audiotthoughts on music

hi there. now, that the big move is right ahead, i’ll have to pause my online activities for about a week, hopefully less. i cancelled the contract with my provider but for some reason they can’t shut it down on 12/31 as they were supposed to. they’ll do it tomorrow instead, no idea why… so i’m dry until 01/01/09 if all goes well.
i’ll be back as soon as possible, so stay tuned and have a great end of the year – and an even greater start into the new one.

thanx

…happy holidays to you guys !!!
i hope you have a great time with your loved ones. thank you very much for reading and take care…

alright, video time again :-)

this time it’s Keziah Jones, a nigerian guitarist and singer performing an acoustic version of ‘All Along The Watchtower’ his blufunk style in some tv-show. the guy who’s holding the mic is John McLaughlin by the way…

too bad it’s such a short piece, but quite groovy nonetheless. and i recommend to check out his first album called ‘Blufunk Is A Fact’ – i love it…

enjoy

in yesterday’s entry i said there were two ways of dealing with practiced-a-lot-but-still-no-jawdropping-syndrome. that could be misunderstood – to make it clearer: those are not two different ways, those are two things you need to know about – two parts of the same way. the first one was messing around as i wrote yesterday. the second one is what today’s post is about. i’m sorry if that confused you, maybe i’ll learn english someday…

so let’s think back, you practiced and practiced at home to finally get your jawdropping scene during rehearsals (or even on stage) but you screw it up, it just doesn’t work the way you practiced, dammit. but why?

what we often underestimate is the fact that we’re dealing with completely different situations here. our brain, however, doesn’t only save the lick you practiced (hopefully :-) ) but also your surroundings, as well as your mood etc. so you practiced at home, relaxed and alone in your room under somewhat perfect conditions. and you finally got it right. now rehearsals are a lot different, there’s not only you but also other people. chances are, the sound’s a lot different and maybe the band plays it 10 beats faster than the recording you practiced with or whatever…. and i’m not even talking about a live or studio situation. it’s just plain stupid to come up with something right before a gig, nobody will notice that one killerlick but everyone will notice if you fail with it – and you will.

so, how to avoid this? well, by messing around as part of practice you can cover different sounds, tempos, situations to be better prepared for whatever comes up. but there is another thing that can help you in that manner. and that is to create a practice situation that is as similar as possible to the situation you practice for. for example if you will stand during playing, than stand up during practice. sounds silly? maybe – but as i said, the brain saves your surroundings. everything looks a bit different if your eyes are at another height, you might hold your guitar a little different etc. and that all adds up. so when it’s getting serious, you’re not only a little nervous as usual but also feeling some discomfort because of the strange situation. i know people who practice in their stageclothes, because it helps them and that’s fine. if it’s about a cover song, don’t practice along to an original recording, use a tape of your own band instead. and so forth. try to get as close to the upcoming situation as possible.

and one more thing: don’t try to be a hero. making up something right before a studio recording or a live gig, playing it 10 times until you get it right once and then go out there/hit the red button just won’t work. it’s better to let go of it this time and really prepare it for the next gig, so you can be sure it will work. and that’s when the dropping jaws come in…

although i’m pretty sure i mentioned this already, probably even more than once, it belongs in this series – so here’s the appropriate entry :-)

it’s about messing around……badass style. and it’s something every artist i look up to does in some way. i once read about an experiment (long ago, so i don’t know anymore who did it – scientists probably :-) ). if memory serves correctly, it was about piano. people could win one piano lesson and the ‘winners’ were divided into two groups. the people of the first one got a standard lesson and afterwards they were told to pratice exactly what they learned in exactly the same way over and over again. the other group was told (after the lesson) to ‘play’ with it. they should play it slow, fast, soft, loud, with different sounds (if they had a keyboard) etc. anything they could think of. in a nutshell, they were told to mess around.

three things happened: first, the people of the second group learned more. second, they were rated better by independent teachers. and third, they had much more fun, were a lot more motivated and wanted to continue with the lessons, so this incidently became kind of a marketing strategy :-)

in other words, our brain likes to explore all aspects of something in order to ‘get it’, the more the better. imagine a kid with a ball. do you think the kid would learn more about the ball and related physics by reading a book on that matter or by simply go out and play? see? and again there’s that other point: messing around is just so much more fun – but let’s save that for a different entry…

so messing around with something lets you learn it better, faster, more efficiently and more complete. but there’s another advantage as well. if you play an instrument, maybe even in a band, you might know this situation. you practice something like a solo or a lick you want to add to a certain song, you practice it a lot until you’re sure to see some jawdropping during the next rehearsals. but what really happens is, you completely screw it up. the reason for that is, it’s a different situation. sitting at home and practicing is a lot different than a band rehearsal, a recording situation or live. and that’s almost a guarantee to fail.

there are two ways to get through this, though. one of them will be covered in another post and the other is: mess around! by practicing it each and every way you can think of, improvise with and around it and having just fun, you’ll get used to it, it becomes more familiar and you’ll shed light on every aspect. and that will help you using it in a variety of situations….

so go ahead, mess it up!

as this year’s end approaches and i’m right in between moving to another part of germany, things around here get quite stressful. and in times like these one appreciates moments of relaxation even more, so i’m posting this little video of Andy McKee playing his song ‘Drifting’ – enjoy…

now that this program was mentioned here quite a few times, i thought i should talk a little about it. although i’m in no way involved with the guys making it, i really like it and became a huge fan over the last years. the software is called ‘Reason‘ right now it’s up to version 4, the company is called Propellerhead and they did another fine release that goes by the name of ‘Recycle‘.

anyway, what is reason? when i checked it out the first time (version 1.0, must have been somewhere around 1999-2001) i was mostly into recording audio and did know little about synthesizers, samplers, drummachines etc., so it didn’t strike me at once. and it wasn’t until version 3 when i started really thinking about it, got into it, actually read the manual and another book on advanced tips, tricks and techniques (powertools for reason 3 by Kurt Kurasaki aka Peff). the more i used it, the more i loved it. and now, running on both versions 3 and 4 (depending on which mac i’m using…), i use it almost exclusively when it comes to music. i’m tracking audio with Cubase LE 4 (sometimes GarageBand), then import it into Reason and stay there for anything else.

