Sound Study #1: Empress Taylor 🎧
Sound Study #1: Empress Taylor 🎧
New Music featuring Taylor Guitars and Empress Effects
If you suffered through the first two posts and haven’t yet figured out what’s a gag and what’s real… well, neither have I.
Photo-ops and a few technical details aside, it’s all basically real. But the relentless self-deprecation was not premeditated. I just couldn’t find a way to account for myself with a straight face. Who the hell blows half his 401k on a home studio without any meaningful history of recording music?
So I have to admit I’ve sort of lost track of my real voice. That said, this self-consciousness can really only mean one thing: I’m about to make an honest attempt at something. I can say that much in all sincerity. I intend to actually apply myself. When I’m done, I won’t be able to pretend that I could have done better, because I will have genuinely tried my best.
Well, I did try my best. It is what it is. And here it is:
This and future videos will be published on my YouTube channel, @JunkieJeffStudio. The quality is good on Substack, but if you prefer to watch on your TV, YouTube is the way to go. Just make sure to set playback to 4K.
Alright, first off, the whole Sound Study thing. A brief explanation:
I do have a small amount of conventional song material. Stuff I’ve written sporadically as a form of self-therapy over the past couple years. Nothing I ever intended to record or share. But when I decided to make music instead of twiddling my thumbs waiting for an inspiring life vision, those songs jumped out as a natural starting point. And they were a starting point, of sorts… a starting point for an emotional meltdown. Long story short, it was a mildly traumatizing experience to discover my complete lack of basic player and producer fundamentals while actively baring my soul. So for now, that shit is going back into the vault.
Here’s my problem. I’ve never really been the type of person to truly apply myself despite knowing that at first, my best won’t be good. My lifelong model for motivation has looked more like this: “I’ve never trained before or even been in a real fight, but last night I had a dream and discovered within myself that I am actually the best featherweight mixed martial artist on the planet.” From there, my next actions are obvious. Research Lamborghinis and get on the horn to start working brand deals. Get a gym membership, you say? …that’s a bit of a non-sequitur, isn’t it? Here’s a Junkie Jeff original life hack: just Conceive and Believe. The Achieve stage is a real drag.
But there I go again with the self-deprecation.
Here’s what I’m getting at. This music thing is different. This time, I intend to—gag—“embrace failure.” Ergo: the “Sound Study.” Pick a sound or piece of gear or a musical idea. With no other agenda, start recording, and don’t look back. Get through the whole process: riff, record, arrange, mix, publish, profit.
This is a profound change of approach for me. I now declare full citizenship in the Orwellian dystopia where failure is good. In fact, here’s how deeply I submit to this new dogma. The very idea of a Substack came to me mid-failure. I was working on the third of these sound studies (yes, three are finished at the time I’m writing this). It was going so badly that I was forced to consider starting over. But starting over would violate my principle of constant forward movement, opening up a whopping can of FUD that would inevitably bring the whole greater endeavor to a standstill. Instead, the idea of writing about what went wrong and posting it, warts and all, somehow loosened my death grip on the work in progress.
So that’s the idea. The Sound Study™. Preamble over.
For expediency I have not explained everything in this post for beginners to music production, but I’m happy to do so if I can! If you want to know what a compressor is, or how to do something in Logic, please ask in the comments. This process is an ongoing learning experience for me, and I’d be thrilled to share the resources I’ve used with other aspiring hobbyists! ❤️
Sound Study #1: Empress Taylor
The point of departure for this sound study was the Taylor GS Mini-e Koa Bass, a fun little instrument that I described at length in my last post (tldr: it’s a “riff machine”). With a touch of compression and a healthy mix of the Empress Reverb’s Modern Hall setting, the resulting pluck sent me spinning into flashbacks of my first mystical encounter with the upright bass on Dawn of Midi’s seminal album Dysnomia.
