King of Time

I've posted mp3s of King of Time on my Songs page.

Songwriting. Words and Music: Ttïmm Roy (and maybe Dale Emery, I don't remember).

Performance

The Story. Do you know the kids' game King of the Hill? A bunch of kids stand on a small hill and try to knock each other off. The last person standing on top is King of the Hill. Well, King of Time is like that, but instead of knocking the other people off the hill, you have to knock them out of time. See?

For years, I thought I hated King of Time. When Ttïmm made a CD of our songs — he is the CEO of a full-service CD replicating company — I begged him to leave this song off the CD. He didn't. Bad Ttïmm!

As I was preparing the mp3 versions of the song, I realized that I don't hate it after all. The song is just fine. What I hate is my performance. My bass is out of tune. I stopped the drums a measure or two too early. Some of my harmonies on first few verses are atrocious.

Also, when we originally mixed the song onto cassette, the cassette deck we were using was slightly fast. So when the tape is played on any other deck, it plays slower, and at a lower pitch, than we recorded it. Ick.

For these mp3s, I used Sonic Foundry's SoundForge 6.0 to adjust the speed back to the way we played it. I like it a lot better at the original speed. Sadly, I can't fix my harmonies without knocking Ttïmm's lead vocals off key.

Anyway, it turns out that I like the song after all, warts and all.

Instruments

Recording. Recorded in 1982, probably on a TEAC four-track stereo reel-to-reel (but maybe on a Tascam PortaStudio four-track cassette recorder).