The Light of Day

String binding

After a quick Googling of “keep guitar in tune”, it seems like there are too many incomplete answers out there, so I’d like to address a specific case of the problem that I’ve put up with for years.

If the guitar’s intonation is basically decent overall, and the strings have already been stretched, but a.) strings shift flat immediately after bending, and b.) strings shift sharp immediately after pushing down the tremolo bar, this is a problem called “string binding”. It means there’s just enough friction in the grooves of the nut to prevent the tension from completely evening out on either side of it. When you bend, a tiny bit of string slides away from the headstock towards the body and “sticks” there. The reverse is true for a whammy dive. It’s not subtle; in fact, it can make the guitar outright unplayable unless you just strum chords and stop trying to play rock star.

For those of us who want to play rock star, Sound On Sound has a great little paragraph tucked away in an obscure article from a zillion years ago. Scroll down to “NON-STICK GUITAR NUT”. Key points: 1.) It’s not supposed to stick. (I actually wasn’t sure if it was supposed to “not stick” or “stick better”, but the former seems more logical, since we do actually have to turn the tuning pegs now and then.) 2.) People with graphite nuts are lucky. And last but not least, 3.) you can lubricate your nut — on your guitar, gutterbrain — by “placing a single layer of plumber’s PTFE tape over the nut before you fit your next set of strings”.

(You can of course trim the tape if you’re vain and superficial.)

To all the people out there who list “strings being too old” as a cause of bad intonation, what universe are you living in? Strings may lose a lot of their timbral majesty when they get old, but in my experience they don’t become harder to keep in tune. Maybe it’s harder to hear if they’re in tune or not because they have such a dull sound?

Basslift (or “bacial”)

Since my studio has the approximate brightness of a cave (after sundown anyway), my best bet to get a pic of my newly painted bass tonight was to take it out in the hall, under the flourescents. (Having flourescent lights inside my studio is something I’m sort of dead set against, though I would like it to be brighter overall.) What you probably can’t tell from this picture is that the body is a shiny metallic silver. The black parts are flat (not glossy). The head was originally going to be silver too, but it wasn’t flattering to my shitty putty job. The back of the neck is still a dark woodgrain, not an ideal match for the black and silver, but I didn’t want to mess with it and risk making it harder to play.

It’s still an “old generic piece of shit” — I paid $50 for it, and told the clerk at House of Guitars I was doing them a favor by improving the overall aesthetic of their store — but it’s my workhorse for bass lines, and I’ve gotten tons of great use out of it. I took it to Buffalo this weekend while visiting my parents, along with some spray paint, masking tape, and wood putty to fill some of the cracks. My father got involved with the project, and was very helpful. I did all the preparation, and he did all the actual spraying. My mother was then gracious enough to let me boil the strings on her stove, even though I’m not sure she understood my explanation (I’ve been boiling bass strings to revitalize them for as long as I can remember).

I wanted to document the whole thing, but just doing it was satisfying enough. Expect to see the newly improved bass in YouTube session videos in the future! You can of course check out my existing bass vids to see what it looked like before.

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!

Eye candy for the day

Low tech eye candy, that is: Tupperware instruments…

Originally spotted on Homemade Noize.

Happy Friday!

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.

Start 2008 off with a warbly Strat arpeggio!

Been a while since I plugged the Stratocaster in (I’ve pretty much been using the Les Paul exclusively ever since I got it a couple years back).

Oh, and look, it’s only got five strings on it. Not exactly a financial priority lately. Hey, kids, it’s also been a while since Cap’n Keith has uploaded an audio clip.

This particular frankenguitar (nothing against Strats in general) prefers not to be in tune (you can tune it, but it takes some coaxing, second-guessing, and reverse psychology), so it’s less than ideal for anything other than quirky parts like this… but kind of fun to listen back to anyway. If you have headphones on, you can hear the Strat bouncing back and forth between your ears — that’s because it’s two separate tracks, me playing only every other string in the arpeggio. And because I’m only playing half as many notes at a time, I overdo the vibrato and bendy shit. Think Adrian Belew on downers.

Enjoy!

