“… Not Because They Are Easy ...”

“… but because they are HARD!”

So said JFK at Rice University, Texas in September 1962. He was talking about the enormity of inventing the as-yet-uninvented technology required for a future moon-trip. I’m happy to appropriate his words to describe how, six months after I began the New Big Plan (and this blog), I’m still faffing around, recording my first song.

I’ve had a rare, full week in the studio (no trips, mainly free-time). Blague Central has a new sign up and I’ve been able, purely through “showing up” regularly, to get a bit of momentum going and predictably, delightfully, craft has begun to turn into art. Here’s a clip from last night’s efforts.

I’ve kept a recording log since Album One (of course I have) in order to know how to recreate an old sound in the future (“Tuesday: Strat – Pod 3 – Edge Power – Analogue Delay”). Even so, the new studio set-up (iMac + I/O box + control surfaces) defeated me for part of the week; without my old patchbay-ful of Aux. outs, in trying to make a special effects track, I struggled to physically send anything into my Line 6 delay pedal and on to a new recording track. I managed in the end – a soloed track (one of the jangly guitars) sent via a headphone output, then patched back in. As with many such sounds recorded in the heat of battle, I’m not sure I’d know how to do it again.

Anyway, you can hear I’ve at least been able to recapture a bit of that old super-saturated analogue delay “noise” with which I swamped many songs on my first two albums. Some artists are instantly recognised by their fantastic voice or signature guitar playing. With me, it’s that fabulous way I fiddle with the “feedback” knob on my delay pedal. Clearly a superskill.

So the “HARD” bit I’ve re-encountered this week is just how much work is required, how many tiny bits of music need to be written, learned, voiced, played, edited and at some future point, placed in the mix – and that’s all just for one song.

I spent today creating guitar & Rhodes piano plinky-plonk melody line, which will sit quietly in the background of the verses, just a splash of colour. I see from the diary it was only Session 21 in these six months of trying. It’s like shifting the Sahara with a teaspoon.

But Oh! The Joy when you get it right. I’d forgotten that bit too. 

So yes, “We choose to go to the moon …”

On The Road

"Amateurs wait until they feel like it; Pros just turn up every day and get on with it.”

The War of Art - Steven Pressfield

It's all gone a bit quiet at Blague Central this month; lots of work travel which sadly means not much music production.

I’ve spent the year so far attempting to consistently live life “The Artist’s Way”, despite all the usual real life getting in the way. I added in “Dry January”; a concept containing enough power to easily carry me through a month of abstinence and beyond (the Dry Drinker shopful of 0% name-beers is a great help!).

The resulting better sleep, if nothing else, has led to brighter days of occasionally feverish activity across all fronts, musical and otherwise, from early morning into late-evening, (traditionally non-productive time where any alcohol is involved.)

Knowing vacuum-abhorring nature the way I do I took the opportunity this extra energy provided, to crack TWO nuts which had beaten me for the past thirty years of on-the-road living.

I’ve long-frequented the various hotel gyms I find on my travels and skipped evening bar sessions to jam in a run along unfamiliar streets. Time is always tight and whilst others would more sensibly be out and at it at 6am, I had NEVER managed it before dusk! (I found myself shuffling past The Parthenon in Athens as the sun set last night.) From waking I seemed to need a day of decreasing lethargy/increasing guilt to drive me into shorts and trainers. Well it’s all change now, let me tell you!

Idly searching the app store last month for a simple workout-log, I stumbled across what seems to be the perfect personalised exercise app: 8FIT. I was clearly ready to make this small leap into near-daily High Intensity Interval Training (thank you Dr Michael Mosley) and this little pestering, phone-based reminder is all I needed to push me over the edge with minimum extra effort. I now find myself tipping out of bed, straight into P.E. kit and performing timed repeats of press-ups or "mountain climbers" (who knew?). Under fifteen minutes later, hot, wiped-out and smug-as-a-cyclist, the day has a new face. In case it hasn’t been said enough times already, if the positive effect exercise has on your mind and energy levels were available in pill-form, it would sell by the billion.

So. Clear-headed, time to burn and even my non-existent abdominals in danger of tightening, if not Living THE Dream, I was certainly Living A Dream. Yet there was still one thing missing.

After decades of attempts to take my songwriting and production with me on the road, one evening in a hotel room in Abu Dhabi a couple of weeks ago, I think I may have finally cracked it, in the most obvious way. 

Since my studio now revolves around a big iMac, it takes mere seconds to save a Logic song folder to a memory stick and load it up on my old Macbook Pro, thus allowing me to take my entire studio multitrack masters (as I might once have called them) away with me, in my rucksack! Back in that room on my first free evening I set up Blague Central Mobile on a corner of the desk. With earphones and the AKAI Professional LPK25 keyboard I’d remembered to pack, I spent a couple of blissful hours recording melodies I’d previously hummed or whistled into my phone.

Once home of course I can transfer this new file to the studio Mac and simply carry on recording tracks. I’d like to think for most people reading this, such behaviour is very old hat indeed, but for me, twenty-five years after I first threw a recording Walkman and a gig-bagged Strat in the back of the van, on the off-chance I’d be inspired one free evening, this is a game-changing, soul-saving, habit-forming, life-affirming technical wonder of the modern age!

That Old Black Magic

I’m no U2-apologist but since Under A Blood Red Sky days I have to admit I’ve coveted THAT Black Strat and found something deeply satisfying about a lightly overdriven, heavily delayed, clanging guitar sound (my own finest BTF moment, homage-verging-on-plagiarism, was the lead break in Yes, We Are Having A Good Time Now).

