started as called broken
I wanted to see if I could make a new age track, and was being ironic and cynical. and then i actually really liked how this turned, might do a few more. here’s for you to do what you can with it, like, close yr eyes and sit awhile. or party hard.
and an 8 minute meditation track gets in on the everyday action.
this one is ukelay lady lay
this one is celloed out
made three songs this weekend
all continuing from the previous, and kind exploring what hides in one chord, even though that sounds more thought out than it was
oh and three different instruments: guitar, then cello, then ukelele
if you like imperfectly improvised solo cello pizzicato, this jam is for you!
make the cello go
played some more bach action and then improvised afterwards, imperfect and all.
picked up good ol’ Cello McCelloface today. I played some Bach badly and then recorded this improvisation.
Here’s a super rough “song”… I don’t know if it’s that, so much as an idea and letting the lyrics fall out of its pockets to see if there’s anything worth picking up.
I posted the early version of this with beats, I thought the cello part was nice enough to share on its own.
this song is a bit more, er, aggressive. here are some tamped punkish chamber cellos.
two cellos playing a pretty line, hard panned left and right gives it that floaty feeling
I’ve been making music everyday! But not specifically for my music everyday project. But with that spirit in mind I’m going to post excerpts from what I’ve been working on for the last few days…
cello. then beats. then cello, and more beats!
big things.
now we are all caught up. trust issues, all resolved.
just after
where floating.
all these cellos chasing after each other.
and here we have a cello falling through a forcefield.
I had fallen behind. I had Bruce Springsteen shows to go to and a show to play in San Diego and Spring to hike for and just life. So I decided to catch up and recorded the 8 missing tracks in the past two days. All cello based instrumentals. Enjoy!
I want to be cinematic. All my cinematic attempts lately veer so hard towards the melancholic. I blame cello.
I want to make a new album where I can sing and it’s just one cello part (no overdubs) so that when I play it live it’s something that is as real as the recording.
This morning the most tremendous thunder I think I’ve heard in LA… woke me up and admittedly I was kind of grumpy like “what is that rumbling sound argh” and then I’m so glad I got up in the early dawn and saw this wall of hail approach and flashes so close I decided being on the roof maybe not the optimal place to witness.
Also this is another solo cello improvised thingy.
Playing cello and that’s all, seeing where it leads…
Here’s my everyday creation for today. It turned out a bit weirder than I expected. It’s another from the cello in a church. Cheers.
Day 2 of sharing something e’ry day. Made this today out of some cello I had recorded in a big beautiful church in LA, where I’m not entirely sure I had permission to play. I built the beats here out of these huge metal wine grape bins that you can find in the vineyards if you’re lucky. This is fun. I hope I can keep this up (he says after day 2)
[embedyt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_p4LyE2Pjs[/embedyt]
Here is the new video. Shot this in Northern California, by the Feather River behind my grandparents’ house, and in Hopland up in the hills.
I’ve been sorta kinda organizing my back log of tracks now that I’ve got a good chunk of my projects sorted out. It’s funny what you find just sitting there.
This is an instrumental that is kinda wandering and pretty. Cellos swirling, as they tend to do, and a kind of trance-y beat. I must have, well I’m sure of it to tell the truth, recorded live with loops.
I just felt like putting this up tonight.
It’s a fine Summer night. Is it the end of Summer? That’s what I hear. Me and Cinco are tending to the empty home while the rest of the pack is off at FYF Fest. Slowdive is playing. Hmm. I wish I was there. It was sold out.
I’ve mostly finished up on a big buffet of music I’m going to serve up in the near future. I’m happy with the work done and mostly the feeling of the songs.
Los Angeles for me: still and ever just past my fingertips somehow. It’s there, I push at it, brush it aside like curtains. But I have yet to pass through.
It’s a good city after all, and there are just so many surfaces you could attach your mirrors to here. Everyone is beautiful and larger than life, even if just in their own minds.
There aren’t country lanes, nature revery is rare, and the general balance leans one way and then the next, undecided. It’s menacing and inviting at once.
Blah blah poetic yada yada. Meaning: I’m here, making music in my dear studio with my dear cellos and my dear thoughts and I’m not on that damn stage at this damn point in this damn city.
That’s my check in.
Hope this version of this song fits with your time and place.
Wrote this song a few days ago. Been playing cello again a lot, and wanted to create something using this arpeggiating technique across the strings (string players… what is the technical term for this? Can’t remember!)
Lyrically it carries the same theme as the rest of “The Faraway”. Journeys, changes, destinations.
Funny how I thought that the lyrics for this were just absolutely impossible. I banged my head against my lyric book for a couple days, recorded several scratch tracks of improvised lyrics and then walked away. When I came back it wasn’t garbage anymore, at least not when stitched together.
