Podcast

 

So bad. I’m so sorry for this. Three Our Houses and three Wind Cries Mary’s.

Fitting ‘Bat Books for Beginners’ into a song is the first step to making one of these parodies. When I first started making these a few months ago I couldn’t imagine that there would be many songs that I could make work. I leave it to others to say whether I was right then or not.

I heard Werewolves of London last Wednesday while waiting for my burger and fries at the Frites and Meats truck on Hudson and Houston streets and it just stuck in my head. I was reminded of it today when I went back for my weekly fix of grease and self loathing. If a song insists on being recorded who am I to argue?

The Warren Zevon original is played on piano and I didn’t know if it would sound good played on guitar. I got the basic riff from YouTube while I was waiting for my burger and was looking forward to coming home to see if it worked. It did. As soon as I played it I knew it would be OK.

I have short fingers and am not practicing guitar at all or stretching my hand so this riff was harder to play than it should have been. It took about three or four takes but I got it eventually.

I am a little confused about which song is the intro to which episode. A month or so ago I recorded the Who’s That Lady parody for the Catwoman One Year Later episode. At the time it was supposed to be 174 but now I think it has been moved up. Anyway, it is done and will find a home eventually.

 

And here is the video

Another quick-and-dirty-I-need-something-fast parody promo. We needed a few promos that explained what the podcast was about not what an episode was about. This one can be the intro for an episode or a stand-alone commercial.

I got the idea for using Slow Ride from @reggiereggie’s Mixlr radio show on Wednesday nights. As soon as he played it I knew it would work and I think it does. All the guitar parts, intro riff, chorus riff, funky verse were recorded separately. I wanted the Announcer portion to have a bass instead of a guitar. This was the compromise.

The razor guitar over the intro is just a single note with finger vibrato and tremolo. I used the Fender Mustang Metal 2000 Preset with my Seymour Duncan, Duncan Distortion bridge pickup in the HSS HiWay 1 Strat. All the tones I used were just the amp presets on the Mustang and some guitar tone adjustments. I like the fat crunchyness of the intro and rhythm guitars.

Here is the promo video for BBFB 171. Enjoy!

 

I love Stevie Wonder, particularly Superstition. I heard this song last night on @reggiereggie’s  Weird Science Radio Show on Mixler and was playing along with it. The main lick was pretty easy to figure out but I did have to hit the google to get the right chorus chords.

Again, I was going to learn a bunch of the licks that are on the record but then I got bored and decided just to double up the vocals and call it a day. I wasn’t really sure how to end it so I just stopped playing at some point. Usually I have an announcer’s voice to talk about Bat Books for Beginners but I decided to heck with it. Declare victory and depart the field.

The song deserves better, but Stevie already did it better, so I’m out.

Yeah, I’m not sure what’s wrong with me doing something like this. It’s weird, I know.

But such a great song. The CSN/Stephen Stills ‘original’ reminds me of early fall nights back in the 70’s. School is back on and we are discovering changes in old friends and finding new ones.

And here I have taken all of those sweet memories and done this to them. I should be sorry for what I’ve done. Maybe I am.

Anyway, Love The One You’re With is another song I’ve always loved but never knew how to play. The original is in a weird tuning and I hate weird tunings. I watched a few guys play it on standard tuning and realized that the complicated part of the fingering didn’t really amount to much musically and so I simplified the whole scheme, and it distilled down to almost nothing. Beautiful, freed me to focus on digging into the rhythm which I sure enjoyed playing.

I was going to add more vocals but I think this gets the point across just fine.

 

Ok, now I feel better. I had to get that last song out of my head and fingers and do something more fun. I love this B-52s song so much. I’ve messed around with it before but it happened to show up in Amazon Music somehow and figured it was the perfect colonic.

I think I made some of the connecting riffs to long, they aren’t that interesting. But I decided that I liked the energy of the whole mess and left it as it was.

My first inclination was to play the bass riff and the high end guitar plucks at the same time. I can do it, but the driving feel of the bass riff gets dulled. I preferred to be able to really slam the string.

I feel better now.

 

Don’t ask me why this song is named Gotham Five Oh Two Six Four. It is a parody of the Chicago song “25 or 6 to 4” and I was trying to get some vocals down so I could play around with a lead so I made up words for the second chorus.

