Category Archives: thought - Page 18

practice

Posted by on October 28, 2009 No comments

After completing my first full project with Logic Studio 9 I was going to write up a review. After some thought, it occurred to me that what Logic did best was stay out of my way. Its highest virtue is what it is not rather than what it is. Logic is not needy and it does not crave my constant attention. For the way that I work, that’s a blessing.

I should also say that the presets to their guitar sounds and any of the mastering settings are well thought out and require minor “to taste” tweaking. Having played in some really great spaces, I have low expectations of what can be simulated. Logic takes it from acceptable to pretty darned good. I’d still prefer to have a good amp mic’d up in a great hall, but in lieu of that I’ll take some factory plug-ins. The work I’m doing now is all acoustic and a little more demanding on that front. I wonder what my opinion will be when that’s over.

The coolest new features in Logic are supposed to be the way you can beat up audio tracks and adjust them to perfection in minute detail. I have two problems with this. One, perfection is really, really boring and completely flat. Two, if you practice you don’t need to tweak things anyway.

I have a really bad cold right now. Probably the flu. It’s hard to say. With that in mind, I beg the reader’s pardon for any half-baked invective that may follow.

I’m sick to death of pitch correction. More so of tweaking rhythms and the quantization of audio. Here’s the deal: if you can’t play in tune or in time you should practice until you can. This goes for people who have been playing for a year or fifty years. The idea of saving something in the mix or removing an imperfection is ridiculous.

Before I go too far, I will wholly embrace the idea of a sound recording as more than a document. If the subject of the recording isn’t a live performance (which should never be altered save to iron out defects in the method of collection) then any kind of alteration could be fair game. There is a lot of art that is made by tending to the nuances. With that out of the way, I’m speaking more to the person who puts a mic in front of an instrument or plugs it in with the aim of recording a part.

I don’t splice my takes. I give them three tries and that’s it for the night. Given that I stick to my one hour per night ritual, it can be painful to screw something up and have to move on to something else. But if I can’t do it right with three tries at this stage in my life I’m either not practicing regularly or don’t know the part well enough to merit recording. It comes down to the following decision: would I rather do it right in one take within the confines of the time imposed by the song (real time) or potentially spend hours making a quilt out of bits and pieces from multiple takes?

In my studio I play many roles. I’m a composer, performer, engineer, and designer. Sometimes I’m a luthier or an acoustician. I’m pretty good at most of those but what I enjoy is playing an instrument. It frees my mind and gives me a sense of peace. When it works, it’s one of the most beautiful sensations. And when it doesn’t, well, it still beats sitting in front of a monitor, splicing up waveforms, and hoping that the judicious application of various effects will hide the scars. So I tend to practice. It’s easier.

Read that again: it’s easier to do it right the first time. This applies to almost every endeavor.

So I may never use some of the more highly touted features of most DAWs and in fact my needs could likely be met by a simple multitrack recorder if I had infinite synthesizers and effects processors. And if all of this equipment were small enough to fit in my bag, that’d be great too. I’ll stick with Logic. And practicing.

a positive reception

Posted by on October 23, 2009 No comments

I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback and some constructive criticism of Nothing Of Consequence after its release this week. It felt really good to put it out there and feel like the project, though fairly short for me, was finally complete. It’s good stuff.

Now for the recap. My goal was to get 100 people to download it. The zip file that contained all of the songs was downloaded about 150 times in the first two days. Some folks may have elected to download the tracks individually (there’s no accounting for taste) and until I see those stats I won’t have a good idea of how many times the entire album was taken. No matter how you slice it, I made my goal.

What’s not reflected there is how many people listened to it. I’d argue that a percentage large enough to fill a room did. Best of all, the people that I wanted to listen did. From that perspective, it’s a complete success.

facewhat?

Some things that amused me were those folks asking how much it would cost when it was advertised as being free. And that’s free as in “give it to your friends and everyone you know” free. Money is such a part of art now that it adds a twinge of bitterness to the process. I guess it’s easy to assume that music on the Internet is either going to cost you $9.99 an album or is illegal. So I can forgive that and let it slide.

I have turned into a bit of a Facebook apologist though. The vast majority of my referrals were via that site and it’s in no small part due to my friends linking to my stuff there. People came out of the woodwork to pass on the good word and for that I am very appreciative. This whole social networking media stuff really works. I’m more than a little surprised. But the quizzes and games still suck. I honestly don’t care what kind of tree I’d be. Morons.

