My
Christmas wish-list was an absurd collection of musical instruments
and equipment, ranging from hi-tech gadgets to children's toys.
Here's what my family kindly provided me with:
Clarinet
I
love the clarinet for various reasons. It has a warm, expressive tone
which is far more interesting and engaging than more
attention-grabbing instruments such as the sax. It's also a beautiful
artefact, with its mix of wood tubing and intricate metal keys,
levers and stops. Mine is a “beginner's” model, which basically
means it's (relatively) cheap and difficult to play. The lower notes
in particular are nearly impossible straight out of the box. I
suspect, however, that a few hundred hours of play will (a) improve
the accuracy of my fingering and (b) break in the instrument itself.
In any case, fighting against the medium is an integral part of my
project: finding ways to get interesting music out of unpromising
sources.
Anyway,
here's Monty Sunshine playing at a level I'll never, ever, ever be
able to match.
Stylophone
The
first mass-market synth with a cheap and nasty tone. Basically a
children's toy, though I'm not sure what sort of child would want to
play with it these days. So it's a retro-toy, reeking of nostalgia
for an outmoded future. I wonder what it sounds like through a few
effects?
Stylophone
Beat Box
The
stylophone marches bravely into the 1980s with this charmingly basic
drum and bass machine. You can build up complex loops with it, but
there's no quantizing or even a metronome, so it's fiendishly
difficult to get everything in time. Most of what you end up with
sounds horrible, but occasionally it's interesting even if it's not
what you intended. And therein lies its appeal: it's like the machine
has a mind of its own.
German
Market Percussion Section
Three
simple percussion instruments bought at the Christmas German market
in Milton Keynes. The mini-tambourine is usefully portable. The thing
with plastic balls on it makes a sound like a pair of maracas, only
softer. The third instrument has hollowed-out nut shells tied to it.
I've no idea what it's called or exactly how you're meant to play it,
but it makes an unusual clacking sound.
Melodica
A
pleasingly simple cross between a harmonica and an accordion, I've
already found it useful for working out chord progressions and simple
melodies. Again, it tends to be known as a children's instrument,
though it was widely used in 70's dub reggae and Steve Reich used it
as the basis for his 1966 tape loop experiment, “Melodica”.
Like I say, time let
Exercise 2 settle for a bit. I'm quite chuffed with it, all things
considered, but it's a bit slick and really the type of thing I'm
supposed to be avoiding. At some stage I'm going to have to fuck it
up. Kill your babies. But I'm too fond of it right now, so time to
move on.
To that end, we have A Message from the Bourgeoisie. You might call it the anti-Exercise 2.
Everything except the flute, kettle drum and guitar synth was
recorded about a year ago when I downloaded Audacity (although I've
extended and reordered the original a bit). Thing is, I couldn't get
on with Audacity, even after trying to master it for several minutes.
I recorded 30 seconds of clunky, laughably out of time music, added a
few annoying whistle sounds and a single drum sample and gave up the
whole thing as a bad job. But I dug it up yesterday just to see if
there was anything salvageable and was delighted by what I heard. I
think the fact that I was so obviously fighting a losing battle
against the means of production added greatly to its charm for me
(there's a Marxist joke in there somewhere). Added the
above-mentioned bits and bobs (which all came courtesy of the fantastic collection of free virtual instruments found here), and it is what it
is.
Yet again, it's not a
finished article. There are at least two more parts to come – one a
cheesy elctro-pop song and the other a piece of ecstatic dance music.
You have to understand that my approach at this stage is simply to
get down as much music as I can, and then to sift, rearrange, re-edit
and remix the hell out of it. And then to select whatever strikes my
fancy. So at the moment everything's grist to the mill.
I've more
or less finished what I think is the backbone of the track. I've
shortened the opening section, tinkered with the drum part and filled
in the long, descending outro. I like how it just sort of melts away.
You can access it here (or at least I hope you can. Let me know if it doesn't work). What it needs now is a focus: a vocal, or
voices, or something of like that. Something to give it a context
outside of mere computer-generated sounds. But for the moment I'm
going to let it rest.
From
a technical point of view (ie, getting to grips with Reaper), there's
been some satisfying progress. I've worked out how to do track
automation (you can automate FX, which is tremendously useful),
create track folders, render groups of tracks, and all that kind of
thing. I'd say I was quite close to where I was five years ago. I'm
still phased by the freedom that non-destructive editing gives you.
