Big things

I understand the appeal of small things. Some people like them better, and I think I get that. Some people relate to things more when they are closer, more attainable, more comprehensible. The feeling of being able to fully understand the way a particular universe operates is a powerful thing. But I don't dream about things like that. They don't fire me up like the big things do. I'm talking about scenarios where, at any one time, the lives and feelings of millions of people could be affected by one tiny mistake. I'm drawn to things that are epic, things that have wide reaching consequences.

Barack Obama was recently re-elected as the President of the United States for a second term. It was a great achievement. It was a particularly dramatic day for me because I had been following along with the build up to the election for months. I'm a politics junkie, and for people like me there's really no bigger event that the US Presidential election. The drama is simply unparallelled. To start with, it's a competition for the most powerful position in what remains the biggest economic, cultural and military power in the world. The victor undoubtedly has the power to influence and shape the United States and by extension the world for four years. The scrutiny and pressure on the candidates and their teams is extraordinary. Every single detail - every word, every press release, every campaign commercial - is analysed, reanalysed and overanalysed. Whether you view the process or the outcomes with optimism or contempt, there can be no doubt that it is absorbing, fascinating and intimidating in it's scope. It is political campaigning writ large, unquestionably the biggest stage of its kind.

When it comes to sports, I have a wide range of interests. I am interested in team and individual sports and both local and global codes. There are big stages in every sport. The AFL grand final has limited global appeal but has a significant cultural impact in the lives of the AFL-oriented parts of Australia. To me though, the biggest stage in world sport is the UEFA Champions League. The World Cup has undoubted global appeal and attracts the attention of an extraordinary proportion of the world's population, but the falling standard of international football in comparison to the elite club competitions has meant that the highest quality, most dramatic and most influential football is played at Europe's top table. In the knockout stages, clubs with magnificent histories, massive fanbases, and extraordinary players square off in some of the greatest cities in the world and the greatest stadiums ever built. With half the competition played in a knockout format, fractions of a second separate events that can fundamentally alter outcomes, often in ways which can stun fans, players and coaches alike. The greatest players in the world, who seem to dominate domestic stages each and every weekend, often come apart under the spotlight of a European semi-final. A dramatic tactical change can resonate across the football world for decades. The amount of money spent by teams chasing this trophy is extraordinary, but even hundreds of millions of euros cannot guarantee glory. At it's best it is an extraordinary competition.

When it comes to television, the United States is the make or break market. New shows must establish a desirable audience relatively quickly or else face cancellation. Numbers are broken down, counted and sorted into demographics. How many people are watching live? Watching on DVR? How are these ratings measured? When I hear and see people talking about Australian ratings figures, I am genuinely interested to find out how certain shows are going, but I'm not drawn to them like I am with the US figures. For those of us who live outside the US, the fate of our favourite performers and characters are largely out of our own hands. For better or worse, the biggest stage in the television industry, an industry which I find extremely engaging, is the United States.

This could all be seen as some sort of cultural cringe, but I don't think it is. Australia can and has produced geniunely world-class creative, sporting and scientific talent and these people, whether they are based here or overseas, have gone on to do brilliant things. But the fact is that for things to be globally influential, they need to affect the lives of millions, hundreds of millions, perhaps even a billion people. I crave the sort of drama and high-stakes brinksmanship that these things offer. It's not a slight on any person or place, it's just that my personal preference is for the big things, and it most cases, they are happening elsewhere.

Melancholy

I suppose we all have these weird things about us we can’t explain. They could be the things we like or things we are scared of. I feel like I have quite a few of these idiosyncracies. But there’s one that I always found quite curious.

I have always loved sad things.

That might be a stranger sentence to write than it was to read. You’re probadly wondering what I mean when I say that, but I don’t think it really needs to be analysed all that deeply. Depressing music, sad stories, grey skies: these are a few of my favourite things.

I do not take joy in the suffering of others; in fact sometimes I’m quite empathetic. Nor do I revel in tragedy on a grand scale. What I do enjoy is the conveyed feeling of melancholy, loss, loneliness, sometimes disappointment. I think these feelings drive some of the greatest art, and I feel that art that stems from these emotions can have a disproportionate impact on the way I’m feeling at any given time. I feel like we learn a lot about ourselves in these moments. Grey may seem like just a shade between black and white, but in reality the difference between the two absolutes is so broad. There is so much subtlety there, such a huge area to explore in any number of ways. Sadness is just way more interesting to me than joy.

Let’s run some examples and see if other people can explain it better than I can.

This is from an episode of a show called ‘Louie’. This scene is just heartbreaking. It has stuck with me ever since the day I saw it. It’s so beautifully shot, written, acted, everything. It’s an emotional hail mary if I’ve ever seen one take place on screen. I feel sick for Louie just watching this, but at the same time I can’t help but relate to it and admire his courage and forthrightness. Few scenes of television have occupied my brain like this one has. I just love it.

This is a song called ‘Dire Straits Pt. 1’ by a hip-hop group called Horrorshow. It’s a real stark instrumental; I suppose you could say it was both lush and melancholy. It’s not really a rap per se, more like a poem or free verse I suppose, which adds to the drama and the tension of the whole thing. It’s so introspective, but it’s delivered in third person so it’s sort of like he’s talking about someone else rather than himself, but it’s pretty obvious it’s autobiographical when you hear it in context. It’s a really great headphone track, in fact the whole album is perfect for a set of cans. The track immediately after this one is even more depressing actually. Go and take a look for 'The Grey Space' if you’re into that kind of thing.

This is ‘Vermillion’ and ‘Vermillion Pt. 2’, off the ‘Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses’ record’. Part one is a grinding hard rock monstrosity with a anthemic final section. Part two is an acoustic strummer where Corey Taylor shows that he has the most devastating clean voice in rock. The these two songs contrast so beautifully, but they also feel like part of a whole.

