SYNTHS AND SNIPS / reconstructing the existing

SYNTHS

Every time I don't feel like playing an instrument (which is not that often), I experiment with synths and sounds. Playing around with synths comes as a good break from playing an actual instrument and I don't feel like I'm playing something to write something - I'm playing it for the joy of making sounds. It's fun to pick a synth and then just turn the knobs to see if you can modulate it to become as close to the sound you have in your head as possible. Another thing I like a lot about synths is that the thought process is a lot different than with other instruments. Synths get modulated quickly which means you don't spend a lot of time listening to the same sounds and every new sound you come up with makes you think of another new sound - it's a fun little circle of thought where you constantly think of something new because something new is constantly happening. After I've written two new demo tracks with guitars and drums and so on (Days of Destruction and Finnegan's Wake), I decided to take a much needed synth break.

SNIPS

Another thing I sometimes enjoy is to try and re-imagine an existing song or take parts of it and put it into an entirely new context. It's a process not that different from the one involving synths. When I hear something that interests me, I try to think about it in as many different contexts as possible. Like, can Bach be a techno track? or what if Chopin had a Roland synth? It might sound silly (and often times it is), but it allows me to think outside of the box and helps my writing go places it wouldn't usually go to. David Byrne just released his new album American Utopia and it's probably his best solo work in years. He's even touring Croatia's INMusic Festival this summer so I'm excited to finally see one of the true greats. Listening to American Utopia made me re-visit the Talking Heads catalog and I couldn't help but admire the transformations the band went through, somehow always managing to stay their own. It also got me thinking about David Byrne's creative process and his crazy out of the box collaborations with other musicians (like Brian Eno, St. Vincent, Fat Boy Slim etc.) or his projects like playing a building. All of this made me want to try and have a little fun with the kind of music and ''writing'' I don't usually do.

(here's Byrne performing his new material live on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. If you haven't checked ''American Utopia'' yet, make sure you do because it's a terrific record!)

SYNTHS & SNIPS

So now for the fun part. My latest goofing around with various synths resulted in recording a track I can't really use in any of my current projects. It's a straight forward, electro, synths based pop track with a simple no vocals chorus-verse-chorus-verse-double chorus pop structure and some contemporary up-to-date sounds one might hear on the radio, but with an 80's vibe and some hip-hop grooves in the background. It's a fun track, the arrangements turned out very nice and I'm even pleased with the overall ad-hoc production of the track but, as I've said, I had no way of actually using it for something I'm doing and let alone for a live show. Then I though: why don't I make it into sort of a half cover song? What I mean by half cover is this: taking an original song and putting vocals from a totally different song on top of it. So I went online to see if there are any David Byrne isolated vocals or something like that. The only thing I could find was ''Once in a lifetime'' with isolated vocals which was actually great because the singing in that particular song (apart from the chorus) is something like spoken-word or, as David Byrne explained in his book, it's supposed to be an immitation of a church preacher preaching over the radio. This is great because the ''singing'' doesn't really follow a certain tempo or a certain measure so I could put the vocals anywhere in the song without even thinking about it and it works great. Since I already decided NOT to use the well known chorus part, I contructed a chorus of my own by using the phrase ''same as it ever was'' appearing a lot of times in the original song. The isolated vocals I had were a bit dry so I put some delay and some vocal plate reverb on it and that's it. I ended up with a half original/half cover song in something like 15 minutes. It's not the best thing I ever came up with or the best ''remix'' I've ever done, but it's a nice little track and, most importantly, IT WAS A LOT OF FUN. So, here it is and I hope it will be fun to you as well!