Negative Players - Banjo Beats and Indie Music - The Lorenzo's Music Podcast (Transcript)
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Tom Ray: Hi, and welcome to another Lorenzo’s Music Podcast. I’m Tom, and this is a show where I speak with musicians. I speak to people who create things for musicians. And I also have a focus on open source, Creative Commons and the Fediverse and things like that. Things that are here to help the DIY musician. Well, I, I have a DIY musician here today that I’m speaking with. So why don’t you tell the people who you are and what it is you do.
Jonathan: All right. I am Jonathan. I am the sole member of Negative Players, which, I like to call a hypothetical indie rock band from southwest Michigan.
Tom Ray: Okay. Actually, I did want to ask that because you. You state many times and emphatically on your site that, that this is a band. And I’m like, but I only ever see you in anything on it. I mean, it sounds like a band. There are many instruments. It’s very layered. But I’m like, is it? And I did want to ask that. So tell me, tell me about the claiming it’s a band. But basically the statement you made there. What? Explain that.
Jonathan: What is a hypothetical indie rock band? So the idea originally was, my youngest child started playing the drums. and we thought, hey, we should start a band. And, I have another relative who’s sort of in the area who play some instruments. So the idea is we’ll start a band together. I’d been recording music and writing music for, you know, decades before that. and so I came up with the name Negative Players. Like, that’s a great band name. We should, we should start a band. So we released the first music we released again was basically just me, you know, on my laptop with various instruments and a daw. And so I was releasing stuff as the theoretical band that we were planning to become. and then that just never really happened. And I was the only one who was invested. So,
Tom Ray: Like a real band.
Jonathan: Like a real band. Yeah, exactly. I also don’t play live very much. So I’ve always made the joke that, I’m just doing what the Beatles did just before they became the Beatles. So I’m a studio studio band, never tour, never play live, unfortunately don’t quite have the following of the Beatles.
Tom Ray: Wait, would that be the Beatles or would that be Led Zeppelin?
Jonathan: Led Zeppelin always toured.
Tom Ray: No, but they beforehand Jimmy Page and, Jon Paul Jones, they were like full on studio musicians, like playing with like, that’s how they met. So they were literally doing that before they got in the bands.
Jonathan: Wow.
Tom Ray: We just got into rock history. Nerd shit.
Jonathan: Right?
Tom Ray: Yeah. Okay, sorry. Continue. It’s your story. What am I interrupting for?
Jonathan: I’m going to interrupt you. I’m just going to go on about a little bit. Dude, I’m a big fan of Donovan. Yeah, I remember hearing, like, oh, Jimmy Page played on Sunshine, Superman and Dirty Gertie, Man. And I always thought it was like, oh, you know, Jimmy Page was part of Led Zeppelin. And then like, oh, you know, Donovan got him to play on the stuff. And it’s actually the opposite. All of that came out way before Led Zeppelin, if I understand it correctly. And it was him being a session musician before he was famous, which is really, really cool.
Tom Ray: Yeah, yeah. No, a lot of. I actually just watched, like, several videos about. There’s a guy that’s doing a whole series on. On, Led Zeppelin. And I wish I could give him credit, but I can’t remember the name of the account right now. But, it did. He’s doing a whole thing where he’s doing one where it’s the Led Zeppelin through the years, by each album. And he does, like, a back history of it. And he goes through the Yardbirds, but he goes even deeper into Jimmy Page’s session work. And basically how him and Jon Paul Jones, like, people laughed at them when they said they were going to go off and start a band. They’re like, why?
Jonathan: Because you’re making. We’re the ones doing this.
Tom Ray: Yeah. And we get paid more than bands do, but for doing this.
Jonathan: Yep. I watched, Becoming Led Zeppelin recently, and I think it went through a lot of that.
Tom Ray: Okay. Yeah, Yeah, I saw that, too. And then there’s another one that he did that’s the Rolling Stones. And that’s fascinating as well. But, I actually learned a lot about open tuning on that one and did not know much about it. I still can’t play guitar, but I’m one step closer to pretending I can.
Jonathan: You can borrow all the notes at one time, then you can open.
Tom Ray: Actually, I can’t. That’s my problem. I cannot. It is the one instrument where, when I do it, everything just sounds like I’m picking up the guitar by the strings is. You know, even if our bar notes, it’s like
Jonathan: you got to build the muscles up in your hand.
Tom Ray: It’s the one instrument where everybody I know plays it better than I do. So the fact that I’m not instantly good at it just makes me go, well, I’m not going to try this anymore. So I don’t even know.
Jonathan: Last time my kid was here, I had her set up the drum set. Because drums are the one thing that I’ve never been able to play.
Tom Ray: Oh, okay.
Jonathan: At all. and so I was like, set this up. I’m actually going to start practicing and I like started learning some of the basic patterns and I’m still terrible, but not as terrible as I was a month ago.
Tom Ray: Well, there you go. All right.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Tom Ray: And so, okay, now going back to what we were talking about. Now you said you started this with you, you were going to do it with your youngest son. And how. When was this? When did this idea transpire?
