If there is one thing that I learned the hard way, is to not call yourself mastering engineer if you have less than ten to twenty years experience, some of which resulting in you actually getting paid for your art.

This means that if you do NOT want to make it in the music business, continue to master your songs alone. You will be canned in less time than it takes for Charlie Sheen to get 100,000 new followers on tweeter. If you do want to succeed, you need a producer. Now producers are like bees. Between vinegar and honey, they usually go for honey. In this case, great songs, presented in the best way possible.

And that’s where all my blogs come in. You may, and probably should, use all the techniques I’ve talked about in the past, and use them to make a case for you, that is the best demo tape you can make. Now only you call this a demo tape, because it actually is sub-standard. But a producer will get the idea about what you’re trying to express. If he’s interested, he may want to collaborate with you and do a real demo tape of you playing, or someone else. If you’re lucky, or truly gifted, you might end up with a CD.

Like I said before, music is a Do Not Do It Yourself world. Be the master of your art, push it to the limit, and let other people take it from there.

Peace.

Madeleine de Valmalete was born a marquise in 1899. She studied piano at the Paris Conservatory under Isidor Philipp, former pupil from Saint-Saens and Chopin. In 1913, at age 14, she received the first place medal from the school then headed by Gabriel Faure. Saint-Saens was very impressed with her and wrote to her to praise her performance of his Danse Macabre. She toured extensively in Europe and Turkey, as well as South America. While in Paris, she created the Paris Trio with violinist Yvonne Astruc and the cellist Marguerite Caponsacchi. In 1946, she returned to Paris to teach at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Musique, created by Alfred Cortot. In 1970 she moved to Grenoble to teach at the Ecole Nationale de Musique, the Conservatory created in 1946 by Paul Erik Steckel. In 1974 the international Madeleine de Valmalete piano competition was created with the help of the Maurice Ravel foundation. She retired in Marseilles and performed until the age of 92. She died in 1999.

 She recorded Le Tombeau de Couperin by Maurice Ravel in 1928, the first time this piece was ever recorded.

I was fortunate enough to have her as a teacher between 1972 and 1976. She was as demanding as she was inspiring. She used metaphors to explain how to play the piano in such a way as to free oneself from the limitations of the instruments, as well as those of the artist.

I own the piano she practiced with,when she was in Grenoble. It’s a Sauter baby grand. I play and record on it very frequently. It is my pride, my  jewel.

When Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin Jr. set foot on the moon, on July 20^th, 1969, I was sitting in the dining room of the house in which sixty or so other choir members were taking their lunch, as part of our summer choir camp in the massif central, the ancient volcanic mountain range raising its gently curved mountain summits west of the Rhone Valley. That walk on the moon was the turning point of the space exploration, or, as it also was called, the conquest of space.

Forty-one years later, as I recall this momentous event, I cannot help but being struck by the conjunction of all the elements that occupy us today. Walk, conquest of space, music. Walking, a challenge for most of us, requires a good balance, and a reliable perception of space. It also requires dopamine, under various forms, so that muscles receive and execute orders given by the brain. While I wish I could replace dopamine altogether by music, I am mostly going to talk about how to help its effects through a better, more efficient, handling of space.

Conquest of space is how I would best describe how I feel when I go outside for a walk. Ever since I was diagnosed with P.D., four years ago, I have experienced a drastic reduction of my space, which is the subset of the total space I used to be able to reach prior to the onset of P.D. I also am faced with challenges to my sense of balance, first physically, and, as the mind is never far from the body, mentally, and psychologically. How music helps me regain access to a wide space, and keep my balance, in every sense of the term, is what I want to talk about today. The goal is to help you, in turn, regain the use of space, with all the joy associated with it, and which is an important part of getting your life back.

We perceive space through three main long range means: Smelling, Hearing, Seeing. Let us concentrate on the latter two. We live in three-dimensional space. This means, if we want to know where we are, we need three numbers: latitude, longitude, height. And to get these three independent data, we need three measurement devices: three eyes, or three ears. Most of us only have two of each, not three. How do we get around this problem?

If we focus on the ear, we notice that it’s a very efficient instrument. Of all the frequencies it can hear, from 20 to 16000 Hz, give or take, the ear mostly perceives sounds that are characteristic of the human voice, what is called the mid-range. Sounds in this range are perceived louder than any other sound. And that’s where the brain, with all its analytical power comes in. Loud, the brain says, means near. Bingo, we got one number, let’s call it longitude.

