"My Ideal"

My Ideal.mp3
"My Ideal"

Recorded many times but man, the one i love is that off-beat one with the keys playing the changes on the celeste. what a strange effect.
this is the 1956 BlueNote date with my all-time favorite pianist Russ Freeman. Yeah man what a date this was...

Anyhow, this is how this session went in a nutshell:

I sat down, laid a brushes track with my usual VSTI...and you know what? i think i better stop right here and explain why, as a drummer, i'm using this fake drum sound.
In a word: laziness.

Yeah, big surprise right? Well those of you who don't know me...maybe. For you others, notsomuch.

Not really. I mean I'm not really really really lazy. I mean i wipe my own...sleeve across my mouth when eating. Gotcha ya didn't i? you thought i was gonna go for the potty humor thing right?

Well, again for those who know me are very surprised right now that i didn't. but hey, it's still early in this post right?

OK, so listening to this, i really actually like what i did on the keys for comping. i mean on a slow tune like this, it's always a question how you're going to go at it...slow block chords or more active outlining of the emotion by using lots of color and whatnot.

I decided to go for the active side. most likely cuz i'm too shy to go for the more difficult 'ultimate and exquisite (in the math sense) approach. But hey, you never know.

In any event, after laying down the brush and hit hat, which in this VSTi sound library it actually is a pretty decent sample ( can't remember, did i already explain what a sample is and how it relates to a VSTi?)

Well, in a nutshell, a sample is simple a recording of something, in this case a drumset. they set a bunch of mics and record the set, one sound at a time and the whole set together etc. the sound engineer does a bunch of techie stuff about which i know absolutely nothing and comes up with a fake drumset.

So then companies package a bunch of these samples together and sell them. Some of them are great, some suck. and surprise, surprise, the good ones cost a zillion dollars and the ones that are not so good, cost a half a zillion dollars. And oh, these samples are what make up the sounds called VSTi, Virtual Studio Technology instruments. ........i think.

Any-who...i recorded my fake drums for a place keeper and then set to work deciding on an intro to get me into the tune. i decided on this one to use a simple vi---ii---V progression with a nice fat sharp nine at the end leading into the head.

Got all that? For the uninitiated (read: those actually making a good living) what i went in at the edge (the beginning of the tune) is a classic chord progression famous in song and story: the 'ole I--vi--ii--V--I chord sequence. A famous (infamous) tune that lots more people know than i wish did, is that evergreen, that fave of the piano elite, friend to trained and untrained cocktail drunk, hmmmm. what IS the name of the tune? Seriously. I can't think of it.

Everyone has heard this hateful thing. Everyone can play it. No one should. It starts out with a rockin back and forth rhythm in the bass....let's see if i can describe it with words....uh....it sounds kinda like:

Bumpa Dee Dee
Bumpa Dee Dee
Bumpa Dee Dee
Bumpa Dee Dee ad nauseum...this is outlining the I,vi,ii and the V chord changes., while the melody is up higher and usually is played by the drunkest most slovenly sorority sister in the house.

it goes a little something like this:

Plink plink plink
Ga Dadda Dadda Du
Plink plink plink
Ga Dadda Dadda Du

Raaaa Raaaaa
Ga Dadda Du du

Plink a
Plink a
Plink a Du Du

Plink Plink Plink....ad nauseum

Really, if you ever hear this again, run. Run screaming from the room like you're hair is on fire.
Better yet.

Set fire to the hair of the person who is playing this infernal bullshit song.

Bitter? Who? ME?

Jeez I'm just kidding, all right?

Anyway, back to my beautiful sweetness and light musical offering for the day: "My Ideal."

After i laid the drum track and designed and practiced the intro, i went after the changes for the tune. I read them down a few times and proceeded to record a pass and it went surprisingly well. but i kept redoing it until i had a minimum of clams (haven't heard from anyone yet. guess you all know what a musical clam is).

