All things must come to an end

Phew, that was quite a ride!

What was initially going to be a three and a half month journey turned out to be a month longer due to the postponement of Kerri's gig here in Finland. I made tons of tracks, some bad, some good, some mediocre, some yet unfinished. I learned a whole new bag of tricks about producing house music, about myself and life in general. Got to know some lovely new people. I also learned that making music on a deadline with strict quality criteria is not an easy task!  While the first month or two was relatively easy due to all the exciment of it, the latter half of the journey was a lot rougher. The forced labour thing, health issues, lost faith, ever decreasing amount of time available, me getting sidetracked with all kinds of track that Kerri probably wouldn't play no matter the quality as well as a million other things that kept me from making music eight hours a day, including my own laziness.

But in the end everything turned out to be perfect and by perfect I mean much more than I had even hoped for. I failed at getting my tracks to Kerri's attention pre-gig, which would've been ideal as he could've properly auditioned the tracks before his gig. But, by sheer luck, I ran into him just before his gig in a quiet spot of the club, managed to exchange a few words and give him my memory stick containing the track I had finished literally two hours before I left home to the club that night. I didn't have my hopes up, as a loud club is not an ideal place to check out fresh tracks. I also didn't have the chance to check out the final version of the track on any kind of speakers, so all I could hope was that my humble DIY mixing and mastering skills were up to par and the track wouldn't sound awful next to professional productions, for which there was a huge possibility considering I make music with just headphones and mostly freeware plugins.

Thankfully, it didn't sound awful. Much better than I had expected actually! It didn't seem to clear the dancefloor either and it didn't sound out of place in Kerri's set. So, as I said, things went much better than I had ever even dreamed of.

Despite the rather pompous subtitle of this blog I don't think I became a world class house producer, but I learned so much both about music as well as about other important things that I can safely say that I reached another level entirely. I'm not quite at the level of Theo Parrish, Moodymann, Larry Heard or Kerri Chandler himself, but at the very least I'm amongst the top 10 house producers of Maunula now!

I could go on for all day as I'm still very excited about that special night, but I'll just keep it (relatively) short.


I'd also like to thank the following people who helped me a lot during my journey:


Pasi Savoranta for providing me with some useful samples as well as giving some feedback for my tunes.

George Jackson for letting me remix his tracks and learn a thing or two during the process.

Panu Antero Posti and Matti Stenman for releasing one of the tracks I made during the project, which will come out on their compilation on Mean Seed Records in about a month from now. 

Ronny Pries, for helping me with finding some very useful, yet free plugins. It saved me tons of time, thanks!

Miikka Hasari for making a DJ mix out of some of the tracks I made during this project.

Mikko Noranta for borrowing me some money so I could renew my DAW license.

Toni Rantanen for booking Kerri to play.

Everybody on the Gearslutz message forum. Despite some occasional and rather heated arguments, I received some valuable advice. I'd especially like to thank Karloff70 for providing me with his wonderful kick drum collection, which proved to be invaluable.  Go buy it now, it's great! http://www.wavealchemy.co.uk/2-keyboards-worth-of-kicks/pid167/

Everybody on the Subsekt message forum and especially the chat room associated with it.

Everybody on the Elektronauts message forum and the Elektron IRC chat room. I don't currently have any Elektron gear but will definitely have in the future!

The following friends of mine for having the patience to listen to my (occasionally terrible) tracks and giving some valuable feedback: Tuomas Nieminen, Ville Aarnikko, Mikko Silventoinen, Johannes Haapala, Sami Keskikallio, Pirkka Esko, Tommi Partanen, Pasi Kyönsaari, Marc Fred, Juho Ylitalo, Janne Nevalainen, Tapani Tunturi, Ilkka Vuorinen, Riku Kivilinna, Pietu Korhonen, Janne Juopperi, Seppo Louhimies, Jarno Ruusuvuori, Olli Ahvenlampi and Stelios Kirtselis. In the (likely) case of me forgetting your name from this list, just drop me a note and I'll add you!

Everybody who listened to my tracks, regardless of whether you hated or loved them.


And last but definitely not least I'd like to especially thank the man himself Kerri Chandler for being kind enough to play my track in Kaiku. I will be eternally grateful for giving me a shot!


PS. I have a new blog project coming in the future as well. The working title is "How to (not) start a record label". More about that later.

Barfunkel out!

The moment of my life

I've been a bit quiet on the blog front. My health ain't what it used to be and I've had to cut down some things. I haven't stopped making music, however, only severely limited my Internet presence.

Anyways...

Last night was the big night. Kerri was in town. I had tried my best to get through to him via some promotional channels I had available, with zero success. So my only shot was a long one, I had to hope he'd be hanging out in Kaiku before his gig and not just appear 2 minutes before his showtime. I'm polite enough to not bother DJ's while they're playing, so things weren't completely under my control. To make things worse, the club was full and loud, so things didn't look good from a friendly chat point of view.

However,  I was very lucky to spot him walking up the stairs where it was relatively quiet. I politely approached the man and he was living up to his friendly, down to earth reputation and talked to me for a little while, during which I gave him a memory stick containing the track I had been working hard for the last week. As a club environment isn't the best place to check out new music, I didn't have my hopes up but at least I made a contact, which was already more than I had dreamed of!

Kerri played for 2 hours and as he was playing disco in the end and my track wasn't played in the beginning when it was more housey I was just enjoying the music he was playing, almost forgotting I had given him my track. However, he switched it back to house near the end and to my surprise I suddenly heard some rather familiar drums and what the heck, my track started to play! It was a little bassy and I'm not entirely convinced that the chords in the intro and the breakdown are the best things I've ever written and if I had had  a few extra days I probably would've made them a bit better but it's no biggie. I'm just glad he played my track on the spot, without having the chance to get really familiar with it.

I'll make a separate post in a few days about all the people who've helped me during my journey, thanking them all. Meanwhile, I'm still  a bit high about this all, as it was definitely one of the finest achievements of my life. Definitely not easy, as I've lost all hope several time during these 4 months. Still, I've persevered, trying to learn from all the mistakes I've made. In the end, it all paid off. I reached my ultimate goal and had Kerri Chandler play my track. Did I become a world class house producer? Probably not, but I did learn enough new tricks to safely say I've reached a higher musical level. I had been kinda stagnating for a while, unable to lift myself from what was a very low level of producing. This project, as stressful it occasionally was, was very good at motivating me to really better myself.

Anyways, I've slept only for an hour and I'm out of words, so I'll just post the track I gave Kerri:




It's not perfect and some things bother me already, I'll see if I'm able to do something about those or do I just move on to the next project.

Last night a DJ saved my life

Again, one of those "I'm still alive" type of short posts. I was out of town for a few days plus I've been extremely busy with work and life, so very little time to make music.

Because of that I have no new tracks to present,  but a DJ friend of mine made a mixtape of my tracks he liked the most. It's a good chance to hear my tracks in the environment they were meant for ie. in a DJ mix. I also had the chance to hear my tracks on a good PA yesterday, which gave me a much needed confidence boost as I was somewhat satisfied with how they sounded.





Also in the news: Kerri's gig over here has been postponed a few weeks so I have  some precious extra time to make new tracks.

Next post will be longer again I hope.

Barfunkel out!

Feelin' kinda low

I'm tired. Too much (unpaid) work. Not enough sleep. Lots of pressure from everywhere. Absolutely no inspiration to write anything of note.

However, actions speak louder than words, so I finished two of the few tracks I've been working on lately.






And that's it for now.

Dance to the drummer's beat

As promised, this post is about drums. I'll try to get in to the details and explain how I make the drums in my tracks.

The kick

Most of the time I start my tracks with a kick. Yet, I wouldn't say it's the most important part of my production, far from it. I just like to have some sort of a metronome to which I can make the rest of the music. Most of the kicks in this project originate from Wave Alchemy's sample pack called 2 Keyboards Worth of Kicks. It's a really nice and especially varied kick drum collection that always seems to have some sort of a starting point for me to mould the kick to my liking.

After I've picked a kick sample that I happen to like at the moment, I start to process it to fit my needs. The first thing I usually do is to simply edit the amplitude envelope of the sampler software. I use a freeware sampler called Grace by One Small Clue. It's fast, simple and free. There are probably better commercial alternatives out there but I'm satisfied with Grace. The envelope editing is a very important phase, as most raw samples are just that, raw samples. Many drum samples, kicks included are quite long and I usually prefer shorter, more defined sounds, so I usually edit the envelope to shorten the kicks and occasionally mess with the attack phase of the envelope as well, as sometimes kicks have quite aggressive transients that are simple to smooth out with an envelope.

