Jack Of All Arts

Gender and Singers

2011-07-07T05:45:00.000-07:00

When songs are written in first person, they are always sung someone of the same gender as the "speaking" character. I only noticed this a few years ago when I heard a counter-example by a relatively obscure synthpop band (G.L.M. by Thou Shalt Not). At the time, it seemed like a clever, experimental thing to do, but I forgot about it fairly quickly.

Recently, my interest and pursuits in Irish Traditional Music (which have been overwhelmingly directed toward instrumental dance music) have brought me into contact with the Irish ballad community...which, in striking contrast to every musical community I've encountered thus far, seems to attach no significance to whether the gender of the song's singer matches that of its character. When I was searching for different versions of The Maid of Culmore, a romantic lament told from a male perspective*, I found it performed by a slew of both male and female performers, the most popular at present being a version by Cara Dillon. This gender ambivalence appears to be the rule rather than the exception.

In addition to making me aware that a spectrum exists of how tightly coupled singers and characters are, this really highlights how ingrained we are, as a culture, at one end of that spectrum. Katy Perry's career, I daresay, exists because when she sang that she "kissed a girl and liked it", people interpreted it as a song about lesbian experimentation. If it weren't assumed that the singer and character were the same person, this lyric wouldn't be nearly as evocative. Imagine if this song had been released by a male singer...it would be a very odd understatement of sexuality, wouldn't it? Unless, of course, the male singer was openly gay...but if, like me, you see how that would completely change the context, that only further demonstrates how closely you associate the identities of singers with characters.

This all suggests a number of questions, to which I have no answers. Why is singer-character gender matching the current standard? Why is it different in the Irish ballad community? What's the standard in other folk song communities? Has the standard changed over time, and if so when, how and why? Is the current expectation empowering or restrictive?

*I've only done cursory research into this, but based on the history of gay rights and related attitudes in Ireland, I think it's a safe bet that all traditional ballads involve straight characters.

Holiday Expectations

2011-06-25T00:24:00.000-07:00

I don't think I'm alone in anticipating that my vacations are going to be awesome. I acknowledged, in advance, that there would be some downsides...the six hour plane ride across the Atlantic in this case. But, now that I'm in the thick of my Irish holiday, I find the awesome stuff:lame stuff ratio is skewed the wrong way. I know, abstractly, that I don't sleep as well in beds that aren't my own, but now that's an omnipresent reality...I haven't slept a full night in a week, and it takes me hours, every single night, to fall asleep in the first place. We've spent the past few days in the urban centers of Cork and Dublin, walking everywhere...my calves are in constant pain. We've taken a couple of bus tours (Newgrange/Hill of Tara, and to the Bantry Bay area), which have consisted primarily of sitting and waiting...in the case of Newgrange, not even waiting while driving, but waiting in the visitor center since they limit the number of people at the actual site at any given time. The route and bus combination to Bantry was so bumpy we had to to take anti-naseua meds half an hour in, then could hardly stay awake for the rest of the day. Frankly, we're spending a lot of our time hoping the next destination will be better.


Neolithic art at Newgrange

And yet...we stood in a 5,000-year-old tomb, made of stacked rocks, that has never leaked. (where I received a compliment on my Zelda hoodie while in said tomb...world first?) We heard a pair of Leo Rowsome pipes played in unison by father and son. I've made peace with the combination of milk and tea. We've walked in astoundingly beautiful places.

Taken moment by moment, this whole vacation thing is wildly overrated, but annoyance is ephemeral...I wonder, in a few years, if I'll remember why I was complaining at all. Even if it's 90% chore, I'm thinking the 10% awesome is probably worth it.

Changing (Historical) Perspectives

2011-06-13T19:46:00.000-07:00

If you look back to this blog's archives in late 2009, you'll see that I got into Irish Traditional Music (ITM) in October of that year, at the O'Flaherty retreat. The focus of the retreat is a series of classes focused on your instrument of choice, but each instructor also teaches an "enrichment" class sometime during the weekend - these generally focus on stylistic or historic topics. I distinctly remember expressing surprise to my friend Lisa that the instructors were universally knowledgeable about this sort of thing, and that I didn't generally think of musical performers as the same sort of people as musical historians. Lisa seemed a bit surprised, and informed me that, in this corner of the music world, there was quite a bit of overlap.

I now find myself, on the eve of two-week vacation in Ireland, knee deep in a complete history of the European flute (specifically Ardal Powell's "The Flute"), which is now my Irish instrument of choice. I find myself wondering about the links between the heavily ornamented style of Baroque Art Music and ITM, and I frequently have to stop myself, when meeting new people, from launching into a detailed explanation of how the modern Irish flute derives from the early years of Rudall and Carte and their peers, including digressions into the introduction of the Boehm system and it's relationship to the Irish peasantry's contemporary financial situation, etc., etc., etc.

On Snobbery

2011-06-02T10:14:00.000-07:00

(The following outburst brought to you by: The Backbone Project)

I'm tired of musical snobbery. I think it's wrong...and I don't mean in the sense of, "I disagree with your opinion", I think musical snobbery is objectively flawed, and I have a theory (okay, a hypothesis) stating precisely why and how.

First, let's get a little definition out of the way. By "snobbery," I don't mean people asserting that they don't care for Rock, or Zydeco, or Gregorian Chant, or Elvis Costello. I do mean, when people assert that only one, or a few types of music, constitute "real" music, and anything is a waste of time. The "real" music is often Classical (meaning Western Art Music, but I'll continue to use the colloquial term), but sometimes it's Jazz (I've met a guy who insisted everything is directly derivative of Jazz), or something else...it doesn't really matter what. Few people will make a claim of this sort outright, though I have encountered some, particularly as a music minor in college. I think a majority of people will subtly imply it, though, or otherwise betray it as their underlying attitude (consciously held or not), sometimes dismissing styles they actually like as guilty pleasures. I don't exclude myself - for a long time, that's how I mentally framed my attitude toward Metal, Hip Hop, Punk, House, Country, etc. (some of which I've grown to like, others I haven't...).

More specifically yet, I'm addressing snobbery that dismisses music by asserting that it lacks complexity. In my experience, nearly all slights toward musical styles can be reduced to variations on, "It's all the same," "It has no content," "It takes no or skill or effort to make that kind of music," and more succinctly, "It's boring". These all imply that complexity equals value, and I think that's close enough to true for the purposes of this discussion. That said, i can finally come around to my point:

Any musical style that is sufficiently popular, and sufficiently long-lived, has complexity.

If a style fundamentally lacks complexity, listeners (fans and critics) will get bored and move onto something else. The obvious retort is, the masses tend to be tasteless idiots who wouldn't know complexity if it slapped them in the face. And, I agree that a whole lot of people...the great majority of people...don't care that deeply or think analytically about music, and given a good media blitz, great swathes of the population may become temporarily enchanted by pretty much anything. The mitigating factor is that, for the past few decades at the least, there has been a constant and intense steam of marketing activity pulling those masses on to ever-newer things. So, when a significant number of people are still listening to something over time, in spite of all the hype and advertising attempting to pull them away, I think that's evidence that there's something to the music that's keeping their attention...and that something, whatever it is, is what I'd call complexity.

If you have large sample of people interested in a type of music, a subset of them will try making that type of music themselves. If you have enough of them, some are bound to be relatively talented at it (maybe the distribution is a bell curve, maybe some other shape...but they're going to be distributed, and some will be at the more talented end). Given the incentive to keep at it over time, some of them are bound to take the style as far as it can go, or "master" it. So, assuming that a given style has some complexity, a large number of participants dictate that it's extremely likely that someone will be there with the talent and skill to explore it.

