The Light of Day

R.I.P. Emily Junior

It’s never fun to lose a fuzzy buddy.

She just couldn’t make it through another surgery. Think a happy thought for her the next time you eat noodles. She loved them noodles.

String binding

After a quick Googling of “keep guitar in tune”, it seems like there are too many incomplete answers out there, so I’d like to address a specific case of the problem that I’ve put up with for years.

If the guitar’s intonation is basically decent overall, and the strings have already been stretched, but a.) strings shift flat immediately after bending, and b.) strings shift sharp immediately after pushing down the tremolo bar, this is a problem called “string binding”. It means there’s just enough friction in the grooves of the nut to prevent the tension from completely evening out on either side of it. When you bend, a tiny bit of string slides away from the headstock towards the body and “sticks” there. The reverse is true for a whammy dive. It’s not subtle; in fact, it can make the guitar outright unplayable unless you just strum chords and stop trying to play rock star.

For those of us who want to play rock star, Sound On Sound has a great little paragraph tucked away in an obscure article from a zillion years ago. Scroll down to “NON-STICK GUITAR NUT”. Key points: 1.) It’s not supposed to stick. (I actually wasn’t sure if it was supposed to “not stick” or “stick better”, but the former seems more logical, since we do actually have to turn the tuning pegs now and then.) 2.) People with graphite nuts are lucky. And last but not least, 3.) you can lubricate your nut — on your guitar, gutterbrain — by “placing a single layer of plumber’s PTFE tape over the nut before you fit your next set of strings”.

(You can of course trim the tape if you’re vain and superficial.)

To all the people out there who list “strings being too old” as a cause of bad intonation, what universe are you living in? Strings may lose a lot of their timbral majesty when they get old, but in my experience they don’t become harder to keep in tune. Maybe it’s harder to hear if they’re in tune or not because they have such a dull sound?

Homegrown spectral analyzer

I whipped this spectral analyzer up this weekend. Unfortunately, like everything else coded in Handyland, it doesn’t run in realtime; it has to be rendered as a movie first and then re-synced to the music. I think it’s fun to sit and watch when it’s done, though. Sometimes, if you look hard enough (or sniff enough glue), you can see which peaks correspond to which sounds.

The featured instrumental here is Kid in a Candy Store, from Leave of Absence vol. 1, currently close to being ready for reissue. It was created by slapping a backwards orchestra track onto a drum track, relishing in the serendipity, and then coming up with bass, guitar, and piano bits that would glue it together a little more. This is the music I want playing when the aliens come to pick me up.

Maybe a graphic as simple as this, in combination with lyrics and/or factoids, would lend itself to my earlier idea of using YouTube as an audio player. My only gripe is that I would have to use a workaround if I want the music to be in stereo — at least until YouTube realizes it’s not 1950 anymore.

Three coats… or actually one coat with three coats…

Like Chevy Chase says just before jumping in the pool, “this is crazy, this is crazy, this is crazy.”

One great thing about life at the Village Gate is that you can walk out to the parking lot with an old jacket, and stand there spray-painting it silver, and no one bats an eyelash. This, my friends, isn’t just a jacket from the Salvation Army with three cans’ worth of silver spray paint on it. This is a MISSION.

Again, I ask… why aren’t you doing this?

The sound of somebody not actually singing something

This is a short snippet of a song that was excluded from the 1998 CD of the rock opera, and is being re-included on the restoration:

That is Kim’s voice… what’s particularly neat about it, though, is that she never actually sang that. Not even some rough version. She never sang that bit at all. Ever. Not back in 1998, not just prior to me posting this, and not at any time in between. But that’s her voice.

You think I’m playing mind-fuck games with you and trying to frustrate you, don’t you? I’m not. That bit was constructed syllable by syllable, by raiding the other five songs she sang on for closest matches (I called it “playing Syllable Bingo”), using Praat to manipulate pitches and durations, and relying on a shitload of trial and error to get the pieces to fit together and sound continuous. Now that you know it’s cobbled together from a series of manipulated samples, you can probably hear that it doesn’t quite sound 100% natural… but, all things considered, I think I got it pretty damn close.

