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Ableton Live for Anybody – 4 Session Online Course

Ableton Live for Anyone – Online!

SoundGirls is offering a four session online course on Ableton Live taught by Elana Carroll.  Sessions will be via ZOOM.

September 17 & 18 and 24 & 25  7-9pm (PST)

$80 for the four sessions

email soundgirls@soundgirls.org if you require financial aid

Register Here

After registration SoundGirls will send you an invoice (via paypal) and after payment is complete, SoundGirls will email instructions for logging into ZOOM.  Each session will be recorded and provided to you after each session.

Class Description
Do you want to start making beats? Do you want to learn how to make your own demos? Do you want to sharpen your DAW skills so you can get over that first learning curve and really start running with your creativity? Do you want to start performing live with Ableton, but don’t know where to start?

By the end of this four session course, you will have learned all you need to know in order to really get your engines revved up about Ableton. I want to give you the tools to explore and to run as much of your show as you want to. With your newfound agility and excitement, you might even feel confident to explore parts of Ableton functionality that haven’t yet been discovered! Because that’s what creativity is all about—exploring and playing! But first, what is it exactly that you will be learning?

Sessions 1 & 2 will be all about the essentials of Ableton. What is the basic design behind this software? How do you get the sounds you want IN there, so you can edit them and play with them? How do you program a drum beat? How do you slow it down if you want to? How do you mess around with ideas and decide what parts you want to go at the beginning, the middle, and the end? How do you listen to it on your phone? By the end of the class, you will have a multi-track song that you create entirely by yourself using Ableton.
*Key items covered: time signatures & tempos, MIDI, audio, clips, arrangement view, bouncing

Sessions 3 & 4 will focus on Ableton in live performance. You will learn how to make backing tracks that are suitable for the type of performance you want to put on. Maybe you want to push play at the beginning of the set and never really look at your computer again until your last song. Or maybe you want to engage with every sound that comes out of the house speakers. Or maybe your fantasy set is something in between! We will go over different approaches to designing your live set by using your new song from day one as a template.
*Key items covered: importing tracks, deciding on a playback concept, labeling, setting up loops and automation

Equipment needed (students):
-laptop with Ableton already installed – You can download a 30-day free trial

Instructor: Elana Carroll is a songwriter, producer and performer who has been making original music for 15 years. She holds a BA in music and critical theory from Bard College at Simon’s Rock.

Elana’s interests as a writer/producer span from electronic and dance to pop and country, and she co-writes with other artists as well. Her current focus is on teaching (she will be teaching a Beats by Girlz class this fall), and her own project, Party Nails. She feels it is part of her purpose in this life to “normalize” non-males in the music business through performance, teaching, and mentoring. She is particularly fascinated with popular culture and music in the age of technology.

Not Your (Grand)Parents’ Dream Job

Working toward a career goal in entertainment comes with a lot of baggage. Movies depict a certain sequence of events, ads promise a kind of instant gratification, and our elders say they were able to work their way up the ladder, buy a house, pay for college for the kids and retire. Never mind that movies aren’t real, that ads are intended to manipulate (at worst) and influence (at best) our spending habits, and that the jobs our elders had no longer exist. In spite of widespread understanding of these facts, our careers are still prodded and picked at by well-meaning friends, family, and even other creative professionals. The unspoken assumption is that there is a correct way to build a career and that if you do it that way then you will predictably meet a series of milestones on your course of upward growth.

Maybe there was a golden era of the American workplace in which upward growth was essentially frictionless. My grandfather started at IBM in the 1960s as a computer engineer and worked for 30 years, during which time he bought a house, supported a family of four, put two children through four-year college programs, saved for retirement, and had access to legitimate health benefits. It wasn’t easy, but his job did make it all possible.

My grandparents on my dad’s side, 1982, on the last day of their first international trip. Their oldest child (my dad) had just graduated from college, a state school which they were able to pay for, and their youngest was 15 and stayed with her grandmother. This was the first of many trips they have taken over the years since their kids have grown up.

The people I know whose careers fell on a similar timeline to his have similar experiences. But the years before this “gold era” were similar to how things are now: people with socio-economic advantages are able to move upward at a fairly rapid pace, and everyone without socio-economic advantages is able to exercise upward mobility only after figuring out how to catch up. The college student with a job that pays her rent does not have access to the same opportunities as her classmate whose rent is paid by his parents so he can attend an unpaid internship for a semester.

I mention this because we now live in a free labor economy. Companies and individuals in power positions have a bad habit of bullying workers for free labor, even when it’s technically illegal. Perhaps this fear mechanism was born out of the crash of 2008 (when many of the people in power positions were still in college), or perhaps we are becoming exponentially shameless in our power hunger, with each passing year putting greater distance between the richest and poorest among us and more attention is given to the loudest people with the greatest number of followers. It is money and popularity, not skills and experience, that are winning in the job market right now.

