Besides biology/microbiology and programming, singing is my favorite thing to do! Of course it helps when you can work with excellent musicians (whose talents far outweigh my own). In this, we have Reggie Padilla on the saxophone, piano, and bass and Pierre Grill on the drums and mixing. All recorded remotely during the pandemic. If you like the music, please check out my YouTube channel where I post other collabs and my own compositions.
Watching others perform is so enjoyable! Before the pandemic, I used to regularly attend concerts and gigs for the good music and just to soak up the exciting atmosphere. As an audience member, it’s easy to forget how much work is going on behind the scenes. So, when I decided I wanted to put more of my own music out there, there was a lot I had to learn. The following are key areas/items that helped me the most in my music collaborations.
In any group project, good communication is key to making efficient progress and making the process more enjoyable. Beyond verbal communication, it’s important to have things written down. And for music, that means having a legible score or lead sheet. Even if the song is a Jazz standard, like “Autumn Leaves”, it should be clear 1) what key you want to perform in, 2) the style and tempo, 3) where/how long the solos should be and 4) how the song should end. Sometimes there are good commercial musical scores available that are already arranged in the style and the key you want to perform in. If not, a good lead sheet should be sufficient in communicating where you want to go in the piece. An open-source software for writing lead sheets is MuseScore. I’ve used MuseScore to transpose songs into keys that I can sing in, as well as write my own songs. Although it is possible for very good musicians (like Reggie and Pierre) to figure out what I’m thinking just by hearing me sing, having my lead sheets makes it easy for me to communicate exactly what I want to achieve. For example, in “Autumn Leaves”, I notated the number of measures I wanted the saxophone solo to last and notated how I wanted a slight ritard at the very end of the song. I did not deviate very much from the orignal structure of the song, but I used my lead sheet to record a demo playing some simplified piano and vocals in the style I wanted. I believe having all of this information available helped make it possible to record “Autumn Leaves” quickly despite us being in different locations.
Since I just love to sing, accompanying myself on an instrument wasn’t on my radar. But when I purchased a good digital keyboard with 88 keys, that is when I started to make the most progress in putting up more recordings. Even if you have an acoustic piano, I highly recommend a good digital piano/keyboard because it lets you make home recordings even if the acoustics of the room/environment are not so good. You can also use the digital piano to enter in notes into MuseScore (instead of typing the notes in). You can make recordings late at night when all your neighbors are sleeping. You can also get a MIDI file out of your digital piano and with an audio workstation (eg. GarageBand, Logic, Pro Tools) you can use Sound libraries to convert that MIDI into different instruments. That is how I get a lot of the bass and strings for my songs. You can enter in drum sounds manually with a digital keyboard. GarageBand and Logic also have virtual drummers that lets you put in pre-recorded drum tracks to your music. You might find that you want a real drummer to redo the drums, but I think those features really helps in planning out/arranging a song.
I still have a lot to learn about music and there is so much I want to get better at in singing and recording. But the tools I mentioned and the habits I developed (i.e. writing lead sheets) has helped me to achieve goals in collaboration that I didn’t think were possible. I hope to do more music collaborations in the future and am always excited to hear about software (like MuseScore) that makes things more accessible for musicians.