New Site Just For Podcast Music

I've launched a brand new site (more like a landing page, really) to focus specifically on marketing my podcast music collection. You can reach it at https://music4podcasts.blogspot.com if you're interested. I'm also planning a YouTube video to tie into the page.

In the meantime, I have two new sets of podcast tracks rolling out and will feature them on Twitter tomorrow (3/30/17). One is "Salsa Jazz," the other a new corporate theme. And I have more in the pipeline - especially for you metal head podcasters out there. Stay tuned!

What's Happening: Week of March 27, 2017

I hope last week was a happy and productive one for you. Business is up for me, and I am so grateful to everyone who licensed my work or just stopped by to listen. Among other things, I had my first ever sale this week under Pond5's Premium Licensing arrangement, which is an awesome bonus. Thank you, buyer!

My featured stock music track this week is Lifestyle Podcast Intro (Full). It's an upbeat (124 bpm) pop-rock intro for topical or lifestyle-oriented podcasts and vlogs. Key is E Major.

A couple of other things on my mind coming into the new week. First, I'm giving more thought to putting a video together for podcasters, explaining the advantages and benefits of using royalty-free music. Second, I'm giving some thought (again) to ditching my thisbrucesmith.com domain and making this blog my online home. Why? It seems that Google in particular is now punishing websites that don't have encryption (the https vs. http). The process to do that right entails some expense, and I'm not sure it's something I want or need given that my blog here at blogspot is already encrypted. I probably wouldn't get rid of the domain completely, instead I'd redirect it here. Stay tuned for updates.

And with that, I hope your upcoming week is a good one.

What's Happening, Week of March 20, 2017

I hope everyone enjoyed a pleasant and safe Saint Patrick's Day, and that all of you basketball fans still have something left of your NCAA tournament brackets.

I have new music for podcasts that I'll be featuring on my Twitter feed tomorrow. This group of tracks focuses on different niches. Two are country-themed. The first is inspired by the honky-tonk style, with a full (:25) version, a very short logo/outro version, and a looped version. The second is a fast-paced tune in full (:29), short (:15), logo/outro and looped versions. Not only is it country, it's also great for road trip and Americana podcasts or videos.

In addition to those, I have a Appalachian folk-themed intro in full (:30) and short (:13) versions, featuring a dulcimer over strumming guitar, which is also great for Americana themed podcasts. Finally, there's a new baroque-themed intro with flute, harpsichord and cello in an early 18th century style in full (:29) and short (:15) versions. Consider this one for historical, cultural or art-themed podcasts. You can sample the complete collection, consisting of 66 tracks in different styles and lengths, here.

Later in the week, I'll be featuring a longer-form stock music track titled "Cinematic Ambient." The title is pretty self-explanatory, but it's a sort of hybrid piece with symphonic synths and deep drums, a good choice for sci-fi, fantasy and video game applications.

Don't forget to check my main web site to hear my featured stock music of the week, and have a great one.

What's Happening: Week of March 13, 2017

I hope everyone in the States is adjusting to the shift to Daylight Savings Time.

I debuted some new podcast music Friday and will be featuring it again tomorrow. My podcast collection has grown to 55 files as of this writing and includes very short (< :10) and longer (up to :30) tracks in various styles, including:

• Rock (including orchestral)
• Pop (uplifting/lifestyle/bright)
• Mellow
• Electronic
• House/EDM
• Modern Jazz
• Breaking news type stuff
• . . . and more

I'm working on new stuff all the time. If you're a podcaster on the lookout for new music to spice things up, please bookmark my collection and check back often.

Meanwhile, the more I learn about the new podcasting boom, the more excited I get about potential opportunities to repurpose some of my ambient and dramatic work for scripted podcasts. If you're a podcaster and want to use music in your presentation, there are definite advantages to going with stock music versus trying to license popular music and potentially having to worry about paying out royalties if your podcast takes off. I'll try to expand on this in a future post, maybe later this week.

Until then, I hope your week is #AwesomeAndThenSome!

Gloriously Baffling: The Real Story Behind "Sonny the Monster" (Part 3)

This is the third of three posts about my cover of the song "Sonny the Monster," which became part of the Guided by Voices canon when it appeared on the compilation Suitcase 3: Up We Go Now. This post goes into some detail about the arranging and recording process, so if you're not interested in that, you're welcome to skip to the last few paragraphs. If you haven't yet read parts one or two, you might want to check them out first.

