The Light of Day

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!!!

Minors, maths, mixes, and magnatunes

I just had a cup of coffee, cranked King Crimson’s The Power To Believe, and fell fast asleep for most of the duration of the album. Drooled on my pillow, even. (Wow, good thing I didn’t have a glass of warm milk and put on Brahm’s Lullaby, or I’d be dead.) Anyway, as I was nodding off, I thought of a simple musical idea: the next time I want to write a single-line countermelody for any chord progression, for any major chord I’ll focus on the third of the chord, but for any minor chord I will focus on the fifth, so I’m not emphasizing that the chord is minor — just letting the ear and brain do that. It might even be nice to try playing some familiar chord progressions, but leaving the third out on all the minor chords, just to see how well the “minorness” is implied by context and relationship. This seems like an interesting way to make the sad aspect of a bit of music more gentle and subtle.

WARNING: MATH

It also makes sense from a pitch ratio perspective. If you’re trying to keep your pitch ratios simple (consonant), think of this. In a perfectly tuned C major chord — putting aside that our tuning system is actually an imperfect compromise — the ratio of pitches in “C, E, G” is 4:5:6. Simple enough, because a major third (C to E) has a 4:5 ratio, and a minor third (E to G) has a 5:6 ratio.

When you play a minor chord, though, those two intervals are flip-flopped. The minor third is on the bottom and the major third is on top. So in a C minor chord (C, E-flat, G), you have a 5:6 ratio (C to E-flat) first, and then a 4:5 ratio (E-flat to G). To write this as one three-number ratio, you would have to first bump up the ratios to 10:12 and 12:15 respectively, in order to have a common middle number. You can then write it as 10:12:15, but you can’t reduce it any further. Still fairly small numbers in the grand scheme of the cosmos, and still a beautiful chord, but just something to have in your awareness when you find yourself becoming fatigued and “over-minor’d”.

MATH ALERT LIFTED, OK TO BEGIN PAYING ATTENTION AGAIN

So anyway, that list of songs that I needed to rescue is way down (less than ten), and I can feel my spirit being lightened. I’m even having nicer dreams. (I explained to one friend of mine that I’m not just copying folders and files, but actually re-organizing tracks and doing partial mixdowns, because the Cool Edit sessions won’t open in any other application.) When that ordeal INVIGORATING CHALLENGE is over with, my next objective is to finish up Fr. Hifta Ryphtor and try to get that accepted at Magnatune, an unconventional and forward-thinking record label that apparently needs more rock artists. They don’t give you advances, they don’t pay for your recording costs, they don’t give you limo rides; all they do is evaluate the album to make sure it’s not half-assed, and then make it available where it can be searched for and paid for with flexible pricing. Initially it was just (DRM-free) digital downloads and commercial licensing (so your music could be used in advertising and various media), but they’re starting to sell actual physical CDs too.

Some of the best songs on Fr. Hifta Ryphtor don’t have complete lyrics yet, so it looks like I’ll be needing to go into… that place… you know the one…

The cheaper the better, the cheapest the best

I updated my discography page to include Cheap Thrills, a sample track I picked out to represent Leave of Absence vol. 1 (1999). I just remixed it this morning to try and bring the drums into the 21st century best I can.

Leave of Absence was my most diverse collection of songs, and featured more experimentation than any other project. In the later half of the 1990s I had made the commitment to try to be more “avant garde”, although I never went atonal or anything. My last installment in the “So You Want” series mentioned something about stolen drum tracks, so I figured I’d bring your attention to Cheap Thrills as an example of that.

My long-time friend Jeff Lewis had recorded a couple of his songs in my studio, one of which was called Popping Flowers Off Of Dandelions. I think he was starting to go through a transformation, where he was waxing as a singer/songwriter and waning as a drummer, because the drums were not a satisfying outlet for him anymore. This reflected in his rather busy and insane drumming style. On this session, his tempo was rather, how shall we say, “rubbery” as well.

In spite of that, I thought the beat would be a good match for Cheap Thrills, and that it would be interesting to try to fit the song to it. I copied it onto another reel of tape and then used one track just to count measures out loud as a reference — “one… two… three…” — and so on. That way, while listening through, if I heard a fill or a crash, and thought, “hmm, measure 57 would be a good place for such-and-such part of such-and-such verse to happen”, I could write that all down and then figure out how many extra measures needed to be filled in with instrumental breaks. I mapped the whole thing out and worked out some extended versions of my original chord progressions, and went from there.

