Is technical talent truly inspiring?

I watched a live performance of Shadowplay by Joy Division from 1978 on Youtube the other day. The performance was raw, the playing was amateur and the vocals were out of key and..

it was still amazing.

I proceeded to read the comments below and was pleasantly surprised that 90% of the comments were also praising the performance. Only one person mentioned the lack of technical skill and everybody jumped down his throat.

Then of course everyone was dogging the Cover version of this song by The Killers basically calling them a bunch of hacks. Now technically speaking, The Killers version could easily be considered better. It was sonically recorded and mixed better, the instruments were well played and the vocals were on key.. but nobody cared. Now I’m not here to say The Killers are shit, but rather I want to explore why bands like Joy Division, Bauhaus and The Cure are practically worshipped despite their lack of what some would call musicianship.

Why are bands like these so well respected despite(or perhaps even because of) a lack of technical talent? What is that magic formula? Why is it that we excuse their lack of technical talent and in fact rate them much higher than bands that clearly have better musicianship?

Some of you reading this will simply say these bands are completely over-rated or popular for being popular in the underground. I’m going to have to say that I believe there is more to it and I would like to explore this a bit deeper.

Being a proud non-musician myself, I enjoy the idea of mucking about on an instrument like a curious child. If I already felt I knew everything there was to know, I probably wouldn’t be very interested in making music. I suppose what I do mocks people that slave over their instrument of choice, but I don’t think that is the whole picture. I, in fact, have slaved over music, but the things I am interested in are how to convey a vibe.

Sometimes pure talent shows little humanity.

Often times talent is something you hide behind. Nakedness and vulnerability can evoke much more emotion.  I personally think it takes bravery to stand up on a stage with little but a handful of chords and some ideas that you want to get across.

Don’t get me wrong, there are times when you need talent to convey a complex idea and those are amazing moments, but those moments are not driven by the desire to “show off” talent but rather to get across your message as accurately as possible.

There is also something to be said about having pent up emotion and being a bit frustrated that you can’t express it accurately. I think I can hear this in bands like Nirvana and Joy Division. Those bands were very vulnerable and spoke for so many who were afraid to speak for themselves. Those who were afraid of their own normality. We can see ourselves in those who show themselves, warts and all.

It might be safe to say that those who are true fans of music don’t base what is good on pure talent but rather on how the music hits them whether it be Mozart, The Who or Velvet Underground. I think it’s likely that “musicians” might get off on complexity for complexities sake because having the skill to learn it can be an ego boost in the same way as mastering a difficult video game. However, music is in a completely different field altogether. Some of the best music defies logic. Sometimes the words are nonsense and the simple parts that construct the song is laughable yet we still find something intriguing about it.

I like to think that there is more that goes into music than just the instruments and vocals. I think there is something that gets recorded between the notes that weaves through the empty gaps. A sort of “ghost in the machine”. I believe emotion and intention comes through the music and those subtleties are picked up by those who really “listen”  and “feel” the music.

Although all of my examples in this blog are talking about live bands, I think the same “ghosts” can come through in electronic music as well. All instruments whether played by hand or programmed are soul-less until the soul is injected into it.

I am beginning to get into another tangent, so I will simply leave you with this Joy Division video. I hope it intrigues you to reconfirm or re-evaluate your attitude towards music and the shallow definitions of talent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LdEM9xhMUM
Happy Music Making

Jason

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Website: http://www.musicsoftwaretraining.com

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Musical Meditation

As I’ve said in previous posts, I can’t read or write music notation. However I do have something that I think makes up for it.

Let’s call it “Musical Mediation”

I have the ability to build a song idea in my head. It can start from a riff, a drum pattern or a lyrical phrase. I can “hear” inside
my head what works and what doesn’t.

For example I can try out certain vocal harmonies in my head. and hear how slight variations can create a better or worse result.
I can tell if something will sound too full or too empty before I’ve physically played or sung a note. Sometimes I don’t know exactly
what is missing but I know it’s not quite “right”.

