This isn’t really a proper Hellagem, but I figured I’d offer you a crumb from the Game Boy Advance game I’m working on. I threw this music together very quickly.

The game will involve this marshmallow man jumping around a young boy’s gums and attempting to kill all of the teeth in his mouth. When you kill them all with your marshmallow gun, you win. Tooth decay, yay!

For the full effect, let it loop over and over until you are driven mad.

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Last weekend was my designated time for making a Hella Gem, but that was taken up by sickness and worry over my cat who I had to put to sleep on Saturday, so I abandoned my personal responsibility for grief.

In lieu of something fresh, here is a demo I literally recorded at work last April, vocals and all. I’ve been working on re-recording it for a Hella Gem instead of posting this but I suppose that can just wait for an eventual album instead. The vocal performance features cameo appearances by one of my co-workers on the radio and the sound of Projector #8. I used the microphone built into the laptop to record the vocal. Frankly, I’m surprised it is listenable at all.

As to the structure, it repeats the same two basic chord structures but I changed the vocal melody from a “verse” to a “chorus” when appropriate. That’s sort of a folk song thing to do, I suppose. Enjoy this super rough cut, with the usual wordless vocal improvisation.

It’s called “The Ballad of Danger” because I recorded two songs that day… the other was called “The Ballad of Hope” (and was not nearly as good).

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This song’s a collaboration with Matthew K. Manning, who I’ve been playing music with for fifteen years off an on. We had a high school band together called Royce, and then played in a rock group called Made in China for a few years. After not playing together for a while, Matt came over today and we mostly fiddled with getting his laptop configured for music (and merry) making, but in between bouts of hair pulling over Windows Vista we managed to bang this song out. It sounds a bit more “live” than most of the other things I’ve done due to the way we recorded it… the vocals, piano and drums (Matt) were all recorded simultaneously, and then we both simultaneously recorded the bass and guitar (Matt). A bit of mixing later and it was done.

I attempted to actually write lyrics for this and re-record the vocal before posting this, but it didn’t really work out. Next time, gadget, next time. The title is a random phrase pulled off the top of my head.

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I wasn’t sure if I’d get a song done this week. Moving/Finals/Excuses. But, Mr. Jings came over this evening and helped me get my studio space set up in my new place, and now with everything setup I threw something together. I don’t really reinvent the wheel with this one (2 verses/chorus + bridge/outro as I’ve been doing for 75% of my songs) but it is more rockin’ than the past few piano ballads have been, so maybe you’ll like it.

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This is NSFW (and definitely rated R for language).

In the spirit of Felix, I quickly recorded this with voice and ukulele using the Voice Memo function on my iPhone while I tried to clean up my old place hastily so my landlord could start getting the house ready for the new tenants. I was not happy about this, one reason being that it might force me to skip posting a Hella Gem for the 2nd week in a row, so I made up the lyrics and music on the spot, ruminating on my situation while inserting a copious amount of expletives. Hold out to the 2nd verse, when the lyrics start getting pretty good as I recall all of the things my landlord never fixed in my old place.

This song is somewhat reflective of the sorts of things I’ll make up on the spot while strumming idly away on the ukulele or other random instruments. Most of these songs are lost to time… but not this one. Yes, indeed, I can be quite the potty mouth.

Here is some hastily scrawled album art:

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On the Hella Gems email list we’ve talked about how the posts have started to dry up around here, so I’m unilaterally going to double my output on Tuesdays. Having made this decision rather recently, I threw this song together yesterday. It does not really traverse much new ground for me, and by and large I don’t see it as a very successful piece except in parts, but that’s the risk you take writing and posting more quickly. It’s all about letting go of that need to “finish” something endlessly until you finally either finish it into the ground or give up on it entirely.

The instrumentation is pretty similar to last week… piano, drums, vocals… this time some guitar, which I struggled to fit in there without overwhelming the rest (except for when it needed to overwhelm things). I did some sort of bizarre heavy metal bass drum thing at the end, which I tried to sync up with on the bass and guitar. Thankfully, I recorded this piano demo with vocal to a click this time. It does make things much easier when you overdub the other parts later. Sorry to get you excited if you saw “Brick Wall” and thought this would be an electronic orgy with a brick wall limiter.