Jonathan: Yeah, youngest daughter. let’s see. So she is a couple years out of college and this was in high school. So I’m gonna say 10 years ago.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Jonathan: Around 10 years ago. I, I’d have to. If I got on to like the streamers and found out the first negative, players album that got released on the various Spotify and the streamers, it would be about six months before that.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Jonathan: I wrote a bunch of songs thinking, oh, well, we’ll start this little band. and it didn’t really happen.
Tom Ray: That is, that is interesting that you’re like, you kept writing the songs. So tell me about writing the songs now. You dec. You would start this band. and what was the inspiration? Like what, what kept you going? How were you arranging it? Were you arranging it with people in mind or were you going, I’m just going to record this and we’ll figure it out later?
Jonathan: just recording it. Figure it out later. I mean I had done home recordings. I mean I. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, you know, I, I would record onto a four track. So I go back a ways. I, I’m always thinking in terms of arrangement. So when I’m like working through a song, like in the back of my head, I hear all these different parts. which is one reason why the negative player stuff, even though it’s me, it sounds like a full band with sometimes a quartet and horns and all kinds of different things. Because when I hear music in my head, I’m thinking. And as I’m working through it, like listening to, where I am in a song, I’ll like, oh, you know, it’d be really great. It’d be a horn thing right here. Like it just pops into my head. Gotta go back, start adding that stuff. so, yeah, I think pretty holistically about music when I’m composing. So it wasn’t really any different when I started working on the first Negative Players album. It was just what I had been doing. I had recently gotten a new daw. I used to have a pirated version of. I’m gonna say cakewalk sonar.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Jonathan: Going back. And then my desktop crashed and was broken, and I went a couple of years just not having anything to record on. so that also was around the times, like, I’m just going to go ahead and splash some money and, down for a real recording type rig m. So that all sort of happened at the same time. That’s when I really got back into, doing recording.
Tom Ray: Okay. And I want to. I want to ask you more about that in a sec. But first I realized, well, two things. One thing was, you said that’s the way you hear the music in your head and everything. You ever notice the fact that people can talk about hearing music in their head and it’s like, oh, poetic and how lucky and, oh, that must be so nice to hear music that way. But if people say they hear voices in their head, that’s a bad thing. Just something that popped into my head. But it’s like, nobody ever brags about hearing the voices in their head anyway. The,
Jonathan: So let me just. Let me just jump out of that. Okay. I think hearing music in your head like that is also, like, kind of a problem. It’s just the result of something generally very pretty and not, something that destroys relationships.
Tom Ray: Exactly. And it also. It can be negative in the sense, like an earworm or something like that. Like, there will be times I’m driving down the street and it’s like, wow, the intro part, like the first couple of seconds of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song have been going on in my head for a good hour now. Yeah, like, that’s a bad thing.
Jonathan: Yep, that’s a bad thing.
Tom Ray: And now it is to everybody else. So the, other thing, too was, we’ve been talking about your music, and actually we haven’t described to people listening to this podcast what m is your music. Everybody’s favorite question. How would you explain your music to people?
Jonathan: This is how I’d explain my music. It is a combination of sort of classic, like, Beatles, like, trying to be sophisticated, but still being sort of pop rock, rock type music. a whole dose of noisy 90s indie rock. like Sonic Youth, Pavement, Pixies, I guess that was 80s. and then whatever it is that’s interesting me at the time. so recently, over the last Two years I’ve written almost exclusively on banjo. And notice that I released an album of banjo songs called Very Creatively Banjo Songs, Volume one. and before that I had bought a, Oh, what were they called? Ukulele. I don’t know why I forgot that I bought a ukulele and became sort of like, fascinated with ukuleles because back in the day I was like, those are toys. And no one serious would ever like, write on one. And I got one. I’m like, this thing’s awesome. So I got another one and I got another one. I ended up with a tenor, a bass or a baritone ukulele. And for a year I just wrote on ukulele and released an album full of ukulele songs. and in both cases, while the instrumentation was mostly acoustic with ukulele, with some electric, guitar in there, I would still say the key inspiration is like that grungy 90s rock like Sonic Youth or Pavement, some Replacements in there. and so it’s just I was filtering what I love through a completely new instrument. And with, the banjo songs, it’s kind of the same thing. I mean, it is instrumentation wise, it’s very sort of alt country, old timey. But there’s a lot of dissonance in there as well. And there’s.
Tom Ray: It isn’t. It isn’t. I get what you’re saying, but it also is. So this would be the comment I would make while it says that. And even on the, you know, the name of the new one, it’s like banjo music or, I’m sorry, missing the exact name of the album. But it essentially goes, this is music written on banjo. You have a presumption going into it going, oh, well, I know what to expect this to be. No, it’s not. You’re basically going to. I’m playing the music. I do, but this time I’m just doing it with a banjo. You’re not like going, here’s banjo music like Steve Martin on stage in the 70s. This is, you know, you playing the alternative sort of songs that you’re talking about. You just have to be using that instrument. And that’s the thing is it’s so. And I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that a lot. Plus the fact too that it will start off that way and then it will just. All of a sudden you’ve got synths and drums and all this stuff that comes in, you know, it’s awesome.
