Category Archives: Song Writing

Thursday 19th April 2012 – Self-Sufficiency and Honesty in Your Work

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Bands have always been an interesting endeavour for me. However, I have never been drunk with the delusions that musicians in bands often get; the chance of making money in a band is very slim, especially if you want it to support you. For this reason, bands have always been something to forward my musical skill, have fun with and develop ideas with. Of course, that isn’t to say I never wanted to take things further; I would still put the work in to take things as far as they would go but I think the realisation about how things really work should be central.

It seems that most of the time bands never work out because there are just too many people involved. Without the threat of pulling income away, people shy away from accountability. Also, with bands being non-earners for extended periods, people will always put their money earners first, along with their security. People will also tell you all about how much they are looking forward to being creative and working with a band but when it comes down to action, the rest of their lives influence them more and all of a sudden they are constantly taking the inferior easy option and/or being unreliable. All fair enough really, we all need to eat and have roofs over our heads!

Anyway, for these reasons I have actually started work on a new project, which will go ahead at a leisurely pace but will be an exploration of basic sound and creativity harnessed with myself as a boundary. I plan to write and perform everything myself, using my own acoustic instruments all recorded in my own space with my own equipment, each instrument having only one role.  For example, if I layered three or four guitar parts, it could sound luscious but if a group of musicians visited my flat without their own instruments it would be impossible to play, as I only have one acoustic guitar. I have actually talked out against people setting themselves creative boundaries before and it’s a little controversial but I still stand by those sentiments. It’s all about context in my opinion: Using only specific tools really does help, but why limit your ideas..?

These ideals are really at the forefront of my thinking at the moment, as can be seen with my project, Secret Soundtrack. Minimal tweaking, using what you have, not over complicating things and using natural ambiences. This is all just to see (or prove) what can be done without getting all excited about the myriad of technologies available. Musicians often want to use all the latest kit (influenced by marketing, no doubt) to give themselves a great sound but my experiences in recording have proved time and again that natural is best. For example, your living room will not sound as good as Studio 2 at Abbey Road, but it will have it’s own personality and flavour which you shouldn’t be ashamed of or scared to use. If you do use it, don’t do this under the premise that it is inferior, work with it’s natural personality to produce something different.  Tinkering too much will easily destroy the integrity, and therefore communication of the output as your aim will be to ape. Also, you do need to improve something that is just different (and therefore not inferior – embrace what you have).  So, to be creative, you need yourself, your ideas and whatever is around you. Of course, it won’t sound like Abbey Road but that’s only an issue if that has been specifically requested by somebody paying for your food and shelter…

If you like the ideas in this post, you may also want to read an earlier post: ‘Working With What’s Natural’.

Thursday 8th March 2012 – Working With What’s Natural

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If you saw somebody suspiciously loitering around on trains the other day in the London Bridge area, then you can put your mind at rest; it wasn’t a terrorist, it was me trying to get some decent recordings of what it sounds like to be in a train carriage while it’s on the move. This was for a project I’m working on at the moment which should be on display when the weather gets a bit warmer. More about this as things progress though…

However, the focus of this post is more on the fact that I was trying to get a ‘decent’ recording rather than working with what the recording was for. I was walking through carriages, getting off trains and getting on others without them even moving and was looking quite suspicious at the same time probably! I was behaving like this as I would get on a carriage and there would be somebody talking on their phone, or coughing a lot; and I got off of one train because a whole class of young children were noisily clambering aboard. Not very good if I wanted the uninterrupted recording of the train moving but this is all part of field recording; it is very difficult to get a clean recording of anything in it’s natural habitat as there is always so much else going on at the same time.

This behaviour has come from a perceived need to get only what I set out for. Anything else is seen as impure and incorrect and therefore I pained to get what I had come for. But when I thought about it, this wasn’t right… I had come to get a natural recording but ended up trying to shape this recording into something very un-natural: a train without passengers; the truth of what I was aiming to capture shouldnt be covered up.