Tangentially, musical complexity can come in many different forms, and I think a lot of snobbery results from people trying to judge all unfamiliar styles of music by the rules of their preferred style. As an example from my experience, Classically trained musicians frequently drop into the world of Irish Traditional Music expecting an amusing diversion. At the risk of overstating my own knowledge, the complexity in Irish music lies primarily in improvised melodic variation, and to a lesser degree variation of ornamentation, rhythm and phrasing. But, all this variation is hung on relatively short melodies, frequently with no harmony whatsoever, and arranged in only a handful of structures (with AABB, repeated a few times, being overwhelmingly dominant). Most of the nuance is invisible to someone new to the style, even a trained musician. Consequently, there's a steady stream of naive Classically-trained musicians (mostly violinists, since they're instrument is phycially the same as an Irish player's fiddle) dropping into the Irish music world, who upon observing the lack of complex harmonies and varied musical structures they're accustomed to, assume the music lacks any sort of complexity. They plunge in and sound absurdly stilted and metronomic to all the established Irish players, who of course are focused on entirely different aspects of the music.

In the big picture, Classical music and Irish Traditional music are actually pretty similar. It's no surprise, then, that Classically-immersed musicians don't tend to appreciate Trance, or House - electronic styles that don't even require live performers, and whose complexity is found in the studio...

The reasonable conclusion, it seems to me, is that Rock, Rap, Country, Metal, Indian Classical, Motown, and yes, even Zydeco, are all "valid" musical styles...they're all complex, even if I, or you, don't understand how. That certainly doesn't mean that everyone should like them, just that no one should dismiss them.

On Finishing

2011-04-30T14:08:00.000-07:00

I feel neurotic when I'm publishing new music. For a day or two before and after I hit the final "submit" button, I'm preoccupied with worries that I need to polish it more, or I missed some glaring technical flaw, or the music just doesn't say anything emotionally. Within a week, I've generally moved on to the next project, the recently published music gets mentally grouped with everything else I've released, and I can return to a state of general optimism about all the music I have yet to write.

I remember a visual artist I knew back in high school expressing a related sentiment...people would offer to buy her work, but she usually couldn't bring herself to sell it, because she never felt finished, and she didn't want to give up the chance to keep working on anything.

Lately, I've shifted to releasing single songs rather than albums, and that seems to help a bit...it's easier to be confident about an artistic judgement call when you've only had to focus your attention on four or five minutes of music, rather than forty-five. Still, it's not my favorite part of the process.

Austin Celtic Festival 2010

2010-11-09T09:57:00.000-08:00

I feel like I've wasted my life. Well, not really, but I kind of did when I got home from the second late night session, having been surrounded by a disproportionate number of extremely talented and skilled Irish Trad musicians. It's amazing how little time you have to spend immersed in an environment like that for it to become your whole world. With some mental effort I have reoriented myself, regaining the perspective that I have been successful in the pursuits I've been at for many years, and Irish music is still very new for me.

That whole "immersive" experience was similar to the O'Flaherty retreat I attended a year ago, but at that time I was starting from scratch, and hadn't built up any expectations. Now that I'm in a position to appreciate what the Festival performers can do, I'm humbled and inspired. I could go on with the florid impressionism, but I want to write all this down while it's fresh in my mind, so let's just start at the beginning...

I arrived at Fiesta Gardens around 9am, when my volunteer shift started. The Festival didn't properly open until 11am, so there was some sound checking going on, and all the vendors were in unpacking and fixing up their tents. I did a couple of odd jobs - primarily cleaning up the workshop trailer and rearranging the fences for the herding demonstration's sheep and geese. Not much came up after that, so for the second half of my shift I mostly wandered the grounds and chatted with early arrivals. The starting time for the uilleann pipe workshop was coming up, so I headed to my car to grab my David Daye starter set, and then back to workshop trailer.

Uilleann Pipe Workshop

I spotted a tall guy wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a long dark coat walking around near the trailer - basically what you get when you run a google image search on "gunslinger" - if you already know who Paddy Keenan is, you too would probably recognize him based on the hat alone - I never saw him without it. A few minutes later, the volunteer running the workshops kicked out the bodhrán group that was meeting before us, as that workshop's leader (who I'd later learn was Paddy League) was pulled off to go perform on one of the stages.

Though some of the later workshops were oversold to the point they had to move outdoors (the trailer was just too small), our group had just three student pipers (myself included) and two prospective pipers who audited the class. I suppose that's the advantage of learning to play an obscure, fantastically difficult instrument.

The fact that there were only three of us playing was a tremendous advantage, in that Paddy's attention wasn't being pulled in too many directions. It was a tremendous liability in that you couldn't slack off lest you get a gentle ribbing from the master piper. On that note, I'd like to dispel a couple of rumors I've read around the internet. First, I've read assertions that Paddy doesn't make his own reeds, but he said during the workshop,"I make my own reeds", in so many words. It's quite possible that in the past he didn't, but in the present tense, he's self-sufficient in the reed department. If you're not familiar with the inner world of uilleann piping, this distinction may seem irrelevant to you, but given how sensitive reeds are (needing constant adjustment when the weather changes), and how time consuming they are to make, it's expected that any piper worth his or her salt will be able to make and tweak their own. Those who don't learn the skill seem to be seen as sort of mooching on the community. I'm not asserting that this is the way it should be, but it seems to be the prevailing attitude, at least here in the online community.

The other rumor I've seen around the web is that Paddy doesn't really have any interest in teaching workshops, and so the best you can expect is to hear him play a few tunes up close. My experience was just the opposite. As we filed into the workshop trailer, I told him I'd only been at it for a couple of months, and that I'd be more than happy to just sit and listen - he said inexperience was fine, and that he's still learning, too. I was the weakest player in the workshop, and after we each played a bit of a tune for him to show where we were, he told me I was basically "doing it all wrong", but he did so in a very good-natured way, and gave me feedback then and throughout the workshop that has led to a major breakthrough in my piping (though it didn't happen until I got home and was able to take my time to synthesize all that he told us). The majority of the workshop was spent learning a tune - Paddy would play a phrase or two over and over while we picked up the melody, and then go into the potential ornamentation and melodic variations. There was far more happening than I could absorb, but he encouraged us to use our audio recorders, so I came away with something to continue working from. He also tried out my chanter at one point, to see if some of my difficulty stemmed from defective equipment - it didn't. In any case, he raised no objections to my Daye chanter, and indicated the reed was quite easy to play (and it was clear in context he meant "easy" in the piping jargon sense, which has a different nuance than in plain language), which seems to me to be a good thing.

I also learned something during this workshop that has little to do with the pipes in particular, and everything to do with the mindset and perspective of good Irish Trad musicians. The tune Paddy taught us includes an F natural (which a standard, keyless chanter like mine is not really designed play - you have to cover half of a hole), and he went out of his way to point this and out and discuss it's importance and execution. He didn't use terms like "key signature" or "accidental" - he talked about "coloring" the note. Elsewhere in the tune, he mentioned how you could hold a single note in place of a short melodic sequence (standard tune variation stuff within the ITM idiom), but that you'd have to "color" it, too, and from the context of the conversation, I think that could have involved any number of articulations, slides/bends, etc. I was already aware that there was a difference in the way the classical music and trad music worlds thought about the music, but this was great insight into exactly how they differed. I'm used to thinking of ornamentation in addition to the notes, and any pitch not in the predetermined key signature as changing the harmonic context of the music - I think I'm a little closer to being able to see these things from the Trad perspective now, as nuanced variations on a musical thought. For the past year, I've been working on freeing myself from dependence on written notes (i.e., learning by ear), and this sort of experience furthers my resolve - it's not just the rhythms of Irish music that you can't get off the page (as is often told to aspiring converts from the classical idiom), but the whole feel of the melodic line - you can break off elements like "ornamentation" and discuss them, but there is absolutely no substitute for listening. And, really, why should there be?

