audiotthoughts on music

as you already know, i was away for three weeks to prepare the new apartment and to record guitars for the garden album. now i posted a bunch of pictures to my flickr-site, where you can see the amps, cabinet, mic and guitars used. nothing fancy, though. two guitar amps (Laney and Sovtek), one Laney cabinet, one Shure SM57 mic and two guitars (Gibson and Heritage).

there’s some pics of my new drum setup and of the two guitars that are for sale (Sandberg and Epiphone). if you’re interested, drop me line through the contact form right here…

alright, being away for three weeks made a mess out of my timeline. so i’m sitting here without internet access, i only have a small mobile device for emailing and some limited surfing. while renovating the new appartment – maybe rebuilding would be a more appropriate term – i’m concentrating on songwriting and arranging rather than tracking stuff. however, being here has its advantages as well. i have a room where i can be loud and i have my guitar amp here. a friend of mine’s gonna help me out with his laptop and audio-interface next week, so i will be able to record some guitar tracks – finally. that means a big step forward….
i really hope i have something postable for you in january. i guess it’s about time for me to upload something rather than just ranting around all the time :-)

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so here’s some (not really) news from the garden: i tracked five guitar takes so far, clean through a d.i. box and am trying to do some reamping now. it seems to me the sheer unlimited possibilities are the no.1 problem there. when i bought my first real guitar amp, i had two sounds: the normal crunch and the overdrive crunch :-) and no matter what i did, knobturningwise, it sounded great. with software this is different, because now there’s a downside: you have to know what you’re doing or it will sound like crap. and although i did a lot of research recently, know about proper gain-staging, about a decent signal-chain, about how distortion really works and other effects as well for that matter, it’s still more trial and error than it should be. anyway, those little troubles are exactly the reason why i’m doing this the way i do. it’s simply the best way to learn something. but somehow the feeling remains, when i’m done with this soundshaping-mess and am happy with what i created – i just might hit delete, take my amp and a mic and do it the ‘real’ way…..for the heck of it :-)

wow, this really takes a long time – but it’s all worth it already. if you’ve read something out of the garden-category already, you know what this is about – at least kind of :-) after many years of songwriting, recording, playing live etc. i decided to do an album completely on my own because a lot of music – actually almost all of it – i participated in is lost due to issues of all kinds, mostly stupidity. you write something together, record it, then everything falls apart and that’s it. so i’m doing this alone because i want to create something that exists, no matter if it’s any good – but it will exist.

that being said, this project serves another purpose as well, which is getting more important every day and which is the reason why this is taking so long. writing and recording a bunch of songs is hardly a matter of months – at least it doesn’t need to be. but i’m taking this opportunity to learn anything this project teaches me….and pass this on to you of course :-)

after learning to play five different instruments in my life so far, i thought i was well prepared for something like that. little did i know about the surprises i’d encounter along the way… but that’s great! there is no timeframe, this project is not at all about making money and it doesn’t cost me a thing – so i can do whatever i want. and i want to learn as much as possible in the process of making this.

so where are we right now? there are five songs already written and, more or less, ready for tracking. lyrics are there but need to be changed, partly recreated. drums and bass are recorded for one song, guitars follow tomorrow. the artwork is finished……in my mind :-) to the point where it’s just about taking the actual pictures and make them look good. i have no idea about how to get to these technical aspects – much learning ahead, yay!

that’s pretty much it. writing goes on in the background while tracking the parts that are already finished. it took some time to mess around with drums, drumsounds, mics, placements and all those cool choices one has. no choices with bass, i don’t have a bass amp and only one bass – so it’s plain and simple d.i. recording into the mac so far, maybe with re-amping involved… i’ll explain every single one of those choices as soon as i have a decent audiofile to post here. i think it doesn’t make much sense to post a dry drumtrack without you having any idea of the song at all. so my approach will be to post a finished song and afterwards give you a tour of how it was created. that will certainly strip all the ‘magic’ away, but that’s exactly what this is about – cool, huh?

so now i finished the drums for the first song of my little garden and am thinking if i should do bass or guitar next. the song was written on guitar so maybe recording guitar next would be the better choice because i already know the part. i’m not sure yet what exactly the bass will play and then i could take the guitar part as kind of a map.

