Pondering Truthfulness…

I was struck by something that happened a few weeks ago.

If you’re on Facebook or any of the social sites, you’ll know of what I speak, likely.  Seems that there was a young lady who had quit her job. She announced it in the form of a series of pictures emailed to her former company.  In it, she told everyone why she quit and revealed a few less-than-desirable qualities in her former boss. 

Bold.  Clever.  Funny. 

Except for one thing.

It wasn’t true.

I do give the website credit for coming forward a few days later and admitting that it was a hoax (in the same fashion and style as the young woman allegedly quit her job).  Still bold, clever, and funny… and still, a fabrication presented as fact, for whatever reason the perpetrators had in mind when it was set in motion.

This is a very strange time we live in.  We are literally saturated with information.  Access to pretty much anything you want to know has never been easier. 

It’s also never been easier to pass off falsehood, opinion, punditry, and inaccuracy as ‘true’.

Case in point.  I go by ‘anoN’. I pass myself off as a male of indeterminate age; over 20, under 65.  But unless you have actually met me and know my connection to the band… you really don’t know who I am.  I could be a 15 year old girl.  Or 70.  Or a collective of people who write as ‘anoN’.  You only have my word that I am who I say I am.

And if I am lying to you about who I am… well, what of it?  What consequences will I really pay when I can reinvent myself daily?  If I am banned from a website for using abusive language…language that very few people are bold enough to use face to face because the consequences would be immediate and painful…what is to stop me from creating another doppelganger and continuing my ways?  

It’s not too hard to imagine a world where expertise is less about actual skill and more about perception and who promotes themselves the loudest.  I believe we have already taken steps in that direction. 

Look.  I am not some humorless curmudgeon whining about the good old days here.  I enjoy a good red herring. I don’t mind being taken as long as my pride is more or less intact at the end of it.  I can take a joke.  And I also appreciate the opportunities that taking a pseudonym provides.  Otherwise I’d just tell you my birth name. 

But I grow wary when deception comes easy.  Whether from individuals, communities, or the environment that makes it possible.

I promise you this.  I may not be able to tell you everything that’s going on… but I WILL be truthful with you.

And in many ways… that’s a far more dangerous thing.

-anoN (who still claims to me a male of indeterminate age) 

The Process: Why I Hate Drum Programming.

There are very few things I really and truly dislike.  That implies that I go out of my way to assign this person, place, or thing negative emotions.  In general I think life is too short and beautiful to waste your time being overly aggro about something.

Drum programming scores high on this very short list.

It’s not that I hate drummers or percussion or anything like that.  Rather the opposite.  Once I (or other members) come up with a drum line, then it helps set the dynamic for the rest of the song, given the way we record.  It’s inspiring and leads to new ideas.

I just hate having to come up with the initial ideas.

You would be perfectly within your rights to interject a few things here.  For example: “You’re not fooling us, anoN.  We know you use a drum machine.”  And you would be right.  You would also be fair in saying “You are playing industrial pop-rock.  Set down a simple beat with a 4-on-the-floor kick drum and quit whining about it.”  And that would also be right. 

Thing is… I have played with enough fantastic drummers over the years that I want to do this right.  I want the drums to sound good, even if I am ‘only’ programming them.  Yes, they are loops.  But I don’t want you to go “Yep.  Loop.”  I want them to sound as if one of my very talented drummer friends might have at least inhaled a few breaths around my beats. 

Here’s the thing.  I am not a drummer.  Bass?  Guitar?  Keys?  Loops?  Sequences?  Arpeggios?  Pennywhistle?  Sure.  Something that requires doing 2 different things out of rhythm with each other?  Forget it.  And don’t get me started about when you should have an open high hat as opposed to a closed high hat, or when to use 16^th notes as opposed to 8ths.  I’m just using the Force most of the time. 

That’s why it’s been awesome to have Carl on board for some of the drum programming.  He’s a jazz/progressive/rock guy with a great sense of when to lay back and when to rock it.  He also knows when to go outside the box.  We have an unusually mellow song on the upcoming compilation.  I was tempted to go with a more loop-oriented feel.  Carl took that idea, invoked early 80s Phil Collins, borrowed some of his rock background, and came up with a really cool set of ideas.  They have a looped feel (which benefits the tune) but help drive the dynamics in a way that I would have never thought of on my own. 

