Try-out

I invited a twenty-one-year old bass player from Yorshire, UK to join me and K for a couple of hours in the studio last night. It was the first time K and I had played with a bass player in about a year. The guy, named Jon, is a riff-hungry player who doesn't hear his lines so much as he feels them. And he likes to play them hard and driving all the time. It's exactly the sort of thing K listens to. Something approaching heavy metal. It's exactly not the sort of thing I listen to or write. I showed Jon one part of a bass line, which had chromatic passages; and, although he's a quick learner, he had to admit that he had never played anything like that before. I told him I heard the line in my head and that's why it came out like it did. Jon had a great attitude, but I wonder how far we could go together. He might get impatient with my melodic playing, as I'm sure K does often. Both these guys like to play on pure testosterone. After working with DuBois for a number of months, I found it taxing to have to sing over loud drums, bass, and electric guitar. I sometimes wonder if it's worth the trouble to play at that volume. Studio rental, vocal strain. And Jon's situation in Japan is unclear. I'm not sure what he's doing here. He didn't even bring his bass to Japan with him, so I had to bring mine for him to play. K was understandably ecstatic about Jon's playing, but there is a big layoff in front of us, since I'll return to the States for six weeks, and a number of unanswered questions, chief of which: does Jon even want to return and play with us again?

From the Home Studio

The challenge this month is to see if I can perfect demos recorded at home so that all that remains for them to be album-ready is mastering at Chimpanzee Studio. Recording at home is less expensive and less stressful and, since my home studio is one half of my kitchen, if ideas come to me, I don't even have to dress properly to get them recorded.

I woke up with a melody in my head on the morning of February 28. In a meeting the next day, I wrote four verses of lyrics based on the melody. I was able to make a preliminary recording of it, which Kei offered some percussion tracks to; but that first stab at a demo was marred by poor timing and a few patchy performances. Moreover, the whole concept of the rhythm section remained vague. All these problems were resolved willy-nilly by the crash of the Garageband software, which has a few well-known bugs. The bug I encountered shuts down the program, with the possibility that one cannot reopen it, when one is looping a section to repeatedly perform a given part. So, if one has a large project at hand, it's best not to record in that manner. It's best to give it one shot, stop the recording, and start again at the beginning of the passage.  So, the first demo project was completely lost, including all its imperfections. All that remained were some of the individual files that I fished out of my hard drive and an MP3 of an earlier version of the project. Not to be discouraged, I started from scratch yesterday and completed a full demo this afternoon. Gone are the timing problems and other imperfections. This is the exact sort of thing I need in order to streamline the recording process.

The song, "DS," started as a simple melody in my head, but the main line was suggested by a comment a friend made. One of my friends said she loves drinking wine and can easily drink half a bottle. Her frank attitude impressed me, especially in light of all the pressures of conformity and self-restraint that Japanese women experience.

After I go through this process of moving a demo through the mastering phase, I will be ready to tackle the demos that Kei and I put down at Chimpanzee last month. I consider this a warming-up or preliminary exercise.

In Chimpanzee Studios on February 11 to record drum and bass parts for "D" and "LB," which took four-and-a-half hours to complete. The rest of the parts for these songs will follow in the weeks ahead.
Moving over to the less expensive Shebeen Studio.

Six-month goal

By some freak of fortune, the practice studio K and I use is named after a source of nourishment cherished by the creature who lends its name to our recording studio. Banana / Chimpanzee: the two businesses are entirely separate from one another. In hindsight, the jungle metaphor probably should have worked itself into our group name so that we'd feel at home while swinging from one to the other.

K and I returned to Banana last week. I have relearned the bass parts for the songs D and LB and thereby re-acquired calluses on my fingertips (which are slightly different than the ones I already had for guitar). I'm itching for some quality recordings, the key to which is first setting down strong bass and drum tracks at Chimpanzee. The rest can be done at home. We have six completed songs for the album that have not yet been satisfactorily recorded, and it feels now as if they are standing in the way of our completing new material. Getting these songs recorded should be the goal of the next six months.

The song LB, I realized, was first recorded at too high a pitch for me or K to sing comfortably. So, I cranked my guitar down one whole step this afternoon and, playing it, wondered why I hadn't thought to lower the key earlier; say, before we performed the song last July. Rather than reconfigure the bass and guitar parts, I think I'll just tune the instruments down to the low-tension setting. If this results in less psychological tension in the song itself, which is required by the subject-matter, then it will have to be created by some other means. (It turned out that playing one half step down did the trick.)

