audiot

alright. what i wanted this series of entries to be about simply was the fact that different situations (studio vs. live) require different ways of playing/singing. on a stage for example, a singer often tries to brim over with power (or better: tries to appear so), even at the expense of precision. the audience loves power and in a live situation, usually, no one realizes if a note was a few cents sharp (shhhh, let’s keep this a secret). saving energy is another very important factor on stage (as well as in everyday’s life – please do care about our world !!!!!) because the singer needs to be able to make it through a long evening. while in a studio it’s all about precision and you can waste as much energy as you want (if it helps the sound), because you just can take a short break a few minutes later. and again this applies to other instruments. drummers tend to hit harder on stage – and play a bit faster – because of the adrenaline…and to the crowd it just looks better. but during recording, hitting too hard is not the way to go – it kind of kills the sound.

so studio would mean jekyll – live would mean hyde, right?

hmmmm, that seems too easy. when i’m on stage doing covers for instance, it usually is a set of 4 hours. so while trying to provide seemingly endless amounts of power, i need to be aware of how much energy every single word costs if i want to keep it up til the end of the last song. practiced long enough, this pretty much happens automatically but is still a rational (can something be automatic and rational at the same time?) process, seems not very hyde-ish. and of course, a recording of pure sanity might not be very catching…

this entry has no conclusion, i guess, but hopefully still provokes some thoughts.

i can’t really explain why a sound works when you’re right there but not anymore when you hear it on a record. maybe it has to do with the fact that microphones ‘hear’ things a lot different than the human ear does. every time i tried to record some guitar and this problem occured, which pretty much means every time i tried to record some guitar in a somehow distorted way, the solution was simple: less distortion. this always worked and i have no idea why. it didn’t really sink in yet because i’m still making the same mistake over and over again and maybe always will… if it’s distorted guitar, i want it to sound bad, really bad. so i turn the distortion knobs hard right….and soon become frustrated because it just doesn’t work that way. going for a mid-position provides a usable sound but somehow that doesn’t satisfy me.

this time it was a bit different though. instead of miking an amp i recorded a clean track and tried to apply some lots of distortion afterwards. and again it didn’t work, even worse, it already sounded horrible before there were any other instruments. and again, less distortion – cool sound…

i’m not sure if this goes for all instruments, it sure does for vocals. with the voice, though, it’s another kind of ‘distortion’. it’s more like pressing too hard, trying to force the voice into sounding like you spent the whole night drinking whiskey and smoking cirgarettes. and this can be a cool sound if you know what you’re doing. if not, it’s just stupid. it causes damage to legions of singers every day and it doesn’t sound cool at all – more like ridiculous. if i had a nickel for every time i laughed out loud into another singer’s face who tried to do that. it just appears to me that this is rather unpolite, is it not? wow, i seem to be a real p in the a sometimes :-|

now i realize i’m drifting way off. although this is an important point as well, i think, it’s not what i wanted this entry to be about :-) duh. but at least it was quite a journey from playboy models in supermarkets to not enough distortion in singer’s faces. ha!

so there’ll be a third part to this as soon as i finish collecting my thoughts…..

did you know that playing an instrument and playing an instrument (the voice is an instrument too of course) can be two very different things? and i’m not talking about different types of music here. think about a guitar player in a band for example. can you imagine that he/she’s playing the same part of the same song in two completely different ways? sure, you may think, the normal and the unplugged version. you’re thinking, i like that, but it’s not what i meant. i’m referring to the good old difference between playing and recording. some of you might think ‘what difference?’, some ‘only beginners make a difference there’ and some maybe ‘wow, that online-picture of this playboy model sure looks sweet’. well, it’s not that easy. and the ‘online-picture-guys’ have the perfect example right there. because believe it or not, that girl looks a lot different when she’s on a trip to her local supermarket. ‘how the hell does he know what picture i’m looking at?’ you might think now but that’s ok. it’s the internet, everybody knows everything about you, get used to it.

