Lately, I’ve been reflecting on music, its making, its meaning, well, its magic. Before Covid (BC), I hadn’t fully appreciated the nuances and subtleties of “live” vs. “recorded” music. I remember Three Dog Night live in Chicago around 1969 performing in a cavernous warehouse, long hair twining through giant strobe light flashes, dancers alone, in pairs, and in clusters, obviously tripping on one thing or another. Try a Little Tenderness sounded like the recording, passionate, powerful, but it was bigger, not just louder; more raw, gutty, gritty, sweeter. It took until 2020 for me to plumb the depths of this insight as I pursued my second childhood dream of making a last stand with a band—hence, Euphemism’s Prism. Once the dam broke in my consciousness, all of these memories of bands and musicians came flooding in—audio memories of live bands (Beach Boys anyone?), old analog tapes of Small Circle of Friends (my band when I was 18), beach parties on Wednesday night at Pitstick’s lake featuring local Illinois bands. The only competition in my consciousness was audio memories of the radio in the car tuned to WLS in Chicago playing all the hits. That’s how I learned to sing as the corn fields rolled by.
It used to be that all music was of necessity at one point “live,” because technology was absent to document the physics of sound patterns for posterity, though people figured out how to record roadmaps to the treasure using notes, flats, sharps, etc. Then came wax and needles, reels and tapes, microphones and pickups—still dependent on “live” performance by lips and fingers and feet at the point of origin. Nowadays not so much. I know I know little about digitally born music, Barry-in-a-box as my drummer friend Barry calls electronic drum machines, but I’m skittish. I’m no Luddite, no naysayer to artificial creativity, nor am I drawn to the mystical, but I wonder what digital origin does to the existential magic of “live” music originating with lips and fingers, breath and body, heart and I’ll say “soul.” Digital does not mean boring or repetitive. Maybe I just like to perform.
During 2020 I holed up in my bedroom studio and made music alone for almost a year, almost seven days a week, hour after hour after hour. I became a band. My iPad became my friend. I laid down drum tracks using a touch drummer, bought a 24 key keyboard and made violins and horns sing in the background, my wife (a superb bassist) recorded bass tracks for certain projects (the same parts she played when we performed together “live”), and I built backing tracks complete with vocal harmonies to back me up for live performances as Euphemism’s Prism. My process for recording these tracks, intended for “live” performance, was not to mix and master a finished project. Instead, I wanted to breath life into them. So to the degree possible all of EP’s songs performed live (breath and body) are built on tracks recorded live and intended for live enjoyment.
I’ve been recording original music, and more recently covers, since I retired, and have come to appreciate the accidents I find in my tracks that turn into focus points, hooks, in my final masters. I don’t perform live any more, my fingers are not fleet enough, nor my memory accurate enough, to entertain others in real time. I find getting immersed in an a few hundred guitar and VOX takes intoxicating, and the results often surprising, even to myself. Now I can share these “happy accidents” with the world online. I guess I’m more of an audio engineer than a musician, but I don’t have to carry bail money for the drummer these days, and I can leave a project for weeks when I am engaged with family and friends, and the music is patiently waiting for my return.
Words like “intoxicating” and “immersed” underscore the power of music to take over consciousness and make us feel joy, Randy. I feel your pain about fleet fingers failing and memory demands less easy to meet during the act of making music on the spot. One of the benefits of making backing tracks for live performance is the option to re-record tracks or sections of tracks to correct mistakes. In that sense my live performances are much like your recorded performances. Euphemism’s Prism is truly hybrid. Thanks for your insights.
You know, I’ve been thinking about “happy accidents” taking place in small bits of hundreds of tracks in take folders, magical accidents you have to find through comparing takes and knitting together one composite track. Could you comment further on this angle? I see now that my immediate thought of redoing whole sections to ‘correct mistakes’ is just the opposite of “happy accidents.” A happy accident is a good thing. A mistake not so much. You’re actually talking about a composing process, not an editing process, right?
When I travel I like to take a project along to mix so the location adds to the texture of the final master. I used to take a travel guitar and a minimal recording kit to add new tracks but the weight and security complicated getting from one place to another.
Now I prepare by recording a few dozen takes for each instrument and VOX track and resist doing any mixing until I’m on the road with my wife. With a simple set of ear buds I can then begin to discover the hidden accidents that I recorded long before I left.
It is a little like audio archeology, digging around in the collection of sounds, all aligned for key and tempo of course, but the tracks vary a little bit, like layers of dirt containing cultural artifacts from long ago.
I sometimes find two guitar tracks slightly off key because as I record for several hours, between retunings, the strings heat up from my hands and the sun coming into my studio, and the notes become a little flat. When I combine two takes the same notes are slightly off so they create just a bit of dissonance, not intended, but there to discover. I sometime find an unexpected VOX harmony that I exploit, and sometimes rerecord with emphasis the new harmony.
This is what happens with live performance as well, which is what makes live special, but I discover these happy accidents in my takes, and preserve them in my final mix. Most people won’t notice these subtle elements in my recording, but I do every time I hear the song played on Spotify or SoundCloud. I do think that these bruises and imperfections bring life to my final masters.