Keith Handy 1.999

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 and another ends, so don’t try to memorize so much as get the general idea.

Like I said, below 50 Hz is super-low bass, the kind that some drivers like to generously share with us while they still have their hearing. The 100 Hz area is still bassy, but not so bassy that most males couldn’t sing it. If you have a track with a higher pitched instrument, like a flute, and that same track has some unwanted rumbling on it, you can cut these lowest frequencies to get rid of the rumbling without hurting the instrument.

100-300 is what I might call upper bass or low midrange, important because a lot of fundamentals are happening here, as well as the “oomph” of the snare drum (its lowest tone, the part of it that you can almost “feel”, although snare drums have energy across pretty much the whole spectrum). Too much of this will sound muddy, but too little will sound hollow.

Going from there to about 1000 Hz will take you to the tippy-top of the female singing range, and many of the highest notes on ordinary instruments such as a guitar.

Most of what you hear above 1000 Hz are overtones from lower notes, which are very important to the character of those notes. If you listen to speech through a band centered at about 2000 Hz, it sounds like it’s through a bullhorn. Through a 4000 Hz band, it sounds more like a telephone. These are important “parts” of the voice, though, and if you removed them, the voice would sound muffled. These upper-midrange areas are what we normally think of when we say “tinny” or “mid-rangey”, and the “bite” at the top of an electric guitar is generally in here.

When you get to about 8000 Hz and up, this is where the cymbals mostly are, the sibilance (”ssss”) and breath on vocals, and the clarity of acoustic guitars. Some darker or more mid-rangey sounds, like bass guitars and electric guitars, don’t have much going on in this range, so it’s easy to remove annoying hiss from those tracks just by cutting the highest frequencies. Also if you took the sound directly out of a distortion pedal without using an amp, you might cut these highs just to make it warmer and less fuzzy. You can sometimes liven up a dull sound by increasing this, but watch out for hiss.

In the actual practice of recording your own music, you will first want to try to get your sounds right as you go. But we all make mistakes, and in those cases you can sometimes improve a track by equalizing it. Equalization is also used on entire mixes, subtly and carefully, as part of the mastering process.

Your homework is to go on a date with an equalizer, with hopefully ten bands, or close to it. It can be an old-skool physical beast, or it can be the one that comes with iTunes, Winamp, or whatever. You’re not going to use it on this outing, you’re just going to get to know it. Bring your favorite romantic music — preferably something with drums and electric bass, and then maybe some acoustic songs on it. Turn all the bands down low, and then one at a time, turn a band all the way up by itself (if it’s too loud, turn the overall volume down) and just listen to it. What’s in there? What part of the sound is in that part of the spectrum? What does it mean to you aesthetically, and how does it make up part of the big picture? Leave that band on long enough to hear how much of the drums come through, and how much of the other instruments come through. Then turn it down and go on to the next band, and do the same. Don’t be in a hurry… just listen, and sort of meditate on the “slice of sound” that you’re listening to. Don’t play favorites or give preferential treatment; remember, they all go together to make up the music you know and love.

Next, set all the bands to their normal position, and this time, cut one band at a time. If you’re wearing headphones or have small speakers, you might have trouble hearing the difference when you cut the very lowest one — if so, don’t worry about it too much. Then bring it back to normal and cut the next one. What’s missing from the overall sound now? Do this for all the bands. Get a feel for what it’s like when energy is missing in each part of the spectrum. As you do this, there may well be times when you find yourself actually liking some of the cuts better than the original sound. Please don’t say you’re going to cut that band out of every song you ever do for the rest of your life! You may have a tendency to get emotional, but you and the equalizer are just friends.

When the date is over, thank the equalizer, and in a polite, rational way, say “I plan to use you from time to time, but I’m going to be using other tools as well. It’s nothing personal.” The equalizer will actually respect you more for this, and your recordings will reflect the sophistication of this relationship.

The song that you sliced up like a salami may not be quite as happy. Hey, what can I say, that’s science for you.

*Ribbit*

So you want to make an album? (part 16)

To read the entire series, do what yo momma told you. Er, I mean, follow the link.

Installment 16: Math is loud (or “I got logarithm”… or something)

All the spiritual and psychological stuff I’ve been pontificating on, as valuable as it is, does not negate the fact that there are a few hard, cold math concepts you should know if you want to get the most out of recording. I’ll try to explain a couple of important points, in the most human terms possible. If you only vaguely understand this the first time through, refer back to it later, as it becomes more practical than theoretical.

To better understand two very basic aspects of sound — amplitude, and pitch — it’s helpful, if not essential, to know what a logarithm is. You may not need to know what goes on under the hood of your equipment, but you absolutely need to understand that human beings perceive amplitude and pitch in a logarithmic way, as opposed to a linear way.

A logarithmic scale is sort of like a distorted lens through which all multiplication has been “translated” into addition, and all division has been “translated” into subtraction. In other words, every time you multiply a real, actual value by a constant amount, you are adding a constant amount to its logarithm.

Hang in there. You’re gonna be okay.