With a quality sample and the right envelope settings you should have a decent kick going on already. The next phase is turning something decent into one monster of a stomp. The secret sauce to that is proper EQ'ing. Classic Pulteq style EQ especially. I obviously can't afford a real Pulteq or currently even a commercial plugin, so again, I turn into the freeware world. There's a really nice Pulteq emulating EQ called SonEQ by Sonimus (tipped to me by an online friend Ronny Pries, to whom I'm grateful for his help). You need to register to be able to download it, but believe me, it's definitely worth the trouble. It's not a jack of all trade kind of EQ, but for kicks it does magic. I don't really understand how it works internally (you boost and cut the same frequency, which is counter-intuitive but just works), but just semi-randomly turning knobs leads into happy places pretty much every time. SonEQ isn't a surgical, fully parametric EQ, so I occasionally use a second EQ for kicks, typically Reaper's built in one. If I hear (or see with a frequency analyzer) some frequencies that bother me, I just cut them out with finely tuned EQ.

What about compression then? I'm not quite sure whether it's my lack of a proper tool, lack of skills or what, but I don't use compression on kicks that often. They often seem to suck the life out of the kicks or at least make such tonal changes to the characteristics of the kick that what made the kick good in the first place is lost.When I do use compression, I usually use another free plugin called Blockfish by Digitalfishphones. When the kick occasionally needs compression, that plugin usually does a decent job.

The clap and the snare

I love a good snare but I hardly ever use one in my housier productions. I prefer to use claps, playing a very basic rhythm, typically on the 2 and the 4. It's not rocket science, but there's still a lot more to a good clap than just taking some unedited clap sound and placing it on the grid.

As with my kicks, I usually start with choosing a basic sample I like, then editing the envelope. Most of the time I use a trusty old 707 clap sample. It just seems to work and takes all kinds of processing well, meaning it can be quite versatile when needed. As with kicks, most clap sounds are quite long by default, so I typically edit the envelope to make them a bit shorter and snappier.

Processing-wise, a solid combination of EQ, transient designer and reverb with some compression thrown in seems to do the trick. As I use a basic 707 clap sample a lot, I don't need to rely on EQ that much. Usually I just highpass filter a bit of the unnecessary low end content away and that's it.  The real magic happens with the transient designer and the reverb. Typically I remove a bit of the attack with the transient designer, which both makes the sound a bit smoother as well as changes the perceived timing a bit. As mentioned before, I often edit the envelope to shorten the clap, sometimes to the point of it just being a short snap. It sounds a bit strange in it's raw form, but that's only because I haven't put the reverb on it yet. I typically use a bit of plate reverb from a freeware plugin called EpicVerb by Variety of Sound. I use quite short reverbs and almost always mess with the predelay settings as well. After this treatment the clap fits the music better than by just using a long clap sample to begin with. It blends in and is somehow a bit airier and takes less valuable frequency space. Most of the time the clap is done by now, but if it's not, I might add some gentle compression to make it smack a bit more.

While the clap usually sits on the 2 and the 4, I practically always mess with exact timing of it. When it lies exactly on top of the kick, the rhytm often sounds quite stiff. While you can of course just move the clap around with the sequencer, I prefer to use a specific plugin for the job. In Reaper, there's a handy little plugin with which you can make some very accurate timing changes to the whole channel. My go-to setting is moving the whole clap channel about 5 milliseconds to the right. It's not much, but it's often enough to turn a boring kick-clap-kick-clap pattern into something a bit funkier.

The Hi-hats

 The most important drums in house, the hi-hats. Also, the most difficult to get right. Kerri is the king of swingy house hi-hats, I wish I knew what's going on with them but since I don't, I just do them the Barfunkel way.

As always with my current workflow, I start by going through my sample collection, trying to find something that fits my mood or the music I've written so far. Most of the time I start with something a bit different, only to change them to basic 909 hi-hats a bit later. I do this with the closed hi-hats especially often, which could partially be caused by my lack of a variety of really nice closed hi-hat samples. 909 hi-hats do sound really housey though and take processing well, so they can be used in different kind of tracks.

As with kicks and claps, I start by editing the envelope. Hi-hats can be quite tricky to edit, as they often convey tons of energy but if the shape of the sound is wrong, it's the wrong kind of energy which can almost ruin a track. The attack phase of the sound is of especial importance, as many hi-hats can have quite loud transients, which can be great for aggressive techno, but if you want to make smooth house, it's usually for the best to soften them a bit, almost to the point of making them sound as if they were played with brushes instead of sticks. I typically want to have quite a subtle hi-hat sound, not a Dance Mania type of in your face sound.

Processing-wise hi-hats are quite simple most of the time. EQ them a bit, maybe add a transient designer and occasionally some kind of an actual effect like a flanger or a bit of delay. There are no rules really with hi-hats, I just do what sounds good to me and fits the context of the track. Not that there are rules in anything else either, I just mean that there's a much wider variety of possible hi-hat sounds that work in a house context than there are kicks for example.

What makes the hi-hats difficult is the sequencing. Anyone can make a basic, offbeat open hi-hat pattern in about 2 seconds, but if you want more than that you probably need to spend some time on your hi-hat pattern. The placement of the notes, their exact timing, the swing settings, the length of the notes (if applicable) all matter, to a degree that a very minor change can make or break the pattern. I wish I could teach it, but unfortunately I'm not very good at it to be honest and it's also something that's very difficult to explain. You just gotta change stuff up until you like what you're hearing, then stop immediately before you ruin it.

The cowbell

 While most would just lump the mighty cowbell along with the rest of the random percussion  sounds, I'm writing a separate paragraph about it. Why? I love the cowbell, that's why! It's also surprisingly difficult to use subtly but effectively, because it basically screams "look at meeeee, they made an SNL sketch about meeeee". Don't get me wrong, I love that sketch but living in the post more cowbell-era has it's difficulties. Namely, it's difficult to approach the cowbell seriously. I'm not opposing using humour in music, I mean seriousness as doing it properly and with class, even if the intent is comedic.

I don't use the cowbell as a comedic effect though. Ever. I'm dead serious about my cowbells.

Looking at it from the production angle, the cowbell is actually quite problematic. It's difficult to make sit in a mix, it almost always kinda like floats around the mix, without ever landing in it's proper place. Don't ask me how Kerri did it with Bar A Thym, as I don't know. I kinda assume that he put the cowbell there first, then wrote the rest of the music to support it. Doing it the other way around easily leads into tracks that sound almost like two separate pieces of music, the actual track and the cowbell that sits on top of it. The example track I made (scroll to the bottom of the page if you want to hear it now) kinda suffers from this. It's the best cowbell I ever made, but it's far from perfect.
 



The breaks

What do crusty old breakbeats have to do with house production? In my case quite a bit! Almost every single one of the tracks posted to this blog has had breaks in them. The thing is, I don't just put an unedited Funky Drummer there in it's entirety and call it a day, I try to be a bit more subtle with them. Lots of times you can't even hear them, but you would notice if they weren't there.  They're quite quiet, but an extremely important little piece of the rhythm puzzle for me. They create the groove in almost a subliminal way.

While I use Grace for my one shot samples, I use another free plugin for my breaks called Short Circuit 2.  The thing with Grace is that it's user interface isn't ideal for breaks, as zooming is very cumbersome with it and chopping a break into little pieces that you spread across the keyboard is impossible.

Strangely, I usually audition breaks outside the DAW, meaning I have the basic drum beat playing on the DAW, then I pick and play different breaks with the Windows Media Player until something tickles my fancy. Only then I load up the sampler plugin and the break sample. Before I start to chop it up, I usually just play the entire break and change the pitch until it loops roughly in time with the house beat. I typically use something like 3 to 6 chops of a single break, spread over the keyboard for easy sequencing. There is no standard to this, as breaks can be very different. Sometimes I use them just as additional single hits, sometimes I use little bits of the original rhythm as well, especially hi-hats and congas/bongos. I sequence them to add a nice little groove to an otherwise sometimes too static house beat and voi la, you have a nice groove going on. This is my secret sauce.

Processing-wise I mostly use some extremely heavy-handed EQ. I often hi-pass filter most of the kicks away, occasionally I just leave a little trace of the hi-hats playing. It's entirely context dependent, but I try to remember that a break is usually the entire drum section of a finished track, which means that without EQ there's very little room left for the rest of the drums. Less is more is usually a good starting point for everything music-related, but when EQ'ing the breaks more is often more. Just cut away to the break of dawn! I'm not a big fan of sidechain compression, but I do occasionally use it with breaks. Just a tiny bit of pumping can make the breaks sound like the belong to a house track a bit more.

