Bill Roper's Journal

I rambled downstairs today and got back into the studio and worked over three songs for Crosstime Bus, leaving me three to go, all of which are fingerpicked guitar, so they will require a slightly different setup. I'll see if I can get those to behave tomorrow.

One of the songs that I worked on today, "Dance by Starlight", is going to need some fixup before I'm done with it. I wrote that song back in 2005, about ten years after Gretchen and I got married, when I was an ocean away from her at the British filkcon which was very, very full of wedding vibes that weekend. I like the song a lot, which is why it's on the album list.

It is, however, being a pain in the butt, because I wrote it *before* I started using a pick again. When you're not using a pick, you can easily transition between the fingerpicked section at the beginning, the strummed section in the middle, and the fingerpicked section at the end. When you are using a pick, this is not something that can be managed at my skill level.

When I'm playing the song *now*, I have worked out that I can arpeggiate the formerly fingerpicked sections and play them with the pick. However, the timing on that is just slightly different from the timing when fingerpicking. The scratch tracks, which have some accompaniment associated with them already, were played without a pick.

Today's session made it clear to me that I cannot get the fingerpicked section to time out correctly when I'm using a pick. This means that I am going to have to record a separate guitar track for the beginning and end of the song and patch it in around the picked section in the middle. I can do this, of course.

It's just another learning experience. :)

But I really like the song, so it will be worth it.

Once I finally got the studio computer to behave again, I went back to working over tracks for "Crosstime Bus" and laying down more guitar tracks and replacement scratch vocals that wouldn't be contaminated with the original scratch guitar. The first song wasn't much of a challenge.

And then I was off into "It's All Right". I have been practicing this song. It shouldn't be a problem.

Except I can hear that the second chord that I'm playing in the song is *clearly* not the same chord that is on the scratch tracks. It's labeled on the lyric sheet as "Bm7/A". Right...

Ok, I can hear the high A on the first string clearly. What are the other notes that are in this thing?

Eventually, I realize that this is a D7sus moved up to the third fret. The guitar chord analyzer tells me that it is (among other things) "Bm7/A". Uh huh.

It's amazing how much easier it is to play the guitar when you know what you are playing.

I swear that I am going to find the chord diagram generator again and use it to add diagrams of some of the odder chords to my PDFs that I play from. The problem is that when I haven't played a song for a while and then I encounter something that I have notated as "A aug5 sus4" where I have *clearly* gotten that notation from some chord naming program, I just start to swear.

I have concluded that "A aug5 sus4" is "take AMaj7 and move it up one fret and make sure that you hit the high E string", as opposed to the same song's "Bm7/A" which I'm pretty sure is "take AMaj7 and move it up one fret and make sure that you hit the fifth string and *mute* the first string".

Grumble.

Sometimes you get an idea for a song and it just doesn't work out the way you planned.

In this case, I was contemplating the fellow who was trying to use modern AI technology to create an on-line replica of his parents simply because he wanted to talk to them so badly. I had a verse. I didn't like it. At all, the longer I considered it.

Yesterday morning while lying in bed at oh-dark-thirty or thereabouts, I got the chorus. And a couple of verses. And random bits to build the rest of the song out of.

Today, I have the whole song. It is not *anything* like the song that I set out to write.

Overall, I think that's a good thing.

I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

I have a ludicrous number of musical influences. Of course, I have been listening to music for a very long time. :) And I learned by listening to the Beatles (especially McCartney), and Paul Simon (with and without Garfunkel), and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and America, and Jimmy Buffett, and many, many others. And for someone who is almost completely unable to sing a harmony, I find my melodies weaving all sorts of harmonies inside of the chords that I play. That makes me happy.

One of the lesser-known bands that was an influence in my music was Mason Proffit. I would never have heard of them, but one of my college roommates owned one of their albums. Through the miracle of cassette tape, I shortly had my own bootleg. Many years later (and much like Jimmy Buffett paying the mini-mart back), I bought their CD, so I am now an honest man.

And one of my favorite songs of theirs was "Two Hangmen", which might have gotten more airplay if not for the extraordinary length of repetition of the last lines of the song, over and over for more than two minutes. Maybe there was a radio version. I hope so, because really, that was excessive.

But somewhere down at the core of it, "Two Hangmen" is a song about disinformation, about spreading messages that the government doesn't approve of, and consequences. And that makes it a song that still feels true to me today.

Maybe I will sing it at a filk some time.

