Terrifying Heights – Demo

Download it! – Here
Finally, Cary and I have collaborated on a song together. Cary wrote the initial chord changes with a sparse accompaniment. I then slammed the MIDI files into Logic, spiced them up with some Virtual Instruments, then played around with the arrangement.

I am in love with the bass line. It plods. I want to make that line plod as much as possible. I want to bob my head with slow deliberate motions; the line should sometimes slip just behind the tempo, like the song wants to get even slower (but it doesn’t). I am at a loss as to how to accentuate that thought with the arrangement. Do we even need to accentuate it? Is it present enough?

Due to the nature of one-man recording I am always fighting against the urge to simply throw on another layer. The first 50 seconds feels full enough to me. I tried to record a melody there, but there was no room and it shifted the trajectory of those 50 seconds. Should there be more there?

The rest of the song has a smattering of ideas, all lined up in a row. I need to work on my development of ideas, rather than simply moving through them.

I’ll leave you with that.

Terrifying Heights – Demo

Beach Canon – Post Mortem

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.

Napping Study

[11/21/08]Finished with a first mix of Napping Study! I’ll edit this post later with more text and perhaps a photo, but for now I wanted to try out posting a link for the file of said mix. Here’s a go!

Click Here!

[11/26/08] UPDATE: This is one of the first pieces I’ve felt good about in a while. I had an actual deadline for it, so it forced me to move quickly and without much thought.

The audio engineering school I go to had a mandatory recording/mixdown project last week, so I decided to write a piece that would use violin (Suzuki trained fiancee!). The recording session was done on a Netoek Elite console to 2-inch tape (Otari MTR-90). The mixdown was done on a Neve VR with Flying Faders.

Composition: Sat down with Logic and my MIDI controller in my apartment. Found a virtual instrument I didn’t mind, and made a sustained, slowing evolving chord progression. I then proceeded to sing over that chord progression. Ended up using four takes, some of them recorded in relation to the other voices, some just singing against the synth drone. My favorite harmonic moments were accidental because of this chance-oriented recording process.

I then strip-silenced the vocals, and began editing. Noting parts I wanted to rerecord for a better performance, deleting unintelligibly dissonant regions, and nudging the regions around to play with timing issues. This I found fun! I also edited the synth drone so it was only moving from single note drone to single note drone, making it into more of a cello continuo part rather than accompaniment. I decided that that would be my violin part. I thus tweaked and automated the vocals until I was at least mildly satisfied, went and did my recording and mixdown sessions, and finished the piece. Took about 2 and half weeks, which for me is astounding. I rarely work this fast and rarely come up with something that actually expands upon a single IDEA for longer than one minute. (Granted its only 3:01, but still…).

Mxing on the Neve VR

The title, though! Has nothing to do with the words, which were improvised. Usually when I first start working on a piece, I get tired and cranky pretty fast. I start second guessing and my frame of reference turns against me and the piece. This happened with Napping Study during the editing stage, before the vocals had really taken any definite shape and were still 4 stems of improvised vocals sort of in the same tonal area. So. I got tired, and instead of plowing through, decided to lie down and nap. The music was gentle and droning, so I put the whole piece on repeat, lay down, and napped. Whenever I would drift awake for a moment, I would catch different places of the piece. And it was always pleasant and unobtrusive. Much like the ambient music I’ve experienced, but this piece least had the feeling of MOVEMENT since the voices were constantly exploring new twists to similar melodic lines, presenting counter melodies, or simply doo-ing randomly for sake of it. Whereas the repetition of much of the ambient music I’ve encountered creates an emotional detachment with its almost mechanical repetitions or rhythmic free-flowingness yet pitch-content-constricted improvisatory-free-floating-ness (nothing that I would begrudge it for, since even Eno describes it as wallpaper), I heard a potential in the piece to be something slightly different. Wallpaper that interacts with your sense of musical movement; from Point A to Point B. But because a napper experiences the piece as a whole and also in bits and pieces (consciously and subconsciously), hopefully the listener continues to move towards Point B until he stops repeating the piece.

Perhaps I am using too many words. I am excited that I found a context IN THE WORLD for this piece! So please listen to this piece whenever and however you would like, but if you ever want to nap or simply rest your eyes, put this on quietly. Maybe there’s too much movement! It might keep you awake. Who knows!

Nevertheless, it’s done! Back to working with my little 1 minute pieces! Please feel free to ask questions or let me know how you found the piece. My brain makes me hear the piece in a pretty specific way.