This all seems fairly obvious, but I have noticed things in music recordings that have annoyed me of late: an acoustic guitar with too much high frequency (or treble) to make it ‘sparkle’, turning up the high frequency on the various instruments in a metal recording to aid clarity, compressing music so much that all dynamic range disappears so it sounds louder (which is generally perceived as better). All of these examples are trying to squeeze a foot into a shoe that just doesn’t quite fit.  Auto-Tune is another great example as a tool to allow non-singers to sing.  Click here for a mastering engineer’s thoughts on this.  They do manage to make it fit but at what cost? The nice woody quality of the acoustic guitar was destroyed, the metal sounded thin and overly compressed music sounds more unnatural and is actually more fatiguing to listen to. Of course, the nature of mixing musical instruments means that they do have to be tweaked a little from time to time, but it seems some people out there like to go a bit too far.

I’m not saying that all recordings should be imperfect or sloppy but do you remember those recordings from the 50′s and 60′s (and earlier) that sometimes had a little imperfection in them? A drum not quite hit properly, or a musician deviating from the tempo a little bit. We are human, so mistakes happen and these little ‘mistakes’ add so much to the character of the music, even changing the feel of the song for the better. Also, the world isn’t nicely ordered to suit us. The world happens around us all of the time and any art that we create is a reflection of this. It should not be showing off for the sake of showing off or pristine as we think it will make more money this way, it should record life and not cover it up.  This also goes for the way we live our lives:  covering up reality and truth can quite easily be the cause of being led down the wrong path not to mention the confusion and extra effort it  causes to get things done properly. Do the right thing and stay true! If you can’t do this you probably should be adapting what you are doing…But then, it really does depend on what your goals are!  But anyway,  the moral here is: why cover up the blunders you make when you could embrace them, integrate them and use them to make yourself stronger?

Thursday 24th November 2011 – Sound, Architecture and Environment

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The odd thing about recording is that your end product, the music, isn’t exactly real… it is a process that allows replication of something that has gone on before:  The music etc is played live and a snapshot is taken.  Also, you may know that the recording process cannot capture every single aspect of what the sound was like when you took that ‘snapshot’.  Current technology is very good at trying to emulate the original sound and you could argue that it does it so well that the imperfections are not even noticed, especially to the non-musician.

However, there are aspects of live music that the face-value capture of sound encapsulates with great difficulty.  Think about listening to a great busking band on the street.  You have the excitement of stumbling upon the performance; the personalities of the performers as they interact with the crowd, verbally and with their instruments; the collective experience of being part of a crowd; your own state of mind, if you are on holiday for example; and all of the sounds and feelings associated with these aspects.  Then there are the more physical aspects:  the way the sound of the different instruments reverberate around the buildings (even depending on where each musician is sitting), the qualities of that reverberation (imagine the difference in sound of a cathedral to your living room); other sounds working with/against the music intentionally or otherwise; even the state of the air could influence the total experience.  You then buy a copy of the band’s CD as the experience was so wonderful but, although the CD may sound good, it just isn’t the same.

The total experience (the actual music added to these aspects missing from the CD) is atmosphere (which I go on about all of the time!) and modern recording technologies can even go a long way to accounting for this; think about those realistic reverbs for example.  To my mind, maybe a change in focus is what’s needed to get closer to this elusive ‘atmosphere’.  When recording, maybe don’t think of it as recording music; or even as recording a performance.  Maybe think about the process as recording an experience.  This combined with keeping an open mind about what you can use to achieve this may produce even stronger results.  Music in particular tries to reproduce the thoughts and feelings of the song-writer using abstract methods (communicating with a guitar is very different from talking!), so why not extrapolate this to the whole process rather than just the sound-making?  You could even take this to the extreme by reproducing the atmosphere of a performance without actually including the instrument being used, although this would be a little silly if you are recording a virtuoso violinist because they are technically brilliant, for example!  Obviously, the balance of sound reproduction and atmosphere would have more real-life applications…

