out über-cryptic tablature?
-2-2000-2
dgdgbd
Yeah like I'm supposed 2 know wuddafuc that says... |
Thanks, yeah, Cinaminimum sucks. I knew it when I was making it, and I was just like, "let's get this over with," and hoping that perhaps I'd come to like it later, but, nope, it sucks.
-2-2000-2 is the tuning for that song. drop d on both e strings, and also bring the a to g, giving you dgdgbd. Unfortunately, it doesn't say how to actually play it. Maybe I will try to re-figure it out. |
Oh, those numbers were supposed to be the tuning! Dang, NO ONE writes tunings like that. It looks kind of like how some folks write tablature for a chord, where the - would indicate "don't play that string." So it looks like tablature for a chord played on a 9-string guitar where you would mute the 1st, 3rd, and 8th strings; fret the 2nd fret of the 2nd, 4th, and 9th strings; and play the rest of the strings open.
Anyway, if you could re-figure out Dance!, that would be sweeet. I tried a little with the tuning, but couldn't figure it out. |
How do people write tunings? Anyway, if you don't have a 9-string guitar you are definitely not going to be playing my sweet ass songs.
I put basic tabs for "Dance!" in the lyrics file, just for you. |
Thanks for the elaboration! I got a 12-string guitar here that I've been playing it on, so that's working out well, it's hella mighty sounding now. The only part I don't get is this:
other part:
d ---------------------------------------------------------------
g -0-0-0-5-4-0-0-0-0-0-0-0---------------------------------------
d -5-4-0-0-0-0-5-4-0-0-0-0---------------------------------------
g -0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-5-4-0-...-----------------------------------
b ---------------------------------------------------------------
d ---------------------------------------------------------------
Where is that in the song? It just don't sound like nothing in there to me when I play it...
P.S. - People usually write tunings the other way that you did, like dgdgbd.
P.P.S. - "First against the wall" means U DIE!!!
P.P.P.S. - U not first against the wall. |
Between the second time the "intro" part plays but before it goes back to the "rocking" part. I may have got the 0's wrong, but the 5-4-0 is definitely there.
dgdgbd is a crappy way to write tunings, cos, how do I know which d? Also, since I just barely even know the names of the strings, it's much harder to tune to a specific note. I used to write tunings as differences between adjacent strings (standard tuning would be 55545), since I would sometimes tune the guitar but then not know what I did! But that way has its problems, too...
Have you seen these guitars that you just hit a button and it tunes it for you? And it can set all sorts of crazy tunings?? I want that shit, but also with partial capos for any string on any fret arbitrarily, and I want to be able to switch that during the song, HELL YES! |
I think the reason why dgdgdb works okay is because, while it might seem ambiguous on paper, given that you don't have a whole lot of leeway with how far you can tune strings without them snapping or becoming really loose and losing all sustain, it's usually easy to figure out. But anyway, if you're making notes for yourself, of course whatever works best for you is fine! But the outside world (i.e. me) had trouble with it...
I haven't seen those magic button guitars, damn, that's pretty crazy. I wonder if they have any programmed in sense of allowable range, or if I could go into the guitar store and set them all to tune to ridiculously high notes, push the buttons, and watch all of the necks and strings snap? |
| Haha, yeah, I hope they have some sense of reasonable range, because they cost like six berjillion dollars. |
This is the company that makes 'em, and they got an auto-tuning Gibson Les Paul for $4500: http://www.selftuning.com/index2.htm
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| That's not the same kind as what I saw, but it is the same idea. I guess $4500 isn't *that* ridiculous, given what les pauls cost anyway.. |
I'd like to know your recording settings, what kind of mics do you use, how do you record the acoustic guitar, are you using other parts like a compressor? I really like the way the album sounds.
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I'd like to know your recording settings, what kind of mics do you use, how do you record the acoustic guitar, are you using other parts like a compressor? I really like the way the album sounds.
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| BF5, on this album I used my brother's Microphone, a MXL V93M condenser, through an M-Audio preamp and recorded on my crappy on-motherboard sound card. I am using compression and equalization plugins (and sometimes, other more interesting plugins) inside Wavelab, which is what I used to record it. I actually didn't put practically any effort into the sound, because I was trying to record it as fast as possible. My general recommendations are to use a condenser mic and preamp, and then compress tastefully. |
I don't know if you get automagic reports when somebody posts here--if not, dunno if you'll ever see this--but I forgot to check back on previous posts comments, so I missed when you said a nice thing about Font of Wisdom and 32768NO, so here's the response...
32768NO was just an amazing discovery that all three 5-digit powers of two worked in standard tuning. (Of course, had they not, maybe I'd have tried an altered tuning.)
On the electric guitar side of the fence, I use a Roland VG-88, which is a supposedly-physical-modelling processor that processes each string separately (through a guitar synth pickup), so one of the things it can do is pitch shift each string independently. I'm usually in too much of a hurry on AADs to do any programming, though, so I just use whatever's there, and I haven't been much of an "experiment with altered tunings" person generally (although in part that's because it's horribly confusing if you can still hear the (normally-tuned) string acoustically when you play it, which I can at reasonable volumes, so I'd have to wear headphones for it to work--and in part because when I'm not recording I usually just play on the electric without turning anything on.)
"March/April Time" on "Suggest a Title 2" uses a factory patch which is tuned down by two whole steps (called "capo -4"), and two other of my AAD songs used the VG-88 to tune down an octave, but that's the extent that I've done anything with it. I guess I should program a bunch of new patches in advance of my next AAD. |
| Huh, cool. Hex pickups might be a cheap way to get the auto-tuning guitar I've always wanted... |
Well, except the VG-88 isn't THAT cheap... $1000 when I bought it. Throw in a Les Paul with a hex pickup and you might be hitting $4500 anyway.
Ah for the days when I made $90K. |
| Yeah, I'm thinking of software solutions.... |
| Except really I like acoustic guitars much more than electric ones, and the only auto-tuning acoustic guitar is $14,500...! |
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