Michael Jackson Quiz

Some past and present Bath Spa students will know that I occasionally compile the ‘audio round’ for a pub quiz. The quiz in question is run by my brother-in-law every few Mondays at the Magdala tavern in Hampstead. He prides himself on setting particularly tortuous questions, and the audio rounds have to conform to the same brief. This has the added benefit of creating some quickfire pop song knowledge quizzes to entertain/annoy my Commercial Music students.

When we started putting these together, we used simple audio quiz tricks such as playing excerpts backwards.

2004 – backwards audio quiz MP3 download.

Then we started getting more adventurous. Here’s one we did in 2005 that was purely based on drum intros (MP3 download). Give you a clue. The first one isn’t a Motown hit. Subsequent quizzes have become ever more cryptic and high-concept. You’ll see what I mean soon.

The Magdala in Hampstead

So what has all this to do with the late great Michael Jackson? Well, we felt that we couldn’t let his passing go unacknowledged by a tribute in quiz form. The quiz runs tomorrow night (Monday) so I can’t release the audio file for the Jacko quiz just yet – but I’ll post it up here early next week after it’s had its public debut. If readers of the blog start getting into these, I’m happy to post up other past audio rounds. Use the comments option on this post, or send a message using the contact form. I do try to set up the quizzes so they can’t be Shazammed. This is not a problem when the quizzes play live (mobile phones are banned of course) but if you’re going to download these and have a go, I’ll just have to trust you!

In the meantime, use the box below to give your answers to the backwards and drum quizzes. This is the quiz version of ‘market testing’ so this feedback does actually help us in compiling future quizzes.

• Backwards audio quiz MP3 download
• Beat The Drum quiz MP3 download

Answers…

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And we sing it every year (oh yes)

Thanks to all the musicians who offered to play on the Widcombe song. The consensus was that my original proposal (FTP-ing Logic files and hoping for the best with plugin compatibility) was just too impractical for the different tech setups you all have. So here’s a simpler solution.

1. Download the MP3 of my demo (done in the new studio, of course!).
2. Using whatever multi-track kit or software you own, add a track of yourself playing your instrument (or singing) on it.
3. Send me the audio file (320kbps MP3 should be fine) of your part only and I’ll drop it into the mix. Don’t worry about lining it up – I’ll figure all the tech stuff out.

I’m looking especially for ornament folky-ness – there’s an approximation of a whistle/recorder part on the final chorus. Plus, of course, you need to join in the main theme after each chorus.

If we find a male vocalist who’s improved on my guide vocal (shouldn’t be difficult!) we’ll use that for the final version.

We’re in G major BTW. Well, of course. And it’s 95 BPM. See this previous post for the full brief.

Widcombe Rising – MP3 download

Widcombe Rising – pdf of sheet music download

—————-

Widcombe Rising
Words and music by Joe Bennett, May 2009

English Morris feel, 2/4 bounce; crotchet=95

Chorus
D
So let’s all join the Mummers
G                     C
Listen can’t you hear?
G                           C
It’s the sound of Widcombe Rising
G        D7     Em        C
and we sing it every year, oh yes
G/D           D7    G
we sing it every year

G                          D
As I walked down this fair Parade
G                 D
One sunny day in June
G                D
I met a man along the way
G                    D
Who said good afternoon
C                      G             C                     G
I asked him for directions to get to Pulteney Weir
C                G                  D                          G
He said if I was going there I wouldn’t start from here

I asked him if he had a job
He cheerfully replied
“I sit by the canal all day
(Just) watching for the tide
And since I started working, I think I’ve done some good
From Allie Park to Beechen Cliff there’s never been a flood!”

So let’s all join the Mummers…

He said he lived in Abbey View
Had been there all his life
And now that he was ninety-two
He wanted for a wife
He said “I’ll love her truly, and give her all I can
As long as she lives less than fifty paces from The Ram!”

So let’s all join the Mummers…

The Logical Song

Right. Muso mates, I need your help. I need to do a recording of the Widcombe song, and I don’t play fiddle, accordion or (much) mandolin. Here’s what we’re going to do.

