i'm a sf based musician. i love recording and production and listening to music. boom sauce with bacon.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
It’s time to show some fan appreciation! Nataly and I are giving away free home made chocolate chip cookies and playing a 30 minute acoustic set for anyone who shows up!
It’s a CookieBlitz!
When: Friday, May 25th 5:00pm - 5:30 pm.
Where: Crissy Field. Specifically: http://g.co/maps/6sku7
Why: Cuz upon releasing our EP, we realized we haven’t done nice things for our fans in a while. Time to say thank you.
Dealing with Despair!!!
This is what I feel like right now: I work crazy hard. I spend my days locked in my studio pouring through manuals and learning how to use music software, listening to my favorite tracks and ABing my mixes, draining every last drop of creative juice into my tracks. And they’re still not good enough. They don’t even sound CLOSE to my favorite mixes, my favorite songs, my favorite music.
I know I’m not the only person who feels like this. Lots of artists have to deal with feelings of despair and mediocrity, that two week period of “fuck, everything I make is boring and fake and not worth the space on my hard drive.” So how do we combat this?! How do I keep going back into my studio to make music? How can I possibly be OK with releasing tracks that I know will never be at the level of my favorite artists?
Make lots of shitty stuff. That’s how to do it. Make LOTS and LOTS of shitty, bad, boring, bold, overstuffed, saturated, bleeding music.
My problem right now is that I’m trying to make ONE perfect thing. I’m concentrating my efforts on one or two tracks. While I’m definitely learning a lot in the process, it’s frustrating as HELL to wake up to the same song again. And when I hit a dead end, I keep ramming my head into the wall, trying to fix it, which is just too discouraging.
I think it’s time to move on. I need to make hundreds of songs before something is good. Spending 50 days on ONE mix? Not the answer. Not at this point in the process. There’s too much I still need to learn. I’ve got to stop trying to make perfect stuff, and start having a little more fun and being more free and easy about the process.
So, how to deal with despair? Just make LOTS of stuff, and know that most of it will be shitty. Make that your goal - to make lots of shitty music. Then one day, you’ll wake up and realize you’ve recorded 50 songs, and 3 of them are pretty good….
Spending the day with Mike Mogis of Bright Eyes. Mike is mixing Nataly’s solo record. I’m sitting here behind him as he’s doing a recall of “Leslie.”
The studio is 5000 sq ft of awesome. It feels and looks brand new, as it was only built a few years ago.
Would you want this much gear for your studio? I think the short answer is yes, of course. But does it add too much complexity and too many options to the creative process? If you had the money, would you build yourself a big studio, or would you keep things contained?
Some Panning and EQ thoughts
This post is in response to @DJChrisson who asked me about panning and EQ. My response was a tad too long for twitter.
As a rock/pop producer, I’m very influenced by early stereo recordings like rubber soul / revolver. There was a lot of hard panning in these records, which I like. It makes the mixes feel uncluttered and clean, and it also allows the listener to hear the intricacy and musicality of each part.
The downside is that sometimes it can make a track feel spacially imbalanced or lacking in “fullness.”
For example recently I’ve been making a lot of bass music and electronic music. I hardly pan anything! One sound at a time explodes through the center of the sound field. However, sometimes I’ll bus a track to an auxiliary input, hi pass it, and put some stereo spread on it (with delay or a stereo field plug-in like Air stereo width). This gives electronic music a stereo feeling while preserving the depth and singularity of the bass sounds.
I also use a lot of hi pass filtering - this is not a good idea for boomy, booty-shaking mixes, though. Getting out of mixing habits is tough, but I’m working on preserving lots of full low end in my tunes to keep the subs rumbling in the car. Knowing what to hi pass and what not is important. I don’t hi pass kick drums anymore, though I used to. I also don’t hi pass bass very much. But hi passing a voice? Great. For my mixes, I don’t need anything below 100hz on a lead vocal usually, and I often hi pass a vocal well above 100 hz.
