Keith Handy 1.999

So… uh…

…I guess I should “go live”?

My only concern at this point: it needs to be gapless. Most of the songs segue into one another, and if lulu’s disc image puts two-second spaces between my wav files, I will not be happy. Especially if people out there pay for it. I mean, you still would get all the music, regardless, but still. I asked one of lulu’s online support people if gaps would be put in, and their answer, after checking with someone else, was “there shouldn’t be”.

Users of lulu’s service can update their files at any time, and they do allow you to provide a complete disc image as opposed to wav files, so if necessary I could create one and upload that instead… but I’m hoping I don’t have to.

By the way, this is the “announcement” I was referring to in earlier posts, as if you couldn’t tell. In no way does this preclude a timely release of some more current material in the not too distant future, as I’m making great progress on that — but the idea of releasing a CD without putting up cash up front is incredibly appealing, and I think a remastered Leave of Absence 2 is the perfect guinea pig for it. Not to mention, a strong album in its own right.

Stop looking at me like that. It’s just a figure of speech.

Well, should I wield the mighty power of my left mouse button, and hope for the best? I’m kind of a hypocrite, because I wait seven years and change to put it out, and yet I can’t wait a couple weeks to order one for myself and just check it… I expect everyone to be patient except me…

Update 9/30/07: Leave of Absence vol. 2 is available for purchase. You can click on the word “this” in this sentence. No, not the “this” just before the word “sentence”, the one just prior to that one, between “word” and “in” — the one in the quotes. The one that actually looks like a link, you troublemaker. I should just make this entire paragraph one big link, but I like to test your motor skills, hand-eye coordination, and ability to follow instructions. Especially if you’re going to be a wise-ass.

Anyway, the process of self-publishing is not as roll-off-a-log dead easy as you would think, but most of it is a matter of uploading the right files the first time, because you’re spending a lot of time waiting. Waiting for files to upload, waiting for disc images to be generated, and so on. If you’re recording music, and you plan use this sort of service, I recommend you download their cover art templates now and start designing that in your spare time. Even if you don’t publish through the same company, the templates will be useful.

Here’s how my day went today. I started off by putting together my little promo mp3 for my page on their site, which I had to keep shortening and rendering at a lower bitrate to get it down to their 2 MB limit. Then while I was editing that, I had a sudden and terrifying thought: Tracktion, by default, starts new projects with the master fader at negative three decibels. So when I did my assembly project to the already-sweetened files, just to make sure they would be at good relative levels from song to song, I ran off partial renders (from cue point to cue point) with the normalize option turned off. Normalizing would have brought every song up to the maximum volume. I wanted most of them to hit maximum volume, but there are a few that shouldn’t, and since the songs had previously been normalized, I assumed I was “good to go”. (Generally acoustic songs should not hit the same levels as full band songs, or they sound out of proportion.)

So okay, the relative level from song to song was fine, but it dawned on me that after this last step they would probably all be three decibels quieter than they could have been!!! Three decibels is noticeable. It won’t ruin the listenability by itself, but if you have CDs in a changer, you will definitely notice the need to adjust your volume from disc to disc. So I opened up each wav file in Audacity, checked their peak levels to confirm that my concern was well-founded, ran a hard limiter on each song at -3.5 decibels, and then boosted each song by 3.5 decibels. Yes, I used this as an excuse/opportunity to push my stuff another lousy half decibel. Yes, I’m an accomplice to the loudness war. Destroying the artistic integrity of my own work half a decibel at a time.

So, re-uploading all the files took another four hours, but at least that’s just a matter of starting the upload and then wandering around, finding stuff to do, and thinking sane thoughts.

Now that that’s all been taken care of, I recommend you grab a copy! If you’re extremely tight and pinching every penny, just bookmark it. Even if you’re so poor that you’re eating rats, you can at least look at the page, listen to the low-bitrate audio clip, and say, “y’know, for being all ‘remastered’ and whatnot, this sounds an awful lot like a low-bitrate mp3.”

Figure of speech, dude. Okay, not a very common one, I admit it…

Seriously, though, right now your word of mouth is more valuable to me than your ten dollar bill.  If you’ve got it, great (I’m currently back on my bread and tuna diet), but otherwise, any plugs into the public consciousness on your part would be enormously appreciated.

This probably calls for a “so you want” post about finishing stuff. Anyone still reading that?

So you want to make an album? (part 19)

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

Installment 19: My song sucks!

Aural fatigue is not just your enemy when your fingers are on the faders — it’s your enemy when you’re deciding whether or not to even bother keeping the track and/or finishing what you started. A tell-tale sign that you’re being taunted by aural fatigue is that you can hear the sound of your music, you recognize that it’s your music, you’re able to identify it as such… but it’s just dead to you. You’re hearing it, but you’re no longer hearing what’s good about it.

And maybe a large part of what would be good about it isn’t even there yet, but it doesn’t matter; before you reached this state, you were able to hear the stuff coming out of the speakers and the stuff in your head equally well. Now you just hear a bunch of familiar yet disappointing sounds.

