submixes

ah, yes. I sat down, guitar in hand, preamp dialed in meticulously, levels perfect, on Sunday only to remember I had forgotten a step– the submix. Submixes serve two purposes. One, they save system resources. Two, they give you a chance to bite off the whole mix in smaller pieces. Maybe I’m simply compensating here. I don’t have the most powerful computer, which means I don’t have unlimited tracking capabilities. Still, there’s value in submixing. Much of Zen Luck Tricks has been spent on drums and bass thus far. To achieve the tonal effects I desired, I split the drum kit into three tracks– the kick, the hi-hats, and the snare. The kit, therefore, is almost a mini song itself. Conceptually, this jibes well with me, because I’ve always been fascinated by not only rhythm, but also by rhythms on the drum kit are physically triggered. My drummer friends taught me about “four limb independence,” where you set each limb on a different part of the groove. I’ve kept that with me. Even today when I record electronic music, I think about how the drum part would sound were a live drummer playing it at that moment.

Sumixing also brings you to the edge of a very important precipice: the point when you play your song from start to finish. As I built these songs in Live, I would generally go through about 75-80% of them, often taking shortcuts. But producing the submix, obviously, doesn’t allow any shortcuts. This is the mix that goes on to be added to the guitar and vocals, so it needs to be the complete song.

And here’s another time when Live is really interesting to work with.

The songs are laid out in Live’s Session View. They’re just a bunch of “clips.” Right now, they’re not a “song” as you would think of one, because the linear outcome isn’t known. Whoa. That’s pretty deep. But it’s true. I can trigger these clips in a number of different ways that will drastically alter the flow of the song. I can change whole sections, change the length of sections, modulate– perform any number of radical alterations. Now, I don’t want to do any of these. I’m not improvising. I want the song to come out as a song– at least this time. Future projects, or when I play live, might very well make use of this sonic plasticity.

Not only is this cool functionality. It’s actually a little challenging. I’m actually playing these submixes by triggering the various themes and variations in real time. I can make an error, just like in playing live, and I have. And there are more subtle changes that don’t ruin the mix, but affect change in such a way as to mix it unique. In other words, the product of these submixes will be unique, as if a band were playing these songs. Of course, a band is playing them– it’s just the one in my head.

Everything is lined up and ready to rock. I had to write some parts, and, truth be told, Can’t Wait still needs a bass variation, which may be the intro. Or it could be an interlude. The upside is I know exactly what I want that figure to be. I should be able to output these submixes this week. Then it will be guitar time. And I’m going to rock the fuck out.

goals for a weekend

I’d like to knock out the guitar parts to Lines and Strange Trains this weekend. Yes, that’s ambitious. I’d be happy with half of that.

The first issue I’ll have to confront here will be guitar tone. I’ve gone back and forth with this one. My preamp, which plugs directly into the computer for recording, emulates 6 different preamps. For Zen Luck Ticks, I’ve been torn between sending my Les Paul through a Fender or a Marshall. Both tonal directions have similar sounds above the preamp setting, but the preamp setting truly does create some distinctiveness. I’ve thought as a compromise that I could lay the rhythm tracks with one and do the leads with the other. That may in fact be the solution, although the rhythm track I laid down for Can’t Wait uses the Marshall, and I had thought of doing those in reverse.

The second consideration will be the chord voicings and the last will be the groove. There’s an art to separating lead and rhythm parts, and for that matter, rhythm guitar and bass. Ultimately, I think, you want to create a unity. It gets back to lush versus sparse. The more difference there is among the voicings, the more dense and lush you make the production. Multiplying tracks is only necessary where a physical limitation occurs on a single track.

We shall see what happens when I plug in. I’m sure I’ll have many lessons learned to share.

Strange Trains intro

I took Diplo’s advice when I sat down last night to write and intro section for Strange Trains. The ideas to include an intro and start with the bass line weren’t exactly novel. I’d been planning to do that anyway. But it’s sometimes nice to know others think your approach makes sense.

