The Light of Day

Hit single

Here’s the mp3 for Broken Wheel, which has basically been 99% done for a while, but needed to be rescued off the Windows 98 time-bomb and subjected to some last-minute tweaks. Actually, I’m in the process of rescuing a few dozen songs from that beast, so you can likely expect more soon. Creative Commons “music sharing” license as usual — share it but don’t sell it.

I installed a plugin (PodPress) that would have allowed me to put that cute little player thingy right in my posts, but every time I activate the plugin, it turns my rss feed into pudding. (All the formatting disappears, including the paragraph breaks.) So if anyone knows how to handle that, or of a different/better plugin to use for that — I don’t need the whole podcasting functionality right now, just the little player — let me know.

Thanks, and enjoy the song!

Update 5/1/07 (testing, testing):

TFBD guitar session 3/12/07

Just got around to fetching this off the camera:

I’m happy to say this music has transcended the internal stigma of “feeling too old” to me — notice I didn’t even select the “ancient” category for this post — and I’m quite enthusiastic about resurrecting it. As I said in a previous post, I played another song from TFBD (The Operation) at Daily Perks and didn’t feel silly about it at all (example lyric: “You’re here to stretch and bend and twist for us/You exist for us”). This is possibly due to my recent experience at my now-former place of work.

A viewer on YouTube requested an mp3, so here’s the whole song. It’s called “Workers’ Theme”, it’s the opening instrumental (not exactly an “overture” because it’s only one theme — I never quite “got” overtures, from an aesthetic standpoint), and it depicts the beaten-down, brainwashed drones as they mindlessly file into their places on the assembly line.

Gïg

I did a full set of originals at Daily Perks tonight, and there were a few more present (though not by many) than the crowd of six I’d anticipated (gotta think positively). In addition to my current songs, I pulled some relics from the archives that I never thought I’d play in front of an audience, such as Lice Blue Hue, The Operation, and Have You Heard The Good News?. (Who knows, maybe in some alternate universe I even did Children’s Abortion Workshop…?) I didn’t have too many lyric slip-ups, but I do notice it is a little harder in general to physically play the guitar when I’m aware of an audience. In the last several months I’ve played in front of people about six times, so I am getting used to it, but I’d get more used to it if I did it more. (That would also increase my chances of getting in front of some larger audiences.)

A recurring theme in my feedback lately is compliments on my falsetto singing voice. It’s interesting to me that people single that out. I don’t think of it as anything special. Maybe it’s because most guys don’t even attempt it?

Sacked!

So you heard it here first, boys and girls: I have officially entered a new phase of my life. Things had gone from “difficult” to “not humanly possible” in my department at Big Company, and what with the ever-increasing cognitive dissonance of clinging to my “get things done” ethic while knowing I was suddenly expected not only to do twice as much work, but also to use entirely new and counter-intuitive procedures, all the while trying to organize twice as much information in a cubicle smaller than a portajohn… all I knew was I had to get the hell out. Period.

In all honesty, when the district manager asked me to leave early on monday and escorted me out the door, I didn’t know why. Sure, I was showing signs of frustration, but all things considered, I thought I’d been keeping it together pretty well. He said he “wasn’t comfortable” with some things I had said, and I wasn’t sure what he meant.

When I got the call from human resources this morning, it finally made sense. It was something I’d done the previous week. Ohhhhh, yeaaaah, that. See, since this “change” first took place, all of my coworkers have been as miserable as me. We’d been taking a real beating, and we felt that we had been lied to about the call volume, and that there was no substantial reason to believe that things would improve. I envisioned us all as pigs in those tiny factory farm crates. I felt like I couldn’t physically stand up without apologizing for it and referring to it as “breaking rank”. When our supervisor sent us a word document on day two, thanking us for the great job we’d been doing, I changed “THANK YOU” to something phonetically similar and sent it to only three people who desperately needed a therapeutic laugh, including one woman who prior to that had been in tears. Only… as I now find out… apparently more than three people saw it.

I was calm, soft-spoken, and direct when I spoke to human resources. I answered her questions neither defiantly nor evasively. The good news is that they are not going to put anything negative on my record or block my unemployment benefits, and I can still use them as a reference. (Actually I think the whole situation is good, but of course the absence of this income does raise a new challenge.)

What it all boils down to is — you can only take so much.

So you want to make an album? (part 12)

Installment 12: Standard sound recipe 101.

I recently uploaded some “unplugged”-type acoustic performances to YouTube. I did some originals (I recommend watching at least one of them before reading the whole post) and some covers; as of this writing I haven’t edited and uploaded the covers yet. While this is a fairly popular thing to do nowadays, I decided that I wanted better than average sound. So, I set up studio-quality conditions, using a few simple guidelines that I can spell out for you here, which should kind of establish some helpful basics for everything you ever record.