So, that finally brings me to the more overt topic of this post.  Architecture could be said to be one of the unsung heroes of the life experience.  We take it for granted that buildings, trees, and the rest of our surroundings are ‘just there’ but as any architect will tell you, these surroundings mold our lives and our life experience/atmosphere.  Therefore if we are thinking about the recording of music as above, it follows that we should take time to notice how sound interacts with the spaces it is immersed in.  This could go further than just putting the sounds in a reverb that emulates the space, and many musicians work with furthering this idea (for example Gustav Holst tried to describe the planets of our solar system in his music ‘The Planets’ using an orchestra; The band The Gathering used samples of crowd noises and street noises in their album ‘If Then Else’ to manipulate the atmosphere).

Thinking about how sounds interacts with architecture or the environment may not lead to placing sounds in a space as such, but it may also deepen an understanding of sound by looking into it’s real-life behaviour, which could loosen-up a musician’s perspective and therefore increase creativity.  For example, watch this you-tube video of a fantastic sound-art installation and see what you learn…

http://youtu.be/Ve6PTrlLGOU

Also, think about the application of sound within the architectural field.  Have a read here for some actual buildings/projects that have been designed to work within an environment that takes sound into account.  A couple use fountains to put up a mask of ‘white noise’ (which contains sound from all frequencies- i.e. the ‘snow’ on blank analogue TV channels) to cover traffic noise; a classroom was also designed to reduce spill of outside noise whilst emphasising the frequencies that the human voice occupies; raised portions and physical barriers evade noise and different materials sound differently when walked on.  Related to this, there are companies out there that design sound for business, taking every sound made within the company’s remit a part of their brand i.e. you wouldn’t use a noisy, clangy metallic floor in a shop that specialises in massage or meditation.

Of course, this is a two-way street as well.  Musicians and sound recorders can learn from sound in the real world and architects can learn from musical idealism i.e. calming soundscapes may be used in a massage parlour so maybe the building can be constructed in a way to emphasises these sounds.

So, if you are a music fan see if these ideas change the way you listen to music; musicians out there, maybe try thinking about sound differently and see if it enhances your output; and if you are involved in any aspect of creation think about how sound is as much a part of experience as your chosen field is and how careful thought around it can enhance the end product.

Thursday 17th November 2011 – Some ‘Normal’ Music!

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As I have been touching up my website this week I thought I’d stick some old songs I wrote on my ‘pop music’ page.  The sound quality and performances aren’t perfect but I thought I’d put them on here to show I also like doing more ‘normal’ things as well as the weird stuff that seems to confuse some people!  I do have a few more that are incomplete so I’m thinking I’ll finish them properly at some point and give them a touch-up using my more advanced frame of mind.

There’s not really too much to say about these songs but they started out with an aim to focus on hooks and rhythm.  Rather like how I want to treat the new Lunar Rising in fact…  Of course, the songs will be very different but the method will be the same, as with pretty much all of the music/sound stuff I do.  Click play below to have a listen. …and scroll further down to hear a special bonus cover song I recorded last year.  As always, feedback is very welcome!

 

Track List: 1. Moonlit River | 2. Dance WIth Me

 

Bonus seasonal cover song….

Download:

 

Thursday 27th October – Graphical Music Scores

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This week, I wanted to plan a piece of music I’m writing for my Dreams project.  Now, I’m inexperienced (although not ignorant of) traditional music notation as I have always found it a little irrelevant to my needs and ideas.  Of course, there’s no denying that it orders things nicely and brings about ideas just by it’s use but when you have an audio scratch-pad like Logic Pro, it’s not the best way to create.  So basically, I create and organise using the sounds themselves and the computer visuals (as well as my mind of course).  This week, I had various jobs to do so I thought I’d see if my efficiency in making music could be improved by making a more detailed plan than usual.

