The Light of Day

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*

Two links and a random question

First of all, a couple of links.

Soundsnap is a site where you can upload and download lots of sounds. The terms are that you don’t have to pay for any of them, or even give credit, as long as you’re using them in something and not just redistributing the raw sounds to make money off of them. I signed up for a user account there, and have uploaded three odd sounds that happened to be collecting virtual dust on my hard drive. People actually seem to be downloading them, so it will be interesting one day to hear one of my boings or bleeps in an unexpected context.

Freelance Switch is a blog for people making the jump to freelancing. Notbythehour.com, which is associated with Freelance Switch, features a free PDF book about creating passive income streams. Say no to wage slavery.

Random thought: something that’s been bugging me for years now. A while back, I was browsing through a pamphlet listing “continuing education” type courses available in the area. One course was called something like “How to completely disappear without a trace and not be found by anyone, ever”. Another course was called “How to find absolutely anyone, anywhere in the world, no matter what”. They were both taught by the same instructor. Obviously they both draw from the same pool of concepts. The unavoidable question, keeping me awake every night for years until my brain a-splode, is this: Who wins? Shouldn’t at least one of the courses be subtitled, “unless they took my other course”?

General update 7/16/07

Just to let y’all know, I took a vow of silence and shaved my head. Well, no, actually I didn’t shave my head. Or take a vow of silence for that matter. That’s just what we authors call a “hook”, to reel you in and make you want to read the rest of the post. Bet you’re excited now!

Gosh, normally when I write these things, I have a fairly specific topic to write about. It’s almost harder to just let my hair hang down and say “yo peeps, wazzap”. Let’s seeeeee… well, my first order of business this week is to finish up a special sound design project for an animation Mike is working on — not his animation this time ’round, but one his studio has been commissioned to do all the work on. This one has some girlies in it. When it came to audio, they had the good sense to sub-hire my acoustitransgenderaural talent for fakin’ the girlies. And so, I’m fakin’ the girlies.

Then, the rest of the week is rather unplanned. So I’d better put a stick in it right now before another week of my life goes by. One thought that came to me is that this would be a swell time to film myself doing some more electric guitar work, to simultaneously flaunt my rock star skills and my petite figure. (Not quite a six pack, but a small keg will give you just as good a buzz anyway. Um… okay, this analogy dies here. NOW.) I’ve noticed I actually get a few more youtube hits when the video involves some kind of “instruction” or “how to” angle than when it’s just “listen to my new song! …please listen to my new song!!”. I would put up a “how I write songs” video if it featured more than me scribbling on a sheet of paper and singing the same part of a verse over and over again. When they invent the “in-brain” cameras I’ll reconsider the idea.

I’m pretty sure my next “so you want” installment will be about equalizers, since I kind of opened the door to that when I talked about how the frequencies are laid out… and it would be really helpful too, to discuss what kinds of sounds are happening in what ranges, and why brighter sounds take up more of the spectrum than duller sounds do, etc. (and why this matters to you).

These days I have two mice. Ralph (”Ralphie”) is the small brown wild mouse that emerged out of nowhere and moved into the cage several months ago, and Emily Junior is a half-white, half-dark-gray fancy mouse with a dog-like patch over one eye, the only surviving one from the last group of three I took home from Pet Saver. They get along really well. Since I have two nearly-identical cages (built myself out of wire mesh and plastic storage units), I clean whichever one they’re not in, and then transfer the mice. Problem is, Ralph won’t let me go anywhere near him (her, actually), so I generally let him (her) out until he (she) eventaully wanders over to the clean cage and gets in voluntarily. This didn’t go so smoothly a few days ago, because Ralph kept wandering around aimlessly, spending most of the time up in the window. A bit of adventure we had. Eventually she accidentally trapped herself by falling into a long cardboard box, and I dumped her into the cage.

How have y’all been? Shoot me some mad science! Or whatever the popular expression is these days!

So you want to make an album? (part 16)

To read the entire series, do what yo momma told you. Er, I mean, follow the link.

Installment 16: Math is loud (or “I got logarithm”… or something)

All the spiritual and psychological stuff I’ve been pontificating on, as valuable as it is, does not negate the fact that there are a few hard, cold math concepts you should know if you want to get the most out of recording. I’ll try to explain a couple of important points, in the most human terms possible. If you only vaguely understand this the first time through, refer back to it later, as it becomes more practical than theoretical.