All those years working with tape-based portastudios has left it's
mark; rendering tracks, producing a master – these things are not
to be done lightly. But of course on a modern DAW that's absolute
nonsense. Make all the changes you want – you can always change
them back again. That's great but, at the same time, it kind of robs
your decisions of significance. Any alteration you make is always
“just for now”. So in a way there's no such thing as “finishing”
a track; it's only ever a work in progress.
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.
Here's
something that puzzles me. Thanks to technology, for a few hundred
quid anyone who feels like it can buy recording equipment that would
have astounded the top musicians and producers forty years ago.
Unlimited tracks and sound-manipulation are there for the asking. You
are not restricted by your ability to master an instrument or the
arduous business of getting several musicians to play in unison.
You're not even restricted by how many fingers you have. Any sound
you can think of, you can produce. Any combination of sounds you can
think of, you can produce. Any sound you can record can then be
manipulated in a near infinity of ways. All you need is time and
imagination. So how come the music created with this unprecedented
technological freedom is so arse-achingly predictable?
I'm
not really talking about mainstream pop here. That trots along more
or less as it has done since the late fifties: producing reasonably
catchy songs that have an emotional hook and are good for young
people to dance to. There are more sequencers, synths and auto-tuning
than there used to be, but those are just decorations on a relatively
fixed underlying structure. We shouldn't fall into the trap of
criticising pop for failing at something it's not even trying to do.
With “alternative” music-makers, however, it's a different story.
Those guys are supposed to be pushing boundaries, tearing up
the rule book, and so on. Yet what do we find? You've got electronic
dance music which sounds almost indistinguishable from stuff made
twenty years ago; rap music, which is actually less inventive than it
used to be thanks to legal restrictions on sampling; retro-rockers
and neo-folkies unconvincingly trying to make a virtue out of being
derivative; and the ambient crowd producing lush, abstract
soundscapes which say nothing and are meant to be heard rather than
listened to.
OK,
I'm being harsh. All of the above styles have their good points, and
a lot of talented people are trying hard to produce interesting
music. But, to return to my initial point, doesn't it all seem a bit
conventional and unimaginative given the radical freedom at our
fingertips? Where are the guys recording stuff that makes you shout
“What the fuck is THAT”? For decades we had them, but they seem
to have disappeared at the precise moment when production methods
have never been more in their favour (and maybe that's no
coincidence).
Actually,
although I'm puzzled by the failure of alternative rock to live up to
the potential of its own technology, I'm probably even more puzzled
by the failure of classical music. After all, classical composers
have a veritable tradition of pushing boundaries and tearing up the
rule book. For most of the 20th
century that's virtually all they did. And their experiments in
electronic music predate those of rock by at least a decade – or by
fifty years if you include the pianola as an early type of midi
device. You would have thought that a gifted composer who had studied
Stravinsky, Schoenberg,
Varèse
and Stockhausen (as well as Bach, Beethoven and Brahms) would be
gloriously well-placed to produce something astounding.
And yet it simply hasn't happened. At most, there are a few composers
who incorporate the odd technological adornment into their work as a
nod to the fact that it's no longer 1935. When it comes to exploring
digital possibilities, contemporary classical music shows an
incredibly depressing lack of ambition.
Part
of the reason, I think, is that classical music has never really
embraced the idea of the studio as a compositional tool. Its focus
remains resolutely fixed on what musicians can produce on the spot,
and the studio is only there to capture their performances. And
actually there's something laudable about that; it helps retain a
social, organic aspect to music which is easily lost when it's just
one person in a studio (or bedroom) endlessly fiddling with loops and
compression filters. Nevertheless, you'd have thought there might
have been at least one composer willing to step outside the
performance-centred orthodoxy and spend a year or so creating an
amazing recording that couldn't possibly be reproduced live in the
concert hall. But you'd be wrong.
Well,
here I am moaning about other people not doing what they ought to.
Why don't I give it a go myself, since I seem to think it's so easy?
And that's what I intend to do, although I don't think it will be
easy at all. Technology has opened up possibilities,
but converting that into a worthwhile actuality
is never a simple matter. For one thing, the very inventions that
seem to help us can also work against us. They offer the prospect of
previously impossible creations, but they also make it almost
irresistibly easy to produce shallow variations of the past. That's
certainly something I've found with my own attempts at home
recording. Why struggle to be original when it's so simple to churn
out an endless stream of charming pastiches? I've been down that
road, and although I'm quite proud of some of the things I produced (you can hear some here),
it's time to say enough is enough. It's time to explore – to
genuinely
explore. It's time to refuse to settle. Let's be honest: it's
probable that I won't be up to the task, that the result will be
unlistenable rubbish. But that's still better than the alternative.
