Tape 2

The tape based album/EP has a name now: Retro Grade.  Please weigh in if you love it or hate it.  I love feedback, especially negative oriented, not because I'm some kind of masochist, but because disagreement is an opportunity to learn, and I hope learning is my greatest addiction.  Keyword: hope.

And, I've started the second track, called "Tape 2" for the moment.  A riff on "take 2", lol.  Lame I know, I won't be booked in the Catskills for my comedy act anytime soon.

Basically, I have 6 lyric ideas for Retro Grade, and only two of them are wedded to melodies at the moment.  Tape 2 may or may not be paired with one of those lyric ideas later, because, it started kind of by accident this evening.

Unlike I See You, which relied completely on "period" instruments I owned in the 80s, Tape 2 (so far) uses only modern instruments that sound (intentionally or otherwise) like early 80s instruments.

I'd been programming a rhythm and melodic loop on a Korg Monotribe.  However, having not yet modded it to accept Midi in, I was very unhappy with the melody part.  Incidentally, if you've ever wanted an analog monosynth, you owe it to yourself to check the Monotribe out.  I was really looking forward to the Arturia Minibrute, but $500 for a single oscillator seems ridiculous and I reconsidered the humble Monotribe, which seems to do much of the same, plus it has a 16 step sequencer with three drum sounds.  The midi mod is super easy, making it a "real" analog synth module for a tiny price.

All that is academic, what's interesting about the Monotribe is that it sounds so much like an early 80s drum machine if you use the drums sounds and the step sequencer.  Like the Echo of Echo and the Bunnymen fame (okay maybe that one sounds more expensive), it totally has that vibe to it.

Fast forward.  Tonight, I was playing around on the Micron, in my continuing effort to know my synths better.  Going over the preset sounds again, I started to tweak a few, thinking about which ones might be useful on Retro Grade.  In doing so, I was playing little riffs on the key board.  When I got to a certain sound (I think it was "closet bass" whatever that means), I really liked the phrase I was playing and knew I had to record it before I forgot it (I'm still unable to write my ideas down in standard musical notation).  But I needed a drum track to go with the bass line, and thought of the rhythm track I'd been working on using the Monotribe.  I turned that on, got it going and played the bassline.  A marriage made in heaven.  They complimented each other so perfectly, and sounded so 80s, despite the fact that the instruments were decades too late for the party.  With only a little effort, I laid down the rhythm track for Tape 2 and felt like the project was really on it's way, the sophomore effort having been launched and sounding really good so far.  IMHO.

You Can't Do That (says who?)

I started bar hopping when I was 15, mostly so I could go hear live bands.  But I loved the social interaction with strangers that bars afforded too.  Back in the 90s, I was sitting in a bar with a friend of mine and a bunch of his acquaintances, several of whom were in local bands.

At one point, one of them asked me, "Are you a musician too?"

I said, "no, I'm more of a composer."

He looked like I punched him in the face, "What do you mean?"

I explained, "I make music, but I don't actually play any instruments."

By that time, he was thoroughly confused, "How can you make music without playing an instrument?"

"Well," I started, "I use a sequencer inside my computer, which controls a synthesizer that outputs sound."  (It wasn't really a synthesizer, it was a Rompler, but I didn't want to confuse him anymore than I had to).

"You can't do that."  He was emphatic.

"What?"  Now I was confused.

"You can't do that.  You can't make music if you can't play an instrument."  It was like I beat up his mother or something, he was so hurt and angered.

"Why?"  I said, because not only could I do it, but I had done it, many times.

"It's not right.  You can't make music if you can't play an instrument."

I didn't bother to point out to him that I could play an instrument, if I wanted.  Nor did I point out that I could imagine compositions more complicated than what I could play, begging the question, are they destined to remain only in my head, locked up in the trash can of time, never to come out.  His attitude, then as well as now, seems so foreign to me, I just can't understand it.  Why does he even care what I do in the privacy of my bedroom (and we're not talking about sex here, lol).