The first thing to do is obviously to acknowledge and accept that this is what’s happening. It’s frustrating, but at least it takes some of the burden off of you to know that this feeling of disappointment is normal, universal, inevitable, and temporary. It’s also somewhat unpredictable. Sometimes you’ll go for a long stretch where you should be burnt out, but instead you get on a “producer’s high” where you just can’t stop listening to the playback over and over. Other times you’ll put it away and come back to it a few days later with fresh ears, and it’s still not happening for you.

The problem is, music is never entirely rooted in physical reality. No matter how careful we are to prop up our end of it with a tight rhythm track, solid singing, and pristine mixing, the other end still has to be propped up by that elusive, cosmic je ne sais quoi. In less flaky terms, if we’re not in the mood for the song, we’re not going to like it, no matter what we do with it. We need to go back to its source — why did we write it? If we lose touch with the “why”, we might as well be doing commercial jingles, because that’s approximately how much faith we have in our own message.

Before we go back to that song, we need to go back to the feeling that inspired it. Think method acting. Who or what is it about? Even if it’s only an instrumental, there was something on your mind just before you stumbled on the riff that started it all. Granted, once your music is “out there”, anyone who listens to it and enjoys it will have a different context and a different set of associations — but if you lose sight of your own personal context and associations along the way, your song will turn into a meaningless pile of notes before you can even get it out the door. This is true whether you’re playing and singing, or just adding those last-minute EQ and compression tweaks to the final mix.

One thing that I find frustrating, or at least surreal — and don’t get me wrong, this is a good thing overall — is that as I write more songs, my perspective on life evolves, to the point where in order to work on an older song, I literally have to back myself up to a more immature way of looking at the world. So why don’t I just throw the old stuff away and start fresh? (This is what most people do.) Because personally, I like to leave a trail of crumbs showing my progression — an ongoing record of where I’ve been, spiritually, philosophically, and emotionally. Not to mention, I have a sentimental attachment to my old melodies and chord progressions. But I can’t just work on them in a detached, clinical way. So why don’t I just leave them in their existing state? Because I’m a completist, and it will nag at me if I know something could sound better with reinforced drums or vocals, even though the song itself won’t be any more sophisticated. Humor me.

Okay, we all need to be coddled now and then, and you’re no exception, so here’s the short version: your song doesn’t suck. If you’re not in the right mindframe for it anymore, make the best objective decisions you can about how to wrap up the session, avoid making rash, irreversible, subjective decisions, step away from the equipment, and focus on dialing back into the song’s ideal version in your head. This may mean returning to the situation or people you originally wrote about — either actually going back to them, or visualizing it as clearly as possible. Get your mind re-entrenched in the context first, and then think about the song. As soon as you can hear it clearly in there again, you can resume working on it out here.

Leave of Absence vol. 2 - from a “drum slut” perspective

1. Never Turn Back - Yamaha RY30 drum machine played by hand to a freely (no click) recorded acoustic guitar part. Brief punch-ins and hits added in certain spots to cover up some of the less smooth-sounding moments.

2. Open the Window - drum machine sequenced on the old Zenith computer with Cakewalk 3.0. The original cassette demo had me playing pseudo-drum-like white noise sounds (using the CZ-1) over an infinitely looping thump on a delay pedal, and I programmed the sequence to emulate what I’d played there, only less sloppily.

3. P.S.R. - drum machine sequenced on the Zenith, using a click and quantizing in a conventional way.

4. Quit Your Job and Join a Traveling Hindu Cult - this is a mashup from several different sources. The bit at the opening and closing is from a cassette improvisation, using the CZ-1 white noise sounds again, but then I overdubbed myself playing a real cymbal and some triplets on a real floor tom. The second section is the solo section from Wake Up, from the original Open the Window album, and I played the drum machine by hand into the computer sequencer at half the actual speed of the song (with click), then quantized it and played it back at the correct speed. The third section is extremely edited bits from a Mind Mogger performance, with Jeff Lewis on drums (I think there were more people on stage than there were in the audience). The fourth section is me improvising on the drum machine into the sequencer without a click, and then deriving all the keyboard and bass parts from the drum part (was originally a longer stand-alone piece called Stampede of the Media Hogs). For the remaster, I’ve carefully added sampled drums throughout the entire piece to give it a little more “snap”, which has the added benefit of making it sound more cohesive from section to section. When I do add new drums like this, I’m very careful to make sure they’re perfectly synchronized to the old drum hits, so they don’t sound like flams.

5. Revelation in the Resonance - the original demo was also from that same improvised tape in which Open the Window and the bookends of Quit Your Job were conceived, but like Open the Window, I replicated the song without using anything from the original tape. I looped eleven bars of Barb Johnson’s drum track from a Peachy Nietzches session for a song that they didn’t complete. For the remaster I have added sampled drums to make it fuller; it was the only way to undo the damage from over-compressing the original tracks.

