Branching Out

Shifting Musical Gears for Deeper Creative Understanding

Recently, one of my guitar students made a comment about how sick they were of playing guitar in standard tuning. They were bored with and uninspired by the usual way that the guitar is tuned (EADGBE) and were much happier exploring open tuning approaches. I can relate; at various times in my life as a guitarist I have felt bored, stifled and limited by standard tuning. Don’t get me wrong, standard tuning is great. It allows for guitar players to easily play in all 12 keys via a beautifully arranged formula of stacked fourth intervals—and one major third interval. But so often this can begin to feel a bit stilted and one can find themselves repeating the same chord shapes or note combinations over and over and over again, which makes one feel like they are stuck in a box of repetition. Not the best thing for creativity.

At various points in my life I’ve felt like I was in a rut as a guitarist and a songwriter— and if I’m honest, a person. The spark of the muse just wasn’t happening. I felt derivative, lost and boring. Chord progressions felt redundant and repetitive. Melodies and arrangements all seemed to be vaguely similar and insipid. I needed to branch out and find something that reignited my creativity. Enter the keyboard. Specifically, the synthesizer. When I was 20, I bought a used Roland Juno-106 synthesizer from a friend (for what seems like peanuts nowadays—$250) and it was a revelation. It afforded me a whole other way to access and engage with music in a way that the guitar really couldn’t. It opened up new sonic landscapes and vistas. It emboldened and inspired me to sit down and try and learn keyboard parts by people like Prince, Devo or Depeche Mode and it eventually opened up my ears and my mind to more experimental electronic music like Terry Riley, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Isao Tomita and Wendy (once Walter) Carlos.

I began to diligently learn how to use the Juno-106 synth. I would sit on the floor of my bedroom and spend hours messing around with the envelopes of the sounds. I learned how attack, decay, sustain and release (ADSR) would affect the tones of various keyboard patches. I learned how resonance and low frequency oscillators (LFO) would change things. White noise, portamento and high-pass filters started to become things that offered new insight and inspiration. But perhaps more importantly, I began to learn how to play piano better.

I’m not the greatest piano player. But I often use it as a compositional tool. When I’m not feeling like playing guitar, or if a song seems to need a different approach, I will often sit down and play piano or synthesizer. Or I will transpose a song I wrote on guitar to piano—or vice versa. My years of messing around with synths were the real catalyst for me to develop this ability. In addition to learning the rudiments of electronic synthesis, this also expanded my ability and chops to use the keyboard creatively. Learning the note names of the keyboard; how major, minor, augmented and diminished triads were formed and how you could alter and expand those chords with sevenths, extensions and alterations, etc, was really important. It codified my understanding of music theory and it widened my sense of what was possible creatively. Moreover, it feedback into my guitar playing. By translating things from piano/ synth to guitar (and vice versa) I became a better guitarist, my sense of being stuck in a rut diminished, and my overall musicianship flourished.

Another place that this occurred in my life was with recording. When I was 15 I began to learn how to use a 4-track cassette recorder. My friend had gotten a Tascam Porta-05 4-track machine and it was another revelation. After hearing what he had done—recording a song of his own by overdubbing guitars and vocals and a guitar solo!—I realized that I needed one too and saved up my pennies to buy my own machine. I worked at a local Mann Theater making popcorn, taking tickets and cleaning floors and toilets for several months in order to save up enough for a Tascam 424 4-track, and a used Shure SM57 Beta microphone. It was and still is, one of the best cassette multi-track machines and it ultimately helped to change my life.

What the 4-track enabled me to do was have a real sense of objectivity. It allowed me to step back and hear what was going on in a “big picture” kind of way. In the recording process it is hard to have a sense of what is actually going on when you are recording. Things sound one way when you are tracking and once they have gone through various components (microphones, pre-amps, tape, speakers, etc) they can often sound very different from how you heard them when you were in the room with the instrument or your voice. Having the 4-track gave me the ability to hear what was really going on. I wasn’t limited by being lost in a “pink cloud” of performance euphoria or the dread “red light fever” of performance anxiety—the former being the ideal for vibe obviously. But this understanding was something that I wouldn’t have understood without easy access to the recording experience. Nevertheless, I could hear the way that the performances, tone colors and arrangements were gluing together in a much more equitable way. It was both exhilarating and humbling. Exhilarating because it was empowering to be able to record one’s own music and have that kind of control; but humbling because sometimes I just sucked.

Basically, I not only learned how to be a better performer, songwriter, arranger and producer from having a 4-track, I learned how to be a better listener—which is the single most important thing a musician or a producer can do. It was an epiphany, one that slowly dovetailed into a lifetime of music and creativity. I would not be the musician or producer that I am now were it not for spending hundreds of hours hunched over my Tascam Portastudio. I even still use one today, unsually for bouncing mixes out to. It glues things together in a way that digital recording can’t. Tape is great for that, but I digress.

