Sean Ongley

Category: Music

  • Mic Check on Drums

    Mic Check on Drums

    Having no field recording equipment, I shopped around and settled on this Zoom iQ6 microphone for iPhone. It looks like the same microphones as the H1 field recording unit in a detached capsule that fits on the iPhone.

    I liked this possibility because it would improve audio on video caught by iPhone when necessary. The app that comes with it records in Wav format, so I get lossless audio. I found an open box unit on eBay and saved $40 compared to the Zoom H1.

    To test the quality on drums, I set it up on a tripod, and decided to make a video of it for the public. The result is this video right here. No big deal, I play the drums okay.

    For anyone considering buying the microphone, I do believe this video gives them something to judge it by, and I hope that is helpful.

  • OHS Sessions Volume One

    OHS Sessions Volume One

    In 2017, when I had settled into the THRU Media studio, I began to host music sessions of my own for the first time in years. I asked my friends Jerry Soga and Doug Haning to come over and do some good old “free jazz” with me.

    Jerry played acoustic bass. Doug played reed instruments, and a little bit of electric piano. I played drums. We didn’t have a band name, I just wanted to produce some sessions. In the end, I have called it Ongley, Haning, and Soga (OHS).

    Each volume consists of two sessions. Each session was combed through for pieces that could be recognized as having an organic start and end point. Each piece was labeled by sequence: sessions 1-6, cuts 1-xx.

    After isolating those cuts, I mixed and mastered them. Once I had the complete sessions, I listened through all five and a half hours of content to slim it down by half.

    The result is three volumes in diminishing length. The first is out now and the remaining are being staged for monthly release.

    It is interesting to hear how we progress over those sessions. By the end, we have a band with a certain kind of sound. My drumming tightened up, but it’s still sloppy, and difficult because we play outside of time. Sometimes we are united by tempo and rhythm, sometimes we each have a different sense of it, but we’re always listening.

  • New Electro Album: Sonny’s Plan

    New Electro Album: Sonny’s Plan

    Without fanfare, I present to you a collection of songs one decade in the making, featuring just one song produced within the last five years, which I made the title track to: Sonny’s Plan.

    Had this music been the exclusive focus of my creative life through these years, then this would deserve tremendous fanfare. Throughout that period however, I ran three more music festivals, played and recorded many hours of improvisational music, got deep into stand-up comedy, launched and disbanded a magazine and podcast, worked madly in a haunted house, while adapting a new life in Philadelphia.

    The music that I hear is deeply connected to whatever was happening in my life at that time. Usually it is positive, because I tend to compose music when I have the extra time and space to work. However, there are plenty of sad stories in here.

    “On the Rails” for me is pure heartbreak. While there is something triumphant about the peak of the song, it rises out of what sounds to me like the welling of tears in my eyes that I had while producing it.

    Only the title track was recorded at my home studio in Philadelphia. This music space is not quite what I’ve always dreamed of, but it is the most professional music space that I have put together for myself yet.

    Every one of these tracks were previously posted to a number of music hosting sites including my blog. All of these scattered songs with no context or proper mastering, something had to be done about them. It started with taking all of my old work offline. Now, it is up to me to package my old work in a cohesive way.

    It took a little time to select these tracks, lay them in order, remix when possible, and finally remaster the whole lot.

    These sessions were all archived in my hard drive, but I don’t have access any longer to the digital audio workstation (DAW) software involved. I was able to resurrect some sessions in a new version of Reason, which I ended up paying for on a monthly basis, to complete the project.

    I’ll break it down briefly how I produced each of these.

    “On the Rails” was produced inside Propellerhead’s Reason 7. The only analog instrument is the ARP Odyssey. This instrument threads across almost each track. It was summer 2015 and my studio was my living room at Penthouse 3 in the Lafayette Building, Portland.

    “Santa Crux” was fully formed in a single day, fall of 2013, in a studio apartment in Santa Cruz using Ableton Lite. I was traveling with a complete mobile production system. My friend had an empty apartment with a range of instruments, giving me the banjo and electric bass tracks herein.

    “Sonny’s Plan” is totally within Apple’s Logic X. The drums were recorded in my studio, clipped and looped. It was composed in 2020 but revisited to replace midi guitar sounds with live electric guitar. It is the first time I have owned a guitar in many years. I missed it.

    “Long House” was a cornerstone for me in early 2011, produced at the InterArts office/studio. Today, it would be a serious undertaking to remix this track, as it was produced with Logic 9 as the master DAW, rewired with Reason 4 and Ableton Lite, plus MOTU Symphonic Instrument.

    “She’s Back But I’m Gone” was produced in my penthouse studio in 2015, entirely in Reason 7.

    “Clap Trap” was produced around the same time as Long House in 2011, entirely using Logic 9.

    “Simple Structures” helped me snap out of a long music break in the spring of 2014. It reminds me of “Structures from Silence” by Steve Roach but I structured it with a simple house beat. Entirely made in Reason 7, in my Kenton neighborhood bedroom.