Dysnomia is an incredibly sophisticated composition. But its sophistication unfolds in musical dimensions that are, for the moment, beyond me. I can certainly feel it, but I’m not going to try to imitate it. Instead, the aspect of Dysnomia that I’m taking as inspiration is the opposite side to the Dawn of Midi coin. Namely, the incredible hypnotic potential in the simple sounds of acoustic instruments.
So I sat down with the mini bass and tinkered until I’d recorded 14 short bass parts. In the end I only used about half of them. The first part I recorded—and probably the most distinctive—is the riff that shows up at that 5 minute mark of the final track (the one where I’m tapping the body of the bass to add a touch of rhythm). There’s not much to it, but from then on it got simpler and simpler. I pumped out one 4 bar loop after another, all in the same key. For many of them I held myself to just one or two tones per loop. Restraint was the name of the game.
I recorded all the bass parts in just under 30 minutes. This is a painfully amusing little data point for me now, having later spent an entire day desperately scraping together 60 seconds of drum loops to balance on top of this rickety mess of slightly off-grid picks and plucks. I did record the bass to a click (metronome), but in the spirit of under-thinking, whenever I got what I thought was a good take, I moved on without listening back. Even if I had listened, I’m not sure the problem would have registered at the time. When I felt satisfied on the bass, I muted the click and went straight to work arranging the parts without a second thought. Lesson learned.
This first sound study has thoroughly sensitized to me the critical importance of two fundamentals I had apparently taken for granted: timing and tuning.
If I reflect on my early childhood impressions of what made a good musician, I was undoubtedly captivated by two particular dimensions of virtuosity: speed and intricacy, on the one hand, and raw emotional expressiveness on the other. A certain kind of shredding and a certain kind of blues. That’s what I cared about, and that’s what I practiced. I knew I had a weak chord game, but until now I never appreciated the extent of my fundamental shortcomings, even playing lead. Starting over as an adult, I could tell that guitar seemed to be coming back a bit faster than the drums. But now that I’ve made an honest attempt at recording, I’m wondering if the underlying reality isn’t just this: I’ve always had terrible timing, across the board. I’ll spare you the full tour of emotional flashbacks this prospect triggered. Just to say, it would certainly make sense of some tense moments in high school band.
As for tuning, I don’t know quite where to diagnose the issue yet. When I moved on to the six string parts I could not shake the feeling of being out of tune. I still hear it in the finished track. But every time I double checked my trusty BOSS TU-3, it gave me the all clear. Was it the bass that was out of tune? Was my TU-3 not that trusty? Or do I also have a terrible ear?
The final recording has plenty wrong with it, but these are the two highest priority issues I’m going to focus on most coming out of this first attempt.
Both shortcomings seem manageable, with practice. And maybe a lot of practice. But that’s ok. It’s all good fun. Nothing to freak out about. What’s really unsettling though, is this: my whole life as a player, I’ve never really listened carefully to my actual playing. I’ve only listened to what I heard in my head while I’ve played. I’ve only listened to my intentions. And as far as I’m concerned, my intentions are nothing short of genius. But, lo and behold, when I return to my Logic project after a 24 hour break… I hear something else entirely. It’s genuinely alarming to discover how much work my mind has been doing to smooth over my own defects, all this time. Though perhaps it should come as no surprise. We interpret everything around us with an undue emphasis on our own beliefs, our own goals, and our own desires. It’s not until we’ve lost the plot of what we were trying to do that we can find ourselves caught off guard by the naked fact of what we’ve actually done.
Damn, I’m really working through something. Yuck. Enough of that. Bad timing. Music fundamentals. That’s all we’re talking about here. I have no regrets. None, whatsoever.
Back to music.
In terms of problem areas in this track, volume came in as a close third to timing and pitch. Playing softly, consistently, and in time, all at the same time, turns out to be a pretty tricky business. So to circle back to Dawn of Midi: the hard parts are almost impossible, and the “easy” parts are actually really hard.