The “Syllable Bingo” step was madness in its own right, even before all the tweaking and molding. I mentally scanned the lyrics on paper while repeatedly listening to existing recordings to find and mark possible matches, and built a crude mock-up without worrying about all the pitches yet. Eventually it came down to a few nasty hard-to-find sounds, which forced me to think hard about how we say and hear certain vowel sounds in certain contexts. For example, in “be afraid”, “be a” has to be a continuous sound, and I believe that came from the word “realize”. The word “memory” contains parts of three words: “remember”, “prisoner“, and “free“.

One thing that did not work (and believe me, I tried), no matter what, was to try to be clever and turn syllables backwards as a last resort. A backwards syllable sounds like a backwards syllable, no matter how short it is. It’s amazing that our brains can call shenanigans on this so quickly.

After gathering, sorting, and whittling down the final sounds to be used, I had to tune and stretch them… and, in some cases, flatten the pitch of two sounds so that I could crossfade them without making a flange-like sound… and then re-pitch and re-stretch, and so on.

What motivated me to do it this way, when most reasonable people would have tracked down the singer or sought a voice double? Well, what motivates you to not do this sort of thing? This is the kind of challenge I like to pose to myself. Sometimes I enjoy approaching art as if I were solving a puzzle. The results and/or sense of accomplishment must feel rewarding enough to me, otherwise I wouldn’t keep starting things that I know are going to be so difficult. And it’s not like I spend hours and hours feeling nothing but frustration until it’s done — each small thing that I get right feels good to me.

More pragmatically (in case I need to answer to the funnyfarm-mobile), using previously existing tracks as raw material helps to keep the continuity, being that it’s the same person, at the same age, at the same microphone and on the same magnetic tape. As a bonus, the whole process gave me a great idea for how to convey that section in the film script. So I’d say it was a weekend well-spent.

Yes, “a whole weekend”, if you choose to word it that way — though I prefer to say, “just a weekend”.

Make ciggysinkers, not disease

Awesome quote alert:

We only pretend to be addicted…
Until we become addicted to pretending.

What brought this on? I mean, in all total seriousness, I was one of the lightweights. A couple of these things a day. Maybe a couple more than a couple sometimes… and every so often a couple more than that. I’ve never been physically addicted, and never actually jonesed for the nicotine. In fact, I don’t even like the feeling from the nicotine. The only thing I liked was the way the activity divides time into smaller (and smaller) chunks. And the way it gives you an excuse to watch strangers walk by without looking creepy.

Being diagnosed with high blood pressure today was a swift kick from reality. In a way, I’m glad to have a tangible thing to work on. I could never get into “doing things for my health” without there being a specific problem. I don’t even really know what the main cause is, or if it’s partly genetic or whatever. Maybe I would be just fine as long as I take the meds and avoid salt, but I’m not comfortable with “maybe” these days.

I had just bought a fresh pack the day before, and I think in a way, the ceremonious act of destroying the vast majority of a pack in full public view (and documenting it videographically) might seal the deal better than saying “I’ll just finish this pack”. The trouble with the latter is that a pack of cigarettes is a “circular” experience, with the end of one pack being psychologically linked to the beginning of the next. You have to find a more vulnerable point at which to upset the pattern and break the chain.

Of course, as not everyone’s mind responds equally to the same motivators, you might resonate more with the ancient wisdom of the masters:

…or maybe I should say “the ancient wisdom of an array of ethnic stereotypes”.

I promise I’ll get back to the music stuff soon here. I’ve had a lot of interesting and inspired thoughts and ideas in that department, and hopefully I can stick around long enough to follow through with them.

Good health to us all!

