A Little Lite but Really Tasty!

Song Title: 116th Street Junk Food

Recorded On: GarageBand

Instruments: (In Order of Appearance)
                    Funky Latin Drums 09 (GB Preset)
                    Cool Upright Bass 01
                    Upright Funk Bass 01
                    Simple Cabasa 01
                    80's Dance Bass Synth 09
                    Chordal Synth Patter 08
                    Funky Electric Guitar 02
                    Club Dance Beat 006
                    Exotic Beat 06
                    Funky Latin Drums 01
                    Percussion Combo 07
                    Motown Drummer 02
                    Conga Drummer 02 (All GB Preset Loops)

Uploaded to SoundCloud: May 24, 2013

Statistics: 12 Plays (4 US/4 Japan/2 UK/2 Germany/2 Viet Nam/2 Netherlands/ 2 Spain)
                2 Downloads (1 US/1 France)
                2 Comments (1 US/1 UK)
                2 'Favorites' (1 UK/1 Canada)

You can listen to "116th Street Junk Food" here: https://soundcloud.com/c-l-neal/116th-street-junk-food.

Again, this was a pretty simple piece. I simply dove into the loops that come with GarageBand and went crazy. As so often happens, I was trying to do something else and was getting nowhere. I was completely frustrated working in Ableton and went back to GarageBand briefly to just snap something off and remind myself that I really can write songs.

Burch, who has kind of been my mentor and often been my sounding-board since I started writing EDM, has told me many times  that I need to get rid of all the loops on my computer. I will agree with him while we're talking but then not do it. Why? Because I'm supposed to be having fun. Come on! And if I'm trying to master something and getting nowhere, why not work with a few loops and put something out?

No good reason, that's why!

Anyway, I've told him that I know the loops are really like junk food. They can be really tasty but have no nutritional value. But I've also said before that there is an art and a science to working with loops. If you do it right, you can come up with something pretty cool.

In fact, several people have agreed with me about this one. One of the comments came from a grumpy English guy who I would have sworn was not listening to my stuff (he's also a musician and his style is completely different than mine.) And he likes it! So if that's not affirmation, I don't know what is.

And the fact that anybody at all is listening to this song in Viet Nam also means that I'm doing something right. I would love to be big all over the world!

So Burch, I luv yer but dude you gotta lighten up a bit on this.

And anyone else who thinks that loops make for sucky or lightweight music?

Bite me!

ShankThr33 - It's In The Genes~

Copyright (c) 2013 Christopher Neal

It's a Big Messy World After All!

Song Title: Big Messy World

Recorded On: GarageBand

Instruments: (In Order of Appearance)
                    Darksitar80b_d (Downloaded from Platinumloops)
                    Indi120_c (Tabla loop downloaded from Platinumloops)
                    Indyfolk120r_g (Mandolin loop downloaded from Platinumloops)
                    Alternative Rock Bass 03
                    Alternative Rock Bass 04 (GarageBand loops)
                    Distance (Loop)
                    KSK Vox Fx (Loop)
                    Club Dance Beat 002
                    Electronic Drum Beat 02 (GarageBand loops)
                    KSK Risa 002 (Loop)

Uploaded to SoundCloud: May 24, 2013

Stats: 6 Plays (United States)
         2 Downloads (1 US/1 Portugal)
         1 'Favorite' (Canada)

You can listen to "Big Messy World" here: https://soundcloud.com/c-l-neal/big-messy-world.

I love EDM but sometimes it just takes it out of me. I had been trying to learn "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" (which I still haven't completely learned) while at the same time trying to learn how to do a four-on-the-floor beat. Trying to learn two such completely different things, even though one is a whole lot easier than the other, is hard. I just got drained. So I turned to my crutch in order to do something fun. And really, isn't this supposed to be fun?

I had downloaded a bunch of sitar and tabla loops. I have for a long time been wanting to do a real kickin' World beat. I went through them, looking for something that I could build a decent trance beat with but not finding anything that quite did it. But I found a few sounds that I hadn't remembered downloading (the KSK Vox and KSK Risa loops) and thinking I would like to do something with them. I'm on a lot of loop websites and I haven't kept proper track of them. Sorry!

