Beach Boys' Music Theory, Harmonic Series with Tim Smolens - Music Production Podcast #359

Tim Smolens is a musician, composer, and recording engineer. He teaches music theory on his YouTube channel and at High Castle Music Conservatory. Tim has toured and plays in the bands ISS and High Castle Teleorkestra.

Tim and I had an inspiring conversation about his work and appreciation of music and chord theory. Throughout the episode, Tim demonstrates the principles on his piano. We discussed the chord theory of the Beach Boys and Soundgarden, the evolution of recording technology, and much more.

Listen on Apple, Spotify, Google, YouTube

Show Notes:

Takeaways:

  • Tim Smolens' YouTube channel focuses on analyzing the chord progressions and music theory behind the Beach Boys' music.

  • The Beach Boys' music is known for its complexity and intricate production techniques.

  • Tim Smolens incorporates interesting chord progressions and extensions in his own music, drawing inspiration from various genres.

  • Home recording has evolved significantly, allowing musicians to create complex and layered compositions.

  • The way music is consumed and appreciated has changed, with a diminished passion for music in society. Music has a profound influence on philosophy and can be explored as a subject of study.

  • Learning to play an instrument can be challenging, but the struggle and resilience required can lead to a deeper appreciation and understanding of music.

  • Technology has revolutionized music production, allowing for greater control and experimentation in creating music.

  • The production of music plays a significant role in creating feelings, moods, and atmospheres.

  • The aesthetics of music, including tone production and composition, can greatly impact the emotional impact of a piece.

  • The studio itself can be considered an instrument, with its unique capabilities and effects on the music.

  • Different musical instruments offer unique challenges and opportunities for expression.

  • Timing and groove are essential elements in music, creating a sense of feel and energy.

  • Studio musicians have played a significant role in shaping the sound and feel of music throughout history.

  • The science of music and tuning, including the harmonic series, can provide a deeper understanding of the relationships between notes and harmonies.

  • Harmonic science is often overlooked in music education, but understanding it can enhance musical compositions and performances.

  • The cultural context in which music is created and perceived can influence the perception and appreciation of different musical elements. Balancing music with a busy life can be challenging, but it is possible to find time for creativity.

  • Creating a dedicated space for music and setting aside specific times for practice and composition can help prioritize musical pursuits.

  • Joining platforms like Patreon and music conservatories can provide valuable resources and support for musicians.

  • Embracing tangential conversations can lead to unexpected insights and creative ideas.

Thank you for listening. 

Please review the Music Production Podcast on your favorite podcast provider!

Episode Transcript:

Brian Funk (00:01.27)

Hey Tim, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.

Tim Smolens (00:04.114)

Thanks a lot for having me, Brian.

Brian Funk (00:06.47)

So your stuff, I was telling you a little bit before, but just to reiterate and get us started, I came across your YouTube channel, just the algorithm suggested it, served it up. It was talking about some Beach Boys chord progressions, I think Surf's Up and Surfer Girl were the ones that I saw first. And I was just, I was in love with the channel right away, the way you're dissecting the chord progressions and showing how, you know, Brian Wilson was able to take

this sometimes relatively simple ideas and just turn it into magic and some of the beauty and the secret little tricks he's doing, modulating and stuff like that. So your channel is so good and for anyone that's interested in music theory and how to bring some interesting chord progressions into their work, I think you do such a great job in helping people get there.

Tim Smolens (00:59.806)

Thank you. Yeah, it's cool that people like you are finding my channel and it is starting to grow and it's kind of pushing me in a certain direction of the Beach Boys analysis was really kind of a small part of what I do. And if you said you've read my bios, I'm kind of all over the place, but it's kind of putting this pressure on me. Like, like, I think the majority of my subscribers are now like mostly in it for the Beach Boys analysis. So how do I reconcile that with, like, the hardcore sci fi prog rock people that, you know, like my channel to?

Brian Funk (01:27.958)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (01:28.747)

But I'm happy to do it. I absolutely love the Beach Boys. It's been something I've been studying for 20-something years at this point. Even in the background of my music career where we did a lot of very eclectic, I'll say progressive even though I don't feel like it is really that related to prog rock specifically. I don't know what else you would call it, but I think the difference between...

What I was doing with some of my, you know, my original group was called Estrada Sphere. My current one is called High Castle Tele-Orchestra, very sort of out there, eclectic groups. Is that music is pretty overtly progressive, but the Beach Boys are, it's hidden. The point of Brian's music is not that it's complicated, it just happens to be complicated. It's not like, check this out, Brian's not sitting there saying, oh, check out this chord progression, it's so cool, it goes to so many keys. It's just beautiful, it strikes the ear.

in this way that listeners relate to. And if you are geeky like me, and apparently there's at least 5,000 other people, because that's about how many subscribers I have now, well, maybe one or two of those were from my own groups, but if you are that geeky and do want to pop open the hood, a whole universe is there for you to kind of latch on to those devices that Brian is utilizing, some of which are original to him, and other I'm pretty sure he got from the four freshmen and groups from the 40s and 50s that he listened a lot to.

that world is there, I'm a big person who likes to get one particular device and then pull it into my world and say, oh, I'm going to keep that in my back pocket next time I need to modulate up a half step. There's a really interesting way to do it and kind of break down each device piece by piece kind of like if as if it was a little flash card that I could just pull out that one. Oh yeah, that's how he modulated up a half step and girls on the beach or whatever. But yeah, I'm glad you enjoyed the channel and it's really exciting to have people.

Brian Funk (03:04.387)

Hmm.

Brian Funk (03:16.088)

Hmm.

Tim Smolens (03:21.51)

watching the channel more because the algorithm is catching on to a couple of the videos, I guess.

Brian Funk (03:26.71)

Yeah, and you know what you just said is a really smart way, I think, to learn. When I first tuned into your channel, I really got the impression you had a lot of musical training and you've gone, maybe you went to school, who knows what, right? And then I read your bio and you actually are very self-taught, where you've decided not to take that road. And I think the result of what I'm seeing now is probably that kind of work ethic where, rather than just try to absorb a million things and never apply it.

It seems like you're taking these ideas and really getting to know them, and then making them, like you said, part of your toolkit.

Tim Smolens (04:01.702)

Yeah, and I'm not entirely self-taught. Like, I grew up getting guitar lessons, so I knew some basic theory and scales. Eventually, I think I did take a couple semesters of jazz arranging. There was this very locally famous in Santa Cruz at a community college, a guy named Ray Brown, not the bass player, not the jazz bass player, but he was a jazz trumpet player who lived there, but he had this famous jazz arranging class. So I took a couple semesters in that and learned how to voice for big band. So I can speak in theory, I can speak in, you know, if we...

talking about harmonic minor modes or whatever, but my main interest seems to be chords and building sort of large chords and jazz type of extensions, but like placing it into pop and rock music.

Brian Funk (04:45.374)

Yeah, that's nice. And I mean the music of yours that I've heard too is really interesting and has lots of cool melodies I think as a result of a lot of that voicing with some of those chord extensions.

Tim Smolens (04:58.726)

Yeah, a lot of what we do is pretty much like they would do reharmonizing in jazz, where you take a melody and then change the chords beneath it. But my methodology is not always pulling from that jazz playbook, where if you had a melody on top, that's a G7, but what if I put a C minor under it and it turns it into a C minor major 9 chord? Just seeing which...

strange chords and I'll just try like five different ones above each chord and then I'll kind of go through and see like what kind of makes a path through the weeds of that and you what you get to the listener is I'm sure you know this but like you still get the melody that everybody's hearing it's the same melody popping out but underneath of it there's just like this spooky sophistication that reharmonization gives

Brian Funk (05:47.944)

Yeah, well that was a beautiful example right there. It just suddenly went from kind of like, hey, you know, kind of normal, happy, and then kind of almost like mysterious.

Tim Smolens (05:58.286)

Yeah, there's a million ways to justify notes of a chord, especially within jazz, of this note. Almost any note, I think there's some joke, I don't remember what it is, that you can pretty much hit any note you want in jazz. There's some way to do it.

Brian Funk (06:13.33)

Yeah, I've heard the thing like, do it once it's a mistake, do it twice it's jazz.

Tim Smolens (06:18.254)

Yeah, we used to have the saxophone player for my band Astratosphere. He was, his name's John Hooley. And let's say we were jamming in C minor. No, let's say we're jamming in, yeah, C minor. First note, E major, and he'll just hold it, like, hold the note for like 10 seconds. And like, okay, he's not, it's what he means to do. Yeah.

Brian Funk (06:33.432)

Hehehe

Brian Funk (06:39.298)

Right? And now we're just going with it. That's cool. The Beach Boys are a fun example too for me also in my life. You know, growing up, you knew him as a kid and you know, surfing Safari and a lot of those songs which sound simple, but are, and that's one of the things I love that he's able to do is he takes these ideas that's, and is able to take complex musical ideas and make them sound really simple.

