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.

I got that feelin'

Another day, another post!

I'm still trying to recover from the last behemoth of a post, so I'll keep this one brief.

While nowadays many people concentrate on the more technical side of making music, house is still about emotion  and feeling. Even if you make instrumental music, you still have to have something to say and emotions you want to convey. It could be something simple such as I love you, I hate you, I miss you. The actual emotion is not important, the point is that if you're dead and cold inside you can't make proper house.

However, even if you're full of life, soul and emotion, it's not easy to make a track that showcases that. Expressing emotions in a musical form is something that can be practiced as well. It's a skill just like any other aspect of music making. It's also a skill that I've struggled with for a long time. My music has been quite hollow and artificial, kinda like being a picture of a thing instead of the thing itself.

When I listen to music, I often get very emotional. It's strange, especially when you listen to a fairly minimal, instrumental house track.  I often wonder how do they do it? There's not much in a track, yet it conveys tons of emotion. A typical example would be this track from the man itself:

Analysing it is quite difficult! The chord progression is so simple, yet conveys tons of emotion. I could listen to just the chords all day long. I wish I knew how to make it or to be precise, how to make a track like it, I'm not interested in a cover version. Now, I know the chord sound is sampled from Summer Madness by Kool & The Gang and I could of course just use the same sample myself, but I don't really like using samples with melodic or harmonic content. I know, sampling from disco, funk, soul and jazz records is very common in house music, but I have a stubborn spirit and I'd like to learn how to make everything I can the DIY way.

In contrast, here's my latest track:




Not bad (I hope...), but also quite not there yet. It has that housey feel to it, but it's still lacking any real depth. The chords also resemble Kerri's House Is House a tad too much I think. It wasn't intentional,  I only realized it after the track was almost ready. Sorry.


Different forms of music have different learning curves. In house music it's relatively easy to get 90% there, it's the remaining 10% that is extremely difficult, to the point of being unachievable to most. Of course, 90% can get you a release, especially a digital one. Lots of, putting it politely, released house music is somewhat lacklustre. The production might be there, but it lacks any real depth and substance and will thus be soon forgotten. To reach my goal, I need to learn both the production chops (so it's playable in a club) and the more musical aspects. I need to dig deep in my soul and really put everything I got into this, else I will fail.

Groove la chord

One thing I've noticed about many of the house tracks that I like (and Kerri's tracks in particular) is that the chord progressions are often the most important parts of them. The rhythm can be very simple, just a kick/clap/hat affair, the bassline can consists of just 2 or 3 notes, the melody can sound like a drunken child wrote it in 3 minutes, lefthanded and blindfolded. But the chords! Oh boy, do the chords need to work.

I would so like to analyse some of my favorite house tracks and their chord progressions, but unfortunately I don't have perfect pitch and none of the chord recognition programs I've tried work that well. Then again, the quality of the chord progression is often a result of many factors, not just the actual notes that are played.

I've divided the chord progression into four separate parts. Now, I'm not a trained musician and if you happen to be one you'll probably have a different view on the subject. When I analyse and try to learn new things, I tend to chop a vast issue into smaller, more manageable bits. Learn those bits and in the end those bits combine into useful, new knowledge. At least in theory.

The four parts of a chord progression, according to me are the following:

1) The notes

If you're a trained musician, this is easy for you. Know your minors and majors, their 7th, 9th and 11th versions and if you want to get adventurous, throw in some diminished, augmented, suspended and other less common chords (I personally don't use those much for house though, even if I probably should to get more varied chord progressions). Play around with the voicings, maybe omit some unnecessary notes and voilà, you have your chord progression right there. Unfortunately, it ain't quite so easy! As the chords are the heart and soul of many house tracks, a very basic progression just won't usually do, like it might do in some other forms of music where the chords are more like something that backs up the melody, instead of being in the spotlight.

If you've made house more than 5 minutes, you probably know this public secret already: Add a 7th to a basic minor or major triad and it'll instantly sound more housey. When you first try it, it's one of those situations where you go "Oh THAT'S how they did it". However, that doesn't mean that basic triads (or even simpler chords, like adding just a fifth to a note) are useless, far from it. When you're composing your chord progression you have to find the right balance between simpler chords and the more advanced ones (if you want to call a 4-note chord advanced that is, jazz players will probably laugh at the mere idea). If the progression is all triads (or fifths) it'll often sound more like a techno track. Adding 7ths (and occasionally 9ths and 11ths) to some of the chords will make the progression housier, deeper and more soulful. If you're a trained musician, this is child's play to you. Many people dabbling with electronic music production are not trained in any way, however. Many aspiring producers learn it the DIY way, though learning by watching Youtube tutorials is common nowadays too. A word of warning though: Every single house tutorial I've seen on Youtube has been extremely basic, to the point of being more or less useless if your goal is to be the next MAW and not just to impress your friends with a loud kick. Feel free to prove me wrong on this one, as I'm always interested in any kind of help I can get.

