After weeks of staying away from non-essential computer work due to tendonitis in both arms and RSI in my right wrist from the stupid stupid mouse, I am now back to slugging out music. (I’m using a touch pad at work and the MS 6000 mouse at home.)

The first order of business has been addressing the inconsistency of the third track with the rest of the album. It was a mix of wannabe classical and percussive bombast. In the past few days, I’ve completely gutted the piece and started from scratch. It’s now one synth pad, udu and drum kit with dub-style guitar fx and it may end up with more instruments as needed.

So far, so good. I am a bit worried that this freaking project is taking so long. I console myself with the fact that I’m the guy who has to put his name on it in the end and I know when I’m satisfied with a track. Besides, why put more crap out there?

I just finished a spanky new version of the music for one the recordings I did for poet Laurie MacFayden. It’s kind of the opposite of the dark ambient original. Here’s a sample of the first couple minutes.

Later (Dec 24):
I’ve redone the little intro bit, so here’s an upload of the latest version:

Things You Need to Know…

I just finished recording a CD for a poet friend of mine, Laurie MacFayden. It turned out pretty well. Twelve tracks, all Laurie’s poetry.

Here are a couple of samples:

I Have Hidden Love

Liar’s Hotel

Pomes de Terre

Later:
Sorry, I meant to come back and say a few more things about this CD – and the fact that this is my 100th Music post.

A few years ago, Laurie won an hour of time at B-Scene Studios from some Raving Poets event or another. She asked me to accompany her on percussion while she recorded her poems. I can’t even remember what I brought, but snare, djembe and shakers for sure. Anyway, the session went great and she wanted to recreate the experience with some new and updated pieces.

She came over with a sheaf of poems on Sunday, November 19th and we spent about three hours laying down twelve different tracks. My arms were still buggered from sprains and tendonitis, so I set up some quick MIDI loops she could read to in the headphones, just to get the mood. I’d then later replace the temp music with something more considered.

Anyway, I kind of thought it would be a shame to restrict myself to drums and percussion. I’ve got a kick-ass synth and soft-synths up the yinyang, so what the hay. To maintain the spirit of our prior collaborations – both in the studio and at the RPs – I would play everything live. I’d get the tone of the piece, find the right instrument, rehearse till I got the appropriate tone, then when I’d figured it out, go back to the beginning and record behind her recitation.

A couple of weeks later, it was all done. I kept the same two buses loaded with EQ, FX, and compression throughout – one for voice, one for all else. That way, there was consistency from the beginning of the CD through to the end. In the buses, I made a point of changing only the FX and panning, and even those very, very little, to maintain the illusion that she was sitting center stage right, and I was sitting center stage left, moving only to get at other instruments.

Anyway, it was a very pleasant and immediately gratifying musical experience. It was especially nice to play keys instead of sticks.

I’ll keep you posted on when the CD will be available.

So, here’s where I’m at with the CD.

1. I’ve been working on it almost constantly, so despite blogillic appearances, it is very much alive and well.

2. There are seven tracks, about 46 minutes worth of music.

3. Two of the tracks have yet to be titled.

4. I hardly know what kind of music it is. Lots of drum kit and percussion, lots of piano, vibes and bass. And tons of synths and FX. One thing is for sure, it ain’t ambient. If I were really pressed for a description, I’d have to say it’s electronica with testicles.

I must admit, the dang thing is for me. Music I really like is far and few, so getting to make my own dang stuff adds to my top ten list hugely.

I can see that it’ll be out in 2010. It can’t possibly take longer than a few months to finish.

And so, my one month of holidays come to an end. The entire 31 days, I’ve been working on a single piece of music – we’ll call it “Funes”, just so I can give a handle to it. The first three weeks was spent entirely on the drum track. I’d ripped the original percussion out of the piece at the end of June (it just wasn’t working) and the fairly simple brush riff I’d developed to replace it practically screamed No Loops! So yeah, three weeks of doing subtle variations on the riff – six minutes worth, to be exact.

The last week was all about mixing the dang thing. I really wish I had more time to work on music. It amounted to only an hour or two a day.

