Old Shanghai was the first “teaser” song Beck released out of his 2012 book, Song Reader. The Song Reader is basically a bound collection of old skool style sheet music, like you’d buy in the pre-radio days to play in your parlor for your friends and family. His whole idea was to release songs that were meant to be played at home by the likes of you or me, rather than by “pros in studios” and he encouraged folks to put their own versions up on YouTube or SoundCloud.
This video is one of two that sal and I recorded last Wednesday, both of which were “one take wonders.” I don’t believe I’ve done two of those in a row before, no matter how long it was between them.
It also marks the 3rd month in a row that I’ve released a video, something that I also think might be a record for me. I’m going to immediately start editing the second song so as to try and get ahead of the game before April rolls around.
While there’s still some “artifacts” in the video, due both to me still on the learning curve with my video editor, LumaFusion, and to the fact that my phone’s camera somehow being set to “focus on faces”–a setting that I can’t seem to find how to turn off–which causes weird little glitches whenever I move and the camera refocuses as the light changes–I’m relatively pleased with the editing here.
For one thing, it’s the first two camera shoot I’ve done since acquiring LumaFusion. I can do that because me and my sweetie both have the same cellphone and she loaned me hers. Editing it is a bit of a kludge in LF, but I’ve learned how to do it.
For another, it’s the first time I’ve added a sound effect since my first ever release back in 2000 (on a 4-track cassette machine!) that featured an analog door slam.
There’s only one weirdness in the recording itself. I decided to leave it in because the rest of the performance was fine. If you spot it while listening, let me know in the comments.
After a several year dry spell, last year I wrote not one, not two, but three new songs. This one is the last of the three, and the second one I wrote since finally copping to the fact that songs don’t always have to be novels. Short stories are a fine art in and of themselves.
It’s based on the Friedrich Nietzsche quote, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Think of it as a sort of open letter to whatever doesn’t kill me. In keeping with that, I have cleverly titled it, An Open Letter To Whatever Doesn’t Kill Me. It’s a very brief song… like the whole video, including titles, is only 2 minutes long. But its history stretches back to the mid-80s. I’m going to tell you 3 brief “sub-stories” before getting to the video itself.
So, if you’re a tl;dr sort, you can click the link above and go straight to YouTube to watch it. (But then, if you’re a tl;dr sort, I wonder what the hell you’re doing following me?)
(Before I forget to mention it, the joke behind the song is thanks to the Dunn Lumber at 93rd and Aurora in Seattle, who posted it on their reader board.)
I’ll have a few last words below the video.
Andrew’s Muse Story (sub-story 1 of 3)
In the mid-80’s I was heavily involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism–aka the SCA, a medieval re-creation group–and was living in an apartment in the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle, WA. (In SCA terms, that meant I was living in the Kingdom of An Tir.) Besides me and my then ladyfriend, there were two other SCA folk in the building.
One of these folk was Andrew–and damn, I can’t pull his last name out of my head right now–who was, amongst other things, quite the poet. He’d been overheard (misheard, actually) by a passing knight, saying something that the knight perceived as dissing the ladies of An Tir.
Since Andrew has something of a game leg, he did not participate in the armored fighter part of the SCA. This made it impossible for the knight to honorably challenge him to a duel in the lists. So instead he told him, as penance, he had to write a poem praising the beauty, wit, charm, etc. of the ladies of An Tir and read it at the banquet of an upcoming tourney. Andrew said (at least, mentally), “Challenge accepted!” and set to slaving over it for the next several weeks.
Yes. Weeks. It was an opus.
When he finished he was understandably happy and he came dashing down to the apartment where me and the aforementioned ladyfriend lived. He read it for us and we showed the appropriate appreciation–because it was good, that’s why–and he went happily back to his place. Probably to get some much needed sleep.
But one line in the poem just sparked me. I took it, twisted it around, and within a ridiculously short period of time had churned out a poem built around it. It was only two stanzas of six lines each, not an opus. I was tickled anyways and dashed up the stairs to read it to Andrew.
He listened, blinked a couple times, and then said (at least half jokingly), “How dare you have a 10 minute muse?!”
KW’s Song Advice (sub-story 2 of 3)
Back in about the same timeframe my guitar guru, K.W. Todd, had made a complementary comment on one of my songs. I muttered on about how, yeah, I was generally happy with it and had been playing it at open mikes to good response, but I wished I’d done this or that bit a little differently. But now that all these people had heard it I didn’t want to change it.