Like leads to like, and I am getting more and more comfortable with drum programming.  We have 5 of the 10 done… and I know that getting this element done usually means that the rest of the instrumentation is only 1-2 days away from recorded completion.  Still.  I want Carl to come back from vacation so we can collectively tackle some of the harder, more driving songs.  It’s right up his alley.

And I still don’t like drum programming. 

Blech.

-anoN    

The Process: Tone in the Digital Realm

So.  We got songs.  We got arrangements.  We got lyrics and melodies.  Ooo-rah.  There’s just one little thing more.

It needs to sound good.  Because regardless of what you might have heard, you can NOT fix it in the mix.  You can alter the tone a fair spell, add effects, and generally make a good track sound better.  But it won’t help bad source material.  As one of my friends is fond of saying, “You can polish a turd all you want, but it’s still a turd”.  The better the tone you track, the less time you have to spend wrestling with your mixes later. 

If I was in a traditional studio setting, I’d achieve this by setting up drums, amps, microphones, and firing up at least a 32 channel board.  I’d also spend at least a day just dialing in basic tones for all the instruments. 

Shai Azul is all digital.  Which has significant advantages.  I can record at 3am without bugging the neighbors.  I can lay down over 100 tracks on a single song if I want to (that’s usually a bad idea).  And best of all, I can do it by myself.  There’s some limitations, though. I can’t just tweak a knob on an amp to get the tone I want – it all needs to be preprogrammed.  The deck I am using has about 30 virtual amps.  None of them are even close to the actual amplifier I use live.  So there’s a lot of fiddling around.  And straight digital recording is *VERY* dependent on the quality of your gear. In a pro studio, a crappy guitar through a good amp can be made to sound passable with enough boosting and knob tweaking.  A crappy guitar recorded direct will just sound bad no matter what you do. 

Keys and drums are pretty easy.  By the time I’m at this stage, there’s been a fair amount of time spent on finding the right keyboard patches, snare sounds, high hats, etc.  We can fine-tune the EQ later; at this point, I just want the tracks to be loud, clear, and out of each others’ way.  I like to try to record the tracks as hot as I can without clipping.  You can always turn the volume down; it’s a bit harder to turn it up. 

Getting good bass tone is a bit more involved.  I knew I wanted a metallic, slightly distorted, defined quality a la King’s X/Overkill/Tool.  Unfortunately, none of the bass amp presets came close.  I struggled with this for several weeks, trying every combination of virtual bass amps, EQ, and outboard pedals I could find in increasing frustration.  This was one of those moments where the hands-off nature digital realm works against you. Because, were I in the studio, what would I have done to get this tone?  I would have grabbed a guitar amplifier, sat it on top of the bass rig, split the signal, recorded both tones, and blended them.  Durr.   Virtual guitar cabinet, check.  Massive bass boost, check.  Tame the midrange, check.  The sound I wanted, check. 

And, of course, guitar tone takes the longest to dial in.  We do some clean guitar, but most of the time we’re looking for big chunks of sharply defined distortion.  That’s a bit easier to come by; I think I chose the preset that said something like “Wall of Marshalls” and went from there.  But just because it sounds good in the phones doesn’t mean that the settings are right.  The initial Mirror Darkly guitar tones had a really unpleasant overtone.  Ever listen to Metallica’s “And Justice For All”?  Does it ever make your speakers make a “whoom-whoom-whoom” sound?  That’s what I had.  That means there’s too much bass on something.  Chris says he can fix that later, and I believe him, but I also didn’t want to be the cautionary tale.  So you turn down the bass.  But then it’s too trebly.  So you dial that back.  Then it sounds right… but doesn’t have that crunch you’re looking for.  So you up the volume… and back comes the “whoom”.  So yeah, lots of fine-tuning and getting the levels set just so.  Just like in a traditional studio. 

