Posts tagged with "music"

Hide And Seek

Sometimes, when cer­tain songs come on, a tinge of jeal­ousy will strike me.

I’ve been known to be very pos­ses­sive about my music, because songs often mark my mem­o­ries and expe­ri­ences. These melodies I keep to myself mean much me, and I don’t share them with just any­one. A per­son has to be spe­cial before I let them hear it. They have to be able to appre­ci­ate the music. They have to deserve it.

I gave her my Eva Cassidy, Blonde Redhead, Vincent Gallo, Sia, Hooverphonic, Postal Service, Iron and Wine, Knife, Mars Volta, Shane Watt, and Scott Matthew. I let her in, I shared with her so many chords that stir up emo­tion in me, I ren­dered myself vul­ner­a­ble, and now I can’t lis­ten to some of them with­out think­ing of her. It seems unfair that I gave her so much, that I sac­ri­ficed things I hold so dear and sacred in my heart, with noth­ing to show for it.

But when I hear Hide and Seek by Imogen Heap, I start believ­ing that I’ve come out ahead.

One night, we sat in silence as she showed me this haunt­ing video, and it moves me now as much as it did when I first heard Imogen’s ethe­re­al voice fill­ing my head with lay­ers upon lay­ers of haunt­ing har­monies. Ironically enough, it’s been help­ing me through this peri­od, because I feel like I’m not the only one who was start­ing to get com­fort­able, let­ting the dust set­tle, only to have every­thing change, and to dis­cov­er cir­cu­lar inden­ta­tions in the car­pet where the fur­ni­ture used to sit, the sun-bleached dis­coloura­tion on the walls out­lin­ing places where pret­ty pic­tures once hung.

This song has made up for every­thing, not only because it brings com­fort and com­pa­ny to me now, but because it reminds me that every­thing I did was worth it too.

The Only Way To Listen To Music

The only way to lis­ten to music is with your heart in your throat and your head­phones on, sit­ting on a curb in the shade, telling your­self you’ll be fine as long as you get the voice out of your head and the smell out of your sens­es, killing your top rat­ed, won­der­ing if you can call some­one, any­one out there, to dis­tract your­self, but no, you’ll han­dle it on your own, because you’re strong enough, you’ve been through the worst of it already, and this is just anoth­er thing, won­der­ing why it’s only in sit­u­a­tions like this that the beats pound your chest like a sledge­ham­mer and the voic­es sing out aching­ly in place of your dumb silence.

Melodica

A demon­stra­tion of the Melodica app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. There are sim­i­lar apps out there — Tonepad, Synthtopia — but none of them are as sim­ple and pol­ished. That being said, there are a few fea­tures that could make Melodica stand out even more, such as the abil­i­ty to save com­po­si­tions on-the-fly and lay­er them under new ones, or the abil­i­ty to change the sam­ple sound, so I’m hop­ing they’ll be added in an update. Regardless, I’ve only had this app for a day, and I’ve been enjoy­ing it immense­ly.

Some tips for composing/performing songs in Melodica:

  • The rests, or spaces between the notes, are impor­tant too. Don’t feel that you need to fill the board with notes. Just like in jazz, it’s impor­tant to hear that notes that aren’t played. Sometimes a melody is strong enough that a few spar­tan notes by them­selves are enough to estab­lish some­thing beau­ti­ful. Or you can places notes on every beat of a mea­sure, except the down­beat, which sub­tly implies “this silence is where the down­beat is sup­posed to be, even though no note is being played”.
  • Don’t feel that you need to use bass notes to estab­lish a rhythm. You can switch it up with high notes as well, and have the base­line as the melody.
  • Syncopation is pos­si­ble. If you imag­ine each of the 16 squares going across as quar­ter notes in four bars in 4/4 time, then you can estab­lish as rhythm by hav­ing a note at the begin­ning (count­ing as the “one”) of each bar, and the third note if you like. You can achieve a nice syn­co­pat­ed sound by putting a note on the sec­ond and fourth quar­ter note of a bar. But be care­ful; if you decide to remove cer­tain notes, don’t remove the rhythm before you remove the syn­co­pat­ed notes. Otherwise, the lis­ten­er eas­i­ly los­es a sense of where the down­beat is sup­posed to fall, it begins to sound like you’re mak­ing a mis­take, and the song eas­i­ly falls apart.
  • Try to have a pur­pose, or an idea of where you want to go. Improvisation is total­ly one of the main advan­tages of Melodica, but you can still decide where you want to go dur­ing a song. If you can see the struc­ture then it’ll be eas­i­er to work up to that ahead of time. For exam­ple, if you want a song that starts qui­et, builds slow­ly to a cli­max, then crash­es dra­mat­i­cal­ly before re-estab­lish­ing a steady pace, then you can plan out which notes to add and take away that will quick­ly and effec­tive­ly achieve these changes.
  • End your songs. Instead of just stop­ping, or clear­ing the board, fade out by tak­ing ele­ments away. And if you can, end your phras­es, which means remov­ing the notes from left to right as they’re being played. If you remove notes from right to left, it’ll sound like you stopped abrupt­ly in the mid­dle of a song. Sort of like hear­ing Westminster chimes with­out the last note, leav­ing the lis­ten­er to won­der where the res­o­lu­tion is.
  • Use sev­er­al notes of the same pitch in a row spar­ing­ly. This is total­ly a per­son­al pref­er­ence, but I find I get tired of hear­ing these quick­ly.
  • Songs sound bet­ter with con­trast. That means keep­ing some space between highs, mids, and lows. Or aban­don­ing the mid-range sec­tion alto­geth­er, since there isn’t much ver­ti­cal room to com­pose. This is because you can cre­ate the illu­sion of more lay­ers by hav­ing strong­ly defined parts of a song. Otherwise, it all sounds like one com­plex melody.

Summer House Show with Shane Watt and Jesse Dangerously

House show invitation, featuring Shane Watt and Jesse Dangerously

Update: Sign up for the Facebook event!

Attention Ottawa peo­ple! I’m hav­ing an indie music con­cert at my house this sum­mer1. That’s right, it’ll be an inti­mate night of folk and rap songs with Shane Watt and Jesse Dangerously. Remember these two from the con­cert I went to ear­li­er this year, where this awe­some and impromp­tu col­lab­o­ra­tion hap­pened:

You also may have read about Jesse in an Ottawa Citizen arti­cle last month, or seen Shane per­form­ing with Krista Muir over the last few years. Well, I want­ed to see both these artists per­form again, so I invit­ed them to my house. Not only will it be a night of authen­tic music (with anoth­er col­lab­o­ra­tion, I’ve been told!), but there will be free ice cream, and you’ll get to meet my cat, with whom you’ll fall in love2. Shane has also hint­ed that he might bring a spe­cial guest for the night. So come and meet the musi­cians, sup­port local Canadian tal­ent, and have a fan­tas­tic time.

  1. Click the pic­ture above to down­load the invi­ta­tion. [↩]
  2. No, you can­not take her home. [↩]