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 Prezident Neutron Daze 
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Post Prezident Neutron Daze
Prezident Neutron Daze

My long-running tradition of doing a song for Federal Holidays has produced this piano + drums piece this morning called "Prezident Neutron Daze," for Presidents Day. It actually started as a Stick song and I took it to piano to develop it and now it's a piano tune that wants me to sing over it.

Funny thing: I couldn't do the bassline on Stick and then do the chords at the same time, so I took it to piano, where I discovered I also couldn't do both hands and lines at the same time. So I looped the bass part until I learned to play both parts together, and then ended up recording the whole thing onto the 2-track MIDI piano anyway as two separate parts. So I could have just done this on Stick anyway and used a looper. Or on piano with a looper for that matter. But my piano version was better than my Stick version. And actually, my left hand piano is doing melodies instead of just powerchords, thanks to Stick, and I really dug the counterpoint between the two hands.

I might be just amusing myself here with my new-found (earned?) piano chops. But it's its own thing now and I thought I'd share. (No resemblance or comment to any current or past Prezident intended. If I'm gonna make a political comment, I'll be much more explicit! :D ) Cheers!

https://soundcloud.com/stephen-sink-1/p ... utron-daze


I spit out a rough score, just using Pro Tools' export score function. It'll give you the flavor, although the split between the hands is approximate.
Attachment:
Prezident Neutron Daze.pdf


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Sun Feb 18, 2018 7:46 am
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Post Re: Prezident Neutron Daze
Nice!

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Sun Feb 18, 2018 12:46 pm
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Post Re: Prezident Neutron Daze
The_Afro_Circus wrote:
Nice!
Thanks, Josh!

I made good headway on recording some vocals. I'm taking Jayessker's advice on laying down successive waves of vocals, and using each track to sing along to and slowly get better tracks. Rinse and repeat.

I got the melodies figured out and some test vocals done. It's really sucky but all good things start with sucking. The vocals I hear in my head are really awesome but the ones I hear in my headphones are not what I hear in my head. I need more work in general with singing and with listening back to that singing. It's classic positive reinforcement based on recursive self-feedback. If you can visually see your heartbeat on a graph in real time, you can mentally slow it down. If you can see and hear your singing and start to correct it, it will slowly get better. But I'd much rather talk about vocals than work on them.

Now just to figure out what this SONG is about!

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Mon Feb 19, 2018 1:41 pm
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Post Re: Prezident Neutron Daze
Sounding very good Steve. Looking forward to hearing your vocals. Its fun watching the score while hearing what going on. Keep it coming

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Mon Feb 19, 2018 1:53 pm
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Post Re: Prezident Neutron Daze
Cool! Can’t wait to hear the vocals. You know it’s something you can educate right? Slowly, but surely. :)


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Mon Feb 19, 2018 5:29 pm
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Post Re: Prezident Neutron Daze
Jzzb8ovn wrote:
Sounding very good Steve. Looking forward to hearing your vocals. Its fun watching the score while hearing what going on. Keep it coming

bachdois wrote:
Cool! Can’t wait to hear the vocals. You know it’s something you can educate right? Slowly, but surely. :)


Rodrigo, I absolutely love the vocals you've done lately, and you're both playing and singing at the same time. I know that's out of your comfort zone and that you've been working on it, and getting better. That's the inspiration that I'm taking from your experience and the model for what I want to do.

I've put fractals on the back burner for a bit, and I'm adding to my Stick practice time by also spending some time on vocals. My temporary assignment is spending no less than 30 minutes a day working on vocals or lyrics.

My sights are set on purely rock singing, which is a very low bar to hit. I'm writing the songs and I'm the producer as well, so it's just me that I have to please. And I think I can do this.

Alright, LESS TALKING AND MORE ROCKING!

Doing this! I have at least 6 (okay 10 or more) instrumentals that want to be songs. I should have a good album when this is over. I haven't set any dates yet for these deliverables, other than PDQ (Pretty Damn Quick).

***********************
The Wreck List To Be Sung:

Prezident Neutron Daze (vocal melodies written and working on lyrics)
Breaking of Nations
Snow Day in Hell (Lyrics done and vocal melodies written!)
Whampa Chunk
Sol Invictus
Z'ha'Dum
The Purpling
Monks Funks Flutes
Love U Like I Love Me
MiStick Dragon Scales
A Minor Pop 4th
Violet Reign
Dubble


I've also learned a bunch about elastic audio and pitch and tone correction and I'd like to redo the vocals to:
Superblue: Jammin' with the Kaiju
Real Good Time (Extended Version)

And finally, add some rap to my old tune "Mutational Frequencies."

