The Light of Day

Pieces parts

Some “blogging music”, maestro:

Thank you, sir. I doubt many of you happen to know the 1998 version of TFBD forwards and backwards, but this is the backing track from Scratched Off, Called Off — or, on earlier versions, Listed Black — right off the old worn-out tape, before I’ve had much of a chance to revitalize it. One recurring regret is that I tended to have “too much fun” with the sequencer back then (circa 1994) — lots of experimenting with ridiculous polyrhythms and other “mathy” ideas, just because I could — often at the expense of the overall aesthetic. In the case of this song, though, I think the arrangement works perfectly. You can clearly hear that there’s space in the sound where the vocals would go. It’s also refreshing to have music that isn’t emotionally overwhelming; it’s just a sonic backbone for a degrading dialogue between three jerks.

The overdubbed instruments on the original tape, i.e. the guitars (and that short REAL CLARINET OMG phrase at 1:16), were all apparently bounced together with the sequenced drums/bass/keys onto a single stereo pair, to open as many tracks as possible for vocal work — so if I’m not totally happy with the guitar tone as it is, tough titties.

Some early observations on the movie project (still in the “scavenger hunt” phase):

1. It doesn’t matter that I can’t see the entire movie in my head at once. All I need to see is the next thing I’m going to do. This much is easy. Each time I do the next thing, I can see a little further in my mind, and keep following where it leads me.

2. While props and costumes accumulate, and parts of the puzzle are coming together, the project is alive. While something sits at one end of the room, untouched for days on end, the eyes stop seeing it, and the project slips into a coma.

3. Visuals don’t hide music or detract from its flaws; they either resonate with it — magnifying and compounding what it already has — or just don’t go with it. If the music is kinda stupid, then the visual has to be kinda stupid. “Music visualization” is somewhat of a misnomer. We can’t see music, so there’s no such thing as one absolute correct visual to go with it. We can, however, see whether or not something fits the music. So while the music can’t dictate the visuals outright — even generative visuals rely on an algorithm that was developed independently of the music that drives it — the music can act as a test for whatever image we present to it. Sometimes just hearing the music helps to tell us, “this image is almost right, but needs to be fluffier/darker/grainer etc.”

4. I’ve long believed visuals could serve as a sweetener, to help some people swallow my more difficult musical pills — or at least as a distraction, so that people might let down their guards and let in some music that falls outside their usual comfort zone in some way. (Notice that people who complain loudly about certain radio stations never seem to mind when the same music appears in the soundtrack of a movie they’re enjoying.) What didn’t occur to me is that I’d be helping myself to experience this old music in a fresh and vital way, just by having a few tangible props to look at while tweaking the mixes.

Investments

Here are a few of the acquisitions that I’ve funded so far with my “stimulus incentive” rebate…

…just so you don’t think I’m spending it frivolously.

No, I’m not going through an “Elton John” phase, but it’s a good guess, and it’s sort of in the right direction…

Thanks to Sassy for the tip regarding ostrich fringe. (That was October? Christ, someone light a fire under my ass, please!)

Homegrown spectral analyzer

I whipped this spectral analyzer up this weekend. Unfortunately, like everything else coded in Handyland, it doesn’t run in realtime; it has to be rendered as a movie first and then re-synced to the music. I think it’s fun to sit and watch when it’s done, though. Sometimes, if you look hard enough (or sniff enough glue), you can see which peaks correspond to which sounds.

The featured instrumental here is Kid in a Candy Store, from Leave of Absence vol. 1, currently close to being ready for reissue. It was created by slapping a backwards orchestra track onto a drum track, relishing in the serendipity, and then coming up with bass, guitar, and piano bits that would glue it together a little more. This is the music I want playing when the aliens come to pick me up.

Maybe a graphic as simple as this, in combination with lyrics and/or factoids, would lend itself to my earlier idea of using YouTube as an audio player. My only gripe is that I would have to use a workaround if I want the music to be in stereo — at least until YouTube realizes it’s not 1950 anymore.

Make ciggysinkers, not disease

Awesome quote alert:

We only pretend to be addicted…
Until we become addicted to pretending.

What brought this on? I mean, in all total seriousness, I was one of the lightweights. A couple of these things a day. Maybe a couple more than a couple sometimes… and every so often a couple more than that. I’ve never been physically addicted, and never actually jonesed for the nicotine. In fact, I don’t even like the feeling from the nicotine. The only thing I liked was the way the activity divides time into smaller (and smaller) chunks. And the way it gives you an excuse to watch strangers walk by without looking creepy.

