The Light of Day

Slight policy change

Did you get the memo?

Actually, slight procedure change, but “policy” sounded more authoritative. It has to do with managing the large quantities of music in progress on my hard drive. There are some older posts that I’m too lazy to dig up and link to, but anyway, they featured photos of my whiteboard with all the songs and post-it-notes describing what to do next. This has sort of worked, and I’ll keep using it, but I haven’t stuck to it 100%.

The new procedure doesn’t replace the old procedure; instead it’s supplemental. And most importantly, it will be good for my peace of mind. When I’m working on mixes, I have a bad habit of not actually mixing. By this I mean, I’m so focused on shifting things around on the timeline, cutting noise out from inbetween phrases, and generally tweaking the performances, with the idea in mind that I’ll actually worry about mixing after all that has been completely taken care of. The problem with this is that it leaves all my projects in a state that only I know exactly what to do with. Levels are out of whack, things that need EQ or reverb aren’t gettin’ any, and so on.

Imagine you’re a surgeon, and you’re mid-way through operating on someone. Then you take a break from this patient to operate on other people — a break lasting several months — while the patient’s body is wide open, his organs perpetually dangling. It’s a grotesque metaphor, but that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

The point is, even if there’s still plenty stuff you know you want to do, try to make the best mix you can of what you’ve got so far. Run that mix off, and back it up. Imagine there’s a possibility (’cause there is) that something could happen to either you — or your projects — before your songs are done. In the event of the unspeakable, whatever mix you run off right now could be that song’s only hope to see the light of day.

I’ve basically carried over bad (but once necessary) habits from using Cool Edit, where you can’t put a plugin on a track and adjust it any time you want down the road; any effect you apply is permanent. So it made sense to, say, avoid applying reverb until I was 100% sure I was done editing, etc.. I had to work in a very linear way. I don’t have to work so linear no more. Must take full advantage of this.

Effective immediately.

My take on “takes”

From Dictionary.com:

take /teɪk/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[teyk] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation verb, took, tak·en, tak·ing, noun
–noun

Definitions 103 and 105 are basically the same. I would meld them into: a single instance of continuous, uninterrupted recording and/or filming of a performance. (Does punching in a single bar count as a “take”? No, I don’t think we would use that word in that case. The idea of “punching in” is a little antiquated now anyway.)

In recording music, keeping track of takes is something we tend to do more in the early stages than later on. If we’re recording basic tracks, for example, we’re laying the foundation for the whole song, so take selection is critical. If we’re just putting down a fairly simple overdub, we might just keep erasing and redoing it until we like it. Common wisdom might tell us to preserve everything, but the more we preserve, the more work it will be to sort through it all. If we’re afraid that we’re going to play the ultimate performance, think it sucked, delete it, and never realize that it was pure genius, then we have a rather crippling and irrational fear that we need to get over. The quality of our performance might vary, but not by that much. Our subjective opinions of our own work will also vary, but again, not by that much.

I don’t know about other bands in general, but the Beatles’ takes were apparently numbered like this: if the song got off to a false start, that was still given a number. If a more clear dividing line needed to be drawn between a new set of takes and an older set of takes, the engineer would skip to a round number, so “take 103″ doesn’t necessarily mean it was recorded 103 times. If a song was mixed down to another reel for adding additional overdubs, that new mix would get its own take number (this probably helped to avoid confusion between reels containing the original tracks and reels containing reduction mixes).

Since I am a really poorly disciplined musician, I don’t do this thing other people do called “practicing”. (I’m not proud of this, nor do I recommend this.) So when I start doing takes for a part, that’s essentially my practice. The software that I’m using now, I’ve had for maybe a year and a half now, and it was fairly recently that I actually started to use its “loop” feature to do multiple takes. It makes it dirt simple; you just drag the yellow markers to the beginning and end of what you want to record (or hit “i” to mark the “in” point and “o” to mark the “out” point) and make sure that “loop” is lit up in the lower right.

