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.