Redeem Your Lyrics With a Memopad

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Get Started Building Your Own Instrument

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Improve Your Songwriting With Odd Timesignatures

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Odd, Unusual, and Downright Weird Instrument Links

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Modal Interchange Demystified

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Microsoft Songsmith Commercial Wreaks Havoc on Psyche

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Make Your Songs the Best

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Look to the Past For New Sounds

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Can You Make a Record In One Month?

Go ahead … what’s stopping you? That’s the tag-line of The RPM Challenge; a one month, one album challenge in the vein of NaNoWriMo. This takes place in February so you have a little over two weeks to get your mojo going.

This is the challenge: record an album in 28 days, just because you can.

That’s 10 songs or 35 minutes of original material recorded during the month of February. Go ahead… put it to tape.

Don’t wait for inspiration – taking action puts you in a position to get inspired. You’ll stumble across ideas you would have never come up with otherwise, and maybe only because you were trying to meet a day’s quota of (song)writing. Show up and get something done, and invest in yourself and each other.

Anyone can come up with an excuse to say “no,” so don’t!

For a complete description of the challenge read more …

 

How Can You Live In an Instrument?

Continuing on the theme of an earlier post on unsual instruments here is this awesome musical house. It seems that someone decided to make their house into an instrument, or a house sized instrument depending on your perspective.

All the Architectural instruments are based around strings. The Architecture becomes the structure, bridge and resonator for these giant stringed instruments. Specially developed brass wire and piano wires are used as “the strings” of the instruments. The use of long string technologies developed by Bill Close allow for the instruments to be architectural in scale. The complex patterns of strings are extension of the architectural lines of the house and become an integral part of the visual experience.

 

DIY Musical Mayhem

For those with a DIY bent, Instructables.com has a group devoted to audio projects. While there are many projects related to iPod speakers, there are some projects more related to music production. Take the Looper for instance. Many a time when I’m diddling on the guitar I come up with a lick I’d like to expand upon. It’s a bit of work getting set up to record, then edit on my computer just to loop a lick so I can jam over it. I don’t want to break the mood, I’d rather just stomp on a button to punch in and out then continue on vamping. Check out the cool Bass stick too. Making your own instrument is an awesome way to bring fresh creativity to your music as you try to find a place for it in the songs you compose.

 

Say NO to Angst

The following is just a short list of words whose inclusion in lyrics I feel should be seriously considered, rather than haphazardly sprinkled in.

While some are overused, others too obvious, most are blunt and do not convey any craftsmanship that may be present in the lyrics. In short, they’re a turnoff. As soon as I hear one of these words my expectations just drop. That’s not to say these words can’t be used well, but the more of them included in one piece, the less likely it is that the work is a brilliant gem.

When writing one should strive to ’show’ and not ‘tell’. The writing then takes on a more experiential tone and not one of a third grade book report on a teenager’s breakup letter. I felt used, then I felt angry, then I felt … blah, blah, blah. One can only hope that producers in the recording studio would have an intervention before anything was committed to tape. Alas, all too often terrible lyrics slip out into the wild and sully what would have been a perfectly listenable song.

The List:

Dark, Darkness, Black, Night, Pain, Hurt, Broken, Sad, Angry, Rage, Feel, Love, Understand, Cry, Tear, Empty, Cold, Stone, Want, Alone, Care, Blood, Hide, Mask, Heart, Everybody, No one, Run

 

Punk Rock Robots Pogo to the Music

BBC reports on robots that have learned to appreciate punk music. I like this story because it combines two of my favorite subjects. As far as building robots that evaluate music goes it’s an interesting reversal on the usual endeavor to have machines perform or write music. In the sci-fi vision of the future could there be a robot audience to a robot band? I can only see this as furthering the ability of computers to generate songs. If they have an ability to judge the musicality of a piece then by using genetic programming algorithms or even using a Monte Carlo approach there ceases to be a need for human interference guiding the process.

The robots can decide whether a song is punk or not within 30 seconds.

“It depends on the form at the beginning of the song. It flicks between thinking a song is punk and not punk at the start and then becomes convinced,” said Mr Jones Morris.

Professor McOwan added: “If you look at the audio cortex in the brain and the cochlea in the ear you find that’s exactly how the human system does it.

The robot reacts to the level of “punk” in the song.

The more punk it believes the song is, the more it pogos in a “happy and frenzied way”, said Professor McOwan.

Read more ….

 

Wire me up!

I went to Seattle recently and while there I took in the Experience Music Project. One of the most interesting exhibits was the history of the guitar. But of particular interest to me was the display of early electric guitars.

Modern music has much to owe the electric guitar. Electric guitars brought with them the opportunity to modify a sound in ways previously unimaginable. Once the sound waves were converted to an electrical signal, that signal could be altered in a manner that would be impractical, or impossible if one were working on the sound waves alone.

If you would like to know more about the history of electric guitars then you can read about them on answers.com as they do a much better job of relating the history than I intend to go into here. My interest lies in how electrification changed the face of music.

Every instrument has an amplifier of sort. Some part of any instrument takes the vibration of the signal generator and amplifies the amount of air it moves so as to make those vibrations more audible. In many stringed instruments it happens to be a box with some sound holes cut into it. Even now, most electric guitars have a solid body and are very quiet when not plugged in as the guitar body make a lousy resonator.

The amplifying element of an instrument is often responsible for the timbre of that instrument. It’s what makes a French horn sound different from a trombone even though both cover roughly the same range of fundamental frequencies.

The configuration and material of the resonator emphasises or attenuates different harmonic frequencies so the final complex waveform produced is of a particular character, distinguishable from one instrument to the next.

