Producing MIDI Cover Music Sequences
Entry posted by xxmikexx
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The full story of my pioneering company Golden Midi Music And Software is for another day. Here it is sufficient to note that we were the first, and the best, to create cover music sequences that were note-for-note faithful to the original recordings, the business having opened its doors to the public early in 1988.
A number of well-known bands used our sequences as intermission music, including Aerosmith, Steve Miller, the German group Kraftwerk, and the mid-west perennial group Hat Trick, but our bread-and-butter business was working two-man bands that wanted to sound like 6-8 man bands, plus amateur "closet record producers", in a ratio of about five to one.
There are many technical problems in constructing sequences that will work across a wide variety of sequencers and tone generators, and the issue of drum machine incompatibilities is a big one, but I don’t want to talk about that stuff today either.
What I want to talk about instead are the musical aspects of a cover music sequence, and the impact this has had on the way I listen to music even today, twenty years later.
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Again compressing a lengthy presentation, one of the things I found is that most musicians – the overwhelming majority of musicians – are deficient in one respect or another when it comes to musical hearing. Now you can’t sequence what you don’t hear, so to make a long story short, I found that only one musician in twenty could hear what I needed to be heard, and therefore only about one in twenty sequence creator wannabes could do what I needed done.
This all surprised me because it turns out that I have what are known as “golden ears”, and until starting the business I assumed that everybody else did too, which 'tain't so.
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As a kid in NYC, every day I rode the subway to a prep school, and later to NYU. As often as not I would entertain myself by playing music in my head. This was a lot of fun because I would be able to play entire records note-for-note, the only difference being that the playback in my head is being run through a notch filter so that it all comes out sounding like it would on an AM radio, which was effectively my only source of music at the time.
You see, I didn’t own more than a half-dozen carefully selected LPs, and I owned almost no 45s. Only if I felt the need to hear certain things repetitively in high fidelity would I spend my money on recorded music. Most of the time the recording was right there in my head with sufficient frequency response to satisfy me, my interests being in rhythm, harmony and melody in that order, with sonic quality being a very distant fourth. (I spent my money instead on my girlfriend. We are still married, having been joined at the lip since age 16.)
Note what I said in the preceding paragraph – “hear certain things repetitively in high fidelity”. When it comes to music that I really really really like, sonic quality suddenly becomes important, and listening to the music over and over and over again also becomes important, because I want to hear everything that the producer put in the recording, and I want to enjoy all the hooks that I’m hearing whether or not the original producer was conscious of them.
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I thought everybody was like this, except that they simply spent more money on records than I did. Yet the signs of trouble were already there. As I mentioned elsewhere I played semi-pro rhythm guitar for many years while I was a student. But I also worked as an arranger for the bands I was in, and for other bands too.
You see, people were constantly coming to me and saying things like “I can play the chords for ‘The Wiggle Wobble’, but somehow the second chord in the progression doesn’t sound right. What’s right here?’ Whereupon I would show the questioner what the correct chord voicing was or, in some cases, what the correct chord was.
That’s right. Most working bands, especially frat house bands, have to be Top 40 cover bands. That’s what you need to do if you want to get paid for playing, which was fine with me because I loved Top 40 stuff. In fact I loved all of it, and I knew most of it note for note.
So I was the go-to guy for what was going on in the various Top 40 records of any given moment in time. On more than one occasion I was called in on an emergency basis to teach a band how to play a new record that was just breaking out because they would be working a wedding that weekend, or they were playing at some frat party that night, or whatever.
So I was an arranger in the sense that I could tell every musician how his part needed to go. I couldn’t play drums, but I could hear them and I could tell the drummer how to play his part. Ditto for bass (which I do play), and for rhythm guitar (which I do play), and for lead parts (which I don’t play), and for keyboard stuff, and horn riffs, and horn section chords, and on and on and on.
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I hear it all, and I hear most of it simultaneously. I had a very interesting experience a few years back reading an interview with Henry Mancini. He got his start the same way I did, by showing people how to reproduce what was on recordings. He said that he could take a set of 78 rpm disks for the recording of a big band piece and track each of the horns through the mix with no problem at all. Well, of course. I can do that too. Can’t everybody?
No, not everybody can. In fact, as I learned at Golden Midi, hardly anybody can. The ones who can are the arrangers and the producers. They may or may not also actively play, but they all have golden ears. You have to.
Edited by xxmikexx
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