Please Please Me

Technology and Music

We played a job at a private party in a park-like backyard on the Fourth of July. My wife Jo, who plays bass guitar with me, noticed early on that the folks there liked the Beatles covers we had sprinkled in. Before long we used up the seven or eight early Beatles covers we had ready to go and wished we had some more.

So today I started recording backing tracks for the first of five more early Lennon and McCartney I’ll add to the files on the MacBook. I record myself singing harmonies, and I add percussion and drums using the touch drums on the iPad or a recorded loop from Apple logic, or I make a drum track using an AI drummer that I can control along dimensions including volume, complexity, and fills.

The track I’m sharing today took about three hours to get to this point. It consists of a Logic bot drum track, two recorded vocal tracks (me), a live rhythm guitar track (me), and a live lead vocal (me). It’s halfway there. It needs mixing (harmonies need more gain in spots) and will get it when it’s in the final stage of development.

My bass player is working out a bass part to play live while I sing and play guitar. She is finicky about being faithful to McCartney’s unique bass work and learns the parts through figuring it out using the Amazing Slow Downer on the computer (an app that lets you slow down and loop recordings to give you a better opportunity to hear parts) or ordering the sheet music. She sight reads music proficiently. In a day or two we’ll practice it some and probably test drive it one weekend soon at a farmers market.

If you’re interested in hearing how it turns out, I’ll record a full live version with mixed and mastered backing tracks and a live bass.

When I first started recording and playing live with backing tracks, I went through some cognitive dissonance. I sometimes struggled to distinguish what I was doing from karaoke. It felt sort of weird. But it was me, my own harmony, my own guitars, my own fingers playing the drums on the iPad. Bringing technology into intimate creative work is not spiritually simple.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had those thoughts. This is live music with a little help from my friendly bot drummer. I hope you enjoy it!