I ordered flowers for my mother from 1-800-FLOWERS on May 2, scheduled to be delivered May 12 or 13 — May 13 being Mothers’ Day — and they processed my order, taking the money from my account as expected. What they didn’t do, however, was deliver the flowers.

Nor did they let me know they didn’t deliver the flowers: I had to find this out myself. Thinking it odd that my mom hadn’t mentioned the flowers (she’s always very conscientious about such things), I logged into my 1-800-FLOWERS account to check the order status today (May 17) and there it was: “Order Placed”. Now, they’d processed the order and taken my money, but after that? Nothing.

I called their customer service line and after waiting on hold for ten minutes (clearly I’m not the only irate customer the company has right now) I was finally connected with a customer service representative who checked the details I provided him and to his credit, immediately issued a full refund. (Of course, I have only their assurance this refund will actually happen, and that assurance isn’t worth much in my eyes right now.)  However, this doesn’t address the primary problem: why didn’t they let me know there was a problem with the order? It’s a full four days after the delivery date, which they have in their system, and their system also contains the order status as uncompleted. I’m not a computer science wizard, but I do know that given those two fields, a simple query should be able to pull up all orders that have not been fulfilled.

One would think following a major flower delivery holiday like Mothers’ Day that a competent and conscientious company might want to make sure their customers received the services they paid for, but apparently 1-800-FLOWERS does not feel that to be a priority. After all, they had my money — the important part of the transaction to them — so why worry about the rest? I just double-checked, and they have both my current email and phone number on my account.

I brought this up to the CSR, who (yes, in heavily accented English) apologized. And apologized again. In fact, that’s pretty much all he did was say “Yes sir, I do apologize” and so forth. However, he couldn’t give me any excuse for the indisputable fact that they processed my order, took my money, and then completely failed to follow up on their end. The best he could tell me was that there were no available florists in the area to fulfill the order, but their system supposedly takes that into account up front, limiting the arrangements that are available for delivery in a given area based on availability. I mentioned that and he had no answer for me. He also had no answers for me on why they processed my order and took my money before issuing any flowers, nor why I wasn’t contacted regarding this problem. Surely someone at 1-800-FLOWERS management should realize that flowers ordered for Mother’s Day should perhaps be delivered when promised? And if they can’t be or won’t be for whatever reason, that proactively letting your customers know there’s a problem and you’re working to solve it or at least mitigate the circumstances is a better strategy than burying your head in the sand and hoping people don’t realize there’s a problem? I have to assume they chose the latter because let’s face it: if I hadn’t followed up to check this out I would have just assumed the flowers were delivered as promised, my mother would have assumed I hadn’t sent her flowers, and they would have just KEPT THE MONEY. That is a totally unacceptable way to do business.

If you have ordered from 1-800-FLOWERS recently, I highly advise you to check the status of both your order and your bank account immediately, because obviously the company can provide no assurances that either their customers will get what they paid for or that they will be informed if there are any problems with their orders. If you haven’t ordered from 1-800-FLOWERS, keep it that way — assuming you actually care whether the intended recipient gets your gift.

Edit: Oh hello consumer complaints and more consumer complaints, just page after page of 1-star reviews. Clearly a terrible company with a pattern of being terrible and intending to continue being terrible.

Time will tell whether this becomes a regular part of my routine or just another Google+ along the way, but I waited until I thought I had a legitimate use for the account anyway, so that’s something.

http://aaronpoehler.tumblr.com/

Above: “Encore” project file screenshot (click to fullsize)

Like “Last Call”, a version of “Encore” appeared on the Daisy Glaze CD “One Way Out”; unlike “Last Call”, I think the original version holds up fairly well as a representation of the song. So why redo it at this late date?

One: while the song and performances on the original are adequate, the sound suffered from the same mastering issues as the rest of the “One Way Out” tracks. Although not as severe as the defects affecting the live portion of the disc, I never found the mushy, tinny sonic palette of the album pleasing to the ear. As an artifact of its time I’m definitely still proud of the disc — it was a record designed to be found in the used bin of a CD store and experienced as a package, and I still think the original version of “Encore” would sit well on a compilation alongside other never-heard-of-ems of the day — but as a listening experience, it was less than ideal.

Two: as detailed in the track breakdown for “Last Call”, I wanted to try using some of the bespoke custom track services offered by studio musicians that the rise of online networking has facilitated. Because “Encore” is much more straight-ahead than “Last Call” and the extant version was closer to my desired end result, I thought it would make a safer and less confusing test case to see if the results of such services would be appropriate.

Three: while I’m the first to rail against lousy outtakes tacked onto the ends of reissues of classic albums, as a personal preference I enjoy a clear auditory signal that an album is ending (I really liked the spoken credits track placed at the end of Faust’s Rien). Album sequencing is appreciated less and less in the era of random access to music, but if the last song on an album doesn’t provide some sense of closure, I feel that’s an opportunity missed the same as if you get to the end of a film or novel and don’t feel it’s properly resolved. In this case, I thought of the title track of this album as the final song of the album proper and “Encore” as something of a bonus track — in fact, were YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK to be taped onto a Maxell XL-II 90 minute cassette as so commonly done in the 80s/early 90s, the entire album sequence sans “Encore” would just fit on one side — so basically, my message to anyone who wasn’t into “Encore” (or the fact that I’m rerecording an old song, which seems to really bother some people for reasons I find unconvincing) was this: you got your full album before this point anyway, so now you have three minutes to get a drink and figure out what you want to listen to next — or turn it off. Your choice.

Above: “Encore” version history screenshot (click to fullsize)

As one might expect, the actual recording of “Encore” was very similar to the process for “Last Call”: first, I commissioned a new drumtrack from Mike Cook at drumsnpercussion.com, sending him an mp3 of the original version to work from with instructions to go for the same feel, but not to feel obligated to precisely duplicate the original drum track. Once I got the fresh drum track back I loaded it up in a new project file and placed it alongside the original mp3 to ensure the two synced up properly; never having reconstructed a song this way before, I thought I might need to refer back to the original version or perhaps even try to pull some sounds from it to tie the new version as closely as possible to the original. As it turned out, this might have been useful were I trying to replicate someone else’s song but it was completely pointless with “Encore” since despite not having played the song regularly for years I didn’t even need to print out the lyrics or relearn the guitar chords. In fact, the only time I found myself tripped up was when I was thinking about it too hard.

Ignoring the original track and relying on the new drumtrack to provide a foundation, I proceeded to build the new track starting with the Traveler EG-1 guitar to provide the single-coil jangle necessary for the two rhythm guitar tracks. I still have the Fender Squier Bullet guitar I started out with and played on the original version, but it would require some work at this point to get it back into playable condition and my dedication to authenticity only goes so far (read: not far at all). I played both the guitar tracks straight through the song with no editing to get as close as possible to the ‘live in the studio’ feel of the original track; back in the day I was a lot more invested in Neil Young’s “live music is better” dictum, but over time I’ve come to find that a balance of live musicianship and studio technique generally creates a better end result than slavish adherence to a dubious aesthetic. It wasn’t really much of an issue on “Encore”, in any case: all I had to do was plug in and start the drumtrack, and muscle memory basically did the rest — I just dialed up an appropriate guitar tone, banged out the song, tried to keep out of my own way, and the guitars were done before I knew it.

Thus emboldened, I tracked the bass in similarly spontaneous fashion. This took a little bit longer as I hadn’t played the instrument on the original, but the tune was so embedded in my head it was really just a matter of figuring out the appropriate fingering on the bass before rolling right into recording. After a couple of runthrough takes to acclimate myself, take 3 was strong enough to be the  keeper — and as with the guitars, played live from beginning to end (save only for an overdubbed harmony bass part in the outro) in keeping with the established aesthetic.

With the basic parts in place, I created a rough mix of the song in progress and sent it over to Kurt Baumer at Fiddletrax.com to start working on violin tracks. As I mentioned in the “Last Call” breakdown, one of the coolest things about Kurt’s service is that he records multiple takes for the price of a single track and includes them for the client to use one or all in their final project. In the case of “Encore” this meant Kurt sent five(!) different tracks for me to play with — a stunning value and given the quality of his tone and fidelity of the tracks, a dead cert guarantee I’d use his services again.

