A Successful Beatles Experience

Hi again!
The Beatles Tribute concerts went stunningly! It was surreal to play in front of so many people. Our second and final night we sold out the Camden Opera House, and had people dancing in the aisles on several occasions. What a rush. My one regret is that we did so few performances. Maybe more in the future?
For now, here's a video of the finale.


Happy end of June!

Now that it's summer...

Hi!
It's been a while, I know. But it's been a busy year. Now that it's summer, here's a brief update:

-I've finished at least two new songs since the last time I posted: "Rain, Snow, Moonlight" and "What Did I Want To Say". I've taken a minimalistic approach to both of these, using only about four main tracks for each--Vocals, piano, drums, and bass, with the only exception being a little harmony on "Rain".

-My next project is untitled as of yet. In contrast to the four-track work I've moved toward recently, I plan on making this huge. Strings, maybe some brass. My two influences for this are Michael Buble's "Just Haven't Met You Yet" and MIKA's "Grace Kelly". Big shoes to imitate (if that makes any sense) but I'm really excited. Preliminary bass, piano and drum tracks are already recorded.

- This coming Friday and Saturday at the Camden Opera House, I'll be performing in a Beatles tribute concert: A Day In The Life: A Beatles Experience. I'll be playing John alongside some stellar musicians: Morgan Cates as Paul, Ben Whitney as George, and Andy Moore as Ringo. See the story here.

Well folks, that seems to be it. Come down to the Camden Opera House for two-and-a-half hours of nostalgia this weekend!

Hope your summers swell!

A Long Lost Blog

Hi!
It's been so incredibly long since I've hammered away at my keyboard on this blog, describing barely intelligible accounts of music happenings in my life. Today, though, I came home and finally had a night without a rehearsal, so I thought I'd pick up the loose ends and start blogging again on a strict schedule of whenever I feel like it. Hopefully it won't be another 3 months. That was a pretty intense drought of babble.

I've been incredibly busy music-wise. Since I obtained a condenser microphone and a beautiful new ukulele in mid-October, the quality of my home recordings has become much better. I haven't had time to record much, but I've done a few covers of Akon songs. It's a bit of a strange concept, as my style and his are about as similar as pudding and nachos, but I had a lot of fun with it. Perhaps I'll find a way to post one of them.

With Malcolm I've been working on a few new projects. The one I'm focused on at the moment is an untitled song in which I delve into the frightening world of falsetto. I'm really happy about how it's turning out, and I'll post it as soon as it's finished.

I have become far more involved with school-related music activities this year as well. So far, I am in the musical, the glee club, the men's a cappella ensemble, chamber singers, and district 3 chorus. They've all been fun and/or challenging, but perhaps my favorite and the most exciting one has been glee. This year, Camden Hills Regional High School put together a glee club for a competition by the Fox23 news station. The "Glee For All" contest is a statewide competition (plus some of New Hampshire) that picked five video submissions of songs done in the style of glee to be broadcast live on TV. CHRHS' choral teacher recruited ten of us to sing "Pressure" by David Bowie and Queen and we got in! Our video was superbly done, and we've gotten a bunch of press from it (from Village Soup and the Bangor Daily News). This has been a thrilling experience and I can't wait to go live on TV! We perform around 8:30 am this Wednesday (the 10th) so watch and vote! Voting will open the 12th.



Vote on the 12th!

Also, this coming weekend will be the second and last weekend of CHRHS' performance of "Once Upon A Mattress". Come see us at the Strom on Friday or Saturday. The show starts at 7 pm both nights!

So that's a highly-abbreviated, advertisement-heavy account of my musical doings these past few months.

See ya.

Camp, finishing touches, and backup vocals

Aloha Universe!
My utmost apologies for not having posted in (can it be?) almost an entire month. I've been having adventure after adventure, with this summer careening by like a train... that... careens. Okay, so bad analogy, but this I've been up to a lot.

