T w e n t y S i d e d
It’s that time of the year again when I pretend I can write music. I’ve been tinkering away, making a new song every few months or so. Three years ago I took a dozen or so songs and called them an “album”, and I guess I’ve produced enough content to do that again. My new pile of loosely related tracks is called NEON.
Whether you’re Skrillex or a nobody like me, to make electronic music you need a Digital Audio Workstation, which the kids call a DAW. It’s a program that lets you map out all the notes and instruments, allowing you to make music even if you don’t play an instrument. For a couple of years I used MAGIX Music Maker. I was not a fan. Last year someone donated enough for me to switch to Studio One, which I love.
In this album, the tracks are in roughly chronological order. The tracks produced in Studio One begin at “Hi!”.
Fair warning: A lot of this work is very amateurish. If it wasn’t for my existing audience as a writer, nobody would listen to this stuff. If I promote a track here on the blog or on Twitter, it gets a few hundred listens. If I don’t promote it, the song gets less than 10. (And I suspect most of those are from spambots. SoundCloud has a pretty bad bot problem.) So my list of musical fans is in the single-digits. This is not a complaint. I suspect I have exactly the audience I deserve. Just like with writing, if I want more fans then I need to make better content.
I’ve been climbing this learning curve for three years now, working on-and-off as the mood strikes me. It’s interesting to see my progression. Sure, my work has improved, but that advancement has not kept up with my expectations. Three years ago I was tickled to simply be able to make music. But now that I’ve absorbed literally hundreds of videos and tutorials on mixing techniques and music theory, I have a much better understanding of how things should work and I’m more keenly aware of my shortcomings.
Mixing
In the past I’ve called myself an “audio slob”, as opposed to an audiophile. I spent my teenage years listening to music on cassette tape players with garbage speakers, so I’ve always been really tolerant of (or perhaps even oblivious to) poor audio quality. If the bass was blown out, the dynamic range overly compressed, and there was a high-frequency hiss throughout the whole track, I wouldn’t really mind. That’s how ALL music sounded to me during my formative years. The loudness wars are the result of record companies deliberately targeting indiscriminate consumers like me.
But after all this time fussing with mixing and really listening to my music, I’ve gradually learned to hear what the audiophiles were on about. This is particularly true of my work since migrating to Studio One. Studio One has more advanced mixing tools and less idiot-proof automation, so you HAVE to pay attention to the mix. Now I would call my MAGIX tracks borderline un-listenable.
On some tracks I made the mistake of mixing using headphones and never checking out the track on common speakers. This results in a track that only sounds good with headphones and quickly falls apart under common listening conditions. Other times I’d be too lazy to plug in my headphones and I would do the mix using my $20 Wal-Mart speakers. This resulted in a mix that was kind of boring and flat. Other times I’d just get frustrated and bored with a track that wasn’t really working out and I’d upload the result as a way of forcing myself to move on.
A few days ago I listened through my archives on SoundCloud and I was tempted to start deleting stuff. But then I realized that’s absurd. I’m sure a year from now I’ll look back on NEON and hate it just as much as I hate my 2015 tracks right nowEh. A couple of them have charming ideas but are marred by excessive repetition or bad mixing.. I know my daughters enjoy looking back on their artwork from when they were younger and seeing how far they’ve come. The goal shouldn’t be to expunge crappy work, the goal is to get better.
What Are We Learning?
Above is the Circle of Fifths, a diagram aspiring musicians use to help visualize how different keys work and how they relate to each other. In the above diagram, A minor and E minor are right next to each other. These two keys have a lot in common. In fact, if you’re playing in A minor and you want to switch to E minor all you need to do is stop using the F and instead hit F♯ on the keyboard. Basically, you just need to sneak one new note in there and make sure it lands in a spot where it won’t sound dissonant. On the other hand, if you’re crazy and you want to jump from A minor to E♭ minor (which are on opposite sides of the wheel) then you’re going to change almost everything, and all of the new notes will be in danger of sounding dissonant when played right next to the notes in the old key. It will eventually sound okay once the listener gets used to the change, but during the transition your song might sound like a bagpipe rolling down the stairs.
I’ve said in the past that I did all of my work in the key of A minor. A minor is easy. It’s just the white keys on your typical keyboard. I’d memorized all the chords and knew what chord patterns sounded good and which ones sounded awkward. But the problem was that I was sort of stuck in that one scale. Most songs shift between scales at various points. Sticking with one key is why so many of my older tracks sound monotonous, or feel like they’re stuck in a rut.
So I’ve been working on how to pull off a key change without making it sound jarring, and I’ve been trying to memorize the common keys used in electronic music. (I’ve highlighted those keys in the chart above.) E minor, B minor, and F# minor. It’s pretty easy to get lost in the weeds of music theory, and this isn’t the kind of learning that makes a huge difference right away. It’s not like F# minor sounds fundamentally superior to A minor in a musical sense. But as I learn, it gives me more options and will (one hopes) eventually allow me to make songs that are interesting for more than 30 seconds.
Footnotes:
[1] Eh. A couple of them have charming ideas but are marred by excessive repetition or bad mixing.
The Disappointment Engine
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
Overthinking Zombies
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.
