How I Learned to Manipulate the Process and Stop Worrying About Bombing

Time to define terms. 'The Big Addendum' has been thrown around this blog, and it is confusing. Let me explain; in 2016, not having recorded anything in nearly two years, I got ants in the pants. Having done around 25 albums between 2006 and 2014, this was understandable. Plus, I was changing gears in my lifestyle, going from hunter/gatherer to more of a curator. Having amassed a huge collection of digital data - well over one thousand DVDs with all sorts of stuff crammed in - it was time to go through them and throw out the bad while organizing the good.

Things got drastic; I started throwing material away by the trash bag load on a regular basis. There was now enough storage space on my computer system to absorb all my data. I started transferring well over a thousand DVD discs onto hard drives, clearing out my closet. It was an endless cycle of absorb, evaluate and eject. I can be ruthless when it comes to cleaning, and never more so than during this period. It was time to go through my music raw data, a task I had tried to do twice before but never getting to the bottom of the barrel.

During the recording process, there is a lot of cleaning up and organizing that has to go on behind the scenes; gigs of raw files are produced on every song. Not everything was labeled correctly in the earliest days, or labeled at all. I have switched audio editing platforms four times; if I want to remix, I had to sync everything up from scratch, which occasionally proved impossible. I rarely notated the time signature of a song, and trying to match or replace individual parts without a click track can be daunting.

I found shocking gaps in my music; lost masters, mis-remembered dates, mislabeled everything. It was time to put everything into one place and search all of it with a fine tooth comb, finding out what I had and what was missing, making redundant back-ups of my most crucial data. It was excruciating and it took six months, at least three hours every single day. Time to stop relying on my memory, find out what there was and what shape it was in, and make if safe for the future.

Between 2006 and 2014, my organizational skills had improved, especially around 2009 when I started drumming. That really increased the number of raw files, making it necessary to clean up as I went along. There became a madness to my method, literally. I had no idea what I was doing when I began home recording. The earliest material recorded was done blindly, instinctively. Recording music in a totally digital environment as a solo venture was a new thing when I stumbled upon it. I found it easy but everyone else found it baffling. What started as a necessity for incidental music at work quickly turned into an obsession.

Over the years, going through the process over and over again, I did learn important lessons. Things did sort themselves out and a methodology developed. Steps were repeated each time. Short changing any of these nearly always resulted in disappointing results. And there were many disappointing tracks back in those days, pieces that I would go back and fix them out of pride.

When I did go back and redo a song, I called it a 'retread'. It started out trying to simply fix parts, but I soon realized that the concept behind the music was often at fault and no amount of replacement parts could fix that. Time to look at the piece anew, take it at a different tempo, try it in a new genre. These worked surprisingly well, and between 2012 and 2014 I retreaded perhaps up to forty pieces of music. Only one or two were not drastic improvements.

But that left the original treatments, and the folders containing the raw files. They were abandoned, left to rot in cyberspace, and in many cases that is where they deserved to be. But there might be a layer of the original that had some merit. Plus, over the years my process of recording had changed, simply because I started playing drums. Before, there were hardly any blues. When drumming, suddenly the number of bluesy tunes increased dramatically. It was an easy groove for my limited skills to achieve.

I had begun in 2014 to contemplate the process, studying it and breaking it down to components. After some research, I separated it into eight different major steps;

1) Conception - an idea behind the piece, simple or complex, loud or pastoral, including if it will be in a specific genre.

2) Composition - writing or adapting music, figuring out the chords and various melodies.

3) Arrangement - which instruments and in what degrees to carry lead and rhythm parts, especially important in cover songs.

4) Performance - getting the sound out of your instruments or creating the looped parts necessary for the piece.

5) Engineering - capturing that sound with whatever fidelity you need that is appropriate, usually the best possible.

6) Mixing - putting together the layers of sound to create the finished product, including room ambience and any special effects such as delay and others.

