“Father, please forgive me – it has been three months, two weeks and three days since my last confession…”
I know you’re used to it by now… I am a sporadic blogger at the best of times, but while struggling artistically, I’m just crap – there really is no other word for it! Still, I hope you’ll bear with me – just knowing you’re out there, listening to me whine – it makes it all worthwhile. Or something…
So, of course I’ve not actually recorded anything new in the last three months. But in that time, a few positive things have happened, musically-speaking – it’s not entirely been time wasted.
First off, I’ve been playing a lot of guitar, and this has lead to two things:
I’m a guitarist first and foremost, and need to face that and focus on that when writing and recording.
I started out in music playing the school drum kit when I when I was about 14, muddling my teenage way through a mixture of Genesis covers and New Romantic papp-ery. I approached my parents to see if they’d buy me a kit – a friend of a friend had an almighty zillion-piece kit for sale for three hundred quid at the time – but they felt it wasn’t in my, theirs or our neighbour’s best interests to do so. I remember playing the congas in my first band, backed by an old Roland drum machine for want of an actual kit of my own.
My sister had started, and given up on, learning the guitar a few years before this, and her old cheese-cutter guitar was still lying around, so I picked it up and started fiddling with it, and after a few months, my parents bought me my first, own guitar – a hefty piece of ash bolted to a cracked neck with custom wiring and a sound not totally unlike a strat, if quite different. And it weighed a tonne.
Anyhow, to cut a long story short (for relevance) – the guitar is the instrument I’m most comfortable with, it’s the instrument I’ve played for the longest, and it’s the instrument on which I’ve at least started most of the pieces I’ve written. In the past I’ve tended to take guitar ideas and try to adapt them to the keyboard to give myself the massive range of options offered by synthesis and effects, but over the last few months I’ve been tending to think I should persist in recording the ideas in the form they were initially envisioned and add other sounds and music (either with more guitars, or keyboards) later. This, I think, will be truer to the original ideas and truer to myself as a musician.
I’ve probably 10 pretty solid ideas now which, if I could just get off my arse and down to recording them, would make a pretty solid digital release. Some of them you’ve already heard on this blog and some are totally new. Some of them are still piano-based (despite [1] above) but I’ve been happening across some really nice guitar ideas too. It’s a good deal of music, I promise, and even just as nascent ideas in my head and my fingers, I’m quite proud of some of them, so I really hope I can finally knuckle down and do them justice on record!
Secondly, I’ve recently been to London for my annual visit and had some interesting and inspirational meetings, not least a fascinating and invigorating lunch with Gareth Jones discussing limitation as a creative tool. It’s an idea I’ve touched on a few times previously – that with too much choice when it comes to instrumentation and effects, I just get lost and produce nothing, but Gareth made some really cool suggestions and I’ve come back feeling quite a bit more energised and positive about the whole thing than I have for a while (hence this blog entry, I guess!)
So, I guess what I’m saying is “Watch this space”, and while I know that what I’ve been saying all along, this time you might actually see (and hear) something worthwhile soon…
Harking back to the thinking that prompted Technological Roadblocks, or The Kore Of The Problem?, over the last couple of days I’ve been exploring some of the multeity of effects I have available to me on my DAW and looking at how I can develop an interesting, recognisable and (above all) personal guitar sound using them.
Though I started out as a drummer at school and had a phase using my voice as my main instrument, these days I am first and foremost a guitarist. The guitar is, for me, still the visceral rock and roll instrument and has the most tactile, expressive interface of all the instruments I play. There is something primal about the wood, the metal, the physicality of bending notes, picking at strings and digging out harmonics that makes a guitar an incredibly satisfying instrument to play.
I have a number of guitars, both acoustic and electric but in trying to develop a sound, I’ve been gravitating towards just one – my much-loved 1986 Fender Thinline Telecaster. It’s a beautiful guitar to play, and the bridge pickup has that characteristic Telecaster twang, but the special thing for me is the neck pickup which has a much lower output than the pickups used on the solid-bodied Tele’s and exhibits an incredible round, almost jazzy quality that really appeals to me.