Once you start recording, it will just keep going through that section over and over until you stop, and it keeps everything you do on one clip. A clip with multiple takes on it has a little “+” sign in the corner, and to listen to, say, take 8, you just click on the “+” and select “take 8″ from the drop-down menu. If you want to make a composite, you can split the clip up into smaller clips, and choose which take to use for each section. Since this can all be done on one track, it’s not making a mess on your screen!

First I pick the take that I like best overall. Then I listen for “trouble spots”. If it’s just a timing error on one note, I may fix that note by snipping it out and dragging it to the left or right. If it’s a more substantial goof-up, I snip to the left and right of the bad part, and try out all the other takes for just that part. There’s usually a decent one. After doing this, the left and right edges of every clip can still be dragged in either direction while the audio stays in the same place (like making a hole wider or narrower to reveal more or less of what’s behind it). I adjust the edges until the point where it switches from one take to another sounds as seamless as possible. When I’m sure that I’m happy with my composite, I “render” that track, so it’s in a single file, and the software has less junk to keep track of.

This is certainly more flexible and less nerve-wracking than doing punch-ins (see next paragraph), but the trade-off is that it winds up being a little more time-consuming, especially if you think every take you record deserves an equal chance for consideration (I’m guilty of comparing and contrasting every take, instead of just going with the first one I hear that sounds decent).

The old way, using tape, was to start playing the tape from a little before the part you want to fix, perform along with it to get into the groove, switch the machine from “play” to “record” in an inconspicuous spot (i.e. hopefully not in the middle of a note) while you’re still performing, then switch it back from “record” to “play” in an equally inconspicuous spot, then regain your composure and hope you did everything right. Most home recording devices allowed you to use a foot switch to control the punching in and out; in a pro studio, the engineer handled that. Each time you botched a punch-in, you had to start slightly earlier and end slightly later, to cover up the previous bad punch.

Invariably, there would still be noticeable glitches on the track at the punch points when listening to the track in isolation, but a realistic goal would be for it to be unnoticeable in context. Now that we have more exact and leisurely control of edit points, we take the extra time — or waste the extra time, rather — to better mask those seams. In a way, though, when we listen to an old recording from the 60s or 70s, and can hear little edits and punches, isn’t that part of the vintage charm? I certainly think so. But somehow, given the choice between a seamless edit and a glitchy edit, the challenge to make it seamless is more compelling; besides, bad digital edits just aren’t as charming as bad analog edits.

Were there a point to this post I would sum it up here. Instead, here’s yet another session video:

Sorry about the attention-hogging, bright red, disheveled bedspread. I’ll take more time to either make that or hide it next time. When I realize I’m about to put something down and want to get it on video, I generally set up rather hurriedly for it.

Film meetings are awesome.

Ah, in the midst of all this emotionally roller-coastery last-minute life-or-death job hunting, two hours to put it all aside and experience sanity. It is so great to be talking with film people on a regular basis. Their input and suggestions for my project are helping to make it real — I really am making a film.

Two months ago, I forced myself to speak of it out loud for the first time. I think I sent an email to Mike a few days prior, just to get his feedback on my “pitch”, and then meekly made an announcement at the meeting, to the effect of, “if you read about it and don’t get what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it”. I don’t know what I was afraid of, but I was. I felt like people would think my idea was stupid and then it would all slink back into my head. But about a month later, Mike happily came over to have brainstorming session #1, and then I created and showed my little rotoscope test at the older/smaller group’s meeting. This one weird little test elicited a lot of interest and feedback, and when it came time at tonight’s meeting to do an update, I wasn’t nervous at all.

This is the “Episodes feeling” that I sometimes miss, where if any of us brought a song into the group, it was a given that we would all get right to work on discussing how to play it. It was always very re-affirming, and in an emotional sense, it’s been a challenge to work on music without that validation. (There’s some validation later, but from people who aren’t directly involved, and haven’t “taken ownership” of the song in some way, so it’s not quite the same animal.) That’s the feeling I wanted to bring back.

