Music

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.

Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy

I have posted previously on the subject of songwriting, in the course of which ramblings I have made reference to my ‘home studio’. There was a point at which this facility took the form of a separate room filled with an accumulation of arcane items of musical and recording equipment acquired over several decades. All that remains now is a single keyboard and a computer tucked away in the corner of a bedroom – though you will not be surprised to hear that in power and capability this humble setup outperforms its predecessors many times over.

The keyboard – the only item that remains from the studio’s previous incarnation – is the venerable and iconic Korg M1, one of the very first Music Workstations. Featuring the now almost ubiquitous ‘sampling and synthesis’ sound generation technique to create a high quality audio palette the likes of which had not previously been heard, the Korg M1 was only produced for a 6 year period from 1988 to 1994, but examples of the breed can still be seen – and heard – in use throughout the music business. In one of those ‘eureka’ moments I heard a demo sequence being played on one of these beasts in a music shop one day in the summer of 1988. I had to have one!

By modern standards – of course – the M1 seems somewhat crude and limited. It could, for example, play only 16 concurrent notes – and considerably less if these featured layered or complex sounds. I now use the M1 purely as a keyboard controller to input notes to the computer. The sounds themselves live on, however, since both the M1 and its successor – the Korg Wavestation – along with all of the additional sounds originally found on extension cards, are available as a ‘virtual instrument’ software package for the computer.

The computer itself is the motivation for this post – or to be more accurate, the software that runs on it is such. Back in the 1970s when I was playing in bands the only way to create a permanent record of a song was to hire a studio – by the hour – for as long as it took to get the piece down on tape. As we had very little money and studio time was not cheap we became accustomed to working quickly and dirtily. When the first relatively inexpensive 4 track cassette recorder – the Portastudio – became available in 1979 I was one of the first in the queue. This little device revolutionised home recording and – though the quality was average at best and deteriorated rapidly if tracks were ‘bounced down’ to create more space – I used it extensively for the next two decades.

When, however – following the dictat of Moore’s Law – home computers finally became powerful enough to handle digital recording I quite naturally hurried to investigate the emerging software packages that would turn the machine into a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). Over the years since I have tried most of the leading contenders but was not – until relatively recently – content that I had found a package that had been truly designed with the musician in mind rather than the computer geek! The solution on which I finally settled in 2007 – Tracktion – has one of the simplest and most intuitive interfaces I have encountered, based on a workflow that mirrors the way that I record music.

Almost inevitably things turned out not to be quite as straightforward as I would have hoped.

Tracktion was designed and created by an English developer, but had been taken up and marketed by a large American musical equipment manufacturer. Around the time that I purchased my copy this manufacturer lost interest in the product, suspended further development and stopped fixing bugs and responding to customer support requests. The software still worked – of course – but would clearly become more and more outdated as time passed. Faced with the prospect of having to start all over again – and probably of having to settle for something I considered inferior – I decided to grit my teeth and to stick with the package anyway. Regardless of these limitations the software has since served me well.

I don’t know what induced me, then – just the other day – to browse the InterWebNet for titbits on my favourite music production software, but I was in for a most pleasant surprise. The original developer- Julian Storer – had set up a new company, purchased back the rights to his creation and re-commenced development work after a 6 year lull. Hooray! Naturally I immediately upgraded my setup to the new version.

This news fills me with a warm glow and I wish the company every success. It is good to have them back.

Every so often I feel the urge to listen to some ‘new’ music.

One of the drawbacks of growing older – at least where listening to ‘popular’ music is concerned – is that it is all too easy to lose touch with recent trends, persisting instead with that which one already knows. The reasons for this are pretty obvious. Much new music is aimed at the young – both in terms of content and in the way it is marketed. This should come as no surprise of course, since the young comprise the main market for it, but the result can be that the rest of us – and our money – are left out in the cold.

We make up for it in many cases by buying new versions (or just new copies) of the music that we listened to in our own youth. Many of us believe in any case that the music scene has steadily gone downhill since whenever that was, and that what remains is but a pale shadow of those glory years. Much recent music seems artificial – driven by the wants of TV ‘talent’ shows – and the rest has steadily become more and more self-referential (pop indeed eating itself) as the same pool of material is repeatedly re-mined, re-sampled and re-used in ever more dilute proportions. It is worryingly difficult to distinguish much sign of the creativity and imagination that pervaded the music of my youth – though it is, of course, pretty difficult to see anything at all through these rose-tinted shades!

I am – naturally – making far too much of this. There is plenty of interesting music around, but with the decline of the once accepted methods of production and dissemination – record companies, record stores, radio playlists and so forth – and the rise of the InterWebNet as a tool for publishing, acquisition and the discovery of music, it is surely much less likely that any gems out there would these days be discovered by chance.

I used to listen to music on the radio a great deal. I no longer do so, as I find most of the UK music stations pretty intolerable. I fear I have reached the age when I prefer to listen to the spoken word – or at least I prefer to listen to the BBC’s radio 4 – which is much the same thing. Oddly I find music radio in Canada to be considerably more agreeable. There seems to be less ‘ghettoisation’ of music into apparently irreconcilably disconnected genres.

Still – as I said at the very top – I felt the need to discover something with which I was not yet familiar. I knew the broad type of music that I hoped to find and – armed with a couple of suitable examples from my existing catalog – I ventured into the digital world. Now – this is something that the InterWebNet is good at, though one has (quite rightly) to work pretty hard to get the desired results. What did we do in the days before we could ask the oracle questions such as “What else is a bit like this, that I might like”?

“Cut the crap”, you say “and just tell us what you found!” Now, now – don’t be impatient…

OK – ladies and gentlemen – I give to you – the ‘Poets of the Fall’.

This Finnish band (yes, really!) – who are pretty much unknown in the UK and Canada as far as I can tell – create a splendidly melodic blend of old and new. They seem to be big in Germany and India (!) where they tour extensively, but they don’t appear as yet to have played in the UK and they have certainly not made it to Canada.

I like them. They may not be your bag, but why not give them a listen? Here are some clips:

‘Late Goodbye’

‘Sleep‘

‘Heal my Wounds’

Enjoy!