The Light of Day

Tracktion 3

I write about Tracktion a lot, because it’s affordable, has a cool (dare I say “fun”) interface, and it’s what I use when I’m doing my stuff. So basically, I can’t not be writing about it. But, I’ve been putting off upgrading from 2 to 3. The upgrade doesn’t cost all that much, and since this is something I use all the time, I might as well.

I haven’t had time to really dive into it yet, but just from playing with the demos, one thing I like right off the bat is the “text” plugin. It’s a plugin that doesn’t actually do anything, except that you can write notes to yourself in it. You can insert as many of these in as many relevant places as you need, sort of like leaving 3M stickies all over the project to remind yourself what you were doing. Yes, I’m sure the developers spent a whopping 20 minutes implementing that feature, but still, I think it’s great.

I suppose I will either amend this post or write follow-ups if I discover any other goodies.

Newly unearthed Handywisdoms

By “unearthed”, I mean I’m sifting through notebooks and miscellaneous papers that have accumulated in a small cardboard box in the corner. The wisdoms below were written around the edges of a staff memo, while sitting in an eighth-floor office where I processed auto loans — a data entry job — sometime around May 2003. I’ll even kick things off with an inspirational photo of the sky across my street after yesterday’s thunderstorm, so it’s like those cheezy new-agey feel-good posters — only more verbose and neo-quantum.

Every event has some relationship with every other event in the great family tree of things that happen everywhere.

Everything that happens is a member of a family and can be connected to everything else that happens.

Whenever you move something, you make something.

Every object that you have is a thing that is happening.

Every action you take is an object that exists.

What you’re doing right this second is probably not exactly what you think.

Everything that seems wasteful or irrelevant is actually necessary, but usually for reasons far more complex than you would guess.

All the things that bother you can be looked at in an entirely different way when you really think about how they are connected to everything you care about.

Whether there is a “master purpose” or “ultimate meaning” is irrelevant, because every event and every object is related to any purpose or meaning you could ever choose for yourself.

Funnily enough, I actually kind of believe all this, or at least believe that there are benefits to looking at life this way — and just think, it predates all that “Secret” and “What the Bleep” stuff! As I recall, it actually made me feel better about trudging through auto loan applications that day as well.

Ideas

Here are a few ideas that have been vaguely floating around in my brain:

1. Improvisation club/network - advertise locally, inviting musicians and singers who like to improvise to join a network or mailing list, so we can all call on one another to participate in projects. For me, in particular, to get more recording projects going that start as improvisations, but can then be refined with editing and overdubbing (this is just something I really enjoy).

2. Microfilming - filming things so up close that they are unrecognizable. A children’s version of National Geographic magazine, called World, used to do these, but they were done as a “guess what this is” game rather than an artistic expression, so some of the pictures weren’t as aesthetically pleasing as I’d like to… “shoot for” (pardon the pun).

3. Live sessions - bringing a laptop with partially-complete sessions on it to a gig (making sure there are backup copies on another computer!), and actually recording guitar and vocal tracks in front of an audience. I wouldn’t be able to do multiple takes or punch-ins — without alienating the audience — but if I performed like this more than once, then I could cherry-pick the best bits from each show. Yes, there would be some bleed-through and audience noise on the vocal track, but I can manage with stuff like that. I could also have the software I’m using projected on a screen behind me.

Added 7/23/08:

4. Music theory book - “Music theory for people who hate music theory”. Kind of self-explanatory here.

5. DVD based on the “So You Want…” series - again, self-explanatory.

Vocal session, 7/12/08: Bemoaning Moments

Vocal for “Bemoaning Moments”:

I’ll start embedding higher-quality versions instead when I figure out how. These look so much better when I play the Quicktime right on my computer…

Questions from internetland: amps and mics for lead guitars?

Reader and musician/music enthusiast Jordan Hoek chimes in with a question:

I really like the lead guitars in workers theme, undue strain, and broken wheel. What amp do you use, and what kind of effects do you use? Could you go into more detail in how you record it? Just stuff like, mic positions you generally use, how loud you put the amp, and whatever else.

I almost never use amps or mics for lead guitars! I know it’s sacrilege, but I have a lot of fun simulating amps. There’s such a diverse range of tone you can get with a few effects and adjustments. I’ll tell you one trick that I use a lot, to make it a little more “live” sounding: I use a good deal of compression BEFORE the distortion and/or cabinet simulator. This gives it more sustain and almost feedback-y sound. Also you can have more sustain with less actual distortion this way, and have long, sustained notes without turning the tone of the guitar into a total square wave (i.e. still have some guitarish “character” to it and not need to make it “metal”).

My current chain of effects for lead guitar tracks in Tracktion: multiband compressor set to only compress the midrange, resonance filter (with resonance set to zero) to act like a noise gate with a more interesting roll-off at the end of notes, an equalizer to give a pre-distortion midrange boost (inspired by Brian May), the amp simulator (includes distortion), and finally, subtle touches of chorus and reverb.

For Workers’ Theme, since it’s a remix, the lead guitar was done within the last year or so and I used a special stored combination of effects I have set up within Tracktion. There’s a YouTube video of me playing it, too, and I punched in a short section using slide instead of fingering… and I had a capo on the first fret, because I guess I wanted to be able to occasionally hit open strings, and the music is in F minor.

For the last part of Undue Strain, I actually used my Crate amp (80 or 100 watts, not a huge amp), probably at a medium-ish volume, and an SM57 hanging in front of it. Using an amp is extremely unusual for me! This was about ten years ago. I’ve never been careful about mic placement, so I’m not the person to go to for tips on that; I’m guilty of just putting the mic “somewhere close” and then using EQ to get the tone where I want it.

