the low end

I recently realized what I’m doing here with all this 4 track and tape stuff, and why I’m doing it.  The jump back to old school analog was about being stuck or stalled out with making acoustic music on a computer as a solo writer/performer trying to record myself.  

So, I wanted to share some tips with you in case you find yourself in a stalled or stuck feeling with writing and recording music. The tips I’m going to give you come from a book I recently read, Hidden Potential by Adam Grant. https://adamgrant.net/book/hidden-potential/  

What to do when you’re stuck, stalled out, or out of fuel:

Tip 1: Backup! 

Grant says When you’re stuck it’s usually because “you’re heading in the wrong direction, you’re taking the wrong path, or you’re running out of fuel. Gaining momentum often involves backing up. When we reach a dead end, we may have to head back down the mountain”

How I backed up  

When I ditched the DAW and went back to the 4 track from my early years, I didn’t realize I was going back down the mountain to find a new path.  I’m so glad I did.  It’s not that a 4 track is better (in any way!) it’s just that I was stalled out, out of fuel, and stuck with trying to record myself with a computer.  But, it wasn’t always like that.  When I first got a laptop I immediately started using garageband and was pretty productive with it.  I didn’t know anything about eq, compression, effects, beyond guitar pedals, so I didn’t use any of that stuff, I basically just used it like a 4 track – plug in mics, play and sing, record.  

The dead end came when I “upgraded” to Logic.  There were suddenly all these plugins and surgical things I could do with the recorded audio.  Then there were internet tutorials, videos, articles about using plugins and drilling down deep in those things.  Then, there were all these third party plugins and forums with people screaming about why this reverb is great and why your “stock” reverb sucks and “shit! I must get better plugins because some guy on gearslutz says my reverb sucks!”  

Then they continued to change Logic every year more and more towards electronic music and loops and how to create music without being a musician.  Why do I need 60 gigs of loops to run a recording program? Then they changed the ports 10 times and I had to get all new cables each time.  I could go on, but the point is, that got me stuck.  So much time, effort, and money to just get the stupid machine to record audio.  Fed up, I said “fuck it” how far away from a computer can I get to record simple acoustic songs.  Bingo! The 4 track.  Immediate results.  More productive, simple recording process, some people saying “hey, that sounds nice but it’s not supposed to because my computer and plugins are so expensive.”

Tip 2: Trust the process, not the results! 

Grant says: “Elite musicians are rarely driven by obsessive compulsion.  They’re usually fueled by what Psychologists call Harmonius  Passion – taking joy in a process rather than feeling pressure to achieve an outcome.”

Youtube videos about recording are usually some guy in a studio full of gear talking about why you should buy the newest tube mic on the market “This one emulates every mic ever made!” And, we buy into this kind of marketing because we really want our tracks to sound professional and polished and so we think, ok, get an expensive mic, and expensive preamp, expensive compressor, expensive eq, a tape machine, a computer, a patchbay, on and on and on.  

What does any of that stuff have to do with songwriting and recording? It’s all bullshit being pushed by corporations wanting to sell you new gear over and over again.  I’ve been guilty of falling into this trap.  I bought all that stuff.  None of that stuff is going to make your music better. 

My advice – figure out what you love about the process.  How good does it feel when a new idea starts to take shape? When you find that chord progression and melody that didn’t exist and now does.  Are you thinking about what specific mic and preamp or are you just lost in the creative process?  Right.

Tip 3: Minimum Loveable Product

Grant talks about the Minimum Viable Product that software and other companies use to get new tech or products on the market. The concept these companies use is basically, how can we get something to market as fast as possible. 

Grant’s take changes “viable” to “loveable” and I think that is such a great idea and a better way to think about songwriting when you’re doing it for the love of it. We should just try to create things we love and then put it out there. Forget about what might come back. I was amazed when I uploaded my first video here with a song that I loved but that I figured would just get dismissed as amateur and comments would be like “oh, that 250hz frequency is masking the Bb on the guitar and this is just not acceptable. That didn’t happen.  Instead, people sent me messages about connecting to the song and enjoying the simplicity and delivery. 