Being diagnosed with high blood pressure today was a swift kick from reality. In a way, I’m glad to have a tangible thing to work on. I could never get into “doing things for my health” without there being a specific problem. I don’t even really know what the main cause is, or if it’s partly genetic or whatever. Maybe I would be just fine as long as I take the meds and avoid salt, but I’m not comfortable with “maybe” these days.

I had just bought a fresh pack the day before, and I think in a way, the ceremonious act of destroying the vast majority of a pack in full public view (and documenting it videographically) might seal the deal better than saying “I’ll just finish this pack”. The trouble with the latter is that a pack of cigarettes is a “circular” experience, with the end of one pack being psychologically linked to the beginning of the next. You have to find a more vulnerable point at which to upset the pattern and break the chain.

Of course, as not everyone’s mind responds equally to the same motivators, you might resonate more with the ancient wisdom of the masters:

…or maybe I should say “the ancient wisdom of an array of ethnic stereotypes”.

I promise I’ll get back to the music stuff soon here. I’ve had a lot of interesting and inspired thoughts and ideas in that department, and hopefully I can stick around long enough to follow through with them.

Good health to us all!

What did we learn today, kids?

What if I wrote a blog post every single time I did a recording session? It would be sort of like a “what I learned today” thing, like at the end of any given episode of Fat Albert or Davey and Goliath.

I didn’t really intend to replace the bass and drums on every single song in my rock opera, but when you’re doing an inventory on the state of your remixes, and the bass guitar is within arm’s reach and already plugged into the board, and hey, the camera is right behind you so you might as well turn that on too… you know how it goes.

So, hmm… what did I “learn” from this one? What was the “moral”?

The lesson is: always give yourself a “thumbs up” of encouragement just prior to a take!

One thing I like about these Through Forbidden Black Doors session videos is that they make the songs actually look playable. By humans. Somehow, having originally done so much on a sequencer, I’d probably given myself and everyone else the opposite impression.

I don’t intend for the Chamberlain (Mellotron) sample to sound like a real flute player, but it would probably be a good idea to ride its volume a little and add a touch of delay to give it a more “trippy hippie fantasy” quality. Maybe also scrunch a few of its more metronomic sounding notes closer together, to loosen the overall rhythm and open some “breath spaces” between phrases.

The John Lennon t-shirt was a thoughtful gift from my friend’s mother, but somehow I get the feeling it was designed by someone who spends more time listening to Motorhead.

Happy Easter!

“Everything tech”: continuing thoughts

I was asked by a faithful reader (where would I be without my faithful reader?) to elaborate on my “low tech/hi tech/everything tech” train of thought. Which I was going to do anyway, but it’s good that the peasants have voted in favor of the king’s will, because I just haven’t been in the mood to behead you folks lately. I know, I know, you’re saying “King Keith has lost his spunk”. Hey, we all grow older. It’s time to move on, man. Besides, this is the age of psychological cruelty. Either catch the wave, or leave your board home, brah.

When I think of an idea that has both specific and general implications, I tend to ramble at length about the general, without actually explaining what it is I’m thinking about in the first place. The general is very important to me, because I want you to run with it — I want you to find your own specific implementations of the general, not necessarily use mine (unless of course you really want to copy me). But if I don’t tell you my specific idea, then I’m not giving you a concrete illustration of the general idea, which would probably help to loosen up your tangled synapses. One little idea which, by itself, any idiot could think of — but which comes with a thousand “potential ideas” attached to it, if you zoom out and ask why it was interesting.

After all this build-up, it will sound really stupid and primitive. But that’s what low tech is, on the surface. Yet, for all its backwardness, it’s something that could not have been done well or cheaply more than about ten years ago. So, yes, it involves the computer. But it requires letting go of some basic assumptions about “what happens outside of the computer” versus “what happens inside the computer”.

After the bazillionth combination of keywords, I found a decent illustration of rear projection on images.google.com. I don’t mean as a type of home entertainment device — those turn up in vast quantity — I mean as an ancient technique for superimposing actors against a fake, moving background, before the advent of chroma keying. The accompanying text for this picture referred to “one of the worst ’street traffic’ rear projection shots I’ve ever seen”, while the image file itself was contradictorily called “sybluescreen.jpg” — just to be sure, had this been blue screened, rather than actually projected behind the car, the horizontal lines behind the windshield wouldn’t appear bent by the glass.

Now, this effect doesn’t exactly look real, as I’m sure you’ve already seen for yourself while watching various old-timey movies. But as someone with an interest in the surreal and experimental, particularly things with a “cartoon-y” or “puppet-y” tinge or texture, it’s not a technique I would run screaming from.