Anatomy of a Weird Cover Song

The basic song structure of "Sonny the Monster" as I recalled it was verse-chorus, with variations in the verses and repeats on the tail end of the second and third choruses that functioned as a sort of bridge. The first verse is repeated at the end with a key change from G to A. There's a final repeat of the chord changes from the last line of the chorus (D -> c# min -> b min ->A) , and the song ends.

In the original, as I remembered it, the chords in both the verse and chorus are the same, power chords that followed the bass line exactly: G->F#->C->D repeated, until you got to the last line of the chorus, when it switched to a stepwise downward progression (C->b min->a min->G). I never cared for the power chords in the verse and chorus because to my ear they clashed with the melody, so I tweaked them more to my liking.

The verses I kept simple, just laying the melody over the bassline with no real chords until the final repeat of the first verse, right before the end of the song. When I wanted full chords at the end I played (in the key of A) A->E->D->E (a very Townsend-ish thing to do, I thought at the time). However, I left the bassline the same, so the E chord had a G# bass note. To make the chords on the chorus sound a little different, on the line "picks me off my feet . . ." I used a slightly different chord structure, going G->b min->C->D, which for me did two things. First, the bass line moved more naturally in thirds and fifths with the melody. Second, it distinguished the chorus enough that you could tell it wasn't just a repeat of the verse.

With all that established, now I had to record. I had accumulated a lot of gear over the previous few years. My main keyboard was a Roland Alpha Juno 2, but I also had a Yamaha DX-100 keyboard and Yamaha TX81Z and Roland MT32 sound modules. Even though I still had the drums I'd played since I was a teenager (including with Anacrusis), I didn't have a lot of microphones to use for recording them, so I augmented the rig with a Roland TR-505 drum machine. I rounded out the whole thing with a Fender Jaguar guitar that I ran through a little Gorilla amp, and my trusty Alvarez nylon string folk/classical guitar. My recording device of choice was the Yamaha MT2X 4-track cassette recorder. I rounded out the rig with an Alesis digital reverb. Of all the stuff I just listed, the Alvarez guitar is the only instrument I still have. I sold off all the rest in bits and pieces over the years. (It’s also the only instrument I did not use on “Sonny.”) Now, like many others, I'm entirely computer-based.

With sequencing and a number of different modules tied together via MIDI, I could do almost the whole arrangement of the song and then play back the sequence while recording it onto two tracks of my MT2X four-track cassette. I had to be careful though, since I only had about 4,700 or so notes to play with on my Yamaha QX7 sequencer.

I started by sequencing the bass on the Yamaha DX100. It had a nice, punchy bass patch called “Lately Bass” that I used heavily. That gave me a bare minimum musical outline that I could lay stuff over. Then I tracked the drum machine. I avoided just using canned patterns wherever I could, preferring to tap the drum parts out on the Roland Alpha Juno 2 acting as a MIDI controller. It could be painstaking at times, especially when I was trying to do more than two instruments at a time, like kick, snare and hat all at once. But I got through it. I wanted a fingersnap, but none of the tone modules had a sample for that, so I improvised and used a castanet sample (I think from the Roland MT32, though I don't remember for sure now). In like fashion. I sequenced different keyboard and synth parts. A tweak here, a little quantization there, and I was ready to track the instruments. (A note in passing: the pounding drum in the last verse that Wires and Waves called an "unnecessary double kick-drum" was actually an unnecessary floor tom.)

One of the great things about the MT2X was that it had six inputs that I could route to a two track stereo mix. That allowed me to have the synths/modules all output in mono to different inputs of the MT2X. The bass and drums were panned center, and other stuff to the left or right to give it a little stereo interest. (Track sheets? Are you kidding? I had stuff to do!) The last input on the MT2X I reserved for my Fender Jag, which I routed clean and panned a bit to the left, with lots of bridge pickup for a nice jangly sound. I played the Jag live along with the sequenced tracks as I recorded them. The only other instrument I recall playing live was a synth part I punched in (inserted into one of the vocal tracks) with the goofy little ghost sound (I think that patch was called "Goblins" or something) that leads into the third verse.

