Digital Music Front

Posts Tagged ‘production’

Again with the slackness, and again due mostly to a lack of progress. I have been working on a new track lately and I’m happy with the way its coming along. I’ve been trying to modify my work flow to just put in an hour here and and hour there instead of setting aside whole days as that rarely happens and often I find when I do that I’m just not in the mood anyway. I tried to set aside some days in my calendar to work specifically on my music, but on the first day I ended up having to reinstall Logic because it was crashing on start up, and the second time I just couldn’t really get into the groove. So now I’m trying to take advantage of the mood when it strikes me, even if its only for an hour. So far the results are promising. I still have 2 unfinished tracks which need work but I think I might leave them til my new years holiday to work on again.

My plans to buy a hardware synth have been shelved for the moment mostly due to financial reasons. I have been looking into getting a DIY synth kit just for the sake of learning about how synths work better and having a bit of fun but I don’t know if my solder hand is up to the task, its never been very steady and something requiring fine motor control like a PCB might not be within my capabilities.

Actually, when I say I’ve done pretty much nothing with regard to working on my music, that’s not strictly true. I have been working, just not on my own stuff. Rather, I’ve been whoring my musical ‘talents’ out again to some people whom I am eternally grateful to – the porn industry, this time for ifeelmyself. At the request of a friend who works for them I produced a quartet of pieces to be used as backing music for video clips. Harder than it sounds, contrary to what you might think, not all porn music is bom-chika-wow-wow. Atmoshperic stuff is generally pretty easy to produce, but trying to picture how some track is going to go along with a naked girl feeling herself up is…. well, distracting….  ’scuse me….

Anyway, so far they’ve only bought one of the four, so at 3 – 5 hours work per piece, I’m not getting a very good return on investment. That said, I’ve been told that rather than the tracks getting bought grouped together its more likely they will just pay for them as they want to use them, which makes sense. Be interesting to see how long before they want the next one, or if they start asking for more without buying any of the others from the last batch.

Lately my musical endeavors have been much like this blog, which is to say, I’ve done pretty much nothing. After my last rant regarding my craptastic monitors, I’ve felt less inclined to put much effort into producing, almost as if the effort is not really worth it until I can over come this hurdle (which is fundamentally a financial problem). Ideologically speaking  this shouldn’t really be stopping me, I was talking to the Rockstar Philosopher just the other day about the realisation that I could and should just focus on getting the music down and worrying about post when I’ve got better equipment. Practically speaking I’m not very good at this, I hate leaving something unfinished… I just sank 100 hours into playing Lost Odyssey to completion before I would even think about picking up another game.

I have however, mostly by accident, managed to start working on another track while ‘Thru the wringer’ languishes in its unmastered state. As seems to be my modus operandi I stumbled upon the beginnings of this next track while cobbling together unfinished bits and pieces from previous work. Every now and then while I’m working on something I will stumble across a bass line or a note progression that I like which isn’t really suitable for the piece I’m working on and just save it in a different file. Then one day when I’m bored I go thru all this crap aiming to clear most of it out and end up using half of it. Behold, Frankensong is born… Actually… I should use that.

I managed to overcome my recent bout of musician’s block long enough to finish the latest track I’ve been writing. Finish at least to the extent that the music is written and layout done. Now what remains to do is that most hated part of any musical recording – post production.

When the Rockstar Philosopher and I released our first track as Untitled Project, I was surprised at how different it sounded on speakers other than the ones we had just spent the last 8 weeks writing it on. I suspect that a large part of this is due largely to my mediocre mastering skills, but I do believe there is also a significant component that can be put down just to the different response curves of different speakers. I’ve never really paid much heed to how different one song sounds on different systems, until I was listening to my own music.

