Keith Handy 1.999

So you want to make an album? (part 7)

Installment 7: They haven’t said much about “making an album” yet. When do you suppose they’ll get to that?

To be completely objective about it, there wasn’t one particularly traumatic event in my life in the period of time from 1990-91. Even the death of a close relative was more about guilt and religious issues for me than “loss”. Internally, though, I was tense, desperate, manic, and teetering on the edge of a breakdown. I felt very isolated from everyone around me, as if the more important my message was, the more foreign of a language it was being translated into in mid-air. The gross oversimplification I’ll permit myself is that I was essentially “asking” everybody the same “question”, worded in widely varied (and often non-questionlike) ways, and not getting a real answer anywhere. It didn’t matter whether the context was religion, sprituality, heaven & hell — career, working, money — friends, love, girls, loneliness — ethics, morals — I was now a blank (albeit very guarded) sheet of paper, and nobody knew what to write on me.

Some thought they knew, and tried. Besides the obvious flashback of Jehovah’s Witnesses at the door, there were the more subtly dismissive suggestions that if I just went out and did the things other people do, I’d be fine. It was probably my own insecurity that tacked “you have nothing unique to offer the world” onto that. And in all fairness, I doubt I was asking the question in a clear way.

So what question am I talking about? Let me put it this way: If there had been a book called How To Be a Genuine Artist on Spaceship Earth and Still Be Functional — that was the book I needed. Please, somebody, write this book. It would be useful to me even today.

Lacking such an ideal guide, I settled for meeting a few times with a counselor and reading a few new agey self-help books about guilt and spirituality. These were the least awful of resources available in my suburban bubble, and they at least helped me to begin to re-establish my sense of identity in a positive way.

Maybe at some point I’ll be able to describe that odd gap of time in a linear way, but linearity is probably not all that important. As I’ve said, most of what was happening to me was internal, but I can list some of the external influences on me. Rather than calling them “positive” and “negative”, I’ll call them “disorienting” and “re-orienting”, because they all played an ultimately positive role in shaping my adult self.

Disorienting:

• Death of a religious relative, followed by a very clear “message” one year later.
• Infatuation with an immature girl in an art class. At the time, this drowned out everything else, but only because this was the most aesthetically pleasing of my issues and therefore kept on top of the stack. (It helped distract me from a non-issue, which was that I felt out of place in a visual art-related class — a clear indication that I was insecure in my identity.)
• The loss of contact with friends, particularly those I’d been playing in bands with. Attempts to coordinate even short-term projects (the basis for friendships, of course) seemed doomed from the get-go.
• The feeling that Christianity was following me around and trying to convert me. Never mind that I could have more quickly skipped past that channel on the telly. Also, the possibility that rock music might be “evil”. I’ve since come to believe that labeling such a wonderful thing as “evil” is about as evil as you can get.
• Repeated watching and re-watching of a TV dramatization of Brian Wilson’s breakdown. I knew little about the Beach Boys prior to this.
• Poor communication (both ways) with my family about important stuff such as life purpose.
• Anxiety and panic attacks in general.

Re-orienting:

• Counseling sessions and self-help books.
• Brent Bambury’s “Brave New Waves” radio show (I could pick up a Toronto station on an old boom box left behind by the construction workers, but not on anything else) and the amazing variety of then-obscure music I was collecting as I taped all the shows.
• Movies that inspired me at the time, such as The Fisher King.
• A rebirth of my songwriting muse, first with Lullabye For a Fallen Angel — and then even more so with If You Were Mine — both which I can be critical of now, but in the context of that time were an explosion of musical and personal self-assertion.
• A chance conversation with Mike Pinto, a customer at the Convenient Mart where I rang folks up part time. Mike was recording an album in his basement. He liked to talk about astral projection, and his hero was Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad (the musician, not the dog).
• Being asked by Jeff, who had also left school, quit his band, and moved back in with his mother, to join a just-for-the-money type cover band, similar to Up Front, with a horn section and whatnot. I learned later that at least one other member was initially resistant to Jeff bringing me in, because he had a perception of me as a “loose cannon” — his exact words — from what little he knew of me at Fredonia.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this I wrote up a rudimentary track list for Keith Handy: Open the Window. (Cue scene of Python-faced fish in tank suddenly becoming alert and interested.) I wasn’t initially going to include the newer songs, but then I realized if I was going to be “vital” I had no choice but to include them, and even kind of center the theme of the album around them.

Next: offbeat technological solutions, and how college dropouts pay for stuff.