Now suppose we’re listening to a concert, played by musicians spread around a stage. Assuming we’re not sitting exactly at the middle of the concert hall, we hear music through our left and right ear. The left ear, by definition, is closer to the left part of the stage, and thus hears left coming sounds earlier than right coming ones. The two streams of sound coming each through one ear, are delayed with respect to each other. From that delay, our powerful brain extracts the separation between the left and right part of the stage. That gives us our second number, latitude. The third one, height, is not that important on Earth, but is extracted similarly, by comparing sounds at ground level to those at higher altitude.

By increasing awareness of space through sounds coming from music, I “explore” space even without walking. Outside of being by itself an incredibly rewarding experience, it sets the stage (no pun intended) for the real exploration of space, the one with our full body.

Back in 1989, I was a graduate student in Indiana, at Purdue University. My field of research was meteorology. I was, always have been and forever will be, a pianist too. I came across the summary of a research paper, which showed that failures in the execution of a movement resulted exclusively from a failure in what is called movement preparation. Movement preparation is the sending by the brain of test signals to the different parts of the body involved before the actual movement. This firing of neurons is a test, in a sense that no movement is performed then. A few hundred milliseconds later, the movement is performed by the brain sending the exact same test signals.

From this astonishing paper, I deduced that if I visualized my fingers playing a piano piece perfectly, my brain would learn the correct sequence of neuron test signals, and that, therefore, my execution would be flawless. That is, assuming nothing gets in the way during these hundred milliseconds, such as panic or sudden emotion.

I decided to start this exercise on a monument of classical music, which is Chopin’s first piano concerto. The first movement lasts ten minutes. At a tempo of 120bpm, that’s 120 quarter notes times ten, or 1200 notes. Since the piece is actually written in sixteenth notes, you get 6400 sixteenth’s, or, to round up, 10,000 “notes” for both hands. Each note requires sending signals about speed, intensity, pedal (there are two), and length of time during which the note is held. This gives the grand total of about 50,000 instructions, give or take a few thousand. (If you’re in the mood, multiply this by three for the three movements, and again by four, for a classical CD usually contains four concertos!)

I have been working on this concerto for the past ten years, four of which with parkinson. Let me share with you a few of the insights I have discovered for myself.

First, why Chopin’s first piano concerto? Because its music has a structuring power. Its chord evolution acts on my brain to straighten it, removes its clutter, helps information flow better, acts like a light bathing my mind and clarifying everything. Mozart’s music has a similar effect, and I play it on my stereo every time I can.

Classical music, from its religious origins to its secular incarnations, has always been a music of the spheres, a music of celestial dimension. This music expresses the order in the material world, such as planets and stars. As a result, it transmits this sense of order to the brain of the person hearing it, and to a far greater extent, to that of the person singing or playing it.

Playing Chopin’s concerto requires learning it first. During that phase, I am put face to face with Chopin’s mind, learning to think the way he thinks. Any obstacle to a good functioning of my brain is being challenged by trying to think like a (musical) genius. By behaving as if my brain was normal, I teach it what it feels to be just that: normal.

Playing, as opposed to learning, this forceful piece is very energizing. When I play, I feel a fire inside me, that usually helps me walk and feel better. When I struggle on a particular passage, I can sense my brain trying to break through barriers, and by my conscious visualization of the proper way to play this passage perfectly, I very clearly feel my brain trying to get “to the other side”, and when it gets there, and new road has been laid out, where there once was just jungle. These are extraordinary moments, whereby I sense my mind expanding, and breaking the straightjacket it lives in. This is a great antidote to the shrinking of space that accompanies Parkinson.

Playing music is also like singing, only with your fingers. The material world, fingers, feet, vocal chords, is a reflection of our internal world: the mind, soul, spirit. When I think about how best to play a piece which is beyond me, I teach my mind the movement preparation phase. And when I execute, or try to execute, this perfect playing, what happens is pretty interesting.

At first, my mind is in shock. There is a kind of “conversation” between myself and (like Austin Powers would say) myself. My brain says: “I’m not supposed to be able to play this fast.” My mind answers: “tough luck, you are now.” Brain answers: “I can’t do it”. Then the mind comes to the rescue. “We are going to do it differently. Try this, instead. See how the fingers move? We’ve never done this before. You have no history of failure associated with this method. Go and run with it.”