I could get way more detaily about this, but I need to go eat something before I pass out.

Oh, and by the way, I haven’t shot a single frame of this thing yet. Yet somehow, it’s “alive” now. Know what I’m sayin’?

“An average level of candidness”

These are my results for one of those “no right or wrong answers” tests given by a local employment agency. I’d make fun of it, except I have to admit, it’s pretty accurate. (The stress management bar should have a little cartoon stick of dynamite at one end and a sparkly flame at the other.)

There must be a planet for me out there somewhere, though, because if the people in my society weren’t so damned “ambitious and assertive”, i.e. pushy, then I wouldn’t have anything to stress about in the first place. Anyway, now that everyone is so well-equipped to methodically assess my fundamental character flaws, does anyone want to offer an actual remedy for them?

No, seriously, the truth is, they don’t want you to be a total flake, but they want you to be just enough of a flake that when you’ve worked hard on something and then your supervisor destroys it in front of your eyes, your instinctive reaction is to smile and say, “rock on, boss”.

No shortcuts, buddy

Chords, ancient history, and happy accidents

I’m thinking about doing a video at the keyboard, showing some early chord progressions I wrote, and how I came up with them. One of the many tag lines for this blog was “I hear chord progressions”, kind of a play on “I see dead people” — which I assume everyone got, but who knows. I’ve always been a chord fanatic, though, more so than a melody fanatic or lyric fanatic; I had to develop those abilities later. But taking chords to the next level has always been my passion — getting them to go into unexpected places and still come out sounding cohesive. This isn’t an intellectual fascination; it’s a fascination with the sound and the effect. (When anyone boasts about how few chords they use or know, as if knowing more chords somehow over-intellectualizes the music and takes away from its immediacy, I have to take a deep breath and bite my tongue.)

The problem with this obsession of mine, is that in order to play along with most of my progressions, you have to actually know them; they don’t generally lend themselves to jamming away in one key or mode. Where music “happens” for me, though, where it has the most intense emotional impact, is the point where it changes, and particularly where it changes most drastically, meaning the very point where you have to change the mode to still be following it. Not the chord itself, but how it relates to the one before it, and the one after it, and finally to the overall key.

Because I familiarized myself with all this in a direct, unsupervised way, creating instant neurological links between the sound, the feeling, and the chords, taking actual music theory classes was more like an afterthought — icing on the cake. I don’t usually think in a methodical way when I write a progression; I follow my ear. But, having done so, I can then analyze it after the fact. Words like “interval”, “chord”, “triad”, “mode”, and “modulate” were not even in my vocabulary; I was just doing it. And I would like to see education reverse itself, to where you know and learn the thing on an immediate level first, and then learn the words for it; because as it is now, these words create an extra synaptic hoop for most students’ brains to jump through.

But, education or no education, it seems the “immediate level” thing is probably just either going to happen or not happen for a person. If they’re interested, they’ll go further down the rabbit hole. If not, they’ll take what they like and move on. In my case, that rabbit hole has been my personal universe for 20 years.

Insomnic Hallucinations (rough mix still available on the sidebar) was the first progression I ever wrote that a.) went well outside its own key, b.) actually followed my ear, and c.) really stuck with me over time. It’s an eight bar progression over a simple, slow 4/4 beat, one chord per bar. I never really wrote one definitive set of lyrics for it, or one end-all-be-all melody for it either. I just like the progression, and I keep going back to finding new ways to sneak it in, like a running gag or an easter egg.

