Dawn Of The Daw: The Studio As Musical Instrument [Hardcover ed.] 0190296607, 9780190296605

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Dawn of the DAW

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Dawn of the DAW THE S TUDIO AS MUS IC AL I NS T RU ME NT

A D A M PAT R I C K   B E L L

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1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Bell, Adam Patrick, author. Title: Dawn of the DAW : the studio as musical instrument / Adam Patrick Bell. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017025068 (print) | LCCN 2017034672 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190296629 (updf) | ISBN 9780190296636 (epub) | ISBN 9780190296605 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190296612 (pbk : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Sound recordings—Production and direction. | Popular music—Production and direction. Classification: LCC ML3790 (ebook) | LCC ML3790 .B33 2018 (print) | DDC 781.49—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025068 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America

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Thanks, libraries

I could learn audio technology. But where? I’d start at home. —​Grandmaster Flash

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Contents

Preface   xiii

Part I   DO-IT-YOURSELF    1. A History of DIY Recording: Striving for Self-Sufficiency   3 The Difficulty of Defining DIY   3 DIY Recording Before Records   5 Tinfoil Revolutions: The First DIY Audio Recording   6 Mechanical Recording (Pre-1925)   8 The Electrical Era (Post-1925)   10 Les Paul’s Legacy of Overdubbing   11 Les Paul and the Tale of Tape (Post-1945)   12 Craft-Union Mode: 30th Street Studio   14 DIY Recording Post-1945: Sticking to the Tape Mentality   16 The Escalating Expenses of Equipment and the DIY Hi-Fi/Lo-Fi Dichotomy   18 DIVIDE-AND-ISOLATE    19 DIY HI-FI AND THE MULTITRACK REEL-TO-REEL TAPE RECORDER   22 DIY LO-FI AND THE MULTITRACK CASSETTE TAPE RECORDER   24 DIGITAL DIY: ADAT    26

Space-Less Studios: Dawn of the DAW (1990–Present)   27 Tracking the Twenty-First-Century DIY-er   29

2. The Studio: Instrument of the Producer   31 What Is a Producer?   31 Instrumentality: The Studio as Musical Instrument   33

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Using the Studio as a Musical Instrument with Others   37 EARLY INCARNATIONS OF USING THE STUDIO AS A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT: ELVIS, LEIBER AND STOLLER, AND ALDON MUSIC   38 PHIL SPECTOR’S “WALL OF SOUND”   40 BRIAN WILSON AND THE BEACH BOYS’ SOUND   41 BERRY GORDY AND THE MOTOWN SOUND   44 THE JOE MEEK SOUND   46

Producing Without Producers   47 PRODUCED, ARRANGED, COMPOSED, AND PERFORMED BY PRINCE   50 BRIAN ENO AND IN-STUDIO COMPOSITION   51 HAPPY ACCIDENT #1: DUB AND ITS LEGACY OF PRIVILEGING TIMBRE IN PRODUCTION   54 TWEAKING TIMBRES    55 HAPPY ACCIDENT #2: HIP-HOP AND ITS SAMPLING LEGACY   58

The Contemporary Collaborative Producer: Max Martin   63 Different But the Same: Conclusions   67

Part II   MADE IN BROOKLYN    Brooklyn: The Cultural Capital of DIY   71

3. Track 1: Michael    75 The Car Stereo Classroom: Learning History   76 CASSETTE CREATIVITY SINCE 1977: SELF-LED EXPLORATIONS IN OVERDUBBING   77 GOING CLASSICAL    78 GOING ELECTRIC AND DIGITAL   80 THE SKEUOMORPHIC ADVANTAGE: NEW TECHNOLOGIES, OLD CONCEPTS   83

On the Road . . . Again   85 Alone at the Kitchen Table: Learning Ableton   86 EXPLETIVES! FIRST ENCOUNTERS WITH ABLETON   87 READY, AIM, MISFIRE: CLICKS OF INTENT   89 THE TIMBRE TRAIL: TWEAKING SOUNDS   92

Lonely Learning: Conclusions   95

4. Track 2: Tara    97 From Scoring Points to Scoring Films: Learning Background   97 “I JUST LEARNED AS I HAD TO”: KARAOKE COMPOSITION AND REFLEXIVE RECORDING WITH LOGIC    98

Walking and Writing: Distinguishing the Song from the Recording   101 Packing Blankets and Piano Tuners: Converting the Home to Studio   102

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Preparation (Saturday and Monday Morning)   102 HOME STUDIO HEADACHES   103

Hypercritical: In Pursuit of the Pristine Piano Performance (Monday Afternoon, Tuesday, and Wednesday)   105 FINDING FAULTS WITH FELIX   107

Recording the Piano for “Chesterfield” (Wednesday)   108 “TRAINS AND STUFF”: BATTLING ENVIRONMENTAL NOISE   111 FELIX AS PRODUCER? DEFINING ROLES IN THE RECORDING PROCESS   111

Technical Difficulties (Thursday)   113 Manufacturing Vocal Perfection: Repeated Takes and Comping (Friday)   114 TECHNICAL DETAILS    116 SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN RECORDING   116 “GOTTA HIT THAT”: SINGING PERFECTION   117

Comping (Saturday)   117 Ongoing: Shopping for a Mixer   121 To Be Continued: Conclusions   123

5. Track 3: Tyler    125 “Just Learned It From Doing It”: Learning History   125 “I WOULD GET TOGETHER WITH MYSELF”: MAKING MUSIC WITH ACID PRO   126 TECHNICAL TANGENT #1: MICROPHONE MATTERS   127 “I LEARNED THE HARD WAY”: SELF-TEACHING WITH DAWS   129

The Cartographic Composer: Mapping a Musical Existence   130 AUTODIDACTICISM AND ABLETON LIVE   132

A Guided Tour Through Tyler’s Bedroom Studio   133 TECHNICAL TANGENT #2: MIXING MATTERS   134 STEMS    136

The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far from the Social Network: Growing a Fictional Family Tree   137 SINGING ROBOTS    139

Audio Avatars: Otter, Sumac, and Totem   141 “THIS IS ME WATCHING ME TALKING ABOUT ME”: STIMULATED RECALL   142 EDITING MIDI    143 EQUALIZING BEATS    145 MAKING LOOPS    146 SHIFTING PITCH    147 “IF I CAN GET MYSELF FEELING GOOD ABOUT IT”: REFLEXIVE LISTENING   148 “AND THAT’S IT FOR NOW”: CONCLUDING THE SESSION   150

“Technology is the Reason”: Conclusions   150

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6. Track 4: Jimmy    153 From Scratching to Picking: Learning History   155 “I JUST FOUND IT SO HARD”: LEARNING TO PLAY THE GUITAR   157 THREE HOURS A DAY: PRACTICE   158 “IT WAS NEVER, NEVER, NEVER SERIOUS”: LEARNING THE STUDIO BY OSMOSIS   159

“I Woke Up With the Melody”: The Making of “Lost and Found”   160 “EVERY DAY’S A STRUGGLE”: WRITING LYRICS   161 “IT JUST HAPPENS”: RECORDING = SONGWRITING   162 FINGER DRUMMING    163 TRACKING, LAYERING, AND TWEAKING GUITARS   164 DO IT AGAIN: LAYERING VOCALS   166

“Me and Him Have This Synergy”: Mixing with Bill   167 ANALOG VERSUS DIGITAL ACCORDING TO JIMMY   169 GETTING GUITAR SOUNDS: EQUALIZING AND COMPRESSING   170 “I NEVER THOUGHT I WOULD BE A SINGER”: VOCAL DOUBLING AND PROCESSING THE VOICE    173 FINAL MIX?    174

Recording as Second Nature: Conclusions   175

Part III   LEARNING PRODUCING | PRODUCING

LEARNING   

Going Green: DIY Recording and Informal Learning Strategies   180

7. Mixing the Multitrack: Cross-Case Analyses   185 Conceptualizing the Multiple Case Study as a Multitrack Recording   185 Classifying DIY Studios   186 DIA STUDIOS    186 DIWO STUDIOS    188

Music-Making Models and Digitally Afforded Techniques   189 THE THIRD DIMENSION: BREAKING FROM THE HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL PLANES   190 KARAOKE COMPOSITION AND REFLEXIVE RECORDING   191 PRESET CULTURE    192 UNDO THE UNDUE   193

Producer Pedagogies: Acquiring Skills and Know-How   193 AURAL EMULATION    194 PEER-GUIDED LEARNING    195 SELF-TEACHING    195 TAPE TRAVAILS    195

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C on t e n t s DOMAIN OF THE DAW   196 IMMERSIVE LEARNING AND HOLISTIC LEARNING   197

Summing the Tracks: Conclusions   198

8. Mastering the Multitrack: Conclusions   199 Implications for Music Education   199 BY-PROCESSES: TACIT LEARNING    199 MAKING WAVES: MUSIC-INVENTING    202 FORGED WITH ONES AND ZEROES: DIGITAL AUDIO MUSIC-MAKING TOOLS   203 TRIAL-AND-ERROR LEARNING: A NEW SPIN ON AN OLD FAVORITE   204 SONG-MAKERS: MAKING AS LEARNING   206

The Les Paul Legacy of the Producer   207

Bibliography   209 Index    221

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Preface

Home Recording Revelations I was fifteen years old when I first became skeptical that my favorite album was a compilation of real-​time performances. Up until this time I  credulously believed that this music, which bleated daily through my earbuds, was the byproduct of talented and practiced musicians collaborating in a studio to commit their best performances to permanence. I knew that microphones were involved in the recording process, and that there was usually a man (often with a cigarette dangling from his mouth) sitting behind a big board of lights and knobs who was obliged to utter catchphrases such as “Let’s take it from the top” and “We’re rolling.” My favorite album during this time was by a four-​piece band whose roles were listed on the back cover as follows: • • • •

guitar, vocals vocals, guitar bass, vocals drums

Whenever I listened to this album, I pictured the band playing together in a recording studio, resembling what Geoffrey Stokes describes as the typical recording processes of rock and roll in the mid-​1950s and early 1960s: Recording was a relatively simple process in which a band lined up in front of microphones, each one controlled for volume from the control booth, and played their music. Generally it went right from the microphones to the final tape . . . when the recording session was over, the record was finished.1   Stokes, Star-​Making Machinery, 136.

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With each passing play audiotape gradually erodes, and paralleling this reality, my adolescent illusion of the studio recording as a real-​time event began to disintegrate as I studied the guitar parts of my favorite album. With only two guitarists in the band, how was it possible that they played three different and distinct guitar parts simultaneously? I deduced that either a ringer was enlisted—​a mystery third guitarist—​or some kind of recording wizardry was invoked. Thumbing through my local library’s card catalogue in search of literature on audio recording proved to be a fruitless endeavor, and the “information superhighway” I had heard rumblings about had yet to make a detour to my rural hometown. Lacking the informational resources to answer my query, I retreated to the basement and took matters into my own hands. Armed with a guitar, two tape recorders, and two audiocassettes, I devised my battle plan to create an audio illusion all my own. I  commenced my experiment by pressing the red record button on one tape recorder and proceeded to play a four-​chord progression that I  repeated for a couple of minutes until the monotony of this exercise begged a quick cadence. I stopped the recording and rewound the tape to the beginning. On the second tape recorder I pressed record, and then pressed play on the first tape recorder. The rhythm guitar part that I had just finished recording now played the role of rhythmic accompaniment; I joined in on the jam by improvising a guitar solo along with it, all of which was recorded by the second tape recorder. What I stumbled upon was a crude form of overdubbing. It forever transformed my musical practices, aiding me in developing my instrumental skills and songwriting ideas. Ignorant of the history of recorded music and oblivious to the existence of multitrack tape recorders, I did not realize one person could play multiple parts on a recording, and that the technology to make this possible had existed for more than half of a century. By the mid-​1960s the recording process had changed drastically in popular music, with musicians harnessing recording technology to move the conception of recording beyond that of an audio snapshot capturing a moment in time. Referencing the increasingly elaborate studio productions of the Beach Boys, Virgil Moorefield writes: Already in 1966, then, the composer, arranger, and producer are melded into one person . . . Brian Wilson was at the controls himself, making on-​ the-​spot decisions about notes, articulation, timbre, and so on. He was effectively composing at the mixing board and using the studio as a musical instrument.2 Since the mid-​1960s, most recorded music has not been made by a group of people playing together in the same room at the same time. Instead, like Brian Wilson,

  Moorefield, The Producer as Composer, 19.

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musicians have used the studio as a musical instrument, either working alone,3 or in teams.4

Digital DIY-​er Shuffling forward a few years to the more digitally dependent musical milieu of the twenty-​first century, my early adulthood years coincided with a critical period of transition in the music-​recording industry: digital technologies were quickly usurping their analog predecessors. This change trickled down to the consumer, giving me access to similar recording technology. A  fifty-​dollar computer program that I purchased at a local mall afforded me to overdub as many as sixteen tracks, opening the portal to a new incarnation of the one-​man band. By routing a few inexpensive Radio Shack microphones to my computer through a battered mixing console acquired from a thrift shop, I patched together a humble recording studio of my own. In my parent’s basement, I diligently recorded myself track-​by-​track playing drums, bass, and guitar to shape the foundations for my not-​so-​original pop songs. My recordings were not intended for others to listen to; rather they served as sonic sketches, an aural alternative to writing down musical ideas with pencil and paper. As I developed my recording skills in tandem with my musical skills, what started as a hobby evolved into a more serious endeavor. Aside from the skimpy manual that accompanied the music-​recording software, I had no form of instruction. My music education took place outside of the classroom, after school, and consisted of a self-​directed approach to making music with recording technology. I learned to use the studio as a musical instrument by teaching myself, much of which entailed a trial-​and-​error approach.

Music Education and Recording Researchers in music education,5 and popular music,6 have opined that recordings constitute the primary texts from which popular musicians learn.7 For example, Susan McClary and Robert Walser assert: “What popular music has instead of the score is, of course, recorded performance—​the thing itself, completely fleshed   See for example Bell, “Trial-​by-​Fire”; Butler, Playing with Something That Runs; Schloss, Making Beats; Rambarran, “DJ Hit That Button.” 4   See for example Hennion, “The Production of Success”; Seabrook, The Song Machine; Warner, Pop Music. 5   See for example Campbell, “Of Garage Bands and Song-​Getting”; Green, How Popular Musicians Learn; Jaffurs, “The Impact of Informal Music Learning Practices in the Classroom.” 6   See for example Bennett, On Becoming a Rock Musician; Schwartz, “Writing Jimi.” 7   This section paraphrases parts of Bell, “The Process of Production | The Production of Process.” 3

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out with all its gestures and nuances intact.”8 “Learn by listening to and copying recordings” is the second tenet of Lucy Green’s Music, Informal Learning, and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy, a model of popular music pedagogy that has been hugely influential on the field of music education.9 It is undoubtedly true that popular musicians learn from recordings, but this is not the complete picture because popular musicians also learn by making recordings. This book aims to shed some light on the making and learning processes entailed in recording. Understanding how music-​recording processes work can help music educators to facilitate learning experiences that reflect this important aspect of how popular musicians learn. To the credit of the field, music educators have written about using the studio as a musical instrument, at least inadvertently, since the late 1960s.10 For example, in 1970 John Paynter and Peter Aston advocated using tape recorders to “make music,” recognizing the technology’s potential to not only record but to edit, make loops (literally), shift pitches via speed changes, layer sounds, and play sounds backward.11 Under the umbrella of “composition,” several music education researchers investigated the music-​making process with computers,12 all of which resemble the practice of using the studio as a musical instrument. More recent studies have reported on music-​making and learning practices in which studio technology serves as the instrument, occurring in a broad range of formal and informal learning settings.13 Despite the significance of these contributions to our understanding of the studio as instrument in music education, the practices of production that typify how popular music is made remain largely absent in popular music pedagogies. Music education needs to espouse the processes of recording as opposed to the products of recording, and focus on how popular music is made to create pedagogies that are more reflective of real world practices.   McClary and Walser, “Start Making Sense!,” 282.   In a review of eighty-​one articles from 1978 to 2010 related to popular music pedagogy, Roger Mantie reported that over half of these cited Lucy Green. See his “A Comparison of ‘Popular Music Pedagogy’ Discourses.” 10   See for example Ellis, “Musique Concrète at Home”; Ernst, “So You Can’t Afford an Electronic Studio?” 11   Paynter and Aston, Sound and Silence, 134. 12   See for example Bamberger, “In Search of a Tune”; Folkestad, Hargreaves, and Lindström, “Compositional Strategies in Computer-​Based Music Making”; Hickey, “The Computer as a Tool in Creative Music Making”; Stauffer, “Composing with Computers”; Wilson and Wales, “An Exploration of Children’s Musical Compositions.” 13   See for example Egolf, “Learning Processes of Electronic Dance Music Club DJs”; Finney, “Music Education as Identity Project in a World of Electronic Desires”; King, “Collaborative Learning in the Music Studio”; Lebler, “Popular Music Pedagogy”; Lebler and Weston, “Staying in Sync”; Mellor, “Creativity, Originality, Identity”; Tobias, “Composing, Songwriting, and Producing”; Tobias, “Crossfading Music Education.” 8 9

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DIY Recording Studios This book is the result of five years of research on the phenomenon of DIY (do-​it-​ yourself) recording. In the age of portable computing, the construct of “the studio” as a physical space is no longer applicable: “The popularity and portability of the laptop opens up a series of possibilities for music that sends it beyond spatial anchorages.”14 The laptop as the DIY studio serves two key functions, as Shara Rambarran explains: The laptop as a mobile instrument or music machine means that it not only helps to produce and play the sounds that the musician has created, but the device (as a hardware and instrument) can also serve as a virtual recording studio and digital workstation, anytime and anywhere.15 As portable computing devices enable recording to occur ubiquitously, the more conventional terms of home recording and project studio have continually been redefined. What I refer to as a “DIY studio” throughout this book is similar in conception to Mark Slater’s description of the “project studio”: The “project studio,” as an umbrella term, encompasses an unknowable range of possibilities and variations. There is no neat designation: project studios can produce professional-​standard material (though they might also be the realm of amateur hobbyists); there can be a flow of people and materials between project studios and professional studios in the overall process of bringing music into being; project studios may be as stable as professional studios (architecturally, economically, and in reputation) but they may also be in a constant state of flux in terms of technologies that constitute them and the practices and materials that are explored there.16 Only a few decades ago the cost of producing a professional recording was prohibitively expensive for most, but with the proliferation of personal computing and the associated exponentiation of processing power, hobbyists were heralding the wonders of DAW (digital audio workstation) technology by the 1990s. It is fitting that the recording mediums of human history (cylinders, discs, tape reels, and hard drives) are round, because we have come full circle, back to a point where DIY recordings can go directly to the radio just like Les Paul and Mary Ford’s 1951 hit “How High the Moon.” The once rigidly defined spaces and roles of musician and audio engineer are coalescing.

  Prior, “OK COMPUTER.”   R ambarran, “DJ Hit That Button,” 596. 16   Slater, “Processes of Learning in the Project Studio,” 10. 14 15

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There is a renewed role in music production reminiscent of Les Paul, a hybrid of musician and audio engineer, a role where one person is responsible for writing, performing, recording, and mixing a musical work. Dawn of the DAW tells the story of how the dividing line between the traditional roles of musicians and recording professionals has eroded, inadvertently inaugurating a new music education paradigm. The phenomenon of using the studio as a musical instrument is illustrated by profiling four Brooklynites who engage in the practice of DIY recording. Detailing how the DAW is entrenched as an elemental cog of the twenty-​first-​century music-​making mechanism, Dawn of the DAW illuminates the centrality and criticality of digital recording technologies in the learning and music-​making processes of DIY-​ers. Divided into three parts, part I  first examines DIY recording practices within the context of recording history from the late nineteenth century to the present. Chapter  1 examines the evolving processes and technologies of DIY recording, which is followed by an explication of the evolving role of the producer and the studio as a musical instrument in ­chapter 2. Taken together, these two chapters serve to contextualize the primary focus of this book: the music-​making and learning that occurs with DIY recording studios. Part II continues the story of the evolution of DIY recording by detailing current practices of using the studio as a musical instrument. How recording technologies are incorporated into music-​making, and how they are learned by DIY studio users, constitutes the central focus of c­ hapters 3, 4, 5, and 6. Each of these chapters chronicles the music-​making processes of a different DIY-​er from the musically chic borough of Brooklyn, and focuses on a different aspect of the music production process: getting sounds, tracking, editing, and mixing. Finally, part III examines the broader trends heard throughout the stories presented in part II. Drawing on Lucy Green’s model for how popular musicians learn, ­chapter 7 examines the common practices of music-​making and learning with DIY recording studios. Dawn of the DAW concludes with ­chapter 8, which discusses the ramifications of these new directions for music educators.

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Part I

DO-​IT-​YOURSELF

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1 A History of DIY Recording Striving for Self-​S ufficiency

The Difficulty of Defining DIY DIY. Do-​it-​yourself. In the context of recorded music, what does it mean?1 For some, DIY is the story of independent distribution, embodied by entrepreneurs like Leonard Chess,2 Berry Gordy,3 and Rick Hall,4 stocking their vehicles’ trunks with records and driving them to radio DJs and stores to promote their respective stables of artists. Perhaps no one in the history of music distribution has been more DIY than Ian MacKaye, who founded Dischord Records and with his peers put together the labels’ first ten thousand records by hand.5 The determination to distribute music—​exemplified by Lookout! Records’ Chris Applegren and Patrick Hynes pushing boxes of seven-​inch records on their skateboards through the turnstiles of the San Francisco transit system—​is a hallmark of the DIY-​er.6 For others DIY is about an aesthetic, a quality of sound that signifies an authenticity that is void in the recordings disseminating from professional recording studios. R. Stevie Moore, the “Godfather of Home Recording,” who is reported to have produced and distributed over four hundred albums,7 “celebrated the unburnished, the intimate, the vulnerable, and the deranged.”8 Oftentimes such an aesthetic is associated with a conception of

  Parts of this chapter were first published in Bell, “DIY Recreational Recording as Music Making.”   Cohen, Record Men, 64. 3   Posner, Motown, 36. 4   Gillett, Making Tracks, 204. 5   Cook with McCaughan and Balance, Our Noise, 6. 6   Boulware and Tudor, Gimme Something Better, 330. 7   Carson, “R. Stevie Moore.” 8   Ingram, “Here Comes the Flood.” 1 2

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what constitutes a professional studio and working in opposition to it, such as these New York-​based examples: • Mantronix recording The Album (1985) in Al Cohen Studio, an apartment in the Chelsea Hotel.9 • Marley Marl producing members of the Juice Crew in his “House of Hits,” which was the living room in his sister’s Queensbridge apartment.10 • Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin cutting LL Cool J’s “I Need a Beat” in Rubin’s New York University dorm room.11 • Vampire Weekend recording parts of their debut album in the music rooms of Columbia University.12 The sound, the space, the selling, and sharing; these are all critical components of what constitutes DIY, but for the purposes of this book, when DIY is invoked it refers to making music, specifically with a focus on how music is made in the recording process and the learning that occurs therein. The history of DIY recording that I present in this chapter is a purposefully skewed one. While it is important to know what people use to make music, more emphasis is placed on how recording as a music-​making practice is conceptualized and performed. Therefore, this is a story about ease of access and ease of use, the two most critical conditions in determining whether or not a practice can be self-​sufficient, which is the essence of DIY. At present, the digital audio workstation (DAW) is the bedrock of music production, DIY or otherwise. DAW is a generic software categorization that has evolved since its origins as simply an audio editing application that ran on specialized workstation computers. Most DAWs now share in common the capability to sequence, record, and mix music, but increasingly can be played using software-​based synthesizers that emulate existing instruments or create new tones and timbres with no existing referent. As a tech-​dependent music-​making society, have we adapted our recording practices in parallel, if at all, with the development of our recording technologies? In this first chapter, I aim to shine a light on DIY practices since the inception of recording itself, and trace its path to the present. What ought to be evident is that relatively soon into the history of recording, an industry is established and DIY practices coexist in a world with professional protocols, conventions, and equipment. DIY-​ers and professionals inform and influence each other, and at times distinguishing one from another is a difficult task. I attribute “professional” to the music industry, meaning that professional practices exist to produce recordings to be commodities. DIY covers the spectrum, as some DIY-​ers set out to   Coleman, Check the Technique Volume 2, 351.   Gonzales, “The Juice Crew,” 103. 11   Considine, “The Big Willies,” 155. 12   Eells, “Vampire Weekend.” 9

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A His t ory of DI Y R e cordin g

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make money, while others simply see recording as recreation. What these DIY-​ers share in common is a desire to be self-​sufficient; to engage in recording as music-​ making. “Recording,” as this history will demonstrate, is a moving target, and over time comes to mean increasingly more than the literal act of recording sound to a medium. As the acts associated with recording change and evolve, so too do the roles of the people that engage with these practices. The music-​making and learning practices of the contemporary DIY-​ers profiled in this book are not the result of a twenty-​first century DIY recording revolution; rather, they are exemplary of a DIY recording evolution that started before audio existed.

DIY Recording Before Records It was not until 1877 that Thomas Edison succeeded in playing back a recording of himself, but many of the concepts present in the modern DAW predate the phonograph by hundreds of years. By extension, DIY recording practices predate audio recording itself. David Bowers details that there are historical records dating to the era of 1500 to 1800 of automatic musical instruments in Europe, typically reserved for royalty, such as flute-​players and mechanical birds. By the early 1800s, music boxes that played melodies using tuned steel combs were being produced by Swiss and German workshops.13 Handel, C. P. E. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven all composed for small self-​playing organs,14 which suggests that they were not just composing for this medium, but programming it, too. This last point is particularly pertinent to the development of the DIY studio because long before the arrival of audio recording, composers were bypassing performing musicians to interpret and play their works in favor of a more direct and self-​sufficient approach. Even more intriguing from the history of Bowers’ automatic instruments is the evidence to support the theory that the drum machine predates the drum set. By the mid-​nineteenth century tuned bells and drums were added to music boxes,15 which effectively meant that a drum pattern could be programmed. Furthermore, there is evidence of miniature drum machines—​essentially a trap kit triggered by a small scroll of paper akin to a piano roll—​in existence in the early twentieth century,16 which is around the same time the modern trap kit began to take shape as an instrument unto itself.17 But of all the marvels of automatic mechanical music technology, the most complex operations were afforded by the player piano, which for a time rivaled audio recording in the early twentieth century as the preferred   Bowers, Encyclopedia of Automatic Musical Instruments, 10.   Hocker, “My Soul is in the Machine,” 84. 15   Bowers, Encyclopedia of Automatic Musical Instruments, 29. 16   Ibid., 749. 17   Avanti, “Black Musics, Technology, and Modernity.” 13 14

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method by performers to record the piano. The significance of these perforated-​ scroll-​dependent instruments is that in theory, one could independently record and reproduce their own musical performance. Making a DIY recording was possible before “recordings” in the modern sense existed, exemplifying that “the growth, persistence in our culture, and technological improvement of sound recording reflect its evolutionary, not revolutionary nature.”18

Tinfoil Revolutions: The First DIY Audio Recording The first audio recording that could be played back was a DIY job by Thomas Edison. This inaugural phonograph recording from 1877 was a spoken rendition of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”19 With this sonic selfie, Edison set a precedent that you could record yourself. Initially, Edison did not envision music recording as the phonograph’s primary purpose; he had other designs in mind than entertainment, such as office dictation.20 Nevertheless in 1878, listing potential uses of the phonograph, Edison included recording music: The phonograph will undoubtedly be liberally devoted to music. A song sung on the phonograph is reproduced with marvelous accuracy and power. Thus a friend may in a morning-​call sing us a song which shall delight an evening company, etc. As a musical teacher it will be used to enable one to master a new air, the child to form its first songs, or to sing him to sleep.21 Although the earliest phonographs produced were equipped to record, low public demand for this feature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries pushed the phonograph and its competing devices toward being used solely for sound reproduction. Up until approximately 1900, the phonograph could both record and reproduce, and the manufacturers “expected their customers to make their own recordings.”22 One such example of DIY recording during this era is presented in How We Gave a Phonograph Party, distributed by the National Phonography Company in 1899.23 This party is depicted as a fun-​filled evening, with anecdotes such as: “The most effective records we made during the entire evening were two   Jones, Rock Formation, 14.   Digital restorations of similar tinfoil recordings from 1878 reveal that these recordings were quite noisy and distorted, making the sound source, such as the voice in this case, difficult to discern. 20   Morton, Sound Recording, 18. 21   Cited in Taylor, Katz, and Grajeda, Music, Sound, and Technology in America, 35. 22   Morton, Off the Record, 14. 23   Reproduced in Taylor, Katz, and Grajeda, Music, Sound, and Technology in America. 18 19

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chorus records. All stood close together in a bunch about three feet from the horn and sang ‘Marching through Georgia’ and it came out fine. Our success lead us to try another ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and it was every bit as good.”24 During the phonograph’s infancy, people could record themselves. Although the role of “recordist” existed in professional recording studios, in domestic life the people operating the recording equipment were the same people performing for it. Recording in this context was a self-​sufficient process that was intended to be fun. Despite some critics’ concerns that recording technology would replace recreational music-​making, “in good part it [music-​making] flourished in response to the possibilities of these technologies.”25 Emulating Edison—​most likely unknowingly—​ people self-​produced their own recordings in their homes decades before “home recording” became a household term. Based on these accounts it seemed that DIY recording was off to a formidable start in the twentieth century, but with Emile Berliner’s disc-​based gramophone design supplanting Edison’s cylinder-​based phonograph system—​due to the fact that it was easier to mass-​produce discs than cylinders—​came a major conceptual shift. The inability to record on discs introduced a structural and social division between making a recording and listening to it. With Edison’s design, access to one assumed access to the other as well; sound recording was something people could do. With Berliner’s design, a wedge was driven between production and consumption; sound recording was something people could listen to.26 As a consequence of this conceptual shift, “recordings would be made solely by manufacturers, not by consumers.”27 The act of recording was no longer participatory, it was proprietary. The story of DIY recording does not end in the early twentieth century with the demise of recording cylinders, but it does drop off the radar of most accounts of the history of recording, only to resurface mid-​century with the advent of tape recording. In part, DIY recording’s absence from the annals of recording history can be explained by the overshadowing presence of the professionalization of recording—​what would eventually come to be known as audio engineering. This was a critical juncture: the beginning of the parsing of the technological from the musical, which over time came to be further entrenched as recording practices evolved in tandem with the music industry. To understand DIY recording in its current state, it must be contextualized within the broader culture and history of sound recording, commencing with the mechanical era.   Ibid., 51.   Katz, “The Amateur in the Age of Mechanical Music,” 460. 26   Suisman, Selling Sounds, 5. 27   Morton, Sound Recording, 32. 24 25

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Mechanical Recording (Pre-​1925) Recording in the mechanical era necessitated that the physical space of the studio be large enough to accommodate the performing musicians as well as the personnel operating the recording apparatus.28 The musicians performed toward a horn, which channeled the collective air pressure of their sounds to a membrane that would vibrate, and in turn move the needle that recorded onto the rotating cylinder.29 A  caveat of this mechanical process was that a musician who could not produce sufficient air pressure—​such as a singer with a soft voice—​could not be a recording artist.30 Further, musicians often had to adjust their performance practices to conform to the capacities of the mechanical studio, such as altering their playing formations to obtain the optimal musical balance on the recorded medium.31 David Morton provides a description of a typical pre-​electrical era recording session: A recording director (who might also be a conductor or serve other functions) physically arranged the musicians and managed the details of the session. During the session, the director motioned to vocalists to indicate when to lean in close and when to duck or step away from the horn during instrumental solos, allowing the musicians to come forward.32 In many regards, performing to a horn is similar to performing to a microphone: A vocalist might literally stick her head inside the horn to ensure that her pianissimo would be heard, but then, with the timing of a lion tamer, quickly withdraw for her fortissimo, so as to avoid “blasting” the engraving needle out of its groove.33 Some studios even employed a “gentle pusher,” whose duty was to monitor the performer’s dynamics and push them away from the recording horn when they were too quiet, and conversely, pull them away when they were too loud.34 Dynamics notwithstanding, mechanical recording could not capture the full   According to Allan Williams, “Old drawings of an early Edison recording session indicate that there was no physical division between musicians and the recording devices and technicians who operated them.” See his “Divide and Conquer.” 29   Horning, “Chasing Sound.” 30   Schmidt Horning, Chasing Sound, 30. 31   Morton, Sound Recording and Off the Record. 32   Morton, Off the Record, 21. 33   Katz, Capturing Sound, 38. 34   Katz, “Introduction,” 25. 28

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extent of the typical human’s hearing range,35 which meant that the frequencies produced by instruments at the low or high end of the sound spectrum were rendered inaudible. For example, a mechanical recording of a drum set would not be able to reproduce the low thud of a bass drum nor the high shimmer of a cymbal. One workaround for this problem was to simply replace an instrument, such as substituting the double bass line for a tuba part, as was practiced in early-​era jazz recordings.36 In sum, both whom could be recorded and how accurately they could be recorded—​with regard to such basic elements of sound such as pitch and perceived loudness—​were subject to the mediated process of recording. Jonathan Sterne succinctly concludes: “People performed for the machines; machines did not simply ‘capture’ sounds that already existed in the world  .  .  .  Making sounds for the machines was always different than performing for a live audience.”37 The perception that the recording studio was once a neutral space where music was simply captured to a medium is misguided. Recording is not just a product of performers; it is also a process, one in which participants other than the musicians as well as the technologies they employ (including the rooms they record in) contribute significantly to the outcome as heard on the final medium. And yet there remains a longstanding view that recording music is simply the process of capturing a musical performance in real time.38 Aden Evens suggests that this perception can be attributed to a cultural bias toward the Western classical tradition: “According to the audiophile community, every good recording should sound like Beethoven played live: fidelity = Fidelio.”39 Despite this construct of fidelity being actively promoted by the emerging music-​recording industry in the early twentieth century,40 an undercurrent of DIY recording practices that eschewed this take on reality would eventually succeed in selling recordings that purposely foiled the façade of recordings as unmediated musical moments captured in real time. This sea-​change shift in perceptions and practices took decades to reach a boiling point and evaporate the illusion of fidelity because accessing (or acquiring) and operating the technology to record continued to present significant hurdles to those outside of the music industry during the electrical era.

  Human hearing is typically 20Hz–​20kHz, although with aging, the ability to perceive high frequencies tends to decline. Mechanical recording could capture a much more limited frequency range of 200Hz–​3kHz according to Schmidt Horning, Chasing Sound, 37. 36   Katz, Capturing Sound, 39. 37   Sterne, The Audible Past, 235. 38   Kealy, “From Craft to Art.” 39   Evens, Sound Ideas, 7. 40   Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever. 35

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The Electrical Era (Post-​1925) With the advent of electricity came significant changes in recording technology and ensuing recording practices. If there is a dark age in DIY recording history, it is this period from the earliest encounters with electrical recording up until the arrival of audio tape following World War II. Exceptions existed, notably Raymond Scott, who in 1935 at the age of twenty-​six “designed and owned one of New York City’s earliest independent recording studios.”41 By the 1940s Scott, a successful bandleader whose real passion was electronics and music composition,42 channeled his wealth toward a lavish recording studio in his Long Island home: “He had . . . a spacious razzle-​dazzle recording studio with a disc lathe, reel-​to-​reel tape recorders, and a wide assortment of wall-​mounted instruments, mixers, and controls that grew more complex from year to year as he continued to invent new gizmos.”43 Individuals like Scott were anomalies during the electrical era because an industrial recording complex had been developing at a rapid rate that not only perpetuated the division of labor between musicians and recordists from the mechanical era, but increased it. The aural artistry of the mechanical recordist was soon supplanted by electrical engineers and the science of measuring audio signals.44 A new and more specialized position in the studio was forged, a hybrid artist–​scientist profession that came to be known as audio engineering. Aside from the increases in dynamic and frequency range ushered in by the microphone and the accompanying electrical recording process, a key difference in practice established during this era was the separation of the recordist/​engineer from the musicians in the studio space.45 Gone were the days of the recordist corralling musicians around the recording horn; instead, the engineer could now direct all involved from a control room via intercom and adjust microphone levels by turning knobs.46 While it was still possible to make a DIY recording in the electrical era using a commercially available “instantaneous” disc recording system, it was considerably more difficult compared to the early days of mechanical recording: “They were far too complex for the amateur.”47 Susan Schmidt Horning details that in the early 1930s one of the owners of Presto Recording Corporation published how-​to guides   Winner, “The World of Sound,” 187.    Chusid, “Beethoven-​in-​a-​Box,” 10. 43   Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music, 140. 44   Morton, Off the Record, 26. 45   Chanan, Repeated Takes. Although the separation of musicians from recording technicians did not become a widespread practice until the electrical era, research by Allan Williams reports that as early as 1906 an Edison recording studio in New York had a partition to isolate the musicians from the recording equipment and personnel. See “Divide and Conquer.” 46   Schmidt Horning, Chasing Sound, 41. 47   Millard, “Tape Recording and Music Making,” 158. 41 42

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for avid hobbyists such as Home Recording and All About It, touting:  “The home recordist can achieve results that will be almost on par with commercially-​pressed records.”48 To most people, however, disc-​based recording was unwieldy, and “it was not until tape recorders became available in the 1950s that home recording became popular again.”49 Fortunately for the future of DIY recording, jazz guitarist Les Paul was more than up to the task to tinker with two turntables in his garage.

Les Paul’s Legacy of Overdubbing Les Paul is the oft-​cited trailblazer of DIY recording mastery, producing recordings in the late 1940s and early 1950s that were futuristic to the ears of the music-​ listening audiences of the day.50 He sped up his recorded guitar riffs and solos to create new timbres played at superlative speeds, and seemed to defy the laws of time by accompanying himself on guitar, or having his wife, Mary Ford, sing with herself using a technique he coined “sound-​on-​sound”: He would record a track onto an aluminum disk, and then record a second track on another machine, while the first machine played back his first track. The second machine would thus capture Paul’s live second performance as well as his recorded first performance. Then he’d begin the process again with the third performance. In this way, he would layer part upon part until he had a finished piece.51 It is noteworthy that Paul’s method demanded exquisite execution to be successful because there was no recourse to correct mistakes. With each added layer of sound, the stakes grew increasingly higher as a single slipup would ruin the entire recording. Even more impressive is the fact that the parts that needed to be the most prominent in the finalized recording would have to be recorded last, requiring a premeditated form of mental mixing. Accounts of others engaging in a similar recording process affirm that Paul did not invent sound-​on-​sound or what is commonly referred to as overdubbing. For example, in 1930, Paul Hindemith demonstrated his “trick music” in Berlin, which featured himself singing a three-​voice chord, possibly the first overdub recorded.52 Reportedly, the first commercial recording with overdubbing was Lawrence   Schmidt Horning, Chasing Sound, 61.   Katz, Capturing Sound, 70. 50   Key examples of Les Paul’s disc-​based sound-​on-​sound recordings include “Lover” (1948) and “Brazil” (1948). 51   Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever, 125. 52   Katz, Capturing Sound, 100. 48 49

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Tibbett’s “the Cuban love song” (1931) on which he sang both the tenor and baritone parts,53 and a decade later Sidney Bechet overdubbed the multi-​instrumentals “The Sheik of Araby” and “Blues of Bechet.”54 Nevertheless, Les Paul, who observed the use of overdubbing in Hollywood at some point in the early 1930s and honed his technique using a homemade disc cutter in his garage-​turned-​studio, is the individual who popularized this approach: “He was certainly the first to make it a major selling point of his disks. This studio technique, which took him roughly two years to perfect, would ultimately force the industry to reexamine its approach to recording.”55 Historians of the Western art music tradition often point to Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry as the progenitors of collage-​based music,56 but their landmark works such as Symphonie pour un home seul (1950) premiered after Paul released tracks like “Lover” (1948) and “Brazil” (1948). Regardless of who was first, the technique of overdubbing that is now commonplace in music production was popularized by Les Paul who applied these principles to tape in just a few years following his first forays in overdubbing with discs.

Les Paul and the Tale of Tape (Post-​1945) Following the conclusion of World War II, the German-​designed tape recorder came into American possession.57 Within a few years, Les Paul emerged as the sultan of sound-​on-​sound, apparently intuiting almost immediately how to retrofit the tape recorder to enable overdubbing upon receiving one of the first American-​made models from Bing Crosby in 1949.58 Much like his disc-​to-​disc sound-​on-​sound achievements, Paul’s tape-​based overdubbing escapades would prove to be pivotal in how recording was conceptualized in the postwar period,   Barrett, “Producing Performance,” 91.   Shaughnessy, Les Paul. 55   Ibid., 143. 56   Prendergast, Ambient Century. 57   Morton, Sound Recording, 114–​142. Following World War II, American intelligence investigated various German technologies including the Magnetophon tape recorder, and one of the investigating officers, Jack Mullin, shipped two of the units back to the United States. The American-​made Ampex tape recorder based on the Magnetophon was introduced to Bing Crosby by Mullin after he was hired to record Crosby’s radio show for NBC. Although the Magnetophon had been unveiled in Paris in 1935, “for reasons that have never been clear, the more creative uses of tape for recording music did not begin until the tape recorder was wrested from its legitimate corporate and institutional sponsors, who were mainly in Germany, and distributed around the world to new owners.” Ibid., 142. Notably, Thom Holmes claims that Raymond Scott invented one of the first multitrack tape recorders in the United States, having figured out how to record “seven or fourteen parallel audio tracks on the same reel of tape” in 1953, a year in advance of Les Paul designing the first eight-​track machine. Electronic and Experimental Music, 141. 58   Paul and Cochran, Les Paul, 203. 53 54

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furthering “the process whereby recording tools became considered instruments unto themselves.”59 Of equal importance to overdubbing was Paul’s advancement of multitrack recording. Bell Labs in the United States demonstrated multitrack recording with film in the early 1930s, and Alan Blumlein, working for EMI in England, filed for a patent for two-​channel recording in 1931,60 but once again it was Paul who helped to popularize yet another tape-​dependent recording technique. In this process the recording tape is divided into “tracks” akin to lanes on a roadway. On each track a different performance can be recorded, regardless if these performances occur synchronously or not. For example, suppose Les Paul (guitar) and Mary Ford (vocals) were to make a multitrack recording. In the first instance, they decide to perform at the same time. Simultaneously, Ford’s microphone is recorded onto track 1, and Paul’s guitar is recorded onto track 2. In the second instance, the setup remains the same, but the process is altered to be asynchronous. First, Paul’s performance is recorded onto track 2, and once he is finished, Ford’s vocal performance is recorded onto track 1. In either scenario, if Ford or Paul opted to redo any part of their respective performances afterward they could do so without effecting each other’s performances because they were recorded onto separate tracks. Understandably, the musicians might prefer one approach over another, but from a technological perspective, there is little difference. The core principle underpinning multitracking is the isolation of recorded performances from each other on separate tracks. Timothy Warner outlines the multifaceted advantages afforded by the tape-​based multitracking process: First, recording each track separately enables the user to attain a much higher level of musical accuracy, specifically timing and tuning; second, each track can be recorded in minute sections, bit by bit and, as a consequence, levels of performance are achieved which would be impossible “live”; third, the complete separation of each track offers control of volume, timbre, and spatial positioning of the signal on that track in relation to the other tracks; and, finally, decisions as to suitability of virtually all the separate sounds need only be made at the mixdown stage.61 It warrants repeating that Paul’s recordings were produced outside of a professional studio system without the aid of professional engineers. Paul recalls that he and Mary Ford often recorded in their kitchen and other rooms in their home to attain different effects: I would have Mary sing a certain part while standing in the hallway, and other parts in different rooms to give each track its own sound . . . We had   Waksman, “Les Paul,” 270.   Morton, Sound Recording. 61   Warner, Pop Music, 23. 59 60

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the bathroom, which produced an echo-​like sound, and once I determined exactly where to position Mary and the mic, the hallway was a great place for natural reverb.62 Virgil Moorefield suggests that the overdub-​dependent approach to recording employed by the likes of Les Paul would have been regarded as dishonest by popular mid-​century producers such as Mitch Miller and John Hammond: “In this worldview, a valid musician is a virtuoso, and the ability to perform in real time is paramount.”63 Albin Zak adds:  “For classical and jazz recordings, such trickery rendered the result false, worthless,” but in the case of pop music, “rather than disguising the overdub, it was highlighted.”64 These hands-​on DIY-​ers were working in direct opposition to what Edward Kealy labels “craft-​union mode,” a stratified system in which record company engineers “controlled access to the technology of recording by forbidding collaborators, such as musicians, composers, and record company personnel, to even touch the studio equipment at recording sessions.”65

Craft-​Union Mode: 30th Street Studio As a point of reference to contrast the practices of entrepreneurial DIY-​ers like Paul with their craft-​union contemporaries in the professional recording studio system, consider the case of Columbia Records’ famed 30th Street Studio in New York City. Acquired in 1949 and in operation until 1982, 30th Street Studio was used to record Kind of Blue (1959) by Miles Davis, Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations (1955), and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (1957). As in-​house audio engineer Frank Laico remarked, “30th Street Studio was a hundred feet by a hundred feet and had very high ceilings; the room was just tremendous. We could record [anything] from solo [musicians] to full symphony orchestras, and Broadway cast albums with forty or fifty musicians.”66 In an interview with David Simons, Laico revealed that the studio typically utilized a simple signal flow for recording that included high-​quality components such as Telefunken U47 and M49 microphones, Pultec equalizers, Universal Audio limiters, and a custom-​made mixing console.67 Laico routinely employed an ambient micing technique in which the sounds of the musicians and   Paul and Cochran, Les Paul, 250.   Moorefield, The Producer as Composer, 3. 64   Zak, I Don’t Sound Like Nobody, 159. 65   Kealy, “From Craft to Art,” 210. 66   As cited in Kahn, Kind of Blue, 75. 67   Simons, Studio Stories. This list of recording equipment is now highly sought after and very expensive, likely in part due to the acclaimed recordings that they were used on by Laico. 62 63

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the resulting reflections—​natural reverberations—​were sought after; the room was an integral part of the recording. The timbral tastes of the time often craved for added ambience and this desired embellishment was achieved through the use of chamber reverb. In the case of 30th Street Studio, the audio signals from the microphones were routed to a speaker in a room in the basement with dimensions twelve feet wide, fifteen feet long, and eight feet high (the chamber). The speaker projected the sound in the chamber and a microphone captured these additional reverberations, which were then added back to the mix, giving it a more spacious sound texture. This approach to recording was typical of professional studios from the 1950s to the early 1960s: The companies encouraged their engineers and mixers to develop their craft skills and strive for a recording aesthetic of “concert hall realism” and “high fidelity.” This required the construction of large studios and the development of microphone and mixing techniques in order to record whole symphony orchestras and dance bands in a way that simulated the psychoacoustics of a live performance.68 The architectural features of the physical space were central to a recording’s essence; the aim was to “capture” a “natural” performance: “The art of recording was not to compete for the public’s aesthetic attention to the art that was being recorded.”69 Whereas an engineer like Frank Laico working for a record label during this era adhered to a preservationist philosophy in recording—​capturing the performance unaltered by editing or overdubbing—​DIY-​ers like Paul purposely drew attention to their technical interventions and alterations: As record production evolved through the 1950s, the result was not only new music but a new way of making music. It was perhaps the most enduring musical concept to emerge from the postwar period: records were no longer simply aural snapshots but deliberately crafted musical texts.70 In the decades that followed, the ideal of the real-​time performance recording eventually became an exception rather than the rule, as the practice of overdubbing became standard in the overwhelming majority of recording sessions. In the span of just a few years, and in the hands of a few DIY pioneers, the window was again opened to record oneself. Coupled with tape-​recording technology, individuals could now produce recordings independently that proffered the audio illusion   Kealy, “From Craft to Art,” 210.   Ibid., 211. 70   Zak, I Don’t Sound Like Nobody, 162. 68 69

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that they could sing and play multiple parts by themselves without the aid of other musicians or technicians. These developments would have an immediate impact on a reinvigorated DIY recording community excited about the prospects afforded by tape.

DIY Recording Post-​1945: Sticking to  the Tape Mentality Home tape recording is as simple as clicking a camera shutter for ever-​ increasing thousands of American sound enthusiasts. No matter how inexperienced or inept the tape-​recorder owner may be, the chances are overwhelming that he will come up with acceptable sound on his tapes.71

Upon the arrival of audiotape in the United States following World War II, tape recording was promoted to the public as an easy-​to-​do hobby. Publications from the proceeding decades including consumer magazines such as Tape Recording (1953–​ 1969), and recreation-​oriented books such as Family Fun in Tape Recording72 and Tape Recording for the Hobbyist,73 covered a wide range of activities related to recording, with music being one of the many possibilities. Meanwhile, outside of home life, DIY recording studios began to surface, made possible by the proliferation of reel-​to-​reel tape recorders. André Millard suggests that “this was an accessible technology which permitted more people to enter the professional recording industry.”74 Most DIY studios had little in the way of state-​ of-​the-​art recording technology, lacking the requisite capital to purchase high-​end (usually German) microphones and custom-​built recording consoles. Instead, they repurposed ramshackle radio equipment and more affordable American-​made microphones,75 and set up their studios in “storefronts, garages, and shacks, as well as radio stations and proper, if spartan, studios . . . Many records were recorded on location in a YMCA, church, VFW hall, or house, almost anyplace with roof and walls.”76 In the case of Atlantic Records, the office of Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler doubled as their studio. They pushed aside their office furniture to make space for their recording artists, and their engineer, Tom Dowd, recorded them with a single microphone.77 In comparison to the professional recording practices of the period, the   Westcott and Dubbe, Tape Recorders, 23.   Ahlers, Family Fun in Tape Recording. 73   Zuckerman, Tape Recording for the Hobbyist. 74   Millard, “Tape Recording and Music Making,” 158. 75   Cogan and Clark, Temples of Sound. 76   Zak, I Don’t Sound Like Nobody, 80. 77   Wade and Picardie, Music Man, 34. 71 72

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“anyplace with roof and walls” approach of the DIY-​ers was a radically different world, and it was precisely this deviation from the standard that redefined recording practices. It is at this mid-​century point that determining what counts as a “professional” recording becomes increasingly difficult. The line demarcating professional is obscured in the wake of many independent recording companies in the latter half of the 1950s that realized commercial success in tandem with the rise of rock and roll. For example, whereas the ratio of major to independent labels was a commanding 40 to 11 in 1955, it was 30 to 40 by 1957.78 In just five years after the introduction of tape into the recording industry, the number of companies releasing albums jumped dramatically from eleven to two hundred.79 These newly established startups likely could not compete with the industry titans’ technical standards of high fidelity, but it is unlikely that their intended audiences—​lower-​class whites, African Americans, and teenagers—​were familiar with such stringent standards anyway.80 The inability for these independents to rival this so-​called realism, opened up an avenue to a new aesthetic, one in which popular musics, beginning with rock and roll, would flourish. The tape techniques that Les Paul popularized were referenced frequently in how-​to guides of the era. For example, consider the following excerpt from ABC’s of Tape Recording: “You can use a tape recorder to produce your own multiple recordings. You can make like a one-​man orchestra or choir (as Les Paul and Mary Ford did so wonderfully a few years ago).”81 Further, in Tape Recording for the Hobbyist, Art Zuckerman relates how one could adopt Paul’s tape-​based “speed trick” to imitate the high-​pitched novelty singing of the Chipmunks or feign violin virtuosity by recording an octave down at three-​quarters of the regular tempo and then speeding up the tape afterward.82 By the mid-​1960s, recording practices, especially for emerging styles such as rock and roll, embraced the creative capacities afforded by tape. Recording was no longer pitted as a process of capturing but as creating. DIY recording guides from this period such as Creative Tape Recording positioned editing as an integral part of the recording process: “The recordist should not feel he is cheating in some way, but that he is using every means available, in this case his editing skill, to get as flawless a performance as possible on tape.”83 Editing, however, was not as simple as clicking a camera shutter: “When you get into editing, you pass the thin boundary that distinguishes tape recording as a mere pastime from a serious hobby.”84 Tape recording was now becoming an increasingly   Stokes, Star-​Making Machinery, 5.   Kealy, “From Craft to Art,” 212. 80   Ibid. 81   Crowhurst, ABC’s of Tape Recording, 71. 82   Zuckerman, Tape Recording for the Hobbyist, 48. 83   Capel, Creative Tape Recording, 128. 84   Zuckerman, Tape Recording for the Hobbyist, 73. 78 79

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technical and less accessible pursuit. On the one hand, the more involved discipline of editing likely alienated some recreational recorders who found it too technical and thereby less accessible, but on the other hand, it also gave self-​recording musicians new compositional possibilities. The concept of editing as integral to the recording process constituted a seminal change in both professional and recreational recording practices. Certainly, recording technologies have changed dramatically since the heyday of Les Paul’s tape trickery, but the foundational concept that recordings entail a process of creative construction at the hands of the person wielding the technology perseveres to the present day. For DIY recording, this development constituted a figurative fork in the road; with added possibilities beyond simply pressing a button to record came the necessity for more training. The DIY-​er wanting to edit multiple takes together had to learn how to splice tape wielding a razor blade. If DIY-​ers wanted to sing with themselves like Mary Ford, they had to master the technique of overdubbing. Most books about tape recording aimed at DIY-​ers from the 1960s and 1970s contained chapters steeped in more technical topics to cater to this crowd, including but not limited to the mechanical principles of tape recording, editing techniques, machine maintenance, acoustics, and microphone selection and placement.85 This more technical and less accessible path of DIY recording continued along the same trajectory throughout the remainder of the twentieth century, and in many regards still persists presently in the digital domain. It was around this time in the late 1960s and early 1970s that the DIY trailhead diverged into two distinct paths, the lo-​fi (low-​fidelity) movement, which continued to value ease of access and ease of use over quality, and the hi-​fi (high-​fidelity) movement, which remained self-​sufficient, but often compromised ease of access and ease of use in its pursuit to rival the quality of professional studios. In the case of the latter, a significant contributing factor was the ability to access or acquire the increasingly costly equipment used in professional studios including mixers, signal processors, and specially built recording rooms.