How to Forum
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
The No Politics Rule
Here are 6 reasons why I forbid political discussions on this site. #4 will amaze you. Or not.
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
I’m not seeing Groove Until Dawn in that list! Is that still stuck up a mountain somewhere in the Pacific Northwest or maybe, oh, Canada?
I especially like Sunburn. I’ve briefly outlined in the following paragraph everything I know about music, but that song struck me as particularly legitimate, somehow – the kind of thing I wouldn’t be surprised to find I’d downloaded from iTunes (along with 30 other tracks from Various Artists because what I was really after were the hour-long mixes at the end of the compilation).
Both your daughters do artwork? I have seen Bay’s website in the past, does Esther have one, too?
Esther is bad about making all kinds of stuff and never posting it. Or she posts it to a string of transient DeviantArt / Instagram accounts that she never promotes, never tells me about, and abandons after a few months. Whatever motivates her to make art, it doesn’t seem to be a desire to have it consumed. :)
She did draw this comic, which Bay is posting to her blog:
https://bayberrystudio.wordpress.com/2017/06/25/975/
Last time that I’ll ask: will Groove Until Dawn be available at some point?
It’s not a real track. You hear basically the whole thing on Spoiler Warning. I mean, if you want it I’ll be happy to upload it, but if you’re hoping to hear the “rest” of the song you’ll be disappointed. Reply if still interested.
Aww, that’s a shame! No, that’s OK, then – you were already having to resist the urge to tidy things up a bit over there, so I wouldn’t want to exacerbate that problem. (What there is of it is great stuff, though! – definitely my favourite SW outro, which is good going given how much more experience Kevin Macleod must have, musicianwise.)
Ill take a copy. while its a shame there’s no ‘rest’ of it, it was a really good track nevertheless
Shamus, could you please resist the temptation to tell me that things that feel recent were 3 years ago already? Feels like I’m losing my mind….
Shamus has concluded his comic 10 years ago.And it has already been over a full year since he finished his huge mass effect novella.
That’s life yo!
As I have gotten older I have frequently encountered situations where I could not remember whether something happened last year… or ten years ago.
Obligatory XKCD comic.
How about this:
Quake is now older than Pong was when Doom came out. By the next major election, Quake will be older than Pong was when Quake came out.
Hey Shamus,did you notice that steam summer sale has 69 of your wish list games on sale?
Is one of them Stalker? :P
Key changes can be an interesting tool to use, but I tend to find you can get a greater effect (and arguably experiment easier) with borrowed chords. In essence, a borrowed chord is a chord you ‘borrow’ from another key, before returning to your original key. An example everyone should be familiar with is House of the Rising Sun. The song is in A minor, but features both D and E in the progression; these are from the key of A major. Notice how the song doesn’t really feel like it changes key, but instead uses the borrowed chords to add some tension before resolving back to more familiar chords.
A really good example of this technique is the song Just by Radiohead. The main riff, verse, and chorus all use borrowed chords, and as a result all sound fairly interesting, without having an obvious key change between sections.
Hopefully someone will find these ramblings helpful…
The only thing that sounds off to me about these is the sounds you use. They’re far from EDM but they’re also not even close to chiptunes, stuck somewhere in between and it just sounds like really, really crappy MIDI. There’s a crippling lack of bass to all of these.
Here’s the thing about playing music and changing keys. Since you can change notes within the keys of E minor and A minor, you can technically change keys chromatically as well.
If you’re ever stuck in a key rut and you feel like letting loose some disastrous playing that actually sounds good, try building up the song by going up in thirds. Example; if you’re playing C Major, climb up to Eb Major, then F# Major, then A Major. Use arpeggios for the whole process and you can then go into any of those four keys. While each one might not fit with the song when you decide on a new root note, you can find which one sounds best, and rather than having only one key to play in (in this case, A minor/C Major), you then have four different keys to play in. What makes this key change even cooler? You can actually change from A minor to A Major simply by this chromatic sequence! See ^? Notice how a third leads you from C Major to A Major? It’s great!
Also about key changes: it’s very tempting to stick with the same few keys (mostly white keys on your keyboard, lots of open strings in your guitar, whatever makes your life slightly easier).
Something few people ever warn you against: by the time you’re writing whole albums, it will make for a very boring whole.
It’s a bit weird, because you’d think that, apart from the small minority gifted with perfect pitch, who would notice, right? Don’t you get to reset between songs?
Well, I guess not really. So it’s worth getting out of your tonal comfort zone for that. At least, Shamus doesn’t have to sing as well.
Yet.
I haven’t listened to Shamus album yet so I don’t know if the A min gets old after a few songs but he could always transpose songs and sections into different keys easily depending on his DAW while still composing and recording in A min.
Guitars are easy enough to retune to whatever tuning makes chord voicings easy to play and you can always use a capo for fast tuning.
The capo is super-useful, but it never sounds as good as open strings.
How many groupies does that net you?
Probably around 0.13.
Be mesmerised:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9Ce0Gr9r5E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7Jpp5hvIAU
I think Buzzsaw is my favorite.
You already know this, probably, but using multiple similar-but-distinct instruments in the place of one instrument will help to fill out the sounds, especially in the drum track.
Would creating a soundcloud account allow me to download the album? It occurs to me it would make a pretty good in-game soundtrack for Distance.