So what can we do to combat this?

Prioritize fair pay in your business. Even if you are relying on the generosity of a friend at the moment, make it a priority to pay them what their work is worth as soon as you are able to.

Name your price and back it up. I hope you never have to experience someone in the music business bullying you, but it can happen to anyone. Someone will tell you that they can get someone else to do it for free. Often this is just a negotiation tactic. You’re worth more than nothing, so make a case for you over this imaginary free laborer. (One exception to this rule is when you are being generous to a friend!)

When money is tight, consider an exchange of skills instead. Are you an audio engineer who wants production experience? The more that you develop your skills the more bartering power you will have when you want to acquire new ones.

Jordan Cantor engineering and I producing at Killphonic Studios in Los Angeles last year. We are in our second year of her engineering me in exchange for me engineering her.

Communicate. This is very important. Your communication style will be different from other peoples’, and will likely evolve over time. You want to be as clear as possible. With experience, you’ll be able to read situations quickly and avoid problems before they become too big to solve.

Decide what your values as a business owner (and/or colleague) are, and resolve to never be lazy about upholding them. If someone you work with is not meeting those standards, don’t be afraid to talk about it and challenge them to do better. (The flip side of this is, obviously, that you must live by these standards as well!)

It is my hope that through the shifting tides of our current economy, we develop new and effective ways to uphold fair business practices. I’m always curious to hear from others about their experiences doing this (positive and negative), so please feel free to leave comments or email your stories to me at elanabellecarroll@gmail.com!

Killphonic Studios

My Love of the Guitar (Pt. 2)

Read Part One Here

I went to an early college (Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Massachusetts), and while I was finishing up my BA thesis, I was also in my second year of private classical guitar lessons. I’d been playing for almost nine years already and was also playing the viola, and in two choirs, and music theory classes. I had a laptop, but this was before everything was done digitally, so I used my hands to write and edit and analyze notation in addition to taking notes, and editing drafts of my thesis. I write with my left hand, and I play “standard” guitar (which is to say that my left hand presses the frets and my right hand plucks the strings). My guitar teacher instructed me to practice a minimum of two hours a day, “but really six hours is more reasonable if you can manage that,” she’d suggested.  Because I adored her, even with a full course load and two babysitting jobs, I practiced as much as I could. This usually amounted to three hours a day.

“If I could play in the morning or late at night, I could practice even more,” I told her. “But I don’t want to bother my roommates.”

“Ah yes, I remember those days!” She reminisced. “When I was in college, I would wake up at 4 am and put socks on my hands. That way, when I played, it was very quiet!” She said this with a twinkle in her eye. I looked at her gesturing hands and arms and realized they were perfectly oriented to hold a guitar. Even without one in her arms, she was ready to play the guitar. I wanted to be more like her. But socks on my hands? At 4 am?

All I could muster up was: “I’ll give that a try.”

playing my G&L telecaster on a rooftop in Brooklyn, 2013. Photo by Lisa Myers.

I woke up earlier and drove to the soundproof practice rooms on campus. I’d set up my foot pedal, cut and file my fingernails, warm up, and set up the various pieces I was attempting to memorize. After three hours I’d head over to the library and sit in my cubicle I was allotted as a senior to read my books and take notes. For the first time, I was writing a long-form academic essay on anything of my choice. It was as exciting as it was terrifying. When the sun set, I’d pack up and drive to the next town over to babysit, where I would read, take notes, and write on the couch while a baby slept upstairs. (To this day I’ve never met this particular child. Once she woke up and I entered her room, picked her up, sang to her until she fell back asleep, and then put her back down and left the room again. But it was completely dark the whole time, so I feel this doesn’t really count as having properly met.)

After half a semester of this routine, my left arm began to hurt. I tried to give it a rest, but I was doing something with it almost every waking moment. I couldn’t help it. I hoped my guitar teacher would have a solution. I’d come to see her as a sort of wise woman; an auntie of musical persuasions.

“My left arm and hand really hurt,”  I said during my next lesson. Truthfully the dull hurt had started to become a throbbing pain that was now going up to my left shoulder. “I think I’m just using this side a lot. You’re left-handed too, yeah? What do you suggest I do during this time while I’m in school and need to use my left hand to write a lot?”

She didn’t skip a beat. “Learn to write with your right hand!”

She said it with a hint of condescension like I was stupid for not having thought of it myself.

