Category Archives: criticism - Page 3

new music – sketch 3 – and click tracks

Posted by on June 9, 2008 No comments

i got an email from kevlar yesterday bemoaning his inability to work with a click track. my response to him went something like this:

the bottom line is that playing with a click is really useful if you work alone (sometimes). it gives you a frame of reference so that you can do things in multiple takes and get it all in sync. but the reality of the situation is that music hates a constant pulse. think about how much give and take is in the tempo of a folk song or any piece of music from the “classical” canon. if i were to play a bach lute suite straight, with no lilt or give, it would be a ridiculous parody of the work. even in dances (or especially) there is a subtle shift in the distance between the beats. music wasn’t meant to be the slave to a metronome.

how do you balance that? with loops, you don’t. but think about what that means when you make music out of loops. what do we lose when we lose the subtle variations? i’m not questioning the utility of these things where music is a part of a whole and the synchronization of events is so important, but i do question it in music that is meant to be heard.

so if you’re trying to do something tribal, write it out. make your blueprint and play one part through. be musical. let it breathe. then record the next track over that one as though you are performing with yourself from 10 minutes ago. layer it up until it reaches what you want it to be. i think you’ll find the give and take among the parts is better and more powerful.

what a wonderful problem technology has brought to us: how do we play as an ensemble with ourselves?

that made a lot of sense last night when i was slugging it out with today’s release. i wanted to add bodhran and talking drum tracks to my 12-string and bass arrangement. i picked a nice clave and let it rock out for me. sadly, i really like to stretch out certain sections and i think you can really hear where in this recording. one take per track. i couldn’t push my luck with recording drums after the dude went to bed, so they are a little softer than i might like. still, i think it sounds ok.

in total i have 8 songs ready. i’m seriously considering starting the process of recording them all in logic with all of the proper mojo. if i can get 8 of them down, i will know where to fill in the gaps. i’m pretty excited, so we’ll see where it goes. after all, my mom is coming for a two week visit so there will be built-in babysitting!

anyway, here’s the track. let me know if you can dig it!

sketch3mix

production quality

Posted by on May 23, 2008 No comments

i just read an article on some news site talking about the death of the audiophile. wow. welcome to 10 years ago!

when i first got into the idea of the mp3, it occurred to me that we were moving away from the CD and toward the computer as the audio component of the home. with the popular adoption of the ipod, i was proven correct. yet my first concern back in 1996 was that my hard drive was not big enough for me to manipulate many of my recordings, so how much music could i really hold? mp3 (and plummeting storage costs in subsequent years) solved that problem for me nicely.

in some other article i read a couple of months ago (note the lack of links because i am really, really lazy) the author was declaring that the peak of consumer audio was with the CD and we are headed on a downhill slide. i am not sure that i disagree with that at all. i follow a lot of mailing lists and forums that go on and on about “pro audio” this and “pro audio” that and i wonder what that means any more. yes, the more precision we have in the digital domain the better our dithering when it comes out and all that jazz. but if i am taking my high quality master and shrinking it down to a 128 kbps mp3 that will be heard on earbuds on the bus or even worse, routed through a cassette adapter in a car that is traveling at 75 mph down the freeway at rush hour, does it even matter? the subtle nuances of my carfully crafted reverb will be lost forever amidst the tire noise.

tack on to this the number of people producing albums with nothing but garageband and an internet connection and we soon see that the high end is really suffering. and no one cares. except for the high end and the folks who have bought into it (protools/logic studio/cubase users…i’m looking at you).

does this mean anything? probably not. i have an enormous music “collection” and i don’t listen to a lot of it. i am quite glad that i don’t own physical copies of most of it because we would have no place to store it. i get to listen to what i want when i want and that convenience is worth a ding in quality that i honestly don’t notice most of the time due to the circumstances of the world around me (dog, chattering baby, neighbor’s car alarm, traffic, people trying to talk to me in random coffee shops).

none of this means that i will be giving up my sennheiser headphones or my CD recordings of shostakovich’s string quartets. but it does mean that i will continue to be content with my ipod and cassette adapter for the car where the majority of my listening takes place.

oh and i’ll probably be investing more in microphones than in software in the future. after all, paying a ton of money doesn’t make it a professional recording. getting paid or paying for it does. and maybe i’m a composer and not a professional.

the relationship between the creator and the audience

Posted by on March 28, 2007 No comments

i find it thoroughly amusing, the way that something as silly as the finale to a show like battlestar galactica can set itself up as an example of the relationship between creator and audience. i remember talking with my master in conservatory about the world we create when we produce a piece of music. we set up rules and lead the audience through the piece based on those rules. if the audience is really listening, they are playing a guessing game throughout the piece. “what will happen next?” as melodies unfold and harmonies swell, the audience tries to figure out where it leads. sometimes, they are fulfilled and othertimes they are surprised.

what i have learned is that the ratio of surprises to fulfillment needs to be skewed in favor of the audience being fulfilled. too many correct guesses means that the music is predictable and boring. but too few leaves the audience feeling like they don’t understand the rules of the world that you have created. thus they are left with a feeling of not having “gotten it.”

