On page 155 of Theory of Fun for Game Design there is some sheet music. It looks like this.

Click for full size

This is that song, played on solo acoustic guitar. Download audio file (IdEst.mp3)
– download

The song is played in DADGAE tuning, one of my favorite “weird” tunings — basically DADGAD with an added 2nd. As usual, I miked up like crazy: two condenser mics aimed at the guitar (one at the soundhole, the other at the 12th fret) plus a bigger diaphragm mic sitting a couple of feet away. I also used a pickup on this one, a Dean Markley Promag Grand.

I have the sound space set up a little weird… the ambient mic is “in the back,” by applying a fair amount of reverb to it. It’s panned around 36% to the right. The fretboard mic and the pickup and panned hard left and right, with much lighter reverb. And the soundhole mic is dead center, with a dry signal.

This has been knocking around the house since 2003, but I just got around to recording it right before the holidays. Enjoy!

I wrote this song quite a long time ago, for one of my favorite webcomics, entitled Alice! The comic hasn’t updated since 2006, but I actually own the print collection that was available for a while. The vibe of it was somewhere between Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes — except it was about an overimaginative teen or tween girl. Glancing at it now, it makes me think of my daughter, who similarly dives into roleplaying and doesn’t come out for days.

An Alice comic strip

Download audio file (Alice.mp3)
– download

The tablature and sheet music have actually been posted up for ages and ages in the Music section of the site. It’s in standard tuning, but uses a partial capo on the 4th fret covering only three of the strings — strings 3, 4, and 5, numbered from the high E as the first string.

Hope you like it!

Back in 1999, the audio guys at Origin had spare time, and they put together this cool little program whereby people who worked there at Origin could get recording studio time.

In my case, that resulted in my only CD, AFTER THE FLOOD, which features Matt Mitchell on bass, Todd McKimmey on bass and electric guitar, and Stretch Williams on slide guitar.

I put it up on mp3.com back when there was such a thing, and some of the songs did fairly well — the opening track hit #9 on the folk-rock chart, for example. But then mp3.com went away.

Then I put it on CafePress just so it wouldn’t vanish altogether. And then CafePress did away with CDs.

So basically, it’s been out of print for years and years.

I decided, hey, if I am going to write hundreds of songs in a spare bedroom, I should actually let someone hear them. So the CD is back! (Well, as mp3 downloads anyway).

If you like it, leave a review, tell friends… if you don’t, blame it on it being from so long ago.

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/raphkoster

Recently some colleagues at Disney gave me a few gifts in thanks for giving a talk to some folks internally. Apparently Warren Spector picked out one of the gifts: a harmonic capo (he knows I play guitar, you see; been a few years, but we’ve jammed together). This little beastie sits on the 12th fret and presses down very lightly on the strings with rubber feet. Unlike a regular capo, though, it does not depress the strings all the way — instead, it sits lightly enough to cause an open pluck of that string to play a harmonic note — those bell-like tones you hear sometimes out of a guitar. But you can play under the capo, and still get standard notes. The result is that you play a regular chord, and any time you play an open string, you get a harmonic instead.

Well, I had to try it out. Beautiful on the Baby Taylor; didn’t fit on my Blueridge (the heel on the neck is too thick)… and just barely fit on the 1962 Gibson, which is what you’ll hear if you click the link. Because once I had it, I started to noodle about in open G, and, well… got this done in the last couple of hours:

Download audio file (AugustTimepieces.mp3)
– download “August Timepieces”

Hope you like it!

Tech notes: I cheated and sped up the recording a bit; I haven’t learned the piece well enough to play it at speed yet — just wrote it after all! In fact, first time into the chorus I go off on some weird little excursion that shouldn’t be in there. It could be played without the harmonic capo, of course. It just would sound quite different, I suspect (haven’t tried yet).

The guitar is miked with three mics and is also running a direct line from a Dean Markley Pro Grand. Direct is panned to one side, and a cardioid condensor pointed at the 5th fret is panned to the other side. Another condensor aimed at the 12th fret is panned to the back with some reverb, and a large diaphragm studio mic is panned smack in the center. This was the second take, after playing it maybe six or seven times. The guitar is tuned in open G — DGDGBD.

