music journal

with Sufjan on my mind, I of course was thinking about the banjo. we’ve got a banjo in the house that belongs to a friend, and a while ago I was trying it out, but I really dont like the standard tuning of a banjo. but I have thought it would be cool to play a tenor banjo, which is tuned in fifths like a mandolin. then it dawned on me: why not try to tune what we’ve got down to a mando type tuning and try it out. fortunately it actually worked, so I noodled a good long while with some of the type of stuff I’ve been doing on the octave mando. it was good fun, and yes, it’s made me want to get a tenor banjo some day.

so here’s one of my banjo noodlings.

and here’s a guitar idea I was playing with earlier this evening.

while not quite as strange or funny as my original experiments with this stuff, I had a good time “playing with myself” as it were. I put down one track of just a chord on the keyboard, played for about 2 minutes. as I played, I twirled the effects dials on the amp to give it a little texture, etc. I think it sounds a very little bit like the first part of the intro of “where the streets have no name”. Michelle said she could picture it playing in the background as a band comes onto a darkened stage and starts things up. anyway, I recorded that and then played it through the aux port of the amp while I overlaid some very simple (and somewhat poorly played) guitar junk on it. but a fun experiment. a poor/lazy/clever(?) man’s way of doing multi-tracking without the expensive gear.

here’s the result.

as reported earlier Michelle got me a new guitar amp, and I finally got it today. it’s a lot of fun with some basic effects built in, such as echos and reverb and such, not to mention presets like “metal” and “insane.” rock on. I got a very basic little clip-on microphone for our acoustics, and Caleb was having fun rocking out a little. I’ll have to post the video of that.

so I was trying different stuff out and I pulled out my grandma’s little old Yamaha “portasound” keyboard, which has all kinds of cheesy beats and sounds. good fun. WAY too much fun when that stuff is sent through the amp and the effects are added and its overdriven a little. yes, it’s still cheesy, but I was having a grand old time making stuff that you might hear at your local Old Navy or Express.

so here’s the results of me messing around with the “disco” setting, so these go out to Ed — one of the few people I know who still enjoys disco. they’re pretty crappy, but not a bad display of the possibilities. the problem I’ve got now is I’ve got only one output, so I cant hear what I’m recording to line-out, so it’s all a bit random, not that it really matters (I just need a simple splitter to solve this problem).

but I’m loving the edge of the keyboard when on the “jazz organ” setting and it’s overdriven a little with some echo thrown in too. maybe someday I’ll make something listenable, but for now, here’s 2 samples: Old Navy 1 and Old Navy 2

and while we’re making strange sounds, here’s a fascinating and mesmerizing sound from a musical top that Michelle’s parents had. we both love it! I will make this an intro to a song someday.