o t h e r t i m e

when i took composition in conservatory, my teacher told me that the most difficult part of teaching was finding the germ that made up the inspiration for the work at hand. he felt that it was important to treat each piece as though it were his own and work from the position of helping his student. he was very good at finding that one, tiny grain of idea that got things rolling and steering clear of it regardless of his feelings about it.

i do not have this skill. or it’s so very undeveloped as to be detrimental to my process.

for the last two weeks i have been reworking what was released here as “sketch 6″ every night. i tried it the way i did it originally and decided to get fancy. that rolled into adding a mandolin. and then a 12 string. and then a lead line on the 6 string. and then a bass line. when i started pondering digging out the psaltry and moving the entire thing to a new key, i realized that i had gone too far.

it has been hot down here in bayou city and as such i’m not really thinking clearly. last night i left the studio very unfulfilled and with a great deal of anger and disappointment. i sat on the couch and listened to the original sketch. i found that little nugget of inspiration and noted with certainty that i had removed it entirely over the course of the last two weeks.

if there’s a lesson here it’s quite simply this: when things start to feel wrong or get too complicated, return to the source. that almost feels like one of those universal truisms, but i won’t push my luck.

back to the beginning.

it occurs to me that i should really post more often during the process of producing this new album. i have started the process of taking my sketches and re-recording them for an actual release. i’m fairly serious about this collection, so i’m giving myself time to really take care of business when it comes to getting them put together. this poses several challenges for me.

first off, i set an arbitrary release date based on what i thought i could do in a week. i’m quite behind. this doesn’t really phase me since, well, i’m the only one who is perturbed by my tardiness but at the same time, i’d like to hit a deadline once in my life. the reasons for not being on schedule are fairly simple: i don’t have a lot of practice time and i hate editing. this means that i’m stuck in the infinite loop of needing to do it right in one take with little practice. not an easy task, i must say. but all of this is purely technical. it’s easily solved. i need to spend more of my time practicing when i’m sitting around in Jax’s room watching him build towers out of soft blocks and anything that doesn’t move.

my other “problem” is the inspiration that i draw from the instruments that i own. one of the simpler sketches got out of hand with the dobro. i’ve been stuck on that one for a while because my intonation has issues and…well…see that part above about not practicing. and then there’s the mandolin. every time i pick it up i feel the urge to work it into something. so i have. and i think it’s even effective this time! so a lot of my “solo” guitar pieces are blooming into multi-instrumental extravaganzas. i’m really happy with that, but developments like this kill timelines.

the whole reason the deadline exists is to push things forward. it’s all mental slight of hand. i’m really pleased with my results so far and when i listen to my rough mixes on the drive to work in the morning i sometimes catch myself thinking “wow! i did that?!” cool stuff.

when it’s all wrapped up, i will be doing something new with the site. i’m actually going to push this recording. the last album made enough to cover its costs which i thought was pretty huge. i’m hoping that i can branch out from the friends and family crowd with this one. i’m not counting on it, but i think it’d be nice. i want to be a part of this great internet publishing revolution too!

so the other day, my good buddy kevlar sends me a quick email asking if he can use some of my music for a short film he’s working on. i think it goes like this: a team has 72 hours to produce a final film from start to finish. it’s a pretty cool idea and i like being associated with pretty cool things.

well, the film is really awesome! my tunes are things i never released here (or at least i don’t recall releasing them). you can hear my stuff in the very beginning and in the section with the credits.

check out the movie here: http://ningin.com/mediastream/item:show/2008/07/01/one-dollar/

it’s really good!

i swear i’ll stop soon. i will not continue to dork around and post mp3s forever. i will go back, rework my material and produce a cohesive collection…

…in a minute…

look, my mom visited for two weeks so i could either go into the studio and be all antisocial with my mom who lives thousands of miles away or i could mess around with some electronica in the living room. i opted for the latter and as a result had a rich visit with my mother and avoided being smacked upside the head (for ignoring her).

in any case, this is about 6:18 of tunage. i like the voices that you can barely understand. they’re some friends of mine reading various things and stuff. i really love working with the human voice and obscuring it. i can also say that i am getting over my fear of drum loops. i think i “get it” now. or maybe i’ve just given in and decided that i’m not a very creative percussionist and loops make my life easier. i think i like the “getting over the fear” option.

