Passenger Pigeon: the self titled album

Im proud to say that my band Passenger Pigeon finally recorded a full length album and released it on most platforms. we've been together around four years and have grown to be an incredibly tight crew of dudes. through the process of creating the album we learned many valuable lessons. the first is time management; we had tried recording several times before but since we had not created a mission statement we fell short and never followed anything to completion. a lesson that Anne Lammot teaches in Bird by Bird in the early chapters is, learn from your shitty first drafts; we had recorded a song called Ibn Battuta three times only to be discouraged by the end result. however each time was better than the last. we learned from the mistakes of these shitty drafts and finally recorded an excellent track. one of the most simple, yet profound lesson Kenny (bass and vocals) and I learned was patience. this was hard for us because as artists we were incredibly anxious to release our music to the world, but before this summer, we weren't ready. after the before mentioned shitty first drafts we considered releasing them, but wisely chose not to. we were rewarded by the fruit of our patience when we waited a whole year to re-record and release our music.

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Recording and Mixing notes

the most important part of recording music is getting good takes with instruments and vocals. getting good recordings is the first and highest priority in the recording process. Once good takes are made you want to begin mixing. to mix you apply plugins such as compression, reverb, panning and so on. it is a good idea to listen to music you like, that would be a good example for your mix. I tend to listen to Dave Matthews band for this purpose. last night while listening I came up with some notes that I later applied to a song im working on called Aesthetic. I Equalized the alternating down beat shaker (used as a snare) to the root note of the key the song is in. a minor touch but I think it adds a lot to the mix. I also noticed how Dave's vocals cut through the layer heavy song; there was minimal reverb and decay, so I rolled down both of these parameters which yeilded positive results. It is like Anne Lammot referencing authors she enjoyed, especially her father, you want to read

crazy time signatures and math

Alternate and odd time signatures are my bread and butter; working to make something so off beat resonate well with a listener is the most enjoyable challenge in my life. The above picture is a simple chart depicting a song I wrote for my band Beat Juice. The first line is the part I play and the one below is what Dal plays; as you can probably see, my part is divided irregularly making it nearly impossible to feel the pulse. to remedy this I wrote Dal's part in 4/5, this way both of us will play a total of 20 beats per phrase. by choosing common time emphasis to put over my part, the pulse of the song emerges. I like to compare this to Anne Lamott's experience with writing stories that may not have appealed to people and publishers, but she continued anyway, and that is the true nature of art in my opinion; push through the hate to create something you are proud of.

Frustration

Over this last summer I recorded an LP. As I listen to the finalized mixes I am a little frustrated with my performance, especially with vocals. It sucks to look back and realize that there is no way to fix it. Fortunately my producer Jame McConnell is a beast and is doing his best to fix some of my sloppiness. I know now that I was singing without my diaphragm and have since learned to do so. It has dis-heartened me but at the end of the day I'm proud of the music I produced, despite it's imperfections. It is a snapshot of where I was as a musician the summer of 2018, and if you look past some of the mistakes I believe it is a fun collection of unique songs that at the very least will be an interesting listen. Like Anne Lammot says, you might think something is perfect at the time only to realize later that it could've used more work, but perfection is impossible and as long as you're happy with what you've written, then it is great.

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