What am I doing?

Besides working the Day Job and such, I’ve been taking a piece of history and reworking it. It has been a fascinating project.

Waaaaaay back in the dinosaur days – that would be 1994 or so – there was a band named Tom&Co, because we couldn’t think of a better name [The “Men with No Hats Band” was a close 2nd in the running. We were the praise band for the fledgling contemporary service at Vineville Baptist in Macon, Georgia.

We recorded an album in 1999, at Macon’s own Capricorn Studios [then it was known as Phoenix studios, and hadn’t been all gussied up like it has today].

One of the tunes on the album – This is My Father’s Jungle – has a story behind it. Maybe one day I’ll tell it – or perhaps type about it over on the typewriter site. It is a decidedly non-traditional version of one of my favorites – “This is My Father’s World“.

The piece started out with Dennis Palmer whacking the toms as loud as he could, followed by playing a ceramic turtle that we borrowed from someone in the church. The initial melody was whistled.

Yes, we played this in church. Seriously, we did. More than once.

Last year I pulled the ADAT tapes out of storage, and sadly – they were not readable. This summer I ran across an article reference lalal.ai – an AI tool that will split out the component parts of a recording. They were running a sale, so I naturally decided to experiment.

While the results are nowhere close to perfect, I was able to use most of the bass and drums, along with the whistled melody and – HOORAH! – the turtle.

That’s the current under-construction project. I’m fleshing out the parts, remixing, and have lots of ideas floating around in my head.

This could be interesting………