Huzzah, the record is done.  Raise a glass and toast “To progress!”

Here’s are free MP3s of two songs:
First Words
Silver King

If you’d like a full listen before purchasing, please use the flash Music Player in the top-right corner. If you’re new to my music, I’d suggest you start with First Words, Northern Lights, Silver King, Where it Began, and This Night.

The record is up for sale all over the place, on CD and in various digital formats (including DRM-free mp3).   Genuine replicated CDs, with slick silk-screened art, are just $10, and that’s a bargain.

Buy at CDBABY.COM
Buy at the iTunes Store  
Buy at AmieStreet.com

I’m very happy with this record, and hope you enjoy it too.

Cheers!
-Garret

I was recently interviewed by Dave Spiers…  he is a great guy with a long history in the music industry, playing keyboards and drums for Debbie Harry (Blondie) and Elvis Costello, working with Underworld and Peter Gabriel.    He is a worldwide authority on vintage synthesizers and manages the music company GForce Software, makers of groundbreaking software synth replicas like M-Tron, impOSCar, Oddity, MiniMonsta, and Virtual String Machine.

Dave has been an improbably huge fan of mine for a few years now.    It’s an undeserved honor really, given how much incredible music he has been involved with in the industry.

Read the interview…

-G

Recently, I gave advice to someone who has been writing songs for years, but who has never been able to “make a record.” 

Mr. Lennon was asked once to give advice to aspiring songwriters.  His #1 piece of advice?  “Finish everything. Don’t dwell on things.” 

Go through your list of songs, and be brutal. Set aside anything that’s lost its magic for you. You’ll find some songs which had great potential, which you sadly have overworked while you learned to produce/record/mix. They’ve served you well, but they’re never going to be finished. So let them be.

A friend urged me to do that once, and spun it so nicely. “That stuff will be in your early years box set, “he said, “when you’re a star and have finished your 10th major release.”

Chin up though: whatever you set aside was not wasted work. It’s helped you to learn how to write and engineer, entertained you, and inspired you to keep writing… Remember, you can’t waste time writing. Whatever you create, good or bad, is all part of the process.

-G

So I’m (finally) almost done with the big amazing record. And I have a new name for the project too: Tomorrow is Already Here.   The album name will be “First Words.”

I’m probably a few weeks away from finishing up the sequencing work (gotta cut some songs! 65 minutes is toooo long), then I’ll be working through mastering, cd artwork, replication, and promotion… one battle done, on to the next!

How many great, I mean truly great writers are completely forgotten?    How many jaw dropping compositions are buried in a music library somewhere?

A few months back, blurry-eyed from trying to write eight (good) songs in a week, I found myself blindly searching google for, things.   Ideas, images, anything to get an inspiration for a lyric or twelve.  I’m a ‘reactive writer.’    For me, the hardest part of writing a song is writing the first few lines.   After I have something to sing, the rest just pours out… years of practice have taught me to guide the process, but I admit there’s a whole lot of “holding on for dear life” involved.

Trying something new, I started searching google for combinations of words I was interested in writing about, trying to steal a spark.  Somehow doing that, I  stumbled in to Project Gutenberg, and fell upon the writings of Charles S. Brooks.  I honestly could not tell you how I got there.    Serendipity, I guess…

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20095/20095-h/20095-h.htm

Somewhere in the middle of this essay, I started reading.   I don’t know how many people have read this since it was published in 1915.   I’m sure it’s tailed off significantly over the years.  It’s in the Public Domain now, which is good for a songwriter (yay theft!), and perhaps the ideal fate for something that should become immortal.

Honestly, this is genius work.  And it’s forgotten, or at least mostly forgotten.   As a creator of something that I think has lasting value, it’s humbling and grounding to think that there’s a very good chance that every piece of music I write will be lost to history.   Or maybe someone will stumble upon my music, late at night, decades from now, and raise a toast to my cleverness?!

At this minute there is a black book that looks down upon me like a crow. It is “Crime and Punishment.” I read it once when I was ill, and I nearly died of it. I confess that after a very little acquaintance with such books I am tempted to sequester them on a top shelf somewhere, beyond reach of tiptoe, where they may brood upon their banishment and rail against the world.
…
Right now, if I dared, I would climb to the roof again, and I would sit with my feet over the edge and crane forward and do crazy things just because I could. Then maybe my neighbors would mistake the point of my philosophy and lock me up; would sympathize with my fancies as did Sir Toby and Maria with Malvolio. If one is to escape bread and water in the basement, one’s opinions on such slight things as garters and roofs must be kept dark. Be a freethinker, if you will, on the devil, the deep sea, and the sunrise, but repress yourself in the trifles.
…
Reader, have you ever purchased a pair of pajamas in London? This is homely stuff I write, yet there’s pathos in it. That jaunty air betokens the beginning of your search before question and reiteration have dulled your spirits. Later, there will be less sparkle in your eye. What! Do not the English wear pajamas? … The Englishman does wear pajamas, but the word with him takes on an Icelandic meaning. They are built to the prescription of an Esquimo. They are woolly, fuzzy and the width of a finger thick. If I were a night-watchman, “doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,” I should insist on English pajamas to keep me awake.

One little thing I noticed a little while back. When studying some of my favorite records from the 60s and 70s, I’d marvel at how well they pull off hard L-C-R panning, without making my ears twitch while listening on headphones.    Hard L-C-R panning, or “assignment”, was practically the only possibility on older consoles such as the REDD.47 and REDD.51 of Beatles/EMI Abbey Road fame.