The Escalating Expenses of Equipment and the DIY Hi-​Fi/​Lo-​Fi Dichotomy The act of mixing, which in its most elemental form entails balancing the perceived volume of two or more sound signals relative to each other, was first made possible in the electrical era. Yet for most DIY-​ers, it would take decades until they were   See for example Capel, Creative Tape Recording; Crawford, Tape Recording from A to Z; Crowhurst, ABC’s of Tape Recording; LeBel, How To Make Good Tape Recordings; Salm, Tape Recording for Fun and Profit; Westcott and Dubbe, Tape Recorders; Zuckerman, Tape Recording for the Hobbyist. 85

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able to affordably acquire a mixing console. In professional recording studios up until the early 1960s, mixers were rather rudimentary with rotary knobs to control between four to twelve signals.86 These mixing consoles were custom built, or modified from a broadcast console by a tinkerer proficient with electronics like Sam Phillips.87 Bill Putnam’s custom built mixing consoles, which he sold under the company Universal Audio from 1958 to 1967, came to be the standard in the recording industry. Bruce Swedien, best known for recording and mixing Michael Jackson’s seminal albums,88 attributes the familiar standardized outlay of the console to Putnam: “The design of modern recording desks, the way components are laid out and the way they function  .  .  .  they all originated in Bill’s imagination.”89 The mixing console as we now know it “remained almost unchanged from Bill’s first rather small recording consoles.”90 A  critical addition to this design was the replacement of rotary knobs with sliders (faders). Atlantic Records audio engineer Tom Dowd was driven by his frustrations with the ergonomics of the console to incorporate the linear fader in order to make the physical actions of mixing less cumbersome: “Because of the narrow width of these things, I could fit them into a board half as wide. Which enabled me to put a whole group of faders in two hands . . . Finally, I could play the faders like you could play a piano.”91 With most manufacturers of mixing consoles adopting Dowd’s adaptation, the fader came to be a standard feature. Artists ranging from the Beatles92 to the Beastie Boys93 have remarked on the phenomenon of “playing” the mixer. Given the prohibitive cost of purchasing or renting a mixing console, the art of mixing was mostly reserved for those working for record companies. D I V I D E -​A N D -​I S O L AT E

Meanwhile, ambient recording spaces like Columbia’s 30th Street Studio, which were once prized in the 1950s and early 1960s, began to fall out of favor. Taking their place were studios designed to eliminate or minimize natural reverberations to enable the isolation of individual sounds. This trend, which was widespread in

  Bushnell and Ferree, From Down Beat to Vinyl, 159.   As cited in Cogan and Clark, Temples of Sound, 90. 88   Notable Michael Jackson recordings produced by Quincy Jones, and engineered and mixed by Bruce Swedien, include Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982), and Bad (1987). 89   As cited in Cogan, “Bill Putnam.” 90   Swedien, Make Mine Music, 123. 91   As cited in Simons, Studio Stories, 53. 92   Emerick and Massey, Here, There, and Everywhere, 112. 93   Brown, Rick Rubin, 45. 86 87

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recording studios and practices by the late 1970s, is described by David Byrne as “divide-​and-​isolate”: The goal was to get as pristine a sound as possible . . . Studios were often padded with sound-​absorbent materials so that there was almost no reverberation. The sonic character of the space was sucked out, because it wasn’t considered to be part of the music. Without this ambience, it was explained, the sound would be more malleable after the recording had been made  .  .  .  Dead, characterless sound was held up as the ideal, and often still is. In this philosophy, the naturally occurring echo and reverb that normally added a little warmth to performances would be removed and then added back in when the recording was being mixed.94 Byrne remarks that in the divide-​and-​isolate approach, reverb would be added during mixing, after recording occurred. This was made possible by external reverb units, which were also prohibitively expensive for the typical DIY-​er. The first alternative to chamber reverb to emerge was plate reverb, which came into wide use in the 1960s and 1970s. Plate reverb works on the same principle as chamber reverb, but instead of sending sound signals to a room, they are sent along a large four-​ hundred-​pound steel plate measuring three feet wide and six feet long, suspended by springs within a metal frame and housed in a wooden case. While hardly portable, these plate units ushered in a standardization of sorts for reverb. If a studio could purchase a plate, the unique acoustic properties of its recording space became significantly less important, effectively devaluing the natural reverberation of a studio space and its reverb chambers. Essentially, plate reverb led to the homogenization of ambience as reverb could now be replicated without using the same studio. The trend of supplanting the previous technology with a more compact and replicable successor continued with the release of digital reverb in the late 1970s. Using algorithms to model a surfeit of rooms, digital reverb units expanded the sound arsenal of recording engineers, displacing the need for older bulkier technologies like chambers and plates. Using digital models of a room meant that different performances could be recorded in the same room and yet made to sound as if each was recorded in a different room, all with a turn of a dial or push of a button. Further, the desired reverb style could be changed quite easily. With chamber and plate reverb, there was one sound option—​all that could be controlled was the amount of reverb added to the signal. The precedent had been set with digital reverb that soon enough the studio would cease to be a space at all. Within professional recording practices the approach to recording and the architecture of the studios changed in tandem:

  Byrne, How Music Works, 148.

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Studios that were built in the next twenty years invariably incorporated designs that led to the complete isolation of musicians and their instruments, one from another. This, along with the ability to overdub on an ever-​increasing number of tracks, was the seed that eventually became the common practice of layering-​recording one instrument at a time.95 By isolating instruments acoustically or recording one instrument at a time and then later adding reverb to these performances, each musician’s part could be scrutinized and “perfected,” either with overdubbing or editing. Like cubicles in an office, baffles and isolation booths were used to compartmentalize a recording studio into micro recording spaces. Even if the musicians played at the same time, they increasingly played in spaces physically isolated from each other, forcing them to crane their necks over the enclosing baffles or peer through soundproof glass like marine life in an aquarium. Louise Meintjes’ detailed description of Downtown Studios in Johannesburg in the early 1990s serves as a prime example of the extent professional studios went to in order to secure sound isolation: Inside the studio, the facility is insulated as tightly as possible from the noise of its own operation, for both recording and monitoring purposes. Clean sound separation is an ideal in studio design, from the overall structure of the rooms down to the minute electronic circuitry. Ambient sound from such sources as the ventilation is minimized through design and specialized insulating materials. Soundproofing in the booths and control room blocks out as much external sound as possible and absorbs unwanted internal frequencies. Specialized double-​paned acoustic windows visually connect booths and the control room, while blocking the sound. Additionally, in a booth large enough to record more than one source at a time, movable, acoustically insulated baffles partition the area to limit leak-​through from the sound source of one microphone into another.96 As these technological advancements provided surrogates to natural reverberation, studios’ dependence on spaces with ambient acoustics were weaned as David Simons makes the case with New York City: “By the 1990s, nearly all of New York’s largest studios—​RCA, Mediasound, the Pythian Temple, Webster Hall and others—​had ceased to exist, their equipment sold at auction and the buildings transformed into offices, apartments, and nightclubs.”97 From the early 1970s to nearing the millennial mark, the trend in professional recording culture was to control sound by isolating it one way or another. Simply   Johns, Sound Man, 169.   Meintjes, “The Recording Studio as Fetish,” 273. 97   Simons, Studio Stories, 160. 95 96

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put, the equipment and methods utilized to attain this high level of control were expensive. Writing in 1976, Geoffrey Stokes affirmed that the capital costs for even a modest studio in New York City would have cost $50,000, and that a modest album recorded in a professional studio would cost at least the same amount: “The studios where they are recorded have an annual gross of approximately $250 million—​making them a hidden industry with income comfortably matching that of the National Football League.”98 This trend of the expensively made album would continue in the 1980s and 1990s, supported by a seemingly invincible music industry that collected ever-​increasing profits. By the end of the so-​called CD boom (1984–​2000), record sales hit $942 million.99 In short, “by the mid-​1970s, recording had become a multitrack, megabuck mess. Million-​dollar albums became commonplace, and the little guy was being squeezed out by technology.”100 The irony of this recording reality is that it was built upon the technological advances at the hands of DIY-​ers like Les Paul, Bill Putnam, and Sam Phillips. Adding insult to injury, the DIY aesthetic that rejected concert realism had been coopted and professionalized by the major studios. As was the case in the mid-​1950s, DIY-​ers were once again at a crossroads; they could try to emulate the industry juggernaut or invent a new aesthetic. They did both. Some pursued a path that paralleled the professionals’ evolving sense of high fidelity, while others willingly embraced the limitations of their budgets, much like their rock and roll forbears did, to create lo-​fi. D I Y H I - ​F I A N D T H E   M U LT I T R A C K R E E L - ​T O - R ​ EEL TA P E R E C O R D E R One man’s bathroom is another man’s echo chamber.101

Starting in the early 1970s, the company TEAC/​TASCAM (hereafter abbreviated to TASCAM) began marketing reel-​to-​reel tape recorders to would-​be DIY-​ers, advertising their products as affordable yet capable of rivaling a professional recording studio: “We don’t say our tape recorders are the best you can buy. We do say they’re good enough to produce commercial product. And that’s what counts.”102 Initially, the multitrack reel-​to-​reel tape recorders manufactured by TASCAM did not have what they later called “simul-​sync” (simultaneous synchronization), which in effect meant that it was difficult for a DIY-​er to produce a recording one layer at time by overdubbing like Les Paul. But in 1974 TASCAM released an instructional LP, “Home Made With TEAC,” that promoted both their 3340S four-​track   Stokes, Star-​Making Machinery, 52.   Knopper, Appetite for Self-​Destruction, 43. 100   Baragary, Billboard Guide to Home Recording, 8. 101   Johnson and Rosmini, “Home Recording Tips.” 102   “TEAC/​TASCAM: Affordable.” 98 99

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tape recorder with simul-​sync, and the practice of a single individual creating a multitrack recording by overdubbing. On the inside of the LP’s gatefold cover there is a section called “Home Recording Tips,” which proffers some advice on how to produce a recording by overdubbing: “You don’t have to play and sing at the same time. Record each part on a separate track until you get it the way you want it. Then put the tune together with the best examples of each element so that the composite is representative of your best efforts all around.” And: “If you don’t like the way something is working, you can always erase it and record something else.”103 Not only did TASCAM push the idea of recording everything yourself, they also encouraged teaching yourself, too, through trial and error, which they called “learning by doing”: It’s really the only way. It’s not so much that reading about how to record isn’t helpful. On the contrary, tape recording isn’t exactly a snap, and you’re better off having a good idea of what you’re in for, before you get in it. But in the final analysis it’s something that must be experienced to be understood. It will only take one good tape. Then it won’t be a question of what got you started. The question then will be how far you can go.104 While the cost of the 3340S at $1,200 constituted a significant investment for the prospective DIY-​er, in comparison, “the cost of professional quality multitrack audio recording remained high—​beyond the reach of many creative artists and producers.”105 TASCAM’s vision of DIY recording was enticing to many whom could not afford to record in a professional studio, resulting in reel-​to-​reel DIY studios proliferating in domestic spaces in the 1970s and 1980s. Lore of artists realizing commercial success using a DIY studio—​such as the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams” (1983), recorded in a warehouse attic using a TEAC eight-​track106—​spurred the growth of the emerging DIY recording industry. The DIY hi-​fi studio involved cordoning off a part of one’s home and designating it for music production. While these studios were DIY in that they were self-​ sufficient, they often resembled scaled-​down versions of professional studios, with separate spaces for the musicians and the engineers to carry out their respective roles. DIY studio enthusiasts built sound isolation booths and installed sound treatment materials ranging from egg cartons to specialized absorbers and reflectors in their basements and bedrooms in an effort to wrangle ideal acoustics. Separate control rooms were constructed to house the expanding fleets of gear they captained,

  Johnson and Rosmini, “Home Recording Tips.”   Ibid. 105   Burgess, The History of Music Production, 131. 106   Wadhams, “Anatomy of a Classic Record.” 103 104

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such as the one described in Multi-​Track Recording: A Technical & Creative Guide for the Musician & Home Recorder: Monstrous metallic panels, strewn with blinking LED eyes, gleam in the darkness. An imposing bank of gadgetry towers darkly in the corner, dripping with wires and cables . . . Could this be a top-​secret air-​defense installation? The bridge of a nuclear-​powered submarine? The hidden headquarters of a telephone company bent on world domination? Nothing so dramatic. It used to be your living room.107 With the arrival of MIDI in the early 1980s, which enabled the sequencing of electronic instruments, notably keyboards and drum machines, the complexity of home studios continued to increase. Out of necessity, DIY instructional resources from this period, such as The Home Recording Handbook108 and Multitrack Recording for Musicians,109 covered considerably more ground than their how-​to counterparts from previous decades. The cutting-​edge DIY home studio user not only had to be adept with analog multitrack tape recording, but now also had to delve into digital sequencing with MIDI. To support the communities of these increasingly sophisticated studios, trade magazines surfaced that addressed relevant issues with how-​ to articles such as Mix (1977–​present), Sound on Sound (1985–​present), Electronic Musician (1985–​present), EQ (1993–​2011), and Tape Op (1996–​present). In her review of North American and European recording magazines (including Tape Op and Sound on Sound) and Internet discussion forums dating from the early 1990s to the present, Alice Tomaz De Carvalho found that “the discourse of home recording seems to form and be formed by prescriptions, guides, and norms for how to record music at home. It assumes that given the ‘accessibility’ of home recording, anyone can and thus should concentrate on reaching a professional sound at home.”110 This discourse was also dominant in the learning materials available to DIY-​ers in the 1970s and 1980s, which laid the foundation for the DIY hi-​fi movement that persists to the present. D I Y L O - ​F I A N D T H E   M U LT I T R A C K C A S S E T T E TA P E R E C O R D E R

In contrast to the DIY hi-​fi movement, the DIY lo-​fi movement prided itself on the fact that the more sophisticated reel-​to-​reel recorders and MIDI sequencers could be bypassed, and that home renovation was not necessary to participate in the   Milano, Multi-​Track Recording, 1.   Everard, Home Recording Handbook. 109   Hurtig, Multi-​Track Recording for Musicians. 110   Tomaz De Carvalho, “The Discourse of Home Recording.” 107 108

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self-​sufficient recording process. Pivotal to the DIY lo-​fi movement was the making of “demo” (demonstration) recordings on cassette tapes using a home stereo or a four-​track recorder such as the TASCAM Portastudio—​the first of its kind, released in 1979, that soon had many imitators. Initially priced in the $1,000 to $1,500 range,111 cassette four-​tracks provided an all-​in-​one approach by incorporating both the mixer and the recording mechanism in a single unit. Ease of use was almost assured because most music listeners were already familiar with how to operate a cassette player: “Musicians could finally record, overdub, EQ, bounce, and mix down multiple tracks all from the foot of their beds.”112 Makers of these recorders such as TASCAM and Fostex provided sufficient information in their thin but informative product manuals for users to commence recording almost immediately. For example, in the manual for the TASCAM Model 144 Portastudio, released in 1980, the provided instructions inform the user on how to record, overdub, “ping-​pong” (bounce tracks), mix, and perform “punch-​ins,” all within thirty pages. Further, experimentation was encouraged: “Because the Portastudio is so versatile, no manual could describe all the possible applications and hook-​ups. Therefore, once you know the unit, use your own imagination—​try your own ideas.”113 As far as the manufacturers were concerned, DIY-​ers did not need instructors or mentors; they could teach themselves. A body of literature in support of demo recording culture emerged with more exhaustive resources than the manufacturer’s instruction manuals such as the how-​to books Recording Demo Tapes at Home,114 Using Your Portable Studio,115 and Making the Ultimate Demo.116 The DIY recordings disseminating from cassette studios tended to circulate in regional music scenes such as punk,117 hardcore,118 indie,119 and hip-​hop,120 and were critical in helping emerging artists establish fan bases. Since cassettes were easy to reproduce using home stereos, a pre-​Internet network of grassroots music distribution was spun that subverted the recording industry. Central to demo culture was the mentality that quality was willingly compromised in exchange for convenience: “In the world of home recording, the cassette had become good enough to record commercially and cheap enough to become an attractive alternative to the top-​of-​the-​line home recorders. To the musician, the portability and lower price of the tape cassette   Jones, Rock Formation, 40.   Alberts, Tascam, 31. 113   “Model 144 Portastudio,” 6. 114   Bartlett, Recording Demo Tapes at Home. 115   McIan, Using Your Portable Studio. 116   Robair, Making the Ultimate Demo. 117   Boulware and Tudor, Gimme Something Better; Spencer, DIY. 118   Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life. 119   Oakes, Slanted and Enchanted. 120   Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. 111 112

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more than made up for any deficiencies in fidelity.”121 For some audiences, fidelity was a nonissue. For example, Peter Manuel observed that in the case of India before the 1970s, recording equipment was “rather inferior,” and as a result, “Indians were accustomed to hearing records with distorted timbres and did not always find the fidelity of pirate cassettes to be intolerably worse.”122 In DIY: The Rise of Lo-​Fi Culture, Amy Spencer points out that American indie (or “grunge”) musicians in the late 1980s drew inspiration from 1970s punk production aesthetics, and celebrated “rawness”: “Bands tried to strip away 1980s’ rock polish and get back to the raw roots of guitar, bass, and drums  .  .  .  musicians made use of cheap technology and four-​track recorders captured this sound as well. Amateurism was almost revered.”123 D I G I TA L D I Y :   A D AT

While TASCAM’s Portastudio came to be symbolic of the DIY lo-​fi movement in the 1980s and 1990s before computer-​based recording became more affordable, many DIY-​ers in pursuit of hi-​fi transitioned to digital recording beginning in the early 1990s following the advent of ADAT (Alesis Digital Audio Tape). In The History of Music Production, Richard James Burgess avers: “This machine represented a penetrating step in, what is often termed, the democratization of the recording process  .  .  .  it enabled the project studio market to blossom and to produce (close to) professional quality digital audio.”124 His sentiment regarding these digital recorders that retailed for $4,000 is echoed by Steven James Cole:  “Coupled with a Mackie mixer, rivaling professional mixers’ features for a fraction of the cost, the ADAT-​Mackie-​based studio spawned the birth of the ‘project studio.’ ”125 As was the case with multitrack reel-​to-​reel recorders and multitrack cassette recorders in the preceding two decades, commercial successes in the 1990s stemming from DIY ADAT-​based studios served to support the assertion that the barriers to ease of access and use of recording equipment had effectively been lowered. For example, Glen Ballard produced three-​quarters of Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill (1995) in his home.126 Successful both critically and commercially, the album sold over 30  million copies worldwide and won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. As the end of the century neared and the declining costs of computer-​based recording opened up this practice to   Millard, “Tape Recording as Music Making,” 162.   Manuel, Cassette Culture, 82. 123   Spencer, DIY, 237. 124   Burgess, The History of Music Production, 131. 125   Cole, “The Prosumer and the Project Studio,” 450. 126   Massey, Behind the Glass, 18. 121 122

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increasingly more DIY-​ers, it seemed plausible that more Glen Ballards would emerge. Citing the example of Moby’s platinum-​selling Play (1999) being made in the artist’s home studio (using a combination of ADATs and computer-​based recording hardware and software), the New York Times writer Jon Pareles pontificated: “In the twenty-​first century, homemade recordings can be indistinguishable from studio products.”127

Space-​Less Studios: Dawn of the DAW (1990–​Present) Technology has brought the process of recording a single $200-​per-​ hour studio closer to the way a demo is recorded on a Portastudio in a bedroom.128 Home multitrack recording has revolutionized music by enabling anyone with musical ideas to record and mix their own compositions without the need to hire expensive studios.129 Not long ago, you needed to go to a commercial recording studio and spend thousands of dollars if you wanted to make a decent-​sounding recording. Now you can set up a first-​class recording studio in your garage or spare bedroom and create CDs that can sound as good as those coming out of top-​notch studios (that is, if you know how to use the gear).130

The three aforementioned quotes aimed at DIY recording enthusiasts—​from 1985, 1997, and 2009 respectively—​evidence the longstanding belief that more affordable high-​quality recording technology is the key component to democratizing recording practices.131 Andrew Leyshon explains this phenomenon in the context of the DAW: The shift to software-​enabled recording has significantly reduced the cost of entry-​level equipment, which has improved the quality and capacity of home recording  .  .  .  Software and code have made possible a regime of more distributed musical creativity, which represents a democratization of technology.132   Pareles, “Home Sweet Studio.”   Everard, The Home Recording Handbook, 7. 129   White, The Sound On Sound Book of Home Recording Made Easy, 11. 130   Strong, Home Recording for Musicians for Dummies, 1. 131   Similar views have been expressed in more scholarly works. See for example Burgess, The History of Music Production, and Leyshon, “The Software Slump.” 132   Leyshon, “The Software Slump,” 1325. 127 128

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Sales figures from the first decade of the twenty-​first century would seem to support this assertion that more people were engaging with DIY recording, or at least buying the equipment to do so. The 2009 global report of the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) details that computer-​based recording experienced a financial boom between 1999 and 2008. The computer music market rose almost 200  percent to become a $400-​million industry, while sound cards and hardware increased by 570 percent, establishing a $180-​million industry.133 But simply knowing that more people were engaging with DIY recording only tells a part of the story. As Timothy Taylor suggests, “the claim that a particular technology is democratizing should always be accompanied by questions: In what ways? For whom?”134 Tracing the development of the DAW through the 1980s and 1990s, it is evident that “the majority of digital systems emulate the key aspects of an analog tape machine’s user interface in order to make the user feel comfortable.”135 Those not familiar with analog recording technology faced a steep learning curve,136 “thus reproducing, perhaps, the social inequalities associated with access to the earlier technology as well.”137 For the DIY-​er in the new millennium, migrating to a DAW was likely more feasible if they had previous experience with analog recording technologies. Conversely, while the ease of access to the practice of DIY recording may have been lowered considerably due to decreasing costs, ease of use might not necessarily have been improved at all. Consider the case of Pro Tools—​the industry standard program in professional recording—​and its adherence to tape metaphors in its design. Conceptually, it is quite similar to the tape recorder; instead of storing tracks to tape, they are saved to a computer’s memory. Where Pro Tools and tape technologies differ dramatically is in regard to their editing capabilities. Pro Tools boasts nondestructive editing and unlike analog audio, digital audio does not degenerate with every passing play like that of a tape. By the late 1990s, DAWs such as Pro Tools had yet to supersede analog equipment completely due to their still-​limited functionality and high price. Instead, they were used in tandem with analog mixing consoles, supplanting the tape recorder as editing tool and storage medium, but not as the recording complex itself. For the most part, hard drive storage was relegated to the role of tape replacement. Although Pro Tools was used to record almost universally by the 2000s, summing signals on a large analog console remained the primary method of mixing a song, and thus required the existence of studios to house and operate them. But   “NAMM Global Report—​2009.”   Taylor, Strange Sounds, 6. 135   White, The Sound On Sound Book of Home Recording Made Easy, 2nd ed., 15. 136   Ibid. 137   Théberge, “Plugged In,” 13. 133 134

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with ever-​improving computers and plugins (software-​based signal processors) displacing the need for outboard processors (compressors, limiters, equalizers, reverb units, etc.), soon the only hardware needed was the computer. By the end of the twentieth century mass audiences experienced Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ La Vida Loca” (1999), “the first Number One record to be done completely within a hard disk system.”138 Engineer Charles Dye’s “in-​the-​box” Pro Tools production bypassed the need for an analog mixing console and hardware-​based signal processors, establishing a precedent that was to become the de facto standard. In less than a decade, the DAW went from augmenting the recording studio to reconstructing it: “By 2007, between 70 percent and 80 percent of all pop music (and probably nearly 100 percent of all hip-​hop, R&B, and dance music) was mixed in the box.”139 From 2000 to the present, the DAW underwent an evolution from tape surrogate to an all-​in-​one space-​less studio. While the technologies utilized for DIY recording have undoubtedly changed dramatically and become relatively cheaper, the conceptual designs and associated practices of the modern DAW still reflect those of Les Paul.

Tracking the Twenty-​First-​Century DIY-​er In theory at least, the DAW in its current form has signaled the dissolution of the technological division that once shielded the so-​called professional sphere. DIY recording in its current state has inherited traits from both the DIY hi-​fi and the DIY lo-​fi movements, marking out a new path that seeks the best of both worlds. The all-​ digital DIY-​er demands ease of access and use, but also expects greater functionality and fidelity. The traditional means of self-​sufficient learning continue to prosper with many of the aforementioned trade magazines still in circulation and an ever-​ expanding body of how-​to books being published that feature catchy titles such as Home Recording for Musicians for Dummies,140 and Home Recording 101:  Creating Your Own Affordable Home Recording Studio (D.I.Y. Music).141 YouTube tutorials cater to the DIY-​er too, most notably Pensado’s Place, hosted by Grammy-​winning mixer Dave Pensado, a veteran of the recording industry, whose videos have garnered more than 15 million views and whose weekly show has over 175,000 subscribers. The short tutorials hosted on this and similar YouTube channels endorse a how-​to approach to recording, and provide a community hub for subscribers to dialogue with each other or pose questions to the channel host on best practices for recording. Similarly, a slew of online forums constitute major meeting points online   Daley, “Recordin’ ‘La Vida Loca.’ ”   Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever, 338. 140   Strong, Home Recording for Musicians for Dummies. 141   Helson, Home Recording 101. 138 139

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for the DIY music-​making community to post questions, solve problems, and sell or swap equipment with each other. DIY recording enthusiasts of the twenty-​first century have access to a community that has expanded and evolved for over a century, guided by the ideals of ease of access and ease of use in the interest of self-​sufficiency. It is at this point in time in the twenty-​first century—​the Dawn of the DAW—​that this book seeks to continue the ongoing story of DIY music-​making in the studio by examining current practices. While this chapter has accounted for DIY recording practices since Edison’s invention by detailing the predominant practices and associated technologies used in a general sense, there is a parallel story of the evolving role of the producer that is equally critical to understanding the context of current DIY practices. This history is the focus of c­ hapter 2.

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2 The Studio Instrument of the Producer

What Is a Producer? Numerous scholars have attempted to answer the elusive question, “What is a producer?” As Andrew Blake rightly surmises, “The term ‘record producer’ is the greyest of grey areas.”1 Blake explains that the difficulty of defining this role relates to the history of producers being involved in seemingly all facets of music production: Producers have been (and are) individual entrepreneurs, freelance operators, record label owners and record label employees. They have been people managers, whether Svengalis, artist and repertoire developers, or gifted amateur psychologists able to guide temperamental artists through a recording session. They have been events managers . . . They have been musical managers . . . And very often they will have started as sound recording engineers . . . But most importantly they have been listeners.2 In “The Record Producer as Nexus,” Mike Howlett provides a similar list of the roles a producer might be expected to fulfill: • • • • • •

Arranger/​interpreter/​visualisier; Engineer; Creative director/​performance director; Logistical facilitator/​project manager; Psychologist/​counsellor/​priest; Mediator—​between the objectives and aspirations of the record company and the artist.3   Blake, “Recording Practices and the Role of the Producer,” 36.   Ibid. 3   Howlettt, “The Record Producer as Nexus.” 1 2

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Lastly, in The Musicology of Record Production, Simon Zagorski-​Thomas describes five broad categorizations of producers: • The producer as a representative for a record label in an editorial and managerial role (e.g., Colonel Tom Parker) • The producer as a creative hub who selects artists as vehicles for the producer’s own creative project (e.g., Mitch Miller, Joe Meek, Phil Spector, Trevor Horn, Dr. Dre) • The producer as artist (e.g., Stevie Wonder, Prince) • The producer as creative enabler (e.g., Phil Ramone, Steve Albini, Nigel Godrich) • The producer as creative partner (e.g., George Martin, Brian Eno, Tony Visconti, Rick Rubin)4 Taken together, these various roles subsumed under the title “producer” have a genealogy of sorts as James Williams details: The historical rise of the producer can be traced from that of facilitator (Fred Gaisberg), to those individuals with the power to authorize recording (Ralph Peer, John Hammond), to authoritarians who told the artist exactly what to do (Walter Legge), or told every musician what to do (Phil Spector). By the late 1960s, the ascent to the pinnacle of the studio hierarchy and the exercise of all-​encompassing power had crested, replaced with the creative collaborator (George Martin) who ceded a considerable measure of control, yet retained final approval of the recording project.5 Williams notes that DIY-​ers who ran their own studios like Sam Phillips and Norman Petty were producers by default because they worked independently. Ultimately, it was this model of the independent producer that would come to be the norm by the end of the 1960s,6 and clear the way for the emergence of the self-​sufficient DIY producer in the proceeding decades. From the aforementioned models detailing the roles of producers, the most accurate label for the typical present-​day DIY producer is Zagorski-​Thomas’ producer as artist. Alan Watson suggests that this approach to production, which he terms “composition,” correlates with the rise of digital DIY studios: This mode is one emerging due to the software-​based digital recording and music-​based technologies emerging in the 1980s and 1990s, and is based around the individual producer-​artist working in a home or project   Zagorski-​Thomas, The Musicology of Record Production, 161.   Williams, “Phantom Power,” 297–​298. 6   Ibid., 299. 4 5

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studio . . . Whereas in a professional studio, music production has always been a collective project between recording artists, musicians, producers and recording engineers, in small digital home studios, there multiple roles are performed by a single person.7 In this second chapter I aim to provide some historical context for the evolution of the producer from that of a recording facilitator to a recording creator. To be clear from the outset, this chapter does not provide a comprehensive history of the role of the producer; instead, I provide examples that serve to illustrate key practices that led to more self-​sufficient methods of using the studio as a musical instrument. These examples include anecdotes from the careers of Elvis Presley, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Aldon Music, Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, Berry Gordy, Joe Meek, Sly Stone, Prince, Brian Eno, King Tubby, Public Enemy, and Max Martin. Devotees of the history of music production will note some inconspicuous absences, most notably George Martin, whose work with the Beatles has been subject to comprehensive research on the recording process and using the studio as a musical instrument.8 But before delving into the story of the evolving role of the producer, it is first necessary to consider how their instrument—​“the studio”—​can be perceived as such.

Instrumentality: The Studio as Musical Instrument In The Drum Book:  A History of the Rock Drum Kit, Geoff Nicholls explains that at the beginning of the twentieth century the individual components of the drum kit existed, but they were not played together by a single individual.9 Faced with restricted space and budgets, percussionists/​drummers performing in theatre productions were encouraged to take on the role of multitasking musicians, and the “trap kit” began to take shape: Everything but the kitchen sink was suspended on and around the bass drum, soon leading to the development of a metal “console” that surmounted the bass drum . . . On top of the console was a traps tray (traps is short for contraptions or trappings) with space for bird whistles, klaxons, ratchets, and other sound effects.10   Watson, Cultural Production in and Beyond the Recording Studio, 36.   See for example Lewisohn, The Beatles’ Recording Sessions; MacFarlane, The Beatles’ Abbey Road Medley; Ryan and Kehew, Recording the Beatles; Martin and Hornsby, All You Need Is Ears; Emerick and Massey, Here, There, and Everywhere. 9   Parts of this section paraphrase Bell, “The Pedagogy of Push.” 10   Nicholls, The Drum Book, 8–​9. 7 8

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Peter Avanti notes that this evolution of trap kit performance practice was made possible by the fact that at this point in history it had yet to develop a recognizable fixed form: Seated, keeping steady time on the bass drum and snare, the possibility of adding other instruments—​tom toms, cow bells, other cymbals, wood blocks, chimes, tuned percussion, etc.—​organized around the drummer became more or less obvious, or inevitable, as the kit is open architecture, adaptable to diverse musical contexts with no physical, only practical, limits to its size and complexity.11 The drum kit’s history is one that hinges on modularity. The idea that a component of the kit can be added in or taken away and still be perceived by players and listeners alike as the same instrument is a testament to its modular form. Through to the present time, drummers continue to customize their kits, with electronic triggers and computers becoming increasingly more visible components of a contemporary setup. The constants of the drum kit would seem to be the snare drum, bass drum, and cymbals, but even these are subject to substitution or subtraction. I employ this example of the drum kit because the background of the recording studio is similar. It, too, has featured in most musics throughout the twentieth century and has a history of being modular; the components have changed remarkably from the phonograph to the DAW, and yet it is still referred to simply as “the studio.” Despite these similarities, unlike the drum kit, the studio has not necessarily been considered a musical instrument by players and listeners alike. Why might this be the case? What qualifies something as a musical instrument? In his study of hip-​hop DJs, Mark Katz considered what makes a turntable a musical instrument. Katz concludes that instruments come to be perceived as such through a social process, and suggests that an object becomes a musical instrument when the following criteria are met: • • • • •

It involves real-​time sound manipulation; It has a body of techniques developed specifically for it; It has its own distinctive sound; The object itself is either specifically designed or modified for making music; The sound it generates is considered to be music by a community of listeners.12

Evaluating the studio with these criteria produces as many questions as it does answers. A cogent argument could be made for or against the studio using any of   Avanti, “Black Musics, Technology, and Modernity,” 490.   Katz, Groove Music, 62.

11 12

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these criteria. Using this model to assess the studio as a musical instrument does not produce a definitive answer. Aden Evens provides an alternative perspective to answering the question of instrumentality, noting that when people “refer to a tool, a technology, or a person as an instrument, part of what we intend is a reduction of that tool, technology, or person to its instrumentality. That is, an instrument is something that serves a particular end, and, as instrument, it is merely a means to that end.”13 The thinking behind this perspective is that instruments that serve their purpose will become seemingly invisible in their subservient function to the player. But as Evens notes, musical instruments do not disappear, rather, they become an extension of the person: “Playing then overcomes technique, so that player, instrument, and sound are assembled in that sublime moment into a single machine with unlimited possibility.”14 Evens posits that in the case of digitally produced music, acoustical gestures (bowing, fretting, strumming, etc.) are replaced by technological gestures (cutting, pasting, duplicating, etc.): “Hours and days in front of the keyboard and mouse are spent playing a piece.”15 In this paradigm, players are no longer identified by what instrument they play, but rather by what roles they play in the production process (programmer, engineer, etc.).16 This perspective supports the conceptualization of the studio as an instrument in some cases, especially electronically produced music. How we extend ourselves to or through an object to make music may be the pivotal point for determining instrumentality. In the case of analog studio technologies, and even for some digital technologies, too, both the criteria set out by Katz and Evens could be used to provide a rationale as to why and how the studio is an instrument. But in the case of musics that are heavily dependent on DAWs, an added criticism that needs to be addressed pertains to agency. Central to this line of thinking is that the DAW or computing device is essentially preprogrammed with music—​it is not “neutral” like other instruments. As a result, the player’s role is not significant in the act of music-​making. This is somewhat of a unique phenomenon to sample-​based and computer-​based music, but not entirely. Player pianos conjure up similar images of supposed passivity as the player simply moves the pedals up and down while the perforated roll of music scrolls through the reader and the piece is replicated perfectly. The parallel with the DAW is that players simply drag and drop premade pieces of music on the screen of their digital device and an insta-​song is produced with little effort. The question becomes, whom (or what) has the agency? As is the case with most discussions pertaining to agency and computer-​based technologies, the binary of technological voluntarism/​ determinism must be   Evens, Sound Ideas, 82.   Ibid., 84. 15   Ibid., 124–​125. 16   Ibid., 90. 13 14

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navigated. Timothy Taylor observes that in Western culture when something new is produced it is often referred to as a “technology” because it has yet to develop a social history with regard to its use.17 With the passage of time, “most technological artifacts are normalized into everyday life and no longer seen as ‘technological’ at all, while whatever is new becomes viewed as ‘technological.’ ”18 Taylor, like Katz, stresses that technologies are more than just objects; they are socially bound. Common assumptions about technology within our social web range from voluntarism—​the idea that a technology is neutral and that how it is used determines its value, and, determinism—​the idea that a technology transforms the user.19 Taylor attempts to find a balance, stating: Technology is a peculiar kind of structure that is made up of both schemas and resources, in which the schemas are those rules that are largely unspoken by technology’s users, thereby allowing for some degree of determinism, while technology as a resource refers to what we do with it—​that is, what is voluntaristic.20 Taylor argues that “some sociotechnical systems are more deterministic than others,” and therefore voluntarism/​determinism is a false binary: “Experiences vary in the familiar ways—​based on social class, age, geographical location, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race, ethnicity, cultural capital, and so on.”21 In short, how we experience technology depends on a range of sociocultural factors. An additional element to be considered is the impact of previous musical experiences on playing new instruments/​technologies; Paul Théberge aptly stresses: “Only the crudest technological determinism could support the argument that musicians approach these new technologies without bringing with them at least some of their own ‘accumulated sensibilities’ with regards to music making.”22 In the case of evaluating the studio as a musical instrument, the theories of Katz, Evens, Taylor, and Théberge must be considered across the span of recorded music’s history. As ­chapter 1 detailed, the history of DIY recording practices is one in which people worked within established social structures with deeply entrenched ways of knowing and doing, but they also challenged and changed them. Even when these changes occurred in seemingly marginal ways at incremental rates, accumulated, they constituted seismic shifts over recorded music’s history.   Taylor, Strange Sounds, 6.   Ibid. 19   Ibid., 26. 20   Ibid., 37. 21   Ibid. 22   Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine, 159. 17 18

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There is no single instance in which the studio suddenly became recognized as an instrument, and even at present it may not have wide recognition as such. Nevertheless, there is a historical precedent of the studio—​broadly defined—​ consciously being used to perform music. It is difficult to pinpoint an era in which music production entered into this conscious state of being played with the studio, but conservative accounts of this history typically select early rock and roll recording as the harbinger. The likes of Raymond Scott and Les Paul aside—​who undoubtedly saw studio recording technologies as their instruments with which to make music—​the construct of recording as a faithful reproduction of a real-​time live musical event remained robust until rock recordings repeatedly repudiated it. By way of example, the remainder of this chapter will survey the recording practices of key figures whose production approaches evidence using the studio as a musical instrument.

Using the Studio as a Musical Instrument with Others There can be little doubt but that the experience of a mechanically reproduced performance involves not only the musicianship of the original performers, but the musicianship of the manipulators of the studio. The musical expertise of one of these groups is often called into question by the other. Both groups, however, recognize the studio’s identity as an instrument, and the manipulator of its controls as a musician—​ however incapable or inspired he or she may be.23

Anecdotes abound of rock and roll–​era musicians using recorders themselves or having a friend record them to make a record of their songs: • Chuck Berry bought a wire recorder in 1951, and later, a reel-​to-​reel tape recorder from Radio Shack: “The most important tool in his songwriting was a tape recorder.”24 • As a high school student in 1953, Buddy Holly had access to his local radio station’s facilities, which he could use as a recording studio.25 He continued to record himself until his untimely death with his last known recordings, “The Apartment Tapes,” made in his Manhattan living room in December, 1958.26 Biographer Phillip Norman writes of Holly’s recording accomplishments: “He was the first   Bennett, On Becoming a Rock Musician, 126.   Millard, “Tape Recording and Music Making,” 159. 25   Norman, Rave On, 48. 26   Ibid., 242. 23 24

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to master the studio’s technical resources, achieving effects with echo, double-​ tracking, and overdubbing which to this day have never been bettered.”27 • In 1960, a few months after dropping out of Minneapolis University, nineteen-​ year-​old Bob Dylan recorded twenty-​seven songs on a cheap reel-​to-​reel tape recorder that would later come to be known as the “St. Paul Tape.”28 Clinton Heylin suggests that the tapes Dylan made of himself, “became vehicles for him to display his prowess as a songwriter.”29 • In late 1961 or early 1962, a group called Little Boy Blue & the Blue Boys were recorded by their friend who used his parents’ reel-​to-​reel tape recorder. Decades later this tape would be sold at auction as the first recorded songs of the Rolling Stones.30 • Lacking the means to buy studio time, but wanting to monitor his progress, Jimi Hendrix borrowed a tape recorder to listen to his live performances.31 Soon after he would be able to afford his own reel-​to-​reel to write songs, and later, his own studio to model the same process on a grander scale. All of the aforementioned musicians used recording as a means of songwriting in the private sphere, removed from the professional recording infrastructure in which they also participated. It is debatable whether or not this form of DIY recording constitutes using recording technology as an instrument, but at the very least it demonstrates the primacy of recording in 1950s popular music practice and thereafter, and a salient shift from a recording of music to a recording as music. This concept is a central tenant of Albin Zak’s Poetics of Rock, in which he asserts that a song, an arrangement, and a recording may not necessarily be three distinguishable entities. It is within this milieu that the role of the producer in its current iteration has its beginnings: when the Tin Pan Alley conception of the song as a printed document is discarded and replaced by the recording. As a byproduct, the act of recording becomes synonymous with songwriting. E A R LY I N C A R N AT I O N S O F   U S I N G T H E   S T U D I O A S   A M U S I C A L I N S T R U M E N T:   E LV I S , L E I B E R A N D S TO L L E R , AND ALDON MUSIC

Citing the recording of Elvis Presley’s version of “Hound Dog” (1957), Albin Zak builds a convincing case that Elvis served as his own producer for the session. Despite being recorded at a first-​rate facility—​RCA Studios in Manhattan—​the   Ibid., 17.   Heylin, Bob Dylan, 3. 29   Ibid., 5. 30   Elliott, The Rolling Stones Complete Recording Sessions, 13. 31   McDermott with Cox and Kramer, Jimi Hendrix Sessions, 10. 27 28

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recording is deliberately lo-​fi. It took thirty-​one takes until Elvis was satisfied with the result: “Through a painstaking process, he finally got what he was after: not simply a good performance cleanly recorded, but a record that, in its crude raucousness, fulfilled his artistic vision.”32 Elvis clearly understood that the studio system in which he worked could be controlled and manipulated to produce the recording he envisioned. Such a mentality is the very heart of perceiving the studio as an instrument. Coincidentally, it was the writers of “Hound Dog,” Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who were known as the music industry’s premier producers in the early era of rock and roll. In 1955 they negotiated with Atlantic Records to receive a producer’s royalty with their names to be credited as such on recordings: “If Leiber and Stoller were not the first independent record producers, they certainly became the first highly successful ones.”33 Telling for the time, Atlantic executive Jerry Wexler’s reaction to the demand was one of bewilderment as he did not grasp what producers actually did: “What is a producer? . . . You just sit in the studio and you say, ‘Take one.’ ”34 The work of Leiber and Stoller with the Coasters serves as an excellent example of their pioneering practices in the emerging field of production. In Charlie Gillett’s Making Tracks, the duo reflected on their working processes with the Coasters, which Leiber described as “plastic” and “clinical,” in contrast to “going for a great soul performance,” like they would with Ray Charles, Joe Turner, and Ruth Brown: “There were no twenty-​six takes, or thirty-​one takes, or six hours of overdubbing two bars of music, like we did with the Coasters.”35 Stoller expanded upon this explanation, offering: We would do things like cutting esses off words, sticking the tape back together so you didn’t notice. And sometimes if the first refrain on a take was good and the second one lousy, we’d tape another recording of the first one and stick it in the place of the second one. Before multitrack recording, this was.36 Here, production takes on a more interventionist approach, relying heavily on the tried and true techniques popularized by Les Paul: overdubbing and editing. Leiber and Stoller’s methodical and meticulous process came to characterize professional recording practices, and its ideal of control was adopted by professional songwriters who sought to make their demos as definitive templates for producers to follow.   Zak, “No-​Fi,” 51.   Emerson, Always Magic in the Air, 14. 34   Wade and Picardie, Music Man, 105. 35   Gillett, Making Tracks, 156. 36   Ibid., 156–​157. 32 33

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Al Nevins and Don Kirshner, founders of Aldon Music, which was housed at 1650 Broadway in New York (near the more famous Brill Building, but not to be confused with it), created a production house with teams of songwriters. Songwriting in this sense was very much intertwined with producing demo recordings: “Nearly all the Aldon writers participated in Nevins-​Kirshner productions. ‘I wanted them to learn production,’ Kirshner said. ‘I wanted them to learn about hooks, riffs, timing, where they were more musically inclined than I was.’ ”37 Cynthia Weil matter-​ of-​factly recounted: “Our entire life was built around writing and demoing.”38 The significance of Aldon’s approach to producing demos was that it challenged the convention that “the demo” and “the recording” were distinct from each other: The procedure for a publisher at this time was to make a rough demonstration record of a new song, which was then submitted to producers for their consideration. Kirshner introduced a new concept, by making demos of very high quality, sometimes employing a full orchestra, so that a producer simply had to copy every detail of the demo when making his commercial recording. As Kirshner also made a point of using good singers on his demonstration records, it soon became apparent that his demos were good enough to release as they were.39 Aldon’s demos, and in particular those made by the team of Carol King and Gerry Goffin, “were often as fully realized as and sometimes even surpassed the records that were made on their basis.”40 Despite the diligent detail invested into these recordings by Aldon songwriters, not all of these of demos were ready-​for-​radio, and therefore required further production. P H I L S P E C TO R ’ S “ WA L L O F   S O U N D ”

A critical link between Leiber and Stoller and the Aldon stable of songwriters is arguably the first famous record producer, Phil Spector.41 He had worked with and observed Leiber and Stoller in the studio, taking note of their production practices. Teaming up with Aldon songwriters Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, the threesome wrote notable hit songs such as “Then He Kissed Me” (1963) and “Da Doo Run Run” (1963) for the Crystals, and “Be My Baby” (1963) for the Ronettes. According to Ben E. King, who as a member of the Drifters was produced by Spector along with Leiber and Stoller, Spector had a special genius for coming up with “hooks”: “Little   Emerson, Always Magic in the Air, 106.   Ibid., 114. 39   Gillett, Making Tracks, 165. 40   Emerson, Always Magic in the Air, 117. 41   For more in-​depth writings on Phil Spector see Kingsley Abbott’s Little Symphonies. 37 38

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key pieces to put in songs that you hear all through the record . . . It is like seeing you in a beautiful suit and saying, ‘That suit is great but if you put on this tie you will really look fantastic.’ ”42 While it would have taken the songwriting team of Greenwich, Barry, and Spector a matter of hours to demo a song, with Spector at the helm of production in a Los Angeles studio (typically Gold Star), songs took weeks or even months to be fully realized in his “Wall of Sound” approach.43 Likening himself to Wagner, Spector saw himself as a mastermind of pop music, and devised a quasi-​orchestral approach to recording rock. Larry Levine, Spector’s longtime recording engineer, describes the Wall of Sound: Here’s how we built the wall: we’d fill up the studio with twenty to twenty-​ five people. The room was very small and there would hardly be room enough for the musicians to move around one another. The room was filled with musicians playing their hearts out and we’d fill every available space on that tape with it . . . this was the basic building block of Phil’s “wall.”44 Using multiple drum kits, guitars, pianos, and so forth, all playing in the same cramped room at the same time, Spector focused on the collective sonic sum of the various parts. He was infamous for his demanding approach, often exhausting the session musicians he employed, but he typically succeeded in achieving his own trademark sound. He made the producer the star; the sonic attributes and achievements of a recording were attributed to him first and foremost. This mindset would take root in other budding producers, like Rick Hall, famous for his Muscle Shoals sound: “I say musicians are like basketball players, they need a manager to tell them when to drop a play. My engineering ability and advice on licks and beats contributes more than the individual musicians.”45 BRIAN WILSON AND THE BEACH BOYS’ SOUND

Whereas Spector ruled the studio with an iron fist, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, an admirer of Spector and adopter of his approach, facilitated studio sessions with a velvet glove. Wilson was especially enamored with Spector’s approach to creating new sounds by having two different instruments play the same part: “Rather than just say, ‘that’s a piano, that’s a bass,’ now, we have what you call a piano-​guitar. It sounds like something else. Although it may be two or three instruments combined playing the same notes, it now sounds different.”46 He also continued the practice of   Wade and Picardie, Music Man, 102.   Ibid., 152. 44   Levine, “Phil Spector,” 10. 45   Gillett, Making Tracks, 207. 46   Howard, Sonic Alchemy, 57. 42 43

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enlisting a large number of musicians. For example, in the recording session of “God Only Knows” (1966), twenty-​three musicians were hired to record the instrumental backing track.47 Wilson’s description of a recording session bears resemblance to those of Spector’s, but a key difference that he cites is the pursuit of a specific “feel” as opposed to a sound: I would gather all the musicians in the studio, teach them the song, and my arrangement. They would play it live, all the way through, until I had a take that I was happy with. For me, the key was feel. It didn’t just have to be perfect; more important, it had to feel right.48 The session musicians that both Spector and Wilson hired on a continual basis were a special group dubbed “the Wrecking Crew,” featuring Hal Blaine on drums, Carol Kaye on bass, and Glen Campbell on guitar. This group of musicians was essential to the success of Spector and Wilson. Using the Beach Boys as an example, in the five years the Wrecking Crew worked for Wilson, they performed on twenty-​two top-​forty hits including the landmark 1966 album Pet Sounds.49 Wilson worked with the musicians to realize his sound visions. In lieu of preparing scores or charts for the musicians to follow, Wilson hummed or sang his ideas to each player.50 Western Studio engineer Chuck Britz recounted: “Brian knew basically every instrument you wanted to hear and how you wanted to hear it. He called in the players one at a time, which is very costly. Brian would work with that instrument until he got the sound you want. The process often took hours.”51 Further, Wilson paid close attention to technical details such as the distance of each player from their microphone.52 Over the course of four months in twenty-​seven different recording sessions, Wilson strove toward “the experience of a record not a song.”53 The instrumental backing tracks were recorded first,54 and then following their completion, Wilson facilitated the vocal sessions, which were overdubbed onto the instrumentals.55 Group member Bruce Johnston recounted that they learned their vocal parts piecemeal in the studio from Wilson and recorded them accordingly.56 Vocal passages were repeated and honed until Wilson was satisfied, as Mike Love   Ibid., 65.   As cited in Buskin, Inside Tracks, xii. 49   Hartman, The Wrecking Crew, 157. 50   Granata, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, 117. 51   As cited in Cogan and Clark, Temples of Sound, 33. 52   Butler, “The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds,” 227. 53   Ibid. 54   In the case of Pet Sounds, the instrumentals were recorded at three different studios: Goldstar, Western, and Sunset. 55   The vocal sessions were recorded at Western and Columbia studios. 56   Granata, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, 166. 47 48

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recollected singing “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” (1966) almost thirty times before it was deemed finished: Brian was looking for something more than the actual notes or the blend: he was reaching for something mystical—​out of the range of hearing. To our ears, it sounded great. But Brian thought it was off, so we did it again and again, until he was satisfied that we’d done it as well as we possibly could.57 In the studio, Wilson relied on a production technique for the Beach Boys that helped craft their signature vocal sound called “double tracking”: “Sing it once, then sing it again over that, so both sounds are perfectly synchronized. This makes it much brighter and gives it a rather shrill and magical sound without using echo chambers.”58 Given all of this activity it would be easy to forget that Brian contributed significantly to these vocal performances by singing, too. Charles Granata calculates that “Brian sings for sixteen of the record’s thirty-​six minutes (most of it lead); the rest of the Beach Boys sing for thirteen of those minutes (much of it background).”59 Bear in mind that because of the way Wilson recorded with either instrumental or vocal ensemble performing and recording together at once, critical mixing decisions were required at the time of recording, as Western recording engineer Joe Sidore emphasized: “You had to know what you wanted to wind up with, and record things accordingly. You had to make your mix decisions on the spot, because combinations of instruments were often mixed together on the same track.”60 Wilson worked closely with the recording engineers like Western’s Chuck Britz to ensure that his artistic aims were being accurately translated to the technical domain. Such actions included microphone choice and placement, equalization, limiting (dynamic compression), and mixing decisions.61 Wilson, having given up on live performances at this point in his career, saw recording as the unparalleled method of making music, and dedicated himself to every aspect of the recording process. He followed up Pet Sounds with the epic single “Good Vibrations” (1966), which cost between $50,000 and $75,000 as it took sixteen sessions over approximately five months in four different studios to complete.62 Like the production of Pet Sounds that preceded it, he oversaw every sonic detail of “Good Vibrations” (1966): “Brian Wilson was at the controls himself, making on-​the-​spot decisions about notes,   Ibid., 168.   Lambert, Inside the Music of Brian Wilson, 63. 59   Granata, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, 189. 60   Ibid., 127. 61   Ibid., 132. 62   Moorefield, The Producer as Composer, 18. 57 58

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articulation, timbre, and so on. He was effectively composing at the mixing board and using the studio as a musical instrument.”63 This succession of production from Leiber and Stoller through to Kirshner’s crew of songwriters at Aldon, followed by Phil Spector, and then Brian Wilson, is but one thread in a knot that typifies the interweaving lines of this history. In less than a decade—​from the late 1950s when Leiber and Stoller produced the Coasters, yielding hits like “Yakety Yak” (1958) and “Poison Ivy” (1959), to 1966 when Brian Wilson self-​produced the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and “Good Vibrations”—​the art of record production in rock barely resembled the bare-​bones approaches of the independent studios that ushered it onto the airwaves in the mid-​1950s. Of great significance to this storyline is that Leiber and Stoller, Spector, and Wilson all had access to the industry’s foremost recording complexes and their technical staff. Yet despite these advantages, the producer role would continue to evolve in tandem outside of the major label system. As a final profile of the development of production through to the mid-​1960s, the home studios of Berry Gordy in Detroit and Joe Meek in London exemplify independent operations that thrived without the support and infrastructure of the record industry’s top studios. B E R R Y G O R D Y A N D T H E   M OTO W N   S O U N D

“Hittsville USA” was the name Berry Gordy gave to the house he purchased in 1959 on West Grand Boulevard, a middle-​class integrated neighborhood in Detroit.64 This house-​turned-​recording complex was Gordy’s vision of an automotive assembly line mentality applied to music production. Everything could be done in-​house—​literally. The garage became the recording space, a closet was used as a vocal booth, and a control room was built on the first floor. For an echo chamber, the downstairs bathroom was used, requiring that someone be posted outside to ensure that no one flushed the toilet during a recording session.65 Part of the attic was used as an echo chamber, too, but the onset of outside noises that could not be controlled like cars or rain proved problematic.66 These impediments led to some innovations on the part of Motown’s approach to recording, as Gordy recalled: “Eventually we started recording songs dry and adding echo afterward.”67 Baffles were put in place around the musicians, or their sections,68 in an effort to minimize “leakage”—​the sound of an instrument being recorded through the microphone of another instrument. The amplifiers of electric guitars and the bass   Ibid., 19.   Posner, Motown, 42. 65   Gordy, To Be Loved, 126. 66   Ibid. 67   Ibid. 68   Posner, Motown, 51. 63 64

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were bypassed to avoid feedback and noise, and instead were plugged directly into the mixing board.69 Nelson George suggests that this technique contributed to Motown’s signature bass-​heavy sound:  “Part of the reason for the vitality of the bass lines was that the Motown studio was one of the first to record by plugging the bass directly into the studio control board.”70 Of course, the Motown sound cannot be explained by engineering alone. Like Spector and Wilson, Gordy had a team of musicians—​“The Funk Brothers”—​that he relied on to produce his signature sound day in and day out: In most cases the music was anchored by the bottom of Benny Benjamin’s bass drum and tom-​tom. James Jamerson’s bass percolated over these rhythms, buried deep enough in the mix so that they were often felt more than heard. The guitars of Robert White, Eddie Willis, or Joe Messina often stood out in contrast, picking up the studio’s tinny sound.71 Like Brian Wilson, Gordy pursued a specific “feel,” and so written charts served only as a rough guide for the musicians: “He would usually lock in the drumbeat and then hum a line for the musicians to start playing. They were encouraged to ad-​lib extensively until he heard a sound he liked.”72 In Gordy’s own words, this approach was borne out of his belief that errors were essential to the creative process: Hittsville had an atmosphere that allowed people to experiment creatively and gave them the courage not to be afraid to make mistakes. In fact, I sometimes encouraged mistakes. Everything starts as an idea and as far as I was concerned there were no stupid ones.73 Upon completion of the recording, Gordy was as invested and involved in the mixing process:  “Mixing was so important to me that it seemed I  spent half my life at the board.”74 He was notoriously picky about mixes, scrutinizing the relative balance of the instruments throughout a song, and thereby demanding multiple remixes: “Twenty mixes were a lot, but twelve was not unusual.”75 By the mid-​1960s, Gordy had solidified his sound, and it was attributed to his label, more so than to the musicians of Motown.   Gordy, To Be Loved, 127.   George, Where Did Our Love Go?, 110. 71   Cogan and Clark, Temples of Sound, 146. 72   Posner, Motown, 50–​51. 73   Gordy, To Be Loved, 168–​169. 74   Posner, Motown, 52. 75   George, Where Did Our Love Go?, 112–​113. 69 70

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THE JOE MEEK SOUND Fair enough, my studio was originally a large bedroom, but it is now a first-​class studio in which I have made many hit records—​and no one will tell me that it is wrong.76 —​​Joe Meek

In some regards, Joe Meek’s approach to music production resembles that of Berry Gordy. First, Meek’s studio was a converted domestic space; a flat in London that he eventually named Meeksville in homage to Motown’s Hittsville.77 Second, Meek made full use of every room in his apartment-​turned-​studio: “In an effort to get a different kind of sound he would sometimes have a recording take place all over the house with perhaps the rhythm section in the studio, the singer in the living room, the choir in the bathroom, the brass in the bedroom, and the strings on the landing and up the stairs!”78 Third, he engaged in the practice of vocalizing musical ideas to his studio musicians to develop songs, as the Tornados’ drummer Clem Cattini recalled about the making of “Telstar” (1962): “Joe wanted a moving rhythm; he sang the beat—​like dum-​diddy-​dum—​and imitated the guitar sound and bass, and then we just kicked it about and he’d direct each individual into the shape he wanted it to go. He knew what he was after but if someone did something he liked he’d say, ‘Keep that. I like it.’ ”79 Like Gordy, Meek was more concerned about a specific feel for a song than other musical factors: “We record until I have a very good track. I’m not worried if the artist [singer] is in tune, or phrasing properly, I want a good rhythm track for the A-​side.”80 Finally, like Gordy, Meek developed a signature sound, but what sets Joe Meek apart from Berry Gordy and the other producers discussed thus far in this chapter is that he was for all intents and purposes an audio engineer. According to John Repsch, Meek was the first engineer in the UK to become a producer and perform both roles in the studio.81 A typical Meek production commenced with him recording his own sung ideas that he would further develop into more complete songs by adding some rhythm in the form of foot stamping and tapping nearby objects.82 Next, he would present his demonstration recordings to a group of musicians whom were tasked with translating his sonic scribbles into fleshed-​out songs. Once a song was formed, Meek first focused on recording just the instrumental, which he called a backing track. Obsessed with isolating the sound of each instrument, Meek placed microphones close to each instrument, and placed   Repsch, The Legendary Joe Meek, 131.   Irwin, “Take the Last Train from Meeksville.” 78   Repsch, The Legendary Joe Meek, 140–​141. 79   Ibid., 145. 80   Cleveland, Creative Music Production, 129. 81   Repsch, The Legendary Joe Meek, 67. 82   Ibid., 98. 76 77

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blankets over the drums and amplifiers to minimize sound leakage.83 To get the backing track precisely as he wanted, Meek would either have the musicians play multiple takes,84 or build it up by layering each instrument one by one.85 During the recording process Meek was actively involved in shaping the resulting sounds by manipulating signal processing devices such reverb, compression, and delay, some of which he had built himself. Unconventional at the time, heavy use of these effects were key contributors to the sought-​after Joe Meek sound. In the case of the song “Telstar” (1962), Meek worked with the band for a day and a half to complete this first phase of committing the backing track to tape. Once the backing track was recorded to his satisfaction, Meek then painstakingly crafted the vocal or melodic track by recording repeated takes and manipulating them with his effects processors. In “Telstar,” the unique timbre of the melodic line can primarily be attributed to an organ-​type instrument called the clavioline played by Geoff Goddard. John Repsch details the grueling process needed to arrive at the final trademark sound: Geoff duly arrived to take over on the clavioline and for the next six hours sat wearing headphones playing Joe’s tune over and over. At the same time Joe was fiddling around in the control room, as usual compressing the music while bouncing it back and forth from one machine to the other; this way he overdubbed it in the high and low octaves to thicken the sound, echoing it all up as he went along with a concoction of tape delay, Binson [reverb], spring [reverb], and echo chamber . . . Then Geoff rounded the piece off with some airy, out-​of-​this-​world aah-​ing.86 As an independent producer like Berry Gordy, Joe Meek was involved in all aspects of the songs he produced. In addition, he performed all of the engineering duties as opposed to overseeing them as Gordy did at Motown. Like Gordy and the other producers discussed thus far, Meek produced in the traditional way of directing musicians, but what sets him apart is that he was using studio equipment to create new sounds, foreshadowing dub practices. Not being able to play a musical instrument in the traditional sense, he instead played the controls of his studio.