So you want to make an album? (part 6)

Installment 6 (to the tune of “The Telephone Hour” from Bye Bye Birdie): Goin’ solo, goin’ solo, goin’ solo, solo for good

By the winter of 1990, Episodes had come infuriatingly close to finishing album #1. We had final mixes of five songs, and rough mixes of two others. Altogether, there were three songs by myself, one song co-written between myself and guitarist Garrett Lechowski, and three songs by the other guitarist, Scott Helfrich. The aborted album never had a title — not even a working title. We never had any idea what would have been on the cover.

The disintegration of a band is an emotional event, and everyone will remember it differently, so this is only my take. Oblivious that anything was amiss, I received a phone call from drummer Thom Delooze, who explained that he was giving us a courtesy/warning call to let us know he was leaving the band and moving to Boston for a (non-musical) job offer. The call started out politely enough, but devolved into an ugly argument about money, and by the end of the call he was threatening to go out of his way to saddle the rest of us with a negative reputation and make it “impossible” for us to get gigs.

More puzzled than concerned, Scott, Garrett, and I gave their friend Chris Michaels a crash course on Thom’s drum parts to get us through our final gig at Fredonia. He did a fine job, but was not interested in joining as a member, partly because he sensed that there was negative energy between the three of us. I’ll admit that the day before the gig, Scott and I were having a rather flippant (and I thought therapeutic) conversation within earshot of Chris, and apparently aimed some of what we said at Garrett — who, by the way, is a fantastic person, and whatever I said about him, I know I didn’t mean in a truly spiteful way. In any case, words were relayed, wounds were opened, and things were taken hard. Before long, Garrett announced that he was done with Episodes, and the few attempts Scott and I made to regroup with a new bass player (Scott and Garrett had previously alternated handling bass duties) left me cold and unenthused. So, that was the end of Episodes.

Since the studio engineer was a friend of Thom’s, it didn’t occur to us that we might be able to salvage the sessions. As a result, other than cassette-quality copies, nothing remains. Judging from the cassettes, though, little was lost. Certainly not any spontaneity or “magic”. I also never thought Scott’s songs and my songs had any kind of yin/yang relationship, or would have benefitted in any way from residing on the same album together.

Bandless for the first time in years, I placed an ad in the Buffalo newspaper looking for creative musicians. I wanted it to be open-ended, so I didn’t specify what instruments or what kind of music. In mix tape fashion, I tossed together a quick demo cassette, alternating between my Episodes tracks and various home demos, and drove my ‘81 Monte Carlo all over the general Buffalo area to meet everyone on my list of responders. It was the musical equivalent of speed dating, and every bit the absolute disaster you would expect it to be. If I was willing to mentally re-visit all the freaks, hacks, and dabblers I encountered on that adventure, it could spawn an uncomfortably hilarious and horrifying side-series all on its own. Strangely enough, the image that sticks out most in my memory is of a clean-cut, ordinary-looking guy in a clean, nice house. He put my cassette in his boom box and played it at such a low level that we could barely hear it — forcing me into the awkward position of having to ask his permission to turn it up. He sat silently and expressionlessly throughout. At the end, when I asked if it was something he was interested in, he said “sure” in a rather polite and automatic way. As soon as I returned to my car, a line went through his name.

The idea of not being in a band at all was terrifying, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say it’s probably one of the top five factors leading to my onset of anxiety attacks in the summer of 1990. I won’t begin to list all the ways I avoided facing up to it, but eventually we have to meet ourselves. Without the “of band X” tag.

I know I was sorting out a lot of heavy stuff over the next few years, and it’s still hard trying to pin it all down, frame it neatly, and bridge the gap between Episodes and Open the Window with something readable. I’m thinking as hard as I can right now, and I can’t remember deciding to do an album as Keith Handy. It’s like I blacked out while a part of me went into a deep freeze, and the only way I can remember it is by re-experiencing something painful…

So you want to make an album? (part 5)

So far, what I’ve written in this series has been predominantly autobiographical, something to give you a sense of who I was and where I’d been when I encountered my first “real” studios. In this installment I take a time-out from that and try to distill what I’ve re-lived so far into some useful advice/wisdom.

Installment 5: What a “real” studio is and isn’t

Don’t misunderstand me; I love recording studios. A fully equipped and nicely furnished recording/production facility is my utopian paradise — the grain of the wood, the leather on the couch, the recessed lighting, and all those glorious blinky lights in the control room — but from the standpoint of you, the person who wants to make a recording, it’s important to foster a good relationship with the recording process, not the studio itself.

With the kind of techno-goodies available to independent artists today, it’s harder than ever to draw an absolute dividing line between “real” studios and home studios. But for simplicity’s sake, we’ll say that a “real” studio:

• has a designated “control room”, with a mixing console with at least 16 to 24 channels, and at least one pair of studio monitors (not home speakers).
• has at least one designated “studio” area, separate from the control room, designed or modified with acoustics in mind.
• requires you to pre-schedule a limited slot of time in which to work.
• is operated by a house engineer, who is generally not one of the musicians.
• puts your sound in the hands of a person who may not understand what you are trying to achieve.

