The Business of Making Music

Tracks. We needed an entirely new catalogue. So, I stayed up nights, toiling with Fruity Loops demo, downloading as many free sound samples as I could find until my Hewlett Packard ran like molasses in January on the South Pole. When I listened to Nesrin I thought of Jill Scott and Erykah Badu, so I went for the Rhodes keys and the jazz drum kits, vintage synths, organic sidesticks, and live strings. Then I got a wild hair and began an ambient project on the side, just because. Nostalgic 70's riffs took a back seat to dark metallic pads and interstellar drones, which begot The Planets collection, and Nesrin fell in love with "Saturn". And so it went. It became our new and impromptu signature sound, something like Enya meets Steve Roach meets Sezin Aksu. We had our first song, and we were excited. It was unlike anything out there. We would be innovators, forge a new niche, abandon the ordinary and become pioneers of something timeless. Now all we needed were lyrics and a vocal melody. How hard could it be?

We began this venture in my living room around 7pm on a balmy Summer night. Coffee and cigs close by. Pocket tape recorder cued and ready. And with the next day off, there was plenty of time for creative genius.

By 4am my girlfriend was ready to hop a plane back home to Japan--she had been listening painfully to a cacophonic myriad of failed melody lines and twelve different arguments over which key worked best and what intervals fit which key most appropriately, what notes were out of Nesrin's vocal range, which lines were best for the chorus and why the word "trajectory" was or was not poetic. Yoko emerged from the bedroom, hair sleepily disheveled, wincing through the end table lamplight, and she hummed in a groggy little voice--once and for all--her version of the Godforsaken melody line Nesrin and I had been arguing over since dusk. We considered it, tried it out, crammed the square peg of it into the round hole of our instrumental for another hour, smashed and hammered and banged away until it disintegrated into a pile of splinters. By 5am we had accomplished very little except to discover that our creative differences were complex, vast, and numerous. And that songwriting was an acquired skill.

Within the next week, lyrical chaos eventually found structure, melodic disarray found order, and we were finally satisfied with "Saturn". It was time to record...low budget style. I had a clip-on microphone that came with the twenty dollar tape recorder we'd purchased the previous week, and with the help of some free recording software, we were in business as Biolyrical Productions.

I handed her the mic and sent her into the bathroom, which would serve as a 'vocal booth' of sorts. But before she shut the door she turned to me with a request. "You have to go outside."

"Huh?"

"Outside. You have to go away. You can't listen to me."

I winced at her. "But that doesn't make any sense. I'm gonna have to listen to you at some point so I can edit your vocals. And besides, I've already heard you sing like a hundred times now."

She breathed an exasperated sigh. "Yeah, I know. But could you just do as I ask? Okay? Go outside, and I'll let you know when I'm done."

"This is so lame," I mumbled, grabbing my cigarettes and soda. I went through the kitchen and shut the back door behind me.

Another glitch. Two-dollar lapel mics tend not to filter extraneous noise very well, and we discovered that every word with a 'p' or an 'f' in it came across like we were recording in a wind tunnel. So, we covered it with a wash rag and kept moving.

The problems...err...challenges continued to mount. I had not yet figured out how to record directly into Fruity Loops program via an outside source (and still haven't), though it may not have been possible, anyway, with the demo version. Consequently, all vocal recordings went into a separate folder on my desktop via the Fee Sound Recorder software (slowing my PC down even more. Grass now grew faster than my computer processed information). The hurdle now was in that it was impossible to sync up Nesrin's vocals with the instrumental track, impossible to just lay a vocal track, mute it, lay another one, record over that one if necessary, and so forth. She had the instrumental track in her ears through the headphones, and the recording software picked up one acapella take at a time, sorted them out in their own little folder by date and time. The word tedious began to take on a whole new meaning. There were seven, eight, maybe ten vocal takes, some of them keepers, some of them garbage, some of them a painstaking combination of each. Nesrin's work was finished, but mine had just begun. I now had to open each vocal file in a Wave Editing program and cut and chop and delete and paste and save the final vocal snippets...line by line...and manually place them into the instrumental track...which could not be saved, closed out, and reopened in Fruity Loops demo version. You have to just keep the program open to the project you're working on and pray that your PC doesn't decide it's time for new updates at 3am while you're asleep. I'd awakened many a morning to find my computer had restarted all by itself and that my most recent creative efforts had vanished in the process.

