Tag: recording

output

I’ve mentioned this before, and I’m bound to mention it again… but in my spare time, or rather, our spare time, we three Confusionaires are working on another record.

We live in exciting times, and in exciting times, time passes very quickly. We are already behind schedule on what my ideal timeline is… we started later than I’d wanted to, and now we’re recording songs in our ‘spare’ (ha!) time, gathering once or twice a week in our rehearsal studio to attain live-off-the-floor versions of songs we’ve been working on and playing live. This ‘spare’ time pops up once or twice a week between out of town shows, and at the end of long work days.

That said… we work pretty quickly. We can typically get a song done (recorded to completion and edited) in a couple evenings, so one song per week assuming we can get together twice that week. Birthdays, anniversaries, condo board meetings pop up every so often and gum up the works… but this is our process.

It’s difficult for me not to put a deadline on these things… I’ve issued deadlines that have been sorely missed but if I’m being realistic with myself it’s because I want it to be done.
Done.
And fantastic.
Done and fantastic takes time.

So I wrestle… belabouring lyrical choices and harmony vocal parts right up until the time they’re recorded, but also writing new songs that won’t even make it onto this album (but I have to get these things out and down on the page because they’re COMING OUT OF ME whether I like it or not, and this is a particularly fruitful season.

Yes, there are seasons to these things and I feel like it’s all hitting me at once right now, in the most amazing and glorious way. It’s truly exhausting and it’s actually caused me to almost completely forget to post to this blog – something I haven’t forgotten to do in this blog’s entire 3 years. But when it dies down, I assure you it’ll be very frustrating, and I’ll probably take to this blog to register my feelings about it throughout the world wide web. I assume some bolt of lightning will hit me and tell me what to do in that off-season but that’s ultimately a problem for future-Davey.

But for now… I make hay while the sun shines.
And despite the so-so weather forecast the Canadian prairies are getting these days… THIS sun is shining quite a bit.

charming mistakes

I recently had a conversation with a friend & colleague regarding recording processes. He’s a fellow guitar player and; as odd as it feels for both of us to refer to ourselves in this way, we are composers. Rock & roll composers.

His question for me was; essentially, how good is good enough?

As in, when it comes to recording an instrument, and the ‘take’ in question is ‘flawed’ in some way – as they often are when they are performed by humans – where is the line for an acceptable take vs an unacceptable take. The easy answer is ‘well, if I did what I was trying to do, then it’s worth keeping’ and we are both inline with that. For me, the question is: Is it charming?

There are happy accidents and not-so-happy accidents in this business, but we both feel that if we get too ‘nitpicky’ with every passing note, and cut out every mistake and replace them individually, that we risk engineering the soul out of the song.

That’s a difficult decision to make in the era of quantization and auto-tune, where no mistakes are left to chance in most popular music, but it’s easy for us as artists to forget that there’s a rich heritage of raw and archaic practices. Once upon a time in 1955, when a young Elvis Presley, Bill Black, and Scotty Moore gathered around 1 single omnidirectional microphone in a room and performed their best renditions of songs, that the one that had the ‘best feel’ was what was chosen by the producer, regardless of mistakes, botched endings, and off-key flubs.

There’s a spot in The Kingsmen’s hit “Louie Louie” where the drummer apparently hit his thumb with a drumstick in the middle of the song and yells “FUCK!” loud enough to be picked up on the tape. Decades of AM and FM airplay later, it’s still there, never having been edited out.

And these recordings became iconic.

Surely, that was then, and this is now – but there’s something to be remembered there – The soul must stay intact.

In the end, it’s important that we’re proud of what we’ve made. We intentionally record on high quality instruments, into state of the art microphones, into an industry standard recording program. We hire fantastic mixing engineers, and fantastic mastering engineers. We hire great artists and have our records pressed by reputable companies. All the elements for a great recording are there, and our efforts in the studio should match those elements.

Unanimously, they do match those elements, but as I am currently partaking in yet another recording project with The Confusionaires, these thoughts and propensities come back into the foreground.

These things can be much easier to say than do.
Wish me luck.

new failures

In my artistic life – a life that I wish wasn’t so separate from my daily life – I’m in a pretty crazy world.

By a very real and tangible metric, I’ve successfully put out roughly a dozen albums. Each one has successfully surpassed reach and influence of the previous. I’ve had music on indie charts. I’ve made music videos. My current band has successfully sold out copies of first vinyl release. I’ve successfully toured internationally as a performing and recording artist. I’ve sold out shows in this country and in Mexico. And I’ve successfully learned new lessons from each experience.

By another very real and tangible metric, I’ve never sold enough albums or had enough steams to make myself eligible for a Juno or a Grammy… meaning that every album I’ve released has sold poorly, failing to meet the criteria for those awards. I’ve never had a hit song. The album we sold out of had very low production numbers, so was a low target. Technically, our international touring adventure earlier this year lost money.

Every musical success I’ve had could be called a failure in the same breath.

There’s an interesting phenomenon that happens with hit songs. If you have a song perform well – say, #15 on a billboard chart, and the next one does even better – let’s say #12 on the billboard chart, things are; by definition, going very well for you. However, if you have a song go to #1, and the next song doesn’t crack the top 10, you get labelled as a has-been pretty quickly.

In a similar way, a restaurant owner I’ve known once said that he wouldn’t want to be the #1 restaurant in town (according to a local publication) because getting bumped from the top spot – which WILL happen – makes for declining value. He was content with consistently being (and his restaurant was) #2 or #3 for years.