These days, with in-the-box, DAW mixing engines, and all modern consoles, mono sources can be panned to any position in the stereo field.   But perhaps they shouldn’t.   We have a long history of great recorded music that features hard panning, and it sounds fantastic. It simplifies mixing, and renders obvious any arrangement problems that might be masked by mashing tracks together.

One of the secrets to making hard panning work is mic bleed. Just a bit of bleed makes it sound natural… wide, but natural.  I.e, if you record two guitars live, and hard pan them, you will get a bit of each guitar in the other’s mic.  That is “bleed.”

Unfortunately, you don’t always have bleed to make things sound natural. If you record two “paired” tracks separately that you want to hard pan, consider crossing their reverb sends. This works great for two acoustic guitars, for instance. Left guitar, send to a verb panned hard right. Right guitar, send to the same verb panned hard left. Balance levels to taste, then bask in your cleverness.

If you are mixing digitally/ITB, with no tape or console crosstalk, and everything you are mixing was tracked separately or is an arranged track (midi/samplers/etc.), the complete separation can sound painfully artificial. Since you’re going to hell anyway, you might as well make the best record you can… so cross pan your reverb sends, and create some fake bleed along with everything else.

Works for me at least.

February is record production month… The annual RPM challenge just finished up, and this year, I took a shot at it. 

I was too busy to post any details about the process, but after many long nights and more than a few days off work, I finished.    I wrote, recorded, and mixed a record in a month.   Well, it’s not really a record, but it’s 10 good songs.   I actually had three weeks, since I heard about the project late.. so I spotted myself three songs I had already written, but which I had never properly recorded.

You can hear the whole shebang, which has been titled (in a bleary-eyed haze) “And Then There Were Ten”, at the RPM headquarters.

Here’s a link where you can download the whole EP as a zip file… (for a limited time).

http://www.worksongs.net/2007/rpm2007

You can also hear the whole album at the RPM website, in their jukebox.

http://www.rpmchallenge.com/jukebox/

They don’t teach you this stuff in music school.  You learn it “on the playground,” so to speak.    Someone you know shows you a few chords, and teaches you the wicked A -> Amaj7 to A7 chromatic dropdown that is the secret to a half dozen George Harrison songs.  Or you’re rocking away in E and someone throws in a C major/G, and you can’t believe how good it sounds.  Hey, isn’t that the hook in Lithium?

All the little tricks of pop/rock music theory are yours for the taking, in Alan Pollack’s analyses of every song in the Beatles canon.  What a piece of work.. 10 years or so of study.

I think I’ve learned more about songwriting, particularly harmonic and melodic development and arrangement techniques, from his work than any other reference. I go back to this again and again… if I could buy it in print, I would, in a second. 

But I can’t, and you can’t either.    You can only read it for free.

A few of my favorites…

http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/AWP/aditl.shtml
http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/AWP/dp.shtml

And the main index…

http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/AWP/awp-alphabet.shtml

Scattered around my audio production drives, I have hundreds, perhaps thousands of free soundfonts, acquired in an addictive frenzy from 2003-2006.    Eventually I stopped looking for new soundfonts, because I had invested in better commercial libraries.

A few soundfonts, however, have stood the test of time…. these are ones I return to for one reason or another.    

FARFISA ORGAN
This is an electric organ… a cheap, trashy home transistor thing.   Sometimes it’s just the ticket.

Rhodes VS Extreme
This rhodes sample set has a unique mellow tone that I haven’t found anywhere else.   The samples are from a Rhodes MKI 73 Stage Piano. 

FLUID Release 3 GM
When you absolutely need a glockenspiel, or some tubular bells, or a wood block… or a gong… or an 808 kick, or well, anything.. you’ll find it here.  These samples aren’t going to floor you with their quality, but they are surprisingly useful in a mix, like the on-board sounds on an old Roland sampler.

Zvon Prepared Rhodes
There’s really nothing like this… it’s based on John Cage’s experiment where he muddled with the inner workings of a piano to create new sounds and percussive noises.  You have to hear this to believe it… Zvon recreated Cage’s work on a Fender Rhodes, and created a soundfont.  The light version is basically free (it’s only $2).    The full version is $20. 
http://www.lesproductionszvon.com/zvon_PR.htm

Another 7 years.  It’s hard for me to believe…  I saw 41 Up! the year it was released (1998), and it seems like only yesterday.  I can’t imagine what it must feel like to the dozen or so individuals featured in the films.

If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, here’s a primer.  Director Michael Apted began a documentary film series in 1964, and has revisited the project every 7 years since.  He began by interviewing a group of seven-year-old children, asking them questions about how they would expect their life to unfold, what they liked/disliked, what their families were like, etc.  They are sweet kids… full of the promise of a life yet to be lived.   You wonder how it will all turn out.  Then, you get to see.

49 Up! was released in 2005.    What were once precocious children are now adults, with long lives of struggles, successes, family joys and tragedies, and personal growth or stasis.   It’s a remarkable achievement to capture life so vividly.  I find this series incredibly rewarding to watch, and equally moving.

If you weren’t aware of it, here’s a little secret.  You are going to die some day.  Sooner than you might wish.  As Mr. Lennon said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”  One of your days ticks away every time you wake.   Make the most of it.

Watching these brave individuals live, love, and age, 7 years at a time, in jump cuts, is incredibly inspiring.  

And with that, I have some new songs to write.
-G