Our band Jack and the Spare Hearts is made up of music wonks. “Wonk” is a prettier word than nerd or geek, although I’ve mostly seen the word applied when talking about people who are enthusiastic about minute details of policy or financial accounting. In this case, I use wonk to describe musicians possessing some deep interest in the technical process of creating or producing music.
Robert Reid is the least wonky of the band with regards to using technology that requires sitting in front of a monitor or laptop screen for hours at a time. I should point out here that the British usage of “wonky” implies unsteady or askew, while the American usage leans towards “overly studious” or “obsessed by details”. It’s a purdy word any way you use it. Anyway, Robert can talk for hours on end about guitars, guitar riffs, songs from the past six decades, touring with The Platters, etc. Robert has a great mind for technical detail with regards to music, so he is certainly a wonk, a most pleasant one at that.
Kim Regimbal has more musical instruments and toys than almost anyone I’ve met. I watched Kim in his natural element a few weeks back, accompanying Adrian Jones as part of the duo Foghorn Saxhorn at the Elora Brewing Company in downtown Elora. Kim is literally a one-man band; he floats from song to song alternating vocals, percussion, and woodwind instruments to suit the mood of each song with proficiency and ease. Kim is never at a loss to solve any music-related creative or technical issue.
Steve Aylward possesses a musical curiosity that guides him towards multiple musical genres and drives him to master all elements of music production. His musical instincts are rock solid and like the rest of us he is drawn towards the quirky yet oh-so-interesting artists and approaches to music.
Ken Brown and I have known each other for nearly twenty-five years. Ken produced my second album ‘Land of Plenty’ in 2001, which also happens to be my most recent album released. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy kicking around music-related schemes, several involving Ken over the decades. One idea arose when riffing on the concept of a music series structured like a sports league, with home-and-away matches, hosts, and elements relating to sports. ‘Folk League’ was successfully granted funding by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund back in 2004, just as I was about to move from Kitchener to Guelph. I returned the funding because… well, there was probably more than one reason at the time so Folk League never saw the light of day.
Flash forward to 2016. I moved back from Guelph to downtown Kitchener while commuting to Toronto several days per week. Eventually I found some time to resurrect musical projects. A few of them involving Ken resulted in unsuccessful grant applications, until this year when our band received funding through the ROW Arts Fund to develop a series of live shows with the band and build a model for audience engagement in the region.
One noteworthy scheme over the years sparked by Ken was—how do I describe this in a way that doesn’t make me the world’s lamest entrepreneur—a digital sheet music business aimed at musicians within folk and roots genres. Let me pause for a minute so you can appreciate the grandiose absurdity of this notion. Musicians in general, particularly independent musicians in Canada, are one sorry broke-ass lot to start with. Money spent by musicians is generally prioritized on goods and services relating to recording and live performance. You know, the things that may, actually, one day if they’re lucky, make them money. Selling musicians on the money potential of printed or digital tabs and sheet music is akin to convincing them to invest in monogrammed pencils to sell at shows. Now let's double down and narrow THAT market to a genre of music that if lucky can generate tens of dollars… That reminds me of a joke- How does a folk musician make one million dollars? Answer: they are given two million dollars to start off and then wait a year.
But I did develop really useful skills during this self-imposed midlife crisis, which saw me leave a secure university job just after purchasing a house to try my hand at self employment while driving a cab for fun, adventure, and few shekels. I mastered a number of music notation software packages along with free and open source eCommerce software which I modified to integrate with and sell digital interactive music charts and tabs. I picked up some interesting freelance gigs over the years relating to music transcribing and notation. To this day, one or two related projects come my way during the year.
Over the past three years I have been utilizing the Presonus Studio One platform which includes both a Digital Audio Workspace ("DAW") component for recording and editing music, plus a music notation package called Notion. The platform supports workflows that fully integrate working between notation software and recording software. There are astonishing workflows I've uncovered so far to streamline the process of notating music from recorded sources as well as create and edit instrumental parts on new or existing songs.
I'm working on a new song titled “My Spare Heart”. The band has practiced this on a few occasions but we haven't yet performed it live. At our last rehearsal, we discussed adding some arranged horn parts during the solo break in the song. Instrumental breaks or solos are often improvised when only one musician is involved. Occasionally, we work up arrangements for the two horns that is charted and played the same way every time. We feel this adds a bit of variety across our songs by varying the approach that we use on instrumental bits.
I'm going to wonk out for a bit. How do we integrate a band rehearsal track into Studio One in a way that we can also add virtual (synthesized) instrumental parts that can be charted and printed out? Importing the rehearsal sound file into a Studio One track is easy. It is imported as a single track that can't be edited. There is one main challenge. In order to integrate with notation software so that I can write an instrumental part in sync with the recording, I have to somehow ensure that the tempo is either steady or I have to “map” the tempo to bars of music using the song's time signature. Studio One provides many ways to do this, including integration with a plug-in called Melodyne, the Swiss Army knife of the DAW world. More on Melodyne in future articles.
As it turns out, the tempo doesn't fluctuate greatly or rapidly because our drummer Steve is really good. There are some simple techniques that allow me to adjust the tempo throughout the song so that it lines up fairly well with the song's 4/4 time signature.
Once the song is lined up, I layer on a separate synthesized percussion and bass track that will allow me to more easily compose new instrumental tracks and hear how they fit in with the existing song. I added synthesized tracks for Tenor Sax and Trombone, which will be played by Kim and myself respectively during live performance. Because I am comfortable with music notation, I choose Studio One's edit option which allows editing each track via a music notation interface. After entering notes for each part I and exiting edit mode, Studio One will play back each part using the chosen synthesized sax and trombone parts. Studio One provides features to make playback more realistic like adding accidentals (e.g., staccato and accents to specific notes) or applying a “shuffle” feel to the track by using a relevant quantizing option that will render eighth notes with a shuffle or triplet feel instead of straight.
I keep going back and forth from editing to listening until I am satisfied with each solo part. Since I have synchronized the original rehearsal track, I can play the composed tracks along with the original track to get a feel of how this will play with the live rehearsal arrangement.
Sheet music generation and printing is initiated through invoking sheet music software called ‘Notion’ that integrates directly into Studio One. With one of the instrumental tracks selected (e.g., Trombone), opening Notion will transfer the notated content into the software for further editing and formatting. Once finalized, the individual part can be printed or saved as a pdf for subsequent printing or sharing.
The reason I am a wonk is because this process excites me immensely. I love that I can uncover a new workflow or process that aligns naturally to the way I work and create music.
Wonk out.