All of the violin tracks had their strengths, so I dropped all five into the project file and panned them across the right side of the stereo field to create a string ensemble effect, adjusting the volume levels to fit with the other violin tracks as well as the dynamics of the song, and very quickly I had a solid instrumental backing track — which meant it was time to track the vocals.

I’d considered doing the singing during the time Kurt was working on the violin, but convinced myself to wait so that I’d be able to sing to the full spectrum backing track and allow myself the option to react vocally to Kurt’s input — if you don’t listen to the contributions of other musicians, I find it somewhat defeats the purpose of their participation — and it wasn’t as though I didn’t have plenty of other stuff to keep me busy in the interim. Once I got started, getting back into the voice I used back in the day took a little bit of work; my voice has settled lower since the original recording sessions, and this particular style of singing hadn’t been  used much of late, having originally been employed primarily in order to be heard over the din of a rock band with an inadequate PA system. Still, it didn’t take much time for muscle memory to kick in and before long I had perfectly acceptable vocal lines that both approximated the tone of the original and even corrected some minor vocal errors that probably no one but me ever noticed.

After that, the version history above shows it was the typical back-and-forth series of mix tweaks, primarily adjusting the levels of the vocals, violins, and drums to work together. (In fact, that’s pretty much all the version history shows, as I apparently didn’t think to save any versions earlier than the arrival of the violin tracks. The tracking must have gone too quickly for it too occur to me.) Despite the existence of the earlier version of the song I didn’t try to emulate the sound of that mix at all other than aiming for a similar reverb treatment on the guitars; while that original mix was fine for what it was, it seemed pointless to try and make the new version a pale copy of the original when my intent was to supercede that version, not to emulate it. While I can’t say definitively whether I succeeded in my aim, I can say that I think the new track has a much more pleasing and powerful sound which is a lot closer to the sound I hear in my head.

And with that, I close this track breakdown series–other than a few final thoughts.

Postscript:

Revisiting the recording of YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK via this series has been an interesting and challenging experience. Because I hadn’t planned on writing these posts before recording the album, for the most part I was forced to rely solely on memory and forensic examination of the project files. (In particular, I would have saved many more “work in progress” versions of the songs as I worked in order to visually demonstrate a song’s evolution via screenshots of the different stages.) However, as a technical writer I know all too well that documentation is a full time job, and that trying to fully and accurately document a  process while performing said process is a recipe for frustration. When making music, I like to work as quickly as possible (a predilection readers of this series will no doubt have picked up on) and I can’t imagine that stopping at every step to make notes and take screenshots wouldn’t get instantly annoying.

I also know that memory is a faulty tool. I have no doubt that somewhere within this series of posts lurks information that’s either slightly mistaken or flat-out wrong as a result of my reliance on memory as my primary source. (I would caution the reader to take this into account not only here, but anywhere memory comes into play.)

Still, looking back I’m pleased with my work here and I feel it was worthwhile. (Had I not, I would most likely have bailed out before the halfway point.) I was able to look at my processes in a way that helped me, incorporate some hopefully useful music making tips, and address a number of issues I’m not sure I would have gotten to write about substantively without this structure as a framework. In the end, I think two questions about these track breakdowns stand out: why did I do this, and will I do it again?

Why did I do this?

I read a lot. I read a lot of books and magazines about music and music making, and with few exceptions they are mostly terribly written. Contrary to the popularly misquoted sentiment, in my experience writing about music well is not a quixotic pursuit, it’s just difficult for many to do properly. The attempt can bring out the hyperbolic, breathless adolescent within many writers and an overly clinical, pseudo-scientific tone in others, with the end result often being either too esoteric or too specific. When these factors are combined with journalism’s unceasing love for stultifying cliche, hackneyed repetition, and addressing the lowest common denominator, the result is more often than not instantly dated hackwork.

I got into technical writing through reading technical literature, fighting my way through to comprehension, and afterwards wondering Why didn’t they just put it this way? In this case, I got tired of music making advice both uselessly general (“use compression on vocals”) or overly specialized (“use Pro Tools 10′s AIR Compressor on the HI-Q setting for screamed female vocals recorded live in an outdoor environment”) and started to wonder: Why hasn’t anyone done this before?

I love ‘behind the scenes’ documentaries about the making of albums — whether I like the music or not — but up until recently they were nearly all for ‘classic’ albums twenty or more years old. Thanks to the proliferation of cheap video cameras and the ubiquity of smartphones this is beginning to change, but sometimes it still baffles me that the processes behind music making are still so poorly-explored and little understood in this age. I think many factors contribute to this being the case, but for me it came down to this: if you think something needs to exist and you’re not willing to do the work to bring it into being, you don’t get to complain. (Or put more accurately: you do get to complain, but you don’t get anyone to take your complaints at all seriously.) I think the preponderance of music issued by record companies both large and small is awful, unlistenable shit and that this has always been the case (lest one delude oneself into buying the illusion of ‘good old days’ which never were) but if I didn’t care about music this wouldn’t be a problem. Either I just wouldn’t listen to music for pleasure, or like so many others I’d retreat into the comforting embrace of nostalgia and “my fave tunes” playlists comprised solely of well-worn, comforting hits.

With this series, I’ve attempted to write about my own music in a substantive way. I think many musicians eschew demystification of music both to themselves and to their audiences out of insecurity, but to me this seems wrongheaded; an informed, educated audience is an understanding audience, and an audience cultivated through openness and personal connection is a lot more likely to remain than an audience built on idolization and illusion. Entertainment is fun but the stark reality is no one is a star, no one is a god, and those who keep their own humanity front and center are generally a lot more interesting than those who affect pretensions to which they have no claim.

I wrote this because it’s the kind of thing I like and that I’d like to see more of, because I wished someone else would do something like this so I could read it. I did this because I could.

Will I do it again?

Well, we’ll see. Right now I have two albums in the works including a group project and a new solo album, and neither seems particularly suited for this format. I’m also leery of making this type of track breakdown de rigeur, as while I have enjoyed writing these posts for the most part I don’t think it should necessarily be expected that every piece of music I release be accompanied by a chunk of writing “explaining” it. I also had a number of issues I wanted to use this series as a platform to discuss, and I think I’ve pretty much covered all of those sufficiently for now.

Also, it’s axiomatic that the act of observation invariably affects whatever is being observed. I don’t think the creative process should necessarily always be visible to the audience because it can affect the outcome of the creative act, and ultimately I do this to please myself, not anyone else. I can’t afford to feel inhibited in my own studio.

I have considered compiling this series into an ebook of some kind sometime in the future, perhaps reedited/reworked and anthologized along with some other relevant pieces of my writing, but whether or not that ever happens I need to step away from it for the time being and come back to it later with fresh eyes. Either way it’s definitely not going to happen anytime soon, so again we’ll just have to see.

In the end what it comes down to is this: writing this series was something I wanted to do and I’m glad to have done. If I end up wanting to do something like this again in the future I wouldn’t be surprised, but regardless it’s been a pleasure sharing these thoughts and experiences with you, and I hope you were able to get something out of it. And even if not, I hope it inspires you to do something much, much better of your own.

———————–

Buy YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK at iTunes, Amazon, and Bandcamp

Stream YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK at Spotify and Bandcamp

Slow down, no one told me there was gonna be math.

Above: “You Had To Leave Your Mark” project file screenshot (click to fullsize)

Somewhat paradoxically, the title track of YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK may be my favorite of the tracks recorded for the album despite the fact that it took the least amount of time and effort. This one really just fell out of my head into recorded form almost instantly and without preconception — the fact that I didn’t have to labor over it probably accounts at least partially for my affection towards it as the song that caused me the least trouble.

Comparing the project file screenshot above to others from this album, “You Had To Leave Your Mark” is far and away the simplest and most direct: each track was recorded one after the other in sequence (beginning at the top of the screenshot and moving down), and each track was recorded only once and edited only minimally with no outside contributors or fancy post-production tricks. To put it as simply as possible, I used no techniques in the production of this song that couldn’t have been implemented had it been recorded on actual magnetic tape rather than my MacBook’s hard drive.

