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When I’m dealing with artists and bands about potentially working together, people often ask me “So what kind of music are you interested in?”

So I tell them that at heart I am a modern rock guy, though I tend to get along very well with singer/songwriter/folkies as well. Country, electronica and R&B, well, not exactly my thing.

But I’ve always felt awkward about specifying what kind of music I’m interested in making.  And that’s not because I am one of those who say “oh, I make all kinds of music, for everyone.”

Rather, when I’m talking about making music, I’m interested in working with good people.

If I like the people I’m working with — and if I can relate to or support how they’re going about their artistic pursuit — I just get this strong urge to help them.  Frankly, I care less about what exactly I do.  I suppose I won’t come clean their bathroom or anything, but really, when I encounter people I believe in, my mind always focuses on “so what can I do to help these people?”  And regardless of what I end up doing, I end up getting a lot of satisfaction from simply having worked with people I like.

This is not exactly true if I’m looking for music to listen to, for my own pleasure.  I wish if it was the case — there have been a number of musicians who were perfectly nice and likable people, though I wouldn’t listen to their music for my personal pleasure.  Or similarly, there are music I love but I probably wouldn’t like the musicians who made it.

But when it comes to making music, the makers and the output are very closely linked, in my mind.  I work with people to make music.  What I’m looking for is good people to work with.  What we end up making, and what my role is in that process, is less of a concern to me.

I don’t hear this discussed in most musician circles — but in my opinion, a public library is a great resource for musicians.

First, the most obvious: they have CDs. You can check them out and live with them for FREE. I know there are many places on the net that streams music for free, but to me, the best way to gauge if a particular artist is for me is to live with the music for a while, listening to them in the background as I do household chores or commute.

Secondly, they have music books. Libraries I know of have books on music business, songwriting, guitar playing, and online promotion. Most books out there are not worth owning — you just read it once, pull out useful information, and then return the book. Efficient, and FREE. Some places even have beginner instruction books on guitars, bass, piano, etc. It’s a great place to get started on broadening your horizon or to see if a particular instruction material is up your alley.

Yeah, you do have to return the books and keep track of when they are due. But even if you miss some deadlines, fees are typically inexpensive.

Even if you’re not short on financial resources, a library is still a great place to get exposed to new music or acquire valuable information. So, what are you waiting for?

I recently was treated to an evening of instrumental rock.  There were 4 instrumental acts on the lineup on Friday, May 22nd at the Terminal Bar in Minneapolis, and I caught 3 of them — the Woodsman from Colorado, and local acts History and Falcon Arrow.  Instrumental rock isn’t exactly a genre I immerse myself in, but a friend of mine (Tate, who plays in History) sent me some sketches of his band’s material and I really fell in love.  I need to get hold of some Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky (the big guns of this genre) now that I realized how much I like this type of music.

The Woodsman is a 4-piece with two guitars and two drummers.  Yes, that’s right — 2 drummers.  I’ve always been curious about 2 drummer acts (there aren’t that many — Allman Brothers and some incarnations of King Crimson come to mind), as I am just a fan of drums and percussions.  Probably growing up in Brazil has something to do with my love of percussive instruments.  Anyway, the drummers were indeed very interesting, as it seemed like the two of them played a single kit — there was only one hi-hat and one kick drum, and one of them helped out in the melodic department on a glockenspiel. After they were done, I asked the drummers about their setup and they said that originally they started with two full kits, but they trimmed them down to the current set up as there were just a lot going on.

The Woodsman’s music is like an ocean tide, rising and falling over extended periods, flowing and ebbing constantly.  I don’t think any of their songs were under 5 minutes.  As far as live acts go, they were so beautifully and fully developed — the foursome completely filled up the sonic scape.  There wasn’t anything I would have added to the mix.  If I was producing them, this would be a great case of simply putting the band all in one room and capturing their performance — with effects and all.  I’d lean heavily on room mics to capture the air that they’re moving.  And because they are fully developed and has little room for additions, I’d say they don’t really need a producer — just go into a studio with an able engineer and self-produce an album.  And if/when they do, I’d for sure be checking that out.

History is a local 3-piece of guitar, guitar, drums.  (I wondered if “no bass” was to be the theme of the night, but that was to be remedied amply by the last act)  Their set was filled with youthful energy and great performance — they were definitely the most entertaining act to watch that night.   Their songs balance melodic content with rhythmic complexity.  Drummers play very important roles in this kind of music, as guitars aren’t often doing anything too complicated (technically speaking, that is) and History’s skinsman didn’t disappoint in this area with lots of inventive drumming that always supported the song.

