ClassicalCode

Yesterday, I was at Donut World drinking a coffee, eating a buttermilk-bar and missing my girlfriend, when this little love song popped into my head. I quickly scrawled it on the back of a piece of paper I found in my pocket, went home and recorded it.

For Chelsea: “Our Love Will Last As Long”

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Today my friend Alison, my room mate Noah and myself recorded a rendition of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by The Beatles.

Ukulele – Jordan
Bass – Noah
Vocals – Alison

Listen to the result:

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Last Mother’s Day I recorded my mom a barbershop tag. This Mother’s Day caught me at a bad time, and I was gift-less when I saw her. So today, with my new recording equipment, I recorded a belated Mother’s Day barbershop tag. I have always thought this tag was particularly beautiful and have attempted it a few times before with little success. This time I feel like I have finally been able to do it some measure of justice.

Happy (belated) Mothers Day Lisa. I could not ask for a better mama.

Listen to the tag “To My Beautiful Life Long Friends” from the Classic Tags Collection:

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Since I began multitracking, my recordings have suffered from “recorded-with-the-built-in-microphone-itis” which has greatly reduced the quality of my multitracks. Recently I got my hands on a Zoom H4 “Handy Recorder”.

This thing is awesome. In one portable package its: a high quality USB microphone, a portable recorder, a four-track machine, an effects pedal, and much more. To take the new contraption for a spin, I recorded an old favorite tag. I did all the multitracking on the Zoom, and then transferred the individual tracks to my MacBook where I added reverb and adjusted some levels (which I could have done on board if I had wanted to).

I have recorded this tag a few times before on my MacBook microphone and the difference of sound quality is pretty noticeable. Have a listen to this new recording of “In Dixie Land Where I Was Born”:

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Several months ago, inspired by this youtube video, my friends Jared Emerson-Johnson, Joachim Luis and I collaborated on a multitracked barbershop tag. Jared and I live about an hour away from each other and Joachim lives all the way in Chicago, so this was a great way for the four of us to do some harmony singing with far away friends.

Joachim recorded the lead part and emailed it to the group, and then Jared added the baritone part. Finally I added the bass and tenor parts. For now we are calling ourselves “Removable Do.”

The tag is The Shadow of Your Smile from the Classic Tags book.

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A few days ago, I wrote a barbershop tag for my girlfriend Chelsea.

My multitrack of the tag (sung a half step lower than written):

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My goal was to write a “bloom” type tag where all voices Read More…

After talking about the Shepard Tone, an audio illusion that can create an endlessly rising or falling scale, with my friend Ben Pender, I decided to try to create one using Lilypond. The result is quite interesting:

Chromatically rising Shepard Tone:

The midi file created by Lilypond: shepard_tone.midi

The Lilypond file used to render the above midi file: shepard_tone.ly

An mp3 file generated from the midi file above:

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I was at home with my parents and my girlfriend Chelsea, and my dad was singing “Take Me Out To the Ball Game” off by one word. He then proceed to sing it again off by TWO words. Eventually the evening was reduced to repeating the song over and over and trying to shift the words one note back each time. We soon realized that this was a sort of phase music. If the number of words is one fewer than the number of notes, the words shift father and farther from their original position in the melody creating various interesting word stresses and pairings.

I decided to take this idea to it’s logical extreme and found a short enough song that, within a reasonable period of time, it can be repeated enough times that the words eventually make the full journey back to their original position. Here is a video of me singing “Row Row Your Boat”:

In order to actually sing this, I had to create sheet music for it.
Here it is: row_row.pdf

My birthday was a few days ago, and two different people, knowing my love of barbershop, sent me a Youtube video of a quartet singing “Happy Birthday”. This got me thinking about barbershop arrangments of the song.

Today is my friend Amanda Ortmayer’s birthday and I wanted to give her something, so I decided to arrange and multitrack “Happy Birthday” for her in the barbershop style.

Happy birthday Amanda, thanks for being such a constant, caring friend.

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The arrangement as a printable pdf: birthday.pdf

Update:
The Lilypond file used to render the above engraving: birthday.ly

I know I am stretching this backwards-alphabet-songs thing, but I am at home in Petaluma and had time to kill.

Here I sing the alphabet song with the melody backwards, the words backwards while showing solfegge hand signs and conducting.