FAWM : Chris Harris (@headfirstonly)

Chris Harris

@headfirstonlyMod

Songs

Joined

2009

Charfield, UK
headfirst.www.idnet.com/blog.htm

I'm an old dude who is absolutely obsessed with music and trying to create tracks that teenage me would have loved. That's it, pretty much. Anything else that happens is a bonus. I've been playing synths and electric guitar for forty years or so and I've been an Ableton user since version 8.

This will be my eleventh Fifty/Ninety. Last year I went a bit nuts and ended up with 117 songs. So many people asked me "What on Earth were you thinking?" that I wrote a book about it; you can get a copy of it, together with twenty of those songs, on Bandcamp:
https://headfirstonly.bandcamp.com/album/a-grand-adventure

(The book also includes the HFO guide to home recording, which you might find interesting, and possibly even helpful).

I have a music page on my website with my discography, gear list, and much more besides:
http://headfirst.www.idnet.com/about_music.htm

My influences are many and varied, and are listed here:
http://headfirst.www.idnet.com/about_groups.htm

I'm also on Twitch:
https://www.twitch.tv/headfirstonly

"Leonard Cohen meets prog" - PROG Magazine

"The Bob Ross of prog metal" - ductapeguy

Chris Harris
(he/him/HFO)

Songs

Soundboard

@mrmadcarpenter 4d

Thanks so much for the feedback. I was pushing the lufs about as much as I could without causing the mix to collapse, I think I ended up at an average of -8lufs.

I'm sure a more competent mix engineer could have had the bass burning the whole track, but I kept running into headroom issues so leaving the bass with the last word was the compromise I landed on.

That said; this one is practice for the next one.

@robertmyers 1w

Yes, the M8 Tracker follows after LSDJ. It makes me wish I'd had a Gameboy and knew about this workflow decades ago. There are only 8 buttons on the device and half of them are the direction keys and that seems easier to wrap my brain around than with the Polyend Tracker. The M8 workflow also reminds me of FL Studio (my very first DAW) where I could build short little phrases and then group them together into longer statements, so there's some personal nostalgia built into this device. The screen is very small and I worried I wouldn't be able to read it with my old eyeballs, but my close-up glasses work just fine with it and if I need a bigger screen, I can hook it up to the computer and it will send both the screen and the audio to the computer. So far, so good with the M8!

@atam94 1w

Oh yeah, the violin bow is an awesome secret weapon for ambient guitar. I have an eBow but I still like the violin bow more (most of the time)... Thanks for the kind words on "the bluffs part 2" - I'm really glad you enjoyed it, and I agree that more guitarists (or any kind of musician) could find enjoyment in making ambient pieces. A lot of techniques can even be brought back to other genres, like drone/pad sounds to glue everything together in any kind of song.

@billwhite51 3w

thanks for your coments on dark side blue. the one i posted was just a rough mix from both rich and myself. i sent him an dry vocal for his final mix, which will be much better. as he is slow getting around to things, i posted this here and no as is just to get some response since it probably wont be finsihed until 50 90 is over. thanks for the mix suggestions and i agree with you. Oh, and Rich is playing all the instriments. He uses a real guitar, but I dont know what he is running it through or what effects he is using.

@fatboyjamz 3w

Yeah, as far as I know (but, I don't actually have any of the synths it interfaces with), Omnisphere controls most of their features natively, while some can be mapped. And, I do know there's quite a list of synths that are covered. Yeah, all I ever heard a few years ago, when I was beginning production in my DAW was Omnisphere, Omnisphere. And, since I knew very little about software synths, and the sounds sounded rather good, I went for it. Lately though, lol, I'm getting back into making music via hardware. I guess it all ebbs and flows. As it probably should.

@billwhite51 3w

Although i cribbed the word from Derrida's Spectres of Marx. i use it in a different sense, both musically and politically. the caps were an accident that i decided to keep in to differentiate the spoken from the sung sections. in todays cowardly new world, any idea that deviates from the party line is negaated as a conspiracy theory and the true conspiracies are truth. the final verse is adapted by the mystical meditations of certain Hassidic Jews.

@jeff9 3w

Thank you, Chris, for the most encouraging words about Solid Ground. Not sure where the hell I get off trying to countrify European philosophers or where the idea came from, but yeah--one more in the bucket anyway.

Hey, something made me think of you recently. There's a super talented South African artist on the Muse Songwriters site named Tony Lowther whose handle there is @Tolo. For some reason I suspect you two might be slightly kindred spirits musically, so if you're ever interested, pay a little visit over there and see if you dig his stuff as much as I think you might. Or his Soundcloud might be easier: https://soundcloud.com/to-lo

@coolparadiso 4w

On your comments re Ashes! I have an agreement on recording times in the house which works well for us! So i save my vocals for those times! This doesn't work when i get a inspiration for a skirmish! Those off sounds you hear are i am pretty sure my good wife in the kitchen maybe emptying the dishwasher! The6 will of course disappear if i decide to do anything with this song, which i actually might!

