Thursday 28th June 2012 – Learn From Your Let-Downs

Posted on June 28, 2012 by Jay

A couple of weeks ago, a company contacted me regarding some music for a showreel that they were producing. Unfortunately, somebody else’s pitch was chosen but I write about it today as I feel that it is important not to be ashamed of your near-misses (or way-off misses for that matter!). In a commercial environment, it could be said that such action unnecessarily highlights your flaws, but on the contrary I believe such action highlights strength and motivation to improve). It is important to think about these misses and learn from them. By doing that, your confidence remains intact and you will also improve your craft ready for the next time. I never had any feedback as to why my pitch wasn’t chosen but I have included some hindsight at the bottom to give my own criticism; self-criticism is very important!

Due to my pitch not getting chosen, I haven’t been able to gain permission to display my audio with the video so here is the standalone audio:

For a reference track, I was asked to listen to the Alex Metric Remix of ‘Sabotage’ by the Beastie Boys and was asked to create an energetic and explosive music track. Reference words used were ‘mega, kinetic, loud, unique and fresh’ and all had to be in sync with the fast-moving video of the showreel.

The beat of the showreel actually reflected ‘Sabotage’ so I had to make sure that my music did the same so that it would fit in with the scene cuts and actions on the reel. To make the track ‘mega’, ‘kinetic’ and ‘loud’ I included some powerful, distorted rock guitar, a bass-heavy kick drum and thick synth noises that whirled about all over the place; I felt that some of the more quirky-sounding synth noises also made the track fresh and unique.

With hindsight, I would probably define the bass end of the synth more and bring the guitars forward to give them a more crushing impact. At the time, I deliberately chose to keep the bass-end of the synths less defined to add to the chaotic feel, but I probably sacrificed much power and definition in doing this. It may sound counter-intuitive that bass can lead to less power but it really does make a difference! The bass contains a lot of energy which can eat up a lot the headroom, or space to make the track louder. Also, the muddying effect of uncontrolled bass leads to less clarity, and a powerful feel does need a sharp, precise element. With the guitars, I kept them less prominent as I was quite conscious of the track becoming too metal… yeah that’s right, I said too metal… That’s me being all grown-up and thinking of the client and not my own rock-god wannabe ambitions!

Well, I hope you like it, but the music isn’t what’s important here. Remember it is ok to not make the grade every time – it could be down to something as fleeting as taste, not your ability; and remember to use these opportunities to reflect on your work and improve it, not to be ashamed!

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

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Jay

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

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Jay

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.