Assignments from the last two weeks of SONAR class have yielded positives, I think.

Last week we began to lay out the tracks for our final project, just to get a feel for some of the MIDI elements. I tend to start things at the beginning and work through sequentially, so I put together a very rough pass at the Intro section for Volo Flamenco. This snippet adds just the bare beginnings of percussion and strings – all synthesized via plug-ins, specifically, the TTS-1 and Session Drummer synths that comes with SONAR 8.

Volo Flamenco Intro – MP3 – 256kBps – 2.5MB – 1:21 min.

This week was an overview of sound synthesis, which technically isn’t a huge part of the SONAR course (synthesizers are a course of study in their own right). The idea was simply to understand the various types – additive, subtractive, modeling, sampling, etc. The task I chose here was to manipulate a few existing sounds’ elements – attack, decay, release, modulation (vibrato) – to create new ones. This short bit has tweaked piano, bass and percussion, tied together with a melancholy little melody inspired by the piano tone.

Masque – MP3 – 256kBps – 2.7MB – 1:30 min.

Enjoy!

This week’s assignment for the SONAR course was kind of interesting.

Last week we recorded a MIDI performance into a track – anything we wanted – just to get the hang of it. I chose something I picked out on the (mostly) white keys back when I was about 14. See ‘Organ Part’, below.

This week we had to take that single track and expand it without adding any new recorded material. Just copy-and-paste, edit the notes with SONAR’s tools, add whatever synthesizers and effects we wanted, etc. So I turned the organ part into Ron’s Tabernacle Choir (with orchestra).

Note: everything you hear is being created in the computer using the “software synthesizers” that come with SONAR 8.

Organ Part – MP3 – 192kBps – 2.1MB – 1:27 min.

Organ, Choir and Strings – MP3 – 192kBps – 2.2MB – 1:27 min.

Sorry, that was a really strained metaphor inspired by Oracle and Sun’s announcement this morning that the Java Programming Language will soon be under the direct control of one of the most money-grubbing companies on the planet (at least in my limited experience with them – that would be Oracle).

Sun is going bye-bye. That would be the “Sky at Night” part.

Looks like it may finally be time to go full-on Ruby. That’s the “Red” part.

Like I said. Strained.

It’s been bugging me for a while – partly because I miss what little I remember of Austin and partly because this site has a regular readership of, like, 12, so I recognize pretty much all of the regulars’ IP addresses – but I think I finally figured this one mystery out.

The person hitting the site from Zymurgy has got to be… PHIL!

Am I right?

If so, are you still ‘tooning?

It took almost as long to come up with a name for this as it did to finally get around to recording a scratch copy – again, this is SONAR running while I practice. Kinda sloppy here and there, but it has the basic feel.

This was inspired in part by Steve Stevens’ Flamenco-A-Go-Go (thanks again for turning me on to that, Bryan). I plan to use this file as a scratch track to build a much more complex piece (more guitars, orchestra… the woiks! use your imagination), as my final project for the Producing Music with SONAR course.

It’s pretty dynamic, so if it sounds really low-volume when it first starts (about 8 seconds in, or so), don’t turn your volume up too high. It’ll get louder soon enough. Enjoy!

Volo Flamenco - MP3 – 128kBps – 6.1MB – 6:41 min.

Too much time between the last post and this. Lots of other stuff has provided ample avenue for distraction.

Happily, though, recent developments include pursuing something I should have done decades ago: formalized musical education. As a Christmas present to me I enrolled in Berklee School of Music’s online program: Berkleemusic.com.

Berkleemusic’s programs include numerous certificates and a lot of standalone courses. See the link above for a sample course (I think it’s an excerpt from the Electric Bass course). I decided on the Preparing for Berklee ‘Specialist’ certificate, since it includes topics I’ve wanted to explore and starts where I really needed to start: Basic Music Theory (BME-101). Just finishing that course this week (actually, I’ve completed everything – just waiting for a grade on my last assignment) and I’m happy to say I learned a good deal that would have meant a lot over the years in all manner of situations. Not the least of which, in that regard, would have been an overall reduction of the frustration that has often led to discouragement and lack of, shall we say, “follow-through” with respect to a number of musical endeavors.

Next on the agenda is Basic Ear Training (BME-115), which starts next Monday. I’m kind of excited about this one, as virtually everything I’ve done by way of musical performance and composition has been “by ear”. I’m anxious to learn how to translate that ability into something more structured and (*shudder*) formalized.

