I Am No Longer A MIDIot... :) / Recording Linda Perhacs

[UstadKhanAli]

Okay, maybe I am still.

 

In all the time I've recorded, I've never MIDI'd my keyboard to a DAW. Never found the need to before. I just would throw down a part and that'd be that. I knew what sound I wanted, and it was quick just to stick a mic in front of the amp or plug the keyboard in, throw it down quickly, and that'd be that.

 

But this new recording project is quite different.

 

As some of you know, I'm recording Linda Perhacs at Blueberry Buddha recording studios. This is her first album since her acid folk masterpiece "Parallelograms", which I believe was released in 1970. She wants to modernize her sound, and she's really pushing for this, so we are trying to figure out what she wants and remain flexible. And it seemed to me that MIDIing up a keyboard would provide that flexibility, at least for the framework of the song, even if we ultimately don't want to use that, as I am hoping to keep the sound rooted in organic acoustic instruments even if we use some analog synthesizers. But MIDIing something up does let us be flexible and change the sound and notes easily without having to re-record, which is important right now.

 

Anyway, we did one session with her, and it was very interesting. We'll see how it goes from here. The first session was really loose and open, which was what prompted me to MIDI up a Nord Electro 2 for the upcoming recording session on Sunday.

 

Between this and the hip-hop recording project I'm beginning today, as well as my own acid folk and ambient improvisational recording projects, I've never been more busy doing music...just the way I like it.

[Rudolf von Hagenwil]

 

... some of you know, I'm recording Linda Perhacs

 

 

do not quantize her MIDI under one whole note, or a rhythmic structure would result

[Kendrix]

Yep.

 

I've found that one of the most valuable aspect of Midi is that it allows you to explore alternative voicings for parts in the context of a partially developed mix.

 

Scrolling through sounds in vast libraries Ive stumbled upon some that really click (pun intended) and that would never have come to mind ahead of time. This can be really powerful.

 

IN this way midi is useful as an arranging tool even when capable players are on board. If you are a purist you can always go back and re-record the part as audio using the selected voicings.

 

YMMV

[Beck]

Cool Ken!

 

Both the MIDI and your projects.

 

I've been into MIDI since shortly after it came out... don't know what I'd do without it now. I still have a bunch of vintage outboard stuff that I use with MIDI same as always... and the new tricks you can do with it are endless. It's a whole 'nother country. You'll have fun with it, I'm sure.

[Lee Knight]

I've found that one of the most valuable aspect of Midi is that it allows you to explore alternative voicings for parts in the context of a partially developed mix.

 

Me too. I like playing one thing then rethinking the voicing and moving a note or two higher or lower to make a big change in the feel of the harmony... after the fact. It makes it sound like I know what I'm doing.

[blue2blue]

I suspect if I was a keyboardist, rather than a guitarist, I would be more inclined to record parts as audio in real time. But, for my general purposes, particularly for accompaniment, pads, textures, and such, MIDI has been heaven sent. (BTW, I thought I was the last recording guy in the world to get up to speed with MIDI at the start of the 90s. But I got jumped in pretty quick, once I got my first ADAT and decided to take advantage of the relatively 'easy' syncing. It got more complex when I replaced my JL Cooper sync box with a BRC when I added another ADAT. Things get complicated when your rig sprawls across virtual and mechanical boundaries.)

 

Like others, I like the flexibility MIDI brings. I've used MIDI for drums for pretty much two decades now, and, all in all, I'll take MIDI over a mediocre drummer. The rock mixes I hear now, I mean, a lot of times they just sound like a clumsily programmed bad set of samples. I'd rather have something I can control and shape. If I want to make it sound like trash, I can do that.

 

I also like the fact that, depending on the project, you can quickly experiment with entirely different musical frameworks around the key tracks. I don't usually find myself context switching around vocals or guitars, but it's certainly happened; something starts off as a rock song and ends up as dub reggae. (Oh, wait, I threw out most of that vocal on that... so... that means there was almost nothing left of the original. But, hey, that's short-scale musical evolution, for you.)

 

 

PS... Sounds like an interesting project, Ken. I was glancing over her Wikipedia page. I didn't remember her name but I hazily remember seeing the album cover. (I used to spend a lot of time in record stores.) It's really cool that she got 'discovered' by some of today's hipsters.

 

I keep hoping to be discovered by the kids but I'm afraid it's one of those How can we miss you when you won't go away? kind of things. I wonder if I could fake my own death to speed things along? Never seems to work out right in the movies, though. The presumed dead guy always seems to get killed for real someplace in the second reel.

[UstadKhanAli]

 

I suspect if I was a keyboardist, rather than a guitarist, I would be more inclined to record parts as audio in real time.

