Playing Music without Understanding Theory

My musical ear is decent – not great.  If you play me a complicated jazz tune or a song by King Crimson and the like, I will not be able to play along, but for most rock/folk/blues tunes, I can figure out what’s happening pretty quickly, and my ability to play the song isn’t usually beholden to a particular key.  Like many musicians, I can think of chord changes in terms of Roman numerals, which is hugely helpful when “hearing” changes and playing along.  I’m often made fun of in band practice because I’ll always ask what key a song is in before we start playing.  I can never remember.  Once I know the key, I’m good to go (usually).

What I find amazing is just how many musicians – good one, too – play their instruments without really understanding the language of music, what we often call music theory.  A friend of mine put it this way: it’s like learning a second language by memorizing a lot of sentences.  Yes, it’s impressive to learn so many sentences, and you may be able to utter hundreds of them correctly, like “I’d like my breakfast with two eggs and toast,” but if you instead want to say, “I’d like my lunch with three pickles and coleslaw,” you’ll be in a fix.

This is a great analogy for what some musicians do.  And I’m not knocking them.  I think it’s amazing.  What they do is actually harder than what I do, because they’re memorizing songs.  I’m usually not.  I’m following chord changes that I hear in my head.  I know guitar players who can play crazy difficult solos note for note but who don’t know what a C7#9 chord is.  By contrast, I can’t learn a complicated solo without a great deal of effort;  I can, however, play along to a tune and tell you that the iv minor chord that the band is playing is incorrect – that it’s a flat VII major 9 (as recently happened when my band was learning “Brass in Pocket”).  I’m relatively good at that kind of thing.  Different skill sets, I suppose, and my ear still isn’t what it should be.  A good jazz musician might wonder how I dare to call myself a musician when I don’t know what mode to play over the aforementioned C7#9 chord.  I’ve got a lot to learn, for sure.

But those among us who literally memorize their parts should be revered on some level, because it’s a huge feat to memorize parts and excel in doing so.  The problems arise when you’re trying to communicate with each other.  I’ve had bandmates who don’t know what I’m talking about when I ask them to go to a III major chord, or who can’t change song keys without a lot of preparation.  That can be problematic and, at times, limiting, just as I would be a limiting factor in a jazz combo.

But I think it’s also encouraging that there are multiple ways to approach and enjoy music, and that one can be proficient in some aspect of music but not in others. Ultimately, those differences might even be invaluable to the makeup of a band.

New Album ready for Streaming

The Human Form Divine is ready for streaming! A long 15 months after I started recording demos, this pandemic-produced album (really more of an EP at 23 minutes) is complete! A snappy, stark album with prog-rock leanings and recurring musical themes, it’s the best-sounding album I’ve ever produced, with stellar guitar, bass and drums leading the way thanks to Griffin Cobb, Julian Wrobel and Sam Heinz.

Listen to The Human Form Divine on:

• Spotify

• Apple Music

• YouTube

• This website

Here’s a bit of background on the project:

On June 19, 2018, a few months after completing my album The Great Divide, I wrote down the song order for what was to be my next album. I thought I was all set. I took some time to pursue a few other activities, including scoring my daughter Sarah’s brilliant animated short, and by the fall of 2019 I was ready to tackle a new project, but when it came time to start laying down basic tracks, I found myself uninspired. Bored. Unexcited. I needed to scrap my plan and start over.

Around that time, I purchased a harpejji, an amazing stringed instrument I’ve written about before, and started messing around with a few musical motifs, including some chromatic odd-timed stuff, and I wondered about doing a sort of prog-rock type project. I went back to a bunch of song snippets I’d recorded on my phone over the years, and one that grabbed my attention was a little tune I’d hastily written in April of 2014 while taking a walk around the neighborhood. I called it “Bunker Song,” and it provided me the jumping off point that I needed to proceed with a thematic album.

I composed the Phrygian mode melody from the title track while attending High Holiday services in the early 2000s, when a reading captured my attention, taken directly from Reform Judaism’s Gates of Repentance prayer book: “Disfigured lies the human form divine, estranged from its center.” I love that line! I even half-thought about doing an album of Jewish-themed content at that time, but instead set the melody and lyric aside, only to find over a decade later that they would work wonderfully in the context of my new project.