Jonathan: well, thank you. yeah, the banjo is a little different because the banjo as an instrument. I got one just. I, I asked for one for Christmas just because, like, I should get a banjo. They look fun. I’d never played one before. I picked one up before and I didn’t know how it was supposed to be tuned. It was out of tune. I didn’t know how to tune it. And like, there’s this weird string that’s higher than all the other ones and it’s at the top. And I don’t understand this. So I put it down. I’m like, that seems weird. And I was like, I should just get one. So for Christmas, I, I put one on my wish list. And it was just like the, the cheapest Chinese. Chinese made one off. I think it was like Amazon or something. And so my wife got it for me and, three months later, I spent a lot of money on a nicer one because I just fell in love with the thing. but what’s really interesting about the banjo is, like, it really changes how you think about music. You just, you can’t do the same things as you can do on a guitar. I mean, the big one is there’s this one string at the very top that’s the highest pitched string. And, and no matter where you’re playing on the fret, it is that string and it’s that pitch. So it’s a drone.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Jonathan: So I tend to really like to do like, using borrowed chords and changing keys and, you know, doing. Trying to do some weird stuff to try to make music more interesting. It’s really hard to do in a banjo because, like, if you’re in C and you’re playing C and then you want to go to E major, well, guess what? That drone at the top is a G. And if you play. Try to play an E major chord with a G ringing out all the time, it sounds terrible. So you have to like, well, no, I can’t use that one. Maybe I need to stick more to, like, the diatonic, you know, traditional chords. So that was really a challenge because it made me sort of embrace traditional music more than I normally do. And so I had to be even more creative in terms of adding, like, bizarre chords that would stand out but not sound bad. okay, so that one, that was very interesting. ukuleles are just basically the top four strings slightly tuned differently. But a banjo is an instrument, and the way you strum it is completely different. So there’s different ways to play the banjo. I use a technique, ah, mostly called claw hammer, which is like, it’s called the Bum Diddies. So it’s like a two. Ah, four, was it fourth note and two eight notes or something like that. It’s like a really weird pattern. And the way you do it, you’re hitting that drone string every third note. And it’s took forever to sort of get it down. but so the banjos really changed the way that I approach writing music. Unlike any other instrument, for sure.
Tom Ray: Yeah.
Jonathan: But I still infuse it with dissonance and some electric guitars and feedback and, you know, whatever, to make it sound like, good to my ears.
Tom Ray: Okay. And also as a comment, and we’ve used a. We have a bass ukulele, that we’ve used on some of our albums. And the thing will not stay in tune. It has a very unique sound. So we literally have it like, we will write songs around it where we tune to it just because it’s like, oh, that sounds really neat. Even though, like, we could tune it and get it. But it’s like bo do do do do do do do do, you know, and it’s. It’s fun to play with. But, yeah, we just use it. We use it sparingly is what I’m saying. We don’t. We don’t spend the time and effort that you just explained into making it work into an entire album’s worth of music.
Jonathan: Are you, Are you familiar with, Madison Cunningham by any chance? She’s a youngish female, songwriter, very, very much up my alley. very Beatles influenced, incredibly sophisticated. she has a song on one of her albums and I remember hearing like this. This instrument that was just like, wow, that is wild. And I looked it up and she. It was a ukulele, put through a pitch shifting, octave pedal.
Tom Ray: Oh, nice.
Jonathan: Downshifting it an octave through a distorted amp. And it is the coolest sounding thing ever.
Tom Ray: I’ll have to check that out.
Jonathan: Yeah, yeah. If. If you’re into songwriter, she’s. She’s one of the best around right now.
Tom Ray: And I wanted to mention too, are you familiar with the band Jellyfish?
Jonathan: I feel like I know the name.
Tom Ray: Okay. If you look it up.
Jonathan: Familiar with them.
Tom Ray: So, and I want to talk more about the recording of your albums right now, but I want to mention before going in, you do a lot of harmonies, and the harmonies remind me of the band Jellyfish. They only put out two albums. But if you listen to anything by them, listen to their last album, which is called Spilt Milk. And it is a fantastic album. And it is very. It is Beatles, Queen, Bee Gees, Henry Mancini, all that in kind of influence. They basically spent the entire majority of their record label contract to make this one album, and then they broke up. Interesting. Yeah, no, check it out. And your vocal, harmonies remind me of that. Now, going into that, we’ve been talking about this banjo album, and we could talk about any of them, but really, I want to talk about the recording of this album because before you said you can’t play drums, but there’s some great drum sounds and drum beats and things like that on it. You also have a lot of synth and things like that. So tell me, first of all, what is the daw that you did end up moving on to. To record the album?
Jonathan: I ended up with Ableton Live.
Tom Ray: You went with Ableton Live?