As a producer, this is an act I’d love to work with, as I heard lots of untapped potential in their music.  They may balk at the idea but if I were producing them, I’d try adding bass and keyboards to the mix.  They didn’t rely on effects as much as the Woodsman so I felt that there were some spaces left to be filled.

Falcon Arrow is a 2-piece (things were progressively getting leaner as the night went!) duo of bass and drums.  Man, what they did with those two elements totally defied my expectations.  The bassist played a Precision with generous amount of distortion, and looped various parts and concocted a huge wall of sound.  His techniques were flawless, as he moved seamlessly from busy strumming to single note lines.  The drummer was rock solid and equally inventive.  Add in liberal amount of punky attitude and you’d get music like no other.

If I was producing this act, I’d be tempted to see what other elements can their music accommodate — OK Computer/Yankee Hotel Foxtrot style electronic manipulation and noises, perhaps?  It’ll have to be sparse and nothing too obvious or recognizable, as the two of them really take up a lot of space.

All in all, it was a pretty eye-opening evening, and I’ll have fun digging up some new stuff from the genre of instrumental rock.  All 3 acts are great live performers, so I’d recommend you checking them out if you have a chance.

Marc Gunn‘s Happy Song of Death is mostly mixed except for a stray song whose files aren’t delivered to me for a strange technical problem.

One of my personal favorite part of mixing is having a say in sequencing the songs in the album.  I was one of those music geeks who loved making mix tapes, and I get the same pleasure out of playing with song sequences in an album.  Putting the pieces together to see how the whole emerges — it’s great fun.

I’m of the opinion that if you string together 10 singles, that may still not make a great album.  Songs have characters, and they want to find the right spot among the collection.  Obviously, we want to bring the best songs earlier in the sequence, so that they have the chance to be heard more, especially by casual browsers.  But the great single doesn’t always make the greatest album opener.

Which was the case with Happy Songs of Death.  Don’t get me wrong, there are no bad songs on the record — but some are bigger and catcher sounding than others.   We’ve been discussing the sequencing quite a lot, because none of the obvious singles sound suitable for album openers.  So for this album, the 1st song is more of a fanfare, a great piece for setting up the rest.  The singles are sprinkled throughout, because we didn’t have to spend them all in the first 3 songs.

So if you’re reading this and gets a chance to hear the album, I hope you’ll listen to more than the first couple of songs!  It’s shaping up to be a terrific collection, with wonderful variety and diversity that makes it worthy of listening from the beginning to the end.

Incidentally, this experience inspired me to write a little essay on the fine art of sequencing songs.  I put that up at SelfSufficientMusician.com, a site where I publish articles for musicians.

Perhaps it doesn’t have quite the significance it had once, but musicians still like to put out an album — a collection of songs — rather than just releasing singles.  And when you have a collection, the order in which the songs appear obviously makes a difference to how the overall collection is perceived and received.

It’s just like the days of making mix tapes — you carefully choose your songs, order them so that they flow well from one to the next.  This is definitely more of an art than sceience, but that being said, there are certain thought schemes that going into sequencing an album.

Let’s say, we’re putting together a 12-song rock album.  The following will be my chains of thoughts in putting it together.

1. The opener, obviously is very important — definitely one of the stronger songs, if not the strongest.  This song should be a good representative of what the rest of the album sounds like.  However, some albums choose to open with little nuggets or prelude, something unexpected and catches audience off-guard by being the complete opposite of what the rest of the album is.  That can work, too, as long as it’s short enough.  I personally like albums where the first song isn’t the most obvious single — because then the rest of the album feels like a let down.  (And many albums are!)
2. The #2 spot, after the warm-up of the opener, may perhaps be the greatest spot for the biggest single.  Assuming you didn’t put in a little prelude in the #1 spot, the #2 is a place where you’ll want to reinforce what you delivered with #1 — not a place for a change of pace, experiment or contrast.
3. In a rock album, the first two songs should be the one-two punch of uptempo songs to get listeners grooving.  The #3 spot, then, is a good place for a mid-tempo anthem.  Something a little different from the first two, perhaps slower and steadier — but just as strong.
4. After setting the tone with the first three songs, #4 spot is a great place for a change of pace.  Perhaps something a bit more experimental, or if the first three were up-tempo, this may be a good place for a hit ballad.
5. If #4 was a ballad, here’s a place for experiments.  If #4 was more of an experimental song, then #5 is a good place for a ballad.
6. Maybe because I grew up listening to cassettes, I’d like this spot to be something that feels like a closer to the 1st half, before hitting hard again with the next song.
7. The first song of the second half should really pick things back up and hit hard again.  If this is a 14-song album, then the same would be said about the song #8.  So, whichever ends up falling as the first song of the second half.
8. And here’s a follow-up to song #7, recreating the one-two punch of the beginning.
9. #8 or #9 is a great spot for another single.  Usually most albums line up singles between 1-4 and then run out of steam — if an album has a single in the #8 or #9 spot, that gives the impression of an album having a great depth — and very worthy of buying the whole thing.
10. If #7 and #8 were up tempo, here’s another good place to slow down a bit.
11. #10 and #11 are probably places for experiments or not single-worthy songs.  Ideally, no song on your album will be weak, but these are spots for ones that are less “obvious.”
12. Albums seldom have enough good songs to really finish strong, so that’s what I’d like to see in an album.  Closers should aim to leave a great “aftertaste” from listening to the whole thing.  Many rock acts finish with a ballad, which is a move I’m not a fan of, though it makes sense.  While “save the best for last” doesn’t make a lot of sense from a marketing point of view, I’d say pick the last song carefully — let it be a song you don’t mind people remembering you by.  Because the last thing they hear is what’ll stay in their head.

