The Light of Day

Sunset revisited

Yesterday’s task was to straighten out, condense, and clean up The Sunset. Written circa 1987 as a narrative intro to Slab of Clay, and remaining fairly faithful to its original incarnation, it depicts a dialogue between factory worker 881 and tourist Nicole, in a “worlds collide”-type first contact between an outsider and a not-quite-successfully brainwashed insider.

Is that what it looks like on the outside?

Not all the time
Only certain places, certain times
But sometimes it does…

Stylistically, it’s universes apart from Slab, which I’ve already done a ton of work on since the 1998 CD version (Slab now has a faster tempo, and features real drums, in turn supported by triggered electronic drums, for an enormous in-your-face beat). Sunset is less of a song and more of a conversation. Besides cleaning up the sound, I actually cut beats out. Changing a lot of the quieter bars from 12/8 to 9/8 was not some geeky attempt to be “progressive” so much as a theatrical decision to tighten up the pace of the dialogue.

The aesthetic danger that Sunset teeters on is that of sounding a bit “Disney”; and we’re not talking edgy vintage stuff like Dumbo, we’re talking sparkly corporate lunchbox fodder like The Little Mermaid. Again, though, I said “teeters”, not “falls into the gaping abyss”. So as long as the film interpretation has some bleak looking gray stuff in the background, it’ll be alright.

Did I say “film”? I really do have to come out of my shell and start talking about a storyboard/animatic for this at the local filmmaker meetings I’m attending. I’ve more than put in my time getting a “feel” for the meetings — it’s time to start soliciting for input.

I’ve “touched” several other parts of the rock opera as well lately, and it seems like there are two main things I’m doing with the weaker sections (the sections that bridge things together, but wouldn’t cut it as songs in themselves); one is the pacing, which I’m finding clever ways to tighten up by literally changing the rhythm (which kills a second bird by making it less plodding), and the other is to make some parts more colorful sounding by adding pleasing or atmospheric harmony to some of the bleaker and more monotonous melody lines.

Sometimes, when people review something, they specifically target overall length, and say the whole thing should just be shorter. My feeling about that is there is no right or wrong length for something; if it seems “long” to you, it means there are parts you’re not enjoying. That’s not to say certain parts haven’t benefitted from economizing, but I’m not a big fan of removing an entire idea from a piece, when the intention was, in fact, to make a rock opera, and not a mini rock opera. So, yes, I economize where it works to do so, but if certain bridges and segues aren’t satisfying, plan A is to ask myself what they should sound like and how I can get them there.

Hometracked.com

Hooray, I can stop blogging now…

http://www.hometracked.com/

Actually, just a heads up to the recordists, I just saw hometracked.com for the first time within the past few minutes thanks to an anonymous tip. (Well, no, it wasn’t an anonymous tip, but it sounds cooler if I say that.) Looks to be a great resource for the technical, nitty-gritty, actual craft of recording. So now I don’t feel the need to cover every imaginable square inch of that; I can just point you there, and focus more on the intersection between that stuff and the elusive muse.

Of course I do still want to flesh out the “So You Want…” series and put it up on lulu.com as a book. I might even like to do a DVD version at some point, so I could demonstrate visually and aurally why that stuff about “six decibels”, “three decibels”, “phase”, “the spectrum”, and “linear vs. logarithmic” is actually useful to know (and not just academic).

The stages of a song’s development over the course of your life

(Note: I’m too tired and hungry to write at my usual level. There are some inelegantly overused words, etc. — I’ll come back and spiffy this up later.)

The stages of a song’s development, none necessarily any better or worse than the others (with the possible exception of stage 5, an awkward but possibly unavoidable “growing pains” stage):

Stage one: You just wrote the song. You know it on a very immediate level, but haven’t formed a relationship with it. It’s almost a little frightening because it’s so unfamiliar, and yet you know in the pit of your stomach this is something good. It’s raw, though. Your melody is simultaneously repetitive (from line to line) and inconsistent (from performance to performance), because you need to have your lyric sheet in front of you just to get through it — but your inspiration, the thing that made you want to write it, is still fresh on your mind. You haven’t developed all the inflections yet; if you record this now and listen to it later, it will sound funny to you.

