Tripecac - Lost Train

This was Giovanna's phrase for some houses on that we saw at the beach. We came upon them abruptly, and as they were up on stilts, they seemed like castles rising out of the sand.

My goal for this album is to try something different engineering-wise with each song. For this one I experimented with effects automation. This was the first time I was able to change the Triton's effects on-the-fly from within Sonar. The differences are subtle, definitely not as groundbreaking or impressive as I'd hoped. Neither is the song itself.

Oh well, we can't expect a whole lot after all this time off. So I'll in invoke my usual motto, which is: I'm leaving plenty of room for improvement in the next song! :)

This is another Giovanna term. We were watching Amazing race, where some rednecks were doing surprisingly well.

My "experimental" technique for this song was to enable Sonar's linked clips option. This means whenever I copied a clip (bunch of notes) from one part of a song to another, and then edit one copy, all copies are affected.

This was semi-convenient in the early stages of the song. However, after a while I wanted to be able to add variation to each copy, which meant I had to keep unlinking clips. And then one time, some of my edits accidentally deleted a whole bunch of clips which were linked together, and I didn't notice. When I finally saw the gaps, I had to open an old version of the project to get those clips back. What a mess!

So, file the linked clips technique "one-off".

This is our code word for diarrhea. Cute, huh?

The new engineering technique for this song is the vocoder. It didn't sound very good, so I kept it subtle and short. However, it was kinda neat to see how it works.

I also learned that the Triton's compressor really does make the soft parts louder! Whenever I dropped out some instruments, the remaining ones got louder. I didn't like this effect in those song, so I switched to a multi-band limiter. I have no idea what it does, except it doesn't mess things up like the compressor, and that's good enough for me!

And one more thing: I accidentally applied the delay and reverb from the vocals to the actual keyboard tracks after I recorded them. This made everything sound pretty muddy, except for the quiet sections, which now sound a lot less thin. I'll have to try that trick more often!

The rest of the song is pretty standard, at least in terms of the engineering. The sound is a little louder and darker than usual, but the loop-based structure and repetitiveness are very familiar.

To be honest, I got extremely bored with this song, even by the end of the first day. It was only on the penultimate day, when I added the arpeggios near the end, that I started liking bits of it. On the final day I threw in the vocals, which are utterly disaposable, and also mixed pretty low.

Flush!

There are two "tricks" for this song. The first is that I started it on the same day as "Dida", and worked on them in parallel. They use the same effects template, instrumentation, and roughly the same keys. The challenge was to see if I could keep them stylistically distinct, despite the similarities, or if their aural and temporal proximity would cause me to make similar creative choices for each of them.

The second trick, which applies to the second song as well, was that all the percussion parts use the Triton's "Orchestra & Ethnic" patch, which I don't use very often. I also kept the other instruments very sparse, mostly as a reaction against the previous song, which was very loud and dense.

The idea behind this experiment is to see if I can sound like a band that plays two songs back-to-back in a concert. Of course, I didn't want them to sound too similar, so I made this one slow and the next one fast.

I developed this in tandem with "Dadi".

This one started off sounding a lot sparser and more Krautrockish. However, I noticed that over time I started using the same sort of musical phrases and rhymic patterns as on "Dadi", so this ended up sounded very similar. Also, since I worked on it second each day, I tended to be more tired when I got to it, and less full of ideas or energy. As a result, what started out as the "cool" song ended up being the boring one. At least, from my perspective.

Anyway, so much for the idea of developing songs simultaneously!

For as long as I can remember, Mom and Jess have been telling me to "chew thoroughly". And now I find myself saying the same thing to Denali.

I wanted to make a song that sounds really "chewy", meaty, rather than smooth and gentle like the light, new-agey jazz stuff that I've been doing recently.

So I picked a really loud, buzzy synth to start, and added noisy effects, with the goal of having a real sharp, percussive sound. The drums, particuarly the toms, are supposed to sound very crisp.

I don't know if the end result sounds "chewy", or if it even works as a song, but it was fun to work on, and that's good enough for me!

The title is a pun on "ganja". It also refers to the fact that cultures outside of Jamaica sometimes adopt reggae as their cultural sound. They seem to regard reggae as their "roots" music, never mind the fact that it originated on an island thousands of miles away.

Why can't people come up with their own catchy music? Why must they depend on what was developed in Jamaica in the late 60s?

Of course, this is all tongue in cheek, because Tripecac is equally guilty of assimilating reggae as part of its identity. If asked to describe the Tripecac sound, one would probably mention two types of music: reggae and jazz, neither of which have anything to do with my cultural roots.

