Tuning, Tension, And Urgency

I have a progression and a structure!  It doesn't include the part(s) I thought up as I was writing my last post.

The parts I do have are a couple of riff ideas that have been kicking around in my head for a while, but I guess I hadn't thought of them, or thought of joining them together, until I started playing around with the Sustainiac on my custom Warmoth Strat.  Uh, how detailed should I be?  Let the Sustainiac hold an open root note, delay pedal on with a long decay, then accentuate a major third off of it.  Hit a power chord, really strong and loud but also slow, to build up.  Break out of it and play the main riff, which I came up with years ago and works with the major third focus.  At the end of the song, the key shifts up and there's another major third again while going full throttle on eighth notes on all instruments (guitar, bass drums).  The song ends in the changed key.  Big beginning and bigger ending.

I just came up with about half of the main parts for my first song?!  A lot more jamming to ensue on this one.

I'm thinking about what guitar tuning I should commit to at this point, but not so much as far as picking out the base key to work with.  The majority of the riffs I write could be transposed in any key and/or work with drop tunings.  However, there are some riffs I've come up with that are specific to either standard or drop tuning.  This would need to be addressed at some point if I want to work on that collection of riffs.  Tuning is more about tone and feel for me and less about the notes.  Guitar strings bend and snap and sustain differently with different tunings and guitar scale lengths, all of which get transferred through the pickups and to the amplifier.

Case in point: I'm quite fond of playing sus2 chords for their color (I'll discuss this in a later post) rather than just standard power chords (fifths).  Overall they're easier to play in a dropped tuning than standard.

With that being said, I'm generally not the kind of player that likes to go super low, or at least for a regular electric guitar I don't.  (I'd like to own a custom baritone guitar someday. *swoon*).  Way too many bands sacrifice clarity by going down to drop B or lower—the strings are practically flopping around on the fretboard.  This works if you're going for slower tempos, but, in my opinion, not for playing fast.

Metal and hardcore are supposed to work off of tension and/or urgency.  And that tension is a dynamic force, too: it winds up, releases, winds itself up again, hangs there for a bit, then explodes.  I don't want to write music where every song is 6+ minutes long, builds up with some slow jam, gradually gets louder, crescendoes with copious amounts delay pedal decay, then comes back down just as slowly...  I want to kick people in the face with a riff, then pull the progression in a direction that's not expected.

There's tremendous power when every instrument is punchy and tight and operating within its optimal frequency range.  (That is to say, each player understands what space he/she is occupying sonically and owns it.)  One of my guitar heroes, Ben Weinman of The Dillinger Escape Plan, has built up an entire philosophy around frequency ranges of instruments: guitar is a mid-range instrument, so SLAM the hell out of that mid-EQ.  Go ahead, don't worry, no one will notice.  Actually, everyone will notice, because now everyone can actually HEAR you apart from the 8x10 bass cab and the cymbals.

YES, good tones can be coaxed from this.  Dial the presence and gain back to no more than 1:00 for channels 2 and 3.  You're welcome.  (Image pulled from mesaboogie.com)

In the days of playing with Overcome back in 2010-2011, I enjoyed being a part of the process of five dudes with varying ages and backgrounds practicing together every Wednesday night in a warehouse to blast sounds.  Jason Stinson had myself and our drummer, Jon, performing at the very edge of our ability, and we had to learn to play and process faster than we had ever done before.  Over the course of a few months, the band wound itself into a perfectly taut synergy, the end goal being to master the dynamics of this tension/release and perform with as much ferocity as possible.  We had the ability to force a stop midsong, quiet enough to hear a pin drop, then slam into the next riff.  Controlled chaos at its finest.  The trouble was that the br00tal moshcore bands we wound up playing shows with, and their breakdown-worshipping fans whom we would not satisfy with 808 sub drops, totally didn't get it.

But this kind of energy is still my favorite thing.

The last show I played with Overcome, 6 May 2011.

Reverse The Session Jamming

Want to know what is the worst way to get me to work on writing music?  Put a guitar in my hands.  Let me explain.

