Metal and the Law

Turns out I wasn't done with the album, though, because my friend Martin in Montreal insisted I make physical copies rather than "Beyoncé-ing" another record. And even Beyoncé has copies of her self titled album for sale now, so I had no convincing reply. He'd gotten an EP and a full length album recorded by his band Alexeimartov pressed onto vinyl, and was looking to put other artists out on his fledgling label. So MB-LP became a real LP, Queen Mary Records #003. An ambitious amount of zeros.

Martin bankrolled the whole operation, and had the smallest possible order of records (100) pressed at Trutone Mastering in New York. Luckily my 16 tracks were short enough to fit on an LP, and I sent him unmastered versions of the tracks so they could master them specifically for vinyl. I know there's some curve they use to attenuate the bass when they cut the record that gets reversed at playback, but having never done it before I figured it'd be better to let them do it.

I'd never decorated a record jacket before either though, but for some reason I decided I didn't mind trying that. I'd already made the labels for the records out of some doctored graphs from a psychology textbook, and I made album art to be printed onto jackets: an old photo for the front and a picture of my notes on the back. I could have easily paid a print shop or duplication service to make them for me, but I decided to go with a different design that I could manufacture myself.

I'm not totally sure why. Partly it's because I still have a whole pile of CDs left over from the first time I had jackets made, and thinking about them sitting, cold and identical, in a box in the crawlspace makes me feel hopeless. Another part is that the music is homemade, with no one who knows what they're doing involved from conception to sending the audio in, so I felt like the package should be too. I feel better selling them if they're also one-of-a-kind works of physical art. The third reason is because I'm an idiot.

My new idea for album art wasn't exactly simple. The front and back were each divided into 16 coloured squares and lines, respectively, one for each personality type. The titles, track listing, and acknowledgements were printed on that background. So I bought the right number of spray paints and painstakingly cut paper stencils for all the shapes and text involved. With a dry time of around 10 minutes, and all of the text being double printed black on white, it was a 13-step process. I made a prototype but found that the edges of the text were fuzzy and hard to read.

There was no way to weight down my stencils enough to make even contact with the jacket, especially with the tiny cutouts and compressed paint shooting at it. I decided to make rigid wooden frames for the background painting, and silkscreen the text instead. The wooden frames worked well, as long as I scraped off the built-up layers of paint periodically. One thing I noticed when I started doing batches of jackets was that, even in a garage with the doors open to the winter weather and fans going, the fumes were fierce. I got a respirator the second day and my blinding headaches and dizziness disappeared.

I had to keep most of my paint in the house, since the garage was freezing. But I worked my way through a hundred and nine jackets, only accidentally flipping the colours on five of them. Next I needed to print the text on them, so I built myself silkscreens out of sheer curtain fabric and bits of wood, then figured out how to expose the screens using the photo emulsion method. You spread washable blocking paste onto the whole screen, prepare transparencies of your art and place those on top, and then burn the screen in with a high wattage bulb. I got a couple neat 250W bulbs for this, but they both burnt out within a couple minutes of use so I wound up using a normal 60W bulb.

The light hardens the emulsion except where your art has protected the screen, so you can wash just those parts out and you have a fabric stencil of your art. I built a hinged press to hold the screens in place and started doing test prints. My results were miserable at first; even with professional tools I bet that technique is pretty important in silk-screening, but with my jury-rigged contraption good pressure and delicate shimming was the only difference between perfection and puddles of illegible ink.

A five step process turned into nine steps as I found that I had to break the screens into sections to get them to print reliably. I was able to touch up most mistakes with a tiny paintbrush, but 8 of the jackets were irretrievably ruined. That still left me a hundred good ones, though, and that's all I needed.

They really are all unique, since my style changed over the course of each step in the process. I went from thick application of colour and rigid adherence to the lines to a lighter, airier approach. None of them are perfect, but I remember them all. Perfection is boring anyway. 

Here's an ESSAY

The last thing I always wonder when I finish an album project, and especially one so conceptual as MB-LP, is if it was successful. It's a given that I learned a ton while making it: about integrating research into my writing, writing from different perspectives, composing with loops, mobile recording, and mixing. So in that sense it was successful. The product itself, though, is harder for me to come to grips with. Unlike a lot of songwriters that talk about their songs as being like their babies, once I'm done working on a song I don't feel paternal affection for it, at least not in terms of unconditional love. If I'm in the right headspace, I can appreciate the thing I made, but it doesn't really tell me anything new about how good it is.

I need other people for that, and at this point I haven't had much feedback about the MB-LP material at all. Even people who've heard it aren't automatically forthcoming with specific opinions, which doesn't bode super well. If someone loves something, they'll tell you. But my suspicion is that even if what I've made is somewhat enjoyable, it will become more so the more the listener understands about its construction and its aims. That takes time, and charitable listening, two things that are in pretty short supply outside of people who already know and like you.

I tried to have something immediately appealing or arresting about the songs on MB-LP, but I definitely feel that there are things I could have done to make the songs catchier. Some I've avoided on (probably misguided) moral grounds: lyrical and structural repetition, especially for looping music, is at a minimum, there aren't a lot of cool sounds for the sake of having cool sounds, or decadent processing on the tracks. Others I should have done but didn't, like explore the possibilities of the loops more, write more songs to pare down from, play them live more times before doing demos. I'm sure I'm ignorant of still other ways, but I hope to learn them someday.

I made a decision to have this project be very conceptual, and to put that up front. The album and track titles are four letter codes, for goodness sake. Bot that said, my hope was always that the overarching concept wouldn't prevent the songs from standing up on their own right. I find it difficult to distil my ideas into something simple and communicable, and am not the best judge of when I've done so. I write and evaluate my lyrics on paper, which is not how listeners experience them unless they have a lyric booklet. And since I don't make CDs, uh, good luck with that.