1. Quiet the room.

Duh. But seriously, if you have heaters, fans, air conditioners, or dehumidifiers running all the time, you probably cease to notice them. My heater is weird, and if you supposedly turn it “off”, it likes to throw temper tantrums at random intervals; so I befriended the circuit breaker. Since I was shooting video too, I “quieted” the room visually by using a simple black sheet for a backdrop, which had the side effect of helping to define my mental focus and establish that I was doing a “performance”.

2. Quiet your mind.

Of course, before your pre-performance mental psych-up, you should have the technical stuff all up and ready to go. Once it is, and you’ve done some mic and level testing and so on, put that out of your mind and give yourself a few moments to switch to performance mode. Take a short walk, have a small snack, visualize your audience, and/or contemplate your reason for wanting to do that song.

3. Quiet your voiceless bilabial plosives.

A windscreen or “pop filter” is very important if you plan to record any vocals. The violent low-pitched “thud” you hear every time the letter “P” is uttered is very difficult to remove once you’ve already recorded it. It may not be so noticeable on small speakers, but for anyone with a subwoofer, it will sound like someone is trying to kick their door in. (Maybe that’s a good thing.) No, the little foam thing that fits on the end of the microphone is not good enough.

If you’re not vain, you can make your own filter with nylons stretched over any kind of hoop. Set the screen at least a couple of inches out from the mic, and keep your mouth at least a couple of inches away from the screen. You should be able to feel it suppressing short gusts of air when you try to blow through it, but it will be otherwise acoustically transparent. Make it two-tiered for extra-anal pop prevention.

4. Choose your transducer.

I’ll confess — for what I do, I should have condenser mics, and I haven’t gotten around to buying one. Last I checked, Behringer made some that started at only a hundred bucks each. Alas, the mics I’m using are Shure SM-57s, a popular example of dynamic mics, which are more ideal for the stage than the studio. They don’t have quite as crisp and “open” of a high end as a condenser would, but they are more directional, so at least they have the advantage of picking up less extraneous sound, like the scuffling of pet mice, or the mating calls of drunk twenty-somethings just outside your window. You can record decently with dynamic mics, but again, you could record even more decently with a condenser.

By the way, the above-linked wikipedia article is impressive; I’d never heard of liquid microphones or laser microphones before!

5. Give yourself head.

Er, that’s supposed to say headroom. Damned union typesetters and their rigid break schedules. “Headroom” is the amount of leeway available for you to get even louder without distorting — the distance above your loudest recording level before you hit the ceiling. This is especially important if you record digitally, since overloading a digital signal does not make for a pleasing, “musical” kind of distortion. Make sure that at the very first stage, wherever in the chain your signal converts from analog to digital, that when you are loud, you have at least six to ten more decibels above that, just in case.

If you have three different places in a row where the level of your input can be adjusted — say there’s a knob where you have your mic or instrument plugged in, and then some kind of overall recording volume for the computer, and then a record level on the recording software, you want to set all but the first adjustment in that chain to either “100%” or “0 dB”, which both mean the same thing. Then, adjust whatever is at the very beginning of that chain to get the ideal level going to the hard drive — again, -6 to -10 dB when you get loud. Maybe you will only be hanging out around -20 dB most of the time, and it might seem like it should be louder, but in digital this is definitely okay. You want to be free to play and sing without worrying about distortion.

6. Be naked and unashamed — initially.

Sometimes effects are part of a performer’s sound, like when a guitarist uses distortion, wah-wah, and a zillion other fun toys. But the “finishing touches” — reverb, compression, and equalization — should not be committed to the track as you’re putting it down, because you will want to have control over these when you mix. Most recording software allows you to hear your sound through special effects while recording, even though what you’re actually recording is just the raw sound. In other words it keeps the recording stage separate from the effect stage. This way, after you record it, you can increase, decrease, or remove the effect; whereas if the effect was part of the recording itself, you would not be able to change it; you would only be able to pile more effects onto it.

7. Perform.

If you have the above items taken care of, you should now be able to hit “record” and dive right in. I recorded continuously for about an hour and a half, so I was able to forget about the computer and just focus on playing, singing, and enjoying myself. I considered wearing headphones, but it would have been distracting. If you don’t create a situation where you can liberate yourself mentally from the technology, you won’t be completely in the performance. You will need to do some mixing later, regardless; but mixing an inspired performance is a pleasure, while mixing an uninspired performance is a nightmare.

