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One of the issues with finishing this record (that I have figured out in retrospect) has been that my understanding of rhythm and “tightness” changed when I was nearly done. Tracks were in the bag and then I suddenly started noticing some songs didn’t “groove” or “bang” the way I perhaps wanted them to.

Before this I’ve mostly thought about my contributions in music as chords & riffs, melody and words. The groove was just something that happened — or sometimes mysteriously didn’t happen and I’d have no idea why.

But what to do? I can’t re-record the album every time I learn something new or get better at something. I know that doesn’t end well for me (or anyone who wants to hear my record in the next ten years).

So I took some time and I’ve gone back and re-addressed things, trying to avoid re-recording everything or changing them too much (people already like a lot of these demos! some have already been licensed!). Here’s an example of one I’m working on right now:

Excerpt of the original “Feel Free Plastic Surgery!” instrumental

Excerpt of the new version

It’s been confusing to diagnose and treat this without starting over. In this one I ditched the South American drum loop that I wrote the song on top of and replaced it with a more straight ahead rock pattern I tapped in. Then re-recorded the bass to fit better.

I’m still working on it (I’m concerned the snare on the 4 is late sometimes), but the new one is more fun to me, dancier and rockier. It’s such a small change and I feel dumb that it’s taken me forever to understand and figure out. But… maybe it’s a good thing? I don’t know, we’ll see.

George emailed me to say:

I wanted to ask your opinion on what you think computers could do to make it easier for musicians to create and perform music.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and wanted to blog two of my replies:

Collaboration: There’s a lot of opportunity right now for better creative tools. The biggest feature missing from all the major Digital Audio Workstations is semi-realtime collaboration (realtime is probably asking too much until the net gets better). I was just bugging Justin at Reaper about that the other day. Maybe ohmstudio (http://www.ohmstudio.com/) will fill the collaboration role but I think it’s a feature every DAW should have within a few years.

Songwriting: For a long time I’ve been fantasizing about rapid songwriting software. Something analogous to a lot of the more creative, less technical software for screenwriters. The software could prompt the songwriter for sections, melodies and riffs and keep them cataloged. It’d let you easily rearrange the structure and experiment, organize your notes & ideas and help you generate new ideas. Throw a good rhyming dictionary in there, a markov chain generator for lyrics, etc. So a musician can quickly hammer out a bunch of song ideas and flesh them out without spending much time dicking around in software. I should be able to write and record an entire song with a guitar, microphone and foot pedal to control the software.

And that’s the tooth.

Last night I stumbled across Joan Jett’s “Do You Wanna Touch Me? (Oh Yeah)” song which I had never heard before (it’s great!). I watched the video, saw Joan Jett in a bikini (weird!), and then discovered the song was originally by Gary Glitter. All I knew about Gary Glitter was that he made KLF’s Doctorin’ the Tardis song possible and that he gets thrown out of countries for raping children.

Anyway what I’m saying is that in this context, holy shit this video of Gary Glitter performing “Do You Wanna Touch Me? (Oh Yeah)” is the most psycho thing ever:

I mean that’s like a musical number in a movie about a horrifying child rapist. Who looks and is named exactly like Gary Glitter.

Anyway I’m conflicted because the song and performance is bad-ass and I feel like a Gary Glitter fan now.

I’m still using Reaper as my main DAW and I still love it. I’m hacking away at the next album with it. Reaper 4 should be released shortly as they’re up to Release Candidate 4 as of this posting.

Here are some of my favorite things in v4:

- ReaEQ – They added a live spectrograph to the EQ, which was a feature other EQs (like the one in logic) made me want.

- Selecting chunks of audio in the media explorer is pretty sweet when you have compatible VSTis. You can preview an audio file and select a section from the waveform and drag it right into the plugin or timeline. Very handy.

- Midi Track Controls (ReaControlMIDI) – I’m not actually sure if this was in v3 but I know I was trying to get a weird midi controller to control the tracks long ago and had no luck. This makes it easy.

- Project Bay – Now you can see and manage all the effects and media you’re using in your project.

- Screensets – save and recall Reaper window layouts easily. Nice.

Here are some things I am not fond of:

- The default theme is too dark and the color coding of tracks is really hard to see. I was finding it really tough to organize my projects so that I knew what was going on at a glance. So I switched back to the v3 theme, which is OK for now.

- The Media Explorer is slow on my Mac. Hopping between files with the cursor keys is weirdly slow. This was never a thing on Windows.

And here’s my wish list:

- I’d like a simple multi-sampler. A Battery-style ‘pad’ sampler would be my preference. Setting up many tracks of ReaSamplOmatic5000 is cumbersome.

- Some metadata/search in the Media Explorer would be great. I have a ton of samples kicking around but if they’re not easily at hand.

- Workflow improvements – Reaper is already so far ahead of the competition in functionality that I think it’d benefit from some time spent on its usability. While it’s awesome that each pulldown and context menu and preference page are overstuffed with cool options, it can be overwhelming. And I’m a pretty huge nerd so I assume the less techy out there go into cardiac arrest at the sight of it.

Anyway, great job Reaper team.

Went to a 70th birthday thing for Bob Dylan last night (he wasn’t there). I’m not really a huge Dylan fan. I mean, I think he’s rad and much respect, good job. But I’ve never really obsessed over any of his music like I have for my favorite artists, despite trying. Last night at the Dylan open mic I realized the only three songs I really deeply love of his (if we count covers) I found from soundtracks:

1. The Man in Me (The Big Lebowski)
2. You Belong to Me (Natural Born Killers)
3. When I Paint My Masterpiece (Observe & Report, by The Band)

So that probably makes me a lame person. But despite not digging most of his music, he’s an inspiration in that he decided he wanted to be a songwriter and has relentlessly stuck with it. That’s pretty bad-ass. Also this paper doll was on the table in front of me:

Happy birthday!

Here’s a hard rock type demo. Track #3 on the next album! Slow and steady wins the race:

Fluoride (demo)

Whoops. I found out on Friday that last week I accidentally uploaded a very old version of my Guess Who’s a Mess demo. That’s pretty embarrassing, I was actually pretty horrified but I think I’m good now. Anyway here’s the latest one instead:

Guess Who’s a Mess (demo 2)

Okay, moving on…

Hey, here’s another messy demo:

Guess Who’s a Mess (demo)

It’s the title track and will probably be track 6 on Guess Who’s a Mess.

I got asked if some folks from Germany could use my music in a sport DVD. I said yes. Then they told me it was for Sporthockers (sport stools) and I said double yes. Here’s what it looks like:

I love any sport where the goal is to become successfully seated.

Seriously gotta get moving on these album demos. Here’s one:

The First Thing About Me (demo)

The mix is a disaster, but I MOVE ON. It’ll be the last track on Guess Who’s a Mess.