I deem the experiment a success and when my next collection (now under construction) is complete I’ll do the same thing. I would like to make the things I do available to podcasters for their free use and push things from that direction, but that’s something for another day. Unless you have a podcast and want to use my stuff. Just drop me a line and we’ll work it out.

My new plan is to do two things at once. First, construct a new collection of songs for release in (hopefully) 6 months. Second, get back to releasing sketches and pieces of sound art weekly. I like having something out there every week. So you can expect more of that starting next week. The only thing more exciting than finishing a project is starting the next.

Thanks to everyone who listened. And double thanks to those who listened and passed it on.

next!

Posted by on October 19, 2009 No comments

Tomorrow, I will put Nothing of Consequence (my new collection of tunes) up on the site and provide appropriate links. I might put it up on the iTunes store or on emusic, but for now it will be free to anyone who drops by and clicks the link. I’m excited to see if I can get 100 people to download the album. That would be really cool. To my mind, it’s like having a recital with 100 people in the audience and that’s the way I’m approaching music right now.

The era of the rock star is fading (more slowly than it ought) and taking with it a pile of assumptions. Platinum albums that lead to mansions and fast cars are not what the future has to offer a dreaming musician. What artists have to look forward to now has perhaps more in common with 200 years ago than 50 which, incidentally, I think is what we’re all looking at in every aspect of our lives. But the value of music and art is pushing ahead into a place where everything revolves around real connections.

gold

I would never pretend to guess what the almighty market will do with music. People will still get paid to play and to write. There will be commercials for years to come that will need hip and edgy sounds from the almost underground to advertise bad cologne and cars. There will always be posers who need to listen to the most obscure pieces they can find. There will always be artistic adventurers who genuinely crave and seek out the new. And in the absence of those, there will always be family and friends (hi mom!) which is sort of the point of creative endeavors the more I think about it. Community. Family.

My son is entering a creative phase. He’s two. The other day, he wrote his name. There’s really no way to describe how that feels. To see your child do something so amazing is visceral and powerful. I want to hear the songs he sings. See the towers he builds. Trace the lines of his crayons when he says it’s time to “color-color paper!” I have the same sense when it comes to my brother and my friends. I want to see what they’re doing. I want to read the pages of their manuscripts and look at their photographs and paintings. In them there are reflections of times and places that have meaning for me and I get to see them through another lens. The work offers me something and I take it.

None of that, mind you, recognizes money or professional status. T.S. Eliot was a banker when he wrote The Waste Land. Many great composers and artists created their ouvre without so much as a dime coming back for their efforts. The reason I ignore these things is that they have very little to do with the quality of the work or what draws me to it. Things like this certainly don’t compel me to create.

This is a long way of saying that no one needs publishers or middlemen anymore and no one really needs to be creating full time for it to have meaning. The Internet makes sharing a story or song as easy as dropping some extra tomatoes on someone’s porch when they’re not home. It’s easy for art to be by and for a community and if that sounds like a lot of hippie-free-love crap, it almost is. I say almost because the sentiment is over the top most of the time. But when I read a cool piece of fiction written by a friend or download some tunes by someone I know who lives too far away for me to jam with, it’s awesomely true. I see more and more of my moonlighting artist friends getting that point. It’s exciting. The excuses for skipping out on one’s creative life are fewer by the day.

So in the spirit of saluting anyone who buys notebooks for scribbling in over an outrageously priced coffee or sets up a blog to push a story like a crazy street preacher or sits in the park tentatively adding to the sounds of the city with a quiet guitar I will put my music out there too. As my uncle always said, more fools, more fun.

history

Posted by on October 14, 2009 No comments

The information age has brought so much to the average person with access to the Internet that it’s hard to disparage it in any serious way. The benefits of the shared knowledge and easy access outweigh any serious concerns to the point where it’s almost silly to talk about the negative effects. Doing so seems precious and falls into the realm of navel-gazers. After all, at no other time could a person of any social standing come into contact with so much information on any and all subjects. With that said, there are days where I wish I knew less.

In high school I played in a band. Our singer didn’t have any training on stringed instruments, but he could pick up a bass guitar and do some stuff that sounded really great. Why did it sound so good? Because he had no pretense. He didn’t know his scales or arpeggios and thus had nothing to prove. The faces of Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke meant nothing to him. He was just having a good time. As a result of this lack of instruction (note I didn’t say talent or ability) he was able to take something that would have been deemed too simple for the almost-journeyman musician and make it convincing. There was no attempt to impress anyone technically, it was all about sounding good.