This experience really hammered home the need for a good pair of monitor speakers, but unfortunately all my rather limited budget could afford when I last went gadget shopping was a pair of Edirol MA-7A’s. They’re not bad little speakers, but they’re also about the cheapest monitors money can buy, and as with anything, you get what you pay for. The speaker cones are only 3 inches, and subsequently they have almost no bass response. That is unless you turn on the bass boost function, however that render’s them useless as monitor speakers – why something like this is even included on a monitor speaker I don’t know, except perhaps that they are really aiming at a more general purpose computer speaker rather than a true monitor.

The upshot of having to use such ill suited equipment is that the mix down and mastering process for me is a convoluted and protracted nightmare that often takes me longer to complete than the actual creation of the song. I will spend hours tweaking the levels, trying to make sure its a nice balanced sounding mix, with no clipping or horrid over compression sounds, and then bounce it all to disk, only to find that what I had sounding pretty decent at home sounds like gutless radio trash on anything else. So the process is repeated, and I go home and try to remix the song in a way to compensate for the deficiencies I heard when played on a real system, only I’m again limited in what I can hear, and so it usually takes me between 10 and 20 attempts til I get something I’m remotely happy with.

So it is that post production has become something that I dread, its the thing that makes me hate being a producer, its that last horrible barrier to being able to say “I’m done with this,” and moving onto to something new. Worse, it even starts to make me hate my own music. I always think its a sign of how good a song is, that you can listen to it through over and over throughout post production, with only minor variations to the levels and overall sound, and not end up hating it. But I am getting close, and thats a problem obviously, because I don’t want to hate my own music.

Unfortunately the only real solution to this I can see is to get better speakers, but my budget doesn’t really allow for that at this point in time. So until it can, I guess I will be dishing out loads of tinny sounding radio trash.

So I’ve been having a bit of musicians block recently, a real mental hurdle I haven’t been able to get over. Having finally settled into my new place after the recent move, I have been meaning to sit down and get stuck into working on some new tracks, finishing off some old ones, but for some reason I keep putting it off. I’m finding any reason I can to do something else. At first I couldn’t figure out why, I mean I really want to make music, why is it such a daunting thing to actually get down to?

After a while I figured out a couple of things. Firstly, as a person without much musical talent or inspiration, making music to me feels a lot like hard work. Its rewarding sure, but its not like RSP just picking up his guitar and having a strum and seeing what comes out. For me its sitting at the computer and blundering around blindly thru different instruments and presets til I stumble across something I like the sound of then trying to make something out of it, and when I do, then I have to really think, really use my head. There’s no creative force desperately trying to get out from within me driving me to express myself musically, its a process of mental construction. Like I’ve said before – I’m not a musician, I’m a music engineer.

But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I realised I was scared shitless of my own incompetence and lack of talent. As much as I dream of being a big shot producer, the motivation to sit down and get to it and take the first steps on the road to maybe one day realising that goal are far over shadowed by the soul crushing terror that I simply am incapable of creating music that is any good.

The first problem, well maybe I can do something about that, because essentially I just need to overcome my own laziness (mind you my laziness is Epic). Once I get into The Zone and I start enjoying myself, thats less of a problem because once I’m having fun it doesn’t feel like work so much. So in a sense, the solution to this issue is at least partly just to keep at it and not let myself get cold.

The second problem however is something I’m not sure I can do much about, purely because I recognise immediately that this fear is not irrational, it is completely legitimate – born from the knowledge that regardless of any knowledge of musical theory which can be learned, I lack that creative inspiration which drives people to express themselves musically. I’m no musician, I’m a computer / sound nerd playing at musician. I am effectively setting out to accomplish something I’m not well suited for to begin with.

So, having come to these realisations, they have lead me to a third – my need to accept the fact that maybe I won’t produce music that is really good, but also that whether I do or not doesn’t really matter. It’s not like I need to make a living this way, I make decent crust doing nerd stuff. The entire excersize then, is entirely for my own benefit really, just something I’m doing because I want to. I don’t have to impress anyone, except perhaps myself (careful, that way lies ruin and suffering).

I guess the point is, I wanted to do this for fun, so I should stop treating it like work.