Project 37: Sudden Death
We returned to the original song challenge for Project 37. We randomly selected the theme of ”Sudden Death” and the constraint of keeping the song under 3 minutes. Here’s what people did with those peramters.
John Henry's Blues by Kelly Duclos
A retelling of the legend of John Henry.
Three Minutes dot Com by Mike Bettison
This song came together in fits and starts. I was messing around with a new vocal synthesizer and started messing with the chorus "Three Minutes dot com" and I just thought it was so funny that I started laughing while I was recording. :-) So then I tried to create some kind of hard(ish) industrial funk groove I could mess with some simple chord changes revolving around D minor. Finally, I just started thinking of rhyming pairs that sounded funny and included "Sudden Death" and interspersed radio traffic blurbs I found on YouTube.
Geek stuff: I used a couple of different Ableton drum kits (Timefold Kit and 707 Funky Beans Kit) to get the sound and pattern right. Second I used Icon Bass from Native Instruments (NI) for the bass sounds and patterns and NI Session Guitarist for the guitar sounds and patterns. I also added some synth hits and bloopies here and there. For the percussion solo/break I used NI's "Cuba" and "Session Percussionist" for sounds and patterns and I'm really happy with how that turned out. To my delight,the whole thing landed at exactly 3 minutes! :-) Great challenge!
Schnelles Ende by Daniel Jöst
For this project I grabbed a song I worked on for years. It never got finished, though. I just could not make a decision about the structure, and the drumming was hard, too. So this project helped me getting a version done. The specification of a three-minute song helped me finishing the drum part without running out of gas after some minutes.
For the structure I just took the parts I liked the most. Finishing this one within a couple of weeks seemed like sudden death to me compared to the years of messing around with it. The lyrics are in German this time, my native language. Surprisingly it wasn't too easy make something up. The middle part features the lines "Weiße Wände, schnelles Ende", and "schnelles Ende" is compareable to sudden death, I would say. Some lines I just reversed, and they strangely sound like a strange language. This was a fun one and it's rocking nicely, I think.
Songs by Bill Fricke
The constraint was a song under three minutes with Sudden Death as the theme. My immediate inclination as to use Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs as a template. Short, simple songs, with simple melodies. I gave myself extra constraints in that the chord progression had to be written quickly, ABAB and maybe a bridge if I felt like it. I think of it as 3 to 6 Death Songs. I had four, but the last one I didn’t have time to finish.
First one was Death by Chocolate. The idea came from my SO, who, after hearing the charge, just blurted out Death by Chocolate. Simple story of a person who desires to die by eating too much chocolate which they crave and love. This was most like a Magnetic Fields type song.
Second one was Death by Elevator (Mr. Otis). Based it on the style of A Boy Named Sue, which I wore out on 45 as a kid. Simple story of a poor man who wishes to die in an elevator crash because he can’t pay his alimony. His wish came true. Last was Everybody Dies Someday. Started out as something else lyrically, but then morphed into a more more tender and poignant song about everyone’s collective end. Someday.
Death by Chocolate
Death by Elevator (Mr. Otis)
Everybody Dies Someday
Sudden Death (parts 1 and 2) by Colby Heston
My take on the theme for Project 37 - Sudden Death was to write about a Darwin Award winner. If you are not familiar with what that is, Darwin Awards honor those who remove their own DNA from our gene pool during the spectacular climax of a 'great idea' gone very wrong. I read of a man who thought it wise to take a selfie while planking on the edge of a 7 story building and fell to his death.
Sudden Death (Part 1) chronicles the tale of his demise. The music for this song was originally written by The Adequate Grippers (Kelly Duclose, Brian Evaslage and myself) over a year ago and I wrote the lyrics for this project. Brian came up with a guitar riff, Kelly added drums and I filled in the rest.
Sudden Death (Part 2) was written from the perspective of that man realizing his fate.
Enjoy!
Chaos i94 by Andrew Charon featuring Steve Burnett and Cory Docken
Andrew Charon (guitar, chants), Steve Burnett (guitar, bass, chants) and Cory Docken (drums and vocals)
I had been trying to recruit a couple of friends Steve and Cory (who didn’t know each other) to join in on Basement sketches for awhile and thought it’d be fun to see what would happen if the three of us just set up a time to record the song. Previous to starting the recording for this challenge, Steve and I jammed a bit and ended up with a part of a song that we liked so we ended up using it as a starting point and the song just kind of evolved into this. Steve has a great DIY studio set up in his basement with a drum set with multiple mics set up, tons of fun toys, and used Cubase to record (totally badass).
We recorded a significant amount of layers of guitar among other things and at the end, it seemed like we needed all parts of the song to be in the foreground. Cory continued to evolve his vocals and in addition to everything else, Steve’s bass playing was outstanding and effortless. This song is titled Chaos i94 and speaks about the Chaos driving east 94. It was a privilege to work with both Steve and Cory and I’m hoping they do more with Basement Sketches in the future.
This is what we ended up with. Enjoy.
Andrew
Suddenly Glorious by Brian Eveslage
This came about pretty quickly. Came up with the intro drumbeat and then laid some simple guitar and bass down. With the theme of sudden death, this song gave me a vibe of a car crash. All I could think about was James Dean wreck and so the lyrics are based a bit around that. Thanks to Neil for helping record the drums at the studio space and Kelly for mastering! This could be a fun, easy one to play live.
Let Me Be by David Cox
In spite of the fact that I took the "let's get all up in our feels" route for this challenge, the experience was a blast! While I've written a few bits and pieces in the past, this is my first fully formed original song. A big thanks to everyone that helped bring it to life: Neil, Brian, Kelly, and Colby! I really like what everyone contributed; it helped capture the feeling I was going for. Colby's guitar in particular is just amazing! I hope everyone enjoys the final mix!
Sudden by Tom Stromsodt
I had a last minute thought and I had to get back on the horse anyway.
Sud in Death by the Dirtpops (featuring Andrew Charon)
This project was a ton of fun. It started with a drum beat. Shelly had the idea to incorporate the “We Will Rock You” beat (as a reference to sporting events and sudden death overtime). We had also been watching a lot of Twin Peaks in honor of David Lynch so that further helped to inspire the style of the song. So I started with that and then wrote the song on guitar. Then it just flowed. Shelly wrote the lyrics quickly. Once we had the blueprint for the song, we asked our friend and Basement Sketches alum Andrew Charon to add some of his personal touches. He laid down the bass part, some rhythm guitar and vocals. Andrew also mastered the finished product.
Overall, we had a blast particularly collaborating on an original song.
Hockey Death by Neil Fasen and Tom Stromsodt
With Tom as my sherpa, we found our way to weave together the intensity and fatigue of sudden death overtime.
Sudden Death by Grant Eull
Once I started researching all the ways the Earth could disappear; the lyrical rabbit hole of sudden death just flowed. Enjoy.
Slippin’ Away by Randy Dever
heya. I cranked this out this afternoon.
I had a hard time coming up with ideas this time and resigned myself to not contributing, but then the deadline got extended by one more day.
I laid some stuff down over a little beat I’ve been dicking around with lately.
I tried to create an impression of the experience of a person who lays dying. I made purposefully rough and ragged — as if their faculties and functions are failing as unfamiliar sensations act on them.
The nearly unintelligible vocal track says
“Neurotransmitters hit me like a flood, as I lay in this ever-expanding pool of flaming blood.”
Well anyhoo….
Thanks!
