The Light of Day

What did we learn today, kids?

What if I wrote a blog post every single time I did a recording session? It would be sort of like a “what I learned today” thing, like at the end of any given episode of Fat Albert or Davey and Goliath.

I didn’t really intend to replace the bass and drums on every single song in my rock opera, but when you’re doing an inventory on the state of your remixes, and the bass guitar is within arm’s reach and already plugged into the board, and hey, the camera is right behind you so you might as well turn that on too… you know how it goes.

So, hmm… what did I “learn” from this one? What was the “moral”?

The lesson is: always give yourself a “thumbs up” of encouragement just prior to a take!

One thing I like about these Through Forbidden Black Doors session videos is that they make the songs actually look playable. By humans. Somehow, having originally done so much on a sequencer, I’d probably given myself and everyone else the opposite impression.

I don’t intend for the Chamberlain (Mellotron) sample to sound like a real flute player, but it would probably be a good idea to ride its volume a little and add a touch of delay to give it a more “trippy hippie fantasy” quality. Maybe also scrunch a few of its more metronomic sounding notes closer together, to loosen the overall rhythm and open some “breath spaces” between phrases.

The John Lennon t-shirt was a thoughtful gift from my friend’s mother, but somehow I get the feeling it was designed by someone who spends more time listening to Motorhead.

Happy Easter!

Something more imaginative than “Update”.

The reason I’ve been so non-prolific in my posting lately is that I have a bad habit of flirting with the lower levels on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs from time to time. I usually mis-manage the levels, by trying to focus on something a level or two higher than I’m actually at, and letting something go unattended on a level or two below me. This is all one fancy-schmancy way of saying my unemployment ran out a few weeks ago and I’ve been in too much of a panic to write coherently.

Then again, occasionally writing about something unrelated to my rent would help to assuage the panic and refresh my mind. I’ve intermittently done some work on recording projects in the interim, both to take a breather from the mental tension, and to make some actual progress. (It’s important to remain creatively productive in less-than-ideal circumstances, even if you can’t realistically expect to be at your peak. If nothing else, this keeps the whirlpool going, and it tells the universe you haven’t given up.)

In these periods, where I allow myself to “forget my troubles” (as they would have crooned back in the great depression), here’s what I’ve done lately:

Current stuff

I’ve put the main vocal down for Rival Big Bang. This is a big leap for me. It still needs harmonies on parts of it, because I intend for it to have a sort of CSN sound to it. I don’t know exactly why I’m so sure of this; I just am. There’s a video on YouTube of me working on the part that’s done so far. I was teaching myself the song as I went along, so I was a little nervous about posting it… but who cares.

(Similarly, when I do the vocal for Bemoaning Moments, that will be another big leap. It’s been starving for that vocal to go down, and it’s a fantastic bit of music.)

After a few months of “existing somewhere out there in the Rochester area”, trumpet player Paul Gaspar finally got in contact with me, so I invited him to try his hand (or, rather, his horn) at filling the void in the instrumental break of Curtis’ Classic Collection of Comforts. I posted highlights from that session on YouTube as well, featuring two differently approached takes out of a total of approximately ten. For the video I of course left his sound natural and organic, but for the final mix I may run it through a resonant filter and/or octaver to make it sound more like a synthesizer. Not to “fix” anything, mind you, just as an artistic choice.

Old junk

Because discussion is underway for the film version of Through Forbidden Black Doors (where I think it stands a better chance of being “gotten” by an audience than as just a recording), I do have to continue tying up loose ends on my remix. Said remix got way out of hand, and I may have put more hours into that than into the original recording project itself, if that’s even possible. Most recently I’ve been bringing things close to the home stretch on the “fourth quarter” of the rock opera (”side four” in vinyl lingo), which would mean This Is Your Chance, Almost Outside, The Operation, The Thing That Happens Next, and Nicole’s Thoughts.

I backed up one song prior to those and put a significant amount of work into Do You Remember? as well, which mostly consisted of manipulating Kim’s vocal — pitch correction (without flattening vibrato or other inflections), timing adjustments on certain phrases, and evening out the volume overall. Since it’s such a long and vocal-dominated song, with no instrumental “relief”, the more pleasing I can get that vocal to sound, the better the chance that people can endure it happily. I’m not saying this is a tough one to like, since a lot of people singled it out as one of their favorites back in the day. But my lyrics oscillate between brilliant and cringe-worthy, and like all of my recordings that go back that far, there’s a tendency for the whole thing to sound like a demo to my 2007 ears. The goal here isn’t to eliminate the “oldness” altogether, though; just to present it as charmingly as possible.

Oh yes, I almost forgot that I checked out and ran off a mix of Smile!, which is just before that (and didn’t really need much work). So that will (soon) put the last seven out of twenty tracks at a point where I don’t need to touch them anymore. Being able to put a whole string of tracks out of my mind like that is always a stress reliever, because look at how much smaller it makes the potential “to do” list for the remainder of the project.

