Review: Christmas Music (Trevor Gordon Hall - Let Your Heart Be Light)

Christmas music sucks. It's the same songs, year after year, played incessantly for more than a month straight of EVERY SINGLE YEAR. It doesn't matter that there are new artists singing them; they're doing nothing new. For this reason, I limit myself to only listening to Christmas music at church and on Christmas and Christmas eve. That's it.

And it's not me being anti-Christmas or anything. I hate the commercialization of it and the music; that's it.

Needless to say, my expansive music collection has chosen to skip over the Christmas-themed music. I have 3 Christmas albums: the RelientK one from when I was in middle school, my friend Matt's band, and Trevor Gordon Hall's, Let Your Heart Be Light, The Christmas Album. I haven't listened to the Relient K one in eons and, honestly, I haven't unwrapped Matt's yet. If I try to preempt the Christmas music strike, bad things happen.

But somewhat out of obligation, I decided to take a risk this year. A HUGE risk. About a week ago, I got out Trevor's album and threw it in my car. I replaced the live August Burns Red album (that I was at the show for!) to listen to Christmas music?! And I'm there asking myself, Why?!


It's Trevor Gordon Hall. He's a musical genius, innovator, and a friend. My logic was that if anyone could do Christmas music right, it'd be a guy with vision like Trevor's. But the whole time I'm nervous. I REALLY don't like Christmas music. I'm thinking to myself, will my respect for Trevor disintegrate after hearing this? Am I going to impulsively drive into oncoming traffic to stop this? What will happen if I actually do like it?! How should I feel?


Yes, I did wonder ALL of those things. But in a moment of trust, I hit play and began my venture to work. It's less than 20 minutes, so I figured, worst case, it'd be a crappy morning drive.


I didn't expect, however, to pop the disc out and take it in to work with me. But sometimes you're broadsided like that. I had high hopes and reasonable expectations, but this album I would listen to year-round.

Here's the breakdown:

It starts out with Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas; commercialized and generic, but fresh. It's got a nice intro tacked onto it and some good harmonic work throughout.

Next is I Saw Three Ships. This is played in a very Trace Bundy-like style; some nice finger work to start off, followed by a very bouncy rhythm that has you bopping back and forth to the music.

O Holy Night follows with a more traditional sound, but done very elegantly. It's got a Don Ross feel to it. Nice and peaceful with few surprises, but just a generally good sounding piece.

The First Noel starts out with The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire). It's a good, familiar way to lead into the meat of the song. What got me about this one, time and time again, was how organic it sounded; there is so much string noise in all of the right places. So many people try to remove any extraneous noises when these are the ones that make the guitar sing.

White Christmas - from the start you've got this big, resonating harmonic. The song is big and open. A lot of times guys will try to cram as many notes as possible into these songs, but this is the perfect balance.

Frosty the Snowman - pretty typical, but spiced up with some sleigh bells and harmonica part way through the song.

Auld Lang Syne - he brings in a Rhodes and a glockenspiel for this song. I love the sound of glock and guitar. Matt Stevens turned me onto that. There's just something about that mellow bell-like resonance... It's a great arrangement.

Silver Bells - it starts out with what sounds like a ukulele and then gets some nice slide work overlaid on top. It's adds a nice mix to the album. If I had to guess, there's also some looping going on here, as Trevor does some pretty crazy stuff live and would probably be able to do the whole thing live...

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel - fretless bass intro. YES! It's super smooth and is coupled with a slow gear kinda volume swell effect on the guitar. There is actually a lot more focus on the bass than the guitar on this one - which on a 15 track album makes for a good break.

Christmas Time Is Here - this brings you back to the guitar-centricity of the album. It's got some nice quiet acoustic parts and then jazzy, lightly distorted leads with a hint of delay, over top.

Count Your Blessings (Instead of Sheep) - is that an e-bow? The spacey, sustain of an e-bow really adds to an album that is, overall, a little slower. Good call by Trevor.