It wasn’t that I deliberately set out to record a ‘simple’ track or to use consciously ‘old-school’ recording techniques on this song — it’s simply how it ended up. I don’t see any virtue in eschewing the use of modern technology, except perhaps as a limited creative exercise as opposed to an overall aesthetic. Many artists of the past would have killed to access even a fraction of the options offered by any contemporary computer-based recording platform, and neoluddites who slavishly emulate the techniques of the past usually come off as blinded to the faults of the past by overwhelming nostalgia — which would be eminently ignorable if their devotion ever resulted in anything remotely similar in quality to the objects of their worship. (Needless to say, bands that consciously dress up ‘old-timey’ tend to give me shudders of revulsion.) Still, just as sometimes it’s nice to hear the hiss of analog tape or the ambiance of a tiny recording space on an old record, sometimes it’s nice to hear a track like “You Had To Leave Your Mark” and know that it would have come out essentially the same even if all I’d had to record with was the old cassette four-track I started out on.

It’s an oft-repeated cliche that like sausage, the process behind making recorded music is better left a mystery — though I assume it to be self-evident anyone reading these words probably doesn’t buy into that idea 100%. Still, a working knowledge of recording technology can have a disillusioning effect in the most literal sense of the word. Music that previously struck one as stunning and majestic can seem trivial and unimpressive once you’re aware of the behind-the-curtain “help” musical artists rely upon. On a certain level, recorded sound is all illusory — a recording of a performance is not a performance, no matter how well-reproduced — but many find it disconcerting to realize to what degree the sounds they hear are shaped by unseen hands, and how little the people whose names and faces are on the front of the album may have had to do with the end result.  The foundations of many already tenuous artist-audience relationships can be shaken irrevocably — but on another level, this is merely part of the development and refinement of personal taste. The songs of one’s childhood may not have quite the same effect once you accept those who made them were really just people of average capabilities, not the godlike geniuses you once imagined — but that doesn’t mean you have to stop loving them. In fact, as your knowledge increases a deeper, more rewarding relationship with music can develop, along with an ever-sharpening recognition of those artists whose work is truly worth your listening attention and those whose output is merely time-filling, generic product designed to be marketed, consumed, and forgotten.

(It would be easy to follow that statement with a theoretically illustrative list of artists whose music I believe falls into each of the aforementioned categories, but ultimately it would represent nothing but my current state of mind and my own understanding of each artist’s work to the present date. I leave it to the imagination of each reader to conjure their own examples — the subjectivity of musical opinion and mercurial changeability of music is far too broad for absolutes. [That said, if you can't find something you like in the music of Miles Davis, then perhaps music is not for you.])

As producer, engineer, and artist on my solo work, I have pretty much as much control of the recording process as possible at any given time, so it seems reasonable to ask: if you like this song so much and it was recorded so simply, why not always do it that way? The short answer is that while every song is different and each demands its own appropriate recording treatment, usually songs do pretty much start off that way. Looking back over these track breakdowns, some are more complex than others, of course — but they’re all relatively simple and straightforward overall. The difference between “You Had To Leave Your Mark” and the others wasn’t really the method of recording, it was the fact that it sounded finished so quickly.

The point at which each track is deemed “finished” is at best a moving target, determined solely by my own reaction to what I hear coming out of my speakers. If I hear something that bothers me and I can do something about it, the track is not finished; if I don’t hear anything bothersome or (and this is the crucial part) if I hear something that bothers me but I can’t do anything about it, the track is finished. “Finished” doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going on an album, mind you: it just means I’m probably not going to work on it any more. Whether it’s actually going to be used for anything depends on whether the end result sounds like music to me; if it doesn’t sound like music and I can’t do anything to make it better, there’s no sense worrying when it’s so much easier to move on to do something else. In the case of “You Had To Leave Your Mark”, what was so striking to me was not the rapidity of the recording process, but the way the song gelled so quickly: after layering just a few instruments together, it sounded like music.

The song sprang from little more than an open weekend for making music and an intention to try out some of my musical equipment in new ways. Between the Traveler EG-1 electric guitar, the ZT Lunchbox amplifier, and the Apogee One audio interface I’ve assembled a fairly portable recording setup so I don’t need to be quite as locked into the studio for my music-making needs — something I can throw in the car in a couple of minutes and use anywhere from a Maui hotel room (which I have done) to the middle of the desert (which I have not). Granted, to test it out I traveled no further than my living room couch — but proof of concept doesn’t require an Arctic expedition.

Above: ZT Lunchbox amplifier in recording position.

The great thing about the Lunchbox amp is that it packs a 200 watt punch, delivering a clean, clear signal that belies the cabinet’s small size (see above).  By setting the amp on the chair beside my couch and dialing the volume up while keeping the gain low, I was able to pull a tone out of the Traveler EG-1/Lunchbox combination that conveyed a wide dynamic range without either audible hiss in the quieter parts or unwanted distortion in the loud parts. The Apogee One has a built-in condenser mic, so I set the interface on the chair in front of the Lunchbox at a distance of about six inches, then adjusted the recording levels appropriately.

After working out a chord progression that struck me as evocative and open enough to suggest some interesting melodic possibilities, I found an appropriate tempo, set a click track to play with, and banged out the electric guitar line right there on the couch in one take. I seem to recall that as I played the sun was going down and I believe other plans beckoned that evening, so after capturing the track I proceeded to break down my makeshift portable studio setup and shut the music down for the night, curious to hear what the results would be when I loaded the track up in the main studio and heard it back on the monitor speakers.

The next morning I was champing at the bit to get back to the track after a good night’s sleep; it’s also possible the break gave my subconscious time to chew on the music, because when I sat down to work on it everything just seemed to flow.  After reviewing the previous evening’s work, first I supplemented the electric guitar with an acoustic track played on the Ovation, mirroring the chord changes but providing a different tonality to help broaden the sound.  I didn’t want to lay much percussion on the track, but a simple kick drum pattern accenting the chords wouldn’t be too obtrusive — to prevent the track from sounding too robotic, I played it manually on the Yamaha YPG-635 digital piano and left it unquantized, maintaining the human feel of my own slightly askew timing. The addition of the kick to the guitars immediately implied a bass line to me, which I laid down in one pass with the Yamaha electric bass and thought sounded good enough to keep and continue moving forward.

After listening to the results so far I thought I had a pretty solid backing track but that some additional melodic content would help, so I figured I’d mess around with the YPG-635 for awhile and try out some different patches. The instrument has hundreds to scroll through — only a fraction of which I’ve ever used — but as it turned out but I settled quickly on the ‘string ensemble’ patch, which has not only a great sound but responds beautifully to key pressure (or velocity, more accurately) to create a track with dynamics enough to avoid the blandness that digital instruments sometimes engender.

Again, after settling on the string patch I figured I’d improvise over the guitar-kick-bass track for awhile and edit together a comp track before moving on, but after one pass with the keyboard strings I listened back, adjusted a few volume levels, and decided that the music was basically finished. Sure, I could have kept fooling with it, layering on different sounds or countermelodies — but I would have known in the back of my mind that I was really only doing so in order to put off writing lyrics and vocals, which is generally the most labor-intensive part of the process. So with a bit of a sigh at already being finished with the fun of playing instruments for the day, I opened a blank text file, cleared my head, and set the track in progress to loop on repeat while I brainstormed lyrics and vocal melodies.

As with the musical parts, the lyrics and vocal were written straight through in one go and before long I had a full song prepared. I don’t know precisely what time I’d gotten started with my musical activities that day but I seem to recall it being between 8:15 and 8:30 AM, which makes sense with my typical schedule — as well as the fact that even had I arisen especially early for some reason, I’d have been loath to make much noise before the 8′oclock hour. The lyric sheet file for “You Had To Leave Your Mark” has a ‘last modified’ timestamp of 10:15AM, which gives an idea of how quickly everything came together for this song: acoustic guitar, kick drum, bass, and keyboard tracks recorded and a full set of lyrics written in under two hours!

