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You make me the best me

My daughter persuaded me to watch K-Pop Demon Hunters while I was tired, and I only saw the first 15 minutes before nodding off. To make up for my lapse I decided I should challenge myself to a) watch the rest of the movie, and b) write a K-Pop song.

I’m looking for stereotypical sweetness, over the top vocal harmonies with multiple singers, squeaky synth sounds, clean, sharp drums and bass, and the de rigeur repeated melodic hook. Despite the name, a fair proportion of K-Pop is sung in English, so I wasn’t too concerned about my complete lack of Korean.

Like many of my compositions, the end result usually ends up being a bit different to what I intended; songs seem to have some kind of life of their own, and my role is to shepherd them in the general direction rather than be too picky; that happened here. I’ve ended up with a sweet, optimistic, high-energy pop song, but I’m not sure that it’s really K-Pop. I’m quite happy with it all the same.

Vocals are, as usual, by Synthesizer V, using the Mia and Solaria II voice databases for the main vocals, and Noa HEX for the rap section. I’ve not used SV’s rap mode before; it doesn’t sound very enthusiastic, but it works well enough.

That squeaky bass is by Logic’s venerable ES2 synth driven by a Logic player. Other keyboard parts are by ES2 and UAD’s PolyMax, which I really like. Funky guitar is by UJAM’s Sparkle 2. Drums are from Logic’s EDM drum machine, driven by a Logic player. The vocals in the second verse really remind me of Olivia Newton-John!

I’m pretty happy with the mix on this; quite a bit of testing in the car really helped keep the bass under control! I also made a point of backing off some of the layering, turning down reverbs to keep everything really up-front and positive, especially during the earlier parts of the song.

Like my previous releases “I’ve only met you once” and “Dancing by myself“, I submitted this song for release in a compilation album, this time “The Four Seasons of Bonkwave: Autumn Waves“; I love the whole bonkwave ethos, though it’s generally a very long way away from K-pop!

[Intro]
You make me
the best me
I can be

[Verse]
We’re taking it slow,
I don’t want you to go
Wanna savour every moment with you

Though we’re sometimes apart
you’ve always got my heart
Wanna savour every moment with you

When you look into my eyes
it shouldn’t come as a surprise
want you to savour every moment with me

[Chorus]
‘cause you make me the best me (I can be)
you make me the best me (I can be)
you make me the best me (I can be)
you make me the best me (I can be)

[Verse]
(rap)
You and me can be the best thing together
gonna be unstoppable, us forever

I wanna be the reason for your smile
match your energy, love your style

I wanna be the picture in your frame
find the spark to light your flame

Looking to the future I can see
that you make me the best me
 
(vocal)
I want to be the picture in your frame
find the spark to light your flame

[Chorus]
‘cause you make me the best me (I can be)
you make me the best me (I can be)
you make me the best me (I can be)
you make me the best me (I can be)

[Verse]
Since I met you
I’ve known exactly what to do,
never had a moment’s hesitation

You’ve made me see
how I can be the best me
never had a moment’s hesitation

I’m so sure we’ll be complete
I’m gonna jump in with both feet,
never hesitating for a moment

[Chorus]
‘cause you make me the best me (I can be)
(I want to be the picture in your frame)
you make me the best me (I can be)
(find the spark to light your flame)
you make me the best me (I can be)
you make me the best me
I can be

If you like this song, please consider supporting me by buying my albums on Bandcamp, and sharing links to my music on your socials.

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Unexpected camera upgrade

I took some dead batteries, cables, and old power supplies to drop off in the electrical recycling bin at our local supermarket. As I was putting stuff in, I spotted that there was a camera in the bin; a Nikon D3000 SLR body, in apparently good mechanical condition. I nabbed it and took it home.