    “Autonomia” was produced at the same time as the previous track using Reason, but this time I took advantage of the new DAW features in the software. It is the only song on this album that includes live vocals, however, they are disguised under a vocoder.

    Naturally, I have had a variety of midi keyboards throughout all of this, however, none of them are noteworthy.

    Today, I look forward to what feels like a new life of creative work, and in many respects I put this music behind me. All put together for the first time, it follows a single thread of intention in a chaotic life. Even as so many things change, I can’t help but come back to music, and if it takes another ten years to generate an album of highly produced music, so be it, because I love the process.

  • Remembering the Boxlift Loft Sessions

    Remembering the Boxlift Loft Sessions

    We had completed our year at Portland State University as professional music students, in the summer of 2008. Branic was a music composition major, I was a hard working punk just taking classes and refusing to follow the curriculum. In fact, I should have been enrolled for the 2009 school year when this concert happened, but I never went back.

    He invited me to perform something as an opening act for Thollem McDonas, on December 8, at his music studio at the artist loft building known as Boxlift Lofts, so named because it has an historic elevator that was employed to shuttle Ford Model T cars around.

    Branic liked my piano stylings and thought I’d make a good shadow to the mastery of Thollem McDonas. That was smart curating, actually, showing the master and student dichotomy on Branic’s baby grand piano in the intimate setting, for an audience largely comprised of college students.

    I had something different in mind, however. I wrote a piece of music for saxophone quartet and I wanted to have it performed by some of my favorite local players. The recording of that was rough, and we didn’t execute the composition perfectly, so it never was released, until now, as a piece of the archive and memoire. Just stream the audio player immediately below.

    Saxophone Quartet Performance 12-08-08

    On baritone sax, I had Doug Haning, on Tenor, Peter Bryant, on alto sax, I had Ben Kates, on soprano, Jefrey Leighton Brown. I am conducting. At the end, I move to the piano for a simple percussive part.

    If memory serves me, I left the equipment at Branic’s loft and we scheduled a session in the near future. I climbed in through the fire exit and got a solo jam done before he got there. In fact, it is inaudible, but that jam, the first track, basically ends with him climbing through the window. I recorded him solo, and then jammed together. It is all very ambient and stripped down.

    The album streaming at the top of the article via Bandcamp is the result of those sessions. Not too bad.

    The recording equipment, again, if memory serves me, was a Marantz digital field recorder and Audix microphones borrowed from KBOO Community Radio. I would have worked on it in my home Pro Tools 5 rig, and probably mastered it in Adobe Audition 1 at KBOO.

  • A Sunrise by Imra

    A Sunrise by Imra

    That was me and songwriter Kelly Slusher. She since changed her name to Avaleya Kelly. We were in love so we produced a love album together. The EP entitled A Sunrise is now available here to stream via Bandcamp, but it turns out that it has been available on Spotify and Apple Music for, I don’t know, a long time. 

    Originally, we published with CD Baby and sold CD’s. That was how you heard this album: You bought a CD. We sold maybe 50 of them. CD Baby helps with digital distribution, and they put it on Spotify, years after the fact.

    Within a few months of becoming steady partners, fall of 2008, Kelly and I produced this EP and set up a west coast tour. Kelly came up with the name, Imra. It sounds like an esoteric deity and we liked it for some reason. It was very common to post a few songs on MySpace, contact local venue bookers directly on the social network, print a CD-R album in conjunction with CD Baby, and hit the road just like that. That’s what we did.

    “Sweet Love” opens the album, and I think it’s the best track on it. It was Kelly’s song, but I totally transformed it from her acoustic guitar version. Although I maintained her chord changes, everything is built on the Arp Odyssey and her electric bass. When we finished this song, it seemed more like a band than a Kelly Slusher song.

    “On and On” is a beautiful tune, I think, and it was also a Kelly song. We kept the guitar version, recording it in a room with natural reverb, adding the synthesizer later, it is my second favorite cut on the record. Then we wrote three songs strictly together, and those are the three in the middle of the album.

    This album contains valuable ideas and vibrations meant for opening space for a relationship. On the other hand, it can be of benefit to one’s relationship to the whole world, not just romance. The truth is that in the two years Kelly and I were together, we slipped into the dark side and never recovered. We fell prey to our own fears and all that junk that challenges those initial impulses of mutual love and respect.

    Our love and determination carried us a long way. As with anything on this blog, I’m not running away from the things that went wrong. I won’t tell you all the stories, but I’ll admit that I’ve brought problems into relationships that a more mature, more secure version of myself today would not bring.

    Not all relationships are meant to last either. The pain can just be in the attachments that we feel for it and our egoistic clashes to hang on or make the other person wrong to justify leaving the relationship.

    This blog post is just to get the album up in here. We put a lot of work into Imra. When I have more content from us put together, then I’ll write a memoire piece and compile a portfolio page for Imra. For now, I just want to make sure this album is available to stream. I still think its a pretty good EP.

    A Sunrise Photo Shoot
    In the Bunkhouse Studio
    Kelly practiced Mudra
    Sadly I’ve lost the photographer information for all of these photos. I am sorry.