Making a Song

I’ve learned to make music through reading, experimentation, and by asking questions of people more experienced than myself. One of the things I’ve learned along the way is that there is more than one way to go about many parts of the process. I’m not sure if my process is unique, rare, or the norm, but here is my process when it comes to making a song. Keep in mind that this is a general process. Sometimes the order of the steps is different, steps are skipped, or steps are added.

1. Initial Creation - A song has to start somewhere. Sometimes it will start with music, sometimes it will start with lyrics, sometimes lyrics and music will be created simultaneously. Creating the music involves choosing instrument sounds to use, and programming the notes into a midi sequencer.
2. Recording - Once the instrumental and vocal parts are written, I record the vocals. Usually, at this point, it’s just a rough version - especially if I’m the one doing the vocals. This rough take helps me hear how the music and the vocals mesh together, it gives me a chance to refine them so that they take even better advantage of each other, and it helps me learn the words for an improved take later on.
3. Rework the music - As I said, once I have the rough vocals, I can make the music and vocals work together even better. This is the point where I cut instruments out to highlight lines, add accents with drums, and rewrite parts of the lyrics and music if necessary. Because of this step, I never consider music I write complete until I have a rough version of the vocals and get a chance to rework the music around them.
4. Record Vocals - Normally when I make a new song I stop after step 3. Once the rough draft is down, I can come back anytime to finish the song. In the meantime I listen to the rough version a bunch of times and maybe even memorize the lyrics. Now, when it comes time to finish the song, my familiarity with the song (even if it’s not memorized) allows me to record a better vocal performance, more suitable for a final version.
5. Record the music - At this point, the instrumental is still midi - a set of instructions that, when combined with a hardware or software synthesizer, will replay the music. In order to add whatever processing is needed (EQ, compression, etc) I need to turn these midi tracks into traditional audio files. When I use software instruments, this is as easy as a few clicks of the mouse, but usually, my songs have a significant amount of instruments that come from my E-Mu Pk-6. When that is case, I have to record each instrument to a separate track. This step tends to be a pain in the ass. If I have a 4 minute song with 7 instruments played through the PK-6 (a typical scenario), it will take 28 minutes (4 minutes x 7 instruments) to record all the instruments. Add to this the time it takes to set up each track before I record it and the time it takes to redo tracks when there is an error (when dealing with midi, my computer frequently hiccups, throwing everything out of time) and the time to record the instruments grows – sometimes to more than twice that 28 minutes. Because I have to catch errors as they occur, I have to be nearby throughout the whole process. What makes this all so annoying is that this is a purely technical task - it involves no creativity and little thought. This is the type of busy work I would give to low level employees if I had the luxury of employing people other than myself.
6. Mix - Now that I have all the elements, I can mix them to make them all sound right together. Mixing involves EQuing and compressing the individual tracks, adding reverb and delay where they are needed, and applying any other effects and audio manipulation that is necessary. Sometimes I will mix with the rough vocal tracks and then carry out step 4 after this step.
7. Extras - This is actually a new step that I plan on incorporating into the process. Sometimes ambient noises or strange little background sounds can make a track come alive, but looking through a ton of sound effects while I’m trying to construct a track would be an interruption to my creative process. Instead, as one of my last steps, I plan to search for an add the subtle sounds that will help make the track more dynamic.
8. Fix - Throughout the process, I listen for parts of the song that need fixing or improvement, but at this point I try to be extra critical and analytical. If there is anything wrong, I go back and fix it.
9. Master - Now that everything is done, the track can be mastered. Ideally, I should be sending tracks off to a mastering house and paying them a heap of money so they can make sure my levels and overall EQ are well-suited for mainstream play, but for money reasons, I do this step myself. This is the final polish before I present a track to the public.

Getting Better All the Time

Bringing visitors to a website is not an easy thing. I've been running AhdChild.com for several years now, and throughout that time, I've been constantly trying to improve the site and increase traffic. This year, I have been more focused than ever on bringing in new visitors. I just took a look at my site statistics, and realized that my efforts are really paying off. So far, 2007 has seen a 19% increase in unique visitors to the site over 2006. It's only May! As we head towards the halfway mark of the year, last year's final tally has already been exceeded. This is despite the surge in visitors to the site that occured around the time that I released Meeting of Minds. I can't wait to see what happens when I release Reverse Psychology and work on promoting it. It's nice to see signs that hard work is paying off. Now if I could only get people to comment on my blog . . .