Stage two: a few days have passed, you may have made a couple of changes in the lyrics, and you can now pretty much sing it from memory. Since you don’t have to focus on remembering the lyrics, some new inflections start to form. You don’t even have to think about doing this; it happens whether you intend it to or not. Some syllables stretch, some get compressed, and the tone of your voice changes.

Stage three: you start to perform the song in front of other people. You’re gauging their reactions, and your self awareness naturally leads you to develop the “character” you sing it in; it may be grittier and more aggressive now.

Stage four: you do the studio version. You keep most of the inflections and character from stages two and three, but now your focus is on being anal-retentive. Your voice is probably not as raspy, because you’re drinking tea and sitting on leather couches. This is going to be (in your view anyway) the “quintessential” version of the song, and having solid intonation is crucial, lest you spend the rest of your life wishing you’d done one more take. It will sound good, but it will be more restrained and less spontaneous than your previous live versions.

Stage five: you continue to perform it, but now you’re mimicking the studio version. Little improvised flourishes from the session are now considered to be essential parts of the song, and you’re starting to tire of doing it all by rote — plus, let’s be honest, you can’t really sing as well in real life as you did on the album — so now you take some liberties that may or may not be entirely smart aesthetically. This is the stage where one would yell out something like “does anybody remember laughter??” in the middle of a song like Stairway to Heaven. Consciously, you’re trying to keep the song “vital”; unconsciously, you’re trying to put it out of its misery.

Stage six: you get so sick of your song that you start to think of it as a cliché. You’re older now, and you feel downright silly performing it. You might swear it off altogether, or only perform it for charity or novelty.

Stage seven: you rummage through your old treasures and find that cassette of your original demo of the song. Your apprehension is trumped by your curiosity, and you pop it in. On one level, it sounds just as silly as you expected it to, and is noticeably missing some key nuances that the song had accumulated as it matured. Yet, at the same time, you’re getting little shivers, smiling, and patting yourself on the back for writing such a neat little song — and remembering the uncomplicated, immediate feeling that sparked it, some of which had been lost in the translation when you “got too good” at singing it. 90% of the lines you sang on that old tape might sound quaint and embarrassing, but you’re too busy being blown away by the other 10%, half-wishing you could have preserved the elusive quality of those lines in later versions.

Stage eight: you use super-advanced modern technology to create a “fantasy mash” of earlier and later versions of the song, the new quintessential version, a version that could never have happened at any particular time in your life, and yet, there it is.

To be continued?

(Pretty soon I’ll have some “stage eights” to put up for your enjoyment.)

Leave of Absence vol 2 - analysis

I just listened to the rest of the tracks from Leave of Absence vol 2, the ones I hadn’t heard recently, to kind of evaluate them as far as what might be needed for a remastering. I was re-organizing the file system on my G5, so that the most up-to-date versions of any songs would all be in one place. I listened to a couple of “deep cuts” from Unfinished Business and Leave of Absence vol 1 as well, just to get a feel for where everything stood sound-wise and production-wise, but of those three albums, LoA2 would be the only one where I didn’t have any songs in the remix queue.

None of the songs from LoA2 can be remixed, because they were all assembled on the Korg D8 portable eight track hard drive recorder. Most of the songs did start out in some analog form on the Fostex, but the bulk of the work was done on the D8. It was all digital mixing and editing, like using a computer, but without the benefit of a screen to see anything on. It just has a little LCD display that tells you what song you’re working on, the elapsed time, and the paramaters of whatever effect you’re tweaking. You can copy sections from one track to another, slide things back and forth in time, and even do a “repeating paste” that effectively loops a sound up to 99 times. But you’re kind of doing all this in the dark, by today’s standards.

Whenever I was happy with an overdub, I would bounce the tracks down to make room for more overdubs, and erase the original tracks. So although I wasn’t losing sound quality, and I did have the benefit of being able to “fix” my overdubs to some degree, once I committed them to this submix, there was no going back. When I felt that the songs were done, another audio engineer in the same building was gracious enough to let me plug my D8 into his CD recorder to save the final mixes to CD before wiping the D8 clean for more work (the timing of the track IDs is weird because you have to hit a button at the exact right moment while it’s recording). So in the end, those CDs were all I had. I eventually ripped them to a computer, while they were thankfully still playable, and have preserved the files as I migrated from computer to computer.

