More Stories of Songfight History

[drew]

I just noticed that this happened, what an extremely awesome thing to do. Kudos to whoever thought this one up. And thank you for drawing attention to my old song "zero to phantom", that is awesome.

I did the chili magnets song with a dude named andrew (he did the vocals and guitar, perhaps some other stuff) and perhaps surprisingly I was fully responsible for the MC Short Bus song. That one was actually recorded on a 4-track in a practice room in the extremely nice music building at college (which I theoretically didn't have access to, but snuck into quite frequently. Oh, the lengths we'll go to.) The drum part was from a minidisc recording I made of some different loops, which I remember painstakingly downloading at some point in the mid-nineties, to floppy disk, from some website stuffed full of "drum breaks". (I was into drum-n-bass at the time and put together several embarrassingly long rattling cut-and-paste things on the computer before realizing they were terrible and deleting them all. The floppies survived.)

I hope this is some entertaining history behind the entry and I can tell you more stories if you like (and if I remember to check this board.)

love
drew

[drew]

That's hilarious! Drew is at least partially responsible (or connected to) entries that I gave ratings of 3, 4, 6, and 10... in a single fight.

I am a dude who appreciates the ambiguous nature of a lot of the stuff that happened at the beginning of songfight, but I know that for some people, it is more entertaining to know "what really happened". So if you don't want to know what's really gone on, and just want to enjoy things for what they are, DON'T READ ANY FURTHER. SPOILERS AHEAD.

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So for whatever reason people assume I am responsible for the Kompressor stuff (probably because I promote it almost as heavily as my own music.) The actual tale of the Kompressor stuff is probably less interesting than most people would believe.

A.K. (not real name - he always referred to himself as "AK", like the gun, and our friends made up some german name for him) is just a dude I met a long time ago, in the early 90s, and he has some problems which get in the way of him getting a lot of things done. I don't think it would be appropriate to talk about those.

His parents moved to the US a few years ago and he lives with them and has a part-time job doing manual labor. He is one of the few genuinely NICE people I have ever met, and he got me into recording music and doing weird avant-noise shit back when I was still playing classical piano, and so I have used my resources to get his stuff out to the public.

I think he deserves every ounce of critical acclaim and professional respect that he gets, and I get angry when people try to say it's my work. A.K. continues to write and record music despite the fact that his daily life is heavily affected by some things beyond his control. I don't know that I could make anything at all under those circumstances, much less several albums.

It is okay with me if some people don't like or appreciate his work but I do think a lot of people don't realize what he's gone through for the benefit of his music career. I am glad to be able to help A.K. press CDs, send out promo packages, promote his music, and make a few bucks off his art.

I recoup my costs and do the rest of his promotion for free, and he's sold over five thousand CDs over the past few years. That speaks for itself. I'm glad to be able to help a friend who truly believes in what he's doing and doesn't care whether people take it as art or as a joke, because either way, people enjoy the music.

So on to some more history. I had talked w/collin about songfight as it was starting and there weren't too many people entering. Once the "free format" started (dec 2000 I think? Zero to phantom was the first one) he didn't personally solicit entrants, but there wasn't a lot of traffic to the site. I told him I'd try to scare up some other songwriters or at the very least some more entries under fake names.

(I had done projects for local comps under fake names before, played shows with crappy college bands under fake names, etc. so it was old hat for me.)

I knew this dude andrew who had done some music I liked so I got him to do the chili magnets song with me. His stuff was mostly guitar-centric and I was on some sort of bizarre-circus-music bent at the time so I layered a bunch of crap over it, and wrote the lyrics for him to record. Something happened and the file ended up at about 80% of its original speed but we liked it and kept it that way.