Additional important propellants were the compositions my son Sam created in his high school music production course. He had a half a dozen instrumental recordings, and between these and several half-formed compositions that I’d jotted down over the years, I was gradually able to whittle things down to several musical motifs that I used to flesh out a number of songs, most notably the title track and “Sea Song,” which comes from a piece of music Sam wrote called “C Song” because it was – you guessed it – in the key of C. I wrote the intro of what would become “Sea Song” in January of 2015, the instrumental intro to “Obfuscation” in August of 2016, the chordal theme from “The Human Form Divine” later that December, and most of the music for “Race to the Bottom” in May of 2017. Sam composed the suspended themes from the title track and “Sea Song” in the spring of 2017 and the brilliant chord sequence of “Unsettled” in December of 2018. I added a melody and B section for that song, but tossed out the B section for this recording. I’d like to do another version of this song as a bossa nova with a jazz band for my next project.

From there, songs came together quickly. As always happens, a few pieces were written contemporaneously. The vocal section of “Why Not” was written on December 26 of 2019, and a few weeks later “Obfuscation” started to come together, as well as the completion of “Bunker Song” and the lyrics to “Race to the Bottom.” I decided to keep the project short and snappy at 23 minutes, and in hindsight this was plenty to keep me busy.

I completed song demos in March of 2020 and then the pandemic hit. Sam and his bassist buddy Julian Wrobel (from The Great Divide) rehearsed the songs on their own, eventually getting together during the buildup to a late-July socially-distanced recording session at Kiwi Audio in Batavia, Illinois, engineered by Brad Showalter and Mark Walker. As was the case for the previous album, both Sam and Julian created parts for the songs rather than just winging it, and the results are gratifying. Check out Julian’s bass riff during the title track or Sam’s drum break in “Obfuscation” – those are parts I could never compose, much less execute!

My daughter Jessica may not have participated directly in this recording, but she came through in a big way by recommending her friend Griffin Cobb to add guitar tracks remotely from Louisville. What a godsend! Throughout August and September Griffin tirelessly recorded scores of guitar tracks, transforming what I heard in my head into real-life performances. How gratifying! And we were never even in the same room!

Meanwhile, my daughter Sarah completed the album cover in short order after sharing a few rough sketches with Sam and me for our approval. She captured the struggle of being human perfectly. The album cover was completed a good six months before the album was.

I added keyboards and vocals in September and October, and then – as I always do – struggled mightily with the mixing process. I shelved the task for a few months over the holidays, and then began in earnest in January, finally completing the mixes in March with the help of a few of my friends. I sent the mixes to Collin Jordan of The Boiler Room, and viola! The album was finished! All it took was 16 months of hard work. I gotta find an easier way to do this next time.

The Nightmare of Mixing Audio

In drummer Jacob Slichter’s excellent book, So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star, he examines the music machinery behind the rise and fall of his 90s band Semisonic.  When discussing the release of their ubiquitous hit, “Closing Time,” Slichter reveals how the song went through several mixes and how each was devoted to a different audience:  Bob Clearmountain handled the initial mix, but Jack Puig remixed it to give the song a heavier edge for alternative radio, Don Gehman did a pop mix, and Puig returned for an acoustic mix.  Depending on what radio station you listened to, you might be getting an entirely different sound to your favorite song.

With the advent of streaming services, I have to believe that alternate mixes are employed less often today, but Slichter’s story illustrates just how important – how defining – mixing is to a song, no less than the musical performance.  In the hands of a gifted engineer, mixing can push a decent song into the stratosphere.  In the hands of an amateur, a really good song can end up sounding merely adequate.  I’m more the latter than the former, but I’m getting better.

I’ve sent mixes for my new album, The Human Form Divine (available on streaming services in a month or so) to a mastering engineer in Chicago, and I’m praying that I’m still happy with them when I get the tracks back.  We shall see.  I’m allowing myself a few weeks of distance from what was an arduous process filled with second-guessing, self-flagellation, irritation, bewilderment, resignation and – ultimately – some degree of satisfaction .  I am not a natural mixing engineer, and it shows; I started mixing my new album last October and finally finished in March!  It’s a good thing I don’t do this for a living.

Part of the problem is that I’m dealing with imperfect recordings.  For example, when we recorded drums and bass in the studio, we couldn’t get the snare to stop rattling whenever my son Sam hit his toms, so at home I had to go back and substitute every tom hit with a sample tom hit that we recorded in isolation (thank goodness we did this as a fail-safe tactic) and mute the snare accordingly.  I employed a similar technique on the snare when raising the volume wasn’t possible due to the accompanying hi-hat and cymbal interference. 

In the studio I also didn’t notice that the bass was drastically out of tune on two tracks, mostly because we were only recording drums and bass and there wasn’t a reference track that allowed us to easily recognize off-the-mark pitches.  Oops!  NOTE TO SELF: TUNE YOUR INSTRUMENTS BEFORE EVERY RECORDING! The bass performance on the title track of my new album was so good that I didn’t want to lose it because of tuning issues, so I ended up copying the bass tracks (one amp and one direct) six times, changing the tuning differently on each grouping to end up with one relatively in-tune performance.

