When it comes to music, the studio is my favorite place to be. This doesn't mean THE studio like my buddies at
Elpop or Binary Detroit, although I like those just fine and if I had the money I'd probably like it a lot more. I'm mostly talking about project studios, also known as the home-studio.
The home studio revolution started for me Christmas 1998. Is that right, Matt? I think it is. Matt would've been there when we fired up Cakewalk Guitar Studio for the first time and recorded Naked, 15, Alliance, Vacant Flow, Schizophrenic. All those tracks from the first EP and more. It was the year that technology started to drop in price...CD burner prices began to drop and I soon badgered my parents into getting one. What I liked most about Cakewalk Guitar Studio was that I had eight tracks that I could add extra stuff on it. Loop things to go through the whole song...little guitar parts...double things up. I though the sky was the limit.
Of course the real limit wasn't the sky but Cakewalk Guitar Studio's eight allowable audio tracks. Soon, we figured out how to go past this issue by bouncing tracks down, or just putting multiple audio tracks on top of each other. It seemed that we'd upped the level a ton. We were pumped up high school students. Little did I know that saving space and recording at 22khz would actually make our records sound pretty awful. Also, little did I know that the guitar tone I thought was cool wasn't.
As time went on, I just took it for granted that my songs would be captured with a microphone and a recording program. Each record I did got progessively cleaner, clearer, and each record my ideas per song swelled. In the studio you can sit around and try ideas and nobody is waiting for you (except Vince or Matt in a lot of my records). For Lessons, 451 and July Songs, my ideas were quickly there and quickly gone...either they were recorded or they were let go. I never thought about recording everything. Bad Luck I started thinking about trying songs different ways when I read this article on Wilco and listened to Pet Sounds for the first time in earnest.
Around this time I realized that the studio was the coolest place ever. I think for me at least it is. There's a kind of quiet relaxation about home-studios that I really enjoy. When I demo, or record for a record in a home studio (most synth/guitar parts on
Mike Vasas and The Beasts of Burden were done in either my Owen Graduate Hall dorm room, or Eric or Brian's places), I like to take my time with my guitar tone, mess around a little bit with parts[generating and recalling ideas], I usually try to record an idea after I think it's ready to be recorded somewhat and then I listen back and rework the parts if I need to. This process never gets tired or old for me.
Reworking ideas can sometimes be as simple as adjusting a pitch in a melody, or as complex as playing the part on a different type of instrument run through with specific effects. Sometimes these effects can take hours to figure out. This tweaking is a constant process because the way an instrument is captured and presented is as important to the song as the songwriting itself...at least at this stage. By reworking ideas, I get the chance to reconsider the implications of the original compositional ideas, and I also get to reroute a song that may be heading in a direction I have no interest in projecting.
Some people I know don't really dig this kind of process, which I understand. Sometimes an idea comes out and you want to say "that's it. I'm through." Those times usually are pretty intense and constant when you're writing a song, but aren't really at all connected to the production process. This is where many people tend to disagree with me. I don't really think my ideas are finished products needing to be captured. When I write a song, I know it is finished when I think "that's it. I'm through." But that is the original development stage of the song for that situation...when I get to the point of recording the song, it's almost as if the compositional process has started again. The song that may begin with a thematic compositional seed of loss, or love, or some other l-word...that compositional seed is now in the process of being grown and just because I thought the seed was one thing when I started doesn't mean it needs to be that when it's all finished growing. So you try coaxing the song out based on inferences about what the seed is...eventually you get some crop that you can give to the audience.
What is great about music, and what makes the studio the best place for this development, is that the seed is actually kind of a ghost. It exists for you as you write the song, but it can be mutated at any point into a different seed all together... because in the moment of interpretation/production process, a song can be twisted to the point of barely reflecting the original intention of the songwriter, and it still reflects an intention from the songwriter. I think that sentence was pretty stupid, let me try it again; the original intention of the song can be developed into a new intention at any point because the process is part of the holistic interpretive process. And even with that, when it is released, such as our current record, the compositional process is over, but the interpretive process continues. With the record, that process is continued, the torch is passed to the listener and thus continues to be interpreted until the record is no longer at all listened to. Also, the band continues to reinterpret the songs live each time a song from the record is performed, so the compositional process is almost excavated.
