Process and ‘Dear Lucy’

One of the problems I have in making music on my own is simply getting started. I have experimented with different ways of generating ‘starter’ material for albums in the past with varying levels of success. I suppose this isn’t helped by making purely instrumental music, so there are no words to help out.

In the dim and distant past (when I mainly wrote straight to notation rather than a DAW) I used algorithmic methods for composition. Sometimes mathematical equations – if they produced anything useful – that I found in New Scientist magazine for instance. Later on I got bored with this and would just look for an interesting sound or short idea and work with that. None of those methods ever really seemed satisfactory though – despite my seemingly prolific output on bandcamp.

It always seemed I produced better pieces when working in collaboration with other people – in particular Helicopter Quartet (with Mike on guitar) works rather well and the synth (CSMA) and guitar (Glider Theory) work done with Stuart was OK. The latter could definitely benefit from a little more work, but it’s limited by how often we can meet up. It seems that having someone else respond to me in real time (and occasionally have them start the playing) makes things easier somehow.

On my last album, “Perceptions”, I tried to emulate this ‘duo’ system by laying down a backing track on my own and then working on top of it. I’m not sure how successful that was really. Some good things came out of it, but like a lot of amateurs I can get quite predictable when improvising to an empty room.

On my 2021 album “Felix Variations” I wrote a simple theme and then used characters to vary that theme in different ways – taking a leaf from the book of many classical composers before me. Musically I think this was the most successful thing I’d done to that date, and it produced several tracks that didn’t sound much like anything I’d done before (not, in itself, a bad thing). It’s also the only album of mine that has produced any PRS payments, though I’m fairly sure that’s a case of mistaken identity rather than an indication of music quality…

To the present day, and I’m still struggling to get started. On my laptop is a directory called ‘2023 album’ that contains four half-started tracks, all of which I think are terrible. So that went well.

Then I was asked to do the music for a film ‘Dear Lucifer’ by some theatre friends of mine. I had already filmed and edited the show so I was very familiar with the content. At first I was worried that my inability to start would hamper me, and I did throw quite a lot of ideas out, but eventually I took a rough idea from a TV show I thought was related (I’ll leave you to guess which – leave a comment), wrote a theme based on that and then got to work, and things quite nicely fell into place. I worked on ideas of musical ‘styles’ for the two main characters and varied those to follow the character arcs, and the main theme became a set of stings that followed the story arc.

Once I’d finished that I had quite a few ideas, almost none of which was longer than a minute. Sometimes it would be an introductory idea to set the mood for a scene or a gentle repetitive bed to give an idea of a ‘space’. It was then that I had the idea to take these stubs and turn them in to full-length pieces for an album. Not only would this give me a creative lift up, but it would also allow the music I was so pleased with be actually heard on its own rather than covered up by the dialogue – it turns out that playwrights (even when they are also musicians) are very keen on people hearing their words!

So that’s what happened. For this album I have taken several bits from the film music and developed them so they have a life of their own. Most of the time I have taken the initial idea and run with it, sometimes adding other bits in the middle or at the end. One piece, “Rainbows” is actually the whole track I did for the film. I recorded nearly 4 minutes for a particular scene because I wasn’t sure how much I would need (it was one of the first bits I did, before it was even fully cut), so that’s just the full un-cut version that I originally recorded.

One thing that this has done is that several of the tracks have a lot of ebow-ed guitar on them. That’s mainly because I was using it as a character reference and I liked those bit so much I turned all of them into a separate pieces. I hope that doesn’t make it too boring, but what goes around that guitar is different each time – because they were for different moods. See what you think.

There wasn’t much violin on the original soundtrack, apart from some octave violin masquerading as a cello and a very short part in the duet for ‘Day 7’, so I added quite a lot of normal (electric) violin to make it feel like one of ‘my’ albums.

It’s interesting to me that I spent most of a year (on and off – mostly ’off’) failing to get four tracks to a point where I didn’t hate them, yet in a couple of months I managed to produce music for a half hour film and turn that into over half an hour of music. I need to learn how to harness this process in future!

