what is going on in your musical life

Third that, I'd love to work in a synth shop! I spent half my teens in the local Brash's fiddling with all the DX7s and wishing I could afford one.

working in a synth shop sounds fun! Fourthing!

Rehearsal tonight for an ensemble gig with the Boston Landmarks Orchestra. Doing Weill's "Lost in the Stars" (again)

Recording an EP in a fairly expensive studio. Expensive for us anyway. Realising the drummer cant play to a click requiring spending more money on studio time. This has probably happened to other people?

The drummer from my old band spent a lot of time playing to Orbital CDs precisely so he could improve his inner metronome

when I used to drum a little I would try to copy the beats on underworld CDs, mostly a fail

drummers: born sloppy

This has exactly happened to me and we (unfortunately) scrapped everything and (fortunately) re-recorded everything to "no click" and when click was necessary we made one to his limping and amazing drum parts

Had band practice last night and B3n has introduced an old bandmate of his in to do live drums. I dont know if the guy was just out of practice, not used to our already-structured songs or struggling using an electric kit (tbf those things are kind of shite) but I found his input a little overbearing. He kept speeding up, adding masses of fills, and basically rocking out like a mad bastard which given up til now we'd been doing sparse electronic/proggy/pretty stuff was doing my head in a bit. Not sure what to make of it.

LIke imagine if you took a minimal styles massive attack song and added bombastic rock drums all over it ugtggh dshfgsrwfhf

Nip it in the bud say "not like that" and give him listening homework

Yeah we played him some loops and said "this is what we're doing" and he was ok with it but just couldnt keep time with the loops and kvetched about it. Surely a good drummer is ok with playing to clicktracks? I dont buy the "you move in and out of time a bit" when it is bleeding obvious. It was a first, rough jam with him tho so benefit of the doubt and all that.

my ~jam sesh~ was fun, didn't quite know what I was doing for most of it cuz it ended up with three ppl using Max/MSP etc and me trying to work out how to fit guitar into that when I can't really play guitar, but if someone's willing to do a Teo Macero on our five hours or so they may have a nice couple of hours between them, 15 minutes of that with my valuable input.

Jams are fun! I have no idea what Im doing other tbqfh, I'm sometimes playing bass and I seriously am shit at it. But if I keep a simple riff going Im ok. Next challenge: do that and sing at the same time, lol.

Trayce I'll be honest with you I have not seen a single drummer play kit convincingly enough along to a click track to make me think "I am so glad this band has a both click track and a live drummer" so I'd probably cut him some slack

not implying you weren't cutting him slack already :)
just saying it's a mountain I have not yet seen scaled except for that one video of "guy performing the drum parts to journey to reedham"

i recently had a drummer in to effectively replay a drum machine beat with the hope of giving it a more natural feel. fantastic drummer, great sounding kit, pretty much perfectly in time, but the end result sounded dismal in comparison to the DM.

a lesson was learned that day

goontie: yeah thats fair and I agree! I think I'm more thinking what Jim just said: I think I just prefer the sound of drum machines :/ I'm such a fucking 80s kid.

My prob with this guy anyway was less his keeping in time and more his MAD FILLS EVERY TEN SECONDS rock styles. No subtlety whatsoever.

But i've now told the other 2 lads this, so its up to them as well, democracy n all that. If we're gonna end up with a wall of noise we could at least get some Guthrie guitar happening.

ha not at all, ascetic devotion is the best. I mean economy in the part of the players, like, rehearsal time.

Well, that's the thing. After I figured out the setup and designed the Max patches, writing the material was by far the easiest part. Preparing it for performance and recording has by far been the hardest. (This is largely partly a reflection of my own playing chops: I'm sure Metheny could knock it out in a weekend.) Relating to the current discussion, this is largely because it requires a f high (for me anyway) level of rhythmic precision. It's probably the sort of thing where you could say "well, you could also just sequence all those loops and play over them" which is probably true but the challenge is part of the point imo. An actual really good guitarist has asked for a demo, though, so maybe there's a possibility there?