K.W. said, “But, Hobbit, it’s your tune! You can do anything you want with it.”
OK. Yeah. I heard that, but didn’t really absorb it until later. Indeed, much later.
Phil’s Short Story Lesson (sub-story 3 of 3)
Here’s where the three sub-stories converge.
Back in mid-November, Phil Doleman, my online pal from England tweeted,
I surprised myself by suddenly writing and recording an EP over the last week. Sometimes it happens like that, and you don’t argue :-)
You can get it from Bandcamp, name your price (which includes free :-) )
My first reaction, of course, was “How dare you have such a prolific muse!” (Yeah, Andrew. I feel it now, bro.)
I went and listened to it and noticed that the longest song was on 2:18 long. I’d never written a song that was that short. But I have notebooks full of song bits I’ve come up with and not been able to expand out into what I would consider a full song. So why not try a short story song? Within a week I’d finished a song called “Hemoglobin Overload,” fleshing out a song snippet I’d had around for years.
(This has a NSFW rating because I drop an F-bomb. Just one, because it’s a surgical strike. Too much collateral damage happens when you carpet F-bomb.)
Oh No! Not Another Learning Experience!
I’m still learning the LumaFusion video editor, so the Picture-In-Picture stuff isn’t as tidy as it could be. Also, I somehow set the camera to “focus on faces” mode and every time I moved it changed focus and mucked up the lighting.
Last Words
If you’ve read this far, please do me a large favor and drop a little comment here, even if it’s just “Hi, Hobbit, I read the thing.”
If you like it, please share it, either via YouTube or the link to this post.
So… the first thing you might be thinking is, “If this post is about a new song, why is it illustrated by a picture of a bunch of ukulele?” Gosh, I’m glad you asked!
It’s because it’s not only the first song I’ve completed in way too long, it’s the first one I’ve ever written on my Ohana sopranino. The sopranino is at the far left in the pic. It was the best shot I could find of the little guy. (Because I didn’t want to mess with taking another one, that’s why!)
In any event, I finished the song about 5 or so days ago, took the time to learn it (yes, they are two different processes), and got a recording of it. For you “tl;dr” folks the recording is just below, you can probably see it scrolling up by now. Under that is the strange, circuitous route I had to travel to get it out in the wild. I wrote it up for the rest of you.
(Though come to think about it, I speak in paragraphs. I can’t fathom why a tl;dr sort of person would follow me online in the first place. <shrug> )
So here’s my brand new tune, a light and hopefully humorous rant on aging. If you like it, please leave a comment and share it with your friends on the social media things. If you think it sucks, go ahead and leave a comment and then share it with your enemies on social media. It’ll serve them bastards right, eh?
The Process
I had decided that I’d do a Digital Demo Tape level recording, strictly using only program(s) I could run on my somewhat aging Samsung Tab E. I got one take several days ago, but wasn’t quite happy with the result. Turns out that the two apps I used for the actual recording had strengths and weaknesses and I needed to play to the former in order to make up for the latter. I reshot the vocal (the ukulele and harmonica tracks were saveable) so the process looked like this.
Export each track as a separate file (you can do it quickly and easily in one process in this app. It does more than the cassette 4-track I recorded my first release on, way back in the early 90’s. Further, that cassette unit cost me $400 back then, while a few years ago I picked up J4T for $3.99.)
Import them, one at a time, into the Lexis Audio Editor (a free android app similar to Audacity, which does not run on android.)
EQ and add any track-specific effects. I kept it pretty sparse, only adding a pale wash of reverb to the vox and harmonica, and a really spare slapback echo to the uke in order to “thicken” it a tad. I also normalized them so that I had some volume to work with whilst mixing.
Re-import the altered tracks to J4T
Mix down to one stereo track
Reimport into Lexis (Getting dizzy yet?)
Trim, add the fade-out, a light touch of compression, and normalize
Save it and import it into Audio MP3 Editor. Another free app which does several things including transcoding, cutting/trimming, making ringtones, etc.
Transcode from WAV to MP3 format and add metatags
Done. Raise a big cheer!
But wait! Now we come to the first of the tech bombs.
Tech Bomb 1
Now that I have a finished recording, I’m going to want to host it somewhere. Oh, look! I have an old and rarely used Soundcloud account. That’s the ticket!
Ummm… did I mention that nowadays I do the greater majority of my computing stuff on my tablet? ‘Cuz that’s going to be important real soon now.
