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  • charlesallison 8:36 pm on February 5, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Week 21- The hip disintegrated into a family 

    This was a great week. I had my Land Camera crew in the studio as well as a few other friends. Spanner’s new friend and filmmaker Kyle Malone was shooting for a short documentary about the project. Another newby to the Spannersphere, Jenny Orr was also hanging with us in the studio. Its great to have lots of people in the studio. It feels vital.

    We rarely start with definitive ideas about where something should go, but sometimes we’ll start with a method that we know can get us there. This week it was Bob’s pared-down looping rig and some of his usual tools to get sounds happening. We mic up the kit and a small number of percussion things and he builds a structure out of some loops. It always proves to be an interesting night when we embark on that kind of journey. This week was no exception.

    As usual with Land Camera sessions for Song a week, i set the group up with what they need to get rolling then let ‘em rip. We started with a brush/snare loop and the band played live over that. Once we had a general arrangement, we started tweaking down on the parts. Once we had a good take Bob ran with some sampling ideas he had. He sampled Jenny’s voice and made the horn-like sound that separates the verses. It sounds crazy and i kinda feel bad that this is all you hear of what i imagine is a great singing voice. It turned out really interesting and definitely gives the song its own voice, no pun. Bob sampled a bowed electric guitar, which ended up, i think, sounding kinda like a rooster crowing or something. So that was generally what we had at the end of the first session.

    Callie put some interesting guitar textures in the mix later in the week. I started playing with some vocal melodies from the beginning but this is definitely a weird key for me. I was really unsure if the song needed an actual vocal line when i sat down to record some, but I ended up writing vocals for better or worse. They’re mixed a little loud but here we are on Friday…

     

    • Brian King 9:27 pm on February 5, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      the sunlight of his days was spent in the grey of his mind…s.f. sorrow is growing a moonshiner’s beard with a pbr chaser.

    • Jamie Jollie 6:24 pm on February 7, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Dig it Man! Unlike anything I’ve heard from you before…haunting…dig Bob’s brush work.

  • charlesallison 3:54 pm on January 29, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Week 20- Until the lord takes my hammer down for good 

    This week was awesome. I collaborated with two new people i’ve been itching to make music with for a while. The first being Justin Cox and the second being my daughter. Finley plays a bit glissando part on the celeste just after the bridge, but we all start somewhere. She was begging me to record her so i let her play around and recorded it and it turned out to be a pretty cool little part.

    Anyway, I started something really early this last week and knew it was perfect for Justin. I called him up and he came over that night to work on it. I wish it were always that easy. I wrote the rhythm section first with bass and the beat. I had the chorus bass line stuck in my head when i went to lunch that day. The two lines i sing in the chorus came to me in the car and i wrote them on a scrap of paper immediately. That was the only vision i had for the song so when Justin got here i sang the chorus and harmonies first thing. He started writing his verse parts and we cut those within an hour. It was super fast and smooth.

    I had a minute to put some rhodes, synth and a few little accents on there the next day. I knew at that point I shouldn’t fuss too much with production, but i wanted some guitar and that was it. Justin, Callie and myself got together in the studio on wednesday and Callie added omnichord and tremolo guitar and we were done tracking in about an hour. I spent a few minutes this morning doing a mix but didn’t tweak too much.

    I’m very pleased with our struggle anthem. Wot u think?

    Stuff:
    Bass
    Drums
    Reason
    Omnichord
    Electric Guitar
    Voice

     

  • charlesallison 2:34 pm on January 22, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Week 19-Chiaroscuro by Butch Ross 

    This week was a little different situation than normal and i consider that a welcome change, particularly in light of whats going on in Haiti. Local Dulcimer player Butch Ross called last weekend and asked if i’d be interested in collaborating on a track of his in the name of a benefit for Haiti. I said hell yeah. I’d never worked with Butch, but I thought two people coming together to make something to try and help was as good a paradigm for what we need to do to help as anything i could think of. I said lets do it and we got to work immediately. I didn’t really know how it would pan out or how much we could raise, but i didn’t care. All you can do is make an effort to change things.

