Extra drowsy Formula

Here’s a song that I sing to my cat, who, like the song, is named Henry Pants. Because he has a lot on his plate and a short attention span besides, this song is less than a minute long. It features autoharp, glockenspiel, and the “Min-O-Matic” rhythm box.

Fun Facts:

1) The “choked” autoharp in the beginning is achieved by holding down two chord buttons at once, so that the only undampened note (F, in this case) is the one common to both chords (F and Bb). Mechanics!

2) I slowed the song down a little bit in order to sing the harmony part. (I sped it back up again afterward.)

3) Everything in this song is hard-panned. The lead vocals are up the center, autoharp all the way to the left, and everything else all the way to the right. (There’s a little bit of autoharp on the right, too, because I forgot to unplug the monitor speakers when I recorded the harmony vocals.)

4) This is a fun song to sing. You can sing it to your cat (or dog! or…hamster?) if they have a name that rhymes with “Pants.” If you are not so fortunate, I guess you can sing it to this picture of Henry Pants, himself.  Here are the words.

Just in time for Election Day! This is a nice song to sing on your way to or from your local polling place. (If you sing it at the polling place — or at work, or really in any polite company — you will be frowned at, at the very least.) If you’ve already voted, that’s okay — you can sing it while watching the returns, or simply learn it for next time. If you’re not in the United States, that’s okay, too — it will probably still apply.

This is what I did on Sunday, mostly, and finished up just now.

Autoharp, vocals, “Dr. Groove” drum machine, and the Alesis Micron for bass & organ. (I’m using my Shinybox ribbon mic for vocals and I’m pretty happy with it so far.)

The words are a couple of years old but apart from a vague melodic idea this is all new as of last weekend.

Inspired by Brutalist architecture, here is a Lullaby for Stalin: Treehouse

I never intended to record this song — the lyrics were tosed off on a lark ten years ago — but due to a “write a children’s song about bugs” challenge over on Metafilter, I wrote some new music and whipped this together in a few hours.

That’s the fastest I’ve ever recorded a song, I think, and it’s made me think about the value of stripping down the arrangements and actually getting things done.

Autoharp, drum machine (pitch-shifted or distorted or something, I think), and 4 vocal tracks, all recorded with the Copperphone.

“Too Late to Sleep” is perfect for your next narcoleptic dance party. It may be the only song in the world to feature both the Stylophone and the Violin-Uke.

This song (but not this recording, which is new and fresh) dates back a decade or more; I recorded an early version on 4-track cassette out at the farm. The drum track is actually from that cassette — it’s a drum machine, recorded on the flipside of the cassette and then flipped back and played backward, and now sampled off the cassette and looped. It’s actually in stereo, with one side offset by half the loop length, but it’s a little hard to tell.

When I originally recorded this song, I made extensive use of a hypnosis record that was kicking around. I’m not sure where it is now, so I decided to make my own. My friend Peter Gunn (not the fictional one) recorded the hypnotist’s voice and I added record pops and keyboard.

There’s also piano (a real one! but, again, looped) and Autoharp, of course, run through a Gibson Skylark tremolo amp. The Violin-Uke (which is neither) shows up in the bridge and the Stylophone appears soon after.

The vocals are recorded through a Copperphone mic,which has a nice old-timey quality to it that I am really enjoying. Words are here.

Warm up some milk and enjoy.

Over on MetaFilter Music they’re having a “cover another MetaFilter-ite’s song” challenge this month. Here is my contribution.

As I say over on the MeFi page:

The rhythm track is the “Rock 2″ preset on the Realistic Concertmate-200 (a clone of the Casio VL-1). Other keyboards used include the MicroKorg, Korg Poly-800, and Kawai X40. Oh, and a marimba.

This also marks the debut of my new EWI 4000 (which I bought with my stimulus check — thanks, Mr. President!), a MIDI wind controller — it’s like a synthesizer in the shape of a soprano sax. So, yeah, I used a sophisticated electronic instrument to make a sound like a cheap, distorted tin whistle — that’s how I roll.

To hear the original, click here.

This one has been kicking around for several years but I could never get around to finishing it. Then I bought a marimba and a vibraslap and it finally mostly came together.

There’s also autoharp and various percussion — fingersnaps, rolling dice — and Sue sings the la la las.

At the very end there’s a Pling Plong, which is a sort of do-it-yourself music box.

Words are over here.

Most of the songs I write tend to have a I-IV-V chord progression. I write songs away from any instument at all, at when I pick up the autoharp, hey! it turns out that it’s I-IV-V. I’m well aware that this is a limitation.