I have both the Soundcloud app and access via web browser.
It turns out that Soundcloud, despite being all about streaming to mobile devices (for all you hip kids), does not allow you to upload a recording from your phone or tablet. Dafuq?
So fine… I pass the recording up to the cloud and fire up my one remaining “general purpose” computer. The problem here is that it’s a 10 year old Dell netbook, running Ubuntu 12.something, an OS upgrade that slowed it way down. Also it doesn’t like my browser.
Despite all that I manage to get the track uploaded to Soundcloud. From my earlier tries on my tablet I know that I can’t get the embed code except from the web version. So I copy the long paragraph of obscure HTML code and paste it into a text document on the Linux box and upload it to the cloud, something I’ve done tons of times before. Then I go to download it onto the tablet so I can embed the player here in WordPress.
Here comes the second tech bomb.
Tech Bomb 2
Despite all past history, neither Google Drive nor my tablet will open the text file, they’re all saying “I don’t recognize the file type.” OMFG! It’s a plain text file, ffs! Who’s Wheaties did I pee on to make the tech gods so angry with me?
Fine!
I’ll just open the file on my netbook and laboriously type it into a note on my tablet. (Using the stylus just so it’s an extra fussy process.)
Done!
Now I open up the WordPress app and start a new post, giving it a title, a brief bit of “lorem ipsum…” placeholder text, and copy/paste the embed code in. Then I save it as a draft post so I can view it to make sure the embed actually works.
Oh look. Here comes another tech bomb.
Tech Bomb 3
My WordPress app seems to be broken. It keeps giving me “you’re not permitted to edit nor save” errors. So let’s try it through the web interface. Broken. Instead of the WP login page, I’m getting an empty page with a popup asking for my login credentials. I don’t think so!
Luckily (?) this has happened before. Some eager young beaver at my hosting service has decided my security isn’t tight enough and set the permissions on the WP folder to clear that up. Locking me out in the process. They’re actually pretty good about fixing fuckups, whether mine or theirs, so this one was cleared up within a few hours of me sending the email.
Leaving me with one final tech bomb. (sigh)
Tech Bomb 4
Remember that vast paragraph of embed code from Soundcloud? Didn’t work. Fortuneately I remembered that WP has a shortcode for Soundcloud. It works. That’s why you can see the player up there and, hopefully, play my new song.
So here I sit, finishing up the last of this blog post. Please remember that sharing is caring! If you share my stuff around, it’s better than a dollar in my tip bucket. And it only costs you a few minutes time.
Thanks much for your patience. Hopefully my next song (or video or whatever) won’t be so long coming
So. What’s this “3rd Time’s The Charm” thing all about?
Around ten years ago I wrote a song called Daisy Fraser. Shortly after that Snake Suspenderz was playing a gig at Egan’s Ballard Jam House and we put it on the playlist. Someone in the audience recorded a video of the song. I can’t for the life of me remember who right now (maybe my sweetie?), but the video turned out horribly. It was recorded on an extremely low end camera in a venue so dimly lit that out of the four of us, only Thaddeus and I can be seen. We look more orange than the Thing from the Fantastic Four but, worst of all, I completely vapor-locked on the lyrics. That’s right, the lyrics to my own song escaped me!
But, since I’d passed off several choruses to Thadd (on trombone) and Dean (who played bass with us then and also did a hella mouth trumpet), I decided to put it online anyway. Part as an homage to them taking up the slack and part for the same reason we get blooper reels. And there it languished for awhile.
Then about 3 years back I got to thinking about it again. I’m reasonably pleased with the tune, having after all both riffed on Shakespeare and channeled a little bit of the Dixie Chicks vibe ala Goodbye Earl.
By this time I had a bit better video editing capability, but the darn thing still turned out a wee darker looking than I liked. About the only thing to say for it was it’s (I think) the first time the humbone appeared in one of my vids. It’s pottered along and gathered about 200 views. *yawn* Which brings us to now.
With LumaFusion I’ve got the best video editing capability I’ve ever had, though I’m still learning the software. The video is still somewhat dusky. *sigh* Nevertheless, here’s Daisy again, this time done like I’ve been busking it recently, on my Ohana SK-21 Sopranino with a kazoo solo.
Daisy Fraser – Third Time’s The Charm edition
home of Howlin' Hobbit, Ukulele Ace & Seattle Busker
