The Light of Day

Happy 7/4!

Wow, the internet is dead today. But I guess that’s to be expected, since most of the blogs I read are by Americans, and today is the day we’re all out celebrating our liberation from those silly British folks, what with their nasty teeth and quaint figures of speech.

This is only “pretend sarcasm”, of course, since the American Revolution is one of the historical events that I actually feel happy about (with my relatively limited “just enough to get through school” awareness of history). But it would be funny if we were actually thinking about England at all during this celebration, since they’re the ones that should be liberating themselves from us. We, on the other hand, need to focus on liberating ourselves from something else: oil.

It’s a serious, hard-core, textbook example of addiction. I’ve heard projections of gasoline reaching $7.00/gallon by the end of the year. And what are people going to do? Are they going to actually reduce their driving, or are they going to consider it a necessity to continue to travel the same number of miles regardless of how little sense it makes? Do they understand that this is the equivalent of everyone in the world getting a pay cut?

It isn’t just that individuals can’t afford it — society can’t afford it. Those of you at the top, enjoy your priveleged position while it lasts. When your billion dollar business is suddenly splitting at the seams because your minimum-wage slaves can’t even make it to work anymore, maybe you’ll start to realize this is your problem too. Sure, you’ve got enough stashed away to afford the gas, but unfortunately the truck drivers couldn’t afford to keep hauling it to a station anywhere near you. Have fun with your “money” now. (Even if we get let off relatively easy, my take on it will be cynical; financial analysts have complex mathematical models to determine the optimum number of lives a CEO can ruin without ruining his own.)

We can each try to restore normality for ourselves in the short run by raising our own prices, but everyone else will have the same “solution”, forcing us to raise ours again, escalating the game of “economic chicken”, until we eventually realize that everyone has always been interdependent, and acknowledge that such a short-sighted remedy isn’t a solution at all. We have to smash the needle. We have to go cold turkey.

But how can we have a “wealthy” lifestyle without a car? That’s one of the fundamental, defining symbols of wealth: having a fabulous new car and driving it around everywhere. We’re so blinded by the addiction that we can’t see past this. What’s the point of having more money if we don’t have the wheels to prove it?

I’ve heard that if a frog is tossed into a boiling pot of water, he will jump out and survive; but if he is put into a pot of room-temperature water, and gradually heated to a boiling point, he will stay in it and die. Shame on the experimenters for being such pricks to the frogs, but take heed of the message: if we weren’t already addicted to our cars, and a salesman came along and pitched to us the idea of paying $25,000 for a car, plus another $10,000 in interest, plus $2000 for a warranty, plus $500 to $1000 per year for insurance, plus $40 a year for state registration, plus $20 a year for state inspection, plus any cost of repairs (most of which aren’t covered by the so-called “warranty” — generally $500 for anything important), plus the cost of oil changes and tune-ups every few thousand miles, plus tickets and surcharges for driving too fast or parking in the wrong spot, plus tolls for the expressways, plus quarters for the parking meters… plus, soon, $7.00 for each gallon of gasoline… we would laugh in the salesman’s face and say, “uh, thanks for the ‘offer’, but there’s no fucking way I’m going to bleed money out my ass just to zoom around in some big hunk of metal”. But, because the frog is already in the pot, we’ll take that five-degree temperature increase, and the trickle of blood has somehow become a fountain, and now we’re asking how we wound up on life support.

This isn’t going to go on forever, because some of us are a little smarter than frogs. God bless the early adopters, those of you who make any kind of changes in the right direction, be it tiny cars, hybrid cars, electric cars, hydrogen cars, hypermiling, car-pooling, biking, vacationing at home, moving closer to work, and/or getting a job closer to home. Some people will laugh at you, at first. Then they will copy you. Then they will mark some day on the calendar to remember you, and how you started the ball rolling that got us out of this mess. You, my friends, are the true Americans… even if you’re not American.

Peace and happy 4th!!!

(Ooh, animated GIF… those were the days… of course, if you’re like me, you don’t see it, because your browser rightfully put the animation out of its misery long before you finished reading the post. In that case, you’ll just have to reload the page and boost my Google Analytics stats, I guess.)

Quick note on racism

I just left a YouTube comment that I’d like to repost.