8. Normalize.

Now that the element of chaos has subsided, and you’ve recorded everything a bit on the quiet side, it’s safe to bring it up to a more useful initial volume. Most software has a “normalize” effect that you can apply to a track. It’s nothing fancy, just a volume boost that automatically scans the whole clip first to see how much it can safely increase it by. Go ahead and normalize each track to 100% and/or 0 dB. (On the software I use, the waveforms shrink and grow interactively as I adjust the level of the clip, so I can just do this visually.) This has the added benefit of making the waveforms easier to see.

Note: if you are using a stereo input to record two different things simultaneously, say guitar and voice, the left and right will have to be split into two separate tracks so you can work with them independently. How to do this depends on your software.

9. Compress individual tracks… a little.

Almost anything with that “pro” sound has at least a bit of compression on it. Not to be confused with data compression which is used to create smaller files, dynamic compression is the nearly-instantaneous smoothing out of amplitude over time. A friend of mine who was less familiar with this term told me he was surprised that it made the sound so “big”, when the term “compression” in his mind made him think it would “sound smaller”. The reason for this is that it gives sound more overall energy relative to its peaks, so you can create the sense of a louder sound while the maximum remains the same. I won’t go into the role this plays in the loudness wars, because that’s a whole article in itself. But suffice to say, a conservative amount of compression on the individual tracks will give them a little more energy, and make them easier to mix together.

10. Add reverb to whatever needs it most… as little as it needs.

If you’ve ever heard anyone talk about using reverb to cover something up, they probably use too much. Sure, there may be times when there’s a good aesthetic reason to put something in a cavern or a cathedral. Even in those cases, you shouldn’t go that far on every instrument; there should be something more “dry” in the foreground to contrast it against. Remember that reverb is sound. When you use it, you are adding a sound to the mix. This might seem like a dumb thing to point out, but the point is, if a song is getting cluttered, reverb can compound the problem. In most cases a vocal should have just enough reverb that you can hear a difference when you switch it on and off, but not enough to be more than barely noticeable otherwise.

11. Equalization… huh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! Except…

Use EQ when you need EQ. Again, this sounds obvious and dumb, but the point is, you usually don’t. There are a lot of different kinds of filtering effects that manipulate the highs, lows, and mids in a wide range of precisions and proportions. These include graphic equalizers, parametric equalizers, FFT filters, “scientific” filters, highpass, lowpass, and bandpass filters. They’re all about slicing the audible spectrum into bands to be adjusted separately. A “graphic equalizer” would be the most intuitive for the beginner, as you’ve probably already played with one on your home stereo.

If you have an instrument or sound that doesn’t use the full spectrum, it’s sometimes good to filter unused frequencies to minimize noise. For example, you can easily reduce treble on a bass guitar to remove hiss without taking anything important away from the sound of the instrument. Likewise on higher instruments you can reduce bass to remove rumble. (I rolled off a little of the “boominess” of the acoustic guitar, and left my vocal un-equalized.) On a very mid-rangey instrument like a distorted electric guitar, you can usually roll off a little at both ends.

On acoustic instruments, you generally want to be sparing with any kind of equalization, as you can easily make them sound worse — especially when your ears are getting tired. Try to get the sound right in the first place with good microphone placement. If you must use EQ creatively to solve a problem with the sound, try to cut bands rather than boost them, or you may run into problems with unpredictable spikes in volume at the boosted frequencies.

12: Chip away at everything that isn’t part of the statue.

How hogwild you want to go with this is a matter of personal preference, but if your voice doesn’t even start until five bars into the song, you might as well erase that track up until the point where it starts. Your guitar intro will thank you for letting it be all the cleaner. Just be careful whenever you cut a clip; if you’re not careful there will be a “click” at the point of snippage. There are two ways to avoid this: either always do a fade-in or fade-out at the edit point, which can be as short as a few milliseconds — or always cut the clip exactly on a zero crossing, which is exactly what you would expect it to be: a point where the waveform is crossing over the “zero” line.

13: Take care of the mix while the master is away.

Another thing cool new software lets you do these days is to place “mastering effects” onto the whole mix so that you can get a slick, cool, “produced” sound right away. This generally amounts to “multi-band compression”, the bastard lovechild of compression and equalization. It’s like using equalizers to split the sound into bass, midrange, and treble, and then running each of those three bands into its own separate compressor. It sounds f’n great. HOWEVER, you should try to get your mix sounding good without it first.

The fact that you’re going to apply some compression to the overall mix is one of many good reasons to be sparing with it on the individual tracks. Why would I recommend using it on individual tracks and on the overall mix? What’s the difference? A little compression of any kind on a full mix — and multi-band is all the better for this — will just help to blend and cement the various instruments together a little, and make them sound more like parts of a whole. At this end of the project, you’re shaping the whole puzzle, whereas previously you were shaping the pieces.

