The Right Column

Spring

Summer. It's starting to be hot outside again.

The Kick Guitar

a story of old Brighton

Back in the '90's, when I was hanging around that apartment on Chestnut Hill Avenue in Brighton, Tex had an old Fender acoustic that he'd bought at Hannamon's on Harvard Avenue for seventy-five dollars used in 1987. Story was some post college kid had inherited it from an old blue's man who played in clubs down on Mass Ave: jazz clubs that I only visited occasionally when I was really drunk and hanging around with Bobby, who knew about such places.

That is an interesting aside. Maybe I go to far to the side. Maybe I'm the literary equivalent of a guy who stands at the side of such a blues/jazz club (where people turn their amps way up, and they walk out into the crowd jamming). I'm the literary guy who is off at the side and I am digging on the music and bopping around and swimming in the wonderful sea which is the drummers eyes and I look like I am drunk with junk but it is just the music and being around friends and the beer. Ya it was the beer too, not just the friends.

Anyway, my friend had this guitar and it had a pedigree. And when Bobby Bixon saw the guitar he said he knew who had owned it. Bixon waxed poetic, that far away look in his eyes, his knowledge base of rock-n-roll was deep like the abysses of the sea. Strange creatures of the deep (please, if I could afford it, the John Deep voice over and Kate W. as well) rising up in the Watertown penthouse (halfway) of Bobby Bixon bopping out his WAAF trivia and the recollection of years of listening to rock radio and being lost in a Marijuana daze. Bobby had seen the guitar somewhere else, being played by someone else. And Bobby was sure that the Spirit of the Lord was upon that guitar and that there were blessing pouring forth from the rosewood neck and the old bronze strings.

First thing that Craig, blesser of guitars that he is, did when he saw that vintage early sixities classic was put his Gibson case down gingerly up against the speaker cabinets. Craig then picked up the guitar and plucked the low E open fret. Then he barred the neck at the 12th fret E. And then he played a very high barred A 17 frets down. What Craig noticed right way was just how well entonated the guitar sounded. Next he scoped the neck by holding the guitar out in front of him looking down the neck from the top. Next he plucked the strings testing whether the guitar was tuned. It was in perfect tune. And so Craig started to jam on it, playing a favorite Beatles song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. At the end of his jam he announced “This is a really good guitar.”

Then Craig let out a riff on the thing, a bluesy, acoustic, and rapid arpeggiation that lasted maybe twenty seconds. But then Keverin turned up his amp and drowned out Craig's playing. I was in the kitchen getting beers for everyone. I had my keyboard set up. I must have seemed like a jack ass cause I was not that good at playing along with other people and I didn't have my chops. But if I knew what the key was . . . then I would play in that key. Problem was that as soon as I would figure out what key Keverin was in he would switch to something else suddenly. This would happen during jams. It was easier if we were playing songs. But then it was the same thing over and over again. Keverin especially liked to play George Harrison Beatles songs and songs like Lennon's "Working Class Hero".

Blueberry
Blueberry Meadows
In the Springtime rain
in the springtime rain

Far fallow fields 
and an old stone wall
and a flood into a drain
and a flood into a drain

Music is Primary

Sound as Music

I've tried to present to you the concept of the toy train composition methodology. Of course composers don't really use toy trains. But if one had an ear, just one ear. And what an ear he has! For composer with just one ear that works the only way to tell the distance of things is probably (and someone could ask him, nicely) the only way for him to determine the distances of things by ear was to train him self to key in on the Doppler effect produced by moving objects. You and I, with both ears working (oh what an ugly assumption, sorry Deaf People), can hear other effects of sound to allow our minds to place an object into space. The human ear and brain have very many different cues that allow for placing a source of sound. The varying loudness of things is one aspect. The right ear will hear some sound a little louder than the left ear . . . ettcettera.

The fact of the sense of sound also being intimately connected to the way that we perceive music means that if we can make our mind stronger as a listener, then we can also hear a lot of other things, things that other people miss.

Someone who is only hearing monaurally has a necessity to understand complexities of sound, and how sound propagates in space, to allow for (mitigate) the lack of the second ear.

