Dancing Snakes

Here is the entry about Dancing Snakes, and here is the link so you can listen while you read:

http://walkingeagle.bandcamp.com/track/dancing-snakes-bansuri

Next to "The Lotus of Mt. Ararat," I think this is my favorite piece on the album.

I wrote this just a few days before recording. It is just a simple bass line.

We recorded the bass line first, along with the drone box (yes, we used an electric tamboura, as my actual tamboura doesn't have a great tone for recording...) After that, I doubled the drone with the didgeridoo.

Dugg added the drums on a clay dumbek.

After all that was done, I attempted to play the melody line on the sitar. I kept trying and trying, and juts couldn't get the sound I wanted. So I went to my old standby, the bansuri.

I play the bansuri a little different than most: My teacher was from Northern India, and so uses the fingering from there, which is 2 fingers down for the root. I have never met another bansuri player who does this. Everyone else seems to use the Southern Indian 3 fingers down for the tonic method.

The benefit of my method is that you can go all the way down to the 4th (MA,) which gives a little more flexibility to the improvisation. On pieces that use a natural ga (major third) you can actually bend down to that note, as well. This piece uses a natural minor scale, so I don't get to do that.

This piece is in E. The E bansuri is just a little big for my hands, so I struggle with it at times, and am glad that there are only a couple of suspect notes in this piece. The bansuri I use most often in in F# (or E for those Southern Indian players...)

I like the energy of this song, too. Dugg and Dick really seem to drive it without rushing it, and we must have had the mics in the right place, because the drum is very intense.

Here is what the bansuri looks like:

And this is the dumbek (one like it, not Dugg's actual one...)

A Confidant of Merlin

A Confidant of Merlin

Here is the link to the song, so you can listen while you read:

http://walkingeagle.bandcamp.com/track/a-confidante-of-merlin-penny-whistle

This is another piece done on the penny whistle, and written in Omaha, again using sort of a descending pattern.

We started out as a Celtic street band, and there are several songs that sort of have a Celticish flavor to them.

After not playing the penny whistle for quite a number of years, it was fun to pull this one out again. There is a bit of a Northern European tribal feel to many of the pieces on this album.

The penny whistle is meant to play in D major and G major, and has tiny, tiny holes, which makes half-hole playing quite difficult. So, for whatever reason, I almost always find myself playing in D minor with some awkward half-holes. I'm not quite sure why...

Dugg chose to play this piece on the djembe, and has a solo in the middle.

Fortitude

Here is my article about track 6 of the new "Walking Eagle" album.

Here is the link, so you can listen while you read:

http://walkingeagle.bandcamp.com/track/fortitude-didgeridoo-khomus-throat-singing

Fortitude is an example of a lot of the experimental tracks I mess around with when trying to combine unlikely sounds to come up with something unique and interesting.

This track features the didgeridoo:

This is a "Hicks Stick" aspen didgeridoo made right here in Colorado, that has a great tone.

It also features the khomus, also known as the jaw harp, jew's harp, or any of a number of other names:

I got my first khomus in Junior High School, so I could make funny sounds for a movie we were making. Years later, when I found myself at a music conference in Kyzyl, Tuva, I learned that this was a very legitimate instrument, especially in Central Asia and Siberia, and that there are virtuosos on this instrument. Google Vladiswar Nadishana, if you want to see a true master!

The main other sounds are two styles of Tuvan throat singing, a style of singing more than one note at a time that I studied 20 years ago, and then let go dormant. This recording was made when I was just getting back into some throat singing. The low style is called kagyraa, and the higher style is khoomei.

Dugg added some drums on it to bring it together.

We just thought it would be fun to include some of our more experimental sounds on a CD that is largely pretty tonal.

Still Light of Day

Track number 8 on the new Walking Eagle CD is "Still Light of Day."

Here is the link, so you can listen while you read about it:

http://walkingeagle.bandcamp.com/track/still-light-of-day-irish-flute

"Still Light of Day" is another of the pieces written in the hotel in Omaha, where I spent a week with a keyboard, a computer and a bag of flutes, and cranked out about 15 songs , about half of which made it on this CD.

This song is based on a simple, descending line, and, to me, sounds very European.

This is one of the simplest songs on the CD, but, as they say, simple is often better. Dick just recorded the pattern as a loop, I improvised a melody on the Irish flute, and Dugg decided to add shakers and the rainstick.

Not much to it, really. Here's what the Irish Flute looks like:

The Implicit Memory

This is the seventh installment in my blog about the new Walking Eagle CD.

