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.

they were broken when i started

Posted by on October 7, 2009 No comments

It turns out that I can’t leave the idea of limits alone for very long. The world is conspiring to put it squarely in the center of my attention. A podcast from Poetry Magazine played a bit of Charles Bernstein reciting F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. They talked a bit about the influence of futurism on several composers whom I enjoy greatly. One of them was Igor Stravinsky (namesake of my long defunct and badly mistreated iguana, may he rest in peace). I have read so much about his life and work over the years that when his name comes up my modest body of knowledge bubbles and I get excited. Alone in the car isn’t a great place for a conversation so the thoughts traveled inward. And that’s where I get back to limits.

Stravinsky believed that music was not a language in the sense that it cannot communicate fully on its own. In other words, meaning can be attached to music but the meaning is not present in the music itself. A simplistic reading of his work would lead one to believe that music exists for its own sake and nothing more. This eschews the romantic notion of the composer as a soul in the darkness, desperate for contact. Now no one who has been to a U2 concert will believe that music exists solely for itself, but I have seen King Crimson shows that support the thesis. As a young composer, I took the simplified version of Stravinsky’s words and followed this line of reasoning for, well, almost two decades. But this morning, something turned.

fields

The assumption that music is not a language and cannot communicate both imposes and removes limitations. If we say that I can’t communicate using music, I don’t have to try. This also erects a wall. What if I really want to communicate? What if I see the simplest dances for the lute as communicating a cultural ritual and assume that this is good enough to pass for communication? What if I compose a piece with the intention of making someone cry? It looks silly in retrospect, but I never thought about it. And I never thought about it because by the time I started composing, all of the rules had already been broken or nullified.

I’ve never been one to have a school. That is to say, I’m not into pigeon holes or styles or -isms. I have always said that I want to make cool noises. Implicit in that statement is the assumption of sound for the sake of sound. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, but it’s interesting to note how willingly I took on so many limitations all the while thinking that I was freeing myself.

It should be noted that limitations or constraints are not bad or good, but they are necessary to make any kind of art. It is easy to argue that an artist is more fully defined by the boundaries he sets up than those he knocks down. Slowly it is dawning on me that the generation of artists to which I belong (the post-20th century whatever we are) will have to define ourselves by the mindful development of boundaries. What walls will we put up so that we may push off from them? How will we fence ourselves in? Criticism seems to be if not dead then severely wounded and down for the count. In a world of twitter and constant polling of opinion via news outlets that never sleep, there is no time to build a body of work in a given style because nothing has a change to establish iteself and grow. Anything and everything goes. But by saying we can do anything we’re also saying that we will probably do nothing. Make no mark. Push nothing forward. Stagnate.

That’s a lot more depressing and underdeveloped than I had thought it would be. But it won’t leave me alone so I’ll keep hacking at it.

limitations

Posted by on October 5, 2009 2 comments

If I were still in the academy and in the habit of writing long essays and whatnot, I would be terribly interested in writing something about limits in art and music that goes beyond the basics. And I’m not talking about a history of what limitations were (no parallel fifths for J.S. Bach) and why, but an examination of what happens when they’re not around and why they are so vital to the creative process.

wall

There are pages and pages of my journals going back to my freshman year of conservatory that discuss the rules of music. At first, there is a lot of whining about how I don’t care to learn 16th century counterpoint or the harsh techniques surrounding 18th century fugues. In no time that gives way to the near panic upon the discovery of John Cage and the ultimate removal of all rules in exchange for music that is entirely conceptual. At some point I even wrote to myself that it was terrifying to consider that all I needed was “a beginning and an end and anything in between is music.” Dramatic, no? But true. For the most part.

There are days when I wish that I had time to think about things like this more. That I could amass enough research to make a compelling case for my theory that without limits there can’t really be any art or music but if I don’t want to give up creating music of my own, I will have to put it off for a while. Or post paragraphs to my blog from time to time and hope it adds up.

Mixing continues tonight. I’m not excited to do the mixing but I can’t wait to get the collection out the door. More on that as the week progresses.

groovin’

Posted by on October 2, 2009 No comments

We abandoned The National Parks on PBS. It was wrecking the routine of the house and with a resident two year old, that’s a non-starter. It’s a brilliant film (so far) and I maintain that Ken Burns is a brilliant documentary film maker. We’ll just have to pick it up later so that we can have some sanity around bed time.

