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…

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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 :-)

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?

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….

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?

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…

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.

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…

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

i’ll keep you informed…

so the first thing i tried to apply to the song was a different groove and it became a different tune, but trying to keep the straight rock groove and changing sound and dynamics instead made it quite terrible. well, that’s not too weird because groove is one (if not the) major factor in defining a genre or style.

so the question stands: when does it become become a different song? think about movie soundtracks – the older ones before they became chart-shows… there were a few different themes, one for the good and one for the bad guy and maybe the girl got hers as well. and for each music including scene there was a variation of one of those themes (as soon as i find out how to include paid advertising i’m giving some examples, ha!). so the song remained the same (sounds familiar) but it was tailored to fit into the very moment of the film. now all in all those variations weren’t too different from each other. different instruments and dynamics, maybe a different mood and tempo and there you go. but i can’t think of a movie that a techno-, a funk- and a mozartesque-version of the exact same song. i can’t even think of a movie with three totally different music-styles at all for that matter… might rip the movie apart, moodwise – so no help here.

i’ll keep on trying, maybe i’m just too familiar with the original version of the song. i just wanted to keep you updated and ask this question: when does it become a different song ?

music is an artform and we should treat it as such, no matter if it’s handmade or the sum of digital signal processing, it’s art. and that means it’s about inspiration, creativity, feelings and not just zeros and ones. when one sits behind a drumkit or plays a guitar it’s a lot easier to remember what he/she is doing – it seems more real, at least to me. creating music on a computer, sitting hours and hours staring at a screen is more like a deskjob and it’s hard to stay inspired and creative.

but then again does it even make sense to compare these two methods of making music? what do they have in common at all?

“music is math”, i heard that many times and the more i think about it, the less it seems to be true. you can write down a whole song as combinations of frequencies, amplitudes, timecodes and whatever else and it might even be a precise reconstruction of the tune itself. but is that it? is that all there is?

what about an artist’s touch on the instrument? how would one calculate that? and what about the choices the artist makes. that’s an important point. come to think of it i’d venture to say that music is rather about choices than it is about numbers…

and that leads me to another interesting thought: right now i’m working on an album. half of the songs are written and i should be in the process of recording them by now but a carpal tunnel syndrom (to be precise it’s something similar but i don’t know the correct term in english…) got in my way, so i can’t use my right hand for at least a few weeks. and because this was meant to be a hardrock album (see the last entry about genres…) there’s just nothing i can do except waiting. at least that would be the normal reaction to the circumstances. remebering the title of this post though gives me another idea that might be worth a try:

did someone ever record the same songs in different ways? i’m not talking about covers. did someone write a song and then arrange and record it as a funk-, jazz-, rock-, hiphop-, blues-, metal-, electronic-tune? the same song? usually in music it’s more like ‘everything you can think of……..has already been done by somebody else’ but who cares? if someone’s been there done that (and i’m quite sure of it) so what? i’m gonna try this anyway although i have not the slightest idea how to do it. at least i know i’m gonna start with the computerbased version because that’s the only one i can do with one hand…

maybe i should make up one category in this blog dedicated to this project – stay tuned…