Hawaiian Dreams vs. Music For Daydreaming

Thrift Stores always have vinyl for sale and if you give yourself 10 minutes, you'll usually find something. My rule of thumb: if they are charging more than $.99 per album, move on. I know very little about what's rare, collectible or what-not, but I do know what I'm out to find: Hawaiian records (from folks like Hal Aloma, Webley Edwards, Les Brown, Ray Conniff, Jerry Byrd), Magic Organ records (who is the genius behind these albums which are seemingly endlessly abundant?), Persuasive Percussion records, Melachrino Strings records (the Moods in Music series rules), and records from artists I have never heard of before (ex. Grady Martin). I give myself major bonus points for any 60s Chinese pop finds, but those are rare in the shops I frequent (i.e. Salvation Army and Goodwill).

This following piece features various snippets of Enoch Light, Grady Martin, Melachrino Strings, and a Hawaiian record from one of the artists mentioned above, and it's all glued together with various Air King bits. We have used the echoing wurlitzer sample in at least 10 projects. It always works and will be used again. And again.

Lisbon At Twilight

Cobble

Using what is already in front of you, you can always make something new. This is a big tenet of AutoPilot and is also how many Air King pieces start -- by culling the library for loops, drones, chopped up bits from the previous project, etc.

Say is not generated by AutoPilot (i.e. it's generated manually), but it is comprised of recycled and tweaked bits from various different projects:

- Electronic beats created for a doomed Swatch Avatar project Future Farmers was commissioned to do way before Avatars showed up in Second Life.

- Vinyl scratching from 2 sessions Adam (MBO) and I did with DJ Disk several years ago with the goal of creating a Scratch sample library. We had 2 good sessions and all the raw material sits on my hard drive today, mostly unedited...

- An optigan maraca beat sampled long ago for a forgotten reason.

- A severely chopped and reversed Wurlitzer electronic piano demo of Secret Life (which MBO used to do live).

- Various little sound effects done for some multimedia projects back in the late 90s when dot coms would commission (for good sums, btw) boutique outfits like Air King to create very short (remember, bandwidth was an issue back then) loops. The good old days...

- Some classical Webern and Satie samples lying around in my loops directory.

And it's a new piece, which can be chopped up again for the next one...

RPM vs AutoPilot

My friend (and daytime work life colleague), Anu, and I are working on a new AutoPilot sound library to use for the RPM Challenge. We initially talked about making a "standard" record in February for the challenge and then decided to take a different approach and build up a completely new AutoPilot library from which we can generate an album. Once we have the library complete, we can generate endless albums...

So, we are in the prep stage and met last night to talk strategy and ended up creating a few pieces. It went really well. For one of the pieces, we dug into Reaktor, which is a deep app, and I found myself having another one of those gear lust moments. This is definitely a far cry from my world of cheap organs and analogue gear, but what we ended up making had a nice warped quality of its own. Let's see what happens when it ends up getting tweaked by Autopilot!

As soon as we hit a critical mass of material, which will take many more sessions, we'll start running AP and posting excerpts here.

Pop Choice

There was a fair amount of snow falling up in the Southern Cascades this weekend. In
between snow showers and jaunts outside to the sledding hill and x-country slopes with my wife, son and dog, I fired up the old Lowrey Carnival organ, which I purchased a year ago for $36 from Salvation Army in Red Bluff. What a steal!

While my Kimball Caravan is especially cool with 2 sustains (short, long), variable rhythm repeat, and Magic Fingers, the Lowrey's main tones just sound better. It also has 2 manuals, 18 rhythms and a really nice rhythm accompaniment section, including a very bizarre "guitar" tone that I like. Unfortunately, it weighs in about twice as much as the Kimball and that's why it stays in the cabin. Picture me in the image above, blasting the Carnival in an idyllic Mountain setting. Deer and rabbits scurry by, holding hooves...

As I play, I usually have the headphone out going via a direct box into my laptop to grab any magic moments. Here's the very rough beginnings of a track that started by capturing a couple of beats and accompaniments:

Pop Choice

Except for the theremin-like part in the middle, an extra rhythm loop here and there, and a little Wurli and Mtron strings at the end, this recording is Lowrey all the way. What more do you want?

