Making music in isolation is strange; the noises you hear can be echoes of your past experiences. Yet if you keep doing it in a concentrated period of time, you can move past the familiar, past what you planned to do. That's when surprises appear, sounds that you've never heard emerge, things that you though were beyond your capabilities. It's happened to me regularly, but it takes a certain quantity to reach that quality.
At the beginning, it was enough to simply have noise organized in a familiar pattern, something resembling a song. After a couple of dozen pieces, now you want sounds at certain places, tones at certain volumes, beats at specific pulses. You get picky, but your skill level isn't up to the task, or you don't have what is needed in your sound library. Experimentation starts to happen, just to hear the results. That's the beginning of the surprises.
Taking over the drumming in 2009, the entire recording process changed. In the past, the beat was created first. Then a song would be fashioned to fit that structure. Now, some instrument, played to a click track usually, was put down, a scratch track, probably erased by the time the piece was finished. Bass was good, outlining the chord changes, identifying the kick drum beat. Drumming came late, usually the last thing added.
'Glider' uses drums loops, a typically convoluted track, lots of elements happening. The original version was done in 2007. It wasn't bad, with two guitars, but the mix was a problem, too trebly. I never could get it right. Doing a retread in 2014 after finding the drum loop in isolation, I reworked the guitar part, simplifying it to one pass. The bass in the original had been sloppy, a difficult part to play, so I corrected it.
The arrangement is completely different, even though the drum part is the same. I leave big spaces this time, let the percussion percolate through. The bass is heavier, even getting a short solo, thumping hard on the beat. The guitar skitters along, slurring into chords, punching out leads. Minor but nice, this shows how sophisticated the balance between instruments can get, even in a short song.
This started as creationism, something invented to fit a time slot, matching the pace of the percussion, invented on the spot. Going back to it eight years later, it became an evolution of the original. There's the paradox in a nutshell; the familiar can never go as far as something made up unless you try the impossible. Sometimes it feels like jumping off a cliff without a parachute.
'Watermelon in Easter Hay' is one of the rare Frank Zappa tunes that I can actually play. Most of his material, when not crushingly simple or obvious, is unbelievably convoluted. I admire his work ethic, his diversity, even though there are some things that confuse me and some things I don't like. But with hundreds of albums, there's some undeniably great material.
This is my third version of the song. Attempted on my first album, I constructed a seventeen minute drum part first. All my other drum loops were short, under five minutes, some much shorter. It was an experiment in stretching time. breaking the ten minute barrier to see what happens. Naturally, it was way too long, although not a complete failure. Of the 33 songs strung together on the 'Normal/Abnormal' project', it was the only cover song, a sign of my high regard for it.
Three years later I tried it again during the 'Odd Even/Even Odder' sessions. To get the feedback necessary, I played through an amp, using a mic to capture the output instead of my usual straight analog-to-digital method. It's a good performance, pushing the limits of my Stratocaster, but the mix I used was a mess. Clattering snare ruined the performance. It was remixed during 'The Big Addendum', no percussion, letting the bass carry the beat.
Experiments can be reused outside of their original context. There was a great table drum part that I developed, overjoyed with finding exotic Indian instrument loops. I tried half a dozen songs on top of it, not getting it right for years. The early attempts were discarded when I finally hit on using it under my cover of 'Paint It, Black' in 2009. Rooting through the dead letter files in 2016, I came across all the early version, one of which I thought had possibilities.
The guitar part in 'Spaghetti Eastern' is based loosely on a Led Zeppelin piece, 'Poor Tom', which I am sure was stolen from someplace else. I learned to play it on the Dobro first; in fact, a very similar song was developed using that instrument with a very mechanical beat underneath. This guitar is trying to sound as if it were a 12 string. For once, it manages that tone reasonably well. Since the drum part was used elsewhere, it was time to try to do something different.
Using acoustic drums and bells (my electronic kit was busted at the time), it was a bitch. The original table bit twisted and turned, so those stops and starts were in the guitar. Replicating it was not easy, even on the bass, which practically is one note. When finished, it had a refreshingly different feel, evolving into something worth saving.
The more experimental, every time you try something for the first time, the more likely it is to be creative. The first time I sang, on a whim, was in a strange song called 'A Modest Proposal' from 2008. There was one microphone for both my voice and the acoustic guitar. No lyrics, but I had just read Jonathan Swift's essay of the same name. With that in the back of my mind, the words came spontaneously. This was one take.
The format is not radical; the drums, a fairly standard rock beat, keep the thing grounded. It was the context, first try at vocals, doing something perhaps a bit more pop, that makes it creationism. I hadn't done anything that straight, although the words had a hidden meaning, keeping it weird enough for me at the time. Later, genre exploration yielded many examples similar to this, but here is the beginning.
A piece can be an exercise, thinking you can finally handle a chord structure or a tricky beat. 'Hello Goodbye' was something I learned 30 years ago on piano, even teaching it to my daughter at one point. I hesitated trying it because all the other instruments were too challenging. In 2017 I felt ready, recording the basics, slowly layering. A couple of tries at the vocals made it clear that this had to be an instrumental.
That made things easier, and fooling around, I came up with the concept of using slide. There are two guitars, something I regularly shy away from, preferring a cleaner sound. Here, I needed to stay closer to the original arrangement than normal. That was okay; I'd done enough Beatles covers, including a few weird ones. Just getting this close way enough.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, sometimes things just happen with little control. 'Soma' is a perfect example, first done in 2010 for the 'Low Hanging Fruit' album. It was anything but, the odd-song-out sandwiched between more normal musical genres. In all honesty, my first try sucked. I had nowhere near the drum skills to play it. The arrangement was mush.
Only two years later, in the middle of my 'Retreads' album, fixing or redoing older pieces, making them better, 'Soma' became a prime candidate. The two songs could not have been different, in tone, tempo or arrangement. It could have been renamed, having so little relationship to the first version. This time I nailed it, a slinky piece vaguely in the style of 1980s King Crimson.
This is extreme enough to count as a double case of creationism, maybe the only time I managed that feat. I really tried the first time, but it fell horribly flat. The second one was the charm, sleek, smooth, completely different, a winner. Being my first attempt at Progressive Rock, a broad term I use for blending many different styles together, I can forgive myself for the first dog, mainly for doing such a better second version.
'Time & Tide' demonstrates how immediate the moment of creation can be. It had been three years since I had recorded new music. I was ready to go, a dozen or so pieces in various stages of preparation. At the end of the first week, with just a couple of songs started, I sat down for coffee Saturday morning. Strumming away, strange hypnotics chords appeared. There was a rough version recorded in an hour.
Not that it was anywhere near finished; there were dozens of versions, dozens of mixes. It was nearly the last of 45 songs finished that session. Even then I wasn't sure of it. The keyboard part came two months after the demo. My vocals were always a bone of contention, but it didn't sound finished without them.
Even when doing this video, I toyed with the idea of using the instrumental version instead. Trying it out, I still had that incomplete feeling. I don't necessarily like my voice in this song, but the music needs it. Pure creationism, out of my hands in the eye - and ear - of the beholder.
This Summer and Fall have been weird, with too much turmoil and trouble. My reaction was to create more music videos than all combined previously. This blog has been a motivating factor; I don't post sound alone, always going to the trouble to putting some visuals to them. Soon, I will start recording again, perhaps right after the holidays, in the dead of Winter. It has been a strange trip. Hope you found some of it entertaining.
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