There is another thing that people can do, who only have one ear, they can bop. They bop from place to place to sample the sound in different locations and the mind is fast and quick and they can then augment the other audiul cues, and 'map' (within their mind) the 'space' and the 'objects'. All of this would augment, and allow for some capacity to comprehend the events, and the noise that gets made by happenings. From that noise, just from that noise, we can intuit various aspects of our environment.

Given the intuition of the environment from noises, we also have an exceptionally complex theory of sound as music. Music. Music. What is music? Do animals understand music? What are 'theories' of music?

Music? How do we get music from a windstorm? Or a car speeding away? I have a youtube clip of a 1963 Dodge Max Wedge pealing out from a starting gate (racing another car) and as it pulls away you hear it zooming. It makes a whine, but it's not unpleasant at all. It's as if the designers, knowing that the car it'self had to sell itself, decided to add in some harmonics that were in tune. so one shaft is buzzing at one rate, and one at a second rate, and the transmission is buzzing, the drive shaft is whirring, it's all leaking out as noise in the air and it's making that vehicle haul on down the road and it's its' own form or music. Every motive part of that vehicle, every moving metal piece, plastic piece sliding through the air, each component, has a natural vibration. Some of them, under power, are driven to other frequencies (driven by the powertrain, and then that drives the car). In addition, in the more modern pop-music era (the ear of the recorded sound) we have the further capacity of having recordings and that they would play back with high-fidelity (High Fidelity was a marketing term that represented the highest audio quality, quality that met a high standard for excellence, that moniker seems to have disappeared around the time of the shameful marketing of the 42 kbaud 16 bit sample (lack-of) of the CD format. Why torture your dog, use a better format!

Toy train music box-car

So it is possible for a car, zooming off, to have a 'song' to it. But here it is, the 'song', or let us call it 'ambiance' of it is much different depending upon the location of the listener. From place to place with in a venue for symphony, be it Boston's best orchestra or Boston's Bad Boys (who we all know who they are), in a venue, if the sound isn't any good where you are, get up and move around. Sound, in a venue, varies from seat to seat, aisle to aisle. Imagine the sound as water that gets pushed out towards a beach. If there are walls on the beach the water will have nodes, parts of a cove or a bay where the waves are higher due to the reflections from the seacliffs along the shore (they could be lake-cliffs too). Sound is very much like that, but it's 3D, and it bounces off of walls, and anything else there.

Toy train music-box-car Doppler shifts

Whooott Woooooo

I say 'whoot wooo' to mimic a train whistle. My guess is that if I look for a toy train with built in music, I will find it somewhere. Maybe it plays Christmas carols?

Picture a music box factory. It's a custom house. Anyone can go with their tune and put there request to have their music wheel manufactured. Next it gets played in a music box. Maybe they sell a special issue music box at a tourist store (tourist trap) and everyone who sees it, that is in to that kind of thing, and also loves the composer, they buy the box and the little wheel inside with the song is the valuble thing because it's a copyrighted composition and it is licensed only to be played on a music box (of course that is the fiction part, as if the world will care about said licenses, but that's another story).

In any case some one invents a traincar for a toy train and as it moves along the track it also plays a song? How? It has it's own music box aspect: a train car that is also a music box. There could be two different versions of this: one of them the notes get sounded as the train moves along so that the faster the train goes the higher the tempo, the slower it goes the slower the tempo (or even, if you can figure out the mechanics of it (go digital and just reverse it in a model) the sound could have a faster tempo the slower it goes.

In any case each 'music box-car' (box-car: a type of train car) could have it's own 'system function' as to how it plays back the sound. Basically it's own 'recording' to play. So the music boxcar could be one that is just like a transistor radio: it gets a feed and faithfully reproduces it. In our model just imagine that the music boxes are music boxes. And that they play back at the constant speed of real time, as if they are being played by musicians in real time. And then imagine that we use as the signal pure tone. So one box could play a middle C, the next an E, the next a G. Now imagine that these music box-cars are being hauled around the train track. Now imagine that there are people there listening to that. As those music box-cars get hauled around the trainset (I'm thinking like HO guage would be cool) they are going to have a dopplering to their output as it is heard from a listener. And to determine what that is, so that one could know the exact mix at a point in space . . . would be a very hard thing to model in a digital (video game world) simulation of such a soundscape.