To better understand two very basic aspects of sound — amplitude, and pitch — it’s helpful, if not essential, to know what a logarithm is. You may not need to know what goes on under the hood of your equipment, but you absolutely need to understand that human beings perceive amplitude and pitch in a logarithmic way, as opposed to a linear way.

A logarithmic scale is sort of like a distorted lens through which all multiplication has been “translated” into addition, and all division has been “translated” into subtraction. In other words, every time you multiply a real, actual value by a constant amount, you are adding a constant amount to its logarithm.

Hang in there. You’re gonna be okay.

We measure amplitude in “decibels“, abbreviated as “dB”. When we describe the difference between the loudest and quietest things we can record, that’s called “dynamic range”, and it’s measured in decibels. A typical dynamic range for a digital recording device might be 90 dB, for example. But what does that mean?

Amplitude is relative. If one sound is twice as loud as another sound in the same recording — that is, if the waveform appears twice as high on your screen — it will always be twice as loud, no matter how loud or soft you have your overall volume set to. So it’s not meaningful to say sound A is “some number of watts more” than sound B. It’s only meaningful to say it’s something times as loud, or some percent as loud. However, we can say sound A is some number of decibels more than sound B, because a decibel is a logarithmic (there’s that word again) unit. This means whenever you increase or decrease the amplitude of something by a certain number of decibels, you are actually multiplying and dividing the height of that waveform by a certain amount.

For recording purposes, it’s best to remember this rule of thumb: any time you double the height of the waveform on your screen, you’re increasing its amplitude by approximately six decibels. To help hammer this nail into your brain, you can use the following graphic aid/mnemonic device:

Likewise, any time you decrease it by six decibels, you’re approximately cutting it in half. Each time you go down six more decibels, you’re cutting it in half again. Theoretically, to go all the way down to absolute silence, you have to go down an infinite number of decibels. That’s why input meters say “negative infinity dB” at the bottom. Notice they also define “zero dB” as the loudest you can go without distorting.

If you accidentally make an exact copy of one of the tracks in your project (I’ve done this), and it plays back perfectly synchronized to the original track, its amplitude will double (since it is two copies of itself), and you will hear it as approximately six decibels louder than it should be. BUT — and this is where it gets a little weird — if you mix together two different sounds that are about the same volume, the mixed sound will only be about three decibels louder than either individual sound. That’s because if they’re not the same exact sound, their peaks and valleys won’t be happening at the exact same times, so they don’t do as much “damage” together. In a third scenario, if you mix a sound with an exact copy of itself, but invert (flip upside-down) the copy so that it’s a mirror image of the original (the peaks become valleys and vice-versa), it will cancel itself out completely, resulting in silence (”negative infinity dB”).

A geekier way of rephrasing the above paragraph is this: if you mix two identical waves together that are perfectly in phase, the result will be 6 dB louder. If they are ninety degrees out of phase, meaning if you slide one of them back in time just enough to be 1/4 of a wave cycle late, the mixed result will be only 3 dB louder. (How this sort of relates to the second example in the above paragraph: if sounds are mixed together without any attempt to correlate them, as will be the case with any real-world sounds, instruments, and voices, they might as well be about 90 degrees out of phase on average.) If two waves are exactly 180 degrees out of phase, meaning if you slide one wave back in time enough to be exactly 1/2 of a wave cycle late, so that it looks like an upside-down version of the first one, the mixed result will be silence.

This understanding of decibels will be helpful when you’re setting levels and mixing, especially since not all level controls are logarithmic. (Ever notice some volume knobs and sliders are hard to control at lower volumes, because they “jump” too much with the slightest nudge? Those are linear.) Likewise for meters. Likewise for curves and crossfades. But I mentioned pitch too, which will be particularly important when using equalizers and filters — how do logarithms relate to that?