You probably want to mess with the voicing as well, moving some carefully chosen notes an octave or two up or down. It's a subtle effect which can really add a nice touch to a chord progression. Musically, it's still the same chord but it'll sound and especially feel a  bit different. And since house music is all about the feeling and emotion, it's good practice to try out different voicings to reach the maximum emotional impact. As big chords can often sound, well, big and thus eat away the valuable frequency space , you might also want to omit some notes that aren't necessary. There's no real science to it as far as I am aware of, just trust your ears, your taste and take away notes that don't fulfill an important role. 

Once you understand voicing and note omitting you can (or at least I could) make much simpler progressions that are still interesting to the ear. The mistake I used to make (and still often make to be honest) is to make the chord progression too complex. Too many different chords, too many changes happening too fast. You aren't trying to sound like the next coming of Yngwie Malmsteen (or if you are, you're probably reading the wrong blog!), you want to express strong emotions as simply as you can. Sometimes you can even get away with not even changing the root  note of the chord, your chord progression  could go something like Cmaj7, Cmin7, Cdom7, Cmin (I just made that up without listening, so there's a high chance it's not the greatest progression in the world, it's just an example). In a way, the more you learn, the less you can get away with. Beginners (me included) often make the mistake of cramming their tracks full of ideas. There's so many things that a professional could write an entire album out of those ideas. Don't fall into that trap! Once you understand complexity and know exactly what you're doing, the less is more approach is usually for the best.


2) The sound

Sound conveys emotion. A smooth Rhodes  conveys different emotions than  a distorted analog synth. Since house is all about emotion (instead of showing off technical prowess or playing ability) and it's a fairly minimal form of music, sound choice is of utmost importance. In some forms music there's so much going on that tiny mistakes will go unnoticed. In house not so much. Even if you have to start with some kind of a sound to pick your notes, once you have the notes of your chord progression ready (though not necessarily finished - you can always go back to them if needed), you typically want to focus on the sound of chords next. While it's always of course situation dependent, house classics such as smooth electric pianos, organs, high pitched strings and warm pads are a good starting point. While they've been of course used on countless records already, they're classics for a reason. Rock bands use guitars, basses and drums and nobody complains that they've heard those sounds already. It's just a question of using them correctly and playing the right notes. Trust me, if you make a really good chord progression no one will go "Man, that Rhodes AGAIN", they'll go "Shut up and take my money" instead.

While the exact production details will vary from track to track, some rough guidelines can still be given. You probably want to avoid harsh, abrasive sounds and favor smooth, silky, pleasant sounds instead. Even if you plan on sounding a bit more modern and not just a retro 90's house track, you probably don't want to sound like Skrillex. However, the trick is to find the right balance. While you probably want to use a high quality lowpass filter (especially if you happen to have access to a Mutronics Mutator!) all the time as chord with some lowpass filtering simply sounds very much like house, you don't want to end up with a track that sounds very muffled which is exactly what will happen when you lowpass filter everything. Some high frequency content (besides the hihats) must come through. Finding the right balance can sometimes be very tricky and take quite a long time to get right.  Everything affects everything, so you just have to keep turning the knobs (be it physical or virtual) until it sounds just good to your ears. While you can take short cuts on some productions aspects (such as get yourself a great sounding, preprocessed set of drums instead of moulding your own from raw sounds), there's unfortunately no short cut (unless lifting a huge chunk of a sample from a record counts) for this, there's just too many variables. All you can do is A/B comparison your track with a commercially released track that's sonics you like and work work work to get it somewhere in the ballpark. However, with experience, this process will of course become faster and faster and once you know your tools well enough, you can get something half-decent almost blindfolded. Then again, that's another pit you can fall in. Constantly trying something new to become better and have more tools at your disposal is a sign of an ambitious producer. Combine that ambition with a large repertoire of basic but extremely useful tricks and you might be going somewhere!

