slowburn

The last set of three songs is almost done. I’ve been adding some blips, bleeps and bloops to a couple of the songs using the Electribe ER-1 and Elektron Machinedrum. I’m trying to make sure I don’t add too much, and don’t try to fill up every available drum step with some noise any noise, but I am also getting a little tired of the sound of a full album’s worth of just the 808, 909, 606 and other Roland drum machines. I love those x0x kicks, snares and hats but trying to spice things up with just rimshots, maracas, and claps is starting to get old. The ER-1 and Machinedrum add some nice, subtle electro-percussion variety to the mix, which has also allowed me to trim down the other existing drum parts. I will probably go back through the other songs and add some blips and bleeps and noises where needed, using these two machines and the Nord Modular, which can make some nice bleeps of its own.

During the Eno/Wright lecture that I talked about in a previous entry, Eno talked about how when you have a steady drum beat going, taking a particular drum hit out of the pattern can have much more of an impact than putting additional ones in. Along those lines, when I have been getting bored with a song’s drum parts, I have been forcing myself to first try to make the existing beats more interesting by removing things, rather than adding them. But, of course, I also can’t resist adding some bloops…

I got this Nine Inch Nails remix CD a while back but forgot to mention it. They included all the multi-track masters for all the songs on their latest album “Year Zero” on a bonus DVD that’s included with the CD of remixes. The tracks are pre-formatted for Garageband or Ableton Live, and also include the raw WAVs if you want to use another program to mess with them. Remixing is a great way to dip your toe in electronic music production, and it’s also a nice, fun side project if you are hitting roadblocks with your own music. This CD/DVD combo is well worth picking up just to play with the master tracks!

After the album is finished up we will try doing a NiN remix or two using these. We will also try to get some of the slowburn tracks up in this format so other people can play around with them, something we’ve been meaning to do for a long time now and I just never got around to…

I was recently watching a DVD of a lecture by Will Wright and Brian Eno where Eno talked about what ambient music is, and it started to hit home that this is not going to be an ambient album. In particular he mentions ambient music just sort of flowing, and being a continuous presence in the background, and the experience should be more like watching a river than reading a novel. Well, this music has a lot of build ups, moments of tension and release, it does in fact try to grab your attention at times, and lately since I’ve been adding the drum parts I’ve realized it doesn’t even qualify for ambient under the broader “if it’s beatless, it’s ambient” definition that modern electronic acts have used. So this thing isn’t ambient at all, really. Whoops.

So, if it isn’t ambient, what is it? At this point in the project I’m hesitant to try to throw a label on it, because that would make me more likely to want to remix and re-do a lot of parts so that it sounds more like other music in that genre. And right now, I just want to finish this thing, whatever it is. So for now I am just thinking of it as an album of music that is supposed to sound more like our live performances: continuous, kind of free flowing, spacey, with moments where things lull and others where they build up and peak. One of the things people have told me about our live sets is that they don’t sound the same when you listen to them later. There is definitely something about the experience of hearing music live, for the first time, with your full attention, over a very loud sound system, and possibly not completely sober, that makes a recording of that same music sort of pale in comparison. Maybe this album could paradoxically get us closer to a recording of that live feeling, while being very much a studio recording. It’s a useful goal at least, that most importantly won’t sidetrack me. So, this is no longer an album of “ambient electronic” music, but now a “pseudo-live in the studio” experience. Well, that sounds really pretentious and makes me want to punch myself in the face just for writing it. So how about “music that makes you want to punch yourself in the face”? Now there’s a genre I could sign up for.

