So you want to make an album? (part 15.75)
KeithHandy posted in Producing, So You Want... on July 8th, 2007
To read the whole series, follow some link or another.
Installment 15.75: Mo’ “in and out”
I occasionally speak of a time when I was going about it with the wrong attitude. This is generally the early 1990’s, from the time that I decided to do an album (Open the Window) under my own name, to the time that I finally handed my DAT tapes over to the cassette duplicating plant. It’s not as cut and dried as that, though. For one thing, I obviously had to deal with some problems in a spontaneous way, or they would have never been tackled at all. For another thing, even after my “awakening”, I never completely rid myself of the old mindset. What makes it a little confusing is that, on a micro-level, the “wrong mindset” isn’t all that wrong. Just as you don’t want to be a slave to a rigid plan, neither do you want to be a slave to random events and arbitrary whims (yours or anyone else’s) whose vectors add up to zero.
So, yes, you do have to take some control of the situation. It’s just nice to realize this is much easier to do when you think of it as being easy. It might have felt like you were dragging a heavy object uphill, because you thought of it that way. But stuff moves all the time, even if you do nothing. Your blunt, unfocused exertion won’t add much to the total pool of energy. So stop feeling responsible for pushing everything (duplicating energy that already existed), and start focusing on harnessing and steering all the stuff that’s already in motion.
You don’t have to go and get stimulus so that you can be influenced; you already have stimulus, and are already being influenced. You just may want to steer your input so that it comes from something better, by steering yourself to a place that will give you better inspiration, or steering your attention to a different book, website, or TV channel.
Same for output. You’re already creating, all the time — creating thoughts, actions, inactions, etc. — and another way of paraphrasing my “red light” installment is that you steer that ongoing creativity into a recording by having the equipment available and hitting the record button. You don’t have to make the ideas come in, and you don’t have to make the notes come out, you simply need to manage all those ideas and notes; think of them as your employees.
Input doesn’t stop just because you’re outputting. When you begin a recording session, unless you’re starting work on a brand new song (which is not the majority of the time), notice how effortless your first task is: you open the project file for some song, and you LISTEN TO IT. That don’t take no brains. What easier way to ease into a session than to chill out for a few minutes and groove to some music, like you always do, like everyone does? Okay, it’s a little more difficult, because this particular music is hell-bent on pulverizing your ego. It takes a little practice to remain in love with yourself as you dutifully note every flaw. Even if you put the tracks down only yesterday, that was the “old you”, and you’re a new person today. The fact that you can be critical of it is evidence of the leaps and bounds by which your production standards are rising! (Come on, now, I’m only slightly bullshitting you.)
I never work for a set amount of time, and I usually only start if I know I’ve got several open hours ahead of me. My problem is that I tend to remain in that gear long after I’ve crossed the threshold of diminishing returns, which is why I’m seriously considering experimenting with time limits. I think the tendency to go on for such long stretches sometimes prevents me from starting work, because in the back of my mind I assume I’m committing to the next few hours, even though I’m free to work for fifteen minutes and walk away. I haven’t completely eradicated the rigid ideas about time that “real studios” forced me to adapt to.
Apart from time itself, there are other things you can pay attention to. Are you on a roll? Are you exploring, discovering, or learning (thus receiving good input)? Are you still having fun (also good input)? Are you close to finishing something and anxious to hear the results (possible good input just around the corner)? These are all probably decent reasons to go a little longer than planned.
On the other hand, do you feel like you’re just not hearing the song anymore, and can’t tell if what you’re doing is any good? It’s called “aural fatigue”, it’s both physical and psychological, and it happens to absolutely every musician, every engineer, and every producer on the planet, in every single recording session. Here’s your membership card. Over time, you learn to maintain perspective for longer stretches, but you’re never completely immune to it. Like anything that exhausts you, you can take a short break and get a “second wind”, but you’ll never be quite as objective towards the end of a session as you were at the beginning. (This is why God invented “tomorrow”.)
The kind of input you’re getting from the session is limited: it’s feeding your output back at you and saturating the ferric oxide of your inner tape loop. That’s cool, to some extent, because you can say “yeah, man, I just did a session and I’m totally burned out”, and if you say this while exhaling cigarette smoke and wearing shades, it comes out kinda sexy. You can even get some interesting work done while your perception is distorted — else we wouldn’t have such a thing as psychedelia — so don’t rule out laying tracks in the later part of the session. Just be aware that tomorrow you may love it, or you may hate it. No biggie.
In general — and this goes for any creative process, not just music — think of ways of looking at it that take some of the heaviness off of yourself. Imagine your creative process is happening with or without you, and you’re simply watching it unfold from a first-party perspective. Imagine the finished piece already exists, and you’re just a conduit bringing it into this realm. Imagine that everything you do is being guided. Imagine that the mundane events in your life are elements of your album being handed off to you in a clandestine manner by a secret agent in a hat and trenchcoat. “PSSST, hey kid, Larry sent this, you’ll need it for track five.” Just don’t blow his cover.
Take all that heavy stuff out, and the “out” part of your session becomes pretty darn simple. You’re going to sit in a comfortable chair, play your instrument a bit, and click on some things. Other than that, your main job is to listen. Let your invisible one-eyed hunchback assistant engineers do the rest. :)