Percussion

I just lump everything else under this umbrella. Shakers, tambourines, congas, bongos, toms,  finger snaps, random bleeps, bloops and whatnot. They often play an auxiliary role in house, which is a good thing to keep in mind. They aren't always even necessary, tons of classics have been written with just kicks, hi-hats and snares, They can, however, add a little bit of extra funk to your music, just try to not overdo them as they can easily overpower your rhythm section.

The same principles that work with the other drums apply to percussion  as well. Start with a quality sample (or synthesize one yourself), then edit the envelope and finally use some plugins to process it to your liking. There's too many variables in place to make any kind of a useful blanket statement.




Bus processing

So, your individual drums are done now, then what? While I didn't do it in my hardware days (mostly due to the lack of gear that can actually do it) I have a drum bus all the time nowadays when I'm ITB. A drum kits carved out of random sounds can sound a bit incoherent, which bus processing can rescue in a nice way.

While the specific vary, the bus usually consists of some variations of EQ, compression and saturation. Nothing too drastic, as the intent is to not completely crush the life out of it, just give it some gentle glue and presence.  I don't usually EQ the bus that much, because can always just EQ the individual sounds with more precision, but I occasionally use gentle high frequency boost on the whole bus, to give the drum track some sense of air and excitement, typically with the Baxter EQ by Variety of Sound. Compressing the bus gives it some much needed glue, a sense of togetherness. For this I usually use either TDR Kotelnikov by Tokyo Dawn Labs or SlickHDR by Variety of Sound, both freeware. For saturation (to make the drum kit sound a bit less ITB-like) duties I often use FerricTDS by Variety of Sound, combined with a reel to reel tape simulator plugin called Ferox by Jeroen Breebaart. I would love to own the U-He Satin for this, but it's unobtainable for me at the moment.




I also have a new track to represent. It started as a simple drum workout, but in the end it became a fully fledged house production that I personally am quite fond of. The intention was to make a DJ toolish drum track, but as these things often go, a real track showed up it's little head and I didn't want to restrain my creativity because of some principle.

Barfunkel's Disco House Ant-hem

As you probably know already, I've been working like a dog lately. Dead tired all the time, barely time to sleep and rest, very little time for music. No pay either, so it's a lose-lose kind of situation.

Anyways, I did manage a few music hours the last few days and this was the result of those precious hours:



No idea about the quality of it as I had a flu for a week, my ears are half-deaf because of it and like I said, I've been extremely tired lately.  Something is better than nothing I suppose?

I still have a month to go to my target, but the chance of success seems very small. The last 3 weeks have been busy, I've had maybe 10 hours to concentrate on my music. At this rate, I don't see a chance to improve enough to write a Kerri-worthy track. I still won't give up, maybe I'll get lucky and hit the right notes accidentally?

The next blog post will be a longer one and the topic is drums. Until then, so long!

Do it your way

Personality. Having your own sound. How do you achieve those in such an old and well-defined genre like house?

Even if I might come through as someone who just wants to be a Kerri copycat, that's not my intention. My plan has many phases. The first phase involves learning the necessary production tricks to be able to make release quality house tracks and as I'm not a genius who can just invent everything on my own I have to study the masters, learn to copy them as well as I can. Kinda like the painters of yore who spent years and years copying paintings before finding their own artistic vision. That's what I'm currently doing. I study Kerri, MAW, Mood II Swing, Chez Damier, Larry Heard, Theo Parrish, Moodymann and so on. That's phase one. Phase two, if I ever reach that far, is to find my own inner voice and vision. I want it to be recognizable as house, but with a little Barfunkel twist. Only time will tell what that twist could be. Maybe something a bit humorous or tongue in cheek, as I'm a big fan of absurd, borderline random humour. But, for the time being, I would be extremely satisfied to reach even the minimum standards, both musically and production-wise, so that I could get my music out there. Even that is a dream far away, as I do realize I'm not much of a musician or a producer.

How does one find his own voice then? Unless you're a singer who writes his own lyrics it isn't going to be easy, particularly if you want to work within the framework of  a relatively restricted genre. While production skills are important, it would be extremely difficult (but not entirely impossible) to be so good that your music would be instantly recognizable because of the production. If your music is up to it, good enough production skills are, well, good enough. Many house classics aren't that great technically. There might not be amateurish mistakes in them as such, but they often aren't polished to perfection (in a pop music sense) either. They have what it takes, the magic lies in the music.

While I've made some fairly unique music in the past, I think I'm struggling a bit in this project. Trying to keep it housey while making something that stands out is a daunting task. House has been around a few decades now and many ideas have been used, re-used and recycled several times already. I also don't want to make a novelty song, something that's different just for the sake of it. Sure, I could make a house track with scatting, yodling, bagpipes and panflutes. Then again, there's a good reason no one has ever tried such a combination as far as I know. Genre conventions are there for a reason, they are things that have been tried and tested again and again on the dancefloors over the years. They work, that's why they are used.

To be honest, I'm a bit torn here. As I have only about a month left and time is thus limited (especially now, with the slave labour thing I talked about in the previous post), should I aim for uniqueness at  the expense of making something that is more likely to work on the dancefloor? Or should I aim for a banger and forget about finding my own voice in house music? I don't have the time for both.

While I haven't made up my mind quite yet, I did make this track:




Definitely not a very original track. More like a cheesy disco house banger. It's even called the Cheesy Disco House Banger! Yeah I know,  naming tracks ain't an easy job. To my defense, I made the whole thing in about 3,5 hours, of which naming it took about 3 seconds.

Oh, and the track I made a remix of a few posts back is finally online in all it's original glory! Comparing the two, you'll probably notice that my remix doesn't bear much resemblance to the original.  I didn't want to make a remix where you just change a few drum hits, maybe write a new bassline and that's it. It's a bona fide Barfunkel remix treatment!




And to refresh your memory, here's my remix:





And that's it for now. See you next time!

Work that mutha fucker

Sad news, unfortunately.

Haven't updated the blog in a week because my unemployment ended this week and I've been busy with work. Now, before you congratulate me or think that I'll be able to buy all kinds of funky plugins or gear now I'll have to explain my situation a bit. I've been almost completely unemployed for two years now.  The Finnish government doesn't like that, so they've crafted these laws which state that unemployed people must accept any job they're offered. Even jobs that don't pay anything. Which is exactly what happened to me this week. They offered me a non-paying job which I had to take or I'd lose my (very small) unemployment benefits. Yes, it's more or less slave labour or at the very least a law loophole which the companies take advantage of.

Thankfully it's only 3 months and there's a very, very slim chance that they'll offer me a real job after that period. Still, it couldn't had happened at a worse time as it means my former 8 hours a day of music making just shrunk to an hour or two, assuming I'm not dead tired after a full day of slave labour.

What does it mean to the blog and the project then? I'm not calling it quits quite yet but naturally the likelihood of completing my noble quest is now even smaller than before. To have any kind of a chance I must really focus my mind now because I simply don't have the time for sidesteps or just lounging about aimlessly.

I would've liked to include a new track but I've been really tired this week. I have some unfinished tracks but I don't want to put them on the blog. If you're really interested, they can be found on my Soundcloud site, some almost finished, some just rough ideas.

Get down saturday night

I know know, it's a house staple, but I don't usually like to make those disco cut up kind of tracks. You know the type, a few disco loops, drums + some filtering, call it your own track, profit. It's been done to death by producers much better than me. Don't take me wrong, I love that stuff. I just don't want to be known as a disco editor, I prefer to write my own harmonies and melodies. I might use little snippets of samples here and there, but almost never as the main body of the track. Partly because of some kind of a principle, partly because I love and respect quality disco almost as much as I do house and I don't want to ruin good disco songs with unnecessary edits that add nothing of value to the original.

However, since it's such a common way to make house I decided to give it a shot anyway. I have a bunch of nice disco samples on my hard drive, sampled from my personal vinyl collection. I occasionally go through them, trying to find inspiration. Usually I don't find it, but this time seemed to be different. One of those disco samples (I won't be naming any names, I'll just say it's a very well known disco group, not something particularly obscure) had a little something that caught my ear.  I thought what the heck, let's cut up the sample to shorter loops, apply some filtering, add some drums, call it a track and profit. 2 hours later, I had something nice cooking and not that many hours after that I had this finished track:


I rather like it, even if I'm the first to admit that it's just a disco edit, not an original composition. Maybe I'll try to use disco loops in a subtler way in the future, this one is quite extravagant. This seems to be a common occurrence for me, the first time I try something new the results are quite blatant, only later I learn to use the new producing methods and techniques in subtler ways.

Anyways, cheesy and cheeky or not, I learned some new tricks once again, tricks that will surely be very useful in the future.