In contrast, a home studio:

• is usually a designated room or area in a house or apartment, which could double for other household or living purposes, but is best if it does not.
• may revolve around anything from a cheap 4-track cassette portastudio, all the way up to a mortgage-straining pro-quality setup (you can “grow as you go”).
• may not have the best monitors — but is best if you have some kind of speakers to double-check your sound on, as opposed to only using headphones.
• generally has the performance and recording taking place in the same room, as they are usually handled by the same person.
• allows you to work whenever you have free time.
• allows you to be more intimately involved with the details of designing your trademark “sound”.

If you are inexperienced with recording in general, and you have an opportunity to record in a pro or “real” studio for the first time, the best thing you will come away with is a learning experience. This is not to say that you shouldn’t try to make the greatest recording in the world — go for it, and in some ways you may very well be happy with the sound, and even be able to promote the end product a bit. But if you truly fancy yourself an artist with a clear sound in your head, there will always be noticeable differences between the final mix and your original idea. Conversely, if you lack a clear vision, you will simply be “purchasing” an engineer’s production style — not to mention under-paying him for a producer’s work.

If you’ve never been to a recording studio — even if you intend to do all your work at home — I recommend visiting one, and sitting in on both a tracking session and a mixing session (these are almost never done in the same session, for several good reasons). Depending on where you live, you may be able to find one under “recording studios” in your local yellow pages. Be honest and up front about why you want to do this, and see if they have something booked that would work out well for both you and the studio. Most people in this field are laid back, have a good sense of humor, and would be flattered that you want to learn some tips from them.

In case you actually intend to record in a pro studio, and don’t have previous experience, here are my suggestions:

You are working with a limited window of time. Now is not the time to learn a whole new talent from scratch… for example, playing to a click track. There are studio musicians who have spent years fine-tuning their ability to synchronize their playing to the excruciatingly lifeless sound of an electronic metronome. If you’re not used to it, it can actually make your rhythmic feel worse — far worse — than what you normally play in rehearsal.

Likewise, it may be tempting to play with the exciting range of studio-provided sounds you don’t normally have access to. In my case, with Episodes, it was the acoustic piano and the Hammond organ, neither of which I was used to playing our songs on. I didn’t have nearly enough time to get comfortable with those instruments and give their respective parts a chance to develop.

In general, don’t be so dazzled by what the studio might be able to do for you that you forget to focus on what you’re bringing to the recording. This party is Bring Your Own Vibe. If you’re paying by the hour, your best use of it is to treat it 80% as a gig — one you want to be in exceptionally good form for — and 20% as a chance to go back and clean up a few minor mistakes. Also, keep your ears open (easier said than done) for what the song needs, rather than going in with a list of things to overdub and mechanically checking them off.

Where a pro studio really outshines a home studio (besides in the creature comforts department) is in clarity and fidelity. They will generally advertise some sort of acoustically ideal (and admittedly awesome-looking) environment, but the degree to which this matters depends how far away the microphones are from the instruments; with close-mic’ed sounds it barely matters at all, and ambience is usually faked after the fact with electronic reverb anyway. (I’ll warn you right now, though, when it comes to recording a drum set, the studio definitely matters — and the drum sound is the first thing the ear listens for when it evaluates a full-band mix. More on this later.) The quality of the microphones tends to be the bottleneck making the most difference for most instruments (and voice), and computers have made the recording medium itself a non-issue.

The home studio is a different animal, and I have different advice: do form a relationship with it. You have time to develop a rapport with this studio. You can experiment. You can search deeply into the nooks and crannies of sonic possibility. BUT… and this is important… every so often, pretend you’re paying by the hour, and psych yourself into “perform or die” mode. This keeps you alive as an artist and staves off the malaise of eternal nit-picking.

Next: Part 6!!! What will part 6 be? As much a surprise for me as it will be for you!! As soon as I know what it’s about, I’ll write it, and then put it up on my website! Deal??

Happy 100 hits, Ralph!

Ralph, the tiny wild mouse that visits and interacts with my caged pet mice on a daily basis, has just reached his first 100 hits on YouTube. Based on his size relative to other mice, I would estimate that he only weighs about ten grams; that’s ten hits per gram. Given our body weights as humans, we would have to get anywhere from half a million to a million hits to achieve the same hits-to-grams ratio … so 100 hits is pretty good for such a little mouse!

I’m not sure who out there is watching the video, but when I look up the ip address it always comes back as “a hole in a wall somewhere”.

So you want to make an album? (part 4)

Installment 4: These installments are not sticking to the subject in their titles anyway, so this one is just called “Installment 4″ for now.