The first of what would be many monumental music tasks was finally complete after ten straight hours of tweaking and pasting. I called her to come over and check it out. She put the headphones on and listened with a mysterious deadpan expression that I have since learned to interpret as a complicated mixture of artistic disapproval and self-doubt. But that evening I had no idea what to make of it.

She removed the headphones before the song was over and handed them back to me with a strange grumble.

"What?" I insisted. "You didn't even hear it all."

"I don't want to," she muttered.

"Why?" I asked, feeling a distinct blow to the ego. I'd spent all damn day on that track, and now she doesn't even want to listen to it all the way through? What kinda shit was this? "How can you decide what you think of it if you don't listen to the whole thing? What the hell?"

"I just don't want to, okay?!" And she stomped off to the living room, dropped onto the couch, and pouted.

I've been a musician all my life, having taken some significant hiatuses, granted, but born with a natural ear for pitch and an affinity for syncopated rhythm. There wasn't a thing about that track that warranted such an ineffectual display of contempt. It was rough around the edges, true, with low-budget technical flaws, cockeyed EQing, and limited bandwidth, but by God it was a more-than-decent demo.

I heaved a deep sigh and followed her into the living room. "Okay. Out with it. What's the problem? Why'd you just shut down like this? Is it the reverb? I can turn it off, ya know. Just a click of the mouse, and it's gone."

My persistence was pissing her off now. She folded her arms tight across her chest and snarled, "I don't like my voice, okay? I've never heard it before. You know, like that. In my ears. Through speakers. In a song. And it just sounds weird and sucky to me. Okay? There, I said it. Ya happy?"

"Not really, no."

"Well," she shrugged. "I dunno what to tell you, then. 'Cause that's just how I feel. And I don't wanna talk about it anymore, so can we change the subject now? Great. So, how was work last night? Heard you guys were really busy."

Thus began a delicate, tactful process of building the confidence of a brilliantly talented singer whose success depended less on the persistence of others and more on the ability to get out of her own way....

In The Beginning....

....there was a lot of talk and very little action. We had great ideas. Big dreams, huge aspirations, as they say. There was a murky vision but no plan whatsoever as to how to execute anything. I had a small catalogue of five-year-old Hip-Hop and Techno tracks, a demo version of the Fruity Loops music program (which was taking up an incredulous amount of space on my six-year-old desktop dinosaur hard drive), and a new friend who'd completely blown my hair back the week before, singing karaoke at Soho's. She had made her decision--she wanted to pursue a career as a professional singer...and she wanted my help.


It had been fifteen years since I had anything to do with the business of music, aside from memberships to a couple free loop sites and a Myspace artist page to commemorate a rap CD I'd done in '98. I had a few page views and a comment or two. A stray fan or three from my short 90's stint as an MC said they were happy to see me making a "comeback", even referred to me as an underground Hip-Hop "legend". That was certainly refutable but enough to fuel a small creative fire in me that'd never really burned out. 

It began on an evening while working at The Cannon Brew Pub, two and a half years ago. I was closing down the kitchen line for the night when a co-worker handed me her cell phone. "Here, somebody wants to talk to you." 

I tucked the phone under my ear and continued fishing burnt fries and sweet potato sunspots from the cooling fryer grease. "Yeah?"

"Hey, this is Nesrin," the voice said. "Somebody told me you do music. Like, you know about the business of it. And I just wondered if I could ask you some questions 'cause I'm trying to make a decision, here." We were mildly acquainted at the time, had seen each other around town, hung out with mutual friends, and so I listened carefully to a barrage of inquiries about how to break into the business as a singer, how one gets paid, the likelyhood of 'making it big', and whether she should relocate to someplace more profitable like New York or L.A.

