Collaborations with John Penola

My super talented bro and I have recently (and finally) begun doing some serious musical collaborations. The results have been really fun/exciting for both of us. John basically sent me sketches, or very loose ideas, of songs in Logic and told me to have at them. So I did, and we've got 2 little songs that we both like and will probably work on a bit more in the future (one may even become involved in Maybe Bomb - whoa!).

For comparison's sake, I included the original "sketches" and of course my versions.

Hope you like!

Look forward to more awesomness like this.

New, Darker, and Generally more Hypnotic

I recently revised an old Logic song of mine, with the working title of "Groper Cleveland" (no, that's not a typo). I included both versions in the zip file. Whaddya think?


Groper Cleveland

Sketch 1-29-11

I think it's safe to say that David Fincher's upcoming The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is my most anticipated film of the year. Even before Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross signed on to compose the score, this was something I knew had potential. After all, who could resist Fincher returning to the crime/noir genre with such an exciting franchise? Yet, with TR and AR officially on board (which excites me to NO end), and the first photos of Rooney Mara (who you may remember as Mark Zuckerberg's girlfriend in The Social Network) as the title character revealed, I'm frothing at the mouth. So I couldn't resist doing a sketch based on this recent W cover.

Sketch with type/"tattoo"



Sketch without

Sketch 1-28-11

Headshot of my Cowboy character. I included a Black & White version for fun. If my layers were more methodical, I'd post a progression, but we'll save that for another time. Enjoy!

Self Portrait 1-26-11

My first self portrait on the iPad! Don't know why I didn't do this sooner.

The original:



A crop that I like (maybe prefer). Which do you like better?

Sketch 1-26-11

Gonna try to do one Sketchbook Pro sketch every night for as long as possible. I've neglected this app for too long. It ain't gonna be easy (this piece went in about 3 different directions before I went with what you see), but I feel the need to try.

New music (yay!) ...by me (boo!)

I recently completed two songs in Logic that I'm pretty happy with - the first called "Bearded Simon LeBon" and the second called "Drunk Simon LeBon" (both titles inspired by a Duran Duran article in New York magazine). These two ended up being an experiment in transitions (they're meant to be played back-to-back as a pair with "Bearded Simon LeBon" as the intro) and instrumentation ("Bearded" is almost exclusively live recorded audio tracks).

My favorite moments on "Drunk" are when the digital tracks made completely in Logic are juxtaposed by the sounds I played out of my microKORG. I want to explore this more in future songs - it can be an enormously satisfying aural experience.

I have a few versions of each, all of which I've included below.

I'm still trying to finish the definitive versions, but this should give you some insight into the process, and how things are more often Different from version to version, rather than Better.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/137ert

Hope you like them!


As a bonus, here's something I did in Sketchbook Pro yesterday...