Today, the sane way to composite video elements — live action with live action, live action with animation, animation with animation — is to use computer software to merge your layers together. You wouldn’t want to actually use a first movie playing on your LCD monitor as a background, while taking a second movie of yourself manipulating little objects in front of it… yes, physically in front of your monitor… and then perhaps use the resulting movie as a new background, onto which you can add more foreground objects the same way… repeat ad infinitum…

…or WOULD you??

You wouldn’t achieve the same kind of effect. Not even anything close to it. You’d achieve a very different effect, which would be the whole point. And if you did this repeatedly for a while, you’d start to develop a vocabulary of techniques specific to the approach. You would become an expert at a previously non-existent art form.

Like I said, this is just one little example of hi/low tech mix and match.

Come up with your own!

What Do You Think Of Yourself?: new vocal

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

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

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

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.

Open letter to Republicans

By now, I’ve read several hundred of your comments and blog posts, and watched the Republican YouTube debates. I want to be informed as to your side of the issues, and your rationale, but I’m afraid it’s not coming through. I really do have an open mind, and I really am listening. All I’ve heard from any of you so far is insults, name-calling, homophobia, racism, xenophobia, religious intolerance, re-hashed McCarthyism, and that the sky is generally falling. (The Republican candidates themselves restrain themselves a little more carefully than you, for image management reasons; but that would hold true for any party, and I’m addressing you, the ordinary “people on the street”, who aren’t under that pressure.)

I’ve heard from you that whenever we vote for a Democrat — which, as long I’ve been alive, has been one of our two most realistic choices at every presidential election, and our only realistic option if we don’t like the Republican candidate — we’re voting against everything this country stands for, voting away freedom, and voting in communism, high taxes, moral decay, and general chaos. Basically, anyone who doesn’t vote Republican is anti-American. This implies to me that you don’t believe in voting. If you think that’s not a logical conclusion for me to draw, then please explain to me the point of having elections if, as far as you can see, there’s only ever one valid candidate. There are plenty of countries who hold elections when, in fact, the leader is pretty much already chosen. Is that what you want?

I’ve also heard that every time we have had a Democrat in office, the country has fallen apart. I’ve lived through several of these terms and don’t remember seeing the country falling apart. Do you have photographs of this fallen-apart-ness to show me and possibly refresh my memory? I was probably looking in the wrong direction at the time. Maybe “fallen apart” to you means that you heard stories on TV about people doing things you personally wouldn’t do, like having weird sex and not getting arrested for it. No, seriously, explain to me how it adversely affected your life, or the life of somebody you know. Explain to me how things got better for you or your loved ones every time a Republican took the wheel again.

Not only have you said nothing to persuade or inform me as a 38 year old, but even as a seventh grader I could have told you that you aren’t apparently making any real, convincing points. All you’ve convinced me of is that you hate a lot of people.

I’ve never checked off the “liberal” or “democrat” boxes on any questionnaire asking me what my political leanings are; I’ve always considered myself apolitical and open-minded. But you’re giving me the impression that this is less about political ideology and more about low IQ, lack of maturity, or common spite. I will flat-out be the first to tell you there are plenty of liberals and democrats who don’t write maturely or intelligently, and yes, there is a signal-to-noise ratio to contend with. The difference is, with Republicans, there’s no signal.

If you just need help translating your noble ideals into coherent sentences, maybe you can hire some of us commie liberals (your word for non-Republicans) as literary consultants to write it up for you. It would be kind of like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, except we’d be helping you with words instead of haircuts.

I like debates. I like intellectual challenges. I like to mull over opposing viewpoints. It’s not fun or challenging to choose between a viewpoint and a bunch of primitive chest-thumping. Please don’t make it so easy for me.

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. :)

So you want to make… something that’s “dead”

The good news is, not everybody takes glee in the album being “dead”.

John Lennon was only ever interested in singles. Paul McCartney was the one pushing to segue tracks together to build longer suites. But neither was right or wrong; it’s a floor wax and a dessert topping. What’s “dead”, if anything, is the need to bend your ideas in an inauthentic way to conform to a physical format. But even physical media itself isn’t “dead”.

We call something “dead” when a bubble bursts. (It’s our spiteful way of celebrating the decline of something that has been popular and ubiquitous, but maybe not a good fit for us individually.) A bubble is something that is bigger than it should be, or bigger than it normally would be, and as a result, can’t be sustained as it is. However, when a bubble pops, the material that made it up still exists; it only ceases to be artificially inflated, reverting to its real and natural size.