1. I’ll demo the song with guide vocal & drums, plus acoustic guitar, (possibly) banjo and bass. It’ll be a Logic Pro file – around 50-100MB, best guess.
2. You’ll download the file (and a .pdf of the sheet music) and use your own copy of Logic Pro to record your performance/s (I need at least fiddle, accordion and mandolin, plus many vocals on the chorus).
3. Send me back your own .zipped version of the Logic file (via YouSendIt or similar) with all the audio files included.
4. I’ll drop your part into the full arrangement.

Performance brief as follows -

• we all need to sound like a Morris band – so fiddle or accordion (or both) can take the melody
• keep it folky, light, bouncy and authentic
• you don’t have to play all the time – parts can drop in and out
• there are some obvious harmonies in the chorus – please do go for it
• vocalists – no American accents please!
• Shakey bells – well, if you must

Your payment will be a performance credit, a hyperlink from this blog, and a beer next time I see you. In the event that you’re not in the Bath area, you may have to get drunk on my undying gratitude instead.

Contact me via Facebook or whatever if you’re up for it. The Logic file download link will be available in a couple of days. Now download the sheet music so you can start practising.

Widcombe Rising pdf download.

Somebody get me a Doctor…

On the last night before Jeff and Artis left to go to the Coventry job, they called me down into the studio (I think we can call it that, now – doesn’t seem right to use the term ‘garage’ any more). They’d got me a little gift, they said.

And it was – a remote controlled Dalek. I’ve been a bit of a Whovian for some years now (since about 1975, although now I’m a parent I’ve got more of an excuse) and the guys had noticed the DVDs and other such fandomery around the house. Dr Who fan + laminate floor = Dalek invasion opportunity!

Thing is, they got me the silver one with the blue spots. Which, as I’m sure you know, operates at a radio control frequency of 27MHz. And there’s only one thing more embarrassing than being overjoyed to take receipt of a 27MHz Dalek. And that’s being overjoyed to take receipt of a 27MHz Dalek when you already own exactly the same model.

Now, I’m no expert on radio transmission, but… I wondered what would happen if we used two Daleks and only one controller.

Dalek ballet.

With a Genelec 8040A playing the role of the Mechanoids.

In the white room…

The final look of the control room - oak-coloured laminate floor, 'ginger' carpet tiles and the light green hessian.

We’re done! The building part of the project is complete. The final phase, in two weeks’ time, will be the building of furniture followed by the equipment installation. More on this in a few days’ time, as I start to set up my current studio kit in there.

Jeff finished the last of the carpet tiling today, and there’s now nothing more to do to the building apart from tweak the aircon heatsink, and ‘box in’ one of the fans. Since the last post we’ve been working on the final bits of cosmetics, selecting colours (’ginger’ carpet tiles and ‘antique light oak’ laminate flooring). Jeff and I took a run out to B&Q where he haggled with the staff (which you can do, apparently, if there is minor damage to the stock).

The control room floor is a combination of wood-effect laminate and carpet tiles. The laminate is actually preferable to wood, because I’ll need to be able to scoot around on a wheeled office chair (between analogue desk, Digi002, Mac and music keyboard) and a real wood floor wouldn’t be as durable as the high-quality laminate that Jeff uses. We’re only using laminate as far as the left-hand edge of the music keyboard (facing the live room window); the rest will be carpet tiles to avoid any reflections coming off the floor. The live room floor is all laminate – and I’m still asking around for rug ideas for the drum kit. What kind of rugs do drummers like anyway? Most drummers I’ve worked with seem to use a thin and moth-eaten Persian rug that smells a bit damp – but that may be an economic choice rather than a musical one.

We’re treating the lobby as a utility area so its look is, er, utilitarian. We’ve painted it all white, and left the hard surfaces of plasterboard panels, OSB ceiling and MDF door panels. It will be a great room for one particular guitar sound that I love – the loud-amp-in-a-small-room effect – although I don’t yet know how much ‘room’ I’ll be able to create in a space that size. Reamping was never really an option with my previous setup because of the need to avoid noise pollution for the family – looking forward to fiddling about with mic placements etc.

Control room fan unit.

The air fans are now fitted and working, so the cooled air in the lobby can be pushed through the ducts at the front of the control and live rooms – there’s a variable speed fan for each room. Jeff has advised me to locate the control for the live room fan outside the room in the lobby (”we don’t want drummers fiddling with it”). Personally I’d rather like to have a speed control for some of the drummers I’ve met .

