audiotthoughts on music

nope, this did not evolve into a fruitblog – still the same ole music crap…

this is about genres…kind of. there is this saying, that goes something like this: if you have nothing but a hammer, everything looks like a nail to you. i love this metaphor, because it hits the issue on the head (punny, now isn’t it?). we often become the hammerguy, even if we have other tools available – sometimes we just don’t see or use them. recently i stumbled across some people who tried to solve a rock-problem by using classical methods. when i mentioned this, they denied, and who’s to say who’s wrong? but here’s my thoughts on that:

the first step in doing something is to think appropriately. you want to speak portuguese? think portuguese! (note: this works for other languages as well ;-)  ). don’t think english (or wherever else you’re from) and then translate, this won’t work at all. the same goes for music. you want to make jazz? think jazz. don’t try to translate classic into funk or reggae – it will sound horrible!

that being said, i’m not talking about creative ways to come up with something new. i’m talking about ignoring the big picture by using only above mentioned hammer because you’re too comfortable with it or simply too lazy to really get into something else.

maybe i’ll write more about this someday. right now, that’s all i have in me and it should be enough to provoke some thoughts – at least i hope so…

ok, i gotta run – so here’s just a quick update on how the work on the new album is coming along. there are no lyrics whatsoever yet. but the intro is finished – i’m thinking about turning the intro into a whole song, though…

the music for one song is finished, except for the solo which i will track after i’ve done the vocals. and the music for 4 more songs is written. this takes that much longer than expected, but this whole internet stuff is stealing away lots of time (not talking about writing entries for this place…).

on the other hand, i’ve got one song almost finished (again except vocals) but it won’t be on “traitor” because it’s a completely different style, more bankjob-like. i tried to combine it with already existing traitor-stuff but it sounded…..cough, cough…..not that great. we’ll see where that goes…

babysteps once again – but at least steps. and they’re in the right direction…

just for the heck of it…

something triggered a memory today and got me thinking when and why i first wanted to be a musician. back then i was about 13-14 years old and on a summer holiday in turkey, when i noticed that i forgot bringing tapes to feed my walkman. i listened to whatever was on the radio those days and even taped some of the shows. but being stuck without any tapes left me no choice but to go to some streetmarket and buy some new ones. nothing they had to offer sounded any familiar so i bought one tape because i liked the cover. it was “Live After Death” by Iron Maiden and it blew me away. the next day, i went back there and bought all the other Maiden-tapes they had. this holiday triggered my way of life. in the months and years that followed i became a true metalfreak, got into Judas Priest, Black Sabbath and similar bands and didn’t want to hear anything else…

well, a lot has changed since those days – my taste in music as well. it got a lot broader, i still love those bands but i love lots of other stuff nowadays. and that’s the reason why i haven’t listened to any of the above mentioned in years. but now that i’m thinking back again, i’m gonna take those old albums and listen to them again. and i can only recommend this, because – believe it or not – this was f***ing great music! go ahead and listen to the first few albums of those three bands, just to see how they started. Judas Priest for instance released their first album (“Rocka Rolla”) in 1974 – 35 years ago! and i bet you’d be surprised how it sounds.

anyway, maybe you should think back as well to the time and the reason why you’re into music. you ARE into music, right? it might shed a new light on things today….

woohoo! here it is. finally. about time. bankjob. yay!

the first song of the album “corner” and the one that plays by default when you click the play-button on the blue player to the upper right. and the one that made it to no.14 on the reverbnation-german-rock-charts – maybe i mentioned that already :-)

the funny thing about this tune is, it was never meant to be a real song, more like an intermezzo or something – if at all. i messed around trying to get a dirty but still defined sound that should go through the whole album. that was even before i started on any other song. just trying to figure out how the album should sound in general.  so i picked a drumset from the “vintage RDK”-refill (check out Peff’s website if you’re into Reason) and fell in love with the sound of the toms. messing around a little more, i came up with this tom-based drumbeat and recorded that for about 45 seconds. it sounds quite wacky if you listen to it closely – sometimes even off, but that’s what’s giving it this great feel and me the inspiration for the bassline, which is simply going up from one ‘c’ to the next and then down again – with very few variations. played with a cool acoustic bass-sound that matched the drums quite nicely, doubled by a saxophone and tripled by a harmonica. then i had the idea for this breathing sound on the ’1′ and the ’2&’ – i did this with a flute-sound transposed way down – giving the whole groove lots of drive. i was quite surprised how big a difference that flute makes. if you could listen to bass-sax-harmonica only, you would probably faint or throw up or maybe both. this is a timing-freak’s nightmare, sounds just horrible!

then there’s the saxophone playing this little melody at the beginning and the end. actually it does sound very real by itself – as a saxophone-player i was truly amazed. but i didn’t manage to get this very real sound into the final mix. for some reason it doesn’t sound that real to me anymore. i guess something else is stealing a few frequencies away – i didn’t find it though, so this was the best i could do.

