There have been a few recent conversations I’ve had with friends, or even just with myself,  about why I love producing and creating music where I’ve for the first time kind of put into words and figured out why I’m so obsessed with what I do.  Making music is like solving a crazy puzzle, like a crossword puzzle, or sudoku, or minesweeper, or a rubix cube, or an actual picture puzzle, but it’s way crazier of a puzzle.  Creating a song starting with what the chords, melody, words, and structure are, and ending at a finished and produced recording is a bunch of puzzles within puzzles, and I’ve never really thought of it like that till very recently, but I do see it like that now.  The trippy thing about music though is that anybody can do the puzzles and get a finished product that is a song.  With other puzzles like crosswords, sudoku, etc… you can’t complete the puzzle however you’d like.  If you don’t exactly choose the right words or numbers, or get all the sides of a rubix cube to be solid colors, then you didn’t do the puzzle.  But music has no rules.  This means that lots of people make music that isn’t very good or original, or isn’t going to appeal to many other people.  For every producer or songwriter who rules there must be hundreds who are pretty amateurish or bad, and that just means they aren’t quite as good at finding the right “puzzle pieces” to connect to each other.  Writing and producing/recording/mixing songs is constant problem-solving.  The cool thing is that there are often unlimited ways to solve a problem.  The difficult thing is that out of infinity ways only a handful, if not one or two depending on the situation, are going to be awesome, and all the other ways are going to be trite or unpalatable, or kind of cool but more like settling rather than getting what you really want in your head or what’s best for the song.  Anyway, I love the puzzle in every possible way.  Let me elaborate a bit more on some of these “puzzles” I’m referring to.  Starting with a chord progression that is cool, this in itself is a little puzzle where the object is to create a certain group of chords and arrange them in a certain order to create a certain vibe to help express the sentiment of the specific song.  Then, throwing in unexpected chords here and there, or making a bridge that is really cool, are new parts of the puzzle, and if pieced together properly are going to make a really cool “picture.”  Now we have one giant piece that we need to fit with a melody, which itself is a crazy puzzle, and then putting it together with the right phrasing, and matching all of that to the chords is a new puzzle.  Now for the gnarliest puzzle for me: lyrics.  Writing good lyrics that stay as true as possible to actually rhyming, while telling a good story or expressing the right theme is a whole puzzle itself that is not easy to solve.  Then when the right words are written and fit the melody and phrasing, and work over the feel of the music, a beautiful bigger puzzle was just put together, but we have so many more puzzles to play with and solve to get a cool recording of a song.  What instruments are played, and what exactly each one does, and why, and how they are then manipulated with effects, compression, frequency equalization, etc… is all some crazy problem-solving.  There are so many ways to do all of that part, and no way is wrong, but many ways will sound uninspiring, unoriginal, or just plain bad, while certain ways will be enjoyed, become platinum hits, dance club anthems, or even more scarcely, a timeless song.  It all gets pretty bananers, and I’m not even going into as much detail about it in this blog as I am tripping out on all this in my head right now.

One of the things that made me start looking at music like this is that I recently made my first attempt at producing and recording dubstep.  If you don’t know what that is and want a good intro to the genre just click here.  As someone who had only heard dubstep I first thought it would be pretty easy to pull off, being that much of what classifies the genre is adhering to some pretty strict formulaic guidelines that do not vary all too much.  But when trying to do it myself I quickly realized how challenging it is to do it well and not suck.  All said and done I am proud of my first attempt, which you can hear at the end of this month when a gypsy-style artist called Joef releases his new album, Miralo, and two remixes I did for him will be included on it; the song I remixed with some dubstep flavor is called Ser Gitano.  But even though I’m proud of my first attempt it did not turn out to be what I hoped I could do.  I realized that dubstep itself is a whole new puzzle I’ve never tried to solve before, and the genre requires solving a bunch of new problems.  That is when I realized how much I absolutely love the puzzle game that is music!  The thing is that I don’t listen to dubstep, and I’ve never had interest in making it, but after trying to and studying it more closely before my attempt, I now totally want to make it and master the puzzle, just for the sake of solving the puzzle.  The last thing I have interest in right now is becoming a gnarly dubstep producer or DJ, but I love the puzzle!  That got me to thinking about people who don’t like making dubstep, and would never do it (or any other specific genre for that matter).  They must not be as addicted to the puzzle of creating music for the sake of doing the puzzle and what that entails, and how that triggers muscles and synapses in the brain.  I say that because I looked at it like this:  People who love creating one style of music are like somebody who loves doing picture puzzles, but only of….let’s say…nature.  And if you bring them an awesome puzzle but it’s of a New York City skyline they would say, “I don’t do puzzles of cities.”  And you might say, “But it’s a puzzle.  Don’t you like doing puzzles?”  And they would say, “I like doing nature puzzles.”  To me that doesn’t make any sense.  By the way, by no means am I saying that how I look at it is the awesome right way to look at it and other people are lame.  I’m just trying to share some insight into my crazy brain that is obsessed with making music beyond most other people who even make music for a living.  Anyway, I felt like the joy of solving a puzzle is solving the puzzle.  Who cares if when it’s done it’s a picture of nature or of a city, or if it’s a dubstep track?  I guess I figured out that I don’t care.  And as I pondered all of this more I realized why I think I love the music puzzles so much:  math.

I love math, and would even go so far as to say that my second love in life after music is mathematics.  I did two years of general education at Palomar College before dropping out of school to wholeheartedly pursue a career in music (so far so good?  lol…)  But while I was there I took every math class they offered and thought I was going to be either a gnarly scientist of some sort, or a high school math teacher because I love helping others learn what they have trouble grasping, and I’m good at explaining things.  I’ve always loved the way that doing math exercises certain muscles in the brain that don’t get worked out under any other circumstances in the same way.  There is actually a feeling, just like when you do bicep curls you can feel the biceps working, that happens in the brain when trying to solve a crazy calculus problem, or some second order nonlinear differential equation.  Music doesn’t quite exercise that muscle in the same way, but music is so mathematical that I can see why music and math are my two loves, even though most people I tell this to think it’s odd that I would love math and a creative art form equally.  At it’s most basic analysis music is mathematical because songs are counted in measures by beats, usually in groups of 4′s, and the way that notes harmonize each other, thus creating chords, and the way chords go together pleasantly, and how a melody works over those chords, all has to do with combining and manipulating the numbers 1-7.  If that all sounds super weird and makes no sense to you don’t worry about it.  Many people never learn music theory and that’s fine, but whether someone is aware of it or not music is all combinations and manipulations of 1-7.  But even deeper than that if you get into the realm of recording, which often leads to producing and mixing,  balancing everything to be perfect volumes and sit together effectively all has to do with sound wave frequencies and how they are stacked, manipulated, sculpted, and colored.  By the time the whole thing comes to an end there is so much math happening that it’s pretty ridiculous, and all of the puzzles within puzzles within puzzles that happen when creating and manipulating sound are all math puzzles really, probably with some stuff going on at the level of differential equations.  Making music is like doing a bunch of really serious math instantly without knowing it.  How cool is that?!  I know at it’s core the entire universe is math, which is why I think I’m so fond of it, but of all the arts music really is the one intrinsically tied to math.  I think I’m so into songwriting, engineering, mixing, and producing because it’s a way for me to still live inside a world of math, even though I never think of it like that.  But I recently did think of it like that, and I thought I’d share it with you, even though I probably sound like a ranting lunatic in this blog.  Who else out there knows what I’m talking about?  Where are my puzzle-loving math nerds at??!!

- Chavez