My beloved turmoil

Whatever I want to say,
It's ruined by my words..
My words..

My beloved,

What to do, I've fallen in love,
I'm unable to live, unable to die.

This song has huge contributions from my friend Gayatri (G3). We are like minded fans of A.R.Rahman and enjoy all of his compositions with much fervor. So for this song, we decided to sit together to see if we could ruin a few ARR compositions together. We wanted to do a medley. Before reading the rest of the post, see if you can figure out the 3 songs in this medley. 2 of them are ARR compositions and the last one is by Clinton Cerejo.

The 3 songs are:
Jo bhi main - Composition by A.R.Rahman for the movie Rockstar.
Aaromale - Composition by A.R.Rahman for the movie Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya.
Baina - Composition by Clinton Cerejo for Coke Studio.

I always wanted to play Jo bhi main, one of my most most favorite ARR compositions. There is a sense of lightness in the song even though the lyrics are kind of on a sad note. My nephew absolutely loves the intro to the song (when he was as young as a year old, my sister is raising him right). I mostly sing the intro part of the song. So, when we were looping and playing this part, G3 and I realized there is some scope for another layer here. We were playing with bass riffs and then suddenly found Aaromale. I was pumped. The first time I heard this song. I thought, yes, this is definitely Pink Floyd. To showcase G3's vocal abilities we picked up the solo interlude in the middle of the song. She has done an absolutely fantastic job! As we were finishing this up, the interlude leads to a chorus in the original song. We thought there is another chorus, which has similar delivery and tone to it. So that is how Baina came into the picture. If you have not listened to Clinton Cerejo, check out his coke studio stuff and a recent Hindi movie soundtrack Jugni. You will thank me later. Musically, this is how our experiment came together.

We had a surprise in store for us after we finished the track. To name it, we were researching the lyrics we used. Note that, we initially had no regard for whether the lyrics gelled as a theme or not (I personally am not huge on lyrics of any song). This was supposed to only be a musical medley. But coincidentally, the lyrics kind of started to make sense.

Jo bhi main kehna chahoon,
Barbaad jaren alfaaz mere..
Alfaaz mere..

(Whatever I want to say,
It's ruined by my words..
My words..)

Aaromale,

(My beloved,)

Ab lagan lagi ki kariye,
Na jisakiye, na mariye.

(What to do, I've fallen in love,
I'm unable to live, unable to die.)

It could be seen as a cry of someone who is torn between his mixed feelings unable to express it. Hence, 'My beloved turmoil'. I went to a Steven Wilson concert recently and he mentioned how most of his music is depressing (\m/) and called it - poetry of melancholy. These lyrics would fit right in.

coda

Last week, Riverside, one of my most favorite bands in the world lost their guitarist Piotr Grudziński. Little did I know when I saw them in NYC last year, this would be the last tour for the band in North America, with the original lineup.

To me, Riverside was the evolution of what Pink Floyd would have been. Mixing atmospheric elements with melodies and sharp instrumental work. Piotr was in the thick of it for sure. I have read several posts over the last week that say he inspired dozens of musicians (including myself at my amateur level) to believe that, beautiful music doesn't need to be complex if the right emotions go into making it. So in that essence, here is my cover of one of their simplest yet most beautiful songs: Coda. Piotr, this one is for you..

The infinitely better original is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp0UWby3GEk

Do check out their full discography.

If you like melodious progressive rock, start with 'Love, Fear and Time Machine':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym_HP88McHw

If you want something heavy, start with 'Anno Domini High Definition':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zrbhzjo6O0

Seriously though, they don't have a single bad song/album.

Irrelevance

Whoa. Long time. Almost an year since my last post. The laziness bug bit me especially when I tripped on the pain staking task of recording and mixing tracks. I have been playing the guitar though, just not enough time to publish music..

A couple of updates.
1) I bought my own looper pedal! Last time I was just experimenting with a friend's and decided its worth the cost to invest in it. It really is a lot of fun. Even if you are a beginner guitarist, and you don't usually like to jam with other musicians mainly because you think you suck (I certainly do), do yourself a favor and buy a looper pedal. Its almost like you have an extra band member jamming with you. FWIW I bought the TC Electronic Ditto looper pedal. Simple, fairly inexpensive and a whole lot of fun.
2) This is the first song I have experimented with a drumming software. Instead of playing a cajon, I wanted to explore more percussion and found the Hydrogen drumming software. Its free and I can download multiple drum machines and program patterns/songs.

The song itself was the product of multiple jamming sessions with my friends here in Boston. I took the guitar with me on a couple of trips with them and we came up with the music. We also worked on lyrics (below). As is evident from the lyrics, it is a fairly dark and brooding song (just the way I like it). The way I see it, the song is about how people are stuck in the 'irrelevant' past, thus the name of the song. The uploaded track is instrumental and we haven't recorded vocals yet. I will update this post if we get there. Song has a lot of looping to feed in different verses below. It hopefully gets interesting around the 2:30 minute mark.

There's a pain in me dear 
In my heart there's a fear 
Nothing's ever clear 
(Even) my shadow's not near 

Life grows in the cold  
My mind is never bold
I can't bear to hold 
But I should never fold

Memories pass by 
Enough to keep me high 
With me (even) when I die 
Sweet baby don't cry

And oh by the way, my solo act is yellowH00d. My friends and I are thinking we should be called 'Straw Hat Invasion Crew'... 

Hopefully I start posting more regularly. Once a month is going to be my target..

don't Turn Back

Happy New Year! Wow 5 months since my last post. To be fair, my guitar was in the shop for at least 2 of those months so that does not count. Now I am back. Last year my new year's resolution was to do a post at least once a month. I am glad that I was able to follow that trend until I broke my guitar.. So I have faith in myself to pursue this further this year as a hobby! And this means I can convince myself to invest a little more (time and money) as the year goes on to experiment more.