Great guitarists in the past have been able to coax a unique, instantly recognisable sound out of a guitar using just their fingers and their phrasing – Clapton and Hendrix to name just two – and others still have employed effects to take their playing on this ubiquitous instrument and elevate it to a career – The Edge, for instance. Well, my fingers don’t match up to Eric’s or Jimi’s, and The Edge already owns 3/16 ping-pong delays so I’m still searching for my sound, but I’ve been having a lot of fun doing it!
It’s possible to get an almost synthesiser-like sound out of a guitar, using a combination of envelope-following filters, harmonisers and fuzz pedals, and that’s what I’ve done on this first excerpt of an idea I’ve been playing around with over the last couple of days. There are two guitars in this piece – the first, an obvious, delayed guitar panned slightly to the right, and the second, panned slightly to the right (that comes in at around 40 seconds), that you may initially mistake for a synth.
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The guitar line is played with an eBow into IK Multimedia’s Amplitube3, where I set up an FX Chain with the Phaser10 phaser, PRODrive distortion, Octav octaver and Envelope filter pedals to give a synth-like quality to the line. The pitch-tracking using the Octav pedal is not great with an eBow’d line but it’s good enough to pipe into the next set of effects outside of Amplitube3, and a bit of variation give a sense of analogueness and movement. From Amp3, everything goes through eletronisounds ubergate plugin, which cuts and chops the line up and applies some further effects (delay, chorus, some further filtering and EQ) and then into Variety of Sounds’ NastyDLA, a delay and saturation effect that I’m really loving at the moment. Finally, we go through Stillwell’s Bombadier buss compressor to even things out and glue things together.
I think it all works very well in context and though it would never be mistaken for a synthesiser on its own, it’s nice to take a guitar so far from its natural sound once in a while!
Another effect I’ve been really enjoying lately is VallhallaShimmer an awesome reverb with pitch modulation. I set up a chain in Reaper for some live improvisation, with the THD BiValve amp model running out into SoundToys’ Tremolator tremolo plugin and an instance of ValhallaShimmer on a send with a huge, modulated reverb sound… and then I played!
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(The opening sound is me tapping this neck pickup of the Thinline with a plectrum. The rest of the effect all comes from ValhallaShimmer.)
When I was thinking about “turning my guitar into a synthesiser”, I considered the possibility of using the live audio from a guitar as one (or more) of the oscillators in a synth itself and going from there. Native Instruments’ Absynth lets you do just that, so I set up another chain in Reaper with the guitar going (again) into Amplitube3 (though this time, the British Copper 30TB amp model) and then into Absynth 5 with a patch that used the audio input as oscillators, filtered and subtracted it a bit before pushing it through Resonators effect. This then all came out into ValhallaShimmer again to create a (far more suble than in the previous clip) reverse reverb sound. Enjoy!
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So far, I guess, I’ve not come up with anything earth-shatteringly unique, but I have been having a lot of fun and am actually making and recording some music, so that can’t be bad in itself! I’ve still got “Connections” to complete, and I shouldn’t be allowing this to distract me as much as it has been this last week, but sometimes you just have to go the way the music takes you!
Anyhow, let me know what you think about any of the clips or concepts in this post, and also let me know you favourite ways of effecting guitars in interesting and fresh ways!
One of the toughest things to learn to do when composing to order is to translate the concepts, ideas and feelings producers and directors try to convey into an understanding of what it actually is they want. Too many people have been quoted as saying “Writing about music is like dancing to architecture” to pick any single on for this post, but they’re all right – music is a nebulous concept at the best of times, but when a director has a very strong idea of what they want, trying to convey that to a composer in such a way that the composer begins to hear the same thing is a test of language, shared experience and cultural reference points.
So imagine trying to do it in a foreign language, with directors and producers raised immersed in a culture alien to your own and sharing very few historial and cultural references… That’s my biggest stumbling block with developing any serious work here in Spain at the moment – connecting!
Coincidentally (or, if you prefer, in a brilliantly crafted seque), I am currently working on the title music for a web travel series called “Connections” which is being developed by a friend here in Granada. After some initial, somewhat frustrating conversations, we overcame the communication issues by swapping YouTube links back-and-forth of music which contained elements of what she was after until we honed in what it was she wanted. And I think I’ve got it now – ambient, oriental drumming (well, who doesn’t like a bit of taiko now-and-then!) with some natural sounds to evoke travel and cultures, etc., etc.