We measure amplitude in “decibels“, abbreviated as “dB”. When we describe the difference between the loudest and quietest things we can record, that’s called “dynamic range”, and it’s measured in decibels. A typical dynamic range for a digital recording device might be 90 dB, for example. But what does that mean?

Amplitude is relative. If one sound is twice as loud as another sound in the same recording — that is, if the waveform appears twice as high on your screen — it will always be twice as loud, no matter how loud or soft you have your overall volume set to. So it’s not meaningful to say sound A is “some number of watts more” than sound B. It’s only meaningful to say it’s something times as loud, or some percent as loud. However, we can say sound A is some number of decibels more than sound B, because a decibel is a logarithmic (there’s that word again) unit. This means whenever you increase or decrease the amplitude of something by a certain number of decibels, you are actually multiplying and dividing the height of that waveform by a certain amount.

For recording purposes, it’s best to remember this rule of thumb: any time you double the height of the waveform on your screen, you’re increasing its amplitude by approximately six decibels. To help hammer this nail into your brain, you can use the following graphic aid/mnemonic device:

Likewise, any time you decrease it by six decibels, you’re approximately cutting it in half. Each time you go down six more decibels, you’re cutting it in half again. Theoretically, to go all the way down to absolute silence, you have to go down an infinite number of decibels. That’s why input meters say “negative infinity dB” at the bottom. Notice they also define “zero dB” as the loudest you can go without distorting.

If you accidentally make an exact copy of one of the tracks in your project (I’ve done this), and it plays back perfectly synchronized to the original track, its amplitude will double (since it is two copies of itself), and you will hear it as approximately six decibels louder than it should be. BUT — and this is where it gets a little weird — if you mix together two different sounds that are about the same volume, the mixed sound will only be about three decibels louder than either individual sound. That’s because if they’re not the same exact sound, their peaks and valleys won’t be happening at the exact same times, so they don’t do as much “damage” together. In a third scenario, if you mix a sound with an exact copy of itself, but invert (flip upside-down) the copy so that it’s a mirror image of the original (the peaks become valleys and vice-versa), it will cancel itself out completely, resulting in silence (”negative infinity dB”).

A geekier way of rephrasing the above paragraph is this: if you mix two identical waves together that are perfectly in phase, the result will be 6 dB louder. If they are ninety degrees out of phase, meaning if you slide one of them back in time just enough to be 1/4 of a wave cycle late, the mixed result will be only 3 dB louder. (How this sort of relates to the second example in the above paragraph: if sounds are mixed together without any attempt to correlate them, as will be the case with any real-world sounds, instruments, and voices, they might as well be about 90 degrees out of phase on average.) If two waves are exactly 180 degrees out of phase, meaning if you slide one wave back in time enough to be exactly 1/2 of a wave cycle late, so that it looks like an upside-down version of the first one, the mixed result will be silence.

This understanding of decibels will be helpful when you’re setting levels and mixing, especially since not all level controls are logarithmic. (Ever notice some volume knobs and sliders are hard to control at lower volumes, because they “jump” too much with the slightest nudge? Those are linear.) Likewise for meters. Likewise for curves and crossfades. But I mentioned pitch too, which will be particularly important when using equalizers and filters — how do logarithms relate to that?

Well, first of all, we don’t actually use logarithmic units for pitch, unless you’re talking about the language of music itself: that’s right, musical notes, the little black dots used by Mozart, are actually a logarithmic representation of pitch. Each time you go up an octave, you’re doubling the pitch, and each time you go down an octave, you cut the pitch in half. (Since the octave is divided up into twelve semitones, this means every time you go up a semitone, you’re multiplying the pitch by the twelfth root of two, which is a hair less than 1.06.) But octaves and semitones are musical concepts; all the equalizers and filters you will ever use show pitch in its plain old linear scale, “hertz“, meaning cycles per second. (Humans supposedly hear from 20 to 20,000 Hz, but realistically it might be more like 30 to 16,000.) BUT… you will notice something funny about the numbers on an equalizer. They will generally look something like this:

30 Hz - 60 Hz - 125 Hz - 250 Hz - 500 Hz - 1 KHz - 2 KHz - 4 KHz - 8 KHz - 16 KHz

So even though pitch is shown in linear units, it’s scaled logarithmically, so the lower frequencies appear to be more “spread out” on the left while the higher frequencies are more “squished together” on the right. This is because, again, we hear pitch logarithmically — meaning each time it doubles, we hear it as going up about the same amount. So the middle of our range of hearing isn’t 10,000 Hz — it’s more in that 500 to 1000 range. Incidentally, if you lost all your hearing between 10,000 and 20,000 Hz, you wouldn’t be losing “half your hearing”, you’d only be losing the top octave. Things would sound a little duller, but not horribly muffled.

This will be helpful to know as you play with any equalizers or filters. If you practice with them a little, you should eventually be able to make a good guess as to where in the spectrum an unpleasant “ringing” is, and be able to quickly zero in on it and filter it out, while barely doing any damage to the music itself. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to do that?

Anyway, you’ve had enough meat for one day. Enjoy your pudding. Class dismissed!

So you want to make an album? (part 15.75)

To read the whole series, follow some link or another.

