The Light of Day

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.)

So you want to make an album? (part 3)

Installment 3: Meanwhile, Back At The Home Studio (1984-1987)

The two-cassette ping-pong rig was my demo-making mainstay for the entirety of my pre-college life. With no access to separate tracks, I had to mix every overdub as I played it. If it was too loud, too quiet, too wet or too dry… too bad. Also, I had to run the full length of the song to add anything to it, and if I messed up a take, I had to either rewind to the beginning and start over… or, more typically, try to somehow cover up the mistake with my next overdub. Fortunately, I hadn’t yet attained the neurotic levels of perfectionism that would later (particularly in my early 20s) come to all but paralyze my creativity.

I previously alluded to my “first legitimate synthesizer”. Like all things “first”, though, there’s always a path of “sort of firsts” leading up to it. Prior to the CZ-101, there was the Yamaha CP-7, a simplistic electronic “piano” that my parents had bought for my sister to practice on. Luckily for me, she lost interest immediately and I inherited it, sustaining me through the first few Glass Exit gigs and some song demos. I tried to give its lackluster sound some character by purchasing (and overusing to death) a $40 Boss wah-wah pedal. Later I took the CP-7 apart and franken-installed the guts of one of my reverbs, deliberately mis-wiring the instrument’s output to the reverb’s mic input to overload it for a distorted Deep Purple sound. Later still, I removed the keyboard altogether and painstakingly wired it up note by note to where the dismantled CZ-101’s keyboard had been, so that I could play it with a full-size keyboard. The resulting beastly contraption on a wooden board was then stolen from the trunk of my ‘81 Monte Carlo in college, marking the end of an era.

Concurrent with the CP-7, like many adolescents in the dawn of the home computer age, I was the proud possessor of a Commodore 64 computer, whose groundbreaking features included the three-voice SID synthesizer chip. While by today’s standards, the BASIC programs included in the tutorial booklet are downright unreadable — requiring non-descriptive PEEK and POKE commands to activate and control sound — a touch of obsession and a whole lot of attention span made it possible to literally write your own synthesizer (using the computer keyboard to play the notes) and/or sequencer. I even took it to a Glass Exit rehearsal once, but it proved too nerve-wracking to load and run the program from a cassette drive without having a TV screen available to see what I was doing.

Before that, I had a Casio VL-Tone, which was a cross between a calculator and a toy synthesizer with a rudimentary 100-note sequencer. You could “program” its sound by storing a number to the calculator’s memory - each digit represented either the waveform, a stage of the ADSR (attack, decay, sustain, release) envelope, or the vibrato. I took it apart and naïvely connected its speaker wires to the “phono” input of my parents’ stereo, reveling in the gloriously overloaded and distorted tone, and most certainly subjecting the stereo to irreparable damage.

I could go back even further and mention that the electronic Merlin game/toy had an extremely limited (one octave, no sharps or flats, only sound was “beep”) music sequencer, but now we’re venturing into primordial soup territory. The point I’m hopefully driving home is that there never really is a “first” anything, just a series of gradual steps towards it.

One thing I notice when re-reading my high school diary is that my motives for wanting to record an album were not always pure and noble. I apparently thought a few great recordings of original songs would be my ticket to a better social life. It’s full of embarrassingly repetitive fantasies of getting compliments and respect, and of people suddenly understanding that “side” of me. The idea of simply learning to enjoy people hadn’t quite occurred to me yet. Nor had the idea that some people might not be worth the mental energy. In any event, I was constantly filling notebooks with revised track listings for the album in my head that would one day win everybody over… or in the case of my enemies, piss them all off.

In my senior year, I was sidetracked by a strange turn of events. The folks running the school musical were apparently short of decent male performers for that year’s presentation of Anything Goes, and they asked me to audition. I showed up and rolled my eyes as I sight-sang Cole Porter songs without any feeling, hoping they would notice I was the wrong person for this. They wound up casting me in the lead role. I was flattered and couldn’t say no. Like WKRP’s Johnny Fever in his identity-endangering stint as TV disco host “Rip Tide”, I fought to cling to my rock and roll cred while (sort of) tap dancing and grudgingly singing lyrics like “please be sweet, my chickadee”. The one remnant of dignity I managed to stubbornly hold onto was my hair, which they had to spend hours pinning up to look short.

