The Light of Day

Subliminal messages are for the birds

I’m not that far from having a refurbed Leave of Absence vol. 1 for all y’all. (Refurbing volume 2 was one of my side projects last year, so I’m sort of working backwards.) I finally resolved a certain gray-area type copyright issue. The new mix of the offending song (Julie) will be missing part of its original vocal, and in its place will be, uh… something kinda weird. The backing track is generic enough to not even be an issue. I’ll probably list the title of the new mix as Julie Minus Julie. I love odd, cryptic titles like that.

Anyway…

Remixing, in and of itself, should never take terribly long. It’s when something crosses the line from “remixing” to “reworking” that we get sucked into a wormhole, and suddenly it’s ten years later.

Fortunately, Friend in the Room (above) was a relatively straightforward hour-or-two remix, starting with the nearly ready-to-go tracks I’d previously copied over from the old Windows 98 computer. I put some essential stuff like EQ on some tracks, and cut out some hiss between lines on the vocal track. Interestingly, all these years later, I’m hearing not just hiss on that track, but also a bird chirping loudly in the background. It’s likely that I had my window open while recording it, but I don’t remember hearing it while making the original mix. I considered that it might have been a squeaky reel of tape being picked up by the mic, since I was always in the same room with the Fostex, but it sounds too distinctively bird-like. You might be able to hear a bit of it in the middle verse (listen at the end of the line “I never could say”, and the next few lines following it).

If I’d already known it was on there, I wouldn’t think it was any big deal. It’s the fact that the bird planted his easter egg in my song and I didn’t even discover it until a decade later — that’s what impresses me.

Anyway, having both volumes of Leave of Absence in nice, tidy, finalized (for now) form will put a nice, big, guidepost-y dent in my mission to sort out my entire back catalog and make it all available in one convenient online musicfolio. (This will be my new word for “discography”, since it really has nothing to do with discs. I may also start using “collection” in lieu of “album”, but we’ll see about that one.)

Clever ending. Blah blah blah.

The sound of somebody not actually singing something

This is a short snippet of a song that was excluded from the 1998 CD of the rock opera, and is being re-included on the restoration:

That is Kim’s voice… what’s particularly neat about it, though, is that she never actually sang that. Not even some rough version. She never sang that bit at all. Ever. Not back in 1998, not just prior to me posting this, and not at any time in between. But that’s her voice.

You think I’m playing mind-fuck games with you and trying to frustrate you, don’t you? I’m not. That bit was constructed syllable by syllable, by raiding the other five songs she sang on for closest matches (I called it “playing Syllable Bingo”), using Praat to manipulate pitches and durations, and relying on a shitload of trial and error to get the pieces to fit together and sound continuous. Now that you know it’s cobbled together from a series of manipulated samples, you can probably hear that it doesn’t quite sound 100% natural… but, all things considered, I think I got it pretty damn close.

The “Syllable Bingo” step was madness in its own right, even before all the tweaking and molding. I mentally scanned the lyrics on paper while repeatedly listening to existing recordings to find and mark possible matches, and built a crude mock-up without worrying about all the pitches yet. Eventually it came down to a few nasty hard-to-find sounds, which forced me to think hard about how we say and hear certain vowel sounds in certain contexts. For example, in “be afraid”, “be a” has to be a continuous sound, and I believe that came from the word “realize”. The word “memory” contains parts of three words: “remember”, “prisoner“, and “free“.

One thing that did not work (and believe me, I tried), no matter what, was to try to be clever and turn syllables backwards as a last resort. A backwards syllable sounds like a backwards syllable, no matter how short it is. It’s amazing that our brains can call shenanigans on this so quickly.

After gathering, sorting, and whittling down the final sounds to be used, I had to tune and stretch them… and, in some cases, flatten the pitch of two sounds so that I could crossfade them without making a flange-like sound… and then re-pitch and re-stretch, and so on.

What motivated me to do it this way, when most reasonable people would have tracked down the singer or sought a voice double? Well, what motivates you to not do this sort of thing? This is the kind of challenge I like to pose to myself. Sometimes I enjoy approaching art as if I were solving a puzzle. The results and/or sense of accomplishment must feel rewarding enough to me, otherwise I wouldn’t keep starting things that I know are going to be so difficult. And it’s not like I spend hours and hours feeling nothing but frustration until it’s done — each small thing that I get right feels good to me.

More pragmatically (in case I need to answer to the funnyfarm-mobile), using previously existing tracks as raw material helps to keep the continuity, being that it’s the same person, at the same age, at the same microphone and on the same magnetic tape. As a bonus, the whole process gave me a great idea for how to convey that section in the film script. So I’d say it was a weekend well-spent.

Yes, “a whole weekend”, if you choose to word it that way — though I prefer to say, “just a weekend”.

Does that make me crazy? Possibly.

“Crazy”, when used to describe someone’s mental state, is not a nice or modern term. But that aside, what does it mean? Can I say I was leaning farther that way than usual during a period roughly between 1990 and 1992? That’s what I tend to do, though I try to frame it with more compassionate words like “going through a rough time”. But what would it actually mean?

I know there are experts on psychology who discuss this in further depth than I’m able to, but let me toss out some definitions off the top of my head.

It would seem that I couldn’t claim insanity outright, because I’ve always had a well-developed sense of logic and reason. I didn’t take a course in statistics and probability, but I get the gist. (I’m not “crazy” enough to buy lottery tickets.) I know how to be critical of my own thoughts.