Also at this stage i had to make up some ending so it didn't go on forever. Using a mixture of chromatics and understated finality, i decided on a figure and ended a random phrase with it. this and many other things will be worked on at a later date.

I sang the head and fought the instinct to wince at all my intonation problems. i made it thru a few times. again, all this and more will be worked on some date yet to be determined. maybe when my extended family is out of the country and safe.

I laid what so far is one of my better trumpet tracks, leaky horn and all. it is unfortunately slightly out of tune. but you know what? this and other things will be worked on at a later date.

Next post: Chet tune number 5? You betcha!

"My Heart Stood Still"

My Heart Stood Still.mp3

Another tune from Chet's crazy-sweet 1958 recording: It Could Happen to You, this one really gave me some trouble.

What makes this session different is the fact that i thought it was going much better then it ultimately did.
it began pretty copacetic. i was feeling pretty good about myself for having learned the lessons from the last session ("The More I See You"). readers who recall that that one was the one in which i fucked up the cable routing so instead of recording in stereo, i was running in mono, which of course necessitated doing the whole shebang over again. Yay.

in any event, i started with a basic drum track and not yet figuring out how to make a loop to simply plug in when needed, i did my hat, ride and brush act Virtual instrument pass. that went ok i guess. i say i guess because after recording a 16 bar pass and copying it over 175 measures, i found it got all messed up due to my screwing around trying to copy and paste different sections of the tune apart and together.

And if this last part sounds confusing, it was for me as well. and i was the one creating the damn thing.

Even listening to the file i ended up with here after the fact, the tracks don't line up properly: the drum track seems to be rushing ahead of the bass track. this sucks because it sucks.

i know words like 'suck' are terribly technical but i know musicians out there will know what i'm talking about.

But let's start with what i like about the session. hmmmm, what would that be? oh, yeah the piano track.

one thing i'm looking to learn here is the style of comping the piano players on Chet's tracks exhibit.

Comping, for the tragically unhip (oh settle down, i'm freakin kidding) is short for...comping...which is short for competition. No. again. just kidding.

Comping is what those musicians not soloing at the time do to support those who are....soloing that is.
Comping is actually shorthand for a style of playing that compliments the soloist. not complimenting as in: "dude you're fucking awesome. keep the hell going man"
no, comping is complimenting the same way a 30-degree angle is complementary to a 60-degree angle... or is that supplementary?

You know what, i'm gonna leave it up to you to set me straight on this one: this way i'll know if anyone ever reads this thing.

Anyhow, comping is an art. i mean a real art. to support a soloist, coming into a phrase and leaving a phrase, echoing, anticipating, leading. It's a beautiful thing when it happens.

Kenny Drew does it on this recording.
Wynton Kelly does it.
Teddy Wilson does it.

The way he voices the changes (those are the chords remember?), the way he applies the harmonic rhythm (that's where he puts the changes in time), the way he uses his right hand to help define the chords in his left, the choices he makes in terms of notes in each chord (leaving out the third here, the fifth there)

Anyway, I want to feel how to do this. I want to play rhythmically as well as melodically. i want to take advantage the piano's percussive nature.

And so i think, listening back to this session, this is beginning to happen, although the sound of the piano patch itself, sounds pretty harsh and angular and stabbing. too much midrange? too much high end? shitty piano patch to begin with?

These are questions for post production i think.

Look at me throwing these terms around like i knew what the fuck i'm talking about.

How'd you like me now?


That said, this session really points out the difficulties of playing good, convincing music.

the individual parts fitting together...or not
the intonation...or not
the facility...or not

so many aspects to this. so much to do. so much to do well.

and i've not gotten a horn part on this yet. i tried to put one on the other day but it never gelled. yet anyway. i'll give it another whirl today or tomorrow.

speaking of horn, i tell you what....my poor old stripped bach 1000 series. it really just needs to be put out of its misery. but

i'm in there pitching

I was trying to lay a trumpet track (on this tune actually) and it wasn't going well; i couldn't string a chorus together to save my life: either the beginning sucked or the middle was weak or there were too many clams (i'm assuming you can guess what those are right? if not, write to me and i'll give you some aural examples)

It was while trying for the life of me to get a horn track in the can that i noticed a constant drip of water. finally i stopped and gave my horn a good looking over. this is when i discovered the leak.

