Lessons from a Parallel Universe
Lessons from a Parallel Universe
Music is a craft; an ongoing effort to capture emotion and improve. It’s been a little over a year since I got back into music in earnest, and I’ve learned a lot. The new track, “silence, broken” reflects that accumulated knowledge, not only over the past year, but the 20+ years since I first picked up an instrument and wrote an original song. Here are 10 things that are different about this new release, and the lessons that led me in that direction:
1. In some ways there’s never been a better time to create. There is a lot of incentive to create, and to create a lot; what people like or don’t like, what they listen to or don’t, how they respond, is all useful information. The new song, silence, broken, is different from anything I’ve done before, but it’s also based on the feedback I’ve received over the years, not just this last year, but in general, since the late 1990s when I first started doing this.
2. It’s never going to be perfect, and it doesn’t need to be. Everything you create and share will teach you something about what you’re doing and help you hone your craft. Critical feedback is hard to take but will make you better at what you do if you take it seriously (and if it’s fair and coherent).
3. If you’re independent, your resources are limited and you’re always going to be fighting an uphill battle; play to your strengths. Some styles of music are simply friendlier to the d.i.y. approach than others. Some types of music are going to be more sustainable too; is this something you’re doing “for now” or something you want to grow into over the course of a lifetime?
4. I really try to eat right, I work out regularly, I avoid some of the pitfalls and bad habits that I have seen ruin artists (and that almost ruined me many years ago). I still drink too much beer and eat too much cheese, but as vices go, I can live with those, I guess. I want to do this long-term, not burn out. Enough stuff hurts enough already; no reason to make it worse.
5. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been and what you did in the past; if you took a long hiatus, you’re starting over. It can be ego-deflating to start over, and almost embarrassing when you’re getting older like I am. You have all these other commitments and priorities; maybe you wonder for a long time whether it’s worth it to get into music and stay with it. But it’s also a chance to do things differently, to experiment with things you would not or could not have done before, with that band or in that scene back in the day.
6. Drumming ain’t what it used to be. Competition and new tech have made listeners expect far more precision than in the past. Most drumming in the studio now is done by machines, and what isn’t involves loops, samples, copy-paste…human drummers play to a click and are still heavily quantized so that they end up sounding like machines themselves. With the equipment I have and the feedback I’ve received on my drumming over the years, I know I can’t compete with that. Silence, broken is the first infinite singularity song to use a drum machine. Even though I was hesitant, I have come to really like working with a drum machine over the past several months.
7. Most metal vocals now are not “clean,” and if they are, they are interspersed with screams, growls, howls, etc. I love metal, and still listen to it a lot, but that’s not my thing, vocally; I wanted to do clean vocals, maybe a bit raspy on occasion. But I’ve learned through feedback and vocal work/training that I have an unusually low singing voice (low bass), and that I am most relaxed in the Johnny Cash/Type O Negative/Leonard Cohen/Jim Morrison/Andrew Eldrich/Nick Cave/Barry White range; my voice tends to get nasally, pitchy, airy, forced, and flat when I move much above that range. You have to write music that fits the vocals so that the soundscape makes sense. It took me a long time to realize it, really “monsters” was the first album where this came together, and I’ve noticed many artists over the years who find themselves caught between metal and goth/post-punk kind of deciding to move more in one direction or the other, perhaps for this reason. If I wanted to stick with metal, as metal exists in the 2020s, I would probably need to hire a singer who had a different vocal sound, style, and approach. I like being a solo artist, and I like clean vocals, so that’s where I find myself, more on the post-punk side with this new single and in general.
8. I try to remember what it was like to be a listener before I started composing. Vocals and rhythm are what most people catch first, but the rest of the soundscape has to support both. A more sparse, minimalistic soundscape often works better with low clean vocals. Bass guitar can anchor the drums to the other instruments, but with lower register vocals, complex basslines can fight with the vocal tone and make both sound out of place. With guitar and keys, I try to round out the atmosphere; both can hit notes that I’m not going to hit, singing-wise. Melodic guitar leads give the song dynamics and finesse, and simple clean guitar picking can create vocal counterpoint. I think of the keyboard like high-pitched or soprano female vocals when recording and mixing; and how to add a haunting atmosphere in the higher register that the other instruments don’t reach.
9. I like the keys a lot, even though I have focused increasingly on guitar. I want to do vocals, guitar, and keys when performing (and back up with drum machine and bass loop). I also find it much easier to sing along to guitar than to keys. If your time is limited and you’re a multi-instrumentalist, you’ll have to pick instruments that you actually can find enough time to play; otherwise it gets overwhelming and the overall quality can suffer.
10. Maybe singles are the way to go. At least for now. It’s just challenging to get folks to listen to a full album by a new or obscure independent artist. and making albums is expensive. so i’m giving up that part of this project for a while, and focusing on getting some new singles out and seeing how they go.
Here’s the new song, “silence, broken,” on spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/343iRmhQJ2ei0t2Ys4WrNd?si=He6oD9EpRyygKkJ3FlnSMg
Here is is on youtube for free as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDnQPUp7PbE