Producing Without Producers James Barrett theorizes that there are two major strands from which the producer emerged: one, from music labels’ artists and repertoire (A and R) departments,   Cleveland, Joe Meek’s Bold Techniques, 188.   Irwin, “Take the Last Train from Meeksville.” 85   Repsch, The Legendary Joe Meek, 95. 86   Ibid., 45. 83 84

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such as Phil Spector and the Beatles’ veritable producer, George Martin; the other from the engineers’ domain, or at least those who were savvy with audio technology, like Sam Phillips, Joe Meek, and Tom Dowd.87 But it is primarily the former group that came to define the producer in the first few decades of the post-​World War II period (deservedly, Phillips, Meek, Dowd, and their technically minded contemporaries have slowly garnered more recognition for their pioneering work). How producers used the studio as an instrument in the proceeding decade did not change markedly from the practices profiled thus far. Arguably, the biggest change was with regard to whom held the reigns of production as increasingly more artists aspired to produce themselves, getting rid of the Gordy-​type guru in favor of independence. Inspired by the likes of Brian Wilson (e.g., Pet Sounds, 1966; “Good Vibrations,” 1966) and his cross-​Atlantic arch-​rivals/​admirers, the Beatles (Revolver, 1966; Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967), artists sought to harness the creative capacities afforded by the recording studio. Paul Théberge observes that by the late 1960s and early 1970s, “it was normal for bands to compose in the studio, spending weeks and months experimenting with the various creative possibilities inherent in the multitrack process. In this regard, ‘overdubbing’ . . . is a central technique of the studio when used as a compositional tool.”88 While some musicians acquired the technical facility needed to run a recording session themselves, many bands relied on the skills of audio engineers to assist them. The studio became the music-​making medium. With little practiced or prepared beforehand, the “writing” began and ended in the studio. The historical accounts describing these sessions often come from the engineers as opposed to the musicians, such as Glyn Johns recounting his work with the Rolling Stones: Mick and Keith very often used the studio to write. One or the other would turn up with the bare bones of an idea. Typically, Keith [guitar] might have a few bars of a chord sequence that he would sit and play over and over for hours on end, with Bill [bass] and Charlie [drums] playing along, providing invaluable support with an extraordinary degree of patience. Brian [guitar] and either Stu [piano] or Nicky Hopkins [keyboard] would join in, trying different ideas and instrumentation. As the song took shape, Mick would leave the control room, where he had been paying attention to the sound with me, and join in, singing along, developing a melody while muttering the odd word of nonsensical lyrics. Eventually I  would start recording and playing back their efforts in order for all involved to refine what they were doing.89   Barrett, “Producing Performance,” 95.   Théberge, “ ‘Plugged In,’ ” 11. 89   Johns, Sound Man, 81. 87 88

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Eddie Kramer engineered similar marathon recording sessions for Jimi Hendrix: We would spend up to ten or twelve hours at a time, recording take after take. Unlike in the past, where, through jamming, he would try to develop the germ of an idea into a song, Hendrix came into Electric Lady with a distinctive idea as to how he wanted each track to sound.90 By the late 1960s and early 1970s, making music in the studio became standard practice, and a taken-​for-​granted reliance on multitracking, overdubbing, and editing in recording practices perpetuates to the present. Even some seminal punk recordings, which were lauded as back-​to-​basics DIY pressings, like the The Ramones’ Ramones (1976), relied heavily on these processes associated with using the studio as an instrument. Recalling, “We did a lot of overdubbing and double-​track vocals,”91 producer Craig Leon explained:  “If you jump to the conclusion that the sound of the recording was just the sound of the band live you would be mistaken even though that was what I was trying to convey. The album is quite layered and structured and took full advantage of studio technology of its time without being obvious.”92 As music-​recording practices grew reliant on the acts of using the studio as an instrument, musicians increasingly sought to participate in these practices themselves, and as a result the distinct division of labor between musicians and engineers became less defined. In turn, musicians emigrated from the traditional performing spaces designated for them in the studio such as the live room and vocal booth, and made their music on the other side of “the glass”: In the 1970s . . . the focal point of the studio-​as-​instrument had shifted from the studio to the control room, where electronic instruments—​ guitars, basses, keyboards, synthesizers—​were being recorded by plugging directly into the mixing console.93 By vacating the live room and taking up residence in the control room, some musicians began to wean their dependence on engineers entirely, and moved toward a more literal DIY way of working in the studio. David Toop singles out Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder as some of the first musicians to fully harness the technologies of the early 1970s, notably the drum machine, to support their DIY approaches. Prefiguring the practice of beginning songwriting by layering rhythmic loops to create polyrhythms that is now commonplace in contemporary electronic-​ dependent musics, “Sly Stone used the drum box extensively to build up tracks,   McDermott with Cox and Kramer, Jimi Hendrix Sessions, 146.   Rombes, Ramones, 73. 92   Ibid., 70. 93   Schmidt Horning, “The Sounds of Space,” 30. 90 91

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playing most of the instruments, including acoustic drums, himself.”94 Oliver Wang writes that “by 1971, Stone had extensively worked the Rhythm King [drum machine] into his band’s massive 1971 release, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, including on the hit single ‘Family Affair.’ Speak to drum machine aficionados about their first introduction to the device and this album is almost always cited.”95 Both Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder were multi-​instrumentalists who used multitrack recording to overdub with themselves; they were literally one-​man bands using the studio as an instrument. PRODUCED, ARRANGED, COMPOSED, AND PERFORMED BY PRINCE

Perhaps no other artist perfected this model of self-​producing better than the prolific Prince. Under the guidance of Chris Moon, who gave Prince the keys to his recording studio in Minneapolis, Prince learned how to use the studio and produce himself while still in high school.96 Following the release of his first studio album, For You (1978), on which he credited himself “produced, arranged, composed, and performed by Prince,” “Prince bought his first house and set up a primitive studio in the basement, beginning the practice of demoing and recording that he would maintain forever afterwards.”97 This first studio had a four-​track tape recorder, which enabled him to play all of the instruments on his songs: drums, keyboard, guitar, bass, vocals, and so on. Prince’s records were essentially solo records, as David Leonard, the engineer for Purple Rain (1984), recalled: “He does almost everything himself; he even records his own vocals using a U47 [microphone] on a boom stand over the [mixing] console . . . He was hands-​on for everything; he was driving the bus.”98 Critical to Prince’s sound was the Linn LM-​1 drum machine, featured prominently on “When Doves Cry” (1984), a song that he recorded entirely by himself.99 Roger Linn, who created the Linn LM-​1, cited two ways in which Prince used the drum machine creatively. First, Prince detuned one of the stock sounds of the LM-​1 to create the now famous knocking sound: Well, that was merely a recording of what’s called a cross stick snare drum, which is a snare drum stick where you hold the tip onto the drum head, and you slap the stick against the rim of the drum. He just used that normal   Toop, Rap Attack, 127.   Wang, “Hear the Drum Machine Get Wicked,” 220–​221. 96   Throne, Prince, 28. 97   Ibid., 34. 98   Daley, “Classic Tracks.” 99   Throne, Prince, 74. 94 95

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sound, but he decided to tune it down about an octave or more to get what you refer as the “knocking” sound.100 Second, Prince applied effects to the drum machine to create new sounds: He had a guitar processor called a flanger, altering the sound of the drum machine. So it would sort of sweep up and down in tone. The record being so stark and so sparse of instruments, it was pretty much just him singing and the drum machine. And then, occasionally, his guitar would come, and there was some other instruments, but there wasn’t so much more.101 What is particularly pertinent about this example of Prince’s use of the LM-​1 drum machine on “When Doves Cry” is that it demonstrates how his quest to be completely self-​sufficient led him into the technical domains of drum programming and signal processing. Widely regarded as a virtuoso guitarist, singer, and songwriter, Prince’s use of the studio as musical instrument is every bit as impressive. B R I A N E N O A N D I N - S​ T U D I O C O M P O S I T I O N I can neither read nor write music, and I can’t play any instruments really well, either. You can’t imagine a situation prior to this where anyone like me could have been a composer. It couldn’t have happened. How could I do it without tape and without technology?102 —​​Brian Eno

Of all the producers profiled in this section, Brian Eno has discussed and written the most about the role of the producer, and more specifically about the concept of the studio as a musical instrument. Having worked with the likes of David Bowie, Talking Heads, U2, and Coldplay, Eno has established himself as one of the preeminent producers of popular music. While Eno better fits Zagorski-​Thomas’ categorization of “producer as creative partner” as opposed to “producer as artist,” he is included in this section because of his contribution to popularizing the idea of the studio as a musical instrument. Steve Dietz observes, “For Eno, the studio gave rise to a whole new way of thinking about music, not as something existing out there in the world to be reproduced but the seed of something to be coaxed and cajoled into being.”103 In his lecture/​essay from 1979, “The Recording Studio As a Compositional Tool,” Eno theorized that once the capability to record three tracks existed, “pop composers” began to question “What can I do with it?”:   Johnson, “Roger Linn.”   Ibid. 102   Eno, “The Studio as Compositional Tool,” 130. 103   Dietz, “Learning from Eno,” 293. 100 101

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From that impulse two things happened: you got an additive approach to recording, the idea that composition is the process of adding more . . . it also gave rise to the particular area that I’m involved in:  in-​studio composition, where you no longer come to the studio with a skeleton of the piece, or perhaps with nothing at all. I often start working with no starting point . . . actually constructing a piece in the studio.104 Drawing on his training and background as a visual artist, Eno likened “in-​studio composition” to painting: It was painting with sound. You could make a piece over an extended period of time—​it didn’t have to preexist the process; you could make it up as you went. And you could make it like you would a painting—​you could put something on, scrape something else off. It stopped being something that was located at one moment in time. It started being a process that you could engage in over months, even years.105 Typically labeled an “ambient music” composer for his solo works, Eno’s sonic imprint on the artists he produces is typically aurally evident. Andrew Blake suggests that in the case of U2, Eno not only changed their approach to making music in the studio, but also how they performed their songs live: Working with Eno, the band was encouraged not simply to record and polish existing songs, but to use the studio as an instrument, improvising in the creation of new songs and overdubbing parts to add to the richness of the final mix. The result changed the way U2 worked live. To replicate the complexity achieved in the studio, they started to use pre-​programmed sequencers to back their stage performances.106 David Byrne’s recounting of the making of Talking Heads’ Remain in Light (1980), which was produced by Eno, provides some insight into how “in studio composition” works: One or two people would lay down a track, usually some kind of repetitive groove that would last about four minutes, the presumed length of a song. Maybe it would be a guitar riff and a drum part, or maybe a sequenced arpeggio pattern and an intermittent guitar squeal. Others would then respond to what had been put down, adding their own repetitive parts,   Eno, “The Studio as Compositional Tool,” 129.   Crane and Baccigaluppi, “Brian Eno,” 40. 106   Blake, “Recording Practices and the Role of the Producer,” 48. 104 105

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filling in the gaps and spaces, for the whole length of the “song.” As we’d listen to one part being recorded, we’d all be scheming about what we could add—​it was a kind of game.107 Eno, a self-​professed nonmusician, did much to popularize the idea that using the studio as a musical instrument did not require previous experience, and in some ways, a lack of know-​how might even be advantageous for creativity. His collaborative work with other artists foregrounded the studio as a musical instrument. The once tried and true approach of having artists rehearse until ready to record had already been uprooted with bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones writing in the studio in the latter half of the 1960s, but Eno’s approach, as exemplified by the Talking Heads Remain in Light (1980) sessions, demonstrates an even more experimental ethos. In Eno’s world, playing with sliders and knobs on the mixing board and other equipment were as important, if not more, than the instruments played by the people in the band. While those of the ilk of Brian Wilson used the studio as an instrument by orchestrating everyone that worked within it, the turn to technology in the cases of Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder, Prince, and Brian Eno signify a conceptual shift in which an alternative approach that might make using the studio as an instrument cheaper, easier, more convenient, or more creative, was increasingly sought after. Compared to the 1960s, using the studio as an instrument became less about working the system as it were, and working the systems. Such an approach was typified by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider for whom their group, Kraftwerk, and their studio, Kling Klang, were one and the same: There was little distinction in Kraftwerk between the music and the studio. In effect, advances in recording technology would become the raison d’etre of the group’s existence. Eventually, they became obsessed with producing music that almost sounded as if it had been created by machines—​not just musicians who were also studio engineers, but more like sound engineers who happened to produce music. This led to the logical conclusion that the studio was a musical instrument or member of the group in its own right. As they would put it, “we play the studio.”108 Kraftwerk had kindred spirits on the island of Jamaica who would also play the studio, specifically the mixing console and effects processors. The practices of these producers, designed to delight dance halls, would formulate a distinct strand of production that arguably is now the most important component of contemporary music production: tinkering with timbre.   Byrne, How Music Works, 164.   Bussy, Kraftwerk, 26.

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HAPPY ACCIDENT #1: DUB AND ITS LEGACY OF PRIVILEGING TIMBRE IN PRODUCTION By taking advantage of the post-​taping afterthought, however, one can very often transcend the limitations that performance imposes upon the imagination.109 —​​Glenn Gould

In Kingston, Jamaica, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, common music production practice entailed recording a “riddim” (rhythm) track, typically consisting of drums, bass, guitar, organ, and horns, with vocals often being recorded separately elsewhere, and mixed in later.110 It was during one of these mixing sessions that a happy accident occurred and “dub” was born. Sometime in late 1967, “Ruddy” Redwood, a “sound system man” (similar to a DJ), was getting a “dubplate” (an inexpensive pressing of a record) cut at Treasure Isle studio. The engineer, Byron Smith, failed to add in the vocal to the instrumental at the right time while cutting the record, and instead of putting a halt to the process and starting over, Redwood opted to have the record completed without the vocal part included. Legend has it that when Redwood played the record on the weekend at a dance hall, crowds loved it, as recounted by producer Bunny Lee in Paul Sullivan’s Remixology: The dance get so excited that them start to sing the lyrics over the riddim part and them have to play it for about half an hour to an hour! The Monday morning when I come back into town I say, “Tubbs, boy, that little mistake we made, the people them love it!” So (King) Tubby say, “All right, we’ll try it.” We try it with some Slim Smith riddim like “Aint Too Proud to Beg.” And Tubby’s start it with the voice and [then] bring in the riddim. Then him play the singing, and them him play the complete riddim without voice. We start to call the thing “version.”111 Over the next few years, versioning would evolve into dub, a practice in which engineers like King Tubby would produce music almost exclusively using prerecorded riddim tracks. In this production paradigm, the recording of a riddim track was akin to setting the stage, and the main act occurred at the mixing board as a form of postproduction. Dubs were typically produced in real time because there was little time to spare; tracks were delivered to the engineers on a Friday with the expectation that the dubs would be played at dance halls the next day. No two dubs were the same because those operating sound systems demanded exclusive material to appeal to their partygoers. King Tubby and his contemporaries transformed riddims   Gould, “The Prospects of Recording,” 53.   Williams, “Tubby’s Dub Style,” 236. 111   Sullivan, Remixology, 24. 109 110

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into new musical compositions, creating dubs, “on which their efforts were often more evident than those of the original musicians.”112 King Tubby’s home in the Waterhouse district of Kingston served as his studio and also as an informal training facility for other budding dub engineers including Prince Smart, Prince Jammy, and Scientist.113 In his bedroom-​turned-​studio, King Tubby had a couple of tape recorders (one for playback and the other to record the new dubs), a four-​channel mixing board equipped with a high-​pass filter (a form of equalization that attenuates low frequencies), and some external effects processing units to add reverb and delay. With this sparse setup, King Tubby forged his own sonic hallmarks: Some of Tubby’s personal innovations include creating echo delay by passing a loop of tape over the heads of an old two-​track machine and applying homemade high-​pass filters to snare and hi-​hats to make a unique “splash” sound. Alongside his liberal use of sirens and gunshots (borrowed directly from live sound system performances), Tubby also became famous for his explosive “thunderclap” effect, a trademark sound that surfaced in his work around 1974. This effect was created by physically striking the reverb coil.114 Given that King Tubby worked primarily with prerecorded tracks, his sonic imprint, unlike past producers, did not come from the musicians or how they were recorded. Rather, his contribution came at the mixing stage, and his sound was both that of his equipment and how he played it.115 Considering the significant degree of difference between the original tracks and King Tubby’s dubs, “the mixing desk and the associated effects devices and machinery must be thought of as Tubby’s musical instrument.”116 TWEAKING TIMBRES

As dub historian Michael Veal notes, the creative and unconventional uses of recording technology by dub engineers led to the development of “a new musical language that relied as much on texture, timbre, and soundscape, as it did on the traditional musical parameters of pitch, melody, and rhythm.”117 This is one of dub’s enduring legacies: that is, the privileging of the qualities of sounds above other more conventional compositional considerations. Using the studio as a musical instrument in   Partridge, Dub in Babylon, 60.   Ibid., 69. 114   Sullivan, Remixology, 47–​48. 115   Williams, “Tubby’s Dub Style,” 236. 116   Ibid., 237. 117   Veal, Dub, 64. 112 113

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this context is more literal in that the musician/​producer/​engineer (distinctions of these roles are difficult to make, and in the case of dub, arbitrary) plays the studio’s “equipment” and in doing so engages in the social process of transitioning music technologies into musical instruments. Paralleling this process in the sound domain is the ascension of sound qualities in importance to recorded music. Timbre is wrested from the acoustic domain to be controlled in the electronic domain: The timbre of a musical sound has traditionally been controlled by the design, materials, and condition of the instrument that produces it, and the ability of the human mind and musculature that plays it. When a performance is recorded in the electronic-​magnetic medium the character of each voice can depend almost completely on the manipulation of various filtering devices that select distinct frequencies from a particular signal for alteration.118 Corneila Fales’ categorization of sounds into a continuum of decreasing contextualization is helpful in evaluating how dub music treats timbre in production. According to Fales, sounds can be categorized as: 1. Exact copies of real-​world sounds. 2. Unfamiliar, but possible or imaginable in some musical universe. 3. Neither familiar or imaginable. Acknowledge the rules of the acoustic world in their infraction of them, and we recognize the sounds they diverge from. 4. Catch-​all bin. Sounds that lack any vestige of contextualization. They must be experienced since they only exist in the hearing, refusing the abstraction of description.119 Dub engineers exploited this continuum, challenging listeners’ experiences of their sound worlds and expanding them. They treated timbre as the foremost frontier to explore in music production, and in the process created a genre and style that forced listeners to journey with them in the pursuit of never-​heard-​before sounds. It is important to note, however, that dub engineers were certainly not the first musicians to privilege sound quality in their music-​making. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Joe Meek made creative use of reverb and delay in his recordings, defying established conventions.120 Frank Zappa, self-​secluded in “a life of obsessive overdubbage—​non-​stop, twelve hours a day,”121 produced recordings that   Bennett, On Becoming a Rock Musician, 121.   Fales, “Short-​Circuiting Perceptual Systems,” 169. 120   Cleveland, Creative Music Production. 121   Watson, “Frank Zappa as Dadaist,” 156. 118 119

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referenced other songs by timbre as opposed to note choices, such as “Hungry Freaks, Daddy” (1966), which copped the guitar tone of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (1965).122 Nevertheless, it was not until after dub’s peak years in the 1970s that tinkering with timbre became a central component of using the studio as a musical instrument, and this became increasingly aurally evident in mainstream music. For example, in his study of 1980s pop music producer Trevor Horn, Timothy Warner made several astute observations related to the primacy of timbre in production. First, he noted that while traditional compositional elements in pop recordings such as “melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and structural manipulation/​innovation—​often may be derivative,” it also contains “startling innovation in sound and sound manipulation.”123 Second, due to this shift in prioritizing production elements and their associated practices, Warner asserts that the four essential techniques in pop production are “multitrack recording, signal processing, MIDI sequencing, and sound synthesis and sampling.”124 In consideration of the aforementioned, Warner concludes: Horn’s contribution would appear to be in the “sound” (that is, the choice and combination of timbres and the way those timbres are manipulated through technological processes), the “feel” (that is, the subtle rhythmic/​ dynamic/​timbral nuances and pitch deviations of performance which give a strong sense of individual expression), and the structuring (that is, the order and content of the various sections of a piece in relation to the whole).125 Timbre is not easily notated, and as a result popular music production relies on the ears rather than the eyes in pursuit of making and replicating specific sounds. Dialing knobs of effects processors to precise points is as crucial as playing the right notes. Citing the example of Michael Jackson’s self-​made demo of “Billie Jean,” Virgil Moorefield posits that Jackson served the role of coproducer by prescribing not just the parts, but the sounds as well: “The nearly exact timbres of the bass, electric piano, and various synthesizers have been copied and refined on the album [Thriller (1982)].”126 The opening bars of “Billie Jean” (1982) further reinforces Moorefield’s point; the drum pattern itself is generic, but the drum sounds are distinctly recognizable as being none other than “Billie Jean” (1982).

  Ibid., 159.   Warner, Pop Music, 18. 124   Ibid., 22. 125   Ibid., 140. 126   Moorefield, The Producer as Composer, 87. 122 123

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Drum timbres would prove to be so pivotal to production that from the sample-​ based era of hip-​hop in the 1980s to the present, “the most unifying sonic thread within hip-​hop is the particular drum timbres that have their own origins in 1970s funk.”127 In Black Noise, Tricia Rose argues that these sounds, such as a James Brown-​or Parliament-​sampled kick drum, and the equipment that processed these sounds in the original recording as well as the succeeding recordings that sample them, “are all central to the way a rap record feels; central to rap’s sonic force.”128 Rose’s point about how a producer processes a sound after sampling cannot be overstated. As Joseph Schloss observed in his study of sample-​based hip-​hop producers, Making Beats, a hip-​hop producer might sample from different decades and genres, and “the ability to make such juxtapositions sound natural is the hallmark of a good producer.”129 The criticality of drum timbres in hip-​hop extends to acoustic drummers like Questlove, who strive to have their drums sound like they are sampled.130 While it could be argued that this aspect of using the studio as a musical instrument—​creating or replicating drum timbres—​is insignificant in the grand scheme of the production of a piece of music, Joseph Schloss rightly reminds that, Hip-​hop’s idiosyncrasies were designed to represent the spirit and intelligence and individuality of its many creators, in a world that would have preferred to ignore them. So when we focus on the seemingly minor artistic and practical choices that go into hip-​hop production . . . we are not minimizing hip-​hop’s social or political significance. We are celebrating its humanity.131 Tweaking timbres—​the production locus of dub—​constitutes one strand of the DNA of the contemporary producer that can be attributed to a happy accident. The other strand in this double helix of contemporary production stemming from a happy accident is sampling: a reimagining of collage-​based techniques by hip-​hop producers that were first pioneered mid-​twentieth century. H A P P Y A C C I D E N T # 2 :   H I P - ​H O P A N D I T S SAMPLING LEGACY New techniques are often discovered by accident or by the failure of an intended technique or experiment.132   Williams, Rhymin’ and Stealin’, 2.   Rose, Black Noise, 78. 129   Schloss, Making Beats, 146. 130   Williams, Rhymin’ And Stealin’, 36. 131   Schloss, Making Beats, 214. 132   Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure,” 13. 127 128

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The second happy accident in music production history that would prove to have a lasting legacy was hip-​hop producer Marley Marl’s stumbling upon how to sample drums while apprenticing under Arthur Baker at Unique Studios, New York in 1984: “I wanted to sample a voice from off of this song with Emulator [sampler],” he recalls, “and, accidentally, a snare went through.” After listening to his mistake a few times, Marley realized the implications of his discovery. “I looked at the engineer and said, ‘You know what this means? I could take any drum sound from any old record, put it in here and get the old drummer sound.’ ”133 Prior to Marley Marl’s discovery, drum sounds in hip-​hop came courtesy either from a drum machine such as the Roland TR-​808 or Oberheim DMX, or from a session drummer, such as Sugar Hill Records’ Keith LeBlanc. Now, anything and everything could be sampled, opening up the history of recorded music to being repurposed and refashioned one way or another while using the studio as a musical instrument. In some regards, the concept of sampling was not novel; Les Paul’s sound-​on-​sound compilations of himself, the Musique Concrete collages of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, and John Cage’s Imaginary Landscapes No. 5, a mix of forty-​two jazz records,134 all evidence sampling in practice mid-​century (albeit rudimentary by today’s standards). And, in the case of hip-​hop, sampling did not begin with Marley Marl, as Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton assert: “The story of sampling is a tale of technology catching up with the DJ, of equipment being created that could do faster, more accurately, and more easily what a DJ had long been able to.”135 Mark Katz poignantly puts it thus: Hip-​hop production . . . is intimately tied up with the techniques and aesthetics of DJing. In the mid-​and late 1980s, hip-​hop DJing spawned a new art, the art of making beats. In some ways the two are quite different—​DJs perform live, manipulating records in front of audiences, while producers compose, often slowly and painstakingly, using digital samplers, drum machines, synthesizers, or computers. But there is a strong link between the two, and in the minds of many beat makers, the DJ begat the producer, simple as that.136 The cornerstone component of early hip-​hop DJing practice was extending “breaks”—​typically a percussion or drum instrumental excerpt of a 1970s funk   Gonzales, “The Juice Crew,” 103–​104.   Prendergast, Ambient Century, 46. 135   Brewster and Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, 267. 136   Katz, Groove Music, 121. 133 134

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record—​using two turntables and two copies of the same record, and alternating back and forth between the two using a mixer’s cross-​fader to create a seamless loop. DJ Kool Herc has been widely acknowledged as the first to extend breaks, while Grandmaster Flash is the oft-​credited mastermind for perfecting the technique, but it should be acknowledged that Walter Gibbons, a disco DJ, is reported to have seamlessly extended breaks in the early 1970s, too, at least paralleling and possibly preceding these hip-​hop pioneers.137 Historiography aside, from a perspective concentrating on practice, a precedent had been set since the early 1970s to create extended rhythmic loops, first to support dancing, and soon after to support rapping. When hip-​hop DJs like Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash DJ’d in parks and at parties, they did not just play the records (the recorded medium), they played the turntables (the reproducing technology), too. While this practice bears resemblance to dub engineers using the studio as a musical instrument, the turntable was an instrument unto itself, as Rob Swift explains: With the turntable you can create your own rhythms and sounds. In other words, the turntable can adapt or mimic the violin, the drum, the guitar, the bass. The turntable can morph into almost any instrument. Out of the turntable you can coax high pitches, you can coax low pitches, there are notes involved. If you move the speed a certain way you can create slow noises and fast noises. There are so many things you can do with the turntable, it’s definitely an instrument.138 Turntablism foreshadowed the compositional possibilities inherent in sampling, and studios strove to emulate it. Just as dub studio practices were an outgrowth of Jamaican sound system culture, hip-​hop studio practices were an outgrowth of DJ culture in the Bronx. Aspiring producers who could not procure DJ equipment were relegated to the fickle art of making pause tapes using cassette recorders. “Samson S” explained the process of making a pause tape to Joseph Schloss in Making Beats: Basically, it’s an early form of sampling, in the most ghetto form possible. What you do is you play a record, and then you pause [the tape], and you play the break, pause it, bring it back, play the break, pause it . . . ’til you have like a continuous loop. And then I’d take another tape and rap over that, put like scratchin’ and shit on it.139

  Lawrence, “Disco Madness,” 281.   Brewster and Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, 278. 139   Schloss, Making Beats, 43–​44. 137 138

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Many hip-​hop artists, including Marley Marl,140 Q-​Tip,141 Chuck D,142 DJ Hi-​Tek,143 and Timbaland,144 made pause tapes as it provided an accessible means to produce. Whether with turntables or home stereos, sampling as music-​making in hip-​hop was well established before Marley Marl’s discovery. And, following Marley Marl’s happy accident, the figurative floodgates were opened to any aspiring producer or rapper that could get their hands on a sampler, as was the case with KRS-​One and Scott La Rock borrowing an E-​mu SP-​12 from producer Ced-​Gee to make “South Bronx” (1986), as KRS-​One recounted: So we ran over to Ced-​Gee’s house and were like: “Yo, Ced, we need that SP-​12 [sampler].” Keep in mind that at that time Ced-​Gee was the only person in the Bronx with an SP-​12, and he was the absolute man. So he lent us the sounds, the kick, the drum, the snare, the hi-​hat. Scott took his records over to Ced and Ced sampled them and made the beat for “South Bronx,” and Scott did the drums and Ced chopped it up.145 In dub practice, there was no division in the studio between the live room and the control room because the studio was the control room, and by extension, the producer was the musician. Similarly, in many hip-​hop studios, such as the KRS-​One anecdote exemplifies, there is no room to speak of, only the musicians and their gear. “The studio” in this context no longer implies a fixed address necessarily, but instead merely the places where the music is made. DIY recording is often associated with the terms “home recording” or “project recording,” and hip-​hop played a major role in making such a movement possible. There is no shortage of stories of hip-​hop musicians making their recordings at their home or someone else’s, like Run DMC recording “It’s Like That” in Larry Smith’s attic in South Jamaica, New York in 1983,146 or Public Enemy concocting a collage opus from their collection of over 20,000 records in their warehouse at 510 South Franklin Street on Long Island.147 These examples demonstrate Geoff Harkness’ assertion that “studios serve as a key site for much of the ‘doing’ of rap music and its attendant culture.”148 Arguably, the apex of sample-​based hip-​hop was reached with Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988), produced by a team of musicians who used the studio as a musical instrument. Known as the Bomb Squad,   Brewster and Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, 260.   Coleman, Check the Technique, 439. 142   Ridenhour and Jah, Fight the Power, 73. 143   Coleman, Check the Technique Volume 2, 381. 144   Timbaland with Chambers, Emperor of Sound, 45. 145   Coleman, Check the Technique, 82. 146   Adler, Tougher Than Leather, 56. 147   Rose, Black Noise, 89. 148   Harkness, “Get on the Mic,” 85. 140 141

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which included brothers Hank and Keith Shocklee, Eric Sadler, and Public Enemy’s own Chuck D, this production group was to sample-​based hip-​hop what the Funk Brothers were to Motown. In his commentary of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Eric Weingarten noted that Bomb Squad-​leader Hank Shocklee once said, “We use samples like an artist would use paint,”149 and building on this metaphor, Weingarten likens the Bomb Squad’s production style to “violent pointillism”; “taking a single guitar stab or drum kick and dotting the landscape until a song emerged. The Bomb Squad mistreated their samples—​when one sounded too ‘clean,’ Hank would throw the record to the floor, stomp on it and try again.”150 As told to Tricia Rose, Eric Sadler explained how the Bomb Squad improvised together using samples, drum machines, and turntables: You decide you are going to write some songs. You just work. You just write, write, write. Sometimes Chuck (D)  will come and say, “Yo I  got an idea here.” So what you try to do from there is to take the idea, put (the sample) in the drum machine, put a beat behind it and move on from there. Sometimes Keith (Schocklee) would get on the turntable and just start scratchin’, like we were a band. I’d play the drum machine for the sample, and Keith would be throwing in records.151 Chuck D’s description of the Bomb Squad’s working dynamic, as described to Brian Coleman, is similar, acknowledging the musicianship of each member: “Eric was the musician, Hank was the anti-​musician,” Chuck explains. “Eric did a lot of the [drum] programming, [Hank’s brother] Keith was the guy who would bring in the feel. And me, I would scour for vocal samples all over the Earth. I would name a song, tag it, and get the vocal samples. The friction between Hank and Eric worked very well. Hank would put a twist on Eric’s musicianship and Eric’s musicianship would put a twist on Hank.152 To Hank Shocklee, samplers were instruments, and each one had a different musical feel.153 Similarly, drum machines and mixing boards played by the Bomb Squad were selected “because of the quality of sounds they reproduce,” and in Les-​Paul-​ and King-​Tubby-​fashion, were altered to produce sounds that were not originally intended.154 In using their studio as a musical instrument, the Bomb Squad   Weingarten, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, 39.   Ibid., 40. 151   Rose, Black Noise, 89. 152   Coleman, Check the Technique, 352–​353. 153   Rose, Black Noise, 76. 154   Ibid., 77. 149 150

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demonstrated that “it is primarily through their use that technologies become musical instruments, not through their form.”155 Prior to hip-​hop, when samples were used in music production they were purposely obscured, their original identities clandestine, but hip-​hop producers drew attention to their recontextualized samples.156 They highlighted the fact that their records were made from records. In the Bomb Squad’s densely layered productions, a single song could feature close to forty-​five samples;157 taking into account current licensing fees to sample a record, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back would cost millions of dollars to make today.158 But while sample-​based hip-​hop may have lost some key copyright legal battles, it won the aesthetic war. Despite the superfluity of music technologies that have been introduced since the heyday of the sample-​ based hip-​hop era in the late 1980s, ultimately the underlying concept of using the studio as a musical instrument remains reliant on samples and synthesis. What was first done with turntables, and second with samplers, is now done with laptops, tablets, and phones. Joseph Schloss’ assertion that “at the most basic level, the hip-​hop producer’s ‘instrument’ (sampler/​sequencer, mixer, and recording device) is a rudimentary home studio,”159 could be said of most music producers, period. Hip-​hop may not be produced in every home studio, but most contemporary home studio designs are at least partly based on the practices of hip-​hop producers. Completing the loop, the Bomb Squad’s conception of using the studio as a musical instrument has come full circle; now musicians play their studios in front of live audiences, standing behind laptops on stage. The technologies/​instruments and the associated actions to play them may have changed, but the underlying ethos is indebted to a hip-​hop aesthetic.

The Contemporary Collaborative Producer: Max Martin If there is a producer who embodies building on this history of using the studio as a musical instrument and extending it into the 1990s and thereafter to the present, it is undoubtedly Karl Martin Sandberg, better known as Max Martin. In recent years Martin has become more of a known entity, given that “in both volume of hits and longevity, Max Martin eclipses all previous hit makers, including the Beatles, Phil Spector, and Michael Jackson.”160 As a songwriter, Martin has had twenty-​two songs   Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine, 159.   Rose, Black Noise, 73. 157   Ibid., 80. 158   Weingarten, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, 42. 159   Schloss, Making Beats, 46. 160   Seabrook, The Song Machine, 8. 155 156

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atop the Billboard chart, and trails only Paul McCartney and John Lennon, who have thirty-​two and twenty-​six number-​one hits respectively. In recognition of his songwriting prowess, Martin has been named Songwriter of the Year for the past six consecutive years by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). In addition, Martin has produced twenty number-​one songs, just three hit songs behind the all-​time leader in this category, George Martin. Max Martin’s production mentor in Stockholm was Denniz PoP, who first realized commercial success producing fellow Swedes Ace of Base in the early 1990s. In The Song Machine, John Seabrook likens Denniz PoP’s music production group, Cheiron, to (1) an updated version of Aldon—​a stable of songwriters who also produced their own demos; and (2) an industrialized model of dub with a focus on making tracks (beats, chord progressions, instrumentation) upon which different hooks (melodies) could be added: A strong part of Denniz’s vision for the studio was that songwriting should be a collaborative effort; no one was supposed to be proprietary about his work. Songwriters would be assigned different parts of a song to work on; choruses would be taken from one song and tried in another; a bridge might be swapped out, or a hook. Songs were written more like television shows, by teams of writers who willingly shared credit with one another.161 Martin learned how to be a producer by being around other producers, and he admitted in an interview to TIME in 2001: “I didn’t even know what a producer did . . . I spent two years day and night in that studio trying to learn what the hell was going on.”162 Retrospectively reflecting on his tenure at Cheiron in 2016, Martin indicated that much of his time was consumed using the studio as a musical instrument in the vein of Les Paul, Joe Meek, Prince, Brian Eno, and Public Enemy: “I got lost in the studio. Fiddling with the sounds, messing around with samplers.”163 A notorious perfectionist, no detail is unattended to in a Max Martin production. In the studio, he is especially fixated on vocal performances being performed to his prescribed specifications, which singers like Britney Spears164 and Kelly Clarkson165 have admitted is a time-​consuming process. While this aspect of Martin’s approach to producing is more traditional—​giving musical direction like Phil Spector, he is also an adept engineer, often performing the tedious task of editing vocal performances (“comping”) by himself. Seabrook writes that at Cheiron, Martin “knew his way around Pro Tools as well as anyone; he was as skilled at programming music   Ibid., 64.   Chu, “Top of the Pops.” 163   Gradvall, “World Exclusive.” 164   Chu, “Top of the Pops.” 165   Seabrook, The Song Machine, 139. 161 162

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as he was at playing his instrument.”166 Having been indoctrinated into the philosophy at Cheiron that “production comes first,”167 Martin labors in the studio over the idiosyncrasies of sound. He recognizes that a hit song can hinge on its production value, which is as important, if not more, than the more traditional elements of songwriting such as melody and lyrics. At present, Martin lives in Los Angeles where he has renovated a former home of Frank Sinatra into a complex of six small recording studios.168 Having produced the likes of Adele, Taylor Swift, and Justin Timberlake in recent years, Martin is as sought after as ever, and has built a music-​production empire of sorts. His house-​ turned-​studio is reminiscent of Motown’s “Hittsville,” but in the digital age where producers work on computers, aspiring to create tracks and hooks that will be amalgamated into hit songs. Martin’s recording complex is a prime example of what Antoine Hennion calls “the laboratory-​studio”:  “Producers work up their musical experiments there.”169 Tuomas Auvinen describes what this type of a producer (what he calls a “tracker”) does using the example of Mikke Vepsäläinen: His main duty is to come up with the “tracks” for a song . . . He works together with the songwriter/​top-​liner from the very early stages of the compositional process, selects sounds, works as a recording engineer, an editing engineer, and collaborates with the singer to make the vocal tracks better while contributing to improving the “top-​line” (melody), the lyrics and, through giving feedback, the vocal performance along the production process. When a tracker/​producer is working, the processes of songwriting and music production constantly intertwine and cannot be separated from one another.170 This take on the producer role—​the tracker—​creates a conceptual space in which the studio is the primary musical instrument of popular music. So-​called engineering skills such as operating a DAW like Pro Tools are considered core competencies. Whereas trailblazers like Raymond Scott and Les Paul were anomalies amongst their respective generations of music producers because of their facility with recording technologies, over time these skills traditionally associated with the field of audio engineering have been normalized as production skills in contemporary popular music. At present, when the term “producer” is incited, it is reasonable to draw the conclusion that this person has some facility with music production hardware and software because these things most likely constitute their instrument.   Ibid., 135.   Ibid., 201. 168   Gradvall, “World Exclusive.” 169   Hennion, “An Intermediary Between Production and Consumption,” 406. 170   Auvinen, “A New Breed of Home Studio Producer?” 166 167

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Max Martin’s house of recording gives an all new meaning to “home recording.” With the most successful songwriter and producer in the current era of popular music choosing to work at home, the long-​entrenched paradigm of the studio as a destination away from the domestic space has been flipped. Following decades of DIY-​ers toiling in their bedrooms and basements to rival the record industry’s sonic standards, we have now come to a point in history where in theory at least, the home—​wherever it may be—​is just as good a place as any for a recording studio. But attaining the core components of self-​sufficiency—​ease of access and ease of use—​does not amount to a level playing field in the recording industry, as Seabrook suggests is plausible: You’d think that in an age when anyone with basic computer skills can make a song on a laptop—​no musical training or instrumental mastery is required—​the charts would be flooded with newbie hit makers. The barriers to entry are low. And yet it turns out that the same handful of top writers and producer are behind hit after hit.171 Can anyone with basic computer skills make a song on a laptop? Is it true that no musical training or instrumental mastery is required? Antoine Hennion’s perspective serves as an apt rebuttal: In the studio, music is not on the one side with its laws, with which one learns how to compose, and the public with its tastes, which can be measured, on the other. The task is not just to fiddle the controls correctly so that correspondence is assured. This kind of equality does not exist:  it must be produced. This is how we would translate what the music industry professionals say with complacency but with common sense on their side: “If there were a rule for making records, everyone could do it.”172 And yet when an article circulates on social media about Steve Lacy producing “Pride” for Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN (2017) on his iPhone with GarageBand,173 it is tempting to conclude that anyone with this hardware and software could do the same. The ability to produce using the studio as a musical instrument—​whether the studio is a space you can work in or a device you can hold in your hand—​is not determined alone by ease of access and ease of use. Once the ability to be self-​ sufficient using the studio as a musical instrument is possible, the more important question becomes how is the studio used to make music? As Justin Morey suggests,

  Seabrook, The Song Machine, 9–​10.   Hennion, “An Intermediary Between Production and Consumption,” 419–​420. 173   Pierce, “The Hot New Hip-​Hop Producer Who Does Everything on His iPhone.” 171 172

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“it is not until the producers have revealed their methodology that a true picture of the process can be understood.”174

Different But the Same: Conclusions This chapter has attempted to serve as a primer on how the studio has been used as a musical instrument since the mid-​twentieth century. From Elvis to Max Martin, there is a common current that runs through the history of recording: producers—​ broadly defined—​perceiving the studio system and systems as something to be played. Granted, pop producers in the 1950s like Leiber and Stoller used the studio in radically different ways than dub producers like King Tubby in the 1970s, but musical styles aside, they played the same instrument, conceptually. Just as Art Blakey and Neil Peart are difficult to compare given their different styles and setups, but are still referred to as drummers, producer styles and setups are as varied, if not more. Like the drum set, the modularity of the studio makes it highly customizable, accommodating diverse performance practices. While the studio may not have the same level of recognition as a musical instrument compared to more traditional instruments with longer social histories, it has increasingly been taken up by musicians since the latter half of the twentieth century. While scatterings of articles in the popular music press skim the surface of how producers make contemporary popular music, we know little about the inner workings of the present-​day DIY studio. Building on the past innovations of using the studio as a musical instrument ushered in by producers of rock, pop, dub, and hip-​hop, part II of this book examines how studios are played at present in DIY contexts.

  Morey, “Arctic Monkeys.”

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Part II

MADE IN BROOKLYN The research for this book was conducted between 2010 and 2015, a period in which the borough of Brooklyn became increasingly sought-​after in the real estate market. For example, per a report from the New York Times, the average rent for a one-​bedroom apartment in Brooklyn during this period increased by 29  percent to $2,607 per month.1 Further, the results of a longitudinal study published in 2015 revealed that particular neighborhoods experienced even steeper increases in rent: “Over the last dozen years, rents rose in Williamsburg by 76 percent (inflation adjusted), in Bushwick by 50 percent, in Bedford Stuyvesant by 47 percent.”2 Writing decades earlier in 1992 for New  York, Brad Gooch described how Brooklyn, especially Williamsburg, had morphed into a new haven for artists where a studio apartment could be rented for $250 per month.3 Robert Anasi reflected that Williamsburg in these early days of artist-​led gentrification was a “ghost town” and that Bedford station, its figurative heart, was “a bleak hole.”4 In contrast, at present he observed: “It could be a blue-​collar enclave in any old industrial town except that the occupants of these railroad apartments are as likely to have graduated from Yale as the University of the Streets.”5 The story of escalating rents in Williamsburg and its surrounding neighborhoods in Brooklyn over the past few decades is a textbook example of artists as “harbingers of gentrification.”6 Writing for the New York Times in 2003, Denny Lee observed: “To some extent, the self-​proclaimed hipster capital of New York, if not the world, was a victim of its own P.R.”7 Now, gone like the venue Glasslands are the glory days of   Kaysen, “Priced Out of a Childhood Home.”   Forman, Creative New York, 17. 3   Gooch, “The New Bohemia,” 28. 4   Anasi, The Last Bohemia, 21. 5   Ibid., 7. 6   Forman, Creative New York, 10. 7   Lee, “Has Billburg Lost Its Cool?” 1 2

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Brooklyn’s music scene: “In the past 15 years, more than 20 percent of New York City’s smaller venues have closed, among them some of the industry’s most prominent and revered locations.”8 Artists have moved upstate or to New York’s unofficial sixth borough:  Detroit. Williamsburg, once touted as “New  York’s hippest neighborhood,”9 is increasingly resembling another former indie music epicenter on the other side of Manhattan—​Hoboken, New Jersey—​where strollers outnumber the strummers.10 Despite the increased cost of living and decimation of arts infrastructure in favor of luxury apartments and condominiums, Brooklyn, at one point or another, attracted the musicians profiled in this book, and they have stayed. Historically, New  York City has been a musician-​magnet, attracting aspiring musicians from across the country with the allure of a creative community where musical trends are set and reset. This point was reiterated in Music in New York City, a 2017 report produced by the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment: What drives New  York City’s music DNA? Start with the extraordinary level of cultural diversity. Across the five boroughs, a melting pot of cultures has been the lifeblood of musical innovation, making New York City the city where entire genres have been created and defined. Salsa rhythms were conceived in El Barrio in the 1960s. Punk rock got off the ground at CBGB’s and other Bowery Street music clubs in the 1970s—​the same decade when the disco took its first beats in New York City dance clubs. Hip-​hop came to life on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx in the 1980s. Add renowned music landmarks like Carnegie Hall, The Apollo Theatre, Strawberry Fields, and The Village Vanguard, and the result is a rich tapestry of musical tradition.11 The report details that the city supports over 57,000 music-​related jobs, outpacing job growth in finance and healthcare,12 but average salaries are by comparison low ($50,000), and also skewed by outlier mega stars like Beyoncé and Jay-​Z who call New York home.13 Frank Sinatra famously sang about New York: “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere,” and “making it,” financially, seems near impossible for a musician in the current economic climate. This is true of the rest of the United States, too, as Scott Timberg noted in Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class: A 2012 study of U.S.-​based musicians and composers by the Future of Music Coalition, which involved a survey, interviews, and financial audits, found median earnings from music to be $34,455 gross, before expenses.   New York City Mayor’s Office, Music in New York City, 17.   Lanham, The Hipster Handbook, 77. 10   Bahrampour, “The Births of the Cool.” 11   New York City Mayor’s Office, Music in New York City, 9. 12   Ibid., 13. 13   Ibid., 16. 8 9

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The sources of this income include—​in descending order of importance—​ live performance, teaching, salaried playing, composing, sound recordings, session work, “other,” and merchandise. (Musicians earned, on average, 6 percent of their income from recordings.) Despite all the cheer in the blogosphere about the wonders of self-​releasing music, musicians who self-​release earned about half of what artists with a label deal made: the average gross for self-​releasing musicians was $26,518.14 Brooklyn, like anywhere else in America, has little capital in the conventional sense to offer the DIY musician, but its large stake in cultural capital makes it the American DIY-​ er’s default destination. This phenomenon occurs across the globe in other artisan destinations such as Berlin (Kreuzberg), Madrid (Malasaña), Melbourne (Fitzroy), and Singapore (Tiong Bahru). Brooklyn serves as what qualitative methodologist Robert Stake labels an instrumental case study because “a particular case is examined mainly to provide insight into an issue or to redraw a generalization.”15 In other words, Brooklyn was chosen strategically because it boasts of a concentration of musicians engaged in the practice of DIY recording. While Brooklyn is an important part of the story of Dawn of the DAW, it could just have easily been written about people from a small community such as the rural town I grew up in Canada; the music education that emerges from the experience of DIY recording with a computer, tablet, or phone is as ubiquitous as the technology itself.

