The Song Fight Bulletin Board

No, because in a blog you write about things that are 1) happening right now, and 2) boring.

drew wrote: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

no. in a blog, you tend to write alot about you and your opinion. while i don't mind reading about the history of songfight, this reads like a blog.

drew, your stories of songfight are interesting yes, but if anyone else posted this kind of stuff, people would be all over them like stink on shit. especially after this thread was seemingly "edited" for content. and yes, i know. i don't have to read it. but i was looking for some history and all i got was alot of how to.

I got a lot of history, plus a little how-to.

Before I get back into more secret songfight history I think it's interesting how minor revelations or paradigm shifts in how you approach recording can have extreme effects on the tone and style of what you both write and record. I don't know if this is the chaos effect or what, but I think a lot of people can pinpoint where major stylistic shifts occurred in their own music (and again, with Songfight, you have a linear and dated record of what you've made and when) while not necessarily knowing even why things have changed so much. The unconscious mind forces the hand and so on.

I find it interesting to look back on the stuff I made for songfight since what I am doing now has a lot of the same ideas w/r/t what I like about songs except better developed and more interesting. I think all of you who have been making stuff for years can go back and see what you've done, and realize that what you may be doing two or three years from now may change just as much for the better.

I LOVE YOU: A fight where I did the top meat surdo and vanadium pentoxide songs. I don't know where the top meat surdo name came from, but a surdo is a percussion instrument used in samba and some other brazilian music. Vanadium pentoxide is the molecule V2O5 (imagine subscripts where applicable there) and as I had just finished up a bachelor's degree in science a lot of the crap was still floating around in my head.

For a long time I was just sort of flexing my recording muscles and seeing how much totally different stuff I could make, under fake names or whatever, just because I had started to record more and branch out and accumulate gear and experience. I have a pretty wide breadth of music that I enjoy in depth and so I kind of freaked out and recorded anything that came to mind. Which was interesting but really this is a point to ponder for many of you (who have probably already pondered it): You only have a certain amount of time and energy you can expend. Do you want to try to cover as much ground as you can shallowly or focus on one or two things? Maybe it comes naturally to some people but not to me.

If you like tropicalia, dub, synthpop, pop, rock, hip-hop, grunge, and who knows what else, it is hard to synthesize a middle ground and I found it is more fulfilling to try to work in a style that hits closest to home.

Okay, small tangent over. See what I said about focusing? When you are at a buffet and the buffet is full of ideas it's hard to pick the best one and fill your plate up with just that one thing. At least for me.

So I eventually ended up finding a place in mid-tempo pop-rock that I really enjoy and feels like a nice place to spend the next few years. But before that came a few years of totally screwing around.

Early Songfighters Of Note:

Metalmags: A lady in new york who recorded a bunch of songs, sometimes with collin/narbotic, sometimes not, but pretty cute stuff (do they still use the word "twee"?) that was well-received. Dudes are just suckers for girl singers sometimes; I am not, really, but I thought her songs were good.

Lispector: Another lady I think in new york who actually released an album at some point. Lispector means something in french but I don't speak it so who knows. Midnight rendezvous and don't dance.

Billie Monster (fight: on a line.) Now that we are years down the road I think I can write about this secret. The billie monster dude made these super-weird songs, 4 or 5 in all I think, which were kind of like jandek, but more in tune and poppier. The dude who made the songs was sam brown (from explodingdog.com.) Sam had a very nice guitar which had a really sweet image decoupaged on it but I don't remember exactly what the image was, or what the guitar was, or which songs he did, apart from "it began with science". Not to be confused with "what we want more of".

Captain Mel (fight: on a line.): This dude only recorded one song I think. It was Collin's dad. I always thought Mel was a pretty awesome name, and the captain does it no disservice. There are not really any weird things here except that Collin asked his dad if he wanted to do a song for songfight, and he did one.

The Templates (run free, yellow lasers): recorded by Narbotic and myself in march 2001. Collin edited the song titles into the songs after the thing was recorded and mixed, so it was obviously a cut-and-paste thing. Worth about exactly the fifteen minutes it took to make, and the one minute it took to listen to. There were not a lot of jokey entries at the time so it was a nice diversion. For exactly two fights, and then it would have been not funny.

Breaker Breaker (fight: new planet.) Collin did this one and I liked the song and he ended up taking the fake band name from this one and making it his real band name for his real band which now exists in new york city. They play pretty big shows at least locally and go on european tours and crap. http://www.breakerbreaker.org.

Crystal Shit (fight: indie rock bottom): I am not going to lie, this is me, it is a pretty stupid song, but I thought it was funny to say the line "indie rock, you can suck my cock. Steve albini, you can suck my tortellini." I did not remember that I did this until I poked back through the archive page.

Back to the Airplanes: I only ended up finishing this one because I think I had ten days and came up with something on the first day it was up, and then had nine days to record it. The guitars sound like they are made out of plastic, that is my fault. I think it is the first thing I recorded that I can still look back and say that it is a good song. I think a lot of you might have one song where you can point at it and draw a line and say "everything before here, I am not proud of, but this is the first point where I made something worthwhile." This is that point for me.

