Episode 5 - Digging through the Archives

Episode 5 - Digging through the Archives




This was a fun podcast to put together for me.
First I'll give you the breakdown of what you're hearing:

0:00 - Bad Plus Beat
1:07 - Alleys at Dawn
2:35 - Paz is a si zaP
4:41 - African Oyoyo
6:25 - Bad Plus Beat revisited
8:53 - Flying Juice
13:54 - Latin Thought

This time around I decided to try to make a mix of tracks that I thought would flow well together. I took some time to browse through my archive of tracks, and I was able to find quite a few beats that had never been used or released in any form. I'll give you a brief review of the tracks.

"Bad Plus Beat" is named because it originally was built around a sample of a Bad Plus song. Unfortunately, over time some of the samples I have chosen get lost in the process of moving files around. So what you hear on this track is simply the arrangement of the song without the sample. I enjoyed this track on its own without samples and I thought it was a good intro to set the mood for the rest of the mix.

Next, you will hear a track entitled "Alleys at Dawn." This is my equivalent to a haiku in musical form. The song is named for the feeling it gave me when I listened to it. The trumpet and organ give it an atmosphere of the earliest part of the day for me. I listen to this track and I feel like I have been up all night and I am making my way through an alleyway toward someplace safer. This track was written a long time ago. I think it was all the way back when we lived in the Shelley St. house, and I'm pretty sure that Dave B's trumpet playing was my inspiration for the song.

"Paz is a si zaP" is a strange name, I know. I named it this because I wanted to create and anagram with the title. The song made me think of lasers and being zapped, if you will. So somehow I came up with that strange title after working on this song for a few hours. This track was originally the same track as "African Oyoyo." I was attempting to flesh out the beat a little and add a transitional part to the song, but along the way it became much more than I ever intended. The bass line is created with samples of the bass track from "Wind," and the wild synth sounding part that carried the melody is actually a sample of the guitar track from "Shadow." Ever crazier is the basis of this entire track came from sampling another track that was mixed down and then played with my MIDI keyboard like an instrument. The track was named "Creedy Air Balloon" and it was sped up about 20x faster to become the instrument you hear.

"Paz is a si zaP" blends appropriately into its mothertrack "African Oyoyo." This is simply a sample that I created a long time ago by layering up lots of loops on my old Boss RC-20 Loop Station. What you are hearing is many bass lines, vocal recordings of myself chanting "Oyoyo," as well as quite a bit of clapping. It was fun for me to be able to add this in, because it is a sample I have had for a long time and I have not had the chance to share it.

Following "African Oyoyo" is a remixed version of the "Bad Plus Beat" from the intro. Most of the track is in reverse for this go through. But the beat still remains the same.

Next is "Flying Juice." This track used to have a sample of my dad's acoustic guitar, but once again the sample has gone missing from moving files around. The track is still very solid without the sample as the bass line holds down the guitar part. This track was intended to be a BSC song called "On the Grind." And in fact, there was one night at the Winslow house on Memorial where Tim, Natalie, Leigh and I all stood around a mic and recorded a chorus singing "on the grind" to this tune. Unfortunately, it just never came together that well. I still enjoy this track a lot and I am glad I can share it now.

Last on the podcast is a great clincher of a song called "Latin Thought." This song is more of a composition than any of the other tracks on this podcast. I wrote this during a time that I was studying music theory a lot, and I would actually spend more time writing songs on paper than on an instrument. I never had the chance to play this song with a band, but it was always my intention to bring it to a group setting. Hopefully with the Nashville Winslows meeting for practice more often, I may still have a chance to play this song live.

This has been a more organized Podcast than the past releases, and I hope to bring you more orchestrated releases like this in the future. Please feel free to send any feedback as this will only help me to improve the project that is the P Buck Podcast.

Until next time, Enjoy!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Episode 7 - P Buck Leaks Hungry Like a Snake

Episode 14 - Just Vibin'