Shakuhachi man {musical notes}

Ok, some musical notes to accompany my first post about the ideas behind the song that opens the Setsu album.

Musically, the song evolved out of the guitar riff/chords that you hear in this final version only in the opening and final verses. This bit:



It's an open A-chord for two bars followed by a bar each of G and D chords that keep the C-sharp third note front-and-centre. Given that these are all open chords I came up with a hammer-on, finger-picking style that lent a jaunty air to the whole thing, enhanced by the rising vocal melody that evolved over the top of the chord sequence. (Actually the delivery of the vocal line changed a bit during recording as my voice kept cracking on the top notes of the quiet verses. That's why the sultry intro vocal is an octave lower than the rest.)

I can't recall where the idea came to insert a shakuhachi-playing-monk-cum-modern-day-spy in the lyrics. But obviously that called for some real shakuhachi in the tune. I say 'real' but this is a sample bent beyond all recognition of a traditional rendition. I tried to incorporate the breathy sounds that are a feature of good shakuhachi playing, both at the start and the end. The honkyoku played by these monks, as with pretty much any shakuhachi music, is hardly jaunty: rather it's haunting and melancholy. Hence the lines in the middle 8:

Shakuhachi in any other player's hands
Is melancholy
But I can't help but play this happy melody

I liked the idea that this guy had learned an instrument that was meant to be one thing but that he couldn't help but infuse it with his own cheery disposition. The melody here is far more Western and major-key than you would hear in a traditional piece. Hence, though we start out hauntingly, as the "morning spring wind sounds" in the second verse, we gradually build to the funky chunkiness and guitary goodness in the verse that follows and we head to the park with all the people and blue tarpaulins and eventually get some quite cheery shaku-playing in the remainder of the song.

Almost forgot: the middle section has alternating bars in 6/4 and 4/4 time, 6/4 being something I became somewhat obsessed with throughout this album. Not sure why. The chord sequence here is also in Temple Garden in the massively rockin' outro sequence. These bookend the album nicely, since the Skakuhachi Man turns up at the temple garden. You realise it's the same temple and garden in those two tracks, right?

6/4 (different chords) also appears in the title track, Setsu.

Finally a fun fact: the little taps you can hear right at the start underneath the opening verse are me tapping the back of the Mermaid Guitar in the garden and recorded on my phone. Not the most high-end recording device or sound-proof studio environment but it worked.

And finally, finally, Onomichi in Hiroshima Prefecture was the place I had in mind when writing this:

Sit beneath this lonely tree
High up on a hill, looking out over the sea
The town below me wakes from sleep
A ribbon of houses wedged beneath the mountains and the sea

A travelling shakuhachi man, I love this cherry tree right here
As I sit a morning Spring wind sounds
And from just above my head the first pink blossom flutters down
I come to this temple this time every year

Practice Perfect {musical notes}

Practice Perfect began life, in my early sketches, in straight 4-4 time. At some point it evolved into something quite different, verses comprising repeated sixteen-beat segments (two bars of 6 and one of 4 beats). In the end I settled on the final arrangement because I liked how it took you off guard, and had a metronomic quality, especially in the outro sequence. This seemed to fit in with the theme of the song, relentless dedication to one's art.

Here's an early version (without drums but including mistakes) in 4-4 time.



The effect is quite different.


This version also shows how I tend to work on early drafts: lay down a guitar guide track on the acoustic, layer over some other guitar parts (here including bass) and then do main and backing vocal tracks, often the backing parts sung along with the main part all the way through, just to see how it sounds. I seldom plan to use these other than in selected parts but this way you sometimes get unexpected delights. Mostly these are just single takes, improvised as the tape rolls.


Also of interest, to those paying close attention throughout the Setsu tracks, is this motif that appears in several tracks.





These chords are the main riff in the November track Harvest and appear in a minor key version in the upcoming June track about the rainy season. I have a feeling they're somewhere else but can't put my finger on it at the moment.

The lyrics also refer to other tracks (not published yet): the Shakuhachi man will make an appearance in the opening track coming in April and the son in this track has a Yankie Girl girlfriend, both of whom might be the subjects of the July track.

Cosuplay musical notes

Cosuplay was the last tune to be completed for the Setsu album. It was quite a struggle to get the parts to fit together but, in the end, it's one of the tunes I'm most pleased with. For a while I wasn't sure if the juxtaposition between dark verse and poppy chorus worked: the verses alternate bars of B major then C major and the chorus shifts to a good old-fashioned doo-wop kind of thing with a G / E minor / A minor / C, though that does have an unexpected Gmaj7 thrown in on the word 'Geek'. Anyway, it was meant to sound both conformist and subversive to mimic the way the girls follow the rules all week and cosuplay on Sunday. Of course, this in itself is typical of Japanese subversion: it should still be done according to a strict schedule and within clearly-defined rules.

