I’m going to take some liberties and use some poetic licence with what follows. ‘Experts’ will just have to wince and bear it… this isn’t for them anyway!

Once upon a time…

Before the latter 1950s, music was recorded and played back only in mono. Radios and record players had just one loudspeaker. So no left and right. Just one loudspeaker.
In the recording studio the tape machines had a single mono reel of magnetic tape and all the instruments and singing would be recorded live in one take, onto the one mono track. Any mistakes and the performer(s) would have to do another take in its entirety.

During the 1950s the idea of recording more than one track on the same physical reel of tape became practical for studios. Having the tracks running side by side on the same one physical tape meant they were always going to be synchronised (locked in time) together. To attempt to use several of the mono machines together to achieve the same result would have meant being able to synchronise them ‘somehow’. This would have required a degree of perfection almost impossible with the available technology of the era.

Recording on multi-track machines meant that you now didn’t have to redo absolutely everything if a mistake was made. Plus the engineers could achieve better clarity and balance with the added control ‘after the event’. The concept of a mixdown was born, as those multiple tracks would need blending back together for the final product which was, at first, still in mono.

At the very end of the 1950s the first stereo albums were released, though few but the wealthy had a stereo playback system. A common usage of the recording studio’s new three track machines was to record the backing band live to the first two tracks (in stereo), then record the vocals separately to the third track whilst the singer(s) listened to the now pre-recorded backing track on headphones. This meant the singer(s) could have more than one go at a performance without the whole band having to repeat theirs.

Did I mention stereo? Why yes I did. Taken for granted now but still merits a quick explainer. If you have two ears, and they both work, you hear sounds and can tell what direction they come from – left or the right. That’s because a sound coming from the left takes very slightly longer to reach your right ear than your (nearer) left ear, and visa versa. Your brain is clever enough to use that difference and create a stereo image. So to create that illusion from a recording you need two speakers with each one connected to one of two tracks. A left track and a right track. In the mixdown each individual recorded track can be panned to either the left or the right or both sides. Equally, to both sides, puts the sound in the middle.

Did I mention tape heads? Why no I didn’t. The tape head puts the sound onto the tape. Each track has its own tape head. Three tracks on the tape means three separate tape heads, but still just one tape. So basically the tracks are just like three lanes on one road.

Through the latter 1960s and 1970s the multi-track recorders grew bigger and bigger to enable more and more tracks, on ever wider tape. Before too long twenty four tracks on two inch wide tape became standard. This meant each instrument and vocal could be recorded on its own track and be placed anywhere between full right and full left in the stereo image on mixdown.

The final part of the music production chain is the mastering process. After the final mix is finished the mastering engineer has the job of making that final mix optimised to sound its best on the playback equipment used by the general public. To be honest, that is a much more complex subject than one might imagine, with many aspects. I think it’s best left for a separate blog of its own.

I hope this blog has been informative and interesting. It is intended for people that ‘don’t already know’ but do wonder ‘how it’s done’. I’ve used ‘tape machines’ to illustrate these principles but of course these days the vast majority of music production is done digitally using computer technology. The principles remain exactly the same though and I think the tape machine story makes it easier to visualise.

Kudos and credit to my good friend Philip Lewis-Jones for copy editing and proof reading. Top job.

We are also taught that working as a team in a spirit of cooperation is the best way forward, but paradoxically that ‘team spirit’ is most strongly evoked as a tool of conflict and competition. How many times have I heard people try and spin something positive out of wartime by eulogising the way it makes people ‘all pull together’ in common cause. Always leaving out that the same is true for all of those on the other side. Was their ‘pulling together’ also to be praised as a good thing?

Another oft stated ‘good thing to come out of war’ is the advance in technology it supposedly brings. As if getting a new type of widget was somehow worth the loss of so many lives and the misery of the wounded, along with the extended suffering of the surviving relatives and friends. As if that ‘advance’ couldn’t have waited a few years or even decades without anyone being significantly the worse for it?

I started writing this months ago after getting involved in playing chess in a local (online) club. I wasn’t sure about it but a very nice friend was keen for me too join.
Now, anyone who knew me as a youngster would know that I was then a very competitive person. Always 110% commitment to whatever game or sport it was, or indeed arguments and ‘whatever’. Interesting to me now is how that never spilled into my music making though, in any way, but perhaps I need to think more about that, so back to the point. In the chess club games I realised that I really don’t want to ‘beat’ anyone anymore. I can’t put it more simply. I would rather play the chess puzzle against a lifeless computer that won’t feel anything whatsoever regardless of the outcome.