Angels We Have Heard On High - it's nothing exciting, but definitely helps to bring the album together more. It's one of those things I guess you expect to hear, and, like many other tracks on this album, can take you back to the stripped-down simplicity of the original hymns.

Edelweiss - throughout the album, there a few places where Trevor uses an e-bow really subtly. It's one of those things that differentiates between good and great. Here's another instance of that.

Christmas Medley - Usually the contents of a song like this would be enough Christmas music for me for the year. Instead, I've listened to this album maybe 10 times so far. It really is that good.

And there's a bonus track. You'll have to check that one out for yourself...


So tonight and tomorrow you need to listen to this. It is literally the only album on my approved Christmas music list.

spotify: Trevor Gordon Hall – Let Your Heart Be Light - The Christmas Album


not on the album, but SO GOOD live -

Soundtrack Review: The Art of Flight

I say “movie soundtrack” and what do you think? I know I’m immediately thinking big orchestral scores similar to The Pirates of the Caribbean and Lord of the Rings. To a lesser degree, I think of movies like Juno and Scott Pilgram vs. the World. Film is one of those places where you can get a hipster to listen to an orchestra or you can get someone with slightly more class to listen to Sonic Youth. It’s a beautiful dichotomy.

But what is it that makes these soundtracks so great? If you were to throw the Juno soundtrack in with The Pirates of the Caribbean it wouldn’t bode well for either. Music is set there to compliment the film. It helps you to experience the film on a deeper level. In my examples, we’ve got POTC and LOTR as these big epics with battles and adventure …and music that makes you feel like you’re in the midst of those exact things. With Scott Pilgram, the music helps you to feel like you’re in the midst of a video game. And with Juno, you feel like a lost indie kid in a big confusing world.

The music is there to remove you from your seat and place you in the movie. Consequently, when you hear the same music without the movie, it is emotive of those same feelings. When I hear the POTC soundtrack, for instance, I immediately am thinking of scenes from the movie.

But this is a rare case. Unless it’s the theme song, for most movies, hearing something from it won’t evoke anything reminiscent of the movie. And even a more rare case is that there is a documentary with such a mind-blowing soundtrack.

Enter, The Art of Flight. It’s a snowboarding documentary. When I think of snowboarding documentaries, after thinking of how awesome the footage is, I am reminded of how terrible the music is. It’s so often over-produced rap, angsty punk, or something else that’s way too much of a sensory overload when combined with watching guys drop off 70 foot cliffs. The music rarely makes you feel like you are there.

And really, snowboarding is a lot more tangible than most movies, so it should be easier to emulate the feeling through music. If music can make you feel like you’re sailing across the ocean in a pirate ship, shouldn’t it also be able to make you feel like you’re doing something a little less fanciful.

So often this is botched up, but not with The Art of Flight. Everything is perfect. There is literally nothing I would change about the movie, except to maybe make it longer. Since I first saw it about a month ago, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about snowboarding or stop listening to the soundtrack.

The soundtrack to this thing redefines what you think of as a soundtrack. It has variety, dynamic, and puts you right in the middle of the movie. Sure, I’m not out there hucking backflips over 100 foot gaps on a glacial melt, but I do snowboard and am pretty well familiar with the sport. And somehow, this soundtrack is snowboarding. It’s complimentary to the images to place you right in the middle of the action.

This is finally a soundtrack that recognizes that snowboarding is more than just about big tricks. When I’m listening to this, I’m doing what I do on a mountain. I like steep and fast and, occasionally, a good cruiser.

Right off the bat, you’ve got some house beats (that's what they're calling this stuff, right?), compliments of Deadmau5, that give the vivid feeling of flying down a chute, airing over small features, but in such a fluid manner and with such intensity. The bass is driving, but at a palatable pace that focuses on the control of every little muscle movement involved with keeping up with gravity. It’s not about going big, but about style. It’s the beauty of a well planned line and the thrill of the moments when your board leaves the ground.

