The Light of Day

How low tech can be cutting edge

Excuse my, uh, “calligraphy” for a moment.

Ow, ow, ow. *shakes wrists*

I just don’t have the endurance for that anymore.

Anyway, the point isn’t that I have any desire to do a handwritten blog, and I will likely never do that again. But think about how strange it is that we get sentimental for “low tech” or “old tech” things, how there’s always a “golden age” to look back to. But none of that old stuff ceases to exist, or even ceases to be available. If you really want to shoot a movie on 8mm film, you can, though it’ll be a little pricey to get the film and develop it. Not prohibitively, though, if you really want to. Key words there: really want to. The only thing we’re ever truly being sentimental for is the lack of an excuse to be lazy. The fact that we’ve paved all these shortcuts doesn’t mean the shortcut is the only — or best — way.

But what truly makes “low tech” interesting now, is that we’re in this higher tech environment. You can not only shoot 8mm film, if you really want — but you could, if you really want, shoot 8mm film of a person sitting in a Starbucks with a laptop computer, wearing a Trogdor t-shirt. Which you could never do when 8mm was actually a sensible way of preserving memories.

Today, we can run a Mellotron through Autotune. We can sample a cassette. All these things we can do, but just don’t think of doing, because we’ve convinced ourselves that all our old toys have been replaced with new toys. Guess what? All your toys are still there; they may have moved to a higher (more expensive) shelf that you’ll need to climb a little (or get mummy to help) in order to get them down, but they’re still there. You have a shitload of toys. Do you realize how much “play potential” you have afore ye now? Do that “relationship” math again. Five toys is ten potential combinations, six toys is fifteen… and that’s only counting pairs of toys.

Tip: do “relationship math” in your head:
Take the number of people in the room, and imagine that number on the left.
Subtract one, and put the new number on the right. (If 7 is on the left, 6 is on the right.)
Whichever number is even, cut it in half. (Cut that 6 down to a 3.)
Multiply the left number by the right number, and you’re done! (7 x 3 = 21 relationships.)

It’s like this: there you were, in 1980, or 1985 or whatever, saying, “okay, if only I had this and this and this”, and now you’re waking from a deep freeze, realizing, hey, I have this and this and this!! All you’ve lost track of is why you wanted it. Once you remember, you’re all set!

Anyway, there’s a reason I wrote all this. Ask me to elaborate later, and I will. Ask me not to elaborate later, and I will anyway, just to spite you.

What Do You Think Of Yourself?: new vocal

First, enjoy the session, ’cause I think it went pretty well…

It’s actually a lot easier than my Rival Big Bang sessions were, because it has a definite and more structured melody. The part between approximately 4:00 to 5:00 is a little empty, though, and rather than featuring me half-heartedly ad-libbing, I want to fill it in with something like gospel singers. I just emailed Paul Gaspar to see if he knows any.

I’ve only been saving my session videos as 320 by 240 MPEGs — better looking than what you see on YouTube, but still small — because the videos themselves aren’t meant to be works of art. That said, I’d still like to incorporate parts of them into more formal “music video” videos. There’s stuff you can do to low-res images to make them… not necessarily look hi-res, but at least look better when blown up.

Mouse update

Emily Junior is home. Her fur is a bit scraggly looking, from going a couple days without her groomer, but I’m sure that shortly after I put her back in with Ralphie she will be shined up to a radiant glow. She had a small tumor just behind her front leg, and when I took her in a week ago, the doc said she needed to first take antibiotics for a week because she (the doc) felt that her (Em Jr’s) breathing ought to be a little less labored before going under the anesthesia. So we (I) did our (my) best at attempting to trick her into taking said meds, and we (I) were (was) semi-successful. And apparently, semi-successful was good enough, because she was in good shape for the operation.

One thing I like about going to Cats & Critters: everyone there, including the other customers, says “awwww”, and nobody says “ewwww”. For some reason, out of any random sampling of our fellow meat puppets, there will invariably be one or two folks who are horrified by little animals. For the sake of all y’all, I will clarify one thing: I don’t keep mice to offend or shock you, or to be a “non conformist”. In fact, none of the “non conforming” things I do are to be “non conformist”. I try to live my life in a genuine way, and it just so happens that I think mice are among the awesomest of critters.