the bass guitar won’t be a dominant factor on this record for two reasons. first, i’m not a bass player – i played bass on some occasions, but never really learned to play it and i would never claim my bass playing to be anything special, so it’s quite obvious the bass will provide the foundation (oh, really?), but nothing more. and come to think of it, that’s great! that’s what a bass is meant to do, right? but on the other hand legions of bass players don’t do that. they rather behave like some guitar players who couldn’t deal with two additional strings.

this brings me to an old problem – maybe as old as the bass guitar itself. what is a bass supposed to do? in my opinion it’s there for the grounding, along with the bassdrum. but why is it that so many bass players don’t seem to get that? sorry, i didn’t want this entry to sound like a ‘blame-it-on-the-bass-guy-rant’ because it isn’t. i have deep respect for good bass players and i think the bass might be the most underrated instrument. after gigs i saw people step up to the guitarist, the drummer and to the singer as well – but i’ve never seen anyone come to the bassist to say like ‘wow, you did great!’ ok, the bass is in the background or better: the bass is the background, so it’s just not obvious to the crowd. and people seem to believe playing bass is a piece of cake, drums on the contrary seem (and look) a lot more complicated – so people get caught by a decent drummer more often.

it might have to do something with the fact that bass seems to have the biggest ‘range of competence’, meaning there’s awesome bass players out there but you could also get some guy, handing him a bass guitar, giving him a few days and play a two hour cover rock gig – and he would do ok. having a good bassist is no doubt important but you could survive the gig with an almost complete newbie. try that with drums, vocals or guitar… and another point which could be pure imagination: a lot of bass players i encountered were former guitarists that switched to bass because they thought of themselves as soso-guitarists but that’s still enough to make a great bass player (so they thought) or just because they couldn’t find a band looking for a guitarist but lots of bands looking for bass players.

and that might be the real problem here. lots of bass players that aren’t real bass players by heart – only by adverseness or convenience. they seem to be frustrated and try to compensate by shameless overplaying. where i live there is an unbelievable amount of ac/dc cover bands and i saw a lot of them live but not a single one is worth talking about – all dabblers. and believe it or not, most of them have good Angusses and Brians (or Bons of course), but drums and bass just suck (rhythm guitar usually too). what does this teach us? for one, ac/dc is not as easy to do as most people think. and: just because drums and bass are kind of spartan doesn’t mean they don’t know what they’re doing. and more: it’s hard not to hide behind lots of notes and/or special effects in music, especially if you’re a stranded guitarist in need of attention :-)

i have no idea what this post really is about – i just got carried away by random thoughts about bass. i just love blogging….

this is just a short update on the new project. i’m working on the drums right now. the sounds are selected, so i’m working out the parts. as you may know already, this record is something new for me and i’m learning while making it. for the first time i’m doing everything myself, including writing of the music and the lyrics, playing and programming every instrument involved, recording, mixing, artwork…well, everything. although i have been in studios many times and i have recorded many times, i never did both of it on the same project. either i recorded somebody else or i sung, played guitar or drums while someone else pushed the buttons… so there’s lots of new experiences and learning involved – especially one important lesson: not getting in the way of yourself. so now i’m creating drumparts on the mac and right now i do not know if i will keep them or if i will use them as kind of a map while recording real drums. yeah, i know what you think: sampled drums suck, do the real thing! and until now i would have been the first to say so (at least in certain musical styles). but i guess that’s something i learned through the last few weeks. programming drums is quite challenging if you want them to sound authentic. you have to play and record them rather than draw small events with a pencil tool. so there’s a click and you track the drumpart live. only instead of a real drumkit and a bunch of microphones you’re using a midi-controller of some kind. again, i’m talking about seemingly genuine drums appropriate for certain genres – no copy and paste here, everything’s played. and you have to know quite a bit about drumming because otherwise it just wouldn’t sound like a drumpart, more like a keyboard track with percussive sounds….

as i said, i don’t know yet if the drums on the final versions of the songs will be real or sampled ones. and come to think of it, maybe i should keep this a secret :-)

it’s the same with guitars. modeling units and reamping are quite common but no one uses them, right?

