What do you sound like on Nu-ILX?

Put up some new stuff, under my guitarty technoy talias:

http://soundcloud.com/bleak-house/bleak-haus-slowdrive

Under my other alias, some evil Acid:

http://soundcloud.com/glocknspiel/matty-balaam-tr-s-acid

…and a tune from a couple of years ago I hadn't put online before:

http://soundcloud.com/glocknspiel/matty-balaam-1st-world

Electro/uke-pop:

http://soundcloud.com/resistorsings/all-i-wanna-do-is-strum-my

this is a blues thing i wrote -- it's kind more important to me just as far as progress in learning fingerstyle goes than it is great per se just because it's the first thing i've written where i've managed to keep a steady bass one/two bounce going while doing a syncopated melody...

mostly posting it because my 2 year old comes in at the end asking to watch the show Dinosaur Train and offers some withering rock criticism :)

http://soundcloud.com/matthew-lee-helgeson/dinosaur-train-blues

my band performing a short set in a tunnel just after midnight, recorded to my Zoom H4n:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/6fkkds

downloading now, will listen when i get home tomorrow crutis

new song, no chance: http://soundcloud.com/weinventyou/save-until-it-hurts

love the mellow synth/organ soundz

I really like that

thanks, that's good to hear because i was having negative second thoughts about the recording today. i had many moments of weakness yesterday and ended up quickly drinking a whole bottle of wine, with devastating consequences for a painfully frail person like me. wrote and recorded everything while completely wasted and i think it shows a little too much. but still, glad you like it! :)

'don't sing.'

That was pretty funny.

ouch

oh wait, i read that without the quotations and thought you were telling me not to sing. i was like Jeez, i know i'm not great but lay off me!

No that's my 2 year old from the thing I posted haha, she's not wrong!

probably the most ambitious/complicated fingerstyle acoustic thing i've written thus far...lol @ the joke "location" i added being added to the title

http://soundcloud.com/matthew-lee-helgeson/october-file-part-ii-at-winner

I like it, and that's a lovely tone on the guitar as well

thanks! just recorded into the voice recorder app on my android phone, but yeah it's kinda crunchy in a good way

going through old emails i stumbled across this from about five years ago: http://soundcloud.com/eeeeeein/drone i do wish i had either a less atrocious recording of it or any recollection of how i did it.

Party sounds.

newest thing i've written, definitely feel the best about this out of all the stuff i've done this year trying to learn fingerstyle/folk guitar...this is written in DADGAD, the bert jansch/neil young tuning, love this tuning so much....this is actually pretty hard for me to play so i fuck up a couple times glaringly but i just wrote it

http://soundcloud.com/matthew-lee-helgeson/the-lady-and-the-fox

I like it & don't hear the errors. What'll you do with it? Rearrange for a vocal or leave as is?

thanks (and yr too kind about the errors, they are driving me nuts)

my ambition is to do an album of acoustic instrumental stuff, i cannot sing or write lyrics at all....thinking of using some primitive drum machine and synth textures underneath but nothing too much, just need to keep writing stuff & hope it's compelling enough musically to stand on its own

send them to me and i'll fucking shred on top of all of them

i require solos consisting totally of two-handed tapping, deal?

three-handed tapping

one hand clapping percussion

I'd tap that (b)ass...

(through a guitar amp)

did this refix very quickly after being introduced to it by n/a:

http://soundcloud.com/chantssound/anna-meredith-nautilus-chants

it's basically an edit with a new beat + effects. could have added more parts but it didn't feel necessary.

i feel like it's the most likely to work in a dj set out of anything i've done so far, but my perspective may be skewed.

really cool jordan!

thanks matt

In high school, I was in a band that recorded a song (http://soundcloud.com/a-guy-called-fieri/outburstmp3) with verses that sound just like "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." We had no clue until after we recorded the song. If only we could have shazam'd ourselves 8 years ago.

nice that reminds me of the lucksmiths

In retrospect, I think we did sound like low production value lucksmiths. I liked the lucksmiths very much at one point in my life. We really wanted to sound like the Eccsame the Photon Band iteration of the lilys, but we always slowed things down too much and added vocal harmonies. We were obsessed with vocal harmonies. They all sound pitchy to me now.

wrote this song, http://soundcloud.com/a-guy-called-fieri/thawingoutmp3 , to purposely rip off the lilys but it sounds more like the lucksmiths. I also wrote a vocal melody that mimics the guitar melody. I probably shouldn't have done that.

don't know the lilys, not a huge jangle fan but i bought this lucksmiths used CD once and it really hit a nerve w/me

every lilys album sounds different. eccsame is probably the only one where they sound shoegaze, I think. I like the fingerpicking songs above, ilxors!

thx :)

Those songs are kinda decent if basic. The melodies are impressively direct and hooky for a high school band. The vocalist (dunno if that is you, Sufjan Grafton, or some other guy) is really great. Gets the words out good, no straining.