Brooklyn: The Cultural Capital of DIY The rise of DIY recording is but one of the many DIY movements occurring in the borough of Brooklyn and beyond. Contextualizing the avocation of DIY recording amidst the broader culture of DIY provides a frame of reference to evaluate the social significance of using DIY recording studios to make music, and its impact on music-​ learning practices. Brooklyn is bustling with artisans pedaling their homemade fares such as soda, beer, taffy, jam, pickles, granola, salsa, popsicles, beef jerky, and even beet ketchup. Woven into the appeal of the small-​batch homemade product is a sense of nostalgic romanticism for a time when life seemed simpler and food was not mass produced, genetically modified, or chemically augmented. Concerns about environmental sustainability, health, and economic inequality have served as catalysts to increase the social capital of DIY. For example, consider the elaborate production process of Brooklyn-​based Mast Brothers Chocolate, which entails importing cocoa beans from the Dominican Republic with a wind-​powered schooner that was built by hand in Cape Cod.16 The   Timberg, Culture Crash, 91.   Stake, “Qualitative Case Studies,” 445. 16   Wallace, “The Twee Party.” 14 15

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Mast brothers’ manufacturing model is vertically integrated—​everything is done in one building with a small dedicated staff that upholds similar ideals as their employers. For most consumers, ten dollars is a hefty sum to shell out for a few ounces of compressed cocoa dressed in royalty-​worthy wrappers, but people are willing to pay the price because they are buying into a concept; they are purchasing both process and product.17 DIY carries with it the connotation of being created with care and pride by a human as opposed to being made in an automated, sterilized, emotion-​void factory. It is with the same care and pride that the participants profiled in part II craft their songs in their DIY studios, and it is changing the nature of how music is made and learned. While the recording industry has undergone an upheaval in the DAW decades, there has been a growth spurt in the population of DIY-​ers holed up in bedroom and basement studios. My aim for conducting this research was to find some of these DIY-​ers and document their making and learning processes with the hope that these findings could be helpful for the field of music education. Table II.1 details the initial information I collected from each participant profiled in part II through a survey I conducted on DIY recording practices in New York. I  used this information to solicit participants who represented a heterogeneous group:  varied ages, genders, races, musical backgrounds, recording experiences, and so on. Michael, Tara, Tyler, and Jimmy each graciously donated at least twenty-​five hours of their time to be observed and interviewed by me. I wanted to know how they made music with their studios, and how they learned to do it. Drawing primarily on the works of Robert Stake and Eliot Eisner, but also Norman Denzin, Ricki Goldman, and Evan Tobias, I used the tools of an ethnographer to document the working processes of the four participants. Observation in this context was derived from participant-​recorded videos, and whenever possible, screen recordings (including the sound) of their computers. Based on these observations and the in-​depth conversations I had with each participant, I formulated the narratives presented in part II. Rather than refer to each participant’s story as a case, I  have labeled them as tracks, making this a multitrack study. First, each track presents the participants’ learning histories with music and recording technologies. Second, each track presents the participants engaged in DIY recording in their own respective ways. Third, due to the personalized nature of DIY recording, each track focuses on a different aspect of the production process:  sound selection, tracking, editing, and mixing. Ultimately, the focus of part II is on the particularities of each participant’s pedagogy, focusing on two broad questions: (1) how does DIY recording work, and (2) how is it learned?

  Cope, Small Batch, 123–​124.

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Table II.1 Demographic data of participants Participant Survey Item

Michael

Tara

Jimmy

Tyler

Age

53

27

32

29

Gender

Male

Female

Male

Male

Race

White

African American Manhattan

White

Borough

Mixed Race Brooklyn

Occupational Category

Arts

Arts

Technical Services

Management of Companies

Instrument 1

Guitar

Piano

Guitar

Piano

Years played

40

23

8

25

Self-​assessed skill level

9/​10

8/​10

10/​10

8/​10

Piano

Voice

-​

Guitar

Years played

20

-​

-​

19

Self-​assessed skill level

2/​10

5/​10

-​

8/​10

Mandolin

-​

-​

Bass

Years played

15

-​

-​

10

Self-​assessed skill level

3/​10

-​

-​

5/​10

-​

-​

-​

Drums

Years played

-​

-​

-​

10

Self-​assessed skill level

-​

-​

-​

2/​10

Self-​assessed ranking of musical training

10/​10

9/​10

2/​10

3/​10

Number of years of formal music training

5

More than 0 10

4

Number of years played in a band

More than 10

0

Less than 1

More than 10

Music type

Rock, Classical

Pop

Pop, Rock, Dance

Electronic, Pop

Contribution of music to income

91–​100%

51–​60%

0–​10%

21–​30%

Instrument 2

Instrument 3

Instrument 4

Brooklyn

Brooklyn

(continued)

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Table II.1 Continued Participant Survey Item

Michael

Tara

Jimmy

Tyler

Years of recording music

4

8

More than 10

45 Desktop

More than 100 Desktop

More than 100

Computer

More than 10 More than 100 Laptop

Operating system

Mac

Mac

Mac

Mac

Music software

Logic & Ableton TASCAM US-​122

Logic

Pro Tools

Ableton

Mbox

DIGI 192

MOTU Traveller

Musical pieces recorded

Soundcard

Laptop

I acknowledge that, as Clifford Geertz wryly observed, these writings are “interpretations,” and therefore are, “fictions, in the sense that they are ‘something made,’ ‘something fashioned’ . . . not that they are false, unfactual, or merely ‘as if ’ thought experiments.”18 In other words, the tracks are my versions, or as I like to think of them, my dubs.

  Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 15.

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3 Track 1 Michael

I arrived ten minutes early at the Starbucks location in Carrol Gardens, Brooklyn, where Michael suggested we meet. My previous experience buying instruments from people on Craigslist has taught me that when meeting someone at a public place they tend to wait near the door, so I took up my post beside the entrance, eyeing the comers and goers. Michael was easy to spot as he looks like a guitarist: he has long curly hair and a goatee. I scolded myself for social profiling and assuming what a fifty-​three-​year-​old guitarist looked like; surely guitarists don’t have “a look.” But I  was right. I  play guitar, too, so perhaps we can recognize our own. Michael was operating on rock and roll time (fashionably late) and seemed a bit disheveled. He greeted me with an apology for being late and offered to buy me a coffee. Every table and chair was occupied so we opted to sit outside on this brisk February morning. After explaining my proposed method, Michael agreed in principle to participate. Despite expressing mild disappointment that such an investment of his time did not garner any financial compensation, Michael empathized with the fact that I was operating on a lean budget. He liked the intent of my proposed study and seemed genuinely invested in the idea of contributing to my quest of gaining insight into what goes on in a DIY recording studio like his. A few days later we met outside of the subway stop nearest his home. Michael gave me a walking tour of the neighborhood, pointing out the restaurants he likes and making a detour to show me a neighbor’s eclectic home front that is plastered with a gaudy mosaic of figurines. When we got to his apartment, we sat at his cluttered kitchen table (Figure 3.1​​), which often doubles as his studio, and discussed some logistics, such as operating the video camera and making screen recordings using QuickTime. With the technical details taken care of, I armed my battered pocket recorder, ready to delve into the extensive musical history of Michael.

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Figure 3.1  Michael’s kitchen table. 

The Car Stereo Classroom: Learning History Michael grew up in Savannah, Georgia; his parents were lovers of music theatre and his first instrument was a Sears “crappy little drum kit.” He played it until “it fell apart.” His father conceded: “Son, you got everything you could out of it,” he said, and Michael did not pick up an instrument again until he was thirteen: My father had remarried and his second wife brought home a guitar and I had figured out a couple of chords, I asked some of her friends, and she came home one day and saw me figuring out a song, “I’d Love to Change the World” by Ten Years After, dropping the needle and stopping it and figuring out what the chords were. Learning the names and shapes of the chords D, C, G, A, Em, and Am, from a friend, along with using a record player to deduce the chord progression of a song, exemplify what Lucy Green refers to as informal music-​learning strategies.1 For a couple of years, Michael took lessons with a local guitarist. I asked if he could recall what he   Green, Music, Informal Learning, and the School, 6–​9.

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gleaned from those lessons, and interestingly his most salient memory had more to do with recording technology: He had a nice car with an eight-​track in it—​something I’d never seen before, headphones in his car, which was probably not illegal, yet. He goes, “Hey dig this, check it out!” and he put on Santana’s Abraxas (1970), and you know the spacey thing where everything is panning left and right and I’m sitting there, I’m a kid and going, “This is the coolest thing I have ever heard in my life.” The term panning, meaning the placement of a sound in the stereo spectrum from left to right, is not a term one would find in literature pertaining to guitar pedagogy. The pan knob is typically located directly above the gain sliders on a mixing console. In the mixing of the Abraxas (1970) album, the engineer would have turned the pan knob intermittently left and right during the mix-​down to achieve “the spacey thing” of which Michael spoke. Michael’s mastery of guitar and recording techniques developed in tandem throughout his adolescence. After inheriting his uncle’s record collection, he became enamored with the sound of early 1970s “golden era” rock: “I loved the engineering, especially those first two Led Zeppelin albums. They were just fat and beautiful.” Listening to a record went beyond listening to the musicians’ performances and took into account recording techniques. C A S S E T T E C R E AT I V I T Y S I N C E 1 9 7 7 :   S E L F - ​L E D E X P L O R AT I O N S I N   O V E R D U B B I N G

Using a cassette-​tape recorder, Michael wrote and recorded his own music: “When I  was thirteen,” he remembered, “what I  was doing during that time was writing my own music, a lot of which I still have on cassette, my own little songs. I’ve got a ninety-​minute cassette of fourteen original songs.” Michael continued this practice into his young adulthood and his technological savvy continued to blossom. His tinkering led to an important discovery: When I was in high school my graduation present was an old Akai cassette deck. It had a mic input and a line input on the back, and two microphone inputs in the front, and a line input on the back. You could blend them so you could get in effect multitrack recordings. So, I was doing that early on my own with an old cassette, putting it into the back, adding effects, doing it again, doing it again . . . I’ve been doing that with microphones on my own since 1977. When Michael remarked “doing it again, doing it again,” he was referring to the act of performing multiple guitar parts on top of each other, like Les Paul’s

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sound-​on-​sound technique. As Michael intimated, his approach to recording had increased in sophistication since his early forays with the tape recorder at age thirteen. Interestingly, one of Michael’s music heroes, Jon Brion, reported a similar experience: “As a kid, I was fascinated with tape recorders, I love everything about them  .  .  .  I  was thirteen years old and realizing the significance of an overdub.”2 Additionally, Daniel Lanois, longtime producer of the band U2, recollected a strikingly similar account of discovering overdubbing with one of his first cassette recorders: It had a “sound on sound” feature. I  had now found my secret weapon. The Sony allowed me to record on channel 1, and then on listening back I could transfer that sound onto channel 2, along with some more singing or playing in the room. A miracle! I could now stack up tracks by bouncing them from channel to channel.3 André Millard posits young men developed a kinship with technology during the sales-​boom era of the electric guitar in the 1960s: Electricity was one of the important symbols of modernity in the United States and Western Europe, and it was entirely in male hands. Technology was considered a male preserve . . . technological enthusiasm was seen as an activity of boys and young men.4 In the span of five years Michael’s approach to recording changed markedly, much of it due to technological enthusiasm and tinkering. This progression was paralleled in his study of the guitar. GOING CLASSICAL

At the age of fifteen, Michael was introduced to classical music through rock recordings and this, along with the influence of young love, greatly altered his guitar studies: I discovered classical music brought to me by all my favorite British art rockers: Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman, the keyboard players in particular. Bands like Gentle Giant, Yes, and a whole bunch of obscure British and European art rock bands—​they are as influenced by classical music as they were by rock and jazz, and I loved that merging.   As cited in Crane, “Jon Brion,” 90.   Lanois, Soul Mining, 17. 4   Millard, The Electric Guitar, 157. 2 3

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My first girlfriend played flute in the youth orchestra, and turned me onto a couple of Bach pieces, and gave me recordings to listen to: Jean-​ Pierre Rampal playing the Prokofiev flute Sonata, which is really beautiful, a pretty priceless recording; the Beethoven nine symphonies, Toscanini’s mono recordings, not some big stereo recording. You didn’t listen to it necessarily on the headphones, you listen to it like you would on a big radio. It was pretty fascinating to get to know Beethoven symphonies that way. So I’m crazy in love with this girl, and she’s like, you need to study, because she was going to go off to college and get her music degree. And I was like, “Well I’m going to go do that too.” And she was like, “Well you need to learn how to play classical guitar then because that’s the only way it’s going to happen.” Even Michael’s explanation of transitioning to playing classical music ushers in some aspect of recording. Most notable is the distinction he makes between listening to a recording like a Beethoven symphony in mono versus stereo. Further, it is important to note that at this point, Michael’s exposure to classical music was primarily through recordings. True to his word, Michael sought out a classical guitar teacher, and the closest thing he could find was a pianist who composed for guitar. These lessons in which he progressed through the six books of Mel Bay’s classical guitar series proved sufficient to gain entrance into college where he studied Andres Segovia’s method of classical guitar. By his own account, Michael was the first to graduate from his university with a degree in classical guitar performance in 1980. Robert Walser suggests that Michael’s experience was representative of the era: Classical guitar teachers had begun to appear on college faculties around the time heavy metal emerged as a genre in the early 1970s. The classical influence owed something to the fact that virtually all of these teachers had started by playing some kind of popular music, turning later to the budding field of classical guitar, which had been almost single-​handedly chartered by Andres Segovia.5 After finishing school, Michael traveled to Europe and “continued his education” by “taking in concerts,” but he did not work as a classical musician. “I was writing my own stuff, still playing and singing, doing my own little thing, but also busking on the streets mostly. I didn’t do the rock and roll thing, didn’t pick up an electric much until I was maybe twenty-​six.”

  Walser, Running with the Devil, 90.

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After relocating to Atlanta where he lived for fifteen years before vacating the Peach State for the Big Apple, Michael collaborated with various other musicians: “That’s where I learned to play the electric guitar; it was writing stuff in a couple of bands and learning other people’s material. Some of those people went on to become somebody, and some of them didn’t.” Much of Michael’s time in Atlanta was spent recording. He estimates that he played on twenty CDs during that fifteen-​year span, one of which includes his own original material, recorded over a month in 1994. I asked Michael if he had a lot of input in the process and he responded: Not when it comes to professional EQing, that’s where I referred to the engineer. I let her make those kinds of decisions, like the mic that sounded the best. For a number of reasons: she had been doing that for a long time with this gear that she has had, and she had acquired it all by herself, and she knew what worked the best. Sometimes I might make a judgment call about the sound of something, and when it comes to the mixing, I definitely put in a lot in the mixing process because by 1989 I was pretty darn good recording with four-​track analog cassette recorders. Michael’s response to this question typifies what I  would expect given the era. While commercial digital recording and its flag carrier, Pro Tools, were in circulation at this time, it had not yet taken root in the mainstream recording industry, and as a result, tape was still the default recording medium. Operating a tape-​based recording studio was largely left in the hands of professional audio engineers. Michael’s recollection of the recording process makes it clear that certain decisions (e.g., microphone selection and equalizing) were reserved for the domain of the audio engineer. Mixing, however, is a different story because Michael sees mixing as weaving the musical with the technical, as illustrated by his glowing admiration of the production achievements of Jon Brion: “Aimee Mann’s Whatever (1993) was produced and engineered by Jon Brion, and that sound blew my brains away. What is he doing? Jon Brion is a genius!” I asked Michael what was genius about Brion’s production, and he elaborated: Just the way he would have melodic lines come in and out, orchestration colors, panning it. Also, being at times not afraid to be outlandish if he felt like it called for it. I couldn’t get enough of some of the tunes. In terms of production, each song having its own environment that it lived in. Almost like all of a sudden you’re being dropped inside a completely new world for the duration of that song.

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Michael’s description reveals a deep appreciation for production style, especially the melding of panning and orchestration to achieve the effect of creating a unique sonic state. Meanwhile, outside of the studio operated by professional engineers and within the walls of his home, Michael continued to adopt more sophisticated means of producing recordings. His explanation of using a MiniDisc demonstrates the increased complexity of his approach: It works like the old four-​track cassette recorders except it’s much more precise. You can be much more accurate with where your punch-​ins and punch-​ outs are, and you can do multiple takes. Say there’s a guitar solo, and you want to do the guitar solo five times and then choose the one that you want to keep, not comping, you choose the one take, listen back to all five, and just choose the one you want in there and boom they’re on that track. Although Michael replaced the cassette-​based recording system with the MiniDisc in his studio, the MiniDisc served the same purpose; the medium changed, but the method of recording did not. Michael’s explanation contains some technical terms that warrant defining: “punch-​ins and punch-​outs” and “comping.” A punch refers to recording a part that occurs mid-​song, and Michael provided a concrete example with his explanation of the guitar solo. In rock music, guitar solos tend to happen mid-​song, and tend not to span an entire song, making it a part that could be punched-​in and punched-​ out in a multitrack recording. Typically, the guitarist is cued up on the recording and given a count in of a bar before they are to start playing their part (the punch-​in). After the guitarist finishes the part, the recording is stopped (the punch-​out). Punching is a time-​saving approach; the instrumentalist or vocalist is only recorded on the sections of the song on which they perform. While comping can be defined simply as the assembly of multiple takes of a performance to create one best take, Mike Howlett sees comping as a tool for interpreting how to perform a piece of music. Based on his experiences working with vocalists in recording studios, Howlett made an important observation: I came to realize that . . . through hearing themselves over and over again, these singers had at last defined their approach to the songs in their own minds. Something that is not often recognized about the recording process is that songs rarely arrive in the studio fully formed. The melody and the structure will have been loosely defined, but all those subtle details—​the particular phrasing of a line, an emotional emphasis on a word, all the minute details that go to make a powerful rendition.6   Howlett, “Producing a Credible Vocal,” 31.

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Using a studio to flesh out musical ideas that are loosely defined is a common practice of Michael’s. He often works on ideas or exercises, treating the studio like a lab of experimentation. Michael gave an example of experimenting with a computer-​ based program called Fruity Loops: Things that I  enjoyed about working with that old Windows 98 computer: One was the fifty-​dollar version of Fruity Loops software that I got endless entertainment from, especially the sampling stuff, like recording myself singing something, and then triggering it on the guitar. I could play the guitar and it plays my voice singing this chord. Michael expanded upon his explanation on how he was able to play his voice with his guitar: When I say guitar I also mean guitar synthesizer. The [Roland] GR-​30 is the guitar synthesizer from 1997. It has orchestral sounds on it like strings and timpani and piccolo and all that. But it also MIDIs out to whatever else you want. You can MIDI to another unit that has better orchestral sounds. Or just keep it as a MIDI file and find one later. The steps involved in playing a chord on the guitar with the resulting sound of Michael’s voice singing that chord involve some innovative uses of recording technology. Fruity Loops is a software program that is primarily used to make rhythmic loops and beats and was widely used in the early 2000s, especially in electronic-​ based music (it is now called FL Studio and is widely used in hip-​hop production). Using a microphone, Michael recorded his voice into Fruity Loops to create a sample. The pitch of that sample can be shifted to represent any other note on the musical staff. MIDI on its own does not produce sound; instead it is a set of messages that carries information such as what note to play and how loud to play it. In order to send the MIDI messages from his guitar to his computer running Fruity Loops, Michael uses a special type of guitar pickup (Roland GK-​2A) that connects to a foot-​controlled multieffects processor (Roland GR-​30). Together, these two pieces of hardware process and interpret the pitches, durations, and velocities (volumes) of each note Michael plays on his guitar. These messages are then relayed to a MIDI-​ to-​USB interface, completing the connection from the guitar to the computer, and finally sending the information to Fruity Loops where the samples are triggered and a sound is produced—​all of this occurs in milliseconds. It was also during this time in the late 1990s and early 2000s that Michael tinkered with other emerging software programs such as Cool Edit Pro (now called Adobe Audition): What I really started using though is just the stereo editing. This is when I got my Roland UA-​30 audio interface, which came with Cool Edit Pro

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software, a stereo software editor of audio. I  would take twenty-​minute jams and do these edits and condense it down to ten, and then take that and put that on two tracks of the MiniDisc, adding stuff while I’m doing it. Even in the era of computer-​based recording, Michael hybridized his studio, integrating the old (the MiniDisc recorder), with the new (Cool Edit Pro), to enable himself to improvise with existing improvisations. Again, Michael’s goal in using his DIY studio in this instance was not to compose anew, but rather to facilitate an exercise. Editing down an improvisation or “jam” requires a discerning ear to detect a fitting place to cut out a section without the listener being able to tell that the music has been edited from its original form. Using a cross-​fade (fading one track out while another track fades in at equal proportions) in Cool Edit Pro, Michael was able to achieve this illusion. In principle this task seems simple, but in reality perfecting the timing to avoid pops, clips, and other artifacts of audio manipulation requires both skill and practice. Recall that when Michael recorded his album in 1994 he perceived some tasks as being too technical for him to assume. In the analog era, splicing tape to edit audio was completely unforgiving and reserved for the recording engineer, but the digital realm affords the likes of Michael to try such feats without negative consequence because of its nondestructive editing capability. T H E S K E U O M O R P H I C A D VA N TA G E :   N E W T E C H N O L O G I E S , OLD CONCEPTS

Two years ago, Michael purchased a MacBook Pro and started using the DAWs GarageBand and Logic, and more recently Ableton Live. The recording software Michael used primarily during the 2000s (prior to 2010), was the industry standard, Pro Tools. Michael’s recording rig during that time consisted of a Mac G4, Pro Tools 6.4, and an Mbox—​Pro Tools’ proprietary audio interface. Like many DIY studio users, Michael was impressed with the capabilities that Pro Tools offered: As far as an audio interface it was far superior to everything I  had ever worked with before. It took me a long time to get used to because I didn’t have anybody tutoring me and I didn’t have any help files, so I just had to figure it out for myself, but you know I had had a little bit of experience. But I loved it. Symptoms of Lucy Green’s criteria of the informally trained musician are present in Michael’s learning approach with recording technology.7 Using phrases such as “I didn’t have anybody tutoring me,” and “I just had to figure it out for myself,” Michael made it clear that he taught himself how to use Pro Tools, a program that   Green, Music, Informal Learning, and the School, 6–​9.

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some people go to technical schools or colleges to learn. Granted, Michael was not venturing into unfamiliar territory. Saying he had some experience was an understatement—​Pro Tools is based conceptually on the same multitrack recorders Michael had utilized since his adolescent years. Additionally, Pro Tools and most other DAWs incorporate a high degree of skeuomorphic design. According to Katherine Hayles, “Skeuomorph is a term anthropologists use for a device that once had a functional purpose but in a successor artifact loses its functionality and is retained as a design motif or decorative element.”8 A great advantage of software incorporating skeuomorphism is that new users are provided with visual cues of familiarity, easing the difficulty of making the transition from hardware to software. There is however a significant downside to skeuomorphic design philosophy, namely that new technologies are used for old ways of thinking and doing. This becomes very apparent when considering that there now exists a generation of music-​makers who will never encounter a mixing console or external effects like the ones Michael grew up using. The software this new generation uses is based on, and in some ways limited by preceding recording technologies. These limitations extend beyond the restraints they impose on the technology itself, dictating how we work and therefore how we make music. For Michael, the seasoned home recorder, using Pro Tools presented challenges, but his learning curve was flattened by skeuomorphic design. Michael knew how to record; what he did not know was how to navigate the software and access the tools he needed. For example, prior to Pro Tools, Michael used a sixteen-​channel analog mixing console to mix from his MiniDisc recorder to a CD burner. Most mixers follow a standardized layout, and the software-​based virtual mixer in Pro Tools is no different. Instead of twisting knobs and sliding faders with his hands on a console, Michael uses a mouse to perform the same actions in Pro Tools, a process that has been popularly termed mixing-​in-​the-​box. In his analog studio, accompanying his mixing console, Michael has two external rack-​mount multieffects units. If Michael wants to add an effect such as reverb or delay to a track, he buses the signal to one of those units to achieve the desired effect. Again, Pro Tools does its best to emulate the analog studio, and with the click of a mouse, Michael can “bus” a signal internally to a software-​based effect, commonly known as plugins to achieve the same end. Starting in 2003, Michael recorded a series of compositions for various performing arts spaces in New  York, showcasing in notable venues such as La MaMa E.T.C. (Experimental Theatre Club) and St. Ann’s Warehouse. To show me an example, Michael flipped open his MacBook, pulled up his personal webpage, loaded a clip from an hour-​long piece he did in 2010, and explained: “They wanted Busby Berkeley music, you know, the water-​dancing stuff from the 1930s. That’s what she [the show’s producer] was looking for, so   Hayles, “The Complexities of Seriation,” 119.

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I had to write this.” Michael was very nonchalant about what he presented to me, underselling it, but it was immediately clear that he is a very versatile musician. I  heard the sound of muted trumpets in the section of music he played and asked him how he made this music. There was so much music and it must have taken him weeks—​how did he do it? Michael explained that the muted trumpets were produced by his guitar synthesizer. He writes everything on his guitar, then records several takes of improvisations and selects the best ones. This is a thin description, and it is difficult to fault Michael for not providing a more thorough account of how he made this music with his computer; it was two years ago and he was not cognizant of the minutiae of the recording process. Fortunately, Michael provided hours of screen recordings of his present-​day music-​making to sift through, and therein lay the crux of how he uses his DIY studio to achieve his compositional goals.

On the Road . . . Again Over the three-​month period of data collection, Michael was very diligent about staying in touch over email, letting me know how his work was progressing, and making time for an interview or a meet-​up to give me video files. These meetings were planned around his touring schedule. Michael makes all of his income from playing music, and much of that entails touring. His touring career has run the gamut of music venues, taking him across the country and across the world to crowds large and small: The largest audience I’ve played in front of was the Pink Pop festival in Holland, which was ten thousand people. That was the biggest—​ satellite feeds everywhere . . . I did play Irvine Plaza sold out . . .. And now we’re playing in freaking North Dakota bringing our own PA, whatever. During the final month of the study, Michael returned from a tour that took him to Wisconsin, North Dakota, Montana, Portland, and Washington. He played most nights in the span of two weeks, including one stretch of gigs on five consecutive nights. Michael sighed and said, “Three sets a night, man. That’s hard work, sometimes four. That’s four hours, 8  p.m. to 12 a.m., or something like that usually.” Michael was home for a week before he had to travel to Australia with a different group for a three-​week tour that included a transcontinental drive in a camper van from Sydney to Perth. While this may seem tangential from the subject at hand, it is critical to take into account the broader context of Michael’s life as a musician. My discussion of him is predominantly as a DIY studio user, but the reality is that his home is often on the road. Being a laptop owner, it is possible for Michael to record

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on the road, but his energies are consumed on stage, and his personal recording projects are relegated to his time spent at home in Brooklyn.

Alone at the Kitchen Table: Learning Ableton When Michael played his studio it took place either in his kitchen (Figure 3.1) or his living room (Figure 3.2​​). On this particular occasion, with his laptop parked in front of his television, Michael morphed his TV cabinet into a makeshift workstation. As a courtesy to me, at the beginning of the screen recording, Michael announced: “It’s 12:32 p.m., April 3rd.” I was his sole audience and he talked me through his thought process as he clicked away on his computer: “I’m going to Ableton Live, which I downloaded today, and I’m going to see what it does . . . I registered it and everything. I have never used Ableton Live in my life.” While I have seen many screen recordings of people exploring software on sites such as YouTube, this screen recording made by Michael using QuickTime on his laptop is particularly unique for two reasons: First, Michael was learning how to use the software, and second, the intended audience was me. In contrast, the legions of audio-​recording aficionados posting their tutorials to

Figure 3.2  Michael’s living room. 

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Figure 3.3  Ableton interface. Instructions are in the right-​hand window. 

YouTube do so with the intent of teaching and disseminating their expertise to someone else, and that someone else could be anybody who stumbled upon it as the result of a simple keyword search. E X P L E T I V E S ! F I R S T E N C O U N T E R S W I T H   A B L E TO N

Over the course of an hour, Michael navigated through the software’s text-​based tutorials that appeared onscreen in a window alongside the other windows that comprise the Ableton graphical interface (Figure 3.3), often reading the instructions aloud. From this screen recording we get a firsthand look at what learning a new DAW looks and sounds like. Minute-​long stretches of silence that are only interspersed by sighs and “hmms” occur frequently throughout the hour as Michael digested the information he consumed. After reading the first set of instructions on how to connect his external audio device to Ableton, his first reaction was one of frustrated bewilderment: “Ten minutes?! Okay, man! . . . it says it’s going to take ten minutes!” Despite his initial grievance, his tone quickly changed as he was able to easily connect his device. The hardware connection itself was simple, the audio interface connects via a USB cable, but ensuring that the software recognized the hardware was more complicated. Michael’s tone returned to frustration again as he tried to find out how to configure MIDI in Ableton, venting, “Well, I’m sorry, that’s bad design. That’s just really clumsy.” Despite the stumbling block, Michael intuitively sifted through the next set of instructions, and announced that he was ready to see if he could get his guitar to connect with Ableton:  “Let’s see if we have a signal from my guitar

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synthesizer . . . that’s debatable right? Yeah definitely not . . . oh dear.” The sound of the guitar was audible when Michael plucked a string, but it was the acoustic sound picked up by the laptop’s microphone, not the sound of Ableton processing his guitar as he had hoped. With some more explorative persistence Michael clicked with purpose on his screen, finding an option called “Live Instruments,” which presented a series of choices. The path he chose was as follows: Instruments —​> instrument rack —​> ambient and evolving —​> ambient-​alien riches (Figure 3.4). Michael strummed his guitar and the resultant sound was a swirl of electronic polyphony that bore absolutely no resemblance to the chord he played. “I love that stuff!” Michael exclaimed, and he became more playful. He mimicked a French accent as he talked through the process of saving a file for the first time: “Make a new folder, call it Ableton.” He figured out how to change sounds as he selected a different option under “ambient and evolving” called “Ambient-​Bells and Formants.” Michael reacted excitedly to the sounds he produced: “Wow this is some beautiful stuff, this is great!” The triumphs during Michael’s Ableton expedition came in ebbs and flows.

Figure 3.4  Michael chooses “ambient-​alien riches.” 

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R E A D Y, A I M , M I S F I R E :   C L I C K S O F   I N T E N T

In his attempts to produce sound in Ableton with his guitar, Michael vocalized his thoughts, which reveal that he was using a trial-​and-​error approach to working with Ableton: • • • •

“I’m trying the guitar sustain pedal now to see what it does.” “Here goes nothing.” “Let’s figure it out here. If I double-​click on that, what do I get?” “Let’s just see if I drag it there . . . okee dokee.”

Lucy Green’s label of haphazard learning,9 is apt as there is a disorganized chaos to Michael’s approach. Green’s use of the term haphazard helps to describe the seemingly endless possibilities of how, when, and where music learning takes place, but the word haphazard also implies that the intent to learn is not necessarily present. This is problematic because there are many instances in which Michael’s actions were motivated by the expectation that learning would occur, and new skills would be acquired. To her credit, Green’s discussion of musical immersion and enculturation clearly convey the presence of intent in informal learning: This includes early experimentation with an instrument or the voice, and discovering what different sounds they can make through trial and error, before stringing sounds together into embryonic musical phrases, rhythms or harmonies.10 “Experimentation” and “trial and error” best describe Michael’s approach to learning Ableton. Every action he performed had purpose behind it. He may have seemed disoriented in the maze that is Ableton, but every click of the mouse had purpose; his actions were not aimless. The learning and music-​making that took place were not happenstance. It took approximately forty-​five minutes until Michael was able to record an audio signal. En route to this miniature milestone, Michael was repeatedly frustrated with the software. He was obviously bewildered and annoyed at times with Ableton, but his expletives should not be equated with anger, and in fact Michael often accompanied these comments with a laugh of disbelief. Here are some examples: • “That’s not recording, it’s not recording a bloody thing.” (spoken in an English accent imitating Ringo Starr)

  Green, Music, Informal Learning, and the School, 23.   Ibid., 6.

9 10

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• “It’s not designed to record, how fucking weird! . . . A gigabyte and a half and you can’t record.” • “No, delete, I just want to delete this son of a bitch.” • “I’m completely lost.” • “See, I don’t understand.” • “It was not doing that, it was doing that, son of a bitch.” • “It’s irritating.” • “I don’t know. It’s a little weird.” • “Yeah, it’s not doing it, it’s not giving me this drum rack thing.” Michael was willing to be transparent on the video and screen recordings, expressing himself honestly. I did not ask Michael to narrate his thought process, this was something he did of his own free will. I later asked Michael what he thought about talking through his process and he responded, “I liked it, it was a way for me to focus, it helped me focus.” For his first hour spent learning Ableton, Michael had little to show or hear for his efforts and before stopping the video recording he announced: “Boy that’s a horrible drum part, I’m stopping now.” Scrolling back through this screen recording, I found brief moments of accomplishment that were overshadowed by Michael’s pangs of frustration. For example, Michael was successful in playing a drum pattern on his guitar. He recognized that the looping function in Ableton worked like an old drum machine he was familiar with, and succeeded in recording a MIDI pattern with his guitar. After playing his pattern he was able to edit and adjust the timing of some of the notes. What Michael figured out through trial and error was that he could select just one note at a time and move it to the appropriate time within the loop. First he asked the question aloud: “Okay, so here’s the question, can I actually move these guys from the map over and make it quantized?” He clicked on the drum map (Figure 3.5) and the whole pattern shifted; this was not what he wanted to happen. He reported: “No, it’s doing the whole thing, that’s not what I wanted.” He tried again, and at the moment when he said, “Just that guy?” he clicked his

Figure 3.5  Ableton drum map. 

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click and consequence

1. click

2. consequence

3. undo the “undue” OR 3. new click

Figure 3.6  Click and consequence. 

mouse on the note he wanted to edit. To his satisfaction, it moved. The small victory produced a eureka moment and with an exhalation of contentment he said, “Ah, very nice. Ah magic.” I posed the question to Michael about using Ableton for the first time: “What did you think of its ease of use to do what you wanted it to do?” He responded: “I have since tried some things, trying to bring in some other audio and throw effects on there and get rid of those effects and that kind of thing and it’s not as easy as I thought it was.” Ableton integrates instructional materials into its layout to facilitate the learning process, but Michael found this to be an annoyance: “I wanted it to go away so that I could focus on the other bells and whistles that were available . . . I don’t necessarily need it to be a part of my peripheral vision all the time in this program.” Michael prefers to reference a separate text-​based file such as a PDF and in later sessions he discovered this feature in Ableton and used it intermittently. Michael’s approach to learning to use Ableton is characteristic of the “digital immigrant” as described by Marc Prensky: As Digital Immigrants learn . . . they always retain, to some degree, their “accent” . . . The “digital immigrant accent” can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather than first, or in reading the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it.11 Ableton offers video tutorials, but Michael opts to forgo watching them, preferring the click and consequence method (Figure 3.6), where he uses his mouse to explore an option in the program, evaluates the consequence of his mouse click, and then proceeds accordingly by either undoing the undue action or continuing on in his current trajectory.   Prensky, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1,” 1.

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THE TIMBRE TRAIL: TWEAKING SOUNDS

A day later Michael was back in his living room, guitar in lap, staring at the Ableton interface on his laptop. Throughout the session, Michael’s right hand alternated between clicking the mouse and strumming his guitar. He chose to position the camera such that it was always centered on his guitar, keeping his face out of frame. For thirty consecutive minutes, Michael scrolled through the exhaustive list of “Live Devices” in Ableton trying to find a guitar effect that caught his ear. He auditioned each effect, sometimes making comments, such as: “This would be good for dub,” or “Needs more gain.” Other times he simply strummed a chord, listened for a moment, and without hesitation clicked on the next effect. Table 3.1 lists the effects that Michael auditioned. Michael shared his thoughts on the sounds packaged in Ableton: I’m sometimes baffled by how somebody could write this and expect it to be used as a preset . . . With Ableton the presets are so crazy anyway, half the time it’s just like, “What the fuck is that? Wow!” Maybe they were thinking this would be great, then you can plug a voice into it or violin or keyboard, but maybe not an acoustic guitar or electric guitar so you have to change it to fit. Michael did not record the sounds he auditioned, but Crystal Reverb must have left a good taste on his sound palate because he left it in his signal chain for the entire exploratory period. Ableton’s help file describes Crystal Reverb as “stuttering ambient delays with a lot of control possibilities.” Michael reacted to the sound exclaiming, “Oh my God, that’s so cool!” Eight days later, Michael opened up a new file in Ableton and in this session, his aims were less enigmatic. He started by importing an existing audio file (Figure 3.7). Table 3.1 Ableton guitar effects auditioned by Michael Effect

FluxedRhythmTrem

RisingReverb

Dizzy Freq

Six String Ambience

Synced Phaseverb

Elastic Cube

Guitar Space

Echo Speak 2

Intimate&Colorful

Rich Acoustic Guitar

Spectral Spank

Ritmo Standard

Acoustic Guitar Hall 2

Wabbler

Annihilator

Crystal Reverb

Circularity

Vocal Choir

PolyRhythm

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Figure 3.7  Michael imports audio. 

Figure 3.8  Crystal Reverb. 

Next, Michael scrolled through the Live Devices to find the Crystal Reverb setting, praising it as “outstanding and strange” (Figure 3.8). Michael’s goal was to apply Crystal Reverb to the prerecorded material, a short four-​bar loop of a guitar-​picking pattern. Michael found the appropriate proportion of the mix that he wanted to apply to the guitar track, commenting, “that’s pretty cool,” but he detected a problem: “It’s a little low end-​y.” To circumvent the issue, Michael loaded another effect in his signal chain, Multiband EQ (Figure 3.9), and proceeded to “twist” the virtual dials Low Freq, Mid Freq Band, and Hi Freq Band until he was satisfied with the resultant sound.

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Figure 3.9 Multiband EQ. 

Michael described how he uses equalization (EQ): It was always hit and miss for me with EQ . . . When I hear something that ain’t working I to try to figure out what that is and duck it. When I hear something that is missing I try to find it and bring it in. That’s the end of my EQ knowledge to be honest with you. This method of equalization entails a process of elimination: the problematic frequency is reduced until the effected sound is improved in the ears of the beholder. Michael explained how he learned this technique: “That goes back to when I first started learning how to work with external effects units . . . I would work with the given preset and then tweak it so that it fit the song specifically for the band or maybe multiple songs even.” Satisfied with the effect he applied to his guitar track, Michael exported the files into a single audio file. Another day’s work done and most of it was spent sifting through sounds. The end product was a short loop that Michael had no intention of selling or distributing. In contrast to working in a professional studio, making music with a DAW at home is a personal experience that affords Michael the opportunity to explore without bounds: You can really create your own sonic landscapes and just go off into your own. It’s a very exploratory experience, and you don’t have to have anybody else telling you what you’re supposed to be doing, and what you’re not doing right or whatever. I’m not a professional engineer. I will make certain choices that will be a little bit outside of what a professional engineer would do, but to me they sound great, so that’s the fun part. I don’t have anybody saying, “Man, how could you put the microphone there?” or “What the hell is that effect?” or “Boy, that’s really noisy.”

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Lonely Learning: Conclusions Much of Michael’s learning background is what Lucy Green would label as “informal.”12 For example, Michael taught himself guitar and learned bits and pieces from family acquaintances before he ever took a lesson, satisfying the criterion “learns alongside friends or by themselves.” He also learned by listening and copying recordings that he chose himself. Additionally, Green’s model is helpful for describing how Michael learned to use his DIY recording studio as a musical instrument: he has never received a formal lesson; anything he knows about audio engineering he taught himself by reading a manual or through trial and error. Certainly his pedigree of recording experience in professional studios must have had some influence on his recording knowledge and skills—​learning by osmosis—​but Michael makes no such claim. His greatest teacher was himself. The same principle holds true for Michael’s learning during the digital era of recording. Despite the bounty of online resources and sheer number of people engaged in the practice of DIY recording, Michael chooses to go it alone. Click and consequence—​DAW-​based trial-​and-​error learning—​best characterizes Michael’s approach to music-​making with his DIY recording studio. Michael is a particularly interesting case because he has had hands-​on experience with the leading recording technologies over the last four decades. He has lived through and adapted to the technological advances in recording. Further, Michael has maintained a DIY recording studio throughout his career, while continuing to record in professional studios for other artists. He estimates that he has appeared on seventy-​two recordings, but this tally does not include his own recordings, of which he says: “Mostly those were for my own edification to be honest with you. I’m inspired to do so and I will always record my own music at home.” From an early age, Michael engaged in recording his own songs and musical ideas with a makeshift multitrack recorder. He became very adept at mixing his own music and is keenly aware of mixing techniques and their impact on the overall sound of a recording. Engaging with recording technology is a constant theme that runs through Michael’s life. He uses it frequently, methodically, and enthusiastically. A final product is not necessary for Michael to feel that his time is well spent; the act of recording is in and of itself a gratifying pursuit. We have been conditioned to think that recording produces an artifact akin to a photograph. Michael reminds us that a recording is a noun, but recording is an action.

  Green, Music, Informal Learning, and the School, 6–​9.

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4 Track 2 Tara

Tara, a twenty-​seven-​year-​old newlywed and her husband, Nathan, live in an open-​ concept studio apartment in the trendy neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In this seven-​hundred-​square-​foot space, the kitchen, a baby grand piano, and a king-​size bed are all within a few feet of each other, but the twelve-​foot-​high ceilings make it feel roomy. Draped from the ceiling like a series of hammocks hang three blue moving blankets that Tara temporarily installed as a means of sound treatment for her apartment-​turned-​recording studio. While Nathan was away working in Europe, Tara decided that his month-​long absence would be the ideal time to record an album. Given that Tara’s recording schedule took place over seven days, I was fortunate to catch her mid-​process. I gave Tara a video camera two days into the recording of her album, and a week later she returned it to me packed with footage to review, having filmed eight to ten hours per day for five days. After finishing her recordings, Tara took three days off before resuming the process of listening and evaluating what had been done. I asked her about her first impressions, and she was upbeat: “Yeah my first impression was that it was better than I thought it was going to be.” As I would come to discover in my conservations with Tara, her expectations of herself as a performer are very high, and she held similarly high expectations for her album—​an album that almost did not happen. Until a few years ago, Tara was on a very different path, and then pivoted away from a career as a professional athlete.

From Scoring Points to Scoring Films: Learning Background Like many classically trained pianists, Tara commenced taking music lessons at an early age, starting with the Suzuki method at age four under the tutelage of her mother. Tara’s family moved frequently because of her father’s line of work, and as 97

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a result she had a handful of different piano teachers growing up, and was exposed to different pedagogical approaches. She estimated that she practiced a half an hour a day—​enough to learn whichever piece she was working on—​but did not become serious about piano until age twelve: I remember every night that I played the piano. I played piano a lot but didn’t take lessons all through high school, which was really strange when I  think back on it. I  realized I  could play lots of stuff. I’d hear stuff on the radio and say, “I can play that.” For the first time I started to realize. I opened up more to music and its accessibility. Despite her passion for piano, Tara channeled her energies at high school toward athletics, and she excelled at volleyball. Tara continued to play piano recreationally when she could, but her commitments to volleyball dictated her life decisions, including where she attended college. Although Tara majored in music, studying classical piano, volleyball remained her first priority: “I didn’t have that much time to devote to it [piano], maybe an hour or two a day . . . sometimes I would only practice three times a week or not even.” Music remained in the backdrop as Tara contemplated future directions after college, with the assumption that volleyball would guide her career path. “I was going to play pro volleyball and then I suddenly made this giant switch . . . one of these rash emotional decisions,” she said. Tara decided that she wanted to score music for films, and inquired about studying with a teacher in New York: She said she would teach me. She lived in Queens, and sent me a huge long list of everything to buy if I was serious about film scoring. I went for my first lesson in September and I literally bought a desktop, a MIDI controller, Logic [DAW], Sibelius [scoring software], East–​West [orchestral sound sample library], monitors, and a desk. I didn’t have anything. I didn’t own a computer. I bought tons of stuff, and I had never even met her. “ I J U S T L E A R N E D A S I   H A D TO ” :   K A R A O K E C O M P O S I T I O N AND REFLEXIVE RECORDING WITH LOGIC

Once a week Tara drove from Connecticut to Queens for an hour-​long lesson, and her homework was always the same: “She had me writing songs a lot. I wrote two songs a week, then came back every Thursday.” Accompanying the challenge of her teacher’s expectation of prolific songwriting, Tara was left to her own devices to assay how to record her songs with all of the seemingly alien technology she had recently acquired: Well, no one taught me. Any of the software that I know, no one taught me. Logic—​I just remember reading the manual. I didn’t read the whole thing,

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just starting a new project. I still feel kind of limited in it, but I’d always learn whenever I needed to do a new thing, I just learned as I had to. Using Logic and a MIDI keyboard with her “learned as I had to” approach, Tara detailed the process of how she used to make her new compositions with Logic, recording them as MIDI files and then exporting them as audio files to bring to her lessons. Tara explained to me, “At that point I did not have a microphone so I would just play her whatever tracks I came up with at home and sing along in her office.” Tara described for me her karaoke approach to integrating recording into her composition. While the recorded piano part remained unchanged, Tara’s vocal performance could be altered with every performance. As a live performer, Tara always accompanies herself on the piano when she sings; the karaoke composition technique disembodies her singing from her playing. Tara explained that for the purpose of her lessons, a recording was not meant to be a finalized performance that could be scrutinized; it was a means of “writing down,” with the understanding that the song was in a state of gestation, allowing her to concentrate solely on the vocal performance when she presented a song to her teacher. In Tara’s words, “it was never really that thought through; it was just more to present, to take to my lesson and she understood that this wasn’t a proper demo.” In its developing stages, the vocal part retains plasticity; lyrics can be rewritten, phrasing can be reshaped, and the melody can be retooled. The song is in a hybrid state, half of it performed by a machine and the other half performed by its human programmer. Using Logic was a new experience for Tara and afforded her a method of composition that was very experimental: I suddenly had Logic, it was very ad hoc. I didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing, so I would just load up instruments and it’s not like I had proper chords underneath them. When I made demos I wasn’t trying to create piano parts or be a piano player, I was just putting anything underneath the voice. Sometimes I  think it worked and sometimes I  think it didn’t. I  would just load up a drum kit and play things in without even knowing basic drum patterns. I almost don’t know what I did. I was just trying things out. I really was just trying to write two songs a week, whatever that meant. I would write melodies first, and then I would journal about what it should be about, and then I would put things underneath it. Tara used the phrases “ad hoc” and “I was just trying things out” to describe her approach to writing songs with Logic. Tara described a “vertical approach” to composition,1 integrating composition, arrangement, and recording into a singular act.    Folkestad, Hargreaves, and Lindström, “Compositional Strategies in Computer-​ Based Music-​Making.” 1

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I prefer the term reflexive recording, because it better describes the act of recording something and playing it back in order to determine next steps. Don Lebler explains, “Recording also allows a performer to reflect on a performance after the act, and repeatedly if necessary, allowing a greater degree of reflection than would otherwise be possible.”2 In Tara’s description she said, “I was just putting anything underneath the voice. Sometimes I think it worked and sometimes I think it didn’t”—​evidence of the reflexive recording approach. Reflexive recording is only possible because digital audio can be edited, manipulated, and saved in infinite incarnations. I  asked Tara if she could play me a song that exemplified this approach to her songwriting; she opened up iTunes, pressed play on a song, and started explaining it to me. This is an old version of the song and it’s not really thought through as much harmonically. I see this as a really over-​the-​top song, like I’m picturing the music video, like at a jungle gym or with a marching band, roller skates, and weird stuff . . . This is a good example of me with ideas without a framework. Even rhythmically it sounds like a giant mess when everything starts coming in. I didn’t have as clear of an idea of what I’m doing, but actually it’s sometimes fun to think about the ideas I had, really raw ideas . . . It’s so home-​done. I put in these beats, and then the snaps are off, and then everything goes to waste. In a sense that is still the original feel I have for that song, so it’s important to look back and see this is the idea . . . This song has many versions, I changed the lyrics, I got really carried away, and changed the lyrics, and made them really cheerleader-​and sports-​themed; too carried away. The key point from Tara’s description of composing this song is that Logic facilitates, even encourages, the kind of experimenting and recording of “really raw ideas” that are rooted in sound. Elements that are not easily notated in a score are accessed in seconds with the click of a mouse in a DAW like Logic because it provides gigabytes of prerecorded samples for the user. Tara described her song as “not really thought through,” “ideas without a framework,” and “a giant mess,” and yet through the cacophony of snaps, boings, and whistles, I can envision the jungle gym, marching band, and roller skates. During this recording process Tara’s music was in a state of flux as she performed actions such as adding, deleting, muting, boosting, cutting, pasting, adjusting, and so on, but eventually these actions lost their momentum and grinded to a halt until the song was frozen temporarily, entering a pseudo-​state of hibernation. What is particularly unique about DAW-​based composition is that it allows the user to

  Lebler, “Popular Music Pedagogy,” 195.

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reboot the music and explore new possibilities between remixing and reimagining. The composer can endlessly edit and rigorously revise one version or create several versions, just as producer Brian Eno (U2, Coldplay) observed with tape-​based multitrack recording: “You could make a piece over an extended period of time . . . It started being a process that you could engage in over months, even years.”3 Despite having engaged in this DAW-​dependent practice, for the making of her album Tara elected to pursue a more traditional approach, reminiscent of Aldon Music as described in ­chapter 2.

Walking and Writing: Distinguishing the Song from the Recording Tara’s process of realizing her goals for her album entailed six distinct stages: writing, recording preparation, piano recording, vocal recording, comping, and mixing. On the whole, Tara did not integrate recording into her songwriting process. Instead, first the songs were written, and then once this was complete the recording phase could commence. Tara’s songwriting often started without her primary instrument, the piano; she prefers to lace up her running shoes and “write” while she walks. For Tara, the Williamsburg Bridge provides more than a means to get from Williamsburg to the Lower East Side of Manhattan—​it is the platform for her songwriting. Tara explained her process of walking and writing: If I’m really trying to write a new song, I usually go for a walk. So I often walk the bridge in this area . . . I find if I’m walking . . . I’m relaxed. It happens naturally; I’ll just sing a lot or hum little things, or think about things I want to write about . . . If you were walking with me I would at least be singing lightly . . . In general I do lyrics first, or melody and lyrics at the same time. It is only after Tara has developed her initial melodies and written some rough sketches of lyrics in her journal that she proceeds to her instrument to write the accompanying music: “Once I have something established that I like, then I find I’ll go to the piano and work with that.” To assist with her writing, Tara started taking pop piano lessons because as she explained, “I just realized that when it came to pop-​style I didn’t really know what I was doing.” Armed with new knowledge and skills in pop composition, Tara prepared for the recording of her album by finalizing her songs: I basically picked twelve or thirteen songs, and then had started writing formal arrangements for them on piano and practicing a lot of singing,   As cited in Crane and Baccigaluppi, “Brian Eno,” 40.

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actually figuring out what melody I  sing  .  .  .  basically nailing down the melodies and a piano part. Using Sibelius software, Tara wrote scores for each song. While technically not a part of the recording of her album, Tara was reliant on recording technology to create her scores. She used an eighty-​eight-​key M-​Audio MIDI piano controller connected to a Digidesign MBox2 to record her piano parts into Logic on either her iMac or MacBook Pro. Despite experiencing some technical issues that caused her to “freak out” on occasion, Tara managed to assemble her scores and committed them to memory by practicing, on average, four hours a day for two months, in preparation for her anticipated recording.

Packing Blankets and Piano Tuners: Converting the Home to Studio Tara looked into professional studios to record her album, and she even considered a studio in Oregon until her husband gave her a different idea. She recalled, “Nathan mentioned that some people just do this in their apartment—​like, David Gray’s first album was in his apartment—​so I started thinking about that. I’ll just work with what I have.”

