I don't have drums or a drummer. Thirty years ago this would have been a major problem. Today it is a minor problem, but the process of solving that problem creates, as a sort of byproduct, unlimited opportunities for creative thinking. But this freedom no doubt comes with a caution.
At the risk of stating the obvious, here is the golden rule of electronic beats: If you're going to use electronic beats, do not use them to imitate real drums. Instead, use them to create new and different sounds that do not resemble real drums
In other words, no pattern you come up with using drum software is going to sound as good as a real drum kit. You can't really get around this fact. Non-drummers, such as myself, might trick themselves into thinking they've done it, but they're wrong. When I first started recording, and even as recently as a couple years ago, I broke this rule often, and it was a major problem for my music. That's not to say that it rendered the music unlistenable, it was just far from what it could be. I thought to myself "I like a rock sound, so I should create a pattern that sounds like someone playing a drum kit." Bad idea. It sounds fake every time.
Fortunately, the golden rule of electronic beats cuts both ways. Just as electronic beats cannot effectively replace a drum kit, most of the cutting-edge electronic music of today cannot be replicated by someone playing a drum kit. The moral of the story: everyone stick to what you're good at.
Indeed, there are no limits to what electronic beats can do, but you need to emphasize the electronic aspect. Radiohead is an interesting example because they demonstrate both sides of the coin. They have a drummer in their band, so the usual "I don't have drums or a drummer" excuse does not apply to them. When the band went electronic, it was because they had a reason to do so, not because they wanted to fake something.
When you spend hours programming beats, it's easy to get caught in the monotony of it instead of taking a step back and saying "why am I doing this?" Any sound you could think to record or synthesize can be sampled into a piece of software and used in a creative way. That freedom is liberating, but also daunting. Anything can be a drum...
Monday, May 28, 2012
Saturday, May 26, 2012
Why Words Are (Not) Hard to Write
At my job I work as an advocate for crime victims, and on Tuesday mornings I sit in the arraignment part in Rochester City Court, meeting clients if they are there, and writing down the outcomes of each case, so my co-workers and I can call our clients and tell them what happened. Arraignment court takes a very long time, and there are a good number of cases where I'm just waiting. So I started bringing a notepad and during the wait, and I've been writing poetry.
When I write poetry in arraignment court, or at any other time, I make no effort to rhyme. In fact, my writing is just as close to prose as it is to poetry, but there is not a coherent narrative. When I was younger it was the opposite. I had always tried very hard to make my first drafts rhyme. Now, I almost never do that, and the rhymes are only added after the fact by ungarbling and rearranging the source material.
The shift in style was significant for me, and it occurred when I was a junior in college. I took a West African drumming class with a very cool instructor named James Holland. I took the class despite already having a full schedule, but perhaps not surprisingly, it turned out to be the best thing I did all semester, a semester that was otherwise difficult. We were required to keep a journal in class, and usually had to writes responses to various readings. I enjoyed the journal because there were no rules. It was "write what you feel." One day James made an assignment that was unusual: "There's no reading. Just write the first thing that comes into your mind. Don't stop to even think about it. I don't want you to sensor yourself."
If there is anything resembling a "breakthrough" in my artistic life, this was a strong contender. I really went to town with this assignment. All kinds of bizarre insecurities came out, along with strange contortions of text, broken narratives, unexpected twists and turns, and a rawness I didn't know was possible. The calculating and restrained version of me would never have thought to put it on paper. The result was perhaps a little too weird for an academic assignment, but James got totally behind it. He commented later, "I wish your classmates had really ran with this assignment the way you did."
So "free-writing" became the norm for me. Whether it is poetry or prose, I don't know, but everything I have written since then has, in a way, been trying to chase that first high. There is a certain freedom one gains from not having to worry about structure, form, rhyme, cohesion, or audience. You can just write and charge ahead with a singular, if disjointed, purpose.
Now I hardly ever gaze at a blank page and wonder "what words am I going to write down?" But the reverse dilemma can be equally frustrating. I've built up a somewhat sizable collection of word soup, and it's sometimes hard to pull up workable material from it, especially since I keep adding new ingredients every Tuesday morning. For a songwriter, free-writing can feel like a strange exercise because typical song structures are far too rigid to accommodate the unfiltered text that may come out in these exercises. Songs have meters, and the words need to fit in that meter. Rhyme still remains strong in modern day song-writing even though a great deal of other contemporary poetry has already abandoned it. Even though my free-writing exercises do not produce rhymes initially, I do make an attempt to organize the words into rhymes later because songs have a more natural flow when listeners hear those common tones. This often means adjusting syllables, re-wording phrases to make rhyme, or even changing the word order entirely. But is something lost in this change?
