This month, or November actually, I plan on participating in NaSoAlMo, other wise known as National Solo Album Month.. This is a thing where various musician / sound artistic types.. decided to participate in a challenge to create a solo album in a months time.. Basically.. it’s an excuse to get serious.. for a month.
Last year, as long times followers would know, I created ZarMattAThustra’s Deep Space Adventures.. for NaSoAlMo…. This, I must tell you, was one hell of an adventure. There’s nothing like working your ass off on something, if you want to grow by leaps and bounds… and at the end of last years National Solo Album Month’s thing.. I felt like I had made a giant jump in my music production / etc skills.. And so now, we embark on the next adventure…
On the Stategery and tactics of taking on such a challenge
Generally speaking.. if I’m working in my conventional ways.. and didn’t have a lot of other stuff to contend myself with.. was very focused.. I could maybe spit out about a track a week.. which might be around.. oh lets say an average of about 6 minutes a pop…. which comes out to what, like 24 minutes of music? Well.. the challenge is to make an album of at least 29:09 minutes.. so that’s not quite going to cut it.. and seeing as I have other things to deal with in life.. and seeing as last year I only found out about this about half way through the month… one must develop alternative strategies and tactics.. which is perhaps another interesting thing to deal with…
So, lets take a look at last years strategies.. and this years strategies.
ZarMattAThustra’s Deep Space Adventures Production Strategy
I found out, as I said before, about this challenge, about half way through the month.. but had already begun work on a few tracks.. so figured I could still make a go of it.. If I tried something radicle.
My radical process started with.. working with different types of sound generating type programs.. where you improvise via tweaking various parameters and record the results. This instantly creates a whole lot of music.. but then you have the question of “is this interesting music?” So the next challenge is “how do we make this interesting music?” This became the jumping off point for an experimental sonic adventure. For the most part, this involved the following approaches:
Lets Process the crap out of these audio files.
Lets mix stuff together different versions of processed audio into a kind of composite audio file.
Lets slice up the audio file into discreet loops n stuff
Lets sequence the loops
Lets integrate this with our usual way of working
Well, that’s the broad outline anyway..
Tools Used
Ableton Live
Arturia Storm
Native Instruments Komplete (mostly Reaktor)
A Wimpy G4 Mac
Reason
A guitar
A Zoom H4 field recorder
Ok, so that’s the basic broad brush stroke outline of it.. You can read more of my writings related to this project here… That would be the full list.. The writings where I wrote during the production are as follows: Off In Reaktor Land, Red Rum Re Drumed, and finally Gonzo adventures in music production.
Should you like to hear the album in it’s entirety, you can find it on over here at mattsearles.com/music.
At the time I created it.. I wasn’t real sure of it.. but since then I’ve gotten a lot of good reviews from people.. and now figure.. well, it’s probably a pretty good album.
The New Production Adventure
Tools likely to be used:
The Bad Ass 8 Core Mac Pro
This here new MacBook (2GHz Due)
Komplete 5
Kore
Ableton Live
Reason
ReCycle
A Tascam 16 channel Mixer as a MIDI controller
An M-Audio DJ like MIDI controller
A Guitar
A Slide Bass
Digital Performer
Liquid Mix 16
Couple of budget Condenser Microphones
Zoom H4
In addition to all that madness.. I’m looking to add VirSyns Cantor Vocal Synth and… VirSyns “Take Five FX bundle” which includes Bark, Matrix, Reflect, TDesign, and VTape. Indulge me as I talk about these a little, won’t you?
Bark is a pretty interesting looking 27 band filter / EQ and compressor
VTape is a set of analog tape emulation plugs that emulate tape based saturation, delay, and flange. I’m very much in need of a tape delay type effect.. and very much wanting some sort of analog tape emulation warmth..
Reflect is an Algorithmic Convolution Reverb. Even in the current version of Digital Performer, I’m not feeling like my reverb bases are covered quite enough.. and I expect Reflect to really help out along these lines.. and the integration of Algorithmic and Convolution technologies into a single reverb unit is a quite attractive thing.
TDesign is a Transient former.. I don’t know too much about this sorta effect.. but it does give you control over your dynamics / transience.. and there are quite a few production folks out there whom are very into such things
Matrix is a Vocoder, and according to a recent issue of Sound On Sound, a very impressive Vocoder.
So… as you can no doubt see.. We’re talking about a massive upgrade from last year’s project.. studio wise anyway, so, what of the plan off attack?
Plan of Attack
I have lots of music ideas, and I’m pretty sure this project isn’t going to be able to explore them all.. but, we’ll certainly see how far we can make it.
The first thing I want to do is.. See if I can’t jam out some stuff using Kore to control various Reaktor beatboxes, sequenced instruments, and sound generators.. This will effectively create one box full of building blocks.
Next I want to experiment with a somewhat traditional-ish approach to sequencing.. where you play around on a keyboard, quantize stuff, and put together stuff that way..
I want to use ReCycle to create REX files out of some of the results.. to use as building blocks that way.
A rather central thing I want to explore is.. vocals. These vocals will probably be ether.. me speaking into microphones and vocoding the hell out of it.. / Melodying the hell of it.. or Cantor stuff.. somehow creatively mixed into the music.
I’m actually thinking of the possibility that this album project could feature some sort of a narrative / lyrical whatever.. that might sit at the center of the album.. which would be a really huge jump for me to take.
I see a part in the process where I jam away on guitar and bass to construct.. well… something or other.
I imagine a part of the process where I have all kinds of content loaded up into Ableton Live.. and use the MIDI controllers / Mixers to kinda improvise out something…
Of course, in the end, all this stuff must me integrated into one giant process… so, wish me luck…
As I speak to you I’m in the middle of the production.. well, lets get to talking about it.
The first thing I want to note is that It’s very awesome working with 2 24″ HD monitors… though I dare say I still find myself wishing I had more space!!!.. but that said it does feel pretty incredible to have this much space going on. For music production it really means you’re able to.. manage more at once.. which has big ramifications.. which I seem to be putting to the test in this project.
So I think I kind of gave the clues to where I’d likely be going in a recent blog post.. that I’m trying to integrate a kind of free jamming process into my electronic music process..
Latter:
I suppose the best way I can describe the experience of it is.. well there’s a lot of dimensions to it really.
It’s an adventure
I don’t really understand certain things about our world.. one of the things I have the hardest time with is “sucky artists.” I particularly hate “sucky artists” whom are more successful then I am.. from a commercial perspective. My definition of sucky is “he” (or she) “whom doesn’t do anything interesting.” You know the type? Takes a safe and well trotted path? If all I was interested in was… making sure I made the rent.. you know what? I wouldn’t be a freaking artist! I mean.. ok, its more complicated then all this.. but I simply mean the artist who’s work is derivative.. which translates into 90% of everything Hollywood produces.. and most of the stuff I hear on the radio.
From the perspective of an artist.. or speaking as one.. the well trotted path is just freaking boring.. you know? I wanna go out there and do something new, something exciting.. that’s just who I am, that’s just how I’m wired.. and its tuff to imagine it being any other way. All of which is not to say that I don’t have my lazy days.. just.. I don’t know.
So I guess what I’m trying to do creatively is take this freaking crazy mad ass jump..
Ok, lets back off from this and look at the economic dimension of my plot at this junction in our story.
If all goes well.. which is a very low bar in many respects.. I could maintain my unemployed, working on my own kinda thing, sorta status.. for a long long time. Things might not go that well.. but this is at least the out look as of this moment.
So what this means with respect to my art is.. I don’t have to make bank tomorrow, which means I can aim high. There is a shorter term outlook where in I have to make bank.. but that’s another story for another time.. we’re talking big picture here. And to all this I should maybe add that I can do all this provided I do my best to live on the cheap..
Ok.. so..
My studio is turning into a freaking monster of a studio. The sound work I’m now engaged in is.. so many orders of magnitude beyond anything I’ve had to work with before… and I’m still really just in the early days of exploring the possibilities of it.
After my recent shopping spree, I’ve landed in a place where I’m now semi inclined not to spend too much more money.. Which is odd seeing as I was planing on spending a couple grand more, prior to the spree. I may still buy one more piece of software, and I might eventually get all the stuff I had planned on.. but I’m feeling like.. well its just not real pressing at this moment.
One of the surprisingly big deals is ReCycle
ReCycle, on the surface, doesn’t really sound all that exciting… but it does have the effect of radically shifting how I think about working with Reason..
Here’s what you do: You load an audio file into ReCycle and you slice it up.. you then take that sliced up file, which is now a loop.. and you load it into Reason. Now.. with the REX player.. you can play the individual slices.. and sorta do interesting things with that loop.
Why is this exciting?