It's it's remix time time

I was recently contacted by someone from the Gearslutz forum about a remix. He had this rather chill out vocal house track that he wanted me to remix into something a bit more dancefloor friendly. I decided to grab the offer as I've never made a remix before and it might prove out to be a good learning exprience. I had a pretty good vision from early on of what I wanted to do with the remix. The original had some good bits I could easily use in my remix and since I liked the vocals, it sounded like quite an easy, quick job. Just use those good bits as a basis, then add some bits that sound more like Barfunkel music, mess around with stuff for a while and hopefully something nice will emerge.

Even though I made the core of the remix in like 4-5 hours, it took me 5 days to complete it. As I wanted as good results as I possibly could I had to up my quality control and simply not put out any half-baked ideas. Remixing stuff is in some way easier and in some ways more difficult than writing your own material. When you just make your own stuff you can do whatever you want, with a remix you're working with something someone else made, which can be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because you don't necessarily have to write the hardest bit, ie. the main hook of the track because it's already there, a curse because your hands are tied to an extent. Now, I do know some remixes are so far removed from the original that you can barely recognize it. Sometimes you can't at all. I didn't want that but at the same time I wanted it to sound like a Barfunkel track and not just like the original with a few different drum sounds or such.

The elements of the original that ended up in my remix were obviously the vocals (well bits of them at least), the pad sound you hear in the beginning of the track and the e-piano, which was just a short snippet of a longer, more evolving piece. The rest of the elements come from my imagination. I also upped the tempo a little bit, to make it a bit less chilled out. All in all, I'm quite satisfied with this remix, especially considering it's the first remix I've ever made.

You can listen to it here:




Due to a delay in the mastering process, the original is not yet online so I can't post it for comparison. I'll add it to this blog post when I can, which will hopefully be very soon.

Jazz is the teacher

Topic of today is what, if anything, can be learned from other genres, particularly genres that aren't that close to house music. Of especial interest are genres that aren't either direct predecessors such as disco and funk or otherwise very close to house, such as techno. What can be learned from jazz, from rock, from dub or reggae, from metal, from classical, from EDM?

Quick and simple answer: A lot. Even though house is a well-defined genre that has remained pretty close to it's roots for 30 years now that doesn't mean that listening to and drawing influence from other genres is wrong, quite the contrary in fact. While house is my number one love of all the music genres that doesn't mean that I'm some sort of a starry-eyed dreamer who thinks all house is great or that house is in some way a superior genre compared to others. It's just personal taste, house gives me the strongest positive emotions and I enjoy listening to it more often than other genres.

Trying to write a meaningful post about this subject isn't easy. I'm no music theory expert who can just sit down and analyse everything down to the smallest of details. I know very little about music theory and I don't have the sharpest set of ears, so my analysis is often very superficial.

I think the easiest way to approach this subject is simply by listing some genres, listening to some examples, thinking about it and writing down my thoughts. I'm in no way trying to include every single genre out there, it'd take me a month and a bookworth of text to do so.

Jazz: As I love jazz, especially the free kind of jazz, this should be an easy target. However, it's not. It definitely is not. I love jazz but I don't really understand jazz. I just listen to jazz because it sounds nice to my ears. I can listen to house, techno, drum&bass, ambient, all kinds of genres and often hear how they were made, at least on a superficial level. With jazz, all I hear is some cool cats playing great music, but I got no idea how they do it.  More specifically, I don't hear what makes jazz jazzy. As if there's some sort of a magic trick or a combination of tricks I simply ain't aware of. Magic jazz scales, magic jazz chords, magic jazz magic? I simply don't know. What can I learn from jazz then, if I can't analyse it musically? Technically, quite a bit actually. If you look at some sort of a greatest jazz albums of all time you'll probably notice how old most of them are. They are from an era when modern studio technology was at it's infancy, many of the studio tricks that are standard practice in 2016 were either nonexistent or very expensive. Still, many of those old jazz albums sound absolutely amazing. Why? It all boils down to arrangement and sound selection. In other words, tricks that aren't just useful but of paramount importance. While I'm a half-decent synthesist and sample mangler, arranging is one of my many Achille's heels. I really have to learn how to make a coherent whole out of decent enough elements.

Rock: What can an aspiring house producer learn from good old rock'n'roll then? A guitar solo perhaps? How to write lyrics with sexual innuendo? How to throw a television set out of a hotel room window? While those are of course very useful skills to possess, the best thing to learn from rock music from a house music perspective is energy. At least before Nirvana killed rock music it was all about the raw, sexual energy of the music. From the openly homosexual lyrics of Tutti Frutti to W.A.S.P.'s Animal, rock music has often been about doin' it. Sometimes quite subtly, sometimes blatantly. It's not that uncommon to hear house music with the same kind of raw, unrefined sexual energy as rock used to have. The infamous Dance Mania records and the artists associated with them  are a typical example.  Their take of the subject was often quite direct, with lots of swearing and using deragotary terms of females and their body parts. While I've done my fair share of swearing I nowadays favour a more subtle approach. I want to have that energy but get rid of all the sexual references, direct or not. That said, it's only a question of time before in a moment of insanity I grab the mic and make a song where I try to find a word that perfectly rhymes with the word bitch.

Metal: How about the bastard son of rock then? What possibly could a house producer learn from metal? Especially since the only form of  metal I know anything about is of the black kind. Sure, I could burn a few churches for inspiration, but that's not exactly #1 on my to-do list. Answering that question properly needs some careful thinking about what metal is about. Like house music, metal is about the expression of emotions. Maybe a different set of emotions than house, but emotions nonetheless. In that regard, listening to metal for inspiration and to learn something from is not as far out an idea as it might sound like. I often do it actually, when I'm stuck in a musical rut. It gives you a different perspective and forces your mind on a different path.

Dub and reggae: This one is actually quite easy to answer, particularly when speaking about dub and not it's poppier cousin reggae. Sense of space, creative use of effects and using a mixer as an instrument on it's own are what make dub. It's often not about what you play but what you don't play, and filling that space with all kinds of strange, yet fitting effects. Echo or delay is of course the effect most commonly associated with dub, but it doesn't end there and neither does the use of an echo unit make you a dub record. I've actually tried to make dub music a few times, but let's just say that it's not exactly my forte. I do, however, occasionally try to imitate the methods of dub, even when the output sounds nothing like it. This was particularly true when I was strictly a hardware user, I always recorded my tracks straight to 2-track, using the mixer and effects creatively while recording. It's a bit harder to imitate with just a laptop, but all the tricks I learned back then are extremely valuable now.

Classical: The hardest of them all, considering my disdain towards classical music. It's way too pompous and opulent for my small mind to handle. I admit, I just don't get it. I do like some of the music created with the same instruments in the 20th century, Steve Reich particularly, but classical or anything resembling it is simply not for me.  Still, I have an open mind and there's always a trick or two to be learned from any and every kind of music.  However, it's very, very difficult to think about anything worthwhile to be learned from classical music. It's so far detached from modern music, from club music even more so. Steve Reich is easy in comparison, it's basically just techno performed with different instruments. Perhaps looking at it from a different angle might be more fruitful? The thing I dislike about classical the most is the lack of concentration. The central motif is either nonexistent or it's so vague that casual listening doesn't reveal it. I like loops. Either actual, repeated loops or just the same thing played over and over again with real instruments, like in rock music. I see no point in writing a great melody, rhythm or chord progression and then only using it once. It seems like wasting something valuable. I've been listening to classical music for a few hours now nonstop and I really have to stop as I feel a bit nauseous. I didn't find an illumination, it only made me more certain about my own personal taste.

EDM: Why include EDM, isn't it basically just a poppified versio of house? To an extent, that's true. It's dance music, it's four on the floor, it uses the same kind of elements as house does. However, the similarities are quite superficial. They are about as close as Blink 182 and GG Allin are to  each other. Since I consider EDM as just a commercial ripoff of house, what possibly could I learn from it? Musically, not much to be honest. It uses all the cheap tricks in the book to create music that might sound interesting to a 15-year old but doesn't offer much of long-term value. Not that far away from the stuff that 2 Unlimited and such did in  the 90's.  However, what I can learn is marketing. By nature I'm quite shy, quiet, reserved type of character.  It's not easy for me to contact an unknown person and tell him that I'm really great and that my music is super awesome. But that's exactly what I have to learn to do. Maybe not in those exact words, but I have to learn to market myself and my music if I want my music to ever leave my bedroom and a handful of Soundcloud listens.  This blog has been a great first step, it being public and somewhat popular. It wasn't an easy decision, making it public, possibly facing humiliation and ridicule. That's not enough however. As my tracks (hopefully) get better and better, I need to find some kind of an outlet for them, which means I have to contact unknown people and convince them that my music is worth their attention. I won't be throwing cakes at people's faces, neither do I believe in fireworks (literal or not).  First, I have to write a track that I really believe in and then I have to market it properly. Try to be my humble self, yet confident. Not the easiest of combinations to achieve.