My point is that a lot of the things I spend time and effort on aren't readily apparent, or require very specific knowledge or attunement to discern. And since most people don't have the time or energy to find them, I have to either temper my expectations of being generally appreciated or change what I focus on. Alternatively, I could insert another step in the process, after I have something I'm happy with but before anyone else is, where I find ways to convert test listener complaints into further accessibility. Having to do major revisions to things I already enjoy is a daunting prospect, but if I want people who don't know me to enjoy my music (and I think I do) I'm going to have to suck it up.

All this is premised by the idea that music isn't actually subjective. Or, if it is, then it's possible for a good thing to appeal to a wider range of subjective taste. Coming up with a plan of how to do this requires knowing who you currently appeal to, so you can determine what you can change without alienating those people while bringing new ones in. At my scale, this means talking to the few people who I know like my music, and trying to see what they think could be improved and what they find essential. I've noticed in the past that when I put a collection of songs together, the first five or ten people I ask will all praise different songs, and my personal favourite will never be one of them. So faced with this reaction every time, I've never been enthusiastic about choosing a direction and seeing if I can stick to it. MB-LP is an eclectic project by design, and I was hoping that in writing it I'd be able to pick the types of songs out that I enjoy writing the most. But I do have a sort of restlessness that makes me have to throw an angry song into the cutesy ones, or vice versa. And that goes for writing as well as performing; I hate to be one-note, and I hate to just fulfil expectations. So in trying for homogeneity I think I'm fighting a losing battle.

Definitely I do notice that I enjoy writing happy, uptempo songs more than in the past. I think when a lot of songwriters first start writing, they feel like writing when they're sad or lonely or anxious, and so those songs come the most naturally. For me at least, it took a while to feel authentic and comfortable writing in happier, less introspective modes. But now I am, and enjoying it, so there's some tangible evidence that I'm improving, or at least broadening my range.

So I guess what I've said here is that I think that making MB-LP was a valuable, fascinating experience, and that through it I've become more aware of ways I can write with greater success in the future. And sometime in the future, when I'm feeling self indulgent, I can grab some earbuds and remember what I thought sounded good back then.

Superthanks

There are only a couple “field recordings” on MB-LP. There's a glass-wiping noise that I manufactured for ENTJ out of a freesound.org file. I had a rough idea of the order of pitches I wanted, so I just cut up the sample and arranged the pieces until I heard what I imagined. ISTJ has a recording of my backyard on it during the breakdowns: a wet morning with the birds out and a neighbour hammering, just cut up and high passed. The only song sample on it is on INTP, where I took a bit of the bridge from KT Tunstall's “Black Horse and Cherry Tree”, pitched it down 11 semitones, and synched it with the song's tempo. Unless these are KT Tunstall's lawyers reading this, in which case that totally didn't happen, shhh.

I recorded the guitars as I normally would, my Mexican Standard Strat through a Blues Deluxe with the NT1a and an SM57, but for the mix I just panned the two mics left and right instead of doubling. I'm not sure if there was a reason for doing that, other than that I didn't want to have to synch up another recording with the first one. Not much processing, except to remove some 3.5 kHz if it sounded brittle. Amp settings depended on the song, but everything was dry and clean on the way in, and there's only a couple instances of guitar effects on the album, on ENFJ and ISTJ. Both of those are long, weird reverse reverbs from the BreVerb plugin; basically presets that I changed only minimally. One thing I did change on the reverbs, and there weren't many, was to always roll the diffusion back to 0%. I read, probably in an old article, that that was a modern reverb sound.

One thing I did with the guitar that I'd never tried before is on all the solos on the album. I turned every string to the same note, probably to D, and then played the solos by barring and strumming across the whole neck. This meant I couldn't play the things I'd normally play, and made it hard to jump around between notes as much, but I found it very fun to play guitar like that: six (or probably four at a time) voices in concert, all at once. It felt powerful, and while it's not for everything, I think it worked well for these songs.

Bass, apart from ENFJ which was recorded earlier, was all done through a DI in my room in Toronto. The bass I used was the one I was playing in the musical, a Rickenbacker knockoff by Carvin with active pickups. It also had new, new strings on it at the time, which I somewhat regret since that meant that I had to roll off the tone knob almost completely, and I wanted some of it back by the time I was doing the mix. Thankfully, I recorded versions of the some songs at three different tone knob positions, so I could choose the brightness I liked once I was listening on the monitors.

The most complicated bass effect on the album is on INFP. It's a 14-bar pattern, with the last two bars intentionally leaving the bass note hanging. I had an idea where the last bass note would start pulsing louder and louder into the next repetition in triplet quarter notes, a sort of dubstep-style thing. I found a soft synth with the sound I wanted, and then automated the gain and a tremolo effect, but it wasn't sticking until I reamped it through my old 12” monitor speaker at a high enough volume that the speaker was struggling to reproduce it. Played quietly, it still kind of has that sense of “your laptop can't handle this” grittiness.

I left a hole in the bass for the kick at around 60 Hz. I read somewhere online where someone had recommended boosting 60 Hz, cutting 275 Hz, then boosting 3.5 kHz and 8 kHz, each by ~6 dB. That seemed to work for the kick I'd recorded, so I used those settings most of the time. A lot of EQing I did on MB-LP was more aggressive than I've done in the past, as I learn just how much you can do in the digital realm without running into crippling side effects. I generally cut everything in the midrange pretty aggressively to make room for the vocal; the idea being, most spoken/rapped stuff has instrumentation specifically designed to leave space for the vocal (in between sub-bass and cymbals). So in my productions, where there's usually either guitar or piano and some other midrange instrument, I decided I have to be more proactive if I don't want to drown out my vocal, which is the main deal.

