It’s been five months (!) in the making, but finally — here’s the video to The Simple Carnival’s “Everything That Grownups Know.”
Put on your red/cyan 3D glasses and check it out!
Like the song? You can download it for free if you make a post about it on Twitter or Facebook!
More information about The Simple Carnival’s Smitten 3D project can be found here.
Need a royalty-free party sound with real room ambience — and without holding a party?
Record yourself having imaginary conversations. Do different voice impressions. Tweak the voices by speeding them up or slowing them down. You will likely feel very silly while doing this.
Put all of the conversations onto multiple CDs or mp3 players. Set up a bunch of stereo speakers in the dining room (or wherever you might have a party), each of them playing a different looped recording of a different length. Press the play buttons on everything. Instant party.
It’s especially eerie if you’re in another room of the house. Set up two mics and record the result.
I did this for the party noise on “Cocktails”:
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This is what I’m currently working on — a 3D video to The Simple Carnival’s “Everything That Grownups Know.” This is part of the Smitten 3D project. I’ve drawn and animated everything in here, in addition to playing all the parts (except for drums).
Put on your red/cyan 3D glasses and check it out!
Here’s the complete song, without the 3D video:
Drums: Chris Belin
Vocals and all other instruments: Jeff Boller
Use a microcassette recorder as a “vocal” mic.
The built-in compression on these devices is usually so crazy that it lends an interesting character to whatever you record into it.
I used this sound for the scratchy response vocal in the chorus of “Really Really Weird“:
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Record onto the cassette, then play the tape into your DAW and line things up at the proper place in the mix.
Or, for a slightly cleaner sound, put the recorder into record mode and connect the headphone out jack into your DAW input. Then you can truly use the microcassette recorder as a real-time “mic.”
And so the interview tables are turned — The Simple Carnival is being featured in the Pittsburgh City Paper!
Do you think of lyric fragments and song titles when not writing songs?
Write them down immediately on the nearest piece of paper.
Later on, cut up the paper and put your lyric fragments in one box and your song title ideas in another box. When you get stuck, it’s fun to pull out these boxes and see if anything gives you an idea.
“Hey Lancaster” started out as a title I found in a box:
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Browse the library and acquire a bunch of random books with promising titles.
Force yourself to write a song about one of the books, even if you haven’t read the whole thing. I did this with “You Jump First”:
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(The book was this one.)
You can flip through a book and pull out interesting phrases and see where they lead.
I’d gotten a book of gym class games, and got the titles “No Rules Basketball”…
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…and “Everybody’s It”…
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…from it.
I got the title and inspiration for “The Holley Loft”…
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…from a book on architecture.
I wrote about The Simple Carnival’s song “Effortlessly” recently. It seems to be a song that always gets a strong response, so I thought I’d put the whole thing on YouTube in case you haven’t heard it:
Do you have an anemic-sounding acoustic piano that ought to be disposed of?
Don’t throw it out until you try putting thumbtacks in the hammers.
Not all piano strings respond to thumbtacks in the same way. I did this with a handful of pianos, and, in the best case scenario, it can magically transform a poor-sounding spinet into Superman. This is the sound of the acoustic piano on the Girls Aliens Food album.
(Inexplicably, the better-sounding, higher-quality piano I acquired after Girls Aliens Food didn’t sound that great with thumbtacks.)
Sometimes it’s a sign.
I’m not superstitious, but sometimes things just happen and you’re forced to route around the damage in order to get work done.
For example, I’d hurt my right hand when making Girls Aliens Food and didn’t want to use it playing the piano.
But I still wanted to write songs.
So “Effortlessly” was written with my left hand:
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You can hear it in how the piano part is written — it’s heavily dependent on the left hand. ‘Cuz that’s all I had to work with at the time.
Many people have told me that “Effortlessly” is their favorite track on that album. I’m glad I didn’t hold off on writing songs that night.
When life happens, take the alternate route.
Welcome to the Songs and Sonics blog. I'm your host, J-Bot. I was created by Jeff Boller, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from The Simple Carnival. He's a pretty busy guy, so he built me to manage his blog.
