The Work Diary

Someone asked me why I still practice / record classical guitar if I already know I don't want to take it to a pro / performance level.  Its because freaking classical guitar is the ultimate in contorting your hand to its most uncomfortable state whilst schizophrenically trying to sustain a posture of complete relaxation to even then even try create something that lands anywhere near the intended musical target.  This is a useful and transferable skill when working on any genre of music. 

Carcassi 2

Sor 8

Originally, I was just trying to figure out how to put this song's drum patterns into my keyboards "pro level" sequencer.  Surprisingly, even though there are 1,000 buttons, it wasn't a total nightmare and I figured it out pretty quickly.  So I learned new guitar chords and tried to actually sing it.  Ambitious or maybe foolish because I hate hate hate it when I work a week on something, and the end result is inadmissible.  In the end I'd call it a success*  Oh well learning occurs most when you tackle something and you don't even know if it will yield anything.

 I was surprised again by the challenges - I'll just list them out:

VOICE
 - Staying connected to your voice is a difficult technique, but thankfully when you sing high or a melody rises it is stylistically appropriate to just get louder which happily strengthens the connection and it sounds normal because the notes get lighter as they go up (lite notes + heavy voice = OK balance).  But a descending melody that goes pretty low just "seems to get louder" by itself so then what do you do?  (heavy notes + heavy voice = rumble)  You have to try to lighten up the tone WHILE keeping the connection in anticipation of the melody going down = difficult.  So inversely if you go back to the first theory then:  Lite notes + lite voice = super difficult

 - Rapid fire text is hard, so you have to be extra aware where you can breath and not let spit accumulate in your mouth. 

 - When your mind is multitasking elsewhere your intonation can totally screw you up.  A note thats normally reachable will just randomly arrive a step flat if you're concentrating on something else = ugh.  Oh well thats why you practice.

 - Don't just get louder, try to really project / "send it" to the microphone.  (This theory isn't really fleshed out yet)

With all these ideas coming and going while trying to record one thing that does happen is you eventually develop a sense of when you got a good capture.  A good one can be a take of the entire song start to finish, or a phrase, or even a single word.  This song I never got a take that was good from start to finish, so I started Frankensteining a version using software.  6 months ago I never would have seen myself doing this, but now I think I understand why its necessary.  I kinda compare it to photos?  You have a lot of versions where theres something good in each one and because this Reaper program is so awesome you can literally just glue them together - I can hear the differences but maybe some day I'll learn how to put an end finish on it so no one can tell.  Although I'll say now I'll never Frankenstein a classical piece because that would be just crazy... but 6 months from now who knows..

Ishida

I think, to my benefit, that I've had an extraordinary number of "Why am I even here?" moments where I felt like I was so far out of my depth that I thought someone must have made a huge mistake that would be soon corrected.  Lets see, when I was promoted to a new team in San Francisco at the where bank I worked, when I was moved out of the office answering emails to teaching kids how to ski in Japan, and my second guitar lesson with my teacher in college.  My first lesson was fine, but my second lesson ended after 10 minutes with my teacher Allen Krantz saying "So you tried to learn it but you don't have any specific questions?  Sounds to me like you didn't try at all."  My only thought at 18 was wtf!

But by far though the most outrageous ability gap was when my piano teacher during my sophomore year at Temple.  My teacher's name was Alexander Panku, and he still lives over in the Philly area teaching piano.  I knew he was from Romania, and although he did speak English the bulk of our lessons consisted of him inevitably saying:

"No no no no - let me.  Like this.  You know what I mean?" - Alexander Panku

Here's his picture

I would try playing my Bach or my sonatina, and he would stop me and take the bench and just play a mini concert where I could watch his hands right in front of me, and it was just the best.  He also would always write and circle things and draw arrows in my books in pen, which is just something you're not supposed to do!  I honestly hated piano lessons because I just didn't want to learn this extra stuff when I had all these other things to deal with - there were other things like choir, ear training, keyboard theory, and ugh renaissance music notation like what the hell I didn't come here to learn all that!  Maybe it was the gravitas of his accent or just how he would pound the little grand piano in the practice room where he would teach me, but he turned me right around, and I started practicing a lot of piano. 

Anyway, this is a Bach prelude I learned for my jury, which is like a final exam, and I remember being really let down at 20 years old because he didn't make it because of scheduling.  I always called him Dr. Panku, but in writing it has to be Alexander, because when he saw his name on a folder of mine he said "No no no no - Alex is my nickname.  My name is Alexander."  and fixed it. 

The sound the Yamaha Motif grand piano with a Line 6 guitar pedal with Reverb set to Hall.

Ishida

Singing is really hard - way harder than guitar for me, and theres a lot of mystery associated with it, but I definitely know for sure that anyone can sing.  Saying someone can't sing or learn to sing is like saying some people just can't learn to speak Spanish no matter how hard they try - or maybe its more like some just can't speak Spanish loudly.  Which is crazy. 

