The Light of Day

What Do You Think Of Yourself?: new vocal

First, enjoy the session, ’cause I think it went pretty well…

It’s actually a lot easier than my Rival Big Bang sessions were, because it has a definite and more structured melody. The part between approximately 4:00 to 5:00 is a little empty, though, and rather than featuring me half-heartedly ad-libbing, I want to fill it in with something like gospel singers. I just emailed Paul Gaspar to see if he knows any.

I’ve only been saving my session videos as 320 by 240 MPEGs — better looking than what you see on YouTube, but still small — because the videos themselves aren’t meant to be works of art. That said, I’d still like to incorporate parts of them into more formal “music video” videos. There’s stuff you can do to low-res images to make them… not necessarily look hi-res, but at least look better when blown up.

So you want to make… something that’s “dead”

The good news is, not everybody takes glee in the album being “dead”.

John Lennon was only ever interested in singles. Paul McCartney was the one pushing to segue tracks together to build longer suites. But neither was right or wrong; it’s a floor wax and a dessert topping. What’s “dead”, if anything, is the need to bend your ideas in an inauthentic way to conform to a physical format. But even physical media itself isn’t “dead”.

We call something “dead” when a bubble bursts. (It’s our spiteful way of celebrating the decline of something that has been popular and ubiquitous, but maybe not a good fit for us individually.) A bubble is something that is bigger than it should be, or bigger than it normally would be, and as a result, can’t be sustained as it is. However, when a bubble pops, the material that made it up still exists; it only ceases to be artificially inflated, reverting to its real and natural size.

There may no longer be a trend of people making albums who weren’t interested in albums in the first place. If you are interested in albums, though, that’s good news for you; when the people who came to the party for the wrong reasons finally leave, that’s when the party becomes fun again.

Oh, and don’t forget all the other things that “died”: acoustic pianos, real drums, the orchestra, radio, live performance… seems to me like most things do quite well after they “die”.

Mixer’s Block on Hometracked

I could very easily find myself posting a link to every single article on hometracked.com. Although there’s been a slump in posting volume over the past few months, they seem to be steadily posting again for now.

Ever heard or used the phrase “mixer’s block“? I haven’t, but I think it’s a great phrase. When you’re mixing, you’re painting a sonic picture. If you try to bring more focus to one element of the picture, the context of all the other elements gets thrown off, and you get yourself in a perpetual tug-of-war between, say, trying to make the drums cut through more solidly and keeping some keyboard part “full” and “present” sounding (my own off-the-top-of-my-head example). Often the solution is somewhere in left field; changing some third thing you hadn’t thought of somehow magically solves the first two, but you need to think creatively in order to get there.

I don’t have time to elaborate on this further at the moment, which is probably a good thing. Class dismissed.

Insertable bits #1: Crutches, puzzles, and originality

Originality. It comes out of nowhere. You’re happily living a normal life, and suddenly, one day, bang, you write your first song. From that day on, you’re never the same again.

You probably realized this immediately, but just to be safe, I’ll clue you in: it doesn’t work that way. The road to originality is long, incremental, and fraught with subconscious plagiarism. It’s possible that the reason some of us fear “going all the way” with our originality is not that we’re afraid we won’t be good enough in the end, but rather that we don’t want to cross all the legal land mines on the way there.

The familiar phrase, “good artists copy, great artists steal” is too cynical for my liking. I don’t buy it. But I’ll tell you what I do think: all artists use crutches. And crutches, despite having a bad name, are not a problem.

For some reason we tend to think that if we could only rid ourselves of all our needs and dependencies, then and only then we can pursue the great art, and the highest levels of consciousness, and blah blah blah. In other words, take off all your clothes, jump out of a high window, and improvise your song a capella on the way down. Anything else you do would not be “pure”.

There is no absolute definition of “pure art”. Many people think you’re selling out or crossing a line when you rely on certain technology (and this line falls in any and every place you can possibly think of along the technological spectrum, depending on who you talk to). For others the line of purity may have to do with style of performance, or choosing between improvisation and composition (which are the same thing, just spread differently over the dimension of time).

In a similar manner, people will pass moral judgement based on how “original” you are. Like any other aspect of your skill, though, you get there gradually, in small steps. Some of those steps may seem impure to armchair critics looking for a reason to stigmatize you, but remember, as with any other skill, we learn to walk before we learn to run.

Why do some of us perceive a need to “jump out the window naked”, metaphorically — the feeling that we must somehow magically conjure up pure originality right out of the gate, in a total vacuum? If you think other artists do this, then they have done a good job of tricking you, just as you will do a good job of tricking your audience. (The audience only ever hears your end result, never your path; although bootlegs, interviews, or “making of” extras can give them a peek.) Artists who develop their own voice and style have essentially accumulated a vocabulary or “tool box” of elements they’ve come to associate with themselves — and which their fans, as a result, associate with them as well. Most of this vocabulary is picked up in bits and pieces from other artists; and what little isn’t, is usually acquired by happy accident.

The idea of a crutch is that you use an existing song as a reference point for your own. It can be on any level where you’re lacking experience, apart from the lyrics and melody. You may, for example, associate a song you wrote with a popular song that’s already out there in the world, and try to “steal” the popular song’s production style — the instrumentation, how it’s mixed, and so on. In your naive attempt to copy the sound of another song, you won’t quite succeed, but be sure to keep your ears open for serendipity. It’s a pretty good accomplishment to copy a sound decently, but it’s an even better accomplishment to notice when you’ve accidentally found a piece of your own unique sonic puzzle.

I’m in danger of making overcooked metaphor soup here, but bear with me — your toolbox, or vocabulary, starts out as a fully-assembled puzzle which you “stole” or copied from someone else. As you discover new tools, you replace the other person’s puzzle pieces with your own (or at least mix in pieces from another puzzle, so that at least the combination is unique). Sometimes you will replace a puzzle piece more than once, and sometimes a fan of yours will adopt the intermediate orphaned puzzle piece and run with it in their own way. Sometimes you shake things up by going avant-garde, which means you replace as many pieces as possible, in the strangest way possible. (You can always change back the ones that don’t work.) It’s also likely there will still be some pieces that never get replaced. (You might, for example, be perfectly happy with 4/4 beats where the snare drum is always hit on beats two and four. Hey, it’s a perfectly good beat, so why mess with it?)

All the pieces that have not been replaced yet — or never will be — are your crutches. The object is to ultimately use few enough crutches that your music has its own identity. Listen to albums by your favorite artists in chronological order, and pay attention to how their puzzle evolved over time. The earliest albums are generally easy to categorize as examples of a particular style that was popular at the time, and most of the puzzle pieces are easy to cross-reference with other artists; the later albums are more identity-focused. Even an artist who has achieved some transcendent and definitive height may continue to play with new ways of reconfiguring the puzzle, hoping to achieve the same or greater height in a fresh way.