Well, first of all, we don’t actually use logarithmic units for pitch, unless you’re talking about the language of music itself: that’s right, musical notes, the little black dots used by Mozart, are actually a logarithmic representation of pitch. Each time you go up an octave, you’re doubling the pitch, and each time you go down an octave, you cut the pitch in half. (Since the octave is divided up into twelve semitones, this means every time you go up a semitone, you’re multiplying the pitch by the twelfth root of two, which is a hair less than 1.06.) But octaves and semitones are musical concepts; all the equalizers and filters you will ever use show pitch in its plain old linear scale, “hertz“, meaning cycles per second. (Humans supposedly hear from 20 to 20,000 Hz, but realistically it might be more like 30 to 16,000.) BUT… you will notice something funny about the numbers on an equalizer. They will generally look something like this:

30 Hz - 60 Hz - 125 Hz - 250 Hz - 500 Hz - 1 KHz - 2 KHz - 4 KHz - 8 KHz - 16 KHz

So even though pitch is shown in linear units, it’s scaled logarithmically, so the lower frequencies appear to be more “spread out” on the left while the higher frequencies are more “squished together” on the right. This is because, again, we hear pitch logarithmically — meaning each time it doubles, we hear it as going up about the same amount. So the middle of our range of hearing isn’t 10,000 Hz — it’s more in that 500 to 1000 range. Incidentally, if you lost all your hearing between 10,000 and 20,000 Hz, you wouldn’t be losing “half your hearing”, you’d only be losing the top octave. Things would sound a little duller, but not horribly muffled.

This will be helpful to know as you play with any equalizers or filters. If you practice with them a little, you should eventually be able to make a good guess as to where in the spectrum an unpleasant “ringing” is, and be able to quickly zero in on it and filter it out, while barely doing any damage to the music itself. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to do that?

Anyway, you’ve had enough meat for one day. Enjoy your pudding. Class dismissed!

So you want to make an album? (part 15.75)

To read the whole series, follow some link or another.

Installment 15.75: Mo’ “in and out”

I occasionally speak of a time when I was going about it with the wrong attitude. This is generally the early 1990’s, from the time that I decided to do an album (Open the Window) under my own name, to the time that I finally handed my DAT tapes over to the cassette duplicating plant. It’s not as cut and dried as that, though. For one thing, I obviously had to deal with some problems in a spontaneous way, or they would have never been tackled at all. For another thing, even after my “awakening”, I never completely rid myself of the old mindset. What makes it a little confusing is that, on a micro-level, the “wrong mindset” isn’t all that wrong. Just as you don’t want to be a slave to a rigid plan, neither do you want to be a slave to random events and arbitrary whims (yours or anyone else’s) whose vectors add up to zero.

So, yes, you do have to take some control of the situation. It’s just nice to realize this is much easier to do when you think of it as being easy. It might have felt like you were dragging a heavy object uphill, because you thought of it that way. But stuff moves all the time, even if you do nothing. Your blunt, unfocused exertion won’t add much to the total pool of energy. So stop feeling responsible for pushing everything (duplicating energy that already existed), and start focusing on harnessing and steering all the stuff that’s already in motion.

You don’t have to go and get stimulus so that you can be influenced; you already have stimulus, and are already being influenced. You just may want to steer your input so that it comes from something better, by steering yourself to a place that will give you better inspiration, or steering your attention to a different book, website, or TV channel.

Same for output. You’re already creating, all the time — creating thoughts, actions, inactions, etc. — and another way of paraphrasing my “red light” installment is that you steer that ongoing creativity into a recording by having the equipment available and hitting the record button. You don’t have to make the ideas come in, and you don’t have to make the notes come out, you simply need to manage all those ideas and notes; think of them as your employees.

Input doesn’t stop just because you’re outputting. When you begin a recording session, unless you’re starting work on a brand new song (which is not the majority of the time), notice how effortless your first task is: you open the project file for some song, and you LISTEN TO IT. That don’t take no brains. What easier way to ease into a session than to chill out for a few minutes and groove to some music, like you always do, like everyone does? Okay, it’s a little more difficult, because this particular music is hell-bent on pulverizing your ego. It takes a little practice to remain in love with yourself as you dutifully note every flaw. Even if you put the tracks down only yesterday, that was the “old you”, and you’re a new person today. The fact that you can be critical of it is evidence of the leaps and bounds by which your production standards are rising! (Come on, now, I’m only slightly bullshitting you.)

I never work for a set amount of time, and I usually only start if I know I’ve got several open hours ahead of me. My problem is that I tend to remain in that gear long after I’ve crossed the threshold of diminishing returns, which is why I’m seriously considering experimenting with time limits. I think the tendency to go on for such long stretches sometimes prevents me from starting work, because in the back of my mind I assume I’m committing to the next few hours, even though I’m free to work for fifteen minutes and walk away. I haven’t completely eradicated the rigid ideas about time that “real studios” forced me to adapt to.