6. Soldiers of Music - I programmed the patterns right into the drum machine itself instead of using the computer. I don’t know why. It could have been during a time when I couldn’t use the computer, because the monitor had died and hadn’t been replaced yet.

7. Ten Years From Now - drum machine, programmed into the computer. Most of it is a looping measure without any variation, except for the section that leads into the final verse, where I played the part by hand (probably at half the actual tempo) in order to give it more of a drummer-like feeling.

8. Undue Strain - the second verse and instrumental section originally had only a guitar, and I wanted a “small drum machine” sound for those parts, so I programmed the bars right into the Yamaha and carefully fiddled with tempos until I could match what I had played on the guitar. For the big loud ending part, I played the drum machine freely into the computer sequencer (no click) and then just cleaned it up a little, before adding any other instruments.

9. Various Fakes - this was originally only meant to be a demo, so I think I only had one repeating bar on the drum machine except for the breaks. There’s a spot in the middle of the guitar solo where I wanted a fill, so I played that by hand to an open track and then carefully punched/ping ponged it in. You can hear the sound quality of the drums change slighty where that fill comes in.

10. Waitin’ for the Wind - there are no drums on this. It’s just my friends and me, goofing around in Jeff’s kitchen circa 1993.

11. X-Ray Tex and X-Ray Ted and the Marvellous X-Rated X-Ray Specs on their Heads - I played the drum machine by hand after the bass, piano, and synth solo had already been sequenced. It’s mostly a ride cymbal, with an occasional snare crack.

12. You Feel Exactly Like Me - played the drum machine by hand. It only appears at the very end of the last verse, and again no click was used.

13. Zero Gratitude - this is Jeff Lewis’ drum track from one of his songs, sped up to nearly twice as fast. On the original mix I ran it through a pitch shifter to make it lower sounding, and combined that with the unaffected sound. Since the pitch shifted version sounded kind of crappy, I did my best to drown that out on the pseudo-remix (or “remaster and then some”) with another, cleaner version of the original drum track. Since it was still sped-up and high-pitched, I ran it through a “sub-synth” effect so at least the kick drum would have some more bottom to it. The disco-ish ending, though, is just a single bar repeating on the drum machine. This was also from a quick demo for a completely different song, and I “cheated” on the remaster by adding subliminal hand claps.

For all you non-drummers, I’ll divulge plenty of non-drum-related factoids about these songs when I make my forthcoming announcement…

Conscious and unconscious

Something that I might want to work into one of my existing So You Want… installments, specifically the “in and out” sections, but which by itself isn’t enough to asplode into a whole post:

Think of your conscious and subconscious minds as left and right feet. In order for your subconscious to do anything useful for you, you have to alternately take conscious steps. If you try to do everything entirely with your conscious mind, or entirely with your subconscious mind, you will just spin yourself around in a tiny little circle, just like if you tried to walk by only moving one foot.

A more concrete way of putting this: if, before you go to bed (or before you meditate), you begin to work on something tangible — be it something creative, solving a specific problem, whatever — you will wake up in the next morning having made some subconscious progress on it, and be in a better state to go forward with it. You’ve “stepped forward” with one foot, so now the other foot has a new destination. You don’t need to make fantastic progress, just have taken that step. If, on the other hand, you simply put the whole thing off, rationalizing that you’re not in the mood now but tomorrow will be a better day, you will just have weird (and possibly scary) dreams that don’t do you any good, and when tomorrow comes you won’t be in any better shape to do it. You’ll be able to do it, but you won’t have the benefit of that extra boost from your subconscious.

That’s it! Simple concept.

Bass sessions 9/13/07

Bass sessions for three of my songs, “What Do You Think Of Yourself?”, “Selling Purple to the Blind”, and “Soul Peer”.

I have the bass relatively prominent in the mix for this video, so you can hopefully hear it clearly, but I can’t make any promises if you’re watching on a laptop or have tiny speakers.

The Sunset - remix update

Holy mother of God, The Sunset/Slab of Clay are sounding so amazing to me right now. Even totally not mixed.

Not mixed?? So what did I just spend the past 48 hours doing??

That’s not “mixing”, that’s tweaking. And it wasn’t 48 hours, it was like 18 hours on and off. Your sense of time is distorted, but it’s understandable.

Not sharing yet. (Update 9/15: Oh, okay, twist my arm. It’s somewhere on this site. But you have to be a super-sleuth to find it, and keep in mind, it’s more of a theater piece than a driving song.) It’s that good. No, seriously, I’m in “that place” where the music is alive, and not just a sound coming out of my equipment. I’d say no human with a nervous system could listen to this and not start jumping up and down saying, “when are we gonna put this on? Huh? Huh??” — but I’m no stranger to that feeling. I think it’s just the spirit guides jumping up and down at the moment. The humans are still clueless. Well, not all of them. You know if you’re an exception.