Installment 15.75: Mo’ “in and out”

I occasionally speak of a time when I was going about it with the wrong attitude. This is generally the early 1990’s, from the time that I decided to do an album (Open the Window) under my own name, to the time that I finally handed my DAT tapes over to the cassette duplicating plant. It’s not as cut and dried as that, though. For one thing, I obviously had to deal with some problems in a spontaneous way, or they would have never been tackled at all. For another thing, even after my “awakening”, I never completely rid myself of the old mindset. What makes it a little confusing is that, on a micro-level, the “wrong mindset” isn’t all that wrong. Just as you don’t want to be a slave to a rigid plan, neither do you want to be a slave to random events and arbitrary whims (yours or anyone else’s) whose vectors add up to zero.

So, yes, you do have to take some control of the situation. It’s just nice to realize this is much easier to do when you think of it as being easy. It might have felt like you were dragging a heavy object uphill, because you thought of it that way. But stuff moves all the time, even if you do nothing. Your blunt, unfocused exertion won’t add much to the total pool of energy. So stop feeling responsible for pushing everything (duplicating energy that already existed), and start focusing on harnessing and steering all the stuff that’s already in motion.

You don’t have to go and get stimulus so that you can be influenced; you already have stimulus, and are already being influenced. You just may want to steer your input so that it comes from something better, by steering yourself to a place that will give you better inspiration, or steering your attention to a different book, website, or TV channel.

Same for output. You’re already creating, all the time — creating thoughts, actions, inactions, etc. — and another way of paraphrasing my “red light” installment is that you steer that ongoing creativity into a recording by having the equipment available and hitting the record button. You don’t have to make the ideas come in, and you don’t have to make the notes come out, you simply need to manage all those ideas and notes; think of them as your employees.

Input doesn’t stop just because you’re outputting. When you begin a recording session, unless you’re starting work on a brand new song (which is not the majority of the time), notice how effortless your first task is: you open the project file for some song, and you LISTEN TO IT. That don’t take no brains. What easier way to ease into a session than to chill out for a few minutes and groove to some music, like you always do, like everyone does? Okay, it’s a little more difficult, because this particular music is hell-bent on pulverizing your ego. It takes a little practice to remain in love with yourself as you dutifully note every flaw. Even if you put the tracks down only yesterday, that was the “old you”, and you’re a new person today. The fact that you can be critical of it is evidence of the leaps and bounds by which your production standards are rising! (Come on, now, I’m only slightly bullshitting you.)

I never work for a set amount of time, and I usually only start if I know I’ve got several open hours ahead of me. My problem is that I tend to remain in that gear long after I’ve crossed the threshold of diminishing returns, which is why I’m seriously considering experimenting with time limits. I think the tendency to go on for such long stretches sometimes prevents me from starting work, because in the back of my mind I assume I’m committing to the next few hours, even though I’m free to work for fifteen minutes and walk away. I haven’t completely eradicated the rigid ideas about time that “real studios” forced me to adapt to.

Apart from time itself, there are other things you can pay attention to. Are you on a roll? Are you exploring, discovering, or learning (thus receiving good input)? Are you still having fun (also good input)? Are you close to finishing something and anxious to hear the results (possible good input just around the corner)? These are all probably decent reasons to go a little longer than planned.

On the other hand, do you feel like you’re just not hearing the song anymore, and can’t tell if what you’re doing is any good? It’s called “aural fatigue”, it’s both physical and psychological, and it happens to absolutely every musician, every engineer, and every producer on the planet, in every single recording session. Here’s your membership card. Over time, you learn to maintain perspective for longer stretches, but you’re never completely immune to it. Like anything that exhausts you, you can take a short break and get a “second wind”, but you’ll never be quite as objective towards the end of a session as you were at the beginning. (This is why God invented “tomorrow”.)

The kind of input you’re getting from the session is limited: it’s feeding your output back at you and saturating the ferric oxide of your inner tape loop. That’s cool, to some extent, because you can say “yeah, man, I just did a session and I’m totally burned out”, and if you say this while exhaling cigarette smoke and wearing shades, it comes out kinda sexy. You can even get some interesting work done while your perception is distorted — else we wouldn’t have such a thing as psychedelia — so don’t rule out laying tracks in the later part of the session. Just be aware that tomorrow you may love it, or you may hate it. No biggie.

In general — and this goes for any creative process, not just music — think of ways of looking at it that take some of the heaviness off of yourself. Imagine your creative process is happening with or without you, and you’re simply watching it unfold from a first-party perspective. Imagine the finished piece already exists, and you’re just a conduit bringing it into this realm. Imagine that everything you do is being guided. Imagine that the mundane events in your life are elements of your album being handed off to you in a clandestine manner by a secret agent in a hat and trenchcoat. “PSSST, hey kid, Larry sent this, you’ll need it for track five.” Just don’t blow his cover.

Take all that heavy stuff out, and the “out” part of your session becomes pretty darn simple. You’re going to sit in a comfortable chair, play your instrument a bit, and click on some things. Other than that, your main job is to listen. Let your invisible one-eyed hunchback assistant engineers do the rest. :)