How breaking the rules can transform your piano recordings This article first appeared in Recording Magazine. I reprint it here with permission, and I encourage you to subscribe to that publication, as they are a stand up bunch of folk! The piano is an amazing creature. It’s ubiquitous in all kinds of music and its frequency range means …
The piano is big, complex, has a frequency range as large as human hearing. Plus, there are hundreds of different kinds. It’s a beast, and caging it is said to be the most frustrating thing in recording, but I think of it differently. For me, it’s the instrument with the most possibility.
Ok – still going through Third Option’s The Four Hard Edges Of War. Here is track 4, “Trains Interlude”: This has no vocals, just music. I like it. It’s ..what’s the word? Reminiscent? Or something? I like the multiple violins. I wrote a simple violin line and a fellow student at Stanford, Sandy Lin, played …
Hey! Still (slowly) writing little bits about tracks. Here is track 3 from the main The Four Hard Edges Of War: I didn’t do it on purpose (except maybe subconsciously), but I can’t help but notice the beat is sort of like – well – a train chugging along. Chigga chigga chigga chigga – CHOO …
HEY! For the first time in like…what? 10 years? I’m writing these little blog posts again! Linking to TUNEZ, sayin some STUFF. 🙂 Ok…I’m gonna start in on The Four Hard Edges Of War, which is the last Third Option album, made mostly at CCRMA at Stanford. It’s a collaboration between me and Andre de …
Kong, by Third Option and here we are at the green leafy apocalypse of it all fallen down broken bones temptation sin and banishment here we are in the locker rooms and candlewax shops we forgot about everything torn down and overrun king kong fallen in the night done in by monkeys mighty mighty mad …
Well here, again, is the first “track” of The Monkey Set, “Monkeys Belong In The Jungle Baby”. It’s really just the build up to the first poem thing/second track. Here’s the “lyrics”, or the “poem” for this part. Which isn’t really lyrics or a poem. It’s just some improv I did on the mic. But …
B-Movie, by Third Option This one has more pieces of the “Cult Of Nice” essay, read by Tamara. A thing I like about this one is I had all the drums and everything decided, and then we were mix the song and we were like “the snare drum is weak can’t we do something with …
Well. I kinda got done with Artistic Apocalypse. So I think I’ll move on to some Third Option. So here is the title track/opening track to the Third Option album Cult Of Nice which me and Tamara (Nicholl) worked on at Rock Romano’s Red Shack in Houston. The album is based on this essay that …
Something I really love that I might not expect someone like me to love, is remixes. I don’t mean somebody sampling somebody else’s song and turning it into some mashup. That’s a new thing that people are calling remixing but it’s not. Remixes, to my mind, are new versions of songs that take the original multitrack audio …
