lostwars: a recording and music appreciation blog

I was listening to a live recording of a Ryan Adams show the other day, and the song "Love is Hell" played. I am not sure of the nature of the recording process, but the song was elegantly mixed in stereo and we a really great recording of this song. I was listening for the effects that I knew were used on the album, but didn't hear them. What I heard was literallly two guitars, plugged into clean amps, and no effects. The result was very interesting. The music, the volume, and the atmosphere was not elevated in any way. The playing was right and in time, and sounded better than the studio version in my opinion.

The point of this is, sometimes its best not to hide behind pillars of insecurity: distorted guitars, louder drums, sloppy playing meant to sound like something its not.

Sometimes its best to just plug the guitar in the clean channel and play.

I went home recently and found a box of cassette tapes I used to do multitrack recordings when I was 20. There are some gems and a lot of crap, but its a nice trip into the past when all I had to record music was a dual tape deck and a Zoom drum machine.

This is the reason I haven't been posting here lately. I decided to take on the job of making recordings of all 47 tapes and posting them here.

I will be back soon as I have a lot to share. In the meantime check out Phil Golyshko. He is a friend of mine and hes been writing some stellar music lately. You can find him on myspace here.

I think this post will be beneficial to both of us because it will allow me to go through what I have done in the last 15 years and outline some of the steps I have taken to gain knowledge over the years, even when I had no money to record music.

First off, my name is Dereck and I play guitar. I am not the best guitar player in the world, I am not some sort of YouTube phenom, nor have I ever gone to a formal school to learn the history of guitar. I started playing when I was 11 years old, on a cheap Bentley dreadnought that wasn't more than $150 from the local music store. My band director at the time told my parents that I should either play piano or guitar. Of course, being the rebellious troublemaker I was - I chose guitar.

I took lessons on and off from various teachers in my home town, but eventually I just learned to play by ear. Anything I really wanted to play, I just practiced and practiced until I got it right. I had been playing old Animals covers and classic rock until I discovered the album "Gish" by the Smashing Pumpkins. I wanted to do away with the acoustic guitar and get a real Strat like my guitar hero Billy.

After memorizing just about every riff from every grunge album of the time, by 1994 I was in a band with Eric Swanson and a few other guys. It wasn't the music I really wanted to do, but it was as close to rock as I could get at the time, and even growing up I learned a lot about how to deal with creative people and their different personalities. The name of our band was Nevenu, a name birthed in the bedroom of my grandparents house by Eric, came from a thought he had in economics class about revenue, and our legacy was born.

This continued for a few years. As I go older I tried apprenticing in a recording studio with a local owner, but inability to learn or teach at the time got in the way. It didn't seem like I was really going down the right path, and this was mostly because of the way I felt about the environment I was in. Which leads me to my first point on creative recording:

You always have control over your environment.

Of course I didn't learn this until I was older, but I could see little ways I chose to implement this idea and how it benefited me greatly. You are never stuck with the same sound, or the same room, or the same situations. Its up to you to take control and experiment, to find what works best for YOU and the music.

Through this time I got more experience recording, but I didn't have the money to buy recording equipment. A bandmate, Zach had a Tascam Recorder, I think it was a MKII or III - but he was overly protective of it and we did very little recording on it.

My first experience with home recording was with some Sony dual cassette boombox that had an unusual defect: it had a microphone that was active when recording the play deck. So I could record a guitar part, switch tapes, play the tape and play guitar over that and it would be multitracked onto the second tape. I did all of my demos like this for almost 6 years. I eventually upgraded to a nicer dual deck, but it was a system I was comfortable with and it worked for what I was doing. This is my second point of creative recording:

There is no real "wrong" way to do things.

The whole art of recording is meant to capture sound, to experiment with mic and instrument placement, to push the boundaries of the human ear. For me there is more excitement in "HOW DID THEY DO THAT?" than being able to pick out the sound of a Marshall JCM800 and Strat in a mic.

