Know thine tools, for they shape thine Art, and sit in thine hand, as though saying, thine hand is not-eth responsible! Thine tool is the lord in-eth this-eth endeavor.
----rigaberto religetti, borm, p. 4765
Now Rigaberto Religetti spent 30 years in a state of perfect robotic mind, channeling the gospel of Precreator. So he had ample time to stretch his narrative legs so to speak. And he takes full advantage of this opportunity, exhaustively beating to death, then beating back to life, then beating back to death, all manner of minutia.
But although his general tendency is to indulge in "fully fleshed out" prose, there are a couple of topics about which Religetti really shows no restraint whatsoever. One such topic is the interaction between tool and art. Religetti spends a full seven hundred pages discussing how, when writing a letter, one can switch between subtly different ball-point pens to acheive a visual effect that he hails as "unnoticable."
But I will spare you the details of that torturous diatribe.
What I want to talk about today is music software. Because when you are recording music, the impact that the tool you use is going to have on your art can hardly be overstated.
Before getting specifc about possible approaches, I need to briefly introduce an idea about which Religetti is uncharacteristicly concise - an idea that is crucial to understanding one's own art strategies.
There are two kinds of artists: Constructors and Executives. Executives have a clear vision, and then excute it. Constructors develop the vision as they are pushing around the mashed potatoes. Or to be more accurate, the truth is revealed as vision to the constructor as he works - tries things out.
Everybody is to some degree a little bit of both. But I am almost enitrely a constructor. Komputadora is almost entirely an executive. Both types of artist are equally capable of making great art. But some tools are more for one type or the other. As are certain media. Clay is a good constructor medium. Woodworking is not. Construction (of the hammer and nails variety) is, ironically, an exceedingly executive activity.
I'll talk now about four different ways to record.
1. The old way. Analog. This way is stupid, and clumsy. But that is not to say it is necessarily undesirable. I have put in some time on the old four track and I have put in some time on an eight track reel to reel. And I got to tell you, it ain't for me. But there is a very specific reason why it ain't for me. Because you have to know what you want to do before you start to do it with analog recordings. I suck very badly when I try to use such tools.
The thing to note here is that for most of the history of recorded music, constructors were excluded. Analog recording puts us at a huge disadvantage.
2. Virtual Workstation. I used to work on a Roland 1880 workstation. It's kind of like a computer that is designed only for audio. The advantages are few, though. The advantages include faders, good built in mic pre's (not on the Roland, but on Komputadora's Yamaha, yes), more intuitive mixing, stuff like that. Better for me, but still not what I needed.
Having graduated from 4 track to Roland Virtual workstation, I was still making crappy music. That had little to do with the tool, however, and more to do with my built in handicap.
3. Soundforge.
Ok. Here's where the story gets interesting, and where we really get to the point of all this. The fact is that when I found Soundforge, it freed me. I hadn't realized it at the time, but I have a significant mental disability that made it almost impossible for me to multitrack. The problem was that I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop doing more takes, and recording more tracks, and I every time would just end up with a mess.
But soundforge is a multitracker with which I can work. Because it doesn't support any multitracking. It's just a stereo wave file editor. And so it's a bitch to record additional tracks. It is possible, but you have to launch the thing that you want to play along with in a seperate app, while recording in Soundforge's "remote record" option. And then, when you are done, you have to maually line it up and mix it on the spot. There is no saving mixing till the end. Each element that you add gets printed to whole. Sure, you can, and I do, save lot's of benchmarks, to make it easy to go back and remix a part if need be, but ultimately you have to keep moving forward. There is no reason in the world to not to. But I was completely unable to move forward in recording music until I discovered Soundforges limitations.
The first song I developed in soundforge, I used no multitracking at all. I took a ten minute jam of me and Komputadora that featured me playing drums while doing vocals, and K doing background vox and fucking around with a sampler. The original jam had been recorded at K's studio with several mics - 1 for the drums, 1 for k, and a lavaleer mic clipped to my beard for vocals. K ran them through a mixer and printed straight to a single stereo track.
The real work began when I ripped that stereo track and brought it into Soundforge. There I cut it, made a bass part by pitch shifting me humming, and then laboriously trying to get it to time right, because I tried to record it in time without listening to what it was supposed to be in time with. I was just learning the app and didn't yet know about the remote record function.
But anyways, here's the song, "rappin eric."
Or hear it with the accompanying video, if you like.
In this track, notice the inexact timings when they arise and reflect on how such issues impact the quality of the work as a whole, either for better or worse. Note the editing sstyle and think about how editing a stereo track results in different sounding music than editing/dubbing that is done in a multitracker.
4. Acid:
The last app I'm going to talk about is ACID. It is a multitracker, sort of. I mean it is, but it is not a very robust one. It is just right for idiots like me. And I can use it to record, and I have with some success, but it will never be as intuitive to me as Soundforge. Why? Because I need to have easy, instant, push things around capability, without being given so much of an opportunity to pointlessly fill up tracks with takes.
Basically, I need to print shit as I do it, and preclude myself from juggling potentialities. I lack the discipline to do so successfully. But the thing is, listen to this track, "Born Bible Clinchin" that I made in ACID, and hear how hugely different the two songs are in terms of "signature." I'm not talking tone at all here. I'm talking arrangement, editing, decision making -- those kind of ground floor things. I am a totally different artist in ACID than I am in Soundforge. And you would be too, if you used these two apps.
Prolly you have found an app that works for you, and have stuck with it. Maybe cakewalk, maybe Cubase, maybe Ableton (what matt uses), maybe Nuendo (what Komputadora runs.) Whatever. My goal here is simply to point out, or to refresh all of our collective memories if we have forgotten, or just to remind myself if you haven't forgotten, that the tool we use, especially in audio, defines huge qualities of the art we make. If it doesn't, we aren't using it vigorously enough. (Or we just have a super inspired song that we want to record plain without any fucking around.) (Or we are totally executive artists in which case everything I have said is way less true for us.)
that's it for now.
Hope that wasn't too boring,
mr strauss
