Hi. I'm E. Robert Frank.

I've been writing songs for a long time, off and on. Lately the mode has been off. I can't recall the last time I tried to record a proper song. I've dabbled in being a video jockey here and there but by and large I'm as rusty as they get. Since this is sort of a proof of concept more than an actual song it will have quite a few mistakes, mainly because the first things to go if I try to polish a track the same day I write and record it is remove the things that sound odd to me, which are also usually the things that turn out to be the most interesting. So forgive my total disregard for the rules of proper mixing.

Even if I did polish this one, I would likely still leave many mistakes in, particularly because I realize now that my shortcomings as a musician and the techniques I've derived to compensate are most of what makes my stuff sound, well, like my stuff.

At any rate, the only lyric I wrote out was "いいえ", which is said a couple of times each verse. It's Japanese for "No" or "No Thanks". The rest of the words were made up as I record it. Even a pen and paper is too slow for my internal critic... I have to record the basic melody and some semblance of words in real time, which sometimes results in some interesting absurdity but more often than not results in more than a few cliches. Forgive them.

The hardest part of this track was getting everything set up. Properly getting things configured for computer-based recording is a certain kind of technical hell, almost completely removed from the actual songwriting. Most of the elements are things I'm familiar with, particularly the mellotron strings (which could probably be stripped down and sound less like noodling, which is what it is) and the Casio beat. I stretched myself a little putting on the "acoustic" drums. This is a fairly new instrument for me. Most of my spare time that I have not spent writing songs has been used learning how to play drums in Rock Band 2 using the Ion "Premium" Kit, which with a cheap drum brain off of eBay I was able to interface with my computer. I didn't quantize the drums because I wanted to retain their "feel", for better or worse.

Be gentle.

ERF - いいえ

girlfromipanema-remix

I'm in the process of moving, so I tried to make a song with just my computer since everything is packed away. I used ableton and two samples, one from Wolfgang - Not in Love Not True (drums) and one from Astrud Gilberto - Girl From Ipanema (vocals). I think the male vocals in the beginning are Carlos Jobim, the original writer of the song. Anyway, then I added some more drums that I made in ableton. Then I used the glitch plugin in ableton on both the samples and duplicated those versions of the sample so that at times I could play both the pure and glitched version each slightly more panned to one ear to give it some depth. By the way, I was able to get just the drums from Wolfgang because on their site they are having a remix contest, here's that if anyone's interested: http://www.hypnote.com/events.html

That's it, thanks

Rosie

Oh Hellagems. Such grand plans I had.

This morning saw me unprepared. Rather than posting from the vaults, a quick sketch would better fit the bold spirit of our new experiment, I thought.

An unstudied 10 minute sketch can certainly showcase one's cliches. It resembles this song. Could be a good thing, I guess.

Not that there aren't better things in the tubes. We shall consider this a baseline.

A year in exile and nothing much to show
A broken pair of glasses and a borrowed Yamaha PSR-300 piano

I'm going home

Two weeks left so I don't have time to burn
After waiting in line some hours I have permission to return

I'm going home

I have no idea if it will soothe this loneliness
Or if I still will feel as close
To the people I have left

I'm going home

Going Home

You can have whatever paper planes you like. I can make the triangle-winged jet, or the square-winged cargo plane. I can't make you a paper football though. In lieu of a paper football please accept this mashup that I created:

Whatever Paper Planes You Like

This is just an instrumental and an a capella track. Most of the work in making mashups is finding the tracks in the first place. I spent a really long time looking for the champagne sound.

I find that making mashups is a good way to surprise yourself. After placing two waveforms together on beat there are often some good unintended consequences that happen later on in the song. For example, listen to 1:48 in this song. I didn't plan for that little event to happen. I find the musical ideas that emerge when making mashups very fun and interesting. 

Historical note: I made this mashup before I ever heard Swagger Like Us.

Enjoy!

Nov 29

Ahoy There! In this song you will here a variety of synthesizers and sequenced drum noises. I created it on the program Reason a while ago, but have recently revised it. Sorry for posting so late in the day, I think I am coming down with a cold.

Thanks & Enjoy