Obviously, sequencing a very subjective thing.  What may feel like a smooth flow may feel jarring to another listener.  That being said, it’s definitely possible to screw up the overall impression of the album as a lager work when you are careless with sequencing.  Every element of putting an album together makes a difference — thus, every piece is worth considering carefully.

Just for kicks, here is a quintessential 12-song rock album that sold gazillion copies.  And they did sequence them well.

Guns n Roses: Appetite for Destruction

1. Welcome to the Jungle
2. It’s So Easy
3. Nightrain
4. Out ta Get Me
5. Mr. Brownstone
6. Paradise City
7. My Michelle
8. Think About You
9. Sweet Child O’Mine
10. You’re Crazy
11. Anything Goes
12. Rocket Queen

The biggest single is sitting at #9 there, but I don’t think the millions of people who bought it minded listening through all the 8 songs getting to the most known songs.  A collection of great songs, sequenced to perfection, is a pleasure to listen to.

Definitely something to aspire to.

Good news first: this morning I signed on to become the composer of an indie feature film Lost in Sunshine, written and directed by Jentri Chancey.  Her producer is my good friend Lorie Marsh.

Bad news: it’ll be at least a year and half before my work starts.  Film composer comes in dead last in the process of filmmaking….

But seriously, I’m super excited!  I read the script and I’d describe it similar to American Beauty, except it’s set in a small Texas town and the protagonist is a turning-30 woman stuck in a bad marriage, instead of a middle-aged man lusting after a highschool cheerleader.  Equal amount of dry humor and vulgarity (sex and drugs, anyone?) but equally profound and classy, too.

In all honesty, it’s so humbling to be chosen to make music for a feature film.  People outside of the film industry may not realize this, but it takes years of work on the part of filmmakers to create one feature film.  And while the digitalization of tools made filmmaking somewhat more affordable than in the past, it still costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a feature film that has even the smallest shot at being competetive in the market.

I dearly admire my filmmaker friends.  The odds are stacked sky high against them.  Yet they soldier on, armed only with passion for the story they want to tell.  It makes all the whining and moaning of us musicians seem puny in comparison.  That’s why, whenever I encounter a project I can believe in, I am happy to contribute whatever I can to their cause.

So — while it’s still a long time coming — and I am sure I’ll score other films before this one — I’ll be talking about this film for the next couple of years.  Follow me down the road of what it’s like to make music for an indie movie.

Last night I hosted the first Minneapolis/St. Paul Professional Musicians Mastermind Group.  The word “mastermind” is a bit of a jargon — you can find an overview here.   I first heard the word when my business coach Tom Volkar mentioned it.   I don’t know how other mastermind groups are run, since I have never belonged to one, but I ran it basically as a peer support group, each participant taking turns describing their current business challenges and everyone pitching in to brainstorm solutions.  At the end we identified several objectives for the next few weeks, which will be followed up by me, to maintain accountability.

I couldn’t be happier with how the meeting went.  It’s the very 1st meeting and I didn’t know what to expect, but the right kind of people showed up and it was a beautiful discussion on what everybody should do next with their musical pursuits.  If you’re interested, you can sign up at Meetup.com for the next meeting.

Musicians and artists in general have a reputation for being intuitive, spontaneous and unpredictable, and I can’t deny it as untrue.  While I think our natural spontaneity has a place in our arts, we all know that effectiveness increase from more discplined approach, whether mastering your instrument or trying to sell CDs.  If nothing else, attending a focused meeting like this to share and exchange ideas on your pursuits can help you meet like-minded people and gain renewed energy and inspiration for your pursuits.

A local music hero Dan Wilson said in a recent speech to “get in the pool.”  And that’s precisely what I am doing — starting a community of like-minded musicians.  Sometimes, it’s easier to attract them than to go looking for them. 