The real reason I made this was because I wanted to test out my GoPro Jaws Flex Clamp. It’s so simple, yet super brilliant for capturing live music. It worked! Now I just need to get like five more and clamp them everywhere.
E’ry so often I put ye old iTunes on shuffle and here something perfectly podcast worthy. Here’s an older live on-air performance from KDVS live in studio A. So much reverb! I believe I requested that. I can never have too much reverb.
Got that image from here, you can get a print of it even.
And thus concludes our magical journey through the soundtrack to “You Follow”… thanks for following.
The next episode. I’ll be following up with the rest of the soundtrack in the next couple days.
I had the honor of working on the soundtrack for “You Follow”, a story about a woman who goes to find out about her past in India. The main character does a lot of searching and I composed this piece to be her (Nisha) theme. It was a fun and interesting project and I’m excited to go see the opening screening tonight(!)…
A while ago I made my girlfriend Katy an album. She has a certain playlist she’s created for painting and has talked about the perfect music for that kinda thing… meditative and non-disruptive, but interesting enough maybe to be listenable over and over. So obviously I created a polka/deep-house mashup. And that didn’t fit the bill. So I tried this.
Just a live cello performance using some looping, and a very brutish beat to pull it all along.
It’s long, and it’s a pretty good quality mp3 if you are into that sort of thing.
This is the first of three parts to that album.
I’ve always been the “passionate” cellist. Early on I probably leaned into the strings a bit heavily to overcome my lack of practice. I might have even used the “I am passionate” card as a justification for not practicing as much as I should have (I never practiced from age 13 until college, I would show up at the lesson and class and sight. I’m not proud).
I still am the passionate musician. My music requires it, and I’m more than happy to be that person. Um, you know, I’m still not the world’s most fantastic cellist in general, especially not technically, but I can hold my own. I have technique now, I get it, I work it. I practice!
But I BELIEVE in feeling and passion in music and I will until the day that I die. I can’t stand dry flat deliveries (hello most indie rock of the last several years).
And yet! And yet… I have noticed this thing that is important, and I have noticed it especially when I know I will have to get on stage and perform, and it is this: a little less feeling, a little less bombasticity (now a word), a deeper breath or two, and yes, a few more thoughts given to the angle of the bow and the curvature of the fingers really really helps. It makes the passion come through in a more sophisticated way.
via CELLO. LESSONS! – Once more, this time with less feeling..
Today I hope I can inspire myself to put on a few sweaters and brave my little studio. I actually really need to, I’ve got a show tomorrow and two the following weekend. And in the midst of that I’ve got some other “real world” responsibilities that are pretty pressing, needing my every bit of extra attention.
I will be working on this ambient set that I’ve been performing for a long while now. Beats + Cello + Effects.
The Process?
I write the beats first thing. I’ve always been a fan of big beats and while I can’t say I am any kind of expert, I enjoy the act of creating beats. I don’t use canned beats (Canned beats are free-to-use beats that somebody already wrote and recorded a sample of, for anyone to use).
Most of the “songs”are quite free-form, and I enjoy that freedom. It’s like electronica/jazz, that openness. But a lot of times I will, no wait, I always decide on a key initially, whether it be b minor or C Major or what-have-you. Sometimes if I can think that far in advance I’ll go modal, though really if anything I play in Dorian and tend, sadly, to not explore the other modes too much. Some of these “songs” over the years have in fact developed their own melodies or themes, and so, in that sense they are not completely improvised. But after those things are out of the way (beats + key + theme) I just see what happens.
The most difficult thing about that in a live context is self editing. It doesn’t take much at all for one of these songs to turn into 30 minute self-aggrandizing tombs. It’s extremely important to try and think quickly and move forward quickly, in my opinion. I’ve seen far too many musicians wanking over how awesome they are for too long and I don’t want to be that guy. A helpful thing for me to keep in mind is that less IS indeed more. In fact that is sort of a mantra I repeat over and over as I perform (less is more… less is more…). I think Miles Davis is the master of that and everything else, and I can’t count how many times his face has popped into my head while playing as a way to remind me to let things breathe. It’s a startling vision that snaps me back sometimes.
That’s the process. As technology has changed the process has changed, the performance has changed. My first attempts at doing things this way was in Portland playing some random loft parties. I had my trusty Korg Electribe ER-1 and a delay pedal. I played loud and feedback was rampant. It was great!
Music device fiends: My favorite favorite thing about the Electribe is its “audio in” feature, which is hard to describe in words, but allows you to create a rhythmic pattern for your external input to actually be outputted… So that the notes I play on my cello beep through with the beats in a set pattern. It is a nice sci-fi sound that makes it sound like more than one instrument is playing. I am bummed that so far the electribe is the only device I’ve found that does this. Even software like Ableton doesn’t have this feature. You can hear that effect in “Everybody Is Dreaming“, it’s the synth sounding rhythmic noise going on throughout, especially audible for the verses.
