Keith Handy 1.999

Sampling 101

Congratulations to long-time Handyfan Jeremy C. Ellis for submitting the closest (a.k.a. “only”) guess as to what my next video would be about! I hinted that the first two letters were “S” and “A”, and Mr. Ellis ventured “salad“. In a way, Jeremy is right… if you think of it as a salad of sampling!

The two main ingredients in this week’s salad are: a set of orchestra bells, and a common rubber band. (Learn the trick that sets the pro ‘bandists apart from the amateurs!) It’s topped off with a dash of my odd personality and musical know-how-what-when-why. (And it took way too long to edit — but hey, all’s well that ends well.)

Jeremy: you have until midnight 6/20/07 to claim your prize. What? That was last week? Ah, better luck next time!

Happy 100 hits, “Soul Peer”

Thank you, hundredth viewer of my Soul Peer demo/performance on YouTube. See, it pays to whine now and then. :)

I know 100 people could fit in the room I’m sitting in (well, not comfortably, and not without breaking fire code regulations), and I’m sure a few of those are multiple views from the same people (which is fine too) — but every power of ten, every digit, that’s one order of magnitude (I think — I don’t know the exact definition of “order of magnitude”, but that’s what I like to think it means) in the right direction. And when you’re a reclusive hermit doing original music in a saturated market, each new digit is a milestone. Next destination: a thousand. And so on. Toppermost of the poppermost and all that.

I was almost about to comment on this as I saw it getting close, but I didn’t want to be one of those annoying punks saying “go to such-and-such site and vote for our band”, as if whatever other bands they were up against weren’t human beings with friends, families, or genius of their own.

Of course I’m already a multi-thousandaire (and have been for some time) in the classical genre with Moonlight Sonata. It seems to be a hit with guitarists, many of whom apparently want tablature now, which I don’t even know how to do with all those bends and glides. So if you’re reading this, you’re a guitarist, and you like transcribing half-improvised lead guitar performances in tablature format, please go for it — the demand is there.

My expectations for the most recent “what I do in my studio” video were quite low, since I didn’t figure watching reels of tape being threaded would be terribly visually appealing, but apparently some people are making it through all three parts. So I’ll continue to do stuff like that, including my forthcoming secret surprise. I already told you it’s about something beginning with the letter “S”… well, the second letter in that word is “A”.

Sentimental treasures

While you’re waiting for my next exciting instructional video (I won’t tell you what it’s about yet, but it’s something that begins with the letter “S”… What? No, not “sex”, you moron…), I’d like to point you to a May post I just found on Matrixsynth that whisked me back to a personal yesteryear. Someone named Ron has posted the audio from several “soundpages”, the thin, flexible records that were included in issues of Keyboard Magazine in the mid 1980s, right around the time when I was reading it fervently.

I used to make mix tapes from these records, so I could listen to them more passively, and give some of the weirder and more experimental stuff a chance to inject itself into my subconscious. Although any collection like this is bound to be incomplete, there was a lot more overlap than I expected between what’s here and what I remember. A few of them are B-sides featuring ads for Kurzweil and Kawai instruments, which are fun in an “OMG the 80s were actually quaint” kind of way. Do you remember when announcers didn’t all sound like vomiting teenagers on speed? (Incidentally, last I knew — back when I watched television — Paul Shaffer was using that Kurzweil on Letterman’s show.  For its time it was admittedly pretty hot… but one of the demos here, subtitled “Rock Block”, features some of the least-convincing “guitars” I’ve ever heard.  Ah, who cares, rock was dead anyway.) One of the soundpages even featured my favorite columnist, Freff, whose way-off-topic articles on creativity I still keep copies of today — although, truthfully, that particular record is kind of corny, and I cringe a bit to envision it as your introduction to him.

If you want to hear these, but don’t like Windows Media files, let me know, because as soon as I downloaded them I immediately converted them to mp3 and gave them proper tags. Now if only somebody could post that mix cassette I stole from a house party in college, declared to be “stupid”, and promptly became addicted to, until it found its way into the laundry, care of a careless family member who shall not be named… sigh… they do hand all that stuff back to you when you check into the afterlife, right?  (Uh, Keith… no, not if it was stolen. HTH.)

P.S. - If you want one more hint about the upcoming video… it’s sort of relevant to this post… in a way.

Geeky “what I do” video

Heads up: you can now watch parts one, two, and three of my newest YouTube experiment, in which I demonstrate how I restore an old multitrack recording. There should probably be at least one more part forthcoming, when I put the final touches on the song.

The guinea pig for this experiment is Nicole’s Thoughts (featuring Kim Pinegar), the final track from my rock opera, Through Forbidden Black Doors. There’s no particular reason I chose it for this presentation, other than the fact that it was one of the remaining few that had not yet been transferred from the original reels into the computer. When the remixing is done, I’ll upload the song too, to give some context to all those little fragments you hear in the video.

I have absolutely no idea how boring this ultimately is; all I know is that filming it was extremely challenging on many levels, including (but not limited to): keeping busy with the camera breathing down my neck, speaking coherently while in my “flow state”, whittling the hours I spend on this kind of thing down to a digestible half hour, and managing to edit it in a way that helps you understand what you’re looking at, what you’re hearing, and what I’m doing with it. (Oh, yeah, and holding the camera steady too — thanks for pointing that out, Mom and Dad.) I’m not sure I succeeded at any of this.