Summing this up: supreme, transcendent originality is an awesome thing to strive for; but if you demand too much of it too soon, you won’t permit yourself the necessary baby steps to actually get there. So don’t be afraid to get your feet wet by, initially, being only somewhat original.

It worked for everyone else. ;)

My take on “takes”

From Dictionary.com:

take /teɪk/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[teyk] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation verb, took, tak·en, tak·ing, noun
–noun

Definitions 103 and 105 are basically the same. I would meld them into: a single instance of continuous, uninterrupted recording and/or filming of a performance. (Does punching in a single bar count as a “take”? No, I don’t think we would use that word in that case. The idea of “punching in” is a little antiquated now anyway.)

In recording music, keeping track of takes is something we tend to do more in the early stages than later on. If we’re recording basic tracks, for example, we’re laying the foundation for the whole song, so take selection is critical. If we’re just putting down a fairly simple overdub, we might just keep erasing and redoing it until we like it. Common wisdom might tell us to preserve everything, but the more we preserve, the more work it will be to sort through it all. If we’re afraid that we’re going to play the ultimate performance, think it sucked, delete it, and never realize that it was pure genius, then we have a rather crippling and irrational fear that we need to get over. The quality of our performance might vary, but not by that much. Our subjective opinions of our own work will also vary, but again, not by that much.

I don’t know about other bands in general, but the Beatles’ takes were apparently numbered like this: if the song got off to a false start, that was still given a number. If a more clear dividing line needed to be drawn between a new set of takes and an older set of takes, the engineer would skip to a round number, so “take 103″ doesn’t necessarily mean it was recorded 103 times. If a song was mixed down to another reel for adding additional overdubs, that new mix would get its own take number (this probably helped to avoid confusion between reels containing the original tracks and reels containing reduction mixes).

Since I am a really poorly disciplined musician, I don’t do this thing other people do called “practicing”. (I’m not proud of this, nor do I recommend this.) So when I start doing takes for a part, that’s essentially my practice. The software that I’m using now, I’ve had for maybe a year and a half now, and it was fairly recently that I actually started to use its “loop” feature to do multiple takes. It makes it dirt simple; you just drag the yellow markers to the beginning and end of what you want to record (or hit “i” to mark the “in” point and “o” to mark the “out” point) and make sure that “loop” is lit up in the lower right.

Once you start recording, it will just keep going through that section over and over until you stop, and it keeps everything you do on one clip. A clip with multiple takes on it has a little “+” sign in the corner, and to listen to, say, take 8, you just click on the “+” and select “take 8″ from the drop-down menu. If you want to make a composite, you can split the clip up into smaller clips, and choose which take to use for each section. Since this can all be done on one track, it’s not making a mess on your screen!

First I pick the take that I like best overall. Then I listen for “trouble spots”. If it’s just a timing error on one note, I may fix that note by snipping it out and dragging it to the left or right. If it’s a more substantial goof-up, I snip to the left and right of the bad part, and try out all the other takes for just that part. There’s usually a decent one. After doing this, the left and right edges of every clip can still be dragged in either direction while the audio stays in the same place (like making a hole wider or narrower to reveal more or less of what’s behind it). I adjust the edges until the point where it switches from one take to another sounds as seamless as possible. When I’m sure that I’m happy with my composite, I “render” that track, so it’s in a single file, and the software has less junk to keep track of.

This is certainly more flexible and less nerve-wracking than doing punch-ins (see next paragraph), but the trade-off is that it winds up being a little more time-consuming, especially if you think every take you record deserves an equal chance for consideration (I’m guilty of comparing and contrasting every take, instead of just going with the first one I hear that sounds decent).

The old way, using tape, was to start playing the tape from a little before the part you want to fix, perform along with it to get into the groove, switch the machine from “play” to “record” in an inconspicuous spot (i.e. hopefully not in the middle of a note) while you’re still performing, then switch it back from “record” to “play” in an equally inconspicuous spot, then regain your composure and hope you did everything right. Most home recording devices allowed you to use a foot switch to control the punching in and out; in a pro studio, the engineer handled that. Each time you botched a punch-in, you had to start slightly earlier and end slightly later, to cover up the previous bad punch.

Invariably, there would still be noticeable glitches on the track at the punch points when listening to the track in isolation, but a realistic goal would be for it to be unnoticeable in context. Now that we have more exact and leisurely control of edit points, we take the extra time — or waste the extra time, rather — to better mask those seams. In a way, though, when we listen to an old recording from the 60s or 70s, and can hear little edits and punches, isn’t that part of the vintage charm? I certainly think so. But somehow, given the choice between a seamless edit and a glitchy edit, the challenge to make it seamless is more compelling; besides, bad digital edits just aren’t as charming as bad analog edits.

Were there a point to this post I would sum it up here. Instead, here’s yet another session video:

Sorry about the attention-hogging, bright red, disheveled bedspread. I’ll take more time to either make that or hide it next time. When I realize I’m about to put something down and want to get it on video, I generally set up rather hurriedly for it.

So you want to make an album? (part 24)

Where’s installment #23? As of now, it’s a draft with just a title. But suddenly I’m on a roll with this one, which I think would make for a good closing chapter in the book.

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

Installment 24: In soviet Russia… so your album wants to make YOU?

I have a lot of respect for the mind, the ego, and humans as individuals, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend either shutting off your mental faculties or belittling yourself while trying to produce an entire album. But as I’ve hinted at throughout this series, it’s important to differentiate between the work of your ego (important as that is), and the valuable contributions from the mysterious “everything else that is”. You could be the best surfer in California, but good luck telling the waves when to roll in. Likewise, when the inspiration hits you to make an album, you can accept or reject the challenge, but you are not the challenger.

A lot of insight can come from simple reversals of perspective. We do it with our pets all the time. We say our cats own us. This isn’t a lie, it’s just a different way of seeing something. In a similar way, as recording artists, or as artists of any kind, it’s good once in a while to remember that our music and art is creating us. (And when we release an album, it’s really releasing us.)

Try as hard as you like to skip past the awkwardness of “first album syndrome” — nobody ever has, and nobody ever will. It doesn’t mean you suck, or even that the album sucks (not totally, anyway). But it will look, sound, and most importantly, smell like a first album. The more you fight this, the more it will fight you.

So the question is not, “are you going to make that particular album?” — the question is, are you going to become a person who makes albums? Because what that first album will achieve, what it will succeed at, is re-shaping you. If you’re starting out, that’s not what you want to hear, and it’s not what I wanted to hear, and as I wasn’t willing to listen, why should you be willing either? I admire and identify with your determination, but ultimately, tough tapioca.

