The Light of Day

Update: Mana

It unnerves me a little to discover that several of the songs I listed under “Essentials” were recorded in the early nineties during the Open The Window sessions. This means I have to go back to those tapes, and subsequently, back to those places in my mind.

The first of those songs will be Mana, which as I stated earlier was my youthful take on the George Harrison let’s go back to our non-existent roots in eastern culture thing. I knew enough to know that if you retune all the strings to one note and monkey around on E F G# A B, you get that sound; but from there outward it was just another Keith Handy song.

The hard part for me is revisiting the early nineties. You can’t pull out old tapes without pulling out a lot more. My amplified guilt and on-edge-ness were kind of inseparable from the material’s dramatic intensity. I’d imagine if you’re Motown, doo-wop, blues, or Bo Diddley, your old recordings probably feel like old buddies and you have a healthy moment of nostalgia. Not quite so simple for me.

That said, the new toys are making it very easy to polish it up and bring it into the present, and I look forward to soon having it available on this site.

This is your brain on drums … any questions?

Lennon was dead. Bonham was dead. Floyd were primed to split.

But worst of all, The Drum Machine had just signed its multi-million dollar contract, and one way or another you were going to have to confront it.

No musician in his right mind could have anything but a love-hate relationship with the thing. It was death knell and panacea rolled into one, in a portable black box. It forced you to re-examine whether or not there was such a thing as ethics when it came to making music, and the already fuzzy line between right and wrong became exponentially more elusive.

In a way, things are better — I daresay cooler — now, because you no longer have to defend and justify technology. It just is. And it exists in harmony with instruments and talents that took centuries to evolve, secure enough in its own power that it no longer needs to bare its teeth at the old geezers. You no longer choose between black (drum machine) and white (real drummer) — your pallet is an infinite gradient. Electronic sounds can be mapped to organic performances, and vice versa. Quantization can be done in degrees. Sampling can be done at the individual hit level, or at the pattern level. Things can be combined and edited in infinite ways. And ironically, proficient drummers stand to benefit the most from the tools.

The diagram above is just an organized brainstorm of the various ideas I’d like to connect together regarding drum tracks. A lot of the components have already been successfully coded. In particular, a way of mapping live human performance to a smooth list of tempos — see the upper left — has come a long way, baby. This is good for when I want to start the recording with an “unplugged” performance, and layer it up from there. This gives me my GRID.

I’ve also had some success with generative pattern mutation. Rescuing the kick and snare from dead repetitition, yet establishing ground rules to keep them out of the bullshit zone. (Example: three fast kicks in a row is bullshit. It screams “I have a drum machine and I don’t know what I’m doing.”)

Immaturity is just an idea at this point. It’s about deliberately inducing timing inaccuracies — not on a random per-note basis (that would just be “sloppiness”), but rather mimicking the subtle stretch-and-squash that happens when humans switch from one note duration to another. All the while, of course, paying reasonable mind to how far thou shalt stray from THE GRID.

This chart will undoubtedly grow more tentacles as I go along.

As for musical uploads, I’m still waiting for my old computer to talk to my new computer. And then we will have fun.

Insomnic Hallucinations (intro)

Keeping in line with my earlier promise to provide the “essentials”, here is the first piece of the puzzle: the first half of Insomnic Hallucinations.

Fun facts about this song:

• I still have my first cassette demo, recorded in 1985 using a cheap keyboard, ping-ponged between a pair of boomboxes, with drum and bass parts done entirely by mouth. The pseudo-piano chords you hear at the beginning are ripped directly off that cassette, as a sort of umbilical cord across time.
• The other synthesizers in the intro are also from an early cassette recording, this time a shorter instrumental version for submission to a contest in a magazine.
• The bulk of this version was recorded in 1996 with an ambi-directional rhythm track; the outro (not included here) uses the same basic tracks as the main part here, only reversed. The backwards guitar you can hear in the background is actually the end solo, and likewise what you hear in the foreground now becomes the backwards stuff in the background then.
• The vocals were re-recorded only a couple of weekends ago, the lyrics having been altered from the original with the help of a text-mangling irc bot affectionately known as Hal Whippy.
• I’ve never been able to find “insomnic” in any dictionary. It’s supposed to be an adjective. The hallucinations are induced by insomnia. Or maybe the hallucinations themselves are suffering from insomnia — all the better.

The mp3 linked to here has not yet been subjected to the car test, so it may undergo some minor tweaking, and may be replaced without notice. Keep checking in for more goodies from my “essentials” list, and I will try to keep the gaps between releases as short as possible.