The reason this matters is that it got me thinking theatrically. At the final cast party, the director, Mark something (I’m sorry I can’t remember your last name, Mark) acknowledged me as having crossed over from the “live fast, die young world of rock and roll” as he handed me my gift: a book about rock musicals. The ego/esteem boost from all the attention and socializing, combined with that nod to the “real Keith”, planted another seed.

Glass Exit had broken up by this point (I quit first), although actually, apart from the guitarist, the other four of us were now in a band with a horn section, called “Up Front”, doing more upbeat music (mostly) for parties and dances. I also formed another band, “Liquid String”, for the sole purpose of doing one show of my originals, using only the bass player from Glass Exit and otherwise going out of my way to use as much fresh blood as possible. I wasn’t totally happy with how that show went, but in retrospect it showed some courage. Last but not least, right around graduation time, our music theory teacher generously talked a friend of his into letting Up Front record a few songs in his 24 track studio (my first of relatively few experiences in any pro facility), asking us only to thank the engineer with a case of beer. We did one angry-ish song of mine, and two fast-paced instrumentals that Jeff and his friend Gary had come up with. (Note: I’ll describe this experience in more detail when I elaborate on the differences between home recording and “real studio” recording.)

That summer, feeling the void where all the creative collaboration and excitement had been, I wrote in my diary (August 2, 1987):

I’ve got the most fleeting idea for a movie — a surrealistic rock opera for film — sounds good already, huh? Well, every time I think about it, I get depressed. I have no power to begin something like that now.

… I don’t know.

So you want to make an album? (part 2)

In this installment, I continue documenting my conflicted musical beginnings, to hopefully provide a clearer background for my perspectives on recording. I also demonstrate that I apparently can’t write a whole chapter without using the word “sex” at least once.

Installment 2: My, my, my, I’m so happy (1984-1986)

No child dreams of one day becoming a “solo recording artist”. Sure, there are the truly reality-divorced youngsters, entirely uninterested in things like ideas, tools, techniques, and learning in general, who simply want to be “a star” — but at least among those who stand a chance of actually doing something constructive, the smallest non-divisible unit of musical power is that most sacred of institutions known as: THE BAND.

What is a band? At first glance it would appear to be a democratic gathering of musicians with an equal desire to play together and live happily ever after. On closer inspection, a band is a fictitious entity that musicians create, glorify, idolize, hide behind, and use as a convenient black hole for the absorbtion of responsibility, accountability, and blame.

In other words, while not quite as legally binding, a band is a young person’s first corporation.

Throughout my freshman year in high school, my “original band recording an album” paradigm continued to descended further and further into just “me playing with the organ” (read that however you like). Then one day, in the autumn of 1984, an alternate model somehow popped up, if only for a seemingly short-term diversion: to play a short set of cover songs at the high school concert. The pendulum had swung to the opposite side of my internal rift, but the rewards were irresistible. Suddenly I had a chance to be an active, functioning member of society: a performing rock musician.

Jeff’s newfound excitement was contagious, to put it mildly. We talked for hours on the phone about what songs to play, who would play guitar and bass (and how we would lure them into the fold), and — most importantly of all — what to name the band.

The naming ritual is delicate and exasperating. Nearly everything you come up with, no matter how you go about scrambling for ideas — letting dictionaries flop open to a random page, making obscure references to pre-existing bands, calling out the names of objects in the room — will have some aspect that rubs at least one bandmate the wrong way. Someone will get so sick of having his ideas rejected that he resorts to sarcastic, deliberately stupid names that at least one other person will actually like, which will only piss him off all the more. The lines blur between sincerity and sarcasm as your radar becomes fatigued. Even after you finally come up with something that everyone is agreeable to, you invariably spend the next several days second-guessing it and wondering if everyone simply got too tired and just wanted to get it over with.

My ever-so-brilliant “Nuclear Ghost” had already been vetoed a couple years earlier, and of course Jeff’s “Hot Mustard” concept (complete with a bun-shaped stage that would open up at the beginning of every show) had to be shot down in retaliation. We finally agreed that “Glass Exit” sounded modern, cool, and visual. (I didn’t notice the unintentional subliminal “sex” in the middle until years later; I wonder if that affected our decision.)