In my head I have this idea of the Session, a length of time between one to two hours, wherein I will pick up the guitar, warm up with some scale runs up and down the neck, and then bring my [nonexistent or at best atrophied] songwriting skills to task.  Work on the previous Session's combination of a guitar riff with a bass line, and improve it so that perhaps it can become a progression.  If two different progressions sound like they would go together, then possibly change the key to one of them so they both fit, like a jigsaw puzzle.  Then it's on to tweaking melodies, counter-melodies, rhythm, leads, guitar tricks and/or effects if there's enough time and space in the song.  Satisfied with my productivity, I save the results and conclude the Session.

A shot of my "Big Riff" guitar's Sustainiac switches, pulled from my other blog, That Dream Guitar.

What actually happens is this: pickup the guitar and play scales to warm up.  Play scales some more.  Oh wait, I've been been focusing solely on major scales up and down the neck.  Switch to minor.  Dang it, can't get my second finger to cooperate with my fourth.  Switch to the harmonic minor because it sounds interesting and exotic.  Attempt to sweep pick on that arpeggio I'm still getting used to.  Nope, still can't get it with the left hand nor the right.  Turn on amp.  Turn on iTunes.  Look through songs based on what tuning my guitar happens to be in.  Choose a fast punk song to play along to that's all power chords and easy (Mxpx).  Choose a moderately challenging hardcore / metalcore / metal song that I know from 8+ years ago (most songs by Every Time I Die).  Attempt a song that's utterly impossible for me to play (just about anything from Megadeth's Rust In Peace).  Then settle for one of my favorite gutiar records: Cave In's Jupiter or Hopesfall's The Satellite Years or Magnetic North or Thrice's The Illusion Of Safety...  Keep playing along to records.  The Session may still reach the 1-2 hour mark, but not a single lick has been written.

 

And, really, could I come up with anything better than this?  No.

I distract myself way too easily with a guitar and I wonder if I should instead start with the part of songwriting I fear the most—lyrics and/or singing.  Or at least, take an idea for a set of lyrics and write the song around it as a cerebral exercise.  Sharp and straight to the point about some social issue?  Punk.  Musing about past loves that are long gone?  Shoegaze.  The incidents surrounding that last breakup?  Emo (synthesizers required).  Existential angst?  Post-metal.  Contemplating the structure of the known universe and life's inconsistencies?  Metal.

Okay, it shouldn't be that pinpointed to genre.  But I like the idea of taking a lyrical concept and asking, "What does that sound like?"  The loneliness of being a single, full-time college student at the age of thirty.  My frustrations with rampant American consumerism (particularly of technology) even as I succumb to it myself.  The sum or the average of all of my past romantic relationships, for better or worse.  My fascinations with outer space.  My faith in Jesus and some of the struggles I've experienced in my faith along the way.

This might help close the gap on many of the little decisions.  When to dig in with a pick, or strum a chord with my thumb, or have a high drone note ringing over the top of a progression.  In other words, figure out the theme of what I'm going for and my fingers will follow.  Do it once, and the second time becomes just a little bit easier.  Do it again and again, and hopefully there won't be this enormous static friction force to overcome to get the creativity moving.

By the way, I went to the bathroom sometime in the middle of writing this post.  As I was relieving myself, a lead came up in my head, which descended as a rhythm guitar and bass part punched in underneath it.  I came straight back to my room and figured out the lead.  Not technically complicated, but it alternates between a 6-count and a 5-count.  Add a 6/8 rhythm part underneath it and...  Maybe I don't need to write lyrics yet?  Hm...

Time to go, but I'll leave with this.  I discovered this 1-man metal act, Cloudkicker, on Bandcamp yesterday and it's blowing my mind.

Why Bother?

Why bother?
It's gonna hurt me
It's gonna kill when you desert me
This happened to me twice before
It won't happen to me anymore...
—Weezer

What is the purpose of this pursuit, really?  Prove my chops, serve my ego, assert my will on others, earn indie cred?  Do I have anything of worth to say about life or relationships or social issues or ________?  Can I, a person who's studying to become a scientist, make art?  And can I, a Christian, make legitimate and original and good art?

I assure you there are a lot of little reasons I just mentioned (and probably a few I don't quite know yet, good or bad), but the simplest answer is that there's a sound in my head that has been swimming around for years, and it needs to pour out.  Whenever my defeated mind tells me I should just play music with whoever wants me around and not worry about it, my heart reaction is NO.  Recently, as I've attended more shows in Seattle this year than the previous three years combined, I would watch a band on stage and...  THIS is what I came here for.  This is where I belong.