However, there are people with highly developed logical constructs of their own who manage to come up with terrifying conclusions, and can explain in elaborate detail why the muppets are communicating to them through controlled cloud formations that the FBI is reading their thoughts through stool samples collected at public bathrooms (unless they drink enough vinegar to scramble the data).

So this means “a sense of logic” isn’t good enough; we now have to distinguish between good logic and “crazy” logic. Each time I think of a way to differentiate between the two, I find myself coming up with notable exceptions. For example, favoring a majority viewpoint over a fringe belief, in which case we’d be discrediting the likes of Galileo and other pioneers.

Then I suppose I could try another defining factor: happiness (or lack thereof). If you’re happy, and at peace, can you technically be crazy? Even if you have beliefs which turn out not to be true, or logic with some holes in it? And it’s often said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, which is what a lot of unhappy people do.

How about a total inability to communicate? If a person refuses to truly listen to anything you try to explain to them, and continues to repeat and reinforce a viewpoint that you’ve already explained away, you’re more likely to chalk them up as “not well” than if they said, “that’s an interesting point. I’ll have to think about that”.

Or how about lack of humor — inability to laugh from the belly, or to acknowledge absurdity? Or never asking questions, only ever making statements, as if you are The One with the knowledge? Or placing a high priority on some obsession of yours that ultimately has little effect on anyone, while disregarding the things that really matter?

Maybe insanity is one of those concepts that you can’t define by any one thing, but… well, think of an object with three elastic strings attached to it, and three people standing around it in a circle, suspending the object above the ground by each holding their own string taut in one direction. No one person is dictating the position of the object. If any one person moves from side to side, or increases or decreases his tension, the object will move, but it’s still dependent on all three people. Maybe sanity is similarly the sum result of several forces/factors pulling in a variety of directions.

A bleak moment before the creative storm (December 1990).

The way I felt (and feel) about music I was working on between 1990 and 1992 is mixed. Not just the usual “mixed”, but mixed with extremes at both ends. The extreme positive about it is that I had the will, ambition, focus, and commitment to get serious, take the wheel, liberate my muse from a dependence on bandmates, and try to ascend from “demo” level to “album” level on a limited budget without anyone’s help. I admire the Keith of that time for that. But I ache for how serious and important this was to him, to the point where he couldn’t just go off and have a bit of fun between sessions. It was like a religious mission. Hell, it was a religious mission. It was too important.

This is the backing track from Dear Diary (1991/92), without vocals. I wish I could listen to this and just think “that’s pretty neat, in a slightly embarrassingly dated way”, but there are too many emotional associations.

(Incidentally, this is when I was “born” as a guitarist. I wasn’t comfortable with it yet — improvising was clearly out of the question, although I tried once or twice — and I had to hunch over the guitar and stare closely at the frets to get the notes right.)

One thing I notice about people who exhibit various character flaws is that they’re often trying to compensate for something they perceive to be the exact opposite. My determination to rigidly control every aspect of the Open The Window album was a reaction to my feeling a greater loss of control over my life… and to a lesser extent, an uphill fight against the maddeningly convoluted digital ping-ponging technique I imposed on myself, for the wrong reasons. Any time I go back to one of these mixes it brings back the overwhelm and the futility. (Lesson: what you put in is what you get out.)

That said, it was shortly after the millionth re-EQ’ing of these nine overworked songs that I began the slow and clunky journey towards getting over myself (somewhat, that is… so, okay, it’s a never ending journey, and I’m fine with that)… so, it all ends with a light at the end of the tunnel.

Apparently, though, I felt like I had to stay in the tunnel until it was done.

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!

Little drum machine mixing tip

I don’t know that this will be useful to anyone, but if you’re remixing an old song where you used a drum machine (or electronic drums), and tried to make it sound like real drums… and it has this stupidly wide stereo spread… you could of course move the left and right inward, so it’s not so wide, but let’s say you actually want to keep the “wideness”, but less of the annoying fakeness as tom toms bounce around unrealistically across your ears… make a copy of the track, swap the left and right, delay it by about 40 to 50 ms, and mix it in quietly. The delay will not only soften the unrealistically perfect transients (attacks) a little, but also create more of an open “two microphone” sound, by giving something to the opposite ear, and filling a void that would have no business being there in the real world.

What Do You Think Of Yourself?: new vocal

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

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

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

Possible video: creating drum parts

So far I haven’t scripted any of my YouTube demonstrations, but I think for something like this it would be good to plan out what I’m going to say instead of babbling like I normally do. Instead of being a talking head facing the camera, I think this would be a voice-over while I focus on the computer screen, my hands on the keyboard, and occasional cut aways to glorious drummers of yesteryear. Since I may not get around to actually making this one for a while, I’ll share the script with you so you can watch it in your mind.

The writing style here contrasts a bit with my usual blogging style, in that, I’m trying to not “over-write” my sentences and make them more clear… not so much “dumbing them down” as cutting out all the little linguistic curlicues and somersaults… such as phrases like “linguistic curlicues and somersaults”. You get the idea.

Hi, my name is Keith Handy, I’ve been recording my own music for over 20 years, and in this video I’m going to show you how I record drum parts. There are lots of ways to do that, but this is one approach that works really well for me lately. It involves using samples.

Sampling in general just means using sound that has already been recorded. A sample can be a musical passage, or it can just be a single note. It’s common for people to sample a measure or two of drumming and just loop it. Personally, I find loops too monotonous, so I like to build up drum rhythms from scratch using individual hits.

