Building Your Band

A better conversation about music, with David Loftis and Peter Bulanow

Playing from the heart

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With 17 years of piano lessons (most done with really poor teachers, some done with really fantastic teachers), I’m firmly grounded in notes and classical technique. While this provides an excellent foundation for playing well, it’s not a great foundation for playing what is on your heart and mind. At one time classical technique was rooted in improvisation [citation] but this has long since calcified (perhaps not unlike our faith?). While my piano teacher would tell me which publisher to purchase a specific piece from in order to assure correct fingers are annotated, she would then continue to specify exactly what was to be played at each flourish – precise notes, fingering, and timing. This was never the intent of these flourishes, as each was to be improvised. Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis duly illustrates this in the baroque recording: In Gabriel’s Garden. While a casual listener could be forgiven for believing this to be one more classical recording, a seasoned ear will be surprised by the note choices. Wynton improvises them, not using Jazz chords as one might fear, but by staying faithful to the expected scale and using anything but the prescribed choices. In doing so, I would argue Wynton is being more faithful to the original than those who would repeat musical orthodoxy. To break away from notes and the “correct” way to play a piece represents no small undertaking for the trained musician. I’ve now spent more time trying to unlearn notes than I did learning notes, and I continue to work at it. To make progress, I can recommend two main techniques:
  1. Have a friend start improvising something in an unannounced key. Play along. (I use this as an audition technique).
  2. Start up a music player on random, or better yet use Pandora so you’re potentially hearing unfamiliar songs but in a specified genre. Play along.
You can start by doodling along with one note, then two, then perhaps a full hand, and eventually both hands. The point is this: practicing this unlearning is intentional. Of course playing from the heart should be predicated on a knowledge of chords. But a knowledge of chords alone won’t tell you what to play.
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of… We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart. – Blaise Pascal

Post-MIDI Subdividing

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One of my favorite influences is an electronic recording artist Brian Transeau or BT. He is known as the “Godfather of Trance” in the EDM (Electric Dance Music) genre. One of the main reasons I like BT is because he assumes his audience is intelligent and have long attention spans. BT’s songs have recently been 8 – 12 minutes long but can be 46 minutes long, and it is only after he has produced these original versions, that he creates a 3-4 minute radio edit. BT made his first significant contribution to the world of music production in 2003 with his song “Simply Being Loved” which had 6,178 edits to the lead vocal track all done by hand in Peak Bias – placing the song in the Guinness Book of World Records. Here he is in the original music video: And this is just the vocal track which BT was gracious enough to release about a year ago… This song has 1,024th notes in it, but ultimately is still rooted in duples and triplets. My wife and I actually met BT at a theater in MD for the release of his next album, This Binary Universe, which was shown with video and in 5.1 surround sound. One thing the wiki page doesn’t explain, but BT explained to us, is that this album breaks the mold of subdividing by 2s or 3s in that it uses logarithmic curve to move from say a 512th note duple, slowing down to a triplet 8th note figure. So not only are we shifting from two different note values, but the interpolation between them is not linear, it’s a nice smooth logarithmic (or exponential) curve. Musically you might think about how a washboard is played or hear how a turbine spins up. Listen to Every Other Way. I’m actually producing a song with this kind of technique right now, using logarithmic and exponential curves to move between different kind of subdivisions, and I hope to release it in the near future. I’m doing this not as an end in itself or just because I think it’s an interesting production technique, but because I really think it serves the song. Can’t wait to share that!

Post-MIDI

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Technology has had a huge impact on music. It’s made us play steadier (I would argue even when not playing to a click). It’s allowed us to use samples. It’s let us loop in real time. It’s let us use loops, or play sync’d to other tracks. It’s let us auto-tune in real time. And it’s allowed us to program sequences that were otherwise unplayable. All of this has changed our ear – the way we hear music. One group (Dawn of MIDI) has responded to this by playing acoustic music live that otherwise would seem like it was programmed. They do this by playing crazy meters, time-with-in-a-time where different people play different meters at the same time and it somehow works, that you wouldn’t think people could play. And they do this by playing intricate and repetitive patterns that, ok is indeed minimalist like Steve Reich, but is normally the domain of machines. Humans are unpredictable and random, machines are anything but. Technology can inform our music. Integrating cultural influences such as these allows us to speak into that culture, they give us that platform for doing so. But practically how could that translate? In a live situation, most typically this can mean integrating programmed loops or tracks. In a studio situation this can be a lot more intricate, and can mean being aware of technology and what is happening.