    Butch set up his website to feature this week’s downloadable track and a Paypal account specifically to enable “pay what you want” donations for ADRA and Doctor’s without Borders at Butchross.com. I’m going to be working on facilitating some other things to help get more aid headed that way, that i will post on here as it develops.

    Butch had a song he wanted to do and we started on sunday with him laying down dulcimer, piano, acoustic, bass, banjo and some glock. We cut all that to a click cause i really don’t think i have loops in 3/4 I could dial up. Maybe something to work on. Soon we needed to put some percussive elements so I put a kick drum in there. Ideally i would have loved to have done something live with a drummer or percussionist but it didn’t pan out. Butch put some other shaker stuff on there and we kinda built up something that would become the rhythm section. We got the basics laid down pretty quickly and it all mapped out. Butch had created an opening rhythm loop, i think in Garage Band, and we imported that and the synth string section at the end. A little scootching–yes, thats a perfectly acceptable term– later, and we had some funky loops and strings happening.

    When we got most of the basics cut i started to sort of see how i thought the track should come together. I called Butch to see if it was ok if i put a view little overdubs and get some vibe happening. He said that was cool, so i put some vibraphone and mellotron on there and started putting delay on everything, like i love to do. Callie Harmon, Spanner’s resident guitar badass, put some of his great guitar on there and I think that was pretty much it.

    Stuff we used:
    Dulcimer
    Piano
    Glockenspiel
    Bass
    Banjo
    Vibraphone
    Reason
    Acoustic guitar
    shaker egg
    Drums

     

  • charlesallison 4:32 pm on January 15, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Week 18- Devils in the details 

    This week was just me and Callie. We wrote and arranged together over some loops with me playing bass and Callie playing electric. We kinda came up with some parts and I moved them around a little get the dynamics to make sense. Still, the arrangement doesn’t make all that much sense. A little more time and i would get things to run a little more smoothly. Alas, its friday and my paper is due. Lets not fuss, kay?

    I recorded the vox this morning and really didn’t feel like doing the whole vocal recording setup, which isn’t all that complicated but requires moving a bunch of stuff around and all that. Its morning and I just couldn’t be bothered, as the brits say. So i used the crappy little computer mic that you may remember from “My beautiful highhorse.” Then again maybe not.

    I ran that through my REV 7 with a cool dubby echo thing and printed effects and all. Conventional wisdom says you’re supposed to print your vocals dry and add effects in post, but convention don’t get me nowhere. I think i’ll start printing vocal effects more often actually. I used to that back in the day when i had no inserts to do such trickery. It saves a little time and adds a little vibe to the performance too. I like both of those things.

    Enjoi!

    Instruments:
    Bass
    Guitar
    Reason
    Tamborine
    Voice

     

    • ++MIRA++ 4:21 pm on January 21, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      this is really kool.u guys did the whole thing? thats awesome. i really love the beginning

    • charlesallison 4:45 pm on January 21, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Thanks, ++MIRA++! We did the whole thing. Well, techically the division of labour was divided as such.
      All good parts: Charles and Callie
      All bad parts: The devil

    • brandon 10:05 pm on January 21, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      ok, so this brings me back to some chenille bumpies era goodness… so far my favorite of the project. i say “yes!” to the effects recorded in the take.

      • charlesallison 2:52 am on January 22, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        Funny you should mention Chenille Bumpies, because everything i did on Chenille Bumpies was printed, distorted drums and everything. F’ed it up right off the bat. I have an REV 7 and a PCM 90 now and i need to start using printed analog efx all the time.

