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READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
Merry Xmas, everyone, John Quays and otherwise! Full moon tonight -- I wanted to take a picture because it was pretty gorgeous; but alas the camera's batteries were dead. By the time I got home and got new batteries the moon was behind a cloud and no longer low on the horizon and orange. But I'll take a look later on.
This is awesome! Every day I am coming up with a new fiddle part. I worked this out on viola just now: ABC format, PDF. Might record it tonight, maybe tomorrow. Those 8-beat drones at the end of each line will have violin on top of them. (This is the first transcription I have done directly into C clef.)
In the sober light of morning: This transcription is way wrong. The part sounds pretty sweet, and I'm going to try recording it; but the notation does not correctly tell how to play it. So don't rely on it.
Update: See the new post for a better transcription.
posted evening of December 24th, 2007: Respond ➳ More posts about Songs
I'm pretty happy with this. I tried putting a solo in but it just doesn't work that way. So I'm just playing it straight through. A couple of bars of solo before the first verse might be something to think about.
Background on this song: it is by an old Country band called the Stanley Brothers, but I have never heard them play it. I heard John Miller's cover on the same disc where I heard The Louisville Burglar -- Thanks Jeffrey! This was Sylvia's favorite song for a while so we listened to it a lot.
The cool thing about this song is, I had been looking for a fiddle part for a while; and then yesterday I just heard the part exactly in my head, and how it would fit in with the vocal. I think it sounds really good together.
Update: Huh, I just listened to the John Miller version again for the first time in a while, and my cover is different in some pretty key ways. That's nice to see. He does a two-bar intro, I'll try and add that next time I play this.
posted morning of December 24th, 2007: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
I wrote out the fiddle part for "Weary Day" -- you can read it in ABC format or PDF. Note the time signature change in the middle of the chorus -- I wasn't sure how else to represent two extra beats in one of the measures. (In the Corelli piece we were playing in the chamber music workshop, the extra-long measure was just written in to the music with no warning, but that seemed a little hard to get used to.)
I will record this tune later on today.
posted morning of December 24th, 2007: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
Very much a working version -- I am not particularly happy with the integration between the vocals and the fiddle; and I don't think I am singing this one very well right now. But there is the germ of something that sounds good in it.
I think The Louisville Burglar is by the Iron Mountain String Band. I heard it on a CD from Jeffrey Davidson's radio show. So now you know.
Hm, well no going to the health club in my day today, like I was planning to do every day of my vacation. Did get a little walking in anyway, we went in to the city to see my sister for brunch and walked around a lot on the lower east side and in Greenwich Village. I just want to mention the Polish deli on 1st Ave. and 7th St. where we got some bread and cheese to bring along with us, it is an excellent place.
I did some fiddling today, the upshot of which is a few posts down. This was the kind of thing I am looking for in music, where I could hear in my head just how the part should sound and how it should fit in with the vocal line. The translation to actual sound was as usually riddled with errors but it actually came close enough this time for me to feel happy about the whole thing.
Before the movie, we ate at a good Chinese restaurant in Montclair, which is a major enough event that I am going to repeat it, with emphasis: A good Chinese restaurant in Montclair. I had been believing for some time that there was no good Chinese restaurant in all of Essex and surrounding counties; so this is a lovely thing to have found out about. It is Sesame, on Bloomfield Ave. not far from the Montclair Book Center and the movie theater. A strange restaurant -- you walk in and get the feeling that it is going to be a lousy, pretentiously high-end fusion restaurant. But once you get over that hunch and look at the actual menu, you see a couple of things that sound good, you get some good smells coming from the kitchen; you realize that it is not really overpriced, just that the first page of the menu is all the highest priced dishes (I still don't quite understand this); and you order. I'm glad I did not let first impressions (and expectations) turn me off to this place.
posted evening of December 22nd, 2007: 2 responses
Sylvia is over at a friend's for the night; Ellen and I went out to see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (which I was thinking, it would be funny if the title were "Belle et le Papillon" -- but it's not, so y'know, ignore). Wow: that was a really good movie. For the first twenty minutes or so I was thinking it was going to be a drag and kind of tiring to sit through; but somewhere along in there I got pulled strongly into M. Bauby's story and once I was in it it did not lose me.
I was identifying his experiences at the very beginning of the movie with my own experience coming out of a coma over the course of several days when I was 12 years old, after an auto accident -- it was nice to have something to connect it to, and I thought based on my memory of that time, that Schnabel did a pretty good job of communicating the confusion of it. (Except in retrospect, I think it would be truer to my own experience if his internal voice were not so quickly lucid.) But I didn't want that to be the whole movie, it didn't seem like enough. Well turns out that's not the whole movie, there is plenty of meat in there to fill up the time.
posted evening of December 22nd, 2007: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
Ok, I'm pretty happy with this recording. Not perfect, there are several places where I have rhythm trouble and I generally have a little trouble with starting the verses; but the ratio of moments that work to embarrassing gaffes is a good deal higher than on the previous attempt.
(I re-recorded this tune. See the new post for the recording.)
Here is a story about "John Hardy Was a Desperate Man": It is my very favorite Carter Family song out of those that I have heard, which is a fair portion of their catalog. (Yes -- I even like it better than "Will the Circle be Unbroken".) Listening to it just puts me into a trance. Sadly I have not listened to it in a couple of years because I lost the disc on which it is recorded -- but this has a very nice upshot. In all that time of not being able to listen to the original I feel like I have come up with a very worthwhile version that is properly my own. The chords are different from the Carter Family's version, the key is different, the melody is different. This is about the only song that I cover where my version is really substantially different from the version I am covering. (Not to imply that my covers are of similar quality to the originals, just that they are imitative.) Anyway, listen to it and let me know what you think.
I am thinking maybe I should try playing this in A minor or G minor, that that might be better suited to my vocal range. I had originally chosen D minor because the guitar part is really easy there; but seeing as that's not a concern currently....
Yes! It sounds way better in G minor. I will re-record it later this morning.
posted evening of December 22nd, 2007: 2 responses
I'm starting to use my new mixing program, Audacity. In the spirit of audacity, I'll post a working version of "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning". Not satisfied with much of this but I think some individual bits work very well. My laptop's microphone captures my fiddle surprisingly well; I think for further vocal work I am going to need to get a microphone. And a better sense of rhythm -- it's surprisingly difficult to figure out where to come in when you are listening to a track you laid down previously.
posted evening of December 21st, 2007: 2 responses
