Please feel free to answer the questions yourself - would be interested in hearing your thoughts!
1. What is your favorite word?
Beautiful
2. What is your least favorite word?
Fail.
3. What turns you on?
Intelligence, inquisitiveness, a sense of inner stupidity.
4. What turns you off?
Business jargon. Hypocrisy
5. What sound do you love?
The sound of no inhibitions. Sarah laughing, Long Tall Sally by the Beatles are good examples.
6. What sound do you hate?
People being stupid. People talking without saying anything.
7. What is your favorite curse word?
Bastard.
8. What profession other than yours would you like to attempt?
Actor. I'd love to be a good actor, good enough to do it as a job.
9. What profession would you not like to do?
Something that didn't challenge me in any way.
10. If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?
"You did alright, kid."
Sunday 14 August 2011
Wednesday 3 August 2011
A Summer Holi-blog
I'm recording a new album at the moment.
My musical "career" thus far has been recording albums of varying production quality (from pretty bad to really really bad). I've always been incredibly proud of them, and still am to this day, as I feel some of the songs on there are good songs, but there's no denying they all sound like they were recorded by an amateur in his bedroom, which is exactly what they are/were.
So, now, a good friend of mine who knows his way around professional sounding things is helping me record my new collection of songs, and I thought I would blog about the process. And I thought I would start with a quick review of the wonder of recording at home.
The process is long and laborious. The process of recording professionally is also long and laborious, but for different reasons. When you're recording at home, there's just you on your own, and so you have to play everything. That's fine, except it has two major downfalls. Firstly, this is dependant on you being able to play everything. I can't. I can play a lot of stuff, and I'm chuffed that I can, but I can't play everything. So I need a synthesiser, and I don't have a good one, so fundamentally if I want to have drums/strings/something that isn't a guitar or a piano or a bass on a song, it's going to sound fairly crap. That's disappointing because it limits my horizon a bit. I might want to branch out, but I can't. Fair enough.
The other major downfall is that if you're in a band, a 4 minute song playing 2 guitars, drums and bass can be done in 4 minutes. If you're on your own, it takes 4 times as long. If you want three part harmony, and there are three of you, you can do it in one take. If there's one, it takes three takes. Then, of course, there are the multiple takes.
Just to be clear, nobody has ever recorded anything in one take EVER. Ok, they probably have, but I haven't. This is not because I am constantly striving for perfection; although I have high standards, I occasionally say "well, that'll do" when it's a background guitar part that isn't too important. The reason I haven't ever recorded anything in one take is because I mess it up, all the time. Of course I do, it's human, right? When you've written a song that lasts 4 minutes or so, playing it through to a decent standard is probably going to include one or two mistakes.
That, in itself, isn't a surprise. The problem then becomes that you have to start again. When you record professionally, if you play a verse really well, you can duplicate it three times over for every other verse. Admittedly, it's cheating, but hell, there you go. But on my own, I can play 3 minutes and 59 seconds absolutely perfectly but if I mess up a single second (which I do, all the time) then I have to play all 4 minutes again. So, time becomes an issue. So does boredom. You should have seen Paul's face (Paul's the producer friend of mine who is a bloody genius) when I told him that when I do a cowbell or tambourine part I have to do the whole thing. Paul can do 20 minutes of perfectly in-time cowbell in about 35 seconds...it would take me 20 minutes of constantly pressing the "cowbell" button on my keyboard. Urgh.
Then you overlay things, so you stick tracks on top of one another, mix them, add effects, all that stuff - I've boiled it down because it's so boring, but eventually you call it a day and you have a song! And you know the best bit about it all is that you have complete creative control. I don't have a record company saying I need to write x kind of song or try y chord change, and it's freeing. Hugely so.
So, the end result is that you work very hard, and get a sound that isn't very polished but does have a kind of "rough around the edges, spit and grit" feel to it. Every minute of song usually takes about 80 minutes of work. It's a tremendously pleasing feeling, and honestly when I've put together a selection of songs, be it a simple 12 songs that are unrelated like last year, or a 90 minute concept album about youth, childhood, growing up, fear and responsibility like on "Celestial Navigation", I just feel like the King of the World.
