The Light of Day

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.

From the management

Dear Mr. Handy,

It has come to our attention that you are in love with yourself. The term for this is narcissism. Actually, it’s been painfully obvious all along, but your most recent posts just push it to a new level. Please rectify this situation at your earliest convenience.

Sincerely,

The Management

I don’t know… I mean, yeah, I’m self-absorbed, because you do kind of have to create and maintain your own little universe if you want to be prolifically creative. But I think what I’m in love with is music… and the idea and process of original music, which, in order to be original, has to be related back to me… am I wrong?

Beep

Speaking of cassettes, I threw a lot of them away so that I can hopefully whittle the collection down small enough to fit in one carrying case. A few that I kept, though, were from my old-skool answering machine (I lost a part of myself with the obsoletion of the art of creating twisted, non-sequitur, perfectly-timed 20-second outgoing messages — if that beast had kept kicking, I would have kept using it forever).

All I can say about these is: dear everyone, as a whole, you are so freakin’ confusing. Who the hell are you all? (That’s not a literal question — yes, I know all your names, I just mean, like, collectively.) And also, I feel like a dick. I’ve been a dick to everyone, in the name of “fighting the system” or something. Sorry. (But thanks for the funny ones.)

Oh, and anyone who gave me their phone number in 1994… it’s not good anymore. Yeah, I actually tried some of them.

Psychology question

Okay, so assuming most forward-thinking people have rejected Freudian psychology on the basis that the past is over (not to mention I’m pretty sure we really don’t want to hump our mothers), what if we believe that time is an illusion and therefore the past is not gone, per se, but just in a different place than we are now? It seems pretty easy to bring it back into existence when I go through old cassettes, go to reunions, or rack my brain for autobiographical details for this blog, etc. — so does this mean it still should be dealt with, since it’s not “in the past” so much as “in a particular box”?

Speaking of autobiographical details, there was a gap in my So You Want… series where I stated flat-out that I don’t remember deciding to do an album in my own name. But I seem to have found a missing link in the evolution of that idea. A cassette labeled Knocked Senseless helped to jog that memory. Actually, the box was labeled, but the cassette, which was not in the box, was not labeled, so I thought it had gone missing over a decade ago. The little piece of splicing tape connecting the tape to the leader had long since come off at both ends, so I had to take it apart and fix it — twice — just to listen to both sides. And since it was still labeled as a promotional demo that had been given to me (which it was, before I taped over it), it could have easily been mistaken for trash.

When I say “evolutionary link”, I’m not kidding — it really is the mutant bastard frankenbridge between the Episodes album and Open the Window. It’s only a demo-quality mockup, mainly for me to listen to in the car and “think about it”, but does include rare early versions of Cheap Thrills and Hard, aka B. D. Caterpillar, that I don’t have anywhere else. Shortly after this, I went through one of those “dark night of the soul” thingies, and the tone of my song selection shifted from callous (it’s hard to believe Children’s Abortion Workshop was still making the list) to hypersensitive (Lullabye for a Fallen Angel). But the main point is, I was already conceiving of a self-credited solo album while taking those classes in Buffalo; I just wasn’t announcing it yet.

Four whole versions of one lousy song!

I didn’t mean to. Honestly. It just kind of happened.

If you really want to experience this from my perspective, scroll down and listen to the current version first, and then come back to the top and work your way back up to it. If, like most sane people, you don’t have that much time on your hands, just listen a little ways through the first verse of each one and needle-drop somewhere in the middle to hear a bit of the solo.

1988/89

This is my first four-track cassette demo of TIYC. I was still “just a keyboardist” so everything is drum machine and keyboards. All them “guitars” are distorted keyboards, the only guitar-like sound I was capable of making. If you listen to several my demos from that time period, you will rapidly reach a point of never wanting to hear that sound again.

The vocals are missing altogether, but somewhere there exists a version like this with a simple vocal added a few years later. The ultra-complicated four-part vocal arrangement didn’t exist until 1994, so when I did go to sing this, it was just a simple rhythm over and over on three notes.

1995

By the time I “got serious” about recording my rock opera, I was faced with the problem of how in the heck I was going to do that insane four-part vocal thing. I think I tried every “cheat” I could think of, one of which was to sequence all the pitches and hook the computer up to one of those DigiTech Vocalist thingies. But that sounded too much like a vocoder, so I didn’t keep that. For this version I tried to run a whispery voice through very short delays to make the notes, and apparently it was only marginally successful, so I re-recorded some parts in a more… conventional way… if you use the word “conventional” loosely. They don’t sound as unintelligible as I remembered them to be, but they do sound weird.