Although I have this ability, I don’t actually use it as often as I should.

The main reason is that I find it works better for me when I’m making  guitar based songs. I figure electronic songs are more difficult
because the soundscape is largely unfamiliar. I think many great composers are so great at dreaming up symphonies because they are
so familiar with each instrument that would make up a symphonic piece of music.

I was thinking about this today and pondering how I could develop this skill of mine and perhaps help others develop as well.

Here is an approach that I’ve come up with:

Dreaming up sounds:

In order to accurately get a unique sound that is in your head into your computer or recording device,  you are going to need to
understand the fundamentals of sound.

*Try going into a synth and only use 1 oscillator.

*Turn off the filters and effects and just listen to each type of waveform, Sine, Square, Triangle, Saw.

These are the basic sound palates to every sound you will create. Understand these basics and you have the fundamentals to
dreaming up great sounds and being able to put the sound in your head into an actual song.

Although getting sidetracked can lead to some wonderfully surprising sounds, for this exercise it’s of utmost importance that
you see this process through without losing focus.  I think it can be argued that this loss of focus is one of the leading causes
of not completing songs.

Here’s the scenario:

You had an original idea in your head but lost focus early on and just went with whatever interesting sound jumped out at
you first. Soon you are listening to a loop or collection of sounds over and over without anywhere to go. You have essentially
lost your steam.

It’s no wonder you get bored with the idea so quickly. You aren’t creating anything close to what inspired you in the first place!

What if you were able to quickly get the ideas out of your head accurately before you lost focus?

My guess is that you would probably find more satisfaction in your work.

Then of course once you got the basic idea out of your head you could allow for more experimentation and happy accidents.

Remember, this isn’t a lesson in inflexibility but of focus.

Having trouble dreaming up your own sounds? Try dreaming up someone else’s.

*Pull out a CD or pull up a song in your computer.

*Listen just a bass tone that attracts you.

*When you find a sound you like, listen to it as closely as possible.

*Listen to how the sound characteristics change with each note.

*If there are volume variations, take note of those too.

Breaking it down:

If the sound you are trying to recreate in your head is complex, break it down into the separate parts that make the sound up.

If you have a hard time doing this, think of it as 3 different sounds. One sound in the lower frequency, one in the mid frequency
and one in the high frequency. In the same way you might break down a harmony into each separate voice, many sound designers
and musicians break down sounds to their most basic elements.  When you can mentality break sounds down to their basic elements,
you can better predict how to build your own complex tones as well.

Now that you have that sound in your head, close your eyes and try to vividly recreate that sound in your head. Try to hear it
all by itself instead of in the context of a song. You may want to give this bass sound a name so you can mentally access it more
easily.

Recreate the bassline you heard in your head in as much detail as possible.

Variation:

Next try changing some notes around and creating variations. Try not to lose the image in your head and don’t change the bass sound in your head. It’s very easy to get bored and wander off, but what we are trying to do is ingrain this sound into your memory as vividly as possible so you can add it to your mental palate.

Imagine changing the eq, or filtering out the high frequencies, then the low frequencies.

Imagine the sound with a bit of distortion, flange,delay or reverb. If you can’t vividly imagine these effects, you may want to spend some time adding these effects to some basic sounds so your mind has something to work with.

Practice makes perfect:

When you are able to do this with some proficiency, You will be able to add more an more instruments in your head and know how to get exactly what you want before you’ve even played a note. You’ll be able to build and arrange full song ideas in your
head and work out the kinks before you waste any time in the studio.

In the same way that it takes a while to become good at meditating and blocking out all of the days thoughts, it’s also difficult to start using “musical meditation” to focus on an idea without distractions. You may not get it right immediately, but with practice I am confident you will have an amazingly powerful tool that will just continue to get better and better.