A Nikon D3000 camera body

This camera can’t be powered by USB (what’s more, Mini-USB, yuk). I needed to get hold of a battery, so I ordered one. While that was on its way, I spotted an identical camera body for sale on a local small ads site, advertised as hors service (broken) due to having been dropped and its lens smashed off, for the princely sum of €20, including a battery and charger. I figured that it was likely to be a cheaper source of spare parts than trying to buy them individually, so I bought it. When it arrived it was clear that the lens had indeed been smashed off, however, what was left was the body with the remains of the lens attached. That is, when it was dropped, it had smashed the lens but not the body. All I needed to do was press the lens release button, remove the stub of a lens that remained, and I had a perfectly good camera body. Bonus!

Now that I also had a battery, and a good camera body to compare with, I realised that the first camera’s mirror was stuck in the up position. I could pull it down, but it just popped back up again. Pressing the shutter button showed an error message. A bit of searching led me to a guide on ifixit addressing this exact error. So I removed the bottom plate, freed up the shutter motor cog, added a tiny drop of oil, and voila, another working camera body!

So then I had two camera bodies and no lens. The D3000 is quite old, launched in 2009, and featuring a 10 megapixel APS-C sensor. It’s compatible with Nikon DX lenses (which have a crop factor relative to full-frame cameras) which are readily available second-hand. I’d not really thought about buying a camera for a while (I was into it while a student; I even had a darkroom in my cellar), but the main thing I’ve had photo problems with is taking decent pictures of the amazing mountains around where I live. Phone cameras are usually very wide angle, and zooming in just descends into blurry mush. I didn’t really have a good idea of how long a lens I might want, but I’d read that the stock 18-55mm lens sold with this camera was not much good, so I thought I’d look for something a little longer. I found a nice-looking Sigma 17-70 f2.8-4.5 zoom with a DX mount – this is a relatively fast lens for its size and price at €70.

A Sigma 17-70 zoom lens

Unfortunately I didn’t quite do my homework, and discovered the hard way that this lens will not autofocus on a D3000 because it lacks a built-in “HSM” autofocus motor, and the low-end D3000 doesn’t have an in-body AF motor to drive it. Using AF lenses in manual mode is fairly hopeless because the viewfinder view is not big enough to judge focus well, there’s no split prism, and the manual focus ring is quite coarse. So I needed to find a different lens. I put this lens and one of the bodies up for sale.

What this lens had showed me was that 70mm is nowhere near enough for taking pictures of mountains. In fact zoomed in fully, it was almost identical to the magnification of my own eyes, as I recall being the case with uncropped 50mm lenses on film cameras. In looking around for another lens I found someone selling a pair – an original Nikon 18-55 kit lens (as a bonus, the version with vibration reduction), and a Sigma 70–300mm zoom with an autofocus motor. Both lenses for €130. That’s a good deal in its own right, but this was actually a bigger bundle including a Nikon D5000 body, battery, charger, filters, and a nice camera bag. The D5000 is the same age, but a fair bit better than the D3000, adding higher performance, higher resolution, an articulated screen, and rudimentary video support. I suspect this had not sold because the ad misdescribed it as a “Nikon DX” camera. So I bought that.

That arrived, and was exactly as described. The 300mm lens is plenty big enough to take pics of mountains. I took this one of the Pointe Percée (2,753m) from Passy, about 10km away.

Snowy mountains & rocky cliffs of the Aravis ridge. In the foreground, the 4 humps of the quatre têtes, behind, the pointe percée, 2,752m

Now I have 3 camera bodies and 3 lenses for a total outlay of about €220. This is getting ridiculous!

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Call me back

Automation channels for the guitar part. Level in yellow, complex wah-wah pedal position in orange.

So you spend ages setting up a web hook so that you can receive notifications when something interesting happens at some API provider that you use. But they never seem to call it, and you wonder why. Have you ever considered how this might feel from the web hook’s perspective? Well, that’s what this song is about.

Yes, this is a very silly bit of anthropomorphisation, but whatever, it’s a fun idea and makes for a nice song! Style-wise, there’s a lot of Morcheeba and Zero 7 trip-hop influence in here, but I doubt they would sing quite such a happy-sounding chorus! For their sake, in keeping with the genre, I found some CR-78 drum machine loops, a Wurlitzer electric piano using Logic’s Vintage Electric Piano instrument, a chilled-out wah-wah guitar, a wacky, chaotic texture from the Native Instruments Komplete “25” library, some lovely Logic Studio strings, and Logic’s drummer on a nice natural-sounding kit. I thought that I’d been using Logic’s players a bit too much in my songs lately, mainly because I’m lazy, so in this one I played the (real!) bass guitar part myself, also to prove to myself that I can.