as soon as i was done with this 45-second-piece, i knew this had to be a full song. so i came up with the break-part to make room for the voice. it would have been difficult to include vocals during the soundmess-section and those breaks seemed an appropriate and easy to do solution. so i played the drums for the rest of the song including the badass ending, played the other stuff as well – let’s be honest, it’s all just repeating itself over and over and over again, but it’s played NOT copy-and-pasted. and was done really quick. throughout this whole process, i thought about some old action-movie with cool car chases and gangsters and such. so it turned out to be a short briefing of the gang right before the job – lyricswise….

although the single parts of this song are, well, not really demanding :-) and poorly played without any correction whatsoever – it has this killing feel and it still blows me away every single time i listen to it. unbelievable – and i think rather incidental than on purpose but who cares?

oops, come to think of it, there was a correction. i had to clean up the snare-rolls at the end of the verse-sections because the midi-controller didn’t react as fast and precisely as i wanted it to….

that’s it! now you know all the dirty details about the creation of “corner”. i’m sorry if i destroyed your vision of me being a creative soundgod, i’m just stumbling around making weird noise that weird people seem to find….weird. yes, i guess that about sums it up :-)

and i’ll prove this to you. as you may know, the next album is in the making….

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• no harm done… (audiot.eu)

so far, it seems i managed to solve part of the problems with this site. i should be able to include links again and the browser-compability should be better now. it’s not yet perfect, one step at a time. and right now i’m thinking about creating another site for just my music and another for just the teaching aspect while this one would again become a blog about thoughts on music – as it was supposed to be in the first place. not sure about this, though, and i’m already having nightmares about how to make this technically happen. but other people are able to have more than one site, so there must be a way, even if it remains in the dark for now – for me…

and to end one chapter once and for all, i’ll post a description of “bankjob” tomorrow – the song that made it all the way up to rank 14 on the reverbnation-rock-charts-for-germany. by the way, it’s down on 15 again – DAMN YOU ALL !!!

please forgive me for posting a video – again, but this is an important message to all you musicians out there (especially the drummers). the video is a kind of a preview/making of clip from Benny Greb’s new dvd. although i don’t have it yet, i’m virtually certain that this is one awesome movie! so go ahead, just buy it – he’s a really nice guy who deserves to be supported! and the message is: you are not alone !!!

this is worth checking out. and not only because this guy is a great player, it’s also a cool song. by the way, the microphone used is a Røde NT-4 (sorry, still no links yet) – for you recording folks out there, it’s worth considering…

enjoy:

i’m dead serious!

no matter if you’re just a player or writing, recording, arranging your own music – even if you don’t have anything to do with music, this is for you. we’re always trying to reinvent the wheel although this is just plain wrong. i thought about this a lot during the last few days, while working on “traitor”, my 2nd album (still having link-troubles, you can find its category in the sidebar to the right). it looked like this would become a pretty straight, down and dirty rock-album but i’m not that sure anymore because there’s an important choice to make. i could either stick to the plan and do a rock-album that’s already been made thousands of times, but not by me. so it would be different as well as the same. now that might not seem very innovative and you’re damn right: it’s not! but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a great album. in my opinion, some of the greatest records of all time lack innovation – so it’s not a necessary ingredient. and if i choose to create a plain and simple rock-album, it would be a bad idea to try and reinvent rock. you know, if the cat happens to be on that very tree, it would be quite stupid to bark up another one (or even plant your own…) – no matter how many dogs are already there. the right thing to do would be trying to perfect the wheel, make it rounder, turn it into a ball – make it mo’ better.

on the other hand, you could always leave the cat alone and do something different, get a bone for instance. in my specific case this would perhaps mean to take those rocksongs but turn them into something else, maybe by using some of the sounds and vibes i used for “corner” (blue player, sidebar, ’nuff said) and doing some combination of the two. not that this was never done before but i’d have no idea how it would turn out. so instead of trying to make a great rock-album by sticking to the tradition it would be more like just going ahead, being creative and see where it goes from there. And again, this wouldn’t be reinventing the wheel. it would be inventing something alright, but not the wheel.

this might sound a little confusing, i guess my point is to not try and REinvent at all. either stick to something that’s already good (there’s nothing wrong with that!) or invent something new.

by the way, there’s two interesting things about this i should mention. first, creating something is NOT letting something completely new appear out of thin air, it’s taking things already there and combining them in a new way. and second: i once read in a book about bionics that we think we’re smarter than nature because we managed to invent the wheel. but the fact is, a wheel is quite useless in nature – that’s why nature invented the leg, which is far superior to the wheel if you really think about it. and do you really believe, if the wheel was such a great and important thing, nature wouldn’t have come up with it aeons ago?

yesterday, a friend gave me a link to something really cool i haven’t seen before – not in a browser anyway. they call it the audiotool and it’s really fun to mess around with this. it’s flash-based, so you need to have some flash-whatever-thingy to use this. the site providing this audiotool is Hobnox (i’m not really sure, what it’s about…) and HERE’S THE AUDIOTOOL. i’m still having trouble including links, so they won’t open a new window this time – but at least they’re there :-)