I didn’t bother listening to the first three songs, because I’ve already got a remastered Never Turn Back and Open the Window on this website, and remastered P.S.R. for the YouTube video. So the first thing I checked out was Quit Your Job and Join a Traveling Hindu Cult. This is just a meaningless, silly title, to keep in line with my alphabetical naming scheme. What struck me about it is that it’s a mashup. You remember when mashups were popular? Oh, yeah, of course you remember, because it’s now. Well, this was a mashup I did in 1999, of my own material, and whatever tapes were lying around with friends’ material as well. Kim’s voice (backwards, mostly) wafts in and out, as well as some of Garrett’s voice and guitar from his album. A bit from Wake Up is used, some of the Mind Mogger jam from Friends and Players that didn’t wind up on volume 1, some of Paul Gaspar’s trumpet from the TFBD sessions, a bit of a weird “vampire” speech Jeff had done on a song of his — the surprises just keep a-coming. The overall effect is somewhat chaotic, like a more tuneful Revolution 9. Since I went to the trouble to time things musically and match keys, it also reminds me of parts of the more recent Love album.

Overall — and this goes for all three albums — the need for remastering is not “icing on the cake”, it’s urgent. Everything sounds muffled. But this is extra true for the next song, Revelation in the Resonance (the title lifted from Never Turn Back’s lyrics just to fill the “R” spot). I actually remember EQ’ing and re-EQ’ing this one because it never sounded good. And the only way to undo the damage is to EQ it yet again. It sounds like a beautifully sad and powerful eulogy for something, and I think that “something” is it’s own sound; this was the last time I ever faked a lead guitar by distorting the CZ-1 synthesizer (I did this all the time, especially for demos, when I was a “keyboardist”). In one spot it hints at the riff from Ten Years From Now, but only because they were both written around the same time.

My memory of Soldiers of Music, in contrast, was that it was sonically pristine. And my memory would be wrong. Although a step up from Revelation…, it’s in just as much need of treatment as the rest of the tracks. But it does groove solidly. I then skipped ahead to Various Fakes, which had me furiously bobbing my head, and X-Ray Tex and X-Ray Ted and the Marvellous X-Rated X-Ray Specs on their Heads, which as you might guess, was titled at the last minute to fit the convention. The latter, a short and sterile faux-jazz experiment, would be more suitably identified as something like “Plastic Lounge”, and sounds like it would be at home on a Zappa album.

You Feel Exactly Like Me is stunningly dark and pointed, and would be appropriate to dedicate to anyone who is hurtful for no reason. It was about something personal at the time, but I remember hearing about the Columbine murders around that time and weaving my feelings about that in with the more personal stuff, as if I was confronting a killer from a channeled victim’s point of view:

Who am I…
Watching you watching me die?

Fantastic improvised guitar noodling in the background on that one, too — sort of Oldfieldian. And then, at the very end of Red-esque rocker instrumental Zero Gratitude, there’s a brief sound of an acoustic guitar and my voice saying “I think I’ve got… enough of that one”, which is actually me doing takes for Never Turn Back, thus making the album subliminally circular (even though it’s supposedly the second half of a two-volume album). Without the listener knowing this, it just sounds like me casually saying that’s enough material for the album, and it’s simply time to end it — an equally groovy interpretation.

I think I can definitively confirm that the album was completed by the end of 1999, because as I recall, Christy had moved to Rochester, and our friend Rich was up to visit, and the three of us celebrated New Years by playing Worms Armageddon (and replacing the existing sound effects with in-jokes and obscenities, which probably made for one of the top ten most eye-tearing and snot-clearing laughs I’ve ever experienced) and listening to the album from start to finish. We all agreed in the end that it was a good album. I still think it’s a good album, but I don’t know if it would fly with something like Magnatune (the compilation idea felt “wrong” to me — I was starting to think maybe I’m a singles person and not an album person, but apparently I was right the first time). They stress that an album should be chock-full of good tracks, and not have fillers — but I think in the broader context, the fact that it does have “fillers” is what makes it work. The emotions are not always at an intense level, so it doesn’t burn you out. You get a chance to just relax and have a laugh between the catharses.