Lyrics in hand, I figured I might as well keep rolling ahead and proceeded to track the vocal. In order to somewhat counterbalance the simplicity of the arrangement, I ran the vocal through the TC-Helicon VoiceLive 2 processor to provide supplemental vocal harmonies (nothing particularly complex), which I kicked on and off manually using a footswitch as I was singing. The project file says the final vocal was take 3, which sounds about right, as it usually takes me a couple of takes to get warmed up vocally. Here again, while I did consider comping the vocal together from multiple takes — at the very least, I thought the vocal harmonies would be pulled from a separate track — take 3 in its entirety was exactly what I wanted, spontaneously punched-in harmonies and all. With that, I threw together a rough mix of “You Had To Leave Your Mark”, called it done for the day, and moved on to other material.

Above: “You Had To Leave Your Mark” version history screenshot (click to fullsize)

The version screenshot above reflects the speed with which the track was recorded in that the first saved version isn’t even the original rough mix, it’s a remix done months later. I never once had any thoughts of going back and adding anything to “You Had To Leave Your Mark”; after rendering that first mix it was clear the song was finished bar only the polish of a final mixdown, which I put off until more of the album that would frame the song was defined. Still, the mixing process didn’t change the song much at all from that rough original: I did no additional recording or editing, and most adjustments made were simply minor equalization and level tweaks. All I was really trying to accomplish in mixing was not screwing up what had been put together, because it already worked. It had been clear to me since listening back to the rough mix that “You Had To Leave Your Mark” was strong enough to go on the then-germinating album to which it would eventually lend its title, and listening back to the song today it’s still one of my favorites. If only they would all go so quickly!

To hear the results of my efforts, listen to YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK via the links below.

———————–

Buy YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK at iTunes, Amazon, and Bandcamp

Stream YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK at Spotify and Bandcamp

Above: “The Last Time You Ever See Me” project file screenshot (click to fullsize)

“The Last Time You Ever See Me” is relatively unusual for one of my songs in that it originated on electric bass. The overwhelming majority of my past songs were written on guitar and more recently I’ve been enjoying branching out into working with keyboards, loops, synthesizers and other instruments, but it’s fairly rare for me to write on the bass for some reason. I’ve always enjoyed the instrument, but rarely play it for extended periods of time because I’m wary of developing blisters in weird places not protected by my guitar calluses. (Of course, this problem can be easily overcome by simply playing the bass more and developing instrument-specific calluses, but you know: time, effort, inclination.)

The song’s origins date back a couple of years to (unsurprisingly) right around the time I picked up a bass for myself. I’d had one long before, back in Bloomington, but ended up letting it go to the bass player I was playing with at the time –  a mistake in retrospect, as I really liked the way that instrument sounded. (In all fairness, it wasn’t getting much use from me at the time and his old bass was crap so the sound of the band improved immediately).

After keeping my eye on Craigslist for awhile I figured I had nothing to lose by spending a hundred bucks or so on a cheap instrument I could use for demos and such, if nothing else. At the time the economy was tanking pretty badly so there was no shortage of listings (rising unemployment inevitably means a buyer’s market for secondhand instruments) so I waited until I saw something that fit my Craigslist requirements as far as price, convenience, and low probability of being murdered. Before too long, I found myself at a North Park Starbucks handing eighty bucks to a resigned-looking former punk rocker as he pulled a black Fender Squier bass out of his back seat while his visibly pregnant wife looked on from afar as if to ensure the cursed instrument was indeed being disposed of and not cached away for postnatal retrieval. Once I got it home and plugged it in it was clear it wasn’t the best instrument available by any stretch of the imagination, but it would more than suffice for my needs.

Above: Fender Squier bass at left (click to fullsize).

New instruments always bring the novelty value of a new toy, and I enjoyed jamming around on the bass a lot more than I had expected.  A lot of people undervalue the role of the bass (including a vast majority of bands whose bass players’ input is largely limited to plodding around on the root notes with the occasional accent or fill) but a good bassist can be as intrinsic and irreplaceable to a band’s sound as a singer or guitarist.  True, those who don’t take advantage of that opportunity tend to find their generic playing eminently replaceable which makes the bass spot a hot seat for many bands, but bassists with distinctive voices like Clint Conley, Billy Gould, Naomi Yang, Lemmy Kilmister, and Les Claypool add so much to their respective bands’ sounds that it’s difficult to imagine someone else coming up with the same basslines. When such musicians are replaced, it’s never quite the same.

Another reason for buying the instrument was that my Craigslist observation had revealed to me that (as per usual) there was no shortage of fledgling bands in need of someone to fill the bass spot. I figured even my rudimentary skills were enough to make me as good as half the bassists in nascent local bands — it doesn’t take much — and after all, the tone of many ads is pretty desperate (other common tones for Craigslist musician’s classifieds: aggressively arrogant, delusionally careerist, young and clueless, just plain ol’ dumb). Granted, I didn’t have a bass amplifier so if a band wanted me to hold down the low end on a regular basis I’d have to invest another few hundred bucks — but there again Craigslist was not lacking for choice. Mind you, I hadn’t suddenly developed a passion for playing bass as a full time thing or anything, but at the time I had just left one of the two bands with whom I had been singing/playing guitar so I had a hole in my schedule. Thumping out some basslines sounded like a nice low-effort endeavor compared to racking my brains for lyrics and vocal melodies while simultaneously churning out guitar riffs, plus there are only two things to carry for bass — one if you don’t have an amp.

I ended up playing bass with two different bands, each of whom offered me a regular position. I was leaning toward accepting one band’s offer until the day I showed up for practice following a 30 minute drive only to find a note on the door which read “Sorry no practice today”. After a quick check of my phone indicated no advance warning whatsoever had been sent my way, that settled that. Nice people all, but sometimes it doesn’t take much to figure out why a band can’t get off the ground; a quick internet check shows they are unfortunately no further along today than during the short time I played with them. The lack of simple consideration, common courtesy, and rudimentary social skills has torpedoed more creative endeavors than any of us will ever know.

Conversely, although they do seem to have had trouble coming up with a name that hasn’t already been taken, the other band I’d declined is still around; people who really want to play music usually find a way to do so, one way or another.  In fact, the first time I played with them I started a jam based on some riffs I’d been playing around with, and after I’d left the group they kept playing the jam until they developed it into their own song! Admittedly, at first I was a little taken aback by this chutzpah, but upon reflection I realized that all they’d really appropriated were two bass riffs which led into one another and back again — one of which I was pretty sure I’d unconsciously swiped from a Githead song myself — and seeing as no antipathy existed between us (I’d declined the spot in the band largely due to scheduling issues and a perceived lineup instability rather than any personality conflicts) I decided just to let it be.

My foray into the full-time (well, part-time) low end ended when I resolved to center my musical activities around recording, which not only precluded the necessary time commitment (I’ve dealt with more than enough half-assed musicians in my time to shudder at the idea of counting myself among their ranks, thankyouverymuch) but also required me to forego purchasing a bass amp in order to invest in upgrading my recording setup. Still, I already had those bass riffs stuck in my head so I came up with some analogous guitar parts and started putting lyrics and vocals to them under the working title “Every Day”. Unfortunately, the resulting song didn’t really seem to go anywhere to me, being comprised of basically the two riffs repeated over and over, so I shelved it for the time being — after all, I had plenty of other material to work on as I built up my studio piece by piece, including both fully developed songs and seeds that seemed much more promising, so it was just another half-finished song for the pile.

Much later, after issuing THIS IS MY REVENGE and several tracks into recording what would become YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK, I decided to record an old song of mine called “Wild In Your Youth” for possible inclusion on the latter. To that end, I sat down and started sequencing the drum parts, much as I had done for “Pristine Isolation”, “It’s No Mystery”, and others, but when I strummed the chords for “Wild In Your Youth” over the finished drum part, the end result didn’t quite seem to suit the song as much as I’d hoped…but it did remind me of something else.

Setting down the acoustic guitar and plugging in the bass, I pumped out the “Every Day” riffs and sure enough, the drums locked right in with the groove, making the bass sound massive even before I applied any effects processing to its signal — a sure sign I was on the right track. Quickly pressing “record”, I laid the bass riffs atop the drums, stopping only after my still-unused-to-bass fingers started evincing the telltale signs of blisters beginning to form (if you catch them in time, they’ll reheal in a couple of days rather than develop into full-blown blisters as long as you don’t play bass again until they’re completely healed).