I was surprised by how it shook out. I sat in front of the computer for an hour, and it was only in the last 20 minutes that I broke through with an idea I liked. The basic groove for Strange Trains, heard in the bass figure, came from a failed attempt to create a tom roll pattern. Essentially what I was going for was a rolling, sixteenth-note feel, which took it’s inspiration, ultimately, from the “chugga-chugga” rhythm of moving trains on tracks. I was stymied though. I wasn’t able to put enough inflection into the beat– it came off as too rigid, no matter what I did. I eventually gave up on it, but luckilly, I transferred that working groove to the kick drum. It spoke on the kick. It stood up and did something. I couldn’t lock the bass in though, I think, because there was too much movement. A pattern that would have “fit in” on toms was too active for the kick, Still, I played around with this for a couple of weeks.

Then, I copied the transformed kick beat to bass– and the fundamental ST groove was born.

This changeability of musical ideas is the thing I love most about Live. A seemingly dead-end idea can find new life slightly altered in a new part. This is a radical departure from the sequncers I was used to that locked you into a linear beginning-to-end workflow. When you’re ready to mix down, this is reasonable enough. But when music is up in the air, still being worked through, it’s a real limitation. Live allows the musician to make major changes, quickly and easily, to go down different roads, and not have to worry about the whole song. I’m still taking weird electronic artifact effects that I experimented with months ago and putting them to use in filling out the ST arrangement. It’s as if nothing is lost. And this is something I very much appreciate.

The ST intro came from an older kick pattern, tweaked to create a new melody. But, here, rhythm is what’s important. The likely accompaniment will be some drum kit odds and ends and a whole mess of guitar. And this intro figure is something. I need to listen again and evaluate it, hear it against other beats. And again the recycling of ideas that Live enables is a godsend!

Will there be an outro? I think if I can get it to pop enough, I may duck back into a points in the song. Maybe I’ll tuck it into an interlude-type part, say, between the guitar solo and the last chorus out. Then the chorus out will be…well, the chorus out.

Back to discuss more about Live…

Greg

music production

I wanted to chat about Ableton’s Live today, when I came across an article at Wired on how to drop dope beats. Diplo offers these 6 tips:

1. Start with the bass line

2. Experiment with the samples at your disposal

3. Use samples as cultural allusions

4. Avoid overused sounds

5. Don’t change tempo

6. Include intros and outros

#1 caught my attention immediately. The Hurry Gain is primarily a blog chronicling my musical projects. But I also want to open this up to the other relevant issues, inclusing contemporary music commentary and technology and music production. I won’t pretend I’m an expert producer, but I’ve done a lot of experimenting over the past 10 years. I took a computer music sequence in college, and even though it stuck me as a bit rough (and my skills at the time were very rough), it wasn’t hard for me to see the potential of bringing together technology and music.

I see this taking two forms– both of which are positive developments. First is using technology to record. What’s new here is not so much the activity of recording itself, which hasn’t changed in the last 100 years or so, but how it’s possible now to record at “studio quality” depths of 24 bits and 96kHz on the home computer. This is a fairly radical notion, actually. Music production has been distributed to musicians who no longer need huge budgets. Technology has slowley been chipping away at this edifice for a few decades at least; sitting here right now, it’s quite possible to get a high-qulity setup for relatively cheap. I’ll detail my rig in a later installment. But moving on…

The second positive development I mentioned above is the capability of technology to make totally new sounds. Aside from production, by the use of sythns, it’s possible to create completely new instruments. Electronic music is the natural place to go to hear the sounding board of experimental sounds.

Both of these developments have helped create the remix movement, of which Diplo and Wired are referencing. I was fascinated by this trend in electronic music, and it likely contributed to me being less active for a while in other forms. Zne Luck Tricks is a change of gears. It’s not a remix project. I’ve recorded everything from scratch. I intend to post the loops I’ve created here, so that others may remix them though.

