Watching Scenes from a Movie

Broken Love Movie (viewing party)Yesterday, my son and his friend shared two scenes from a movie they are producing — Broken Love — to a select audience of Kickstarter supporters, and it was so interesting to see the work they did in shooting, editing and producing these two important scenes from their movie.

During a Q/A period on livestream, the two talked about the logistics of the filming, working with other actors and a small production team, and where the idea for the story originated from.

The Kickstarter helped fund the making of these clips and now, they are going to use what they have to try to get funding and support to keep going on their movie project, and it has been great to see these two friends, who made movies as kids, continue to follow their passions forward. (My son, Colin, now works as a video editor, and Sam, his friend, is a writer finishing up his first novel).

Peace (showing it to the world),
Kevin

 

On Songwriting Part 6: A Voice In The Mix

(This is the sixth of a series of posts about writing songs. Read the first postsecond post,  third post, fourth post, and fifth post, if interested)

I’ve been tracking the writing and recording of a new song — Million Miles Away (From Finding Me) — as a way to reflect on my songwriting process. I’m not sure if too many other people are interested but if you are here: welcome.

In the week or so since my last post, I’ve been tinkering with layers on the music of the song, trying to wrestle it into some form of existence that I find satisfying. I’ve added instruments and taken them away. I’ve walked away from it more times than most just not all that satisfied, feeling (as I mentioned last post), that the production I have done is too contained, too restrained, as the foundation of drums and piano and bass were built mostly upon modified loops. That said, the layering of vocal “ahhs” at the opening and in the chorus sections, the distorted guitar on top of the bridge, and the simple percussive bell keyboard melody after the last verse all help offset the “in a box” feel, I hope.

Then there is my vocal track. I kept trying to find time in the house when no one was around, as I am pretty self-conscious about singing new songs, and I know my voice has many limitations (along with some interesting qualities, if I get it right, which is not all that often). Last night, I realized: no one else is in the house, and I rushed to get my microphone, headphones, computer and lyric sheets all set up, and then spent time recording the vocals (disrupted at times by the dog, barking at her tennis ball).

It came out OK, I guess, but I still feel like this produced version of the song is not the version I have in my head — it doesn’t have the intangible thing that led me write it in the first place and stay with it so long —  and interestingly, every time I practice the song on acoustic guitar, I think: THIS is the version of the song that seems most true to what I was writing.

So, with all that said, here is what I am calling the Production Version of Million Miles Away, with many layers of instruments. I like it OK. I don’t love it but I appreciate it for what it is: an final step in an experiment of bringing a song from start to finish in the open. At one point, I tried to add some higher backing vocals to some lines in the song that could use more texture, but that failed miserably and I lost patience so I abandoned that idea. I have some visions of recruiting a real singer to sing it, but that may be at some point down the road, when I am ready to let the song go.

My next, and maybe last step, interestingly enough, is going to be to do an acoustic version of the song — low production value — focused on guitar and voice, as I see if I can capture the heart of the song in the way I hear it in my head. That’s for another day.

Peace (produced in loops),
Kevin

Book Review: The Lyrics (Paul McCartney)

PRE-ORDER Paul McCartney: The Lyrics Hardcover Book Set ...

This is my kind of book — a songwriter taking apart each and every song, from where the words came from, to how a song fell into place, and using the process to tell a larger story of a life in music — but the two-volume The Lyrics (1956 to the Present) by Paul McCartney would be a bit too much for the casual listener. And it would be a hit on the wallet (for me, this was a combined holiday gift from my children).

While many of the songs here in this collection from McCartney’s later life were not familiar to me, the Beatles’ songs and the early Wings’ songs certainly were (my first vinyl LP was Wings: At The Speed of Sound) , and as I perused the lyrics, I could hear the songs playing in my head. Each song lyric sheet comes with a narrative that McCartney pulled together, with help of writer/poet Paul Muldoon, and McCartney’s life as a curious observer of life and explorer of songs comes through.

As a songwriter myself, I was most curious about the gathering of early drafts of lyric sheets, arrows and scratches, recording studio notes about instrumental tracks, photographs inside the studios, and the other ephemeral items from a life of making songs. You can see handwritten notes and chord changes, and doodles in the margins, and all the things that show a creative mind at work.

After watching the six hours of the recent Beatles movie, and then reading this book, I’m McCartney-ed out at this point, but I was glad for the journey into songs, and appreciate how he has long developed his craft, but also the ability to recognize, seize and develop inspiration from wherever it comes, and to always be ready for the moment when a song arrives.

Peace (singing it),
Kevin

Slice of Life: Noticing The Stretch of Days

(This is for the Slice of Life challenge, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We write on Tuesdays about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.)

It’s easy to forget, amid the hubbub of life and school and family, that the Winter Solistice was a month ago, and the days are indeed beginning to stretch longer.

