‘Whatcha working on?’
Music composition for the amateur can be a challenging affair, leaving them with a couple of options. Firstly, they can practice on their own, and when sufficiently skilled they can go searching for other musicians to play with.
This isn’t as easy to accomplish as it sounds, and is dependent on some sort of social network where one can ‘advertise’ oneself and talk about the sort of music one is able to play, or is looking for more experience in playing. Before the arrival of social media the local music equipment shop used to serve as a communal host, with a corkboard for hosting short messages: ‘Pop-funk bassist looking to join band, influences include The Gap Band, Phone The Pope and George Clinton. Call Harry on XXXX for more details’.
‘A new song.’
In one small ad, tightly compressed, were the essential details: the name of the advertiser, what style they played in, three suitable musical heroes they listened to a lot and copied, their contact details. These days, with social media, the corkboard has disappeared and is replaced by the music shop moderating a group on Facebook. This gives the musician a chance to not only share the details they did before, but link to other sites (perhaps to other songs they’d written or played on) and include the killer app, video. A video of the musician in person, ideally playing their instrument, gives the viewer the opportunity to see the poster and thus make judgements about the poster’s suitability for any musical endeavours. One can quickly see if Harry looks the funk part, or is more likely to appeal to the shoe gazers.
‘What’s it called?’
The other option is for the more auteur[1]musician: Do It Yourself. In the 1980s there arrived a godsend for the creative musician who found themselves temporarily embarrassed by not having a full, professional backing band at their disposal. That godsend was the sequencer, and it enabled bedroom musicians to write songs that would normally require a full band to play but could instead by played by the musician/songwriter themselves into a grey box and all of the constituent parts––bass, keyboards, drums, string instruments, wind instruments, percussion, and so on––playing back in perfect time and key. Soon after the arrival of the grey box sequencer the computer version arrived, courtesy of Cubase, and that software remains one of the leading software sequencers available on the world market. As an aside, I bought the first version of Cubase––Cubase 1.0––in 1990 and still use the latest version of Cubase today. And like most owners of sophisticated technology, I probably only use around 5% of its features and power.
Today there are a number of world-class, powerful computer-based sequencers like Cubase. There’s Pro Tools, there’s Garage Band for the Mac, there’s Ableton Live. All have their fans and detractors, as you would expect among passionate people.
‘0077.’
‘Isn’t that your age, ha ha? What style is the song in?’
A musician has tools of the trade: their instrument of choice, mainly. Plus, any ancillary equipment such as effect ‘stomp’ boxes, stands, microphones, cables, spare reeds, sticks and rods, spare bows, and so on. The amateur musician, perhaps working from their bedroom or study, needs equipment too.
First, a powerful computer. Dad’s old desktop is probably not powerful enough to run and manage today’s DAW (Digital Audio Workstation––Cubase, Pro Tools, and the like). It would likely choke and stutter when asked to do complex tasks. Even simple tasks such as recording a vocal track might be beyond it. So only a fairly new, high-spec computer will meet the requirements now and for the immediate future.
‘Eighties, with highly compressed and gated drums.’
Then there’s a need for an audio interface. They allow you to input analogue equipment such as guitars and microphones and record them into your song project.
Then the musician will need a way of listening to the sounds that are being created. For this the pair of speakers that came with the computer won’t be good enough. The musician won’t have to spend a lot, but a professional pair of monitor speakers will make mixing so much more pleasant and accurate. It will save time that would otherwise be spent remixing sounds that don’t sound ‘right’ on the car stereo, for example. The monitor speakers are ‘flat’, meaning they don’t have any audio equalisation or acoustic bias applied to them. The idea behind the use of them goes something like this: if you can create a mix that sounds good on ‘flat’ speakers, that mix is going to sound good on every speaker.
‘Is there a market for eighties songs anymore?’
