Stardom and Anonymity

I join the masses in loving the music of Norah Jones. I watched an interview she gave today on Billboard.com, and was far from impressed. For being such a brilliant songwriter, singer, and instrumentalist, she was a far cry from articulate. And I found her comments leaned toward the conceited side. What a let-down.

Famous musicians, the ones who become household names, seem to lead lives that are often disturbed and filled with angst. Strange how money and fame mangle the lives of those who have both, yet somehow hold strong appeal to those who have neither.

As the Redline Project album begins to take shape, I am convinced of two things:

1) The music I am producing is fairly good - compelling, varied, and gives the listener a good bit to think about.

2) The music I am producing is not nearly good enough to be an attention-getter or career-builder.

Somewhere inside of me lurks the evil desire to strike a chord with a world full of music listeners and piece together a career as a touring, recording, performing musician. The sensible part of me - a small but growing percentage of my being - inches closer each day to rejecting those thoughts. What a mess stardom would be; anonymity is far superior.

Lessons from Glen and Marketa

To say that I had a great time on America's highways over the weekend would be a grand understatement. The Redline Project is not a venue for personal pontification, so I will reserve my bouquet of wanderlust tales for blogs that exist elsewhere.

The trip's relevance to the Redline Project is somewhat limited as I did not write songs, record tracks, or research software techniques while away. In short, a fuse in my mind had blown, and I gave the old brain a weekend off. I am pleased to report that my cranium is operating at full tilt, and I am ready once again to dive into the deep end of this project.

Of all the dashboard crooners that meandered around the Gulf Coast with me, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova spent a considerable amount of time singing through a stack of songs from the movie, "Once."

Have you seen the film? If you have not, go rent it tonight. If you are busy tonight, put it on the list for tomorrow. "Once" is the story of two brokenhearted musicians who meet each other in Dublin, Ireland. The two form a beautiful collaboration and discover a life-giving friendship in the process. The film is gorgeous, the plot delicious, and the music sumptuous. One lovely detail about the movie: the main actors realized their music was meant to exist past the scope of the picture and started a band that still performs today.

Why are you still reading this blog post? Go to the rental store now, or at least hit up your Netflix queue.

Beyond enjoying the music at face value, I spent ample time listening deeply to Glen and Marketa, trying to understand lyrics and their constructions, considering song structures, analyzing chords, pondering vocal techniques.

Neither Glen Hansard or Marketa Irglova have perfect voices. On the recordings, there are notes out of tune, phrases unaligned rhythmically, and even an occasional wrong note. Why then is the music so gripping, so compelling, so haunting?

Part of the answer lies in the performers' abilities to bring their songs to life with emotional conviction. Their voices cry in sad moments and rip during choruses of rage. The two singers invite the listener on a journey into the story behind the song, and it is impossible not to taste the bittersweet sentiments carefully penned for such a purpose.

I have over-thought every lyric I have written for this project, trying to saturate every line with as much meaning and emotion as it could hold. Because I deem my voice an unworthy instrument, I have relied on words alone to create meaning in the songs I am trying to sing.

With Glen and Marketa as role models, I am going to practice using whatever voice I have to deliver compelling performances of the poetry I am working so diligently to write. I would like nothing better than for my songs to be compelling and perfect, but since I have to choose, compelling may be the way to go.

Stepping Stones

I am one month and 13 recorded experiments into my brazen return to music. As I walked a friend through some basics of Logic Express two nights ago, it occurred to me that I have rounded up quite a bit of knowledge in a short amount of time.

Ask me how to send a signal to the sidechain of the EVOC Vocoder or how to dump samples into the ESX-24 Synth. Inquire about sending audio to a bus for effects treatment or boiling down all the tracks into a MP3 bounce. I will be able to explain, and the answer I offer will be at least somewhat more substantive than moose poo. Progress.

With each new effect, synth, and recording trick I tuck into the toolbelt, it is apparent that endless possibilities tempt the great danger of overproducing. A familiar ailment from my early days as a graphic designer, I used to smother my projects with every possible plug-in, from drop shadows to bevels, from inner glows to noise overlays. Sure, I could click buttons, but was I exhibiting any taste, any restraint, any thoughtfulness in my selections?

This is why you, the listener, are essential to the success of this initiative. In the scratch recordings posted here, do you enjoy the ones with a raw sound? Do you like any that have heavy voice effects or vocoding? Do you prefer the instrumental tracks? The found-sound experiments? The lighter songs?

