Signal Chain / Home For Me
Here’s the thing:
Writing a song is easy.
Realising a song?
That’s the hard bit.
We tend to think of songs as inviolate. We hear All Shook Up, Beethoven’s 5th, Hey Jude, Blowin’ in the Wind, Dancing Queen, Bohemiam Rhapsody, To Here Knows When, whatever … and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. This is especially true if those songs become part of a representative culture. They come out of the radio on the way to work, we listen to them on our Walkman / Discman / ‘phone as we’re walking through town, they’re on in the background when we’re out with our friends …
Oh, I know how this one goes …
Even when we’ve heard the outtakes, the bloopers, the alternate takes, etc that are all over social media now, the way it was supposed to be is the way it is - and when the artist in question reimagines your favourite teenage banger as a Latin-flavoured Bossa Nova in concert, well, my, oh my don’t you feel like you’ve just wasted £50-00 for a ticket on a school night?
And yet every song you think you know could have turned out completely different.
A song sounds the way it does because at every stage from the moment the idea came to the point where the listener presses play series and sets of decisions were made that shaped the way the idea, ultimately, ends up being presented.
At each stage, those series and sets of decisions could have been different - and if they had been, the song would have come out different.
Songs, like all art (and everything is art, from jazz to engineering and back), then, aren’t made of inspiration.
They’re made of choices.
I’m going to explore one of the songs on Songs For Separation to illustrate how that might work.
The idea for Home for Me came to me wandering around a pandemic-locked house singing to myself. The whole lyric, the vocal line, everything. Andy H has a video clip of me singing it literally to record it as it was happening so I didn’t forget it.
It’s very, very brief. A simple refrain.
I wish I was a sailor / I wish I sailed across the sea / I wish I was a sailor / for there’s no home for me ...
How did it turn into a 36-minute composition?
Ok.
What were the first set of choices when it came to Songs For Separation?
Well, I chose to record all of the songs on Songs For Separation on a TEAC quarter-inch four track, making every sound myself.
Some will call this a lo-fi approach.
Go and listen to it.
I might not have used Logic or Ableton or VST instruments or snap-to-grid functions or autotune or … or … or …
But Songs For … is not lo-fi.
What else?
I decided that the songs would appear on the album in the sequence in which they’d arrived as ideas.
Why?
Because they did so in conjunction with the music that would become Test Pieces - and it made sense in terms of narrative and emotional arc. Someone Else was the first thing with words I wrote. Home For Me the last. Each led to the next, and the next led to another.
What else?
I wanted Songs For Separation to start and finish with a single human voice.
Why?
Because.
Because we live in an overproduced, over-adrenalised, over-sugared, over-caffeinated, over-CGI’d AI painted world - and our voices are often lost in that, even though they are the most individual and precious things we have.
And because COVID removed my ability to sing and play. Rather than dress that up, it seemed more appropriate to stand there and say this is me, now.
Yes, but the above vocal line is quite short, as it is on the album. How did it develop into the mutli-movement track it became?
Every song on Songs for Separation went through a natural and organic development process.
Musical decisions were taken based on fully realising and aligning the emotional cores of the songs with their sonic presentation. It became clear to me that the first six songs on Songs For Separation were very much direct reflections of lived experience. Between writing them and recording them was a period of two years, which left me permanently disabled by COVID. This also left me separated by time from those lived experiences. I began to think about developing Home For Me in a way that showed how those experiences had subsequently been processed and resolved.
I chose to do that by taking snippets of conversations, musical notes, concerns, ideas, areas of research and practice and moments from those two years of illness and rehabilitation and sections of the music that will be on Test Pieces and blending them together.
For all it’s sonic space when you listen to it, there are thirty-eight separate recorded audio inputs on Home for Me, for example.
From a music theory perspective, although each input starts together, they are all also running at their own tempos and in their own sequences, creating a musique concrete tapestry where accidental convergences of different moments come together to form musical moments, moments of harmony and climax that then diverge again, constantly intertwining, meeting, parting and ultimately building towards the original melodic and lyrical refrain.
Now, for each of those 38 separate audio signals, before you even get to performance choices or aesthetic ideas, each has its own signal chain.
Let’s take one.
So, I took a decision to include snippets of music that will appear on the Test Pieces album. This was made for a few reasons. The music on Songs For … and Test Pieces developed at the same time in the same place (Lockdown). I’m approaching this as an artist would rather than a musician. Artists work in and on themes and ideas that interest them - and the development / progression of those themes can be seen in the work. Including snippets of what’s coming up on Test Pieces means both works can be read forward and back in light of one another.