The price of a note

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Notes actually do mean something. They have power. I think of notes as being expensive. You don’t just throw them around. I find the ones that do the best job and that’s what I use. I suppose I’m a minimalist instinctively. I don’t like to be inefficient if I can get away with it. Like on the end of “With or Without You“. My instinct was to go with something very simple. Everyone else said, “Nah, you can’t do that.” I won the argument and I still think it’s sort of brave, because the end of “With or Without You” could have been so much bigger, so much more of a climax, but there’s this power to it which I think is even more potent because it’s held back… ultimately I’m interested in music. I’m a musician. I’m not a gunslinger. That’s the difference between what I do and what a lot of guitar heroes do.
U2’s guitarist pontificates about things so central to what we have been talking about here at BYB that what he says here is really worth contemplating. In keyboard-land, there is a mythical figure in the progressive rock scene, well more than one, but since I’m not talking about Keith Emerson, I must be talking about Rick Wakeman. Rick, who by all estimates has a philosophy roughly opposite of the one described above, arguably considers notes much less expensive, and is often accused of lacking feel. Even though Rick’s playing doesn’t resonate with me personally, I bring him up because he has a storied career as an artist. So even if you think differently than me, you can still find much success. Ha! But the point I want to make is that this kind of Wakeman-like-proficiency may not serve the song as well as simple playing can. So that’s the good news, especially if you’re starting out. Yes, do work your way through a basic curriculum of getting all the chords and all the keys under your fingers. But once you do that, it’s probably more about what you take out than what you put in.

The most important musician

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Who do you think is the most important musician? This is not a question I have heard posed a lot, but I am very confident about how I would answer this question, and it may not be who you have in mind.
  • It’s not the drummer, although this person is critical for keeping steady time.
  • It’s not the bassist, although this person is critical for how chords move in the song.
  • It’s not the guitarist, although this person is often the most notable in a band.
  • It’s not the keyboardist, although this person can add so much color and depth to the sound.
  • It’s not the lead vocalist, although the front man can make or break how a band connects with the audience.
The most important musician, if you ask me, is the sound engineer. The sound engineer is a musician. Their instrument is the mixing board, and they need to be able to play that thing like a Stradivarius. They need to love, and I mean really love, music. If they don’t love music, that will become very apparent in the mix. It will sound clinical and boring. I call this the NPR mix.
Onyx 1640i by Pete Bulanow

Onyx 1640i by Pete Bulanow

Their role as gatekeeper is clear: Everything goes through the sound engineer. What is muted or un-muted is totally in their hands, and a band is helpless against a sound engineer who isn’t paying attention.  The sound engineer controls the stage volume, and what the band hears is largely in the hands of that person. The band has very little control over the house mix, and while a sound engineer can’t “polish a turd” as the saying goes (even if they can mute a pitchy vocalist), they very much can make or break how a band comes across in the house, which translates to how the audience responds, which translates to how the band plays. This person couldn’t be more critical. The rookie mistake I hear (see) engineers make is when they “mix with their eyes”. What I mean is if they set levels the same (to include gain) e.g. for all the backing vocalists, the sound comes out at the same volume. True, each channel could be producing the same amount of gain, but vocalists sing at really different volumes. You have no choice but to mix with your ears. Or you think because you push a channel up a little louder that it got a little louder. But if you didn’t hear it get louder, it doesn’t matter if you pushed the fader up. Perhaps you pushed the wrong fader up! You can actually walk by a mixing board and see an engineer who mixes with their eyes vice their ears. And yet, when everything is going great, the sound tech goes largely unnoticed. The only time the engineer gets any attention is if there is feedback. It’s a thankless job to all but those who know the real deal, to those who really hear a mix. So musicians, thank your engineer for a great mix!!!!

Sounding like a garage band using garage band

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Among the dire warnings in the world of music was the prediction that software like Apple’s Garage Band would allow anyone, even untrained musicians, to make music. This is because Garage Band allows anyone to drag in musical loops of sound, and transmogrify them into the key and tempo of the song*. People seriously thought this was the end of music as we know it [citation needed]. Turns out that’s not the way it works. Computers are like a bicycle for the mind. They don’t think for us, they allow us to think more efficiently. So what Garage Band really does, in essence, is to lower the threshold for music creation. What was missed by its detractors is that it doesn’t change the threshold for what good music is. The part they got right is that Garage Band can allow untrained musicians to make music. Which technically means that you can be a musician without having technical training, or knowing how to play an instrument. But if you’re not a musician, if you don’t have “it”, you’re not going to make good music. You’re going to simply create a wall of sound, because in Garage Band, it’s easy to paint a track full of a certain loop. Turns out that “Garage Band” was aptly named. The secret to making music, then, becomes knowing what to cut. Suddenly, Michelangelo’s apocryphal story that to create David he simply “carved away everything that wasn’t the sculpture” shines in a new light. I was reminded of this recently when my 4 year old daughter got a new Toca Boca app for the iPad called “Toca Band”. It’s basically Garage Band for kids, except it only has four bars of music that loop with no tempo or key change options, and then has about three variants of each loop, plus an opportunity to perform a solo instrument. It was easy for her to fill up all the slots with instruments, but I started pulling things out, showing her that it sounds better when you only have a few things going. The trick to revealing the song, is knowing what isn’t in the song.   * Technically “Acid” by Sonic Foundry, did loops first