take a listen. let me know if you dig it…or if you want to use it in a movie.

electrosketch02

electro sketch 02 by j.c. wilson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.othertime.com.

so the other day i picked up the latest “computer music” magazine. it’s the “ultimate guide to garageband.” look, i’ve been using GB for all of my sketching and i thought that i might pick up a tip or two. and i did. they include a pile of apple demo movies that go over some things that are obvious and some things that aren’t. the brilliance of GB for me is in the simplicity and sometimes simple is difficult. i watched the movies, learned two or three things and then dove into the demo projects.

wow.

ok, so i wasn’t expecting something brilliant, but i did hope that it would be something that wasn’t slapped together in thirty seconds or less. i was underwhelmed. so i started messing around with some things that i don’t usually mess with. it was a lot of fun and reminded me of a time when my plan was to put out a series of techno-trash albums under a cool pseudonym. we can all see how far that got.

i think this track has a neat groove. without any further ado, from the coffee shop on my lunch hour to your ipod. enjoy!

update: the mp3 was a little distorted, so i fixed that. not nearly as annoying (in terms of quality only).

electrosketch

i got an email from kevlar yesterday bemoaning his inability to work with a click track. my response to him went something like this:

the bottom line is that playing with a click is really useful if you work alone (sometimes). it gives you a frame of reference so that you can do things in multiple takes and get it all in sync. but the reality of the situation is that music hates a constant pulse. think about how much give and take is in the tempo of a folk song or any piece of music from the “classical” canon. if i were to play a bach lute suite straight, with no lilt or give, it would be a ridiculous parody of the work. even in dances (or especially) there is a subtle shift in the distance between the beats. music wasn’t meant to be the slave to a metronome.

how do you balance that? with loops, you don’t. but think about what that means when you make music out of loops. what do we lose when we lose the subtle variations? i’m not questioning the utility of these things where music is a part of a whole and the synchronization of events is so important, but i do question it in music that is meant to be heard.

so if you’re trying to do something tribal, write it out. make your blueprint and play one part through. be musical. let it breathe. then record the next track over that one as though you are performing with yourself from 10 minutes ago. layer it up until it reaches what you want it to be. i think you’ll find the give and take among the parts is better and more powerful.

what a wonderful problem technology has brought to us: how do we play as an ensemble with ourselves?

that made a lot of sense last night when i was slugging it out with today’s release. i wanted to add bodhran and talking drum tracks to my 12-string and bass arrangement. i picked a nice clave and let it rock out for me. sadly, i really like to stretch out certain sections and i think you can really hear where in this recording. one take per track. i couldn’t push my luck with recording drums after the dude went to bed, so they are a little softer than i might like. still, i think it sounds ok.

in total i have 8 songs ready. i’m seriously considering starting the process of recording them all in logic with all of the proper mojo. if i can get 8 of them down, i will know where to fill in the gaps. i’m pretty excited, so we’ll see where it goes. after all, my mom is coming for a two week visit so there will be built-in babysitting!

anyway, here’s the track. let me know if you can dig it!

sketch3mix

my wife says that this sketch isn’t “peppy.” i think it bounces along well enough. it feels like a throwback to some folksy fireside geetar music mixed up with an etude by fernando sor. i think it’s light and has a lot of space.

as i was telling my friend Kevlar the other day, i give myself 3 takes. that means i get about 10 minutes to warm up on nights when i don’t play for the dude in his room before bed and then i wind up with 20 minutes or so to produce 3 takes.

my rationale for this is pretty simple. when i was studying the classical guitar full time, i learned that if you stop when you make a mistake, you never really get past it. you learn to get to the point of the mistake, make the mistake and stop. so i play through it. this is intimidating at first since it’s going directly to disk for me to hear again and again, but so what? i have a delete key. but i don’t use it. for the same reason that i used to compose in pen: i might not like something now, but it could make sense later.

well that was more of a ramble than i had intended. less talk, more music. if you enjoy it, please make a comment and let me know.

