Music      

Music is usually thought of as distinct from other arts, but that is not the case here.  I have a few compositions I’ve recorded and would like to share and, since a dedicated site for them is unwarranted, they will appear in this music “gallery” in ART @ CHC.

I ask only that, if you care to listen, please avoid playing these on laptop speakers.  Earbuds are better!  Thanks.

Bucket of Steel   [Posted 2020.03.23, Length 4:07]

The first recording I’m sharing here is a composition I wrote sometime in the mid-1970s.  It was a staple of my home piano-playing sessions, and over time I developed a number of variations on the tune to forestall boredom.  I finally recorded the piano track on our Yamaha U1 upright in February 2016, for a future CD for my spouse.  In February 2020, I dusted off this track and added other digital instruments to the mix.   The analog and digital performances, the arrangement and the mix are all mine and the end result is not mistake-free.  It is, however, good enough for me and I have spent enough time on it — probably a month.

I once wrote a few lyrics for this song but never really developed them.

Company Man   [Posted 2020.12.02, Remix 2024.04.27, Length 4:26]

Company Man is the first words-and-music song I’ve recorded in over 40 years.  I wrote the outlines of the song in the early 1980s, but the lyrics and the bridge were only completed in 2020.  I may have borrowed inspiration from the Kinks’ Shangri-La as well as from the Jackie Gleason Orchestra.  The composition and all analog/digital performances are mine, with the exception of the intro and outro vocals — those lines were extracted from management comments in Eastman Kodak annual reports of the late 1990s – early 2000s, which I typed into online speech synthesizers and then recorded.

I’m not proud of the vocals, but it’s the only voice I have left after all these years.  And even this modest effort would not have been possible without the (amazing) capabilities of Melodyne pitch-adjusting software.

Overall, I worked on this recording about five months, plus some.  At that rate, I might be ready to release my first album when I’m 72.

[April 2024:  I did yet another edit/remix – this one called 81J – to fix certain spots that still weren’t sitting right with me.]

Love on Sale  [Posted 2023.12.11, Length 2:08]

This analog recording of Love on Sale turned 50 years old in 2022.  Love on Sale was one of several dozen multi-track songs I recorded in my college dorm room from 1970 to 1974, when I should have been studying physics, chemistry, fugacity, reactors and tensors.  Or not — as I still managed to graduate and have a career in engineering.

I have my friend Lou Trott to thank for demonstrating how one could write and record songs of one’s own devise, track by track, on a sound-on-sound tape recorder.  It was eye-opening, really, like someone showing you how to build an airplane and fly.  Once I recorded my first crude song on Lou’s Norelco four-track recorder, I was hooked and I had to have a machine of my own.

I bought my Sony TC-252 reel-to-reel recorder in the summer of 1971 at Kaufmann’s department store in Pittsburgh, PA, with money I earned in my first ($3.15 an hour) factory job.  My mom wouldn’t let me drive the family car to Pittsburgh — those bouncy cobblestone streets and all — so I took the bus, bought the machine and then spent the entire day sketching and writing poetry in Mellon Square waiting for my return bus trip home.

The kind of songs I recorded in college weren’t meant for radio play (clinched that one!) but were creative projects, to see what I could produce with a Silvertone electric guitar, a cracked tambourine, a melodica, a harmonica, two drumsticks, a cymbal and two microphones.  It helped having forgiving dorm-mates in the rooms adjoining mine.  Plus musical friends, who not only joined in on many recordings but let me borrow their instruments (Lou’s bass, Eric’s acoustic, Bruce’s twelve-string, Rob’s vocals) when the creative need arose.  Thanks, guys.  And mostly, thanks for letting me share/impose the finished products with/on you, because that was the best experience of all.

• • •

There was a certain order I had to follow when making sound-on-sound recordings, as each additional track tended to bury the music underneath.  Here was my workflow:  I’d record the first instrument, usually bass guitar, on the Left (L) track.  Then, for the next instrument (guitar chords, say), I would switch the recorder to “L→R” mode so that the bass on the Left (L) track got copied to the Right (R) track while I recorded the guitar part on the Right (R) track.  Next, I’d switch to “L←R” mode and record percussion on the Left (L) track, while the combined bass/guitar track was copied from Right to Left.  And so on…

I could not just ping-pong forever between the Left and Right tracks, adding more and more instruments at each step, because the sound would get too muddy.  The strategy I evolved was to record the parts needing the least detail first, leaving the vocal and lead guitar for last, so that they stood out.  For Love on Sale, I recorded the vocal and lead guitar parts on the same track at the same time, a rarity for me.  I’ve never been able to play an instrument and sing at the same time — just not wired that way.  So the best I could do was play the guitar licks in between the lines and stanzas, which is why my vocals sound so rushed.

Since no one had a drum set in our dorm, “percussion” had to be improvised.  I would tuck the microphone under the mattress of my dorm bed, leaving just the head sticking out.  Then, I positioned a padded chair next to the bed and taped a couple of sheets of computer printout paper to the seat of the chair.  This setup served as a two-piece bass/snare drum set.  If I needed more treble, I’d sometimes play tambourine during the vocal (but not on this recording).

There were times I had to venture beyond my dorm room to get the sound I needed.  Sometimes I would invade the Fine Arts Building at Carnegie-Mellon and commandeer a practice room to record a piano part.  It was my good fortune that no haughty arts student ever smelled an engineering student on premises and asked me to leave.

For another song, I recorded a twelve-string guitar part in the stairwell of my dorm, because of the great echo it produced.  No one came by and questioned what I was doing.  It was the 1970s.   Do your thing.  Those were the days.

• • •

Why am I sharing Love on Sale, out of the dozens of my recordings, as an example of my college output?  Probably because it’s the only time in my life where I barely-competently played guitar licks in the style of Chuck Berry.  Back then, I was under the impression that great guitarists just made up what they played as they went along, everything improvised, nothing practiced.  I was good at the “nothing practiced” part.  My musical friends seemed to play licks effortlessly and I envied them.  Love on Sale was my first and last attempt to emulate them.

Besides, as one can tell on first listen, it’s evident that I had just changed the strings on my guitar to a lighter gauge and discovered that I could now bend them!  Another meager justification for sharing this recording — it’s certainly not to demonstrate primo musicianship.

Finally, I ask misogyny-sensitive listeners to consider that this song is about an imaginary materialistic person, written in 1972 when there were such things as five-and-tens (Murphy’s) and bargain basements in many American downtowns.  These are the kind of character-stories Ray Davies or Paul McCartney might have composed.  Hey, I just name-dropped Paul McCartney.

With those histories, apologies, sidesteps and disclaimers, here, anticlimactically, is the recording, freshened up to sound like I think it might have sounded in October 1972, less five decades of oxidation. (Listening hint: Earbuds!)