(Especially to artists.)

You’re trying to create, to write or play, and you’re desperate to make something happen, but nothing comes.  So you keep trying, and then really nothing comes.

Then the panic starts.  You’re out of ideas.  You pace the room, looking for answers.  There aren’t any.  You sit back down and think, I must have a good idea.  It’s in there – I’ll find it.  I have to.  But no amount of probing turns up anything good.

Maybe there’s the beginning of an idea.  You follow it a little while – it’s a dead end.  You turn around, go back, start over.  Try something else – also a dead end.  You go back to the first idea.  It hasn’t become any better while you were away.

You pace the room some more.  You can’t breathe.  This is it, it’s over, time to quit, you’re never going to write anything again, never play another note.

Don’t worry – it doesn’t last.

I was just there.  After pacing the room a few more times I had to escape.  I grabbed my coat and walked, almost ran into the gathering evening dark.  I was still panicking, but at least I was outside.  I walked for nearly an hour, until it was completely dark, and when I came back, I still didn’t have any answers.  So I gave up and let it go.

I ignored it, and it passed on its own.  It always does.  I promise. Don’t worry.

Image by Wonderlane.

At any other time, part if not all of me is terrified.  People who know me may find that surprising, as I have, in the past, tended to sing in public quite regularly.  However, I am absolutely sure that there is someone in the audience at all times who is evaluating every note that comes out of my mouth.  So I think about it too much, and it isn’t fun anymore.  I think that’s why I prefer singing while simultaneously playing the piano–it gives me less mental capacity with which to judge my voice.

In the studio, the situation is even worse.  I am painfully aware that every nuance of every sound that escapes my lips will be immortalised in digital form, so that future listeners will be able to dissect the performance and call me up some day to tell me that F went a little bit flat.  So I agonise over the recording, and then I fiddle with the audio file afterwards.  I experiment with EQ and auto-tune, decide to cut out the sound of my breath, then decide that sounds unnatural and put it back in, and the end result is still not perfect but totally sterile.  At which point I give up and start over.

Suffice to say, I’m not happy with my voice.

When I first started studying music at university, I was really unhappy with my voice.  For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by amazing vocal performers who, in my opinion, should have already been famous singers (and now, some of them are).  Next to them, my paltry little efforts were laughable.

In my final year, I decided to do something about it. I had never formally studied singing; I had learned how to sing gradually as I learned how to play other instruments, and I learned how to sing in choir, but I had never taken voice lessons.  I hadn’t wanted to spend the money, and I had always been able to get by, so I hadn’t bothered.  But as “getting by” was no longer good enough, it was time to learn how to do better.

The lessons helped.  Mostly they improved the quality of the sound I could make, and the improved technique prevented my vocal chords from wearing out so quickly.  They were totally worth it.  And then my teacher and I both got busy, and I stopped studying.

Fast forward to now – a few years have gone by, and while I still like the sound of my voice generally, I struggle with recording vocals because I feel like I’m just not good enough.  I have these crippling fears I’ve mentioned above.  But then I was going through some old recordings and found a song I had done at the end of my brief period of vocal lessons.  And I had a real surprise:

It was good.

Really good.  Better than I would have believed I was capable of singing.  This is why it can be so instructive to make recordings.  If someone had told me I had sounded like that, I wouldn’t have believed them.  But I could listen for myself and hear that my voice used to be more consistent and smooth than it is now.

Well, if I could do it once, I can do it again, right?

Enter vocal warm-ups.  This is something really annoying that vocalists do (well, are supposed to do) every morning before they start singing.  I’m sure every school of vocal teaching has its own set of warm-ups.  This is the technique I learned.  Every lesson was spent making obnoxious and embarrassing noises at a high volume.  It was okay then – I was in a performing arts school, which is audibly indistinguishable from a mental institution.  But after I left, and entered the real world, the vocal warm-ups stopped entirely.  I didn’t want to make a fool out of myself, I didn’t want to annoy my house-mates/relatives/neighbours.

And my voice has suffered as a result.

A few nights ago I swallowed my pride and went for it.  I warmed up my vocal chords properly for the first time in years and tried to forget that there were other people in the house.  And then I sang a song, one that I had been struggling with for months.  It was suddenly easy, almost effortless.  Not perfect, but much improved.  Mostly it was fun –  I could stop thinking about my voice so much and just enjoy singing. (And I wasn’t even in the shower.)

So there you have it.  Vocal warm-ups, much as I hate to say it, have proven their worth, and I have to do them now before I sing.  I suppose everyone else in the house will just have to deal with it.