MORE OFFHAND HISTORY: So I did a few more things with andrew, but they didn't really pan out too well, I didn't have much to record on at that point (equipment-wise) and not a lot of time as I was working in a factory and going to school at the same time. He had a friend Matt who had some pretty cute songs with Casios and stuff, but they were actually quite catchy songs. I didn't talk much with Matt as he lived in Georgia. His project/band/thing was called The Carpool Tunnel. We were going to do a collaborative project together, but my school and work got in the way (I was working 50+ hour weeks... any guesses as to why I got carpal tunnel? I loved his band name of course) and so I ended up calling it off.

Oh, Matt? He was just this dude... named Matt Chapman... who worked on this small animation site called "home star runner". WHOOPS. Guess I screwed that one up.

More history to come as I think of it.

love
drew

[drew]

MORE SECRET SONGFIGHT HISTORY: PLEASE BEWARE THE SPOILERS



THANK YOU




I recorded "Zero To Phantom" over about two days in cold, cold December where I was not doing so well. I had been working in a chemical factory, supervising the installation of some piping and tanks. This by itself was a hazardous adventure, as I spent around eleven hours a day intermittently patrolling the construction site to make sure the crews weren't doing anything unsafe.

But they were. They would put pipe elbows up on full drums of methanol (VERY EXPLOSIVE) to weld, and walk around without goggles or gloves on, and do things like THROW HOT SLAG AT EACH OTHER. Okay guys, you may have gone to vocational school, but PLEASE TRY NOT TO BLOW ME UP. PLEASE. Anyway, this was somewhat stressful as the small office in which I ran the joint was about fifty feet away from the construction site, so if something blew up or caught fire, I would likely be engulfed. Wonderful.

Back to the songfight history. I sat in the office, looking at the internet on some kind of 128k ISDN connection, and listening to some dub tapes on a ten dollar stereo, and thought up some ideas for the songfight. I decided to do something that was dub/dancehall as I was pretty hard into the music at the time and wanted an excuse to experiment with recording different styles of music. (I had done something for the golfpunk fight but it was less involved and I spent less time writing and recording it.)

I wrote the lyrics in the barely-heated office, sitting next to two fire extinguishers, and went home to record them that night. I quit the factory job about a month later. It took my hands two years to heal from the daily abuse of data entry that I did there. However, industrial-strength Sharpie markers that I took home from that job are just now beginning to dry up, four years later. So those markers, they are awesome. Check them out.

I recorded Zero To Phantom on a Tascam 238 which was an 8-track cassette deck. I used an ensoniq SQ-80 for almost all of the sounds, sequencing the drum parts with a TR-707. I TOld U I WAS HARDCore.

I did 8 tracks, dumped down to cassette, put back on the 238, and recorded 6 more tracks. I think I mixed down the harmony/backing vocal parts that come in at the end to get them to fit. The "pop pop" sound was me pulling my finger out of my mouth, a talent I developed in grade school and perfected before I left high school. I can play pitches with the pop sound and I think this was the first and last time I used that ability.

More history forthcoming (remind me if I forget, or if there is anything in particular you want to know about. I will get to it sooner or later most likely.)

love
drew

[drew]

PS: I have been mostly writing pop songs for as long as I have tried to write my own songs, but nearly everything before maybe 2001 was pretty awful and only survives on cassette tape in a box in the closet in my studio, so my ancestors can sell it to a record company if the world decides I am a genius after I die. I want them to have a better life than me. I want them to not have to work in a can factory. (More on the can factory later.)

[Eric Y.]

my ancestors can sell it to a record company if the world decides I am a genius after I die.

wow man, your ancesters must be pretty damn old if they are still alive, and if you expect them to outlive you, even!

[Leaf]

my ancestors can sell it to a record company if the world decides I am a genius after I die.

wow man, your ancesters must be pretty damn old if they are still alive, and if you expect them to outlive you, even!

ah dude! Sometimes I think you're nastier than me!

[Mogosagatai]

Drew: Care to give us a detailed explantion of the "It's Charging" fight?

[drew]

I just remembered to come back and post here, thank you for making a new topic JB.

Where was I... late 2000? Crapping christ that was a long time ago.

