Today (Lüke Remix)

Music school is hard.  After a while, setting a mass text for five voices in a 16th century polyphonic style just doesn’t seem very natural for me.  It’s nice to have projects like this to remind me that making music is fun.

I used the same drum beat that Joe wrote, but I used my own samples and added a few fills.  I changed the chords a little, but Joe is ok with that.  I also threw in some Rhodes and a 5-note xylophone that I made in my Physics of Music class.  I call it the Lukophone.

-Luke

Today

This song is really sad.  I was secretly hoping Luke’s remix would be slightly less mopey, which he did, so hooray.  I mean, the song is kind of about distancing yourself from yourself and watching your world fall apart, so it still has to be at least a *little* sad.

There are actually 16 tracks of my voice at the end.  I have no idea why I felt the need to double everything, then add octaves on top of them and double those, but it took a pretty long time to put it all together.  I was probably listening to that Thrice song “The Whaler” a lot when I wrote this.

-Joe

Sparrows and Doves (Joe Remix)

This is a really interesting song.  I couldn’t really decide what I wanted to do with it at first – part of me wanted to strip stuff away and just keep it as sparse as possible, and part of me wanted to just keep layering more and more stuff on there.  So in the end I decided to do both, giving it the wtf treatment, treating the part with vocals as some sort of “chorus” I guess.

I wish I knew what synth sounds Muse uses, because that’s kind of what I was going for with the noisier parts.  Only kind of though.  Is it wrong to use pitch correction on a cello part?  Hopefully that doesn’t offend anyone.

-Joe

Sparrows And Doves

My girlfriend wrote this song for a trio that we play in when we have time.  Like everything else, my part was deciding that it needed a melodica part.

Ellen – Rhodes, vocals

Luke – Guitar, melodica, vocals

Hillary – Cello

-Luke

Run-Around (Blues Traveler)

Luke – vocals, guitar, rhodes, beatz
Joe – vocals, bass, handclaps, programming
Ellen – flute
Stowell, Mark, Justin, Dan, Curtis, Baker, Ellen & Keith – singing and other assorted noises

In addition to being Luke’s cat’s namesake, this Blues Traveler classic seemed to be the theme song of the weekend that Aryn and I spent at Luke’s place in Chicago in May.  It just seemed to pop up everywhere (but in my head, mostly).

It also seemed like there weren’t enough (or any) covers of this song out there, so we wanted to do it party-style.  It was somewhat difficult to create that party atmosphere while we recorded our parts in different states and then spliced them together in such an artificial environment, but I still think it was a success.  Luke does a better John Popper than I do.

-Joe

Bitches (Joe Remix)

This was the first song Luke sent me to do a remix of, and I guess I didn’t really know what to make of it when I first heard it.  I didn’t immediately identify with the lyrics, but I figured throwing in some phat beatz and an 80s ravetastic synth solo couldn’t hurt.

Then I sequenced that part at the end because I’m a nerd.  I thought it would sound neat if I took a bunch of instances of people saying “bitches” from the verses and just messed around with them to construct some crazy over-the-top polyrhythms, but it turns out the word “bitches” is always said too quickly, so it ends up sounding like “bshh” or “bits” or “bshiz” or something.  I’m OK with that though.

-Joe

Bitches

(Mom, you can skip this one.)  This is the result of a drunken evening with a visiting friend and barely remembering how to use Pro Tools.  I also recorded the vocals before the synth for some reason.

Nolan, Baker and Dan are rapping; Dan is on the MicroKORG synthesizer (I’m on the pitch bend wheel).

-Luke

Gorgonzola

I wrote this song with my friend Drew. Joe then visited and threw some ideas in there as well, like the bass and ooh’s and whatnot.

Drew – Vocals, Guitar
Luke – Guitar, Rhodes, Beats, Backup Vocals, Melodica, Xylophone, Claps
Joe – Bass, Backup Vocals
Ellen – Backup Vocals, Claps
Dan – Backup Vocals, Claps

-Luke

And Then I Wake Up (Lüke Remix)

I tend to enjoy the sound of a bouncing bottle cap more than a snare.  What does everybody else think?

-Luke

And Then I Wake Up

This is a song I wrote awhile ago that never really went anywhere arrangement-wise.  There’s something to be said for embracing simplicity and keeping orchestration sparse, but in this case it was just because I didn’t really have any ideas.

The song has two somewhat pretty sections, both fairly simple, and they basically just alternate for three minutes until it ends.  I hadn’t really thought too much about what other instruments could fit in there, or how I could rework the structure, or what the dynamics should be.  A lot of my music ends up somewhat unfinished for similar reasons.

This was the first song of mine that Luke remixed, and I think it was his idea.  I like his take on it better.  Here’s the original version:

-Joe