]]> http://www.raphkoster.com/2011/08/28/the-sunday-song-august-timepieces/feed/ 5 http://www.raphkoster.com/2011/08/11/rip-bill-morrissey/ http://www.raphkoster.com/2011/08/11/rip-bill-morrissey/#comments Thu, 11 Aug 2011 07:44:55 +0000 Raph http://www.raphkoster.com/?p=3832
I just learned that one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Bill Morrissey, passed away from heart failure a few weeks ago, at the age of 59. The news was drowned out in the hoopla around Amy Winehouse’s death, that very same day. We started listening to Bill back around 1991 or 1992; I had seen a [...]]]>

I just learned that one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Bill Morrissey, passed away from heart failure a few weeks ago, at the age of 59. The news was drowned out in the hoopla around Amy Winehouse’s death, that very same day.

We started listening to Bill back around 1991 or 1992; I had seen a review of his album Inside and we were feeling adventurous and interested in trying out some new music. We didn’t have lots of money to spare at the time — starving college students — so taking a flyer on someone was a big deal. If I recall correctly, the same batch of tapes (no CDs for us, they were too pricey) led us to other favorites like Patty Larkin and Greg Brown.

He had a gravelly voice, and his lyrics were like short stories — narrative poems that weren’t afraid of emotion and honesty, but also some truly hilarious songs you could only call “ditties” — hummable silly things that were just great fun. Above all, they were stories of ordinary life for working class Americans. As a 19 year old, he left college to work on a fishing boat in Alaska, gig across California, and ended up working in a mill in New Hampshire. When he sang “who knew it got this cold in Barstow” he was writing from experience.

We ended up seeing him live at least three times — at Birmingham City Stages, at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas, and in the intimacy of the Cactus Cafe in Austin. I got to talk to him a bit after that Cactus gig, and got his novel Edson autographed. It’s a Raymond Carver-esque novel about working class people in New Hampshire, with a singer-songwriter who never made it big at its core. Bill himself did make it big, for a folk singer — two Grammy nominations! But like most folk singers, he never saw significant commercial success. But many who worked with him did — backing vocals on his early albums were from Shawn Colvin and Suzanne Vega, and he produced one of Ellis Paul’s albums.

It was impossible to ignore the undercurrent of songs about alcoholism that ran through his work; he was upfront on his website about how much it had impacted his life. He was also later diagnosed as bipolar. Both took a big toll on his career, I think. But the albums, though they slowed, kept coming. He died of heart disease, quite unexpectedly — but he was on tour.

I have a lot of his songs in my fakebook, and I played several of them at the concerts I did live on Metaplace. Here are my versions of three songs of his, taken from those concerts.

Download audio file (08RobertJohnson.mp3)
– Robert Johnson

A song about the bluesman who sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads. Morrissey had a lot of affinity for some of the older bluesmen, though not so much with Johnson — more with Mississippi John Hurt; he did a whole album of covers of Hurt, in fact.

Download audio file (19WaitingfortheRain.mp3)
– Waiting for the Rain

One of the most chilling songs I have ever heard, about a farmer family facing a drought, and a storm, and maybe more.

Download audio file (29%20Birches.mp3)
– Birches

I picked one of his songs in particular, “Birches,” as the closing song when the service shuttered. It’s a song about a married woman whose husband no longer seems to be on the same wavelength. He wants to put oak in the fireplace, because it will burn long and steady. She kind of wants to have a glass of wine, and dance to the flickery exciting light of birch wood, even though it will burn out and leave the house cold that night. He goes to bed, and she drinks her wine, puts “logs as white as a wedding dress” in the fireplace, and dances with herself. The final lines are amazing: “She thought of heat, thought of time, and called it an even trade.”

I think of that song every time I miss something that I didn’t get to have nearly long enough; and every time I think about how lucky I am to have lasting love and warmth in my life. Really, skip my version, and go for the real thing. In fact, hunt down all of his work.

We already know how Bill’s doing now, fortunately, because he told us, in his song “Letter from Heaven.”

“And me, I couldn’t be happier. The service here is fine. They’ve got dinner ready at half-past nine. And I’m going steady with Patsy Cline. And just last night in a bar room, I bought Robert Johnson a beer. Yeah, I know, everybody’s always surprised to find him here.’’

I am very much going to miss that sense of humor, and that to-the-bone sense of story. Word is that he had finished a second novel; I hope it sees print, because I don’t want to have heard the last from Bill Morrissey.

I wrote this in 1994. We were living in Alabama at the time, while we went to grad school. A lot of the stuff I was writing back then was kind of like “short stories as songs,” very under the influence of folkies like Bill Morrissey; this song in particular is one of those.

