podcast - BaconWorks

Screaming Wretch

by bacon

In the mid 90’s I went to New York for the Millbrook Muster. After a lovely day of traditional fife and drum we imbibed a few cocktails and enjoyed each others company as we played tunes around the campsite. As the night covered us in stars our fifing had moved from the traditional jigs, reels and hornpipes into the more exploratory realm of what we called ‘Space’.

Space usually involved a half-dozen fifers playing, without any predefined structure or direction, in an attempt to spontaneously create atonal music. From the outside I suspect it was fairly offensive. But being in the center of it was intriguing. Like an ant colony, it initially appears unorganized, but after a bit of observation, a strange sense of organization emerges. Musicians would react to what the other musicians were doing and the Space would take on a musical dialog of its own. Without a map the participants would begin to gain an intuitive sense of where things were going like ants finding their way to food. Fascinating.

Well, the woman who was trying to sleep with her newborn a few tents over did not find Space to be nearly as interesting as we did and, with a fair amount of energy, she let us know. In an attempt to be considerate we put the fifes away and, instead, decided to continue our musical explorations through group humming. Ironically, this ‘Hum Jam’ attracted quite a crowd and before we knew it we had a dozen or more participants with as many onlookers. It was all very organic and quite exciting. But, once again, our lady-with-a-baby was unable to see the brilliance in the musical and communal phenomena that was unfolding before her. And with more energy than before, she leathered into us with an ear popping, shrill harangue that rivaled any atonal noise we could have possibly produced with fifes. She really killed the mood.

I went home, once the weekend was over, with a spiteful vengeance toward that screaming wretch who ruined our Space, which is ironic since I’m actually a reasonably nice guy. The next day, in a moment of catharsis I wrote this tune.

In a nod to Space, I wanted to write a tune that sounded somewhat random and, originally, left the last note of the tune up for interpretation by the performer. My recording of Screaming Wretch, primarily on bouzouki and tenor banjo, is very incomplete as you will hear instruments drop the second time through. But, I wanted to post it because Plùc is looking for some new material and the best way to learn this tune is to listen to it…repeatedly. Also, you will notice, upon close inspection, that I am playing this slightly differently than how I originally wrote it. This is due to a combination of me softening a few spots, now that the years have soothed my aggravations, along with my fading memory of every accidental that I wrote in.

So, to the lady-with-a-baby: Thanks. This tune would have never been written without all your bitching. Second, I hope you can accept my belated apology for ruining your good nights sleep.

Screaming Wretch by baconworks

Sketch

by bacon

I once took a painting class where we were asked to do ten paintings in thirty minutes. The rules were simple.

No more than three minutes per painting.
The entire painting surface had to be covered at the end of three minutes.

What one quickly discovers is that there is no time for detail. Instead you focus on the bones that define the structure of an image. Bad bones, bad painting, and one that is not really worth details anyhow. What you also discover is that details is not where the energy lies. The good stuff is in the most fundamental elements of the image such as line, balance and color composition.

I painted a lot of ugly three minute sketches. Keep at it long enough, though, and suddenly a good painting pops out. You then realize that the ugly ones were just part of the process of getting to the good one. The ugly ones are where you explore all your good ideas. It is where you separate the wheat from the chaff, as they say.

The image above comes from one of those sketches that, at the time, I was not really all that happy with. Fifteen years later my wife found it, framed it and put it on the wall. I love it. It reminded me that sketches, serving most often as a means to an end, occasionally have the power to stand on their own.

A lot of what I have been musically producing lately is what I would consider audio sketches. I have not focused too much on details such as set arranging, voice leading or instrumental variation. Instead, I have been focusing on melody and tempo, the basics. Going forward I will group these sketches under the internet album title of ‘Sketch‘.

Yesterday, after changing the strings on my borrowed bouzouki, I became mesmerized by its exotic sound. I was noodling around and a melody in minor started to take shape. I envision that it has a second strain but I am not sure what that would sound like yet. Or, maybe it is an intro to a song or even a set of tunes. I don’t really know. For now I have given it a working title of ‘Crosswinds’. That could change too, though I do like it. What I do know is that it has a couple brush strokes that I wish it didn’t but enough good ones where I will continue to push the paint around. It is a sketch.