“Oh. Okay, I will have to… give that a try,” I said, disheartened. She couldn’t be serious, could she? It’s not like I chose to write with my left hand. How could it be as simple as choosing to write with my right hand?

I really did try it, but it was useless. I couldn’t write a word with my right hand, let alone notes and sentences and paragraphs.

I had to keep going the way I had been.

my first electronic (read: no guitar or live instruments) performance, somewhere in Vermont, 2010. Photo by Jane Sweatt.

After I graduated, I expected the pain to subside on its own within a few weeks, but it got worse. For the next year it was so bad there were nights I had trouble sleeping. I talked to many musicians about it. Finally, a violinist who had toured and recorded for over 40 years suggested that I had nerve damage. “You have done the same couple actions so many times, and overused certain parts of your arm in the process. The only way to experience relief is to completely stop doing those actions.”

I looked down at my right hand. I had kept my fingernails long and curved for plucking for many years. My left-hand nails were always short for pressing strings onto the neck board. I was used to typing like this, used to the difference in sensation when I would use both my hands. I loved sitting down to practice and learn new pieces, even if I wasn’t planning on being a concert player.

Could I let this go? How long would I need to stop for? Would I be okay without it? Would my college guitar teacher somehow find out and call me and berate me for not following her learn-to-write-with-your-right-hand advice? How much shame could I endure?

my first time troubleshooting Ableton Live during a soundcheck, Brooklyn, 2012. Photo by Clyde Rastetter.

Eventually, the pain became so bad I had to stop playing for years. Sometimes I would forget the pain and would pick up a guitar for a little while and regret it later. I was so sad to not play as much as I wanted. But unbeknownst to me, my guitar time was being replaced by audio time. I was buying books, downloading programs, going to classes, and spending hours upon hours learning the ins and outs of digital audio technology. I was starting to create sounds I had never heard before, using them to create soundscapes I’d never interacted with before, and writing lyrics and melodies I’d never think up before.

Unknowingly, a  new world was opening up to me.

Vocal Production 101

When I listen to my older productions, some of my first recordings on Logic, one thing that sticks out a lot to me is the vocal. This happens a lot when I listen to “young producers”—people interested in making records and being in charge of the record making process, as opposed to those that make demos and want to find a producer to collaborate with. The vocal rarely sounds as good as it could, and it often goes unnoticed.

Before continuing, I want to mention a few things, even if they seem obvious to some. First, not all music is vocal-centered. There is music with no use of voice at all. There is music with the use of vocal samples which are treated as a riff similar to how one might treat a guitar part. There is music where the voice and instrumentation are treated as two parts with equal status which weave in and out of each other.

I would also like to acknowledge that the approach to recording vocals varies greatly according to the style of music and production. One would approach recording the featured soloist of a choir very differently from how they would approach recording a singer and her acoustic guitar, and differently still is the approach one would take to recording the vocal for a pop song…and even in pop, there is a big difference between a Selena Gomez vocal and an Adele vocal. When I say “recording” here I am referring to both the engineering process (type of microphone(s), mic placement, use of compression and EQ) as well as the vocal production process (type of performance from the vocalist/s, approach to comping, approach to tuning*, approach to layering, i.e., how many Selenas are we really listening to in the verse versus the chorus; are they singing the same notes or are they harmonizing; are they all natural or are they effected in different ways and playing more autonomous roles? etc.)

I have yet to come across any reading or class that goes into depth about these styles and processes, which is surprising because it is something all listeners of music experience. We know quality when we hear it, and I think most musicians are genuinely interested in the record making process. Even if they would rather be playing, they understand it is to their advantage to know something about making records. I’m sure there are Tape Op articles about people who specialize in vocal production, and there may be a class in a university somewhere that touches on vocal production in all of its complexity (let me know! I’m curious to learn how they cover the topic!) Mostly though, I think many producers and engineers learn it by way of doing, which is fine. But what about those of us who aren’t assistant engineering (yet)? Can we study this as a subject and not as a specific recipe?

Here is a basic overview of vocal production. Depending on your level of experience, it may be worth watching a few YouTube tutorials on comping and tuning in your specific software. Vocal production is super fun, but it’s also tedious. It’s not for everyone, and it takes lots of practice. I hope with this jump start you are encouraged to give it a shot, dig in deeper, get some new skills under your belt and create dope vocals!

Step 0 is basically, decide what kind of vocal you are going to make. If you are recording a group of vocalists, decide if you want to record them together or separately, ask yourself why (sometimes the answer will be obvious). If you are recording a solo singer with some layers and/or background singing, it helps to do a little research and have a few existing recordings to use as a reference for the sound you are going for. It rarely works to have only one reference; it is more useful to have a few and create something from a place of cross-pollination. I’ve noticed that after years of being inspired by others’ vocal production techniques, I often don’t need to listen to be using something as a reference in order for it to be playing that role—it is just part of my tool belt.