I don’t fully understand why I feel this way about this stuff. The clips I posted are all things that I love, things that make me happy by drawing upon sad, desolate feelings. It’s strange in that most people who know me would probably say I’m a pretty positive kind of guy, and that’s the way I’d generally like to be perceived. I’m no moper or defeatist; I’m a proactive, happy person. It’s partly an aesthetic thing, but it runs deeper than that as well. I like the weight these things carry, the impact they can have on what you are thinking and feeling. Few things can cut you down or lift you up like a sad song. I don’t know what it means; I just know that for me this is a real thing, that this stuff affects me.

Off the grid

I forgot how draining it was.

Over the course of four days, I sat in my studio recording guitars for something like twenty-four hours. I know I’ll look back on it as something awesome and I really am thrilled with the results, but it was more stressful than I expected.

I locked myself up in the studio working on the guitar tracks for five songs that Dead Pool are recording. It was a new experience for me because it was the first time I’d ever recorded myself playing through a decent guitar amp. I’d never done anything like this before because these tube amps, the amps that are actually worth recording, are extremely loud. Considering my studio is really just a spare bedroom it just hasn’t been practical to just crank my Mesa and put a microphone in front of it. But since we had the opportunity to record drums at a great studio a few months ago, I felt I owed it to these recordings to make a bigger effort this time.

Here’s the boring technical details. I ran my guitars into my beloved Mesa Single Rectifier, which sat in the studio, and then ran a thirty foot balanced lead from the amp out the door into my room, where I had miked up my cabinet with a trusty Shure SM57, on-axis and on grill. The mic lead then fed back into the studio, into my little Soundcraft desk and then into Pro Tools 8 via a Delta 44 soundcard. I closed both doors to make sure I heard as little sound from the cabinet as possible and monitored from inside the studio room with my Alesis M1 Active MkIIs.

I tweaked the amp a little and then I went about my work. I woke up at 7.30am each morning, went downstairs to have breakfast and then started recording just after 8. I recorded for a block of two hours until my Dad got home for lunch. It was too loud to record when anyone else was in the house, so I waited until he’d go back to work at 11 before going again until about 2pm. I was genuinely concerned about the noise levels the entire time. I convinced myself that it would only be a matter of hours before someone knocked at the door or put a brick through the window. It added a whole layer of stress to the process and kept me on edge the entire time, but as far as I know I didn’t have any complaints, which was lucky.

I worked pretty methodically, doing parts of songs with similar guitar sounds together to minimise the amount of messing around between takes. Each night I would listen to the recordings, take stock of what I had done and what needed to be fixed, upload some mp3s for my bandmates to listen to and then make a list for the next day. Then each morning I’d go back to the list and pick up where I left off.

I’ve been playing guitar since I was about eleven years old, and I got my first electric guitar for my thirteenth birthday. Even after all these years though, I didn’t fully understand just how temperamental these things can be. I’d do a take and then tune. And then do a take and then tune. And then do a take and then tune. And even in spite of all this, I’m sure there will still be spots where someone will hear something flat and tell me to fix it. Another thing I noticed is that the difference between playing live and tracking in the studio is like night and day. Every little squeak, buzz or bum note is just so obvious; doing big, chunky, quadruple-tracked guitar riffs is a ruthless, demanding process. Almost every guitar part on the recordings I did last week were recorded four times for that thick hard rock sound. That meant that if I needed to change even the tiniest section it would end up taking me half an hour. When everything needs to be done perfectly four times over, redoing anything is just so time consuming. I would play the same part over and over, not quite up to scratch, then I’d make mistakes because I was drifting off and not focusing. I suppose if I was sick of the parts, I’m sure the neighbours grew even more sick of them.

I was in this weird lockdown mode for the four days. I still did a couple of errands each afternoon and made sure I went to the gym most days, but by Friday afternoon I was a mess. I hadn’t shaved in over a week, my hair was scruffy and long, and there were piles of clothes in my room and cables all over the place. My studio still hasn’t recovered; there is still gear everywhere. You might expect all of this mess to be a normal state of affairs for a musician, but for me it’s really unusual. On Friday afternoon I went down the street and having looked down after leaving a shop I was in that there was multiple casserole stains on the hoodie that I was wearing. Disgraceful.

It’d been a long time since I’d done so much music-related stuff in such a short space of time. Back in my high school days I’d come home exhausted after long days of dress rehearsals or shows, but not only was this was just as draining, but it was more stressful and a little bit isolating as well. It was just me, my instruments and my computer for long slabs of time each day. I had some time with one of my band-mates, which was good, but I was mostly in my own world; playing, tuning, swearing to myself, making lists and adjusting faders and knobs. Being a creative professional that worked alone the majority of the time would take some getting used to, I think.

I’m really proud of the results from my efforts last week, and when the vocals are done and everything is mixed I’ll be even happier. I gave it everything I had. I figured out how I was going to do it, took a weeks leave from work, blacked out the time and got my hands dirty. It certainly wasn’t a walk in the park; it was goddamn hard work, but I learnt a lot. I learnt about recording, about my guitar playing, about these songs and about myself as well, I suppose.

Frankly, this is not a typical thing I’d write about for this site. I don’t think many people are interested in a long-winded story about me sitting by myself in a room recording guitars for four days. I was lucky, I think, because I feel like that there isn’t that many people who can take the time to do something they love so much in such an intense fashion. I really do think there’s something to be said for really putting your head in one place and going off the grid in order to get something done. If you’ve got a big project you need to finish and have the chance to take the time off to focus on it, I’d say go for it; you really can achieve a lot, just don’t expect it to be a walk in the park.