Merry Christmas Almost Everyone

     This video is a pastiche of photos I took from a recent trip to the national park in Kirishima, a few from my time in France, and video of various guitarist friends in London or Saintes-Maries-de-la-mer or of fellow performers at a cultural festival Kei and I played at a couple of weeks ago. The masks were on display in Kirishima. To make this, I spent 5 percent of my effort writing the song, which took a day to do, minus a little air-brushing of the lyrics; 90 percent of it recording it under circumstances that were akin to a person being asked to engage an enemy at the helm of a tank for whose use he has no prior training; and, then, in a dash to attach images to the sound, the final 5 percent scouring through the contents of my hard drive.
     It was pointed out to me that no overtly Christmas imagery appears in the video. Fair enough, and I did skip over some Christmas tree shots and the like; but having the word "Christmas" appear three or four times in the song lyrics suffices, doesn't it? Who needs to see more of Santa, reindeer, snowmen, wrapped presents, illuminations and need I say more? The relentlessly rehashed imagery is part of the tyranny of Christmas music; it's as if the world's collective imagination hits a snow patch in mid-December. Besides, in keeping with the lyrics, the spirit of Christmas is something you've got to earn, and you can see me and Kei busting our butts here in the chilly bay-side air of a Kagoshima December, so don't say that this year we didn't try!

     Musicians who appear in the video: James Walton Ingham (opening guitar sequence); Gregorio Ibor-Sanchez (guitarist in flamenco trio); Ayako Ichiki (solo section violin) and Azumi Tanaka (solo section keyboards); Emile Ogoo (second guitar break); and Mohamed Niang (djembe).

DIY recording

Catching a wave of creativity, I booked studio time last week at Chimpanzee with the intention of recording the basic tracks of a spanking new song. My hope was to get the acoustic guitar and vocals down before telling K about it and to surprise him with a quality recording that he could enhance with percussion.

This plan of secrecy fell apart. First, in attaching the demo MP3 to an e-mail on the day before I was to record, I mistakenly sent it not to the studio hand, YY, but to our former bass player... of all people. It was only hours later, well into Tuesday night, that I noticed the error and sent the file in the right direction. The next morning, while walking toward the studio accompanied by Janey, a Chinese exchange student at our school who had come along to see what a recording studio is like, I proposed we stop first at a convenience store within view of the studio. We still had 20 minutes to blow. As we set our stuff down behind a parking block, I heard my name called out and, looking up, saw K sitting in his car about 10 feet from me. There were no other cars in the lot. It's a sparsely peopled area. The studio is in the middle of a giant rice field surrounded by mountains. OK, so many places in Japan can be described that way; but this is truly an out-of-the-way location. It took me well over an hour to get there by bike the one time I hazarded a trip on two wheels. K had made a lunch stop at the convenience store on his way between point A and point B and it was a shocking coincidence that he was parked near the studio as we approached it. K travels the length and breadth of the prefecture regularly for purposes of customer relations. 

So much for the idea of recording in secret, since the gods of fate seemed opposed to it, but something worse wrecked the intended surprise: the three-hour session went horribly. 

After I put a first, imperfect guitar performance down, YY said that I needed to play with the click track. Well, I never play with click tracks and don't like having to think about them. Furthermore, there is so much rhythmic variation in the song I was performing that no 4/4 click track was going to keep me on pace even if I played along with it exactly. YY assumed that if I just overrode the click track for a few measures here and there, it would eventually fall back into place. Alas, the world of music does not all revolve around 4/4 time. After he acknowledged the incompatibility, what ensued was a good hour and forty-five minutes of his trying to edit my performance by shifting sounds around like some kind of chemist in a lab. He wanted to create a click track out of my guitar sounds that would reflect the 3/4 measure here, 5/4 measure there, or string of triplets that occurs three separate times in the song. The problem with this plan is that YY did not understand the rhythm he was trying to match it up to. Another 30 or so minutes melted away as he backed away from his computer screen and tried with pencil and paper to analyze the three poly-rhythmic sections. This led nowhere. After a long stretch of waiting in the hallway, strumming my guitar while Janey sat studying a textbook, I interrupted YY's analytic session, saying there were only 20 or so minutes left before we had to leave since Janey had a part-time to get to. Upon this, YY showed a stroke of boldness or, rather, desperation. He asked me to perform the song, playing and singing at the same time, just as I had done at home. I did this passably, but with not as much success as in my kitchen. Then, in the final minutes, all that was left to do was to record the pianica part. YY then burned a CD of this hastened recording while finishing up some kind of commercial project he had started for another customer the day before. I trashed the CD after reaching home without once listening to it. It was a useless token for the time and money handed over like some kind of charity offer to Chimpanzee.