And you don't even realize he's doing all this tricky stuff with the melodies and the harmonies and modulations even. But it's presented in this way. Cause there are other kinds of music where you listen to it and you're like, okay, you're doing this to be weird and do these unusual things, but not the Beach Boys. And my journey with them was, you know, just kind of like knowing their stuff, but then being about like 18 and hearing

Tim Smolens (07:16.487)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (07:37.291)

and then just being like, oh wait, because there was something that was clearly different and then getting into that world and just being like, oh my God, I can't believe this whole time, like all this crazy stuff was going on.

Tim Smolens (07:48.398)

Yeah, the Beach Boys have this reputation in America as just the dorky, the striped, you know, red and white striped shirts, kind of representing that sort of like older Eisenhower era of America where, oh, we're past that now, ever since the hippies came in, you know, we don't need that kind of thing anymore. You know, never were seen as cool as the Beatles, for sure, even though they, you know, maybe don't have as much output that's hip as the Beatles, but it's definitely comparable.

Brian Funk (07:58.677)

Mm.

Tim Smolens (08:16.35)

the best of the Beach Boys is easily comparable, I think even better than the Beatles. First thing, I used to hear, some of those songs, the fun, they're not terribly complex, other than that it's interesting that you're taking a Chuck Berry-style rock and roll and then putting this little four freshman vocal on top of it. Some of them, there's really not too much to them, but the ballads are surprising, like the...

The Surfer Girls and Lonely Sea and Warmth of the Sun. Almost from the beginning, Brian was doing these extraordinary ballads with this harmonic complexity. But the first time I got into him for real was, I was in this whole avant-garde music scene, Mr. Bungle and all these scenes, and someone's like, oh, you gotta hear Pet Sounds. It's one of the craziest albums ever. So until I knew it was cool to like them, then I kind of dove in, started learning the chords, listening to the production, and realized how similar it was.

even though their music is not as abrasive as a lot of avant-garde and eclectic music, the production is like off the charts with complexity and, you know, for me it would be layering all this stuff because I overdub everything, but he had a full orchestra available to him and it wasn't a normal orchestra either. It's like, oh, Harry, we need a bass harmonica player today and we're going to need three cellos, a woodbark player, and some muted trumpet. Whatever he was thinking.

Brian Funk (09:33.171)

Icicle horn.

Tim Smolens (09:34.298)

to paint the picture for that, yeah, he would order up some very strange ensembles, which is super cool. I love that stuff.

Brian Funk (09:41.85)

I got the Pet Sounds box set around that time. It's like the four discs. And it's got all those little outtakes and all you hear the conversation and just, they'll do a take and it'll be brilliant. He's like, no, no. Cuts it off and.

Tim Smolens (09:44.24)

Oh yeah.

Tim Smolens (09:58.238)

I need you to stand a foot back more from the mic and when you hit that snare, Hal, can you give it a little emphasis going into the chorus there? I was blown away by how good those backing tracks sound because the vocals, let's face it, like when you mix, I've mixed music like this where there's 70 different instruments plus the vocals, it is really hard to fit everything into that stereo space. You have to kind of favor the vocals, right? Because it's vocal music, you're trying to make a hit.

Brian Funk (10:01.677)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (10:28.082)

And the vocals, I don't wanna say it the wrong way, but it almost makes the album sound more lo-fi than it is because it's taking up so much space. You take away the vocals and wouldn't it be nice and suddenly you hear timpanis and accordions doing like a Chuck Berry type of. ["Chuck Berry"] You know, this rock and roll like, but that's an accordion playing that? I had no idea that that's what it was. And you just hear everything in the mix and it's a super, if anyone hasn't heard the Pet Sounds box set, the vocals alone and the.

instrumental tracks alone are a total revelation.

Brian Funk (11:00.658)

Right. Yeah. They got both versions. You can hear just acapella, which is unbelievable. You know, and then, yeah, just all that orchestration was incredible. And the bass player, I'm forgetting her. I think it was her name. Carol. Yeah. Carol.

Tim Smolens (11:04.59)

Yeah, amazing.

Tim Smolens (11:13.866)

Carole K. Carole K was the electric a lot of time. Lyle Ritz played a lot of the stand up, and I'm sure there was a couple other people that came in and out on different tunes, but. Ha ha.

Brian Funk (11:25.33)

Yeah. Before we started recording too, I was admiring your basses and I just picked up a Fender 6, I was telling you. And right away, like the palm muting on that, I don't think that's what she used. I actually have no idea, but yeah, the palm muting. Yeah.

Tim Smolens (11:33.664)

Oh nice.

Tim Smolens (11:40.326)

I think she does a fair amount of muting when I listen to those, especially on like Sloop John B, where it's almost like a lead bass on that song, but I do a ton of palm muting. In fact, I think it's my default way to play an electric bass. I play the stand-up bass too, so a lot of times in my own music I layer three or four basses in unison and it just...

The cool thing about that kind of stack that Brian probably got from Phil Spector was it just sounds like one instrument, but it's like an instrument that doesn't exist, so it doesn't take up a ton of space. If I do stand-up, it's got that woody sound, and then the muted sort of Hoffner bass, and then maybe a P bass, and you put those together, and you don't have to line them up because unless there's something horribly, like, you know, off-rhythm or something, but...

back in those days they wouldn't have been able to do any of that so a little bit of that flaming actually helps it pop out a little bit as long as it's not egregiously you know out of time.

Brian Funk (12:33.346)

Yeah, and it makes me also think of a great example is Walk on the Wild Side by Lou Reed, where he's got the stand-up bass and the electric bass too. Just, they work really nicely together.

Tim Smolens (12:39.512)

Oh yeah yeah.

Tim Smolens (12:44.138)

It is something that's relatively underused. Yeah, he was usually one bass player in what, 90, 99% of rock music, I would guess. Yeah.

Brian Funk (12:51.806)

Right. Yeah. That's something I'm having fun with that bass six. It's a six string bass, but it's tuned exactly like a guitar. So it's just an octave lower. Yeah. Oh yeah. And so it's

Tim Smolens (12:58.175)

Oh wow. Oh, I had no idea.

So it's like a super low E.

Brian Funk (13:06.374)

No, it's tuned. It's the same low E as a, a bass. It's just a guitar one octave lower. So rather than, uh, you know, most six string basses will have like a low B and a whatever else they have, maybe a high B or something too. Uh, this, this is E A D G B E. So I've been layering them together. Yeah. Like some of the higher parts and it's just, yeah, it's beautiful.

Tim Smolens (13:08.658)

Oh, oh, so it's the same low E as a bass, okay.

Tim Smolens (13:20.046)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (13:24.57)

Wow, that sounds cool man.

Tim Smolens (13:29.356)

Octave, oh yeah, that's cool.

to show me some of that when you finish. Yeah.

Brian Funk (13:35.058)

Yeah, it's fun. I know I'm like trying to tell everyone I know Defender of Sakes is so great. What is that like though? I saw today you just released the video on Black Hole Son's chord progression by Soundgarden, so that's like, you know, much different. As far as you were mentioning sort of like the algorithm now, like people are coming to the Beach Boys, you know, now do you

Tim Smolens (13:49.924)

Yeah, so much different.

Tim Smolens (14:00.846)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (14:04.95)

That's the poll to follow that or is it kind of like, you know, do what you do? Cause you're also talking about chords with something like Black Hole Sun, which is really interesting in itself.

Tim Smolens (14:15.906)

Yeah, so to me, I didn't start and say, how do I reach different audiences? That absolutely wasn't it. Black Old Sun's been one of those things for years that I've like, what the heck is that? That uh...

Tim Smolens (14:30.182)

where this chord progression that I couldn't put my finger on what it is because it wasn't like anything I knew from any of the studies I did. And then when I opened it up, if you look at the video, there's all kinds of sus chords, which if you don't resolve a sus chord, you know, if you just keep it as a sus chord instead of resolving it, you don't even know where you are harmonically. Like, it's a very...

Brian Funk (14:50.518)

It's major or minor.

Tim Smolens (14:51.758)

It's because in the harmonic series, what you're dealing with is the perfect fifth, which is the third harmonic, but the mirror image of a perfect fifth, or going up a perfect fifth, is going down a perfect fifth. So it's those three notes are kind of like this pivot point of all of, like, the laws of harmonic nature, which are, like, not from music theory, but are actually just from science or physics, which, but... So you essentially have the idea of times three and divided by three all together.

I go over a lot that on some of my videos where I'm going over like harmonic series I don't want to get too much on a tangent because you have to kind of know the language a little bit But that's the reason is you're kind of creating a lot of ambiguity with a suspended chord and a lot of times We you know use sus as a way to resolve And then was it resolves you know where you are, but if you just come right out and go You don't ever resolve it you really put the listeners ear like into kind of a little tailspin of

Where am I? I don't know what key we in. Is it major, is it minor? I have no clue. So the idea was not, yeah, so I'm gonna, if I was gonna do that, I'd probably start analyzing some Taylor Swift songs or something like that. But it's really, if something catches my ear, that's anywhere in pop music, I'm gonna definitely start incorporating those. It won't be just Beach Boys. There's one song I was looking at this morning by Sublime. And everyone in my circles, I mean, Sublime's one of the bands, oh, you have to hate Sublime,

I always thought they had a lot of talent, and they only had like one record or something, but there's one song called Pool Shark that has like 10 key changes in it, and I don't know if the guy was thinking that or what, but to me it is unbelievable the way that he switches keys so many times. I'm like, I am definitely doing that song, and it's not just to try to get popular, but I haven't done it yet.