As I have written about before, my current interests include drawing sound from abstract ideas and creating atmosphere.  I have been using a main theme and using descriptive words to describe that theme in the context I want to write about.  I then translate these descriptive ideas and words into sound (through the filter of my own perception of course).  Notes aren’t important so much as I rely on my playing instincts to provide those, although theory is used when layering and directing the textures.

So, what is a graphical score?  Basically, traditional notation is a visual cue and organiser of music.  Somewhere along the line, someone thought ‘why don’t we use any picture or symbol to elicit a feeling, note, series of notes, sound etc.’  As a graphical score also deals with atmosphere in an abstract way it  seemed very relevant and natural to put my plan down on paper in this way.  I had seen a couple graphic scores before although they weren’t accompanied by explanation, but in any case the great thing about them is they are pretty self-explanatory, meaning I felt comfortable trying my own.  Just giving it a go also follows part of my ‘ethos’ where you should never be afraid to try something if it is doing it’s intended job.

The piece I worked on this week is called ‘Flying’ and is in the context of a dream (thought I’d start with something pretty obvious to make it easier on myself!).  I started by making a list of ideas surrounding the theme.  Usually I would go straight to designing the sounds for each theme and sort out the structure once I have those but this time I chose a symbol for each sound and created a structure and map of them interacting over time.  This produced the graphical score below:

 The next step will be to create sounds for each symbol/symbol section and start weaving them together!

A great thing about a graphical score is that some one else could also use it in their music, or anything else for that matter, allowing for individual creativity within the guideline of the score; making the work so much more than it could be otherwise.  This is because, theoretically, it’s full realisation may never happen until every person on the planet has added their perception of it i.e. when there are still options open it remains unfinished.  It therefore follows that one idea or score could (potentially) be absolutely huge with an incredible amount of depth after many many influences have contributed to it.  You could say this about any score of course, but here the guidelines are far looser than the traditional score and it follows the results would be more varied and richer as a result.

I haven’t yet worked on the music for this score but am very much looking forward to it.  It feels very natural and comfortable so I have a feeling the results will be better than usual…. Hopefully I wont be eating my words…

Search the internet for graphical scores.  Some of them are normal-looking photographs while others use parts of traditional notation, but they are all designed to the same end: the production of sound derived from abstract thought; or music, if you like…

Thursday 29th September 2011 – What is Musical Atmosphere and how do you Create it?

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Atmosphere is something that I often refer to so I thought I would try to explain this abstract term in relation to my interests.  Many musicians are expert at manipulating atmosphere but many don’t even try so I thought I’d give my opinions and ideas.  If you look at a dictionary definition it will tell you that atmosphere is a pervading tone or mood but I’m a little conscious that this is a bit vague when referring to music/sound.

In terms of creating a convincing, all-enveloping atmosphere that transports the listener I think that it is helpful to expand the above definition.  An atmosphere is an intricate network of various emotions and senses that are tightly knit together, sometimes so much so that the overall effect gives no clue to what it is composed of.  Because of this, creating an atmosphere by working backwards from a general feeling may produce very bland results i.e. just filling a happy song full of happy melodies/chord.

To effectively transport the listener into the song or music, a deeper understanding of the happy situation is needed.  The best way to achieve this is to try to affect as many senses as possible and refer to related thoughts and feelings, untangling multiple causes of the atmosphere and deciding their weighting. I also find that it helps to picture the scenario and think about what you can see and/or feel as well as think about what others may see or feel.