It’s funny sometimes how something so simple can provide all the inspiration necessary to push a song to its conclusion. Fired up by the thunderous, lumbering rhythm created by the interplay between the bass and drums, I overlaid the guitar parts I’d previously played for “Every Day”, then combined the unfinished verses from that song with lyrics from another half-finished song called “Second Best” to create a full set of lyrics that worked surprisingly well together. After recording and editing the vocals, “The Last Time You Ever See Me” was basically finished bar only the final mixdown — although the track was briefly titled “Scare You Half To Death” until I decided that sounded too much like an Alice Cooper or Rob Zombie title.

Above: “The Last Time You Ever See Me” version history screenshot (click to fullsize). Note that the project retains the “Wild In Your Youth” title from the drum tracking stage.

The final mix didn’t take too much effort to execute; as I’d kept the arrangement to simply guitars, bass, drums, and vocals, I went for a big rock sound and before too long, the track was finished. As YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK progressed towards completion I did tweak the mix a little bit, but ended up reverting most of the changes and going back to an earlier version as the mix was starting to show signs of being overworked.  At a certain point, regardless of the perceived quality of a mix (or lack of same) nothing seems to improve it and each attempt to do so only makes things worse or just different. Learning to recognize when this point has arrived is an ongoing process, but when I see it I know it’s time to call it done, walk away, and move on to something else, regardless of whether the thing ends up going on an album or not.

To hear the results of my effort, check out “The Last Time You Ever See Me” via the links below.

———————–

Buy YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK at iTunes, Amazon, and Bandcamp

Stream YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK at Spotify and Bandcamp

Above: “Pristine Isolation” project file screenshot (click to fullsize)

During the making of YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK I was actively trying to expand my knowledge of audio recording and engineering as much as possible, consuming dozens of audio-related magazines, books, and instructional videos on subjects ranging from basic home recording tips (a little review never hurts where recording is involved) to mixing, mastering, and MIDI.  After digesting a certain amount of advice I noticed that whenever experienced engineers were interviewed, they almost always complained that as recording transitioned from magnetic tape to the era of digital audio workstations and recording styles changed with the technology, tempo changes had all but vanished from music! And while that’s almost certainly a generalized oversimplification (I can think of many metal, noise, and experimental acts that change tempo within songs, and often), the fact is that DAW-based recording definitely makes everything a lot easier on the user when everything is recorded at a consistent, steady timeframe.

However (to give credit where credit is due) while watching one of William Edstrom Jr.’s Groove 3 Studio One instructional videos, I realized that it wasn’t necessarily a lack of ability to introduce tempo changes so much as a lack of motivation to do so. Granted, while using Cubase and others DAWs in the past I had never thought much about it, but I had been spending a good percentage of my music-making time just trying to get things to work they were supposed to. After finally getting a simple crossfade to render properly I certainly wasn’t going to suddenly try to jump the tempo up or down and potentially derail hours of work! But after switching my DAW of choice to Presonus Studio One and eliminating many of my former frustrations (and seeing as the video tutorial showed me that setting up a time change wasn’t nearly as difficult as I might have thought) perhaps it was time to aim a little higher.

The way Studio One is set up, each song project has a tempo marker track that runs in parallel with audio and virtual instrument (MIDI) tracks. Typically one sets the tempo for an entire song, but the tempo track allows the user to set markers to delineate sections within a song which can then each be set to a different tempo.  If you click to enlarge the “Pristine Isolation” project file screenshot above, the tempo track is visible near the top of the window: each tempo is represented visually by a solid-colored block which gains height as the tempo rises, so here we can see that the intro section starts off at 70 BPM (beats per minute) before rising to 155 BPM as the vocals come in.  When the instrumental break hits, the tempo drops back down to 70 BPM before speeding all the way up to 182 BPM to drive the song’s conclusion home.

“Pristine Isolation” had been a source of considerable frustration to me over the years.  Written to be played with a live rock band, the song didn’t translate readily to a stripped-down acoustic context well at all — in fact, the more stripped-down the song became, the less it seemed to work. I am generally a fierce proponent of editing to cut to the point,  but this was one of those cases where less wasn’t more. The long instrumental intro set up the verse section, and banging right into the verses didn’t seem to work without that setup; similarly, going directly from the verses into the outro drained the faster section of any impact — without the instrumental break, it was just a fast song that got faster.

Unfortunately, for some reason the song proved next-to-impossible to execute properly with a band. Attention spans are short in the practice room, so I generally tended to rely on songs that didn’t require explanation beforehand. It may not seem like much to say “This one starts off slow for 16 bars, then speeds up, then drops back for the break before speeding up into the outro” but when you’re communicating with three or four people at once and trying to keep everyone on the same page, a sentence of such length is guaranteed to get garbled by at least one intended recipient. Most of the time you’re lucky if you can get everyone playing the same tempo at the same time even on simple songs, let alone pull off anything with a tempo change that stands out like a flat tire if anyone misses it.  And even if you manage to keep the cats herded long enough to get through the song structure once, that’s no guarantee anyone will remember it at next week’s practice — or that no one will pretend to have forgotten it, preferring instead to jam out on simple, easily remembered songs. Having plenty of simple songs, it was easy en0ugh for me to put “Pristine Isolation” away and tell myself we’d come back to it after the band had built up enough chemistry and breadth to make it worthwhile.

Unsurprisingly, that day never did come. Still, make no mistake: this was not going to be an easy song to pull off as a solo production, and I thought long and hard before attempting the climb. Besides the tempo changes — which I didn’t think would work unless the drums sounded like a live drumkit — the instrumental breaks were lacking melodic content, and the moods of each of the song’s sections were different enough that I was concerned recording the song piecemeal would result in something that sounded like pieces of four different songs clipped out and pasted together. Which, again, could be cool, but wasn’t what I wanted. Even a cursory look at other entries in this series of track breakdowns ought to show that I’m all for experimentation, but this was different: I had a definite, clear idea of what I wanted a recorded version of “Pristine Isolation” to sound like, and if I wasn’t going to be able to achieve that, I wasn’t going to put the song on the album. Now granted, it’s not a huge loss for me, you, or anybody when a song gets cut (outtakes are taken out for a reason; if a song is good it’ll make it on an album eventually), but this song was going to require a lot of time and energy — time and energy I wasn’t anxious to lose in my progression towards finishing a second album.

Eventually I figured that the bottom line was that I’d never know whether I could pull it off if I didn’t try, so after reviewing the appropriate Groove3 video I plunged ahead, delineating tempo regions in a new song file by counting off bars while mentally replaying the song. Typically, when building a track in the studio one starts with the drums and works upward, but in this case I decided to begin roughing in the song by tracking the rhythm guitar parts because I’d played them many times before — as shown by the fact I could just sit down and count out the bars of the song in my head without external reference of any kind. The song structure was set by the demarcated time changes anyway, and I wanted the primary rhythmic impulse of the song to arise as much as possible from the natural rhythm of the guitars.

Another reason I approached it this way was that I was worried I’d screw up the rhythm of the song by starting with drums, which I wasn’t sure I could execute acceptably. I strongly considered bringing an actual drummer in to play the part — an approach I ended up adopting later on for “Encore” and “Last Call” — but having no extant recording, I figure the best thing to do would be to sequence the part myself so that if I did decide later to have a drummer replace the track, I’d at least have a (hopefully) representative demo.

As I’d come to find, what might have been a weakness in the song in terms of playing with a band would be a great strength in assembling it solo. Because I had a clear vision in mind for “Pristine Isolation”, once I had the rhythm guitar parts recorded and sequenced properly it was largely just a matter of going through my collection of drum loops to find appropriate starting points and compose the drum parts accordingly.

Editing samples and drumloops is generally among my least enjoyed musical tasks, but to look on the bright side it’s almost monotonous enough to qualify as meditative. Going through samples and loops is definitely time well spent and rewarding and all that good stuff, but it often doesn’t feel so during the early stages of the process. Usually it takes a lot of time to come up with anything decent, plus sitting and clicking ‘play’ on audio clip after audio clip doesn’t provide the warm feeling of ‘playing music’ in the same way as even practicing guitar scales. Realistically though, I find the former generally a lot more compositionally productive than the latter.