One of my issues was “how do I work with vocals.” This is a bit of a problem if you can’t actually sing. At this point I can change the pitches of the vocals.. and do other funky things.. process them.. but.. if they are a basic audio file.. you can fracture them.. play them glitched up.. Fubared.. and something about the creative process of it.. the work flow.. the whatever.. makes it kinda incredible.
A few latter:
At my current stage of thinking.. well.. instrumentals are kind of abstract… what are they about? Popularity wise.. instrumentals tend not to be as popular as songs with actual lyrics in them. You know, singing and all that? So bringing lyrics / singing / etc.. to my music.. is on the to do list.. and I’m now in early stages of exploring what I can do along these lines.
Using ReCycle and Rex files.. its a bit like Picasso’s cubism.. where we are taking an image and fracturing it. We then have control of the fractures.. we can think of the fractures compositionally.. What goes on inside of a fracture can be treated as a texture / timber.. its more about orchestration then counterpoint..
This also leads us into certain historical threads in music.. since the dawn of equal temperament.. our music has gone in a direction of being about pitches.. and the relationship of pitches.. as a pose to being about the timber. The dawning of electronic music has had the effect of increasing the importance of the timber.. So my use of ReCycle now brings my work into this somewhat lost thread.
Later still:
I’ve dug a little deeper into this project… It’s an experiment, so it doesn’t really matter.. or, I’m sorta willing to just kind of take it where ever.. and um, there’s interesting things emerging.. so lets back out of the subject of ReCycle here…
Earlier in this production it was all about mixing.. and the mixing was no easy task… perhaps made more complex by my spirit. It involved a lot of automation of levels, EQ, and effect sends.. trying to wrestle with things enough so they might not be too muddy.. I’m not sure that this was ever exactly achieved.. eventually the notion came that this automation had to be thought of as.. not just about making certain elements clear.. but also as a compositional thing.. so that we could have contrasts / evolutions between various sections… a sense that we were moving through space..
A day or two latter
Well for a limited time you can hear the fruits of this project in a recent post… my last post actually. After that you won’t be able to get the individual track for a while.. act now, and all that. I do plan on posting it as a part of a podcast in the next week or so.. so it’ll be there to hear.. and on that note, let me post this entry.
I’m sitting here going through old libraries of old sound projects of mine.. Projects that in someway anticipate a project I plan on venturing forth on in the not too distant future: The Fresh Meat Project. Music To Freak Out Stoners, or MTFOS, was created in what we call “The JP years.” This was back in the days when “The Doctor” and “Mr. Sketch” where living off in JP MA… lost years if you will.. lots of chemicals in there brains.. and I’d visit on weekends.. MTFS somehow had to do with the psychology of those circles.. and my reaction to them.
This had to have been in.. the very late 90s… I was still on a G3, had just gotten my MOTU 828 audio interface, and started F-Ing around on it… I’d just kinda Jam out a bit.. didn’t even bother mixing the Jam sessions.. which took place on guitar and synths.. this was total experimentation.. just to enjoy the sound quality of the 828.
Around this time period.. my thought was.. I should like to make music that came out of extended jam sessions. The problem was that these jam sessions where.. I’m not sure how to characterize them. They had a kind of out sider art mentality to them.. there were a lot of levels on which they were probably very flawed.. whatever they were, they were so far out there.. that I wasn’t really sure how to turn them into something interesting..
Well now we enter a very different period in my musical evolution where I’m at least entertaining the notion of going off in radically new directions and I wonder if I could facilitate those older directions now. Today I am both a lot more sophisticated musically / production wise.. and I have a lot more sophisticated tools that allow me to work in very new ways, and I wonder if these new possibilities might facilitate the older zeitgeist.
New to my studio.. in particular, is a fretless bass and ReCycle.. Ableton Live has been in my studio for sometime.. but I haven’t really used in the way I’m thinking now.. And of course there’s Melodyne…
//////
I pick up my bass and start playing.. kinda all the time. It seems not at all infrequent that I’ll get into a mode where everything I play I think sounds good.. sounds interesting.. these little jam sessions. I think about taking them into my computer, recording them.. composing with them.. where might I be able to take them?.. what could I do musically?
While I have many ideas.. one idea I find quite appealing is the notion of repeating exactly what I did with MTFS.. accept.. when working with a synthesizer.. record only the MIDI.. when working with a guitar.. make sure there’s no transience recorded with it.. Between Melodyne and MIDI I could take the results and sculpt it into something. But what?
Part of the idea is something along the lines of capturing a raw moment.. How differently you think when you’re thinking in real time.. improvising, versus composing my usual ways..
I feel that this is a path I must go down.. a journey I must make.. even as I don’t really have a lot of confidence in it.. It seems like its important for the completion of a musical style I have yet to totally create….
Let me see if I can get serious in talking to you about this stuff.
What do we have thus far?
Electronic Music Composed: I sit in a sequencer and program the sequences and the Mix. This method is the most sophisticated / mature.. of my processes.. I mean I’ve taken this method further then any of my other methods.. thus I tend to want to stick to it simply because its something I can rely on for good results.
Electronic Music Improvised: We are talking about some sort of a process by which.. via tweaking various parameters of some kind of a sound generating device… music results. These results could be further processed, or edited, or whatever.. in order to be used as building blocks of a more programmed music.. we see this sorta thing Starting in Zar Matt A Thustra’s Deep Space Adventures.
Guitar based song writing: I sit down on my guitar, or perhaps now even my bass, and I play, come up with riffs, put riffs together.. create a song idea.. produce it..
I improvise out some sorta performance… on real instruments.. wether we are talking a keyboard to control synths.. or we are talking about guitars and bass.. maybe something going on with a microphone.. and we sorta do something with this.
So these are our basic processes. The question then becomes how do we integrate them.. how do we bring them to some level of maturity.. where there possibilities become great; a sum more then the parts?
The answer lys, no doubt.. in continuing to work on each of these processes, going down each path.. taking it to its logical conclusion… building a library of raw material.. and playing with making stuff out of that raw material.
As near as I can tell this is a long term project.
So, Boston Podcamp 3 is just about here… and in anticipation of that.. I figured I’d at least have to post new episode… So it here it is.
In this podcast we can hear 3 bits of work.
Toshiro Mifune VS John Wayne.. in progress (the last version I made available for a limited time)
Peter’s Hill: This is an old “Fresh Meat” project between the Ev-on, and myself.. It’s sorta representative of a spirit / energy I’m interested in bringing to my work today.. Hopefully Ev-on will play a roll in this..
The New Metal Track… This is very early.. and there’s even a lot of work I’ve done for this that is yet to be a part of the track.. but I wanted to have something to share with you anyway.
As we speak I’m getting ready to rush out of the house for a Jeff Pulver type meet up thang… So not too much time to talk about too much..
I’m working on the guitar solo section, for the track I’ve been talking about in recent postings.. I haven’t figured out the proper work flow with the liquid mix.. even when I turn all the plugins off.. I get high latency… so I decided to just create a new project, where I’d do the the guitar parts, and then import then into the main project.. hoping i can import the midi tracks whole sale.. just another thing to have to work out.
I’m engaging in a process I’ve done before.. You sit at your guitar and try and work out the parts, while programing them into the computer.. for synths to play / stand in for the guitars… so you can work out exactly how things fit together.. This process has its pros and cons.. not the least of which is it’s hard to make things swing.. and the midi parts are more approximations of what it’ll sound like, and the performances.. then they are actually what you plan on playing.. which creates the problem of hearing things kinda wrong during this stage of things. Further.. or even as a result.. this process can change what you’re writing.. so you write it in such a way to make it easier to program or perform.. which is less then ideal.
The advantage of this sorta thing.. well what I’m trying to do is create a solo section which is somewhat of a “jam out” section. You have two guitars doing there thing.. they, to one degree or another.. exchange between playing rhythm and lead… and will eventually work out to doing harmonized leads..
The plan is to actually attempt to perform the thing.. probably at about half speed.. and then edit / speed up to real speed.. in post, so to speak. This will result in a lot of work…. but I’m hoping it’ll be worth it. Just the fact that it is a lot of work.. may make it so this section will be rather short, tight, and concise.
lyrics
Another issue I’m having is in the lyrics: There is no verse chorus thing going on.. right now we just have 3 riffs that play into each other.. I’m writing out vocal lines without knowing what they should say. I have this feeling that there ought to some sorta chorus-ish part.. where we here the same lines repeated at different parts of the song…. but for now it seems like the first few words of the first riff.. will repeat.. and then it’ll all go in a different direction after the repeat.
guitar
Another idea that’s evolving is we might have 2 solo areas in the song.. The one I’m working on now.. and another that’ll be… fairly insane…
insanity
One thought is to just improvise out some guitar playing.. and then edit the solo’s in melodyne… make them all work together.. The challenge I foresee with this approach is.. that I play too damn fast.. The song is already a very fast song.. and even relative to that fast tempo.. the notes will no doubt go faster then any grid will work.. and I’m not sure how well Melodyne will cope with all that.
