The Light of Day

Three coats… or actually one coat with three coats…

Like Chevy Chase says just before jumping in the pool, “this is crazy, this is crazy, this is crazy.”

One great thing about life at the Village Gate is that you can walk out to the parking lot with an old jacket, and stand there spray-painting it silver, and no one bats an eyelash. This, my friends, isn’t just a jacket from the Salvation Army with three cans’ worth of silver spray paint on it. This is a MISSION.

Again, I ask… why aren’t you doing this?

How low tech can be cutting edge

Excuse my, uh, “calligraphy” for a moment.

Ow, ow, ow. *shakes wrists*

I just don’t have the endurance for that anymore.

Anyway, the point isn’t that I have any desire to do a handwritten blog, and I will likely never do that again. But think about how strange it is that we get sentimental for “low tech” or “old tech” things, how there’s always a “golden age” to look back to. But none of that old stuff ceases to exist, or even ceases to be available. If you really want to shoot a movie on 8mm film, you can, though it’ll be a little pricey to get the film and develop it. Not prohibitively, though, if you really want to. Key words there: really want to. The only thing we’re ever truly being sentimental for is the lack of an excuse to be lazy. The fact that we’ve paved all these shortcuts doesn’t mean the shortcut is the only — or best — way.

But what truly makes “low tech” interesting now, is that we’re in this higher tech environment. You can not only shoot 8mm film, if you really want — but you could, if you really want, shoot 8mm film of a person sitting in a Starbucks with a laptop computer, wearing a Trogdor t-shirt. Which you could never do when 8mm was actually a sensible way of preserving memories.

Today, we can run a Mellotron through Autotune. We can sample a cassette. All these things we can do, but just don’t think of doing, because we’ve convinced ourselves that all our old toys have been replaced with new toys. Guess what? All your toys are still there; they may have moved to a higher (more expensive) shelf that you’ll need to climb a little (or get mummy to help) in order to get them down, but they’re still there. You have a shitload of toys. Do you realize how much “play potential” you have afore ye now? Do that “relationship” math again. Five toys is ten potential combinations, six toys is fifteen… and that’s only counting pairs of toys.

Tip: do “relationship math” in your head:
Take the number of people in the room, and imagine that number on the left.
Subtract one, and put the new number on the right. (If 7 is on the left, 6 is on the right.)
Whichever number is even, cut it in half. (Cut that 6 down to a 3.)
Multiply the left number by the right number, and you’re done! (7 x 3 = 21 relationships.)

It’s like this: there you were, in 1980, or 1985 or whatever, saying, “okay, if only I had this and this and this”, and now you’re waking from a deep freeze, realizing, hey, I have this and this and this!! All you’ve lost track of is why you wanted it. Once you remember, you’re all set!

Anyway, there’s a reason I wrote all this. Ask me to elaborate later, and I will. Ask me not to elaborate later, and I will anyway, just to spite you.

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.

No shortcuts, buddy

OMG a whole week!

This is an unusually long time for me to go without posting. There is no tangible reason for this, except that it’s like that Byrds song, which was stolen from Pete Seeger, who plagiarized it from the Bible (and now I’m “stealin’ it back”, to steal plagiarize copy borrow a phrase from Bono, who, like me, couldn’t technically “steal back” Helter Skelter, because he’s not technically a Beatle, just like I can’t “steal back” a Bible verse because I’m technically not God): a time to read, a time to post, a time to refrain from posting… stuff… or however it goes.

Yeah, the punchline was less funny than the rest of the paragraph.

Here’s 11 seconds of eye candy to appease the hordes of psychotic fans thrusting their bodies against the outer walls of my cyberatlantis: my first test of the “partial rotoscoping” method I’m developing for my feature:

Yes, it’s creepy. I did it in a few hours. It’s test #1. The ideas are an iceberg, and you’re looking at the first square inch to pop out of the top of the water.

P.S. - I just went to the open mic at Bodhi’s downstairs, and apparently they’re discontinuing it.  So tonight was the big finale.  I wasn’t in the mood to do any any of my own songs (moratorium on the O-word still in effect), not that I usually am.  So figuring I was only gonna do one song, What Do You Want From Life by the Tubes felt like a good one.  Then since I was kind of green-lighted to do a couple more — i.e. Dan, the guy who hosts it, wasn’t walking back up to the, er, “stage” — I followed it with A Day in the Life, and then Comfortably Numb.  (I should YouTube all three of them.)  I’d say if you don’t know who either of those last two are by, get professional help, but I’ve mellowed with age.  Google them or something.  Anyway, it’s a little sad that it’s over, but c’est la life.