Once more, I’ve created a Frankenstein piece that is not much like any other chunk of music I’ve ever heard. Grand piano, classical guitar, jazz brush kit, electric guitar, fx. It sounds like a stretched-out theme for a high-brow HBO crime drama that occurs in the halls of a Spanish Julliard. Yeah, I know. WTF. But I guess that’s the kind of music this little brain of mine likes making.

I finished revamping a piece yesterday, It’ll end up being either the second or third piece on the album. It took what felt like months of agonizing to accomplish. At this stage, I think I’ve mentioned before, it’s tough to tell “the discipline of the last inch” from scab-picking. How do you tell if you’re applying all this time and brain power to “plus” the piece (to use Pixar’s neologistic verb), as opposed to worrying the fabric of it into non-existence?

Quite forcibly I’ve determined the answer is, you can tell it’s done if, in listening to it, you’re either still unsatisfied or you’re blown away and never want it to end.

Well, I went through every friggin permutation for this piece of music. It’s essentially a pretty straightforward piece. Strings, drums, bass, guitar, shaker and some simple fx. You wouldn’t believe what I went through to try and spiff it up. There is an entire other composition in the waste basket that was to serve as a three minute bridge. I ordered a CD by another Canadian artist so that I could either sample it or get some idea what I could ask for if I hired them to do something original. I spent three friggin days looking for a purchase-able fx track to replace one I’d been using as a place-holder. My DAW choked on my VSTi’s at least fifteen or twenty times, causing me to lose unsaved changes and/or VSTi specs. Hunting for those specs again in a six gig library was no fun at all.

Anyway, it’s a pretty freakin great piece. So with the confidence my first track is fine, and my second one is fine, I listened to my third one again this morning, cringing. It’s good. It’s head a shoulders better than a lot of stuff already on other people’s albums. But it ain’t good enough for me. I realized this morning that I’ve had three distinct composing styles in the past few years, since I started doing this DAW thing.

The first was all canned samples and loops. I just didn’t know anything else was possible, and at the time, I didn’t have my electronic drum kit (couldn’t play a kit anyway), I didn’t have my Motif and I didn’t have the killer softsynths I have now. It was a bigtime learning couple of years.

My second phase was fairly reliant on other people’s midi and arpeggios. All hard and soft synths come with sequencers these days and it’s dang easy to apply wacky riffs to unusual instruments – an organ riff to a bass guitar, for example. As a result, I’ve got a couple of tracks (that I really worked hard on) that rely on these ‘arpeggiators’.

Sucks when you learn something better and look back.

My current phase is all about midi, classical harmony, rich chords and progressions, deep grooves, and complex linear rhythms. This may sound like I’m all fancy-pants trained up the yin-yang. But let me assure you, I’m not. I just glommed onto about sixty ways of cheating. I don’t carry around chord charts in my head. That’s what we have the Internet for. I just listen to everything and pick the progressions that put meat on my musical intentions. You don’t need to be a scholar or an ace session guy to do that.

Anyhoo, I’m now in the unenviable position of having to turf my “middle phase” pieces. I may redo them, I may heave them outright. But it sucks that I got close to having a full album of stuff and now… not. Oh, well… when this thing is finally done, it’ll be pretty dang good. At least I’m more than halfway there.

This morning, I started working on music and before I knew it I was side-tracked and ended up listening to the entire thing. Ok, so my impressions are:

a) Wow, some nice stuff in there.
b) “I thought that was supposed to one of the simple pieces! Holy crap, it’s like a four part fugue!”
c) I’ve never heard anything like it in my life – and I’ve listened to a hell of a lot of music.
d) There’s a lot of strings – some full on, but many of them short bow, pizzicato and spiccato
e) This will be almost impossible to play live (sans laptop) without either 10 musicians on stage or 5 multi-instrumentalists

I’m currently having this big-ass internal debate over whether I will ever play it live. Music labels pretty much expect you to go out and sell the product with concerts. It’s also how working musicians make a living, since CD sales alone won’t pay a mortgage.

