The September Music Project

A Plea for Help

As should be obvious, this is just my first swipe at a plan.

All thoughts, emendations, and additions are welcome.

Overview

The improv troupe has a ton of musicians who don't have an effective outlet for their musical creativity. Lately I've heard several people talking about how it would be cool if some of us wrote music together, or if we had a band, et cetera, et cetera.

These are really talented people, but nothing ever comes of it.

So: by September 3rd, I want to sketch out a project for our getting together and creating some sort of music throughout the month of September.

Things the SMP Should Accomplish Musically

Songwriting

We can all write songs. There's no way to self-efface out of this one; we've all improvised songs during Micetro.

However, we never quite seem to get around to writing them properly.

I think there's just not enough incentive for us. All of the venues for creative output are too high-pressure. There aren't any deadlines, so writing music becomes just one more thing that we can always work on... later....

Also, we have no infrastructure for getting feedback from our peers about our work.

Performance

Everybody in the troupe wants to be in a band. But being in a band requires finding people to be in a band with. This can be especially hard if most of your social contacts are in a large engineering company filled with men who have long conversations about lawn edging. Not that I'm bitter. Anyway, we need a good chance to perform music together.

Recording

As one might infer from the DoItYourselfMusic page, I have a small amount of recording equipment: an SM57 mic, a POD, a small mixer, a couple guitars, a good MIDI trigger, and a fast computer with an okay sequencer. It's enough to record home demos with. Many of us can write decent songs and play decently, but we don't even have a chance to get at a 4-track.

Ideally, the SMP will allow us to pool our equipment and do some decent recording.

Bob can contribute two guitars (electric; a Strat and a Gibson), a bass, a couple pedals (distortion, flanger, bass chorus), and a few amps (Peavey !MicroBass? and a Fender Princeton Chorus)

I've been writing my own music, with my little setup, knowing full well that my songwriting is no great shakes. However, every time I've written a song, I've learned a tremendous amount about recording. I hope that more opportunities to put together little demos allow me to gain more experience with the setup. Ideally, everybody involved would learn something about digital recording.

So, what is it? (Our "Mission Statement.")

Kacey, Amy, Bob, and Peter will get together and form a 'provisional band.' We'll collectively write and record a few songs, and perform one of them at No Shame.

(Ideally, the songs should not be that good. :) 1?)

We'll finish all of this by the end of the month.

"The Future, Conan?"

I have long-term plans here.

I can see this scaling up to something similar to Shannon's "Under the Gun" project for No Shame Theatre. For reference, this is where Shannon gathers together 21 actors, 7 writers, 7 directors, and a bunch of slips of paper with words on them. On Monday, he divvys everybody up into groups (1 writer, 1 director, 3 actors each). Each group has to come up with a 5-minute skit by Friday.

Why not have an analogous thing for music?

We could invite more musicians in on this, do the random groupings, and come up with music for public performance -- either for playing at No Shame Theatre, or doing an entire music-showcase of what we've all come up with.

--

That said, there's some issues with involving more people.

First off, my little ersatz recording studio doesn't scale. That, and I'm not sure I trust just anybody to not, say, spill a Coke on my $200 POD. That, and if we have seven bands clamoring for studio time, I can't play studio rat for all of them.

At any rate, I'd like to settle doing this with just us in September, then maybe bringing in another four people in October and maybe mix up the groups, and then scale up further if our efforts are successful.

On Planning Ahead -- What to Do the Rest of This Month (August)

(Peter): I myself don't have any plans musically for the rest of August. I'm pretty solidly busy until the 24th. That said, there are still some things we can do this month:

Write Music:
It couldn't hurt to toy with writing stuff, or collate and organize what we've already written, and bring some ideas in for September.

Schedule:
Figure out where and when we'll meet for a low-key jam session (see below).

Learn One Another's Background:
I'd like to figure out what kind of musical style each of us has -- to that end, I made a page for "Damn, I Wish I Had Written That".

Predict & Solve Performance Problems:
Mainly, we have to deal with our Curious Lack of Drummer. These are the options as I see it:

The other thing to think about is, what's the best way to take advantage of Kacey's mad violin skillz?

Covers!

Amy suggested we try a doing some covers. Sounds like a great way to get up to speed together musically. In the interest of democracy, I think we should all suggest one song. This gives us four songs to try to cover, which should be more than enough to keep us occupied for the month.

Detailed Plans for September

Songwriting

Meet for a while to just freely play. Ideally we pick favorite tunes out of that.

Once we have a fair-enough tune, we work on bringing that up to speed, playing it together.

Then, we all have a go at improvising lyrics to it. Ideally, we take down bits and pieces of what works until we have a fair little song. 3?

Performing

Then we practice performing however many songs we get for a while. (Note that we shouldn't make a very technically demanding song, or it will require endless rehearsal :) ).

Pick one that we like, and perform it at No Shame, which should be mid-month or so. (Working on getting the date from Shannon.)

We ought to consider what kind of music would play well to the crowd at No Shame -- I'd like us to not be self-indulgent.

Recording

After No Shame, we have a go at recording. 4?

First, pile up lots of recording equipment 5? and dump it at either Bob's house or Peter's apartment.

Then, we have a long 'studio day' or two (at most) 6? where we twiddle knobs, set up microphones, and pretend to be studio rats for a while.

The key is to keep recording on a brisk, reasonable schedule. 7? First, get a crappy copy of the song recorded and laid down. Then, work on improving it, replacing the worst tracks with better recordings.

We allot a specific amount of time to recording, and once we're done, we're done, whether our song could be improved with zealous re-editing or not. By the end of recording day #2, I would much rather have a crappy copy of a completed song than an exquisite recording that isn't finished. 8?

Finally, burn CD's, create spiffy cover art, give them as gifts to friends and family. :)

Our Schedule!

August 26th: First meeting. Practice.

Recommended Reading

Useful Links

Footnotes

1? God knows, we don't need that kind of pressure.

2? Think Riders in the Sky (they do almost all the music for Pixar's movies and shorts) at half speed.

3? (Peter): Odds are, songwriting will be a lot more free-form & organic. I'm just really cowed by writing lyrics, and this is the order of events that is the least intimidating to me personally. Really, if there's a method to this, we'll all probably discover it together. <sigh> :)

4? As mid-September rolls around, I'll need to figure out how much Kacey & Amy want to be involved in the recording process. In my experience, recording demos is 10% singing/playing, and (somehow) 140% twiddling knobs, dealing with emotionally unstable computers, trying different MIDI instruments, and adjusting levels and post-effects. I know I would be up for doing this for two days straight, and I suspect Bob would be okay with it, but Amy & Kacey may prefer to just do their time on the mics and be done with it.

5? We might consider getting our hands on some slightly better recording equipment. For instance, a proper condenser mic might be useful. Susie's Brian may be able to lend us instruments for a couple of days.

6? We want to do this in as few sessions as possible, because getting everything up and getting ourselves ready to go takes a lot of time.

7? I need to plan our 'studio' time so that we work efficiently. It'll help to have our song cheated out on MIDI first, and to know exactly what we need to record. Maybe we can get various members'o'the band around at different times to record their stuff. I'm just worried that we'll get (say) Kacey standing around for an hour while I try to get the perfect lead vocal track from (say) Amy. Recording sessions have to move.

8? At the very least, we need to get audio recorded. Once the audio data is on the computer, I could just do the mixing and post-effects on my own. Not that I would do that(thoughts of Brian Wilson running the Pet Sounds sessions with an iron fist deter me); I'm just saying at that point we don't need all of these people and all of this equipment to get to a finished product.