audiot

this is worth checking out. and not only because this guy is a great player, it’s also a cool song. by the way, the microphone used is a Røde NT-4 (sorry, still no links yet) – for you recording folks out there, it’s worth considering…

enjoy:

yay! one small step for me and absolutely no step for anyone else. you decide if it’s a step for art…..and if yes, in which direction :-)

while the work on this site or better: the collecting of information regarding those little troubles i talked about still eats up my time, i got the news that “bankjob” is now no. 15 of the german reverbnation rock charts. by the way, it’s #14.188 in rock globally and #62.939 across all genres globally. although i have no idea why, this ROCKS !!! so a huge thank you to you guys and don’t stop now (with whatever it is you’re doing…), there’s only 62.938 steps to go! YOU CAN DO IT!

by the way, i have the feeling this site might be too much about me. if that’s the case, i apologize. i’ll try to include more other things – it was supposed to be a site about thoughts on music in general in the first place. on the other hand, it’s my site and i guess i should keep you informed about what’s happening – and the statistics are going through the roof this month, so maybe it’s just me feeling weird about being on display…

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…

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

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!

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once again i found a great discussion over at music think tank right here. especially the comments are very cool. the discussion started with the question if great songs ever go unheard and after reading through it all, my sick mind kind of turned this question around…

so here’s what i wrote about it. i didn’t think this through, just wrote away and in the end wondered where i ended up :-)

“Without these utilities we would drown in an ocean of songs.”
…but we do, Bruce – we do. and i think that’s exactly the point here. first of all, how can we talk about great songs if ‘great’, even ‘truly great’ means something different for everyone? we’d have to differentiate between a variety of ‘greats’. if great means popular (imo it doesn’t), then the answer to the original question is ‘no’ – that’s a no-brainer. but if great means a true work of art in terms of composing, performing, producing etc. then i guess the answer would be ‘yes’, because works of art are not good as background noise. but that’s what music often – maybe mostly – is. these days, who buys himself a record (in whatever form), sits on the couch and really listens? really concentrates on the experience? who does that anymore? who has the time and the calmness? and as a side note: we lower the quality to make the songs smaller. we wouldn’t do that if it was for the experience and there were times when this was the other way round. we do that for quantity – i’ll get to that in a moment…
people are preoccupied with all sorts of things, so they need some ‘easy listening’ they can do on a bus, maybe during work, while doing the dishes or while dancing in some club. but those are not works of art, those are fast-food. and that’s exactly why those songs are popular or even big hits. they have no rough edges or anything one could think about. they’re flat, that’s why they work. a hamburger is no culinary masterpiece – that’s why it’s such a success. the only thing you need to concentrate on while eating it, is to not drop half of it. it doesn’t distract you, but that’s the core idea of a great meal. two different worlds or two oppositional meanings to fulfill.
that would lead to the question: is it even possible for a great song to be heard? we could argue about what ‘being heard’ is. how many people are needed to turn a tune into a heard one? if it’s a huge crowd, then it’s only possible for songs tailored for a huge crowd to be heard and that almost automatically leads to a not-very-artful-song because it has to please the masses and therefore has to be kind of slick, without edges, one-size-fits-all. there might be exceptions of course but the more people it pleases, the less great it is.
when we talk about songs that are decades old but still known, heard and loved by people – we usually talk about songs people connect to certain experiences of their lives. but decades ago, it was a lot easier for a song to get there because people bonded more with a song than they do today. why’s that? time’s weren’t that fast. a song like, ida know, ‘life is life’ (or is it ‘live’?) or ‘the final countdown’ or whatever was played for months at every single event back then, so lots of people had a chance to connect. not that these would be great songs in any way except being as one-size-fits-all as it gets. today a song lasts how long? a week? and of course the people themselves have changed but getting into that would lead too far beyond the scope of this place… and let’s not forget, today quantity is worth more than ever before. how many songs fit on an ipod? i piled up about 800 cds before i had my first real computer and i knew every one of them. that’s not even a third of what you can pack on a classic ipod. and i’m a musician, someone for whom listening is part of the job aka a full time activity. when the internet opened the possibility of sharing songs illegally, it was about songs. later it was about whole albums and now? it’s about discographies. tomorrow it’s what? whole genres? we do drown in songs. people hear more songs today than ever before but as a result they care less about every single one. maybe today listeners connect more to a band than to a song?
today we need tools that search and pick songs that we might like for us, because we drown in songs. productive? hell, yeah – but since when is productivity even ballpark with greatness?
and who could even think about a single waterdrop while swimming in the ocean? i have no idea where i’m going with this, for i already got ideas that could keep me writing for ages. sorry if this is of no help for your research, i just wanted to add a short (!) note to your ‘drowning in an ocean of songs’-picture and that’s where it went.
truly great thread here. i do think though, you might be going at your research the wrong way or with the wrong goal. and as soon as i hit the ‘create post’ button, you might want to reconsider about the follow up note below the title of your post :-)

Image by taivasalla via Flickr

alright, i managed to create an account on one more site: soundcloud. i already love this page because it’s ridiculously easy to use and offers nice advantages. in a nutshell, it lets you up- and download, distribute and share audiofiles without sizelimit. and it’s free, well, with some limitation to how many songs can be uploaded per month – there’s pro accounts as well….the usual. but that won’t be a problem at the moment. setting up and understanding how to use an account there took about 5 minutes, way to go. i’m gonna use this account to work on my collaboration projects and furthermore to distribute and share any other stuff that i come up with.

and there’s one more cool feature. it’s called a dropbox and maybe you’ve already seen it. it’s the widget-kind-of-thingy below the feed-subscription-button in my sidebar and – now the cool part – you can send me songs, pieces, loops – actually any audiofiles, by simply clicking on it – wow!

so here’s the link to my page over there – it’s almost empty….yet, but the material will come.

go soundcloud !!

hopefully, yesterday’s entry was understandable to you. i’d like to add some points though. it’s possible that you encounter a song well within your range but you still have problems singing it. maybe you play this song at the wrong position in the set, you might still be recovering from the one before… maybe it’s a new song for the band, so you play it five times in a row during rehearsals and that’s why it becomes a problem… maybe the band plays the song higher as planned because it’s easier to do for the others and you might not even know this – it’s been known to happen. or maybe the song itself is just hard to do, apart from the height. there’s a bunch of songs that are very hard for me heightwise although other, even higher, songs are a piece of cake…

you can try to eliminate as much problems as possible by simply drink enough (water!) while you’re singing, take deep and calm breaths during guitar solos, between songs etc., by not forgetting to breathe in the song’s rhythm, by wisely placing the song at a good position inside the set. make sure you play the song in the key planned. find ways to pitch a song a few steps up- and downwards without changing it’s tempo (today that can easily be done on a computer) to be able to provide correct material for your bandmates. it’s a lot easier to hand them a copy of the song in the key to be played than giving them the original version and telling them what to change. musicians are stupid, so make it as easy as possible for them :-)

it sometimes can help to pick the highest note of a problem-song and compare it to the highest note of a song you’re able to do. use a guitar, keyboard or whatever to identify the note. you might find out that the problem-note is lower than the other one and that can be a motivation. as i mentioned, some songs seem to be very high but compared to others they aren’t, they’re just hard to do…

certainly, this doesn’t work for every song. sometimes a song really is too high and then you have no other choice than to sing it your way or not at all. come to think of it, finding your way should have its own entry sometime.