As usual, I could go on forever but I decided to stop here. I have a bad habit of babbling about given the chance, but I'll try to control myself and keep these blog posts compact.



As with most of these posts, I made a track to go with it too . Originally, I wanted to make a jazzy house track but I'm not so sure of the outcome. It samples a well-known free jazz record (if a free jazz record can be said to be well-known that is), so most of the musical ideas don't originate from my mind. I don't usually like to sample stuff with melodic or harmonic content, due to my inability to recognize notes and chords by ear. I got basically no idea if this track contains off-scale notes, as I simply don't hear them that easily. I went with a feeling, instead of building something theoretically correct. It is what it is. 20% wonky, 30% jazzy, 50% housey, 110% barfunkely.



Note: As this blog is a real-life document, not a way for me to glorify or put myself on a pedestal, I must admit that I was quite drunk when I wrote all this and I also made the final mix of the accompanying track while drunk.  Typos, grammatical erros as well as errors in the track are a result of a few pints of Finnish Karhu beer. It is what it is.

Hypno dance

So, what's that picture about then? What does a cartoon character wearing a cape and a top hat has to do with the production of house music? Well, that character is no other than my favorite comic book superhero Mandrake the Magician! He had the ability to hypnotize people (and other creatures as well) by simple gestures. And that's what good house music often does, it hypnotizes people with very simple ingredients, often with nothing more than a simple loop that changes in minor ways for the whole duration of the track.

The question is, what makes something hypnotic and alluring while something else that's superficially similar bores you to death after 3 seconds? What's the secret trick? The answer is, sadly, that there is no secret trick. Knowing how to make something simple, yet interesting is what separates the men from the boys, the Kerris from the amateurs like me. It takes lots of practice, good taste and a deeper level of understanding of what works in the context of house music. Ie. things I don't really possess.

Which makes this particular post rather hard to write.  I don't feel I'm qualified to say anything meaningful about the subject but it's an important subject so I must at least think about it, even if I don't manage to say anything of worth in the end.

What I do know is that music I consider hypnotic is often very loopy and subtle, as drastic changes break off the hypnosis. There's also almost always some sort of a catchy, yet simple riff  and the drums advance the track in a subtle way instead of banging in your face. Chords are often involved in the equation as well, in one way or another. Naturally, these qualities are not unique to hypnotic music, they pretty much cover most music in the deeper end of house, at least on a superficial level.

What separates a basic, half-decent loop from a stroke of genius is in the details. The riff works on a musical level as well as on a rhythmical level. The chords accompany that riff well in a kind of a dreamy, ethereal way and of course, sometimes the chords are the riff. The drumming is simple and rolling, but every drum sound and beat is well thought of. There's nothing extra that the ear and the mind would find distracting. Everything just works. Every note and drum hit brings you closer and closer towards a dream-like state, that special vibe that allows you to dance for hours without even noticing how much time has passed. The hypnosis only breaks off when the lights come on at the end of the night. And of course, when a bad DJ plays something that doesn't work but that's an entirely different subject.

Dance music is rarely musically very complex. There isn't that many notes and at least in house and techno, the drums are usually fairly basic four on the floor type of rhythms. Getting down a basic idea of a track is thus often quite a quick process. If a melody consists of just three notes repeating, it doesn't take that long to find a good combination of them. But and this is quite a big but, the job doesn't end there.  Because it's so simple, every note must count. Every note must be just perfect. The perfect sound, the perfect notes, the perfect combination of all the variables that affect how that simple melody is perceived by the listener. It can take quite a bit of time to get those three notes working together just right. While I usually work quite fast, I typically spend the longest time on getting those tiny details of the main loop the way I want them to be. After that process, the track more or less just writes itself. If the main loop doesn't work, it can actually take more time to sort out the mess later, that's why I spend a considerable percentage of my music making time on those little details that make a boring little loop into something that can, at least in theory, be listened to for a very long time.


What kind of details are important then when you want to write a track that allures the listener? That one is impossible to answer without the context of an actual track. Sometimes stuff just happens almost automatically, all the pieces of the puzzle fall right in their places in a very short amount of time. Sometimes you spend 2 hours on editing just one tiny thing. You also got to learn out of the habit of over-editing things. When they sound right they are right, even if spending just 30 seconds on something important may seem like a mistake of some kind. Learn to trust your ears! Making music has no rules, the only thing that counts is you.

And that's it. More or less, just another episode of Seinfeld (ie. a show about nothing). I've been busy making tracks so this blog has slightly suffered as a result.  I'll try to write something a bit more meaningful in the future.

I also made a track, where I tried to emphasize the hypnotic effect. With or without success, how the heck should I know? The track also turned out almost techno-like. It's a constant issue I have to deal with, as I used to make techno for a long time and the things I learned during those years can easily overcome my housier side. Anyways, it is what it is. House, techno, something in between, I have no idea.

Groove is in the heart

Groove. What the heck is that then? Sure, it makes you wanna dance and shake your rump but what exactly is groove and more specifically, how do you achieve groove?

Some people say you are just born with it and that it's impossible to learn. What a load of bollocks! At least according to my knowledge, Bootsy Collins wasn't born with  a bass guitar. He might be extremely gifted in the sense that it was easier  for him to learn to play that instrument than it would be for someone else. Still, most people with a working brain and a pair of working hands can learn to play it funky. It just takes dedication, motivation and understanding the building blocks of what groove consists of, either intuitively or via careful analysis.

In house music it's even easier. You can manage with just one hand and at a pinch, with a set of very nimble toes. In house music you can even cheat. You can sample a funky drummer (quite literally) and use that sampled loop in it's entirety or if you think that's lame or too old school, you can always use some fancy piece of software that extracts just the groove out of that funky drum loop. You don't have to know how to play an instrument, you can just program stuff until it sounds funky enough for you.


It's never THAT easy though. Even when you use every cheap trick in the book, you still gotta understand how groove works and learn to recognize when your  loop grooves and when does it need extra work. As I often do, I try to chop a big problem into smaller, more manageable pieces.

According to my research, there are four major factors that contribute to groove. Timing, the sound itself, the shape of the sound and interaction of the elements.


Timing. The most obvious one but also the hardest one. For the groove to be, well, groovy, there's no room for mistakes. One drum hit or a bassline note slightly in the  wrong place and the groove falls apart. This doesn't mean that everything should be tightly quantized or otherwise in a robotic order, quite the contrary. Slight, controlled timing fluctuations create the groove, particularly if we're talking about playing instruments and not just programming them. I won't touch the subject of playing here, simply because I'm not that much of a player and I don't have anything of note to say about it. The easiest way to create those slight, controller timing fluctuations is by using the swing function of your sequencer. Most sequencers and drum machines have some sort of a swing parameter to work with. Not all swings are equal however. Some sequencers create beautiful swing while some have swing that sounds like a drunken robot was playing it. Swing is only one way to do it though, often you simply want to manually move notes around until a  groove shows up. Though, I must admit that I'm a bit lazy at this part, I often use quite rigid quantization and choose to create the groove by moulding the sounds to my liking and sometimes messing with channel midi timing offset values.

Related to timing is the length of the notes. Might sound trivial, but is actually quite important. Da da da da doesn't sound rhythmically very interesting. Da daa daa da is a bit better. In real life situations, you might want to spend a quite a bit of time on getting the note lenghths just right. Often a simple riff can be quite boring with equal length notes, but if you play with the lengths, all kinds of interesting rhythms start to show up. I don't think there's a formula to this either, just play around with the values until you like the results.
 

The sound.  What does the sound have to do with groove you might ask? A lot, actually. While a skilled programmer or player might be able to make everything sound really funky, in reality some instruments just sound funkier than others. A bass guitar is much funkier than something that creates long, sustained tones for starters. Even in relatively similar sounds the differences in the funk factor can be tremendous. Many people, me included, like to sample old dusty breakbeats, chop them up and re-arrange the pieces. If you're not even using the same rhythm as the original sample, only the sounds the sample contains why do this? Why not just use something that's less immoral and illegal, like one shots from drum machines or acoustic drums from a sample pack? The answer is that those old, crackly, dusty drum sounds simply contain something that is either impossible or at the very least very difficult to create with anything else. They contain the essence of funk, which you can use to your advantage. Usually, when I make or audition sounds, playing just one note or a drum hit is enough to tell me whether it has the funk or not. A good sound inspires me to make something funky as well. Using bad or unsuitable sounds might not get me the kind of results I want, simply because it doesn't inspire me at all. Some people can make complete compositions on one instrument and only later transfer that composition to the instruments that end up in the final recording. I'm definitely not like that, I need to have the right sounds or at the very least, sounds that are in the ballpark from almost the very beginning.