Needless to say, it’s entirely fictional; I was seven years old in 1978. It’s supposed to be a tale told from the point of view of a man on New Year’s Eve in 1990, looking back at 1978 and looking at where his life is on that day.

Download audio file (NewYearSong.mp3)
– download “New Year’s Song/1990″ (mp3)

This was one of the tracks of an album called “The Land of Red Barns,” all of which had that short story vibe, pretty much. I have never recorded decent versions of most of them, and I am making it a project to get all the couple hundred songs I have written recorded and maybe even out there somewhere, so here’s this one.

Music geek stuff from here forward…:

The AT4033 for an ambient mic, towards the back of the room. Main vocals on the ATM41HE, and a Digital Reference instrument mic pointed at the guitar (the Blueridge jumbo cutaway). Guitar and vocals were recorded simultaneously to a drum loop used as a click track. The female vocal is actually my voice through the DigiTech Vocalist Live 4, recorded as an overdub. I also overdubbed the violin (played on the keyboard… couldn’t get my MIDI guitar to work for some reason!) and a bass part.

Haven’t gotten around to EQ’ing it or mixing it really, just tossed a bit of reverb on it here and there and panned the tracks. I did it all last night, and I really should re-do the main vocal independent of the guitar, too, so I can actually pay attention to the notes I am hitting. It’s been years since I played this one.

Lyrics & chords below. The “A add E” is x07650 in tablature. I also play the F#7 as xx4320, but all the other chords are basically open, no barres up the neck or anything. It’s fingerpicked, of course.

It was in the summer 1978                                                                  Bm A
I met her taking the pup to the Hatfield vet                                 Bm A
It was raining outside and we both were wet                               Bm A
Her arms crossed on a plaid flannel shirt                                      E G
Legs crossed under a denim skirt                                                      E G
She was reading Tolkien and tore a page                                        E G
I wrote my number on the scrap and gave it back                     C C7 F#7 AaddE

And it’s been a dozen years, been a dozen years                        Bm A E Bm A E
Funny how time moves slow                                                              A F#7 A F#7
It takes forever for faith to grow                                                       A F#7 A Fmaj7
Here’s the indentation, this finger, this hand                               C G
This is where I wear my wedding band                                           E

We hiked around campus in ’78
Disco tunes played on acoustic guitars
The U Mass quad, the dog, frisbees and fires
We held hands to watch Mideast news
Kissed over the gearshift in a VW
Got our diplomas and made love to the moon
Traded mortarboard caps and laughed
When mine slipped and hit her nose

Chorus

Taking the dog out for a midnight walk
We used to snowmobile along this snow
Been a dozen years with no kids to show
Dog’s feeling the ice in her bones
And maybe I am too and the Hatfield whores
Won’t get their 20 bucks from me no more

Chorus

It was in the summer 1978
Met her taking the pup to the Hatfield vet

We moved to a new house. There is a huge backyard, with fruit trees. And there are many snails.

This is the first thing I have recorded in quite a while, and the first in the new house’s music room.

It’s pretty rough. I just wrote it, and haven’t learned to play it very smoothly yet, and I didn’t even try to mix it right, so it clips in places.

Download audio file (AprilSnails.mp3)
– download April Snails.mp3

Open D tuning, on the 1962 Gibson acoustic.

Download audio file (DeadCheerleaders.mp3)
– “Dead Cheerleaders” (mp3 download)

See below for guitar chords! No offense meant to any present, former, living, or dead cheerleaders.

Cheerleaders came to the door selling cookies
They were raising money for crazy acrobatics
But I told them I could not support their evil cause
So many cheerleaders fall and break their necks

And I don’t like dead cheerleaders
They are much cuter when they’re alive
I don’t like dead cheerleaders
So please don’t take revenge on me and mine

And think of all the jocks, what would they do?
After all, high school years are their peak
The cheerleader slaying scourge must be stopped
Before there are no popular girls left

And jocks don’t like dead cheerleaders
Plus, we run the risk of a zombie army
I don’t like undead cheerleaders
…that look in their eye …just like the living ones

On the other hand, perhaps cheerleading was invented
By the rejects, the geeks, the readers, the people of my tribe
Perhaps school spirit was all a genius plan to exterminate the cheerleaders
To make sure that the downtrodden students could thrive

If so, it backfired, so I won’t be buying cookies
From girls in short skirts risking their lives
So that they can snub the people with less fashion sense
I cannot support this systematized oppression

That’s why I don’t like dead cheerleaders
They are much cuter when they’re alive
I don’t like dead cheerleaders
And we need some left over to make Bring It On Five.

