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What’s On The Other Side?

Here’s that sec­ond album I men­tioned. We’re incred­i­bly proud of it.

Be sure to check out
the Kick­starter cam­paign which fund­ed it!

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My earliest published lyrics (1999)

Writ­ten for eso­teric rock band “Left­y’s Head”, who had insist­ed on nam­ing this song after my (then cur­rent) web­site for some rea­son. The title was orig­i­nal­ly my email address, but I was able to talk them out of that much.  The SPAM quo­tient would have been horrifying.

These lyrics replaced their own for the song, which were orig­i­nal­ly about an insur­rec­tion of mous­tach­es who had bro­ken free of men’s faces and vio­lent­ly tak­en over the world. For bet­ter or worse, I don’t have a copy of that ver­sion to share.

Any­way, I felt invest­ed because of the web­site tie-in, and want­ed the song to rep­re­sent the themes I’d been going for in nam­ing that site. The fol­low­ing is what result­ed, and what end­ed up on their 1999 album “50 Years of Left­y’s Head”.

Fallensky.com
Lyrics by Aaron Levitz
Music by Left­y’s Head

Remem­ber when they said the sky was falling,
and we were sure it could­n’t be true?
’cause we were list’n­ing to the future calling
with out hopes all planned out — if we only knew!

Remem­ber notic­ing the edges sagging,
and our stom­achs twist­ing into a knot?
In that one moment, our fears went from nagging
to a full fledged pan­ic, right there on the spot.

The world was cov­ered in a cloudy blanket
and the build­ings crum­bled under its weight.
The water flood­ed in and peo­ple drank it,
fill­ing up their lungs, and going to their fate.

Held down and smoth­ered by the thing we trusted,
there was com­fort still with­in its folds.
But look­ing up, we saw the sky­line busted,
like some eerie sign of what the future holds.

Each day we get up and go through the motions.
Each night we watch the stars burn where they fell.
They melt the ice caps and dry the oceans.
Where heav­en meets the earth, we enter hell.

But we’re adapt­ing and a new sky’s forming.
The old ones fad­ing, along with the pain.
Our strength is thawed and I hope it’s warming,
but we’re still afraid it could fall again.

*(I’m not sure whether “our strength is thawed” is accu­rate or not.  It’s the most sense I can make of the record­ed vocals, with no print­ed record in front of me.  It’s an awk­ward turn of phrase, but I can’t think of a bet­ter one off­hand.  I hon­est­ly can’t remem­ber what I was thinking.)

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ongoing project: The Velveteen Band

I sup­pose I should men­tion that I play key­boards and melod­i­ca in The Vel­veteen Band.

This would be us: 

(most of our songs are not about Doc­tor Who.)

Our lead singer’s a pup­pet. Our oth­er lead singer is also a pup­pet. There’s a six foot rab­bit on gui­tar and trum­pet.  We took “2016 Artist of the Year” at the Ven­tu­ra Coun­ty Music Awards.

We’re cur­rent­ly work­ing on our sec­ond album. You can lis­ten to the first one here:

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pushCCs app

This app cre­ates vir­tu­al MIDI ports for map­ping in Able­ton, and pro­vides indi­vid­ual pres­sure val­ues for each button.

I’ve added an option­al latch­ing mech­a­nism. When that is active, you can press any of the cor­ners to hold the oth­er but­tons in place. You can then safe­ly remove your hand from those but­tons with­out zero­ing out their parameters.

Addi­tion­al­ly, if you press three of the cor­ners simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, that will zero out all of the but­tons and their asso­ci­at­ed values.

If you’ve got a foot ped­al plugged in (slot 1), you can use that for latch­ing instead of the corners.

Note: This one is Mac only. It relies on some ser­vices from the oper­at­ing sys­tem, as well as the friend­lier device shar­ing nature of things in gen­er­al. At this time, there are no plans to cre­ate an equiv­a­lent PC work­flow. The editable .max­pat file is includ­ed, should you like to attempt a port yourself.

v1.2:

v1.1:

  • …had all kinds of prob­lems. you don’t want it.

v1.0:

  • DOWNLOAD
    (note: the com­piled ver­sion includ­ed here was not in fact stand­alone. I’ve since learned how to make those correctly)

Josh Spoon did a video write­up of v1.0 here:

as part of his excel­lent “30 Days of Able­ton Push” exploration.

early prototype / previous max for live version

I’ll write up a prop­er expla­na­tion lat­er, but here.

requires Able­ton Live 9, Push, and Max For Live. if you don’t have those things, this prob­a­bly won’t inter­est you.

par­tial­ly based on this:
http://4live.me/post/51020217777/momentary8-pro

or rather, the old version:
http://4live.me/post/48177590939/momentary8

(This is miss­ing near­ly every fea­ture you’d pos­si­bly care about, but it does­n’t require the max run­time. I may add some of the func­tion­al­i­ty from the run­time ver­sion back into this lat­er, when v2 is fleshed out a bit more, but there’s no point with this ver­sion. m4l will nev­er sup­port poly after­touch, so it’s strict­ly a mat­ter of whether the oth­er fea­tures add enough with­out that. They don’t yet.)