As the first month of the year comes to a close, I woke up this morning feeling optimistic. It’s been just over two months since I played my first live show as Reliquary V. The next show on my horizon is in May and I had decided to write a new album in the interim.
I feel as if I’ve picked up where I left off a few years ago with music. It’s not that I stopped; but in 2019 my life was disrupted with travel and ultimately moving from NYC to Vancouver, and although I did some intensive work that year creating the albums that became CLAIRVOYANCE and Dematerialize, I was mainly confined to Ableton for writing purposes with those releases. Whereas, prior to this tumultuous period, I’d been learning to write and record on hardware instruments.
The live set I played in late November 2021 was a small but significant step back in this direction. The material was brand new, raw, and unpolished, but it got the crowd moving in the small after-hours club. It was a culmination of a long journey of trial and error, moving from experimental song to some version of “techno.” This week I dusted off my multitrack interface in earnest and began attempting to record some of these tracks.
While this 8-input rack interface is invaluable for individually tracking the different components of my set, it had been sitting mostly unused in my studio since I moved in a year and a half ago. I’m much more partial to my 12-year-old Yamaha stereo interface (it’s white, square, and resembles a mixer more than anything that is sold as an interface today), which is so much more immediate and gets used on a weekly basis for tasks like recording directly out of my live mixer, documenting DJ practice, and playing zoom parties. But I decided I wanted a proper “demo” with the possibility for mixing, so I had to break out the less-fun (to me) multitrack set up.
After spending way too long fiddling with the overly complex control software (why would I want a separate mix for each input and output when I’m just tracking a demo in Ableton?! That’s a rhetorical question btw), I made the executive decision to reset all settings and just work directly in Ableton. I’m still flummoxed by the process of running my live mixer as an external effect. After seven years of working in Ableton, somehow I feel like a beginner again when it comes to recording live instruments.
That said, once I actually started tracking demos, I started to get a feel for what I’d been creating in my hardware. Truth be told, it’s a bit sobering. When it’s all laid out on the timeline like one of my in-the-box projects, I’m programmed to scrutinize it the way I would when writing in the actual software. Writing on hardware step sequencers isn’t like that.
I’m finally grappling with this hybrid style of music production that I’d scratched the surface of a couple of years ago. It feels like a confrontation of sorts: seeing all the flaws in broad daylight, and evaluating the imperfections in my approach. However, even in the past week of this painful process, I feel I’ve made some progress and gotten some valuable information on where I can improve.
That’s why I woke up feeling hopeful today. Even as I was dissatisfied with the demo I was working on last night, I could also see how I’ve gotten better at playing my instruments in recent months, and in the years since I moved out of NYC. There’s a lot of cringe that happens with the self-examination inherent in (demo) recording, but a lot of growth as well.
I feel as if I have the time and space right now to actually develop my music in a way that wasn’t possible in New York. I never would’ve said that while living there, but there’s so many distractions in that environment that it was pretty difficult to hone my craft. This topic deserves a post unto itself, but that’s definitely the long and short of it for me as I come away from this month in the studio.
Until next time.
xx RV