It's like, how much more white...

...could this be? And the answer is...

...none. None more white.

The music keyboard area - the laminate goes as far as the left hand piano part. Mustn't play too many low notes.

And our final B&Q purchase was a pair of black handles. These are purely to help with the ‘garage door’ illusion and neither of them are fixed to a real door.

The finishing touch is the black handle. It's purely cosmetic (it's actually just screwed into a plywood wall) to achieve that 'garage door look'.

The final look of the exterior - guttering has been added, and the door lock is now fitted.

And here, for comparison, are the original garage doors.

Jeff and Artis are off to start a large-scale acoustics job at Coventry University, so we all had a few beers last night to celebrate the end of the build phase of the project. During the evening Jeff impressed us with his uncanny ability to identify specific models of Ducati engine by the sound only.

And Artis, of course, introduced us to yet more Latvian music. We got into a long discussion about how Skyforger have gone mainstream since they started introducing electric instruments, and started investigating which traditional instruments they played. This got us into talking about the Kokle - a Latvian zither/dulcimer/harp. Here’s composer Laima Jansone performing variations on some traditional folk tunes on the kokle.

But you want more eighties hits perfomed by Latvians, don’t you? Happy to oblige. This time Artis has introduced us to an a capella band called Cosmos – sort of Flying Pickets with proper beatboxing. Check out this amazing version of Billie Jean.

Next time I’ll be blogging about kit and tech spec – Jeff calls this stuff ’small wires’ and won’t countenance any discussion of it on-site. Don’t worry – Howard will be here in a week or so, and normal geek service will be resumed…

Shape of my heart

Launching home-made UFOs at a Gloucestershire campsite.

I was expecting to write a post this weekend to the effect of “all the walls are now covered with hessian”. This is great news sonically, but doesn’t necessarily make a very interesting blog entry, considering that you probably now know (more than) everything you ever wanted to know about frames, fabric and sound absorption etc. I’ve just been away at a camping weekend with the family (also playing bass for a blues scratch-band – kinda DIY music festival for a couple of hundred people). Before we left I had a quick look at the studio in progress and asked Artis if there was anything he needed while we were away overnight. He asked if it would be OK for him to cover the air ducts in the live room with ‘interesting shapes’. He suggested that the room was starting to feel a bit austere (when someone says the words “like a dark prison” very slowly in a Latvian accent, it is difficult not to think of Count Dracula). Given that Artis has a real craftsman’s eye, I figured that whatever he had in mind would be tasteful, and way cooler than any suggestion I would make – so I left him to it.

When we returned it was blisteringly hot day so I went straight down to the studio, partly to see what Artis had done, and partly because it’s really cool in there: the sound isolation is so heavy that the building’s interior temperature is pretty much unaffected by the weather.

He’d completed all the hessian frames in both rooms, plus all the window frame pieces, and had made the MDF/hessian panels to covered the air inlets as planned. And… he’d made them all in the shape of guitars!

I’m speechless with delight. Here are some pictures while I calm down.

A simple cover, in front of the control room cool air duct...

 

Although it conceals Artis' secret signature inside, which reads "Build Till Last (built to last) by LAZY FAT PEOPLE."

And in the live room, here are the works of art…

The circle represents the banjo - the headstock is from my banjolele. Cool air comes from the now-concealed duct.

And this is my banjolele - the first musical instrument I ever bought. It was £10 in 1980, and is responsible for my love of playing music. Explains a lot, perhaps.

On the opposite side of the live room is the warm air outlet, and this time Artis has gotten really creative…

Live room warm air duct cover. The shape is based on...

...the curve of the body from my Yamaha classical guitar...

...and the pegs of the Takamine's headstock

I can’t say how delighted I am with this development – it’s not only beautiful in its own right but it’s made the studio really personal, referencing some instruments that have been with me most of my musical life.

Here's the live room laminate floor, which Artis laid this morning. Beautiful!