 

 

That's just how I thought. I know what sound I want, so it's keyboard > play > done. The project I'm doing with Linda Perhacs is different, though. I don't know what sound she is ultimately going to want. I don't know what exact chords she is going to play. Right now, it's up in the air, so I set this up for maximum flexibility. I have the quantize off because I don't want my playing altered in any way. If she plays, I may consider turning it on, but more than likely, I'll either just replay it myself or fix her parts. So easy to fix MIDI notes....

 

The Electro 2 is a good, general purpose keyboard for this task. It's good sounding, has piano, electric piano, organ, etc., and can get the job done. I also have the Kurzweil Micropiano ready to go in case she wants other piano sounds or some of the string sections that it has. "Flexibility" is the key word here.

[nice keetee]

I'll record midi using say a piano sound, then sometimes see what the part sounds like with a different sound. Have come up with some totally unique parts that would never have happened otherwise. A lotta noise too.

[nice keetee]

 

Never quantize MIDI period. Just don't do it. I've been a MIDIot since 1989. I think MIDI is the greatest innovation for music composition -- ever. And I would kill for a functioning Kawai K1.

 

 

Why do you want an old piece of gear like this?

[UstadKhanAli]

Maybe he likes the sounds? I used a Kawai K3 for the longest time, and got great sounds out of it, unfortunately losing it to a house fire a few years ago. I have to say that I preferred the K3 over the K1, but YMMV.

[nice keetee]

I have a Kawai K1r...what am I missing?

[Etienne Rambert]

 

nicekeetie: "I have a Kawai K1r...what am I missing?"

 

 

You're lucky I'm flying out today. I would track you down.

 

S-I-A-3 "string pad" (8 bit).

 

Irreplaceable.

 

I have 2 K1's. Both batteries are dead.

[tremolounge]

 

I have 2 K1's. Both batteries are dead.

 

 

Most synths from that era use common lithium batteries like the CR-2032. If the battery is in a clip, it's a snap to replace; sometimes they need to be soldered in -- a hassle, but not a tough job.

[Ernest Buckley]

Wow Ken, glad to hear you`re so busy. I love working in the studio more than anything, don`t tell my wife that but I think she knows.

 

Yeah, I use MIDI for pretty much most of my pre-pro then I get real players to overdub. MIDI was created for pre-production IMO! Nothing like it to experiment.

 

Just curious, have you dabbled with REASON? If you like the Nord, you`ll love Thor.

[UstadKhanAli]

No, I have never used anything besides Pro Tools in the last ten years, and before that, I was using SAW+.

 

I'm totally busy in the studio, and a large part of the reason I can get away with it so much, besides the fact that my girlfriend is really cool, is that she is participating in one of the projects.

 

I mic the Nord, and wow, does that sound good when I do that. And even if I use MIDI for the Linda Perhacs recording project, I just may go ahead and mic it eventually when we're ready to commit to the performance and sound. I know for a lot of people, this is old hat. This is not revelatory. But it's new for me, and it's a new fun way of trying to figure out what someone wants to do, remaining flexible but still true to ultimately keeping the recording as organic and alive as possible.

[tremolounge]

When you mic the Nord, are you running it through a guitar amp, or monitors, or what? I ask because I love that classic sound of Rhodes through a Twin Reverb.

[UstadKhanAli]

Nothing fancy. I run it out of a Roland Bass Cube 30, putting it in the auxiliary inputs and then micing it, depending on the sound, laziness, and position of the moon, either the Lawson L251 or the Heil PR30 or the AT4060 through a Neve Portico on Silk Mode. I'll position the mic anywhere from several inches away to several feet away, depending on the feel I'm going for. Man, it sounds good.

 

While the Roland Bass Cube 30 sounds really good, I'm not saying it's the be all end all. It's what I have, and it works really well for bass and keyboards. Space is at a premium in my tiny little house, so I wanted a small amp that handled bass and keyboards well, and the Roland does this for me.

[Lee Knight]

I have to say... there is nothing llike keys through an amp. I was working with a new wavish group and they had an old Farfisa. We took it direct and... it didn't really sound like any Farfisa I know. Stuck it into an amp (Blues Jr.) and... there it is.

 

I keep telling myself I'll run my virtual stuff like Wurly sounds etc. out to an amp and reamp but laziness gets the better of me.

 

Time to do it.

[Ernest Buckley]

There is something about capturing sound between an amp and mic that cannot be done in the box... yet. Something about those air molecules moving around with the dust... well at least in my studio theres dust.

[blue2blue]

You're lucky I'm flying out today. I would track you down. S-I-A-3 "string pad" (8 bit). Irreplaceable. I have 2 K1's. Both batteries are dead.

