Mission: do an original, not a remix, not a cover.
specifics: Waltz, Accordion, Philicorda, Bells.

The clapping sound in the background is hands on naked thighs… Imagine a large condenser mic over a pair of legs with the trousers dropped on the ankles, on second thought: don’t. Sorry for that info, it sounded just way better with my pants off.

Crystalsong Forest – 2:34

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Happy New Year!
With this Tune I declare 2009 the year of the Schnauzer. It’s a bit hard describe this one; is it an original or a remix? 90% of what you hear is played in the last month. The rest is from a hard to find German 60s album. For some reason I keep going back to using found material, although it is way more work than recording an original from scratch. Note to self: do an original next week.

Deine Platte – 3:02

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Download song

I’m almost finishing the small tour we did with a George Harrison tribute “While my guitar Gently Weeps”. Last night returning from the gig I listened to Coverville ep.519, and behold a great cover of that particular song was in that very episode. I had to stop the car to laugh and to listen to the awesomeness even better. Not only that but I could be downloaded legaly AND free here

Snippet from the forums:
Lemon Demon:  “Sadly I didn’t actually use the keytar in this. It’s lovely but not quite as lovely as my microkorg.”

Forum member response : “A microkorg is just a keytar in need of a strap”

My organ is not full time present in the Schnauzer Studios, because of all the live-gigging going on. Last Monday I had to carry the thing in for a rock-project that had to be finished this week. To do a mic-check (and also to finally do some schnauzer-recording) I allowed myself to fiddle about for 2 minutes . I added a drumloop and added some reverb, and presto, the next summer hit for the Schnauzer Radio Orchestra was done.

Hammond Fiddling

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Now this is annoying. Dalhousie University professor Jason Brown has made an extensive study about the opening chord of ‘A Hard Days Night’. The reason why is because this chord sounds so fat, no guitar player ever could copy it. For the one reader who has no clue what I am talking about, press play will ‘ya!

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In my humble opinion this starts with the proper guitar, the proper amplifier AND record that in a proper room, and be done with it, but it goes one step further. Because of a new version of Melodyne (a pro -audio plugin for mangling and surgically alter sounds) he could extract each note of that chord and listen to it. I am not going to bother you with the details, you can read all about that in this 4 page pdf, but I can pretty much sum up the study in a few lines.

The reason the chord is so fat was, according to producer George Martin, because they knew that single chord was the opening of the album AND the movie. They were just going for the biggest bang they could come up with.
What’s in this study is a piece of music-geekdom I don’t even want to touch with a ten foot pole.
George playes a 12 string guitar in his solo, so it is safe to assume he uses the same guitar for the opening chord. He uses these notes, but that leaves out these notes, which could be played by John’s guitar. ***insert schnauzer gagging here***

To me a good record is like a movie: I don’t want to know how it’s made, I want to enjoy the organ sound, recorded through a fan, a wah-wah pedal an routed through a Marshall stack to give it some extra oomph. It’s still sounds like an organ, but it will be ‘different’

Every beatle recording has been extensively documented numerous books about those have been released over the last 40 years. To me further studies in that is just a waste of money and time.

I don’t know how much money went into this study, but I just took the sample and reproduced it in 5 minutes…by taking the 21th century route: SAMPLING!  I even played smoke on the water with it, because that was the stupidest thing I could think of commenting on this news. (on a sidenote: what I did was illegal, but that is a whole different discussion)
Thank you very much.

A hard days smoke

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source

The ever expanding Schnauzer Radio Orchestra is extremely proud to present the next tune before world domination. Roughly forty years after the summer of love you are presented with this.
A production time of 6 months and a few guest appearances over the mail made this song. The longer this was sitting on my hard drive the bigger it got. Around last May I already announced this tune, and 4 weeks later I still wasn’t satisfied with the result. Luckily I was able to find a few fellow musicians who where also feeling groovy. That took this thing into a whole different direction than I expected, but made it infinitely better.  A song is never finished until it is pressed to vinyl so this will go down as the web 2.0 mix.

-edit: all tracks were submitted through the mail

Feeling Groovy – 4:10

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download feeling-groovy.mp3 (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA0)

YES! this is also a SchnauzerStudios Production!

I just finished the official Comics Coast to Coast tune. CCtC is a weekly podcast by Brian Dunaway (missiondeep), Tom Racine (booksmart) and Justin Thompson (mythtickle) about … ehm… comics. That’s right, the three panel thingy’s you see in the paper and on the web.

Creating this tune required me to listen to a few episodes, and in one of them Brian used a party-whistle. I immediately sent my wife to the store to get me some, because I knew that, that was exactly the right angle for this thing. The rest is just whistling the theme over and over again, playing the kazoo, noseflute, programming drums, playing the organ, and loads of other stuff you don’t want to know. And there you go.

The tune was first aired: TBA.

Comics Coast to Coast – 1:17

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cc-by-nc photo: &y ‘BACON MARTINI’

Here’s the story.
Len Peralta posted an ode to bacon on his blog. Reading that made something in my head click. I could totally relate to that poem, I love bacon too! So I sent an e-mail to Len immediately; what if Len would read the poem out loud accompanied by a medieval harpsichord. That way we would have a full on Shakespearean version of the ‘Ode to Bacon’. I would do the music obviously.

A few days later Len mailed me an mp3 with the vocal track. It was not done by him but by super-voice-over artist Scott Fletcher, in a Barry White/ Isaac Hayes kind of way.  (clip 1)
Out went my medieval idea, in came the sexay R&B style ode to bacon. (with only 2 days until the next jawbone radio show)

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clip 1: Scott Fletcher testing his voice

I grabbed a funky drumloop I sampled a long time ago from some obscure orchestra-album, played a 2 bar bass loop and started to spread out Scott’s voice over the track.
Exactly on the day of the deadline my Fender Rhodes came out of restoration. Needless to say, the moment I tracked that instrument it instantly tied the mix together. There was no time to hire a horny female singer, so the choir was done by me (I hope that doesn’t put you off).
The huge orchestra I had in my mind for this was obviously a no go.. There was no time to hire, record, and even make an arrangement for it, so I grabbed some random trumpet and flute samples I had lying on a hard drive and added some strings. That gave the impression a grand orchestra was sitting behind Scott. Mission accomplished.

To be frankly: with a voice actor like Scott Fletcher there is no way you can screw this up. The track was finished the moment the voice-work entered my mailbox. I’ve got some ideas up my sleeve now…

Enjoy, Ode to Bacon!

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Ode-to-Bacon 1:45

download: ode-to-bacon.mp3 1.7mb

A new tune written exclusively for Theater Walhalla. Technically I did 4 different versions of the same one. If you click www.theaterwalhalla.nl you have 4 random chances to hear them. To make your life a little easier here are the two main ones.

The original Walhalla tune:

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…and the one for lounging in the intermission

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Yes, you begged and begged. And I said no, no, no, but I did it anyway. Recorded the Hammond organ to test out my new olympus portable recorder. I just set te levels, and fiddled for 2 minutes on the ol’organ. No theme, no nothing. So there you go.

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