Vocals are by Synthesizer V 2.0, as usual, using Solaria 2, with another Solaria and Mai on backing vocals.

I commissioned Uama on fiverr.com, all the way over in Argentina, to play the guitar part, and he did a great job in creating the chilled, trippy style I was after, though I ended up redoing the wah effect with a ton of automation using the ribbon modulation controller on my Arturia Minilab II keyboard, some of which you can see in the featured image in this post. To give the solo a more spacey feel I used the Cableguys Pancake 2 plugin to pan it around the stereo field.

As in some of my other songs, the lyrics are deliberately ambiguous – if you have no idea what a web hook is, you can be quite comfortable thinking that this song is about a slightly needy person that wants a call back after exchanging contact details, and is a bit unhappy about being ghosted. Those of you who understand what it’s really about might spot a few clues.

The first inkling comes from the “all those clicks, all those emails” that might be required in setting up a web hook. Then “I wanna say that it’s ok in two hundred ways” should cause you to recall that “200 OK” is an expected HTTP response code from a request sent to a web hook (yes it’s likely to be a 204, but 200 will do!). “Write a little message and post it to me”, well this is asking the caller to make an HTTP POST request, obviously! “I need a little token if you wanna know me better”, is not asking for a gift or bribe, but an authentication token, usually an HMAC signature, to prove that the caller is legit. “I want your body, not just what’s in your head”, refers of course (well, apart from the obvious) to the header and body parts of an HTTP request; the former will often contain the aforementioned token. “I’m listening out…” – an HTTP endpoint has to listen for incoming requests. Aside from all that it’s really just complaining that the endpoint that was so carefully set up isn’t being used. That’s a bit sad, so we can feel a little sorry for the poor little web hook, but at least it sounds cheerful and optimistic, and resigned to continuing to wait for something to happen; it is after all its raison d’être.

I have added this track to my “Developer Music” album.

[Verse]
When we first met
we got everything set up
all those clicks
all those emails
so I know you’ve got my number
but you never call me
did I give you the wrong impression
that I wanted to hear from you?
didn’t I make it clear?
that’s why I’m here

[Chorus]
I just want you to 
call me back
to know that I’m wanted, so please
call me back
I’m just sitting here waiting for you to
call me back
Please let me know if I’m wasting my time
(call me back)
I’ll be here waiting for you

[Verse]
I wanna say that it’s ok in two hundred ways
Write a little message and post it to me
It might be a rejection; I’d prefer a love letter
but I need a little token if you wanna know me better
I want your body, not just what’s in your head
I’m listening out for every word that you said
I’m try'na keep this uncomplicated
But I'm so lonely without you

[Break/solo]

[Chorus]
I just want you to 
call me back
to know that I’m wanted, so please
call me back
I’m just sitting here waiting for you to
call me back
please let me know if I’m wasting my time
(call me back)
I’ll be here waiting for you
call me back
I wanna know that I’m wanted, so please
call me back
I’m just sitting here waiting for you to
call me back
Please let me know if I’m wasting my time
(call me back)
I’ll be here waiting for you

If you like this song, please consider supporting me by buying my albums on Bandcamp, and sharing links to my music on your socials.

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I found it on Etsy

Sadly, there’s no great story behind this song. I’d love to be able to say that it’s in reference to some past circumstance recalled with fondness, but it’s just a nice little tongue-in-cheek fiction. But let’s explore the story anyway: a guy has a thing that was obtained from Etsy; he’s not quite sure what it actually is, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter, because it’s main purpose is to remind our protagonist of his (temporarily?) absent love interest.

