Keith Handy 1.999

Guitar overdub: Bemoaning Moments

Whatever question you’re going to ask me about the tie, the answer is “no”.

Gotta record the vocal for this soon, dammit…

Enjoy!

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!

Something more imaginative than “Update”.

The reason I’ve been so non-prolific in my posting lately is that I have a bad habit of flirting with the lower levels on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs from time to time. I usually mis-manage the levels, by trying to focus on something a level or two higher than I’m actually at, and letting something go unattended on a level or two below me. This is all one fancy-schmancy way of saying my unemployment ran out a few weeks ago and I’ve been in too much of a panic to write coherently.

Then again, occasionally writing about something unrelated to my rent would help to assuage the panic and refresh my mind. I’ve intermittently done some work on recording projects in the interim, both to take a breather from the mental tension, and to make some actual progress. (It’s important to remain creatively productive in less-than-ideal circumstances, even if you can’t realistically expect to be at your peak. If nothing else, this keeps the whirlpool going, and it tells the universe you haven’t given up.)

In these periods, where I allow myself to “forget my troubles” (as they would have crooned back in the great depression), here’s what I’ve done lately:

Current stuff

I’ve put the main vocal down for Rival Big Bang. This is a big leap for me. It still needs harmonies on parts of it, because I intend for it to have a sort of CSN sound to it. I don’t know exactly why I’m so sure of this; I just am. There’s a video on YouTube of me working on the part that’s done so far. I was teaching myself the song as I went along, so I was a little nervous about posting it… but who cares.

(Similarly, when I do the vocal for Bemoaning Moments, that will be another big leap. It’s been starving for that vocal to go down, and it’s a fantastic bit of music.)

After a few months of “existing somewhere out there in the Rochester area”, trumpet player Paul Gaspar finally got in contact with me, so I invited him to try his hand (or, rather, his horn) at filling the void in the instrumental break of Curtis’ Classic Collection of Comforts. I posted highlights from that session on YouTube as well, featuring two differently approached takes out of a total of approximately ten. For the video I of course left his sound natural and organic, but for the final mix I may run it through a resonant filter and/or octaver to make it sound more like a synthesizer. Not to “fix” anything, mind you, just as an artistic choice.

Old junk

Because discussion is underway for the film version of Through Forbidden Black Doors (where I think it stands a better chance of being “gotten” by an audience than as just a recording), I do have to continue tying up loose ends on my remix. Said remix got way out of hand, and I may have put more hours into that than into the original recording project itself, if that’s even possible. Most recently I’ve been bringing things close to the home stretch on the “fourth quarter” of the rock opera (”side four” in vinyl lingo), which would mean This Is Your Chance, Almost Outside, The Operation, The Thing That Happens Next, and Nicole’s Thoughts.

I backed up one song prior to those and put a significant amount of work into Do You Remember? as well, which mostly consisted of manipulating Kim’s vocal — pitch correction (without flattening vibrato or other inflections), timing adjustments on certain phrases, and evening out the volume overall. Since it’s such a long and vocal-dominated song, with no instrumental “relief”, the more pleasing I can get that vocal to sound, the better the chance that people can endure it happily. I’m not saying this is a tough one to like, since a lot of people singled it out as one of their favorites back in the day. But my lyrics oscillate between brilliant and cringe-worthy, and like all of my recordings that go back that far, there’s a tendency for the whole thing to sound like a demo to my 2007 ears. The goal here isn’t to eliminate the “oldness” altogether, though; just to present it as charmingly as possible.

Oh yes, I almost forgot that I checked out and ran off a mix of Smile!, which is just before that (and didn’t really need much work). So that will (soon) put the last seven out of twenty tracks at a point where I don’t need to touch them anymore. Being able to put a whole string of tracks out of my mind like that is always a stress reliever, because look at how much smaller it makes the potential “to do” list for the remainder of the project.

The Operation has been a tough one to produce right, because I keep doing too much with it. Every time I remove something, and “hollow it out”, making it cleaner, I wind up liking it better. For some reason, I’ve always assumed it needed to have distorted rhythm guitars through the whole thing, because it’s supposed to be evil. Well, the fact of the matter is, the song is so fucking evil that it doesn’t need distorted rhythm guitars. It can be a keyboard dominant song, and the evil still shines through. One thing it does need, though, and finally has, is a real bass guitar. Once again, you’re invited to my studio to watch. My rhythm isn’t consistently tight on up-tempo music like this, but that’s what editing is for. I forget exactly what’s in the video version of the mix, but in the actual working version I think I can finish tightening the bass part, add a new hi-hat, and I’m good to go.

Overall, the rock opera is a restoration project, and will never be a “current” project. Making the film will be like making a tribute film; I want to produce it well, and creatively, as a respectful send-off, but I don’t want to immerse myself in the dystopian view that it presents.

Back to reality

Just to show you an example of things I need soon, but I’m putting off buying, because I’m that tight right now:

• Soda (!!!)
• Coffee filters (using paper towels)
• Athlete’s foot spray (just don’t scratch)
• Fingernail and toenail clippers (using scissors)
• Replacement window for passenger door of car (saran wrap)
• Rubbing alcohol (to clean scrolly ball in mouse)
• Dandruff shampoo (soap)
• Facial cleanser (soap)

…and of course, on the upside, I can’t afford cigarettes. I should use this time to come up with something better to do while standing outside for a few minutes, because I’m in danger of being able to afford them again soon. The thing is, if a stranger walks by and you make eye contact with them while taking a drag, it’s normal. If you’re just standing there, though, doing nothing, and you make eye contact with people, you look suspicious.

I suppose I could start taking “apple breaks”.

Harmonized guitars

Man, I freakin’ love doing harmonized guitars like this:

I don’t care if it is a 1980s hair metally kind of thing, or a 1970s middle-of-the-roady Eaglesy/Bostony kind of thing, or what cheezy genre it sprung forth from. I just like the sound of that particular musical… *cough*… “device”. I’ll be working on using the guitar to do a lead melody line, as I was just now — a specific melody as opposed to an improvised solo — and while I’m fiddling around with ways to reinforce it (unison, octave up, octave down, etc.), I say, eh, what the hell, and start to play along with it a third higher — you know the sound — as a sort of internal joke, initially snickering at myself for shamelessly barreling straight for the cliché — but then reluctantly admitting to myself that I just plain have to keep it.

Dammit.

Edit 11:00 PM sunday: Here it is a little better mixed. I sped up the whole first measure by 4% because it really felt like it was dragging, which was hard to tell when all I had to go by was a drum track.

How did I speed up the first measure by 4%? With a calculator, and some careful slicing and dicing. So there you go… that 27 seconds of music encapsulates me. You don’t need anything else. Play it for my funeral. It will be a 27 second funeral, which is great, because nobody likes funerals… although some people will complain that they got all dressed up for a 27 second funeral, but hey, let’s be real, you can’t please everyone.

I must not rest on my laurels…

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

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

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

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

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

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.