3) The performance

Even if you're not playing everything by hand and draw notes with a mouse instead, I'm still calling it a performance because at the end of the day they lead to the same results, ie. the notes you've chosen have certain attributes such as timing, length, velocity and such, which affect how the listeners experience the chord progression. If everything is rigidly quantized with no velocity changes and all the notes share the same length, your track will sound like a techno track that uses house sounds. Don't take me wrong, I love proper techno! It's just a different paradigm, even if house and techno share the same roots and many tracks fall somewhere between the genres.  That relentless, mechanical groove works in techno, but you need to loosen up a bit when you make house. Ideally, you're (or have an access to) a world class jazz piano player who can play anything without much effort. Most, me definitely included, aren't in such a fortunate position. Your arsenal probably consists of a computer, a mouse, some form of monitoring and maybe some kind of a cheap MIDI controller.  To make matters worse, your keyboard rendering of Für Elise wouldn't pass a test made for 5 year olds. I'm like that. I sometimes play stuff by hand but it's definitely not my forte. I wish it was, as creating house-y chord progressions with a mouse can take a very long time. Every note, every note length, every velocity and the timing must be near perfect or it'll sound amateurish. As the amount of variables runs in the millions,  I wasn't kidding when I said it can take a long time. You don't of course have to literally go through millions of variations, with experience you can take educated guesses and get in the ballpark at least somewhat quickly.

While I personally don't mess that much with the timing of the chords and use quite rigid quantization most of the time, it's still something you might want to pay some attention to (and something that I'm planning on paying more attention to in the future). If you play your chords with a keyboard and don't quantize, this will be a natural side product of it and not something you need to intentionally aim for and spend hours on editing the minute details of note placement. If you sequence your chords instead and your sequencer allows the editing of microtiming, you might want to spread the notes of the chord a bit as well as move the whole chord back and forth a bit, to make it sound less robotic.  Working with a modern DAW has it's advantages, as most DAW's have some sort of a humanize function nowadays which does this automatically so you don't have to manually try out a huge amount note positions until it sounds the way you want.

House has it's roots in funk. In funk music everything is a slave to the rhythm, chords included. Besides the timing, one often overlooked aspect of creating a rhythmically exciting track is the length of the notes. Da da da da is not a very exciting, da da da daaa was good enough for Beethoven. As funky as Beethoven was, James Brown was even more demanding. When he was conducting his funk orchestra he made sure everything was funky, including the chords. While you can get away with having even length chords for background pads and strings, your main chord progression is likely to need some close attention. While there might be some science behind the funk, I'm not aware of it. Just experiment with the note lengths until you like the rhythm of it. Now, I know it might sound strange to use the word rhythm when we're talking about chord progression, but that's exactly what's going on. If you want it to be funky, the space between the notes is just as important as the notes themselves. If you just have an ongoing wall of sound the listener will get easily bored as there's nothing to latch onto and to chop the incoming information into smaller pieces, in a way quite similar to reading text with no commas and periods that divide the text in to sentences. While funk and jazz drummers are the masters of small timing variations that create the groove, it's very much possible to create a track with stiff quantization that the ear still perceives as funky. The key is to vary the note lengths to create a rhythm that grooves well by having all-important space between the notes. If you like your notes and like the sound but the progression still doesn't seem to quite work, experiment with note lenghts! It might be just what the doctor ordered.

While many old and classic synths don't even have velocity, being able to edit the velocity of the notes is a very important tool in your arsenal. If all the notes in your chord progression share the same velocity the end result can sound quite robotic and some of the notes of the chord can really stick out in an unpleasant manner. For starters, when  you play a sound across the keyboard with the same velocity, some notes will appear quieter and some louder, depending on the sound you've made or chosen. Velocity is often also mapped to other parameters than just volume, filter cutoff being very common. Because of these issues (or rather, features) editing the velocity of the individual notes of the chord is a often a very smart idea. Typically, particularly when you've spread out the voicing of the chord to span several octaves, you want to lessen the velocity of the higher notes or else they can sound quite really harsh and out of place. It can be one of those things that make or break the chord. You could have the right notes, the right sound and everything, but if the high note sounds really shrill and unpleasant, the whole chord can sound off. That's why I, almost by default, use lower velocity values for the higher notes. It's a small and simple detail, but it's quite often all about the details. There's lots of house producers out there, fighting for their moment of fame. If you ever get there, you better make an impact and be able to present a track that's flawless.

4) The context

 Chords, just like everything else in music,  don't exist in a vacuum. The most important thing to always consider is whether it suits the track or not. If you take the most amazing piano performance in the world and slap a house beat on top of it it'll probably sound quite horrible. Unfortunately, context is not something that can be easily explained in a few words. If you want to learn it, you have to first develope your musical taste buds (by listening to quality house records for a while - say about 10 years), then spent lots of time experimenting on your own, finding your own voice and style, without losing your roots.

