After several months of my live gear living on my bedroom desk, I finally packed it up in a rolling suitcase and took it down to my studio on the bus. This was precipitated not so much by the change in weather – although it’s quite a lot more comfortable in the studio these days, and the bathrooms have been thankfully renovated as well – but the need to actually hear what was going on outside of my headphones.
I somehow got away with writing two albums primarily on headphones in 2019, sometimes while traveling or in a co-working space I briefly rented when I was staying at my parents’ place. One of them was outsourced for mixing (more due to my imposter syndrome around mixing vocals than any real issues), but the other turned out pretty passable. Those were both made on Ableton, though, and listening to my mixer vs. laptop through headphones is an entirely different experience.
It’s actually way too loud, and since I've been back in the studio using my (cheap Facebook marketplace) monitors, I’ve been struggling to figure out the appropriate levels. Yes, things “sound better” loud, but these live songs are just so loud and aggressive in every way. I’ve spent the last week considering what changes I might make to the existing set, and after a week of Octatrack struggles, today I concluded that I don’t have the patience to make a lot of changes to what’s already there. I’m learning as I go along, and I decided to just accept the crudeness of some of my early efforts and move on to writing better things each time (one hopes).
It also scared me a bit because I have my first live show of the year (the May 13 Verboden Festival afterparty at Red Gate) coming up in a couple of weeks, and I’m kind of already bored of my set? Lol. Of course I’m excited to play in an actual venue, but I feel like my current live set was spawned from a different creative era, and at the moment it feels like I’m crossing a bridge from one phase to another.
I’ve been writing a lot of one-off or spontaneous tracks on my laptop as a way to recharge my confidence as I struggle with the gear I’m less adept with. I still haven’t gotten as good as I’d like at arranging, but I have improved a lot at creating sounds and grooves that I like. Honestly, doing more of these quick little sketches would probably help me figure out my live set?
I still haven’t figured out how I want to record/release the live songs – my instinct right now is maybe to do a live recording or something like it, and do something intentionally more raw rather than agonize too much comparing it to things I’ve done before. And I need to sort out the volume issue before my occasional mild tinnitus develops into something worse.
There’s a few exciting possibilities and projects emerging for the rest of the year, so I’m looking forward to opening up my mind to new approaches as things develop. Til next month…