There was some extra space at the end where I extended the third verse with additional lyrics, though I’m not 100% sure if I did that before or after mapping out Jeff’s drum track. It’s kind of unsettling that I wrapped up the lyrics with something foreshadowing American Idol when the rest of the song is apparently about terrorists and serial killers — satisfying as it was at the time, I’m not sure I needed to make that drastic of an association.

Cheap Thrills:

So you want to make an album? (part 13)

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

Installment 13: Be a drum slut (you’ll love it!)

When it comes to layin’ drum tracks, I ain’t no vanilla cherry, honey. I am, indeed, a drum slut. I’ve done drums in every place you can name, in every imaginable way. Before recording the other tracks. After recording the other tracks. Real drumset played by someone else for my song, with or without a click track. Real drumset played by someone else for their song and “stolen” for use in my song (mmm, so naughty). Real drum set played by me. Back when I was under-age, I recorded myself hitting pillows with sticks (and I’ll be damned if it didn’t sound just like… pillows being hit with sticks!) — and I was also using the built in rhythms on organs and toy keyboards. I’ve created makeshift drum-like sounds with a synthesizer, and likewise with a Commodore 64. I’ve done oral. (Yes, “oral” — I was mouth-drumming before beatboxing took off.) Played a drum machine by hand. Programmed a drum machine. Programmed a computer sequencer which then played the drum machine. Played a drum machine by hand into the computer’s sequencer, and then used that to fix/tighten/clean up my performance. Programmed a computer sequencer to play samples of real, actual drums that I’d originally hit with a real, actual drumstick (this is one of my favorite positions methods lately). Ain’t no lie, I’ll try anything once, sugar.

Why so many different ways? Lots of reasons. Sometimes you just have to use whatever is available to you. Sometimes you want to try something different. Sometimes the song demands that you do something different (I love it when the song gets bossy). Sometimes you think you’re being super-creative and all you’re really doing is making a mess. But that’s okay too, because we all gotta learn.

Since 1.) this series is geared more at home recordists than at bands going into pro studios, and 2.) home is where the revolution is happening anyway, I’m going to assume you’re recording one instrument at a time. The logical thing to do is to record a drum track before anything else, whether it’s real drums or machine drums. If you’re a little crazy, it is actually possible to record other instruments like guitars first, but only if there’s a good reason, or if you have experience doing so. (I know one guy that always does his drums last — he has to crank his headphones to the max to hear what he’s playing along to — but he’s so intimately familiar with his own songs, that even when there are breaks between sections, he can intuitively “feel” how long to pause before starting up again.)

On some of my own songs (listen to Have You Heard the Good News? for an example), the guitar holds the groove for most of the song, and the drums only come in on one verse. I could have started with a click track for the whole song, but then the rhythm of the initial guitar track might have felt too rigid, and I wanted it to be natural. So I played the guitar part “free”, i.e. not to anything, and then played the drum machine by hand over the third verse. On Never Turn Back, I actually did it this way (guitar first, then played the drum machine) for the whole song, partly just because I’m nuts, and partly because, again, I wanted the acoustic guitar to have a really natural feel to it. No click or reference was used, so the song is at whatever tempo I naturally played the guitar at. Playing a drum machine to an existing track is at least a little easier than doing so with a real set, because you can do it at a volume that won’t make you deaf. Be picky, though. If a bit doesn’t “feel” right, do something about it, because a half-assed drum part will kill a song.

If you know drums will be playing for most of the duration of your song, as in most pop/rock songs, the logical and sane thing to do is to record them first. This is not without its own challenge; if there are fills, accents, or breaks that happen in certain spots, you need to be able to mentally keep track of where you are in the song. Even if there is a section where you don’t want drums, say an intro for example, you could just play a “placeholder” beat for that part and remove it later. Always give yourself a one-measure count-off at the beginning, or you will be cursing yourself as you try to nail the first chord on overdubs. Setting the ideal tempo can be tricky; for drum machines, play and sing along with it to see if it feels right before committing to it. For real drums, maybe play and sing the song with your keyboard or guitar first to get the tempo in your head, and watch out for that human tendency to speed up as you go along.