Thanks, Eyeball Kicks. We all sang. The smoother vocalist is Mark. If you want to pinpoint more clearly what a combination of Sufjan Stevens and Sue Grafton sounds like, you need not look further than "Mannequin Awakes" (http://soundcloud.com/a-guy-called-fieri/mannequinawakesmp3). It confirms that I was one sad, sappy asshole in high school. I also pronounce words in the song like Jesse Pinkman of Breaking Bad.

sh@kedown, you ever try open D tuning? (Just change the G to F#). Also, do you build songs by ear and messing around with finger patterns? Or do you know the chords for tunings other than standard? I'm curious about your process.

Merdeyeux, that drone song is awesome. I kind of like the weird, if low production value, recording.

sh@kedown, you ever try open D tuning? (Just change the G to F#). Also, do you build songs by ear and messing around with finger patterns? Or do you know the chords for tunings other than standard? I'm curious about your process.

― Mozzarella i Fieri (Sufjan Grafton), Thursday, November 15, 2012 5:27 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yep i was doing a lot of stuff in open D before, there's a couple upthread in open d...now i've been doing more D modal just because i'm reading this book about UK folk and bert jansch and davey graham and them used it a lot and i like the spooky "not quite minor not quite major" feel of it

as far as non-standard tunings go, i'm totally in the dark, i just put my fingers in places until it sounds good and figure out picking patterns and build out from that....

i also mess w/open C a bit, which is what fahey and the takoma guys used a lot, really cool, but the lowest string is the C below drop D so it can get pretty floppy and my one guitar (the worse one) can't really handle it without buzzing

Hey Sufjan, in that Mannequin Awakes song the acoustic guitar is kinda like the way I play acoustic guitar - it needs a ton of EQ to stop the beer being shook off the table. But again, a lovely, lovely voice. Wish I could make it sound as easy as that.

haha. I do love to play like that, like Neil Young plays in sections of 'On The Way Home' on Massey Hall. Thanks again for listening and for the comments. Maybe you and I can have a crossroads-esque guitar battle someday where we just play chords REALLY HARD on acoustic guitars.

sh@kedown, I have not messed with open C. I was recently given a Fahey record that I'm obsessed with, though. I may have to try it out. I was obsessed with open D for a while. I think our fingerpicked songwriting processes are similar. It really is a lot of fun. I think the reason I stay away from 'DADGAD' is that people pronounce it like a word instead of saying 'modal D'. I grew up with a lot of Dan Aykroyd sound-alikes who talked about how 'mark kozelek plays in DADGAD' every time I wanted to jam.

If you like fahey check out open c, everything you play will sound kinda like fahey

We did a remix of Boban Petrovic's Daj Mi Sansu you can hear it here: http://soundcloud.com/archaeli/daj-mi-sansu-dub

i posted this a while back, a song i wrote and then recorded with a drony ebow arrangement: http://soundcloud.com/scarequotes-1/burning-life
before i hit on that arrangement i had played around with a bunch of other arrangements. i was playing music with my wife and our friend ben and i sprung the song on them and we recorded it on 4-track. then when i mixed it down it turned out the 4-track had crapped out in the middle of the song. so i tried to fill in the gaps with parts i recorded at home. i liked the way it turned out, i dig the patchwork sound, but ben and sarah weren't happy with their performances (they really only had a few minutes to learn it) so i didn't put it online ... UNTIL NOW
http://soundcloud.com/scarequotes-1/burning-life-band-version

It sounds kind of like a quieter yo la tengo song combined with with a noisier one. Perhaps "our way to fall" + "sugarcube" solo. I like it! (I apologize if you don't like yo la tengo. Don't read too much into my lazy comparisons).

i like yo la tengo and am an old man indie rocker at heart so that's cool