So what goes into making music like this anyway? There is a staggering variety of elements that comprise music; the ingredients if you will. Elements like tempo, key, time signature, chord progression and meter are fairly global and broadly define a piece of music. A given genre of music (rock, country, classical, industrial) will then tend to have certain other elements in common, and a given piece of music will be identifiable as being 'rock' because of certain things, or 'classical' because of certain things. The instrumentation of a piece of music goes a long way to defining what genre something belongs to, for example, distorted electric guitar is rampant in rock music and scarce in others. What comes next is the arrangement of each of the instruments. Are the drums loud or soft? Which instrument will play the melody? Which will play one of the harmonies?

When people listen to songs they tend to hear the entire song rather than hearing each individual element of the music -- and that is the idea. When you create music, however, very special attention has to be made to each and every ingredient that makes the song. By the time everything is on its own track and is ready to be mixed down into stereo, one can find themselves making decisions with incredible specificity like "What's the main frequency of the snare drum? I think it should be increased by 3dB in the chorus."

The most important aspect of writing music is that it is *fun*. It is incredible fun. From the genesis of a song, be it strumming a progression on guitar or banging it out on piano or just writing lyrics, the process is an absolute joy. When the process starts, *something* gets created and early on the song will seem deceptively simple but in fact is in large part already completed! Let's take an example.

When Unquiet Home was started all I had was the rhythm guitar and the first verse. Even though it didn't sound like much, even then I had most of the song finished: the key was E major, the tempo was around 80, it was in 4/4 time, the chord progression was E, B, A, c#, A, f#, E, A, f#, E. Based on the lyrics of the first verse I knew where the rhymes would fall in subsequent verses, what the melody of the song was, and what the song was about! What a wealth of information. From there it was a comparatively easy matter to write more verses, and add bass and drums.

One of the first 'hard parts' would be adding subsequent instruments. The idea is to find a musical statement that complements what you already have written. It has to be similar enough to be recognized as part of the musical whole, but it has to be unique, too, so that it doesn't end up being redundant. Listen to the interplay between the bass and rhythm guitar playing the structure of a verse without the lyrics at 1:05 in the MP3. Same tempo, progression, et cetera, but the two lines accent differently making them quite distinct but still a complementary part of the whole.

Rock, like most modern music has a predictable overall structure with verses and choruses and bridges and intros and outros and so on. These separate parts of songs also have to be similar yet distinct. Generally one or two of the basic features of a song is violated to make a distinct 'chorus' (like time signature or key or meter) but even a subtle difference (like changing the accented beats or putting a digital effect on an instrument) can be sufficient to distinguish one from the other and thereby make a song less monotonous.

Just as there is an infinite combinations of time signatures and meters and keys and rhythms and other structural aspects of songs, so there is an infinite choice of instruments or sounds to use for the content of songs. Modern digital technology ensures that no instrument ever need sound like any other ever again. Even acoustic instruments, with the addition of digital effects, can have a wide variety of possible timbres or sounds. As a song starts to take shape the artist will start to get a sense of what each part needs to sound like in order to produce a coherent song. Filler material, like a certain underlying sound of strings or a keyboard pad, will become desirable in some parts of the song, and other little sporadic things will make themselves necessary in other places. At 1:20 in the Unquiet Home MP3 a keyboard pad and piano come in to add color to a small bridge section. This section, for continuity, repeats itself after the solo and leads back into a verse. In the last verse all of the instruments drop out except the rhythm guitar (which you'll recall started the song) and the lead vocal, plus a pedal-tone harmony to reitterate that idea from the first bridge.

Put on headphones and listen to a CD you know very well. But don't listen to the song, listen to each of the instruments that comprise that song. Listen to how similar they are, and how different they are from each other. Try to realize that each one of those lines was written and recorded largely separate from each other. A strange effect that colors part of the song -- they had to discover that noise, and they had to realize that putting it there would have a certain effect on the overall tone of a song. It's amazing how all of those competing sounds come together to make a song.

That's the easy part. Now you have all of your instruments. You have a vocal with lyrics that are about something you wanted to sing about. Your drums are keeping a steady beat and the different melodies and harmonies have rhythms intrinsic to them that offer a mild counterpoint to the main beat. So what else is there? It sounds just like a normal song, right?

Well, yes, sort of. The next step is the icing on the cake. Studio recordings sound much more refined than live performances largely through the magic of post-production and mastering. Post-production is the minute tweaking of dozens of tiny knobs aimed at making everything sound perfect together. Equalization (EQ) brings out the frequencies that you want to hear in an instrument and to cuts the ones you don't; panning spreads elements out along the stereo spectrum. Adding a common reverb to all of the instruments gives a greater sense of cohesiveness, and other timed effects like delay can easily be added to make an instrument or vocal more in synch with the underlying rhythm.

Then there's the magic. With today's affordable equipment it is a comparatively simple matter to import the music from your tape or whatever it is you've recorded on into your computer. We mixed everything and downloaded just the two stereo tracks into the computer. Once you're in the purely digital domain it's amazing what you can do. First all of the 'irregularities' are fixed. Pops, clicks and other undesirable audio phenomena are listened for and, when identified, the frequencies that they represent are determined. Then it's just a matter of decreasing, for the second or so that the imperfection is in, the relative contributions of those frequencies to the overall sound. Saying the letter 'P' gives big boomy noise, and the letter 'S' yields an annoying sibilance. You just go in and make those sounds go away. If there's an instrument that you just want to hear a hair better in the mix, find the frequency and boost it a fraction. The last step is applying software algorithms that detect noise, and cut those frequencies. Voila! Between one second and the next just about all of your audible noise is gone.

The equipment? I have a Yamaha MTX8II analog 1/4" tape 8-track recorder with a mixer and 3-band EQ. I use an Alesis MidiVerb III for my 'effects' and also have an Alesis Compressor. I use an Ibanez Roadstar II guitar and distortion pedal, Yamaha bass guitar, Lakeland 4-piece drumkit and a Roland D-10 keyboard with the most wonderful Alesis NanoPiano MIDI module. Erik is the genius with the computer and the Sound Forge software.

Well, if you read all the way to the bottom, you get a gold star!