Yours portly is squeezing in a quick, post-cruise Lazy Sunday with some recent posts featuring reedy chorales:
Enjoy!
—TPP
Yours portly has been in a chorale mood, to the point that I was asking CoPilot about churches that actively commission original sacred pieces (it’s information was fairly dated, unfortunately, as the few leads it offered were from some years ago). I love playing around with little mathematical harmony problems, and seeing where long, sustained notes will take me.
When putting together last week’s piece, one of the proposed instrumentations I pitched to readers on various platforms was soprano saxophone, English horn, and oboe—a highly unorthodox blending of higher reeds. I ended up going with a more traditional woodwind trio of flute, oboe, and bassoon, but I wanted to try that other instrumentation for this week’s effort. I was pleased with the outcome.
The piece itself began as some jotting after Dr. Wife and I had our pre-breakfast Bible reading time together. I wanted to play around with writing a chorale in 6/4—something a bit different, which would also give me some more flexibility in moving the voices.
The process for mastering/mixing this piece was virtually the same as last week’s piece. I imported the WAV from Noteflight into Audacity and applied a “Small Dark Room” reverb effect; an “Wide Synth Pad” chorus effect; and a “Tape” master effect. The granular effects are probably slightly different, as I tend to tweak the chorus and master effects slightly, but listeners will recognize a similar soundscape as the one I shared a week ago.
I then took the audio and pictures of the score and track artwork and imported them all into iMovie. From there, I imported the resulting video into YouTube Create, where I added my favorite filter, “Vaporwave.” I got this one churned out quickly, as we were packing for our cruise (I took advantage of a Dr. Wife nap to hammer it out).
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Dr. Wife and I had some errands to run last week, and while she was tending to a few things I jotted down today’s piece. I will sometimes keep little bits of staff paper open in my music journals for short musical sketches, and I had three glorious staves waiting for an opportune moment to do some hasty composing.
The result is this set of three chorales. I posted polls on Substack and Telegram asking for feedback about the instrumentation, but results were limited. I initially arranged it for a string trio—violin, viola, and cello—but changed to a woodwind trio of flute, oboe, and bassoon. I think that captured the sound I wanted better.
I imported the WAV from Noteflight into Audacity and applied a “Small Bright Room” reverb effect; an “Wide Synth Pad” chorus effect; and a “Tape” master effect. I then took the audio and pictures of the score and track artwork and imported them all into iMovie. From there, I imported the resulting video into YouTube Create, where I added my favorite filter, “Vaporwave,” and added one bit of text that reads “<–“(C# Locrian)” to indicate that the “A major” section in the handwritten score is, actually, in that highly unusual key signature.
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Like last week’s piece, I’ve got another experiment in multitrack recording recording using Audacity and my Logitech Blue Yeti USB microphone (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of any purchases made through that link at no additional cost to you). My workflow was a bit different. I did start with a Voice Memo recording while driving to play at a Sunday morning camp service for the local Presbyterian Church (the summer is always a good time to be a sellsword hedge pianist), and I used that as the template for building today’s piece.
I tend to walk around the house singing and/or chanting weird little phrases or songs I make up. Dr. Wife calls these my “vocal stims“; she claims (correctly) that I do them the most right before bed, as I get the “zoomies” before crashing out for the night. One I do frequently is saying, “Old Boy” in a slight British accent in a very low register.
To illustrate, here’s the track I recorded on the way to play that morning (converted to a lossless WAV):
I used that track as the base for recording other parts. I used the count-in to assure that I came in with the vocal harmonies correctly. I did a major third, a fifth, and a major seventh, then re-recorded the root note so I could ditch the above track, as I didn’t want the road noise in the mix. I also re-recorded the beatboxing as part of the root track.
To keep effects consistent, I mixed the four fresh vocal tracks down to a single track, and applied a 1980s chorus effect, as well as a “large room” reverb preset and some kind of mastering preset. The only downside was that, for some reason, my mic did not pick up the new beatboxing well at all, even though I was “performing” directly into the microphone, with my generous, pouty lips touching the mic’s grill. Maybe I screwed something up when I was playing with noise reduction, which I tried initially to avoid re-recording the (admittedly) short base/bass/beatboxing track.
Next came the saxophone parts. I wasn’t sure what key I was in, I just knew it was major. It turned out to be something approximating B major, with the vocal parts forming a Bmaj7 chord (B, D#, F#, and A#). That works out to an Ab major on the alto sax, but due to some intonation (and possibly the slight tonal ambiguity introduced by the major seventh A#), it didn’t sound quite right until I started recording. It felt like I brute-forced the song back into major—the vocal parts were taking a minor flavor—with the punchy, vibrant saxophone part. Regardless, I riffed out parts that, to me, sounded like a celebration, which really changes the entire mood of the piece (although it probably does capture something of the chaotic joy of vocal stimulation).
I was recording the sax part yesterday morning in the waning minutes before I had to head out for an afternoon of tasks. That said, I managed to squeeze in four quick sax parts, with the result being today’s track, “Old Boy”:
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Like last week’s piece, I’ve got another experiment in multitrack recording recording using Audacity and my Logitech Blue Yeti USB microphone (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of any purchases made through that link at no additional cost to you). I followed a similar workflow, this time using the Voice Memo app on my iPhone to record a percussion part on one of Dr. Wife’s mixing bowls. The blow in question is made from some kind of lightweight metal and has a rubber bottom, so it made for a pretty good drums.
The four sax parts are a bit chaotic. My timing does not always align perfectly, but there is a driving sense of forward motion in the piece. The melody is built on an improvised F major (concert Ab major) arpeggio, then I had a great deal of fun bleeding in different harmonies that sometimes work beautifully, and other times add strange (but, I think, still pleasing) colors, like major seconds and such.