But without the two minutes of repetition. :)

And here's the song.

Yesterday, my good friend Amy McNally posted an image of a breakfast sandwich that she can, sadly, no longer acquire, because the restaurant that served it has long since closed. I sympathize with this.

On the late, lamented series "Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist", two of the principals ran a restaurant named Maximo's, where you could order from any of a variety of other restaurants in town and they would retrieve the food from all those different restaurants and serve it to you. This was an interesting concept, but not what I'm looking for. What *I* want is to be able to get food from all of the restaurants that I used to love that no longer exist. I mentioned this in response to Amy's post and Callie Hills said that I should write that song.

Well, yes. I have been contemplating writing that song for a few years now. It just wasn't coming together.

Until this morning when I realized that:

1) I had the chorus.
2) This should really be a duet with me and Gretchen and banter between the verses.

I broached this to Gretchen this morning and now we have a song. Gretchen is not convinced that the song is improved by the banter, but we'll see how that develops. In any case, it can be sung with or without banter, so here is the banter-free version for your perusal.

I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

In and around the three loads of laundry I did today, I was able to duck into the studio and use Cubase's pitch shift function to capo 2 the scratch vocals and guitar. The vocals did not at all appreciate this treatment, but they and the guitar are going to be replaced shortly and only need to be there now to assist me in timing everything correctly to Sally's drum track. They will do for this purpose.

K is off on the high school's "all night" sojourn to Six Flags. It is not actually "all night", but they'll be getting back around 3:30 AM and I'll need to go rescue her and one of her friends. I offered K my car, but she cleverly declined, as she expects to be in no shape to drive at that time.

I will be snoring away waiting for my wake up call...

After two weekends of good intentions, I have actually gotten started pulling together the Dodeka taxes for 2024. This is not going to be pretty...

I have been working on getting my older albums up on streaming since discovering that "The Grim Roper" had found its way there and was actually generating a noticeable number of streams. Not as many as some folks, but enough to produce a few hundred dollars in income a year, which was quite a surprise. So "Liftoff to Landing" should now be up on the streaming services as well.

Since I already had "Seven Miles a Second" and "Falling Toward Orion" up on CD Baby, it looked like it would be easy to get them set up for streaming. This turned out not to be as true as I had hoped, but I am finally in contact with the support folks and something should happen there soon.

That will leave "Live In Germany (mostly...)" to get up on streaming and then all of the stuff that is currently available on physical media will also be available on streaming.

And all of this is a good thing to be working on while I still don't have a singing voice. :)

I'm back from GAFilk, where I had an excellent time, even with so many folks who couldn't make it there because of the weather or other factors. Traveling companion My Good Buddy Clif and I had good fortune with clear and dry weather on Thursday for the trip down and Monday for the trip back. But it is a *very* long drive. :)

Thanks to the Midkiffs (mostly Phil, who had to deal with it :) ) for keeping Clif's car so that we could meet up in Indianapolis on the drive down. And to Sutton and the concom who had found a speaker system that *worked* well this year, so that I could hear the concerts and such in the Dealers' Room -- which was very nearly the singular Dealer Room, as Sally Kobee couldn't make it for a variety of reasons, I'm told. And neither could the Blibbering Humdingers or Marc Gunn. But Leslie Hudson ended up with a table and we had a nice conversation or two.

I had nice conversations with a lot of people, which is mostly why I go to conventions. That and the singing, which was also fun. And I got to perform in the 2x10s with Amy, which I always enjoy. And the dinner dance with Play It With Moxie where I tended the board for a few songs so that James Mahaffey could get on stage and play. And the Interfilk Auction, which was quite brief, and where Gretchen won the Interfilk Quilt raffle in absentia, Brenda having been good enough to write her name on the tickets I'd bought for her while I was auctioning things. At one point, I was auctioning an OVFF thumb drive that claimed to have the Pegasus Nominees for 2024 and 2025 (!) on it. I would have been greatly interested to hear the latter... :)

And I got Sutton to sing "Stray Dog Man" before heading off to bed on Sunday, because I had been requested to sing it on Friday in his absence and it seemed like he should sing it at least as many times as I did, he being the author and all that. I suspect that was the only time he led a song all weekend, because he stays very, very busy at GAFilk.

Oh, and we released "Liftoff to Landing" (which I should now go turn loose on Bandcamp) and sold a few copies of that as well, which is good, because I have a *lot* of copies of that album. :)

I have tables for next year, so I should be back, weather permitting. :)