Oh, it will have its bits here and there where it transcends its own naïvety. Heck, if you pound your head against the studio wall enough times, you very well may increase the number of moments in which it achives such transcendent heights during its 40 to 55 minute debut. Sure, Led Zeppelin had a strong first album, but Jimmy Page was in a band before that and had plenty of session experience. It’s all ongoing. This obsession with The Album sometimes tends to make us forget we’ve been “creating” since birth and possibly before that, and the only distinction is that we’re now establishing a frame to better define our current creations. We’re saying, of what we’d be creating anyway, this is the first song, this is the last song, and these are the songs between them.

Yet even if you have plenty of experience writing or playing, the seemingly simple act of establishing that frame for the first time will throw a shiny new wrench into every aspect of your creative process. It’s like you and your muse were a happy husband and wife, and suddenly the recording studio is your high-maintenance mother in law who has just decided to move in. The dynamic suddenly shifts, and everything needs to be re-balanced.

If it makes you any less apprehensive, remember, you can always rewrite, er, uh, reframe history later. The earliest album of mine that I would even consider re-releasing in its original form — or rather, “consider being re-released by” (don’t forget to play with those perspectives) — was one that I finished in 1996. So from an outside perspective, that album will look and smell like a first album, and it does have its particular “firstness” to it. But, I finished one in 1993, so that should be considered my first, right? But, but, but, I was in a band that pretty much recorded a whole album in 1989, so that would be my first… right? But no, I was doing whole albums on portastudios and pairs of ordinary cassette decks before I even started highschool, and even drawing detailed cover art for them… so what is “first”? “First” is what you say it is. You don’t designate a blank space, and then suddenly create stuff out of thin air to fill that space — you create raw material just by being yourself, and then one day you decide to actually make a point of collecting, preserving, beautifying, and assigning track numbers to whatever is coming out of you, so that someone else in the world might benefit from it.

Okay, so the bad news is, your first album is going to have some of the tell-tale characteristics of a first album. It won’t truly reflect your unique style as well as something a few albums later would, once you’ve gained some momentum and a matured sense of intuition about the process. Once you hear it from the perspective of someone who no longer has the power (or motivation) to change it, the album may seem embarrassingly ambitious, lacking in subtlety, or just plain confused about what it’s supposed to be.

The good news is, every creative thing you ever do has a sort of “life of its own”, so you should try to look at it as an observer, saying, “that’s interesting”, instead of, “I suck”. In general, first albums are more valuable to long term appreciators and other artists than to the unsuspecting general public. They tell the first chapter of a great story about how you eventually developed the sound and style of your masterpiece (your sixth or seventh album). And they empower you, the artist, to continue creating without fear.

Embrace this weird passion that has entered your life. The heavens hath assigned to you and entrusted you with your first album project. Like your first car, it’s a wonderful, clunky “winter beater” with a fresh paint job; and though you may graduate to nicer and nicer cars as you go, you will never take this large a leap again.

This is where, if this were the last chapter of the book, I would just end it with “So… you want to make an album?” — but I don’t wanna get all teary-eyed here, because it’s a blog, not a book. Alright, I admit, I’ve got a little moisture in the edges of the eyes, but I swear, it’s just allergies or something. If I put this out as a book (and I probably have a few more middle parts to wedge in), it’s pretty much my “winter beater with a fresh paint job” in the literary world. Which is cool, because, hey. I don’t know what I’m typing anymore. Okay, over and out.

Quick note on aural fatigue

I’m writing this one quickly, on my way out the door, so forgive my lapse in quality control.

Last night I was up late working on a song. I was adding overdubs to it. Lemme clarify something about aural fatigue: you don’t necessarily lose all your ability to function when it’s setting in. You can still work. You might be on a roll with putting stuff down, and that’s great. What you are in danger of doing, is over-fiddling with mixing related stuff, because you’ll be a little lost regarding how present or clear something should be.

Like, last night, I had mixed feelings about this organ track I was doing. It had an excitement to it, but I felt like it was drawing attention away from the spirit of the music underneath it. “This is cool, but did I really want to go this direction?”

Today, it was much easier to put it in context. The very end of this organ part was really cool, have that up front in the mix, but have it a little quieter before it gets to that. And I immediately knew a couple things like this orchestra bell thing could start later, but also be louder, so it was okay for it to be “noticeable”, because by that far into it you’ll be starting to get bored of what’s going on up to that point, and need to hear a new instrument come in.

So the kind of creative work you can do while your ears are fatigued, is that you can play around with crazy-ish ideas (i.e. tossing things in to see how they sound, in the spirit of “playing” in the “what children do” definition of the word), but then give yourself the next day to decide how much of them to keep and how prominent in the mix they should be. Before you fire it back up, paint a mental picture of what it should sound like.

Also remember that when you’re fatigued, you might think a special effect makes something sound better, because you were getting sick of it the way it was, but leave yourself the opportunity to switch the effect off, or only use it on a certain part of a track.

Gotta go. Will reduce this pile of words to its essential point later.

White screen syndrome, on Freelance Switch

Here’s a short but well-articulated article about overcoming writer’s block, or as it’s referred to in the article, “white screen syndrome”. I think the general ideas are applicable to writing music and lyrics too. (We could call it “blank tape syndrome” or something.)

Excerpt:

My favourite method of getting something on the white screen is to just write what’s going through my head on the subject – then revise afterwards. I see it as a combination of stream-of-consciousness writing and Ann Lamont’s “shitty first draft.”

You know the subject matter, so just write. Usually it can be modified into something useful at the end and who knows, maybe you’ll find a few great sentences you wouldn’t have written if you were trying to stay professional.

I’ve written a few articles entirely like this and only had to edit out all the obscenities.

Here is the Anne Lamott (not “Ann Lamont”; hopefully FS will correct that soon) passage they’re referring to: an excerpt from Bird by Bird, which I hadn’t heard of before, but was curious enough to do a search on. (It’s awesome, by the way — except that as a mouse person, I would prefer she used something other than cruelty to mice in the visualization part at the end — regardless, don’t skip this one!)

And here are some notes that a fellow named Kyle took, summarizing Bird by Bird. Don’t sit back and let authors reap all the benefits of this stuff; how can you apply it to your music?

So you want to make an album? (part 22)

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

Installment 22: Click or no click (human time vs. machine time)

Before you even begin record a song, there is one global decision you need to make about your approach to it, and this decision will affect every successive stage as you go forward.

It’s the question of “click or no click”, or more precisely, “human time vs. machine time”: How do you establish the tempo of the song when you put that first track down?  Do you find a good sounding tempo on a drum machine or computer sequencer and stick to that? Or do you just pick up an instrument (including a drum set) and just play? There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

Let’s start from the initial reasons why, as novices, we might choose one or the other without even really thinking about it.