Apart from time itself, there are other things you can pay attention to. Are you on a roll? Are you exploring, discovering, or learning (thus receiving good input)? Are you still having fun (also good input)? Are you close to finishing something and anxious to hear the results (possible good input just around the corner)? These are all probably decent reasons to go a little longer than planned.

On the other hand, do you feel like you’re just not hearing the song anymore, and can’t tell if what you’re doing is any good? It’s called “aural fatigue”, it’s both physical and psychological, and it happens to absolutely every musician, every engineer, and every producer on the planet, in every single recording session. Here’s your membership card. Over time, you learn to maintain perspective for longer stretches, but you’re never completely immune to it. Like anything that exhausts you, you can take a short break and get a “second wind”, but you’ll never be quite as objective towards the end of a session as you were at the beginning. (This is why God invented “tomorrow”.)

The kind of input you’re getting from the session is limited: it’s feeding your output back at you and saturating the ferric oxide of your inner tape loop. That’s cool, to some extent, because you can say “yeah, man, I just did a session and I’m totally burned out”, and if you say this while exhaling cigarette smoke and wearing shades, it comes out kinda sexy. You can even get some interesting work done while your perception is distorted — else we wouldn’t have such a thing as psychedelia — so don’t rule out laying tracks in the later part of the session. Just be aware that tomorrow you may love it, or you may hate it. No biggie.

In general — and this goes for any creative process, not just music — think of ways of looking at it that take some of the heaviness off of yourself. Imagine your creative process is happening with or without you, and you’re simply watching it unfold from a first-party perspective. Imagine the finished piece already exists, and you’re just a conduit bringing it into this realm. Imagine that everything you do is being guided. Imagine that the mundane events in your life are elements of your album being handed off to you in a clandestine manner by a secret agent in a hat and trenchcoat. “PSSST, hey kid, Larry sent this, you’ll need it for track five.” Just don’t blow his cover.

Take all that heavy stuff out, and the “out” part of your session becomes pretty darn simple. You’re going to sit in a comfortable chair, play your instrument a bit, and click on some things. Other than that, your main job is to listen. Let your invisible one-eyed hunchback assistant engineers do the rest. :)

So you want to make an album? (part 15)

As I start to type this, I don’t know whether this is a “so you want to make an album” installment or not. I only have a vague idea about what I’m going to write, and it’s regarding an area that I’m not sure I excel at, so I can’t exactly claim expertise. I’m just hoping that by writing about it, some wisdom will emerge that I too can benefit from.

It’s sort of about the broader subject that would include time management… but time management would only be a part of that. It’s about synchronizing with the natural life rhythm that allows you to keep working on something without being totally burned out. It’s about admitting when your tank of inspiration is on “empty”, and knowing you can do something to replenish your fuel… instead of beating yourself on the head for not being as productive as you think you should be.

But that said, it is about time management too. See, we creative freaks have a weird, off-kilter concept of “time”, and so the conventional time management tools don’t work for us. Not for what we want to do.

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

Installment 15: In and out

For most of the process of making this album, you presumably want “flow”, and you want a “moving forward” feeling. You probably want your hair to still be the same color when you finish. When friends ask you how the album is coming along, you want to have some exciting news about how things are progressing. You don’t want to be stuck.

Let’s start with some things that don’t work:

Plan the album out in detail, in advance, and stick to your plans religiously. Right down to where everything will be panned in the mixdown. This is a carry-over from when indie artists had to pay by the hour for studio time. There is no better way to suck all the fun out of the music-making process. From your first drum track to your final de-essing of the vocals, your music will broadcast to the world how passionless of a worker bee you’ve become.

Refuse to switch tasks until you’re absolutely sure you’re done with the one at hand. After all, you might suffer from total amnesia and forget what you were doing.

Refuse to work on other creative projects. Can’t you see they’re only competing for your attention and distracting you from the important project?

Refuse to do anything “fun” or “recreational”. The ninety minutes you’d waste watching that mediocre family-friendly comedy could be devoted to agonizing over what the heck is bugging you about that keyboard part, and getting that much closer to the solution. And don’t you want to show everyone else how much more serious you are than them? The inspiration for a better keyboard part couldn’t possibly be lurking somewhere in the film’s soundtrack or anything.

Be hard on yourself. You’re not getting as much done as you’d hoped? Well obviously you’re a bad person. Shame on you. Now lock yourself in that studio and force yourself to put in more time.

