matt mullenweg
using technology and still being jazzy
There have been a lot of questions lately about jazz, technology, composing, performing and what it takes (and means) to create music in this day and age. The thoughts and questions in this post highlight a few interesting tidbits on music composition & production:
nothing new: ‘recorded’ jazz is much different than ‘live’ jazz.
Many jazz musicians today only record a live performance, it makes sense – the feeling of a performance is best suited on a stage in front of an audience. The reasoning is simple: there is a special energy on stage.
There is also another kind of energy that exists within a studio. Instrumentalists spend years developing a ‘sound’ on their instrument, but many seem to only spend hours when it comes to the sound of their music on album. Don’t these musicians realize that the studio is also an instrument?
The recording studio is, of course an artificial environment. Yet because it is artificial certain rules can be broken. Those musicians who ‘break the rules’ creatively gain an entirely new canvas on which to paint their music.
The studio is a place where time, space, pitch and timbre can be manipulated:
It’s a place where you can compose using sounds.
Classical music recordings undergo hundreds of tweaks to ensure the most flawless, virtuosic performance possible. Jazz dogma states that this is a sin punishable by death, yet musicians have been utilizing current technology to broaden the scope of their music for centuries – example: harpsichord -> piano. I think people get scared of the word “edit”.
You can still be improvisatory, you can still be creative and compositional – the studio is just like any other instrument, all it needs is practice.
thoughts on ‘doing it live’
If the studio becomes your instrument, you too can use it live.
I had an email conversation not long ago when someone asked me about doing some of my studio stuff live, I confessed it was a topic that I have spent great deal of time contemplating but have not spent much time perfecting. There are many good ways of incorporating audio production live, and below are a few common pitfalls:
Death by vamps:
If you want ‘background tracks’ on stage, the trick is not to generate loopy material but to create loads of composed sounds & forms that can develop and be interactive, the goal here is avoiding the trap of over-repetition. If the musicians are playing to a click, the flavor of live spontaneity can go out the window very quickly. However, if you give musicians something they can relate to, they will easily vibe to it: Instead of click-based tracks, make whole parts for a band to play around with.
Death by quantization:
You can ‘program’ live-sounding bits and bites using real sounds, with a real, human rhythmic feel. Jazz has always been about the groove, feeling time, feeling swing – you can actually make a computer groove, but it takes a helluva lot more thought and effort than a few quantization settings – in fact, quantization can be quite musically devastating by itself.
Instead, try sampling yourself.
To do all these sorts of things live, there has to be a strong focus on the composed/designed material. Even the best electronic musicians start with ideas they have already spent much time polishing. Improvisation will ensure if you build libraries of mini-forms and/or sounds that you can freely execute and arrange on-the-fly. It’s just like building your own vocabulary.
