{"id":39255,"date":"2017-06-25T06:00:21","date_gmt":"2017-06-25T10:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=39255"},"modified":"2017-06-25T01:11:18","modified_gmt":"2017-06-25T05:11:18","slug":"new-album-neon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=39255","title":{"rendered":"New Album: NEON"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s that time of the year again when I pretend I can write music. I&#8217;ve been tinkering away, making a new song every few months or so. <a href=\"?p=25398\">Three years ago<\/a> I took a dozen or so songs and called them an &#8220;album&#8221;, and I guess I&#8217;ve produced enough content to do that again. My new pile of loosely related tracks is called NEON.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"100%\" height=\"450\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/playlists\/331653734&amp;color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Whether you&#8217;re <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Skrillex\">Skrillex<\/a> or a nobody like me, to make electronic music you need a Digital Audio Workstation, which the kids call a DAW. It&#8217;s a program that lets you map out all the notes and instruments, allowing you to make music even if you don&#8217;t play an instrument. For a couple of years I used MAGIX Music Maker. <a href=\"?p=24037\">I was not a fan<\/a>. Last year someone donated enough for me to switch to Studio One, which I <strong>love<\/strong>. <\/p>\n<p>In this album, the tracks are in roughly chronological order. The tracks produced in Studio One begin at &#8220;Hi!&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p>Fair warning: A lot of this work is very amateurish. If it wasn&#8217;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&#8217;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. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been climbing this learning curve for three years now, working on-and-off as the mood strikes me. It&#8217;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 <em>make<\/em> music. But now that I&#8217;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&#8217;m more keenly aware of my shortcomings.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<h3>Mixing<\/h3>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/studio_one1.jpg' width=100% alt='SO MANY SLIDERS WHAT DO I DO?' title='SO MANY SLIDERS WHAT DO I DO?'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>SO MANY SLIDERS WHAT DO I DO?<\/div><\/p>\n<p>In the past I&#8217;ve called myself an &#8220;audio slob&#8221;, as opposed to an audiophile. I spent my teenage years listening to music on cassette tape players with garbage speakers, so I&#8217;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&#8217;t really mind. That&#8217;s how ALL music sounded to me during my formative years. The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ\">loudness wars<\/a> are the result of record companies deliberately targeting indiscriminate consumers like me. <\/p>\n<p>But after all this time fussing with mixing and <strong>really<\/strong> listening to my music, I&#8217;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. <\/p>\n<p>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 <strong>only<\/strong> sounds good with headphones and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=57iD9HhVHOo\">quickly falls apart under common listening conditions<\/a>. Other times I&#8217;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&#8217;d just get frustrated and bored with a track that wasn&#8217;t really working out and I&#8217;d upload the result as a way of forcing myself to move on. <\/p>\n<p>A few days ago I listened through my archives on SoundCloud and I was tempted to start deleting stuff. But then I realized that&#8217;s absurd. I&#8217;m sure a year from now I&#8217;ll look back on NEON and hate it just as much as I hate my 2015 tracks right now<span class='snote' title='1'>Eh. A couple of them have charming ideas but are marred by excessive repetition or bad mixing.<\/span>. I know my daughters enjoy looking back on their artwork from when they were younger and seeing how far they&#8217;ve come. The goal shouldn&#8217;t be to expunge crappy work, the goal is to <em>get better<\/em>.<\/p>\n<h3>What Are We Learning?<\/h3>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/circle_of_fifths.jpg' width=100% alt='The Circle of Fifths, which has two sets of twelve points that are numbered with letters.' title='The Circle of Fifths, which has two sets of twelve points that are numbered with letters.'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>The Circle of Fifths, which has two sets of twelve points that are numbered with letters.<\/div><\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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&sharp; 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&#8217;t sound dissonant. On the other hand, if you&#8217;re crazy and you want  to jump from A minor to E&flat; minor (which are on opposite sides of the wheel) then you&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve said in the past that I did all of my work in the key of A minor. A minor is easy. It&#8217;s just the white keys on your typical keyboard. I&#8217;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&#8217;re stuck in a rut. <\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;ve been working on how to pull off a key change without making it sound jarring, and I&#8217;ve been trying to memorize the common keys used in electronic music. (I&#8217;ve highlighted those keys in the chart above.) E minor, B minor, and F# minor. It&#8217;s pretty easy to get lost in the weeds of music theory, and this isn&#8217;t the kind of learning that makes a huge difference right away. It&#8217;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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s that time of the year again when I pretend I can write music. I&#8217;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 &#8220;album&#8221;, and I guess I&#8217;ve produced enough content to do that again. My new [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[468],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39255\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}