Ultimately, a computer is a tool, like any tool.  I suspect he thought the computer was doing the composing and I was just pressing buttons or something.  To me that's like suggesting the hammer builds the house and the construction worker is just there to keep the hammer from falling on the ground.  It's absurd, right?

On the other hand, the computer is a tool like no other.  It can't create or think for you, but it can help you out immeasurably.  It freed that music from my neurons.  It didn't write it, but no other tool could have helped me get it out.  In that sense, it's much more powerful than the hammer I mentioned before.  And, as such, I started to get very suspicious of it, lol.

In spite of the incredulousness of that guy in the bar so long ago, I did decide to go back and start playing instruments again.  There is a human quality to playing that computers lack.  I love the mechanical drone of a drum machine, but I equally love the power and presence of live drums.

Anyone telling you you can't do something should make you ask "why"?  But I guess sometimes when they tell you that you can't do something, what it really means is, you should just rethink it.

P.S.  When I started writing this, I did not expect I would come out even slightly on the side of the jerk.  Strange.

Analog Boy in a Digital World

I have finished recording my first analog tape track in over a decade.  I have even posted an early mix if you are interested:





I have learned so much, doing this project and I am committed to doing at least a few more analog tape songs.

Ihave previously mentioned how much more planning one needs to do, working with tape than with a digital audio work station.  In fact, one of the things I'm least happy with, regarding this song, relates to a lack of planing:

Listening, you will note that the glockenspiel, once it comes in, continues to play, without rest, until the song is complete.  I did not plan that.  It's a result of how it was recorded.   You may also notice that the glockenspiel shifts from the right side to the left side and back again.  Each shift represents and different performance, which will be made clearer when I post video of the making of this song.  As I recorded, I felt like I took many rests on the glockenspiel, but as a listener, it sounds like it plays continuously, because the different performances are all playing at the same time and the breaks were arranged to give it a continuous sound, I just didn't intend it to be so continuous.  So, you might ask, why not fix it now?  Well, except to fix it in the mix, as they say, there is nothing I can do, because all the synthesizer parts are on the same tracks as the glockenspiel (not including the bass synth, which is on the same track as the drums).  This is very hard to describe in writing.  I hope it is clear.

Another thing I noticed, recording the vocals:  I forgot how frustrating it is to wait for tape to rewind.  It's a short song, but it takes almost a minute for the tape to rewind each time.  I made many fatal mistakes when I was recording the vocals, and my hand just got into the old habit of hitting "stop" then "rewind" instantly, as the mistake occurred.  The rewind delay was like a punishment for bad behavior, and really motivated me to "get it right".  Twice, I thought it was "good enough", only to listen on playback and hear something terrible.  That was crushing, to think it's done and realize it's not even close.  I stopped getting excited when I thought I had a good take, and just practiced patience.  I tried to use the rewind time to take deep breaths and collect myself, but not my thoughts.

I don't know if you heard the thing I heard recently (probably on This American Life) about slumps, where great athletes and performers suddenly start to suck, and once they suck have the hardest time getting good again.  What's interesting is the relationship of slumps to thinking.  Psychologists believe these people can't get out of their slumps because they can't figure out how to turn their brain off, how to stop thinking.  This seems so counter intuitive, on its face, but actually confirms something I've long, long, long believed.

I first took up golf in 1995.  I should also mention, I haven't played it since 1997.  What blew me away about the game, aside from the fact that it's got this huge proportional curiosity about it (a giant field with a tiny goal), was the only way I could play, was to clear my mind.  If I thought for even a second about hitting the ball, I would miss it.  If I thought about hitting the ball hard, I would miss it more spectacularly.  The only way to hit the ball was look right at it, but stare past it and erase all conscious thought from my head.  It was so Zen-like.  I instantly understood why it was so popular.  It's better than alcohol for making the worlds problems go away, never mind that one often drinks during or after play.

