I think this post will be beneficial to both of us because it will allow me to go through what I have done in the last 15 years and outline some of the steps I have taken to gain knowledge over the years, even when I had no money to record music.
First off, my name is Dereck and I play guitar. I am not the best guitar player in the world, I am not some sort of YouTube phenom, nor have I ever gone to a formal school to learn the history of guitar. I started playing when I was 11 years old, on a cheap Bentley dreadnought that wasn't more than $150 from the local music store. My band director at the time told my parents that I should either play piano or guitar. Of course, being the rebellious troublemaker I was - I chose guitar.
I took lessons on and off from various teachers in my home town, but eventually I just learned to play by ear. Anything I really wanted to play, I just practiced and practiced until I got it right. I had been playing old Animals covers and classic rock until I discovered the album "Gish" by the Smashing Pumpkins. I wanted to do away with the acoustic guitar and get a real Strat like my guitar hero Billy.
After memorizing just about every riff from every grunge album of the time, by 1994 I was in a band with Eric Swanson and a few other guys. It wasn't the music I really wanted to do, but it was as close to rock as I could get at the time, and even growing up I learned a lot about how to deal with creative people and their different personalities. The name of our band was Nevenu, a name birthed in the bedroom of my grandparents house by Eric, came from a thought he had in economics class about revenue, and our legacy was born.
This continued for a few years. As I go older I tried apprenticing in a recording studio with a local owner, but inability to learn or teach at the time got in the way. It didn't seem like I was really going down the right path, and this was mostly because of the way I felt about the environment I was in. Which leads me to my first point on creative recording:
You always have control over your environment.
Of course I didn't learn this until I was older, but I could see little ways I chose to implement this idea and how it benefited me greatly. You are never stuck with the same sound, or the same room, or the same situations. Its up to you to take control and experiment, to find what works best for YOU and the music.
Through this time I got more experience recording, but I didn't have the money to buy recording equipment. A bandmate, Zach had a Tascam Recorder, I think it was a MKII or III - but he was overly protective of it and we did very little recording on it.
My first experience with home recording was with some Sony dual cassette boombox that had an unusual defect: it had a microphone that was active when recording the play deck. So I could record a guitar part, switch tapes, play the tape and play guitar over that and it would be multitracked onto the second tape. I did all of my demos like this for almost 6 years. I eventually upgraded to a nicer dual deck, but it was a system I was comfortable with and it worked for what I was doing. This is my second point of creative recording:
There is no real "wrong" way to do things.
The whole art of recording is meant to capture sound, to experiment with mic and instrument placement, to push the boundaries of the human ear. For me there is more excitement in "HOW DID THEY DO THAT?" than being able to pick out the sound of a Marshall JCM800 and Strat in a mic.
After I moved to ProToolsLE on Windows 98, then the whole game changed. The art of multitracking made even more sense to me. Layers of sound made more sense to me. The colors that came out of e-Bowed electric guitar and string quartets made sense to me: a la Glycerine by Bush. Its a played out song to some people, but it is an example of how you can layer sounds to create an emotion with sound that then becomes iconic. Think about all the e-Bowed/String quartets we have had since then. Nigel and Clive knew what they were doing.
From here I tried everything I could get my hands on: Cubase, Live, Pro Tools, Cool Edit Pro, etc. And learned by winging it.
After years of writing songs and trying to market them, the Internet started becoming a multimedia machine and I was seeing more Enhanced CDs and secret sites from mainstream artists I tried to do the same thing in the spring of 2003 with Driving At Midnight. DAM was a website that I had my music streaming from and available for purchase for about a year. I gave up on DAM because at the time bandwidth was expensive. I had to find another way to get my music out there. So I applied for ASCAP.
A couple songs I wrote showed up on an indie film in 2004, but I had no way to collect on payments after the movies release. ASCAP helped me do this. I recommend anyone that is serious about getting their music out to the masses, register for ASCAP, BMI, or another recording artists group. ASCAP has given me great resources for getting my music heard, they have a great mentoring program, and an awesome convention for songwriters every year.
This is my last point for todays post: Think beyond your music for other opportunities.
The larger your personal artistic world is, the more opportunity for your art to thrive and grow exists.
So thats a little bit of my background. I didn't really go into the bands I have been in, but I will be sure to make that the subject of some future posts. The point of this blog is to show those of you struggling with your music that there are quite a few options for getting your art and hard work noticed. This could be in the form of recording techniques or business practices that will help in the long run. Thanks for reading.