Well, it won’t hurt anything to remaster the dang thing and send it in…

Wild mouse and fancy mouse living together harmoniously

For anyone who doesn’t already know: little brown Ralphie stalked the cage for several weeks this past winter, and finally moved in. The other one is Emily Junior, a “proper” pet fancy mouse. See how well they get along despite their divergent backgrounds?

I’m sure there’s some political lesson in all of this, but considering that Ralph actually barged in uninvited, I think I won’t go down that road.

You better park the car well out of sight

I wasn’t going to blog about this a few weeks ago, but that was because it had only happened once. Now it’s happened twice, so the perpetrator is entitled to his fifteen minutes. Unfortunately it’s fifteen minutes of anonymity, because he didn’t leave his calling card.

Whoever keeps smashing in my car window, stop it. I don’t have an extra $150 to keep replacing it. I also don’t keep any crack cocaine, heroin, jewelry, or cash in the glove compartment. Thank you.

I think I’m just gonna wrap the top half of the door in generic Saran Wrap until they catch the notorious Rochester Car Window Bandit (what a lackluster name — serves you right for committing such a lackluster string of crimes). Only when I know the streets are safe again will I be buying more glass.

I know you don’t believe this, but I feel sorry for you, whoever you are, and I hope you experience some kind of transformation. Take control of your shitty life.

So you want to make an album? (part 18)

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

Installment 18: All your bass

One of the nicest perks of being an independent recording artist is that your bass player has no ego. Sure, some of your own ego will come through in the bass parts you play and/or sequence, but for the most part, your allegiance is to the song, not the instrument.

I could probably rattle off another laundry list, similar to the opening of my drum slut post, only this time of “ways I’ve recorded bass parts”. But, this series is not about me anymore, it’s about you — using me as a metaphor for you, of course, since my writing snaps back into first-person if I stop consciously thinking about it for more than two seconds. Suffice to say, depending on the style of the music, you will most likely be using an electric bass guitar, or some kind of keyboard. I like the sound of a real bass guitar best, or at least I like my simulations (when necessary) to be as believable as possible. Generally, if I use a keyboard and sequencer, it’s to work out a “sketch” of a bass part, so I can experiment with changing certain notes and see what sounds best before actually learning to play it on a real bass. I always start right off with a real bass guitar on slow songs, though, because they’re easy enough.

Bass parts, oft thought of as a dull chore, can actually be very stimulating if you let yourself get just playful enough. You don’t have to keep the part totally interesting through the whole song, but you can work in little variations here and there to keep the song “alive”. There’s rarely a practical reason to record the bass first, so by the time you do so, you’re generally past the stressful stage of needing to create the song’s framework and worry about its tempo — so it’s easy to do multiple takes and punch-ins, which means you can try something a little different in bar 38 without committing to anything.

What makes it extra fun is remembering that you’re playing to the listener’s subconscious; nobody actively listens to the bass line (besides other musicians), and small changes can have a surprising impact on the song’s overall effect. Have fun with these. Try changing the rhythm just a little by syncopating/anticipating one of the notes (playing it a half beat early). Try using a different pitch on one of the “inbetween” notes (one that isn’t on the chord change). Try leaving a hole on a certain beat, so that the notes you do play are that much more defined. Try mimicking something from a bass line you heard in a jazz, disco, reggae, country, or polka song. It won’t change the whole style of your song, but it will hint at something. To most listeners, it will be subliminal; but if you drop it in stealthily enough, even your musically savvy friends may not pick it out until the tenth listen.

Sometimes people record the bass secondly, so they can be sure to lock their rhythm tightly with the drumming. But without other instrumentation there, and all that apparent “space” in the sound, you might have a tendency to overplay. If you record some of the other instruments first, you’ll know where you can just keep the bass part simple, and maybe even leave some holes in it.  Also, if you first get everything else to sound as good as possible without it, you’re more likely to end up with a final product that sounds good on smaller speakers where the bass part can’t be heard quite as well.