Of course, the only way to make progress in music, is by first hearing better. The better I hear, the more clearly I receive the message of order and structure coming from the music itself. It’s like living in a spa. I get a constant “massage” of my mind, a kind of mental therapy. It is constant because I hear, and have been hearing, music in mind since the age of three.

The above conversation could equally have taken place when walking, instead of playing. Conscious movement preparation helps by visualizing the movements needed.

The next aspect I want to talk about is proper balance. We’ve seen how music provides a “copy” of the three dimensional world. Proper music, which, in my opinion, is classical music, provides with a reference frame, with a grid, which is the auditory equivalent of the visual lines on the ground which are being used to help parkinson patients walk. The way I understand this, is that parkinson flattens space by removing depth. Distant objects appear unreachable, hence the inability to walk. By restoring the missing sense of depth, music recreates a three-dimensional world in which the brain has no problems giving the order to walk.

Of course, there are other reasons behind walking difficulties, but I believe that this flattening of space is an important one. How else to explain that a parkinson patient walks better with lines drawn on the ground, or drawn on special glasses?

Satellites launched into space must be able to send information back to Earth at all times. For that they must be able to orient their antennas toward our planet. How do they know in which direction to point? The answer is, a spinning top is put on board the satellite. That top, because it is spinning, always points in the same direction, and provides a reference frame, ie a set of three axes, up-down, left-right, closer-farther, which allow the satellite to always be able to stay balanced. Music, likewise, is a spinning top which restores balance inside the mind.

Last, but not least: rhythm. Through rhythm, music can make people move, a most welcome “side-effect” of rhythmic music. I am fortunate enough to be able to write my own music. When composing rhythmic pieces, I naturally write music that makes me move.

In the morning, listening to one such special piece (summertime, part of my debut CD coming out in the next few weeks) always puts me in motion. Right after taking my pills (requip 16, stalevo), hearing this piece makes me dance. It’s clumsy at first, then as my limbs loosen, my moves become more natural. I know of no better way to start the day. I can indicate you where you can listen to this piece, should you find it of relevance to your life.

Thierry kauffmann

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It all started with a piano melody. I loved it, recorded it, but it was a failure. Post-mortem: too many notes, an attempt at going back to the roots of jazz, mostly a mix of fast tempo piano blues, and ragtime. But I’m quite stubborn, so I took steps to release it on a cd. At the last-minute I found a way out: add a guitar with an exciting kind of strumming.  I loved that guitar, and before I knew it, the piano was gone.

Lesson number one: the hit is not what is said, but what is not said. The piano was occupying the entire sound scape, leaving a tiny space for the guitar, the unspoken background. In the language of call and response, you write the call, but only to get to the response, which is the beginning of the hit.

I expanded on that guitar and produced two songs which got me so close to real music that I released one of them as single. But nobody bought it. Post-mortem: too many notes! I had repeated the same mistake with the guitar. Live and not learn!

Lesson number two: there are errors and mistakes. Mistakes are shallow, errors are deep. Correct a mistake and you’re on your way. Correct an error and you’re a different musician. You have changed. You know you’re still stuck when you keep attacking the problem (of writing a hit) with old tools and old mindset.

So the guitar, which had morphed into fiddle, was tossed, and buried. Luckily for me, I’m more stubborn than you can imagine, and one morning I sat down and decided to rewrite that fiasco, i.e. the string melody. Re-write is polite for burying, incinerating. Re-write means saying goodbye to your creation, and let it rest. A hard thing to do.

Equipped with a rational approach, I took the string melody, threw away everything but the first and last 3 notes. The result was immediate. It sounded like real music. Mature, spare, intelligent music. Not just an overflow of notes, but a statement.

But the song wasn’t working. It was missing an ingredient that I had decided was wrong. Which is why I couldn’t see it. Wanna guess? It was missing none other than piano! The instrument that brought me failure in the first place. I was dumbfounded. But I accepted it. Put piano back in. Now I had an exciting peace, so exciting that I sent it to a producer.

Now comes a personal view of the hardest lesson ever. Please take a moment to consider the following, before dismissing it. Ready? Here we go. The most important lesson is:

Talent doesn’t exist. Success comes from something entirely different: maturity. Maturity of your musical mind is what others will interpret as talent. It can be composing maturity, or performing maturity, it’s nothing else than the opening of your mind to a higher level of musical awareness. Nothing else. Takes years and years of work to get there. But that’s what it is: open your mind, and the rest will follow.

