Keith Handy 1.999

Defibrillator for your internets

This is going to be less of a “cool post”, and more of an electric shock to my blog’s heart to make sure it keeps beating. Thanks for sticking with me and being a faithful reader. I actually started getting notices about exceeding bandwidth, so that’s a good sign.

I can’t wake up today. I leave my old iPod playing all night as a soundtrack for my subconscious. It’s beautiful how the old ones can actually drive a pair of speakers, since they were made before anybody demanded that headphone users be protected from their own inability to operate a volume control. For all the loud and raucous songs on there, the first thing that startled me awake is the extra 30 seconds of soloing before the fade out on the remastered No Way. (”Those notes aren’t supposed to be there!”)

Then there was the actual alarm. I hit “snooze” a bunch of times, finally forced myself to get it together in time for my mandatory and mercifully brief unemployment orientation, waited half an hour for Wendy’s to open and grabbed a burger — no, I’m not really doing the pescetarianism thing yet (I have to learn to pronounce it first) — and went back to bed, this time to be startled awake in the early afternoon by thoughts about the true nature of color, and about how we can’t escape perception.

Since I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here yet, I’m now doing my first score for a live action film, A Voice from the Lantern (I’ll link to it when a public site is up), which is considerably longer than the average short. As I’ve said to Tony (the director), if I resort to my usual methods of composing music, it will never get finished. So I’m going to have to stop thinking like a songwriter, and do more improvisation and “soundscaping”.

In the between times, I’m trying to do work on an album, and I’m having my usual moments of doubt. First of all, I don’t know who my target audience is. Forget that I’m getting close to 40, because I still look like I’m in my 20s (see above self portrait) and nobody has to know. But the music itself swings a wide, almost schizophrenic range, from very soft and gentle to very loud and in your face, and I don’t think that makes for an album most people can just put on while going about their business. I mean, I can do that, but I’ve had years of practice.  Generally, people want to pick a mood and stick with it, not get thrashed about on the wild seas of melodrama.

I know I’m going to read this post someday from another perspective and think “how sweet and honest, he has self-doubt just like any other authentic artist”. It’s just kind of icky when you actually feel it.

History, splicing tape, and babes

Three words: untapped fetish gold. I’d imagine this is how “girls posing with cars” calendars look to an auto mechanic — except she ain’t posin’.

There are apparently only three pictures of Delia Derbyshire in existence, one of which unfortunately shows her teeth (ha ha, I’m pretending to be superficial, get it?). My question is, how did I go 37.5 years without seeing any of them, or without realizing that a female-born (non-transsexual) chick made such a huge contribution to the very craft I’m supposedly so knowledgeable about? (Edit: if the “craft” I’m referring to is “electronic music in general”, then it might seem that I’m overlooking theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore — but since instrumental mastery and tape manipulation are at very opposite ends of said craft, let’s assume I’m talking more about studio wizardry than performance.)

I finally got up to speed on all this when I watched a 60 minute documentary about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, entitled The Alchemists of Sound. Highly recommended Mandatory viewing, despite the fact that whoever edited it got a little non-sequitur with the visual effects (such as reels on a machine turning opposite directions, unnecessary morphs, or a human face appearing in the background for no reason). If you can’t track it down, let me know, and I just might be able to do somethin’ for ya. We’ll see.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to call that mechanic I was talking about, and see how he’s coming along on my time machine.

In praise of dirt-dead simplicity

One thing I remember reading among the user reviews for Tracktion is that one included plugin, an extremely bare-bones sampler, is too limited to be useful. I’m going to take a contrary position to this (what? me? take a contrary position??) and I’ll tell you why.

Under the umbrella interest of music, the sub-interest of sampling is not really in the “passion” league for me. If it was, I would have a beef with all the things this plugin can’t do: It can’t change the timbre of the sound in response to key velocity (it only changes the volume of the sound). It doesn’t respond to pitch or modulation wheels. It can’t loop, so your sounds better be long enough for the notes you’re going to play. You can’t set a release time; it either cuts off abruptly when you lift your finger, or for something like drums you can select “ignore release” so the sound always plays all the way through.

It’s about as “dumb” as you can get and still be functional; what you see on the screenshot above is all there is to it. The box on the left starts off empty, and you click “add”, find a sound on your computer, and then slide the green and white arrows to whatever part of the keyboard you want to assign it to. That’s it.

But instead of thinking of it as a retarded sampler, I think of it as editing on speed. Because what am I actually doing? Just triggering existing sounds at certain times in a song, which I could do by just importing those sounds into the project and putting them where I want them. Obviously it would not make sense to assemble a drum part for a whole song by importing a wav file every single time a drum is hit. So this is kind of like direct injection: hit the key, presto, instant imported sound. And then you can edit painlessly, because it’s laid out musically on a piano roll.

Samplers will always sound like samplers, so stop trying to make them “expressive”. When I want nuance and timbral variation, I’ll pick up a guitar. This is a cool, quick and dirty way of getting a simple drum or mellotron part down. Here’s one such drum part I just did:

The above song, Curtis’ Classic Collection of Comforts, is still in the “putting things down” stage; what’s most lacking still is the electric guitar, and probably some additional supporting vocals. If you want an amusing point of reference for how it has progressed so far, this older version had a hastily done drum machine and synth bass part, just as temporary placeholders.

Dark night of the wallet

On behalf of anyone whose life path has ever taken a dramatic twist over one lousy (wonderful) little four-letter word, I would like to thank whoever had the good sense to sign, initial, key, click, or do whatever they had to do to finally approve my unemployment benefits. Oh, believe you me, a great weight has been lifted. (And if I had checked my bank account two days ago, I would have felt the relief that much sooner. Eh, what’s another 48 hours of nervous tension after the past three weeks.  Actually, what makes it funny is that I actually physically went to the bank on 5/22 to deposit two small non-work-related checks — I wonder if those first two unemployment deposits reflected on the balance on my receipt, and I just didn’t bother to look at it.)

Although I’m presently too euphoric to even be functional, tomorrow I shall celebrate by foregoing my bread and tuna diet and eating at a freakin’ restaurant. I’ll even have dessert. And leave a nice tip. Hallelujah! Anyone in the area up for mexican?

Another thing I promised myself I would do once this was settled: I’m going to write a nice letter to the people I worked with and worked for. No, I’m not being sarcastic. I had some of the nicest coworkers, and an unbelievably tolerant, understanding, wise, and good-humored supervisor. There was love in that office. Unfortunately, some “important” people, who didn’t know us personally (but were sure to spam us with reminders about how exciting it was that one of them had a new title, or came up with a new acronym — don’t get me started on those!), wouldn’t get off our backs, and insisted on meddling with what should be an easy job and making it difficult for no reason.

One last thing: if you work in any call center, anywhere, and you hear rumors that your calls are going to be monitored by something called “Hyperquality“… run.

Chunk o’ wisdom #433

What do you take care of first, before you take care of anything else?

That’s what you are.

“Loudness war” clarified

If you’ve seen me mentioning the “loudness war” in previous posts, and aren’t 100% sure what I’m talking about, GO HERE. NOW. THIS IS ME WHACKING YOU ON THE ASS WITH A PADDLE. GIT, GIT, GIT!!!