I wanted a big, thick vocal sound. Ever since I first heard the chorus of Lou Christie’s 1960s hit “Lightnin’ Strikes,” I’ve been a sucker for tight vocal harmonies. The trouble was, having laid the instruments on two tracks, I had only two left for vocals. Standard procedure back in that day was to record the backing vocals first. You started out with one of the backing vocal parts on, say, track 3 (assuming the instruments are mixed to stereo on tracks 1 and 2). You then recorded another backing vocal on track 4, mixing in the vocal from track 3 as you went. You ended up with two vocal parts on track 4. You could then repeat the process, going the other way, recording a third vocal on track 3 (and in the process erasing what was there before) and mixing in the two vocals from track 4, ending up with three vocal parts on track 3. (Rinse. Repeat).

The process was known affectionately as "bouncing." You couldn't bounce too much, though, because eventually you would develop tape hiss and the signal would degrade. I also threw in some reverb (thanks to my Alesis ProVerb) to good effect, as in the backing vocal that echoed the words "long black car" in the second verse. I think I did five background vocal overdubs in all, before going back to and recording the lead vocal by itself on track 3 (Or was it 4? Never mind.)

I put in one final touch at the very end. If you listen closely as the song is fading out, you may be able to catch a low, soft voice panned hard left in the stereo field. It’s "Sonny," cursing under his breath as he walks away.

Working with instruments going to two-track stereo and bouncing vocals around meant I had to do a lot of the mixing of the song as I was recording. If I went back and found that a certain vocal or instrument was a little louder than I really wanted after the fact, that was too bad (and it killed me). In the end, I mixed the instruments and vocals to the best of my ability (which wasn't super then for sure) down to a stereo cassette deck and took the tape around along with other music I’d done to share with a few close friends and fellow musicians.

I have a few of my recordings from the 1980s in mp3 format and maybe someday I'll stick some of them on Bandcamp or Soundcloud just for grins. Don't hold your breath, though. If anything, I'm sort of the "anti-Bob." I'm hesitant to put anything out there that I don't consider worthy (meaning most of it). I am definitely my own worst critic. It’s almost miraculous that I’ve put out so much stock music over the past four-plus years. The fact is, my cover of "Sonny" might have stayed buried, except that I had a brief stint in GbV myself in 1989, and once played the song for Bob. He seemed to get a kick out of it, and I remembered many years later while digitizing a bunch of my old stuff, and sent the mp3 to Rich.

That brings it full circle. By the time I realized that “Sonny” had actually seen the light of day, I found to my surprise that the song had taken on a life of its own. Mark Deming, writing for AllMusic, didn't have much positive to say about Suitcase 3 as a whole, but did single out "Sonny," calling it "gloriously baffling." (http://www.allmusic.com/album/suitcase-3-up-we-go-now-mw0001327408) Other comments I saw found it bewildering, to say the least. One poster referred to me as a “truck driver hick,” which is false. (I drive a sedan.)

Most of the true GbV fans who weighed in, though, seemed to enjoy it. I'm glad that the fans have had as much fun with “Sonny” as I did. Just taking this trip down memory lane has been fun, too. Who knows? After this, I might even try my hand at fiction. I know just how to start my novel, too.

"Over on the west side of town . . ."

For more on my history with GbV, click here.

More Podcast Music Today!

This morning I'm rolling out three freshly-approved tracks for podcasters. Two are short (:10 and :12) attention-grabbing electro tracks. The third is a sort of lo-fi surf rock thing in three versions: a full (:19), a slightly shorter (:12) and a looping version (:23). It's an option for folks with retro or nostalgic-themed podcasts. I'll featuring them on my Twitter feed all day. If you're looking at this on my blog page, just look to the top right to see my tweets.

I hope you enjoy your Friday and your weekend. Don't forget the last post of my series "Gloriously Baffling" drops tomorrow morning.

What's Happening: Week of March 6, 2017

I hope everyone had a great weekend, and that the week coming up will be fulfilling for you.

I have two more pieces of podcast music coming on line, and will be featuring them on my Twitter feed Monday. One is an upbeat, inspiring track to introduce religious or uplifting themed podcasts or vlogs. The other is a darker, ambient electronic track for more conspiracy theory or occult related podcasts. I hope you'll check them out.

Also, I have a new stock music track geared toward scenic visuals like drone videos, urban, mountain and ocean vistas. It's called "Panorama," and I'll be featuring it tomorrow or Tuesday.

The second part of my three part post on my cover of "Sonny the Monster" dropped this past Saturday and the third part will be available this coming Saturday.