So, here is the album I came up with. The download also includes a copy of the ‘Suite’ from Dear Lucifer that contains (almost) only the bits that appeared in the film itself, glued together to make something of a whole. In general I think this is the best album I have yet done – by quite some margin. I hope that some people enjoy it.

Theory of Gliding

So, CSMA has been replaced by Glider Theory. I’ve moved from synths to
guitars – neither of which I’m especially good at playing if I’m
really honest.

CSMA and GT (as I’ll refer to Glider Theory from now on) were both
initiated by Stuart and he mostly ‘runs’ those projects – I’m really
just along for the ride.

GT started around lockdown when Stuart started going back to guitar
playing, having fairly recently bought a new Gibson Les Paul
gold-top. I think this re-kindled something in him as he’s now also back
in his 90s band playing guitar there.

For me I was never really a guitarist – even though I’ve always owned
guitars – even before I owned a violin I had a basic acoustic guitar
that my parents must have got for me. I did have some lessons at
primary school so could play the basic movable chords and had a
modicum of technique.

In my teens I had a Hondo Les Paul copy that I used to play with a
friend of mine. I have no recollection of what we played. It would
definitely have been terrible.

The first major thing I bought when I started my first job was a 70s
CBS-era Fender Stratocaster which I played in a sort-of folk-rock band, but as we never got any gigs I’m not sure that even counts.

CSMA was never good for a long-term project, at least as it stood. Playing
lots of large synths in my room was fine of course, but gigging that
was HARD work, and as we get older is now actually impossible. A guitar
and a few pedals, especially if one is a ‘guitar synth’ now that’s
much more portable.

So, Glider Theory seemed to fall out of that, the impossibility of
CSMA and Stuart’s rekindled love of guitar playing. For me, I was just
pulled along from one instrument I could barely play to another!

When we started CSMA I embarked on piano lessons to improve my playing – those stopped when my teacher retired and I never found another one I
liked. Maybe I should get some guitar lessons (probably online tbh)
this time.

Being a violinist (ish) I’ve always liked string instruments anyway so
that helped I suppose (and guitars are SO MUCH PRETTIER THAN SYNTHS)
and I have been using effect pedals with violin since I bought my
first electric in 2009, so that was a skill that was easily
transferrable. But also, being a violinist meant I was more
used to playing single-line leads or counterpoint, I’m not really good
at chords if I’m really honest.

So, it was Stuart who got me into synths, and Stuart that got me
(back) into guitars. I’m such a pushover; but it’s fun.

Finding “Your Sound”

When I first started playing electric violin I was convinced that my sound was “Bridge Violin + RE-20 delay”. Mostly, I suppose because that’s the violin I had and I almost never switched the RE-20 off. And this combination served me well for several years with We Sell Seashells/Catscans, early Helicopter Quartet and a Crippled Black Phoenix tour.

In late 2010s I did two things that bothered me in terms of what they might do to “my sound”. Firstly I replaced my pedalboard with the GT-1000 which, at the time, didn’t have a space echo emulation built-in. It did have a “Tape Echo” though so I used that. A little later I upgraded the Bridge to a six string Vector solid body violin. If Bridge+RE-20 was my sound then I’ve changed it almost totally!

Of course, no such thing happened. A musician’s “sound” comes from the way they play the instrument. Me playing Vector+GT-1000 was no less “me” than Bridge+RE-20 was. It’s easily possible to tell the difference between tracks done with the Bridge and tracks done with the Vector, but they still sound like me.

<apparent change of subject>

My first few solo albums were are bit (to put it mildly) of a mess. My “solo sound” was really just me mucking about and seeing if I could get something reasonably listenable. More recently (well, in the last 5 years) I’ve been trying to find “my solo sound” – not in terms of violin playing, but in terms of composition, as the tracks have become more carefully structured and … well … composed.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, this has caused a substantial (well, for me) drop in downloads from bandcamp, but I think it’s been a worthwhile exercise in finding what I want to be doing. I remember listening to Sarah Schonert’s excellent album “Penguin party” and thinking that THAT, is the sort of thing I wanted to be able to do. Not with singing, obviously, I can neither sing nor write lyrics, but something that’s equally well done, nicely structured, but with an ‘alternative’ core.