Bass sessions 9/13/07

Bass sessions for three of my songs, “What Do You Think Of Yourself?”, “Selling Purple to the Blind”, and “Soul Peer”.

I have the bass relatively prominent in the mix for this video, so you can hopefully hear it clearly, but I can’t make any promises if you’re watching on a laptop or have tiny speakers.

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.

Our cushions never clash…

I made my vocal pitch graphing a little easier to read visually by de-saturating the quiet parts, i.e. graying the spaces between notes where the line on the pitch graph doesn’t mean anything and is just connecting the dots. So the bright colored columns are where the syllables happen. The idea will be that you can then open it in a graphic editor, mark it up where you want it tuned, re-save it, and have another program “read” your squiggles and go from there. The meta-idea being that I’ll have an alternative to Autotune to rein pitch into the general vicinity without flatlining it (killing the nuance and vibrato, and destorying emotive pitch scoops and fall-offs). I’m already doing this anyway, but this should help make it less tedious. Of course, you can do this with Autotune if you’re not lazy. But I’m not just lazy — I’m also poor.

Ethics? Learn to sing? Practice more? Do more takes? Bah.

I did have a fairly productive week last week, as I promised, and now I’m extending that promise to have a productive week this week too, even though it’s half over. Well, that’s okay (it being half over), because the pitch thing should be useful. In my remixing projects I keep coming to these points where my ears are fatiguing too quickly to be confident of the vocal pitch. I never have a problem getting it to sound good on big, loud speakers, when I have all that bass and stuff to support me; it’s the little, quiet speakers that taunt and heckle me.

But I digress! Last week, did a halfway decent rhythm guitar part to my ode to selling out, Curtis’ Classic Collection of Comforts — which is meant to evoke a train wreck without actually being one — and video’d it for posterity. I may also revive a similar but much older rhythm guitar take, from an earlier attempt at the song, back when I was a Stratocasterist, to combine with the newer take (dueling me’s!). It was a different version altogether, so if I do that, I’ll no doubt have to Frankentempo it (Feel that vocabulary s-t-r-e-t-c-h!), as in cut it up and slide bits to and fro.

Tip for the intermittently depressed: the thing that will make you feel better may not be a completely new idea or epiphany, 180 degrees away from whatever you’re whining about focused on — it’s more likely something about 20 to 30 degrees off the edge of your peripheral vision, something you’re aware of but haven’t been consciously thinking about. Beyond that, there’s always the next weather change to look forward to. (Thunderstorms are cool.) In the meantime, drink water and eat something healthy.

Chronically depressed: you’re on your own. Get pills.

Sampling 101

Congratulations to long-time Handyfan Jeremy C. Ellis for submitting the closest (a.k.a. “only”) guess as to what my next video would be about! I hinted that the first two letters were “S” and “A”, and Mr. Ellis ventured “salad“. In a way, Jeremy is right… if you think of it as a salad of sampling!

The two main ingredients in this week’s salad are: a set of orchestra bells, and a common rubber band. (Learn the trick that sets the pro ‘bandists apart from the amateurs!) It’s topped off with a dash of my odd personality and musical know-how-what-when-why. (And it took way too long to edit — but hey, all’s well that ends well.)

Jeremy: you have until midnight 6/20/07 to claim your prize. What? That was last week? Ah, better luck next time!

The continuing stooooory of a *track* that’s gone to the (over)dubs

You can tell me to STFU with these “clever” post titles any time now. :)

Here’s your next opportunity to micro-manage my deeply personal creative progress on What Do You Think Of Yourself (from last chorus to end this time):

0:17 - distorted rhythm guitar with wah-wah. This whole section will have more layers of vocal improv going on, and is supposed to have a “gospel-ish” sound. Maybe even some tambourine and hand claps. I’m almost embarrassed that I did too good of a job simulating Jesus Christ Superstar with the piano riffing. I’ll try less hard next time. :)

1:04 - sampled Chamberlain (same thing as a Mellotron, different make) strings enter here; it might be a few seconds later before you can pick it out over the other stuff. The whole point of these eight bars is to extend the previously repeating B/C#/D/E “rising” chord progression to B/C#/D/E/F/G/Ab/Bb so that it “keeps going all the way up” until it hits THE BIG C that kicks the next section off. And to help over-dramatify the second half of that…

1:14 - sampled trumpet. Love it or hate it, it does sound damn real, and reminds me a bit of some of the stuff Christy listens to, like Polyphonic Spree and Robyn Hitchcock. If you do hate it, it’s only there for ten seconds.