So now imagine the composer. He understands about this Doppler effect thing. He understands how it can be interpreted as a phase shift, or a key shift, what is known as a 'modulation' of the music. And in his case the band, him hearing this train-setup simulation of sound in his head, he's put the band members on the train (so to speak, I could have used a bus analogy, be on the bus, off the bus, but buses aren't so easy to setup in simulation, an actual musical toy train setup could model this idea here. In the case of music buses, the same theory of audial perception applies, however the modeling of it, by freshman classes in physics and music, would not be an easy task.) He provides part for each player or member of the band. He hires others to do vocals and to sing along. And he can make something to be performed live, to be learned as a piece, to be scored and presented to an orchistra, to be used as a place for genius solos for the best virtuosos. That's the dream for a world class composer. It can be your career field too.

The composer must provide parts for all of the players and vocalists in the band. The composer is someone who provides the score for the piece. In fact, while being played, the band can either do a 'sight read' playing of the composition, or just play it by memory. We can see the consequences of 'playing by memory' and so if the orchestra is very large you always have people who can sight read, it's a requirement, and there is also a conductor. When the orchestra is smaller, a punk or rock or hip hop or jazz band, then they might not need to have everyone be a sight reader. If you decide that music is your business, a very fortunate business it will be for you. And better still if you learn to sight read. As one who didn't do this, I can't play a score in real-time, I regret not learning this talent.

Some people can sight read, but they make no compositions of their own. Some can make compositions, but they never score them. In the modern age we can almost get away with this. But the real deal of doing a mix-down for public consumption, and the real deal of having a live band or orchestra play your composition, is what often make a piece marketable. Often times it is not the quality of a song so much as the quality of a band to take that song and jazz it up. Just like that. They have a framework and they dress it up, they dance around it, they get it moving forward.

I've not even gotten to the part where I discuss the phase shifting of a doppler effect, and how many steps it might be. How many steps on the scale does it modulate the sound? So you could perpel the music along that track, at a constant speed to get that phase shift, and then have it shift in the other direction of the other side as it passes by and speeds away. It's it's a forth changing to a root, then won't it be a root changing to a fifth when it speeds past? How do you add that into the composition? How do you put the players on the train? There is no train track, but they could play the notes that you would hear if they were on a train and then, at teh point of flying past, suddenly they've had an extreame modulation, all the way eight steps back from where they started. From the four to the zero to the five in the lower octave. Not a bad little modulation.

I'm
gonna walk that old stone wall
I'm gonna climb a tree that's tall
and walk out beyond the waterfall.

I'm 
gonna ride that old grey mare
Climb the mountain stair
echos in a canyan hall.

inline svg sample 1,inline svg sample 2,inline svg sample 3

Did the Sun ever really go down that night? I parked there, watching for a long while, not realizing that I'd left on my head lights.

Did somehow the Sun just duck within the clouds till day break, and amble along the far horizon till it got to the otherside?

🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 
🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 
🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 
🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 🌛 

Music music music music music music!

March 11, 2015


clean water, even for enemies.
if you have this attitude, you won't need this attitude.
delete your delusions.

Music of
 Christ! 

Dance to the Jam if you want to! 
🌛
    Lovers
    and
    fighters
    are often the same
    



  

Please visit my DEMOS

   Live your life
in constant resurrection!


    Fear the Lord ~ ⏲⏱⏰⏲⏱⏰⏰⏲⏱⏰⏰
 But He's always good to you ~ ; )
     so
 

Praise the Lord while you still have voice in the world!

 
 The gardeners
 healthy exercise
 some might call hard work.
 He calls it invigorating.
 
 Off in the yard
 off in the yard
 where the grass grows
 I don't have to work that hard
 but as hard as I need to, though
 
 not that hard
 working hard
 
 fresher air
 cleaner yard
 
 off in the yard
 off in the yard
 it's not hard
 to work hard
 
 When making fresh
 the verdant yard
 it's really easy
 to work really hard.
 
 It isn't really working so much
 as it's exercise.
 That kind of gardner
 is no disguise.
 
 

I got nothing more