After that, there’s this song by The Naked and Famous, “No Way.” It’s basically like cruising on some packed power and then dropping some fresh tracks. You’ve got the opening words of “When the daylight comes, do you feel it?” It’s in a soft voice and makes you think of cruising blues on packed power after getting first chair, bright and early in the morning. When I’m listening to it, I’m hearing the crunch of cutting through the snow through nice, relaxed carves down an empty slope. Every verse is like this – like cruising leisurely and enjoying life. Then you’ve got these big choruses that take you from the lift lines and packed powder to the back side of the mountain, laying fresh tracks through huge pow turns. It’s like floating.

Next in line is Apparat’s, “Ash/Black Veil.” It’s set by a delay driven, beat that seems to be comprised of some guitar, violin, percussion, and random sound effects. It’s light and open. Listening to this one, I’m envisioning a tree run. Not an east coast run, but out west, where you’ve got big, open aspen glades and powder. The song takes you along this trail, where you’ve got nothing but trees ahead of you and nothing but trees behind you.

Basically, the album continues at this pace – exploring the many facets of snowboarding, snow, and winter. You’ve got tracks for big jumps, tracks for steep lines, tracks for danger, and tracks for relief. This is what I want to ride to this winter. This is a soundtrack beyond the scope of a movie. It’s one that spans to reach the snowboarding (skiing, snowmobiling, etc.) subset of the population to the point of being the soundtrack to our lives for the next 4 months.

Check it:

And, of course, the rest of the soundtrack:

Segment	Artist	Song
Intro 1	Defrag	Element 1
Intro 2	M83	Outro
So Far Gone 1	Hendrickson/Dick/Harry	Before the Storm
So Far Gone 2	Deadmau5	Ghosts n’ Stuff (Nero Remix)
Down Days	Oswin Macintosh	Passion Victim
Wizard	The Naked and Famous	No Way
No Bueno	Apparat	Ash/Black Veil
Darwin 1	Klaus Badelt	Nowhere to Run
Darwin 2	Blockhead	Sunday Seance (Loka Remix)
Home 1	The Album Leaf	Another Day
Home 2	The Naked and Famous	Young Blood
Home 3	Mel Wesson	Motional Rescue Pulse
Avalanche 1	Mel Wesson	Stark Light
Avalanche 2	Sigur Ros	Track 6
Aspen	M83	Intro
Revelstoked	Hum	Iron Clad Lou
More stoked	The Black Angels	Young Men Dead
Even more stoked	M83	My Tears Are Becoming A Sea
Credits 1	Okkervil River	Westfall
Credits 2	We Are Augustines	Chapel Song

Studio Session 12/9-12/11

So I was just in the studio this past weekend and thought it’d be good to share some insight for those of you who may want to someday record some music and also for those who just want to know what it’s like. I’ll summarize my time this past weekend and throw in some tips as well.

Over three days (Friday-Sunday), I was at MR. STUDIO (Jeremy Bentley) in Lancaster for about 21 hours. In that time, I laid down guitar for 7 songs, totaling close to half an hour of material. These ranged in complexity from one or two track songs to some that had 6 or so. I’ll need to go in for one more day/weekend to finish up the project, but it is coming along well.

Overview:

Friday:

I tend to try to get the hard stuff out of the way first. It makes sense to me.  So a song that uses two stages of looping, distortion, delay, and some crazy polyrhythmic stuff made sense. Between setup and this song, I ended up going over by an hour.

Saturday:

I started with some easier stuff on Saturday. Starting off with something straight forward made sense after Friday night’s work. After one easy one, I did one that had a bit more percussion involved, so it was a little more difficult to lay down and get dynamically correct.

Then I started on another complex one. Looping, reversed loops, distortion, delay, and surprises were all involved… And by surprises, I mean, you’ll have to wait and the wait will suck. In any event, this one took the cake for hardest. Some 6 hours later, both Jeremy and I were frustrated and didn’t have a complete recording.