If I really stretch my memory back to when I was a tiddler, I recall always wanting to give stuff away if someone else liked it… perhaps that was the real me, before school and conditioning for ‘growing up’ essentially corrupted me? That’s actually a happy concept!
OK it’s taken me sixty years to get back from the dark side but nevertheless, hurrah! So is the almost universal state of continual conflict something that at least partly stems from the ideas of ownership and control and tribalism that are encouraged in us as we grow up, even with that encouragement being delivered in a most conflicting way… sigh.

“Be generous, but keep hold of your stuff!”

“Be a team member, but not of that team!”

Even now, with many billions of us on the planet, this world still has the resources to happily cater for every single human to eat, drink and have a good home. As a species we humans have long seen off any competitors. We’ve made many of the other species extinct along the way, either deliberately or by blundering around carelessly and selfishly. Perhaps this driving emotional compulsion to fight and enjoy fighting (even as a spectator) is our most dangerous legacy and the one that will be our downfall if not reigned in.

Well, having at last posted these cheery notions for the reader to ponder, I will sign off. Meeting a mate down the pub for a pint or several of Goachers finest ale and no doubt to talk much nonsense with not a serious thought!

So now, aged 66.5, it is quite a thing to realise I have truly forgotten what the (religiously speaking) point of it all might be. For me this is a happy moment, akin to my post retirement pleasure in not knowing what day it is and the freedom from those ticking clock imposed schedules that this lack of knowledge implies. Now I really think about it I may only still have Christmas left as a celebration of which I do know the religious meaning. The fact that I am struggling to recall even the names of the other events in the Christian calendar is rather ‘telling’ is it not.

I went to primary school in England during the 1960s and at that time you attended primary from ages 5 to 11 years old. In the final year you took an exam called the Eleven Plus (or 11+) and that determined what ‘grade’ of secondary school you went on to attend. My primary school was St. Francis, a Catholic school, but still a ‘state’ school, at least as far as the secular part of the curriculum went. Without more research I can’t be certain exactly what the arrangement with the education authorities might have been. From talking to others it seems that I received an ‘extra dose’ of religious indoctrination compared to those that went to the normal state primary schools, where the religious content was that of the official Protestant state religion, C of E (Church Of England).

We lucky kids had an extra little text book called the catechism which was entirely a ‘summary or exposition of doctrine’ (Wikipedia) and were tested regularly on how well we had learned ‘our lessons’ from it’s pages. Some Christians would rankle at the term indoctrination and relate that to, say, the Chinese communists with their little red book, but the uncomfortable reality is that there’s no difference at all. Filling impressionable young minds with ‘your’ beliefs (and that’s all they are) is no different whatever those beliefs might be. So it’s with a little amazement that I realise how much of that early indoctrination has finally slipped away. It was literally knocked into our skulls at St. Francis where the much feared Mrs. Coakley would rap you hard over the head with her crooked knuckle for pretty much any reason, but especially hard if you’d forgotten or answered incorrectly about something from ‘the holy book’. In latter primary years Mr. O’Donnell would delight in taking a good run up before whacking the love of Jesus into you with a size 11 plimsoll.

Those latter two years were spent at an annex on the grounds of the local Catholic convent school. On the other side of the wall, I later learnt (from my sister amongst others), the daily regime of harsh treatment for transgression being dealt out by those ‘lovely’ nuns actually put Mrs. Coakley and Mr. O’Donnell’s peccadilloes in the shade, with their added layers of mental cruelty and humiliation. It’s little wonder that many of us do not look back on those days and institutions with fondness and indeed do look back in anger. I don’t know what either of those institutions are like now, but one assumes they surely must have moved somewhat forward with the times, at least in the tolerated levels of casual violence dished out by the adults to the children.

