Heavy Metal Mixing

During this weeks lecture we were shown a mulitutde of songs, and we were given the task of reviewing the mix. This related back to my first post on the blog, in the way it's impossible to determine what is a 'good' mix.

One of the tracks we were shown was August Burns Red - Truth of a Liar. This isn't really my cup of tea, genre wise, but I can see why people would listen to it. This track seems to fit into the whole generic metal mix, where everything is over compressed and cranked to the max. The kick drum was gated and EQ'd, giving it the standard metal 'clicky sound'. You can also hear where it seems to be triggered and quantized. Of course, this is what modern production can accomplish. Anything and everyting can be edited and made to sound how it's wanted. The band rarely get to chose how they're going to sound, as it's left to the producer times which can lead to huge band fall outs. Sometimes, the over proudction makes it sound unatural and almost robotic. Unfortuantely, this has become the norm now.

However, some metal tracks break this sound. It may be the era of recording, or the producer chose this sound, but Pantera - I'm Broken seems to have hit the nail on the head. It's a near perfect mix (or so it sounds to me, other people may have different opinions). While most recordings don't have depth to them, this recording sounds as though you are sat in the room with them listenening to them play. That's what I enjoy anyway, the sense that you can imagine being there with them. The drums sound real, the guitar and bass sound beefy, and each one is crystal clear on the recording. You would have no trouble learning any individual part by ear. As soon as the track starts, you're kicked in the face with a spot on guitar tone and everything else. 

So, the real argument is, what are you trying to sound like? Do you want to be real sounding like Pantera, or do you want to sound like every metal band nowadays?

Creative Arts Research Skills

This year has been a completely different kind of course, for me. Every other year, I've had to sit up until 2 in the morning writing essays and paragraphing and everything else you can think of. But this year was a lot more relaxed and free.

I much prefer blogging to writing essays. My blog is a place where I can go and post all things musical, and it's really useful. I can store things on here that I think would be useful later on. The fact we can also record ourselves playing and upload it for people to see is good too. I've never really thought about uploading a video anywhere, but blogs have changed that. I also found myself falling into a routine, where I would type things and save them as a draft. This is so they were not public, but I could go and read what I was thinking two weeks ago or something. The course has shown me I learn things and organize things in my own way. For example, most people wouldn't prefer to sit and write things that are on their minds down, but I find it easy to do and I potentially have a  blog post on me. Having the blog has helped develop that because it's a designated place for me to ramble. Also, learning new techniques on guitar and videoing myself doing them has improved my playing vastly. The fact I can sit there and watch my technique gives me the opportunity to see where I'm slacking and give me areas to tune up. For example, I wrote a post earlier this year about my picking technique. I hadn't even noticed that until it was brought up and I saw myself doing it on a video, and I've now changed it and I've progressed since.

Instead of getting an assignment brief and being told to go and write an essay, we would have a lecture about a certain subject and then write a blog post on it. I found this so much better than writing essays, because I could be informal and just ramble on. I found it good practice to sit with my blog open during the lecture and type notes and later edit them to a post. If it were an essay, I would have to wade though pages upon pages of notes and find what I needed. The blog got rid of that, because it was all there and I just had to expand on ideas I wrote down. As said before, I prefer to write as if I'm talking to someone, so quite informal. With my blog, I see it as I'm talking to the people who read it. An essay just seems like I'm typing to no one, and it gives me no context to write in.

On the other hand, I can see where essays kind of have the upper hand. While blogging may be informal and place to ramble, it can get extremely messy. If I need to find something relevant, I have to find related blog posts and scour through to find what I'm looking for. In an essay, it's all there in one huge chunk of writing. The worst you would have to do it really quick scan it to find what you need. Looking at it from an tutors view, it's the same kind of thing. If you need to mark a student on something, it would be a lot easier to have it all there in front of you than stored in bits around a blog.

