audiot

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 :-)

sorry, folks – but i’m in a ranting mood right now.

this is one of those days i regret it a little to do everything on my own, when it comes to recording, songwriting etc.

don’t get me wrong, this is the best freaking thing in the world and i’ve had very good reasons to make this decision. one of them being people who just talk and talk and never get something done. i remember this guitarplayer who wanted to record a few takes at home, taking the daw (digital audio workstation) with him – so nobody else could record anything. he kept talking about how this will be happening, how cool this is and so forth and that we shouldn’t do rehearsals for the time being because it’s best to fully concentrate on the recording. after six months (!) i asked him about some status-report an the answer was “i’m still working on the right sound” – he hadn’t recorded a single note. that’s when i decided to do things on my own. and regarding the creative process (including recording, mixing etc.) i’m happy with this, never had any second thoughts – i love it!

what i don’t love is the whole statistics stuff. there are dozens if not hundreds of sites you need to be on, there are lots and lots of tools you need to use, things you need to do – this never ends and eats up tremendous amounts of time.

i just found out yesterday, that “bankjob” the first song on “corner” (you know, the blue player, top of sidebar…) currently is no.16 of the ReverbNation rock charts for germany (hmm, since i upgraded to wordpress 2.8, some features are missing – including links for instance…). and that’s awesome! on the other hand, obtaining this tiny piece of information took longer than actually writing the song. and i haven’t even got to the whole social-networking-thing yet. that’s where a band has a huge advantage – you can pick one guy who does this, probably the one least involved in recording or songwriting activities. a whole band can certainly be much more efficient than a single person, but let’s not forget, most bands aren’t. there’s still one guy who basically does it all – which again is good for lone warriors like me…

anyway, i just wanted to write a little frustration off my chest regarding that neverending statistics war- ugh. now i’m getting back to work on “traitor” – time to do something of substance…

oops, i just noticed that i still owe you the rest of my singing-workout – sorry about that, i’ll finish it soon…

but now to the question above: “can i learn how to scream?” believe it or not, i get this one a lot - yesterday for example. but this is a special one because i need to give a different answer to you than to someone who asks me in person. so here’s the answer for you: yes, you can. but no, i won’t tell you how because this is one thing you’d definitely need a teacher for. trying to do this on your own is a really stupid thing to do because chances are you’ll damage your voice – maybe even permanently. don’t let anyone tell you, he/she could show you through the net or a book or something. it’s a lie! no, not even youtube. and maybe this is the right time to tell you: first you learn how to sing, then you can learn how to scream. there’s no reasonable way around it, no shortcut. screaming is not a separate thing, it’s more like a combination of techniques you’ll have to learn first – sorry.

now there are some other things to consider. first of all, you should know what you mean by ‘screaming’. i have no idea if there’s an official definition to this – i doubt it very much. by the way: as for official definitions, singing is quite a minefield! it never seizes to amaze me, how many terms are being thrown around that don’t even have a clear meaning. usually someone is just trying to get attention by using complicated sounding words – you know, like doctors do. then you should keep in mind that screaming only works if done at the right moment. you don’t want to go over the top with this, that’ll only reduce it’s meaning. and another thing: screaming, even if done properly, is not really the healthiest thing to do, voicewise – so now would be the time to decide if you really want to go through with this……….still there? ok, then i’ll give you my definition, or more like examples to check out for yourself.

for me, screaming is what the Manowar singer does all the time. yes, i know – you don’t have to like them. just listen to some of their songs and you’ll know what i mean. by the way, i liked this band a lot when i was younger, sometimes i still listen to them – it takes a certain mood :-) and make no mistake, the singer rocks – big time! you can also find a rather famous example in Deep Purple‘s “Child In Time”. this is what i call ‘screaming’, just to not mix up different things.

a lot of people asking that question mean something else, more like nickelback (nope, i refuse linking to them – ptui!) or similar stuff. but that is not screaming, it’s just singing with more power and a little ‘rawness’ in the voice. again, ask your local vocal teacher. now there’s some other guys who say ‘screaming’ but mean growling or whatever this is called. well, there really is a way to do this without hurting yourself, although it doesn’t give you the amount of control you might want. or you could just have lots of beer and grunt away – complete loss of your voice sooner or later along the way almost guaranteed. but in that case this might be considered a good thing…

hehehe, maybe i’ll tell you about the ‘growling-trick’ someday – but not right now.

i just finished recording rhythm-guitar for the first song of “traitor”, i played ten tracks, threw two of them away and kept the other eight – not sure if i’ll use them all, though. there are lots of bits and pieces for this new album i already recorded, but until now i wasn’t sure what this album would sound like. during the last few weeks i was messing around with all kinds of ideas but now it became quite obvious where this will go. this little tracking-session today made it very clear that this will be a straightforward, lowdown and dirty hardrock album.

