The Light of Day

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.

First “final” mix of Rival Big Bang

“Final” because all the things are there that are supposed to be there. “First” because they never are, are they?

My ears are toast. Enjoy if possible. :)

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.

White screen syndrome, on Freelance Switch

Here’s a short but well-articulated article about overcoming writer’s block, or as it’s referred to in the article, “white screen syndrome”. I think the general ideas are applicable to writing music and lyrics too. (We could call it “blank tape syndrome” or something.)

Excerpt:

My favourite method of getting something on the white screen is to just write what’s going through my head on the subject – then revise afterwards. I see it as a combination of stream-of-consciousness writing and Ann Lamont’s “shitty first draft.”

You know the subject matter, so just write. Usually it can be modified into something useful at the end and who knows, maybe you’ll find a few great sentences you wouldn’t have written if you were trying to stay professional.

I’ve written a few articles entirely like this and only had to edit out all the obscenities.

Here is the Anne Lamott (not “Ann Lamont”; hopefully FS will correct that soon) passage they’re referring to: an excerpt from Bird by Bird, which I hadn’t heard of before, but was curious enough to do a search on. (It’s awesome, by the way — except that as a mouse person, I would prefer she used something other than cruelty to mice in the visualization part at the end — regardless, don’t skip this one!)

And here are some notes that a fellow named Kyle took, summarizing Bird by Bird. Don’t sit back and let authors reap all the benefits of this stuff; how can you apply it to your music?

Progress report: Fr. Hifta Ryphtor

I suggest listening to the second audio clip in the previous post — the updated mix — while reading this.

It’s kind of scary to me how “right” I’m doing the current (coming fairly soon, hopefully) album, Fr. Hifta Ryphtor (assuming I don’t change the title), at least by the values I’ve been preaching lately on this blog. By which I mean, philosophically and artistically right… actually following my own advice, for real. And I’m using the word “scary” in a literal sense here. Not scary in a bad way, but scary enough that there’s a leap of faith involved in making it.

I’ve hit on this topic a few times in my So You Want To Make An Album series, but it bears repeating, and in plain English: if you have the luxury of working in your own studio, and not paying for recording time, it’s best to only plan the album out in a skeletal way, leaving plenty of holes open, so you still have something creative to do at every stage. In other words, don’t divide the project into creative work and busy work, and do all the creative work first, leaving nothing but busy work. Don’t pre-plan every detail in every single song, and then pound out the overdubs in an assembly line manner. It’s like giving your muse a temp assignment and then locking it in the closet after you think you’ve “milked” it. Instead, get it involved, and keep it involved every step of the way.

This is scary, and does require a leap of faith. I have gaping holes in my track list, and songs with incomplete lyrics. Yet I can tell from the material I have, like having enough puzzle pieces filled in to see the overall shape of the picture, that this is going to be a fucking fantastic album.

This is not how it was for Open the Window or Through Forbidden Black Doors. On both of those projects I nailed down the song order before so much as putting down a drum track, and clung to it religiously. Then I typically felt like some songs were behaving, while other songs were being difficult. There wasn’t an issue of not having any high quality material for either of those, don’t get me wrong, but I wasn’t demonstrating total trust in the muse. Great stuff still managed to come out, but I didn’t understand that I was putting the brakes on it, making it harder than it had to be. I got so frustrated with all the seemingly external obstacles constricting the flow of my projects, not realizing I was creating those obstacles. Unfinished Business and Leave of Absence were steps in the right direction, but with production quality sometimes taking a back seat to artistic exploration.

Still, I’m not saying this with regret; this is all part of The Great Learning, and it was necessary for me to experience that to the extreme in order to be where I am right now. Would I go back and do it differently? That’s a useless question. (For one thing, I have, in a sense, “gone back and done some things differently”, but that’s not what I mean.) If I were to change the past, I wouldn’t have the present as it is. It’s really as simple as that.

Oh, and another awesome thing about this album: no “boy-girl” themes (sorry, Mike Love). Nothing about relationships, heartbreak, lust, jealousy, or anything like that. Granted, when I have touched on those subjects in the past, it was always in my own way, bravely putting my passive-aggressive, co-dependent neuroses on display, so I’ll at least give myself credit for that. But one thing that really appealed to me about Dark Side of the Moon, way back in my musical infancy, is that the album isn’t about some external object of your desire; it’s about YOU, the person listening to it. And I’m happy to say Fr. Hifta Ryphtor seems to be my first album to have that consistently going for it as well.

Edit 10/16/07: I still haven’t escaped the “really old shit being released as new” pattern, mind you. I’m working on cleaning up Happy Birthday Pump Prototype, and reminded by this song that time is, really, in fact, going by, and I’m not entirely caught up to it. But the poor freakin’ instrumental has never been on an album before, and a lot of people liked it. Consider it the “token 1980s-styled drum machine song”. It’s kind of in the spirit of Propaganda’s Dream Within A Dream. No, I don’t know anything else about that band. I’m a cold-hearted one night stander that gets the musical influence he needs and then isn’t there the next morning to listen to the rest of your album.

Interesting way to write a weird vocal melody

The usual (for me): really really old song gets rewritten with a new twist, but even then isn’t totally followed through on for a long time. In this case, we’re talking so old that the original lyrics were downright painful. It’s actually that “The Tube” song from the days of that old stapled-together loose leaf, pictured on installment one of the So You Want series.

