Blimix

When I climbed Crane Mountain this fall, I raced ahead of the group to have a secret part of the summit to myself. I recorded a short music video, which is now on YouTube and Instagram.

It consists of a bit of showing off: I sang three harmony lines in one recording, so that the track could be played over itself, offset, to combine the harmonies. Normally, anyone accompanying themselves would have digital assistance such as a backing track or looping, to hear what they're singing with. I included a long shot of my recording it, to help show that I had no such tools.

We often sing/append little songs if we happen to say something that scans to "Mah Na Mah Na," "If I Were A Rich Man," or "Camptown Races". (e.g., "I have evil oversocks, doo dah, doo dah.") Yesterday, Karen challenged me to find a replacement for "Camptown Races," due to its racism. (While I don't think that original lyrics plus "Doo dah, doo dah" retain any of the racism, it's still a callback to a racist song.)

During our walk today, I realized that "In The Hall Of The Mountain King" works. However, it takes much more focus to sing that melody. I think that I have fulfilled the challenge terms, but Karen wants something that is as easy to sing as "Camptown Races".* So the challenge continues. I am allowed to put out a call for assistance. What other song can we use for seven syllable observations with accents on the odd syllables? (Can it be called "trochaic" if there's an odd syllable count? I don't know what else to call it.)

* Also, the appended "Doo dah, doo dah" may get harder to replace in my version. Obviously, a Mountain King fan could sing, "I have evil oversocks, oversocks, oversocks." But what do you do with, "When thy heart began to beat"?**

** "When thy heart began to beat. What dread hand? What dread feet?"

Help me out here?

In listening to songs from "Encanto" (spoilers!) after the initial viewing, I noticed some new things.

"Surface Pressure": There's a foreshadowing sigh right at the start, after the first couplet. Also, the songs seems to have two hooks! ("Under the surface" and "Pressure like a drip, drip, drip".)

"What Else Can I Do": This one struck me from the start as sounding like a traditional Disney princess song. The weird thing is that the gratuitous modulation shifts the key down a whole step. A gratuitous modulation is always up a whole step! But it works. The key mirrors Isabela's stepping down from perfection, and how that works for her.

"We Don't Talk About Bruno": Dolores explicitly gives away that Bruno is still there, and I missed it! She says it right after she names her fear, so the line can be dismissed as something residual going on in her head. "Grew to live in fear of Bruno stuttering or stumbling / I can always hear him sort of muttering and mumbling". Her line, "Do you understand?" could have a lot of meanings, but one of them is, "Mirabel, do you get what I just told you about Bruno in a way that didn't give away his secret to the rest of the family?" And it just now occurs to me that she has such a hard time keeping secrets; how did she keep this one for so long? Or did she just keep saying plausibly ambiguous stuff like that, and having people dismiss her? For example, her later lines, "It's like I hear him now / It's like I can hear him now / I can hear him now". After Camilo's verse, everyone sings "We don't talk about Bruno" together, except for Dolores, who lags behind and sings it more quietly. Like she's not quite with them on this.

(I kind of want to walk into a crowded room, loudly sing out, "We don't talk about Bruno, no, no," and leave. Just to get it stuck in everybody's head.)

"All of you": "But the stars don't shine; they burn. And the constellations shift." That line kind of confused me for a while. But Mirabel is talking about the family, and their need to embrace change.

I've learned to play "Dos Oruguitas". It needs practice. And maybe a twelve-string guitar. Or a tiple.

My friend Amalia and I have just shot three — count 'em — three (!) music videos about golems. In one gorram day!

If you're unfamiliar with them (except possibly from D&D), note that golems originally come from ancient Jewish tales of rabbis creating them from clay using Kabbalah magic. They were automata (unthinking artificial people) that never spoke but that could do heavy work. A word inscribed on the forehead (or sometimes on paper inserted in the mouth) would activate them, and the word could be removed to deactivate them for the Sabbath (which Rabbi Loew forgot to do one week). One tale involved a golem defending a Jewish ghetto from the army of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II. That should be most of what you need to know to enjoy these videos.

I Had a Little Golem

Do You Wanna Build a Golem (horizontal format)
Do You Wanna Build a Golem (vertical format)

Frosty The Golem

We recorded the audio recently at a great studio (with Scott Petito, sound technician extraordinaire), and shot the videos today.

This all started two years ago, when Amalia told me, "I'm giving you a homework assignment. I have one line of a song: 'Golem, golem, golem, I made it out of clay.' Write it." So I did! We collaborated to refine it. (If it looks and sounds like a cheesy 70's children's show, that's intentional. Amalia gave me the stage direction, "Imagine you always wanted to be a serious musician, but instead here you are on this lousy show." I'm no actor, but I got the empty smile by thinking, "My life is meaningless.")