Often times, after creating what you think is the ultimate drum track, you will put your overdubs down and then wish the drum part was a little different. There’s no easy rule for how to avoid this; it takes a certain amount of experience and foresight. If you’re not sure, it’s generally better to keep it really simple than to get fancy, because everything else you do will be adding to it. Something like a cymbal crash can always be overdubbed later if you think a transition isn’t getting enough emphasis. Another thing I’ve noticed with drum machine parts is, if you have velocity sensitive pads and some hits are a lot quieter than others, the quieter hits can rapidly disappear into near-inaudibility when you start putting overdubs on. So it’s best not to overdo the dynamics if you know there will be a lot of other things on top.

Recording the sound from a drum machine is a no-brainer; the work has already been done for you. Just patch it directly in and record it. Comparitively, recording a real kit in your home studio will prove to be a challenge as far as microphone placement and setting levels. The tight, clean, well-defined drum sounds on studio recordings are the result of microphones being placed right near the drumheads, generally one mic per drum, plus a pair of overhead mics to capture cymbals and room ambience. In all likelihood, your project studio may not have as many mics or recording inputs as you would like, yet you may still want to record a set anyway. This is fine, just be aware that your sound will be a compromise, and you may need to experiment a lot with the overall mix to get a sound that you find acceptable.

If you record with only one or two microphones, it is best to hang them several feet above the set, and then some after-the-fact multi-band compression might help you bring out the lacking “oomph” of the kick drum without muddying everything up the way an ordinary EQ might. If you have a couple more mics, it’s generally recommended that you close-mic the snare and the kick, and record them to separate tracks so you can adjust them afterwards. If, however, like a lot of home recordists, you don’t have a multi-channel soundcard, you can combine the sounds from multiple mics on the fly with a small mixer — you won’t know what it sounds like until after you record it and play it back, and you won’t be able to re-adjust the balance later, so you’ll need to record and listen back to some short “test takes” before starting work on the actual song.

Do a Google search on “miking drums” (without the quotes). A lot of what you find and read, you may not be able to do with the equipment you currently have, but the general principles will still be valuable. I’ll link to a few of them, but there are so many good articles out there that you really should do a full search yourself when you have time for explorin’.

A few years ago, a friend and former drummer of mine left his drums at my studio for a while, so I tried a session or two of playing the set myself. Your mileage my vary on this, but from my own experience, it may be helpful to let you know that I wish I had played them a bit louder, or rather, more consistently loud. Because drums are so much louder than other acoustic instruments, a non-drummer will tend to play relatively quietly. It will sound loud in the room, but you can tell on playback when you didn’t capture the familiar sound, timbre, or character of “loud hits”.

From these same sessions, I isolated, copied, and saved some of the better sounding drum hits and cymbal crashes to create a personal library of drum samples. When you think too hard about individual sounds, you tend to over-embellish them. These natural sounds — cleaned up a bit, but not “sweetened” much — sound nice and organic when I use them in conjunction with a sequencer. On my old Windows box, I used Cakewalk as the sequencer (think “the robot that plays the instrument”) and Mellosoftron as the sampler (think “the instrument being played by the robot”) which produces the actual sound. On my Mac, I can do it all self-contained within Tracktion.

It’s worth mentioning here that seemingly dull and ordinary drum sounds are often ideal in the larger context, since you usually don’t want the drums to be hogging all the listener’s attention anyway. Having realized this, my current “drum set” sounds pretty realistic, and I can use it in a lot of songs without getting sick of it — whereas a while back, particularly in the competitive climate of 80s, the pressure was on to blow everyone else off the charts with the ultimate, big, bad, in-your-face “snare drum to end all snare drums”. It took me a while to recover from that.