@richaux 4w

Hi Chris, many thanks for the comments (on "No Heart") -- you're on to something with the vocals needing a cut: good call. [And I'm now back listening to the source, I'm starting to think the DAW -> mp3 -> mp4 -> YT process might also be affecting the overall, um, timbre. Time for some digging/simplification! 🙂]

Ironically, the Marker Tracks used to be part of my templates ... but I got a bit paranoid that I was repeatedly writing the same song, so have been using a much cleaner starting point. Unfortunately, the baby was out with the bath water (e.g. no Marker, Group nor FX tracks 😬) and everything just took longer!! Time to get the balance right.

@rickatfulcrum 4w

Thank you for the kind words on Mesas! FWIW Genesis, Floyd, Alan Parsons and UK were definitely not far from my thoughts as I struggled with the music, so you were on point there — so too were Supertramp, Alan Gowen-era National Health, and Return To Forever; I didn't hear the Utopia inferences till after it was done. (Glad you name-checked PFM too, I still think it's a sin Flavio Premioli never got his propers Stateside along with Emmo and Wakey.)

@brisk 5w

That really means a lot coming from you, but all I did was automate the expression, dynamics and vibrato sliders... with more or less the same uppy downy patter no less - and the plug in handled the rest. I'm not sure what "evo"s are in the context of this plug in, but I think it just means it handles a natural sounding ongoing output - that's why there are those different articulations to the vocalisation. It was a ridiculous extravagance to buy it, and it remains horribly underused, but they had a massive sale on two or three years ago, and the deal just seemed too good to pass up - if you are a plug in nutter with (at the time) money to burn!

Thanks so much though, if this "fooled" you into thinking I was tinkering with a lot of settings then it could probably fool anyone!

@berni1954 5w

Glad you liked my Kraken. I actually paraphrase a line from the Tennyson poem at one point. I loved the Wyndham books as a youth. I think they got me into SF more than any other writer. But later I would go on to Heinlein and I still regularly re-read PKD and Vonnegut.

PS I see you are in "Bristow" my lover. - I lived in Redland and Clifton for 18 months in the early 80s. Does Hobgoblin still have a branch in Bristol?

@sollis 6w

Thanks for checking out 'An Answer', Chris :) Always happy to nerd out with some guitar talk, but there's not too much to the signal chain here. I played my Strat (Mexican 60s remake if you're nerdy enough to be interested) on the neck pickup, with the tone dial rolled back a little for the lead parts. That goes direct in to my interface, through a little bit of compression and EQ but nothing drastic. A touch of chorus on the first guitar but nothing on the lead. And then I send it to a reverb (trusty old Valhalla VintageVerb) and that's about it.

It's not the most exciting chain, but I do enjoy recording DI most of the time now since it's so quick and easy. Takes a lot of the decision making out of the picture too!

@fuzzy 6w

Hey, thanks for your comment on "SOLARIS".
Yes, it's only four minutes long, but there's a lot more where that came from; that was one of my and @yesnoyes's shorter improv jams at an hour and a quarter. I just figure, keep the songs short and leave em wanting more!
As for the films, I have not yet seen the Tarkovsky version (I do have it recorded and plan on watching it next week, however).
As for the Hollywood version, all I can say is that it is not as bad as it could have been, which from me is high praise for a Hollywood SF film.
Fantastic book, though.

@brisk 7w

Thanks for that comment on Shutterbug! Much appreciated. There's a kind of bell curve, isn't there? something totally predictable isn't satisfying, but add more unpredictability and it gets better until you get the a sweet spot... and then too much unpredictability detracts from the song until it's unlistenable again. The complicating factor is that the site of the apogee (if bell curves have apogees, dunno) is different for everyone, with some liking more unpredictability and others less. That's how you end up with Mr Bungle.

@squirrelhavenstudios 7w

Thanks for the nice comments about Bunk Moreland for President! I wasn't consciously thinking of the Dead while playing that guitar part, but I can definitely see how its loping nature alludes to Jerry. And I'm a Dead fan, so I appreciate you making the connection for me! I find it fascinating how our influences can seep into our psyches to such an extent that they sometimes come out without us even realizing it at the time.

And as for the Wire, I agree wtih @davidtaro - it's the best show I've seen (and there has been a lot of great TV over the last couple of decades, not to mention the great shows of long ago). But I would give it a few episodes. Its greatness didn't make itself apparent to me until the fourth episode. Since then I've watched the series in full three times. It's got a lot to say about the corrupting nature of institutions and society in general.

Finally, I just want to say that I've started reading your book, A Grand Adventure, and I am really enjoying it. I'm only about 40 pages in at this point, so I'll try to provide some more feedback once I've read some more, but it's the kind of thing that I wish was 1,000 pages, because I could read about the subject matter forever and never tire of it.

@betoMod 8w

Thanks for your comment on my postcard song, Chris! Happy you liked it! 🙂

As for Orca, the sequencer I used, you're 100% right that it's rogue inspired. The proof is that the cursor in the program is the ampersand character! Unfortunately I didn't have it in my screenshot, since I only showed the part of my program related to ZIP codes.