The Operation has been a tough one to produce right, because I keep doing too much with it. Every time I remove something, and “hollow it out”, making it cleaner, I wind up liking it better. For some reason, I’ve always assumed it needed to have distorted rhythm guitars through the whole thing, because it’s supposed to be evil. Well, the fact of the matter is, the song is so fucking evil that it doesn’t need distorted rhythm guitars. It can be a keyboard dominant song, and the evil still shines through. One thing it does need, though, and finally has, is a real bass guitar. Once again, you’re invited to my studio to watch. My rhythm isn’t consistently tight on up-tempo music like this, but that’s what editing is for. I forget exactly what’s in the video version of the mix, but in the actual working version I think I can finish tightening the bass part, add a new hi-hat, and I’m good to go.

Overall, the rock opera is a restoration project, and will never be a “current” project. Making the film will be like making a tribute film; I want to produce it well, and creatively, as a respectful send-off, but I don’t want to immerse myself in the dystopian view that it presents.

Back to reality

Just to show you an example of things I need soon, but I’m putting off buying, because I’m that tight right now:

• Soda (!!!)
• Coffee filters (using paper towels)
• Athlete’s foot spray (just don’t scratch)
• Fingernail and toenail clippers (using scissors)
• Replacement window for passenger door of car (saran wrap)
• Rubbing alcohol (to clean scrolly ball in mouse)
• Dandruff shampoo (soap)
• Facial cleanser (soap)

…and of course, on the upside, I can’t afford cigarettes. I should use this time to come up with something better to do while standing outside for a few minutes, because I’m in danger of being able to afford them again soon. The thing is, if a stranger walks by and you make eye contact with them while taking a drag, it’s normal. If you’re just standing there, though, doing nothing, and you make eye contact with people, you look suspicious.

I suppose I could start taking “apple breaks”.

Harmonized guitars

Man, I freakin’ love doing harmonized guitars like this:

I don’t care if it is a 1980s hair metally kind of thing, or a 1970s middle-of-the-roady Eaglesy/Bostony kind of thing, or what cheezy genre it sprung forth from. I just like the sound of that particular musical… *cough*… “device”. I’ll be working on using the guitar to do a lead melody line, as I was just now — a specific melody as opposed to an improvised solo — and while I’m fiddling around with ways to reinforce it (unison, octave up, octave down, etc.), I say, eh, what the hell, and start to play along with it a third higher — you know the sound — as a sort of internal joke, initially snickering at myself for shamelessly barreling straight for the cliché — but then reluctantly admitting to myself that I just plain have to keep it.

Dammit.

Edit 11:00 PM sunday: Here it is a little better mixed. I sped up the whole first measure by 4% because it really felt like it was dragging, which was hard to tell when all I had to go by was a drum track.

How did I speed up the first measure by 4%? With a calculator, and some careful slicing and dicing. So there you go… that 27 seconds of music encapsulates me. You don’t need anything else. Play it for my funeral. It will be a 27 second funeral, which is great, because nobody likes funerals… although some people will complain that they got all dressed up for a 27 second funeral, but hey, let’s be real, you can’t please everyone.

I must not rest on my laurels…

…because I’m not very good at it. It’s now the end of week #1 of Leave of Absence 2 being available on CD through Lulu.com. As experienced as I am at working on stuff, I have very little experience finishing and letting go of stuff, so that experience tends to be somewhat traumatic. I exaggerate, but I do have to make peace with the non-existence of an immediate stampede of customers; but the good thing is, if there’s anything technically wrong with the handful of discs that have been ordered so far — like gaps between the songs — it won’t be a nightmare to arrange for those people to receive corrected versions. In a few days I’ll know for sure about that. Like I said, this is a guinea pig. And thank goodness I’m not paying rent on a storefront, or any up-front manufacturing costs.

But anyway, the best thing to do is quit re-loading my stats, and just get on with more work. Get that whirlpool going. So in that spirit, here I am working on It’s You, on an instrumental for the beginning of the current album, Fr. Hifta Ryphtor (which I should be able to finish in a few months):

It’s not technically an overture, but I noticed today that at about 2:22 the chords kind of hint at Curtis’ Classic Collection of Comforts. So I went ahead and accentuated that. Here’s a (slightly) more “mixed” version of the above — note that I fixed the sloppy timing at the end (God bless digital):

Note also that the first few guitar phrases are gone now, save for some barely audible volume swells.  I never intended for the guitar to come in right at the beginning, but it’s good to play through the whole thing just to get in the flow/mindframe.

In case you’re wondering, yes, there is such a thing as Leave of Absence 1, as well as an early-ish album called Unfinished Business, and I intend to remaster them and make them available as well. I also have a large enough collection of what I’ve been referring to as “orphan tracks” to compile into yet another album, and this morning I had the spectacular idea of naming said compilation Extreme Leftovers. Because, you know, Leave of Absence is technically leftovers, so anything that didn’t make it onto that would be even more “left over”. And far from being lesser-quality material, it would include some of my all time favorites such as Mana and Phone Booth.

