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.
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.
posted by Ahd Child at 12:20 PM
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