audiot

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…

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….

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 :-)

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hehehe, and once again i uploaded the album to one more site, added a button to the sidebar – i know it’s not exactly where it should be, i simply don’t know how to put it in the center, but at least it works – and added the link to the “other audiot stuff” section. this time it’s last.fm and if you know any other artist whos music is similar to mine (…) then please feel free to make the connection over there. and as always: tell others about it :-)

and another one :-)

in case you don’t know what i’m talking about, or maybe even what “corner” is, you might want to consider crawling into a lake and die – but on the other hand, you could just hit the play-button on the nice blue player to the right at the top of the sidebar. and in this case, skip to the third song, called “in the elevator”, because that’s what this post is about…

there’s not much to say about this song. it was completely improvised (pretty much like the 5th song “taking the blame”), based on a song i did about ten years ago i guess. when i first got my hands on the Reason 1.0 software (go here to find out about their present stuff – and no, i’m not getting paid by them, i’m just a fan of their software), i messed around a little, trying to figure out what this software could do. after a while i came up with this little piece of drumloops, synthbass, vibraphone and organ and i still like the feel of it. i already posted the tune in one of my first entries when this blog went online – you can listen to it here.

anyway, for the album i wanted to do something similar, some kind of elevator music – and, because of the concept-album-idea, i thought it would be cool to have the woman run from the butcher and ending up in an elevator where suddenly the wild chase is interrupted by really cool and relaxing elevator-music. you know, like in the Blues Brothers movie – great scene!

you already know about the playing live with a midi-keyboard thing etc…… so i’ll spare you this. i started with recording the bassline, just out of thin air – if i remember correctly, i didn’t even use a click. just pushed the record button and played away for a few minutes. then i wanted to have just fingersnaps as beat, but decided against that because i already had the handclaps-and-fingersnaps-thing going in the meatbucket song. so i played some hihat-chicks instead, nothing fancy, just the offbeat and one or two times i let it ring – that’s it for the drums.

again i wanted to have a vibraphone part and then an organ take over for the melody, so i played the vibraphone for the whole tune with the intention of keeping the best part and throwing away the rest. and that same thing i wanted to do with the organ. but this didn’t work to well, i don’t know why, it just didn’t sound good. so i left the whole vibraphone take in there and played a second organ part to support the vibraphone, throwing away the first one. i then mixed it in at a really low volume, you can rather feel than actually hear it. and in the end, to have more layers of sound, i added two different, rather complex synth-sounds, somewhat alien-ufo-like and again mixed them in at low volume. the thing with those two sounds is, i used two sound-modulators of a software synth with two different and randomized waveforms to control the pan-positions of the two sounds, meaning they’re changing their place in the stereo field all the time, completely unpredictable – and different from each other. that should give the whole piece some kind of floating feel.

and that’s all, just two instruments jamming along and a few others to support them…

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getting back to business. ok, this is about the 4th song of the album “corner”. you can listen to it (and the rest of the album as well) on the little player at the top of the sidebar to the right. the song is called “the chase”. as you may remember, this album started off as kind of a concept album about the butcher who goes out hunting etc. – during the song “catching up” (description follows…), he follows a couple, kills the guy but the woman escapes. he is then trying to hunt her down, which brings us to “the chase”, where it’s about running – pure and simple.

although “a bucket full of meat” was the first song i really worked on, and the first one to be finished for that matter, “the chase” was the first idea i had and the song i started with. i worked on that one until the first couple of ideas were gone and then the meatbucket caught my attention for quite a while…

you might have noticed that this one is mostly about sound – it’s not complicated songwriting, no different parts (at least not really), no changes in harmonics or anything like that. it’s meant to picture the last part of that hunt when it’s simply about running – apart from that section in the middle, where i imagined her hiding somewhere and him stopping to look around, then spotting her and the running continues…

i couldn’t help adding a whole lot of horns to this tune. i did that with having 70′s action movies in mind, or maybe tv-shows like “Streets Of San Francisco”. Have you ever heard the titletune of that show? unreal!

there are some new and modern sounds, the synths that carry the “melody” (it’s only 3 notes…) or the sreaming feedback synth, and then there’s a lot of old sounding stuff. for example the organs that play along with the synths or the drums. because there were no vocals involved, this song was completely done in Reason 4, using the included factory sound bank for everything except the drums. those were given this really cool sound with the DrumKits 2.0 Refill and the additional Vintage-RDK-Refill provided by Kurt Kurasaki to make the drums sound like in an old recording. by the way, the vinyl-noise you can hear all over the album as background is also from this Refill, with a few adjustments i made.

again, all this was played live by me using a cheap midi keyboard. i played the drumbeat for about 3, maybe 3,5 minutes and later had to prolong it by using some pieces again, because the song got a little longer due to the extensive horn-thing. the percussion-part was done with loops (9 different ones – it wasn’t easy to make them sound good together…), i have to admit – i did think about playing all of that too but there simply wasn’t enough time left before the end of the challenge.

i really dig hose plumbers. there is a trumpet section, a standard trombone section, a crescendo trombone section, then a crescendo french horn section and a glissando french horn section. some of them doubled, tripled or even quadrupled – fattening this whole thing up – and don’t they sound freakingly real? well, at least they do to me.

and after the big finale, there’s the drums again with all those so-called fruit-of-the-looms-fills (i just counted 30 of them throughout the song…) sophisticated artwork? surely not. diversified stroke of genius? HAHAHAHAHA, what did you have for breakfast? but was it effective? you bet!

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• no harm done… (audiot.eu)

wow, those were some ridiculously busy days, but before i talk about it, i’m gonna give you a description of the fifth tune from the album corner…just because i can :-)

this song is called “taking the blame” and it sounds like that as well. the interesting thing about this tune is, it was almost completely improvised. the whole thing took about 30 minutes. i tracked a bassline (again played live with a midi-controller using a nice sample-based sound from the reason factory soundbank), then laid down some drums (same method as above, sounds from the reason drumkits 2.0 refill) and some vibraphone (same again). this took about 15 minutes, all first takes – no cutting, copying, pasting or anything like that. then i exported this mixture as an audiofile, imported it in cubase le4 and recorded the vocals to it. for the vocals i wrote down three lines of lyrics, then pressed record and again improvised something. again, this was only one unedited take, which i imported in reason again to apply some dynamics processing, a bit of reverb and do a mixdown. that’s it.

now, my voice sounds quite damaged and…well….weird on this one. the reason for that is quite simple and shows off the perfectly well-coordinated strategy i applied to the whole album: trial and error! long may it live! i did the vocals for song no. 6 right before this one, so there was just no more voice left to do anything even related to singing. but hey, it’s about embracing the flaws, right? so i left it that way. and i’m really glad i did – now. it took a while to get used to it, though :-)

another funny thing about this song is, i tried to do a song similar to one i heard before and it really went wrong. the song i’m talking about is called “18 with a bullet” (at least i think so) and can be found on the soundtrack to “lock, stock & 2 smoking barrels”. i haven’t heard that song in years, so mine turned out completely different – but anyway, that’s were the inspiration came from…

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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…

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.