once again the work on ‘my little garden’ will be delayed as a friend/student of mine and i decided to record some acoustic-guitar-plus-vocals-duets. he wants to try making gigs on his own so he asked me if i would record him for kind of a demo cd. we’ve been playing together for quite a while now and so it seemed logical to not only record him but us as well…

yesterday i did some pilot tracks (no idea if that’s the right term in english…), meaning i tracked some rough playing of the songs which will be on the headphones during the real recording. actually we wanted to do a live recording, just playing along and recording but we don’t have the right room for it anymore. so we will record single tracks and mixing them together. hopefully not much feeling will be sacrificed due to this type of recording. the live session will happen as well, but we have no date yet, so it seemed a good idea to do this now…

as soon as i finish writing this entry i’ll record some more pilot tracks and tomorrow we’ll do at least one guitar, maybe more – we have only a few hours.

oh boy, i can’t wait to move back to my hometown on the 01.01.2009 and have a decent setting to record again. it’s kind of cool doing everything on the mac (i learned so much through this) but on the other hand, the real stuff is deeply missed. it’s possible to make it all electronically but when it comes to rock music for instance, i feel detached in a way. even if it sounds real, it feels a little weird…. but that won’t stop me from working on my little garden – it’s just a great experience, somewhat weird but still great. yay!

so it’s nice to be playing acoustic guitar again this few days, we’re doing that in my apartment. real strings…wow. then saturday morning off to gigland, returning on sunday and finishing the acoustic thing next week as early as possible so i can go back to picking sounds for the new album. guitar sounds are done, drums are next…

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…

sorry, it’s been a few days…
right now i’m thinking about how much of a good recording is equipment and how much is know-how of the engineer/recordist/whoever-did-it. is it even possible for someone with the best room, best recording equipment, best instruments, best… you get the idea – BUT with no real knowledge of how to use all that to make a decent record at all? understanding how an equalizer works is not that difficult but to be able to really use one, meaning to decide first, which one to use for what and then to use it in a way as to really get the sound needed for the song is somewhat more complicated. and i’m not even talking about the necessity to have more than one high-end equalizer to be able to choose which one you want to use in the first place.
i don’t think one can really use pro-gear if he has no idea what he’s doing or just some basics…
so if you want to make a professional sounding record, there’s two things to consider:
first, there seems to be no use in spending all your money (and maybe even more) on the best equalizer/compressor/expander/limiter/microphone/etc. there is because to compete with a pro studio gearwise you would need much more than one of each kind and that is just out of the question – moneywise – for almost all of us. for example you save money until you can afford that great preamp you always wanted because it’s just the best for vocals. as soon as you have it you think ‘awesome, now i can make the best records out there’ and then you find out that your new preamp is just not good for drums… see where i am going? cool.
the second point would be your education. let’s say you’re rich and you spend all your money on the best equipment so you could compete with any pro studio. but what now? you still wouldn’t know how to use all this stuff (…and there’s no money left to hire someone who could do it for you or teach you for that matter). you’d still be nowhere. so you would need both, agreed?
on the other hand i’m quite sure someone with the know-how would be able to make a decent recording without the best equipment out there. maybe imagine a painter. i’d bet that a professional painter would paint a better picture than me, even if i had the greatest quality colors, brushes and so forth and he had only the cheapest stuff of all. it wouldn’t even be close, trust me on that.
well, any sound engineer will tell you how important the equipment is and that’s right to a certain degree. but given someone with huge knowledge about recording/mixing/mastering… the difference between good and bad equipment is not as large as one might think. there would be a much, much greater difference between huge-knowledge-man and some rookie.

so know-how is the single most important aspect of making records and compared to that, gear seems to be almost irrelevant.

not convinced? ok, here’s the mother of all examples…

think of all the great sounding records of the 60s and 70s, some of them still being considered among the best sounding recordings of all time. and now think of the equipment they had back then…..

so good news everyone, you can go and spend all your money on hookers and booze because you’re too stupid for that fancy multithousanddollarcompressor anyway.
hm, maybe i phrased that unwisely.

don’t get lost in the struggle for high end gear – go learn instead! chances are, you won’t need anything but know-how…

good luck