audiot

yay, here it is! the legendary meatbucket-song! listen to it here.

this was not only the first song i did for the album and the one that took most of the time but also the song that i had the most fun with – and the worst croakiness… well, it is of course inspired by Tom Waits but you already heard that, right? it honors me that some people said my song would sound like one of his – some even said it would sound worse…and that’s an even bigger honor. thank you!

because this was the first tune for this album i made a mistake with it. the album was supposed to be done in 28 days and i spent about a week on this one song before i noticed, that i never could finish in time if i went on this way. the song is not at all complicated and even the single parts were tracked in no time but i ‘wasted’ lots and lots of time with creating the right instruments and with the automation of the volume- and panorama-levels. take the handclaps for instance: there’s a lot of work in them. i took a handclap sample that sounded real to me, but it was only about two or three pairs of hands clapping – not enough for what i had in mind. just doubling the same sample a few times didn’t sound real anymore, so i created a whole new sample out of dozens of the original one but with as many variations in pitch and pan-position as possible. this is not as easy as it sounds because some pitches just didn’t work – i couldn’t find a logical pattern in this so it was mostly trial-and-error-strategy and took a long time because i really cared about each one of the sample-parts. and the coolest thing was to put a variation to the time the different claps occur. if you listen closely you can hear that all the claps sound more or less unique. sometimes all of them are simultaneously sometimes there are a few too early or too late ones, exactly as it would be in reality – when some morons are not able to stay in time but clap anyway. i love those claps but wonder if i spent too much time on them. i guess nobody notices this detail anyway – it’s just handclaps for god’s sake! hopefully they at least create the vibes i wanted them to. see? i even spend way too much time writing about them!

the next thing i think turned out really interesting, although you probably haven’t noticed as well, is the bassdrum which is the first sound of the song and the last one as well. what happens with this one is that it gets louder, stronger and more intense throughout the whole 8 minutes of the song. but you can only really hear it if you compare the beginning and the end of the tune. in between it just draws no attention to itself. again, hopefully this also creates great vibes.

then there’s a bunch of other instruments that play the same licks over and over again. the bass, that kind of holds it all together, a kalimba-sound, a harp. later there’s some celli and some tremolo-strings to create a little tension when the wife comes down the stairs… i automated the volume levels of all of them so they rise from nothing to a certain degree and then fall down again but all of them in different ways, so it doesn’t sound like some computer did this. sometimes the bass is loudest, sometimes the kalimba etc. – pretty random. and i didn’t play the lick for each instrument just once and then copy-and-pasted it again and again, i played them all for about 5 minutes because that was the duration of the song in the first place. it got longer with the lyrics and the whole automation stuff, so i took a variety of licks (i picked each one of them – not just a sequence!) and pasted them to have the increased length covered. i learned that those details are very important to make it sound real…

that’s about it. oops, how could i forget the vocals :-) hmmm, there’s not much to tell about them. i just tried to sound dirty and went a little over the top with it. dig the breathing and slurping noises…

by the way, the reason why my voice sounds broken and strange on “taking the blame” is that i recorded it directly after the meatbucket. there was just no way to really sing after what i did to my voice before. note to myself: change the order of songs appropriately in the future…

finally, the bandpages on the rpm-challenge site are up and running. the jukebox is not fully loaded and launched yet, but you can go to my page there and listen to the album. now why should you do that? simply because until now you could only listen to it on 5 different websites, which is pretty lame, right? BUT NOW THERE’S SIX!!!

i command you to check this out!

ok, time for the next episode. the seventh song of the album, which i called “the lover”. this is a really simple song, just two guitars and vocals. one guitar playing the bassnotes and the other one the chords – only three by the way. again, no real instruments, i used guitar samples with a tremolo effect. if i was to do this again, i’d record a real guitar – although it sounds quite real to me… anyway, i wanted to do everything except the vocals with the laptop only as kind of an experiment, so i used samples for everything.

the interesting part were the vocals. i should have mixed it a little different, i realized afterwards, because the words are hard to understand. this is the result of something i never did before, so it was new to me and i improvised. the reason for this was i wanted it to sound as close and soft as possible which brought up a variety of problems. first of all, if it should sound close, you need to turn the microphone up – way up. just having a normal setting and go further away from it might work live but for recording this ain’t good enough. why? because the words are not the only noise you make. there’s breathing for instance, even the air that comes out with the words has a certain sound and then there’s the little sounds that appear when you open or close your mouth. now, the recording can only sound really intimate when those sounds are there. if someone talks softly into your ear, those sounds are there as well – so to keep it real, you need them. cranking up the mic, though, can really freak you out because a large diaphragm tube condenser mic is quite a monster – those things pick up everything! when you’re recording that way you need silence, perfect silence. you might even want to think about the clothes you’re wearing, that’s why i recorded nekkid – and shaved :-) just kiding……or am i……