BUT, for all that, if I ever want people to listen to these songs and take them seriously, I have to make them sound like "proper" songs. Hopefully recording this new set will bring that about, and people will enjoy them. It's a very different process though! Will blog about that later.
Thanks
Paulo
x
My musical "career" thus far has been recording albums of varying production quality (from pretty bad to really really bad). I've always been incredibly proud of them, and still am to this day, as I feel some of the songs on there are good songs, but there's no denying they all sound like they were recorded by an amateur in his bedroom, which is exactly what they are/were.
So, now, a good friend of mine who knows his way around professional sounding things is helping me record my new collection of songs, and I thought I would blog about the process. And I thought I would start with a quick review of the wonder of recording at home.
The process is long and laborious. The process of recording professionally is also long and laborious, but for different reasons. When you're recording at home, there's just you on your own, and so you have to play everything. That's fine, except it has two major downfalls. Firstly, this is dependant on you being able to play everything. I can't. I can play a lot of stuff, and I'm chuffed that I can, but I can't play everything. So I need a synthesiser, and I don't have a good one, so fundamentally if I want to have drums/strings/something that isn't a guitar or a piano or a bass on a song, it's going to sound fairly crap. That's disappointing because it limits my horizon a bit. I might want to branch out, but I can't. Fair enough.
The other major downfall is that if you're in a band, a 4 minute song playing 2 guitars, drums and bass can be done in 4 minutes. If you're on your own, it takes 4 times as long. If you want three part harmony, and there are three of you, you can do it in one take. If there's one, it takes three takes. Then, of course, there are the multiple takes.
Just to be clear, nobody has ever recorded anything in one take EVER. Ok, they probably have, but I haven't. This is not because I am constantly striving for perfection; although I have high standards, I occasionally say "well, that'll do" when it's a background guitar part that isn't too important. The reason I haven't ever recorded anything in one take is because I mess it up, all the time. Of course I do, it's human, right? When you've written a song that lasts 4 minutes or so, playing it through to a decent standard is probably going to include one or two mistakes.
That, in itself, isn't a surprise. The problem then becomes that you have to start again. When you record professionally, if you play a verse really well, you can duplicate it three times over for every other verse. Admittedly, it's cheating, but hell, there you go. But on my own, I can play 3 minutes and 59 seconds absolutely perfectly but if I mess up a single second (which I do, all the time) then I have to play all 4 minutes again. So, time becomes an issue. So does boredom. You should have seen Paul's face (Paul's the producer friend of mine who is a bloody genius) when I told him that when I do a cowbell or tambourine part I have to do the whole thing. Paul can do 20 minutes of perfectly in-time cowbell in about 35 seconds...it would take me 20 minutes of constantly pressing the "cowbell" button on my keyboard. Urgh.
Then you overlay things, so you stick tracks on top of one another, mix them, add effects, all that stuff - I've boiled it down because it's so boring, but eventually you call it a day and you have a song! And you know the best bit about it all is that you have complete creative control. I don't have a record company saying I need to write x kind of song or try y chord change, and it's freeing. Hugely so.
So, the end result is that you work very hard, and get a sound that isn't very polished but does have a kind of "rough around the edges, spit and grit" feel to it. Every minute of song usually takes about 80 minutes of work. It's a tremendously pleasing feeling, and honestly when I've put together a selection of songs, be it a simple 12 songs that are unrelated like last year, or a 90 minute concept album about youth, childhood, growing up, fear and responsibility like on "Celestial Navigation", I just feel like the King of the World.
BUT, for all that, if I ever want people to listen to these songs and take them seriously, I have to make them sound like "proper" songs. Hopefully recording this new set will bring that about, and people will enjoy them. It's a very different process though! Will blog about that later.
Thanks
Paulo
x
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