Brian Funk (16:39.211)

Yeah, I know that fool with sublime. It's not the music. It's more the people, you know It's just silly. Yeah

Tim Smolens (16:45.358)

I yeah and to me I'm kind of at an age I'm 46 now or where there would have been a time where I hang on to like what's hip and what's not and there's plenty of things that I would almost consider guilty pleasures now where I'm just like oh sorry I think that was pretty good I don't it's not based on how popular how cool it was but there was definitely a time in my life where I was susceptible to that type of thinking.

Brian Funk (16:53.239)

Right.

Brian Funk (17:06.478)

Yeah, with Black Hole Sun. And you know, it makes a lot of sense too, now that you're talking about it with the suspended chords and not knowing where you are. And if you remember that video that they had, so bizarre and yeah, it's.

Tim Smolens (17:18.394)

It's very dystopian. Yeah, very dystopian. And I hinted out of the video, there's definitely some occult references in there that Chris Cornell a hundred percent denies. So maybe he was just word salad. But if you look up the history of the idea of a black son, I'm not even going to talk about where it comes from because it's distasteful part of human history, but I find it interesting, but I just don't want people to get the wrong idea. But there really seems to be this real dystopian theme running through that. It's hard to

pinpoint exactly what he's talking about. There's a line that I really relate to in there. Times are gone for honest men. And then it's talking about the snakes or whatever. I don't even know all the lyrics, but uh, there, yeah, there's some very sort of stark imagery in there.

Brian Funk (18:02.734)

What a weird song to be such a big hit too, right? Is that, do you know, on guitar, is that some kind of alternate tuning? I've never learned how to play it.

Tim Smolens (18:05.241)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (18:11.554)

I don't think so, because it's really just those arpeggios that everyone recognizes, right? Those, like...

Brian Funk (18:18.302)

Yeah, nice.

Tim Smolens (18:19.306)

And that's, I derive the chords, there's no one playing the exact chords that I... If I press share here, does it share, oh it'll share my screen or what? No, I don't... Okay, because I have it in here, like I can just really quickly show... Let me keep talking while I do it here. Black holes, there it is.

Brian Funk (18:29.154)

Should share the screen, yeah.

Brian Funk (18:38.158)

It's fun. Yeah, I appreciate all this examples you're doing. It's like interactive YouTube. Ha ha.

Tim Smolens (18:42.146)

Yeah, I haven't used this particular program. So let's try share screen. Oh.

Brian Funk (18:50.914)

We'll try to talk anyone that's listening through this as best as we can too.

Tim Smolens (18:52.058)

Yeah, yeah, go ahead and you can keep asking me questions about it, because I don't want to kill our rhythm here. Oh, maybe it's just a tab it wants to do. We'll try it later. They can see that I share all the chords on the video on Black Hole Son on my channel, so go check that out.

Brian Funk (19:05.034)

Yeah. Cool. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that one because that was one of those, that was like right when I was learning guitar too, learning music. And it was kind of like, you know, I'm learning Nirvana, I'm learning Green Day Pearl Jam. Yeah.

Tim Smolens (19:18.814)

who has some strange progressions as well, right? Nirvana's progressions are very lithium. I'm gonna do that one day for sure. Kurt seemed to, I doubt he knew any theory at all. I bet it was just the melody that was dictating things and then what, you know, you can make different chords justify a melody that are not the obvious chord that you're hearing as the key center, you know?

Brian Funk (19:25.016)

Right.

Brian Funk (19:39.146)

Right. Yeah. Black hole son was kind of like, I don't know if I'm ready for that.

Tim Smolens (19:42.842)

It was pretty deep, man. I wasn't a fan at the time. Like on the video, I said I was kind of indifferent to it. I didn't say I disliked this, I never bought the record, but as I heard it over the years, I kept going, what are those chords? I'm gonna learn that one day. And I never got around to it till last week.

Brian Funk (19:53.602)

Mm. Right. Yeah. But Nirvana is really pretty complex too and probably gets a lot less credit. Like, you know, I've heard people say things like, he's not a good guitarist, he's not a good singer. But I disagree, honestly.

Tim Smolens (20:09.426)

Who cares? I think he's a good singer. I don't think he's the greatest guitarist. Rhythm's okay, lead, he didn't, it seemed like he intentionally didn't want to do a good lead, it was just kind of a noisy. But I thought as a, as a singer I think he's fantastic. I mean, Butch Vig talks about that he could overdub and you barely can even tell it's doubled. He didn't want to double the vocals until Butch Vig said, oh, John Lennon does that. And then he was okay with it because of the.

Brian Funk (20:21.21)

He was like a tone player, you know, like he was, that's where I think he was especially skilled. Yeah.

Brian Funk (20:30.786)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (20:36.141)

Right?

Tim Smolens (20:36.498)

you know, the simple sort of punk rock aesthetic would say that's cheesy to overproduce it. But I think he's a great singer, and to sing like that without blowing out your voice, like, my voice would be out of commission for two weeks if I sang one of their songs, even tried to sing it like that, and it would sound like a skinning a cat. It's not really my wheelhouse at all to scream.

Brian Funk (20:46.005)

Oh yeah.

Brian Funk (20:53.806)

Yeah. There's a pretty nice breakdown of Smells Like Teen Spirit by Rick Beato, where he gets into some of these, like, what the actual voicings he's doing over these chords. And, you know, he's like, this is crazy. Like, this is, you know, playing like how complex these melodies are over.

Tim Smolens (21:00.942)

Oh yeah, I like Rick, yeah.

Tim Smolens (21:08.143)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (21:14.706)

They are, yeah. He's hitting little jazzy notes. He doesn't know it, but he's on the 11 of the chord, you know, with his voice or whatever it was. Yeah.

Brian Funk (21:20.922)

Yeah, yeah, but I guess that's the ear, you know, just have the sense for how the...

Tim Smolens (21:26.639)

Sometimes knowing less, yeah, you can stumble on some cool notes that way.

Brian Funk (21:30.966)

Hmm. Yeah, that's cool. Your band too, I checked out some of the music. I love that you're really going for some of that, at least in a couple of songs, the 60s, like kind of big production, wall of sound, Beach Boys vibe. That it seemed, yeah, She's a Girl, I think it was one of them where that one especially was

Tim Smolens (21:51.954)

You're talking about ISS, I'm assuming. Okay, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Brian Funk (22:00.914)

I'm quite the ode, I mean...

Tim Smolens (22:02.27)

That was an undertaking, yeah. People get all, I try to make a little disclaimer. You're going to hear the Heroes and Villains vocal, the do-do-do-do. The little sort of barbershop do-op. I use that as just the motif that I could incorporate into my song. I think I used the trombone line. A couple times in there, and then the verse chord progression of Heroes and Villains.

And that's it though. I mean, it's not a copy other than those three elements I did take from Here's In Villains. It's a nod, yeah. But that song, I mean, that took me like a year to record. There's like hundreds of tracks and yeah, there's part of a record called She's A Girl also. That's the title track. So that one, if people want to pick it up, can pick it up at TimSmollins.com or on Bandcamp. But the record is largely Beach Boys, you know, influenced.

Brian Funk (22:34.13)

It's like a nod. Yeah.

Tim Smolens (22:58.835)

There's a couple that are more just like strange pop music, but it's all pretty listenable compared to the progressive stuff that I do in some of my other bands.

Brian Funk (23:08.206)

Mm-hmm. Are you doing these recordings at home? Are you going to studios for that? Yeah.

Tim Smolens (23:12.954)

No, I do it almost all at home, although when I do drums, I'll usually try to go somewhere and track for a day or two, if necessary, yeah. No, I don't play drums. Yeah.

Brian Funk (23:20.226)

Hmm. You playing the drums too? Yeah. Okay. That's one that's tough to get right.

Tim Smolens (23:27.994)

Yeah, I don't even try, I don't like pretending. I like to admit what my limitations are. I mean, I definitely play a lot of stuff. Even piano, like I understand everything from the piano, but I'm not a great pianist. Like, I can't shred or play a lot of lead stuff, but like if you want me to hit a C13 flat nine chord, you know, I can hit it.

So yeah, so the bass is kind of my main thing. I can play some guitar, but it really production has become, I think my main instrument, because it takes the most amount of time. So that's what I'm best at doing is layering and trying to use effects plugins in a way that I can sort of mimic sounds that I have heard on records in the 50s and 60s, which these days, obviously it's still too clean. Everything is still so clean, but like if you want a spring reverb, you can get a great spring reverb, like sky's kind of the limit.

Compared to 10 years ago with effects plugins, you can really get some gritty tones.

