First day of having
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that was then this is now
there is only
…is the new band name for the project on this blog. The old band name is over. It’s story is complete.
My friend KP said that my old band name – Playing in Tongues – didn’t fit what the music I’m making is about. My instinct was to ignore him, but I trust his opinion and he the kind of friend who is loyal enough to say something I need to hear even if I don’t like to hear it, and after a while I realized he was right.
I thought of band names I like:
“God Speed You Black Emperor”
“the desert is warm at night”
I re-read every post on this blog to find blocks of text I like. I realized that “Playing in Tongues” is not a bad name on a functional level – memorable, not too obvious, not Cringe, it’s unique enough to search up on the internet – but it is not a good poem.
I had a moment of realization. I realized that band names are a little nub of word-art. A genre. A literary medium for miniaturists. Stories that are too short to notice. Smaller than a haiku. Probably 1-3 words, maybe four, at most five.
I didn’t know what I wanted the new name to be but I knew I needed it to be a decent poem, so I did a thing that I haven’t done since high school: started carrying around a little notebook to scribble into. One page, one line, one band name, one micropoem.
After a week the book was full. I read through it. A couple were terrible. About half were not usable but not painful. Several were good but the mood didn’t match the music. One was just right.
there is only
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Poem Names
1-5 words: go!
Band names are poems
Mainly bad
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There is Only
Autocomplete results in DuckDuckGo:
Search results in Spotify:
Autocomplete in YouTube:
Stuffs in Apple Music:
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Lady Glow Worm
My friend had said something nice and I had the glow of self-satisfaction. Then this happened.
How I Made It
The time is a slow 3/4 way down around 50 BPM.
The bottom track is bottleneck guitar in tuning CGDGBD, played in a single pass. Then I created a track to double that original part. It’s hard to get doubling just right. Maybe you don’t even want to. If it’s too perfect you can’t really hear the double. In the end I was only able to get a close enough match on the C section, but that was fine because it gave the song a dynamic high point when the double comes in.
The two purely digital tracks come from sending that recorded audio into the audio-to-MIDI converter at ai-midi.com, then importing back into my DAW as a MIDI instrument. If the converter was more accurate the digital tracks would sit right on top of the recorded audio. Fortunately it’s nowhere near accurate. The version of the guitar part that it created is hallucinating AI at its best. I put that same MIDI on two different tracks, panned left and right, and selected very different instrumental voices.
Want to make your own thing out of this? I put all the stems plus the MIDI file into a tarball at playingintongues.com/misc/LadyGlowWorm-stems.tar.
Rough Draft
The original mix had some charm that’s worth hearing if only to compare with the final one. I’d be interested to hear whether you think the first one is better.
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Arrival in Heaven II
In the before days, I had a title without a song. Now there’s music but it’s in an early stage. Around 1:08 or 1:56 it needs a big new idea to take center stage and rattle on until about 2:52.
Do you want to do your own thing with it?
- Something creepy with S or SH sounds?
- Something improbably sparkly, like My Little Pony in Mordor?
- Clip the dull bits out and loop the good tasting ones?
BPM 60, if you care about that kind of thing, and if a click track helps here’s an MP3 to play along to:
What you’d do with that is record your own track – with the exact same length – and send me a stem to mix in.
If what you’d need is full-resolution audio to sample, just ask.
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Not mine but thine
Music by Jeremiah Chiu from an album called In Electric Time
¶This is not my music. I have nothing to do with the making of this.
¶A blog of your own music is better if you have other people’s music too. Otherwise the blog has completely inward flow, like a black hole.
See also the Bandcamp page for the album.
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Arrival in Heaven
This is a song title without a song.
Maybe later I’ll make one. We’ll find out!
This is a blog post with a cliffhanger.