Yes we need some left over to make Bring It On Five…

Verse:

• A (x02225 to x02224 to x02222) to D6
• and again
• F#m7 to Bm
• F#m7 to E7

Chorus:

• Same pattern as the first line of the verse, repeat for first three lines
• A, E, A

Bridge:

• A7
• C7/9 (x32330)
• G7/6 (323020)
• E7/9 (020133)
  

I have an iPad, as of about a week ago. I have now had the chance to try it out on a trip, as well as general home use, and I think this sort of form factor is probably the future of computing for most folks. It’s clearly early days still for slates like this, but you can see the path from here, and it is an interesting one, with variations depending on who needs to use the tablet. In the meantime, with some trickery, it can do most of what I would need to replace a laptop. Basically, I am now carrying it everywhere, and on my trip I booted up my laptop exactly once, and it was to create and display a presentation — I didn’t have a VGA adapter yet, so I couldn’t project from the iPad.

I have already spent over $100 on apps for it, and thought I would share some of my thoughts. I tend to favor free and cheap apps, actually, so the below is me trying to be a skinflint and failing!

It’s a decent art platform, for example, except for the lack of a stylus and pressure sensitivity. The drawing tablet capabilities of my old Toshiba M400 destroy it. But there’s laptops out there now with screens that work as either capacitive finger multi-touch or stylus devices… so I can see that niche getting filled. In the meantime, Sketchbook Pro ($7.99) makes for a decent drawing app, though the fact that you have to adjust a slider constantly to affect opacity or line width is annoying. For more natural sketching, you can try out Wondershare iDraft (free!), which varies line width based on speed, but lacks most everything else. Both go better when paired with a Ten One Design Pogo Sketch Stylus. Still a long way from a proper Wacom pen, but better than nothing. I had real trouble fingerpainting…

A stylus is also pretty much a must if you plan to write anything in handwriting. They asked me to sign the credit card on an iPhone when I bought the iPad, and I laughed at how bad the signature was… you just don’t write with fingers with that sort of precision, sorry! The iPad also lacks handwriting recognition support, and the selection of apps for note-taking are very keyboard-centric. What I was looking for was something that felt like a pad of paper, and instead, I mostly found text editors. I mix diagrams and text liberally in notes, so the fact that most notes apps don’t let you do this seems like an obvious oversight.

Among those that do, I preferred Notes Plus ($4.99), which translates all your strokes into vectors, for the simple reason that you can write in a zoom window, so your text is actually handwriting-sized instead of poster-sized like in most apps; smartNote ($0.99) offered similar features, but the zoom window wasn’t there. I do miss having an erase tool that isn’t based on shape selection, though. Both apps let you type or sketch, and neither offer handwriting recognition — for that you would have to go with WritePad, which is again, just a text editor so I didn’t try it. The industry leader in notetaking, Evernote, doesn’t do ink yet in its iPad version, and I haven’t tried Penultimate because you can’t type into it.

A pleasant surprise was the way the musician community embraced the iPad. There’s a pile of pro-grade apps for music creation. I won’t try covering the kajillion instruments, but two pleasant surprises were AC-7 Pro ($9.99), which turns your iPad into a wireless Mackie control surface — I can control my digital recording software through it, with sliders and knobs on screen! — and MultiTrack DAW ($9.99), which is what it says — even including loop-based tools. And I should mention that Voice Band which is an iPhone app, is really neat — it generates MIDI data off your voice. I look forward to getting a Camera Connection kit (Wednesday, I hope) and hooking in a good USB mic into this setup, and seeing what happens, when recording jam sessions and the like. I have my eye on a Blue Microphones Yeti USB Microphone, which is reasonably priced for the quality mic it is.

