Ok, so you want to know how that solo project session went? It was beyond words. The ideas filled the room and solidified quickly, the musicians played off each other like we'd been playing all our lives, and the soul was overwhelming. The entire album will be available once I'm done getting horn parts done, and one of the tunes still need lyrics.

This is the first cut, nearly done. It will have horns on the final, but I can't keep it to myself any longer. It's a funk cover of Drive My Car by the Beatles. I did the arrangement, and everyone did their own improv solos on the spot. Nothing was written out except for the form.

http://libra.franklins.net/DriveMyCarMix4.mp3

Of course, your thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Photo by Serinol Lowman. Click to enlarge

Al Laporte, Carl Franklin, Matt Covey, Andy Chaney

There are more photos too, which will be available with the album.

I had a crazy impulsive idea a few months ago. My ex and kids are going on vacation for a week, and I wanted to do something in the studio. So I had the staff edit up next week's shows in advance, turned down a couple gigs, and hired three of the best musicians in the area to live in the studio with me for a week and crank out an album of original funk and blues music, with a couple covers.

Franklin Brothers' drummer and local skinbanger Matt Covey is playing drums, Amazing Al Laporte is on piano/keys, and the *ridiculously* talented Andy Chaney is on bass. I'm playing guitar and singing. We'll also have horns and backup singers on the final product. This week is all about getting the rhythm section down.

We'll be working Sunday through Friday 6pm to 2am.

I can't wait.

Check out this hilarious (and sexy) music video by C-Moe and the Gator Girls for all those who are addicted, such as myself.

http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=A5nNwLC7OGw

What do you do when you suddenly realize that the man who invented multi-track recording, delay, reverb, and the solid-body electric guitar is 93 years old and still hasn't signed your guitar which bears his name? You take a ride down to the Iridium Jazz Club in New York where Les Paul plays every Monday to ask him for a signature.

Les is my hero. He inspired me as a child to use both halves of my brain. He showed me that you could be technical and creative at the same time. That's where innovation comes from. I was attending my grandfather-in-law's 90th birthday party and I guess it hit me on the ride home... you know, I really ought to get my act together and go get my guitar signed by the man himself. So I did.

The Les Paul Trio (Lou Pallo-guitar, John Colianni-piano, and Les Paul) was recently expanded to include Nicki Parrott, an incredibly talented and beautiful bass player and singer. They played a bunch of standard jazz tunes, and Les pointed out the different members of the band, who all got to showcase their talents. As for him, he's still got it. He's not as fast as he used to be, but his chops are still as sweet and tasty as ever.

I can't say it was a cheap night, $50 cover for each set (I stayed for both) and a $25 food/drink minimum (also per set) but getting my guitar signed by the Wizard of Waukesha was well worth every penny.

After he signed my guitar the guy in the white shirt standing to the left in the picture said "it's kind of like getting Alexander Graham Bell to sign your telephone, isn't it?" Yup!

I also invited him to be a guest on .NET Rocks! We'll see how that turns out, but I think his stories would be more than inspirational to our listeners.

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I have been itching to do a kick-ass guitar song all by myself in the studio, so I enlisted the help of my daughter Emmy (12) and her friend Yumi (16) to help with camera work and recording controls. They learned a little about the recording process and had some fun as well.

You might remember my first all-me tune, Home at Last by Steely Dan. I received a lot of suggestions for more Steely Dan tunes to do next, and I will get to them someday for sure, but I wanted to do something else first.

I grew up with Steve Miller's greatest hits, and this has always been one of my favorites to play and sing. I admit I had never played it on drums or bass before sitting down to do the video yesterday, but the parts are pretty straight-ahead. The bass took some extra time. Lots of tricky stuff there. The guitar work was pure bliss, and the vocals just popped right out. This might have been the best day I've had in a long time!

I used the same technical setup as with Home at Last. Same cameras, although I know a bit more about lighting now. The drums were first, followed by bass, guitars, and finally vocals. By the time I recorded the vocals it was the wee hours, so you can see a dramatic difference in the light. The daylight shines through the big windows in the studio during the day. Yeah, I could have tweaked the color spectrum a bit, but I really just wanted to get this done and out there. It's a cover tune, after all.

Click here or on the image below to see the Silverlight version in 720p (23mb).

Click here to see the low-fi youtube Flash version.

Click here to download the mp3 (5mb).

Click here to download the hi-def 720p wmv file (110mb).

I have this project band called Carl Nivris that is focused on original tunes that are all variations on a single theme, all instrumental. It's the same lineup as the Franklin Brothers Band, but the music is unique.  We played at the St. Patricks Day Parade party in New London on March 17th. A few friends grabbed the video cameras and we got an audio feed from the sound board. We threw it all together and came up with a couple good tunes. Here's the last tune we played that night, Tubal Litigation. Shot in DV video and encoded with Silverlight.

Click the image to play.

I loved this song when I was a kid. I found a more grown-up version by Mel Torme recently, and re-arranged it to my liking.

Click the image below to see the HD Silverlight version

Click here to see the Low-fi Youtube version

It's actually old music from Franklin Brothers, but nobody has heard it before. I wrote this song in the 90s. We were looking to do something more unplugged tonight, and this song came to mind. Enjoy!

Click here or on the photo below to view the high-def Silverlight version.

Click here to see the low-fi Flash version on YouTube

This was recorded in July, 2004 at Pwop Studios before the renovation. The space consisted of two 25x25 rooms. One was the studio and my office (where this video was shot), and the other was a room I used for teaching classes on VB.NET programming. 