The video was an edit of some short clips from cartoons depicting racial stereotypes, or at least animals where “you can tell what color they’re supposed to be”. Having myself already seen some brow-raising doozies from the 1930s, most of the examples in this one were ridiculously tame, and certainly not hateful (example: the crows in Dumbo). Yet commenters (as usual) managed to run the gamut from “this is horrifyingly offensive” to “I wish all you f***ing n*****s were dead”.

Since I realize that leaving any kind of carefully-constructed comment in the middle of all that is like tossing a baby into a pack of wolves, I’ve decided to preserve a copy of it here for anyone who might actually slow down and think about it.

The problem is that “racism” is such a broadly defined word — covering everything from unconscious stereotyping to organized hatred — that if you look hard enough for it in your own bellybutton you’ll find it there.

If you break it down, hatred is clearly worse and more serious than stereotyping. As long as we don’t hate, we can work out the stereotyping crap.

That’s it. That’s all I wanted to say. Hatred: bad. Stereotyping: not great, but not enemy number one either.

Stop lumping them together, and your opponent’s argument will lose its fuel. Heck, you may even become friends.

(But where’s the fun in that, right?)

Less blogging, more doing.

That’s my excuse.

For now.

See all y’all as soon as the bug hits again!

My problem with “sucks”

A quick rant to a group of people that aren’t reading this anyway:

When you hang out with a group of people, physically or virtually, and you finally realize what it is about the group that bothers you, good luck expressing or resolving it. Maybe it was impossible to understand from your perspective, but I’m completely serious when I say I can’t carry on a conversation with people that use the word “sucks” as often as you. It’s not a language issue, it’s a “way of looking at life” issue. If you’re sitting in a studio, trying to record a guitar part, and you botch up take 7 and say “that sucked”, that’s fine. But if you swing the word “sucks” around like a machine gun to wipe out entire songs, albums, and artists who actually put some effort into their work, without you putting any effort into explaining why, or even having the humility to acknowledge that your opinion is subjective, it only makes your armchair righteousness look all the more pathetic.

In short, if you haven’t tried to cut your own, then none of us give a shit what you think of ours. People who have tried, appreciate what other artists do even at their low points — not in blind worship, but out of respect for the guts it takes to keep going when you’re not sure where you’re going. (Maybe this doesn’t occur to you from the comfort of your computer chair, but there are no blueprints for this stuff, people; anybody who does know where they’re going, isn’t being creative.)

Some of you have very openly admitted (boasted?) that you have no desire to leave any mark on the world beyond the butt-shaped indentation on your couch, because you’re “not going to be here after you die anyway”. The same lot of you is struggling with depression. Have you considered that maybe if you did care about your impact in the world, your time on this planet might be more fulfilling, and, oh, I don’t know, happier?

Here is what I will concede. You and I are in a room. A song is playing. I don’t like the song. You do like the song. Instead of me saying, “you are wrong, the song sucks, you should learn to hate it”, I will admit that I am the one who isn’t appreciating it, and that your experience is genuine, and it’s too bad I’m not “there” with you. I can tell you how I’m perceiving the song, what I associate it with, what bugs, irritates, drives me nuts about it, and what I would do differently if it were my song — but I have no right to imply that you should be ashamed to like it. I will instead acknowledge that the song clashes with the way I see and hear life, I have a weak connection with or relationship to it, and it isn’t a good fit for the wavelength I’m on. (In general, I find that experienced musicians are more likely than naïve musicians or non-musicians to treat other people’s opinions with this kind of respect.)

Here is how 99% of the internet apparently understands subjectivity:

1. Your opinion is subjective.
2. My opinion is objective.

We could go so much farther as a global community of music and art appreciators if more of us had the motivation to grow past that mindset… and by “so much farther”, I mean not stuck in this one stupid pile of mud day in and day out.

Those of you who get what I’m saying, no need to pass the rant itself around; just try to set a good example. Maybe it will rub off on a few people here and there.

My first tera

My first tera…

Hooray!

Pieces parts

Some “blogging music”, maestro:

Thank you, sir. I doubt many of you happen to know the 1998 version of TFBD forwards and backwards, but this is the backing track from Scratched Off, Called Off — or, on earlier versions, Listed Black — right off the old worn-out tape, before I’ve had much of a chance to revitalize it. One recurring regret is that I tended to have “too much fun” with the sequencer back then (circa 1994) — lots of experimenting with ridiculous polyrhythms and other “mathy” ideas, just because I could — often at the expense of the overall aesthetic. In the case of this song, though, I think the arrangement works perfectly. You can clearly hear that there’s space in the sound where the vocals would go. It’s also refreshing to have music that isn’t emotionally overwhelming; it’s just a sonic backbone for a degrading dialogue between three jerks.

