Podcast: Summer Days, Winter Nights (musical mashup)

A collaborative piece with Firdaus.

SUMMER DAYS, WINTER NIGHTS 1.2

Listen/ download at ARCHIVE.ORG

When I heard the original (with vocals) that Firdaus posted at his blog, I liked it immediately because it reminded me of what Carlos Santana might play. I commented that his song sounded like “Santana meets Oasis”!

I asked if he could email me a ‘Minus-One’ version, as I wanted to experiment with a rock guitar lead version. He emailed me a MP3 file during the week. I downloaded it and managed to work on it on Friday night.

Thanks for sharing, Firdaus!

Basically I added several “live” guitar leads and two “live” bass tracks. I cut about a minute from the original; I tend to keep my songs to about 3-and-a-half minutes. The most challenging part was keeping time with Firdaus’ original.

There were at least two segments where his guitar strumming didn’t quite keep in time with his drum beats. After a few hours of “close-quarters” editing and experimenting, I decided to replace an entire segment (starting from the 33rd measure) with a GarageBand drum loop. At the 50th measure, I didn’t replace his original segment but lowered the volume of his original track and raised the volume for the drum loops. Luckily, Firdaus used the standard 120 bps setting, so I was able to incorporate the GB drum loops into the song perfectly.

I think I spent about 18 to 20 hours before I was happy with the final version.

I used three custom guitar effects settings:

Bass effects:

This work by Ivan Chew is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. For permissions beyond the scope of this license , please contact via RamblingLibrarian@gmail.com.

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A new item in my guitar collection

Bought a Bass Guitar today. A Stagg “B300-BK“.

Standard “J” electric bass guitar - Pickups: 2 x JB - Controls: 2 x Volume + 1 x Tone - Body: solid Alder - Pickguard: White (BK/BL/SB) or Tortoiseshell (N/NS) - Neck: Hard Maple, bolt-on, 867 mm, (34.2 in.) - Fingerboard: Rosewood, 20 frets - Bridge: “JB” Classic - Machine heads: Standard “P”, nickel - Colour: Black.

Bought it from Zen Guitarwerks (they’re located at the basement of Peninsula Shopping Complex, at Coleman Street) for $310, including a $20 guitar bag.

Discussed with my wife if I should buy the bass guitar. Did a mental check so that I was sure I’d be using it and not buying it on a whim.

Didn’t really shop around to see if there were better deals. My budget was $500 or less. If the instrument was within my budget AND gave me the right feel, I was prepared to buy it there and then.

So I dropped by Peninsular Shopping Complex (which, in the last decade, has quietly become the guitar player shopping mecca in Singapore).

Zen Guitarwerks was the second shop I went into (the price range of the bass guitars at the first shop were beyond my budget). It’s a relatively tiny shop, and I’d almost missed it had my wife not pointed it out.

Within minutes of my scanning the price tags at the bass guitar section, the young girl manning the shop asked if I needed help. Her demeanor was friendly, and she seemed knowledgeable about the stuff in the shop.

Tried about four bass guitars from different price ranges. The one I bought was the lowest priced in the store, but somehow the feel and tone was nicer than the higher priced ones that I tested.

Final test was to tune the bass guitar, check the action for buzzing (none that I could tell), last intuitive feel of the weight and fret play.

I’ve reached a point where the sound generated from MIDI just isn’t good enough. Plus, I’m interested in learning more instruments. Admittedly, I was also encouraged after watching videos like these (now how’s that as an example of YouTube indirectly influencing a purchase decision?).

Technical skills-wise, I’m still going to focus on the guitar. But I decided to buy a bass guitar to try out some musical ideas I have in mind. I don’t expect it to drastically change my compositions but will see how it goes.

Will check out some online resources and books from the public libraries.

Nice to be trying out something new.

Music Mashup: Chris Ismael’s “We Are”

A few hours ago, I listened to this recording of Chris performing “live” at the recent songcraft session.

Chris’ performance was near flawless that evening. The “live” recording was excellent, considering that Jeremy just plonked his MP3 recorder on the ground.

But my guitar lead still sucked, weak as it was in the background.

Then on a whim, I decided to download the MP3 file, imported it into GarageBand and recorded a guitar track. There was hope for my playing yet! After five hours, I was happy with the recording and sound engineering:

*
“We Are”

Listen/Download at ARCHIVE.ORG
Composer: Chris Ismael.
Performed “live” by Chris Ismael. “Live” recording by Jeremy Yew.
Additional guitar lead/ bass by Ivan Chew.
*

For comparison, here’s the original “live” version, without my additional guitar and bass:

*

While mixing this version, I reminded myself the guitar lead should serve to highlight the song, and not be the centerpiece. I tried my best to bring Chris’ vocals up, and was careful to keep the accompanying guitar in the background.