While I did want to make something I could perform easily, I did add some things to the album that wouldn't be straightforward to do live. There's a soft synth TR-909 drum machine on a couple of tracks, and 4 or 5 tracks have an additional snare on part or all of the song. Usually it was a Gretsch one from Sonar's Session Drummer 3, with the original snare drum hits converted to MIDI and then copied to the soft synth. I wanted ENFP to sound a bit Kings of Leon-ish, and when I read an interview with their mix engineer he mentioned overdubbing an additional snare on the chorus of one of their songs, so I tried that a few times. Another thing I tried was how he mentioned treating the bass: adding a reverb for early reflections, and a quick delay, to muddy up the bass a bit and have it sound a bit chorused. So I tried that on at least that song.

One last new thing that I tried was something from the Boss RC-300 I wanted to replicate in the DAW, which was a global tremolo effect during the chorus of ENTP. I just set up a bus for it, inserted the tremolo, added sends to it, and then rode the fader on it and brought it up for the choruses as a parallel process. I also rode the fader on the drum room mic on several tracks, to add or remove ambiance depending on the part of the song. Some final reflections (forget early reflections!) on making the album next time.

Adult Themes, Disagreement

I'm not totally sure about the amount of edits I made to the rhythm tracks on MB-LP. In some looping projects, repeated mis-timing can be charming, hypnotic even. Like Tune Yards' first album. But for the most part, I chose the cleanest repetition out of 3+ minutes of playing the loop. That's not how it works live, you have to stick with the first one. Or, as I've seen some people do, start playing the loop but only hit record on the second or third pass, once you've settled into the groove. That's more what I did for these songs: pretend I can play them a bit tighter than I can yet live. But what else are records for?

I left vocals for the end of recording. In some cases, I had guide vocals, but for most of them I had no detailed plan for vocals before everything else was tracked and balanced. I did that in the makeshift vocal booth for the Rode NT1a, in the middle of the bare linoleum floor. The only thing out of the ordinary was the presence of a big metal Manhasset music stand right next to the mic, which I had there to hold lyric sheets while rehearsing the songs, but which I kept around for the short plate reverb-sounding reflection it provided.

I think vocal tracking went fairly well, the only thing I wish I wouldn't have done is save a few of the most taxing vocal songs, ENTJ and ENFJ, for the end of the process. My voice was a bit out of shape and after doing 14 other songs multiple times each, my vocal chords were a bit rawer than I would have liked. If I'd spread out the sessions a bit instead of trying to do them all in one block it would have been easier, but I was anxious to dismantle the vocal booth and reconfigure the room into mixing mode.

Apart for the drum EQ I'd applied during editing, I went into mixing with untouched tracks, with no EQ or compression on the way in. So the first step was to try and set the rough balance and see which faders felt unstable. My new laptop has multi-touch, so I used a two-monitor setup with the console view on the laptop to take advantage of finger control.

The most readily accessible of Sonar's compressors is modeled on the 1176, and I wanted to know how to use it properly, so I found an academic article that aggregated opinions of mixing engineers on how to use the 1176 on various sources. They had quotes where engineers suggested settings, and so I tried a few to see what they did. As I went along, sometimes my preferences would change. For much of the initial mix, I hit the compressor hard with the vocals, like 15 dB reduction, but by the end of the mix I was switching songs to ~6 dB reduction with a further 3 dB from an SSL 4K-style compressor on the vocal bus.

For monitors, I rented the 5” Yorkville ones from Long and McQuade. I've now rented the 5”, 6”, and 8” monitors. It's true that the biggest difference between them is the amount of bass, but I found it fairly easy to judge the bass level even on the 5” ones by A/Bing my songs with other material, then referencing my mixes on my parents' home theatre subwoofer. The same is true of the Sony MDR7509-HD headphones I tracked on: the bass is there, just not as prominent as we're maybe used to in modern live settings. So when I actually buy some monitors, I don't think I need to discriminate based on size. One thing I still enjoy about renting monitors is that it puts a time limit on how long I can spend mixing; in this case, a week for 16 songs.

Thankfully I wasn't still fiddling with song structures and comps, so I could just concentrate on making the songs sound ok to me. I got a free spl meter app for my phone so that I could see what level I was mixing at. Turns out about 70 dB at the mixing position, for the most part, with short excursions into louder and softer for forensic work and big-picture perspective, respectively.

When setting the balance and checking for perspective, I increasingly find myself able to just focus on a couple of elements, usually vocals and drums, and making sure these key tracks are audible and consistent as opposed to trying to work on everything at once. I think extending this approach to mastering would be my best next step: putting the album tracks in sequence and focusing on their relative loudness rather than that of the whole tracks, I think this is closer to what I'm listening for when I'm trying to make sure if a record has a consistent volume. Usually I'm just asking, “well, how loud is the vocal”.

I didn't lean as heavily on Boss DD-2 delay-time twiddling on this record as on Little Gwaii. In fact I think it's actually only on ISFP. Instead, I used a combination of delays using instances of Sonar's Sonitus plugin. This usually consisted of a short slapback-type delay and then a longer one for echoes that I would ride the output of, and sometimes the EQ filter as well. I got that idea from reading Mike Senior's dissection of “Paradise” by Coldplay, where apparently the repeats of “para-para-paradise” on the lead vocal go to a progressively wetter signal over the course of the line. I feel like I have more to explore on the front of filter automation.

For only having a week to mix the record, I actually tried a lot of new processing techniques, not the least because the material on MB-LP is so diverse. More on that next.

Vining to the Top

I arranged and mixed the songs while making the demos. I'd decided that I wanted to do full demo recordings because it wasn't much extra work to pull the loops off of the looper and sequence them in the DAW. I wrote Little Gwaii before I had the RC-300, so I couldn't work this way before while keeping the looped instruments separate (the RC-300 has three separate tracks).