This is not one of my great pieces, but I had a lot of fun. Burch likes to roll his eyes when he hears I'm working with loops again but what I always want to say at that point is, "Bite me." I was drained from trying to master things that weren't working and needed a little fun. And like I said before, isn't this supposed to be fun?

So enjoy it in the spirit in which it is offered.

Peace out and catch you later...

ShankThr33 - It's In The Genes!

Copyright (c) 2013 Christopher Neal

Don't Ever Mess with the Little Loudmouth!

Title: Little Loudmouth

Recorded on: GarageBand

Instruments: (In order of appearance)
                    Edgy Rock Bass 04 (GB Loop)
                    70's Ballad Drums 01 (GB Loop)
                    Smoky Clav (Preset)
                    Deep House Dance Beat 01 (GB Loop)
                    Blue Jazz Organ Riff 03 (GB Loop)
                    Southern Rock Organ 05 (GB Loop)
                    Southern Rock Organ 04 (GB Loop)
                    Southern Rock Organ 03 (GB Loop)
                    Southern Rock Organ 02 (GB Loop)

Uploaded to SoundCloud 03/14/2013

Some of my songs I like less the more I listen to them, and some of them I like better. This one is definitely in that second category. In fact, this has always been one of my favorites, ever since I first wrote it. This is also the first time I almost had the courage to use just loops when writing a song.

At one minute and forty-three seconds, it's not the longest song I've ever written but it's got some pretty satisfying stuff packed into it. Unfortunately I don't remember bpm, but I'm thinking it's about 120 because it's pretty fast and I wrote this when I thought successful EDM needed to be 120-140 bpm to get club play.

Like most of my songs, it tells a coherent story. Spoiler alert, if you just want to keep your pictures of it (which I say bless you if you do) then skip to the next paragraph. It's a classic story of falling and redemption, with a little Southern-Gospel-Style thrown in. The opening bass line is meant to represent someone (and yes, I do think of a girl, although don't call me misogynistic. I just do. It don't mean nothin',) who is tightly wound and on a continuous roll of shooting off her mouth and getting into trouble. The additions of drums and other bass (the Smoky Clav) are just meant to show her speeding along no matter what happens. Then the organs come up and I couldn't help thinking of her going into a church and finding redemption. Since it's a dance song it's all meant to be done in spectacular fashion, but that's the basic of it.

When I started writing this I just was listening to different loops in the Garageband collection and really liked Edgy Rock Bass 04. I think I almost used it for something else but decided not to since it is kind of busy. It's got a great funk sound to it and is kind of dirty and grinding. I added the Smoky Clav preset (the only instrument that I actually play) to fatten it up (like it needed it, but it still works!) And also to add a little menace underneath, emphasizing the beat.

There is an art and a science to arranging loops just right. I don't claim to have mastered it yet, let alone when I wrote this song, but when I started working with the organ loops I realized that I was going to need to let some pieces go in order to have it tell it's story most effectively. Layering the organs on top of each other, which was what I initially wanted to do and I know some EDM guys WOULD do, was just a mess waiting to spill. May seem like a no-brainer just listening to it, especially if you're a more experienced producer than I am, but at the time it was a bit of a revelation. This piece more than any other helped me form my Three Rules of recording. It was accidental, but I found that groove and locked it in solid. I layered effectively, knowing when to let go. And I finished it up. And I was pretty happy with it, and I still am!

You can listen to it here: https://soundcloud.com/c-l-neal/little-loudmouth

I've always been disappointed that this one wasn't more popular. In all the time that it's been up through this writing, it's had fifteen plays, no downloads and no little hearts. It's been most popular in the US, followed by Canada and Ireland. Hey, I love for people to like it no matter where it's played!

Hopefully if you read this you'll check it out and maybe this little gem will get another shot at the life it deserves.

Peace out and catch you later...

ShankThr33 - It's In The Genes!

Harlem Digital Nocturnal, a beautiful place to be

Title: Harlem Digital Nocturnal

Recorded on: GarageBand

Instruments: Ambient Beat 01
                    80's Pop Beat 09
                    Lunar Strings
                    Nylon Shimmer
                    Motown Drummer 06
                    80's Dance Bass Synth 04
                    Deep Round Synth Bass
                    Deep Electric Piano 04

Now we come to the song that was my first "favorite song" and is still the second most popular song I've done. On SoundCloud it's received 21 plays in approximately 2 months and has been played by people in the US but also people in Canada, Turkey, Brazil, Indonesia and the Asia Pacific Rim. Fantastic!