Minister And Man: I wrote out about a hundred song titles before doing my most recent album and ended up picking through them and writing songs. I sent a few of the titles to JB and this ended up getting picked as an actual songfight title.. I wrote a song for it sometime this summer but I failed to check songfight for a while and that is why the title is here and also on one of my songs, because I have trouble remembering to do things like look at songfight, etc.

More songfight history coming up. If there is anything unexplained that is explainable by me I will try to post it.

Wow, a few bands I never expected to be drew turned out to be (at least partially) drew. Neat.

Also, the reason I thought you were Kompressor was because when you hosted your stuff on Ampcast you were also hosting Kompressor's in your space. Well, that and the whole "Zero to Phantom" thing.

Everything you've said about experimentation and change and learning and growing is true, by the way.

drew wrote: If you like tropicalia, dub, synthpop, pop, rock, hip-hop, grunge, and who knows what else, it is hard to synthesize a middle ground and I found it is more fulfilling to try to work in a style that hits closest to home.

'Specially that.

drew wrote: Lispector: Another lady I think in new york who actually released an album at some point. Lispector means something in french but I don't speak it so who knows. Midnight rendezvous and don't dance.

Then a couple years later she came back to the forum and started pimping her forum and album under a different name, I suggested that she post some stuff to Songfight before she started pimping her own not-Songfight stuff, she told me to eat shit and die (in French!), and then someone else (JB?) pointed out that it was Lispector. Oops.

<b>How I Found Song Fight</b>

One day over lunch, Frankie Big Face mentioned that "She's Got a Problem", by Fountains of Wayne, was written as a challenge. So we're like "hey! we should do that!" So we started giving each other challenges. Here's one he gave me: <a href="http://www.johnorama.com/songs/novascotia.mp3">Nova Scotia</a>. I was to write a song containing the words "Nova Scotia". And I think there was something about a song about a truck, which I interpreted as the whole "ride back to" thing.

So after a couple of these, I was surfing the 'net one day and thought "hmmm, I wonder if anybody else has done song challenges before". And one of my searches turned up Song Fight. I went "hey, cool" and called up Frank, and we both entered the fight of the moment, which was "On a Line".

And there you have it.

It's kinda weird on one hand how JB was not an "original", yet on the other, it kind of reflects the accelerated sense of history we have in our current culture, and especially on Songfight. A few weeks ago I got a pm asking me my "opinion" on something because I had "clearly been here a while". That was weird, I've been invloved not even a full year yet. But my involvement has a little cute charm to it, in that my good friend from highschool days, who operates under the psuedonym The hip cola (formerly PinV) first turned me on to soundclick, and then pointed me at songfight, which he had heard about through BradSucks... man... what a trip it's been!! We played together when we were 14, 15 years old, and now we can make music in our 30's even though we live 5000 km apart!!! The internet is just a wild, addictive, yet rewarding form of communication. And, the growth that is possible through this type of international collage is just... bloody fantastic. And I've made some friends , unlikely friends. Perhaps some enemies, though I really wouldn't know who, I'm just open to the possibliity.

People I wrote lyrics for and the amount of times they didn't record said lyrics.
sonofsupercar: 2 songs. One later got picked up by Jon Eric, and the other was going to be picked up by Sven and tviyh for a somesongs thing, but didn't.
15-16 Puzzle: 1 song. he made it up to me by collab'ing with my then-girlfriend using lyrics I wrote. There was another thing that he got me to write lyrics for, but the lyrics didn't work out, so he used something else. I don't blame him.
IRC All-stars: 1 song. They made it up to me by using my lyrics (and toy piano) for "Cur".
obscurity and Sven Mullet: 1 song. I have no idea why it didn't get recorded, I think there were mixing issues. I kinda liked it, too.

I think I've only let two people down - Erik for one song, and Blue for another. I dunno, I forget. The one lyric I wrote that I really liked was:
"Put some Sanity bullets in my handgun of wealth
Cocked the hammer of happiness and shot myself"
which was going to be from 15-16 Puzzle's "Spring of teal". Oh well. I'll just recycle it later.

OK heres some Me$$iah history for ya

I found this song fight through MC Hawking's site and when i looked the first song was Zer to Phantom.
I thought what a good idea and decided to enter the next week

the title was Piece of my heat

and in true noob stylee I misread it and recorded piece of my heart
http://www.mediaroots.com/me$$iah.htm
which can be heard here I think???
(a friend is hosting this ive got no idea about webspace an stuff)

tho i mailed in this effort it never made it to the playlist (nevermind)

as with my second effort Wrath of god I had time issues and ran out of it before i was happy with the song a rerecord of the vox would be nice I have since corrected it but the link is what I originally sent in

I totally ran out of time for the Xmas songs even with the longer deadline
but then I blame the season, familiy and friends etc.

this time round im pushed again but that my fault fot deciding to change titles with only like a day to go

but I think im getting better at it tho we'll see

any way that is all the Me$$iah song fight history there is to date
May I add many more chapters

right im busy me
go away leave me alone
or Ill never get finished

Me$$iah wrote:the title was Piece of my heat

... this is history?

tviyh wrote:

Me$$iah wrote:the title was Piece of my heat

... this is history?

