Beach Canon

Evan: Some thoughts!

So yes. I wrote this piece for a contest. How perfect. I’ve been pushing, in my mind, a return to compositional freedom. That is, to write something that I think sounds good, without a care for what my doubting brain has to say. Since entering the shapeless world of post college graduation, I entered that scary space of existential-dilemma-ishness in regards to recording. Why was I writing? Who was it for? Was I truly in need of new sounds? I wasn’t necessarily in a good place in general, so it makes sense that it would affect my ability to record.

But now. I am finishing up audio engineering school, and I’ve found that excitement again. We’re in the process of creating a space on the internet where we all can share our music. Where we can take as much care as we feel in presenting our work. This is all exciting to me, and I know helped me in writing this piece. Sure, if I made a good recording, maybe I’d win a sweet piece of gear; but at least I’d have finished a piece. Alright, enough emotional baggage!

I had three weeks to complete the whole thing, and knowing that I would need at least four days for mixing and editing, I had a little over two weeks to write and record SOMETHING. (The stipulation of the contest was that I had to use the Apogee Duet (see video below) in some creative and interesting way and submit whatever I came up with). I had written a canon back in my college days and decided to use that as my starting point. The early process of creating and then sifting through musical ideas can be hard when working with a deadline, so I was happy to have the canon to start out with.

Composing was a similar process to Napping Study. Recording singing ideas in the morning, then editing them later that night. I really enjoyed this process, as I was working every morning, and I only had an hour to setup, record, then put everything away before class started.

Scenes from the iso booth

This way I was always working fast in the morning, and when I was editing at night I could sort everything in such a way that I would have a general idea of where to begin the next morning. A big problem with sitting down and recording at home is that there’s no crunch time. I really feel that the time constraints helped me write this piece.

The equipment was nice, too. Used a Neumann TLM103. Mmm. Nice microphone. It’s going to be sad to leave the school here and return to my SM57. Ah well.

When it came to mixing, what I was the most concerned with was levels. Since I exclusively used punch recording and each section had its own SPECIAL AND INTERESTING arrangement, my biggest challenging was making the listening experience smooth. Later on I’ll post some of my recordings from 2007-08 where I did not do such a smooth job. Thankfully the school had some really nice monitors, and I was able to mix Beach Canon in several different rooms. I ended up with a mix that although still has some irregularities and EQ issues, I was happy with. And apparently Apogee was too!

I’ve never had my music give me something in return, so this has been an incredibly encouraging experience.

This is in no way a complete post, but I’ll leave it at this for now. If you have questions about the piece, please comment! If you have ideas for what I could have done better compositionally, engineering-wise, or mixing-wise please let me know! Discussion is always cool. Again, here’s the link!

Beach Canon

LATER.