The above article really made me chuckle.  It’s about a piece that will be appearing in Newsweek in the near future, in which Madonna acknowledges how similar Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way ” is to her 1989 “Express Yourself” (from Like a Prayer – the cassette tape that smelled like patchouli, mmmmm!).

Well, duh.

When I was in songwriting class, we were encouraged to imitate existing songs.  And in music production class, we were encouraged to produce music that sounded like a specific, current song, because that’s apparently how professional producers make hits.  This inspired argument after argument, as students claimed to be ‘complete originals’ and protested that they weren’t there to ‘rip off other people’s stuff’.

I see both sides of the argument.  It really can help to take inspiration from those who have gone before, as this songwriter has found.  We listen, we learn, we make it our own, but in a way that others can relate to, because it will never be completely new.  And being completely original and weird just for the sake of it tends to alienate an audience.

But seriously.  ”Born This Way” is taking it too far.  It is the same song as “Express Yourself.”  The chords are the same, the melody is similar, the lyric says almost the same thing.  See for yourself:

I’m just glad Madonna finally acknowledged what so many of us already knew.

It is times like these when I need to remind myself to take a break, and not just for reasons of comfort, health and hygiene, all of which are extremely important (especially for artists).  Even more important, if I’ve been mixing a piece of music for more than about 30 minutes, my ears are tired, and I don’t even realise it.

It is truly amazing how much ear fatigue can distort reality.  I was first made aware that ears could get tired when my high school jazz band attended a masterclass at a nearby university.  We performed our piece of music, after which the professor told us all to sit quietly for about 5 minutes.  We were good kids, so we obeyed.  After this, he told us that we had been playing everything far too loudly, but that we probably didn’t even realise it because our ears had closed up in protest.  Silence gave our ears the chance to relax so that we could listen to things properly again.  Afterwards, we could experiment with taking the overall volume level down, but playing with more dynamic contrast.

I don’t know whether that was based in science at all, but it did improve the sound of the jazz band.

A similar thing happens when mixing audio.  I don’t have a good set of monitors, so I do a lot of mixing in headphones, which is probably worse for my ears.  Once they get tired, I start to turn up instruments that were at the right level before, because my exhausted ears can no longer pick them out of the mix.  Or the equalisation suddenly isn’t quite right. Or I decide there needs to be more reverb.  The upshot of it is that something that was beginning to sound quite good suddenly gets destroyed.  By me.  And then I have to back up and start over again.  Total waste of time.

I’m a real novice at audio mixing – I’m more of an arranger, and I do my own mixes because there’s no one else to do it for me (not for free, anyway).  But I’ve seen some really good sound engineers make some really disappointing mixes just because they were facing a deadline and worked for 18 hours straight and hadn’t slept for 2 days.

We’re only human, and our ears are delicate.  It’s better to take a break and get a sandwich than to mess up what had been a really promising project.

Image via Wikipedia

This is a public service message for anyone out there who plays an instrument.  Hopefully you know this already, but I just want to make sure.  After all, knowledge is power.

If you play an instrument, then you should own a metronome.  Even if, at this point, you don’t own a metronome, you should at least know what one is.  If you don’t know what one is, please read this entry in Wikipedia.  I’ll wait…

Oh good, you’re back.  And now we all know that a metronome is a device that goes “click” at whatever tempo you set it for, in beats per minute.  There are basic models that do only that, as well are more advanced ones that can be set for various time signatures and beat groupings.  Convenient, but unnecessary.

Okay.  Now that we all know what a metronome is, we should all be practising with one.

This topic probably warrants an entire book, rather than just a few lines.  However, to keep it relatively simple, I will condense my feelings on this matter into 3 major points:

1. Every musician in a group is responsible for keeping the beat.  If you’re a drummer or a bassist, this is old news for you.  If you play keys or guitar, you may be sceptical.  If you’re a horn player or a vocalist, you may have laughed out loud at the above statement.  But it’s true.  It makes a group sound so much better when everyone is on the same page rhythm-wise, rather than one or two members carrying the whole band.  Practising with a metronome will improve your internal sense of the beat. Which leads me to point number two…
2. Solo performances are better when the artist has a sense of rhythm.  Even if you’re playing by yourself, say, as a vocal/instrumentalist, your performance will be better and more enjoyable for the audience if there’s no speeding up or slowing down.
3. Someday you will need to record to a click track.  At some point in your career, even if it hasn’t happened yet and you can’t imagine it ever would, you will want to do a recording, whether in a professional studio or otherwise.  And unless all the instruments are playing at the same time, you will need to play your part while listening to a click track (software-produced metronome) in headphones, so that others can add their parts later and have the whole thing be in time.  Do you really want to be the person that the whole session has to do it over and over just to stay in time with the metronome?  Of course not.  No one would.