Death, taxes, and nazis

I have to admit, Turbotax has made leaps and bounds in the enjoyability department since my rantings of a couple years ago. Not only didn’t they take all my money, they managed to not take all my time either. Great jaerb, guys! New York state is a little weird, though…

So, are they asking if I got paid to be persecuted by Nazis? Or paid to persecute Nazis? In either case, I don’t think this pertains to me. Yes, I’m sure there’s a serious, non-funny explanation for that one, but, like, don’t harsh my buzz, man.

Basslift (or “bacial”)

Since my studio has the approximate brightness of a cave (after sundown anyway), my best bet to get a pic of my newly painted bass tonight was to take it out in the hall, under the flourescents. (Having flourescent lights inside my studio is something I’m sort of dead set against, though I would like it to be brighter overall.) What you probably can’t tell from this picture is that the body is a shiny metallic silver. The black parts are flat (not glossy). The head was originally going to be silver too, but it wasn’t flattering to my shitty putty job. The back of the neck is still a dark woodgrain, not an ideal match for the black and silver, but I didn’t want to mess with it and risk making it harder to play.

It’s still an “old generic piece of shit” — I paid $50 for it, and told the clerk at House of Guitars I was doing them a favor by improving the overall aesthetic of their store — but it’s my workhorse for bass lines, and I’ve gotten tons of great use out of it. I took it to Buffalo this weekend while visiting my parents, along with some spray paint, masking tape, and wood putty to fill some of the cracks. My father got involved with the project, and was very helpful. I did all the preparation, and he did all the actual spraying. My mother was then gracious enough to let me boil the strings on her stove, even though I’m not sure she understood my explanation (I’ve been boiling bass strings to revitalize them for as long as I can remember).

I wanted to document the whole thing, but just doing it was satisfying enough. Expect to see the newly improved bass in YouTube session videos in the future! You can of course check out my existing bass vids to see what it looked like before.

Sound atoms

So, according to Wunderground, March will in fact be going out like a lamb. It’s just waiting until the last minute to put its lamb suit on. And if I’m waiting until the last minute to have my car inspected (we have to do this once a year in New York state), then it would be hypocritical for me to demand anything else.

I’m working out an idea for a new coding project. It’s not in code language yet. It’s not even in pseudo-code. It’s in English, but not “blogosphere friendly English”, so I’m not going to alienate all y’all by posting said brainstorm here. Essentially it’s a kind of analysis and resynthesis for creatively simulating and manipulating voice-like sounds, which is something I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while now. I’m basing it around something I call “sound atoms”.

Why on earth we as humans feel the need to simulate voices, when we actually have voices, I couldn’t tell ya. But it should be interesting.

Does that make me crazy? Possibly.

“Crazy”, when used to describe someone’s mental state, is not a nice or modern term. But that aside, what does it mean? Can I say I was leaning farther that way than usual during a period roughly between 1990 and 1992? That’s what I tend to do, though I try to frame it with more compassionate words like “going through a rough time”. But what would it actually mean?

I know there are experts on psychology who discuss this in further depth than I’m able to, but let me toss out some definitions off the top of my head.

It would seem that I couldn’t claim insanity outright, because I’ve always had a well-developed sense of logic and reason. I didn’t take a course in statistics and probability, but I get the gist. (I’m not “crazy” enough to buy lottery tickets.) I know how to be critical of my own thoughts.

However, there are people with highly developed logical constructs of their own who manage to come up with terrifying conclusions, and can explain in elaborate detail why the muppets are communicating to them through controlled cloud formations that the FBI is reading their thoughts through stool samples collected at public bathrooms (unless they drink enough vinegar to scramble the data).

So this means “a sense of logic” isn’t good enough; we now have to distinguish between good logic and “crazy” logic. Each time I think of a way to differentiate between the two, I find myself coming up with notable exceptions. For example, favoring a majority viewpoint over a fringe belief, in which case we’d be discrediting the likes of Galileo and other pioneers.

Then I suppose I could try another defining factor: happiness (or lack thereof). If you’re happy, and at peace, can you technically be crazy? Even if you have beliefs which turn out not to be true, or logic with some holes in it? And it’s often said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, which is what a lot of unhappy people do.