For next year, I think I'm going to stick with what I already do, but just do it better. I'll sit in a lecture and write down the key talking points in a draft blog post, write some notes beneath and then shape them into a post that night. Talking about blogging is all well and fine, however getting work in on time for me is something I must focus on. For next year, I'm going to work on this and hopefully improve my organization skills. It would be better I guess to once I've finished a blog post, while I'm still on a roll, I should do any work assigned to me that night too and not leave it or leave it half way finished. I'd like to see the freedom continue next year, because it is a really nice feeling not to have the pressure of outstanding essays over your head. The blog covers essays in short little posts, and it works so well. I would very much like to write an instrumental album too, and record it and release it all myself. It would be an awesome achievement. I'm hoping to record myself a lot more too once I finally have my home PC and studio sorted.

Recorded Music Age/Music in Context

What's the point of being a musician? To be world famous? To have all the money you could dream of? A private jet? Whichever your reason for being a musician is, there's one key part that can get you all of these. Without this part, you wouldn't make anything. Your audience. Imagine if you had absolutely no fans whatsoever. You would release an album you probably paid to have recorded and released, and no one would buy it. Seems like kind of a waste. But of course, every band has their target market, and this is who you tailor your promotion too. For example, being in a ska band, our target audience is drunken, drug smoking glue sniffers. But hey, they're gonna pay for me to eat.

People seem to enjoy what we play. We all know ska to be a bouncy, happy, dance-y kind of music. when we play a gig, it's almost a weird experience. Ska isn't really a mainstream/popular genre, so when we get up and play, it shocks people. Most of them are drunk anyway, so as soon as we hit the first off beat, people are dancing and laughing. The music kind of takes over them.

Of course, music has all kinds of effects. When you're sad you listen to sad songs, when you're happy you listen to happy songs. It's just basic. Music can lift you up when you've been down. Music has been used with people that are ill too. For example, there's that guy on the TV who can't talk a complete sentence without listening to music.

So actually being a musician, where do you start? Do you write happy songs, or sad songs? This is the demand that put on us. We're almost expected to play what they want to hear. It's a horrible position to be in, but we do it anyway. An example of band album not being received well is Metallica's Lulu. People know Metallica as the God's of thrash metal, and they bring what the people want to hear. However, this album was recorded with Lou Reed, a well known figure in the music world, and Metallica's fans hated it. They said it wasn't 'Metallica' enough. This shows that it's a delicate game we're playing, with lots of risks.

Not just focused on the music though, musicians are expected to be some kind of clean, god-like beings that never do wrong. Look at Miley Cyrus for example. She went from being a teen pop star/actor, working for the most over the top and fake companies in the world (Disney), to being the controversial musician she is today.

I personallly think Miley has been swept up in social conventions. If you turn back to the 80's, musicians were known to be heavy drinkers, smokers, addicts, and whatever else you could think of. It seems to me like musicians now are trying too hard to act like this, when it's really not suited to them. It's almost cringe-worthy reading the news about the newest generic pop star being caught smoking a joint. You almost want to walk up and scream 'IT'S NOT THE 80'S ANYMORE, YOU LOOK RIDICULOUS.' The likelihood of that having an effect is ridiculously slim.

I've been over how it affects musicians, but how does social culture change the music? For this, I'm going to compare two tracks. Different genres, yes, but I hope it will show my point. First of all My Funny Valentine. Here's the first part of it...

'My funny valentine
Sweet comic valentine
You make me smile with my heart
Your looks are laughable
Unphotographable
Yet youre my favourite work of art'

 Everyone knows this standard. If you were to look at the lyrics, it's about how beautiful and unexplainable the valentine is. It's about love and not wanting the valentine to change. Now, I'll compare it to Nicki Minaj's song, 'Stupid Hoe'. Let's look at the lyrics of the chorus...

'You a stupid hoe, you a, you a stupid hoe [x3]
You a stupid hoe, (yeah) you a, you a stupid hoe
You a stupid hoe, you a, you a stupid hoe (stupid, stupid)
You a stupid hoe, you a, you a stupid hoe (you stupid, stupid)
You a stupid hoe, you a, you a stupid hoe (you stupid, stupid)
You a stupid hoe, (yeah) you a, you a stupid hoe (you stupid, stupid)'

Just... Look at it. Really take it in. It's ridiculous. How did we get from My Funny Valentine, to this? What happened? If you were to look at the youth of today, it's getting bad. There's teenagers getting pregnant, kids stabbing each other, and Justin Bieber. I'm guessing it related to the audience again. When My Funny Valentine was released, it was probably used to woo some girl you wanted to marry. It had a purpose. It was done properly. Nicki Minaj probably got annoyed with some other dolled up 'popstar' and wrote this song. It just shows how things have gone wrong.