A lot of artists get lost when the art produced is for an audience of peers, living or dead, and I find myself in that boat from time to time. It’s given that at a certain point in the development of one’s voice it is critical to be reviewed by masters and peers. It’s very important to have that audience of others who are learning and growing. Much benefit can be derived from hearing a fellow composer discuss a more difficult passage and offer suggestions from a similar level of experience. When both members of the conversation are at the same point in the path up the mountain, there’s a lot of good information that can be shared and the passage can be more easily navigated by each. At the same time, when one composes only for one’s masters and peers the reason for starting the work can be lost to a desire for recognition and praise from “those who know.”

diagonal

It’s also difficult when framed with the historical precendents and their ready availability. I remember like it was yesterday (because it was) thinking back through pieces that I have heard or played and searching for permission to do something. Thinking that if Roger Sessions or Edgard Varese did something like what I was trying that I can do it too. Or in moments of despair defaulting to Cage and getting my pat on the head that anything with a start point and an end point is in bounds.

Why this deferrence to history, peers, and masters? I honestly don’t know. This hang up only comes to me when I compose. My painting could not possibly care less about the Canon of Western Art™. When I build an instrument, I’m not looking to the makers of old for anything more than solid construction techniques or jigs. I don’t need for Dave Grisman to approve of my mandolin picking or Henry Miller to agree with my writing. I simply do them.

I noted this search for permission that occasionally leads to writer’s block and the derailing of projects when I started college and have made great headway in ignoring it by working with people who are not trained, talking with artists who work from the gut, and trusting the judgement of those who are the goal: normal listeners. My wife can’t write a four voice chorale in the style of J.S. Bach but she can always give a thumbs up or down to a piece of music.

Part of moving toward mastery is scrutinizing the craft. Studying its history and understanding how it all fits together is to be expected. But the untaught lesson of when to use this knowledge and when to put it aside is something that has to be learned alone in the studio. It’s one of the seldom mentioned battles that is fought by anyone who studies and creates. In the end, the desire to know less is really the desire to understand more exposed.

never use headphones to mix

Posted by on October 12, 2009 No comments

Managing time is tricky. It’s in short supply and is, in terms of the average human, a finite resource. There are books and web sites loaded with detailed instructions that claim to maximize the use of time. The methods are attractive. The systems are seductive. But the unasked question is: what is getting done?

The assumption on the part of any productivity guru is that there is a task worth doing. This task is important and must be done but there are so many other tasks that are important that some method must be applied to managing them. A survey of an average day for an average person would shed some painful light on these poor givens.

Many tasks that accumulate are ones that we simply don’t enjoy. Mowing the lawn or handling the finances. If looking over credit card and bank statements were entertaining would as many people be in debt as are? Probably not. But those tasks must be done. So perhaps a TODO list is a good thing. But that’s hardly the daily grind. And more to the point, those aren’t the kinds of things that people spend effort budgeting time toward. When it’s time, it’s time and the task gets done. This is the crux of the matter: when an item is important, it gets done. A person who budgets time for making dinner is badly broken.

all wet

Creative work bubbles regardless of the task at hand. Words are scribbled in the spaces left between the more mundane daily activities. Songs are written, paintings planned. When the time is right, the piece is completed because it is important. Stopping a great novel from being written is as difficult as stripping away the time spent driving to and from work or shopping for groceries. That is, if writing that novel is important. If it isn’t, then all of the magic in the world won’t make it so.

Having a child has been revelatory on many levels but the most concrete part of my existence that it has changed is my concept of the priority. When my son needs something, he needs it right now. Putting him off is not an option. This strange new rule to my game has made me far more proactive than I have ever been. On the one hand, everything gets planned. On the other, each plan is subject to improvisation and change in the most real of real time. I set aside my studio time and little windows where I think I might be able to sneak in some work on this project or that so that I’m ready if the opportunity presents itself but I’m fully aware that these opportunities are fragile and can fall apart instantly. This creates an appreciation of the moments that do work out unlike anything I’ve ever known. I’m always ready for things to work or fail. This readiness maximizes the chances when I get them and removes that ugly sense of disappointment or failure when I don’t. It’s probably a great boon to my getting things done.

None of this means that I can mix with my headphones and expect it to sound like anything other than garbage when it hits my car’s speakers or the monitors in my studio. Having studied the production of digital audio for how many years now I should have known better. In fact, I do know better. But I got greedy. I thought that I could cheat it somehow and produce something great by flying using instruments alone. Great for pilots in the dark, awful for sound engineers.

So I start over. Run the faders back down and see how long it takes to make things sound good. Patience. It will get done because it has to. It’s important to me.