Becoming a better rhythm player: triplets and strumming January 30, 2016 No CommentTwo years ago, I started this blog with a series on songwriting. I finished fifteen posts, and then went careening off into other areas of personal interest. Some of it, I hope, was of interest to readers. Some of it was me clarifying my own process of music-making. Triplets I ended the series with posts about rhythm, but I didn’t get past quarter-notes and eighth-notes. Here’s the last post in that series. How to make chord progressions a pro would love, Part 15: Rhythm III – Strumming So I didn’t get to triplets. Too bad, because they’re kind of awesome. Here’s what they look like, and how to count them. As with eighth-notes, you need to keep a steady beat and distribute the notes evenly over that beat. Use a metronome to get this right. Most metronomes can play eighth-notes and triplets while accenting the downbeat. This is really useful for hearing what I mean by “distribute the notes evenly over that beat.” Eighth-note strumming Strumming triplets turns out to be more challenging than strumming quarter-notes and eighth-notes. Here’s why. With eighth-notes, you naturally use an up-and-down strumming motion, hitting the downbeat on the down-stroke (square bracket symbol) and the upbeat on the upstroke (wedge symbol). It feels pretty natural. After all, you have to bring your arm up after the down-stroke in preparation for the next down-stroke. Might as well hit the strings as you do. Triplet strumming But with triplets, everything changes. If you use an up-and-down strumming motion, you wind up using an upstroke on every second down-beat. In the following example, that means on beats 2 and 4. Like this: This means that you don’t get to use gravity to emphasize those downbeats where you use an upstroke. This feels weird, and it’s why some people use down-strokes exclusively when strumming triplets. But practice it anyway. If you do, you’ll make your upstrokes as strong as your down-strokes. This will make you a more flexible and interesting rhythm player. It will also make people want to play with you more. songwritingShare : Tweet
Songwriting and sonic texture January 9, 2016 No CommentI’ve been talking a lot about ambient/textural music and sound in the last number of weeks, but how does all this fit into song-writing? Song-writing isn’t just about chords, melody, and words. Conceptually, it starts there, usually with words that seem to work only if music is supporting them. And that music usually has some relation to the words. Or it should, even if it’s only minor key for sad song, major key for happy song. Conventions Here’s some other conventional material that can be used to support words: A guitar solo (with or without the rest of the band) to illustrate loneliness Arpeggiated chords to illustrate a lighter mood Power chords to illustrate confidence or aggression Silence to build tension This list can get pretty long, and of course any of these can illustrate something other than what I’ve indicated here. But each choice should have some sort of reason for being there. Music should support the story of the words somehow, otherwise what’s the point of including it? (At this point, it’s not a bad idea to list all the musical ideas, techniques, etc. that you can think of, and then try to relate them to lyrics that you’ve written). Ambient experiment Ambient sound can function as support for lyrics, too. Using the guitar, you can create sound that illustrates thunder, wind, industrial sound, etc. But can you sing over these kinds of sounds? Of course, you don’t have to; they can just be used for effect. But it’s fun to try. As an experiment, take a melody from a song you know (or one you’ve written), create and loop an ambient sound, and sing that melody with the sound. Here’s a couple of ideas for ambient sound: Delay pedal – set a delay of .5 second with maximum feedback; play long, single notes in the same key as the melody until you get a dense weave of notes. Distortion – maximum distortion; rub or scrape the strings; don’t try to get any sort of conventional harmonic sound; just think noise. These sounds can be disorienting to sing over. But give it a try. It usually sparks ideas, and it’s not like you have to use it as part of a song. Although you might want to. songwritingShare : Tweet
Guitar preparations and digital effects January 3, 2016 No CommentHere’s one of the preparations that I use to get unconventional sounds from the guitar. Guitar preparation allows me to create sound that doesn’t suggest the sound of the guitar. Eliminating the associations that the guitar brings to mind allows listeners to experience the sound itself. The plastic stencil muffles the sound to a certain extent when the strings are activated; the knife produces a sustained ringing sound when struck with wood or metal; the stone cube with the metal stems muffles the sound, but in a different way than the stencil. It can also be used to scrape the strings. Digital processing The great thing about digital effects software (I’m using Guitar Rig 5) is that you can experiment with effects by “piling on.” This means using multiple iterations of the same effect just to see what happens. Here’s one of my favourites. Resochord is a pitch modifier and harmonizer. It uses single pitches or chords and can pitch shift them and sustain them. Stacking a number of them like this creates a preset with a ton of harmonic possibilities. I’ve added a pitch pedal for more control, and a fuzz pedal when I want a grittier sound. Preparation and effects With the recipe of preparations and effects preset that I’ve outlined here, I’m able to produce the following sounds: Scraping the strings with stone http://davewallmusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/stone-rub-1.mp3 This reminds me of an animal sound (a roar of some kind?) slowed down. It’s difficult to hear it as a guitar sound. Knife strike (weaving a knife between the strings and striking it with metal) http://davewallmusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/knife-strike-1.mp3 A bell-like sound with something that sounds like a distorted organ. Flicking stencil (weaving a plastic stencil between the strings, pulling it upwards and letting it go) http://davewallmusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/plastic-flip-1.mp3 Similiar to the knife strike, but with a different attack sound. Playing straight (no preparations) http://davewallmusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/plqy-straight.mp3 In this example, you can clearly hear the guitar. These are examples of what can be done with one preset and guitar preparations. Preset creation is not limitless, but it’s extremely extensive. Mixed with the huge variety of guitar preparations, the guitar becomes an instrument capable of tremendous sonic possibility. Songwriting… And it can be used this way for songwriting. More on that in the next post… guitarShare : Tweet