To me, the most important aspect of an atmosphere is the space it is contained in because this seems to form a basis of almost any experience (through the filter of experience and emotion, but I’ll come to that).  For this reason, I like to start here.  Generally, a song or piece of music can have a sense of space when listened to because of the amount and/or type of echo (reverb) added to individual instruments or the whole piece.  In many cases, this echo is added for technical reasons to help individual instruments be heard more clearly and to add depth for a bigger sound.  In other cases, relevant to this post, it is used specifically for mood such as to enhance emotional vocal lines: the sound of an emotive vocal in a big hall can be very powerful.  These days you can use convolution reverb to actually sample real spaces and use your computer to put your recorded audio into these spaces.

If you look at the space you are currently in you will see various objects around, some of them make sounds on their own, others may need a little help… If you are at work and think about making music about it, you could use machinery/technology noises but morph/adapt them to underlying emotions. Emphasising uncomfortable sound frequencies could increase a sense of stress (at work) along with using a rushed timing. You may use the same sounds but soften their sound and transients to make them more calming if your story involves a calm workplace.  You may not want to use field-recordings in your music so, to communicate stress, you may play your guitar faster with a strong attack (note onset), and also emphasise those harsh frequencies.   For work-related stress, you may also play with a mechanical, repetitive feel or even mirror the sounds of machinery/technology present. To soften this you may slow your playing down, manipulate the sound to get a warmer (bass-influenced) feel or layer it with a soothing instrument like a string orchestra.

There will always be more sensations though, such as experience or other emotions, as life just isn’t that simple.  If you are at work, you may have an underlying sense of stress and also relief of being able to joke around. You may have a sense of pride or despair; or you may experience excitement and longing if you met your husband/wife there.  Conveying the overall feeling may be hard without breaking this atmosphere into it’s parts.  Of course, lyrics can convey these ideas but this wont work for instrumentals and if there are vocals wouldn’t the experience be far more intense if the instrumentation strengthened their effect?  To create an overwhelming sense of being placed right inside the music’s subject matter, dissect the elements of the atmosphere you are experiencing and find sounds/themes/ideas for each aspect.

There are also more aspects you can reference; atmosphere also contains the perceptions of the people in the space, or have been in it, along with your own possibly unique viewpoint.  These interactions may be a central theme but hard to convey from a general perspective so all these aspects could have sounds or themes. You could layer physical themes with references from personal experience or common sense to create your whole; obscuring the sounds may give the impression of dreaming or forgetfulness; you could use different sounds, instruments, styles of playing or different sound treatments to represent different people.  The way the themes interact with each other in your ‘physical landscape’ can also be manipulated. Are they in harmony? Are they fighting? Are they working together to solve something?

Well, here are a few ideas of how the atmosphere in music can be intensified (in my opinion!). You may want to do this to make your music more convincing and substantial or you may be exploring sound and it’s relation to the human experience but either way have fun and use these ideas, if new to you, to open up a whole new universe of inspiration. If you have any thoughts or ideas on these ideas please feel free to comment below.

My first experiment into using atmosphere in this way, using synth, is Bedtime Nursery Rhymes.  My next venture along these lines, using ‘found sound’, is Some London Life; go over and take a look!

Thursday 3rd February 2011 – Don’t Get Carried Away

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For some reason, over the past week or so people that actually read this blog have been telling me that they take an interest in it and what I do. This is pretty amazing really as up until now it really has felt like I’m writing to the void.  In a peculiar way it is quite fitting that this week’s post was intended to be more of a listen than a read…

My newest song is called ‘Don’t Get Carried Away’.  I wasn’t entirely sure  what I was going to do with it but my partner in crime for Henry Spencer Project, Pia Berg, said she’d think it cool if we used it.  As this song is a bit of a cross-pollination between different interests I would like to talk a bit about it…

Don’t Get Carried Away is the third song that I have written as a solo effort (not taking into account a few singer’s-point-of-view suggestions Pia has made!)  My first one is posted on my music page but this one really has been a sort of maturity in my songwriting.  Have a listen to Don’t Get Carried Away while you read by clicking here.