Bass sessions 9/13/07

Bass sessions for three of my songs, “What Do You Think Of Yourself?”, “Selling Purple to the Blind”, and “Soul Peer”.

I have the bass relatively prominent in the mix for this video, so you can hopefully hear it clearly, but I can’t make any promises if you’re watching on a laptop or have tiny speakers.

So you want to make an album? (part 18)

To read the entire series, go to the “So You Want…” category.

Installment 18: All your bass

One of the nicest perks of being an independent recording artist is that your bass player has no ego. Sure, some of your own ego will come through in the bass parts you play and/or sequence, but for the most part, your allegiance is to the song, not the instrument.

I could probably rattle off another laundry list, similar to the opening of my drum slut post, only this time of “ways I’ve recorded bass parts”. But, this series is not about me anymore, it’s about you — using me as a metaphor for you, of course, since my writing snaps back into first-person if I stop consciously thinking about it for more than two seconds. Suffice to say, depending on the style of the music, you will most likely be using an electric bass guitar, or some kind of keyboard. I like the sound of a real bass guitar best, or at least I like my simulations (when necessary) to be as believable as possible. Generally, if I use a keyboard and sequencer, it’s to work out a “sketch” of a bass part, so I can experiment with changing certain notes and see what sounds best before actually learning to play it on a real bass. I always start right off with a real bass guitar on slow songs, though, because they’re easy enough.

Bass parts, oft thought of as a dull chore, can actually be very stimulating if you let yourself get just playful enough. You don’t have to keep the part totally interesting through the whole song, but you can work in little variations here and there to keep the song “alive”. There’s rarely a practical reason to record the bass first, so by the time you do so, you’re generally past the stressful stage of needing to create the song’s framework and worry about its tempo — so it’s easy to do multiple takes and punch-ins, which means you can try something a little different in bar 38 without committing to anything.

What makes it extra fun is remembering that you’re playing to the listener’s subconscious; nobody actively listens to the bass line (besides other musicians), and small changes can have a surprising impact on the song’s overall effect. Have fun with these. Try changing the rhythm just a little by syncopating/anticipating one of the notes (playing it a half beat early). Try using a different pitch on one of the “inbetween” notes (one that isn’t on the chord change). Try leaving a hole on a certain beat, so that the notes you do play are that much more defined. Try mimicking something from a bass line you heard in a jazz, disco, reggae, country, or polka song. It won’t change the whole style of your song, but it will hint at something. To most listeners, it will be subliminal; but if you drop it in stealthily enough, even your musically savvy friends may not pick it out until the tenth listen.

Sometimes people record the bass secondly, so they can be sure to lock their rhythm tightly with the drumming. But without other instrumentation there, and all that apparent “space” in the sound, you might have a tendency to overplay. If you record some of the other instruments first, you’ll know where you can just keep the bass part simple, and maybe even leave some holes in it.  Also, if you first get everything else to sound as good as possible without it, you’re more likely to end up with a final product that sounds good on smaller speakers where the bass part can’t be heard quite as well.

I generally put the bass part down after there are some guitars and keyboards already recorded, so I can hear it in context; but, then when I’m editing and polishing up the bass track, I’ll leave those other things muted so I can make sure certain bass notes line up perfectly with the drum hits, especially the kick drum. If a bass note happens to be between two drum hits, I usually nudge it to make sure it’s exactly between those hits. (Our eyes are more critical than our ears, so if it looks good in the editing software, it probably is good. Listen to be sure, of course.) Melding your bass and drums into one synergistic monster will help give your song a solid backbone, and subsequently a “professional sheen”, even if your other instruments occasionally flake out.

Idea: try recording two very different versions of the bass part. For the first version, keep it simple, minimalistic, and safe — just lock to the beat, define the chord changes, and give some semblance of “bottom” to the music. For the second version, improvise ambitiously and dangerously, at the outer edge of your skill level. You’ll flub a lot, but you might manage to get in a few “golden moments” where you sound better than you actually are. Just keep the good parts, and erase the corresponding parts of the “simple” version, to make a great composite.

If you need something precise, you need it done quickly, and it doesn’t need to “rock” in the strictest sense of the word, sequenced bass will do the trick. There are plenty of sampled basses available that will satisfy your need for a realistic tone, and synthesizers can generally do a reasonable “fretless” sound; the only thing you’ll be missing are some of the performance nuances and inflections — like the gliding of the fingers, and the natural variation in timbre from note to note. Sequenced bass will serve it’s most essential purpose, mind you, supporting the chord changes and establishing the bottom of the spectrum — it just won’t get anyone “air bassing”, so be sure your song gives the listener something else to do with their hands.