What was interesting to learn on This American Life was that the same holds true for Pitchers in Baseball and many other high performance physical tasks.  If our brains start working, our performance suffers.  Try to remember that the next time you see a post-game locker room interview.  I always felt there was a huge amount of truisms and nonsensical BS in those conversations.  I'm more sure of it now.  If the athlete is doing their job, they shouldn't really be able to describe how they were able to achieve or miss their goal.  Asking them to do so is really an insult.  However, it's expected behavior, so most of them acquiesce, lest they appear rude or arrogant.  It's a dance that I have a very hard time watching without cringing.  But I digress.

As a musician, I find my golf strategy serves me well.  The more clear my mind is, the better I perform.  Of course, doing things this way, I may be closing myself off to emotional nuance that more seasoned performers (ie: people who know what the hell they are doing) are able to evoke.  But, anytime I think about my performance while I'm doing it, the whole thing falls apart.  Like thinking about fingering and strumming a guitar simultaneously.  As soon as I allow the idea in my mind, I can't do it.  I can only do it by ignoring what I am doing.

One could say that the analog tape is actually making me a better performer on more levels than one.  I have to perform entire songs without mistakes and I have to maintain my clarity even as the tape rewinds, which would be the easiest time to "leave the zone", if I let it happen.  Working in digital, you don't get the chance to "leave the zone" because you can keep recording, even after you make mistakes.  A fact I've often used that to my advantage.  The best part of my performance is usually in the middle of the song (I have inertial anxiety, I get nervous at the beginning and the end of the song).  So, in a digital environment, I often record the lyrics out of order and combine different takes for the final cut.  I'll put each part of the song (beginning, middle and end) in the middle and use a series of "middle takes".  It's not remotely possible with analog.

to be continued . . .

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A Compromise and Delicate Balance, Maybe, and That's Final

As I wrote before about what I've been calling The Retro Project but which is actually an entry for Simon Holland (aka Carrillion)'s 80's Bedroom Tape Compilation my original intention for this cassette based song was to only include vocals by the Speak n' Spell.

Currently, I have used up 3 of the 4 tracks available to me.  I like the song so far, but it sounds thin on content when I'm used to using 20-30 tracks for a song.  If I worked with 4 tracks everyday, I'd have a different attitude, but considering what I'm used to, it's hard to adapt.

The only thing I had planned for track 4 was the Speak n' Spell.  I've decided to crank up the Casio MT-540 again, which has a peculiar "sound effect" section, in that it contains sounds identical to the video game "Galaxian" in addition to the "natural" sounds that don't sound natural at all.  I'm thinking to add at least one sound effect from there to the vocal track with the Speak n' Spell.  But I still don't think it's enough. So I'll probably end up adding vocals of the traditional variety.  I was originally going to use an old poem, but with the lyrics from the Speak n' Spell, I need something different.

As such I started working on some lyrics.  I want to fill it with 80s references, to suit the theme of the project.  Having recently seen Cars 2 for the first time, the first thing I thought of was the Yugo.  Although the car was around for a little while longer, it's really a kind of mid 80s phenomena, meaning, my song is going to be a faux mid 80s song.

So, of course I had to have a shopping mall reference and I couldn't leave New Coke out, and given people's negative feelings toward that product, it's a negative reference.  Keeping with the beverage theme, we also have some wine coolers.

I struggled to figure out which band to name check.  I considered the Smiths and New Order, but settled on the Cure.  I'd have preferred to go with New Order, but I needed something with two syllables.  Such is the way with song lyrics (and poetry).

I didn't have one, because my family had an Apple IIe, but I knew a guy who ran a BBS at the time, using one of two Commidore 64s he had.  BBS was a kind of proto internet for those who don't know.  He also had two phone lines, one was dedicated to the BBS.  Not to get too Geeky, I also included a cyborg reference, because the first Terminator movie had been recently released to much popular acclaim.

This stuff is all fine and dandy but I wanted to punch up the drama a bit, and what was more dramatic in the mid 80s than the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger.  I set the song's dramatic conclusion against the doomed space flight.  Like Kennedy for an earlier generation, Americans always remember how they heard about the Challenger explosion.