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I’ve got something very different for readers/listeners this Tuesday. I’ve been experimenting with multitrack recording using Audacity and my Logitech Blue Yeti USB microphone (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of any purchases made through that link at no additional cost to you)—the most rudimentary setup since my early days dangling a computer microphone from an ancient 486 33Mhz computer running Windows 3.11 for Workgroups in front of my older brother’s ancient Crate amplifier (shew—talk about a long sentence).
I’ve done lo-fi recording before, and this setup is actually pretty clean. The Lo-Fi Hymnal and The Lo-Fi Hymnal II were both recorded entirely using the Voice Memo app on my old second-generation Apple iPhone SE. Well, the “drum” part for this piece was recorded using the Voice Memo app on my new third-generation Apple iPhone SE!
I put “drum” in scare quotes because the “drum” in question is actually a piece of yellow, metallic patio furniture that Dr. Wife brought down from her old house:
While I was carrying that cylindrical “table” (or whatever it’s supposed to be) outside, I whipped out my phone and recorded a quick little drumbeat (the pitter-patter of feet at the very beginning is Dr. Wife’s three-legged dog, Nugget, shuffling along the floor behind me):
My plan was to use that little beat for something at some point. I had a chance Saturday morning, and imported the file into Audacity. Well, I tried to import it into Audacity, but the Voice Memo records in the obscure M4A format, which isn’t supported in Audacity without jumping through a bunch of software hoops that I’ll figure out eventually but didn’t want to mess with while the creative juices were flowing. Instead, I used an online audio converter (the same one I use to get the WAVs that I export from Noteflight upconverted to the proper bitrate for digital distribution).
With a proper WAV file, Audacity took the track. I then copied it and replicated it over the course of about forty-five seconds, after which I grabbed my alto saxophone and started layering in tracks:
I started with a “root” alto sax part that essentially consisted of the root of a A minor (concert C minor) chord, along with some other little bits of noodling. The “harmony” alto added in the minor third, with the lead alto coming last. For “OCD” reasons, I added a fourth alto sax part to the tail end of the “Yellow Metallic Gong” percussion track to add a bit more color into the last chord, an Asus2 (concert Csus2).
The end result is this slithering, mysterious, slightly messy piece, “Sumatran Snake Charmer“:
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After a month of on again, off again composing—with a good chunk of “off-again” in there—I have finally finished composing “Japanese Trapdoor Snails.” I started the work on 15 April 2026 and wrapped it up late on the evening of Wednesday, 13 May 2026.
It’s an unusual piece, as snails are unusual creatures. I wanted to capture something mystical and contemplative—and, in a hackneyed kind of way, something vaguely Japanese—in the opening bars, with are a slow, flowing 5/4 time. I thought 5/4 fit the slow movements of snails, as if they need an extra beat to get where they’re going.
The “B” section, of sorts, shifts to 3/4 (after some shifting from 5/4 to 4/4) in the same tempo, with the flute moving in dotted quarter notes and the oboe moving in quarter notes. My goal here was to blur tonality and, again, to depict the kind of shuffling crawl of snails along the edges of a pond.
After a recapitulation that shortens one 4/4 phrase to 7/8, I launch into a lively 3/8 portion that has a sort of gypsy and/or Slavic feel to it. In retrospect, I think of this section as capturing the trudging lives of a Japanese Trapdoor Snails going about their never-ending business of pond cleaning. Note that I wasn’t quite sure how this portion fit thematically with the rest of the piece until after listening to it, which happens sometime—an idea pops into my head, I develop it, and then try to figure out if it should stay with that piece.
To be clear, I’m still not convinced it does fit, but I like the contrast and I think it gives some life to this otherwise contemplative and reflective piece.
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Finally—some new music for New Music Tuesday! I’m still working on “Japanese Trapdoor Snails,” but I took a quick aside yesterday to jot down a quick little piece.
You see, dear readers, the pond hobby creates an insatiable appetite for more aquatic critters. My next planned addition to the pond is a trio of weather (or “dojo”) loaches. These are cold-hardy bottom-dwellers that look like an eel and a catfish had a baby, but the baby is somehow cute and not a hideous monster.
Naturally, I had to write a trio depicting these odd but adorable (oddorable?) creatures, three of which I hope to add to the koi pond soon.
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Happy Tuesday, dear readers!
No New Music Tuesday today, I’m afraid. With the school year winding down, several aspects of the job are winding up as we enter into exam review season. I’m attempting to squeeze in one last mini-unit covering the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and European exploration in the span of three lessons, so my unstructured time has been spent putting together slides for those quite vast topics. We’ll see if I can speed run the biggest events of 1300-1600!
The point is not an in-depth analysis of these major movements, but to keep the students a taste before they head into United States History next year. The first part of United States History examines the political, social, and religious context of late medieval/early modern Europe, as that context is significant in the exploration and colonization of the Americas. I’d like the students to finish the “story” of World History in such a way that it dovetails with the “story” of United States History.
I’ve tinkered with my latest composition, “Japanese Trapdoor Snails,” slightly, but have hit a bit of a block with it. As with writer’s block, the solution is simply to write—in this case, music. To do that, though, I need to have a bit more unstructured time, and what I’ve had has been dedicated to more pressing matters.
It’s a quick installment of New Music Tuesday today, friends. I’m working on a piece called “Japanese Trapdoor Snails”; I’m attempting to capture a quintessentially “Japanese” sound, although I’m not sure if I’m succeeding just yet.
It’s for flute, oboe, classical guitar, and drums (so far). I’ll likely continue to add instrumentation as needed.
Here’s a thirty-second bit of what I have so far:
Still a bit static, but what do you think of this odd little piece in its current form? Does it have legs—or one big, fat, muscular belly-foot?
Happy Listening!
—TPP