Even at the age of 12 or 13 (early 1980s), I was already getting weird with chord progressions, almost by necessity. There was a guitar with only three strings on it, and I would tune them to either a major or minor chord (minor in this case) and barred it with my thumb while the guitar sat on my lap (and sometimes I’d also be tapping a tambourine on the floor with my foot). So The Tube was all minor chords, and the main gist was to start at the octave fret, go up one, down three, up one, down three, and so on, until it got all the way to the bottom. Then there’s another part from there, but using the same kind of barred minor chords.

Sometime later, in the mid 90s, I wrote a dumb poem about a recording session gone haywire, and then realized that it was written in the same meter as The Tube. I figured if I ever pulled that tune out again, I’d use those as lyrics, but they would have to have a more interesting melody than just following the “up one, down three” pattern of the progression. I have two different bits of sheet music for it, worked out at various points during the last several years, but neither one has a proper melody. One has a bunch of “pseudo-notes”; just notes drawn at approximate intervals to how my pitch would go up and down if I was speaking them, without any thought given to the chords, and no specific rhythm. The other sheet has a rhythm worked out, done separately, without any indication of pitch. So these were kind of like lost soulmates (or socks) that needed to be matched up.

In my Tracktion project for this song, what I’ve done is plunked all the notes in on a midi track (sounded as an electric piano, just as a sort of “musical scratch pad”), as they appear on the pages, and then fiddled with their pitches until they had some semblance of relationship to the strange chord movement underneath. But, I was losing track of which words went with which notes, so I did an additional guide track where I was speaking the words to the rhythm. Um, rapping? I don’t know. But the idea is that I can listen to this a few times until it embeds itself into my longer-term memory, then sing it in a more natural, less disjointed way. (Having a mental picture of what this sketch represents in terms of a real vocal part is what I mean by “hearing the greatness in the shit“.)

Regarding one line in there, “fat old maids that reek of booze” — I apologize for the social stereotyping, but I wrote the poem quickly, on a whim (on cardboard, no less), without much thought, and unfortunately, “full-figured, mature, single women who enjoy a good cocktail now and then” would not have fit the meter or rhyme scheme.

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!

Leave of Absence vol 2 - analysis

I just listened to the rest of the tracks from Leave of Absence vol 2, the ones I hadn’t heard recently, to kind of evaluate them as far as what might be needed for a remastering. I was re-organizing the file system on my G5, so that the most up-to-date versions of any songs would all be in one place. I listened to a couple of “deep cuts” from Unfinished Business and Leave of Absence vol 1 as well, just to get a feel for where everything stood sound-wise and production-wise, but of those three albums, LoA2 would be the only one where I didn’t have any songs in the remix queue.

None of the songs from LoA2 can be remixed, because they were all assembled on the Korg D8 portable eight track hard drive recorder. Most of the songs did start out in some analog form on the Fostex, but the bulk of the work was done on the D8. It was all digital mixing and editing, like using a computer, but without the benefit of a screen to see anything on. It just has a little LCD display that tells you what song you’re working on, the elapsed time, and the paramaters of whatever effect you’re tweaking. You can copy sections from one track to another, slide things back and forth in time, and even do a “repeating paste” that effectively loops a sound up to 99 times. But you’re kind of doing all this in the dark, by today’s standards.

Whenever I was happy with an overdub, I would bounce the tracks down to make room for more overdubs, and erase the original tracks. So although I wasn’t losing sound quality, and I did have the benefit of being able to “fix” my overdubs to some degree, once I committed them to this submix, there was no going back. When I felt that the songs were done, another audio engineer in the same building was gracious enough to let me plug my D8 into his CD recorder to save the final mixes to CD before wiping the D8 clean for more work (the timing of the track IDs is weird because you have to hit a button at the exact right moment while it’s recording). So in the end, those CDs were all I had. I eventually ripped them to a computer, while they were thankfully still playable, and have preserved the files as I migrated from computer to computer.

I didn’t bother listening to the first three songs, because I’ve already got a remastered Never Turn Back and Open the Window on this website, and remastered P.S.R. for the YouTube video. So the first thing I checked out was Quit Your Job and Join a Traveling Hindu Cult. This is just a meaningless, silly title, to keep in line with my alphabetical naming scheme. What struck me about it is that it’s a mashup. You remember when mashups were popular? Oh, yeah, of course you remember, because it’s now. Well, this was a mashup I did in 1999, of my own material, and whatever tapes were lying around with friends’ material as well. Kim’s voice (backwards, mostly) wafts in and out, as well as some of Garrett’s voice and guitar from his album. A bit from Wake Up is used, some of the Mind Mogger jam from Friends and Players that didn’t wind up on volume 1, some of Paul Gaspar’s trumpet from the TFBD sessions, a bit of a weird “vampire” speech Jeff had done on a song of his — the surprises just keep a-coming. The overall effect is somewhat chaotic, like a more tuneful Revolution 9. Since I went to the trouble to time things musically and match keys, it also reminds me of parts of the more recent Love album.

Overall — and this goes for all three albums — the need for remastering is not “icing on the cake”, it’s urgent. Everything sounds muffled. But this is extra true for the next song, Revelation in the Resonance (the title lifted from Never Turn Back’s lyrics just to fill the “R” spot). I actually remember EQ’ing and re-EQ’ing this one because it never sounded good. And the only way to undo the damage is to EQ it yet again. It sounds like a beautifully sad and powerful eulogy for something, and I think that “something” is it’s own sound; this was the last time I ever faked a lead guitar by distorting the CZ-1 synthesizer (I did this all the time, especially for demos, when I was a “keyboardist”). In one spot it hints at the riff from Ten Years From Now, but only because they were both written around the same time.

