The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Holy Cow, that's a brilliant title...

...and yet, YouTube and the Bollywood exorcism process gives me this
...

Oooo, watch me be Spud!

Jewel of India
Due: Tuesday, 05/25/10 9:59am pdt
mp3 with artist name sent to fightmaster@songfight.org

subject: Jewel of India
message: Your Band Name
attachment: yourbandname_joi.mp3

Thanks very much, s.e. I AM getting a little tired of having to be Spud all the time.

Sweeeet, our guitarist plays sitar with a local Indian group, just got himself one of those tabla synth boxes, I've been itchin to sample it...

Even if my song was any good, I'm gonna get slaughtered for the synth sitar sounds, I know it already...

Charles (KA)

king_arthur wrote:Even if my song was any good, I'm gonna get slaughtered for the synth sitar sounds, I know it already...

Charles (KA)

I've been wondering how I'm going to do this. I think many of us are in the same boat.

You could not use sitar.

Who, me?

{gratuitous extra characters to meet the eight-character minimum)

Yeah, but then how am I going to draw attention away from the fake drums?

In. It's a long weekend here, but my wife looks like I'm done.

Finished and sending now. Acoustic with no extreme production. Going back to the basics with this one. Hope you guys like it!

I've had music composed for some time now, but no lyrics. If I can't think of any lyrics by tonight that have anything to do with the title, I will probably write some that don't have anything to do with the title. Either that, or submit an instrumental.

This one was fun. Made the recording session into a dinner party for Arvid and his lady. Indian (naturally) curry, paneer, naan, cooking Indian by the seat of yer pants, groovy. Arvid brought two sitars, a dilruba, tanpura, some random chimes and the super-groovy electronic tabla box. Arvid and I tracked sitar (Rode K2) and acoustic guitar (AKG 451) together, while the little tabla box chugged away (next to an SM57 pointed at the hardwood floor).



He made two more passes, on dilbruba, with a slide instead of the usual violin bow (pictured above, me watching) and tanpura. I next banged on various chimes, just trying to lay down hits that I could chop up and move around later. I ended up using three hits from that track. That was it for Session 1. Everything but the acoustic guitar was tracked with the K2.



Monday's session was Mal's vocals (K2), bass guitar (DI) and mixing/arranging. Except for the dilruba in the intro and the bells, the rest of what you hear was one pass each of the various instruments (automated and muted where needed to leave room for what other instruments are doing). The idea for this song was that it be a sort of tone poem, a blend of Celtic ballad and Indian raga, because for some strange reason that seemed to work. When I tentatively suggested this to Arvid, he immediately started talking about the similarities between the two styles of music, so I didn't have to do any of the convincing I was convinced I would have to commence.

For some, the title might have made them step back a bit - "Indian? What the hell am I gonna do that sounds Indian?" but me, I jumped up and down and went "Wahoo" or something. Our guitarist plays that style of music as much as any other these days. One of his gigs is sitting surrounded by instruments - 120 strings! arg - and playing in a constant steady stream for yoga classes. It sounds new-agey and gay. It's not. Mallory toured once around India performing, and she's stood on the grounds of the subject of our piece. While she was there, admiring the beauty, a man pooped in the canal out front. So, you see, the subject matter resonates with us.

Interesting -- thanks for posting the session details. That makes at least two Celtic-Indian fusions for this Song Fight! -- although mine doesn't have very much India in it, because I don't have a sitar, much less Arvid.

Google turns up some hits for "Celtic Indian music."

I'm in, but with fake sitar (and drums and flute)... after seeing the pictures above, maybe I shoulda just kept it to myself, but... I'm in...

Also in with some pretty poor cover art... somebody please do something better!

Charles (KA)

I'm in, though I chose to forgo the Indian feel and made a tribute to Ronnie James Dio instead.

I am in by conspiracy.

Not so much a song as an experiment in actually recording amps and not using digital simulations of them. My new(ish) VOX ac4tv, on the wife-friendly 1/4 watt setting but cranked to 10, and no other guitar effects. Even the fuzz bass is an actual physical little big muff and not some kind of fuzz VST or something. Drums are fake, though.

Torrentz are in:

FYI... Definition of Ruby Murray.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.p ... y%20Murray

Not so much a song as an experiment in actually recording amps and not using digital simulations of them. My new(ish) VOX ac4tv, on the wife-friendly 1/4 watt setting but cranked to 10,

Oh hell yes. I love my blues jr, rarely use effects, maybe a little delay... crank the pre-amp gain ("Volume"), drop the master output ("Master"), great tube distortion pushing the preamps at reasonably friendly volumes (or actually crank it the hell up and work the power tubes) - play it soft, it's thick and mellow, bite into the strings, suddenly the amp wakes up and starts shouting.

It never actually occurred to me to use sitars in my song. I mean, mixed with my music, any kind of artificial sitar is gonna sound like total cheese. If any of you manage to pull it off without making me cringe, I will vote for sure.