2:19 - doubled lead guitar, in left and right. I will probably have it a little quieter when it first comes in so we’re not quite so “power ballad”.

2:26 - Chamberlain strings re-enter.

2:54 - I just want to mention that hearing the Chamberlain really quiet behind those piano chords makes me feel like I’m in a movie theater, watching something with a lot of sparkly stars (the in-the-sky kind, not the tabloid kind) and magical glowing things in it… possibly an alien type flick, where a little boy is peering into some cosmic portal, and you can see that it’s shining bluish or greenish light on his wide-eyed open-mouthed face. But I’m visual that way. :)

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…

Da Hornet

While my unemployment funds do indeed cover rent, food, and other basic expenses, simple math tells me I won’t quite be able to work the $3695.00 for a Minimoog Voyager into my budget. In the meantime, I’m satiating my analog synthlust with a free plug-in that emulates the lesser — okay, much lesser — EDP Wasp. It was one of those butt-ugly, super-cheap looking things that I’ve always kind of wanted to play with anyway, just to see what it would sound like. (Hey, Duran Duran apparently used one at least once, so it can’t be that bad.)

The emulator is cleverly named (if you can’t tell by the picture) “Da Hornet”, and while it won’t quite do everything you would ever want a synth to do, it is quite analog-ish, quite fun, and quite available for both Windows and Mac (okay, I’ll stop saying “quite” now). Some free plugins are on sites that require you to register and log in; this one involves no such hassle.

You can’t tell by looking at it that there are 128 presets included (you have to click on the name for a context menu), five of which I’ve jotted down on a “gotta use” list. You can even have it generate patches randomly, if you need a unique sound but aren’t in a twiddling mood. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t discover any of this right away, because it forced me to figure out what all the knobs do.

Here are some other users’ reviews (some people actually bitched about the color), and here is where you can download it.

Edit 6/8/07: Here’s a short clip of some overdubs I just did, so you can hear how Da Hornet sounds:

So you want to make an album? (part 13)

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

Installment 13: Be a drum slut (you’ll love it!)

When it comes to layin’ drum tracks, I ain’t no vanilla cherry, honey. I am, indeed, a drum slut. I’ve done drums in every place you can name, in every imaginable way. Before recording the other tracks. After recording the other tracks. Real drumset played by someone else for my song, with or without a click track. Real drumset played by someone else for their song and “stolen” for use in my song (mmm, so naughty). Real drum set played by me. Back when I was under-age, I recorded myself hitting pillows with sticks (and I’ll be damned if it didn’t sound just like… pillows being hit with sticks!) — and I was also using the built in rhythms on organs and toy keyboards. I’ve created makeshift drum-like sounds with a synthesizer, and likewise with a Commodore 64. I’ve done oral. (Yes, “oral” — I was mouth-drumming before beatboxing took off.) Played a drum machine by hand. Programmed a drum machine. Programmed a computer sequencer which then played the drum machine. Played a drum machine by hand into the computer’s sequencer, and then used that to fix/tighten/clean up my performance. Programmed a computer sequencer to play samples of real, actual drums that I’d originally hit with a real, actual drumstick (this is one of my favorite positions methods lately). Ain’t no lie, I’ll try anything once, sugar.

Why so many different ways? Lots of reasons. Sometimes you just have to use whatever is available to you. Sometimes you want to try something different. Sometimes the song demands that you do something different (I love it when the song gets bossy). Sometimes you think you’re being super-creative and all you’re really doing is making a mess. But that’s okay too, because we all gotta learn.