I did learn a few valuable lessons about live performance that one doesn’t learn in a home studio environment:

• If you try to use home stereo speakers in lieu of a keyboard amplifier, within fifteen minutes they will cease to be speakers at all.
• A minute into the song, you don’t throw a tantrum and demand to start over.
• Don’t get up from the keyboards to prance around like Mick Jagger, if you’re not Mick Jagger.
• If you happen to be able to sing exactly like Billy Idol, that’s not necessarily something you want people to know.

On a more serious note, I did in fact learn most of what I know about drums and guitars during this time period - what all the strings were tuned to, how to play the most common chords, and so on. While I would hardly call myself a drummer, I can keep a beat in an emergency, and I have an awareness of the drum set that keeps my drum sequencing from getting too unrealistic (some may say that’s a bad thing).

As proud as I was to hang “rock musician” on my hat hook, there was still the composer burning within, and the songwriter on a roll (I’ll describe my take on the difference between these two terms in a later installment). I made some dents in getting the band to try my songs in rehearsal, but not quite to the point of performance. I tried to encourage them to write as well, but they weren’t ready. They all at one point or another played on my home demos, but I found I was more “into it” when I just did the parts myself on my first legitimate synthesizer, the Christmas gift that I demanded so relentlessly that my parents had no choice: the Casio CZ-101.

In my next installment, I’ll look at this same period of time from the opposite side of the widening rift: my very different “meanwhile at the home studio” perspective. Heck, there’s my catchy chapter title already…

Coming attractions!

… I will restore the “P.S.R.” video.

Left to right: Paul Ceppaglia, Jeff Lewis, and myself, in a 1994 video for the mock-rap song, “P.S.R.”, which Jeff and I wrote while simultaneously bored, depressed, and prone to hysterical giggle fits. Illicit substances may have provided some inspiration.

(Look at how freakin’ long my hair is!)

Stay tuned …

So you want to make an album? (part 1)

In this multi-installment posting, at least partly inspired by a new/old net friend who is embarking on an exciting and treacherous creative journey, I aim to recollect my personal experiences with the combined thrill and agony of recording original music, and hopefully pass on a few useful words of wisdom along the way.

Today, we set the stage by going way farther into my past than necessary.

Installment 1: The Soil and the Seeds (1982-1984)

My earliest recollection of talking to Jeff Lewis differs from his. In mine, we were in seventh grade, sharing a bus seat on a mini field trip, cracking each other up with obscure bits we’d memorized from Steve Martin records. In his first memory, I tapped him on the shoulder in an eighth grade classroom and asked “do you play drums?”

At the time, I wasn’t aware of any internal rift or dichotomy, but the seeds for it had already been planted: I was more interested in studio records than I was in live concerts. I loved to listen carefully with headphones and pick apart all the elements that had been put together to make up that sound. I loved to listen to the left or right speaker by itself, to hear what had been masked by instruments on the other side. I discovered by accident that if I cut a certain wire on the headphone cord, I could cancel the center out (karaoke style) and reveal even more “hidden” sounds. Needless to say, I destroyed a lot of headphones.

Of course, if you coexist with the human race, you have to speak their language. “Are you in a band?” Of course we were in a band. “Cool!” Hooray, I’d moved up a few notches on the popularity grid! Never mind that we hadn’t even gotten together in the same room, let alone played any music together — but that would be rectified soon enough.

I could have started off as a guitarist. I certainly liked guitars enough. But the idea of buying replacements for the three broken strings on my father’s acoustic dust collector never occurred to me, or maybe I just assumed strings weren’t affordable (not that I didn’t muck around with the three survivors). Besides, most of my musical learning was happening on my grandmother’s Wurlitzer organ and the pianos at school. Keyboardists were less common than guitarists, as keyboards were not considered an essential rock instrument (in spite of featuring on pretty much every rock song I’d ever heard); and besides, the keyboard magazines were always more intellectually stimulating and less degrading to women than the guitar magazines. So, for the foreseeable future, I was a keyboardist.

After many months of nothing but talking with friends and writing up elaborate plans for a mind-bending double album, I set out to do the actual dirty work. If you want to be technical, I had already experienced a sort of “multitracking” on my own using two portable cassette recorders, by playing three-stringed guitar, tambourine, and recorder along with one tape of myself and recording to the other one. I even created altered-speed effects by wedging small objects between the capstan and pinch roller while playing or recording.

