Journal
This journal is going to be a daily account of my creative process. It's intended to be accurate, not interesting. If you decide to read it you will see how a writer and composer actually thinks and works.
In the past artists have typically avoided discussing their working methods in any detail, or concealed them, or even lied about them to create an aura of mystery; and all this because their real methods were and are, as you'll see, actually tedious and uninteresting. It's largely nose- to-the-grindstone stuff. Just working hard day after day to realize your vision.
There are a few reasons I've decided to do this, but the main one is that AI has made it necessary to take the mask off. The public now wants to know whether the art they're consuming and the influencers they're following are real people and not chatbots or AI artists, and being open about actual day-to-day labors will help to clear this up.
Another problem is that the delusional ideas so many entertain about who artists are and how they work have enabled bad actors to foment artist hate, convincing the public that artists and writers in general are "getting away with it" by having fun and easy jobs and are therefore underserving of pay, basic legal protections, or even respect. I've provided considerable value to the public but I'm completely broke, so this kind of nonsense really pisses me off. Artists are generally driven people who work hard but live a precarious existence dependent on a fickle public; the work isn't easy, and it's often not fun either. They're not getting away with anything. Once in a very rare while they do win fame and fortune, but they deserve their chance at fame and fortune at least as much as anyone else, and certainly more than the people who bash them.
So read on if you will, but don't expect fun and games. I'm not trying to entertain you here.
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May 19, 2025 - "Bad Hair Month"
Massively frustrating day today.
When I woke up I didn't like yesterday's mix at all. It's obviously too dark. Then I spent about ten hours trying to improve it. I did make some small improvements but I'm just not very happy with the outcome. Most of the time I was going around in circles. I have three candidate mixes I'm going to listen to again after I take a break. I hope one of them is passable.
I am mainly trying to decide between using tape emulation and a completely different saturator to soften the edges. I would rather have a clear sound in this case but the edges are too harsh. Possibly this could have been fixed at the recording stage if the hpsi was recorded with some other mic. Or maybe not. And I don't have control over that anyway. What's the third option? Just accept the hard edge of the hpsi as is. Tomorrow I will post the option I end up choosing.
I don't feel like writing a lot today and I need to take a break to rest my eyes. I'm in a pretty bad mood. Hoping one of the candidate mixes is acceptable because I'm not going to do this again tomorrow.
May 18, 2025 - "Bad Hair Month"
I guess today was a success, but it wasn't a brilliant one.
Yesterday I mentioned that stacking alto voices in the low register is rather soft and muddy. Today I changed the compressor on the master to a different one that increased the distinctness of the parts. This doesn't sound like something a compressor would do, but, it does, apparently. Then, however, I became concerned that the resulting sound was too aggressive for the song. In an attempt to restrain this I increased the tape saturation and otherwise fiddled with my tape settings. But, this was not a good solution as it melted the mix too much before it was able to tone down the aggressiveness. After some hours of futility, I accepted that this was not going to be a completely effective response and gave up. Then I fiddled with the fine details of the mix. With the compressor changed everything else needed to be re-tweaked so the overall sound worked together properly.
I feel that all this took an inordinately long time. But the resulting mix is better than the one I started the day with. You can hear it below. Note that I'm only halfway through programming the instruments and voices so this is still not the final sound.
I'm guessing I don't have the exact right compressor for this project, but spending a couple weeks testing different compressors I don't yet own is not something I can afford to do. The current mix seems to me, for now, a reasonable one.
I mentioned earlier that production, in the sense of engineering and mixing, isn't something I particularly care about as an artist, but it still needs to be good enough to present my music clearly and sympathetically. The perfect production of a Phill Brown record (e.g. the Mark Hollis album) is beyond my means in several respects. Fortunately there's a lot of great music that only has decent yet unspectacular production, and even some excellent music with poor production--like the lo-fi recording of a Junko Ohashi performance I linked a few days ago. So, spectacular production is not a necessity for great art. But, competent production is. I will listen again tomorrow and see whether I've met a reasonable standard, as having spent the entire day mixing, I may have lost perspective.
May 17, 2025 - "Bad Hair Month"
So, I figured out the source of my confusion yesterday as I was falling asleep.
"Bad Hair Month" has unusual instrumentation, with four altos, a flute, and a cello being the most prominent instruments. Rhythm section is harpsichord and cymbals. This unusual instrumentation creates an unusual frequency balance because the altos and flute, playing near the bottom of their range and mezzo piano, are very fundamental-heavy. This is quite different than e.g. the previous song, "Emergency Call," which had a more typical instrumentation of one alto voice singing in its middle register plus rhythm section of piano, harpsi, electric guitar, and mostly string-based orchestral backing. All of those instruments have considerable upper-midrange presence. The strings in particular, when playing in the tenor range, are quite penetrating; the alto voice in the same range, at mezzo piano, is not penetrating at all, and of course the flute is the flute, sine-like at the bottom.