There’s about 4 different distortion settings on the Mirror Darkly compilation.  And unless I played them back to back you’d probably not notice any difference.  One for parts played with palm muting (louder, more bass and midrange), one for chord and riff-heavy songs (less bass and volume so that “whoom” doesn’t appear), and two more ‘general’ sounds that I use for blending.  I also tend, on the more metal/industrial songs, to double the guitar parts.  Makes for a very big sound, as long as I play them identically. 

That’s a lot of instruments, and one of the main challenges is making them all distinct and cohesive.  You want clarity, not sonic mush.  You can avoid a lot of this in the songwriting and arranging – drop out a guitar line, boost the keys an octave, simplify the riff, whatever.  But you also need to shape the EQ of individual tracks.  Sometimes that means adding or subtracting way more of something than your instincts would tell you.  But the goal is for the instrument to be audible in the mix.  If it’s not, then drop it.  It’s just clutter.   

Oh, vocals?  

I don’t even try.  I bounce all this down to .wav files and take it to a full studio for that.   

-anoN

The Process: Here and Now…

There is nothing more ironic for a musician as the moment where they forget how to play their own songs.  And I have been enjoying a lot of irony of late.

If it seems like I am going to California every other week, it’s about right.  As I have mentioned before, Shai Azul is one of several projects.  As much as I enjoy making music with Oily, Tanya, Kelly, Vic, and Anthony, it doesn’t pay the bills.  That isn’t too weird.  It’s rare that ANY artist can pay the bills with their art form.  So I have been spending a lot of time with the theatre troupe in the last 2 months, helping them get ready for tour, rehearsing the players, driving, and generally trying to pass on everything I know to people half my age.

And they are presently on tour.  In California. 

Admittedly the reason I am going THIS time is because a friend asked if I would help her company out at San Diego Comic Con.  I have never been.  Should be fun. 

Still, that’s a lot of time between recording sessions.  Last week I finally had an uninterrupted stretch to get some work done on the second compilation of songs.  And it was hilarious how much I had forgotten of my own music. 

The scratch tracks for most of these songs are 4-6 months old.  While I do take notes, sometimes I forget to write down the chord patterns.  That’s not too bad for guitar, since most of what we do there is riff-driven.  But I tend to play a lot of ambiguous-sounding patterns on the keyboards (5^th chords, suspended chords, and things that generally don’t imply a major/minor).  I also tend toward a gut-level approach with keys, playing what sounds ‘right’ and then figuring out the actual chord voicing later.  If I haven’t written this all down, then it’s a game of ‘guess the chord’.   Which, on some keyboard patches with lots of extra fiddly bits, can be a challenge. I struggled with one part for 3 hours before I realized that the arpeggio pattern I had put on the scratch track required actual chord voicings as opposed to single notes.

That’s written down now.

The most humbling indication that I have been away from the console for too long came on a new song called “Wasted/Wanted”.  This particular tune is the first collaboration between Vic and myself and is quickly becoming one of my faves.  Vic’s initial vision was for a strong keyboard hook, but as the tune developed, a relentless distorted bass guitar line came more to the forefront.  The scratch track came around in less than a few hours.  Then the tune simmered on the back burner until last week.  Well, I’m a bass player, right?  How long can it possibly take to cut a mix-ready version?  I’ve played on about half a dozen studio recordings in the past year.  Not like I don’t know what I’m doing.

Or not.  Took me about 30-40 passes to get it right.

Admittedly my studio doesn’t make overdubbing easy.  I am using a console-based digital deck for recording; no Pro Tools at this stage.  So I either have to be very quick with my button pressing (a very 80s’ way of doing it all) or program in the punch points.  But on this song specifically, the bass guitar NEVER LETS UP.  There’s not really any place to insert an overdub without making a digital ‘click’ because of the note spacing and distortion.  Even if I had Pro Tools with Chris at the command chair, this would be a hard song to punch in on.  And I kept screwing up either 15 seconds in (doesn’t take long to decide the overall performance isn’t where you want it to be) or 15 seconds from the END of the song. 

In the end, it all worked out.  The guitars went surprisingly fast (I was expecting to struggle with them since I hadn’t completely finalized the guitar grooves yet) and we added a few little keyboard treats that we many not even end up using. 