Early guitar effects were the result of limitations in the amplifier to faithfully reproduce a sound wave. In the sixties some musicians began boosting the signal from the guitar to the limit of the amplifier. This was accomplished by using pre-amplifiers to overdrive the gain or by simply raising the volume on the amp until it started to distort.

High gain signals would saturate the valves causing the top and bottom of the signal wave to be clipped off. In other words the signal amplitude would actually go higher if it were allowed but limitations of the electronics, or even physical limitations of the speaker being extended or retracted completely, disallowed this. What would normally be a sine-wave ends up looking more like a square-wave (A simplification, I know. Look here and here for a more in depth treatment).

Another way musicians would change the sound coming from the amplifier would be to tear, cut, or punch holes in, the paper cone of the speaker. This would give the guitar a fuzzy quality, a sound that was later packaged up in a stomp box saving countless speakers from such unspeakable horrors.

With the advent of the transistor and its subsequent use in pre-amps and amps, a harder clipping quality was brought to overdrive distortion as the transistor had different saturation characteristics than vacuum tubes. The sharp edge of its clipping meant that the resulting signal contained more of the higher level harmonics than tubes which then translates to a ‘colder’, sound.

In any other application all this would be considered a bad thing. For some reason having an amplifier that doesn’t accurately reproduce the signal it is being fed became a desirable thing. The coloration and tone that was introduced into the signal by the way in which amplifiers distorted the signal represented a shift in what an amplifier’s purpose was to the electric guitar. In effect, the amplifier became part of the instrument in a way that transcended mere soundboard status. Given the nature of the guitar/amplifier relationship you could now change the timbre of the instrument at will just by choosing another amplifier or by turning a dial. This ability was of monumental importance in the history of music. Never before was there such ease and flexibility in choosing the tone of an instrument.

To be sure, distortion in amplifiers was an issue long before it was put to musical use. Seeing as guitars were first electrified in the 30’s and distortion effects were being used in music during the 60’s one may postulate that it was the change in musical styles that informed the listeners as how they should perceive this distortion. Rock-and-Roll emerged in the 50’s at a time when the electric guitar was first mass marketed. Being the musical style that began to capitalise on these effects in the 60’s it only seems fair to place blame on the miscreant youth. The combination of rebellious music, and now a viable instrument that can be made really loud, were the perfect conditions for distortion to be used productively. Rock and electric guitars go hand-in-hand and in part this match is enabled by the effects pedal. Nothing says “I’m rebelling” quite like the harsh tones of an amp that is being used the “wrong” way. It’s certainly nothing that Benny Goodman would approve of.

It seems to me as though the quest for novelty exploded in the 60’s and to stand out above those who employed guitar effects you had to do ever increasingly bizarre things to your sound. It was a blessing that the guitar was electrified as you could now interject devices into the signal flow that could modify the sound in wild ways. The sound of the guitar did not resemble what it was and it was never going back.

New genres of music would rise up as musicians incorporate new effects into their playing. The effect helps define these genres as playing style adapts to maximise or revolutionise the effect and the effect itself becomes part of the signature of that music. Consider the Wah-Wah and its distinctive use by Jimi Hendrix and later adoption by funk and soul musicians, psychedelic rock and funk wouldn’t be the same without it. The variety of musical genres that have emerged out of, and since, Rock-and-Roll are nearly always inextricably tied to the sound the guitarist was trying to produce.

Another form of distortion normally considered detrimental in sound reinforcement has become a staple of Rock musicians. Controlled feedback became a tool in the musician’s repertoire also during the 60’s by such notable bands as: The Beatles, The Monks, The Who, The Kinks, and of course Jimi Hendrix. With feedback another means of playing the guitar was born, one that would have been unobtainable without electric guitars.

There are so many effects nowdays packaged into stompboxes that rarely do we see professional guitarist without them. The cat is out of the bag and you would be hard pressed to put it back in. Once guitarists are given the choice of tweaking their sound they often will not do without. For all the benefits to sculpting your sound there is a downside too: reliance on effects can mask bad playing, preventing you from developing as a player. To that end I wouldn’t recommend starting a kid off with an electric guitar and a pedalboard full of stompboxes. They may not progress past making cool noises.

The next step in sound processing was to take the signal which was modified by electrical components and turn it to digital information. Now sound is unharnessed from the hardware and exists purely as a mathematical construct. As such, the wave may be changed through operations in any way that you could mathematically describe. With the cost of microprocessors having dramatically fallen and a significant history of Digital Signal Processing under our belt, nearly any sort of wave shaping you could possibly want is available. There are limits based on digital to analog conversion hardware, processor speed, and what you can mathematically define, but the plethora of digital effects out today, and those that are possible but as of yet unrealised, we will have no shortage of novel timbres to influence our playing.

 

Don’t Get Stuck

Magnetic Fridge poetry! I love this stuff. It forces you to put together thoughts in unexpected ways. It’s the constraint on word choice that does it; you have to think of another way to say what you want given the available vocabulary. Artificial limits are a great way to break writers block or spark creativity.

Brian Eno made a set of cards he called Oblique Strategies that he would use for this purpose. Each card contained a directive such as “Honour Your Error as a Hidden Intention” or “Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame”. Through having to carry out this directive you take yourself in a direction uncharted, or gain new perspective on a problem.

You can buy these cards on ebay, though the original sets can be pricey. They have since been put into many other forms like a program, placed on the web, and are even available as a dashboard widget.

SongsToWearPantsTo is the brainchild of a very talented musician. This guy takes on the most arbitrary and ludicrous restraints that are suggested by the public and pulls them off with great flair and humour. Be sure to check out “A Rap Song in Which None of the Lyrics Contain the Letter E”

So remember kids, next time you’re beating your head against something, put handcuffs on.