My memory of Soldiers of Music, in contrast, was that it was sonically pristine. And my memory would be wrong. Although a step up from Revelation…, it’s in just as much need of treatment as the rest of the tracks. But it does groove solidly. I then skipped ahead to Various Fakes, which had me furiously bobbing my head, and X-Ray Tex and X-Ray Ted and the Marvellous X-Rated X-Ray Specs on their Heads, which as you might guess, was titled at the last minute to fit the convention. The latter, a short and sterile faux-jazz experiment, would be more suitably identified as something like “Plastic Lounge”, and sounds like it would be at home on a Zappa album.

You Feel Exactly Like Me is stunningly dark and pointed, and would be appropriate to dedicate to anyone who is hurtful for no reason. It was about something personal at the time, but I remember hearing about the Columbine murders around that time and weaving my feelings about that in with the more personal stuff, as if I was confronting a killer from a channeled victim’s point of view:

Who am I…
Watching you watching me die?

Fantastic improvised guitar noodling in the background on that one, too — sort of Oldfieldian. And then, at the very end of Red-esque rocker instrumental Zero Gratitude, there’s a brief sound of an acoustic guitar and my voice saying “I think I’ve got… enough of that one”, which is actually me doing takes for Never Turn Back, thus making the album subliminally circular (even though it’s supposedly the second half of a two-volume album). Without the listener knowing this, it just sounds like me casually saying that’s enough material for the album, and it’s simply time to end it — an equally groovy interpretation.

I think I can definitively confirm that the album was completed by the end of 1999, because as I recall, Christy had moved to Rochester, and our friend Rich was up to visit, and the three of us celebrated New Years by playing Worms Armageddon (and replacing the existing sound effects with in-jokes and obscenities, which probably made for one of the top ten most eye-tearing and snot-clearing laughs I’ve ever experienced) and listening to the album from start to finish. We all agreed in the end that it was a good album. I still think it’s a good album, but I don’t know if it would fly with something like Magnatune (the compilation idea felt “wrong” to me — I was starting to think maybe I’m a singles person and not an album person, but apparently I was right the first time). They stress that an album should be chock-full of good tracks, and not have fillers — but I think in the broader context, the fact that it does have “fillers” is what makes it work. The emotions are not always at an intense level, so it doesn’t burn you out. You get a chance to just relax and have a laugh between the catharses.

Well, it won’t hurt anything to remaster the dang thing and send it in…

So you want to make an album? (part 18)

To read the entire series, go to the “So You Want…” category.

Installment 18: All your bass

One of the nicest perks of being an independent recording artist is that your bass player has no ego. Sure, some of your own ego will come through in the bass parts you play and/or sequence, but for the most part, your allegiance is to the song, not the instrument.

I could probably rattle off another laundry list, similar to the opening of my drum slut post, only this time of “ways I’ve recorded bass parts”. But, this series is not about me anymore, it’s about you — using me as a metaphor for you, of course, since my writing snaps back into first-person if I stop consciously thinking about it for more than two seconds. Suffice to say, depending on the style of the music, you will most likely be using an electric bass guitar, or some kind of keyboard. I like the sound of a real bass guitar best, or at least I like my simulations (when necessary) to be as believable as possible. Generally, if I use a keyboard and sequencer, it’s to work out a “sketch” of a bass part, so I can experiment with changing certain notes and see what sounds best before actually learning to play it on a real bass. I always start right off with a real bass guitar on slow songs, though, because they’re easy enough.

Bass parts, oft thought of as a dull chore, can actually be very stimulating if you let yourself get just playful enough. You don’t have to keep the part totally interesting through the whole song, but you can work in little variations here and there to keep the song “alive”. There’s rarely a practical reason to record the bass first, so by the time you do so, you’re generally past the stressful stage of needing to create the song’s framework and worry about its tempo — so it’s easy to do multiple takes and punch-ins, which means you can try something a little different in bar 38 without committing to anything.

What makes it extra fun is remembering that you’re playing to the listener’s subconscious; nobody actively listens to the bass line (besides other musicians), and small changes can have a surprising impact on the song’s overall effect. Have fun with these. Try changing the rhythm just a little by syncopating/anticipating one of the notes (playing it a half beat early). Try using a different pitch on one of the “inbetween” notes (one that isn’t on the chord change). Try leaving a hole on a certain beat, so that the notes you do play are that much more defined. Try mimicking something from a bass line you heard in a jazz, disco, reggae, country, or polka song. It won’t change the whole style of your song, but it will hint at something. To most listeners, it will be subliminal; but if you drop it in stealthily enough, even your musically savvy friends may not pick it out until the tenth listen.

Sometimes people record the bass secondly, so they can be sure to lock their rhythm tightly with the drumming. But without other instrumentation there, and all that apparent “space” in the sound, you might have a tendency to overplay. If you record some of the other instruments first, you’ll know where you can just keep the bass part simple, and maybe even leave some holes in it.  Also, if you first get everything else to sound as good as possible without it, you’re more likely to end up with a final product that sounds good on smaller speakers where the bass part can’t be heard quite as well.

