For the 50th Time…

By the time this goes out, we will have had our first studio session with (almost) everyone.  I hope to be able to report good things about that. 

However, before we get there, there’s a teeny thing I needed to do.  Finish up all my instrumental tracks.

One of them just about killed me, I won’t lie.

Funny thing is that it’s really not that difficult a riff.  It’s a repetitive 16-bar guitar hook.  It only happens twice.  So you think it wouldn’t be that hard.  But it’s the dominant part of the song it’s in.  It has to start strong and end stronger.  On a technical side, it also requires a fairly quick alteration between palm muting and picking.  So it’s not just bashing out slop chords, but it’s also not Flight of the Bumblebee.  Should be doable. 

And for the life of me I could NOT get it right.  Something was always missing in the performance.  A missed mute here, a wrong note there.  I added up the time usage while I was taking a frustrated break.  I had tried and failed to get the riff recorded correctly 50 times. 

So what do you do when you’ve blown it for the 50^th time?

Play it for the 51^st time.  Or however many times you need to so you can get it right. Or maybe even swallow your pride and re-evaluate the part.  Because that’s what it means to be a professional.  The whole is more important than any one part.  Get over yourself that you’re not a hot guitar player and serve the tune, anoN.

In this case, serving the tune was to simplify the riff down to the parts that were cool and iconic and jettison everything else.  6 takes later it was done.  And you will never miss the other notes. They weren’t really required. 

You know what?  Sometimes doing what you love really sucks.  It doesn’t make it any less cool that you get to do it.  But just because you love it doesn’t guarantee pure joy; sometimes it’s just soul-sapping work.  Just because you love it doesn’t immediately make you a master of it.  And it doesn’t always mean it comes out the way you envisioned it. 

That’s not weird.  That’s life. 

For the record, the guitar line that nearly did me in is the main verse hook from “House of Cards”.  That song should be out in the next 6 months.  And yes, you probably could have done it better. 

-anoN

Something for everyone to find fault with.

(Written Monday, Sept 20)

It’s one of those days in the Northwest where if you don’t like the weather, just wait a few minutes.  Recording is on hold for one day; fatigued ears need some time off. I am presently working on the louder, faster songs.  They are more challenging to play, and tonally there’s more distortion and jagged edges.  More complex+more abrasive tonality=lots of time spent making it right and tired ears even when recording at a relatively low decibel level. 

It has been a good reminder, however, in how varied this upcoming compilation is. 

It’s not a huge departure from Mirror Darkly. True, most of it falls in the 100-140bpm industrial pop/rock vein.  I suppose it’s more of an evolution, with wider bookends.  The mellow stuff is more chill; the harder stuff is more intense.  Example.  The song that’s blown out my ears is over 200 bpm when you take into account the double time drum signature.  It’s based around a fast, chuggy guitar riff and a relentless beat.  The topic of the song is betrayal, usury, and revenge.  It’s brutal all the way around.  On the other side is an atmospheric, largely electronica tune clocking in at 91bpm.  The song initially started as a personal challenge to write about a topic that’s often a rock and roll cliché. When I sent it to Tanya for her comment, it was couched with “Does this sound too much like a Christian worship song?”  She laughed and assured me I was in no such danger.  But even the topic – alright, fine, it’s a love song – is a bit of a departure from the more angsty, aggressive lyrics our songs usually have.

And in the middle?  More. More guitars.  More keyboards. More drums.  More harmonies.  More riffs.  More space.  More atmosphere.  More turmoil.  More defiance.  More hope. 

More paradox. 

I can already hear industry professionals shaking their heads and telling us to focus.  Do one thing really well.  Paradox doesn’t sell.  Neither does a compilation that goes from blast beats to synth drums; from hard-edged male vocals to delicate female performance. 

They’re not wrong about this, you know.  You won’t be hearing Lady Gaga doing jazz standards anytime soon.  Even though I’m sure she can. 

I also know that it wasn’t too long ago that Led Zeppelin could put “Stairway to Heaven”, “Going to California”, and “When the Levee Breaks” on the same album.  3 different songs, 3 different styles.  All clearly one band.  And they weren’t the only ones doing this kind of thing. 

We’re not Led Zeppelin.  But we are a band of a lot of contributors and a lot of emotions.  Only makes sense that the music would reflect that in the aggregate. 

It would surprise me if everyone liked every song on the compilation.  But that’s okay.  You can always skip over the songs you don’t like. 

Besides.  I would rather that you hate a tune or two than lose interest less than halfway through. 

-anoN

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