In case you’re not familiar with Etsy, it’s an online store that aims to be a marketplace for hand-made, home-crafted goods. If you’re into leatherwork, macrame, felt, shoes, vintage clothes, and myriad other things, it’s quite a sweet and lovely place, filled with people carving out their own little niches. Because people are people, some of the things you can find on there are very strange: the belly button cleaners, the potato people, the 8-legged stuffed chicken, the crochet digestive tract, the toesnail, clippy sculptures, and so on. It also suffers from occasional sellers that resell cheap goods obtained from Ali Express, Temu, and other large-scale Chinese commercial sites, which isn’t in keeping with the spirit of the place.

So I was just entertained by the idea of buying something without having any idea what it was. Later I was thinking about why you might keep such a thing, and the romance angle popped up, along with the phrases “I found it on Etsy”, and “it reminds me of you”, and voila – one song idea.

The song is a conventional structure that I’ve used before: cut-back intro, long first verse, short chorus, second verse, chorus, solo, ending, and all wrapped up in just under 3 minutes.

I really liked using UJAM’s virtual guitar instruments on previous songs, so I bought a few more, including Sparkle, a “pop electric guitar”, and it’s exactly what I was looking for — clean, sweet tones, smooth, funky strumming, and a great partner for their Amber acoustic guitar plugin; both are used in this song. Drums and bass are courtesy of Logic’s players, and the vocals are by my go-to plugin, Synthesizer V. I wasn’t sure on the timing for the vocal part, so I sang the tricky parts myself, then got SV to convert them to synthesised versions that I could fine tune.

I left space for a solo, but initially I wasn’t sure what instrument to fill it with. I’ve commissioned various musicians for guitar and harmonica parts before, but I was looking for something a little different. So after singing the song to myself and listening to early mixes, I decided that a trumpet would fit the bill. The style I had in mind for the trumpet part was along the lines of Pet Shop Boys “Go West”, their wonderfully over-the-top 1993 pomp-glam-pop rendition of Village People’s 1979 original, which features fantastic horn section and solo trumpet parts. As usual, Fiverr proved a rich resource, and I found Kelly O, an astonishingly capable Australian trumpet player based in Berlin.

Kelly provided three full-length takes, so I was able to pick the bits I liked (using a Logic take stack) to form a single trumpet part. I then split it up into the verse, chorus, and solo sections so that I could mix them separately. To make it sound more of a section I duplicated a track, and used Logic’s Flex Pitch to turn it into a harmony line for the choruses.

In all this was such fun to make. It’s just a sweet, funny, sentimental pop song with no pretensions. I hope the people at Etsy like it too!

I bought this thing
I don’t remember what it does
Thought it would go with my sofa,
or maybe store my shoes
But it’s kind of cool,
or at least it was
At some point in the last 50 years or so
I wish I could remember what it’s meant for
Should I hang it on my door
or wear it when I climb a tree?
It’s got new-age, vintage, hi-tech, flower-power
authenticity

I found it on Etsy
  I can’t remember what it’s for
I found it on Etsy
  I think I love it, but I’m not quite sure
I found it on Etsy
  I don’t really care what it’s meant to do
I found it on Etsy
  ‘cause it reminds me of you

It’s fully reclaimed,
recycled but new
Completely authentic,
though I don’t know by who
It’s nothing like the one
on Ali Express
I’m not sure it’s quite my style,
The way that I dress
It’s one of the things that reminds me of you
Ooh, and it smells great at bathtime too
I was happy it was there when I knew I’d be late,
bringing back those memories of our first date

I found it on Etsy
  I can’t remember what it’s for
I found it on Etsy
  I think I love it, but I’m not quite sure
I found it on Etsy
  I don’t care what it’s meant to do
I found it on Etsy
  ‘cause it reminds me of you
I found it on Etsy
  I can’t remember what it’s for
I found it on Etsy
  I think I love it, but I’m not quite sure
I found it on Etsy
  I don’t care what it’s meant to do
I found it on Etsy
  ‘cause it reminds me of you

[solo]
I found it on Etsy
  I found it
I found it on Etsy
  Oh yeah, I found it
I found it on Etsy
  I found it on Etsy
I found it on Etsy
  and it reminds me of you

If you like this song, please consider supporting me by buying my albums on Bandcamp, and sharing links to my music on your socials.