Check Your Confidence

I’m not sure which is more dangerous – confidence or its lack. The dangers of lack of confidence are pretty obvious. Without confidence we underestimate and undervalue ourselves. We second guess our choices and this often results in self-sabotage. But too much confidence can be just as dangerous to ourselves and the people we interact with. A large number of ignorant, incorrect, or inconsiderate assertions and statements that I’ve heard seem to come directly from too much confidence. Too often, that same confidence translates to charisma, making these statements more acceptable to listeners.

Sometimes we can gain much by second-guessing ourselves. Sometimes a little undervaluation (the fact that “undervaluation” is a real word just boosted my confidence) is equivalent to a healthy amount of humility. Sometimes underestimating is a good thing, especially if overestimating is the alternative. How much is too much? As with many things in life, it seems that the challenge is not to gain confidence, the challenge is to find balance between confidence and humility. We must be confident enough so that we do not accept less than we deserve and constantly doubt our choices, but we must not be too confident to see our own flaws, empathize with our fellow men, and question our beliefs.

In my search for balance, I’ve found a few situations that should always set off alarm bells when it comes to confidence:

• If I find myself thinking of another person or group of people as being stupider, weaker or lesser than me in some other way, I question myself and take a second look. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not living in some fairy tale land where I think there are no stupid people. Sometimes after questioning myself, I find that I was right in the first place. However, sometimes, I find that the same stupidity, weakness, or whatever else that I am accusing someone of, is something I am guilty of. Other times I find that while I may not suffer from the particular fault I am seeing in the other person, I can easily understand why such a fault would arise in the situation.
• If a new of thinking about something or new idea comes to my attention and my immediate reaction is to discount it, I ask myself why I am discounting it. Is it because there is something wrong with the idea or is it because I am too confident in my beliefs to change them?
• If I find myself doubting my ability to accomplish a particular task or doubting the quality of my work, I do my best to take a second, more objective look. Perhaps my doubt is caused by lack of confidence rather than lack of ability.
• It’s not just our own confidence we need to watch out for. If someone makes an extra-confident assertion, I do my best to look past their confidence to the reasons and justification behind the assertion.
• If I ever find myself believing that I deserved something that happened to me, whether good or bad, I take a second look. If it’s something bad, there’s not much to consider. I don’t believe anyone deserves bad things ever. At times we might need bad things to result from our actions to teach us lessons, but punishment for its own sake serves no purpose. If you feel that you deserve punishment, that means that you are aware of mistakes you may have made. Once you are aware, wallowing in guilt is no substitute for doing what you can to right the wrong and learn from the experience. If I feel like I deserve something good that happened, I ask myself why. Was whatever I supposedly did to deserve the good thing that came really something above and beyond? Maybe I need to work to deserve that good thing after the fact – you know, pay off some of the debt on my karma card.

Balance never comes easy. I believe that achieving balance is the essential challenge of human life. These are just a few tips to help achieve balance, but this is far from comprehensive. Every situation where we should check our confidence is not easily generalized broken down into neat bullet points. Most aren’t. However, the way I see it, if we think about the simpler, easy to generalize cases ahead of time, that leaves us more time and energy to deal with the complicated cases as they occur.

A Song I Can Feel

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while – I just found a note to myself from July ’06 reminding me to blog about this. The note is titled “Emotional Music” and the entire content of it is:

I like emotional music.

By “emotional music”, I mean music that makes me feel things. I like music that can make me scrunch up my face as I marvel at the sheer power of the instrumentation. I like music that can make me feel the depth of the artist’s sadness or the enormity of his loneliness. I like music that will take control of me, of my emotions, music that will guide and shape them, music that will captivate me, music that will let me lose myself in it. I love music for the power it has over me. Whether I listen to sad music that makes me wallow in the artist’s pain as if it was mine, or music that reminds me of everything good in life, the experiences that emotional music gives me always leave feeling refreshed and energized.

When I make music, I constantly strive to make it emotional music. I can’t help it – I try to make the best music possible, and in my opinion, the best possible music is emotional music. This leads to one of my major issues with hip-hop music. Most of it is not emotional music. I love the form – that should be obvious from the fact that I make hip-hop – but I hate the fact that I don’t see nearly enough people taking it as far as it can go.

