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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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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.

yep, i know i still owe you descriptions of 7 more songs from the album “corner”, but right now i’m throwing together kind of a demo for the boss of a music school who offered me a job as a jazz-vocal-teacher. i can’t post the tunes because they weren’t written and recorded by me (except the vocals of course). but it still was an interesting experience – the most interesting thing about it was the speed…

after quite a while of studio-abstinence i felt like a hired gun again. go there – do your job – get out. i always loved this kind of work, even if you have no real control over what’s happening or what’s being done with your tracks afterwards. what i like about it is the efficiency, the professionalism – dig it! so i thought of this as a studio gig and approached it that way. i went to my recording room, set up the laptop, the audio interface and a tube-mic – did some gain-staging (i wanted to link this to some nice article that explains gain-staging in an understandable way but couldn’t find one! maybe you’ll have more luck, i’m simply not able to explain technical stuff with my crappy english. in a nutshell, it’s about setting the gain right in every part of your signal chain, so you have a loud and clear signal without noise or clipping in the end…) and had a go!

i then recorded vocals for 12 songs in about 3.5 hours – two takes for each track and one take of backing vocals for one song. that makes 26 takes total (incl. the first one i did as a test) + setting up the gear in less than 4 hours. i don’t know about your experiences but i’d say this is pretty fast – and a whole lotta fun it was. it just feels great to be productive like that, to spend 4 hours and then go home with an usb-stick full of decent material. although i haven’t done such vocal recording sessions in a while, and therefore felt a bit rusty, it turned out very well. i picked 6 of the 12 tunes to be on the demo, but they’re all good enough – it was more about having different things to offer.

so i dare you to go out and speedcord (just made this term up :-) ) something, anything, just like that. instead of sitting around and complaining about that one missing piece of equipment or about whatever it is you’re complaining about. once i was in a band with a guitarplayer who was not able to record anything in over six months! not a single note. we wanted to make an album, did some test-tracks and when it came to the real thing, he took the DAW home to do this (so noone else could do anything…) and that was about it. six months later i dared to ask how it’s going, only to hear that not one single note has been recorded by him – he was still trying to find the right sound! maybe he still is – come to think of it, i’m pretty sure about that. so the only thing that happened quickly with this band was me packing my stuff… nothing worse than time-thieves and the world is full of them!

go speedcord!

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

hehehe, just did a little more ‘research’ on funny a capella vids and found this one. this time it’s real, the guy you see is really singing. the quality is not that great but who cares anyway. and again there’s a lesson, you need to watch this until the end though. if the whole thing sounds good, do the single parts really matter? first he does the bassline and it’s, well, let’s call it subperfect. then he adds the harmony and still it’s not really good, but you get an idea where it’s going. but as soon as the melody enters, it’s fine. even if the time’s off and some notes are as well, it’s still fine. so my question stands: if the finished product is good, do the single parts matter?

p.s. stuff like this is awesome vocal practice! lots and lots of notes, changing very fast. you need great precision to do that right. you get to practice bass- and harmony-lines and learn how they’re connected. and best of all: it’s a lot of fun!

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…