How about a total inability to communicate? If a person refuses to truly listen to anything you try to explain to them, and continues to repeat and reinforce a viewpoint that you’ve already explained away, you’re more likely to chalk them up as “not well” than if they said, “that’s an interesting point. I’ll have to think about that”.

Or how about lack of humor — inability to laugh from the belly, or to acknowledge absurdity? Or never asking questions, only ever making statements, as if you are The One with the knowledge? Or placing a high priority on some obsession of yours that ultimately has little effect on anyone, while disregarding the things that really matter?

Maybe insanity is one of those concepts that you can’t define by any one thing, but… well, think of an object with three elastic strings attached to it, and three people standing around it in a circle, suspending the object above the ground by each holding their own string taut in one direction. No one person is dictating the position of the object. If any one person moves from side to side, or increases or decreases his tension, the object will move, but it’s still dependent on all three people. Maybe sanity is similarly the sum result of several forces/factors pulling in a variety of directions.

A bleak moment before the creative storm (December 1990).

The way I felt (and feel) about music I was working on between 1990 and 1992 is mixed. Not just the usual “mixed”, but mixed with extremes at both ends. The extreme positive about it is that I had the will, ambition, focus, and commitment to get serious, take the wheel, liberate my muse from a dependence on bandmates, and try to ascend from “demo” level to “album” level on a limited budget without anyone’s help. I admire the Keith of that time for that. But I ache for how serious and important this was to him, to the point where he couldn’t just go off and have a bit of fun between sessions. It was like a religious mission. Hell, it was a religious mission. It was too important.

This is the backing track from Dear Diary (1991/92), without vocals. I wish I could listen to this and just think “that’s pretty neat, in a slightly embarrassingly dated way”, but there are too many emotional associations.

(Incidentally, this is when I was “born” as a guitarist. I wasn’t comfortable with it yet — improvising was clearly out of the question, although I tried once or twice — and I had to hunch over the guitar and stare closely at the frets to get the notes right.)

One thing I notice about people who exhibit various character flaws is that they’re often trying to compensate for something they perceive to be the exact opposite. My determination to rigidly control every aspect of the Open The Window album was a reaction to my feeling a greater loss of control over my life… and to a lesser extent, an uphill fight against the maddeningly convoluted digital ping-ponging technique I imposed on myself, for the wrong reasons. Any time I go back to one of these mixes it brings back the overwhelm and the futility. (Lesson: what you put in is what you get out.)

That said, it was shortly after the millionth re-EQ’ing of these nine overworked songs that I began the slow and clunky journey towards getting over myself (somewhat, that is… so, okay, it’s a never ending journey, and I’m fine with that)… so, it all ends with a light at the end of the tunnel.

Apparently, though, I felt like I had to stay in the tunnel until it was done.

What did we learn today, kids?

What if I wrote a blog post every single time I did a recording session? It would be sort of like a “what I learned today” thing, like at the end of any given episode of Fat Albert or Davey and Goliath.

I didn’t really intend to replace the bass and drums on every single song in my rock opera, but when you’re doing an inventory on the state of your remixes, and the bass guitar is within arm’s reach and already plugged into the board, and hey, the camera is right behind you so you might as well turn that on too… you know how it goes.

So, hmm… what did I “learn” from this one? What was the “moral”?

The lesson is: always give yourself a “thumbs up” of encouragement just prior to a take!

One thing I like about these Through Forbidden Black Doors session videos is that they make the songs actually look playable. By humans. Somehow, having originally done so much on a sequencer, I’d probably given myself and everyone else the opposite impression.

I don’t intend for the Chamberlain (Mellotron) sample to sound like a real flute player, but it would probably be a good idea to ride its volume a little and add a touch of delay to give it a more “trippy hippie fantasy” quality. Maybe also scrunch a few of its more metronomic sounding notes closer together, to loosen the overall rhythm and open some “breath spaces” between phrases.