Reason is best described as a virtual studio rack. you actually see the rack itself and even the screws that attach the devices to the racksides. so you start with an empty rack and have a whole list of devices you can create in it. first, there’s two different mixers, then various synthesizers, samplers, a loop player and a drum computer as sound sources. you can choose between a whole bunch of different effect-devices including 5 different master effects and then there’s little helpers like mergers and splitters for both audio and control voltages and a pattern sequencer as well as an arpeggiator. and believe me it’s all you need – most of the time even more. the amount of devices you create is only limited by your computer… besides the rack itself you have another window that shows the sequencer where you see the different tracks (of different devices) and can move slices, cut, copy, draw etc. – the usual.

you can create patches for most of the devices and save them, in- and export them to be used in another one of your projects. there’s so called ‘refills’ you can download from the net, lots of them are free, to get a bunch of new sounds or effect patches. you can copy and paste complete devices and, i believe, even combinations of devices from one project to another. if you’re done with a tune, you’re able to export it as an audio file or as a published reason song, that means other users can open it, look at what you did exactly, make changes but cannot export or publish it in their name. so there’s a cool way to learn from others…

but one of the most interesting features is the do-it-yourself-option, or however one could call that. with the push of a button you can turn the rack around and see the rear of it. now you might think in good old monty-python-crunchy-frog-sketch-manner: ‘now where is the pleasure in that?’ because the devices are created to look and work like the ‘real’ ones, with knobs, buttons, little displays and such, they also have derriéres where you see power cables, don’t open warnings and cooling slots. AND cable connections! that means you are able to make your own cable connections between different devices to create whatever frankenstein-device you want or even a feedback loop :-) you actually see the cables hanging around and even moving right after turning the rack around – that alone makes for hours of entertainment, trust me on that….

this is in my opinion what makes Reason one of a kind, the possibility to create any freaky combination of whatever your even freakier mind can come up with. yeah! the disadvantage, however, is getting lost in the sheer mass of possibilities is quite easy if you don’t really know what you’re doing. but on the other hand that’s quite common with other programs as well and for Reason there are nice sites, forums, databases with all kinds of stuff to help you out or help you expand.

the only thing i do not love about reason, and that’s really the only thing i can come up with, is that the rack-window has a fixed width. that means on a widescreen there’s wasted space, it would be better (in my opinion) to be able to make it the whole screensize. in case of a macbook for instance, the single knobs, letters and displays get quite tiny…

but apart from that it’s an awesome piece of software that should be checked out by anyone who’s trying to make music on his/her own. i wouldn’t want to do without it anymore and if they don’t suddenly start screwing up things, i’ll buy the next versions as well – guaranteed.

wow, i just found this video of a (at least to me) new device. it’s called a ‘reactable’ and is a musical instrument based on modular synthesis. last year i would have watched this video and thought something like: ‘yeah, that’s cool – so what’. but since i spent quite some time with reason, reading different books about it and even got into synthesizer programming (i never would have thought of that before…), i fell in love with this video right there on the spot because it explains it just great. you wouldn’t even need the talking of those two guys, seeing the different pieces and the various waves, pulses, radars etc. the table shows pretty much explains itself. that’s exactly the kind of device we’d need in our schools! and not just for music – for everything! seeing what it does in such an easy way and being able to touch it, play with it, mess around with it is one hell of a way to learn something….

ok, i just created a new category for the learning basics posts. there’s five of them already and there will be more, so it seemed appropriate to put them all together…

so small beats large, eh? didn’t i talk about that already? well, this time it’s more like short beats long and i’m talking about periods of time. did you know that it’s impossible for us to really concentrate on something longer than a few minutes?  it’s true, although i don’t know the source of that information anymore. we think we could do something for hours and being focused the whole time but we can’t. by the way, this might be the reason that the ideal length for a song, which is played on radio, is somewhere around 3:00 minutes – keep that in mind when you record your next 70s-sound-alike-mammoth-intro…

anyway, learning is most effective if you do it for short periods of time – about 5 to 10 minutes and then take a break. there are two reasons for this: first, the above mentioned ‘concentration-span’. and the second reason: remember the puppeteer-and-datahighway-building-guys? those fellows are quite assiduous people. when you start learning, they start building – nothing fancy here but when you stop learning, they go on building for at least a few more minutes. ok, if you’re learning for five hours and then you win 5 more minutes, it’s nothing. but if one of your learning units is only 5 minutes and you still get a 5 minute bonus, that means – well, you do the math. depending on how long you need to dig in, learning periods of 10 minutes might be better, you need to check this out for yourself.

so go ahead and make up a plan by first breaking down the task into small pieces (that can be done in 5-10 minutes…), then do one at a time -  slowly and focused and after each of those periods give your brain a break, so the tiny workmates up there can finish up. you don’t need to doze off into standby mode, just do something else you don’t need to focus on. for example, you’re working for 7 minutes on that new arpeggio, playing it slowly and focused up and down the guitar neck. then, as a ‘break’, you crank up the amp and thresh your favorite punkriffs out to the universe. and after that mr. brain is ready to take another bite…