The real advantage of working this way is.. its a lot more human.. a lot more “the real me,” in a certain sense.. The performance will be more organic.. and the actual playing will be.. more and unpredictable.
Later, back from Pulver:
Had a really great time, I LOVE these things. There was a kind of after twitter-ish party that lead out to karaoke.. It was a rather intimate crowd at this point… Apparently there was a party from Google there as well.. which made it sorta surreal.. being with social media folks and the fellow who started VON….
I’d say more about.. the project or the night.. but I’m feeling like my blogging has had better moments, so I’ll just leave this as it is.
Ok, this is a somewhat long-ish story.. the story of Matt’s recent woes.. from anxiety, career, money, banks, and what not to.. well lets say stuff.. which will eventually lead us into my most recent trip to guitar center, the buying of the Liquid Mix 16, and then into the current music production project…
It all started last Sunday. I was in a sleep deprived state, and as is my way, running late to the Boston Media Makers. The Boston Media Makers is now taking place at Doyle’s Cafe in JP.. (Boston).. so it’s new media plus breakfast… and so I needed to go to the bank to get money to fill up my gas tank, buy an energy drink, smokes, and still have enough left over for breakfast.. and then things turned ugly!
The bank tells me I put in the wrong pin number.. a few tries latter and the ATM won’t give me the time of day. WTF I think… but being sleep deprived.. in a somewhat LSD like consciousness.. made even more LSD-ish after watching a documentary on the Beats.. who knows, maybe I did get the pin wrong?
So long story short, got Gas, smokes, and my Monster on credit, breakfast on cash… but it was a stress feast combination of sleep deprivation, running late, and.. the ATM experience. All of which fueled a little extra anxiety over how I presented myself at the media makers.. but that’s another blog entry.
[Editor’s Note: This is a long, sometimes rambling entry.. so brace your self, you hardy souls whom might actually get through it.. also to note is a certain connection between this entry, and the recent social media cool-aid entry.]
More problems:
I was actually planning on buying a computer monitor, at Micro Center in Boston, with cash after the meeting… It’s the closest “good” computer store I know… or at least see if they had the Dell I wanted, what there price was.. and that sorta thing.
The food supply in the house was running low.. so grocery shopping had to be done soon.
My dad had medication that needed to be picked up from the CVS
I should maybe break off from this and explain my anxiety paranoia at this point? When my mom died I was told, by a couple aunts, not to pay the credit card bills that were my mom’s bills. Someone had talked to a lawyer about this.. and something to do with Massachusetts state law.. trouble is, I never actually talked to a lawyer.. and am kind of vague about all this.
[Editors note: Matt wanted to insert this scene from the end of THX 1138, as it seems express of the psycho reality of his situation.
You’d perhaps have to see the full movie to really appreciate the significants of this clip.. and probably need to read the rest of the blog entry to, while you were at it.. but pay attention to a certain subtext of this blog entry.. its all sorta crystalized here..]
In any event… there’s lots of credit card companies calling the house.. I have yet to talk to any of them as.. well until I get the iPhone.. I’m a very difficult person to get in touch with via the phone.
Now the LSD like consciousness of sleep deprivation does have… well you sometimes attribute causality to things that, in reality, don’t have a causal connection. These causal connections are truths of a kind of symbolic nature.. they have something to do what’s going on in you psyche.
So what’s going on in Matt’s psyche?
This is really a subject for another time, I mean to really dig into… I will tell you that since my mom passed things have not been real easy… and that most of the uneasiness of it is not something that expresses its self consciously.. It’s kind of a complicated thing.. and I feel like blogging about it might actually be helpful to me.. or at least talking about it.. but it’s somehow hard to talk about.
All these inward tension.. they expressed them selves in the paranoid dilution that.. well I think the bank might actually be one of the creditors… so the paranoid delusion.. was there was something more to my inability to get into the bank then.. some sorta pin number problem. And with this was the fear that I wouldn’t have access to money to pay bills.. so I shouldn’t write a check till I got to the bottom of this.
On top of all that.. another expression of anxiety is a procrastination of bill paying.. so the bills are.. now in the over due column.. and one expects one’s credit is getting dinged.
Crazy is as Crazy Does
Ok.. so allow me to stop here and try and explain a little of this.. For one thing I’ve been behind on sleep for a little while now… for another I’m being a little operatic in how I’m talking about it.. which is to say I’m amplifying the story a little.. which is not quite to say I’m not crazy.. just that.. I’m turning up the gain of a certain sorta crazy.. or perhaps on the microscope through which we are looking at it…
[editors note: Matt’s operatic-ness, at this point in the entry, is mainly expressed through with language like “paranoid delusions,” which sorta overstates things “a bit.” And what he’s talking about is the casual connections sleep deprivation is facilitating.]
Matt’s Plot
Ok, so lets pull back a little and take a look at my life’s plot, and where this moment fits in it all. I’m trying to do this “artist” shtick thing. I don’t know if you’ve heard the cliche about starving artists? Well.. I don’t believe that being an artist means you have to starve.. but the cliche is at least expressive of the fact that making a living as an artist is no easy feet.. more so when you’re as uncompromising as I am.
Though I march forward in a sorta heroic-ish way.. I don’t think anyone could walk this walk without there being a lot of really huge tension over what the future might bring.. It’s really that I’m crazy enough to not let that keep me from walking this way… [Editors note: This would be part of the significance of the THX reference] but there is still that fear that it might all come to naught.. and that perhaps all my sacrifices are in vain.. and this is a very big tension.. particularly as it interacts in a larger ecology of tensions.
Now.. if you ask me about the “objective real reality” of the situation.. I’ll tell you.. things are probably “A-Ok.” Allow me to give you reasons why things are probably “A-Ok.”
I’m doing the social media shtick. Why would this make things A-Ok? Well.. I’m connected / networked in with a pretty substantial crowd of folks. If you’re reading this, you might be one of said substantial folks? There’s a humanness to.. many of these connections where.. to one degree or another, we really do care about each others well being.. and.. all of us are pretty well connected, one way or another.. and the long and the short of it is.. social media is a powerful tool for finding work.
It is not an infrequent thing that.. I get a job lead.. or some connection leads to something. Of course I don’t put a premium on following this stuff up.. because of how focused I am trying to be on trying to do my own thing.. but the point is there is stuff out there.
Very sweet and wonderful people have actually come out and asked me what they could do to help. Can you dig that? For me that’s down right mind blowing.. but its true.
What I’m doing.. in my own adventures.. has within it’s self the idea.. that I’m putting together a skill set for a job that does not yet exist. And believe it or not I’m actually networking with people who could us those services.. even if they don’t know it yet.
Latter:
There’s more to this story… lots more.. but for the purposes of this blog entry I only want to go so far as to say that tensions can obscure this reality.. so that it doesn’t feel like things are “A-Ok” in the big picture… even if they kinda sorta are. And we could talk about this more but…
Yeah.. so imagine the fear like.. you don’t know if you’re going to be able to take care of your father or your self, that the world could be crumbling down… This kind of stress inevitably leads me into pushing harder in my work.. and my self criticism gets much worse then it sometimes can be anyway.
None of this would have been a big deal if not for.. by that monday.. there was very little food in the house.. and if not for.. I had gotten to the bank that day prior to its closing.. I didn’t realize this.. but our bank likes to close at 4PM.. in order to get there I kinda have to fight my way through my tensions over it.. and so find myself there and.. the bank closed.. and I didn’t even know there hours! And so days passed with this hanging over my head.. all of it.
Add to all this that here I am gearing up on these music projects.. and I need to go out and buy more gear! I was also planning on getting an iPhone.. still needed to buy my Podcamp ticket.. I’m not sure what else.. and all of that was.. at least in my fears, looking like it might not work out.
And the dark clouds reseed.
Well finally I did get into the bank.. did make a with drawl so I have enough cash in my pocket to run for a few weeks.. somehow the pin number.. sorta fixed, accept it still wasn’t able to use it.. so maybe I’ve somehow miss remembered it.. anyway they are sending me the numbers so I’ll have them..
That dark cloud emphasized how fragile I can feel.. way out here in starving artist vill.. and it was a crazy rough week for me.. when the clouds finally did leave.. I finally decided that it was indeed time to make my trip to Guitar Center and pick up Liquid Mix 16. This was a long deliberation.. most of which is documented in this blog..