The shape of the sound. What does that mean then and why is it important? It's actually of utmost importance. Unless you take your sounds from some sort of a premade kit, it's unlikely that they play well together and especially groove well together. You usually pick  or make sounds that kinda sound nice together, but don't fit perfectly. That's where the tools that mould the shape of the sounds come into play. In practice, if you want perfect results, you got to spend quite a bit of time with envelopes, compressors, transient designers and such until the whole ensemble plays and grooves together as one. It's of course possible to just get lucky and simply stumble upon sounds that sound groove well together, but most of the time you have to do some pretty heavy-handed production work. Especially important is working on the attack phase of the sounds. Sometimes all a sound needs is a small tweak of the attack stage of an envelope. Sometimes you it needs a series of tools, all doing relatively minor things which then add up to create a sound that works in the context of your track. It's very situation dependent and you need to really know your tools as there's simply too many variable for random knob twiddling to work.

Interaction of the elements. Unless you're using some sort of a premade construction kit, it's unlikely that a hodge podge collection of random sounds works together as a whole. You must pick, make or edit sounds so that they make musical sense together. Even though it sounds easy, it's a difficult thing to pull off without resorting to cliches. Something like 909 + 101 + Juno is a formula that works, but it's also a formula that's been used on thousands of records already. Not saying that it's impossible to write a good house track with just those instruments, but it'd be very difficult to make something that really stands out and has it's own personality. It's difficult enough with other tools already, no need to make things even harder.

How do the elements interact then? What causes it? Unfortunately, it's something that's very difficult to explain, especially by an amateur. My best advice and the one that I've given myself is simply learning to listen properly.  Try different things, learn to recognize when the elements are in the pocket. Listen to other people's music in a similar vein, try to hear why they work and your music doesn't.

And that's it for now. I would've liked to write more about the subject, but most of my free time is spent on actually making music, this blog is just a documentary side project of it. Most of the advice is more or less just about using your ears. Then again, that's very important and something I occasionally forget to do too.

Oh, and I made a new track too. I tried to focus on the groove, but not so sure it turned out the way I wanted to.

4 hour party people

The topic of today is efficiency, getting things done in a short period of time.

Even though I've always worked fast, particularly with my former hardware setup, the strict deadline I have for this project means that I must work even faster and with even more efficiency. I have no time for procastrinating or wasting time on irrelevant things. I must focus focus focus on the task at hand and do my best to improve as much as possible with the time I have left. Which isn't much, only 2,5 months as we speak. Now, I've already made some decent progress so far both from my own point of view as well as according to others. However, this isn't a cause for celebration. I'll open the champagne bottles in July if I manage to reach my goal. Until then, I'll settle for a single pint of cheap production beer.

While I've always been a fast and efficient worker at whatever job I had at the time, the creative arts are something else. You can't just show up at 8'o clock in the morning, put your working gloves on and start working. It just doesn't quite work like that in music or at least, it doesn't work like that for me. I need the right mood, the right spirit, the right mindset that allows me to focus analytically. Those don't just appear out of thin air, unfortunately. They need to be lured out somehow.

The first 3 weeks of this project were very easy in that department, I was feeling really creative and energetic, I was able to just turn on the DAW anytime I wanted and write something I was at least somewhat satisfied with. The last week has been something entirely different. All music, including masterpieces I usually love, have just sounded plain bad. I've been unable to turn on the DAW without forcing myself. I was unable to judge what I had written because everything just sounded wrong. I might have accidentally created and deleted the greatest melody ever written, simply because I've been unable to analyze anything.

But, since the ongoing topic of this  blog is improving myself both as  a producer as well as a human being, I decided to take the bull by the horns. For a second I imagined that my mouse is a sling and I have to take down the mighty beast that is Goliath. At least for the time being it seems to have worked, as I managed to write this track in about 4 hours. It's not the greatest thing ever written, but that wasn't the point either. I just had to regain my confidence, show myself that I can start and finish tracks, not just write a loop and listen to it for 10 hours, thinking about what to do about it.




Okay, mission accomplished. Sorta, kinda. It's just one track. How about something more generic instead of just something that applied to this particular situation? How do you do something creative when you simply have to do so, because of a specific deadline or simply because your income is dependent on it? How do you force yourself to be creative when in fact you'd rather watch a few seasons of Seinfeld?

As always, there is no universal answer to that question.  We're all individuals, what works for me might not work for others. For me, there are three major factors that lure the creative spirit in me out of it's cave and allow me to actually finish something relatively quickly.

1) Inspiration. Quite obvious. Listen to something great and it might inspire you to write something great too. There's more to that than meets the eye however. It's not always clear what exactly might inspire you. It's not necessarily even music. Eating a delicious pizza when you're suffering from the mother of all hangovers can be a borderline religious experience. Watching a great movie or a TV show can trigger your creative side. Even if it's as simple as listening to music, it's not always clear what music exactly will do the trick. Sometimes something similar than you want to make might work, sometimes it might be black metal. Thankfully, living in the 21st century has it's merits such as having instant access to practically any kind of music you can think of for free, thanks to Youtube. It can be extremely inspiring to just listen to something you didn't even know existed. Happy accidents for the win! Or if that doesn't tickle your fancy you can always just play something that you know you love, even if you don't own the record yourself. Listening to other people's music to find inspiration is of particular value once you have trained your ears to analyze what's going on. Not necessarily traditional music theory analysis, just having a keen ear and being able to spot things other people don't even hear unless they're pointed out to them. Production tricks, arrangement, melodies, harmonies, rhythms, most forms of music have something of value that can be useful to analyze and learn. The most important thing in this is that it can set your mind to the right state, a creative state. You don't necessarily need to copy the things you heard or make anything resembling the source of inpiration. You just want to enter that "I wanna make music and I wanna make it right now" kind of zone.

2) Knowledge. By this I mean musical knowledge (the scales, the chords and such) production knowledge (when and how to use EQ, compression, reverb and so on) and simply knowing the tools you own from the inside out, so when that moment of genius hits you you are actually able to do something about it and not just spend the next 3 hours finding the right kick or whatever. Gathering this knowledge can take some time, quite a long time actually. There are some shortcuts such as Youtube tutorials, but those usually just scratch the surface or alternatively, aren't that relevant to what you want to accomplish. Very few people are able to make great music with little to no training. Some insanely talented individuals perhaps, but most require years of practice and hard work to reach a satisfactory level, some never reach that. Once you reach that level however, you can very quickly turn a simple idea into something resembling a finished track. At least for the way I work, it's important to get a rough skeleton of a track quite quickly. It's hard for me to imagine, for example, what might happen after the breakdown if all I have is a short loop. That's why I quite often make a rough arrangement quite early on, to have some sort of a frame which I can later fill with better elements. Without that frame I very easily fall into loop zone and just play the same thing for hours, doing irrelevant, minor edits instead of focusing on what's really important. Having something that roughly feels like a complete track helps me to actually finish that track to a satisfactory level.

3) Planning. Related to knowledge, but still somewhat a different entity. By planning I mean that you should know what you want to achieve. It's not always relevant of course, sometimes you want to just experiment. But when you're stuck, it can be useful to have some sort of a plan that you follow. The plan could be something quite specific, like "I want to make a track like Bar A Thym with cowbells and parallel chords". It could also be something like "Today I will learn how to use polyrhythms".  The way I usually do it is by simply using a template in my DAW which has a basic house beat ready and all sorts of carefully chosen plugins ready to be used. Some might condemn that kind of behaviour, saying it leads to just repeating some kind of a stagnated formula. In a way it's true, I openly admit that I'm not trying to invent anything groundbreaking here. I just want to write a great house track. Having that template saves me about 30 minutes of work that I'll nearly always do the same way anyway. It also means that I can just start laying down musical ideas, instead of going through tons of tools.

That's pretty much it. When I don't feel creative but have free time and the desire to make house music, I just simply listen to something inspiring, then load my template and use the knowledge I've gathered over the years. Sounds pretty basic, but the difference is that I do it consciously, after analysing what works for me. It's not random, it's not something I read from a book, it's just what works for me personally. Just aimlessly throwing sounds together is fun of course, I've spent countless of hours on that. However, now my aim is to get certain kind of results in just a few months, so I must streamline my process, almost to a degree of building some sort of a house music assembly line. Sounds quite boring when I put it like that, but that's what you get when you start a crazy project like this.