For someone who barely uses any outboard gear to make records, this project was dominated by two new toys: the Boss RC-300, and a 15” HP Envy laptop I bought that I ended up using for the final recordings and mixing. I needed it so that I could keep working on the recordings while in Toronto music-directing my musical, since I couldn't travel with my desktop. I picked it because it was the only sub-$1000 laptop I could find that had a significantly better processor than my desktop's; I didn't want to spend $600+ on something that'd be relegated to second string when I got back home. At the same time I got a slightly newer version of Sonar, X2 (which was an unstable nightmare until I got the X2.1 patch, which calmed it right down).

I never actually got around to doing demo vocals, I was still just singing live overtop of my demos when I started recording the final versions. I worked out most of my ideas about how many verses and choruses there should be at that time, keeping the song structures fairly traditional, my goal being more to see how I could replicate normal pop while using a looper than creating super experimental things. Three of the 16 songs still needed lyrics when I started doing final drums. I'm not sure why those three (ESTJ, INTJ, and INFP) took longer than the rest, which were mostly written in short succession over a two week period, but I managed to finish them in a couple of days in Toronto.

For the final versions of the drums, I decided to just use my practice drumset rather than renting things to augment it, as I usually do. So that's the same no-name Taiwanese kit I've had since I started playing, although I've learned a bit about tuning since then. Similarly, I used whatever mics I happened to have on hand, apart from an SM7b for the top of the snare. That meant CAD drum pack mics, SM57s and SM58s.

But instead of letting those mics sound like themselves, I decided to do some extensive EQ modelling on them as an experiment. I picked mics that I wished they were, like MD421s for the toms, KM141s for overheads, and then compared the frequency response diagrams provided by the manufacturers of those mics with the ones for my mics. Next, I determined what modifications I could make to bring the one curve into line with the other, the locations of the boosts and the cuts I needed to make and their Qs, which I expressed as the length of the frequency spectrum it had to affect, like this:
+2 dB @ 500 Hz ± 250 Hz

I put these EQ changes into Ozone 5's EQ module, which then gave me a single slider to control the total amount of these modifications to use, from 0% to 200%, and chose the spot where I thought it sounded best. I'm aware that the results obtained from this method will differ from using the actual mic desired, because different mics behaved differently off-axis and depending on proximity, and many other reasons I don't understand. But I didn't mind the results I got in the end, so I think it is a useful method, even if a better method for next time might be to rent the desired mic for a day and record it side by side with my substitute, so that I can compare the waveforms directly and use Ozone's matching EQ feature to calculate the changes required automatically.

I edited the drums in spare moments I had in Toronto while working on the play. Some came together quite quickly, depending on the length of the drum loop and how well I'd played it. A few were as simple as finding the cleanest two-bar section and making sure it looped tightly. Other tracks required more extensive cutting up, and I told myself I was being zealous now so that I'd have a solid base to overdub everything else onto. It was still way easier than recording non-looped drums.

Next I added keys, when I was using MIDI and synths, and any keyboard loops that I was salvaging from the demos. I rescued some of the original DX7s keyboard tracks because they sounded fine – appropriately gritty – and I couldn't find a soft synth that I preferred. I recorded MIDI with an unweighted KeyRig 25 controller, editing the results extensively for timing and velocity. This was about the same time that I was working on the cast recordings of my musical, where I decided that I'd just import the MIDI piano from the score writing program and “humanize” it a bit by adding timing and velocity irregularities, so I was aware of how far I should go in the opposite direction for it to sound believably tight as opposed to robotically quantized. Not as good or fast as being able to play the piano well, but still faster than learning how.

Other odds and ends like the melodica bits I was able to stick right in from the demos; I didn't change any of the tempos, which might not have been best. I should have been performing the songs for people at this point, making sure they didn't feel like they were dragging or going too fast. I guess I was busy though, between the musical and the rest of the recordings.

Explain Your Eyes

  I wanted the songs on MB-LP to be as diverse as the people they were for. I had some idea of which songs would have more rock vocals and which would have spoken vocals, based on the groove, but I didn't have an angle for any of the songs initially. Instead, I went back to research, trying to find something that I could imagine working on.

To me, a good idea involved lining up several tumblers. It had to fit the world created by the backing track, it had to be something I'd found in my research, it had to be applicable to the people I actually knew who were that type, and it had to be something I had also experienced or that I felt somewhat qualified to write about. Some types that several close friends shared, like ISTJ or ENFP, came easier since I had a fair amount of experience seeing them function, so I leant heavier on things people of that type had experienced or described to me. When I didn't have good friends for a type, like ESTP or ESFJ, I relied more on the forums and literature. Others, like INTJ and ENTP, felt familiar enough that something I'd read about them would leap out at me as something I'd experienced before, or a mode which I'd slipped into on occasion.

Avoiding repetition was a big theme for me in writing the MB-LP songs. The types, by definition, approached things differently, so in my mind the songs should as well. The grooves were designed to work differently as well; some were short loops, others were longer, others were short loops with a active bassline, or static bass with an active rhythm guitar. Still others were designed to be pitch-shifted or reversed at specific moments to create different sections. The one thing I didn't do was the standard looping thing of layering one instrument on top of itself many times. That was just because I know that works and I've seen it done well already, and part of what I wanted to do with this project was continue to explore different ways to build songs using a looper. And I get bored if I play one instrument too long.

Looking back, one of the things I did repeat more than once in the lyrics was references to mental arithmetic. As it happens, according to Meyers-Briggs, the lead function (the first strategy employed) for my type of INTP is introverted thinking, so that makes some sense. It's difficult, and never competely possible, to leave your own way of seeing the world behind when you write a song. As much as possible, though, while writing I did try to think my way into other types' heads. I'd search the forums for threads about greatest fears, happiest moments, family, relationships, friends; whatever could help me understand their values and outlook. Depending on how successful I thought I could be, I'd try to write some of the songs from their perspective. Other times I'd write to them from my perspective, or try and describe them in the third person.

I found the ones written from their perspective most satisfying to sing, because I get to take on a sort of persona in order to sing them. Something I visualize in non-concrete terms, add inflections, try to project a specific type of energy. It's a bit like what I imagine acting is like. I guess as a performer I'm more comfortable trying to portray a character I create than trying to make myself into one.

