I have embarked on recording projects for over 20 years now, home recordings, demos, side projects and full albums; projects where I was involved as a writer, performer, producer, sometimes all, sometimes none. Successful or not, and what success really means, is not important. Well, it is important, but I\u2019m not going to get into that.<\/p>\n
Through these experiences I\u2019ve learned what matters: the feeling. When listening to music, or when making music, knowledge passes, the feeling remains. And since feelings are complex \u2014 we rarely reduce our feelings to simple matters of good or bad \u2014 we need not apply the same or similar rubric within the art we make. <\/p>\n
Your music isn\u2019t your own. It\u2019s a culmination of everything you believe to be true about itself. A worldview. A perspective we share with some and are confined from others. To make and take cues about music is part of the art makers\u2019 spiraling lineage, a web unimaginably, almost infinitely dense, from simple social gatherings to a global industry of middlemen that aim to control the conversations. <\/p>\n
I am not talking about the treadmill or the spectacle of the live show, where the music has already been worked out in advance, even if it\u2019s improvised. And this is not even necessarily about recorded music, in which song, sound and voice form something of an identity. I am pointing to somewhere in between the idea and its crystallized output, between inception and completion.<\/p>\n
The stuff that exists between what we have in our head and what\u2019s heard out loud, where all the decisions, big or small, conscious or not, are made. Here is where, when the bumper paddles of judgement remain untouched, more work can be done. <\/p>\n
The lack of judgement in evaluating your own work, like stoic meditation techniques, can help unlock crucial elements in understanding your own voice and vision. <\/p>\n
I have been chasing sounds for years. Growing up playing classical music, an interest in recreating heard sounds, pursuing jazz in music school, a devotion to the limitless discovery of various media in retail stores, libraries and friends\u2019 collections, I came to view music listening not as a banner of aesthetics but as a portal to dynamic worlds. Worlds that encourage a staging of interaction, from remote observer to active participant. And it all happens inside our heads. <\/p>\n
There is a famous story about Ramones\u2019 Johnny Ramone<\/strong> telling The Clash\u2019s Paul Simonon<\/strong> something like \u201cwe\u2019re terrible\u2026we can\u2019t play our instruments.\u201d Whether this was intended as diffidence, it became a feature of punk aesthetics. Perceptions of good and bad shuffled about. Extracted from notions of good or bad, the music thrived beyond it. <\/p>\n Jump to Nashville, TN, land of individual talent, where I\u2019ve lived since 2009, a place where good and bad have their own theory of relativity. \u201cIf you\u2019re not on the top you\u2019re on the bottom.\u201d <\/em>Egoist attitudes prop their own relevance. Up is down and down is up. After graduating from music school and continuing my own pursuance of music, it dawned on me that in order to be successful here, one does not have to be good, just good enough. <\/p>\n When I reflect upon my recording projects over past decades, there have been great teaching moments, but in particular, the moments that occurred outside of that duality are the ones that stand out as being the most educational.<\/p>\n Here are six epiphanies<\/strong> when good or bad became unimportant in the recording studio.<\/p>\n My first two projects were with a band in Boston, MA. We were adamant on making decisions democratically, which proved to be difficult, but more on that later.<\/p>\n Our first album was eye opening, and I felt a seduction of the studio, a want to learn everything, all the buttons. It was so satisfying (the experience, not necessarily the music) that I was not prepared for any changes in approach for our second album, which, having different personnel, was necessary.<\/p>\n Everyone operates under different credos and our engineer had one in particular: if you have 12 hours to mix a track, you mix a track in 12 hours. I remember hearing that and juggling the words in my head, not agreeing or disagreeing, just analyzing. It wasn\u2019t until the project was completed that it occurred to me that this approach works for very detailed mixes, but our music was loose. We liked to record live and with limited overdubs, so scrutinizing over small details during mixing was going to do little to change the feel of the music.<\/p>\n From here I started to think that the music itself should determine the approach, to mixing, but really to most everything, and not the other way around. Musical content and its approach to post-production may be mismatched, but that doesn\u2019t deem either as good or bad. Perhaps they should match, and perhaps not. <\/p>\n David Ferguson<\/strong> has a long list of impressive credits to his name, but you wouldn\u2019t know it to watch him play. In fact, I\u2019ve never seen someone so laid back, nearly all the way. While his knowledge and experience would fill a series of books, there is one story in particular that struck me as particularly valuable.<\/p>\n I wasn\u2019t there, but it goes like this: someone asked Ferg how a session went. \u201cWas it good?\u201d<\/em> Answer: \u201cBetter than good, it\u2019s done!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n A skeptic could view that sentiment as someone all too eager to close the book on a particular session, and perhaps that was accurate, but there is also more to it than that, and with a shift in perspective, quite the opposite comes out. As much of a craft as an art, the work, not<\/em> the end-result of the work, is what we recognize, the thing itself, and understanding the mechanics of a particular thing is what a craftsperson learns on the long road of experience.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s better than good, it\u2019s done\u201d<\/em> is not the sentiment of a beginner, but someone who has learned what done is. Possibilities were exhausted, decisions were made or left alone, and some sort of identity was identified, without a question of good or bad. <\/p>\n I\u2019ve recorded vocals with different engineers and each has their own approach. One might concentrate on technique, room sounds, relation to mix, emotional impact, on and on. With one particular demo, I heard something unrecognizable \u2014 myself!