audiotthoughts on music

long time, no see…

i know there haven’t been many updates recently and this one is just a quick question to get you thinking. actually this is not just about music but can be applied to virtually anything.

yesterday, i read an entry in some german musicians forum about a guy who wasn’t really sure what to answer when someone asked him what instrument he was playing. he identified himself more with the band than his instrument, that sort of thing – this isn’t exactly what this post is about, but it got me thinking.

what exactly is it that you do? and more important, do you even know it – and know how to phrase it without sounding shy or silly? this is very important because it tells you something about yourself and the path you’ve chosen so far. are you a drummer? or a musician? or an artist? or all of it? or what?

this goes for any other profession as well. what exactly is it that you do? think about this, as will i, and try to put it into words – words that convince not only whoever’s asking, but yourself as well.

to be continued…

now we’re getting somewhere :-)

i just finished another recording session and am now up to 15 song-construction-sites. and since i’m still in da zone, this will be a really short entry (once again…). sorry for spending so much time making music, but i can’t help it – it’s what i do…

anyhoo, today was all guitars so far and if you’ve ever tried to record electric guitar, here’s the mother of all advice from me to you: less gain! stop mocking me! i know this is no bloody Richard-Friggin’-Feynman-Flash-Of-Genius-Idea but it helped me a lot. set up your sound the way you like it and then turn the gain-knob down by maybe 20% or the sound will suck big time on the recording. i have no idea why, this came out of experience, lots of swings-and-misses and running up and down the street, waving my arms like crazy screaming out “serenity now!” at the top of my lungs. so better take this advice before your neighbors call the lunatic-patrol-guys who will come into your home and kidnap you away from your compu

woohoo! here it is. finally. about time. bankjob. yay!

the first song of the album “corner” and the one that plays by default when you click the play-button on the blue player to the upper right. and the one that made it to no.14 on the reverbnation-german-rock-charts – maybe i mentioned that already :-)

the funny thing about this tune is, it was never meant to be a real song, more like an intermezzo or something – if at all. i messed around trying to get a dirty but still defined sound that should go through the whole album. that was even before i started on any other song. just trying to figure out how the album should sound in general.  so i picked a drumset from the “vintage RDK”-refill (check out Peff’s website if you’re into Reason) and fell in love with the sound of the toms. messing around a little more, i came up with this tom-based drumbeat and recorded that for about 45 seconds. it sounds quite wacky if you listen to it closely – sometimes even off, but that’s what’s giving it this great feel and me the inspiration for the bassline, which is simply going up from one ‘c’ to the next and then down again – with very few variations. played with a cool acoustic bass-sound that matched the drums quite nicely, doubled by a saxophone and tripled by a harmonica. then i had the idea for this breathing sound on the ’1′ and the ’2&’ – i did this with a flute-sound transposed way down – giving the whole groove lots of drive. i was quite surprised how big a difference that flute makes. if you could listen to bass-sax-harmonica only, you would probably faint or throw up or maybe both. this is a timing-freak’s nightmare, sounds just horrible!

then there’s the saxophone playing this little melody at the beginning and the end. actually it does sound very real by itself – as a saxophone-player i was truly amazed. but i didn’t manage to get this very real sound into the final mix. for some reason it doesn’t sound that real to me anymore. i guess something else is stealing a few frequencies away – i didn’t find it though, so this was the best i could do.

as soon as i was done with this 45-second-piece, i knew this had to be a full song. so i came up with the break-part to make room for the voice. it would have been difficult to include vocals during the soundmess-section and those breaks seemed an appropriate and easy to do solution. so i played the drums for the rest of the song including the badass ending, played the other stuff as well – let’s be honest, it’s all just repeating itself over and over and over again, but it’s played NOT copy-and-pasted. and was done really quick. throughout this whole process, i thought about some old action-movie with cool car chases and gangsters and such. so it turned out to be a short briefing of the gang right before the job – lyricswise….

although the single parts of this song are, well, not really demanding :-) and poorly played without any correction whatsoever – it has this killing feel and it still blows me away every single time i listen to it. unbelievable – and i think rather incidental than on purpose but who cares?

oops, come to think of it, there was a correction. i had to clean up the snare-rolls at the end of the verse-sections because the midi-controller didn’t react as fast and precisely as i wanted it to….

that’s it! now you know all the dirty details about the creation of “corner”. i’m sorry if i destroyed your vision of me being a creative soundgod, i’m just stumbling around making weird noise that weird people seem to find….weird. yes, i guess that about sums it up :-)

and i’ll prove this to you. as you may know, the next album is in the making….