Joining my continued efforts in songwriting and scratch recording, the next step for the Redline Project is to draft an overall approach for the final product; a set of guidelines that will steer the artistic direction of the final piece. There will be plenty more to which you can listen in the coming days, though the focus of this project will start to shift from experimentation to conceptualizing the actual album.

Now is the time to scratch on the Facebook group wall, bombard the email, click away on the 'comment' button. What's working, and what does not come together for you? What keeps you coming back for more? What sounds scratch away at your nerves? Sincere thanks for all who are reading along and offering feedback. The Redline Project is nothing without you.

Justin the Bug Man

Around 2:00 this afternoon, the doorbell rang. Our hero (and nemesis to all things crawly) Justin the exterminator returned for another round of critter genocide. The bell tolls for roaches and palmettos once a quarter, and on such nasty occasions we are usually good to remember pulling bric-brac away from walls to speed up the process.

No more than ten minutes into his rampage of bug doom, Justin burst through the office door with a look of fire in his eyes unfamiliar from our previous visits.

"What kind of Guild is in that case?"

One of the many items not tucked into its usual spot was my acoustic-electric cutaway. He must have seen the emblem on the case.

"It's an F4-CE. Post Fender, but still pretty sweet."

That's all he needed to unearth the true Justin from under pounds of bug-man disguise. What was a gray-uniformed employee morphed into a human being full of vitality and wonder. We engaged in a conversation about guitars, and guitar brands, and recording, and home recording, and musical goals, and songwriting, and lyrics, and, and, and...

Turns out Justin is one of us: a person whose heart palpitates for music. He has a wife and two kids, all supportive of his art and at the same time all needing cash for groceries, shoes, and school supplies. I already knew that Justin pummels bugs to put potatoes on the table, but I learned today that he been jotting lyrics and rehearsing songs for twenty years.

He traded me some yellow paperwork for a 75 dollar check and headed for the door.

"This is your year. You have to do this now." I encouraged.

He agreed to aim for some recording and a little bit of performing in the coming months. I hope he follows through. I hope he can let the music out. I hope he will get heard.

Justin, if you land on this page, know that you have found a small but fiery band of sisters and brothers who all wrestle deeply with the issue at hand. There is music, art, prose, dance, drama, poetry inside trying to push to the outside. Time to let it out.

Why Redline?

Many have asked how The Redline Project came to be the title of this blog. Here is the answer:

Redline is a generic recording term. In an audio project, the levels of the tracks can be seen on a dynamic graph, often a series of LED lights. It is good if the recording illuminates the green lights and fine if the signal goes into the yellow ones, but if the red ones are lit, the sound is overloading the system and distorting. To redline also means to encounter an emotional experience greater than one knows how to handle.

There are many bands, recording studios, music projects, and sound-related ventures that use the term in their nomenclature. And yes, a search of the term will also land you in the domain of public transit systems as the name is a common indicator for subway lines.

Redline introudced itself as a possibility in a simple way: I am an avid mountain biker with passion for the sport that far exceeds my abilities as a rider. I pedal Redline bikes, and my favorite is the Monocog Flight 29er. It may have nothing to do with music, but I liked the sound of it well enough that it stuck in my head when I was looking for a name suited to a music project.

When I took my first office job five years ago, I was making a choice to quiet the music of my life. But there was a flame, somwhere down there, that kept it simmering. In recent months, more and more of those green LED lights flickered on, the levels creeping occasionally into the yellow. As I contemplated this project in the weeks leading up to the New Year, the red lamps lit, the pot boiled over. The music needed to come out.

So Redline Project it is. It is commonly held by many musicians, and artists of all types, that we were made to create. The Redline Project is an outpouring of that sentiment, an acknowledgement that my double-helixes have a loud voice in my pursuits.

I am shouting out to all of you poets, painters, potters, wordsmiths, sculptors, musicians, and the like. What are our struggles? How do the realities of life hinder us from creating? What do we do with the fear of failing? What do we dream may happen? I covet your input and will feature it, along with a link to you, on this blog.

Small Steps - Forwards and Backwards

Allow me to pontificate about message boards. When the opportunity to acquire an Alesis firewire mixer came along, I did as any good e-peon would do: I typed the model number into Google and mashed the button. Over 10,000 hits appeared, mostly to sites like IgnoramusExpert.com or ConceitedBasementTechs.net. Everything I could find seemed to say that the particular unit up for consideration is to computer recording what an icy Coca Cola is to a steamy August day. The perfect compliment, the balm for that which ails.