Preparation (Saturday and Monday Morning) To prepare for her recording, Tara took a week off work and hired an acquaintance, Felix, to assist her. Additionally, Tara hired a professional audio engineer, Tony, as a consultant to evaluate her apartment’s suitability for recording. In her journal Tara wrote about this process: Felix arrived at 3 p.m. We set up his interface and got a little situated. Tony arrived and began to take command. He immediately commented on the room and assumed I heard what he heard. I told him not to assume, because I am often focused on other things besides acoustics. He recommended acoustic treatment but said that I would need a lot of it—​and it can be expensive, not to mention ugly. The “interface” is a Presonus FireStudio Project (Figure 4.1) that connects to Tara’s MacBook Pro. It can record up to eight sound sources simultaneously. Tony provided some specific advice on acoustic treatment, which Tara explained: “Tony suggested to push the piano against the bed and told me that this space was really problematic because of all the noise, that constant buzzing, He said

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Figure 4.1  Felix working on a Logic session. The Presonus Firestudio audio interface sits to his right with four microphone cables plugged into it. 

the room was super alive.” After providing Tara with some guidance on how to optimally set up her apartment as a recording studio, Tony spent four hours with Felix testing out different possible microphone techniques, which Tara documented in her journal: We began to do mic setup. The Sennheisers in the piano. After a few takes, we decided to take the lid off the piano entirely, and push the piano right against the bed. The bed is apparently the best thing going on in our apartment. We turned on the high [pass] filters and had the mics exaggerated [angled] out to help the stereo effect. We tried a room mic at Nathan’s bedside table area. No good. We tried one about seven feet away from the piano. No good. We tried one about thirteen feet from piano. Good. We did many, many, takes, and he developed some standard EQ settings for the three mics. We’re now using those as starting points. HOME STUDIO HEADACHES

I asked Tara about her involvement in the process of setting up the microphones for recording the piano. Her explanation made it clear that she did not perceive herself

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as being active in the decision-​making, choosing to rely on the expertise of Tony and Felix: Well, I didn’t make any of those decisions really. We first started micing the piano with the lid on it, and it was getting tons of phasing from the lid, so then we took the lid off and that seemed to help a lot, plus the strings are pretty noisy with the pedal. The pedal dampers are noisy so that was bouncing off. We tried a room mic in that corner and a few other places, and basically Tony thought it wasn’t making much of a difference. I wasn’t making those decisions. Tara delegated the decisions of microphone technique and placement to Felix and Tony, but her description demonstrates that she was able to identify sound problems such as “phasing,” and reflection issues (“bouncing off ”). Alec Nisbett provides a succinct and clear explanation of phase: Phase is a term used in describing subdivisions of one wavelength of a tone . . . The mathematical jargon is not important to the microphone user, but the concept of waves being in or out of phase is vital. Signals that are in phase reinforce each other; those that are out of phase subtract from or tend to cancel each other.4 While Tara may not have been able to describe the sound that she wanted, she was able to identify aural characteristics that she wanted to eliminate or improve in the sound of the piano: I was more frustrated with the piano. It sounded like a home recording because it sounded like it wasn’t a proper piano. You can really hear it. It’s one thing to hear the pedal damper, which you can hear in all of my songs, which is authentic, but this, like, knocking noise did it for me. Plus, it just felt not like how I hear it playing. I couldn’t even hear the real articulation of the bass part. The bass was getting left out initially—​there was a lot in the middle register. I need to hear the bass part to know when to enter and how to articulate. Capturing the sound of an instrument can be an elusive quest because it entails multiple factors. In Tara’s description, the first attempt at improving the overall sound of the piano was adjusting the positioning of the microphones. Julio d’Escriván provides an insightful explanation of why microphone placement is not a simple task:

  Nisbett, The Use of Microphones, 14.

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A microphone on its own is rather like one ear on its own with no head, yet by combining microphones we can build an “image” of the sound we are trying to capture and this is, of course, where all subjectivity comes in and why recording is an art form.5 Another factor in the overall sound of the recording is the quality of the instrument itself. To remedy the problematic sounds of the piano, Tara hired “these big Russian guys,” extending the preparation phase into another day. To further improve the acoustics of her apartment-​turned-​recording studio, Tara and Felix strategically hung blue moving blankets from the ceiling (Figure 4.2). Tara’s journal entry summarizes the day’s activities: I’m fairly exhausted. Drove through the Hasidic neighborhood and picked up Felix in Crown Heights (blankets and acoustic panels also). I stood on a chair on top of our kitchen table and threw a string attached to a bolt over the pipes on our rafters and began to hang packing blankets. It’s amazing what you do when no one else is there/​willing/​able to do it. We also hung blankets on the sidewalls and above the bed. The Russians came and tuned. They also told me that my piano was kind of a toy—​and okay for children—​but not for a professional pianist. They really went to town—​as the pictures show. I appreciate how Tara took the time to document the hours of careful planning and preparation that go into the making of a DIY recording. In a professional studio, typically an intern would be assigned the task of picking up items for the studio such as blankets and baffles, and a maintenance person would be responsible for hanging acoustic treatment from the ceiling. In the budget-​conscious DIY studio, the musician has no choice but to do it all.

Hypercritical: In Pursuit of the Pristine Piano Performance (Monday Afternoon, Tuesday, and Wednesday) On day two of seven, with the apartment set up and the piano freshly tuned, Tara and Felix transitioned to the next phase of tracking, specifically, recording the piano. Tara managed to record three of her songs on the piano, but noted some difficulties in her journal that evening about the early goings: “All the noises and trains make it difficult. I’m not sold on the way Felix organizes the tracks, but it’s a combined   d’Escriván, Music Technology, 48.

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Figure 4.2  “The big Russian guys” tune the piano. Felix looks on standing beneath the blue moving blankets that he hung with Tara. 

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effort.” It was a long day for Tara, and her final sentence captures the blend of exhaustion and optimism that she felt: “I’m exhausted, and my back hurts . . . but am feeling better than yesterday about things.” F I N D I N G F A U LT S W I T H   F E L I X

Tuesday was the first full day of recording piano and Tara’s journal entry both describes and captures the feeling of the nine-​hour session: It was a rough start. We did “Fire Drill” again at the beginning, and I wasn’t playing well in time. It’s a challenging song to begin with, but I wasn’t properly warmed up. I continued to get aggravated, some, at things that were being deleted. But I think we’ve started to norm into a bit of a system. Basically we do at least five full takes. I figure it will mean I’ll need to go through and make decisions about sections (I wish that was being done along the way), and there’s not really a guarantee that we have everything down, but I think I have some sense of the parts I have or still need. Tara spoke of her aggravation toward Felix regarding his judgment of what takes were kept and what takes were deleted. Because Felix served as the engineer of the project, he was afforded the position to save or discard tracks as he saw fit. Tara had hoped everything she recorded would be saved, but Felix acted as the judge, jury, and executioner of what was deemed worth saving. She described how the act of Felix deleting a track impacted her piano performances on proceeding takes: For me, if we spent ten hours on three songs I want to have ten hours of recordings . . . I suppose for him, especially since they’re not his songs, he would like to see things his way, at the end of the day, a clear one take . . . That actually threw me mentally sometimes, I’d look back and he would erase the take we just did. I would get frustrated and I would actually mess up and that’s my own mental weakness. We never fought or anything, but personally there was some tension sometimes or I would get frustrated. That happened and I could tell it was getting to my mental state. I could tell it directly affected me a little. It could be him; it could be me not being able to get over it. In my final interview with Tara, I followed up with her again on this issue, asking what she thought about working with Felix on her album. Her explanation demonstrates that she had a preconceived idea of how the recording process would work and it did not align with Felix’s: That dynamic—​he did mention it at the end of the week—​I think it takes time getting to know how someone works. He found it surprising how

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I wanted to work and vice versa. I thought by the end we had each other figured out. He didn’t think we would have so many takes to go through. If you didn’t like it you would just scratch it and we would just start from that point, and that’s not at all what I was thinking. The tension that Tara felt between herself and Felix helps to explain her journal entry from that evening. It is evident that the day’s activities took their toll: My brain is tired. I like the stress and pressure of having to do take after take (all with the expectation to be without error), but it gets exhausting too. I feel like now I’m kind of in the swing of it, which is nice, but also a bit like free-​falling. I can’t really tell how things are going anymore and I don’t know if I have it in me to step back enough to try and tell at this point. I think just keep going. Allan Watson suggests that when a performer and a producer disagree on the quality of a recorded take it creates tension in the studio: “There is an inherent difficulty around critiquing a performance whilst at the same time maintaining the confidence of the performer and avoiding upset.”6 Since both Tara and Felix assumed producer roles, they both had to keep their composure, and expend emotional labor to ensure that the recording sessions continued productively. Putting her frustrations aside, Tara continued to work with Felix, adhering to their rigorous recording schedule.

Recording the Piano for “Chesterfield” (Wednesday) Tara’s journal documented that she recorded the piano parts for three songs on Wednesday, one of which is the focus of this discussion, “Chesterfield”: We started late and ended early. I’m hoping this left enough time for Felix to edit/​comp three tunes so vocals can begin Thursday. We did “Get Well,” “Chesterfield,” and “Danish Dynasty.” These are three that I haven’t practiced as much. I was able to get in the zone for the most part. The constant running eighth notes in “Chesterfield” can be difficult if not totally relaxed. Tara’s stimulated recall interview,7 and journal entries were crucial to documenting her case because the video camera footage is almost static, like a still image. The   Watson, Cultural Production in and Beyond the Recording Studio, 57.   Lyle, “Stimulated Recall.” In a stimulated recall interview participants watch previously recorded videos of themselves engaged in an activity, and then answer the researcher’s questions related to the 6 7

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Figure 4.3  The camera view of Tara playing the piano and Felix engineering. 

video camera was placed on a nearby table, and provides a profile view of Tara playing at her piano while Felix sits at a desk watching the computer screen (Figure 4.3). Together, Tara and I watched the video footage of her recording the piano part for “Chesterfield.” I hoped to gain some added insight from her (note that I have italicized the conversations I had with Tara while we watched videos together in the stimulated recall sessions to help distinguish this dialogue from the moments when she speaks in the previously recorded videos). Adam: So when the video starts you’re already playing; did you just turn the camera on? Tara: I think the first day I may have forgotten to turn it on right away, but I have a feeling—​since we have three long videos here—​this is very near the beginning of the session. I would have warmed up or something. Adam: Are you recording at this point? Tara: Yeah, I think so. I can see that little recording ‘grey’ thing there [points to the computer screen in the video frame]. In the video Tara said to Felix, “All right, let’s stop and punch in at chorus 1B,” and Felix responded, “All right, I’ll give you two bars.” Although Tara handed over the

excerpt. François Tochon explains this approach is necessary because “it is unfeasible to interview people about their thinking while they are engaged in action, the interview time is postponed to the moment they are able to view their own actions on a monitor . . . Viewing past actions is a way to remember one’s past thoughts with greater validity than recall done without the benefit of video feedback stimulation” (“From Video Cases to Video Pedagogy,” 59).

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reins of engineering to Felix, Tara provided specific engineering instructions to Felix, as she explained: I’d tell him where to put markers so that when we would have to do restarts, and then in the comping stuff, it’s much clearer. So, if there is a noise here, let’s just take it from the 6/​4 bar, or let’s just take it from the prechorus. Sitting beside me watching the video, Tara laughed as she watched herself stretch her hands on camera. In the video, Tara resumed playing the piano. As she listened to the steady click of a metronome in her headphones, partially obscured by a microphone stand, Tara rocked slowly back and forth as she played “Chesterfield.” Her eyes were closed and she appeared to be in a Zen state, focusing solely on the task at hand. It was difficult to discern what Felix was doing, but he appeared to be equally focused; listening to the performance on his headphones and staring intently at the MacBook Pro’s screen, and watching the audio waveforms take shape as they were recorded. Tara abruptly stopped playing piano, as if halting a speeding vehicle, and exclaimed, “I wasn’t thinking.” “What?” asked Felix. Tara repeated herself, “I wasn’t thinking.” “Oh,” laughed Felix. Adam: You stopped that one, what didn’t you like? Tara: My rhythm was a little off. [Tara emitted a subtle laugh of amusement.] So, this was a new way of playing piano in this song. It’s not that hard—​it’s just kind of like a pick-​guitar type, imitative of guitar-​style playing, so I just feel like if you’re not totally even you can just really mess up a lot. Adam: So that’s why you’re stopping yourself, you don’t have that feel? Tara: Yeah. That time I got it. Seven stops and starts later, Tara completed her first take of “Chesterfield.” Sometimes she stopped herself because she wasn’t happy with how she executed a passage, and in hindsight, Tara thought she may have been hypercritical of her piano-​playing in the moment, commenting: “In a sense it’s a mistake, but when I watch this it’s not that big of a deal,” and “It’s funny because what I just did was really, really, minor.” Tara’s actions are demonstrative of Erick Clarke’s argument that recording drives the performer to adopt a perfectionist attitude toward their playing: Repeatability and semi-​permanence mean that the slips and risks that either go unnoticed in live performance, or are quickly forgotten, have been regarded (rightly or wrongly) as unacceptable in a recording. And so

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the drive towards technical perfection begins: fidelity of the medium and fidelity to the score.8 “ T R A I N S A N D S T U F F ” :   B AT T L I N G E N V I R O N M E N TA L   N O I S E

Contributing to the start-​and-​stop nature of the recording sessions was the uncontrollable factor of unwanted extraneous environmental sounds. A reoccurring scene in the videos shows Felix interrupting a take, suspending Tara’s playing with a comment along the lines of “there was a noise” or “that thing,” referring to environmental sounds that bled into the recording and tarnished the otherwise pristine performance. Adam: I didn’t realize how big of an issue that kind of thing was. It was hard to hear and I wasn’t always sure why you were stopping because you weren’t happy with it. But it’s these environmental noises. Tara: Especially because there is just a lot of noise with trains and stuff, especially like the endings of songs, like when you know there is nothing to be heard but the sound of the piano fading out. That sort of thing is when it really became a problem just because during a great take or ending there would be a train. You’d have to do it again. There was one time when we went upstairs and asked a guy to turn down the music—​he started blaring music upstairs in the middle of the day—​so he was really nice about it. And one day we had to quit because they were reflooring an apartment. It was like a chainsaw. Susan Tomes avers that recording makes musicians hypercritical of their performance and the noises of the environment: “We become extremely conscious not only of our playing, but of every little cough and scrape, page-​turn, pedal noise, and squeak of the piano stool.”9 FELIX AS PRODUCER? DEFINING ROLES IN THE RECORDING PROCESS

Aside from identifying unwanted noises, Felix intermittently assumed the role of a multitasking producer similar to what Phil Ramone details: “Because he or she is involved in nearly every aspect of a production, the producer serves as friend, cheerleader, psychologist, taskmaster, court jester, troubleshooter, secretary, traffic cop, judge, and jury rolled into one.”10 The following excerpt of dialogue   Clarke, “The Impact of Recording on Listening,” 53.   Tomes, “Learning to Live with Recording,” 10. 10   Ramone with Granata, Making Records, 15. 8 9

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exemplifies Felix serving the role of psychologist as he questioned Tara after her first complete take: Felix: How do you feel the little things were working out last time? Tara: Tempo wise or . . . Felix: Yeah, timing wise. Tara: Um, I don’t know. I’m trying it out for the first time, I think we should do a few more full takes and then I’ll see if I should use that thing maybe. Felix: All right. While watching this excerpt of the video, Tara interjected and explained to me what their conversation was about: Tara: Oh, so there’s this little fill that I was doing on the piano that I was basically, I was playing two different rhythmic versions of it in the same song, so I think one was sounding like a mistake. Adam: To him? Tara: I think maybe. I can tell that I was slightly offended when he asked, “How do I feel about that take?” I think I took that as, “That sounds weird,” you know? I’m trying to think of what version I ended up taking. Should I keep going? Tara resumed play on the video and the dialogue between her and Felix continued: Tara: What do you think? Felix: No, it’s beautiful. Maybe it wasn’t that confident. The first time it was great, second time it was a bit sloppy. Tara paused the video again and provided some insight: Tara: Yeah so that’s the thing, he thinks the first time is great and the second one wasn’t great, which is probably a good point. It was just that the second one was like an anticipated rhythm so if you’re expecting the first riff then it was like, “Oh, she flubbed that one up.” Adam: When actually it was a variation? Tara: It was a good point he made even though I didn’t make a mistake, it’s probably not a good idea to make a small variation of this little riff because then it sounds like a mistake, apparently. I sensed a tone of mild annoyance in Tara’s voice when she finished her sentence with “apparently,” but I think that she was genuine in her appreciation for Felix’s

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feedback. As Tara explained, any residual irritation she harbored could be attributed to the fact that she and Felix were spending long days together: I mean it is a lot of time with one person so you get that feeling of a week, or even after every day I needed to clear my head. When you’re used to being by yourself a lot, you just need to go for a walk. Further, Tara’s journal entry points to the fact that she relished the opportunity to execute her music at the high standard that she sets for herself. Gone were the grumblings about Felix, replaced by a revitalized spirit of enthusiasm for challenges that the recording process presents: I find that hours of trying to do perfect takes is very exhausting, but it also feeds me. I love this sort of thing and can tell now that I’ve missed this sort of “work.” Perhaps this is the sort of situation where I’ll be able to find that “cut and dry” critique I miss from not being in a sport. I’ve often said that the switch to music and particularly composition, has been challenging, because it is so subjective. In sports you always know if you’re good or not, strong or not, won or lost. But in this situation, I’m starting to love the objective parts about it: Did I play perfectly in time? Can I sing in pitch? Can I make it through the song without a noticeable mistake? Maybe being an artist or performer—​or at least that pursuit—​has the balance.

Technical Difficulties (Thursday) The fifth day of recording was intended to be a full day of singing, but technical problems combined with construction in her building prevented Tara and Felix from being able to record. “We had some problems,” she said. “We attempted vocals for a while, but kept getting latency issues. Then construction started on the floor and we had to call it a day around 2:30 p.m.” Refusing to let a snag in their plans impede their progress, Tara and Felix used the rest of the day to prepare for the remaining two days of recording. Tara’s journal reveals that she wished she had the ability to do the comping independently: Felix had lots of comping to do anyways. I took notes and did comping notes for six songs. I should just learn to do comps better and edits and fades, it can’t be that hard. Anyways, hopefully the notes make sense to

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him and he’s able to get some sleep. Right now, everything is still basically in one session. I need to learn a better system of organization! Tired, and should rest my voice/​drink tea . . .

Manufacturing Vocal Perfection: Repeated Takes and Comping (Friday) In Friday’s journal Tara wrote: “Began around 11:40 a.m. My voice didn’t feel too hot, but we did five or six songs anyways. Actually six or seven.” Amid the hours of singing, “Chesterfield” was second on the docket. After cueing up a new video file on my MacBook, Tara and I settled in our chairs to watch the vocal recording session of “Chesterfield” together. The video captured a side profile of Tara as she sang. In the video’s frame, Tara stood in front of a white wooden baffle with grey jagged foam on one side that partially surrounded her. Tara explained, “Felix brought that. It keeps the sound from the outside. We just tried to make it as closed as possible.” Tara sang directly against a pop filter, a device that reduces sibilance and plosives such as the “p” and “s” consonants. The pop filter was placed six inches in front of the microphone. Tara mentioned that she tried out a few different vocal mics, but ended up using one belonging to her husband. Enclosing the back of the microphone was a concave-​shaped perforated steel baffle that Tara referred to as a vocal windscreen (Figure 4.4):

Figure 4.4  Tara sings into the mic. In front of the mic is the pop filter and behind it is the windscreen. 

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I bought that vocal windscreen, it actually worked really well. It makes a little sound booth as long as you sing into it, it really eliminates everything. It attaches to a mic stand. Felix thought it worked amazingly. This thing made the vocals. We didn’t have a noise problem with the vocals. Maybe the tiniest bit and there’s a little bleeding and stuff like that, but this thing really helped. With the piano if there was any train we’d have to start the whole section over. With this if there was a train in the middle of the song, you’d never know. We cued up the video to the point before Tara started singing “Chesterfield,” and after finishing the first song of the day, “Sunburn,” Tara’s conversation with Felix revealed that she was feeling nervous about her ability to sing all day: Tara: Well, I don’t know if it’s perfect, but I think we should keep going. Felix: Yeah. Tara: Because I don’t know how long it will last. Felix: Yeah, it will be a long day of singing. You’re doing great. If I notice something, I’ll let you know. All right, so can you tell me what one you want to do next? Tara: Let’s do Chesterfield. And looking at the list they all feel challenging right now. Felix: Really?! Tara (mimicking going through a list): I don’t know if I can sing that one, I don’t know if I can sing that one . . . Felix: Come on! Tara explained that there was a rationale behind the singing order of her songs: It was mostly vocally the range you know, so the first time I sang I made sure it wasn’t like a song that I really wanted my voice all there for. In contrast to the nervous trepidation Tara expressed to Felix before singing “Chesterfield,” Tara clarified that singing this song was not as demanding vocally as some of her other songs: It’s not that challenging of a song, I think. I can sing it pretty lightly. There was a couple of songs that I didn’t get what I wanted. I’m not sure that this is one of them. Like one of those songs that on a good day you can get the sound you want, and I’m just not good enough to consistently get it. The origins of the song “Chesterfield” are interesting because Tara started writing it on a family trip as she explained: This happens to be one of those songs where I saved this random piece of paper literally . . . I literally had this piece of paper in my makeup bag

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for two years. It was one of those things that would be an interesting idea sometime. I asked Tara is she still had it and she pulled out a Black n’ Red notebook and showed me the scrap of paper. Tara is an immaculate record keeper and proceeded to show me five more pages of lyric sketches that were eventually whittled down to the final draft. T E C H N I C A L D E TA I L S

Before the singing of “Chesterfield” commenced, Tara and Felix went over some technical details. Tara asked, “Is my proximity to the mic okay?” Felix strolled back to check her distance from the microphone and deemed it good. Felix then walked out of frame to take his post at the computer and announced, “All right, here we go.” Tara confirmed her readiness with an “mmm hmm,” and listened to the playback in her headphones. “Would you mind cutting the click?” Tara requested. She started to sing the first few lines of the song: “Stay a few more minutes before you go. I’ll wait right here on the shoulder of your chesterfield,” before interrupting herself: “Um, let’s start one more time, could I have a little bit more piano?” Felix proceeded by going through a technical checklist with Tara, “All right, and the vocals are good?” “The vocals are fine,” Tara retorted matter-​of-​factly. Making sure, Felix confirmed, “Just piano?” “Yeah,” followed Tara’s instant approval. Felix started to raise the volume of the piano in Tara’s headphones asking, “Is this okay? More?” Tara motioned upward with her thumb, the universal signal for “more” until she was content with the piano level and informed Felix, “Okay, that’s good.” Tara answered Felix’s final item on the checklist, “You don’t need a click at all, right?” with a nod, and once again she resumed singing: Stay a few more minutes before you go. I’ll wait right here on the shoulder of your chesterfield. S E L F -​C O N S C I O U S N E S S I N   R E C O R D I N G

As Tara sang, her eyes were closed and her posture was upright. Her right hand grasped the fingers of her left hand and she made a circular dipping motion with her hands, as if summoning an imaginary object from the ground. Pointing at the computer screen, I asked Tara: Adam: What’s this kind of thing? Tara: I actually was conscious of it. That’s like, trying to pull up if I know I’m going to be flat. I was conscious of it, but I don’t necessarily think it helps. I knew I was doing that a lot. Now this is much stranger to watch [than playing piano].

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Adam: Why? Tara: Well part of it is I think it looks unnatural and I think it is unnatural because I never sing like that. You know, you never sing in a booth without playing anything or hearing a band or feeling, but oh well. I know I feel relaxed because I look weird, I didn’t feel self-​conscious. Adam: Did you ever think about the camera? Tara: Yeah a couple of times. Not much, but I guess a little bit. But not thinking about and really doing anything about it. “ G OT TA H I T T H AT ” :   S I N G I N G P E R F E C T I O N

Compared to the piano recording of “Chesterfield,” the vocal recording took considerably less time, partly because the recordings were not interrupted by environmental sounds. Yet Tara’s drive for perfection spurred her on to get perfect vocal takes. After completing the vocals for “Chesterfield” in two halves, Tara took a drink of hot water from her mug and muttered, “Ah, gotta hit that,” and repeatedly sang the three notes outlining an Eb-​minor triad: Bb4, Eb4, and Gb4 with the lyrics “ches-​ter-​field.” The leap down of a perfect fifth from the Bb4 to the Eb4 gave her some problems, as she had a tendency to sing the Eb slightly flat. Tara walked out of the camera’s frame, but she could be heard playing the notes at the piano and singing them back trying to match the pitches precisely. Tara commented to me that singing perfectly in tune is a point of pride for her: “To me, if I hit a note really in tune, but it wasn’t the best take, I would be happy about how I hit that note the way I wanted.” This sentiment was echoed in Tara’s journal: “I really like this sort of thing more and more, because it’s motivating for me—​I want to sing better, more in tune, play more accurately.” Tara and Felix took a quick recess while she sipped from her mug and rehearsed “ches-​ter-​field” a few more times. When recording resumed Tara sped through “Chesterfield,” and marched onto the next song. In total Tara sang six songs in one day—​impressive for someone who did not think she had it in her when the day began. The challenges she encountered recording vocals are not uncommon, as Producer Bob Rock (Metallica, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi) affirms: “I truly believe that recording vocals is the hardest skill to master in all of recording.”11

Comping (Saturday) There was a tone of relief in Tara’s journal entry from Saturday: The apartment is almost back to normal. In a hurry, I’ve kind of tried to clean up. I  feel like I  do after a trip—​that even though I  want to relax,   As cited in Hatschek, The Golden Moment, 184.

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I want to put everything back in order and really be finished and just move on to the next thing. But I remember the importance of giving thanks for something that’s happened and taking a break from it, and celebrating it. We finished the vocals today. With the vocals done and the recording stage completed in a furiously paced seven days, Tara was cognizant that there was more work to be done: I have my work cut out for me with regards to making comping notes. I wish that there had been more of a system in place and/​or that Felix had been very clear with takes and what he was using. But I don’t think he’s used to working with so many different takes/​tracks. And I don’t have a lot of experience with how to organize projects in that regard. So, I think the best bet will be to take tomorrow off and maybe Monday too, but then listen and do comping notes right away—​before the projects become too distant from my memory and ears. I’m going to do very rough bounces right now of the songs we did today, and the songs with harmony. Felix thought he could do comps in about a week. I’ll then need to decide on a mixer, next step, etc. Understandably, after the recording was finished Tara was in need of some respite from the project, but she quickly resumed after a few days’ rest: “I didn’t want to listen to it for three days, and then I listened to it for a week starting that Wednesday and did comping notes. I didn’t do the comping but I did really detailed notes and sent them to Felix.” Working for anywhere from two to seven hours a day for seven days, Tara made detailed notes on the recordings and sent them to Felix. To start this process, Tara first made a set of notes for comping the piano and the vocals. These notes were prepared separately. To make these notes, Tara meticulously listened to every recorded take and selected her favorite performances. With a cut and paste mentality, Tara’s notes to Felix instructed him on which part of which take to keep and join to another take. Her notes on the piano takes were color-​coded in purple, yellow, rust, blue, dark blue, and green, because in Logic, Felix assigned each new take a different color (Figure 4.5). Conceptually, the song is a rainbow of Tara’s takes; only the bright moments are presented and the dull moments remain obscured. “V” stands for verse, “C” for chorus, and “Pre” for prechorus: • • • • •

Intro: Purple V1: Yellow (but see if bar 8 can be fixed or replaced because the timing is off V1B: Rust or Blue (but see if it has too much room noise**) Pre 1: Rust C1A: dark blue for bars 18 and 19; yellow for the rest of C1 or yellow for all of it

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Figure 4.5  Screenshot of the “Chesterfield” Logic session. 

• • • • • • • • • • •

C1B: Purple C1C: Purple Intro 2: Purple V2A: Yellow V2B: bars 36 and 37–​Yellow; bars 38 and 39–​Green Pre 2: Green C2A: Green C2B: Rust C2C: Rust or Purple Outro: Rust take 4 or Purple take 5 ** the ritard is better in the purple take, but there’s a little noise in purple. Maybe rust is better

Tara prepared a similar set of instructions for comping the vocals, but they were more specific, indicating to Felix when to merge one audio file with another file at a precise beat. In some instances, Tara instructed Felix to use only two bars of a take at a time. The color-​coded system was not employed, instead each vocal recording had a number and in some cases a take assigned to it (e.g., Vox 3 Take 4). In total, the final vocal rendition of “Chesterfield” included at least six different takes that will end up sounding as one seamless take. • Bar 1 to bar 19 beat 2–​Vox 1 • bar 19 beat 2 (“on the shoulder”) to C1B: Vox 6 take 2

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• C1B: to bar 27: Vox 1 (but the word “chesterfield” in bar 26 either needs tuned or take the phrase “on your chesterfield” (basically around bar 26) from track 8 pink • bar 27 and 28: Vox 5 • V2A and V2B: Vox 1 • bar 40: Vox 4 (just for the phrase “time is running out on us”) • middle of bar 41 (“waiting for you silently”)—​end of bar 45: Vox 1 • bar 46: take Vox 6 Take 2 from the C1 and put it here beginning with “anymore” up until bar 49. • Bar 49 and 50: Vox 1 • bar 51 to end: Vox 3 Take 4 Felix followed Tara’s instructions and sent her the comped files she requested after a day’s work: He sent me three comps on the piano, three audio files for each song on the piano. Then he sent me a tuned vocals and an untuned vocals, so I just listened to both I guess. I thought my tuning was okay, but I know that there were some parts that weren’t. The process of editing continued with Tara listening to what Felix had done and making more notes. Her notes start with general points that apply to all of the songs: • Noise in the beginning of the vocals. Some have it and some don’t have it. In general, I would want the tracks to be as clean and succinct as possible before delivering them to be mixed. • If you have time, could you get rid of the noise that’s in the beginning of the lead vocals? • Should all the tracks end in the same place? • There is a lot of noise in the vocal tracks (between verse and chorus, etc.). I think that should be fixed before being delivered to a mixer (as in cleaning up the dead space where I’m not singing). • Regarding the tuning, it seems when I play the tuned versions and the untuned versions that it produces quite a funny sound. I assume this means that in the tuned versions, most of the notes have been tuned slightly? Do you have an estimate of what percentage of the vocals you tuned in the “tuned versions”? • We need to figure out why those tuned vocal tracks won’t import. Hmmm—​ strange that they imported for some songs but not for others. Tara explained to me that in comping it is critical to have the audio files prepared as best as possible for the mixing stage: “In delivering them to a mixer if there was a lot of pops, like literally pops in the edit and stuff like that . . . they’d be sending them back.”

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In addition to the general notes, Tara produced two sets of notes specific to each song. Her notes on “Chesterfield” gave very specific references, citing measures in the music where the errors occur. Additionally, she provided directions to Felix on how to go about correcting these mistakes: CHESTERFIELD—​Notes: •  There’s a noticeable vocal pop in bar 26 after “chesterfield.” • The C2, measure 45 is for some reason a bit late. . . . not quite sure why—​but you can take Vox 1 from the middle of measure 41 to end of measure 50, and that should fix it. But let me know what you think—​the main thing is that measure 45 seems to be out of time. With her “I’s” dotted and “T’s” crossed, Tara did everything in her power to ensure that her seven days of recording represented the best of her performances. At last she was ready to move into the final stage, mixing.

Ongoing: Shopping for a Mixer Tara revealed to me her plans for mixing: I’m going to shop out a mixer. That Tony person that came over said he’d be willing to work on it, but I think he might be too expensive. I’ve had a couple of other people offer for hire, but I don’t know. In reading about it, in a sense, it’s not going to be that complicated for a mixer, but I don’t know that much about mixing. Matthew Homer observes that “there are now many artists who use the professional studio in conjunction with their home recording tools to create high-​quality records,”12 and Tara outsourcing mixing from her DIY studio is an example of this phenomenon. Tara received two mixes from two different people she hired, neither of which she was very happy with. She played for me the first mix of “Hooked” done by Felix. My first impressions of the recording were that her voice sounded very crisp and professional, just like what you would hear on the radio. In contrast, the piano sounded murky and lacked definition. Combined, the mix sounded like there was a singer in one room and a pianist in a separate distant room. Tony Visconti, longtime producer of David Bowie, remarked:  “The vocal is probably the most

  Homer, “Beyond the Studio,” 95.

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important part of the mix. If the vocal is poorly placed in the mix, it’s going to defeat the purpose.”13 I asked Tara, “So you don’t like it?” Tara: I don’t totally dislike it but . . . Well, for one, I’m trying to figure out if every song sounded like that, why I wouldn’t like it mix-​wise. In general, the voice is so prominent and hot sounding and the piano sounds underwater. But he was just doing a basic mix of what he would do. Adam: Do you like the performance? Tara: Yeah, for the most part. Adam: So it’s more the sounds? Tara: I guess so. There are a couple of edits in there that I can hear little cuts, but that’s not really the mix. The other mix I will show you. I was talking to Jim yesterday on the phone and he said I wish I hadn’t sent that to you now that I know what you want. You’ll hear there is a lot of reverb and I wanted more of a dry, clean sound. Tara played me the mix of “Sunburn” done by Jim, someone whom she had met at school that would be willing to mix her album for a more reasonable price than some of the other quotes she had been getting. “His rate is so much more affordable, it would be a few hundred dollars, which is much better than thousands.” In comparison, the consultant she initially hired, Tony, would charge Tara five hundred dollars per song, tallying a price tag of fifty-​five hundred dollars to mix the entire album. It was almost difficult to believe that these two mixes were made with recordings done in the same room by the same person; they were conspicuously different. As opposed to the dry-​style vocal treatment on “Hooked,” Tara’s voice sounded distant in “Sunburn,” drenched in synthetic-​sounding reverb. Further, the piano sounded even more distant. Tara shared the same criticism: That one, to me, the voice seems reverby and big and going for that feel. I don’t really know until I hear a balance I really like. It could just be inherently problematic; the piano isn’t that great if you listen to it. That’s what a couple other people have said—​it’s going to be hard to make it feel balanced and have a good stereo sound. While Tara had not been able to find someone to produce a mix to her satisfaction, she knew what she was waiting to hear: “I feel there is not a sense of ‘here is someone performing,’ and that is the nature of this, or it should be, because there aren’t any other instruments on it.” Tara wanted the mix to evoke an image of her playing the piano and singing at the same time, something that of course did not happen.

  Visconti, Tony Visconti, 153.

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To Be Continued: Conclusions Recording technologies play different and distinct roles in Tara’s life. Unlike the other case study participants, Tara did not engage with recording technology until her mid-​ twenties. She described her early interactions with recording software as “ad hoc,” employing the click and consequence technique of sifting through sounds and layering them against one another, taking advantage of the multitracking capabilities of a DAW. Her music-​making during this stage was reflexive, as the playback of sound was integral to her proceeding musical actions. Tara also adopted an approach to music-​making with recording technology that pitted it as her accompanist. For the purpose of making demos, Tara recorded her music, but not her voice, creating a type of karaoke composition in which she sang along while her computer played her precomposed files. In contrast to this interactive approach, Tara’s most recent project involving DIY recording technology resembled a typical mid-​century approach to recording in which the music is first composed and then recorded. There was no integration of the two processes of songwriting and recording. Her goal was to have a finished product, an album that people could purchase and listen to. What is particularly unique about this scenario is that Tara has attempted to create a mélange of the professional and DIY studio models by hiring consultants, mixers, and an engineer to work within her home system. Forgoing the model of the solitary studio in which an individual shoulders all of the responsibilities of production, Tara functioned more like a traditional producer: “A record producer is responsible for every aspect of her recording. In the early days the word ‘producer’ was more descriptive because the record producer put up the money for the recording and hired a team of experts to execute the various creative jobs.”14 Employing Felix to engineer allowed Tara to focus solely on her performance, almost to a fault with her drive to attain perfection. The downside of her collaboration was that introducing Felix into the equation ushered in a new set of complications: human dynamics. In distributing the workload Tara relinquished total control; whether it was solicited or not, she subjected herself to the feedback of another person. Tara made it quite clear that there were times when she wished she had greater technical proficiency with her DIY studio so that she could circumvent some of the frustrations she experienced working alongside Felix. Despite the friction, Tara efficiently recorded her songs by working collaboratively with Felix in her DIY studio. The tradeoff of collaboration in this case was power for expertise. Tara’s recount of her own learning history revealed that much of it could be classified as informal. Lucy Green’s criteria of self-​directed learning and learning by copying recordings are clearly met,15 but Tara also dedicated much of her busy   Ibid., 50.   Green, Music, Informal Learning, and the School, 6–​9.

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schedule to formal lessons, especially during her college years. Tara seems not to have straddled but rather defected back and forth between the formal and informal spheres of music learning. Like Michael, she shares some similarities; she has a university degree in musical performance, and referred to herself as “classically trained,” but the reality of her learning history is that it has an identity crisis. Tara’s case evidences characteristics of both formal and informal learning approaches. Tara’s recording technology skills and know-​how were nonexistent until a few years ago. She now has the ability to record a complete song using Logic, and write an orchestral score using Sibelius. Claiming “no one taught me,” Tara embodies the spirit of the self-​taught learner. Learning as she had to with only the aid of manuals, Tara was able to gradually learn how to use the various pieces of music software and hardware she had purchased on the recommendation of her teacher. Initially purchased with the expectation of pursuing a career as a film scorer, Tara has applied the technological skills she acquired studying that discipline to songwriting. Whether she is shaping raw ideas into music using Logic by herself, or sourcing out services for her studio, DIY recording is integral to Tara’s music-​making process.

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5 Track 3 Tyler

It was an unseasonably warm spring day when I first visited Tyler at his Williamsburg apartment, and some of his neighbors were basking in the heat and playing dominos in front of the building. Tyler, a twenty-​seven-​year-​old musician who lives with three roommates on the ground floor, confessed that he was tempted to cancel our meeting in favor of following his neighbors’ example and seeking some respite under the sun. The compromise of cohabitation is an exchange of private space for reduced rent. As a result, Tyler spends most of his time confined to his humble two-​ hundred-​square-​foot room. His desk is comprised of an abandoned door perched on two stacks of cinderblocks, and various audio cables hang like willows from a piece of pegboard mounted to the adjoining wall. This corner of his room comprises his recording studio. It is also his entertainment center where he streams and projects television shows from his laptop onto the adjacent wall, his figurative office cubicle where he works as a consultant for a small Brooklyn-​based tech startup, and his dining room table where he eats. He remarked that most things in his room are modular. For example, he’s a proud futon owner as it functions as a sofa during the day and transforms into his bed at night. Tyler’s modular mentality extends beyond feng shui and is apparent in many aspects of his thinking, especially in his music-​making.

“Just Learned It From Doing It”: Learning History Raised in a small town in Georgia, Tyler started playing his grandmother’s piano when he was very young, “like four or five, just self-​taught.” Although he took structured lessons for a year and a half, he credits his self-​led explorations for his advancements: “I just played all the time. I learned what chords were before I knew what they were. Just learned it from doing it.” His recollection of learning to play the guitar is similarly scant on details:

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I saved up my money from mowing yards to buy a guitar when I  was twelve. I  took guitar lessons for about four months, five months, somewhere around there, and that’s when I learned chords. Actually, I learned chords from a book—​at first I was teaching myself guitar, too. Summarizing his music education involving piano and guitar, Tyler concluded: “Really, my knowledge about those instruments was self-​taught.” His early explorations with recording technology were similarly self-​supervised and coincide with his pursuit of learning how to play the guitar and keyboard. The earliest experience he could recount entailed overdubbing using two cassette recorders: The very first recordings I did were in the fifth grade using my keyboard. I had two different tape players, and I would play and record into one, and I would press play on that one, and play the keyboard at the same time, and record on the other, and I would go back and forth. Later, at the age of fourteen, Tyler invested in a four-​track cassette recorder: With the four-​track, it was magical . .  . I just started making thirty-​two-​ track songs so I would bounce it down to one track. Guitar, vocals, and keyboard . . . I played some drums too, which is again teaching myself. In his senior year of high school, Tyler transitioned from using a four-​track to his first DAW, Cakewalk Home Studio for PC, because it enabled him to record both audio and MIDI. By the time he entered college a year later in 2000 at age seventeen, the digital recording boom had already begun to trickle down to the consumer market. Tyler learned to use DAWs like Cakewalk and Acid Pro (hereon abbreviated to Acid), and the drum sequencing programs HammerHead and Fruity Loops. All of these programs were “cracks,” downloaded from file sharing sites on the Internet. When asked how he learned to use these programs, Tyler responded: “I would say that it just happened over time, and over trial and error more than anything.” “ I W O U L D G E T TO G E T H E R W I T H M Y S E L F ” :   M A K I N G M U S I C WITH ACID PRO

Using his laptop, Tyler played me a collection of archived mp3 demos to supplement his oral history of learning to use a DAW: “This is 2003. One of the first songs I wrote all the way through and recorded on my computer.” He played the file and offered a critique: “It sounds like Granddaddy covering the Eagles. My voice was much higher then. There’s so much Belle and Sebastian in it. I  was using sound

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effects and stuff in it like wind.” He recalled how he wrote songs during this time: “I would get together with myself and record forty seconds of guitar just to get the basic idea, and I would do some vocals with no lyrics to kind of get the two different vocal parts down.” Tyler also detected a mnemonic device he employed while making song sketches: place holder lyrics. “So here’s an example of fake lyrics: ‘nothing I will write here will stay, only the rhythm and meter, no choruses either.’ ” T E C H N I C A L TA N G E N T # 1 :   M I C R O P H O N E M AT T E R S

I was impressed with the quality of the recording, but Tyler countered with a technical critique of himself: “I was using cheap microphones, so much of it is that, just the basics. I wasn’t getting the right sound, and then to make up for the noise I would take off some of the high-​end in the EQ, but then it just makes it sound kind of weird.” Albin Zak stresses the importance of microphones: “In many ways microphones are the technological soul of any recording project; the effectiveness of all other tools and techniques depend upon the quality of the image that the microphone is able to deliver.”1 Famed jazz recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder’s selection of a microphone was made “with the same care a photographer employs in selecting a lens.”2 Similarly, recording engineer Geoff Emerick who recorded the Beatles from 1966’s Revolver to Abbey Road in 1969, remarked “I think of microphones as lenses.”3 While not perfect, the lens analogy is a helpful aid for a visually oriented, selfie-​obsessed culture. Anyone who has ever taken a photograph can appreciate the fact that a camera’s lens does not “see” identically to that of the human eye. Similarly, microphones do not “hear” identically to that of the human ear; they emphasize some aspects of the audible sound spectrum more than others. To record guitar, Tyler typically uses a Shure SM57 dynamic mic. The SM57 holds a special place in recording history because despite its relative inexpensiveness compared to other microphones, countless engineers continue to choose it for recording snare drums and guitar amplifiers.4 In part, the rationale for opting for the SM57 for these purposes can be attributed to its frequency response, which is similar to that of human hearing: “The Shure SM57 sharply attenuates all incoming audio below 200 Hz and above about 13 kHz, exaggerates all sound between roughly 2 and 7 kHz, and rejects everything under 40 Hz and above about 15 kHz.”5   Zak, The Poetics of Rock, 108.   Cogan and Clark, Temples of Sound, 198. 3   Massey, Behind the Glass, 84. 4   Massey, Behind the Glass, and Massey, Behind the Glass Volume II. 5   Hodgson, “A Field Guide to Equalization and Dynamics Processing on Rock and Electronica Records,” 285. 1 2

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To record vocals Tyler uses an AKG C 414-​XLS condenser microphone, which he explains, “is a great mic, it’s one of my prized possessions, but for my voice, well, typically I would sing lower on my real music, and I want to get a different mic for that. This one has limitations.” The limitations that Tyler experiences could be attributed to technique as Gino Robair explains: Condenser mics, for example, sound brighter and harsher when the capsule is positioned directly on-​axis with the singer’s mouth. As the capsule is tilted forward, the sound tends to get warmer, darker, and less strident. This is because the sound hits the capsule less directly and the capsule captures more of the singer’s chest resonance. An off axis tilt can also help reduce sibilance and popping caused by plosives.6 Stylistically, Tyler is not a crooner,7 but he sings softly, almost at a whisper volume, necessitating a microphone to capture his vocal nuances. Tyler suspected that a different microphone would better suit and capture the quality of his mellifluous singing voice: I want to get a Shure SM7B microphone, which would be good for recording my voice, a lower voice. The recordings that I’m doing that are a rip-​ off of Leonard Cohen, they are more mellow and baritone-​ish. That mic would work so well. Tyler may have a valid reason for thinking that a different microphone altogether could make the difference. The inherent properties of the microphone itself could be the culprit. Different microphones have different frequency responses, meaning that they will uniquely accentuate or reduce specific frequencies. This helps to explain why one microphone might be an excellent choice for one singer and not another; it depends on the character of the singer’s voice. Tyler recognizes the critical role of the microphone. His AKG C 414 is one of his “prized possessions.” Donald Grieg observes: “The microphone is the representative of potentially countless future audiences.”8 Bruce Swedien’s proclamation distills the vital role that microphones play in his profession, an attitude that has been adopted by DIY-​ers like Tyler: “My microphones are prized possessions . . . They are the voodoo, the magic wand, the secret weapon of the music recording engineer’s or producer’s trade and craft.”9   Robair, The Ultimate Personal Recording Studio, 154.   Mark Katz points out that “crooning was only possible with the microphone, for without amplification such singing would be expressively flat and nearly inaudible.” Capturing Sound, 40. 8   Grieg, “Performing For (and Against) the Microphone,” 16. 9   Swedien, Make Mine Music, 174. 6 7

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“ I L E A R N E D T H E   H A R D WAY ” :   S E L F - ​T E A C H I N G W I T H   D AW S

Returning to my initial question of how he learned to use recording software, Tyler assessed that there was a lot that he did not understand: When I started out I didn’t understand how to use effects in Acid. I understood how to use effects in Fruity Loops, so I used to bounce down the track from Acid, and move it into Fruity Loops, add reverb to it, and bring it back into Acid. Everything I did I learned the hard way. I think it was only six or seven years ago when I discovered that I could put effects in Acid. I just didn’t know, I never read things, I didn’t watch tutorials; YouTube wasn’t around at that time. It’s crazy to think about how I did things so wrong. Using Acid as his primary DAW from 2000 until 2009, Tyler’s competency with the software advanced over time, and he has amassed an armory of samples to show for it. Recorded in 2006, Tyler played a song that demonstrated a marked increase in technical prowess. The song features beats he made with Fruity Loops and GrooveAgent, a beat he sampled from an Elliott Smith song, and “cut up samples of Yo-​Yo Ma playing cello.” Combined, it’s an impressive exposition of the melding of Tyler’s musical vision and software mastery. For three consecutive hours, Tyler guided me through his recording history, playing me songs that date back nearly ten years, and many unfinished songs that were never released to the public. Intermittently, Tyler shifted into karaoke mode, singing along to the tracks to give me a sense of what the completed songs would sound like with lyrics. Caught in a moment of self-​consciousness, Tyler interrupted himself: I think the funny thing about your project is, “Oh, I’ll get them to record themselves because no one would ever feel comfortable just doing this stuff in front of me,” and I feel like every time we get together that’s what I do. This is literally what I do: I sit in front of it, and I think about how cool it’s going to sound at one point, and I get excited by it, and it’s very egocentric, solipsistic, like I am the only person making stuff at this moment! As Tyler revisited his musical past by aurally sifting through his archive of recordings, he voiced a range of emotions, some of them downtrodden: “I feel like I’m becoming a cliché,” he said, “like the consummate underachiever. I have all these songs on their own that should have been released, that could’ve been done.” Parrying his self-​aimed attacks, Tyler later expressed relief that he did not complete and distribute his older songs: I feel like I was too naïve as an artist to know what I wanted to say. I just spent all this time trying to figure out how to do things, and I was excited

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if I could make a song that sounded catchy regardless of what it meant. I almost feel glad that I didn’t put myself out there, doing stuff that wasn’t as developed. Further, he saw a silver lining as much work remains to be done: “I’m getting inspired by myself, just listening to all the stuff that’s not done and realizing, remembering that there are fifty songs that can be followed to their fruition.” To facilitate accomplishing these goals, Tyler has a lifespan plan.

The Cartographic Composer: Mapping a Musical Existence Tyler has charted a lifetime’s worth of music that he will produce. The sessions that I was able to eavesdrop on are but a few of a multitude of recordings that he plans on releasing for decades to come. Tyler’s rationale for his life plan of music-​making stems from his ratiocination of a need for newness in the music industry: I started thinking of how I wanted to release music, and what would make it interesting to me because I just felt like it lost a lot of what I felt was interesting about it . . . Music hasn’t changed a lot in fifty years . . . I’m sure there has always been a genealogy that you can follow, but it seems like with a lot of things you reach this postmodern dead-​end where a lot of it is rehashing things that have been done before. And bands are doing this thing where they play music and tour and sell music between the hours of 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.—​and this is kind of a twentieth-​century invention in a way—​and I don’t know that it’s like a permanent thing. Tyler’s perception that the music industry is stagnant is in part based on his own experiences of touring and recording with an indie rock band for seven years throughout the early 2000s. During their tenure, Tyler’s band toured internationally and shared the stage with chart-​topping bands while garnering praise from Spin and Pitchfork. Tyler’s band was a seminal act in the burgeoning indie rock faction that emerged in the post–​boy band era of the early 2000s. Despite the initial excitement of this experience, the luster gradually dulled with time. He realized that his band was perpetuating a cyclical model of touring and recording that has been entrenched in the music industry since the dawn of recording capability: “To some extent when you get the curtains pulled back and you tour and you play, the people that I thought were doing magic, they were doing pretty obvious things.”

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In an attempt to deviate from the status quo, Tyler devised a new way to go about music-​making that is influenced by the distributive characteristics of the Internet, specifically social networking: I started thinking about how music is consumed and distributed now, and I think that music hasn’t really adjusted to the changes in technology and the Internet. When I  think about what changes with the Internet, there are two kinds of things that people talk about: One of them, which I think is talked about the most, is that it is a network of people and it’s a web of content, so that you are able to have users and people all around the world contribute; it’s a network. The second thing about the Internet to me is that it is constantly changing. It’s dynamic. Nothing on it is static. You find the occasional page from 1997, but even that probably has a little animated GIF that says “under construction.” It’s fighting against its actual static state. That I found really interesting, and the more that we start to experience music not through physical discs, not even through downloads, but through streaming, through just being given access to music that is somewhere else, seems like it should be reflected in the music. So I started thinking of albums not as this permanent thing but rather as a fluid collection of songs. More like how a photo album is on Facebook. People might remove photos or add new photos to it, but it is a collection that makes sense at any specific given time. So that’s what I think I want my albums eventually to be like. I want them to be like collections and projects that are ongoing indefinitely. Maybe the songs are remixed in different times. I want to tear down, at least for my own music, the idea of sacred recording, like this is the song. Tyler’s framing of recorded music as a process of petrification evidences his critical thinking. His tone resembles that of Chris Cutler, who argues: “Until 1877, when the first sound recording was made, sound was a thing predicated on its own immediate disappearance; today it is increasingly an object that will outlast its makers and consumers.”10 But Tyler seeks to go beyond the binary of music as a passing event/​permanent object, and instead privilege the processes by making multiple iterations of his music available online. He is participating in what Kim Cascone describes as an Internet-​based cultural feedback loop: “Artists download tools and information, develop ideas based on that information, create work reflecting those ideas with the appropriate tools, and then upload that work to a World Wide Web site where other artists can explore the ideas embedded in the work.”11   Cutler, “Plunderphonia,” 138.   Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure,” 17.

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One of the first steps Tyler took toward fostering the development of his recordings was purchasing Ableton Live in 2008 (hereafter referred to as Ableton). Especially enamored with Ableton’s looping capabilities and flexibility, Tyler instantly intuited that it would change the way he made music, and hastily switched from Acid. He spent a year watching YouTube tutorials on Ableton before he started using the software, and credits the Internet as his foremost teacher: I think it’s a cliché, but the aspects of the Internet that have enabled autodidacticism have really influenced my own knowledge about music, and I’m more inclined to learn about stuff because I can learn it at my own pace. I could watch a YouTube tutorial about a very specific thing in Ableton, or a very general thing about mixing, and those things all feed into this. Social media and social circles—​it’s not been an isolated journey in a way. Tyler’s recognition of the advantages of adopting an autodidactic approach are echoed by Hannah Quinn: “My bedroom studio was a place of solitude, a private world where I was able to take things at my own pace, a place to both lose and find myself.”12 With his enthusiasm for Ableton, Tyler could be mistaken for a sales representative. He spouted praise for the profusion of features it boasts: What comes bundled in Ableton is already great. A lot of great samples—​ not just effects, but samples—​so for using a MIDI keyboard it’s great. But the effects are also awesome. It has an amp modeler so I can record a clean guitar signal and model amps in there. It has the vocoder, the ability to loop. It’s kind of an all-​in-​one package. Additionally, much of Tyler’s ardor for Ableton can be attributed to its design: “It is just so smooth and clean, the interface, and I like looking at it. I think that’s the case with anything; if you like the process of using it, you are going to use it a lot more.” In contrast to many other DAWs such as Pro Tools that more closely resemble an analog multitrack recorder, Ableton is simply a better match for Tyler. “The design,” he continued, “has as an interface that really fits with how I make music or think about music,” affirming Andrew Brown’s claim that “when we choose a piece of music software, or other technology, we are essentially deciding, in part, whether or not our priorities align with those of the designer.”13 Having briefed me on the software he uses, Tyler proceeded to show me the hardware he uses in his DIY studio.   Quinn, “Perspectives from a New Generation Secondary School Music Teacher,” 24.   Brown, Music Technology and Education, 17.

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A Guided Tour Through Tyler’s Bedroom Studio In tour-​guide fashion, Tyler introduced me to each component of his bedroom recording studio: I have the audio interface, which is connected to the computer [Figure 5.1]. I have a tuning pedal. I plug my guitar into the tuning pedal, and the tuning pedal goes to the audio interface. There’s an output in the audio interface that goes to this reverb pedal. Basically, a dry guitar signal will go to this interface, and then something will come out of that interface. Despite being an accomplished keyboard player, Tyler writes most of his songs on guitar. His studio is efficiently configured so that he can practice for a live gig or record music with the same setup. The MOTU Traveller is the central hub of his studio, all audio signals pass through it. Tyler detailed how and why he records his guitar with two different inputs, a direct input from the pickup in his acoustic guitar, and an acoustic signal that is recorded with a microphone: “I have more flexibility in just recording an acoustic sound while I’m recording, a direct sound, and then later, if

Figure 5.1  Tyler’s laptop that he uses to make music sitting atop his audio interface, a MOTU Traveler. 

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I want to run that direct sound to the amp and mic, I can change whatever settings I want.” Tyler’s bedroom studio is humble in appearance, but the routing alone evidences the technical sophistication involved, and his thinking behind it. Figure 5.2 shows one of Tyler’s mixers used to route signals in his DIY studio. T E C H N I C A L TA N G E N T # 2 :   M I X I N G M AT T E R S

Like a real estate agent taking me from room to room, Tyler briefed me on a few other items of note including a ukulele, a toy piano, and the next piece of equipment in his quiver: This is called an Akai MPD 32, and it is a USB and MIDI pad control unit [Figure 5.3]. It’s very flexible, it has faders. One reason I would use it is if I was mixing a song, I would like to get it down to a few groups. So, I will have like drums maybe and then bass, keyboards, vocals, and backup vocals. This is eight channels—​the greatest songs that were ever recorded were mixed down to eight channels at some point in my mind. One thing I use these for is like a mixing board because I actually get a tactile response.

