Tripecac - Mix 3 (triton instrumental)

This is one of the very few Tripecac songs which used a "canned" rhythm (in this case the Triton's "Streetwalk" combi). Usually, I prefer playing all the notes myself.

I was experimenting with piping my guitar through the Triton's effects. I wanted to see whether a signal from the guitar would lower the volume of the rest of the Triton's audio tracks. Likewise, I wanted to see whether a Triton-based sound (like an synth) would have a similar effect. In other words, would the Triton automatically normalize the overall volume of the outputs?

To find out, I recorded myself noodling on the guitar and keyboard at the same time while the "Streetwalk" combi played in the background. I had one hand on the guitar, the other on the Triton (playing the synth and tweaking knobs), and my foot controlling the Triton's sustain pedal. I recorded everything in one take to a single stereo audio track.

When I listened to this "test" later, I forgot all about my experiment and just sat there amazed at how cool this chaotic little test ended up sounding!

I started this song on the morning of 9/11, before I turned on the news. It was a light, repetitive test of Cakewalk, nothing special really. As far as I was concerned, it was destined to be Yet Another Unfinished Song. I forget what I called it.

An hour later, when I started work, I heard about the WTC and Pentagon bombings. I marvelled at how relaxed and blissful I had been just minutes ago, when I was working on music. I decided to rename the song "Memorial". I also decided to try to turn this negative situation into a positive one. I hadn't finished a song in years, and promised myself I would work on this one until I finished it.

It ended up taking me about a month. I worked on it almost every day. I wasn't used to having unlimited sequencer memory, so I kept adding sections to the song: solos, choruses, breakdowns, and more solos. I didn't want to delete any of the ideas, so the song grew and grew. It became an epic (easy-listening) jam, approaching the length of "Been Way Too Long", my longest song at that point. I had no idea how I was going to finish it. Not knowing what to do, I resorted to adding more solos...

Eventually I realized that I needed to set a time limit for myself or I would never finish. I decided to stop expanding the song, to switch gears and start editing it. Now began the endless hours of fine-toothed tweaking, mixing, and rearranging. I obsessed over almost every note, trying hard to make this a "masterpiece". By the time I had finished editing it, I think I had sucked most of the life out of it. It was super-listenable, but also super-bland. Dad liked it, however, and had me put a shorter version of it on Dad's Picks.

The good news is that I had momentum now. I was elated over having actually finished a song, and immediately started on the next one. Since "Memorial" had taken me exactly one month to finish, I decided to give myself the same time limit for the new song, which became "Renewal".

This is probably my favorite Tripecac song ever! It's instrumental dance, with a dose of jazz and subtle sound effects (crickets, thunder, rain, etc.) I liked it so much I decided to record a vocal version ("Trail Running") to put on Renewal. Dad liked it too, and selected it for Dad's Picks.

This is the result of me trying to sound like Andreas Vollenweider. There's a nice "jam" section in the middle; I wish I had extended it longer! Initially, I planned to have vocals, and even wrote some lyrics. For some reason I decided to keep it instrumental.

I don't remember why I named it "Tension". I remember one of the lyrics was "There is tension in the band". Why was I singing about tension in a band? I don't remember! All I know is that I like it a lot more than "My Old School"!

This is a long, spacy improv which I started in January 2002 and finished in May 2002. Stylistically, it doesn't really fit with the rest of the album. Unliked the other songs, it wasn't carefully composed, and emphasizes texture over melody. I think it would seem more at home on later albums.

Although this isn't as in-your-face powerful an opener as "Convenience", it still gets Back Up off to a rolling, finger-tapping start. It's upbeat, driving jazz/funk, and was my first experiment with swing quantization. I also tried to give the groove a more "human" feel by nudging the notes a little off the beat.

The title had at least two meanings. First, I wanted something peppy, something with more "drive" than the song I had most recently started ("Skins"). Secondly, I started this during a time when I felt like I should to get out of the house more. I was jumping up and down in my room for exercise and realized that I needed to move horizontally (not just vertically) in order to have hopes of ever meeting someone special. I needed to move my car at least once a month (to keep the battery charged). I may have been thinking about moving to a different apartment (with more space and/or light), although I doubt it. Also, I was "moving" the notes off of the beat as part of my experiment.

I was in a horrible mood this evening, and decided to pour everything into a song. Here it is: created, recorded, and uploaded all within 3 hrs. The name has a few meanings:

1. It was late fall (my favorite time of year) when I recorded it.
2. I was trying to create a dark, relentless groove like The Fall.
3. I felt like my mood had fallen big-time since the previous week.
4. I had a "f*** it all" attitude about socializing at that point.

Simple, repetitive instrumental which ever so gradually builds into a "heavenly" chorus.

This is my favorite song on Baby Talk. It starts as raucous, funky trance, gets jazzier and quieter, breaks down into a drum+bass reggae beat for a while, and then returns to the noisy funk at the end. Most of the coolness comes from 2003.

During the summer of 2001 I took a long car trip from Virginia up to Alaska and then back down to Bellingham. On the way, I visited my fellow Cope fan Andrew up in Fort McMurray. One day Andrew had to go work for a few hours, and I came with him. His job was at a school, which happened to have a piano practice room (yay!). Naturally, I parked myself at the piano for the next couple hours.

It was during that practice session that I came up with the roots of this song (see the Trex song "Different Mood Same Person"). "C Cm F Fm" is named after the chord progression, which is very simple but seemed unique. A couple months later, after I was settled into Bellingham, I added a melody and some basic rhythms. In 2004 I finally finished it. Long story for a short song!