Quick little back history here: I started getting into music in my early teens, which was in the early eighties. While my friends and I were just starting to lose our musical virginities to the warm, organic sound of classic rock bands like The Beatles, The Doors, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin, the pop landscape was being taken over by the cold, mechanical sound of sequenced digital keyboards and drum machines, particularly in dance music, which I found really irritating. I was totally on the anti-drum machine bandwagon. I felt like a hypocrite, though, because I preferred the clean sound of a studio recording to the sound of real live drums in a practice room. This forced me to admit that at least on some level, I preferred a “fake” thing over a “real” thing.

Fast forward to the 1990s — my band breaks up, and my attempt to form a new band is a dismal failure. I had to keep moving forward with my music, though, because it was either that or gouge my eyes out with a grapefruit spoon… so out of necessity, I caved in and bought my first drum machine. By that time they were getting more affordable, and sounding a little more realistic, so I could make rock rhythms with fills, crashes, and other variations… which might not have fooled any drummers, but could at least create enough of a drum-like impression that a listener could suspend disbelief if he wanted to. The Yamaha RY30 drum machine got me through the 90s, and I pretty much milked it for everything I could get out of it.

Sometime around the turn of the millennium, my old friend and former drummer Thom DeLooze happened to leave his drum set at my studio for several months. During this time, I set them up and recorded myself playing them for a couple of hours. The results of the session weren’t outstanding, because I’m not a drummer, but bits and pieces of it were useable with some patching up. A side benefit of doing this, though, was that I could raid this recording for individual drum and cymbal hits, which I now use in my sample library.

These aren’t the “biggest”, “baddest”, or “most awesome” drum sounds in the world, but they’re drums. I think if you want music to sound “big”, “bad”, and “awesome”, that has to come from how instruments combine together, not from how they sound individually. And the fact that these are recordings of me hitting actual drums with actual sticks, in a weird way, gives them a sort of roundabout authenticity.

I have a different sound assigned to each key on the keyboard. I have several slightly different versions of the snare, hi hat, and ride cymbal, because if you’re going to play the same drum or cymbal several times in quick succession, it’s more realistic if it doesn’t sound identical on each hit.

I didn’t have any good, isolated ride cymbal hits from the session, so I had to steal those sounds from elsewhere. And there’s one crash I use that’s from a different session, different drummer, and different set. But the rest of the drums and cymbals were all me hitting Thom’s set.

On one key I have a soft snare drum roll. This is the only one that cuts the sound off when I release the key. The roll sounds good in a fill once in a while, and it’s more believable if I hit a loud snare or tom tom at the end of it.

The roll is fake… I can’t actually play a roll. I edited a bunch of quiet snare hits together to make that.

And last but not least, I have this guy counting to four. I’ve had this guy’s voice on a cassette since the dawn of time, and I keep finding ways to sneak him into my music, like a recurring theme. I don’t know who he is, but I’m sure he’s dead now.

A really nice thing about modern recording software is that audio recording and sequencing are integrated into one application. This is a godsend for those of us that like to record our parts all out of order, i.e. doing acoustic instruments first and then sequencing the electronic stuff, which I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing ten years ago.

Before I begin working on drum parts, I definitely want to have a tempo grid in place. If the bars and beats don’t line up with the music in my tracks, then I won’t be able to take advantage of quantizing, which means automatic correction of timing. If I’ve imported older projects into the software, or if I started recording the song without a click track, I have to fiddle with tempo changes throughout the song until the barlines match up with the music I already have. This isn’t as much of a nightmare as you would think; it’s actually pretty easy once you’ve done it a couple of times.

Once the tempo of the project and the actual tempo of the music are in the same universe, I’m ready to begin recording a drum part. I’m not recording audio, I’m recording MIDI. So instead of seeing a waveform in the new track, I’ll see a piano roll. Any note I’ve played can be dragged to the left and right to make it play earlier or later, or up and down to a different “note”, which in this case means it would play a different drum sample. I can cut, copy, and paste it, change its volume or length — in this case, the length doesn’t affect anything, because my drum sounds are set to ignore the release of the key, and always play the entire sound — and I can use the pencil to draw additional notes.

Instead of trying to play the whole keyboard as a drum set, I break it down into simpler tasks. I usually focus on the kick and snare first, since these sort of define the beat. I always quantize drum parts. It may sound sinful, but if you’ve ever tried to play a totally kick-ass drum rhythm on a keyboard, you soon realize it was never the right tool for the job; the keyboard is just not ideal for precise rhythms the way a drum is. So I think of it less as a “performance”, and more as “entering notes in real time”. Typically, you would quantize to the nearest “16th note”, or “nearest 1/4 beat” as it shows here, but if there are any flams or triplets, I have to work around them and deal with them separately. Also, in the case of notes that were played too sloppily initially, I have to check to make sure they weren’t corrected in the wrong direction.

Generally on the second run-through I’ll add hi hat or ride cymbal. When it gets to the point where I’m adding fills and crashes, I reach a point where I’m doing less playing and more drawing. I just go by my ear; if I’m listening back and I hear it differently in my head than what’s coming off the playback, I’ll just hit stop and edit the bar I just heard to better match what’s in my head. It’s like what a painter does; you start off with something broad and rough, and then you spend a lot of time examining and finessing the details.

