keeping it (sur)real.
Brad and I played our first laptop gig last Friday, at the Cilli Original Design Gallery's grand opening. It went really well -- our frantic few weeks of preparation paid off and we played a 3.5 hour set with no breaks and no problems. My new Thinkpad T30 (nicey nice) did great.
Lots of people leaned over the DJ desk to see what was happening on our screens. They were pretty surprised to see AudioMulch screens, which don't exactly look like a recording studio.
Anyway, we'll be doing more of these... should be easier to book than Plink gigs since there are so many more potential venues. The main thing is deciding what we want to actually do. With a few days prep beforehand, we can play anything from academic sound design to big funky beats to trance to full-on digital noisecore. Yes folks, it's that easy, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I'm personally drawn to the noisecore, but that definitely reigns in the venue list a lot, and hey, playing beats really loud is fun too. So, I don't know, we'll see.
In another amusing chapter of Wordclock history, NBA Inside Drive 2004 just came out for XBox. This is amusing because... well, it's a long story. Back in July, Brad got us hooked up with some up-and-coming hip-hop kid who had an in at Microsoft Games, and was somehow going to end up on the ID2004 soundtrack. Only thing is, he didn't have a producer -- he needed a beat, and mixing, and all that. And they needed it in literally 5 days or so.
So Brad and I scrambled to throw a bunch of beats together, which was pretty comical. It's one thing to create your own style, do your own thing, innovate in your own ways; it's entirely another thing to try and kind of emulate people that are very good at something. And making good, convincing, funky-ass beats is an art form. Believe me -- that shit is deceptively simple.
We sent our ideas over to these guys and they loved one of mine, so off we went. They booked studio time, rapper kid tracked some vocals, they sent us the files, we started producing the track. The vocals were pretty bad -- the kid had heart but he was a total rookie and his time was ... sub-metronomic. We did what we could to fix him up digitally, given the amount of time we had to work. Rapper kid and MS Hookup had great things to say about everything we did.
At some point the lead audio guy at Microsoft started giving us feedback, but all second-hand, through MS Hookup (he wouldn't give us Lead Audio Guy's contact info). Lead Audio Guy was pretty negative: he wasn't crazy about the synth hook, etc etc. A lot of his feedback sounded pretty, uh, white, if you know what I mean. "Instrumentation needs to vary more on the chorus" kind of things. Right, just like all the stuff on the radio... isn't.
We frantically did revisions, we turned around production changes in hours, we took hours off of work to finish this thing. MS Hookup gave us positive vibes; we were making progress. Meanwhile, we paid our to lawyer to write up contracts real quick so hip-hop kid wouldn't run off with our beat and we negotiated contracts with the rapper kid.
By the way, all this work was pretty much for free; MS had a stack of major players signed on who were apparently doing it for nothing. Great!
Of course, you see where this is going. In the end, White Lead Audio Guy rejected the track. He cited "overly repetitive" as one of the issues ("vocal timing problems galore" was another). Oh, and a friend of his at MS had taken the same vocal tracks and produced something completely different, and they were probably gonna use that. Hah.
So yesterday I borrowed an Xbox and rented the game to see if shorty's track actually made the final cut. Sure enough, it rolls in the background of the game credits. And it's like... techno-pop! Sounds like it was done in Acid or something, and it's about 30bpm faster than the original. We were like jeez, if we knew they would have taken that...
So anyway, this whole thing was kind of hilarious throughout. I'm not mad about any of it except for the part where MS Hookup misled us right up to the last minute. Given how hard we worked for him, that's pretty fucked up.
In hindsight, we should have worked harder to please the real client, which was White Lead Audio Guy and not the artist. We should have demanded direct contact with WLAG -- then we could have established a personal rapport, and understood what he really wanted. And if the contact info was unavaialble, we should have walked away.
And really in hindsight, we should never have tried. If you're faking, if you're emulating, if you're not doing what naturally comes out of your mind... why bother? We have better shit to do.