Since 1.) this series is geared more at home recordists than at bands going into pro studios, and 2.) home is where the revolution is happening anyway, I’m going to assume you’re recording one instrument at a time. The logical thing to do is to record a drum track before anything else, whether it’s real drums or machine drums. If you’re a little crazy, it is actually possible to record other instruments like guitars first, but only if there’s a good reason, or if you have experience doing so. (I know one guy that always does his drums last — he has to crank his headphones to the max to hear what he’s playing along to — but he’s so intimately familiar with his own songs, that even when there are breaks between sections, he can intuitively “feel” how long to pause before starting up again.)

On some of my own songs (listen to Have You Heard the Good News? for an example), the guitar holds the groove for most of the song, and the drums only come in on one verse. I could have started with a click track for the whole song, but then the rhythm of the initial guitar track might have felt too rigid, and I wanted it to be natural. So I played the guitar part “free”, i.e. not to anything, and then played the drum machine by hand over the third verse. On Never Turn Back, I actually did it this way (guitar first, then played the drum machine) for the whole song, partly just because I’m nuts, and partly because, again, I wanted the acoustic guitar to have a really natural feel to it. No click or reference was used, so the song is at whatever tempo I naturally played the guitar at. Playing a drum machine to an existing track is at least a little easier than doing so with a real set, because you can do it at a volume that won’t make you deaf. Be picky, though. If a bit doesn’t “feel” right, do something about it, because a half-assed drum part will kill a song.

If you know drums will be playing for most of the duration of your song, as in most pop/rock songs, the logical and sane thing to do is to record them first. This is not without its own challenge; if there are fills, accents, or breaks that happen in certain spots, you need to be able to mentally keep track of where you are in the song. Even if there is a section where you don’t want drums, say an intro for example, you could just play a “placeholder” beat for that part and remove it later. Always give yourself a one-measure count-off at the beginning, or you will be cursing yourself as you try to nail the first chord on overdubs. Setting the ideal tempo can be tricky; for drum machines, play and sing along with it to see if it feels right before committing to it. For real drums, maybe play and sing the song with your keyboard or guitar first to get the tempo in your head, and watch out for that human tendency to speed up as you go along.

Often times, after creating what you think is the ultimate drum track, you will put your overdubs down and then wish the drum part was a little different. There’s no easy rule for how to avoid this; it takes a certain amount of experience and foresight. If you’re not sure, it’s generally better to keep it really simple than to get fancy, because everything else you do will be adding to it. Something like a cymbal crash can always be overdubbed later if you think a transition isn’t getting enough emphasis. Another thing I’ve noticed with drum machine parts is, if you have velocity sensitive pads and some hits are a lot quieter than others, the quieter hits can rapidly disappear into near-inaudibility when you start putting overdubs on. So it’s best not to overdo the dynamics if you know there will be a lot of other things on top.

Recording the sound from a drum machine is a no-brainer; the work has already been done for you. Just patch it directly in and record it. Comparitively, recording a real kit in your home studio will prove to be a challenge as far as microphone placement and setting levels. The tight, clean, well-defined drum sounds on studio recordings are the result of microphones being placed right near the drumheads, generally one mic per drum, plus a pair of overhead mics to capture cymbals and room ambience. In all likelihood, your project studio may not have as many mics or recording inputs as you would like, yet you may still want to record a set anyway. This is fine, just be aware that your sound will be a compromise, and you may need to experiment a lot with the overall mix to get a sound that you find acceptable.

If you record with only one or two microphones, it is best to hang them several feet above the set, and then some after-the-fact multi-band compression might help you bring out the lacking “oomph” of the kick drum without muddying everything up the way an ordinary EQ might. If you have a couple more mics, it’s generally recommended that you close-mic the snare and the kick, and record them to separate tracks so you can adjust them afterwards. If, however, like a lot of home recordists, you don’t have a multi-channel soundcard, you can combine the sounds from multiple mics on the fly with a small mixer — you won’t know what it sounds like until after you record it and play it back, and you won’t be able to re-adjust the balance later, so you’ll need to record and listen back to some short “test takes” before starting work on the actual song.