And the guy selling it lives less than four miles from my house. Score. I flopped ten crisp twenties on his kitchen counter and carried the digital bundle of joy back to the car.

I have been an acoustic instrumentalist for 25 years. Hit a drum, it makes a sound. This is the level of musical technology with which I have comfort. I also understand computing with a Mac. You buy a new mouse, you plug it in, it works. You want to add a drive, just slide it into place. Done. So you could imagine my wide-eyed, wiggly-tailed enthusiasm about running a simple wire between the mixer and computer and being instantly ready to lay down some tracks.

You may have figured out by now that the exciting prospect of the Redline Project has drizzled me with a delicious naivety. Late last night the first fingernail scratched the chalkboard.

The matte-gray beast skipped and popped, and the recording level was barely registering, and there was an awful, persistent hissing. One hundred knobs stared me in the face like a cyclops gone terribly wrong, all taunting, "Turn me, twist me, just try it."

I looked to my old friends the message boards for a little comfort, a little guidance. Much to my dismay, the whole two-faced lot of them had turned on me. Scores of skeptics had logged their frustrations with the same unit now sitting in my basement, most with a laundry list of grievances and very few with helpful suggestions. Furthermore, everyone uses a confounding array of technical, insider vocabulary. Latency... what the heck is latency?

I am thankful for my good friend Peter who comes over for coffee and good conversation each Thursday morning before work. He is something of a whiz with musical gear, and he had a look at my tangle of wires. Though we are not out of the woods yet, he had a few tips and ideas that give me some semblance of hope that my purchase will not prove to be a grand waste.

Due credit goes to Peter once again for lending me a condenser microphone. Any analog sounds that wind up on the final project will only be there because of this generous loan, and it will keep a good chunk of the budget unspent.

A friend that I have known since middle school contacted me with the following uplifting story. I am sharing it to encourage all of us to continually look for opportunities to express the creativity that dwells in all of us. She writes:

I am on the brink of a musical rebirth. I'm not sure if you remember that I sang in the choruses all through middle and high school. From there I was in a few ensembles and a cappella groups in college and loved every minute of it. After I graduated though, focus turned to career and family, and music took a backseat.

Now here I am, six years later, and a few months ago I got a chance invite to sing in an upstart band. It was one of those "in the right place at the right time" situations that had to be divine intervention, like a nudge from the universe to jump back in and rediscover that part of myself that I've been missing for so long.

The Importance of Song

From my first days sitting at a piano, with my kindergarten-sized legs swinging around unable to reach the pedals, I have always been moved by the sounds of the different instruments. As this fascination developed into a love, I became continually more serious about studying instrumental music. Matter of fact, I did not stop until I had a bachelors degree hanging on the wall and a masters degree tied in a neat roll on the counter.

A quick tangent and a true story worth telling: It was not more than a few days after I received my official masters degree from Fedex that I left the house to run a brief errand. When I returned 20 minutes later, I found a guilty-looking beagle, my pooch Daisy, slunk across her pillow. When she wouldn't look me in the eye, I knew it was time to survey the damage. Sure enough, I found what remained of my diploma on the floor. Daisy had consumed most of it, including the official school seal and the presidential signatures. Pffft.

For every moment I am working on these posts or researching musical gear, I am finding at least five more to contemplate my approach to creating an album of music.

The main problem: I can't sing. Not an underestimation, I know how I want the emanations of my mouth to sound, but my vocal chords refuse to cooperate. My voice is wispy and feeble, and hardly ever squarely on pitch. Hence the instrumental bent I suppose. It only follows that I have no experience writing lyrics or composing song structures.

A quick jostle through the radio dial reveals the truth anyone could have guessed: music that connects with most people has lyrics, tells a story, is sung.

Big questions loom. As I begin to put together an approach to the product of this project, will I somehow include singing and songwriting? Stick with my instrumental comfort zone? Some combination of the two? And even larger, what is the story I am trying to tell here? What is the picture I am trying to paint?

Just for giggles I sat with the blinking cursor yesterday and scribbled out a few verses. Instead of my custom of being embarrassed, I am going to make a practice of putting my scratches out there for everyone to dissect. If there are any poets or lyricists out there, feel free to dig your nails in.