I also decided to ‘jump ahead’ a bit and enrolled in a course that also starts next Monday, but which is not part of this particular certificate curriculum: Producing Music with SONAR (BMPR-177). This is actually the course responsible for my learning about Berkleemusic in the first place. Through the magic of Google Ads, one day last November I was corresponding with someone (using GMail) about some aspect of SONAR and over on the right column, in the list of related ads was an entry listing Berkleemusic’s on-line SONAR course. I hadn’t known Berklee even had an online program, much less that anyone was teaching courses on SONAR (which I’ve used since about Cakewalk Pro Audio Ver. 2 or something). Looking into that, I discovered all the other areas where Berklee provides on-line music instruction, and I decided it was something I wanted to try.

Some folks will undoubtedly note, correctly, that there are all manner of books and instructional material available to learn pretty much everything in Berklee’s on-line catalog. What I’ve found over the years – and something likely at the heart of the delay in my formalized musical education – is that when I pursue learning along those lines I invariably “lose interest” and move on to something else. Sometimes I’ll pick whatever-it-was back up again later, but that’s rare. I just don’t have the self-discipline to study in a vacuum. I’d be surprised if many people do. So the rationale here was that if I paid for the course – which has a very specific calendar schedule for completion – I’d be inclined to follow through. And so far that’s pretty much how it’s worked out. We’ll see how that translates to these next two courses, but I’m optimistic since they’re both in areas of “musical recidivism” that I’ve gone back to several times.

One interesting aspect of Berkleemusic is that the system they use for their online instruction is a highly customized instance of Moodle – an Open Source distance learning software package. Although we didn’t make use of a lot of its capability, or spend much time customizing it anywhere near as well as Berkleemusic has, we used the Moodle package at my last job to manage training for various technical courses on BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) and other related technologies. It was also the system used for administering our Certified BPEL Engineer exam. Kinda cool to use it as a student and see how flexible it is. Patty’s talked about putting the course of study she’s developing (as a doctoral student) on-line at some point, and I may go back to considering that as a system to support it in my next career as “Obi-Ron: Househusband and Tech Guru”… now potentially scant months away.

One final thing to mention, because I personally got a lot of inspiration out of this as well, is the access to stuff like John Mayer’s workshop (students-only, sorry – but there’s a preview there). I’ve always liked his music, but didn’t know he was such a philospher as well – at least with respect to his art – and on top of that he’s able to communicate that philosphy and make it accessible to others. Musical composition and performance is, at it’s core, an emotional activity. Mayer’s managed to rein in that emotion with a kind of enlightened pragmatism that has worked (exceptionally well) for him. If nothing else, it’s enjoyable to watch that expressed in a forum like this workshop, where I think a lot of Berklee students learned quite a bit that they weren’t expecting to. John has a blog – Battle Studies – where he’s intermittently chronicling the development of his next album. Interesting stuff there. He describes it thus:

It’s a house,
in a clandestine location,
that’s being converted into a music studio.
No, not a music studio.
An entire music experience.
A living, breathing, ever-evolving organic space that contains every part of the record making process.
Everybody involved has left their comfort zone. Including myself.
I need to be disoriented again.

I can relate to the need to be disoriented, again. Looking back (as I’m guessing John has), moments of best inspiration and motivation have come from disorientation. The need to make some internal sense of the externally unfamiliar is, I think, a kind of rocket fuel for musicians. I don’t know if The Music Room we keep talking about adding on over our garage would qualify as a disorienting environment. Likely not. But since all my Grammy nominations are in the future, and I can’t afford to remodel an entire house yet, that’ll have to do.

Some pics from the old days… CLICK TO ENLARGE

• A promo band shot (by… Jay Silverman, I think… back when he first started?)

Ron, Bob, Tony, Brian M., Brian A., Jay

• Another promo from that same shoot. Yes, Virginia, we were a show band. (duh)

clockwise from bottom: Ron, my old bass(!), Jay, Tony, Bob M., Brian A.
Brian M. in the middle

• Mugging on the job

Brian A., Bob (above), Brian M., Ron (squatting), John, Jay, Tony (above), Dave

• Giant City Brunch ’06

John, Brian M., Tony, Bob B., Bob M.

• Ron + Years = …?

I’ve decided to leave the recorder running when I practice. If nothing else, it gives me a reference for what I need to work on and whether or not I’m making progress in specific areas.

While doing so today I was able to rattle off a somewhat clean rendition of an original composition for guitar called Indiana Fields. The piece is unique in that it virtually played itself out of the Larrivée when I first got it 14 months ago.

