I feel like someone who has published close to zero books and writes articles about how to publish books. It’s been years and years since I was involved with having a band together — as a kind of band leader.
Anyway, I prefer substitute jobs and ad hoc projects of many reasons. The biggest one is that having a band together is like a marriage, you better like each other and understand how things work. Otherwise there’s just a lot of drama rather than musicianship.
I do think think that in the current situation having loose bands work much better. You put together the music, have a pool of musicians that could be configured in various configs. It resembles how the jazz bands operate in NY or LA. If the musicians know each other, how they play, it’s just a matter of re-assembling bands for various purposes. You could even get more gigs as you have more ‘cards on the table.’
There are bands like U2 that just seem to work year after year, and they also had their internal drama. The worst that could happen is that the band members show up for the obligatory show or album recording. After that they again part their ways. So it’s really an artificial band situation, as well.
This of course works if there’s some kind of monetary outcome from the work. Or if you are/were someone like Frank Zappa, just playing in his bands lead to lifetime fame.
Well, I will explain. Let’s take an example. Blues is nice, it’s a very important musical style, has influenced nearly anything that has to do with contemporary electrical guitar playing. Anyone who aspires to be any kind of guitar player should know something about blues.
Still. You could easily get into the rut of constant blues playing, pentatonic scales, stuck to blues formula. At the extreme here in the San Francisco South Bay we have all these blues bands with elderly good musicians that crank out the same music evening after evening. Nobody is exactly enjoying it.
What I suspect happening is that when you get really well-versed in a style, you want to stay there and enjoy the woodshedding results. Instead of growing as a musician and try other styles and expand your mind.
There are other similar cases like all the DeadMau5 wanna-bes in bedrooms who crank out techno track after techno track with the same formula. Recently I’ve noticed that even in genres like tech house, things have become very stagnated and boring. You learn how to program the tech house drums and bass lines and you are stuck there…
There’s really a simple solution. Just do something totally different. If nothing else, think of the poor audience that really wants to enjoy new music and will get the same dessert evening after evening.
Personally I like artists and bands that surprise me year after year. Even if there’s sometimes a hit-and-miss case, just the effort to try something and expand is what counts.
- Unkle – Heaven — How ambient voices should be produced.
- Stevie Wonder – Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing — Take complex chord progressions and turn it into a pop hit.
- Metric – Help I’m Alive — Good pop song, good arrangements, what else do you want…
- Boards of Canada – I Saw Drones – Ambient could be short, too.
- Howard Jones – Another Chance – You could do pop songs with arpeggiators.
- Steve Vai – Aching Hunger — Wish I had that kind of vibrato technique.
I guess you could get samples for nearly anything now, including voice and singing parts. An artist could spend hours in the studio just putting together samples, with no need to learn how to play the keyboard, drumming, guitar playing or even singing.
Which is good. And also bad.
What happens with such reconstruction jobs is that without really knowing how compositions work someone ends up with a very bland productions. Things come and go but there’s really no dynamic content, or thinking behind it, or even much inspirational parts. The closest I could think of this is doing microwaved food for a four-star restaurant.
Well, you could always learn and improve. My suggestions is to either look at classical composers such as Debussy and Stravinsky, see how their minds tick when they compose larger bodies of work, how themes come and go, how various parts play unexpected roles here and there.
A couple of modern day bands/artists that have a similar know-how, I suspect based on hours and hours perfecting this, is The Orb or System 7. Actually there’s even a cross-over such as the Art of Noise album where they re-interpret Debussy — highly recommend this one to get a feeling how to compose music with any sample you have around.
I did an earlier solution for bringing hundreds of lyrics on-stage using an iPhone hooked to a mic stand. Well, it had its problems, mostly getting the GorillaMobile properly attached to mic stands, especially the non-boom ones (straight up mic stands.)
So back to the drawing board. Here is version number two! This time the iPhone (or iPod Touch) is hooked to a RadTech SLAM clip case that I got online for $7. This has a clip in the back that could be hooked to various possible support structures.
What I figured out concerning the boom stand mics and the single straight ones is that there has to be one single place where to attach the support structure. Well there is one — the XRL connector for the mic cable! What I tested out was using a document clip, those you use to clip together lots of paper, the big size. I attach that to the XRL connector, bend the clip pins over and hook the SLAM clip case to the top one. I use the bottom clip pin to support the case so it’s nicely aligned. I think the second picture shows how it all works.
So the end result is a system that is cheap, quick to set up (sometimes, as with jams, important), robust enough and also as invisible as you could have it concerning lyrics in front of your eyes.
Which leads to eye sight. Most of us that are somewhat, eh, older, we lose the short sight over time. My son could easily read the text in the iPhone from the distance close to the mic. I could barely read it. What’s the solution? Well, it’s cool to have sunglasses on-stage when performing and now I have a real need for them. In other words, from CVS and similar drug-stores you could get sunglasses that are bi-focal, the lower part has reading-glass strength lenses. The upper part is transparent.
The last thing I’m still working on is the lyrics delivery system. I set up a special email address on my ISP so I could send lyrics to an IMAP server — rich text emails. These I could then arrange in folders online and then sync these over to the iPhone. This means I have backups out there and could download them to any iPhone or iPod Touch in case I need to do it. As well as constantly sending over and updating my lyrics setup.
I’m sure I will be working on version 3 based on the experiences I have with this setup, but as the Japanese know, kaitzen (constant improvements.)