(Sometime in the next week or so, I'll be posting a video in the YouTube series where I'm chronicling my learning process - if you're interested in the gritty, technical details I got out of the workshop, I plan to go into more detail there.)

Concerts, Concerts, Concerts

The Festival technically has four stages - two of them are used primarily for workshops, lectures, and dancing, but two are exclusively for bands to perform on. The larger of the two is, ironically, terribly suited to this purpose in some respects. When the sun is out, everyone on stage is backlit, often to the point of being nothing be silhouettes from the audience. More critically, if you get decent seats (I'd guess there are 500 or so set up, and none really bad), the sound reinforcement is painfully loud. I've stood in the back, near the sound desk, and of course it sounds great from there - the awful conditions in the middle of the audience certainly owe something to proximity to the speakers, but may be exacerbated by the cavernous bare metal roof over the stage. The festival grounds stretch a fair distance East-West, but the bulk of the action really takes place here at the West end, where the grounds widen out, and the stage is ringed by vendors of all types. You don't have to be a dedicated listener to catch the acts that play here - you can hear quite clearly while you're shopping or grabbing a bite.

A few minutes' walk over a wooden footbridge to the East lie the remaining three stages, a couple of permanent buildings (housing a temporary bakery and the Gaelic League), and various demonstrations are strung out across a finger of Ladybird Lake (which is in reality a dammed up stretch of the Colorado river). In the middle of these is the "Pooka" stage, which I'd guess seats a modest 150 or so. I vastly prefer it's more intimate dimensions for fundamentally acoustic music like this.

The problem with the Festival is that there are too many good acts. I spent the majority of both days bouncing back and forth between these two stages trying to catch the majority of the sets. There's always someone playing on one of the two, most of the time there's someone playing on both. As a result, I continuously left midway through one show to catch part of another. I saw roughly ten partial sets over the weekend, missing at least part of the shows by 5 Second Rule, Fingal, John Doyle/Oisin McAuley/Paddy Leauge, John Williams/Jeff Moore, Beyond the Pale and Raising Jane. I only made it through the entirety of four sets. Of course, Paddy Keenan/Tommy O'Sullivan were my top priority, so I made time to catch all of the first, and their Sunday set was the "Dimming of the Day," the closing set of the festival, and no one else was playing at the time. Paddy was constantly tweaking his reeds, and mentioned the dry weather was wreaking havoc on them. I also managed to catch an entire set by the Tea Merchants, a local group I've heard great things about for a long time, but didn't actually see until this festival. Unbeknownst to me, I met the group's bodhrán player at last year's O'Flaherty retreat, and have run into her a couple of times since. Now starstruck at having been pre-acquainted with a famous person, I had to make time for their whole second set (this is, of course, silly - I've been on stage in front of roughly this many people before, and a fair number of my friends do so regularly - nevertheless, I spent the whole weekend in a state of giddiness you'd expect from 14-year-old girl at being able actually talk, person to person, with all these big stars).

Though I hardly had any downtime at all, I missed a ton of the festival. There was a Celtic Rock group, the Prodigals, who played three sets, and I sort of overheard one song from a distance - but, I was in Trad mode the whole weekend, so I wasn't really interested (in a different context, I think I would be). There are a number of sporting events and demonstrations - archery, hurling, and the always-pleasing Highland Games, but I didn't catch more than five minutes of any of these. I saw perhaps ten minutes of the herding demonstration that I helped set up pens for. I stopped in and greeted some acquaintances from the Gaelic League, but just for a minute, and I caught just a glimpse of the Viking Invasion. I'd have liked to see the Irish step dancing, but there just wasn't time. There were quite a few intro-level music workshops that were free to attend and would have been enlightening (most based on instruments I don't play, but it's good to know what everyone else is up to), but again, I couldn't work it into my schedule. I can't say I regret the scheduling decisions I made, but there's just so much going on, I really could have used a clone or time machine.

Role Models

If you were keeping count (you were, right?), you may have noticed that I saw four complete sets, but only listed three of them. The fourth was the second set by flute player Hanz Araki (with fiddler Kathryn Claire and guitarist Cary Novotny), who has provided me with something critical to a student of an instrument - a specific goal. I'm coming to appreciate the importance of this more and more - you can pick up a lot of technique from the general, aggregate pool of traditional music and knowledge, but having a very specific sound in mind as a goal is invaluable. It provides you with motivation, a way to prioritize your practice time, and if recordings are available, examples you can study in detail (luckily for me, Hanz has released three CDs, the most recent of which I'm listening to as I type - plus, there are a number of videos on YouTube to serve as visual references).

When I started out on whistle a year ago, I already had a target sound in mind - it was Joanie Madden's CD that introduced me to Irish Trad over a decade ago (albeit, couched in the New Age sound I was very much into then, but it still served it's purpose as a gateway), and by sheer coincidence, she was at last year's Festival. Now, I have make a confession - a big part of my motivation in taking up the flute was not that I loved it's sound - I certainly didn't have a problem with it, but what I really wanted was a way to get away from the shrill, uncontrollable volume of the whistle's top notes. Since taking up the flute, I've listened to a number of players, and if pressed to pick a role model, I would have named Matt Molloy, but that's really because of his historical significance. I have some of his recordings, and I like them, but I haven't developed a preference for his playing above anyone else's. When I came out of the pipes workshop and I heard Hanz Araki on the main stage, his flute playing spoke to me the way Joanie Madden's whistle did years ago. His tone is focused, his articulation clean and precise, supporting rather than interrupting the flow of the melody. It's awesome, it's emotive, and I want to be able to do it too. I realize that I'll probably never get around to putting in the requisite time, and I may not have the natural talent to get to that level, but if I work toward that end, I think I'll be happy with wherever I end up.

Festival Nights

Most of the out of town performers stay in the same hotel near the Festival site. In the evenings, most of them (along with savvy locals) find their way down to the hotel bar and have a session. If you're unfamiliar with the concept of the Irish session, it resembles what most people would call a jam session, but it has some additional, unwritten rules. You play Irish music, in an Irish style, on an instrument that's part of the Irish tradition, and you only play if you can keep up. Each session has it's own personality, based on the skill level and goals of it's participants, but there are common themes. In some sessions (as was the case here), there's an occasional song.

*more triva: "tunes" are instrumental; "songs" have words - this is a pretty old, established terminology - the notion of an instrumental album track being a "song" is a recent development.

I, along with a few friends (including fiddle and whistle players who are at about the same place as I am in this Irish music journey), spent Saturday and Sunday evening on the outskirts of these sessions, playing along when we knew the tunes and could keep up. All told, I probably totaled about five to minutes of playing time over the eight hours or so we were there - roughly nine o'clock to one in the morning each night - and I'm pushing my luck to claim I could keep up even then. I flubbed a few notes, but I couldn't pass up the chance to play with the pros. The communal nature of the session is largely what drew me into this music in the first place, and the experience was transcendent. On Saturday, Paddy Keenan came down for a bit, and played a few tunes on the banjo, saying it was the first time he'd ever played it in public. This was doubly reassuring, as evidence that the best of the best are as addicted to trying new instruments as I am, and that they do indeed have to go through the same learning process as the rest of us - I was even able to play along (quietly) on Willie Coleman's jig. On Sunday, he brought his pipes down, and I got to hear a full set in a session context for the first time. As I'd expect in the climate controlled environment of the hotel, there was a much less reed tweaking involved than in the outdoor performances.