It’s not totally dry, mind you; in fact, it kind of reveals how “by the seat of my pants” my working process is. Problems arise that might not have if I were more self-disciplined in the first place, but I deal with them — okay, I eventually deal with them — and move on. In that sense, there’s a wee bit of the human factor. That said, though, I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone who didn’t at least have some interest in the tedious realities of recording.

So who am I to tell you not to watch it? Enjoy!

The barbed wire fence stretches on

Apologies to anyone (particularly myself) whose sensibilities are being tested with my recent rant and subsequent follow-ups. Let me make this clear: I’ve never wanted to “rise above you”. I want to take you up there with me. A good thing becomes a bad thing if it’s not in a good place, so I’ve shifted my concern from the work itself to its context, or environment, which has been neglected. The where, as opposed to the what. It’s just hard to discuss this without making a zillion little disclaimers for everyone that’s out to seek and destroy prima donnas.

An angle I still haven’t mentioned with regard to the barbed wire fence of fame (I can’t call it a “wall of fame”, because that has an entirely different meaning — which is fine, because I’m burned out on the “wall” metaphor anyway) is how it impacts our relationship to music itself. Correct me if I’m wrong, but we seem to have a much easier time forming a relationship with music when we don’t have a real relationship with the people who created it. I don’t know why that is; maybe knowing the person kills the mystique. Maybe it’s because we feel safer surrendering ourselves to music when we know it’s in a “fixed” state, because otherwise we’re afraid we might influence it (we don’t trust ourselves). Or maybe it’s simply that fully forming both relationships, to the person and their music, is overkill, and too much for any person to handle. Yet again, maybe all of this was a lot less true when music was live and communal, and didn’t magically spring forth from electronic boxes. In any case, the detachment from the person seems to actually help the music to shine through.

Wouldn’t anonymity help even more, then? Apparently not — even though the artist must remain untouchable, we have to form the internal hallucination of a relationship, a sense that we “know” the artist; but this apparent relationship is just our concept of the artist, which remains entirely under our control. It helps that we can easily overlook his worst characteristics. If we hear that the artist is rotten to his spouse or children, we can write it off as defamation from a vindictive journalist; and then when we hear that the same person has done something noble, we take it as fact. This is a lot harder to do when you live with someone and see that person every day.

What we really want to do with music, whether we’re the creators or just the listeners, is surrender to it. We’re handing ourselves over to it and letting it have its way with us, and this is an extreme act of trust. Otherwise we’re just hearing sound, which is outside of ourselves, and has nothing to do with us.

More on “the other F-word”

As little things come into my life and my mind that feel like positive or hopeful responses to the fairly dark emotions I had while writing my “fame” post, I’ll do these little updates. Hopefully they will be helpful to more people than just me.

1. I’m not having another “dark night of the soul”. Not that you could tell just from reading that I was actually worried about going there, but I already went through that in the early 90s, and the only thing I can experience now is occasional re-living of certain feelings. Flashbacks, you could call them.

2. What triggered this, besides all the obvious time on my hands, was re-watching the Brian Wilson SMiLE documentary, and then watching part of the Led Zeppelin DVD to snap myself out of the empathic descent into Brian’s mental instability. The reason his name didn’t come up among the others is that it’s impossible to feel envy for a life like his. There are probably similar reasons why I shouldn’t envy anyone else either.

3. Something that didn’t come up in my rant was my frustration that there has always appeared to be an invisible barrier between the people I normally interact with and the people who have had so much influence on the musical end of my life. The fact that my heroes are untouchable and unknowable beyond everything I’ve already taken from them on the CDs. This would seem in direct contradiction to my “they love people” statement, but I think what I mean is, for purely a reason of numbers, they do have to go to greater lengths than the average person to keep whatever parts of their lives they choose private. And also because of those numbers, as much as they “love” their fans (when they do), they can rarely form more than a one-dimensional concept of the individuals that form that cloud. Which kind of leaves you feeling one-dimensionalized.

4. Ask this question: without asking for specific feedback, in general, how would your heroes feel about your right to at least try to build on what they’ve done and take it to the next level? Some might feel very clingy to the status that they’ve attained for themselves, in which case, they’re immature and you should stop giving them the time of day. Others might be indifferent — they did it for the money, they got their money, you do what you want and good luck. Others still might actually hope that people like you are out there trying to do that, and would feel honored to know they not only achieved some name for themselves, but were actually able to contribute something even larger to the world by way of passing on the torch, regardless of how seemingly obscure your current role in the universe is. Even if you don’t know which of them fall into which category, doesn’t it make sense to assume that at least some of them fall into the third — and in those moments where you’re too discouraged to press on for yourself, press on for them?

A friend of mine just shared the “Who’s Next” edition of the Classic Albums series with me, and this comment from Pete Townshend struck a helpful-feeling note with me:

Won’t Get Fooled Again was not a defiant statement, it was a plea… it was a plea. Please don’t end this story, please don’t feel that because you’ve come to this concert, because you’ve come to this place that you’ve got an answer. Please don’t make me on the stage the new boss, ’cause I’m just the same as the guy who was up here before. You’re in charge.

(Several instances of “y’know” omitted.)

Kind of reminds me of Monty Python’s Life of Brian.