Hm, there’s a tambourine during the solo. Did I play that?

The 1995 version of my rock opera was important because a.) that’s when I really made the biggest leaps production-wise (what I’m doing now is comparitavely incremental), and b.) at the end of the year I threw a listening party to showcase it. It was mostly people I knew, but hey, it was still an event.

With 90 minutes of music to record and mix, and me being just plain sick of laying down guitar parts, I invited my friend Garrett to play the solo heard here. Notice there’s actually a walking bass line now (albeit synthesized), instead of just fast triplets on the root notes.

2002

Never quite happy with the metronomic triplet drum machine feel of previous versions, and wanting it to “swing” a bit more, I stupidly brilliantly recorded the bass guitar first for this version. Without a click track. Then I pasted drums on top of it and tried to make it feel rhythmic. The drums at the very beginning and end are lifted from one of Jeff Lewis’ recordings. I also got fancier on the arpeggiating guitar, playing groups of four notes even though they’re triplets… but what’s more noticeable is the gargantuan drum sounds and occasional reverse reverb; I’m not sure what the motivation was for that.

You will probably notice the vocals are now speech synthesized. I may have briefly considered keeping them as the official vocal part, but I quickly faced the truth: they’re just a guide.

Bonus: isolated speech synth

Here’s the synthesized vocals by themselves.

2007

The current version. (This mp3 is slightly quiet relative to the last two; sorry for the inconvenience.) You may have seen posts on this blog about “the hardest vocal part in the world”. This is how it sounds when I put myself to the grindstone and just do the work. Hooray! Fucking difficult it was, eh mate? Don’t ask me to sing this live; it ain’t happening.

The intro should sound familiar, since it’s just cleaned up a bit from the 2002 version. And the little violin bit (courtesy Mike Edwards) has actually survived being transplanted and re-transplanted since the 1995 version.

The underlying rhythm track is smoother too. Maybe a bit toooo smooth. [*makes shifty eyes*] It’s pretty much all sequenced on the computer, but using samples of real drums and real bass notes played by real me, so it’s franken-legit. The arpeggiated guitar has grown even more complex too, with seven-note, six-note, five-note and four-note patterns, but it doesn’t jump out as being such, because it’s textural. I just like it to be varied. Hey, if you’d been working on a song for 20 freakin’ years, you’d change it up a bit too.

In a way, comparing it to the others, it seems like maybe it’s too mellow. I do miss some of the “rocking-ness” from earlier versions. But first, well into the home stretch of a bombastic 90 minute piece, it might be good that the production style doesn’t compound the listener’s fatigue. And second, it doesn’t have any mastering on it yet, which should make it a bit “bigger”.

~

So admittedly, not an absolute favorite per se — not in my top twenty as individual songs go. Just a neurotic compulsion fueled by a series of technical challenges. I think since I was running out of ideas when I wrote it, it turned into a musical lab rat for ideas I’d come up with later on, because hey, it’s not like I’d be ruining anything.

Okay, that’s that. I hope you enjoyed it for whatever it is!

Ultra-rare “bootleg” - for the diehards only

A 1996 attempt to toss together a quick “pop song”. Do you really want the backstory? No, I didn’t think so. I’m simultaneously grooving on it and embarrassed for myself. Never one to hog the embarrassment, I’m generously passing it on to you.

I have a much higher quality copy of this demo on DAT tape, but this is from a cassette I ran off, and apparently is missing a guitar that comes in at 2:13. I’ll save my rant — about begging permission to borrow equipment just to be able to preserve music that I put all the work into — for another time. (Suffice to say, owners of expensive toys should be lining up to beg me to deflower their devices with my fertile and horny music.) Thankfully that’s mostly a problem of the past, with songs like this being the rare exception. I think I mixed it down quickly and then re-used the quarter inch tape for something else.

Anyway, the real reason I dusted off my cassette deck in is so that I can do some side-by-side comparisions between certain old demos and how the songs sound today. Might be interesting for ya. For one song in particular, I have not two, not three, but four progressively evolving versions…

Cutting edge systems - how’s that workin’ out for ya?

The board…

…she’s a-fillin’ up with stickies.

And check marks too. Just to remind myself, lest I feel overwhelmed, that several of the songs are already, in fact, done. I can just double check the mixes on those, and then archive them.

