great, love the innocent atmosphere and the timelessness

Midnight in September

Lightning Bolt - Pearl Jam

NUNS WITH DIRTY HABITS

I wanted 12 minutes because I had a modern dance piece in mind, and was impressed with a show in Seattle called '12 minutes max' that showcases dance and performance art on a regular basis. I was impressed with it because I was amazed about what could be done with 12 minutes. Not long after I had the rhythm track, I put on the main guitar track that runs through the entire piece. It was completely improvised (I kept the second pass over the tape, never did any more) and is similar to the guitar track in the 'fruit' piece. The guitar was plugged in directly to a digital reverb unit and played working the volume knob to make the swelling effect. This is completely stolen from Bill Frisell as I saw him do this volume knob swelling thing when he was recording at Ironwood studios in Seattle when I was a staff engineer there in the late 80s early 90s. After this improvised guitar track the tape probably sat for a year. Every time I heard the rough mix of it, I enjoyed the 'watery effect of the guitar juxtaposed with the rhythms where they had these huge pipes hanging from what looked like big rubber bands that would bounce up and down in the water while the musicians/dancers would bang on them. But I wasn't sure where to go from there, so the tape sat for nearly a year. Then one winter day whilst living high on this hill in San Francisco, a storm front moved in in the early morning and wind and rain pounded the windows of my room upstairs (facing southwest, which where the storm was coming from) where my studio was. I immediately thought of this piece, got the tape out, did the bass track, and started to search for storm samples to put over the heavier drumming section. I stole samples from various places; I already had a lot of samples from doing sound effects for this small play in Seattle ('the vulgar librarian'). I also stole ocean storm samples from "quadrophenia" which are some of the finest stereo ocean samples I have ever heard (kudos to Pete Townsend, I'm sure).  I put a bass part over the storm that fits the rhythm of the drums which is great as the original guitar part isn't doing much right there (I remember when laying down the guitar track being baffled and befuddled about what to do during that sudden shift of dynamics in the rhythm track, but in the true jazz tradition, I just got through it, even if it meant just laying back). At the time I was also discovering how to make weird keyboard sounds using a sequencer as an arpeggiator and using that as the modulation signal through a vocoder of which I would modulate all sorts of sounds coming out of my little cheapie casio (with full size keyboard without enough keys, i.e. if you try to play Chopin on this thing, you'd go nuts). My favorite sound to modulate was organ; the casio actually had a nice deep organ sound. In this case, instead of the sequencer/arpeggiator as the modulation for the vocoder, I used the FX track from the Bill Frisell swelling guitar track (i.e. reverb and some delay). This was somewhat limiting in that I had to play right along with the guitar or it didn't work, you can barely tell it's there, it comes in a 1/3 of the way through when the guitar goes lower in register. So I had to play along with this improvised guitar track that had almost no attack on any of the notes. It was somewhat difficult, and I tried to harmonize as much as I could but usually doubled the melody. There were many flubs and punch-ins. The organ was pretty static through the busy section, which was a nice contrast. The last track was the reverse guitar and added reverse reverb on the original guitar track. For this I took the tracks, all on ADAT and transferred them to this Fostex R8 open reel machine. Flipped the tape over and started playing guitar. I made a pass trough the entire piece and then flipped the tape over again to see what I got. I always find some sort of 'discovered composition' when do backwards guitar (ala Jimi Hendrix), one of my favorite things to do. I flipped the tape back over and made another pass and that was it. The finished reverse guitar track was then recorded on one side of a stereo track to the computer and the other was a rough mix of the song so I could fly it back into the ADAT, essentially by ear. We (studio engineers) used to do a lot of this sort of thing before multi-track recording was done on computer. (I think the jury is still out if that?s a better way to record, but just like anything else, the people who do it all the time swear by it, myself, I still use tape machines, even digital tape machines like the ADAT, mostly because the transport behaves, and punches in, like those old MCI JH24 24 track 2" machines we had at Ironwood.). I did a similar 'flying' technique with reverse reverb on the guitar and FX tracks although I recorded them full stereo (I believe) and match something on the intro since these tracks needn't be as tight as the others. You have to listen carefully, but you can hear some reverberation of the guitar swells before the actual swells, and that's the effect. At any rate the reverse guitar solo (completely improvised) really surprised me. It gave the piece a dramatic effect.

Yes, I've been working this music into dance shows of various shapes and sizes for awhile, I guess it's one of my more popular pieces. <a href=http://www.youtube.com/v/k_pzd8pEedE>Dance Performance</a>

Water

Listen to the second track from 'I Am'.
This is 'Your Pillow'.

J.R. Rhodes - Vocals, Guitar
Jeff Fielder - Guitar
Dan Walker - Keyboards
Keith Lowe - Bass
Mike Stone - Drums
Produced by Johnny Sangster
For more info please visit: jrrecordingco.com

RFI: 12-30-2015

Your Pillow

"Sixty Candles" from the Album Absolution by Shades of Red, www.shadesofredmusic.com from Washington State. Available on iTunes, Amazon, and CDBaby.

Music and Lyrics by Solveig Whittle
Solveig Whittle, vocals; Stevie Adamek on everything else.  

Sixty Candles

MONOLITH

INNERLIGHT

Kind of randomly wrote this, along with 5 other songs, in economics class over the last two days (pretty much to keep me from falling asleep). Combine economics with a hot classroom and you get the perfect place for a nap.

Myself on vocals/guitar/violin/piano/lyrics.

I feel slightly country on this. Hmm.

Remember This -- Julianne Crea (Original Song)

Buy on iTunes

Moonlander - Stone Gossard

Here are some of the pieces I have been working on over the last decade or two, most of them are completely unfinished rough ideas of which I may (or may not) finish later. It usually takes a specific project deadline to get me to finish something.

Water

rodneyjohnson

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per van per ~ ALL IS LIFE

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