Keith Handy 1.999

Look ma, no bubbles

Now that I’ve taken out the trash…

Strangest thing about my old auto-morphing code that I’ve had a couple of demos up for (also on youtube): it’s had an incredibly stupid bug in it all this time, that I would never have noticed if I wasn’t just staring at the code mindlessly. It was transitioning smoothly from picture to picture, but there seemed to be an excessive amount of white or light gray circular areas that would unnecessarily billow up before resolving to the next keyframe. Everything was working correctly except for there was this line of code that I copied and pasted and didn’t finish changing it the way I’d intended to, so instead of getting the data for a, b, c, and d, it was getting “b” twice and leaving “a” at zero.

The reason it didn’t totally cause it to malfunction outright? To interpolate, it takes the data from not two, but four pictures. The keyframe just before the current frame is called “b”, the one just before that is called “a”, the one right after the current frame is called “c”, and the one right after that is called “d”. So you’ve got a, b, c, and d, and the thing you’re filling in is somewhere between b and c.

The reason it uses info going that far back and forward is so that I can make the data curve as it goes along. It’s called a spline curve, when the computer sort of “improvises” a curve to fit an arbitrary set of points, and in order to know how the curve is shaped, you want to know where at least a couple extra points are beyond the ones you’re between. Well, since “a” was treated as though it were all zeros, it would come out of “b” at the right place but at the wrong angle. So the data would always have sort of an “upward lurch” at the beginning of the transitions, thus making all those white and light gray bubbles.

Here is a demo video of a transition sequence that works the way I meant it to.

(Is this the same Keith Handy guy that does the music, or am I at the wrong website?)

Keep singing

Before I can write anything with a clear head, let me exorcise myself of the residual anger at some recent youtube comments. It seems like these jerks only target the cover songs, because they idolize their rock stars and get offended when you don’t sound exactly like them. It took me decades to get over my own mother telling me I probably shouldn’t sing (when I was 15). There’s something fundamentally wrong with telling anyone they shouldn’t do something, and singing (or anything you do that reveals some incredibly personal aspect of yourself, including the limitations of your own physical body) takes a lot of courage, period. I want to tell these jerks I sure hope they’re not parents or teachers.

What could be more creatively inhibiting than this rule: don’t open your mouth unless you’re sure something beautiful will come out. Don’t put your paintbrush to the canvas unless you can promise to not make something ugly. Don’t touch, try, or do anything unless you’re guaranteed not to fail. Modern society does not encourage creativity, because it does not encourage screwing up, missing a note, making a mistake, inviting criticism. (Actually, criticism, when it really is criticism, is fine. But this is rare.)

(Above screenshot illustrates the Dunning-Kruger effect)

I need to remind myself that when they tell me “you suck, you shouldn’t sing”, etc. — yes, there is some concrete basis for it, as they are responding to some strain in my voice that really is there, which in fact a lot of people will resonate with and hear as passion — what they’re predominantly doing is projecting their own repression onto me. They’re afraid to sing. They’re afraid to try. No truly talented singer who has put a lot of work into developing their skill would use such destructive put-downs.

Knowing this intellectually doesn’t change the fact that immediately after reading such a comment, when I pick up a guitar and try to “sing it off”, I feel some paranoia about the kinds of similarly rotten thoughts people just outside my window must be having about what they can hear of me. Some people outside the window are repressed and will have those thoughts. So fuck them, right? Intellectually, no problem. Emotionally it always requires a re-aligning of self esteem before I can be “in my game” again.

I’ve often told people that a defining moment in my life was listening to Dark Side of the Moon for the first time when I was about eleven years old… but possibly even more defining was listening to Ummagumma. To this day I think it’s a pretty awful album, and all the more awful by Dark Side standards. But instead of thinking of it as a finished product, I now think of it as a sneak peek into the process, the raw material, the stuff under the hood, the grotesquely imperfect underbelly of a band figuring themselves out. It’s “crap” like Ummagumma that reminds you that you can start with this and get to that. A friend once told me he thought bands should never put stuff like that out. None of the musicians themselves are particularly proud of it, for that matter. But it’s this kind of unwitting open-sourcing of process that helps us to break down the invisible force-field between ourselves and our own potential. Would you go back in time and tell them “don’t put out Ummagumma — in fact, don’t put out anything until you’re good — just sit there for three years until your masterpiece appears”?

