Dave Short

I was thinking of how our common cultural points of reference are related to popular culture, and specifically how fame plays into that. Becoming well-known for anything is difficult, and the vast majority of us are only known to the people we directly meet. And in the entertainment field, there’s also a component of luck: were you in the right place at the right time? Played a show the day before that A&R man stopped by the club? Better luck next time…

The other factor that influenced the lyrics was just how social media provides this distorted fun-house mirror view. There’s this bias because we try to present our best image on social media, and if you spend a lot of time comparing yourself to others — always a bad idea — it can feel like your real life is second-rate compared to the best of the best that your friends (or parasocial relationships) share online. And all that stuff doesn’t really matter. Just do what you want. Have fun with it. Be creative, make stuff and share it, even if nobody else in the whole world cares. You probably will never be famous for the creative things you do, but is that really so bad?

This one benefits from “weekend time.” I recorded the instruments using a combination of my Zoom recorder (I used the XY condenser mics to record the acoustic guitar, and I supplemented that with the direct feed from the guitar’s pickup, as the Zoom’s mikes are fairly trebly) and the Boss amp simulator for the electric guitar parts and bass. The drums, per usual, are synthesized and from the Blasting Room Kontakt library. The vocals were recorded using an SM-58 into the Zoom Recorder. They were a pain because the Zoom recorder really doesn’t have a wide tolerance — signals were too hot or too cold unless I positioned myself just right. The organ was done using my little MIDI keyboard, which was pretty fun. I also drove myself insane trying to play the arpeggiated clean line in the bridge, as I was miscounting the picking pattern and trying to squeeze an extra eighth note in there. It took me about an hour of stubborn trying to finally stop and think through what I was trying to play, before I realized it had one note too many.

Continue reading “Jamuary 2023 Day 15: “The Fame or the Fun”” →

We were at the ZooLights exhibit at Woodland Park Zoo on Saturday, and they had an “interactive exhibit” for children. This included transparent, light-up see-saws, a machine that emits smoke-filled bubbles, and a small dance floor with panels that changed color as you stepped on them. As my young one was cutting a rug, I thought up the frankly ridiculous lyrics and melody that became today’s song. I imagine the full thing being in the style of one of those “Trashy Disco-Punk” songs like Fall Out Boy included on their first few albums (before Save Rock and Roll, where those tunes slowly started becoming the rule rather than the exception) like “Dance, Dance” from Cork Tree or “This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race” from Infinity on High. I also came up with a little fragment of a verse that had a reference to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  but I forgot this by the time I thought to turn the silly idea in my head into an actual candidate for Jamuary. It’s floating around above the zoo grounds, intermixed with the smoke from all those bubbles.

When we got home, I recorded a more isolated version on my phone while supine on the couch, which is what we have here. Since I was pretty tired at this point, I just did everything on my phone, including the MP3 encoding, artwork selection, and MP3 tagging.

Continue reading “Jamuary 2023 Day 14: “Machine on the Dance Floor”” →

This song is about negative self-talk. If you’re your own harshest critic then you’re probably often wrong. That’s a message I could really do better about sinking into my head because I’m very hard on myself in pretty much every aspect of my life — work, family, creativity, the list goes on — and I guess I wrote it as a reminder about maintaining perspective.

This one used a recording setup than usual — I have a Zoom recorder with a stereo XY pair, and I used that for the ukulele and the Hohner. I also recorded the vocals using the same recorder. The piano part is actually played on a tiny Akai MIDI keyboard I have, as is the lead instrumental line. There’s only 2 octaves on that sucker, so I had to transpose from the song’s key of Bb down a tritone to E so that I could play the little mixolydian chorus bit with two hands. I also used that keyboard to input the 808 kick and snare heard in the song. I think this song would benefit from an upright bass, but I don’t have one of those (and couldn’t play it, even if I had one lying around).

Continue reading “Jamuary 2023 Day 13: “The Wrong Man”” →

I decided to go with nostalgia, because that’s an easy way to appeal to a lot of people, right? I feel like I could add all sort of stuff — where is the content about the food, the Jack Doritos and the Squeeze-Its and the (delicious) Hostess Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pies? Maybe I should add a third verse?

This was recorded with a combination of the BOSS guitar sim and the mono laptop microphone. It’s slightly over the 4-track limit, since it’s got the double-tracked electric guitars.

Continue reading “Jamuary 2023 Day 12: “Saturday Morning, 1991”” →

I decided to go with something a bit more lighthearted for today’s song, since the last few have been heavy subject-wise. And yes, I recognize the irony of calling a song “lighthearted” when it has “sad” in its title. I was trying to do something simpler and shorter than the last few, which feel like they’ve been expanding away from me. This one has a fairly simple structure and harmony (nothing fancier than V7-of-V and I7), unless you count the modulation to the 4th scale degree for the bridge.

Recorded as per usual with the laptop mono speaker. This time, I used a tenor uke and a soprano uke for the two instruments, with the tenor also playing the little instrumental leads. Those lead sections are the only things standing in the way of this being in standard 32 bar form, by the way (I guess the extra bar pivoting to the bridge also counts).

Continue reading “Jamuary 2023 Day 11: “My Sad Beard”” →