Tunes and Tones

Lately, I've been trying a new approach to songwriting. I need one. Since completing the four compositions that composed a portion of my college thesis, I've had much less love for the songwriting process. I haven't ever really gotten the hang of creating for the purposes of academic progress. I think even my professors recognize the idiocy of judging a creative piece in such a way, but they're prisoners of accredition. On top of that, I've developed a real love for the surprises inherent in jamming. Composing something concrete is just not as enticing as experiencing something fluid.

But I have no jamming partners at the moment. Luckily, I can still jam with myself. My chops are tight enough at this point that I can bang out a simple riff on my MIDI keyboard in one or two takes, and then the layering process begins. Reason software is truly amazing: a drum machine, loop player, and a synthesizer. Sadly, I'm still using v2.5, so my capacity to properly mix and EQ tracks is sonically limited, but it's better than nothing.

So I just play stuff out, record it, and see what happens next. Not much structure, it's very free form, which poses a new set of challenges. The phrasings occur in groups of five, one, or nine measures instead of four. Moods and modes change dramatically over the course of a minute. My reluctance to do multiple takes and rely on the software's capacity to 'fix' slight rhythmic discrepencies gives the whole thing a rougher, sloppier, more organic feel. Which I like, it reminds me of Isaac Brock drunkenly stumbling through his riffs in the earlier Modest Mouse albums. Why should it be perfect? I'll always prefer the swing of a live drummer to the geometric metronome of a drum loop. The current standard for popular music is immaculate bordering on the obsessive compulsive. After an hour or two of listening to record label funded studio gloss, my ears crave the sound of an acid-tweaked Jimi Hendrix touching his guitar in inappropriate places.

She sounds like she likes it.

And on that screaming, moaning, fuzzed up, tweaked out note, I have to give modern studio work props for one thing: timbre. Timbre is no longer the neglected younger brother of the holy musical trifecta, pushed off to one side in favor of the more easily manipulated melody and rhythm. But now, with VST plug-ins, digital effects racks, and boutique stompboxes, timbre is not simply tolerated but sculpted. A whole menagerie of sounds never before available to the ear are now at the disposal of anyone ready to drop a few hundred dollars on the industry's latest toys. NEW timbres, people! There aren't new notes! There aren't new time signatures! But in the past fifty years, an arsenal of new methods of timbre generation have arisen. The technology has come far enough along in the past few decades that one can mold a simple sine wave into the sound of a clinking piano key or a blaring trumpet. Sure, the end result may sound varying degrees of synthetic, but that it can be done at all is staggering once one pauses to consider it.

Billy Howerdel, the deranged sonic genius behind the gorgeous guitar tones of A Perfect Circle, mentioned in an interview that he spent hours and hours tweaking the reverb on one of his tracks. One track. Of one song. Hours. He finally had to be dragged away from the computer. As a lifelong reverb junkie, I can relate. I get so easily lost in crafting tones that I need to set boundaries for myself (“fifteen more minutes and then you HAVE to stop”). Otherwise I'd never finish anything. In Howerdel's case, the end result is the audio equivalent of ambrosia. The guitars on Mer De Noms sound at one moment like the mating calls of primordial lizards (The Hollow), and a choir of cybernetic angels (Magdelena) the next.

Simple metaphors don't do these sounds justice, especially given the synaesthetic manner in which my mind registers timbre. While tremelo and delay sometimes translate visually for me (not in any dramatic way, of course, I don't see colors or anything), distortion registers as tactile mouth sensations. I'm not alone in this; ever wonder why guitar affecionados describe tones as crunchy and creamy? They're not referring to Clapton. Some tones, such as Howerdel's, can even cause me to salivate. I feel rhythm in my pelvis, melody in my heart, and timbre on my tongue.