Overcome @ Cornerstone Festival, 2010

The guitar blog completed from last year to a few months ago had a low amount of risk associated with it—Come listen to me talk your ear off about components and watch me make something legitimately cool.  But writing music?  There's a whole world of criticism out there waiting to find you.  I had to learn to take that criticism well, and to filter out the voices of trolls and naysayers, when I started posting tutorial demo videos on YouTube in 2009.  Perhaps I just figured that songwriting would be a hundred times worse.  Fear can stop you, but that doesn't negate the drive nor flush out your ideas.  I'd like to think that time, age, a few dozen rejections from women, and those YouTube videos have made me a more resilient individual, such that I'm ready to tackle a much more personal project and release it to the world.

Alright, enough talk.  Over the years I've amassed a library of guitar riffs and chord progressions using the most crude software (Cubase AI, Audacity) and microphones (Shure SM63 into a XLR/TRS converter, smartphone).  Recording was just never a world I wanted to get into.  The idea of dropping enormous amounts of money on gear and software, just to have it all go obsolete in a couple years' time with another Pro Tools update, was something that kept me at bay.

I have all of my files arranged by date as YYYYMMDD and loaded in my iTunes under my own name.  Narcissistic?  Maybe.  But it makes for easy access:

I'll start with these files and see if there's anything interesting there that will spark any new ideas.  And I've got plenty more sound files between two different smartphones, too.

Speaking of ideas:

I'm Not A Songwriter

As of March 2015, I've been playing guitar for fifteen years.  That's half of my life spent on one passion; one pursuit.  Music has been a tremendous gift that has kept on giving.  There have been rock bands, church worship bands, shows, flights to other states to play, recording sessions, and a YouTube channel as a platform for gear tutorials.  I've had a good run and a fun ride on this thing so far.  But lately a wire in the light bulb of my thought process has begun to glow: I'm not a songwriter.

I've always been someone else's musician.  The hired gun.  The backup guitar or bass player called in when someone else in my circle of friends needs someone who can play.  Over the years I've developed this skill set of being able to drop in at a moment's notice (especially in worship music), and I can improvise working or sometimes even interesting parts.  I've prided myself on this ability, but whenever I've been asked if I have any songs, or a band, there would be that awkward moment of tension where I have to admit that I haven't developed the discipline for those pursuits.

I had left "my" previous metal band, Overcome, in 2011 to move to Seattle so that I could rock out here.  I say "my" because it really wasn't MY band; Overcome is Jason Stinson's band; there's a history attached with that band name that I'm only a small part of, and while I was a full member for over a year and recorded an album with them (The Great Campaign of Sabotage, Facedown Records), and it was a fantastic experience, and I was challenged in ways that were good...  There was something missing.  The space was left open at the time where I could write some riffs or contribute a major portion of a song structure for Overcome, but everything I wrote at home just didn't fit.  I learned to trust Stinson's judgment and songwriting style and keep up the pace.

I could go on and on about how the last four or so years here in Seattle have left me with no opportunity to pursue music here, including phases of intense involvement in a church, or being broke poor to the point of living solely on pasta, or returning to school (I'm now enrolled full-time and working toward and engineering degree), etc.; while true, it's all BS.  It's time to get over being my own worst enemy as far as having discipline is concerned.

I'm not a songwriter, but it's time to work on becoming one.

This blog will be structured much like my custom guitar blog from last year (That Dream Guitar, which turned out to be a huge success): chronicle the individual decisions working up to a larger whole.  In that blog, I knew I wanted a tangible thing as a result of the process.  Here, I may need some time and processing to figure what my actual goals are.  Are you a songwriter if you write just one song?

To be explored in my next few entries, my goals are to:
-Write a minimum of 3 songs with... well-thought out structures and riffs.
-Discover my lyric writing style.
-Develop my singing voice and determine whether or not it would truly fit in with the [loud and abrasive] music I want to write.
-Attempt to have these songs recorded professionally.  None of this "Oh yeah, I've got a buddy with a mic preamp in his bedroom at his mom's house; I can hook up a discounted rate" nonsense.
-Address the issue of pulling off this project entirely solo or attempting to become a bandleader in the process.
-PLAY AT LEAST ONE SHOW IN SEATTLE.  This one is huge for me, you guys.
-Accomplish most of these goals by Summer 2016.

Let's rock!

—Nicholas Greenwood, April 2015