Step 1. Use the best mic and preamp possible.

Step 2. Listen to who you are recording.

What is interesting about their voice, from a sound perspective? Is it booming and loud? Does it crackle on certain vowels? Adjust your EQ and compression settings to best capture these elements you want to emphasize.

Step 3. Now listen to them again from a performance perspective.

Does the way they inhale before this one phrase feel intentional and emotionally compelling, or is it sloppy and distracting? Do you believe what they are singing? Is there consistency in their intonation/pronunciation, and how much consistency do you want there to be, AND WHY?

Step 4. Record the parts you need in a space that sounds good.

Get as many takes as you need to composite a solid main vocal. Do the same thing for a double of that main. It’s nice to have a quality double on hand for when you might decide you want to use it. Grab an octave down or octave up from the main if possible. If it’s not possible for the singer, but you want the option, grab another double. You can use a pitch shifter in your DAW to fake an octave up or down (or to play with and effect in other ways, such as a vocoder sound tucked away behind the main vocal for some added texture). Grab any background vocals you want, and remember that sometimes its fun to record these with the vocalist/s further away from the mic than they were for the other parts. Grab any harmonies you want. Record harmonies until you have too many harmonies recorded. You can take some away later. If you want, record your vocalist singing ad libs through the entirety of the song, at least one time through (three is the magic number here).

Step 5. Make good comps.

A good comp contains the best moments from all of the takes. It checks all the boxes of a good vocal recording—quality in fidelity, quality in performance, a lens into the singer and their ability to use their voice as an instrument and/or story-teller.

Step 6. Tune with integrity.

Don’t knock it ’til you try it!! Tuning with integrity adds a beautiful glistening sheen to a vocal, and is absolutely necessary if you want to make pop records. Yes, even the best singers of today are tuned, but with integrity. What does this mean? It means we use tuning to emphasize the things we worked on in steps 2 and 3. If a vocalist sang a word in a way that was so amazing that you want to use it, but is off-pitch in a distracting way, you can adjust that specific word. Take care of those instances, and then treat the rest with a light setting.

Step 7. Create a rough mix (or a real mix if you are a mix engineer too!)

Your references will come in handy here as you will want to communicate the desired final result to whoever is mixing your record.

Get your relative volumes in order. How loud do you want your harmonies to be in relation to your main? Get your textures in order. Are there any effects like reverb or delay that you would like to add? Are there some harmonies that you thought you liked, but you realize now the song sounds better without them? Compare yours to your references. What work do you still have to do to make it stand up next to them? Do what you can. Push yourself. Then save up for your next piece of gear so you can make even more music!!

*There is quite a bit of literature on the history of Autotune, it’s relation to the vocoder, and how artists like oft-cited Cher and Kanye have used extreme settings for specific effects. What we don’t see as much of is a practical, reasonable description of the role tuning plays in the record making process for many, many producers who do NOT use it in extreme ways. I guess the latter isn’t all that interesting for people who don’t work in music…

The Magic of Records

I love discovering fresh and exciting new music. But I often find myself fatigued in the search for it and end up putting on something older—usually Louis Armstrong or Gary Davis. After years of studying and trying my hand at music production and songwriting, my brain and ears are easily distracted dissecting these parts in new music. If nothing in a record really “grabs” me, I’m unable to listen passively. Instead, I’m listening for ideas and inspiration. I imagine that people working in film and TV have very similar experiences when watching movies and television.

The reason older music doesn’t distract me as much isn’t because I think it’s better. Rather, it’s because the production is simple, and there is not much to dissect. Using audio technology to create records with complex auditory experiences has not always been the goal of record-makers, i.e., producers. The earliest recording we know of is a wax cylinder recording of “Au Clair de la Lune” from 1860. The record is one barely audible voice. At this point, audio recordings were literally a form of preservation—a record-keeping device.

 

Musical preservation has existed in many forms (including the folk revival of the 1960s and the many, many attempts made by Western anthropologists to “understand” African music), but the least retrospective of these was probably the blues recordings made in the 1920s and 30s. At this time in America, there was a huge effort to preserve the songs of the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia and other song-heavy regions, as one generation of musicians and storytellers died out, and a new era of recording technology was becoming the norm. After blues and folk came jazz recordings, which eventually led to bebop, and then (by no small force of culture, story-telling, and talent) rock came shortly after that.

Until rock, there wasn’t much anyone could do as a recording “engineer” beyond capturing the beauty of the music. There are stories about New Orleans big bands bunching together and taking turns getting closer to the single microphone for their solos during their recording sessions. For all intents and purposes, this process is a form of production but is simple compared to what was to come a short time after.

