Hi everybody,

I was more than just excited when I read all those kind words about my first appearance here (Hens Night ’68), especially as this was the first time I had presented one of my songs / videos to native English speakers - thanks an awful lot again for your positive feedback.

I was quite uncertain which song / video I should post here next, but I finally decided to put back the more ‘conventional’ songs for now and come out with the weirdest project I have put together so far:

GIMME YOUR DOUGH !

While in the beginning I wrote songs and afterwards thought of how to build a video around them, I lately tend to regard song and video as a unity, which means that I already have the video in mind when I start writing the lyrics.

I do hope you don’t mind my passion for funny or even weird stuff - before I retired I was (and loved to be) a serious and staid SLP, but now I feel free to at leadt sometimes just let it all hang out (hope that this is the appropriate expression) and just tell strange stories. After all, my sense of humour was significantly shaped by early American comedians like my all-time hero, the one and only Tom Lehrer.

So GIMME YOUR DOUGH was my first almost absurd project - it’s a funky number (not the most sophisticated song I’ve written so far, I admit...) telling the adventures of Funky Fritz in the form of a musical photo novel (which I hereby claim to have invented - LOL).

And I'm very proud of the fact that my lovely wife Maha (who also did all the EQing and mixing), my beloved brother Henni and my best friend Harald did me the honour of being in on it !

As to the musical development: Not so easy to recall, because I changed and changed and changed a lot in the course of it. As far as I can trace it back, I designed the song with BIAB, using the _TBLZRAS style.

After I had shifted it to RealBand I replaced the bass track by an own bass line and also wrote a completely new drum track using a VST plug-in called MT-POWERDRUMS, because although BIAB in my mind is one of the finest apps ever developped, it has its limitations, when it comes to certain breaks or rhythmic effects (or I still don’t know it well enough...)

Bit by bit I must have replaced all the original RealTracks, so I finally ended up with the following ones:

Guitar: RT1637
Organ 1: RT2619
Organ 2: RT689

Then I added some minor guitar licks played on my Fender Strat and a Wah-Wah loop I had accidentally come across.

Like always the horns arrangement was developped using the RB piano roll, then using Kontakt 5 to re-direct the MIDI track to Native Instruments’ Session Horns. The same goes for the short string interlude - here I used Native Instruments’ Session Strings.

Well, I think that’s it. I really do hope you will enjoy that weird thing. And I promise the next post will be a normal one: Cross my heart and hope to die...

All the best and have a great weekend,

Stefan

All the videos & songs with lyrics: http://www.nachtsheim.de/BJN/BJN-Videos.html

Guest book: http://www.onlex.de/_gbuch.php?username=SpaceFart

YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeS46zV9s38WRYx7LCVgkhQ?view_as=subscriber&pbjreload=10