Man, I found another 20 after all this that has needed vocals over the years. Plenty to keep me busy. Just cruise through my SoundCloud channel and imagine about 80 or so instrumentals as songs instead. THAT'S the level of effort coming up!

--Singing Steve

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Tue Feb 20, 2018 8:58 am
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Post Re: Prezident Neutron Daze
It never stops does it? So many things left to do, so little time :)


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Tue Feb 20, 2018 3:44 pm
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Post Re: Prezident Neutron Daze
The "to do list from hell" haha

I am looking forward to hearing what you do, my man!

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Tue Feb 20, 2018 4:48 pm
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Post Re: Prezident Neutron Daze
thats a big list. cant wait to hear you rocking out

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Wed Feb 21, 2018 6:45 am
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Post Re: Prezident Neutron Daze
It's a long list, but only because I've been neglecting it for a long while. I've been awash in the excitement of learning Stick and doing fractals, and cranking out new pieces, but losing track that my main goal is to write songs, and all the rest are merely tools to do that along the way. And I do love the instrumentals and they are rocking in their own right. Not everything needs to be sung over. But a lot of what I do and have done does need to be sung to.

I have a 20-minute commute to work in my car. Yesterday, I put PND (Prezident Neutron Daze) on my phone and connected it to the car stereo. My ride to and from work involves me singing at the top of my lungs--just wailing away, with no shame, filter, or self-consciousness.

Then sitting in the car at lunchtime in the parking lot, eating my sandwich and chips, listening and singing some more. No shame or filter.

This morning, I put my new Shure MV88 Lightning mic for iPhone in front of me on the console in the car and put PND in my earphones on another device and sang on the way to work. I'm still working on lyrics, so a lot of "Shabba Do," and "I don't know" (my favorite singing filler phrase). I wailed away into it, and tonight, I'll see how it came out. The Shure MV88 records stereo 24-bit, 48 HZ vocals and I've really liked what I've recorded with it so far.

I made some backing vocals tracks in the studio last night on the "real" studio mics, and I think I've got the basement room noise (heater, fans, and PCs) down to a low level by just singing balls out loud, using directional mics, and putting up some noise baffling blankets and padding. But mainly just increasing the volume. That's probably the easiest way to tweak my signal-to-noise ratio: if you can't decrease the noise, increase the signal. Same for the car: what little road noise bleeds into the mic is masked by me yelling my balls off into the mic and turning down the input. I may even end up using these tracks and making this my short-term production method: like Car Karaoke, except for just recording the vocals. I got 40 minutes a day with just me and the car and my voice.

It's interesting that I have no style yet in singing. Or rather, I can sing in a number of completely different and yet shitty ways. I have a country twangy voice (that I hopefully will never use in a recording, although that's probably my money voice!), an Axel Rose voice (both a high and low voice, both of which I've stolen from him), a James Earl Jones Darth Vader Voice of Doom voice, and a bunch of crappy versions of Steven Tyler. I wish I had a better David Lee Roth, and I have no Sammy at all. I might have a Brian Johnson voice in there somewhere. But that hurts after a while.

As for rap, I can give you an Eminem rap style or a Snoop Dogg or an Ice T. But I have no style of my own, because I don't do this enough yet.

So I sing in a number of crappy yet enthusiastic ways, and slowly I'm sure I'll figure out what my style is. My apologies to anyone that can sing easily and naturally. I'm sure it's like someone watching a beginning player of any instrument and wanting to say: "The A is over there, man. No, over there! No, that's not even on the right string. The top string--no, the OTHER top string!"

I could take voice lessons, I know. But I'm far too embarrassed to sing for a teacher. And god knows (pun intended), I had some twenty years of choir practice at church every Sunday morning and night and Wednesday night, with Mom on the accordion and the congregation rocking "Amazing Grace." I loves me some church music, although not so much churches these days. I just need to DO IT. And KEEP DOING IT. And then "sucky" will turn to "Good Enough For Rock, Especially if the Lyrics Are Really Lit." See: Tom Petty, Neil Young, and of course, Bob Dylan. Heck, Jimmy Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn--good enough vocalists but not the best, and even Billy Joel thinks he can't sing...but songwriting is the thing.

This trainwreck in motion is starting to come together! I'm going to be tormenting you all with my lyrics and vocals, on top of otherwise-rocking music, soon enough! :ugeek:

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Steve Sink, Laser Fractals
Rosewood 10-string, #5989, M4s
Sapphire Railboard, #6763, MR
Wenge-on-Wenge NS/Stick, #170130, Bass 4ths
http://soundcloud.com/stephen-sink-1
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-RDlN ... Ez0hN49_Qg


Wed Feb 21, 2018 7:33 am
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