Music production can only be as complex as the technology available at the time. Thusly, we see music production shift as audio technology shifts and, like technology, exponentially. Reverb and other time-based effects, multi-tracking, amp distortion, compression as a creative tool, the speed and efficacy of computers in music production—in this shortlist we have traveled from the 1950s to today!

In trying to pinpoint the moment I started hearing production in music, the earliest memory I can find is hearing Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. At the time I was playing guitar and singing in a band that had similar instruments that are on the album, including an accordion and saw. I had spent a little bit of time recording in a small studio outside of my small town, as a 15-year-old at-home dabbler of Garageband.  The engineer, his assistant and I were re-recording four of my home demos (my guitar teacher had entered my recordings into a contest the studio was having, and I had unwittingly won the contest). I noticed how much time and effort it took to achieve a desired sound in the studio. We need to record the guitar part; are we plugging it directly into the computer? (Regarding guitars, the answer is almost always no.) Are we going to mic an amp in the big live room? Are we going to mic an amp in the isolation room? What amp are we going to use? What guitar are we going to use? How do we capture all the stuff we like about the demo, but somehow also make it better? And on and on for every sound.

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea cover art

The production played no small role in In The Aeroplane Over The Sea’s staying power. In the 21st century, there is a big difference between putting a microphone in a room and recording a band bunched up around it, and using multiple tracks, compression, vocal doubling, and arranging found sound noise to create an atmosphere that is reminiscent of a time and place, but isn’t literally a time or place (it’s a record). In The Aeroplane Over The Sea blends folk, noise and rock music and maintains a lo-fi quality, but is never messy or unprofessional. Also, it was not expected to be as popular as it was. The magic of this record is that the listener can experience the grittiness that songwriter and bandleader Jeff Mangum exhibited throughout all of his work and life, in the format of a record that sounds good to our ears.

The magic of records is that our ears are part of our culture, too. Even though most listeners of music are not trained in music production, their ears are discerning. They want a new perspective. They want something real. They want something fresh that can tell us a story about our world and lives.

So producers. Let’s make some magic records.

 

Editors Note: Folklorist Alan Lomax spent his career documenting folk music traditions from around the world. Now thousands of the songs and interviews he recorded are available for free online, many for the first time. It’s part of what Lomax envisioned for the collection — long before the age of the Internet.

Me and My Guitar: Part One

When I was 11, everyone got a guitar at Christmas except for me. My dad had started taking lessons at the music store in town, and wanted the rest of our family to join in on the fun. He had asked me if I wanted one, but I said no. If everyone else was going to have one, I didn’t want one.

I felt a tinge of envy as my grandpa, brother, cousin, and aunt all unwrapped their new instruments on Christmas morning. My grandpa got an electric bass. My brother an electric guitar. My cousin got a classical guitar, and her mom got a ukulele. The living room was bubbly with strings being plucked and tuned and looked over. I avoided the instruments, stubbornly holding onto my original plan, which was that I absolutely definitely without a doubt did not want one.

With school off for the holidays, my brother and I did our usual routine: half the week with mom and then half the week with dad. My dad, who is an artist, was at that moment in time paying our bills by creating covers for syrupy romance novels. (He hilariously used himself and his girlfriend as the models for a number of them; since he was a long-distance contractor his clients were none the wiser.) Computers have always been slow at graphics, but in 2000 were remarkably slower. So in the downtime, he had while a Photoshop file would render or a new proof would print, he would practice his new guitar skills. He played Billy Bragg’s record Back To Basics loudly and practice his chord shapes and pentatonic scales along with it. Billy Bragg was a rockstar with an activist bent, singing in shouts over pulsating solo electric guitar. I could hear the rock n’ roll energy from my room across the hall while I was writing, reading, hanging out with my cat. It was magnetic, and it made me feel something I’d never felt before. And my dad sounded so excited and motivated to play along with one of his favorite musicians.

My dad would regularly ask my opinion on his work, often showing me variations on a piece he was working on. He’d turn layers off and on in Photoshop, showing me the options and discussing the ideas, colors, and shapes with me, what the client was looking for and what he was interested in. So one day I let myself into his studio under the pretense of feedback. He was playing along with his favorite song off Back To Basics, “A New England”—a record chock full of folk-rock hooks like “I don’t want to change the world / I’m not looking for New England / I’m just looking for another girl.” He was singing along in Braggs’ Cockney-ish accent. He stopped playing long enough to say, “Go get the acoustic guitar from the living room.” The moment I had been waiting for had come. Proud as I’d ever be, (I’m a Leo,) I couldn’t openly admit I wanted to learn what he knew. I was grateful he hadn’t mentioned my change of heart since Christmas. I went and got the guitar.