I also used some outside sources and artists as inspirations for the songs. As part of my research, I looked into the (pretty dubious) celebrity typings that people do. I think some could be reasonably accurate, especially when the person typing has access to an autobiography, interivews, and contemporary accounts. Not to say that many ones posted online are based on those resources. A lot of them seem to be trying to type artists through their work, which I think is almost always problematic. Mainly because an artist's work isn't usually what comes easily for them; more often it's probably things they're working out that they find difficult, or confusing. Better to look at how they approach their work, or their personal relationships.

All that said, I sometimes threw a bit of an artist that's often typed a certain way into the song for that type, if it felt like it could work. Or, for instance, INTP is often called the Architect type, and so I threw a little of Charlatans UK's song “The Architect” into the track. Sometimes I'd try a vocal style that had more to do with the sound of the track than anything else; I thought of ESFP as Elvis Costello meets the Russian Futurists, for example. Sometimes I have to justify the way I'm choosing to sing something to myself like this; other times it doesn't bother me that I'm not drawing from something in particular.

Once I got a topic for an MB-LP song, I'd free write or take notes until I figured out what I wanted the song to say or accomplish. Some were speculative, like ISFJ: it puts the personality into the scenario of a devastating earthquake hitting during their wedding, a way for me to get at the fears that type has about support networks breaking down. Others are straightforward description, like ENFP, which takes its form and subject from “Richard Cory”, a poem I found posted on the ENFP reddit. Both of these songs also relate semi-directly to specific people in my life that are those types; they're pretty typical examples of how the MB-LP songs draw from all over the place while keeping enough personal meaning for me to feel like something authentic is underlying the whole collage.

Nothing Too Soon

I wanted each song of the Meyers-Briggs LP to not only be written about people of that type, but also to feature aspects of music that each personality type appreciated. But most of the type descriptions I could find online dealt only briefly with music, usually as a career option. But I discovered forums where people who self-identified as a given type went to discuss all sorts of things with like-minded people, and there were always a few threads about music. I also found out that reddit had a sub dedicated to every Meyers-Briggs type, where followers discussed in much the same way.

Not a lot of literature covers the relationship between Meyers-Briggs type and music taste, because it's hard to immediately discern one at all. On the forums, when someone started a “What's your favourite music?” thread, the responses always seemed all over the map, artist/genre wise. Which makes sense, considering that most people discover music through friends and family; even those who find completely new things online hare understanding those things through the lens of music they've been exposed to up to that point. Not to mention the huge bulk of music out there, where even if it's possible that people of a certain type could agree on specific artists, it's unlikely they've all heard them.

Where things got more interesting is when they also included a justification of why a given song or artist was their favourite. Once I found enough responses from a specific type, I could see which reasons came up the most often. Some broad patterns emerged: extroverts were more likely to enjoy uptempo, cheerful music; songs that made people want to dance and socialize. Lyrically, sensing types seemed to prefer songs with storylines whereas intuitives liked associative, list-style songs.

The value that types place on lyrics is complex. Certain types often seemed to cite foreign or instrumental music as favourites; ones where the voice is perceived as another instrument or is entirely absent. For every type, there was someone who found lyrics important, but types like INTJ or ENTP seemed more comfortable than other types without words present. For other types, like ESTJ, words needed to be included, but a strong, recognizable voice was often more important to them than the lyrical content.

What kind of lyrics people quoted as favourites also varied by type. INTP, for example, enjoyed songs where an esoteric idea or emotion was expressed accurately; they liked songs that did something they hadn't heard done before. ESFJs, on the other hand, tended to enjoy songs that expressed a universal emotion or situation especially beautifully. When ENFPs found a bit of lyrics they especially liked, they often reported listening to that song constantly for a certain time, almost like a personal mantra.

And so, armed, with this patchwork of knowledge, I set it aside entirely to write the music. I worked much the same way as I did on Little Gwaii, setting up a roomful of instruments fed into a looper, and then building a groove one instrument at a time until I had something I could envision writing lyrics over, at which point I'd save it and start on a new one. This is a process that I have to be in the mood for: a confident enough headspace to explore whatever idea I had fully, without being critical. Sometimes I just worked from an idea I'd had, other times I'd grab an instrument and see what came to mind. I was able to do around 4-5 of these a day before I'd decide to work on something else.

When I had thirty or so of these demos, I figured I'd be able to pull 16 good ones out. I tried showing the loops to people at this point, and they helped me let go of some ideas I liked but that were too weird to wrap an ear around. More than anything else, the positive reaction to them psyched me up to work with them further. I made up a master list of characteristics I'd identified in each type's musical taste, and started mapping the loops I had onto Meyers-Briggs types. At this point, I had only vague ideas about lyrics and song structures, so I went by the mood and qualities of the instrumentals, asking questions like how fast, how happy, how complicated, how original. Sometimes I had more arbitrary reasons, like when a track's style reminded me of a person or artist I wanted to draw from for a given personality's songs. I didn't do a lot of swapping around once I'd assigned tracks to types, and the only misgivings I had were with the last couple of ones I had to pick, where the instrumentals I was most sure about were already taken.

I think it was at this point that I decided the songs on MB-LP should be comparatively short. My thinking was, first of all, that I wanted to write songs I could actually perform live with a looper, and that setting up the loops would add at least 30 seconds to the runtime of any given song. Second, that 16 tracks was a lot of songs, and at the rate that I sing, a lot of words, so keeping them short meant that I could keep the amount of writing I would have to do manageable, without resorting to too much repetition. And third, that some of my favourite songs were around the two minute mark anyway – “Web in Front” by Archers of Loaf, “In the City” by the Jam, or John Peel's favourite “Teenage Kicks” by the Undertones – so it was definitely enough time to leave a strong impression. As I started to write lyrics, I kept this in mind, timing out sections as I wrote them and aiming for the 2:30 mark, with varying success.