Figure 5.2  One of the two mixers Tyler uses in his studio to route audio signals to various places. 

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Figure 5.3  Tyler’s Akai MPD 32 MIDI controller that he uses to mix his music. 

To me it’s just way different than if I’m here with the mouse trying to do it. It just feels more natural. Using the Akai MPD 32 as a mixing console manifests Tyler’s preference for an analog approach to mixing. The span of a human hand can grasp multiple faders on a console and move them with one fell swoop. With just one deft gesticulation, the levels of multiple instruments can be simultaneously raised or lowered. In DAW-​based mixing, using a mouse to mix multiple signals on a virtual console requires the user to select the virtual faders one-​by-​one; first to group them before they can be controlled as a singular unit. For audio engineers that are accustomed to mixing on a console, a common-​voiced sentiment is that mixing in-​the-​box is a frustrating experience. The curt critique voiced by recording engineer John Cornfield (The Stone Roses, Muse) captures the essence of the argument against DAW-​based mixing: “Mixing with the mouse drives you up the wall after a while.”14 Mixing on a physical console requires gross motor movement such as rolling around in a desk chair to navigate the mixing board, and reaching at arms’   Touzeau, Making Tracks, 188.

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length to adjust a fader or knob. It is a kinesthetic experience that occurs at the macro-​level, requiring the whole body. Mixing with a mouse requires micromovements of the hand; all mixing actions are performed with fine motor skills. As mixing consoles have been pushed toward obsoletion, mixing in-​the-​box has become the rule rather than the exception, and Cornfield’s sentiment will soon have little relevance to the up-​and-​coming generations of music-​makers who will never have experienced a mixing console. The mixing console has been in use for approximately fifty years, and the virtual console twenty years, which puts twenty-​nine-​year-​old Tyler medially in the zone of transition between the two technologies. Using a device such as the Akai MPD 32 to mix allows him to experience the tactile response of the physical console while mixing in-​the-​box. It is an intermediary technology: it is not necessary, but it helps make the transition from the withering technology to the emerging technology easier. STEMS

Tyler’s songs invariably have more than eight tracks, preventing him from using his Akai MPD 32 as a mixer in the traditional sense, in which every instrument is assigned to a different fader. Instead, Tyler employs a hybridized approach to mixing, doing some preliminary mixing in-​the-​box with a mouse, and then performing the final mix with the Akai MPD 32. Tyler surmised that “the greatest songs that were ever recorded were mixed down to eight channels,” and so it follows that he creates stems: Well these are all stems. You could mix everything down individually, but usually there’s not enough time to do that, so you would just mix guitars and ukuleles together, things that are treated similarly, so that later you know their volume relationship to each other at least, and you can decide the overall relationship of different things to each other in the song, volume-​wise. Tyler’s description of stems was somewhat convoluted, but he did delineate the distinction between a track and a stem. First, a single track can be conceptualized as a stem. For example, a single vocal track may be preserved as a stem so that it can be isolated from the other instrumentation during mixing. Many musics privilege vocals as the focal point, making it critical that the mixing engineer be able to treat and control the vocal performance independently. Alternatively, a stem can represent several individual tracks, an arrangement that requires grouping together multiple tracks and assigning them to a single fader; a process of mixing by clustering. Take for example the recording of a drum kit: It is an instrument comprised of a confluence of distinct components (e.g., bass drum, snare drum, tom-​toms, floor

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tom, and cymbals), each of which are often mic’d individually. In the mixing stage, once a relative balance between the components of the drum set is achieved, a single stem of the drum set can be created, allowing the mixing engineer to control the entire kit with a single fader. Amidst the technological descriptions of Tyler’s recording software and hardware, it is easy to lose sight of their purpose. Combined, they constitute his instrument. His bedroom DIY studio is the physical vessel in which he works to construct his virtual community of musicians.

The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far from the Social Network: Growing a Fictional Family Tree With the impetus of social networking spurring Tyler to seek alternatives to the established practices of music production and distribution, he derived a two-​ pronged approach adopted from his observations of the workings of the Internet. First, he framed the construct of an album as evolving—​an entity that resists stasis by inviting constant addition, revision, and modification: I decided I wanted to release music in the form of a blog. Just put it out, give it tags or different categories, and be like, this is one kind of album, this is another album, and then release songs incrementally and say this is being added to that album or to this one. The second concept that Tyler applied to his music-​making was the idea of a web of characters. Assimilating the added influence of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, Tyler promulgated Pessoa’s literary conventions to hatch a fictional web of characters: I started to incorporate the other idea that I had—​I mentioned about the Internet—​w hich is that it is a web, a network of people. Instead of having a pseudonym, Pessoa had what he called heteronyms, and there are all these characters with their own biographies, and their own religious and political views, and they sometimes disagreed with each other, but he would write in all these different voices, and I  thought that was pretty interesting. What he did for personhood and authorship I find fascinating. Having all this music that I felt represented different people to me in different parts of my personality, I thought that would be a great thing to carry into the realm of music, and the Internet really facilitates that. So, I created this fake label that is run by a fake person whose artists are fake people. They are heteronyms, but all the songs are me.

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Embracing the ghostwriter model, as an anonymous author Tyler has concocted a village of characters. The relationship that he has to each character is unique; reality in this imaginary realm is blurred: Three of the characters are me, but the other characters that I’m writing aren’t really me. I will write songs for them but they’re not really me, so I think I might cast them the way somebody would cast a play or a musical and find musicians that would want to be this band, and I would pay them . . . All of these things, any one of them could seem gimmicky, except that to me they are all connected by an ideology, the way we make music needs to be reflective of the way it is listened to. I think that is starting to change, and music has been slow to recognize that. That’s the basic rundown, and now it seems pretty weird, not weird, but just delusions of grandeur, like a grotesquely ambitious kind of project, but I think the beauty of it is I don’t have to create all this at once. Tyler has formulated six different bands that he writes for, one being himself, and five others that he puppeteers. Some of the bands include more than one member; in total he has created twelve characters. Currently he has eleven different albums in progress. Figure 5.4 presents a tree of Tyler’s characters to aid orientation to this concept.

Figure 5.4  Tyler’s tree of characters. 

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Tyler cites practical reasons for writing characters that are not him, such as, “I’m not a great singer or performer, and I write songs with big ranges, so it’s great, it gives me an excuse to have other people sing songs.” Additionally, he hopes to marry old and new ways of producing music: It’s doing two things at once. In a way it’s the ultimate manifestation of the narcissism of modern music where people record stuff themselves, and write stuff themselves, and are expected to be ten hats all at once—​the idea behind this is I’m going to control ten different bands. But on the other hand, it’s also a return to the old way of doing things when there was a division of labor, and you had different people perform songs than the ones that wrote them, and you didn’t have the artist or the songwriter necessarily tied to the things being said in the song . . . This is kind of doing both of those things, both very controlling, solipsistic, and at the same time, it’s very collaborative and embraces the division of labor. I think. I hope. Tyler’s description demonstrates his awareness of the changing practices in recording music. The shift to the “narcissism of modern music,” in which the musician controls the production process. As ­chapter 2 detailed, gradually throughout the latter half of the twentieth century many musicians began to infiltrate the engineers’ empire, abandoning comparative advantage in favor of control. Tyler is continuing this trend of striving to be self-​sufficient, but also evolving what it means to self-​ produce by creating multiple characters with their own production personalities. Rather than establishing a singular production identity (“the Motown Sound,” “The Wall of Sound,” etc.), Tyler has many. S I N G I N G   R O B OT S

An example of one of Tyler’s bands that is not him, but performed by him, is his band of singing robots. He explained his concept that aims to contrast humor with sentimentality: It’s designed to demonstrate the “uncanny valley,” which is what is talked about when robots become so real, but not quite real, and that weirds us out. That and other things like the gap between where we think we are at with technology. To get a robot singing sentimental things is inherently funny. So this is a band where I can be funny, but also try to do beautiful music to some extent. Together, Tyler and I listened to a recording of a song by his fictional robot band. It was apparent that the music is purposefully kitschy, featuring simple instrumentation including a country shuffle drumbeat at a moderate tempo; a galloping

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acoustic guitar; a honky-​tonk piano playing a triplet rhythm of the chords, giving the song a 12/​8 feel; and a reverb-​laden guitar solo playing the main melody predictably midway through the song. The focal point of the song is a robot singing along mechanically, juxtaposing the vocal performance that is void of emotion with the song’s inherent melancholy sentiment. Tyler’s creation sounds simple, which was intended. He explained that his aim was to make a recording with a “classic” sound, and to accomplish this he purposely used GarageBand to limit himself: “I don’t have the expertise to do something that pushes any boundaries. I wouldn’t know how to use it in a creative way. I only know how to use it in a formulaic way. So, therefore it forces me to make formulaic music with it.” Formulaic structure aside, it required great ingenuity, integrating multiple technologies in the recording process: This is using a vocoder and Autotune, as well as this program called VocalWriter. It’s like text-​to-​speech, except it sings. So you type in the text, and then you play on the keyboard what the notes are going to be, and it sings the song, robots sing the song. It’s very popular in Japan, but hardly used here at all. Robots have been able to sing for a long time. In 1961 the IBM 7094—​I became obsessed with this when I first heard it. I thought it was beautiful, there is something strange about it—​we created this computer, a computational device that does math, and we’re asking it to do something very emotional and not mathematical, to sing a love song. Following up on Tyler’s explanation, I asked him how he constructed the song and he responded: Using the Mac text-​to-​speech thing. Text Edit is designed for people with disabilities, you can go into settings or preferences and it reads the text. So, I  recorded that and cut it up to fit rhythmically with the song, and then I played all the instruments. This is just done in GarageBand. I just plugged my acoustic [guitar] in and my little keyboard. The drums was just a loop on GarageBand, and I played the bass with the Korg [MIDI keyboard]. This is a vocoder, this is me singing through using this to do the harmonies. Again, evidence of Tyler’s modular mentality surfaced as his response demonstrates that he recognized the musical potential in text-​to-​speech technology, an application not typically associated with music-​making (although it is famously woven throughout Radiohead’s acclaimed 1997 album OK Computer). Continuing on, Tyler revealed the depth of his technical knowledge and its application to his songs, explaining the difference between a carrier signal and a modulator, and how a vocoder, harmonizer, and Autotune are different devices that can be used to create singing robots.

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As ingenuous as his singing robot concept is, impressively demonstrating mastery of several complex music technologies, Tyler’s other projects are much more involved, both in time and technical sophistication. The remainder of this chapter will focus on the making of a song Tyler worked on during the data collection period, a song by Tyler’s longest living character, Otter.

Audio Avatars: Otter, Sumac, and Totem Otter is part of a triumvirate of characters that are related to each other, and in Tyler’s words, “are represented versions of me at different points in my life.” Each character has a biography that has purposely been underdeveloped because, as Tyler explained, “I also want to discover things about the characters later. I’ll probably get bored, and want to change things about them too.” As Tyler purported, the characters were created with a long-​term plan in mind: Ideally, I would be able to record using these names for the rest of my life and all the different characters because there is enough variation in them that it should suit any kind of mood. It’s designed to be future proof, I can just keep changing these characters, and they can continue to evolve. In 2006, Tyler released his first EP under the name Otter. Otter is from Montreal; he is a lover, he is naïve and melodramatic, and his lyrics are highly romanticized. Tyler disclosed, “Otter is probably closer to my songs than any of the other stuff that I’m doing, but hopefully it sounds pretty stylistically dissimilar from my own songs.” The second character is Sumac, a bison. Sumac is a soldier, a more pragmatic character, who roams the plains of Alberta: His lyrics are more concerned with, certainly not romantic issues, mostly political issues, the body politic, concerned with issues of society, the social issues. I have a collection of songs for that one that are related to social inequality in America or income inequality. Sumac’s album is a “country-​tinged record,” a “Dust Bowl record about social inequality.” Beyond lyrical content, Tyler attempts to make each character distinct musically by varying the vocal ranges he uses: “The Sumac stuff is going to be projecting really high, almost like Chris Martin [lead singer of Coldplay]. That’s part of how I’m going to differentiate the characters, different singing styles. Otter is this doubled sound, my own voice this Leonard Cohen thing.” The third character is Totem: “a mysterious guy that Totem, he doesn’t talk so how would we know?! Maybe later

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I will know where he’s from,” Tyler said with a smirk. Totem is an eagle that symbolizes justice. He patrols the west coast, but has no fixed address, It’s the only wise character, and because I’m not old enough to presume I would know what that sort of wisdom is, all the music I’m making for Totem is instrumental. And it probably will be for a long time. It may be fifty years from now. I will decide when I’m confident. With Tyler’s trinity explained, I was eager to get a glimpse of how these different characters are produced in his DIY studio. Tyler obliged by recording the processes of himself working on an ongoing piece by Otter. “ T H I S I S M E WATC H I N G M E TA L K I N G A B O U T   M E ” :   S T I M U L AT E D   R E C A L L

Tyler: I downloaded a trial version of a screen capture software called ScreenFlow, and it records video off of my webcam while it’s capturing the screen, so you can see them synced up together. It also shows keystrokes for when I  do keyboard shortcuts and things like that. I  wanted to test this out because I’ve considered doing tutorials in the future . . . I’ve also thought that I might look at this as a sort of journal, so I’m thinking I’ll talk over what I’m doing and kind of explain it. Using ScreenFlow, Tyler devised a way to record everything that occurred in Ableton as he worked away on his music, and also everything recorded by his webcam. Tyler captured some music-​making using ScreenFlow, and together we sat down and watched it. Making it more interesting, we recorded this interview with ScreenFlow as well. The bemused Tyler gushed, “This is me watching me talking about me. It’s kind of funny because I’m at the same desk that I was at.” Referring to the fact that we’re both in the camera’s frame, Tyler beamed, “This is great because you get both the scientist and the subject.” What follows is an account of Tyler’s processes as he worked on a song by Otter. This session is representative of Tyler’s working processes; he dedicates most of his time to critical listening and editing, as opposed to “writing” in any sense of the word, tracking, or mixing. For the most part, his focus is on the minutiae of production. Aden Evens suggests that this is to be expected of electronic music production: At a remove from the sound, standing over it, the electronic musician reflects on the sound, has the opportunity and the distance to hear every detail. Digital music tools allow and encourage an unending editing process,

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exposing every aspect of the sound to the music maker and offering a focus on arbitrarily small detail and arbitrarily large structure . . . Hours and days in front of the keyboard and mouse are spent playing a piece.15 In a word, Tyler engages in microcomposition—​composition at the atomistic level. EDITING MIDI

Serving me tortilla chips and hummus, Tyler navigated me through the screen recording (note that I have italicized the conversations I had with Tyler while we watched videos together in the stimulated recall sessions to help distinguish this dialogue from the moments when he speaks in the previously recorded videos). In the screen recording Tyler spoke aloud, presumably to me or some other potential audience: “I’m just going to jump in and not explain anything at first.” His first reaction to hearing himself speak was candid. Tyler: “I was really mumbling, wasn’t I?” he said to me. “And there’s a shadow over my mouth so you can’t read my lips!” After refamiliarizing himself with the screen recording, Tyler recalled what he was doing: I was just figuring out this harpsichord part. So, I took that thing and copied it five times; the melody. Consolidating just makes the small little clips, glues them together. In the screen recording Tyler clicked on these little red blocks, and at first it was difficult to discern what he was doing, but it became clear that each block represented a musical note. He was editing a MIDI part he wrote earlier. In the video, as he clicked on the blocks, Tyler explained his mouse actions: “Maybe I’ll change both of them to see if that makes any difference. I don’t know, I think I need to take out that and that.” With a few quick clicks Tyler deleted a note, E3, and replaced it with a different pitch, G#3. He then pressed play and listened, saying, “Let me test this out.” Something sounded amiss, and Tyler calmly admitted, “Oh, wrong place.” He had edited the wrong beat, the second eighth note at 134.1 (bar 134, beat 1) instead of the second eighth note at 134.3. Realizing his mistake, Tyler made the change, claiming, “That’s better and this can come out, I think,” and deleted a bass note in the pattern, B2 at bar 131. “That’s definitely better,” he said. “This pattern just doesn’t work with two keys being hit at the same time.”   Evens, Sound Ideas, 124–​125.

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Figure 5.5  Tyler edits the MIDI notes for his harpsichord part. 

After watching this part of the video, Tyler turned to me and offered a more overarching explanation of his actions on screen: TYLER: I think I first wanted the melody with [sings E3] and then changed it to this note [sings G#3] . . . I didn’t really know what I was writing when I started doing it at first; I just started filling in notes in the chords very arbitrarily just trying to see what it would look like, and I knew which notes would be in the chords and which notes wouldn’t. In a lot of Baroque music where they use the harpsichord a lot, there’s just a lot of eighth notes, or sixteenth notes. Adam: So you didn’t play this in on a keyboard? Tyler: Not this part. I started making a pattern and then I started hearing little melodies out of it. Once I heard that melody I adjusted it to fit that, but it’s still very mechanical. [In Ableton, Tyler uses a pencil tool to “draw” in the notes on the MIDI grid, often called the piano roll (Figure 5.5)] In the playback of the screen recording, Tyler moved onto other matters of concern: “So let me start bringing in the beats . . . let me just do harpsichord and beats.” Tyler pressed the solo button on the harpsichord and instantly the rhythm section appeared. There seemed to be a lot going on, polyrhythms of electronic drum kits, and a confluence of other pitched sounds. Tyler gave an itemized overview of the sounds being played: “First of all, actually this stuff here I recorded ten years ago. I just chopped up a bunch of guitar chords, and made this pattern for the end of this song, this is an old song.” Tyler pressed play in Ableton, and the sound he referred to bore no resemblance to a guitar, it sounded more like a skipping CD. Tyler analyzed the sound: “You can hear the thing clipping, you know, that pop that you hear—​ that’s where the waveform wasn’t at zero where it’s looped, but I kind of like that. It’s very unnatural sounding.” As we were watching this section of the screen recording I asked Tyler:

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Do you remember what you used to do that ten years ago? He responded: I just cut part of the guitar and pasted it next to itself over and over again. It was like ten milliseconds or something, and I just kept pasting it. When you cut something you know it has a click. E Q UA L I Z I N G   B E AT S

Meanwhile, the taxonomy of sounds in the video continued with Tyler explaining the multitude of different applications and approaches that were used in making the complex rhythm section: “The beats are constructed from a lot of different things layered together. There’s this”—​Tyler played a track labeled “elecbeat” and continued—​“which has got some heavy EQ on it, and it also was made about ten years ago in a program called Fruity Loops.” Next, Tyler muted “elecbeat” and played a different beat, explaining, “This is the same loop, but EQ’d differently. So, I’m emphasizing different EQs at different volumes.” Figure 5.6 depicts the two different EQ curves. Albin Zak describes equalization as: The manipulation of particular areas of the frequency spectrum whereby bands of frequencies are selected and then incrementally boosted or cut in (a)

(b)

Figure 5.6  The two EQ shapes that Tyler used on “elecbeat” (a and b). Both shapes feature significant cuts to the high frequencies. 

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order to precisely tailor a sound color, which, in turn, affects its place in the overall frequency structure of the track.16 Tyler explained his rationale for cutting high frequencies: “That gives us a bit of a lighter touch. I just didn’t want to hear too much of the hi-​hat, and the thing is, I don’t have the different components that made up this rhythm anymore. It’s on an old, old hard drive.” Tyler’s equalization curves may appear extreme, but Bill Gibson claims:  “An experienced mix engineer allocates equalization boosts and cuts across broad frequency bands with the tracks fitting neatly together like puzzle pieces.”17 MAKING LOOPS

Continuing on, Tyler played another beat called “funmachine” and explained that it was something he recorded from an old organ he had owned. I asked Tyler how he matched the tempo of the beat recorded from the organ to the other beats and he explained: I just cut it to be a perfect loop and then you can set that loop to any tempo. He said this so nonchalantly as if it took no effort, but making a loop requires precise editing and a keen ear. Perhaps Tyler recognized that looping material is considerably easier in the digital domain with nondestructive editing and auto syncing. In the analog era making loops was a more difficult process as Beastie Boy MCA explained: On Licensed to Ill (1986), we didn’t even have any samplers. So the stuff that’s looped, we actually made tape loops. We’d record [Led Zeppelin’s] “When the Levee Breaks” beat onto a quarter-​inch tape, and then we’d make the loop . . . And then, in order to layer that with something else, we’d have to actually sync it up, physically.18 Rounding up Tyler’s list comprising the rhythm section were a few more sounds, one labeled “ride,” “a ride cymbal thing, this was added forever ago,” “tambourine,” and in Tyler’s words, “some beat I made in GrooveAgent five or six years ago.” While watching the deconstruction of the rhythm section on the screen recording, Tyler provided some insight into how he goes about compiling beats:

  Zak, The Poetics of Rock, 120.   Gibson, The S.M.A.R.T. Guide to Mixing and Mastering, 130. 18   Brown, Rick Rubin, 45. 16 17

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I have a lot of different loops, a lot of these loops might have been made at different times for different things, and then I will pair them up and see which ones sound different together in different ways. Tyler provisions for himself by making beats that are not intended for a specific song. With stores of loops to call upon, he can audition his library of beats for the song at hand. The five loops stacked together create a dense texture of rhythm, which Tyler explained helped to characterize the sound of Otter: “It’s a lot of rhythm, too much rhythm, but again I kind of like that too. It sort of creates this nerdy version of an African drum circle thing, definitely this character—​his music is kind of contrived in that way.” S H I F T I N G   P I TC H

Having completed the tour of the rhythm section, Tyler proceeded by playing the few remaining tracks that were previously recorded. One of the sounds is a chorus of “oohs”; the harmonies are close and clear like something from the Beach Boys, but it is strangely perfect-​sounding. Allowing the screen recording to continue playing, Tyler clarified that his aim was to achieve an inhuman sound: This was intended to sound very unnatural because the pitch is being shifted down so many times that it doesn’t sound human. You know when a voice is shifted down to mask the identity of the person or something like [in a low voice] “Where is my daughter?” It’s the same principle. Audio Engineer and “FXpert” Alex Case explains: “Extreme or crude pitch shifts can make a vocal sound very unnatural . . . Using a pitch-​shifting processor to raise or lower the pitch of a note is not the same as singing or playing the higher or lower note.”19 In tutorial-​like style, in the screen recording Tyler deconstructed how he created the harmony using Acid: I sang the part once, and I copied it several times, and I would just cut a little section like that, and pitch shift that down to the next thing, and then cut another section and pitch shift that down. It’s basically the least efficient form of sampling ever. And that’s how I constructed the three-​part harmony. It’s just from one voice, which is why it sounds funny, but again I like the funny sound.

  Case, Mix Smart, 181.

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Figure 5.7  Analog Warmth. The effect Tyler uses on the master track. 

“IF I CAN GET MYSELF FEELING GOOD ABOUT IT”: REFLEXIVE LISTENING

In the screen recording Tyler played the song from the beginning and started to sing along: “I stood clean before the sun, in another world, 2001.” For two minutes Tyler sang along, and it appeared that the webcam was not inhibiting him from acting naturally: he rocked subtly to the music, focused on the Ableton interface as the music played. When his concentration on singing broke, he morphed back into explanation mode, confessing, “I think a lot of the time I  spend singing to instrumental tracks and/​or dancing, if I can get myself feeling good about it, singing and dancing, that’s always a good sign.” This type of listening is not so much critical in nature, but rather reflexive, like a knee-​jerk reaction. Tiger Roholt argues that grooves must be embodied,20 and it appears that this is what Tyler is doing. To further improve the overall sound, Tyler used an effect on the master track (Figure 5.7). He let me hear the difference with the effect on and then off. “This is what the track should really sound like,” he said, “but it gets me more into it to hear it premastered in a way.” With the effect on, the overall sound was remarkably different and sounded instantly clearer and crisper. Tyler divulged, “This is just an audio effect rack that includes a lot of different stuff (Figure 5.8). Saturator, EQ, compressor, I’m just using the presets, just something quick and easy to get us there.” Commenting on having just watched himself sing along, Tyler explained this behavior is par for the course: A lot of the time is probably spent trying to dance or kind of get into it. That’s all you can really know, is whether or not you like it.   Roholt, Groove.

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(a)

(b)

Figure 5.8  The saturator, EQ, and compressor that comprise the plugin Analog Warmth (a and b). Tyler used Analog Warmth on the master track “to improve the overall sound of the song.” 

Following up, I asked, “Do you write stuff that you don’t like?” In his response Tyler compared his songwriting to speaking, explaining that in retrospect his opinion may change: Yeah, but it takes a while before I can be honest about that, because I usually like it at first. We all like what we say at first, but everyone says things that make them cringe later when they remember them. It’s similar to that. Considering that this song has been under construction for ten years, Tyler has sung along many times, with both the lyrics and melody undergoing constant revisions. Tyler confided, “You’re getting a bit of how I write. In fact, the melody I just recently changed. It used to be something that I did not feel was dark enough.” He dug up an older recording of the same song that was slightly faster and featured a completely different set of lyrics: I climbed the Douglas fir, the fall of ‘93 And he harbored all my resentment The falls ran dry, no hydro for the mill So now we wait until . . . Tyler reflected, “I don’t know what those meant, I wrote lyrics that didn’t make sense back then. So that changed to”: Our faces glowed red around the burning tree When the winter slayed spring in 2003 The cold air burned my lungs,

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My limbs went numb to keep my body warm And death crept in like the calm before the storm. Having spent twenty-​five minutes scrutinizing single notes out of a sixty-​four-​note pattern that will ultimately serve as a backdrop in the song, Tyler’s time of singing along serves as respite, an interval of recess from the painstaking editing he labors over. Singing along is a means of surveying his song holistically, gauging its readiness for future steps. “A N D T H AT ’ S I T F O R N O W ” :   C O N C L U D I N G T H E   S E S S I O N

In the webcam view, Tyler moved back and assessed his checklist of things to do to complete this song, Okay, I need to take a short break, and when I come back I think orders of business are: getting a bass part together, editing fills, seeing if there’s anything salvageable or not from the strums, and, if not, recording guitar. What time is it? It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday night so I should be able to record guitar for awhile. Recording has always been my least favorite part for whatever reason. I  like editing. So yeah after that, get a little scratch vocal down because as I start to, I mean, I should have even done it before, but as I start to get more definite parts and stuff, it will be helpful to have the vocal there. And that’s it for now. The video ended, and I looked forward to seeing what Tyler did with the rest of his evening, but there was no second video file for this day. Tyler relented, “But I didn’t come back, not that night.” Within the span of time I spent with Tyler, he did not return to this song. Instead, he chipped away at other pieces in similar fashion, and even wrote/​recorded a playful breakup song (as himself) in a fit of inspiration in a single day. To my disappointment, Tyler opted not to document this rare occurrence—​the completion of a song—​in his musical existence, but I suspect this was intended. In Prince-​like practice, Tyler has a vault of songs he keeps stowed away, not intended for the ears of others. And, like Tyler’s inspiration, Fernando Pessoa, no one will know which characters are “him,” unless he decides to make it so.

“Technology is the Reason”: Conclusions For Tyler, the technological world is not only an enabler, it is an inspirer: “Technology is the reason why I have those ideas, and then of course it’s absolutely what makes it possible for me to do this.” During his early adolescence, Tyler sought out the

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recording technology to overdub, and his interest in recording never waned. With the ability to record constituting such a vital component of Tyler’s songwriting process, it is no wonder that he speaks of it with such enthusiasm and reverence. Having mapped out life goals that are contingent on recording capability, Tyler presents a world view in which music-​making and recording are indistinguishable from each other. Tyler perceives his formal music lessons as forgettable memories. He credits his self-​guided practicing for his ability to play piano and guitar. With statements such as “I learned what chords were before I knew what they were,” Tyler’s background suggests that he is the quintessential self-​taught musician. His learning history includes all the components that constitute Lucy Green’s definition of the popular musician, yet there is something askew with this picture: Tyler also evidences traits of a classically trained musician. He reads music, employs the counterpoint compositional technique, and discusses conventions of Baroque music. In comparison, Tyler’s history of self-​guided learning bears a striking resemblance to Louis Armstrong’s as summarized by John Sloboda: • The casual immersion in a rich musical environment with many opportunities to listen and observe. • Early systematic exploration of a performance medium. • A great deal of freedom to explore and experiment without negative consequences. • A lack of distinction between “practice” and “performance.”21 Recording technology is so central to Tyler’s music-​making that it commanded the limelight in our conversations. His early encounters with cassette recorders were self-​led explorations. This pattern of self-​directed learning using a trial-​and-​error approach continued when Tyler commenced using digital-​based audio software. Additionally, immersion in professional studios while recording with his band further contributed to Tyler’s audio education. He keenly observed multiple audio engineers at work, asking questions and lapping up every bit of wisdom he could. Presently, he dedicates more energy to learning and mastering recording technology than any of his more traditional instruments (i.e., piano and guitar). His drive to master recording technology continues to perpetuate. Relying primarily on YouTube tutorials, Tyler dedicated years to learning the intricacies of Ableton before using it to make music. Now with a firm grasp of the DAW, Tyler’s focus has shifted back to music-​making. Tyler is spinning a web of characters with his DIY studio, each with their own signature sound that he achieves by painstakingly shaping at a plodding pace. Immersed in this world, Tyler is completely self-​sufficient, carrying out all aspects of production. He adapts his production approach accordingly to whatever audio avatar he dreams up; he is a modular man.

  Sloboda, Exploring the Musical Mind, 253.

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For our first meeting, thirty-​three-​year-​old DJ-​turned-​guitarist Jimmy invited me to his rehearsal space in an industrial zone of Bushwick, Brooklyn. While some of the buildings in this neighborhood appeared to be used for manufacturing and shipping, many had been converted to art studios of one kind or another. The cinderblock building Jimmy rehearsed in was unremarkable aside from its steel door bearing the address in spray paint (Figure 6.1). After opening the door for me, Jimmy shook my hand and said “What’s up?,” and then led me down a maze of halls toward his practice room. The floors and walls of the building are made of concrete, which intensify the barrage of sounds that blare from the deluge of practicing bands. Each hallway is lined evenly with steel doors indicating the hallway number and room letter (e.g., 4E). Jimmy opened up his room and invited me to sit down, but there was nowhere to sit down, or so I thought (the “room” lacked room; “cell” better describes the confines of the claustrophobic space Jimmy refers to as his rehearsal room). I  failed to recognize the multipurpose potential of musical instruments, so Jimmy motioned for me to sit on his guitar amplifier, the seat for guests. Jimmy, being a gracious host, sat on the floor. We were in close quarters: the dimensions of the room are five feet wide and eleven feet long: a mere fifty-​five square feet. Most of the room was packed with Jimmy’s gear (Figure 6.2). Across from me was a large guitar cabinet and beside it, on a wire cart, sat a white MacBook with a cracked screen. Resourcefully, Jimmy hooked up an old computer monitor to it so he could still use the computer. On the lower racks of the wire cart sat a few bottles of vitamins, a jar of peanut better, and a loaf of white bread. Side-​by-​side, the cart and speaker cabinet spanned the width of the wall. Behind these items were stacked guitar cases, an acoustic guitar, a keyboard, some bedding, and a pillow. Jimmy is very soft-​spoken and has a low smooth baritone speaking voice that was easily washed out by the tsunami of sounds pounding through the door from the practice occurring in the adjacent room. Heavily distorted guitars, chest-​resonating

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Figure 6.1  The exterior of Jimmy’s rehearsal building in Bushwick. 

Figure 6.2  Jimmy’s rehearsal room. 

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bass, clacking drums, and shrill cymbals amassed to cover the full frequency spectrum, making it difficult to hear Jimmy speak. It was not as loud as a construction site—​not painful to the ear, but bordering on uncomfortable. How did Jimmy practice through this? I could barely hear myself talk. One of the first things that Jimmy mentioned to me is that he loves this place, finds it inspiring, and enjoys being bombarded with the cornucopia of musical styles: “Something captivates me in here. Sometimes I have to go to the door and say, ‘what is this?’ ” What seemed like a cacophonous cage to me is Jimmy’s place of musical refuge. Here, Jimmy practices incessantly and envisions his future as a signed artist. In pursuit of the elusive record contract, he moved back to New York from Pennsylvania. By day he works as a manual laborer in shipping and receiving; by night he devotes himself wholly to music.

From Scratching to Picking: Learning History Like clockwork, Jimmy practices guitar for at least three hours every weekday evening starting at 6 p.m. and going as late as 1 a.m. On weekends he does not work, so he will start earlier, around noon, and play into the early evening, making the most of the two hundred dollars it costs him to rent his room for the month. He estimated that he has kept up this practice since he graduated from college as an economics major in 2004. Throughout college he had been very serious about DJing ( Jimmy says “heavy, heavy, heavy into DJing”), so much so that his studies became a lesser priority, extending his four-​year degree to six: “I know I went pretty hard, that’s probably the reason why it took me so long to graduate.” Jimmy explained the origins of his relationship to DJing: I became fascinated with turntable-​style music and especially coming from New York you hear hip-​hop radio stations toward the end of the night. DJs come on and I wondered: how do they do these kinds of things? I know you guys are using records but how do you do it if you’re only using one record? Then I  found out that they used two records of the same thing and all this other stuff, so I’m like, “You know what, I’m going to be a DJ!” There was just a whim that drove me to it. Once I started it didn’t really stop until I started playing the guitar. Then it kind of slowed down. Jimmy’s DJ side is fascinating to me because it was a big part of his life, yet he was reticent to talk about it. He sees himself primarily as a guitarist, but in listening to his songs, the influence of hip-​hop is apparent. Jimmy’s blend of rock and hip-​hip does not come as a surprise when you consider his musical influences as a teenager: In the early 1990s, Nirvana was definitely one group that stuck out, like, what is this, and how are they doing this, and why do I love this so much?

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I was able to really consciously think about music. Even on the hip-​hop side—​like Method Man, and Redman, and Biggie when he was just first coming out—​all this stuff was just so captivating. As Jimmy later explained to me, conceptually as a DJ, he approaches making music differently: “I was using my DJ side when I was producing that. It’s not like I wrote it and produced it, I did it all at the same time.” Joseph Schloss reminds that in hip-​hop the instrument is the studio; recording is integrated in the composition process: “The hip-​hop musician’s instrument, the sampler, is a piece of studio equipment. This simple fact totally obliterates conventional distinctions between performing (or practicing) and recording.”1 In contrast to his DJ approach, when Jimmy writes and records music with his guitar, it resembles a more traditional Aldon-​type approach: first the music is written and then it is recorded. It is logical that Jimmy would conceptualize recording guitar-​based music and DJ-​based music differently because he perceives DJs to be musical people, but not necessarily musicians: For one, to be a DJ you have to have a good musical mind, a solid musical mind. It’s definitely not as skilled as far as a musician, but it’s a music skill for sure. You have to learn how to mix, you have to know how to scratch, and not just how to mix and scratch; you have to know how to do it, and do it seamlessly because that’s what makes a good DJ. Pretty much that’s the skills it takes to be a DJ. You discover, learn how to mix, learn how to scratch, and hear the songs in your head before you actually physically program them out. I asked Jimmy how he picked up a skill like scratching and he provided a straightforward answer: “By listening to other DJs really. Just like a guitarist listens to other guitarists.” According to Lucy Green, listening and copying recordings is a hallmark of the informal learning approach exhibited by popular musicians.2 As an aspiring DJ, Jimmy did not have anyone to take him under his wing and model the techniques of turntablism, so he sought instruction online for his tuition: With YouTube and the Internet you can pretty much pick up on anything like a typical scratch, your normal “chicka chicka” that you hear in a commercial song. The baby scratch, obviously, because a baby can do it, it’s your simplest scratch. Then you get to more complex ones like the scribble, the chirp, the Transformer. The reason why they called it the Transformer   Schloss, Making Beats, 46.   Green, Music, Informal Learning, and the School.

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is because of the sound Transformers make. That’s how the scratch sounds. It’s a cool thing. Describing his DJing style, Jimmy acknowledged that he did not master all of the scratches because he was “more of a club-​party-​playing-​party-​rocking DJ.” Impressively, he played weekly gigs on his college campus to eight hundred people, and once opened for a renowned platinum-​selling rapper, performing his music to an audience of five thousand. Given his success as a DJ, I was curious why Jimmy did not continue in this direction. The gist of Jimmy’s explanation is that his love of the guitar supplanted his passion for DJing: It’s fun. It’s fun now. It’s not like guitar. Guitar is my thing, but it’s like, it’s hard to describe. You love it and you hate it, you know what I mean? It’s just so much greater than being able to have fun and not care. Because I  care, I  care way too much. It’s like my heart is invested in it, whereas DJing, where I was like that before at that time, now I’m not. “ I J U S T F O U N D I T S O   H A R D ” :   L E A R N I N G TO   P L AY T H E   G U I TA R

Deciding to take up the guitar after college was Jimmy’s second attempt at doing so. His first encounter with the guitar came courtesy of his aunt who gave him lessons. He remembered: “That’s how I learned your basic G, C, D, you know what I mean? I was twelve. I didn’t play much. Around that time I was playing every day for maybe three months and then I  just stopped.” “Why did you stop?” I  asked. Jimmy responded, I just found it so hard because the action was so high on the guitar, and I always thought like that’s how the guitar is supposed to be. That’s what deterred me so much. I  didn’t realize you can lower action. It’s an easy experience to play the guitar. I  didn’t know that. I  always thought, how does that guy do that? How does he do that when he has to press so hard on those strings? It’s impossible. I didn’t even realize until I was damn near twenty-​five that you can actually adjust the action. It would seem that the guitar drove Jimmy to another instrument, the turntable, but only temporarily. Jimmy held onto his first electric guitar with the hope that he would eventually pick it up again: I had a black Strat [Fender Stratocaster], like your first two-​hundred-​dollar Strat, and I would just carry it around wherever I lived, only because it was mine, and I always looked at it, like, “I’m sure I’ll figure you out one day,”

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but I  don’t know. Other people used to come and play, and they would sound great, and I thought, “I’m never going to sound like that.” T H R E E H O U R S A D AY :   P R A C T I C E

After finishing college, Jimmy made a conscious decision to commit himself to making music, especially with his guitar, telling himself: “I’m going to be a guitarist and producer, and use the elements of being a musician to produce good music.” If Jimmy’s estimation of how much he practices is accurate, three hours a day of practicing amounts to over a thousand hours a year. Adherents of the “ten thousand hour rule” should take note that Jimmy will soon approach expert status if he is able to sustain his practicing regimen.3 In his practice, Jimmy set out to develop an understanding of chord combinations as well as master the art of the guitar solo. Evoking the idea of speaking through his guitar, Jimmy detailed, “The more and more I play it, it’s like the more and more I see where I am now. I can talk, in a sense, communicate with the instrument.” Having gained proficiency playing his instrument, Jimmy explained how his focus shifted from guitar mastery to his other music-​centered goals: I started slowing down not even six months ago. It got to a point where it was like, all right, I have accepted the fact that I can play the guitar. I’m not saying I’m great, but I can play it though, you know what I’m saying? I need to move on now. I need to put a band together. I need to do this. I need to do that. I don’t have the time to just sit there and study the guitar. Just as long as I’m playing it every day: that’s all that really matters. If I get to a higher level, then I can get back to concentrating on the guitar, because I want to learn jazz guitar and all that other stuff, more complex forms. All of which is not necessary now, but for me to feel like a complete guitar player. The “higher level” that Jimmy spoke of is part of a bigger plan: he wants to build a following for his music, and have a record deal. But he recognizes, “I have to become 3   The ten thousand hour rule was popularized by Malcom Gladwell in his book Outliers. Citing the research of Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-​Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Gladwell argues that the development of musical expertise requires ten thousand hours of practice. Calculating that both Mozart and the Beatles reached the ten thousand–​hour mark at the peak of their careers, Gladwell concludes: “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good” (42). In his book Guitar Zero, Gary Marcus counters that attaining expertise is not simply a matter of time commitment: “The Beatles . . . put in more like two thousand hours, not ten thousand . . . to focus solely on practice is to unfairly dismiss talent. Consider, for example, Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page; neither started until he was an adolescent . . . but both were playing professionally within a year or so of their peers” (100).

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something on my own before I can even deal with a record company.” Given his experience as a DJ and his father’s background as a music producer, Jimmy has had some bad experiences dealing with record labels, and has some misgivings about their judgment of talent: “It’s like every breakthrough artist is always that person who nobody on the record label ever wanted.” Until the record labels come around, Jimmy plans to make recordings to distribute on Facebook, SoundCloud, YouTube, ReverbNation, iTunes, and any other way he can. Having a deep appreciation for the music of his parent’s generation, Jimmy suggested that the future of recorded music is bright, and that the key is harnessing the technologies we have at our disposal: I think with all these technological advances we have now, I think music can be at its best point now. Talking about better than the Motown days, it has to be. It can’t be that our parents had it, but what do we have? Even though we have some great artists right now, we are at a point where we can be making the best music possible. Once people start finding the mediums between these advances and actual music itself, I think we’ll be on our way. It’s happening, it’s definitely happening. “ I T WA S N E V E R , N E V E R , N E V E R S E R I O U S ” :   L E A R N I N G THE STUDIO BY OSMOSIS

It was difficult for Jimmy to recollect when he started using recording technology because it has always been a part of his life. Jimmy’s father was a DJ and a record producer who maintained a professional recording studio in their home; Jimmy and his brother were free to explore and experiment in it. According to Jimmy’s professional biography, he “has been in the studio absorbing the eclectic and expansive audio created by his own father—​one of the most heavily sampled producers in music.” I asked Jimmy what equipment his father’s studio had. Jimmy: He had a keyboard, a drum machine, and the Yamaha NS10s, those studio monitors I was telling you about with the natural sound. That’s the setup that he basically had. He always had a mixing board also so he could record and do stuff like that. Adam: Was that to tape? Jimmy: It was, earlier. Earlier ones were recorded to tape, and then down the line we’d get the digital ones, but like a physical board that recorded digitally. Adam: You guys played with it and that’s how you learned it? Jimmy: Something like that. I mean, my brother was more into it when we were younger, especially like real younger and into the teens. I didn’t, really. I would always mess around with it once in a while when I felt like, “hmmm maybe I’m just a little bit too far away, let me just kind of jump in here a little bit,” but it was never, never, never serious. It was kind of weird because the tides have turned. My

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brother was the one that was super on it, and now I’m the one who’s super on it. It’s funny how things work. Jimmy is very nonchalant about the significance of the fact that he has the know-​ how to operate a sophisticated DAW like Pro Tools. Given that Jimmy grew up through the recording industry’s transition from analog to digital mediums, and that his father always had the most current technologies, it appears that his learning occurred by immersion. I asked if he’d spent a lot of time in his father’s studio. Jimmy: Nah. I didn’t really spend time in the studio, I would just go there. If maybe I wanted to record something DJ-​wise or if I had a friend—​a couple of my friends are rappers that throw together beats. Nothing that was ever good. But that was it though. Adam: But you knew enough that you could record your friends. And you were making the beats then. Jimmy: I always had a solid idea of how to do it. But as far as really going for it and trying to make things that sound good, that came later. Jimmy’s responses to my questions and redirects baffle me; he claims not to have spent much time in the studio, and yet he could program beats on a drum machine, and record his friends’ rapping. His explanation was simple: he “always had a solid idea of how to do it.” It had only been eight years, the same amount of time he’d spent learning the guitar, since Jimmy had committed to learning how to record his own music with Pro Tools. “I didn’t really get into it until after I graduated college,” he said. “I mean I knew how to do it from being around it all the time, but I didn’t really get serious until I was twenty-​four.” Now that Jimmy is serious about making music, when the inspiration for a song comes, he ceases upon it, and “writes” by recording in his DIY studio.

“I Woke Up With the Melody”: The Making of “Lost and Found” Pounding the pavement, slave to the grind Work for the weekend, I pay no mind Peel off your uniform, be who you are Lost and found . . . [chorus:] You can never find it, find your way So let me go and let our pathways part You can never find it, find your way

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So let me go and let our pathways part Struggle, struggle, struggle Every day’s a struggle But the sun it keeps on rising MCs rock the mic Today becomes tomorrow, the lost become the found Earth begins to crumble, sky is all we have STARS UP IN THE SKY, SING IT, STARS UP IN THE SKY STARS UP IN THE SKY YEAH! “Lost and Found” is part of a larger pool of songs that Jimmy wrote and recorded for his debut solo album. He recollected how he wrote it: I was dating this girl at the time, and we were just napping, and I woke up with the melody, and I’m trying to figure out what the song is telling me. I just heard “sell your soul,” and that was the only part I had. I was hearing the chords in my head from G to B—​then that’s it. Now I have to figure this out somehow, you know. That’s how it started, the “find your way” part, which was the only part I heard that I was able to make sense of. Jimmy described songwriting as a fluid process, one that comes naturally and cannot be forced: “Every time I’ve tried to write a song, it doesn’t work—​it never works—​ but when I  write songs it always comes from somewhere, and it always happens when I’m not expecting it.” Jimmy’s approach to songwriting is to craft songs that possess a universal appeal, with a central message of self-​empowerment: I try to let it flow out. I try to write from the perspective that other people can relate to in some sort of way, you know what I’m saying? We take a lot of things lightly, and take them more seriously than we need to at the same time, and that’s the kind of things I try to write about. I try not to make it so much about myself. It’s more about living life, and being who you are, just allow yourself to be who you are. I just try to write songs that people can relate to. As much as we like to think that we’re all different and separated, we’re really not. Everyone has a connection whether you realize it or not. I try to tap into that connection and see what comes out. “ E V E R Y D AY ’ S A S T R U G G L E ” :   W R I T I N G   LY R I C S

Jimmy indicated that the first lyrical line to come to mind was “find your way,” and the song was built around this phrase, with the musical ideas coming first. Curious to know what inspired the other lyrics, I asked, “The lyrics, how did the rest come about?”

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Jimmy: Part of it, being that I was a DJ—​and I still consider myself a DJ—​“MCs rock the mic,” that’s been said a million and one times, but not on a song like this. Let’s do it like this, you know? The rest was just saying, hey, this is for us, this is not really for the record industry. Adam: What about the part “struggle, struggle?” Jimmy: Every day we struggle, and not even like some sort of desperate struggle. Like get up out of your bed and go to work, you have to go to school, you have to do something, you have to struggle, you have to do something, you know? Sometimes we get so caught up in that circle that we don’t take the time to reflect and enjoy life. Jimmy accentuated a recurring theme in the lyrics of his album:  celebrating personal independence and finding social solidarity through that common bond. He perceives the struggle of life to be something that detracts from the human ability to enjoy it. He wants to inspire and sees himself as a “forward thinker.” “IT JUST HAPPENS”: RECORDING = SONGWRITING

Typically, when Jimmy is struck with a moment of inspiration, he looks to record the idea one way or another before he forgets it: “Yeah I definitely do write it down, or I’ll just record it on my phone, depending on whatever is the case. If it’s a guitar riff, I’ll record it on the phone. Even if it’s some song lyrics, but usually I write the lyrics down.” The strategy of “writing down” by recording is one that Lucy Green found to be characteristic of popular musicians.4 One problem Jimmy encountered during the few months I followed his process was the loss of his phone, which consequently meant the loss of some song sketches that he had recorded. The phone serves as a temporary vessel for Jimmy’s songs; ideally he is able to commit his sonic ideas to a more finished form using Pro Tools in his father’s studio. Jimmy’s father has upgraded his home studio throughout the years and given Jimmy free access to this space to use at his convenience. Currently, the studio is equipped with the following:  PowerMac G5, Pro Tools, DigiDesign 192 audio interface, professional-​ grade Waves and Bomb Factory plugins, Genelec and Yamaha monitors, Avalon 737 Preamplifier, Neumann U87 microphone, Yahama Motif MIDI controller, and Native Instruments soft-​synth plugins. Jimmy recorded “Lost and Found” in a flurry of activity: I laid the music down as soon as I  got home from visiting with her [ Jimmy’s girlfriend]. As soon as I got home I rushed straight to the studio and started laying down the music. I had the music, and then I started   Green, How Popular Musicians Learn.

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writing, just trying to feel it out, and it came together. That’s how it usually happens—​I don’t really know—​it just happens, you know, it just happens, it just happens. “Lost and Found” sounds like a Foo Fighters–​style, heavy rock song that contrasts soft verses with loud and heavy choruses. Jimmy listed the instrumentation: “Well for this particular one we have drums, bass, guitar, some synths in there, light synths though, and that’s pretty much it. Vocals obviously, vocal layers and stuff like that.”

Finger Drumming

Jimmy recorded the drums first; they are synthetic as opposed to a live recording of an acoustic drum set. I asked Jimmy, “So when you program a drumbeat how do you do it?” Jimmy explained: It depends. If I’m going in without an idea at all, then I will try to play the whole thing. This song just came to me: I was laying with the girl I was seeing at the time, just napping, and I woke up with this idea in my head. It was like the chorus part but half of it, and I’m just like, oh man, I’ve got to lay it down. And when I went home to lay it down, I just kind of separated all of the drums because I already knew what it was going to be. In writing the drums Jimmy took a horizontal approach,5 knowing already in advance how the music was supposed to sound and programming it to match his vision. To “play” the drum part, Jimmy used a MIDI keyboard, on which each key was assigned a different drum sound. The drum part was played with his fingers substituting as drumsticks, and the keys of the keyboard serving as drums and cymbals. One of the parameters that MIDI records is velocity, enabling Jimmy to provide a varying dynamic to his performance. The drum part was further edited by altering the timing of some of the notes to give it the feel of a “natural drummer”: We have a couple of virtual drum programs, one is called the Stylus RMX, and the other is from Native Instruments, who made this bundle which has a ton of freaking sounds, called the Battery. Basically, the people who made it sampled a lot of drums, live drums, recorded it, and made it into a program. Some of them are like synthetic drums, but I kind of wanted to give it a little bit of an alive feel, and a little bit of an electronic feel at the same time, so a lot of the snares may sound like a drummer is playing it. But you can’t necessarily do that because you only get one key on a keyboard, so you’re not really going to get that feel. So sometimes you have to take the    Folkestad, Hargreaves, and Lindström, “Compositional Strategies in Computer-​ Based Music-​Making.” 5

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edit window, grab your notes or grab that MIDI, and move it around physically. Even if it’s not right on the bar you want it to be a little bit off because that’s how a natural drummer is going to play.

Tracking, Layering, and Tweaking Guitars

Aside from the voice, the most prominent instrument in the mix of “Lost and Found” is the guitar. Jimmy had little to say about recording the bass, but he did recall that for “Lost and Found,” he used an electric bass. When making songs that are less rock-​oriented, he often uses his MIDI controller keyboard to program the bass lines in the same way he would program the drums. The advantage of using MIDI is that Jimmy can change the sound of the bass at any time or rewrite the bass line completely if he chooses. For “Lost and Found,” Jimmy opted to record an electric bass hoping it would lend a “live” feel to the song. Because Jimmy sees himself primarily as a guitarist, he pays a lot of attention to the timbre of his guitar sound in his recordings. While listening to the final mix of “Lost and Found,” Jimmy drew my attention to the guitar sound, a sound that he felt could be improved upon, but not to the extent that the average listener would notice: All of this was done, the guitar, with a Fender Champ, a small little solid-​ state amp. It’s decent but it’s thin, you know? And then I used this Hartke [guitar amplifier] as a bottom. There are a few guitar layers; I think there are four. I still had the other amp that I sold—​I had that and I’m thinking, man, I should have taken this home and run it through this because it has the tubes, it has that thick sound; but at the end of the day most people are not going to know the difference, so I just let it go like this. André Millard writes that guitar amplifiers are “not just adjuncts to the instrument. They are the sound of rock.” Over time rock musicians have grown “highly discerning in evaluating the tone of their amps, analyzing the sound and using terms like crunchy, swirly, smoky, booming, fat, flubby, doinky, dirty, greasy, and country clean to describe it.”6 Jimmy fits this trait of the electric guitarist, and attaining the right sound is critical for him to be satisfied with the recording. Central to Jimmy’s guitar sound are distorted power chords, a staple of heavy metal and alternative rock. Robert Walser explains how the combination of a power chord and distortion amount to an amalgamated sound that covers a large range of the audible frequency spectrum: Distortion also results in a timbral change toward brightness, toward a more complex waveform, since distorting a signal increases the energy of its higher harmonics. Power chords, on the other hand, produce powerful   Millard, The Electric Guitar, 133.

