Blog labels for home recording, links, quotes, etc.

Since this blog seems to be spreading out in several new directions, I'm starting to use blog labels that allow you to look up specific types of posts. Here are the labels I'm using:

Quote--for artist quotes, from my interview archive.
Link--cool sites and Web resources for musicians and music lovers.
Home recording--thoughts and advice, both practical and philosophical, on recording music at home.
JPR music--what's happening in Pepperland with my own music.
Musing--random thoughts on the music life.

Click on a label and you'll see all related posts (at least the relatively recent ones that I've labeled). Check it out.
JPR

Wallace Stegner on truth vs. fiction

"You break experience up into pieces, and you put them together in different combinations, new combinations, and some are real and some are not, some are documentary and some are imagined.... It takes a pedestrian and literal mind to be worried about which is true and which is not true. It's all of it not true, and it's all of it true."

From an interview with Stegner by Richard Etulain, quoted in the afterword to Stegner's novel Crossing to Safety. I don't normally quote fiction writers in this blog, but his words are equally valid for songwriters. As discussed in my book The Complete Singer-Songwriter, the line between reality and fiction is often blurry in great songs--what matters is the deeper emotional truth.

Spins: Rani Arbo & Daisy Mayhem, Big Old Life

This great string band is back with more groove-oriented roots music, from gospel to old-time, bluegrass to swing. A few years back Rani was diagnosed with cancer, just after giving birth to her first child, and their new music is all about finding joy in hard times. (She's recovered, and the band is on the circuit this summer.) The title track is just classic--check it out on their MySpace page.

A few years back, the band was featured in my All Things Considered story about a music hall in Indiana Amish country. Listen to the story at NPR's site.

Home studio log: recording with click tracks and loops

I've started work on the new CD, tentatively titled Humming My Way Back Home. Wrestling with lots of philosophical and pragmatic issues down in my home studio. I'll be posting some thoughts about the process over the coming months, especially for the benefit of other home recording musicians.

First of all, I hate the damn click. That machine sound is, to my ears, so anti-musical and anti-groove... But there are plenty of practical advantages to having a steady time reference in a song, especially for editing. So I'm trying an alternate approach: using percussion loops.

Here's how it's going so far: I set the meter and tempo in Pro Tools, start up a MIDI click, and then record a little minimalist percussion part along with the click--something very basic and unobtrusive that fits behind the whole song. For instance, last night I did a four-bar groove with sticks on a pillow (for a sorta kick drum sound) and a tambourine. This percussion part will obviously be replaced later.... Then I shut off the click and record the basic tracks (guitar, voice, etc.) over the percussion loop.

Advantages? The loop is custom made for the song, and it's a basic groove rather than a mechanical click. And I have a steady tempo/measure reference that'll come in very handy later on.

Disadvantages? I'm still playing to mechanized time rather than letting the tempo breathe...

I'd love to hear others' thoughts on this.

Onward,
JPR

Miles Davis and me

Got a nice bit of comic relief from my computer the other day.

I popped in a CD-R--a live recording of me performing solo, doing a mixture of my own songs with tunes by Tom Waits, the Dead, Chris Whitley, etc. My music player connected to the Gracenote database to figure out what CD it was, and a window popped up asking me whether this was:

Miles Davis, Another Bitches Brew (English)

or

Lisoir / Meta-Extase/Meta-Relaxation (French)

So apparently my music resembles either cutting-edge jazz-rock fusion or some sort of French new age therapy. That gives me something to ponder as I start working on the next CD project... Thanks for the feedback, Gracenote.