A lot of people don’t want to break down that force field. They believe that it’s good to maintain a clear dividing line between entertainers and consumers. CDs are things that magically appear in the store, all shiny and shrink-wrapped, and regular people don’t make them. They’re afraid that if they humanize the people who created those CDs, or de-mystify the process, they will spoil the magic of the music. This couldn’t be farther from the truth, because the more you study and examine everything that goes into making music, the more magical and mysterious it actually becomes.

Anyway, singing in particular is a hard horse to get back onto when somebody knocks you off. You’ve just let somebody kick you where you’re extremely vulnerable. But you have to take it — you have to get back on the horse. Their envy that you can sing at all is more painful (and lasting) than the brief sting of being told something you know isn’t true.

If Karma were merely a bitch…

When we first start believing in Karma — or at least in the broad general idea which basically is Karma, minus the flaky, bead-wearing, tie-dying, lava-lamping K-word — we think, “oh, that’s simple. Just do good things for other people, and then my life will improve.” Because for some reason we think while it’s really hard to do good things for ourselves, it’s somehow really easy to do good things for other people.

First of all… why do we think this?? I’m not talking about the act of putting aside one’s selfishness, which may be difficult in its own right. But suppose we’ve got that part nailed, we’re totally willing to be empathic, and psyched to give up that precious half hour out of our life to do some kind of good deed. Why do we think the good deed itself will be easy? As long as it’s not for us, it should be easy, we rationalize, because our judgement isn’t clouded by that person’s biases and short range whims. As if there wasn’t a much bigger cloud to deal with… the fact that we have absolutely no fucking idea what will make somebody else happy.

We could just randomly give stuff away, and randomly give time to other people. But that does no good if the people don’t like the stuff (or time) we’re giving them, especially if it’s stuff that we thought they’d like because we liked it, and now it’s totally going to waste because they have it and not us, and we’d sooner spend the next 20 years wishing they’d appreciate it than simply ask to have it back.

We don’t really know what other people need or want, because while they’ll be very vocal about short-range needs and wants (I want to go home and lie down, I want ice cream, etc.), people tend to be secretive about the things they really want, the big-picture long-haul things, the things they want the most. We guard our deepest desires as if they were dark secrets, occasionally letting a small sliver out to stand as the official public version of The Dream, and then we’re frustrated when well-meaning people see the tip as the iceberg, and try to help us entirely on that basis. (In fact, we get so good at this that we wind up hiding our desires from ourselves.)

The lead character in Wonderfalls grudgingly accepts the cryptic missions handed off to her by various inanimate animal faces, which ultimately lead to her helping somebody in some way. Along the way, she gets only a vague idea of what she’s doing for anyone, but by the end the real purpose (more ironic yet somehow less strange) to the madness reveals itself. Why isn’t she allowed to know until the end exactly what it is she’s accomplishing for them? Is it that, given a detailed plan and explanation, we would fuck it up by trying to take a shortcut, but as long as we’re only given hints at a time, we’ll stay on course? Or is it just the sheer randomness of life, whereby we can always have happy endings if we define every happy moment as an “ending” of some kind? Is it all down to where we draw the barlines, how we frame the shot, when we shut off the video camera or audio recorder, and/or when we end the conversation? Or is there such thing as actually doing something better?

We know when we’ve helped or inspired someone. They often let us know in glowing terms, and even when they don’t, we can “feel” it in a strange cosmic way. The thing to remember is that, like anything we do, some attempts to help or inspire people will fail. Possibly the vast majority. So while we may get some points for trying, we get a hell of a lot more points for succeeding. Simply putting in the half hour won’t do it — Karma doesn’t pay in hourly wages — we actually have to get the golf ball into the hole.

To make lots of money (one kind of karmic return, at first glance less mystical than most, but no less confounding) the supposed right way, we need to not only provide value to society — which is up to everyone but us to appraise — but actually enjoy doing it, so that it doesn’t kill us. Not to be cynical, but it seems like we either need to appeal to dumb people (because there are so many) or rich people (because we can charge more). I have no idea where the intersection lies between exactly what I can happily do and what people will pay for. There has to be an “a-ha!” moment, but there also have to be a hell of a lot of “hang in there” moments.

