Yesterday, I was in the studio assisting on a singer-songwriter type project and had the opportunity to track a melodica. A melodica is basically a small hand-held keyboard that you play by blowing into a mouthpiece that is affixed to the side -- and the sound it makes is somewhere in between a harmonica and an accordion. The keyboardist was working out his parts with the artist in the mix room and I thought I was going to break down into tears because of how amazing this little toy instrument sounded (not really a toy but they sure look like something you would play in 5th grade choir).
When the keyboardist actually got into the isolation booth to record his parts it became evident to me that this was going to be an instrument that I was going to have to put into any song I ever arranged for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, everyone else in the room disagreed. While they thought that the instrument sounded great, they ultimately thought that the part that he was playing was too busy and added too much complexity to the overall arrangement. I thought it sounded perfect, but I was just the assistant engineer, so my point of view didn't carry a lot of weight. So rather than playing the beautiful chords over the verses, they opted to have the keyboardist just play single note pads -- to keep it simple.
Honestly, I see their point. When you are tracking singer-songwriter stuff, your audience isn't really looking for density of composition -- usually. Either way, after leaving that session I was really in the mood to bite into something complex. This morning my thirst for depth was fully satiated by this awesome piece on Pitchfork.tv documenting Dan Deacon's recording process for his new LP; Bromst.
Dan uses a piano retrofitted with a MIDI capability. This basically means that you can compose unplayable piano parts -- super-high bpms, crazy rhythms, time signatures -- on a laptop and then download them onto the piano which will play it with perfect timing. I've played around with retarded compositions using MIDI on a computer, but I've never seen a real-life piano with motorized hammers which can play MIDI. This piece shows how they comp together multiple highly dense piano parts and at the end give you a listen to the final product -- which I have to say sounds incredible. This is just part 2 of the mini-documentary, I highly recommend watching the entire thing -- this album is going to be great.
he is coming to the orange show in houston in april
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He was not doing too well with his online endeavors back in 2005.