As part of my quest to humanize the digital, to utilize technologies as tools to enhance art rather than a replacement for the artist, I have been doing more of my work live, especially my music.
Back when I first started doing work as a recording technician in the early 2000s, I realized what a pretend product a studio recording could be. It sounds like live musicians but is, in reality, a complicated mesh of performances carefully edited and mixed to achieve what in prior eras would be a perfect musical performance. To that end, I view it more like painting a picture than performing music. It’s a careful, slow, and tedious process that creates a “frozen” idea of the music that, if not perfect, is the best realization of the music for permanent memory.
There are a lot of trade-offs to such an approach to recording. The big one is the loss of the human, as more and more tools come out to make things “perfect” and thus level out all the human gestures in music. Using, for example, autotune can produce a technically less erroneous performance but one that also lacks the liveliness and nuance of the human voice as we really hear it. Click tracks and programmed drums can be rhythmically perfect, but they don’t groove or subtly stretch time the way real drummers do when reacting to real musicians.
You don’t necessarily have to make such trade-offs when recording, but you do have to accept the resulting lack of perfection when recording live and also be well-rehearsed. Most modern bands write in the studio; they don’t walk in and lay down tracks they’ve spent years gigging on, like Stevie Ray Vaughan or Gov’t Mule. The energy of a human really doing something live gets traded for a realization of an idea with as few mistakes as possible. You lose something by turning music into a careful painting. The perfect is the enemy of the good.
I found this to be an issue back when I started recording myself playing classical guitar. I could make a recording perfect, but it often sounded lifeless and devoid of the expression I wanted to have in my recordings, especially as a musician who has spent so much of my life playing live in front of audiences. You also end up with the problem in classical guitar of recording things that others have done a dozen times over, and your recording ends up sounding just the same (at best). I was turned off from recording for a long time as a result.
Lately, I’ve returned to the music game (for like the third time), and this is all post-Pro Tools, post-AI, and post-[insert your favorite MIDI sequencer here]. It’s also post-YouTube, and that offers a special opportunity. YouTube is a live format because it is video. I have the opportunity to do my music live!
The problem was how to achieve this, considering I moved into an instrumental rock and soundtrack-like style starting in 2017. These were pieces that featured improvisation, to be sure, but were full of many tracks, contained complex forms and hemiolas, and were, at times, vertically dense.
The solution was the Ableton Push, a software controller for Ableton Live software.
I have to be clear that it is the software that makes what I am currently doing possible, but the controller makes operating the software so smooth and intuitive I don’t think I’d be able to do what I am currently doing with just a mouse. Add to that the expressive possibility of the pads where I can bend pitches, slide, add vibrato in a natural manner, crescendo, and decrescendo… It’s far beyond a typical keyboard and very natural for me, a string player.
I love Live because it has two sides to it: what they call the arrangement view, which is like a traditional DAW (digital audio workstation—recording software like ProTools or Cubase), and session view, which is like a big grid of loops.
This is what allows me to do what I’ve done so far on the Zul channel. It’s like a looper on steroids. It allows me to perform improvisations solo while emulating full instrumentation.
Yes, improv. I do everything live on the channel, and everything is improvised. In fact, I made the channel to record my journey as I figure out what I’m doing and get closer to the ideal that is floating in my head, something that I cannot yet fully describe in words. It would be similar to what is on my first two albums, but all done live on the spot.
Really, doing music live adds a different dimension to the experience, which is why you can’t program jazz with a MIDI sequencer. Every moment is a different moment, with different thoughts and emotions, and so every improvisation is a different journey, a different picture of the passions of the performer. Even when you are performing a set piece, as I spent many years of my life doing as a classical guitarist, you never play it the same way twice. I prefer never to attempt to do so. It’s boring for me, and it also will cause your performance to sound mechanical when you try too hard to replicate a performance. My fortissimo is never the same night to night, nor do I perform rubato the same, nor do I control my vibrato in the same way, nor do I use the exact same tone each time.
To do your job as a performer, you can’t always do it the same way. I spent years performing in noisy environments, and you must execute your music differently to cut through and make an impact. That might mean playing faster or louder or just using a brighter tone that penetrates background noise. It might mean selecting different pieces, and it might mean playing those pieces with different dynamics and tempos.
