Partially Naked Self-Examination Music Blog, Week 20

Here's another, earlier music composition class piece of weirdness: "Argument Leading to Death." I'm thinking now that my week 19 entry was likely from the early spring of 1993, while this one was from late fall of 1992 in the previous semester's class. I think I decided it would require less effort this time around if for the class performance I just brought in a tape of something I'd put down at home, and this was it.

I'm playing electric bass here, and my roommate Sanj Ghogale (now a doctor in the navy) is playing alto sax. Sanj has been my friend since early high school and played in my high school band The Backdrop, whose small body of work I will eventually post. We recorded this on my 4-track recording, which gave us the advantage of being able to punch in a lot, which means that instead of playing the song all the way through, you just play a phrase (or more) and then stop, then you can punch in and do the next part. This is a totally routine way of doing things in the studio (for parts like backing vocals, anyway; it's not so easy with, say, drum kit) and really lets you perfect your parts, or even make them up as you're recording. In this case, I had sheet music written out, so this was merely a matter of us being able to get the recording created without having to practice very much. Still, I guess this is proof that I did start playing bass by reading music in orchestras, and this may have been the last time I ever really had to read a part written out on a staff as a bass player.

Is anyone actually enjoying these pseudo-classical pieces? I'll admit that while I seem to treasure to the point of fetish even a lot of my old songs that were too crummy to have ever been recorded, I'd totally forgotten about this until I went just now through my tapes, and the same goes for last week's entry. Listening back to this very loud on headphones, though, I kind of like it.

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