Graduation had been a hollow experience. There was no feeling of achievement, merely an acknowledgment that we had put in our thirteen (twelve in my case) years and were free to leave. While I understand America’s motivation for mandating this, I think the way we go about it needs to be reformed. The “anguished teen” cliche is unnecessary, and would be more of an exception than a rule if we had more respect for the individual, encouraged every child to pursue learning at his/her own pace, and permitted work experience and apprenticeship for younger children. After the first few years of teaching the basics, enforced homogenized schooling becomes a cage, and we learn to live our adult lives as a continuation of that cage.

So it was naturally in the aftermath of all this that the theme for my rock opera, with the working title Factory, began to take form. I think the title’s earliest incarnation was The People Factory, since what we are ultimately mass-producing is ourselves. Eventually it became Through Forbidden Black Doors — seemingly an improvement, because it focused more on the escape than the entrapment, but a couple of things still bug me about it: Firstly, “black” doesn’t mean anything; it comes from a lyric that needed an extra syllable to fit the music. And secondly, people tend to forget exactly what the title is, and make up their own bastardizations when they bring it up in conversation.

Not that bringing it up in conversation was a smooth ride from my end either; The rift between my ever-evolving “rock concept” and where other musicians’ heads were at was not getting any narrower. “Rock”, in my mind, was a living, breathing, storytelling, audio-visual “force” or “spirit” that brought bright colors and vivid images to mind. In turn, “rock opera” was clearly something that, although a few existed, had not begun to crack open its glaringly obvious potential. From the other musicians’ perspective, though, music was still a thing where you played an instrument, joined a band, entertained people, and called it a day. They were polite and open to listening to my ideas, but they generally weren’t fired up about weaving songs into a narrative. So it was that this would be Keith’s project, not a band project.

Bands were still the musical currency, though, and I kicked myself the first time I neglected to respond to a certain handwritten “keyboardist wanted” ad on the SUNY Fredonia bulletin boards. It was for a cover band, and it rattled off several reasonably up-my-alley bands followed by this unforgettable gem: “basically, anything that’s good — in other words, NO TOP 40!!!” When the same ad went up a second time, I kept my personal promise to leap at it. I proudly remember being outspoken and insistent that we should ditch the covers and do all original material. So for the next few years, I was in an all-original progressive rock band called “Episodes”, and at least half of what we were playing were Keith Handy originals. We only ever played about six or seven gigs in our entire life span, but this seemed like the logical time to get serious about that elusive first album. And for once, I wasn’t the only one talking about it.

I’m not sure why I didn’t pitch my rock opera, or even a song or two from it, to Episodes. Maybe it was because I had so many other songs and didn’t want to monopolize the writing. In any case, when not rehearsing with them, I regularly trotted off to the piano practice rooms at Mason Hall to be the “mad genius at work”, losing myself in the moment to hammer out chord progressions and segues. Mason Hall also had a full-fledged 24 track recording studio for its recording program. I was not in that program, but everybody knew somebody who was, so it was easy to get free recording time. The downside was that the engineers were students with very little experience.

“How hard can it be to set up some microphones and run a tape machine?” For some reason I expected the transition from high school senior to college freshman to suddenly surround me with talented and forward-thinking people, but the only thing I truly saw college culture excel at was helping the beer industry to thrive. The locally-produced cassettes I bought at a nearby record store seemed boring and disappointing — and production-wise, they just “didn’t sound right” — as was the case with many of the shows I attended.

Episodes did record a few songs at Mason Hall, but then we all kind of unanimously decided they were “unofficial”, because they had some flaws. If we were going to make an album, it damn well had to be perfect. We later booked time at a small studio outside of Rochester to record a full album’s worth of material. In some ways, though, the Mason Hall recordings were actually better.

One sad thing about those gigantic reels of 2″ tape used in 24-track studios: they were expensive. So expensive that people usually re-used them, or gave them to the studio in lieu of unpaid session bills. So nobody, not me, not any of my friends, can ever go back and remix something we recorded in a 24-track studio, because all the original tracks are gone. If we did have those tapes, it would be nothing to transfer them into a computer, fix the minor glitches, and actually mix them in a clear, full, and satisfying way. But as it stands, we usually have to settle for umpteenth-generation cassette copies of mixes done under the double whammy of limited time and aural fatigue — which, when you think about it, defeats the whole point of using a studio in the first place. Conversely, if I recorded something at home and preserved the tapes, I can restore it, remix it, and bring it into the 21st century where it belongs.

Next (maybe): what you think a pro studio will do for you, and what it actually does to you… initially, anyway.

P.S.R. is now up

The P.S.R. video is now up on YouTube. (Previously mentioned in this post.)