Keith Handy 1.999

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.

Quick plea to performing songwriters

If you perform covers and originals, please stop actually using the word “originals” (I have to work on this too). It attaches a stigma to your music. Present your music with the presumption of legitimacy that it deserves. Try this: at your show, don’t even tell them which songs are which. The focus is on performance, not songwriting. If someone asks about a particular song, “I wrote that” or “George wrote that” works fine. But in the energy and atmosphere of a live show, the experience will blur all the material into one overall vibe for most people; people don’t really latch onto songwriting until they’ve heard something a few times in their home or car.

Also, stop using the phrases “shameless plug” and/or “shameless self-promotion”. They were self-effacingly funny the first few times, but now that they’re commonplace, they come off like a desperate, passive aggressive sales pitch. Furthermore, it’s like starting sentences with with “I would just like to say that…”; they’re extra words that add no value for anybody. The DJ on the radio isn’t “shamelessly plugging” Black Sabbath. He just says “here’s Black Sabbath” and puts it on. Just say what needs to be said — “we’re blahblahblah, we’re at blahblahblah.com, our CD is over there (or better yet, refer to it by title instead of “our CD”), thanks for coming” — and trim off the fat.

Trust that your music has value of its own, independent of your salesmanship. It’s okay to be polite and show appreciation to your listeners, but there’s no need to reinforce the notion that your music is on a “lower rung” by repeatedly reminding the audience that you really really hope they’ll go to your website, and oh gosh you’d be so grateful if they’d please consider buying a CD because it’s so cheap.

Please copy the above plea and pass it along. Let’s all stop acting like wussies and present our music with the simple confidence it deserves.

I have a small audience, but I prepare for a large audience. I produce my recordings as if people will be picking apart at every detail and appreciating the extra care I put into them. I write posts assuming that people are interested. (Sometimes I’m okay with the small numbers and have more difficulty with the delay between creation and feedback — but of course larger numbers would shorten that delay.) Occasionally I have mini-breakdowns where I cry, throw fits, and question the worth of my existence, but then I get back on the horse and keep riding.

Validation is addictive, but not instructive. Commercially successful artists like to thank their audience for supposedly “making them what they are”, but the fact is, the audience didn’t pick out the chords or fuss over the lyrics. That has to be done alone, by the artist, in a void where he has no immediate feedback from anywhere but his gut, no matter how big of a star he is. Start making peace with that now, because although you say you’d love to be in a situation where your worst failure was going from an album selling 4 million copies to an album selling only 400,000 copies, that’s rejection by 3,600,000 fans. I haven’t experienced that, but it probably stings a bit.

You’re always going to be likening yourself to someone and differentiating yourself from someone else, so please, for all of us, help to rotate the line of differentiation so that it doesn’t fall squarely between independent and signed artists. So they have stars on their bellies and you don’t. Big deal. You’re not as different from them as you think you are, so stop playing up your “indieness” and just focus on being kickass.

(Dismounting soapbox and nodding politely to scattered applause)

Pulling a Radiohead…

For those of you that either link/bookmark straight to the blog, or use an RSS reader (and therefore skip the news page that keithhandy.com directs people to), you can now download and listen to Leave of Absence 2 in its entirety in 224 kbps mp3 format before deciding to purchase it! Nicely packaged CDs will continue to be available on lulu.com at a reasonable price if, like many people (myself included), you like physical objects.

I’ll soon write a more extensive post/page revealing more than you ever wanted to know about every single click, bang, and whirl on Leave of Absence 2.

Send some thanks to my friend Brooke for encouraging me to enter the twenty-first century. And be sure to check back for more music to come.

I must not rest on my laurels…

…because I’m not very good at it. It’s now the end of week #1 of Leave of Absence 2 being available on CD through Lulu.com. As experienced as I am at working on stuff, I have very little experience finishing and letting go of stuff, so that experience tends to be somewhat traumatic. I exaggerate, but I do have to make peace with the non-existence of an immediate stampede of customers; but the good thing is, if there’s anything technically wrong with the handful of discs that have been ordered so far — like gaps between the songs — it won’t be a nightmare to arrange for those people to receive corrected versions. In a few days I’ll know for sure about that. Like I said, this is a guinea pig. And thank goodness I’m not paying rent on a storefront, or any up-front manufacturing costs.

But anyway, the best thing to do is quit re-loading my stats, and just get on with more work. Get that whirlpool going. So in that spirit, here I am working on It’s You, on an instrumental for the beginning of the current album, Fr. Hifta Ryphtor (which I should be able to finish in a few months):

It’s not technically an overture, but I noticed today that at about 2:22 the chords kind of hint at Curtis’ Classic Collection of Comforts. So I went ahead and accentuated that. Here’s a (slightly) more “mixed” version of the above — note that I fixed the sloppy timing at the end (God bless digital):

Note also that the first few guitar phrases are gone now, save for some barely audible volume swells.  I never intended for the guitar to come in right at the beginning, but it’s good to play through the whole thing just to get in the flow/mindframe.

In case you’re wondering, yes, there is such a thing as Leave of Absence 1, as well as an early-ish album called Unfinished Business, and I intend to remaster them and make them available as well. I also have a large enough collection of what I’ve been referring to as “orphan tracks” to compile into yet another album, and this morning I had the spectacular idea of naming said compilation Extreme Leftovers. Because, you know, Leave of Absence is technically leftovers, so anything that didn’t make it onto that would be even more “left over”. And far from being lesser-quality material, it would include some of my all time favorites such as Mana and Phone Booth.

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?

Two links and a random question

First of all, a couple of links.

Soundsnap is a site where you can upload and download lots of sounds. The terms are that you don’t have to pay for any of them, or even give credit, as long as you’re using them in something and not just redistributing the raw sounds to make money off of them. I signed up for a user account there, and have uploaded three odd sounds that happened to be collecting virtual dust on my hard drive. People actually seem to be downloading them, so it will be interesting one day to hear one of my boings or bleeps in an unexpected context.

Freelance Switch is a blog for people making the jump to freelancing. Notbythehour.com, which is associated with Freelance Switch, features a free PDF book about creating passive income streams. Say no to wage slavery.

Random thought: something that’s been bugging me for years now. A while back, I was browsing through a pamphlet listing “continuing education” type courses available in the area. One course was called something like “How to completely disappear without a trace and not be found by anyone, ever”. Another course was called “How to find absolutely anyone, anywhere in the world, no matter what”. They were both taught by the same instructor. Obviously they both draw from the same pool of concepts. The unavoidable question, keeping me awake every night for years until my brain a-splode, is this: Who wins? Shouldn’t at least one of the courses be subtitled, “unless they took my other course”?