The process of sorting through pages of freely-written material can be problematic because you are editing the words and taking them out of the artistic context in which they were created. Some songs I have written have actually taken some of their individual lines from two separate and seemingly unrelated poems. This is indeed a necessary evil, but an evil all the same. Some words lose their true effectiveness when they are no longer in the stream of consciousness that exists somewhere between poetry and prose. I suppose the reason why spoken words have always been an element of my music is because some ideas can only be expressed outside of the constraints of a rhythmic structure. If, like me, you find words hard to write, I would recommend free-writing as an exercise as a way to at least get something down on paper. Shoot first, ask questions later.
When I write poetry in arraignment court, or at any other time, I make no effort to rhyme. In fact, my writing is just as close to prose as it is to poetry, but there is not a coherent narrative. When I was younger it was the opposite. I had always tried very hard to make my first drafts rhyme. Now, I almost never do that, and the rhymes are only added after the fact by ungarbling and rearranging the source material.
The shift in style was significant for me, and it occurred when I was a junior in college. I took a West African drumming class with a very cool instructor named James Holland. I took the class despite already having a full schedule, but perhaps not surprisingly, it turned out to be the best thing I did all semester, a semester that was otherwise difficult. We were required to keep a journal in class, and usually had to writes responses to various readings. I enjoyed the journal because there were no rules. It was "write what you feel." One day James made an assignment that was unusual: "There's no reading. Just write the first thing that comes into your mind. Don't stop to even think about it. I don't want you to sensor yourself."
If there is anything resembling a "breakthrough" in my artistic life, this was a strong contender. I really went to town with this assignment. All kinds of bizarre insecurities came out, along with strange contortions of text, broken narratives, unexpected twists and turns, and a rawness I didn't know was possible. The calculating and restrained version of me would never have thought to put it on paper. The result was perhaps a little too weird for an academic assignment, but James got totally behind it. He commented later, "I wish your classmates had really ran with this assignment the way you did."
So "free-writing" became the norm for me. Whether it is poetry or prose, I don't know, but everything I have written since then has, in a way, been trying to chase that first high. There is a certain freedom one gains from not having to worry about structure, form, rhyme, cohesion, or audience. You can just write and charge ahead with a singular, if disjointed, purpose.
Now I hardly ever gaze at a blank page and wonder "what words am I going to write down?" But the reverse dilemma can be equally frustrating. I've built up a somewhat sizable collection of word soup, and it's sometimes hard to pull up workable material from it, especially since I keep adding new ingredients every Tuesday morning. For a songwriter, free-writing can feel like a strange exercise because typical song structures are far too rigid to accommodate the unfiltered text that may come out in these exercises. Songs have meters, and the words need to fit in that meter. Rhyme still remains strong in modern day song-writing even though a great deal of other contemporary poetry has already abandoned it. Even though my free-writing exercises do not produce rhymes initially, I do make an attempt to organize the words into rhymes later because songs have a more natural flow when listeners hear those common tones. This often means adjusting syllables, re-wording phrases to make rhyme, or even changing the word order entirely. But is something lost in this change?
The process of sorting through pages of freely-written material can be problematic because you are editing the words and taking them out of the artistic context in which they were created. Some songs I have written have actually taken some of their individual lines from two separate and seemingly unrelated poems. This is indeed a necessary evil, but an evil all the same. Some words lose their true effectiveness when they are no longer in the stream of consciousness that exists somewhere between poetry and prose. I suppose the reason why spoken words have always been an element of my music is because some ideas can only be expressed outside of the constraints of a rhythmic structure. If, like me, you find words hard to write, I would recommend free-writing as an exercise as a way to at least get something down on paper. Shoot first, ask questions later.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Monday, May 21, 2012
Who is the Better Guitarist?
So who is better anyway?
Tosin Abasi of Animals as Leaders:
or...