The Sunset - remix update

Holy mother of God, The Sunset/Slab of Clay are sounding so amazing to me right now. Even totally not mixed.

Not mixed?? So what did I just spend the past 48 hours doing??

That’s not “mixing”, that’s tweaking. And it wasn’t 48 hours, it was like 18 hours on and off. Your sense of time is distorted, but it’s understandable.

Not sharing yet. (Update 9/15: Oh, okay, twist my arm. It’s somewhere on this site. But you have to be a super-sleuth to find it, and keep in mind, it’s more of a theater piece than a driving song.) It’s that good. No, seriously, I’m in “that place” where the music is alive, and not just a sound coming out of my equipment. I’d say no human with a nervous system could listen to this and not start jumping up and down saying, “when are we gonna put this on? Huh? Huh??” — but I’m no stranger to that feeling. I think it’s just the spirit guides jumping up and down at the moment. The humans are still clueless. Well, not all of them. You know if you’re an exception.

Cutting-edge systems

It’s hard to see in this picture, but in the seventh column, fourth row from the top, under “Sunset/Slab”, there is a post-it note. Remember when I said I wanted some way of keeping notes on all the songs I’m working on? A notebook didn’t completely make sense, because I never really know how much I’m going to need to write about any particular song, and there will either be wasted paper or not enough paper. Not like I have paper shortage issues, but yeah. And besides, I already have a great big BOX full of notebooks containing ideas, doodles, lyrics, algorithms, and rants (all of which I need to go through, armed with scissors and stapler, and do an intensive sorting — not to mention remember what the heck is in them, so that I can have all these epiphanies about the forgotten purpose of my life and whatnot), and the last thing I need is one more notebook to lose track of.

(Exhibit A: this is only about half of them; there are plenty more scattered throughout the studio.)

There will ultimately be post-it notes in most of the boxes on the whiteboard. I can use as many or as few as I need. When it’s time to dive into a song, I’ll peel off the sticky notes for that song and go “a-ha, I still need to [whatever] on this one!” They won’t necessarily be complete lists of everything that needs to be done, just reminders of whatever I was going to do next, before my ears got all burnt out. Then, when it’s time to put that song away and go to the next one, I take a few minutes to put up revised notes/ideas for the one I’m putting away and look at the most recent notes for the one I’m moving on to. And the fact that there’s this big, physical, visible thing greeting me every time I walk through the room will help to compensate for the “out of sight, out of mind” effect of having my digital data a little too nicely tucked away on the hard drive, so hopefully any given song won’t languish in some freakishly half-alive state for quite so long.

I’m still interested in a randomization system for picking out what to work on next (unless I’m already excited about doing something on a particular song). Maybe simple dice would do the trick, but in that case I should have made it a 6×6 grid… Also, I may use some of the empty rectangles for other projects, like coding or video stuff.

(In case you’re wondering, the orange thing at the base of the whiteboard is a “giggle stick” noise-making toy. Such sound-producing objects are important tools of the trade, though admittedly it’s not doing much good up at the whiteboard and I have no idea how it wound up there.)

Better this than my underwear drawer

In my last post, I mentioned the “dozens of Tracktion projects on my hard drive”. So now you can see what I mean. Couple of notes:

“Teat2″ is supposed to be “test2″.

Those last three (Fangbonus/Everyone…/Funky…) are not mine. They’re sample projects that come with Tracktion. I haven’t gotten around to deleting them.

Look ma, no bubbles

Now that I’ve taken out the trash…

Strangest thing about my old auto-morphing code that I’ve had a couple of demos up for (also on youtube): it’s had an incredibly stupid bug in it all this time, that I would never have noticed if I wasn’t just staring at the code mindlessly. It was transitioning smoothly from picture to picture, but there seemed to be an excessive amount of white or light gray circular areas that would unnecessarily billow up before resolving to the next keyframe. Everything was working correctly except for there was this line of code that I copied and pasted and didn’t finish changing it the way I’d intended to, so instead of getting the data for a, b, c, and d, it was getting “b” twice and leaving “a” at zero.

The reason it didn’t totally cause it to malfunction outright? To interpolate, it takes the data from not two, but four pictures. The keyframe just before the current frame is called “b”, the one just before that is called “a”, the one right after the current frame is called “c”, and the one right after that is called “d”. So you’ve got a, b, c, and d, and the thing you’re filling in is somewhere between b and c.

The reason it uses info going that far back and forward is so that I can make the data curve as it goes along. It’s called a spline curve, when the computer sort of “improvises” a curve to fit an arbitrary set of points, and in order to know how the curve is shaped, you want to know where at least a couple extra points are beyond the ones you’re between. Well, since “a” was treated as though it were all zeros, it would come out of “b” at the right place but at the wrong angle. So the data would always have sort of an “upward lurch” at the beginning of the transitions, thus making all those white and light gray bubbles.

