The album Disarm by She Makes War is out now

A lovely coincidence of information occurred today that give me a chance to beat a drum for using good studios to record your music, if at all possible, and to do this sensibly by preparing thoroughly for the recording sessions.

The first element is a great blogpost from warriorgirl announcing the release of the She Makes War album Disarm. Before going any further you can (and should) buy the album here because it’s great. In the post she shares her thoughts on making an album as an independent artist including the decision to spend money on making the album in a studio rather than recording at home.

… I wanted to show people that indie artists could make a product with a quality of sound and aesthetics on a level with or better than those with label backing, at a fraction of the cost. By being prepared for the recording sessions (the songs were all written and arranged) and getting down to work in the studio rather than wasting time playing pool and drinking coffee you can get a professional sounding album made for a reasonable sum of money, and I’m happy I chose to work with Myles rather than added the pressure to become a good quality engineer to my already full plate.

There are a couple of things here that I want to heartily endorse,

1. Sticking to what you are best at and allowing someone who is already a good quality engineer to handle the recording process is a great idea
2. If you prepare well making sure that all the writing, arranging and practicing is done before you start recording you can keep the costs pretty low

The most famous example of excellent preparation creating an efficient recording process is probably Trout Mask Replica with the reputed recording of 20 instrumental tracks in a single six-hour session with the vocals recorded over the next few days. The Magic Band spent eight months rehearsing for the recording sessions in an environment described as Manson-esque.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend that as a healthy working practice but the results are stunningly delivered performances of complex nuanced music. The key point is only that with great preparation you can keep your recording time down to a minimum and that can save a lot of money.

The second element that brought all this to mind was getting my grubby hands/ears on a recording of the Steve Albini produced version of Cheap Trick’s In Color. The band were evidently not happy with the Tom Werman produced original version and had a few days spare while working with Steve Albini on a project for SubPop in 2004 so, as you do they decided to re-record their second studio album.

I don’t know how long a few days is, but it seems that they ran out of time to add finishing touches like high vocal harmonies, so I’m reasonably sure it wasn’t a long time. The recording sounds incredibly tight to me and to get it done in “a few days” is deeply impressive.

Of course they were doing this 20 years after the original recording but they had recorded 12 other studio albums in the meantime and been gigging  like bandits, so it’s not like they had nothing to do but play Downed over and over again. It’s probably the gigging that allowed them to work so efficiently. Most of the songs on In Color became favourites of their live shows particularly after the at Budokan live album.

I think home recording setups are great places to work on the writing and arrangements for an album. You have the chance to try out all sorts of approaches to the songs with the only cost being your own time before venturing into the studio and starting the clock. If you are confident with editing digital audio it may even be worth taking your tracks back to your studio to edit into shape before returning to the studio to mix ready for mastering.

So thanks to warriorgirl for showing that you can make great music (that you can and should buy here) on a sensible budget and to whoever leaked the as yet unreleased Albini version of In Color for letting me hear the fruits of 20 years of gigging.

The image she makes war by mädchenkrawall is used under a Creative Commons license

It can all become a blur very quickly

Metaphors are a crucial part of how we relate to the digital world. They are crucial in one sense as the low-level languages that computers use are incomprehensible to humans. All our spangly, shiny Powerpoint presentations and music libraries are streams of hexidecimal or binary digits to our processors and disk drives. Unless you’re very special these low-level digital streams are gobbledygook and even if you are special enough to make sense of them they’re certainly not anything like the files most of us expect to see or listen to.

With the invention of the graphical user interface (GUI) metaphor became a much more explicit part of our computing experience. A host of analogies were launched upon us in a rush, windows, scrolling, dragging, trash and even document. These terms were needed to help us cope with this new world and GUIs were crucial in the spread of computing from the lab to the wider world.

While these metaphors were initially liberating they have become limiting particularly as digital information weaves itself into increasingly intricate patterns in our lives. Venkatesh Rao from the Xerox Innovation Group has written an interesting post on Mashable on this issue, specifically how the metaphors that served us well in the past now limit us.

Somewhere to start from

Back in the ancient days of the ‘80s, when Apple launched the GUI, personal computers were used mostly as analogues of old tools. We typed letters and tabulated spreadsheets. Perhaps this was enough of a revolution to take on board in on bite. It certainly was a revolution. Word processing made it possible to efficiently edit existing documents in a way that was impossible a few years earlier. They also made collaboration possible in new ways. What would have been accomplished by a trail of arcane editorial notation and another trip to the typing pool could now be completed in a fraction of the time.

It is in the realm of word processing that the first big metaphor shear occurs. In his wonderful book In the Beginning was the Command Line Neal Stephenson examines the term document. As a writer he has a particular attachment to his work and the sense of document meaning to record permanently is important to him. Digital files are not necessarily permanent though. Strings of digits captured as electromagnetic marks on a disk are subject to all sorts of perils and if one crucial area of the disk, an address block for example, is damaged the whole file can be cease to exist.