I generally put the bass part down after there are some guitars and keyboards already recorded, so I can hear it in context; but, then when I’m editing and polishing up the bass track, I’ll leave those other things muted so I can make sure certain bass notes line up perfectly with the drum hits, especially the kick drum. If a bass note happens to be between two drum hits, I usually nudge it to make sure it’s exactly between those hits. (Our eyes are more critical than our ears, so if it looks good in the editing software, it probably is good. Listen to be sure, of course.) Melding your bass and drums into one synergistic monster will help give your song a solid backbone, and subsequently a “professional sheen”, even if your other instruments occasionally flake out.

Idea: try recording two very different versions of the bass part. For the first version, keep it simple, minimalistic, and safe — just lock to the beat, define the chord changes, and give some semblance of “bottom” to the music. For the second version, improvise ambitiously and dangerously, at the outer edge of your skill level. You’ll flub a lot, but you might manage to get in a few “golden moments” where you sound better than you actually are. Just keep the good parts, and erase the corresponding parts of the “simple” version, to make a great composite.

If you need something precise, you need it done quickly, and it doesn’t need to “rock” in the strictest sense of the word, sequenced bass will do the trick. There are plenty of sampled basses available that will satisfy your need for a realistic tone, and synthesizers can generally do a reasonable “fretless” sound; the only thing you’ll be missing are some of the performance nuances and inflections — like the gliding of the fingers, and the natural variation in timbre from note to note. Sequenced bass will serve it’s most essential purpose, mind you, supporting the chord changes and establishing the bottom of the spectrum — it just won’t get anyone “air bassing”, so be sure your song gives the listener something else to do with their hands.

When sequencing a bass part, you will probably want to quantize it. If your drums are sequenced too, this will make locking the bass to the drums a one-step no-brainer. Also, try to avoid letting notes overlap; it will generally stick out and kill the illusion, and multiple pitches don’t blend well in the lowest register unless they’re really simple intervals, like octaves. (If your tone generator/sampler/synth can be set to monophonic, as in only one note at a time, this keeps things simple.)

Whether the bass is real or not, it usually sounds good to put some compression or limiting on it. This smooths out the volume and helps it “sit” more with the drums. EQ is useful too; by adusting the upper midrange, you can control how much it “stands out” among the guitars and keyboards, as opposed to just turning the whole instrument up and overpowering everything. Most other effects are not good for bass, in general, unless you want to be experimental. I’ve met bass players with racks of digital effects the size of refrigerators, and it’s kind of silly. Like it or not, the bass serves a musical purpose, and a wonderful one at that — and serves it best with a clear, simple tone. If you ache to transcend the degrading stereotype of “bass players playing low notes”, and you feel your time has come to shine as a musician… listen… is the thing surgically grafted onto your body? When you arrived into this world, did the doctor congratulate your mother on her bouncing baby bassist? Have you ever met a carpenter that only uses saws? Set it down and pick up a different instrument.

In closing, here’s a bass. It lists at $4,546.00, but hey, it’s worth it, because it’s all pre-banged up, and you don’t have to go to all that trouble wrecking it yourself.

Edit 8/14: in post-closing, here’s a bass track I recorded years ago and just finished editing:

This is a song I originally recorded with Episodes in a proper studio in the late 1980s. We never finished mixing it, and the original tapes are gone forever. Towards the end of the 1990s, we had a half-hearted stab at reuniting, with Garrett being the most reluctant of the four of us, and did a rudimentary session for two songs in my home studio, including a remake of Phone Booth. The drumming is by original Episodes drummer Thom DeLooze. A rough guitar part exists, played by Garrett, which I still plan to sift through and assemble the best bits of into a (hopefully) complete guitar track. The three of us played together for about three and a half takes, and this is a composite of the best bits from Thom’s and mine, carefully edited to still sound natural, but without the mistakes.

Notice that the bass by itself (or with just the drums) sounds simplistic, naked, even “dumb”. That’s fine, though, and it’s good to get comfortable with that sound, because in the context of everything else, every little inflection or variation helps carry the music along.

What Do You Think Of Yourself? (demo, 4/6/99 8:11 PM)

Here is something straddling the line between demo and song-skeleton: What Do You Think Of Yourself. Thanks to Garrett’s verbal time-stamping, we can now pinpoint the exact year, day, and minute that the acoustic demo was originally recorded. The funny thing is, I forgot we ever did record the song, and it was a delightful surprise to find it intact when I was inventory-ing my reels a few years later. The drums (for part of the song) had already been played by myself in a separate session, and I had to do some time-squashing of our demo to fit it to the tempo of the drums.

Apologies for my out-of-tune vocal, and for, uh… Michael Bolton. That will be cut at the last minute, but I’m keeping it in the working version because it’s a cheap laugh. :)

Oh, I almost forgot the reason why I’m posting this now: I just used Da Hornet (plus a Leslie effect) to make the “spinning” chord for the intro (0:58 - 1:39).

Whenever all the noise dies
Behind the lids of my eyes
It’s never hard to give rise to a “me thing”
But when I see the whole earth
I wonder how much I’m worth
Or if I even deserve to be breathing

People pay a pretty penny
Collecting clowns to criticize
People love to make a fool of
That reflection in Bozo’s eyes

Have you noticed when you’re looking
At squirmy worms that crawl the ground
Squirmy worms are less repulsive
They look up while you look down

What do you think of yourself?

Every day you let slip away from you
Is a day you can never retrieve
Twenty four hours of your past down the drain
Your future might as well just get up and leave
And when you choke your deepest desires
Your worst fears are guaranteed to come true
‘Cause really, isn’t your worst fear of all
That nothing good will ever happen to you?