Local musicians often suffer from what’s been referred to as hometown prophet syndrome. This is a situation where you have a difficult time drawing a crowd to a performance in your home town because the perception is that people can see you anytime, so what you’re doing isn’t special. But, to perform a few towns over can be a guaranteed barn-burner of a show, mainly due to the fact that a great performer can show up and blow minds and get a reaction like “where did these guys even come from?” which is a stark contrast to the hometown music scene who’s been watching that performer get on stage and just suck, while gradually grinding it out and honing their craft to near perfection without anyone really taking notice.

My band an I are embarking on a new recording adventure. We’re going back to the drawing board with a few things, and revising our approach to recording while working up a new batch of songs for what will no doubt be an album that we will release. In that way, it will be a success. We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again.

How that album will perform, we sincerely hope, will be better than any of our previous efforts. The challenge will be to go back through every misstep we’ve taken and improve upon every bad idea we’ve ever followed through on, and amplify the good ideas we’ve barely scratched the surface of.

Addressing the shortcomings of the past is hard, but it’s how growth is achieved and it’s as painful as it is necessary.

I can’t wait to learn how to improve this.

After 30 years, I am still improving.

attentive

In my artistic life – not that I segregate my life, but certain things require a singular focus and art is one of those things – my band and I are embarking on another recording project.

To date, we’ve released 3 full length albums and essentially 3 EPs, and I’ve essentially lost count of the ‘sessions’ we’ve done because (a) there’s been a lot of them, and (b) my memory is not great most of the time and these things tend to run together, especially when it’s been the same 3 guys, and pretty much historically has happened in the same studio. We’ve also done a bonkers amount of rehearsal recordings.

Sometime next year, we’ll take our artistry and duplicate it a whole bunch of times and turn it into a product to be bought & sold. It’ll become a commodity that people can have an opinion on, and they’ll determine if it holds up to our other albums, and at some point someone will say they liked our “old stuff” better, which will add a linear element to all of this, thereby making us feel old or something.

But for now, we make art. We set up microphones and baffles and headphone mixes and we flush out chord progressions and ramblings and churn them into songs. There will be pounding drums and loud guitar amplifiers and we’ll allow our imaginations to take us into strange places. We’ll weave together poetry and bent strings and interesting rhythms and low frequencies and our dreams will stretch our further than our shadows.

Working a job in between recording sessions is brutal, but we’ll do it because it’s the part of the process we can’t do without just yet. The transition from the top of our creative mindframe to the of an exhausted and underslept worker and back again is so painfully humbling, yet necessary.

Months later, a critic will refer to our efforts as “fairly country” or “chaotic” and if we’re lucky, both of those terms in the same sentence – but that’s in the future, and we don’t live in the future, we live in the now, and now is the time for art. Now is the time when we redefine and reframe the way we’re perceived by the world, designing a work that will give us another shot at notoriety. We fully believe it will propel us further, but how much further is not yet determined.

I have to focus on the art right now, though imagining a future in which this artist work already exists is such a beautiful distraction.
Now is the time for focus.
Now is the time to be attentive.
Now is the time for art – while completely disregarding the future possibilities.

We can’t create art for the future, this is a snapshot of the present.

The future will take care of itself.

The future happens anyway.

keep pushing

The last little while has been a veritable firehose of creativity coming at me, or through me, or however it comes out. I feel like I am part antenna, plucking poetic metaphors from the sky, while simultaneously spitting out verse and peeling off chord patterns and riffs like they’re going to rot if I don’t get them contained.

It’s both inspiring and perplexing.

When records are made, there’s often a feeling of dread and doubt looming beneath the skin, perpetually asking questions like “what if this isn’t good enough?” and “what if you never make another record?” and I know this to be true because I’ve heard other songsmiths say it out loud, but the past few records I’ve made haven’t been like that at all. I know for a fact that I’ll make more and I have a dozen professional releases behind me to illustrate how that happens, but lately I’ve been feeling like the recording(s) that my band is about to start work on are actually really important.

There’s nothing “right now” about these songs, as far as subject matter. On the contrary, I find that records tend to be a marker in time – sort of a “this is what it was like that year” rather than something that affixes itself to a time & place and becomes irrelevant with the changing times. (By that token, if you want to know what my life felt like in 2010-2012 was like, take a listen to the Fuzz Kings releases that came out in 2013 & 2014. If you want them on vinyl, I’ll be happy to furnish you with them.)

Anyway, I have no idea what ‘really important’ even means. Will it propel me forward as an artist? I certainly hope so… I can’t imagine it not doing so, really. Will it top charts? influence media? challenge the status quo? I am certain that I have no idea. “Important” doesn’t always mean successful, and nothing is guaranteed in this life and in this industry. And I know as well as anyone that sometimes people don’t find your record until it’s 10 years old… maybe older.

I don’t think it’s happenstance that I’m posting this as I encroach on 2 years clean & sober. October 22nd, 2019 I had my last drink (in excellent company, mind you). A couple weeks prior to that I was pulling over on Highway 2 to throw up into the ditch multiple times on my way back from a music conference. I’m not here to tell anyone to drink or not drink, but I can tell you that in my case, it’s resulted in being much more present in my performances, much more present in my songwriting, and much more present in my interactions with people. It’s interesting that it’s also the anniversary of this blog, and the anniversary of the day I moved into my house… all happening in different years, and unintentionally.

What I do know is that this is what I am supposed to be doing right now, and this is the frame of mind I am supposed to be in. We can talk about destiny, or the illusion of free will if you like, but all I know is that it feels really good to be right where I am supposed to be.

I cant wait to share my art with you.