In my Q and A post on Facebook, Imran Mumtaz asked for the "juicy technical details on recording the latest album” (Awakened to the Sound). So I’m taking the opportunity to give the inside scoop on this Album.  I aim to satisfy the tech-savvy geeks out there, but I hope it is equally as informative for the general music fan. Accordingly, the following will have “juicy” details on the creative process but also some insight into the meaning behind it.

From mellow acoustic to cinematic

Part of the beauty of music is that it reveals aspects of the artist that might be tucked away or hidden in the normal everydayness of life.  Music provides the opportunity to peer into someone’s soul.  One of the things I love about being a musician is that my discography is an audible journal that has captured many seasons of my life.  Music has an incredibly powerful way of portraying the heart of a season. The lyrics and melodies capture that as a whole. But even the details and nuances in the way the songs are arranged, recorded, and mixed are meaningful.  My previous album Pages (recorded in San Diego) captures an intimate, raw, vulnerable season.  After a big move to Colorado, family, studio and all, I began writing Awakened to the Sound. It was a new season.  Life felt like it was expanding, almost exploding into newness.  It felt cinematic in its growth, movement, and beauty. 

Finding the Voice: the Sarangi

The stage was set for what the next album would feel like.  When I set out to write each album, I have to identify what is important.  What is the dominant factor that emotionally moves me?  What is the unifying factor that builds a strong composition and sound?  One of the main instruments that I knew would capture the “sound” I heard in my head was the unique voice of the sarangi. The sarangi also inspired the use of other instruments on the album such as the tabla and the sitar.  I also knew that I wanted the Sarangi to be heard within a cinematic/epic landscape.  Historically, the sarangi is a very “folky” instrument. It is typically played as a solo instrument or with a small group of musicians.  It is not the kind of instrument you typically see accompanied by symphonies or rock bands.  In “Awakened to the Sound” I wanted to bring two worlds together.  I wanted the huge and moving feel of cinematic strings and drums to be merged with the rustic and other-worldly voice of the sarangi.

With a pretty clear directive, most of my songwriting effort was spent embracing the sarangi and its conventions. Let me explain: I could have written 10 to 20 songs, completed the demos, and then told the sarangi player, “Ok, play along with the song.”  The result would have been 10 to 20 songs that sounded like my previous discography but with a sarangi added to it.  I wanted more than that. I wanted something that was kind of out of my hands, something that was more than what I would have created on my own. I wanted to add my voice to the sarangi's. 

So I invited my friend, Suhail Yusuf Khan, an eighth-generation sarangi player to my home studio in the forest for about a week.  When he arrived, I had no music written, no demos prepared, no chord progressions for him to play along with.  I wanted to find out what the Sarangi was about first.  So I had him sit down in the tracking room, and I just asked him to play.  It was like listening to someone tell a story.  The story was ancient; more than eight generations old.  The sound was wrought with memory and emotions.  As I listened, it struck me how small my musical world has been. I realized that this was a privilege.  Suhail shared with me that the word “sarangi” means “voice of a thousand colors.”  I had the honor of having my album colored by a master painter.

I had to learn a few things about how a sarangi player approaches music and how that technically applies to music theory.  

What Suhail taught me was that a sarangi player is trained to have a melodic approach to composition. This is not the case with Classical/Orchestral or Rock music (which both are considered Western), which tends to have a choral or harmonic approach.  In Rock music, when a guitar player is playing along with a band, she is anticipating and structuring her performance around chords and harmonies that are being built under her by other instruments in the band.  In Classical music, the violinist’s melody is built on a structure of chords established by the rest of the orchestra.  A sarangi player does not approach music this way.   The player is not focused on chords or harmony.  He is moving in pure melodic synchrony.  On a theoretical level, he is thinking in terms of scales (or more specifically modes).  More importantly, though, Suhail explained to me that a truly advanced player is not thinking at all.  A truly advanced player is fully connected intuitively and emotionally to the music.  A master sarangi player has a clean and direct conduit between his soul and the instrument.

As a classically trained musician, this is pretty far from my typical experience!  

I’m constantly trying to figure out what chord would be good after this chord, what beat might be cool here, or what would happen if I changed this to that.  I’m not exaggerating when I say that the experience of recording him brought me to tears.  There was something so free and so deep in his melodies.  It was one of the most memorable and enjoyable recording experiences of my life.

I basically wrote songs to his playing.  

He would pick a key that works for his instrument (incidentally, the instrument has limitations and must be re-tuned to fit the key of the song and/or the mode that it is to be played in), and I would create a bed of music and chords that responded to his playing.  This was done with a variety of virtual instruments such as piano, harp, or strings. Since there was nothing fully developed such as a verse or chorus or even vocal melody, I had to just feel out something that would give me a start.  As he played, if I got an idea, I would record the idea into Pro Tools, however long or short the idea was.

The next step was having Suhail hang out for some days while I developed those ideas.

The ideas didn’t need to have full-blown production; they just needed to be developed enough to record full takes of sarangi throughout the song.  At times, I would ask Suhail to come back into the studio and maybe add some more ideas to what had just been developed.  But by the end of about five days, most of the songs for Awakened to the Sound had been structured, and the final sarangi tracks had been recorded.

The following months were a long process of taking the songs to the next level, writing verse and choruses, developing the sound of each song, and orchestrating or choosing what kind of instrumentation should be used.  The important thing though was that the songs had an identity; they had a birthplace. Suhail and his sarangi became the source of light and creativity for what the album is today.

I hope this lends some inspiring insight. While music always reveals something about us, we must continue to reach outside ourselves to make new meaning with sound.

I will continue with part 2 next time...stay tuned as we get into more of the technical details of the album!  Subscribe to this blog at the bottom of the page HERE!

~ Eric