Are you good or are you evil
After all is said and done?
Is your life worth watching over?
And I mean that in more ways than one

What do you think of yourself?

Edit 6/11/07: “What’s all that with just the drums by themselves from 5:49 onward?”, I hear you asking. That’s for a section of music that bridges What Do You Think into the next song. Fortunately for me, as I sit behind a drumset, I can hear all of my chord changes in my head. Unfortunately for you, you can’t hear all my chord changes in your head, so all you hear is drums.

New piano part to the rescue!

I put in way too many hours — yes, that’s right, you heard me, “hours” — on this new piano overdub over this past weekend. First, I played the grandiose dramatic thing from 1:18 - 1:52, as in actually played it on the keyboard, since I’ve played it thousands of times and pretty much knew exactly note for note what I wanted there. Since you can only play so well on a $100 unweighted keyboard, I did take some time cleaning that up in piano roll view: erasing mis-hit notes, quantizing rhythm, smoothing out volume (”velocity”) of notes.

Then I did the quiet part from 0:50 - 1:17, the same way, but separate from the quiet “guide drums” so they wouldn’t be locked into that tempo. Since it was a little shorter/faster than the guide drums, I lined it up with the next part, and then slid all that stuff to the left to line it up with the part before it.

For the “apocalyptic chords” (0:22 - 0:49), I knew what chords I wanted there but didn’t have a set way in my mind to play them, so I “composed” that whole part by drawing it in the piano roll view, working backwards from the end of the section so that it would lead into the next part as naturally as possible. (Kind of bends the definition of the word “naturally”, I realize.)

For everything before that, the “jam-out” part (which you only hear the tail end of here), I did a combination of actual playing and creative note-drawing, got too far out with it — to the point where it was getting in the way — and then replaced the most excessive bits with simple filler. One of the big differences between the me of today and the me of 1992-1994 is that I realize I have this tendency to overwrite, and know when to cut out a crazy measure and replace it with dead-simple quarter notes and triads.

Towards the end, when I only had a few measures left to fill in (0:04-0:18 on this mp3), I felt creatively zapped. I was ready to call it a night and go to bed, when I asked myself this awesomely powerful question: “what would you put in there if you had to quickly put something there and didn’t have time to think about it?” That helped blast that block out of the way, for sure. And I didn’t cop out on those measures — I did wind up putting some real “artistry” into them — but that was kickstarted by the “just do something” mindset.

“So what’s up with the piano all by itself from 1:53 to the end?”

Ah, another day… another day…

Defibrillator for your internets

This is going to be less of a “cool post”, and more of an electric shock to my blog’s heart to make sure it keeps beating. Thanks for sticking with me and being a faithful reader. I actually started getting notices about exceeding bandwidth, so that’s a good sign.

I can’t wake up today. I leave my old iPod playing all night as a soundtrack for my subconscious. It’s beautiful how the old ones can actually drive a pair of speakers, since they were made before anybody demanded that headphone users be protected from their own inability to operate a volume control. For all the loud and raucous songs on there, the first thing that startled me awake is the extra 30 seconds of soloing before the fade out on the remastered No Way. (”Those notes aren’t supposed to be there!”)

Then there was the actual alarm. I hit “snooze” a bunch of times, finally forced myself to get it together in time for my mandatory and mercifully brief unemployment orientation, waited half an hour for Wendy’s to open and grabbed a burger — no, I’m not really doing the pescetarianism thing yet (I have to learn to pronounce it first) — and went back to bed, this time to be startled awake in the early afternoon by thoughts about the true nature of color, and about how we can’t escape perception.

Since I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here yet, I’m now doing my first score for a live action film, A Voice from the Lantern (I’ll link to it when a public site is up), which is considerably longer than the average short. As I’ve said to Tony (the director), if I resort to my usual methods of composing music, it will never get finished. So I’m going to have to stop thinking like a songwriter, and do more improvisation and “soundscaping”.

In the between times, I’m trying to do work on an album, and I’m having my usual moments of doubt. First of all, I don’t know who my target audience is. Forget that I’m getting close to 40, because I still look like I’m in my 20s (see above self portrait) and nobody has to know. But the music itself swings a wide, almost schizophrenic range, from very soft and gentle to very loud and in your face, and I don’t think that makes for an album most people can just put on while going about their business. I mean, I can do that, but I’ve had years of practice.  Generally, people want to pick a mood and stick with it, not get thrashed about on the wild seas of melodrama.

I know I’m going to read this post someday from another perspective and think “how sweet and honest, he has self-doubt just like any other authentic artist”. It’s just kind of icky when you actually feel it.

Minors, maths, mixes, and magnatunes

I just had a cup of coffee, cranked King Crimson’s The Power To Believe, and fell fast asleep for most of the duration of the album. Drooled on my pillow, even. (Wow, good thing I didn’t have a glass of warm milk and put on Brahm’s Lullaby, or I’d be dead.) Anyway, as I was nodding off, I thought of a simple musical idea: the next time I want to write a single-line countermelody for any chord progression, for any major chord I’ll focus on the third of the chord, but for any minor chord I will focus on the fifth, so I’m not emphasizing that the chord is minor — just letting the ear and brain do that. It might even be nice to try playing some familiar chord progressions, but leaving the third out on all the minor chords, just to see how well the “minorness” is implied by context and relationship. This seems like an interesting way to make the sad aspect of a bit of music more gentle and subtle.

