Solace by TOY PIANO

This is Installment 005 in the MAXIMUM MUSIC CAMPAIGN. One of my favorite albums growing up was the soundtrack to the 1973 movie "The Sting", starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford as two Chicago con-men in the 1930's who manage to outwit an outside racketeer from New York at his own game. The soundtrack was predominantly arrangements of Scott Joplin compositions done by Marvin Hamlisch, alongside a few original works by Hamlisch himself. The soundtrack had spawned a hit single with Hamlisch's full band arrangement of Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer". Obviously, the use of pre-20th century piano rags in the soundtrack of a movie taking place in the 1930's would be an anachronism unless you're Quentin Tarantino putting (for one example from Hateful Eight) White Stripes and Roy Orbison songs in the context of a Western movie. But to George Roy Hill, the director of The Sting, using Joplin's music made sense. My parents had the soundtrack on eight-track tape (a format I have long since despised in favor of reel-to-reel, not to mention cassettes, CDs, vinyl, and FLAC files.) and over the years I have gotten copies of the album for myself on CD, vinyl, and reel-to-reel tape.

I had been wanting to cover "Solace" from the movie soundtrack for years. Normally, when you cover a song, you have to pay a small fee upfront either through a service like EasySong.com or through your distributor, like I had to do with Distrokid for "Ohm Sweet Ohm" on CAMPAIGN STOPS and "(Theme From) A Summer Place" on TOY PIANO I. I have no issue with paying the composers of cover material (like I haven't contributed to the bank accounts of Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider enough with how many times I've bought and rebought Kraftwerk albums over the years) as I, myself, would want to be compensated for cover versions of my songs (this is why I have been a member of BMI since 2004), but when you're a self-capitalized independent artist with a day job, paying upfront for cover songs is a pain in the fucking ass that has to take a backseat to the rest of your everyday expenses. If there was a way to just arrange for the songwriters and publishers to take a share of every download and stream of a song I covered, I would have done more cover songs or even concept albums with lofi or ambient rearrangements of classic albums. However, Scott Joplin's music has been in the public domain for years, not unlike how classical labels and artists can issue countless new recordings of every "decomposing composer" under the sun and not have to worry about paying royalties to some distant heir of Beethoven or Mozart. (Covering Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich would be a completely different story since those guys were 20th century composers whose works are part of ASCAP's catalog here in the United States; Eric Carmen found this out the hard way when he slipped Rachmaninoff melodies into "All By Myself" and "Never Gonna Fall In Love Again", under the belief that those leitmotifs were in the public domain. only to wake up one day and find out that Rachmaninoff's estate was suing him.)

This recording was the longest I have ever taken with a lofi/chillhop recording. Most of my lofi recordings have only taken a few hours per song. For "Solace" I spent the better part of two days on it, most of it programming a MIDI file of the original piano sheet music from The Sting soundtrack. Why was I programming it? Because trying to record it piece by piece while trying to sightread it quickly proved to be difficult for me - something that wasn't the case when I covered "(Theme From) A Summer Place" and "Ohm Sweet Ohm"! Somewhere from the next dimension, Scott Joplin and Marvin Hamlisch must be fucking with me.

After I imported the file into Logic Pro, I played the drum track live using my Novation Launchpad X (normally I'll just program a loop, split the drum tracks individually, and mix them in and out as the arrangement calls for them.) All of the overdubbing took a few hours and then mixing and mastering it took an even bigger chunk of time. I think I did five remasters of this track alone as I would do a mix, master it, and decide to adjust the mix some more, which meant mastering it again... you get the picture. (The only other track in my history that took several versions of the master before release was ESCITALOPRAM DEFICIENCY back in June of 2023.) In the end, though, it was all worth it.

The piano track was put through BabyAudio's excellent SuperVHS plug-in to give the effect of sampling the piano right off a rental tape of the movie, even though in reality, the piano track is a "live" MIDI track rather than a sample, and I can't even recall having watched the entire movie in eons, let alone owning it on any home video format. Everything else is Logic Pro stock instruments except for the "lead/pad" synth part which is one of the countless settings found within Output's Arcade software instrument.

This is the fifth installment in the MAXIMUM MUSIC CAMPAIGN and may be, if not the last track I get to record and release in 2023, might be at least the last lofi/chillhop track of the year. Then again, I have another work in progress sitting on my studio iMac's hard drive as I write this minutes before December 27 becomes December 28, and just might open up that file and work on it some more as soon as I call this an upload. If you see something else pop up on my Bandcamp page between now and January 1, 2024, don't be surprised.

The entire soundtrack to The Sting can still be heard on your favorite streaming service, and even though it's currently out of print physically, used copies on either CD or vinyl are plentiful - go check Discogs or your local record store. Until the next installment, which might be sooner rather than later: Be good to each other.

-- CJ Marsicano, December 28, 2023, 12 AM EST.

Toy Piano is the electronic music project of musician, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist CJ Marsicano, embracing lofi hiphop, synth wave, ambient/space music/new age, and more.

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