this happens all the time in literature and film. and, unfortunately for me, sci-fi. how many episodes of star trek: the next generation ended with someone saying “of course! it was the hitherto unknown particle that everyone in the future would have learned about in high school but no one watching the show could ever have guessed that blocked the transmission! silly us!”? it’s when the creator of the universe we’re inhabiting breaks his own rules or adds to them arbitrarily that we begin to feel less of a kinship with characters and their plight. perhaps it’s because it all feels too random. too much like the real world. there’s nothing the mind hates more than being unable to find some pattern.

i think that’s part of the problem with the relationship between the audience and much of the art music created in the twentieth century. there was no common vocabulary. no way for someone who was new to the universe to grab hold and begin to enjoy the ride. there were no rules to identify with.

but i’ve stepped away from my main point: changing the rules of a piece is welcome, within a tolerance. to keep the audience engaged requires a firm set of rules that are layed out at the beginning of the work and adhered to as tightly as is possible without crushing the creative spirit. altering things too radically once a work has begun can create a feeling of betrayal on the part of the audience and destroy the relationship between creator and audience that provides for a satisfying experience for both parties.

in short, making col. tigh a cylon really, really pissed me off. consider that series off my list for next season. until SG tells me i don’t have a choice in the matter.

kind of?

Posted by on February 2, 2007 1 comment

i’ve become terribly dependent on podcasts. i absolutely hate the radio and on my 45 minute commute to work, it’s hard to come up with constantly fresh playlists that work for me. in fact, when i listen to music i really *listen* to it and that isn’t conducive to driving or working. it’s really a bummer that the thing i enjoy most is the one thing that i have to do exclusively.

the point of this is that i have subscribed to a gaggle of podcasts to fill my morning commute. one of those is the studio 360 podcast. on my way to work this morning, there was a piece about miles davis and his masterpiece “kind of blue.”

the piece itself brought a number of things to my attention: i don’t own a copy of “giant steps” by john coltrane; i didn’t know that ornette coleman really introduced free jazz in 1959 (the year “kind of blue” was released); and that people can honestly judge music by the person who made it.

it’s that last bit that really caught me unawares. it was a really tiny part of the story, but it derailed my train of thought.

i won’t claim to be an expert on the life of miles davis, but from what i understand he had some very undesirable traits as a human being. he beat his wife. he was a pimp to make money for drugs. he did some bad things. again, i’m no expert, so i’m going strictly on what i’ve gotten from excerpts and interviews like the one i heard this morning.

does that affect how i hear “kind of blue”?

i’m a big biography reader. i especially love reading about composers, writers and painters. i like drawing the parallels between their lives and the works that they produced. autobiographies and journals are even more fun for me as i get a peek inside the head of the creative individual through their own filters. when i came to the biographies on john cage, i was quite aware of his work. looking back, it was fascinating to connect the dots. the same goes for harry partch and edward abbey. i wonder how it would have colored my views of their work if i had known their life stories in advance. would i have been more sympathetic? more put off? i can’t say. i do know that all too often i will hear a story about this author or that band and go off to experience their work and feel let down by the quality of it for one reason or another. in a way, it’s de rigeur to get a promising story about a creator only to find that the work itself is less exciting than the story of who made it and how. but i don’t think i’ve ever heard a horrible story about someone and then gone on to really fall in love with a work by that same person. is that because i don’t seek out the work of those people?

but i wonder if it matters.

we know nothing about the individuals who make our clothes or cars or meals, yet we make use of them daily. would i send back my steak if i knew for a fact that the chef beat his wife? would anyone? i honestly wonder.

but music is different, right?. it’s something that we take so very personally. i would argue that there are few things that are taken on a more personal level. saying that you hate someone’s favorite song is almost akin to saying that you despise a very specific part of what makes that person who she is. maybe it’s because we identify with certain pieces of music so deeply that we desperately want the people who made it to be good and kind. the way we might imagine ourselves to be. in essence, we want to recreate the people who make this highly personal music in our own image. when reality clashes with that, it can prove to be too much.

so i think about miles davis. would i have enjoyed drinking with him? i don’t know. he sounds like he was an edgy man who liked making people uncomfortable. i find that amusing most of the time, so i might have enjoyed his company very much. i’m sure that i would despise some of his behaviors, but would that affect the music?

as a composer/writer i try to put a great deal of myself into my work. but do i want people to judge my music based on my loose and frequent use of four letter words? whether or not i go to church? how i treat my wife?

i guess not. because to me, it shouldn’t matter. i don’t know that i believe in absolute music in the purest academic sense. i think that music does bring something to a listener. but i don’t know that it’s the heart and soul of the person who made it.

music is interpreted by the listener and great music allows the audience to bring pieces of themselves into it. so at its best, music is a joint venture between the creator of the sounds and the receiver. the way that the listener applies the music in her head is independent of the creator and his life story.

i have had dear friends whose music didn’t move me one whit. and i’ve know people that i branded as jackasses who could do amazing things. maybe miles davis wasn’t a good person. am i defending the pimp? no. i’m saying that in the context of his music, it doesn’t matter to me. perhaps there would have been less soul had he not been what he was: deeply flawed just like the rest of us.