Amado Ohland

Boy this one was a struggle. 26-bar loop at a nice slow tempo. And with all those I-vi-ii-V progressions in there, you'd think it would be simple. But the writer(s) threw just enough delicious curve balls in there that the "simplicity" is deceptive. So, you get minimalism. And you get a little game on the time-signature shift. Does it work? Who can say. What I learned: if you want to really get to...

This track is a reply to “SSS Prompt 39: Ours to heal.” More on the Society for Spontaneous Singing at http://singthis.org . The story that elicited this sound from me: https://soundcloud.com/jaschahoffman/ours-to-heal-a-story-sss-heal This story means a lot to me, and the only way I know to speak to it is with compassion. Everyone's going through this life, and we've all got our pains, and most o...

...continuing Covers Month with a Friday kind of song that... well, I missed Thursday, and I missed Friday, and I didn't do a make-up on Saturday, so it took Sunday to get it done. Enjoy.

A deconstruction. My reach has again exceeded my grasp, but with practice I could perform this better.

It may not be revolutionary, but I'm just seeing what I can get done in an hour, using techniques I've become familiar with while improvising 'new' stuff over the past 13 months. It's a little long, too. I wonder what I'm learning this month?

Not really about the glorification of alcohol. The song's a mambo, and it just moves in really fun ways. ||: F Eb6 :|| x16 ||: Ddim7 F :|| x3 G7 C7 tequila! it always makes me feel like a muppet. That said, there's a lot of cool and ...mysterious?... sonorities that you can explore in a progression like that. It's those--the muppet groove, and the way that the notes and the chords slide--that have...

Continuing my Covers Month, here's a Blues tune that I do quite often with Jazz bands, or a Jazz tune I do quite often with Blues bands... I can never keep straight the difference between the two...

Alright, that's a manageable loop-length. This rendition is complete with a short contribution by my little dog. I might have been a little distracted after that point... I'll let you know, when I've had a chance to listen back to this. Enjoy.

The Society for Spontaneous Singing wanted us to do a song on the concept of "chocolate," and it happens to be my Covers Month. So, see what you get. I hope you're pleased with yourself.

For realzies, when the Society for Spontaneous Singing puts out a one-word prompt "Chocolate," I'm inspired to make something as rich and lush as I can. This is what comes out if I'm not making a silly cover as a gag.

Since I don't yet have a set-up that makes it easy for me to do a "B" section, I'm still looking for songs that are just 1 loop. Whether it's 12 bars (as this is, at a nice quick tempo) or 24 or 32... but please, someday, could I find one that's 4 or 8, or a 1-chord jam, or something?!? Brings me back to my days with Upbeat. Good times.

Where DOES the time go?!? Just gonna have to keep this short.

I've a sore throat and a limited amount of time! Here's today's. Some version of this similar to what you hear here has been rattling around my brain for years now. Down-home. Foot-stompin'

The great Lambert, Hendricks & Ross piece, solidly in the Jazz camp but employing a Blues chord progression, and the great, great vocal harmonies. No attempt, here, to be faithful to their original harmonization. Nor do I stick to the swing feel... re-interpretation is the name of the game. Enjoy.

This track is a reply to “SSS Prompt 36: Explore your break.” More on the Society for Spontaneous Singing at http://singthis.org . ...and it was Judi (nee Donoghy) Vinar who told whatever break-out group I was in that it is... unkind, perhaps ...to call the place where the other muscles engage a "break." It's a flip, it's like the clutch on a car, it takes practice to engage it or disengage it smo...

written by Jimmy McCracklin and performed by Samuel "Magic Sam" Gene Maghett, this song was always one of my favorites to perform in by Blues band from 2000-2005. Here it is in a quasi-improvised arrangement.

Covers for a month? Sure, why not. I will learn something. And, until I get my new system(s) set up, they're going to have to be loop-based songs. That might mean a lot of Jazz and Blues stuff at first.

The exhilarating dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you created in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could, only to break in case of emergency. Last song of my month-long exploration of the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows....

the amniotic tranquility of being inside, warm and dry, during a thunderstorm.

This track is a reply to “Prompt 35: So Emotional.” More on the Society for Spontaneous Singing at http://singthis.org. You can join the SSS at https://soundcloud.com/groups/society-for-spontaneous-singing ...Though it feels like a bit of a cheat. I'm still on my Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows thing, so I guess this is Option B, but I'm not sure this expresses an Emotion per se. Ah well. I was thin...

I tried to get "emotional" last night, so as to make this a response to another Prompt (www.singthis.org to see what I mean), but I just wasn't 'feeling' it. I needed to funk, so I looked for a word in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows that I could funk to. "...an image that somehow becomes lodged deep in your brain—maybe washed there by a dream, or smuggled inside a book, or planted during a casu...

"...fear that learning the name of something—a bird, a constellation, an attractive stranger—will somehow ruin it, transforming a lucky discovery into a conceptual husk pinned in a glass case, which leaves one less mystery to flutter around your head, trying to get in." — from John Koenig's "Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows" This track is a reply to “SSS Prompt 34: Sing to a thing.” More on the Socie...

Who would ever WANT to be struck by disaster? Probably only somebody who has never been through it; one who fantasizes that passing through calamity will be the event that forges their otherwise dull life into something hard and sharp.

wow what a day. okay. Look up "Ecstatic Shock" on John Koenig's "Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows." Enjoy. Okay bye.

...a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee—which leads to a dawning awareness of the haunting fragility of life. From John Koenig's Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which see.