Unfinished business

I haven't been feeling that great the last couple of days. All music, either from me or music that I usually love just sounds really bad. I know, it happens to everyone every once in a while. I just gotta find a way to snap out of it somehow as I have no time to waste.

I did manage to write a new track too, but since I feel the way I do it's simply impossible to work on it anymore so I'll just leave it here as it is, call it done and move on to the next project. It's not a great track by any means and could use tons of extra work, but I just gotta get it out of my system.



I do have about four unfinished blog posts in the works as well, about various aspects of production. I'm constantly working on those too and hopefully will have something worthwhile to say in the next few days.

There's nothing going on but the rent

This post was originally going to be about how to make something simple and hypnotic. I studied the subject, tried to analyse some hypnotic house tracks but in the end I just felt that I'm not qualified yet to say anything meaningful about the subject, so I'll save that topic for a later date.

I also tried to make a track that is simple and hypnotic but I don't think I succeeded very well in that either.

So, the last few days have been full of failure and I feel slightly disheartened. I have no time for self-loathing though, just gotta pull my head out of the gutter and get back to work.

Here's the latest track. Hypnotic or just plain boring, you be the judge of that.

Minimal nation

This time I'll talk about what minimalism means in the context of house music, according to me.

It's easier to start by defining what minimalism is not. Minimalism is not genre, it can be applied to any form of music. Minimalism is not about making a boring loop, playing it for six minutes and calling it a finished track. Minimalism is not about using an artificially limited amount of elements just for the sake of it.

What is it then? It's a way of thinking, sort of like a philosophy applied to music production. It's about adding only the elements the track in question really needs and nothing else. Sometimes a minimalist piece might actually need lots of elements (such as in Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians - which as the title suggests is written for  18 musicians and is sometimes performed with even more than that), but it's still considered a minimalist piece while something else might be composed for just four musicians but would not be minimalist in nature no matter how far you stretch the definition.

Minimalism in techno is well documented as well and there's an entire sub genre called minimal techno, even if some of the music associated with it actually rather maximal. However, often when people try to make minimal techno they are more interested in what equipment Robert Hood happened to have in his disposal in the 90's, rather than actually try approach their own music from a minimalist point of view. No, you don't need a vintage 909 to make minimal techno. You need the right mindset and the right vision.

 Steve Reich and Robert Hood aside, how about house music then? How does one strip a house track to it's bare essentials, yet make it funky and danceable and interesting enough so that the listeners don't get bored? It's a fine line and one of my main weaknesses actually. I tend to hide my poor taste and my  lack of compositional and arrangement skills with a wall of sounds, effects and mediocre, useless melodies.  It's an area where I really have to improve, learn to concentrate on what's important for the track I'm making and lose the rest, or at the very least use the less important bits more sparingly.

The basic principle is that the less elements your track has, the better they need to be if your goal is to make a track that hypnotizes the listener for 6 or so minutes. To an extent, everything has to be just perfect, because in a barebone track even the slightest of mistakes can break the illusion. Perfect sounds, perfect melodies, chords and rhythms, perfect arrangement, perfect mixdown. Perfect everything pretty much. Sounds like a daunting task but fortunately, pioneers did most of the hard work already so you don't have to start everything from scratch. If you've listened to house for a long time you probably already have some kind of an idea how things should sound like and how a house track is structured. I'm not suggesting directly copying an existing tracks (except as an exercise), just trying to say that you should carefully analyse them and see how and why they work. If you don't analyse them and dissect them, you're more or less just guessing. There is no shame in using a frame someone else created, especially in the context of this blog where I'm not even trying to invent something new, just trying to learn how to make a great house track.

What does perfect mean then? It doesn't mean an over polished pop production, neither does it mean a great composition in a classical music sense. It simply means that within the boundaries of the track you're working on, everything just fits and there's no extra fat. Everything makes sense. It sounds good sonically, even if it contains distorted or lofi elements. The melody (if it even has one) might only contain a handful of notes, but they are the right notes. The same goes for chords. There are some amazing tracks that have no melodies at all and the chord progression is just one chord repeating over and over again. Aril Brikha's Groove La Chord comes to mind immediately. That doesn't mean that every track using similar elements is great. Most of them suck and suck badly actually. Brikha just happens to have great taste, vision and a good sense of drama. He can write a more complex melody or a chord progression too, it's just that Groove La Chord didn't need anything more complex than what it has. A lesser musician would've either added more notes and made it unnecessarily complex or alternatively, his lack of dramatic sense would've resulted in an arrangement that doesn't do justice to the the elements.

Speaking of arrangement, it's one of the most important if not the most important aspect of a minimal track. Some rather minimal tracks actually contain lots of different elements. They are just used sparingly when needed and are almost never all played at the same time. Those elements are also purposefully introduced or removed at certain points, where they make dramatic sense. Two different tracks might be superficially similar, but if the other track is arranged to tell some kind of a story and the other is just a loop with elements dropped in and out almost randomly, it's the first one that will get noticed and played by the key DJ's.

One could go on and on about this subject, but I decided to stop right here and keep it minimal (pun intented). Feeling somewhat exhausted  so it's difficult to think clearly, write in a coherent manner even less so. So I'll just leave this as it is, maybe return to the subject later.

Oh, and I also have a new track! Again, I tried to make something relevant to the topic at hand. Stripped down, minimal house track, using only what the track needs and nothing else. I would've preferred to make it even more stripped down but I'm not perfect, it is what it is. Also tried to inject a bit of humour into it with that speech sample from an interview of a certain, quite famous musician known for his opulence and pomposity.

Deep inside

What is deep? What does it mean in the context of music to be more specific?

As with almost all music-related subjects the answer is: It depends. Depth is not a scientific measure, it's a highly personal issue. To get a feeling of depth some people require lyrics, some people prefer instrumental music. Some find depth in complex music, while some get anxious from listening to the very same track. Some like it really simple while some others find simplicity boring,  unmusical and especially lacking any real depth.

It depends.

Which is why this topic is so difficult to write anything meaningful about. I've been consciously trying to avoid using the phrase deep house (until now that is) in my blog. It used to be a phrase that at least tried to mean something. Usually something like a Theo Parrish or a Larry Heard record. Nowadays it has lost it's meaning and is casually used with almost any four on the floor song that is somewhat mellower than a typical EDM banger. I try to avoid it and to honest, I wasn't the biggest fan of it in the first place. Just like intelligent dance music, deep house sounds quite pretentious and artificial. It tries to make it sound better than it actually is. It's only music, house music, that evokes certain kind of emotions in certain people. That's not a real, defined genre (not that defining genres is ever easy). It's all just house music to me. Some of it just happens to awaken deep emotions in me but there are no strict rules for what causes it, neither can you  make a repeatable formula out of it.

Typically, music that evokes deep, positive emotions in me is fairly mellow and moody, doesn't have a fast tempo and uses sounds that are smooth and soothing instead of harsh and abrasive.  Most of the time it's instrumental too, as lyrics often break the illusion of depth in a sense that you have to think and feel what an instrumental track is about, vocal tracks often announce what they are about in clear words. But, these are not rigid rules. Some fast music is quite deep to me, such as certain forms of drum & bass. Some lyrics are deep. Sometimes it can be quite aggressive even.  So, it's impossible to make a formula out of it,  not even in a house music context.

Which brings us to an important question: If you can't define it in any meaningful way, why bother to write about it at all? Well, first of all this blog is not about science, it's about my personal journey written from my own point of view so I write about whatever I feel like or what I think is somehow important or useful on my ambitious quest.

It's also very useful to think about these things, even if they don't lead to anything immediately useful and concrete. I had no idea what I wanted to write about the concept of depth, so I started to think about it and wrote down my thoughts. It was never something I was consciously thinking about, I just felt depth in some tracks and not in others, even if the tracks in question were quite similar.


I also didn't just babble about the subject and waste all day writing this! Thinking and expressing ideas in literal form is useful but I also wanted something concrete, a soundtrack for this blog post. I didn't want to use an existing track so I made my own instead. It's a bit of a sidestep as the track I made is very chill and relaxed, not necessarily something that Kerri might play at peaktime hours. However, it was an useful exercise and I learned a few new tricks, so it was in no way time wasted.

Whether it's deep or not is impossible to say. As I said, depth is a very personal thing. You be the judge.

It's time

I have a few posts about some production subjects in the works but I've been more in a music making mood lately rather than in a blog writing mood. A good thing obviously as this blog is just a side product and not necessarily all that important. It's just a document of the journey, not the journey itself.

As a result of some precious DAW time I have a new track for you.