Fortunately for me, Hanz Araki and his bandmates were at both sessions, pretty much the whole time that I was there. On Saturday, we arrived before the music started, and I got the opportunity to talk to Hanz - later in the evening, he played a tune on my flute (which, serendipitously, is of the same make as his primary instrument), and verified that it is in good working order. I had brief conversations with Hanz's bandmates, Kathryn and Cary, at other times during the weekend, and they were just as sociable. By watching Hanz play during the sessions, I was able pick up some improvments for my own technique - specifically, to keep my fingers closer to the flute when resting, and to reduce flute waggling - Hanz keeps his instrument amazingly still, moving it only when his entire head moves. Of course, these things are intutive and I've read about them before, but there's no substitute for seeing how it should be done.

So, all told, it was a great time, and I'm still recovering. I can't wait until next year. Oh, and a certain drum maker told me they have one of these festivals up in Dallas every March...

The Art of Music Music Overflow

2010-10-13T11:52:00.000-07:00

A year ago, every time I got in the car to go to work, I'd grab one of eight CD cases to provide my music selection for the commute and the workday. Today, those CD cases are collecting dust in the closet, while I carry their collected contents in a 160 gig iPod everywhere I go. I rarely use it in my office, since Grooveshark and Last.fm offer a vastly wider array of music. I know many others made this transition years ago, but I just got around to it, and I think I'm part of the masses in this transition, as opposed to the early adopters.

In any case, I've been thinking about the long-term effects of end of physical media. While reading music blogs, I've encountered a lot of discussion about this subject, but almost all of it is focused on the impact it has on the music business; surprisingly little is said about the artistic impact.

I approach music first as a listener. Deciding how to spend my music budget used to be a big deal - I carefully considered what I would most like to listen to, and I often guessed wrong. Now, the majority of music costs me nothing to hear - money is no longer a limiting factor. In fact, given the vast array of readily available music and my relatively broad tastes, there's no way I will ever get around to listening to everything I might like. I can listen to practically any artist on a whim, and I can choose to filter out all but that artists' best songs (measured imperfectly by popularity and various tagging schemes, but the technology is bound to improve, and already works tolerably well).

What I think this means to artists is that filler is dead. Let me back up, and say that the notion of "filler" is only meaningful from a listener's perspective. Generally, I don't believe artists intentionally release bad music. Most are aware that certain of their songs are better than others, but everyone tries to pick their best to publish. When I started working on my first album, the album format was still very dominant, and based on all of my past experiences as a music fan, I felt a sense of responsibility to give anyone who bought my album their "money's worth." I figured most listeners were like me, owning a limited number of albums, and listening to each multiple times. In that context, adding a decent (but not great) song to an album made it better, by extending the variety and collective play length of its owner's finite music collection. Now that everyone's library is effectively infinite, that kind of song is filler. In other words, when evaluating which of their songs to release, artists should set a higher bar for "good enough."

By extension, the concept of the album is obsolete. A lot of business-oriented articles address this, but from the angle of how to market singles versus albums. I think it's important in that it removes the need for a given number of songs to sound like parts of a whole. If, for artistic reasons, you want to release a collection of 12 songs together, you still can. But, you can just as easily release one song at a time, or three, or 85. I'm planning on taking the singles route, partly out of the desire to be more free with stylistic changes, but moreso because I have found the necessity of creating an album at a time to be paralyzing. I have a job, and other interests - the massive time required to get a set of songs ready at the same time was disruptive to everything else in my life, in a way that working on a song or two at a time is not. I have a backlog of partially finished songs, that were left unfinished at least in part because they didn't fit with the rest of what I had planned for an album. The need to wait for an album's worth of songs to be ready also served as an excuse that I used to give myself permission to finish them - now, there's no barrier.

Small Decisions

2010-08-18T11:15:00.000-07:00

A "simple" problem in music production, for example not being able to understand what a singer is saying (in an otherwise good mix of a song), rarely has a simple solution. In this case, solving the problem might involve carving out frequencies from other instruments and extending pre-delays on reverbs to keep them from obscuring for the vocal line, adding multiple layers of dynamic compression to the vocal track(s), applying EQ to bring out consonants, adding some multi-band compression to reign in the consonants (usually S's) that are now too prominent, and manually tweaking the gain on the remaining few problem spots. This is, in fact, pretty much what I did over the past week to gain a bit of clarity on a vocal line. In my opinion, the end result is an obvious improvement, but each step along the way was a very subtle one.

In my experience, this is the way most of the creative process goes. In writing, arranging, mixing and mastering music, the vast majority of my time is spent making small, difficult judgment calls - very rare is the "eureka" moment where I happen upon the perfect chord that gives a chorus lift, or the right EQ boost to a the kick drum that makes a lackluster beat into a good groove. Those moments happen, and they're thrilling, but they're not representative of how I spend my time in the studio. Of course, those moments make the best stories, so they're what movies, "behind the music" shows, and pretty much any other entertainment-oriented depiction of the creative process is focused on.

My main point isn't that "real life isn't like the movies" - which, of course, it isn't, but most people are aware of that already. My point is that great artists aren't necessarily* great because they're able to spontaneously create fully-formed masterpieces, but because they can consistently and efficiently make many small decisions that lead to an end product - be it a song, painting, screenplay, etc. - that's great.

* I emphasize necessarily because this is precisely what a few geniuses, particularly young prodigies, are known for.

Familiarity, Destroyer of Art

2010-06-17T10:16:00.000-07:00

When I first heard "Try to Remember" (from The Fantasticks, a show in which I recently performed), it moved me - I got a lump in my throat and teared up when I really listened to the lyrics the first few times. Years later, I've rehearsed the show for months, performed it, and sung the song more times than I can count. I still like the song, but after so much exposure, its emotional weight is mostly an abstraction to me. In a couple of weeks, I'm going to start rehearsals for a production of Into The Woods - I've been watching a filmed production of the show, and its effect on me at the moment is very similar to The Fantasticks' in the beginning. When the run is ending in September, I'm sure I'll be looking back fondly on the experience, but I doubt I'll still be getting choked up by the closing number.

I suspect this phenomenon is common to all performers, and perhaps all artists. When writing songs, I have similar experiences. During the initial writing process, I know very clearly when I've hit upon a good idea (according to my own tastes, of course), but once I spend some time developing it into a song, with a bass line, drums, structure, etc., it no longer appeals to me like it did at first.

Perhaps this psychological application of the law of diminishing returns is fundamental to what makes great art hard to create. Most art forms take time and repetition to "polish" to finality, and this numbs the creator's ability to emotionally connect to their own creation. The upside is that time away seems to counteract the numbing effect (eventually leading to nostalgia, I suppose). It takes me months and months (sometimes over a year) to finish a song, because I like to let it sit long enough to forget, then come back to it with fresh ears. Only this process gives me sufficient perspective to really evaluate what works and what doesn't.