The dream sequence in the middle section, where the girls imagine leaving their "small town shopping mall" behind for the crowds and glamour of Harajuku, shifts unexpectedly from the neat resolution of the C at the end of the chorus up a semi-tone to a D flat minor. Again, this subversion of the doo-woppishness represents the rebelliousness of the thought of hanging out with 'actual' weirdos (what would grandma think!). To me at least, the girls in this tune won't realise this dream; the thrill is just in the thinking of it. Any kind of cosuplay I saw in Japan to me was all surface and no substance: kids didn't dress as punks in clothes they'd actually made look punky, it was all bought like that, pre-fabricated with rips and safety pins in place. It could just as easily have been teddy boy fashion or an anime character. They certainly didn't identify with the spirit of the punk movement.

The lyrics in the verses probably zip past too quickly to hear on a first listen (but they're on the Soundcloud page in the song info). The first part of the verse is solo voice only but then the backing vocals chime in, highlighted in this excerpt with all other tracks (except one guitar backing) switched off.

Harvest musical notes

Harvest starts out with chanting, drums, bells and calls from a danjiri festival, though not acually the Katsuyama 'quarrelling' shrines that inspired the tune. It took a while but I found chanting that matched the tempo of the tune, which I wanted to pulse along in the rhythm created by the crowd - hence a strong hi-hat on the quarter beats rather than my more typical eighth notes in a tune that's reasonably slow (87 bpm to be precise).

Similarly, the chanting lyrics when my vocals come in are meant to be crowd-like, then the call-and-answer style of the verses matching the danjiri festivals, where certain individuals lead the calls of their group. I had this group ethic in mind with the repeated phrases echoing each other in the outro too, which were pretty much just improvised as the recording kept going and then edited into some semblance of cohesion.

I had originally thought this tune might be all-acoustic, including all the percussion being shakers, tambourines and such. Then I jammed the bass line, which is fairly stomping if I say so myself, and couldn't go back. Kickin' drum sounds just had to go with it. The solo guitar parts, though, are a nod to this original idea, with the Mermaid Guitar itself brought into the action. It's not the easiest guitar to solo on, at least in the bluesy style of this song, having a high action to the fret-board. Worked out pretty well. The rhythm guitar parts are my Takamine and the Mermaid, each part panned hard to one side of the stereo image.

After several takes my voice was pretty shredded but I kept a lot of those later takes as the final version, a la John Lennon on Twist and Shout - nice inappropriate comparison there. Perhaps the episode of Friends where Phoebe has a cold is a better one.

Harmonies hide bum notes: musical notes on Haiku

A tricky beast, is my October track for Sestu (original post here).

The two acoustic sections for the beginning and end were recorded as one, though always with splitting them in mind. Both sets of lyrics are haiku, though as I explained earlier the first is the more proper in the Japanese tradition. The time signature is the interesting bit, three repeating bars to match the sound pattern of a haiku poem: one bar of 5 beats, the next 7, then another of 5. It creates a nice circular feel as it goes around each time, I feel. You can count them out along with the first verse the 1 of the first bar of 5 is on the word "leaves" and the second bar begins on the second word "catch," with the extra two beats (6 and 7) on "mid-day" and then "sun" is the 1 of the third bar of 5 beats.

Two acoustic guitars are panned hard left and right, one playing the same chords but in a different shape with a capo to create a slight contrast between them. The solo is played on the mermaid guitar itself over the top of these two, recorded with a room mic at a decent distance from the instrument to give it a natural reverb.

Screen shot of left-side harmonies

Like the guitar the heavy vocals harmony parts are panned hard left and hard right. The screen grab here shows the left side: 7 vocal tracks of varying pitches (and quality! - you can see from the names I give them when editing that there are some dodgy notes, but I learned from this that 'choral' singing really does hide the bum notes). There's an 'answering' set of harmonies on the other side, though this one only has seven voices. I usually make up harmonies on the fly as I record, so there are always plenty of bum notes. I record listening to the main vocal, improvising a harmony, though obviously I have an idea of what it sounds like in my head beforehand. Then I repeat the section, normally keeping all the takes. Then later on I'll listen to the whole lot, taking each one in turn, labeling them as I go to indicate the pitch and quality. Some I just delete or mute.

The left side harmony sounds like this:

From there the electric segment kicks in, but that's probably best left for another post. Time to leave you humming "Leaves catch midday sun..."