Roll Tape

It feels odd to be sitting curled around a guitar, a microphone staring at me expectantly again.

This started as an act of reclamation and reconnection. If I can learn to play again, can I write again? If I can write again, can I record again? If I can record again, can I finish something and put a full stop on it?

It's become a project.

I'm doing this for me, now. I don't need to prove anything.

Before everything happened, recording was like all other aspects of the music-making process to me: something shared with friends, colleagues and collaborators. It was done in nice rooms with lots of equipment.

To find myself doing it in a bare bones borrowed room on my own with minimal equipment is a new thing.

However, if you can't do it under one light bulb on a bare stage, all the bells and whistles in the world won't save your sorry ass.

Recording to tape is proving an interesting experience.

There's no cutting and pasting. The only way to get a complete take is to do a complete take.

There's no click track to help out tempo-wise and no snap-to-grid or quantizing functions to save me if I can't count. I can't call up ranks of percussion instruments from a hard drive to fill out the sound. There are no folders full of sound f/x for me to use. I can't dial up a brass section should I need horn stabs.

I've only got four tracks, so every decision counts. I can't keep performances for later to compare them, or comp multiple takes together to get a perfect run through. I will have to bounce to realise what I can hear, so every note I play has to display its awareness of everything else that will be around it and under it and over it - even when I don't know what will be around it and under it and over it.

It's like three-dimensional musical chess - and I am a bear of little brain.

But that's good.

Music works because it's where emotion meets structure and discipline. Structure and discipline give expression form so it connects and communicates.

Others you get the inchoate adolescent mess that is free verse.

The process of recording this way is channelling and structuring.

I can't just run patterns.

I have to think.

I have to engage.

I have to feel.

The tape is also remarkably precise in its own way. You really do only get out what you put in. It only ever reflects you back at you. When I playback, I feel like I'm hearing and seeing myself for the first time in a long time.

It is as profoundly odd and unsettling an experience now as it was when I heard a playback of my teenage self thrashing away on an electric guitar in a garage with my friends for the first time.

It's like meeting a familiar stranger.

I'm not an digital reactionary, mind.

The history of music is the history of sonic innovation. To reject Logic and Pro Tools and Ableton is to reject the evolution of music. I'll record with both again, I'm sure.

However, this has shown me how reliant we've become on algorithms and drag-and-drop technology. When you have to make and consider every sound you make, you own it far more completely than when you can push a preset and get Abbey Road's console and a radio-friendly mix to go.

Which is good to learn.

©℗ A. I. Jackson

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The first Origin(al) Stories Journal was a blog launched to track the writing and recording of the Northumbria album. You can read about the thought processes behind that here.

Following the launch of The Landing Stage website, I’ve decided to continue with the Origin(al) Stories posts.

The Landing Stage showcases some of the things I do.

The Origin(al) Stories posts show some of the thoughts and processes and activities that go into those acts of doing.

Drawn from my personal diaries and journals, the posts might often seem unconnected, elliptical and fragmentary.

This is because the Origin(al) Stories blog doesn’t offer the definitive conclusions, hacks, lists or ‘how to …’ advice beloved of Youtube gurus, bro-science and self-help manuals.

This is because there’s no one road through the forest, no one route to the top of the mountain, no one path to where you want to be and what you want to do.

The Origin(al) stories only shows how I’ve found a path through to doing something.

The path always has to give you as much as the destination.

They are, as I noted in the original post about it, postcards from the journey. Snapshots of work in progress - which is what all lives and endeavours are.

If you’ve liked an Origin(al) Stories post, or it’s helped you with something you’re doing in some way, please share it to your socials, and give credit. All content on this website is copyrighted and attributable.

If you’d like to listen to Northumbria, download it here.

If you’d like to listen to Alnwyck Jameson Badger, download it here.

If you’d like to listen to Broken Oars Podcast, download it here.

Thanks for reading. Have a great day. Tell the people you love that you love them. Be a positive force.