Sometimes all the track needs is the same chord repeating over and over again, like in Aril Brikha's famous track Groove La Chord. Sometimes a more complex progression is necessary for the track to work. It all depends. Music is not a sport, there is no simple way to measure what is good and what is not. Some of the best house tracks are quite banal actually. They just shouldn't work, but they still do. They are simple, but they convey an emotion and convey it well. Even if people who don't listen to house often look down upon it because it's so simple and can sound like something that is quite easy to make, in reality it's not easy to make a strong, emotional track with minimal elements.  You need vision, talent, experience and lots of hard work to make a house track that stands out. While many, if not all, house tutorials want to make you believe that it's all about the production techniques and focus on EQ, compression, reverb and all kinds of studio trickery, hardly any tutorials deal with the musical and emotional aspects of making house and when they do they're very basic, usually just show you how to add a 7th and that's about it.

Teaching how to apply chords in real world musical situations, where the amount of variables is very high is very difficult. One could always say something basic about staying in key or using tried and tested chord progressions but then again, there are tons of tracks where everything is just wrong but it still works. Out of key notes, out of tune instruments, rhythms real drummers would be ashamed of playing. Such is house. Right can be wrong, wrong can be right. It's all about the context and applying your taste to create a whole that's larger than the sum of it's parts.

And that's it for now. You could easily write a whole book about chords (and many have), I only touched the surface of the subject. I'm not entirely happy about this post as it's quite long, yet not informative enough. I might make a further revision of it if I ever feel like it.

Mbar A Thym

While doing research for my blog post about chords, I happened to read (again) about parallel chords. Now, I've known the concept for ages but never really tried it, it's just been on my to-do list for years. Parallel chords have been used in house music for ages, though it's been more like a byproduct of the limited sampling technology rather than something that the house pioneers were doing deliberately.

I also have a (virtual) notebook full of ideas for tracks and particularly track names I consider clever and/or funny and occasionally borderline  moronic. One of the names in that book is Mbar A Thym.  As you're probably aware, Bar A Thym is a famous Kerri Chandler track. Mbar is, or rather was, a popular (especially among the DJ crowd)  bar here in Helsinki which rather sadly closed a while ago. As I'm a big fan of wordplays I combined these two into which is now the title of both this blog post as well as the accompanying new track of mine.

I rather like it (at least in this premilinary honeymoon period), even though I'm the first one to admit that it's quite a rip off. But as they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. At least I ripped off a great track and not the Vengaboys!

This is what the track sounds like:


As you can probably hear, it's not the most original track ever made.  Copying others is a good way to learn though as long as you do it with the intention of finding your own voice in the end.

And that's it for now. Feel free to leave a comment. Positive, negative, everything is fine.

Winter madness

Another intermission!

The post about chords has turned out to be quite a long one and I really have to put my mind into it for it to make any sense and to be worth reading to anyone. I'm about 70% there though, so I'll publish it in a day or two.

Meanwhile, I've noticed that my little, quite personal blog has gathered some attention. Feeling slightly ashamed now, as I assumed no one would read it.  Then again, as they say, any publicity is good publicity and since I'm a nobody I suppose I'll just take everything I can get, the good, the bad and the ugly.

Anyways! Since the post about chords isn't ready yet and this is a blog about music, I'll just post the latest thing I'm working on. The new speakers are still a week or two away, so I have no idea how this will translate to speakers, proper club PA even less so. It is what is. If it sounds like crap you can always shoot me some ideas on how to improve it.

Think twice

This post was supposed to be about chords, but it's about something that all musicians should learn to do. Abandoning projects that are going nowhere, that is.

I've spent the last 2-3 days working on this track:




And it's just going absolutely nowhere. I kinda like the mood of it, but the mix is atrocious and I can't think of anything that I would want to add to it.  To make things worse, it has some core level production problems that aren't easy to fix. Now, I could always waste a week on fixing the problems but the question is, is it worth it? If the track behind the mess was good enough, then maybe yes, sometimes. But, polishing a mediocre track for a week is not.  One could always say that the process could teach me a thing or two about production, but then again, I could always just as well write a few new tracks and focus on building them to be good from the ground up.

As time is short, I will thus just abandon the track. If I want to, I can always come back to it later or salvage the good bits from it.

And that's it for now. This was basically just an intermission, a short post about frustration. Next post will be about the chords, I promise!

First time around

As I promised in my previous post, this time I'll post a track of mine to showcase my current level of production and to paint some kind of a picture of the amount of work I have to do to reach my goal.