Jonathan: Okay. mostly because I have a friend who is a fantastic musician. and at this point I was like, man, I need to get a new dial. What do you think? He’s like, well, I love Ableton. and I just got the demo and there’s a couple things that were so different than what I’d used before that I really liked, that I just went with it. I didn’t even think. More likely, I probably should have gone with something like Pro Tools, because it’s. I think it’s geared more because I don’t really. My music’s not electronic as a genre, but because it’s just me. There is a lot of electronics, in terms of MIDI and samples and stuff. But, yeah, I just went with. I went with Ableton from his recommendation and tried out the demo. I’m like, yeah, this works. And just. Okay, I’ll go with this one.
Tom Ray: Okay. And then you. Are you programming the. The drum beats into Ableton?
Jonathan: Yes. So all the percussion, any strings, horns, are all going to be sequenced. some of them I play, I’ll play on an actual keyboard to get sort of the more natural. but often the arrangement stuff I’m doing, I kind of do when I’m away from home or not sitting down at my computer. If I’m on a trip or something like that, I’ll just open it up and start working on arrangements. so a lot of the times it is. It is literally click the little boxes for the notes for the duration. You know, humanize it, do all kinds of things to try to make it sound as natural as possible.
Tom Ray: That’s what I was wondering, because the recordings on them, the sound is really great. And I’m like, are you. I mean, since you can run Di. But I didn’t know if you were actually playing the Sense, if you were programming the Sense. And then with the drums, it’s like, you do have. There’s a lot of brushwork on the drums. I as well. So that’s why I was like, is he recording the drums? Is he programming those? So I wasn’t sure.
Jonathan: I’m so glad that there’s even a question about it because, it was
Tom Ray: brushwork that made me think it.
Jonathan: Yeah. So. Yeah. So Ableton, I kind of splurged. I work in higher ed. So, all, all of these software companies give, oh, you get the educational version discounts. So I spent, I think like $250 for Ableton Suite.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Jonathan: If something, I could be the only
Tom Ray: people I know that pays for Ableton. All right.
Jonathan: Right. Yeah. Well, I, I spent my time pirating, and decided, you know what, a couple hundred dollars just to be legit is not a terrible idea. And I don’t want to get in the place again where my hard disk drives like, fails and then I have to spend the next three months trying to figure out where the hacked versions are and getting them all at.
Tom Ray: I’m just gonna see, that’s why I went open source. That’s. I just, I’ve.
Jonathan: I’ve tried some of the open source stuff and this was a long time ago and it just didn’t, I love open source software. I’m actually, I’m a developer DevOps type person as well. So, I love open source software. but when it comes to recording, I just found it just. There’s too much friction in my case, a little too much frustrating. I’m plenty frustrated recording music. I don’t need the software to. I want that to be as smooth as possible. I want all the frustration to be me not hitting notes and messing up guitar parts.
Tom Ray: Yeah, I’m an anomaly in the open source realm in the sense that I use Linux, I use open source software, but here’s the thing. I get it and then I just leave it alone and work with it. Everybody else who seems to work in open source is because they can customize it, they can do things, and it’s like, that’s fine and dandy. I just want to make the music. I don’t want to spend my time tinkering with music. So I’m weird that way. In the sense that.
Jonathan: What do you use for a workstation?
Tom Ray: I Use Ardor, which is a very good. It’s actually very likening to Pro Tools.
Jonathan: Okay. M. Because I remember downloading that and trying it, but this would been like 10 or 15 years ago.
Tom Ray: Yeah, it’s.
Jonathan: I’m sure it’s a lot better than it was then.
Tom Ray: It’s very stable. He built it specifically because there was no good DAW workstation on Linux and he built it specifically for that. But it’s also now cross platform. It’s Windows, it’s Mac. So interesting. It’s. Yeah. And also the fact it has probably one of the most robust and like him and the other person that he works with, they have a discourse where they, you can, they will answer your questions directly like all day long. Like they’re in there helping everybody figure it out. They know that software in and out. And it’s like you get an answer, you’re not getting some sort of robotic response or people trying to explain it for you. I mean you will get that but not the robotic part, but the people trying to explain it for you. But it’s a, it’s a vibrant community. So if you ever check it out again. Plus they have a subscription model. Like you can install it yourself and it’s free, but you can also download prepackaged, like just click on the.exe file or whatever your, your actual OS is and install it. And you can just do a name your price subscription and just pay them like yearly or monthly like whatever. And yeah, it’s like, you know. Okay, cool.
Jonathan: Yeah. Anyway, that, so getting back to the drumming, the brush stuff. So with Ableton Suite, one of the reasons I decided to go ahead and get that version is that it had a full orchestra, plugin
Tom Ray: which sounds very nice.
Jonathan: and it comes with sort of really high quality drum samples. And so when I open up a project, I always have two different drum kits to choose from. One’s like a rock drum kit and the other one is a jazz drum kit. And for the stuff that I’m doing right now with like banjo and I, almost always go with the jazz kit. so yeah, I use a lot of brushes, brush samples. I’m so happy that you, you think that it sounds good because.
Tom Ray: No, it does.
Jonathan: All I hear, all I hear is how fake it sounds.