I’m pretty sure that my “a-ha!” moment won’t steer me 180 degrees away from my current direction (go into real estate, health care, or the priesthood) so much as add some missing ingredient (more visuals, more collaboration, more how-to). I call it “a 20 to 30 degree turn”. On a 2-D surface, this would give a fairly small set of options; on a 3-D surface it would be quite a bit more, but still, if I stretched out my tunnel vision to be more cone-shaped, I could manage to spot the answer pretty quickly. Life, however, is more like 100-D. The nature of the shift I need is probably not currently in my conscious mind, but once I look back at it, I’ll be saying, “well, duh”.

So how many possibilities are there to scour through in that 100-dimension 20 to 30 degree slice of everything? I don’t know. But I’m gonna put those guitar bits away for a while and play with Moho.

Our cushions never clash…

I made my vocal pitch graphing a little easier to read visually by de-saturating the quiet parts, i.e. graying the spaces between notes where the line on the pitch graph doesn’t mean anything and is just connecting the dots. So the bright colored columns are where the syllables happen. The idea will be that you can then open it in a graphic editor, mark it up where you want it tuned, re-save it, and have another program “read” your squiggles and go from there. The meta-idea being that I’ll have an alternative to Autotune to rein pitch into the general vicinity without flatlining it (killing the nuance and vibrato, and destorying emotive pitch scoops and fall-offs). I’m already doing this anyway, but this should help make it less tedious. Of course, you can do this with Autotune if you’re not lazy. But I’m not just lazy — I’m also poor.

Ethics? Learn to sing? Practice more? Do more takes? Bah.

I did have a fairly productive week last week, as I promised, and now I’m extending that promise to have a productive week this week too, even though it’s half over. Well, that’s okay (it being half over), because the pitch thing should be useful. In my remixing projects I keep coming to these points where my ears are fatiguing too quickly to be confident of the vocal pitch. I never have a problem getting it to sound good on big, loud speakers, when I have all that bass and stuff to support me; it’s the little, quiet speakers that taunt and heckle me.

But I digress! Last week, did a halfway decent rhythm guitar part to my ode to selling out, Curtis’ Classic Collection of Comforts — which is meant to evoke a train wreck without actually being one — and video’d it for posterity. I may also revive a similar but much older rhythm guitar take, from an earlier attempt at the song, back when I was a Stratocasterist, to combine with the newer take (dueling me’s!). It was a different version altogether, so if I do that, I’ll no doubt have to Frankentempo it (Feel that vocabulary s-t-r-e-t-c-h!), as in cut it up and slide bits to and fro.

Tip for the intermittently depressed: the thing that will make you feel better may not be a completely new idea or epiphany, 180 degrees away from whatever you’re whining about focused on — it’s more likely something about 20 to 30 degrees off the edge of your peripheral vision, something you’re aware of but haven’t been consciously thinking about. Beyond that, there’s always the next weather change to look forward to. (Thunderstorms are cool.) In the meantime, drink water and eat something healthy.

Chronically depressed: you’re on your own. Get pills.

If you build a better vocal pitch grapher…

Workin’ on it… middle of the yellow row is C, middle of the green row is D, and so on…

So you want to make an album? (part 17)

Note #1: the word “band” in this installment refers not to a hodge-podge of long-haired freaks, but rather to a slice of the audible spectrum, as in “ten band equalizer”.

Note #2: I’m thinking about how to do re-do the image for this post. Obviously most of the images in this series are temporary placeholders, for copyright reasons. But this one in particular might be a real turn-off, even just for the blog. (Not to mention the faux-pas of having the salad fork on the inside.) Just be aware that I was primarily trying to merge some of the concepts in the article, using simple images, and the overall effect is a little more gruesome than I expected.

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

Installment 17: Dissecting the spectrum

Why did we all dissect frogs in biology class? We couldn’t have forseen it at the time, but in retrospect, it turned out to be a real advantage once the time came to build a GIANT DEADLY LASER-TONGUED ROBOT FROG to unleash on our enemies. Would you want your master plan to backfire on you just because you put the cloaca where the glottis was supposed to go? I didn’t think so.