There may no longer be a trend of people making albums who weren’t interested in albums in the first place. If you are interested in albums, though, that’s good news for you; when the people who came to the party for the wrong reasons finally leave, that’s when the party becomes fun again.

Oh, and don’t forget all the other things that “died”: acoustic pianos, real drums, the orchestra, radio, live performance… seems to me like most things do quite well after they “die”.

YouRadio

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was saying “if only video was as standardized as audio”. At the file format level, it’s still relatively true; you can talk about OGG, MP4, FLAC, and so on, but ultimately, there’s no such thing as a person out there who can’t listen to an mp3… whereas, if you’re making a video, and want to send it to everyone in the world, good luck.

But the file format level is no longer the hurdle. At the web level, the problem is pretty much the opposite. You can put up as much video as you want on YouTube, it costs nothing, the sound and picture quality aren’t bad enough to make it unwatchable, and everybody basically knows what YouTube is, how to embed it, how to promote on it, and so on. For everyone but the high-def snobs, video delivery has been solved for some time.

Not so for plain audio. We can find free hosting for the files, but to present them in a “ready to play” format requires figuring out where to put them. And, as I’ve recently learned, figuring out how to make them available to humans only…

In the big picture, this may not be a bad thing.

Although my first instinct is to ask, well, why the hell don’t we have an audio equivalent of YouTube? Something like a “YouRadio” or whatever… okay, well suppose we did. Suppose there was such a thing.

I would hate it.

I can tell you that right now, in full certainty. Why? Because I’ve always hated music culture, and the whole “promo” activity scene. Get your band heard, get your band discovered, get your band ranked higher, get your band this and that… spend more and more time playing this like a game, and less time exploring the creative act of navigating unknown musical waters. And that’s exactly what a YouRadio would be. Promo-noise. The only people interested in bands are other bands, and the only reason they’re interested is because of what they think they can get for themselves by association.

Music, at a fundamental level, is a genuine thing that happens to a person. A person hears some music, a person is affected by the music. If anything else is happening — supporting your friends because you like them as people, etc. — it’s phony.

I’m here to create, not to compete. Trying to rise to the top in a heap of artists all trying to rise to the top is scarcity-minded. Engaging in this sport reinforces the tiny prize-to-contestant ratio as a reality, unnecessarily. Rather than seeing myself as one of millions of musicians, I see myself as one of only one: me. There is no other me. I don’t have to compete with anyone else to be myself. The noise everyone else is making is their problem, not mine. (Not that you’re all making “noise” individually — just collectively.)

But I digress. Since there is no “YouRadio”, I can stop bitching about how awful it hypothetically is. And suppose it did exist, and was useful, and free, and gave you an easy way to embed all your songs in flash players such that you would be rewarded rather than penalized for accruing plays over time. What features would I want it to have? Well, maybe it would be nice if it could display lyrics. Or production notes. Or some kind of images associated with the songs…

(Thanks to Heather for having a baby for the sole purpose of illustrating the parent-child relationship between necessity and invention.)

So, like, it would be audio… but with video. In other words, maybe the ideal “YouRadio” would simply be YouTube.

So now, I wouldn’t be making videos just to promote the audio; the videos would be the audio delivery. Out of necessity. And the fact that there’s anything to look at on the screen will just be a bonus.

First goal: get one song up from each album. The “music videos” don’t need to be any slicker than the session videos… just be imaginative.

And at least now I’d be doing it for a tangible reason.

You’re full of shit…

…so cut the shit!

“Well, I never!”, I can hear you say in gasping, blushing, brow-raised disgust, shielding your upper chest with the spread fingers of one shaky hand. Okay, okay. Lemme clarify. We’re all full of shit. Ah, that’s better, isn’t it?

See, I just filmed this short video blog, and — well, what I really did was just turned the camera on, and left it on for hours, until I finally had something to say. I initially shot and discarded over an hour of myself lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, sort of playing guitar along to music I didn’t know, out of tune, beating rhythms on my stomach, coughing, blowing my nose, and occasionally making the valiant attempt to speak to the camera. And when I finally felt I had said something worthwhile, and watched it back, I was disgusted by all the crap I said leading up to it.

“Oh, actually, I already know I’m full of shit”, I can hear some of you say. “I mean, I have a day job, and/or some difficult relatives, I sometimes have to interact with people I don’t like, it’s just part of life.” BZZZT. No, that’s not what I’m talking about. That’s the easy part.

