The Work Diary

I spend so much time on the computer editing that I don't even know what to write anymore.  You listen to the same changes over and over that you don't even know if its good or if you even like it anymore!  Oh well 1 day late now I can work on something else!

Goals:

 - All I wanted was a short organ solo with a "keygrab" - a word I made up where you start an organ line by sliding your hand up the keys and hopefully land on a note that is in the supporting harmony.  I was able to capture 2 on the recorder yessss.

 - A bridge section with syncopation that fits back into the regular tempo

Heres a random photo so maybe it'll be more noticeable in my facebook feed.

Ishida

This song almost got vetoed or at least significantly reworked, but its already a day late and I need to upload.

I was going to add bass guitar to this one but ended up taking it out because it didn't really add anything to the song.  I was also going to add keyboard and harmony, but for the same reason they were axed.

Music inspired by recently found band Hurray for the Riff Raff.

Lyrics were inspired by Schubert's Gretchen Am Spinnrade which were written by Johann Von Goethe.  Found here: http://classicalmusic.about.com/od/romanticperiod/qt/gretchenlyrics.htm

Pro Tips

 - My script writing teacher in Melbourne told me "If it doesn't help propel the story forward then get it out."  This can also be applied to music.

 - According to the Allen Ginsberg Movie "Howl", Allen says the goal is to speak to your 'muse' the same way as you speak to your close friends in order to achieve true frankness.

Ishida

I might be wrong, but I believe the vibrato of an actual Hammond organ is made by a horn inside of an accompanying Leslie speaker spinning at a different frequency than a rotating chamber that bounces around / amplifies the sound...like a guitar body.  You can use the keyboard's turnwheel to activate or deactivate this effect.

I've wanted to learn how to play accompanying organ with the volume pedal for a long time, so I figured instead of learning another song I'd just make up my own - finally.  I thought writing my own song would be this big occasion, but really I just had to learn an organ song within a week:

 - guitar - 30 seconds
 - melody - 30 mins
 - harmony / counter melody - 1 hour
 - lyrics - 2 days?
 - organ - 5 days

Lyrics were annoying because its just hard to decide on the what words to use only to later discover that the natural stresses of the syllables wont quite gel with the stresses of the melody you're fooling around with OR you begin changing the melodic idea to accommodate the foreign sounding words - then I get stuck going back and forth forever.  I mean eventually you can get away with mumbling a word here and there or just saying fuck it they're gonna go where I want them to go, but I just didn't want to do that - I wanted some kind of natural gellingness.  Then I kinda realized how certain cliche phrases and rhymes just sit easy in the mouth - and thats what actually propelled the work forward because I knew I had serious heavy lifting to do w/ the keyboard part.  I can kinda see how outsourcing lyrics to someone else would be useful because its just freaking hard to argue with yourself. 


Take aways
 - Mixing Pro tip - recording with effects live is way more fun than adding reverb and stuff afterwards.  Messing with EQ while you're recording and seeing how the compressor works live are good lessons.  You also don't need to sing as loud to get a good capture - I recommend it. 

  Songwriting Pro tip - Its hard to reinvent 5 wheels at once, so just choose one thing to accomplish and don't feel bad about leveraging cliche / familiar ideas at first

 - The videos were loading too slowly, so I exported at very low quality in order to avoid buffering hell online

 - Lyricism is an entire field of its own - being sensitive to all the syllables and rhymes and fricatives and even just the attention grabbing nature of uncommon words really demands significant mindshare...in my opinion.

Ishida

This song was originally by Bob Dylan but because his version sounds completely different from George Harrison's version I pretty much consider this one Lyrics: Bob and Music: George.

I wanted to try to use this intonation tool on my audio software but because the guitar and voice were recorded together I couldn't isolate the voice alone to use it.  The tool reads the music and shows you a chart where your notes are and you can manually put them in tune whereas auto-tune graps every note I believe and slams it into perfect pitch which gives it that robot sound. 

The goal of this one is I wanted to sing it for a gig coming up but also because now that I think I have a pretty good sense of 'placement' in order to form a connection with your throat and breath (ugh I hate this abstract vocal speak), whats even harder is to connect at lower volumes - or at least to me it is.  I remember a professor in school emphasizing how difficult it is to hit a high note softly with enough intention to project into an opera theater.  

Also this one I learned in 2 days and threw together a roadmap of how I wanted to sound and just wanted to record it.  6 months ago I would have never posted a recording that sounds this rough, but its important I think to become accustomed to just letting it go and moving on - plus no one really cares if it isn't perfect anyway. 

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 is an exercise in picking, which I don't do very much of - I either play fingerstyle or just use the back of my longish index finger nail to strum out chords, but this has led me to discover that this creates kind of a lazy, mumbling tone and doesn't access at all the brightness that my super nice guitar can make.