The unifying misconception in all of the above is that your creative output will be in proportion to your masochism. If you’re surrounded in your day-to-day life by people who aren’t making albums, then it’s logical to reason that maybe they would be making albums if only they weren’t so relaxed all the time, and that the only way to transcend this creeping complacency is to keep yourself neurotic.

The underlying fallacy is that you are an output machine, creating something out of nothing, and the more time you spend outputting, the greater your contribution to humanity. A less false (but equally crippling) version of this is that you already have so much accumulated junk in your brain, that now you have no room for new ideas, and you’d better just focus on outputting, until eventually you get it all out, and feel fresh and clear-headed again.

You can’t really not have input over any period of time — even staring at the wall is input — but you can resist it and refuse to let it help.

“So if I’m doing all the same things other people are doing, won’t I be not making an album, just like them?” I didn’t say you would be living exactly like everybody else. A mistake I once made myself, though, was to live a more closed life than the average person — I frequently perceived situations and events as obstacles, thinking I knew better than the universe what would be best for my work — as opposed to living a more open life, and making music out of whatever life threw my way. You can live what appears to be a completely ordinary life (save for that hour or two a day when you retreat to your underground laboratory with all the dials, blinky lights, and invisible one-eyed hunch-backed assistant engineers), but there is one thing that sets you apart: no matter where you are, no matter what you appear to be doing, you are now a scavenger, gathering useful ideas.

No place or situation has a monopoly on these. Libraries and museums are great, but you can just as easily get useful ideas at Wal-Mart, a monster truck rally, or one of those small-church barbeques where they give you chicken and cole slaw in a styrofoam box. You don’t need to alienate your friends with constant exclamations of “this gives me a great idea for my song!”, nor do you even need to be consciously thinking of this every waking second. Obsession can work for you on the back burner just as well as, if not better than, on the front. But you do need to make a conscious declaration that this is now the meta-purpose of all those seemingly unrelated activities and events in your life. Just be sure your conscious brain checks in every once in a while with some tangibly empowering questions, like “how can my album benefit from this?”.

Here are some things I would suggest, although admittedly I’m being a hypocrite here, because I haven’t truly given them all a serious chance:

Discipline yourself to switch gears after a certain amount of time on any particular thing. I can’t say for sure what that ideal amount of time is: Half an hour? One hour? Two hours? Experiment with this. Pull yourself away from a song while you’re being productive, and then pick up where you left off next time. Finishing up some mundane task is an easy way to begin a session and will “warm you up” to start the next task.  Staggering tasks across multiple sessions challenges you to remember what the heck you were doing, which is why I’ll also suggest:

Keep notes on every song. Things you haven’t done that you still want to do, and if you stopped midway through doing something, what part of it is still left to do? (Example: “cleaning up background noises on vocal track, still need to do from 1:50 to end of song.”)

Try “finishing” the whole song/album really quickly. Then, instead of always needing to finish it, you’re only ever doing things to improve it. This might be less stressful in a way. Any rough demo can be transformed track by track into a solid final product, and at any time along the way, you always have something you can play for other people.

Try devising some system that randomly tells you which song to work on today. I’m really curious to see how this would go. It would certainly get some of my more neglected songs out of the closet. I’d also like to try setting a time limit for each song, and using the same random system to pick the next one. Being sure to update my handy-dandy notebook between songs, of course.

Repeat after me: “This plan is tentative”. Plans are fine. They’re a great way to kickstart your creativity. Just make sure you don’t shut the creativity off somewhere between planning and doing. Think of your plan and your creativity as two cars headed for the same destination (a finished album), and you want them to arrive there at the same time. (You did this in math class, remember?) Replacing or rewriting songs halfway through the project is healthy and normal. It’s a living thing, not a stone tablet.

Hand some of the work over to your subconscious. And affirm that you’ve done so. And affirm that your subconscious is, in fact, doing a good job. And give it a tasty biscuit.

I don’t know if I’ve made as much of a dent into this topic as I want to, so this may be expanded either here or in a follow-up.

