Your Opinion Is Wrong™

Hey, about that last post I made? This website/e-book thing has a few articles that articulate what I was trying to express in my previous post rather well. I've been reading while working. Interesting stuff, some of it.

More often than not, a musician will define themselves through the intrument that they play, or prefer to play, usually through statements such as 'Yeah, I'm the drummer', or 'I play the keyboards in this band, but I'm a guitarist at heart' or something similar.

Most people who read this should know that generally my stance is essentially:

I AM ARE BASS PLAYAH

If you didn't figure that out already, what planet have you been on?

I bring this up because anybody who knows me probably knows that I'm interested in creating songs more than writing basslines, so it makes little sense for me to just focus on my instrument of choice at any time. I happen to be drawn to playing bass because of how it affects a song's progression more than any other instrument you can think of. There's also the idea that a conventional clean bass tone could never be considered to be out of place in any genre of music, be it jazz, radio-friendly rock, hip-hop, sample-driven stuff like Radiohead and Massive Attack, metal...the list goes on. Also, there is a saying that the bass is the sound that is felt, not heard. How cool is that?

I've developed an interest in song structure and recording technique over the past year that's made me care less about what instrument I'm actually playing at any point, as well as how I'm playing it. This means I'm not at all opposed to sitting behind the drumkit and coming up with a beat to play something else to, much to Lucas' annoyance (not that he doesn't come across as totally cool with it, but I'm sure I'd be pissed off if some n00b tried telling me how to play my instrument, too - especially if it's a line I don't want to play). Further to this, I no longer care as much as I used to about making music that can be produced in a live setting, instead being more insterested in just using abstract sounds musically.

That means that I'll just be more inclined to totally mess a sample up and just give it a musical (work with me here) quality. If you've checked the MySpace, you'll have heard (probably) a song made of a sampled, sloppy, Meg-White-after-she's-had-a-few-too-many drum beat, droning over and over, a fuzzy bass line that, like the drum beat, cuts in and out at odd moments, and nothing else that could be reproduced live (also, Craig deserves props for that bassline - He came up with it, as he was present during the recording session that spawned many of those samples that are used on the same track). There's an M&Ms wrapper being screwed up, some water pouring into a bottle, and Lucas doing some bad (then later some good) throat-singing, among other effects. All this has been rendered unrecognisable. Sure, you might recognise Lucas' throat-singing in the track (did I mention its name? Martian Chorus Bells?), but you'd be surprised how much of said throat-singing is there that you're not hearing - a lot of it's been rendered unrecognisable by yours truly.

This sort of stuff is basically hella fun. I've just finished (I think) my second track along these lines. Again, live drums, although it's been run through distortion and reverb channels to make that exact sound that unreproducable live. But nothing else is conventional instrumentation. I've used backwards-masking, pitch-shifting, a lot of overdubbing. I'm still learning how to use Cubase, and when I get my head around that, I'll move on to other things.

It's entirely likely that the majority of the music I make will be like this. It's easier with my setup/skill level now anyway. There's that romanticised view of having a 'band' and physically playing music live in front of people which still appeals to me, but at this point in time, it's proving difficult to get live recordings of Lucas and I sounding as I like them. That, and I need to be able to play my instrument. My improv-ing skill sucks.

Basically, what I'm getting at is that my instrument of choice is becoming my recording setup. Recording live music with the expectation that one's sound will be reproduced faithfully is just silly, especially if your mic preamps are still broken, like you blogged about months back, preventing you from getting any sort of clean sound out of any instruments recorded live, 'cause you need those preamps for your wonderful condenser mics (yeah, I'm looking around for a stand-alone preamp now anyway...)

P.S - I've also checked the MySpace last night. Frustratingly, Martian Chorus Bells doesn't sound quite as clean as I thought it did through my headphones at home. It could be that I didn't listen to it through other speaker setups enough or that the track's quality on the page is not as high as when I mixed it, but it's incredibly muddy. I might see if I can fix that. You heard me...it's NOT FINISHED! HAHAHAHAHHAHAA! EAT DAT, LUCAS!)

I've had a lot of 'Muso's Block' today. In fact, I've been having it most of the day.

I pretty much just played Warcraft III a lot instead. It bugs me that the most productive days for me are usually days that I don't have time to record/play anything.

Still working on things, though, just got less done in a day than I thought I would.

Ink were playing somewhere tonight for their EP launch. I was planning to go, but didn't. I played a bit of C&C3 instead.

Leaving the other job's paid off already. I've somehow found time to sleep, eat stuff (you know, substantial food, not a 500g bag of M&Ms), watch a few commentaries for Firefly (often quite hilarious) and actually come up with the basis for a song. If I get enough time to record things with Lucas tomorrow, I should be able to get a rough version of it completed rather quickly, since I have most of my ideas for it stuck in my head.

Just before I made this blog entry, I did something unimaginably stupid - I went and checked out Sarah's myspace. Been avoiding anything to do with her to the best of my ability, but my curiosity got the better of me.

