Archive for May, 2007

Day 17

May 31, 2007 Waiting

Lovely rehearsal tonight for our mini-gig on Monday. Come on out; it’ll be great.

After: spent a while tweaking sloppy timing in In The Days. Spent another while pondering whether the sloppiness I’d just tweaked was what made the song work. Undid tweaking. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Tried out some different drum sample kits for La Da Da Dee. The verdict: the one I already had was the best.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move it along.

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Day 16

May 30, 2007 Waiting

So, after a long day of work, then a visit to the doctor about the soft-wrapped marble that my throat has turned into, and an attempt to make dinner without falling asleep, I tried to get down to work tonight. I started in on 4ths again, trying to make some sense of the weird groove I put together last night.

Now, 4ths is a pretty serious song. It’s about futility and sadness and inevitably death. Tough stuff to deal with when you’re not in the right frame of mind. But I was determined to put in my hour, and I wasn’t ready to tackle any of my other arrangements tonight. So I slogged through for 45 minutes, trying stuff out, listening, playing, goofing off, dragging my feet. And at the end of all that, I had big fat nothing.

So I opened up La Da Da Dee to see if I could get the bridge to a sort of compromise between the current boring tight version and the old sloppy but lively version. I couldn’t.

Bah. I couldn’t focus; I kept just playing around on my sampled drums instead of working. Then I thought, you know what, you work hard at this shit, give yourself a break. So I decided to have a little fun.

I don’t usually post samples in process, especially stuff as blatantly derivative as this, but making it put a smile on my face at the end of a long day. I hope it does the same for you.

“Ride Out?” (or maybe “Lie Down?”)

And if anyone can tell me where I jacked that drumbeat from, I’d greatly appreciate it. I’ve been racking my brains…

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Day 15

May 29, 2007 Waiting

So I just spent another hour working on La Da Da Dee. The keen readers among you may remember that just yesterday, I proclaimed that song “done.” But you can never underestimate the need to revise, to perfect, to tweak. I started by just making innocuous fixes here and there, cleaning up the timing of a piano part, adding quiet strings to supplement a build in the 2nd verse. But by the time I hit my stride, I had completely dismantled the first section of the bridge and built it back up again.

Eek.

Now I’m not sure which version I like better. The first one was too sloppy; every time I listened, I winced a little bit at the poor timing and the slapdashedness of the parts. So I redid the parts, one by one, thinking them through, practicing them, and making sure they worked well with each other. By the time I was done, that section was much cleaner. Much prettier. Hmm. Much duller?

I recall a conversation with a friend a couple months ago; he was suggesting that I get some other people playing on my album. His argument was that getting someone who actually played drums, for example, to play the drums would result in measurably better drum parts, and therefore a better album.

I resisted, of course. I had no good counterargument at the time, but over the course of the next few days, I thought about it. Why am I so resistant to having other people play on this album?

And then I remembered. That the true goal of artistic work is not empirical quality. It’s self-expression. I have things to say, and no one else says them the way I do. I have met literally dozens of better singers and better instrumentalists than myself, better ears and better stage presence and better looks, better whatever. But none of them could make this album. Not necessarily because it’s better, just because it’s mine.

What does that have to do with this bridge section? Well, it’s one thing to state your grand theories to the people; it’s entirely another to be able to stick to them. Every time I listened to that part, sort of pretty with airy vocals and strings, I remembered the Sufjan Stevens album Illinoise I’ve been listening to recently, and a little voice in the back of my head said “Sufjan wouldn’t have been so sloppy.”

Bah. So now I’ve got this new much prettier section with boring timing. What to do, what to do.

After that, I got to work on 4ths, which is definitely going to be the weirdest song on the record. I hadn’t touched it since January, so I wasn’t sure what would happen. I just left what I had alone, and started futzing around with a groove for the rest of the song. I like what it’s turning into; it’s very different from everything else on the record so far. More like the stuff I used to do when I was just fooling around with Logic and didn’t have to worry about song structure. Something nice to croon and scat and growl over.

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Day 14

May 28, 2007 Waiting

And La Da Da Dee is done.

Well, not done, exactly. But in a complete form. An arrangement I like from beginning to end. The drums could use some reworking, and the languid section of the bridge still isn’t right. But it’s at the point now where I could give it to someone and say “Here is a late draft of a song on my album.” Last week, the best I could have said was “here are some ideas for this song that’s going to be on the album.”

I love this working every day thing. I was talking to a friend about it; he was concerned that by forcing myself to do it every day, I was turning it into a job. I am! I now have the best job in the world! I love doing it, but most importantly, I have to do it. Even on the days when I don’t want to. Because something good will come out of those days whether I want it to or not.