Tom Ray: That’s, that’s the curse of knowledge right there. That’s the knowing, because you show it to somebody else and they’re like, I have no idea. And it’s like, yeah, that’s I I programmed that because I’ve also,
Jonathan: every once in a while I’ve gotten some comments with like, hey, this band’s great. And I’m just like, hahaha, it’s just one person. But that’s what I’m going.
Tom Ray: Me again.
Jonathan: Jonathan, I, I absolutely am going for an organic band. That’s what I’m trying for.
Tom Ray: Yeah, it comes across. I mean, I literally was going like, is it, Is it? Maybe not. You know, I’m like, I was butchering it.
Jonathan: That’s great.
Tom Ray: now, shoot. What was I going to ask? Oh, I had a question. I was totally going to ask you. Oh, no, no, it was this. Okay. So we’ve talked about the fact that I, opened the show saying that this is a show focused on open source, Fediverse, all that kind of stuff. And people might be going, well, he’s not using open source. He’s not releasing under Creative Commons. Why is he talking to this guy? Well, first of all, it’s my show. I can talk to any damn musician I want to. Second, it’s because I found out about you on a federated, video music channel. Okay. The indie beat. And I, saw it and I was, I really liked the song and I was, I go on there all the time. I just kind of pop in, watch some videos and stuff. But I also am just looking for musicians to talk to, looking for musicians to check out music. Also, here’s the funny thing, and this is going to be even more humorous now. I also am trying to find more bands online.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Tom Ray: So a lot of, I meet a lot of solo musicians and that’s great. But me, I’m in a band, I work with a band and it’s really hard to meet other bands that, have the same backgrounds and interests or at least are involved in the same communities. Sorry, but that’s quite all right. I just find that funny that it was kind of like, God, is he or isn’t he?
Jonathan: I mean, that’s, that’s the thing, because I, I love bands more. I mean, I mean, some of my favorite musicians are like solo artists, but.
Tom Ray: Oh, same.
Jonathan: yeah, I absolutely love the band dynamic. and because I don’t play out live, I don’t need a band. So. Yeah, I mean, what, what attracts me to music in terms of like, listening to bands is what attracts me to writing music. And so just because it’s me doesn’t mean that, it’s not approached the same way as a band. I mean, even hear all kinds of stories. I remember even, like, Like, one of my favorite bands is Pavement, and, like, one of their albums, it was basically the drummer and one other guy recorded the whole album while the rest of the band was doing barbecues out in the backyard because no one else cared. but, you know, they were a band, right? so, yeah, okay. That’s why. That’s what the theoretical band from southern southwest Michigan. Theoretical band.
Tom Ray: And also, it’s a band that in this is something I notice. The theoretical band also has a bird theme. You write a lot about birds.
Jonathan: Okay, So I have two daughters, and my eldest daughter, who is now in her late 20s, is a birder. And so a lot of that is actually sort of a shout out to her. you’ll probably notice that the bird metaphors and the bird visuals all started after the pandemic, which is when she got into, like, that’s what her and her partner, like, they would. They would go out birding, because that’s the thing you could do. And then they decided they really loved it. She ended up, like, getting into photography and she goes out, takes pictures of birds constantly. So there’s one album called Minor Birds out There that has, like, a stitch of bird. They’re all hers. and I’ve been influenced by it. It’s not just like, oh, I want to give a shout out to my daughter. it’s like, birds are really cool, and I think about them a lot more than I used to. And m. Then I, mean, for the most part. I mean, birds do show up in some of the songs. The, opening track off banjo songs is just an extended bird metaphor, which is one of the few songs I actually did research for. So I started looking up all the behavior patterns of Arctic Terns, and I had an idea for a song which was basically, humanity is so awful, I wish I was a bird so I wouldn’t have to be around. and so I looked up in Arctic Terns. Like, we saw. We were in Iceland a couple of years ago, on vacation. And that’s where I saw. I saw some Arctic Terns. I remembered them and, like, that bird name fit into the line that I was working on. It’s like, oh, yeah, Arctic Terns, they’ll be good. so I did research, and lo and behold, they live on the two polars where no one lives. And when they migrate, they migrate over the ocean to avoid all humans. So the metaphor was just perfect.
Tom Ray: Right?
Jonathan: So, yeah, there are a lot of birds, metaphors, and visuals.
Tom Ray: Okay. And when you. So you’ve mentioned that when you record, you sometimes even do it. You can do it on the go, you can do it portably, you know, but there are still the aspects of you have the guitar or the ukulele or the band that you record, plus you do vocals.
Jonathan: So. Yep.
Tom Ray: Are you. Is the room you’re in, is that your studio? Is that, where.
Jonathan: No, this is. This has been. So both my kids are out of the house and, depending on who comes home, I’ll move. I have like a home office with. And that’s basically where my studio is. So there’s actually the room over here. The lighting’s really bad in it. I was gonna do this interview there, but, I was like. It was. You could barely see my face. because, yeah, the lighting’s bad in there. that’s actually where most of the recording’s done. Some, of this stuff has been done in here.
Tom Ray: okay.
