Critical Evaluation
Over the course of the past 4 or so years of being a musician, I have always tried to involve other people in my work whether it be via forming bands or simply sharing ideas with others for feedback. However, I have awful luck with these things! For one, every band has fallen apart before it’s had the opportunity to blossom; My high school band, The Lucidity, was originally inspired by pulling things from all 3 members diverse musical interests which ended up being it’s undoing due to creative differences. Fat Raccoon was my fault as I let my inner control freak loose and it ended up souring the experience of the other two members. Most recently, Leatherman’s was ended abruptly as the other member left to go focus on his other band that he expressed more joy in playing with and had a sound which, unlike Leatherman’s, had and still has the possibility of being a mainstream success. These are all very understandable reasons for a band splitting, and this project made me come to terms with a core fact of them; I needed to figure out what I truly wanted to get out of my music on my own.
This is part of the reason why I was so deeply inspired by Nick Drake, specifically the album Pink Moon; After trying to forge a path of success with his two previous albums, utilising orchestral arrangements and wide, encompassing production, he found little reward and reclused into himself, recording one last effort which to many stands as his best. On a different level than he was experiencing, I found myself relating to his story. Stumbling into things that sounded fantastic (Five Leaves Left and Bryter Later are two phenomenal albums despite initially poor reception) and as soon as the rush of joy from creating the music had passed, the world caught up and landed him back where he began. Pink Moon consists of purely (save for a piano in the title track) Nick’s voice and his guitar. That’s it.
This inspired me to change my direction with where I had originally believed I wanted to go with this project. Instead of furiously hectic and in your face noisy math rock, I found solace in Nick’s stripped back sound and realised that I really ought to rekindle my folk sensibilities.
When it came to writing, I figured if I was in a standard tuning that I would seep back into my typical process of noodling around on an acoustic, writing guitar parts that were completely unsuitable for the soft context of the instrument. So the first course of action was changing my tuning-For Three Steel Roses, I retuned to DADF#AD, a tuning I picked up from indie musician Alex G. In combining the tuning, a rather happy sounding open major chord, with my usual dramatic and emotional style of harmony I hammered out a very nostalgic sound with my chord progressions, which I felt perfect about since the whole idea of returning to my folk roots was born from looking back upon my past projects. However, I didn’t want to completely abandon my former style of writing, so I introduced a brief key change in the pre-chorus from D major to D minor as the song up to that point didn’t feel like mine. Then in the chorus I slowly modulate back to D major using jazzy and dissonant chords and intervals, utilising oblique movement between the melody and harmony to smoothen the transition. This resulted in something which felt resoundingly mine, whilst still being reminscent of the influences I had when writing the lyrics and guitar part.
I mixed and mastered the song myself, which makes it the first piece of music I've ever properly produced! While I can very apparently improve, I'm not terribly displeased with the results; I went for a purposely dry and close sounding mix, adding a layer of vulnerabilty to a song who's lyrics depict a vulnerable mind experiencing complex emotion. This is also to reflect the sound of a lot of early folk artists, such as Bert Jansch and Jackson C. Frank who both recorded their early music in small spaces with close mic techniques. Again, this is how Pink Moon was recorded, with Nick recording incredibly dry tracks on some songs, for example Horn, the companion piece to Things Behind The Sun.
The poem reading I felt tied it nicely together. It's something I wrote in the midst of wracking my brain for past experiences to write a song about and while not turning out as as song, I felt it fit too well to not include in the end product.
Overall, this project has massively improved my songwriting abilities, and in part my understanding of production devices such as compression, EQ, and the process of mastering.
No comments:
Post a Comment