My friggin horn was leaking! i never, ever, saw this before. in fact i never ever witnessed such a thing in all my forty years of association with this piece of brass plumbing. jesus.

But no matter if i ever saw or heard of a horn leaking before, there it was before my very eyes. my friggin horn was leaking...and not in only one place!

Turned out it was leaking from the tuning slide (on the lead pipe side no less) and from the spit valves.

Well shit i thought. i've already put in like 10 hours into this thing, what with stripping all the lacquer off of it and sanding it down and using lava soap on the valves and third valve slide etc. jesus what now?

That was it for the day. The session ended with me nearly throwing the damn horn into the fireplace.

But instead, I put it on my trumpet stand, (the one that gets stuck inside the bell due to the fact at one point in its life, the poor thing got freakin smashed to shit. it must have judging from the fact that the bell had to be severed from the horn, then soldered back on(which is yet another heretofore unseen phenomenon in my experience as a trumpet player).

Whatever. it's all good right?

Lest you think i am sort of maladjusted temperamental musician, i actually did fix the leaks, re-polished and refit the corks on the thing the following weekend. we'll see what the next challenge is on this thing.

Aren't you gratified that i used the word 'challenge' instead of a more vitriolic term like...oh i don't know...the next....horror show, or fuckin piece of shit bullshit thing....maybe.

OK, i'll stop.

"The More I See You" cont'd.

Send me your sounds
I left off talking about learning, i.e., i learned that sometimes i learn stuff out of losing something. vague enough? right, i know. but you know what, vagueness. (vague-osity) is part of what happens in life when we breathe in and out. in other words, there doesn't seem to be any hard and fast rule that can be applied to this crazed rush from birth to death, at least in terms of causality.

Why things happen when they do is at best a reason to believe (in Something or Someone) or not. Hence the vague-osity factor. and what's this got to do with that seemingly inevitable point during each session that stops me dead...in this case, my discovery that the setup from the day before remained past the point of usefulness--i.e., the recording connections between my piano and the USB interface was set for recording my voice (in mono) instead of the piano (in stereo)?

Well i guess from my standpoint, my curiosity about this whole idea of:
WHY THINGS HAPPEN THE WAY THEY DO.

So, what happened after making this discovery?

I swore lots. I cursed my stupidity and the fact that i had to retrace my steps and destroy a perfectly good --yet ultimately unusable--track. but i made it through the ordeal by calmly resigning myself to my task: record another pass, this time in stereo.

Big deal, right?

Well, truthfully was it not for the sheer repetitive phenomenon (redundant?) of screwing like this EACH and EVERY time, maybe i could be a little less dramatic about, but, alas, such is not the case. maybe in a few months.

Don't know for sure but i do know that it won't be today cuz no sooner had i realized what i had done and prepared to re-record the intro, this time with a properly routed piano, i screwed up again.

this time it was a virtual miscue.

i got all set up for recording the piano intro:
reset the metronome for a count-in two measures before the start of live recording
set the record mode to punch in and not regular recording
and pressed record.

everything was great until i played the first chord and heard an acoustic bass, not a piano.
yep.

in my disappointment, frustration and haste to move past the fuck-up, i had forgotten to change the patch on my piano. it was set to the last pass i made: laying down a bass track.
oh well, live and learn? live, screw-up and then screw-up again is more like it.

anyway, what happens next, in this 'The More I See You" part of the ChetBakerProject?

