PB006 - A Musical Postcard

Last week I was on holiday in a forest, by a lake, just outside Berlin. As I’ve been doing for a while now I took my baby guitar with me. This time – slightly ridiculously – I also brought my new keyboard. Instead of the drum machine I’d normally bring, I had some drum sticks, a microphone and an 8-track recorder.

Here’s a song I recorded.

Recording this in a new place and with limited equipment has made me think about a topic I’m endlessly fascinated with: the conditions which impact how likely I am to do something, and how I do it. Here it is applied to music, but I think a lot of the ideas below map to other aspects of life.

Small Obstacles

Last time I moved house I swapped a broken, untunable upright piano I’d got off Freecycle for a brand new, beautiful keyboard which replicates the Fender Rhodes electric piano sound I adore so much. I love it, but it takes about 30 seconds to turn on. This fact has meant I play the piano much less than I used to. Or at least I play it fewer times. I no longer play for those 30-second bursts as I walk past it to the kitchen, or whilst the kettle boils.

At a similar time I realised I had a slight condition with my hands and so swapped my acoustic guitar for a Baby Taylor. It is so light to pick up and walk around with, so easy on your hands, that I immediately started playing guitar 10 times as much.

Location

Going somewhere new seems to be a great way to encourage making something new. Friends have said this to me directly and I’ve heard it echoed by many well-known musicians.

Part of this is the inspiration that a particular location provides. I think most people would veer away from hard dance music whilst sat alone in the dappled sunlight, nestled between silence, birdsong and forest. Maybe you can hear the relationship between this photo and the song?

But it is equally to do with the simple fact of being away from home. Being separated from ‘normal’ life and being largely unable to carry out the responsibilities of that life – work, cleaning or just keeping up with friends. It becomes much easier to commit an unbroken block of time to making something – knowing that anything else I ‘should’ be doing will just have to wait.

Instruments

The instrument you play obviously dictates the sound you make, but over time I’ve realised how much it impacts how I think about music and what I’m likely to make.

Guitar

I think the guitar is so persistently popular because you can access rhythm, melody and harmony with relative ease. For a particular type of music – in a western rock tradition – you can really give the sense of a complete song on a single instrument. Guitars make chords easy, but it is very much pattern-based. I find when I play guitar I will naturally make up new chord progressions, but will play each chord in a fairly predictable way.

Whilst it may not be as expressive as say, a saxaphone, sonically, a guitar can produce endless variations of sound, adjusted directly with your hands. Micro-variations in timing, how hard you pick or strum, fully or partially muting strings with your palm or fingers, picking pattern, vibrato or tremolo by moving your hand after the note is played. You can create a distinct groove by combining melodic sounds with percussive sounds.

Piano

On a piano you can play even more notes (10 rather than 6) and they are laid out in a single straight line. I find it easier to experiment with different chord voicings, so playing with harmonic complexity is very intuitive. I can more quickly add nuance and variation to a chord progression on a piano than on a guitar.

However, the sound of any one note is more or less limited to how hard you press the key, so expression within a melodic line is much more limited. It is also more difficult to make percussive sounds.

Synthesisers

Synthesisers contain all the expressive variables of a guitar – and more – but they are accessed by settings, not movements. To adjust the vibrato speed and depth on a synth you turn knobs - to achieve what an untrained guitarist can do instinctively by wiggling their finger. 

It is much easier for a guitarist or saxophonist to intuitively express a subtle, personal emotion – approaching what a singer can – than most electronic music.

The use of knobs and settings has another impact: they allow and force you to hear sounds you weren’t intending to make. Moving from one position on a knob to another means passing through everything in between. It also allows you to just twist it back and forth to see what happens. 

Both of these give you ‘happy accidents’ that are much broader in range than would happen on a guitar or piano. You make a weird sound and think, ‘that’s actually great’. Sometimes you can recreate it, sometimes you can’t.

Drums

Drum machines naturally create perfectly timed rhythms with every hit landing exactly on the beat. For this song, I just recorded myself hitting various things I found at the house. Speaking generously, it is all a bit loose. But everything else falls in line with the drums. The slightly off beats create different pockets for the other instruments to fall into, so the whole song takes on a different feel.

Online electronic producers often talk at length about trying to create an ‘organic’ feel in drum rhythms – something that happens automatically when you just hit things with a stick.

Equipment & Process

Instruments guide you down certain paths of musical experimentation. Similarly, instruments and recording equipment guide you towards a certain process and in turn song structure. Over the last few years I have actively bought equipment based on achieving the perfect process, not the perfect sound.

Structure

Drum machines are invariably loop-based. Most electronic music equipment supports some kind of syncing so that different devices will stay in time and loop with each other. This naturally draws you down a path of a song structure which is based on a relatively short, single loop that gradually evolves by adding layers and changing settings. This, I think, encourages in electronic music a foundation in structural complexity – builds & drops – which in turn plays to bigger, more collective emotions like euphoria over the subtler moments of bliss or sadness you might find in a more expressive instrument.

Conversely, a guitar or piano allows you to easily change between sections of a song – verse, chorus, say – in a way that most drum machines would need you to either pre-program (if possible) or stop ‘playing’ to make the change to a different section.

This difference in tendency for, say, techno to be based around long evolving loops and, say, rock to be based around a verse and chorus, has of course been acknowledged, leant into, and at times subverted, but it stems from the technology used to produce each one.

Recording

Recording directly into a computer allows maximum opportunity for attaining perfection – copy and pasting a particularly well-performed section, removing or adjusting individual notes, surgical EQing, an entire universe of effects. All the interfaces involved pull you towards micro-adjustments and it becomes very easy to spend hours on the precise sound of a kick drum rather than make any changes to the actual ‘song’. 

This is important to lots of music but it’s somehow different to playing music. I actually really enjoy this process but I feel the need to recognise it as different.

My 8-track recorder is far more limited. It only has 8 tracks. If I want to free some up I have to bounce some together onto one track, after which they are stuck as one lump. It is possible to apply some limited effects but it is clunky and not fun. I can re-record a particular bar that I messed up, but it’s impossible to cut out or move an individual note.

All of this encourages you to work out what to play, then play it. If it’s wrong, rather than fix it, practice it and re-record. Pursuit of a perfect mastered sound is folly, so I accept it as flawed / lo-fi and move on. It encourages getting a relatively complete idea finished in a short time frame – over using one session to really nail one aspect of a song.

You can see why musicians are still attracted to a simple set-up that can be used to bash out a demo – quickly getting the sense of satisfaction from a completed thing. And also why musicians and fans alike are often attached to the demo versions of songs – not polished but retaining the immediacy of those first few takes.

Outro

So that’s the song: a relaxed, sun-drenched jam. Lo-fi, with background noise. A wonky drum loop with single takes of each instrument – sometimes aligning, sometimes not so much. 

Would this have happened at all if I hadn’t been on holiday? Probably not. Would it have come out noticeably different if I’d done it in a different place with different equipment? Definitely.

These are just some examples of how our environment impacts what we do. Taking a broader view, we should think about this stuff more often. How does the room layout change my behaviour? What small obstacles can I remove to encourage me to do this thing? And to get back to my obvious bug-bear – how does the technology and the decisions of its designers impact the way I think and behave.

Please Share 🙏 

Have a think if anyone you know would enjoy this… another musician perhaps?

Bye

Enjoy the bank holiday. Free Palestine 🍉 

PB x