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signals below the actual pitches being sent to the amplifier. Thus, the distorted guitar signal is expanded in both directions: the higher harmonics produced by distortion add brilliance and edge (and what guitarists sometimes call “presence”) to the sound, and the resultant tones produced by the interval combinations of power chords create additional low frequencies, adding weight to the sound.7 In my first listening I could discern three distinct guitar parts: a rhythm guitar, a lead guitar playing a solo before the bridge, and a guitar playing octaves during the chorus alongside the rhythm guitar. The rhythm guitar during the chorus is heavily distorted and adds what Walser describes as “weight to the sound.” In addition to the added timbral change in the guitar sound during the chorus, Jimmy explained to me his technique of recording multiple layers of the same rhythm guitar part to add impact to the chorus: It is definitely doubled. It’s tripled. What we usually do is, whenever you track certain things that you want to have extra sounds on, sounds that have a certain thickness, like vocals and stuff like that, always record at least three so you can center one and pan out the other two so you get that kind of sound. And that’s what we did. And that’s what I always do now. When Jimmy recorded guitar, he had a preconception of how the different parts would be mixed. Taking the example of the rhythm guitar, he played the same part three times and panned them differently to cover the stereo field of the recording from left to right. Michael Chanan theorizes that conceptualizing a piece of music based on how the recording will sound shifts the paradigm of what it means to be a musician: “A new kind of performer is needed, the virtuoso of the repeated take  .  .  .  In pop music, this tendency leads to products that depend entirely on recording technique, and which cannot be performed live at all.”8 In order to replicate the performance of the recording on a stage, Jimmy would have to triplicate. The technique of recording multiple rhythm tracks with slight differences, the “natural double,” was brought to the forefront of the recording industry with the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols (1977). Producer Chris Thomas claimed, “One of the things I did was sort of orchestrate it guitar-​wise.”9 Guitarist Steve Jones explained the process: “The initial track went down on the guitar, then that would be copied on the right hand side, you know, so that it was, like it wasn’t stereo, it was like mono deluxe.”10 This technique was later exploited and popularized   Walser, Running with the Devil, 43.   Chanan, Repeated Takes, 18. 9   Sex Pistols. 10   Ibid. 7 8

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on one of Jimmy’s favorite albums, Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991). Doubling and panning two guitars left and right in the stereo field creates a sense of envelopment for the listener, and is central to Nirvana’s sound. Julio d’Escriván explains: Envelopment is pleasing to the listener partly because it transmits a sense of what it must be like to actually be in the live presence of that sound source as opposed to just a recording, and partly because it places the listener somehow inside the soundfield.11 While Jimmy employed many different technical strategies to achieve his guitar sound, it is important to recognize the uniqueness of his playing that is elemental to his sound. Engineer Jack Joseph Puig ( John Mayer, No Doubt, U2) stresses: All guitar tones start at the musician’s hand, and you have to realize this. From there, each part of the chain contributes to the end result, and that chain includes the way the musician plays, the guitar itself, the pick, the voicings, the cable, amp, room, position of the amp in the room, and even the way the musician holds the instrument.12

Do It Again: Layering Vocals

Jimmy has a system for recording vocals similar to his system for recording guitars, which entails tracking several layers of the same part: “The regulars, the doubles, and triples of that, then there’s the octaves, so there’s two of those, and then harmonies, so that’s about seven. And all of that gets panned left and right.” Being more specific regarding the placement of the vocal tracks in the stereo field, Jimmy explained the general guidelines to which he adheres: “Main vocal: left, right, and center. Harmony and octave: left and right. That’s usually how we do it. Sometimes they don’t get panned hard left and right, they will be more to the middle.” Again, the reference to Nirvana surfaces as layering vocals was a technique that engineer Butch Vig employed in the recording of Nevermind (1991): “I’m a big fan of doubling, particularly on choruses, and he [Kurt Cobain] did that quite a bit on the record, and that’s part of what the sound is.”13 To record his vocals, Jimmy used some expensive equipment: a Neumann U87 microphone and an Avalon 737 preamplifier. Guiding me through a video tour of his father’s studio, he froze the frame to call my attention to the Avalon 737: That right there, that’s a mic preamp I  was telling you about. That’s the vacuum tube that we run all the vocals through. Avalon 737. We run   d’Escriván, Music Technology, 57.   Puig, “No Limits,” 237. 13   As cited in Buskin, Inside Tracks, 346. 11 12

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everything through, all the guitars, everything. It’s pretty much industry-​ standard. Everything you’ve heard on the radio—​if it’s not done by that, it’s done by something better. Jimmy gave me an overview of the different parameters that can be adjusted using the Avalon, and explained how it was used to process every track that he recorded: “What I do when I’m getting ready to get a song sent to mixing, I will run all the music through these tubes to give it a more authentic real sound.” Once all of the recorded tracks were processed through the Avalon, Jimmy’s recording session was complete. With all of the instruments recorded in the span of a single day, Jimmy’s focus shifted to having his song mixed.

“Me and Him Have This Synergy”: Mixing with Bill The production of “Lost and Found” spanned several months. When I first met Jimmy, he had already recorded the tracks and was in the midst of arranging a mixing session for “Lost and Found” at his father’s studio where his friend Bill would serve as the mixing engineer. A  week after we met, Jimmy was able to coordinate the mixing date and brought along the video camera to the session to capture the day’s events. Jimmy did not film continuously; he selectively captured aspects of the mixing session that he thought were the most important for me to see. He explained the camera’s presence and purpose to Bill: “This isn’t really for me. This kid is doing an interview of me and he’s trying to, I  guess he’s doing a thesis on like, audio, home audio recording, and mixing, and stuff like that.” Curious as to why Jimmy did not mix his own music, I asked him why he hired Bill for the task. First, Bill is a professional audio engineer and Jimmy has a rapport with him. Having collaborated on previous projects, they have developed a trusting relationship. Second, there is a style to Bill’s mixing that suits Jimmy’s musical tastes. Bruce Swedien explains how mixing sound is like cooking. They both are dependent on taste: Mixing can in parts can be compared to making food. It really doesn’t matter how good the quality of the individual ingredients are—​if they are not put together in the right manner it will never please the eater. Different cooks make very different meals with the very same ingredients, and the same can be said for sound engineers—​no two will give you the same result. But one thing they will give you is their own sonic personality.14   Swedien, In the Studio with Michael Jackson, 126.

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Third, Jimmy sees himself as a producer, a role that encompasses more of a holistic vision for the music, and delegates the technical responsibilities to the mixing engineer. Albin Zak notes that the relationship between the engineer and producer is “analogous to that of a film’s cinematographer (and editor) and its director. The former is charged with the actualization of the latter’s imagined visions, ideas, and speculations.”15 Jimmy described what kind of input he communicated to Bill in the mixing session: With him I usually kind of not say so much, only because it’s like me and him have this synergy, so it’s like we know each other and we know what we’re looking for. I mean if it comes to production, per se, I’ll be like, all right, make it do this or make it do that, you know what I’m saying? If I want a specific sound, like, make it sound like a radio kind of effect, take all the bass out, or just have it run everything on the high pass or something like that. But other than that I pretty much just try to produce it in a way to where this is what it is, all you have to do is bounce it. Thomas Porcello outlines five different strategies that an artist and engineer use to communicate desired sound outcomes in the studio: 1. Singing/​vocables: using the voice to mimic the timbral and resonance characteristics of the musical sounds; 2. Lexical onomatopoesis:  using words that bear at least a partial acoustic resemblance to the sounds they describe, but which are simultaneously metaphors that more abstractly describe the sounds; 3. “Pure” metaphor:  using words to describe timbral characteristics (e.g., pitch-​ bend, tight, deep), but do not bear any acoustic similarity to the sound in question; 4. Association:  citing other musicians, recordings, sounds, time periods and so forth, in a search for a common frame of reference from which to describe the timbres in question; 5. Evaluation:  evaluating sounds to establish a mutual sense of solidarity between the artist and engineer, to mark a territory of shared musical aesthetics. Its function is therefore largely social, signifying an agreement on sonic goals.16 Although Jimmy uses pure metaphors (“make it sound like a radio”) and audio engineering terminology (“run everything on the high pass”) in his communications   Zak, “Getting Sounds,” 74.   Porcello, “Speaking of Sound,” 746.

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with Bill, much of what happens in the mixing session is the result of previous years of what Porcello calls evaluation. Jimmy and Bill have an established history working well together in the studio, which has led to a mostly unspoken but understood sense of sound. In the studio, part of getting acquainted with a collaborator entails getting to know their timbral tastes. Figure 6.3 shows Jimmy’s collaborator, Bill, mixing “Lost and Found.” A N A L O G V E R S U S D I G I TA L A C C O R D I N G TO   J I M M Y

Before Jimmy walked me through his mixing session, he distilled his views on the difference between mixing a song with a DAW (i.e., Pro Tools), and the more traditional approach of using a mixing console, in this case a Solid State Logic (SSL) console. Jimmy compared some software, the Waves SSL 4000 E-​Channel plugin to the original hardware that the software was modeled on, a SSL 4000 E series channel strip: Jimmy: When you get something mixed—​I have something that was mixed on an actual SSL board—​it’s so big, so grand, so thick. With [a DAW], it sounds good and it’s good, but it’s not like, “Man, did you hear that?!” You know? A lot of guys would tell you it’s the same thing. It’s not the same thing. It’s good. You can get your stuff on the radio. People won’t be able to tell the difference, but people can subconsciously tell the difference:  so they hear a song that’s mixed on an SSL simulator compared to an actual SSL, and people feel the one done on the SSL more than the emulator. Sound is really important—​that’s one thing people

Figure 6.3  Bill at the helm of the Pro Tools session for “Lost and Found.” 

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don’t realize—​sound is very, very important and it affects us very intricately and people don’t realize it. It really does. Adam: What do you think the difference is? Jimmy: I think the thickness of it, the feel of it, the more you can actually capture because even though when you’re recording, you’re not capturing everything. The SSL captures the most. If I’m in the club and I’m hearing the same song I might subconsciously dance harder to the one that’s done on the SSL even though it sounds crazy. Adam: What did you mean by when you record something you don’t capture all of it? Jimmy: Well nothing is perfect. I  run my guitar through a good mic, my ear is going to be able to catch everything but the microphone will not be able to catch everything. Certain elements are going to be missed, because nothing’s perfect. You definitely want to use the best equipment so you capture the most that you can. Jimmy demonstrated that he has engaged in critical thought about the process of recording, recognizing that something gets lost along the way when sound is recorded. Microphones process sound differently than the human ear; in Jimmy’s view, the ear captures everything, but the microphone cannot. Greg Milner concurs: Our auditory systems make adjustments in perspective that a microphone cannot. When we hear solos, we move that sound to the forefront of our consciousness; a microphone just reads it as another sound—​more distinct than the others, perhaps, but still part of a two-​dimensional picture. The microphone passively receives sound, but we use it to create a multifaceted tonal picture.17 G E T T I N G G U I TA R S O U N D S :   E Q UA L I Z I N G A N D COMPRESSING

Jimmy spoke of a subconscious feeling people have for music that mixing technology can influence. Part of the task of mixing is ensuring that the intended emotion of a performance is preserved or even accentuated. This is best exemplified in the processing of Jimmy’s guitar sounds in the mixing process. Jimmy’s engineer used different plugins to alter the timbre of the guitar tone to draw out its emotion. Robert Walser argues, “of all musical parameters, timbre is least often analyzed, but its significance can hardly be overstated.”18

  Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever, 64.   Walser, Running with the Devil, 41.

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In the video of the mixing session, Bill pulled up a plugin on screen called Waves Renaissance Equalizer and started to make adjustments. David Gibson provides a lucid explanation of the role of an equalizer (EQ) and the challenges in using one: EQ is a change in the volume of a particular frequency of a sound, similar to the bass and treble tone controls on a car stereo. It is one of the least understood aspects of recording and mixing probably because there is such a large number of frequencies—​from 20 to 20,000Hz. The real difficulty comes from the fact that boosting or cutting the volumes of any one of these frequencies depends on the structure of the sound itself: Each one is different. But even more complex is the fact that different sounds are equalized differently depending on the type of music, the song, and even the people you are working with.19 As Roey Izhaki surmises, “understanding frequencies and how to manipulate them is perhaps the greatest challenge mixing has to offer.”20 Jimmy explained Bill’s use of the equalizer: JIMMY: This is EQ. You get a flat line once you pull it up. But now he’s adjusted it. This is the bottom, this is the high, so obviously you can take it down or go up. It’s looking like he’s added a lot of bottom to it. Adam: How would he decide to do that? Jimmy: It would be based on the guitar sounds at its current state. What needs to be taken out, left in, what needs to be more. And a lot of the time you’re doing that kind of stuff, it’s not based on what you think or what you like, it’s more or less based on what is the best frequency it is going to be heard at. He’s running the guitar through that, that is the octave. He’s adjusting the way-​highs, obviously it’s a guitar. I think he’s trying to capture the feeling that the octave guitars are supposed to have. Adam: What would you say that feeling is? Jimmy: The octave guitar is supposed to be a reinforcement of adding motion. Like that kind of I-​can-​overcome emotion. Whatever I said in the verses, then that is the solidifier. Like I said this, and now music says this you know what I’m saying, yeah. It’s always hard to explain music. While Jimmy sensed that he was struggling to put into words how the equalizer was used to illuminate the emotion of the octaves he played on the guitar, he managed to explain that the function of the octave guitar part is to reinforce the message of the lyrics. Once the line “lost and found” is sung, the music is structured such that the guitar   Gibson, The Art of Mixing, 89.   Izhaki, Mixing Audio, 205.

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reinforces the lyrical message. Bill Gibson advises that a mix be given a constant focal point or else risk being identified as unprofessional: It’s common to hear an unprofessional-​sounding mix in which the mix is all right as long as the vocals are active. However, the spaces between the lyrics lose interest—​the momentum drops and the listener is left without a point of interest.21 A key component of “Lost and Found” is the guitar solo. With a noticeably wide dynamic range, it is susceptible to being masked by other instruments. To circumvent this issue, Bill employed compression. Alex Case writes, “compression is an effect easily misunderstood, and often misapplied . . . compression is the automatic reduction in signal level whenever the amplitude exceeds a specified value.”22 Jimmy described the Bomb Factory BF-​3A Classic Compressor plugin that Bill used to compress the guitar solo: This one only has two knobs: input and output, pretty much. The production is pretty much when [the guitar signal] goes into the red, [the compressor] plays like an equalizer. So every time the signal goes to a point where it will peak, [the compressor] will automatically pull [the signal] down. Technical description aside, Jimmy perceived the compressor as serving an artistic function within the mix: “You use it to give the sound of the guitar more beef, a little more body, so that’s what he’s doing.” Employing adjectives such as “beef ” and “body” to describe sound in this case translates to the compression of the dynamic range of the guitar signal. Jimmy’s word choices are logical considering that beef is synonymous with brawn, robustness, and power. Both Robert Walser23 and André Millard24 convincingly argue that during the twentieth century the electric guitar came to be seen as a symbol of masculinity and strength. Compressing a signal makes it denser and thick, giving it more body. For Bill to be able to translate Jimmy’s descriptors such as beef and body into manipulations of audio resulting in the desired sonic result is impressive. Jimmy is not alone in struggling to describe sounds in musical or technical terms. Longtime recording engineer of the Beatles, Geoff Emerick, claims John Lennon floundered when he had to verbalize his musical ideas: John always had plenty of ideas about how he wanted his songs to sound; he knew in his mind what he wanted to hear. The problem was that, unlike   Gibson, The S.M.A.R.T. Guide to Mixing and Mastering, 71.   Case, Mix Smart, 81. Emphasis in original. 23   Walser, Running with the Devil. 24   Millard, The Electric Guitar. 21 22

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Paul, he had great difficulty expressing those thoughts in anything but the most abstract terms. Whereas Paul might say, “This song needs brass and timpani,” John’s direction might be more like, “Give me the feel of James Dean gunning his motorcycle down a highway.”25 Similarly, Jimi Hendrix struggled to articulate his ideas for guitar sounds as anything more than colors and relied on engineer Eddie Kramer to help him realize his sonic visions: “Hendrix would speak to Kramer of sounds playing in his head or sounds he had heard in a dream . . . he could hear them clearly, but he could not translate them to the guitar.”26 Albin Zak commends audio engineers in this regard: “In interpreting the ideas, complaints, and aural fantasies of the recording team, engineers serve as facilitators of both performance and creativity in the recording studio.”27 Bill is continuing a tradition of engineers interpreting musicians, and his ability to translate from the transcendental to technical is essential to the realization of Jimmy’s desired guitar tone in the finished mix. “I NEVER THOUGHT I WOULD BE A SINGER”: VOCAL DOUBLING AND PROCESSING THE VOICE

Much has been made of Jimmy as a guitarist and DJ, but my conviction is that Jimmy’s greatest talent is his singing ability. In the final mix of “Lost and Found,” his voice is the central focus. While the guitars are certainly accentuated during the sections of the song without vocals and provide a powerful backbone to the chorus, it is the voice that carries the song throughout. Jimmy has an impressively versatile voice. Reflecting his musical influences, he can holler hard rock growls, rap with a rasp, and serenade with soul. Reflecting on his development as a singer, Jimmy described his revelation: It’s definitely a work in progress because I never thought I would be a singer ever, ever, ever, ever. The first song I  actually recorded was two years ago and that’s when I knew, “I think I can do this” . . . And then it started growing and growing and it’s like, wow, I  guess I  can sing pretty well! In the video, Bill said to Jimmy: “Since you already have some of the delays set up, I’ll use that as a base and tweak it from there.” I asked Jimmy how the delay was used in the song and he explained, “It is used basically everywhere because there is a lot

  Emerick and Massey, Here, There, and Everywhere, 8.   McDermott with Cox and Kramer, Jimi Hendrix Sessions, 40. 27   Zak, “Getting Sounds,” 75. 25 26

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of space in the song. It’s not a filler, but kind of like a filler in the sense. It’s used on the vocals and the soloing it is definitely used also.” Bruce Swedien writes: Used cleverly in a mix, delay can be subtle enough that it is not obvious when swallowed by the rest of the instruments and can be used to just change the feel of a track by giving it life and space; or it can simply be used to give a dramatic edge to an instrumental part.28 The use of delay in “Lost and Found” is purposely audible during the verses. Jimmy has rests of two beats between lyrical lines, which translates to a couple of seconds in real time. Delay serves to fill these spaces with a clear echo of the line previously sung. In this way delay serves to provide the song with momentum, keeping it from being derailed by silence. In addition to delay, Bill applied distortion to the various vocal takes: “For the layers of voxes a lot of the times we would put a guitar amp on it, a virtual guitar amp on the voxes.” The “virtual guitar amp” that Jimmy referred to is called Amp Farm, which gives the user several different options of software-​modeled guitar amplifiers. Pointing at the plugin that Bill called up on the video, Jimmy explained, “These are the cab simulators, if you want a different type of head, what kind of cab it’s going to come out through, and what kind of mic that you’re simulating.” Jimmy explained that filtering his voice through Amp Farm “will give it that raspiness and then bring it down so it mixes nicely.” FINAL MIX?

With every element of “Lost and Found” receiving a critical ear from Jimmy and Bill, the four-​minute song took six hours to mix. While that may seem an eternity to dedicate to four minutes of music, Jimmy remarked, “That’s pretty fast actually, usually it will take half a day, twelve hours.” Every sound was scrutinized, processed, and tweaked such that the amalgamation of sounds formed a cohesive unit. As Bill Gibson affirms, “mixing is where everything comes together—​it’s where you should be able to spend enough time to create a musically and sonically powerful work of art.”29 Having had some time to evaluate the mix for himself, Jimmy was satisfied with Bill’s work: “It sounds good, it’s mixed, it’s fully good enough to hear. But once it’s mastered it will be louder and bigger—​pretty much that mix, just louder and bigger.” While Jimmy weighed his options regarding where to have “Lost and Found” mastered, he had already uploaded the mp3 to various websites for people to stream, and posted it as a free download on his website. Considering the time, energy, and   Swedien, In the Studio with Michael Jackson, 139.   Gibson, Hal Leonard Recording Method, 77.

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money he put into the recording, I asked Jimmy why he opted to give it away instead of selling it. He rationalized: Let’s say everybody in New  York has it. Let’s say the record takes off. I could still sell it even though I gave it away, and if a record label wants to come in, what would be their incentive to want to work with me if I’m already selling my own records? So I’m thinking about it, maybe I  should fall back and give it away, give it away to all the people that are going to listen to it, and then once we’re in a good place, then we’ll sell it. In the record label ecosystem that Jimmy endeavors to join, he would not have to contemplate promotion and distribution. Until then, every day he pounds the pavement. Whether it’s playing gigs in dives bars of New York’s Lower East Side, writing thoughtful emails to the people who come out to his shows, posting his music online anywhere that will have it, making promotional video shorts for YouTube, or spending months explaining his creative process to an academic—​he does it all with the hope that his music will be heard.

Recording as Second Nature: Conclusions The studio is part of Jimmy’s identity. Having been around a recording studio his entire life, Jimmy expects to continue in the family business of being a music producer. Musical ideas come naturally to him; as he described, “it just happens.” Jimmy’s songwriting process is similar to that of producer Todd Rundgren (Meat Loaf, Hall and Oates, The Band), as detailed by Paul Myers: Rundgren describes self-​production as more of “an evolutionary process” and relates the process to different approaches in art and sculpture. “Working alone is for the most part, additive,” he says, “like sculpting with clay . . . When I’m composing, by myself, it’s just my own sort of internal process. I’ll start with something very rudimentary, a rhythm pattern or a bassline or something and, over time, that gets layered up and evolves into something more complete sounding. It’s not strictly trial and error; I usually start out with some sort of overall feeling of where I want to go . . . I’m just kind of wandering around in a musical area, waiting for whatever it is that I come up with to start coalescing and tell me where it’s supposed to go.”30

  Myers, A Wizard, a True Star, 42.

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Once a musical idea is conceived, Jimmy’s first instinct is to record it. Recording entails Jimmy orchestrating an entire song in a single session and scrambling to commit his ideas to a medium of permanence in a matter of hours. Using MIDI instruments such as Battery (a drum sequencer), Jimmy is able to program a drum pattern and lay the foundation for what constitutes the core of his songs. Guitars and vocals are recorded in layers with the foresight of how these different layers will be mixed. This strategy involves a “recording consciousness”—​thinking about the finished final product and working sequentially backward.31 Jimmy realizes that if he wants his guitar and voice to sound a certain way on the final recording, they need to be recorded multiple times and mixed a certain way. In the same vein, with the help of his engineering friend Bill, Jimmy agonizes over the timbral qualities of the guitar, ensuring that they translate the emotions of his songs. Recording is second nature to Jimmy; he is comfortable with the technology he uses and is able to efficiently use it to facilitate the realization of his songs to a distributable format. Jimmy has never taken a formal music lesson, but in his learning journey he has received lessons from online videos and people passing through his life. Influenced by his DJ background, Jimmy has learned to play the guitar primarily by listening to other guitarists and trying to emulate them. Jimmy spends most of his time outside of work alone, diligently mastering the guitar, trying to match the likes of his musical idols Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton. As someone who is almost entirely self-​taught, he meets all of Lucy Green’s criteria that characterize how popular musicians learn,32 including the complex process of integrating listening, performing, improvising, and composing simultaneously while learning. With regard to recording technology, Jimmy has acquired an impressive array of skills to be able to use his father’s recording studio. He is fluent in Pro Tools and can navigate both external and plugin signal processors. He uses a MIDI controller to play keyboard parts and synthetic drum parts. He can explain the workings of effects processors such as equalization, reverberation, delay, and compression; he cannot recall a single moment when he acquired these skills. By his own account, Jimmy absorbed this skill set as a young child and it has stayed with him. Engineer Ed Cherney explains that audio engineering has a lineage of being absorbed: Traditionally, it was taught by osmosis—​you would be in a room with people who are striving to make the best sounding records they possibly could. Things that were dynamic and wide range and true, and sounds you could almost step into. And sitting behind these guys, you would get that perspective, you would learn how to listen critically.33

  Bennett, On Becoming a Rock Musician, 128.   Green, How Popular Musicians Learn. 33   As cited in Gottlieb, How Does It Sound Now?, 36. 31 32

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Jimmy’s lifelong immersion in the studio also resembles the recollection of producer Madlib: “My pops had me at the studio since I was born, like, that’s why I got into music . . . Just mess with stuff, that’s how I learned.”34 As unsatisfying as it might be to hear someone explain that they learned by osmosis or by messing with stuff, it speaks to the importance of the tacit dimension of learning in/​with the studio, which will be discussed in greater depth in part III. While Jimmy might not be able to make explicit how he learned to use a studio, what is clearly more important to him (and likely many other DIY-​ers) is that he is able to manifest it.

  Madlib interviewed by Jeff Mao, “Madlib Lecture (New York 2016).”

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Part III

LEARNING PRODUCING | PRODUCING LEARNING Simon Zagorski-​Thomas writes that throughout the history of recording there have been two predominant models of learning: “that of getting access to some equipment and learning through trial and error; and that of observing someone who knows what they are doing, getting them to explain, and subsequently copying them.”1 To this he adds a third: “the practical use of PC-​based systems in conjunction with a plethora of semi-​professional and amateur books, magazines and, more recently, websites and Internet discussion groups.”2 To some extent, Zagorski-​ Thomas’ assertions are supported by the cases of Michael, Tara, Tyler, and Jimmy presented in part II; they each discussed or evidenced some learning following these three approaches. Yet the complete picture of their learning is much more complex and difficult to synthesize into either an expanded or more refined model. This impasse stems from the fact that much of the learning that occurs in DIY recording is tacit or implicit: “There is no intention to learn and no awareness of learning at the time it takes place.”3 Arthur Reber, who coined the term implicit learning, argues that “implicitly acquired epistemic contents of mind are always richer and more sophisticated than what can be explicated.”4 This poses considerable problems for research, as Michael Eraut explains: Not only is implicit learning difficult to detect without prolonged observation, but reactive learning [“near-​spontaneous and unplanned, the learner is aware of it but the level of intentionality will vary and often be debatable”] and some deliberative learning are unlikely to be consciously recalled   Zagorski-​Thomas, The Musicology of Record Production, 164.   Ibid., 165. 3   Eraut, “Non-​Formal Learning and Tacit Knowledge in Professional Work,” 115. 4   Reber, “Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge,” 229. 1 2

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unless there was an unusually dramatic outcome. Worse still, potential respondents are unaccustomed to talking about learning and may find it difficult to respond to a request to do so. If they do, they are more likely to refer to formal learning rather than non-​formal learning.5 In consideration of these obstacles, what is presented in part III should be read as incomplete because it is not possible to make the implicit learning experiences of the participants entirely explicit. As Eraut avers, “Tidy maps of knowledge and learning are usually deceptive.”6 Nevertheless, there is still great value in analyzing these tracks both for their individual saliencies, and for their dis/​similarities with each other because we stand to gain new knowledge about how learning works in the context of DIY recording. The concepts discussed throughout part III should not be interpreted as part of a singular learning model representative of DIY recording; rather, they should be considered points of illumination within a far-​reaching galaxy in which there remains much uncharted space. We are better off now than we were before because we have a better understanding of the phenomenon, but we also know much remains to be learned about this phenomenon, too.

Going Green: DIY Recording and Informal Learning Strategies With regard to new discoveries as a result of this research being conducted, the tracks profiled in part II demonstrate that there are different types of DIY recording studios. DIY can be conceptualized as an umbrella term under which there are multiple possible configurations. Related, there are particular ways of using these different types of DIY studios, some of which are distinctly digital such as the affordances of using presets and undoing unwanted actions. In tandem with these actions of music-​making with DIY recording studios, the participants manifested or recollected learning. As anticipated, much of the learning that occurs when a person engages in DIY recording is self-​led; returning to the observations of Zagorski-​Thomas cited at the beginning of this section, “that of getting some access to equipment and learning by trial and error,” was overwhelmingly the most predominant approach to learning employed by the participants. This learn-​as-​you-​go approach is inherently immersive and holistic, reminiscent of Lucy Green’s descriptions of how popular musicians learn. In contrast, absent is much evidence of peer-​ guided learning because these DIY-​ers often work alone; however, in the cases of Jimmy and Tara, it is inevitable that some learning transpired as the result of their   Eraut, “Non-​Formal Learning and Tacit Knowledge in Professional Work,” 119.   Ibid., 133.

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interactions with their collaborators in their respective studios. In these cases, peer-​guided learning is not necessarily absent; rather, what is missing are vivid recallable episodes of the participants experiencing learning with their peers. Aural learning in the DIY studio takes on a very different meaning than what Green’s work presents. DIY-​ers do learn from recordings, but specifically, they learn from their own recordings, which are often works in progress. Further, what DIY-​ers listen for goes beyond pitch and rhythm; they attend to the qualities of the sounds themselves. It is tempting to distill these generalizations into a new pedagogical model, but the danger of doing so is extracting only a sliver from the trunk. The following randomized list provides a sampling of actions exhibited by the participants that could be used to complete the sentence, “DIY recording is . . .”: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Dancing Trying Recording vocals Modulating Preparing Adjusting Humanizing Striving for perfection Programming Sitting/​standing silently Auditioning sounds Pitch-​shifting Layering Consolidating Recording guitar Clicking EQing Tuning Boosting Self-​teaching Recording bass Processing Consulting Setting up microphones Vocoding Recording piano Drawing Listening Pasting

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Double-​tracking Plugging in Nudging Punching in/​out Adding reverberation Distorting Mixing Delaying Doubling Compressing Loading Triggering Staring at the screen Recording Audio Adding Moving furniture Singing VocalWriting Hanging blankets Failing Muting Recording MIDI Working with others Comping Harmonizing Making stems Pondering Autotuning Looping Experimenting Crashing Cross-​fading Busing Learning from the Internet Quanitizing Using preset effects Waiting Tweaking Getting together with yourself Reading Editing Cutting

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Using preset sounds Deleting Fixing Filtering Limiting

Consider the inherent issues in attempting to formulize this list into a replicable pedagogical model. First, as previously discussed, there is no way to completely explicate what occurs in DIY recording; no matter how comprehensive the list, it will always be incomplete. Second, even if it were possible to establish a consensus of common practices amongst DIY-​ers, the proportionality of these practices in use will vary from person to person. Third, DIY recording practices change over time, and therefore a fixed model would quickly become obsolete. Fourth, making value judgments as to what is most important for learners to do by separating the seemingly passive actions (e.g., staring at the screen in silence), from the seemingly active actions (e.g., tinkering with timbres by twisting knobs) is problematic. While this may seem like an exercise in identifying best practices, it is at best a practice in reducing DIY recording to an oversimplified equation. It is of great pedagogical value to seek out the variables that comprise DIY recording, but to conflate these as a formula would be misguided: “One of the dangers of theorizing the content of a practice-​based creative activity is exactly the kind of outcome that might be desirable in noncreative forms of practice—​homogeneity.”7 To avoid guiding music educators toward homogeneity, part III does not prescribe a particular pedagogy of the producer; no singular synthesized step-​wise approach to DIY recording is endorsed. Instead, part III begins by framing this multiple-​case study as analogous to a multitrack recording to illustrate that my analyses are subjective and artistic decisions. Similar to mixing a song, there are multiple ways to go about arriving at a final version. First, ­chapter 7 highlights that there are at least two distinct types of DIY studio models, both of which should be encouraged in music education. Second, to ground the findings from part II in music education literature, each participant’s approach to making music in/​with their DIY studios is examined referencing “Compositional Strategies in Computer-​Based Music-​Making,” by Göran Folkestad, David Hargreaves, and Berner Lindström. Although an older model, this framework provides important criteria for assessing how the participants go about DIY recording. How these participants conform to this model in some ways, and defy it in other ways, evidences that DIY recording encompasses diverse practices that are difficult to distill into a singular pedagogical model. Third, the findings presented in part II are analyzed using Lucy Green’s informal learning strategies, arguably the

  Zagorski-​Thomas, The Musicology of Record Production, 167.

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most significant work in music education research since the millennial mark, and undoubtedly the foundational work for the current surge of practice and research in the sphere of popular music pedagogy. Chapter 8 is likened to a master recording—​the final version of a song that gets committed to a permanent audio format. Whereas part II concentrated on the details of each track, in this final chapter the implications of the findings for the field of music education are considered. How might DIY recording practices translate to music education contexts such as classrooms and community settings? Ultimately, music educators must consider the particularities of their own respective teaching and learning contexts, but there are some general conclusions drawn from this research that can be applied to diverse learning environments, albeit in suitably customized ways. Meaningful DIY recording should foster tacit learning environments, creating music in/​with the studio (using the studio as a musical instrument), trial-​ and-​error learning approaches, and music-​making as an activity that privileges processes over products. Taken together these components do not constitute the whole of DIY recording, and therefore should not be interpreted as such, but they do serve as starting points. For the field of music education to transition from perceiving “recording” as merely a noun—​an object that you learn from—​toward “recording” as a verb—​a set of practices that you learn by doing—​a good start would involve championing these DIY recording strategies.

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7 Mixing the Multitrack Cross-​C ase Analyses

Conceptualizing the Multiple Case Study as  a Multitrack Recording A multiple case study is analogous to a multitrack recording. In a multitrack recording, several individual tracks comprise the whole, which I will refer to as the multitrack. The preceding four chapters presented the cases of Michael, Tara, Tyler, and Jimmy as individually bounded units. I liken cases to tracks on a recording; tracks can be soloed and listened to individually or they can be heard all together at once. Soloing an individual track enables the listener to hone in on a singular sound, and to detect its dynamic detail and subtlest of timbral nuances. It is a zoomed-​in view, a hypersensitive listening preoccupied with specifics demanding thick description. The detailed waveform depicted in Figure 7.1 helps to illustrate this point. In Figure 7.1 there is only one sound source to examine, inviting a close examination of the waveform’s intricacies such as its crests, troughs, amplitude, period, and frequency. Robert Stake uses the term “quintain” to describe the common bond between cases. As he succinctly summarizes, a multiple case study commences with the investigation of single cases, but then proceeds with a cross-​case analysis to answer the study’s research questions: Multicase research starts with the quintain. To understand it better, we study some of its single cases—​its sites or manifestations. But it is the quintain we seek to understand. We study what is similar and different about the cases in order to understand the quintain better.1 The individual tracks of Michael, Tara, Tyler, and Jimmy have already been soloed and scrupulously sifted through to stress their salient features. How do these   Stake, Multiple Case Study Analysis, 6.

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Figure 7.1  A singular waveform. 

individual tracks sound when played together? This question is the essence of a cross-​case analysis. In combining the individual tracks to form a multitrack, the individual tracks are situated in a new context. No longer individually bounded, the tracks are mixed together to illuminate the consonant and dissonant relationships amongst the multitrack. This is new data generated as a product of mixing, as consonance and dissonance are contingent on the intermingling of multiple voices. Figure 7.2 helps to illustrate how a zoomed-​out multitrack view privileges holistic listening. It is physically difficult to focus on just one track without referencing the tracks around it. Track 2 is sandwiched by tracks 1 and 3, while track 4 bears the weight of the other three tracks, and track 1 sits comfortably atop the pile. The tracks are still distinct with their individuality intact, but they are also framed adjacent to each other in Figure 7.2 such that they must be referenced to each other. Just as a musician chooses which instruments to include in a multitrack musical creation, I chose the musicians that comprise this multiple case study. My cross-​case analysis is a performance akin to mixing. With my fingers on the figurative faders of Michael, Tara, Tyler, and Jimmy, I raised and lowered their voices to examine and illuminate the consonant and dissonant relationships within the multitrack. First, this chapter will present two classifications of DIY recording studios based on the findings presented in part II. Second, the participants’ respective approaches to DIY recording will be examined using a framework for analyzing computer-​based compositional processes. Finally, the learning subsumed in DIY recording will be evaluated using the criteria that constitute Lucy Green’s informal learning strategies.

Classifying DIY Studios DIA STUDIOS

Examining across cases how DIY studios are used, the participants presented two different models of working. The first model, the do-​it-​alone (DIA) studio, pits the musician as a jack-​of-​all-​trades who bears the responsibility of accomplishing all

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Figure 7.2  Multiple waveforms constituting a multitrack. 

stages of producing a recording from conception to completion. Matt Brennan observes:  “Even though the DIY acronym stands for ‘do-​it-​yourself,’ in the case of music there is normally still an assumption that music-​making remains a collective, social practice; in other words, even music scenes that self-​identify as DIY are much more frequently ‘do-​it-​yourselves’ than ‘do-​it-​yourself.’ ”2 Brennan suggests DIA serves as a more literal and apt label for this self-​sufficient strand of DIY music-​making. Drawing from his historical survey of one-​man bands, Dale Champan suggests that the present iteration of this practice embodies the ethos of neoliberalism: The contemporary solo multi-​instrumentalist leverages physical dexterity and digital/​mechanical prostheses to produce multivalent sound constructions, harnessing limited resources in the service of maximal results. In this way, solo multi-​instrumentalism can be understood as a useful window onto contemporary political economy and its idealized representations.3

  Brennan, “One is the Loneliest Number,” 263.   Chapman, “The ‘One-​Man Band’ and Entrepreneurial Selfhood in Neoliberal Culture,” 453.

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Similarly, the DIA studio approach also idealizes an individualistic “enterprise of one.”4 Michael and Tyler presented similar approaches to using their DIA studios. Neither of these DIY-​ers was concerned with a timeline; Tyler continued to tweak songs he wrote ten years ago when he was seventeen, and Michael dug up old cassettes from the 1980s, transferring them to a digital format so that he could continue to develop his twenty-​year-​old song ideas. There was no rush, no deadline, and no impetus for these two to distribute their music to the masses. Michael perceives his DIA studio as a retreat from a traditional studio system that dictates decisions. In his DIA studio he feels unimpeded: free to explore and make unconventional decisions that are not inhibited by an overbearing audio engineer. For Tyler, the DIA studio has become a state of mind. He perceives his life goals to be intricately connected to the DIA studio model. Tyler joked that he uses his technical impasses as an excuse for procrastination, but his commitment to mastering Ableton is a manifestation of his dedication to ensuring his engineering skills are tantamount to his musical skills. Slowly but surely, Michael and Tyler have inched toward a greater understanding and adroitness of their trade, but there is a curious quirk in their work that sets them apart from Jimmy and Tara: they rarely finish songs. During the study, Tyler and Michael both had several projects in progress; Tyler’s tree of characters continued to sprout new branches and Michael took on a new project before finishing one. In comparison to Jimmy and Tara, Michael and Tyler work at a snail’s pace, but Richard Sennett defends the virtues of the slow worker: “The slowness of craft time serves as a source of satisfaction; practice beds in, making the skill one’s own. Slow craft time also enables the work of reflection and imagination—​which the push for quick results cannot.”5 Considering Michael and Tyler’s histories as professional touring musicians, I suspect the allure of having an album to market has lost its luster to some extent. Alternatively, they derive satisfaction from living on a musical island unencumbered by the demands of record labels, managers, band members, engineers, and producers. The Internet enables Michael and Tyler to circumvent the distribution network of the record industry; they can easily post their music online, but they do not. These are inactions of passivity more than aversion. Quite simply, they are not concerned with attracting an audience. They are more process-​oriented than product-​oriented. Their music is their music, and that is sufficient for them. Michael and Tyler use their DIA studios to perform almost exclusively for themselves. DIWO STUDIOS

In contrast to Michael and Tyler, Tara and Jimmy hold out hope that eventually their diligence will pay dividends in a career that is financed by public demand for   Ibid.   Sennett, The Craftsman, 295.

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their music. Their end goals directly influence how they use their studios. While there are resemblances in the working processes of Tara and Jimmy compared to Michael and Tyler, their practices constitute a fundamental deviation, demanding a separate categorization: the do-​it-​with-​others (DIWO) studio. John Richards argues that “the notion of DIY is an oxymoron, since those who share a DIY aesthetic rely on each other to exchange ideas and work together as a form of counter-​culture,” and suggests that DIT (do-​it-​together) or DIWO (do-​it-​with-​others) serve as better descriptors of collaborative DIY projects,6 such as those exhibited by Tara and Jimmy. More specifically with regard to DIY musical practices, Don Lebler and Naomi Hodges observe a similar phenomenon: “DIY musicians are self-​reliant and autonomous, writing, performing, recording and producing original music. This is not to say that they are working alone—​indeed, collaboration and networking are important aspects of most DIY musical practice.”7 Both Tara and Jimmy have the know-​how to see their songs through to completion, but they seek to collaborate with peers whom they perceive to have a specialized skillset and whose expertise exceeds their own. Not willing to relinquish control, Tara and Jimmy remain intimately acquainted with each aspect of the production of their music. Rather than outsourcing to another studio, they hire outside help to enter their DIWO studio domains and facilitate their music-​making processes on their own terms. They aim to record their music on a fixed timeline, setting goals of when to have their music mixed, mastered, and distributed. In theory, collaborating with someone else in the recording and mixing phases streamlines the production process and has the added benefit of incorporating the expertise of another party. While Jimmy praised Bill’s abilities, boasting of their synergistic relationship, Tara struggled to synchronize with Felix, questioning his decision-​making. For Tara, having two people in her musical territory seemed crowded at times, raising issues regarding roles and boundaries in the music-​making process. Advantages and disadvantages of including a peer in the music-​making process aside, both Tara and Jimmy met their self-​imposed deadlines and finished their respective projects using the DIWO studio model.

Music-​Making Models and Digitally Afforded Techniques Each of the participants’ music-​making evidenced some of the traits of the vertical and horizontal compositional models as proposed by Göran Folkestad, David   Richards, “Beyond DIY in Electronic Music,” 274.   Lebler and Hodges, “Popular Music Pedagogy,” 274.

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Hargreaves, and Berner Lindström.8 The prevailing problem with using the categories “vertical” (songwriting and recording as a singular act) and “horizontal” (songwriting and recording as distinct acts) exclusively is that they cast music-​making in a two-​dimensional mold. In defense of Folkestad et al., computer-​based music-​ making technology has changed markedly since the late 1990s when their research was conducted, which helps to explain the instances of incompatibility of their model with my findings. While no generalizations about the participants’ music-​ making processes can be made based on a comparison of the individual cases, there are some intriguing commonalities. Most notably, users of the DIWO studio model tended to approach music-​making with a horizontal strategy. Tara and Jimmy typically had preconceived song ideas, committing to song structures before commencing recording. Jimmy relied on his cell phone to catalog melodic ideas and Tara prepared scores using Sibelius. The horizontal approach dictates that composition and recording are distinct phases, and dates back to the dawn of recording when the aim was to capture a real-​time performance. In discussing how he wrote “Lost and Found,” Jimmy explained that he awoke with an idea in his head; he knew the vocal melody, the guitar chords, and the drum pattern. What he needed next was a studio to record his ideas. Similarly, Tara commenced her album by taking walks on the Williamsburg Bridge to focus on writing lyrics and melodies in her head. Once inspiration struck, she fleshed out her ideas on the piano and rehearsed them until she believed they were fit to be recorded. THE THIRD DIMENSION: BREAKING FROM THE H O R I Z O N TA L A N D V E R T I C A L   P L A N E S

After Jimmy and Tara commenced recording, their music-​making processes became more malleable. In some instances, Jimmy adhered strictly to his initial conception, but even in these cases, his songs were not completely written until recording commenced. Using “Lost and Found” as an example, Jimmy woke up with a lyric running through his head, and hearing a harmonic change from G major to B minor. When he described the process to me, he said he was “just trying to feel it out,” concluding, “It just happens.” These statements imply that Jimmy did not have as solid of a sound conception as he initially intimated. When using his “DJ side,” Jimmy conceptualized making music differently than when he incorporated his guitar. In DJ mode, he perceived songwriting and recording as an intertwined process, stating, “I did it all at the same time.” DJ-​based or guitar-​based, Jimmy engaged in reflexive recording when he made music with a DAW. The playback function influenced his decision-​making as he constructed a song from the foundational blocks of his initial inspirations.    Folkestad, Hargreaves, and Lindström, “Compositional Strategies in Computer-​ Based Music-​Making.” 8

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On the surface it would seem that Tara is a prime candidate to be labeled as a prototypical horizontal composer. For the making of her album, she strove to realize her songs fully before commencing recording. Yet once recording was underway and she was confronted with the playback of her performances, she found idiosyncrasies that were askew to her ears and adjusted accordingly. She wanted her recordings to sound as if she was singing while playing piano, but was frustrated that the mixes she outsourced failed to convey this alternate reality. Achieving the recording she envisioned was not simply a case of playing and singing her songs; she found herself chasing the elusive perfect take. While Tara’s most recent project followed a more horizontal scheme, she expressed a desire to return to the less structured music-​making method she experimented with when she first purchased Logic. Referring to this approach as “very ad hoc,” Tara recalled, “I almost don’t know what I did. I was just trying things out.” In stark contrast to the perfectionist attitude Tara adopted toward her most recent recordings such as “Chesterfield,” in her “ad hoc” approach she expressed a laissez-​ faire attitude, commenting, “Sometimes I think it worked and sometimes I think it didn’t.” KARAOKE COMPOSITION AND REFLEXIVE RECORDING

Further blurring the boundaries between horizontal and vertical approaches, like Tyler, Tara employed a karaoke composition approach, creating backing tracks with which to sing along. Given that vocals are typically the focal point of pop music (a label used by both Tyler and Tara to describe their music), employing the karaoke method allowed them to fine-​tune lyrics and melodies. Tyler’s use of the karaoke technique was especially interesting because some of the backing tracks he created have not changed in the course of a decade. He tended to find faults with his lyrics, never fully satisfied with what he had written: “I wrote lyrics that didn’t make sense back then.” Each time he sang along to the backing track he reauditioned himself. Being able to sing along to what he previously recorded was critical to his self-​ evaluation process: “If I can get myself feeling good about it, singing and dancing, that’s always a good sign.” Tyler was very forthcoming about the fact that he anticipated incorporating recording into his production process, knowing it would alter the course of his songs, and give them new shapes and textures. His music is never completely preconceptualized prior to recording; he is the flag carrier for the reflexive recording approach. Recording ideas as they come to him and working in spurts over years, Tyler is dependent on listening to what he has previously recorded to plot his next step. When we listened to some of his unfinished songs together, Tyler revealed to me, “I’m getting inspired by myself.” He seemed to be perpetually thinking about his music, contemplating what direction to take it, but seldom did he alter its course dramatically. I liken Tyler’s approach to a woodworker: the piece has taken its shape

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and gradually he increases the grit of the sandpaper to smooth it out. Details that would go unnoticed by most listeners are points of pride for Tyler, and attending to them takes precedence over seemingly arbitrary timelines and labels of being “finished.” P R E S E T C U LT U R E

Of the four cases, Michael is the most experimental-​oriented music-​maker. Whereas Jimmy, Tara, and Tyler worked toward making songs, Michael labored to make singular sounds. He used Ableton to tinker with timbres, stumbling across sounds that he deemed “cool,” and “outstanding and strange.” Michael’s aural expeditions entailed expectant encounters of unearthing new sounds. He employed the click-​ and-​consequence method, auditioning sounds until he at last found the din of his dreams. Michael’s scavenging for sounds earmarks an important phenomenon that is dependent on which DAW is used. Ableton and Logic come bundled with effects and samples, but Pro Tools is lesser known for these features. Essentially, a preset is a sonic shortcut, a prepackaged chain of effects that combine to create a specific sound quality. Comparing the mixing approaches of Tyler and Jimmy serves to exemplify a key difference between using Ableton and Pro Tools. Tyler used a mastering preset called “Analog Warmth,” which consists of a string of effects processors including an equalizer and compressor. With two swift clicks of the mouse, Tyler metamorphosed his song, concluding, “This is what the track should really sound like.” Well aware of the fact that Ableton affords such a shortcut, he confessed, “I’m just using the presets, just something quick and easy to get us there.” Michael’s and Tyler’s contentment with using presets contrasts the findings of Mark Marrington’s study of DAW-​based composers: “A common attitude among DAW users which has particular implications for authorship and authenticity—​that one strives to avoid any kinds of norms dictated by the software, for example by resisting using presets in plugins, or generic samples libraries.”9 The issue of using preset sounds is not a new phenomenon, which Steve Jones makes the case with preset sounds on synthesizers in the 1980s.10 For Michael and Tyler at least, using a preset had no bearing on their views of authorship and authenticity. Using Pro Tools, Jimmy’s use of plugins is demonstrative of a more traditional approach to effects processing. Jimmy used plugins from audio engineering aficionado companies like Waves. Jimmy and his mixing engineer, Bill, painstakingly adjusted the parameters of each effect processor until the desired sound was achieved. The mixing stage for one song alone constituted a full day’s work.   Marrington, “Experiencing Musical Composition in the DAW.”   Jones, Rock Formation, 68.

9 10

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In comparison, Tyler loaded built-​in Ableton plugins en route, integrating mixing in the music-​making process. Examining his symbiotic music-​making processes, it is difficult to parse out mixing from the other actions he performed such as songwriting and editing. The actions involved in the making of a recording diverge from a linear model, in which one stage of production is contingent on the other; instead these stages intermingle in a less ordered, but more organic sequence. UNDO THE UNDUE

Each one of the participants adopted their own unique approach to integrating a DAW into their music-​making. Michael, Tara, Tyler, and Jimmy all engaged in some degree of reflexive recording by employing trial-​and-​error approaches with their DAWs. With the assurance that all actions can be undone with a keystroke or a click, they were free to explore multiple paths in their respective music-​making journeys without undue ramifications. Their recordings are compilations of their very best takes; DAWs enable them to create seemingly flawless performances to their audiences (even if they are their only listener). In this regard, their musical products are byproducts of a computer-​age afforded undo-​mentality in which musical permanence is merely a construct.

Producer Pedagogies: Acquiring Skills and Know-​How Drawing primarily on the interview and observation data generated within each case study, the following discussion compares and contrasts the participants’ approaches to learning with their DIY studios. With a view to answer the question, “How do musicians acquire the skills and know-​how to create a recording?” I modified the categories of Lucy Green’s model of informal learning, to analyze information across cases. While Green’s initial research aim was to examine the learning strategies of popular musicians,11 my aim was to examine the use of recording technology by musicians, and thus necessitated the modification of her schema to better fit the context of my research. These new categorizations are almost identical to Green’s, but for the sake of brevity use a single term to describe each learning strategy. It should be noted that these categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive; an approach to learning with recording technology may exhibit more than one learning strategy. The five categories include: (a) aural learning (e.g., learning by listening and copying recordings); (b) peer-​guided learning; (c) self-​directed learning;   Green, How Popular Musicians Learn.

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(d) immersive learning (e.g., learners assimilate skills and knowledge in haphazard, idiosyncratic, and holistic ways); and (e) holistic learning (e.g., learners integrate listening, performing, improvising, and composing simultaneously throughout the learning process). A U R A L E M U L AT I O N

William Moylan’s Understanding and Crafting the Mix prescribes a series of critical listening exercises to develop one’s ability to construct a mix.12 Moylan’s premise is that the ability to aurally deconstruct a mix is key to developing the ability to construct a professional-​sounding mix. This is a form of tinkering—​taking something apart to understand how it works—​with the distinction that these are exercises of the mind only; there is no hands-​on tangible experience. Some of the participants alluded to engaging in similar critical listening exercises that impacted their approach to recording. Referencing the work of Led Zeppelin, Santana, and Aimee Mann, Michael frequently discussed how he listened acutely to these recordings to study the production techniques involved. He marveled at the psychedelic panning in Santana’s Abraxas (1970), and the “fat and beautiful” sound of the first two Led Zeppelin albums. He was cognizant of the technical merits of record production, effusing, “I loved the engineering.” As Michael’s musical career progressed and his interest in record production deepened, he began to take interest in specific producers, most notably Jon Brion. Michael enthusiastically conveyed his reverence for Brion’s production imprint on Aimee Mann’s 1993 album Whatever by proclaiming him a “genius.” Like Michael, Jimmy heard music on the radio that caused him to question how the sonic results were achieved. Reflecting on the listening experiences that sparked his interest in DJ-​based music, Jimmy recalled asking himself, “How do they do these kinds of things? I know you guys are using records but how do you do it if you’re only using one record?” Tyler found himself seeking out recording technology like Acid and Fruity Loops because “bands like Radiohead were doing the sequence-​based things.” Quite simply, without a sequencer he could not sound like Radiohead. Despite being from different generations and being enamored by different musics, Michael, Jimmy, and Tyler share an inquisitive ear in common. Their approaches to DIY recording are directly influenced by the production techniques they heard in the music of their favorite artists during their adolescent years. With the common goal of emulating their musical icons, they ushered themselves into a technology-​dependent music education.

  Moylan, Understanding and Crafting the Mix.

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P E E R -​G U I D E D L E A R N I N G

Throughout the twentieth century, audio engineering skills were passed down in professional studios through apprenticeships:  “Junior engineers traditionally learned skills from senior engineers and continued the chain of knowledge to others as they rose through the hierarchy of the studio.”13 Recording engineer Phil Brown reflected, “I discovered that there was an informal system of apprenticeship in the recording industry. I was expected to learn by watching and listening while I made tea and performed other mundane jobs about the studio.”14 Brown’s experience is representative of the predigital era.15 Renowned audio engineers have a history of mentoring the next generation of renowned engineers. For example, Bill Putnam mentored Phil Ramone, who mentored Elliot Scheiner. Putnam also mentored Bruce Swedien, who in turn mentored Ed Cherney. Shadowing a professional was the prescribed path to audio engineering excellence. In contrast, manifestations of peer influence on learning in the DIY studio are difficult to detect. Tyler turned to his online peers to enhance his learning: “I could watch a YouTube tutorial about a very specific thing in Ableton, or a very general thing about mixing.” Michael depended on the supplied manual and on-​screen instructions to traverse through Ableton, making no mention of receiving help from peers. Jimmy and Tara opted to seek out paid help whom they referred to as friends or acquaintances. Jimmy was able to describe and explain Bill’s mixing actions, demonstrating an understanding of the process, but what he learned from Bill is not clear. Similarly, Tara spent a week recording with Felix, but at no point in the hours of video footage was there a clear moment depicting peer-​guided learning. Tara and Jimmy did not enlist the services of their friends to learn from them; rather these hired hands were brought into their DIWO studios to apportion the workload. S E L F -​T E A C H I N G

In all four cases, there is abundant evidence of self-​directed learning. This mode of learning was the most frequently cited strategy by the participants.

Tape Travails

Michael and Tyler extended their aural learning to a hands-​on trial-​and-​error approach using cassette recorders. Exhibiting technological enthusiasm, Michael and Tyler tinkered with their tape decks intuitively and independently. Their recollections of using tape recorders are strikingly similar; both jury-​rigged what   Seay, “Capturing That Philadelphia Sound.”   Brown, Are We Still Rolling?, iii. 15   Glyn Johns reports a similar anecdote in Sound Man, 13, as do Ken Scott and Bobby Owsinski in Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust, 15 and 27. 13 14

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technologies they had available to them to overdub. Describing his tape recorder, Michael explained, “It had a mic input and a line input on the back, and two microphone inputs in the front, and a line input on the back. You could blend them so you could get in effect multitrack recordings.” To sync sounds, Tyler pressed into service two tape recorders in tandem: “I had two different tape players, and I would play and record into one, and I would press play on that one, and play the keyboard at the same time, and record on the other.” Michael and Tyler’s exploits with recording technology continued into adulthood. With their ears to the figurative ground of the recording realm, both stayed attuned to the technological trends in recording, continually seeking the sonic state-​of-​the-​art. While Tyler made the jump directly to digital during his formative years, which coincided with the digitization of the music industry, fifty-​three-​year-​old Michael meandered through intermediary recording technologies for four decades until delving into digital. The overwhelming majority of the learning that took place in these scenarios was self-​directed in their DIA studios.