This was something inspired by my cousin Alessandro’s current movie project, working-titled Red Gold (more info available here, but you may want to ride the volume control on your computer, as the ambient music is a bit loud, IMHO, and there’s no ‘off’ widget).

The script, which is a love story loosely based on events that occurred at Camp Atterbury, has apparently gone from a one- to a three-hanky tear-jerker since I read the first draft, which was compelling enough in its own right.  Prior to reading it, in fact, I was completely unaware that either Italian or German POWs were held in the continental U.S. at any time. But apparently there were POW camps established in Indiana during WWII. I’m anxious to see the film, once completed.

Anyway, my apologies for the room’s ambient artifacts and low-rez mic. This was taken with the dynamic just laying on my rack setup, not the condenser on a stand. The latter stays in its moisture-controlled container unless I’m actually recording.

Indiana Fields, 1943 – MP3 – 192kBps – 5.5MB – 4:00 min.

While working on a new site today I had Michael Kamen‘s score from Band of Brothers playing in the background. Track 17 (Why We Fight- Discovery of the Camp) is the portion of the score that accompanies what is, to me, easily the most compelling and devastating scene in the entire series. If you’ve seen it then you know what I’m referring to. If you haven’t, then you should simply rent it, as any attempt I might make to describe it would pale to insignificance by comparison – especially if you watch that episode in context with the rest of the series. Anyway, the music triggered a distraction I had to follow up on.

A phrase in that track at about 10:22 reminded me of something I received via email from Michael long ago, which became all the more dear to me after his passing in 2003. I thought I’d lost it, but thankfully I had not. It was sitting alone on a 3-1/2” floppy disk (among several hundred I keep in boxes under the desk here).

About thirteen years ago – back around the time that the Mosaic Netscape browser became Netscape Navigator; long before every company on the planet had a ‘.com’ internet address – one of the very first web “sites” I created was something called The Kamen Conundrum. In fact, the entire 4-or-5-page ‘site’ was just a sub-section of my personal site at Connix back then. I’ve had no luck finding it via the Wayback Machine, although I imagine I have the pages and audio files archived away somewhere on one of my old IOmega ZIP disks, which are not readily accessible at the moment, as I’ve retired the system that contained the drive for those.

The Kamen Conundrum was a friendly jab at Michael’s apparent penchant for a particular musical phrase (do-re-me-re in solfege), which I dubbed “Doodle-Dee-Doo”. At the time I owned a number of Michael’s scores on CD, and one day I happened to notice that this phrase appeared somewhere on pretty much every one I had: The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Don Juan DeMarco, Lethal Weapon II, and several others I can’t recall at the moment. At the time, this ‘discovery’ seemed worthy of Internet publication (uhm… remember, this was back when The Spot was popular…), so I crafted a few pages with audio clips of the passages and put them up on my site.

After the site had been up for quite some months, I received a blank email with a single WAV file attachment. The From address was not recognizable to me and I actually almost just deleted it. Thankfully, I did not. As it began to play, at first I thought it was my cousin, who is named Michael, who’d been trotting the globe and who I understood to be in London at the time. His voice and speech patterns had a striking resemblance to MK’s. It wasn’t until I restarted it after getting halfway through, completely confused, that I heard “…this is Michael Kamen, in London…”. I think I stopped breathing for a moment just then. Here’s what he said:

…this is Michael Kamen in London, having finally accessed your… interesting message to the world. Uhm… you’re not entirely wrong. You’ve got one doodle-dee-doo. Uhm… there’s something you’re really missing, man, and you really have to go back over everything – I’m really sorry to tell you this. Ah, I’ll give you a hint in my own inimitable singing voice. It is possible to describe it as “doodle-dee-doo”, but you need an extra “doo-doo”. And it’s [singing] “doodle-dee-doo-doo-doo”, not just simply [singing] “doodle-dee-doo… vuh-vuh-vuh-voom”. And as, uh, John McClane would say, “Doodle-dee-doo, mutherfucker”.

Although I actually did go back over everything, I never did figure out what the reference was that Michael was trying to describe. We subsequently exchanged several emails on the subject, and I did get him to admit that “my” version appeared in many of the scores – he adding that it was simply a very ‘satisfying’ phrase. But both he and, later, Chris Brooks his (often) producer stated that there was indeed a musical phrase / homage running through almost all of Michael’s work, and that it was something different from the one I’d “discovered”.

To this day, it remains – to me – a happy mystery and welcome memory of a guy who left us far, far too early.

I laughed. I cried. Sue me.