Week 2:

This was a pretty long week, but what was weird was that I felt exhausted after just two days of work.

The first day, George was recording a hard-rock artist. She and George had been working for a few weeks, I think, because when I arrived there, they were working on an already-completed song which had guitar, vocals, bass guitar and drums.

He spent most of their session recording a guitar solo for the song, which took several hours. I sat there listening to the process, where he seemed to play the track over and over again, as his ideas for the solo slowly evolved into a comprehensive mold. Every time he replayed the track and tried to record the solo he would take parts that he liked, but discard the rest, sometimes even the whole recording.

Eventually, he got to a point where he had everything he liked, but there was a piece of the guitar solo which required playing an arpeggio at a high rate, which he played and re-recorded several tens of times, but eventually the solo came out and it sounded exceptional.

That day I learned that it is okay to spend several hours on one piece of music, as long as there is progress mounting.

The next day was long. It was eleven hours (with breaks, of course). I was there for that long on my own volition.

The day started with a solo piano artist, but his songs had more than just piano sounds in them. I arrived at a point in the song's evolution where it already had programmed drums and guitar. There were also vocals, and tons of keyboard-created sounds all played by one person.

The part that most interested me about this song was it's unconventional structure. What I mean by that is most radio-songs have the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure, whereas this song seemed to weave in and out of tempo-changes and more than three different distinct sections which were not returned to, yet the song sounded cohesive and musically pleasing.

At the end of the session, the artist explained to me that that song had been through about twenty years of evolution, where he meticulously picked and crafted the sections to produce the unconventional structure.

Later that day, I sat in on a rap artist's session, there I learned about ad-lib rapping. That is where an artist adds "comments" to the main vocal track that work to accentuate the main track. The ad-lib track might have vocal samples like the word "what" after the main track says something absurd or noteworthy.

The last session of the day was with a hip-hop duo. One of the members made the music while the other rapped lyrics. It was interesting to see that the the member who made the music was not using the most updated equipment. In fact, he was using a drum machine and keyboard, both from the 80s.