In the interest of not seeing "Untitled" songs for months on end, I went on yet another marathon of writing. Working so fast makes me wonder whether I am finding the truly right words to go with each song. But over time, I'll forget.

• Epiphany, formerly "Untitled (Stylish Number Girl #1)"
• Contrition, formerly "Untitled (Stylish Number Girl #8)"
• Disengaged, formerly "Untitled (Stylish Number Girl #3)"
• Relent, formerly "Untitled (Stylish Number Girl #6)"
• Dismissal, formerly "Untitled (Stylish Number Girl #4)"
• Faith In Religion, rewritten from previously unpublished lyrics

— Posted: 2005-12-19 17:20:03

I re-uploaded just about every file this morning with versions sifted through a mastering limiter. I acquired the Voxengo Elephant VST plug-in for Cakewalk Sonar and applied limiting on all my mixes. Some of these quickly mastered versions are going to sound a bit off, but most of them should sound fine. And louder.

— Posted: 2005-12-18 21:40:27

I got off my duff and finally set some lyrics to the remaining untitled songs on Restraint. I have to say -- I'm not all that enamoured with the process of setting words to music, and I'm terrible with procrastinating on it. Perhaps my next iteration of shinkyoku moratorium is not to write any new music until lyrics have been done for all the songs unfinished. In any case, here are the new words:

• Melt, formerly "Untitled (Enjoy the Silence)"
• All the Times I Remember, formerly "Untitled (Stepwise)"
• On Paper, formerly "Untitled (Guitar)"
• Letter II
• Emancipation, formerly "Untitled (E-Dorian)"
• Reticence, formerly "Untitled (E-Mixolydian)"

— Posted: 2005-12-17 10:35:03

Just about a week ago, I decided to see how much work I could get done with a new project, Revulsion, and today, I'm about 99% done with writing the music. I'm missing a melody to one track, but aside from that, the seven songs which consist of this particular release as solid.

I still wouldn't mind going back with real live instruments and recording these songs again, but at least they're no longer the realm of vague sketches. I've used the blueprint analogy to describe pretty much all the work on this site, but it applies moreso with Revulsion.

Lyrics ... ugh. I'm just going to have to carve out some time and conduct a writing marathon. There are five songs each on both Restraint and Revulsion that need lyrics. I will feel much relief when I can rid those track lists of "Untitled" songs.

— Posted: 2005-12-13 09:29:09

Against my better judgment, I posted a new song, "Revulsion". It's supposed to be a rock song with a lot of very loud guitars. But I cannot play guitar very well, and I haven't yet experimented with trying to record live instruments on my setup.

So I'm making a blueprint of what I would like the song to be arranged. In actually fleshing out the song, I discovered I had to drop an entire verse, and I created a bridge for which I hadn't written lyrics. So don't consider the song you hear here as anywhere even begun.

— Posted: 2005-12-07 09:34:58

I said I would wait till I finished all the lyrics before I changed the title of Speechless to Restraint, but I decided to go ahead and make the change. (Which means I'll need to change all the ID3 tags on the files as well.)

In doing so, I created a new cover for the project. Neck ties? Restraint? Get it? Uh-huh, right.

Another change I forgot the mention were a new set of lyrics for the song now called "Melt".

— Posted: 2005-12-03 11:39:57

I actually put these up about a week ago, but I'm only now getting around to announcing them. I loaded up six new songs for Speechless, which will eventually undergo a title change to Restraint. But that won't happen till I've written lyrics to these new songs, and that may take a while.

I also added a new page to the site: the file log. I don't usually announce when I put a new version of a file online, so you may have early versions of songs that don't really sound the way they're supposed to. I would prefer that listeners overwrite any old files they may have with the latest version, and the file log will help you to do that. It lists all the files currently available by modification time.

For instance, I re-recorded "Speechless" to include some percussive effects, and that version reflects what I originally intended with the song.

— Posted: 2005-09-26 09:42:11

Having never needing to use embed or object tags before, I relied on some incorrect instructions to load the Flash players used throughout the site. If you use Mozilla Firefox (as you should), you should have experienced no problems. If you use Internet Explorer (and you should consider switching to another browser), you would have seen some disproportionately large players on the page.

And none of the players worked, to boot.

It was partially my mistake. I didn't change the width and height attributes in the correct spot, and I didn't use the correct parameter to load the Flash player. Those mistakes have been fixed, as is the layout of the track listings in the projects section.

IE sucks, by the way. I tire of having to debug for it.

— Posted: 2005-08-31 21:41:15

In an attempt to keep the number of untitled songs to a minimum, I hunkered down over the weekend and dashed off lyrics to a number of songs. Of course, I changed the file names of those songs to reflect their new titles. Here are the newly minted songs:

• Here, formerly "Untitled (Initializations)"
• Letter, formerly "Untitled (Triads I)"
• Release, formerly "Untitled (Hokuro/Vox)"
• Rescuer, formerly "Untitled (D-E)"
• Restraint, formerly "Untitled (Dolly)
• Without Nothing, formerly "Untitled (C-Mixolydian)"

I also named the untitled Sacred Hearts 1991 theme song with its intended title, "Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow", but since that collaboration didn't really go anywhere, I'm keeping the title but leaving the lyrics unfinished.

— Posted: 2005-08-29 09:51:05

In attempting to clean out my Cakewalk audio folder (between two different versions of the application), I ended up deleting a number of mixdowns originally associated with some newer files. (I should really uninstall Cakewalk Pro Audio 9.)

