audiot

no matter if you’re a listener or if you play an instrument yourself – maybe even write your own songs – there are times when things get boring. everything sounds the same. you try to come up with a new guitar riff and it sounds just like the same old stuff you always come up with. or you pick a cd from your collection and it sounds dull.

this is a perfectly normal reaction. our brain needs input, that’s what it’s there for – the more the better. or should i say the fresher the better. input is for our brain what air is for our lungs and old, used, stinking air is not as much fun to inhale as……you get the idea.

so whenever you get into such a situation then you know it’s time for something new. so try the following:

listen to music you never listened to before. sounds easy enough? well here’s the catch. any genre you like is forbidden. any style you already own music of is forbidden. it has to be something completely new to you. so if you own and listen to nothing but speed metal, go out and get yourself an album of afro-cuban-latin-music. and here’s another catch: dig into it! concentrate on it. really listen. like it, that’s an order. you have to like it.

if done properly this will take you up to the next level, guaranteed.

and who knows, you might even find some new favorites. i do this every once in a while and it keeps me interested and hungry. the only disadvantage in doing this on a regular basis is that it gets harder and harder to find something really new…

go check it out!

what do you think? it seems the more music surrounds us the less important it becomes. hmm, i might have phrased that badly. maybe i should give an example. when mp3s became an alternative to the cd the size of my music collection exploded. suddenly i had twice as much cds. i continued collecting songs on cds, so i burned the mp3s as uncompressed files on cds and put them on the shelf like the ‘real’ ones. back then i had no mp3 player, so i needed normal cds if i wanted to listen to them outside my computer.

it didn’t take very long until i made it a little easier for myself by no longer printing covers and tracklists, only putting a handwritten note with the songtitles inside. then i wrote the songtitles i liked directly on the cd’s surface, then only the artist’s/band’s name and then nothing at all. i stopped putting each disc in a case, stacked them in a corner of the room instead. so at some point i had piles of cds looking like empty ones in corners throughout the whole apartment. needless to say that the music on those discs practically didn’t mean anything to me. i hadn’t even listened to about 60% of it after downloading…

so was it just me? did i make the mistake of trying to treat music like i was used to?

before the internet, going to a record store was something special. i really had to go there, ‘browse’ through the music by touching it with my hands, sometimes stand in line to listen to it and then buy it with real money, going home with something. today the whole process is a lot easier of course, but doesn’t that take away some of the meaning? instead of going somewhere (in my case even another town), i just sit there sucking it out of the net. it comes to me and not vice versa. there’s no more achievement involved. this might sound weird but it feels like i don’t bond with most of the music anymore. and the collecting process is not much better: i store the songs on my harddrive, mp3 player, cellphone, usb-sticks or sd-cards and i’m still losing track of it all… and, believe it or not, i have the feeling that i’m listening to less music than ever before. this isn’t true of course, but it feels that way.

another point besides the ‘obtaining-process’ is the sheer mass of music available to us. if you would own a ferrari (damn, i should have made this word a payed-ad-link…) it would mean a lot to you. if you would own two dozens of them, they’d become boring.

so where am i going with this? i’m not sure. and although music is more important to me now then it was my whole life the global question stands: has music lost its meaning?

p.s. i should mention the big advantage of getting my hands on music by independent artists throughout the world which simply wasn’t possible earlier. so don’t get me wrong, i’m not saying it all got worse. i’m just thinking about the feeling of music touching us not as much as it did once…

hi there. this is only a short note to let you know what’s happening regarding the new project (see categories). right now i’m up to my neck in technical literature that should help me out of some programming issues. usually i would have played the instruments myself, but now programming and automating is the only way as i still can’t use my right hand.

i’ll keep you informed…

ok, so you thought about what you want to do. you still don’t know? don’t panic, that’s perfectly fine. in the last entry i wrote about a definition problem (what does a musician really do?). and that there is a huge number of possible jobs related to the music business. so how can you know what you want to do if you don’t know about the possibilities. now what?

this step requires some action. you should go out and ask people ‘in the business’ about what they do. go to some recording studios and talk to the guys there. you’ll get a picture of what studioguys are doing and of what a studio musician does. it’s quite different from being on stage. nobody cares about your funky haircolor and tattoos in a studio, but if you’re not able to play/sing with great precision – you simply don’t get the gig. precision is not such a big issue on stage, although it should be your second nature nonetheless (there will be an entry about precision)… i’ll stop here before it gets boring. you go and find out yourself what people ‘in da bizz’ do to make a living. usually those folks are open and happy if someone comes along to ask about them, so don’t be shy. get a hand on some magazines (not that kind of magazines!), about music/musicians! read interviews, product-reviews reports, anything that can show you what people do. maybe you love your guitars so much that you decide to get into building them or become a writer for a review-magazine…

the internet can also be of great value here. simply search for all jobs you can think of and you’ll find more material than you can ever get through. check out as much as you can because you’re about to make a decision.