Through a process comprised of equal parts trial & error and luck, eventually I managed to piece together a drum track which complemented the rhythm guitar properly. I still somewhat wish I was skilled enough to be able to execute the drum part on a live drumkit, but I tell myself that even if I had the kind of space required for live drums (which I don’t) I would probably still just frustrate myself trying and failing to get the drum parts to sound like they do in my head, regardless of the method used to record the parts. Maybe one day it’ll be an option for me, but for the present I’ll just have to make do without.

Once the drums reached a level I could live with, I decided to try to use the bass track to help unify the track by bridging some of the slight rhythmic disparities that arose between the sequenced drum parts and the live rhythm guitar tracks — nothing too problematic, but at times the parts seemed to be ‘disagreeing’ slightly on the push of the rhythm, and the bass is the perfect instrument for establishing a compromise between rhythm and melody.  Again, because I hadn’t played bass on “Pristine Isolation” before I took some time to fool around with a few different approaches before recording, but I had a pretty clear idea of what I needed the bass to do musically so it became clear pretty quickly what worked and what didn’t.  Because the drums had been pieced together I wanted to counter with a very live-sounding bass track, and after four or five takes I comped a final bass track that was almost entirely live, with a single edit before the coda — not bad at all for someone that’s never occupied a band’s bass slot full-time.

At this point I had a solid backing track and wasn’t sure what other melodic ornamentation I wanted to add, so I went ahead and tracked the vocals. Again, having been written to be played live there was only one vocal line to consider, and having sung the song dozens of times I had my vocal approach pretty well defined already. There was no delay to figure out the melodic topline or write lyrics (both incredibly time-consuming), I just had to set up the mic and go.  I’m fairly sure I would have used the V67G condenser mic for vocals at this time, but don’t I happen to specifically recall in this case — I might have used the SM-58 to go with the live rock vibe I was looking for. Either way, looking at the project file it took several tries to get a vocal track I could live with, given that the final vocals seem to be assembled largely from takes 6 through 8. If I had to guess, it’s likely because the song is so old that it took me as long as it did — my voice was naturally higher in the 90s and like a lot of people back then I tended to sing near the top of my range a lot, so it probably took me a few passes to warm up and get back into the right frame of mind.

After editing the vocals the basic song was essentially finished but between the intro, the break, and the outro, the song had several long sections that lacked vocals or other melodic lead lines and so sounded a little bare.  In the past, constrained by the limitations of playing guitar and singing at the same time, I’d left those sections open so that bandmates could add their own input and flesh out the song, but nothing had really stuck to any degree worth revisiting. Instead, I decided to take the opportunity to break with the old: with multitrack recording, I was no longer limited by physical realities, and since I had a solid live-sounding rock backing track assembled it seemed like a great opportunity to play some guitar leads.

Surprisingly, I honestly can’t recall ever playing lead on “Pristine Isolation” before — besides wanting to give others the chance to shine, I most likely couldn’t stop playing the rhythm guitar because the song would grind to a halt. (Not an unjustified fear.) I hadn’t really consciously thought out what I would do with the leads, so I just set the track to play on a loop while I fiddled about on the Explorer, then edited the results down to create the final track. My first couple of passes seemed kind of busy and overplayed, with too many notes — not uncommon at all where lead guitar is concerned — so I took a few breaths, told myself to relax, and came at it again using longer, sustained notes that played against the rhythm guitar patterns and brought out a lot more of the natural tone of the guitar. Fortunately, playing lead guitar is pretty much the polar opposite of sifting drumloops on the fun scale for me, and like most fun things in life it seemed like it was done too soon.

I don’t recall the precise details of the lead guitar signal chain other than that I definitely used the Dunlop 95Q Cry Baby Wah through the Line 6 POD crunch setting, as the distinct tone produced by that combination is all over these leads. I run hot and cold on using the POD, but the degree of expression provided by the Cry Baby makes it pretty much a constant in my chain even if only as a tone control whenever I play lead. Though the pedal’s been banged around a lot in and out of my gig bag, it’s suffered no ill effects other than losing the little rubber feet off the bottom (which I’m sure I could replace easily if it ever became a problem).  Of course there are a lot of pedals out there but as long as I’ve had the Cry Baby I’ve never wanted for another wah, which is about the highest praise I can give an effects pedal. (The fact that the 95Q has an extra distortion circuit built in for those occasions when you want just a little bit more is the extra touch that makes it perfect for me.  Your results may vary.)

Once the guitar leads were comped and edited, the mixing process here was basically a question of making it sound as much as possible like a live rock band playing together rather than one dude overdubbing parts in his garage and setting them against sequenced drum loops. (Of course, the latter sound can also be useful — just not in this case.)  This was basically a matter of after-the-fact arranging, using volume level changes to shift focus from the guitar leads to the vocals and back again, while maintaining a tight, powerful backing.  Balancing the levels of the various vocal sections proved to be a little tricky given the variations in delivery (hushed at the beginning, full voiced through the verses, not-quite-shouted in the outro) but after giving myself some time to get used to the final mix I could hardly believe the guitar leads hadn’t been conceived as part of the track from the outset. It’s definitely my best lead guitar playing on record to date, and it makes the track for me — to the degree that without it, I can’t say for sure whether the song would even have made the album!

To hear the results of my effort, check out “Pristine Isolation” via the links below:

———————–

Buy YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK at iTunes, Amazon, and Bandcamp

Stream YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK at Spotify and Bandcamp

Above: “Last Call” project file screenshot (click to fullsize)

A live version of “Last Call” recorded at the Bluebird in Bloomington, Indiana was originally released on the Daisy Glaze CD “One Way Out”; while that version has a certain ragged charm, it also has a lot of things wrong with it. The fact is, the song was never properly recorded and all of the live recordings on that CD were used less out of satisfaction with the way the songs were represented and more due to the fact that was all we could afford. And as if the cost of multitrack recording at the time wasn’t enough, all the mixes of the live Daisy Glaze tracks came out hideously unbalanced with one of the stereo channels much, much louder than the other, a problem that was only partially corrected before mastering. Finally — and most important in my mind — the spare arrangement necessitated by live performance didn’t really suit the melodic structure of the song, and I simply hadn’t sung it very well. Reason enough to execute a proper recording!

Because a previously recorded version of the song (however unsatisfactory) did exist in this case, I decided to take advantage of that fact and outsource the drums to Mike Cook at drumsnpercussion.com rather than attempt them myself. I also thought an actual drummer would be more likely than sequenced or quantized tracks to maintain the feel of the song; while the extreme looseness of the live version was one of the main reasons for doing a proper studio version, I didn’t want to go too far in the opposite direction and end up with a sterile, robotic track — ideally, I wanted something that maintained the power of a live rock band while bringing out the melody and clarity that had previously been buried in the murk. Mike’s first take on the track was slightly wide of the mark and pushed the song’s rhythm in a fast punky direction that didn’t quite fit, but after some guidance his second take hit the mark squarely.

With a solid drum track in hand on which to build and a preexisting song I’d played many, many times before to work with, the rest of the tracking went quickly. First, I laid down two tracks of acoustic guitar — one with the Ovation 2078TC and one with the Fender Catalina,  in order to to bring out slightly different timbres — to serve as the spine of the song. Structure in place, I proceeded to lay down electric bass through the Hartke VXL Bass Attack Pedal and Direct Box; this took slightly longer than the guitars as I hadn’t played bass on “Last Call” before (I’ve typically sung and played guitar when playing live).  Fortunately, between knowing the song by heart and having the reference of the early version to work with it didn’t take long to figure out. Once I’d doped out what bassline I wanted to play, in order to minimize the necessity of chopping and editing the bass track after the fact I practiced it a bit more than usual before pressing ‘record’ ; the acoustic guitars had been played mostly live with very few edits to help maintain the ‘band’ feel and I was determined to do the same with the bass. This approach worked out pretty well and it only took a couple of takes before I had a bassline I was satisfied with.

With the bass down and the the acoustic tracks to guide me, it was almost a trivial matter to record the electric guitars; while the project file screenshot above shows a number of edits on the electric tracks, those were nearly all added in the mixing stage for reasons of adjusting volume dynamics rather than comping parts together or eliminating errors. Both electric guitar tracks were done with the Gibson Explorer — the same guitar used on the older recording — played through the Line 6 POD’s Crunch setting, and after a few level adjustments I had a solid backing track in place.