First of all, the main guitar part isn’t mine… Lesley Flower wrote this after her first guitar lesson with me. I concentrated on getting her to make sounds and to strengthen her fingers.  I find no value in teaching people songs when they want to learn the instrument and actually use it.  Replicating a song is for iTunes and technique can be picked up other ways. I was very pleasantly surprised when she showed me the result of her efforts.  She was making her own tunes not playing a half-baked Oasis song…  However, it seems she did pick up my style somewhat as the melody may even sound at home in a Lunar Rising song! …Anyway, I turned a metronome on and held a mic to the strings and asked her to play… As well as it being a pretty little melody, the awkward picking style only a beginner has lends a lovely innocence to the tune and I feel this really adds to a resulting lullaby feel.  Lesley messed around with some midi strings but I used the surrounding chords to see through my admiration for the tune in my own way…

The second influence has been through a development about subject matter.  Some that know me realise I’m quite opinionated on stuff that’s close to me (although I hope not in an obnoxious way!).  Through chatting to people on Twitter (as well as ‘real life’ friends!) I started to realise that some have the same opinions as me (for a change!). In particular, TheRealBobby004 said something about extremist Islam that really hit home with my beliefs and it was this conversation that led me to convey my ideas in this song. (if you’re on Twitter, follow him, he’s a nice guy and balances the all too popular general/ignorant views of what Islam can be. No, I’m not religeous by the way…).

Lastly, a seemingly minor contribution comes from the synth sound used in the song, especially at the break before the last chorus.  This may seem a small aesthetic contribution but it has derived from my blossoming interest in the more artistic, experimental side of sound/music.  I designed this sound for the art project I am creating with Lesley and I used the ‘Sculpture’ synthesiser that comes with the Logic Pro sequencer.  The sound came from the making of a soundtrack for one of Lesley’s photographs; part of the background in the photo is quite blurry and I wanted to convey this with a sound… Out of context and using different notes, the sound conveys a different notion….. but in any case enough of the waffling… If you haven’e heard the song yet, have a listen by clicking here.

Thursday 21st October – Sound Art and how it’s shaping my music.

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Sound Art and Sound Design are two concepts which are surprisingly quite new to me.  The definitions of what they actually are are a little ambiguous but generally  Sound Art concerns the use of sound to express artistic ideas for their own sake, whilst Sound Design refers to the practical application of such ideas.

In my music, my main pursuit has always been atmosphere.  This term may be a bit vague, but I have always thought of it as creating something rich that envelopes the listener and takes them on more than one journey in parallel.  Subtleties and the more salient aspects interact to produce some sort of sub-text, musically rather than lyrically.  This allows for the words to tell one story, the music another (although linked and supportive) and other sounds, themes, ambiguities to point at other feelings.  All these aspects should work together to produce something that seems to have depth.  The listener can choose to take on board the more obvious aspects only or get a richer experience through more involved listening.  I have by no means accomplished this yet but I’m hoping that you can maybe see what I have been trying to do when you listen to my music.  For example, with Henry Spencer Project I have tried to mix the dark with the light in an effort to make them co-exist; making the songs fun but also a little bit melancholic.  I have also been working on some sound design ideas which my mailing list will get access to this week as well as anyone that signs up to my mailing list on the left side of the screen.  The music is a conceptual idea used as a pitch for some ‘no budget’ film music I may work on and  I am very excited about what I have produced here so please do take a bit of tome to check it out.

You may or may not think this is all rubbish but my atmospheric goals are there and the pursuit of these has recently been made even more accessible by thinking about music differently.  My research into Sound Art and Sound Design has been teaching me more about using sounds in a general way and looking at them for what they are.  I have found that this is much more helpful and exciting rather than just thinking of one part as a guitar part, another drums, etc etc.  The possibilities are endless and I am very excited about what I may find travelling this road.

I hope to go see/hear some installations at galleries as they become available to help my understanding of this movement and I’ll let you know about my progress on here!  Hang around and see if these ideas manage to creep into my work more convincingly….