In this example the metaphor encourages us to imbue the digital object with qualities is doesn’t have, permanence, but increasingly the metaphors we habitually employ in attempt to describe our digital world limit us. The computers we have in our homes now are incredibly powerful and their potential is massive. We limit ourselves through the mental models we have constructed to understand them. This is particularly evident as we struggle to understand the potential of social media.

What is Twitter?

The question of what is Twitter gets people reaching for metaphor in an instant. It’s a conversation, a party or a stream depending on who you talk to, but all of these descriptions are like the story of the blind men and the elephant as they only tell part of the story. We have created a world where our old models are less and less relevant. In fact they may even be damaging or at least limiting to the potential of our new media.

To see Twitter as a conversation deemphasises the broadcast potential of the medium and the party metaphor struggles with the complexity of how different friend sets affect the perception of the information shared. The stream metaphor seems to be the best fit. Twitter is a fluxional medium. You can’t visit the same Twitter twice for it is not the same Twitter and you are not the same man. Streams are fairly homogenous entities though and once you get close Twitter is far from homogenous. There are lots of chunks of different kinds of information in that stream.

Media like Twitter are curious in that they seem to be both high and low definition. They demand attention by a pageant of information (like a film) but they also require conscious participation to extract value (like a comic book). The volume of information is enormous but the character limit on individual posts restricts the amount of information an individual message can contain. Films and comic books used to be very different media but now we have a medium that contains elements of both experiences our mental models are being stretched.

So what’s the problem?

The problem with forcing flawed models on how we think of social media and digital information in general is that we limit the scope of how we can use the tool with the model. If Twitter is seen a conversational medium then that metaphor shades our perception of what the platform is for and the individual voice is seen as more valuable than the aggregate of the information broadcast. This isn’t in itself bad but limits in the scope of our thoughts are powerful.

Google has announced it is to stop developing Wave. This was an attempt to create a collaborative communication platform. To risk a metaphor, a modern take on email using the technology available now rather than sticking to the protocols and concepts invented in 1965.

Wave floundered for many reasons and one was that email has an incredibly powerful hold over how we think about online communication. Wave was collaborative and fluxional whereas email narrowcasts discrete slices of information with clear authorship and date of creation. I wonder if the concept of a mutable, participatory and plastic medium was just too far from the concept of mail to easily absorb.

As the possibilities of how we can distribute and structure data expand our models of thinking about what we are doing will become increasingly important. This is not an issue that will pass with time either. There are youngsters who have never used a typewriter who spend huge amounts of their life typing using a keyboard layout invented to stop mechanical machines from jamming.

The image Light Trails on the Square by Rich Anderson is used under a Creative Commons license

It still works

There is an easy tendency in most disciplines to fetishise the state of the art tools, endowing them with the magical power to make your work (whatever it is) wonderful. Tools are important. If you create things with them and spend a lot of time using them the minutiae of their good and bad points magnify in your mind, but the quality of your work has little to do with the quality of the tools you use.

There is an obvious caveat that the technical quality is defined by the limits of the tool. You can’t shoot HD video on a 1.2 megapixel kids camera, but you can make a good video with one.

There’s a video of Dave Grohl playing on a child’s drum kit after signing it for some promo shindig and the drum kit is a toy but he makes music with it. Sure if he was playing a Drum Workshop custom shiny wonderkit it would sound better, but you can make music on a child’s toy.

Of course it helps if you’re great at your discipline and there is a threshold of quality that helps in learning a skill. It is a lot easier to learn to play guitar on an instrument that stays in tune and you’re not going to play Mendelssohn’s Spinning Song at much of a tempo on a piano with sticking keys but you can make music on poor instruments.

Moaning about the tools seems to get louder the better the tools get. Well, perhaps until you have the absolute state of the art and there really is nowhere to go, but that might be an imaginary land as there’s always something to improve even if it’s your chair or the paint on the walls. Yearning for, faster computers, bigger monitors, more plugins, better lenses, or whatever it is that sticks in your craw that you don’t have is just getting in the way of doing whatever it is you do.

I would love to have an orchestra ready to play every little theme that pops into my head or a DigiBeta camera shoot a film with, but the lack of these things shouldn’t stop me making music or making a film. I might make something different but I can still make things perhaps even wonderful things. The constraints of lower quality resources can even be a boon. It can make you think hard about what it is you want to say and value what you create all the more.

I am as guilty of this as the next person, perhaps more (I want some new monitors for my studio) than most, but the tools have never been the reason I haven’t made something. There was always a way to record sounds or capture images. The perceived lack was just a way to excuse inactivity. As soon as I really had something to say I could find a way to make what I wanted to.

This is the core of the issue for me. It’s about what you want to say not what you say it with. The ingenuity required to overcome obstacles is fired by the desire to articulate something. It isn’t about what you use to say it with. It is about what you have to say.

The image wrench rust by Hernan Vargas is used under a Creative Commons license