Music

Stuff about music, either mine or stuff I am listening to.

  • The Sunday Song: Zombie Christmas Trees

    Hours Categories Music
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    We chop the poor trees down, then stick them in embalming fluid to keep them alive for a few weeks while we use them as our helpless servants; then we throw them away to wither in a landfill. If that isn’t a zombie, what is?

    This little ditty came about because of something my daughter said — I don’t remember what exactly. But she rolled her eyes a lot when I said that it gave me this idea. If you like, you can think of it as a spiritual sequel to “Dead Cheerleaders.”

    –download here

    I just wrote this yesterday and recorded it in a few hours today. I play it up at Capo VII, fingerpicked, but in the recording I added a couple more guitars to give it body and it sort of turned into a 70s country rock song. Sorry about that. The fingerpicked line is on the Baby Taylor, and the rhythm parts are on the Blueridge, and I just doubled it through an amp simulator to get some crunch and space in it. And added a bass part and a fake Hammond organ.

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  • The Sunday Song: Alice

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    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
    An Alice comic strip

    – 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!

  • “After the Flood” is available again

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    After the Flood CD coverBack 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

  • The Sunday Song: August Timepieces

    Hours Categories Music
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    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 “August Timepieces”

    Hope you like it!

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