Why use a click (machine time)? Maybe because we’re using software that, by default, displays a big tempo, shows bars and beats while playing and recording, and clicks on the beats while recording. All we have to do before we start is adjust that tempo until it sounds appropriate for our song. Then, as we continue to pile overdubs on, we can easily see where loud notes and percussive hits fall relative to this pre-established grid. This also makes it easy to mark sections of the song; the intro might start on bar 2, the first verse on bar 10, the first chorus on bar 26, and so on.

Why (again, as novices) would we not use a click (human time)? Again it could be what the software leads us to. Audacity, for example, functions a little more like an ordinary tape recorder than a sequencer (ideal software will be a combination of both). Or maybe you’re not even using software. If you have an ADAT machine or some kind of portastudio (although digital portastudios can have programmable tempo grids, and provide a reference click), you might be inclined to just “think like you’re using tape”.

There’s nothing wrong with either rationale for the person just getting started, because we have to just try it out one way or another to start learning and figuring out what works for us. But the longer we do this, the longer and more complicated the list of pros and cons gets on both sides.

Will it flatter my performance?

You want the music to sound good, but also, as a human being with an ego, you want to sound like you are a good musician. (Subtle distinction there.) Even if the drummer is anonymous, you don’t want the listener’s reaction of “yikes, what a shitty drummer” to toss a wet rag on their overall listening experience. So which method is going to make your drumming, bass playing, guitar playing, etc. shine the brightest? That depends.

Playing to a click is a separate skill that you have to practice and learn. It’s not quite as natural as playing to a drum track, which is why some click tracks will come with the option to sound more like drums — or you could have a temporary track using a sampled drum groove and replace it later. Or decide you like it as is, and just keep it. No matter what sound you use as a reference, there is one predominant challenge in playing your instrument along to it: avoiding “the lurch”. “The lurch” is when you’ve just been playing a hair behind (later than) or ahead of (earlier than) the beat for a few moments, and suddenly correct yourself. The moment when you spontaneously correct yourself will sound worse than what you were doing just before it, especially if you listen to this new track isolated. Having it in a mix may cover it up to some extent, but the less you rely on that, the better. When it comes time for mixing, you’ll want to be focused on creating a good balance, not on covering up awkward rhythmic glitches.

In order to play well with a metronome/click, you have to loosen your mental “grip” on the individual clicks, and try to feel the overall tempo more. In other words, mentally zoom out to the bigger picture. You still need to have an internal sense of tempo, which you strive to keep in agreement with the click, but you’re not checking each click one at a time and asking, “was I early or late for that one?” It’s not target practice. You don’t win a prize each time you “hit the click”.

This same challenge applies when you’re overdubbing on top of an existing performance, even if that was played freely by a human in human time, although in that case it should be much easier, because hopefully the slight timing irregularities in the existing tracks will correspond to how the song naturally “feels” to you.

The act of putting down a first track in human time, however, carries with it its own headaches. “Good tempo” is subjective, and our own idea of what a good tempo is will drift a little depending on what we heard previously, how much energy we have, and so on. Our perception of something as “too fast” or “too slow” also depends on how the rhythm divides the beat up, whether we play staccato or legato, how tight or loose the instruments are, how the song is mixed, and probably a zillion other factors. Compound this with our natural tendency to speed up as we go along.

All that said, there are tons of drummers who will play much better without a click track, for the reasons I outlined above. Similarly, if you’re doing a song that’s more acoustic based, with the “glue” of the song being, say, a guitar or piano, you can sometimes get a more natural performance if you’re not distracted by the “TOC toc toc toc TOC toc toc toc” of the almighty beat-per-minute counter.

What about logistics?

Using machine time from the get-go gives you some advantages later on. As I said earlier, you have a clearly laid-out grid where, at any time, you can see exactly what measure and beat you’re on, and have an easy visual reference if you want to adjust the timing of a note/hit by making careful cuts in the silent areas just before and after it and then sliding it to the left or right. If you decide later in the game that you want to add a keyboard part with a very exact rhythm, you’ve made this very easy for yourself — you simply sequence the keyboard part, by playing into the sequencer, drawing notes on a piano roll grid, or using a variety of other input methods — and then because your project is “aware” of where the beats are, you can easily quantize all those notes to the nearest sixteenth note, eighth note, or whatever your smallest subdivision is.

I wouldn’t say that human time has any logistic advantages, per se, but with all the artistic benefits, it doesn’t have to be a logistic nightmare.

For starters, you could simply go old-skool all the way. Not all that long ago, people used tape, and it was impossible (or extremely difficult) to synchronize a sequenced track to an existing performance. If you were going to combine sequenced performances with human performances, you always did the sequenced stuff first, be it drum machine or whatever. Eventually people came up with ways to apply a time code to one of the unused tracks, so that a computer could remain synchronized to the tape. But in this relatively post-tape era, that kind of workaround seems like a Rube Goldberg solution.

Anyway, I digress; my point was, there is absolutely nothing wrong with recording a drum set, then playing bass to that, then playing guitars to that, then singing over that. “Look, ma, no click!” This is perfectly legitimate. If your software’s timeline lets you choose between “bars/beats” and “minutes/seconds” views, choose the latter, because the bars and beats at the software’s default tempo will be irrelevant. The click would also have no relation to the song, so you’ll be leaving that turned off too.

If your human time performances are mostly good, but have a couple of sloppy spots, you can often look at the peaks on the drum track as a visual guide. If, however, you’ve started off a song in human time, but want all the advantages of using the software’s bars/beats view and quantization capablility for new sequenced tracks, you can still create a tempo grid after the fact that will perfectly align to your human performance. It won’t be as easy, but you can do it. I believe there is some software that will help you with this, but I’m going to assume you have to do it the hard way.

Let’s say you have a drum track recorded that you’re really happy with, and you’ve already edited it and cleaned up any bad timing by ear. First get an approximate idea of of its tempo. Generally, when you set tempos, you can tap something and the software will figure it out based on your tapping. Do this while your drum track is playing, watch the tempo fluctuate up and down a bit, and whatever it appears to average out to, go ahead and set this as the tempo for the whole project… for now.

Find beat one on your drum track, and drag the clip either left or right so that the peak is exactly on a barline, and set a tempo change exactly at that barline — for now, to the same tempo it already is. If your drummer’s tempo is really steady, you may be able to get away with doing four bars at a time. (If you actually started by recording a drum machine, but it wasn’t synched to anything, you should be able to do even more.) In a lot of cases it’s best to do one bar at a time, which will take longer. Keep looking ahead to the next significant downbeat. If the barline is to the left of the hit, you need to decrease the most recent tempo change; if the barline is to the right of the hit, you need to increase it. Make smaller and smaller adjustments until you zero in on it. Then as soon as that barline lines up with that hit, set a tempo change there, and look to the next significant downbeat to adjust that one. If a bar doesn’t start with a clearly defined downbeat, use an earlier or later bar (you don’t have to use the exact same number of bars for each tempo change). Listen back frequently with the click turned on, from the beginning up to where you are, to make sure you don’t hear four clicks where there are supposed to be three or five!