I sounded out the chords to "Do You Wanna Build a Golem," but it just didn't sound right on guitar. So I got my MIDI setup (from 30 years ago) working for the first time in twelve years, then figured out and reproduced every note of the original. We brought my recording of that to the studio, so Amalia could add her vocals.

"Frosty The Golem" had some more involved recording. My garage sale bass, that I had never touched since I had bought it and replaced the missing string, turned out to have a rattle that we couldn't trivially fix. Scott lent me a bass guitar with flatwound strings, which I didn't even know were a thing. I had literally never figured out, let alone practiced, a bass line for the song before I started recording. So I had a crap first run, but got it okay for the second and third takes. We lucked out for percussion: Amalia wanted something that sounded like a sleigh bell, and unbeknownst to her, I had a sleigh bell!

I've done my own sound editing, but I'm far from a sound engineer. Scott was playing back the mostly completed Frosty as he made some minute changes. I commented, "I kinda want some dynamic range compression on the bass."

He replied, "That's what I'm doing right now." Vibe! So that felt good.

After we shot these videos, Amalia did the editing for all three on the same evening!

(If it looks like we're not being pandemic-safe, don't worry: We're in a social bubble. We take safety seriously.)

Amalia Rubin and I just recorded this song: Mammas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Fascists

It was my first time in a professional recording studio, and I had a great time.

We had a spectacular outdoor take for the video, but my camera cut out (due to low battery) two-thirds of the way through. I can't complain, though: We still have a good video. (And the outdoor one, while very pretty with snow falling on us, had a couple of cars drive by in the background. So it's not like we lost a perfect take.)

I was listening to one of my 700 or so favorite songs recently, when it struck me that, while this song was musically a force to be reckoned with, the lyrics made it something of a douchebag anthem. See how quickly you can figure out the song from my paraphrasing.

Verse 1:
I have plans tonight for my significant other, whom I refer to by an insultingly diminutive term of endearment. I must keep these plans secret from her parents, presumably to avoid being thwarted by their inevitable disapproval. The questionable ethicality of this is ameliorated by our respective, uncommonly good, appearances.
I interrupt my initial plan of getting us both drunk at a small but charming tavern because I disparage the entire genre of music that suits the proprietor's musical tastes, and I insist that my significant other drop everything to leave with me immediately.

Refrain:
Our behavior toward, and within, this municipality shall be so egregious that I must describe it with a metaphor that would be fatal if it were anatomically possible. It shall be so egregious that the residents will object vociferously, but we will persist until we explode and lose consciousness.

Verse 2:
We delightedly engage in a decades old version of East Coast Swing dancing. I look with derision upon another patron's outdated fashion sense. He notices me, so I threaten him with physical violence. As if I had to emphasize this, our enjoyment of this evening will be characterized by massive destruction. (It appears that my increasingly inebriated state softens my understanding of this as being purely metaphorical.)

[Repeat refrain.]

Holy crap, y'all!

Look what I have wrought!

I wrote this song over four years ago, and thought that it would be trivial to just arrange some MIDI tracks, play along with them, adjust the levels, and mix it together. Whoops! It turns out that sound mixing is an art that requires lots of learning and lots of work (a tiny fraction of which was described here).

But finally, I can cross "Work on song" off of my "to do" list!

Not that the list is getting any shorter. After all, what's a song without a music video? It's okay, though: Whipping one up should be trivial.

"I'm not motivated to do anything," I said yesterday. We had spent four days scraping and painting, my planned "down time" after Tuesday's dinner (fun pot-luck; we learned to play Hanabi) had been eaten up by kitchen cleaning, and I had utterly exhausted myself with martial arts Wednesday night. I didn't even have the mental energy to play computer games.

So I went upstairs, pulled out the guitar, and played a whole bunch of Jonathan Coulton songs. That doesn't require any motivation. Rather the opposite: I have to make an effort of will to stop playing. (The thought process usually goes, "My hands really can't take any more. Fine. I'll put the guitar down after two more songs.")

Just like that, I was recharged. I sat at the computer, loaded up the song I've been working on, listened to and took notes on twenty-five tracks of a half-minute kazoo instrumental, spliced together pieces of the four takes that didn't suck, and spent way too long fixing their dynamic range. I rearranged audio cables and re-recorded the MIDI, separating the instruments this time so that I could adjust and pan them independently in the mixing software. I tweaked some vocals by 30 ms. I experimented with reverb, which went much better than before (now that I know what "wet gain" and "dry gain" are).

And so, on a day when I was not motivated to do anything, I put in the work to finish a beta version of the song whose recording and mixing have been a pain in my ass for, well, longer than I care to admit. It's been the sort of project on which contemplating working suddenly reminds one that there is laundry to be done, grass to mow, and a cat to floss, so one should probably do those things, and work on the project tomorrow. Definitely tomorrow. Unless the birdbath needs cleaning instead.

I think the end might even be in sight, if I squint just right.