7) Sequencing - how the different finished pieces are placed together to form a cohesive whole when placed together on an album or playlist.

8) Packaging - finding a reflective name and image to wrap this all together.

Here is a secret: When I began, I knew nearly nothing of any of this.  I had seen the inside of a recording studio and even participate a little in the process, but that was in the analog days.  I could get a clean sound for video, but that was different from directly patching into a USB recording device.  I had mixed two or three sounds together, but not multiple layers of noise all competing for attention.

None of that stopped me from charging ahead with an attempt to remix and revisit some of the earliest tunes. This despite the dismal quality of my first two projects. How bad were they? I have re-sequenced the first one at least four times, from a double CD with 33 songs to a single CD with 11 songs, two of which weren't on it originally. And I don't even own a copy of the second album. So finding the raw material for large parts of this did not bring joy to my heart. I had thought that most of this material was missing, but it was simply lost in the clutter. There were folders with generic names. Not everything was complete, nor was every song there. But what I found was significant once it was sorted.

I found that it wasn't quite as dismal as remembered. In fact, the problems in the music could be traced to arrangement, performance, engineering and mixing in most cases. There were songs that were abysmal from start to finish, but there were songs that worked, and songs that were somewhere in between. Now I had ten years of experience, so what if I looked at this material from the standpoint of a producer and not as a performer? Could significant improvements be made?

There were 92 folders containing complete or partial song layers when I finished sorting through the mess. I had retained much more of the first two albums than I realized; it was only the third album that was missing a majority of material due to a catastrophic computer crash. Systematically, I went through and remixed over 70 pieces of music. Some songs were beyond repair while others could not be improved. There were surprises, like new bits and pieces of songs. There were trends, like too much noise and too many layers. There were improvements; I found myself enjoying the process. Could this be turned into something both old and new, a reassessment of my earliest work?

I found myself frequently replacing bass parts. Some songs needed new lead instruments, but I tried to keep that to a minimum. Many songs needed new arrangements, parts removed or re-arranged. Each song posed a different challenge. Back in 2006, I had some guitars and a crappy Casio keyboard. A drum track was made by piecing together a couple of minutes of little bits with changes and turn-arounds hopefully in the proper place. An entire piece could be conjured up with enough time, patience, and loops. My goal was to use the loops to create a foundation and then layer my playing on top.

Instead of writing a melody of chord changes, then building an arrangement around it like the rest of the world, I was making drum and percussion loops, sometimes adding a few instruments, then creating music to fit the rhythm. They were very time consuming, used once then discarded.  The above song, although a revised version from 2016, is based on an original version from 2008 and is called 'Summer Sunday'. The pace is turgid, as I strung together some very slow cymbal crashes that panned from speaker to speaker.

In 2014, I retreaded the same melody and chord structure, but this time I put my own drums on it. The approach is totally different, turning this into more of a jazz piece. Both are done in dropped 'D' tuning on the guitar, but the second one has a lot more chords. It also changes pace and texture when the single string section comes in. Overall, it is a much better song, and so radically different that I changed the name slightly, now labeled 'Sunday Summer'.

The difference between the above two videos should illustrate the vast changes that could be made when retreading a song. The first one is part of 'The Big Addendum', and it has a new guitar and bass added to the original strings and percussion. Trust me, the first version was much worse. On the second version, I have switched genres and tempo, turning it into a peppy toe tapper. Both videos were put together with a great deal of input from the Prelinger Archives.

I set about to methodically and systematically review my output, remaining brutally honest in my evaluations.I started in April 2015, going over every album, noting sub-quality songs, where the retreads were. Duplicate songs were becoming a problem, so I removed the earlier versions. Even after this, I still felt that my music was terribly disorganized, along with my life in general. It was getting time to simplify and reduce, not complicate and multiply. I went through movies, books and even other artists’ music, purging, reducing my footprint. Work was busy. My daughter graduated on the West Coast. There was a Civil War centennial and Caribbean vacations. I was exhausted and dissatisfied. I still hadn’t gotten my shit together. I was impatient.