Brian Funk (24:23.33)

A lot of the plugins I get these days are things that degrade my sound on some level.

Tim Smolens (24:27.722)

I have so many, whether it's distortion or overdrive or tape emulation or some of those ones that make it sound like an old vinyl. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sorry, my dogs are going crazy upstairs. Yeah, there are some amazing plugins that I use and I'm going to start doing some more videos on my channel that show kind of my setup for all of that.

Brian Funk (24:32.642)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (24:41.883)

No problem.

Brian Funk (24:51.002)

Well, I mean, it sounds incredible, you know, what you've done. It's so cool what people can do at home, you know? It sounds, you know, I had to ask, right? So, really cool stuff. But yeah, the capturing those sounds, it's interesting how my journey has gone. And I think we might have some similarities in this too, because we used to fight against all these things with my...

Tim Smolens (25:02.515)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (25:19.246)

24 track cassette recorder and I had a pair of ADAT machines as you said you did. You had three 24 tracks. Nice.

Tim Smolens (25:24.89)

Me too, I had three ADATs. I made my first record in high school on three ADATs, yeah. Yeah, had the first ADAT in Los Angeles, woo.

Brian Funk (25:33.178)

Oh yeah, that's funny. Buddy, Amine and I, we had gotten them off of eBay. So this was probably around like 99, 2000, you know, that year. And it was like, it was so amazing to go to that level. But even still, like things have come so much further since then. It's unbelievable.

Tim Smolens (25:40.467)

Oh wow.

Tim Smolens (25:52.208)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (25:56.55)

We made a very complex record in high school, was this group we had at the time called Dawn Salsa, which was definitely heading toward that experimental avant-garde branch of my music, but it was like, we were trying to be as extreme as possible. So the first song was 30 minutes, and there was like 200 different parts of the song, and we recorded it in sections, and then ended up going to a mastering studio and having him just like fly it in on a dat tape to like until the cut was right. Like.

Brian Funk (26:21.93)

Right. Oh man. Yeah. Some trickery there. Those machines were, they were funny. Like in VHS tapes, you know, literally. Yeah. Unbelievable. But, uh, they got the job done. They have a sound too. They, you know, looking back.

Tim Smolens (26:25.362)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (26:31.21)

Super VHS, yeah.

Yep.

Tim Smolens (26:38.35)

Yeah, they kind of have a dead sound, like the converters are probably pretty low. I was using like some Tascam board at the time. I don't know. I didn't know the difference between a great tone or not. It was more like the ideas I was doing and the layering.

Brian Funk (26:50.647)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (26:52.022)

I got better at engineering as time went on and I still don't know if I consider myself like a world-class engineer. I can do some frequency carving and compression, but you know when you go into a real studio with a legit engineer It's always it's always impressive to me to see what they can do. That's way above me

Brian Funk (27:06.878)

Right. Yeah, that's, I started getting into that a bit too at that time. And, and one of the big lessons that I still think about a lot was that I kind of was slowing down a lot because I was trying to get all that stuff right. I didn't know what I was doing with the compressors and you know, I had a compressor and I thought everything should have it and no idea why, just that's what you do.

Tim Smolens (27:34.854)

It's confusing, right? Because you use compression for two reasons. You use it to actually squash it a little and limit the dynamic range, but a lot of times they're using it like for the sound that a compression has from pushing it a little bit, of getting a little bit, you know, those types of compressors that can handle more gain reduction and sound pretty clean. So it does have a...

Brian Funk (27:47.016)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (27:55.194)

you know, a framing effect where it just kind of smooths out your gain a little. But a lot of times it's kind of a sound, right? That's why we reach for different ones, whether it's a workhorse like an 1176 or one of the ones I use, I think it's an emulation of a manly.

Brian Funk (28:03.767)

Hmm.

Tim Smolens (28:12.226)

limiter or compressor. It's a Native Instruments plug-in, but I think it's a Faramu or something like that. But you can push it so hard, and it's like 10 dB of gain, you're barely even hearing it, but it sounds really punchy.

Brian Funk (28:25.314)

Hmm, that's nice. Yeah, I found my big lesson was to just stop worrying about that stuff because everything sounded so much better than it used to on my cassette tapes. So not getting so bogged down on that helped me get a lot of work done because I was just, and I have to remind myself that sometimes now when I start working on a track and I'm trying to make like.

Tim Smolens (28:38.739)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (28:44.659)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (28:52.722)

kick drum sound great before I even have anything else on the track. So how do I know what a great kick drum sounds like until I have other things to have it work with?

Tim Smolens (28:56.656)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (29:02.222)

Yeah, I mean you kind of know what your default might be and I can work from that way, but yeah sometimes it is good to know how it relates to the rest of it.

And I'm always trying to imagine, I don't know how I don't get this buildup of frequencies because I swear on almost every instrument I find myself adding some air, like a really nice EQ at like 12K that's just one of those EQs that are just one button and you don't have to think about it because whenever you try to emulate those shelves on like a parametric EQ, it's not the same as they have programmed into something like a Pultec or whatever the curve they have in these, Softube has a tape plug-in, it's just called tape.

But the high end, they have this high end knob on it that is the greatest sounding treble EQ I have ever heard in my life. And you just turn it up and it's like, it brings out all that air. So I find myself adding that to most things a little bit and then carving out some kind of boxy low-mid, like 220 or 200 or 240, somewhere in there that's just kind of getting a little bit crowded, but you have to be careful because you'll eventually get this buildup where it sounds just a little bit brittle because you're doing that. But...

Almost everything when I'm just EQing something, you know, I'm just soloing something being like, oh, what's going on there? Like, I always find myself adding a little more treble than I would otherwise want to because I'm trying to see how is this going to translate to everyone's crappy system that they have at this time.

Brian Funk (30:24.387)

Right, yeah, I mean there's a lot of people that listen right out of their phone. I'm guilty of that sometimes too, you know, when it's all I got. It's like, all right, just put the phone on.

Tim Smolens (30:27.15)

Yeah, that's all you're gonna get. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And my music, like, music that's very layered, it's even worse on a phone than if it was just like a piano and a voice or something. It really, people try, you know, at work or something, Oh, he plays music! I don't go around telling everyone I play music. They find out and like, Oh, show me something! They pull up their phone, I'm like, no.

Brian Funk (30:37.771)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (30:49.438)

Yeah, oh man, you're gonna put it on that? That's so funny. Yeah, it's like you're gonna watch a movie on a little screen too, same kind of thing. Like, you're gonna lose all that immersion and impact. Never gotten chills listening to music off the phone.

Tim Smolens (30:59.44)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (31:04.002)

Yeah. Yeah, well, it's...

It's a pretty bad time historically to be a musician. You know, there's a lot of, we could probably dive into it, but it'd probably be a boring conversation of, you know, since it became readily accessible on the internet, it's, you know, how many people go, oh, I can't wait and go stand in line at midnight to buy that record, you know, and all these things that we saw. I don't know how old you are, but I feel like I saw the tail end of all of that, that where record buying was a fun thing.

Brian Funk (31:31.298)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (31:34.626)

And it just now it's like most people I know don't buy music. It's just a very superficial part of their life in the background. You know, maybe while they work out or something or I don't even talk a lot about music with a lot of people, you know, I work with or whatever, just because I like the stuff. I'm not trying to be a snob, but it's like I know all this stuff and like they're trying to tell me about Taylor Swift or something. And like I'm like, you know, I'm not here to also to just turn my nose up at everything either, but.

Let's just talk. I'd rather talk about the weather or something like that. As far as like, you know, if I've I don't mind if people like, you know, different tastes and all of that kind of stuff. But like I just don't find most people are real connoisseurs of any music at all.

Brian Funk (32:04.619)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (32:15.934)

Yeah, well, I think, like you said, it's everywhere, right? So you don't have to devote the same attention to it. Whereas if I put on my CD even, even when we're talking CDs, I had to put it on, you know, and play. And listen to the whole CD. It's not a shuffled playlist. It's an album. And you can go back even further with records where you got to flip them halfway or tapes. There's a little more of...

Tim Smolens (32:27.283)

Love CDs.

Tim Smolens (32:31.291)

intentional.

Tim Smolens (32:36.273)

Right.

Tim Smolens (32:42.705)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (32:44.95)

participation required. So I think it got more of your attention.

Tim Smolens (32:48.73)

And there was a time when, you know, before Xboxes and cable TV and YouTube, like that was probably the equivalent of an Xbox was getting a record player or playing the saxophone or like now people are so overstimulated. It just doesn't seem that exciting to most people to either take up an instrument and really practice hard on it.

Brian Funk (32:55.254)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (32:59.021)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (33:10.166)

or even to just be a real fan of music. So I just don't see a lot of passion for music in general. I think its role has become extremely diminished. And I can reclense, I'm a major optimist, despite the unbelievably grim outlook. I still see it as kind of a reflection of society. What else would you expect from a society that is in this state, but that music...

is a superficial thing for it in general, you know, so you look at some historians that would go through different barbarian tribes, you know, in the old world and they would write about the music that they could tell by listening to the music that they did, you know, what kind of personality that tribe would have and how rough around the edges they would be or how sophisticated they were or not. So it's always been a thing, right?