I don’t like to give my imaginary drummer three arms. Maybe it would sound perfectly fine, but I like to try to stay within the constraints of playability. For the same reason, when I used to do more bass parts on a keyboard, I avoided playing notes below the low E. So if I add a crash, I generally erase the hi hat or ride cymbal on that beat. I’m old fashioned that way.

Eventually, I declare it to be done, and render the track. This means the software converts the track from a sequence — that is, a piano roll which only triggers the drum samples — into an audio track containing an actual waveform of the complete performance. This means I can’t twiddle with the individual notes anymore, but it also means the software won’t have to work as hard to play it back. It also forces me to commit to it, so I can let go of it mentally, and move on to other things.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the end result, but in the near future I’ll probably make some adjustments to the sounds I’ve been using. The kick drum in particular is a little “harder” and brighter than I’d like it to sound. I think I’ll rearrange the keyboard layout so the most commonly used sounds are all on black keys, because those are easier to hit rhythmically. Just for variety, I’d also like to create some alternate drum sets using sounds from records, or making beatbox-type drum sounds with my mouth.

So has this technique of using a MIDI sequence to trigger recordings of actual drum sounds, hit by myself with actual sticks, muddied my moral dilemma about “real” vs. “fake” from twenty-some years ago? I think the bottom line is this: it has nothing to do with our tools and techniques. “Real” is about doing it all in the right spirit.

First “final” mix of Rival Big Bang

“Final” because all the things are there that are supposed to be there. “First” because they never are, are they?

My ears are toast. Enjoy if possible. :)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mixer’s Block on Hometracked

I could very easily find myself posting a link to every single article on hometracked.com. Although there’s been a slump in posting volume over the past few months, they seem to be steadily posting again for now.

Ever heard or used the phrase “mixer’s block“? I haven’t, but I think it’s a great phrase. When you’re mixing, you’re painting a sonic picture. If you try to bring more focus to one element of the picture, the context of all the other elements gets thrown off, and you get yourself in a perpetual tug-of-war between, say, trying to make the drums cut through more solidly and keeping some keyboard part “full” and “present” sounding (my own off-the-top-of-my-head example). Often the solution is somewhere in left field; changing some third thing you hadn’t thought of somehow magically solves the first two, but you need to think creatively in order to get there.

I don’t have time to elaborate on this further at the moment, which is probably a good thing. Class dismissed.

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!

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”.

My take on “takes”

From Dictionary.com:

take /teɪk/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[teyk] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation verb, took, tak·en, tak·ing, noun
–noun

Definitions 103 and 105 are basically the same. I would meld them into: a single instance of continuous, uninterrupted recording and/or filming of a performance. (Does punching in a single bar count as a “take”? No, I don’t think we would use that word in that case. The idea of “punching in” is a little antiquated now anyway.)

In recording music, keeping track of takes is something we tend to do more in the early stages than later on. If we’re recording basic tracks, for example, we’re laying the foundation for the whole song, so take selection is critical. If we’re just putting down a fairly simple overdub, we might just keep erasing and redoing it until we like it. Common wisdom might tell us to preserve everything, but the more we preserve, the more work it will be to sort through it all. If we’re afraid that we’re going to play the ultimate performance, think it sucked, delete it, and never realize that it was pure genius, then we have a rather crippling and irrational fear that we need to get over. The quality of our performance might vary, but not by that much. Our subjective opinions of our own work will also vary, but again, not by that much.

I don’t know about other bands in general, but the Beatles’ takes were apparently numbered like this: if the song got off to a false start, that was still given a number. If a more clear dividing line needed to be drawn between a new set of takes and an older set of takes, the engineer would skip to a round number, so “take 103″ doesn’t necessarily mean it was recorded 103 times. If a song was mixed down to another reel for adding additional overdubs, that new mix would get its own take number (this probably helped to avoid confusion between reels containing the original tracks and reels containing reduction mixes).

Since I am a really poorly disciplined musician, I don’t do this thing other people do called “practicing”. (I’m not proud of this, nor do I recommend this.) So when I start doing takes for a part, that’s essentially my practice. The software that I’m using now, I’ve had for maybe a year and a half now, and it was fairly recently that I actually started to use its “loop” feature to do multiple takes. It makes it dirt simple; you just drag the yellow markers to the beginning and end of what you want to record (or hit “i” to mark the “in” point and “o” to mark the “out” point) and make sure that “loop” is lit up in the lower right.

Once you start recording, it will just keep going through that section over and over until you stop, and it keeps everything you do on one clip. A clip with multiple takes on it has a little “+” sign in the corner, and to listen to, say, take 8, you just click on the “+” and select “take 8″ from the drop-down menu. If you want to make a composite, you can split the clip up into smaller clips, and choose which take to use for each section. Since this can all be done on one track, it’s not making a mess on your screen!

First I pick the take that I like best overall. Then I listen for “trouble spots”. If it’s just a timing error on one note, I may fix that note by snipping it out and dragging it to the left or right. If it’s a more substantial goof-up, I snip to the left and right of the bad part, and try out all the other takes for just that part. There’s usually a decent one. After doing this, the left and right edges of every clip can still be dragged in either direction while the audio stays in the same place (like making a hole wider or narrower to reveal more or less of what’s behind it). I adjust the edges until the point where it switches from one take to another sounds as seamless as possible. When I’m sure that I’m happy with my composite, I “render” that track, so it’s in a single file, and the software has less junk to keep track of.

