Postcard Helicopters

Sometimes I wonder if my day count is accurate. I didn’t actually sit down and chart out what each Saturday was supposed to be.

It’s been a productive week since the last post, as I’ve put together three more songs. That doubles my list for this challenge, but still leaves 44 more songs to go by the end of next month.

At two a day? Sure, it could be done. The question, though, is will I be the person writing two songs a day next month. I won’t know that until October 1st.

Here’s this week’s demos:

50/90 2009 | 04. Evil Came To Town

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This is a rough demo that I sort of stumbled into. I was setting up for something else, then played the descending guitar riff to check the amp sound. On a whim, I doubled it and dropped it an octave as a way to simulate a bass guitar track and thought that sounded okay. The drums came next, and it shows. I didn’t go back to fix or quantize the drums, nor did I re-record the descending riff now that I had the drums to play against. When this challenge is over, I want to come back and re-record this track so it’s tighter.

The vocals were vamped over the music, trying to catch a syncopated rhythm I heard in my head. I added a pitch shift to also drop a copy of the vocals an octave, and then a fuzzy distortion effect to try and give a slightly evil countenance. I’m not too sure it works, and the vocal treatment is something else I’d like to work on at a later date.

Lyrics – Evil Came To Town

On the day I was born
They said evil came to town
On the day I was born
They said evil came to town

Lock him up!

On the day I was born
They said evil came to town
On the day I was born
They said evil came to town

Get him out!

50/90 2009 | 05. Skidmarks! [Background Harmonizing Exercise]

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The main point of this track was to test a technique for recording harmonized background vocals. I broke down the chords into three melody lines and sang along with each one in turn, independently, with everything else muted. It was just a one-pass recording for each voice. If this had been a real song, I would probably do a few more takes to put down something better.

I couldn’t really think of any lyrics or melody to go along with it, so channeled a bit of The B-52’s by shouting out nouns and noun phrases.

The Arp voices are from the free “Factory Selection” Library for the (also free) Kontakt 3 player. Both are available at the Native Instruments website in exchange for your email address. They already had mine because of the two Garritan libraries I own, so it was a no-brainer to take advantage of those two offers. [NOTE: I guess that was a short-time promo offer sent to folks already on the N.I. mailing list. I can't find a link to the player or library at the Native Instruments website. Sorry...]

Lyrics – Background Harmonizing Exercise

Dustmop
Pencil cup
Joystick!
DVD
Power cord!
Lightbulb
Coffee pot!
Toejam
Wristwatch!
Toothbrush – ummm hmmm
Doorknob!
Pencil sharpener!
Skidmarks!
File cabinet
Paperclip!
Shoelaces!
Dishwasher!
Baseball!

Broken window
Fender bender
Rolling pin
Doorbell!

Okay, we’re done!

50/90 2009 | 06. Floating Out to Sea

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This is just a quiet little number, good for relaxing to. I thought it was gonna get a whole lot bigger, with more and more tracks added but listening to just this version of it sounded really nice to me, as is.

So, there ya go. Eight minutes and forty seconds of peacefulness.

There is already a music video for this track, but I am committed to finishing the music for a previous video before I post this one. It’s one of the projects which has slowed me down during this challenge, because I wanted to get that music just right.

Well, if I’m now getting a backup of music videos to post, then I really oughta turn my attention to finishing that previous one, it seems. Hopefully, that will come along in the coming week.

And that wraps up a week’s worth of 50/90 goodness from me. See ya next Saturday!

This is simply filler.

There is no real substance to this post, except to say that there are no new songs to share.

This is simply filler.

I am wondering if a part of my brain is running the Nancy Regan playbook and has decided to Just Say No to the whole thing.

This is simply filler…

…but there may yet be a call from The Comeback Kid before October arrives.

…and that would be a very early Day 44 Update, as it’s about a quarter past three in the morning as I start this post.

Tomorrow is the actual midpoint of this challenge, by which time (if someone is to be on schedule) twenty-five songs oughta be in the can. Let’s see where we’re at, okay?

:::removes can from shelf:::

:::shakes can – not much noise:::

:::looks inside can, past the cobwebs:::

:::shakes out three measly songs:::

Well, that’s it then, huh? Just three measly songs so far? Hmm… It doesn’t look like The Kid’s gonna put together twenty-two more in the next forty-eight hours, does it?

But I shouldn’t complain. Last year, I signed up but didn’t post a damn thing — so three songs is already an improvement. Part of the process is figuring out what it takes to make this work.

These days, you can find people all over the Internet writing a song a day, so it’s not like it can’t be done. One of the reasons I signed up for this challenge is to, simply, figure out how I could do that, too.