but turning up the mic wasn’t enough for me, i wanted more. the only possible way was to get even closer to the mic. next problem: usually there’s a pop-killer (i think that’s the right word….) between the mic and your mouth, a round thingy to prevent pop noises that occur when too much air hits the mic hard. light a match and sing a ‘p’-word (not phuck…) into the flame to know what i mean. those airstrikes cause little sound-explosions and can ruin a track in no time. getting closer to the mic meant to get rid of the pop-killer. i virtually touched the mic with my lips which makes it almost impossible to get something useful out of it (not talking about live here!) and the fact that the mic was cranked up made it even impossiblyer…..uhm….more impossible……or…less possible…..or…..uhm……you get the idea.

all that forced me to sing not only more cairful but also softer than i ever did before. there’s a thin line between really soft singing and whispering and to make it sound somehow even is a real challenge. singing out loud is a lot easier than doing it really, really soft. by the way, it’s the same with drums. tell your drummer to play a groove as soft as a whisper (or try it yourself) – it’s freaking hard to groove at such a low volume, when the sticks can only be an inch away from the drum…

in the end i’m not sure if it was worth the trouble, because i still don’t know if it’s even possible to get a decent recording with this. although i was very careful, it still doesn’t sound quite as even as i wanted it too. and it was a lot harder to deal with it in the mix than it is with ‘normal’ vocals. so it sounds like either a bad singer or a bad recording – i guess there is such a thing as ‘too real’. it seems there is kind of a threshold and from that point on ‘more real’ results in ‘less good’… i’m gonna spend some time in the future to figure that one out…

anyway i really love that song for its intimacy, even if it shows what could have been better.

p.s. i should mention that the feeling i wanted to create with this was inspired by Nancy Sinatra‘s “Bang Bang” and the title tune from Twin Peaks.

yeah, that’s right. i’m finally starting to give detailed descriptions of evey single song you can find on “corner” (listen + download it right here). i’m cheating a little, though – because i’m gonna be late for a fotoshoot (not as hip as it sounds…) and spent way too much time on pimping the new site-design. so i’m starting with the last song of the album, which is just kind of an outro – only one minute long. this is my chance to keep my word AND be off the hook early enough to keep my appointment, both at the same time. it’s unbelievable how well coordinated i am once again :-)

there’s not that much to say about “rest”, but it is part of the album – so here we go. this melody came to me when i first started working on the album. if i remember correctly it was the second or third idea i had at all. it’s nothing special i suppose but for some reason this melody got to me somehow. being a trekkie, i immediately thought about the episode where Picard lives an imaginary life under the influence of some alien probe and afterwards he has this flute and the melody he remembers. by the way, i really dig that melody…

although the two melodies have nothing really in common, i wondered how it might sound when played with a flute. i was blown away by its simple beauty and wanted to make a whole song out of it. you know, the really hard stuff with string sections coming in and so forth. but it didn’t work out because with everything i tried to ‘epand’ this melody, so the listener would get more out of it, i just failed miserably. i then thought about playing it with a violin and this too sounded very nice, especially because a violin could play it really soft at the beginning but give it a lot more power later. i tried to combine flute and violin and it sucked. i tried to play them one after another and it sucked. i tried to play the violin and in the second round provide kind of a carpet with a cello…..and it sucked. all that got me close to say ‘away with it, i’m doing something else!’

now i’m glad i kept it. with all this experimenting i lost track of what was important (you might find this sentence more often in future entries…), the music. it doesn’t matter if it’s a 43 minute tune involving all instruments one can possibly imagine or if it is a 30-second melody played by one flute. if it’s good, it’s good – easy as that. it’s always about what the song/the moment needs. and if it needs such simplicity – so be it.

hehehe, by the way, i just found a sweet pic of Picard and Riker – embedding…..done!