There’s another important part of my system that I left out, which is so simple and obvious that it’s easy to neglect: when I’m done working on a song for the time being, unless it’s in some editing stage where a track is chopped up in little segments and not completely synchronized to the rest of the song (which I try to avoid leaving that way), I run off a working mix as a .wav file, and put that in a directory called “Most up-to-date mixes”, which contains sub-folders for each album, plus one sub-folder called “Not backed up yet”. This way, if I want to refresh my memory on how a song is sounding lately, I don’t need to launch Tracktion and load the whole darned project.

These mixes will initially go in the “Not backed up yet” folder, until they’ve been FTP’ed to my new Amazon S3 account via Transmit. In the event of a burglary or fire, this feels safer to me than using CDs or DVDs. Hopefully I will never need to download them.

The hardest vocal part in the world, post #3

As I mentioned in a comment on another mortal’s site, I sometimes tend to “micro-blog”, meaning I write about the details of whatever I’m working on without always giving a clear overview of what I’m talking about.

And today’s post will be no exception!

So, back to tweaking and cleaning up what I’ve here referred to half-jokingly as “the hardest vocal part in the world”. So ya’s doesn’t have to go searching through my backposts for the details, the song is called This Is Your Chance, one of the songs left off the 1998 CD version of my rock opera for time considerations, and it was written in traditional four-part SATB format. That’s where “traditional” ends, though; had I handed it in to my college music theory professor, he would have drawn a truck driving through the gaps between the notes. (He always used to do that on the blackboard.)

I made up my own rules for how to arrange it. I figured since it would be sung over rock instrumentation anyway, it wouldn’t need to stand on its own, so if it had some questionable voicings in it, that would be fine. I wouldn’t have gotten as complicated as I did with it, except that I was working double shifts at a gas station in 1994, and needed a challenging project (besides counting packs of cigarettes) to keep me awake in the wee hours.

This song, or at least the vocal part, is a rare case where my prime motivation is “climb the mountain because it’s there”. Truthfully, though, it’s coming together nicely, and not as likely to be an acquired taste as I’d thought.

Here are my most recent issues with the vocals and what I’ve done about them:

1. External genetalia. SATB stands for “soprano, alto, tenor, bass”. Two of which I’m not qualified for. One more of which I’m only semi-qualified for. So some thirteenish years after writing out this arrangement, I decide that it can’t hurt anything to just try knocking the two higher lines down an octave, since like I said, the voicings were weird anyway, so it can’t make them any weirder. And a lot of it does sound just fine this way, but some of it is very “clustered” sounding, like if you played a keyboard with your fist.

Solution: I created a varying delay effect that was pitch-aware (requires Praat and does not work in real time, sorry peeps), so that I could make versions of the soprano and alto lines that were consistently delayed by exactly one half of a wave cycle. When mixed with the original part, it cancels out the fundamental pitch and all the odd harmonics, effectively making the voice sound an octave higher. By changing the volume level of this delayed sound, I could gradually shift the emphasis back and forth between the higher and lower (original) octave. As the soprano/alto voices went lower and got too close to the tenor/bass voices, I increased the effect — and as they went higher, I used it less, because there was already enough space between the voices (and the effect would have sounded ridiculous on those higher notes). I think this even fixes my amateurish voicings, but how anyone would ever perform it live is… not my problem.

(I say “not my problem” now, but just watch, in another ten years I’ll be working out a five or six part version for live performance, to emulate the recording I’m making now.)

2. Intonation. Hearing the voices sound the way they’re really going to sound makes it easier to pick out where the tuning issues still are. When I recorded them, I was extremely fussy and did a lot of tweaking by ear, but that was only with a horizontal (time) reference. Meaning, I was working on each line by its lonesome, tuning it to itself and not to the other voices. And for the most part, I did a decent job of this; but with aural fatigue, and perception naturally distorted by the repetition of listening to a phrase over and over, one is bound to be off here and there.

Solution: well, this is simple enough, because I now have all four lines synced together on four tracks. If a chord doesn’t sound like it’s quite hitting it, I mute different combinations of tracks to see which tracks do sound in tune with each other, and this makes it easy to zero in on the culprit. Isolating the offending syllable (snip snip) and shifting its pitch by 1% or 2% (less than a quarter tone, since a semitone is about 6%) in either direction usually is enough, and only takes a few seconds.

There aren’t that many occurences of noticeably wacky pitch anyway, and besides, some syllables — and this goes for any vocal performance — are more important than others. It’s best not to waste too much time on un-accented “in-between” notes, especially if they fly by so fast that you barely perceive them as pitched. Instead, it’s better to waste time writing a blog post about it. That is to say, if I hadn’t stopped to write this, I’d be done now. Curse you, internet!