Of course, that gave me the opportunity to re-record a number of tracks that have been bugging me.

The enigmatics files were recorded way before I had Cakewalk, so they've always been rather poorly encoded. I decided to go in and finally fix the mixes on those songs, changing a few timbres and editing the levels of some tracks. I also renamed the filenames, because track times keep changing whenever I edit the files. Now they simply go by Roman numerals.

I changed the piano used to record "Speechless" to something a bit less harsh, and I messed with the levels of "Choices" to bring out more of the bass.

Over the next few weeks (if school work doesn't interfere too heavily), I'll be pulling a fine-tooth comb over all the files posted so far, rectifying any digital clipping and editing things I've been putting off.

— Posted: 2005-08-29 09:41:04

Against my better judgment, I went ahead and posted a bunch of new files from a project currently titled Speechless. It was supposed to be the follow-up project to enigmatics back in 1999, and I managed to sketch out about seven songs before I hit writer's block.

I've gone back and fleshed out those sketches, and while half of these songs don't have lyrics, I feel they're strong enough to show off now.

I also went ahead and listed A Ghost in My Shadow on the Projects page, even though I'm not sure what I'll be doing with it. I may dismantle it completely, or I may actually write new material for it.

Right now, I'm just putting everything up, and I'll move everything around later.

— Posted: 2005-08-21 23:26:45

I installed an XSPF Music Player to provide a web player on the site. Check out the Listen section to hear all available Eponymous 4 files. Also check out the Projects section, where you can listen to each project in full.

— Posted: 2005-08-12 10:33:36

I've spent the last few weeks rerecording tracks from my original demo, A Ghost in My Shadow. The demo was transferred from a cassette tape (which I titled A Loss for Words), which didn't have the greatest sound quality. The 13 tracks I put online a few years back have now all been redone, some even remodelled! I have more tracks from the original cassette to tackle, although some I may just allow to degrade into obscurity. It's actually quite a bit of work. The tracks done thus far:

Read the full article ...

— Posted: 2005-08-12 10:26:14

Well, I thought about adding some new songs to Imprint, and I have. I wanted to wait till I finished the lyrics for both songs before posting them, because I didn't want to have to change the links later from "Untitled" to whatever title they became. "Late Thaw" is probably the closest thing to a real jazz song I've written -- not a hybrid with some other genre. I even reduced the arrangement to a trio -- piano, bass, vocals. "Choices", meanwhile, took a lot of effort to bring together. I managed to map out the melody and harmonic rhythm of the song, but it took what felt like forever throwing together the parts for it. I'm not sure I'm very attached to the lyrics, and even this mix may do well with more sprucing. Nonetheless, Imprint is now 44 minutes long, and it feels like an album. Now I just have to lay vocals on everything.

— Posted: 2005-08-01 00:03:03

Oh my -- it's been three months since I've worked on anything. I thought I was done with Imprint, but I decided to write more songs for the project. The current mix is fine, but sometimes I feel it's a bit short. At first, I thought about including an old song, "Faith in Religion", and I even created a new mix for it. But after listening to it with the other songs, it didn't fit. I'm posting it on this site anyway, just because a lot of work went into it, and it's such a strange tune. I did finish the music for a new song that will be added to Imprint, but I won't put that up till I after I write the lyrics.

— Posted: 2005-07-24 23:59:43

I may spend the next few weeks reconstructing music from my old demo than work on new material. I've reached something of a wall at the moment, but I don't want to lose the momentum of all this work. So tonight, I reworked the song from which the old demo takes it title -- "Beat of the Heart". (A Ghost In My Shadow is a phrase in the second verse.) When I finally arranged this song on my old workstation, it was adapted from a piano arrangement I had hope to perform in a college concert. But when I first imagined the song, I wanted it to be incredibly minimal -- a bass drum, an accompanying instrument, vocals and ambient sounds. So I went with that idea for this reworking.

— Posted: 2005-04-11 20:57:03

Yet another very, very rough mix is available, this time "Downtown Downpour", a song I wrote back in 1991. It's missing the solo in the middle, and maybe it could accomodate more instrumentation. But all the times I've tried to add anything more in the past just didn't sit well. So perhaps this is it. As with this file and "Hear the Wind Sing", I reserve the right at any time to change them without warning.

— Posted: 2005-04-08 17:29:20

I finished a very rough mix of a reconstructed "Hear the Wind Sing". Emphasis on very rough. There's still a lot more work to be done to cut back on some parts and to boost others. (And I notice there's a glitch at the end of the Meredith Monk vocal sample.) Still, it's nice to have a clear version of this song on MP3 than the fuzzy digitized-from-cassette version from A Ghost in My Shadow. You can find the MP3 in the Projects section.

P.S. I briefly considered renaming 「風の歌を聴け」 to Happy Birthday and White Christmas, which is a line from the song. I decided I didn't want listeners to expect covers of "Happy Birthday" and "White Christmas" on it.

— Posted: 2005-04-06 21:55:02

Actually, the site launched its new design a few weeks back, but tonight, I finally managed to get a database working with the site. Plus I created (yet another) weblog to post quick and dirty news items regarding this site.

(You can find more ponderous stuff about the nature of songwriting in my creative scrapbook.)

Right now, the bulk of the content is in the Projects section, where you'll find MP3 files and lyrics.

Now that this is up, I can go back to writing ...

— Posted: 2005-04-03 22:54:48