After finishing on the bass, I spent a couple hours tinkering in Logic. I tested the bass loops to see if any of them worked together at the same time, and found a couple decent fits. Then I rearranged them until it felt like there was some kind of coherent movement. I expanded some sections to create space for the next set of parts, added a touch of EQ and applied crossfades. Eventually, it felt like something, and that something became the base layer of the track.
Next came the mini 6 string.
I knew I wanted some really simple parts using a strong palm mute, getting as close as I could to the sonic quality of the Dysnomia keys (in which the pianist, Amino Belyamani, reached inside the piano to apply a palm mute, creating a very unique sound). What came out actually gave me a strong recollection of the synth lead on the Houses track Soak it Up. Completely different overall sound and groove, but nonetheless hypnotic in roughly the way I wanted. I ran with that, and harmonized the picked part. When the parts are played simultaneously, they’re hard panned to left and right.
I liked this part enough to make it a kind of refrain, and scattered it around in a few places. But again, while arranging, the timing issues hadn’t registered. Listening now, a few weeks later, I find myself cringing at how amateur it sounds. But I think this is a case where the cure is in the poison. I have to imagine that a significant part of making better recordings is building up the sensitivity necessary to spot and correct problems at the source, before building on top of them. Becoming more sensitive can be a painful process, so I accept the cringe. The cringe is my teacher.
After a few parts on the mini, my ear started to get a little tired of the sound. This could be an EQ thing, so I have a bit of research to do there, but it felt a bit harsh to me. I decided to break it up with nylon strings—a Taylor 312ce-N.
Perhaps another unique pick for a smallish collection, but this guitar probably makes my top 3 (maybe even top 2) to hold onto once I start selling off gear to pay for groceries. I am by no means a classical player. But this guitar feels great, and I love the harp-like sounds you can pull out of the high strings with a strong pluck and some compression. The nylon strings quickly yielded another fun little refrain, which I also doubled and hard panned left and right.
Now, the whole premise of this sound study was to explore the basic sonic potential of my acoustic collection. But at one point I started to doubt that it was at all interesting, so I thought to myself: “you know what this pure acoustic performance needs? Some big fat juicy effects pedals.” So I pulled the Empress Echosystem from my board and hooked it up to an outboard loop.
I made 3 quick recordings of harmonic sounds from the mini six string (beginning at 1:55 of the track) and recorded the return from a send to my tabletop loop (stereo out via Scarlett 18i20 and Radial EXTC).
The Echosystem was set to the Panning Delay mode, with Pan Width (thing 1) to 100% and Pan Speed (thing 2) set to give me effectively a quarter note per side. In plain English, the effect is: the original sound (pluck of a string) plays back as an echo one quarter note delayed on the left side only, then again on the right a quarter note later, and again and again etc as per the feedback parameter. This gives the sound a very wide and gently swirling feel. (The best way to experience this effect is of course, with headphones on).
The signal going out of each of the stereo channels is then compressed in mono by an Empress Compressor mkii to give it that nice, even, silky smooth quality. These pedals have handy volume reduction meters, so they give you a nice bonus visualization of the panning effect in action (left-right-left-right).
If you know your way around this effect and listened closely, you might have noticed that something didn’t quite add up. So I’ll admit there’s a bit more going on in Logic on top of the pedal effect. I’m not trying to cheat any pedal-heads out there, but this kind of thing is totally in bounds for me. The next few videos show all the moving parts.
Here’s the first acoustic track, soloed without any effects:
Here’s that same region, with the Echosystem loop soloed in as well. I faded in the effect in by hand, rolling the output knob up during the recording:
Unfortunately, it looks like the screen capture did not preserve stereo, so the panning effect is not audible in these videos, but you can hear it in the original.
