Relax and The Tower of Babble

One of the most rewarding things about blogging and/or keeping journals is that through writing down your thoughts and experience, you often discover things that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise. Patterns stand out more when you put things down on paper (or in pixels). Yesterday, I wrote about The Sound of Life and the idea of working on a song with a soundtrack in mind. As I begin this entry, I'm realizing that there is a trend. I guess its one of those obvious things that I knew before but never really thought about. When I start a song with a target in mind different from my usual targets, it comes out sounding different from my normal songs.

Not long before I officially began working on Meeting of Minds, a friend of mind approached me with an opportunity to make a commissioned CD for a local spa. I didn't really have any appropriate music, so I got to work on a two song sample. I figured that the CD needed to be relaxing and suitable to be played as background music, but not boring. The first song was pretty basic. A slow drum beat. A breakbeat coming in to add a little life to it. A simple piano line that repeated a few times and then grew more complex. With the second song, I wanted to keep the same relaxing groove but change things up. For that one, I recorded a live djembe and my voice. The vocal was vocoded and both the djembe and vocoded vocal were smothered in effects. The rest of the sounds were built around those two building blocks. Both songs contained as much repetition as I felt I could get away with. I figured the fewer parts I had to write, the less time it would take and if I got the deal, I wouldn't have had a lot of time.

Here's the fun bit of trivia for this one. When I recorded the vocals, I was already planning to mangle them beyond intelligibility so it didn't matter what the actual words were. The actual words ended up being the most half-assed freestyle in history. Somewhere in there, I acknowledged the fact that no one will "understand this shit." If you really listen, you can kind of make it out - or maybe only I can because I know where it is. That distorted "shit" is the closest thing to a curse on the album.

Ummm, yeah, back to the story. I made rough mixes of the two songs and gave them to my friend to give to the spa guy. If I remember correctly, he liked the first song but wasn't really feeling the second. I guess it was a little to out there for him. When I listen to it now, I laugh at myself - what was I thinking? Don't get me wrong, I like what I made - if I didn't, I would fix it until I do or I wouldn't be putting it out for people to hear - but it is definitely out there. In the end, the CD never happened. The guy wanted something exclusive for the spa, but he didn't want to pay a lot of money. A full album costs money and exclusivity costs money.

The songs sat around for a while until I was going through my material trying to get together the idea for an album. I came across them and figured that instead of wasting (in my opinion) good ideas, I could re-work them and use them. Both songs got shortened and re-arranged to eliminate a lot of the repetitiveness that I had figured would be ok for background music. Both got properly mixed. One thing about the way I usually work that may be a handicap is that the composing and mixing stages are usually separate. Often, by the time I'm mixing, the sound of the piece has already been determined, so effects are only added to help that sound. Effects usually do not come into play at the creative stage. Reworking these two songs, effects did come into play, and on both of them they changed the sounds drastically. With the first one, a delay added to the drums created the illusion of a more complex drum pattern and changed the feel the song. In the second one, because it was no longer intended for a commission, I figured I could go even further out there. I threw tons of effects - delay, phasers, flangers, etc - at it to create a very psychedelic feel.

Relax and The Tower of Babble are the last two tracks on my upcoming CD Meeting of Minds.

The Sound of Life

A few people who have heard music I'm working on have told me either that my music generally makes them think of soundtracks, or they have described scenes that certain songs evoke. Such comments are always very welcome because I want my music to create emotional and visual responses. One day, because of these comments, I decided to try writing a piece specifically for a soundtrack. I didn't have a particular scene in mind, but I was aiming at something that sounded appropriate for film. I ended up calling it The Sound of Life because I figured that without a particular movie for it to be attached to, it might as well be part of the soundtrack of life.

Working with a soundtrack in mind was very different from the way I normally work. In one sense, I think you are very limited because the mood and some aspects of the music are dictated to the creator beforehand. in another sense, its very freeing. Usually, people watch movies for the plot, theme and/or acting. The music is a part of the package that just comes along with the rest. That means those first notes don't need to make an impression. That means I don't have to worry about tricks and gimmicks like vocals or a catchy hook to capture interest. Like it or not, listeners will hear all of the song, so I don't need to think about capturing their interest in the first few seconds. I can write a piece that is meant to be and will be taken as a whole. Of course because the song wasn't actually for a soundtrack, this didn't hold true, but I wrote it as if it did.

You can hear the result yourself next month. The Sound of Life is the second track on Meeting of Minds.

Meeting of Minds

My album is called Meeting of Minds. Even though I am the main producer and writer on the album, I did my best to bring a variety of the talented people I know in on the project. It is representative of these partnerships as well as many less explicit partnerships. My journey through the world of music thus far has been amazing, and the majority of the time, I was not travelling alone. Meeting of Minds is not just the name of the album, it is an accurate desription of the album and my whole musical career to this point.

The title track got its name because it was the one track that best captures that spirit on it own. Sometime last year I was hanging out with a fellow MC, Godhead, and fellow MC/producers, Oo, More Deep and Mekz One. If I was forced to use one word to describe Oo in situations like that, it would be inquisitive. Oo loves to ask questions and learn about how other producers do what they do. As a direct result of his inquisitiveness, we were sharing our techniques. More Deep and Mekz One were showing me Fruity Loops, and I was giving them a demonstration of Reason, Cubase and my keyboard (E-Mu PK-6). Oo and I are strong proponents of sample free music. To demo my setup and to push the idea of self-sampling (cuz there ain't nothing wrong with sampling it if you made it in the first place), we decided to create a song in Cubase and Reason using Reason's NN-XT sampler to sample a guitar riff that Oo played. We recorded Oo playing a few riffs, picked one, cut the audio up into one-note segments, and created a new instrument in Reason with them. Oo also played the bassline and some other guitar. As a group we made the drums, came up with the music to be played, and arranged the parts.