I generally put the bass part down after there are some guitars and keyboards already recorded, so I can hear it in context; but, then when I’m editing and polishing up the bass track, I’ll leave those other things muted so I can make sure certain bass notes line up perfectly with the drum hits, especially the kick drum. If a bass note happens to be between two drum hits, I usually nudge it to make sure it’s exactly between those hits. (Our eyes are more critical than our ears, so if it looks good in the editing software, it probably is good. Listen to be sure, of course.) Melding your bass and drums into one synergistic monster will help give your song a solid backbone, and subsequently a “professional sheen”, even if your other instruments occasionally flake out.

Idea: try recording two very different versions of the bass part. For the first version, keep it simple, minimalistic, and safe — just lock to the beat, define the chord changes, and give some semblance of “bottom” to the music. For the second version, improvise ambitiously and dangerously, at the outer edge of your skill level. You’ll flub a lot, but you might manage to get in a few “golden moments” where you sound better than you actually are. Just keep the good parts, and erase the corresponding parts of the “simple” version, to make a great composite.

If you need something precise, you need it done quickly, and it doesn’t need to “rock” in the strictest sense of the word, sequenced bass will do the trick. There are plenty of sampled basses available that will satisfy your need for a realistic tone, and synthesizers can generally do a reasonable “fretless” sound; the only thing you’ll be missing are some of the performance nuances and inflections — like the gliding of the fingers, and the natural variation in timbre from note to note. Sequenced bass will serve it’s most essential purpose, mind you, supporting the chord changes and establishing the bottom of the spectrum — it just won’t get anyone “air bassing”, so be sure your song gives the listener something else to do with their hands.

When sequencing a bass part, you will probably want to quantize it. If your drums are sequenced too, this will make locking the bass to the drums a one-step no-brainer. Also, try to avoid letting notes overlap; it will generally stick out and kill the illusion, and multiple pitches don’t blend well in the lowest register unless they’re really simple intervals, like octaves. (If your tone generator/sampler/synth can be set to monophonic, as in only one note at a time, this keeps things simple.)

Whether the bass is real or not, it usually sounds good to put some compression or limiting on it. This smooths out the volume and helps it “sit” more with the drums. EQ is useful too; by adusting the upper midrange, you can control how much it “stands out” among the guitars and keyboards, as opposed to just turning the whole instrument up and overpowering everything. Most other effects are not good for bass, in general, unless you want to be experimental. I’ve met bass players with racks of digital effects the size of refrigerators, and it’s kind of silly. Like it or not, the bass serves a musical purpose, and a wonderful one at that — and serves it best with a clear, simple tone. If you ache to transcend the degrading stereotype of “bass players playing low notes”, and you feel your time has come to shine as a musician… listen… is the thing surgically grafted onto your body? When you arrived into this world, did the doctor congratulate your mother on her bouncing baby bassist? Have you ever met a carpenter that only uses saws? Set it down and pick up a different instrument.

In closing, here’s a bass. It lists at $4,546.00, but hey, it’s worth it, because it’s all pre-banged up, and you don’t have to go to all that trouble wrecking it yourself.

Edit 8/14: in post-closing, here’s a bass track I recorded years ago and just finished editing:

This is a song I originally recorded with Episodes in a proper studio in the late 1980s. We never finished mixing it, and the original tapes are gone forever. Towards the end of the 1990s, we had a half-hearted stab at reuniting, with Garrett being the most reluctant of the four of us, and did a rudimentary session for two songs in my home studio, including a remake of Phone Booth. The drumming is by original Episodes drummer Thom DeLooze. A rough guitar part exists, played by Garrett, which I still plan to sift through and assemble the best bits of into a (hopefully) complete guitar track. The three of us played together for about three and a half takes, and this is a composite of the best bits from Thom’s and mine, carefully edited to still sound natural, but without the mistakes.

Notice that the bass by itself (or with just the drums) sounds simplistic, naked, even “dumb”. That’s fine, though, and it’s good to get comfortable with that sound, because in the context of everything else, every little inflection or variation helps carry the music along.

Coupla cool quotes from the ’sphere

I happened to see two quotes that I really liked today in my daily readings. I’ll just paste them here out of context and link back to the full posts, which were not as important to me as the bits I’m quoting.