The John Lennon t-shirt was a thoughtful gift from my friend’s mother, but somehow I get the feeling it was designed by someone who spends more time listening to Motorhead.

Happy Easter!

Anatomy of a family, through the lens of song

In innocenter times, while my mom, dad, sister and I were on one of our summer road trips, we jointly composed “Bubbles” as a game to pass the time:

Bubbles are the
Wonderfullest
Because they’re (or “they are”)
Round and poppable
But my friend
Henry says
He hates them
Each day

The idea (I don’t know whose it was) was that one person would sing three words, then the next person would add three more words, and so on. Because I have such a clear memory of how things went down, I can now distill its components to correlate them to our individual personalities:

Mom (Sandy): “Bubbles are the…”

Mom has always been the most innocent of the four of us. She never ever uses swear words of any caliber, let alone any nasty or cynical expressions, and she “just wants things to be nice”. Obviously she started this song with the intent to pay homage to something nice and happy.

Heather: “…wonderfullest. Because they’re…”

As we grow older, we lose our inclination to make up words like this. Well, some of us do. I remember that she thought her turn was done after contributing the “w” word, an easy error to make since it was the same number of syllables. But we had to coax two more words out of her. Later this warped into “because they are”, but I will insist all the way to my deathbed that it didn’t start out that way.

Me: “…round and poppable.”

Always a correct, literal, and scientific description from me. I mean, what else are bubbles? Wet, I suppose. Soapy, perhaps. But most importantly, what defines a bubble (and makes it more wonderful than anything else), is its roundness, and its capacity to be popped.

Dad (Fred): “But my friend,”

I don’t know what this says about my father, except perhaps “my friend” may have been the kind of thing that would be in a song he would hear on the radio. He could have initially meant it as “But, my friend,” — meaning we’re addressing the audience as “my friend” — but obviously we didn’t interpret it that way at the time. It’s not exactly bubble-specific, but that’s a good thing, because it opens the rest of us up to re-thinking the larger context of what we’re singing about.

Mom (Sandy): “Henry says, he…”

Who the hell is “Henry”? The only Henry we knew was Henry of “Henry and Amy” fame, who I’m thinking (but not sure) were grandchildren of one of my grandmother’s friends, and who Heather and I had to keep re-getting to know, because we only saw them once every two or three years. But I think this song is less about him, and more about “The EveryHenry” in all of us. Yes, I’m over-thinking this.

Heather: “…hates them, each…”

You could stereotype Heather as a child with a negative attitude — her first word was allegedly “no” — but to be fair, this line had to be something negative in order for the “but” to make sense. We just didn’t know how deep into negative territory she would go with it. At least it’s only Henry who is hating the bubbles. Really, that’s okay — we can’t all love them. Different strokes for different folks.

Me: “…day.”

Sure, I had credit for two more words, but the song was over (or was that the fun-ness of the game?). Besides, my father didn’t even get a second turn. Why should I be greedy?

Eye candy for the day

Low tech eye candy, that is: Tupperware instruments…

Originally spotted on Homemade Noize.

Happy Friday!

Little drum machine mixing tip

I don’t know that this will be useful to anyone, but if you’re remixing an old song where you used a drum machine (or electronic drums), and tried to make it sound like real drums… and it has this stupidly wide stereo spread… you could of course move the left and right inward, so it’s not so wide, but let’s say you actually want to keep the “wideness”, but less of the annoying fakeness as tom toms bounce around unrealistically across your ears… make a copy of the track, swap the left and right, delay it by about 40 to 50 ms, and mix it in quietly. The delay will not only soften the unrealistically perfect transients (attacks) a little, but also create more of an open “two microphone” sound, by giving something to the opposite ear, and filling a void that would have no business being there in the real world.

Stuff that’s not so great (quick thought)

I don’t think of myself as having “good stuff” and “bad stuff” — I think of myself as having “good stuff” and “experimental stuff”. The good stuff is, well, good, and that’s wonderful. Calling the other stuff “experimental”… I don’t mean to get all pretentious and pseudo-intellectual, or imply that it’s all on the cutting edge and you’re just too bourgeois to understand it… but simply to have the attitude that it’s potentially good, or at least potentially interesting, or at least potentially good or interesting in some context down the road.