When sequencing a bass part, you will probably want to quantize it. If your drums are sequenced too, this will make locking the bass to the drums a one-step no-brainer. Also, try to avoid letting notes overlap; it will generally stick out and kill the illusion, and multiple pitches don’t blend well in the lowest register unless they’re really simple intervals, like octaves. (If your tone generator/sampler/synth can be set to monophonic, as in only one note at a time, this keeps things simple.)

Whether the bass is real or not, it usually sounds good to put some compression or limiting on it. This smooths out the volume and helps it “sit” more with the drums. EQ is useful too; by adusting the upper midrange, you can control how much it “stands out” among the guitars and keyboards, as opposed to just turning the whole instrument up and overpowering everything. Most other effects are not good for bass, in general, unless you want to be experimental. I’ve met bass players with racks of digital effects the size of refrigerators, and it’s kind of silly. Like it or not, the bass serves a musical purpose, and a wonderful one at that — and serves it best with a clear, simple tone. If you ache to transcend the degrading stereotype of “bass players playing low notes”, and you feel your time has come to shine as a musician… listen… is the thing surgically grafted onto your body? When you arrived into this world, did the doctor congratulate your mother on her bouncing baby bassist? Have you ever met a carpenter that only uses saws? Set it down and pick up a different instrument.

In closing, here’s a bass. It lists at $4,546.00, but hey, it’s worth it, because it’s all pre-banged up, and you don’t have to go to all that trouble wrecking it yourself.

Edit 8/14: in post-closing, here’s a bass track I recorded years ago and just finished editing:

This is a song I originally recorded with Episodes in a proper studio in the late 1980s. We never finished mixing it, and the original tapes are gone forever. Towards the end of the 1990s, we had a half-hearted stab at reuniting, with Garrett being the most reluctant of the four of us, and did a rudimentary session for two songs in my home studio, including a remake of Phone Booth. The drumming is by original Episodes drummer Thom DeLooze. A rough guitar part exists, played by Garrett, which I still plan to sift through and assemble the best bits of into a (hopefully) complete guitar track. The three of us played together for about three and a half takes, and this is a composite of the best bits from Thom’s and mine, carefully edited to still sound natural, but without the mistakes.

Notice that the bass by itself (or with just the drums) sounds simplistic, naked, even “dumb”. That’s fine, though, and it’s good to get comfortable with that sound, because in the context of everything else, every little inflection or variation helps carry the music along.

Our cushions never clash…

I made my vocal pitch graphing a little easier to read visually by de-saturating the quiet parts, i.e. graying the spaces between notes where the line on the pitch graph doesn’t mean anything and is just connecting the dots. So the bright colored columns are where the syllables happen. The idea will be that you can then open it in a graphic editor, mark it up where you want it tuned, re-save it, and have another program “read” your squiggles and go from there. The meta-idea being that I’ll have an alternative to Autotune to rein pitch into the general vicinity without flatlining it (killing the nuance and vibrato, and destorying emotive pitch scoops and fall-offs). I’m already doing this anyway, but this should help make it less tedious. Of course, you can do this with Autotune if you’re not lazy. But I’m not just lazy — I’m also poor.

Ethics? Learn to sing? Practice more? Do more takes? Bah.

I did have a fairly productive week last week, as I promised, and now I’m extending that promise to have a productive week this week too, even though it’s half over. Well, that’s okay (it being half over), because the pitch thing should be useful. In my remixing projects I keep coming to these points where my ears are fatiguing too quickly to be confident of the vocal pitch. I never have a problem getting it to sound good on big, loud speakers, when I have all that bass and stuff to support me; it’s the little, quiet speakers that taunt and heckle me.

But I digress! Last week, did a halfway decent rhythm guitar part to my ode to selling out, Curtis’ Classic Collection of Comforts — which is meant to evoke a train wreck without actually being one — and video’d it for posterity. I may also revive a similar but much older rhythm guitar take, from an earlier attempt at the song, back when I was a Stratocasterist, to combine with the newer take (dueling me’s!). It was a different version altogether, so if I do that, I’ll no doubt have to Frankentempo it (Feel that vocabulary s-t-r-e-t-c-h!), as in cut it up and slide bits to and fro.

Tip for the intermittently depressed: the thing that will make you feel better may not be a completely new idea or epiphany, 180 degrees away from whatever you’re whining about focused on — it’s more likely something about 20 to 30 degrees off the edge of your peripheral vision, something you’re aware of but haven’t been consciously thinking about. Beyond that, there’s always the next weather change to look forward to. (Thunderstorms are cool.) In the meantime, drink water and eat something healthy.

Chronically depressed: you’re on your own. Get pills.

Happy 100 hits, “Soul Peer”

Thank you, hundredth viewer of my Soul Peer demo/performance on YouTube. See, it pays to whine now and then. :)

I know 100 people could fit in the room I’m sitting in (well, not comfortably, and not without breaking fire code regulations), and I’m sure a few of those are multiple views from the same people (which is fine too) — but every power of ten, every digit, that’s one order of magnitude (I think — I don’t know the exact definition of “order of magnitude”, but that’s what I like to think it means) in the right direction. And when you’re a reclusive hermit doing original music in a saturated market, each new digit is a milestone. Next destination: a thousand. And so on. Toppermost of the poppermost and all that.