Although it will benefit your album to conduct similar experiments on songs that already exist, the tools for dissecting music don’t work quite the same way. You can’t, say, carve out the funky rhythm guitar and set it neatly on a paper towel next to the song. Equalizers dissect the music in cross sections, as if you sliced your frog cross-ways like a salami. Some organs may be small enough to remain intact in a single slice, but larger organs will be split between two or three slices, and then things like the spine, muscles, and skin will be distributed among all the slices. (If all this is making you sick, just pretend this frog is actually the guy who invented car alarms, but he’s been put under a terrible thousand-year spell by a sleep-deprived witch.)

The first equalizer most of us ever played with only had two bands (regions of the spectrum that you can adjust); many home or car stereos, in lieu of something actually labeled “eq”, have a pair of knobs labeled bass and treble — which is still an equalizer. There’s generally a large gap in the spectrum between these two bands, so you can effectively adjust the midrange by turning both bass and treble up and down together, and then re-adjusting the overall volume. Hopefully, you already have a feel for how to use these. If not, play with them. And not conservatively — set them at extreme positions, and listen for a while.

Done with that? Good, now take off your training wheels and hop onto the ten-gear, er, I mean, ten-band. Let’s look at a typical set of bands again (the exact frequencies on yours may deviate from this):

30 - 60 - 125 - 250 - 500 - 1000 - 2000 - 4000 - 8000 - 16000

Each number tells you the frequency in the center of that band, but that slider will affect frequencies below and above it to progressively lesser degrees, somewhat overlapping the range of the next band over. On a ten-band equalizer, the spectrum is divided up into about one octave per band. That’s because our hearing range is approximately ten octaves. As I said in the last installment, each octave is double the pitch of the octave below it, so as you go from band to band, the frequency approximately (if not exactly) doubles. Some equalizers of this type split the spectrum into more bands: 15, 20, or even 30. While easy to understand visually, these are more time-consuming to adjust. So other types of equalizers and filters have been invented, such as parametric equalizers and FFT filters, to give you more precise control with fewer parameters — but since those require more experience to use effectively, we’ll stick to an ordinary ten-band for now.

Most musical sounds will be spread over several of these bands. This is partly due to the range of the instrument, but also due to its harmonic content. A single note on an instrument, played all by itself, doesn’t just contain energy at one frequency — that note contains many harmonics, also called overtones, which are higher than the note itself (the fundamental), and give the sound its color, character, or timbre. In most cases, these overtones are exact whole-number multiples of the fundamental, and they don’t sound like extra notes, because you just hear them as part of that note’s sound.

If you’re a guitarist, you might know that you can isolate harmonics by touching the string at certain points while you play it. It’s important to realize that those higher pitches are actually in the note regardless; if you listen carefully while alternating between playing the harmonic and playing the open string normally, you can hear that those higher tones were in there all along. All you’re really doing is muting some of the harmonics, including the fundamental, so that other harmonics are now more prominent.

So if you have a recording with an unwanted note in it, at about 250 Hz — this would be close to the open B string on a guitar — you could try to remove that note by cutting the 250 Hz band on your equalizer, but that would still leave its overtones at 500 Hz, 750 Hz, 1000 Hz, 1250 Hz, and so on. Just from hearing all those harmonics, your brain will fill in the phantom fundamental and you’ll still perceive it as the same note, albeit more trebly. This is not to say you could never use filtering to soften a ringing open string on a sloppily-played guitar track, but its use for that type of thing is limited and difficult. (I’ve done this in extreme circumstances, by making four or five very narrow cuts on an FFT filter, right where the first few harmonics are, since they’re generally the loudest.)

The best way to think of equalization, though, is as an overall sound-shaper. When you split the sound into those ten (or however many) bands, you can think of them as “parts of the sound”, but you have to think of those “parts” in a different way than as specific instruments. There are no “good parts” and “bad parts” — though the average consumer is more likely to buy a stereo (or a CD) if they hear proportionately more extreme bass (below 50 Hz) and extreme treble (above 8 KHz), the meat of your music — melody and harmony (remember those?) — is always somewhere in the middle, and you do more or less want to give your listener a balanced meal, right?