at the end of this journey you should know what it is you want to do. again don’t panic, you can change along the way – lots of people do. but that requires to be on the way in the first place. so go decide. deciding is cool! and once you decided what you want to do, repeat the above step: go and find out as much as you can about this particular field including all the details.

at that point you might want to re-decide because you’ve found out about some disadvantages of your ‘dream-job’. but think twice first. there’s disadvantages to everything, so let it sink in a little first. give yourself the chance to get used to the idea, maybe you can work in that field for a few weeks to get a better idea of what it’s really like (again just ask if someone needs a helping hand). again, talk to people who know about it – now you’re able to ask better questions.

and again, consult the internet. go into forums (there’s forums for everything!) and ask, ask, ask.

if you’re ready to decide now, fine. if not, you’ll have to repeat the above steps. i know, this might be a tough decision but it gets better as soon as you made it. because once you know about the destination, it’s a lot easier to make your way…

did you ever think about becoming a musician? i’m talking about doing this for a living. if your answer is ‘yes’, let me ask this second question: are you nuts?

maybe you’ve heard this already – i did. parents, friends, relatives, girlfriends and the man on the street asked me that lots of times and my answer back then always was ‘hey, that’s a dream job and if you’re good at it, it’s safe and well payed.’

today my answer would be more like: yes, i sure am.

i guess the main thing people find weird about this job is the fact that it’s not really defined. what is a musician? what does he/she do? this question seems silly but think about it. if you call yourself a musician (if not – lucky you – ask one), think about what you really do. how do you spend your working time? recording? practicing? making phone calls? blogging? writing songs? do you have a plan?

when i first wanted to be a musician i had no idea about what it really is. i thought if i practiced hard enough and found the right people for a band i would make it big – as if this was the logical order. ok, i was 14 at that time. but even ten years later i still didn’t know exactly what i should be doing. and it seems to me a lot of wannabe musicians have the same problem.

so it’s not just the people around you who don’t know what being a musician is. chances are, it’s you as well and that is not good. how do you want to make a living when you have no idea? yes, i know, you’re a musician, an artist, a free spirit – making plans, restraining yourself with serious calculations is destroying the vibes. but if you’re not becoming a star fast (you won’t), you’re gonna be in serious trouble as soon as the landlord knocks on the door.

this is where art meets facts. sooner or later you’ll have to deal with it and believe me, the sooner the better. of course, some guys become stars and it’s cool to have this dream – just don’t count on it! so you need a plan, right? (of your answer is ‘no’, just read this entry again from the top). now, how do you make such a plan? first, ask yourself what it is you want to do? do you want to raise hell on stage or would you prefer to be a hired-studio-gun? you could just write or start your own record label. you could create cellphone-ringtones (i’m serious) or become the f.o.h. (front-of-house-guy) in a neat club, responsible for the livesound… there’s an endless number of jobs related to the music-business and that’s one reason why there is this definition problem.

i always wanted to be a live musician……..until i became one. now i love to teach and i didn’t even think about that possibility before i tried it. i prefer recording to the stage-thing, setting up the microphones, making all the choices instead of playing in filthy clubs with a crappy sound. but i still have live projects going on. and that’s the huge advantage of this whole music field. you can do it all if you like, you don’t have to concentrate on just one task. it’s completely up to you…

….as long as you remember – and i hate to say that – to make some money because even artists have to eat.

to be continued…

this question came to me yesterday as i started working on the new project (check out the last entry: “everything you can think of is true…”). i was thinking about how to transfer a song written as a straight hardrock tune into a relaxed, Henry-Mancini-like-jazz-thing, completely based on electronic instruments. i felt like the make-up-guys of star trek as the boss comes in to say: turn her into a weird alien, but no matter what, keep her beautiful!

so the first thing i tried to apply to the song was a different groove and it became a different tune, but trying to keep the straight rock groove and changing sound and dynamics instead made it quite terrible. well, that’s not too weird because groove is one (if not the) major factor in defining a genre or style.