But wait, there’s more!
I couldn’t find my car keys.. and not only that but I still had grocery shopping yet to do.. I had done a little after the with drawl… but.. now without my keys, how could I do this? It wasn’t till sometime today when I finally found the keys.. and boy do I hate doing grocery shopping on the weekends, when the places are a crowded madness.. screw that!
So I made my way over to Guitar Center, finally. Was I really going to do it?
I wish I knew these guys names more.. I told the sales guy “I’m here for the Liquid Mix 16.” His eyes sorta widened.. “That’s a great little unit.” What? Every sales guy in the pro audio department didn’t even know what it was.. nor did they know much of anything of any of the mix engineer-ish tools I had been looking for.. but this guy new it.. and was thinking of getting one for him self.
I then rattled off a number of things I had been looking for..
Ok, let me explain. Guitar Center has a thing where you pay no interest for 3 months, 6 months, a year.. depending on what mood there marketing department is in.. what this means is you can buy stuff on credit without interest payments.. which is something you can’t easily do over the internet.. and credit card interests rates being what they are.. buying on credit will add a hell of a lot to your bill.. so going to Guitar Center for the big ticket items is what makes the most sense at this point..
So a number of pieces of gear.. gear that other sales folks had never even heard of.. stuff that you often can’t find on the Guitar Center website.. he could find in the computer.. stuff that the other sales folks didn’t think they carried.
So it was pretty awesome.. I mean he could actually answer some of my questions!
Onto the Liquid Mix 16
I had read where people had had problems with instillation.. particularly with Digital Performer.. and boy have I had software problems lately.. so I was a little nervous.. but the instillation was more or less as smooth as they come.. and before you knew it, I was up and running.
Liquid Mix is… well you get a library of 40 compressors and 20 EQs. I’ve explained this ad nauseam else where in this blog.. but basically you’re getting this library of the most high class EQs and Compressors on the planet.. each of which works in slightly different ways… is good for different sorts of applications.. colors sound differently.. etc.
The first problem you run into is.. “which should I use?” To further complicate matters.. its sorta like a hockey video game where they can’t use the names of real NHL teams.. where they can’t give you the names of the real gear you’re using.. not that that would make too much of a difference as I don’t actually know the names of the real gear anyway.. but.. if you read interviews with various mix engineers.. telling you what they use for what.. or articles on these subjects.. you’d kind of like to know what you’re dealing with… Fortunately I found an old Sound On Sound review of Liquid Mix that included the names.
The light in my room is out.. so I couldn’t actually go digging through magazines to find that recent article on mix buss compression… but upon doing the google.. I found this blog entry.. from of all people.. Charles Dye, which covered the subject.. and recommend an SSL compressor for my master buss. (Charles is quite the sophisticated fellow for this sorta thing).
And with that I jumped in
First, you must understand that I usually make crazy music like this (click on the little arrow to hear, and yes, it is a free download.. but it’ll stream for ya fine )
This kind of electronic music has very different sorta mixing requirements from my new experimental electronic metal thing.. I mean.. now I have to try and be “a real” mix engineer. God save us!!! And I was fearful that.. well I hear a lot of stories of the struggles folks go through when they are first starting out..
But strangely.. I felt as if I had discovered that I had a real talent for this… upon reflection
The Start of my Mix Engineering Training: “The JP Years.”
After college I would hang out with.. the man we call “The Doctor” aka Diggity Dave.. and Ev-on, as he sometimes refers to him self in the comments of these blog entries.. Now.. these fine upstanding citizens.. well
They are artists to.. and were struggling to
There was more alcohol and Pot going on then… lol, good times
Crazy adventures were the norm.. one could become quite a fine author with the material our of those times.
Diggity did indeed have a stereo system with the best speakers I had ever heard in my life.. at that point.
We’d throw CDs in there.. just to see what we had been missing all these years.. and I was forever analyzing the mixes. Mind you, at the time.. I wasn’t really all that sophisticated in my mix analytic abilities.. but it was surely something.. Dave and Evan’s music tastes had a whole lot of Hip Hop going on.. classic rock.. metal, electronic stuff.. even Curtis Mayfield.. quite the eclecticism.. and I with my Zappa and assorted strange stuff… and there was Jim whom would sometimes be there.. with his punk and indy rock.. and so.. though we were all rather poor.. we were wealthy in terms of the music we were all able to hear.. and it was quite an education.
I’d just listen to those records and dream of the day I could have a chance to put one together.. and could I ever make one as good as some of the stuff we were hearing? Oh my god, so much amazing stuff!!! Seems like these days I don’t get a chance to listen to too much.. but back then, oh wow!
The production in this track was a little rushed.. so there’s certainly things in there I’m not totally happy with.. but there’s also a lot in there that has me feeling very proud…. that I think is sorta amazing.. the marriage of the mix and the composition.. the experience.. the scenes.. the painting of it.. to put it a certain way.
When you listen to stuff like that.. you can kind of tell I’m really thinking about the mix… even if there are huge problems here and there.. and even the problems.. its sorta like a punk rock school of mixing or something.. where we kinda consider them in a different light.. or something.
So.. my music production is kinda all about the mix, on a certain level… but the mix isn’t static.. nothing stays still. In metal.. things stay still. The guitarist stays over there.. the bass player over there… no ones moving that drum set.. so my electronic music is all about a mix that has a virtual stage that is forever in flux. I regard it much more as being about “Mix Painting” then “Mix Engineering.”
Buckling down into Metal. My god, how am I going to handle this? I didn’t know.. but I knew investing in Liquid mix would be an important step along these lines.
First Impressions on the mix metal path
The first thing you realize is that what you’re really doing, as a mix engineer, is quite subtle. No wonder those guys seem so obsesses over so many little things that I don’t think I can even hear! Being subtle is the first thing you have to get used to… That you’re really thinking in terms of a lot of subtle colorations which, hopefully, eventually lead up to a whole that is more then the sum of the parts..
My recent obsession with effects has been one of… well a kind of obsession with with subtleties.
Next morning (still not really awake):
The metal I have going on right now is.. incredible
The transition from my normal experimental production and composition style.. to a metal sorta song writing thing is a huge jump. In my electronic stuff there are no rules… there certainly isn’t anything like a traditional structure.. and In Metal.. I’m not sure how traditional my structures will turn out to be.. but at least from a starting point sorta perception of things.. I need to figure out how to make my music work inside of the limitations of a popular music format.
The funny thing is.. I’m kind of an amazing heavy metal guitarist from certain perspectives. As a guitarist I’ve never been too terribly big on playing other people’s music.. I’ve maybe learned 3 such songs in my life.. but I’ve certainly learned a lot of riffs.. and what not… The point is that my guitar playing has really always centered around.. being more interested in making original music then replicating other folks stuff.
I would say, generally speaking.. my style draws heavily from the riffs of Black Sabbath.. and a kinda speed-e metal of Metallica and Megadeth… and from there comes an original vision. That vision is largely about a strange interpretation of music theory… and a strange kind of aesthetic vision.
For me, a lot of what you of what you see, in say a John Coultrane.. is like.. just natural and obvious? Let me share with you two videos.. one with Coultrane playing, another with a critic talking about it.
In a certain sorta way you could kinda imagine critics talking about my work this way.. hope that doesn’t sound arrogant but..
Now I’m not sure if Ben Ratliff totally gets it. See… composition is about “organization” of sound, and the framework for how we organize sound.. is the same sorta thing for how we organize facts into a conception of reality… and that’s sorta the implication of what Coltrane is doing… Thus a critics application of the terms of American Transcendentalism is… not really all that far fetched. [Editors note: The second critic quoted.. his “conversion story” has some relation to the earlier THX clip]
So if I tell you that I have a hard time thinking inside of conventual structure, that’s sorta what’s interesting in my work.. So here I am embarking on an adventure to.. think in conventional structure? I’m not totally sure about this, I think maybe its like.. that’s just the starting point.
So I’m obsessing on song writing.. thinking about song writing, or thinking about music making from a “song writers” perspective…..
It’s so hard to know how to bring you in on this.
In a traditional structure there are lots of possibilities. (sub structural interest?)
Lets say you have a chord progression going on.. Now really, that chord progression could be anything.. but what we usually here is sorta limited… I mean were used to a fairly limited number of chord progressions. Once you have your chords progression, there is the question of how it gets voiced by the individual instruments… What’s guitar 1 play, what’s guitar 2 play, what’s the bass playing… Even if what we have going on is a simple riff… that riff can be interpreted different ways.. you could have two guitarists harmonizing the riff… or playing different parts of the chord.. and perhaps they don’t play it the same way twice..