<\/p>\n Well, I knew it was my voice, but it had been comped \u2014 smaller pieces cut and pasted together \u2014 in such a way that I lost the recognition of my own musical decisions. It wasn\u2019t that the take sounded bad, just not myself, not something I would have sang live. <\/p>\n The idea of this sense of identity expands beyond the voice. To form a recognition of yourself, your instruments, sound and style, will yield more information to help guide decisions than any aesthetic qualifications. <\/p>\n After a smooth process in recording our first record, the Boston-based band returned to the studio with slightly different members, recording engineers and studios for our second effort. The results were\u2026not as smooth<\/em>, and I remember feeling pressure to spark things up as much as I could. This feeling permeated the edits and overdubs and it\u2019s something I can still hear if I listen back. <\/p>\n But my biggest fallacy was thinking I could rework the particular groove of a song by re-recording the bass. Convinced all the track needed was a little more bounce, I did my best impression of our regular bass player and called it a day. Did it help the groove? I don\u2019t know because listening back all I can hear is my attempt to rerecord. In the end I should have let the groove be what it was originally. <\/p>\n I\u2019ve pulled bass parts back on the time clock on at least one other recording to attempt the same thing, a meatier groove, a fatter beat, and whether it was achieved is debatable. The lesson is one of many in how pieces can, should, do or don\u2019t fit together, not of their inherent goodness. <\/p>\n In between Boston and Nashville, I spent time recording my own music in my hometown in Evanston, IL. I had the house to myself to use as a studio, setting up a drum set in the basement, experimenting with ideas, putting myself on a daily regimen of writing, improvising, recording, editing, tinkering with no particular process other than to draw ideas out as much as I could.<\/p>\n I also designed and printed handmade CDs, gave them away, receiving positive, acceptable, and difficult (as in this music is difficult to listen to) feedback. But those points mattered little because through its completion I understood a few more concrete things about my music. No matter how complex the layering, and I tried to make it complex, there were still simple underlaying changes, in chord progressions, in texture, and in structure, that identified the music. <\/p>\n The other takeaway was specifically about overdubs. The performances on this project were all my own and I tried my best to act as a band would, each voice or instrument in its role, interactive, dynamic and responsive to each other, serving the song, jam or idea. But by the end of the project, I was craving the simple pleasure of accompanying another human, being accompanied or just locking in sync with a voice or instrument that wasn\u2019t my own. I made no official vow, and there have been many an overdub since then, but from that point, the thought of hearing more than one layer of me renders me unsatisfied. I want real sounds happening simultaneously from real people in real places, independent, thinking, reacting, expressing. <\/p>\n One thing you can never know is how it\u2019s going to go. You can plan every detail out to a tee, but until everyone is in the room and says \u2018go,\u2019 the thing itself contains something of the unknown.<\/p>\n Tension exists inherently, and while larger systems (like more people playing together) adds complexity, this uncertainty, this unknowing can also exist as a singularity, in just one person, alone. I learned this, after some struggling on my latest project, Strange Passages, by ultimately putting the performance front and center. <\/p>\n The project started as a way to demonstrate songs for others to play, a demo, with a plan to fill in spaces with musical parts beyond the voice and accompaniment. But partly due to time limitations, I ended up letting the sounds and empty space coexist, focusing on the performance. In the interest of the song, the music and the words contained imagined parts that would not be played, and in doing this I shifted to the emotional output of the words, contemplating if I wanted it to come out this or that way, and let the song be whatever it was.<\/p>\n This not a unique approach, but it was the uncovering of this unknown, this revealing of an alternate identity, occurring through a sort of squeezing, a wrestling of direction, a struggle.<\/p>\n With this, a feeling of conflict, and, at times, resolution. But by the end, through all the tinkering, I had to accept the output, and could, so long as aesthetic judgement was suspended. When it comes to art, good and bad must wait in the wings while decisions are being made. <\/p>\n In a discourse of aesthetics, there is a natural pull to recognize art when its value goes beyond its intention, or in other words, a guilty pleasure. There are different concepts here, but perhaps we can think of one as an inverse of the other. When a song (or movie or book, etc) is enjoyable outside the rational, we give passes, both to it and to ourselves.<\/p>\n As any child will demonstrate, visceral human expression can simply exist, outside of any rubric or skill, real or imagined. By adjusting our dials effectively, we can ignore any scent of social consensus. Popular music insists that it\u2019s good for a listen, though what\u2019s popular at a particular time changes, as people change, as the world changes. <\/p>\n In short, artists should chase not aesthetics, but their own identity. They should heed not the voices around them but search for and discover (and rediscover) internal voices. Remove miraged social anchors of good and bad, cultivate the freedom to explore more, wider and deeply. And through exploration, hopefully, comes understanding, a sense of context, and an ability to communicate more directly or more indirectly. <\/p>\n And so, don\u2019t listen to what other people might think. Return to the Tao of Ramones. Be smart. Next time, listen your heart. Don\u2019t hurry if it\u2019s good, don\u2019t worry if it\u2019s bad. It\u2019s all the same if it hasn\u2019t got a name. <\/p>\n