I have been writing a lot of music though.
At this point we have a good arrangement of our first song, which makes me unbelievably happy. In brief, it was written like this:
Jeff has a great love of drones in music, which I share also, which for tambura providing a background to the sitar and tabla. Jeff laid down some licks on his mizwiz, which is a double tubed wind instrument that sounds somewhat like a small bagpipe. He also played a straight drone on one note.
Then I looked around in Reaktor and brought up my favorite new synth, the OKI computer 2. This is supposed to emulate those eight bit sounds of video games of long ago, but it does much much more than that. We played around with the settings until we got this nice tone, sort of like a shruti box, which is a hand held and pumped type of organ.
After some tweaking, I came up with a nice drone that fit with the key the mizwiz is in, and then another different kind of drone. And then for good measure, another drone, a bit more complicated. We then found a good rhythm to go along with this, from a CD that contains popular belly dance rhythms. I dumped the whole track into Project 5.
Now we needed a bass. Once again, we turned to the OKI and mess with a preset until we got this nasty, cutting bass sound. Jeff, in dealing with belly dance music for so long, wasn't used to thinking in terms of bass lines, but after all he was an electric bassist for years and years, so its not like he is unfamiliar with the concept. I said, here you have a tone to work with, so write a bassline. Which he did, pretty quickly, a nice and simple bit that worked with everything else.
We run out of time and I get back to working on this piece by myself and end up with a little more inspiration, and a couple of other basslines. Jeff is back a few days later and as I am showing him some stuff in Battery, he asks about a deeper kick drum. I have a kit already set up, and take one of the bass drums, copy it, and mess with the pitch. Viola! Instant huge kick. Combine this with another track of drums to go with the original middle east drumbeat, and you get a HUGE kick ass sound. Also on the middle east kit, I add some Tibetan cymbals, and with the two together it gets amazing. This pretty much takes up all the time for that session.
When Jeff comes by next time, I have doped up an arrangement and he checks it out. One thing I did that was off the wall, was copying one of his horn parts, re-pitching it up 22 semi-tones, then down-pitching some of the notes in a pattern, then playing with the panning. Now it doesn’t sound so much like a mizwiz as some weird kind of synth – but to my relief, when I play it for Jeff, he really likes it. After all he told me to do something crazy with his horn part.
We mess with the arrangement and I burn a CD for Jeff to listen to. We are going thru a lot of CDs doing this! But the important thing is after listening to it for several days, and comparing it with other CDs in this genre, he still likes it. And Paulette, his wife and diva of the Gypsy Caravan, likes it too! Great news, since we are trying to hit the belly dance market, and hell, she certainly is a belly dancer.
Next time we get together, at Jeff’s suggestion, we decide to shorten the piece, since its almost five and a half minutes long, a bit long for the dancers. This is when the collaboration gets good: we just start listening to what is there, and between the two of us decide what we can cut and not lose the flow or the ideas of the music. Its really pretty easy, Jeff and I seem to be much on the same wavelength. Once you give up the idea that not every single thing you write down is precious, you can really cut to the chase.
After a couple of hours, we get down a much tighter arrangement, without losing anything critical. In fact, to both of us it sounds much better, tighter and more focused. And we cut an entire minute off the song, so someone dancing to it will have a better shot of fitting it into a time slot.
That’s a great thing working with Jeff, and actually trying to write for a market – you have some idea of what people want to hear. And since Jeff and Paulette and the Caravan have sold lots of records, I am way happy to listen to what he has to say.
Its really a change for me, having at least some idea of what I want a piece of music to do before I write it, instead of just tooling around until I find some sounds or a rhythm I like. What I am doing now is copping these belly dance rhythms and working from there. Its not constraining, I like the beats, and it gives me a lot of creative freedom since I have a bit of structure to work from.
The other thing is working with Jeff, not only do I get the benefit of having more than my own brain having to make decisions and coming up with ideas, I am forced to write a lot of material. At this point, I am writing more of this stuff than Jeff, which of course is part of me having the equipment to do it, but the end product is certainly always going to be a collaboration. Anything that makes me write better music is great! And I feel this CD with Jeff is going to turn out great, feels like endless creative possibilities.
What more could I ask for the new year?
Its Saturday morning here in Portland and its cold, at least for here. The temperature is about 28 degrees Fahrenheit with a stiff breeze, gusts up to 50 mph.
I make a quick run down to the store, since I am low on some essentials. The store is really close, too far to walk in weather like this, and the car doesn’t even get close to getting warmed up enough to use the heater. I have the radio on, tuned to the only 24 hour a day classical station here in the pacific northwest, and as I start driving home I hear the familiar strains of Bach’s “Sleepers Awake”. Its part of this famous cantata "Wachet Auf, ruft uns die Stimme", and its maybe all of five minutes long. I have been so familiar with this piece for so many years, back from the 70’s when I was a serious classical guitar student. Before we go on here is a link to one of the maybe hundreds of arrangements of this piece: Sleepers Awake.
