Author: Dave

A sauropod dinosaur and its baby.

My daughter put me in time out for swearing the other day. I was driving her home from school on garbage day and making good time, until I turned down a street with a garbage truck on it. “God damn it,” I muttered, and she caught me. I find myself having to answer lots of “why” questions, as well, and having to think about reasonable answers to these queries, some of which I’ve never thought about before. This song is about how raising kids causes you to change your own behaviors.

Musically, this song is pretty much all diatonic. It makes heavy use of minor III, but otherwise is fairly straightforward.

I spent some time on this one, since my cold has been making it harder to sing. It was recorded in my home studio, using Amplitube for the heavy guitars and Line 6 Helix simulation for the clean ones. Drums are Blasting Room and vocals are via my SM-7B.

Continue reading “Jamuary 2024 Day 21: “How You Make Me Better”” →

A man in a suit, plugged into a wall outlet to recharge.

This is a fairly short song about taking time to refresh yourself, and realizing that not everything you do will be a runaway success.

Musically, I decided to see what I could do with pretty much every chord here being either a major or a minor seventh. This was an interesting challenge since I was using a concert ukulele, which only has 4 strings (and has fairly limited range due to its re-entrant tuning). This means that, essentially, you have to be fretting a different note on every string, since seventh chords obviously are made up of 4 notes. I count this song in 2/4 time instead of 4/4. I envision a “full recording” of this song would use a piano instead, so the chord voicings would be slightly different.

The "X,Y Everywhere" image meme from Toy Story, with Buzz Lightyear explaining to Woody: "Seventh chords... seventh chords everywhere"

I recorded this simply, using just my phone’s high-quality mode and doing both the ukulele and vocals live.

Continue reading “Jamuary 2024 Day 20: “Recharge”” →

A drawing of a Nintendo Entertainment System controller on fire from atmospheric re-entry.

Games Done Quick is a twice-yearly (or sometimes, more often) week-long charity marathon that features speedrunners showcasing runs of video games from the 20th century through today. Speedrunning is a competitive activity where players attempt to complete video games as quickly as possible. It is awesome, and here’s a video explaining why it’s so cool. The winter session, known as Awesome Games Done Quick, coincides with Jamuary (usually starting around MLK weekend). GDQ weeks are an awesome opportunity to feel like you’re part of a community, see some very talented people breaking video games wide open, and make a difference giving to charity (AGDQ supports the Prevent Cancer Foundation). Over the past few years, I’ve found that AGDQ has helped me to deal with my post-holiday blues, due to the sense of community and positivity that pervades the proceedings. This song is my love letter to GDQ.

I imagined the “final” version of this song would be either a pop-punk track, or potentially even a ska-punk tune (imagine horns playing the intro lead line). Musically, this is fairly diatonic, although the bridge veers off into the territory of the key’s parallel minor (Db major to C# minor). The most straightforward thing to do is to say the song is in Db as opposed to C# (5 flats vs. 7 sharps), but for some reason I found it easier to notate it in C# (although I just included F# major and F minor as chords, when they’d really be F# major and E# minor). The very end also includes the “Mario cadence” (flat-VI to flat-VII to I).

This song is multitracked, with the Zoom recorder capturing the acoustic guitar part and the SM-58 on the vocals.

Continue reading “Jamuary 2024 Day 19: “Games Done Quick”” →

Jamuary Day 1An impressionistic painting of a person skating down a city street.

This is a surf-rock instrumental. The title is a reference to one of the streets in downtown Seattle that you could conceivably skate or surf down on the way to the Elliot Bay. There’s nothing distinctive about Seneca Street itself (aside from it being the “downhill” street in the Spring/Seneca pair), and the fact that it’s one of the “Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest” pairs of streets that make up the core of downtown, and it starts with an “S” for that sweeeeet alliteration.

Musically, the song is almost purely diatonic, being in A minor (I think there’s one moment that’s a G# passing chord).

The guitars and basses are DIed with Amplitube. The drums are the Kontakt ’50s Drum sample library. There is an absolute smearing of reverb on the tracks because this is surf rock, after all. The song is made better if you find some contemporaneous footage of surfing to watch while listening to the song.

A small crowd from classical antiquity, drinking ambrosia.

For this song, I thought I’d take a less literal approach than usual. It’s a figurative song, and it’s about finding your inspiration. For the lyrics, I wanted to play around with internal rhymes and assonance.

Musically, this is in E mixolydian (except the bridge, which modulates to C# minor, where the D becomes a D#) with a very short visit from flat-VI and flat-VII, borrowed from the parallel minor, and the minor IV chord making a tiny cameo at the very end.

This is a simple recording — I captured the track live on my phone.

Continue reading “Jamuary 2024 Day 17: “Ambrosias”” →