Album Summaries

Being a non-professional means that there is no real need to write and record songs in any particular order. However, I have always conceived of music using a project-based process. A particular group of songs are written with a common conceptual theme or musical sound. I do this until enough music accumulates to complete an 'album'. The degree of adhesion to a specific theme may vary a fair amount from project to project, but some basic thematic idea is generally there.

This is of course not the only way to do things, but it works for me. A collection of songs can be part of a visual cue or be inspired by a particular concept. The length of albums has historically been limited by the playing time of vinyl record albums. The advent of the CDs format allowed longer collections of music. But the 45 to 60 minute record always seemed to me to be a reasonable length for most progressive rock concepts.

So far in this blog, I have covered songs from my following 'albums':

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Album #1 - For Good
I wrote a lot of songs when I was younger and recorded them on tape using a 4-track recording machine. The result of this period was 3 or 4 album-length tapes which each had a concept and cohesive theme. A lot of the material was written while I was still in school and was recorded during the few years that followed.

At some point, I took a several year break from my recording hobby with the intention of eventually getting back into it when digital recording technology matured. Sure enough, the technology finally became available and affordable to the average person. The flexibility that I could only dream about in the 1980's was a reality a few years later.

This was a collection of songs that were written during a year or two prior to obtaining my first digital audio workstation. And I used the songs written in this period to learn the digital recording process. So many of the songs are not that great structurally or were not very good sound quality. Only a couple of the tracks could be considered passable. Maybe I will go back and rescue a couple other tracks from this album at some point.

The title 'For Good' suggests something that is positive and permanent. I think the idea was drawn from a song that didn't actually make the album. The particular song as recorded wasn't that great, but the title survived because it was upbeat and appealed to me at the time.

Songs posted:
Superheroes
Thank You, I Love You











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Album #2 - Measure of Success
I was still learning the recording process, but was improving somewhat. For me, digital recording changed how I wrote songs a little. With 4-track tape, the process had to be planned in advance and be very deliberate. Maximizing the distribution of available recording room for the song arrangement was always a concern. With digital, the process is not constrained or inhibited. The transition from idea to sound is much more immediate. Despite the tendency to less organized, the benefits to digital outweigh the drawbacks. This realization was one reason why I called this album 'Measure of Success'. There are more tracks worth listening to on this album.

This album also had a more cohesive thematic element to it than For Good. Lyrics that contributed to the common theme were distributed throughout various songs. In some ways, this album started me on the road to getting back to how I wrote music when I was much younger.

I was also starting to consciously work at improving the quality of my vocals. I have always struggled with vocals. It is something that you are either born with, or not. If someone has a weak or unappealing voice and this is combined with poor recording technique, the result can be pretty lousy. I used to feel pretty good about a song until the vocal process started. It seemed like the song was ruined as soon as I started trying to sing it. On Measure of Success, I started to get a small amount of satisfaction in this department, even trying to pull off some harmonies.

Songs posted:
Measure of Success
A305 on Wednesday













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Album #3 - Quantum Nature
After becoming somewhat more familiar with the digital recording process and software, I could start to focus a little more on what I was trying to say; the actual lyrical ideas. I have always been interested in science and physics. Reading a couple of good books about string theory and dimensionality started me on the road to adopting some of those concepts in my lyrics.

Quantum Nature had a number of songs about physics phenomenon or songs that used physics lingo to convey other ideas. (There were a couple of tunes that didn't fit this pattern, but they were the minority.) The problem with this type of subject matter is that it can be too technical and may even stifle artistic fluency if it becomes a forced exercise. That seems to have happened on this album even though more of the songs from Quantum Nature survived into this blog than the previous albums.

Songs posted:
The Door














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Album #4 - Tales of Twilight
Realizing that too strict an adherence to a technical theme can have some drawbacks, I decided to loosen up a bit. So I tried to think in terms of stories and experiences rather than phenomena and analysis. There were some technical ideas on this album, but they were not the focus of the discussion. Having this approach turned out to be a little less restrictive in terms of writing. Not all ideas need to be explained and developed to excess. Like the difference in detail between a photograph and a painting.

Have you ever heard someone who is working on a recording complain that their tracks aren't loud enough in the mix, but somehow the overall sound is still distorting? They are probably wasting a lot of their dynamic range on frequencies that aren't actually contributing to the audible presence of each track. Like burning fuel without actually getting anywhere. I was having my share of those problems. Poor recording technique and sloppy playing always seems to drag good ideas back. So on this album, I wanted to try to get a bit more solid musically. The available dynamic range of music is limited, and I needed to work on using it more efficiently.

Songs Posted:
Tales of Twilight
The Great Race
The Shape of Dreams

(There are obviously more songs on this album, but I couldn't decide which ones to post. So that's it for now.)

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Album #5 - Moments in the Mind
Next up was an album about another interest of mine - human consciousness and cognitive awareness. The fact that from a physical object such as the brain can emerge a conscious individual mind always amazed me. So I wrote some songs about it.

Songs Posted:
Mind's I
Enemies
Chameleon on a Mirror
Lifenet
Moments in the Mind


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Album #6 - Three Cities
My favorite author is Jorge Luis Borges. In a story called Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, he introduces a mysterious country called Uqbar that is part of an unknown world called Tlön. It is a brilliant story on which I have built some simple musical ideas.

I basically treated Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius as three separate cities, each with unique characteristics. The narrator is telling a story of how he or she spent some years journeying to these cities searching for 'meaning' or 'truth'. I combined this with some ideas gleaned from a strange little anime series called Haibane Renmei in which a group of angel-like children inhabit a walled city. There are some dialog sequences that I lifted directly from the show (without permission) because they make some interesting allusions to familial nurturing, cooperation, and confinement.

One or two of the musical ideas originated from when I was teenager more than 20yrs ago. But most of this was written during the recording process a couple years ago. A few interesting ideas emerged on this CD, but I had trouble settling on satisfactory results. The sound quality and song structures went through several iterations, and I sort of gave up on searching for the right end point. Sometimes you just have to walk away. Maybe trying to start with a master like Borges was foolhardy anyway.

Songs to be Posted:
A Dream, A Desire, A Decision
Uqbar
Tlön
Orbis Tertius
Looking Glass Unknown


More to come...

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