Oregon Music News

Nowadays anyone with a laptop and even a hint of musical inclination can bang out a song and make it available worldwide in the course of an afternoon. Programs like GarageBand make multitrack recording and sophisticated effects processing easily accessible to the least tech-savvy, while a plethora of other variously specialized programs address the needs of more serious artists.

The recent explosion in inexpensive music software has empowered solo, home-recording artists to articulate complex, multi-instrumental visions without the assistance of band mates in ways not previously possible–even to reach global audiences without ever setting foot in a studio or dealing with a record label.

But what about the live show?

After a successful home recording, how can a digitally empowered solo artist take their music to the stage and project a compelling presence in a live context?

Great recordings don’t necessarily translate into crowd-pleasing stage performances without significant adaptation, and most regular concertgoers (at least those interested in technologically tolerant genres) have experienced disappointingly karaoke-like performances from artists who relied too much on pre-recorded backing tracks.

Over the last two years, Portland’s Micah Tamblyn has been experimenting, writing, recording, and meticulously polishing a moody, electro-influenced brand of indytronica under the Dropa moniker. Singlehandedly employing a mix of organic and digital instrumentation, Tamblyn has relied primarily on home computer based technologies to record and compose his musical vision, last october releasing a 13 track album entitled A Well Orchestrated Plan for free online download.

Listen to “Another Fix” from the album:

The album’s rich, multi-layered aural texture could be easily mistaken for the concerted effort of a pop-minded ensemble, replete with skittering electronic beats and booming live drums, freely intermingling synth washes and punchy baselines, soaring vocals and catchy guitar riffs, an instrumental diversity belying its genesis in the mind of one individual. After the album’s release, Tamblyn decided it was time to start performing the songs for live audiences and began working to bridge the gap between his home recorded vision and the stage. OMN recently sat down with him to discuss the process.

OMN: You produced A Well Orchestrated Plan totally by yourself right?

MT: Yeah.

OMN: How many tracks on average did each song have?

MT: Well some vary, I’d say from 7 tracks to others maybe like 15 tracks. One thing you hear on the album is a lot of resampling, where I’ll send stuff out and manipulate it and send it back in… filters and stuff like that, then I’ll resample it and make a loop out of it. There’s a lot of parts in the songs where I did that with vocals as well as multiple synth parts. There’s a lot of experimenting with resampling.

OMN: Would you say that a lot of the composition process was just experimenting with the technology itself?

MT: Yeah, yeah, the computer definitely had a big influence on the creative output of the songs themselves. I don’t think any of them would’ve sounded near the way they did if it wasn’t for the computer, wouldn’t sound anywhere near the way it turned out.

OMN: Laptops are so integral to what a lot of people are doing these days, how do you feel about them as performance tools?

MT: As long as you’re not just playing tracks and you’re using it as a tool or an instrument itself, then it becomes something completely different. For me I have like three different keyboards and a drum set going into it, controlling instruments and effects, my vocals are going into there, and I’m changing around and resampling my vocals so to me it’s like a magnificent instrument but I think it’s no different than having a bunch of effects pedals. The fact that software’s constantly being developed and there’s no limit to what you can do, I find that when you’re dealing with a guitar and a few effects pedals and an amp there’s a lot of possibilities but you’re still limited what you can do with a guitar and some effects pedals and your amp, and you know going to a laptop setup makes it like endless possibilities, you can do anything.

Listen to “Conscious Connection”:

OMN: Once you had a finished work of art and decided you wanted to play that live for people, how did you start the process of transferring what you created individually into something that would be performed by a group?

MT: Well that’s kind of funny, that’s kind of been my major battle with this, deciding how to play it live. I’ve seen a lot of artists get up there and perform with a laptop or a pre-recording. I didn’t wanna do that, be like a one-man band, which you know can be fun but from an audience standpoint people like to see stuff that’s being played. I first just decided just to have a drummer and then I came across two brothers [Nathan and Darren Trtek], one’s a drummer who plays an electronic kit and the other one plays bass and synth, so we worked at that for a while to try sequencing our performance. It’s kind of been interesting to see how a lot of these parts have come to life with them performing it ’cause they put some of their own fill and flavor into it, especially with the drums. The drums have more life and that’s really what I wanted to come across being an electronic musician.

OMN: So you’ve got three guys now, but up to 15 tracks on some songs. How do you re-create those complex songs or begin the process of changing those songs? What kind of difficulties did you run into?

MT: Well we found that some of the songs you can only perform so many tracks. I guess the idea of trying to pick the most solid tracks out of the songs, the essential pieces and focus on those but a lot of the tracks have thick textures of ambiance and other things going on so what we tried doing for performance was having a few tracks sequenced and then playing along with those, playing key instruments, but I think we’re at the point where we’re talking about either adding another person to try playing everything live and not having any sequenced stuff, or using loops and building on that in a live performance, which could be tricky and could also crash on us. The problem of adding a new person is the complexity of having different points of view and attitudes. It’d be easier to keep it a three piece as opposed to moving on to a four piece.

OMN: How do you determine where the compromise point is in terms of what you’re dropping out, what you’re keeping?

MT: There’s a bit of play with, “Ok, let’s try it like this” and if it sounds too empty then we try re-working that.

OMN: You’ve actually created your own instruments to facilitate the live recreation, the microkorg keytar?

MT: I wanted people to see what I was doing performance-wise, wanted to be able to move around and dance so I transformed my microkorg into a keytar by putting a strap on it and attaching a MIDI controller onto that to give myself some extra options.

OMN: Now that you have band backing you up, do you feel like your songwriting style is more restrained, keeping in mind you’re going to have to recreate it in a live context?

MT: I’m trying to keep it more simple, but I don’t wanna put restrictions on what’s possible. If it comes down to it, live might sound a little different than the recordings, but I think what’s more important is having the sound be in the moment and not sound like we’re just replicating a recording.

Listen to the album’s opener “Headtrip”:

OMN: What’s more important to you–to produce a song that sounds really awesome to be distributed and listened to or to go and perform for a live audience?

MT: I almost feel like they’re two different mediums.

OMN: So how do you determine where to place the emphasis as an artist?

MT: I think there’s art behind both of them, but it’s not necessarily detrimental either way whether you’re just a recording musician or also a performing musician. There’s a lot of artists making these home studio recordings and distributing them. I think that’s great because not everybody is a performer that’s able to get up on stage and maybe not everybody wants that. I think when you’re performing it, the song definitely does grow with you, but there’s also an art behind something that’s created in the moment. Live is interesting because it’s a living, breathing thing–you have to worry about the reaction of the audience. I’m excited to perform live but it’s also kind of nerve-wracking.

OMN: Are the guys contributing their ideas to it as well?

MT: We’ll see how it goes, I’m not sure where the songwriting’s gonna go at this point, but I’m not gonna say, “No, this is my project.” I started off making this in the direction I wanted to make it but I’m not gonna keep it restricted to that.

Dropa will perform songs from A Well Orchestrated Plan Friday March 5th at the Doug Fir with Climber and Hello Morning.  Dropa plays at 9 PM so arrive early.  $10, 21+