My latest album (yes, this is really just a plug) is definitely the nearest I’ve got to that. It’s full of my usual mournful violin, but I’ve added drums and guitars without making it too upbeat and jolly – which I seemed to do in Diversions. What’s on this album is, to some extent, now ’my compositional sound’ and it’s from here that I feel I can evolve as a composer/performer/multi-instrumentalist. That’s not to say I’m just going to clone it from now on, but that I have something concrete I can build on for future projects.

The message I take from this is – don’t go searching for your “sound” – just be yourself and it will come. In fact the more you search for it, the more it will elude you.

Drumming

For ages it seemed like I was almost against drumming in my music – it was all definitely in the “Ambient” (code for “no drums”) category. Bizarrely I did have a totally context-free drum fill in “An Evening with Ada” but that was it for ages. Until “Carriageworks” (2016), six years and 13 albums later, which had some badly programmed lo-fi drum machine things in it.

Since then, all the drums I’ve used (if at all) have been using patterns from my Montage synth or provided by the MT Power DrumKit plugin – which has groove & fill presets – on the basis of “that sounds OK, I’ll use it”. I’ve mostly avoided drum machine sequences and finger drumming as I never really “got” them for some reason, and the results were never satisfactory.

So, to the surprise of everyone, including me, I now have a semi-decent e-drum kit and am taking proper lessons (on the internet, but the tutor is very contactable and interactive, it’s not just a series of videos). What happened?

The answer is, I think, related to the subject of an earlier blog post, I’m getting more into ‘normal’ music by way of chords and structure, so adding drums to that seems a logical extension. And it’s not like I’ve never been interested in drumming – I have always admired the drumming on my favourite albums, especially Phil Collins and Gavin Harrison. The drums on Genesis & Porcupine Tree are more than just providing a groove, there’re an integral and important part of the way the music works.

The main spur was when a friend of mine ‘gave’ me an Alesis samplepad-pro which she no longer wanted. Using this device for rhythms made more sense to me than when trying to make them using sequencers or finger drumming. Here was a properly visceral way of making them. I’ve always liked the physicality of making music, coming from violin where the slightest adjustment of fingers or arms can affect the tone produced. I used the pads at CSMA gigs and on a CSMA video track.

After trying a cheap-and-cheerful electronic drum kit for a while I realised that something better was needed and so I recently decided to buy a Roland V-drum kit. I so enjoyed it that I signed up for lessons and seems to be making decent progress.

So in future there will probably be EVEN MORE drums on my albums, thus alienating almost everyone who ever liked my music (yes, both of them!). They have even infiltrated the new ‘ambient’ guitar duet Glider Theory that I do with Stuart, though I suspect that Helicopter Quartet will remain drum-free for the foreseeable future, so don’t worry about that.

Oh, and I still don’t really like drum-solos though 🙂

Me playing ‘real’ drums at Rock & Roll Circus

Waves plugins & Bitwig

I’m posting this as a service to the internet really.

I was having trouble using my Waves v11 plugins in Bitwig 4. The window was 3/4 red with the bottom left quarter showing the plugin graphic, and mouse clicks inside the plugin area didn’t match the display, effectively making them unusable.

Contacting BitWig support, apparently there are some graphics issues in V4 and Waves have/will-have a fix coming out – hopefully for the v11 plugins (but I’m not optimistic TBH).

In the meantime I found a workaround. If you install the free Waves StudioRack plugin, you can then insert any Waves plugin you like into that, and it will display correctly.

I hope this helps someone!

The small time

My albums are getting less popular – EVEN less popular! These things are all relative, of course; “The Way Through” scored twelve downloads and it’s been downhill all the way since then – this latest one has just two downloads.

This isn’t a whinge, I observe this more in amusement than annoyance – as I have said before I don’t do this for the money, or even adulation, and I think I understand what’s going on. But I’m not about to change.

My first few albums were pretty awful, in my opinion. I didn’t really know what I was doing in terms of production or even composition. I just threw a few ideas into the DAW and kept the ones that didn’t sound terrible – which was the point of RPM challenge of course, only I adopted it as normal workflow. Things started to get a little more organised after that, but they were all still very much improvised. 

