There are occasions when I spend an inordinate amount of time amusing myself by recording music that is completely worthless but is wickedly entertaining…to me at least. This morning was one of those occasions.

I was lying in bed and had an idea. I wondered what it would sound like if I recorded a drum solo and then took the MIDI information in that solo and transferred it to a different instrument such as piano. So I tried it and the results were pretty interesting.

I took the drum notes and kind of split them up between three pianos, two electric pianos, and one bass. This took a few hours but it proved to be a rip roarin’ good time.

I took some of the highlights from this eight minute monstrosity and (poorly) edited them together into one mp3 that is a little less than two minutes long.

If Frank Zappa had ever written music for a piano band this is what it would have sounded like.

Click here to download the mp3.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I found all of the CDs with the original tracks to The Drew Johnson Band’s album “Invention of the Wheel”. I was able to read the CDs with Angel’s PC and copy the files to my PC. It was a lot of fun for me to go back and listen to those tracks so I thought I’d share.

I put together an mp3 of me talking through the song “Lulu’s Machine” and explaining a lot of what’s going on. There are a bunch of clips of guitar tracks, vocal tracks, drum tracks, and bizarre tracks played by themselves so you can hear what they sound like exposed, along with my commentary on what we were thinking and trying to accomplish.

For anyone who was a fan of The Drew Johnson Band I think you’ll find this interesting and informative. You’ll also probably hear some things you’ve never noticed before. And there are a few pretty good laughs to be had also.

This mp3 is about twelve minutes long so grab some popcorn and set your phones to vibrate. Hopefully you’ll have as much fun listening to it as I had making it.

Click here to download the mp3.

Remember when you used to go to youth convention with your church’s youth group? Me too. Remember how every year they would do some sort of presentation titled roughly “Listening To Rock N Roll Will Cause You To Be Demon Possessed”? Me too. Remember how they played “Another One Bites The Dust” backwards and it said “start to smoke marijuana”? Me too.

The Drew Johnson Band should have been one of the bands in their presentation. This band deliberately tried to rob your soul. Near the end of their song “Lulu’s Machine” they used backmasking and until now (unless of course you just happen to know how to reverse audio) the hidden message of this evil band has been a mystery.

You can now learn why you quit your job and grew your hair long after only one listening of “Lulu’s Machine”.

The secret is revealed in this mp3.

“It’s all in good fun. It’s all in love.”

There are some other very bizarre vocals going on in that section but I don’t remember exactly what’s happening there. I found the discs with the original tracks to all of “Invention” tonight but my PC won’t read them since they’re formatted in ancient sanskrit. If Angel’s PC will read the disc I’ll find out what those other vocals are and put them up here tomorrow.

From time to time Dino will send me a drum loop that he has recorded and ask me if I can put some music to it. He sent me a new one a couple of weeks ago and I was messing around with it last night and came up with something that I think is pretty stinking cool.

Dino hasn’t even heard this yet so don’t tell him about it. I’ve left the drum loop out for now because it’s Dino’s loop and I’m not sure that he’ll like what I’ve put on top of it. So for now this is just the music I’ve added.

Click here to download the mp3.

For more examples of music that was made by me adding to Dino’s loops see this post.

Two, two, two posts in one day.

There’s this little guitar lick I’ve been working on as a picking exercise that I thought was kind of cool. I didn’t intend to use it in a song until today. So I sat down and put some simple chords changes under it and it immediately sounded ridiculous. It sounded like the soundtrack to the montage section of a bad 80′s movie.

I found it so entertaining that I went ahead and put a second guitar part on it and a rhythm section. This is so far from the stuff I usually write but it got me to laugh so I thought I’d share.

This is not really how I play the guitar but it was fun to wear that hat for a day.

Here’s the mp3.

I recently picked up some overtime at work and agreed to let Angel and Riley spend the money on me for Father’s Day. They got me the Komplete Classics sample library from Native Instruments and I am completely blown away.

I had read some really glowing reviews of this package and everything I read turned out to be true. These sounds are absolutely phenomenal.

I spent some time tonight putting together a little demo thing of some of the tones so you could hear how great this software sounds. The first thing you’ll hear is me basically improvising on the Steinway piano. The next thing is me playing what sounds a lot like Beck’s ‘Two Turntables and a Microphone’ on the Wutlitzer A200. Then next is me playing the ending keyboard riff from ‘Lunar Beams’ on the Fender Rhodes. And lastly is me goofing off on the Hammond B3.

Check it out.

Download the mp3 here.

I was sneaking around in Christopher Gustave‘s Photobucket page the other day and found some pictures of The Drew Johnson Band I’d never seen before. I asked Gustave if he’d mind if I post them here and he said “Mi bucket es su bucket.”

Most of these are from the soundcheck for the George Harrison tribute show we did at The Pageant a few years ago.