Does that mean the reggae and jazz are forced, mere pretense? No. They are just as natural to my music-making instincts as rock or pop or anything else. In fact, making music which deviates from the jazzy reggae sound is very hard for me.

For example, I intended to make this song sound like pure reggae, with no Tripecac-ish jazzy bits. I added delay for a "dubby" sound, and really sparse, heavy bass and kick drums. Did it work? Heck no! Sure, for the first few measures it might sound different, but then it quickly [d]evolves into the familiar elevator jazz formula, with only a touch of reggae left. Not only that, but by the end of the song, any unique ideas are used up, and it sounds tired and ultimately empty of passion and interest.

I'd like to pretend this was intentional, in keeping with the theme of the title, but it wasn't. I honestly don't know how to shake the reggae and/or jazz from my sound any more than those other cultures can shake the reggae or hip-hop from theirs. We've been influenced, our unique identities compromised, and we're likely to stay that way.

Recently on the radio and podcasts there have been songs that sound really distorted but have managed to retain a certain catchiness. I decided to try the same thing: make a really noisy, distorted song, and see if it ends up engaging or annoying. In other words, do noisy effects help or hurt the overall song?

The music itself is really dumb, but the instruments are different from usual, and the performances are sparse. So it should at least be marginally interesting.

For this song I decided to create a new default template for Sonar. I wanted something that sounded more like a piano practice room. My hope was that this would encourage me to sketch out rough ideas before jumping into song assembly and polishing.

For the new template, I kept the small room reverb, but replaced the stereo chorus with an "analog record" effect. This creates deliberate pops, clicks, and static which I can control with a knob. The idea behind starting with a "messy" effect like this is that it will hopefully get me in the practice room mindset, and at the same time will force me to think about and change the effects for each song rather that sticking with the defaults.

The title of the song refers to this new template (which actually makes it sound like a really old song), and also the fact that the song is like an avenue: one long, straight road, with no curves or bumps. It's all in a single key, and ended up very krautrocky.

It's not very polished, but was fun to work on. It only took two days to finish it, which is much faster than I've been working recently. So I ended up feeling energized by this song, warts and pops and clicks and all.

The process of making gems is very tedious. So is this song.

Well, at least it proves something, and that's changing the Triton's default template doesn't automatically result in inspiration.

The writing, in my opinion, is a real dud. I could have extended the idea it for several minutes, but what'd be the point? Better finish it quickly and move onto the next idea, which will almost certainly be better.

In other words, bin it!

The name comes from the fact that this is the eleventh song on the album, and I wanted it to sound more like Fela Kuti than the last couple.

As an experiment, I decided to use general midi for all the instruments. Usually I avoid general midi because I assume the Triton's sounds are more unique and closely tailored to it, and therefore superior. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that these sounds weren't all that bad. Can you tell the difference?

For some reason, I quickly ran out of tracks, so I added some vocals to flesh it out a bit. The end result sounds really busy. And repetitive. But at least it's upbeat!

It's not the instrument that is to blame; it's the musician. This album has made that clear.

For a while now, I've been getting tired of the music I've been creating with the Triton, and suspected that maybe I could liven things up by trying different engineering techniques; that's the point of this album.

However, after a dozen songs where the end result sounds like the same old ultra-repetitive so-so stuff that I've been creating for the past year, I've come to the conclusion that I really need to start writing songs, not just assembling repetitive jams from small looped ideas. Sure, some of the resulting tracks might almost "work", but the vast majority are underwhelming, non-memorable, and effectively filler.

And that's what I want to avoid: album after album of filler.

Therefore, for the next album, I will stop worrying about the engineering and start focusing on the writing. However, for now, I need to finish this album the way I started it: messing around with sounds and winging the rest.

This song originated with a very loud, chimey synth sound and an extremely distorted ring modulation effect. It sounded very coarse and dramatic, but ultimately tiring to listen to. So I ended up deleting it.

That's right, deleting it. After all, it's very hard to delete ideas. However, it's necessary if I want to improve the average quality of the songs. We need a little Darwinism to kick in, or else we end up with an overpopulation of mediocre ideas. Deleting the unsatisfying ideas is something I need to do more often.

Anyway, I kept the first bass sound (which you can hear in the beginning, and sounds a little over-reverbed), and the funky drums. The rest of the stuff is new, from after about a week off. Fresh ears definitely make deleting old ideas easier!

The opening and closing melody to this song (DDC DDC GGA GFD) was chosen long before the other songs were finished. Can you guess where the title comes from?

I wanted to give the song more of a live ambience, so I used an exciter effect and added soft ride cymbols in places. Doesn't really fix the song, though, which suffers (like the rest of the album) from a lack of direction.

Lost train indeed!