This unusual frequency balance led to me being dumbfounded when listening to tweaks to the reverb frequency balance that in the last piece seemed very striking. Because none of the foreground elements in "Bad Hair Month" have much high-frequency presence, they're hardly impacted by adjusting the reverb brightness; whereas the background of the piece, the cymbals and harpsi, are affected by this. While changing the reverb brightness in "Emergency Call" was changing the overall sheen of the piece in a very striking way that was therefore easily calibrated, in "Bad Hair Month" the same adjustment was having a much different effect: causing the background of the piece to sizzle more, without really affecting the foreground. So, I was listening for the wrong thing and not catching the different difference it was making, and in my confusion twiddling knobs blindly and stupidly.
After I figured this out I was able to listen more intelligently and perceive the effect properly.
Then there arose a new and interesting problem of just how much sizzle the background should have. The background sizzle is pretty, but when the foreground is lacking in high frequency content, the reverb brightness tends to bring the background forward at the expense of the foreground in a rather distracting way.
The solution I settled on today was to EQ the alto voices up a bit at 3k and 10k and moderate the verb sizzle until background and foreground came into an acceptable balance and I could keep some of the prettiness in the background without losing the foreground. I am not sure I will keep this solution, as I usually use zero EQ on anything except basses. I may find the EQ irritating later. And there was something interesting about that soft foreground. But, for now, I think this solution is the most balanced and the soft foreground risked failing to grab the listener.
I was hoping I could mix on autopilot after spending so much time getting the last song right, but it seems things don't really work that way. Even so, solving this problem made me feel less upset about yesterday's total waste of time.
May 16, 2025 - "Bad Hair Month"
Completely useless day today. I started off with the thought of tweaking my reverb settings to fit the new piece. This seemed like a smart idea as the perspective is quite different - it's chamber music rather than orchestral music. So, I thought I wanted to hear things a little closer. I was mainly going to tweak the brightness and predelays. However, I got lost doing this and after some hours I found myself right back where I'd started. And then when I did a blind test of my different options, I found I couldn't clearly distinguish them, even though, on the previous piece I thought I'd distinguished them well enough to automate them fairly precisely. This left me at something of a loss. Did I overestimate the clarity of my perceptions on the previous piece, or were my ears just not working today, or was it something about the current piece that obscured the differences and made them irrelevant?
My guess is that it's a mix of these. The previous piece had a lot of strings. The current piece is centered in madrigal-type vocal writing with a harpsichord and cymbal wash in the background. These different arrangements have a different frequency emphasis. And for whatever reason a wide range of reverb brightness and predelay settings seem to be giving me fairly similar results on the new one. Or, it could just be that my ears have decided to take the day off and the new bright lights in my studio have confused my brain.
In any case, a frustrating day that was basically a waste of time. I'm going to briefly revisit this issue in the morning and if my ears aren't hearing any better I'm just going to move on and let the small differences lie as they are.
May 15, 2025
Today I went into the big city to deal with the lighting problem. I didn't want to spend a second month in a dark studio waiting for a replacement product to arrive from China that might or might not look the way it was supposed to. Fortunately I ended up finding the lamps I wanted for $40, and bought three. I wasn't looking for anything complicated, just something in the right style with a decent metal finish instead of cheap gold paint. However, instead of taking the few hours I expected, it took actually the entire day. And when I got home I realized I needed four. Well, I am going to get by with three lamps for a while because I don't want to make another trip.
The studio is already looking a lot better. My concept is to combine midcentury globe lamps with kantha-quilt-style fabrics covering my old furniture. You don't necessarily think of these as going together but they complement each other marvelously, the simplicity of the lamps offsetting the busyness of the quilts. It's not the style I would have chosen with an unlimited budget, but it works. I still need to replace the curtains, which don't fully cover the windows, find some old bricks to serve as plant stands, and maybe get a rug. But it's shaping up very well, with very little money spent.
So, no music written today due to my late return, though I will poke away at it before I fall asleep. Tomorrow, in my new and properly lit studio, I should make great progress, right?
Still listening to Junko Ohashi. Top voice for sure. And a great expressive range. But no, not the target vocal sound for my own music. I want something with a frivolously girly sound.
May 14, 2025 - "Bad Hair Month"
As promised I'm going to post a very early draft of "Bad Hair Month." Nothing in it is finished yet so listen at your own risk.
I'm already confident this song is going to be good. However, the question that's up in the air is how to treat all the vocal parts. When should they have lyrics and when not. Where should they be in the stereo image, how loud should they be, etc. Should one of them be replaced by an instrument.
My current view is that they will likely work when the proper polish is applied. It's too soon to judge from the current mix as I've only done a rough pass at programming the main vocals and they'll need lots more programming to sound right.
Another issue is the stereo image. Four altos in an awkward number when there's a leading line that needs to be centered, and it would be easier to do three or five. But, given the limits of the alto range it would be nonsensical to have five independent parts running simultaneously. Four is the limit. It would, however, be possible to have five with doublings or exchanges.