Recorded music has always been my first love. I’m not a big concert-goer. Going to the symphony drives me nuts because the dynamics are pathetic. I want everything mic-ed and the loud stuff to blow me out of my chair – they way it does at home and at rock concerts. If Tchaikovsky could’ve heard his 5th Symphony on a kick-ass stereo he would never have conducted it live again.

What live music gains in energy it loses in subtlety. Why would I ever downgrade my own music? Concerts take huge amounts of time and planning and money. All for an inferior product and, more importantly, at the expense of a) your life and b) new compositions.

I think in the end, I will opt for being a composer and producer and not a performer. But we’ll see… As I said, I’m still debating. Performing is a huge amount of fun.

Spent nearly the whole day working on music. Most of it was trying to resuscitate a piece that has choked my DAW like a quad wad of double bubble. Then I conned Nora into doing some recording with me. That got me working on a different piece, and, I am ecstatically happy to report, led to finishing it. So it’s been a good weekend, all in all. Easy, six hours spent on music.

Last week, I started working on Gary Chaffee’s drumming book, Linear Time Playing. Holy moley, this is one of thoese "keys to the kingdom" books. Fried my brain on it two days in a row and could barely touch a drumstick the next day. I just love the challenge waaaaay too much.

I’m still working on that last track, both mixing and finessing. I’ve decided that synth and sampled strings just suck for this piece, so I’m looking to hire a string player. But otherwise, the piece is going really well. I keep thinking the best thing I can do is leave it alone, get some perspective on it, and come back to it with really fresh ears in a while.

To that end, I too a break this morning (after 2½ hours of work on it) and decided to make a first stab at setting the order of the tracks. Well… was that ever a revelation. Here, I thought there was only a very tenuous consistency between my seven little pieces. Turns out, they have much in common. Lots of drum kit and percussion, various basses, a lot of strings, guitars and subtle effects. The essential thing I took away from this first glancing listen, was that in all pieces, the groove is all important. Oh, and I like to fuck up the listener with polyrhythms. I love that delirious sensation of falling when you lose the downbeat and have to hunt for it.

Last week I called this stuff cinematic dark jazz. This week, I’m not so sure that’s what it is. It’ll probably get lumped in with IDM, but in no way is it dance music. Truth be told, there’s a vast gulf between the music I love to listen to and the music I love to create. How that happened, I don’t know. But I suspect it’s from the process of discovery that’s involved in the creation of every piece of music. Self-consistency is a sine qua non of every work of art. And because of that, the artist, to a certain extent, is just along for the ride. So today, I’m going to call this stuff fusion. (Yeah, there’s an F word for you.) There’s everything in the pot, and though you’ll be able to tell what I’ve loved over the years (classical , rock, jazz, world, electronica, etc), you’ll have to wonder what weird brain filter was in effect when these pieces were created. I’m happy wondering myself.

Well, that piece I described below fell through about a week later. For the past two months, I’ve been hard at resuscitating a piece I’d rejected for the album (see May 24th entry, below). I tossed all the fancy chord progressions I’d worked so hard on and heaved the third of the three melodies and started with a very simple palette. It didn’t take long – maybe ten days – to come up with a satisfying structural arc for the revamped piece. And then I hit a wall.

The wall was a break in the piece, a bridge that I couldn’t, for the life of me, get to work in any complimentary way. Weeks of hard testing, introductions of new instruments, dozens of melodic variations, ensued. I tell you, the thing nearly made me give up hope that I might have any talent in composition. Not to be melodramatic, but the last month was a friggin horror for me. Day after day of failure. Fucking hell…. I almost chucked the whole thing.

And then the other day I figured it out – what to do with this break. I got it going, reached a very happy place yesterday, and today, absolutely nailed the structure and instrumentation of the rest of the piece. It has now turned into a very joyful section of music. I even considered making this the first piece on the album – that’s how confident I am in it.

So now I have seven pieces for the CD – a total of maybe forty-odd minutes of music. In a way, it’s not much time, but man… a hell of a lot of work has gone into these few pieces. And I’m nowhere near finishing mixing them. But at least now I have a cohesive whole, a very odd, very modern, fairly unique cinematic dark jazz album.