Grandma Organs Must Be Cheap

I have a Craigslist RSS feed on my Netvibes page that keeps me up-to-date on Bay Area organs for sale. I see the standard Hammond B3/C3/M3/M100/L100 posts asking for serious money, depending on condition, vintage, leslie, etc. I disregard those and search for the slew of grandma organs, those Kimball, Lowery, Baldwin, Rodgers, Yamaha, Wurlitzer, Thomas, and No Name behemoths with 1 or 2 manuals, a rhythm section, and usually bass pedals.

These are the postings that keep me amused. They are also the ones I'm interested in. The Kimball Caravan I use with Madame Blavatsky Overdrive was $80 or so (Goodwill) and is amazing, versatile and cuts through rock music as well as a Farfisa or Vox, IMHO. The majority of posters realize that they are stuck with large instruments that few people have any interest in and they request accordingly reasonable prices (from $1. to $100). That's fair. What amuses me are those who can't get over the fact that their Grandparents, Parents, Someone paid several hundreds or even thousands of dollars for something in the 70s or 80s that now has very little monetary value.

My advice: Never pay more than $100 for a grandma organ. Just wait. A deal is around the corner.

Walk into any small town Salvation Army and you'll see what I mean. Case in point: today I was in Red Bluff, Ca. Population 15,000. 1 Salvation Army. The organ pictured above was sitting there in the back room next to a TV and a sewing machine. $75.00. Worked perfectly fine. Sounded awesome, in fact. 2 manuals, loads of voices and rhythms, tremolo, sustain, percussion, etc. Try getting it home. You'll need a truck. That's why they must be cheap. The previous owner did the right thing here. They didn't try to sell it, they gave it away.

Even further back at this store was a weird looking piano with a cable coming from the bottom and 5 switches on the left hand side. It turned out to be a Roland organ. I even moved the plant on top and looked inside. No hammers, no harp, no strings. Just an old circuit board, an amp and speakers. Entirely contained within a piano case. The tag said sold. I turned it on and realized that 2 octaves around middle c didn't even generate sound... Maybe some collector knew something about it, and snatched it up with some scheme or another.

I can relate. I've been there several times before....

Optical Organ (aka Optigan)

In 1998, I convinced my wife to drive with me from San Francisco to Sedona to pick up a broken Optigan for $50. The Optigan was originally marketed as a kid's instrument by Mattell in the 70s and has a broken, scratchy charm that must be heard to be understood. Anyhow, the problem with this particular Optigan was that it would not power on, so I had a hunch that the issue was a bad fuse. One fuse and a little soldiering work later, we were back in business, and I had picked up 13 optigan discs in the sale. Not bad.

We have since used this Optigan again and again for Autopilot and many, many recordings.

Optigans generate sound through optically read "discs" which rotate like a real record on a turntable located beneath the keyboard. Each disc contains beats & musical accompaniments that you play with your left hand via rocker switches and chord-organ-like buttons and tones (organ, marimba, strings, etc) that are played with the right hand on a standard keyboard. There are many cool discs (New Orleans Blues, Gospel Rock, Guitar Boogie, Swing It!, Polynesian Village, Champagne Music, Country Waltz, Singing Rhythm, etc.) which fetch pretty prices on Ebay.

Here are a few Air King pieces which use Optigan:
- Live AutoPilot rhythm performance (1998).
- Piece I recorded for my friend (and fellow Air King compatriot) Geoff's wedding. (2002)
- Another piece from the same wedding.

AutoBlog

It's a new year and this is the first AutoPilot blog post. This will be an area to talk about things that matter: AutoPilot, thrift store organ hunting, old records, gear, tunes, mountain living, fermented foods, making bread, pastured eggs, grass finished beef, etc. You know, relevant stuff.

Check out our generative music AutoPilot system here: http://www.airkingsound.com/autopilot/

We are currently beefing up the sound libraries that feed the app, so check back often. You'll always hear something new.

Also, check out Madameblavatskyoverdrive.com. I play keyboards in this band and we are currently recording album #2 in West Oakland. The first album is available for free. Download it now!

That's post #1.