It’s weird to reflect back on these things because to me they still seem so relevant. I cut my teeth in an era where analog recording was still “queen”. Pro Tools was barely nascent in the public eye and early digital multi-track recorders were expensive, clunky and had limited storage capacity and some pretty common functionality issues. The bleeding edge of technology didn’t turn over so quickly and it was completely reasonable to be using equipment that was maybe 10-20 years old, especially for making demos, etc. For example: I bought a Boss digital delay pedal in 1996 (DD-3), it was originally released in 1986 but it felt totally contemporary at the time that I bought one new from my local music store. Another example: once at a gig with songwriter/ musician Paula Frazer, founder of the SF band Tarnation, and she intimated to me that she liked to run her vocal through her old Boss DM-2 analog delay pedal and had done so for years—much to the ire of many a sound guy—even using it at the Royal Albert Hall to open for Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. (There’s a trick to making this work well, but I’ll leave that for questions in the comment section… )

Now people have so much at their fingertips with digital audio workstations (DAW’s) like Logic, Garageband, Abelton, etc. Editing and splicing together things is simple and (mostly) painless. It is amazing what we can do with digital recording and it definitely has its place and value. In fact, we have more recording capability then The Beatles ever had during their recording career—or during some of their lives. But are things as creative or exciting? Are things as interesting or emotionally impactful as before when it wasn’t so easy? Does the ubiquity of this kind of technology make for a “sameness” and sterility in sound? Moreover how does this affect the listener in terms of attentiveness and engagment? Does the “lust of result” as occultist Aleister Crowley called it, denude the heuristic experience of its full creative potential, for both artist and audience ?

I often wonder if the limitations that the equipment of the time had, made people more creative? I grew up having to either play a song all the way through from start to finish or do a “punch-in” to fix a mistake. A process that required pressing record at the right spot and fixing the gaff, then pressing stop before you recorded over the next part of the track. If you fucked it up, you would have to try and fix it by punching in earlier or redoing completely. A lot of this was necessitated by limited track counts. If you only have four tracks, you had to think about arrangement choices as you went. You could bounce several tracks down to one track, ping-ponging similar sonic parts together in a submix, but each generation of this step lost fidelity and limited overall control. Nowadays there are endless track counts, myriad synthesizer plug-ins and hiss and noise floor—while still an ancillary concern—are often not as much of a problem in recording, or can be fixed later… sometimes. But often I wonder if people even know or care about these things because they are too eager to put something out into the world for 15 seconds of quasi fame than worry about proper gain staging. In line with Marshall McLuhan’s concept of “the medium is the message”I also wonder if the hiss and inherent aural qualities of old cassette created a different aesthetic and cultural paradigm via the differences in the way that it captured and reproduced sound; offering something “realer”, more human and definitely less slick than modern DAW productions. Imbuing musicians with a different set of goals and perceptions that were more focused on the creative act rather than the financial or celebrity successes that might be gained. In hindsight, I’m glad that many of my early forays into songwriting/ recording were not potentially universally available to everyone in the world with a computer and a wi-fi connection. It gave me time to develop; to hone my sound and get better without feeling like I could and should be presenting myself to the public as quickly as possible.

Ultimately, the world goes on. Technology runs its course and then the next thing comes along. I somewhat begrudgingly accept this fact and I do use some modern recording equipment almost daily. But I haven’t forgotten the past. I haven’t forgotten my past and what it afforded me in experience empirically. To reword the poet Allen Ginsberg’s famous first lines from Howl: I think that the best minds of any generation are destroyed by a blindness to/or forgetting of history.

Much of what I initially learned about recording and playing music in general was done on equipment that was technologically behind the times. But back then, things didn’t move as fast. Equipment was not so easliy accessed or standardized, nor did it have the overwhelming options of variety. We bought what we could when we could and made due the rest of the time. Amazon couldn’t deliver $10,000 worth of gear in 24 hours to my doorstep and I couldn’t charge that on a credit card—and I probably still can’t. I had to make a bounce of my 4-track mixes onto another cassette or a DAT tape and then play it on different systems to know what it really sounded like, what the generational degradation was going to impart, or the Dolby DBX noise reduction was going to affect.

I really think that spending a lot of hours sitting with one instrument or piece of machinery made me better equipped to use it skillfully. When I did branch out from my comfort zone, exploring new creative routes, I focused longer and went deeper. It made me listen more acutely and learn empirically via cross-instrumental/ sonic means. It forced me to think outside of the box more and find novel ways to try and do things. Now it often seems like technology does an update every fortnight—maybe more often? How does this benefit creatives? Do ease and speed actually allow for thorough examination and understanding? Isn’t that just another order of operations to have to re-learn? Doesn’t this take away from time in the present moment for being creative and purposeful? Maybe the Facebook motto of “Move fast and break things” is best suited for technocratic conceptions of success? Or maybe some live performance/stagecraft… Okay sure, throw it all up in the air once in a while, break the rules and question everything. But 75% of the time I think solid creativity really comes about when you move slow and make things. But the real crux of that is showing up. Show up, move slow, be present and make things.