The country that invented itself

As with many Americans, there were gaping holes in my education, and history was a particularly weak subject of mine… so take it with a grain of salt when I suggest that America is a super-sized “man who invented himself”, or, the country that invented itself. You could criticize me here for reffing a song written by one Brit about another Brit, when England is the very country we’re celebrating our independence from (an inconvenient detail to mention these days). Of course, as George Carlin observed, “When you get right down to it, we’re Europe Junior.” Besides that, though, I think the Barrett analogy fits: we came over wild-eyed, passionate, and full of original ideas, overdosed on the fruits of our own brilliance, and became fat, apathetic, and schizophrenic… and now our own president stares at the world blankly while strumming the same chord over and over.

Before you fire off the hate mail, I realize that’s not the whole picture. America is about the people, and I’ll flat out admit I’m no good at talking about people; in fact, I can probably tell our story much better by talking about our things. So let’s look at a much-abbreviated list of American inventions, care of a quick Wikipedia search. In general, I picked the ones that had some emotional ring, be it “thank god”, “what have we done?”, or as in most cases, a combination of both:

• 1806: Coffee pot
• 1833: Sewing machine
• 1836: Revolver (the gun, not the album)
• 1837: Power tools
• 1843: Mechanical refrigerator (I assume this means “refrigerator” in general?)
• 1860: Repeating rifle
• 1863: Roller skates
• 1867: Barbed wire
• 1876: Telephone
• 1879: Light bulb
• 1882: Electric fan (gimme that and the coffee pot, and I’m all set!)
• 1887: “Platter” record (as opposed to cylinders)
• 1891: Escalator
• 1891: Motion picture camera
• 1902: Air conditioner
• 1903: Powered airplane
• 1906: Assembly line
• 1929: Frozen food
• 1934: Television
• 1945: Microwave oven (don’t watch the food cook!)
• 1945: Atomic bomb
• 1959: Integrated circuit
• 1960: Laser
• 1964: Operating system
• 1965: Minicomputer
• 1974: Product barcode (I remember these being spoofed by MAD Magazine when they first became widespread)
• 1983: Internet (the first TCP/IP-wide area network)
• 1988: Graphical user interface

…among many others. It’s likely that your eyes scanned over the list fairly quickly — it has more impact if you take a few seconds to register each item visually and ponder its subtexts, implications, motives, and long term (and indirect) effects — or better yet, read the full Wikipedia entry. I left out the medical and space-travel innovations because, important as they are, they don’t greet us in our day to day routines. So I don’t know what my rationale is for leaving weapons in; maybe because they look satisfyingly sinister lumped in with the other stuff. (Gun… gun… BOMB.) Yes, I am all about the drama.

I wonder if America’s two-century-and-counting invention spurt (or at least the sort of things we’ve been inclined to invent, since by no means do we have a monopoly on this trend) has been partly fueled by the nearly complete severing of our own roots, leaving a void where our world and identity had to be created from the ground up, a void that we filled with technology in lieu of culture. What culture we do have is largely bracketed within that technology — the preservation of early jazz recordings and newsreels, for example — and now, art and entertainment are practically non-existent outside of reproducible media, to the point where cutting edge technology is the very canvas we work on. Not unique to America, but very American, if that makes any sense.

I love technology, I love the spirit of invention, and I love the things we’re capable of coming up with. And while there may be some inventions capable of more harm than good, ultimately A.) it’s always up to people to choose to use technology for good, and B.) there’s no sense suppressing ideas, because if we force ourselves not to invent something, somebody else will. It parallels my views on speech: if you don’t like what was said, rather than silencing the speaker, say something back; and likewise, if a machine or tool is causing a problem, invent something that will either improve/replace it or correct the problem (I, uh, don’t know what to tell you about the atomic bomb here, sorry). We can sit around blaming the existence of refrigerators, escalators, TVs, microwaves, cars, and frozen food for that extra thirty pounds of blubber we’re hauling to Chuck-E-Cheese every day in our minivans… or we can re-invent ourselves again, now that we know even more about the effects of our inventions on ourselves, each other, and the planet. If we settle for the former, then America has jumped the shark; but if we pursue the latter, then I would dare to suggest that maybe it hasn’t.

P.S. - I was going to end this post with a link to one of the hundreds of “America F*ck Yeah” videos out there, before I realized there were hundreds of different versions (there must have been a competition or something)… and as I was watching them all, they became less and less funny to me, partly because half the people leaving comments on YouTube interpreted the song literally. See what I mean about schizophrenic?

Earth-shattering news

I revised most of the descriptions that pop up when you mouse over my categories.

I just didn’t want to wait until 2009 for anyone to notice.

Sorry for shattering your earth so early in the morning!