Gloriously Baffling: The Real Story Behind "Sonny the Monster" (Part 2)

This is the second of three posts telling my story behind the making of my cover of "Sonny the Monster," which became part of the Guided by Voices canon when it was released on the compilation Suitcase 3: Up We Go Now. If you haven't read the first part yet, I would suggest starting there. 

Choosing “Sonny”

During the late 1980s, I was trying to make something happen with music again. I had gone to college and then graduate school. For a year, I actually worked on a Ph. D. in finance at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Unfortunately, I was homesick (I had met my future wife, who was back in Dayton at that point), and I found I just didn't have the chops for the advanced math involved. I dropped out of the doctoral program and came back to Dayton, was married and worked at Wright State for a year as an adjunct finance instructor. In the spring of 1987, the university fell on hard times and my contract was not renewed.

During the period between jobs that followed, I got intensely into doing music. Although I played drums and some guitar, I also identified very heavily with piano and keyboards. I greatly admired virtuoso players from the prog rock realm, like Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson. I also really dug jazz and fusion players like Chick Corea. The only problem was, I stank as a keyboard player. I had taken a piano course in college and barely passed. By the 80s, though, I was helped by a new technological development: the sequencer.

Several years before, the chief builders of synthesizers had gotten together and created a standard to allow their various instruments and gear to communicate back and forth. The standard was called Musical Instrument Digital Interface, or MIDI. A sequencer was a box that you could hook up to MIDI instruments to make them play whatever you wanted. This allowed me to overcome my fat, uncoordinated fingers. With a sequencer, I could record complex passages very slowly and then speed them up. With the fullness of time, I did develop some rudimentary skill, but sequencing sped up my creative process greatly.

I was doing a lot of writing in 1986-88 (not a Bob Pollard lot, but a lot for me). Most of it was a cross between what would now be called smooth jazz and New Age (which at that time was still actually, well, new). I also tried my hand from time to time at pop, country, love songs to my wife, and some occasional rock. I was talking back and forth at one point with an aspiring filmmaker in the area about potentially scoring an independent film he was trying to produce, but that never panned out. To be honest, neither did anything else, really. It was during a period some time in 1988, while I was in a dry spell trying to come up with ideas, that I remembered "Sonny the Monster."

Anacrusis was mainly a cover band at the beginning, but the band had developed at least six originals I can remember. "Daddy's in the State Pen" was a straightforward rocker about a wife beater whose son (the singer) has to grow up fast. "Somewhere Sometime" was a wistful ballad. "Fame and Fortune" was the band's signature song, a power ballad that Bob sang at times as though channeling Paul Rodgers. Recordings of those three were made and released and in the various Suitcases. You can find them on YouTube, although they're hardly the best versions. Another original was "Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia," which was later borrowed as the title for the GbV record on which I played. I found that song interesting because it had a slow verse that went double time in the chorus. (I can still hear the repeating "I'm goin' back/I'm goin' back."). "Status Symbol" was another rocker I’d forgotten about; thanks to Tony for jogging my memory. (Somebody once mispronounced it as “Status Stymbol” and that became its unofficial title.)

Then there was "Sonny the Monster." The narrator is a sad sack who's run up huge gambling debts that he cannot repay, and he now must face the wrath of the local crime boss, the title character. Sonny was based on a stereotypical local figure the likes of which you find in every town in the world of any size. One of Dayton’s most notorious at the time was a fellow named Bill Stepp. Tony Conley reminded me.

Bill Stepp was the godfather of the organized crime in the Miami Valley [Dayton area] from the 1960's through the 1990's. He was involved in extortion, racketeering, dog fighting, prostitution, loan sharking, and anything else illegal. He was an extremely talented street fighter and had a violent streak a mile wide. He was a true gentleman to those who didn't cross him and managed to avoid prison time all his adult life. He was the guy that put Larry Flynt into business and had some of the most dangerous men in the nation working for him that were scared of him. Some of which are now in prison.

In my choice to cover, "Sonny" I seized on one distinct advantage it had over the other Anacrusis songs: I thought I remembered all the words. The song was what I would consider a midtempo heavy rocker that made extensive use of power chords. So extensive, in fact, as to be harshly dissonant to my ear. I think several people tried to get Bob to change the chords, but he would have none of it. It was still a rocking song, but given my resources and the times, I decided to recast it as a contemporary, if quirky, pop song.

Next: Anatomy of a weird cover song

For more into about my history with GbV, click here.