This is not at all some flashy piece for a virtuoso, no amazing chromatic runs or complicated, mind bending modulations, although if you listen closely, you can hear one beautiful, almost dissonant, at least to my ears, note about ¾ of the way thru the piece. I have heard this music countless times, even once in the 70’s as done by a rock band called Graced Lightning – and it was a damn fine version in my opinion.
But back to it - its simple, just a few lines of counterpoint, that weave their way around and around with one of those catchy melodies that is instantly unforgettable. Yeah you could hum this, and I certainly did as I drove the short distance to my house.
I wasn’t in a bad mood by any means, but certainly hearing this music again, so familiar and yet so interesting, with clarity of thought and masterful restraint, hit me on that deep level that truly great music always does.
Let me be clear about something here, lest you think I am some kind of classical snob: I can get just as turned on by a great jazz performance, a killer rock band or something non-western (like the Kronos Quartet’s recording with Ashe Boshle, my god what a record!) as I can by J.S. Bach. I still considering him the finest composer of all times, but he is not of course the only person that has ever made fantastic music.
I was a bit transfixed by this sublime little piece of music, and even though it was freezing cold in the driveway, I had to listen to the piece thru its conclusion. At the end I said to myself, as I often have, that man was a genius! It made me feel good down to my bones. And I realized at that point, once again, why I spend so much of my time writing music: if I could get just one person, once, to get 1/10 of the righteous, soul-satisfying feeling that I get from “Sleepers Awake”, - well, it would make all the effort more than worth it.
Its just that the obsession changes, still centered around music in one form or another.
Its been a few weeks now that my CD has been out, and I have sold half a dozen copies, enough to where I had to take more down to CDBaby. Interesting to me, the person that took my CDs in was Derek Sivers, who had the great idea for CDBaby in the first place. I told him I came in with a restock, that I had just started selling thru CDBaby. He told me that there are a couple of different types of people who sell thru his site: the first have just wanted to release a record their whole life, and as soon as they do, they don’t really care about selling any, just getting it done so that they could sell it is enough. I understand that a bit, since I was so crazed about getting it done myself.
The second type, like me, actually want to sell the damn things, and that’s a more active stance.
That is where I am now, stuck in how to promote this CD now that I have it. Trust me, its not as much fun as playing music, but if I am as serious about selling as I was in creating, I just have to do the work and figure out how to get more exposure.
One thing I did recently was to get a spot on MySpace.com. This is a huge free network (41 million strong) that apparently every knew about but me. It seems to have lots of uses, from a giant chat place for kids to ways of people promoting themselves for music and god knows what else, and of course links to porn sites. As usual with any public forum, but still….And of course it seems, from a casual perusal, that everyone on MySpace is totally self-absorbed. Maybe I fit right in????
Certainly there is a lot of music on there, and what I did was to get a musicians site, which I guess is different somehow than a personal site. Its quite impressive that you can upload four songs and in just minutes they will be added to your profile in a little custom mp3 player. You can randomize the player, and it starts playing as soon as you hit the page.
There is also a blog on there – like I need another one but hmm, maybe I could make it more general, not as targeted to musicians as this one. Forcing me to write more, and that could be good too.
I took one of my CDs over to a local music store, where I have dropped some cash and it was a positive experience for me. The guys who worked there checked out the cover and artwork, the whole package on my CD, and gave me some great feedback on how professional it looked. I guess they are putting it on the store CD spin, so maybe when I stop in sometime I will hear it. In any event, I felt good about that, again it shows its worth it to have the packaging done professionally.
I have been doing some more work with Jeff too. Its getting a bit more concrete, there is something like half a song done in some fashion now, and we are settling in to some sort of work pattern. At this point it is more like Jeff saying, I want to hear a bit more of this (whatever this may be) at this point, and I am working the computer to fix it, but slowly its evolving.
I have managed to make my XL7 work as a controller for Reaktor and Battery, and for the drums especially this is quite excellent. Hitting my fingers on the pads is way better than pretending to play drums on the keyboard. How I wish I had an electronic drum set, or a hand drum that I could trigger midi from! But these are all out of range for me at this point.
Jeff and I did some work on Saturday, and he brought over a couple of CDs of Egyptian music that featured something I had never heard of before – quarter tone trumpet and saxophone! I was sort of flabbergasted, actually, to hear of such things, I had no idea that they even existed. I knew that middle eastern music has quarter tone accordions (which kick some SERIOUS ass!) but I never knew about the horns.
A quick google search brought me up some interesting things: Don Ellis was quite the quarter tone trumpter, even had a four valve quarter tone trumpet constructed for him. I will have to look into this some more, but of course buying a custom made trumpet for me is out of the question.
However, I did find something else: quarter tone fingering charts for my sax! Now this I may actually be able to pull off, and it just gets me that after all these years I could possibly play more notes on my beloved Martin tenor – can’t wait to try this. I am actually listening to some quarter tone sax now, and sure enough it does have that wonderful minor tonality I love so much in music from the middle east.
Cool!
That’s it for the moment. I get together with Jeff again Tuesday, and hopefully more progress from there. Stay tuned, and hey, buy my CD – makes a great Hanukkah gift!