audiot

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?

again, i found a nice little video by Mr. Pincter (sorry, i’m still not able to provide links…), that nicely explains what a compressor does. those thingies can be found everywhere but lots of people still have no idea what they’re for. when i started out mixing my own songs i searched the net as well as different books, but all i could find was very theoretical, unnecessary complicated, dry and boring. so i hope this little video helps you in understanding it better, because it’s a good and practical approach. again he’s explaining it using Propellerhead’s Reason and again that doesn’t matter because it just goes for any compressor. by the way, if you want to know more about compression and see lots of examples, do a search on the terms “loudness war” and/or “loudness race” in youtube. those will take you to a specific corner of compressionland, but you should be able to get the big picture and understand how compression can be used in different ways. this is of course not for the pros out there, just for the folks who want to get the basic idea…

ps: i really dig the librarian-analogy!

while i was searching for some tutorials about a few special things i wanted to include in the record i’m currently working on, i found this one here. it’s really helpful if you’re trying to mix your own stuff or wanting to get into the whole guerrilla recording thing. very basic stuff that works with every parametric eq. you might find it a bit annoying at first, but he does that to make a point – i’m glad i didn’t turn it off right away :-)

sounds ridiculous, right? i never thought about this before, but a few days ago i went to see a band and that got me thinking…

they should remain anonymous because this is no review about this gig and i don’t want anyone to directly connect them to what i’m gonna say here. so let’s just say there was a live-show that triggered the following thoughts…

as a matter of fact i never heard of them before, when a friend told me they were playing some place near us, so we decided to have a look. first i must say, the place was crowded and the people were in a great mood right from the start. we went in, stood there for a couple of songs, then looked at each other and thought exactly the same thing: why does this work for anybody except us? the audience loved it, they were screaming and singing along…..we were kind of bored. i then asked my friend what he was thinking and he said the very word i would have come up with – slick. no doubt, the performance was flawless – well, pretty much. we detected very few minor mistakes, nothing worth mentioning. it all was really well arranged, really well played and sounded very tidy and, well, slick.

it took a few more songs to find out what was missing (for me/us). there was no edge, no character, no feeling. ok, this is a bit harsh i guess. but it reminded me of my early recording experiences years ago. when i would lay down a performance and then cut off and delete anything that seemed not essential for the part, meaning fingernoise on the guitar or breathing during vocal-takes. so in the end i would have a flawless, tidy take with notes only – nothing else. and it would always sound like shit! why? simply because i deleted everything human in it. what is it with us musicians? we’re building drummachines that play better than any drummer (in terms of timing and precision of course…) and then we’re spending decades trying to add random flaws to it – giving it a human factor, controlled by unbelievably complex algorithms. on the other hand we’re playing something and then try to make it as machine-like as possible, erasing the human factor as good as we can (pitch-correction, quantizing etc.) – what is that? why is that? is this really it? or are we just too stupid?

when it comes to recording, i’m still figuring this out for myself – making this same decision for every bit i’m tracking and it’s very well possible that i would make a different one for the same take on another day. so at least there’s a human factor in deciding if a human factor should be involved :-)

anyhoo, my answer to the question is YES! there is such a thing as a too good performance. it’s just a matter of how one defines ‘good’. wow, this is getting more complicated than i thought – it seems there should be a second part to this, so here’s your chance to think about it yourself :-)

Related articles by Zemanta

• great exercise… (audiot.eu)
• song no. 7 (audiot.eu)

every now and then i feel this need to have a look at the basics of playing an instrument – the voice is an instrument as well of course. and in my case this works best when i do something i haven’t done in a while or even something i can’t really do at all, for then i have to focus on what it’s really about. this time i chose the bass guitar. it stood there in the corner for about three months but now i’m looking forward to rehearsals with a band searching for a bass player – so i found it was time again to play some bass. now i’m not a bass wizard – or something near it – but the funny thing is, when i play/record bass guitar it sounds good. over the years i picked up some playing technique and i know the notes on the fingerboard through my guitarplaying – but this shouldn’t be enough to play a good bass guitar, now should it?

thinking about this, my guess would be that i focus on the very basics (because i can’t do anything else anyway) and this makes it sound decent. too easy? think about it, what’s the most common mistake bass players make? not just them of course but let’s stick with this example for now… right, overplaying! and that usually causes them to sound anything BUT tight. now, i understand that playing straight eight notes for 87 measures with no more than four different notes seems boring but nothing ruins a tune like a bassist that dreams about being a not-so-good-but-at-least-getting-through-the-song-somehow-guitarist. i find it quite intriguing that even most bassplayers think the bass is the guitar for beginners or wannabes. it’s not surprising that others think that way because, hey, it looks almost the same. and it usually has less strings so it must be easier than guitar! it still is not common knowledge that a bass is a completely different instrument and needs to be treated as such. and believe it or not – it’s kind of more important than the guitar. do you know why Led Zeppelin worked? it wasn’t Page or Plant. without the foundation Bonham and Jones laid down the band would have gone nowhere. same with AC/DC. certainly, everybody thinks Angus does it all but again, without the foundation he’d have no chance.