Sunday:

Sunday started with an easier song that ended up with some extra goodies. I’m excited for this one. It didn’t take too long until I decided to start playing around with it. Then ideas just started popping up.

After that, I did an old one that really didn’t take much time at all. It was easy and straightforward. Then, one with some looping and some percussion that wasn’t too hard either. This one brought out some new ideas that drastically change how awesome the song will be, so playing around there took some time.

Finally, the song from Saturday was revisited. It took us up until the very end of the session, totaling somewhere between 7-8 hours on that one song… Frustrating, but a great final product.

Tips:

Guitars:

Get them professionally set up. This was the first time that my Taylor was set up (big thanks to Penn Avenue Music in Reading). I keep it in a pretty well controlled environment, so it wasn’t out too bad, but with the neck true, it plays noticeably smoother.

Restring your guitar. This will be done with the setup, unless you’re going to skip that step. Don’t experiment with a new type of string – use a gauge and brand that you are comfortable and familiar with. And break them in! No one wants a tinny sounding recording, so make sure you’ve got 20 hours or so on them.

Also, go into the studio with options. I never go in with just one guitar. This weekend, I only used one guitar, but I had another, as well as a bass, just in case I felt inspired. You don’t want to think up some great idea and not have the means to execute it. Sure, it sucks lugging tons of gear into the studio, but it sucks more when you want something that’s not there.

Electronics:

With acoustic, you generally just mic the guitar. You don’t use an amp, and, even with electrics, you want to avoid effects. The idea is that it is easier to add stuff later than it is to take it away. Ever try to take out reverb after it’s been recorded? Ha!

What you’re looking for with the electronics is that everything is working properly. This may mean a new set of tubes in your amp (or preamp, as was my case), isolating and eliminating any noise from your pedals, changing the battery in your guitar (for active p’ups), or servicing your vintage echoplex (mine needs to be cleaned). This will ensure that you’re not messing around trying to fix stuff during your studio time. When you do it there, it costs you money.

Practice:

You’re going to be playing your instrument for extended periods of time. And you’re going to be trying to get everything right the first time. So figure out what you want to play and then you’ve got two focal points: accuracy and endurance.

Accuracy is hitting every note correctly. In your practice time, focus not only on the right notes, but also on tone. At least with guitar, there are a number of different sounds you can get from the same note. You want the best one. So practice that way.

The endurance required may vary. For a solo instrumentalist such as myself, 20 hours in a studio means upwards of 20 hours playing guitar – in two or three days. If you’re in a band or also sing, you’ll have some relief. If not, you’ve gotta be prepared.

The first time I recorded with Jeremy, my fingers were raw after day one and I was in excruciating pain at the end of the weekend. I actually had to take time off of playing to let my hands recover. This time? My hands felt great at the end of every day and Sunday night, when I got home, I got out my guitar and started playing some more. The key was that leading up to the weekend, I put in quite a few 4-5 hour practice sessions, some on back to back days. Earlier I mentioned putting 20 hours on a new set of strings. I did that in a week. Including the time recording, I played for nearly 40 hours in a 7 day period. That’s a full week’s work.

Rest:

Don’t go in tired. Recording is mentally draining. Even if you are physically prepared, your mind needs to be in the game or you’ll get nothing done.

For vocalists, I hear you’re supposed to rest your voice. I don’t know, I’m not a vocalist.

Documentation:

This is a big engineering thing that has carried over to my music. I’ll never be one to write out my songs, but make sure you include any relevant details, so that you know them when you’re recording. This includes song names, tunings, effects used, effect settings, etc. I went a step beyond and made a chart that listed these things. Ultimately, it helped me to visually see which songs made sense in progression, giving me my album order. Sending this to Jeremy gave him a good idea of what was coming where as well. Be sure to keep track of anything that changes in the studio as well.

