Last weekend I got some lights for my car (backup lights, tail lights, and a blinker light) and I put them in ALL BY MYSELF (I feel so handy and self-sufficient)!! Then, with almost no help, I WIPED OFF THE DASHBOARD!! My next project will be to build an engine from scratch.
I was once talking to a serious Christian I used to work with who heard some of my songs. He liked what I had done, and was in awe of what must be the power of God that came through my music. “There’s no other possible explanation!” he said. To which I replied “No, the explanation is called practice. The explanation is that I’ve been playing the piano since I was 4. The explanation is that I’ve been working on music my entire life. This isn’t something that just happened yesterday.” Then he just looked at me and walked away. Boy, it irritates me when someone takes a perfectly normal human function and feels he has to concoct some imagined magical reason for it. What is involved in making music? Is it coordination and finger dexterity? Is it the ability to memorize and repeat musical patterns? Is it the ability to learn by repetition? Does it concern the desire to find out how other musicians do a particular thing, and then try to do it yourself? Is it a dogged determinism in getting better at what you’re passionate about? Or is it something we couldn’t fathom in a million years that’s handed to us by some magical power? And why are some people better musicians than others? Are they blessed? I don’t know. I just know that some people are better than others at things. Some people are better at brushing their teeth than others. And some people are better musicians. Every (good) musician I know lives for music. We constantly listen to music everywhere we find it. We take apart what we hear and analyze how each part fits in with the whole. We discuss music. We compare advice and opinions on the music we hear. That’s what’s involved in making music; even if you’re too lazy or incurious to bother to think about it, it’s not some mystical power handed down to the elect elite. It’s a constant process of learning and application and a conscious striving for improvement.
The craft of making music is much like writing. When someone writes, they don’t sit there consciously thinking “Now let’s see. I want to write some words together to make up a thought. A sentence. I want to write a sentence. About someone. A guy. And I think I’d like to use a non-personal designation. Like, uh, “him.” No. “He.” Yeah, that’s good. “He....” Let’s see now. He moves toward something. “He goes.” No, that’s not right. “He went....” Yeah. Past tense. “He went....” What’s that thing, like that thing in a wall? The thing with the hole.... Door. That’s it. Doorway. “He went through the doorway....”
Nobody has to think like that when they write a sentence. Chances are you might picture the scene in your head, but basically you would just write “He went through the doorway.” Then again, maybe that is what our brains go through when we write, but it all happens so quickly that we’re not aware of our brains doing it. When I improvise music I’m not aware of my brain or my fingers hunting for the right notes to pick. If I’m playing in a certain key, my fingers hit only those notes that are appropriate for that section. Barring any mistakes, of course. And, of course, musical scales and notes and riffs are like words and sentences and language. Phrases we learn from reading and listening to speakers are just like musical phrases and patterns that we hear from other musicians and practice and go over and over and over until their execution becomes like an unconscious thought. Another good analogy would be using a typewriter. Once you learn to use a typewriter you no longer consciously think of the intermediate stage of placing your fingers on the right keys in order to type out the words in your head. It becomes part of the same action. And speaking and coming up with new sentences on the fly is just like coming up with new phrases and musical lines.
There’s usually one of three ways that I’ll write a song. Sometimes I’ll get a melody in my head and either write it down or keep it in my head until I can get to my keyboard to record it. Sometimes I’ll just be sitting at the keyboard and improvising and I’ll hit upon some melody or chord progression that I’ll like. If I’m stuck for an idea I’ll take a word or phrase or someone’s name and use the corresponding musical notes as a basis for a melody or chord progression. I’ll start out with the letter “A” matching with the musical note “A.” “B” is the note “B” and so on, until I run out of directly corresponding musical notes. Then the letter “H” corresponds to the note “A” as I reach the next octave, and so on up the keyboard.
Recording-wise, I play and record everything with my Korg Triton Pro keyboard, and I use Logic Pro on my Mac for mixing. While the sounds are all from the keyboard and the computer rather from “real instruments,” I’ve had enough experience with real instruments that helps me know how to play a real-sounding imitation. I’ve played piano, organ, accordion, a little guitar, and flute, sax, and clarinet in school. I also played percussion in high school band and played drums in my first band. And I play everything by hand, thank you very much. I’m much too lazy to take the time to program sequencers and have the computer play it for me. Who has the time for that? I also don't care much for people who rely on that rather than spending the years it takes to become proficient at an instrument. That’s all part of being a musician. And while I’m on the subject, writing words for your little rap song doesn’t make you a musician. You can call yourself an entertainer, that’s fine. But you’re not a musician.