David Gilmour of Pink Floyd:
Who can play faster?: Tosin Abasi
Who has more rhythmic precision?: Tosin Abasi
Who has more advanced knowledge of music theory?: Tosin Abasi
Who has probably practiced more?: Tosin Abasi
Who can come up with more complex musical structures?: Tosin Abasi
Who can better play in obscure time signatures?: Tosin Abasi *
Who has more mastery of many different musical styles?: Tosin Abasi
Who better understands classical counterpoint?: Tosin Abasi
Who can more effectively layer and overdub contrasting guitar parts?: Tosin Abasi
Who dresses better?: Tosin Abasi (not a real category, but really T-shirt and jeans while playing in front of thousands of people???)
Who plays more beautiful melodies?: David Gilmour
Who is better? Tosin Abasi or David Gilmour?: It's a tie.
Feel free to weigh in.
Tosin Abasi of Animals as Leaders:
or...
David Gilmour of Pink Floyd:
Who can play faster?: Tosin Abasi
Who has more rhythmic precision?: Tosin Abasi
Who has more advanced knowledge of music theory?: Tosin Abasi
Who has probably practiced more?: Tosin Abasi
Who can come up with more complex musical structures?: Tosin Abasi
Who can better play in obscure time signatures?: Tosin Abasi *
Who has more mastery of many different musical styles?: Tosin Abasi
Who better understands classical counterpoint?: Tosin Abasi
Who can more effectively layer and overdub contrasting guitar parts?: Tosin Abasi
Who dresses better?: Tosin Abasi (not a real category, but really T-shirt and jeans while playing in front of thousands of people???)
Who plays more beautiful melodies?: David Gilmour
Who is better? Tosin Abasi or David Gilmour?: It's a tie.
Feel free to weigh in.
Sunday, April 8, 2012
Saturday, April 7, 2012
How to Make the Backstreet Boys Sound Evil/Awesome
Ok, I've officially lost it. Anyway, I thought you'd enjoy this piece of serious art that I am now presenting to you. In the tradition of "Justin Bieber 800%" I am now adding my own creative talents to the emerging genre of "Making Pop Hits Sound Like Space Aliens." This was all done using a program called Mammut that I talked about in an earlier post. I promise, if you click "play" you will not be disappointed! (If you get bored, skip ahead to the "epic climax" at around 3:00).
(I have to admit, I always kind of liked this song...)
(I have to admit, I always kind of liked this song...)
Friday, April 6, 2012
The Mars Volta and More Comments on Loud Sound Files
I wrote in an earlier post about the Loudness War. This refers to the idea that sound files are being mastered so that they are too loud, and they lose sound quality as a result. This idea should not be confused with idea of the musical quality of "heaviness." Heavy bands can have well-mastered albums, and non-heavy bands can have albums that are mastered too loud.
The Mars Volta provide an interesting study because they are a heavy band, but they also have very loud sound files. All of their albums, with the possible exception of "Octahedron," suffer sound quality problems as a result. The newest release "Noctourniquet" is the loudest Mars Volta album yet, and is one of the loudest albums I have ever heard by anyone. When I say this, I speaking from an engineering standpoint, not a musical standpoint.
As I wrote earlier, the album "Californication" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers is one of the most poorly-mastered albums ever. And so naturally, I was dismayed to find that "Noctourniquet" is about as loud as "Californication," though to my ears the audio damage is not as apparent on "Noctourniquet." I don't know enough about the science to know why this might be the case, but I do know that the two albums had different mastering engineers. In any case, both mastering jobs are unacceptable, in the absolute sense.
As for the music contained on "Noctourniquet," I think it's quite good. The Mars Volta is one of my favorite bands, and I think they have really pushed the "weirdness" boundaries, while still trying to maintain some level of accessibility. "Noctourniquet" continues that tradition without fail. Because I love this music, I find the production issues particularly frustrating.
So then there are three lessons I can take away from this whole thing:
1. Playing heavy music does not give you license to make your sound files sound terrible. The Mars Volta are a very heavy band. Distortion is part of their musical arsenal. However, the type of distortion resulting from excessive loudness is not in any way a good thing. Of course, if you were to crank the gain on a recording of Bach's Mass in B Minor, it would probably be more a more noticeable degradation than what is currently heard on Mars Volta albums (to my knowledge, no one has tried this yet, thankfully). In either case, it's degradation. I have trouble thinking of any situation where mastering an album too loud would be artistically beneficial.