Here’s how I would write it as chord names:

Cm(add 6) | Abmaj7 | Em | Bm | D#m | F#m | F(add#4) | G, G+

Here’s how I would play them on a keyboard, in simplest form:

C Eb G A

Ab C Eb G

B E G

B D F#

D# F# A#

C# F# A

C F A B

D G B, then Eb G B

The first three bars were initially just me trying something out. They started as Cm, Fm, Em. I was listening to Led Zeppelin’s Song Remains the Same (the song, not the album), and my still-naïve ear heard the chords under “anything I wanted to know/any place I needed…” as though it might be a minor chord (but not the one whose key it was in) dropping a half step to another minor chord. Of course, it’s not… not even close. But anyway, that’s what I tried, being in Cm and going from the Fm to the Em, and since I was now mentally hearing the Em as “the new iv chord”, going to Bm from there made it feel like it was “landing” on the new tonic.

So what I had so far (Cm, Fm, Em, Bm) was okay, but I think if it had stayed like this I wouldn’t have had such a life-long love affair with it. I did manage to write another four chords after this to bring it around full circle (D#m, F#m, F, G). I was particularly proud of the D#m chord, because even though it had no proper relationship to any of the chords before it, it was exactly what I heard in my head. The F#m was less daring, because I’d already played with taking a minor chord up a minor third (I thought of it as a sort of “horror film soundtrack” technique at the time). The F and G were just obvious, simplistic, almost cop-out ways of saying, here we go, back to C.

I have no idea how I decided to change the Fm chord to an Abmaj7 chord. But that made all the difference in the world. My inept attempt to recreate the Song Remains The Same vibe took on its own new identity, and ever since then, the Abmaj7 to Em part has sounded beautifully ominous to me. Also the thing of augmenting the G chord at the end to “pull” it towards the C minor was a good choice.

But two things that happened to this progression were purely happy accidents. When I was playing the first bar (C minor), and also the second-to-last bar (F), my poor keyboard technique occasionally would lead to me hitting the next note over. In the case of the C minor, it was an added A, which I think is a very spooky (in a good way) note to add. I said “add 6″ when I named the chord above, but I just want to make sure you realize I don’t mean Ab, the “natural” sixth degree, because that’s a different animal, which happens to show up soon enough anyway, as the root of the next chord. In the case of the F chord (played as C F A), my keyboard klutzery added a very mysterious and alluring B (I now know this is a “lydian” sound, used often by David Gilmour on songs like Mihalis and Terminal Frost), that made it more “dream-like” and helped pull it towards the G chord.

The thing is, my brain is hard-wired to immediately like these happy accidents. It also doesn’t think all accidents are happy. In fact, it’s very selective about which accidents it likes. But the question is, what is the purpose or usefulness to society that a sound might grab my ear right away, while to other people it might take several hearings before they internalize it?

Anyway, all these words (and chord names) get in the way, and I’m sure I would skim some of this post myself if it wasn’t my own… so maybe a video version is still a good idea. Something to take home from this, though: failing to copy something correctly can be a great source of originality. So try to play something you don’t know… and see what does come out.

Important message to fellow junkies

If you drink a cup of coffee, drink a glass of water too.

I can’t say any more without going outside the appropriate scope of this blog.

Scams as wish lists

I don’t really have a shape to this thought, so if you know what I’m getting at, feel free to pick up the ball and run with it.

It’s about things that are advertised, which we intellectually know to be untrue or misleading, but emotionally we’re kind of drawn to it anyway. Get rich quick schemes, for example. Mixed in with their misrepresentation of how feasible or sustainable their system is, is generally a valid motivational hook: have more free time to spend with your family and doing what you love, etc.. As much as this hook manipulates the gullible viewer’s perception of the scheme, by causing his sense of “good reason” to spill over into his attitude about the mechanics of the scheme itself, it works the opposite way for the skeptic: our intellectual knowledge of the flaws in the scheme spill over into a rationalization that “more free time” is impossible.

Instead of us shaking our heads in disgust that the worms on the hooks are made of rubber, why don’t we look at those fake worms as models, wish lists, or “vision boards“? We can say, yeah, that particular worm is fake, but how can we all work together to fill the world with real worms, so instead of running schemes to merely move wealth from person A to person B, we’d actually be creating more of that wealth for everyone?

