Countdown to 100: 8 - Whip In
Chronicling the final 10 out of 100 Open Mic and Showcase performances I have done since June 2011. This is #93
photo by Amy Zamarripa
When they say “Keep Austin Weird”, Whip In is maybe one of my favorite examples. Perhaps it’s because it was the first place I saw a show in Austin when I came down to check out Rubicon Recording Studios in February. Two of their slogans are “South Asian Food, South Austin Mood” and “Namaste Y’all!” They have a crazy amount of beers on tap and an even bigger selection in bottles and cases, along with a teeny grocery selection in the back. They also have a menu with some typical Indian food and a few Austin twists - they have panini, but it’ll be like naan bread around curried veggies grilled in a panini press.
It’s also the first place I performed at an open mic when I started going out to them in June. June 7th to be exact. My first performance was rather a hot mess - I tripped on the cables, I knocked into the mic with my face, I got some almonds stuck in my throat to the point some kind person had to go get my water bottle from across the room before I could even continue. But after surviving that, and still getting a positive response from people, I realized it was not as scary as I thought it was going to be.
Tonight was a great night, super full list and a bunch of new faces. With such a full list we were only able to do two songs, and I was already planning to have Heidi Nadine sing Jonah with me, so I decided to go for a nautical theme and do Anchor first. There is something pretty special about hearing someone else interpret your song, and we’ve worked out a few harmonies that are really pretty.
It was also great to have a nice balance of men and women performers, some nights I’m the only or one of very few gals.
I couldn’t get a very good picture, but there was a guy there with an awesome sparkly purple guitar:
And this (also rather crappy cell phone) pic gives you a bit more of the idea of the stage area - the ceiling draped in saris, other sparkly fabric, Indian artwork, and posters decking the walls.
The other thing than happened is when I was getting ready to head home, I could NOT find my bus pass! After searching through my whole bag and asking the couple who sat down across from me if I could trade them places back to my original seat of the night so I could keep looking, the man asked me what I was looking for and ended up giving me a dollar when he heard my story. So grateful, that dollar was the difference between a long cold walk and getting to transfer to my second bus! Thanks again Sir!
Songs: Anchor, Jonah’s Whale
Host: D.C. Bloom
Location:
Whip In
1950 IH35 South
Austin Texas 78704
(512)-442-5337
Odd Tuesdays (1st, 3rd & if there’s a 5th week, that too, of each month)
Sign up at 6:45, Music 7-9ish. 2 to 3 songs depending on how full the list is.
Favorite Whip In Eats: Dal Puppies (spicy fried lentil cakes with tamarind date sauce), The SOLA (Mushroom spinach masala, feta cheese wrapped in naan & grilled on a panini press), Chana dal rice bowl with seasonal squash.
Other things I like about Whip In: The beautiful saris draped from the ceiling, the awesome posters, the church pew style benches inside.
My Trials & Tribulations of SpinTunes Round 2 (Part3)
I woke up on Monday wondering what would happen if I tried switching to 6/8 for the verses and 4/4 for the choruses, and thinking it might be nice prosody even to have the solid, dependable, always on the mark, 4/4 in the chorus part about the bullseye.
I tried it, and it was sooooooooo much better fitting to the lyrics, but I had to leave for work. While out and about, my dad called to say that he had not left town as he thought he was going to, and he would be happy to pick up my brother from the airport. I hadn’t even asked if that was possible and here he was offering it!
So with 4 more hours than I thought I would have suddenly free that night, I was pretty sure I would get somewhere with the recording. My voice was approaching more of the husky, smoky stage so I was pretty sure I’d be able to sing the basic concept of the melody without having to drag my friend into it.