Domain of the DAW

Tara has been noticeably absent from the discussion thus far, but that can be attributed to the fact that she did not use recording technology until a few years ago. This is hardly surprising, given that the musics she was most entrenched in as an adolescent were musical theatre and classical: musics that have traditionally eschewed recording technology by harnessing a “willful ignorance” of production techniques.16 Alex Ross comments: “Classical music stands partly outside the technological realm, because most of its repertory is designed to resonate naturally within a room. By contrast, almost all pop music is written for microphones and speakers.”17 Meanwhile, despite growing up immersed in studio culture, enveloped in the most current recording technologies, Jimmy could not recall actively pursuing an understanding of the workings of his father’s recording studio until his mid-​twenties. In both cases, evidence of self-​directed learning with recording technology did not enter our conversations until discussing DAWs. Michael is a consummate self-​directed trial-​and-​error learner. It may be the case that a dependency on trial-​and-​error techniques is characteristic of learners reared in the computer age, but Michael’s learning history helps to illustrate Steve Waksman’s assertion that there is a lineage of trial-​and-​error learning with music technology (“tinkering”) that predates home computing.18 In the cases of Michael and Tyler, self-​directed trial-​and-​error learning strategies were carried over from   Grieg, “Performing For (and Against) the Microphone,” 20.   Ross, Listen to This, 66. 18   Waksman, “California Noise.” 16 17

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their analog experiences when they emigrated to their new digital devices, largely aided by the cues of skeuomorphic design.19 Discussing his entry into using Pro Tools, Michael professed, “I didn’t have anybody tutoring me and I didn’t have any help files, so I just had to figure it out for myself.” Jimmy leisurely employed a more passive approach to learning Pro Tools: “I would always mess around with it once in a while.” Reflecting on acclimating to Acid, Tyler conceded, “Everything I did I learned the hard way . . . I just didn’t know, I never read things, I didn’t watch tutorials, YouTube wasn’t around at that time.” Literally left to her own devices, Tara relented, “Well, no one taught me. Any of the software that I know, no one taught me . . . I just learned as I had to.” Mark Slater observed a similar trend in his study of learning in a project studio: “Participants had to work out what knowledge and skills they needed as they went along.”20 Taken together, the voices of the participants resoundingly echo the observation of Alison Black: “Today’s students simply plunge in and learn through experimentation and active participation.”21 Beyond recognizing that they taught themselves how to use recording technology, the participants struggled to provide anything more than ambiguous accounts of what was entailed in these self-​educated escapades: • Tyler: “I would say that it just happened over time and over trial and error more than anything.” • Jimmy:  “Just trying to feel it out, and it came together. That’s how it usually happens.” • Michael: “It’s a very exploratory experience.” • Tara: “It was very ad hoc . . . I was just trying things out.” These descriptions frame recording as acts of intent with no prescribed direction. Armed with a desire to make something new, the participants seek out an experience in which the acts of listening, performing, improvising, and composing are indistinguishable from each other, toward an immersive and holistic approach to music-​making. IMMERSIVE LEARNING AND HOLISTIC LEARNING

The remaining two categories, immersive learning (learners assimilate skills and knowledge in haphazard, idiosyncratic, and holistic ways) and holistic learning (learners integrate listening, performing, improvising, and composing

  See Bell, Hein, and Ratcliffe, “Beyond Skeuomorphism.”   Slater, “Processes of Learning in the Project Studio,” 17. 21   Black, “Gen Y,” 99. 19 20

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simultaneously throughout the learning process) are part and parcel of self-​directed learning with a DAW. All of the participants exhibited the characteristics of immersive learning using trial-​and-​error approaches as described earlier in this section. Further, given that all of the participants are songwriters, their intent was to compose with their respective DAWs and perform their own parts. Lastly, listening and improvising are the key actions of trial-​and-​error learning with a DAW. Each of these characteristics of learning can be accounted for under self-​directed learning. At their core, immersive and holistic learning thrive on the trial-​and-​error approach.

Summing the Tracks: Conclusions My mix of this multitrack highlighted the consonant and dissonant relationships between the individual tracks. With regard to conceptualizing the DIY studio, two distinct models emerged: the DIA studio and the DIWO studio. While Tara and Jimmy hurriedly worked to complete albums, Michael and Tyler were not concerned about timelines. None of the participants’ approaches to songwriting could be defined simply as “vertical” or “horizontal.” Each participant exuded traits of both vertical and horizontal approaches and relied on affordances of the computer such as the ability to undo actions using a click and consequence approach to music-​making. Learning strategies varied, but self-​directed learning was the predominant mode referenced by the participants. While anecdotes of aural learning and peer-​guided learning surfaced in some of the participants’ interviews, self-​directed learning was the common denominator across all four cases. The participants’ descriptions of self-​directed learning exploits included strategies that were both immersive and holistic. Each participant engaged in listening, playing, improvising, and composing in an integrative approach that was self-​directed and often employed a trial-​ and-​error strategy. The implications of these findings for music education will be examined in ­chapter 8.

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8 Mastering the Multitrack Conclusions

Mastering is the final stage in the process of committing a musical recording to a medium. With the stages of sound selection, tracking, editing, and mixing completed, a final preparation of the recording is all that remains to ready it for distribution. A mastering engineer uses many of the same audio tools as a mixing engineer such as equalizers and dynamic processors, but for different purposes. Whereas the mixing engineer is charged with the responsibility of achieving a musical balance between individual instruments, the mastering engineer’s chief concern is to sonically enhance the mix. Mastering analogies abound in the audio world, conveying images of finality such as “the cherry on top,” “the broad brushstrokes,” and “the final polish.” An ideal master enables the listener to experience the utmost of a recording by spotlighting the key elements of a mix while also illuminating the nuances that are equally essential in maintaining the consistency of the composition. Just as a pinch of salt can coax out and enhance a flavor in a recipe, so too can a touch of equalization emit an appealing aural impingement on the ear. The previous chapter presented a mix of the multitrack, featuring the most salient similarities and dissimilarities found upon comparing the individual tracks. In this final stage of mastering, the implications of these findings on how we learn, make, and listen to music are examined. More specifically, this chapter hones in on implications for music education, focusing on: (1) DIY recording practices that support tacit learning; (2)  creating music in/​with the studio; (3)  trial-​and-​error learning; and (4) song-​making as an activity that privileges processes over products.

Implications for Music Education B Y -​P R O C E S S E S :   TA C I T L E A R N I N G

Learning is often framed as an event that has transpired. For example: • Tyler: “I learned the hard way.” • Michael: “I learned to play the electric guitar.” 199

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• Tara: “I just learned as I had to.” • Jimmy: “I learned your basic G, C, D.” The implication of saying “I learned” is that learning has ceased and only exists as a byproduct of past experiences. For example, Jimmy’s statement makes it clear that he is no longer learning basic guitar chords. This particular learning experience has concluded, the byproduct of which is the ability to play G, C, and D. In contrast, Jimmy’s broader endeavor of guitar mastery is ongoing as evidenced by his commitment to daily soloing and improvising practice. His explicit goal is to be as good as the guitarists postered on his practice room walls, and the riffs he learns and refines are the by-​processes of these ongoing experiences. This learning model eschews a prescribed path of scaffolding and sequencing events toward an identified goal because the goal in this case meanders by evolving. The concept of learning as a by-​process is fundamental to DIY recording practices, and is otherwise known as “subception” in psychology, or tacit learning.1 Michael Eraut describes six different types of situations in which “tacit knowledge may be either acquired or used or simultaneously both acquired and used: 1. Knowledge acquired by implicit learning of which the knower is unaware; 2. Knowledge constructed from the aggregation of episodes in long-​term memory; 3. Knowledge inferred by observers to be capable of representation as implicit theories of action, personal constructs, schemas, etc; 4. Knowledge which enables rapid, intuitive understanding or response; 5. Knowledge entailed in transferring knowledge from one situation to another; and 6. Knowledge embedded in taken-​for-​granted activities, perceptions and norms.”2 In The Tacit Dimension, Michael Polanyi explains that “tacit knowing achieves comprehension by indwelling  .  .  .  all knowledge consists of or is rooted in such acts of comprehension.”3 He reasons, “We know a person’s face, and can recognize it among a thousand, indeed among a million. Yet we usually cannot tell how we recognize a face we know.”4 Paralleling this lucid example, DIY recording is easier done than explained. The overarching aim of DIY recording is to make music with a DAW as opposed to learn how to operate one. Learning how to use a DAW is a necessary step toward making music with it, but these processes often occur in simultaneity as opposed to a sequence of hierarchical steps. Doing and learning are confounding variables,   Polanyi, Knowing and Being, 143.   Eraut, “Non-​Formal Learning and Tacit Knowledge in Professional Work,” 133. 3   Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 55. 4   Ibid., 4. 1 2

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which helps to explain why the participants profiled in part II were somewhat confounded when asked to identify their learning experiences. Holistic learning “arises from repeated confrontations with real things: comprehensive entities that are grasped all at once, in a manner that may be incapable of explicit articulation.”5 In most cases, recalling what you did is easier than recalling what you learned because the latter requires an additional exercise of reflection. Thus a great deal of learning is embedded in the music-​making process, but goes unaccounted for by the autodidact. Seymour Papert postulates that “most people are more interested in what they learn than in how the learning happens without giving a thought to learning.”6 “Giving a thought to learning” while learning is, as Haridimos Tsoukas reasons, not possible: “Shifting attention to subsidiary particulars entails the loss of the skillful engagement with the activity at hand. By focusing on a subsidiary constituent of skillful action one changes the character of the activity one is involved in.”7 Polanyi concludes: “If such formalization of tacit knowing were possible, it would convert all arts into mathematically prescribed operations, and thus destroy them as works of art.”8 Music-​making and learning are parallel processes, they start and stop in synchronicity. As demonstrated by the persistent practices of Michael, Tara, Tyler, and Jimmy, DIY recording is a continual pursuit parceled with continual tacit learning. At the crux of this homemade movement is the textbook definition of “amateur”: “The term itself derives from the Latin amare—​‘to love.’ The essence of amateurism is intrinsic motivation: to be an amateur is to do something for the love of it.”9 For the music educator, it is critical to recognize that what is of utmost importance is to create contexts in which tacit learning can occur. Different approaches should be encouraged to foster the development of diverse learners. For example, The DIA model might work well for some learners whereas others might prefer the DIWO model. Liz Przybylski and Nasim Niknafs observed that these two different paths privilege different learning objectives: “While DIY [DIA] focuses on student-​ directed learning and nonspecialist music-​making, DIWO is useful for educators because it focuses specifically on collaborative learning and the importance of engaging in the learning process with others.”10 In the context of DIY recording, music educators ought to be less concerned about a model of learning that can be prescribed and followed, and instead focus on helping learners to develop their own bespoke pedagogies, which is consistent with real-​world DIY   Crawford, Shop as Soulcraft, 234.   Papert, The Children’s Machine, 29–​30. 7   Tsoukas, Complex Knowledge, 147. 8   Polanyi, Knowing and Being, 164. 9   Shirky, Cognitive Surplus, 82. 10   Przybylski and Niknafs, “Teaching and Learning Popular Music in Higher Education,” 113. 5 6

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recording practices. This could require making time and space for trial-​and-​error learning experiences, connecting learners with someone more experienced to serve as a mentor, and helping learners find resources to engage in self-​led learning.11 These different tacks will depend on—​and should be determined by—​the music-​makers’ goals. A prompt as simple as “What would Prince do?” could provide a learner with enough direction to find their own path to self-​sufficient DIY recording,12 whereas others might require more guidance. One such example of a more guided approach is the track-​and-​hook method used by Max Martin and other contemporary producers as described by John Seabrook in The Song Machine. Regardless of the framing of the music-​making activity, it is the context created in which these activities occur that music educators need to ensure foster the various kinds of learning that occur in/​with real-​world DIY recording studios. M A K I N G WAV E S :   M U S I C -​I N V E N T I N G

Throughout this book, the DAW has been framed as a technology that supports self-​ directed and exploratory music-​making experiences. This view should be tempered with the realization that DAW affordances can direct the actions of music-​makers, pitting the software designer as educator.13 Such delimitations are not unique to DAWs, as all technologies impose constraints on the user: “Ultimately design considerations affect not only the usefulness and quality of musical equipment but also the process of music making.”14 For example, the limited capacities of early recording mediums dictated performance lengths: “For seventy-​one years between the invention of the phonograph and the introduction of the long-​playing disc (1877 to 1948) recordings could play no more than four and one-​half minutes of music continuously.”15 The music educator should consider whether the limits experienced by the learner are self-​imposed or design-​dictated, and adapt pedagogy accordingly. Despite the potential drawbacks of the DAW, it opens a portal to music-​making possibilities that have the potential to reach the masses in the margins of music education. The “key to the reinvigoration of music-​making in general,” of which Lucy Green speaks,16 can be realized: “As more people come to expect that amateur participation is always an open option, those expectations can change the culture.”17 The current culture of music education is enthralled with research on 11   The documentary The Art of Organized Noize (2016), the YouTube video series “Into the Lair” by Dave Pensado, and the free publication TapeOp are some examples of possible resources. 12   Lorin Parker avers, “The greatest value in exploring older avenues of DIY culture and information lies not in the re-​creation of archaic technology, but in the integration of these ideas into current paradigms.” See “Repurposing the Past,” 298. 13   Bell, “Can We Afford These Affordances?” 14   Jones, Rock Formation, 88. 15   Katz, Capturing Sound, 31. 16   Green, How Popular Musicians Learn, 186. 17   Shirky, Cognitive Surplus, 154.

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informal learning pedagogies and exploring the application of these models in formal school settings. In particular, the rock band model has been touted as the future of music education throughout the 2000s, and more recently hip-​hop pedagogies have emerged as the next wave. Factoring jazz into the equation, the period between the swells of popular music that reach the shore of music education is approximately forty years from inception. The issue is not timeliness or trendiness; it is music education’s mimicking malaise. The musical culture of a school ought to mirror the culture in which it is situated, and incubate an environment where the future is fashioned, and new genres are generated. Just as the cross-​ pollination of cultures in New York City has sprouted novel fusion foods such as the Cronut, Ramen Burger, and Kimchi Taco, music education needs to reclaim a mash-​up mentality and make new musics. As Stravinsky succinctly surmised: “We have a duty towards music, namely, to invent it.”18 “Music-​making” is a ubiquitous term in music education literature, and for good reason as it constitutes the core of a healthy music education, but perhaps the field could benefit from embracing Stravinsky’s charge by extending music-​making to music inventing, making waves instead of waiting for them. F O R G E D W I T H   O N E S A N D Z E R O E S :   D I G I TA L A U D I O M U S I C -​M A K I N G   TO O L S One of the things that we built into our contract, which was unheard of at the time was unlimited studio time. We knew we had to pay for it, but we wanted as much as we wanted, you know . . . Our strategy was, what we wanted to do is, we want to play in the studio, we want to learn how the studio works, we don’t want anyone else doing it, you know, it’s our music . . . Essentially . . . we bought ourselves an education, you know, and the way we achieved it was to spend lots and lots of time in the studio fooling around with stuff . . . it was a trial and error kind of thing.19 —​​Jerry Garcia (The Grateful Dead)

Garcia’s anecdote illuminates some pivotal points for consideration with regard to music education. First, he reveals his band’s motivation for wanting to learn “how the studio works,” was the realization and recognition of the close relationship between recording technology and music; the band’s desire to be involved in the recording and mixing processes was motivated by musical ambitions. As a simple first step, it is exigent that music educators realize and recognize that recording technologies are musical instruments. From the phonograph era onward musicians have sought to utilize recording technologies as instruments. For example, the compositional   Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, 69.   As stated in Anthem to Beauty.

18 19

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capabilities of the record player were explored in the 1920s by Milhaud and followed by Cage in 1939.20 This trend extended into the era of tape: When tape recorders, basically designed for documentation and reproduction, became available in the 1940s, a few individuals, like Pierre Schaeffer in France, began transforming the recordings, distorting them into something new, producing music through them as if the tape recorders were magnetic violins.21 Producer Daniel Lanois remarked, “My tools have always been dear to me, and I continue to embrace tools—​technology and musical instruments.”22 For Lanois, both technology and instruments constitute his music-​making tools. For many musicians, these coopted tools have become essential for making music. As Richard Sennett divulges, the process of repurposing tools makes us more adept with them: Getting better at using tools comes to us, in part, when the tools challenge us, and this challenge often occurs just because the tools are not fit-​for-​ purpose . . . the challenge can be met by adapting the form of a tool, or improvising with it as it is, using it in ways it was not meant for.23 The computer and its peripherals—​the mouse and QWERTY keyboard—​were not initially intended to be used as music-​making tools and this may help to explain why the field of music education has been slow to embrace the studio as an integral component of music-​making. Music curricula have a proclivity to frame music technology skills as supplemental rather than elemental. As the cases of Michael, Tara, Tyler, and Jimmy elucidate, the studio is so enmeshed in their music-​making that they sought learning experiences with recording technology that occur outside of formal school settings. Even Tara, who anticipated learning how to use recording technology in school, found herself using informal strategies such as self-​teaching and referring to peers. T R I A L - ​A N D - E​ R R O R L E A R N I N G :   A N E W S P I N O N  A N O L D F AV O R I T E

Jerry Garcia described his learning in the studio as “fooling around with stuff ” and “it was a trial and error kind of thing.”24 Many musicians and audio engineers describe   Katz, Capturing Sound.   Oswald, “Bettered by the Borrower,” 132. 22   Lanois, Soul Mining, 24. 23   Sennett, The Craftsman, 195. 24   Anthem to Beauty. 20 21

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their education with recording technology as largely experiential and often cite examples of a trial-​and-​error approach to learning. For example, describing his forays into music-​making with recording technology, Les Paul reflected: “We were more or less applying the scientific method of learning by doing, trying anything and everything just to see what could be observed from it, to see where it would lead.”25 In their formative years, producers Pharrell and Timbaland also engaged in learning by doing. Timbaland recalled: “We spent hours and hours at my house, playing around with sounds and making music. That group was a crash course in sound engineering for me. It was like hip-​hop academy, and I was getting the education of my life.”26 How did Grandmaster Flash perfect his “quick-​mix” theory? Trial and error.27 Most DJs, as Mark Katz notes, “developed their skills largely through trial and error.”28 DJing, as ­chapter 2 detailed, is a forebear of the contemporary producer, meaning that much of the skillset associated with modern production was derived from trial-​and-​error learning. The trial-​and-​error strategy has also been attributed to the breakthroughs of seminal sound figures in the history of rock production including Sam Phillips,29 Geoff Emerick,30 and Brian Wilson.31 Mixing engineer Tom Lord-​Alge matter-​of-​factly summarized: “In the old days it was trial and error.”32 While much of the research in music education over the past two decades has dwelled on shepherding informal learning practices into classrooms as a new pedagogy, in contrast, the trial-​and-​error approach to learning is traditional in production. It is a fundamental component of skill development: “Technique develops . . . by a dialectic between the correct way to do something and the willingness to experiment through error. The two sides cannot be separated.”33 In the history of recording music, the trial-​and-​error modus operandi is a well-​tread path to learning, and many successful producers knew little about their craft when they started, including Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler (“We didn’t know what we were doing”34); John King and Mike Simpson (“We didn’t know how anything worked . . . but just acted like we did”35); Prince Paul (“I didn’t really know what I was doing”36); and Max Martin (“I didn’t even know what a producer did”37). Music educators would be   Paul and Cochran, Les Paul, 176.   Timbaland with Chambers, The Emperor of Sound, 46. 27   Grandmaster Flash with Ritz, The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash, 75. 28   Katz, Groove Music, 233 29   Millard, The Electric Guitar. 30   Emerick and Massey, Here, There, and Everywhere. 31   Cogan and Clark, Temples of Sound, 31. 32   As cited in Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever, 298. 33   Sennett, The Craftsman, 160. 34   Wade and Picardie, Music Man, 42. 35   LeRoy, Paul’s Boutique, 23. 36   Coleman, Check the Technique, 148. 37   Seabrook, The Song Machine¸ 66. 25 26

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wise to foster authentic music-​making experiences with recording technology that encourage trial-​and-​error approaches, heeding the advice of Peter Brown and colleagues: “Embrace the fact that significant learning is often, or even usually, somewhat difficult. You will experience setbacks. These are signs of effort, not of failure. Setbacks come with striving, and striving builds expertise.”38 S O N G -​M A K E R S :   M A K I N G A S   L E A R N I N G

Michael, Tara, Jimmy, and Tyler are musical craftspeople; they are “song-​makers.”39 Like craftspeople, they are committed to perfecting the fine-​grained details in their work: “Craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it, because one wants to get it right.”40 Elements that would go unnoticed by the casual listener are scrupulously examined by these song-​makers. Michael scoured for the perfect timbre, Tara strived for the perfect take, Jimmy scrutinized for the perfect tunefulness, and Tyler searched for the perfect text. In short, they seek to make the superlative song. They devote as much of their time and resources as possible to the craft of making music. As Mark Frauenfelder explains, in the DIY ethos, making is not simply a means to an end; both process and product are relished: The planning, selection of tools and materials, creation of the workspace, method of construction, documentation, and final product of a DIY project are things to be savored, not to be thought of as hassles or expenses. The end result of what a DIYer makes is important, but it’s also a reminder of an experience that serves as its own reward.41 Making entails experiences, and experiences beget learning: “Practical know-​how . . . can’t be downloaded, it can only be lived.”42 Through making music with recording technology we learn to play, improvise, create, arrange, record, and mix in such a way that these subcategorizations of music-​making become confounding variables and parsing one out from the other might not be possible. Suffice it to say, music-​making is learning: Making is central to our practice as musicians, but making can also be transposed to the context of learning and teaching, whether it becomes part of a process of constructing knowledge, engaging in a shared journey of enquiry, or a creative endeavor.43   Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel, Make It Stick, 201.   Clarke, “ ‘A Magic Science,’ ” 201. 40   Crawford, “Shop as Soulcraft,” 13. 41   Frauenfelder, Made By Hand, 220. 42   Crawford, Shop as Soulcraft, 225. 43   Savage, “Tom’s Story,” 221. 38 39

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Jerry Garcia indicated that by contractually securing unlimited studio time, the Grateful Dead in effect purchased an education. Following along similar lines, purchasers of computers are purchasers of an education. Further, owners of computing devices are owners of musical instruments. Music educators need to recognize the DAW as a conduit to channel learners to music-​making experiences that transcend the typologies of “informal” and “formal.”

The Les Paul Legacy of the Producer Generally speaking, performing artists and audio engineers are two distinct species. Musicians often lack the vocabulary to successfully convey their needs to technicians and vice versa. But Les, fluent in both languages, managed to meld the two disciplines.44

Extending the trial-​and-​error lineage, DIY recording fosters and promotes a discovery-​based approach to music-​making. Click-​and-​consequence music-​making (a DAW-​ dependent version of trial-​and-​error music-​making) encourages taking risks and improvisation. Further, DAWs enable reflexive recording, which encompasses critical listening, musical thinking, and sculpting with sound. Lastly, with the DAW, the music-​making process can be extended indefinitely. Taken together, the affordances of the DAW can support a music education situated in an audio culture where musical actions (listening, performing, improvising, and creating) and technical actions (tracking, editing, mixing, and mastering) coalesce into a single action. The musicians discussed in this book are representative of a migratory movement within the world of music recording. In spaces not originally intended for recording (e.g., bedrooms, kitchens, basements, converted industrial factories, and warehouses), sometimes with the help of friend, each participant performed the roles of what would have been done by ten people in an earlier era. Assimilating the role of musician and audio engineer into one, they are hybrids that play the studio, and continue the ongoing evolution of the role of the producer and DIY recording practices. Using the studio as a musical instrument in this way is how much, if not all, popular music is made. As popular music pedagogical initiatives in music education continue to grow and evolve, it is essential that the field espouse DIY recording practices, the role of the producer, and the studio as a musical instrument.

  Shaughnessy, Les Paul, 140.

44

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221

Index

30th Street Studio (Columbia Records), 14, 15, 19 Ableton Live, 74, 83, 86–​92, 132, 142, 144, 148, 151, 188, 192, 193, 195 accessibility, 24, 98 Ace of Base, 64 Acid Pro, 126, 129, 132, 147, 194, 197 acoustic treatment, 102, 105 ADAT, 26, 27 Adele, 65 Adobe Audition, 82 Aerosmith, 117 affordances, 180, 198, 202, 207 affords, 83, 94, 192 Akai MPD, 32, 134–​136 Al Cohen Studio, 4 Albini, Steve, 32 Aldon Music, 33, 38, 40, 44, 64, 101, 156 alternative rock, 164 amateur, xvii, 7, 10, 26, 31, 201, 202 amateurism, 26 amp(lifier), 44, 47, 127, 134, 153, 164, 165, 174 Apollo Theatre, 70 apprenticeship, 195 Armstrong, Louis, 151 arrange, xiv, 31, 38, 42, 50, 99, 101, 136, 206 Atlantic Records, 16, 19, 39 audio engineer(s) assisting musicians, 48, 80, 102, 167, 173 co-​opted by musicians, xvii, xviii, 188, 207 learn by observing, 151, 195 learn by trial and error, 204 opposition to mixing-​in-​the-​box, 135 audio engineering emerging from electrical engineering, 10 and the professionalization of recording, 7 skills learned by osmosis, 176

skills learned through apprenticeships, 195 skills learned by trial and error, 95 terminology, 168 audio interface, 82, 83, 87, 103, 133, 162 aural learning, 181, 193, 195, 198 autodidact, 201 autodidactic, 132 autodidacticism, 132 Autotune, 140 Avalon 737 preamplifier, 162, 166, 167 Bach, C. P. E., 5 Bach, J. S., 79 baffle(s) (sound), 21, 44, 105, 114 Baker, Arthur, 59 Ballard, Glen, 26, 27 Bambaataa, Afrika, 60 Band, the, 175 Barry, Jeff, 40 bass (guitar) emulated with MIDI by Tyler, 140 imitated with turntables, 60 and the Motown sound, 44–​45 as part of the riddim track in dub, 54 recorded by Jimmy, 163, 164 timbre on “Billie Jean,” 57 bass drum absence on mechanical recordings, 9 as central component of the drum kit, 33, 34, 136 Beach Boys, the, recording processes, 41–​44 Beastie Boys, the and making loops, 146 and playing the mixer, 19 beats the making of, 59, 82, 129, 145–​147 as foundational to contemporary pop music, 64

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222

I nd ex

Beatles, the and Geoff Emerick, 127, 172 and George Martin, 19, 33 writing in the studio, 53, 59 Bechet, Sidney, 12 Bedford Station, 69 Bedford Stuyvesant, 69 Beethoven, 5, 9, 79 Bell Labs, 13 Belle and Sebastian, 127 Benjamin, Benny, 45 Berkeley, Busby, 84 Bernstein, Leonard, 14 Berry, Chuck, 37 Beyoncé, 70 Biggie (Notorious B.I.G.), 156 Blaine, Hal, 42 Blakey, Art, 67 blog, 137 Blumlein, Alan, 13 Bomb Squad, the, production processes, 61–​63 Bon Jovi, 117 bounce, tracks, 25, 126, 129, 168 Bowie, David, 51, 121 breaks, 59, 60 Brion, Jon, 78, 80, 194 Britz, Chuck, 42, 43 Broadway, 14, 40 Bronx, the, 60, 61, 70 Brooklyn, background information, 69–​71, 73 Brown, James, 58 Brown, Phil, 195 Brown, Ruth, 39 bus, 84 buses, 84 Bushwick, 69, 153, 154 busking, 79 by-​processes, 200 Byrne, David, 20, 52 Cage, John, 59, 204 Cakewalk Home Studio, 126 Campbell, Glen, 42 Carnegie Hall, 70 Carrol Gardens, 75 cassette recorders and ease of use, 25, 26 and ease of access, 26 to make pause tapes, 60 and Michael, 77, 78, 80, 81, 195 and overdubbing, 77, 78, 126 and Tyler, 126, 151, 195 CBGB, 70 CD, 22, 27, 80, 144 burner, 84 Ced-​Gee, 61

Charles, Ray, 39 Cheiron, 64, 65 Cherney, Ed, 195 Chess, Leonard, 3 Chuck D, 61, 62 Clapton, Eric, 176 Clarkson, Kelly, 64 click and consequence, 91, 95, 123, 192, 198, 207 clipping, 144 Coasters, the, 39, 44 Cobain, Kurt, 166 Cohen, Leonard, 128, 141 Coldplay, 51, 101, 141 college and Jimmy, 155, 157, 158, 160 and Michael, 79 and Tara, 98, 124 and Tyler, 126 Columbia Records, 14 comp(s), 108, 113, 118, 120 comping, 64, 81, 101, 110, 113, 114, 117–​120, 182 composition and Jimmy, 156 and Tara, 98–​101, 113, 123 and Tyler, 143 compose, in the studio, 48, 66 composing, at the mixing board, 44 compression, 43, 47, 172, 176 compressor(s), 29, 148, 149, 172, 192 consolidating, 143, 181 control room, 10, 21, 23, 44, 47–​49, 61 Cool Edit Pro, 82, 83 Cornfield, John, 135 cracks (software), 127 Craigslist, 75 Crosby, Bing, 12 cross-​fade, 83 cross-​fader, 60 Crown Heights, 105 Crystals, the, 40 cultural capital, 36, 71 cylinder (recording), xvii, 7, 8 cymbal, 9, 34, 137, 146, 155, 163 Davis, Miles, 14 DAW affordances, 202 description, 4 development and proliferation, 27–​30 influences on music-​making approaches, 190–​193 as instrument, 34, 35 as instrument of the contemporary producer, 65 Dean, James, 173 delay and Jimmy, 173, 174, 176 and Joe Meek, 47

223

I n dex and King Tubby, 55 amd Michael, 84 democratization (of technology), 27 demonstration recording, 46 demo(s), 25, 27, 39–​41, 57, 64, 99, 123, 126 demoing, 50 Denniz Pop, 64 determinism (technological), 35, 36 Detroit, 44, 70 DIGI 192, 74 digital audio, 26, 28, 100 disc (recording), xviii, 7, 10–​12 Dischord Records, 3 disco, 60, 70 distortion, 164, 165, 174 divide-​and-​isolate, 20 DJ as Jimmy’s musical background, 155–​157, 160, 162, 176, 190 as sampling predecessor, 59 DJ Hi-​Tek, 61 DJ Kook Herc, 60 DJing and making beats, 59 do-​it-​alone (DIA), 186–​188, 196, 198, 201 do-​it-​together (DIT), 189 do-​it-​with-​others (DIWO), 188–​190, 195, 198, 201 do-​it-​yourself (DIY) definition, 3, 4 producers, 31–​67 recording history, xviii, 3–​30 scene in Brooklyn, 71, 72 studio definition, xvii studio classification, 186–​189 double bass, 9 double-​tracking, 38, 43, 182 doubling, 166, 173, 182 Dowd, Tom, 16, 19, 48 download software, 86, 126, 142 music, 131, 174 Dr. Dre, 32 Drifters, the, 40 drum(s) emulating electronic sounds in hip-​hop practice, 58 kit, origins of, 33, 34 machine(s) and the Bomb Squad, 62 in hip-​hop, 59 and KRS-​One, 61 origins of, 5 and Prince, 50, 51 proliferation of, 24 and Sly Stone, 49 and Stevie Wonder, 49 and Michael, 76 programmed by Jimmy, 163, 164

sampling practices, 59, 61, 73 and Tyler, 126 dub, 47, 54–​58, 60, 61, 64, 67, 74, 92 Dye, Charles, 29 Dylan, Bob, 38 dynamic processors, 199 E-​mu Emulator, 59 SP–​12, 61 Eagles, the, 127 East-​West (software), 98 echo, 14, 20, 22, 38, 43, 44, 47, 55, 174 economic inequality, 71 Edison, Thomas, 5–​8, 10, 30 edit(s) and Jimmy, 164 and Michael, 83, 90, 91 and Tara, 108, 113, 120, 122 and Tyler, 144 editing ease with Pro Tools, 28 as integral to recording, 17, 49 and Michael, 82, 83 with tape, 18 and Tara, 120 and Tyler, 142, 143, 146, 150 effect(s) (audio) and Buddy Holly, 38 and dub, 53 and Jimmy, 176 and Joe Meek, 47 and King Tubby, 55 and Michael, 77, 84, 91–​94 and Prince, 51 and Tyler, 127, 129, 132 Electric Lady Studios, 49 Emerick, Geoff, 127, 172, 205 Emerson, Keith, 78 emotional labor, 108 engineering and Jimmy, 167, 168, 192 and Michael, 77, 95 and Tara, 109, 110 and Tyler, 188 Eno, Brian, 32, 33, 51–​53, 64, 101 environmental sustainability, 71 equalizer(s) description, 171 and Jimmy, 171, 172 EQ (magazine), 24 EQ description, 171 and Michael, 93, 94 and Tara, 103 and Tyler, 127, 145, 148, 149

223

224

I nd ex

EQing and Michael, 80 equalization description, 145 equalizing beats by Tyler, 145 guitar by Jimmy, 170 Ertegun, Ahmet, 16, 205 ethnicity, 36 Eurythmics, 23 experiment, in the studio Michael, 82, 89 Motown, 45 Rolling Stones, the, 48 Talking Heads, 53 Tara, 99, 100 Facebook, 131, 159 fader(s), 19, 84, 134–​137, 186 fades, 83, 113 fidelity, 9, 26, 29, 111 FL Studio, 82 Foo Fighters, 163 Ford, Mary, xvii, 11, 13, 17, 18 formal learning, 124, 180 Fostex, 25 four-​track, 22, 25, 26, 50, 80, 81, 126 Fruity Loops, 82, 126, 129, 145, 194 funk, 58, 59 Funk Brothers, the, 45, 62 Gaisberg, Fred, 32 GarageBand, 66, 83, 140 Garcia, Jerry, 203, 204, 207 gender, 36, 72, 73 Gentle Giant, 78 gentrification, 69 Georgia, 7, 76, 125 Gibbons, Walter, 60 Glasslands, 69 Godrich, Nigel, 32 Goffin, Gerry, 40 Gold Star Studios, 41 Gordy, Berry, 3, 33, 44–​48 Gould, Glenn, 14, 54 gramophone, 7 Granddaddy, 127 Grandmaster Flash, vi, 60, 205 Grateful Dead, the, 203, 207 Gray, David, 102 Green, Lucy, xvi, xviii, 76, 83, 89, 95, 123, 151, 156, 162, 176, 180, 181, 183, 186, 193, 202 Greenwich, Ellie, 40, 41 GrooveAgent, 129, 146 grunge, 26

guitar acoustic, 92, 133, 140, 153 classical, 79 electric, 44, 78, 80, 92, 157, 164, 172, 199 recording process of Frank Zappa, 57 Jimmy, 164, 166 Joe Meek, 46 Les Paul, 11 Michael, 87–​90, 92–​95 Prince, 51 Talking Heads, 52 Tyler, 133, 140, 144, 145 solo, 81, 140, 158, 172 synthesizer, 82, 85, 87 Hall and Oates, 175 Hall, Rick, 3, 41 HammerHead, 126 Hammond, John, 14, 32 Handel, 5 hardcore, 25 harmonizer, 140 harpsichord, 143, 144 Haydn, 5 heavy metal, 79, 164 Hendrix, Jimi, 38, 49, 158, 173, 176 heteronym, 137 high fidelity, 15, 17, 18, 22 hi-​fi, 18, 22–​24, 26, 29 high-​pass filter, 55 Hindemith, Paul, 11 hip-​hop, 25, 29, 34, 58–​63, 66, 67, 70, 82, 155, 156, 203, 205 Hittsville, 44–​46, 65 Hoboken, 70 holistic learning, 194, 197, 198, 201 Holly, Buddy, 37 Hollywood, 12 homemade, 12, 27, 55, 71, 201 homogeneity, 183 hooks, 40, 64, 65 horizontal composition, 189–​191, 198, 163 horn (recording), 7, 8, 10 Horn, Trevor, 32, 57 horns, 54 hum, 45, 101 IBM 7094, 140 immersive learning, 194, 197, 198 implicit learning, 179, 180, 200 improvise and Michael, 83 improvising in the studio, 52

225

I n dex indie, 25, 26, 70, 130 informal learning, xvi, 89, 124, 156, 180, 183, 186, 193, 203, 205 instrumentality, 33, 35 in-​studio composition, 51, 52 Internet, 24, 25, 91, 126, 131, 132, 137, 156, 179, 182, 188 iPhone, 66 Irvine Plaza, 85 isolate (sound), 10, 19–​21, 136 isolation (sound), 13, 19, 21 isolation booth, 21, 23 iTunes, 100, 159 Jackson, Michael, 19, 57, 63 Jamerson, James, 45 Jay-​Z, 70 jazz, 9, 11, 14, 59, 78, 127, 158, 203 Johns, Glyn, 48 Jones, Steve, 165 karaoke composition, 98, 99, 123, 129, 191 Kaye, Carol, 42 keyboard, recording by Tara, 99 by Tyler, 126, 132, 140 kick drum, 58 King, Ben E., 40 King, Carol, 40 King, John, 205 King Tubby, 33, 54, 55, 62, 67 Kirshner, Don, 40, 44 knob(s), to alter sound, 19, 53, 57, 84, 136, 172, 183 Kraftwerk, 53 Kramer, Eddie, 49, 173 KRS-​One, 61 La Mama E. T. C., 84 Lacy, Steve, 66 Laico, Frank, 14, 15 Lamar, Kendrick, 66 Lanois, Daniel, 78, 204 learning Ableton Live, 86–​94, 132 approaches in DIY studios, 193–​198 curve with DAWs, 28 by doing, 23, 205 history of Jimmy, 155–​160 history of Michael, 76–​85 history of Tara, 97–​101 history of Tyler, 125–​127, 129–​130 by making, 206, 207 producing, 179–​184 by self-​sufficient means, 29

225

by tacit means, 199–​202 by trial and error, 204–​206 LeBlanc, Keith, 59 Led Zeppelin, 77, 146, 194 Lee, Bunny, 54 Legge, Walter, 32 Leiber, Jerry, 33, 38–​40, 44, 67 Lennon, John, 64, 72, 172, 173 Leon, Craig, 49 Les Paul, xvii, xviii, 11–​15, 17, 18, 22, 29, 37, 39, 59, 62, 64, 65, 77, 205, 207 lessons, 76, 77, 79, 95, 97–​99, 101, 124–​126, 151, 157, 176 Levine, Larry, 41 limiters, 14 limiting, 43, 183 Linn LM–​1, 50, 51 Linn, Roger, 50 LL Cool J, 4 Logic (software), 74, 83, 98–​100, 102, 103, 118, 119, 124, 191, 192 Lookout! Records, 3 loop, 55, 60, 90, 93, 94, 131, 132, 140, 145, 146 looped, 144, 146 looping, 90, 132, 146, 182 loops, xvi, 49, 60, 82, 146, 147 Lord-​Alge, Tom, 205 low fidelity, 18 lo-​fi, 18, 22, 24–​26, 29, 39 Lower East Side, 101, 175 lyrics writing process of Jimmy, 161, 162 writing process of Tara, 99–​101 writing process of Tyler, 127, 141, 149 MacKaye, Ian, 3 Mackie, 26 Madlib, 177 Manhattan, 37, 38, 70, 73, 101 Mann, Aimee, 80, 194 Mantronix, 4 Marley Marl, 4, 59, 61 Martin, Chris, 141 Martin, George, 32, 33, 48, 64 Martin, Max, 33, 63–​67, 202, 205 Martin, Ricky, 29 masculinity, 172 Mast Brothers Chocolate, 71 mastering, 192, 199, 207 Mayer, John, 166 Mbox, 74, 83, 102 McCartney, Paul, 64, 173 Meat Loaf, 175 mechanical recording, 8–​10 Mediasound, 21 Meek, Joe, 32, 33, 44, 46–​48, 56, 64

226

I nd ex

Mel Bay, 79 melodies and Tara, 99, 101, 102 and Tyler, 144 melody and Jimmy, 160, 161 and Tara, 101, 102 and Tyler, 143, 144, 149 Messina, Joe, 45 Metallica, 117 Method Man, 156 microcomposition, 143 microphone(s) description, 105 limitations, 170 placement, 42, 43, 103, 104, 116 selection, 43, 80, 127, 128 as similar to a recording horn, 8 techniques, 103, 104, 114 MIDI, 24, 57 controller, 98, 135, 162, 164, 176 editing, 143, 144, 164 grid, 144 keyboard, 99, 102, 132, 134, 140, 163, 164 recording, 82, 87, 90, 163 Milhaud, Darius, 204 Miller, Mitch, 14, 32 MiniDisc, 81, 83, 84 Mix (magazine), 24 mix and Brian Eno, 52 and Brian Wilson, 43 and Jimmy, 156, 167, 172–​174 and Michael, 77, 84, 93 and Motown, 45 and Tara, 121, 122 and Tyler, 135, 136 mixing, 18 actions, 19 board(s) as musical instrument(s), 44, 53–​55, 62 and Berry Gordy, 45 and Brian Wilson, 43 console(s), 49, 50, 53, 77, 84, 135, 136, 169 design, 19 and Jimmy, 169 and Michael, 84 and Tyler, 135, 136 and dub, 54, 55 and Jimmy, 167–​175 and Les Paul, 11 and Michael, 80, 95 mixing-​in-​the-​box, 29, 84, 135, 136 and Tyler, 134–​137 Moby, 27 Moore, R. Stevie, 3 Morisette, Alanis, 26

Motown, 44–​47, 62, 65, 139, 159 MOTU Traveller, 74, 133 Mozart, 5 multitrack ADAT, 26–​27 cassette, 24–​26 DAW, 27–​29 description, 13 reel-​to-​reel, 22–​24 Muscle Shoals, 41 music degree, 79, 124, 155 music education, 194, 198, 199, 202–​205, 207 music inventing, 203 National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM), 28 Native Instruments Battery (drum sampler plugin), 163, 176 natural double, 165 neoliberalism, 187 network (social), 131, 137 Neumann U87 (microphone), 162, 166 Nevins, Al, 40 Nirvana, 155, 166 noise avoidance in recording, 21, 45 as an issue in Tara’s recordings, 102, 104, 110, 111, 115, 118–​120 as an issue in Tyler’s recordings, 127 non-​formal learning, 180 Oberheim DMX (drum machine), 59 orchestration, 80, 81 Otter, 141, 142, 147 overdub and Daniel Lanois, 78 early examples, 11, 12 explanation, 13 overdubbing and Les Paul, 11–​13 and Michael, 77 and TASCAM, 22, 23 and Tyler, 126 Page, Jimmy, 158, 176 panning, 77, 80, 81, 166, 194 Parker, Colonel Tom, 32 Parliament (musical group), 58 pause tapes, 60 Peart, Neil, 67 pedagogy, xvi, 72, 77, 183, 184, 202, 205 peer-​guided learning, 180, 181, 193, 195, 198 Peer, Ralph, 32 Pensado, Dave, 29

227

I n dex perfectionist, 64, 110, 191 Pessoa, Fernando, 137, 150 Petty, Norman, 32 Pharrell, 205 phasing, 104 Phillips, Sam, 19, 22, 32, 48, 205 phonograph, 5–​7, 34, 202, 203 phrasing, 46, 81, 99 piano and Tara comping, 118, 119 learning to play, 97–​99 recording, 102–​113 writing parts for, 101–​102 and Tyler learning to play, 125, 126 piano roll, 5, 144 pitch, shift, 82, 147 Pitchfork, 130 player piano, 5, 35 plugin(s) and Jimmy, 169–​172 popular music, xiv, xv, xvi, xviii, 17, 38, 51, 57, 65–​67, 79, 184, 203, 207 pop, xv, 14, 29, 41, 51, 57, 67, 73, 101, 165, 191, 196 pop filter, 114 Portastudio, 25–​27 power chords, 164, 165 presets, 92, 94, 148, 180–​183, 192 Presley, Elvis, 33, 38, 39, 67 Prince, 32, 33, 50, 51, 53, 64, 150, 202 Prince Jammy, 55 Prince Paul, 205 Prince Smart, 55 Pro Tools, 28, 29, 64, 65, 74, 80, 83, 84, 132, 160, 162, 169, 176, 192, 197 producer(s) roles, 31–​33, 111, 123 pedagogies, 193–​198 programmer, 35, 99 programming, 5, 51, 62, 64, 163, 181 project studio, xvii, 26, 197 Prokofiev, 79 pseudonym, 137 Public Enemy, 33, 61, 62, 64 Puig, Jack Joseph, 166 Pultec, 14 punch, 81, 109 punch-​ins, 25, 81, 182 punk, 25, 26, 49, 70 Putnam, Bill, 19, 22, 195 Pythian Temple, 21 Q-​Tip, 61 Queens, 98 Questlove, 58

227

QuickTime, 75, 86 quintain, 185 race, 36, 72, 73 Radiohead, 140, 194 Ramone, Phil, 32, 111, 195 Ramones, the, 49 Rampal, Jean-​Pierre, 79 rap, 58, 60, 61, 160, 173 rapper, 61, 157, 160 RCA (studio), 21, 38 record sales, 22 recording consciousness, 176 consoles, 16, 19 recordist, 7, 10, 11, 17 Redman, 156 Redwood, “Ruddy,” 54 reel-​to-​reel, 10, 16, 22–​24, 26, 37, 38 reflexive recording, 98, 100, 190, 191, 193, 207 religion, 36 remixing, 101 rent, 69, 125 reverb, 14, 20, 21, 29, 47, 55, 56, 84, 92, 93, 122, 129, 140 chamber, 15 digital, 20 pedal, 133 plate, 20 reverberation, 15, 19, 20, 21, 176, 182 ReverbNation, 159 revise, 101 Rhythm King (drum machine), 50 robot, 139–​141 rock, 26, 33, 37, 38, 41, 44, 67, 73, 77, 78, 81, 155, 163, 164, 173, 203, 205 Rock, Bob, 117 rock and roll, xiii, 17, 22, 37, 39, 75, 79 Roland GK–​2A, 82 GR–​30, 82 TR–​808, 59 UA–​30, 82 Rolling Stones, the, 38, 48, 53, 57 Ronettes, the, 40 Rubin, Rick, 4, 32 Run DMC, 61 Rundgren, Todd, 175 Sadler, Eric, 62 samplers, 59, 62–​64, 146 samples, 62, 63, 82, 100, 129, 132, 192 sampling, 57–​61, 82, 147, 181 Santana, 77, 194 Savannah, Georgia, 76

228

I nd ex

Schaeffer, Pierre, 12, 59, 204 Scheiner, Elliot, 195 Scientist, 55 Scott La Rock, 61 Scott, Raymond, 10, 12, 37, 65 scratch (turntable technique), 60, 62, 156, 157 ScreenFlow, 142 screen recording(s), 72, 75, 85–​87, 90, 143, 144, 146–​148 Segovia, Andrés, 79 self-​ directed learning, 123, 151, 193, 195, 196, 198 educated, 197 evaluation, 191 guided learning, 151 led, 77, 125, 151, 180, 202 produce, 7, 44, 139 production, 175 reliant, 189 sufficiency, 3, 30, 66 sufficient, 4, 5, 7, 18, 23, 25, 29, 32, 33, 51, 66, 139, 151, 187, 202 taught, 124–​126, 151, 176 teaching, 129, 181, 195, 204 sequence, 4, 194 sequencers, 24, 52, 63, 176, 194 sequencing, 24, 57, 126, 200 Sex Pistols, the, 165 sexual orientation, 36 shift pitches, xvi, 82, 147, 181 Shocklee, Hank, 62 Shocklee, Keith, 62 Shure SM57 (microphone), 127 SM7b (microphone), 128 Sibelius (scoring software), 98, 102, 124, 190 Sidore, Joe, 43 signal processing, 47, 51, 57 signal processors, 18, 29, 176 Simmons, Russell, 4 Simpson, Mike, 205 Sinatra, Frank, 65, 70 sing(ing), approaches to by Brian Wilson, 43 by Jimmy, 161, 173 by Mary Ford, 11, 13 by Michael, 82 by Tara, 99, 101, 102 when recording, 113–​117 by Tyler, 128, 129, 139–​141, 147, 148, 150 skeuomorph, 84, 197 sliders, 19, 53, 77 Sly Stone, 33, 49, 50, 53 small-​batch, 71 Smith, Byron, 54 Smith, Elliott, 129 Smith, Larry, 61

snare drum, 34, 50, 55, 59, 61, 127, 136 social class, 36 social media, 66, 132 social network, 137 Solid State Logic (SSL), 169, 170 solo button, 144 song-​makers, 206 song-​making, 199 songwriter(s), 38–​40, 44, 51, 63–​66, 139, 198 songwriting and Jimmy, 161, 162, 175 recording as, 37, 38, 40, 49, 64, 65, 190 and Tara, 100, 101, 123, 124 and Tyler, 149, 151 Sound On Sound (magazine), 24 sound-​on-​sound, 11, 12, 59, 78, 95 SoundCloud, 159 Spears, Britney, 64 Spector, Phil, 32, 33, 40–​42, 44, 45, 48, 63, 64 Spin (magazine), 130 splice, 18 St. Ann's Warehouse, 84 Starr, Ringo, 89 stems, 136, 137, 182 Stevie Wonder, 32, 49, 50, 53 stimulated recall, 108, 109, 142, 143 Stoller, Mike, 33, 38–​40, 44, 67 Stone Roses, the, 135 Stravinsky, Igor, 203 stream (music), 174 streaming (music), 131 Stylus RMX, 163 subception, 200 Sugar Hill Records, 59 Sumac, 141 Suzuki method, 97 Swedien, Bruce, 19, 128, 167, 174, 195 Swift, Rob, 60 Swift, Taylor, 65 Sydney, Australia, 85 synthesizer(s), 4, 49, 57, 59, 192 soft-​synth, 162 tacit, 177, 179 learning, 184, 199–​201 Talking Heads, 51–​53 tape recording and Bob Dylan, 38 and Brian Eno, 51, 52 and Buddy Holly, 37 and Chuck Berry, 37 and DIY approaches, 11, 16–​18, 22–​26 and Jimi Hendrix, 38 and Joe Meek, 47 and Jon Brion, 78 and King Tubby, 55

229

I n dex and Leiber and Stoller, 39 and Les Paul, 12, 13 to make music, xvi and Michael, 77 and Prince, 50 and the Rolling Stones, 38 and Tyler, 126 TASCAM, 22, 23, 25, 26 US–122, 74 TEAC, 22 teaching, xv, 23, 71, 87, 126, 129, 181, 184, 195, 204, 206 technological enthusiasm, 78, 195 “technology,” 36 Telefunken (microphones), 14 Ten Years After, 76 Text Edit, 140 text-​to-​speech, 140 Thomas, Chris, 165 Tibbett, Lawrence, 12 Timbaland, 61, 205 Timberlake, Justin, 65 timbre(s) and dub, 53–​56 and hip-​hop drums, 58 and Jimmy, 164, 170 and Les Paul, 11 and Michael, 92 and pop music, 57 and referents, 56 Tin Pan Alley, 38 tinker, 11, 192 tinkering, 53, 57, 77, 78, 183, 194, 196 top-​liner, 65 Toscanini, 79 Totem, 141, 142 tour, 85, 130 touring, 85, 130, 188 tracker, 65 tracking Jimmy, 164, 166 Tara, 105 tracks, description of, 13 Treasure Isle Studio, 54 trial and error, xv, 23, 89, 90, 95, 126, 151, 175, 179, 180, 195–​199, 202–​207 tuba, 9 Turner, Joe, 39 turntable(s), 11, 34, 60–​63, 155, 157 turntablism, 60, 156 tweak, 94, 173, 188 two-​track, 55 U2, 51, 52, 78, 101, 166 ukulele(s), 134, 136

229

uncanny valley, 139 undo, 193, 198 Unique Studios, 59 Universal Audio, 14, 19 Vampire Weekend, 4 Van Gelder, Rudy, 127 version (dub), 54 versioning, 54 vertical composition, 99, 189–​191, 198 video camera, 75, 97, 108, 109, 167 Vig, Butch, 166 Village Vanguard, the, 70 Visconti, Tony, 32, 121 vocal recording, 101, 114, 117, 119 ranges, 141 takes, 117 windscreen, 114, 115 vocalist, 8, 81 vocals, recording and the Beach Boys, 42 and Jimmy, 166, 167, 173, 174 and the Ramones, 49 and Tara, 114–​120 and Tyler, 127, 128 VocalWriter, 140 vocoder, 132, 140 voluntarism (technological), 35, 36 Wagner, Richard, 41 Wakeman, Rick, 78 Wall of Sound, 40, 41, 139 Webster Hall, 21 Weil, Cynthia, 40 Western (studio), 42, 43 Wexler, Jerry, 16, 39, 205 White, Robert, 45 Williamsburg, 69, 70, 97, 101, 125 Williamsburg Bridge, 101, 190 Willis, Eddie, 45 Wilson, Brian, xiv, 33, 41–​45, 48, 53, 205 wire recorder, 37 Wrecking Crew, the, 42 Yamaha NS10s, 159 Yes, 78 Yo-​Yo Ma, 129 YouTube, 29, 86, 87, 129, 132, 151, 156, 159, 175, 195, 197 Zappa, Frank, 56