WARNING: MATH

It also makes sense from a pitch ratio perspective. If you’re trying to keep your pitch ratios simple (consonant), think of this. In a perfectly tuned C major chord — putting aside that our tuning system is actually an imperfect compromise — the ratio of pitches in “C, E, G” is 4:5:6. Simple enough, because a major third (C to E) has a 4:5 ratio, and a minor third (E to G) has a 5:6 ratio.

When you play a minor chord, though, those two intervals are flip-flopped. The minor third is on the bottom and the major third is on top. So in a C minor chord (C, E-flat, G), you have a 5:6 ratio (C to E-flat) first, and then a 4:5 ratio (E-flat to G). To write this as one three-number ratio, you would have to first bump up the ratios to 10:12 and 12:15 respectively, in order to have a common middle number. You can then write it as 10:12:15, but you can’t reduce it any further. Still fairly small numbers in the grand scheme of the cosmos, and still a beautiful chord, but just something to have in your awareness when you find yourself becoming fatigued and “over-minor’d”.

MATH ALERT LIFTED, OK TO BEGIN PAYING ATTENTION AGAIN

So anyway, that list of songs that I needed to rescue is way down (less than ten), and I can feel my spirit being lightened. I’m even having nicer dreams. (I explained to one friend of mine that I’m not just copying folders and files, but actually re-organizing tracks and doing partial mixdowns, because the Cool Edit sessions won’t open in any other application.) When that ordeal INVIGORATING CHALLENGE is over with, my next objective is to finish up Fr. Hifta Ryphtor and try to get that accepted at Magnatune, an unconventional and forward-thinking record label that apparently needs more rock artists. They don’t give you advances, they don’t pay for your recording costs, they don’t give you limo rides; all they do is evaluate the album to make sure it’s not half-assed, and then make it available where it can be searched for and paid for with flexible pricing. Initially it was just (DRM-free) digital downloads and commercial licensing (so your music could be used in advertising and various media), but they’re starting to sell actual physical CDs too.

Some of the best songs on Fr. Hifta Ryphtor don’t have complete lyrics yet, so it looks like I’ll be needing to go into… that place… you know the one…

So you want to make an album? (part 4)

Installment 4: These installments are not sticking to the subject in their titles anyway, so this one is just called “Installment 4″ for now.

Graduation had been a hollow experience. There was no feeling of achievement, merely an acknowledgment that we had put in our thirteen (twelve in my case) years and were free to leave. While I understand America’s motivation for mandating this, I think the way we go about it needs to be reformed. The “anguished teen” cliche is unnecessary, and would be more of an exception than a rule if we had more respect for the individual, encouraged every child to pursue learning at his/her own pace, and permitted work experience and apprenticeship for younger children. After the first few years of teaching the basics, enforced homogenized schooling becomes a cage, and we learn to live our adult lives as a continuation of that cage.

So it was naturally in the aftermath of all this that the theme for my rock opera, with the working title Factory, began to take form. I think the title’s earliest incarnation was The People Factory, since what we are ultimately mass-producing is ourselves. Eventually it became Through Forbidden Black Doors — seemingly an improvement, because it focused more on the escape than the entrapment, but a couple of things still bug me about it: Firstly, “black” doesn’t mean anything; it comes from a lyric that needed an extra syllable to fit the music. And secondly, people tend to forget exactly what the title is, and make up their own bastardizations when they bring it up in conversation.

Not that bringing it up in conversation was a smooth ride from my end either; The rift between my ever-evolving “rock concept” and where other musicians’ heads were at was not getting any narrower. “Rock”, in my mind, was a living, breathing, storytelling, audio-visual “force” or “spirit” that brought bright colors and vivid images to mind. In turn, “rock opera” was clearly something that, although a few existed, had not begun to crack open its glaringly obvious potential. From the other musicians’ perspective, though, music was still a thing where you played an instrument, joined a band, entertained people, and called it a day. They were polite and open to listening to my ideas, but they generally weren’t fired up about weaving songs into a narrative. So it was that this would be Keith’s project, not a band project.

Bands were still the musical currency, though, and I kicked myself the first time I neglected to respond to a certain handwritten “keyboardist wanted” ad on the SUNY Fredonia bulletin boards. It was for a cover band, and it rattled off several reasonably up-my-alley bands followed by this unforgettable gem: “basically, anything that’s good — in other words, NO TOP 40!!!” When the same ad went up a second time, I kept my personal promise to leap at it. I proudly remember being outspoken and insistent that we should ditch the covers and do all original material. So for the next few years, I was in an all-original progressive rock band called “Episodes”, and at least half of what we were playing were Keith Handy originals. We only ever played about six or seven gigs in our entire life span, but this seemed like the logical time to get serious about that elusive first album. And for once, I wasn’t the only one talking about it.

I’m not sure why I didn’t pitch my rock opera, or even a song or two from it, to Episodes. Maybe it was because I had so many other songs and didn’t want to monopolize the writing. In any case, when not rehearsing with them, I regularly trotted off to the piano practice rooms at Mason Hall to be the “mad genius at work”, losing myself in the moment to hammer out chord progressions and segues. Mason Hall also had a full-fledged 24 track recording studio for its recording program. I was not in that program, but everybody knew somebody who was, so it was easy to get free recording time. The downside was that the engineers were students with very little experience.

