I feel like I’ve neglected this blog a bit. A few things started to take up more of my time, energy and attention and I wound up letting months and months slip by without an update. But I guess that’s ok; the main thing from my point of view is that I didn’t stop trying to channel creative energy. The vast majority of my efforts have been in the realm of music, so that’s what this post is about, mostly. That and a really harebrained idea I have for a game.
I can’t recall exactly when this happened, but sometime early in 2024 I switched from playing guitar to playing bass. I played a borrowed four string bass for a few months and then picked up a five string for myself. I like having that extra low range. I have really been enjoying it – it’s very different from guitar in terms of the approach and I’ve learned a lot as a result, and it has helped me hear new things in music, even in very familiar pieces. It helps that our drummer also has extensive experience with bass and has coached me some on how to change stylistically. You can really feel a difference in the music when the bass and drums, the kick especially, are locked in together. I am pretty sure that this is what makes a band sound “tight.”
The bass has a much larger scale than a guitar does, and as a result, it is physically more demanding to play. My fingers hurt for a while as I got used to the thicker strings. Also, when I finally picked up the guitar again after a couple of months, it felt almost childishly small to me. All of a sudden I was able to make four or five fret stretches pretty easily. And I’ve noticed during our less active periods that I have to stay in practice or I loose my chops much, much faster than I did for guitar – more endurance in the musculature is required, and if I don’t play for a few weeks, I wind up feeling like my arm or fingers are almost, like, paralyzed after playing something with a lot of fast downpicking.
About three months ago, we decided to record a few songs, essentially an EP. Our drummer has done music professionally since he was in his early twenties, and he has a pretty nice home studio so we did the actual recording there to save money that we are now using for post-production. We wrapped up the recording part itself a couple of weeks ago and it’s been sent to someone who really knows what they are doing for mixing and mastering and general post-production.
One of the things that I feel like I really grasped during this particular recording experience is the role of preproduction and how incredibly important it actually is. Typically I have always thought of preproduction as just rehearsing the songs into the ground and making sure that everyone knows where they need to be at all times, knows the pieces backwards and forwards. And that has actually been sufficient in the past, when all we were looking to do was capture what we do live. But it’s also the time to ensure that everyone is on the same page, and in a band like the one we are in now where we are doing some somewhat more complex arrangements than we could easily reproduce live, this really matters. The thing about working in the studio is that if there are differences of creative vision, they come right to the fore and can no longer be ignored during the recording process. That can be a real test of a band’s communication and interpersonal skills, since you often have multiple creatives with strong personalities and opinions who are involved in the disagreement. We did have some differences in our creative visions for some of the material this time around. Mostly with us it involved the keyboardist / singer wanting to add a LOT of instruments that are not normally part of our performance. He has a much different sense of dynamics than the other three of us, and we were sort of constantly having to restrain and reel him in. We worked through it, but there were some moments when I could tell it was stressful for various members of the band. It’s never fun to be told “Hey that idea you had? Yeah, we don’t like it,” you know? And for myself personally, I don't enjoy delivering this kind of news either, and would expect most people do not. In the future, I am going to do my best to make sure that this kind of thing gets hashed out during preproduction. I’m also going to make sure that during the recording process, if there are differences of opinion anyway, that the band has a “lead” we have agreed can make the final decision on something if we cannot otherwise reach consensus. A “ref” if you will. The drummer has also acted as a producer for a lot of other bands during his career, and he filled the same role for us. If he’s going to do that again, I’m going to make sure he has buy in from the entire band so that he can make the final decision on a dispute and once he does, we cease discussion and move on.
I don’t want to make it sound too dramatic, it really was not bad compared to some of the disputes I’ve been in with fellow band members. I will say though, that it takes a special kind of person to be a singer; they almost have to have a little ego. I used to have kind of a hate-on for singers and spent about 10 years playing in bands that were instrumental only as a result. It stemmed from several experiences I had at live shows I played where the band minus the singer humped in all the gear – our drummer at the time had a massive heavy metal kit with two bass drums and like 6 rack toms and probably as many cymbals and just a ton of hardware to rig it all up. This was also in the days where you had to have a decently powerful amp to play a live show, so those also weighed like eighty pounds – most house sound systems were much more primitive than they are now. So the band gets all this gear in, and set up, and we’re waiting for the singer. And he’s not there….and he’s not there…and it’s fifteen minutes to go live and he’s not there….and it’s ten minutes to go live and he’s not there….and it’s five minutes to go live and he shows up doped to the gills carrying a microphone. This happened more than once. Thankfully the guy we are working with these days is not like that at all.
Anyway, I think the recording should be ready within the next couple of months. It’s just a little thing, hardly even an EP, two songs at about five minutes, two that are around a minute and a half, and one that is about twenty seconds. The singer wanted to do thirty songs, and given that we ran into some of this stuff, I am really, really glad we didn’t try to do that! We got mixes on the first few short pieces back earlier this week, and I am hugely impressed with the guy doing that work. He’s really managed to get the best out of the recordings. Of course, I am of the (admittedly biased) opinion that he had really solid material to begin with, but still – given that these were just little throwaway things, I am really pleased with how they sound and am eager to hear what he does with the longer, more complex, more serious stuff. There is probably not much call for it, but I will post links when the stuff is ready. One tune in particular might be of interest to people familiar with this blog; the lyrics were written by the singer after he read a short story of mine posted here, and then we co-wrote the music. My original inspiration for the story was a sort of amalgam of real world stuff that has kind of haunted me for years and ideas from the Starling and Shrike world that Dave (aka Her Christmas Knight, who runs the Grand Commodore blog) created. It’s been really interesting to watch how one idea can spin out and serve as inspiration for multiple projects, even cross-genre. The same kind of thing happened a long while ago working with this particular singer where I wrote a short story and he wound up writing lyrics based on the story. That tune musically quoted Lovely Rita Meter Maid and Sympathy for the Devil (at the same time, no less!) and then went into a dirgelike metal thing. The overall effect was a little Helter Skelter, like the acid trips of the Summer of Love gone very, very bad indeed and devolved into the Tate-LaBianca murders. I’m really quite fond of it.