2. If you take it as a given that your sound files must be excessively loud (of course, this is a ridiculous thing to take as a given), that doesn't mean you shouldn't still work to make things as good as they possibly can. "Noctourniquet" sounds less clipped than "Californication," at least to an untrained ear, even though both albums are about the same loudness. Fake it 'til you make it, I guess. But don't get me wrong, the mastering job on "Noctourniquet" still has major problems, and I certainly don't advocate a policy of "let's crank it as much as we can and then see if we can trick people into thinking that this sound quality isn't actually as poor as it is."
3. Is the end in sight? I'm sure people asked this question back in 1999 with the release of "Californication," but in 13 years we don't seem to have come very far. I think record companies need to make a musical version of a nuclear disarmament treaty. With things as they are, everyone is losing. But there is a natural limit. I'm pretty sure if anyone tried to make an album louder than "Noctourniquet," all listeners would start to notice that something was not right.
It could be that the biggest problem is us. We're the earbud generation. We're the Youtube generation. We listen to music for convenience, not quality, and we keep consuming these albums that have major problems. The only way to turn this around is to educate ourselves and each other about this issue, so that higher-ups in the companies will start to notice. It's all about supply and demand, after all. Unfortunately, however, Warner Bros. Records know that I'll still buy a Mars Volta album whether the volume is cranked or not. I guess I'll just listen angrily.
The Mars Volta provide an interesting study because they are a heavy band, but they also have very loud sound files. All of their albums, with the possible exception of "Octahedron," suffer sound quality problems as a result. The newest release "Noctourniquet" is the loudest Mars Volta album yet, and is one of the loudest albums I have ever heard by anyone. When I say this, I speaking from an engineering standpoint, not a musical standpoint.
As I wrote earlier, the album "Californication" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers is one of the most poorly-mastered albums ever. And so naturally, I was dismayed to find that "Noctourniquet" is about as loud as "Californication," though to my ears the audio damage is not as apparent on "Noctourniquet." I don't know enough about the science to know why this might be the case, but I do know that the two albums had different mastering engineers. In any case, both mastering jobs are unacceptable, in the absolute sense.
As for the music contained on "Noctourniquet," I think it's quite good. The Mars Volta is one of my favorite bands, and I think they have really pushed the "weirdness" boundaries, while still trying to maintain some level of accessibility. "Noctourniquet" continues that tradition without fail. Because I love this music, I find the production issues particularly frustrating.
So then there are three lessons I can take away from this whole thing:
1. Playing heavy music does not give you license to make your sound files sound terrible. The Mars Volta are a very heavy band. Distortion is part of their musical arsenal. However, the type of distortion resulting from excessive loudness is not in any way a good thing. Of course, if you were to crank the gain on a recording of Bach's Mass in B Minor, it would probably be more a more noticeable degradation than what is currently heard on Mars Volta albums (to my knowledge, no one has tried this yet, thankfully). In either case, it's degradation. I have trouble thinking of any situation where mastering an album too loud would be artistically beneficial.
2. If you take it as a given that your sound files must be excessively loud (of course, this is a ridiculous thing to take as a given), that doesn't mean you shouldn't still work to make things as good as they possibly can. "Noctourniquet" sounds less clipped than "Californication," at least to an untrained ear, even though both albums are about the same loudness. Fake it 'til you make it, I guess. But don't get me wrong, the mastering job on "Noctourniquet" still has major problems, and I certainly don't advocate a policy of "let's crank it as much as we can and then see if we can trick people into thinking that this sound quality isn't actually as poor as it is."
3. Is the end in sight? I'm sure people asked this question back in 1999 with the release of "Californication," but in 13 years we don't seem to have come very far. I think record companies need to make a musical version of a nuclear disarmament treaty. With things as they are, everyone is losing. But there is a natural limit. I'm pretty sure if anyone tried to make an album louder than "Noctourniquet," all listeners would start to notice that something was not right.
It could be that the biggest problem is us. We're the earbud generation. We're the Youtube generation. We listen to music for convenience, not quality, and we keep consuming these albums that have major problems. The only way to turn this around is to educate ourselves and each other about this issue, so that higher-ups in the companies will start to notice. It's all about supply and demand, after all. Unfortunately, however, Warner Bros. Records know that I'll still buy a Mars Volta album whether the volume is cranked or not. I guess I'll just listen angrily.
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