Keith Handy 1.999

Childhood vs. Adulthood (putting eyes on things)

One thing that sometimes stifles my creativity as an adult, even as an adult artist, is the ability to desire a certain thing — a certain shape, a certain color, a certain chord, a certain instrument — and hold an image in my mind until I can create an exact-as-possible expression of it. It’s great to have this power, but all the while, I’m letting a zillion little useful things float by, untapped.

When I was little, whatever happened to be in the room would become part of my art, or part of my “play”, if there’s any difference. I didn’t go searching for things. For example, I once had this discarded black trench coat with a red lining, and also one of those big “Hoppity-Hop” balls… I hung the ball from the basement ceiling and draped the bottom half of the trench coat over it, threw a scarf around the neck, and presto, instant fat-bellied ghost. In my mind it was a scene from a movie waiting to be made. I was sad when that coat was taken down and discarded, presumably by one of my parents; I’d like to find it again and re-create that character. But the artist isn’t supposed to be looking for that old coat, it’s supposed to be seeing the next thing as it comes.

Frank Zappa had a phrase, “put the eyebrows on it”, which meant to put that extra bit of attitude on a musical performance. In a way, my phrase could have been, “put the eyes on it”, because I had a tendency to see the cartoon character in the ordinary object. Whatever I had, whatever I came across, somehow the raw magic was already in it, and I was going to use it in my next movie.

Now I find myself getting stuck, getting hung up, postponing the child-like behavior until I “get this thing taken care of” or “find this piece I need”. This isn’t always a bad thing; a few weekends ago, I decided a certain spot in a piece of music ought to have a timpani line followed by a gong hit. A few Google searches, and I found some high quality samples of both timpani and gongs (neither on the sites where I expected to find them, but on the greater Internet nonetheless), and they worked beautifully. For this kind of thing, I love being an adult.

In some other areas, though, I’m letting stuff slip by. I’m neglecting useful objects because I’m not seeing the eyes on them. I’m strongly considering going to a craft store, buying a whole bunch of eyes, and just sticking them on things. This is probably what might be classified as “weird”, having eyes on all of my stuff, everywhere in the room, looking at me… but it may be the only way to re-awaken that part of my mind.

What little I remember about last night’s session

This will be short, precisely because it’s what I would have posted last night had I not run out of time, and it’s not fresh on my mind anymore.

Here’s a pretty screenshot:

This is the “bluesier” remake of “No Outside After All”, in progress. My inspiration for the remake is an old recording of Billie Holiday singing “Yesterdays”. (Before you give me too much credit for knowing the music of this era, be advised that ’twas Fritz The Cat what introduced me to this song.)

Anyway, “slow” was “too slow”, and the crux of my objective…

You know what, I don’t really care about telling you anything anymore. All I really care about is playing with words. “Crux of my objective”. What a deliciously non-utilitarian linguistic flourish. Indeed. Kiss my feet, peeps.

Anyway, the C.O.M.O. was to make it not quite so slow, so I sped the first half of it up by 10%. This was too much a speed-up for the second half, so I only went 5% there. The section between the vertical yellow lines is actually the whole song, so as you can see/deduce, it cross-segues into another song from there. Thus, there was some care involved in not destroying the segue.

I made copies of the tracks, did the speed adjustments, and then slid them to where the new tail-end fell exactly where the old tail-end was. Then, I got rid of the original tracks and kept only the sped-up copies. The new beginning starts about 8 seconds later than it originally did, which means (for those of you who have a difficult time drawing simple conclusions) the song is now 8 seconds shorter.

Hooray!

6/7/09

I’m hopefully writing.

That’s what I appear to be doing.

Now I must poo.

A guy’s gotta poo what a guy’s gotta poo.

This is so much better, yes. Ahhhhh… now, what was I going to type about? Whatever I want to, so here we go.

I’ve been working in the archives, where I have years and years worth of recorded musical stuff that “only needs a little bit of love” as they say on the Peanuts.

OK, where was I…

Only needs a little bit of love, right.

So the little anemic Christmas tree of the day would be “(She’s a) Rag Doll”. I had already fixed up the second half to be both a.) better and b.) truer to the original. This isn’t a reversion, though; it brings back more of the Episodes version, but at least for the instrumental outro, simply speeding it up has given it the energy it was lacking, whereas my mid-90s “remake” of that section was kind of chaotic. That section was sort of supposed to feel like a cross between the Kinks’ “Lola” and the Beatles’ “Hey Jude”, and hopefully it succeeds at neither while still being what it was meant to be in its own right.

Working my way backwards from that, the quiet part at the beginning of the outro needed significant cleanup, primarily to do two things: 1.) to put in the ride cymbal pattern that I had painstakingly worked out, where each beat-four hit was preceded by one more sixteenth note than in the measure before it, until the entire space between beat two and beat four was filled by sixteenth notes, and 2.) to cover up the rhythmically awkward CZ-1 “organ” with a re-do of the same organ part, using a sampled hammond.

