Keith Handy 1.999

Free* (just kidding) to good home: creepy soundtrack bit

This weekend, the previously mentioned folks in the local improv group have been working on — or I guess trying to work on — a short film for the 48 Hour Film Project. They had invited me to contribute some creepy music. However, it seems the plans for the storyline, shooting schedule, etc., have been consistently changing for what is now already the majority of the 48 hours. Whether they’ll have something by the deadline is anybody’s guess. And I think the story they initially presented to me might bear so little resemblance to the end product that there won’t be a place in it for this creepy score I came up with:

Well, maybe it’s “stock creepy” instead of “brilliant creepy”, but that’s what I came up with in a few hours yesterday. Personally, I think I’ll need a quick dose of therapy after listening to it the requisite 500 times. Anyway, if not this film, I’m sure it can be recycled somewhere.

* “Free” is just a joke, and in no way constitutes a release into the public domain or any other such tomfoolery. But you’re free to listen to it and re-connect with your inner sociopath.

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.