I’ve played the lead for this song (all impromptu) four times at various Songcraft sessions. Each time I walked away feeling that I’ve not done justice to his song.

Since the songcraft mini-concert, I’ve been pestering Chris for ages to do a proper recording of “We Are”, so that I can attempt to play a decent lead. He said OK but didn’t have time to do a proper recording.

Well Chris, I hope you like this lead. Not fantastic but better than my impromptu leads that you’ve been putting up with so far!

Thanks Dude, for the song.

Changing to higher gauged strings & adjusting a floating guitar bridge

I’ve always used a set of 0.09mm electric guitar strings. Found them easier to play and bend. But lately, I found the lighter strings sounding too thin. Plus, I’ve stop harbouring any pretenses that lighter gauge strings would make me the guitar-shredder virtuoso, LOL.

I have a floating bridge, and changing to a set of higher gauge strings isn’t as straight-forward. You need to perform additional adjustments to the springs that connect to the floating bridge.

Apparently it’ll cost about $180 to $200 to have a professional change it (and a friend told me horror stories of how some “professionals” turned out to be amateurs).

I figured I might as well try learning how to do it. I had some idea how to do it. Besides, I wasn’t aiming for that good a sound and I might learn something in the process.

First, I removed the old strings and gave the guitar a wipe down and polish.

Next was to remove the access cover, to get to the springs that controlled the tension of the floating bridge.

Then I put on the new set of strings (this was a higher gauge; 0.10mm for the first string). The floating bridge no longer “floats”, since the strings have no tension.

After I tightened the strings (standard E tuning), it was clear that the tension is way too high. The bridge is raised to a level that far too high to play the guitar properly.

After this point, it was just pure “learn as I go”; a process of adjustments and experimenting. After twiddling for a bit, I realised I had to increase the tension of the floating bridge springs, so that it will bring down the bridge.

True enough, the bridge was lowered.

I continued to make adjustments to the bridge springs, and the string tension. The tricky bit about tuning a floating bridge is that any adjustment to a string tension affects the rest of the strings. So it was a process of repeatedly adjusting the tension, checking the tuning, re-adjusting and re-checking the tuning… eventually, you’ll get there.

Right now, there’s a slight buzz when I play the sixth string at the 12th fret. I was told I’d have to adjust the truss rod (a metal bar that reinforces the guitar neck) but I wasn’t brave enough to try that yet. I’ll let it go, until the buzz irritates me to further action!

OK, my guitar is still in one piece. And it’s playable. And the bridge works fine.

Total time taken to change the strings and adjust the bridge: Two hours.

Saved myself $100 plus dollars.

Not bad for a first attempt.

And the higher gauge strings sound real sweet.

Podcast: Here And Now

A rock guitar instrumental.

HERE AND NOW (200

Download/ listen at ARCHIVE.ORG

Chords: Em/ D/ A + C/ G
Tempo: 90 bps

Details at Starfish Stories.

Podcast: Wanna Be With You

Here’s a song that was inspired by the last Songcraft meetup in March 2008.

I dedicate this to my wife.

WANNA BE WITH YOU

Listen/ download at ARCHIVE.ORG
Music: Ivan Chew
Recorded, mixed and engineered with GarageBand.
Lyrics, adapted with permission, from Betty and Huiling.

My singing’s passable at best. If anyone wants to improve on the song, go right ahead (see: Creative Commons license). Or if you don’t have GarageBand, you can record your vocals only and email me. I’ll work it into the song and add you to the credits.

Sequence of events:
At the March 2008 Songcraft meetup, Jerron performed one of his songs (I can’t remember which one at the moment). His songs had the chords C and probably a G in there.

Next to perform was Betty and Huiling. Their song was titled “I just wanna be with you” (on a totally different chord and arrangement). The two ladies passed around slips of paper with the lyrics.

After they sung their song, and was in the midst of explaining how they collaborated on it, I picked the C and G chords on the guitar and mentally sung the first two lines of their song. It sounded quite nice, I thought.

Then I was suddenly inspired to spontaneously sing aloud the lyrics to the whole group (something I’ve only done maybe once in all of my past songcraft meetups). It sounded nice in spite of my singing. So I decided to develop it into a full-fledge piece.

There’s no break or bridge. Just a simple and straight-forward stanza/ chorus arrangement, as you can see below.

