Tripecac - The Walking Dad

I was testing some new Cuban sounds. But my test ended up sound like cheese city. Do Cubans use a lot of cheese in their food? I didn't think so.

Anyway, this sounded so generic and lame that I decided to end it early rather than prolonging the aural agony for another 5 minutes or so. This makes it one of the shortest songs I've recorded in years!

This song is really really stupid, and really really long. To make it worse, I had really really bad audio problems in Sonar: pops and clicks galore. I think the fault lay mostly with the cheesy drum sound, which was piped through a very aggressive compressor. Also, there were some arpeggios on the organ patch which caused lots of popping. It was a painful experience to edit this song, so listening to it is not much better. Misery loves company!

Anyway, at least it's done. "Finishing" it felt like euthanasia. And on the positive side, since it eats up quite a bit of time, I guess that means I (hopefully) won't feel as rushed to finish the album later on this year.

This song took forever to finish, thanks in part to school holidays. And tons of work. And an increasingly feeble mind.

But at least I finished.

So... not so feeble after all, eh?

Eh???

The last part is deliberately off-kilter and grating. The hedgehog has been smooshed.

But it keeps trying to walk, like it's coming back from the dead.

Like Tripecac.

As always, I had to pick a name first, so I chose "Yet Another Yet Another" (or YaYa for short).

But then I decided I wanted to create something very different from what I'd done before on this album. So I started with a very echo-y drum kit, and a very sparse rhythmic pattern.

I then added a melodic bass part, and then piped it through Guitar Rig 5 to give it a really grungy sound. For the first time ever, I figured out how to preserve the stereo input of the bass part with Guitar Rig, and that sounded a lot cooler than the mono version. It was nice to learn something!

As for the rest of the parts, well, their instruments were not that unusual (clav and kora), but what was unusual is the arpeggiated feel of them. Usually I just sort of bang away (thud thud thud) but this time I tried to add some delicacy. Without sounding too wimpy.

Then I added some out-of-tune vocals. Oh boy.

When I started this song I was feeling starved for free time, and getting impatient with everything, including music making. I was tired of spending so much time trying to get the instruments and mix sounding "right" when I knew by the time the song was done, they wouldn't sound nearly as "right" as I wanted.

I decided to switch things up a bit, to try to break the "rules" in terms of what constitutes a good recording (according to the audiophile forums I'd been frequenting).

So instead of trying to sound like a "real" band, I chose intentially fake-sounding synths and drums. I overcompressed everything, to simulate the "loudness war". Instead of adding master reverb to give the instruments a sense of unity, I left everything dry, except for a dated-sounding gate reverb on a snare drum towards the end. In other words, I was trying to see how much worse this "lazy" approach would sound relative to my more careful habits.

The net effect is pretty synthetic, artificial, and harsh. But is it worse? I don't know. It certainly is different.

Kinda like a new spice to add to the rack.

Which sits in the corner of the garage.

Silly, crude, repetitive but catchy in parts. The vocals were mostly improvised. Can you tell?

I had a persistent cough for a few weeks. Since Tripecac is functioning like a monthly musical blog, I decided to sing about it. Badly.

This project was plagued with its own technical difficulty. The audio kept disappearing every few minutes, forcing me to restart Sonar. I finally tracked the problem to Drumlab, which is a Kontakt instrument I was using for the first time. It was somehow overloading the sound card and/or Sonar. I never found a fix, so I ended up "finishing" the song quickly just to get the pain over with.

I started this on the afternoon before a kids' disco. That's where the name comes from. The sounds were partially from a new Kontakt instrument I was testing: India Discovery Series.

The lyrics were juvenile.

Again.

What's up with that???

Also, the vocals and bass are very muddy (too much reverb) and the song is overall VERY LOUD!!! But, as usual, I got tired of mixing it, so, well, yeah.

On a positive note, I like the coda at the end. That was a bit accidental. Not that anything else isn't!

A bit of a joke, this.

I had recently found some pre-programmed drums rhythms for Addictive Drums 2 and wanted to try one in a song as an experiment. In order to justify its use (since I almost never use canned rhythms), I decided to pretend that the drummer was someone I had no control over. That notion, plus my randomly stumbling upon an old DX7 patch, gave me the idea of making a song in the style of the Anchovies.

So here you go. The first drum rhythm is canned, but everything else is mine. (Not that that's anything to be particularly proud of!)

Does it sound like the Anchovies?

I tried to give it that same cheesy tunefulness combined with the imbalanced orchestration we had (drums, keyboard, and horns). And I even left in the "tape hiss". :)

However, a few minutes into the song I couldn't resist adding some instruments that we didn't have in the Anchovies (namely the bass and some of the percussion sounds). Also, I often had multiple solos going at the same time, which is something we didn't do. So it's not a "pure" Anchovies-eqsue song.

But who wants that???

Inspired by a recent bout of jazz listening (and watching, and reading) I decided to create a "traditional jazz" song. After selecting a classic jazz instrumentation (acoustic drums, acoustic bass, piano, and horns) I started trying to come up with some interesting "jazzy" chords and melodies.

Well..... Whipping out jazz ideas is a lot harder than I thought! I hadn't focused on jazz writing (or writing at all for that matter) in decades. So, pretty soon I found myself distracted by a semi-funky bass riff, and couldn't resist adding some reggae-ish piano. And then some dancy drums. And some repetitive horns. Of course, by then the "jazz" experiment was over, and I was back to my shallow little Tripecac comfort zone! :)

The title and lyrics were inspired by an encounter with a frisky cat in a park. That's probably the cutest thing about the song.

The rest is a bit of a drag, particularly the drums, which are painfully monotonous. And the horns. Oh those horns. And that mute trumpet. Argh! And it all goes on SO LONNNNNNGGGGGG... It really makes me want to run up and PUSH this song out the window!

(Or at least push fast forward.)

I wanted to end on a purely improvised jam. It starts with a wimpy EP and organ melody before the main groove starts. A bit clunky in the beginning but then it gradually get cooler.

I threw on some juvenile vocals at the very end as an afterthought. Sorry!