There were good things that emerged, alternate mixes that I had completely forgotten, files and folders that were presumed lost that turned up. I was going through every mp3, video, photo and text file that I had, sorting and eliminating. That’s where the next project emerged from; the middle of this digital mess. The 'Big Addendum' was both a huge organizational push, a chance to correct the earliest albums, and an effort to get consistency in my work. It took five months of work to finish once I located all of it, going through ninety two folders, trying to re-synchronize over seventy five tracks. Then there were the replacement parts that I did, mostly bass but also guitar, keyboards, and even the occasional acoustic drumming. My drums were still broke but I was itchy to do something. 

It was time to ponder my early work, to judge and evaluate, to define terms and set guidelines that could be used on all the material. The 'Rule of Eleven' is simple and the by-product of years of sequencing; keep it to eleven songs, otherwise, the listener to never get to the end, losing interest. In the early days, I tended to try and pack a full 78 minutes of music onto every disc. Nowadays, somewhere between 50 to 60 minutes feels about right. I can break the rule if it is an album of leftovers or outtakes, since there might be some very short songs. It was in 2014 that the 'Rule of Eleven' first occurred to me, although I did not apply it retroactively until later.

I am sure that nearly everyone who got ‘The Big Addendum’ was even more confused by the discs than their normal befuddlement, but it was something that I had to do to clear the past. I took my first eight albums, which I had been chipping away through many retreads, and tried to wipe the slate clean. I couldn’t remix everything; there were many missing folders before 2009. Songs that couldn’t be altered were segregated; those tracks became the albums 'Decorated Time' and "Groove Batch'. Of the 108 songs on those eight first albums, those two collected mostly unaltered songs. By my calculations, 8 songs were discarded as unlistenable, forty four were remixed during 2016, and twenty nine retreaded, for a total of 81, leaving a scant 27 out of the original 108 in their original mix. This was as systematic as I could manage. It was tedious but it was fun.

There were folders that contained the raw files for discarded originals of songs that had been retreaded. Could I have any fun or learn something by rooting around inside there? Had my work improved my post-production skills enough to rescue some of these tracks? I had previously thought that a sacrilege to look back, but with no new music on the horizon, I decided to poke around. That created two additional albums, ‘Eclectrick’ and ‘Bumping Under’, where I was able to break my own rules and revisit the past.

I did manage to squeeze one fresh new album out of the 2016 project, ‘Froth’. I put all the new surprises on one album. The above track, 'Funky India', was something spontaneous I created on top of a discarded drum loop that had been used in a retread. It's short and possibly an ethnic slur, but that was not my intent. Instead, I wanted to experiment with some of the Bollywood genre. I shot all the video for that one, and it is suitably psychedelic for the occasion.

This last one was a guitar experiment done around 2008 and then forgotten. My older effects pedal board did a nice job stacking up layers of digital delay. The obvious reference point are the Frippotronics of King Crimson founder Robert Fripp. There were two very different attempts that I found, and the other one became the track 'Hell's Bells' on the 2012 album 'Tracks'. For this one, I did overdub a bass to give a sonic reference point, and it worked to focus this rather esoteric piece.

By the end of 'The Big Addendum', I had five albums of material, including nearly one album full of underscores and another of radical remixes. It was time reshuffle every album before 2010; there had never been a theme back then, just a desire to try out as many different styles as I could squeeze in. Some themes emerged, musical and textural, but there was still room for variety and diversity. However, the nagging worry was that I was becoming obsessed with my own musical excrement.

Happily, I did acquire new drums inflate June 2017, creating a very healthy 45 songs, all new and many originals. I produced three themed albums and one random collection. The material was strong, showing both new paths and approaches. Best of all, there were no references to the past albums. I used ‘The Big Addendum’ to move beyond my early work, make definitive versions of all that old stuff. From that project, I learned how to manipulate the process and stop worrying about bombing. At least musically.