I wanted to write a piece of mood music and something that would kind of fit onto maybe some 1970's blaxploitation style movie. Something kind of soundtrack-y at any right, whether for a movie or for a video game. Something you could listen to and kind of see the action as it went along.

Kind of is what I got. The song itself is pretty good, in fact until recently I would say it was the best I've ever done and undeniable proof that I do, for real, have talent. It was also, in some ways, a lucky accident. Most of the stuff I've done on GB shows how new I am at this. Even when I started getting the writing together under my Three Rules, there would still be glitches or gaps. This one didn't have anything like that. It came out pretty close to perfect as-is. In fact, when I played it for Burch he told me that he couldn't believe this came out of GarageBand.

What can I say?

A-Mac also really liked it, so I decided to go out on a limb. Of all the songs I have on SoundCloud right now, this is the only one not available for download there. I went ahead and posted it to Beatport. It promptly got lost there, the only way I can find it is to log onto my account. But it's up there, waiting for the day when some clever DJ will discover it and pay me 9.99 to download and tear it apart for beats.

Part of the reason, I think, is because it has sucky artwork. But artwork is a subject for a different posting.

You can listen to it here: https://soundcloud.com/c-l-neal/harlem-digital-nocturnal.

I tried to find orchestral sounds but had little luck. Some of the bass presets I was actually able to utilize better by lowering the octaves on my controller (I have an Alesis QX25 controller. It has 25 keys so I can't do too much two-handed stuff, and if I want to play low I have to lower the octaves manually. I want the Ableton Push and a Korg midi controller so bad!) And also by raising the octaves on the "Deep Electric Piano 04" preset, I was able to get the piano sound to somewhat mimic a glockenspiel (Burch thought that it was that sound.)

I started with long, slow, bass-heavy chords and went back and added the drums in later. Then, when I had the rhythm down and the groove was really set, I added in the texture bits. This is the song that more than any other showed me how to find the groove. "Lost In The Big House" would be the opposite end of the spectrum. But everything really clicked on this. And I had been listening to it on a pair of cheesy headphones. After I finished it and took it to Burch, who has access to a decent studio, he popped the disc into that Mac and when I heard it through some good studio monitors, wow! I blew myself away!

It got the name "Harlem Digital Nocturnal" because, and don't ask me why, when I listen to it I often hear the opening strains of Earle Hagen and Dick Rogers' "Harlem Nocturne." So I wanted to pay homage to that in the title.

Anyway, thank you very much to everyone who has enjoyed it so far, and if you haven't heard it yet, you are in for a treat even if I do say so myself!

Peace out and catch you later...

Three Rules and One Motto!

It's hard to be a musician.

As I've mentioned before, I have three rules for writing songs. I've developed these over time based on listening to what I write that works, or doesn't, and also listening to what other people have put out. I also have three goals as a producer, three things that I would ultimately like to accomplish. And I have one motto.

The motto? Well, okay, let's get that one out of the way first. I've already mentioned it in a previous post. It's the Voltaire quote, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." I made the decision to start putting my stuff out there for people to listen to and (hopefully) comment on before I started even really writing anything. Feedback is a good thing, even though it doesn't always come in the form you're hoping for. This is not complaining when I write what I'm about to write: I have had 375 plays on my SoundCloud account. That's between 32 songs, some of which have been up for over two months. Now, I could get all depressed over that and say, "Yeah, but Deadmau5 get's that many plays before he's even recorded the song!" Which is true. But I can also break it down case by case and see which songs are getting any love and which ones go to bed lonely every night. And one that gets 15 plays in a month and maybe one or two favorite-ings (yes, that's a word because I just made it up) is by definition more popular than one that got three plays the first day and then no one ever came back to it. And I can work on what I've got until the day I die but if nobody is listening to it, why bother?

Yes, I am an artist but I also want to connect to an audience. There's nothing wrong with that.

So I stick my stuff out there even though there are glitches and pops and ideas that stopped too soon, or not soon enough. And if people like something enough to listen more than once, I'm on to something.

My three rules for writing a song are: 1) Find a groove.
                                                           2) Layer effectively.
                                                           3) Finish what you start.