so the question stands: when does it become become a different song? think about movie soundtracks – the older ones before they became chart-shows… there were a few different themes, one for the good and one for the bad guy and maybe the girl got hers as well. and for each music including scene there was a variation of one of those themes (as soon as i find out how to include paid advertising i’m giving some examples, ha!). so the song remained the same (sounds familiar) but it was tailored to fit into the very moment of the film. now all in all those variations weren’t too different from each other. different instruments and dynamics, maybe a different mood and tempo and there you go. but i can’t think of a movie that a techno-, a funk- and a mozartesque-version of the exact same song. i can’t even think of a movie with three totally different music-styles at all for that matter… might rip the movie apart, moodwise – so no help here.

i’ll keep on trying, maybe i’m just too familiar with the original version of the song. i just wanted to keep you updated and ask this question: when does it become a different song ?

that’s a title of a Tom Waits song. but not only that, it kind of sums up what music is about. when i’m working on electronic based music it all seems to be about signal paths, amplitudes, control voltages and so on – i forget sometimes what it really is that i’m doing there – and i know i’m not the only one.

music is an artform and we should treat it as such, no matter if it’s handmade or the sum of digital signal processing, it’s art. and that means it’s about inspiration, creativity, feelings and not just zeros and ones. when one sits behind a drumkit or plays a guitar it’s a lot easier to remember what he/she is doing – it seems more real, at least to me. creating music on a computer, sitting hours and hours staring at a screen is more like a deskjob and it’s hard to stay inspired and creative.

but then again does it even make sense to compare these two methods of making music? what do they have in common at all?

“music is math”, i heard that many times and the more i think about it, the less it seems to be true. you can write down a whole song as combinations of frequencies, amplitudes, timecodes and whatever else and it might even be a precise reconstruction of the tune itself. but is that it? is that all there is?

what about an artist’s touch on the instrument? how would one calculate that? and what about the choices the artist makes. that’s an important point. come to think of it i’d venture to say that music is rather about choices than it is about numbers…

and that leads me to another interesting thought: right now i’m working on an album. half of the songs are written and i should be in the process of recording them by now but a carpal tunnel syndrom (to be precise it’s something similar but i don’t know the correct term in english…) got in my way, so i can’t use my right hand for at least a few weeks. and because this was meant to be a hardrock album (see the last entry about genres…) there’s just nothing i can do except waiting. at least that would be the normal reaction to the circumstances. remebering the title of this post though gives me another idea that might be worth a try:

did someone ever record the same songs in different ways? i’m not talking about covers. did someone write a song and then arrange and record it as a funk-, jazz-, rock-, hiphop-, blues-, metal-, electronic-tune? the same song? usually in music it’s more like ‘everything you can think of……..has already been done by somebody else’ but who cares? if someone’s been there done that (and i’m quite sure of it) so what? i’m gonna try this anyway although i have not the slightest idea how to do it. at least i know i’m gonna start with the computerbased version because that’s the only one i can do with one hand…

maybe i should make up one category in this blog dedicated to this project – stay tuned…

what kind of a listener are you? do you care about genres? or do you listen to just about anything? well, i do the latter. when i started listening to music – my sister gave me an ac/dc record when i was maybe 6-7 years old alright, but i mean really started listening somewhat in my mid-teen-years… – i really did care about genres. hell, i would have never listened to anything else than heavy metal, never. and i was positive that this would stay that way……it didn’t. but why? it would seem that taste just changes through time, that’s an easy explanation. we all hated/loved some things when we were young and later on maybe started to like/hate them. and again i ask: why?
is it the sheer presence of such things, surrounding us until we get used to them? or is it some kind of boredom regarding what we always liked and now are getting tired of? maybe we just get more experienced, so our taste changes accordingly? and maybe all of the above, maybe none, maybe too many ‘maybes’?

to me this is always an intriguing question. the fact that i like something isn’t enough, i want to know why. and usually i get lots of maybes but when it comes to music i do exactly know why.
the first band i fell in love with was iron maiden. oddly enough i stumbled over a cheapish booklet tape on a turkish beach – holidays with my parents, i must have been around 12-13. i liked the cover and nagged my parents about it until they bought it for me (it was only a few cents….). as soon as i had it in my walkman i was blown away and this feeling stayed for years. and today it sometimes is still there. but to start making music myself really changed things, for i got much deeper into it and know a lot more about music than i did back then.
musicians listen to music in a different way and they like different things about it. the big advantage is quite obvious, i get much more out of a good piece of music than the average consumer. but luke, with the force comes the responsibility. the downside is also simple: i’m hardly able to listen to music without analyzing, comparing, processing and that can be a real bummer…

woohoo, drifting off again – back to genres: today i don’t care about genres anymore, it’s all jazz to me. the only thing i care about is if it’s good or bad, if it’s worth spending time on or just sucks. and the more i’ve heard, the more i want to hear. so bring it on world, i dare you to show me the music i’ve never heard before…