The record I'm working on is called Little Gwaii. I originally planned to record it on location in the Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwaii), where I lived just after I was born but as you'll soon appreciate a lot of things I'd planned for this record changed completely.
The first big difference was the method of composition. After doing two albums in pretty short succession, I wasn't super excited to start another project with a blank page and an acoustic guitar. Instead, I started playing with my friend Chris' Boss RC-2 looper (as I'd done in the live video for 'Rubber and Glue'), getting all of my instruments together and sending them into a mixing board and then out to the looper.
This way I can pick up an instrument, play a phrase, and have the instrument keep playing while I grab another one to play overtop. I can then build a full band groove fairly quickly, something I've seen artists like Owen Pallett and Tune Yards do live. I then ran the looper through a Boss GE-10 EQ and a DD-2 digital delay. So after I had a groove recorded, I could fiddle with the knobs of these effects boxes and screw with the sound as I've seen Holy Fuck or countless DJs do live.
I worked like this in the room, with the sound heading to my recorder as a well as to a couple of monitors. So I improvised grooves, choosing whichever instrument I wanted to start with and adding whatever I thought would work until I thought I'd made something. All without worrying about vocals, just trying to come up with a loop I thought sounded fun and enjoyable. Then once I was happy I'd record it and explore its possibilities a bit by playing with the effects.
Over a few days I recorded maybe twenty of these, of variable quality, and chose the moments I liked best. Then I tried to write words overtop of these loops, at first mumbling and free associating until I had a couple of words I thought sounded good, and then expanding on them. I have a notebook full of scraps of lines that I've thought of at one time or another, and sometimes I'd start with one of those. I didn't explicitly draw from my existing list of song ideas, the ideas were developed from the first germs of lyrics.
The moods of the loops themselves also helped. Unlike having to imagine what the tone of the finished song is going to be while playing an acoustic guitar, as I've done in the past, I had a fairly reliable blueprint of the most fully featured part of the song already. So I could be inspired by the feeling of the instrumentation as I wrote, instead of trying to replicate the mood I'd imagined while writing.
The song structures also had to change, since I had only a short loop to work with in every case. I couldn't make all of the melodic instruments I'd looped change chords for a chorus, for example. So dynamics had to mostly be accomplished by adding or muting certain parts, and interest had to be sustained by the lyrics and effects. This is how producer-heavy bands like TV on the Radio generally operate too, but it's a necessity for a looping musician. More on recording the demo arrangements soon!
The first big difference was the method of composition. After doing two albums in pretty short succession, I wasn't super excited to start another project with a blank page and an acoustic guitar. Instead, I started playing with my friend Chris' Boss RC-2 looper (as I'd done in the live video for 'Rubber and Glue'), getting all of my instruments together and sending them into a mixing board and then out to the looper.
I worked like this in the room, with the sound heading to my recorder as a well as to a couple of monitors. So I improvised grooves, choosing whichever instrument I wanted to start with and adding whatever I thought would work until I thought I'd made something. All without worrying about vocals, just trying to come up with a loop I thought sounded fun and enjoyable. Then once I was happy I'd record it and explore its possibilities a bit by playing with the effects.
Over a few days I recorded maybe twenty of these, of variable quality, and chose the moments I liked best. Then I tried to write words overtop of these loops, at first mumbling and free associating until I had a couple of words I thought sounded good, and then expanding on them. I have a notebook full of scraps of lines that I've thought of at one time or another, and sometimes I'd start with one of those. I didn't explicitly draw from my existing list of song ideas, the ideas were developed from the first germs of lyrics.
The moods of the loops themselves also helped. Unlike having to imagine what the tone of the finished song is going to be while playing an acoustic guitar, as I've done in the past, I had a fairly reliable blueprint of the most fully featured part of the song already. So I could be inspired by the feeling of the instrumentation as I wrote, instead of trying to replicate the mood I'd imagined while writing.
The song structures also had to change, since I had only a short loop to work with in every case. I couldn't make all of the melodic instruments I'd looped change chords for a chorus, for example. So dynamics had to mostly be accomplished by adding or muting certain parts, and interest had to be sustained by the lyrics and effects. This is how producer-heavy bands like TV on the Radio generally operate too, but it's a necessity for a looping musician. More on recording the demo arrangements soon!