“It’s not a Game” went quite well for downloads(ten). These tracks were basically layered improvisations, I would put down a synth track and then see what I thought went with it and what it seemed to need. “Diversions” was a halfway house between those earlier albums and the new one, a bit more structured and more upbeat, but still quite ‘loose’. “Felix Variations” is very structured and quite upbeat, it’s less relentlessly depressingly and there is more ‘music’ – in the sense of chords and, to some extent, tunes and beats.

I think process this really took off when I started taking piano lessons; I developed more of a sense of harmony and structure, and less tolerance of the very loose approach to improvisation I used to have. My teacher would be pretty strict on keeping my improvisations within the required bar lengths and also not too far away from the home key – all sensible things really, the first pretty much essential if you’re going to do this with a band. My ‘old’ approach to improvisation was very much, “pick up the violin (or whatever) and play some stuff, ideally inspired by whatever else is going on”. This caused me all sorts of odd problems when mixing/arranging (they were largely the same thing in those days) in trying to make things fit, especially as it was almost impossible to do retakes without getting something different.

For this album I’ve laid down structures quite strictly before working out what should go into them; this was helped, deliberately, by it being a “theme and variations” album so I had an actual melody or chord progression to work to.

In my opinion, this makes the new album is less “weird” than previous ones, though it has been still described as ‘very experimental’, so maybe that’s just my perception. I thought I was heading for the mainstream – especially with “Jasmine”/“J.M.” which I even released as as single! Obviously I’m kidding there but I’m certainly heading for less “just mad noises” and more “music” in what I do.

So the collapsed download figure is, I am assuming, the people who started following me for the mad noises and dark depressive textures not being into what I’m doing now, and that’s fine. It might be that I’ll attract a new audience for what I’m doing but I think that’s unlikely, I don’t really know anybody, and I’m famously atrocious at publicity (oxymoron alert). It could also be that I’m not, yet, good enough at what I’m doing that it’s comparable with actual good stuff in that arena. It’s not for me to judge, but I hope I will continue to improve anyway.

In the meantime I am resolutely heading in the right direction for the “No Audience Underground” as Rob Hayler would phrase it. Even if that’s not exactly what he means.

On video sync

I’m not one to use the phrase “blew my mind” but … no, I’m not going to use it today either. But I watched this video and was .. shocked.

INTRODUCTION

The precis of the video is that syncing music videos to the audio track is not as straightforward as it sounds. In an earlier video, John Hess shows that physchoacoustics tells us that the audio beat should precede the related video event by a few milliseconds. So video editors usually cut audio so it’s one frame AHEAD of the video event. BUT in this video he finds out that YouTube shifts the audio so that it’s one frame BEHIND the video!

So, does this mean we need to cut audio TWO frames before video? and what about Vimeo? And does H.264 vs ProRes make a difference here?

I wanted to find out.

METHOD

I made 3 videos in DaVinci Resolve using a simple drum beat and some still photos. One had the video cuts exactly on the beat, on had the cuts with the audio one frame behind the video, and another with the audio one frame ahead of the video. I then rendered these into both H.264 and ProRes and uploaded all of those to YouTube and Vimeo. I’m not going to link to these videos (sorry) because I screwed up a couple of things and that messes up the results if you don’t know what I did.

RESULTS

Before uploading I had a look at the files that came out of DaVinci Resolve – using Reaper. The synced ProRes file look perfectly synced, but in the H.264 file, the audo was about 40ms behind the video – about one frame at 25fps. I don’t think this is exclusively a Resolve issue as Hess noted similar results with Premiere Pro.

On YouTube that particular difference didn’t seem to manifest itself. But the files where the audio and video where exactly synced, the audio looks clearly delayed to my eyes. On Vimeo there was a very slight delay but only really visible if you’re looking for it.

With the files where the audio was ahead by one frame, the YouTube videos looked much better. There was still a slight delay in the audio but, like the Vimeo above, it was quite reasonable. On Vimeo the files looked precisely synced.

Now this might be down to me using 25fps, I do this because I’m in the UK and that’s the TV convention here but I wonder (and haven’t had time to test this) whether 30fps might be better (or worse) on YouTube, it being American.

