In July 2018, two of my best friends got married and they asked me to do the music for the wedding ceremony. Not being particularly musical people themselves, they didn’t have any particular requests beyond it being “y’know, nice”. When even threatening them with playing music from the Legend of Zelda games series or the Rains of Castamere from Game of Thrones didn’t produce any more forthcoming opinions, I just decided to write them something myself.
The colour themes for the wedding were navy and rose gold, so I did two bits of music, one in a calm rosy A major and a more lively one in the orangey-gold key of E. (Yes, I know rose gold is one colour. No, I do not care). I worked a wedding bell peel idea into the second one and other than that, it’s basically just me noodling on the harp.
When the time came I threw the harp in the car and drove down the length of the country down the A1 (again). It was a really lovely wedding and everything went smooth. I used the first piece for the entrance of the bride, played them both during the signing of the register, and played the second again as the wedding party left.
As a present, I made them a special framed version of the music in rose, gold and navy. But neither of them read music all that well so to be honest I could have put literally anything there…so when I got back, I decided to make some recordings for them to listen to in days to come if they wished. This went far less smooth.
A topic I have not yet discussed on this blog is as follows: The thing about recording that non-musical people, or indeed, anyone who has never recorded an album, just don’t get, is that recording is a hellish, stressful, totally unnatural and time-and-energy-consuming faff from the pit of your worst nightmares. Times thirty if you have a tendency towards perfectionism. And my god it HAS to be perfect, because that stuff is going to be listened to over and over and over, by you if not by anyone else….FOREVER. Recording a piece of music goes against every ounce of training you as a musician ever had to Never Stop Playing, brush off mistakes and carry on in time to the music like nothing happened, because the audience might not notice a mistake but they sure as hell will notice you stopping half-way through and saying oops. A fumble for a fraction of a second in a live performance is a fleeting moment that is soon forgotten, but when you are recording and you make a mistake, you stop, and you start ALL OVER AGAIN. And again. And again. And again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again, because you can’t use a recording that has a mistake in it as it will be there forever and people will notice. Sure, there is a certain amount of patching up one can do, but that’s much more work post-recording and you are basically just moving that time and energy to a different place. Recording is a bit like playing a 3D Mario game. You almost get to the top of the mountain (or whatever) when you reach the edge of a cliff, and then instead of stopping and turning around like a normal person, stupid Mario runs in a little circle in order to turn around and ends up falling off the cliff and you have to do the whole level all over again.
The best piece of advice I ever got on performing was from the god of Irish whistle players, who told me that when you play you should think of a time you were in love or heartbroken or angry or happy, and play it through the music, and stop worrying about notes and techniques and other such fluff. He’s right of course, you play music with your feelings and what you’re thinking about when you play drastically changes the way it sounds.
In my experience, what I am inevitably thinking when I am recording the same music by the fourth time onwards is “oh god, please let me not foul this up again and just be done with it already”. That’s not exactly the best version of me or my performance. But by the tenth time, if you nail a version with no obvious boos then you just don’t care anymore.
The solution of course is to be some sort of magical perfect mega-wizard performer person and never, ever make mistakes.
Ha. Ha. Or maybe to care less? I have still not figured this one out. The first time I recorded an album, none of us were even slightly prepared for this. It took us over a week to lay down seven or so tracks (say, 45 mins of music) with three musicians, and that’s not even to mention all the work that was done post-recording. I swore that I would never agree to do another album if I wasn’t confident that I could walk in there and nail it in one take, because things always go wrong, even when it isn’t your fault. I kept my word, and the second album I did was five tracks, three musicians, wrapped up in a single day. By then, playing the whistle and recorder was no sweat off my back and I could do it easily without worry of tripping over, but the prospect of recording my harp playing had me shaking. I got there in one or two takes, but holy cow… One day I’d like a recording of me playing the harp which says “I’m so in with the feelings, making you feel things that I’m feeeeeeeeling” rather than “come on come on come shit shit shit let me not mess up please”. The third album I did was the one of my compositions recorded entirely electronically and I had no hand in the execution of the performance whatsoever. Glorious, glorious magic. Computers don’t mess up.
Occasionally someone hears a piece of mine and asks me if I recorded it live. Like, yes, I have 24-hour access to an entire symphony orchestra who play note-perfect for free. But even for the odd piece of music featuring a harp, people sometime ask me if I recorded it myself. I mean, I could. But every time I write something like that, I always weigh up the benefit of having a real, live recording vs. the utter, utter pain and time and faff and energy of recording something live, and it almost always goes the same way. So I mumble and say no, because it’s not necessarily the time to launch into how much work recording is. Kind of like telling someone you have a new jumper and they ask if you sheared the sheep, dyed and spun and the wool and knitted the thing by hand. Yeah, that would be cool. But…are you kidding?
Sometimes, even an epic sound library doesn’t cut the mustard. This is particularly the case with solo instruments. Sometimes, you’ve got to bite the bullet and do the recording, and sometimes, you have to be like the flower-drawing artist and say: Good is good enough. Time to move on. Mistakes are human and flaws are human, and next time, it will be all the better for having done it this time. Perfectionism, like everything else in this world, is only good in small doses. Good is good enough.
On that note, placed here with the kind permission of Eli and Sophie, here is my recording of Rose/Gold.
Mae McAllister 