  • charlesallison 4:44 pm on January 8, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Week 17- Having neither calyx nor corona 

    Well, this week for various reasons we didn’t get anything going until wednesday, which i try to avoid just for the fact that i usually need a little time to do necessary overdubs and post before Friday. I was fortunate once again to have Land Camera in the studio, so i didn’t sweat it too much. For those who don’t know, Land Camera is a group that originally formed in 2008 to play my songs that i’d written over the years, but soon became a force on its own. I realized at some point that the band was more than capable of writing all its own material. The band now plays its own songs written as a group live.

    Bob Stagner, Land Camera’s drummer, brought his live looping rig so we all knew it was gonna be interesting. His rig consists of several mics on the kit submixed into an Akai Headrush and also a sampling keyboard, so he can play loops back in any key. It makes for a very inspiring session.

    I pretty much set the boys up to track and let them do their thing, with Bob leading. What we ended up doing was using a loop of some african cowbell and some other stuff as kind of the guide loop and then later put some loops of kalimba and other rhythmic things on top of the arrangement. The band played most everything live, except for a few overdubs from everyone to fill out the spectrum. And i put synth and vibraphone on later.

    I think it has a nice vibe. It reminds me of some African stuff that i love. I hear a little Fela Kuti influence in there and some 70’s Nigerian afro-funk influence too.

    Instruments:
    Drum kit and various percussion with looping rig
    Bass
    Electric guitar
    Vibraphone
    Kaossilator

     

  • charlesallison 5:16 pm on January 1, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Week 16- To Hamburg and Helsinki 

    As is often the case, there are alot of things i would do differently with this song, but thats a major part of this project. I think one of the most important parts of doing your work as an artist is making decisions. You make them throughout the entire process of making something. Almost everything you do is a decision. Its easy to waffle in those decisions and wonder what might happen if you tried something else. Much art is lost to the world in this dilemma and it keeps some people from ever making anything. I’ve lost a good bit myself. Digital mediums compound the problem with endless possibilities and opportunities to put those decisions off until later in the process.

    I think as you mature as an artist your ability to make decisions becomes stronger and you commit to your instinct with less hemming and hawing. One of my goals is strengthen my ability to know where something needs to go and just taking it there quickly. Life struggles and time constraints (mine are rigid-7 days) make this more complicated but are closely tied into the work.

    I feel like i keep saying this, but this week was another tough one. How tough can they be right? I don’t know why, but this winter has been one of the worst for sickness in my household. As parents know, kids bring all kinds of funk (the bad kind) home with them and we seem to be passing it all around and one of us seems to be sick at any one time. This week i was blessed with a particularly nasty dose of the funk that manifested in conjunctivitis in both eyes, strep throat and an ear infection.

    It didn’t get bad until late in the week so tracking was pretty typical. I started early in the week on laying some groundwork. I started with some background sounds from an old sound library i have on vinyl. Its airport interiors with flight announcements. I thought it would make an interesting backdrop. I knew i wanted the tempo slow so i started with a click at 65 bpm. I laid down some piano with a flat four walkdown. Before i got too into the rhythmic stuff i put some beats and rhythmic loops to establish the accents.

    Once i had the foundation and a few different parts Callie put some cool guitar riffs on top of the different sections. I think it gave it a cool sort of spy feel. I had an hour or so to arrange and sort out the bits before Bob Stagner came over on wednesday, but still didn’t have an arrangement. I also put the organ and some other textural stuff in there to give it some vibe. I thought we would likely replace most of the loops, but we ended up putting drums on top of the loops for some action.

    The end of this week was dismal and i really just wanted to be done and not have to hear anything for a little while. My hearing was very sensitive and i ended up mixing with headphones with one ear off cause i couldn’t stand to hear anything with my other ear. I cut the end off cause i didn’t add room for the reverb tail but i don’t even care at this point. This is my theme song for a funky foreign spy movie set in…well, Hamburg or Helsinki of course.