That whole endeavor, three hours in the studio, cost me the equivalent of 135 US dollars. Unless its purpose was to convince me that using this studio is a giant waste of time and resources, it seems that I was ripped off. However, I am now convinced.

The problem here is the entire approach to music. You come into the studio as a living, breathing musician with dreams in your hands and lungs and you need to warm up and get yourself going and feel inspired and what do you run into? A nice guy who works like an intimidated, myopic technician. He asks you for a single performance, anything approximating your song idea will do. Then he obsesses over the "piano roll view" editing screen on Pro Tools. Not a thought is giving to nurturing or challenging the performer to improve. Very little time is even reserved for performing. In three hours, I must have played for no more than 8 or 10 minutes, and most of that was in the vain dash for the finish line as time expired. The rest of the "session" was consumed by YY's noodling around with software. Apparently, the purpose was to perfect my first take, or to create a rhythmic template out of it, so that I could listen to it while playing a second time, but why not just ask me to replay it? Why not listen to the whole song and think about its intention and how best to capture that intention rather than just focusing on the click track?

This is the same YY who advised me earlier in the year to purchase 750-dollar software that was incompatible with the Pro Tools he knows I use. Another punch in the wallet. YY is a very nice guy, but he has to be one of the most expensive acquaintances a person can have. Give me four girlfriends over this guy, a wife and three kids, and call me better off by comparison.

Since that miserable experience at Chimpanzee, I rediscovered my damn-it-all attitude and have produced a far better demo at home than I did the first time or than the hastened studio product that YY used to appease me. K and I may have to return to the studio if we are going to record a full drum set, but I would rather stay away from that place and dig my own creative holes if that's what it comes to.

The thing is, the software can be an impedance when you feel inspired and just want to get your ideas down before they disappear. So, while continuing to learn Pro Tools, to capture song ideas, I still turn to GarageBand, which is bundled with any Mac.

Good terrace

"Good terrace" is the (literally translated) name of the performance hall Kei and I performed at tonight. It's a large space that constitutes the 10th floor of a building that rises to perhaps 12 or 13 floors and that has an easy-access steel stairwell with a mesh-like appearance that allows one to take in the surroundings while trying to catch one's breath. The view of the city and volcano is eye-boggling.  Tonight's event was put on by some kind of non-profit organization that organizes cultural activities of various sorts. The theme tonight was 異文化交流, which could be brutally translated as "cultural exchange with otherness." There was a real variety of performers, everything from a guy whose mother is Japanese and father is German lecturing about German Christmas songs to a performance on koto and shakuhachi by two accomplished, elderly musicians. There were some folk bands, some dance routines, some Americans playing Christmas tunes, a magician, and I don't know what else. But there was us, playing our songs, including MCAE, a song that was written for the show. MCAE is a bit difficult to play because of some tricky time changes, and because it is only about 10 days old as I write, but being able to play a song in front of a fairly sizable audience (80-90 people) only days after having put it together was itself a pleasure that exceeded any concern for perfection. This is the kind of band I want to be in -- one that produces new material and embraces it courageously. I don't think more than 3 or 4 people heard the demo to that song before we played it. I haven't checked the recording of our live performance yet; doubtless there are few rough spots -- lyrics garbled, rhythm hacked -- but it was satisfying to get the song out there for others to hear and to feel our way through it. I read somewhere that Dylan wrote "Who Killed Davey Moore?" about a week before it started charting in the U.S. In the 1960s, musicians could write music about current events and circulate it as part of the ongoing commentary. With the onslaught of corporate radio, Clear streaming, and payola, that sort of spontaneity in radio waves has essentially disappeared. However, spontaneity still exists wherever people make music and bring it to stage without any suits standing in between them and the public.

For the first time, we played a fingerpicking style instrumental. This is one thing that having a bass player in the band did not allow us to do. So, you lose something when you lose one of three members, but you also gain something. That's not to criticize anyone, it's just to point out the obvious paradox, which Vladimir Jankélévitch cleverly called "the eye-obstacle." By this he meant that while our eyes allow us to see, they are also the reason why we cannot see further, or better. They limit us as they enable us, necessarily. Of course, he only used the eye as a metaphor. The concept is far-ranging. Just not infinitely so.