This was actually one of those days. I put off getting down to work until 10 in the evening. It was just too hot. But I managed to pull it together and slog through. The turning point was a bit of self-indulgence, starting to work out harmonies for the chorus and the 2nd verse. My voice is total crap right now, so most vocals that I record are going to get redone, but I like to work out harmonies early so I can build parts on top of them. I recorded some harmonies, and the whole song really began to make sense. The chorus melody is the best part of this song, and it is coming together in this Sly and the Family way that I first envisioned two years ago and completely forgot about. Yes!

It’s amazing how one little piece of magic can give everything around it such a jolt. I really like the way this song is turning out. I can’t wait until it’s done.

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Days 12 & 13

May 27, 2007 Waiting

I’ve been working some more on La Da Da Dee. Cleaning up those bridge grooves, filling out the 3rd verse, trying to get the ups and downs right. I don’t like programming drums for slower songs. It’s too easy to subvert the groove with a misplaced fill. I just looped a basic 6/8 patten and recorded everything over it. Then when I find a moment that needs accenting, I’ll throw in some goodies. All very simple, though. I’m from the ?uestlove school of drumming; keep it simple as it can be. Now if only Arthur and the Geniuses could find a drummer who agreed.

It’s still a little disjointed. Parts will jump in out of nowhere on accented points, and fade away as easily. I’m finding that cellos really help to smooth things out. Just a simple line in the background provides a real nice pad. I’m totally lazy about my patch choices though. I’m just using the same basic Kompakt “Cello Arco” patch that I always use, and it doesn’t quite sound right. I suppose I could find something better, but I’d rather figure out the meat of things now, when it feels like I have all the time in the world. In a couple of months, when I start to panic, it’ll be nice to have something easy to work on.

But on the whole, i’m getting pretty close to have a full arrangement of this song. Once I do, that’ll make six full arrangements, two on the way, and one that just needs a day of piano and vocal recording. Of course, those “full” arrangements will still need tweaking, and the more I work on these songs that I wrote anywhere from one to three years ago, the more I think about writing new melodies. I’m constantly writing new tunes, but I don’t have time anymore to develop them as songs. I might sneak some on to this album as instrumental or, dare I say it, nonsense interludes. (Gasp!)

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Day 11

May 25, 2007 Waiting

Last night, I got down to business with the bridge on La Da Da Dee. I really like bridges. I like that feeling you get when everything’s going along as expected, and then something starts to give, and you know you’re off on a new journey. My music has always been about motion, about getting from one place to the next; departures and arrivals, transitions and stops.

Here it was the question of straight vs. swung again. Well, not exactly swung.

When I started taking jazz piano in college, one of the first things my teacher Bill Brown told me was “Don’t swing. You can immediately tell the inexperienced players by the way they swing. All the modern players play straight.”

And he was right, in a sense. The concept of swing, as we’re taught it in high school, is hopelessly outdated. Whenever I hear that old stumbling broken triplet feeling, I picture Benny Goodman in a black-and-white film, entertaining the troops. (I don’t know if he ever made such a film, but the imagery all just pops together.) Not that he wasn’t great, but he’s dead, and so, in the traditional sense, is swing.

But I learned very quickly that straight wasn’t exactly what Bill meant either. When he played, the beat charged forward like a train. You never wanted to get off because the train was always moving. Even when he paused between phrases, the momentum carried you through.

That was my first lesson in lateness. That same year, Voodoo came out, and everything started to make sense. I realized that groove itself is built on departures and arrivals, on veering and returning, on cleanly and deftly swimming around and through time. That sometimes each beat is narrow, and sometimes it is very wide. That you can push them to your heart’s content, but only if you keep track of exactly where they are.

I know there’s a lesson for life in there somewhere, aside from the obvious (and not so obvious) sexual parallels. Darned if I can figure out what it is. Maybe it’s “don’t go off on tangents, unless you have to to make a point.”

In this case, I didn’t.

But that bridge is coming along. It’s beginning to fill with the languidity it needs, but it’s not there yet. Maybe I needed to write this to remind myself not to make it too square. Or to remind myself that the contrast of “straight vs. swung” is really much more subtle and complex than I initially imagined. Maybe my illness is still affecting my lucidity. (Actually I think that’s much more than a maybe.)

Or maybe I just like to yap.

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Excuses

May 25, 2007 Personal

I know what you’re thinking. I can just see each of you now, shaking your heads, saying “so much for schedules.” “So much for daily updates.” But it’s not what it seems. Really. I’ve been ill. Dizziness, coughing, a smattering of fever. Even now, a little delirium persists.

So the past few days, I would spend 8 hours at least semi-functional at work, and then somehow, by the time I got home, I’d be too sick to spend an hour on my album.

Hmm.