You know, ideas that you never see most musicians talk about in the usual back-and-forth, which tends to go as follows:
Line: It’s our best album.
Meaning? It’s our latest album.
Line: We think it shows our growth as artists.
Meaning? We no longer talk to each other, but we were contractually obligated to give the record company another album.
Line: We really took our time and let the material grow …
Meaning?We rushed it out to make the deadline for this year’s festival bookings.
Line: We feel it’s our Sgt. Pepper.
Meaning? Track three has a string section on it.
Line: Everyone contributed.
Meaning? We were short of material, so we had to include one by the bass player.
Line: Working with [insert name of famous producer here]? Unbelievable. An absolute genius in the studio.
Meaning? Unpunctual, coercively controlling psychopath. We had to feed him / her drugs just to get him / her through the door.
You know, that sort of thing …
Okay.
Back to Home For Me.
Music, like everything else, is in the details.
So, let’s zoom in for a moment.
At 9 minutes 24 seconds, a series of harmonics enters in the right speaker, three o’clock pan.
These are taken from Cascade, the fourth track on Test Pieces, which will be released in October 2024.
From a musical perspective, they’re reasonably simple - but even if you can play, they aren’t that simple, for reasons you’ll work out if you try and pitch them.
Here’s the signal chain for that moment.
My fingers.
Guitar. (Sitka spruce top, mahogany back and sides, ebony fretboard, phosphor bronze strings for those who think these things are important).
Rode NT1a large diaphragm true-condenser mic @ twelfth fret.
AKG 451b small diaphragm condenser mic @ left ear.
GLS audio cables.
M67 preamp.
Tuner.
Low Cut filter @ 60hz.
12 step phaser (in post): - ceiling 20000 hz / floor 8500hz; rate 1: 0.20hz; rate 2: 0.92hz; phase +10; mix 50 /50; sweep mode square wave; feedback 30%; output mix: 30%.
Reverb (in post): predelay 10ms; room 7; room size 20m2; stereo base 2m; low cut -10db; hi cut 6000hz; density 50%; diffusion 100%; reverb time 2.95 secs; wet / dry 100 / 25 ratio; spread 100 %; crossover 400hz.
EQ low cut - 24 db @ 92.0 - 80.0 hz -2.5 db @ 200hz, +3.5 db @ 1660hz + 5.5 db @ 6000 hz, + 4.5 db @ 8100hz
Delay. Left channel: 1/4 note @ 750 ms / 50% tape deviation / crossfeed l to r.
Right channel 1/8th note dotted @376ms / 50% tape deviation crossfeed r to l. Wet / dry mix: 30 / 70.
Now, not counting the transfer mechanism from the masters for Test Pieces, and without getting into the minutiae of the TEAC’s specs in terms of tape (RTM LPR 35 1/4" 1100m NAB, model (A3340). recording heads, playback heads, etc … that’s the signal chain for one short section of music.
If I’d chosen to record digitally, I might not have hooked up all of the analogue units and futzed around with patch cables and what goes where in the signal, but all of the above elements would have still been present - because they were needed and used to create a specific sound, which means that the sound you hear is the result of a specific sequence of choices and decisions. Yes, this. No, not that. That up. That down. Take that back out. Add that there … and those choices and details were then all referred back to the bigger picture of the overall track … which was then referred back to the ideas about who, what, when, where and why which informed the way song ideas might progress into something where someone else could press play and listen.
I don’t know if this information is helpful for anyone. Cultural ideas about how music / art is created are very ingrained, with the whole individual genius / moments of genius, emotion, lightning in a bottle we just jam it into existence man narrative still dominating - despite the wealth of evidence showing that this is patently not the case. Saying on record that what you’re listening to took time and effort and craft and patience and skill and consideration to create goes against the whole we just feel it, maaaaaan nonsense that’s still fairly routinely spouted.
But what it should do is highlight that often the initial idea is often the easy bit.
Often the universe gives it to us for free.
It’s the realising of it, the realising of it in a way that’s artistically and emotionally resonant and fulfilling, that’s the hard bit.
Now, multiply each decision above for each of the 38 separate audio inputs used to create the Home For Me track in its entirety.
And then multiply that for every audio input on everyone of the other six songs on the album …
… and then multiply that by the total number of songs.
… and that’s still only the number of technical choices that were made to produce the sound that you listen to.
Lo-fi, right?
©℗ A. I. Jackson
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Origin(al) Stories was first launched to show some of the thoughts, decisions and processes that went into the writing, recording and release of the Northumbria album.
Following the launch of The Landing Stage, which brings together some of the things I do, I’ve continued adding to Origin(al) Stories.
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