I made it through all the tracks except the trumpet track, which for some reason gave me the most problems. i just couldn't seem to play a convincing solo on the changes i had laid down.

but, after a few hundred passes, i finally got something that could at least act as a place-keeper between vocal choruses. and the vocal itself?

uh...not so much really. i am finding that singing is not as easy as i thought. not by a freakin long shot. Intonation is proving to be a humbling experience. Each note, every phrase must be in tune. and holy shit.

i've had to adjust my estimation of every singer that i've ever judged to make room for the woeful inadequacies i am continuously confronting with respect to how much my own singing sucks.

but with experience comes wisdom right?

right.

we'll see.

'The More I See You'

The More I See You.mp3


....the more i want you
....somehow this feeling just grows and grows

'The More I See You' is a tune I've been listening to for over ten years. Chet recorded it several times.

Like many of my favorite sides, The More I See You, the version I most love, appears on his 1958 recording entitled: It Could Happen to You. This is the album I would recommend for CHet novices. It includes a nice mix of vocals when he was younger and horn work that reflects what i believe to be some of his most prolific sides.

Chet Baker Sings - It Could Happen To You (Riverside RLP 12-278)

Chet Baker (tp, vo) Kenny Drew (p) Sam Jones (b) Philly Joe Jones (d)

NYC, August, 1958

So remember i said it seems that there comes a time during every session where i hit the wall and say "i can't do this shit!"

well true to form it came during the session friday (that would be august 28th for those of you keeping track). the flavor so to speak, of this point of saturation, has a flavor all its own. this particular flavor had to do with engineering; the nuts and bolts of tweaking knobs and pushing buttons.

These are virtual knobs and virtual buttons i'm speaking of here of course. back in the day they would be real ones. and in a way i think that would be better, a little more real, more charming perhaps. they'd be grey or black with knurled surfaces. maybe they'd have a nice soft rubbery feel that would make you want to fiddle with them just for the hell of it, even if you didn't want to change their settings.

These knobs and buttons are made to look like the real deals but really, they're just graphics on a computer screen; they could be pictures of greeting cards or refrigerators for that matter. they're not particularly endearing, at least not to me. and why does this matter? it doesn't. i'm pretty much just whining. about technology and how i really shouldn't have to put up with this shit because i have bigger, more creative fish to fry. creative fish? did i really just type that?

Anyway, i reached this particular flavor-o-the-day frustration on account of this:

I had chosen the tune "The More I See You" and decided to first lay a rhythm track to play against when it came time to lay down a piano part and a bass part and a vox and a horn, you know...

Well is seemed to make sense to me at the time so i figured i'd lay a simple brush and hat figure down for say, 8 or 16 bars and then just loop it for the rest of the tune, to save time and whatnot seeing as how these tunes are not really meant to be much more than practice vehicles. so i laid it down, pressed ctrl C and copied it for about 175 measures, thinking that that would be in the ballpark for the length of the song.

OK. so far so good. Except I couldn't figure out how to make a real honest-to-God loop. I mean I could just do what i said i'd do and what i've been doing: recording a few bars and copying it, but if i was going to be doing a similar sort of thing throughout this entire project, why not make a friggin loop to be saved and dialed up anytime i wanted it? right. good idea.

But alas, after a few unsuccessful attempts i figured instead of stopping, firing up the pdf of the Reaper Help (which sometimes is more like 'customer no-service than anything) i would just do the copy deal and jot down a note.

HOW DO YOU MAKE A LOOP? is what i scrawled in my little 37-cent spiral back-to-school bargain i got the last time i was in Target. best deal i've gotten since the time i accidentally scored a $97 on-line ticket overseas for my son back before the shit hit the fan and i blew my life apart. but i digress.

Well things went pretty smoothly through my making up and laying down a short intro for the tune...just a little ii-V-I turnaround with a C pedal (have i mentioned that the tune is in F major?)

But this is how this goes sometimes. You see, it seems it's when you think things are going swimmingly (whatever the fuck that means) that things tend to go south. And indeed this is what happened.