"eternity without you": I made the "love from thailand" song and did the non-vocal tracks on the "drew and the narbolites" song. There is not much else to say here except that I recorded this stuff on a tascam 238 (8-track cassette, again) with the ESQ-1 and some kind of guitar. I am also pretty sure the drums were TR-707. That is about all I remember.

I should note here that I made a bunch of songs (maybe around 20-30 in all?) which ended up pretty lousy and which were more about figuring out how to write songs than about making the best songs. Those were one. I don't think I write songs now in a particularly weird fashion but you have to work on that kinda stuff to get your skills to the point where you can do what you want to do.

Besides, girls like dudes with skills. Nunchuck skills, computer hacking skills...

The songs leading up to valentines' day 2001 were all sorta-love titles. That was intentional (on narbotic's part).

I think narbotic's "repair my heart" is good.

And Miss Mary Ellen was one (the first?) of the many competitors to enter a few songfights, win one, and not return. The goal to some people I guess was to prove that their music was better than other peoples', which as most of us know is not really the goal at all. But to each their own. If I remember right, MME was in the band Sissybar which was very slightly famous (like, "played on a couple of college stations" famous) for doing some kind of indie rock girl-singer cover of the song Gin and Juice.

"I Love You" by vanadium pentoxide: I made this. I am not sure what is going on here. I had just gotten some kind of synth with an arpeggiator and I think I was too excited to realize that it should not be in every song. (You have to realize, the only things I had done up until 1999-2000 were either in completely horrible bands, or on a dictaphone recorder with a bad acoustic guitar and a casio.)

Dog Traders "Shipwreck" - I found an optigan for $12 at a thrift store and used it on this song. Years later, before moving out of my college-era tenement, I sold it to some hipsters for about $300. (That is how much they are worth, or at least were worth, when people were going crazy over them.) An optigan is an organ which plays these clear acetate discs, it sounds kinda awesome, but it has these persistent mechanical problems like "never staying in tune" and "horrible 60hz hum". I modified it some to remove as many of the problems as I could, but there is a limit to how much you can polish a turd.

The dudes who I sold it to ran some crazy free-jazz studio and I like to think that it was pounded on by some second-rate frank zappa nutface and maybe destroyed in the process of recording something. I hate to see good instruments destroyed and it makes me cry to think about a nice guitar being broken but I would not shed a single human tear for the death of an optigan. It is an inhuman and horrible contraption. I am surprised it did not catch my tenement on fire and kill me.

So I later rewrote the song and re-recorded it and it ended up on "the floor is made of lava". The end. (...or was it?)

Yes, it really was the end.

Feel free to ask questions but I will try to post interesting things in chronological order (when I can remember.)

[drew]

OH CRAP! One last bit of songfight legend before I return again:

Narbotic and Gill Sans lived in brooklyn in 2000-2001 (Collin still lives there, not sure about Gill Sans as I haven't talked to him in a while - they are both great dudes though) and while in the neighborhood one day they ran into..... drumroll.... John Flansburgh, from the band They Might Be Giants.

I am not sure if you have heard of this band. Haha just kidding, you're on the internet, of course you have. If you are slightly nerdy their brand of sarcastic/nerdy/geek rock-pop will hit you to the core. You may get bored of them in like a year, but don't worry, that happens to most people who like em.

Anyway, so yeah, they ran into him, and told him about song fight (he's a super-nice guy by the way - before i met and started dating her, he used to meet up with my now-wife when TMBG came to ohio and hang out) and he told them that he liked the concept... and might enter at some point in the future... but would enter using a pseudonym to make it fair.

So... did he ever enter the contest? (This was sometime in winter-spring 2001, by the way.) Who knows. Listen to the entries from then and see what you think. I think Mr. F. probably enjoys doing pseudonymous stuff on the internet as much as any of us do, so it's quite likely that we will never know.

