Elias

Day 52

Your appreciation of art is similar to what appreciating a mobile phone is to myself. It's a nice thing to have! Nothing more, nothing less. I appreciate it and I take it for granted. But.. I don't have any idea of what kind of efforts have been suffered in order to make the device work. And most days I don't even care. Too busy, too busy..

I live in an illusion that I'm an educated consumer, but, in reality, I don't have any fuckin' way of evaluating the real cost/price of any of these products I'm seeing. But it doesn't stop me from throwing in easy opinions on how much it "should" cost, how much I'm willing to pay, and all kinds of other ignorant bullshit.

My appreciation of a mobile phone is real, but ridiculously shallow. It goes only as deep as my personal needs and preferences are. Which isn't very deep.. As long as my personal needs are fulfilled, I don't give a shit about what's the true potential (or value) of this technology.

What if my needs are false? What if they are ignorant? What if they are destructive to people who I don't even know?

What do I care? As long as I have the option to pay less and get more, I will. That's how I'm wired.

And the same goes with music. If I'd not been so interested in music for the first 32 years of my life, it'd be easy for me to accept that the price of music is indeed 0.00-0.99eur/song, as it nowadays seems to be.

The true price of music? This question has too many answers, because the topic is just too damn complex.. But I'm pretty confident it's not 0.99eur/song. Nor is it 0.00eur/every-song-ever-made-since-the-big-bang-instantly-available-24/7, which is one of the strongest trends right now. Or what do you think?


To the main point...

...All this rambling above was not at all what I was supposed to write this time. I was simply going to tell you that I've been on this really healthy diet for the past two weeks, and it feels GREAT! I've been reducing the intake of processed sugars, alcoholic beverages and red meat. And I've been increasing the intake of all kinds of healthy foods. Here's the recipe of today's super smoothie.

• 1 Banana
• 1 dl of Blackcurrants
• 1 tsp of Wheatgrass powder
• 3 tsp's of Spirulina powder
• 1/2 White Grapefruit
• 1 dl of Oat Milk
• Put it all in a blender and enjoy!

Today's super smoothie

Day 43

The problem of my music is mostly on the production side. The writing is ok (most of the time), I think. It's frustrating, but what are you going to do? There's no money to throw away and hire a mixing engineer. Or any other personnel (and equipment / facilities) that might come handy when producing a nice sounding music album..

Why not? Well.. You take a look at the pension system of Finland and you'll quickly realize it's not going to work for my generation very well. Especially if you're an entrepreneur.. I just calculated that, if I'm lucky, my pension will be about 1/3 of what's usually considered a minimum wage. I kid you not. And the most pessimistic view about the ongoing and constantly elevating crisis in the EU is that the whole economy will collapse.

I won't go too deep into the details, but, all in all, it seems very likely that the current pension system will be either radically scaled down or wiped out completely before I hit 75-80, which is the likely retirement age for my generation.

So, if I'm going to prepare myself for what's coming, it's better to start now when I'm still in my early thirties. This realization leaves me with two options:

1. I work (earn money), write music (spend money), go to a refreshing vacation every now and then (spend money) and enjoy my life. I live like a "regular" working person, pretending I'm safe when the retirement age comes.
2. I work (earn money), write much less music or even quit (save money), skip all vacations (save money) and live under constant pressure of balancing between music and financial realities. It's sad, but I do trade artistic expression for security. Hoping the savings will be at least somewhat safe when the system collapses.. Which comes most probably much earlier than my supposed retirement age is.

With my personality the first option is not going to happen. Surely would be nicer to carry out the second option, if I'd be getting money from making music. But, with my skillset and style, that's unfortunately not happening very often.

Now don't take me wrong. I appreciate my profession as a piano tuner. But I also realize it's not my calling. How big part of your life can you dedicate to doing something that doesn't come from your soul? Without gradually losing something that is part of your soul. That's a big question that touches so many of us every day.

All this leads me to a rather disturbing, yet strangely inspiring, realization. The first years of this decade are a time of awakening, identity crisis, or whatever you like to call it.

I call it reality. And whatever music I'll be writing next is the result of these thoughts. In the meanwhile here is "Chaih Beizii" from two years ago. If I only had that damn mixing engineer...

Day 27

The look of relief. The first rehearsal went fine. I sort of feel sorry for our av-technician though. Only few hours to learn the whole piece.. Lights, sounds, visual elements and everything. But I'm confident we'll do just fine.

The past month has included way too much (the wrong type of) stress, but this is one of those moments that make it worth it. Some good and firm initial steps taken back into the world of music. I'll write more about it next. Along with some audio examples.

Maija-Liisa and I

Day 25

My food blog. Not that I've ever understood why people write them and keep posting photos of what they'll be consuming next.

Music-wise, deadline is less than two days from now.. And I'm still composing and building stuff that originally should've been done by last friday (at the latest).  No one else to blame for the pain I'm currently in than myself. I'll make it, no question. But this made me learn a good lesson. No more these, please. If not absolutely necessary.

"Heaven" is a tune that uses the idea of layering a melodic phrase and harmonic phrase on top of each other asymmetrically. First, let's take a look at an example of a typical symmetric song, "Mary Had a Little Lamb".