The overdubbed instruments on the original tape, i.e. the guitars (and that short REAL CLARINET OMG phrase at 1:16), were all apparently bounced together with the sequenced drums/bass/keys onto a single stereo pair, to open as many tracks as possible for vocal work — so if I’m not totally happy with the guitar tone as it is, tough titties.

Some early observations on the movie project (still in the “scavenger hunt” phase):

1. It doesn’t matter that I can’t see the entire movie in my head at once. All I need to see is the next thing I’m going to do. This much is easy. Each time I do the next thing, I can see a little further in my mind, and keep following where it leads me.

2. While props and costumes accumulate, and parts of the puzzle are coming together, the project is alive. While something sits at one end of the room, untouched for days on end, the eyes stop seeing it, and the project slips into a coma.

3. Visuals don’t hide music or detract from its flaws; they either resonate with it — magnifying and compounding what it already has — or just don’t go with it. If the music is kinda stupid, then the visual has to be kinda stupid. “Music visualization” is somewhat of a misnomer. We can’t see music, so there’s no such thing as one absolute correct visual to go with it. We can, however, see whether or not something fits the music. So while the music can’t dictate the visuals outright — even generative visuals rely on an algorithm that was developed independently of the music that drives it — the music can act as a test for whatever image we present to it. Sometimes just hearing the music helps to tell us, “this image is almost right, but needs to be fluffier/darker/grainer etc.”

4. I’ve long believed visuals could serve as a sweetener, to help some people swallow my more difficult musical pills — or at least as a distraction, so that people might let down their guards and let in some music that falls outside their usual comfort zone in some way. (Notice that people who complain loudly about certain radio stations never seem to mind when the same music appears in the soundtrack of a movie they’re enjoying.) What didn’t occur to me is that I’d be helping myself to experience this old music in a fresh and vital way, just by having a few tangible props to look at while tweaking the mixes.

Investments

Here are a few of the acquisitions that I’ve funded so far with my “stimulus incentive” rebate…

…just so you don’t think I’m spending it frivolously.

No, I’m not going through an “Elton John” phase, but it’s a good guess, and it’s sort of in the right direction…

Thanks to Sassy for the tip regarding ostrich fringe. (That was October? Christ, someone light a fire under my ass, please!)

Subliminal messages are for the birds

I’m not that far from having a refurbed Leave of Absence vol. 1 for all y’all. (Refurbing volume 2 was one of my side projects last year, so I’m sort of working backwards.) I finally resolved a certain gray-area type copyright issue. The new mix of the offending song (Julie) will be missing part of its original vocal, and in its place will be, uh… something kinda weird. The backing track is generic enough to not even be an issue. I’ll probably list the title of the new mix as Julie Minus Julie. I love odd, cryptic titles like that.

Anyway…

Remixing, in and of itself, should never take terribly long. It’s when something crosses the line from “remixing” to “reworking” that we get sucked into a wormhole, and suddenly it’s ten years later.

Fortunately, Friend in the Room (above) was a relatively straightforward hour-or-two remix, starting with the nearly ready-to-go tracks I’d previously copied over from the old Windows 98 computer. I put some essential stuff like EQ on some tracks, and cut out some hiss between lines on the vocal track. Interestingly, all these years later, I’m hearing not just hiss on that track, but also a bird chirping loudly in the background. It’s likely that I had my window open while recording it, but I don’t remember hearing it while making the original mix. I considered that it might have been a squeaky reel of tape being picked up by the mic, since I was always in the same room with the Fostex, but it sounds too distinctively bird-like. You might be able to hear a bit of it in the middle verse (listen at the end of the line “I never could say”, and the next few lines following it).

If I’d already known it was on there, I wouldn’t think it was any big deal. It’s the fact that the bird planted his easter egg in my song and I didn’t even discover it until a decade later — that’s what impresses me.

Anyway, having both volumes of Leave of Absence in nice, tidy, finalized (for now) form will put a nice, big, guidepost-y dent in my mission to sort out my entire back catalog and make it all available in one convenient online musicfolio. (This will be my new word for “discography”, since it really has nothing to do with discs. I may also start using “collection” in lieu of “album”, but we’ll see about that one.)

Clever ending. Blah blah blah.

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?