Above: “Last Call” version history screenshot (click to fullsize)

Having previously used the services of Kurt Baumer at Fiddletrax.com to record violin tracks for “Encore” (the track breakdown for which is coming later, in its proper album sequence) and been pleased with the results, I sent the rough mix off to Kurt with instructions not to simply replicate what had been played on the live version, but to start with a similar feel and elaborate as he wished. Based on Kurt’s performance on the earlier track, I was fairly confident that giving him free rein to do what he felt most appropriate would produce better results than micromanaging his contribution.

In my experience, unwarranted micromanagement is one of the worst habits of local musicians: people whose creative output might otherwise be completely viable constantly shoot themselves in the feet by affecting unearned authoritative stances based on their own insecurities. I played a few times with one nascent local band whose bassist referred to himself as the band’s “musical director” despite having no previous experience whatsoever playing in a band, let alone the training or skill that goes along with such a lofty title. He never let this lack of knowledge inhibit him, though, constantly interjecting ill-informed opinions at every stage; my favorite of his halfbaked theories was “A band should release everything they record, no matter how it turns out” — had he never bought a reissued album with terrible previously unreleased bonus tracks tacked on? This made every little choice into a teeth-gritting ordeal, from deciding which song to play next to ascertaining whether a break in a song should be 4, 8, or 11 bars (correct answer: no one cares but you — and if you really cared that much you should have worked it out beforehand rather than wasting valuable practice time with pointless bullshit).

Unsurprisingly, the same drummer never showed up twice during the three times I played with that band; after all, it’s one thing to give a helpful indication of a song’s direction to a stranger who’s never heard the material before and then let them do their thing; it’s entirely another to critique every aspect of someone’s performance to their face after every song, particularly when one isn’t a drummer and doesn’t have a clear, communicable vision.  Sensing a fundamental instability in the band’s organization and having previously seen the same self-destructive tendencies keep many a musical project from ever getting anywhere, I quit soon after the third practice, wishing them luck and vaguely citing an “opportunity I couldn’t pass up” — the opportunity not to waste any more of my time.

Sure enough, within a few months the other guitar player flipped out and quit the band, telling the bassist that not only didn’t she want to play with him, but that she didn’t want to be his friend and he should never contact her again! To his credit, the bassist recruited more members and kept going (now that every other position had turned over multiple times, he could at least insist on keeping the cringeworthy band name he came up with) but only a few more months later that version of the band had dissolved as well; they haven’t been heard from since. Ironically, now that he has the experience under his belt of getting a band to that first hurdle of doing small recording sessions and playing a few local gigs, he might actually be tempered enough to play with other people — if he’s learned the right lessons along the way and worked the preponderance of his unfeasible and unrealistic ideas out of his system.

The lesson: playing in a band is not an excuse to act like a rock star, and putting an ad on Craigslist doesn’t make you a bandleader. If you can’t work well with other people, a band is not for you. No one is going to show up for free week after week to take orders and worship at the font of your genius, so if that’s how you always imagined playing in a band to be you’d better have independent wealth or extremely indulgent parents to finance your delusions. And if you really do have strong ideas for all the other instrumental parts on which you can’t (won’t) compromise, well then buy an interface, learn how to record, and do it all yourself. This isn’t 1960; if you want total control of how your music comes out, just take it! If nothing else, I hope these track breakdowns help get the fact across that it’s really not all that hard, you’ll save a lot of time and hassle, and you’ll probably be happier with the results in the end. But if you want other people involved and you’re not intending on letting them have any input into the music then you don’t have a band, you have a solo project with supporting musicians — and that situation only works when the supporting musicians are getting paid.

Fortunately, the inexorable march of technology now allows those who have managed to accumulate both instrumental and social skills to market their abilities and let others make use of those abilities for a reasonable fee. Where it used to cost thousands of dollars simply to rent a studio and hire a musician or two, the rise of home recording and the interconnectivity of the internet has lowered the cost of custom bespoke music tracks to much more affordable levels. And while those same technological advancements have made instruments like drums and violin far easier to simulate synthetically, the feel of a human being playing an instrument made of wood is still irreplicable. It’s not hard for me to create something that sounds a lot like a violin line, but that doesn’t make me a violinist any more than being a bossy prick makes one a bandleader. Hence, when I hire someone to create a track for one of my songs I want them to bring their lifetime of skills to the table, not restrict their playing to my idea of what’s possible. If they are too far off the mark, then yes, I’ll guide them back towards what I’m looking for — that’s the prerogative of the client: if you’re paying, you’re calling the shots — but letting someone bring in ideas you would never have thought of is the point of playing with other people.

Getting back to this particular track, at the time my email asking him to do the violin work on “Last Call” reached Kurt he happened to be on tour, so during the interim I proceeded to record and edit the vocals for the song. (Kurt offered to record his tracks while still on tour — he brings recording equipment with him on the road in order to serve clients who need violin tracks tout suite — but I told him to take his time since I wasn’t in any rush and had plenty on hand to keep me busy.) Again, having sung this song many times before was a real help insofar as recording quickly; nothing lends confidence to a vocal like properly doing the work of trying out and discarding various vocal approaches ahead of time. Of course, this isn’t always possible — or even desirable — but the difference is nearly always audible.

I had initially thought to use vocal harmonies to flesh out the melodic content a bit, but in the vocal editing stage I ended up cutting back and cutting back until I basically had one lead vocal with a second used for intermittent doubling. I find this to be the case more often than not with vocals: as someone who’s not in love with the sound of his own voice, I tend to pile on the tracks during recording, then later during editing I realize how indistinct and ‘blurry’ the overlapping vocals sound and I end up cutting them back to one strong lead track and perhaps a few harmonic embellishments.

When Kurt got back to me with his finished violin tracks (not long at all) the vocals were edited and mixed, so after dropping the custom tracks into the project file I brought the mix up on the monitoring speakers to hear them in context. One great thing about Kurt is that he records a few takes with slightly different parts on each job, so one has the choice of using any one of the provided takes, comping the various takes together to make one part, or even using all the tracks together!  In this case, while each Kurt’s three slightly different takes on “Last Call” sounded good individually, when placed atop the rest of the instrumentation and panned left to right within the stereo field, the violin tracks together achieved a string quartet-like quality as well as providing the additional melodic content I was looking for earlier. I can honestly say that I literally could not have been more pleased with the results of Kurt’s efforts and I would recommend his services to absolutely anyone looking for custom violin tracks.

From this point forward, all that remained was mixing; as “Last Call” was among the final tracks finished for the album, I recall looking forward to wrapping it up and getting everything sent off for mastering. As the screenshot above shows, after the violin tracks were added in the last week of September 2011 the version history is simply a series of mixes and remixes, largely just tweaking the levels of the guitars (mostly for dynamics, as mentioned above) and violin tracks to get everything to gel as well as possible. Fortunately, it took relatively few back-and-forth trips between the studio and my various listening environments (as detailed in the post in this series for “It’s No Mystery”) before I settled on a “Last Call” mix I was pleased with. In the end, it turned out to be exactly one month between finalizing the “Last Call” mix on October 17 and finally getting to listen to the completed master for YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK in mid-November.

To hear “Last Call” and the rest of YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK, listen to the album via the links below.

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Buy YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK at iTunes, Amazon, and Bandcamp

Stream YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK at Spotify and Bandcamp

Above: “Overrich Diet” project file screenshot (click to fullsize)

This track was another brand-new song created from the ground up for YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK, in the sense that it was written in the studio during the recording process.  I’ve found that having a song fully written before beginning the recording process often makes for a faster recording since there’s a clear roadmap to follow, but it can feel a little robotic at times — more craftsmanlike than expressive. In a sense, there is something more purely creative about sitting down without preexisting ideas and making something out of nothing, but the flipside is that if the ideas aren’t forthcoming you can easily end up with uninspired, meandering improvisations and tracks that don’t ever go anywhere. Then again, that’s what editing is for — all the boring stuff goes away, never to be heard by the ears of others.  In reality, I find that when composing on the fly via DAW recording, the best results spring from somewhere between inspiration and recitation — when you literally have no idea of what might be coming out of your fingers next, you can come out with some gems that surprise even you — but once you’re finished playing, you’d better be prepared to spend some time trimming and highlighting the keeper parts for future reference or they will quickly get misplaced.