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• no harm done… (audiot.eu)

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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• great exercise… (audiot.eu)
• song no. 7 (audiot.eu)

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)

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.

maybe this is the right time to come out of the closet: no instruments were harmed during the creation of this album! oh, except my voice of course :-) but seriously, apart from the vocals, there was not a single real instrument involved. everything you can hear is based on samples. BOOO!

well, it’s not that simple. everyhing was played alright, but on a midi-controller. so even if it consists of samples, it still was actually played by a human being and recorded – including flaws. i didn’t select a pencil tool to just draw event-lines all over the place and then ‘randomize’ them with kind of a human-factor-function (which is no problem with today’s software).

now, why does this make a difference? why draw the line there? lots of musicians think it’s completely off limits to use samples, others believe there are no limits at all and let the software do all the work – if no one knows about it, who cares? again, why does it make a difference? until recently i was one of those guys who thought of samples as cheating, only what was played and recorded the old fashioned way counted. but two things changed this opinion of mine. first, it’s virtually impossible for the independent ‘guerrilla’ musician to get a professional sound out of a – let’s say – drumkit. and by professional i mean Colaiuta-like. because you do not only need a decent drumset, professional mics and a high-end signal chain, you also need a professional room to record it in – not to mention all the know how to deal with funny little things like Pandora’s-phase-orgy-box. it’s not coincidence that sound-engineer is a full-time job, as is drummer. so doing it all alone requires some dirty tricks. period. and i’m not even talking about the ability to play (and proper record) all instruments that are involved – in this case: drums, saxophones, trumpets, french horns, trombones and other plumbing devices, harmonicas, flutes, an orchestral string section, percussions of all kinds, guitars, basses, all sorts of mallet-instruments, synthesizers, organs, accordeons and other things i can’t remember right now. and, by the way, one would need to have all those instruments…….and quite a storage facility as well.

and second, it’s still one hell of a challenge to make those samples sound real. even with the best drumsamples available, the knowledge of how to actually play the drums is as important as it is for the real instrument. you have to know about accents, about which hand/foot is playing what and when and so forth. otherwise it will sound artificial and boring – as it does in countless recordings. yes, software has come a long way towards sounding real, but a program is only a tool. if you don’t know how to use it, you’re gonna hurt yourself – and others.

so no matter how much cheating is involved, there’s still a big difference between an artist and a pencil-tool-pusher. and i guess it will stay that way…

alright, video time again :-)

this time it’s Keziah Jones, a nigerian guitarist and singer performing an acoustic version of ‘All Along The Watchtower’ his blufunk style in some tv-show. the guy who’s holding the mic is John McLaughlin by the way…

too bad it’s such a short piece, but quite groovy nonetheless. and i recommend to check out his first album called ‘Blufunk Is A Fact’ – i love it…

enjoy

yep, i wanted to add a few words to the last entry of this series. first of all, the doing-it-very-slowly-thing is especially for learning new things. then, it’s not only about doing it slowly but also about doing it well aware and concentrated. so to avoid any misunderstandings, i wanted to clean that up. learning something new on a drumset is a great example because with this instrument, the moves you make are huge compared to a guitar for example. big moves mean you can easily see what exactly’s going on. maybe you want to hit the hihat with your right stick and then hit the lowest floortom afterwards. that’s quite a long way for poor mr. stick. now, if you practice this at normal playing tempo, chances are, your motion is far from perfect. you mostly concentrate on getting this done in time. doing it slomo, however, gives you nice visual feedback on what it is you’re doing. you will immediately see, if the motion is unbalanced, weird, wacky, whatever. and you will be able to correct that aka replace it with a nice round beautiful motion that will not only help you staying in time, but also look a lot better to bystanders :-) – it will sound better (trust me on that), feel better and your hands, arms, shoulders, back, neck will thank you. and one more thing: you will be able to play this a lot faster once you really figured it out and got rid of all wackyness.

of course this goes for any instrument, drums just happen to show it more clearly…