Vocally not very challenging thanks to all the practice on that last pop song.  I think the longer I stay in Japan, the more country I'm becoming...

I learned this song for my friend Andy who's from Argentina and we were first roommates in Niseko three years ago.  When I showed it to him it turns out he had never heard of it before that wanker...

Tried not to over sing.  Tried to keep it light but got the idea of making each verse more "country" than the last one. 

Take aways

 - Accuracy with a pick takes a long time but you just gotta keep on picking...

 - Songs that don't have much melodic variety leave you vulnerable to confusing lyrics or forgetting where you are especially if you're trying to incorporate rhythmic contrast or other tricks to mix it up.  Its a weird space you're trying to get to where you don't want to be on auto pilot but it also doesn't work very well for me to concentrate intensely on coming verses or licks - it ends up just sounding stiff.  This just takes time until you're just very very familiar with how the tune goes.  I call it seasoning, but how do you accelerate this process?  To me the #1 symptom that you're vulnerable is speeding up - and just playing with a metronome wont save you.  You just have to put the time in until you know it backwards and forwards and can think about what you're doing and not think about it at the same time...

Ishida

Here's another recording of a long set I played at the same bar as the first gig.  This was a surprise party my friends had set up for me because I was leaving Fukuoka (I'm currently typing this in the Sapporo airport as I left this morning).  I've collected 5 or 6 professional photographers as friends so this time, my friend recorded everything, they took pictures, and even made me a real Japanese hankou which is like your signature that you stamp in red ink. 

This recording has way way more mistakes - I didn't practice / prepare at all because I was moving and selling and throwing away various crap all day.  Luckily I had my note book showing the song order / keys from last time.  Also I was even a little bit drunk, so maybe thats why I'm so chatty between the tunes...

Anyway, there are moments where wow my intonation has really improved thanks to that Harry Nilsson song.  Also its difficult to play with someone live as it can be distracting!  Extra concentration is required to remember where you are and where you're going.  Other than that, yes I need some kind of upgrade to my recording device to get better quality recordings - although this one sounds a little quieter to me?

Ishida

This is from my first gig about 2 weeks ago at a bar in Fukuoka.  I was invited to play after another musician heard me sing a few tunes at a different bar on the house guitar - he said please come to my show and you can play a few before me!  That turned into playing for half an hour.  Luckily thanks to the blog I had 10 songs that were more or less ready to go! 

The first thing that blew my mind was how much better the bar owner's recording sounded when compared to mine!  I told him "Man I wish I had a set up like yours!" and he whipped out a small recording device thats just like mine!  He showed me he has a mixer where his microphones all lead to and then from the mixer 2 cables go directly into the recording device.  This means I need one of these mixers!  Its also amazing how playing in a bar full of people is quieter than my recordings in my apartment where I'm the only one there. 

Nevermind the musical errors - damn its embarassing to hear your own screwed up Japanese on a recording.

This was supposed to be a classical one, but I hurt my wrist after practicing too long every day with too much tension.  For the first time I recorded a guitar accompaniment part in order to figure out and learn the lyrics of a new song.  It turns out that singing without the guitar is way easier, and actually listening to the recording of your own voice immediately after is enormously helpful.  Almost naturally your ear will suggest different things to try to affect the tone.  In summary, I discovered that using the recorder right at the beginning is both super helpful in learning a song (because you can save your hands / wrists from strumming the same chords over and over again), but also in developing your voice across the long run.  I mean I know you're supposed to record yourself and listen because you can't trust the sound thats resonating in your own head, but so far I've only been recording at the very end after rehearsing over and over again.  

I need to learn how the hell these guys "smooth out" a recording that doesn't fatigue the ear.  I know that more instruments and having more contrast helps, but I guess yeah I see how you can make a lot of money finalizing a CD to the pro level because I have no idea.

Take aways (I never would have thought of had I not put the guitar down)

 - Intonation:  Especially on long or final notes if you gotta hold em out or if its the last note of a descending line you're more likely to be a little flat.  No wonder my choir director in college would always say "aim for the top of the note!"

 - Darkening vowels:  Words like 'me' or 'going' end on a bright EE sound which sounds nasally, so you have to open up your mouth, so the sound becomes more... wide?  I say 'darken' because the opposite is definitely 'bright' and words like 'easy' can really hit your ear like a laser.

 - Brightening vowels:  When I'd have a long open vowel word like 'stone' or 'I' I'd notice that I was going flat more often, and just slightly brightening pulls the pitch up - but don't do it too much because then you'll go nasal and you'll have to darken it down again.

 - Signal Strength:  Yeah you get a way better recording when you have the mic right up to your mouth instead of away from you trying to record the voice and guitar at the same time.  You also don't have to sing as hard and things can happen more naturally - like I was surprised how much vibratto was coming out when I've been trying to figure out the secret for years!

Ishida

Shit now I need to learn this one playing guitar at the same time...