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…