but back to the music. when the guitarist i mentioned above plays a song during rehearsals or maybe on stage, it’s different from the way he/she plays in a studio. i came across this many times as a singer but never really realized it. the first time i was in a professional studio the recording guy told me about dos and don’ts, what i should care about and so on. i was quite nervous so i payed attention, didn’t try anything and just layed it down – as simple as i could and that made him very happy. he then talked a lot about others who came in, played the star and tried to impress him with all sorts of things that usually went terribly wrong and sounded like crap afterwards. i didn’t think about that too much back then because it was a great experience and i just felt overloaded with impressions. but even without thinking i kind of adapted to this. on a subconscious level i knew that singing in recording situations requires something else than shouting out to the crowd.

through the years i thought about this every now and then and yesterday i experienced it again while recording a dry piece of guitar for re-amping. for my new project i’m messing around with sounds right now so i recorded some guitar piece without any amp or effect (but with some noise reduction and compressing) into the mac and then tried to apply different ways of distortion etc. to it. it took a while to discover that i was going at it the wrong way. it’s a hardrock tune, so i wanted a hardrock sound – as tough as it gets. when i’m playing live or during rehearsals the gain and the drive knobs are always on ten. i’m not using any effects though, just a tube amp with a separate overdrive channel. and i loooooove the sound. but i tried to record it on different occasions and it sucked to ridiculous lengths. when we taped the whole band with one mic hanging from the ceiling it sounded great (the whole band, not just me…) but recording that same guitar sound in better quality and mixing it together with the other instruments makes it terrible. but ‘why’ i asked myself – why?

damn, i can’t finish this entry now because time slipped away even faster as usually – so you’ll have to bear with me. i’ll be back tomorrow….

i’m doing two gigs with a cover rock band in august, haven’t gigged with them in a long time. this will be a lot of fun. covers kind of keep it real if you’re messing around with your own stuff too much. well, at least one of those gigs will be private (wedding – good food….hey, i’m a musician, i don’t eat on a regular basis ;-) ), not sure about the other one but since both take place in the middle of germany….

anyhow, if someone reads this and actually is from here (you never know), drop me a line and i’ll pass on the info as soon as i have them (and the drinks are on me…).

ok, first of all i’m glad to announce (finally, i hope), that new music strategies is back online and should stay that way. it’s not my site and i don’t have anything to do with it. i just like it and told this here so i thought i should keep you informed.

second, i will rename the “new project” category into “my little garden”, because i (again finally) started working on the new album and this will be its title, working title at least. so no new blog at the moment, just its own category named after the album. right now it’s mostly searching for the right sound and i’m really not sure yet if it will be completely old school sounding or with a touch of todays electronics. so i’m messing around with all kinds of soundstuff i can come up with for guitar and checking out possibilities…

third, mix match music is about to start. it has been in its beta state until now and i’m gonna write them what i think of it. the idea is great, artists load up their musical pieces (like loops for example) and anyone can mix them together to create a song, directly on the site. there’s a sequencer where one can really mess things up – how cool is that? using the pieces either costs something or you’ll have to upload something yourself and if someone makes money with such a creation everyone who participated in it gets his/her share. so go have a look, i’m not sure about the exact date of the takeoff but the site including all infos is already there.

that’s all for now. i plan to update to the new wordpress software this weekend, so hopefully it will be a smooth transition. maybe i’ll change the theme (the look) as well, i really love this design but it might be time for a change…

take care

a few days ago i gave you a heads up that the site ‘new music strategies’ would be back online after some provider vs. user issues…

now it’s offline again and it may not return, at least not with the same domain. so i took it off my blogroll again and apologise if i misled someone to the error-page. i really hope the author will make the content available again somewhere somehow because the site was quite helpful for me and the free ebook there as well….

on the other hand i got an idea through this ‘site-here-site-there-different-site-but-same-content-or-whatever-else-thing’: maybe i should write about the recording i talked about yesterday (read it here) in a different blog, because it’s a project of its own and i don’t want this site to look like just some ad for it. but maybe it’s fine the way it is….