“How hard can it be to set up some microphones and run a tape machine?” For some reason I expected the transition from high school senior to college freshman to suddenly surround me with talented and forward-thinking people, but the only thing I truly saw college culture excel at was helping the beer industry to thrive. The locally-produced cassettes I bought at a nearby record store seemed boring and disappointing — and production-wise, they just “didn’t sound right” — as was the case with many of the shows I attended.

Episodes did record a few songs at Mason Hall, but then we all kind of unanimously decided they were “unofficial”, because they had some flaws. If we were going to make an album, it damn well had to be perfect. We later booked time at a small studio outside of Rochester to record a full album’s worth of material. In some ways, though, the Mason Hall recordings were actually better.

One sad thing about those gigantic reels of 2″ tape used in 24-track studios: they were expensive. So expensive that people usually re-used them, or gave them to the studio in lieu of unpaid session bills. So nobody, not me, not any of my friends, can ever go back and remix something we recorded in a 24-track studio, because all the original tracks are gone. If we did have those tapes, it would be nothing to transfer them into a computer, fix the minor glitches, and actually mix them in a clear, full, and satisfying way. But as it stands, we usually have to settle for umpteenth-generation cassette copies of mixes done under the double whammy of limited time and aural fatigue — which, when you think about it, defeats the whole point of using a studio in the first place. Conversely, if I recorded something at home and preserved the tapes, I can restore it, remix it, and bring it into the 21st century where it belongs.

Next (maybe): what you think a pro studio will do for you, and what it actually does to you… initially, anyway.

Get around, get around, they (The Other Gods) get around

I asked Mike Boas for a running list of all the festivals which have either shown or are scheduled to show his animated short, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Other Gods, which, as you know, I created the soundtrack for in a few insanely focused and self-disciplined days. Here’s the list as of now:

• H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival — October 8, 2006
• Something Wicked This Way Con — November 3-5, 2006
• Horror Dance — January 13, 2007
• Tromadance — January 24, 2007
• Emerging Filmmakers Series — February 26, 2007
• A Night of Horror — March 23-25, 2007

That last one is way out in Sydney, Australia. You gotta give Mike a hand for the tireless promotion he’s doing!

I wasn’t joking! I really do sometimes write songs!

As a follow-up to my last post:

If you don’t know what a demo is, or are completely lacking in imagination, don’t listen to this.

Enjoy!

P.S. - now you can see if you guessed right about which stanza was the “rock out” stanza, unless you are so profoundly clueless that you still can’t tell after listening.

Sometimes I actually write songs (who woulda thunk it?)

A new song began to emerge yesterday, and it’s really kind of unusual, and I love it. I should try to scrape together a quick demo so you can get the idea, but for now I’m tossing up a quickie post using the power of the English Language to flawlessly convey the sound to you.

For starters, the melody of the verse crashed in on me first. I was driving to the pet store to buy some supplies for the mice, and going over in my head what I needed. As I was driving, I became fixated on “water bottle holder”. I started singing/rapping “a watta botta ho-DA” and could barely get my brain onto the next thing. This of course is not my new song, but when I drive, I do wild improvisational singing. I need to start bringing that recorder along with me. You have to hear how absolutely twisted I get.

Anyway, just as I was pulling in to the pet store, this melody emerged out of the end of my improvisation, so I made a mental note of the intervals, knowing full well that once I got in the store it would be flushed out of my head by the muzak system. I was able to revive it when I got back out to the car, and worked it out a little further before I even got home to grab a guitar.

I try to explain to people that in spite of my rock influences, melodic inspiration seems to come from an amalgamation of the darndest things, like TV theme shows, movie music, commercials, whatever. So this melody being kind of croony-meets-theremin, I likened it to some of my favorite semi-eerie theme songs, like that from Fantasy Island, or the original Star Trek. But it also has a feel of a 1920s crooner — not just any 1920s crooner, but one with a big shiny time machine who knows time is really one big illusion anyway. And then in each verse, the last few chords start to rock out just a little, almost like the Stones did with Paint it Black, but more subtle. The actual rocking out happens in the chorus, which ends on big major seventh chords, so even though it’s big and in-your-face, there it will still be a “1970s game show” flavor to it there, and that will lead it back into the verse gracefully (he says with a wink).

This is what I have so far for lyrics (you can probably tell which of the three stanzas below is the “rock out” one just by reading them):

Soul peer
Welcome back, dear
It’s so nice to pass you on the same sphere
This thing called “time”
It blows my mind
And I truly hope that you’ve been having a fine one here

Sometimes
We get misaligned
When we stick to the same script with the same lines
We’re in a rut
It’s comfy but we know
We only need to change what’s inside our minds

I’ll meet you backstage after the performance
With the whole audience
We’ll take off our costumes and congratulate us
We were the greatest
We wouldn’t take less
We were the show, yeah, yeah, yeah!

The hardest vocal part in the world (the saga continues)

So here’s my user-friendly (he says with a resigned sigh) road-map to the screenshot above. We’re somewhere in “week 2″ of recording four-part harmony vocals for This Is Your Chance. As I said earlier, it’s rather ornamental, non-repeating, dense, frilly, embellished. I still insist that at the core it’s not “complex”, but that’s a brawl for another pub. The bottom line is that it has to be done in tiny sections, tweaked, and edited as smoothly as possible. And I’ve been working on it for nearly two weeks now.

The top (red) track, “Guide (whole thing)”, is the whole song repeated four times, one for each voice, with a computer-sequenced speech synthesizer singing all the parts. It’s muted for the time being.