Next, I created a couple new samples of the harmonic sounds with aggressive fades, which created a nice swelling sound. At first, those samples are not included in the bus out to the Echosystem loop. Here’s the first of those samples:
Now, here’s a stem with all the guitar parts from that section soloed together:
In the back half of the track, when I wanted to re-trigger the ambience from the Panning Delay, I sent the swelling pad samples out to the Echosystem loop, and played with some of the parameters to create some more movement (tone and volume). Here’s a stem of the sample, plus effect, from the end of the track:
The effect (Loop 1 Print above) was recorded while I rolled the tone knob on the Echosystem all the way to the top.
Back to guitars.
Again, I had intended to stick to acoustic instruments, but with all the Empress Effects in the air, the electric spirits were speaking to me. And the spirits said: what this track really needs next is a super cheesy, over the top E-Bow part.
The E-Bow, for those who don’t know, is a sustaining device that you can place over the strings of an electric guitar to make them vibrate without any percussive impact (string sounds without picking). The softly swelling sound is reminiscent of bowed instruments (violins et al), hence the “E”-Bow brand name.
The ES-335 I used (the red guitar) is a semi-hollow, which I decided would count as acoustic for my purposes. I swelled the signal in with the volume pedal, and gave it a hefty portion of digital delay to thicken it up and add some sustain between swells.
Correction: the delay used on the E-Bow track was the Pristine Digital mode of the Empress Echosystem. But doesn’t that DD-3 just look so pretty?
Here’s another case of hearing what I think I’m playing, and not the sounds coming from my amps. Sounded silky smooth and not cheesy at all as I recorded it, but playback was horrendous. I had to remove just about everything above 2500Hz, and even then when I solo this track it still sounds terrible to me. But somehow it doesn’t offend me when mixed in. No idea why. The whole mastering thing is a dark art that I have no intuition about yet.
Percussion.
Here’s when I really had to come to terms with the fact that I’d gone and done the whole house-on-sand thing. Stupid proverbs. You don’t know me.
So, the no-looking-back rule is going to have to be hedged with a bit of common sense. I had to throw out a lot of drum ideas. I started with some fancier rhythms. Nothing was really clicking, which didn’t surprise me. “My drumming just hasn’t come back yet.” So I tried some slightly simpler beats, and again, nothing worked. I started to wonder whether my drumming was inadequate, or maybe it was the guitar tracks?
Narrator: It was all inadequate.
It remains to be seen how innately terrible my sense of rhythm actually is, but at this point I had my “aha” moment. All the little errors were compounding, and the only way to not make it worse was to do almost nothing. The shaker part, for instance, cuts out on the first beat of the last bar in its loop. It certainly passes that way, but the reality is after 10 minutes of shaker takes, I realized there was no way to fit it to the errors in the last bar of guitar parts. So I just stopped it early. Problem solved.
The minimal rhythm that remained was still off, but when I didn’t listen too closely it seemed passable. Good enough to mark the end of this first attempt. Turn up the reverb and call it good.
There’s a lot wrong with this track, but I have to say I was nevertheless pleasantly surprised by the result. It certainly sounds nothing like Dawn of Midi. Something completely unintended came out. So much of my past creative work has been unnecessarily weighed down by the baggage of all the “me” I put into it. This, on the other hand, came into being with a few deep tokes off of Rick Rubin’s creative peace pipe. The whole process was all about curiosity and discovery, and the resulting piece doesn’t feel like “me” at all. It feels like something new. For all its faults, at least it has that to its credit.
That said, if I want to make better music, I’ll have to get better at making music.
And with that, I think we’ve finally bushwhacked our way out of the haunted, bug-ridden swamp of tedious personal backstory and arrived at the real subject of this Substack: getting better at making music. All jokes aside, I am incredibly grateful to have this opportunity to spend my time this way, however long it lasts. I’ve questioned myself constantly over the past two years, but the further down this road I go, the less it feels like a completely crazy, self-destructive thing to do. I’m starting to believe that what I’ve always really wanted was to make something beautiful. Now, that I’m finally trying, everything feels alright.
More to come.
Q: Did you buy a black turtleneck just for that gag at the top?
A: Yes I did.
Very engaging video