The good news is, maturity is something you can acquire through hard work, by doing an essential thing: don’t throw away your mistakes, record them to their fullest extent. Only then can you fully learn from your mistakes and progress.

So there is hope. What I’ve done you can do it too, your own way. Perhaps I can talk in more details about the tools I use to compose. Musical tools, as opposed to software. There is a language of music, called harmony, and it is so powerful that if you master it, the sky’s the limit for you. Ok. Deal. Next post will be about harmony. In the meantime,  I let you meditate on today’s post. Lots of food for thought here.

Peace.

One part of your song will sound new, another one will sound old, i.e. familiar. For instance if the melody is a classic, the instruments will be new. That is the market for drum loops, synth loops, guitar licks, and the ubiquitous klapz. Remove these elements, and the song is familiar. Or, keep current instruments, but write a new kind of melody. Trying to go beyond and you might find yourself innovating out of a public. It’s not enough to lead, people have to be willing, and better, wanting, to follow. Make it a little easier for them and you will be rewarded.

That’s where the producer comes in, taking you wild new sound and taming it to make it sound familiar. Only a new pair of ears can do this. Our ears are far too attached to our original compositions, it is just too difficult to progress and take that extra step.

Knowing when continued holding on to your vision is more beneficial to your ego than to your song, is the key element in a successful music career. This is the moment at which you realize, admit, understand,or surrender to the fact that your song is more important than you. This is the moment at which you put your DNDIY hat and start searching for talented people who will take your song to the next step.

Of all the talent that is needed to realize your dream, the most misunderstood and the hardest to possess is, in my mind that of mastering engineer. At each step of the process, the song gets better and better, and each talent has the mission of making it even better. Now the mastering engineer is the last in the music chain. That means the song he receives is already perfect, and his job is to improve on that! Anybody who has tried his hands at mastering, knows how hard that is, and how easy it is to totally screw up a piece by a wrong touch of EQ or compression. The mastering engineer is responsible for the meaning of your song. The content, that’s you, but the meaning, that’s the mastering engineer.

God bless all the mastering engineers in the world, mine in particular, for their irreplaceable talent. I mean it. Letting go of your song to a talented mastering engineer is one of the most exhilarating experiences for a composer or singer-songwriter. It’s a win-win.

Sit down and listen to that song, as if written by someone else. Compare in your head with your favorite song. There will be at least one major difference in composition. Chances are your song is cluttered, says too much, doesn’t breathe, has too much background instrumental pieces. Grab that too much instrumental section, and rewrite it by picking one out of every three notes. Experiment with which note you want to select. Play that line with the original beat. There should be a misfit. Correct the beat to accommodate with the spare melodic instrumental, leaving plenty of room for your vocals.

Do not add a single instrument until you feel great about the new bare song, and the song itself is calling for additional instruments. Proceed slowly. Your guiding principle at this stage is that the song should have not enough music, rather than too much. You may have to change tempo, and pitch. When you get real excited about your song, “produce it” to the fullest extent that you are capable of. The most polished, original, goose-bump giving, possible. Then comes the hard part.

Copyright it, and send it to a studio to have studio musicians do a demo of it. Give the musicians a free rein, don’t try to control the process. Sit back, and wait for the studio to send the demo to you. What you will hear, is miles away from what you conceived. It’s clean, spotless, ten times better than what you gave to the studio. Let me give a personal example. I had written an instrumental, with a healthy dose of brass. Boy I loved that brass, so much I put it everywhere. Demo came back, the brass was gone, replaced with a discrete guitar. This piece is climbing on internet radio charts, whereas my version never made it past the first round. That brass was clearly wrong, yet it allowed me to record such a convincing pre-demo, that the musicians who heard the piece outdid themselves and recorded a stellar version of it. Without the brass. What did I get from this? A great piece, whose composition problems had all been fixed. That is the power of sending your music to the right pair of ears, and trusting these chosen outsiders.

Not everybody is meant to be a recording artist. By far. Some are meant to be composers, like me, other producers. You need to ask yourself that question, and answer it. In any event, never send anything to a label, that you did yourself. Have it professionally done by a studio. Trust me on that. You will not regret it.

Peace