This is certainly more flexible and less nerve-wracking than doing punch-ins (see next paragraph), but the trade-off is that it winds up being a little more time-consuming, especially if you think every take you record deserves an equal chance for consideration (I’m guilty of comparing and contrasting every take, instead of just going with the first one I hear that sounds decent).

The old way, using tape, was to start playing the tape from a little before the part you want to fix, perform along with it to get into the groove, switch the machine from “play” to “record” in an inconspicuous spot (i.e. hopefully not in the middle of a note) while you’re still performing, then switch it back from “record” to “play” in an equally inconspicuous spot, then regain your composure and hope you did everything right. Most home recording devices allowed you to use a foot switch to control the punching in and out; in a pro studio, the engineer handled that. Each time you botched a punch-in, you had to start slightly earlier and end slightly later, to cover up the previous bad punch.

Invariably, there would still be noticeable glitches on the track at the punch points when listening to the track in isolation, but a realistic goal would be for it to be unnoticeable in context. Now that we have more exact and leisurely control of edit points, we take the extra time — or waste the extra time, rather — to better mask those seams. In a way, though, when we listen to an old recording from the 60s or 70s, and can hear little edits and punches, isn’t that part of the vintage charm? I certainly think so. But somehow, given the choice between a seamless edit and a glitchy edit, the challenge to make it seamless is more compelling; besides, bad digital edits just aren’t as charming as bad analog edits.

Were there a point to this post I would sum it up here. Instead, here’s yet another session video:

Sorry about the attention-hogging, bright red, disheveled bedspread. I’ll take more time to either make that or hide it next time. When I realize I’m about to put something down and want to get it on video, I generally set up rather hurriedly for it.

So you want to make an album? (part 24)

Where’s installment #23? As of now, it’s a draft with just a title. But suddenly I’m on a roll with this one, which I think would make for a good closing chapter in the book.

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

Installment 24: In soviet Russia… so your album wants to make YOU?

I have a lot of respect for the mind, the ego, and humans as individuals, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend either shutting off your mental faculties or belittling yourself while trying to produce an entire album. But as I’ve hinted at throughout this series, it’s important to differentiate between the work of your ego (important as that is), and the valuable contributions from the mysterious “everything else that is”. You could be the best surfer in California, but good luck telling the waves when to roll in. Likewise, when the inspiration hits you to make an album, you can accept or reject the challenge, but you are not the challenger.

A lot of insight can come from simple reversals of perspective. We do it with our pets all the time. We say our cats own us. This isn’t a lie, it’s just a different way of seeing something. In a similar way, as recording artists, or as artists of any kind, it’s good once in a while to remember that our music and art is creating us. (And when we release an album, it’s really releasing us.)

Try as hard as you like to skip past the awkwardness of “first album syndrome” — nobody ever has, and nobody ever will. It doesn’t mean you suck, or even that the album sucks (not totally, anyway). But it will look, sound, and most importantly, smell like a first album. The more you fight this, the more it will fight you.

So the question is not, “are you going to make that particular album?” — the question is, are you going to become a person who makes albums? Because what that first album will achieve, what it will succeed at, is re-shaping you. If you’re starting out, that’s not what you want to hear, and it’s not what I wanted to hear, and as I wasn’t willing to listen, why should you be willing either? I admire and identify with your determination, but ultimately, tough tapioca.

Oh, it will have its bits here and there where it transcends its own naïvety. Heck, if you pound your head against the studio wall enough times, you very well may increase the number of moments in which it achives such transcendent heights during its 40 to 55 minute debut. Sure, Led Zeppelin had a strong first album, but Jimmy Page was in a band before that and had plenty of session experience. It’s all ongoing. This obsession with The Album sometimes tends to make us forget we’ve been “creating” since birth and possibly before that, and the only distinction is that we’re now establishing a frame to better define our current creations. We’re saying, of what we’d be creating anyway, this is the first song, this is the last song, and these are the songs between them.

Yet even if you have plenty of experience writing or playing, the seemingly simple act of establishing that frame for the first time will throw a shiny new wrench into every aspect of your creative process. It’s like you and your muse were a happy husband and wife, and suddenly the recording studio is your high-maintenance mother in law who has just decided to move in. The dynamic suddenly shifts, and everything needs to be re-balanced.

If it makes you any less apprehensive, remember, you can always rewrite, er, uh, reframe history later. The earliest album of mine that I would even consider re-releasing in its original form — or rather, “consider being re-released by” (don’t forget to play with those perspectives) — was one that I finished in 1996. So from an outside perspective, that album will look and smell like a first album, and it does have its particular “firstness” to it. But, I finished one in 1993, so that should be considered my first, right? But, but, but, I was in a band that pretty much recorded a whole album in 1989, so that would be my first… right? But no, I was doing whole albums on portastudios and pairs of ordinary cassette decks before I even started highschool, and even drawing detailed cover art for them… so what is “first”? “First” is what you say it is. You don’t designate a blank space, and then suddenly create stuff out of thin air to fill that space — you create raw material just by being yourself, and then one day you decide to actually make a point of collecting, preserving, beautifying, and assigning track numbers to whatever is coming out of you, so that someone else in the world might benefit from it.

Okay, so the bad news is, your first album is going to have some of the tell-tale characteristics of a first album. It won’t truly reflect your unique style as well as something a few albums later would, once you’ve gained some momentum and a matured sense of intuition about the process. Once you hear it from the perspective of someone who no longer has the power (or motivation) to change it, the album may seem embarrassingly ambitious, lacking in subtlety, or just plain confused about what it’s supposed to be.

