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How much music experience do you guys have- stuff like reading music, being proficient on an instrument?
I'm a terrible musician. I've never taken lessons for anything. I learned the very basic basics in school (like, I can work out what the notes are in written music, but it's a slow process, I can't scan it) and the rest I picked up from playing with other people I suppose. I played guitar (self-taught) in a few bands, I'm slightly less shit at that than other stuff.
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How much music experience do you guys have- stuff like reading music, being proficient on an instrument?
I'm primarily a real-world musician - playing piano since 7, drums since 12, guitar since 15. Never read music but can muddle along if I know the key. Always loved home production ever since someone lent me a four track tape recorder and I blasted a song out in a day on drums and a crappy guitar - was never sure why there was ever a gap between 'electronic' musicians and 'real' musicians.
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Primarily a musician who has been forced to engage with the nuts and bolts of hands on engineering myself after years of lo-fi home recording backseat driving in the studio.
Learned jazz guitar and some piano at school, formed rock bands and started playing in London aged 15 and never really stopped. I went to Uni in 2005 but my bandmates went to The School of Audio Engineering so I've always been around studios and music production. I'm self taught in music theory and although like to test myself on it, I never really got up to speed with reading or writing the dots and always played by ear.
After years on the toilet circuit i eventually signed a record deal with one of my bands in my early 30s but label admin nonsense and personal crises in the band torpedoed the whole enterprise just as the first album came out in 2006.
Done some live and studio session stuff for other people and produced various things for TV and film in the last few years while spending the bulk of my free time from the day job putting together the band for my "solo" project. This has included finally biting the bullet, buying the hard and software and spending some time teaching myself to drive a DAW. It was actually a fairly painless process as knew the basics of signal path and gain structure etc. I've read plenty around production, hoover up any documentary or new book on famous producers and engineers. I subscribe to Tape Op and read Sound on Sound most months. I know what works and what doesn't (although not always why!). So really it was just a case of learning the how to work a project, learning ketboard shortcuts to make it happen.
Obviously the "making it sound objectively good" bit is ummm... well subjective. I've got a long way to go before I'll be able to unveil something that I can say I'm proud of from a sonic perspective. I'm working hard at it though.
At the moment i'm stuck flip flopping between the Tape Op-esque mantra of "work with what you have, be creative and don't be dogmatic about how things should be done" and the slightly painful realisation that I won't be producing anything that sounds even close to how I want it to unless I spend several thousand pounds on better quality kit.
But yeah, muso trying to self-produce here.
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After years on the toilet circuit i eventually signed a record deal with one of my bands in my early 30s but label admin nonsense and personal crises in the band torpedoed the whole enterprise just as the first album came out in 2006.
WOuld be interested to hear this dude.
My old band was called Miocene. We didn't suck too bad.
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I've seen you rocking out in cut-off-combats you shouty ol' rock bastard. Hehe. Great stuff man.
Whoa! I just googled my old band and found this old review. Look! HAIR!
http://glasswerk.co.uk/magazine/review/1123/Daddy+Long+Legs/
Oddly enough although that was my band, that gig also marked my debut on bass with one of the support acts, The Tacticians. It was them who signed to Setanta a couple of years later while Daddy Long Legs sort of ambled to a natural conclusion, neatly punctuated by me getting spiked at a festival in Yorkshire, having a catatonic wig-out on stage then wandering off and getting lost on the moors for several very frightening hours.
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Noice. I still have it. It's my only electric guitar these days and I LOVE it. It's a 2000 model USA standard with a two piece ash body. It was Olympic White but it's starting to look very faded and creamy now. It has a single ply black pickguard and a custom (forget which brand) compensated three saddle bridge now. CSBx2
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I kinda blagged mine. My old man is in music management - it was originally modified for a Famous Guitarist with a Gibson spoon-handle style tremelo bridge, which didn't work (scale length too long I think) and so they took it off and replaced it with the '50s repro hardware it originally had. They had to drill holes for the Gibson bridge, which have been filled but they're clearly visible, so they couldn't really re-sell it and they let us have it for a nominal sum. I think it might have been a Custom Shop '50s model originally but I'm not sure, I'd have to double check as I don't think it has a CS neck plate. It is facking nice, though the Custom Shop Strat my dad still has is nicer.
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How much music experience do you guys have- stuff like reading music, being proficient on an instrument?
I'm completely self-taught. I've played guitar for 25 years, and dabbled in other instruments. I'm now a pretty good piano player, and a reasonable bass player. I can fake it on drums and could once fake it on the saxophone. I have never been able to read music. It simply won't stay in my brain. But I can play a lot of stuff by ear. (except Jazz - I can't figure out how that works)
I wrote a lot of songs over the years - there was always a tune in my head for years, but these days the muse has deserted me. I learned to produce music as a means to get those tunes out of my head and into a more permanent medium, sometimes racing against my memory. I usually have something fully formed in my head - the whole arrangement - and the challenge for me is to reproduce the sound in my head before I've forgotten it. I use Sonar 8.5 these days (paid for) because when I started pirate copies of its predecessor Cakewalk 8 were the easiest thing to get hold of, and it was easier to stick with the same product than learn something else. -
WOuld be interested to hear this dude.
My old band was called Miocene. We didn't suck too bad.
You were in Miocene?! Ha! Pretty sure I saw you guys a couple of times over the years
^^That is awesome. SO want a machine drum and octatrack...bit spendy though
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15% off Black Friday sale at Teenage Engineering, if anyone was after an OP-1…
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Just tried to find some footage of my old band and there appears to be none. Started googling songs we used to cover and found this:
Thirteen views since August. I suppose if we'd really wanted to be successful we might have taken as our biggest influence a band who's songs get thirteen views in four months. Ha! I like this fact. Let me see fond some of the other songs we used to cover for comparison...
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This was one of our "big numbers". The original recording has had 4000 views since september 2010. Hehe!
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4000 since 2009
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Ok this might up the average a bit. But still... what the fuck were we thinking?
I know technically it's a cover of cover.
Regal
ReekBlefs
EB
dooks
Multi_Grooves
bq
Mrlemon
_Leon-
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We are the music makers - producers?
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