Brian Funk (34:00.142)

Hmm. Yeah. That's, that's a cool way to study a civilization or a group of people anyway.

Tim Smolens (34:09.886)

The Secret Lore of Music by Fabre D'Olive, fantastic historical music book. Yeah. The Secret Lore of Music by French esotericist Fabre D'Olive, F-A-B-R-E D' apostrophe O-L-I-V-E-T.

Brian Funk (34:15.134)

Oh yeah, secret lore music. I'll put that in the show notes.

Tim Smolens (34:25.446)

kind of these little essays he wrote. I could talk forever about this guy, but I won't, because it would take way too long. But I absolutely love his work on philosophy and music is one of the things he focuses on at times. And that book is a collection of all of his writings on music.

Brian Funk (34:41.134)

Awesome. I gotta check that out. That sounds like a lot of fun. Yeah. You know, I often wonder, because now we've got, like you said, so much to entertain ourselves, right? We can watch any show we want, we can play any game we want, we can do anything. We don't have to be bored. I wonder if when I was 14, we're going back to like 94, would I have been bored enough today, like

Tim Smolens (34:42.79)

You'd like it. Yeah.

Brian Funk (35:09.966)

to struggle through it and sound like crap and have my fingers hurt and have a lousy guitar to learn on. If I could just scroll on my phone and get like a lower hit of dopamine to make me feel good compared to the long-term investment that it takes to learn instrument, I don't know if I would.

Tim Smolens (35:29.902)

Yeah, I agree. I see kids on my street trying to do it, and I kind of discourage people from the guitar, because I don't think they're going to have that year of resilience, which it takes to just get the voicings in it not be a torture. Where, sometimes I suggest piano, because you can at least just press a note, and you don't have to struggle to produce a tone. You might have trouble with the combinations you're hitting, but I can just do this on a piano, on a guitar. It's like, they can't even get that idea of like...

Brian Funk (35:55.394)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (35:56.394)

pushing, you know, supporting with the back thumb so that this front finger is not, you know, being tortured so badly.

Brian Funk (35:57.774)

threading that note.

Brian Funk (36:02.862)

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, it's I mean guitar. It's kind of an easy one even compared to like things like a violin Yeah

Tim Smolens (36:09.394)

Violin or trumpet. Yeah, I had the instruments. I would not want to touch for that reason just because tone production is such a difficult thing

Brian Funk (36:14.488)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (36:18.546)

Yeah, I wonder. I don't know. I teach high school English as my day job. So I'm with like, you know, kids that age and I look at them a lot and I wonder like, because I know I'd be the same way as them. It'd be very arrogant to think I'd be any different. Like I'd be walking around like a 14 year old like high horse, you know, no, I want to fit in with everybody. And I just don't know.

Tim Smolens (36:25.99)

Oh wow. Wow. Cool.

Tim Smolens (36:40.837)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (36:46.07)

Like there's so many things that they are dealing with that we just didn't have to worry about.

Tim Smolens (36:50.602)

I think it's fair to say we would probably not be embarking on the same path. Who knows which direction it would take, but it seems like there's more resistance to that now. It would be harder to do what I did, you know, that seemed like a natural path forward to me at the time, even though it was kind of a strange trajectory compared to most people. But for me, it seemed like the path I saw through the forest.

Brian Funk (36:58.134)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (37:15.318)

Yeah, you mentioned in your bio seeing that movie La Bamba about Richie Valance and Lou Diamond Phillips, right? And that had a big effect on me as a kid too. And it didn't make me go into music, but it made me think it was cool. And it was, you know, it's a powerful story, you know, what happened to them.

Tim Smolens (37:19.28)

Uh-huh.

Tim Smolens (37:22.899)

Yep.

Nine years old, man.

Tim Smolens (37:33.33)

I still remember the way they used, um... Sleepwalker in the...

Brian Funk (37:37.374)

Yeah, oh god, yeah, right, yeah.

Tim Smolens (37:41.742)

When that airplane crashed and the slow motion and that's what got me in love with 50s music was just that idea of that you know It took me forever to figure out why because that's the it's the typical one six four five But he goes straight to four minor instead of four major says

Brian Funk (37:43.989)

Uh.

Brian Funk (37:55.202)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (37:59.467)

Oh.

Tim Smolens (37:59.914)

going so many times we hear people go major to minor right it happens all the time but not as common is to just go straight to the minor

Brian Funk (38:12.28)

Yeah, it's so heartbreaking, that chord.

Tim Smolens (38:13.854)

Such an amazing track. I mean just the composition is great. The lap steel or whatever it is. What do you call that? A steel guitar? Why am I blanking on that? That's not a lap steel. It's a pedal steel. Yeah, sorry. But yeah, I love Johnny and Santo. So much music from the 50s and 60s. And it's not...

Brian Funk (38:23.018)

Yeah, pedal steel or something. Yeah.

Tim Smolens (38:33.618)

There's some amount of instrumental music that's not as popular as the vocal music, from the, whether it's like some of the surf stuff, the Ventures or the Tornadoes, or the Shadows. And I could listen to that stuff all day, a playlist of just like instrumentals from the 50s and 60s and surf. You know, surf has this cool thing where you can take... How do you say this? Like, the melody... The composition does not have to be that amazing. It's actually more about the aesthetic of the tom-tom and the surf guitar tone and the...

Brian Funk (38:40.654)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Tim Smolens (39:03.122)

reverb coming out the twin guitar amp, where it can take a song that if I were to play it for you on a piano, you'd probably be like, oh, that's kinda cool or something, just like some kinda half corny thing, and then you play it like in surf rock style and it just absolutely comes to life. So that's always fascinates me, is how productions can elevate. Obviously you have pure composition, which is great. You listen to a piece by Chopin or...

Brian Funk (39:03.713)

Right.

Tim Smolens (39:29.102)

any of the greats, and you're like, there's not a single problem, you know, an error in there anywhere, there's absolutely immaculate composition from front to back. But then you get all these things like you listen to, whether it's something like Sleepwalk or, it is a great composition, but it's just as much about the production and the way they get those tones and the aesthetic of that recording as it is about the composition.

Brian Funk (39:53.322)

Yeah, yeah, it's hand in hand, right? There's a vibe, yeah, like those like twangy guitars give and it just feels like the beat.

Tim Smolens (39:55.794)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (40:02.574)

I'm a huge collector of Italian film music from like the 60s and 70s. I've thousands and thousands of soundtracks, all digitized now, but same thing there. The production is so good that you sometimes, it elevates a song tremendously where if someone had just played that for me on the piano, it would only sound like kind of mediocre. But a production, that's not the goal. We don't set out to say, hey, we're going to write mediocre songs and the production's going to be so good. But

If you have the skill to elevate like that as a producer, it's only gonna make your recordings that much better, right?

Brian Funk (40:37.526)

Yeah, and you said it earlier, you know, the production is my instrument. And it really does take things places. It creates feelings, it creates moods and atmospheres and environments. And part of that's part of what I think music does is takes you on a journey. Really good handle on that kind of production stuff. You can.

Tim Smolens (40:54.267)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (40:58.53)

Right, and the studio itself, as people like Brian Wilson taught us and Joe Meek, it is an instrument in and of itself and you can use it like that. Most people don't. Most people are like, we're just trying to record the song we played. But for me, it's always this journey and I get so caught up in the weeds. I mean, it'll take me two or three years to make a record and I wish I could slim down my process a little bit. I think a lot of times the ideas that I gravitate to...

It's almost masochistic that I know that it's gonna be really hard to pull this off And it's gonna take me like I'm surprised when I finished an album because before I only had kind of a vague vision I'm not one of those people that like I can picture exactly what I want like I have some ideas about which way it can go but then I kind of start throwing stuff at the wall and thinning it out a little bit and shaping it and You know like when I'm doing MIDI, you know some of the stuff. I'm now let's say I'm doing like a woodwind section That's behind one of my songs

Brian Funk (41:27.438)

Hehehe

Tim Smolens (41:55.148)

and French horn and whatever, I kind of record my chord voicings as little blocks. I don't know if you've done this before and then I'll look at the little MIDI tabs and I'll start pulling things around so that they have all these scattered entrances. But I couldn't have envisioned that scattered entrance just if I'm sitting there with my, you know, staff paper and pencil. Like I could, it was so much easier for me to just put down the chords that I want and then finding an interesting way to stagger the entrances by

Brian Funk (42:07.465)

Hmm.

Tim Smolens (42:21.178)

eighth notes or something comes in early so that it's like and they all enter at different times and you don't get so much blocky movement among your voicings.