On Wednesday, while teetering about at work, trying to last until the end of the day, I got an e-mail from my favorite self-help guru, Phillip J. Eby. This paragraph seems particularly appropriate:

And so, when you make excuses about circumstances “beyond your control”, you might as well be bowing down and saying, “Yes, Master,” to those circumstances, because you’re sure as heck not the one in control.

It took me until today to come to terms with the fact that I was doing just that. I was using sickness as an excuse to keep from getting down to business. Just as I’ve been using my cough as an excuse to keep from recording vocals since November, just as not having my acoustic panels up was an excuse before that, and having too boomy a room before that. I’ve been using my circumstances as reasons to avoid doing the things I claim to want.

But knowing this is not enough. Even if I’m making myself feel worse than I actually am, even if, as I’ve recently theorized, my epic cough is mostly psychosomatic, what do I do about it? Do I plow through anyway? Can I make it happen in spite of what I’ve convinced myself are perfectly reasonable excuses?

Back to Eby:

But today, I want to tell you about just *one* simple, specific way that we smart people mess up our lives: We like to be “realistic”.

Smart man. And he’s right. Only by transcending the reasonable, the rational, the realistic, can we ever do anything truly great.

Scary.

Days 6 & 7

May 20, 2007 Waiting

Last night, I worked on that Perfect Moment bridge yet again. Sometimes I reach a point where I’m just throwing things together with almost no regard for what actually makes sense, and absolutlely none for context. But then I’ll listen back later on and realize that I’ve done something new. That once I’ve veered from the path of trying to make something sound like this or that, magic starts to happen. And when I listen, instead of thinking “oh, that bassline isn’t hip enough, or oh, those vocals don’t blend right,” I’ll just think, “That’s me! I did that!”

I think I don’t actually like arranging my songs. I just love new ideas; when I work, I get excited about coming up with countermelodies and stringing them together, and somehow it all comes together. So tonight, when I sat down with La Da Da Dee, and tried to change the feel of one of the sections from swung to straight, I started to get really tense. I knew the general feel I wanted, but I didn’t know how to get there. I just wanted a part that you wouldn’t notice (which is something I often want in a rhythm section – if you don’t notice the instruments, it means they’re really playing the song), but I couldn’t make it happen. So I just looped a couple bars and played over them again and again.

Until, of course, I had an idea. And once I have an idea, lights start to turn on, and my hands move by themselves, and soon enough I’m nodding my head, yes, this is how it should be.

But I’m a little worried. I’m worried that I’ll end up not with 9 coherent songs, but with 9 collections of ideas, stuck together with chewing gum and common key signatures. My high school composition teacher once told me, after listening to one of my disjointed pieces, that I should write music for cartoons. I hope that Waiting doesn’t get the same reaction.

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Day 5

May 19, 2007 Waiting

Another day, another hour. I spent this one, once again, working on this new bridge section to Perfect Moment. I have only a glimmer of how it needs to go, a sort of epic lightness, that reflects, as Matty suggested to me the other day, the way my characters wait. When you’re lost in your 20’s, your waiting is the biggest thing you’ve got. Your hopes, your wonders. What comes next?

Now how do I get that big sound out of my little voice in my little room? Tip #1: If you want to make a small number of voices sound like a chorus, a Chorus plugin does not help. Not even if you throw a big choir-sized reverb after it. Neither does singing as many different parts as you can come up with.

I haven’t got it yet, and I’m hanging up my headphones for the night. But sometimes it’s much clearer what to do when you’re not actually there to do it. When I get home tomorrow, I’ll write out some 4-part harmony and triple-track it. If I can’t make a bunch of people singing sound like a bunch of people singing, I might as well turn in my Logic Pro dongle and call it a day.

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Day 4

May 17, 2007 Waiting

You’d think that, after a long day of fixing and setting up stuff, two more hours of driver-related troubleshooting would kill a man’s spirit. But guess what, Digidesign? Even though I had to reinstall your drivers twice, even though you made me reinstall the whole OS 10.4.9 Combo Update, and even though your goods still stubbornly and mysteriously refused to work properly after all my voodoo magic, I still prevailed. Because I know that if a trick doesn’t work the first time (like unplugging and replugging your stupid crap audio interface), you just have to do it again and again until it does.

I am smarter than machines.

So once I got that out of the way, I got back to work on Perfect Moment. Another listen to the new bridge section, and I realized it’s actually pretty hip! I added in a Dilla-style bassline and hi-hats, a nice little 16th-note-anticipatory thwap before the snare on 4 (kind of like a really big flam), and started building up my airy choral harmonies.

I have no idea how I’m gonna fit this new idea into the song proper, but that’s for one of my more lucid moments. This was a night for zombie creativity. Don’t think, don’t look back. Just eat the brains and move on.

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