After I moved to ProToolsLE on Windows 98, then the whole game changed. The art of multitracking made even more sense to me. Layers of sound made more sense to me. The colors that came out of e-Bowed electric guitar and string quartets made sense to me: a la Glycerine by Bush. Its a played out song to some people, but it is an example of how you can layer sounds to create an emotion with sound that then becomes iconic. Think about all the e-Bowed/String quartets we have had since then. Nigel and Clive knew what they were doing.

From here I tried everything I could get my hands on: Cubase, Live, Pro Tools, Cool Edit Pro, etc. And learned by winging it.

After years of writing songs and trying to market them, the Internet started becoming a multimedia machine and I was seeing more Enhanced CDs and  secret sites from mainstream artists I tried to do the same thing in the spring of 2003 with Driving At Midnight. DAM was a website that I had my music streaming from and available for purchase for about a year. I gave up on DAM because at the time bandwidth was expensive. I had to find another way to get my music out there. So I applied for ASCAP.

A couple songs I wrote showed up on an indie film in 2004, but I had no way to collect on payments after the movies release. ASCAP helped me do this. I recommend anyone that is serious about getting their music out to the masses,  register  for ASCAP, BMI, or another recording artists group.  ASCAP has  given me great resources for  getting my music heard, they have a great mentoring program, and an awesome convention for songwriters every year.

This is my last point for todays post: Think beyond your music for other opportunities.

The larger your personal artistic world is, the more opportunity for your art to thrive and grow exists.

So thats a little bit of my background. I didn't really go into the bands I have been in, but I will be sure to make that the subject of some future posts. The point of this blog is to show those of you struggling with your music that there are quite a few options for getting your art and hard work noticed. This could be in the form of recording techniques or business practices that will help in the long run. Thanks for reading.

Right now I am in a hotel in Illinois relaxing and working on music. I am playing a bit with the Center Channel Extractor in Adobe Audition. I like to do this to songs I like since it lets me hear more background vocal flourishes, some guitar and percussion overdubs, and how producers and engineers build layers in hit songs.

The song I am analyzing right now is a great song by Jimmy Eat World called "Let It Happen". I can hear a female voice singing in upper register at the chorus. It reminds me of a song by the Promise Ring where Jim Adkins sang in the same style. Its a well worn signature of their music and gives it drive and personality that makes their music really enjoyable to rock out to.

Here is the Original





Here is the Edited version with just background vocals.

So this is how I gather up ideas and inspiration for creating my own music. I listen to other creators and work my magic with tools I have to listen to what they are doing and maybe I can even figure out how. I used to do this same hack with my old Sony Walkman and the headphone jack and a pair of cans. I would place the headphones plug in halfway and it would either throw the song out of phase or cancel out the center channel.

In this example, I used Auditions Panning and Expanding tool to cut out the vocal, and the FFT filter to isolate the frequencies where I was hearing the female voice.

What are some creative ideas you can come up with based on this example? For me it means I can try experimenting with stretching my voice and tuning it to emulate this background vox, or even find someone whose voice fits well over mine in the mix. This also opens up opportunities to hear different modes of singing harmony, which is always useful. When I sing in the car, 80% of my singing is in harmony with a lead vocal.

email me and let me know if you come up with any ideas: dblackburn@gmail.com

This week, I was thinking of things I wanted to do in my spare time from looking for a job. It was pretty clear what I wanted to do. I wanted to share knowledge I had found in the hours of looking on the Internet, trying to answer questions about recording I just didn't know. In taking this simple step, I realized the importance of applying this idea to my creative endeavors.

I'm the one on the left.

I have had a bad case of writers block in the last year. I was writing songs every week in 2005 during a tumultuous part of my life, and actually finding a lot of satisfaction in the creative process. But for the last year I have just felt frustration about not creating the way I "should" be. I just felt like it wasn't the right time. But when is the right time? I can't wait for everything to fall into place to be able to do what I want to do.