So, I’ve got the melody and basic harmonic structure together, a pretty simple idea in Em. (Title music doesn’t have a lot of scope to be complicated – this is a 60 second spot, and at 70bpm that allows for 16 bars, but it’s still possible to develop a nice little AA’A”B structure with some sacrifices.) Now it’s time to start looking at orchestrating and developing it to: a) develop a recognisable identity, and b) make it interesting!
Here’s a very rough render of the melody and a harmony line to give you an idea:
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Along with “Connections”, I’ve been playing out and developing a few ideas on the Taylor. A couple of chord sequences have some potential I think, including one which has some strong resonances of the Floyd which I need to flesh out and see where it goes.
Recently, while playing, I’ve been experimenting with tunings other than the guitar standard EADGBE. (Interestingly, I played out the harmony for “Connections” with the guitar in Dropped-D [where the lowest E-string is tuned down one-tone to a D and the other strings are left as they are] and it turned into something completely different, but really nice, so don’t be suprised if that chord sequence ends up somewhere else in a more guitar-oriented form at some later date!) It’s all too easy to find one’s fingers falling into tried-and-tested (and worn-out) positions in standard tuning and changing things about can often make for interesting and exciting discoveries. I hope a few of the little ideas I’ve been coming up with while doing this will turn into stronger ideas over time!
Given I’ve been ill over the last couple of weeks, I’m quite pleased with what I have been producing. The Adams are making a difference, both in the quality of sound I’ve been creating, and in the desire to do it, so I’m happy with that too. Anyhow, just keeping you up-to-date – hopefully there’ll be some completed work to show for it all very soon now!
Typical as it is, having set up and started to learn my new monitors, I fell sick and spent the next couple of days in bed, unable to get into the studio and take advantage of the “new gear buzz”!
Laura Kidd, She Makes War (image by Tim Collings)
Once well again though, I jumped in the studio to tackle a new remix, the opening track for She Makes War’s album Disarm, entitled “Scared To Capsize”.
Laura is an incredibly driven, talented artist and I wanted to get my teeth into remixing a track for her from the moment I first heard the album. Having heard my remix for Matt Steven’s “Big Sky”, she was more than happy to let me have a crack at a tune, so once the stems were prepared, I grabbed them from SoundCloud and sat down to listen to the building blocks I had to work with.
Twelve stems were provided – lead vocals, two double-tracks for same, a B(acking) V(ocals) track and a megaphone distorted climax of the lead vocal, along with two keyboard tracks, a guitar track and four loops of vocal build-up. Like Matt, Laura works a lot with a looper and layers a backing track from 4- or 8-bar loops before singing and playing live over the top of it.
Strangely missing from the stems was the opening (and thus defining) ukulele riff, but I knew I could rip that from the original CD if required.
My first decision was to decide what tempo my remix was going to be. The original track is at 117bpm and I wanted to speed that up a little, though I didn’t want to go into the 130s and create a “dance mix”. After playing on the acoustic guitar for a while I settled on 125bpm. This meant I needed to time-stretch all the stems I intended to use by 6.83%. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to use any of the original instrumentation (which is not as drastic as it sounds, given that a good deal of the original track is layered voices) so I stretched all the vocal tracks and cut them up into phrases, ready for when they were needed.
Then I got down to working out my arrangement. First off, I took two of the vocal loops and cut them up into two bar segments, alternated them on two separate tracks (which I panned 40% left and 40% right in the final mix) and then attacked them with a delay, some chorus, a bitcrusher and some other plug-ins. This created the opening rhythmic bed for the track which I drop in and out throughout, offsetting the lead vocals.
Next up, I played a fairly funky drum track into BFD2 (which was later tweaked to change some voicings, such as the ride in the pre-chorus). The drums were mainly acoustic samples, which I compressed using BFD2′s built-in compressors and added a little overhead mic ambience to before bringing separate tracks out of BFD2 to be further compressed (Stillwell’s The Rocket on both kick and snare). Then, finally they were bussed together again and compressed once more (this time with Stillwell’s Bombadier Buss Compressor) – I wanted a pretty in-your-face drum sound as I was planning on a pretty sparse arrangement otherwise.