And by wealth, I don’t just mean money, I mean time as well — actually more so, because unlike most of western culture, I value time more than money — and also the actual goods and services that money itself is just a medium of exchange for.

That said, my long term desire to free the entire world from long “check your human rights at the door” workdays and workweeks needs to be put aside in the short term. I can’t save the world until I figure out how to save me.

OMG a whole week!

This is an unusually long time for me to go without posting. There is no tangible reason for this, except that it’s like that Byrds song, which was stolen from Pete Seeger, who plagiarized it from the Bible (and now I’m “stealin’ it back”, to steal plagiarize copy borrow a phrase from Bono, who, like me, couldn’t technically “steal back” Helter Skelter, because he’s not technically a Beatle, just like I can’t “steal back” a Bible verse because I’m technically not God): a time to read, a time to post, a time to refrain from posting… stuff… or however it goes.

Yeah, the punchline was less funny than the rest of the paragraph.

Here’s 11 seconds of eye candy to appease the hordes of psychotic fans thrusting their bodies against the outer walls of my cyberatlantis: my first test of the “partial rotoscoping” method I’m developing for my feature:

Yes, it’s creepy. I did it in a few hours. It’s test #1. The ideas are an iceberg, and you’re looking at the first square inch to pop out of the top of the water.

P.S. - I just went to the open mic at Bodhi’s downstairs, and apparently they’re discontinuing it.  So tonight was the big finale.  I wasn’t in the mood to do any any of my own songs (moratorium on the O-word still in effect), not that I usually am.  So figuring I was only gonna do one song, What Do You Want From Life by the Tubes felt like a good one.  Then since I was kind of green-lighted to do a couple more — i.e. Dan, the guy who hosts it, wasn’t walking back up to the, er, “stage” — I followed it with A Day in the Life, and then Comfortably Numb.  (I should YouTube all three of them.)  I’d say if you don’t know who either of those last two are by, get professional help, but I’ve mellowed with age.  Google them or something.  Anyway, it’s a little sad that it’s over, but c’est la life.

2 years!!!

As of this coming tuesday, the sixth of november, it will be two years since I changed the default wordpress first post from “hello world” to hello squirrel, intending to delete it shortly thereafter, and never quite getting around to doing so.

So, like, the thing to do would be to say “happy second birthday, keithhandy.com”, except I’m sort of cheating, because I didn’t start posting here regularly until several months later. I tried to get some of my LiveJournal friends to continue reading me as I migrated, but apparently they were more in love with LiveJournal itself than any actual human beings posting on it.

It sucked to have to lose some readers, but I’m glad I made the leap. Now, after some time, I have new readers (some of whom vanish for weeks at a time, but eventually come back and catch up). I have a permanent, final destination to lead back to for any other social sites or blogs I participate in — an actual “presence” — and I feel like I can write to whoever in the world is interested, instead of a stagnant circle of friends with a known set of common interests. My posts are readable and searchable forever, and people still go back and read the older ones.

I’ve tried over time to make this site more helpful and inspirational for any of you that have a pet project or labor of love, and I’ve heard some encouraging feedback about my progress in that direction. But also, the site is becoming a central point of organization for my projects. Even though, at close range, I appear to jump from project to project without finishing anything… if you look over everything on this site to get a broader view, you can actually start to see my patterns, the relationships between my projects, and how I ultimately do get stuff done. You can start to connect the dots, in other words.

When you get a chance, go back to hello squirrel, and leave a dumb, meaningless comment. It doesn’t have to be about squirrels… but it doesn’t have to not be about squirrels either. You can say “happy birthday”, or you can just imply it. The main thing is that you take a quick trip back to 2005, and say, “hello, 2005″. It’ll be fun. You’ll have a good time.

Well, hey, it can’t possibly be any less fun than taking one of those LiveJournal quizzes.