Friday, December 10, 2004

The making of AfterImage.mp3 – an Alternative Rock song

Started a new song last night and thought I’d try to write a log of the song's development, sketching out the creative process and mechanics involved. This is my first attempt at blogging; no idea where this will go at this point.

I don’t have any ‘formula’ for writing songs; they can start in several different ways. Sometimes it can start with a lyric, other times I’ll get some rhythmic thing going with a drum line and bass line evolving and then layer sounds on top. The new song started from feeling like I wanted to explore some new sonic turf, try to break through to a new sound.

What I’ve been listening to recently: U2 (How to dismantle an atomic bomb), Radiohead (Hail to the thief, the Bends, Pablo honey), Linkin Park (Reanimation). I’m not into sampling or recreating other band’s sounds, but they do open up my mind to new possibilities, help me break out of the past. They get me in the right frame of mind and push me, challenge me to try and go further.

Musically, my background is as a sax player and vocalist. Over the years I've developed some rudimentary keyboard skills and have learned how to use the computer as a musical instrument in its own right. Here’s my setup:

Instruments: Tenor sax, Yamaha WX5 wind controller
Synths: Yamaha VL70M, Yamaha DX7, Korg MS-20 with MPU-101 midi converter
Sampler: Gigastudio 96
Sound processing equipment: Lexicon MPX-110
Mic: Shure SM-58 through an ART Tube Preamplifier and Compressor
Speakers: Tannoy Reveal
Headphones: Audio Technica MH-40fs
Sequencer: Cakewalk Sonar
Soundcard: Soundblaster Live!
PC: 800MHz PIII 512MB RAM

Not high end stuff, but I find it’s everything I need.

With an instrument like the sax, in order to get to a new sound you have to ‘woodshed’ (i.e. practice with no one around) for a while, refining your skills and trying to push your limits. In abstract terms, I think what this involves is getting familiar enough with some new thing that you no longer have to involve the rational left side of the brain in this new activity, you can do it while remaining in the creative / intuitive right-side of the brain and let the limbic / motor system or whatever do the rest. For me, the same holds true for computer-based music. I find I need to get all of the rational stuff – configuring equipment, learning how to use the equipment and software, trouble-shooting – out of the way so that I can get into a right side of the brain zen groove to create music. Once you feel like the equipment is not in the way of the music you are trying to create but instead is a natural extension of you, you can fly! This takes time and planning, however, especially to get the most out of your setup.

Lately, I’ve been trying to push what I can do with the Lexicon MPX110 by creating an instrument map that makes it easy to ‘play’ the effects in the same way that a synth is controlled in Sonar. It’s just a matter of copying all of the config info into a text file in a standard format. You can download the map I created here. I’ve also been playing around with the Cakewalk application language (CAL) to auto-generate midi effects, specifically auto-gapping the midi stream by injecting volume control events. Not sure if I’ll use it in this song yet – we’ll see if it fits the song or not. The CAL file is here.

Limitations can force you into new approaches, and sometimes that can be a good thing! I love the VL70M sounds for their rich expressiveness, but it’s a mono device so building up e.g. guitar riffs is pretty slow. It involves laying down each note of the riff in individual mono tracks and recording each track to a .wav file before combining them. When you are getting started on a song idea and don’t even know what tempo you want to go with, this can really break that zen thing. So I thought I’d try playing around with the Lexicon’s pitch shifting abilities to see what happened. Picasso once said something along the lines of ‘you are your mistakes’ (?)which I take to mean that true creativity often comes through the way you react to the unintentional. It forces you out of memory and into new learning, and you incorporate that learning into who you are. Well, some pretty cool stuff can happen when you combine VL70M voices with midi controller events and the Lexicon’s pitch / delay program! Just riffing with this for a while was really amazing. Here’s what resulted: AfterImage_a.mp3 (0:13, 212K)

