biscuit

I honestly think, “Biscuit,” is perfect, but I’d never compose and produce it this way ever again. There’s a Bill Evans song that he did not write, called “Nardis.” The song was composed by Miles Davis but it’s Bill Evans who became obsessed with its melody and recorded the song countless amounts of times. Frustratingly, it can be difficult to return to your particular favorite rendition of the song on streaming. Maybe that’s the point, there might not be a better example of getting the joy of hearing your favorite song for the first time.

I was listening to Bill Evans a lot when I was producing, “Biscuit,” which remains far and away the best thing that I’ve ever produced. The melodic motif came to me in between classes at Loyola Marymount. There’s a piano that they keep in a rehearsal room and one of the students left his rehearsal session earlier than he had planned. While I didn’t study music at LMU, I had the great luck of studying film, and the film school sits right next door to the Burns music school.

After moving off campus, my ex-girlfriend and I, at the time, were living together with another couple in a newly renovated apartment in Inglewood. There was a shooting in our neighborhood during the weekend that my roommates moved into the apartment. I know that ’cause one afternoon, my roommate came in and told me, “The shooting was right there, where I walk Biscuit!” Around that time, I started writing, “Biscuit,” which was named after my roommate’s beautiful white dog.

There are a number of things happening in “Biscuit,” all driven by my limitations as a composer and producer, but juxtaposed against my enormous capabilities as an editor, producer, and arranger.

The first limitation came from the speed of the melody itself. My original demo for Biscuit had the metronome count at 200 bpm. When I gave this to the session musician, Dan Harriss, he said it would be impossible to play it at that speed, and dropped the bpm slightly to 190 to accommodate for the difficulty. Quite interestingly, Dan would send me his takes split up into “right hand” takes, and “left hand” takes. This afforded me the flexibility to edit, chop, and remix Dan’s takes in all sorts of ways. Anxious that I wasn’t “doing enough,” I would experiment with Dan’s takes in all sorts of ways. Usually, any “mistake” from Dan was an opportunity for me to delete the space of music and “patch it” with another delicious texture. The session musician who played the saxophone also played the part for the flute, but improvisations she performed for both parts were chopped and rearranged to ensure everything flowed more smoothly.

One of the things that I’m most insecure about is drum programming. I think in terms of melody and harmony, but I don’t do nearly enough experiments around rhythm. I don’t think I’ve ever started a production with the drumming and percussion section or sample first, but perhaps that’s a reason to try it. But for “Biscuit,” after the piano was finalized — and remember, when you listen to “Biscuit,” you’re hearing three piano takes simultaneously running or bouncing back and forth between them; this allowed for some careful planning in the mix — on headphones, “Biscuit” is a bit of a special experience. So after the piano was finalized, the saxophone and flute were. Next, a trumpet is sparingly included for light texture. Editing, chopping, reversing, and effects were done on every instrument in an attempt to imbue the jazz sound with as much hip-hop technique as possible.

For the bassline, because there were no drums in the project file at this point, the bassist complained about being forced to play the song against a metronome click. We actually had to argue for a bit, back and forth, before the bassist was ultimately convinced that he could play the bassline and deliver something that would be useable for my purposes. At the time, given my limited access to musicians, I had settled into a routine of finding a mediocre performer but painstakingly editing or chopping their performance to perfect it, or “fix it in post”. For me, this was just an extension of a sampling workflow and process that I developed while producing hip-hop music. For a sampler, the challenge is pulling out a lot of music from a restricted input. For me, someone’s bad take offers an excessive amount of material to “sample” if you keep thinking about the session musicians’ takes as little more than “samples” for me to manipulate. There are limits to this creative approach, as I remember the way that a composition mentor of mine ridiculed my process by calling it “Composition by Pointillism”.

He meant the remark as a criticism. I did not take it that way at the time. At the time, I didn’t just embrace it, it felt like something of a eureka moment to hear my music described back to me in this fashion. Today, I would resist producing music in this pointillist fashion, not just because of the logistical insanity of making music this way. You cannot push the boundaries of harmony and melodic tension (which delivers the tools that can encourage the most emotional and cathartic release) by merely editing and manipulating a session musician’s improvisations. To push the boundaries of harmony, you need to actually write sheet music, demos are not going to be enough. During the pandemic, I became a lot more serious about doing this.

The bassist’s complaints weren’t without merit. After I opened his session files in my DAW, it took me about sixteen hours spread out over two days to painstakingly drag each individual note of his performance to where it needed to be. This needed to be in line with the grid of the metronome so that the last musician, the drummer, could record his parts without an issue.

The hard work paid off, and I did my best to mix the bassline of “Biscuit” in the same way that a producer might mix the bassline for a trap rap song. The bass sound is filtered through digital amps that would never go on an upright bass player’s tracks. The result works. By the time the track was handed off to the drummer the timing was perfect. Because I didn’t touch any instrument on the track myself, the insecurity that “I wasn’t doing enough” persisted, so when the drummer submitted his session, I still took the time to experiment. There are a dozen or so adjustments to the drum session, mostly effects that call attention to themselves, like a reversed snare sound.

I love this song, love the story of how it was made, love what inspired it, and love that I stuck with it for months throughout several mixes. It’s perfect.