When I worked at Nike, there was a cadre of musicians in the IT department who were all doing digital recording on their own. So we instituted sort of a monthly (ok, maybe quarterly) challenge. This particular challenge was to "cover a song from the '60s." Hmmm...during the '60s, I was mostly in South America listening to classical music and a little Tijuana Brass... What to do? Luckily, every Beatles song ever recorded was from the '60s, so This is my version of their classic Beach Boys sendup. Sorry, for copyright reasons, it's not for sale or download at the moment; just this snippet is available. I sure had a good time doing it, though. (You should really hear Kevin Laurila's "stalker version" of "Suzi-Q." Brilliant.)

 

This was another Nike musicians' challenge that I dreamed up. We called it "Raid Santa's Refrigerator." The idea was that everyone would contribute 3-5 short wav files that we would put out on a shared drive somewhere. Then the challenge was to take as many as you liked (the more, the better), do whatever processing you wanted and then weave them all into some composition that was "holiday related." We left that door wide open; if you could even vaguely relate it to the holidays in your own mind, we deemed it acceptable. So when Greg Lawrence came up with a composition called "Wet Duck," we were stumped. "Of course: duck!" he insisted. "It's the traditional Christmas dish!" Those of us born in the U.S. chalked it up to him being from the other side of the pond. I contributed the sounds of M&Ms being poured into a bowl, tearing wrapping paper, snorts, laughs, shouts, and various squishy mouth noises. This piece needed several tracks for the Chapman Stick Touchboard. The melody line is just a wav that's been pitch-shifted to make the melody work.

 

This piece started out as a series of stock drum loops I put together in Cubase. Then I got out the bass and jammed with it until I came up with a usable riff. After that, it was just one guitar on top of another until I came to the break (in the snippet) which has the only "vocals" in the whole thing. Though it's more of a funk composition, I kind of hear that Randy Meissner/Joe Walsh/Glenn Frey guitar trio happening...but I flatter myself.

 

Did you ever notice how one person always seems to be the designated cake procurer whenever there's a celebration at work? In our case, it seemed to be Dennis McMinn. Why? We have no idea. "Dennis! It's So and So's birthday! We need a cake!" Off he goes to get one. Again. So John Pedersen came up with the idea to memorialize it in song. I ripped off Bad Company and came up with "Cakeman." It has a rap in the middle that I did incredibly lamely. Could I play that guitar solo again? Not without a lot of practice and a lot of caffeine. A tip of the hat to John Lennon at the end there.

 

I started this piece by opening up Cubase's Key Editor with a pizzicato strings patch selected on the E-MU Proteus X. I then started the clock and did some mostly random clicking on the keys with a mouse as the time scrolled by, leaving bits of MIDI triggers all over the page. Then I looped a basic drum beat underneath it with ezDrummer and played with the note timing and pitch to make a composition that I liked. Next, I programmed the drums start to finish, putting in new fills and taking out unnecessary hits. But it wasn't until I started putting in the sound effects--stuff that I found royalty-free on the web, amazing!--that the piece really started to take shape. Pícaro means "rogue" in Spanish. I see this little gremlin breaking into the house and quietly (or not so quietly) wreaking havoc.

 

This was one of those pieces where the sound inspired the composition. Proteus X has a patch called "Mozambique" which I modified a bit to get the main sound for "The Creek." The other instruments are from the E/W Gold Orchestra. I love this harp! How cool that a guitarist like myself can actually create harp music because of these amazing tools!

 

I spent several days with my mp3 player set on Bobby McFerrin's "Vocabularies," playing it over and over again. Incredible. I'm also a big fan of Bruno Coulais' soundtrack for the movie "Himalaya." So one night, I just started recording improvised vocal lines and putting them together to see what would happen. I pitch-shifted some drones and other lines down low, and then added several tracks of different pitches held steady on one note. With the automation, I adjusted the volume up and down on each vocal line, pretty much randomly at first, and then tweaked a bit when things started to take shape. After listening to that for a few days, I recorded some new improvised vocal lines and remixed. Here's a bit of the rough mix. I still don't know what this will turn into, but it's fun to do!

 

I wrote "When We Go Away" back in 1985 when some very good friends were moving out of state. For decades, I've wanted to hear this with a decent piano and the full orchestration I've had in my head. Thanks to Cubase and E/W Gold, I get to! This is the rough arrangement. I'm sure it will morph some more. It's waited 25 years to get to this stage...

 

Stay tuned for MORE coming soon!