This might seem tedious while you’re doing it, but in the grand scheme of things it takes a negligible amount of time out of your life, and gives you the best of both worlds: a natural drum or guitar (or whatever) performance, and the ability/freedom to quickly add a precise keyboard part. (Of course, if the only keyboard part you’re going to add is something with soft, slow attacks, like a “pad”, as they call it, this might not be worth the trouble — but it’s great if you plan to add anything rhythmic.)

I’ve just described how it’s possible to harness the natural push and pull of a human performance, but remember you could also make a “human-like” tempo grid by starting with sequenced material, and speeding it up or slowing it down as it goes along. Some software lets you draw the tempo curve with an icon resembling a pencil. Other software requires you to enter individual values. Sequenced tracks, as opposed to audio tracks, will actually speed up and slow down according to your newly added tempo changes. Sometimes it might be good to first record a keyboard sequence to an unchanging tempo, and then fiddle with the tempo curve until you’re happy with how it sounds. I would advise you not to record any audio tracks until you’re completely happy with this curve.

There’s some trial and error in doing this, especially if you’re trying to get it to sound “human”; but on the plus side, once you get it to where you’re happy with it, your project will be very easy to work with, whether you’re recording audio or adding additional sequenced tracks. If you’re deciding whether to create a tempo grid first, or base a tempo grid on a human performance, it comes down largely to what instruments you’re featuring. If the song is heavily keyboard based, i.e. you’re using a lot of orchestral samples to simulate the sound of an orchestra, then this curve-drawing method might be ideal. If it’s more drum and guitar (or other “real instrument”) based, then I suggest the method I explained previously, where you record the performance and then map it (if you even need to map it, that is).

A few notes about fixing audio tracks

It’s not as easy to fix audio performances as it is to fix sequenced performances, where you can literally grab a note and just drag it into place. But it can be done. You want to start with the best performance you can, but there will likely be a few parts that still don’t sound 100% right to you. Slicing an audio track into little pieces and nudging them around may seem blasphemous, but it’s not as much of a black art as you might think.

1. Be sure to cut in a good spot. The quieter, the better. Cutting in the middle of a note will generally sound unnatural. And no matter how perfectly quiet of a spot you cut it at, always put a very short fade in/fade out — even if it’s just a few milliseconds — on the beginning and end of every new clip. Some sounds will be just quiet enough to not show up on the screen, but if you cut in the middle of any sound whatsoever without a fade, there’s a chance you will hear an audible click.

2. If there aren’t any good edit points on a track, but you absolutely need to shift something in time, use a crossfade. In most cases a “square root” fade curve, the one that bulges upward, will keep the overall volume most consistent through the overlap. If it still sounds noticeable, experiment with longer and shorter crossfades. The attack of a note should not be in the crossfade.

3. Don’t sacrifice horizontal timing for vertical timing. Any time you’re moving isolated bits of a track around on the timeline, be sure to listen to that track by itself and make sure it sounds consistent.

4. In real life, it’s normal for certain instruments to tend to play a little earlier or later than the beat. A strummed guitar sound will usually start a little before the beat. A piano will generally be a hair later than the beat. Also, a sound that’s slightly off the beat will stand out more, and you can use this to your advantage.

5. If a drum fill is a little too fast or too slow, but the hits are evenly spaced, it could still sound good. If they’re unevenly spaced, it might sound a little more awkward and amateurish. See if you can make a clumsy drum fill a little nicer, but be sure to crossfade carefully, especially if there are any ringing cymbals. (This would be suicide on tape, but we can at least try it, because we’re the “undo button generation”.)

6. We are naturally pickier about some things than other things. For example if we have really tight drums and bass, we can get away with a little looseness in the guitars. Since perfectionism tends to be addictive, we need to know when to stop. Listen for little rhythmic flaws in well-known songs by your favorite artists, and ask yourself if they actually bother you or just give the song character. Having every single sound precicely on the beat (or subdivision) can sometimes be impressive — but what’s necessary, and what’s overkill?

So You Want To Make An Album? (part 21)

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

Installment 21: Some general advice on tracking

These are just some thoughts to keep in your head during that long stretch in the middle of your project (the bulk of the work), when you’re doing the actual recording — actually playing the parts, choosing what takes to keep, and, somehow or another, smoothing out the rough spots. In particular, the tracks that people won’t be paying direct attention to: the “boring” basic tracks that form the song’s skeleton, the wind beneath the wings of your diva vocal track and your Eddie Van Halen guitar solo.

1. Be simple, but clever. When you come up with a rhythm guitar part, a drum part, a bass part, “clever” can be as simple as using a fairly common and clichéd riff, but just changing one little thing about it — adding in a note, leaving a note out, anticipating something (playing it a half beat early) rather than playing it on the beat. Playing the absolute most obvious thing you can think of is fine, but do a few takes and see if it evolves a little. Listen to your mistakes and see if they’re any good, because sometimes a “mistake” is actually your subconscious trying to make a suggestion. Leave holes. Play less. Dumb it down. Do at least one take where you say “screw you guys, I’m playing something totally different this time just because I can”. In that moment of rebellion you’ll find a little nugget or two of gold; keep those nuggets, but keep the rest fairly straightforward.

2. More tracks = less reverb. Reverb is additive.  (Fast readers: I said “additive”, not “addictive”, but that may apply to you as well.) It sometimes sounds cool to have a significant amount of it on a sparse mix, where you have maybe no more than three or four tracks total, and therefore have holes for those trails/tails to fill. If you like to do heavily layered stuff, with two or three rhythm guitars, two or three keyboards, and extra instrumentation beyond that, you’ll need to leave it relatively dry or you will lose definition.

3. The drums and the bass together are one instrument. I don’t care that rationally, we know otherwise; for production purposes, they are one instrument. If they don’t sound like one instrument, they’re not tight enough.

4. We hear timing both horizontally and vertically. Before you adjust the timing of a particular note relative to the other instruments, be sure it’s going to feel good relative to its own previous and subsequent notes. If you’re not sure, solo the track. A track will sound better if it’s consistently lagging (or consistently rushing) than if one perfectly timed note stands out in the middle of a string of lagging or rushing notes, messing up its “horizontal” rhythm. If you’re using editing to tighten rhythms, just be sure to check both the vertical and the horizontal.

Incidentally, I don’t think of using software to fix performances as “cheating”. I think when you do multitrack recording, you actually have some handicaps that you have to make up for. For one, you’re initially playing without hearing all the instruments (you have to hear them in your mind), so it is much harder to get into the right vibe right away. Besides that, you don’t have the energy of an audience to feed off of, so at first you feel like what you’re doing is “fake”. Recording is its own artform, though, more like painting than theater, and some of the talents it will showcase are your abilities to listen well and make good-sounding decisions.