So, to sound recording issues. I had a long chat with Howard (the ‘Studiowizard‘) over the weekend (all our chats are long – when two geeks collide it’s always the way). Obviously the whole of the live room is ‘dry’ rather than ‘live’ due to the small dimensions involved – it’s too small to get a useful room reverb going, and anyway, it’s always easier to add reverb to a dry signal than to try to dampen a lively room. But wooden floors can still be great for acoustic guitars and drums, even in an otherwise damped room (a while ago I took a recording tip from Davey at the University, which is to record acoustic guitarists on wooden boards for extra reflections). So for the best of both worlds, the plan is to lay high-quality wooden laminate on a bed of fabric (to prevent squeaking floorboards), and then to buy a large IKEA rug on which to put the drum kit; the laminate is pretty tough, but I don’t want nasty bass drum spikes spoiling my nice wooden floor.

Laminate floor with UFO lights, archetrave, mains socket and hovering banjo...

KIBÄK - one of the many classy rug designs available from IKEA (not that I'm trying to compromise your right to a free democratic choice)...

So, the important question. Which rug? Here’s an IKEA search to get you started. This isn’t a poll, it’s a free choice for readers of this blog, so you can suggest styles and colours. Please add comments on this post, or via my Facebook page. You will of course be asked for your opinion on matching drum shells when the time comes…

Rug-a-round… now!

Living in a box

This man will not appear in my blog very often.

Just a quick post today from the phone, to try out the excellent wordpress for iPhone app. I had a meeting on Wednesday in London at the Institute of Musical Research. It’s a group called the UK Popular Musicologists’ Collocquium and represents an all-too-rare chance for (popular) music staff from different universities to get together and discuss academic articles and analysis relating to popular musicology. There are about eight of us the meetings, which are chaired/organised by Allan Moore (editor of Popular Music Journal), and we get together every six months or so in Guildford or at the IMR (any musicologists reading this, do feel free to get in touch with Allan if you’re interested in becoming involved). I’ve made a basic WordPress/edublogs site so we can collect together study materials and YouTube links – UKPMC site.

This meeting’s theme was discussion and analysis relating to a particular track – Prince’s ‘When Doves Cry’. It is a fascinating song (noted for its lack of bass line) in that it appears to be based on one eight-bar chord loop – Am  | G   |  G   | Am   | Am  | G   | G   | E7  Am | – but is actually based on a four-bar loop that is only actually stated halfway through the track  – | Am  | Dm/A  | G   | E7+5/G#  E7/G# |  (hey, this stuff keeps me awake at night).

Like any multi-million-selling song, it’s always interesting to note just how well-constructed it is – and to make inferences about why it was so successful. It seems to obey most of the general ‘rules’ of songwriting (lots of primary and secondary hooks, lots of monosyllables, effective lyric imagery, economical use of language, clear meaning, unusual title) while deliberately challenging them in other ways (relentless/repetitive chord loop, quirky rock-funk guitar solo intro followed by guitar-less arrangement, slightly mad lyric lines “animals strike curious poses”, classical extended mono-synth outro). Prince, for me, is like Bono or Sting – however smug or irritating they might seem as people, you have to admire the sheer talent at work.

And, as a bonus, while walking past Hyde Park I got to see five K6s all together. If you’re unsure why I have become such a phonebox geek you need to read this previous post. After which you may still be unsure.

Five K6s near Hyde Park. Model A, 1936, if I'm not mistaken.

Leave a light on for me…

“I’ll be there before you close the [soundproof] door, to give you all the love [...ly recording isolation] that you neeeeeeeed…”

We have light! The electrics are live, the lights and dimmer switches are installed, and it all works great. My wife is deeply suspicious of my need for intimate mood lighting, of course…

Live room light fittings. UFOs overhead.

Ta-daaa!

In the live room we’ve gone for the flying saucer look, with low-energy bulbs to reduce the carbon footprint and also to avoid the generation of heat (once the door is closed no heat will be able to escape from the building, so it’s important for me to remember to power down ever time I lock up).

The control room lights are now also fitted – these are the heat-proof boxes we saw Artis building a while ago. They can be angled front to back, and there are eight of them in two strips of four.

Control room light fittings - these will be directly over the engineer/work area.

And here they are set to 'interrogation mode'...