Now, it transpires that within the couple of days during which I have been creating this post the pope has died. No doubt the faithful will be a-weeping and a-wailing, whilst the cardinals jockey for position. For myself I feel precisely nothing, after all roughly 150,000 people die every day and most days they are people I have never heard of. If I felt honest ‘grief’ for even a tiny few of them I would be inconsolably sad and depressed for my whole life.
I am aware of very few things this last pope ever said; only one comes to mind and that is his declaration that I and my partner are selfish people because we chose not to have children and had pet animals to love and cherish instead. Excellent on the ‘love thy neighbour’ and inclusion of diversity front mate! I guess he won’t mind going to a ‘heaven’ (presumably) where there are no animals, according to doctrine. Yet another reason I’d rather not go to their idea of eternal paradise; I won’t meet up with my beloved Claudia, Paddy, Mary, Murphy, Purrdita, Tinkerbell and Cleopatra!? Doesn’t sound very heavenly to me.

So there we have it, a bit of an Easter waffle during which a pontiff expired. Time now for a toasty fruit bun, some chocolate and then to tell my two furry children they are the most beautiful cats in the world!

The ‘it’ in question is the creation of new music and I guess more specifically the complete process of creating a finished recording of said new music. My answer is of course rather dependant on who’s asking; no point getting too technically detailed with someone that is primarily a listener and, seeing as there are very many ways to make and record music, even a fellow creator may work in a way so different to my own that a general ‘broad brush’ explanation is also applicable to them. So with the above in mind I am going to try and describe my processes in a way that might enlighten… will do my best… maybe add a little glossary at the end explaining a few terms.

My first spark can come from doodling on guitar, some ‘random’ humming, or just a rhythm tapped out whilst thinking about nothing much. I would say the second two examples are probably more common now and I have learned, the hard way, to capture those ideas quickly as they are ephemeral and can be totally forgotten in an instant. As I can’t write them down as musical notation I find the only way to guarantee that all the notes, phrasings and nuances are captured properly is to get them recorded, on whatever device I can find the quickest. At that earliest stage sound quality is unimportant. Whilst there is a greater chance of me recalling something I’ve actually come up with on the guitar, it’s still best to get a rough recording of it as soon as possible!

So, with a spark of an idea safely captured the next stage is to build on it and hope that, in the doing of that building, more ideas are sparked. Invariably this does happen but it’s also at this stage the first dawnings of self doubt appear… supposing the magic doesn’t happen? The thing is I can’t force it, I have to trust that the ideas and creative thoughts will flow. However, luckily, they usually do and it’s here that I ‘start building’. The building process for me can go in various directions, depending somewhat on the original idea.

If it’s a bass line then I will want to write a drum part next most likely and then a chord progression on either keyboards or guitar.
If it’s a chord progression and rhythms from the guitar I might well (these days especially) convert that to a piano part because, although I am as a player primarily a guitarist, I like writing for other instruments a lot and am also ever more keen for my music to not be overly a guitar thing.
If it’s a melodic phrase then I will be turning to my guitar for a chord progression and probably a groove too, before moving on to bass drums and keyboards. Although my chord progressions often end up being keyboard parts, my knowledge of chords is based on my guitar experience, so generally that’s my route.

I try and imagine my band as a bunch of experienced and ‘good’ musicians but not as absolute virtuoso players, so I aim to write a backing track that fits that scenario. I keep at it till I have the whole thing up to the level that you get in a ‘real’ band once the basics are learnt and it’s been played through as an ensemble successfully, without too many clangers! The elements of the arrangement are all part of the ‘more ideas are sparked’ that I mentioned earlier, and hence that feeling of, “Will I think of anything?” persists (with me at least) throughout the process and can actually lead me into avoidance behaviour if I am not careful. All of which which leads me on to the subject of those sometimes elusive things called melodies, which can be the very worst cause of Will-I-Think-Of-Anything syndrome. To date all my stuff has been quite ‘old school’ in the sense of there being written melodies for different sections (the verses and choruses etc. if they were songs) and sometimes I do start off with a melody or two in the first place. More often though I don’t, and therefore just wait for ‘bits of tune’ to pop into my head… and ooomph, we’re back into, “Will I think of anything?” territory. However these days I must say I am much more relaxed about that and the more relaxed I am the more likely are the tunes to pop in and visit the little grey cells of Poirot legend.