In my experience, metronome practice is specifically encouraged for orchestral instruments and hard-core jazz players, and not so much in the world of pop.  This is probably because (again this is in my experience) many pop musicians are self-taught.  I taught myself the guitar and how to write songs, but I already had a background in music (clarinet) from growing up in a fantastic school music programme.  I think that many other artists aren’t so lucky as I was, which is a real shame.

So, whether this is all news to you or it’s something you knew and chose to ignore (I will freely admit that I get lazy about this, too), I would recommend staring to use a metronome.  These days, there’s even an app for that.  I would start by taking a song that you know well, setting the metronome for the tempo at which you usually play it, and seeing how long it takes to get off of the beat.  This requires a certain amount of discipline – I have seen musicians using a metronome for the first time get 30 seconds into a song and lose the beat entirely without even realising it.  So pay attention.  Hopefully it won’t be too difficult.  If it is, then you have work to do.

Perhaps I will write more about this topic in the future, if no one hates me too much after this article.  I learned quite a few pointers for advanced metronome practice in university from this guy, and yes I’d be willing to share.

Which is the perfect metaphor for the subject of this post.  Having a home studio is also something I was wanting to do for a long time before I was able to get into it.  In the end, my decision was to start where I was and see what happened. Which is exactly what I’m doing now.  So, here we go. This is my journey from complete ignoramus to confident and competent user of LogicPro on a MacBook.

This actually makes sense to me now.

My first experience with Logic was at an Apple demonstration at a conference on popular music, the inaugural “I Create Music” ASCAP Expo in San Diego, California, 2006.  There was a room full of computers with a guy explaining the basics and letting everyone play around.  I thought it was great – he showed us about all the audio loops that come with the software, and I combined gamelans and whistles and drum beats and thought it was really something.  And that was it.  I had neither  the money nor the inclination to buy anything, so I forgot about it.

Later that year I went off to study popular music at university.  During second year, there was a module on how to arrange with LogicPro, which was taught in the computer lab.  Only, the class was hit and miss, really.  Some of the students had been mixing and arranging with computer  software in their bedrooms for years and seemingly knew how to do everything, whilst others were learning how to hit “play” and “record”.  I was somewhere towards the latter end.  And there’s only so much that a person can learn once a week for 10 weeks or so.  When we presented our final projects, something became very evident to me:  the students who owned the software presented the best projects by far.  The rest of us had to find time to get to the computer lab and figure it out as we went, with generally low levels of success.  This was made worse by the fact that some students were already at such a high standard – it was a bit demoralising.

Well, I never wanted to be a record producer anyway.  I passed the module and moved on with my life.

Fast forward to the end of 3rd year, 2009.  Graduation was impending, which meant that soon I would be cast into the tumultuous seas of the “real world”.  (I’d already been there – I hadn’t liked it much.)  Soon I wouldn’t have the university resources to rely on, and therefore I would no longer be able to record much of anything.  I was beginning to do more composing by then as well, and I would need to be able to make demos of my work in order to get anywhere.  But still, it would be an expensive purchase, especially given that Logic only runs on Apple computers, and I was a PC girl.  So I’d need a new computer as well.

Well, I had some student loan money left over at the end of term, and I was having a bad day, and my student discount was going to expire.  One thing led to another and BOOM!  I phoned Apple and ordered a 15″ MacBook Pro, LogicPro 8, and a cute little sleeve for the laptop (in light blue).

Now, let me remind you, at this point, I had very little experience in using Logic, or in using Apple computers at all for that matter.  It was all new to me, and I had just jumped into the deep end without a floatation device.  I learned how to use the computer quickly enough, as the MacBook is as intuitive as all the advertisements proclaim.  The software was another matter.  But I was going to teach myself.  I was going to make arrangements of songs I already had written, and write new compositions.  I was going to get good at it.

Weeks went by.  Then months.  I made excuses, which led to auxiliary purchases: I couldn’t use it without a fully-working mouse, so I bought a new mouse.  Then I needed to be able to input notes with a keyboard, so I bought a midi cable.  Then the in-built microphone wasn’t good enough, so I bought an mBox 2 mini audio interface so that I could plug in a microphone.  All of these purchases then sat in the corner and collected dust, while I developed a gnawing sense of guilt over spending so much money and then doing nothing.

