"Red Chair" - Original by Ted

[Ted]

amputee?  i get examples often in the week about people that keep going on regardless...

To be honest, I had a discussion with my younger self about that line. I said it might be insensitive. We decided to keep it. The idea is that you lose part of yourself, and you are clumsy and diminished – at least at first – until you adapt. But this song – the perspective of this song; the perspective of my younger self – doesn't see the possibility of triumphant surmounting of such a setback. And you're right: Younger me is trying to bring you down. Younger me is trying to tell you that much of what you believe is patently ridiculous. "People who say forever? What fools. I'm smarter than that."

Thanks, everyone, for the positive comments so far. Sometimes I get a little defensive when people invoke Graceland when they react to my music. I shouldn't be. It's a brilliant album. One of the best albums of all time, IMO. But I want to complain that I was being inspired by African music before Graceland was released – which is true. But in this case, the math doesn't lie. I wrote this song after Graceland was released in 1986.

[Ray Brookes]

Love this, Ted. Great African feel musically and cool lyrics.

[Mike_S]

Yeah I like the idea of letting the listener to a little of the work. It makes the listener more intrigued... like a movie where the ending leaves it open. Those are normally good.

Great little song Ted. It's a lovely upbeat tune and yes it does have that kinda African leaning. I also think those verses really benefit from that sparse arangement. Excellent stuff!

Mike

[Ron D Bowes]

Really good. It's almost a reggae/folk fusion. If that isn't a genre it should be  . Styles merging here with a rock guitar entering the tune. Good job!

[Pru]

crikey what a great song! no particular genre i can think of but this rolls along excellently.

sometimes i think it can get disheartening when listeners compare your songs to somebody else's such as the Graceland album for example as you mentions above. nevertheless i think your influences in this song are outside the scope of that great album and you have made the style of it your own. hope that all makes sense!

[Ted]

it can get disheartening when listeners compare your songs to somebody else's

Nah! It's not disheartening. Usually when someone compares my music to some other well-known artist, I don't hear a similarity at all. When the comparison is Graceland, however, yes, I hear it. And there's some stupid ego thing inside of me that wants people to know that I was immersing myself in African sounds ahead of Graceland. Like some boring guy who says, "I was into Pixies before they blew up!" It's only been 39 years since Graceland. I'll get over it eventually. I think I'll officially shut up about it, even if I'm not over it.

Speaking of neurosis:

I planned on cheating (recording at 2/3 speed and speeding it up).

Why 2/3 speed? Why not 3/4 speed or 4/5 speed? 

Here's a document from my recording process. The Micro BR can do tempo to an accuracy of 1/10 BPM. Audacity can change the tempo of a song to an accuracy of 3 decimal places. So I had to choose a slow MBR recording tempo that I could accurately speed up the "normal" MBR tempo to an accuracy of .1 BPM. Otherwise the imported sped-up track would slowly wander off of the tempo of the drum track.

I created a spreadsheet and compared every slow recording tempo from 73.4 to 88.0 BMP against every normal tempo from 109.0 to 111.0 BPM – there are 3,087 combinations. For each combination I tested to see if you could get from the slow tempo to the normal tempo (in Audacity) with the limitation of 3 decimal places. I identified 10 candidates. I chose 2/3 (66.6667%) because speeding up and slowing down WAVs introduces weird time-stretching artifacts artifacts (phasing, mushiness, glitches, flanging, warbling, pitch fluctuations).  And simple ratios are less likely to introduce noticeable artifacts compared to arbitrary decimal changes.

And ultimately I didn't do any time stretching at all – I didn't use the 2/3 speed recording.

What I'm trying to say here is: Y'all who can produce music every week without ever making a spreadsheet are my heroes.

[BerryPatch]

Wow Ted! This is a wicked track, excellent chords and I love the bass (very Tony Levin might I add). The parts with the electric guitar are excellent, great bridge to even out the song. Superb!

[Ted]

I love the bass (very Tony Levin might I add).

Oh stop. [Blushes.] Flattery will get you everywhere.

[StephenM]

I would rather listen to you any day over say "Elvis Costello"... lol
I like your spreadsheet and your mentality... I find certain things about recording and likely somewhat to very different than others... I like the engineering and math ideas you have there... not too many people who would record on these devices would think this way.
Baseball stats have been turned upside down (actually not just the stats, the game itself) by metrics, by data, by formula's.  What is funny about it to me is there is still only 1 champion at the end, so it changed everything and changed nothing. 
Industry and manufacturing have been drastically changed by data...

and one doesn't even need to know what they are talking about they just need to convince the right person that they do an bingo, the keys get turned over to them... ah... salesmen are everywhere...

where is my crazy ramble going?  no where fast...

I like the way you go about recording... great results... doesn't really matter about how long or the details of motivation etc... but it does as the journey is as important to us as is the end result, which I suppose is the song... and it is... but also the fun in this for me is getting to "talk" with everyone who wants to about the whole process.... I learn alot from this...
and with big stars, or the really great musicians we really like this will not be much of the case...they don't have time to "talk" to everyone.