While the track is not based on anything, I did use this track from my house collection as a mixing reference:

It's a relatively modern production but I really love the smoothness of it. It's really pleasant to listen to, both at home and in a club. I wish I knew how to achieve such smoothness without losing all high frequency content. My tracks sound much harsher, for various reasons. One could of course blame the medium and just say that it sounds smooth because it's on vinyl. Unfortunately, that's not the way it works. As wonderful as vinyl is, it's not an instant road to happiness. Neither is mastering. Those things help a bit, but the track must sound more or less perfect sans mastering or pressing on vinyl. That's one of the major obstacles I'm facing on my journey, how to give the elements lots of presence and weight, while maintaining a smooth, pleasurable listening experience, even at loud volume. I suck at mixing (among other things), it's an area where I really have to improve so that I can make a Kerri-worthy track. To make things worse, I'm working solely on headphones at the moment and making a mix that translates well to speakers is very difficult on headphones alone. That thing will hopefully change in a week or two though, as I'm planning to buy a pair of half-decent studio monitors.

Anyways! For comparison's sake, here is a recent track of mine:



It's not much. The arrangement needs lots of small adjustments to keep it interesting, the mix is muddy, the individual elements sound weak compared to commercial releases, the composition is naive (and at the same time, too complex). However, that's where I am now. To reach the level of that Slowhouse track needs tons of work. And I'm not sure even that level is high enough! I must aim even higher, as unrealistic as that may be with this deadline.

Next post will deal with the most important aspect of the kind of house I like. Chords! Lovely, sweet chords, mmmm.

House is house

House is house. It can be jazzy, it can be soulful, it can be funky, it can even have rapping on it, but at the end of the day it's still house. Even when it contains elements of other forms of music, it doesn't try to be something it isn't. That's the beauty of it. It's not pretentious, it is what it is. Not everyone loves it, not everyone understands it. Some of the best house tracks are deceptively simple. There's a kick, a clap or a snare, some hihats. A simple bassline, a few chords, maybe a bit of a piano or an organ. And that's often it. On the surface, it's something a child could make after a little training. Right and wrong! While it's true that making a mediocre house track is relatively easy, making something that stands out is remarkably difficult. There are literally millions of house tracks made every year these days, thanks to cheap or sometime even free computer software. Out of those millions, only a handful gets released and even less end up on vinyl. Out of that handful very few tracks have any kind of staying power.

And that exactly is my goal. To make a track with staying power. Not necessarily a bona fide classic, but something that I can listen to 10 years from now and think that it still sounds good and relevant. Quite a mountain to climb, considering my current level doesn't even produce music that would break the release barrier, even digitally.

Some might wonder how exactly can I  pull it off then? 3,5 months is nothing. Even if I work on it 8 hours a day on average, it's still only a bit over 800 hours. Nowhere near the usual requirement of 10 000 hours. The answer is hard work, dedication, motivation and analysis. The last part is of  especial importance. All my life I've made music on my own terms. Even though I've of course listened to music a lot, I've never really analysed it as such. That's one thing that has to change. I have to chop the kind of house that I like into smaller, more manageable pieces and learn to duplicate what I'm hearing, without actually ripping off anyone. At the same time, I have to learn to understand how fragile house is. It's simple and minimalistic, so even a really small detail that is off can make or break a tune. So, knowing how to write great drums or a great bassline or a great chord progression is not enough, I have to learn how to arrange it all together, to form a coherent whole and not just a hodge podge collection of good bits.


And that's it for now. Next time I will try to post an example of where I am now musically, to paint some kind of a picture of the amount of hard, sweatty work I have to go through to reach my ultimate goal.

Intro

First things first: Kerri Chandler is my biggest idol in music. Alongside Joe Claussell, he's the biggest reason I listen to house music nowadays. I didn't even like house in the 90's, I was into drum & bass, hip hop and some random crap they played on the radio. It all changed some 15 years ago, thanks to the aforementioned two gentlemen.

While I've always dabbled with making music myself too, I've never really took it seriously. It was just a hobby, something I did for fun and recreation. I had no real goals or motivation to get better. That shit is about to change now! At the tender age of 39, I've decided to teach myself everything there is to know about house and especially how to write a great house track with the ultimate purpose of having my idol Kerri Chandler play my track when he's playing here in Helsinki next summer.

The catch? I have just three and a half months to elevate myself from a low level hobbyist to a professional house producer who can make a track worthy of a Kerri Chandler playlist. This is the hardest thing I've ever set my mind and spirit into.  This blog will document my progress and I intend to update it a few times a week for the next 3,5 months. The game is on!