I was almost about to comment on this as I saw it getting close, but I didn’t want to be one of those annoying punks saying “go to such-and-such site and vote for our band”, as if whatever other bands they were up against weren’t human beings with friends, families, or genius of their own.

Of course I’m already a multi-thousandaire (and have been for some time) in the classical genre with Moonlight Sonata. It seems to be a hit with guitarists, many of whom apparently want tablature now, which I don’t even know how to do with all those bends and glides. So if you’re reading this, you’re a guitarist, and you like transcribing half-improvised lead guitar performances in tablature format, please go for it — the demand is there.

My expectations for the most recent “what I do in my studio” video were quite low, since I didn’t figure watching reels of tape being threaded would be terribly visually appealing, but apparently some people are making it through all three parts. So I’ll continue to do stuff like that, including my forthcoming secret surprise. I already told you it’s about something beginning with the letter “S”… well, the second letter in that word is “A”.

The continuing stooooory of a *track* that’s gone to the (over)dubs

You can tell me to STFU with these “clever” post titles any time now. :)

Here’s your next opportunity to micro-manage my deeply personal creative progress on What Do You Think Of Yourself (from last chorus to end this time):

0:17 - distorted rhythm guitar with wah-wah. This whole section will have more layers of vocal improv going on, and is supposed to have a “gospel-ish” sound. Maybe even some tambourine and hand claps. I’m almost embarrassed that I did too good of a job simulating Jesus Christ Superstar with the piano riffing. I’ll try less hard next time. :)

1:04 - sampled Chamberlain (same thing as a Mellotron, different make) strings enter here; it might be a few seconds later before you can pick it out over the other stuff. The whole point of these eight bars is to extend the previously repeating B/C#/D/E “rising” chord progression to B/C#/D/E/F/G/Ab/Bb so that it “keeps going all the way up” until it hits THE BIG C that kicks the next section off. And to help over-dramatify the second half of that…

1:14 - sampled trumpet. Love it or hate it, it does sound damn real, and reminds me a bit of some of the stuff Christy listens to, like Polyphonic Spree and Robyn Hitchcock. If you do hate it, it’s only there for ten seconds.

2:19 - doubled lead guitar, in left and right. I will probably have it a little quieter when it first comes in so we’re not quite so “power ballad”.

2:26 - Chamberlain strings re-enter.

2:54 - I just want to mention that hearing the Chamberlain really quiet behind those piano chords makes me feel like I’m in a movie theater, watching something with a lot of sparkly stars (the in-the-sky kind, not the tabloid kind) and magical glowing things in it… possibly an alien type flick, where a little boy is peering into some cosmic portal, and you can see that it’s shining bluish or greenish light on his wide-eyed open-mouthed face. But I’m visual that way. :)

What Do You Think Of Yourself? (demo, 4/6/99 8:11 PM)

Here is something straddling the line between demo and song-skeleton: What Do You Think Of Yourself. Thanks to Garrett’s verbal time-stamping, we can now pinpoint the exact year, day, and minute that the acoustic demo was originally recorded. The funny thing is, I forgot we ever did record the song, and it was a delightful surprise to find it intact when I was inventory-ing my reels a few years later. The drums (for part of the song) had already been played by myself in a separate session, and I had to do some time-squashing of our demo to fit it to the tempo of the drums.

Apologies for my out-of-tune vocal, and for, uh… Michael Bolton. That will be cut at the last minute, but I’m keeping it in the working version because it’s a cheap laugh. :)

Oh, I almost forgot the reason why I’m posting this now: I just used Da Hornet (plus a Leslie effect) to make the “spinning” chord for the intro (0:58 - 1:39).

Whenever all the noise dies
Behind the lids of my eyes
It’s never hard to give rise to a “me thing”
But when I see the whole earth
I wonder how much I’m worth
Or if I even deserve to be breathing

People pay a pretty penny
Collecting clowns to criticize
People love to make a fool of
That reflection in Bozo’s eyes

Have you noticed when you’re looking
At squirmy worms that crawl the ground
Squirmy worms are less repulsive
They look up while you look down

What do you think of yourself?

Every day you let slip away from you
Is a day you can never retrieve
Twenty four hours of your past down the drain
Your future might as well just get up and leave
And when you choke your deepest desires
Your worst fears are guaranteed to come true
‘Cause really, isn’t your worst fear of all
That nothing good will ever happen to you?

Are you good or are you evil
After all is said and done?
Is your life worth watching over?
And I mean that in more ways than one

What do you think of yourself?