Brian Funk (42:31.158)

Yeah, I think about it that way too. And sometimes I'll even, you know, take apart a chord and put it to different instruments, you know, just give them individual voices. And it's for me, I, it's more like exploring. I feel sometimes more like someone that's getting on a ship in the 1400s and seeing what they can find out there and recognizing

Tim Smolens (42:41.136)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (42:53.582)

Right. It makes me feel like, I don't know, like I am not like super egotistical, but I'm also like, like I know I've got some talent at things and I'm good at certain things. But when you, maybe this has happened to you, but when I...

when you watch or look at a composition of something that happened before any of this, whether it's Chopin or Debussy, and you're just like the forethought that these people had that this is exactly what I want, and there's all the crap we get to do with editing it after the fact and going in and trying all this stuff, I mean, it is a luxury, but they were just more advanced musicians or composers than we were because they were that talented. It was the same thing with like authors, right? If you're... If they were writing the rough draft of a book, like...

the sentence would come out as they wanted it. It wasn't like, now I go through, I have my text file, I try this word, I change this word, I move this word over here. It's a double edged sword, right? It is cool to be able to do that, but I think as a result, I am not even in the same realm of composer that we're talking about with the greats, and that's fine, I don't lose any sleep over that fact, and I can do things that they probably wish they would have done, or maybe not them. I mean, think about like,

Brian Funk (43:43.267)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (44:04.582)

what Brian Wilson could have done with this technology, they probably would have been able to finish SMILE if Brian was able to play around with it in Pro Tools, right? I mean, trying to record the way that they recorded good vibrations, which are hundreds of different sessions and then cutting them together with tape in this modular style, that was, you know, it took what, six months to make that single, but trying that process with an entire record was probably an ill-fated conquest to begin with.

because it's just so difficult, right? But if he had the basic tools that we had now, like not even any of the plug, like just the ability to like cut it up and try it and whatever, could have easily been finished in 67.

Brian Funk (44:45.622)

Yeah, I guess that's why we get the term engineer, right? Like, because it's so technical, some of that stuff. And, but yeah, that does blow my mind. And I was even, one of the last conversations I had on the show, Charlie McCarron does film composition and he was talking about how, yeah, you can, now you can have the video and you can watch it and you can play along with it. But even going back, you know, 50, 60 years or 40, probably even,

Tim Smolens (44:52.595)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (45:15.394)

they had to know what the orchestra was gonna play. Before they got hired and it had to work with the film. And then you just start thinking like, holy cow, like.

Tim Smolens (45:18.995)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (45:26.626)

You have to just have the idea, right? We're content now to kind of dive in without our ideas being fully formed, right? And being fully formed, it doesn't mean, like, you might have your song, you might have your chords and your melody or your lyrics, but as far as, like, how the production's going to go or how any of it's going to, you know, it's unbelievable what people with less to work with, you know, were able to do as far as forming the ideas completely ahead of time.

Brian Funk (45:31.878)

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Brian Funk (45:54.998)

Right? Yeah, and I guess in those days too, you didn't get even anywhere close to the studio unless you were like at the top because that was precious time and money and teams of people.

Tim Smolens (46:02.97)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (46:08.014)

Yeah, you had the heyday and just as far as music, like I was thinking about scoring films, but just as far as music, in the 60s, you had The Wrecking Crew, in the 70s, you had more of this.

cast of characters that were not really the wrecking crew, but all the people that were playing on like the Steely Dan records and just these unbelievable musicians that made a great living playing music as Studio musicians that they still exist But gosh not to the level that they did back then before you know before MIDI came around and people stopped caring about those performances Of you know your I want Chuck Rainey on the bass, and I want to bring in you know Larry Carlton on the guitar

have Bernard Purdy play the drums and whoever, you could just get these unbelievable cast of musicians. It took me a long time to listen to some of that music and just listen to the backing track and be floored with the feel that those people are able to collectively get. I mean, it is...

You know, I wouldn't have noticed that when I was 20 years old, of like, listen to the feel of that drummer. Like, it just, it's not something you think about, it's kind of a background thing, but now you can, I could play here the simplest beat played by certain drummers and you just stop and go, oh my gosh.

Brian Funk (47:12.685)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (47:23.134)

Well, it didn't occur to me how important that was until I got Pro Tools and I put all my drums on the grid. Like I finally, I'm my drum, you know, I've tried to play the drums, but you know, I'm not a drummer at all. And putting it on the grid, I was like, finally, everything's going to be right in time the way it's supposed to be. And you're like, wait a minute, like, what's wrong here? It just doesn't, it, it's

Tim Smolens (47:31.474)

and sounds bad. Yeah.

Tim Smolens (47:43.77)

It's sterile, huh? Yeah.

There's a push and pull among rhythm sections, right? There's a certain, where if you were to map out the click track, you'll find they're deviating within two or three beats per minute over a minute or two, pushing and pulling in certain sections. You know, I don't know if drummers consciously lay back certain elements of the kid, if the hi-hat lays back, or if the bass lays back or pushes, and that, you know, I think each group is different, and that's what gives it that characteristic style.

Brian Funk (47:50.744)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (48:14.674)

But there's also the mysterious element of swing, right? Is we tend to think of swing as either straight eights, da da, or completely swung, do do, but when you go in quantize, right, you can do 20% swing or 15% swing, and that doesn't sound swing at all. It doesn't sound the slightest bit swing, and if you were to break down some of these beats from the greats, you're going to find they're swinging in various amounts, unconsciously, they're not thinking about it at all.

that's just very little music is really truly straight eighths

Brian Funk (48:50.89)

Yeah, and I've done some stuff where I've taken like, songs I love, just great songs, put them into my session, and then just make markers where the parts change, just to give myself like arrangement ideas, you know, like little templates for arrangements, like, okay, the verse one here for four bars, and then we had another little interlude, whatever it is, right? And I was really surprised, especially with the Beatles,

Tim Smolens (49:03.721)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (49:20.882)

You know, they don't line up for very long on the grid and like they're so much faster than or so much slower and it'd be like five to ten dBs, uh bpm sometimes and I i regard Ringo as like he's my favorite drummer. I just think he

Tim Smolens (49:31.782)

Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, it.

Tim Smolens (49:36.638)

He's pretty amazing, because he has a per- He might have been the first drummer with a personality, where you just noticed. And some of his stuff is so simple, but like it is so innovative too, because no one had done a beat like that. No, Ringo is super, super amazing. Yeah, it's, it doesn't stay straight, right? The click, the click, the, and so when you do a sterile click track, it's like you're making techno music.

Brian Funk (49:45.366)

Yeah, clever and appropriate for the song.

Brian Funk (49:53.046)

But they have so much energy because of that.

Tim Smolens (50:03.562)

I've found these ways where on the last, you know, progressive album, we made a High Castle Tele Orchestra. It's called the Egg That Never Open. It's that, um, that record right there with the egg that's broken there. Um, that's the vinyl version, but I found ways to, um, take a conductor. So I'll take it or a, uh, tempo map from some conduction performance, conductor's performance of some orchestral thing.

Brian Funk (50:15.374)

Chris.

Tim Smolens (50:30.434)

and all the ups and downs of the speed ups and slow downs and then I'll apply that to my own grid and we're playing like music with drums over it. So it breathes in this way that is like fermata like you would have in an orchestra. To me it's just very boring when you don't have stuff like that. There's this one waltz we had that was like this.

cover of some strange like German mechanical music museum piece. And it's a waltz, but it has this constantly breathing. So like just mapping out the click, because I like to have everything on a grid because it's easier to edit, but it can be a grid that has a dynamic click on it.

Brian Funk (51:09.718)

Yeah, it matters, you know? I was even fooling with this last night. I have a three-piece garage band, two other guys, and I play guitar, but every once in a while, we switch instruments, you know? And I'll get on the drums and just fool around. And I was thinking a lot of Smells Like Teen Spirit again, actually, because when Dave Grohl does those big hits at the beginning of the chord, they're like late.

Tim Smolens (51:18.74)

Nice.

Tim Smolens (51:35.841)

Chippa

Brian Funk (51:38.262)

boom, boom. It's a little bit like behind and I was playing around with that when we were jamming and I'm trying to hit the chords a little bit behind. As soon as I started doing that, the guys in the band started rocking back and forth. I was like, wow, you know, I'm trying, when I'm playing drums, I'm just desperately trying to keep time, you know, but when I started playing with that, it was so funny how the sway happened, you know, with the guys in the band. And it's just like, look at that, you know?

Tim Smolens (51:41.246)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (52:08.106)

Well, if you think about our internal clock, right, is we have a, I'm always fascinated with the heart, right? The heart's beating at a certain BPM.

Brian Funk (52:08.162)

this little adjustment.

Tim Smolens (52:15.758)

I have you ever taken a microphone up and recorded it and then pushed up the frequencies. You can actually hear it like loud and clear at tempo and everything. You could map out a click to your heartbeat, but, but you have the variability of, you know, when you're walking and it's going up a little, or even just being a little anxious about something. And so, so we're never sitting here at like 65 beats per minute is, is we live in a fluctuation of tempo that's, that's resonating from the core of our body. So I think those

Brian Funk (52:16.161)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (52:22.422)

I never know.

Tim Smolens (52:43.058)

tempo fluctuations are more natural to us than the straight click track that never changes.