i’ll try to update to the newest stable wordpress software in the next few days, so there might be some problems with reaching this site during the updating itself. the first installation was fast and easy so i don’t really expect trouble, but in computerland things can get tricky sometimes….

well, it looks like the work on the new album will begin sooner than i thought. i had to deal with some handproblems (similar to carpal tunnel syndrom) but they’re gone now and i’m in the process of regaining full power and control in my right hand again. while i was unable to play an instrument for quite a while i thought about creating the album in a complete electronic way first. getting into the whole synthesizer programming stuff taught me a lot but now that i’m able to play again, i will begin the way it was planned in the first place. although i’m not a ‘hardrock guy’ – i don’t think in genres anymore – this will be a hardrock album, plain and simple. some of the songs were written over ten years ago but for some reason i couldn’t use them in different bands so they stayed in the back of my head all this time. and every now and then another idea for a song of this kind came to me so there’s six songs ready to record (some have no lyrics yet) and i’m planning to write another four at least.

so now comes the toughest part (for me): creating the sound those songs need and only a part of me is looking forward to this because on the one hand i love messing around with sounds and creating them but on the other hand it can be a real boring and tiring journey towards brainwash-island. first i’ll have to decide if want to record the guitars the old-fashioned way (amp + mic) or if i prefer some kind of digital re-amping (recording a clean signal and creating the sound afterwards inside the mac). maybe i’ll do a combination – i don’t know yet.

and there’s another thing to consider: i wanted to do a complete see-through-production with this record, meaning i wanted to write about every step in this blog – explain the choices etc. and post samples of the whole process. i thought of this as a great idea to let you guys be part of it, or at least witnesses. but i’m not so sure of it anymore because i don’t want to bore anyone and listening to dry guitar takes without any idea of the song itself might not be that much fun. so maybe i won’t post every single step but more like every finished stage of the process… we’ll see about that.

i know you guys are the quiet type but it would be cool to know if anyone would even be interested in that sort of idea, so feel free to speak up. if no one wants to know about such a process and only the finished product matters, i wouldn’t bother anyone with it. because this is by no means meant as some kind of advertising. au contraire, there will be flaws and stupid mistakes for i’ve never done that before and i’m doing this album mainly to finally listen to those songs i kept inside of me for so long…and because it will be so much fun, yay.

so if you want to be embedded somehow, go ahead. if not you’ll have to live with the consequences, muwahahahahaha.

and here i go again on my own… once again i left a band, well, left is not really correct. we started a little over two years ago but soon it became clear that this was going nowhere. i didn’t mind because it was fun to play and apart from rehearsals or a few gigs there was no time involved. but now i haven’t heard from them for maybe 3-4 months (!) and this time i won’t be the one to call them (i usually was). so i packed my stuff and took it somewhere else about 2-3 weeks ago and i’m quite sure they haven’t even recognized. it’s not hard to leave them (if there still is a ‘them’) because i’ve been through this so many times i lost count. what’s that you say? yes, maybe it is me. who can tell? and who cares? so here’s one of the most important lessons of all and it’s not confined to music only:

if you want something done, then do it yourself.

don’t get me wrong, i’m not talking about ego this time. you don’t need to stay all alone for the rest of your life. what i’m getting at is try to do your own thing, maybe on the side, maybe as your main focus but do something that nobody else can sabotage. write some songs completely on your own for example. i’ve worked on so many songs that will never be played/recorded again because of some childish brawl that ended a productive relationship.

so a while ago i started my own little project where nobody else will be involved. this takes unbelievable amounts of time because of all the new things i have to learn. but on the other side it’s so much fun and really rewarding. certainly i will never quit playing with others, that would be like dying. but from now on i won’t quit having my own projects either…

try to check that out. think about a project that’s completely your own and think about what you would have to do to make this happening. this might include learning basics of other instruments or recording. maybe you have songs lying around that never fit in any of your bands – i have. and there will be an album but not too soon because there is still a lot to learn and i’m excited about that already…

alright, that’s a tough one.