The first one would be nice to refer back to the next time I have a run-in with a drive-by fight-picker on youtube (or any other socially interactive web service where you don’t have to pass an IQ or personality test to participate). It’s from Gapingvoid’s Hugh MacLeod, primarily about the decline in blogging, but applicable beyond that:

4. Believe it or not, some of us have better things to do than to be continually justifying ourselves to a crowd of passive-aggressive, self-loathing, loser fucktards. Thankfully these folk are a minority, but their one skill-set in life seems to be in the less-than-noble art of “using up too much oxygen”. Which makes “Engaging in The Conversation” a lot less appealing for the others. Life is short.

The second one was from Peter Kirn’s Create Digital Music, regarding a video demonstration of a rather unaffordable modular rig:

I certainly can’t afford this setup myself, but then that’s not the point. Once you see an exciting performance, you’ll find a way to do something of your own on what you can afford; that’s part of the grand tradition of music.

That should help to remind you folks (and me folk) that it’s okay to drool over the ’spensive toys, as long as you then proceed to go ahead and just do it with the toys you got.

Cutting-edge systems

It’s hard to see in this picture, but in the seventh column, fourth row from the top, under “Sunset/Slab”, there is a post-it note. Remember when I said I wanted some way of keeping notes on all the songs I’m working on? A notebook didn’t completely make sense, because I never really know how much I’m going to need to write about any particular song, and there will either be wasted paper or not enough paper. Not like I have paper shortage issues, but yeah. And besides, I already have a great big BOX full of notebooks containing ideas, doodles, lyrics, algorithms, and rants (all of which I need to go through, armed with scissors and stapler, and do an intensive sorting — not to mention remember what the heck is in them, so that I can have all these epiphanies about the forgotten purpose of my life and whatnot), and the last thing I need is one more notebook to lose track of.

(Exhibit A: this is only about half of them; there are plenty more scattered throughout the studio.)

There will ultimately be post-it notes in most of the boxes on the whiteboard. I can use as many or as few as I need. When it’s time to dive into a song, I’ll peel off the sticky notes for that song and go “a-ha, I still need to [whatever] on this one!” They won’t necessarily be complete lists of everything that needs to be done, just reminders of whatever I was going to do next, before my ears got all burnt out. Then, when it’s time to put that song away and go to the next one, I take a few minutes to put up revised notes/ideas for the one I’m putting away and look at the most recent notes for the one I’m moving on to. And the fact that there’s this big, physical, visible thing greeting me every time I walk through the room will help to compensate for the “out of sight, out of mind” effect of having my digital data a little too nicely tucked away on the hard drive, so hopefully any given song won’t languish in some freakishly half-alive state for quite so long.

I’m still interested in a randomization system for picking out what to work on next (unless I’m already excited about doing something on a particular song). Maybe simple dice would do the trick, but in that case I should have made it a 6×6 grid… Also, I may use some of the empty rectangles for other projects, like coding or video stuff.

(In case you’re wondering, the orange thing at the base of the whiteboard is a “giggle stick” noise-making toy. Such sound-producing objects are important tools of the trade, though admittedly it’s not doing much good up at the whiteboard and I have no idea how it wound up there.)

Sorry, buddy…

…I know you heard I take in stray rodents.  But they have to be land-bound.

Better this than my underwear drawer

In my last post, I mentioned the “dozens of Tracktion projects on my hard drive”. So now you can see what I mean. Couple of notes:

“Teat2″ is supposed to be “test2″.

Those last three (Fangbonus/Everyone…/Funky…) are not mine. They’re sample projects that come with Tracktion. I haven’t gotten around to deleting them.

It’s not all fun and overdubs

I’ve just noticed something. I’m not going to “play expert” on this one, because I’ve barely had any time to think about it, but it bears pointing out.

Okay, what’s the battle cry I’ve been hammering into my head and everyone else’s? “Be creative”. Create, create, create, create. The opposite of “create” is of course “destroy”, which is something you should only do under extreme circumstances, if you absolutely have to do it to make room for something else, or if the thing you’re destroying is destructive in and of itself, and you’re “rescuing” other things by destroying the big bad thing, blah blah blah.