Even if a new song of mine doesn’t demand such a track, I often start the guitar writing process simply by firing up that kind of sound (Line 6 PODs or if I’m really keen, AC30 and Line 6 green stomp box) pressing “R” for “Record” and jangling madly along. A few quick takes of that on a fledgling recording can often focus the mind nicely and spawn half-a-dozen new ideas as well as inducing that head-on-fire, fleeting mania which in my teens was enough reason and reward for ever getting involved in music in the first place.

Whilst there were more than a couple of weak spots I wish I could change in my second album, generally songs like the aforementioned YWAHAGTN represent “Me”, more or less at my “peak”. Like it or not, sorry but that’s it; words, music, that’s about as good as I get. If I insist on doing another album, it begs the question: how on Earth do I top that? More of the same but better? It’s tricky.

Michael Palin, in the BBC’s 1989 OMNIBUS Monty Python 20^th anniversary documentary, Life of Python, considered the difficulty of writing a third series after they clearly hit their stride in the second; his brow furrowed as he stared into the middle-distance and said,

“That was the best time, before we got self-conscious… suddenly we’ve ‘broken new barriers in comedy’ and we all went a bit quiet then”.

To limit my own self-consciousness and avoid becoming lost amongst the near-infinite choices of instrument and arrangement the modern tech. allows (and maliciously encourages!), I have long-since employed a pretty strictly limited palette, based on my idealised band line-up (fundamentally, guitars, bass, drums, Hammond, Rhodes, Mellotron strings, flutes & choir –  a 1973 Pink Floyd minus the widdling synths). This keeps me focused and forces the “creativity” to come from what is played, (and it IS played, not programmed) not from hours and hours of scrolling through sound patches, (however delightful and comforting that undoubtedly is.)

The icing on my Productivity Cake™ is to make a TEMPLATE in Logic. Not just the list of pre-labelled empty tracks, but all inputs & outputs set on the Focusrite i/o box, pre-wired and ready to go. Need to thrash down a quick electric guitar track? Plug guitar into Pod 2, click “R” on Track 11, play! It’s that fast. In my previous hard-disk-recorders-based studio, it took me twenty minutes or more to set up each individual track. The joy of eliminating such creativity-killing faff is tempered by the potential for instant and infinite retakes which can suck the soul out of the art.

New Rule Number 6: Don’t give yourself the option!

“I’m A Perdoocer Now!”

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’s Douglas Adams was fond of quoting Ernest Hemingway (among many others):

“Writing is easy; you just stare at the paper until your forehead bleeds!”

For the solo music producer, the blank sheet of paper is an empty multitrack recorder, but the principle is the same.

Something I hadn’t quite banked on last month when I raced headlong into my New Big Plan (initially, to record and digitally release the first of my new batch of songwriting), was that aside from having not written a new song in the past seven years, never mind done any producing/arranging, I also hadn’t played Hammond organ, or Rhodes piano, or drums, or electric guitar, or, of course sung an entire song through since I last did those live radio promo sessions and acoustic nights (as the duo version of Bikini Test Failure, out-harmonising the Everlys with my pal Tim.)

I’m presently, discovering daily just how far my skills have dropped.

To compound this ineptitude, I’ve decided the catchy little brass riff intro I wrote for my first new recording, Uncomplimentary can’t possibly be done with samples, like THIS, but instead I must learn to play enough of both the trumpet and trombone to at least have a stab at creating some real brass magic as my cousin Alan previously effortlessly did on my old BTF track Millions.

For now, I’m still stuck recording the first proper track: drums!

Determined to link the old ways with the new ways, my new Logic-with-real-faders setup allows me to treat my studio in exactly the same way as I did when the medium was 16-track, 1-inch tape. Back then, we’d have striped one track with SMPTE timecode, triggered a Casio RZ-1 drum machine as a click and set off into the great emptiness with a rhythm acoustic guitar guide track. Things have barely changed, but now simply selecting “Metronome” in the control bar saves a precious half-hour’s set-up.

With the basic chords and a good first attempt at the song structure in place, it’s time to really play some drums. As the world’s most enthusiastic non-drummer, my now-old Roland TD6 kit, triggering the wonderful Native Instruments AbbeyRoad 60s drums allows me to thrash away, vaguely in time, hopefully coming up with fills, pushes and crashes driven by my feel for the acoustic guitar track and knowledge (so far) of what the song will do; interesting and natural drum parts which I’d like to think I would never have invented had I just relied on the keyboard or mouse.

That said, I then necessarily spend a few minutes picking all the chaff out of the wheat before I move on to the magic ingredient: real, live-played, stereo-recorded hi-hats and ride. My aviating, drumming, fellow-self-employed, pro-photographer pal Phillip – he’s the chap walking away from RAF Duxford’s Tiger Moth in the sleeve photos on my last album - loaned me some of his spare brass-ware about 15 years ago and I’ve used them ever since. (It’s surely time I bought them from him.)

This neat little trick, unquantizable, live rhythm tracks wandering around against a solid backbeat have allowed my records to stand out against other “project studio”, one-man productions. It’s never something the casual listener need care about, but somehow that extra bit of human-playing can lift a production.

Alas even here, this week I’m finding the simple task of hitting a bit of flat metal with a little stick of wood, eight times-a-bar in a regular fashion, ever-so-slightly beyond me. Looking at the audio track I can easily see I’m consistently out. I’ll spend an hour double-checking it’s not a monitoring problem (I’ve got far too much choice of monitoring with the Focusrite box's controller) but ultimately, I think I’ll find when I get to the end of laying down the initial tracks on this first song, I’ll need to redo these instruments I played poorly at the beginning.

New Rule Number 5: Two steps forward…