Album, the Soul-Quest

I came up with the idea for a Meyers-Briggs themed album in the fall of 2011, during my first wave of enthusiasm for personality theory. I was washing dishes in a vegan restaurant in Montreal and wrote “Personality = Essence + Experience” on a napkin, which I stared at for a while before deciding I should read what scientists were actually saying on the subject. I was a bit surprised to find that personality theory was pretty soft science; a lot of the tests and metrics were owned by private companies, and the common theories chose the characteristics they measured relatively arbitrarily. Even the most common one they currently use, Big 5, chooses the 5 spectra it uses to describe personality based on “qualities that reoccur again and again in literature”, or something like that.

It seemed to me that personality theory was, like the Philosophy of Mind stuff I remembered taking in school, waiting for neuroscience to provide quantifiable physical evidence to ground its systems. Faced with this vacuum of hard physical evidence from the brain itself, Meyers-Briggs and theories like it do what Phenomenology does to explain existence: look to the phenomena. So, if you want to find out what a person is like, study what they do. Specifically, study what they prefer to do most often. And since following people around and keeping track of what they do would be too long and expensive a testing procedure, get people to self-report what they prefer to do most often.

Meyers-Briggs and Big 5 represent two very different ways of turning this data into a description of a person. This has a lot to do with their intended application. Meyers-Briggs was developed by laypeople, interested in how a person prefers to function: what mental tools they employ in what order, without attempting to measure the acuity of those tools. A Meyers-Briggs personality type is an archetype that successful and unsuccessful, happy and unhappy, healthy and unhealthy can share. Big 5, on the other hand, was developed by psychologists, whose jobs often entail diagnosing and treating personality disorders, so they need a theory that can both indicate the possible presence of these disorders, and demonstrate positive change as a result of treatment.

The results of a Big 5 personality test indicate a person's percentile on 5 spectra, and therefore have almost infinite combinations of percentages to describe people. After therapy, one's “Openness” score might increase from 40% to 60%, or their “Neuroticism” score might drop from 76% to 51%. A Meyers-Briggs result purports to show a person's preferred method of functioning through four either/or dichotomies. So a person is either an I (introvert) or E (extrovert), and while they may enjoy doing many extroverted things, if they're an I they will find those things draining whereas introverted behaviour will energize them. Since there are four dichotomies, there are only 16 Meyers-Briggs types possible.

So when I started thinking about doing a collection of songs that related to personality theory, Meyers-Briggs was the most attractive to me, since there were a manageable amount of types and I could describe without worrying about being judgemental or prescriptive. The idea of sorting people into boxes, trying to determine what people in each box have in common, and then writing something specifically about them was appealing. The first thing I did was take a short version of the test myself and try to understand my own results, which are expressed as four letters: I/E (introvert/extrovert), S/N (sensing/intuiting), T/F (thinking/feeling), and J/P (judging/perceiving).

I got INTJ, with INT all fairly confident and J only 1% confident. So I read an online description of the INTJ type and thought it was fairly accurate, but was concerned about the effects of horoscope-like confirmation bias, where you're subconsciously trying to make the description fit you. So I read a few more type descriptions until I was satisfied that at least they didn't all describe me. So with the goal of finding out which one described me best, I read the closest ones to my result, and found that INTP seemed to describe me a lot better than INTJ did, so much so that I was satisfied that INTP was actually my Meyers-Briggs type.

From there, I started asking other people I know to take the test and go over their results with me. It was shocking to me how wrong I'd be trying to predict their answers; I guess often I'd been assuming that everyone else thought the same way as me, and if they were truly honest with themselves they would prefer the same things as me, but I was clearly wrong. The best proof that this is a common thing for people to do was when someone would insist that their result was entirely confirmation bias, when I couldn't identify with their type description at all.

As I had more and more friends and family take the test, I started to know the dichotomies better and be more accurate in predicting people's results. If people often hosted or initiated social events, for example, they often came up E instead of I. If people liked to play board games, a lot of times they'd be N instead of S. If they sometimes hurt people's feelings unknowingly, they were usually T rather than F. And if they had to go to a library or café to study instead of staying home, they generally came up J rather than P. Not hard and fast rules, but useful questions to quickly approximate a type description.

I wrote down all the results I'd gathered in a shabby old binder, still deciding how I'd convert the information into songs. One night I used the binder as a fan to light my barbecue, and then forgot it on the back porch for several days. My roommate threw it out unknowingly, which was totally understandable but which meant the project lost a lot of steam since I didn't have a backup of my notes, and I wasn't immediately enthused about redoing them. It took a couple years and several other album projects before I got interested in the Meyers-Briggs album idea again. I decided to ask everyone whose results I'd lost to take it again, as well as a bunch of people I'd met since. Once I had multiple people I knew test as each of the 16 types, I was ready to start in earnest.

Gigs Boiled Down

I got in to Toronto after a week's holiday in Montreal, tired for the overnight bus but ambitious enough to buy a bike off craigslist within a couple hours. With a metro pass running $130 a month, it seemed like a better deal to buy a $70 bike I could resell afterward. I got accustomed to my new wheels on the way out to the director's house in the Beaches, where I met the cast and crew in person for the first time. Having never worked closely with actors before, I was surprised at how quiet the room went when they had to step outside to do promo shots. I hadn't realized the four of them had been filling the room! We did a read-through of the show during which the vocal director and I demoed the songs for the cast. I'd forgotten that all the keys had been changed, so I had to mentally transpose all of the guitar as I played it, which made for a slightly harrowing beginning.