First off, my name is Dereck and I play guitar. I am not the best guitar player in the world, I am not some sort of YouTube phenom, nor have I ever gone to a formal school to learn the history of guitar. I started playing when I was 11 years old, on a cheap Bentley dreadnought that wasn't more than $150 from the local music store. My band director at the time told my parents that I should either play piano or guitar. Of course, being the rebellious troublemaker I was - I chose guitar.
I took lessons on and off from various teachers in my home town, but eventually I just learned to play by ear. Anything I really wanted to play, I just practiced and practiced until I got it right. I had been playing old Animals covers and classic rock until I discovered the album "Gish" by the Smashing Pumpkins. I wanted to do away with the acoustic guitar and get a real Strat like my guitar hero Billy.
After memorizing just about every riff from every grunge album of the time, by 1994 I was in a band with Eric Swanson and a few other guys. It wasn't the music I really wanted to do, but it was as close to rock as I could get at the time, and even growing up I learned a lot about how to deal with creative people and their different personalities. The name of our band was Nevenu, a name birthed in the bedroom of my grandparents house by Eric, came from a thought he had in economics class about revenue, and our legacy was born.
This continued for a few years. As I go older I tried apprenticing in a recording studio with a local owner, but inability to learn or teach at the time got in the way. It didn't seem like I was really going down the right path, and this was mostly because of the way I felt about the environment I was in. Which leads me to my first point on creative recording:
You always have control over your environment.
Of course I didn't learn this until I was older, but I could see little ways I chose to implement this idea and how it benefited me greatly. You are never stuck with the same sound, or the same room, or the same situations. Its up to you to take control and experiment, to find what works best for YOU and the music.
Through this time I got more experience recording, but I didn't have the money to buy recording equipment. A bandmate, Zach had a Tascam Recorder, I think it was a MKII or III - but he was overly protective of it and we did very little recording on it.
My first experience with home recording was with some Sony dual cassette boombox that had an unusual defect: it had a microphone that was active when recording the play deck. So I could record a guitar part, switch tapes, play the tape and play guitar over that and it would be multitracked onto the second tape. I did all of my demos like this for almost 6 years. I eventually upgraded to a nicer dual deck, but it was a system I was comfortable with and it worked for what I was doing. This is my second point of creative recording:
There is no real "wrong" way to do things.
The whole art of recording is meant to capture sound, to experiment with mic and instrument placement, to push the boundaries of the human ear. For me there is more excitement in "HOW DID THEY DO THAT?" than being able to pick out the sound of a Marshall JCM800 and Strat in a mic.
After I moved to ProToolsLE on Windows 98, then the whole game changed. The art of multitracking made even more sense to me. Layers of sound made more sense to me. The colors that came out of e-Bowed electric guitar and string quartets made sense to me: a la Glycerine by Bush. Its a played out song to some people, but it is an example of how you can layer sounds to create an emotion with sound that then becomes iconic. Think about all the e-Bowed/String quartets we have had since then. Nigel and Clive knew what they were doing.
From here I tried everything I could get my hands on: Cubase, Live, Pro Tools, Cool Edit Pro, etc. And learned by winging it.
After years of writing songs and trying to market them, the Internet started becoming a multimedia machine and I was seeing more Enhanced CDs and secret sites from mainstream artists I tried to do the same thing in the spring of 2003 with Driving At Midnight. DAM was a website that I had my music streaming from and available for purchase for about a year. I gave up on DAM because at the time bandwidth was expensive. I had to find another way to get my music out there. So I applied for ASCAP.
A couple songs I wrote showed up on an indie film in 2004, but I had no way to collect on payments after the movies release. ASCAP helped me do this. I recommend anyone that is serious about getting their music out to the masses, register for ASCAP, BMI, or another recording artists group. ASCAP has given me great resources for getting my music heard, they have a great mentoring program, and an awesome convention for songwriters every year.
This is my last point for todays post: Think beyond your music for other opportunities.
The larger your personal artistic world is, the more opportunity for your art to thrive and grow exists.
So thats a little bit of my background. I didn't really go into the bands I have been in, but I will be sure to make that the subject of some future posts. The point of this blog is to show those of you struggling with your music that there are quite a few options for getting your art and hard work noticed. This could be in the form of recording techniques or business practices that will help in the long run. Thanks for reading.