I find, it’s only when I am in a moment of quiet that I observe more sunlight later in the afternoon, and the days of darkness at 4 pm are gone.

Yesterday, as I waited to get my son from indoor track practice, I noticed the sun was still mostly up, and it was 5 pm and that made me smile, even as the cold air was circulating all around me and more snow was coming (only an inch or two, but still … winter).

So, a poem with this morning’s Slice:

Poem: These Longer Days

Peace (in the moment),
Kevin

 

On Songwriting Part 5: Building The Tracks From The Ground Up

(This is the fifth of a series of posts about writing songs. Read the first postsecond post,  third post, and fourth post, if interested)

Note: After spending quite a bit of time working to produce tracks of music for this ons song that I am writing and reflecting on out in the open, I sort of still like the rawness of the early versions where it is just guitar and rough voice. I may yet abandon what emerged and described here in this post, but not yet. I’m going to continue my song quest forward.

In my earlier posts, I shared how I took an idea built of a chord pattern and opening line of a song, worked through drafts of lyrics, developed a verse and chorus, and began to construct a new song out here, in the open, as part of a creative reflective practice. (See the links above if you want to read and listen to what I had been up to from the start)

With the lyrics mostly together, and solidified, with only a line or two still being tweaked now and then as I practice the song — Million Miles Away (From Finding Me —  I decided to try my hand at building and producing an instrumental backing music with technology. Initially, as almost always, I was on my acoustic guitar, with the chords and words and paper. In turning to Garageband, and Soundtrap, as digital music stations, I was hoping to turn the song at a slight angle, with layers of sound.

I began in Garageband, on the app on my iPad, and started with drum loops, and then added piano, and then bass and so on. I added, and removed, other instruments that either didn’t work for my ears, or became too cluttered for the sound of the song that I could hear in my head. Still, I kept some guitar, percussion (in two sections) and organ in there.

Million Miles Cover

Even this screenshot shows how many layers are in there, and the tracks are divided up by song sections — the verse, the chorus and the bridge. Here’s a little snippet from the center of the song, so you can get a listen to how the layers are working together at this point. If you have been following this series, you may hear how different the feel is with this, as opposed to my earlier demos. It’s both intentional, and not, if that makes sense, as the automated loops began to shape the song anew in my ears, through my own choices of instruments (the piano gives an entirely new texture) and patterns.

Using and remixing loops in an app like Garageband is fun, and it’s relatively easy, but it also risks generating a fairly sterile sound, as everything is locked in perfect place with the unforgiving metronome, and this is what continues to nag at me here, even as I think about how to wrangle some imperfections in there. To humanize the looped sound. It is this notion of loop track perfection that had me writing the first thought that began this blog post (above) — a reason that I still might ultimately scrap this whole song construction I am outlining here and begin from scratch all over again on guitar.

But not yet. So …

I moved that mixdown of tracks out of Garageband and into Soundtrap, another music recording platform which has some nice options for live recording, and then layered in my own acoustic guitar, giving it more of the original feel of the song, which the piano tracks, while nice, didn’t capture in my ears. The live guitar, while intentionally not very prominent in the mix, gives the song a little extra of something. I play off the beat at times, filling in the robotic metronomic forward motion of what I built in Garageband.

Take a listen to this snippet.

I’ve since added some vocal backgrounds (ahhs) and a section of power chords for electric guitar for the bridge section but I don’t have that ready yet to share.

My next step will be to record some lead vocals, which I will do as another track in Soundtrap. I may add some more live keyboards (myself, playing, as opposed to loops) at the end, to give the second half of the song more texture. In regards to vocals, I aim to do my best, but in my mind, I keep wondering: Who else could I ask to sing this? Or help me sing this? A backing track might make all the difference in the world.

Peace (continuing on),
Kevin

Book Review: Mirror Sound

Rock and Roll Book Club | The Current

The very first songs I ever wrote and then recorded were done on a little Tascam Four-Track machine that a friend (Murph) borrowed from another friend (Eric), and we set it up in a basement room in my house. We were teenagers. We used a microphone to record some Casio keyboard drums, and layered other sounds, and added vocals (ack), and the magic of the moment when we had a “mix” of that first song was … amazing.

You can even take a listen (because I try to keep everything). The song is called Follow That Dream. It’s hard for me to listen — the lyrics, the voice, the mix … but you can hear some of what we were trying to do with our production as beginners. What you can’t hear is how excited and focused we were, to be recording songs we had written.

That memory has been lingering in my mind as soon as I began reading Mirror Sound (A Look Into the People and Processes Behind Self-Recorded Music) by Spencer Tweedy, Lawrence Azarrad and Daniel Topete.