You see, i laid the intro down without incident, nailed it on the first pass. i was pretty pleased with it so i moved on to begin learning and laying down the changes on piano. well yeah. good idea. and i say, it was all going well except for the fact that the volume was low for some reason.

Why the hell am i having trouble hearing the keys. the level seems hot enough on the meter for the track i assigned it to...the monitor is on, the level is tweaked, the ProKeys (my piano) is doing its talking thing with the MIDI audio interface (my USB Edirol UA 25 EX). so what the hell is going on.

If you were to see me on a closed circuit tv screen, watching me at my little workstation in the corner of my living/dining room, with the windows blinded against the Texas inferno outside, my little fan (that just that day shit the bed and passed away finally after i don't know how many years spent in Al's basement, study, office, TV room and workbench), my horn and mic stand and little Yamaha studio monitors (the ones that rattle every time the bass levels wander anywhere close to human expression)

If you could see me during these times of befuddlement (electronic, engineering, or musical) i think you'd be bored. bored because i am nearly motionless, just staring in shocked, annoyed, pissed off disbelief. how the fuck is happening? i have everything set the way it should be......................................

wait for it..............................................

OH SHIT. Goddamnit!!!

Then fill in the blank for whatever flavor of the day's cup-runneth-over moment.
This particular hideous mistake was really quite simply and annoyingly simple.

Maddening actually. You see, the day before the track that i was working on was laying a vocal line. and so what do i have plugged in the USB Edirol UA25 EX?

Yes, the mic cable. You dumb shit. So, the result was, there was only one side of my Prokeys piano going into the Edirol, hence only one side being recorded, hence only mono signal not a stereo signal was being recorded HENCE IT WAS REALLY QUIET.

YOU DUMB ASS.

So unplug the mic cable, plug in the other piano feed and do the whole thing over again...sheesh. This is how we learn isn't it....isn't it?

Well yes, but as it turns out, we really don't have to lose something to learn.

More on this in the next post.

Talk among yourselves........

The More I See You

....the more i want you
....somehow this feeling just grows and grows

These are some of the lyrics for this tune. 'The More I See You' is a tune I've been listening to for over ten years. Chet recorded it several times.

Like many of my favorite sides, The More I See You, the version I most love, appears on his 1958 recording entitled: It Could Happen to You. This is the album I would recommend for CHet novices. It includes a nice mix of vocals when he was younger and horn work that reflects what i believe to be some of his most prolific sides.

I can't do this

Inevitability....curious phenomenon i think.

Seems nearly every session, one thing leads to another, and i reach a point where i say 'i can't do this.'

I don't mean figuratively now....i say it out loud.
usually it's more like:

'shit, man. i can't do this.'
or, conversely,
'man, i can't do this shit.'
or even,
damnit man, i can't do this shit!'

You get the idea.

The point is that it is getting to be almost like an old friend. well maybe friend is the wrong word; maybe more like old adversary, like that fucking pain that keeps coming back no matter what exercises you do or what kind of food you eat or what beer you don't drink or which thoughts you suppress...
oops, giving a little too much of the candy store away here i think...

Reason i bring it up is it happened again yesterday. That was the day I began a new tune, my favorite so far: The More I See You.

I'll write about the session itself in the next blog but suffice it to say that it was once again, a very humbling experience.

This music thing is really something. even after all these years it just blows me the fuck away.
Take singing for instance. I've had experience on several instruments since playing in my first 'real' band back in 1972. That was also the year I quit school.
Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.

I mean it wasn't like the band was some sort of drug-induced group hypnotic hippie communal metal band or something. it was actually formed by a bunch of us Music majors all carrying full class loads. we had long hair though. but hell we didn't even smoke dope. not yet anyway.

So up till then, my musical training was pretty minimal actual. I don't know really how i got into music school. maybe it was the fact that i could play the trumpet pretty well. maybe it was cuz i used to travel up to the university town 50 miles away for lessons sometimes. and that this teacher also came up to the music camp i used to go to up in Bristol Hills.