A Simple, symmetric song

You can think of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in two-bar sections. This means that you feel the need to emphasize the first beat of each two-bar section. The "X" shows where the beginning of the two-bar section is. Sing the song and tap your foot on the floor on "X".

"X" Mary had a little lamb,
"X" little lamb, little lamb.
"X" Mary had a little lamb, its
"X" fleece was white as snow.
and so on, and so on...

See, it feels very natural to emphasize this nice little song like this. The song is simple and it has a structure that's easy to predict. Hence this song is easy to follow. And once you can follow the song easily and tap your foot along with it, it's probably easy to start dancing to it, too. The enjoyment of music is fulfilled!

This is how our brains work whenever we hear music. We constantly analyze and organize hierarchically the sound we hear. Extracting enough symmetric or constant rhythmic information and patterns from the sound, will eventually lead to the expectation of certain kind of rhythm. How you react to a song is determined by how a composer has decided to fulfill your expectation. By choosing certain notes over others.

Depending on your musical background you may find the structure and patterns of certain type of songs perhaps easier to understand than others. And this is, of course, very much related to your ability to appreciate and enjoy music.

The most obvious structures that most of us find easiest are usually the structures that are perfectly symmetrical. Two-bar sections and four-bar sections are easy for most of us. When it gets a bit tricky is when phrases or sections of different lengths are mixed.

Now, the section (from now on I'll use the term "phrase") can live in two distinct elements. The phrase of a melody can be analyzed separately from the phrase of the harmony. To those of you who are not familiar with music theory, this simply means:

• When you sing alone "Mary Had a Little Lamb", that's the melody.
• When the pianist who you hired to accompany you plays the chords of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" alone on a piano, that's the harmony.

So far we have assumed that both of you have thought the song in two-bar phrases. And it may not make sense to change this approach, if your goal is to perform this song next weekend at your birthday party. Just keep on practicing!

A bit more complex song

But, just for the heck of it... Let's say that your pianist had just taken a couple of jazz-lessons and wants to make your life miserable by experimenting with this song.

For example, she might start to think in three-bar phrases, instead of two. Or five-bar phrases. Depending on the song and the arrangement, this might or might not align well with your singing. But the interesting thing is that whatever path she will try, there will be moments when you both will still emphasize the song at the same time. When your "rhythmic cycles" cross.

This creates a distinct pulse or pattern. It may be more complex to listen to than if both, the melody and the harmony, would be completely symmetrical. But don't get scared. You can look at the new structure another way, too. The pulses of the melody and harmony are independent, BUT they still have one strong pulse together, which creates yet another independent pulse! Your creative possibilities just got much more interesting.

---Please note that this may not make any sense what-so-ever to you now. But if you found "Heaven" an interesting song, and you'd like to learn more about its structure, all this is very relevant. You'll see..---

So, let's take a look at the first two verses of "Mary Had a Little Lamb". As each verse is eight bars long, two of them makes sixteen bars total. If you are thinking in two-bar phrases, you'll emphasize eight times and you'll sing eight full phrases. Right?

Let's say that your pianist thinks in three-bar phrases instead of two. She will emphasize only six times and play five full phrases plus 1/3 of the sixth phrase. See that even though your phrases are asymmetric, your "paths" will cross as follows:

Your first "X" will align with her first "X".
Your fourth "X" will align with her third "X".
Your seventh "X" will align with her fifth "X".
And so on..

If you'd keep on playing the song long enough, it's very likely that eventually you'd start to expect this weird asymmetric behavior and it would gradually start sounding less and less weird.

I know, all this is rather theoretical discussion. And how much mileage you could get out of this particular technique will depend on many things. But this kind of thinking is exactly what composers and arrangers will often do. "What possibilities will open up if I make this structure asymmetric? What happens if I try this and this?"

If you just play the above mentioned experiments now on your piano without planing about it too much, it may not make sense. It may just sound weird or even completely wrong.. But I'm 100% sure that if you have some arranger's skills and you'd spend time arranging the tune, it would end up very different kind of "Mary Had a Little Lamb". Not a weird and wrong, but just different. A bit more complex musical structure that could raise many kinds of emotions and feelings.

Now you ask: What the hell re-arranging "Mary Had a Little Lamb" has to do with Thaiga's song called "Heaven"?

The answer is: Not a lot. But "Heaven" does use an asymmetric structure as its main composition motive.

Welcome to Heaven!

Below is a picture of "Heaven". You can see that the harmonic phrases are built the usual way. Four-bar phrases which make eight bar blocks. You can also see (hear) that the song is made of three sections that are 24 bars long.

What's interesting is that if you take a careful look at the melody, you'll see that it's really only a 23 bar long melody that simply repeats three times. In other words, the melody section is one bar shorter than the harmonic section. This is the important thing to notice! This an asymmetric structure.

You feel that the song flows symmetrically, because the harmonic phrase flows in multiples of two all the time. But what you're also hearing is an unchanging melody cycle that's going out of sync from the harmonic rhythm starting at bar nro. 24.

