Since
Saturday I've been getting to grips with my new Reaper workstation. I
wondered at first whether it was all that good, since it didn't seem
to have many of the features I want. But of course it does have them
– and many others besides – I just didn't know where to look.
I've no doubt now that, for the money, it's an astonishingly powerful
program. So most of my time has been taken up with getting back to
somewhere near where I was when I stopped recording six years ago.
It's like I've bought a strange new car and I'm having to learn where
all the pedals and controls have been hidden.
Anyway,
I'm slowly getting up to speed, and I've started work on a couple of
tracks. The first (excitingly called “Exercise 1”, with a cheeky
nod to the Joy Division song of the same name) is a short piece of
nonsense thrown together to practice a few basic techniques. It
sounds like 1988 is breaking out all over because the only
instruments I had at the time were free VST imitations of old
analogue synths and drum machines. Well, that's my excuse and I'm
sticking to it. There's no live performance on it (or the other track); since I don't have an audio interface yet I'm only working with MIDI and sampled sounds. Still, you can do a surprising amount with those.
The
second track (excitingly called “Exercise 2”) is more
substantial. It's based on two different chord progressions bolted
together. The first seeks to form a new chord by altering one
semi-tone of the existing triad. So it starts in G major then drops
the G to Gb to form B minor, raises the D to Eb to form B major, and
so on through five transitions until it arrives back at G major. It
repeats four times but then moves into a different cycle. This time,
starting with G minor (the final chord of the previous sequence), it
drops the root note by a single tone to form a major chord (so from G
minor the G drops to F forming Bb major) and then drops the root note
by a semi-tone to form another minor chord (Bb drops to A to form D
minor). In this way you can transpose through all 24 major and minor
chords without repetition before you arrive back at your starting
point. It still needs a lot of work, but I like the way it's shaping
up, and you can hear
it here. Oh, and for no good reason at all it's in 5/4.
A laptop (HP Pavilion
g6 Notebook). A phone (Samsung mini something or other). A wifi connection. A couple of
blues harps (one in C, one in D). A tambourine. A pair of maracas.
Various leads and jack-plug adapters.
And, as of yesterday, I
have a DAW: Reaper. They give you a 60 day free trial, which should
be plenty of time to work out whether it's worth the candle, and even
after that it's only about £40. Obviously, it's not going to be top
quality, but that fits my approach down to the ground. Part of what
I'm trying to achieve here is a victory over the fetishization of
sound. The less potent your ideas, the more you fixate on sound
quality as a kind of ersatz substitute. You end up like one of those
dreary wine buffs who bollocks on for hours about highlights and
notes. The quality of the actual music gets pushed aside by a
neurotic obsession with the depth and clarity. That's a marked
feature of modern music – especially electronic music, where it's
almost taken for granted that the songs themselves will be formulaic
and banal. It's all about that bass. At the same time, I must be on
my guard against inverted snobbery; just because a song is ramshackle
that doesn't make it meaningful or profound. Indie music is ample
proof of that. The sound quality should be sufficient to do justice
to the idea, but without taking centre-stage. So I will be an avant
garde Aristotle, ever striving for the golden mean.
Anyway, Reaper comes
with a rather basic soft-synth, to which I've already added an organ
and a piano (both free downloads). More will follow once I've got a
better grasp of how to integrate them with the workstation. As for
Reaper itself, I've fiddled about with it for a few hours, watched a
few tutorials on YouTube and managed to get about twenty seconds of
midi music out of it. It's frustrating to be back near the bottom of
the hill. My previous stint of home recording involved Cakewalk, and
by the end I could do some fairly sophisticated things with it. I'm
not sure yet whether Reaper is better or worse than Cakewalk from a
technical point of view, but it certainly seems less intuitive to
use. Perhaps that's just a matter of getting used to it. Really
powerful software programs often have a steep learning curve but then
again so do quite a few shit ones.
What I will need to get
– recording
Obviously an audio
interface and a condenser mic – and so, obviously, the audio
interface will have to be able to accommodate a condenser mic. The
interface will be new territory for me as previously I've used a
portastudio for live recording and final mixing. I only used Cakewalk
on my laptop for midi and drum tracks which were then transferred to
the portastudio (via a simple line out). Man, I loved the “make do”
feel of that. It was like I was in Abbey Road in 1966.
I'll also probably need
an external hard drive and some extra memory, though neither of those
are particularly pressing at the moment. But what I'll certainly need
is a decent field recorder. I'm thinking of a Tascam Dr-22wl, but the
Zoom equivalent would probably do just as well. The ability to record
reasonable quality material outside of my flat is absolutely vital to
my project. You see, a huge drawback to home recording is that if you
don't watch out it becomes isolating. In that respect it's part of a
wider social trend: technology isolates. But you can also use it as a
means to defeat its own end, and the modern field recorder is a good
example of that. It allows you to get out and record things with
other people at the drop of a hat. Those recordings can then be
weaved into the larger tapestry of your design, and you can make them
available to the others involved so that they too can use it if they
wish, but whatever is done with it after the fact, it will retain a
moment of human cooperation. That is, or ought to be, at least an
aspect of all recorded music.
What I will need to get
– performance
Obviously I'm going to
need some musical instruments, but I'm fighting shy of getting a
guitar. I've played guitar for nearly forty years now, and there's
just too much baggage comes with it. As soon as I pick one up my mind
starts to run on rails: it's this chord sequence, that riff, that
scale, this trick, and so on. I'll get one eventually, I suppose, but
I'd quite like to avoid composing on the guitar as far as possible.
It's strangely liberating to write a song on an instrument you can't
really play. You make connections you wouldn't normally make and hear
the world differently. So my wish list (it's literally an Amazon Christmas wish list) contains almost everything except a guitar:
violin, clarinet (how I regret getting rid of my old one!),
glockenspiel, keyboard, cheap analogue synths, mandolin, Tibetan
singing bowl, a recorder, bongos, ukulele – basically, anything
that's not a guitar (although I don't want a saxophone either, as
that's the sound of Satan farting). I'd get a trombone, but I reckon
even my mild-mannered neighbours would be after my blood.
I suppose I'll also
need a midi controller keyboard, but my heart sinks slightly at the
prospect. For one thing, I enjoy composing straight onto the midi
piano roll, like Stravinsky (amongst others) used to with the
pianola.