It even provided enough momentum to get some more drum programming done and dissect out chord charts for some of the other songs.

It only cost a little bit of professional pride. 

Cheap price to pay, really. 

-anoN

The Process: Development

Let me let you in on a secret. 

About 75% of what I write is crap. 

Is that pretty blunt? 

It’s meant to be. 

Because it’s true. 

I really don’t know how other artists work, but most of the time, my initial ideas for lyrics, songs, and melodies aren’t good enough to present to my Other, let alone anyone who might spend money on it.  It doesn’t mean I abandon those ideas.  Most of that stuff ends up turning into something that’s pretty decent.  But my music doesn’t spring fully formed from the head of Zeus.  It takes work. 

That’s not really that surprising, is it?  Saying otherwise would be like an author saying that their first draft is *THE* version of the book.  Or a sculptor looking at a rough-hewn lump of iron and going “This is complete”.  The creative process is…well…a process.  It gets better when you spend time on it.  One of the best things that my consulting producer Anthony suggested I do at the beginning of the project was to write for an hour a day.  Don’t have a goal… just write.  Get the ideas out on paper. I have a ton of ideas and songs because of that.  But very few of them are acceptable as written; they’re incoherent and random.  A good song says something, even if that something is abstract or metaphorical.  It still needs to be tight. 

As I mentioned in the last entry, a song will have most of the critical elements in place only if I am lucky.  Most of the time, I instead have a handful of riffs, some lyrics, and some vague idea of a melody.  At that point, it’s laying down a simple drum loop to kick things off (working without a metronome is asking for trouble) and literally sitting down with a guitar or a keyboard, throwing things up against the wall, and seeing what sticks.  If the melody is more defined, it’s usually easier to make the music around the melody than the other way around. But either way, it’s all about finding what ‘serves the tune’.

‘Serving the tune’ is a philosophy I learned early on in my career.  It’s the notion that every song you write has a natural tempo, groove, vibe, dynamic, and flow… you just need to find out what it is.  It’s a goal-oriented method that starts immediately with your beginning building blocks.  A sad, brooding tune will tend to have certain qualities; a fast, intense song others.  The tune will take its’ natural channel because of that. 

This is the place where verses, choruses, and bridges are crafted (intros and outros come later).  Most of the time, I will want distinction between all these parts so listeners know what’s coming up.  But that’s not always the case.  Again, every song is different.  Some songs don’t ‘ask’ for that.  “Only As”, from the early scratch tracks, only ‘asked’ for 2 parts, with the keyboard solo evolving out of a variation of the verse groove.  And yes, this kind of thing has been done before.  Want to know what inspired the music?  Check out ‘Controversy’ from Prince’s album of the same name.  I dare you. 

This really doesn’t take as long as it sounds.  Once things get rolling, like attracts like.  Guitar ideas suggest keyboard lines and vice versa.  Melodies suggest harmonies.  Bass grooves imply drum grooves.  And if I am with one of my collaborators, it’s usually a matter of having to stop adding layers to the idea.  After all, the goal is to get an idea of what the song COULD sound like, not total completion of the song. 

Once I have the outline, I will fill it out with a few instruments (usually keys, guitar, and bass so it’s a good representation of what I think the final song can be) and send it out to Vic, Kelly, Tanya, and Oily.  I will ask for their opinion.  A response of “Wow, this sucks” means I have missed the mark.  A response of “I don’t know what to do with this” usually means the same.  And that’s okay.  I have a hard drive full of ideas that haven’t quite found their voice yet.  If it clicks, then it’s up to the singers to work with basic melody lines, or if I haven’t come up with one, to make one up.  Tanya likes working without a net.  Kelly prefers melodies more defined.  Oily is somewhere in the middle. 

While the singers work on their part, I am usually writing more songs.  Of late, Vic and I are working a lot together.  I like his vibe.  I am more cerebral and metaphorical; he’s more gritty and sensual.  He also has a cool sense of groove that keeps me from going totally black metal on everyone. 

Once a song finally passes muster, then the real fun begins: Commitment. 

-anoN