For web purposes beyond browsing, I found that the WordPress app (free) was a universal app, and while I kept around the old version of this app on the phone, on the iPad I use the newer one with no issues. The best cheap RSS reader I found was ZeFeed (free!), which beat out xFeed (also free) mostly because of its organizational structure and interface. ZeFeed is a bit slow to launch, and marking everything as read is obscure (tap the ribbon, the listing will flip to a mark read button). none of these offer OPML import, unfortunately. And I use Twitteriffic (free) for Twitter, which is nice because it’s what I use on the phone too. I also use the official Facebook app (free), and man, it is terrible. I hear there are alternatives…

Accessing my files on my webserver and even editing files up there was easy with FTPOnTheGo Pro ($9.99). You need the pro version because the non-pro is just for iPhone/iPod. It lets you edit files remotely, FTP up and down, etc. Of course, the fact that iOS does not have a filesystem is an issue that causes every app to include attempts at parsing every file format known to man — this one will attempt to display JPG, PDF, DOC, XLS, PPT… it crashed on some of my more complex PPTs, but so did every other app.

In fact, the single biggest letdown with the iPad is in fact the ridiculous hoops that lack of filesystem makes you jump through. None of the slideshow apps seem to let you see the slide both on the iPad and on the projector at once, Apple’s own Keynote ($9.99) included, which for me is a huge problem when giving presentations. You have to use iTunes to transfer files in and out, which basically locks you out of working easily on the road. To add insult to injury, Keynote choked on almost every PPT I gave it.

So I bought Quickoffice ($14.99), which let me mount the iPad as just a network drive on my PC, which was awesome. But it doesn’t let you edit Powerpoint files, though you can try to view them (editing is a promised feature). It did better at at least showing the slides, but then you can’t project them! (Projecting things on iPad is app by app, which is stupid and no doubt some crazy Apple restriction). So I tried Goodreader ($0.99), which does support VGA out as well as displaying darn near anything… but isn’t an editor of any sort. And getting files between the two, well, you email them to yourself. Ugh.

I often need to pull up webpages on a projector too. For that you can use Expedition VGA ($0.99), which apparently is intended to grow into more of a presentation tool than a browser. Of course, getting files into it… well. I tried AirSharing HD ($9.99) but had trouble getting it to mount as a network drive on XP. It basically attempts to give you a filesystem. In the end, I may frequently resort to LogMeIn Ignition (a whopping $29.99) which gives me remote desktop access.

Other work-type stuff I have not messed with enough to form an opinion: ToDo and Dragon Dictation. But overall, I’d say that the iPad serves better as an office tool for non-traditional jobs, like art or music, than it does for pushing paper or giving presentations. Which is interesting, and odd.

I am using Stanza (free) for eBook reading. It does a bunch of ebook formats (though not LIT, alas, I have a bunch of those). It does well with PDFs which were useless to me on the iPhone, but are great and exactly book-sized here. I was able to bring in my song circle fakebook, which is 500 pages of PDF, and it worked. It also reads CBRs, which I haven’t tried yet, but basically gives you access to comics. And it does connect to both a pile of exisiting eBookstores, and to arbitrary URLs as well.

The idea of transcoding video content to the iPad made me shudder, so I was very happy to find yxPlayer ($4.99), which is basically yxFlash for the iPad, and handles playing a variety of movie formats. Alas, no VGA support.

Lastly, it is a very good game machine, but more importantly a game machine that enforces incredibly simple UIs. It is no surprise that the games I have liked the most are ones where the touch screen is embraced, like the arty games Osmos, Auditorium, Spider (newly in HD as of yesterday) & Trundle; puzzle stuff like Drop7, CrossFingers, Colorbind; super casual things like BirdStrike, Tiki Premium, and everything in the Chop Chop series (Ninja, Runner, and Tennis). Also, I was happy to find classics, like Frotz (basically, the entire IF archive at your fingertips!), Troika (think Set), Blokus HD, and that the pixel-doubled Archon for the iPhone holds up very well. I scarf up probably a game a day, often via free promotions, so this list is very very far from exhaustive.

What am I missing, and what rocks?

As those of you who follow the blog closely know, I listen to (and play) a lot of singer-songwriter music. One of my favorites is Ellis Paul, whom I’ve been listening to since I first heard him on a Kerrville stage in the early 90′s. Every once in a while I mention one of his songs or comment on one of his concerts here…

Well, today an email showed up… seems like his manager noticed. I don’t usually put up marketing stuff on here, but as a fan, I’m going to anyway even though this is more of a gaming blog than a folk music blog!

Ellis’ new album was completely funded by the fans, and he is giving the lead single track “Annalee” away for free. Go check it out! You don’t need to give an email, sign up, register, or anything. Just download it — and share it. Share the link with as many people as you want. And if you like what you hear, buy the album (buy all of them, they are all really good) and support a truly indie and truly fantastic singer-songwriter.