He left the CD playing and showed me the pentatonic scale he had recently learned. Then he turned the CD player off and showed me the three chords he was working on transitioning between A, D, and E. He told me what his teacher had told him: there are hundreds of songs you can play with just these three chords. The trick is just being able to press down and to strum in the rhythm of the song. And they were interchangeable—you could mix and match them in any order you wanted, and they would still sound great. I will master these if it’s the last thing I do, I told myself.

For the next week, I picked up my dad’s guitar for a few minutes every day before we got in the car to go to school. It hurt to press my fingers down on the sharp strings, but making pretty sounds was vastly more noticeable to me than the pain of callouses forming. I wasn’t sure why, but I was drawn to the instrument more every day that passed.

Finally, one Wednesday, my dad asked if I wanted to go to his guitar lesson in his place. I was so excited. I played it cool and said yes.

One of the Polaroids from the wall in Rob’s shop.

The teacher was a man named Rob. He had a very dry sense of humor, which was lost on me at the time, and had hundreds of polaroids around his store of all the different students and customers that had passed through. I felt like they knew something I did not. Something which I desperately wanted to know. I even felt a little bit entitled. All of this compounded into courage when Rob asked me to show him what I already knew. Truthfully, I was terrified to be put on the spot and to have my skills judged, but I wanted to know what they all knew, and I put my fear to rest for a one-half hour. I played my A, D, and E chords and showed him the pentatonic scale runs that my dad had taught me. Rob showed me how I could lift one finger up in my A and E chords to create a seventh chord. He showed me the same thing with my D chord, but it was different: with this chord I had to readjust my shape, so it became upside-down-looking. Rob told me that “Whoolly Boolly” “Wild Thing” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go” all used these exact chords and their seventh variations. We played through these songs for the remainder of my lesson.

After that day I absolutely definitely without a doubt wanted a guitar.

Round Robin – Rob and I playing some of my songs and some of his songs together at a local round robin. Around 2004.

My next lesson Rob showed my how to play “All You Wanted” by Michelle Branch, which was a huge hit on the radio at the time. I didn’t care too much for the song, but I was too nervous to tell that to Rob because I wanted to seem like I knew a lot about music. In spite of my lukewarm feelings about the song, once I had the chords learned, I became obsessed with memorizing it and playing it well. I couldn’t quite sing and play at the same yet, but the idea that I could eventually recreate the song in its entirely was so amazing to me that I forced myself to practice. All of the friends and family that came over for the next week were subject to listening to me try to do just that.

Once I got that down, I started writing my own songs. I showed them to Rob, who in turn showed me “Psycho Killer” by the Talking Heads to encourage me to play with new subjects and characters. He taught me about I-IV-V or 1-4-5 progressions, and traditional song forms based on their variations. He taught me the circle of fifths using Buddy Holly’s “Everyday.” He taught me diminished and augmented chords, using The Ink Spots’ “Java Jive” and The Beatles’ “Oh Darling” as unforgettable examples. I loved it all. I loved every moment of it.

I didn’t realize that I was at the beginning of a life-long relationship with the guitar and with Rob.

 

Take Care of Good People

SoundGirls is a community by women for women, to enable greater gender balance in male-dominated audio and related fields. Groups like SoundGirls exist to provide women with space they need to develop and share the skills and experience necessary to work as professionals in music and audio.

It goes without saying that these spaces exist as women-only because their real-life counterparts are essentially male-only, though not officially or by definition. There is no rule of a soundboard that says you have to be male, and yet the majority of students, interns, teachers, mentors, and other people working soundboards are men. So men are provided with the experience of learning something new in an environment that feels somewhat familiar, and women interested in the same thing are not able to learn in an environment that feels familiar, except through programs like those that SoundGirls offer.

So, here we are with programming that is expanding, and a growing professional database of women in audio and music. How do we translate this to the real world, to actually being at work? There are many women-only collectives, labels, and studios & businesses propping up, which is very exciting. But not all people want to be surrounded by only their gender. Also, isn’t the goal equity?

One day I hope to work in a studio with as many women as men. I hope to produce male artists; I hope to produce women artists aside from myself. I hope to hand over skills that others want to learn, regardless of who they are as a gender.

When you love a woman, you take her seriously. You aren’t surprised at her skill level, and you encourage her to keep challenging herself. You let her learn from her mistakes. You let her go, switch jobs, leave for tour, meet new people. Just like we do men.