Aside from the main band, I’ve started fooling around with some ideas for a two-piece side project with the guitarist. Heavy, super bleak industrial stuff reminiscent of Streetcleaner-era Godflesh. It gives me an excuse to tune the 5th string on the bass even lower and allow all the nasty feedback I generate when I use distortion to bleed through ungated. That side project is in its infancy right now and it may discontinue before much happens with it, but we will see. At the very least it’s forcing me to learn a lot more about drum machines and MIDI programming than I have ever bothered with in the past.
SO: There are some really interesting parallels between playing RPGs and being in a band. The most obvious one is that you’re all trying to imagine and create something together, and it’s very easy to think of a band as a bunch of PCs. There are also both roles and rules. The role parallel is pretty easy to envision I think – drummer: maybe the fighter, bass player: cleric, guitar player: rogue, singer: magic user. Of course these could be interpreted differently, and there is overlap, and multi-classing, and you might wind up with like an electronic digeridoo sub-class, but I think most people would agree that these parallels make sense. Like a party of PCs, a band must often cooperate if they are to achieve the best result; when that result is achieved, whether it is in an RPG or a band, there is a sense not just of getting to a flow state, but of arriving at a group flow state, which is just an amazing feeling, exponentially better for every additional person who gets there together. There’s also the potential for PvP, particularly if the singer shows up late and so fucked-up they can’t function. I’ll admit I’m holding on to a bit of resentment there.
There are also rules. Even in the most avant-garde bands, and those most dedicated to improvisation, there is usually some structure. One project I was a part of (which was actually a very very long running thing) there was one rule, which was: if you know how to play it, you’re not allowed to touch it. A lot of people would call what that project did noise rather than music, but I have a very loose definition of music – “sounds arranged for the purpose of listening to.” And by that definition what we were doing was certainly music, as well as just a lot of fun. There were some absolutely beautiful, happy accidents during improv sessions with that group where things came together even though no one knew how to play whatever instrument they were holding, if it even was an instrument – sessions with that band used to begin with someone emptying a box full of toys that made weird noises into a central area in the middle of the room. This pile consisted of everything from a kid’s laser gun that made zap sounds to an old 8 track machine to an out of tune harpsicord, to a child’s xylophone. Once we used the spring from a garage door to make absolutely heinous crashing sounds. Probably we are lucky it didn’t snap and take someone’s head off as it unwound.
But in what most folks think of as music, there are more and more rules - typically you need to play in the same key for example, and stay in time, and you usually don’t want the bass to be louder than the vocals. And there are quite obvious skill checks when it comes to playing the music, but not so obvious ones as well: I’ve watched more than one person fail a wisdom check by putting a beer on top of their amplifier which then vibrated until it tipped over and spilled the contents into their gear. To continue the D&D metaphor, one could think of different bands as different parties. And I guess the city or area in which a band plays is the campaign world, whether that’s the local suburban VFW, clubs in the city, or, at the superstardom level, the world.
Because of all these parallels between being in a band and playing RPG’s I have had this recurring idea to write an RPG where the characters are musicians and their enemy is possibly the crowd itself. I was initially thinking the enemy would be other bands, but I like the idea of the crowd being the foe. Somewhat related, buried in the root for the word “monster” is “monstrare” – which among other things, means “to show.” I kind of like that.
Each kind of musician (drummer, guitar player, etc) would have an RPG analog level and techniques they could learn as they leveled up, almost like spells or feats. The venue (the “dungeon” analog) can make a massive difference, like maybe one place is a total shithole that pays in pitchers. I played a venue (which shall remain nameless) like this once, and wound up ordering a pitcher of gin, which seemed like a very good idea at the time, but in hindsight (speaking of failed wisdom checks) was unwise. I did not have a great performance that particular night (though I managed not to fall off the stage either, which was actually kind of difficult given that it was split by a lane leading to the bathroom down the middle). But another venue might give you 10% of the door or something, which could be used like treasure. And gear would be like, well, gear – swords and armor and stuff. I guess the lawyers might come after me if I use brand names like Fender and Gibson but maybe a Gibson 335 gives you a +2 skill check when playing rockabilly or using the chicken picking technique, where something like a BC Rich Warlock or Mockingbird gives you that kind of bonus if you’re playing death metal, or shredding – something along those lines, anyway! I’ll do my best to work out something that makes sense.
If this thing stops living entirely in my head and I start to actually put down anything solid, I’ll throw it up here. And if anyone knows of anything out there already that is like this, I’d love to hear about it – I’m aware of something out there called Deathbulge that looks kind of amusing and similar enough that I may abandon this entire idea completely, but I don’t know very much about it - if anyone has played it, I would love to hear what it was like!
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