Do a Google search on “miking drums” (without the quotes). A lot of what you find and read, you may not be able to do with the equipment you currently have, but the general principles will still be valuable. I’ll link to a few of them, but there are so many good articles out there that you really should do a full search yourself when you have time for explorin’.

A few years ago, a friend and former drummer of mine left his drums at my studio for a while, so I tried a session or two of playing the set myself. Your mileage my vary on this, but from my own experience, it may be helpful to let you know that I wish I had played them a bit louder, or rather, more consistently loud. Because drums are so much louder than other acoustic instruments, a non-drummer will tend to play relatively quietly. It will sound loud in the room, but you can tell on playback when you didn’t capture the familiar sound, timbre, or character of “loud hits”.

From these same sessions, I isolated, copied, and saved some of the better sounding drum hits and cymbal crashes to create a personal library of drum samples. When you think too hard about individual sounds, you tend to over-embellish them. These natural sounds — cleaned up a bit, but not “sweetened” much — sound nice and organic when I use them in conjunction with a sequencer. On my old Windows box, I used Cakewalk as the sequencer (think “the robot that plays the instrument”) and Mellosoftron as the sampler (think “the instrument being played by the robot”) which produces the actual sound. On my Mac, I can do it all self-contained within Tracktion.

It’s worth mentioning here that seemingly dull and ordinary drum sounds are often ideal in the larger context, since you usually don’t want the drums to be hogging all the listener’s attention anyway. Having realized this, my current “drum set” sounds pretty realistic, and I can use it in a lot of songs without getting sick of it — whereas a while back, particularly in the competitive climate of 80s, the pressure was on to blow everyone else off the charts with the ultimate, big, bad, in-your-face “snare drum to end all snare drums”. It took me a while to recover from that.

A whole universe of techniques, some of which might be considered “cheating” if you were in a “real band” with a “real drummer”, is out there for less-pigeonholed artists to explore without guilt. Don’t be afraid to try recording your drum parts in separate layers, or to combine the drum machine with a real drumset. Try, for example, using the drum machine for a simple, tight, clean kick/snare groove, and then overdubbing real cymbals. Try playing the drums at half the actual speed of the song, and then speeding it up on playback for a cute and infectious “toy drums” sound. Try looping your best measure or two (or four, or thirteen) of drumming. Try using the drum machine for the hi-hat, the drumset for the kick, your mouth as a snare, and the contents of your silverware drawer being dumped on the kitchen floor as a crash. (Try to get your pets involved too, and if you can get your neighbor to scold you for something, that’s always a fun thing to catch on tape.) Remember, a good sounding rhythm track will only give you half of your satisfaction; the other half will come from the scandalous stories you can tell afterwards about how you did it.

So what are you waiting for? Be a drum slut. You’ll love it. It’s a way of life.

So you want to make an album? (part 3)

Installment 3: Meanwhile, Back At The Home Studio (1984-1987)

The two-cassette ping-pong rig was my demo-making mainstay for the entirety of my pre-college life. With no access to separate tracks, I had to mix every overdub as I played it. If it was too loud, too quiet, too wet or too dry… too bad. Also, I had to run the full length of the song to add anything to it, and if I messed up a take, I had to either rewind to the beginning and start over… or, more typically, try to somehow cover up the mistake with my next overdub. Fortunately, I hadn’t yet attained the neurotic levels of perfectionism that would later (particularly in my early 20s) come to all but paralyze my creativity.

I previously alluded to my “first legitimate synthesizer”. Like all things “first”, though, there’s always a path of “sort of firsts” leading up to it. Prior to the CZ-101, there was the Yamaha CP-7, a simplistic electronic “piano” that my parents had bought for my sister to practice on. Luckily for me, she lost interest immediately and I inherited it, sustaining me through the first few Glass Exit gigs and some song demos. I tried to give its lackluster sound some character by purchasing (and overusing to death) a $40 Boss wah-wah pedal. Later I took the CP-7 apart and franken-installed the guts of one of my reverbs, deliberately mis-wiring the instrument’s output to the reverb’s mic input to overload it for a distorted Deep Purple sound. Later still, I removed the keyboard altogether and painstakingly wired it up note by note to where the dismantled CZ-101’s keyboard had been, so that I could play it with a full-size keyboard. The resulting beastly contraption on a wooden board was then stolen from the trunk of my ‘81 Monte Carlo in college, marking the end of an era.

