|
2004-02-13 - 3:45 a.m.
you could say I’m an avant-garde composer, because there isn’t a single note in any one of my notebooks
So a couple months ago, I passed along a tape of the music I’ve been working on for the past year to my friend Mat and he was pretty jazzed about it. And since he’s been working hard the last few months on both his record label, Olympus Mons Records, and on the studio in his basement, it was a pretty natural decision for us to try and polish my demos in his studio in hopes of putting out a record. Of course, his plate is pretty full, and so is mine generally, especially around that time, back in November. So we made plans to get started after I got done with my exams and after the madness of the holidays and such. A couple times over the past few weeks, we’ve managed to fit in time in our busy schedules to spend the day in Olympus Mons Studios (formerly Skylab), and start figuring out how to make a record out of all this stuff I’ve been doing. I do a lot of writing/recording at home on my digital 8-track, but the one thing I don’t really have the capability to do at home is record live drums. And since I have live drum parts written/in mind for about half of my works in progress, our main priority is recording live drums. And if there’s anything Mat knows, it’s drums. The first couple times I went down there, back in October, and then in January, I didn’t have a chance to bring my drums, so we just recorded me playing on Mat’s set. Which worked out ok, but any drummer will tell you, playing behind anyone’s set but your own can be really difficult. Everyone has their own arrangement and posture and sound that they're comfortable with. For instance, Mat’s bass drum is much smaller than mine, and the head is completely unmuffled, so when I press down on the pedal to hit it, the pedal bounces right back. It takes a lot of getting used to, since drumming is all about coordination and reflexes. But on Sunday when I went down there, I finally brought my own bass drum and snare drum, and it really made all the difference. I realized as soon as I set it all up, with Mat’s cymbals and stuff, that it’s the exact drum sound I want on my songs, and after Mat took some time tuning up my drums and mic’ing them, they sounded better than I even imagined they could be. When I went down there in January, it was my first time checking out Mat’s new 32-track mixing board, which he bought off someone on eBay and drove up to Philly to get. He could tell you all about the brand and the model and the history of it and what it can do, but I don’t really know about all that stuff. But it’s huuuuge, and it sounds really good, and he knows how to use it, so that works for me. I also got to meet Gordon, who evidently has become Mat’s right hand man in the studio. Cool guy, and it’s always good to have a 2nd or 3rd opinion. Plus, Mat and Gordon are fluent same language: technical jargon. I swear, sometimes they're just speaking in tongues. It's eerie. It still feels kinda weird for me to work on my music with other people, though, just because I’ve spent so much of the past year alone in my room working it out and never really thinking about how it will sound to anyone else but me. But my ultimate goal is to be able to share it with other people, and to be totally comfortable with it and proud of it. So it’s not so much a matter of compromising for other people’s acceptance as it is a process of editing and refining and writing until it’s as good as I know it can be. Because I don’t want to waste anyone else’s time with it. And of all the people I’ve known and talked music with or made music with, Mat is definitely my best bet for really helping me achieve that. He’s got a total head for the technical side of things that I only bother with as much as I absolutely need to. And we’ve got enough musical tastes in common to be mostly on the same page, but enough different tastes that he can give me a different perspective on stuff I’m making with something very particular in mind. There’ve been times when I’m working on a track and the reference point I have in mind is Just Blaze, but he hears it and it reminds him of Trans Am. But I definitely wouldn’t mind ending up anywhere between those 2 points. One of the big stumbling blocks we’ve been grappling with in these first few sessions is how to get these half-finished songs from my 8-track onto Mat’s studio equipment to record the rest of the parts. Back in October, we ended up just plugging his mixing board straight into the 8-track and recording new drum tracks onto there. But in January, we tried a couple different things, and ended up dumping each individual track from a project onto Gordon’s computer, and then hooking it up Mat’s board. It was all very complicated. On Sunday, the way we ended up routing the audio, which will probably be our standard procedure in the future, was to take to just dump a track from my 8-track onto Mat’s DAT, and then take it from there. The problem with this approach, though, is that we can only really dump one track from my 8-track at a time, and doing more than one would be nigh impossible to sync up. So, if, say, I had a track all finished with a melody line and a bass line, and just needed to add drums, I’d have to choose whether to put the melody or bass track onto the Dat, and re-record the other along with the drums. This isn’t a big problem yet, at least not with any of the project we worked on on Sunday. But I have a few works in progress that I pretty much have finished with multiple tracks recorded in ways that would either be impossible or very difficult/inconvenient to have to re-record. So there’s a couple songs where this strategy may become either very headache-inducing or unworkable. But Mat and Gordon are resourceful guys, I’m sure we’ll find some way across that bridge when we come to it. One nice thing about this strategy that we realized is that since my 8-track has a built-in MIDI-compatible drum machine, which I have most of my tracks all sync’d up with, we can hook up the MIDI to one of Mat’s drum machines while drumping a melody line, so that we have a scratch rhythm track that I’ll be able to play along with while recording live drums. And yes, I realize that at this point this is become so jargon-heavy that probably very little of this is going to make sense to anyone who wasn’t there, and I’m probably not explaining it all that well. But anyway, it was pretty cool. The song we concentrated on on Sunday was actually a loop made by my friend Scott, which he gave me a copy of to mess around with, and I hooked it up to my drum machine and wrote a beat and a bass line and synth parts to go along with. And I was pretty happy with the drum machine pattern I made for it, but Mat mentioned thinking it could use live drums when he heard it on a demo tape, and the more I thought about it, the more I agreed. The thing is, though, usually when I’m working on a song with live drums in mind, I at least record a scratch drum machine pattern in a tempo that will be physically playable behind a drumset. And it just so happens that the tempo that Scott created his loop in is just a few BPM’s too fast to be easily playable for me, at least with the hi-hat part I want to play for it. So even though I can keep up with the hi-hat part for a few measures at a time, during every take I eventually had to switch to a two-hand approach to the hi-hat part, which for some reason just didn’t feel right for the tense rhythm I want the song to have. After a few hours of fiddling about with all this stuff, it was about time for us to take a breather. And since a friend of Mat’s from high school, Eric, and his band were down in College Park playing live on my friend Chris’s radio show, we decided to go down there to check it out and give them some support. Mat’s band with Daniel, the Silver Sessions, played on the show a couple times after reccomended the gig to them, but I’d never been down to the studio. It was a cool little place they had the band set up in this big living room, and we got to chill on these sofas right in front of them while they played live on the radio. They rocked on an instrumental tip, although I felt kind of bad about drifting off to sleep for a minute or two during the quiet parts, but I was running on 3 hours sleep, so I couldn’t really help it. After getting some tasty subs at Wawa for nourishment, we returned to the studio, but we ended up not working much more before calling it a night. I guess it can be considered kind of lame that we’ve done a couple of these sessions now and all we really have to show for it so far is a few drum takes that we might not even end up using. But I feel like we’ve gotten some really good work done as far as feeling out the whole process and figuring out how to make this work. My mind is already reeling with the possibilities of what to try next time. Now that we’ve sorted out a drum configuration that feels and sounds good, I feel like I’m going to be able to pound out keeper takes really easily and then we can get down to the business of filling out all the synth parts and stuff. I’d say I’ve got at least a dozen songs in some demo form right now that have serious potential, and if we can get even half of them together and sounding good, then it’ll be easily enough for the EP I want envision releasing. But time will tell what the results will be. In the meantime, I’m just really enjoying the process. -al
previous - next
|