Mice are a paradox, simultaneously the most innocent and mischievous of creatures. To some degree, individual mice are polarized, some being predominantly “alpha” while some are “beta”; but every mouse has components of both. Their innocence is projected by their tiny, almost dainty feet, inquisitive eyes, big ears, round bellies, and outgoing social nature… but the movement of their tails gives away their naughty side. They sometimes yearn to escape and asplore, but if they have a nice home, they want to come back to it. The fact that Ralphie was so determined to move into the cage removed any doubts I may have had; if PETA comes knocking on my door, insisting that mice belong out in the woods, I can tell them to fuck off in good conscience.

Mice are very “people-aware”; although to some degree they’re in their “own universe”, they’re not oblivious like a bowlful of cockroaches. Emily Junior in particular will always rush to greet me at the wall of the cage, even if it means putting aside one of her favorite foods. Ralphie, although she has been living the domestic life for a year, still has her wild background and preservation instincts, so although she wants to “check me out”, she will often twist her body to one side to get ready to run away if I move too quickly. If I back up a few inches, she understands that I am surrendering, and she relaxes again.

Anyway, pretty soon here, I’ll re-unite these best of buddies, and there will be a whole lot of groomin’ goin’ on. Thanks to anyone who read my previous posts and sent positive thoughts (without necessarily knowing what was the matter).

Follow-through

I suspect that my blog would be a more effective tool (CATEGORY ALERT!!!) if I followed through by consistently providing updates of the things I wrote previously. This would also make me appear to have an attention span of more than a few seconds.

Without even peeking at my blog, I’m going to pull a number out of some dark and dirty place, and that number is…

Five! Ah, the comforting sound of men and women singing an octave apart… and when we’re little kids, we don’t notice how thumpy the tom toms are. (Why do I suddenly have an urge to listen to Hair?) So anyway, without further ado, here are quick follow-ups to my five most recent posts, from oldest to most recent…

1. First “final” mix of Rival Big Bang. I’ve noticed that, within my album tracklists, there are some things that are more absolute than others. Within those lists, I’ll often find pairs of songs that are, in my mind, absolutely inseperable. You know the kind: Heartbreaker and Living Loving Maid. We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions. Well, in my case, one such pair would be What Do You Think Of Yourself? and Rival Big Bang. Those two songs are married to each other. So what I should be doing is making videos of these pairs as “mini suites”. And just think, these “mini-suites” will fit into the YouTube ten-minute limit (which for some strange reason doesn’t apply to everyone… hmmm…).

2. Open letter to Republicans. Some masochistic force within me made me watch a thirty-second Mitt Romney campaign promo tonight. By the six second mark, he had already said something negative about Democrats. By the 15 second mark he did it again. Only 30 seconds to talk, and at such loss for something constructive to say that the time has to be padded out with broad insults. But the greatest insult was that his voice was dubbed. You know the sound of a hollywood movie, where every time someone talks, it sounds like the microphone is a few inches in front of the actor’s mouth, even though there’s no microphone anywhere in the shot? Makes you wonder what else was fake about it…

3. I’m so tired. The “night crew” paid a visit to Cats and Critters this evening, because Emily Junior is gonna need to get fixed up, and she’s gonna need to take some meds for at least a week beforehand. I took the whole darn cage along, so Ralphie had a chance to check out the scenery too. Em Jr. is still acting sociable and energetic — but nonetheless, now would be a good time to send some positive energy her way. Thanks!

4. Possible video: creating drum parts. Maybe I can go ahead and shoot this. The main thing holding me back is how to get the camera to pick up the sound as I’m working, so I don’t have to sync it up after the fact… I suppose I can just turn my speakers on. Can’t do that for vocal sessions though. Other videos that I want to do: a video at the Fender Rhodes where I discuss chords, and a video at the desk of improvised doodling, cutting shapes out of colored paper, making some kind of “paper puppets”, and generally making images inspired by music without knowing ahead of time what they’re going to be.

5. My results on the equal loudness test. I finished doing what I had to do to create my vocal limiter/de-esser effect, which is both functional and theoretical, in that I’ve tested it, but not on vocals. Don’t forget, that post links to a site where you can test yourself to see how you perceive volume at different pitches. It’s useful stuff to be aware of when you produce audio of any kind.