All this is well and good, but it sets up a simplistic worldview in which anything you do will fall under one of those two categories. Consider this: are you really being creative when you correct something? Our language does have such a word as “corrective” — it’s mostly used with regard to lenses and vision. You could say that correcting things as you go along is a not-so-fun but necessary part of the process of creating, but there’s plenty of correcting we can do without being particularly creative at all. In fact, the very act of correcting something is almost un-creative since we’re fitting something to a pre-conceived expectation.

Why am I bringing this up now? Well, think about the several dozen mixes I have on my computer in various stages of incompletion. The thought of going through and finishing them up would be nothing but purely exciting to me if all it involved was simply to “get creative” and go at them. But this is tempered by the fact that there will always be something tedious about the process, and a large part of that tedium is the need to correct something.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing. It’s something that I feel neutral about. I can deal with some fairly tedious tasks as long as I have a comfortable chair, something to drink, and so on. But it does put up some barriers to always being in total “artist” mode. Not that I would want that either; artists are crazy. It’s fine with me to spend some of my time being just a craftsperson. You don’t have to cross over to the other side of the looking glass just to fix a glitchy drum track, or time-stretch something from an older version of a song to fit it to the tempo of the newer version.

Most of the time that I’m working on something, it’s in some state of needing a similarly tedious fix on something before I can go on to adding the next overdub (the supposedly fun part of making music). In fact, it’s pretty rare that I can just go in and toss down a new overdub without creating a new mess that needs to be cleaned up.

On just the song that I’m working on right now:

• There are vocals from an earlier mix that need to be time-compressed. They’re imported into the project, but whenever they come up, they’re not in sync with the song.
• There is a drum machine track which was actually triggered by a real drum track, using a cool “beatbox” plug-in that makes it fairly easy and fun to modernize the drums on your song. But, even if you set the threshold levels on it carefully, it mis-triggers sometimes, and you have to go through afterwards and edit out some of the unwanted hits.
• The live drum track is actually split into three tracks (using filters), with different effects applied to the bass, midrange, and treble. They should really be consolidated, because if they got accidentally unaligned — even by a little bit — it would mess up the sound, and it wouldn’t be easy to re-align them.
• There are way too many percussion-type tracks in general, and it’s hard to see them all on the screen at once and know what’s going on with them. I’d like to consolidate them, but I’m afraid I’ll mix them down to one track and then later wish something was louder or quieter.
• There’s a lengthy intro where I’m not even sure if the clips are lined up or not, because I haven’t even touched that part since opening the project/song yesterday, and I hope this doesn’t cause difficulty or confusion with regard to the part that is lined up for sure.
• I can’t make use of Tracktion’s quantizing capabilities on this song (or anything where the computer keeps track of bars and beats), because the tempo for the entire project is set to the default tempo, and has nothing to do with the tempo of the imported music. Since the imported music has a fluctuating tempo, it would be harder to actually map all the tempo changes than to simply do timing adjustments by ear and sight, especially now that it has so damn many tracks and clips.

So it’s not all fun and games. To an extent, I relish the challenge, but it’s like always having a mess to clean up… not just any mess, but a mess requiring detailed notes and to-do lists. Ultimately it feels good to get things more organized, and it’s worth putting in some time to do that. One thing for sure, there’s no way I’m adding any new overdubs to this song, until I can vastly simplify what’s on the screen in front of me. While it’s in that state, I have to be extra careful not to die, because if anyone were to try to take over these projects and finish them up for me, they would have no way of knowing what the hell I was doing.

The solemn bonds of geography and time

Sure, people can — and do — form bonds over such superficial things as common interests, common beliefs, common philosophies and values, a shared sense of humor — but pray tell me, what truly binds man to his fellow man like being born in the same one-year window into a family living within an N-mile radius of the other guy’s house? Yes indeed. It was with this thought in mind that I knew I could not make the same mistake I’d made ten years earlier, passing up the golden opportunity to reconnect with two hundredish soulmates that I’d been painfully separated from ever since that bittersweet day when mortarboards crowned our heads, diplomas kissed our hands, and tears flooded our eyes.