5. As listeners, we’re more fussy and demanding at the beginning of the track. (To a lesser degree, we’re more fussy and demanding at the beginning of an album, but you never have a guarantee that people will listen to your album in sequence.) Make sure things are super-tight and super-in-tune when it kicks in. Then it’s okay for it to loosen up a little as it goes along — not sloppy, just a little looser — because hopefully by then we’ve “accepted” the song, and have an internal beat and tonal center going on in our brains. First impressions, and all that.

6. If you feel like you’re playing/singing a good take, you probably are. Use the take you feel best about while playing/singing, even if it has a few glitches that need to be fixed.

7. Every little thing you fix will make progressively smaller flaws more noticeable to you. Sometimes it’s good to “under-fix”, meaning adjust it only part way. Modern sequencers, for example, let you select a percentage when you quantize. This means you can compromise, retaining some of your original feel. Even if you know you’re going to quantize a keyboard part, play it the best you can, so you have the option of quantizing at a lower percentage. Besides, if you play really badly, the quantization will push some of your notes in the wrong direction! Check by first quantizing 100% to make sure it’s interpreting your performance correctly, and then undo-ing and experimenting with smaller percentages to taste.

8. Everything you add will make your previous tracks sound different. So when you’re putting down the first few tracks, yes, fuss over tuning and rhythm, but don’t spend too much time adjusting the sound (EQ and effects). At this stage, shoot for “dry and clean” (some effects like distortion and delays are of course “part of the sound”, but don’t get too deep into perfecting compression, EQ, or reverb before the rest of the instruments are there for context). Once you have more instruments down, you’ll have a better idea of what needs to be adjusted on the earlier tracks — or, as you play with the mute buttons, you might even find some of them superfluous and leave them out altogether.

9. The extra steps you take to make your basic tracks tight, clean, and in tune will pay off thousandfold when you get further along in the tracking. The little extra flourishes that you occasionally put into those tracks will make the finished product more lively and interesting, even if they’re “in the background”, as long as you don’t overdo them.

10. “Nobody’s gonna really be paying attention to this part” is a bad attitude. Remember you’re playing not just to the listener’s conscious mind, but also to the subconscious. Every little thing adds up.

11. There are good flaws and bad flaws. Yes, I know it’s a challenge to know the difference. Resist the quantizers and the autotunes for a minute, and listen with your heart.

12. Simply having more experience of going through the whole process will improve your confidence and your ability to “trust the music”. If you’re three-quarters of the way through your first project, and stuck in that awful love/hate relationship with it, the sooner you finish it up and move on to something fresh, the saner you’ll be. The first project will not be perfect. Do your best and move on. Even if you’re not ready to wrap up that first project, start sketching out some ideas for the next one, and imagine the future you, looking back at the first one as “ambitious and endearingly naïve”, and happily having bigger fish to fry — this will give you a healthy sense of perspective.

13. Do not judge yourself harshly, if your project got off to a bad start and is headed in a direction you don’t like. If you do enough recording, you will like at least some of what comes out of it. Pay attention to what works for you, and don’t get hung up on what doesn’t work.

14. There’s a series of DVDs about classic albums. In fact, it’s called “Classic Albums“. I’ve only seen three of them, but I want to see them all. Even if you’re not into most of the bands featured in the series, you should pick a few you don’t mind and check them out. Quoting Wikipedia:

The music, and its production, is dissected by the musicians and/or producer playing the multitrack recordings and singling out tracks that one does not usually consciously hear when listening to the music, giving insight into the way the sound is built up.

This is probably your best bet for getting a feel for what kind of basic tracks will lend themselves to creating the “overall sound” that you’re looking for in the end. Beyond that, the programs will simply give you extra inspiration to fight lethargy and circumstance, and simply go forward. I can’t recommend this strongly enough.

15. Everything you do will one day be “old”.

16. Everything you do matters. Have a noble spirit. If you have a total audience of three people, show them your appreciation by creating a fantastic performance for them. And besides, you’re not just playing to a present audience, you’re playing to a future audience as well, including people who may hear it long after you’ve moved on to another plane of existence.

17. “Perfect” and “wonderful” are on two different axes, at 90-degree angles from each other. They have nothing to do with each other. Aim for wonderful, and if you can make it perfect too (without sacrificing wonderfulness), make that your second priority.

18. I do this kind of thing because, when I put down one track, and get it the way I like it, even if it’s just a basic part that’s going to be in the background, I get excited about it. I hope you get excited about each little step too.

19. Make recordings that will inspire other musicians to make recordings. Pass along pointers and advice that you pick up along the way, in your own words. Yes, you’re making history, but it doesn’t end at you.

20. At any given time, someone out there, someone you’ve forgotten, or someone you’ve never met, could be listening to your song while driving, or walking, gardening, or who knows what. They might even have a rough mix or early demo that you weren’t totally happy with. But they kept that song in their rotation, because they got something out of it; it meant something to them. Someone, somewhere, is listening. Remember this any time you get discouraged. Keep going.

So you want to make an album? (part 20)

The fact that this installment is about finishing stuff does not mean the series itself is finished. It just happens to be timely for me. If/when I make this into a book, I’ll be sure to arrange the chapters more logically.

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

Installment 20: Let go of the baby!

Wrapping things up seems like it would be a simple matter of putting in the time and effort until your song or album is “done”. That assumes “done” is a simple notion. First, you will be “pretty much done”, then you’ll be “basically done”, and then you’ll be “really done”, and then you’ll be “absolutely done”, and so on. It’s a maddening series of greater degrees of done-ness. During all these stages you’ll of course be apologizing to everyone for how rough the mix is, even though most people — unless your target audience happens to consist entirely of seasoned producers — won’t be able to hear the difference by now.

But it’s not just the technical tweaking that you have to contend with; there’s a much harder psychological process involved in making the decision that it’s okay for your little one to be sent out into the world to be eaten alive by the wolves. (It won’t really be eaten, but it will be stepped on, pushed aside, and drowned out by the noise of the world en route to its true audience.)

Think about this: when someone puts a song out, they use the word “release”. They say they are releasing the song. What does that really mean, literally? It means letting go. Music came to you from somewhere in the time space continuum, as a raw wave of inspiration, and you were given the task of raising it, molding it, and dressing it up nicely. It was on loan to you. You were its nanny or foster parent, but it is (and has always been) part of the larger cosmos, something that exists “within you and without you” (to borrow a George Harrison lyric), and in the grand scheme of things, has nothing to do with your ego, apart from the fact that it had a symbiotic relationship with your ego for a period of time. You’ve just had the great opportunity to work first-hand with something eternal and larger than you — music — and when you’ve done all you can do to shape it into something that fits on a CD and complements the stereo equipment your listeners will be playing it on, you need to step out of its way and let it find its place in the world.