Commercial hip-hop is definitely not emotional music. I can’t relate on an emotional or intellectual level to some guy bragging to me about how he’s the best MC out or about how much money he has. When I hear songs about dealing drugs, being a gangster or mistreating women, my anger is a blockade between me and any chance of emotional attachment to the song. These guys degrade black people, the hip-hop culture and Black American culture with the things they say. They serve only themselves and money hungry record execs who care nothing for the art or for the people listening to the music. Commercial hip-hop pisses me off for the most part. I can’t and don’t want to get past that anger to “feel” the music. Even if I disregard the vocals, way too often I find the music to be uninspired and uninspiring. It seems to be getting even worse lately as super-simple beats that sound like they were made for toddlers seem to be becoming the norm.

That leaves the “underground” and the “conscious” artists. I look to them and what I find is not that different from commercial hip hop. There is a stigma throughout hip-hop that it has to be boastful, full of machismo and that an MC can admit no weakness. The conscious and underground artists put out many songs that contain the same pointless bragging as the commercial guys. I am so tired of that. It’s been done. The lyricism and wordplay was interesting at first, but why not put some content into the music? The subject matter often differs from that found in commercial hip-hop, but it is just as limited. It seems as if the one unifying theme of hip-hop artists is that they can be pigeon-holed. If your music doesn’t fit a stereotype, many people won’t find it worth listening to. An MC must fit one of a few categories – thug, baller, player, backpacker, revolutionary, or hippy.

My problem is that rather than engage me, these cliche topics bore me and I know that hip-hop can be so much more. I have no problem with the subject matter of the militant, revolutionary MCs who use their music to explore questions of race and class. I have no problem with the subject matter of the hippy MCs who use their music to explore ideas of religion and spirituality. Sometimes I don’t even mind the backpacker’s focus on lyricism instead of content. What I can’t stand is the fact that so many MCs have so little variety in their material that it is possible to easily categorize them. Even many of the MCs who fit in multiple categories cannot break out of those six archetypes. We all live life. We all have a ton of experiences, ideas and feelings that can be translated to music and words. Why do we limit ourselves? We end up painting limited pictures of ourselves and our experiences, and the repetition and lack of variety render our messages emotionally sterile. It seems that with just about any other musical genre, I can find examples that cover a wide range of subjects, stories and emotions, but when it comes to hip-hop, I am much harder pressed to find that variety.

I’ve heard a lot of songs about what is wrong with hip-hop – I even have one of my own. I’m going to try to limit my complaining to that one song (and maybe a few more). I don't want all my music to end up being about how I think music should be better. I’m doing my best to teach by example. (I think I’ve said this elsewhere, but) Reverse Psychology will be my first major step in this direction. My aim with it is to communicate emotions, to reveal weakness, and to tell stories that any human can relate to. My goal is to make emotional music. I want listeners to go through an emotional journey as they listen to my album, feeling the feelings behind every song, and when it is over, I want them to feel refreshed and energized when it’s over.

Of course it will be up to every individual that hears my album to judge whether I succeeded at what I was attempting, but I hope that at the least, the recognition of the attempt will give people the idea that hip-hop can encompass much more than it currently tends to.

Tweaks and Fixes

So I've been steadily working on the new album, Reverse Psychology, when I can, but it seems that there is always a bunch of work left to do. I finished the creative process - the music and lyric writing is pretty much done - but I still have to record a bunch of vocals and mix everything. On top of that, today I listened to the whole thing and came up with a bunch of fixes and tweaks that need to be done. Below is an image of my notes, just to give folks a look at my creative process. Click the picture for a larger view.

I'm on drugs

I grew up in a household where drug use was discouraged. Drugs have known and unknown side effects and many of the times that we tend to resort to drug use, we don't need to. I'm not against using drugs, but I do try to minimize my intake of body altering chemicals. It seems that most over-the-counter drugs are aimed at symptoms, so I usually only take them if the symptoms are inteferring with things I want/have to do. A lot of the time headaches can be cured with a nap or just some quiet time. Why take cold medecine when I'm staying at home all day? It doesn't do anything to help cure the cold.

My one exception is allergy medicine. Every year around this time, I get hit by allergies - runny nose, itchy eyes, and breathing problems. The symptoms are usually so bad that I take medicine whether I'm out and about or at home doing nothing. Two days ago I changed medicines, and I am sooooo happy. I was using what I was used to - Benedryl. It's been far from 100% effective and the other day, I got tired of having to take it every 4 hours. I went to CVS and checked out my alternatives. Claritin sounded real good - would just have to take it once every 24 hours. I ended up buying a pack of Alavert, which is the same drug as Claritin (loratadine) but cheaper. I am a convert - this stuff really works. It is way better than Benadryl, and it is so much easier taking it once a day. No more constantly checking the time to make sure I take my next pill before the symptoms return. No more waking up with no more medicine in my system and allergy symptoms running rampant.