For me my teachers in college always threw around words like "tension" and "support" and "the breath" and I guess yeah once you have your own handle on the sensations happening in your own guts and throat that you can adopt those words, but its just so personal that you really just gotta fumble around and screw it up for a long time until you figure out a good feeling happening inside.  Teaching someone to sing with words is like me trying to teach someone to play the guitar over the phone: "yeah sounds pretty good, so I assume you're doing something right.."  Obviously I would just show them with my hands but unfortunately this is kinda impossible cause everything is annoyingly hidden underneath your skin and muscles. 

One lesson I can say is that tone... and by that I mean what your voice sounds like is a combination of 4 factors (at least) according to my notes.  What consonant the word starts with, the vowel, how high the note is, and how loud your trying to sing it.  So you're trying to juggle these things all at the same time and once that word is done you need to move on to the next one in real time rapid fire!  And sometimes a single word has several notes happening all over it!  Its also like a rubik's cube because everything could be feeling good but then you change one of those factors and the rest might freeze up.  Then theres the mother of all factors that obliterates the others - fear of someone actually hearing you.  No matter how awesome you think you sound or how great it feels alone, if you freak out because someone is listening to you then your notes will just fall apart like Jenga.  Thats why you should move to Japan and practice - because here no one cares if you sound bad, and if you can sing in English you're freaking awesome!

My new amp I bought online for 60 bucks and is set to UK 70's w/ the reverb on. 

Ishida

I learned a technique that I just made up on my own called Proactive Left.  When you're playing really hard chords or fingerings on the left hand, its natural to simply apply more strength and crush the strings into playing the right notes, but when you have a really lyrical melody this will inevitably result in a galumphing sound like you're just Hulking your way to the finish line.  Also if you're left hand is way way too strong then this will also influence your right hand where even if you want to pluck the strings softly, ultimately all the notes will have a dynamic range of kinda loud to loud.

So you're sitting there trying to tell your hands what to do, but the music is telling your LH its going to have to work harder to play the right notes.  This creates a conflict because now your Right hand is trying to follow instructions from your mind and is being persuaded by your LH as well.  So Progressive Left is getting your left wrist, elbow, and shoulder way more involved on the crazier passages in order to apply more leverage instead of strength upon the difficult fingerings.  You can't have overactive joints throughout entire pieces because that will lead to tension and stress that can spread all the way to your back which will then make the music sound stressed out - but when you have hard maneuvers coupled with a gentle / lyric melody you gotta get help from the rest of the team for your LH to smoothly navigate the passage.  At least thats what I did on this one.

Probably the most famous representation of this song is from Milo and Otis where Otis gets pissed off at Milo for getting a girlfriend and decides to run away and just figure out how to get home by...by himself.

There are still missed notes, but I've been working on this for so long I just have to move on.  

Ishida

I didn't even like this band when I was in elementary school.  The only CDs I had were Weezer, the Offspring, and The Beastie Boys and none of my friends had this CD, so I could only hear them on the radio or MTV.  I only remember that song Champagne Supernova being really annoying to me, so I decided I didn't like Oasis when I was 13 - but a lot of Japanese people remember and still like them, so I learned this song because I'm singing it with another guitarist in the near future.  I first recorded the guitar and voice parts and then would rehearsed the harmony part and shaker / tambourine while the first tracks were playing from my recorder and little speaker.  Coming up with the harmony is a lot of trial and error, but I think its getting easier.

Anyway, I recorded them together to hear if they even sounded all right, and then I went ahead and loaded them into the computer for the blog since it would give me another chance to practice using the recording software.

Ishida

In case you didn't know: I am a pretty big Bach fan.  This is the first piece of music in a new Bach book I got at the Fukuoka shopping mall - only 1,000 yen and its printed on legit music paper. 

This was recorded on my new (to me) Yamaha Motif keyboard, and I just can't get over how mind-blowing the sounds are that are built in.  For a long time I've always wanted to play the organ, and by that I mean play keyboard that can make organ sounds - not learn to use your feet and monkey around with all the stops and play three manuals all at once.  Although maybe eventually I could get one of those digital dual-manual organs...  Anyway, I like this sound because it reminds me of a small organ that was in the jury room of Rock Hall when I went to Temple to study music.  Here's a picture of what it looked like. 