Anyway, another thing Eno mentioned in the lecture was that for an ambient musician you constantly struggle with trying to do less. As a composer, you want to keep adding parts, adding complexity, filling in all the holes in the song to keep things interesting. And you become so familiar with the song that you start filling up holes that really don’t need to be filled. So in writing music, the struggle becomes not writing more to make the song better, but using less, using only the most important parts, so it doesn’t become a cluttered unfocused mess. Similar thoughts have been expressed by John Cage, Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, and many others. Sometimes less is more. A lot of the time, in fact, less is more. Eno accomplishes this by writing his songs at a certain tempo, and then slowing them down when he’s done and releasing the finished version at half the speed it was composed at. I won’t be doing that, but I am trying to be more conscious of leaving spaces, focusing on the key parts, sending others to the background, and making sure there is some ebb to go along with the flow. So when I say this album needs more ambient, what I’m really saying is it needs less.

Part of the lecture is available on Youtube, the whole thing is pretty insightful. The DVD of the full lecture, called Playing With Time, is available on Amazon. Will Wright’s upcoming meta-life simulator Spore, where you control the evolution of life every step from the cellular level up to galactic civilizations, is scheduled for release in September and will use generative music written by Brian Eno.

There haven’t really been any new products that have caught my eye lately besides the occasional plugin. The NAMM show was a big letdown, usually there are a few new things that at least spark a little interest, but this year it was pretty boring.

One exception is this new pedal from Moog. This is a control pedal, unlike the Moogerfoogers I already have (phaser, filterbank, delay), it doesn’t make any noise itself. But it lets you map all sorts of LFOs and buttons and the pedal itself to various CV outputs to control the Moogerfoogers or other effects. You can set ranges for the outputs, so your LFO will just go from 50-80 instead of 0-127, and you can have the pedal affect that so if the pedal is down it will send out 0-10 and as you bring it up it slowly moves towards 45-90. You have multiple CV outputs, so you can be controlling multiple parameters, with different ranges, at once. It can also do MIDI. This would have been really cool to have at the beginning of the project, coupled with the KP3 Kaoss pad it would pretty much cover all your real-time synth and effects parameter tweaking needs. Like the KP3, though, it’s kind of pricey…

In the past I’ve had a bit of a psychological block in buying expensive things that don’t make noise themselves. This even has extended to effects, I had always preferred to buy another new expensive synth and just kept using cheap effects. This project has shown me the value of spending money on effects, which have a huge influence on the final sound, as well as the value of spending money on controller devices such as the Mackie Control, and likely this pedal, that make using the powerful but complicated features of what you already have much easier.

I’ve started drinking coffee to help me finish this thing. I had managed to avoid the coffee habit my entire life, but I got tired of constantly drinking carbonated high fructose saturated soda things to keep me going, so I switched to high octane coffee. Lots of cream, lots of sugar, because that’s how I roll. If you still remember, I started the project by training for a marathon for the first time, so finishing it with a new bad habit provides some nice closure. It would be a lot cooler if it was something like heroin, but I’ve never been very good at projecting a rock star image. Anyway, it is keeping me going.

I am currently reading the 33 1/3 book on Celine Dion’s “Let’s Talk About Love”. I have mentioned this series of books before, they are really quite excellent, and cover the ground from albums like My Bloody Valentine “Loveless” to Sly Stone “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” to the Beach Boys “Pet Sounds”. So what the hell are they doing with a book about Celine and the record that spawned that godawful Titanic song? Basically, it’s a book by a guy who has always hated Celine, trying to figure out why people like her. And why he likes what he likes. And why people like what they do in general. There are a million ways a book like this could go wrong, and end up making you hate the author for being a pretentious hipster jackass as much as you hate Celine for being trite and schmaltzy, but so far the book is excellent and provoking a lot of thoughts. Definitely worth reading, especially in public, if you enjoy receiving puzzled and/or disgusted glances, which I do.

Progress on the last set of three songs has been very good. I bounced out the first rough mix of the three and have been listening to it outside the studio on the living room stereo today. I will go through a few cycles of listening, adjusting things, re-listening, re-adjusting, until things are sounding good and then put it up here and move on to the last mixes of the full album. Things were delayed a bit earlier this week when I went through a nasty little stretch with the stomach flu which is best not elaborated on. But as of today I am pretty much back to 100%, and we continue to move forward. I’ll have the next set of three for you to listen to shortly.