To combat this, I bought a book called Chord Progressions for Songwriters — it’s a list of tons of chord progressions, and it gives examples of songs that use them and classifies them — “folk,” “blues,” whatever.

I flipped through it and found a “Doo-Wop” chord progression — I-VIm-IV-V — not too different, but the addition of that VIm chord, sure enough, sounds like an old Doo-Wop song. So I started playing it (in this case, F-Dm-Bb-C) and making up silly words about sock hops and stuff. And one of the things I sung was the line, “when my baby was mine.”

That, I thought, has to be the name of a song already. But I couldn’t find evidence of it existing. So I figured I should write it. Here it is.

I would normally never write a song called “When My Baby Was Mine.” But this messing around with a — for me — totally new chord progression tumbled me in a direction that I would normally never go. I deem this Experiment #2 — force yourself to find a new chord progression. See where it leads.

Instruments include autoharp (one fairly clean, one distorted and pitched down an octave), drum machine, and a Q-Chord during the bridge. Words are here.

Here’s the back of a shirt I got — for free — when I bought one of my autoharps. I can’t decide what rocks more — the radical purple-and-yellow color scheme, or the stick figure with the awesome ponytail. Perhaps they are tied, rockin’-wise!

Okay, so a cassette player makes noise when its tape head reads information off of a magnetic tape, right? And credit cards have those magnetic stripes on the back with their own information on them, right? So you should be able to play a credit card just like a cassette tape.

Turns out you can. It sounds a little bit like scratching a record. Here is a sample.

Here’s how to make your own credit card noisemaker.

Stuff You Need:

• Credit card. Or, really, anything with a magnetic stripe: Hotel key card, MetroCard, Costco card. They all seem to make pretty much the same noise.
• Speaker. A guitar amp is fine. Small is great; I’m using this little amp from Radio Shack.
• Alligator clips.

You’ll want two pairs (each pair is connected by an insulated wire, like the one above).

• Phone plug.

This one is a mini — you can use a 1/4″ instead if you’re running it into a guitar amp. Mono is fine (and a little cheaper). Get one where you can get at the connectors (on the left of the pic). You’ll be connecting one alligator clip to the short one (top left) and the other alligator clip to the longer one.

• Tape Head.

You can pull this out of any old tape deck that isn’t working anymore. This one is mono, which means that there are only two (instead of four) connections in the back, so there’s less futzing around — but stereo is fine too. I pulled this one out of a little kid’s plastic walkman that I picked up at Value Village. (Broken answering machines are good too.) Note that I kept the wires attached to it; this makes it a little easier to hook things up to it.

Now, all you have to do is use the alligator clips to attach the two connectors of the plug to two connectors of the tape head. (It doesn’t seem to matter what gets hooked up to what when you’re using a mono head and a mono plug. With stereo stuff, you may have to do a little trial and error.) Then, plug the plug into your amp.

Now rub the tape head against the magnetic strip on the back of the card. Sweet music!

(The obvious next step is to take a cassette tape and take out the actual tape part, and use some sort of adhesive to affix it to a flat surface, and then play it with a loose tape head, like a really low-rent Laurie Anderson.)

Buying stuff on eBay is dodgy. Here’s a phonoharp I bought recently.

It’s a precursor to the autoharp. The metal grill across the middle has holes in it, in three horizontal rows; when you scrape a pick along a row, it hits only the strings exposed by the holes, thus sounding a chord. There are only three chords possible, but C, G, and F are pretty much the only chords I use anyway.

This particular one has a patent date of 1891 stamped on it; I am not sure how old this particular one is. It has a solid body — rather than a hollow one with a soundhole — which I’m guessing dates it fairly early.

The problem with this one is that the dead pin end is starting to pull up due to the tension of the strings.

Here is a side view of (what in the photo above is) the lower left-hand corner:

You can see a pin sticking out at the far right; this is what the strings hook onto.  (There’s a whole row of them, one per string.) As the string is tightened (using the standard zither pins at the top end), the loose wood will pull upward. This means that it’s not possible to keep the thing in tune, since the pulling will cause the strings to loosen; tightening them will only cause the wood to pull up further until it comes loose entirely and smacks you in the face.

Now, if this was something I could look at before buying, it’d be one of the first things I’d check. It’s way too much hassle to deal with that sort of bodywork. This one might be easier, being a solidbody. Can I just shove some woodglue in there and clamp it down for a few days? Should I run a screw into it?

I think what I will do is run it by an instrument repair shop and see what they think. Worst comes to worst, it cost me less than $20 (including shipping) and I can live without it, but it’d be nice to get it up and running.

Further reports as events warrant.