It was sometime in the early eighties when I first considered this as a possibility.

I saw Barbra Walters interview Dolly Parton on TV. And in that interview, she said she wrote a song every day – no matter what. I was deeply impressed by that. Talk about dedication! Talk about courage! To say, “screw it” to the idea of waiting for divine inspiration and just working your craft. Well, that interview gave me newfound respect for her, and a small voice inside of me said, “I wanna do that, too.”

It took another two decades for me to write anything more than those teenage efforts which ignited this spark, so I can’t be too hard on myself for not having a star on the 50/90 Hall of Fame this year.

If FAWM is a sprint, 50/90 is a marathon. And I believe it’s a marathon I can eventually win, if I keep training, keep practicing and just keep at it.

There’s still forty-six more days to see what happens, this year. I, for one, am not yet giving up.

This is the first track built since I reinstalled Windows XP on my desktop computer. What a trying ordeal that was! I don’t have the reinstall complete, but I do have Reaper up and running, and was loading up my VST folder and trying a few things out to make sure that they work.

The main voice in this track is the LaborOSC VST plugin, which I’ve not really played around with before. I was noodling around on it while I listened to Kombinator by The Inbreds and I thought this particular preset went along with the track pretty well. When the album finished playing, I kept noodling around on this synth and this riff evolved, reminding me of the sound of Gary Numan’s first LP, “The Pleasure Principle.”

I recorded a couple minutes worth of playing to a click track, ignoring where the pattern falls apart, thinking that I can fix it in the MIDI after I record a long enouogh riff. It’s a technique I use a lot when I’m working on a song. I’ll just keep playing a riff to the click track for as long as I can, through the points where it starts to fall apart because what I feel is most important for me to record is a naturalistic velocity along the keyboard. I can always switch the notes around if they’re not quite right, but the human variability in volume between notes is much harder to re-create.

Once I had that basic track down, I duplicated it with the intention of going in and fixing the missed and wrong MIDI notes. But wait – it’s The 50/90 Challenge and I have a serious deficit of tunes. I threw the “Demo” switch in my brain, and just pushed forward, adding three more voices, one at a time, recording in one-pass performance in an effort to get the bones of a song that I could return to at a later date and work with, should I be so inspired.

Afterall, that’s the goal and the spirit of this challenge, isn’t it?

Let it fly and catch as much as you can, in the process.

And so, with warts and all, I present Down the Rabbit Hole, which I feel is more like my first real entry into this year’s challenge.

Postcard Helicopters – Down the Rabbit Hole

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Still not finished fixing the computer…

Oh, wait… Sorry, that’s just me on autopilot, because this week I’m happy to report that I finally have the desktop computer back to original factory condition. What’s next will be to reinstall my peripherials and then rebuild the software environment. No ETA on that, but I don’t expect it to take as long. Who knows, I may get adventurous and figure out how to set up the computer so it doesn’t become such a complex mess to repair the OS in the future.

As far as specific 50/90 progress, I had another accidental song this week. Except in this case, it was lyrics instead of music.

I was hanging out on the forum and had the following exchange with Joel on the post titled, Texas Rednecks?

Joel D Canfield: My first vacation in Texas to visit in-laws, I ate chicken fried steak at least once a day, sometimes twice. Can’t get boots to fit my robust calves anymore, though, and I miss ‘em.

Postcard Helicopters: I suppose spandex cowboy boots are out of the question, Joel?

Joel D Canfield: @Postcard: I hope to high heaven that’s the last time I see the words ’spandex’ and ‘cowboy’ in the same sentence.

Postcard Helicopters: @ Joel – knowing me, it probably isn’t. …Sorry…

And that’s about all it took to get those two words lodged in my brain. Within a couple hours, the following lyrics had wormed their way out from some secret hidey-hole.

Imagine The Duke or Jack Palance reciting these lines next to a blazing campfire on a starry night, a lonesome harmonica wafting on the breeze, and maybe the clip-clop of a passing horse.

I’m probably going to Cowboy Hell for this, but I think it might be worth it.

Electric Spandex Cowboy

Electric Spandex Cowboy
It’s what happens
when you add more South
to the West
and Horsepower is counted
on more than one hand

When the setting sun
is only seen
on a 52 inch plasma screen
it’s a guarantee you’ll find
Electric Spandex Cowboy

They used to shoot old, brokedown horses
but in the age of hip replacements
the Long Tooth
may as well be a watering hole
serving Daiquiris and Sprite
with only George Jones on the jukebox

Country, Blue Grass, and Blues
ain’t the same, no more.
with stirrups rusted
and spurs on the bone
where Walkers don’t mean Tennessee
and every getalong’s got a catch

I reckon that’ll be where you’ll find

Electric Spandex Cowboy

Electric Spandex Cowboy

Electric Spandex Cowboy

Hippy-Ki-Yi (:::Snap!:::) Youch!