Well, that certainly felt responsible! Let’s do this again sometime.

My results on the equal loudness test

I’ve got a neat little application I wrote, which, for simplicity’s sake, I call “louden”. It’s like a cross between hard limiting and distortion. Unlike hard limiting, there is no “attack” or “release”; the effect is virtually instantaneous, working on half a wave cycle at a time (if you consider a “wave cycle” to be a period of time where the wave goes below and above the center line exactly once, the part it works on is from the lowest point below the line to the highest point above it — and, alternately, vice-versa — and only does anything if one or both go out of range). Unlike ordinary distortion, which is what you wind up with when you set extremely low attack and release times on an ordinary limiter, “louden” doesn’t flatten the tops or bottoms; it maintains whatever curved shape was between them.

All this surely sounds like I’m full of shit, and in a way I’m sure I am. There’s no reason why the above idea/algorithm should have any merit. But this is one of those lucky times when it actually kind of does. When I push audio through this code, and test how far I can mangle it, the end result to my ears is like tape saturation; a kind of “gentlest of distortions”, which, despite having this non-digital character, happens to be extremely compatible with digital, because of how it reins more sound into a smaller space (yes, loudness war, I’m a bad, bad boy) and keeps those tops and bottoms inside the lines like a good kindergartener.

Despite its usefulness in ambushing the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I think there’s also a way to mold this into a useful limiter and de-esser for vocals. I read somewhere online (scroll down to “The Highs Have It”) that half the reason we need such a thing as “de-essers” in the first place is because the compressors we’re using aren’t responsive enough to the higher sibilance sounds. A typical old-skool compressor or limiter responds to the sound as it measures it… not as our ears would measure it.

So the key to making compression sound more like it’s working right, to us, would be to trick it into hearing more similarly to the way we hear. A lot of testing has been done to find what are called “equal loudness curves”, first by Fletcher and Munson in 1933, and then by Robinson and Dadson in 1956 (not sure why it always takes two guys to do the research). Apparently testing on this has continued since then, and today the current standard is called ISO 226. There’s no absolute way to determine how “accurate” any of this is, because it’s essentially a test of human perception.

With so much conflicting information — and of course, all the data changes drastically when you test people at different volumes — I decided to just test myself, using a simple online tool, and come up with my own damn curve. The results are undoubtedly biased by the type of headphones I use, the volume I tested at, and various childhood traumas percolating in my amygdala — but I seriously think this is better than looking at a bunch of pre-existing charts and trying to decide which one to rely on.

Although there are exceptions, I see that large parts of my graph look like a downward slope at 6 dB per octave. That means, twice as high = half as loud. Which brings me to a question: with all this supposedly being about “perception”, isn’t there also a reality that higher pitched sounds at the same amplitude would naturally have more energy? I know when I mix music, I’m more than happy to see kick drums and bass guitars with waveforms that nearly hit the top and bottom of the track, but I wouldn’t want to see a flute doing that. Yet, if we hear the flute as being loud enough to compete with the bass guitar, doesn’t that mean the flute is putting out just as much “energy”, only doing so by vibrating faster instead of wider? Why is our only measurement of sound energy — decibels — based on width (amplitude) alone? Why don’t we have a unit for width and frequency combined?

I’m not saying that our senses aren’t distorted; I’m just asking, shouldn’t the “distortion of our senses” be judged relative to that diagonal slope instead of a horizontal line? Shouldn’t “higher is louder” be accepted as an objective reality? I’m not joking.

By the way, I originally put the 12K and 16K where they are in the above screenshot because I simply couldn’t hear them. As I check again now, I realize I can hear the 12K, but I have to really crank the bejeezus out of it, so I’m not going to take the chance of over-interpreting that. I am, after all, approaching 40. I suggest you try the test yourself, but be sure to heed Warning #1 in large text at the top of the screen.

The point of all this, for me: if I make two EQ curves — first, one to simulate the exaggerations that our own ears/minds apply to sound, and then one to reverse it — and stick my “louden” effect between them, I should wind up with a nice “instantaneous” vocal limiter that is not as scientifically correct as it is psychoacoustically correct…

…which is what we want, because, we’re not scientists… we’re, uh, psychos.