I'm not sure if what I said could've possibly influenced her to leave the security of a management career, or the potential upper-five-figures (perhaps more) she could garner with her recent business marketing degree. For when she told me she was teetering between seeking a job at National Geographic and the Lotto odds of becoming the next Alicia Keys I said, quite pointedly, "Stay as far away from the music business as you can get. Light years. Put light years between yourself and every A&R rep on the planet. Go for the NatGeo gig and never look back."

Over the next couple months the idea waned, but our friendship hadn't. The music prospect quickly took a back seat to other situations such as lost love, long-distance relationships, my college graduation, and her finding a new living situation. The week before she moved out of her apartment I showed up to use the washing machine, and it looked as though a tornado blasted through the living room--she hadn't yet begun to pack, mind you. It was a thousand sheets of paper, strewn about the sofa, the dining table, the end tables, the floor, the book shelves, the desk. I took one up and looked it over. Song lyrics.

"Couldn't sleep last night," she confessed, a little embarassed. "So, I was writing." She snatched the page from my hand and muttered something about it not being finished and that she never shows her writings to anyone. Ever.

"Well, when are you ever let me hear you sing this stuff?" I asked.

"Dunno," she shrugged. "I'm not ready yet. Maybe one day."

It took another two months to coax her to sing for me. I had since undertaken a production project with a local MC who dragged me out of retirement, and my creative energy was surging again. I had brand new sample packs downloaded into Fruity Loops, hundreds of sounds and loops and effects to choose from. My girlfriend was back home in Japan for a while, and so I was up most nights, splicing and chopping and tweaking new tracks into existence for Roman Flux. My theory was: I'll make the tracks, hand them over, send him on his way to write/record his lyrics, and if the bolt of lightening called success ever strikes him, he can pay me on the back end. If not, then I had fun with the creative process, and I'll see what I can do with a literature degree. Nesrin's hesitance in giving me a reason to extend my musical services wasn't doing much to change that thinking. Then she invited me out with her to Soho's.

I was beyond nervous for her. In fact, I was secretly, prematurely embarassed for her. The place was packed--Monday night karaoke. I'd caught her humming along to something soulful at The Tap several weeks prior while we waited for our drinks at the bar, and it was enough to tell me she could at least carry a tune...under her breath...muttering absently to a song playing at a hundred thousand decibels. Singing solo to a much more rehearsed, much more successful, and infinitely more seasoned entertainer's song was a whole different animal. And if she couldn't pull it off satisfactorily, then what? What do I say? What expression do I conjure on my face? How do I explain that there's no time in my life as an underpaid line cook to produce tracks for an inadequate wanna-be singer with zero vocal technique, who could quite possibly be tone deaf, and who might not even know it? Then, how do I change the subject and never return to it again?

They called her name, and she took the stage--she would sing Lauryn Hill's version of "Killing Me Softly". Oh, brother. I sipped my amaretto sour and lit a cigarette.

But by the end of the first verse, I was transfixed. I wandered away from my bartop table and drifted closer to the stage, so pleasantly surprised and bemused that my mouth had run dry from hanging open in a silly grimace. When she was finished, the crowd exploded with appreciation. It took her ten minutes to get back to our seat as people stopped her every three feet with a compliment or a moment of conversation. When she was within arm's reach I gave her the biggest, warmest bear hug I could muster. This girl was the whole package, a producer's dream, with a soulful raspy voice likening that of Lauryn Hill herself, or Amy Ray, or Billie Holiday, perhaps. That was it. She would be my secret weapon, and visa-versa--to look at me, few people imagined I made Hip-Hop and RnB tracks. I suppose I look more like grocery store jingles or bad country and western. But I knew precisely what to do for a voice like Nesrin's. And we needed to get started as soon as possible.