There was a running theory between a few of us that Alexander Molodkov was John Flansburgh in disguise for a while, and I don't know whatever happened to that, but I do know that I still think Molodkov is pretty awesome. Check it out:

http://www.songfight.org/music/shipwrec ... pwreck.mp3


until later, space cadets.

[drew]

I will think of some more crap to post in a little while (i'll get to It's Charging later, although it's really not as interesting as most of the other stuff I posted.) If you have any questions feel free to ask.

Some of it has turned out to be "what happened to me" as opposed to actual information about songfight but I suppose pictures without people might as well be lines in the sand, drawn by a machine, on a beach where no one goes.

[drew]

One more thing: FUN FACT: I wrote songs for "do the math", "birds of our own", "a thousand swords", "been to china", and "it's invisible" but these were given the axe as being not good enough... but I don't think anyone would have wanted to hear them anyway.

Songfight is an excellent way to polish your writing and recording skills and give you the motivation to do what you really want to do. At risk of sounding like a motivational speaker, everyone has a mountain to climb, and just because you wanna climb it doesn't mean it isn't hard to do, mentally and physically.

If you are just starting to work on recording and writing, it's nice to have something to push against, and nice to see what other people are doing with the same (or less, or slightly more) resources.

ANOTHER FUN FACT: I paid for most of my music gear by buying broken things on the cheap, repairing/refurbishing/refinishing them, and selling them for decent prices to other people. Or keeping them. I'm moving to another place in Columbus in a few months and cleaning out my studio and I am really starting to understand that I have ridiculous amounts of STUFF.

But the more you write and record, the better you get at playing instrument(s), the further you get down the road of making good music, the less you actually NEED stuff.

I whittled down my recording/mixing setup to four compressors, two preamps, a roland space echo, and a lexicon PCM70. From, well, you don't want to know how much gear I accumulated. It is kind of embarrassing.

ANOTHER FUN FACT: Along the same lines as the last fun fact - it is almost infinitely more useful to have one nice guitar, than five crappy ones. The same with compressors, preamps, microphones, and any analog or digital processing device you can think of. It's nicer to have one good fuzz pedal than eight plastic twenty-buck specials, and cheaper too.

That is more "general recording philosophy" than songfight legend, but let me enlighten you with one last songfight legend:

FUN FACT: All of the vocals I did on my first album, and for most of songfight, were done with a Shure SM-57. All of the guitar tracks I recorded up until about 2002 were direct through a sansamp GT-2, that is why they sounded like ass.

Okay, one more:

LAST FUN FACT: While recording "world of screens" my downstairs neighbor was pounding on the ceiling of the apartment (my floor) as I, rather quietly, played the snare drum with a brush. It was about 4pm. I stopped for a bit, ran a mic cord to my kitchen, and started recording again. He started pounding on the ceiling again, but the song was only like three minutes long, so I just kept playing, and high-pass-filtered the snare track to cut out the thumping sound, which sadly was out of time with the snare track.

[erik]

There is nothing wrong with talking about personal stuff; in a good percentage of the review threads someone wants to go on about their own song. Clearly people want to talk (and if no one wants to listen, they can avoid this thread by not clicking on it).

but these were given the axe as being not good enough

Songfight Songs that I Wrote and Then Didn't Record (and Why):

'I Think It's Killing Me', becase I couldn't come up with a suitable outro;

'Death Plunge', because I didn't want to re-watch Thelma and Louise bad enough to write the lyrics for the second verse and the bridge;

'So Long Atticus', because I thought it sounded too similar to another song I wrote;

'What We Need More of is Science', because I really got stuck on the lyrics for the outro and bridge;

'Tomorrow's Almost Over', for while the chorus more than made up for it, when I realized I had pretty much ripped off the verses from "The Living Years" by Mike and the Mechanics, I was too disgusted with myself to do much of anything;

'Merry Christmas', because it was too much of a country song;

'Don't Forget to Come to My House on Wednesday', because the song had changed so much that it no longer had anything to do with remembering to go to someone's house in a few days;