I’m in the mixing stage of Marc Gunn‘s record “Happy Songs of Death.”

At this stage, I find myself removing pieces more so than adding.

Let me explain.  Before mixing, when the tracks are raw and unprocessed, without any reverb or compression (two things that really move a track from “just recorded” to “finished” stage), it just feels like the song needs a lot of help.  So I’d add percussions here, lead instruments there, backing vocals there…. only to find that once you start dialing in the mixes, all the sudden they sound clattered.

Which is a good place to be, in my book.  It’s so easy to remove tracks in mix.  Yes, some of the tracks, we all labored to get — put the mics in the right place, do several takes, comp the performance — but in the end, if it’s not serving the song, I take them out.

In general, I believe it’s best to put in only the absolutely necessary pieces in the final mix, and not one part more. And here’s the reason why.

Our stereo listening field has a real estate.  And it’s definitely a finite field.

The less parts there are on the plain, the more space each part can take up.  It’s easier to make a bigger sounding recording this way.

The more layered the recording is, the less space each part takes — and we’d have to EQ and compress to that each part is only taking the very essential range we need it to occupy, and no more.  That’s how we cram so many parts into a recording.  And when this happens, it takes some exceptional mixing skills to still make a big-sounding record.

It probably is a reflection of my skills, but in the past I’ve struggled with these huge, layered songs ending up sounding tinier than sparse ballads that are meant to sound small and intimate than the first song.

So I have learned to be “lean and mean” with my arranging and put in as few tracks as I can get away with.  That’s not to say that I leave things naked, dry and uninteresting.  All I am saying is that I have a sense of balance with layered vs. sparseness, and I like getting there by throwing in a few more parts than necessary first and then taking some out at the mix.

I think it was Jimmy Page who said that if you make a mistake, repeat it 4 times and there’s a riff.

I myself am attracted to recordings that oozes with humanity.  And that means imperfection. 

Now, does that mean I accept any take, and enjoy making sloppy records? 

Definitely not.

The amount of mistakes that can be contained within a recording has a direct relationship with how “produced” the recording is.  Overdubbed, tightly arranged and produced records have less room for mistakes.  When you leave them in, they are distracting. 

The more “live” and raw sounding, the more tolerant of mistakes. In fact, looseness adds charm there.

In the days of digital recordings, it’s easy to get caught up in making perfect recordings.  Fix and correct all mistakes — line up the note attacks, tune the sour notes, and compress the whole thing so dynamic irregularity disappears. 

It’s very tempting, and sometimes I get caught up in it, too.

But I really believe that perfection is achieved through imperfection.  Leave in the right amount of looseness and mistakes, and you can avoid making lifeless, sterile records.

When you’re listening to a take, here are a few points to consider whether the mistakes contained are good or bad:

• Does it add to the vibe of the record, or does it stick out like sore thumb?  Remember, our ears can really get used to mistakes — if you listen to it that way often enough, that starts to feel normal.
• Did the overall take have a great feel otherwise?  How hard/easy is it to reproduce that take without the mistake?
• How prominent is the track going to be in the final mix? 

The line between good and bad mistakes is pretty fine, and is a movable target.  But as a producer, I always know when I achieve the right balance between perfection and imperfection.

Part of my fascination with the music industry is that they seem to be as much about the life style as it is about music.

I am into all kinds of music, but at the bottom of my heart, I’m into rock.  Actually, I can go into greater details to articulate what My Kind of Rock is, but that’s beside the point.  In general, rock music is linked with somewhat street-smart life style.

Now, I am not a very street-smart kinda guy.

Oh, I try.  I can wear junky clothes and say “dude.”

But that’s about as far as I go.  I don’t have any tattoos, or piercings.  I don’t smoke at all, never have, and I don’t get drunk.  I love watching Little League games with my kids.  I am more comfortable in churches than in bars.

The 5 members of the prog rock dynasty Dream Theater, in my mind, have the distinction of being the only rock band with 20+ years existence with no divorce among any of the members, at least the current ones.

Now that’s something rare and astonishing.  I admire that, greatly.  It’s hard enough to have a stable line up (which they do) to the band — but also stay married as long as they have, raise a family (I believe all of them have kids) and tour as long as they do and be successful?  I don’t want guitar playing lessons from John Petrucci (well, I won’t refuse if it was offered).  I want them to tell me how they pulled that off.

Rockers of any kind with that kind of stability are rare, at least from what I have seen, especially at indie/local level.  At the big league level, it’s not quite as rare — people do make good living with music at that level, and are able to afford a nice middle-class stable family.

Is it possible to have a stable family first, and then get into music — particularly rock?

Well, I’ll find out and let you know.  It’s not supposed to be easy, but that is always given.