Re: recording methods - what's your approach?

[Per Boysen <perboysen@gmail.com>]

2010/7/12 Christo Jota <chris@christojota.de>:
>> > The problem with recording an album by using material from looping jam
>> > sessions is that it might
>> > be spontaneous fresh sounding music, but it lacks from (complex)
>> > composed
>> > tracks and good sounding.


There is an obvious treat for this issue: learn at least as much about
music as you already know about "playing"! Whenever you play a note
you should be able to "hear" this note at any position in any
key/scale. Same goes for chord and arpeggiation theory, just learn it
all and keep it in the back of your mind while playing. With this
method all your "simple" melody/noise playing will be rooted in a
musical complexity. During improvisation performance you may
experiment with playing over alternative imaginary contexts in order
to load the same musical phrase with different emotional content. At
the second stage, when post producing a recorded improvisation, you
remember those founding structures and, if you like, you can recreate
them as sounding parts embedding the improvisation.

I have been using this method since I started playing improvised music
and it always works. Good thing is that even if you get interrupted
and forget 90 percent of the backing structures the resulting 10
percent will work as a sharpened creativity booster for refining the
recorded improvisation in a "re-composing" way.

Make up your own definition of "music". Not only according to the
usual music theory, timbre, phrasing, thematic variation,
"questions-answers, time, space etc. Make sure you get to learn
certain elements in "music" as they relate to you, your memories and
your unique personality, simply how you use to think on an average
day. Can't go wrong. An example of this technique is well laid out in
Victor Wooten's book "The Music Lesson". Wooten chooses to go with ten
"parameters" in music, as a universal take (used as chapter names in
the book), but one can as well experiment with a different scheme.

best

per boysen