"Stop The Presses!"
My band, Sounds Like Water, has released our new album: ‘Expat’
Click on the green links to listen on your favorite streaming service. YouTube Music seems the easiest to use if you don’t have a favorite. If you wish, you can go to the SLW website.
I have spent a over a year writing and recording 11 songs. About 90% was done on the road in Airbnbs. When we left home for our odyssey I had more recording gear checked at the airport than clothing. In deciding between socks and my Rode N-1 vocal mic, well I haven’t worn socks in 8 months.
Getting into the weeds with Bill about music...
There is a wide spectrum of thoughts and attitudes on rock/pop music in the world. They range from ‘I don’t really listen to music” to ‘I’m on top of the music industry and can recite lyrics from Led Zepplin to Taylor Swift” and everything in-between. Music is all around us. It is a part of our life. Even if you don’t listen to music during the light of day you still are moved by it in movies. It is a part of the portraying a story as much as the words spoken by the actors. The people who write the scores of the movies we enjoy are the modern-day equivalent to Mozart or Beethoven.
I always assume some people don’t think about how music is written or recorded. I can even imagine a couple people assume musicians just put that black and silver Panasonic tape recorder in the middle of the room press the play button, then the record button. Then in the style of old black and white movies, the singer says “hey, fellas. I got a new song, and it goes something like this” and the song is born and recorded at the same time. That has never been done that way and never will be done that way. On that note, did you ever notice that in black and white movies the main actress sings only one song, then sits down with the handsome guy. That aint how it’s done. In the club world you’d play 45-minutes sets with a 15-minute break for four hours and be happy with the $100 your earned for the night. One song! OhForCryingoutLoud!
The rest is going to bore the hell out of you, so stop reading...listen to music!
I have what is called a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) Its pretty much software on my laptop with equipment allowing me to plug in and record guitars, mics, and keyboards. The recording world moved to digital recording by the late 80’s. It is amazing to me that I can do many of the things a major recording studio can do but on a much smaller scale. Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas are a success story when it comes to home recording. I suspect their first few albums had about the same recording equipment I currently have.
When I write a song it usually starts with me sitting at my piano banging out chords that seem pleasant. I’ll add instruments, send an audio file to Sean, where he can add his bass guitar, Diane will do her thing on piano, I’ll adapt melody and lyrics, add harmonies, and do general magic until it sounds just right.
Many times, I’ll have my vocal coach (Diane) there as I record myself singing. She whacks me across the knuckles with a ruler when I hit a bad note, so the pressure is on. Just imagine that scene in The Phantom of the Opera where the phantom makes the singer do scales over and over, yelling “again” after each one.
This is my current setup in Chiang Mai. The giant monitor came with the condo. I took advantage. That is the same model of piano we have stored in Seattle. Now I have two Yamaha P-125 on two continants.
I am not alone in a desert. Pete, Sean, and Diane all have input and help. They are the team. They are the band. Diane plays all the pianos, Sean plays bass guitar, and because what I’ve learned from Pete over the years, I now can program my own drums. He is here in spirit for sure. I can bounce things off them and I will get honest answers. I can walk over to Diane and ask “if I am playing G Am Csus2 and G, what key I’m I am playing in?” She stares at me with an expression “how can you not know this?” Pete and Sean are overly polite too. “Er Bill, I kinda liked the original intro a tad better”.
In the new world of AI and such you can have a computer write you lyrics. I’ve seen software where you type a genre and a theme, and it will give you a completed song. This…. is not what I do. What would be the fun in that? I suppose you could impress your 11th grade girlfriend. Yeah, I get that.
Why do I do this? I can’t imagine not doing this. It is an artistic outlet and gives me a feeling of accomplishment.
This is now our 4th album available on all the streaming services. I formed a band in 1990 called Sounds Like Water. I wrote 10 songs then we went into Triad studio in Seattle and recorded an album. BTW that cost me $14,000 in 1990. We played in rock clubs in and around Seattle but years later the band ended. Then in 2020 I gave away all my recording gear and thought that part of my life was done. But a month later, Sean changed my mind and invested in a DAW at home at began writing again. Out of this in 2021 the album ‘Sofie’ was created and can be found anywhere you download music. Since then, it has been downloaded in 28 different countries around the world. Admittedly the downloads are only in the thousands which is nothing in today’s standards. But it stunned me none the less that this occurred.
This album was recorded in Seattle and Thailand. Some of the Chiang Mai portion was recorded in what we refer to as the ‘bunker’. It was a two-bedroom, two-bathroom Airbnb house nestled between a night club and a tattoo parlor. The remainder of the album was recorded in our converted second bedroom 7th floor condo overlooking the city.
Diane, shown here, works out a super complicated piano part. First recording her right hand, then later her left. Later I manually added the sustain pedal. This was at the ‘bunker’ and before I bought a real keyboard here in Chiang Mai when we moved into ‘the condo’.
Humble beginnings in Thailand at the bunker. While at a mall in Chiang Mai I saw this $180 guitar in the window between … and …. It does not compare to my $4000 Les Paul at home but we can’t buy too much stuff here. Some of it will have to stay and be donated when we leave.