'Chainsaw', because I collabed with someone, and ran out of time to make a respectable recording;

'Five Minutes', because I went to LA and ran out of time to record it;

'Are You Having Fun?', because no one wants to end up looking like a jerk by recording a song that makes fun of someone's foolish behavior after that someone has already apologized

[Kamakura]

While recording "world of screens" my downstairs neighbor was pounding on the ceiling of the apartment (my floor) as I, rather quietly, played the snare drum with a brush. It was about 4pm. I stopped for a bit, ran a mic cord to my kitchen, and started recording again. He started pounding on the ceiling again, but the song was only like three minutes long, so I just kept playing, and high-pass-filtered the snare track to cut out the thumping sound, which sadly was out of time with the snare track.

At least I'm not the only one with 'neighbour' trouble. Mine get me so paranoid that unless they're out I never sing properly.
Also big thanks for the turn on to http://www.homestarrunner.com. 'Marzipan's answering machine' is especially good.
Keep the stories coming!

[Kapitano]

While recording "world of screens" my downstairs neighbor was pounding on the ceiling of the apartment (my floor) as I, rather quietly, played the snare drum with a brush. It was about 4pm.

Oh yes, I've had that too. Except my neighbours lived below. They used to scream obscenities if I walked across the floor.

When I moved out, a newly married couple moved in. They were 'trying for a baby'. And the bed squeaked very loudly. I like to imagine my ex-downstairs neighbours were driven to cutting their wrists to escape the noise.

At least I'm not the only one with 'neighbour' trouble. Mine get me so paranoid that unless they're out I never sing properly.

I have adopted the tactic of singing quietly. Which means I now have trouble singing loud.

[john m]

my downstairs neighbor was pounding on the ceiling of the apartment (my floor)

Oh yes, I've had that too. Except my neighbours lived below.

...

[Bjam]

I rarely sing loud when I record stuff, usually just because I'm too paranoid that someone will hear me. Thus it ends up being powerless and vaguely quiet. Then when I sing in front of people, at concerts or on stage, I sing really really loudly and get into it. *shrug*

Songfight Songs that I Wrote and Then Didn't Record (and Why):
A lot: Because I'm way too scared and usually run out of time.

[tonetripper]

Excuses...... excuses...... excuses!!!!

Gerald

[jb]

I pruned the thread to be on-topic.

*glaring at tangentizers*

[Poor June]

uhm... a songfight story i just told niv through pm

i thought i loved you
i wrote while i was on the phone with an ex...
sort of fit my mood at the time
and it just worked out perfect
cause the title just came up
while i was on the phone...
and it was perfect timin' \m/

[drew]

A historical note: A lot of my songfight stuff and things I recorded before 2002 or so sound different from what I am doing now. The vocals are anywhere from weird to bad to kinda creepy. If you listen to what I am doing now that is what my voice sounds like. A lot of songwriting is "finding your voice" but usually not in a literal sense.

Sometimes it takes you years, literally, to know what you really want to do with yourself, and what you like more than anything else. I guess that is just general life stuff.

So as this pertains to songfight history: I recorded "It's a Shame... (binoculars)" under the name Flavortron, that is me singing in falsetto.

http://www.songfight.org/music/its_a_sh ... culars.mp3

I bought a snare drum, just a snare drum, at sometime in mid-2001 and it was like a revelation to play this along with real drums. It added depth and dynamics to the drum machines I used for a long time.

If you want another example, I sang backing vocals on the Narbotic track "black hole":

http://www.songfight.org/music/black_ho ... ckhole.mp3

So anyway, I was just thinking today about how the music you make relates to what's going on with your life, conscious or not, and I thought I'd post here about it.

Basically if I go back and listen to my old stuff it sounds pretty dry and claustrophobic, which pretty much sums up my life for a while. Like the actual aesthetic goals of your music, it can take a while to figure out how you want to live your life, and what really makes you happy, as opposed to what you think other people think will make you happy.

