| << Time warp | 2005 > May | Enjoying the weather >> |
Having a vehicle ::
When I first started writing music, I’d just write songs for piano and voice. Playing them alone felt complete. A couple years later I got a Fender Rhodes and played with a friend who had an electric guitar. Some songs conceived for guitar emerged here and there. A few years after that, I was in an instrumental band. Everything I wrote was conceived with the band in mind. I spent more time composing than ever before.
In 1986 Pat Cahill and I did a few gigs in New York City as a bass/keyboard duo with MIDI sequencer. We’d thought it would be nice to have a drummer, but finding one was difficult, so the attitude was, be prepared to play alone, and be prepared to make room for others if the right player comes along.
That worked well for us, but by the time I moved to California in 1988, with no musical contacts and not much time/energy for making new ones, I dove into exploring what could be done alone with keyboards and a sequencer. Some things Pat and I had adopted as good working principles became more difficult to follow, like, keeping the sequenced parts mixed quietly, especially the drum machine, since neither of us had the patience to try to program it expressively, if that was even possible.
I still don’t have the patience for drum programming. The first songs I wrote for the album I’m recording next month didn’t have any drum parts. But some crept in here and there. I found a friend of a friend who did some brilliantly creative parts. Last week I finished integrating his parts on the four songs he did. I think seven of the nine album tracks are close to done now.
But that leaves two I hadn’t touched since getting Christoffer’s feedback in January. I opened one of them yesterday, looked at his comments, and realized, wow, he knows a woman who will sing a vocal part if I write one. I spent several hours looking for some vocal samples that were at least in the neighborhood of the right approach, enough not to leave too much to the imagination while composing.
Today the vocal parts just came out in an hour or two. I fixed up several more sounds that were weak and elaborated on the bass part (Christoffer plays bass and it would be silly to have it in only a couple of places on the track.) Once more, I’m reminded of how much it helps, when writing music, to know there are players who will actually play the parts. All I have to do is find the notes and not worry too much about the sounds (as alien a concept as that may seem for a synth-tweaker like me!).
| << Time warp | 2005 > May | Enjoying the weather >> |