Get to know the spectrum. I’ll introduce you to a few slices of it, but then you need to go and play with an equalizer and form your own mental relationship with it. All the numbers below are “general areas”, and there is no hard-fast cutoff point where one really begins and another ends, so don’t try to memorize so much as get the general idea.

Like I said, below 50 Hz is super-low bass, the kind that some drivers like to generously share with us while they still have their hearing. The 100 Hz area is still bassy, but not so bassy that most males couldn’t sing it. If you have a track with a higher pitched instrument, like a flute, and that same track has some unwanted rumbling on it, you can cut these lowest frequencies to get rid of the rumbling without hurting the instrument.

100-300 is what I might call upper bass or low midrange, important because a lot of fundamentals are happening here, as well as the “oomph” of the snare drum (its lowest tone, the part of it that you can almost “feel”, although snare drums have energy across pretty much the whole spectrum). Too much of this will sound muddy, but too little will sound hollow.

Going from there to about 1000 Hz will take you to the tippy-top of the female singing range, and many of the highest notes on ordinary instruments such as a guitar.

Most of what you hear above 1000 Hz are overtones from lower notes, which are very important to the character of those notes. If you listen to speech through a band centered at about 2000 Hz, it sounds like it’s through a bullhorn. Through a 4000 Hz band, it sounds more like a telephone. These are important “parts” of the voice, though, and if you removed them, the voice would sound muffled. These upper-midrange areas are what we normally think of when we say “tinny” or “mid-rangey”, and the “bite” at the top of an electric guitar is generally in here.

When you get to about 8000 Hz and up, this is where the cymbals mostly are, the sibilance (”ssss”) and breath on vocals, and the clarity of acoustic guitars. Some darker or more mid-rangey sounds, like bass guitars and electric guitars, don’t have much going on in this range, so it’s easy to remove annoying hiss from those tracks just by cutting the highest frequencies. Also if you took the sound directly out of a distortion pedal without using an amp, you might cut these highs just to make it warmer and less fuzzy. You can sometimes liven up a dull sound by increasing this, but watch out for hiss.

In the actual practice of recording your own music, you will first want to try to get your sounds right as you go. But we all make mistakes, and in those cases you can sometimes improve a track by equalizing it. Equalization is also used on entire mixes, subtly and carefully, as part of the mastering process.

Your homework is to go on a date with an equalizer, with hopefully ten bands, or close to it. It can be an old-skool physical beast, or it can be the one that comes with iTunes, Winamp, or whatever. You’re not going to use it on this outing, you’re just going to get to know it. Bring your favorite romantic music — preferably something with drums and electric bass, and then maybe some acoustic songs on it. Turn all the bands down low, and then one at a time, turn a band all the way up by itself (if it’s too loud, turn the overall volume down) and just listen to it. What’s in there? What part of the sound is in that part of the spectrum? What does it mean to you aesthetically, and how does it make up part of the big picture? Leave that band on long enough to hear how much of the drums come through, and how much of the other instruments come through. Then turn it down and go on to the next band, and do the same. Don’t be in a hurry… just listen, and sort of meditate on the “slice of sound” that you’re listening to. Don’t play favorites or give preferential treatment; remember, they all go together to make up the music you know and love.

Next, set all the bands to their normal position, and this time, cut one band at a time. If you’re wearing headphones or have small speakers, you might have trouble hearing the difference when you cut the very lowest one — if so, don’t worry about it too much. Then bring it back to normal and cut the next one. What’s missing from the overall sound now? Do this for all the bands. Get a feel for what it’s like when energy is missing in each part of the spectrum. As you do this, there may well be times when you find yourself actually liking some of the cuts better than the original sound. Please don’t say you’re going to cut that band out of every song you ever do for the rest of your life! You may have a tendency to get emotional, but you and the equalizer are just friends.

When the date is over, thank the equalizer, and in a polite, rational way, say “I plan to use you from time to time, but I’m going to be using other tools as well. It’s nothing personal.” The equalizer will actually respect you more for this, and your recordings will reflect the sophistication of this relationship.

The song that you sliced up like a salami may not be quite as happy. Hey, what can I say, that’s science for you.

*Ribbit*