Now, however, it was time to upgrade to the big time … I somehow acquired two stereo cassette decks (with Dolby C, for sound so clean it would of course rival the professional studios), a stereo equalizer, two microphones from Radio Shack, and two strange reverb units that doubled as mixers, since they each had a line in and an adjustable mic in. (I eventually got a third reverb, because I couldn’t use the other two as reverbs if I was using them as mixers!) I was all set for cutting-edge ping-pong cassette wizardry.

Geared to proceed forward with my great vision of using this “band” as my vehicle for creative expression, I invited Jeff over to record his drumming in my family’s basement. I didn’t have any way for him to hear what the songs would sound like, other than by trying to describe them to him verbally, and dictating to him what kind of beats and fills to play. (To remember the rhythm of one fill in particular, I told him to think the words “order a pizza”, and it’s been a recurring joke ever since.) I can’t imagine how uninspiring the overall experience must have been for him.

I did manage to record several Wurlitzer organ overdubs atop Jeff’s drumming, blissfully oblivious to the rapid deterioration of his sound with each successive “ping” and “pong” between the two cassette decks. Hearing myself layered like that for the first time ever was — for me, anyway — like splitting the atom and discovering sex at the same time. Alas, this particular magnum opus was not to be. It was certainly not igniting the enthusiasm of my “bandmates”, and other musical directions would soon consume my focus.

To read the entire series, go to the “So You Want…” category.

Colossal mp3 inventory giveaway! Everything must … uh … download!

I’ve uploaded lots of mp3s to my hosted space over the years. Some complete songs, some incomplete songs, some demos, some strange effects, and some category-defying rarities. Some of them are linked to from old LiveJournal posts that only a historian would ever look at again (and he would probably assume the links are broken by now), or were linked to from the old pre-blog Web 1.0 version of keithhandy.com. Some were put up temporarily just to be shared with someone else, and I never got around to removing them.

In any event, without any present-day links, they’re all up there collecting cyber-dust. So help yourself! Dig in! Mix and match! Make your own ultimate Keith Handy mashup album!

http://keithhandy.com/audio-coding_example_1.mp3
I wrote some code that helps to lay out a “grid” for a song with uneven tempo. It first finds the loudest beats in a recording, and then interpolates all the beats inbetween. This way you can start with a “squishy” human performance and add sequenced stuff to it afterwards.

http://keithhandy.com/audio-coding_example_2.mp3
This is interesting — a snippet from Momentum before and after an experimental transformation that would take a-whole-nother blog to explain. (Have you ever seen “a-whole-nother” typed out? Admit it, you’ve said it, just not written it.)

http://keithhandy.com/blahblahblah.mp3
New untitled song in progress. (”Maybe it’s not all it’s cracked up to be”, etc.)

http://keithhandy.com/brownacidpartridges.mp3
This was one of the more hilarious and surreal things I’ve ever experienced, putting my family members in front of the microphone and telling them to improvise. My father is doing the lead vocal, and he swears up and down he has no idea where “little black baby” came from. I assure you we’re more progressive than that.

http://keithhandy.com/C64-bleepies.mp3
A rhythmic sound I made with a Commodore 64 emulator (similar to what I originally did with a real C64 in my teens). Legendary computer with sentimental value, but I wouldn’t want to use one on a daily basis.

http://keithhandy.com/catastrophic_noises.mp3
A collection of “catastrophic noises” that I found in various places to use as part of a piece of music. They sound hilariously jarring out of context.

http://keithhandy.com/Exactly_What_You’re_Looking_For.mp3
Exactly What You’re Looking For (aka There Will Always Be More), recorded early 90s. The instrumental lead-in is actually the recycled middle of Lullabye For A Fallen Angel from that same time period, minus the embarrassing lyrics.

http://keithhandy.com/foulsong.mp3
Earlier demo of the aforementioned untitled (blahblahblah.mp3 - “Maybe it’s not all it’s cracked up to be”, etc.) song.

http://keithhandy.com/Insomnic%20Hallucinations%20(intro).mp3
Insomnic Hallucinations (first verse and creepy middle section). Old, old song.

http://keithhandy.com/Kid_in_a_Candy_Store.mp3
Kid in a Candy Store - cool experimental instrumental made by tossing a drum track onto a backwards orchestra, and then writing complimentary guitar and piano parts to make it sound like it was written that way on purpose.