CONCLUSION

For best sync on both YouTube and Vimeo, cut your video so that the audio is one frame ahead of the video. In other words, when cutting video to audio, make your video cuts one frame BEHIND the beat. On YouTube (at 25fps) it’ll look fine, and on Vimeo it’ll look great.

Of course cutting video to audio is a subjective process and sometimes you want to cut across the beat – be creative folks!

All tests done on a a 2019 i9 Macbook Pro running DaVinci Resolve Studio 16.2.6 on OS/X 10.15.6, with 350Mb/s internet connection, and watched using Mozilla Firefox 79 full-screen after waiting for all online processing to complete.

Introducing Synth Natter

Synth Natter is a YouTube podcast started by Stuart Russell in which one of us talks to someone interesting in the world of synthesizers. We’ve done 2 1/2 episodes now (the first one was just an intro) and have guests lined up for several more, so hopefully we can make a ‘go-er’ of it.

The idea is to interview someone new every second week and to get people from as wide a variety of the field as possible – the world of synths is very varied and there are people doing a huge variety of things with them.

Episode 0 was just a very short introduction from my studio where we chat about the point of the project and I give a quick tour of my studio synths.

In episode 1, Stuart interviewed Leah Kardos from Kingston University about her Stylophone Orchestra and her charge of the Visconti Studio (and its Mellotron!) as well as playing a couple of tracks of hers.

In episode 2 I chatted to Annie Jamieson (AKA Dr Sonic the Curator) from the Science and Media Museum in Bradford about the collection of fascinating synths and other audio equipment in the collection there.

The next one is on Saturday 22nd August where Stuart will be interviewing Matthew Bourne. We moved the show from Sunday to Saturday to avoid clashes with some other programmes (that I can’t remember the names of).

Subscribe to Stuart’s YouTube channel to keep informed about upcoming episodes.

New CSMA album

Yeah, you wait for ages for an album then three come along at once.

I’m joking of course, literally nobody is waiting for albums from me.

But I do have 3 main music projects and they all seem to have reached fruition at nearly the same time, so maybe I should apologise for the bunching of releases at least.

To clarify. my projects divide up as follows:

Helicopter Quartet: violin & synths (me) and Guitar (mike)

CSMA: Synths (me) and Synths (Stuart)

Chrissie: anything I feel like playing, but mostly violin & synths (me)

So, anyway, this came out today from Stuart & me, and has a large collection of synths on it. If you like synth music, you will hopefully find something to enjoy here. Some of it has been previewed on YouTube, but all the tracks have been carefully mixed and mastered so will be better than what you’ve already seen.

New solo album

Just after lockdown in the UK I decided to get on with making another solo album. I put down around 8 tracks in total and then realised they were all terrible. Well, maybe not actually terrible, but no different from anything I’d done before, and all a bit ‘static’. They didn’t GO anywhere. So I deleted them all and decided to start again with a different idea.

I saw lots of people releasing ‘lockdown’ or ‘isolation’ music in response to the pandemic – all isolated drones or dour themes and decided I didn’t want any more misery in my life at this time. Music can do many things and I’ve often used it as a release from bad situations – orchestra rehearsals have often provided an escape from reality for me, but these are not possible at the moment. My last couple of albums have built on bad personal situations, of course. But this time I wanted a release.

So “Diversions” is what it says it is, a diversion from the current isolations; music for it’s own sake. As such there a few slightly different styles here, there are a couple of ‘techno-type’ tracks and some with definite rock drum beats. I’m not claiming to be actually producing real techno or real rock music here, just appropriating styles for my own purposes really.

The worry with this sort of approach is that is not ‘what I normally do’ so the (few) people who actually like what I normally do won’t like this, and that it’s not sufficiently good techno or rock to be liked by afficionados of those genres. But that’s not really the point. I did this for me more than for anyone else, but if someone else does also like it then that’s lovely.

Of course, I’m not really thinking that this is so far different from anything I’ve done before that it’s TOTALLY new, it’s not. There are steps leading up to ideas I’ve used here all over the place, even in those last two or three albums of mine, and certainly on the CSMA albums (though I had to do my own rhythmic work on this one), so in a way it’s really just another step on the ladder of musical progression. The next album will probably build on things I did here. Probably.

So, here is “Diversions” – see what you think.