If you can create something that you love, then don’t wait to put it out because you have a $99 dollar mic and not a $9,000 mic.  It’s not going to change the song.   That’s why I love demos more than produced tracks. The demo usually has the passion and the feel that the artists wants to communicate.  Then when it does into production in a fancy studio, it just sounds like everything else. So that’s it.  Minimum Loveable Product. 

Bonus Tip.  Practice relentless incrementalism.  

Once you’ve backed up and are not stuck anymore, then practice relentless incrementalism. Make small improvements in your process, gear, techniques, playing, performances, etc. over time and with purpose. The compound effect of relentlessly trying to improve small things adds up over time.

So, if you’re contemplating a purchase of gear or instrument or whatever, ask yourself does this purchase align with improving my love of the process or making a loveable product?  Preamps, compressors, eq’s, tape machines They’re not going to have the effect that you think.  They’re just tools. Do you really need new tools to build something you love? 

For example, I have a pretty sibilant voice.  So, a small improvement was getting a hardware DeEsser for $85.  This made an incremental improvement for me.  When you have something you love, then maybe upgrading your tools helps incrementally.  Identify the little problems and the little solution.  Don’t be drastic with gear purchases because if you don’t love what your hearing with your current gear, chances are you’re not going to love hearing it with more expensive gear either.  When you love what you hear with the gear you have, then you can start to make small improvements that, when added together, can polish up that turd a little.  

I was in my parent's basement looking for the old tape deck I knew was down there somewhere.  I found it.  It didn't work.  Next to it there was an old bucket filled with aged cassettes, nails, and dust.  Most of the tapes were not labeled, but one was.  "Tape from Wedding" was written on Side A of the tape.  The other side had no label.  I got the old tape deck working with some new belts and a lot of trial an error getting the mechanism to run again after 25 years.  I put in the tape and immediately was transported to 1972.  I later learned that at my parent's wedding, the band placed an old tape recorder somewhere in the room and pressed record.  

I found the tape about a week before my parent's 50th wedding anniversary.  We had already arranged to throw them a party in a private room in a local restaurant. I hooked up my computer with some RCA cables from the tape deck to the audio interface and recorded both 90 minute sides of the tape into Logic and bounced it to iTunes as an mp3.  Using my phone and a bluetooth speaker, we played my parent's wedding band recording all night during the party.  It was amazing.  People cried. 

Here's the point and here's one reason why cassette's are so great.  This tape was physically AT THEIR WEDDING! It's been in a bucket for 50 years collecting dust and turning yellow with age, but it still exists.  Of course we all have wedding pictures and videos, but playing this tape with all the crowd noise and people talking, band playing, laughing, applause, etc. it is so much more than watching a video or looking at pictures.  It makes you imagine the space and the people and the band and it is a tangible record of the event that you can hold in your hand.

I'm not an audio engineer - I'm a self-recording indie folk songwriter type of person.  I don't usually use the term singer-songwriter because I would never sing without an instrument, so I don't really feel like I'm a "singer."  I've recorded in studios, basements, stages, and my car.  Anyway, I've been DAWless for about a year now and I want to share what I've gained and lost in that transition.  

First, I believe the DAW is an amazing advancement in technology and puts music studio tools in the hands of anyone who wants it.  I used Logic Express when it first came out for years as a tool to record my music.  I still use a little DAW on my phone to record when I'm writing songs.  My only goal with being DAWless is to escape the screen of this machine that I work on all day long. The computer became a barrier to my creativity, so back to the four track I went willingly.  

EQ - Analog vs. Digital

Have you ever turned an eq knob on your mousepad in your DAW and it made absolutely no difference in what you were hearing, so you kept turning it to hear something, bounced the track and realized you had cooked the high end so much that bats can hear it? I have. That doesn't happen to me with analog equipment. I turn the eq a millimeter and instantly hear what just happened to the tone. DAWless Recording Truth#1: Turning a knob and hearing the immediate result will make you a better recording musician. 