One tricky thing about EQ is trusting your ears, not your eyes. One producer I was just reading about, Alan parsons I think, said that if he had to A-B something more than 3 times to hear a difference, he considered it unimportant. He said he laughs when guys solo out drum tracks for an hour and make 1/2 db tweaks here, 2 db tweaks there, only to bring in the rest of the band and wonder why their drums still sound wimpy. Most people say that EQ adds distortion, which scares people into under using EQ. Parsons evidently makes sweeping adjustments without soloing out tracks, until it sounds right IN the mix. I thought that method could give mixers a new, solid perspective on EQ.
It’s hard to trust your ears, but often it’s the only way. My electric guitar sound on the song “eat” came from a tiny little amp, and I needed to add probably around 9 db of boost to a whole area of the spectrum to make the guitar pop in the mix. Geoff emerick, engineer for the Beatles, was famous for over compressing, stressing, and pushing his gear to its limits, which is mostly why the Beatles had such a ballsy, unique driving tone.
Sometimes distortion is a good thing. Especially if you’re going for a little bit of “fuck you” in your records.
Is this stuff helpful? I don’t know if my tumblr followers are fellow musicians. Anything you guys want me to write about in particular?
Don’t read the following if you don’t produce music - you’ll be bored, trust me!
The most interesting part about the recording process for this song was the way the form evolved. I’m talking about the AABA stuff - the way the various parts are arranged. Originally, it had an additional “verse” section, that was soon to be cut. Oh no!! Why?
I tried recording every instrument all the way through, because I had been reading a book by the Beatles engineer, Geoff Emerich, and I was inspired to simulate the “live tracking” technique. I was secretly hoping this would give my music a more organic feel instead of my usual chopped/looped and copy/pasted brand of electronic rock that I’ve gotten to accustomed to creating.
I was left with a near finished song after recording the last instrument. But every time the verse section happened, I was always slightly disappointed and bored. Originally, the “rock out” section didn’t happen until the very end of the 3 minute recording. And the lyrics “Drink this holy water…” were going to be the chorus of the song. I never opened up on the cymbals or the full kit until the last 30 seconds, because I wanted it to be a huge surprise explosion. But I liked listening to that part every time it happened, and I found myself fast forwarding through the verses to get to the ending!
As much as it pained me to start my usual chopping and pasting, I decided I had to be honest with myself about it - after all, if I find MYSELF fast-forwarding through my own song, then everyone else would probably do the same. So I chopped up the end section and pasted it after the first A section as a “chorus.” It immediately felt better, more structured, more rocking, and clearer. So I added it after the second verse and so on.
Finally, I got up the guts to cut out those verses that I had spent so much time writing. I just lifted it right out of the pro tools session. DELETE. It was so painful, but it needed to happen. I saved a backup of the session with the verse so it would be easier to come back to it if I needed to (though I never did). What was left was the A section (which was originally my chorus!!) followed by a chorus (which was originally the surprise explosion at the end).
The lesson I learned from this was about being honest with myself and not trying to achieve some false notion of an “ideal” - I desperately wanted to try “live tracking,” and I wanted the song to be “real.” I didn’t want to “cheat” with computers by chopping and pasting. I wanted to record the song as if I was using tape. Ultimately though, what originally felt STALE and INORGANIC was the live tracking session that I had finished. The chopping and pasting made it feel MORE ORGANIC, raw and real. I don’t know why that was the case, but it all comes down to using your ears and believing them, trusting them. It’s hard to be honest and true with yourself, especially about your own work that you’ve spent so much time crafting. And it’s easy to get into a mindset that you need more “professional technique” to make your recordings more “legitimate.”
This is all bullshit.
There is no such thing as legitimacy or fidelity or reality, only music that sounds good to you, and music that doesn’t sound good to you. Some of my favorite recordings of all time were made on garage band by Louis Cole with 15 dollar microphones that most engineers would scoff at. They would say something about how these mics didn’t have a flat enough frequency response because they were attempting to boost the high and low end of the spectrum to compensate for clarity and craftsmanship, in an effort to appease the public’s ear with that lovable “smile curve” on the EQ graph. Well, they’re wrong. At least to my taste, to my ear, to my liking, Louis’ music sounds better TO ME than most everything they’re ever made in their entire lives with all their fancy equipment and studios and $20k mic pre amps and such.