Sometimes we need to let go of our inhibitions when it comes to the creative process and let subconscious reasoning take over. What does this mean?

DON'T THINK TOO HARD.

Thinking too much is perfectly fine. Over thinking, or thinking too hard as most people classify it, is the real enemy of the creative process. Over thinking self-worth, ability, and outside opinion can really kill the creative spirit, and for some of us the process feels more like something that controls us than something we can have control over.

For musicians, this ability to "let go" is practiced during improvisation. I always heard that improv was good for me, I would learn so much from it, and it would make me a better musician. It was easy to do when I was in Jazz Band in high school. I was given a set scale to solo over, and because it was a teacher telling me I needed to do something, I did it. I made mistakes, but over time I gradually got better at it. This blog isn't about my experience, though. This is about how my experience can help you break through whatever issue you're having with creating art. This is about pushing yourself into territory unknown with a healthy dose of geekiness over what happens when you cut 50hz out of your mix.

So back to the reason for blogging. To me its clear that there are a ton of resources out on the net for creating music at home: YouTube demonstration videos of recording and performance techniques, websites dedicated to artists sharing their plug-in presets with the world (sometimes for a fee), and of course thousands of magazines and books in various forms available for download to outline all of the ways to manipulate, create, and destroy your music. What is it thats missing?

I'm still not sure, but I know there is a void and I am going to try to fill it.

And this was the simple key to overcoming another bout of writers block. I know there is something there and I am going to find out what it is. I will bring it out into the light.

Identify.

Embrace.

Release.

Last night I listened to Adore in full for the first time in many years and I could hear some interesting things that were never apparent before. I think this is one of the best reasons for purchasing a decent pair of studio monitors or headphones. I was using my mixing headphones: A pair of Audio Technica ATH-M20s. These headphones have great clarity and a really flat response. If you have them cranked to about -12dB - -15dB you can really hear the texture of music quite well and I prefer them to my Grado Labs P60s when listening to music while working.

Some things I noticed:

To Sheila: Towards the end, the muffled strings and electric guitar sounds roll off the main phrases in slow motion. Its amazing. I can hear the EQ cut off at about 200hz and a large metallic hall sound applied to the guitars. It really opens up the song quite a bit. At 4:38 the sostenuto pedal comes off the piano right after some electronic blip that I don't think I have ever heard before.

Ava Adore: There are reverse cymbals integrated into the drum loop on the verse. They are predominantly in the left channel.

Daphne Descends: I don't know if this is true or not, but I can hear the cut and paste of loops during the verses here. The loops cut points are very subtle, but you can hear a difference in the snare and the drum loop in the back ground, plus some sort of ARP blips going on over 2kHz.

Once Upon a Time: See if you can hear the distorted guitar flourishes during the vers. They are swirling around in the right channel. Also there is a bongo type drum following the appregio there too.

Tear: At 1:05, there is a clear EQ difference and possibly a compressor issue with Billys voice. I think the beginning o fthe song must have been tracked at a different time than the rest of the song, or at least the vocals were tracked at 3am and someone got lazy...

Tear has some of the best multitracked drums on the entire album though. The rolloff on the toms with compression really carries the rhythm section throughout.

Annie-Dog: In my opinion this is the best song on the album. The pedal bass tones here really flow with the piano lines. There are little guitar flourishes in the background during the verse breakdowns that bring out the piano too. I love listening to this song with headphones. Its really beautiful.

Blank Page: Another awesome vocal arrangement. This is something I am going to go into deeper in the future. The power of a strong vocal performance coupled with a creative arrangement makes for a stellar song.

I think that its difficult for independent musicians to understand how much time and love goes into creating an album like Adore. Even though it did not get amazing reviews, it stands on its own for what it is and what it represents.  With the advent of home studios and cheaper components and plug ins, there is more possible now than ever was in 1996 for home musicians.

Hopefully, I will be able to explore this more in future posts and with examples of my own music.