In January 2010 and I’d had enough.  I finally decided to take control of the situation the only way I know how:  one small step at a time.  I realised I had been feeling that I wasn’t good enough or deserving enough for my recording equipment, that I should somehow know how to use it already because it was too late to learn.  As it happens, it’s never too late to learn, as I realised when I became gentle with myself. I assigned myself a certain number of minutes a day to play around with LogicPro.  Not to create anything specific, just to play around with it. I started with something small like 10 minutes, and then I gradually moved up to 30 minutes a day.  No more than that.  I would hook up my keyboard to my computer and play around with different software instruments and effects, or just use a piano sound and see where it took me.

Six months later, I felt pretty comfortable with it, simply through trial and error.  I’m still no expert at recording software, and I will never claim to be one.  The important thing is, I can use it, it gets the job done, and it doesn’t freak me out or leave me wracked with guilt.

I relate this experience here because I think that a lot of people are as intimidated by recording software as I was, especially when there do seem to be so many experts creating wonderful things with computers these days.  I was scared, too, but I took the leap and survived.

Related articles

• Introduction – Intimidation Factor Zero

My 'studio'. That weird thing next to The Sims 3 is my pop filter.

See, professional studios use something called a pop filter, or pop shield, when recording vocalists.  This is a circular screen of mesh that is placed between the singer and the microphone to keep out that awful popping noise associated with the letter “p”.  (P is for “plosive” – there’s one for Sesame Street.)  It keeps lyrical vocal lines from sounding like the microphone is falling down the stairs.

When I started making home recordings I just thought, in the defeatist way I sometimes have, that my recordings will never be at a professional standard anyway, so why bother with a pop filter?  I didn’t have one and wasn’t about to spend any more money on equipment.  Well, as it turns out, I did have a pop filter.  At least, I had all the makings of one.  This is how I did it:

• Step 1 – Get some old pantyhose (UK: flesh-coloured tights).  This is where girls have the advantage over guys.  I always have a pair that have a run in them, but high enough up the leg that I think, “I’ll keep them in case I’m wearing a long skirt and have no other options”.  As long as they aren’t completely in shreds, they’ll do.
• Step 2 – Get a wire coat hanger.  Like you usually get from the dry cleaners’, not like you get from the department store.
• Step 3 – If you’re a guy, maybe ask your girlfriend for help on steps 1 and 2.  Now that we’re all on the same page:
• Step 4 – Bend the coat hanger so that the triangular bit is kind of in a circle.  Doesn’t have to be a good circle.  Mine’s kind of a quadrilateral.
• Step 5 – Cut off one of the feet of the pantyhose to make a sleeve that will fit over the coat hanger.  At the knee will probably suffice.
• Step 6 – Slide pantyhose on coat hanger.

Now you have a DIY pop filter that probably cost you nothing at all.  The professional versions clip to the microphone stand.  There are ways of doing this at home, too, but they’re more involved than I ever wanted to get into.  I just hold it between my face and the microphone.  If I’m recording someone else, I get them to hold it.

There’s probably a whole book somewhere on getting the correct positioning of microphone – pop filter – human.  Certainly real sound engineers can spend a lot of time fiddling with it before saying, “Right, now you stand there and sing but DON’T MOVE!”  I just move them apart and together until it sounds good to me in the headphones.  The result is the “pops” are “filtered” out of my vocal recordings, so I must be doing something right.

I have a love-hate relationship with social networking. I admit that it is useful and necessary for most careers (especially music), but it sure can be tedious and time-consuming! Last time I talked about all the things I find wrong with MySpace. Fortunately, I don’t find it necessary anymore.

This is mainly because SoundCloud is so awesome.

Observe:

What you’re listening to is an audio file that I uploaded to my SoundCloud profile, in the same way that I used to upload songs to MySpace. The difference is that, while with MySpace there was a focus on bringing listeners to your MySpace profile to listen to tracks there (correct me if that has changed – obviously I’m not on MySpace anymore). In contrast, with SoundCloud the focus is more on placing your music where it can be heard. (Like a WordPress.com blog, for example.) This is probably why actual SoundCloud profiles are so austere, though you can add a photograph and some links and a bit of text.

Once you’ve created a profile and uploaded tracks (and these are actively encouraged by the site to be anything – songs, sound effects, remixes, interviews, whatever), you can then use the track’s url to link to it directly, or, like I did above, copy the html code for an embedded widget and allow listeners to hear your music directly from your website or blog. Or Facebook page, even. But the folks at SoundCloud can explain it better than I can.

What it boils down to is the ability to share music in the same way you could already share YouTube videos. It’s more difficult for anyone to steal your music than if you’d just posted mp3s on a website, but there’s an option to let people download your music if you like. I find it such a convenient way to share music that I’ll probably delete my Facebook account before I’d give up SoundCloud. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to share music on-line (especially if you hate My Blank as much as I do).