Happy Music Making,

Jason

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Website: http://www.musicsoftwaretraining.com

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Analog vs Digital
The Analog vs Digital war battles on and will likely continue through the ages, however year by year digital has tightened the gap and is getting warmer all the time. Some of the softsynth reproductions of “analog” warmth has been pretty impressive as well. Although I’m not planning on taking sides, I am going to defend digital a bit for all the heat it seems to get from so called “analog purists”. I am also not planning on getting into the math on this one. That kind of stuff bores me to tears and defeats the point of this little blog.

Digital strengths vs Analog strengths

The Art of Mastering Audio by Bob Katzs makes some good points on this subject. Being one of the most respected mastering engineers, I take what he says as coming from years of experience in both the digital and analog world. This is what Bob has to say:

Analog recordings tend to excel at producing accurate detail in the lower frequencies and get less detailed and fuzzy at the higher frequencies.
Digital recordings excel at accurate reproduction of the higher frequencies and get fuzzy on the bottom end.

Bob uses this analogy to give you an idea of how this works:

Analog recordings would be like looking up at a skyscraper from the bottom whereas Digital would be like looking at the same skyscraper from the rooftop down.

From this perspective you can see where both digital and analog could both be used to good effect, depending on what you are going for. You can say that analog has a pleasant muddiness (I’m using this term loosely so don’t throw a fit) and digital has a sharper sound overall.

Imperfections

The thing many of us love about analog is that it’s imperfect and thus more human. The artifacts created in an analog recording keep a recording a bit more dynamic and unpredictable whereas digital recordings come across much more sterile and with virtually no artifacts or imperfections. Many producers keep this in mind when recording in the digital domain and do their best to inject some variation and unpredictability to the recordings. Many high end virtual instruments and fx plugin’s do a good job of recreating analog-like artifacts and “analog” warmth. If you know the right tools to use in the digital domain, you can fool most people most of the time.

Mastering

Many people think that a professional mastering studio only uses analog equipment to do their work but this isn’t the case.

Most engineers agree that taking your wav or aif file master recording, running it through analog equipment and then back into the digital domain will usually do more harm than good even if they are using excellent converters. More often than not, if an artist wants everything mastered in the analog domain, they will deliver their reel to reel masters to the mastering house, otherwise the work will most likely have the best results staying in the digital domain.

For Studios on a small budget, the cost of comparable analog gear, the converters and all the highest end cables would not be worth it. Also remember all the maintenance to keep the equipment working top notch. That isn’t cheap. On top of that, you can’t expect to have an artist come back to you years after your first session and have presets that will deliver identical results. Analog gear can’t be expected to get the same results day after day because its not crunching numbers like in the digital domain. There will always be a little chaos added to every piece of analog gear. This can be wonderful during the recording phase but can make it very difficult to master an album over the course of months or years.

The Real Test

Go ahead and go through your CD collection and pull out your warmest analog recordings. Pink Floyd? Stevie Wonder? Air? Notice the difference you hear in those recordings. Notice all the warmth from the tape saturation. Notice the difference between that and the most obvious digital recordings and these old recordings. Some of you might prefer the clean modern sound and that’s totally fine. To each their own.

The most important point that I want to end with is that digital must be pretty damn good at reproducing analog sound since the best CD you’ve ever heard is still a 16 bit digital representation. It might not be vinyl, but most of what you listen to these days ends up digital at some point. In fact, don’t doubt that some of your vinyl is just an analog representation of a digital recording.

This blog wasn’t meant to answer all the questions in the analog vs digital debate but rather to open up a healthy conversation on the topic. These days there is so much great technology at our fingertips whether it be Analog or Digitally produced that it’s hard not to be attracted to both. Even with free software you can create release worthy music. Don’t get hung up. Use what you’ve got. If it sounds good to you, roll with it. When it comes to your art, it’s your opinion that matters most.

Happy Music Making,

Jason

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Website: http://www.musicsoftwaretraining.com

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