For starters, I went to a Village Harmony Teen Residential camp for the second year in a row. The camp consists of nine days of almost constant singing, including two concerts. By "almost constant" I mean that we rehearsed for seven to eight hours every day. I didn't calculate this year, but last year I found that we sang for an approximate fifty hours over the course of the week (excluding two two-and-a-half-hour concerts). Our group consisted of 25 teens under the age of 19, and we focused on two very different genres: Georgian (high energy music that is very different from western music) and Americana (folk and country). For a relatively small group, we had quite a powerful sound. The bass section, which mostly consisted of veteran VH singers, had a great sound. We were very synchronized and the timbres of our voices matched beautifully. In short, it was an intense experience, although for the most part it was incredibly fun as well.

Once I got back from camp, I came back to "It's Not You That I Want" with Clio. In the past couple weeks, we've cleaned most of it up and given it more "life". When recording in a studio with a few people, all playing different instruments at different times on different tracks, the biggest goal is to try to accurately play ones part. This can mean leaving out nuances and details, moments that make a song move. After coming back, we added some of these "moments" and changed some timing issues. Additionally, a tremolo string part was added by myself on the last verse to accentuate the stressfulness of the mood. If this is incomprehensible now, it should (hopefully) become clear once the song is out. We may release it for streaming next week or so!

In my last post I mentioned a friend, Will, doing a cover of Billy Joel's "River Of Dreams" that I was helping with. Last week, with the piano, bass, guitar, percussion, and lead vocals down, Will decided we would sing backup vocals. Although I had made some a capella songs on my own in garageband, I had never done it with Malcolm. I had also never done it with someone else. That was the really cool part. It sounded pretty bare at first. We laid down a track or two, and it wasn't much to hear. But after recording three harmony tracks each, it really started to sound like a choir. So exciting! The one point of frustration was when Will put down a very original, cool ending and I had to sing a weird harmony to it. My choral music training has kind of wired me to sing things a certain way, so that was incredibly hard. I spent a good fifteen minutes to a half hour trying to get it. In the end I managed to get something down, but it was quite a wake-up call to how closed-minded I am in some ways about music.

Thanks for reading and I hope summer's treating you like it should!

Near finished and Billy Joel

Hi!
I realized it's been a good two weeks since I posted anything. I know! You look like you grew a couple inches as well! I've been doing some work since the last time I checked in. Some, at least. I admit to doing a lot of sailing and playing quite a bit of badminton as well.

Anyway, the past two lessons with Clio have been productive. We've really pulled most of it together. Today we mostly worked with correcting notes on the vocal track using Melodyne software. This is a process that has a byproduct of insanity. Once a note is found that needs correcting, one can correct it to various degrees using two sliding bars: one corrects pitch and another decreases drifting. This seems easy, but there are usually three different notes that come up on the screen for every one note you sing (something to do with harmonics; I'm not sure I understand it myself) and hence one must perform the correction process thrice. In addition, the correction of a note doesn't necessarily mean it will sound good, so sometimes we had to correct multiple tracks and then undo them and whatnot. Thus, insanity was created. By the end I no longer had any idea what was right and what was wrong. Then we had to do the mix.

After much compressing, normalizing, adding reverberation, etc., we finally came out with something we thought was half-decent. It was then sent to the home emails of Clio and I as an mp3. I started a checklist on a scrap of paper for what needs to be done:

Basically, although there are a few more adjustments to be made before "She's What I Need" is posted (vocal volume adjustment and track work, and bass revision and addition) as illustrated by the fuzzy cell phone photo, the song should be out soon! Sadly, due to travel, a lesson will not be held next week so it will be a fortnight at least. :-(

In other news, I had the privilege of working with my neighbor, Will, on a song he's covering last Friday. The song is Billy Joel's "River Of Dreams" and he asked me to do a piano part for it. At first I was apprehensive (for who can imitate such a legend?) but I practiced a bit beforehand and we laid down a fairly solid - if simple - track. It was very easy to play to because he had created a really great track behind that with guitar, bass, and all sorts of percussion. After the piano track was down, we fiddled with percussion rhythms to clean up the sound and the end result was really quite something. I'm extremely excited to see how that comes out.