Possible video: creating drum parts

So far I haven’t scripted any of my YouTube demonstrations, but I think for something like this it would be good to plan out what I’m going to say instead of babbling like I normally do. Instead of being a talking head facing the camera, I think this would be a voice-over while I focus on the computer screen, my hands on the keyboard, and occasional cut aways to glorious drummers of yesteryear. Since I may not get around to actually making this one for a while, I’ll share the script with you so you can watch it in your mind.

The writing style here contrasts a bit with my usual blogging style, in that, I’m trying to not “over-write” my sentences and make them more clear… not so much “dumbing them down” as cutting out all the little linguistic curlicues and somersaults… such as phrases like “linguistic curlicues and somersaults”. You get the idea.

Hi, my name is Keith Handy, I’ve been recording my own music for over 20 years, and in this video I’m going to show you how I record drum parts. There are lots of ways to do that, but this is one approach that works really well for me lately. It involves using samples.

Sampling in general just means using sound that has already been recorded. A sample can be a musical passage, or it can just be a single note. It’s common for people to sample a measure or two of drumming and just loop it. Personally, I find loops too monotonous, so I like to build up drum rhythms from scratch using individual hits.

Quick little back history here: I started getting into music in my early teens, which was in the early eighties. While my friends and I were just starting to lose our musical virginities to the warm, organic sound of classic rock bands like The Beatles, The Doors, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin, the pop landscape was being taken over by the cold, mechanical sound of sequenced digital keyboards and drum machines, particularly in dance music, which I found really irritating. I was totally on the anti-drum machine bandwagon. I felt like a hypocrite, though, because I preferred the clean sound of a studio recording to the sound of real live drums in a practice room. This forced me to admit that at least on some level, I preferred a “fake” thing over a “real” thing.

Fast forward to the 1990s — my band breaks up, and my attempt to form a new band is a dismal failure. I had to keep moving forward with my music, though, because it was either that or gouge my eyes out with a grapefruit spoon… so out of necessity, I caved in and bought my first drum machine. By that time they were getting more affordable, and sounding a little more realistic, so I could make rock rhythms with fills, crashes, and other variations… which might not have fooled any drummers, but could at least create enough of a drum-like impression that a listener could suspend disbelief if he wanted to. The Yamaha RY30 drum machine got me through the 90s, and I pretty much milked it for everything I could get out of it.

Sometime around the turn of the millennium, my old friend and former drummer Thom DeLooze happened to leave his drum set at my studio for several months. During this time, I set them up and recorded myself playing them for a couple of hours. The results of the session weren’t outstanding, because I’m not a drummer, but bits and pieces of it were useable with some patching up. A side benefit of doing this, though, was that I could raid this recording for individual drum and cymbal hits, which I now use in my sample library.

These aren’t the “biggest”, “baddest”, or “most awesome” drum sounds in the world, but they’re drums. I think if you want music to sound “big”, “bad”, and “awesome”, that has to come from how instruments combine together, not from how they sound individually. And the fact that these are recordings of me hitting actual drums with actual sticks, in a weird way, gives them a sort of roundabout authenticity.

I have a different sound assigned to each key on the keyboard. I have several slightly different versions of the snare, hi hat, and ride cymbal, because if you’re going to play the same drum or cymbal several times in quick succession, it’s more realistic if it doesn’t sound identical on each hit.

I didn’t have any good, isolated ride cymbal hits from the session, so I had to steal those sounds from elsewhere. And there’s one crash I use that’s from a different session, different drummer, and different set. But the rest of the drums and cymbals were all me hitting Thom’s set.

On one key I have a soft snare drum roll. This is the only one that cuts the sound off when I release the key. The roll sounds good in a fill once in a while, and it’s more believable if I hit a loud snare or tom tom at the end of it.

The roll is fake… I can’t actually play a roll. I edited a bunch of quiet snare hits together to make that.

And last but not least, I have this guy counting to four. I’ve had this guy’s voice on a cassette since the dawn of time, and I keep finding ways to sneak him into my music, like a recurring theme. I don’t know who he is, but I’m sure he’s dead now.

A really nice thing about modern recording software is that audio recording and sequencing are integrated into one application. This is a godsend for those of us that like to record our parts all out of order, i.e. doing acoustic instruments first and then sequencing the electronic stuff, which I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing ten years ago.