All's I know is that when i showed up the august following my graduation from Mynderse Academy, i was totally unprepared for what was to come. i was so far away that i didn't know how far away i was. pure, utter, blissful stupefying ignorance.

That's what i was back then: a big bag of small town duh.
In fact, and this is hard to write down in public, I didn't even know where middle C was on the piano. truly.
And there i was: in a friggin music conservatory. jesus.

But anyway, i don't want to go into all this right now. there's time enough. in subsequent posts. lucky you.

next post: "The More I See You"
Hell yeah!!!!

This is the Chet Baker Project. I will not make up an acronym for it. It will not be called the CBP...ever.

That said, I might at some point write in third person--why--I don't really know yet...until I do it. I do not suffer from split personality syndrome or whatever else you call it when you don't know who the hell you are from one day to the next. Oh wait. Well, whatever, let's not quibble over formalities.

I will always try to write concisely so whomever, if anyone, ever reads this thing, won't have to wish they weren't.

Oh, one more thing. sometimes i'll write in lower case. cuz basically i figure, why the hell not. they're all letters right? and who really gives a shit, outside of the english police, the copy editors in publication newsrooms and academia (of which i was once a member) and equally tight-sphinctered-toe-the-line straight shooters.

sorry. it kinda got away from me there. i mean i don't mean to denigrate those whose job it is to monitor and enforce...anything. except to say that if you wouldn't want to be on the recieving end of a parking ticket, go find yourself a different gig for chrissakes.

well now that we're far afield from the original intent of this blog, let's just see if we can reign it in a little.

the Chet Baker Project is something i've wanted to do for fifteen years, ever since i first remembered what i love about jazz and music in general.

i am a trumpet player, piano tinkler and percussionist/drummer. i've been in music since i took my first cornet lesson in that tiny high-ceilinged anteroom just off stage at the Junior High School in my sleepy little upstate hometown of... Back in the day, they were called jr.highs, not middle schools. lots was different back then. but more about that later.

so i've had music in my blood forever. i've played in hundreds of music groups none of which i will ever mention in this blog. (you're welcome)

and you know what, more about Chet and me later. I'm getting bored writing this stuff so i can imagine how you, the reader, is feeling. let's move on, waddya say?

so how about a definitive statement.

ok here it is:

i am going to transcribe, play and record a song from chet's catalog every day.

i am going to practice the piano part (the changes--the chords) the best i can in the style that best emulates the pianist on the recordings that i love.

i am going to use Reaper as my music editor (wish me luck)

i am going to record the drum part using either on-board VSTIs or live drums

i am going to add a bass part to each song and play it on my keys (not the bass, although i do have a bass and if time permits, i shall learn how to play it)

i am going to learn the lyrics of the tunes and actually sing them and record it

i am going to play trumpet on each of the tunes, perhaps in the form of a solo


THIS I SHALL DO.

So, here it is thursday august 27th 2009 and i have already three of these recordings under my belt, those being the result of the three days previous.

THE INTENT

how the hell should i know.

at this point i have a few different ways of thinking about it: one is to use this experience as a methodology. a practice method. the rationale being that by coming up with the chords, playing them in the right places, with the best intrepretation of which i am capable, learning the melody on horn, getting the lyrics and singing them, that i will be accruing valuable skills. valuable to whom, to what you may ask. good questions.

another reason for this project is to pay a debt. to myself. to satisfy the lip service i've been giving to wanting to say something of myself thru music, specifically, on horn.

another reason is that i seem to have time right now. i am unemployed. YAY.
more about this later you can be sure. (hey this is my blog right?)

So what's next?

I guess i'll stop and drink my coffee here in my squat blue beach chair in my cement driveway in my unusually not-so-hot-you-wanna-kill-yourself austin texas.
bye