Anybody else love SoundCloud?

The faceless drones of MySpace.

My first “music on the web” experience was when, in 2004, someone told me about this exciting new web site called MySpace.  I made an account. And eventually deleted it. I had my own domain name by then.

One day I found myself amongst a group of musicians who said “What’s your MySpace?  What do you mean you’re not on MySpace??” in the same disbelieving tone people use with non-Facebook users today.  So I made a new account, then immediately made another one when I realised I’d made a normal account, and if I wanted to upload any music I needed a special, music account.  (Rubbish.)

After that, every new project had to have its own MySpace page to go with it. I don’t think I have an e-mail address that hasn’t been attached to a MySpace account at one time or another.  I eventually got frustrated and deleted them all, only to create yet another MySpace account for that one time I was trying to get a gig somewhere and the venue demanded receiving details via MySpace.

That account is now deleted.  I will never return to MySpace.  I hate it, oh I hate it so much.  Here are the reasons why:

1. It’s ugly.  Okay, that one’s not such a big deal anymore.  I think everyone had been generally complaining about that, so now the site isn’t the juvenile monstrosity it has been in previous years.  It still doesn’t look as nice as Facebook or Twitter though.  Which leads me to #2:
2. It’s difficult to customise.  You can use the built-in editor to change colours and backgrounds to a certain extent (finally), but making any more substantial changes, while possible, requires figuring out where to paste a chunk of html text in a way that it works and doesn’t break anything.  I have wasted more hours of my life than I like to admit on this.  (I could be a top-end web designer by now if I’d applied myself differently.)
3. Friends mean nothing. Now we’re getting into the real meat-and-potatoes of what I’ve got against MySpace.  It’s supposed to be about “social networking”, right? So why do I have so many requests from people I don’t know? Oh right – because everyone’s just trying to up their friend total in the hopes that an A&R agent will look at how many fans they have and sign them to a label.  Only all these “fans/friends” are just other musicians trying to do the same thing.
4. Comments mean nothing.  ”Thanks for the add!  Check out my new album!” from a total stranger is a waste of everyone’s time. Often there’s a large image attached.  And then it’s sitting there on your profile page, in your comments section, and you don’t want to delete it because at least if there is a comment there someone, somewhere, will think you’re doing something. Music on MySpace isn’t about social networking – it’s about spam-broadcasting yourself to as many other people as you can. Which is soul-destroying.
5. It’s noisy.  All those pointless comments and friend requests, plus the giant advertisements, all add up to an awful lot of sheer noise.  Life is chaotic enough without spending 20 minutes a day sifting through this stuff.  But finally,
6. It sounds ridiculous.  Speaking a web-site aloud is never going to be cool, but standing up at the end of a live performance and having to say “double-u double-u double-u dot my space dot com forward slash our band name” can make anyone look like a dweeb.

But what does anyone else think?  Am I only against this site because I’ve missed something?  (Hey, it’s possible.  I didn’t like Angry Birds until I found out the different coloured birds actually do things.)  Or is Justin Timberlake poised to revitalise the whole site and make it the best thing since sliced bread?

I welcome any insights.  In the mean time, the next post will be about a music site that I do like and use – SoundCloud.

The bit of information relates to making videos of live performances.  I thought, as I tend to do, that this was something complicated, difficult, and completely inaccessible.  Of course, at the same time, I owned a camera.  A digital one, that, as most digital cameras do, recorded video as well as still photographs.  (One of these, but older, so not as good.) But the video function was just an aside, and not very good quality, right?

Wrong.  Even 3 years ago when I was first having this epiphany, the video quality of my digital camera was sufficient for YouTube. However, I literally did not discover how easy it was to have video of performances until I handed my camera to a friend and asked her to take a few pictures for me.  She was smarter than I was, and what I got back was some decent quality videos that I promptly uploaded to the web.  As with an mp3 recorder, the audio was in mono, but I was surprised at how well the vocals came through and how I could hear everything clearly.  (N.B. – If the sound engineer at the gig doesn’t know what they’re doing, this may not be the case.)

I’ve been filming gigs with that camera and a similar one (the first one eventually bit the dust) ever since then.  In a later post I will describe ways in which I have taken it a step further and doctored the audio to make it sound more professional.  But in honour of the friend who first made of video of me performing in 2008, here is a video of her performing in 2008, recorded with a similar camera.  I love especially how her lead vocals are prominent, but you can still hear the tablas and the guy with the egg shaker.