I found a twangy electric country guitar effect that I liked but after several takes, I thought it sounded weird to have the acoustic guitar pushing through the effect, so lugged out my dad’s electric (that I seem to have borrowed fairly long term but haven’t played in years) and laid down the guitar part yet again. I plunked out the simplest of simple bass lines and finally got everything done except for the vocals. At that point I asked my husband to come listen because I wanted to know if I should leave the two contrasting drum tracks, use the (badly done, but at least the same sounding) shaker track I’d made, or just take out the drums altogether. His vote was to keep the drums and then I kicked him out so I could work on the vocals.
I made it through with some cough drops, and a lot of water and the throat potion. I kept an eye on the submission time clock and prioritized what was most important to focus on and stopped in decent time to convert and email my files. There were also some parts that I was hearing better/differently/wished I had hit better but at that point I knew I had to just let go and get it in.
So, it’s in! I’m so proud of myself for sticking through it and turning something in. There were several moments in the past week and a half where I considered not turning something in, or where I was worried I’d run out of time before I got it to a place where I wasn’t completely mortified of sharing it.
I’m grateful I got to push myself way out of my comfort zone and write something I never would have on my own. I’m thankful to all the friends and family, online and offline, who believed in me even when I didn’t. I’m curious to hear the feedback from the judges. I’d love to make it to the next round so I have one more chance to enter a song. I know I could shadow all the way, but I’m worried with everything on my plate, I’d drop the ball if I didn’t have that added pressure of competition to do it.
I want to write more about what a cool community this is that is hosting and participating in this songwriting contest but this beyond too long already! I’ll say for now in short that I’ve been so overwhelmed and impressed with how generous, kind, honest and fair everyone is and I’m so grateful that it exists! I’m sure I’ll get into more details sometime soon, because there is so much good stuff to say. :-)
My Trials & Tribulations of SpinTunes Round 2 (Part2)
My original idea for approaching the challenge was to create a music track and write lyrics to fit it. I tried to put pieces together in a million different ways, making two different files in GarageBand and thinking to paste them together but it wasn’t happening. I started to get a little panicky then.
After a couple days of not getting anywhere I realized I needed to take a new tactic. I decided to try out fitting music to lyrics, so I started looking through a few lyrics I had been working on that week for a class. I chose the one called Bullseye partially because one of the things I heard in my head while writing it was a big drum crash right before the chorus as if something was BAM!, hitting a target. I was hoping that would serve for a believable reason to stop playing one time signature and move to a new one, since I had no idea how to smoothly move between them.
With one piece feeling more created, I thought I might have more luck figuring stuff out with my brother’s keyboard, but he was at VidCon and I couldn’t find the power cord. A few frantic tweets and emails later, he finally got back to me saying where it was and I got started listening to rhythms.
I switched back and forth between trying to get the rhythm parts down, figuring out the chord progressions and adding to the lyrics, at one point ending up on the wikipedia page for Billiards scouring it for possible terms to work into the song.
It was also at about this point that I started losing my voice. Which was weird, because I HADN’T been singing or doing anything to wear it out. It just kind of disappeared. Which sucked because I couldn’t vocally try out the melodies in my head. As it got worse, l started to worry I might not be able to sing for my entry at all! I have a good friend who I thought would probably be willing to step in for me if that happened but realized that I also would not be able to explain to her how the melody went without a voice! So I spend a good deal of time picking out note for note the melody in my head “hunt & peck” style and trying to notate it in Finale, which meant a lot of trial & error & re-adjusting of rests and such to get it to sound as close as possible to what was in my head.
The amazing Jules sent me a recipe for a throat potion, which luckily the cafe where I work had all the ingredients, so I made myself several big cups of it on Saturday during my shift, and my voice slooooowly started to come back a tiny bit. I brought some home with me and kept drinking it the next couple days.
Sunday night I started REALLY panicking. Nothing was working. Nothing sounded right. At least I had more puzzle pieces than I’d had a few days ago, but I felt like they were all from different puzzles!