Here is a link to the song, so you can listen while you read:

http://walkingeagle.bandcamp.com/track/the-implicit-memory-soprano-sax

I "wrote" this piece two years ago. I was in a phase of listening a lot to the group Oregon. I have always loved their music, and especially Ralph Towner's use of interesting chords. So, I got a piece of chord diagram paper, and worked with my guitar to see how many Ralph-Towner-like chords I could come up with. I came up with about a dozen.

Then I didn't know where to go with the composition. So one day, when Dick came over to practice, I just handed him the chords, and asked him to play through them while I improvised. Dick did that, and added a lot of his own chords.

This song became known as the free-chord piece, and, apart from starting with some of the chords on the sheet, it is completely improvised.

While recording, we often play one part at a time. This allows for clean recording, editing, and if we work on one track at a time, if we make a mistake, we just rerecord that part,

"The Implicit Memory" works based on the interplay between the musicians. Dugg wasn't available the day we recorded, so Dick and I did several takes of this piece, playing together, Dugg added the cymbals later to fill up some of the space.

We enjoy playing this piece, since it is different every time.

Cavalcade of One

This is the sixth installment of my blog about the songs on the new Walking Eagle CD.

Here is a link to the song, so you can listen while you read:

http://walkingeagle.bandcamp.com/track/cavalcade-of-one-duclar-duduk-with-a-clarinet-mouthpiece

This odd little, hybrid instrument in the duclar - which is the Armenian duduk with a clarinet mouthpiece replacing the traditional double reed.

I wrote "Cavalcade of One" in a hotel in Omaha, along with about 15 other pieces. My inention was to create some stand-alone guitar parts over which I could play different instruments from my collection. This song was originally written for my Prayer Rock (also known as Anasazi) flute. The Prayer Rock flute is a recreation of an ancient American, endblown flute. It was modeled after fragments found in the desert of Arizona, at Prayer Rock, that are believed to be over 1,000 years old.

In this picture, the top flute is the Coyote Oldman Prayer Rock flute. The bottom one is the Coyote Oldman Desert (also know and Mojave) flute.

I wrote the piece in Ab to accommodate the flute, but found that the song was much too upbeat and jazzy, and the slow-responding desert flute didn't work.

I searched my collection for another instrument that worked well in Ab. The duduk plays well in A - and the clarinet mouthpiece option causes it to play a half-step lower. Perfect!

The guitar part I wrote swings because most of it is played off the beat. It creates an interesting syncopation, but is very tricky to count. While Dick was recording it, he was extremely careful to play it accurately, and we got some very good takes of it.

After he left, however, I realized that in our care to play the piece precisely, we had recorded it at about half the speed it was intended. I tried working with the track as it was, but it was just painfully slow, and defeated the point of the song.

We recorded it in Logic. Logic does not have a good tool for changing the tempo.

So, in the middle of the night, it dawned on me - I would take the song to Garage Band, which can easily change the tempo, and then save it as a loop. So I doubled the tempo, and used it as a loop back in Logic. It seemed to do the trick. It was also easier to swing the duduk with the clarinet mouthpiece, so that all seemed to work out well.

Dugg added the final track on the bodhran. Dugg plays the bodhran probably in the ancient way. He does not use a tipper, just his hand. It gives a softer sound, and he better able to play unusual rhythms this way.

Trigonometry

Hello. This blog is about Trigonometry, the song and not the math...

This is the fifth track on the new Walking Eagle CD, "Walking Eagle."

Here is a link to the track, so you can hear it while you read.

http://walkingeagle.bandcamp.com/track/trigonometry-soprano-sax

This is an older piece I had started and came across in some notes. I completed the piece in the months before the recording took place.

I initially wrote it as a vehicle for the shakuhachi, however, when we recorded it, it just seemed to progressive for the shakuhachi, so Im played it on the soprano sax. The part that created the challenge is that the chords modulate from a D minor tonality to an Eb minor tonality. I thought I could do this by dropping the jaw position on the shakuhachi, but it didn't work too well. Plus the beat is pretty driving, and the shakuhachi is a lot more effective in a mellower setting.

So, the soprano sax is my usual go-to instrument in times like these, and it works pretty well.

I wrote two parts for the backing track on this. I intended them to be played both on the guitar, and figured we'd use a looper in a live situation. We recorded the two layers of guitar, and it sounded too muddy, as both parts are written in a fairly close range, so we left the rhythm part on the guitar, and I played the counter-part on the keyboard. Dugg rounded it out with the djembe.

Not much else to it, really.