If you are a noble soul, you will use these tools for primarily for aesthetic reasons. You want that little “boost of life” that a mastering effect or plugin can give you; as far as the loudness wars go, you can still be a conscientious objector (and damn well you should be). But, that said, when your song comes up, you don’t want someone dropping the shopping bag with the eggs in it just to fumble with the volume on their iPod — so that bit of volume increase doesn’t hurt.

So, okay, Jimi, you say you want your recording to be wild and artistic and unconventional, so why am I teaching you how to bake white bread? Because!!! Because you can’t color outside the lines if there are no lines to color outside of. Because you can’t push the boundaries if there are no boundaries to push. Because you can’t fuck the man if there’s no man to fuck. Just trust me — someday you too may be old, boring, and grumpy, and just want a vocal to sit in a goddamned mix. You’ll thank me for this someday.

4/12/07

It’s not that I want
What other people’ve got
I wouldn’t know what to do with that crap anyway

I’m not for playing house
Or keeping my car clean
Or seeing myself through the words my friends and neighbors say

I’ve never been much of a lover or a boyfriend
As a brother and a son I barely cut it too

I skip most birthdays and I barely notice Christmas
Why they invite me to the funerals still, I have no clue

All I want is a real connection
All I want is a real connection

So you want to make an album? (part 11)

Installment 11: A whiter shade of perfect

I’ve now certainly scared most of you away from the very thought of making your own album. Congratulations on coming to your senses, and I look forward to hearing about your success in real estate, insurance, law, medicine, and any other path that involves wearing a tie and using a lot of spreadsheets.

“His greatest reward was… what? ‘More music’?? If I wanted ‘more music’ I’d go to the frickin’ record store. Beam me up, Scotty.”

For the few remaining noble nutcases among you who are either incurably determined, or just plain stuck to the proverbial windshield (”huh? ‘proverbial windshield’?”), I’ll do my best to scoop some useful generalities out of this otherwise self-indulgent tale.

Most independent recording artists are really just frustrated architects. We logically assume that we can’t decorate the windows before erecting the scaffolding, and certainly can’t do that until we blueprint the whole dealy. While it’s always better to “get off to a good start”, it takes some experience to know what a good start actually is. We have a rather one-dimensional concept of quality, with “crap” at one end and “perfection” at the other. When we finally acquire the means to do something “perfect”, we intuitively sense that there’s something wrong with it, and then we back off and try to somehow make it less perfect, and can’t explain why.

I think some people miss out on a valuable learning experience by never striving for perfection in the first place; I think you grow more as an artist when you go through this stage, and you will go through it in at least some aspects of your work. So let’s examine the idea of “perfection”, and get to know this color on our pallette, so we can decide for ourselves how, where, when, and to what extent to use it.

First, what is perfection in recorded music? Sure, music is an art, and it’s subjective; but when we put it down on tape (or bits, nowadays), we’re shooting for something beyond what we can crank out at a typical bar gig.

Pitch

The reason we hear certain combinations of pitch as harmonious, some as dissonant (creating tension that can “lead” to something), and some as downright pathetic, has to do with math and ratios. You can do some searching to learn more out more about this, but here is a key (no pun intended) thing to keep in mind: the math that we use to define “in tune” today is not the same math that caused those intervals to sound harmonious in the first place. Our modern system of tuning is a compromise. As such, when an exceptionally talented vocal group sings a chord by ear, the pitches will not be exactly the same as if you played that chord on a perfectly tuned piano; some of the notes will be “cheated” a hair to bring the pitches closer to a true ratio, making them actually more harmonious.

(So why don’t we ditch the compromise and go back to the old way of tuning? Because then we would lose our freedom to explore all those different keys. One key would sound great, and the rest would sound like crap.)

Rhythm

Rhythm also relies on simple-ratio math: dividing a measure into a certain number of beats, then dividing each beat into two, three, four, or more parts, leaving some spots empty, and filling other spots in. When drum machines became popular, something strange happened: drummers started playing like drum machines. The more exact these divisions were, the better. So why is it that when we listen to pre-machine drumming, we get the urge to “air drum” along, yet when we hear mid-to-late 80s electronic beats we tend to just hear the rhythm without feeling it?

Fidelity

The original objective of recording — “to make record of” — was to preserve sound. So naturally, the more accurately you can re-create the original sound when you play it back, the better — from a purely recording standpoint, in the literal sense of the word. This would be cut and dried, except that everyone has a different-sounding set of speakers, in a wide range of large, small, echoey or quiet environments, and sets his/her EQ (bass/mid/treble) differently. So even if you could achieve perfect fidelity, it would be worthless for all but one playback system.