Jonathan: But yeah, I, I record, electric guitars, acoustic guitars, banjos, ukuleles. I, have a bass and I have a piano. Not an acoustic piano, but a. A decent weighted key piano. So all that stuff will be recorded in that room. but often what I’ll do is, for instance, I’ll have the basics ideas of a song. M. I will just go in there and record a guitar part to a click track or to a very, very simple drum beat. And then, the weekend, if I’m somewhere and I have some time, I’ll open up the laptop and just start working on the drums. and eventually what I’ll do is I’ll do scratch tracks for everything. And then I’ll get. The drum’s pretty tight. and then often, like the first bass line, I’m just going to be doing MIDI stuff just to get an idea of the idea of the bass. and then I’ll go back and rerecord everything. and yeah, that will all be done in that room. And then I’ll tweak all the arrangements via midi.
Tom Ray: Here’s one thing that I always run into when I try to write scratch track, especially if I’m putting bass on it. So I’ll spend a lot of time going, oh, here’s a unique drum beat and here’s some really cool chords. And then I have discovered on more than one occasion, I’ve written the same bass line for like three different songs. I don’t know what it is. I’ll be like, oh, that’s a really cool bass. Line that fits in really well. And then I’ll show it to my bass player, and he’s like, that’s the same. No, not even that. I’ll do a boom, boom, boom, boom. It’ll be. It’ll be something that’s like, oh, that’s. That’s funky and unique as hell. And the bass player will go, hey. And he’ll play it for me, and then he’ll start humming another tune that we do. And I’ll be like, oh, my God, it’s the exact same bass.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Tom Ray: I don’t know how I do that. So. So that I want to say it’s because I usually do it because I want to get that natural feel. So I’ll play it on keyboard. And it’s like, apparently when I write a bass line with my right hand, it just wants to do the exact same thing. Anyway, that’s just a story about me, so.
Jonathan: Good story.
Tom Ray: I want relatable. I want to ask you about this. On your YouTube channel. You seem to have what our live demo sessions from. I want to say, because of the picture you put on it when you were a, teenager playing in a band. Is that true? What is that? There’s, like, a whole group of recordings that you have on your YouTube channel that look like people playing at a house party. It’s a shirtless. Yes.
Jonathan: Okay. Yes. That was college.
Tom Ray: Okay. That’s what I was going to say. There have. That’s why I’m also. This led to the. Is this the same band lining up? So it’s like.
Jonathan: That’s so. On YouTube. It’s just the picture with audio, right?
Tom Ray: Yes.
Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. that actually came out of, Pandemic Times, where I just, discovered some tapes of live footage from college.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Jonathan: and everyone was going, you know, stir crazy. So it was mostly. It’s mostly for maybe six or seven people to hear. Okay. but I just threw it up on YouTube. But, yeah, that was a, one of my bands from college.
Tom Ray: Okay. So you had been in a band?
Jonathan: I have in college. I was in a handful of bands. I was in quite a few bands in college. they were all. I don’t want to say they weren’t rewarding. They were frustrating, in terms of trying to get everyone to practice, or you want to be more ambitious and no one else really wants to spend the time to do anything difficult, or maybe someone wants to do something more difficult than you want to do. And so playing in a band was a lot of fun, but I found the creative process, a little more frustrated. Frustrating, in terms of like, I want to do what I want to do. And like, you’re in a band, so there’s three other people are like, eh, yeah, I’m busy.
Tom Ray: And it’s a weird dynamic too, because it’s a small window, much like high school, where it’s like something’s really important to everybody in this one window of time. And then it either becomes not important or people’s ideals change or they want to go somewhere else or somebody goes, all right, I did that. Now I’m going to go, like, wear a tie for the rest of my life. You know, there are different people turn into different things. And it’s a weird snapshot of. Because there are so many people I knew who were like, they need to take this seriously. And then the band, they went off to do something else. It broke up quickly. And then they never did music again ever in their entire lives. And it’s like they were the most serious one in the band about making it happen.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Tom Ray: Anyway, that’s just an observation, that’s not a critique.
Jonathan: One of the most fun things that I did. So I discovered I had tapes of two. Two concerts from two different bands. I was in college, and so I digitized them because I wanted to hear them. And again, this is during the pandemic where we all had a ton of time with nothing to do. So I ended up re. Recording like modern day recordings.
Tom Ray: Nice.
Jonathan: Of 14 songs from one band and seven from the other. And it was so much fun to just go back and like relive those songs and dedicate like put, put a good record, like a decent recording to them.
Tom Ray: Right.
Jonathan: I haven’t released those yet. I still haven’t released those yet. I, I am going to at some point. At least one of them. One of them turned out really well. the other one’s fine.
Tom Ray: The other one’s fine.
Jonathan: The other one was fun to do.
Tom Ray: We haven’t heard any of them. But I like how you’re already going like. But that other one, don’t worry about it.
Jonathan: Yeah, there’s some good. There were some good songs. yeah.
Tom Ray: So now I had said that I discovered you on the indie Beat tv. And that ah, leads me to the question, so how are you promoting yourself? You’re making this music. You make a lot of music. You put out at least. Yeah. You make like at least, I want to say two albums a year. If not, at least an album and a few Singles leading up to that album a year. So how are you promoting yourself? How are you getting the word out there? How did you end up getting. I mean, do you even know how you ended up on the indie Beat tv?