Then you have the matter of how each instrument “interprets” the other instruments.. I mean screw the preconceived chord structure! This where we are in some ways echoing Coultrane.. or Jazz.. This is especially doable in a metal context because… the guitars are generally not playing the 3rds.. So how is the vocal line to relate to the guitars?
Then you have.. well you have things like how one riff relates to the next… how the riffs are moving around.. In the particulars of how I’m working.. the consideration is generally.. where’s one riff starting and ending.. what’s the chord there.. and then if you look at that riff over all.. where is it hanging out most.. and how do these characteristics relate to the riff that came before? There’s also issues of how the energy works in a given riff.. contrasts in energy.. and a number of other things.
So all of this is kind of how I think about music generally.. when making it, but it’s different in that.. It’s like going from free verse poetry to poetry with a structure. What’s interesting about being forced to work inside a structure is.. you find your self spending more time refining things… as I write vocal lines I’m like “oh, no really, what’s the right word to put here?”
There also is structural anarchy going on.. which in a certain way you could call the linguistic framework of the music. Or the anarchical aspects create the linguistic interest…
My Goal
My goal is to make something that is.. as good as anything I’ve ever heard before, at least. Good in the sense of.. how developed the details are, in the sense of the refinements of the song writing.. the composition… the mix. Beneath all of this there is the essential idea of what it is I’m doing.. the core of it.. and that… that I think is amazing.. and that’s one of the first things that hits me…. that’s one thing that is already in it.
I think it must be the anarchy speaking.. It must be my difficulty fitting in, in a certain way.. it must be how strange I am.. that that strangeness has been allowed to evolve for so long.. to have its own depths, its own maturity.. that it managed to escape the forces of socialization.. that we are seeing a kind of new animal before us.. one that lives within us all.. and it is like a call to becoming… a voice we have often heard before.. but perhaps did not have the courage to follow.
Creating the Mix and the Song at the same time:
The process is an experimental one.. one where the composition it’s self, at a certain point, is made to fit the mix, just as the mix is made to fit the music…. and the mix even is the music. So again.. I’m drawing from my experimental electronic music.
A we bit latter:
So let me wrap this up
For starters I’d say that I think this new direction in my music.. will correct certain problems I have with my work.. I’ll leave this at that.
Now I want to talk about Anxiety.
A little while ago I did a post entitled Death by Anxiety. It was a kind of strange post. It was strange in that it painted a picture of myself that was.. raw and naked and.. well what it was. After making that post, and the feedback I got on it.. I started to think of my self in different terms then I normally do. The people in the videos suffered from very bad anxiety.. and I both identified with them, and began to see the roll of anxiety in my life in a way that threatened my self concept. This then lead into a wrestling with the subject.. and it reached it’s worst point when I ran into my ATM trouble.
One of the things you run into thinking, or I did, was.. is anxiety an organic problem? Some sorta genetically inherited issue.. was it a mistake to blame my mom for it? Perhaps heavy metal is nothing but a kind of expression of anxiety? Or I mean about anxiety? What is anxiety?
Well you know I’m kind of a philosopher of the mind… and in my LSD like sleep deprived consciousness… I began to explore my mind in relationship to anxiety. Indeed the anxiety threatened to capsize me!
One of the things I notices was that anxiety seemed to be a “normal psychology” that relates to reality in “interesting ways.” Anxiety seemed to be a situation where the unconscious mind is participating in our organization of the details of life, of reality, and painting a picture for us. Reality is ALWAY this… as we experience it.. detached objectivity, though it is a modern ideal, is an illusion. Reality is ONLY experienced through the lens of consciousness. And so it is that anxiety is an adventure into our own depths.. with our depths expressing its self on the world around us, or through our experience of the world around us.
This is obvious enough stuff.. to any student of depth psychology… medication treatment is never about fundamentally changing the matter, its about living with it.. where as the natural way of the psyche is one of changing the matter. Indeed, it would seem that anxiety is actually a kind of advanced process of self evolution. We are confronted with the question of how do we relate to our own depths.. as this is projected in front of us. Our living in the world becomes about a psychological process / evolution.
I have a long held belief, a kind of presumption, that one’s psychological reality is always as it is for a reason. The existence of a psychological phenomenon is there to serve us, if we can just find the proper relationship to it.
As I stated earlier in this entry… there are things In my life that I’m having a hard time dealing with… It’s hard enough that I’m really only able to deal with so much of it at a time.. in a kind of direct experience. When the pressure of it builds up to a certain point.. it forces a confrontation. It can ether do this via a sorta psychological confrontation, or via reality.. by which I mean that the unfolding events of one’s life are direct manifestations of the inward realities, versus a projection onto our understanding of reality.. we are, after all, talking about the first stage here.
When I talk about composition as being about organizing factors that have a relationship to how we organize our understanding of reality.. and when I say my music is prophetic in the sense that I’m developing new organizational methods.. more advanced, I think, then what has come before.. my music, on a compositional level, is a way of dealing with all of this.
This is really deep and profound stuff..
Latter:
THX 1138 Revisted
THX 1138 is a dystopia… its is a kind of prophetic vision of our modern situation.. A few points
The power relationships relative to mental health, define what is a normal or not normal… and of course proscribe medication.. treatment that, as mentioned above.. is more about coping that dealing with the underlying problems. In THX it is law that we take medication, and when we stop taking it.. we become anxious
Consumption is the enforced behavioral norm in THX.. again leading to the behavior control.. the sense that everything is “A-Ok.” We see this in normative modes of being.. in our modern situation.
It’s really all about the power to define a thing. We are now used to –
Next day
I’m thinking this entry is long enough, and I ought to cut it short.. what I want to suggest is that there are connections between social control, anxiety, human potential, the structure of the psyche, collective evolution, and um.. so the symbolic significance of what I’m trying to do… has to do with how I’m relating to this complex of factors, and how my work does.. and we’ll leave this at this for now.
[editors note: This was written a few days ago.. Matt sorta touches on some of what he’s explore for his new “super duper” heavy metal.. which is a kind of crazy combination of heavy metal and electronic music.. the electronic music element being mainly about music production techniques rather then genera.. mostly all this as it relates to guitar playing, and aesthetics more generally]
I just got in, a little while ago, from Guitar Center. I went there to pick up picks, found it was a big sale day.. so I bought a audio cable to. I also came dangerously close to buying an electronic drum kit.
On Electronic Drums.
Super duper long term readers will no doubt know.. that I’ve been thinking about buying an electronic drum kit for about 3 or 4 years. The reasons are as follows:
They are generally cheaper then acoustic kits
They produce MIDI, I can sequence them into my electronic music’s work flow
Electronic drum kits are probably pretty good for heavy metal production styles
They don’t make to much noise, so neighbors won’t hate me
It would allow me to create a situation where folks could come over and jam
learning to “think like a drummer” is pretty important for what I’m doing
Hey, it’s a pretty cool thing
Did I mention I have a fairly substantial drum sample library? Battery, Kontakt, Reason, Ableton Live.. all come with such things.. plus the LMR4 from Steinberg.. and the Waldorf Attack drum synth..
So.. Guitar Center had $100 off a super cheap-o electronic drum kit. The sales guy was actually someone I felt pretty good about.. asked questions.. and it came around to the feeling that I would need to buy a special double bass piece to go with the kit.. and the whole think would be… oh, around $700. This would be a little more then what I’d planned to spend, should I get a kit.. but maybe it would be worth it?
I had him go searching for the kit.. the box.. and it was found that there were no boxes in the store, the only option was the display unit, and I just wasn’t willing to buy the display unit without further discount so… I returned home without the drum kit, and feeling a little relieved that I hadn’t parted with the money.
Onto the Guitar Madness
It’s been a while since I picked up my guitar.. or at least it feels like that. I still don’t have Melodyne working in DP.. accept that it will load up inside of Kore, so I figured that was good enough for government work in the Bush administration.. so decided to pull out the guitar.. which of course is why I went to Guitar Center in the first place.
It was time to restring my guitar… which I haven’t done in.. well probably a couple of years! So it’s interesting to hear what my guitar is supposed to sound like..
So I started to monkey around with Guitar Rig 3.. which I still haven’t done all that much with… just to kind of see what I had..
What blew my mind was.. even though I’m rusty as hell.. my hands are super duper uber fast. Yes boys and girls, I was meant to be a metal god!
On the negative side, though I wasn’t playing with melodyne as I was playing around, it was clear that my metal guitar playing isn’t really monophonic… which means those non-monophonic parts might not translate to terribly well. It was striking me to take notice of just how much of my guitar playing wasn’t monophonically orientated.