CHORDS:
[main] C/ Am/ F/ G
[chorus] F/ Am/ C/ G

LYRICS:

[1]
Oceans blue, flowers bloom
I just wanna be with you
Bright round moon, lovebirds’ croon
I just wanna be with you

[2]
Purple sky, mountains high
I just wanna be with you

[Chorus 1]
Everywhere that I go,
I wish somehow you were here
By my side to share these times
I just wanna be with you

[Repeat 1]

[Chorus 2; repeat]
Everywhere that I go,
I wish somehow you were here
Hold me tight all though the night
I just wanna be with you

This work by Ivan Chew is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. For permissions beyond the scope of this license , please contact via RamblingLibrarian@gmail.com.

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Technorati Tags: garageband, mac, apple, collaborative music

Poem: Visayan Adventure #3

A poem I wrote back in 2002, after visiting the Philippines with a fellow SSEAYPian, Lim. We were hosted by Nick (who made sure we touched all the major islands), attended Ian’s wedding and caught up with friends like Tisha (I think V-lyn and Grain)… and a whole bunch whose names I’ve forgotten (sorry!)

Reading this again brought back memories of food and places. Lots of cryptic references. The poem (which can be improved from the technical viewpoint) probably means a lot more to me that anyone else reading.

Visayan Adventure #3
—————————-

Which was first?
Heavenly Halo-Halo
(subsequent overkill)
Succinct Su-tu-kil

I recall
Raw marlin in coconut vinegar
Name forgotten but
Taste remembered

Eyes feasted upon
Churches, old buildings
Glinting butterflywings
Nature’s pigments in manmade paintings

Restaurant or Street food?
Roasted chicken, cup of rice
Bamboo skewed, hand to mouth
I survived

Knife in the back
A hunk of roasted bliss
Scrapping fats off lard ladened Lechon
(Whatcha lookin’ at?)

Emerald Green
Colour of Bohol’s river
Therapeutic water massage
Reminiscence of
Refreshing green mango shakes

Love at first taste
Sweet tooth meets Ms. B .D. Mercedes
In a second home in Bacolod
But infuation soon replaced
By nostalgic Sansrivals
Heart tied in Red Ribbon

Final lingering
Lighted headed on Light (I blame San Miguel)
In a moment of drunken courage
I am onstage,
With an unrehearsed rendition of Metallica

Last night in Cebu,
Of a journey of first tastes

Ivan Chew, 5 June 2002

Music banner

This is what I call a badly-designed graphic. The spacing at the top and bottom of the words could be a bit more even. Ah well…

Podcast: Surfing on Solar Winds

See this post and this one, at Starfish Stories for details.

Listen/ download at ARCHIVE.ORG

Podcast: Weight of an Empty Page

From previous post: This is my idea of what the song should sound like.

I wanted something simple, that starts a little moody but uplifting in the end.

Listen/ download at ARCHIVE.ORG

I’m not sure if Regina would find the song suitable, or close to what she had in mind.

Anyway, Regina and I discussed over email on how the song should take shape. I suggested recording the words as spoken lyrics but Regina had other ideas. She preferred it to be purely instrumental, “preferably with keyboards/ piano as the main instrument”. Sure, I could do that

My reading of Regina’s words was that the mood of the song was something that contains hope. It didn’t come across as a sad song. Not happy, but not sad either. More like a calm, contented song. One that says “Acceptance”.

Surprisingly, Regina had similar thoughts:

It is about acceptance, and about making the unbearable bearable. In my head it’s sounds more like an ambient piece. A little like a John Cage piece, or Philip Glass. Very minimal, with some parts that are repetitive, with a slight dissonance. I’m not a musician, but that’s the closest I can think of.

I didn’t work on the song right away. Found a few Philip Glass references in YouTube. While thinking about repetitive and dissonant piano tunes, I remembered this earlier post.

Then one evening, I just played a few notes on the MIDI keyboard. Recorded a few bars. Didn’t really have anything in mind except that I’d record the notes and try to piece them together like a jigsaw puzzle. I also decided to experiment with a 3/4 timing (spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to do it, since my mind has been stuck with a 4/4 time signature like, forever).

Anyway, I really can’t give any details of how the song came about, other than saying it was a matter of playing, recording, experimenting, using editing and arrangement to make up for my lack of piano skills.

[72 BPS; 3/4 time signature]

Well, I’m quite happy with how this piece turned out.

This work by Ivan Chew is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. For permissions beyond the scope of this license , please contact via RamblingLibrarian@gmail.com.

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