Also required is a keyboard you can use to power the DAW’s in-built array of sounds. A cheap MIDI keyboard is good enough, and they come in 25-, 49-, 61- and 88-key variants. MIDI is short for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and is the world-wide protocol for the movement and management of digital musical information amongst musical equipment and computer-based music programs. Something that sometimes tricks novice digital musicians is the fact that the MIDI keyboard plays notes, not sounds. Just because the computer or sound module is playing a piano sound doesn’t mean that is what the computer will record. The DAW will just record the notes the keyboard plays, so that at some other stage a different sound can be ‘replayed’ by the DAW (for example, a drum kit, or a soft string section, or a saxophone or trumpet)––same notes, different sound.
‘Sure is, the retro market. It’s niche but profitable. Jamiroquai were very successful in the eighties and nineties by playing seventies acid jazz-funk. I am hoping to write an eighties rock-pop song and be successful in a different decade, just like Jamiroquai.’
The amateur musician, although envious of the professional musician, now has at their fingertips the same tools the professional uses to record, arrange and mix music. There is no barrier to success these days.
For example, all successful songwriters and movie soundtrack composers use DAWs. It’s just the way things are done. They use the same tools as the amateur musician, although at the higher-spec ‘pro’ end of the range of DAWs (for example, Cubase has a ‘Pro’ product, a mid-level ‘Artist’ product and an amateur ‘Elements’ product. The only real difference between them are the number of tracks that can be recorded and played, and I’ve never been caught short by having ‘Elements’ as my DAW; I don’t write music as complex as an orchestral piece or a movie soundtrack, I write pop-rock songs).
‘Can I have a listen?’
As an example of just who is successfully using Cubase, here’s some names: Hans Zimmer (movie soundtrack composer), Hildur Guðnadóttir (cellist and movie soundtrack composer), James Newton Howard (movie soundtrack composer), Paul Oakenfold (twice voted World DJ of the Year), Nils Frahm (German composer), New Order (English rock band), Tiësto (voted Best DJ of the last 20 years), Jóhann Jóhannsson (composer for theatre, dance, television and films), Chvrches (Scottish synth-pop band), and many more. Wikipedia’s page on Cubase lists eighty successful musicians who use the software, but of course that’s just eighty names that Wikipedia’s editors know about; the number of actual successful bands and composers is probably much, much higher. The point being that if successful musicians use it, and you can too, then perhaps you can be successful as well.
‘Sure. Just bear in mind that I haven’t fully mixed it yet, it’s still very wobbly and not as tight and polished as I will eventually mix it to be.’
The impediments to success as a musician, particularly the songwriter but by no means limited to them, are the same that have always plagued musicians. You need a distinctive sound, you need something catchy––a ‘hook’, you need contacts in the industry to help you find a recording contract. You need an agent and a lawyer to protect you from the ruthless types that exist in the industry. None of this has changed. But as the technology to create music has advanced, so too has the democratisation of the record industry. No longer are the few, the record labels, the only ways to the market. Democratising outlets such as bandcamp.com provide the artist with a way of reaching the market and selling their wares, including merchandise such as t-shirts, stickers, vinyls, and so on. It is up to the artist to conduct their own marketing and outreach. I even have my own page on Bandcamp.
The musician artist can control their marketing destiny. They can place their albums and singles up on iTunes and Google Play for little outlay. They can manage and run a blog, a Tik Tok account, an Instagram account. They can talk direct with their fans through these social media accounts. All activities that the artist can perform for free and that the traditional record company would have charged lots for. I remember the English musician and songwriter Thomas Dolby marvelling over this new marketing environment. He could place an advert on Facebook for just $29 a night in cities he was about to perform in, whereas the traditional record company would have charged him thousands, he said.
To sum up, today’s musician faces the same impediments to success that have always been there––access to the market, attractive material, representation––but the technological impediments, the requirement of a horrendously expensive studio and expensive production staff, have been replaced by technology that the home musician can use to create masterpieces.
‘It’s amazing that you can make a song on your computer and have it sound like one you’d hear on the radio.’
‘It is, isn’t it? That’s the power of technology, that what was once only in the hands of the few can now be in the hands of the many. It’s very cool.’
It is, indeed.
[1] A creative (usually a filmmaker) whose individual style and complete control over all elements of production give a creative output a personal and unique stamp. Dictionary.com