Concurrent with the CP-7, like many adolescents in the dawn of the home computer age, I was the proud possessor of a Commodore 64 computer, whose groundbreaking features included the three-voice SID synthesizer chip. While by today’s standards, the BASIC programs included in the tutorial booklet are downright unreadable — requiring non-descriptive PEEK and POKE commands to activate and control sound — a touch of obsession and a whole lot of attention span made it possible to literally write your own synthesizer (using the computer keyboard to play the notes) and/or sequencer. I even took it to a Glass Exit rehearsal once, but it proved too nerve-wracking to load and run the program from a cassette drive without having a TV screen available to see what I was doing.

Before that, I had a Casio VL-Tone, which was a cross between a calculator and a toy synthesizer with a rudimentary 100-note sequencer. You could “program” its sound by storing a number to the calculator’s memory - each digit represented either the waveform, a stage of the ADSR (attack, decay, sustain, release) envelope, or the vibrato. I took it apart and naïvely connected its speaker wires to the “phono” input of my parents’ stereo, reveling in the gloriously overloaded and distorted tone, and most certainly subjecting the stereo to irreparable damage.

I could go back even further and mention that the electronic Merlin game/toy had an extremely limited (one octave, no sharps or flats, only sound was “beep”) music sequencer, but now we’re venturing into primordial soup territory. The point I’m hopefully driving home is that there never really is a “first” anything, just a series of gradual steps towards it.

One thing I notice when re-reading my high school diary is that my motives for wanting to record an album were not always pure and noble. I apparently thought a few great recordings of original songs would be my ticket to a better social life. It’s full of embarrassingly repetitive fantasies of getting compliments and respect, and of people suddenly understanding that “side” of me. The idea of simply learning to enjoy people hadn’t quite occurred to me yet. Nor had the idea that some people might not be worth the mental energy. In any event, I was constantly filling notebooks with revised track listings for the album in my head that would one day win everybody over… or in the case of my enemies, piss them all off.

In my senior year, I was sidetracked by a strange turn of events. The folks running the school musical were apparently short of decent male performers for that year’s presentation of Anything Goes, and they asked me to audition. I showed up and rolled my eyes as I sight-sang Cole Porter songs without any feeling, hoping they would notice I was the wrong person for this. They wound up casting me in the lead role. I was flattered and couldn’t say no. Like WKRP’s Johnny Fever in his identity-endangering stint as TV disco host “Rip Tide”, I fought to cling to my rock and roll cred while (sort of) tap dancing and grudgingly singing lyrics like “please be sweet, my chickadee”. The one remnant of dignity I managed to stubbornly hold onto was my hair, which they had to spend hours pinning up to look short.

The reason this matters is that it got me thinking theatrically. At the final cast party, the director, Mark something (I’m sorry I can’t remember your last name, Mark) acknowledged me as having crossed over from the “live fast, die young world of rock and roll” as he handed me my gift: a book about rock musicals. The ego/esteem boost from all the attention and socializing, combined with that nod to the “real Keith”, planted another seed.

Glass Exit had broken up by this point (I quit first), although actually, apart from the guitarist, the other four of us were now in a band with a horn section, called “Up Front”, doing more upbeat music (mostly) for parties and dances. I also formed another band, “Liquid String”, for the sole purpose of doing one show of my originals, using only the bass player from Glass Exit and otherwise going out of my way to use as much fresh blood as possible. I wasn’t totally happy with how that show went, but in retrospect it showed some courage. Last but not least, right around graduation time, our music theory teacher generously talked a friend of his into letting Up Front record a few songs in his 24 track studio (my first of relatively few experiences in any pro facility), asking us only to thank the engineer with a case of beer. We did one angry-ish song of mine, and two fast-paced instrumentals that Jeff and his friend Gary had come up with. (Note: I’ll describe this experience in more detail when I elaborate on the differences between home recording and “real studio” recording.)