http://keithhandy.com/Kim-mix.mp3
Backing harmony part for Curtis’ Classic Collection of Comforts, unwittingly sung by Kim Pinegar. I say “unwittingly” because it was just one note snagged from another song, and I used Praat to change her pitch without turning her into a chipmunk. It’s not music software, but it works.

http://keithhandy.com/Mana%20(overdub%20talk-through).mp3
The “commentary track” for my overdubs on Mana.

http://keithhandy.com/Mana.mp3
Mana. Originally recorded early 90s. Touched up a bit for this remix.

http://keithhandy.com/Momentum.mp3
Momentum.

http://keithhandy.com/onenote17.mp3
A demonstration of what one “bin” of an FFT sounds like all by its lonesome. A “horizontal slice of sound”, if you will. FFT breaks sound up into a few thousand of these, which can be mixed back together to reconstruct the original music. It’s useful for filtering. (You don’t need to listen all the way through.)

http://keithhandy.com/Open_the_Window.mp3
Open the Window - went by the title Layers in the early 90s. I could never get a satisfying vocal sound back then. The remix of course features a speech synth. This was not a musical speech synth, though, so I had to generate all the individual pitches separately and piece them together. Are you getting the picture here? Yes, I apparently love tedium. The tediouser, the better.

http://keithhandy.com/outflute.mp3
The solo section from Outside, remixed to feature sampled mellotron. Not necessarily an improvement, just something I felt like doing.

http://keithhandy.com/partialvox.mp3
A difficult four-part harmony with only about a third of the phrases actually sung by that point. I have finished all the singing since then, but to have told you that would have been like putting chocolate and graham crackers on my s’more.

http://keithhandy.com/skeletal_curtis_(with_cheezbass).mp3
Curtis’ Classic Collection Of Comforts. Just enough to get the song across. Don’t laugh at the drums and bass — they’re just temporary. I’ve put down a real bass since then. You get to hear the fake Kim in context, anyway.

http://keithhandy.com/soulpeer-demo.mp3
Demo for new song; the working title is Soul Peer.

http://keithhandy.com/t1.mp3
This is a test. This is only a test. I only had Tracktion out of the box for maybe ten minutes before I recorded this. Kinda charming in its brevity.

http://keithhandy.com/Thank_you_anyway.mp3
I’m not sure I should have this one up. I was really feeling awful that day (about a year ago, I think). And, uh … “poison darts”? Whatever. I did say “everything”, though, so I won’t self-censor.

http://keithhandy.com/The_Mark_Walnicki_Page.mp3
The Mark Walnicki Page (instrumental).

http://keithhandy.com/tv.mp3
A “chord bed” made up of random TV sound that has been re-pitched. I love the “freaking out about something” at the end — I think that’s Jessica from One Life To Live. Not that I would know who that is.

Antiquated software and other pains in the tush

[mood| frustrated]
(Lil’ nod to my LiveJournal era there.)

So anyways, I still sometimes use Cool Edit on my wheezy old Windows box. It does a few things my current software on the Mac doesn’t do, like snapping to sample-accurate cue points (stored in the actual wav files), locking clips together into “groups”, good quality noise removal, and a few other must-haves. Ultimately the goal is to wean myself off of it altogether, but today, part of that weaning process involved actually using it to export some mellotron samples.

Since other software seems to have no idea what cue points are, and I have cues in these samples to indicate where it would loop (a sacrilege if you’re a true mellotron snob), the idea was that I would just manually copy and paste the looped part until the sound grew to a healthy eight seconds. Since there are a total of 35 sampled notes each for mellotron brass, mellotron flute, and mellotron strings, and each one of these notes had approximately a half-dozen or so repeats of the “loop” region, my project file had a lot of little clips in it.

Now … computer programs keep track of numbers in variables, which point to some exact place in your RAM. Some types of variables can hold a larger range of numbers than other types, because they use more bytes. If you’re a programmer, and you use the wrong type of variable, it will greatly limit what the program can do. (I was addicted to a Tetris game on a PDA where my score kept flipping into the negatives, because the programmer didn’t have the foresight to use a variable that would have held a larger score.)

So somewhere within the tangle of spaghetti that is Cool Edit, there is an unnecessary limitation on the number of clips I can have in a project. Only the program doesn’t realize this, so it lets me go hogwild, without warning me or stopping me, until suddenly I realize the program is repeatedly crashing, and I can’t keep it open long enough to consolidate my work.

So basically … grrr.