I spent the Fourth of July holiday weekend in San Felipe, México, with a large contingent of my wife’s family. On our final night, we unrolled our sleeping bags on the sand to sleep under the stars on the beach. Just before bed, my 5-year-old nephew plopped down next to me and said, “Let’s make wishes on the stars!”
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I met Race Gentry standing with his antique camera and vintage flash lamp outside his mother’s home in La Jolla. I was there to record audio for an All Things Considered story and shoot video to accompany the interview on NPR’s website. Race is one of the few people around who uses the 100-year-old technique.
In typical tape sync fashion, Robert Siegel spoke to Race by phone. I stood next to Race, holding the mic six inches from his mouth — my recording of his voice would later be combined with the host’s voice by NPR editors, giving the conversation a higher quality, natural sound. Unfortunately, we had to stop the interview every few minutes because of the military flights going in and out of MCAS Miramar. We were also interrupted for trash collection. And again for recycling.
Race explained the process of pouring the powder in the tray, setting the percussion cap in place, pulling the trigger to ignite the cap, and the explosive flash that follows. The first flash lamp he demonstrated with wouldn’t fire. He was using toy paper caps, but the humidity or bad luck kept it from firing. He switched to another flash lamp that uses rare, original percussion caps. That definitely did the trick. The massive smoke cloud was pretty impressive.
Take a look at the final video, listen to the interview and hear the flash lamp sound. Race Gentry also has his own flash lamp videos on YouTube.
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Here’s another diddy, mixed in Garage Band. I threw in a few of the default drum loops for fun. Download the individual tracks for your mixing pleasure: Guitar, Wah, Rhythm.
2 x o o x x x – 4 x o o x x x – A
F#m – A – E – F#m
G# – A – C#m – B
F#m – D – A – E
C#m – A – C#m – B
C#m – A – B – G#
This work by Nathan Gibbs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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Here’s a track I’ve fiddled with the last few days. I’m posting this for you musicians to remix. I’m licensing it under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. That means you are free to use it as long as give me credit (attribution), don’t make money with it (noncommercial), and license any work you make under the same license (share alike). Contact me if you want to use it outside those parameters.
For your mixing pleasure, download the individual pieces (recorded at 72bpm): main guitar riff (mp3), accent guitars (mp3), bassline (mp3) and reversed cymbols (mp3). The bass and cymbols came straight out of Garage Band, so feel free to discard those and come up with something better. If you use these pieces in some way, post a link in the comments.
Bm7 – A – D
G – Bâ™ – D
Bm – Gâ™ – A – E
Bm – A – G – A – Gâ™
This work by Nathan Gibbs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
I’ve played the piano and guitar most of my life. I’ve improvised an endless number of riffs that never materialize into songs. I’m going to try and start recording and posting them online with a flexible copyright, hoping that the creative geniuses out there will make something out of it.
This video is an eight minute excerpt of a 12 minute improvisation (I think Sarah ran out of tape). As students in an M.F.A. program (it looks like their site went downhill after Fish went to RISD), the four of us had been playing together for a few months. We recorded some really interesting sessions, learning the soundscape of each instrument. The masks were donned as last-minute inspiration, but it was the first time we’d played with them:
This is the one and only public performance from the group we called Floating Point: Andrew Lynn on cello, Stephan Moore on laptop, Naomi Ture on violin, and myself on guitar.