…or decisions if you like. until maybe a year ago, i never really thought about those. when i listened to something i liked, it was always about the ‘how’ – how did the artist do this or that, how did he/she make it sound the way it did. i never really thought about the ‘why’.

now when i started to work on “corner”, i already knew about the importance of choices but never made them myself with this in mind. i usually did what i thought sounded cool and was done with it. i should add though tht there never were that many choices before. what i did in those years was mostly the usual band lineup, sometimes an unplugged duo or trio but switching to doing almost everything with software changed it all. suddenly i had choices, more than i could deal with. instead of just being able to choose exactly where to place the four drummics (because there were only four mics and only one drumset and only one room etc…), now it’s more like which of the dozens of drumkits should i use or should i combine two of them…or more? should i use closed mics? or ambient mics? or both? and how should i mix them? which shape do i want the room to have and how large and so on…. one can easily get lost in the sheer amount of possibilities – very easily.

well, you could just browse, right? you want some drums, so you just go through the drumsound-archive and pick the one you like best. sounds easy enough – and it is……if you’re able and willing to spend the next two weeks 24/7 browsing. and that’s just the drums! and even if you’d go through with this, chances are, it sounds like crap once the other instruments are in place. of course, no poblem, just pick another drumset – AAARRRGH !!!

so with this unbelievable amount of choices comes a certain responsibility. you should know what you’re doing aka where you want to go with it and that’s not as easy as it sounds. at least for me because i mostly do not know what i’m doing….mostly. don’t get me wrong, it’s cool to not know where the journey will lead you, this is the perfect way to be creative BUT the challenge is being able to react to whatever your creativity tells you – and fast. if your little mr hyde wants to hear some wahwah sound at exactly this point, you have to know how to get it – before too much thinking throws you out of the zone (or the flow). and if there’s no wahwah available, how to fake it (or build one yourself if you’re using Reason – sorry ’bout that but i’m kind of a fan…). i guess this is where the term artist comes into play. how do you want it to sound? and why do you want it to sound like that? what kind of reaction do you want to create? these are the kind of questions that begin to matter and not only because answering them will narrow the possibilities down to a manageable amount…

in the end it’s more than just picking a few sounds and throwing them together somehow because it will sound good automatically. yeah, that’s a bummer – i thought it would work that way too :-( but on the other hand: that’s what separates the men from the boys.

well, i wanted to spare you the boring technical stuff, but some of you asked about it – so there you go. it won’t be a long list :-)

what i used to create the album “corner”:

• one of those rather new aluminium Macbooks
• an E-MU Tracker Pre usb 2.0 audio interface
• Cubase LE 4
• Reason 4
• Reason Drumkits 2.0 Refill
• Peff‘s Vintage RDK Combis v1.1 Refill
• a T-Bone SCT800 large diaphragm tube mic
• a CME M-Key usb keyboard
• some cables
• some old headphones & the pa in our rehearsal room for monitoring (yeah, i know…)
• lots and lots of buttercookies, fruitjuice, gummibears
• a really cool looking baseball cap

that’s it.

although the last two points were the top priorities in this – their direct influence on the project can hardly be measured or described. i’ll go with the word: vibes!

the audio interface, the microphone, Cubase and the cables were used to record the vocals only. and the rest did the rest. so apart from tracking the vocals, everything was done with Reason 4 exclusively. in my opinion one hell of a programm and without any doubt one of the best inventions since frozen pizza! here’s to the folks at Propellerhead.

i will upgrade some of my gear in the near future – there will be some nearfield monitors and better midi controllers to streamline the workflow. but for this head-over-heels-project the above mentioned gearlist was absolutely sufficient. and even if there will be some changes, the list won’t get much longer. it’s a lot more fun to make do with what you have (and especially learn to really use the things already there) – MacGyver rocks!!!

yay, here are a few links to where you can find the new album online. just for the heck of it:

• corner on bandcamp
• corner on reverbnation
• corner on soundcloud

i just uploaded the album to the rpm jukebox as well, but they haven’t lanched it yet – the link will follow.

you can listen to the full album in 128 bit mp3 quality at bandcamp and reverbnation. you can listen to five of the eight songs in original cd quality at soundcloud. you can download the full album in 128 bit mp3 quality at bandcamp for free or you can download it in a variety of better qualities for whatever YOU want to pay (min. 90 cents per song or $5 for the whole album – hey, even i need to pay for hookers and booze!) also at bandcamp.

i disabled the cd-quality-download at soundcloud after it was available for over a week, because i think the people who read this blog and are interested in what i do should have the advantage of getting those files for free. if you haven’t downloaded them yet but would like to, drop me a line. you’ll get the chance to download the 3 other songs and complete the album in cd quality for free as soon as soundcloud lets me upload them, might take a few weeks though…

tomorrow i’ll continue unveiling the mysteries surrounding this creation, so stay tuned…

maybe this is the right time to come out of the closet: no instruments were harmed during the creation of this album! oh, except my voice of course :-) but seriously, apart from the vocals, there was not a single real instrument involved. everything you can hear is based on samples. BOOO!