And it’s stuff that I can play around with, without worrying that I’d be ruining something.

Yes, I do have a wastebasket. But I think our culture is disposable enough already.

“Everything tech”: continuing thoughts

I was asked by a faithful reader (where would I be without my faithful reader?) to elaborate on my “low tech/hi tech/everything tech” train of thought. Which I was going to do anyway, but it’s good that the peasants have voted in favor of the king’s will, because I just haven’t been in the mood to behead you folks lately. I know, I know, you’re saying “King Keith has lost his spunk”. Hey, we all grow older. It’s time to move on, man. Besides, this is the age of psychological cruelty. Either catch the wave, or leave your board home, brah.

When I think of an idea that has both specific and general implications, I tend to ramble at length about the general, without actually explaining what it is I’m thinking about in the first place. The general is very important to me, because I want you to run with it — I want you to find your own specific implementations of the general, not necessarily use mine (unless of course you really want to copy me). But if I don’t tell you my specific idea, then I’m not giving you a concrete illustration of the general idea, which would probably help to loosen up your tangled synapses. One little idea which, by itself, any idiot could think of — but which comes with a thousand “potential ideas” attached to it, if you zoom out and ask why it was interesting.

After all this build-up, it will sound really stupid and primitive. But that’s what low tech is, on the surface. Yet, for all its backwardness, it’s something that could not have been done well or cheaply more than about ten years ago. So, yes, it involves the computer. But it requires letting go of some basic assumptions about “what happens outside of the computer” versus “what happens inside the computer”.

After the bazillionth combination of keywords, I found a decent illustration of rear projection on images.google.com. I don’t mean as a type of home entertainment device — those turn up in vast quantity — I mean as an ancient technique for superimposing actors against a fake, moving background, before the advent of chroma keying. The accompanying text for this picture referred to “one of the worst ’street traffic’ rear projection shots I’ve ever seen”, while the image file itself was contradictorily called “sybluescreen.jpg” — just to be sure, had this been blue screened, rather than actually projected behind the car, the horizontal lines behind the windshield wouldn’t appear bent by the glass.

Now, this effect doesn’t exactly look real, as I’m sure you’ve already seen for yourself while watching various old-timey movies. But as someone with an interest in the surreal and experimental, particularly things with a “cartoon-y” or “puppet-y” tinge or texture, it’s not a technique I would run screaming from.

Today, the sane way to composite video elements — live action with live action, live action with animation, animation with animation — is to use computer software to merge your layers together. You wouldn’t want to actually use a first movie playing on your LCD monitor as a background, while taking a second movie of yourself manipulating little objects in front of it… yes, physically in front of your monitor… and then perhaps use the resulting movie as a new background, onto which you can add more foreground objects the same way… repeat ad infinitum…

…or WOULD you??

You wouldn’t achieve the same kind of effect. Not even anything close to it. You’d achieve a very different effect, which would be the whole point. And if you did this repeatedly for a while, you’d start to develop a vocabulary of techniques specific to the approach. You would become an expert at a previously non-existent art form.

Like I said, this is just one little example of hi/low tech mix and match.

Come up with your own!

How low tech can be cutting edge

Excuse my, uh, “calligraphy” for a moment.

Ow, ow, ow. *shakes wrists*

I just don’t have the endurance for that anymore.

Anyway, the point isn’t that I have any desire to do a handwritten blog, and I will likely never do that again. But think about how strange it is that we get sentimental for “low tech” or “old tech” things, how there’s always a “golden age” to look back to. But none of that old stuff ceases to exist, or even ceases to be available. If you really want to shoot a movie on 8mm film, you can, though it’ll be a little pricey to get the film and develop it. Not prohibitively, though, if you really want to. Key words there: really want to. The only thing we’re ever truly being sentimental for is the lack of an excuse to be lazy. The fact that we’ve paved all these shortcuts doesn’t mean the shortcut is the only — or best — way.