The first one is both a lot more simple and a lot more complicated than it sounds. What is a groove? You know, I've never heard a technical definition of that but in context of how I learned about it, it's that time in a song where all the musicians are working together and the song itself gets bigger than the people playing it. A lot of people can write a competent song and play competently but when the song seems to suddenly become really big, and reach deep inside of you, that's the groove. With one exception (Harlem Digital Nocturnal) I haven't actually written anything that big but I keep looking for it. And I go with ideas that add to, not subtract from, the song.

Which brings us to the second rule.

There's an old rule about visual art (and to some extent it applies to music as well.) The measure of a really good artist is not only the space they fill but the space they leave blank. A lot of people, even some pretty big names, don't seem to know the value of space. But you especially notice this with rookie producers, they throw a riff in that sounds good in one particular spot so they assume that it will sound good throughout the entire song. It just isn't so. Sometimes one riff can carry a whole song, but sometimes you have to use the riff for a couple of measures then drop it as you layer in other instruments and riffs. I like a "wall of sound" as much as most people but not when it comes out as just a bunch of noise. A song should have melody, or at least a tune you can make out. That synth line you layered in after twelve measures may not sound as cool after thirty measures when you've added more synths, drums, guitar and maybe a tabla. Know when to leave well enough alone.

And now number three. A lot of people start something and then give up. I'm not really saying anything against them, at one point I was pretty bad about that. But I found that I wasn't happy leaving songs just hanging. Either I need to finish it or I need to erase it. And in music as much or more than other art, sometimes pursuing an idea you had that isn't working out leads to another idea that is better. Or you just make a mistake somewhere but it actually sounds really cool. Don't ever just write something off because you got frustrated. On the other hand, if you have a bunch of ideas that you can't seem to finish, maybe you need to face up to being a perfectionist and just get on with it. Tina Fey relates how Lorne Michaels used to say, "We don't go on because the show is ready, we go on because it's 11:35 on Saturday night." Just do it!

Which brings us back to the motto!

Well, it's late and I'm tired. If I remember, next time I'll write about my three goals. Until then...

Peace out and catch you later...

Yes, I Want To Eat Some Cake!

Title: Eat Some Cake

Recorded on: GarageBand

Instruments: Clean Electric (guitar sound)
                     70s Ballad Drums
                     Rock Kit
                     Upright Jazz Bass
                     Trumpet Section
                     Fingerstyle Electric Bass
                     Angelic Organ
                     Megaphone (for primary vocals)
                     Male Basic (for other vocals)

Once again, the instruments are all presets in GarageBand.

As I struggle to learn Ableton and therefor am not writing any of my new ideas down, I go back and revisit some of my older stuff. This one was deliberately written as a single and although I don't think it would sell well (and SoundCloud apparently agrees because in the month or so that it's been out it's only had 17 plays,) it's still fun. It was written as a tribute to the band Cake and I sometimes wonder what John McCrea and the boys would think if they heard it. Hopefully they would take it in the spirit which it was written in.

I'll be the first to admit that this song owes a lot to "Short Skirt/Long Jacket" even though that's not my favorite Cake song. Right down to the reference line to wanting a woman who is "sharp as a tack." I was trying to write an original song but I was listening to the "Comfort Eagle" disc a lot and also writing about my recently deceased wife. So there you go. In a way, this is the grown up version of "Short Skirt," being about what kind of woman I would want for a long-term relationship, unlike the twenty-something fantasies of Cake's song.

I went with an entire trumpet section instead of trying to emulate Vince DiFiore's single, clear trumpet because, well, I'm just not  that good yet as a producer or a keyboard player. And besides, for all the great things you can do on GarageBand, the truth is that a lot of their sounds suck. The loops tend to be good but the presets all by themselves can be really tinny, or sound canned.

I used the Megaphone preset for the primary vocals because it was the best way I could find to mimic John's monotone, disaffected vocals. I don't know how he does that. I'm not a singer (I don't actually sing on this song,) so I tried to fake it as best I could.

I played this song for Burch and he laughed out loud. It's good that someone got the joke, at least it means that I did what I set out to do. It's always a good feeling when someone reacts positively to your stuff!

I posted this one a while back, you can listen to it here:https://soundcloud.com/c-l-neal/eat-some-cake
. I hope you enjoy it!

Peace out, catch you later...