But mostly the mixing process is challenging because my ears don’t pick up on subtle distinctions.  I’m good at broad brushstrokes – volume, panning, and basic compression, for example – but the nuances of slight variations of compression or EQ are largely lost on me.   Luckily, with a lot of trial and error, over time I used a few techniques that I was able to employ across the board.

Thanks to my bassist friend Johnny’s suggestion, for the first time I used saturation to help bring out a track rather than using a lot of compression.  This was a tricky balancing act, and one I’m not sure I mastered it, but I was able to get bass and snare to cut through mixes a touch better without having to squash the hell out of them. Even so, on some busses I used parallel compression a bit with good results.

I also utilized sidechaining extensively.  With the help of a couple of tutorials, I ended up doing the following:

1)      Ducking the bass slightly to make room for the kick.
2)      Ducking the overheads slightly to make room for snare and toms.
3)      Ducking guitars and/or synths to make room for vocals or solo instruments.
4)      Ducking a vocal delay bus with the original vocal track so that the delay can only be head at the end of a syllable.

The above helped enormously, as getting the vocal and snare tracks to sit in a mix has always been a challenge for me, as has the kick/bass relationship. 

Also helpful was being aware of accentuating frequencies in the 300 Hz range to allow bass guitar to be heard on smaller speakers.  I’m amazed at how the bass disappears on many professional recordings from long ago when played on tiny speakers such as those on a cellphone.  Today, mixing engineers are more cognizant of this inevitability.

I also used a high-pass filter on multiple tracks, boosted my vocal a touch at around 1800 Hz, and used a high shelf boost on overhead busses for a bit of sheen. Eventually, I created a kind of EQ blueprint that worked for these particular recordings.

Even with all the above and more, I had to go through mix after mix after mix of each song, listening on five different sets of speakers (studio monitors, stereo speakers, car speakers, a decent Bluetooth speaker and my phone) plus a pair of headphones to get a sense of what was and what wasn’t working.  And once mixes were complete, I got additional feedback from my son and two of my musician friends, Johnny and Anthony.  Luckily, by the time I sent them the final mixes, they agreed that the songs were in a good place, requiring just a few minor edits.

I have aspirations of one day hiring all of this out and getting someone who I trust to handle the entire mixing process so that I can free myself of this nightmare.  But then again, what fun would that be?  As much as I say I hate the process, I also love the challenge.

New album forthcoming!

Journey's "Too Late"

For a couple of decades, it was in vogue to trash the band Journey.  With their at-times schmaltzy lyrics, histrionic videos and sappy ballads, the band were easy targets and critics were quick to dismiss them, but I’ve always felt that Journey were a cut above their arena rock peers; their musicianship alone took them beyond bands like Head East, Def Leppard, Loverboy, Foreigner and April Wine.   And during the transitional period from their fusion prog-rock roots to radio-friendly AOR during 1978-1980, they achieved – in my mind – rock gold with the studio albums Infinity, Evolution and Departure.  Subsequent years would bring the band greater success, but I love the period when Steve Perry shared vocal duties with keyboardist Gregg Rolie, culminating in 1981’s live Captured, which I received as a present for my thirteenth birthday that year.

It’s this live album that came to mind recently as I drove from Chicago to Cincinnati, where during the commute I spied the exit sign for “Dixie Highway,” which also happens to be the title of a song off of Captured.  For the next hour of my drive, my mental jukebox went through the entire album track by track, and then replayed a song that I’ve always loved but is largely absent from radio these days, not to mention Journey’s setlists.  Journey may have experienced a resurgence over the past decade in a half, perhaps even garnering some respect that had been denied the band early on, but along the way some of their old radio standards have gone by the wayside.  One such song is “Too Late,” one of my favorites off of Evolution, and while I replayed the song in my mind several times during my trip, I noticed a nifty melodic trick that the band employs.

The song’s verse has a simple chord pattern – D A  Bmin  F#min G  (I V vi iii IV) – and the chorus continues in D, employing the non-diatonic flat-7 chord, C major.  It all works well, with Perry’s singable melody working nicely on top.

What elevates the song is twofold:  first, the solo section has some fun with the chords, first transposing to the key of E and then leading us to the key of A, eventually building on a sustained E chord, begging to resolve back to an A. 

But then the second interesting thing happens.  Instead of the next verse starting on A and continuing the verse in that key, we hear the same chords as in the first verse: D A  Bmin F#min and G.  But they now sound like the song is in the key of A, so instead of hearing it as I V vi iii, we hear it as IV I ii vi.   When the band hits the A chord, it sounds like the tonic, and by the time they get to G, we’re back in the key of D, and the song resolves to the chorus as heard twice before.