    Instruments:
    Sound samples
    Piano
    Reason
    Electric guitar
    Drums

     

  • charlesallison 3:32 pm on December 25, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

    Week 15- The basest creatures 

    Everybody knows this is like the craziest week of the year. Well its no exception for trying to finish a song. My daughter has been out of school for two weeks so there has been very little time to work on this week’s song, or anything for that matter.

    I had the fortune this week of having my Land Camera crew in the studio on Monday night. I thought earlier in the project that i might do a christmas song, whether that meant writing my own or reworking a classic. We talked a little about how we might do that but it probably would have taken a little more time than we had and we decided to write something of our own. I thought i might write a dark Christmas tune for this one but that’s just not what came out. Callie had some cool chords that he’d put together and we started with those. We all loved the idea of getting really heavy on some parts and that was really fun. I especially like the contrast of the two parts. Those guitar stabs are boss.

    Once we’d arranged a bit we recorded the basic parts live and then Bob put his brilliant scraped cymbal parts on. They sound really scary and we all loved them. John put some Juno on, Bob added some piano in one pass. Last night i finally had a minute to treat the rest of the song. I used some distorted Wurlitzer to double the chorus guitar and some other textures and then cut the vocals pretty much improv as i was singing them. I usually take a little more time to mix but there just wasn’t much time to do anything else with the Christmas madness afoot. I did get to use my new Echoboy plug on the vocals with a long delay that I think is nice.

    That was pretty much it. Come go with us…

    Instruments:
    Drums
    Shaker
    Bass
    Electric guitar
    Reason
    Piano
    Juno 60
    Drum stick scrapes on cymbals

     

  • charlesallison 2:56 am on December 18, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , ,   

    Week 14- Some people 

    This week went by very quickly. I would love to have more time to work on this song. Hopefully i’ll be able to tweak it down some in the future. I started planning for something on Monday and wanted Land Camera to be the core of it. Bob couldn’t make it but the rest of us decided to try and get something laid down on Monday night. I didn’t have a distinct vision for the song at all, but John brought a mandolin and i knew i wanted to include the mandolin for sure, so it was just a matter of who was gonna write a progression.

    John was playing some chords that had a nice laid-back dark country feel and i liked it. So I quickly whipped up a beat that worked with the accents of his part. We worked up a quick arrangement with about three parts and cut that all live over a loop. We laid down John’s mandolin part and Callie’s omnichord together for the foundation. John laid bass and piano down next and i was really impressed with the accents he hit on. The bass and piano have a really nice counterpoint on the chorus. Before i go on, i have to say that Callie and John played nearly everything on this song. I played banjo and sang but it was almost a token effort. I basically just art directed, which i love. I kept it moving but claim very little credit for the creative content and that is awesome. Callie contributed great electric guitar, kerosene heater percussion and tamborine. Everything moved very smoothly and came out great, i think. You’ll be the judge, i know how you are.

    Instruments:
    Mandolin
    Reason
    Omnichord
    Bass
    Piano
    Electric guitar
    Voice
    Kerosene heater percussion
    Tamborine

     

  • charlesallison 8:34 pm on December 11, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

    Week 13- The Island/Red Dress 

    This was definitely a tough week for creativity. Between my studio schedule and my wife’s crazy schedule, this week has definitely been the hardest to make something finished enough to post on here. Big ups to ma and pa Allison for taking Finley again for me.

    Before i make it sound like i wasn’t able to do it, let me tell what happened. I did somehow manage to record a song and was about 98% done with it when my Pro Tools system took a turn for the dark side. Damn do I ever hate computers this week. I’ve been using Pro Tools for a while now and I think i’ve dealt with just about every error there is. And for every glitch PT has, there is generally a work around. I’ve looked them all up and fixed every problem i’ve ever had. I tried them all this week. Every single thing i know how to do, i did it.