Balance

Unlike the previous three attributes, the relative levels of sounds in a mix can not be evaluated in any cold, clinical objective way. They can be measured — two sounds can be compared to one another in decibels — but there’s no scientific reason why a 3 dB difference would be better or worse than a 15 dB difference; there’s no quantifiable target to aim for. It is, however, something that a neurotic perfectionist can lose nights of sleep over, because this is the presentation of your music, and this is where you make an artistic decision about what falls in the foreground, what falls in the background, and what holds the bottom and top together. Balance is almost visual, the art of seeing the sound composition in your mind’s eye… and it is deceptive. Your ability to “see” this composition becomes distorted as you repeatedly listen to a song, because your brain forms a sort of “after-image” as it adjusts to what you’re hearing.

Why do we pursue perfection?

For a combination of right reasons and wrong reasons. We want our work to be good. We want it to be powerful, to move people, to transcend, to “come to life”, and to entice our audience into repeated listenings. These are all good reasons. On the other hand, we may be focused on the negative, trying to avoid mistakes, avoid out-of-tune notes, and avoid sloppy rhythms, in order to hopefully avoid criticism or rejection. When we operate from a mindset of avoidance, we become creatively constricted, and tend to forget why we’re making music in the first place.

So how do we reconcile with all this?

Simple. Just decree that Keith Handy is your lord and master, and send him $100.00 and a nice handwritten note saying “you are the best”.

Apart from that, the main thing is that this one-dimensional continuum, with crappy on one end and perfect on the other, is a gross oversimplification. I wouldn’t suggest trying to be “less than perfect” so much as re-examining your idea of what “perfect” actually means. Is exactly equal spacing between all the notes perfection? Maybe. In what way though? In what way do you really want your music to be perfect? Hopefully in the sense of the feeling you express through it. Rhythm has a “feel”. When you listen back to that rhythm, how does it “feel” to you?

Nuance is not random; nuance is expression. So when you play the notes a hair early, a hair late, a hair sharp or a hair flat, just be sure that’s what you mean. There will be times when you want rhythms that are metronomical and exact. Great! Use sequencers in those cases. When you need to record a great human performance, be the performance. Let it flow through you, and if the red “record” light is making you self-conscious, do a few more takes until you finally get swept up into the music and forget it’s even on.

When it comes to mixing, you home project folks have a huge advantage against the aural fatigue boogeyman. You can save the mix you’re working on, and come back to it with fresh ears… not just once or twice, but as many times as you need. This has been recommended a zillion times elsewhere, but in short: listen to your mix in the car, on your parents’ stereo, on your friends’ stereo, in your friends’ car, and so on. Listen to it immediately after listening to one of your favorite songs by another artist on the same system. Thought the bass guitar sounded a little quiet? Go home and bump it up, but not by too much; just 2 or 3 dB. Rinse, lather, repeat. Pay particular attention to what you notice the first time you hear it after getting away from it, from the instant the song starts.

Last but not least: hang in there. All is good. The statue is already in the marble. Just chip everything else away.

Next: ??

One last peek at an unforgettable verbal trainwreck

Before I give my old copy of Ayn Rand’s The Romantic Manifesto a better future than it deserves — in the “free books” pile rather than the wastebasket — I just wanted to take a final morbid glance at this… um… well, just read it.

The products of America’s anti-rational, anti-cognitive “Progressive” education, the hippies, are reverting to the music and the drumbeat of the jungle.

[…]

A brief word about so-called modern music: no further research or scientific discoveries are required to know with full, objective certainty that it is not music. The proof lies in the fact that music is the product of periodic vibrations — and, therfore, the introduction of nonperiodic vibrations (such as the sounds of street traffic or of machine gears or of coughs and sneezes), i.e., of noise, into an allegedly musical composition eliminates it automatically from the realm of art and of consideration.

[…]

“Because I felt like it” is not a definition or validation of anything.

There is no place for whim in any human activity — if it is to be regarded as human. There is no place for the unknowable, the unintelligible, the undefinable, the non-objective in any human product. This side of an insane asylum, the actions of a human being are motivated by a conscious purpose; when they are not, they are of no interest to anyone outside a psychotherapist’s office. And when the practitioners of modern art declare that they don’t know what they are doing or what makes them do it, we should take their word for it and give them no further consideration.

- Art and Cognition, 1971

Thank you, Aynny-baby. Not just for hammering that final nail into the coffin of my embarrassing Rand phase… but had you not spoken out so courageously, we’d all be listening to gears and coughs right now.

*cough*

…

… hey, that was kinda catchy. I think I’ll call it “Symphony for a Rational Industrialist“.

Goodnight, Mooshika

So you want to make an album? (part 10)

Installment 10: The whirlpool

Lately, one of my favorite metaphors for MAKING THINGS HAPPEN is that of a whirlpool. As a kid with your friends, you’ve probably walked around in the same direction in a circular swimming pool until the water built up enough momentum that it actually pulled you along. The first time around, the overwhelming inertia of the water is against you, and you have to fight it just to get around at all. With each consecutive lap, though, the water fights you less, and gradually aligns with your original idea. Before long, it becomes harder to stop than to keep going.