Why was it a stupid thing to do? 'Cause I just got myself depressed for the rest of the night.

I gotta move on. I don't like booze, so I'll just find something else to keep my mind occupado - I'm going to make pretty explosions with things in C&C3.

Tomorrow, Lucas and I shall record things. I shall make him play The Hardest Button To Button over and over again, as though he were a professional musician - the fact most professional musicians wouldn't be caught dead covering a White Stripes pop song notwithstanding. I'll also make him play a song which has a constantly shifting time signature (the one I was speaking of earlier). Once he's done all of this, he'll likely wish he never left home.

It's four minutes 'till the end of my last shift here. That said, here's my last blog entry to be written from the PC Tools network. Looks like from now on, I'll have to do this from home.

*shrugs*

Joseph D Kucan, the actor who plays Kane in the Command and Conquer series, is actually the guy who's directed all the cutscenes in the series up until Generals. Interesting.

So I'm listening to a CD called Feedbacker by a band called Boris on the shiny headphones I bought mainly for recording purposes (which were fixed and returned fairly quickly under warranty, being faulty out of the box).

Holy crap. Mogwai got nothing on these guys for layers (and layers and layers and layers) of noise. Especially impressive, given that the instrumentation up until this point has been incredibly minimal.

I think my ears are bleeding.

edit - just over twelve minutes into the second song, after a brilliant guitar solo (yes, I just called a solo brilliant) they've just started actually singing.

The Tucker Bs have finally updated their website with a few gig dates. In Perth. No sign of when they'll be back here.

I just made myself sad.

...yeah. I just spoke to a customer with a tech issue of some sort who mentioned, in passing, that he'd purchased our product because, not being a computer-person (by his own admission), he couldn't uninstall our trial version, nor disable the automatic startup. So he handed over the money-numbers, and became our bitch.

Yeah, I bought Command And Conquer 3 not too long ago. This was while I was meeting Craig at Ashfield, we were going to go to Lucas' surprise birthday party (he's 25ish now!) that night.

The conversation leading to the purchase of the game went (more or less) thusly:

Me: 'Yeah, I'm heading over to Ashfield now...shouldn't be too long'
Craig: 'Cool. Oh, and I just bought C&C3'
Me: 'WHAT?!?! That's been released?'
Craig: 'Yeah, it looks awesome'
Me: 'OK, when I get to Ashfield, I'll be heading up to EB to buy a copy'

I'm quite the C&C fanboy.

And I was dragged, kicking and screaming, into modern home-computing and finally bought and installed a DVD drive in my PC (only because I learned that C&C required a DVD drive to run). The game's been a bit of fun so far, although it seems to be very much about building masses and masses of units and just hurling them at the opponent. Given the vast amount of resources of most maps, and the ability to gather said resources very quickly, a CPU-choking army can be massed within a few minutes, so it makes any intricate tactical maneuvering redundant and impractical.

Lucas' party thing went alright. Lucas was right about getting a group from salesforce organised for anything: It's like herding cats. Despite the turnout, fun was had by all. Ashleigh did the usual thing of getting the day the event was on correctly memorised, but the wrong week. We ended up calling her and bullying her into coming halfway through, so there was one potential no-show that ended up showing.

I'm officially putting my minimal D&D knowledge and experience to use, and can now officially claim to be a nerd (up until now, it's just been tall talk): I'm in a D&D group. It involves having to take time out of every second weekend, meeting with like-minded nerds and argue about whether each possible injury caused by misusing a crossbow can be represented by rolling an eight-sided die.

My character, so far, if Tiefling bard. Like me, he wanna be a muso. Bards usually are seen carrying an instrument, usually something smallish and practical for the adventuring lifestyle, like a lute or something. When it came time to decide on what instrument by dude would be lugging around on his travels, I could only think of one thing:

An upright bloody bass.

Just because nobody else was doing it. Well, it's not entirely an upright bass, it's a 6-ft eight-stringed instrument with a reinforced neck which doubles as a +1 Halberd-ish sort of thing that I got specially made for me. I would have picked a grand-piano, had a character in our party been willing to carry it for me. No such luck.

It looks like my character is almost certain to become the party's leader by default, on account of the high charisma rating (I know that Craig's ninja-mantis dude is an ugly sonovabitch and Damo is making a character that's basically a humanoid rock that carries a sword. All that guy's going to be doing is walking around making rock-puns and innuendo at every opportunity, which'll be great around the kids). Needless to say, these guys don't have a focus on charisma, or any abilities that could be considered 'social'. And, let's face it - Bards are lame until you realise that there's almost always a hole left in a given party (lack of theiving abilities, lack of spellcasting etc.), which Bards inevitably are able to fill. With any luck, I'll find myself useful on occasion.

It's also very likely to be the last week I'm working at PC Tools, too. Enough said about that for now, as this is being typed out on one of their computers and being sent over their connection, if for no other reason...