A whole universe of techniques, some of which might be considered “cheating” if you were in a “real band” with a “real drummer”, is out there for less-pigeonholed artists to explore without guilt. Don’t be afraid to try recording your drum parts in separate layers, or to combine the drum machine with a real drumset. Try, for example, using the drum machine for a simple, tight, clean kick/snare groove, and then overdubbing real cymbals. Try playing the drums at half the actual speed of the song, and then speeding it up on playback for a cute and infectious “toy drums” sound. Try looping your best measure or two (or four, or thirteen) of drumming. Try using the drum machine for the hi-hat, the drumset for the kick, your mouth as a snare, and the contents of your silverware drawer being dumped on the kitchen floor as a crash. (Try to get your pets involved too, and if you can get your neighbor to scold you for something, that’s always a fun thing to catch on tape.) Remember, a good sounding rhythm track will only give you half of your satisfaction; the other half will come from the scandalous stories you can tell afterwards about how you did it.

So what are you waiting for? Be a drum slut. You’ll love it. It’s a way of life.

The guys with the ties

Dead in the center of industrial nowhere
The guys with ties pull up in their new cars
Expecting me to stand behind
The products that they’re selling
Never telling me exactly what they are
Could the guys with the ties
Explain or understand… why?
No, I don’t see how they can
Their eyes have tunnel vision
And glow a fiery red
All systems go, full steam ahead

Don’t cry, little boy, it’s alright
Take it like a man
Invest in our 401K plan

And late at night you can hear the sound
Of new necks being strangled
As fresh blood is recruited in their clan

Dear Mr. Melting Heart
We heard what you’ve been saying
And we don’t appreciate your damning tone
We’ve told you once before
You leave that “free speech” at the door
When you’re on our clock and in our corporate zone

[part that’s not written yet]

I don’t believe in evil
But I don’t believe they care
Look in their eyes
There’s nobody there

P.S. We’ll still be here long after your demise
Sincerely yours, the guys with the ties

Women and children first

Above is the list of song-projects that I have to, one by one, “rescue” — that is, mix down into logical submixes in Cool Edit (left monitor) in order to be used in other software on my Mac (right monitor). As you can see, I’m pleased to say that as of now, a whole mess of ‘em have been taken care of and crossed off. If you look really close and see “STD” next to some of them, that stands for “safe to delete”. (I don’t know what else you would think it stood for; just wanted to make sure we’re on the same page here.)

I’m down to 17 remaining songs, which is less than half of what was on the list. When my Windows box decides to stop postponing the inevitable, it won’t take my songs down with it. Not to mention, once I get them into something like Tracktion, I’m working so much faster, not having to wait for effects to render and so on. So I can get them mixed down and uploaded before my enthusiasm runs dry. Like, for example, this whiny-yet-moving oldie:

Thank you, thank you. That was Have You Heard the Good News?, recorded in 1996, and for a lot of people a high point on Unfinished Business. Kim Pinegar, who is a way more positive and upbeat person than I am, sang backup.

How to turn a table lamp into a ceiling light

Or, “unemployment is the mother of truly desperate invention”.

No, it’s not that dark in here — I used a fast shutter speed so you could see more detail on the light itself.

Hanging behind it on the end of the flourescent fixture — which I refuse to use — are a Christmas toy soldier ornament, and some kind of clay insect thing that supposedly brings good luck. (Maybe I should have paid more attention to season 4, episode 73 of the Brady Bunch, in which Bobby finds an evil tiki that causes Greg’s surfing wipe-out, a visit from a large, hairy spider, and a back injury for Alice.)

Speaking of things that are evil and bring bad luck, here is a not necessarily final but not terribly rough either mix of Tea Time Pow Wow:

New discography page!

This is just a heads up to my peeps that I’m setting up a discography on this website, to outline just about everything I’ve ever recorded. For now, there’s just a main page, which will feature one sample track per album, as well as cover art and a blurb.  Eventually those will link to individual album pages where you can listen to a lot more music (maybe all of it) and read factoids about individual songs. Sure, it’s egotistical to assume you want to do that — but there are six billion of you out there, and all I need are a few nutcases to validate my existence.

The link to my discography will permanently reside thataway, over yonder, in the sidebar on the right, near the top of the page. If your mouse hand is lazy enough to shame your ancestors, you can just click here instead. Or here. Yes, I’m just repeating the same link, so you can click on whichever one “feels best” to you. No, the page ain’t done, but you can look at what I’ve got so far to get the general idea.

Some of you may notice that, to this day, there still has been no resolution to the long-standing controversy over exactly what the cover art for Leave of Absence consists of. Hang in there, babies. Captain Keith always comes up with some ingenious solution at the last minute.