In this oversized (and pricey) table book — full of cool photographs of underground and independent musicians across genres and genders — the three men (Tweedy is the son of Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco, but an accomplished drummer and producer in his own right) dig deep into what makes music makers creative, and how a home studio format (either simple or complex) helps these artists to chase their musical threads.

I found every page fascinating, even though I barely know any of the artists in this book. What struck me was the articulation of the creative mind at work, and the desire to make music and follow your paths, for yourself first, and maybe the world, second. These musicians are driven by the need capture the sounds and songs they hear and feel, with little regard for audience (at least, in the making of music part of things).

While some of the discussions went technical (about microphones and set-ups and software), Tweedy always seems to ground the discussion to the creative mind, and to the motivation, and to what it is about recording your ideas on your own that keeps the flame of making songs alive for each of these artists. The first section of the book is mostly photographs, intimate shots of people’s bedroom studio spaces (sometimes, it’s just a bed with a laptop and a guitar), with some enlarged quotes, and the second half is packed with interviews with the people. I enjoyed both parts, and the book itself is a beautiful piece of visual art.

After my friend, Murph, and I recorded those first songs, we were able to “steal time” at night one summer in another friend’s garage where he was slowly setting up recording equipment. We’d tinker in there, and make some tapes, and sit and listen in the car.

Later, I saved up and bought my own Tascam (which, reading here in this book, was a revolutionary product for many musicians, for its affordability and its ability to layer four tracks, or more, if you bounced tracks down) and I spent countless hours in my room, by myself, playing around and experimenting. (Murph, my friend, later went on to build his own recording studio as a business.)

These days, I mostly use an online site  to record and layer tracks, although I have an old Tascam in the basement and a cardboard box full of master tapes somewhere (probably gone bad with time).

And I am still mostly writing for an audience of one — myself, and the hope that I will stumble upon something interesting, and follow that path into a song. When it happens, there’s nothing quite like it. That’s what Mirror Sound captures on the page — that sense of wonder and magic of making music.

Peace (the muse sings),
Kevin

On Songwriting Part 4: Getting It Down As Demo

(This is the fourth of a series of posts about writing songs. Read the first post, second post and third post, if interested)

I’m always anxious about my singing voice, which is one reason why I always am ready to call anything I record a “demo” and cover myself from criticism (that I can’t sing as well as I should be able to, given how many years I’ve been at this).

So, in that vein, I’m going to be sharing a demo recording of the song that I have been writing, and writing about, in the open. The song is titled Million Miles Away (From Finding Me).

A demo recording is valuable for me as a songwriter because it sets into “tape” (or app) how I am hearing a song still in development. You’d think if you were writing a song, you would remember how it goes when you took a break and came back to the song.

If only.

I can’t say it happens often, particularly if a song is worth keeping and the melody line is running in my head, but there have certainly been more times than I like when I have returned to a lyric sheet and picked up my guitar, and forgotten a little melody line that is the heart of a lyric or a line or the song. If I have not have the foresight to record even a rough version of the song, I have to walk away in frustration. Sometimes, the lost piece will return the next time I try the song.

A demo recording at least preserves some version of the song as it is being written, and almost always, my demos are only guitar and voice, recorded these days on the Voice Memo app on my phone, and then moved over to my computer. In the early days, it might have been a cassette player or four-track machine.

For this new song that I have been writing about recently, this audio demo followed yet more minor revisions to the lyrics (something I wrote about in Posts 2 and 3) as I fine-tune words and phrases a bit. For demos, I just hit “record” and start playing, and as long as I don’t completely flub it up, it’s a keeper.

Listen to the first part of the demo of Million Miles Away (From Finding Me).

The next step for me now is to determine if the song is worth a more focused recording session on my computer, in which I would record the guitar separate from the vocals, and maybe have a drum track, and other instrumentations on it. I’m leaning towards that for this one, if only to complete this reflective writing adventure.

And I still like the song enough to keep pushing forward.

Peace (singing it),
Kevin

Slice of Life: To Watch The Joy

(This is for the Slice of Life challenge, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We write on Tuesdays about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.)

I let Rayna, our young dog, loose in the yard early in the morning, as wet snowfall was just starting to turn to rain here. The slush would come later as the temperatures shifted.

For now, it was a few inches of pure white packable snow from overnight, the kind you could use to build a snow-fort, or snow-person, or perhaps have the most epic snowball fight of the world.

From the back deck, I smiled and laughed out loud as Rayna ran and ran and ran, in circles and then in zigzags, and then in reverse circles, then around the tree and along the fence, and then leaping over the tipped chair, just being so glorious in the moment of pure joy of what the night could bring that all I could do was join her.

So I did, leaping off the steps and running with her in my heavy boots, dashing alongside her, at her, in shared winter exhilaration, the dog and I, together in a moment of play.

Peace (one moment at a time),
Kevin