It turns out this is called a Baroque Continuo Organ and the housing and all the pipes are made of wood - you can buy one online for $43,900.  The convenient thing about organ is that all the notes create the exact same level of volume - like the harpsichord and virginal and clavier, so you don' t have to pay attention to the dynamic markings like 'forte' and 'piano' - although those markings aren't original anyway and have been added in by the editor.  But it is a student book and you gotta learn to do that if you're playing piano so thats why they're there.  Thats why organs have stops and multiple sets of keyboards because each one would make different sounds or different volume levels.  The way to convey dynamics without a second manual is with a volume pedal - which I actually have, so uh I guess I should have paid attention to those markings afterall...  It wasn't until the 'fortepiano' was invented that people could play all kinds of different degrees of volume and intensity depending on how hard you smashed the keys.  This caused other instruments to quickly go out of style because rich parents now wanted their kids to learn to play the fortepiano at home instead of harpsichord and guitar. 

I'm getting back into keyboard because I'm pretty sure if you want to have a smooth workflow for songwriting you have to be at least a little bit proficient. 

Ishida

I am loving this Reaper software for mixing, so I recorded a bunch of tracks and harmonies for this relatively uncomplicated song.  The effects are pretty fun but there are so many, and I just use the presets that come with it.  This took 2 days to record with the hardest part being the harmonies.  I wanted to come up with 2 separate ones so I could choose which one sounded better with the melody but in the end I just used both!  This one had 12 separate tracks all going at once and my Macbook Air didn't even stutter or freeze or crash or anything - and I'm still just using the demo version!  Plus I'm actually enjoying using the computer, so it looks like I'm going to have to invest more time on the mixing / engineering side of music.

I actually wanted to record organ for this song too but in the end it just sounded like it already had enough going on...

Take aways

 - How do you record with a metronome playing to help you stay on track?  Download a free one to an iphone and put one headphone on so the mic can't hear it.

 - When you plan to have a lot of layers going on, background noise picked up by the microphone doesn't matter as much in my opinion

 - You can learn to play the harmonica from YouTube.  You can actually learn to do anything from YouTube...

Ishida

This one took a long time to nail down.  For me repeats of passages are more stressful than playing new material - maybe because if you did it once its just extra annoying when you screw up the second or third time because then you have to start all over again to get a good take.  So many barre chords.  Thanks to the Bach I did 2 uploads ago, my tone has really improved, and I think I really have a good handle now on how to reduce right hand "nailiness" on the guitar.  I'm not happy with the dynamics, but I guess at this point I'm still just trying to develop a command of the left and right hands to go where I want them to on time and accurately - once I'm super certain my fingertips are going to get there and on time I think I'll focus more on dynamic variety. 

I had to record using the sheet music in front of me.  I'm not really focusing 100% on classical guitar and there is just too much repertoire to try and memorize everything in a short amount of time so I read.  Plus I get confused when I have to take multiple takes of recordings, so if I forget where I am toward the end its really annoying to have to start all over again.

Each time I record a classical piece I'm dying to get over with, and its always a major struggle to get it recorded and finished so that must mean I'm challenging myself?

Recorded on a solo Rode NT5

Take aways
 - relying on the sheet music = OK
 - Used the Compressor a fair amount in the software to bring up the total volume - although this really makes it honk out that my performance was really loud the whole way thru.

Ishida

My first real attempt at mixing a song - and thank Jesus it wasn't an eye gouging nightmare that I usually have on Garageband.  Have I mentioned how much I hate Garageband?  I downloaded a new program called Reaper and its way better (though I hate the name).  They let you use it for free with no limitations for 2 months which is a freaking brilliant move because I hate apps or demos that let you use but don't let you save or export the thing you actually worked on.  I also like it because all the effects have built in presets that I can just put in instead of fooling around with the knobs - I guess that comes later.  I wonder if I'll look back on this and laugh at myself for going overboard on everything... hopefully I will.

In the program, the bass is just my acoustic guitar detuned an octave and it sounds like an upright bass.  I didn't intend this to turn into a bluegrass style acousti-version..though it has prompted me to want to take apart a Dixie Chix song next...  I recorded voice and guitar first  and tried to build around them but I now know you should probably record bass first because if you're a hair off, the bass really honks out as late.  At first I thought it was the detuning that was making it sound late / off the beat but then I realized.... it was me.  So play with a metronome even if it seems a relatively uncomplicated song because late bass just sounds really bad.

The guitar solo is a Frankenstein mix of other solos which strangely sounds very Mexican / Cuban and totally out of context but whatever.

The harmony was recorded on my big studio microphone and I think does sound way way better than my hand held microphone that I bought for gigs.  Its more of a pain to set up, but the signal is a lot "bigger". 

Also doing this I figured out how to record multiple tracks on my Tascam device that I didn't know how to do before.  You can record once, then hit record again and hear yourself and have them mix together, or keep it as a separate new recording - then repeat as many times as you want and then put the SD card into the computer like uploading pictures from your camera.

Yes everyone is right - record guitar and voice separately because otherwise your guitar track is going to have voice all over it that you can't get rid of.

Take aways
 - Use reaper
 - Record bass first
 - Use a metronome
 - Record on the studio mic (duh)
 - Record guitar separately next time

Ishida