The good news is, every creative thing you ever do has a sort of “life of its own”, so you should try to look at it as an observer, saying, “that’s interesting”, instead of, “I suck”. In general, first albums are more valuable to long term appreciators and other artists than to the unsuspecting general public. They tell the first chapter of a great story about how you eventually developed the sound and style of your masterpiece (your sixth or seventh album). And they empower you, the artist, to continue creating without fear.

Embrace this weird passion that has entered your life. The heavens hath assigned to you and entrusted you with your first album project. Like your first car, it’s a wonderful, clunky “winter beater” with a fresh paint job; and though you may graduate to nicer and nicer cars as you go, you will never take this large a leap again.

This is where, if this were the last chapter of the book, I would just end it with “So… you want to make an album?” — but I don’t wanna get all teary-eyed here, because it’s a blog, not a book. Alright, I admit, I’ve got a little moisture in the edges of the eyes, but I swear, it’s just allergies or something. If I put this out as a book (and I probably have a few more middle parts to wedge in), it’s pretty much my “winter beater with a fresh paint job” in the literary world. Which is cool, because, hey. I don’t know what I’m typing anymore. Okay, over and out.

Quick note on aural fatigue

I’m writing this one quickly, on my way out the door, so forgive my lapse in quality control.

Last night I was up late working on a song. I was adding overdubs to it. Lemme clarify something about aural fatigue: you don’t necessarily lose all your ability to function when it’s setting in. You can still work. You might be on a roll with putting stuff down, and that’s great. What you are in danger of doing, is over-fiddling with mixing related stuff, because you’ll be a little lost regarding how present or clear something should be.

Like, last night, I had mixed feelings about this organ track I was doing. It had an excitement to it, but I felt like it was drawing attention away from the spirit of the music underneath it. “This is cool, but did I really want to go this direction?”

Today, it was much easier to put it in context. The very end of this organ part was really cool, have that up front in the mix, but have it a little quieter before it gets to that. And I immediately knew a couple things like this orchestra bell thing could start later, but also be louder, so it was okay for it to be “noticeable”, because by that far into it you’ll be starting to get bored of what’s going on up to that point, and need to hear a new instrument come in.

So the kind of creative work you can do while your ears are fatigued, is that you can play around with crazy-ish ideas (i.e. tossing things in to see how they sound, in the spirit of “playing” in the “what children do” definition of the word), but then give yourself the next day to decide how much of them to keep and how prominent in the mix they should be. Before you fire it back up, paint a mental picture of what it should sound like.

Also remember that when you’re fatigued, you might think a special effect makes something sound better, because you were getting sick of it the way it was, but leave yourself the opportunity to switch the effect off, or only use it on a certain part of a track.

Gotta go. Will reduce this pile of words to its essential point later.

So you want to make an album? (part 22)

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

Installment 22: Click or no click (human time vs. machine time)

Before you even begin record a song, there is one global decision you need to make about your approach to it, and this decision will affect every successive stage as you go forward.

It’s the question of “click or no click”, or more precisely, “human time vs. machine time”: How do you establish the tempo of the song when you put that first track down?  Do you find a good sounding tempo on a drum machine or computer sequencer and stick to that? Or do you just pick up an instrument (including a drum set) and just play? There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

Let’s start from the initial reasons why, as novices, we might choose one or the other without even really thinking about it.

Why use a click (machine time)? Maybe because we’re using software that, by default, displays a big tempo, shows bars and beats while playing and recording, and clicks on the beats while recording. All we have to do before we start is adjust that tempo until it sounds appropriate for our song. Then, as we continue to pile overdubs on, we can easily see where loud notes and percussive hits fall relative to this pre-established grid. This also makes it easy to mark sections of the song; the intro might start on bar 2, the first verse on bar 10, the first chorus on bar 26, and so on.

Why (again, as novices) would we not use a click (human time)? Again it could be what the software leads us to. Audacity, for example, functions a little more like an ordinary tape recorder than a sequencer (ideal software will be a combination of both). Or maybe you’re not even using software. If you have an ADAT machine or some kind of portastudio (although digital portastudios can have programmable tempo grids, and provide a reference click), you might be inclined to just “think like you’re using tape”.

There’s nothing wrong with either rationale for the person just getting started, because we have to just try it out one way or another to start learning and figuring out what works for us. But the longer we do this, the longer and more complicated the list of pros and cons gets on both sides.

Will it flatter my performance?

You want the music to sound good, but also, as a human being with an ego, you want to sound like you are a good musician. (Subtle distinction there.) Even if the drummer is anonymous, you don’t want the listener’s reaction of “yikes, what a shitty drummer” to toss a wet rag on their overall listening experience. So which method is going to make your drumming, bass playing, guitar playing, etc. shine the brightest? That depends.

Playing to a click is a separate skill that you have to practice and learn. It’s not quite as natural as playing to a drum track, which is why some click tracks will come with the option to sound more like drums — or you could have a temporary track using a sampled drum groove and replace it later. Or decide you like it as is, and just keep it. No matter what sound you use as a reference, there is one predominant challenge in playing your instrument along to it: avoiding “the lurch”. “The lurch” is when you’ve just been playing a hair behind (later than) or ahead of (earlier than) the beat for a few moments, and suddenly correct yourself. The moment when you spontaneously correct yourself will sound worse than what you were doing just before it, especially if you listen to this new track isolated. Having it in a mix may cover it up to some extent, but the less you rely on that, the better. When it comes time for mixing, you’ll want to be focused on creating a good balance, not on covering up awkward rhythmic glitches.