Neptune’s Trident

by bacon

biscuits

Biscuits McGillicudy was the sound man for a band that I once belonged to called Amadán. He is shaggily bearded, pierced, stout in stature and gritty in character. His arms bear the permanent markings of India ink artwork as well as more crafted dermal displays. These are not the trendy tribal tattoos that all the smart kids from the ‘burbs are gettin’ but instead they represent the chapters of his life. Worn and faded, the older chapters are outshone by the vividness of the newer chapters. One look at him and you tell yourself that you’d prefer him to be a friend rather than foe. To reconfirm your knee-jerk judgment one only needs to hear a colorful line or two of his northeastern-biker-bar-localisms.

Once, after an Amadán show, I watched as he slogged up to a sweet, pretty young lady and opened with, ‘do you like stabbin’ people?’, to which she happily replied ‘Who doesn’t?’. To my astonishment his pick-up line afforded him a certain amount of latitude with her and they continued on with a delightful conversation. True story. Another time we were at a restaurant together after a gig. He heckled the waitress into telling him how old she was. ‘Thirty-two’ she said leerily. He boldly proclaimed, ‘thirty-two… that’s the age I date’. She then gave him her number and I believe they went on a date. How either of these pick-up lines worked is almost beyond my comprehension. I say ‘almost’ because just beneath his knives, guns and dump trucks facade is actually a very kind, giving and gentle person. He is an incredible example of how true character always shines through the thin exterior that we often work so hard to construct. I suspect both women quickly saw through his shell in spite of the shocking things he says that I’m afraid to print.

Biscuits is also a phenomenally talented rudimental snare drummer. A few years back Biscuits and I were talking about a new tune I wrote for the fife called Neptune‘s Trident.

kingnepute

He wanted to try his hand at putting a drum part to it. Sounded like a good idea and I agreed to get him an audio copy of the tune so he could work on it. Four years has passed, I’ve been negligent on my promise and Biscuits is starting to send me threatening emails.

So, Biscuits, before things get out of hand and you decide to give me a piledriver during out next encounter, here you go. You can call off the dogs. I’m expecting to see a drum part by the Sudbury Muster.

P.S. – Biscuits, the wife and I would love to have you over for dinner. I’ll send you a list of the words you’re not allowed to use around my kids.

The Hazards of Hatteras

by bacon

Stinson Davis

My great, great uncle Stinson Davis, pictured above, was a sailor. He wasn’t just your average day sailor. He was the real deal. In fact, he was the last real deal.

A captain of three, four and five masted schooner ships during the waning age of sail, he spent years of his life carrying whale oil from the West Indies, coal from Portugal and hauling lumber out of Africa.

Stinson was one of those witty Yankee Mainers with enough salt and grit to live four years past the centenarian mark in spite of the fact that he was cast adrift twice after loosing his vessels at sea. He had two lives worth of stories and if I accumulate half the stories of one of those lives I’d have twice as many as anyone I know.

When I was fourteen I attended his hundredth birthday party. You think it is hard buying a gift for your dad’s birthday? What do you get someone turning one hundred? My father was wise and convinced me to do some research and draw him a big map of all his sailing routes. I spent weeks with colored markers and piece poster board charting his journeys. On the day of his birthday party, in some Grange hall near Five Islands, Maine I nervously presented my gift. He quietly looked it over. After a few moments, instead of a ‘thank you’, he began pointing out the routes I had missed, like the one that lead him a thousand miles up the Congo River. He began to tell me stories of his voyages, bouts of malaria, brothers lost at sea, The Maude Palmer, Cape Horn and the hazards of Cape Hatteras. I suppose I thought I was giving an old man a map to remind him of the places he’d been. Truth is, he didn’t need it.

Reflecting back to that day I think it is safe to say that my real gift to him was the wide eyed curiosity of a young boy. And in a way it was he who gave me the map. I pull out that map on days when life is hard and I ask myself this: Have I really been everywhere I want to go? If the answer is ‘no’ then it is time to start charting a course for my West Indies, even if it means that I will have to face the Hazards of Hatteras.

The following tune is the first one I wrote that I was every happy with. It is also the first of many that have titles that serve as my own reminders of my ancestry. I have included two mp3’s in which you will find three stylistic variations of the same tune.