the funny thing about this is, i stopped being a rock-musician years ago. and since then i’m listening to everything with the same amount of interest, i’m playing everything with the same amount of ‘being into it’. but beyond all that there’s some unfinished business i suppose. songs i wrote during my rock-phase for instance, like 15 years ago… i don’t even like those songs anymore, but i still love the feel of some of them or some parts, riffs, licks or whatever. and since that time, whenever i’ve picked up a guitar, some of those old ideas snuck up on me. so now i’m making peace with myself by finally doing a record with all that stuff – hoping those ghosts from the past will leave me alone at last :-)

nah, don’t gimme that “so, now you’re trying to palm off old and rotten stuff on me?” because that’s not what this is. there won’t be a single one of those old songs on the record, as i said before, i don’t like them anymore. i will, though, write new material with some of those riffs, ideas etc. included. what will mostly remain of the old stuff is the feel. suffice it to say i was quite an angry young loon back then. but don’t panic! i’m already thinking about the third album which will be completely different – again. this second one is basically about getting something off my chest and be done with it. on the other hand – recording this dirty stuff was kind of fun……………..

hold on, we’re almost there… this one’s about “catching up” – the 2nd song on “corner” (listen to it in the cool blue player to the right at the top of the sidebar).

this was of course inspired by Tom Waits, like a few others on the album as well. there’s this dark soundmess crawling forward, with almost no change throughout the whole song, and a distorted voice just telling this little story. the idea was not complicated at all, but putting it into practice was a somewhat more demanding task. again all sample based (except vocals) but there’s lots of them, about 5 different bassdrums – 3 normal ones and 2 orchestral ones (whatever those are called…), a complete drumkit, a few additional toms, two different kalimbas, xylophones, pan flutes, a bassoon, a synth-sound called ‘plucking teeth’. then a distortion device applied to some of the above mentioned instruments as well as the vocals.

there is a lot of automation going on in this tune, the faders move all the time, even if just little bits. when i started with that song, i figured this should be the easiest one because, hey, how hard can it be to create a soundmess? little did i know :-)  making a mess is a lot more difficult than i thought. for one, it’s against everything i ever learned and therefore well outside my field of expertise. no matter what i did, it sounded kind of organised, unbelievable. and it still is not as messy as i wanted it to be – i’m working on it… another reason is, everything about good music-software is designed to make a good sounding recording, from well sounding samples to the different processes you can use to shape the sound. of course, you can always go over the top with the settings but this often sounds just crappy instead of dirty, messy or raw. i plan to record some of the instruments i’ll use in the future myself to combine them with the sampled ones in order to get a somewhat messier sound, but for this album it was out of the question because there was very little time. and you can’t just set up any microphone anywhere, play your instrument and count on the recording to sound the way you want it to. chances are, again, it will just suck and not sound badass-like…

so instead of just throwing something together and guessing it would sound really bad (the good ‘bad’) automatically, it took a lot of experimenting and learning how to achieve such a sound. and that’s quite complex, because our brain is ridiculously skilled in recognising patterns of all kinds and that’s usually a good thing. but patterns are just the opposite of  a mess, meaning if you want to create a mess, you’ll have to work hard getting rid of any patterns along the way. ok, you may want to leave a few of them in there to have a rhythm of some kind for instance but anything else could easily become a problem.

as i mentioned, i’m just getting into this mess-making-thing and the song didn’t turn out the way i wanted it in the first place, because it is somehow based on patterns – but on the other hand, i like it. it would seem i need to create more mess-tunes in the future – a lot more….

do you remember the last time you’ve been to a museum? what i always hated with this were the discussions about what the artist meant with his/her work. same thing with poetry. back in school, we spent hours and hours figuring out what the writer’s intention was – or to be precise: the intention our teacher wanted him/her to have back then…

another teacher of mine, a rather stupid man and an unbelievably bad teacher, who should never have been allowed to influence children in the first place, made one (!) good point (in all the years we had to deal with him): “how can they claim to know what the poet/painter had in mind while creating this? maybe he was just too drunk to know what he was doing or maybe he just did something he got paid for without even thinking about it…”

no doubt, there are works of art that scream for some interpretation. and of course there are those with which the creator’s intentions are a priority – or maybe they just don’t make sense without the background knowledge of the artist’s situation, surroundings, feelings etc. but then again – back to school – we analyzed stuff that surely had no intention whatsoever. ‘it’s spring, i see a butterfly and some flowers over there, looks neat…’ that kind of thing.