But what truly makes “low tech” interesting now, is that we’re in this higher tech environment. You can not only shoot 8mm film, if you really want — but you could, if you really want, shoot 8mm film of a person sitting in a Starbucks with a laptop computer, wearing a Trogdor t-shirt. Which you could never do when 8mm was actually a sensible way of preserving memories.

Today, we can run a Mellotron through Autotune. We can sample a cassette. All these things we can do, but just don’t think of doing, because we’ve convinced ourselves that all our old toys have been replaced with new toys. Guess what? All your toys are still there; they may have moved to a higher (more expensive) shelf that you’ll need to climb a little (or get mummy to help) in order to get them down, but they’re still there. You have a shitload of toys. Do you realize how much “play potential” you have afore ye now? Do that “relationship” math again. Five toys is ten potential combinations, six toys is fifteen… and that’s only counting pairs of toys.

Tip: do “relationship math” in your head:
Take the number of people in the room, and imagine that number on the left.
Subtract one, and put the new number on the right. (If 7 is on the left, 6 is on the right.)
Whichever number is even, cut it in half. (Cut that 6 down to a 3.)
Multiply the left number by the right number, and you’re done! (7 x 3 = 21 relationships.)

It’s like this: there you were, in 1980, or 1985 or whatever, saying, “okay, if only I had this and this and this”, and now you’re waking from a deep freeze, realizing, hey, I have this and this and this!! All you’ve lost track of is why you wanted it. Once you remember, you’re all set!

Anyway, there’s a reason I wrote all this. Ask me to elaborate later, and I will. Ask me not to elaborate later, and I will anyway, just to spite you.

What Do You Think Of Yourself?: new vocal

First, enjoy the session, ’cause I think it went pretty well…

It’s actually a lot easier than my Rival Big Bang sessions were, because it has a definite and more structured melody. The part between approximately 4:00 to 5:00 is a little empty, though, and rather than featuring me half-heartedly ad-libbing, I want to fill it in with something like gospel singers. I just emailed Paul Gaspar to see if he knows any.

I’ve only been saving my session videos as 320 by 240 MPEGs — better looking than what you see on YouTube, but still small — because the videos themselves aren’t meant to be works of art. That said, I’d still like to incorporate parts of them into more formal “music video” videos. There’s stuff you can do to low-res images to make them… not necessarily look hi-res, but at least look better when blown up.

Mouse update

Emily Junior is home. Her fur is a bit scraggly looking, from going a couple days without her groomer, but I’m sure that shortly after I put her back in with Ralphie she will be shined up to a radiant glow. She had a small tumor just behind her front leg, and when I took her in a week ago, the doc said she needed to first take antibiotics for a week because she (the doc) felt that her (Em Jr’s) breathing ought to be a little less labored before going under the anesthesia. So we (I) did our (my) best at attempting to trick her into taking said meds, and we (I) were (was) semi-successful. And apparently, semi-successful was good enough, because she was in good shape for the operation.

One thing I like about going to Cats & Critters: everyone there, including the other customers, says “awwww”, and nobody says “ewwww”. For some reason, out of any random sampling of our fellow meat puppets, there will invariably be one or two folks who are horrified by little animals. For the sake of all y’all, I will clarify one thing: I don’t keep mice to offend or shock you, or to be a “non conformist”. In fact, none of the “non conforming” things I do are to be “non conformist”. I try to live my life in a genuine way, and it just so happens that I think mice are among the awesomest of critters.

Mice are a paradox, simultaneously the most innocent and mischievous of creatures. To some degree, individual mice are polarized, some being predominantly “alpha” while some are “beta”; but every mouse has components of both. Their innocence is projected by their tiny, almost dainty feet, inquisitive eyes, big ears, round bellies, and outgoing social nature… but the movement of their tails gives away their naughty side. They sometimes yearn to escape and asplore, but if they have a nice home, they want to come back to it. The fact that Ralphie was so determined to move into the cage removed any doubts I may have had; if PETA comes knocking on my door, insisting that mice belong out in the woods, I can tell them to fuck off in good conscience.