The first recording was done by The Ancient Mariners and comes from a live album I co-produced with good friend Roger Hunnewell. Incidentally, that is me with outstretched arms at the top of the disc and no, I was not responsible for the artwork. The graphic work was a surprise to me! The second is from an unreleased recording that I did back in 2000. I was interested in combining both fifing style with Irish flute style onto one track. Lastly, here is the chart for this trio.

Calliope House / Stone’s Mongrel

by bacon

Home recording has never been easier. Recently I have been experimenting with some equipment and have found the audio quality to be quite stunning. The experiments have looked something like this:

recording

I record in my basement in between the furnace going on and off, which is a real pain since it has been so cold lately. Nothing like a perfectly good track ruined by the boiler firing up.

The track at the bottom of this post is made up of two tunes. The first is called Calliope House and is a tune that was written by Dave Richardson of ‘The Boys of the Lough’.

The second tune is one I wrote in January of 2007. I have been attending a session at a pub called John Stone’s Public House. After hearing lots of A minor jigs this tune fell out of my head on the way home from the session. I am quite sure it has to be a mix of all the tunes I had been listening to. The thing I like about the tune is that the A strain has ten measures … two more than is typical.

For those interested in the recording details, I used the following equipment:
AKG C1000S microphone ~$200
into a
Pesonus TUBEPre preamp ~$100
into an
Echo Indigo IO ~$150
into the pcmcia slot on my laptop, which is not at all optimized for recording. It has a Pentium M processor, 1500 MHz and 1 GB of RAM.

I used free software called Kristal Audio Engine for mixing tracks, adding reverb, EQ and such. I also added additional effects such as compression from Kjaerhus Audio. They provide a set of free VST plugins.

Indigo

by bacon

It is funny how a word can have very little meaning in your life one day and the next it turns up around every corner. In the fall of 2006 I went out sailing in the waters around New London, CT with some old friends on a boat called The Indigo. Since then I have been trying to lyrically incorporate the word ‘Indigo’, along with my experience, into a song. Unfortunately my songwriting skills are horrible and I have, to date, failed miserably. More recently I have been testing some recording equipment and coincidentally one of the components is called Indigo. Oddly enough both Indigo the vessel and Indigo the hardware have provided me with a sense of revitalizing freedom. After thinking a bit about the tune I blogged about last night in Hot off the Brain I realized that it is Indigo. So I put together a quick mp3 of the tune on whistle with some guitar backing. It’s a rough mix but you’ll get the point. At some point I am hoping to thread it together with some other tunes and record them all.

Also, here is a legible copy of the sheet music for the tune.

Hot off the Brain

by bacon

I just got back from my weekly John Stone’s session and I gotta tell ya that playing with good musicians is always an inspiration for writing tunes. I had to pull over twice on the way home to jot down the following tune. I will try to get a simple mp3 and something legible posted as soon as I can. In the interim, I need to come up with a title.

untitled1

The Making of a Tune

by bacon

I have been playing a lot of traditional Irish music at John Stone’s Public House in Ashland, MA lately. One evening, while driving home from the session a few weeks back, I pulled over and jotted down the following tune that was rattling around in my head. I keep a penny whistle lying around my vehicle for these very moments.

The Perfect Pint

A couple days later I continued to work on the tune only to find that I was confused by what I had written. I quickly realized I had written it as if there were a pickup when, indeed, there was none. I then struggled a bit trying to tack on a B part and after an evening of failed attempts I did the only logical thing. I gave up. I have always found that if I force myself to look at a problem from a new perspective, I am often led to a solution that I did not anticipate. One mechanism that I often use when writing music and am in need of a new perspective is to simply change instruments. So, the next day I picked up a bouzouki and … shazam! … the B part presented itself.

When I played it for Mustachio later that week he asked about the name of the tune. ‘Oohh, I haven’t gotten that far’ I said. However, that very same evening the two of us were admiring the love and attention that is put into pouring a pint of Guinness at John Stone’s. So, from that chat I decided the tune should be called The Perfect Pint. Here is the final printed version that I typed into Finale:

Incidentally, here is how you ruin a Guinness .
Here is a basic mp3 of the tune