The next (purple) track, “Guide (what’s left)”, was an exact copy of the first track. Only, as you can see, most of it has been deleted by now. Each time I sing a bit and get it lined up and sounding decent and in-tune, I erase that part of this track so that I can easily see and hear what I still have left to sing.

The next track, “takes as they go”, is exactly what it says it is. This is my wide-open work area. Instead of singing along with the guide track, I find it a little easier to play a section of it and then sing it back; I can better hear what I’m doing that way. So I play a little bit of the guide, and then sing it. If I need to, I sing the bit several times until it “feels right”. I don’t have to line it up while I’m singing, because I can always drag it into place afterwards.

Even after I get a “good” take, though, I usually find I still need to edit it a little to make all the syllables line up right, and also want to slightly adjust the pitch of some of them. This is easy in Tracktion, because you can split a clip into smaller clips and type in a new “speed” value for any one of them. (Normally a clip’s speed is at 1.000; if you type in 1.01 the pitch goes up a percent, or if you type in .99 it goes down a percent — a semitone is about 6% lower or higher — I rarely have to adjust it by much more than 1 or 2%, which doesn’t noticeably impact the character of the voice.)

When I’m happy with how it sounds, I drag the edited clips (blue) down to the “accumulated good bits” track and cut that much more out of my guide track, again leaving the “takes as they go” track open for more raw recording.

The yellow track below that, “rough first take (test)”, is muted; it was just a rough run-through of all four voices without any attempt to perfect anything. As you can see it is 1/4 of the length of the other tracks, this is because I’ve dragged all four voices on top of each other to hear how they might sound together. It is quite out of tune, sloppy, and has a lot of random background noise. And it was important to do, because it gave me a vague idea of what I might have to look forward to if I put in the work.

The green track below that, “incomplete (test)” is something you can listen to right now if you didn’t listen to it last week. It’s a partial rendering of what I had so far of the “good” takes, again merging all four lines together, but with more than half the bits missing. It was good to be able to hear how things were progressing.

Now you can see how much more blue there is than purple … that shows how much of it I’ve done and how little I have left to do.

The hardest vocal part in the world

One “lost track” in particular from Through Forbidden Black Doors, called This Is Your Chance, didn’t make it to the ‘98 CD … most probably because no one could actually sing it.

It started out simple enough, with a nice chord progression and a clear-cut meter for the lyrics (which have never been revised, save maybe a word or two, since the 1988 draft), and apparently for lack of a better melody, according to the old-old sheet music I’m looking at now, just followed the original simple version of the rhythm guitar triplet part. I apparently wasn’t too committed to who exactly was supposed to be singing it, and hadn’t yet decided that it would be a chorus.

Fast forward a few years — early 90s — and I’m getting serious about recording the whole opera in my own studio. This Is Your Chance is still considered part of the running order, and by now I’ve decided it’s going to be a four-part choral arrangement, so I’m going to have to actually write those parts. The repetitive rhythm is a little too bare-bones and uninteresting, so I’ve decided to play with it, and then play with it some more when a friend of mine looks it over and complains that what I’ve written “doesn’t swing”.

I work this all out in the wee hours of the night on my trusty staff paper while working double-shifts at the Atlantic gas station in depressing East Rochester, when the customers are few and the hours are long. I stick with the “soprano/alto/tenor/baritone” format that got drilled into my head in college, but other than that, my solitary constraint is to avoid doubling.

I apparently also avoided any kind of repetition whatsoever, so all the individual parts are awkward to sing, each new phrase throwing a curve ball to the singer. It would be hard enough to nail just one of the four lines; doing all four was out of the question.

Time and time again I try different ways to get an acceptable performance on this excruciatingly difficult four-part vocal arrangement down on tape so people can actually hear it in context. I try speaking the whole part and then running it through a vocal unit that does vocoder-like effects, with a computer sequencer controlling its pitches. Sounds too robotic. I try whispering the parts and then running that through very short delays to give the impression of pitch. I try using Flinger in conjunction with Festival to speech-synthesize all four parts. I try to find live humans to sing it, only to send them running in terror from the demo and/or sheet music.

I’m not sure exactly when I decided to give it another shot just singing the damn thing (bumping the girlie parts down to a manlier octave, which will make some of the harmonies kind of dense and clustered-sounding), but certainly the transition from tape to software made it at least feasible, if still not easy, to break the task into small pieces and micro-edit to satisfaction. It is also among my most put-off of musical chores; if you had asked me at any point within the last few years what recording sub-project I was procrastinating on more than any other, this would be at the top of the list.

Taped next to my bed (a good place for it, I might add) is a short handwritten note to myself: “TAKE SLOW ACTION”. This is after decades of alternating between taking no action (in many areas of my life), and working myself into a frenzy to make up for it. No wonder I lament any inability to get into a sustainable flow state. The key lesson, of which I am in constant need of reminding, is: don’t worry about doing the whole thing, just do a little bit of it, at a relaxed pace. The roll will come later.

Thus came time to apply this lesson with regard to the dreaded This Is Your Chance harmonies. One evening my assignment was to simply copy a guide track (I used the speech-synthesized version as my guide) from the old computer to the new computer. Another evening it was to create the folder I’d be working in, and the Tracktion project file with the imported guide. Another it was to set up the microphone stand. Some of my small daily goals are saved as text messages on my cell phone, and I should keep doing that.

Here’s a great recommendation to anyone with a little bit of cold feet about recording: do a “crap take” right away. Just hit record and start singing. I did this with all four parts just so that I could hear a “worst case scenario” of what they would sound like