Lessons from Melody Ranch
Trust Your Ears
A couple of years ago, my lifelong collaborator, Meg, hit me up and asked if I wanted to write a tribute to Sinéad O’Connor. I agreed and instantly sent over a gazillion verses for her to choose from. She laid out a demo and sent it over. I think Sinéad’s death was still too raw for me to return to it. So, the tune sat in a proverbial pile for quite some time.
Meg and I went to Costa Rica and didn’t even talk about it. Season after season passed, and another year later, I found myself floating in my pool in Costa Rica, thinking about Meg’s visit. How embarrassing. It had been well over a year since I had even thought about it, and I still hadn’t dug into this tune meant as a tribute to one of our favorite and most influential artists. What gives?!
Well, my procrastination may have come from a few places. First, yeah, I was sad. Then my dad died. I’ve just been choosing not to let myself fall into dark places with my creations, so I let things that feel heavy sit docked more often. Also, Meg said she wanted “it to sound like ‘Iris.’ BIG STRINGS!” No pressure there. In production, I do appreciate reference tunes, but when it’s something like “Iris,” it’s a bit daunting to think about. Can I even do that?! The answer is, of course I can, but I’m no different from you. I have to hype myself up too!
But something changed last month in Costa Rica. In the quiet of my solitude, surrounded by nature and a world that grows faster than you can imagine, I suddenly felt the urge to cast off. So I went digging for what Meg had sent me. And, if I’m being honest, I didn’t have everything I thought I had. All I could find was the demo, and not wanting to look unprofessional, I wasn’t about to ask Meg to resend it.
So I dumped the demo into Logic, and then Moises. I used Moises’ stem-splitting feature to get a little more control over the balance between Meg’s voice and her guitar. I figured out the tempo and got to work charting the chords.
“Iris”… What are the parts of that tune that sit in my head without looking it up? Well, it’s already in three, so that makes that easy. Acoustic guitars—and is there a mandolin, I wonder? But I didn’t let myself look it up. Where do the strings enter? I can’t remember. There’s that break: dat dat dat dat, data dat dat dat. We can pay homage to that. What else?
I wrote down every little thing my brain had stored from this foundational tune of my teenagehood.
With fresh drums programmed, Meg’s vocals tightened up, and fresh guitars and clean charts, I sat down with Meg to discuss it.
“These aren’t the charts I sent you. These are so clean.”
“Yeah, I couldn’t find what you sent, so I just redid them.”
“Nice.”
“Hopefully we got it all right. If not, don’t tell me unless you hate what you hear, okay?”
“This sounds great. There’s that one part—I really want to emphasize the break.”
“Like in ‘Iris,’ yeah.”
“Is it in ‘Iris’?”
“It is, like a bridgy interlude.”
For the first time, I pulled up the tune and jumped to the middle to show Meg.
“Oh my God, is that what I was remembering this whole time?”
“Probably. It’s super clear in my mind, so I figured I’m not gonna reinvent the wheel. It will feel familiar, and the listener will love it. We’re using it differently, in a refrain. So it’s not THE SAME.”
“Agreed.”
As I put this tune together, over and over my brain defaulted to hesitation. I’d walk myself through it and not get stuck on what I don’t know or what I am slow at. I just trusted my mind’s ear. You have one too, just like your mind’s eye.
First, I sat with my drummer pal and hummed out everything I knew I wanted in there. He recorded.
“Great. Now, at measure 124, can you accentuate the ba ba ba pa!?”
“Yep.”
We recorded another take with a handful of notes for him to pay attention to. With drums, generally three takes are what you need for a good comp. So I asked him to do it again one last time, with “lots of cymbals,” “only snare fills” (I’m a sucker for snare fills), “tons of cymbals,” and “maybe you can find a spot to try using the ride.” This is what my drum sessions look like. Then I comp! Sometimes the comp is what we keep. Sometimes it’s a super-fancy scratch.
Epic… “Iris”… strings…
Every time strings came up, I would pivot. Because, with all of my skill, charting strings is among my slowest tasks. So… let’s ignore that issue and work on electric guitars. Record. Comp. Guitars are done. Epic is entering the room, but no strings.