This opens up the melody in a whole different way! The whole perspective to the melody changes. The feeling of "X" (or the pulse) is a sort of spotlight that makes the melody "visible" from three different angles. You don't feel that anything really repeats, even though the motives will sound very similar throughout the piece.

The vocal melody simply picks out certain notes from the underlying asymmetric structure that the piano is playing.

After the melody has cycled three times, it aligns naturally with the harmonic rhythm. And that's a good point to end the song. You'll get a sort of the feeling "what the hell just happened?", but it all seems fine in the end.

The mathematics of music

Composing this song started the usual way. I played with notes and intervals and they started to sound interesting enough. Next I decided to play with this rather theoretical idea of asymmetric phrases.

Now, I don't like theoretical games just for the sake of "getting the numbers right", as I've never really understood maths anyways.. But as a tool for creativity these mathematical strategies can be sometimes very useful. The main goal has to stay clear, though. If it starts to sound like a mathematical formula, it's not good music. For me, at least it isn't.

"Heaven" came out nicely. Perhaps even a bit nicer than I had expected. When I started to commit to the idea of asymmetric phrases, I first thought that quite a few notes should be taken out of the strict mathematical formula to make the music happen. But that proved not to be the case.

I don't think you can really hear much traces of this mathematical game happening in the background, if you don't know what to look for. There is only one note that I changed from the original formula. Just because it just didn't fit well enough in the final version. But changing only one note is a good enough achievement. (See if you can find that one note... :) )

I guess the main point I'm making with all this is that if you plan your composition well enough, you can hide in there all kinds of stuff that's living sort of its own life without anyone paying attention to it. Surely it can be just an amusing music game that composers play and show to other composers. Without much artistic value.

But at its best this game can lead to great compositional discoveries that simply sound good. If the structure of the song is well made, it becomes that much more difficult to ruin it when playing and recording it. If the substance is there, it will carry the music. This kind of song can be approached on many different levels. Not just on the most obvious level that is "Oh my, that sounds nice!" Not that there's anything wrong with that either..

Hope you enjoy our Heaven! If you didn't already know, you can find us at http://Facebook.Thaiga.net. We'd love to hear what you think about our music!

Happy holidays and take care you all!

Elias
About me

ps. Thaiga is alive an kicking even though getting our album done seems to get always pushed further and further. But what can you do. Other projects that actually pay the bills have been the top priority for the last six months.

Maybe it's best that we make no promises in regards of the album release any more. It will come when it's possible. It'll take a lot of dedicated time and some money too. So, we'll see. We'll keep you updated, for sure. And remember that you can listen all of our music for free at music.thaiga.net.

For the past two months I've been working as the editor for the Teippaaja Pro movie. But one thing led to another.. And now I find myself as the music director and the composer of the movie, as well.

It's quite a challenge. We are still several weeks from finishing the movie, the cut is not yet locked etc. Lots of work still ahead! The current deadline (November 2011?) is approaching fast..

All in all, I predict that I'll probably have about two weeks total to plan, compose, record and mix the whole thing. That's not a whole lot! After all, I'm not John Williams or Danny Elfman..

In fact.. This is my very first film scoring gig.


So, the key to being able to get the job done lies in planning that's absolutely well made. The tighter I can get the frames built for the task ahead, the less work it's going to be to get the picture drawn. Sure, this is somewhat vague analogy, and many will find it inadequate describing the composition process. Nevertheless, it works for me.

My main questions right now are:

1. What's the absolutely minimum amount of music the film can't live without?
2. What are the most important cues?
3. What are the cues that are most likely to get thrown out if the time is just not going to be enough and the hell will break loose?
4. How much music is it possible to compose in such short time?
5. How much, what kind of and at what price can I get music from online libraries etc.
6. What kind of arrangements can I realistically expect to produce and mix with the available resources?

And the answers seem to be:

1. About 20min. As an editor of the film I'd very much like to have at least 30min of music. But we can live with 20min if needed.
2. The scenes where the characters or the plot needs some more flesh. At least six scenes.
3. Various kinds of source music. Cars, rooms, trains etc.
4. Hmm.. Don't know yet. I'll definitely aim for 15min or so.
5. 5min shouldn't be a huge problem. But more than that is probably going to be painful (with our budget, anyways). What we need is a solid element that unifies the scenes that may otherwise be a bit chaotic at times.. Finding this kind of material from online libraries is like trying to find water in the Kalahari Desert.
6. Big Band or orchestral music is likely not going to happen.. Nor the kind of music that will require even moderately complex recording sessions or mixing..

So, what are the options?

Very simple instrumentations, solo instruments and some synthetized setup. The kind of music that's simple enough that I don't need to write it down and rehearse first. Complex arrangements should be avoided.

I really need to find a concept that'll enable me to pretty much produce and even mix the music along the way while I compose. So, let's try to keep it in Logic's arrange window as much as possible.

It really boils down to a simple principle: Try to keep the number of moving parts in as few as possible.

Elias
About me

The very first step: Importing the 4th rough cut of Teippaaja Pro into Logic. Notice that this is not yet the "locked cut". We simply don't have it yet.. So let's start with playing with some ideas and themes first.