Tripecac - Vegibles

This is yet another simple jam with no real theme or focus. It starts with the same old riffs, rhythms, and melodic patterns that you've been hearing on the past dozen or so albums. There's nothing new or challenging; it's pretty basic and boring. Like a seed.

You see, each album has to start off somewhere. And since this album's about veggies, we'll call this song a seed. It inherits its characteristics from previous Tripecac songs and has no character of its own. Hopefully from it will grow something more interesting. Cross your fingers!

More small ideas. Hopefully this is an improvement over the first song, which was really boring. This one's at least a little dancy.

Well, actually, this one is pretty nondescript, too. Like a sprout, right? Sprouts are supposed to be nondescript, so it's okay for the song to be boring? And it's like my duty to make the song boring? Sound reasonable? Sigh. The strings in the beginning are supposed to represent the sprouting of the seed. Double sigh.

A baby plant shoots up as it gets nourished. My intention was for the quality of this album to shoot up. Has it shot up? No? Hmmm... Well, any day now it's gonna shoot. I can sense it!

Yup. Any day now...

So, um, in the meantime, I guess I should say something constructive. This is a standard swinging jazz/blues ditty. Hey, at least it's not reggae. The only experimental part of it is the dual hi-hat parts, which you can barely hear. I was been getting tired of the hi-hat sound in my current template (which I used for the past several songs), so I tried to get a better sound.

The mix is horrid, though. So much for breaking new ground! I really can't stand this song. Maybe it'll stop annoying me in a few days or weeks. Or maybe I'll always look back on it with disappointment. Or disinterest. Or disgust.

Wait... I was supposed to say something constructive, right?

Shoot!

I was testing a new connection to the Pod Pro. The name also refers to pods of seeds.

The guitar bookends the other instruments; in a way, it forms a shell around the solos, which are the peas. Hmm. Sounds pretty metaphorced, eh?

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 wanted to see if I could change something deeply structural (to match the name of the song). So I tried 3/4 time. As you can tell it didn't sit very well with me; I overlayed a 2/4 beat in parts so it ended up sounding more like 6/8.

At first, I kinda liked the weird timing and the melodic sparseness. But then it got annoying. And now the song is really annoying. It feels really gnarled and twisted. Like a root!

Does this have anything to do with weeds? Not really. Except it's relentless. Weeds are relentless too, right?

No poison in this ivy; it's all pretty tame. Well, I guess one ivy-like property is its rambliness. It just kinda goes on and on at the end.

I don't like the mix. The melody was too mellow for my tastes, so I added the aggressive drums. It's an uncomfortable balance. Sigh.

Loose, heartfelt jam. By the end of the first day working on it, I really liked it. It was fun to close my eyes and add grooves to it.

The second day wasn't quite as immersive. I focused mostly on the organ solo and cleaning up the bad notes. If there's any life left in it, credit the first day.

Anyone want to try a blue berry?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!

Sorry, inside joke.

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. :)

Is moss peppy? Is this song peppy? Moss rambles, right? So does this song. But is it peppy? By "it" I mean either moss or the song. So is it?

Are these notes pathetic? Am I tired? Just a bit?

Somehow the music part of my brain has more energy than the verbal part. Musically, I can whack out some mean beatz, but word-wise I'm slug-o-wimp-o-rama. Soft as in mushy. Like moss.

This started as a pure piano improv. I then added the other instruments. My rule was that every track had to be recorded in one take. I could edit the notes, but I couldn't loop or re-record solos. The result is a simple "jam" with lots of energy (especially at the end) but not much polish. Fortunately, it's not too long.

The name doesn't match the music. Ferns represent self-simimilarity. (interesting typo, Trav!) Lots of repetition on different scales. Therefore, a fern-link song should have at least loops, or at best a Bach-like fugue-ish something or other structure. Mmm... (nice music vocab, Trav!) But this doesn't. (nice grammar, Trav!) My bad! (nice '80s retro jargon, Trav!)

(nice liner notes, Trav!)

G picked the title. I think it was because there were beans in my soup. I was thinking of calling it "Jumping Bean" but decided to stick with what she said.

The music is peppy but loop based (unlike the previous song, "Fern"). I wanted to see if I could still make fun loop based music, or if I needed to get back into more jammy stuff. I kinda like it (so far). If it's enjoyable to you too, then I guess I don't need to shy away from loops anymore.

How will I know if the song is enjoyable to you? Who is "you"? Not G, since I just referred to her in the third person. My parents? Probably not, since they never read these liner notes on my site. Jess? Maybe. I need to find out if she ever reads this stuff. Miro? Nah. He's too busy with his own life to keep up with all the Tripecac happenings.

So who is "you"? A casual, quiet Tripecac fan? Are there such things? Does anyone actually listen to Tripecac regularly besides me and G? Anybody? Hello? Is anybody out there???

In order to finish Vegibles at the same time as Aminals, I needed to catch up by creating a really long instrumental. The title comes from the longest tree I could think of, which is a redwood.

Stretching the song out was tough. I had to add lots of solos. Lots of solos. I also had to work quickly, so it's loop-based, which means it's repetitive. Very repetitive. Very, very repetitive.

When plants die, they become mulch. Or compost. Or just dirt. I couldn't decide which word to use.

Sometimes people put eggs and other non-veggie stuff in compost piles. So I decided not to use "compost". Also, animals also become dirt. So strike "dirt" and "soil".

Mulch is an okay term. Most of the time, mulch is made from chunks of dead trees. Not bad. Oh well. What else is a dead plant called?

This music reminds me of mulch. It's dark, messy, and smelly, without any focal point. It's a pile of fragmented ideas. Why does it speed up? Well, mulch speeds up plant growth, right? Okay, well, I don't know why I made it speed up. I think I just got bored with it.

Normally I end albums powerfully. I think I get invigorated by the impending completion of a task. This time I lost steam. I don't know why. Tired, I guess.

Anyway, here it is. Task complete.