Making ambient December 27, 2015 No CommentMy approach to creating ambient music involves the following resources: Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig 5 preparing the guitar Check out my post on prepared guitar for an explanation. Prepared guitar Guitar Rig 5 and prepared guitar describes my basic rig. I also use… MAX to create either guitar effects, or separate instruments altogether Audiomulch for creating separate instruments …and two iPad apps: Samplr Curtis Orchestral soundscapes This provides me with tremendous resources for creating non-conventional guitar sounds. I combine these sounds with the Boss Loopstation to make soundscapes of orchestral complexity. I set this up by placing one instrumental section on one of three phrases. “Phrases” are what the Loopstation calls the place where you can record and overdub sounds. You can see them on the lower right of the device. I’m thinking conceptually here. I don’t use conventional orchestral instruments (although lately I’ve been thinking about it). I create 4 -6 unique sounds for each phrase using the above resources. Then I arrange and overdub them. Each sound can be either a prepared guitar sound processed through Guitar Rig or MAX, or sounds created in Audiomulch, Samplr, or Curtis. Then I can fade sections in and out as desired while playing a live part against them. There’s a lot of detail to talk about. In future posts I’ll describe the materials I’ve mentioned here in some detail. Composition, UncategorizedShare : Tweet
Tim Hecker December 21, 2015 No CommentTim Hecker’s work is more clearly ambient than Christian Fennesz’s. Greater use of conventional instrumentation with the judicious use of noise makes it possible for his work to fade into the background, while still being compelling. Prism Hecker is concerned with timing, placement, and taste. Often there is one overriding idea. Prism, from Virgins is an example. It starts with a processed organ pad (?) that gets interrupted by a seven-beat phrase at regular intervals. The seven-beat phrase itself is attention-grabbing in its combination of simplicity and strangeness. It’s essentially an uncomplicated melody that’s sliced somewhere in the middle and time-shifted slightly, giving it an arresting quality. Bits of the phrase continue ghost-like after the fact. The ear tries to capture these, and the listener becomes an active participant. Try to hold the organ pad in your ear, and you’ll hear it evolve slightly. Or is that just an aural hallucination? Smearing Imagine a painting, something representational, a landscape or a portrait with undried paint. Now imagine smearing the paint across the canvas. Hecker uses this effect aurally by creating upward gissandos with entire organ chords beginning around the two-minute mark. The effect is a wiping away of some of the existing sound. The ghost of the seven-beat phrase remains. Tim Hecker is an ambient composer who creates music that encourages you to listen to it. While it’s possible to ignore, it never becomes aural wallpaper. UncategorizedShare : Tweet
Christian Fennesz December 12, 2015 No CommentTake a listen to Ferment_action_OZmotic on Christian Fennesz’s album Aireffect. This is along the lines of what I’m thinking of as fractured ambient. Maybe a better name for this is noise ambient. This is part the process I engage in when I’m forming ideas: close listening to stuff that I like. It gets inside clarifies my own way of doing things. Pretty common approach, really. But a lot of people don’t write it down. Ferment_action_OZmotic Brian Eno described ambient music as being “as ignorable as it is interesting.” This piece is interesting, but ignorable? I’m not sure. The piece begins inside what sounds like a faltering airplane engine. A tearing sound after 20 seconds forms a boundary between that and (in order of appearance) granular raindrops; a chirping metal sound; a rusty, clockwork machine; and a bassy synth replaced immediately by a metallic scraping. Bass synth balloons out from there, followed by a pedal-tone (guitar?), and obsessive morse code bleeping. These elements recede and emerge. All this in the first two minutes of a six minute piece. Can we call this ambient? It’s certainly textural (as ambient music tends to be). It’s also interesting. Ignorable? Probably not in a quiet space where it would stand out. Moving on Around the 2:23 mark we get a sloshing sound and synth pads, followed by what sounds like cutlery on plates, dog barks, bell-of-the-cymbal strikes, a bit of farting static, and at 3:37, a gong repeated three times, accompanied each time by a change of harmony in the synth pads. Sounds like he’s moving toward something more conventional… Large bass synth at 4:10 with random drum synth-produced woodblocks and metal, and another bass note at 4:23. More drum synth, and more bass at 4:36, 4:45, 4:54, 5:00, followed by huge synth pad swells that consume the bass. Continue drum pad, add static, dial down synth pad, end with static. The granular raindrops from the beginning never go away. Ok. Ambient? Is this ambient? There are clearly marked sections (the gongs starting at 3:37, the bass synth at 4:10), and a variety of different sounds that don’t evolve. This runs against type. But the slowly evolving sound structure – the gradual addition of similiar types of sound (metal) in the first 2 minutes – reminds me of ambient music. So I’m thinking of it fractured or noise ambient. The evolving sound (granular raindrops, metal sounds) is interrupted (fractured) by sounds alien to the existing, noisy structure. These sounds – gongs, bass – are more conventional, and send the piece in a different direction. Previous elements remain as what can be thought of as an ambient structure. I know I’m pushing it. It’s as easy to reject this as ambient altogether, as it is to call it fractured or noise ambient. But taking a close look at stuff that might be described as ambient – textural, or timbre-based music – and trying to squash it into an ambient box – is one way to clarify for myself what it is I’m trying to make. UncategorizedShare : Tweet