Ok.. so here’s the deal.. Monophonic basically means playing one note at a time. Metal is generally ether one note at a time or a “power chord.” A power chord is as good as monophonic… your two or 3 note move together.. and generally speaking the intervals stay the same wether it’s minor or major as there’s no 3rd in a power chord.. it’s just route 5th… The 3rd, of course, is the note that tells you if a chord is major or minor.
Here’s the think about my playing.. It’s all about blurring the root, 3rd, or 5th.. This is done in such a way so as the make my playing “extra dark.” My playing is perhaps “slightly darker then Black Sabbath.” In any event.. these moments of blurring are often polyphonic moments… and this blurring of the root, 3rd, and 5th is pretty much a corner stone of my style.
I spent a little time going over the usual suspect sorta riffs.. riffs I have lying around that I haven’t really gotten around to using for anything yet. When you figure there’s very little guitar playing in my music generally… these are most of the riffs I’ve come up with over the last.. 15 or so years.
So, early reflections on what I could mainly do?
I think its time to really think about song writing on the guitar: This is actually a lot of work. Though in recent posts I have characterized my notion of working with guitar and this sorta software as allowing me to be a more lazy guitar player.. the process of actually writing the music.. if you do it organically, without relying on the computer for at least your main riffs.. its still a lot of work.
Hours latter:
Well I’m going to interrupt the train of thought…
Guitar Rig 3’s Possibilities
I’ve been spending a lot of time playing around with Guitar Rig 3.. which is an interesting program. Guitar Rig models various amps, and effects, and what not.. It’s basically “everything you need for your guitar,” and bass guitar to for that matter. You can just go line in to your computer… and you’re good to go. Some will argue there are better ways to go, but it suits me well enough.
What makes it interesting, however.. or interesting to me today.. is that as of version 2 Guitar Rig has had elements of synthesizer architectures built into it. This amounts to various “modulation devices.” A “modulation device” is something that “modulates” “something.” Modulating something means that it controls that something… which will make more sense once I explain the modulation devices…
You have various modulation devices.. A basic one is an “LFO,” or low frequency oscillator. You could think of the second hand on a clock as an LFO, it’s frequency of oscillation is one cycle per minute. When the second hand is at 12, it could be generating a number like.. say 100, and when its at 6 o’clock.. lets say that’s zero.. as the second hand moves… the the number changes.. So, if you used your second hand to modulation a distortion effect.. when the second hand is at the 12 it’s really distorted, and when it gets to 6, its clean.. no distortion.
Now.. and I’m not even sure off the top of my head if Guitar Rig does this.. but you can have different “wave forms” of oscillators.. one way to conceptualize this is imagine of instead of a clock being a circle.. it was a triangle.. so the the numbers coming out of our clock don’t change evenly with respect to time.. sometimes it goes faster, sometimes slower.. repeating this in a constant pattern at a constant rate. Do you follow this? Well it doesn’t really matter… I just want to give you a basic idea of this.
Now there are other types of modulators.. modulators that respond to how hard you hit your strings.. or respond in relationship from when you hit the note.. or any number of other things.. and all modulators can be used to control anything in Guitar Rig 3.
So why is this interesting?
I’m not totally new to mucking around with these modulators, or Guitar Rig for that matter. What is new is the notion that my guitar parts, the audio of them, can be sequences, as can the over all mix, as can the parameters of Guitar Rig… and now even the audio being fed into Guitar Rig. This is a situation where the whole is more then the sum of the parts…
What I’m looking at now is the possibility that I could be making electronic music that doesn’t sound like electronic music.. I’m looking at electronic music that sounds like.. a real guitar player. I am, of course, a real guitar player.. but the situation, at least as far as I can tell, is I’m entering a situation where the only real limitations are my imagination.
I don’t know where I’m going, this is all an exploration of the unknown… I’m sure there’s lots of bands out there who are benefiting from these kinds of tools.. but I’ll bet not too much of them are using these kinds of technologies in a way that’s about exploring new possibilities.. it’s more about managing costs of production in a market place where the funds band have for working in the studio are drying up thanks to the implications of P2P, among other things. It’s about creating an idealized version of what bands have been doing forever.
I don’t believe in the idealized visions.. Ideals.. they are so often about “removing imperfections” as if the imperfections where not perfect. All things are perfect in there own way, the question of perfection is more, at least in my introverted prejudice’s point of view, more about relationships of things then things onto them selves… or its an ecology between these things.
What I’m interested in doing is like turning heavy metal into a fine art.. It’s a heavy metal that doesn’t live inside the old heavy metal box… This isn’t really some sort of elitism, and I don’t believe it carries the same sorta baggage that prog rock did.. It’s more like every piece of the puzzle gets more attention then it traditionally would.. and by doing this we can transcend the old forms.
For a long time I’ve been thinking about cliches.. The funny thing about cliches is that they carry inside them certain truths, certain meanings.. that somehow, the one who’s employing the cliche, has lost touch with. In any form of art, what you need to do is push beyond the preconceived notions everyone has.. or that’s what you need to do if you’re going to do anything worth while. You can do this via a cliche as long as you’re doing something with the cliche that’s worth while.
I’m in software hell, or so it seems. Perhaps computer hell would be a better way of putting it? I mean.. just the amount of issues I’ve had since I bought this computer.. between Apple doing a shitty job of getting this computer to me in a reasonable time frame.. issues with, I suppose, guitar center and native instruments.. with both Komplete and Kore… Issues with Adobe.. and now onto the issues with Melodyne.
So I don’t think I’ve mentioned it in this blog yet, but I ran out and bought Celemony’s Melodyne Studio. My hope is this could revolutionize the way I work, but that still remains to be seen… cause I’ve had a hell of a time getting the software to run on my machine properly.
First it wouldn’t install.. tech support got back to me pretty quickly.. and we got it installed.. only with a number of snags.
ReWire isn’t working.. which is fairly crucial to me.
Now both Ableton Live and Reason aren’t working.. again pretty crucial.
Molodyne will not run as a plug-in.. which is pretty crucial to me…. haven’t tried to get it in ReWire mode yet.
Then tech support started to slack off a bit, I suppose you could say.. and I was only getting about one email a day… and then yesterday I didn’t hear anything from them.. so I emailed today, wondering what was up.. and explaining that this problem had sorta stopped my work, and all that.. and they tell me it is definitely not a known problem…. and gave me some instructions on how to.. I guess uninstall and then reinstall the software, and hopefully clear up whatever the issue is.
I haven’t bothered to go through the hassle of trying to follow those instructions yet.. only just got in the door a little while ago after all… Think I might jump in the shower, get something to eat, and see what happens. Mean while it’s about 12:15 am…
Some first impressions of the new possibilities
I will give you something of my first impressions.. first impressions based off playing with some of the tutorials: I think melodyne could absolutely revolutionize the way I work.. and could be what I’ve been looking for for years…. I’m very excited about it, but we’ll have to see if can live up to that kind of excitement and expectation.
Still, even with the questions marks hanging over the situation.. dreams do flow. If, with the help of a little software, I can kinda sorta sing… that seems like an amazing possibility. I could write songs about anything! It’s not even that I have a lot of confidence in my song writing ability.. it’s more like.. well maybe confidence in my imagination.. I feel like I could do some freaking amazing stuff.
You add to that that you’re supposed to be able to sequence audio like I can sequence midi / program performances for electronic instruments? Dude, I could make metal like no one has ever heard before!!!
The combination of these two things has me dreaming in ways I’ve never really dreamed before. It has me feeling like a sound artist in a way I haven’t felt before.
And if dreams can become reality? Well… lets just say I have a lot more confidence in the possibility of making a living from my work then I had a month or two ago.
So, how does this change our plot?
Next night:
Back to the tech woes
It’s about 1:20 AM, I followed the tech supports advice.. and now Melodyn is installed, and Reason and Live are working.. The only snag is DP is not recognizing the Audio Units plug-in.
Let me see if I can sorta explain this a little bit: Melodyne studio has a plug-in called “Melodyne Bridge.” What you do is put the plug-in on the first insert effects slot of the channel you’re working on, and it streams the audio out of your DAW and into Melodyne Studio.. or something like this? Maybe it just puts it in Melodyne studio? In any event, if you want to do the serious audio sequencing of your stuff.. you do that in Melodyne Studio… and you do that via Melodyne Bridge.
Melodyne Studio will also allow you to work with Melodyn via ReWire, but as near as I can tell this means that whatever audio you’re working with has to start out in Melodyne. For the project I’m working in now.. I have audio in Live that I’d like to, one way or another, be able to mess with in Melodyne. This would be the crazy processed vocal tracks… It might be nice to control there pitches.. to whatever extent I could.. [editors note: the “crazy processed vocals” references a post I have yet to post.]
They are so processed that it is likely that Melodyne won’t work well with them.. Melodyne like’s signals that are as dry as possible, which is why you put the plug-in in the first insert slot of the channel who’s audio you want to work with.