I have a working K4... It was what my old live loop act was built around... all those mushy new age sounds. Love that wacked out echo flute preset, though, I used the crap out of that. I got crazy good at avant-jazz flute solos... great thing for me about looping was I could do everything with my right hand, if I wanted, and work around my lack of even basic left hand technique. (It can be a challenge doing an all improv, keyboard based solo act when you have only the most primitive left hand control. Lemme tell ya. )

[UstadKhanAli]

I don't know very much about the old Kawai keyboards such as the K1 or the K4. But the K3 was a strange analog/digital hybrid, a hybrid in that it had digital waveforms but analog filters. A good sounding keyboard. I probably shouldn't post about it too much because at some point, I may want to buy another one used (my other one was destroyed in a fire some years back)!!

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

A couple of you were asking me somewhere about the Linda Perhacs recording this weekend, but she wanted to take a week off, so we are resuming the Sunday after tomorrow to hopefully cut some vocals. Be interesting to hear where that goes. But the first recording session, especially when I have a group of people, some of whom have never met before, is all about getting everyone familiar, comfortable, and feeling like they can trust one another as well as the humble Audio Monk from Blueberry Buddha! And I think we got that down and can hopefully continue down that path. So hopefully we can get some more music going soon.

[mistersully]

i've actually just gone from using midi back to audio for most of my keyboard parts

 

i guess it depends on the quality of software instruments you have

 

midi's great though

[UstadKhanAli]

 

i've actually just gone from using midi back to audio for most of my keyboard parts i guess it depends on the quality of software instruments you have midi's great though

 

 

Cool. Well, this is being done for flexibility, and once we've determined the part, I'm recording it through an amp.

[UstadKhanAli]

I thought I'd chime in again here...I MIDI'd up my keyboard, as I mentioned. However, Linda Perhacs wanted to use her keyboard instead. So I dutifully attempted to MIDI her keyboard, some sort of Yamaha thing with built-in speakers that ends in a 700, up. It was a bit of a headscratcher, especially since I didn't have the menu, but I finally managed to do it. Ended up working out really well, as she played the keyboard line, and then I could go in, fix all the bum notes on the fly, extend the length the notes were hit, take out all the inappropriate pauses, etc. etc. I had never done this before using the MIDI function in Pro Tools, but it was really easy to figure out.

 

Did everything to a click because we couldn't quite figure out her rhythm at first. My friend Adam, who is also playing guitar on this project with Linda, really is helping to communicate with her and suggest new methods and things like that, and so he was a lot firmer than I was in talking her in to using a click and playing the melody separate from the chords and so forth. My click was a large floor tom, which Linda didn't even realize was a click because it simply sounded like someone playing a floor tom, with the emphasis on the one for good measure. To do this, I simply hooked up Drumagog to the Click Track. Easy.

 

So Linda is really happy with the template we laid down and feels that she can sing to this. So the next step is to record one of her vocals and then start creating this beautiful otherworldly music around her vocals, with one foot back in her debut album "Parallelograms" and one foot in the future.

 

We'll see how it goes. We have another artist named Julia working with us, and she's going to help quite a bit with the textures as well. I think there's a lot of potential for us to make a really cool sounding record, but we're still sorting it all out. This is probably the first project in which I wished there were a producer around, but in many respects, Adam is starting to step into that role.

 

Anyway, lots of fun recording her new album at Blueberry Buddha. Oh, btw, in response to my concern about how slow the project has been going so far, she replied that she was not so much concerned about finishing 12 songs, enough for an album, by the time the year is through, but that she'd rather get 5-6 sounding really great instead. I felt a wave of relief after she said that because she had previously mentioned that she felt like this year only was her only window of opportunity to finish the album before she'd have to go back and work more days.

 

Right after this, I went and recorded The Tibet Connection radio show. Was a looong day.

[UstadKhanAli]

It was a MIDI-free day here at Blueberry Buddha. We worked on the chord changes and arrangement for a song that we are collaborating on together, and recorded some rough takes of that for everyone to familiarize themselves with later. Everybody left quite happy with the arrangement. I spoke at length with Linda a little later about her synesthesia, which I'm absolutely fascinated with...she perceives sound as shapes and colors, hence the name "Parallelograms" for her first record.

 

We're going to MIDI up Julia's MicroKorg or another keyboard a little bit later when we throw down some of the keyboard parts, just for flexibility in terms of the sound of the keyboard as well as if we want to change some of the notes. But no, we won't quantize anything!!

 

And...I finally have some photos a couple of you have asked for as well:

 

 

Adam Passow, Linda Perhacs, and Julia Holter work out a song at Blueberry Buddha Recording Studios on Valentine's Day 2010.

 

 

Adam Passow, Linda Perhacs, and Julia Holter work out a song at Blueberry Buddha Recording Studios on Valentine's Day 2010.

 

Blueberry Buddha Recording Studios

 

Lots of fun for a day that is also Valentine's Day, Chinese New Year, and Losar (Tibetan New Year). Followed this up with a late tamale lunch. And we're going to see Daniel Lanois at Spaceland tonight as well!