According to the 50/90 website, there are 54 days left. It’s getting close to the point where it will become a song-a-day project if I’m going to cross the finish line.

I don’t see having much time to work on music until this Tuesday, so a song-a-day may just be how this works out.

Stay tuned!

Nope. Nothing new on this front. I’m having a great time hanging out at the 50/90 forum, and also getting a lot of other business taken care of while I continue to procrastinate on actually beginning a concerted effort to dig in and get cracking.

I still avoid re-installing the OS for my desktop computer. It worries me so much that I’ll miss something important that I can only work on it in fits and starts. Each step gets me a little closer, but the pauses between each step are still fairly large. Which means progress, yes, but very slow progress.

We had a record-breaking heatwave last week, and that only added more fuel to my foot-dragging.

Someone on the forum said he had two songs written, and he’ll probably get concerned when there are only forty-eight days left to go. It’s a sentiment I can identify with. So at this point, I’ll get worried when there are only forty-nine days left.

In the meantime, I’m catching up on a lot of postponed reading, which is a nice side-benefit and also watching lots of movies, which is perhaps more a comfort than a benefit.

Technically, it’s still possible to complete this competition with only one song finished after one month. However, the real question is am I someone able to pull out that kind of performance?

I guess the answer to that will come on October 1st.

I have one housekeeping note, before I wrap this up.

Lately, there’s been a glut of spammers signing up as subscribers to this website. I’ve conceded defeat on leaving that option open and so, for the time being at least, the option which allows “anyone to register” as a subscriber to this website has been disabled. I expect I’ll change it back at some point, but I just can’t say exactly when that will be.

The desktop computer still hasn’t seen it’s operating system re-installed, but the task is much closer to completion.

The day before yesterday I accidentally got started with the 50/90 challenge.

Fellow participant Steven Wesley Guiles posted a solo guitar riff and offered it up to anyone who wanted to try and do something with it. It caught my imagination and I decided to have a go.

I was using the netbook at the time so I downloaded his mp3, imported it into Reaper, and within two hours had something that makes me think “Perry Mason in the 21st Century.” I didn’t take the time to lock in Steven’s track to a steady tempo, and since I’m not the best player of the bunch, my additions are rough.

It’s clearly no “Park Avenue Beat” and I’m no Fred Steiner, but for a quick demo to capture an idea, I kinda like it.

One down and forty-nine to go!

The Request – by Steven Wesley Guiles & Postcard Helicopters

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Not much to report.

It’s been a week filled with non-music-writing tasks.

The computer is still in its old, corrupted state. It’s in serious need of having the operating system re-installed, and that job just gives me the willies. I’m so worried I’ll lose something important in the process that I keep putting it off. If much more time passes before I finish that job, well; it may have to wait until October.

Theoretically, there’s still time to make this challenge work, but it just doesn’t have the juice of FAWM with this longer deadline. “Thirty days? Wow! Better get cracking!” vs. “Ninety days? Hell, there’s still plenty of time to get it done.” Which is probably the most sneaky aspect of this challenge.

Still no songs recorded. That could be part of the lure of this challenge, in that it’s not quite as urgent as FAWM so I find it easier to postpone getting started. There is a chart on the website, showing just how many songs you need at each point to keep a steady and regular pace to the finish line. Going by that chart, I’m behind by about three songs, I think. Three and a half, perhaps.

I have a few offline obligations to tend to before I can really sit down to focus on nothing but writing new music.

I’m getting some inspiration in things, and collecting some creative tension, so within a few more weeks I should engage in active and regular songwriting.

I’ve also begun a DIY project to build a Tactile User Interface which may or may not feature in some of the upcoming songs for this challenge. I’m not a programmer, so it’ll depend on whether or not someone who is a programmer has written all the code I need to convert the TUI info to MIDI data. I’ll keep you updated on this project as it develops.

Oh, hey, I could still end up doing a no-show like last year… That’s still a possibility, and the final tally won’t come in until October 1st.

Stay tuned!

Today is the third day of the 2009 50/90 Challenge and, so far, I haven’t finished a song.

I had a good time out-of-town for the weekend celebrating the holiday with a boatload of huge explosions and with equally top-notch company.

I started work on a couple of ideas while I was away, but I don’t expect them to develop into much. As it is, I don’t really expect to seriously get started with the challenge until next Monday. I still have cleanup work on my desktop computer to tend to, and then this morning I decided today was dedicated to catching up on a few other things before going back to that task.

Hopefully by next Monday, I’ll have some songwriting news to report.