Seeing as I haven’t actually worked with Melodyn yet.. not in these kinds of contexts.. I’ve only done a few tutorials and skimmed through the manual, I don’t know how all this works in practice… So what I’m saying here is not as reliable as it could be.
The fear I have is… one of work flow. Ideally I’d like to be able to see what’s going on with what in an integrated fashion.. So if I’m sequencing audio.. I’d like to see those pitches in the same place that I see my MIDI notes, and as far as I can see, this is an impossibility. The best solution I can think of is to finally go ahead and take a look at getting a second monitor. I’ll likely do this sunday after the Boston Media Makers meeting.
The Second Monitor
I’m looking at Dells.. Dell offers 2 24″ HD monitors.. one is a bit more econo class then the other.. Origionally my plan was to go all econo class.. though I ended up running out and bying an acer, which is sorta super econo class. This isn’t really a problem.. I mean I still love the monitor and it’s amazing to me that you could get a 24″ HD monitor for so cheap.. but..
I really want my second monitor to be capable of playing movies from some sort of a Blue Ray type DVD drive.. or perhaps from cable.. and the higher end Dell has a much higher contrast ratio and.. well if you’re serious about color, which as a visual artist you can’t help but be, you really need the better monitor. Another feature I like of it is the built in card reader plus the USB hub. If that weren’t enough it’s rotatable.. so it can be a horizontal wide screen sorta thing.. or a vertical tall sorta thing. This latter option would be absolutely awesome for working with Reason.. among other things.
How’d the tech support leave ya?
So, how do my technical challenges, and experiences with there tech support, reflect on Celemony?
I think the problem came down to some sorta corruption on the installer DVD.. which is why, as the tech support guy said “this is anything but a known problem.” While it would be possible for the tech support experience to be better.. having to wait around to hear back.. and then having to email back to hear back.. and all that.. I have to say that.. I don’t feel that it was that bad.
How many times do you feel like it’s not really a human interaction with the tech person you’re dealing with? How many tech support people will treat you like a moron? If anything they might have assumed I was more sophisticated then I am.. He told me I had to repair disk permission as a part of the process.. but didn’t explain that you do that through Apple’s hard disk utility.. I sorta knew that, but I wouldn’t necessarily imagine the average user would.
I think it was a stump the experts sorta situation… and that these kinds of things happen.. well that’s just the way things are.. so it doesn’t bother me too much. So over all it was a positive sorta thing.. my first interaction with company.. or I certainly don’t feel pissy about it.
So if the software works great.. yeah, I’ll be recommending it a good deal..
Back to how all this effects our Plot:
I dream of a creative process… a process that is very different from my current process: My current process is very much a slave to technical considerations.. I see the possibility, at least, of leaving those shackles behind. I could sit down, write out some lyrics, see what I think.. sit down on my guitar, riff away.. come up with something here, something there.. and just sorta put it together in the computer.
Conventionally, if I want to put guitar playing into my music.. just a simple riff, it’ll take me about a day, between the conception and getting the performance up to par.. When you’re dealing with integrating guitar based music into an electronic context.. the beat of the electronic stuff is robot on perfect, which is different from how real humans play… this robot on perfect then highlights the imperfection of your playing, calling you to a higher standard. This isn’t always ideal.. there’s value in human imperfection..
In any event.. when I work on the electronic music side of things, I tend to work very very fast.. my compositional process is one of reacting to what I’m producing.. so if the process has to get slowed down to the point that it takes a day just to put in one guitar part… that kinda throws a monkey wrench into the process.. it disturbs your perception of your musics ecology..
If, on the other hand, I could sit down at my guitar, come up with a riff, record it, fix it, and go.. the process will not be disturbed.. If my guitar playing is more like.. a basis for something.. that I can then transmute into something else again… we’re really talking about limitless possibilities.. I mean the music I make will not be limited by the limitations of my musicianship.. which is really why I got into electronic music in the first place.
Video’s to End on
This is mildly off topic, but fits into the larger conversation, and I thought it was real interesting to take a look at.. from the 1980s
How about that.. a compact disk or “cd” using laser beams? Pretty sci fi ha?
[editors note: This is yet another one of them unpublished blog entries.. it’s a long one.. that never real gets to what it aims to get to be about.. this idea for a “new super metal.” Think of it as part one, or like a fragment of a larger idea. ]
My process, at the moment.. at least in some areas, is more about thinking then doing… and at the moment this involves an awful lot of research related to sound studio tools. As wee speak, in fact, I find myself gong through about 4 or 5 years worth of Sound On Sound magazines.. SOS being a music production orientated mag… and um.. checking out various web sites and just.. doing a lot of poking around.. and I suppose in all of this I’ve only started to do my research.
It’s probably not a good idea to dream too much about what you could do with a tool.. till you actually have the tool.. as.. well dreams and realities in this area can be two very different things.. but none the less, one of the things I’m dreaming about is the notion of creating a new “super metal.” Allow me to try and explain this.
I make a kind of experimental electronic music. At this point in the story of this, I’m interested in exploring different sorts of processes as a part of my productions… That said.. there are certain processes that are sorta like foundational elements of how I work. I call them foundational because.. its as if when ever you do anything.. you develop muscles by which you can do that thing better.. perhaps more efficiently.. perhaps whatever..
In my production process, one of the strongest muscles I have has to do with programing the performances of various instruments and effects… indeed the mix to. This muscle is very very strong.. but also very limited in the scope of what it can do. A part of exploring new processes is about broadening the scope of this muscle.
It’s looking to me like Melodyne will fit into this process in a rather exquisite sorta way… Allow me to speak of this.
For starters… when the new version comes out.. it looks like you’ll be able to sequence audio in more or less the same way I do with MIDI now…. err, kinda sorta. But to put it simply.. if you can change the pitches, and where the notes fit time wise.. well, I can build guitar performances the same way I can build any other sorta performance.. for any other sort of instrument.
The history of MIDI as a part of the electronic music production environment is one that is dominated by keyboards as you’re controller.. Most people will play a keyboard into there computer, edit there performance.. and that will be how they work. I, on the other hand, program from scratch. While I’d love to work in a process that starts with a keyboard performance.. the truth is that I’m not much of a keyboard player. One can be not much of a keyboard player, and still use ones keyboard playing as the basis of a production.. and so rather effectively.. but this is a process I have yet to really explore.
Now.. if you can take a guitar performance and basically edit it the same as you would a MIDI performance.. well, exploring the possibilities of using my guitar playing as the basis of a production.. starts to make a lot of sense. Further, because you can convert the audio to MIDI, to then control various instruments.. well now we are entering a world where.. in a lot of ways, working this way might make a lot of sense.
As a guitarist I’m.. I have very good technical chops. Indeed I could be a regular guitar hero.. accept that I’m not really a “whole guitar player.” What I mean by this is.. basically I have other things to do then play guitar all the time.. so my guitar playing has a lot of flawed areas, never mind that it’s perhaps not growing as much as I’d like. But the thing is.. if I can compensate via sequencing type editing of my guitar performances? Well now we’ve got some really interesting possibilities.
The commercial issues of metal versus my experimental electronic music
From my point of view there is the issue of commercial potential. The kind of electronic music I made is, basically, a kind of “serious electronic music” which doesn’t fit into a popular form too terribly well. I can imagine it being popular.. but it does carry a lot of challenges with it. A significant part of those challenges is simply that.. it doesn’t fit into any known genera which really complicates marketing…
Heavy metal, on the other hand, is one of the most popular music forms going.. It’s a much larger market, and it’s a much easier market to reach.
Another interesting element is.. I don’t really know that much about the electronic music market, electronic music genres, the history of it.. or anything really… So I’m at a real disadvantage. Metal, on the other hand, is something I know very well… even if I’m not totally up on what’s new in Metal.
What I’d do with Metal
One of the things that’s really important to me is that my music have a lot of integrity.. The notion of moving to metal because the commercial potential is better might sound a little like selling out…. but there’s no reason that that has to be the case…
Another interesting point is that my interest in electronic music.. started out with a notion of exploring things that might have metal type applications… It was as if there was a certain metal aesthetic behind how I was thinking about electronic music. This was more then 10 years ago.. and I certainly have evolved but… there is this strange way where the structural thinking of my stuff has certain metal kinds of things behind it. How about some examples…
What I want you to take note of in this is.. The way its a kind of heavy metal roller coaster ride.. the technical sophistication / demands of the music.. It might also be worth noting that we see harmonic minor modalism going on in here… both the roller coaster and the harmonic minor modalism I take to further extremes in my music… you could think of my stuff as almost like megadeth on steriods in a certain sense:
Not that I’m the biggest Metalica fan at this point.. but here’s Metallica at a similar stage.. Note the changes.. again roller coaster ish metal
Of course… what I’m thinking of doing is a little more candy coated…
[editors note: Matt wishes you could hear the line “just who’s mystic am I anyway” a little better.. sorta fits into the conceptual continuity of the blog, ya know?]