Which we promptly did not get last night. Instead of going to sleep like a good little boy, he screamed and followed me into my studio. I got the message after a few minutes that recording wasn’t going to be an option so I went with a little listening, editing, and writing. I turned the lights down and wrote in one of my journals for a while. Mostly some admirable attempts at awful poetry. Writing helps me listen.

There are nine tracks that are awfully tasty, in my opinion. I’ll try to add two more (if they fit) and then master it up. Release still looks like November, but I would really like to move it up. I’m proud of this collection. It feels good to say that.

lines

I’m reading a lot of blogs by creative people and most of them are making the same mistake. At the end of a post they’ll pull the old Slashdot routine of “how do you handle this problem?” It’s a way to prompt a discussion and I get that, but I don’t know that the forum is quite right. Blog comments are great but I think that for the most part people are writing in the style of Op-Ed journalism or something more personal that might not be the greatest start for a discussion. My only evidence for that is the number of “really great article! Keep it up!” comments I see. I guess I haven’t closed comments here for the couple of dozen readers so perhaps I should let it go?

There are also things I’m not reading any more. I love and hate Merlin Mann. That said, he has posted some things lately that are dead on. He mentioned that every minute spent reading a site about productivity or trying out a TODO application is time that could have been spent getting something done. So-called “productivity porn” is getting out of hand. I’m done with it. If I am going to waste time online it will be on the good stuff and not learning what the latest notecard hack is. Freaks.

Vacation is over and I’m back on track. Music soon.

coffee shoppes

Posted by on September 30, 2009 No comments

If I had to pick one thing that made me jealous of other flavors of artists it would be the ability to listen to music while working. A composer can’t really do that. Consequently, I lose a lot of listening time to writing. Weird, eh? But it’s true. I have to go pretty far out of my way to hear new music and I have to make time for it. Part of this is due to the fact that my day job doesn’t allow for it and my commute is better suited to podcasts than to new music. As a result, I really only have the time during my lunch hour when I’m sitting in a coffee hut somewhere with huge headphones on and either trying to edit or journal. Journaling time is new music time.

Come to think of it, maybe I am jealous mainly of writers. They can write anywhere. I hear about people taking up residence at a coffee shop or library to do their work and it makes me green with envy. Being able to work anywhere just sounds cool. Which means that it probably isn’t. Those people are probably just as chained to their chairs as I am to my studio. The on-the-go lifestyle probably doesn’t involve much moving around. More like moving from where you sleep to where you work which is what everyone else does every day anyway.

up

But there was a long time ago when I would go once a week to the coffee shop with a buddy of mine and compose at my laptop for the evening. It was nice to get out and be surrounded by other people who were deep into being alone together. Despite the horrible music they played on a loop (changed at the whim of the coffee dude) and the malfunctioning temperature regulation (regardless of the time of year) it was a wonderful place to get things done and to experiment. Being out of the studio was a good thing. It changed the rules by taking away some of my options.

I’m a big believer in limits. Someday I’ll write a great treatise about how wonderful it is that art and music today are more or less defined by the intent of their creator and how fantastic all of the opportunities for setting up our own constructive boundaries are. But not today. Today I will simply say that the arbitrary obstacles imposed by changing where work is done can really improve certain processes and not at the expense of others.

My limited time at the coffee shoppe eliminates my ability to record my guitar. I lose access to most of my noise making toys. It’s really just me, the laptop, and some headphones. It makes tasks like critical listening much easier because all I can do is work with that is there, not what I would like to record over top of it. I can really listen to what I have produced outside of the creative process.

After a week away from my most recent batch of songs it’s amazing to sit down with complete focus and listen to them as though they weren’t mine because once I’m done with them and they are released to the unsuspecting internet, they’ll just be things that show up on shuffle on my iPod. The tracks can play while I journal and notes can be made on things that stick out. If there is a buzz or hiss or screech that jars me, I can make it go away later. Levels become obvious. Spatialization is more pronounced. And the almighty flow of the song, that force that drives it forward and reveals any and all energy contained in the piece, is on display.