Edit 6/11/07: “What’s all that with just the drums by themselves from 5:49 onward?”, I hear you asking. That’s for a section of music that bridges What Do You Think into the next song. Fortunately for me, as I sit behind a drumset, I can hear all of my chord changes in my head. Unfortunately for you, you can’t hear all my chord changes in your head, so all you hear is drums.

New piano part to the rescue!

I put in way too many hours — yes, that’s right, you heard me, “hours” — on this new piano overdub over this past weekend. First, I played the grandiose dramatic thing from 1:18 - 1:52, as in actually played it on the keyboard, since I’ve played it thousands of times and pretty much knew exactly note for note what I wanted there. Since you can only play so well on a $100 unweighted keyboard, I did take some time cleaning that up in piano roll view: erasing mis-hit notes, quantizing rhythm, smoothing out volume (”velocity”) of notes.

Then I did the quiet part from 0:50 - 1:17, the same way, but separate from the quiet “guide drums” so they wouldn’t be locked into that tempo. Since it was a little shorter/faster than the guide drums, I lined it up with the next part, and then slid all that stuff to the left to line it up with the part before it.

For the “apocalyptic chords” (0:22 - 0:49), I knew what chords I wanted there but didn’t have a set way in my mind to play them, so I “composed” that whole part by drawing it in the piano roll view, working backwards from the end of the section so that it would lead into the next part as naturally as possible. (Kind of bends the definition of the word “naturally”, I realize.)

For everything before that, the “jam-out” part (which you only hear the tail end of here), I did a combination of actual playing and creative note-drawing, got too far out with it — to the point where it was getting in the way — and then replaced the most excessive bits with simple filler. One of the big differences between the me of today and the me of 1992-1994 is that I realize I have this tendency to overwrite, and know when to cut out a crazy measure and replace it with dead-simple quarter notes and triads.

Towards the end, when I only had a few measures left to fill in (0:04-0:18 on this mp3), I felt creatively zapped. I was ready to call it a night and go to bed, when I asked myself this awesomely powerful question: “what would you put in there if you had to quickly put something there and didn’t have time to think about it?” That helped blast that block out of the way, for sure. And I didn’t cop out on those measures — I did wind up putting some real “artistry” into them — but that was kickstarted by the “just do something” mindset.

“So what’s up with the piano all by itself from 1:53 to the end?”

Ah, another day… another day…

So you want to make an album? (part 13)

To read the entire series, go to the “So You Want…” category.

Installment 13: Be a drum slut (you’ll love it!)

When it comes to layin’ drum tracks, I ain’t no vanilla cherry, honey. I am, indeed, a drum slut. I’ve done drums in every place you can name, in every imaginable way. Before recording the other tracks. After recording the other tracks. Real drumset played by someone else for my song, with or without a click track. Real drumset played by someone else for their song and “stolen” for use in my song (mmm, so naughty). Real drum set played by me. Back when I was under-age, I recorded myself hitting pillows with sticks (and I’ll be damned if it didn’t sound just like… pillows being hit with sticks!) — and I was also using the built in rhythms on organs and toy keyboards. I’ve created makeshift drum-like sounds with a synthesizer, and likewise with a Commodore 64. I’ve done oral. (Yes, “oral” — I was mouth-drumming before beatboxing took off.) Played a drum machine by hand. Programmed a drum machine. Programmed a computer sequencer which then played the drum machine. Played a drum machine by hand into the computer’s sequencer, and then used that to fix/tighten/clean up my performance. Programmed a computer sequencer to play samples of real, actual drums that I’d originally hit with a real, actual drumstick (this is one of my favorite positions methods lately). Ain’t no lie, I’ll try anything once, sugar.

Why so many different ways? Lots of reasons. Sometimes you just have to use whatever is available to you. Sometimes you want to try something different. Sometimes the song demands that you do something different (I love it when the song gets bossy). Sometimes you think you’re being super-creative and all you’re really doing is making a mess. But that’s okay too, because we all gotta learn.

Since 1.) this series is geared more at home recordists than at bands going into pro studios, and 2.) home is where the revolution is happening anyway, I’m going to assume you’re recording one instrument at a time. The logical thing to do is to record a drum track before anything else, whether it’s real drums or machine drums. If you’re a little crazy, it is actually possible to record other instruments like guitars first, but only if there’s a good reason, or if you have experience doing so. (I know one guy that always does his drums last — he has to crank his headphones to the max to hear what he’s playing along to — but he’s so intimately familiar with his own songs, that even when there are breaks between sections, he can intuitively “feel” how long to pause before starting up again.)

On some of my own songs (listen to Have You Heard the Good News? for an example), the guitar holds the groove for most of the song, and the drums only come in on one verse. I could have started with a click track for the whole song, but then the rhythm of the initial guitar track might have felt too rigid, and I wanted it to be natural. So I played the guitar part “free”, i.e. not to anything, and then played the drum machine by hand over the third verse. On Never Turn Back, I actually did it this way (guitar first, then played the drum machine) for the whole song, partly just because I’m nuts, and partly because, again, I wanted the acoustic guitar to have a really natural feel to it. No click or reference was used, so the song is at whatever tempo I naturally played the guitar at. Playing a drum machine to an existing track is at least a little easier than doing so with a real set, because you can do it at a volume that won’t make you deaf. Be picky, though. If a bit doesn’t “feel” right, do something about it, because a half-assed drum part will kill a song.