There's a nice intro video to Orca here, if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaI_TuISSJE

@toms 9w

I'm no expert on the issues, but fwiw among philosophers Libet's defense of free will has been rejected by a fair number, who agree with the criticism - don't know who made it first - that he just pushed the problem back a level, so that the ability to intervene itself just needs to be taken into account as part of causation, and unless there is some non-physical thing initiating the intervention, it, too, would work basically the way the original impulse does. Like I said, I am no expert on this set of issues.

@paul_pedersen 10w

Hi Chris. Thanks so much for taking the time to listen to "The Film Crew's Come to Town" and talking about the times filming happened in your town.

A lot of the films that land in my city are by Hallmark. A little conflict, a little romance and a happy ending. Sometime something with more depth shows up. For a month in April-May we had Bryan Cranston and Allison Janney filming in town. One part of the movie was on location just over the fence from where I live. Being a good fellow, I stayed home and left them in peace.

@toms 10w

I just got lazy with the phonemes! :) A cognitive bias isn't a defeator - a defeator must be epistemically reliable. Edit: oh yes if you identifya cognitive bias operating that doesn't mean the claim is false, but it means that we need more info. That said, CBs are nasty, and funny thing, philosophers don't study them. I have been prodding one of my psych colleagues to co teach a class in logic and the psychology of reasoning. problem is they won't pay us full rate for such a class.

@sapient 10w

Thanks for listening to Disappointing But Nice!
There is a bit of a backstory to it.
Helen and Deb visited this weekend (you get to hear Deb doing backing vocals on I Hate Burpees, but that's another story...) and H brought a couple of pedals with her: a Mooer synth pedal and the EHX Mellotron Emulator. We plugged them into my board and has a lovely time making weird noises, some of which we recorded.
This was going to form the basis of some epic new soundsculpture, but then lots of beer and a bottle of raspberry-flavour rum happened. The resulting hangover reduced us to barre chords, reverbs, the EZD Earth Pop kit, and generally trying to keep things gentle. Hence the title: disappointment at not having carved a new hole in the spacetime continuum through the use of too many pedals, but delight at having made something nice that didn't hurt our heads too much... 🤪
And we did at least manage to use some of those noises at the end of the piece!

@jeff9 10w

Many thanks for those kind words about Heartache In This Bottle, Chris. That lap steel is pieced together from things a session player called Tommy Hannum provides for users of Band In a Box. You just cobble together various recorded licks of his that match your progression and which fit with the other tracks. Would love to hear what you could do with a lap steel. If you check out the Youtube channel of a guy called Luke Cyrus Goetze, you'll really get the fever.

@sunfire 10w

Lol Thank you so much for your remarks on Trojans, Got a moment. Speaking of Condom Man. I want to tell you a true story as to how I brought that idea into my writing. A number of years ago in NYC, I was sitting at an outdoor cafe with a friend having something to eat, when this nearly 7 foot tall man who was homeless walked by, stopped and said, look in the sky!, It's a bird, it's a plane, no, no, it's Condom Man!!!!!!!!!!! And he's here to protect you!!!!!!!!!!! lol
I nearly choked on my food and spit out my beverage. Don't remember what he said after that but I do remember giving him a good tip. Perhaps I should have written about Condom Man instead. lol Thanks again for commenting.

@toms 10w

Yep! The other serious objection, seems to me, is that we are using intuitions developed in the context of physical causation to draw conclusions about causation that by definition involves a non physical component- similar problem when using intuitions about physical causation to argue for causing something to come into existence out of nothing through an act of creation - "creation-causation" as it were. But Descartes was brilliant nonetheless, and it's worth following his thought process to see how genius works, at least that's my view 😀

@reklov 12w

Hi, "old dude"! ;-)

A slighty delayed "thank you" for your thoughtful comment on my "haunted dancehall" piece! Maybe you're right: The hiss and scratches could appear a bit earlier, but now it is as it is...
Thanks for leaving the youtube link. Never heard of this piece but I know what you've meant.
I took my inspiration from "Everywhere at the End of Time" by The Caretaker which is a disturbing and horrifying work about dementia. If you have just 6,5 hours of spare time, walk this way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJWksPWDKOc

Thanks again,
Volker

@billwhite51 12w

thank you for your comments on my spitting song. im with you that we are reaching a lot of people through the internet..actually more than one can reach playing local gigs only. but most of the music that has really influenced and affected us has been done by those people who went out and braved the world. otherwise we would not have heard it and our cultures would suffer for it. so my idea is that this is why we sometimes get emotional over the death of someone we never knew, but whose work has had a profound effect on us....and then we question ourselves if we have been selfish in keeping our work cloistered.

@nadine 13w

Thanks for your comment on "The Dying Of The Art". I fear that the mainstream listening habits and decreased span of attention longs for more, shorter and cheaper music. No doubt, AI will generate masses of technically well-produced but musically mediocre content - or music for pleasure as you called it. I cannot support this, as small artists already suffer from algorithms.

The strings in the beginning are using MIDI CC on portamento and pitchbend. I wanted them to sound a bit off-kilter and detuned as the lyrics are slightly disturbing. The noises come from my beginner guitar skills fretting bar chords.

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Chris Harris

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