That sounds real seriousd, but the session was far from it. At some point we got in a discussion about Punjab and we asked Oo to say some curses. (So what if we were acting young!) Somehow we ended up recording this and putting it at the very beginning of the song. (If you understand Punjab, let me apologize in advance for the things that are said) The song ends with audio recorded right after the curses when we started talking and I hadn't stopped recording yet. I thought it would help show a little of what the mood was like when we were making the song. In the middle, there is a roughly cut sound of someone counting in Spanish. that is More Deep. He was doing an impression of a cliche sound and when I heard it it just sounded right, so I told him to get in the booth and do it again. At some point during the session, Godhead left for a while. When he came back, he was completely lost because we were all wiling out, throwing "producer" jokes back and forth.

Meeting of Minds was just a bunch of guys hanging out acting silly. Somehow a song came out of that. Good times!

See Me Stop

See Me Stop is the oldest song that will be on Meeting of Minds, the album I'm about to release. It features vocalist Dusky Diana. Several years ago when I was first getting into house music, I decided I wanted to try making a house song. I think I started by trying to figure out a good bpm. I was still very new to house and I didn't know what I know now about some of the technical stuff, so I ended up with a rough estimate somewhere around 138bpm, which was way too fast. Around the same time, Nina Simone's Sinnerman was very popular on my playlist.

As I write this, more is coming back to me. I remember riding home either on the 42 or 21 bus thinking about my house song. I decided I wanted to make it ridiculously happy and optimistic yet lyrically simple. As I got off the bus and stopped at the 24 hour grocery store on the way home, the words and tune came to me:

I've been climbing so long.
The years have come and gone.
I'm nowhere near the top,
But I won't stop.

I got home and began working on the music. I forget the order I did the parts in since it was so long ago, but my guess is that I laid down the drums first. I played around with the keyboard and came up with a piano part that captured some of what I love about the piano in Sinnerman. It is dull sounding, somewhat far back in the mix, very repetitive, and almost jumbled sounding. I did it in the key of C Sharp major which is now one of my favorite keys though I don't think I've used it a whole lot. I got the basic structure down and recorded myself singing the words so I wouldn't forget the tune.

Not long after that, I was hanging out in the Crimson Moon talking to a new friend. She mentioned that she did some singing, so I asked if she'd be interested in coming by to work on the song. I think I might have played her the rough version. She agreed, we set up a time, and we met up. She came early in the morning, so we went to the coffee shop on the corner and had coffee before we got started. I had written the four lines above with a specific tune, and that was it. I told her that first I wanted those lines sung the way I had written them and then she could add words, adlib, and harmonize however she liked. I wanted the song to have a build up, so it needed to be understated in the beginning. Ms. Dusky didn't look like she quite understood what I wanted, but she gave it a try. What she was singing wasn't what I wanted, so we stopped several times. Eventually I could see that she was getting frustrated, so I asked her to sit down and attempted to explain it to her again. This time it made sense to her. I could see in her face when it clicked.

She got up and started singing again. This time it was completely different. She did exactly what I wanted and the energy was perfect. After we got that first part down, it was time for her to add her flavor. It was amazing to experience. Ms. Dusky would have me play up to a certain point, then she'd ask me to loop it. She would play around with different ideas for a few minutes, then she'd say, "ok, record." I'd record it, then we'd repeat that process. Before I knew, there were a bunch of new vocal parts and they all had multiple layers.

Thinking about it now, I guess that session set the tone for my current production style. I do not consider music done if I haven't heard the vocals yet. The music can and probably should change once the vocals are recorded. After recording Ms. Dusky, the different parts she had come up with inspired me to make changes to the music. About halfway through the song, there is a part where all the instruments drop out except for a piano and a sub-bass sound and the piano plays a new part. That whole section came about because of the way she sang the lines that now go along with it.

After the recording session, I had to put the song together. I had to figure out where which parts of the music should do what and which vocal parts should go where. From the beginning, I had no intentions of keeping the vocals where she'd sang them. The aim of the recording session was to make building blocks, so afterwards, the large task of building something remained. Its strange to look back on the process. I didn't have a lot of the knowledge or resources then that I have now. I did a lot of things the hard way. For example, there is a sustained note in one part that I wanted to fade into the back. I decided it should start relatively dry, then the echo on it should gradually increase. At the time I didn't know that this was a common technique normally used to make fadeouts sound more natural or to give music a more dynamic sound. I also didn't know that with audio editors better than what I was using at the time, I could simply automate the reverb to gradually increase at the proper time. Instead I made a separate track with a separate copy of the same sustained note but with tons of reverb. Through trial and error, I found the right amount to fade out the dry track and fade in the reverb track to get the effect I wanted.

See Me Stop was full of such examples of 'the hard way' but somehow, it worked. My skill at mixing was definitely not what it is now. Songs that I did after that one were not mixed properly. I think its because of the amount of time I put into it. See Me Stop was finished months after I recorded Ms. Dusky's parts. I believe it was still warm outside when we recorded it. It wasn't until February of the next year that I met up with her to give her a copy of the final version.

You can hear See Me Stop on my website in the downloads section.