My brother Jay (on keyboards and backup vocals) and I were working at the time with monster bassist Kevin Carey and just as monster drummer Steve Kremidas on some original tunes, and we decided to do this recording with a few Mini DV cameras. The video originally appeared in the .NET Rocks! 2004 movie, but was never widely seen by the public until now.

It's nothing special, but it does kick ass, and I thought my fans would like to see it.

Click here (or on the photo below) to see the higher-quality video with Silverlight.

Click here to see the Flash version on YouTube.

Click here to download the 44MB WMV file directly.

I couldn't sleep the other night (what's new) so I got up and recorded Steely Dan's "Home at Last" from their amazing 1977 album, Aja (highly recommended in all its forms). I did the vocals and played all the instruments, set up the shots, recorded the audio and video, produced it, and published it using the Microsoft Expression Encoder (SilverLight). The story continues below. 

Click the picture below to watch the video in 1280x720 (Microsoft Silverlight will install quickly if you don't have it).

Click here to watch the low-res Flash version at YouTube.

This was recorded in my studio at Pwop Productions. The studio will be booking (audio and video) soon. Please direct all inquiries to info@pwop.com

Unlike my first experiment with producing hi-def Silverlight videos, this one involved a real multitrack recording and 5 different camera shoots. I used Adobe Audition 2.0 to record the audio, and Adobe On Location to record the video using my latop and an external hard drive. The video was done exactly the same way as in the first experiment.

First I recorded the drum track. My hair was actually dry for that one. What's funny is you can see me getting progressively sweatier as the night went on. The entire recording and initial audio mixdown took only 4 hours, but the lights were hot and I was running a round quite a bit. 

Next I laid down the bass, then the piano, guitar, and finally the vocals. I recorded one main vocal, and two background tracks, and then I doubled each background track and the original vocal on the chorus only.

The drums are a Yamaha Custom Maple kit with Evans heads, which were expertly set up by John Van Ness at Caruso Music in New London, CT. The Bass is a cheap (but awesome) Samick 5-string through a 1000-watt (I know... excessive) GK rig. The guitar is my modified 1983 Gibson Les Paul Standard with EMG pickups through a BOSS effects unit with stereo outs to two amps, a Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier and a Lab Series L5. It makes a nice little sound, doesn't it?  The piano is a Yamaha G2 Baby Grand recorded with a Shure C81 and a Rode NT1000. Nuff said.

Once I got a good audio mix, I brought all the video files and the mixed down audio file into Sony Vegas 7.0 to mix the video. One problem: Vegas doesn't have a codec for DVCPRO-HD, the format recorded by my Panasonic HVX100 camera. A little poking around the web and I found the RayLight DVFilm decoder and snagged it for a $195.

Once I got that working, I had to manually line up the videos to each other, one at a time, and then the audio. Then it was just a matter of doing the edit. Well, there was some kind of memory leak or something, because the RayLight codec gave me an error by rendering a text "something bad has happened" message where there should have been video in the preview window. A few seconds later it bluescreened.

I was able to get back into it. The next time I saw the error, I immediately did a save and exit. After coming back into Vegas all was fine, for a while until it happened again. All in all this happened like clockwork about every 10 minutes.

It took about an hour to render a straight uncompressed AVI with Vegas. It then took about 20 more minutes to encode it with the Expression Media Encoder. If you want to know what kind of machine I'm using, check out this post where I introduced "The Beast."

After listening to the mix in the car I had a couple things to tweak so I got back to the studio and did another mix. This time I used VirtualDub to simply replace the audio in the AVI instead of waiting for Vegas to render it again. I love VirtualDub!

If you're new to Silverlight, it's a new browser technology from Microsoft that, in its first incarnation (1.0) does some serious video. The video I published here is 1280x720 at 29 frames per second, and it streams like flash! The next version of Silverlight will bring the power of Microsoft .NET development to the browser, allowing for rich interactive applications that compile in the browser. Expect Silverlight 1.1 next year sometime. In the meantime, we have a serious web video platform to play with!

I'd like to hear your comments, and I'm happy to answer any questions also. Thanks for watching!

Pwop Studios hosted its first unofficial recording session last night with a new band project I've started called Carl Nivris (a take-off on the word carnivorous). While it's a purely original band, we do have a few cover tunes we like to play. This is Herbie Hancock's awesome funk groove, Chameleon. It's not exactly true to the original, but then again Herbie never plays it the same way twice either.

Click here for the 256kbps wma file

Matt Covey is playing drums. This is my kit, a Yamaha Custom Maple kit with Evans heads. Dave Anderson is playing bass. He's playing an old Fender Precision bass through a GK amp direct. You'll have to put up with the overly-compressed bass as we were still messing with the input settings when we recorded this. Jed Johnson is playing his 1957 Hammond B3 organ. That's right.. 1957!  The Leslie speaker was miked at the top and bottom. Jay Franklin, my brother, is playing a Kurzweil PC88 digital piano, and I'm playing my 1983 les paul through an effects unit and into a Mesa Boogie dual rectifier on the left, and a Lab Series L5 amp on the right.

It was one take, but recorded on separate tracks. Just a little EQ on the individual drums, a touch of reverb on the snare and toms, a 2K notch cut on the guitar, and that's about it.

The band will be recording an album of all original funk tunes this fall.