first of all, a blog can’t teach you how to breathe in all it’s details. now you may think ‘there he goes again with all that get-a-teacher-stuff’ but since you already seem to understand i’ll skip it.

so why am i writing about breathing? because there are simple aspects you can learn by reading this entry and practicing a bit:

1. breathe deeply into your belly

if you’re looking pregnant – way to go! down there the air has the most room, no bones in the way. breathing into the ribcage is not that efficient because of…well…the ribcage. look into the mirror, if your shoulders move while you breathe, you’re doing it wrong. the shoulders need to be relaxed. by the way, that’s the reason why so many people who work in sitting positions at desks, computers etc. get problems with their neck muscles being hard as stone in the evening. think about it, we’re breathing about 21.000 times a day (it depends of course, but that’s a number to work with…). that means, if you’re working 8 hours, you move your shoulders up and down about 7.000 times. do it 100 times right now, come on….notice something? so keep the shoulders relaxed, you don’t need them to breathe.

2. breathe in through the mouth (yes, i know…)

you’re right of course. usually breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth is the best way, because inside the nose the air gets cleaned, becomes warmer and a little wet – preparations for better use later. but for starters it’s a little trick to see (or hear actually…) if you’re breathing calmly and steady. open your mouth just a bit and suck the air in. the idea is to make a little breathing sound. that way you have perfect feedback about how calm and relaxed your breathing is. if it sounds like you’re freezing to death, no good. it should be more like a smoking-a-joint-sound, not that i would know how that sounds – someone told me once. and by the way, smoking is just plain stupid. as soon as you’re familiar with breathing, you can use your nose because from then on it really is better.

3. the correct rhythm to breathe

this depends on the song. but it’s not really complicated. think of it this way, every songwriter has to breathe as well. so there are breathing gaps all over the place, usually more than you need. there’s exceptions of course but listen carefully, look at the lyrics and you will find enough breathing pauses. singing is a way of exhalation, so it’s natural to have a good balance between in- and exhaling, amountwise. for example you sing for three measures and then you inhale for one measure, so exhaling is slower but the amount of air should be about the same. this would be one exercise: listen to many, many songs and find out when the singer breathes. if you have the lyrics of the song, mark those breathing points so you can see if there’s a pattern (hint: there is). if you find even more gaps where breathing would be possible, mark them as well (maybe in a different color so it doesn’t blur the pattern) visualizing is a good thing. there’s about seven patterns that fit onto (almost) every song but let’s not get too technical. i only show my students those patterns to let them know how to think breathing. as soon as they get the idea, those seven patterns aren’t mentioned anymore – they’re just a stepping stone.

4. how much air

when my students start, they usually get short of breath very quickly, but as soon as they start to think and breathe in patterns, it gets the other way around – they have too much air inside their lungs and don’t know how to get rid of it. it’s all a matter of efficiency. the more efficient you manage to turn air into a tone, the less air you need. and if you breathe regularly throughout a song a lot of air gets accumulated and that’s a problem. having not enough air only means you have to sing a word shorter or maybe leave out one ‘baby’ or ‘yeah’ and there you go. having too much air could soon result in not being able to sing anymore. you’re feeling like a balloon ready to blow. so always before you breathe in, get rid of the air still inside you. imagine the air can only be used once and then becomes spoiled. so if there’s air left after you sang a line, breathe out first and then in again. you can get the air-rest out with the last word you’re singing as well, just sing this last word more ‘breathy’. soon you will be able to inhale the exact amount of air needed to get you to the next gap plus a little reserve. don’t ask me how, your body just knows…

one more tip: use the whole breathing pause for breathing. if you finished inhaling and there’s time left, inhale slower. don’t stop breathing, inhaling and exhaling (aka singing) need to become a constant circular motion.

i don’t want to go over the top with this subject, so that’s it for now. remember those are just some simple rules and tricks. check them out and if you’re running into any problems, just ask through a comment right here – this will help others as well. i kept this quite general so it’s of course no learn-to-breathe-right-in-five-easy-steps-guide but it should get you started nonetheless.

go breathe