Sorry. I almost went on another rant there....
My song “Driving to Atlantis” is one that I’m pretty proud of, and I thought it would be a good choice to explain the song-writing process.
The opening line is a simple phrase I programmed into the sequencer that I could riff over; something I very rarely do. By listening to this two-bar phrase over and over I came up with the bass line that plays in the verse. The weird haphazard melody line that follows is me playing with a technique that I have used occasionally just goofing around. On my keyboard I set the arpeggiator to random and just riff away. An arpeggiator is a function of a synthesizer that automatically plays a pattern when you hold down two or more notes together. Let’s say you hold down the notes CEG and B. If the arpeggiator is set to “up” the pattern C, E, G, B will play over and over, one at a time, as long as you hold the notes down. (Or you can hit “hold” and the notes will continue playing when you take your fingers off the keys, but let’s just keep the examples simple....) If the arpeggiator is set to “down,” the notes will play in a B, G, E, C sequence. A “random” setting will play the notes in a random pattern. So while I’m playing the notes in the song, the notes that are being triggered by the keyboard, and are thus being heard, are not necessarily the ones that I’m playing. As long as I play the notes detached from one another (“staccato”), the keyboard records the notes I’m playing. When I hit at least two notes together, only one note is chosen at random. This is a technique I’ve played around with from time to time, and I always thought of putting it into a song. So I finally did.
The break at 0:34 is just because I needed something to break up the verses, and was the first thing I thought of.
Through the second verse (0:43) is a failed attempt at a shepard tone. If you follow along with it, it seems like the notes should always get lower and lower, but they don’t! More successful examples include the intro and outro to Queen’s A Day at the Races album, the end of Pink Floyd’s song Echoes, and the forever ascending bass line in Kansas’ Going Through the Motions.
At 1:18 the song gets a bit more conventional with a clavichord solo, which moves us to the guitar solo, which brings us to the bar-band chorus at 1:35. I really like the way the song goes from a kind of beefed-up trance music style in the beginning to a style you might hear in one of a million rowdy bars on a Friday night. As I remember, I think the chorus just grew out of the guitar solo, so I just went with it.
At this point let me just say that I used to think the splash cymbal (1:44) was just good for the occasional effect, but I’ve grown to love it and I use it a lot!
1:45 takes us to one of my favorite organ solos I’ve done. When I play a solo I’ll try it different ways numerous times, and I’ll keep the parts I’m happy with. I think the part at 2:02 was the first part I liked, and the part at 1:53 and the end (2:09) I hit on pretty quickly. Then the rest I just filled in.
The bridge (2:55) was fun. I wanted a big drum sound that was different from the rest, and the call-and-answer guitar just kind of formed itself as I played around with the parts. My favorite part here is the answer-back guitar at 3:05, which sounds like the final phrase of the section, but then there's one more to go! The 3:11 section wasn’t planned, it just grew out of the part before it. The clavichord part was (I think) the last part added, but it ended up taking over and sounding like the main drive of that particular section rather than the guitar melody that originally drove it.
We go back to the verse with a little bit of silence at 3:37. At 4:12 (after 3 splash cymbals...) I go back to the second part of the bridge for the ending. I didn’t want to go back to swapping solos until the chorus like I did twice already, and I thought the bridge was fun enough to repeat (and it seamlessly moves into the chorus).
The Title
I never really write songs about a thing. Maybe a particular mood I’m in will feed a certain style of song, but I never really have a specific idea in mind when I start to write. That’s why the titles of songs usually come last. I’ll look everywhere for a title that’s appropriate. Books, paintings, other songs, things that pop into my head. One trick I have is listening to a song when I’m really really tired. As I listen I can get images playing around in my head, and that sometimes inspires a song title. For this song I was leafing through one of my Frank Frazetta books and came across the painting “Atlantis.” For no other reason than I liked the painting, I wanted to name a song “Atlantis.” With this song it seemed appropriate, since the verses have kind of a new-age trance music feel. But there were also parts that made me think of some rowdy weekend bar band. Which made me think of cars. Which made me think of driving cars. To Atlantis!! What? You can’t drive a car to Atlantis!! That’s just crazy talk!! So that’s what I called it. Which made me put in the ever-so-subtle sound of bubbles in the bridge (2:49 and 3:06, for those of you playing along at home). And I also put them at the end just in case you missed it (4:47).
So that’s Driving to Atlantis. Some parts carefully crafted with a purpose in mind, while other parts were created on a more serendipitous line. As I was writing it I wasn’t always sure it would succeed as a song, but I really like the end result.