The problem is, by the time we get this far, the relationship between the music and our ego has gone from symbiotic to co-dependent. We’re thinking, “this music reflects me“. How does that hamper our ability to promote the work? Well, for one, we might feel a weakened ability to stand behind a song if the lyrics (for example) come from a less advanced stage in our emotional development — especially if, like me, you take a long time to record music. But if we’re always growing, as we should be, wouldn’t this always be the case? The music came to us when we were at a particular stage for a reason. If the music had wanted “more mature lyrics”, it would have waited longer to come to you, or it would have gone to a more mature person. Whatever perspective you had when you wrote it, that’s what the audience for that song is going to identify with. What matters is that your newer material reflects your growth, so that your audience can grow with you. (Revising stuff is fine if you still feel the song, but your primary motive shouldn’t be the ego-fueled avoidance of embarrassment.)

This is just one of a zillion ways an unhealthy ego-music relationship can manifest as a stifling of your creative flow; and when I say “flow”, I’m talking about the Big Flow, all the way from inspiration to expression (if it hasn’t reached an audience, it hasn’t been “expressed” yet). The solution is to deal with this early on. Don’t wait until the mastering stage to face your separation anxiety!

Your ego is important, mind you. Your ego is the carpenter, the craftsman. Your ego sets up the scaffolding, pours the concrete, and makes sure wood is being cut to the right length. In a more literal sense, your ego establishes key and tempo, it sets the recording levels, it selects what instruments to use, and makes sure they’re in tune. Your ego picks the best takes, guides you to flaws that need to be fixed (or covered up), and generally leads you through all the stages from basic tracking to overdubbing to mixing to mastering. Your ego deals with the structure-oriented aspects of funneling music into a tangible form. This is something you and your ego can be proud of.

But that first inspired moment you had, when you first started playing those chords in that order, and suddenly had a shiver down your back, or a heightened sense of “realness” — that would be a good time to start thinking grateful, thankful thoughts towards whoever or whatever out there just handed you this gift — or call it a “curse” if it amuses you. Actually it’s a little of both, and maybe a responsibility too, but mostly a gift. And a compliment. So accept the compliment, and do your best, but remember all the while that it chose you, and not the other way around.

Thinking this way will make things like mixing and mastering so much easier. Because instead of confusing the process with your need for the music to “represent you”, you can listen to it as an audience member. A very special audience member, but an audience member nonetheless. It’s not you; it’s it, and you’re you. With that out of the way, it will be so much simpler to say, “okay, needs this turned up a bit here, and, ah, that’s better — now this needs to be adjusted like this, and — yes, good”. On the other hand, if your ego is still attached to it, nothing will sound right, no matter what you do.

So how do you let go of the baby? Early and often. Any time you start to feel your ego attaching itself to a song, gently remind yourself that you’re just the conduit, that if you weren’t qualified to handle the job you wouldn’t have been chosen for it, and if you do your best, that’s absolutely good enough.

So you want to make an album? (part 19)

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

Installment 19: My song sucks!

Aural fatigue is not just your enemy when your fingers are on the faders — it’s your enemy when you’re deciding whether or not to even bother keeping the track and/or finishing what you started. A tell-tale sign that you’re being taunted by aural fatigue is that you can hear the sound of your music, you recognize that it’s your music, you’re able to identify it as such… but it’s just dead to you. You’re hearing it, but you’re no longer hearing what’s good about it.

And maybe a large part of what would be good about it isn’t even there yet, but it doesn’t matter; before you reached this state, you were able to hear the stuff coming out of the speakers and the stuff in your head equally well. Now you just hear a bunch of familiar yet disappointing sounds.

The first thing to do is obviously to acknowledge and accept that this is what’s happening. It’s frustrating, but at least it takes some of the burden off of you to know that this feeling of disappointment is normal, universal, inevitable, and temporary. It’s also somewhat unpredictable. Sometimes you’ll go for a long stretch where you should be burnt out, but instead you get on a “producer’s high” where you just can’t stop listening to the playback over and over. Other times you’ll put it away and come back to it a few days later with fresh ears, and it’s still not happening for you.

The problem is, music is never entirely rooted in physical reality. No matter how careful we are to prop up our end of it with a tight rhythm track, solid singing, and pristine mixing, the other end still has to be propped up by that elusive, cosmic je ne sais quoi. In less flaky terms, if we’re not in the mood for the song, we’re not going to like it, no matter what we do with it. We need to go back to its source — why did we write it? If we lose touch with the “why”, we might as well be doing commercial jingles, because that’s approximately how much faith we have in our own message.

Before we go back to that song, we need to go back to the feeling that inspired it. Think method acting. Who or what is it about? Even if it’s only an instrumental, there was something on your mind just before you stumbled on the riff that started it all. Granted, once your music is “out there”, anyone who listens to it and enjoys it will have a different context and a different set of associations — but if you lose sight of your own personal context and associations along the way, your song will turn into a meaningless pile of notes before you can even get it out the door. This is true whether you’re playing and singing, or just adding those last-minute EQ and compression tweaks to the final mix.

One thing that I find frustrating, or at least surreal — and don’t get me wrong, this is a good thing overall — is that as I write more songs, my perspective on life evolves, to the point where in order to work on an older song, I literally have to back myself up to a more immature way of looking at the world. So why don’t I just throw the old stuff away and start fresh? (This is what most people do.) Because personally, I like to leave a trail of crumbs showing my progression — an ongoing record of where I’ve been, spiritually, philosophically, and emotionally. Not to mention, I have a sentimental attachment to my old melodies and chord progressions. But I can’t just work on them in a detached, clinical way. So why don’t I just leave them in their existing state? Because I’m a completist, and it will nag at me if I know something could sound better with reinforced drums or vocals, even though the song itself won’t be any more sophisticated. Humor me.

Okay, we all need to be coddled now and then, and you’re no exception, so here’s the short version: your song doesn’t suck. If you’re not in the right mindframe for it anymore, make the best objective decisions you can about how to wrap up the session, avoid making rash, irreversible, subjective decisions, step away from the equipment, and focus on dialing back into the song’s ideal version in your head. This may mean returning to the situation or people you originally wrote about — either actually going back to them, or visualizing it as clearly as possible. Get your mind re-entrenched in the context first, and then think about the song. As soon as you can hear it clearly in there again, you can resume working on it out here.

Conscious and unconscious

Something that I might want to work into one of my existing So You Want… installments, specifically the “in and out” sections, but which by itself isn’t enough to asplode into a whole post:

Think of your conscious and subconscious minds as left and right feet. In order for your subconscious to do anything useful for you, you have to alternately take conscious steps. If you try to do everything entirely with your conscious mind, or entirely with your subconscious mind, you will just spin yourself around in a tiny little circle, just like if you tried to walk by only moving one foot.