Culture may be a big influence on musicians and music, but there's another big influence too. Politics. We all know punk was created as a rebellion. Sex Pistol's God Save The Queen is probably the most iconic track of the punk era, due to it's tongue in cheek political message. It was like a protest they made money from. But punk wasn't the only protest music. If you listen to Hendrix's Machine Gun, you'll notice it's about the Vietnam war. He used a really cool thing where he had the snare drum doing a certain pattern which imitated a machine gun being fired. More recently, a band called Jeremiah Ferrari released a song called Mindless Riots. If anyone can remember, in 2012, London saw some extremely bad riots that happened for no legitimate reason. The track is about how stupid people were, breaking into shops and stealing what they could. I wish Jeremiah Ferrari were bigger than they are, because this track could make it so well.

Before recordings, people would buy sheet music. If you wanted to hear a song, you would have to learn an instrument and play it. If it needed more players, you needed a band. This all changed when vinyl came out because the people that made the record players, also made the record. They found it to be better selling thousands of copies of one song, instead of one copy of thousands of songs. It was also made easier with recording because you could make multiple copies to sell.

Seeing as there was no amplification when recording was created, it was extremely difficult to get a decent mix of the music. It all relied on the positioning of the band. For example, you would have the bass and guitar quite close to the source of recording, and the drums and brass further back. The vocalist would differ on position, depending on the power of their voice. Although, seeing as there was no amplification, singers were trained to sing as loud as they could so they would be heard at a concert.

The artists didn't make much money until Motown came about. Most of the money went to the promoter. Motown players were on salary, like they were doing shift work. Before Motown, players would make money on tour or for performances. Now, they were being paid to record on tracks. With the advance of technology, it was a lot simpler to record them too.

A big question is how did artists promote before the internet? It's a really puzzling idea. Nowadays, you can put a poster online and the whole world has access to it. Even people in a different county can see it. It makes everyone connected. But before this, how? Would they just put posters up in high traffic places? Would they use word of mouth? I suppose it's all of these things, but there's one useful tool that recording brought along. Albums. Albums made it possible to record longer tracks and were used for promotion. If you recorded a 45 minute album of 7 tracks, more people could come to see you play those tracks than if you released a 15 minute record. People wouldn't come to see you play 2 tracks and covers.

Albums or single that were released a while ago were tallied up to see which one sold the most for that week. We know this now as 'The Charts'. Usually, it's around 40 for some reason, but there can be as many as 100. If you think about it in present day, the Top 40 is useless because there are 100,000 songs made public each week. In the 50's, it was the Top 40 out of about 200. This proved it was what everyone was listening too.

In the future, I can't imagine how big a part the internet will play.  Already, most of the music bought is from iTunes, so where can we go from there? There's also streaming, like Spotify. You can easily download this on your phone, so music is everywhere. With the creation of Google Glass, I'm trying to think how they can incorporate augmented reality with music. Maybe you could download a video of a gig and play it through your Glass to simulate being there? Who knows. I think music is going to keep on evolving. They say things go in cycles, so maybe big bang jazz will come back and be the big thing. Let's see Nicki Minaj do that!

Different Genre Sessions

In the past few weeks, I've been doing a lot of work in studios. I've blogged about it before, but I thought if blog some more about it.

First of all, I've been in the studio with my band working on our EP 'No Ball Games'. It's been quite a hard task, seeing as we only have our for a few hours at a time. We have a pretty good system, because before he gets there I'll record a guitar ghost track for the rest of the band to follow. I know this is bad practice, as if it was real studio time and we were paying, it would be a waste of time. After our drummer leaves, we work on the rest of the instruments and get their takes down. 

We've only encountered one problem where we were a few bars short of a verse, and the drummer had already left. We were going to try and cut and paste it, which is a legitimate technique, although I feel like this is almost like cheating at it. Soon, the EP will be mixed and up on BandCamp for a 'pay what you want' download.