So rehearsing the tracks doesn't allow you to develop the compositional seed? Sure it does. For many bands...many amazing bands....rehearsing the songs tends to develop the ideas to a finished product that can then be presented/captured for a recording. In this sense, the recordings become an archive of a moment with the band. It is not that I disagree with this process, it is just that I find it to be inferior within my own creative process. I am put on the spot when rehearsing, I am forced to be a convergent thinker all to quickly for my liking. I can generate ideas, but they must, in one way or another, work immediately or the rehearsal falls apart. For some, rehearsing is a shadow of performance, and thus is a fantastic way to develop the ensemble for the main act. Rehearsing is a development for the moments when true development occurs; interaction with an audience. In this way, the audience becomes part of the interpretive development of the compositional seed early on, before the record reaches completion. This process is quite enjoyable but still rather taxing to me. In my experience, only a touring band can develop songs on the road...an ensemble that has enough dates to attempt playing songs different ways in front of an audience and see how they react.
But with this situation, a touring band would still have to have some form of idea communication with the other members of the band. I'm not saying they'd have to rehearse these songs out excessively, but assumedly one or the other occurred so that the band members could perform these songs live adequately...either rehearsal or demoing within a home studio or studio studio.
So we're back to rehearsing and why I think it's far inferior to developing ideas in a studio. Rehearsing is, as I mentioned before, quite limiting in scope with creative process. If I am rehearsing by myself, I could sit and think between rehearsing numbers what I should play on my instrument...this time would add up eventually just like in a home-studio situation. However, none of this would be archived, unlike in a home-studio situation. Now, imagine that these solo rehearsals are duo rehearsals...suddenly there is now twice the wait time for a band to develop ideas live as a rehearsal is occurring. Multiply this by two and you have four times the amount of wait time as each member thinks about what part to play and works through his ideas. If my thinking/redeveloping takes 10 minutes, we've now expanded our rehearsal to about 40 minutes of silence/thinking/messing with ideas. Patience is a virtue? In our band, to allow that to happen there would have to be at least 50 to 60 minutes of messing around time to get through one song. Nobody would ever do that. So we work through the songs quickly and play them as traditionally/easily as possible so we can feel like we accomplished something.
Within a home-studio setting, each person can have their time to reconsider their parts, even when most of the other band isn't around. I can take 6 hours to keep working on one song if I really wanted to. I can take more. Nobody has to wait around. I can call out all of my questions. You wanna go huh? You think cutting all high and low frequencies and leaving only mids will make this guitar track sound better? Try it. You want to play a chromatic scale throughout the next verse? Do it, punk. Nobody on your back except yourself.
This kind of relaxed awareness of your own creative process means you can learn how much divergent and convergent thinking you need to be most creative. In a rehearsal, that can't be the case. You need to converge or everybody will quit eventually. With the studio, specifically the home studio, I am allowed to see just how much experimentation I'm will to try, whereas after every rehearsal I always leave going "I should've tried this" or "if only I'd done this." Sure, that sounds a lot more like live performance...but isn't a live performance nothing more than a decision to converge something for public appreciation? A live record is the same, because in the end, we converged and picked the record we made, but I feel like we had enough divergence along the way to truly make the decisions we needed to make...plus we created enough divergent ideas left unused that we can easily try those at a later date.
Steve Reich, in an interview recently with
Pitchforkmedia said...
"Yeah. Experimental was a word used by John Cage. Michael Nyman used it in his book. But I also took that other view, which Cage himself had as a young man: "I do my experiments at home, and you don't hear 'em." I've got a big trash basket on my Mac, and I've got a big trash basket of paper underneath my desk. They stay full. I reject a lot of stuff. I don't think everything I write is the greatest, and I don't think it ought to be inflicted on the world. And I wrote it! By the time I get out there with a finished piece, I feel like, look, I've done the best I can with this thing, and I hope you like it, but it ain't no experiment. It's a finished piece, take it or leave it."
But if the initial part of it IS an experiment, the process at home...it has to happen. If it doesn't happen or happens in a tiny amount (i.e. rehearsal), then one certainly can't consider experimental music development as anything but straight-forward genre stealing. Because a lot of times that's what musicians do in rehearsals...they just pull out whatever they know already...I'm not looking to steal my music from my subconscious (although I'm sure I do). I want to surprise myself along the way. I don't want to settle on a final end when I'm just starting the journey. The studio gives me train tracks to ride on rather than a destination to get to.
That's why I like the studio.
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Read this review of
Eric Tamm's book on Brian Eno. This book (along with other Eno writings) has really effected how I approach music. I guess it is safe to say that I am a follower of Eno's school of studio composition, whatever it is...Eno may probably laugh at me saying that and would find some fault in what I've said above. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