This show was far and away the coolest thing I’ve ever been a part of as far as music goes. We had a twelve-piece string section, a four-piece horn section, Tim Redmond (from Cobalt Blue) on keys, Sean Garcia (from Three Merry Widows and Tinhorn among others) also on keys, Lliam Christy (I don’t even know what to say here, it’s just like totally Lliam Christy of Lliam Christy fame, and a long time ago he played in The Stranded Lads) on guitar, and The Drew Johnson Band rounding out the the whole thing.

Steve Nowels (bass – The Drew Johnson Band) gets all the glory for pulling this whole thing off. Dave Kalz had asked us if we would play in this Harrison tribute he was putting together and of course we agreed. I assumed we would just tackle it as a three-piece just like we had always done. Then Steve came into practice with the idea of putting together this gigantic band and he said he would write out all the scores and rehearse the orchestra and the horn section and the whole nine yards all by himself. To this Dino and I gave a resounding “Pfft!” It was a wonderful idea but we knew there was no way we could ever pull the thing together in a few short weeks. But I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if Steve didn’t pull it off.

The whole thing didn’t come together until the soundcheck because we couldn’t find a way to rehearse such a huge group. So we had to use the soundcheck as the only rehearsal where everyone was there all at the same time. I was stunned by how well it all came together. Huge kudos to Steve for having a vision and seeing it all the way through. His incredible work ethic made for an unforgettable experience for everyone on stage.

I think the thing that made me the giddiest was that Steve was able to get Lliam Christy and Sean Garcia to play with us. Those guys are legends around these parts. I went to college with Lliam and always saw him as this enigmatic super-human guitar wizard so to get to play with him was really an amazing thing for me.

Here is an mp3 of us playing ‘Here Comes The Sun’ at that show if you’re interested in hearing how the whole thing sounded.

All photos are by Christopher Gustave.

This is Sean Garcia.

This is me with hair.

Dino Nicastro

This is me trying not to giggle about the fact that I’m on stage with Lliam Christy and he’s actually talking to me.

Me and Lliam again.

Sean Garcia with Tim Redmond and the Magical Mystery Orchestra.

Steve Nowles – the brains behind the whole thing.

These next two aren’t from the Harrison show, I just thought they were cool so I stole these too.

Me and Steve.

Here are a few other pictures I happened to have from the Harrison show. These are of the actual performance. These are not by Gustave. These are not very cool.

Man I really wish I still owned that Les Paul.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted any new music but it’s not for lack of new music, it’s for lack of anything-close-to-done music.  I had this short little mp3 sitting on my desktop so I thought I’d throw it up here and let you hear a wee bit of what’s going around here.

This is the very tentative intro to one of the new tunes I’m working on. There is a vocal that goes with this but I’ll spare you that for now. This song is called One Way Home and will probably not even remotely resemble this when it’s all said and done, though I do kinda like it like this for now.

Check it out.

I was going through some boxes of old cassette tapes in my basement this weekend and came across a few un-marked DAT tapes. I was extremely curious to find out what was on the tapes so I dug out and dusted off my DAT machine. One of the tapes was the master of an album I did with the band Koffterweid called ‘Wilson In Your Travels.’

I’ve posted another Koffterweid album before called ‘Without Benefit Of Clergy‘ that was basically a recording project I did with Kristopher Curtis. ‘Wilson In Your Travels’ pre-dates that record by about a year or so and was recorded when Koffterweid was actually a full band.

I haven’t taken the time to rip all of the songs but I thought it might be interesting to at least post a couple of them. This was recorded right here in my basement on a 4-track cassette recorder around 1996 I think. It features Kristopher Curtis on bass and Darren Cuppett on drums who had only been playing drums for a few months at the time. The first song is called ‘We’ll Be Famous’ and ended up being a staple in the set list of The Drew Johnson Band.

The second song is called ‘Enough Son’ and was part of what ended up being a trilogy of songs about my break-up with Angel in November of 1995. The other two songs were ’11/95′ and ‘The Ballad Of War’s End’ from The Drew Johnson Band’s album ‘Invention of the Wheel‘.

If you’re interested in seeing some live footage of this band you can find it here.

Click here to download We’ll Be Famous.

Click here to download Enough Son.

Have you ever heard that song ‘Falling For Me’ by me? Yeah me too. Ever notice how painfully bright it sounds? Yeah me too. Ever notice that sensation of having a straight razor scratch your eardrum while listening to it? Yeah me too.

So today I finally did something I’ve been wanting to do since about 24 hours after uploading that song to the site: I re-mastered it and made a few slight changes to the mix. I have no idea what I was thinking when I made the thing so incredibly strident but it’s all better now.

This is the reason that, from here on out, I will be leaving the mixing to the pros.

Click here to download the new, more pleasant version of Falling For Me – .wav file

Click here to download the new, more pleasant version of Falling For Me – .mp3 file