Week 79: The Ballad of Stayed and Gone 9

I didn’t want to do this two weeks in a row at this point, but I’ve been trying to figure out what else to post about, and I’m drawing a total blank. This is the music that I'm thinking about so it's hard to step outside of it to talk about anything else. A friend of mine was going to write about Mr. Springsteen, but I think that’s going to be next week. You hear that Mr. D?

Anyway…

Last weekend we did some location recording. Our engineer, Jesse, has this really cool handheld recorder, which does 2-track recording with a 4-mic capsule configuration. It fits in your hand, takes about a second to set up, and you’re ready to record on location. It’s a nice little machine and we took it out to record various bits that we want to use for the record.

The first thing we did was use it for Marina's first recording session.
We recorded about 5 minutes of her playing on two toy pianos. I know, bear with me for a moment. Here’s a very very short video of one of the compositions she performed for the recording. This one we call A Very Very Short Composition 1.



Marina’s recording will be used as an intro to a song called Baby Camilia. The idea is that the song will transition from Marina’s piano recording to pianist Alex Bowers' recording on the same toy pianos, to Alex’s recording on a grownup piano. Musically the track is a solo piano instrumental piece loosely based on the song Camilia, a version of which was posted last week. So in a sense Baby Camilia works as a prelude to the later Camilia song.

There is a lot of Marina in this record, not only her voice and her tinkering on various instruments, but also her presence and her influence on the music, how it was written, performed and recorded. Ultimately the record is for her. It is the record that, if she is ever interested, in 15, 20, 30 years, she can listen to it and get a sense of what home was like back then.

After recording Marina’s piece, we went to the Local 506 and met up with Grandmaster of Ceremonies Hoppie to record him doing a carny call. He is better known for his MC'ing skills with a microphone and a top hat introducing some band, or a rock paper scissors match, but he transitioned nicely to a megaphone and a top hat trying to convince people to step right up. Along the way we also picked up some nice ambient sounds.

Further down is a draft of the Carny Call track, which leads into another track, Itch, which leads into another, Feet Beat Faster (or something like that, the title has not been decided upon yet).

The Carny Call draft is composed of a bunch of different stuff recorded all over the place. I did this draft in garageband with my crappy headphones, and afterwards, when i played it on the regular "nice" stereo, it sounded way more muddled than it did on the headphones. Go figure. Listening to it on the stereo we figured that Hoppie’s vocal track will need to be upped a little and given more separation. But this draft is not supposed to be perfect, just good enough to get a general idea so that when we go into the studio to cut the final version together, we’ll have a good blueprint to guide us. At any rate, if you listen to it I recommend using headphones.

Itch is pretty close to finished, but it still needs a lead instrument during the instrumental break (suggestions?) and there is a little bit more work to do on the ending/transition.

Feet Beat Faster is also pretty close to being done, except there will be piano at the tail end of it, big piano chords, like giant footsteps. The quote at the beginning of the song is from Carlos Fuentes’ Gringo Viejo.

Here’s the three tracks back to back – Carny Call into Itch into Feet Beat Faster