I had a radio show interview to blog about and otherwise prepare for, homework to catch up on and a house concert to prepare for (which entailed COMPLETELY rearranging the furniture in my house and getting the guest room ready for the artists, and preparing food & drinks for the party). I also had to put in a couple hours at another job the next day and was supposed to pick up my brother from the airport which is 2 hrs away on Monday night during the time the song submission was due.
After watching a bunch of YouTube video lessons about time signatures, stress snacks, some supportive talk from my husband complete with listening to some of his dance tunes collection for examples of how he mixed songs of different time signatures together, several encouraging tweets from the #spintunes folks and a tearful chat with my mom (who was out on the West Coast and therefore still up) in the wee hours of the morning, in desperation I finally decided to go to bed and ask the Higher Powers to give me some guidance while I slept.
My Trials & Tribulations of SpinTunes Round 2 (Part1)
If you’ve been following my tweets for the past week and a half or so, you may have picked up that the challenge for Round 2 of SpinTunes TERRIFIED me and although I started working on it pretty early, I was fighting to get it done, yes, up to the last minutes!
(Well, I wanted give myself at least a little bit of a buffer for uploading, so there were a few things I would have done over, but I opted for getting it in so I even had a chance at competing, rather than get eliminated for missing the deadline. So I got it in with about 15 minutes left to spare, which thank goodness I had that time because I forgot to include an mp3 file with my first email and still had a chance to send it!)
Why was I so freaked out? The challenge was to write a song where the time signatures in the verses were different than the time signatures in the choruses.
I am NOT by any means a music nerd or genius or whatever you want to call those talented people I envy who actually know what they are doing. My music education has been with pretty awesome teachers when I get the chance, but also scattered, varied and sporadic, and much of my writing so far is purely by ear & intuition. Before you start giving me the long list of AMAZING artists who never knew a lick of music theory and tell me I’ll be just fine, rest assured, this has long been a complaint of mine, so I’ve gotten versions of that story a bunch of times, and I’m well aware that you don’t HAVE to be a theory genius to make great music that other people enjoy.
However, the challenge for this round DID require some basic knowledge to be able to pull it off. I’m willing to bet that 99% of my songs are in good old standard 4/4 time. Any of them that aren’t are purely by accident/instinct/chance. (Which I guess the same can be said for all of them that ARE in 4/4 time as well! ha!) Keeping ONE time steady while playing and singing is hard enough for me, let alone switching back and forth in the same song! Because I so often stray from the metronome, I’ll usually play at least a drum loop pretty loud to keep me on track when I record guitar parts, and then depending on the song I will leave it or drop it later.
The thing that seems extra bizzaro to me about that is that I can dance different time signatures - waltz, swing, salsa, etc - no problem! But this challenge made me think of a couple getting up to start waltzing together and suddenly on a dime the music changes to salsa! And then back again to waltz! And back to salsa! All in 3 minutes! That was the best way I could come up with to explain it to my non-musical friends and family who didn’t understand why I was so distraught.
Now I think that really ideally, it would NOT necessarily be that obvious that the time signature was changing, or the change would be fluid and seamless at least. I wasn’t even sure how I was going to pull off two time signatures at all, since GarageBand only allows one time signature per song. (the workaround is to just turn off the metronome and ignore the bars in the recording space as much as possible.)
I wanted to choose two really different time signatures so that it was really obvious that I’d completed the challenge, both to myself and to the judges. I sorta randomly chose 4/4 & 6/8, knowing that the one time previously I THOUGHT I wrote a song in 3/4, a teacher responded with comments about it being in 4/4 and when I asked him to explain why it wasn’t in 3/4 when I’d really tried to make it that way, and how I could tell the difference so I could get it right next time, he wasn’t really able to give me a good answer. So in my book, 4/4 & 3/4 was too high of a risk that I’d end up with no time change at all and be eliminated for not meeting the challenge. Later I realized that there is often confusion between 6/8 & 3/4, but even then I figured if I aimed for 6/8 & landed on 3/4, that would still be different from 4/4.
So that was a starting point.