Tomorrow I'm going to work on detailing these parts, balancing the mix, and then think more about this stereo issue and the lyrics. That may take me two days. I want to hear the opening verses sounding good and polished before I move forward.
I also want to consider adding an oboe d'amore and possibly a clarinet as I think those timbres could be a nice touch. But, seeing as it's already a detailed arrangement, I need to tread carefully there.
This song sounds much different from "Emergency Call." However, it's not a sound that came out of nowhere. It has a lot in common with the albums of fugues I composed a few years ago (not available for download right now).
I am feeling optimistic about where this is going and also my health has finally been quite good the last few days, allowing me to make quick progress. I was in a bad health place in April and it really slowed me down. I was too foggy to compose during most of the day. Now I feel the cloud lifting. If I can recover the composing powers I had when I wrote my fugue albums, and hopefully improve on them of course, there will be exciting things ahead. For the last few years my composing time has been limited because of the number of hours I was putting into writing essays and fiction. Soon that will be a memory, best forgotten.
May 13, 2025 - "Bad Hair Month"
Fast progress in sketching out the initial idea for the next song, as you can see below. This sketch is full of errors, but it's written with the purpose of feeling out the idea without getting caught up in details too soon. Tomorrow, after I've put it together more coherently, I'll post an audio example.
First rough idea sketch for "Bad Hair Month"
I started this journal in medias res, having already written the outline for "Emergency Call." So, this is the first time I'll record my composing process in full from the very beginning of a song.
For "Bad Hair Month" I'm using a reduced chamber ensemble consisting of alto-voice quartet, 1 bass, 1 cello, 1 viola, 1 flute, 1 horn, harpsichord, and drums. I may add 1 violin later or I may remove the horn or replace it with a bassoon. The idea is to build the piece around a core quintet of four altos and a bass part, roughly in the manner of a string quintet or madrigal, with the other instruments only playing a supplemental role for occasional coloration.
When writing for orchestra I am very careful about outlining. But the need for outlining scales with the number of instruments. With so few playing here, the structure is fairly transparent and it's not always necessary to outline. Furthermore, I normally begin by writing the initial measures into a full score to get a feel for the sound, even when I'm writing for full orchestra. After I can feel whether an idea is working, then I turn to the outline. For the current ensemble I suspect I won't need to do much outlining in a separate document, but we'll see.
This piece is in a totally different creative direction from the last one. As I mentioned yesterday. Instead of being in the dramatic vein it is more in the vein of an early Renaissance song. With a pop twist, of course. But I'd best wait till tomorrow to say more about that.
I have recently been trying to remodel my studio. This remodeling is very simple, consisting of some new blankets and lamps and eventually, though probably not soon, a coffee table. I haven't changed anything in ages, and during that time the whole thing has been put together from discarded furniture. The slumminess of it was cluttering my mind, and it was long past time to change. So I threw out as much as I could, reducing the furniture to a minimum and expecting to replace the old lamps rather quickly. However, the new lamps I ordered, after a month delay, were lost in the mail. So I've spent the last month in a dim room that's half empty. No table, one old lamp, my pots are sitting on cinder blocks, my curtains don't cover the windows. It's like being in a house where someone hasn't finished moving in or out. And now I have to start over and find new lamps on an extremely limited budget. It's very time consuming. Oh well. I wrote much of Winter Post in an empty room on two cushions. Literally. I have half a mind to go down to a single cushion, but I've nowhere to put my remaining furniture, so I'll just get by as is for now.
May 12, 2025 - "Emergency Call, Ontario"
For perhaps the first time ever, I finished well ahead of my expectations. You can listen to the completed video for "Emergency Call, Ontario" below.
I can't really tell how good this track is right now because I've overimmersed myself in it. Production dragged out for a long time due to interruptions and especially hard work on the mix, not to mention putting the video graphics together.
As a postmortem, I feel a bit at odds. I began changing my intended direction midway through the writing of this song. That didn't affect the quality or process for the song, but I have in my head now that I'm going do something more direct and "idol-esque." That's why I've been listening to idol music lately. Obviously you can't hear any of that in "Emergency Call," which I'd already composed before I had the idol-pop idea in mind. So, while I think my execution was good, it's not something I intend to follow up on soon.
(Incidentally, I would never write anything that sounded like real idol music. It's more about absorbing some of that spirit rather than any direct influence.)
I'm releasing "Emergency Call" without any hype or special promotion and I am not expecting any reaction from the public. I've learned my lesson well on that one. When I finish something, whether it's good or bad, nothing ever happens. A great illusion I had in my innocent youth was that, if I finished something really good, something would happen. Preferably something positive. But no. Nothing ever happens. It's very similar to writing on the wall in solitary confinement. Quality doesn't matter.
I want the next songs to be more direct and not have a dramatic structure or orchestration. And rather than dwell on this piece, I've already started sketching the next one. To help with the change of direction I am going to use a small chamber ensemble and forbid myself the orchestra for a while. I am thinking vocal counterpoints. We'll see tomorrow.