Secondly, I've been asked to feature on a drum and bass track playing guitar. This is something completely out of my comfort zone, but no one gets anywhere sticking to one genre. After talking to the guy who wanted me to play, he sent me the track and asked me to create some nice chord inversions and a melody. I managed it, but it was quite difficult as I don't normally write for this. I also added a riff for the build up, which seemed to work well when harmonised.

Last of all, I was asked today to do the same kind of thing playing on a Folk track with Alice Coley. I've played with her band before for a short while, so I have some experience in this genre. I made up a melody that followed the chords, and again, added a harmony to it. It seemed to work well. I was then asked to do the volume swell technique while playing the chords, which was added after the first chorus.

All in all, I think it's been a good experience, because I've been thrown into a broad variety of genres. Let's hope the tracks and EP do well!

Perfectionism

Recently, I've been recording a lot of things. I'm currently in the middle of recording an EP with my band, and I also record videos for this blog. One thing that has really thrown me is the fact that I have to get it perfect, or I hate it.

In a few of my videos, I make mistakes. I know that once that happens I should carry on like it was nothing, but I can't. I have no definite answer why, but I have a few ideas. One of them is that as I was growing up listening to my favourite bands, there are never mistakes on the tracks. I think this is mentally conditioned me to think that if I make a mistake, it's not right (which is completely untrue).

Another idea is a kind of ripple. I don't know about anyone else, but when I make a mistake in a high pressure situation, my brain goes into overdrive and I keep thinking 'You made a mistake', 'You went wrong', 'You played an F#, you f***ing idiot!'. This then continues making me loose focus on what I'm playing, thus leading to many more mistakes. It's an on going thing.

While recording the EP, I've taken at least 15 attempts at a 16 bar solo. After playing for almost 14 years, you'd think this would be a piece of cake. I thought it would be easy, to go into a studio, record a few licks, then listen to the playback and it sound like Metallica. I was wrong. It's incredibly difficult for me. Everyone else was saying each take was fine, but there was always a bit of unwanted string noise, or a bend wasn't perfect. This really bugs me, meaning I'd delete the take and go again. 

I've been taught a really good way to get over this. A college tutor told me to do 3 takes, and then choose the best one. I think this is a great idea, because that way you have set a limit and you have a kind of deadline. I tried working to this discipline, but again, each take had something wrong with it, and it bugged me.

This is different in a live situation though. I remember our bands second gig. We played a small festival type party for someone's birthday. We we're up on stage, and there was about 200 drunk teenagers watching. It came to one part in a song where everything cut out apart from me and the vocals. What happened next, I blame on Jack Daniels. My fingers stopped working right when I needed them the most. Nothing but me hitting every wrong note ever played in a succession, and the vocalist. The notes were that wrong, our vocalist actually stopped and started laughing. But it was okay, because I was laughing too. I just made a joke out of it, fell onto my knees and started playing some country licks for a laugh. Even the audience we're laughing, but I didn't care. A mix between whiskey and laughter created a bubble around me. Then, we finished the set, got off stage, and got our party on.I think the reason I could laugh it off was because it was live. I knew there was no going back, I knew there was no second take, so I just went with it.

 Why I can't do this in a studio situation I will never know, but I'm going to work it into my practice regime to film myself playing every time and get used to being recorded and allowing a certain number of errors. After some time, I'm sure I'll learn to disregard any mistakes.

Livestreaming

I was just thinking about how my band could reach a wider audience than those actually at the gig, and the idea of livestreaming came to me. It seems like a simple enough thing to do, and that way people can watch us perform without actually having to leave their bedrooms.

Having never really done a proper livestream before, I wanted to make it as professional as possible (aka no low quality webcams or audio). I Googled 'How to do a professional livestream' and came up with this gem of a page:

http://www.streamingmedia.com/Producer/Articles/Editorial/Sponsored-Articles/Six-Tips-for-Planning-a-Professional-Looking-Live-Streamed-Event-90985.aspx

It's told me everything I need to know, and it isn't really all that difficult. My band (Fenton) did an amazing gig last year in Wales, and the organizers have asked us to do it again. I'm hoping to take down all my equipment and stream that providing that the venue has wifi and I can use the mixer.

Fingers crossed!