Mice are very “people-aware”; although to some degree they’re in their “own universe”, they’re not oblivious like a bowlful of cockroaches. Emily Junior in particular will always rush to greet me at the wall of the cage, even if it means putting aside one of her favorite foods. Ralphie, although she has been living the domestic life for a year, still has her wild background and preservation instincts, so although she wants to “check me out”, she will often twist her body to one side to get ready to run away if I move too quickly. If I back up a few inches, she understands that I am surrendering, and she relaxes again.

Anyway, pretty soon here, I’ll re-unite these best of buddies, and there will be a whole lot of groomin’ goin’ on. Thanks to anyone who read my previous posts and sent positive thoughts (without necessarily knowing what was the matter).

Follow-through

I suspect that my blog would be a more effective tool (CATEGORY ALERT!!!) if I followed through by consistently providing updates of the things I wrote previously. This would also make me appear to have an attention span of more than a few seconds.

Without even peeking at my blog, I’m going to pull a number out of some dark and dirty place, and that number is…

Five! Ah, the comforting sound of men and women singing an octave apart… and when we’re little kids, we don’t notice how thumpy the tom toms are. (Why do I suddenly have an urge to listen to Hair?) So anyway, without further ado, here are quick follow-ups to my five most recent posts, from oldest to most recent…

1. First “final” mix of Rival Big Bang. I’ve noticed that, within my album tracklists, there are some things that are more absolute than others. Within those lists, I’ll often find pairs of songs that are, in my mind, absolutely inseperable. You know the kind: Heartbreaker and Living Loving Maid. We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions. Well, in my case, one such pair would be What Do You Think Of Yourself? and Rival Big Bang. Those two songs are married to each other. So what I should be doing is making videos of these pairs as “mini suites”. And just think, these “mini-suites” will fit into the YouTube ten-minute limit (which for some strange reason doesn’t apply to everyone… hmmm…).

2. Open letter to Republicans. Some masochistic force within me made me watch a thirty-second Mitt Romney campaign promo tonight. By the six second mark, he had already said something negative about Democrats. By the 15 second mark he did it again. Only 30 seconds to talk, and at such loss for something constructive to say that the time has to be padded out with broad insults. But the greatest insult was that his voice was dubbed. You know the sound of a hollywood movie, where every time someone talks, it sounds like the microphone is a few inches in front of the actor’s mouth, even though there’s no microphone anywhere in the shot? Makes you wonder what else was fake about it…

3. I’m so tired. The “night crew” paid a visit to Cats and Critters this evening, because Emily Junior is gonna need to get fixed up, and she’s gonna need to take some meds for at least a week beforehand. I took the whole darn cage along, so Ralphie had a chance to check out the scenery too. Em Jr. is still acting sociable and energetic — but nonetheless, now would be a good time to send some positive energy her way. Thanks!

4. Possible video: creating drum parts. Maybe I can go ahead and shoot this. The main thing holding me back is how to get the camera to pick up the sound as I’m working, so I don’t have to sync it up after the fact… I suppose I can just turn my speakers on. Can’t do that for vocal sessions though. Other videos that I want to do: a video at the Fender Rhodes where I discuss chords, and a video at the desk of improvised doodling, cutting shapes out of colored paper, making some kind of “paper puppets”, and generally making images inspired by music without knowing ahead of time what they’re going to be.

5. My results on the equal loudness test. I finished doing what I had to do to create my vocal limiter/de-esser effect, which is both functional and theoretical, in that I’ve tested it, but not on vocals. Don’t forget, that post links to a site where you can test yourself to see how you perceive volume at different pitches. It’s useful stuff to be aware of when you produce audio of any kind.

Well, that certainly felt responsible! Let’s do this again sometime.