This post is all about resolutions! You can even say with some sort of a vindictive feeling to it; to get back at something that you failed to do last year but you promised yourself you would do. If your mind is in that mindset this track will be a good background music for it. I think part of the reason why I am in that mood is because I have been binge watching a lot of 'Sons of Anarchy' and 'The Walking Dead'. Both series has a lot of revenge drama (for some weird reason my sister and I really like this sort of drama) and I have been exposed to a lot of situational sound tracks and background music. So here you go 'don't turn back':

Now some slightly technical rambling:
I also realized that a lot of songs have some sort of looping to it. Either a background riff or percussion, something that keeps going on maintaining the tone of the song. It is impossible for an amateur like me to play the same riff the exact same way twice. So recording, lets say a 3 minute long background riff is 1) Boring 2) Painstaking.

In order to get around this, I used the following brute force way. Played 9 - 18 seconds long clips and then used software to stitch together the track I had in mind. It is literally cut/copy/paste with an extra function called 'mixing' where you can imagine it as if I am pasting a picture on top of a picture to get a 'combined' picture. So in audio, I can paste my guitar on top of percussion track and its called mixing instead of pasting. This was again painful for two reasons. 1) You can hear the minute tempo mistakes due to my laziness and crude audio processing 2) VERY time consuming. So much so that I spent more time working on software compared to playing an instrument. The hell! This is what I do at work. I don't want to be staring at a computer screen to be creating music. So what is the solution?

That is when I came across the looping pedal! Essentially it records stuff real time and I have the ability to record on top of it, overwrite it, start/stop it whenever I want, even connect an aux cable to play external soundtracks so that I can play over it. I borrowed one from a friend and it has a lot of potential to make my recording process easier, more fun and definitely less staring on computer screens. FYI my birthday is in April but I accept early gifts...

all Shall Fade

Is it actually a surprise that I am a huge LOTR/Tolkien nerd? I went to see 'Guardians of the Galaxy' and there it was, the trailer for 'The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies'. Apart from the stunning 3D in the movie, the best part of it was the fact that they used Pippin's song as background music! I LOVE that song. Simple, effectively emotional (brings a lump in my throat and a few tears every time) and masterfully orchestrated. Irritating table manners by Lord Denethor adds to the melancholy nature of the song. For those who don't remember this (I am up for a LOTR marathon of preferably the extended cut anytime you are ready), here is that song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ltiVOUmo9o

I took this and decided to ruin it in exactly two ways

1) Sing the song myself (I went to a Karaoke session last weekend and singing Creed and Linkin Park has boosted my ego a bit. I did totally screw up a Tool's Sober' though)

2) Metallize the song a little (I mean everything \m/ is awesome right?)

So here you go, my version of Pippin's song 'All Shall Fade',

USE HEADPHONES/EAR BUDS FOR THE BEST QUALITY.

chasing My Tail

A slightly different experiment this time. I have two versions of the same track.

USE HEADPHONES/EAR BUDS FOR THE BEST QUALITY.

First one is a guitar + cajon track:

I think I am very much into the metal groove. I used Rob Zombie's - Thunder Kiss 65 guitar tone for this one. Have I told you, based on ~50 songs I can make my Rocksmith software assign guitar tones like any one of those songs' bass/guitar? This is pretty bad ass. For the next song based on my mood, I can switch from Rob Zombie to Alice In Chains or System of a Down.

The second is the same track but this time accompanied by the pre-programmed drums. I basically choose the tempo and the tone of the drums (I used 140 bpm similar to my cajon beats and used degraded drums to give a bass-ier feel). Here you go, an actual video of me playing the guitar :P :

Which one did you like? I have my favorites in both parts. But I am starting to feel that my cajon playing is starting to fall behind my guitar experiments. I am unable to easily switch between beats or manufacture new beats mostly because there are only 2-3 unique sounds you can make with a cajon and not all of those tones match all guitars. Time to recruit a drummer? What a bummer. Ironically, I bought the guitar to accompany my cajon experiments, but I am pleasantly surprised that I have been able to do my own thing using the guitar without getting bored.

'chasing My Tail' because that is how I have been feeling for the past month or so. Constantly chasing so much that now I don't know what I will do when I finally do catch up. Will I enjoy the destination as much as I thought I would before I began the chase or will the lack of chasing lend myself to no purpose? (Alright, alright, don't worry, I am fine. ) 

twist Y'all!

Surprise, surprise. No cajon in this track! I was playing with the 'Newgrass' band in Rocksmith and was surprised how the 'dynamic' band was fairly stable in their rhythms. The band is supposed to be changing based on what you play (a jamming mode in the software if you will) so when I started riffing my own tune it kept repeating the same thing between different sessions. So I thought why not let the virtual band be my backing track! And to my surprise it turned out pretty well. I practiced this tune maybe 5 times and then finished the recording. Unfortunately I could not completely mute the percussion. So recording a cajon on this track seemed a little redundant. So I had to abandon my cajon for this track. I am thinking I will make up for it in the next track by recording my cajon first and then add rhythm by guitar over it. Will be interesting.

Anyway when I was playing this 'Newgrass' band, the bass line and the banjo sounded familiar made it sound like a twist song, hence the name. The bass line in fact is very similar to one of my favorite Tamil songs (from 1964!) which is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swzBXaGeJ-0

Here is my track:

I did not do a lot of processing. Only some background noise removal filters. This was a very organic riff. If you listen closely, you can actually hear some mishit notes. But who cares :P ? Or maybe I am just getting a little lazy.. Again just wanted to re-emphasize that only the lead guitar notes are mine. Others are provided automatically by Rocksmith. I am not THAT much a multi-instrumentalist yet ;)