Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘snare’

My New Album ‘Carnival’ Hits The Streams

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 21, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Congratulations to me! The 47th album by my musical act Salon de la Guerre has just hit the streaming services, and unlike the somber piano album I unleashed just a week ago, this new one is a bit more upbeat and radio friendly (dare I dream that anybody will play this on a radio).

The latest album is called Carnival and it’s now available for digital download on all the major streaming platforms, including Amazon, Apple Music, Pandora, Bandcamp, YouTube and Spotify.

As I said in a recent blog post, this latest album of upbeat rock and alternative songs is where you get to hear me learn how to play the drums in real time, kind of the way you heard me learn to play piano in previous outings. So you can take that as a nervy statement of purpose or an apology.

See, I never had a real drum set on previous Salon de la Guerre records; instead I’ve turned to drum loops and beats I programmed myself on Logic Pro X, GarageBand or Cubase. Lately, however, I wanted to expand the dimensions of my sound a bit, make the songs sound less mechanical and the production of the songs a bit more “roomy.” And as I said earlier this month, I thought some people out there might reject my music simply because it had no real drums.

What’s my personal experience with drumming? Precious little except by osmosis: I was in marching band in high school and while I didn’t play the drums, my sister did, and I was for a long time on a quest to figure out how the magic of drumrolls went down. I bought a pair of my own drumsticks almost 30 years ago, but I’ve never had anything to beat with them except a few cardboard boxes (I hear the Byrds did that in the beginning). Given the quality of the drum loops on modern software—as well as the fact I don’t have a band or a soundproof room in my apartment, and furthermore that I don’t keep time very well—I largely gave up on the idea of real drums until this last autumn, when a kid told me at a high school open house that there were drum rooms in New York City. I realized I could simply take my laptop and a microphone to one of them and experiment.

I’m happy with the results and think I’ve made a fun work that doesn’t sound like anything I’ve done before. The Stonesy flush of “Drink Mee” (the album’s first “single,” as it were) finds me working even without the help of a metronome, and after hearing what I did on the rhythm track here, I decided to go big with a falsetto vocal. I hope you like that instinct, and if not, I apologize in advance.

The idea again: If I’m keeping it fresh for myself, my gamble is that I’m making it fresh for listeners. You can be the judge.

Lyrically, Carnival is a bit of a party album, but since it’s me and I always try to bring a novelist’s sense of irony and wrongness, there’s always going to be a bit of sour with the sweet. As I say on Bandcamp, “The songs look into feelings of anticipation for festive and better times but also know something about the hangovers that come after the fun.”

Meanwhile, I’ll have to humble-brag a big: With the release of Carnival, I now have almost 600 songs in circulation online. Yes, you can actually go count them (if you’re doing your due diligence).

The entire album Carnival, like its predecessors, was composed, performed and produced by yours truly at my home studio, except, in this case, for the drum tracks, which were recorded at the Rivington Music Rehearsal Studios in lower Manhattan. All the work was done over the autumn of 2025.

The cover photo is by Susan Daniels.

I hope you enjoy it. Here’s a taste from YouTube:

Read Full Post »

Give the Drummer Some

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 11, 2025| Leave a Comment »

A few years ago I was telling a friend after I’d finished an album that I thought I was a pretty good timekeeper.

Without missing a beat, he said: “No you aren’t.” (Thanks, Jason, for keeping me honest!)

If you are a Salon de la Guerre fan (a rare breed) you have likely sensed something critical about my music. Not something missing, necessarily, but a certain sound quality that has characterized my (almost 600!) songs. You are right, and I won’t make you guess: I have never, ever used a real drum set. No real drummer has ever graced a Salon de la Guerre song. Every beat you hear has been patched, drum-machined, looped, fabricated and preconceived by robots. I have found a way many times to work in real instruments (including acoustic and electric guitars, pianos, banjos, lap steel guitars and saxophones). But never a real drum kit.

That is, until this year, when I completed an album called Carnival, coming to a streaming service near you soon.

But let me back up.

How can a rock ’n’ roll fan like me have gone so long without real drums? Well, it’s not because I don’t like them. The answer is one of pure practicality: I live in New York City with my family in an apartment that won’t accommodate an extra room for a drum kit. Even if I did have an extra room, I couldn’t play drums here without bringing down the wrath of neighbors (or my long-suffering wife).

Practical point No. 2: I don’t have a band. As I’ve said before, Salon de la Guerre is largely a one-man project. While that has disadvantages (band dynamics do often make music better), it has also allowed me to release a lot of music at a quick pace because my software lets me to churn it out constantly … so my listeners get to drink from the fire hose.

Since I’m limited only by my imagination, since I’m allowed to be ridiculously productive and since I’m (usually) proud of the work, I’ve never let the drum issue bother me too much. However, I’ve always imagined there’s some audiophile out there who hates computer sounds and might well hate my work for all its computery qualities. That’s bugged me enough that I occasionally have wondered as I’ve passed a drum kit in a store or at someone’s house: “Why not just sit in someone else’s drum kit for a bit and make my own loops?”

Then I had an “Oh, duh!” moment. My son recently started going to a performing arts high school, and during the open houses, the kids told me what I didn’t already know: There are drum rooms all over New York City where I could have been doing this shit all along for a very modest fee, putting real drum parts into my laptop.

Derp!

So with that new knowledge, I booked rooms at Rivington Music Rehearsal Studios this fall. And now Salon de la Guerre is about to release an album where you actually get to hear me play drums for the first time.

Now back to my friend Jason’s point: Drumming is a real talent. It’s not just about doing rolls, flams or other magic tricks. You actually have to count and keep a tempo. My talent at this is suspect (you have all my respect, you real drummers). So most of the songs on my newest album, Carnival, actually mix the real drum beats with the computer loops so that I didn’t lose the time.

Is that cheating? Maybe. Do I care? No. Again, the point was to increase the dimensions of the sound. Having computer and analog sounds together has always been part of my aesthetic, and the contrasts it creates cut deep into the heart of how I see art in general: Art mostly is about contrasts, first and foremost. Forget messages. Forget theory. Forget shiny objects. Contrast (antithesis) is where all the compelling stuff usually is, whether it’s in music, painting or novels.

If your art is about one color white clashing with a lighter shade of white, you and I are likely on the same page. So a computer drum contrasting with a real drum is automatically interesting to me.

Having said that, I did go out on a limb on two or three songs and build the beat in my own wobbly time without a backing drum loop, click track or metronome. Real producers will probably be able to tell which ones, but I still think the music in those cases came out exciting. I might do that again in the future.

I recently submitted Carnival for distribution and hope it will be available on streaming services in the next couple of weeks (or maybe the beginning of next year, since my preferred distributor, CD Baby, has gotten a bit slow lately). I’ll discuss the album more when it’s released.

But look for it. And enjoy some real drums, if that’s your thing.

Read Full Post »