Progress

There's no short cut to making a good piece of music. What there are, are genres that take more or less skill as a player or composer, and audiences that will be more or less interested in untrained or semi-trained performers.

But one still has to put the time in. Even naive musicians who focus on simple song forms get better with practice. And all the tools in the world, all the shortcuts and technological tricks, don't entirely stand in for labor and sweat. It's more that they maximize what one's able to do with the labor and sweat.

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours laboring over a MIDI track for one of my bands. My band mate had composed the source track the way he often does: by playing a drum machine "live" into software and creating loops from it. He built up these layers and then put various synths and guitars over it. Eventually it fell to us to reprogram all that into the synth workstation we use for live performances. (Yeah, we could probably play it directly out of his software but he isn't entirely sure how to make that work. And we like the MIDI workstation better).

Problem is ... my band mate doesn't always quantize very strictly. The positive effect of that is that his work has a looser, more organic feel. The downside is, it's more difficult to work other stuff alongside it.

When we laid the tracks into the work station, he insisted (for simplicity's sake) on working out the exact time stamps where the beats occurred in the software and translating those to the synth. Which is great if the start points of the loops match up with the downbeats. In this case they didn't.

Upshot: once in the synth, *nothing* fell on the first tick of each measure. It was all offset by some amount.

A dotted sixteenth, I'm pretty sure.

Rehearsing the song has thus been a bit of a chore. It's not that one "can't" sync to a rhythm that doesn't fall right on the measures, it's just that it puts you to extra work. The synth does this really nice thing of flashing a red LED on the "1" beat and a green for all others ... so in 4/4 you get "red green green green" and you know where you are. Except on this song where red meant "something will be happening in a little bit." ;-)

Anyway, yesterday I worked it all out, and as I suspected, the rhythm patterns were mostly in a simple 4/4 time, in fact a lot of things fell on ordinary quarter or eighth-note intervals, barring some syncopated cymbals and some toms in funny places. There was a definite kick drum pulse and putting the first of those beats on the "1" beat forced everything else into place rather neatly. Exactly what we probably would have realized long ago, if I'd won the "argument" with my band mate about moving his loops around in the software so that something--anything!--lined up with "1."

:-)

Funny how much easier it is to play my synth part live over the rhythm track, now that it's nicely laid out.

Once done with that, I set to work on a backing track for my solo project. The melody is in F, kind of, but mixolydian mode, or maybe it's really a G aeolian--and that's a result of my time in a melody composition class via Berklee College of Music a few months ago. It's not that I couldn't have stumbled on a Gm-Bb-F chord progression on my own, but fact is, the training I got in that class has made composition a lot faster and smoother. I had some of the main chord progression pads and rhythms for the verses and choruses already programmed, so I moved on to working on the bridge, repeating the verse and chorus where needed, and making the drums more interesting.

I'm getting a better sense for when to add additional instruments and when to turn things down or subtract them, also. The bridge has some nice piano filigree now, added pretty much spur of the moment. Not only is coming up with such a thing on the fly a bit of an advance, so is laying it down so quickly. Yeah, I used the input quantizer, but my playing would have been decent without it.

I even worked out what the chords ought to be for an old bass line I put down on the synth ages ago .... which should both let me work on melody next, and clues me in about where to go with the chorus.

Nobody would mistake this work for that of a highly-schooled musician, but it's credible considering where I started. The tools definitely help me make the most of my efforts, but the difference between what I could tell the tools to do for me now, versus what I could have done even a year ago, is noticeable. That's the difference time and practice make, even with all this technological assistance.