In order to play well with a metronome/click, you have to loosen your mental “grip” on the individual clicks, and try to feel the overall tempo more. In other words, mentally zoom out to the bigger picture. You still need to have an internal sense of tempo, which you strive to keep in agreement with the click, but you’re not checking each click one at a time and asking, “was I early or late for that one?” It’s not target practice. You don’t win a prize each time you “hit the click”.

This same challenge applies when you’re overdubbing on top of an existing performance, even if that was played freely by a human in human time, although in that case it should be much easier, because hopefully the slight timing irregularities in the existing tracks will correspond to how the song naturally “feels” to you.

The act of putting down a first track in human time, however, carries with it its own headaches. “Good tempo” is subjective, and our own idea of what a good tempo is will drift a little depending on what we heard previously, how much energy we have, and so on. Our perception of something as “too fast” or “too slow” also depends on how the rhythm divides the beat up, whether we play staccato or legato, how tight or loose the instruments are, how the song is mixed, and probably a zillion other factors. Compound this with our natural tendency to speed up as we go along.

All that said, there are tons of drummers who will play much better without a click track, for the reasons I outlined above. Similarly, if you’re doing a song that’s more acoustic based, with the “glue” of the song being, say, a guitar or piano, you can sometimes get a more natural performance if you’re not distracted by the “TOC toc toc toc TOC toc toc toc” of the almighty beat-per-minute counter.

What about logistics?

Using machine time from the get-go gives you some advantages later on. As I said earlier, you have a clearly laid-out grid where, at any time, you can see exactly what measure and beat you’re on, and have an easy visual reference if you want to adjust the timing of a note/hit by making careful cuts in the silent areas just before and after it and then sliding it to the left or right. If you decide later in the game that you want to add a keyboard part with a very exact rhythm, you’ve made this very easy for yourself — you simply sequence the keyboard part, by playing into the sequencer, drawing notes on a piano roll grid, or using a variety of other input methods — and then because your project is “aware” of where the beats are, you can easily quantize all those notes to the nearest sixteenth note, eighth note, or whatever your smallest subdivision is.

I wouldn’t say that human time has any logistic advantages, per se, but with all the artistic benefits, it doesn’t have to be a logistic nightmare.

For starters, you could simply go old-skool all the way. Not all that long ago, people used tape, and it was impossible (or extremely difficult) to synchronize a sequenced track to an existing performance. If you were going to combine sequenced performances with human performances, you always did the sequenced stuff first, be it drum machine or whatever. Eventually people came up with ways to apply a time code to one of the unused tracks, so that a computer could remain synchronized to the tape. But in this relatively post-tape era, that kind of workaround seems like a Rube Goldberg solution.

Anyway, I digress; my point was, there is absolutely nothing wrong with recording a drum set, then playing bass to that, then playing guitars to that, then singing over that. “Look, ma, no click!” This is perfectly legitimate. If your software’s timeline lets you choose between “bars/beats” and “minutes/seconds” views, choose the latter, because the bars and beats at the software’s default tempo will be irrelevant. The click would also have no relation to the song, so you’ll be leaving that turned off too.

If your human time performances are mostly good, but have a couple of sloppy spots, you can often look at the peaks on the drum track as a visual guide. If, however, you’ve started off a song in human time, but want all the advantages of using the software’s bars/beats view and quantization capablility for new sequenced tracks, you can still create a tempo grid after the fact that will perfectly align to your human performance. It won’t be as easy, but you can do it. I believe there is some software that will help you with this, but I’m going to assume you have to do it the hard way.

Let’s say you have a drum track recorded that you’re really happy with, and you’ve already edited it and cleaned up any bad timing by ear. First get an approximate idea of of its tempo. Generally, when you set tempos, you can tap something and the software will figure it out based on your tapping. Do this while your drum track is playing, watch the tempo fluctuate up and down a bit, and whatever it appears to average out to, go ahead and set this as the tempo for the whole project… for now.

Find beat one on your drum track, and drag the clip either left or right so that the peak is exactly on a barline, and set a tempo change exactly at that barline — for now, to the same tempo it already is. If your drummer’s tempo is really steady, you may be able to get away with doing four bars at a time. (If you actually started by recording a drum machine, but it wasn’t synched to anything, you should be able to do even more.) In a lot of cases it’s best to do one bar at a time, which will take longer. Keep looking ahead to the next significant downbeat. If the barline is to the left of the hit, you need to decrease the most recent tempo change; if the barline is to the right of the hit, you need to increase it. Make smaller and smaller adjustments until you zero in on it. Then as soon as that barline lines up with that hit, set a tempo change there, and look to the next significant downbeat to adjust that one. If a bar doesn’t start with a clearly defined downbeat, use an earlier or later bar (you don’t have to use the exact same number of bars for each tempo change). Listen back frequently with the click turned on, from the beginning up to where you are, to make sure you don’t hear four clicks where there are supposed to be three or five!

This might seem tedious while you’re doing it, but in the grand scheme of things it takes a negligible amount of time out of your life, and gives you the best of both worlds: a natural drum or guitar (or whatever) performance, and the ability/freedom to quickly add a precise keyboard part. (Of course, if the only keyboard part you’re going to add is something with soft, slow attacks, like a “pad”, as they call it, this might not be worth the trouble — but it’s great if you plan to add anything rhythmic.)