so what i’m talking about here is my reluctance to overanalyzing, i guess. when i see a picture, i decide if i like it. simple as that. i have never ever liked a picture more after i was told what the artist had in mind. there were some ahuh-effects with music though. i heard something, didn’t like it, then was told /figured out/read what it’s about and decided that it wasn’t that bad. but that’s more like having respect for it rather than liking it…

don’t expect some kind of conclusion or punchline here, just random thoughts… it seems there are two three kinds of art: the one that should be thought about, analyzed, figured out because it makes it whole and without the idea behind it, you’d just miss the point (political comedy comes to mind for instance) aka one important piece of the puzzle, so what you receive would be only part of the creation. second, the creations with absolutely no background, nothing to analyze – scribbling out of the head of some drunk. which might, come to think of it, not be art at all in the first place (usually the stuff that pays the most…). and third, something that just looks, feels, sounds great even if there is no deeper meaning (at least not to our knowledge). but aren’t the third and the second not the same? nope, because of what i didn’t take into account – read on:

in all this, i forgot one very important part. the second half of every artwork: the recipient, beholder, listener etc. if it means something to him/her, who’s to say that it is not art? if it means something different to him/her than the original idea behind it, who’s to say that he/she got it all wrong? maybe that’s what makes it art, the fact that it means something to someone, no matter what or why….

i think i’m done with this. told you – just random thoughts…..

Image by audiot.eu via Flickr

this word has kind of a negative taste, right? but i guess it’s time to stop that because we need a term for it and this one seems appropriate. what i’m talking about is once again the awesome possibility to work together through the internet, which is – sadly enough – not used to the extent it deserves.

so i’m stepping forward and dare you to do the same. of course there were others before me and i won’t accept any credit whatsoever for this idea, because it simply wasn’t mine, but it’s a great one and anyone interested should stop couchpotating and be part of it. what i’m talking about here is a cooperation between artists – an artistic-penpalship-thing (we might have to work on that term though :-) ). if you would like to create something with me, drop me a line. easy as that. i don’t care if it’s ‘just’ music or if you’re a video-, photo-, paint-, or whatever-else-artist. i don’t care about a genre or some other stereotype. i just love to work something out with someone else somewhere. so if you are creative and kind of a free-thinker, we might give it a shot and see what happens…

come to think of it, “guerrilla” is also one of those words in need of a less negative rating. recently this has become a term for people who try to do things on their own, musicians without a label who try to make do with the resources they have for instance. and that’s a great thing, at least in my book…

ok, i borrowed this idea or learning technique from two outstanding teachers: Billy Ward and Vera F. Birkenbihl. the first one’s an unbelievably creative drummer, the second one’s a ridiculously productive and creative german author and trainer. i don’t know if there is any english material of her but if there is you really should check it out.

the idea now is quite simple. i mentioned this before as a way to learn in a passive way but there are ways to exploit this even further of course. again this is about imitation and the experiment would be to pick something to imitate, a guitar part from one of your favourite songs for instance. now the goal is not to cover it or play it your way but to copy it as perfect as you can. this includes not only the notes played in the same tempo but also things like the sound, the phrasing, the accents etc.

make an exact copy of the original. this can be pretty hard, i know, but it was a lot harder before the internet with sites like youtube made our day :-) now the first thing to do would be to figure out what it really is that’s been played in the first place. for me this usually is the tough part because great musicians have ways of making things sound different. ahuh. i’ll try to explain: there are two types of creativity, convex and concave (gosh, i hope this is the same in english…) – maybe we could call it active and passive creativity as well… the active (or convex) type is the one an artist uses by creating something – easy enough, right? now the other one is the type one uses by listening to what the artist created. meaning not only the artist needs to be creative but the audience as well. hmmmm, not very cear, is it? think about a painting by a modern artist. to lots of people it may just look like someone threw up right on the canvas. but others see something in it, their mind makes something of it, it creates or re-creates the picture. maybe the way the artist meant it, maybe not… that’s concave (passive) creativity. if you don’t have this, there will be no picture. of course this goes only for that one picture or artist and maybe he really threw up on the canvas, who knows? in that case your nose would need the concave….you get the idea.

anyway, great musicians (or painters etc.) are able to get your ears to hear it in a certain way. for example a drummer could leave out certain notes but you would swear that you hear them. that’s what makes it hard to find out what was really played in some performances. so the first thing i would do is to look if i could find it on youtube. if you dig it there’s a good chance other do as well, so someone might have uploaded exactly what you’re looking for. you might find a performance of the original artist as well as other guys trying to play it or maybe even break it down. if it fails you’d have to use trial and error but that’s fine and even has its advantages, because the quest for creating a sound-alike-piece is much more rewarding this way. but it can also be a very long one and might even not work at all… as soon as you know what was played, figure out how to get that exact sound – everything’s allowed. after that it’s just practicing to bring it up to speed or precision etc.

anyway, experiment. try as hard as you can to make a perfect copy. “but i don’t have the same gear…” don’t give me lame excuses. you need to make do with what you have, that’s an important part of the journey.

in the end you will not only have gained really cool insight into your favourite artist’s world but also have more possibilities to express yourself. and hands down, there’s no better way to learn than being taught by the masters themselves…