In retrospect, making Open the Window was just my first lap around that pool.

During those first six months of living in East Rochester with Jeff, between the Mind Mogging and the Renaissance Society-ing, I dusted off my incomplete cassette demo of my rock opera, Through Forbidden Black Doors (no, I haven’t done any other albums about ways to get in and out of buildings), and wrote some new material for it. In particular, I totally revamped what would have been “side 3″ of a four-side record, and in fact wrote what I think are a couple of the best songs on the whole thing, Scratched Off/Called Off and Do You Remember?.

To backtrack a bit, since I’ve sort of glossed over it in this series — I’d gotten my feet wet in actual home multitracking while recording TFBD demo #1, initially using borrowed 4-track portastudios (before finally getting my own) and borrowed drum machines. I had barely put down anything other than drum machine and synthesizer, meaning, no, not even any vocals. And though a few songs sound surprisingly close to their later versions, I would be lying if I told you that my cassette of this demo, for the most part, sounds like anything but total crap. I sent it to a few local theater people with photocopied sheet music for the vocals, thinking they’d be able to listen to the cassette, read along, and magically hear everything else that was in my head. No, of course I didn’t hear back from any of them.

I had been trying to push the idea of a TFBD stage show on the Society, which was essentially just a circle of friends, and made some headway actually getting people excited about it. I whipped up 4-track demos of the newer songs, and “completed” my old demo with a one-take vocal run-through, singing all the parts myself, both male and female, in our East Rochester basement — which had Jeff fearing that our neighbors would soon be calling 911.

A few of us had been talking about ideas for stage direction and scenery. We’d gone around and introduced ourselves to various organizations in the area, including Arts for Greater Rochester, and we had a rehearsal or two on a couple of the songs… and then, close to the end of our six month lease, there was a quick falling out between Jeff and me. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know exactly what caused it; I only know that I just sort of clammed up, and didn’t try to talk through anything or get the issues out into the air. Since we were the core of the Society, the Society in effect ceased to be. I think from my end, it had been an attempt to reap the benefits of being in a band while stubbornly refusing to be in a band.

A few hundred dollars in the hole (which seemed like a lot then), in need of a new vehicle and a place to live, and determined as hell to finally do a run of Open the Window, I signed up for a six-week lab rat stint at a hospital in Buffalo, letting them pay me quite a chunk of money to take a very small dose of experimental medicine. (This personal factoid freaks some people out, but it’s a controlled situation which is really more un-glamorous than unsafe.) To fill all the long intervals between my blood draws and vital checks, I’d brought along several musical toys, including my drum machine, and began programming rhythms for the songs on my follow-up “sister album”.

I didn’t have to try hard to make Unfinished Business an album; I almost thought of it as a bit of a time killer while trying to figure out what to do next with the rock opera. Most of the material was stuff that had fallen by the wayside from my high school songwriting spurt. The songs had an angrier edge, and unlike the harder-edged bits from Open the Window, didn’t try to justify their existence in some lofty context about healing or learning. This was just an unapologetic tantrum, and I found myself enjoying it.

Open the Window itself had an okay send-off for what it was. It didn’t make me rich or famous, but what I heard from people was generally that they were very impressed. I think there are some people who I haven’t seen in such a long time that, to this day, Open the Window is what they associate me with. I’m proud that I was so ambitious with it. Since then, I’ve officially declared the album “defunct” and “obsolete”, but I’ve remixed, recycled, and improved on nearly every song. Not only was it not a waste of time as far as the individual songs went, but it had the incredible effect of paving the way for all the more spontaneous, adventurous, and inspired recording that I would do next, and continue to do today.

When famous producers didn’t knock down the door of my cockroach-infested studio apartment, when the only interest small “labels” showed was in asking me to send them money, when the people who appreciated it most were the same people I already didn’t feel like I had to “prove” anything to — I had moments where I felt like it all might have been a failure. As time went on, though, I came to understand that the greatest* reward for my music would be more music.

By that criterion, Open the Window was a phenomenal success.

Next: Nope, I ain’t done writin’ this, not by a long shot. :)

*greatest “selfish” reward, at least. There may be an even greater reward in inspiring and encouraging other musicians and creative people in general, but my soul hasn’t fully advanced to that level of awareness yet. ;)

So you want to make an album? (part 9)

Installment 9: Don’t worry that it’s not good enough (yeah, right).

I tried to record my vocals using the same setup I used to record everything else: plugging a microphone into the cassette portastudio that I was only using as a mixer, and singing along to one DAT tape while recording the mix to the other DAT tape. I had a digital reverb, and I figured as long as I was careful setting the level, and did a decent performance, everything would be okay.