Back from that, is the fanfare section. I think of this as the “Bad News Bears” section, even though I could not for the life of me tell you what the theme music to “Bad News Bears” sounded like. It’s also reminiscent of the mellotron fanfare arrangement from Richard Wright’s “Summer ‘68″. Anyway, the trick with this one, which I did while I was still living at Cedar Commons with Christy, was to extend it by a bar in order to pitch the whole bit up a whole step and still land on the correct ending chord. I’m sure I spent a few weeks on that, knowing myself, though I can’t say for sure.

The fanfare section did not exist before the mid-90s version (or not as a part of this song, anyway); this was partly “orchestrated” on the keyboard-slash-workstation I was borrowing from Paul Gaspar, using Cakewalk on the old Zenith computer (no GUI, no mouse). I don’t remember the make or model of the keyboard, but it was a fairly large thing, and I used it extensively on Unfinished Business. Anyway, I had this section still split between a few tracks, unlike the Episodes stuff, so that gave me a little flexibility to reconstruct it. The reason I pitched it up a whole step in the first place was to accommodate a resurrection of the 3/4 part that had been dropped altogether in my mid-90s version.

It’s not that I was planning to drop it. I started work on this part, but the monitor on my computer gave out. Not being in a position to buy anything new, I committed what I had to tape by blindly using the shortcut keys for “rewind” and “play”. I had been in the middle of working on an extension to the 3/4 part that would have hopefully segued into the fanfare bit. The original end of the 3/4 part modulated briefly to A minor and had to go through another modulation to get it back to G. I was going to rework this to get to G minor instead, which the fanfare was originally in, but at that point I had cut my losses and scrapped the 3/4 part altogether. Now that I was going to bring it back, of course, I decided to shift the fanfare up to A minor, and add the extra bar to get it back to G. The fact that the pitch-shifted fanfare sounds clean and continuous is a small miracle, and doth please me.

So this weekend’s work was on the aforementioned 3/4 part. I’m using the mid-90s backing track, but trying to import some of Garrett’s vocal from both the GFI mix and a crude recording of a live show. Neither of these is isolated, but what I’ve done is “cut around it”, added delay to the last syllable of each phrase, and a swelling-up of backwards reverb at the beginning of each phrase. It’s not so much an illusion as a nice effect; we are in one universe, and then another universe “whooshes in and out” without losing the beat.

There was some decidedly whacky, spastic guitar playing all over my mid-90s version, which I made even whackier with electronic re-harmonization, etc…. but it seems that the more of that I cut out, the better I like it. It was interesting in its own right, but with everything else, it’s obnoxious, and it keeps fighting everything else for the spotlight. Hence, for now, the 3/4 part has no spaz-guitar. And I think it breathes better that way.

As it is now, the whole song can be mixed down and nothing is either missing or slated to be cut, as far as I know, although I should probably come at the verses and choruses with a fresh ear.

Things need to be pretty on the inside too

I just realized one thing I hate about blogging here… it’s the Wordpress edit box. It doesn’t make me feel good. You get a fairly small window to type in (although I do realize I’m not on the latest version), and I’m staring at this uninspiring, mostly-white screen with blue trim of the exact hue of a night-light my grandparents had in their bathroom.

Sure, this is the “back end”, who cares, right? What matters is the theme that the reader sees, right?

Exactly WRONG.

We need high quality stimulus and high quality environments when we’re creating stuff. That means making things pretty not just on the outside, but on the inside too! I’ve been spoiled by the charcoal gray look of Tweetdeck, although I can’t exactly use that to blog. Anyway, these blogging environments should allow us to customize not just the pretty face on the outside, but also the back end where the blogger has to spend his time.

And this is not at all what I was going to write about just now.

Google Analytics has been disabled.

That’s it.

The script has been removed from the footer, and from the index page.

The bookmark has been removed in my browser.

No more analytics.

I feel emotional about this, but that’s because I’m an emotional person, and I’m affected by pretty much everything.

I make no guarantee that I will continue to post here.

I make no guarantee that I will start any kind of new web presence to replace it.

I have absolutely no idea what I will decide to do.

Just like starting over, part 2

Is a web presence really about letting you into my head? I’m not so sure. I think if anything, the internet is about shared spaces — two or more people getting into “the same head”, without that head necessarily belonging to any one specific person.

In shared spaces like Facebook and Twitter, I have to constantly ride the brakes. I can talk about Keith stuff, but I have to limit that for the sake of social conventions. The social conventions here are to stay fairly “in the present”, stay fairly objective rather than subjective (facts over ideas), and run every topic through some kind of “will people understand this quickly?” test before posting. Some cheating is allowed, but to run wild with it is to risk alienating people.

Sometimes, though, I wonder if maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing? In the least offensive way I can put this, if someone out there isn’t interested in what I want to talk about, then shouldn’t they kind of move along and leave me to find other people who are?

You know what? The above three paragraphs, by themselves, can stand alone as a post. But I didn’t hit “publish” because I was waiting for a few more paragraphs to come to me, and now it’s been a couple of weeks. A flaw in the medium, or a flaw in the me?