Be Open Minded:

Sure, I mentioned above that you want to have things figured out beforehand. The point there is that you shouldn’t be writing the songs on studio time. That doesn’t mean that they can’t change. Be open to changing things last minute. You may accidentally hit an extra note somewhere, but if it sounds better that way, then change it. When you’re sitting in a studio listening to the same section of a song a million times in a row, you’re bound to come up with some new ideas.

Let the Engineer Do His Thing:

These people record for a living. They probably know more about recording than you do. Accept that. Once I was in position with the mics, I was told not to move. Sure, I moved in between playing, but while playing I was in the exact same position EVERY TIME. Don’t screw that up.

Finally, here’s the gear setup that I used:

• ·      Guitar: Taylor 410ce (c. 2007)
• ·      Pickups: K&K Onboard Trinity
• ·      Effects: (in order) Presonus TubePRE (w/JJ 12ax7), Ernie Ball Volume Jr., Ibanez TS7, Line 6 DL4, Danelectro Tape Reel Echo Simulator, BBE Sonic Stomp, Fishman AFX Reverb, Boss RC20XL
• ·      Amp: Roland AC-60
• ·      Mics: (2) SM57 – 1 off of soundhole, 1 for amp. GT55 – off of 12^th fret.

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5.10

What do you want to be good at? What do you want to succeed in? And more importantly, how are you getting there?

If you want to be famous, go play in traffic. You’ll make the news. Better yet, film yourself doing it. Youtube will eat it up …for a few days.

But if you want to do something great or to be a better person, it won’t happen tomorrow. Or next week. It takes time and push to get anywhere. If you’re lucky enough to be handed something “successful,” you still aren’t “successful” until you’ve tackled adversity and dealt with bad times.

Tuesday, at the climbing gym, my girlfriend climbed a 5.10 on her first try. A few months ago she was too afraid of heights to climb the whole way up the wall. To put it in perspective, there are 8 different “colored” routes at the gym, white through black. She started at white. This was a green, with only blue and black above it.

To get to that point took a lot of hard work. To start, she was afraid of heights. For most fears, the best way to deal with them is to face them. Climb a 35 foot wall enough, and suddenly 35 feet isn’t so high. Maybe you’re still afraid of heights, but you’re not afraid of 35 feet.

Beyond that, a 5.10 is pretty nuts. It takes a lot of skill development and strength; skills and strength that you only get through constantly being challenged. On easy climbs you have huge jugs to hold on to. It’s essentially like climbing a ladder; one hand after the other and one foot after the other. As you move up, the holds get smaller. Suddenly, you’ve got small pockets, pinches, and crimps. Your holds go from being 6 inches off the wall to being half an inch or smaller. And instead of a logical hand-over-hand progression, you’ve got places where you match a foot on a hold your hand is on and other places where you’re laying back with your shoulder into the wall. You have to not only learn these techniques, but you also have to learn when to use them and how to use them effectively.

And if you can’t constantly be looking ahead, you’re going to get stuck. I push pretty hard with climbing. Generally, I slow down when I feel like I’m risking injury and become reckless. If you’re not pushing towards that, then you’re not being challenged enough. You don’t want to push past that point, but you want to go right up to it and stare it in the face.

It’s a progression. We all start out playing individual notes or chords in whatever we do. It’s a slow process, note by note. Then you start to learn skills and technique. You practice endlessly until it hurts. Then you practice more and it hurts more, but it’s a good hurt because you understand it. Finally, you work on developing those skills and being innovative. That last step is a life-long work. It involves few of those days where your fingers are raw because you’ve already built up the calluses. But you can’t ever be comfortable with where you’re at. To be great, you don’t stop at 5.10, because there is 5.11.

It’s really great to see Kelly progress how she has. And it’s encouraging to know that my moderately aggressive teaching style gets results. But she’s far from done. We’re both taking December off, but come January, we’ll be picking back up, moving back up to the 5.10s and looking ahead.