This is when I started to learn how difficult it was, at least with my voice, which I was still very self-conscious of and hadn’t fallen in love with yet, to get a vocal to “sit in a mix”. By that I mean “sound like it’s part of everything”, and not some voice that isn’t supposed to be there, superimposed over the top of canned, pre-existing music, like half-assed karaoke.

Even if I was careful, the level was still all over the place. Certain syllables would “spike” out over the top of the music while others would be hard to hear over the backing music. I wasn’t prepared to spend yet another few hundred dollars on a decent rack-mount type studio-quality compressor, so I looked into cheaper options: I found a compressor guitar pedal for only about $40 or $50 and, against the advice of the sales clerk, brought it home, optimistic that I could wring some usefulness out of it. It didn’t seem to do much, though, apart from adding noise. To be quite honest I doubt it would even have worked particularly well for guitars.

All this — combined with the fact that, in general, I really wanted much more power to mix and fuss with my vocals after singing them, when my ears would be free — led me to a sobering admission: I could get by, struggling with my insanity-inducing ping pong setup, up to a point… but that point had been reached and passed.

Mike Pinto had been excitedly telling me about the Fostex R8 he’d just purchased, which recorded eight tracks to quarter-inch tape at 15 ips, had noise reduction, and just plain looked cool. I was welcome to spend a few evenings using it in his converted basement. He’d actually built a little “studio area”, walled off from a separate control room, with a window in the middle — though it was far from soundproof. I could, if I wanted, copy what I had so far to two tracks on the R8 and use the six remaining tracks to freely play around with vocals (and a few other final-hour acoustic things).

Of course, then my project would no longer be “digital”. I worried about the pristine clarity I might lose. I had to think long and hard about this potential sacrifice, until the words of wisdom had fully taken shape in my quiet center: “Fuck digital.”

Listening back to the stereo backing tracks that I’d just transferred from my poor little DAT tapes to the first two tracks on my fresh new reels sitting on Mike’s R8, I was surprised. It didn’t sound horrible at all; in fact, it sounded quite good. There was hope.

I let Mike play engineer/co-producer, call out suggestions, and run the tape machine for most of my vocal sessions (it was, after all, his house and his equipment), but it felt kind of silly and unnecessary going back and forth between the two little rooms. I think it also felt a little strange letting him into the rather personal world in my lyrics, but I took it as a compliment when he told me the songs were getting stuck in his head. Being in someone else’s home also brought with it some of the time constraint factor normally associated with “real” studios; although money wasn’t going down the drain, I was self-conscious and didn’t want to impose too much, so I didn’t do more than two or three takes of anything.

Hyper-concerned about my inability to sing perfectly in tune, I devised a tedious poor-man’s method of pitch fixing: I brought home special “practice mixes” on a cassette, with all the music in the left and all the vocals in the right, and experimented with riding a pitch shifting effect (on a rack unit I’d also borrowed from Mike) on the voice. I painstakingly wrote down the amount of adjustment that sounded best to me for every word and syllable, then took the rack unit back to his studio and ran the original vocal tracks through that effect, while “playing” the knob, to an empty track. The pitch shifting gave the voice an unnatural “metallic” quality that I thought was cool at first, but eventually regretted, and most of the original, unprocessed vocal tracks have long since been erased over.

Although I did manage to mix down all the songs in Mike’s basement (mixed back to DAT tapes, of course), about a year passed before I was able to have a batch of professional-looking cassettes run off for the people. (I’m not sure what my exact rationale was for doing cassettes instead of CDs; maybe I thought CD players were still not ubiquitous enough.)

A lot happened in that year, most notably that I moved to Rochester with Jeff to be closer to the other musicians we were hanging out with, and try to get a strange organization we called “The Renaissance Society” off the ground. We also had a few false starts with a experimental band we called “Mind Mogger” — mostly strange, dark and dissonant improvisation, which we referred to as “mogging”.

Despite my re-involvement with Jeff, he was kept separate from Open the Window, and I sensed he generally wasn’t interested in what I was doing on my own. I was embarrased to still be toying with what I’d already mixed, trying to EQ it just right and create perfect crossfades between the songs (which would be so easy today).

Next: Letting go of the baby.

So you want to make an album? (part 8)

Installment 8: Digital ping pong

We take digital recording for granted today, but in 1990 it was still fairly new and unaffordable. Nonetheless, I wanted to be cutting edge. I wanted the “wow” factor. Although digital multitracking was out of the question, consumer DAT (digital audio tape) recorders — which merely recorded and played back in stereo, using small tapes similar to what some camcorders use now — were just starting to dip into the three-digit price range. In a flash of inspiration that was as regrettable as it was brilliant, I reasoned that with all of my cassette ping-ponging experience, I could certainly employ a similar approach using two DAT recorders. Then I could boast that my album had been recorded digitally.

