Great day. I listened to the whole of The Myth of Sisyphus last night and made a list of changes. I rose and 7am and got to work, it's a good job I can work with headphones.
The key parts were changes to Nick Drake and We Shall See. These have a similar structure of verse, verse, piano solo and verse. The solo was a bit aimless and needed more focus and substance. I started with We Shall See and added some child laughs and birdsong (originally trying to record some this morning, which would have worked if it wasn't so windy, the birds were performing well!) This instantly added feeling and atmosphere; it adds image. Then I edited the music itself, cutting out a tiny section of just a few seconds, and added more silence which flips from sun into rain at the key moment. I used my new Grey Wave plug in to create some good artificial thunder. In the end the central part of the song has gone from the worst to the best part.
Next, I extended the intro and did some tweaking to the mixing of The Invisible Man. I noticed a bug in Prometheus regarding the timing calculations, so fixed that too.
The Light Blue Evening. I've played with this song so much over the years (5? 10?) since I wrote it, I keep thinking that backing vocals would help, but I've tried many and nothing quite works. In the end I recorded some new ones, tuning these down by 3 semitones, then tuning them back up - this adds a new timbre to the voice. It's a bit like the trick I used for the China Syndrome video years ago. I think Muff Winwood used it for the backing vocals to Sparks' Equator.
Finally, Nick Drake, which has a similar extended solo to We shall See. I wrote some words for it and spoke these over the top. I had in mind the effect of the speech in Kate Bush's The Ninth Wave (Jig of Life, I think). The words fitted remarkably well with the pace of the music.
Drake Poem
I float through fields
of autumn corn
heavy with the dust of dusk
and falling feathers,
heavy with the bells of dew
sweet, like the first star,
like the last ring on the pool
as it collapses to return
distorted, a gift
for our dreams.
The 'bell' references the pub in Nick Drake's village but the words are generally about setting the scene of warm stagnation and peace that pervades the song proper; there's nothing explicit in the words but it's emotionally obvious, visually obvious on one level, that the song is depicting the static scene of death, flecks of dust in the harp of sun-rays.
I made a few more program changes then and have written words to two more songs. I had the idea of setting Style Guru aside and using a new song in that E.P. (still unsure of the title), partly because Style is such a strong song, but also because I have an old and simple electronic dance song that might fit there. I'll have to produce it all from scratch. I feel as though I could work at this pace and ability all year, if not grow still.
I was reminded today why no singer should ever use 'auto-tune' (I've certainly never used it and never will, I don't have any equipment that can even do it). There are three key reasons:
1. It sounds ugly. I hate the sound of it and can't stand to listen to it or even real vocals that sound auto-tuned like Michael Buble's mahogany drones. A vocoder, by comparison, sounds beautiful. Those E.L.O. tracks or the Beethoven music from Clockwork Orange is truly otherworldly and magnificent.
2. The point of music is emotional expression, direct human to human transmission, and a recording artist needs to know what damages this communication and what doesn't. Every effect or recording process damages the original, raw, source material and emotion. The goal of the recording artist is to minimise this entropic loss, so effects need to be kept to the minimum needed to convey the intended feeling. The voice is the most expressive instrument of all, we are genetically programmed to respond to it; we make other instruments in a desperate attempt to create a voice, so vocals should be left as raw as possible, there is no such thing as inaccuracy of expression. There is an obvious caveat, that being a good singer means singing in tune if needed; but if missed, no machine can 'fix' it without harming the emotion - an unfixed but naturally in tune version of the vocal will always be better.
3. Anyone who calls themself a singer is in competition with every singer; every singer alive and even dead ones nowadays. Those who compete must strive to be the best; not merely 'good enough', but better than everyone, and better than the best possible. Of course the best would never use or need auto-tuning. It would be shameful for the best to even lower themselves to need it. Would a champion cyclist use training wheels? It would be inefficient. The point of being the best is that you don't need them. I heard that 90% of recording artists use auto-tune, so by not doing so you leap from average to the top 10% in one instant.
There is one reason to use it though; like an audio effect, for the sound quality. You might want that specific sound, like Daft Punk did, or Jean-Michel Jarre did in Metamorphosis, or well, like Cher (or Kate Bush when she painfully, heartbreakingly, ruined her old song Deeper Understanding by making a new version). Strange and interesting effects are part of the palette of creation for a producer, nothing should be ruled out. I've said effects can destroy emotion, yes, but they can create new ones too; aesthetics is the balance between order and chaos and destruction is a necessary tool for this. Guitar distortion is destruction, but it sounds pretty.