One thing I really wanted to avoid was the kind of self-consciousness I witnessed in the movie The Wedding Singer, which did things like referencing a Van Halen breakup in retrospective faux foreshadowing.  Nothing takes you out of the moment like those kinds of hindsight induced references.  In contrast, I wanted to write lyrics that sound like they could be from the mid 80s but super timely.  I did not want lyrics that sounded like they were written in 2012, as they were.

It's a delicate balance, actually.  Of course, you'll be the ultimate judge of my success.

Why Tape?

I was talking with one of my co-workers the other day, a younger guy who may have missed the days of cassettes and I was telling him about the retro project (see previous posts, like here).  I told him I'd forgotten how difficult it was to work with tape and he asked the very logical question, "then why do it?"

Even as I've been reveling in the sound of analog audio, it's been in the back of my mind that no one is going to hear the difference.  In fact, I'm sure a lot of people will be turned off by the hiss of the tape itself in the background.

I was talking to another friend, who's getting her masters in Electronic Media, someone infinitely more plugged in than I am, and she was lamenting the loss of film in movies.  She could see why digital would be preferred for blockbusters, since it's so much cheaper and convenient to shoot, but wondered why it was losing ground on art films as well.  She had actually been having the same conversation with her professor at school, days earlier and he told her it just wasn't economical anymore.  And she said, "but it looks so much better"  But he was ready for that too, "Young people can't see the difference, like you or I can.  To them it doesn't matter."

I remember when DVD and MP3 first landed in the late 90s.  I was slow to adopt each.  People kept raving about the higher quality of DVD over VHS.  But even expensive machines back then had serious artifacting issues, which annoyed me.  I preferred the analog noise of VHS to the digital compression issues of DVD.  Same with MP3, it sounded like someone sucked the life out of the recording, though it was hard to put ones finger on what had changed.  MP4/AAC was such a relief when it came along.  But I digress.

Now with the prevalence of flash video, especially from YouTube, much of which is awful quality, DVD and MP3 seem like super high fidelity formats.  Which is ironic to the core.  But if YouTube is what you're used to, you really will have trouble seeing the quality difference between HD video and Film, they're both going to look so spectacular you'd be hard pressed to identify one being better.  But I'm not here to complain about young people.  I'd happy join their ranks if it weren't a quantum impossibility.

Why work on tape?

It's unforgiving.  It has quality issues (hiss).  It has severe limitations (very limited numbers of tracks and dynamic range).

There were two important thrusts in my education:

• critique (and self critique)
• process

Both are about making your work better.  The second is also about overcoming creative blocks.

The thing about tape is it radically alters my process for making music.  It throws so many wrenches at me I often feel I will fail before I even start.  It's a hurdle, to get up the courage to even lay down an analog track.  So much can go wrong (and does), and as I've mentioned before, each additional take diminishes the sound quality slightly.  When I record on the computer I have the most lackadaisical attitude to the process, and I record anywhere I have my laptop, train, car, park, etc.  If I make a mistake, I keep playing and edit it out later.  Not so at all with tape.  I rehearse, get comfortable, and leap into the abyss.  Often I lose my way out of nervousness and have to repeat the process.

Additionally, I usually try to play more than one instrument at a time, to maximize my 4 limited tracks.  I would never bother to do that on the computer, where I have limitless tracks.  I also have to plan what is going to go on each of my 4 tracks and how I eventually plan to mix them together (something that needs to be center mixed cannot be recorded on the same track as something that needs to be panned right or left).  On the computer I don't even think about the mix when I'm recording.

All these little things change the process dramatically, and by changing the process, you change the music.

Will it be good?  Who knows.

But it will still sound like Tribrix.  Regardless of what process I use, at the end of everyday I cannot be someone else, I'm forced to be me.  I can evolve and change over time, but my DNA is always the same (transcription errors not-with-standing).  We can't help but be who we are, even if we try to be someone else.  But changing our process, our routine, our geography, anything significant will awaken something new in us and take us down a different path.  That is why one works on tape.