So, I’ve made a new category called “music production” that I’ll group posts like this one that address actually rolling up your sleeves and getting dirty with making music. I’m of the firm belief that everyone should make music, whether they play an instrument or remix. In its simplist form, you could take any song purchased from iTunes or ripped from disc, and alter the tempo. A 20 bpm (beats per minute) adjustment slower or faster would give you a whole new feel. From here, it’s not so difficult to get into mashups. The next step would be slicing apart songs and recombining them in new ways. Lastly, you could start composing loops from scratch.

Music production will explore the various ways to go about doing that– both technically, as in what software to use, and conceptually, as in why two notes sound good together yet when one is paired with another it sounds weird.

There’s a simple reason why I feel music should be played: there’s nothing more satisfying or fufilling than stacking up a groove and hearing all the pieces work together.  It really becomes transcendental…but that’s a subject for another thread.

bass lines

A trend I’ve noticed in rock is to bring the bass closer to the surface, almost as if to use it as the riffing instrument instead of the guitar. As a guitarist, I might be partially opposed to this on principle. But as an electronic composer, I don’t see the big difference besides timbre. I’m all for riffing with the bass. Bass has a little more weight to it, so I think it’s a bit shocking to hear it take real melody lines– by that I mean not just contrapuntal figures, but the primary melody. I think this shows creativity on the part of musicians today.

I didn’t get into recording recently with this production concept in mind, but it has crept in. The Can’t Wait verses have an almost exaggerated bass riff that might be overboard in theory…but I just like it so damn much. Music I’ve heard that turns up the bass has usually turned down the guitar, which makes sense in the interest of simplifying. I may push this threshold. There’s no reason, I feel, to dumb things down. It may be easier for listeners to have only 3-4 parts to take in. But I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to not write more.

This gets into a running bar debate I’ve had over the last few years. I find the main distinction in musical forms today to be one of lushness vs. minimalist. To take a rock example, in the lushness camp you have Radiohead and Interpol. In the minimalist one, you have the White Stripes. It’s interesting to try to discern motives. But I think if you proceed from the premise that these artists maintain independence, you’d have to conclude these contrasting styles of production are simple expressions of what they feel needs to be in the songs.

I might say Zen Luck Tricks is an active minimalist. My setup and style tend towards the more spartan approach. But there are some densities. I don’t anticipate doing a whole lot of layering, say along the lines of Kill Hannah. My jazz background seems to compel me to think in terms moving harmonies.

On my next project I’ll probably take greater liberties with adding and subtracting. What will be most interesting then is to see what survives from now, because a new style for me is coalescing around these arrangements. Can’t Wait transformed over the past two weeks right before my eyes into something that was more Zen Luck Trick-ish, as if to really drive home exactly what I’m hearing.

I’m reminded of a music researcher who’s name and works I’ll have to look up and link to. He studies how the brain interprets pitches and timbre, and he’s argued that pop music is more about sound than about the elements of music. That probably sounds obvious to a lot of people. But those of us who studied music academically tend to think– overthink, that is– that those elements intellectually are the foundations. If sound is what is truly most attractive, then we’d have to re-think some of this.

I’m going on record as calling myself a “soundwriter.” I haven’t googled it, and millions of others might be using the term. But it describes to me a state closer to the goal…

96 takes…

Recording took some unusual twists and turns this weekend. For starters, the chords of Can’t Wait changed– pretty significantly too. The verse had really been in two parts. The first was the spoken lines; the second was a type of interlude contrast to those parts. I was working at fitting together a turnaround back to G, when I got a sequence interesting enough that I began to think that I may not even need these alternating sections. I’ve been leaning towards making simple, direct musical statements, in the spirit of rock. So why complicate things?

Yesterday was me first big push at recording. I put together grooves in the software, and had done a few sound tests with guitar and mic, but I hadn’t driven my rig with guitar. Half of the 96 takes it took me to be happy with the verses were technical glitches and me getting used to Live’s count-in. The rest were either me screwing up the take, or me changing up the rhythm or voicing. All of the initial takes (about 60!) were played to Live’s metronome. I changed that so that the quarter notes were instead marked by a side stick sample. It was a little more realistic feeling, and it wasn’t pitched– after a couple of hours of “beep-beep-beep-beep,” this was refreshing.