So, with my band’s parts worked out, the basis of an arrangement sorted and some main melodies dreamt up, what next? Lots of listening through and lots of pondering! That’s my way. I do like to get the melodies played and recorded very early on as they are the ‘washing lines’ on which the rest of it will hang. I just bang them down, always with the idea that they are merely guides to be played properly much later on but, dear reader, I have found that they nearly always end up as the finished item. So now I have to actually believe my own “It’s just a guide part” mantra when recording them… weirdly I seem to be able to do that?
So this is the middle game (to use a chess analogy) – deciding how long the piece should be – will there be improvised solos, and on which instruments? This can be quite a Rubik’s Cube to solve.

With my current setup I play the guitars and bass guitars, plus the odd very simple piano or synthesiser part. If I have guest musicians like I did on my last album, on saxophone and trumpet, they record their performances and send them to me. Literally everything else is written by me, every note and beat, but then ‘played’ (as if from a musical score) by my studio DAW – Digital Audio Workstation – in my case an app called Cubase. I go to great (some might say crazy) lengths to impart as much of my own feel into those parts as possible and it does take a lot of care and time, plus some considerable thought and invention! One of my favourite things is to record myself playing a rhythm guitar part completely on my own, with all my little ‘human errors’ (not actually errors to my mind, it’s MUSIC!) and use that to create a ‘musical timing map’ for the app to follow, rather than it’s perfect-but-inhuman metronome clock. That guitar part quite likely won’t feature in the final mix at all.

Eventually all the writing and the recording is as done as it’s ever going to be and, in this modern age of being able to undo/redo as much as one likes, actually deciding to stop and put yet another hat on can be hard. In fact the next hat is really several hats; mix engineer, producer and mastering engineer. The first two have in fact been on and off throughout the process, tinkering away and providing a general view on the overall sound as well as the arrangement itself. Now we are into the end game and trying to make the whole tune gel together as well as possible – making it sound as if it’s somewhere and placing the instruments (players) in the stereo image – using reverberation and delay (echo) to place the sounds nearer or further away, creating an illusion of a three dimensional space.

Finally the whole tune is finished! Done! But… not dusted, no, there’s one last stage, the mastering process. This where I plant my mastering engineer hat firmly on my head and proceed to make the final mix acceptable to the modern world. We are talking about the overall perceived loudness, the dynamics (quiet to loud ratios) and the overall tonal quality (treble, middle and bass frequencies). These things are actually a lot more complex than my simple descriptions but they are very important if you want your great masterpiece to sit nicely in a playlist with who knows what before and after it, on the radio or wherever. Some people even go to the lengths of producing several mix/masters for use in different scenarios, but I haven’t done that yet. I go for a ‘middle for diddle’ approach because… hmmmm… honest answer? Well, I just can’t be arsed!

Now… thinking about non musicians that might have made it through my waffle I mean blog, there are a few musical terms that might need clarifying.
What’s a chord? Well imagine a piano keyboard; if you play more than one note at the same time, that’s a chord, usually we use three notes as a basic chord and may add a few more. Most songs you hear are built on repeated sequences of chords and these are called chord progressions. This concept can lead us onto the arrangement.
When you have a series of chord progressions (think verses and choruses and maybe ‘that middle bit’) then at its simplest that’s an arrangement. In a more advanced understanding the term arrangement can cover rather more that the ‘order of the blocks’ but that will suffice for this ‘ere waffle, no! I mean blog

Nuff said!

I think it would be remiss of me not to mention the Mothers Of Invention (as if one ever needed an excuse) and two of their early albums, We’re Only In It For The Money and Lumpy Gravy, both of which are, to my warped mind, titles that can be easily twisted into a mental connection with the modern era’s version of what was once called Mothering Sunday (quite a sweet and parochial event). If anyone wanted to get ‘an alternative slant on alternative culture’ then the albums by The Mothers through the 1960s and into the early 1970s would be the place to go. An astounding range of musical styles and lyrical commentary (few punches pulled) combined with a level of composition and playing ability that was pretty much unheard of in the popular music world of those days. Their music really did defy categorisation and was therefore not ever big in radio world!

Of course no mother related discourse should fail to hail The Mothership, and we are talking about The Funk here, or indeed “The Fonk!” as George Duke would have it. Having played with Jean Luc Ponty in a small jazz combo, he went on to become the stalwart hub on keyboards various for Frank Zappa’s band throughout the mid 1970s, as well as getting to show his amazing vocal talents, singing some of Frank’s most ‘impossible’ parts. Check out the song Inca Roads from the album One Size Fits All for a beautiful example along with one of Frank’s finest ever ‘talking’ guitar solos, in which can be heard those… Johnny Guitar Watson influences of course! Having indulged my little ‘cleverness’ in bringing this bloggery full circle I suppose it’s time to go buy some small pieces of printed cardboard, chocolates and ‘fizz’… Diamanda and Lovely would never forgive me if I forgot to get some treats for their Best Cat Mum!