We started rehearsals the next day, teaching the cast to sing the songs one at a time. It went pretty smoothly, with a few hiccups. They had the sheet music, but we were able to teach cast members who didn't read music by imitation and repetition. Since it had been several months since I wrote the songs, and even then in a different key. I sometimes needed to learn as much as they did. Once I'd developed lead sheets for myself to play from, I could really focus on what the actors were doing. We had the most trouble with the idiosynctratic harmonies and rhythms I'd sometimes used. I did make an effort to keep the music simple, but forgot that included the singing, too. Those things were apparently a lot easier to understand by listening than by reading the sheet music, so I started making special demos for the actors with their vocals isolated so they could hear exactly what was going on prior to each rehearsal. After that, things went way smoother.

The first chance I had to rehearse with the band was a couple weeks in, after we'd finished teaching the cast the songs – I'd been accompanying on guitar up until then. I was amazed how quickly we managed to put the songs together as a group; in three hours, we had all nine songs and the overture sounding the way I wanted them. I guess it didn't hurt that they didn't have to memorize anything. I promptly cancelled the rest of the band practices until we had to rehearse with the rest of the cast, because they were ready to go.

The vocal director, Claire, had been running the music rehearsals with my help, but the director, Jess, was in charge of the next step: dialogue and blocking. We'd run the songs as we came to them in the script, but the focus was on acting and making good choices for the characters, as well as the logistics of where the cast needed to be at what point. Unlike the music rehearsals, it was sometimes hard for me to tell when something wasn't working, or what Jess was looking for. What helped is that she did have a consistent vision for the tone of the show, that the cast and I eventually came to understand.

In style and conception, #WeddingMusical was broader and more marketable than most other Fringe shows I've heard of. And unashamedly so; the graphic design was professional and iconic, the characters were archetypical, the premise familiar with a fashionable social media tie-in. It was cool working on a project that was made to be accessible, appeal to different generations (I brought my 88 year old great aunt!), and sell tickets. Also, working on a project I wasn't in charge of; I was responsible for making sure the part I controlled fit the aesthetic and added to the fun.

The least fun I had on the show's run was probably opening night, though. We'd only got a couple of hours in the venue the weekend before the first performance, and the sound tech we'd worked with that day wasn't there for the show. I was stuck onstage with the band, so there was no one to realize and relay that the actors' headset mics were feeding back like crazy because the stage monitors were too loud. As a result, the reviews for the first show weren't particularly good, or clear on the content of the show. Fortunately for my self-esteem, even the most negative review I saw successfully identified the best song I'd written and cautiously recommended the show on the strength of it.

Honestly, though, reviews were somewhat incidental to the people that were showing up for the performances. They were coming based on the premise, the great promotion work our producer David was doing, and the fact that the hashtag in the title put us first in the alphabetical Fringe programme. Our showtimes were all over the map – from a weekday afternoon to an 11pm slot – and the crowds varied accordingly. What lines got laughs varied absurdly from show to show. At the 11pm show, they were laughing at things that weren't meant to be jokes! I definitely understand what stand up comedy is like a bit better as a result; it was the same material, but different crowds had different reactions, and thus, a different shared experience. Of course, the delivery of the material varied as well; the second show, I broke my lowest bass string on the very first note and had to take half my parts up an octave on the fly. And actors modified their lines as they remembered them, or as costume problems and prop malfunctions permitted.

The show got a lot smoother as we went on, and we got an extra show as a result of winning the “patron's pick” Fringe award for our venue; based on our attendance numbers, the venue thought we were their best chance to cash in by splitting an additional show with us 50-50. Thankfully my flight out was a couple days later, so I didn't have to worry about changing it. The cast party was fun, but people kept asking me what my next project was. I said I wasn't really sure, but that I did have an album to finish.

Opposite of an Apple

I got the musical-writing gig on the strength of my previously recorded material, I guess. Apart from doing lights/sound for drama productions in high school, I didn't have a lot of experience with musical-style music. That was a fault that Jess, the director, was willing to overlook. She had Tabia Lau (MFA Playwriting, Columbia) writing the story and dialogue, and they both sent me musical songs to listen to and emulate.

Tabia sent me an approximate synopsis of the story and character sketches, and then paragraph-length briefs explaining what each song had to accomplish. They also had the song titles already, and some specific lyrical suggestions – all kinds of things, from suggested rhymes to possible ways to attack the song subjects.

I spent quite a long time sitting on that material, listening to the song suggestions, trying to figure out how to write for a musical, and also trying to get a handle on the characters. Tabia was writing the dialogue concurrently and I hadn't seen any of it yet, so all I really had was the one or two line descriptions of the characters and their actions. When I had any further questions about the characters' backstories as Tabia had written them, or about bits of detail she'd thrown in (eg. why did the Jewish groom insist on including Christmas lights in the wedding?), she couldn't give me clarification. “I just write what they do”, she said, which I was confused by, but which I later realized is an equally valid way to work that gives the director and actors more room to interpret the characters' motivations.

It's not my favourite way of working though – I don't trust that the things I just come up with for the characters to do will be consistent at all, so in order to feel comfortable writing lyrics for them, I had to do some thinking and exploratory writing on my own. For a given song, I'd try to write my way into the head of each character: what had already happened to them, what they wanted, what they were worried about. Then I felt a little more confident I could write from a specific place for them that was different from the other characters in the song.

I worked on a couple songs at a time, generally writing for voice and guitar at first, then adding instruments once I had at least one verse and chorus written. I'd initially been told not to limit myself, to write for whatever I thought the songs called for instrumentally, but when it came time to apply for venues, I was told to prepare for the songs to be pared down to three instruments. And one of these instruments apparently had to be piano, since a member of their theatre company was already signed on to play piano. I'm not a great piano player and I'd been imagining a guitar-based show, but faced with the possibility of just three instruments I knew I wanted bass and drums, so I rewrote the guitar parts for piano.