In any event, everything that's hard to do is recorded now, as tight as it will be with me playing. (I've decided not to quantize.)

I made a beat and then realized that I just completely recreated some random minor madlib beat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dG6bK5wxmE

(Btw, roxy, the songs I'll be singing for the exam are lol "When Love Is Kind", "Jardin d'Amour", "Moon, sing" by Jon Washburn, and "Let There Be Peace on Earth" so yeah, probably not the most advanced repertoire but enough to keep me busy. I figured out tonight that the trick is, counterintuitively, to think about chest resonance when singing higher notes and to think about head resonance when singing lower notes.)

Sat down to edit a note that was off by the duration of a 64th note, decided in the end that I liked the original imprecise take. This feels like some kind of triumph. This recording is done.

i spent three hours painstakingly transcribing a rough hand-played take to midi, then copypasted the best third over the other two thirds of it

My musical life as you guys are discussing it is still in its infancy. I'll probably spend --I have spent -- a long time gathering steam before ever considering myself capable of even doing this at all. But I have ideas! And I think they're not terrible! I'm writing them down. I'm probably going to have to meet some more people, that's not the easiest thing to do, but it's not going to keep me from moving forward.
This is easily one of the most earnest and embarrassing posts I have ever composed. Still, that's what's going on in my new musical life. It kind of feels like getting an extra life, tbh!

drummers are the worst huh

lol
yes

i started using in-ear monitors for my solo electronics + drums show, and it's made things way more fun. i'm good at playing to a click but it's only fun if i can comfortably hear the tracks, and this way i never have to worry about shitty monitors again.

had a crazy weekend of brass band gig > electronic gig > up at 5 am to drive to a festival to play another brass band gig. festival culture is weird.

What sorts of things are you doing with drums and electronics?

nothing especially cutting edge, i play tracks that i've produced at home using an SP404 and kaoss pad quad (adding effects and triggering samples), and add live drums to sections on a small acoustic kit.

welp, one of the pieces I thought was cut from our concert in two weeks is back on, and we just got the music for it so we can memorize it

oh well

It's OK LL, I still feel like a bit of a faker at this myself! Like "oh hey I can make music sound ok with presets lolol *sing sing*". Still, it goes over ok...

I bought a £3.50 shakuhachi. Look out world, my hit machine is just warming up.

I don't even know what a shakuhachi is beyond a General MIDI patch
Send photos

Best emulator sample of all time iirc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g93mz_eZ5N4

Ugh, after mastering, not happy enough with my timing. Might have to finish this after moving, aargh.

FML

Sat down to edit a note that was off by the duration of a 64th note

Reminds me of the time I re-rendered a track just to reduce the volume of one instrument by half a decibel.

do it right, guys :)

OTM, sadly.:(

Reminds me of the time I re-rendered a track just to reduce the volume of one instrument by half a decibel.

oh i do this all the time

That actually sounds like standard mixing procedure to me tbh.:P

1: reduce volume of closed hi hats
2: render track
3: listen to track and realise that closed hi hats are still too loud
4: repeat from step 1 about a hundred and trillion times
5: say "fudge it" and leave the track as it is
6: every time this track is played think "damn this sounds terrible"
7: remix entire album
8: repeat from step 1

closed hi-hats can be crazy, like looking at the meters they'll be the quietest thing in the track BY FAR, but they just cut through at any volume. like they can be almost subliminal and still do their job. loud hi-hats are cool too though.

Ah. Yeah, I get you. I spent a good amount of time this year remixing a piece from 2 years ago. Then uploaded it to Soundcloud where 128kbps streaming killed it anyway, ultimately taking it down anyway.

I just got back from a studio where I made an appointment to go over a mix with pro dudes. They basically thought it was fine and didn't need any real changes. I am feeling audio autodidact pride.

xpost

I used to be really anal about my mixes, these days I’m all about capturing raw energy, and the take is the take - live mix down, riding the faders, no going back afterwards.