Doing it live means adaptation.
But there are obvious hazards, the main one being mistakes. These come in many forms, and not all of them are equally apparent to the listener. It could be something like a buzzed note or just playing a section at slightly too slow a tempo and slightly too bright a tone. Fingernail clicks and string squeaks. Those little things can shake an inexperienced performer. A professional knows that he has to live with imperfection because it stares him in the face every night. It’s impossible! So instead, you do your best and also try to move the audience as much as possible, rather than being passive and afraid of somebody noticing a mistake.
So, on the Zul channel, the mistakes are there. In some cases, the mistakes are quite obvious, and in others, subtle. Sometimes, the mistake is the entire concept of the piece I am trying to make, and the whole thing sounds either boring or ugly. However, I still try to document the process and let the listener decide when I nail it and when I fail it. That’s the other beauty of live improvisational music: there is always next time. Every piece is a learning experience. Where did I screw up, and why? What did I try to do that is beyond my current reach? What critical thing did I forget?
It’s a fun and invigorating process if you embrace it, but I know many people would be too embarrassed or stressed out to work forward in that way. Listening back the other day during the Livewrite, I saw just how rough my initial musical practice sessions were, which I chose to post to push myself forward. There were false starts, long moments of silence, and visible frustration on my face. But there were also good ideas in there. I had a vision, even if the knowledge of my setup wasn’t there for me to realize it.
I know I’m going to reach what I’m imagining eventually. I’m imagining playing a concert – maybe in person or, more likely, just online – and going with what I feel and being able to sketch out the entire texture and form of the piece live with just my guitar and my push. Maybe I pull the texture down and throw in a baroque guitar piece just because it’s something different. That slow change of minimalism and ambient, but also improvised live, going on for what seems like both a long and a short amount of time like Steve Reich’s The Desert Music. Something that is relaxing but also has potent moments of interest and passion in the form of a solo or a sudden change.
There are so many skills to master to get there, but sometimes, when I’m recording a piece, I smile as I finish because I know I nailed it. Part of what I imagined ended up on the tape. It sounds like something I want to listen to myself. It’s for me, and it meets my standards, even with the inevitable mistakes. I hear Miles Davis clam the same notes on Kind of Blue for eternity; he lived with those little failures, knowing the whole was great.
So, to that end, Zul is throwing a lot of spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks, but it’s also a living documentary of my progress as a musician, pursuing something that I can’t quite describe yet. Maybe I’ll get better at it, but we’ll see. What is it, anyway? Ambient guitar? It sounds like ambient guitar, certainly, but there are other things there, like synth. There are rhythms, classical guitar parts, minimalism, drums… It’s instrumental music. It’s humanizing the digital world of music because I am a human!
And that’s the last thing about live performance. The act of live music is fundamentally human.
If you are interested in the technical aspects, here is a livestream where I break it down:
https://www.youtube.com/live/3vNBXHk8l9E?si=Sh4uP7Uj1YAIorx6
I am an independent artist and musician. You can get my books by joining my Patreon or Ko-Fi, and you can listen to my current music on YouTube or buy my albums at BandCamp.
You make some excellent points regarding the state of modern music. The canned drums that are timed to perfection. The voices that are flawlessly autotuned. I think this one of the reasons why I find most modern music so lifeless and boring.
I wonder if I'm turning into the the old guy who just hates the new fangled music that the kids are into these days, but I think there is more to it. In my youth I liked hard core punk, and my parents and grandparents didn't like it. To them, the heavily guitar distortion sounded grating. The extremely fast tempo was very different than what they had grown up with. It made the melodies difficult to pick out, and the lyrics hard to understand. I can understand why, from their perspective, the music was jarring and unpleasant.
I don't feel at all about modern music the way my elders felt about my music. It's not the least bit offensive sounding to me. If anything it's a watered down version of the mass market pop of my youth, just further simplified. It's dull. It's empty. It's the equivalent of an audio sleep inducing drug.
Your Zul channel is a refreshing change of pace. I wish you luck with it.
I was always on the lookout for more Zul anytime it came out so have been tuning in and really enjoying what you're creating. 🔥