If you know drums will be playing for most of the duration of your song, as in most pop/rock songs, the logical and sane thing to do is to record them first. This is not without its own challenge; if there are fills, accents, or breaks that happen in certain spots, you need to be able to mentally keep track of where you are in the song. Even if there is a section where you don’t want drums, say an intro for example, you could just play a “placeholder” beat for that part and remove it later. Always give yourself a one-measure count-off at the beginning, or you will be cursing yourself as you try to nail the first chord on overdubs. Setting the ideal tempo can be tricky; for drum machines, play and sing along with it to see if it feels right before committing to it. For real drums, maybe play and sing the song with your keyboard or guitar first to get the tempo in your head, and watch out for that human tendency to speed up as you go along.

Often times, after creating what you think is the ultimate drum track, you will put your overdubs down and then wish the drum part was a little different. There’s no easy rule for how to avoid this; it takes a certain amount of experience and foresight. If you’re not sure, it’s generally better to keep it really simple than to get fancy, because everything else you do will be adding to it. Something like a cymbal crash can always be overdubbed later if you think a transition isn’t getting enough emphasis. Another thing I’ve noticed with drum machine parts is, if you have velocity sensitive pads and some hits are a lot quieter than others, the quieter hits can rapidly disappear into near-inaudibility when you start putting overdubs on. So it’s best not to overdo the dynamics if you know there will be a lot of other things on top.

Recording the sound from a drum machine is a no-brainer; the work has already been done for you. Just patch it directly in and record it. Comparitively, recording a real kit in your home studio will prove to be a challenge as far as microphone placement and setting levels. The tight, clean, well-defined drum sounds on studio recordings are the result of microphones being placed right near the drumheads, generally one mic per drum, plus a pair of overhead mics to capture cymbals and room ambience. In all likelihood, your project studio may not have as many mics or recording inputs as you would like, yet you may still want to record a set anyway. This is fine, just be aware that your sound will be a compromise, and you may need to experiment a lot with the overall mix to get a sound that you find acceptable.

If you record with only one or two microphones, it is best to hang them several feet above the set, and then some after-the-fact multi-band compression might help you bring out the lacking “oomph” of the kick drum without muddying everything up the way an ordinary EQ might. If you have a couple more mics, it’s generally recommended that you close-mic the snare and the kick, and record them to separate tracks so you can adjust them afterwards. If, however, like a lot of home recordists, you don’t have a multi-channel soundcard, you can combine the sounds from multiple mics on the fly with a small mixer — you won’t know what it sounds like until after you record it and play it back, and you won’t be able to re-adjust the balance later, so you’ll need to record and listen back to some short “test takes” before starting work on the actual song.

Do a Google search on “miking drums” (without the quotes). A lot of what you find and read, you may not be able to do with the equipment you currently have, but the general principles will still be valuable. I’ll link to a few of them, but there are so many good articles out there that you really should do a full search yourself when you have time for explorin’.

A few years ago, a friend and former drummer of mine left his drums at my studio for a while, so I tried a session or two of playing the set myself. Your mileage my vary on this, but from my own experience, it may be helpful to let you know that I wish I had played them a bit louder, or rather, more consistently loud. Because drums are so much louder than other acoustic instruments, a non-drummer will tend to play relatively quietly. It will sound loud in the room, but you can tell on playback when you didn’t capture the familiar sound, timbre, or character of “loud hits”.

From these same sessions, I isolated, copied, and saved some of the better sounding drum hits and cymbal crashes to create a personal library of drum samples. When you think too hard about individual sounds, you tend to over-embellish them. These natural sounds — cleaned up a bit, but not “sweetened” much — sound nice and organic when I use them in conjunction with a sequencer. On my old Windows box, I used Cakewalk as the sequencer (think “the robot that plays the instrument”) and Mellosoftron as the sampler (think “the instrument being played by the robot”) which produces the actual sound. On my Mac, I can do it all self-contained within Tracktion.

It’s worth mentioning here that seemingly dull and ordinary drum sounds are often ideal in the larger context, since you usually don’t want the drums to be hogging all the listener’s attention anyway. Having realized this, my current “drum set” sounds pretty realistic, and I can use it in a lot of songs without getting sick of it — whereas a while back, particularly in the competitive climate of 80s, the pressure was on to blow everyone else off the charts with the ultimate, big, bad, in-your-face “snare drum to end all snare drums”. It took me a while to recover from that.