Good People – Naz Massaro

Working with all genders means that everyone understands they have strengths and weaknesses. One person may be good at something that someone else is terrible at, and that person may know much more about something than the first person. A young brain would feel threatened by this disparity, and try to compensate with egotistical actions. But truly, there is nothing to feel threatened by—your differences make you a stronger team. Embrace them. Challenge yourself to learn from the people around you! Challenge yourself to learn more about yourself by recognizing your strengths and weaknesses! Enjoy the beauty that is collaboration. Teach people around you to work from a place of love, so they too can spread that light.

Note: SoundGirls is inclusive and open to anyone who has a desire and drive to succeed in professional audio. The ratio of women to men members is approximately 65% women and 35% men.

Music and Life-Long Friends

When I was a kid, I used to sing in the tubes on the playground with my friend Melly. We liked the way the plastic tunnel helped us hear our own voices. We’d lay head to head and play with our voices, intervals, vowels, lyrics, improvising harmonies for what seemed like hours.

We both played the guitar, our little 11-year-old hands barely reaching both E strings for our first position G chords. We wrote songs together in Melly’s bedroom, which she shared with her little sister and was covered in Spice Girls stickers. Her dad was a musician, a drummer and songwriter, and we sometimes listened to his recordings for inspiration. Melly had music in her blood.

We stood next to each other in the school choir. We were both in the alto section, but Melly’s range extended well into soprano. Together we learned Mozart’s “Lacrimosa” and Rogers and Hammerstein’s “Edelweiss”. After school, we’d take turns guessing the soprano part, so we could sing together in harmony.

In middle school, we started a band with three of our other friends called Magenta. We were essentially trying to be the new Spice Girls. Our “thing” was that we all wore magenta lipstick (even though none of us had ever actually worn makeup yet). Melly wrote a song for us called “The Stars Are White” which we rehearsed a few times before our schedules conflicted too much for us to keep going…I still sing “The Stars Are White” to myself sometimes.

In college, we took Electronic Music Production together and learned MIDI and audio signal flow. We learned C Sounds and how to create sounds using computer programming language. We learned Melodyne and the power of auto-tuning software. We learned how amazing it was to have a studio software at our fingertips—we could harmonize with our own voices now, and there was no limit to how many we could have at once! We could make beats with our mouths and a microphone. We could play any sound we wanted on a MIDI keyboard. Melly always created with a sense of ease and excitement that was electric to be around.

2006 – Melly playing with a capo

Melly transferred schools for the last two years of undergrad. The year we graduated, she got a job in Massachusetts and I found one in New York City. I played gigs on the side and took more music production classes. She got her master’s degree in social work. I moved to Los Angeles. She got engaged. The power went out in a thunderstorm at her August wedding and I sang her (and her whole wedding party) songs by candlelight underneath the gazebo.

She adopted a baby boy and for his first birthday, she and her family came to visit me in Los Angeles.

I picked them up from the airport and sang to the baby in the car. We arrived at my house after trekking through LA traffic, and it was time for his nap. We put his travel crib in my bedroom and closed the blinds. Everyone besides Melly and I was asleep, exhausted from a day of traveling. We crept upstairs to my home studio. “Show me what you’re working on!!” she said. I opened Ableton Live, which Melly had not used before. I explained the basic design of the software to her and we started a beat. Five minutes later she was recording vocals and harmony parts and we were discussing lyrics. Her teenage sister Lillian woke up from her nap and joined us in the studio to watch. She had never seen Melly The Musician before—she knew her as a sister, as a bride, as a mom. “This is incredible,” she said. “I didn’t know you could do this!”

2017 – us together last year

“She’s a beast,” I said.

Melly was totally comfortable using Ableton. She played a bass part on my Push controller and quantized it. “This is SO much better than Digital Performer…” she said, referring to our pseudo-antiquated Electronic Production class in college. “Wow. I love making music.”

We kept playing for what seemed like hours like we had always done. Except this time we were in my studio, and her sister was watching us, and her baby was asleep in the next room. And yet it was just as it had always been. We were on the playground again, in the tube again, head to head, listening to our voices and making music together.

 

 

Powering Through

For my March blog post, I’m going to answer two questions I was recently asked.

How do you manage performance while stressed/upset? Like today I played a show and I was really stressed all day, and I could really feel it when I was on stage. I was really still and didn’t move a lot and, I could feel it in my voice too. What do you do to kind of control that?

I’m really close with my parents but they’re a little bit unsupportive of my choice to go for music. My mom more than dad. So far I’ve gotten into all the colleges I applied for, and I also might be able to get a full ride to another school that used to be my top until I realized I didn’t like the programs there. My backup is either graphic design or entertainment management, both of which are at the college I want to go to. If I go to the school I want to go to, my friend and I are gonna get an apartment together and really work hard on building our band and putting ourselves out there.