A more concrete way of putting this: if, before you go to bed (or before you meditate), you begin to work on something tangible — be it something creative, solving a specific problem, whatever — you will wake up in the next morning having made some subconscious progress on it, and be in a better state to go forward with it. You’ve “stepped forward” with one foot, so now the other foot has a new destination. You don’t need to make fantastic progress, just have taken that step. If, on the other hand, you simply put the whole thing off, rationalizing that you’re not in the mood now but tomorrow will be a better day, you will just have weird (and possibly scary) dreams that don’t do you any good, and when tomorrow comes you won’t be in any better shape to do it. You’ll be able to do it, but you won’t have the benefit of that extra boost from your subconscious.

That’s it! Simple concept.

Hometracked.com

Hooray, I can stop blogging now…

http://www.hometracked.com/

Actually, just a heads up to the recordists, I just saw hometracked.com for the first time within the past few minutes thanks to an anonymous tip. (Well, no, it wasn’t an anonymous tip, but it sounds cooler if I say that.) Looks to be a great resource for the technical, nitty-gritty, actual craft of recording. So now I don’t feel the need to cover every imaginable square inch of that; I can just point you there, and focus more on the intersection between that stuff and the elusive muse.

Of course I do still want to flesh out the “So You Want…” series and put it up on lulu.com as a book. I might even like to do a DVD version at some point, so I could demonstrate visually and aurally why that stuff about “six decibels”, “three decibels”, “phase”, “the spectrum”, and “linear vs. logarithmic” is actually useful to know (and not just academic).

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.

So you want to make an album? (part 17)

Note #1: the word “band” in this installment refers not to a hodge-podge of long-haired freaks, but rather to a slice of the audible spectrum, as in “ten band equalizer”.

Note #2: I’m thinking about how to do re-do the image for this post. Obviously most of the images in this series are temporary placeholders, for copyright reasons. But this one in particular might be a real turn-off, even just for the blog. (Not to mention the faux-pas of having the salad fork on the inside.) Just be aware that I was primarily trying to merge some of the concepts in the article, using simple images, and the overall effect is a little more gruesome than I expected.

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

Installment 17: Dissecting the spectrum

Why did we all dissect frogs in biology class? We couldn’t have forseen it at the time, but in retrospect, it turned out to be a real advantage once the time came to build a GIANT DEADLY LASER-TONGUED ROBOT FROG to unleash on our enemies. Would you want your master plan to backfire on you just because you put the cloaca where the glottis was supposed to go? I didn’t think so.

Although it will benefit your album to conduct similar experiments on songs that already exist, the tools for dissecting music don’t work quite the same way. You can’t, say, carve out the funky rhythm guitar and set it neatly on a paper towel next to the song. Equalizers dissect the music in cross sections, as if you sliced your frog cross-ways like a salami. Some organs may be small enough to remain intact in a single slice, but larger organs will be split between two or three slices, and then things like the spine, muscles, and skin will be distributed among all the slices. (If all this is making you sick, just pretend this frog is actually the guy who invented car alarms, but he’s been put under a terrible thousand-year spell by a sleep-deprived witch.)

The first equalizer most of us ever played with only had two bands (regions of the spectrum that you can adjust); many home or car stereos, in lieu of something actually labeled “eq”, have a pair of knobs labeled bass and treble — which is still an equalizer. There’s generally a large gap in the spectrum between these two bands, so you can effectively adjust the midrange by turning both bass and treble up and down together, and then re-adjusting the overall volume. Hopefully, you already have a feel for how to use these. If not, play with them. And not conservatively — set them at extreme positions, and listen for a while.

Done with that? Good, now take off your training wheels and hop onto the ten-gear, er, I mean, ten-band. Let’s look at a typical set of bands again (the exact frequencies on yours may deviate from this):

30 - 60 - 125 - 250 - 500 - 1000 - 2000 - 4000 - 8000 - 16000

Each number tells you the frequency in the center of that band, but that slider will affect frequencies below and above it to progressively lesser degrees, somewhat overlapping the range of the next band over. On a ten-band equalizer, the spectrum is divided up into about one octave per band. That’s because our hearing range is approximately ten octaves. As I said in the last installment, each octave is double the pitch of the octave below it, so as you go from band to band, the frequency approximately (if not exactly) doubles. Some equalizers of this type split the spectrum into more bands: 15, 20, or even 30. While easy to understand visually, these are more time-consuming to adjust. So other types of equalizers and filters have been invented, such as parametric equalizers and FFT filters, to give you more precise control with fewer parameters — but since those require more experience to use effectively, we’ll stick to an ordinary ten-band for now.

Most musical sounds will be spread over several of these bands. This is partly due to the range of the instrument, but also due to its harmonic content. A single note on an instrument, played all by itself, doesn’t just contain energy at one frequency — that note contains many harmonics, also called overtones, which are higher than the note itself (the fundamental), and give the sound its color, character, or timbre. In most cases, these overtones are exact whole-number multiples of the fundamental, and they don’t sound like extra notes, because you just hear them as part of that note’s sound.

If you’re a guitarist, you might know that you can isolate harmonics by touching the string at certain points while you play it. It’s important to realize that those higher pitches are actually in the note regardless; if you listen carefully while alternating between playing the harmonic and playing the open string normally, you can hear that those higher tones were in there all along. All you’re really doing is muting some of the harmonics, including the fundamental, so that other harmonics are now more prominent.

So if you have a recording with an unwanted note in it, at about 250 Hz — this would be close to the open B string on a guitar — you could try to remove that note by cutting the 250 Hz band on your equalizer, but that would still leave its overtones at 500 Hz, 750 Hz, 1000 Hz, 1250 Hz, and so on. Just from hearing all those harmonics, your brain will fill in the phantom fundamental and you’ll still perceive it as the same note, albeit more trebly. This is not to say you could never use filtering to soften a ringing open string on a sloppily-played guitar track, but its use for that type of thing is limited and difficult. (I’ve done this in extreme circumstances, by making four or five very narrow cuts on an FFT filter, right where the first few harmonics are, since they’re generally the loudest.)

The best way to think of equalization, though, is as an overall sound-shaper. When you split the sound into those ten (or however many) bands, you can think of them as “parts of the sound”, but you have to think of those “parts” in a different way than as specific instruments. There are no “good parts” and “bad parts” — though the average consumer is more likely to buy a stereo (or a CD) if they hear proportionately more extreme bass (below 50 Hz) and extreme treble (above 8 KHz), the meat of your music — melody and harmony (remember those?) — is always somewhere in the middle, and you do more or less want to give your listener a balanced meal, right?

Get to know the spectrum. I’ll introduce you to a few slices of it, but then you need to go and play with an equalizer and form your own mental relationship with it. All the numbers below are “general areas”, and there is no hard-fast cutoff point where one really begins an