This time I was aiming for something quite specific. I wanted to create a bona fide club banger. A cheeky (used without permission, so I'll probably get into trouble) sample everyone's gonna recognize. A bit of acid. A catchy chord riff (it's intentionally a bit off-beat, though I'm not sure yet if I like that effect or not) that seems to build and build, without anything actually happening.Simple but effective drums. High-pitched strings to create a bit of tension. It has it all, basically!

Intentionally trying to make a hit is something that usually doesn't work though. They easily come out as too cheesy, too obvious, too contrived. While I like this track now, I might hate it next week. It's hard to be objective about your own music, particularly just a moment after you've finished it.

Anyways, here's the latest track. A bit of a sidestep, as I'm not sure it's anywhere near something Kerri might want to play in his sets. Might be good, might be bad, might be mediocre, you be the judge.

Money's too tight to mention

Some of you might wonder what kind of a setup I'm doing this project with.

Well, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words so here's a handy picture of the entire setup:

I do actually own a few pieces of hardware but those are for sale as I seriously need money for new monitor speakers as well as a few well-chosen plugins. I admit, I'm a hardware junkie and love working with it. However, to get professional kind of sound quality, something that might get released in 2016 requires quite a setup, a setup that would cost at least 10 000€, preferably more. Considering I am currently unemployed (I wouldn't have the time for this project if I wasn't), I simply can't afford to buy anything too expensive. So, a laptop and software it is!

So, what I have is not exactly  a professional grade studio with tons of analog synths, all kinds of funky processing gear, a large Neve console and whatnot. Then again, DAW's and plugins have come a long way and many professionals work solely in the box these days. Shed as a prime example, doing sonically really great house music with just a computer.  So, it's entirely possible to get great results with what I have, it's just the matter of acquiring the right skills and buying a few key plugins to patch the holes I have in my arsenal.

Anyways, enough of my financial blight!

Here's a track I started yesterday evening and finished today. It's quite a quickie job as I only spent about 5 hours on it. It's not exactly a dancefloor banger, more like a moody warmup track.  While it could use a better mixdown and stuff, I'll still call it a done deal, as I don't really have any more new ideas for it. Maybe I'll get back to it a week or two later, if I think the track is worth a major rehaul. At least it could be a bit shorter, I got carried away.

Some people might recognize the speech sample. It's from an old favorite of mine from the 70's.

Unknown - Untitled

I conducted a scientific research today.  I took a track I'm currently working on and a track from a professional house producer which was released a few years ago on a respected vinyl label. I made as sure as possible that they would be comparable, cropped them both to the same length, checked out that the volumes match (as louder tracks so easily sound better), checked that the tempi were about the same and the general mood of the tracks were somewhat similar. Basically, tried to match them as close as I could, so that the individual taste  of the listener wouldn't affect anything. Finally, I made up anonymous names for them, so they couldn't be identified in any way.

Then I asked 12 people (so far, the number might go up) to listen to  those 2 tracks with whatever monitoring they had available. It wasn't just house fans, there was an ambient/experimental composer, a professional movie sound designer and so on. Some of them knew very little about house, which was of course great as it meant they didn't have any kind of bias what proper house is supposed to sound like and could be more objective about it.

As we speak, 7 out of 12 people have listened to the tracks and given me their opinions. Some didn't have the time to analyse them properly, so they just tried to guess which is my track and which is the pro track. Some gave me some detailed analysis, of which I am very grateful.

Anyways! The results of this little survey were quite interesting. Out of those 7, 5 people guessed incorrectly and thought that my track sounded more like a professional release. Surprising, to say the least!

Now, before I get all cocky I must admit that the professional track I used isn't a great, big classic house track. It was impossible to use such as most listeners would have recognized it instantly and the whole point of the blind test would had gone down the drain. Still, it was a track made by a professional, mastered by a professional, released on vinyl by a good label. Which (hopefully) means that I've made some noticeable progress. Or maybe just got lucky, who knows!

Next time I'll do this I'll up the ante and use an even better reference track. Something that costs a lot on discogs preferably.

Inspiration

Do not spend to much time thinking and not enough doing.
Did I try the hardest at any of my dreams?
Did I purposly let others discourage me when I knew I could?
Will I die never knowing what I could have been or could of done?
Do not let these doubts restrain of trouble you just point yourself in the direction of your dreams.
Find your strength in the sound and make your transition.


Inspiration. That's a tough one. Almost anything can inspire you to make music. A walk deep in the woods. A bottle of fine malt whisky. Watching The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou for the millionth time. Going to a club where a great DJ is playing (though this can also be a bit disheartening, as good music on a loud PA sounds so great and when you get back home everything is just so quiet and you can't really feel the bass and the groove with headphones or small studio monitors).

And of course, listening to great music can and does inspire. This post is about what music has inspired me over the years, music that has shaped my taste and mind in one way or another.

I chose 12 (because 12 is a magic number) tracks that somehow represent my musical taste outside of house music. I might cover my favorite house tracks later.

Here they are, in no particular order.  Some are well known, some not so much.

Most people remember Jan Hammer from his work in Miami Vice, but he was a well-known keyboardist and composer even before that. This little gem, tucked away in his 1977 album Melodies is one of my desert island tracks. Such a beautiful composition with great lyrics and a magical performance from everyone. While I've listened this track hundreds of times and it's a huge inspiration in terms of the emotions it awakens in me, it's just so much above the level of anything I could ever be able to make myself that it can be a bit depressing to listen to it from an imitation point of view. I just listen to it to make me feel good, not to draw direct influence from.

I usually hate guitar jazz but this one is a notable exception. It takes a while to get going (4 minutes to be exact), but when it does it's bloody brilliant. Those subtle brushed drums, Jan Hammer's keyboard action and for what is probably the greatest, most emotional guitar performance ever recorded. I have tears in my eyes every time I hear it.

A not so well known jazz record from 1975. A hypnotic, almost techno-y synth riff mixed with free jazz. If you added a pounding kick drum to it, it might even work on the dancefloor. Maybe not in Ibiza, but at least on more sophisticated dancefloors. I absolutely adore it but again, it's one of those tracks that I'm never able to replicate. Purely for inspiration. If this is too strange, too random, too jazzy for you, you might want to skip the next entry altogether!

I love free jazz. The crazier the better. It doesn't get much crazier and more chaotic than this one from the year I was born. One of my biggest dreams is to one day write a house album that combines the dancefloor aesthetics of house with the almost random sounding nature of free jazz. I have exactly zero ideas on how to accomplish such a thing, all I got is the initial idea and the name for that album. Quite likely that the album will never materialize, simply due to how difficult, even impossible it would be to actually make it. Still, one must have dreams!

While generally I prefer the more synthetic form of disco of the 80's, this little nugget from 1976 is such a wonderful track that I just couldn't exclude it. Funky and soulful with lyrics that sound great, even if I actually have no idea what they're about. Something about dancehalls, diners, streets and cathedrals. Or something.

No list is complete without this one! An absolute, unique gem of a track. At 67BPM it'll probably clear most dancefloors (so not exactly a club banger), but in a way it's still dance music with it's four on the floor kick drum and the snares on 2 and 4. In an alternate universe people dance to half-time protohouse.

It's techno. It's from 1979 and it's not Kraftwerk. Ok, maybe it's not techno per se, more like really fast Berlin school music. The differences are minor though and you could easily slip this into a more chilled out techno set.

Considering I named my dog after them, I just had to pick something from Kano. Kano, as you probably know already,  was an early italo disco group who were (in my opinion) musically way ahead of most italo disco. A lot funkier and not as cheesy as what is typically associated with italo.

Probably my favorite boogie record of all time. Just awesome synth action, funky drums and possibly the most emotional vocals out of all disco records I've heard. You can dance to it, you can cry to it, you can make love to it. All three at the same time even.

I'm not an expert in African music. I know Mulatu Astatke of course but that's about it. However, ever since I heard DJ Anonymous (a Finnish DJ whose record collection and knowledge way, way surpasses mine) play this one when warming up for Danny Krivit I've been hooked. As I  unfortunately don't  speak Yoruba that well I got no idea what the lyrics are about, but the music's just so funky, without sounding like a James Brown derivative, that it's just  irresistable.

Miami Vice! My favorite TV series of all time, particularly the first two seasons. Since the music on it was so excellent I could easily include several tracks from it, but since no one's gonna read a blog post that's like 100 pages, I had to pick something (well, in addition to the last pick that is) and I picked this one. I don't know much about Mr. Ballard and from what I've heard, this is the only good song he ever wrote but what a song it is! Makes me want to buy a speedboat and drive it to Miami.

And last but not least what is probably my favorite song of all time. You know this one!

And that's it. Tons of stuff was left out. Picking just 12 tracks is not an easy task. If I feel inspired, I might make a separate list of my very favorite house tracks in the future.