Now that all the hessian in the control room is fitted, and the doors are at full thickness, it’s possible to get a feeling for how the room ‘feels’ sonically, combining the effect of the hessian, rockwool, room design and bass traps. And I’m delighted to report it’s completely ‘dead’ – just what you want in a room used for mixing. It has that curious quality of anechoic environments – being so quiet that you can hear the blood vessels in your ear, and you feel like your voice can’t be heard by others because there are no early reflections. Jeff says this (the feeling of airless isolation) is why he hates being in studios – he loves building them but as soon as they’re finished he can’t wait to get out! Personally I can’t wait to see exactly how loud my Genelecs will go when I turn off the bass lift.

And it means I won’t have to practise my banjo in the garden any more.

The sound of breaking glass… when I’m cleaning windows

The double-glazed window pane has shattered and will need replacing.

We’ve had our first setback today. The pane of glass which we were going to use (the one that was recycled when we had the catflap fitted) shattered while it was being moved. Not a huge disaster – it was an opportunistic plan anyway – but it does mean we’ll need more glass!

Artis is now working on fitting the other frames. The problem with double-glazing (or in this case, quadruple-glazing) is that once the unit’s sealed you can never open it up again. This means that the glass has to be clean to NASA-like standards before the next pane is fitted. So he’s shining halogen lamps at each pane from both sides so he can see to clean any speck of dust or grease.

Artis checks the panes to see where the marks are. As any window cleaner will tell you, part of the job is to figure out...

...which side of the glass needs cleaning. In this pic, he's actually using a razor blade to get fragments of glue off the glass.

More soap! More light! Still not clean enough!

Today the lobby floor went in. The lobby is primarily a utility area, so we’re not going for hessian walls etc – just plasterboard walls and a chipboard/carpet-tiled floor (plus a doormat so we can leave muddy boots in the lobby when coming in from outside). The principle of floating rooms has been maintained throughout – neither room actually touches the lobby flooring, so no vibration can be transmitted between the floorboards.

Lobby floor and door-frame. The gap at the bottom is where extracted air will escape into the lobby. See that line of shadow on the inside of the pine panel by the door...?

...it doesn't touch the frame. So no part of the structure touches the lobby doorway, keeping the whole of the control room completely isolated from the outside.

I took my first measurement this afternoon of the amount of SPL (Sound Pressure Level) reduction the building provides. There are still a few panes of glass to go in, so actual performance will be better than this. On the main road outside, the reading is around 88dB. Inside the studio it averages around 40dB – though some of that might have been my own breathing – it really is quiet in there. I’m using the rather limited iPhone Decibel Meter and will be testing the levels with pro equipment soon, but it’s already clear that I’m going to be able to record whispery vocals or delicate unaccompanied acoustic guitar without any discernible traffic noise on the recording.

Back in Black

Artis is working on windows today, building the frames, beads and hessian linings inside the glazed sections. The control room and live room will both be quadruple-glazed – the outer panes are vertically angled, and the inner two are parallel – this combination stops low frequencies from leaking (because it prevents sympathetic resonance in the glass).

We’re nearly at the stage where we need to start thinking about kit. The studio will centre around a Mac Pro running Pro Tools and Logic Pro through a Digi002. Monitors are Genelec 8040s although I may upgrade these to a system that provides proper sub-bass.

I work digitally in the Mac environment, but now that I have a proper, decent acoustically treated space for the first time, I’m going to go the extra mile and get the best possible quality of input signal – which will mean a valve desk. With Howard’s advice, and having spent a lot of time with the TL Audio VTC in the MusicLab at the University, I’m going for a small version of the same thing – the TL Audio M1F. We’re still working out the signal path – the Digi002 has a rather odd collection of inputs – but I’m basing the planning on the principle that I can have up to 12 simultaneuous valve input channels.

And today, the Latvian ‘cellists are playing… A-ha’s Take On Me.

Live room window frame under construction, with a sample of the black 'spongey stuff' that goes in the void between panes.

And here's the spongey stuff fitted into the frame - it will eventually run all the way around. The glue has to be completely dry because the unit will eventually be air-sealed.

The control room window will be quadruple-glazed, with 2 x 10mm panes in the interior and 2 x (angled) 6mm panes on each side - that's 32mm of glass.