In the case of “Overrich Diet” I had nothing but an intention to try out what I think of as the “Herbie Flowers bass technique” after the prominent session musician who played with David Bowie (Space Oddity, Diamond Dogs), Lou Reed (“Walk On The Wild Side”), and T. Rex (Dandy In The Underworld). Bass is notoriously difficult to record properly and many rock albums have lousy bass tone (which often went unnoticed, given how undermixed bass tended to be on vinyl masters), but all the records Flowers played on have a great bass sound that he apparently got in a very counterintuitive fashion: rather than using overpowered amplifiers to drive massive stacks of bass bins loaded with speakers or by plugging the bass into the mixing board via a direct input (DI) box, Flowers played with a pick through a small practice amp played at a reasonable listening level and recorded with a single mic. Flowers himself described the signature tone obtained via this method as a “nice puddingy sound”; I call it “creamy”.

First, I set up a small 10W bass practice amp and plugged in the Yamaha bass; when I play bass I generally play with a pick anyway, as I don’t play the instrument often enough for the strings not to tear up my fingers. Next I set up a Shure SM-58 mic at a distance of about six inches from the front of the amp, pointing slightly off-axis and off-center into the amp’s speaker cone. This signal was amplified with the GA-73 preamp before going into the DAW to impart some of the ‘vintage character’ of the analog mixing desk circuitry that would have been used in Flowers’ heyday, and after tweaking the mic placement by listening through my monitoring speakers I loaded up some drum loops to play against and just jammed out on the bass for awhile, having fun.

Fun is important! Although I would generally characterize the whole process of creating music as “fun” for me, there’s a lot of difficult detail-oriented work involved in the process that is really more accurately described as “rewarding” than “fun”, but slamming out bass riffs with no stakes or pressure attached to the outcome is a blast.  I’m a lot more likely to have big, stupid grin on my face after ten minutes of jamming out on “creamy” sounding electric bass than editing and sequencing drum samples for an hour.

When I’m playing like this I try not to think too hard about what I’m playing or how I’m going to make it into a song later, as I find those thought processes just get in the way: as much as possible, I’m playing for the enjoyment of playing itself. It’s only after I’m done — with bass, generally my fingers tell me I need to stop before I give myself a blister — and I listen back to what I’ve played that I start to apply critical judgment to the results of my free flight.  Often things that are enjoyable to play are enjoyable to listen to although that’s certainly not always the case, so taking some time between recording and editing is often helpful in keeping the enthusiasm of the moment from running away with me and making a fun-to-play-but-maybe-not-very-interesting part the centerpiece of a song.

I tend to think of the shaping of this kind of improvisatory part into the backbone of a song as a process analogous to sculpting or painting: I note striking bits that sound like they could work as verses, choruses, or instrumental breaks, move  pieces of audio around, and generally cut away anything that sounds like it doesn’t fit.  In this case, since I was working with just bass and drums, I also resequenced the drum parts along with the bass line, essentially composing the backbone rhythmic structure of the song.

This is the part I would characterize as less “fun”, but taking something that would otherwise remain an ephemeral solo jam and shaping it into a framework around which something can be built is creatively rewarding enough to compensate. However, a working familiarity with your DAW of choice is absolutely necessary to do this efficiently, as hitting a roadblock can be frustrating enough to derail a session and prevent you from getting anywhere that day; experience enough similarly frustrating sessions and one will abandon the ideas contained therein rather than face another (doing things this way in Cubase didn’t work for me at all).

In my case, as detailed in earlier posts in this series I chose Presonus Studio One as my DAW largely based on its expeditious workflow and I have a lifetime of experience (including professional training in audio technology) on which to draw, but I still took the time to watch basic instructional videos on using Studio One as well as general home recording and audio production. You don’t have to know everything before you start — no one does — but you can save yourself hours of frustration by learning the basics and reviewing them at regular intervals.

In this case, I had a couple sections that broke down easily into a verse/chorus type of structure as well as a fun bass lead part that showed off the “creamy” bass tone in a way that would make for a good break, bridge, or outro.  Once I hammered the parts into a rough sequence, I had a pretty strong barebones song structure over which I laid electric guitar tracks with the Explorer, and after a little editing I pretty much had the instrumentation for “Overrich Diet” down.

One reason the electric guitar tracking went so quickly is Studio One’s loop recording feature. Basically, what this allows me to do is set up a song or section of a song to repeat while I record, so it’s possible to record two or more takes without stopping after each take.  Granted, the time required to set up a new track for recording is minimal — a minute or less — but it’s a question of momentum: it’s much, much easier to keep the vibe when all you have to do is keep playing it than it is to hit ‘stop’, set up a new track, mute the previous track, double-check you’re not overwriting the previous track, and hit ‘record’ again. Additionally, I’ve found several times that the best comped track ends up being the end of one take added to the beginning of the next, as if I’d found my groove somewhere during a take and continued it through as recording rolled on; if I’d had to stop in between those two takes, I would almost certainly have lost that groove. It’s great for improvisation too, as it makes it incredibly easy and fun to just keep playing after a take, throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks. If it’s all garbage, it’s easy enough to delete and cut the recording back to the proper take, but you never know what might come out. Besides, it’s a great excuse to let loose, fly free, and have more of that fun I mentioned above.

Above: “Overrich Diet” version history screenshot (click to fullsize)

With the drums, bass, and guitar in place I had a basic track completed, but because this track had been composed on the fly I now hit the point where real work had to be done: it was time to work out the vocals. Song that are written ahead of time often come to me with lyrics attached as they tend to get built outwards from fragments of words and melody in my head; typically what happens if I think of a melody is that I have to attach it to some words to remember it, and then those words imply other words, and the melodies imply other melodies and the songs are constructed as support for those words and melodies. A song like “Overrich Diet” is a different challenge, a lot like coming up with vocals and vocal melodies for music someone else has written and brought into a band. For me, it’s a process of getting a reasonably listenable version of the music to work with and then playing it repeatedly, humming and singing to myself until fragments of words and melody start coming to me, writing them down, and continuing until I have enough idea of what the song is and where it’s going to finish it up to my satisfaction. It’s really one of the most exhausting and annoying stages of making music, to be honest: I don’t care how interesting and cool a song is, listen to it on repeat play for three hours and its charm will inevitably begin to wear on you. Fortunately, it’s also one of the most rewarding as I’m always somewhat surprised at what comes out of this method, and when it really works the end result is a vocal line strong enough that  it would have merited building a song around it had I conceived it separately. (For me, that bit in “Overrich Diet” is the chorus.)

Once the vocals and lyrics were written, the sections of the song were rearranged to properly accommodate them and finalize the song structure. The vocals were then laid down using the V67G condenser mic through the Golden Age Project Pre-73 preamp — I think it might have been my first use of the GA Pre-73, but I’m not 100% on that — and after that, the history of “Overrich Diet” is a long series of mixes and remixes.  The final mix is obviously of huge importance to a song, but particularly so with songs that are composed in the studio: if a song has never been played live by a band it’s less likely that any preexisting notions of what the mix should sound like will come into play. This can be both good and bad: good, because you’re not limited by perspectives possibly developed under faulty conditions (each member of a band generally thinks their instrument should be higher in the mix because that’s the way they always hear it standing next to their amp); bad, because you may not even know what you’re going for. In this case I thought a fairly straightforward approach would be best; although the song hadn’t been played with a band, I wanted it to sound as though it might have been and mixed it with that in mind. This mostly consisted of a lot of adjusting guitar levels to fit in and around the vocals — which, remember, had been recorded after the guitars, so I was looking to give the impression the guitars were somewhat reactive with the vocal line.  Based on the version history above, it looks like I kept coming back to the track and remixing it about once every two weeks until the YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK album was starting to get finalized, at which point I stepped it up and kept tweaking it until I had a master-ready final mix.  In the end I was pretty pleased with the ‘live rock’ feel of the song — especially considering its origins were anything but!

To hear the results, check out the “Overrich Diet” video and listen to the album via the links below.

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Buy YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK at iTunes, Amazon, and Bandcamp

Stream YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK at Spotify and Bandcamp