How do you define the past? Man, Something drew said

I think I've only let two people down - Erik for one song, and Blue for another. I dunno, I forget

I find the pressure to complete something when other life issues get in the way much harder with people I relate to on the internet more so than in person... I guess because commitments for sf collabs are usually done in writing, and seem more binding to my sense of honour than a conversation about completing a tune with a bandmate. I'm sure there are other elements to this that say Dr. Crane, could articulate better than I.... or Mostess.

i miss your old sig line leaf.....

history....did you know that the 2 songs that brody has done for the SongFight Live titles (unless i change my mind and please the pig) have been "faked" live? i think the first time we might have fooled some folks but i doubt we did the second time.

Leaf wrote:How do you define the past?

For the purpose of recounting stories of songfight history, take "songfight history" to mean "any fight that is over" and "story" to mean "anything you want to tell about the song making process for a particular song".

yeah, i realise this. i guess i'm just not used to this fast-paced modern life. back when i was in school, i seem to remember "history" being "stuff that happened a long time ago"...

bzl wrote:
No, because in a blog you write about things that are 1) happening right now, and 2) boring.

So he was 50% right then?

Leaf wrote:
How do you define the past?

n.
The time before the present.

j$ wrote:
'all history is bunk'.

Me$$iah has every right and is just as 'correct' to post stories about his/her Songfight history as Drew. However, it rarely increases my enjoyment of a song to know about the song's composition process, songfight or otherwise. Music for me is the pursuit of the visceral, not the intellectual. This documentation might be handy for possible future biographers to fill in the gaps. Otherwise, even if requested, it's just nostalgia, and therefore massively unattractive.

Just my opinion, of course, and not trying to wrinkle the thread. Feel free to discuss.

j$

I found SF the same way some of you other folks did. I read Penny-Arcade for a long while (the blue and white days, bitch), and eventually found Frontalot's track linked from there. I checked out all of his stuff, and that led me here.

The first fight I saw was WWNMOIS. The first fight I recorded for was Bullseye Girl, but internet problems barred me from the fight. Stand in the Circle was my first successful entry.

Since then, I've done a couple more.

j$ wrote:not trying to wrinkle the thread

Wow, I'd hate to see what actually trying would look like.

How I found Songfight
Looking for songwriting sites where people give a shit about each other's songs. I was tired of playing something for a friend or giving them a CD of my stuff and getting the same response: "hey, that stuff you gave me was pretty cool". I needed more critical feedback, and a little encouragement. I was also hoping for motivation. I don't recall the Google terms used, but at some point I found Somesongs, and after a month or so noticed a link on the bottom of the page to "the songfight network". Then things got interesting and I lurked for a couple months before submitting "So Aggravating", and after already writing but not submitting Look Good In Black and Shreds.

As for the story of how a song is put together, I am totally into this when it is more than: "first I put down the drums, then layered guitar and sang some made up lyrics. Then I...". I am into how a lyric happened to correspond to a news event that happened the next day, which led to a sample used for the rhythm track, which wss from a Google search on related topics, and then the Britney Spears sample fit perfectly when played backwards over President Bush talking about the same item in the State of the Union. It all comes together as if god meant it to be.

i was on barbelith.com one day long ago and someone posted a link to banjo v's 'experimental fashion' (then the newest fight). i downloaded it (and it's still probably my favorite songfight song ever) and checked out songfight with mild interest. afterwards i promptly forgot about the site. much later, i decided that i needed to do music with guitar and vocals, and decided that songfight would provide the motivation i would require. to my happy surprise, it was still around, so i did a track, and convinced calfborg to do one as well.

roymond wrote:..". I am into how a lyric happened to correspond to a news event that happened the next day, which led to a sample used for the rhythm track, which wss from a Google search on related topics, and then the Britney Spears sample fit perfectly when played backwards over President Bush talking about the same item in the State of the Union. It all comes together as if god meant it to be.

or the drugs. sometimes it comes together as the drugs meant it to be

How Hoblit came to Songfight! (boing)

I was listening to an Atlanta morning show via the internet. (Gkort, another fighter from yesteryear was also listening that morning) There was a spot where a guy, once a week, talks about a small list of websites that the listeners might find interesting. Songfight.com (the URL of the time) was on his list as he gave a brief description of the site. I loved the idea and went to it right away. The current fight was 'a thousand swords' and the next title was 'I Can See You'. I spent every day that week writing and recording my song. Spent something like 30 hours on it trying to get it right. I won. It would be my last win. (Under Hoblit)

Been addicted ever since. (4 years?)

One day, a few years ago, I was getting hella teased by my friends because I was stymied by this simple-looking children's toy that they could all solve easily. I couldn't think of anything to say, and I wanted the solution, so I did a google search for "15-16 puzzle" and "snappy comebacks" and the rest is history.