That summer, feeling the void where all the creative collaboration and excitement had been, I wrote in my diary (August 2, 1987):

I’ve got the most fleeting idea for a movie — a surrealistic rock opera for film — sounds good already, huh? Well, every time I think about it, I get depressed. I have no power to begin something like that now.

… I don’t know.

So you want to make an album? (part 1)

In this multi-installment posting, at least partly inspired by a new/old net friend who is embarking on an exciting and treacherous creative journey, I aim to recollect my personal experiences with the combined thrill and agony of recording original music, and hopefully pass on a few useful words of wisdom along the way.

Today, we set the stage by going way farther into my past than necessary.

Installment 1: The Soil and the Seeds (1982-1984)

My earliest recollection of talking to Jeff Lewis differs from his. In mine, we were in seventh grade, sharing a bus seat on a mini field trip, cracking each other up with obscure bits we’d memorized from Steve Martin records. In his first memory, I tapped him on the shoulder in an eighth grade classroom and asked “do you play drums?”

At the time, I wasn’t aware of any internal rift or dichotomy, but the seeds for it had already been planted: I was more interested in studio records than I was in live concerts. I loved to listen carefully with headphones and pick apart all the elements that had been put together to make up that sound. I loved to listen to the left or right speaker by itself, to hear what had been masked by instruments on the other side. I discovered by accident that if I cut a certain wire on the headphone cord, I could cancel the center out (karaoke style) and reveal even more “hidden” sounds. Needless to say, I destroyed a lot of headphones.

Of course, if you coexist with the human race, you have to speak their language. “Are you in a band?” Of course we were in a band. “Cool!” Hooray, I’d moved up a few notches on the popularity grid! Never mind that we hadn’t even gotten together in the same room, let alone played any music together — but that would be rectified soon enough.

I could have started off as a guitarist. I certainly liked guitars enough. But the idea of buying replacements for the three broken strings on my father’s acoustic dust collector never occurred to me, or maybe I just assumed strings weren’t affordable (not that I didn’t muck around with the three survivors). Besides, most of my musical learning was happening on my grandmother’s Wurlitzer organ and the pianos at school. Keyboardists were less common than guitarists, as keyboards were not considered an essential rock instrument (in spite of featuring on pretty much every rock song I’d ever heard); and besides, the keyboard magazines were always more intellectually stimulating and less degrading to women than the guitar magazines. So, for the foreseeable future, I was a keyboardist.

After many months of nothing but talking with friends and writing up elaborate plans for a mind-bending double album, I set out to do the actual dirty work. If you want to be technical, I had already experienced a sort of “multitracking” on my own using two portable cassette recorders, by playing three-stringed guitar, tambourine, and recorder along with one tape of myself and recording to the other one. I even created altered-speed effects by wedging small objects between the capstan and pinch roller while playing or recording.

Now, however, it was time to upgrade to the big time … I somehow acquired two stereo cassette decks (with Dolby C, for sound so clean it would of course rival the professional studios), a stereo equalizer, two microphones from Radio Shack, and two strange reverb units that doubled as mixers, since they each had a line in and an adjustable mic in. (I eventually got a third reverb, because I couldn’t use the other two as reverbs if I was using them as mixers!) I was all set for cutting-edge ping-pong cassette wizardry.

Geared to proceed forward with my great vision of using this “band” as my vehicle for creative expression, I invited Jeff over to record his drumming in my family’s basement. I didn’t have any way for him to hear what the songs would sound like, other than by trying to describe them to him verbally, and dictating to him what kind of beats and fills to play. (To remember the rhythm of one fill in particular, I told him to think the words “order a pizza”, and it’s been a recurring joke ever since.) I can’t imagine how uninspiring the overall experience must have been for him.

I did manage to record several Wurlitzer organ overdubs atop Jeff’s drumming, blissfully oblivious to the rapid deterioration of his sound with each successive “ping” and “pong” between the two cassette decks. Hearing myself layered like that for the first time ever was — for me, anyway — like splitting the atom and discovering sex at the same time. Alas, this particular magnum opus was not to be. It was certainly not igniting the enthusiasm of my “bandmates”, and other musical directions would soon consume my focus.