Skrillex made “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” on Ableton Live with a set of KRK Rockit 5s (which I’ve decided to call the “people’s speaker” because I’m sure it will be a famous monitor 50 years from now). Those monitors are $150 a piece. Oh, and he used a MacBook Pro. No analog gear, no frills, no fancy stuff. Just a hefty set of ears, some cheap speakers, and a lot of hard work and creative energy. ROCK ON, BROTHER.
FUCK money and fancy studios. FUCK pristine analog boards from the 60s. FUCK that thing that I need to buy to make better music. No excuses! We live in the greatest, easiest time to be creative in history. We have the tools we need. Now we just have to put in the time and be honest with ourselves.
I’m working on a stop-mo animation. ”Creatures pulverize fruit with huge guns” is the tentative title….
Studio Success!
Today was day 3 working on my Judas cover, and I was able to salvage it! hooray.
The problem, like i said in my last post, was that the main hook of the song is a super-rhythmic off beat synth line that i was trying to play on various instruments (organ, guitar, wurlitzer) and I was trying to sync it up to my live drumming. My rhythm is decent, but it wasn’t good enough to make this part feel good. So i ditched the live drumming and opted for my casio drum machine instead on my m100. this metronomic grid gave me a more solid foundation to build on as i laid down the tricky off-beat stuff.
i actually ended up adding live drums on top of the casio (after all that…) but i played for about 5 mins, picked the coolest bar, and then chopped it up a bit. then i looped it and layered it on top, and i dug the groove, so that’s the final beat.
i’m going to edit the video tomorrow and maybe over the weekend, but hopefully i’ll have it up by monday.
Studio FAIL! Tomorrow is another day.
I just FAILED hard core in the studio! Spent two days working on a “Judas” cover, and I can’t get it sounding good. I think the main problem was I was trying to use a live drum beat, but there’s this SUPER groovey off beat rhythmic synth line in the song, and my time simply isn’t good enough to make it feel good with live drums. I going to try again tomorrow (day 3…), and I’m going to start by creating a tighter, drum and bass style beat, then lay down the groovey bass to a backbone that’s more locked into a grid. I used to get discouraged when stuff like this happened, but it happens so often that I’m used to it now. Just gotta keep trying new stuff until something works - that’s generally how i record i think.
Occasionally, something works right off the bat - the super mario bros VideoSong was INSANELY quick. Like 6 hours, and it was done. Everyone once in a while that happens. But the version of “Sinking Feeling” on VS4 on the other hand was my SECOND version of the song. I have an ENTIRE version, start to finish, with vocals and everything, that I completely scrapped and remade. Sometimes that happens, too.
I guess it’s important to just keep trying. If something doesn’t work, try something else! and keep trying till it works!
Sinking Feeling, from my new album, VS4
What I was thinking 5 years ago
In 2006 my friend, Michael Aisner, wrote me an email about my seemingly disparate interests in both music and film - he knew that I was confused about which ONE to pursue, and he was trying to help me figure out which basket I should put my eggs in.
My email back to him was this:
Yo,
Yeah, I do feel pressure to specialize, but I find myself reluctant to pick a certain direction. Right now, I love film, and I love music. I don’t know where that’s going to take me, but I can’t give up one or the other. I don’t think I’d be happy, or rather it wouldn’t be possible. The day I decide to give up movies, I’ll come up with an idea for a screenplay, and I won’t stop myself from writing it down, you know? I can’t.
At some point, you’re right - I’m going to have to pick something and go for it. But I feel like I need to let nature take its course and help me decide which way to go. Hopefully, after all is said and done, I’ll be able to do both. If not professionally, then one as a hobby, the other as my career. Although, I can’t imagine that right now. It seems like they’re so integrated. I don’t know.
Anyway, thanks for your encouragement. I’m going to keep pressing forward, and when I get an idea that worthy of all my eggs, I’ll go for it. So far, that idea is still lingering around somewhere, but not in my head. We’ll see.
Talk to you soon.
Jack