FUN FACT: I still like my glockenspiel that I used on New Planet and some other fights, and used it on my new album, which comes out later this month.

[drew]

What I meant to say (we were en route to a movie but upon getting there, the theater was packed, the parking lot was full, and the movie had already started so we came back home) was:

The acoustic space (bear with me, this is a sort of tenuous concept, maybe) around your music is a variable. And I think that if you don't consciously work to change it, it reflects the general mood of your life.

I felt like my music was quirky and okay but rather directionless for a while and finally ended up focusing on what I wanted to do over about the past year and a half. That is a long time considering I started writing songs with a 4-track in maybe 1996 or 1997.

And funny enough, I was in college, I didn't know what I was doing, I just tried to do what I liked (in a pretty unfocused manner.) Over time I've been able to hone in on what I want to do with myself as far as a career, my personal life, and in my music. When you sharpen a knife you gotta cut off part of the metal and it sucks to lose some of an expensive knife, but it ends up sharper than before. And if you don't end up working and constantly pushing to do something different, you end up bored, and boring. (Finish the dull knife metaphor here if you want.)

So the acoustic space. A lot of my stuff before sounded like "small music" - stuff made by a dude in a bedroom with a tape recorder. Even if it had reverb or delay on it, it still sounded small and somewhat timid. A lot of you have talked about singing quietly because of your neighbors. I think that is exactly what I am talking about here - your music is reflecting the limits of your abilities (whether real or perceived) and the whole idea of that is pretty interesting to me.

I am not going to assign a good/bad scale to the authenticity or size/style of your own music's acoustic space, but I finally realized I did not want to make quirky and small (acoustically small) music any more. I experimented with real acoustic spaces in my house while recording my new album. I have worked more with amps and recording in different spaces and different ways. I have gotten some different mics and experimented with recording stuff the "wrong" way, like using a crap mic as a drum overhead or a TURBO RAT as a mic preamp.

Here is an interesting thought for all of you recordists: When you put up a mic and record something, you are getting the direct sound from the instrument and the diffuse sound from your space. No matter how close or far you are from the instrument, you record the room you are in, the acoustic signature of the room. This influences (great or small) how your music sounds. If you want your music to be a characteristic portrait of the space you inhabit, try focusing on recording the space as well as the instrument(s) you want in your song. A simple way to do this is to record acoustic guitar with one or two mics up on the guitar at the neck or body (however you usually like to do it), and then put a LDC (large-diaphragm condenser mic) in the opposite corner of the room. Or out in the hallway. Or in the bathroom. Record both tracks at once and experiment with how they sit in your track.

If you use a drum machine, output the signal to your computer speakers, or to a guitar amp, and mic the amp. Try micing it from close distances, or from across the room, or somewhere in between. Try compressing the track after it "gets some air in it" to bring out the sound of the room.

Recording can be more about who you are and what you're doing in your life than the actual song you are singing or even the lyrical content of the song, at least to yourself. You can never fully disconnect your life from the music you write or any other art you create, but I think that's good, because it tangibly tethers you to your past and reminds you to keep pushing forward.

I know a lot of this is philosophical more than concrete information but I hope it is enlightening or at least interesting as another way of looking at the recording process.

FUN FACT: A glockenspiel, much like an accordion, will almost always sound like a glockenspiel when recorded, no matter how you record it. BUT. Record them and play back at half speed (so the pitch drops an octave) and listen. The accordion turns into a terrifyingly deep, warm pipe organ. The glockenspiel is slow, pure, impossibly huge metal tubes resonating.

COROLLARY: It may be hard to play instruments in double-time so you can play them back at half-speed and end up synchronized to your song, but doing so lets you examine your sounds under a microscope. It is visualization without psychedelics and magnification of the intangible. And it is just one of a hundred interesting things you can do to tie yourself closer to, and bury yourself in the music you make.

drew

[jack]

ok. maybe it should now be renamed drew's blog.