(Starting during the first chorus there’s a clave sound, low in the mix and washed in reverb from ValhallaShimmer – they’re actually offcuts from some curtain poles we had left over from a recent bout of DIY!)
The bass sound comes from Vir2′s Basis instrument, hosted in Kontakt 4. Again I tried to go a little funky, with plenty of 16th-note doubles and a tight following of the kick drum pattern. I dialed in a completely DI’d sound from Basis and routed the output from Kontakt into Amplitube3′s GreenBA250 amp and matching cab and then into BBE’s H82 Harmonic Maximiser set for a subtle addition to the low-end (which is often missing from samples). A touch of FabFilter’s Pro-C compressor kept things (more-or-less) under control.
Then I took a look at the ukulele riff that opens the song on the CD and thought I’d record my own version on nylon strung guitars… With a capo on the 5th fret, it’s a pretty easy riff (though I arpeggiated it rather than strumming it). I recorded it twice, panned the tracks hard left and right and added a bit of Bootsy’s EQmkII to low-shelf away any mic noise and add a bit of warmth to the mids, and from there into Bootsy’s NastyDLA for some subtle panning and delay fun. This created another bed to interact with the vocal loop I created earlier.
Now it was the turn of synths and first up was Spectrasonics’ Trilian. I created a simple bass/sub-bass synth sound by mixing samples from a Cwejman modular and a Roland SH101 with filtering in Trilian and EQ’ing in Reaper using FabFilter’s Pro-Q. I took a side-chain from the kick drum to lightly duck away some of this low synth sound whenever the kick sounded as it pretty much stomped over the bass drum otherwise!
On to Omnisphere for the Solina String Machine sound, which I tweaked a little and played a line very reminiscent of Simple Mind’s “Theme for Great Cities” – a nod of the head to my past! In mixing, the pad is constantly being panned from left to right to add some movement to the track.
With most of the instrumentation done, it was time to start dropping the vocals in, tweaking the time-stretching where required and lining them up. I used VocAlign Project to sample-match the tweaked double-track samples (where accuracy is important) but I later matched the BVs up by ear (where a little lack of synchronisation is both humanising and harmonising).
The vocal loops (as used straight, in the breakdown and in the final choruses) were compressed together with a touch of Bombadier and very slightly chorused.
The lead vocals, the double-tracks and the vocal loops were then bussed together and treated as one. I didn’t manipulate Laura’s voice too much – a little EQ to low-shelf any sub-sonic noise and a little high-shelf to give some air and a fast compressor (ReaComp) to tame any peaks followed by a slower compressor (Stillwell’s The Rocket again) to smooth out the levels a touch.
Backing Vocals were compressed separately, with Stillwell’s Bombadier Buss Compressor. All the vocals were sent to Lexicon’s Native LexRoom reverb.
Once the arrangement reached the final choruses I used the megaphone distorted versions of the vocals, playing them straight the first time then cutting and mixing them up and interleaving them together to create a more insistent outro than on the original version.
I recorded two electric guitars (panned 70% left and 70% right in the final mix), both effected differently through Amplitube3, then bussed them together, compressed them (with Stillwell’s Major Tom – for a change!) and added some movement using SoundToy’s EchoBoy plug-in, then dropped them into the mix to add some weight.
Mixing itself was fairly straight forward. I leant towards using filters to control volumes and fades – mainly Schwa’s Oligarch filter (on the bass guitar and synth pad) with FabFilter’s Simplon taking over the duties on the bass synth. The filter cutoffs are fairly heavily automated, carving shapes in the track all the way through the the end of the breakdown (where both are fully open, of course!)
The nylon guitars pad drops in volume during the middle of the song and a little volume automation brings a bit more power into the final choruses, with it, the vocals and the bass guitar all being boosted slightly. I also used volume automation to duck the un-effected vocal loops whenever the effected vocal loops played in the outro section.
Finally, I added some delay to a few parts of the final lead vocal, and a little reverb on the bass guitar and guitars using Lexicon’s Native LexRoom reverb (again – though a different algorithm than I used on the vocals).