Brian Funk (52:50.134)

Yeah, I just got this Fitbit for Christmas this year. My wife got it and I'm really surprised at how much my heart rate changes. I thought it was a little more consistent, but I might be sitting there, it's fun. And then I just like move and like grab a drink of water and like, oh, it's just, yeah. Very interesting that.

Tim Smolens (53:01.019)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (53:09.438)

That's all it took. Oh man, now I'm breathing heavy, cause yeah, I've definitely... yeah.

Brian Funk (53:18.066)

And it's also just a crazy thing. It just never takes a break. It never takes a break. That's a problem if it does. Yeah.

Tim Smolens (53:22.406)

No, no

Tim Smolens (53:49.534)

creates what we call the major third. And the third harmonic creates what we call the perfect fifth, so those two are actually reversed in the harmonic series, which, for those who don't know, if you play one note on an instrument, there's actually an infinity of notes ringing out in that, in the ratio of one over one, which is the note you think you hear.

but also in diminishing two over one, three over one, four over one, five over one, six over one, you can look at it on an oscilloscope, but they're kind of diminishing to infinity, but the prominent notes are the one over one and the two over one, which are just octaves of each other, reinforces that one note you think you hear, but you can derive true tunings from that, which equal temperament, which is the system we use, which is 12 notes equally divided in an octave, which is really more of a convenience than anything. It's a way you can play in 12 keys.

and be equally out of tune in all the keys. But if you take it back to Indian classical music, they tune, I don't think they're thinking intellectually like this, maybe they are, but like in terms of ratios and things like that. You've got microtonal music.

Brian Funk (54:36.877)

Right.

Tim Smolens (54:52.57)

That's like, you know, in Persian music and things like that. But you can make music that is truly in tune and it sounds the sound is there are notes that you wouldn't even believe because they just don't exist in our system. But but anyway, I forget how I got on that tangent. But the major thirds are that's significantly sharp. And let's not forget, major third is the note of beauty. So so if you're 14 cents sharp on the note of beauty, if I were to play this major chord,

and then sing... .. You actually are gonna tune to the bass with that five over one ratio, even though you're not thinking that, you're just thinking what's a tune. And that's how powerful that resonance is of the harmonic series, is even though there's a note ringing out 14 cents sharp in the middle there... ..

Tim Smolens (55:43.446)

It's a different note and you can produce it on a cello or a guitar harmonic. You can hear where the real thing is, but it's a whole fascinating branch of music that is very hard to do because you have to play on fretless instruments or tune synthesizers and you can't do a bunch of chord progressions because they're not going to be in tune. So you can do some.

Brian Funk (55:45.09)

Mm.

Brian Funk (56:01.058)

Right?

When I was in college, I took a Bach class and they brought in a harpsichord tuned to, I think they call it mean tone.

Tim Smolens (56:07.027)

Wow.

Tim Smolens (56:10.258)

just be, yeah, well-tempered or whatever, mean tone, yeah.

Brian Funk (56:14.258)

Yeah. And he played something in like A and it was like beautiful. And then he's like, I want to play in G and it was like all out of tune. It sounded awful. And that led us to the discussion of the well tempered Clavier.

Tim Smolens (56:21.394)

Terrible. Yeah.

Tim Smolens (56:27.854)

So, yeah, all of those tuning systems that piano tuners use are ways to try to compensate for that problem that I'm describing, is that you can't put 12 notes equally spaced out from each other and expect to be in tune. Our system is actually, it's pretty good in regard to perfect fifths, that's only two cents off.

But that major third is a disaster, and the dominant seventh is actually 31 cents off, which is a complete disaster. That's why it's a tension chord for us, a dominant seven. Or if I were to, some other time, I'll tune my synthesizers down, I can produce all those tones, or I can play them on cello too. But we've become so accustomed to that tuning that it does sound in tune to our Western ears. And in fact, if I were to show you the right notes, you would probably think they sounded weird. It takes a little bit of getting used to.

Brian Funk (57:18.294)

This is what I'm gonna say the next time I'm singing out of tune. I'm like, well, it's actually not out of tune, you know. This is 14 cents sharp here. This is where it's supposed to be.

Tim Smolens (57:23.584)

It's actually a true seventh harmonic.

Tim Smolens (57:31.514)

I like, you know why I like cents though? Because they say there's 1200 cents in an octave, right? So 100 cents between each semitone. Because cents, since there's 100 per semitone, when I say cents, we're actually expressing what percent it's off also, because it's out of 100. So if I say it's 14 cents off, it's 14% off. So it gives you a good gauge for how out of tune something is on equal temperament versus true tuning or just intonation as they call it.

Brian Funk (57:47.942)

Right.

Never thought about that, but you're right.

Brian Funk (58:01.474)

A lot of times when I'm playing around with synthesizers and tuning oscillators, I go about like 8%. Then that's kind of like...

Tim Smolens (58:08.554)

And that sounds good. You could do it 8% in both directions, right? And just get a fat, like, yeah, that sounds fantastic to do. Anyone who's interested in that, I have a video called, on my channel called Harmonic Science with Tim Smollins. I think I only have episode one out, but it's a pretty extensive overview of the Harmonic series. And to me, it's strange how this is left out of music education. Like, you literally don't learn the science of music.

Brian Funk (58:12.746)

Yeah, real wide chorusing. Yeah.

Tim Smolens (58:38.202)

Music is taught as a practical art. It's taught, learn this, this is just true, we call this the major scale, don't ask why, we just do. Like, there's no questioning what the source is. They don't teach you that the harmonic series exists, that when you hit one note, there's an infinite number of notes coming out of that in perfect ratios of each other. And so we're, I think we're very separated from the universal nature of music, and we're kind of relegated to this realm of practical art, which is cool, it's like...

do what you want, anyone's opinion is whatever, but if you take this back to the teachings of Pythagoras that have been handed down, is this stuff was huge in the old world, in different areas of the world, the studying music and its relationship to the universe, and that everything, I mean, I think science has come to that, even though they can't necessarily tie it into music, that I would bet there's a huge connection. Why does Pluto...

even though it comes inside the orbit of, God, is it Neptune, the one right before it? I'm not very good with the planet orders. But the next one out, Pluto comes inside of it. And the reason why they never collide is because it's in a perfect three over two ratio, which is a perfect fifth. So it's never there at the same time. So this is stuff that has been considered by some of the greats throughout the ages in the medieval times and then all the way back to the Greeks and the Egyptians.

Brian Funk (59:36.767)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (59:41.439)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (59:50.936)

Wow.

Tim Smolens (01:00:00.334)

To me is an absolutely fascinating subject and I'm trying to on my channel and on my patreon I'm trying to which is called High Castle Conservatory I'm trying to reconcile Western music with science of music which science you can look in any curriculum I don't think it exists I don't think there's any universities that teach harmonic science and that's just music as ratios and then tuning it correctly

The only thing we have in our music that is truly scientific, and this is gonna seem kind of dumb and obvious, but it's rhythm. Like, if you say, play these four beats in this time, you play those four beats. Like, that's just dry science. If you say play a major third, the only reason that's called a major third is because we've arbitrarily decided that a major scale is the source of everything. And I don't know where that came from, but the major scale is not the source of everything. The harmonic series is because it's...

because I can't play a note where the harmonic series is not ringing. It's impossible to play on any acoustic instrument a note that doesn't have an infinite number of notes ringing inside of it. So that is science, but...

Brian Funk (01:01:03.025)

Hmm.

Tim Smolens (01:01:05.114)

It's really not, like I said, it's not, and I could imagine that if you could reconcile those two things a little bit, you would get musicians that understand a little bit more of the foundation of music as far as math. Like, people think of math as this dry thing that's just numbers, but, you know, I could verify it through, I could verify if you gave me an oscilloscope, or even I could draw it in a circle, the reason this perfect fifth sounds good is because it's a three over two ratio.

Brian Funk (01:01:16.558)

Hmm.

Brian Funk (01:01:32.254)

Right? Well, if you take a rhythm, three over two, like that played on a drum and then another drum and speed it up enough, suddenly it switches from being a rhythm to a tone and you get that.

Tim Smolens (01:01:34.718)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (01:01:38.662)

It sounds great.

Tim Smolens (01:01:43.37)

It's one of the easier polyrhythms to do, because I've been in music where we play like five in the time of like stuff that is like really, I'm not a good like multi-limb polyrhythm kind of person. I'm always amazed that there are drummers that can do that kind of stuff, but three over two is the one like natural polyrhythm that most musicians can get a handle on if you just play it for them. You play it for them, they're like, oh yeah, that thing.

Brian Funk (01:01:53.633)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:02:06.71)

Yeah, it's interesting and then becomes a tone. That would probably make math more fun for kids at school too, right? To just see, like, check it out. Look at how this is related.