Of all the songs in line to be completed, this was my favorite. I'd been looking forward to finishing it for over two years. It's a long, trancy jazz/rock jam, with three screeching guitar parts. The mix is a little bass-heavy and muddy, and the funky reggae ending is a dead end, but overall I'm happy with how this song turned out!

I named it after the bugs that I kept seeing in my apartment (in 2002). Silverfish aren't as nasty as roaches, but they're still pretty startling and annoying. Fortunately, my new apartment seems to be silverfish-free (knock on wood... but not too loudly or else the silverfish will hear me and investigate).

I guess it was raining the day I started this. Since this is the last song I started in April 2003, I decided to make it the last song on the album. There were about 10 minutes left to fill, so I made this really long. Hopefully it didn't end up too boring! I try to end albums on a positive note, no pun intended!

This song, whose title is short for "let's go", kicks off the album on an upbeat note. The familiar Tripecac formula is in effect (or "in da house"): a repetitive mix of funk, jazz, and reggae. It's peppy enough to sound like it could have fit on Coma Pill. I guess that's a good thing, because I like where Coma Pill was headed. Now I just need to slow down and actually start writing some songs!

It's interesting (to me) that I've been waiting almost three years to start working on new material, and here I am, building this song in exactly the same way I was working on the old songs! There's no "composition" phase; it's just me constructing patterns, dropping instruments in and out, and adding solos. Perhaps this first "all new" album will be a bridge between the groove/improv older material and actual written songs? Who knows?

For the record, I actually like this song, so I'm not "knocking" it. It's just not as radical a departure as I thought it would be. No revolution here! Just steady improvement, hopefully. I like the fact that I didn't obsess over it! I finished it in about 3 hours, over 2 days! :) I'm happy. Okay, on to the next new creation!

This is very loop-based. I wanted it to seem like a plant's stem where there's one relentless flow but little branches of variety. The "branches" are when the different instruments drop in and out. Oh well.

In case you're wondering about the footsteps... I was trying to find sounds with "stem" in the name. I couldn't find any, so I reduced my search string to "ste", which found me the footstep sound effect. The car noises are, um, gratuitous.

This track was awarded GarageBand.com's electronic "Track of the Day" for 2006-10-16. I guess people liked the footsteps!

I was in the shower brainstorming what to do for this song. I picked a title: "Corn". Of course, this meant I had to make something really corny. A tune instantly popped into my head. It stayed in my head until I got it down. And now you're hearing it.

It's kinda cool that I can have a musical idea and then make it real a few minutes later. This doesn't mean I'm brilliant or anything; it just means I got lucky today. Usually when I get an idea in my head, it gets lost or warped in transit so that the final song doesn't do the original idea justice.

Also, it's nice to have an idea at all. 99% of the time when I sit down at the keyboard, I have no musical ideas and have to rely on my fingers' mistakes to come up with something new. Luckily for me, I make lots of mistakes. :)

Starts off with the same chords as an IPECAC song, but then turns funky. I don't know why I called it "Ekimo". Sorry!

We've been having trouble with our microwave oven(s). The one I had for over a decade finally quit, and the replacement started acting up within a week. At the same time, our washing machine stopped spinning so we had to buy a new washer. And my main computer has been crashing. Ugh!

This song aims to express my frustration with the malfunctions. I wanted it to sound jerky and stuttering (like our ailing applicances), but then every time it seems to lose the groove, I wanted the drums and bass to kick in forcefully and steadily, "fixing" things. These are supposed to represent my efforts to fix the problems. Of course, soon after I "kick things into gear", the weirdness starts up again...

So we do that over and over and over again. There are several themes woven together... at a micro level. Get it? Ha ha ha ha ha!!!

Okay, sorry, I think my humor is malfunctioning too.

When it rains it bores, eh?

Ha ha ha ha ha!!!

Hmmm...

Ha ha ha ha ha!!!

I was tired of the sparse, crisp, and bluesy feel of the previous album(s), and wanted to start the new one with something dark, bleak, blurry, dense, European, and krautrocky. I also wanted a more "live" sound. So I cranked up the reverb and delay and started thumping out some repetitive, dramatic, trancy stuff.

The result is this song, which doesn't really fit with my original idea for the album (a band playing at a mental hospital). However, I really enjoyed immersing myself in the thick, murky texture, so I didn't try to make this song fit the theme any better. In fact, I decided to change the theme to fit the song; to what, I didn't know, but I could defer that until later.

Anyway, the title is a pun on "sin" and "intro". It's supposed to give you a feeling of foreboding. The idea is that the main character is committing a sin (antisocial act) before getting admitted to the mental hospital.

Okay, well, it's a thin premise, but the template is thick. And that's what matters to me right now. :)

The title comes from a phrase G used. I thought it was cute, so decided to use it for a song title!

The music is mellow and soothing, like cool spring drizzle. It's repetitive and a little tedious at times, but then again, so was the weather this week. Yet we still got out for fresh air and exercise, and had our quiet little adventures, all in the brilliant green countryside.

So this song is a little thanks to the rain for all that green, and big wet, flowery hug for Mother's Day!

I started this song the day after one of our guinea pigs (Coffee) died. At first, I wanted to make it "heartfelt", which meant emotional, sad, touching, etc. But then I decided that a more fitting (and fun) tribute would be to have it resemble Coffee's personality, which meant making it peppy, repetitive, and friendly (melodic).

It took me a long time to finish it, so the original idea got kinda bogged down by the usual Tripecac-isms. Whether it succeeds as a eulogy is up to you.

No, actually, it's up to Coffee.

Rest in peace, little monster!