Did you know the active ingrediant in Benadryl, diphenhydramine, is also the active ingrediant in many sleeping aids? Yes, Benadryl is a sleeping aid. No more taking a sleeping aid every 4 hours throughout my day. I know a bunch of drugs come with warnings of drowsiness, but that is one of the primary uses of Benadryl. Now that I know that I'm wondering why it doesn't come with a stronger warning. According to wikipedia, loratadine's side effects are much milder - "dry mouth, headache and gastrointestinal disturbances."

If you suffer from allergies, I definitely recommend you give loratadine a try.

Have you wikied today?

Remember when you used to ask what a word meant and you were told to look it up? Do you still do that. Thanks to technology today, we can go way beyond the dictionary definition and little encyclopedia article. If you're curious about the meaning or history of something or how it works, look it up. Wikipedia is one of my favorite websites. You can find answers to your questions and educate yourself at the same time!

Sleepless Dreams

In a conversation with a friend the other day, I said that an artist's mind should always be several years ahead of the present. While I was working on Meeting of Minds I came to the realization that if I was going to release finished work, polished work to the public, my releases would never reflect the current state of my art. As I worked on getting all the tracks for Meeting of Minds recorded and mixed, I was already composing new material that is in my opinion more sophisticated than what was on my first release. I could have held back Meeting of Minds in order to infuse its tracks with that same level of sophistication, to apply all the lessons I had leared since starting it, but if I kept doing that, it would never be done I am always learning. Always finding new ways to improve, to be better.

So it was with that experience in my past that I made my claim - an artist should be way ahead of what he is releasing. Maybe I'm wrong to make such a sweeping statements about the criteria of being an artist. I do know that when it comes to me, that is definitely the case. I can't help visualizing future endeavors. Ideas constantly run through my head. I want to make an album that is targeted at children - teaching them positive values - but that an adult could enjoy too. I want to make an album of short stories - each song is a story. I want to make an album where every song is inspired by some other song/story/painting/work of art that already exists. The ideas come faster than I can turn them into actual music.

My latest idea is for something that has already been on my mind. I plan to follow up Meeting of Minds with another electronic album. I already have rough/unfinished versions of some of the songs for it. I've thought about calling it Meeting of Minds 2, but that didn't sem right. I want it to have it's own name, but I also want it to be linked to that first album. Tonight, while I was lying in bed sleepless, it hit me! I think I'll call it Harmony of Hearts, and the next one after that will be Subsistence of Souls . . . or maybe not. I'm going back to bed.

Enjoying the Weather

Philly is a great city to walk around in when it's nice outside. It's a people-watcher's paradise, full of interesting sights.

The blue pill?

I'm Gonna #008

I'm gonna show the whole world that I have nothing to prove.

The Pattern of Art

I don’t know if this is something particular to the human species, but we have a very strong attraction to patterns and what is familiar. I don’t even know if “attraction” is the right word. In many ways it’s like a deer-in-headlights kind of attraction - patterns fascinate and mesmerize us.

Considering this, it makes a lot of sense that pattern is one of the most basic and essential parts of art. When we see paintings, the ones with identifiable patterns or recognizable images tend to draw our eyes. Our favorite music is packed with repeating hooks that we remember even if we forget every other part of the songs. Of course making good art is not as simple as making a good pattern. The problem with pattern is intrinsic – patterns are predictable. The challenge to the artist is to exploit the attractive powers of pattern while creating something that is new and original.

This is both not as hard as it sounds and harder than it sounds. It is not as hard as it sounds because of the particular way our attraction to pattern works. If you make a sound in a silent room, it will stand out and draw attention much more than if you were to make a sound in a noisy room. Likewise, if you throw something new and unfamiliar in the middle of a pattern it will stand out and draw attention. We can use the pull of pattern to draw attention to the unfamiliar and unique. It is harder than it sounds because combining the predictable and unpredictable in a way that is coherent to our senses is no easy task. As I write this, I wonder if it is not this contradiction that is at the heart of what we call art and what draws us to it.

I think anyone who is a passable artist applies this idea to some degree, whether or not they have actively considered it in the way I describe it. As it often is, knowledge is power in this case. By being conscious of the effects of the predictable and the unpredictable, the artist is able to manipulate pattern to serve his purposes to an even greater degree. Artists constantly seek to create patterns, but the aware artist will follow up the creation of a pattern by trying to break it. This is something I must constantly remind myself of, for though I know it, it is easy to fall back into old patterns.