Stage Fright

2010-04-15T12:01:00.000-07:00

Since I started taking piano lessons in the 3rd grade, I've had to perform in front of people occasionally. Recently, I've been doing four or five productions each year, so I think I could say I perform fairly often - probably somewhere between 25 and 50 times a year. Despite this, I still get anxious before nearly every performance. This past weekend, we closed a run of The Fantasticks, and a couple of hours before the show each night, I started running my lines and lyrics in my head. I didn't particularly want to - I had no major memory lapses during the whole run - and yet, I still have this lurking fear that my memory is going to completely fail, and so I compulsively run through everything I say and do, again and again, every night. The upside is, once the show has started and I've got the first song/monologue/whatever out of the way, the anxiety fades away and I can have fun.

I suspect different performers have different specific anxieties that manifest as "stage fright." Mine is specifically tied to memorization, and in the process of coping with it, I've learned one particularly valuable lesson - in order to have something (let's say a song, though this is just as applicable to dialog, choreography, etc.) "well-memorized", you don't need to be able to keep the whole song in your head at any given moment. I used to think I did, and while just starting to sing the first verse, would try to recall pieces of the later verses - if I couldn't, I would start to panic, and lose my place altogether. Fortunately, this usually happened in rehearsals, but I did it in a performance a couple of years ago (singing a duet from Phantom as part of a choir concert), and just managed to muddle through singing a mish-mash of verses. Amazingly, most of the audience members and other singers to whom I mentioned it after the performance didn't even notice, or at worst, had thought something might have gone wrong, but weren't sure what. The point is, audiences are incredibly forgiving. They frequently won't even notice minor mistakes, and are more likely to express sympathy for a performer who makes a major blunder than to heckle them. To get back around to the main topic, though, the most valuable thing I have learned is to have faith in your sequential memory. If you learn something well enough that you can do it correctly, at home and in rehearsals, in it's proper order, you know it will enough to perform it. No one cares if you can write out verse three while singing verse one, or vice versa.

Irish Whistle Update

2009-11-22T05:59:00.000-08:00

A New Way to Play

I'm awful at memorizing piano music. I don't like doing it, and it takes me forever. I'm also pretty bad at memorizing lyrics, but vocal melodies (or pitches, in the case of singing harmonies in a choral work) are fairly easy - I learn them, and pretty soon, they're just embedded in my subconscious. With the whistle, I'm starting to experience this deeply-learned phenomenon on an instrument for the first time.

At O'Flaherty, it was made quite clear that the primary way tunes are learned is by ear, so I've made some effort to learn them that way. I've used written music to assist in learning most of the tunes I know so far, but I've endeavored to learn by ear as much as possible. Now, I'm having the novel experience of finding it easier to play some tunes purely from memory, with the music actually distracting me when I'm looking at. Though I sometimes don't know where my fingers should be headed next, I can "hear" the melody in my memory, and the fingers just make that melody happen. I'm sure, at some level, this is what happens when I play something on the piano repeatedly and feel like I "know" it, but the progress is so swift in this case (perhaps because harmonies aren't there to complicate the issue) that it feels like a completely different phenomenon.

The Austin Celtic Festival - Joanie Madden Workshop

I'm writing this nearly two weeks after the event, so the details are already hazy, but better late than never. There were in the range of ten to fifteen people at the workshop, so it was fairly personal. Joanie has an enormous personality, and a bit of a Brooklyn accent (which seems a bit incongrous for an All-Ireland champion). From the moment she entered the tent, all attention was unequivically on her, and not due to star power - Joanie just exudes charisma and competence. She rolled out her nigh-legendary collection and told a couple of short stories, including how she first met Pat O'Riordan (who's early playing failed to impress Joanie, but whose whistle-making was a different matter), and how she drove over her previous whistle collection. She also indulged us with a couple of tunes at the beginning and end of the workshop. Most of the session was spent learning an Air and a Reel, replete with Joanie's ornamentation. What I personally took away was a better understanding of how to execute slides (push the finger "toward" the whistle and up) and vibrato*. I asked Joanie whether you had to vary the way you executed ornaments on a low whistle, referring to "piper's grip" in the question, and she didn't know that term - there's still a lot of regional culture to this, I guess. I walked away with an autographed CD booklet and a photo - an hour and a half VERY well spent.

* Varies from note to note, but usually by trilling a half-hole, two holes down from the bottom hole you're currently fingering - for high D, you trill the entire top hole, and for E, you trill the bottom hole, on a quarter-hole or less)

O'Flaherty in Review

2009-10-29T08:22:00.000-07:00

I spent the last weekend, Friday through Sunday, at the O'Flaherty Irish Music Retreat, a bit south of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I expected a relaxing vacation flavored with some musical insights and a few tunes, but I ended up with gruelling, 16 to 18-hour, action-packed days (well, musically-packed, at least). I could have opted out of some activities to have a bit of rest, but I was having far too much fun, and I couldn't let the opportunities pass me by.

Background

When physical music stores were the only source of music (i.e., pre-internet), I spent a fair amount of time exploring the New Age sections at the local Borders and Barnes & Noble. Space constraints tend to force music sellers to consolidate myriad actual genres into a few over-arching descriptors, and Celtic music tended to get lumped into the New Age section. Compounded by the fact that there actually are a number of artists that fuse Celtic and New Age styles, including Enya (probably the best-known New Age artist around, whether she likes the genre label or not), I've tended to mentally tie Celtic and New Age together throughout my adult life.

One of the older albums in my CD collection, among those I found in the New Age section, is "Song of the Irish Whistle" by Joanie Madden. Since I first heard that album, I've loved the sound of a slow tune on the whistle, and sometime around six or seven years ago I picked up a whistle of my own. Since then, I've acquired a few more whistles, which I've noodled around on and used in a few Longing for Orpheus songs. I've never put much effort into learning to play them in a proper way, by any definition of "proper." During rehearsals for the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Iolanthe over this past summer, one of my cast-mates mentioned driving up to an Irish music retreat for a weekend later in the year; I thought it might be fun, and provide an opportunity to get a new perspective on music. So, I signed up for the beginner's Irish Whistle course...

Irish Traditional Music Culture

At some level I knew there was a community and culture based on Celtic music, but I didn't appreciate how large or serious this community was - nor did I realize that Irish Traditional Music (ITM) is a very specific thing, and not synonymous with Celtic music (are there communities dedicated to Scottish, Welsh, and other regions of music, I wonder?). I now think of the ITM community as a comporable entity to the Classical or Jazz communities. In some ways, the ITM culture is far more limited - tunes are almost universally diatonic, and in a handful of keys (those with one to three sharps, both major and minor). There are perhaps ten types of tunes, representing a few basic rhythms (jigs are 6/8, slides 6/8 with a particular syncopated feel, slipjigs 9/8, reels 4/4 or cut time, etc.), and no one really ventures into odd-time territory (no 5/4 or 7/8 experiments). These limitations place the musicians' and listeners' focus on other aspects of the music, perhaps most intensely on performance style.

ITM also has one serious leg up on the Jazz and Classical worlds, and that's the tune session. Sessions make Irish music something many people can actively participate in, rather than than just observe, and I think that's incredibly cool, and probably central to the explosion of the music's popularity over the past few decades. Still being a newbie, I could be mischaracterizing a "typical" session, but its basically a gathering of players who sits in a big circle and just play tunes. If you don't know the current tune, you typically sit it out, but it seems you can generally get away with a bit of quiet stumbling as you try to pick up on the tune yourself. The nature of these sessions puts a lot of emphasis on remembering a huge repertoire of tunes, and on learning by ear, which is a skill I desperately need to develop. At the retreat, in any case, there were a lot of beginners, or at least beginners on a particular instrument, and so there were sessions geared specifically toward us. It seems to be an axiom in this culture that you really have to listen and imitate to play this music properly, but the ability to jump-start the session experience by reading made my sessions far more enjoyable. I overheard some talk about starting a teaching and/or slow session here in Austin, and that really excites me.