well, it’s not really that simple, every band member is equally important – sure. i just wanted to make a point here. now where am i going with this? honestly, i have no idea :-) i just picked up the bass guitar and found that i did what i think every bass player should do on a regular basis. and that is playing the bass. not some melody-crap, tapping-licks or mimicking everything the guitar does. just playing the bass. if that’s out of the question for you because you want to be the star or sticking to the bassline is just way too boring – then, and i’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, you picked the wrong instrument…

found this through a friend in a forum. it’s drummer Marco Minnemann playing to samples of spoken phrases. he’s trying to catch the rhythm of the phrase and play it on the drumkit. i knew this only as a guitar exercise, but i guess it works with every instrument and i bet it takes you to another level of playing. so check it out…

…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.

all this computerwork is kind of freaking me out. working on the ovotex, the ‘normal’ teaching stuff, the rpm-album, the website etc. wow! and the more i sit behind the screen the less i’m really playing. nah, that’s not complaining – i’m way more productive right now than i was ever before, i’m just beginning to drift away from really playing music. so i joined a network to find musicians in my area. i wonder if there’s someone willing to just jam. this might sound weird and maybe it’s a german problem (at least it seems typical…) but it’s kind of hard to find jammers here. they all want to make setlists and do gigs and demos and whatever else. don’t get me wrong, it’s good to have musicians who take music seriously and if you’re in a band it’s good to have a goal – but, hey, let’s not forget why we started making music in the first place: fun! tadaaa!

and one more thing, jamming is not just some stupid habit of killing time. it’s the no.1 thing to become tight as a band. there’s no better way of getting to know the guys you play with. so jamming is fun AND learning at the same time and that makes it really cool in my book!

every now and then i experience something i’d like to call the craftsman-syndrome – usually when i’m working on new material, like right at the moment…

i want it to be outstanding, something special – so nothing that comes to my mind is good enough, no matter what it is. some of these ideas could become huge hits, who knows, but i don’t let them. i just say ‘nah’ and wipe them away. on the one hand it might be good to have some kind of quality control but this sucker prevents me from creating anything. have you ever been to the home of a craftsman? those guys build formidable stuff every day but their homes often look like junkyards or building sites. they could finish it in an instant but they want it to be awesome or stunning. the point is: this way it will never be finished. never ever. exactly like the material i’m trying to create.

now the thing that made Einstein the genius that he was, was not the ONE great idea. it was unbelievable productivity. the same goes for Mozart, DaVInci etc. those guys didn’t just have great ideas. they put such a huge amount of ideas out there, that some of them just had to be milestones. meaning if i would stop worrying about every idea not being good enough and just put them to paper or tape instead, i’d be much better off……

sorry to waste your time with this, maybe i shouldn’t have published this entry, it doesn’t seem to be worth it………….

i never liked music schools. and i had good reasons for that. when my parents sent me off to one it was a waste of time and money. there was just a large room with two rows of organs, one child sat at each one playing by him- or herself with headphones and about 2 teachers walked around and listened a bit here and there through another pair of headphones. i can’t remember it perfectly because i was 5 years old back then but thinking back this room must have looked like some children-enslaving-manufacturing-something. needless to say it was not efficient at all……..for the kids that is. for the others involved it was great. the parents bought the feeling to do something for their breed and to have them off their backs for a while and the school made money with minimal effort. well, i don’t want to do anybody wrong. my parents really wanted me to learn something, they just didn’t know it was the wrong way. and i knew the school’s owner, he was quite a nice man who honestly believed his school was a good thing…. i got out of there quick because i seemed to be the only one really interested in music, so one of the schoolguys told my parents to get me a private teacher which they did.

the next experience with a music school came about 15 years later. i wrote and recorded some songs together with an american singer/songwriter/vocal teacher who lived in germany and who used to teach at a quite popular singing school in the region. he stopped teaching there shortly before we both met and he gave me two reasons for this decision: 1. a huge drug problem at that school and 2. nobody of the school staff cared about the students. even better: the teachers were told to not teach the students too well so they would need to stay longer. it was a really expensive school that parents had their kids go to in order to impress friends and relatives. ugh!

then a few years later, when i started teaching myself, i talked to some guys at music schools if it would be possible to teach there. but then i decided to stay on my own. it seemed none of them was interested in offering some valuable teaching really. they all wanted to kill as many birds possible with one stone. i simply do not believe it’s possible to teach a group of people to sing at the same time. choirs or background sections are exceptions of course but the single members of those groups need to learn it for themselves first as well. every voice is different. easy as that. you can’t teach 2 or more people simultaneously without sacrificing the very thing teaching is about. it might be possible with instruments if you choose students who are on kind of the same level, this is still not the best way though. but with the voice this is simply impossible. i’ve yet to meet a student who would be a decent match for any other one i had ever before. and that’s where the talking always ended. i wanted to teach one student at a time, they wanted me to teach groups of 2, 3 or even more. end of story… so until today i’m still the private teacher i have been for almost ten years now.

and now the punchline: about 8 years after my last music-school-encounter it seems there is another one ahead.

i’ll keep you informed…….