Tim Smolens (01:02:10.224)

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (01:02:15.502)

Yeah. Yeah, I think it's kind of a shame that, you know, that musicians are so separated from the actual science of what's going on in their music because it is

very scientific and very mathematical. Like everything in music is math as far as the notes and the harmonies and the rhythms. And that's most of what music is. Obviously you have tone and lyrics and all these flavors we add on top of that. But the absolute foundation of everything we're doing is numbers, but we're not. And it doesn't mean we have to, I've been accused, oh, you're over it. Like I don't see any problem with trying to understand what it is. I mean, yes, it is possible I could go down some road where the music I made from what I was learning

did sound maybe Overthinking it or something, but it's not like a foregone conclusion that if you like learn what's actually going on You're automatically gonna make like dry sterile music, but it opens. I will say it opens up It's kind of intimidating because like I said, you can't tune you can't play guitar unless I were to just tune to open chords Pianos I'd have to tune I there's Synth synthesizer plugins that I can tune them and even adjust via MIDI that like sends MIDI pitch bend messages

So you don't even have to think about it, you just program in what you want, and so you're not thinking about what the tuning is, it's just sending it to your software synthesizer, but it still makes music infinitely more complicated to try to be in tune.

Brian Funk (01:03:41.526)

Yeah, Ableton Live is rolling out a tuning system in the new version that's coming out soon, 12, and it's got all these different tunings and scales. And when you play your keyboard, it's kind of funny because you've got to play the scale and you might be playing some exotic Middle Eastern scale where it takes you like four octaves to get to the next octave. Like it's a whole bunch of them. And I think some of these more natural harmonic series types tunings are part of that.

Tim Smolens (01:03:47.337)

Nice.

Tim Smolens (01:04:00.058)

Wow, oh, it's like a multi-octave scale.

Yeah, those are cool.

Tim Smolens (01:04:11.155)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:04:11.814)

It's kind of interesting, like, computers can get us back there in a way, you know, because it's math, like I said.

Tim Smolens (01:04:16.238)

It is, I mean, have you ever heard a dominant chord tuned correctly? If you can imagine, that major third is tuned down 14 cents, but that dominant seventh is 31 cents off. And it's a note that, they did some study a long time ago that how many cents can average Joe here as even a different note. And the study determined it was somewhere around 12 cents is where your average person can even perceive that there's a different note happening at all.

And that sounds about correct to me, which is why it's interesting that major third lies at 14, just beyond the border, just beyond where average, or just within what your average Joe could hear. But when we're talking 31 cents, that's almost a quarter tone. A quarter tone is, by definition, at 50 cents. And those are really just vague, because harmonics rarely fall. I've got this chart here I'll show you one day. It has all exactly the anatomy of where all the harmonics up through like 200 fall within the octave.

But most of them don't fall directly on a quarter tone. It might be 10 cents, you know, north or south of somewhere. But yeah, I think there's notes in there that truly don't exist in our 12 tone system that are super cool and exotic. And you do hear them in Balanich, gamelan music, Persian classical music, Indian classical music. There's plenty of music that uses, you know, ethnic types of music that uses.

and I don't think they're thinking of it the way I am, oh, that's the 25th harmonic or whatever. I'm just one of those people that likes to try to understand what I'm dealing with so that I can put it in my tool belt and use it.

Brian Funk (01:05:42.487)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:05:50.298)

Right. And that's why I think it doesn't matter that you want to intellectualize this and understand it, because it becomes part of your tool. And that's the beauty of music, it is so much science and so much art at the same time. There's the human emotional side that goes to it, but like you said, it's also built on numbers and relationships and ratios.

Tim Smolens (01:06:11.61)

You know one way you could use this, if you just went in and let's say you're doing music that had like vocal background vocal harmonies and all you did was found every major third and just pitch corrected that one note down 14 cents. That would be, it's not that hard to do. Like I use a, I'm kind of a weirdo, I use digital performer, which I think only like movie scoring people use that, but I've just used that forever. That's my

Brian Funk (01:06:34.294)

I had a run in with that at one point.

Tim Smolens (01:06:35.782)

That's my DAW. It's kind of complex learning curve. I love it. I've used it since like the early 2000s. But there's a great pitch automation inside of there. It's not like auto-tune, where I just choose the one note that I want to pitch shift and can move it, and it doesn't have that annoying like auto-tune sound to it. So if I want to go in and just find my major thirds, it's still tedious. I'm like, this chord C major, who's hitting E, but you can see like...

you know, who's out of tune, who's in tune, and you just could correct those on chords you're holding or something like that, and you would find that tangible effect in your music.

Brian Funk (01:07:12.962)

Hmm. Yeah, that's amazing, right? That we can do that these days.

Tim Smolens (01:07:16.282)

I think voices naturally do it. I think the Beach Boys, I mean, the Beach Boys aren't perfectly in tune. That's part of their sound, is there's some flatness in there, but they always would at least double-track their four or five parts on top of each other, at least do it at least twice. But I think when you're hearing other voices next to you, I think you will naturally gravitate towards those ratios, right? The five over four or whatever, which is that major third, as opposed to this equal-tempered interval, which is just an arbitrary, you know, equal division of an octave.

Brian Funk (01:07:44.654)

Just so we can make pianos and guitars.

Tim Smolens (01:07:46.702)

Yeah, so it does give us a lot of convenience, right? It allows us to switch keys, and you notice how Western music, unlike modal music of Eastern countries and India, our music seems to be, even classical music, keep moving, keep moving, keep moving, keep changing chords, keep going somewhere else, because keep making it exciting, but whatever you do, don't stay in one place, because if you do...

we're gonna realize you're out of tune. I really think there's something to that, the fact that we never settle in on in tune, it just naturally makes us wanna be really harmonically adventurous.

Brian Funk (01:08:11.735)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:08:17.858)

Yeah.

Yeah, like a lot of that music has drones and this pedal points and...

Tim Smolens (01:08:23.446)

Yeah, it is 100%. Yeah, they'll stay there all day.

Brian Funk (01:08:30.676)

Yeah. Really cool. Really interesting how our culture and our upbringing influences what we hear and perceive as correct. And the emotions we put behind a sound, so much of it is just what our conditioning is.

Tim Smolens (01:08:47.238)

Yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah, and I'm down to, you know, what I'm trying to say here. Like, if you want to do something, do a segment sometime in the future where it's like just I could zoom in on any of the stuff we talked about a little bit more and go into more and give you some like graphs and stuff you could show on the screen at the same time. But.

Brian Funk (01:09:10.594)

Yeah, I would love that. That would be a fun education. Yeah.

Tim Smolens (01:09:12.422)

Check out that harmonic science video on my channel and you're gonna see like some of that sunk It's so much easier with graphs to illustrate like what I'm talking about with some of the stuff So sorry if some of that was uh, oh Yeah Cool, man. I Have a class. I got to teach you online for my music school High Castle Conservatory, which is on patreon Which you guys should come join because we go into all this stuff in a much deeper than I do on my youtube channel So I'm starting to try to build a little community there, but you know, it's hard. I'm

Brian Funk (01:09:20.418)

Yeah. I'll put the link in the show notes too for people that are listening. I know we got to let you go because you're teaching soon. So.

Yeah.

Tim Smolens (01:09:41.894)

I got kids, I work as a ER nurse, a graveyard ER nurse. So got a pretty busy life and doing all this music, I'm just trying to fit it all in there.

Brian Funk (01:09:51.923)

I can relate. But no kids. You have a dog and she's pretty easy. But you know, it doesn't matter. It's still hard, you know. My job.

Tim Smolens (01:09:53.286)

You have kids? Okay. There you go.

Tim Smolens (01:10:02.182)

Yeah, it is hard man. It's hard to fit it in. I I'm always doing as much music as I can get away with down here in the basement that my wife doesn't like snap on me So I always find that line where it's like is that is that too much? I better get back up there like because you know how it is It's I can't really get anything done unless I sit here for two or three hours Like it's like coming down for 30 minutes is I might as well not even do it

Brian Funk (01:10:16.798)

Yes.

Brian Funk (01:10:25.77)

Yeah, yeah, sometimes you need to just get lost in that black hole.

Tim Smolens (01:10:30.194)

Yeah. Yeah, well, thanks for having me on. I'm down to do it any other time. Like I said, we could focus in on any of this crazy random subjects that are somehow in my wheelhouse.

Brian Funk (01:10:38.741)

Yeah, great.

Brian Funk (01:10:42.79)

Excellent. Yeah. And for people listening, I guess this is a pretty good taste of some of the stuff they'd get by joining and checking out your stuff on the Patreon and then the music conservatory. So I'll put all the show notes in there so people can find it. And yeah, we'll definitely have to do this again because you opened a lot of can of worms and Yeah.

Tim Smolens (01:11:01.07)

Yeah, it's hard to get into mall and I can get a you invited me in the invite to this to said you were you're cool with being tangential. So I definitely took you up on that.

Brian Funk (01:11:08.042)

Yeah, I loved that. Yeah, I'm happy we did because there's a lot of cool stuff came out of it. But thank you so much.

Tim Smolens (01:11:15.33)

Thanks, it was a pleasure being here.

podcastBrian FunkTim smolens, music production podcast, beach boys