Before I begin working on drum parts, I definitely want to have a tempo grid in place. If the bars and beats don’t line up with the music in my tracks, then I won’t be able to take advantage of quantizing, which means automatic correction of timing. If I’ve imported older projects into the software, or if I started recording the song without a click track, I have to fiddle with tempo changes throughout the song until the barlines match up with the music I already have. This isn’t as much of a nightmare as you would think; it’s actually pretty easy once you’ve done it a couple of times.

Once the tempo of the project and the actual tempo of the music are in the same universe, I’m ready to begin recording a drum part. I’m not recording audio, I’m recording MIDI. So instead of seeing a waveform in the new track, I’ll see a piano roll. Any note I’ve played can be dragged to the left and right to make it play earlier or later, or up and down to a different “note”, which in this case means it would play a different drum sample. I can cut, copy, and paste it, change its volume or length — in this case, the length doesn’t affect anything, because my drum sounds are set to ignore the release of the key, and always play the entire sound — and I can use the pencil to draw additional notes.

Instead of trying to play the whole keyboard as a drum set, I break it down into simpler tasks. I usually focus on the kick and snare first, since these sort of define the beat. I always quantize drum parts. It may sound sinful, but if you’ve ever tried to play a totally kick-ass drum rhythm on a keyboard, you soon realize it was never the right tool for the job; the keyboard is just not ideal for precise rhythms the way a drum is. So I think of it less as a “performance”, and more as “entering notes in real time”. Typically, you would quantize to the nearest “16th note”, or “nearest 1/4 beat” as it shows here, but if there are any flams or triplets, I have to work around them and deal with them separately. Also, in the case of notes that were played too sloppily initially, I have to check to make sure they weren’t corrected in the wrong direction.

Generally on the second run-through I’ll add hi hat or ride cymbal. When it gets to the point where I’m adding fills and crashes, I reach a point where I’m doing less playing and more drawing. I just go by my ear; if I’m listening back and I hear it differently in my head than what’s coming off the playback, I’ll just hit stop and edit the bar I just heard to better match what’s in my head. It’s like what a painter does; you start off with something broad and rough, and then you spend a lot of time examining and finessing the details.

I don’t like to give my imaginary drummer three arms. Maybe it would sound perfectly fine, but I like to try to stay within the constraints of playability. For the same reason, when I used to do more bass parts on a keyboard, I avoided playing notes below the low E. So if I add a crash, I generally erase the hi hat or ride cymbal on that beat. I’m old fashioned that way.

Eventually, I declare it to be done, and render the track. This means the software converts the track from a sequence — that is, a piano roll which only triggers the drum samples — into an audio track containing an actual waveform of the complete performance. This means I can’t twiddle with the individual notes anymore, but it also means the software won’t have to work as hard to play it back. It also forces me to commit to it, so I can let go of it mentally, and move on to other things.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the end result, but in the near future I’ll probably make some adjustments to the sounds I’ve been using. The kick drum in particular is a little “harder” and brighter than I’d like it to sound. I think I’ll rearrange the keyboard layout so the most commonly used sounds are all on black keys, because those are easier to hit rhythmically. Just for variety, I’d also like to create some alternate drum sets using sounds from records, or making beatbox-type drum sounds with my mouth.

So has this technique of using a MIDI sequence to trigger recordings of actual drum sounds, hit by myself with actual sticks, muddied my moral dilemma about “real” vs. “fake” from twenty-some years ago? I think the bottom line is this: it has nothing to do with our tools and techniques. “Real” is about doing it all in the right spirit.

I’m so tired

Come on, internet. Keep it going. Make me appear to be awake 24 hours a day.

Don’t make me come up with a new category just for this stupid post. It’s a stretch to pick “caffeine” from the list, but I’ve got better things to be doing than adding categories.

While I call upon the other side to instruct and guide me in the use of a weekend that’s already starting to slip through my fingers, here’s the night crew to the rescue:

I guess that suggests another tag I could add… done and done.

(You only needed one “done” there, Keith.)

(Well, put the second one towards something else then. How about adding “your soul”?)

(Done.)

(Nooooo, see, now that you said that, I’m off by one again.)

(Just go to bed, Keith.)

(By the way, you never checked “your soul”.)

(By the way, you’re still up.)