None scheduled.
Elise Tomlinson
Rory Stitt
Arlo Midgett
May 6th, 2007 | Comments: none
Yeah, as I suspected that was a little too ambitious to get a song written and recorded in those fading days of April. Some things came up in my non-musical life that were a hindrance. Nonetheless I have quite a few little song-seeds germinating and am confident one or more of them will soon blossom. It is, after all, springtime.
And if you missed it, check out the awesome press I got in the Juneau Empire.
April 24th, 2007 | Comments: none
Sunday night we played our final show of Tommy. The last weekend’s crowds were large and exuberant, which is just how we like ‘em. It was a fun show, but I’m okay with it being finished. Now I can turn my attention to…
My New Years resolution this year was to write a song a month once I’d finished my CD. I was inspired by Jonathan Coulton’s “Thing a Week” project where he wrote and recorded a song every week for a year (!). Day jobs and such being what they are, it wouldn’t be feasable to try and pull that off myself. But I think a song a month is quite achievable yet it’ll force my creativity just enough to be really good for me. I figure if I tell enough people about it I’ll have to stick to it. This month is going to be tough because Tommy and finishing the CD took up most of my time, and now I only have six days to whip something up. It’ll happen. Stay tuned.
I updated the site some with a new page all about the new CD, and uploaded an MP3 for “Buenos Aires,” so there are now five of the CD’s nine tracks available for download. It’s my hope enough people will purchase a CD that I can roll that money into a couple small upgrades to my studio setup, but as always I’m most interested in getting the tunes out there and hoping people enjoy listening as much as I’ve enjoyed creating, so that’s my compromise.
April 12th, 2007 | Comments: 4
Ladies and gentlemen, I present my new CD: Magellan & Pele. It feels SO good to have it finished. I started recording the thing in the fall of 2005, originally intending it to be a 4- or 5-song EP, but graduate school and life postponed it. And finally… GRRR ARGH AROURRORORUR NGGGGG… it’s finished (I was thinking birth pains there, but now I’m thinking it reads more like Schwartzenegger pulling the nose thingy out from Total Recall which, while classic, doesn’t really apply to my CD, which is nose-detritus-free).
I’m working on uploading some MP3s and getting all the lyrics pages going, so not every link may work at the moment, but they will presently. Head to the song page to check it out. Some of the song pages have early demos and clips from the writing process as well as pithy commentary.
I’ve signed up with CD Baby to help distribute the CD to people who can’t track me down to get one, and they should have it in stock within a few days. In the meantime, have you seen Tommy yet? Come check us out, and bring a few bucks for a CD after the show.
April 8th, 2007 | Comments: none
We just passed the halfway mark with Tommy performances - 17 down, 15 to go. The show is going well. The band is tightening up nicely.
[Warning: minor Tommy spoilers follow.]
One of the most fun aspects of doing this show for me has been the chance to play a lot of different keyboard parts. The original production had three keyboard players, each covering a couple dozen sounds. Distilling that down to what I can cover myself was a fun puzzle. My solution is to run two boards: a digital piano and a MIDI controller driving my laptop.
My main board, a Yamaha 88-key digital piano, has a decent set of basic keyboard sounds: piano, rhodes, digipiano, pipe organ, harpsichord, legato strings, and straight jazz organ. It’s where my hands spend most of their time.
That covers the basics, but the show needed a lot more. For Hedwig I had used my old AKAI hardware sampler for the hammond parts, but its paltry 32 MB of RAM wasn’t going to cut it for this show. So I decided to go with software.
The second keyboard I’m running is a 61-key Korg controller driving my laptop. The laptop is running MOTU’s MachFive software sampler hosted by a great little program called Rax2, built just for hosting software instruments for playing live.
All of the samples I need for the show are loaded at once, and the bottom five or six keys on the keyboard are programmed to switch them as needed: marcato strings (which can be layered with a legato section via a button toggle), glockenspiel, horn section, tympani, classic fat synth, another organ, pan flute, piccolo trumpet, tuba, and various synth sweeps.
The synth sweeps were a key part of the original production. They’re heard during “Amazing Journey” and the “Pinball Wizard” reprise, most notably when [spoiler] Tommy rises up off the stage [/spoiler]. Also the “woosh” at the end of the first act. I had to program those myself, for which I used Crystal, then just sampled the result into MachFive. It’s quite satisfying to rip out some big farty blasts of sound.
Oh, and yeah, the CD is truly, really finished. More on that very soon.
March 30th, 2007 | Comments: none
The CD is finished! The CD is finished! More to come. Must sleep now.