A whole universe of techniques, some of which might be considered “cheating” if you were in a “real band” with a “real drummer”, is out there for less-pigeonholed artists to explore without guilt. Don’t be afraid to try recording your drum parts in separate layers, or to combine the drum machine with a real drumset. Try, for example, using the drum machine for a simple, tight, clean kick/snare groove, and then overdubbing real cymbals. Try playing the drums at half the actual speed of the song, and then speeding it up on playback for a cute and infectious “toy drums” sound. Try looping your best measure or two (or four, or thirteen) of drumming. Try using the drum machine for the hi-hat, the drumset for the kick, your mouth as a snare, and the contents of your silverware drawer being dumped on the kitchen floor as a crash. (Try to get your pets involved too, and if you can get your neighbor to scold you for something, that’s always a fun thing to catch on tape.) Remember, a good sounding rhythm track will only give you half of your satisfaction; the other half will come from the scandalous stories you can tell afterwards about how you did it.

So what are you waiting for? Be a drum slut. You’ll love it. It’s a way of life.

TFBD guitar session 3/12/07

Just got around to fetching this off the camera:

I’m happy to say this music has transcended the internal stigma of “feeling too old” to me — notice I didn’t even select the “ancient” category for this post — and I’m quite enthusiastic about resurrecting it. As I said in a previous post, I played another song from TFBD (The Operation) at Daily Perks and didn’t feel silly about it at all (example lyric: “You’re here to stretch and bend and twist for us/You exist for us”). This is possibly due to my recent experience at my now-former place of work.

A viewer on YouTube requested an mp3, so here’s the whole song. It’s called “Workers’ Theme”, it’s the opening instrumental (not exactly an “overture” because it’s only one theme — I never quite “got” overtures, from an aesthetic standpoint), and it depicts the beaten-down, brainwashed drones as they mindlessly file into their places on the assembly line.

Gïg

I did a full set of originals at Daily Perks tonight, and there were a few more present (though not by many) than the crowd of six I’d anticipated (gotta think positively). In addition to my current songs, I pulled some relics from the archives that I never thought I’d play in front of an audience, such as Lice Blue Hue, The Operation, and Have You Heard The Good News?. (Who knows, maybe in some alternate universe I even did Children’s Abortion Workshop…?) I didn’t have too many lyric slip-ups, but I do notice it is a little harder in general to physically play the guitar when I’m aware of an audience. In the last several months I’ve played in front of people about six times, so I am getting used to it, but I’d get more used to it if I did it more. (That would also increase my chances of getting in front of some larger audiences.)

A recurring theme in my feedback lately is compliments on my falsetto singing voice. It’s interesting to me that people single that out. I don’t think of it as anything special. Maybe it’s because most guys don’t even attempt it?

The digital video revolution is doing for self-portraits what sliced bread did for … people who didn’t want to slice their own bread!

Top: first time trying out the camera on me playing guitar, using only the built-in mic for sound, just to see what it would sound like. I played at least a dozen songs, whatever came to mind, and a four-minute Shine On You Crazy Diamond sounded best (surprisingly, since it’s not really an acoustic-friendly song), so I preserved the moment on YouTube, flubs and all.

Bottom: I filmed myself putting down the bass part for a new song this morning. Unfortunately, I sounded better than I looked, so I’ll be keeping the track but not the video. The above still is one of the less-incriminating frames, but yes, the truth is out there: I still have a few grams to lose.

Flute solo from “Outside”, mellotron remix

I haven’t uploaded any audio here recently, so I’ll give you a small taste of my progress on the Through Forbidden Black Doors nonexistent film version remix project. This is an instrumental solo section from a track called Outside, depicting an unhappy factory worker’s daydream of an “outside world” which none of the workers have ever been to.

It’s not that much different from the version on my 1998 CD; it’s a nearly faithful note-for-note copy. What’s most different is that instruments have been replaced. The flute part was originally played on one of those uninspiring 1980s synths, with a few rows of patch selection buttons and a tiny digital readout. It didn’t sound terrible, but I’ve replaced it with sampled mellotron flute to give it a more vintage-y feeling. The drum machine was replaced by sampled drums from a well-known 1969 album (first correct guess wins a hug!), and sampled cymbals from an obscure early 90s album. There’s a heavily reverberated speech-synthesized choir filling in the background and adding to the other-worldly dream-like quality.

Mana (finally!)

Maybe this is an exaggeration, but as a songwriter I think I have maybe three or four songs that represent some kind of musical ideal, and then three or four hundred songs that satirize the frustrating blocks between myself and that ideal.

(Thanks to Christy for permission to use these pics)

The irritable, short-sighted nitwit I was at 16 could not have written Mana. It came from somewhere, though, and I’m not questioning it.

What I recorded a few years later for the Open The Window sessions was the complete song; everything was essentially there. But when I pulled it out to remix it recently, it called for some overdubs — more than I expected — not to add new parts, but to reinforce what was there. I’ll talk about those in another post.

As with everything here, the mix may undergo minor tweaking, but this is basically it. Enjoy!