The Electribe is still with me, even though I don’t really need it. I’ve found a way to integrate it via midi into my current setup. My setup is not all that different now, I just use my laptop with Ableton Live + Electribe + Effects Pedal + Keyboard Synth + Launchpad.
Using a laptop live does have its drawbacks… 1. software glitches and computer malfunctions (they happen, I can attest) 2. It’s your laptop, which, in my case, is the most valuable thing I own second to my cello, so that’s not ideal to have on a stage at a club, but in the end it takes a solo act to levels probably impossible otherwise.
So yeah, time to stop writing and go practice! Maybe I’ll record some snippets and post. Maybe!
As I was walking along I was thinking about how much I want to release an album on vinyl. Vinyl sounds good, and almost without realizing it, I still to this day record my albums with the album format in mind: short and sweet, with a definitive Side A vs. Side B.
So that’s what I am going to do, is record my ultimate vinyl record. Whether or not it gets released as a record, I’ll keep Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” in mind, as the tone. It’s not all mellow, it’s not easy listening, but something about that album with its hiss and feeling is perfectly suited for that vinyl sound.
How many of you would be interested in a re-issue of REDWOOD SUMMER on vinyl? I’ll gauge the interest and see if I can make that happen. I think that album would sound good that way…
SO… today I tidied up three songs for that album. Mostly recorded some new vocal tracks for one of them… that came out of the “point of view” question I tend to always have with the narrator of the song… should I sing “You were standing there, and you saw all kinds of rad things…” (great lyrics right? just an example 🙂 or should I sing “I was standing there, and I saw all kinds of rad things”. I am choosing the latter on this day. I feel like, despite how it makes me feel like it’s a bit more revealing, it also is more natural. I feel like people listen to songs and put themselves in the position of the person singing it, I know I do. I don’t think that I’m not actually Willie Nelson or the dude from Muse as I sing along, I just can relate to the songs more easily if I can sing along saying “I saw awesome things…”
So we’ll see. Recorded that. What do you think? Any thoughts on the lyric writing/listening process for you?
Added some drums to a big build at the end of another song. It’s kind of epic, with tons of backup vocals and lots of open chords. I suppose that’s becoming my acoustic sound.
And then I tightened up one electro-cello song. Re-recorded some cello traxxx to make them more in tune, and tidied up my arrangement, so that it is good and long and trance-y, but still interesting.
Tomorrow I get serious about a few totally new recordings… as I’m itching to get those going…
Life has been rolling along. All the sudden it’s May. It’s not even May, it’s the middle of May. Wow.
That slip of the tongue of time has happened (for me) because I’ve been buried in music. Culminations occur tomorrow night, Thursday at the downtown art walk in Los Angeles, where I’ll be playing some jams at the Annex Gallery. Basically I’m playing cello, mixing it up with beats, and making rad action happen all the time. It’s cool, playing music in the center of one of the biggest cities in the world. It’s why I’m here.
On the other fronts, I’ve been writing new songs and nostalging about old ones, culminating in at least a couple new albums by the end of this (very busy) Summer.
Life is good, my fingers have callouses, I’m deeply inspired.
Still awaiting, I suppose, the big break, but I’ll just keep making this music, like I always have, and that will do it, I think.
Let me know when I should come to your town and play a gig.
I sincerely hope you are well. Thanks for checking in. You know I’ll post some new music here when I feel it is deserving of your ears…
In all things, do good, be well. Etc.
Luke.
Tomorrow night, March 30th, I’ll have the pleasure of playing cello on a few songs for the ever awesome Chuck Ragan at The Troubador in Los Angeles.
I’m real excited. I’ll let you know how it goes. If you are in LA, be sure to come out, as it is a benefit for Haiti concert, and Chuck is amazing.
I’m thinking of remixing all the tracks off of JUNEAUREVOIR, my all cello instrumental album, or having other electronic musicians give it a go. This song is my first foray into it.
For any purists out there, this track is not pure anymore!
Which leads me to a quick note about what I do. Currently I am making music across a broad range of genres, here is my quick summary:
1. Garage Rock With Cello, Punk-Folk Action (ala REDWOOD SUMMER)
2. Highly orchestrated dark electronic influenced with vocals, cello, beats and lots of other sounds (ala Midnight Door).
3. Cello instrumentals, kind of classically influenced, kind of not, it depends (ala JUNEAUREVOIR)
4. Dark dance electronic beats with cello, instrumental and mainly live at parties and whatnot. (Album on its way)
OK, so that’s out of the way, below is the track, enjoy, and thank you.
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PS – Click here to listent to a sample of the original on iTunes