thanks for listening!

sketch6mix 3.5 mb, 3:50.

i just read an article on some news site talking about the death of the audiophile. wow. welcome to 10 years ago!

when i first got into the idea of the mp3, it occurred to me that we were moving away from the CD and toward the computer as the audio component of the home. with the popular adoption of the ipod, i was proven correct. yet my first concern back in 1996 was that my hard drive was not big enough for me to manipulate many of my recordings, so how much music could i really hold? mp3 (and plummeting storage costs in subsequent years) solved that problem for me nicely.

in some other article i read a couple of months ago (note the lack of links because i am really, really lazy) the author was declaring that the peak of consumer audio was with the CD and we are headed on a downhill slide. i am not sure that i disagree with that at all. i follow a lot of mailing lists and forums that go on and on about “pro audio” this and “pro audio” that and i wonder what that means any more. yes, the more precision we have in the digital domain the better our dithering when it comes out and all that jazz. but if i am taking my high quality master and shrinking it down to a 128 kbps mp3 that will be heard on earbuds on the bus or even worse, routed through a cassette adapter in a car that is traveling at 75 mph down the freeway at rush hour, does it even matter? the subtle nuances of my carfully crafted reverb will be lost forever amidst the tire noise.

tack on to this the number of people producing albums with nothing but garageband and an internet connection and we soon see that the high end is really suffering. and no one cares. except for the high end and the folks who have bought into it (protools/logic studio/cubase users…i’m looking at you).

does this mean anything? probably not. i have an enormous music “collection” and i don’t listen to a lot of it. i am quite glad that i don’t own physical copies of most of it because we would have no place to store it. i get to listen to what i want when i want and that convenience is worth a ding in quality that i honestly don’t notice most of the time due to the circumstances of the world around me (dog, chattering baby, neighbor’s car alarm, traffic, people trying to talk to me in random coffee shops).

none of this means that i will be giving up my sennheiser headphones or my CD recordings of shostakovich’s string quartets. but it does mean that i will continue to be content with my ipod and cassette adapter for the car where the majority of my listening takes place.

oh and i’ll probably be investing more in microphones than in software in the future. after all, paying a ton of money doesn’t make it a professional recording. getting paid or paying for it does. and maybe i’m a composer and not a professional.

so i’ve been working away in the studio every night. i get about 30 to 45 minutes to put something down and i’ve been generally pleased with what i’m writing. last night i added some instruments to a sketch and threw together this mix. i make no excuses about the poor intonation on the dobro. i’m out of practice with a slide and that’s all there is to it.

i hope you enjoy it.

oh…and sketch 1 and all of the ones after 2 are under construction. more to come soon!

sketch2mix-all

about three weeks ago, i looked up and realized that i hadn’t been very productive lately. it got to a point where i was spending a lot of time noodling around and not a lot of effort getting down to writing something. for some reason i started thinking about managing my musical projects the way i manage things at my job. that means deadlines.

i got really crazy. i opened up my mac and started a todo list. i decided that i would do a sketch a week. what this means is coming up with something i could call a song every week before i go to bed on sunday night. my plan was to accumulate four songs and then take one of the four and clean it up to a release quality recording. actually produce the song. and i would do one of those every two weeks. the crazy part is that i want to keep sketching underneath the re-recording of the songs.

tracking things with the todo list and iCal turned out to be a stroke of genius! it turns out that if i put it on a calendar, i suddenly have to meet or beat the deadline. and right now, today, i am one week ahead of myself. i have three tracks down and i started my fourth tonight.

more productive simplicity? don’t mind if i do! all of my sketches are done in garageband. why garageband? partly because it’s easy to set up and record but mostly because it’s limited. there are no options. no settings to go on and on with. no desire to tweak this compressor or mess around with yet another reverb or audiounit. i click record and go. and man if it isn’t working! record a track, duplicate it, record another take. simple.

again, i find myself a parody of the mac switch ads, but the thing is, i’m getting a lot done this way. more than i expected. and that’s what a computer should do: facilitate my work, not get in my way.

and where are the fruits of my labor? not quite ready for prime time. they are, after all, sketches. but i’ll have something posted soon enough.