So I think I better wrap this up, having rambled about two events for much longer than seemingly possible. I hope everyone who's reading this is having an awesome summer (hopefully music-filled!)

May the force be with all of you.

A Side Project

elloHay orldWay!
Today, I attended a somewhat last-minute-scheduled lesson with Malcolm. However, the song I've been working on with Clio, "It's Not You That I Want", was not the one worked on because she's off in some far-away state or something. Instead, I started recording a song I wrote a while back entitled "But We Don't Talk" (I'm considering leaving out the "But" in the title). I had shown it to Malcolm at a prior date, but we had dismissed it because of its descending A-minor chord progression and piano part. This may not seem like a reason to shun something to an outsider, but if one looks through my compositions, one will surely find numerous instances of this A-minor pattern. It is not my wish to be predictable or repetitive, but I needed something to record for today and I had been toying with the song for quite some time prior to this. As a sort of compromise, I decided to play it on ukulele instead of piano. I thought it lost depth, but Malcolm said it was "plaintive", so I kept it. I certainly hope he's right. In our hour together, we got the uke part down as well as a vocal track. The song also obtained a solo in that time along with a second chorus at the end. I found it much more exciting after that.

I've really had fun in the past few weeks coming to Malcolm's and simply getting stuff done. In the past there's been a lot of writing and brainstorming that goes on in the sessions, but recently it's been a lot more structured. The songs that we're doing are already almost fully developed. This definitely started with Clio and I coming in to do "It's Not You", as we had already written and performed it. Even with "But We Don't Talk" I made a demo on garageband so I know what I want it to sound like (although the demo was piano-based.)

On a completely different topic, I'm starting to think this blog would be more fun to read if it had pictures. I mean, we all know that picture books are far superior to those stuffy chapter books. The same seems like it would apply to blogs. I'll bring a camera to the next session if I remember. Gosh, I could also make videos of songs. That would be intense. The cool thing is that I have so much free time (I'm far to lazy to get a job) that I can probably do that.

Summer has definitely set in. All productivity is lost. I find myself going to bed way too late, watching lame movies, and swimming obsessively. I should start getting to bed earlier...

...he typed at 1:00 am.

Ah, well. Such is life.

Happy (somewhat late) solstice!

The Song is Coming Along

Howdy Y'all,
"It's Not You That I Want" has made leaps and bounds since the rough cut of last week. Even after the first two-hour session it was sounding like everything I do sounds after a few months. This time, Clio and I redid the vocals, rearranged a high piano part, added guitar (played by the virtuosic Malcolm himself), and put in high strings in the last verse. It was very productive.

"It's Not You" is cool because of how different it is from anything else I've ever heard. I guess this is the magic of working with Clio. The style is hard to put into any genre (soft rock/acoustic/tango/whatever?), the lyrics are a bit out of the ordinary (key line: "It's not you that I want, It's those feelings I got"), and the setup of sections is a bit unconventional (there is no final chorus!). This has been unlike anything I've ever done and it's just so fun to do. I can't wait to finish and release it! (although this won't be in the very near future, as Clio is gone next week. Oh well!)

This is really quite exciting. If you've been terribly bored with this post, here's something you may find cool: Still Frame Animation
I did this and a few others a while back when I was obscenely bored. Hope you enjoy them!
By the way, my YouTube account is wildmanpete9, and although it has nothing pertaining to music on it, it's still really cool. I guess. See for yourself :D

Oh... and by the way...
SUMMER'S HERE!!!!!!!
Just thought I'd get that out.

Peace, love, respect, forever.