Do I really want a relationship with everyone that likes my music, beyond the pleasure they get from listening to it and I get from knowing they enjoy it enough to actually shell out and buy some downloads or CDs from me? How much, if any, of myself beyond the music I create do I want to share with the world at large? I appreciate that it’s interesting to know a bit of the background and bio of an artist that resonates with you, I’m the same as most people in that way, but I have never been of the “…want to know who’s shirts you wear” (thank you David Bowie) persuasion. Even with artists of whom I became a lifelong fan and admirer, I was always 99% interested in their music and 1% their ‘whatever’.

So, I guess there may be a few (to me very odd) people out there that would like to know my favourite sandwich or whether I have any filthy habits (not telling on either example, so there!), and I know that some see all the sharing of one’s inner self as essential… but for what? More sales? Hmmm… already sounds tawdry to be honest, but for me it’s just not ‘me’. I am in life quite an outgoing person and actually do share quite a bit of myself without even thinking about it (not always a good thing! ) but to make it a part of some kind of ‘look at me, I like xxxxx and yyyyyy sandwiches best’ sales pitch… Nope, not going to happen.

So, to move beyond my own experience, where did the oft quoted work ethic come from anyway? Well I for one don’t know and, as ‘workers’ in one form or another have existed since the very earliest of recorded histories, I can’t see how anyone can know the answer without using far too much presumption and assumption to be able to claim any certainty at all.
I do know that the era of human society that one might call transactional (as in something beyond basic bartering, “Swap you these turnips for those parsnips?”) is likely quite new in the time span of our evolution as a species (barring interesting but totally speculative theories of forgotten civilisations from ten or more thousand years ago). A good friend suggested to me that even before our transactional era, say as the proverbial ‘hunter gatherers’, everyone would be expected to ‘work’. Initially that sounds straightforward enough but when I try and imagine the details (wherein the devil lives) I can’t see even that supposed ‘simpler existence’ being… that simple.
There would be a great many individuals either not able to do, or with no aptitude for, the main work of ‘hunting and gathering’. Those that were too young, those that were ill or injured (inevitably some in the long term), those that were too old, those that were pregnant, those looking after babies and small children, those that were a positive liability in the hunting and gathering groups. I’m sure that is a far from exhaustive list. So what of them? Almost certainly far outnumbering the actual hunter gatherers. What of the artists, entertainers, carers, thinkers and all of those that might be hopeless at most practical ‘work’ but great to have around making life enjoyable and better for others? Unless one assumes that humanity in prehistory merely lived a life of harsh and joyless drudgery then surely all those ‘types’ need including in any theories of a supposed way of life. After all, we have the beautiful cave wall art to account for do we not? Those date from unimaginably long ago (20, 30, 40, even 50 thousand years ago) and took great skill with obviously a long time invested, both learning the skills and creating the images.

Perhaps we need to consider the basic hierarchical structures of this transactional epoch. After all the concept of the worker is symbiotically connected to the concept of the boss, but it’s not the ‘chicken and egg’ scenario to my mind. The boss must have come first, before the worker surely. Someone had to establish authority, in order to ‘tell others what to do’. That authority then has to be maintained, policed, enforced, call it what you will. My best guess is that our pyramid like hierarchical systems originated with organised religions and the self proclaimed leadership of those religions. That seems an almost certain font of authority with a boss atop of the heap, sorry, pyramid.
Of course we have no way of knowing how the groups of prehistoric humans really organised themselves, or behaved, or thought about life, we can only make suppositions, but the most basic philosophical wondering is perhaps of the, “Where did we come from and what’s it all about?” variety, closely followed by, “What will become of us?” variety. Was there ever a time before some character put on a silly hat and said, “I know the answers! The gods have spoken!” If successful with that playbook, pretty soon the person wearing the hat is ‘the boss’ and getting others to do as they are told… or else… there’s always the stick lurking behind the carrot.