(Abrupt “record stopping” sound effect)

Well, actually, my friend Paul talked me into going, pretty much at the last minute, a few hours before the reunion. His exact words were, “come on, it will only be slightly painful. And there will be alcohol.” So I looked at my schedule, and it was painfully clear that I had absolutely no excuse whatsoever — really, seriously, what the hell else was I going to be doing that evening?

The whole time I was showering and getting ready, waves of nervous apprehension kept wafting over me, and I kept talking them down. I’m not going there to impress anyone, I’m just going to observe. Think of it like one of those rides at Disney World. All the people there are animatronic robots. No problem. I go, I observe, I come back home.

To describe the whole event in detail would bore you to tears. Suffice to say, once you actually get there and put on your name tag, it’s all downhill (in the good sense). You apologize to people for not knowing who they are, and each time you regurgitate your soundbite (”I work various jobs that I hate, although at this moment I’m unemployed, and in all my spare time I do creative work in my space which is both a recording studio and a living space.”), you refine it a little.

A few highlights:

My friend Dean Stresing apparently lost his job about the same time I did, and was every bit as elated about it as I was. (Not being sarcastic here.) We rejoiced in the fact that, essentially, the state was paying for every beer we ordered. Dean was perplexed that I let Tim Reed draw my caricature, when to the best of his memory, I’d always “hated” Tim Reed. I told him, yeah, maybe I did, but not on any actual basis whatsoever. (There were people in my past much more deserving of my wrath, but for some reason Tim was the unfortunate subject of several dumb stories, audio dramas, and 8-millimeter films I made with Dean between fifth and seventh grade.)

At one point, Dean’s wife commented on how condescending [name omitted] had just been to me. I told her I barely noticed, maybe because I was trying to be in a totally non-judgemental mindset, or maybe because my radar for that kind of thing was down. But I did notice [name omitted]’s girlfriend was particularly friendly. She repeatedly insisted she’d known me since elementary school, and tried to get me to remember when our kindergarten teacher lost a contact lens. While she was babbling about how much she had “changed” since high school, I said, “so you became a slut”, which didn’t even faze her. It was kind of endearing, actually. (The animatronic rides at Disney World would have at least said “hey, watch it.”) Anyway, I thought of [name omitted], and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Gimme Three Steps, and quit while I was ahead.

IN GENERAL, women tan themselves way too much (after the first couple of shades, it does not make you more attractive), and men eat too many hamburgers. Paul also noticed a trend with the hair:

Paul: “It’s good to see so much male pattern baldness.”
Me: “It’s good to not partake in that.”
Paul: “Shut up.”

For anyone considering going to such an event, it’s not a major life changer, but it will give you food for thought. You can draw karmic lines between how people behaved and how their lives turned out. (It should be mandatory to attend one’s 20 year reunion before starting kindergarten, if this were possible.) Some people apologized for instances of bullying that I don’t even remember, which makes me feel a little better about the human race. Some people will be stuck for years and years and years in some kind of identity crisis stemming from how they felt about themselves in high school. And everybody’s a little nervous about seeing people they haven’t seen in a long time.

Last but not least, though, at the end of the day, it feels good to come back to the present.

8/2/07

You want my attention
You’ve got my attention
For a little bit
That’s all you get

You decided a long time ago
To be a small person
With a small mind
And small dreams

And so you wreck shit
And you throw shit
And you break shit
And you smash shit
And you piss on things
And you shit on things
And you spit on things
Because that’s all you have
Knocking people down is all you have
Knocking people down is all you have

One day the hardened membrane
Between you and your empathy
Will corrode and burst
And in one blinding flash you’ll suddenly see
All the shit you’ve been trailing behind you in your wake
An acid-bath in your eyes, from your life-long mistake
The one you’re creating right now, every day
A part of you knows but keeps looking away

I never challenged you to the competition you think you’re in
You can kick my ass all you want but there’s nothing to win
Whatever you’ve been through, and whatever happened to you
To make you crave such unfocused revenge
Against — not your abusers — but your future friends
I wish I could help you
But you’ve chosen to be small
So that’s all I can say, my friend, that’s all

You wanted my attention
You got my attention
For a little bit
That’s all you get