I’m talking about being full of shit when you’re in your element. It’s the most pervasive part of your affliction — the shit that you don’t smell anymore, because unlike the masks you sometimes put on and take off, this is running through your heart, mind, and soul, all day and night.

It’s easier to see it in other people than in ourselves. Let’s pick on an easy example: someone who devotes his personal education and career to being an expert on finance. To me, he’s obviously doing one long and meaningless dance around something that, in the end, is a.) is going to all whittle down to one barely-interesting little number at the bottom of a sheet of paper, and b.) is going to be distributed among his survivors (whose love for him was always genuine, of course) because he’ll be too busy feeding the subterranean ecology to spend it on anything meaningful.

Okay, so, speck in one eye, board in the other, what about all the crap that I ramble about? So I know which musical intervals approximate what whole number pitch ratios, and how much they’re off by. How does that help me? Even as a songwriter, how the fuck does it help me? How does it benefit anyone? The information itself is just noise. Maybe occasionally useful, but even so, for the few people that ever need to do so, they can look it up on a table.

But it’s worse than that. It’s not my occasional tangent into mathematical factoids; it’s my constant endless rambling about what I want to do with my life, and how far along I am on this, and what little thing I worked on today, and so on. It’s fine that I do those projects, and useful that I have such patience for the mundane details while doing the work, but when it comes time to talk about them, what do they mean?? It would probably take me a while (and some humbling) to even comprehend what the big picture looks like, because of how ingrained my habits are of throwing jargon around to describe some obscure tweak I just made. And using that jargon as ___ to ward off the Big Questions nipping at my feet. (And then complaining that people “don’t get it”, because it’s easier than admitting I don’t get it myself.)

Videoblog #1 doesn’t answer The Questions (I put that in bold type to avoid the flood of demands from people wanting “their ten minutes back”), but it gets me to the point where I’m at least asking them, and that’s a a start:

Now, granted, I’m still kicking the residual gunk from this cold, and I’m not at full energy or clarity. For that matter, it may be downright hypocritical to post such a shitty video. But why not begin this process now, since the past few weeks of zero productivity kind of gives me a blank slate.

Eagle-eyed viewers may spot mice at play in the background. Notice how totally not full of shit they are.

How about you? What would you kick your own ass for babbling about way too much, and what point are you trying to get to? You know all that clever and careful editing we do on our art and music, to get rid of all the stuff that was helpful in the working stages, but superfluous in the final presentation… could you benefit from applying some of that ruthless editing to your own everyday inner dialogue?

I’m going to assume…

…that the man pulling up his pants and zipping his fly in my parking lot had a darn good explanation.

Slight policy change

Did you get the memo?

Actually, slight procedure change, but “policy” sounded more authoritative. It has to do with managing the large quantities of music in progress on my hard drive. There are some older posts that I’m too lazy to dig up and link to, but anyway, they featured photos of my whiteboard with all the songs and post-it-notes describing what to do next. This has sort of worked, and I’ll keep using it, but I haven’t stuck to it 100%.

The new procedure doesn’t replace the old procedure; instead it’s supplemental. And most importantly, it will be good for my peace of mind. When I’m working on mixes, I have a bad habit of not actually mixing. By this I mean, I’m so focused on shifting things around on the timeline, cutting noise out from inbetween phrases, and generally tweaking the performances, with the idea in mind that I’ll actually worry about mixing after all that has been completely taken care of. The problem with this is that it leaves all my projects in a state that only I know exactly what to do with. Levels are out of whack, things that need EQ or reverb aren’t gettin’ any, and so on.

Imagine you’re a surgeon, and you’re mid-way through operating on someone. Then you take a break from this patient to operate on other people — a break lasting several months — while the patient’s body is wide open, his organs perpetually dangling. It’s a grotesque metaphor, but that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

The point is, even if there’s still plenty stuff you know you want to do, try to make the best mix you can of what you’ve got so far. Run that mix off, and back it up. Imagine there’s a possibility (’cause there is) that something could happen to either you — or your projects — before your songs are done. In the event of the unspeakable, whatever mix you run off right now could be that song’s only hope to see the light of day.

I’ve basically carried over bad (but once necessary) habits from using Cool Edit, where you can’t put a plugin on a track and adjust it any time you want down the road; any effect you apply is permanent. So it made sense to, say, avoid applying reverb until I was 100% sure I was done editing, etc.. I had to work in a very linear way. I don’t have to work so linear no more. Must take full advantage of this.

Effective immediately.

Hello squirrel!

WHOOOOOOOP