    No huge deal. It will be resolved, but for the mean time i thought a while and decided how i would handle the dilemma of not having a song to post. It might happen again and i’ll always post the real song when I get it worked out. The session i created won’t open but i was able to open other sessions. The first one i tried to open was a song that was done in the last year in a similar style to all the “song a week” tunes.

    It features me and callie and some interesting field recording that i’m pretty proud of. I sampled my daughters jack in the box and cut up all the samples and rearranged them into a new melody that is definitely NOT “Pop goes the weasel.” Then i added the normal stuff like loops, acoustic guitar, and lots of other made up samples i field recorded. Then i made up a vocal that doesn’t make any sense, just like every week of this project. So this week there will be two embedded songs once i get the other session to open and i’ll tell you about the real song i made this week. Deal? Sweet.

    The Island instruments:
    Reason
    Finley’s jack in the box
    Garden hose being squeezed
    Carabiner click
    Bass
    Electric guitar
    Field recorded tom fill
    Voice

    Alright, finally got some bugs worked out and not a second too early. I was about to lose it a few times over the last few weeks. Creativity and a buggy ass computer do not mix, i don’t care what the kids say. We’re right as rain now, at least for a few. So the real song for this week is not mine, its a cover/remix/wotev for a web series that is awesome. It’s called “The Steps” and they’re having a little feature right chere where they encourage people to remix the song featured in the first three episodes. So that’s what i really did last week. My mix features Sahale Jensen on vocals. She is an avid garagebandist and a strong holdout of the virb music account. She was on the production crew for The Steps series and is quite a little songbird, even though i can’t believe i just used that word. What am i like 80 years old? So i did beats, synth, production and Callie Harmon did guitar and glockenspiel and Sahale sang. I should have spent more time on arrangement and dynamics, but things are crazy enough as it here so i do what i can.

    Instruments for Red Dress:
    Reason
    Electric guitar
    Bass
    Glockenspiel
    Voice

     

    • cat 2:42 pm on December 13, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      i’ve been away for a few weeks; just now catching up and glad i am. this one is really nice and for me the lyrics-words are really irrelevant; i’m just listening to the sound. nice work!

      • Susie 8:01 pm on December 15, 2009 Permalink | Reply

        No wonder you had problems – IT’S WEEK 13. Good “fake” song.

    • terra 2:51 pm on January 13, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      loving the jack in the box! for real?? what an awesome touch

      • terra 2:52 pm on January 13, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        that was supposed to be for the last one. :)

  • charlesallison 2:35 pm on December 4, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , ,   

    Week 12- My beautiful highhorse 

    I’ve barely played any electric guitar on anything during the project and i thought it would be cool to write something on it. I wrote a little riff for the verse and from that i had an idea for a chorus melody. It reminded me of some sort of 60’s british something. I was starting to get ideas. After i had a skeleton, Callie came over and put a little of his guitar magic on there and wrote the weird third part where i sing “could be wrong could be right.” We wanted to put some junky drums on there but it just wasn’t panning out so i used a dirty hip hop loop and distorted it even more. I had lots of ideas for cool things to do to each part. I envisioned it getting really psychedelic and strange and maybe becoming something really different. I had very little time to work on it and none of that ever happened. I think its kind of cool anyway. The lyrics were stream of consciousness, scary as that is, and my voice is pretty well toast from the sinus infection that won’t quit. I decided to use a little computer mic that had its own stand for the vocals. Its a real piece of crap, but its kinda fun and junky in a sweet way, me thinks. I have to admit I chuckled when i sang “hang on to the mane, of course.” I think it kind of sounds like Latin Playboys meets ZZ top meets Money Mark. Geez, how could you lose with that?

    Electric guitar
    Bass
    Reason
    Voice

    My view for this week's vocals a la ZZ Top. That's a Fat Tire Ale, btw. Very important detail.

     

    • terra 3:03 pm on January 13, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Well I couldn’t tell you had a sinus infection…and I like the fact that you are brave enough to go with your stream of consciousness. I could do that if I were on drugs. :)

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