Jonathan: I do know how it got. So I, I basically don’t promote myself.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Jonathan: I tried to early on and it was just like, you know, you spend hours to get like two people to listen to something and I’m like, yeah, that’s not worth it. Okay. So I’ve, I’ve. My attitude now is like, this is. I love making music. Maybe someone else will like it. I’ll do the minimal effort that I need to promote things. I did find, like, like Mastodon was very. Has been very good. and I, I know I got a lot of probably some followers on Mastodon through the Fetty Vision contest. So I met. You’re familiar with the Fetty Vision? Okay. Yeah. So, the last two years that they held it, I submitted songs. I came in second on both of them. so, yeah, so, I mean, relatively successful, but a lot of people like, reached out, said, you know, love this song or.
Jonathan: And so I think a lot of people are familiar with Negative Players because of that. but, in terms of that video, I mean, it’s a song from a couple years ago. Someone, had reached out to me and said, because I had made one video and like, yeah, I saw you made a video. You. If you want anyone else to work on videos for you. Sure. And so I was like, yeah. And I, I sent him like the, the wav files for all of them so they could have the, the top notch audio. And someone else was like, hey, I made a video for one of your songs that I like. and. And it was that one. and yeah, it was very, very cool. All right. Yeah, I’ve gotten. I’ve gotten some, some feedback from, from that. But again, like, I don’t know. I’m. I’m lazy. I’m not lazy. I’m a little lazy.
Tom Ray: I just got done saying that you put out like several albums a year. That’s not being lazy.
Jonathan: I’m lazy. I. I am unmotivated when it’s something that is not super motivating to me. So, like, making music, you’re not in a rush.
Tom Ray: I would put it that way. Let’s say you’re not in a rush.
Jonathan: Right? I’m like, when we’re talking about hearing, you know, voices in your head and music in your head, I mean, Maybe it’s the same, but like it’s a compulsion to make music.
Tom Ray: Right.
Jonathan: As soon as I’m done with a song and I’m happy with it, like immediately I’m like, what’s the next one? What’s the next one? And I’ve actually gone probably four months feeling comfortable not being super prolific. which is about the first time in 15 years where like, I don’t constantly have something in my head. I’ve got a couple songs I’m working on. I’ve got one that I did actually record. I started doing some covers that was a lot of fun. so soon I’m gonna release two songs. One of them is a Charlie XCX cover that I actually, I find incredibly beautiful. and it fits my style. It’s got some weird chords, it’s really moody. And I was like, that’s there, we have it. So, and like I wrote, I did one original that I’ve recorded that’s basically sitting there ready to go. But other than that I have a couple ideas I’m working on and I don’t feel rushed at all. And it’s, it’s been kind of a relief just to be able to take a breath for a little while.
Tom Ray: Yeah, well, and that kind of, that actually leads into the question. I was going to ask one more question. it was what kind of things do you have coming up in the future? So along with that, I mean, do you have any plans or expectations, any gear you plan on getting? Anything where, like when you have this downtime, when you’re going, there’s time when you’re not doing it. I know that’s when musicians start looking up, you know, Sweetwater and Reverb and all that kind of stuff and like going. Looking at gear and crap.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Tom Ray: Like, okay, so on top of that with the Because, just. Because I know that you just named off a bunch of stuff you’re going to do, like what are your plans for the future? What are some things you’re looking to do? What do you aspire to?
Jonathan: one of the things that I, I, it’s a conceptual idea that I’ve looked into a little bit and it hasn’t worked out yet, but I want to do it is release a bunch of singles.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Jonathan: two tribe, like A side and B side singles that are the same song. One with rock instrumentation, guitars, bass.
Jonathan: You know, maybe loud, aggressive and then the exact same song in a completely old timey fashion. So it’d be released in impacts like here’s this, here’s the song twice. One is indie rock and the other one sounds like, ah, 78 cylinder. I don’t know. I don’t know what 78 cylinder is.
Tom Ray: Those. So it was like the Thomas Edison cylinder.
Jonathan: I think you’re referring to a band. No, no. When it comes to, when it comes. When it comes to banjo, I. The primary reason I wanted one was a band called 16 Horsepower.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Jonathan: Which again, if you are not familiar with them, geez, are they something special? And they are actually. They’re sort of the groundbreakers and kind of what I’m doing, which is. Yeah, I like banjos. I also like punk rock and I love Sonic Youth and I love noisy stuff. So I was going to put it all together. 16 horsepower did that. But not only, the main guy plays a banjo, or he plays like an old timey guitar, with a slide, or he plays a bandion, which I think is pronounced correctly, which is like a, accordion. But it’s like the creepy one that the monkey that’s about to kill you plays like, has really long. So he plays one of those. So all of his songs are either like acoustic or electric guitar. About a third of them are that. A third of them are banjo and a third of them are this weird accordion instrument. But then it’s sometimes extremely loud, like with guitars and stuff. And they’re, they’re absolutely phenomenal. so when you said 78 cylinder, I was like 16 horsepower, like.
