Musician Diaries

This is the song that I challenged myself to finish before February, and showcases, for better or worse, the best of my abilities (and technical means) right now (the mix is a bit dull now and I will revise it in the future, when I'm not so close to the project). As engineer and producer, I have learned a lot along this month, and it shows for example in my folders' structure. I know better at every moment what I'm doing and how. Taking a look at my previous process lists, I think my biggest problems were that I tended to standardize too soon, or not at the adequate "height" (for example, didn't have the "feel" for when you have to go deep in the woods or be more general ("use a 1.5 compression ratio" vs "play with the compression rate until it doesn't pump"). Of course you can always get better, and those were necessary errors that I'm happy to have gone through. Someone once defined the people at Toyo...

Bff. Arg. Pant. Hot from the presses, as imperfect as it gets, please imagine the cracks and pops come from an original gramophone, with one of those disks that only had one side. The composition of this one was a bit like those stories we've seen in plenty of comedies, full of artistry epic: The musician: "OK, let's call it a day, it's been an hour jamming and we're just straining ourselves, let's face it, today we won't be able to make a new song" (utters a distracted chord as he gets ready to switch off) The producer: "Wait a minute! What did you just play?" The musician: "What, this?" The producer: "Quick, engineer! Keep recording!" The song is based on an actual event. Here is the picture of the actual leak to prove it: And here are the lyrics. A persistent problem I've been facing with these quickies is that the recorded voice is difficult to understand. I'll probab...

What a week it's been. Rocky road (but not with "rock" in the good sense). I feel 500 years older. I don't know how I managed without my processes before. I guess I was younger and could afford the waste. My wip folder has grown with project after project that seemed straightforward but it turned out to not really. On new year's eve, I completed one of those "given" songs I'm sometimes gifted with, but it still shows several obstacles: in the heat of the moment, I wasn't sure if it the style was an OK homage to one of my heros, or if it reached the degree of servile plagiarism. Listening to it with distance, I think it has enough merit on its own, but it still presents several problems to be solved: 1) There is a difference in the tone of the lyrics; the first 2 verses were literal, while the 3rd one is poetic. I'm substituting the approach of those first two, but this process is a "dripping" one. The frag...

This song is so underproduced that it's embarrassing. This time I got the mastering volume right, but a couple of unexplainable cracks and pops sneaked in... arrgg! There was a "pit of misery" moment in there when I was twisting the knobs and thinking I hate my fucking life, so I stuck to the principle of keep it fun, and moved along. Each time I fail a bit better, my processes advance and get richer and more detailed every time, but God, I need a producer so bad, this stuff drains me, it always feels like fishing in the dark with a stick, I'd rather be doing anything else, for example music. In any case, like the other quickies I'm releasing weekly, this is good practice and dexterity; you can figure out a lot a process and do a lot of preproduction, but in the end there is a kind of knowledge that you only get by running the whole process from one extreme to the other time after time after time... The song is something I dreamt. Not...

nother musical persona has recently joined my one man musical production army. I call him the production assistant. In short, my inner production assistant takes care of all the unglamorous, mundane stuff that goes in a software session, so that my inner creative guys, the inner musician and the inner producer, in that order of preference, can focus all their energy in experimenting and making the right decissions. Like the sound engineer, whom I discussed in a previous post, his role is taking out of the way everything that is repetitive and boring, so the creative "sectors" can dedicate themselves to create at ease. The difference with the sound engineer is that the production assistant is more software focused, and enters only once the process has been started. For example: I'll tell the sound engineer that I have a new song, and he will create the DAW session, a script to get there quickly (opening also other colateral stuff required, like lyrics docs, et...