I had to get two DAT machines right away so I could get to work, even if I had to “beg, borrow or steal” to get the money. Well, I didn’t quite steal, but having already received a few of those credit card offers banks love to tempt college kids with, I had a feeling more such offers would be in the mail soon. In fact, I think one arrived within a day or two of my epiphany. My parents had already warned me against the trappings of easy credit, so I did the smart thing: I rented a post office box, so they would never see my bills.

When I found that I wasn’t coming up with a satisfactory way to create a percussive foundation for the songs, an offer came in for another card — presto, instant drum machine. Somehow my parents didn’t think to ask how all this electronic stuff was being financed. Personally, my conscience was less troubled by the additional debt than by the scandalous fact that I was using a drum machine at all.

As a mixer — just to mix whatever new part I was overdubbing with whatever was already on tape, and record the output of that to the other DAT machine — I used the inputs and outputs of a cheap 4-track cassette portastudio. So, yes, my pristine digital sound was repeatedly going through a rather cheap device, but surprisingly it didn’t impact the sound much.

What made DAT tapes a pain, more than anything, was dropouts. Unlike analog tape, where you might hear the sound get a bit muffled for a moment where some of the iron oxide has worn off the tape, DAT players stuck zeros between good samples wherever it couldn’t read the data, making an obnoxious digital “zipper-like” ripping sound. All it took to cause a dropout on a DAT tape was to leave the tape in pause for a few seconds. For this reason, I bought a lot of tapes and avoided re-using them.

It’s often the people you meet in the least likely settings that make the biggest contribution. I had already made substantial headway on several songs by the time Mike Pinto, a customer at my part time workplace — I think he generally went there to get cigarettes, but I can’t remember for sure — decided to get into a conversation with me about recording music. I think he was interested in using one of my DAT recorders to mix his project down to (which I think he and his friend Aaron had been recording to a borrowed 1/2″ 8- or 16-track machine, I forget the specifics), and in exchange he would hook me up with a version of Cakewalk that ran on DOS — just a MIDI sequencer, no audio capability back then — which he dutifully photocopied the manual for, page by page.

What Cakewalk looked like on a monochrome monitor.

Mike had only been using it for drum parts on his project, and had it slaved to a sync track on the tape machine, so that it would automatically be in sync with his overdubs, even if the tape was started in the middle of the song. (I would have just recorded the drum machine straight to the tape, unless they really thought they were going to change the drum part later on.) At home, I installed it on my father’s prehistoric IBM compatible “Zenith Data Systems” computer, and only needed to buy a relatively inexpensive MIDI card to hook it up to my synthesizers and drum machine. It actually worked, believe it or not. I used that computer, with that version of Cakewalk, for nearly a decade.

As I was now able to quantize (auto-correct timing of notes), modify, and perfect all of my keyboard parts before committing them to tape, I became less and less of a keyboardist and more of a “part composer”. And this didn’t bother me at all. Meanwhile, since I had to play my own guitar parts, initially with borrowed guitars (I think I used Mike’s Stratocaster — or something resembling a Strat — for all the guitar parts on Open the Window; thanks again, Mike), this is pretty much when I started to become a guitarist.

I tried to improvise a little, but on listening back to an improvised solo, I could tell I wasn’t ready. Especially since the nature of my ping-pong setup didn’t allow me to record over (”punch in“) parts of my performance; I had to do the whole thing right in one continuous take, or not do it at all.

In some cases, the solution was to fake the guitars. A heavily-distorted guitar can be reasonably faked by running a keyboard through distortion. Sometimes to simulate a fast or otherwise difficult guitar part, I would sequence it on Cakewalk, and painstakingly edit the sequence to create vibrato, pitch bends, and whammy bar dives. For one “solo” in particular, I fed the playback through a wah-wah pedal in addition to distortion, and just stood there rocking the pedal back and forth with my foot while the Zenith did all the fancy fretwork for me.

I did do a healthy amount of actual guitar playing, though. I distinctly remember spending hours sitting through the whole length of a song over and over just to put down an overdub that might only last twenty seconds. If one note sounded “off” to me, I’d run the whole song again. I’d hunch over the guitar, in an extreme state of concentration, and just stare closely at the exact frets my fingers needed to be on. One time I was having trouble with accidentally hitting open strings while playing a lead part, so I stuck a piece of cloth under the strings near the headstock to keep the open strings muted.

Things were going slowly and tediously, but generally I was able to achieve results that I was satisfied with, until I came to an impasse: the vocals.

Next: Mr. Pinto saves the day, again.