My plan to wrap the groove around the rhythm guitar part did work. It’s not what I expected. And I may re-record the guitar (hopefully in under 96 takes!). But I love the bassline and the kick. I don’t think I would have found this complementing happiness between the two if I built up, starting one before the other. I fit the kick into my guitar part. I’ve been going for a floating feel, almost like skipping a stone on a lake. When I started screwing around with the bass, it just fell into the right spaces.

The next thing I’m going to do is listen to the tracks without the first guitar. With the lead guitar it may not even be necessary to have a second. Getting the chorus down is obviously important too. This was rewritten too. Now it’s almost just a melody, much like how the verses were redone. And, ironically (or maybe not), it’s the samenotes of the melody. I can see a symmetry here how the whole song hangs on these two notes. If they lead you one way, you’re in the verse, if they lead the other, you’re in the chorus.

Upcoming topics: melodic bass lines, Ableton’s Live, WordPress

Lyrics

[verse] 

Let’s start it up ’cause it’s so brilliant

How we light the night up with our sun signs

hey…

hey…

The elements lay nature bare

When you touch me, I’m fire breathing air

[chorus]

I find a lot of things about you

Leave me searching for words to say

To explain what we can do

And I can’t wait

[verse]

I believe it’s time that makes us wait

Curves and edges fill our spaces

hey…

hey…

Force of attraction, course of stars

Bring us together, earth and water

signs…

[chorus and out]

I wrote that when I was checking out career options selling music to publishers. Luckily, I failed at that, or I would have lost the rights

When I moved to New York City in 2002, I was reacquainted with rock. I’d kind of given up on it, or maybe the better way to put it is I fell behind. I heard a lot in electronic music that I dug. Having went through music school in college, I scoffed at rock a bit– at least on the outside. I got to NYC and heard the Strokes and Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs. A friend of mine was in a band that iconoclastically– and unabashedly– played grunge. There was a bit of grunge revival, I felt, at the time with a few lackluster tunes on the radio. Can’t Wait tapped into that, at least as far as some meta organization goes. I thought of it as a loose direction.

The original chord progression altered between G and F and went to Eb in the “hey” parts. It’s a much-used progression, you might call it an aeolian major, with roots in R&B. Madonna and Seal have used it on hits, and it’s common in hip-hop. The movement grabs well because of the inherent major-minor tension.

The chorus was pretty bare, a means to an end mostly. It actually came out differently when I recorded demos. The more demos I recorded the more it seemingly changed. Like I said in the last post, CW wasn’t written with a strong musical hook in mind. So a bunch of crazy musical hats can hang on it. Instead of forcing pegs, I’m going to start at the guitar and wrap the groove around. And the guitar’s main job is to follow the vocals, so this will be top-down tracking. I can’t wait.

Can’t Wait

I’m beginning to record the guitar for Can’t Wait this weekend. Grooves for Strange Trains and Lines are in the bag. Can’t Wait was much trickier, resistant to conforming to my time and phrasing ideas. I’d learned (the hard way) to record electronic music from the bottom up, which means starting with the kick then the bass on up to the melody instruments. I’m finding with Ableton’s Live sequencer that it’s not necessary though.

Can’t Wait was always less about music and more about lyrics. I say that it’s musically sloppy, because it’s a bit of everything without being strongly one thing. The song has a bit of an identity crisis. It never even had a true chorus until I married it up with a theme I wrote a few months ago. As far as superimposing order, Can’t Wait wants to be on its own. I hope it doesn’t mind me teasing out the essence on guitar.

I’m new here. I hope this all works. If you found this blog, welcome. This is online home of my musical project, the hurry gain. I’ll be releasing an EP titled Zen Luck Tricks in about a month. I’m also thinking of posting all submixes and samples I used on the album. The blog will be a daily record of current and next steps in pursuit of my true love, music.

Let’s see if this publishes correctly. I’ll be back to discuss the lyrics and inspiration behind Can’t Wait.