new music – sketch 3 – and click tracks

Posted by on June 9, 2008 No comments

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

new music – sketch 6 – and ramblings!

Posted by on May 29, 2008 No comments

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.

production quality

Posted by on May 23, 2008 No comments

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.

new music – sketch 2

Posted by on May 22, 2008 No comments

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

getting organized

Posted by on May 6, 2008 No comments

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.