Maybe… you know what the string players need? A bass line. Bahaha. So I laid that down in a feeble maneuver to put off the strings. Now I was at an impasse. If I started charting all of the string parts, it was going to take me FOREVER. So I could either suffer through that or suffer through singing parts at players while they read a chord chart. I chose the latter.
There it is, folks: a trade secret. We don’t all chart everything. Sometimes we just sing it at the players. Being a singer, this is a super-solid tool that gets things done—if you find players courageous enough to hack through the jungle with you.
I started with the violins. I already had beautiful electric guitar ideas and a strong melody. A solid violinist had enough to work with.
“That part at 66, in the guitars—follow the upward motion. Yeah, like that.”
“Can we put a touch of counterpoint right in here, kinda like baaaabadaaaaa…?”
My sweet and willing violinist sent me 126 tracks to play with, all labeled “Violin take two.” The engineers and producers are laughing right now. I Mary Poppinsed them into four violin parts and scheduled a session with my cellist. I sent him all of my comped parts and charts and texted him, “See you tomorrow.”
Tomorrow rolled around, and I found myself no longer in Costa Rica but headed home to Santa Fe, the long route via San Diego. What can I say? I get around. Within moments of landing in SD, calls poured in from my musician friends, and I was scheduling out every meal. Breakfast with Mandi Jo and Steph, check.
Wait?! Did I just double-book my morning? Shit. I have a cello session! I had created a bit of a quagmire for myself. As I sat at the beach, I pondered what the right decision was. Work or play? Can I leave solid directions and trust my talented cellist and the universe? F it. I can always schedule another cello session if I don’t get what I want. I’m going to breaky tomorrow.
“Dear Marco, I’m being a shit and ditching our session in favor of life. Would you be willing to check out my directions and send me something you feel good about? I won’t be mad at anything you send. I trust you and hope you feel liberated and free to create with just enough direction. Feel free to text me if this is a misread and you need more info.”
Then I really was a shit and left my phone in the car, ran to bfast, went to Home Depot, painted a bathroom with Mandi, and checked my email hours later.
Wouldn’t you know it? Marco sent two wonderfully comped cello parts with a note: “I think these lines should be in the cello, not the viola, so I added them to my line. Hope you like it.” Hope I like it?! It was perfect! What a man, what a man, what a mighty good man!!! He even picked up on my love of a little counterpoint and reinforced it. Let’s face it: sometimes, with solid instructions, players do better without being watched over. I didn’t have to Mary Poppins any of it!
Okay, this thing is really coming together. Do I have a hundred tracks? Yes. Don’t panic. Just color-code. Fill the empty spaces. Do I even need a viola? Not really. I have guitars for days. F it, no viola. Moving on to bass for the string section. The easiest part, but the cherry on the sundae.
Fast-forward to last night. I sat, working my magic and tidying up the tracks. That sounds done. There’s nothing left to arrange.
But there’s no viola…
But it sounds good…
Maybe I should chart out the parts and see what’s missing.
But… is anything missing, though? It sounds good.
Then, as it has done a thousand times before, my conscience served up my mentor Donald Brinegar’s long-held lesson and calmed my anxieties:
Trust your ears. Trust your ears. Trust your ears.
That’s how I finish things. I trust my ears. If my ears know something is wrong, I do something about it. If they tell me it’s done—even without the viola, the perfect chart, or all the certainty I thought I needed—I let it be done.
I encourage my students to do the same. Don’t let overwhelm create inertia. Cut out the things that annoy you first. Follow the things that move you. Trust the people courageous enough to hack through the jungle with you. And when it sounds right, believe yourself.
The same instinct matters outside the studio, too. If your ears know something is wrong in the conversations around you, speak up. Change things.
It’s not just a way to produce epic tunes. It’s a way to approach life.
Homework
Choose a song you know so well that you can hear it in your mind. Without playing it, write down everything your ears remember: the instruments, the rhythm, where the music swells, where it breaks, and the little part you always wait for. Then listen and see what you got right. Don’t worry about what you missed. Pay attention to what stayed with you—and trust that there’s a reason it did.
Now pull out something unfinished. Listen to it fresh. Fix the first thing that annoys you. Keep going until your ears tell you to stop. Even if there’s no viola.