well, it’s not that simple. everyhing was played alright, but on a midi-controller. so even if it consists of samples, it still was actually played by a human being and recorded – including flaws. i didn’t select a pencil tool to just draw event-lines all over the place and then ‘randomize’ them with kind of a human-factor-function (which is no problem with today’s software).

now, why does this make a difference? why draw the line there? lots of musicians think it’s completely off limits to use samples, others believe there are no limits at all and let the software do all the work – if no one knows about it, who cares? again, why does it make a difference? until recently i was one of those guys who thought of samples as cheating, only what was played and recorded the old fashioned way counted. but two things changed this opinion of mine. first, it’s virtually impossible for the independent ‘guerrilla’ musician to get a professional sound out of a – let’s say – drumkit. and by professional i mean Colaiuta-like. because you do not only need a decent drumset, professional mics and a high-end signal chain, you also need a professional room to record it in – not to mention all the know how to deal with funny little things like Pandora’s-phase-orgy-box. it’s not coincidence that sound-engineer is a full-time job, as is drummer. so doing it all alone requires some dirty tricks. period. and i’m not even talking about the ability to play (and proper record) all instruments that are involved – in this case: drums, saxophones, trumpets, french horns, trombones and other plumbing devices, harmonicas, flutes, an orchestral string section, percussions of all kinds, guitars, basses, all sorts of mallet-instruments, synthesizers, organs, accordeons and other things i can’t remember right now. and, by the way, one would need to have all those instruments…….and quite a storage facility as well.

and second, it’s still one hell of a challenge to make those samples sound real. even with the best drumsamples available, the knowledge of how to actually play the drums is as important as it is for the real instrument. you have to know about accents, about which hand/foot is playing what and when and so forth. otherwise it will sound artificial and boring – as it does in countless recordings. yes, software has come a long way towards sounding real, but a program is only a tool. if you don’t know how to use it, you’re gonna hurt yourself – and others.

so no matter how much cheating is involved, there’s still a big difference between an artist and a pencil-tool-pusher. and i guess it will stay that way…

alright, now you can listen to the full album in the correct order over at reverbnation. i’ve uploaded all songs as mp3s, quality should still be ok. it’s also good for people with slower connections.
go and check it out right here.

i’m not sure if it was too much Sin City or too much Tom Waits but the first idea i had for a song was messy, bloody and disgusting. suddenly the title popped up in my head: ‘A Bucket Full Of Meat’ which turned out to become the sixth song of the album. inspired by an episode of 2 Stupid Dogs and one of Coupling i now had a title. yay, a title! i was almost done!

but, as i mentioned, the approach was quite stupid. isn’t that cute? but it’s wrong! (small joke for the insiders, hehehe). Because i just did the usual. instead of just doing it, i started planning – again. don’t get me wrong, there came some cool ideas with the foolishly-trying-to-work-out-all-the-details-phase. one of them was quite tough to get rid off. it was about making a concept album about the butcher who kills people and sells their meat to the public (not really inventive, i know that). and there are actually 5 songs on the album that were related to that idea. first of all, ‘A Bucket Full Of Meat’ of course, then ‘Catching Up’ which is about the butcher on the hunt, killing a guy but missing his girlfriend which led to ‘The Chase’. She runs into a building, enter the song ‘In The Elevator’. But in the end he gets her as well – ‘Rest’. i still think this was a pretty cool idea, but i got caught up in way too many details about making up a decent storyline and appropriate music that i finally abandoned the idea.

so i started working on ‘A Bucket Full Of Meat’ and some of the other tunes on the side as idea-collectors. more than a week later i still hadn’t finished a single song! i was way too busy doing automations and correcting subtle details etc. to get something done. that’s when even i understood that this way i could never finish in time. in a moment like that, my usual thought would have been ‘so what, it’ll take a little longer then.’ case closed. but this time, and i owe the rpm-folks a huge thank you for that, there was no way of just not doing it. i had signed up for the challenge and i wrote about it in lots of emails, on this site here, in forums and on twitter. making this public simply was like shutting the door behind me, the only way out was to go through with it. and only seconds later i hated myself for doing so :-) but now it was done.

so i was in a really uncomfortable position – not only was i forced to create something, i was forced to do it fast and with flaws. UGH! it’s always the fight inside of oneself, right? looking back it was a very smart move to blackmail myself like that because it kind of broke a blockade. now i wasn’t only able to finish this, i also feel the strong urge to make another album, starting in march – as soon as i dealt with some website issues. but i say it again: i will start a new album in march and finish it in april.guaranteed! there! i did it again! ………………. DAMMIT !!!

now with no possible excuses for failing and with no more roadblocks ahead, i could finally get to work…