I know at the end of the day it’s my decision but it’s difficult to discuss this with my family. All in all, I guess I know they just care and want the best for me and are coming from a good place. But it’s so difficult to face that, and it affects me a lot (especially performing). Did you have to deal with something like this?

I’m going to answer these questions together, as they are both about maintaining composure and performing well even under stress and sadness.

Yes. The late teens and early twenties are inherently chaotic times for most of us. The arts are scary to a lot of people for a lot of reasons, including issues of self-love, capitalism, and creative blockage. Often it seems easier for children of musicians to find their way into music, and I speculate as to whether this is a result of fewer barriers such as these.

As you say (and you are completely right), it’s your decision at the end of the day. If you can go to college for free and do not have another opportunity conflicting with college (e.g., an all-expenses-paid impending tour for your band), it is probably a smart choice to go to college. It’s hard to go to college for free in the US, and if you find yourself at a crossroads, you can always switch your area of study or leave altogether. At the end of the day, finding your path takes time and you will make mistakes. Period.

It sounds like the emotions or thoughts of people around you affect you strongly, and I think a lot of creative people have this trait. I definitely struggled (and still do) with navigating the feelings and thoughts of people around me, especially my loved ones. When I was in my preteens and teens, my biggest challenge as a performer was learning to stop worrying about what my audience thought of me and my songs. At this point, my audience was mostly my friends and family. I wrote a lot of songs about my parents, growing up in a small town, moving a lot (divorced family), and that sort of thing. People would cry, and give my parents the stink eye. I would be nervous to sing new songs that talked about this stuff, but I faced the fear and would do it anyway. I’m glad I did it, but it was not glamorous! It was terrifying and embarrassing, but also totally necessary.

Oddly, my parents never really confronted me about anything I said in my songs. In this sense, they were very respectful of my creative inclination. However, they were not able to provide me stability through high school, college, and after college. For me, these years were a hodgepodge of putting pieces together, and aside from my grandparents buying me a microphone for my birthday and my aunt paying for my college textbooks, every dime I spent was my own money. Any bit of space I’d previously been able to occupy in their homes all but dissolved as their own romantic relationships started to dissolve. I was stuck in the middle trying to figure out how to make my life happen. Both my parents felt awful and their home lives were coming apart at the seams. I felt terrible for them and wanted to help them, but also I just wanted someone to help me drive my stuff to my new apartment and walk it up the stairs, and maybe to help me put up curtains. Maybe eat dinner with me in my new apartment. I was barely 20 after all. With no one to do these things with, I did them by myself. It was sad, and exhausting, especially after it went on for years. Other family members would say things like “Well if you’re not feeling great, maybe try something else.” What they didn’t realize is that making music DID feel great; it was one of the ONLY things that felt great! But I was only able to do it after a 40 hour work week, after getting off the phone with a crying parent, after cooking and cleaning and paying all my bills, after dragging a desk up the stairs to my apartment by myself.

Really the thing that felt bad was getting through all of the chaos to put my life together in a way that allowed me to make music more often than not. I had to trust that this much was true.

It actually can get harder as you get a little older. Many, many well-meaning people will see your “musician lifestyle” as a lack of commitment to your own self-worth and life. Many will ask why you would do something that doesn’t pay very well, especially during the beginning years. I have lost count the number of times a well-meaning family member or friend has told me to “be ready to get a real job when the time comes.” The sting never lessens, but you indeed become less and less concerned with getting stung at all. So much of the life of an artist consists of stings. It’s part of the job. A lot of times, the discouraging family member is actually just worried about you. They don’t want you to go through all that pain and sadness.

At first glance, all this chaos may seem like something you should avoid. But, listen to other artists and musicians. Their stories always have chaos! They always have tough decisions. They always have shows where something is affecting their emotional state and they need to power through anyway. Channel all the bad stuff into your performance. Treat every performance as an opportunity to be your best performance ever. It’s a skill you must practice to get better at. Play lots and lots of shows and get feedback and keep challenging yourself. Work.

I have a joke I tell myself which is that “the life of an artist is a life of constant embarrassment.” No matter how successful you become, you will always need to take risks to make meaningful work. Taking a risk means there is a possibility you could fail. Furthermore, there will always be people who find a way to undermine you. There is always failure, there is always rejection, and there are always haters. There is always the fear that you may be misunderstood. Check out this interview with Janelle Monae where she talks about how she is afraid of rejection right now.

Every single person has their own struggle. It may not come early on—it may come later in a career. Regardless of when and what it is, it is meant to provide strength and wisdom.

 

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