Mastering was done using Slate Digital’s FG-X as a very slight mix buss compressor (a ratio of 1.2, tagging less than 0.5dB of gain reduction) and utilising its absolutely amazing transparent limiter to give a 2dB level boost. From there the mix went into iZotope’s Ozone for a little M/S mastering EQ, some further multiband level boosting and stereo widening, and then finally Ozone’s limiter, set on Transparent to raise the levels up to -0.3dB for finalising.
So here it is, the completed remix… I hope you like it! And, once you’ve listened, please go and discover more of She Makes War’s music at her BandCamp site, or on her own site.
Almost to a man, everyone who records their own music will tell you that the one part of your signal chain you cannot even consider skimping on is monitoring. Unless you can really hear every nuance in a mix, you cannot hope to get it sounding perfect by anything other than luck. You need to be able to hear when you cut 0.8dB from the mid-range of a guitar, or exactly where the reverb tails of your snare go when you pan them another 12% to the left. If you can’t, why bothering making the changes at all?
So having been without monitors here in Granada for some time, mixing up until now (in the main) on a pair of old BeyerDynamic DT100 headphones, I finally invested in some new monitor speakers – a pair of Adam’s new A7X’s… Thomann delivered them swiftly (as always) and, after moving the studio around to accomodate them and to create a more natural listening position, in they went!
When you first get a new set of monitors, you need to learn them by listening to music that you know well – reference material – so you know what the monitors are telling you – are they hyping the treble, or weak on the bass? After a day or two of enjoying some of your favourite music, you’re ready to start mixing your own stuff.
The first thing I noticed about these monitors is the stereo image is so tight. Anything in mixed right down the middle literally sounds like it’s emanating from my screen, with no sense of separate sound sources being merged from the left and the right. Anything panned from hard left to hard right is perfectly placed at all times and it’s easy to pinpoint a sound in the mix.
Secondly, they’re LOUD! With two amplifiers built-in to them, one at 150W for the 7″ woofer, and another at 75W for the tweeter, I certainly can’t turn them up beyond 50% without some serious steeling beforehand!
And thirdly, bass and treble are both very accurate, with perhaps a little hyping from the ribbon tweeter which I may soon dial down using the controls on the back of each speaker.
In short, they are very accurate, very capable monitors which should help improve my mixes no end. And, believe it or not, in the process of initially testing them out I put together a quick cue! Yes, I actually recorded something! And so, I give you “Supernatural Chase Guitar Mix Cue”:
So, I know I need to do break the back of this unproductive period I’m going through. I’ve been calling it “writer’s block” because, well, because that’s easily understood and as most of my friends are artists in some medium or another, it’s simple for them to empathise and leave it at that.
So, I’m not even going to apologise. Let’s just get on with this!
The last month has been the usual cry of “Lots of writing (or, at least, playing) but little recording!” And it’s true, of course, but a composer who doesn’t actually produce anything tangible is pretty much useless in this day and . . . → Read More: A (Much Needed) Update…
I’m not even going to say that it’s been over a month since I’ve posted anything here – that’s self-evident and… oh.
One of my major problems with writing is developing Ideas into full pieces. I can do Ideas – every musician does Ideas all the time, when noodling or practising, or just strumming . . . → Read More: Write Horizonally, Not Vertically
OK, so this week it looks like I’ve failed to record anything worth uploading for you guys to hear… But I haven’t been being (that) lazy, really! After my success last week with my remix of Matt Steven’s “Big Sky”, I thought I’d tackle another remix that’s been hanging around for a while…
A week or so ago, Matt Stevens posted the stems for “Big Sky”, one of the tracks from his excellent album “Ghost” and requested that people remixed it for him. I grabbed them and they lay unopened in my temp folder until this morning…
Gah - this is the umpteenth time @Channel4News have changed the From: portion of their "Snowmail" mailout, breaking my .procmailrc. Quit it! 2 hours ago
Almost to a man, everyone who records their own music will tell you that the one part of your signal chain you cannot even consider skimping on is monitoring. Unless you can really hear every nuance in a mix, you cannot hope to get it sounding perfect by anything other than luck. You need to be able to hear when you cut 0.8dB from the mid-range of a guitar, or exactly where the reverb tails of your snare go when you pan them another 12% to the left. If you can’t, why bothering making the changes at all?
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