I did manage to get feedback going with a software simulated amp, which basically required me to turn up the monitoring while I was recording the guitar. I was pleased with how well it worked.

As usual, improvised vocals, so don’t try to listen to closely. Pretend it is in a language you don’t understand. That’s how I love my J-Pop.

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After Michael Jackson died, my inclination was to do the same sort of thing that Bill did, which is to record either an MJ cover or a dance song in that sort of vein. As usual, my braggart inclinations gave way instead to introspection, so I started tinkling on the piano instead. Eventually I remembered this song, which is one that I had written two years ago for a concept album that was never finished.

The subject matter of the album was the rise and fall of a boxer, and this song was going to be the last song of the cycle, chronicling the end of his career, as the fans have gone away and his body is no longer capable of the fears needed to regain them. With both the positive and negative lights being shone about as bright as they can on Michael Jackson, doing this song seemed appropriate.

In any case, I had many of the elements of this arrangement lying in my head for quite a long time, and their recording was almost accidental, since I recorded the initial piano and vocal without a click, hence the floating drums and other instruments not quite being in time with one another.

There is actually 60% actual lyrics in this song, mostly the 1st verse and the chorus/bridge bits. Everything else was a first take piled upon another first take:

Piano/Vocal -> Drums -> Bass -> Strings -> Backing Vocal on the Bridge

Thanks to Bill for nudging me to post this as is.

The title came from seeing this memorial at Oakland Cemetery:

At first I thought the lion was only sleeping, but no, the lion was dead.

When you go to Omaha, NE to meet a bunch of people you’ve only know through the Internet, things are bound to go south quickly, at least if pitchers of Busch Light are involved.

Last Friday, we all went bar hopping in Bellevue, where the dive bars are just that, and ironic hipsters with PBR tall-boys are nowhere to be seen. You either get lit or you get shipped. I opted for the former.

I wanted to do something nasty and dirty, so here is my stumbling attempt towards that. Just imagine I’m still hopped up on wheat beer watching the landscape spin as you listen to the incorrigible mix, which seems impenetrable to me, but I’m going to have to let it go for now. There’s even a bitcrusher running through a send/return channel on my voice (once again improvising, only with slight hesitance due to my roommate being in the next room as I screech it). Yup, it’s that kind of song.

This one’s for all those guys I met in Omaha who aren’t insufferable hipsters, especially Keith, who will soon depart to China for the Peace Corps. Do they get crunk in China?

Here’s a little something I’ve been tinkering with for a while for an upcoming laptop battle which likely is not to happen (I hope to be proved wrong).

I wrote most of this at work using a little Korg Nanokey and Live 8. I have tried a few various wrestlers over it but nothing has quite fit yet (“I Fight For A Living” is getting done this year, I hope). So tonight I finally picked a random structure from the session view and laid down one of those broken leads that gets really skunk when you lay on the modulation.

Most of the instruments are Live 8 instruments, except for the lead synth, which is Korg’s delicious MS-20 emulation. No words, just some quasi-funk.

I wanted to do a more rocking song than I’ve been doing lately, and I also wanted to have a song that started off with a slow acoustic(ish) intro before going into the rock. I’m not super enthused about this one and spent a bit of time trying to bring it to life with various parts and such. It should have gone into another part at the end but I ended up just ending the song early, hence the bastardized spelling of “Truncation”.

Edit: Okay, had dinner, met a DJ, let’s try some more background:

1) I started watching this movie (リンダ リンダ リンダ) last night at work, which has a high school band learning the song “Linda Linda” by The Blue Hearts. That is where I got the idea to try to start with a slower part then go into a more rocking part. Of course my attempt to rip it off sounds little like what I’m ripping off, because I can’t consciously rip off something completely if I want to have any hope of sleeping at night.

2) I like the texture of the chorus and all the parts, but I didn’t record enough backing track for the 2nd verse to work, which is why that sounds sort of random and mumbly (well, more so than usual, this song as usual has no planned words).

3) To do the intro where it comes in sort of perfect in Ableton, I played the guitar whilest ignoring the click track that was tapping furiously away in the background, then played the guitar over the click when it gets fast and stuff. I could have just done it separately, but I wanted the fast part to sort of come in when it seemed “natural” to me. That’s what worked for me, at least.