Instead of repeating:

A podcast thats for the winners

Its Bat Books for Beginners

 

I had:

The Batphone’s ringing behind the door

Its Gotham Five Oh Two Six Four

 

It was funny for a quick second, which happened to be the quick second when I decided to first save the audio file. So that’s where we are.

I am not a big fan of “25 or 6 to 4”. I don’t think it is a bad song, but I always felt it suffered in comparison to Zep’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”. The second half of the Led Zeppelin song is almost identical to the bass riff here.

But I heard this song at a Hamburger and Fries lunch truck last Wednesday and it stuck in my head. I had to do this recording or it was going to drive me crazy. I listened to the Chicago song a couple of hundred times trying to come up with an interesting angle on the tune and realized it isn’t a bad song, but it does have the absolute worst ending of any song I can think of.

My first try at this song wasn’t as punchy and went on way way too long. I had fantasies about putting all kinds of leads and licks behind the vocals to copy the horns on the original. At some point I just boiled it down to the basics, kept just the few licks I used here. I got tired of thinking about this song so I decided it was good enough and time to move on.

Anyway. I do like the vocals more than usual. There are some spots that I had guitar licks I ultimately removed. It seems a little bare to me but at this point I need to listen to something else.

 

Last Friday coming home I heard a drummer on the Lex and 63 st station and one of the songs  he was playing was an insane version of Billie Jean. All his songs were insane but this one stayed with me. I decided to give it a try for a more generic intro, rather than being about the plot of the comic book.

There was a lot of shortening of this song. It was a funny idea that ran out of laughs pretty quick. You have to hit and run with these promos. The end might sound jammed on but the reason for that is because I just jammed it on. It was going too long and I did it a little spitefully so there it is. Maybe I’ll come back to it. That is one of the little lies I like to tell myself.

There are two guitar parts, both using my Strat Highway 1 with the Vintage pickup probably. The SM 58 is the vocal mic. All through the mixer into the computer and mixed in Audacity.

Neither part is particularly difficult. It was really all about synchronizing all the parts which is hard for me without a drummer. And I have no experience doing it as a singer and am finding it more difficult than I expected. I made a mistake in the timing of one of the chords somewhere in the middle pf the song. Maybe I’ll fix it when I fix the end.

 

 

So I think I got a little messed up regarding what shows we are doing coming up and what songs I need to make. This one is pretty generic but I fit the lyrics to match with the book 52 which I believe is the Ep  170 TPB.

I have always wanted to do a Talking Heads song for one of these promos and never thought of this one until I stumbled across it. “Take me to the River” is a natural fit for the lyrics “Bat Books for Beginners . Kind of.

I found the Talking Heads version beautiful and rich. The song does lend itself to being broken down to very bluesy elements which I did here. And then of course I am forced, against all that is good, to sing.

Anyway.

This is my usual setup. HiWay One Strat using the Vintage neck pickup. And the vocals through the SM58. All through the mixer into Audacity.

I am pretty sure the guitar was the first take straight through. I think the guitar volume is still too high in the mix. I need to pull it down more.

The chorus and verse vocals were recorded separately. I wanted to make sure I could do the Bat Books for Beginners chorus part of the vocal that I recorded it before I wrote the verse. It is raw and could stand some production tweaks, but I probably won’t do much, here it is.

 

Here is the intro/promo song for BBFB Episode 169, Batgirl: Destruction’s Daughter. It is a parody of The Letter, which was done by the Box Tops first but this recording is more reminiscent of the Joe Cocker version which is one of my favorite songs of all time.

I was in a little bit of a time crunch for this one, I had been working on another song for this episode but it wasn’t working. The guitar was ok but I needed a much fuller sounding production with drums etc. and since I’m doing these by myself I was kind of stuck.

After watching The Wolf Man on #Svengoolie I realized I needed to get a song figured out ASAP because I was running out of time. Luckily MeTV moved Svengoolie two hours earlier so it wasn’t the wee hours of the morn.

I’d learned my rough way around this tune years and years ago and re-learned it and did a one take recording of the guitar part. Then I wrote out the lyrics and sang/announced most of it in one take. I did have to go back and re-sing the first line of each verse to make them hit a little harder.

Overall I like this recording a lot. Though I am a little worried about it being a weak intro to a podcast. It is very laid back and maybe a little too smooth to grab people. I was going to try to put a lead or bass over top of it, but there is something I like about the simplicity of it.

Oh well, here it is. Enjoy!