Shhhhhh! Quiet Please.

Although he doesn't know it and would never admit it, my father hears the truth.  He doesn't hear what he wants to, he hears precisely what is there.  Cold, exact, brilliant, powerful; he would be great in a recording studio.

On Saturday, I recorded drum tracks for six songs at KMA studios on 49th street and Broadway in Manhattan.  The equipment was somewhere in the Nasa-quality range, and the studio itself would have James Bond's approval for the combination of elegance and functionality.  A friend knew the owner which meant that since they had no one scheduled for the afternoon, we were allowed an eight hour session, typically priced at a modest $1,500, for free.

When you have seventeen microphones recording a small drumset, there are no unnoticed mistakes.  No smoothing things over.  No lying.  If you play the entire song ahead of the beat but then drop behind it for two measures, you'll hear it clear as crystal.  For the non-music inclined we're talking about milliseconds of temporal shift.  Sounds intimidating but this is a musician's dream: to spend the entire day hearing your mistakes and learning from them and correcting them.  To realize that your bordem during a song will drastically shift your energy and when you don't make conscious decisions about which notes to play, it's as obvious as an orator who's mixed up their index cards!  I was blown away at how clear and objective it all was.

But my playing was not the only 'naked' thing in the room.  The kid at the helm was a nice guy and a hard worker, but as I said already, milliseconds stick out.  Maybe it was the way he set up one of the microphones.  Or his voice over the intercom.  Maybe it was his answer to the question, "Where are you from? Where'd you go to College?"  For whatever reason, in the room without any distractions, I knew exactly who he was, how old he was, how competant he was at his job.  What if your brain operated like a recording studio?  Would you be able to read people without bias and give them honest answers in return?

And how about all those buttons!  10,000 settings and thirty microphones can't disguise a poorly written song.  I was amazed at how much time we spent moving a small microphone around the bass drum.  Was the same amount of time spent working out the chorus?  Some of the most amazing songs in history were recorded with four microphones and almost no effects.  The effects should be used to sell the song.  Make sure your product matches your salesmanship.

Being in the studio felt right.  I've already said it was quiet.  It forced me to look at my playing and the songs we worked on through an untainted lense.  It made me think of my father and how he knows when someone is bullshitting (and let's them know).  Most importantly, it made me listen.

Pop & Circumstances

Remind me to post some funny stories along the way.  Like the time I fell asleep on my drums while playing a musical.  Or the time I left my snare stand next to a strip club and had to "buy" it back the next day.  On a side note: it should also be known that my alma mater sent me a magnet-backed bottle opener enclosed in their semi-annual donation solicitation.  They want to get me drunk, then ask for money.  I'm getting off track...

Any good musician will have a hard time explaining pop music.  But like true love or a bad rash, they'll know when they've got it.  Pop music is contemporary music enjoyed by the masses.  Let's refer to it as now-music for short.  If you write the pop music you hear on the radio (or the iTunes store homepage), you'll get a perfect example of now-music.  But by the time you've written your now-music, it's become then-music and someone is making money while you're living at your parents.  So you must attempt to accurately predict and then write future-music.  That way, by the time you're through writing, it's become now-music.  This involves some guess work.  My roommate, a market analyst, will tell me all about what's happened so far.  He can then guess, with a certain degree of uncertainty, what's to come next.  But the bottom line is that no one knows.  Same with pop music.  How then do you write future-music?  The good news is that "Humanity doesn't do backward."  (Words of encouragement tossed at me by a friend last Saturday.)  As long as you be yourself, you'll be combining elements of everything you've ever heard thereby producing something totally new.  You will write future-music which will then become now-music.  But I almost forgot: if your music sucks, no one will want to listen to it.  And then you've failed at writing pop music.

Should we go for fame?  Perhaps post-mortem glory?  If you pen something "ahead of your time," it will eventually be recognized as great work, astounding work, genius work.  Nothing sounds quite as unfulfilling as laying in a box in the dirt, while everyone dances around above celebrating the music they didn't used to like.  It's not my fault they didn't like it.  I was just too future and not enough now.

I must be a good musician: explaining this was hard.

Dust Settles

No Cambria?  Alright.  Not a problem.

I blame Neil Gaiman and New York Magazine.  Neil, who writes amazing books, comics, movies, etc., obsessively writes interesting entries into his blog. Meanwhile, NYMagazine recently published an article about Twitter.  I decided at midnight to use both.  For silly thoughts, I direct you to my twitter page.  For thought-out thoughts like this sentence, you are welcome here any time you like.  I'll feel published and loved and no one will ever read either.  Everybody wins.