ABC 11: Prophetic Music Production Part 2
This episode takes us into the music production of the asymmetric biz cult podcast, as well as my more personal sound work…. It’s another flawed struggle at trying to make a good podcast.. Though I believe it is not without it’s virtues and redeeming value.
Today’s show notes will include 2 things. #1 Links to resources, #2 A talk about process and technology.
Resources:
Podcasts I recommend:
The Project Studio Network Podcast — Intermediate to Pro Music production podcast.
Home Recording Odyssey Podcast — Music production on the cheap.
Magazines: (many of which you can read for free online)
Keyboard Magazine: Though it’s called “keyboard magazine” its pretty good for anyone dealing electronic music production.
Electronic Musician: Was a favorite of mine for a long time.. on electronic music production
Virtual Instrument Magazine — This is a fairly new magazine that I’m rather fond of as it really goes much deeper into many aspects of electronic music then any other magazine I’ve found.
Sound On Sound: I subscribe to Sound On Sound, its probably my favorite.. A good well rounded music production magazine.. glossy and big.. and just a pleasure.
Mix Magazine — Good magazine on mixing (surprised?)
On process:
The main sound project that went into this episode was the intro. The intro, as I listen to it now, points to where the production of this podcast should be going..
I think of the process like film making: A film maker goes out and shoots a lot of stuff.. and then goes back into the editing room and puts the film together. The editing is where the film emerges.. is really made.. it is here where we discover what we have.. the shooting, to some degree, is a process by which we gather our ingredients for our film.. we are collecting colors and what not..
For the intro I had two main recording sessions where I captured raw materials.. The first was a jam session that happened right around the time of the recording of episode 1.5…. The second was recorded a couple weeks prior to putting the intro together.. where Evan, myself, and Mark, all improvised these little descriptions of what Asymmetric Biz Cult might be.
Now I should tell you that I have a crazy amount of hard disk space on this computer. . I have content on here that goes back to… I don’t know.. 2000? I have my college work on here.. which may go back as far as 95? So I have a huge library of stuff, from which, I can use as building blocks for new projects.. This is an important idea.. that you can reuse your old work, when you work digitally.. and there’s a strange sort of surrealistic continuity that it can add to your work.. (you get this, like with Frank Zappa, when you see a lot of the work together with different treatments of the same materials, concepts, and compositions… etc)
One thing to think about in relationship to this sort of thing is copyright: If you do work for clients.. if you want to reuse source material that you created doing projects for clients.. you need to make clear, in your contracts, that you intent to hold on to the right to make future derivative works from these files.. you need to communicate with your client about this sorta thing.. you want them to feel comfortable in knowing you’re not going to reuse this stuff in such a way that would undermine what you’ve done for them.. and of course.. you work a little cheaper if retaining a little more of the copyrights.. and I would advice you, in all cases, to at least hold on to the right to use your work in the context of a portfolio..
Anyway.. so what I find powerful about the recording sessions was there energy.. How alive they felt.. A mad enthusiasm… How they capture certain qualities of the asymmetric biz cult vibe, if you will.. This is in stark contrast the way my music usually works:
My music creation process.. is like a painters in the sense that it’s this lonely introverted kind of journey. A painter just goes out there somewhere.. and paints, and that’s it.. just the painter and the canvas. And that’s what my production is like: Just me and the tools of my trade.. So my music is, in a certain sense, a kind of chamber music.. a kind of labyrinth of secret things.. its like some deep investigation of “the metaphysical this that and the other things”.. explorations of consiousness.. thoughts on organizational principles.. aesthetics.. and on and on it goes….
So what is special about the intro in the scheme of my larger body of work, has to do with the raw materials for my music creation… Which is a very exciting new twist to my work.. because my work can be as deeply self reflective, analytical, self critical, and whatever else.. as it ever was… but it also can be full of life.. So it can have a kind of balance between introversion and extroversion psychology types..
Ableton Live
The intro’s production took place in Ableton’s Live. I’m not a master of Live yet: I’m to some extent fumbling around in the dark. Live is in some respects a kind of tool of aliens, and my job is to figure out what it might have to offer my art.
To some extend “music production is music production.” What I mean by this is that there’s a whole lot to music production that is universal and doesn’t change just because you’re working in a different area of music production.. or a different style, or a different digital audio work station. Right now.. a lot of my sound production efforts are directed into thinking about mixing / the mix engineer’s roll. So some of the first things I’ll try and get a handle on in working with a new DAW is EQ, Compression, Reverb’s and Delays.. and the various effects that you’ll normally use to try and carve up your mix.. And if we where to explore in much depth where I’m at as a mix engineer, we’d probably also want to explore where I am as a composer, musician, or just all around sound artist.. and how all these things interrelate.. and come together in the production.. at any rate, more or less, this is the “music production is music production” and our job, when stumbling around in the dark, is to figure out how to breath this stuff into a live production.. so that it might benefit from what we know.. and where we’ve been in the past.
But Live is a very strange tool. It works in ways that are counter intuitive for someone coming to live from other DAWs… which is part of why I fumble around in the dark so much.. There’s a way to approach new tools, or at least there’s my way: You start out with “the basics” that you need to operate.. “What do you need to know how to do in order to be able to do what you want to do.” Once you get that worked out, you can start working on projects.. and along the way you can start experimenting with learning other features, and kind of expanding..
There’s what I’d call “The Uber Hard Core.” This happens where #1 You know all the key commands.. so that instead of going to menus you’re hitting key commands to make stuff happens.. #2, When there are multiple ways of achieving something you know which way is fastest, and perhaps whatever pros and cons might go along with whatever route you might take to achieving whatever it is you are trying to achieve. When you are at this kind of level you are able to work in a way that is a lot faster / more efficient… and the faster you can work, the more you can get done in less time.. and the greater your level of craft can then be…. and the higher the level you’re work will be at. So to some extent.. when you start with a program you have “Uber Hard Core - dom” in your mind as where you might like to go with this, and this helps to set your trajectory.
With Live, for now, I’m struggling with.. well mastering the basic basics… I’m pretty sure that Live is more powerful that I’m really fathoming right now.
Day or two latter:
Live is designed from start to finish to operate effectively as a live performance tool.. which is a little different from how you normally work with DAWs.. So I basically end up working with Live as if it where a conventional DAW.. Part of this is because I have a slow computer that’s not really up to taking full advantage of Live, particularly not in a live context…
Days latter:
This is getting pretty long, ha? Well I suppose this is sorta good enough for now.. lets just end it here….