Which is unlike anything I’ve heard before, let alone created before (maybe I lead a sheltered life…there’s probably some electronica / techno out there that has plowed this field already, but hey it’s new to me – ignorance is bliss). Started putting down some drum hits to try to feel out a rhythm – there’s definitely a rhythmic thing in there (maybe due to the echo), even though the midi controller data I injected to control it was intended to be somewhat random, more of a shape than a groove, if you know what I mean. It was originally recorded at 100 bpm, which is quite slow, so I sped it up to 128bpm and added a drum line(: AfterImage_b.mp3) (0:14, 219K). Then started complementing the drum line and VL70M weirdness with a bass line. Not really melodic in feel, more semitone transitions. I’ve been trying to identify why occasionally something I hear or play will send shivers down my spine (which is a good thing!) and I think it has something to do with when the music sets you up to expect something and then twists it slightly so that it harmonizes with what you expected; you end up resonating with the music in this weird way. I don’t have any kind of formula (unfortunately!) for this; it just kinda happens every so often. Hasn't happened yet, but the semi-tone thing feels like its in the right area for me right now to help create this feeling, kind of like sus-2 chords, and hey it just felt right so I kept riffing in that direction. After ripping it apart and reconstructing it a few times, here’s the result: : AfterImage_c.mp3 (0:12, 203K)

Next I tried to re-inforce the 128bpm tempo by adding a Stratocaster midi sample with a 1/4th note echo delay and some pitch bends in for a bit of strangeness.AfterImage_d.mp3 (0:12, 193K)
This started to sound like something, so I ‘jammed’ over top of it and came up with a vocal line:AfterImage_e.mp3 (0:12, 189K)
Adding this got me doing word associations. This is where everything you’ve done in your life starts coalescing. Listening to the groove that was starting to take shape made me think of the phrase Pattern Recognition - it just surfaced from that and fit the music. I really like William Gibson’s books, and read Pattern Recognition several months ago. Didn’t really think of writing a song about it or using it as a lyric until that very moment, but it just fit somehow. A poem fragment that I wrote when I lived in Ottawa (‘bare bulb burning bright like life, swinging to the beat of an unheard rhythm) was the next thing that the music called up. The rhythm of the words and then the image of staring at a bare lightbulb made me visualize the after-image retina burn you’d get. After Image stuck as a great intro line – like some flashback to something that has already happened. And recognizing the pattern in the after image burned into your mind dovetailed so beautifully with it. "After Image... and Pattern Recognition" has a great internal rhythm to it with the alternating stressed / unstressed syllables. Say that a few times over the music and the melody for what must surely be part of a chorus or background vocal coalesced.

When I’m working in this way, I like to build up the sound and song by looping 8-16 bars of the music and just playing it over and over, incrementally tuning the midi sequence and adding parts. Works well for lyrics too – just open up Notepad and start writing down the words that sync up to the music, rapping them over the music to see how they fit, then adding a midi melody line, iterating until music / words / rhythm and melody converge. Here’s what it sounds like so far, with the 'chorus' or whatever it will become repeated 6 times - by around the 4th repetition you start to really dig into the groove: AfterImage_f.mp3 (1:00, 940K)

First cut at capturing the images that lead up to the After Image / Pattern Recognition phrases:
afterimage
and pattern recognition yeah

burning bright like life
with this unheard rhythm
swinging to the beat
like a light bulb burning
through the night
lighting up the back alley
up the fire escape
into the music
into the rhythm
and from the fire escape
tape to tape
cheek to cheek
dancing to the beat
of this unheard
rhythm and rhyme
keepin time
to the
driving bass line
to the
deep down drum beat
right off your feet
until the day light breaks
and wakes you up
and its all gone

now all that's left
is the retina burn
and the sonic shock
just an afterimage
and pattern recognition yeah

afterimage
and pattern recognition yeah

afterimage
and pattern recognition yeah


The ideas for the song were obviously influenced by U2’s Vertigo (where the singer is calling from a dance club) but are at the same time very different. I started a song a while back called Backstreet Epiphany which geled with the other words to get this image of going up a back alley fire escape into this loud night club, and trying to piece what happened together from the after image of it all. I like the image of entering another world, some kind of parallel universe that you’re not really aware of until you’ve discovered it, and then leaving it and only having the memory of it to say it really existed. The main thing that is shaping the lyrics at this point is kinetics – having the words bounce around aggressively. Obviously, listening to Linkin Park, especially Reanimation, will do that to you. Charlie Parker once said something like ‘You have to live it for it to come out of your horn’. When I was younger I didn’t really realize how true this is. Everything you do combines to create possibilities for you to shape “now” with. One thing I want to try with this song is to write lyrics that work on multiple levels - time for me to really try to push myself here.

That’s it for now – sounds like there might be something worthwhile happening here. I’ll post again when I’ve made some progress on this. Sometimes songs come together quickly (e.g. Secret Agent Girlfriend), sometimes it takes years before they get ‘finished’ (e.g. Crystalize). Feels like there’s some potential in this one – let’s see where this goes!

Brian
Dreaming in Technicolor