How?  How the heck does this work?  I’ve tried figuring it out and it isn’t a no-brainer.  It all seems to stem from the altered melody.  If Steve Perry had sung the same melody as in the first verse, our ears would quickly adjust and accept that the band is now back in the key of D.  Instead, Perry does a wonderful melodic variation:

• The original verse has the melodic motif: F# A B A F# D F# E.  D pentatonic.  Cool. 

• But AFTER the solo Perry sings A A B B B C# B A. 

And THAT is all it takes to make the verse sound like it’s in a different key.  Why does this work?  After all, all of the notes are diatonic to both the key of D and the key of A.  What the heck is happening here?

Truthfully, I don’t know.  I’ve sung the second melody over some different chords in the key of D, and it isn’t required that our ears hear it in the key of A, but they do.  Part of it is the fact that the solo ends on an E chord, which at that point sounds like the V chord.  But dang, I find it all a bit baffling.

It just goes to show how melodic alterations can totally flip a chord progression around, and I have to give guitarist Neil Schon and vocalist Steve Perry credit for employing this technique, whether it was by design or by pure chance, and whether or not they could articulate why it works.  It does work, and that’s what matters.  I wish I could understand it enough to employ the technique to my own songwriting, but I’m not sure I’d know where to begin.

And this is one little example of why Journey was not your average arena rock band.  And why seeing a sign that reads “Dixie Highway” can take you down a long ‘journey’ of musical discovery.  Rock on.

Learning the Guitar - Again

For some keyboard players – me included – the guitar is a very mysterious instrument.  The visual logic of a piano, with its repeating 12-note pattern of black and white keys, each key corresponding to a unique note, is lost when trying to decipher the fretboard of a guitar.  (“What do you mean middle C can be played here…and here…and here…and here?”)

Sure, learning the basic open chords is easy enough.  Back in the late 80s I borrowed my friend Shawn’s acoustic guitar, bought a chord book, and pretty soon I was playing songs like “Driver 8” by R.E.M. and the similar jangly “I’m Looking Through You” by the Beatles, my fingertips pulsing painfully with each passing hour.  I even figured out open E tuning so that I could play Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.” 

But dang, it got hard after that.  Like, REALLY hard.  As soon as I placed my fingers further up the fretboard, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.  Over the past thirty years, I’ve made a concerted effort to improve my guitar playing at least a half a dozen times.  I’ve taken lessons.  I’ve watched videos.  I’ve learned songs.  But each time my efforts have fizzled out after a few months.

But not this year.  I recently started to break down the guitar in ways I hadn’t been dedicated enough to do before.  It started with a terrific set of tutorials on YouTube by guitar instructor Mark Zabel.   This guy is terrific, and I like his instruction techniques.  Of particular help to me were his videos on “Playing the right notes” and the CAGED system of instruction.  CAGED may not work for some people, but it helped me to better visualize the fretboard, and I can now work my way up and down the guitar neck (slowly) to play different chord intervals. I also enjoyed this guy’s video:

Despite CAGED being helpful, in a way it overcomplicates things.  There are really only three shapes for major triads:  D, A and E.  C is basically the same as D.  G is basically the same as A.  At least that’s how I’ve looked at it, and it’s been helpful.   It’s similar for minor chords.  I learned the shapes for D minor, A minor and E minor.  G minor is basically the same as E minor.  C minor is basically the same as D minor. 

These videos put me on the right track, but just as important has been my commitment to learn how to shape chords depending on where the tonic is.  If the tonic is on the second string, how do I shape a major chord?  A minor chord?  A dominant 7 chord?  What if the tonic is on the fourth string?  I’ve worked hard at this, and gradually I’ve better grasped the different chord shapes. 

With the above tools, as long as I can follow where the tonic is, I’m able to play whatever triad I want.  (for CAGED 7th chords, I like this guy’s video). I’m gradually figuring out the proper hand position no matter where I am on the fret board, and over time patterns have emerged.  I’ve found it helpful to do the following:

1)      Go from a major chord to its relative minor, and vice versa.
2)      Play a I, IV, V blues patterns.
3)      Play chords over descending roots of the major scale (think the “Piano Man” by Billy Joel, and see my blog about this musical cliché here.)

Now, none of the above is going to make me a great guitar player, or even a good one.  Hell, just a few days ago I tried playing the opening lick to David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel,” and I could not get my left had to cooperate!  I may never play a lead line that anyone would like to hear.  But my goal for the foreseeable future is to be able to play major, minor, dominant 7, major 7 and minor 7 chords from anywhere on the guitar.  If I can do that confidently by the end of year, that will go a long way towards making me moderately competent at the guitar. 

A good start, anyhow.