Ornamentation is Everything

Okay, it's not really everything, but hyperbole is so effective... I went into this retreat already familiar with the Whistle's fingerings and breath support, but I had no idea how deeply integral style, and ornamentation in particular, are to playing Irish music. Nor did I have any idea how to play any of the ornaments correctly. Fortunately, my beginner-level class (taught be Janice Deane, in the photo there) didn't have any true beginners - everyone could read music or play an instrument already, so we were able to spend a good portion of our time focusing on whistle ornamentation, which is apparently based on Uillean Pipe ornamentation; the Pipes are among the oldest Irish instruments, and as new instruments have been integrated into the Irish music tradition, their players have typically emulated the style of the established instruments. Pipes and whistles share similar fingering, so I'm now entertaining the long-term goal of taking up the pipes someday. But, I'm not going to let myself think about that too much until I've learned a lot more about the whistle. In any case, if I learned any generally applicable musical principle during the retreat, it's the importance of paying proper attention to every little bit of a musical line - a simple melody can be just a simple, boring melody, or it can be a canvas for musical expression, depending on the performer's competence, and how much they put into it.

Mickey Dunne

I was surprised to hear that many of the instrument instructors would be doing lecture-type presentations on the history of Irish Traditional Music, both in general and as it pertained to particular instruments and regions. I said to the friend that told me about the retreat that I "didn't think of musicians and historians overlapping much," and she replied that I was dead wrong when it came to Irish Traditional musicians. I learned a tremendous amount about the background of Irish music from some of these players, but was most moved by Mickey Dunne.

It's easy to get used to phenomenal musicianship when you're surrounded by it, but I absolutely maintained my sense of awe at Mickey's piping throughout the retreat. He was among the guests presenting an enrichment lecture, and his traced the tradition of Uillean piping back as far as the written word will allow, which is unfortunately only to the mid-1800s. The pipes certainly predate that period, perhaps by centuries and possibly by millenia, but that's when the first written documentation of individual pipers starts. Mickey is passionate about preserving the knowledge and techniques of the pipers who came before him, and his passion is infectious.

But, some of Mickey's passing comments are what are really sticking with me, and those relate to the early years of his life, when his family were "travelers." That's the word he typically uses, but to clarify, he mentioned, "...or gypsies, tinkers, or whatnot" (paraphrased, not a direct quote). Shortly after, he mentioned something about the travellers' reputation as thieves and trouble-makers being unjustified, since there were some bad seeds among them, but there were some bad seeds among "settled folk" too. I think its fascinating to get a glimpse into the intricacies and tensions of another culture (it gives one a new perspective), even one that's relatively genetically homogenous - Mickey said that the travellers of Ireland really emerged from the famine of 1847, when a large portion of the population just started moving around in search of ways to survive, and maintained the lifestyle after the crisis was over. The travellers have the same set of common names as the settled population, and I'm less clear on this point, but I get the impression there's still a non-trivial subset of the Irish population that leads a nomadic lifestyle. In the 50s or so, the Irish government apparently made an effort to settle the travelling musicians, so Mickey moved into a house when he was about seven. On the one hand, it seems a little strange to me that he puts such emphasis on a lifestyle he only experienced as a young child - he implied that the experience was integral to his playing and the musical tradition as a whole - but he speaks with such passion and conviction about it, and emphasizes the connection between the traveling busker and the musical tradition, so that I absolutely cannot dismiss the idea. After all, for the first two thirds of the known history of piping (~1850-1950), the travelling life was the life most pipers led.

Wrapping It Up...

I could go on and on, but at this point, my time is probably better spent learning some tunes. The retreat is over, but my enthusiasm has remained, and I just got a ticket to participate in a Whistle workshop with Joannie Madden at the Austin Celtic Festival in a couple of weeks...

Compress Classical Music

2009-10-20T08:33:00.000-07:00

It is constantly lamented in the Classical Music community that there aren't enough new fans, particularly young ones. I think the Classical recording and publishing industry could do a lot to change this by abandoning one old but deeply rooted convention.

A few relevant ideas:

An almost universal technique in Popular* music is to compress the dynamic range of finished songs. Tools called "compressors" and "limiters" are used to achieve this, and they basically make the quiet parts of a song louder. Many members of the audio engineering community feel that these tools are grossly overused by the modern music industry (including many of those engineers who are compelled to overuse them in order to keep their job), but that's a completely different rant.

There's a tremendous divide in the approach sound engineers take to making a Classical recording versus a Popular recording. There's variation within each community, based on genre and sub-genre, performer, engineer, etc., but the Classical Music world typically attempts to capture and reproduce an original performance as accurately as possible, while the Popular Music world uses the studio as an instrument, and all sorts of heavy processing are acceptable and commonplace.

A whole lot of people listen to music in noisy environments. College campuses and mass transit are full of music fans listening to mp3 players with earbuds. I personally listen to over an hour of music accompanied by significant road noise each workday. In these settings, music with a relatively small dynamic range is great - the listener sets the volume at one comfortable level, and the music never gets too quiet to hear or too loud to bear.

Most classical music is just impossible to enjoy in a noisy environment. I've felt a bit guilty throughout my life that I don't care more about Classical music than I do, but every time I make an effort to listen to a Beethoven Symphony, I end up constantly twiddling the volume knob, or forget it's even playing during a quiet part, only to get startled when something loud happens. For Classical music to have a fighting chance on my car stereo, and likely the earbuds of millions, it needs to become acceptable in the Classical audio community to seriously compress the dynamic range of recordings.

In an ideal listening setting, a large dynamic range is fantastic, and I don't think the old standards should be abandoned, but in the modern world of downloadable music (i.e., where there's very little cost associated with the actual transfer of audio data), it should be easy to provide both compressed and uncompressed versions of a recordings to listeners.

*For this discussion, I'm making a tremendous generalization and dividing EVERYTHING into either Classical or Popular - frankly, though, I have no idea how Jazz fits into this discussion.

On Picking an Instrument

2009-09-16T08:49:00.000-07:00

I mentioned before that I didn't really think my time playing the saxophone in 6th-9th was worth it. I've thought further, and have come to some conclusions about what set of instruments a well-rounded musician should study at minimum as they come up through school.

Harmony
If you want to understand western music, you've got to understand harmony, which is a much easier thing to do when you play a polyphonic instrument (i.e., one that can play multiple notes simultaneously). Nothing beats a keyboard for clearly laying out the relationships of pitches to one another, or the black/white key configuration for illustrating the main scales in our sonic vocabulary. Other traits that recommend the piano are a good dynamic range, plus a very transferable skill set; if you can play a piano keyboard, you can pretty much a play any synthesizer or organ, as well as more obscure instruments like harpsichords and harmoniums.

The guitar is another solid contender to fill the harmonic role, but I think that the variety of tunings and the fretboard structure provide a more convoluted model of the relationships between pitches and scales. Like the piano, the ability to play the guitar is transferable to a myriad of stringed instruments, from the bouzouki to the oud, not to mention the rock mainstays of electric guitar and bass.