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

Flute solo from “Outside”, mellotron remix

I haven’t uploaded any audio here recently, so I’ll give you a small taste of my progress on the Through Forbidden Black Doors nonexistent film version remix project. This is an instrumental solo section from a track called Outside, depicting an unhappy factory worker’s daydream of an “outside world” which none of the workers have ever been to.

It’s not that much different from the version on my 1998 CD; it’s a nearly faithful note-for-note copy. What’s most different is that instruments have been replaced. The flute part was originally played on one of those uninspiring 1980s synths, with a few rows of patch selection buttons and a tiny digital readout. It didn’t sound terrible, but I’ve replaced it with sampled mellotron flute to give it a more vintage-y feeling. The drum machine was replaced by sampled drums from a well-known 1969 album (first correct guess wins a hug!), and sampled cymbals from an obscure early 90s album. There’s a heavily reverberated speech-synthesized choir filling in the background and adding to the other-worldly dream-like quality.

Roland SH-5

There are certain synthesizers that I covet based entirely on their appearance (synth porn does indeed follow the same protocol as regular porn). This one, for example, looks like it could mow down a whole streetful of pro-democracy protestors (click on the picture for a more oppressive version):

Of course I would use it for good, to mow down their fascist oppressors. I may be turned on, but not to the complete abandonment of my superheroic moral code!

This is your brain on drums … any questions?

Lennon was dead. Bonham was dead. Floyd were primed to split.

But worst of all, The Drum Machine had just signed its multi-million dollar contract, and one way or another you were going to have to confront it.

No musician in his right mind could have anything but a love-hate relationship with the thing. It was death knell and panacea rolled into one, in a portable black box. It forced you to re-examine whether or not there was such a thing as ethics when it came to making music, and the already fuzzy line between right and wrong became exponentially more elusive.

In a way, things are better — I daresay cooler — now, because you no longer have to defend and justify technology. It just is. And it exists in harmony with instruments and talents that took centuries to evolve, secure enough in its own power that it no longer needs to bare its teeth at the old geezers. You no longer choose between black (drum machine) and white (real drummer) — your pallet is an infinite gradient. Electronic sounds can be mapped to organic performances, and vice versa. Quantization can be done in degrees. Sampling can be done at the individual hit level, or at the pattern level. Things can be combined and edited in infinite ways. And ironically, proficient drummers stand to benefit the most from the tools.

The diagram above is just an organized brainstorm of the various ideas I’d like to connect together regarding drum tracks. A lot of the components have already been successfully coded. In particular, a way of mapping live human performance to a smooth list of tempos — see the upper left — has come a long way, baby. This is good for when I want to start the recording with an “unplugged” performance, and layer it up from there. This gives me my GRID.

I’ve also had some success with generative pattern mutation. Rescuing the kick and snare from dead repetitition, yet establishing ground rules to keep them out of the bullshit zone. (Example: three fast kicks in a row is bullshit. It screams “I have a drum machine and I don’t know what I’m doing.”)

Immaturity is just an idea at this point. It’s about deliberately inducing timing inaccuracies — not on a random per-note basis (that would just be “sloppiness”), but rather mimicking the subtle stretch-and-squash that happens when humans switch from one note duration to another. All the while, of course, paying reasonable mind to how far thou shalt stray from THE GRID.

This chart will undoubtedly grow more tentacles as I go along.

As for musical uploads, I’m still waiting for my old computer to talk to my new computer. And then we will have fun.

EXTREMELY SERIOUS POST

This is my first attempt at writing a coherent post on this website. Hooray! Not that I have time right now to do this. It’s morning, and I have to take a shower and go to work. But this is fun, so maybe I’ll quit my job and just spend the day writing. I’ve got a lot of cool categories! I think I’ll make this post about instruments. I LIK INSTURMNTS. INSTRMUMNTS AR COOK I MEAN COOL. HAVE U GOT A INSTRUMNET? I GOT A INSTURNEMT! I THINK I HAVE LOTS!!!