I sent recorded demos of my compositions to the creative team, with me singing all the parts, and they would give me ideas on how to improve them, or make them more musical-ish. Thankfully most of what I wrote already made sense to them, since they're fans of Jason Robert Brown, who I'd never heard of but who apparently writes in the same style. The dialogue started to appear, and I had to change some details of the lyrics to reflect the changes made to the story. One unfortunate byproduct of Tabia and I working separately from the same briefs is that a lot of the action I'd described in the song lyrics ended up getting repeated in the dialogue, or vice-versa. I guess that I wasn't confident enough as a story writer to feel like adding extra action to the songs, or energetic enough as an editor to overhaul what I'd already finished writing when the dialogue was too similar.

As we got closer to showtime, Jess and Tabia added a couple other songs for me to write, the most important being an intro song that got a lot of story exposition out of the way really fast. The show called for six characters to be played by only four actors (with costume changes), so it was kind of tricky to figure out how to get them all involved in the intro song since only four of the characters could be onstage at once, and how to clue the audience in to the fact that the actors weren't just changing clothes but changing what character they were portraying.

They skyped me in for the casting process, since we wanted people that could sing the sort of unaffected (by musical theatre standards!), pop-like vocals I'd written. As it was an internet connection with a macbook webcam and mic, it was hard to be confident that I was judging their skills correctly, or even seeing them well enough to recognize the ones we called back. There were a couple dozen girls auditioning for two parts, and five guys for the same number. Actually four guys, since one of the guys could only sing “Born to be Wild” a capella, and so off-key that even I could tell. It was hard for me to fully participate in the decision-making process, since my mic wasn't working and I'm a slow typer, but it was really interesting seeing what they were looking for in their potential cast.

I hadn't really given the acting part of the musical much thought up until this point, but they were understandably concerned with things like chemistry between actors, respective heights, hair, and general demeanour: bringing the characters to life as they imagined them. When I chimed in, it was mostly to do with vocal style or range. I was excited with who we ended up picking; it was hard not to be, seeing so many people wanting to be a part of it.

It did mean that I had to transpose all but one of the songs to accommodate their voices. And I had to rewrite instrumental parts when transposing them took them out of their playable range. One thing I was surprised by was that even though I'd written the vocal parts with specific female voice types in mind, using their quoted ranges, they came out sounding much too high and strained. It turned out that most female voices sound the best in the middle of their range, whereas in my experience male voices sound the best in the top half of theirs. Thankfully, I had Claire, a classically trained vocalist, helping me as vocal director, and she could tell me what was going to work and what wasn't.

The last part I had to figure out before flying out to music-direct the show was who exactly I was going to be directing. It turned out that we'd gotten one of the largest venues for Fringe, so space for musicians wasn't an issue, but our budget still was. Due to a happy miscommunication the producer sent me a bunch of craigslist applicants, and I thought I was allowed to hire them all, so I did. By the time I found out I was supposed to only hire one of them, it was too late and I had a five-person band: paino, bass, drums, violin, and french horn. I'd originally written for trombone, and french horn covered those parts, and I added violin to a bunch of the songs either as harmony or counterpoint to the brass. I couldn't find a bassist, so I decided that I'd play bass and we'd function more like a rock band than an orchestra with a conductor. Once I had the craigslist musicians interested, I sent them their parts to look over and my work was done until I arrived in Toronto.

At Two Speeds

This post is a bit of catch up since I have another album I've finished that I want to write about, but I did some amazing, crazy other things in between that I should mention first.

I played on the Oh Wells EP Roll With The Punches, which we recorded starting in March 2013 (when I'd just joined), and it came out a year later. I did guitar, backing vocals, trombone, and violin, and we recorded it with Paul Boechler at FaderMountain Sound.

We spent a couple days in the big room they used to use for recording commercial jingles (I know because my dad interned here in the 70s), tracking through their newly hooked-up SSL 4K console. As far as I know we just kept the drums from these sessions, since we overdubbed everything else later in the small studio. If I'd known nothing I was playing mattered, I probably wouldn't have tried so hard, but it did force me to nail down my parts, which made overdubbing pretty painless. Seeing all the fancy mics and where they went was fascinating, and I gleaned everything I could without making a question-asking nuisance of myself.

I learned about the typical path to becoming a recording engineer, which means being an intern (read: coffee-maker and food-getter) for a certain window of time, after which they either find you more meaningful work, or they don't. Meaningful work apparently means things like chopping out fret buzz from between every note of a bass part. Things like that happened on this EP. Can you tell? It seemed kinda like make-work to me, but I think it's more that when your role doesn't give you much control over the content, you can probably go overboard making sure there are no possible problems with the things you do control. Especially with slave labor close by!

There's a reason why people are willing to put up with all that, though, and it's because it is fun and exciting recording things. And when you're not there for the actual work of mixing, it really seems like magic. We pretty much just came in to record and listen to mixes in various states of progress, and I missed the power of choosing comps and finicking with note timing on solos. At the same time it's nice getting a result that's easy to accept for what it is as opposed to having to fret about every decision that's made.

The EP was done by the fall, and we applied to a couple grants to get a video made for the single, "Let it Go". We developed a couple concepts with a team of videographers that we didn't end up working with, which was an interesting experience anyway. In what I'm sure is a common dynamic, we had a strong but difficult-to-execute narrative idea, and the video people were preoccupied with disjointed images and arresting, ambiguous symbolism.

We wound up landing a MUCHfact viral video grant anyway. The contract had a short deadline to finish the video, so we decided to realize the second concept with a friend of the band who works in video production. The central idea of the video was to mirror the song, which is about not feeling limited by a diagnosis of mental illness. In the video world, a doctor physically tattoos the diagnosis onto the patient. We shot the scenes over several days, splitting our budget between the crew, props, makeup, and food for the unpaid actors. I just barely got the finished copy back to MUCHfact on time, and we released the video with the EP launch.


While this stuff was going on, the director of a theatre company in Toronto that I know through a Montreal bandmate asked me if I was interested in writing the music for an original musical they were putting on for Toronto Fringe Fest. So I said yes, because that's what you do when that happens.