Of course, I plan to be “a little” more creepy… as unlike Manson, I shall be presenting serious philosophical challenges to civilization as we know it. Err, and did I mention I want to be explicit about corrupting you’re children? (too complex a topic to go into here.) The other thing to make me more creepy is I tend to indentify more with God.. which is a hell of a lot more scary then Satan!
Another type of Candy:
So what do you think, to much compression in there production style? I’ve always thought these fellows where a little too candy coated:
Ok.. so lets cut the BS, ha? Lets see something much closer to where I’m coming from… how about this? (No one does slayer like these guys!)
I think there’s a lot to the Metal genera to be critical of.. cliché’s up the ying yang.. a kind of stupid pose.. A way the form often has more to do with low budget commercial conceptions then anything like “art” or creative possibilities.
I suppose the metal quality to my work might be something like.. a surface glaze?
Much Latter:
Ok, well lets talk about my metal, lets see if we can get to it.. cause I’ve been working on the design for.. geeze, a good 15 years or so?
There’s a kind of starting point.. and then there’s how it stretches out into abstraction. See, as you no doubt know, metal starts in rock, and rock starts in blues and… well metal also starts in Jazz.. but…
So I start out in minor chord progressions.. the “minor” quality and abstract into synthetic scales.. which is sorta.. well welcome guitar geek-dom, right? Well music theory geek-dom anyway. I’ve mention in the above Megadeth track.. that there was “harmonic minor modalism” going on.. modalism is probably most often associated with Miles Davis.. and harmonic minor comes from classical.. It’s what gives the Megadeth it’s middle eastern flavor.
Modalism, really, is a kind of.. lets call it “a tactical response to the challenges of improvisation.”
[editors note: So Matt sorta stopped writing around this point, which is probably where things would have likely gotten interesting.. *sigh* and then there was this other fragment that he was going to try to integrate into the flow latter on.. well, lets have the fragment]
Well it starts with Ozzy actually. When I was first starting to listen to music / explore music.. Ozzy was one the first bit of music I found that was like.. I’d listen to endlessly… and it was also some of the first stuff I started playing on the guitar.
[editors note: And that’s where it ends, just like that.]
[editors note: This was written, or at least started, a long while back, so it doesn’t fit in the chronology quite right]
Guitar Rig is a part of the Komplete package.. And it’s occurred to me that I should give it a test drive.. as I haven’t since I installed Komplete.
I haven’t actually picked up my guitar in an awful long time.. which normally results in “I can’t quite play this damn thing.” But today I’m feeling pretty good.
Guitar Rig 3 doesn’t seem to me much more exciting then Guitar Rig 2.. there’s a few additions, and things tweaked.. but I wouldn’t be inclined to upgrade if I wasn’t upgrading as a part of the Komplete bundle..
I’ll tell you what’s been a pain in the butt though.. setting up audio. I don’t know how much of this is to blame on how Apple does things, or now much could be laid at the foot of Native Instruments.. For one thing Kore is working as an interface, but it’s not allowing me to monitor via it’s head phone out.. which is quite a pain in the but.. and ultimately means that Kore is sorta useless to me.. as far as operating stuff in a stand alone way.. The only way I’ve really been able to do things is via opening them up inside of Digital Performer..
DP allows me to route to multiple available audio interfaces at once.. which can be Kore, my attached Zoom H4, or the Mac’s built in audio.. so once in DP it’s all things go.. but none of Native Instruments stand alone apps are so generous.. There’s enough gear in my studio that these kinds of problems aren’t real big problems.. but they are problems none the less.
I don’t know how much of the problem might be a Kore incompatibility with Leopard, versus how much could be.. a broken Kore.. such is the way of things at this juncture.
Fudging around, playing my guitar through Guitar Rig, lots of ideas emerge nearly instantaneously. I have this one idea that starts out rather bluesy.. kind of 12 bar blues esk thing.. but bent into a dissonance that evokes the coming of the dark one.. The idea would be you’d start off with this… and this would eventually lead us into some very very heavy metal sorta stuff.
There’s a bit of an open question as to where my sound projects might take me going forward. Generally, I’d like to bring my guitar playing into my music more then I have to date. The problem is.. creating guitar based music, at least for me, takes a lot longer then my usual electronic fair..
My Guitar Process:
The Basics
Different processes lead to different results.. I have more approaches to guitar, but I’ll give you “lets go write some stuff on the guitar” sorta shtick.
You just pick up the thing, and you play around. You don’t have to be plugged in.. but that can help. At some point in the process you’re working on different riffs, different ideas. Ultimately you have to really own these riffs and ideas… you just have to be flawless in your execution.. to the point where it will sound flawless under a microscope.
This is a sorta problem exacerbated by working with electronic music. Computers play dead on the beat every time.. if you don’t want them to play dead on every time.. you’ll have to mess with things. Humans are not so dead on.. This really isn’t a flaw.. there’s a whole art to how one might play around the beat.. who plays where.. and the tempo might change from one section of a song to another.. or be an expressive element.. in a way that’s difficult to model on the computer using current production technology.
The problem is.. with were I’m at.. is that the electronic elements will highlight any imperfections with my performance.. the result being that I can literally spend a whole day doing nothing other then working to perfect a riff.
Becoming a Better Guitar Player.
You sorta have to have goals. “Where do you see your self in 5 years?” Your skills, your chops, your performance frameworks, this is all stuff you build. As a composer, working with electronic music, my technical chops with the software become the language I try to make poetry with, so to speak.. On the guitar, my process of thinking is almost not thinking.. It’s somehow through muscle memory.. inside of which composition it’s self can be stored.. I mean there’s music theory that works on a muscle kind of level, if you can imagine that.
When I think about what sort of a guitar player I’d like to be.. one of the things I think about is “how do I want to think with my guitar.” You have these things called “scales” on which chords and melody are based.. knowing the scales allows you to think on the instrument. Most folks don’t really know all that many scales.. I mean its mostly just a question of what note you start with on the same scale.. and where on the neck you are.. if you’re good you’re maybe able to do this at any point.. at best you can’t really call these multiple scales.. its more like knowing different modes of the same scale…
My guitar playing isn’t that complex scale wise.. There’s a little bit of the pentatonic, the harmonic minors.. diminished scales, and augmented scales.. along with the conventional diatonic stuff.. but in my brains these exist more like abstractions of each other.. The way I would describe it is.. I’m almost thinking like “what sort of colors do I want to play with today” and I move in that direction.
See, chords are built on scales.. my knowledge tends to be fuzzy on a certain level.. On a 3 note chord I’m basically thinking in a spectrum between diminished, minor, major, and augmented chords.. that can be inverted anyway I please.. As far as I’m concerned I can forget scales and just play chords.. playing around with what chord is being played at any particular moment.. and thinking about chordal interrelationships as I move around.. In this way of thinking.. scales become a side effect of your chord changes.. what exactly constitutes a “chord tone” or a “scale tone” is an open question.
On some level I think of this as an almost more advanced way of thinking.. when you look at music theory.. its sorta all about what’s being played.. what this chord or that chord is.. how these things relate.. and blah blah blah.. but my compositions.. while on some level they might be intellectual exercises.. The actual choices I make are very often not purely rational. In fact the way I use reason is in the service of whatever trip I might be on.. Things get more interesting the further out there I go.. It eventually becomes a question of how out there can you go without loosing your grip on things.
Its sorta a basic principle of consciousness that you can only be conscious of so much at any given time..
Many days, perhaps moons, latter:
What I was trying to get at, maybe difficult to elucidate. Imagine musical composition.. theory, process, results, whatever, as a 3 dimensional object. What I’m talking about is changing your perspective on how you relate to that object. If you sit down at a keyboard, or on some staff paper.. that’ll organize how you think. The organizing of thought is like a way of organizing that 3 dimensional object. On a keyboard or on a staff paper, things like scales become vary obvious.. you’ll often start with a sense of scale.. and that will organize all the choices you make.. or this is sorta how things conventionally work.
When I talk about being “out there” what I’m saying is.. you’re in some sense blind folded.. you’re working with less information… less understanding. If you play chords, while being aware of the interrelationship of the notes of those chords.. scale becomes an implied thing, but its not the central starting place of what your doing.
I suppose how I work is a little bit like juggling musical composition conceptual frameworks. Each framework has a relationship to the other frameworks.
