THE MUSIC PAGE
All of this music is copyrighted. You're welcome to listen to it, download it, put it on a cassette or CD and throw it in the car, send it to your friends - do whatever you want with it, as long as it's for personal use only.
Talk about overkill; it took 3 full days of writing, recording, editing, and mixing to produce this little 78-second ditty. A video producer hired me to compose a grand, over-the-top orchestral piece which would play under a comedic montage - shots of a group of lawyers bumbling around at a golf outing (these guys were definitely NOT golf pros). The idea was to satirize the whole "thrill of victory/agony of defeat" idea of a real sporting competition. For this piece, I used a Korg O1W/FD for everything except the trumpet, which came from an Alesis QS-8.
Ever had a happy accident? I've had lots of those, and "The Hits & More" was one of them. I had just bought a sampling CD containing a whole gaggle of pre-recorded drum grooves. I had no intention of writing any music that day; I was just curious to see if I could sample one of these grooves, loop it, and then get it to lock up with other drum parts I'd programmed myself. While I was listening to these grooves playing over and over again, trying to get them to work together, a little melody started rattling around in my head, and... well, you get the idea. This song literally wrote itself - it didn't orginate with me, it just sort of passed through me. The sampler was an old Korg DSS-1, and the MIDI stuff all came out of a Roland D-5 and a Roland JX-8P, and I think the O1W is in there too.
(Warning: There also exists a very bloated, self-indulgent version of this song called the Tribal Head Trip Remix that is dangerously boring and should only be listened to in cases of extreme emergencies or significantly altered states)
(For people who ask me why I don't sing anymore!) Once upon a time, there was an '80s pop band named Square One. I was one-half of that band, the other half being Barry Youse, a truly gifted drummer and programmer who taught me everything I know about how to lay down a groove. Early in 1990, Barry and I collaborated on this, the last official recording of Square One (I wrote the music, and Barry wrote the lyrics). This song was recorded and mixed by Doug Edwards at Musicol in Columbus, Ohio. We used the studio's Steinway grand piano, plus a lot of synths by Roland and Korg. I think the drum machine was a Korg DDD-1, but I couldn't swear to it. For the guitar tracks, I used a Washburn G2V and a Charvel Deluxe-Something-Or-Another, both played through a tiny Marshall amp, cranked up to 11 (because 11 is one louder than 10).
In 1994, while in the posession of an ancient 4-track cassette recorder (loaned to me by me friend Barry, who by now had a real job and wasn't using it much), I stumbled onto a long-forgotten computer file containing my very first experiement with MIDI sequencing and drum programming (not my best work, but you gotta start somewhere). I dumped a stereo mix of the sequence over to the recorder and brought it with me on a road trip. The guitar parts were recorded over the course of two very late nights in a hotel room after a gig, using my red Washburn guitar and a Zoom preamp direct to tape (no amps or speakers could be used because of the late hour, so I used headphones for monitoring). I had no specific melody in mind; everything was improvised. I just kept going back and re-recording the same eight bars until I played something I thought was cool. Then I moved on to the next eight bars and did the same thing, and so on. Eventually, I got through the whole song, eight bars at a time.
Remember back when you were a kid, how much fun you used to have with those small jars of soapy water with the little wand built into the lid? Remember how you could blow through that ring at the end of the wand and fill the room with bubbles?? My friend Sally Lentz (she has really Big Wits, you know) gives those little bubble jars to folks who come to her shows. Everyone knows you can't have bubbles without bubble music, so Sally commissioned the Happy Bubble Song. My task was to capture a Lawrence Welk-ish vibe to underscore a particular moment in the show. This piece was done completely on my Korg O1W/FD; no other instruments, sequencers, or effects were used. This stupid little song STILL makes me laugh after hearing it literally hundreds of times during the course of writing and recording it.