Melody
Plucked and hammered strings can be very moving, but there is no more expressive instrument than the human voice. Even if you have no aspirations of singing long-term, taking formal voice lessons will likely teach you more about subtle expressiveness in a melodic line than any instrument. To get the most out of studying voice, though, you must learn to sight-sing. With an instrument, it's possible (and in my experience, common) to learn to read music by converting written notes directly into physical actions (keys pressed, breath exhaled), without really learning what specific intervals and chords really sound like. That is, you can sort of inadvertently bypass the hearing part of the process. Every college music student is expected to be at least minimaly competent at transcribing and playing back what they hear. At my school, there was a class called "aural learning"; practically every singer in the class breezed through with an A, while many instrumentalists struggled to pass.

Ensemble
Finally, any decent musician is going to be expected to perform as a member of a group, whether it's a drum line, symphony orchestra, or power trio. There are any number of ways you could go here, but I really think violin is the best choice (and, by extension, a school or community orchestra) - it's useful in orchestras, country music, and the occasional rock group. There also seem to be more paying gigs out there for violin than any instrument save piano (and most of those are accompaniment jobs).

Structure in Art

2009-09-11T05:28:00.000-07:00

In my old blog, I pointed to game designer Mark Rosewater as an unlikely source of artistic wisdom. Though I haven't kept up with his writing over the past few years, the main point I originally took from him is still as relevant - structure helps creativity. This seems counter-intuitive, but I've found it to be true. Tom Shear of Assemblage 23 recently mentioned in his blog that having fewer options makes him more productive, in that he has fewer opportunities to get distracted.

Not to get too terribly meta, but I think my previous post is a perfect example of structure aiding creativity. Ordinarily, a games-centric convention wouldn't be relevant to an arts blog. Further, it would have been very time-consuming for me to filter out interesting bits of the con into a general-purpose post, and it probably wouldn't have been particularly cohesive to read. The stated purpose of this blog forced me to focus on a few aspects of my convention experience, and I was able to quickly (relatively) write up a pertinent post. In fact, this is the primary reason I started this new blog, rather than reviving the old one.

Thoughts from PAX

2009-09-08T19:02:00.000-07:00

I spent the past weekend in rainy Seattle (a beautiful contrast to the record heat that central Texas has been experiencing), attending the gaming convention PAX. While much of my convention experience is wholly unrelated to the subject of this blog, I attended a panel on the Rock Band Network, a program that's going to allow independent artists to get their music into the Rock Band store, and the keynote speaker spent some time addressing a big question that's been floating around the gaming regions of the blogosphere for a while now...

Are Video Games Art?

The keynote speaker was Ron Gilbert, designer and programmer of a number of successful games over the past quarter century. As an industry player, I would assume that Gilbert's answer is biased (its "Yes," of course), and while he was a very entertaining speaker, the reasoning he presented in favor of games as art was a little shaky. He cited attacks on gaming as demonstration that games are powerfully emotional and thought-provoking, which equates them to other art forms that have been censored through history due to their ability to challenge the status quo.

Jack Thompson is probably the most notorious detractor of video games, but his actions have been so over-the-top that he's been disbarred, and consequently I doubt that anyone takes him seriously anymore. A quick Google search list is topped by Mothers Against Videogame Addiction and Violence, who equate gaming guilds with street gangs in their introductory paragraph. Anyone tech-savvy enough to be reading this blog probably knows a few World of Warcraft players - please, suggest this premise to them, and see how hard they laugh. The Chinese government has imposed restrictions on the length of time gamers are allowed to play, but they're primarily focused on students, and appear to be more of an attempt to make them spend time studying than to prevent them from becoming reprobates or criminals. I suspect that only a small "lunatic fringe" truly views video games as a serious threat - then again, perhaps the art censorship of the past was enforced by a small lunatic fringe that just happened to gain power.

In any case, I happen to agree with Mr. Gilbert, but for different reasons. One thing that has really stuck with me since college is the concept of gesamtkunstwerk - Richard Wagner (he who wrote the operas with the viking "fat lady") was a proponent of this philosophy of opera as an art form comprised of other art forms - he insisted that the music should not overshadow the acting, nor the stage design the plot, etc. By the same token, it seems clear to me that since video games contain various combinations of visual art, music, storytelling, voice acting, etc., they too are an art form. Perhaps the simplest of games, like tic-tac-toe, are not art, but even video games produced by one-person studios like Spyeart contain most of these elements. While many games don't have much artistic value, the same can be said for many examples of any art form. Relative to other arts, video games are a medium in their infancy, and I have no doubt that many classics are yet to come.

Rock Band Network

Harmonix (the games' developers) and Microsoft have refined and expanded the tools that Harmonix currently uses to incorporate songs into Rock Band, and are making them available to the music-making public. A lot of potential users already have the right equipment (a PC and an XBox 360), so the cost of entry is only a $99/year subscription to the Microsoft's "XNA Creators Club." The rest of the tools are freeware or inexpensive (~$60) software. Songs authored via the Rock Band Network will be available through the same online store the current Rock Band selection, and creators will be able to set the price of their downloads within a certain range. The current default is $1.99, and I'd expect prices to stay in that vicinity. As of this weekend, 30% of sales is to be passed on to creators, meaning you'd have to roughly 170 downloads a year to break even.

The panel itself consisted primarily of a demonstration of the development tools, used to implement a song by internet nerd-hero Jonathan Coulton. Sadly, we missed his big concert on Saturday night, but the front-row seats we had for this were pretty cool. The rest of the post is going to be technical details, so if you don't spend any of your time in an audio sequencer, you'll probably want to bail out now.

A plugin for Reaper is the centerpiece of the software tools. Specific MIDI pitches are mapped to the various instrument's pads and keys. For example, the easy drums (with 4 drum pad and a kick pedal) might occupy C2, C#2, D2, D#2, and E2, the medium drums C3-E3, etc., and solid notes in the C5-E5 denotes a drum fill (these particular note ranges are just examples I'm making up). There are macros to chop align lyrics with MIDI notes, but I suspect a little manual tweaking will still be required. It will also possible to specify lighting changes and camera angles. I'm unclear on a number of details (i.e., how hammer-ons are going to be programmed), but the panelists assured us that the documentation will be very thorough. All of this must be programmed in sync with audio stems of the original song in Reaper.

After all the MIDI and audio stems are correct in Reaper, you use a custom tool called Magma ("because that's where rock comes from!") to compile everything into a file that can be uploaded to Microsoft's XNA network. You can then download the song to your XBox to test out, and submit it for peer review. I'm still curious about what all the peer review is aimed to weed out, and what will be allowed. For example, can we put songs on Rock Band that don't use all the instruments, like instrumentals without vocals or ambient tracks with no drums? Pearl Jam's "Master/Servant" is currently in the game with no vocal track, but did they make that exception soley for the sake of a classic album? Will it be up the sole discretion of a fickle peer review community? The beta test should be starting soon, so we shouldn't have to wait too much longer to find out.

Rock Band as Educational Software

2009-08-28T12:34:00.000-07:00

Soon, I hope for my Synthpop band, Ice Queen Alias, to start performing live. I intend to play drums, and I'm using Rock Band to learn how.

Background

I don't have many regrets, but one that I do have is choosing to play the saxaphone, rather than the drums, when I joined the school band in 6th grade. Now, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of value in learning to play a monophonic instrument like the sax, which I may bring up in a different post - but I love the drums, and I really wish I had spent some more of my formative years strengthening my sense of rhythm, and dexterity with a pair of sticks.