Who are you? Lost around the world.

Without a face. Without a trace.

A lonely space echoes back the silence.

Years slip by without a word.

Lost into the past.

Just dial tone on the telephone.

The mailbox rattles in the wind.

Come home. Who are you?

On a lighter and much more trendy note, the Redline Project is on Facebook and Twitter now.

Facebook: The Redline Project

Twitter: @RedlineProject

Loose Schedule

I awoke several times last night thinking about the Redline Project. A year seems like a long stretch, but the time will slip away if there are not some basic deadlines for the various parts of the project. An arbitrary stab:

1) All funds acquired by January 31, 2010.
2) All equipment acquired by February 28, 2010.
3) Basic album ideas and audio sketches completed by May 15, 2010.
4) Recording completed by September 30, 2010.
5) Recording released and promoted by October 31, 2010.
6) 10,000 downloads of recording by December 31, 2010.

Again, simple and impossible all at once. Pure excitement and the fear of failure hold hands, and all I can do is try to make this happen.

First Challenge: Project Budget

I am pleased to announce that the premise of the Redline Project has been approved by the advisory board (my wife)... Well, mostly.

The first issue this project will face is a slight discrepancy in the budget allotment. Instead of having $1000 to begin, I have $0. Not an insurmountable problem, but definitely one that will require some creativity and resourcefulness.

My goal is to spend no more than $1000 on this entire project, but despite my hoping otherwise, it looks like I am going to have to find the money before I can spend it. Initial ideas: There's a fairly nice bicycle in the shed and few pieces of musical gear around the house that are no longer of use to me. I will spend some time this afternoon valuing these items and posting them for sale.

On a much more confounding note, I have commenced the tedious job of scouring through endless web pages looking for advice on piecing together an adequate recording rig. Thanks to my line of work, I already own a powerful Mac G5 that is a bit old, but still has plenty of kick. That leaves the need for recording software, audio interface, microphone(s), cables, and some sort of midi controller keyboard.

There is much to discuss about an acoustic instrumentalist (steeped in the jazz tradition) embracing the world of computer music and midi interfacing. But this is a philosophical topic that I will reserve for a day further down the road. For now, this little piggy is off to the e-market to pawn off some unwanted gear in exchange for a project budget.

The Idea

I am a musician. This is admittedly a bold statement because I have not played a gig in over three years, I am not in any sort of band or ensemble, and I have never been in a studio - not even as a sideman.

So what gives me the right to pin such a title to my lapel? To be honest, I'm not sure if I can in good conscience accept the honor of it. Or at least not yet.

I may have years of experience playing both piano and drums. I may have both a bachelors and masters degree in the field. I may have a good ear and natural ability with composing and arranging music. But the somewhat sad and all-too-honest truth is that I am completely average - nothing more, and nothing less.

Has there ever been a musician who hasn't daydreamed about excelling in their field? Performing in amphitheaters to a sea of followers? Releasing the record that pulses through the earbuds of iPods across the nation? A reality any artist must face: there are millions gazing at the celestial beings, but only a few shooting stars. Most end up with shreds of dreams and workaday posts in gray cubicles.

Like most recipients of masters degrees in music, I failed to launch any sort of career in or related to music. So I hung up my instruments and slowly pieced together a career in graphic design. Working first in an office for three years, I steadily became adept enough in this new vocation to build a freelance work base. I now sit in my basement daily, clicking away on my Mac, producing disposable artwork for nonprofit organizations that is, familiarly, neither awesome nor terrible.

I have always felt this drive, and as years come between me and the days of actively pursuing music, a sadness has crept in. I ignored it for a while, but the sense of loss has only grown with each passing month, and I have finally sifted through the lament to see what the trouble really is.

It is not money I am after, and it is certainly not fame. I believe that music resides in me and has been trying to bust through my ribs for decades. To this point my music has been the proverbial tree that falls in the middle of a thick wood. Without a witness, the whole stunning thing comes and goes without so much as a raised eyebrow.

Well, I have had enough of that. It is time to let the music out. Time to create something... put it out there in all its glory, with all its faults. It is the second day of the new year, and at this time next year, I am questing to release a digital album of my music, striving to have 10,000 people download and listen to it, aiming to spend only $1000 to do it.

There it is: a set of goals that sound simple enough and seem all but impossible. Please join me for the adventure.