Keith Handy 1.999

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.