A couple of years ago, Rock Band came out, giving me a relatively cheap opportunity to bang on things in a rhythmic fashion. It turns out, I enjoyed it even more than I thought I would. So much, in fact, that I decided earlier this year that I wanted to play drums when Ice Queen Alias finally starts performing live. I set a goal for myself - if I could score 5 out of 5 stars on 20 songs in Expert mode, I'd make a real commitment and buy some real (electronic) drums. After three or four weeks of work, I reached my goal, and purchased a Roland TD-4 set. I play a bit on the Rolands (and will focus more and more on them as Ice Queen Alias approaches live performances), but I still play a whole lot of Rock Band - an average of about 45 minutes a day - and I really feel that this is the most productive thing I could be doing.

Practice Isn't Fun - Games Are

I started taking piano lessons when I was in 3rd grade, and while I truly appreciate all my various music teachers have taught me over the years, I have hated practicing, and by extension music lessons, for as long as I can remember. Past experience shows that if I had started taking drum lessons instead of playing Rock Band, I probably would have put in four or five half-hour practice sessions for the first month or two, which would have eventually fallen off to about one a week. With the small, incremental goals and variety of songs and difficulty levels offered by Rock Band (plus the ever-expanding catalogue of downloadable songs), I've been playing the drums nearly daily for the better part of a year.

If I had the drive and focus to truly "practice", I would probably be advancing faster, and certainly be picking up complicated rudiments more quickly (I do occasionally work on these with a practice pad for a few minutes at a time - but it's unstructured and spontaneous, so I enjoy it). But, since my goal is to play live on songs that I write, and not to become a marketable, well-rounded percussionist, this limitation on my advancement is really no big deal.

What I've Learned

There are some distinct limitations inherent to Rock Band, in comparison to a real drum kit. Rock Band has a kick pedal, but no Hi-Hat pedal; the pads don't have much "bounce"; the pads are too close together, etc. I've aquired some tools, and adopted some techniques to wring all the training potential I can get out the game.

Lefty Mode

In Rock Band's default (right-handed) configuration, the left hand is typically assigned to the snare drum, while the right hand plays the hi-hats and the lion's share of the toms, crashes, and rides in fills. I frequently sit down for a session, and immediately switch to lefty mode in the options menu. This promotes limb independence, and helps to limbre up my left hand, which is still far behind my right in dexterity and stamina. A strong and independent left hand is particularly important to me, as I intend to play "open-handed" when I play with the band, playing hats with my left hand and snare with my right. This is a non-traditional style, but prevents all the arm-crossing nonsense inherent in more traditional drumming, and feels more comfortable and natural.

To compensate for the lack of a hi-hat pedal, I occasionally move my kick pedal to the left foot. This certainly doesn't address the more subtle techniques of hi-hattery (half-closed position and all that), but it's a far cry better than no practice at all, and it has illustrated to me just how woefully behind the curve my left foot is.

The Kick Box

The kick pedal that came with the original Rock Band was just awful, and the one accompanying Rock Band 2 is only a slight improvement. Fortunately, there's a way to use a real kick pedal - unfortunately, it'll cost you around $250. I already owned a Roland kick trigger, the most expensive element, so it was absolutely worth it. The key element is the Kick Box ($65), a third-party device that converts signals from pro electronic drum kick pedeals to signals a set of Rock Band drums can understand. It's made by a tiny little one-man operation, but it's a good product, and when mine got fried by a lightning strike, he reparied it for free, so I have no hesitation in recommending his business.

The tall thing with the circle on top is a Roland kick trigger (model KD-8, $135), and the pedal is a "cheap" Pearl model($60).

Rebound

When I first started playing more intensely, and for longer periods, I developed pains in two places - a numb twinge in my wrists while playing, and a dull pain in my left elbow for a day or two after playing. In part, this was caused by tension - I focused on relaxing my grip (as well as researching different grips online), and striking more lightly, and this pretty much took care of the numbness. However, I didn't really overcome the elbow problem until I picked up a pair of ridiculously light sticks:

If you can't read the photo clearly, they're Regal Tip brand, size 7A. I suspect that the Rock Band pads just don't have the bounce of real drums (electronic or acoustic), which is probably compounded by some poor-quality engineering in my own arm. If I play too hard or long, I still get a little of this pain, but it seems to be fading as I build up stamina over time. In any case, I highly recommend light sticks for long Rock Band sessions.

You Still Have to Use Your Ears

As strongly as I endorse Rock Band for improving your rhythm skills, it's still a game, and the feedback system is designed as such. Consequently, it's possible to get a great score in Rock Band with some pretty inaccurate playing - you can get a little behind or ahead of the beat, or play with generally poor precision, but if you're "close enough", the game counts it as a hit. So, if you really want to improve while playing, you still have to listen, and force yourself to concentrate on your weak points. Going through the calibration process in the options menu is an absolute must. Additionally, the game doesn't care how hard you hit the pads, but dynamics are critical in actual performances, so you have to pay attention to this on your own.

Once again, into the breach

2009-08-28T09:57:00.000-07:00

As in my myriad artistic endeavours, I am once again overreaching. I've maintained a blog before, but it had no stated focus. I also have facebook and twitter accounts, plus 5 myspace accounts (4 belong to my various projects). It is, of course, a fool's errand to add yet another project to my life, but here we are.

My intent with this blog is to share whatever insights I gain into learning new skills, and ideally, synthesize knowledge between seemingly disparate disciplines. To that end, let me introduce my projects...

Longing for Orpheus: My furthest advanced electronic musical project, in a New Age/Ambient vein. So far, I've released two self-published albums, doing everything up through the mixing stage myself, then hiring a mastering engineer and relying primarily on CD Baby for distribution. I also did basic promotion work (radio and internet radio) for both albums.

Ice Queen Alias: A dark synthpop band that includes myself, my fiancee, and a friend of ours. We're still in the writing-only phase, and have few songs up on MySpace. I'm putting a lot of work into this project at the moment, and hope to start performing in local dark scene venues within the next six months (that's been a stated goal for well over a year, though...)

Artificial Emotion: My third and final music project, this is more along the lines of what people usually think of (in my experience) when you say "electronic music." My concept of what fits here is ill-defined - it's kind of a catch-all for experiments and things that don't fit stylistically within the other two projects. The one unifying concept is a sci-fi theme; I originally created the project with the purpose of writing a "Trance Opera" concept album, with a robotic protagnist (lots of vocoder!), and still hope to get around to it someday.

After Enigma - A Guide to Nu Ambient Music: Like its title implies, this is a web site dedicated to defining and exploring "Nu Ambient" music, mostly via album reviews and artist profiles. It is, sadly, the most neglected of my projects.

Live Theater: I consider myself a regular performer with three production companies in my area - The Wimberley Players, The Way Off Broadway Community Players, and The Gilbert & Sullivan Society of Austin. For the past few years, I been performing in about four shows or so a year. Multiple times, on recieving a role in a well-known show, I've trawled the internet for the thoughts of other actors who played that role, and have never found any relevant hits. One aim of this blog is to rectify that.

Vexel art: I just discovered the word "vexel" the other day, and it amuses me tremendously. I have used the freeware GIMP tool a few times in the past, and it turns out it's a vexel tool - you can create persistent vector-based "paths", but in the end, you render them out to a big map of pixels, and that's your end product. I've used GIMP for simple image manipulation in webpage design (for the pages linked above), and to design a couple of t-shirts before, but I've just recently (in the past few months) begun freehand drawing concepts, then using GIMP to create more "polished" versions. I'll probably create a DeviantArt page soon, and post the link here.