audiot

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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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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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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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.

who would have thought of that? i wanted to show you some Michael Landau video, because i think he’s not known enough. this guy played on so many records, chances are you even have an album on which he did his thing. but – as is the thing with many studio-cats – nobody knows him. except guitarfreaks of course. anyway, he deserves to be known…

then i found this clip of his trio playing in Karlsruhe/Germany last year – and i was there! this was one awesome show, wow. Gary Novak on drums, whom i had a little chat with afterwards, is such a nice person and such a bada$$ drummer. he got most of my interest that evening, sorry Mike. and Jimmy Johnson on bass, never seen him before. i think i heard or read his name somewhere but that was it – he was another pleasant surprise that day. this is a great band, if they are still out there gigging – don’t miss ‘em… under no circumstances!

by the way, the guitar really was that loud compared to the other instruments – it’s too bad you almost can’t hear anything else in the clip. i stood right at the stage, in front of the drumkit – that made for a balanced sound. i got very few of the pa, almost only stagesound and that was fine. the guy who shot the video though, seemed to have a somewhat worse position, so sorry for the sound. but you should hear that they know what they’re doing ;-)

enjoy

i just wrote an email to a guy who bought some of my drumparts on ebay and once again i experienced this ‘brotherhood of drummers’ that i got used to over the years and that i love very much. i’ve been a guitar player long before i learned to play drums but i never experienced this with other guitarists. and certainly not with singers :-)

there have been a lot of other musicians that i got in touch with just to buy or sell something. and with a guitarist it’s usually saying hello, making the deal, saying goodbye and be done with it. but this never ever happened with a drummer. even in the first email you can feel this togetherness-thing and when it really comes down to seeing each other, it’s more like trying to say hello but he interrupts with something like: ‘hey, there’s something i need to show you’ – then it’s off to geartalkland for hours, switching over to experiences-with-bands-story-talkland and it never ends. sometimes you even are forced to stay for dinner – unbelievable.

but that’s not it. at the first drumclinics i attended, i felt kind of uncomfortable. why? because i only knew guitar-clinics and there always was rivalry in the air. and not just at clinics, i sensed this at music-stores, in bands, rehearsals, even (maybe especially) on stage and at events like the Musikmesse which takes place once a year in Frankfurt/Germany. i have no idea why, but there always seems to be a rivalry between guitarplayers. i even was in a band once where the two guitarplayers actually fought about who gets to play more solo-notes and they were dead-serious. maybe it’s because of the instrument’s character. in a ‘normal’ band, the guitarist is the second ‘star’ next to the singer. singers usually have the lead, they’re in front. but when they’re not, it’s about the guitarist. that is at least one reason why singers are so cocky. and to a certain degree that’s not only understandable but even required. sounds ridiculous? it isn’t. it takes self-confidence and ego to be the singer in a band (remember, i said to a certain degree!) because the audience thinks of you as the lead and wants you in that position. my guess would be: the average audiencer doesn’t know anything about playing an instrument but he/she has a voice, so the singer is as close as it gets and therefore the listeners mainly identify with the singer.

guitarists however, are the ones that play solos and make funny moves :-) so they are sometimes in front getting the most attention. and if the same rule applies, they would need some self-confidence and ego too, to give a convincing performance. i’m no Freud so i won’t speculate about the fear of losing the lead of the one or the inferiority complex because of being the all time second of the other – ida know, maybe there are such things, maybe not. but one thing is for sure: the different musicians in a band are different characters. for instance, the drummer is often the funny one, making jokes, laughing the most – right? that’s at least how i experienced it. while the singer often is a bit of an outsider. and the most amazing thing of all: when i’m playing drums in a band, i’m making jokes and mess around – when i’m the singer, i’m a lot more serious and a lot more about business. how freaky is that?

once again i’m drifting off a bit. i just wanted to share some thoughts about the guitarists’ rivalry (“i’m not showing you my riff!”) and the drummer’s club (“come on in, what’s mine is ours.”) if you haven’t experienced this, go ahead and hang with guitarplayers (if they even get together outside the rehearsal room…) and with drummers. the perfect environment is a clinic or a music fair or the Musikmesse itself. you can go from the drummers’ hall to the guitarplayers’ hall in an instant and feel the different vibes. i’m not kidding, you can actually feel the vibes in the room – crazy…

p.s. i’m not mentioning bassplayers or keyboarders here because i have never been one of those in a band. i have been a singer/guitarist/drummer in many, many bands so i can’t really compare this…

AND of course: there’s exceptions to everything. rumor has it there are drummers out there who really are serious people – never met one of those though. and there are guitarplayers and even singers who are actually very nice persons – i even know a few of them…

i’m up to 14 now :-) the new ones sound a bit more real with kind of a garage feel – seems to be hip at the moment…

anyway, check them out here, you need to click on ‘music’ (below the picture) and then on ‘audiot’s uploads’. i’m afraid there is no direct link….

have fun

just a quick note to let you know there’s some more loops of mine at mixmatchmusic.com

check them out at my profile page right here