For Broken Wheel, I was recording on one of those digital portastudios, and used a built in amp simulator, but probably tweaked it a bit. And I think I used one or two foot pedals before the input; I know I at least had a slow phaser on it. Sometimes it’s interesting to put an effect like that before the distortion, because it puts some randomness on which harmonics get emphasized by the distortion. I did takes both with a slide and with regular playing, and made a composite from bits of both. I remember sort of trying to go for a “Momentary Lapse of Reason” sound there, though I don’t know if I pulled it off. ;)

How I simulated amp tone in the mid to late ’90s

Before I had access to good amp simulator effects, I got reasonably passable tones just using an equalizer after the distortion. The main thing you have to do is completely filter out the upper frequencies, anything over 4K or so (so it doesn’t have that “buzzing bee” tone), and scoop out a big chunk in the middle somewhere too, so you’re left with an emphasis somewhere in the higher midrange (anywhere from about 2K to 4K), and then another lower one somewhere. Sort of an “M” shape. Even using a wah-wah pedal left in one position will kind of give you an interesting tone.

Thanks, Jordan, for letting me post your question!

P.S. - in the early 1990s, when I was struggling through my first solo project, I borrowed one of these and used it for most guitar parts.

Guitar overdub: Bemoaning Moments

Whatever question you’re going to ask me about the tie, the answer is “no”.

Gotta record the vocal for this soon, dammit…

Enjoy!

Happy 7/4!

Wow, the internet is dead today. But I guess that’s to be expected, since most of the blogs I read are by Americans, and today is the day we’re all out celebrating our liberation from those silly British folks, what with their nasty teeth and quaint figures of speech.

This is only “pretend sarcasm”, of course, since the American Revolution is one of the historical events that I actually feel happy about (with my relatively limited “just enough to get through school” awareness of history). But it would be funny if we were actually thinking about England at all during this celebration, since they’re the ones that should be liberating themselves from us. We, on the other hand, need to focus on liberating ourselves from something else: oil.

It’s a serious, hard-core, textbook example of addiction. I’ve heard projections of gasoline reaching $7.00/gallon by the end of the year. And what are people going to do? Are they going to actually reduce their driving, or are they going to consider it a necessity to continue to travel the same number of miles regardless of how little sense it makes? Do they understand that this is the equivalent of everyone in the world getting a pay cut?

It isn’t just that individuals can’t afford it — society can’t afford it. Those of you at the top, enjoy your priveleged position while it lasts. When your billion dollar business is suddenly splitting at the seams because your minimum-wage slaves can’t even make it to work anymore, maybe you’ll start to realize this is your problem too. Sure, you’ve got enough stashed away to afford the gas, but unfortunately the truck drivers couldn’t afford to keep hauling it to a station anywhere near you. Have fun with your “money” now. (Even if we get let off relatively easy, my take on it will be cynical; financial analysts have complex mathematical models to determine the optimum number of lives a CEO can ruin without ruining his own.)

We can each try to restore normality for ourselves in the short run by raising our own prices, but everyone else will have the same “solution”, forcing us to raise ours again, escalating the game of “economic chicken”, until we eventually realize that everyone has always been interdependent, and acknowledge that such a short-sighted remedy isn’t a solution at all. We have to smash the needle. We have to go cold turkey.

But how can we have a “wealthy” lifestyle without a car? That’s one of the fundamental, defining symbols of wealth: having a fabulous new car and driving it around everywhere. We’re so blinded by the addiction that we can’t see past this. What’s the point of having more money if we don’t have the wheels to prove it?

I’ve heard that if a frog is tossed into a boiling pot of water, he will jump out and survive; but if he is put into a pot of room-temperature water, and gradually heated to a boiling point, he will stay in it and die. Shame on the experimenters for being such pricks to the frogs, but take heed of the message: if we weren’t already addicted to our cars, and a salesman came along and pitched to us the idea of paying $25,000 for a car, plus another $10,000 in interest, plus $2000 for a warranty, plus $500 to $1000 per year for insurance, plus $40 a year for state registration, plus $20 a year for state inspection, plus any cost of repairs (most of which aren’t covered by the so-called “warranty” — generally $500 for anything important), plus the cost of oil changes and tune-ups every few thousand miles, plus tickets and surcharges for driving too fast or parking in the wrong spot, plus tolls for the expressways, plus quarters for the parking meters… plus, soon, $7.00 for each gallon of gasoline… we would laugh in the salesman’s face and say, “uh, thanks for the ‘offer’, but there’s no fucking way I’m going to bleed money out my ass just to zoom around in some big hunk of metal”. But, because the frog is already in the pot, we’ll take that five-degree temperature increase, and the trickle of blood has somehow become a fountain, and now we’re asking how we wound up on life support.

This isn’t going to go on forever, because some of us are a little smarter than frogs. God bless the early adopters, those of you who make any kind of changes in the right direction, be it tiny cars, hybrid cars, electric cars, hydrogen cars, hypermiling, car-pooling, biking, vacationing at home, moving closer to work, and/or getting a job closer to home. Some people will laugh at you, at first. Then they will copy you. Then they will mark some day on the calendar to remember you, and how you started the ball rolling that got us out of this mess. You, my friends, are the true Americans… even if you’re not American.

Peace and happy 4th!!!

(Ooh, animated GIF… those were the days… of course, if you’re like me, you don’t see it, because your browser rightfully put the animation out of its misery long before you finished reading the post. In that case, you’ll just have to reload the page and boost my Google Analytics stats, I guess.)