Physical Connections - Outboard Gear vs. Plugins

I learned a LOT more about recording and audio in general using analog equipment with voltage passing through physical connections that I ever learned using Logic and a full armory of plugins.  I mean, I had plugins from Waves, Universal Audio, IK Multimedia, Omnisphere, and literally hundreds of others.  Half of those plugins were bought and then became useless as the operating system updates made them obsolete or the company behind the plugin decided that cloud hosting and subscription service would make them more money and stopped maintaining their older plugins.  

Connecting cables to a mixer, using the mixer's insert to bring in some analog compression from a piece of hardware you can physically touch, watching the VU meter bounce in real, absolutely no latency, time is something you will never, ever, fucking ever get from a computer. Connecting things up and learning what does and doesn't sound good teaches you about what really happens to signals in a chain vs. loading up a prefabbed signal chain from a plugin.  You want to sound like the Beatles?  Well, you should buy these Abbey Road plugins and you'll become John Lennon in an hour.  It's marketing.  It's stupid.  But, people buy it.  DAWless recording Truth #2: Physically connecting your recording gear will teach you about limitations and you will learn much more about signal processing than you can learn by endlessly creating aux and buss strips in your DAW. 

Effects

Do you want that real recording studio sound in your tracks? You better buy this plugin that emulates Ocean Way studios.  Bullshit.  Connect any reverb pedal from your guitar pedalboard to your mixer and listen to the way it blends with the original signal.  Yeah, those reverb pedals are digital, but the signal coming into the pedal and passing through the circuitry and then back out to the mixer is as analog as it gets.  Don't spend hours in Space Designer trying to create the perfect IR response reverb.  Grab a pedal or two, chain them in different ways, run a delay in front of the reverb pedal, or after, see what happens.  DAWless recording Truth #3: Chaining effects pedals together to create a sound you want is much more fun and makes you better equipped to keep your processing under control if you do return to your DAW. 

Fun

Maybe you're not working in front of a computer all day, so you don't care about looking at the screen when you're creating music.  But, I'm sure you've had to first install an update, wait for plugins to be recognized by the host, find a license key, wait for your interface to open the software needed to use the interface, etc.  For me, that became not fun.  Sitting in front of the mixer, I turn on the main power, my mics are setup and waiting for me to sit down and immediately record that song idea. Now, I record mostly acoustic instruments and pluggin in even the best acoustic guitar with the best pickup sounds like absolute garbage in a pristine digital environment and that's a creativity killer, which is not fun. Running a mic in front of the guitar through a bunch of tubes and circuits takes away that harshness and sounds like a guitar in a room, and that's fun.  DAWless Recording Truth #4:  Analog recording is just fun.  

The Music Doesn't Care About the Gear

The last truth for me is that the music, the song, absolutely doesn't care about what gear you used to record it.  With a few exceptions.  The media where the song ends up doesn't matter. A good song recorded in a DAW is a good song.  A good song recorded on a four track is a good song.  A bad song recorded on either, is just a bad song.  Where that song ends up, tape or hard drive, doesn't matter.  I find myself spending a lot more time in the writing and arranging pre-production process before I commit anything to tape.  That could just be me growing as a recording musician, but I feel it is directly connected to the way I record now.  There's no fixing a bad take on tape.  In the DAW I can recall spending a few hours beat-mapping a guitar track so that I could add some fake Logic drummer to the track.  Why? I don't know, I guess because I could.  I can't do that with a track on tape.  What goes down on tape, is there and it stays there.  

So, what are the exceptions?  The instruments. You have to have a good instrument to get a good recording no matter what you record it on.  You definitely should not stop recording if you don't have a great quality guitar, but you will start to hear the difference when you do pick up a nice one.  Also, a decent mic.  You don't need a mic locker or a mic that emulates old vintage mics using software.  Please don't buy that garbage.  But, do get a decent mic for your voice.  I have used an SM57 ($99) mic on acoustic with great results.  I have used a $1,500 tube condenser with horrible results. You don't need to spend a ton of money on a mic, but just get a decent one that gives you back what you put into it.