Tom Ray: Right. Yeah. I just messed up the numbers and the, you know, the, the animal.
Jonathan: yeah. In terms of gear, I kind of just want a better banjo.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Jonathan: So my first one was like, you know, a 200 cheap Chinese made one, which, you know, got me in. and then three months later I, I went on reverb and I spent like maybe 500 or 600 for a used one.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Jonathan: and so the quality is like way, way better. And now I’m kind of like, I can’t really afford it, but I’d love a $2,000 banjo, one of the really nice ones. we’re gonna move soon and I’m having plans to try to make the studio space a little better. Right now it’s just stuff in a room. it’s not very organized. and I might try to see if I can get a situation where I could actually record live drums. it probably won’t happen because I am terrible, at playing drums. But if I could get good enough to do some basic stuff, that’d be awesome to actually have live drums
Tom Ray: as a person who does most of the editing and producing for our stuff, as do you. you know that beat that. You’re like, oh, I want to play that beat. And you get really close. You get as close as you can. You chop it up in the old, daw. And then you make it seamless.
Jonathan: Yep.
Tom Ray: And you’re like, I played.
Jonathan: And then I’m thinking, that sounds like a lot of work. But then I think back, it’s like sequencing drums in MIDI to make it sound real.
Tom Ray: That’s way more work.
Jonathan: So much work. I got in a stupid Reddit argument with someone on, like, R Songwriting that was saying that, like, people. It was sort of like somebody posted something about AI and then, you know, the backlash was enormous. Like, just get out of here with that stupid stuff. And, their whole argument was, AI is just a form of abstraction. Just like, you know, MIDI drums is a form of abstraction. I’m like, no, it’s not. It’s a digital recreation of something. But an abstraction means it’s easier and higher level and actually sequence. I thought about this a little later. Like, actually sequencing drums is much more detailed, probably, than actually playing the drums.
Tom Ray: Yeah.
Jonathan: There are so many things you have to control everything on almost every hit, whereas with drumming, you just play it and you get the emotion across. So, that’s neither here nor there.
Tom Ray: But the argument I would make, too, is the fact that it would be more like. It’s not even comparable in the sense that you have to take the time and effort to do it. Now, if I could turn to you and go, hey, I want a beat to sound like this. And then I walk away and you make that beat, that would be more what It’s. I mean, that’s the thing. It’s. It’s not the. It’s not even the time and effort. It’s like asking somebody else to do it for you. And then, like, go and listen to this great beat that I made. You know, it’s. That’s. That’s the thing is, it’s like you’re not putting in the time and effort.
Jonathan: And an abstraction would be select style. Four on the floor, a stack. select time. you know, four. Four. select genre. Rock and roll.
Tom Ray: Yeah.
Jonathan: That’s abstraction.
Tom Ray: Yeah.
Jonathan: And that’s basically what AI is doing, right? going through and putting. Plotting every. Every bass kick and every snare kick and getting the symbol rides at a certain pattern with a certain intensity to get the right. That’s that’s not abstraction, that is velocity
Tom Ray: and the beat pattern and yeah, all that kind of stuff.
Jonathan: So much work. So having said that, it probably, I’d probably save a lot of time just learning to play the drums and trying to sequence it. Also, gear. I just kind of want to improve all the gear that I have. I mean I recently bought a better interface because I used to have just the Scarlett, like the cheap, cheapest one you could find. So I spent a couple hundred dollars on an Audient, that has like some better, better hardware. I’ll probably want to like improve some of the microphones I have. I only have a couple. Maybe I should get some more microphones. so I think in terms of gear, I mean I’ve got, I’ve got three electric guitars, two acoustic guitars, three ukuleles and two banjos in a decent digital piano. So I, I don’t think I need a whole lot more gear. And now I’ve got a drum set that I can tinker around with.
Tom Ray: Well, I will say that is one of the benefits of having a band is that, yeah, a lot more. I don’t have to care. Everybody else can get the gear and I can go. I didn’t know we needed that. Yeah, so, so now if people wanted to check out your stuff, where could they go do that?
Jonathan: Negative, players.com, has. It’s out of date. again, because I’m not motivated to update it. I should,
Tom Ray: Negativeplayers.
Jonathan: Band Camp is probably the best place to go. It has pretty much everything I’ve released. and you can buy it or listen to it or download it. I’m on all the streamers. Just search negative players. and even if you type in negative players, I’ll probably be the 8th person to show up because Spotify just doesn’t care about small indie artists. it’s crazy. I’ll type in one of my songs, it’ll be a unique title and it won’t be in the first three pages of results. And all the song titles that are showing up are nothing remotely to what I searched for. It’s like how do you get discovered on these, platforms? so I mean, I like, you know, Mastodon, has been really, actually really beneficial to me in terms of exposure because it’s more organic and people have actually. Hey, I see you. Nice song. but yeah, type in negative players. You’ll see stuff everywhere.
Tom Ray: All right. And also I want to thank you so much for talking to me. Today.
Jonathan: Thank you for asking me. This has been a joy.