Here is a demo video of a transition sequence that works the way I meant it to.

(Is this the same Keith Handy guy that does the music, or am I at the wrong website?)

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.

If you build a better vocal pitch grapher…

Workin’ on it… middle of the yellow row is C, middle of the green row is D, and so on…

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!

History, splicing tape, and babes

Three words: untapped fetish gold. I’d imagine this is how “girls posing with cars” calendars look to an auto mechanic — except she ain’t posin’.

There are apparently only three pictures of Delia Derbyshire in existence, one of which unfortunately shows her teeth (ha ha, I’m pretending to be superficial, get it?). My question is, how did I go 37.5 years without seeing any of them, or without realizing that a female-born (non-transsexual) chick made such a huge contribution to the very craft I’m supposedly so knowledgeable about? (Edit: if the “craft” I’m referring to is “electronic music in general”, then it might seem that I’m overlooking theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore — but since instrumental mastery and tape manipulation are at very opposite ends of said craft, let’s assume I’m talking more about studio wizardry than performance.)

I finally got up to speed on all this when I watched a 60 minute documentary about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, entitled The Alchemists of Sound. Highly recommended Mandatory viewing, despite the fact that whoever edited it got a little non-sequitur with the visual effects (such as reels on a machine turning opposite directions, unnecessary morphs, or a human face appearing in the background for no reason). If you can’t track it down, let me know, and I just might be able to do somethin’ for ya. We’ll see.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to call that mechanic I was talking about, and see how he’s coming along on my time machine.

P.S.R. is now up

The P.S.R. video is now up on YouTube. (Previously mentioned in this post.)

Coming attractions!

… I will restore the “P.S.R.” video.

Left to right: Paul Ceppaglia, Jeff Lewis, and myself, in a 1994 video for the mock-rap song, “P.S.R.”, which Jeff and I wrote while simultaneously bored, depressed, and prone to hysterical giggle fits. Illicit substances may have provided some inspiration.

(Look at how freakin’ long my hair is!)

Stay tuned …

The digital video revolution is doing for self-portraits what sliced bread did for … people who didn’t want to slice their own bread!

Top: first time trying out the camera on me playing guitar, using only the built-in mic for sound, just to see what it would sound like. I played at least a dozen songs, whatever came to mind, and a four-minute Shine On You Crazy Diamond sounded best (surprisingly, since it’s not really an acoustic-friendly song), so I preserved the moment on YouTube, flubs and all.

Bottom: I filmed myself putting down the bass part for a new song this morning. Unfortunately, I sounded better than I looked, so I’ll be keeping the track but not the video. The above still is one of the less-incriminating frames, but yes, the truth is out there: I still have a few grams to lose.

I think I’ve improved on your methods

Above: a still from an improved version of my auto-morphing picture-bleeding algorithmic video whatchamacallit thingy. At this point, increasing the picture quality is just a matter of increasing the number of “passes”, so I’m going to concentrate more mental energy on making it more useful.

From the user’s standpoint, the way it works now is linear. You start with a single stream (thread, channel, whatever you want to call it) of video, with some frames missing, and it fills them in. You could start with a very small number of key frames (like in my early tests below), so that it generates the majority of images for a morphing effect; or you could have most of the frames already (as in pre-existing video) with only a few missing frames, and use it as more of a transition effect. In either case, though, as it stands now you start with one list of numbered frames, and it fills in the gaps.

What I want to do next is give it the ability/option to cross-mutate between two or more simultaneous video sources, sort of like an A-B roll but with the middle zone being more of a cross-breed than a crossfade…

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!

Bleed test 2

No attempt made to synchronize anything:

So I suppose if you were sedated enough, this could pass for a music video. My initial criticisms:

1. What I already said above: no attempt was made to synchronize anything.
2. It doesn’t stay on the actual pictures long enough. Too much time spent in abstract-land.

Both of which could easily be dealt with.

(Holga pics by Christy)

“Bleeding” transitions

As I become wiser in the ways of the YouTube, I may later be able to upload something with better image quality. For now, though …

This is my first test of something I coded a while back, for cross-mutating between images. It should also be useable in video to fill in missing frames, or as an unusual transition between one scene and the next, though I haven’t tried it for either. It’s sort of like morphing, but not quite. It’s not a straight crossfade either. The best I can describe it is that the dark and light areas “bleed”, expanding or contracting as necessary until they become the next picture. It can happen over as many or as few frames as you wish (the key frames in this example are all spaced apart differently).