I’ve just described how it’s possible to harness the natural push and pull of a human performance, but remember you could also make a “human-like” tempo grid by starting with sequenced material, and speeding it up or slowing it down as it goes along. Some software lets you draw the tempo curve with an icon resembling a pencil. Other software requires you to enter individual values. Sequenced tracks, as opposed to audio tracks, will actually speed up and slow down according to your newly added tempo changes. Sometimes it might be good to first record a keyboard sequence to an unchanging tempo, and then fiddle with the tempo curve until you’re happy with how it sounds. I would advise you not to record any audio tracks until you’re completely happy with this curve.

There’s some trial and error in doing this, especially if you’re trying to get it to sound “human”; but on the plus side, once you get it to where you’re happy with it, your project will be very easy to work with, whether you’re recording audio or adding additional sequenced tracks. If you’re deciding whether to create a tempo grid first, or base a tempo grid on a human performance, it comes down largely to what instruments you’re featuring. If the song is heavily keyboard based, i.e. you’re using a lot of orchestral samples to simulate the sound of an orchestra, then this curve-drawing method might be ideal. If it’s more drum and guitar (or other “real instrument”) based, then I suggest the method I explained previously, where you record the performance and then map it (if you even need to map it, that is).

A few notes about fixing audio tracks

It’s not as easy to fix audio performances as it is to fix sequenced performances, where you can literally grab a note and just drag it into place. But it can be done. You want to start with the best performance you can, but there will likely be a few parts that still don’t sound 100% right to you. Slicing an audio track into little pieces and nudging them around may seem blasphemous, but it’s not as much of a black art as you might think.

1. Be sure to cut in a good spot. The quieter, the better. Cutting in the middle of a note will generally sound unnatural. And no matter how perfectly quiet of a spot you cut it at, always put a very short fade in/fade out — even if it’s just a few milliseconds — on the beginning and end of every new clip. Some sounds will be just quiet enough to not show up on the screen, but if you cut in the middle of any sound whatsoever without a fade, there’s a chance you will hear an audible click.

2. If there aren’t any good edit points on a track, but you absolutely need to shift something in time, use a crossfade. In most cases a “square root” fade curve, the one that bulges upward, will keep the overall volume most consistent through the overlap. If it still sounds noticeable, experiment with longer and shorter crossfades. The attack of a note should not be in the crossfade.

3. Don’t sacrifice horizontal timing for vertical timing. Any time you’re moving isolated bits of a track around on the timeline, be sure to listen to that track by itself and make sure it sounds consistent.

4. In real life, it’s normal for certain instruments to tend to play a little earlier or later than the beat. A strummed guitar sound will usually start a little before the beat. A piano will generally be a hair later than the beat. Also, a sound that’s slightly off the beat will stand out more, and you can use this to your advantage.

5. If a drum fill is a little too fast or too slow, but the hits are evenly spaced, it could still sound good. If they’re unevenly spaced, it might sound a little more awkward and amateurish. See if you can make a clumsy drum fill a little nicer, but be sure to crossfade carefully, especially if there are any ringing cymbals. (This would be suicide on tape, but we can at least try it, because we’re the “undo button generation”.)

6. We are naturally pickier about some things than other things. For example if we have really tight drums and bass, we can get away with a little looseness in the guitars. Since perfectionism tends to be addictive, we need to know when to stop. Listen for little rhythmic flaws in well-known songs by your favorite artists, and ask yourself if they actually bother you or just give the song character. Having every single sound precicely on the beat (or subdivision) can sometimes be impressive — but what’s necessary, and what’s overkill?

So You Want To Make An Album? (part 21)

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

Installment 21: Some general advice on tracking

These are just some thoughts to keep in your head during that long stretch in the middle of your project (the bulk of the work), when you’re doing the actual recording — actually playing the parts, choosing what takes to keep, and, somehow or another, smoothing out the rough spots. In particular, the tracks that people won’t be paying direct attention to: the “boring” basic tracks that form the song’s skeleton, the wind beneath the wings of your diva vocal track and your Eddie Van Halen guitar solo.

1. Be simple, but clever. When you come up with a rhythm guitar part, a drum part, a bass part, “clever” can be as simple as using a fairly common and clichéd riff, but just changing one little thing about it — adding in a note, leaving a note out, anticipating something (playing it a half beat early) rather than playing it on the beat. Playing the absolute most obvious thing you can think of is fine, but do a few takes and see if it evolves a little. Listen to your mistakes and see if they’re any good, because sometimes a “mistake” is actually your subconscious trying to make a suggestion. Leave holes. Play less. Dumb it down. Do at least one take where you say “screw you guys, I’m playing something totally different this time just because I can”. In that moment of rebellion you’ll find a little nugget or two of gold; keep those nuggets, but keep the rest fairly straightforward.

2. More tracks = less reverb. Reverb is additive.  (Fast readers: I said “additive”, not “addictive”, but that may apply to you as well.) It sometimes sounds cool to have a significant amount of it on a sparse mix, where you have maybe no more than three or four tracks total, and therefore have holes for those trails/tails to fill. If you like to do heavily layered stuff, with two or three rhythm guitars, two or three keyboards, and extra instrumentation beyond that, you’ll need to leave it relatively dry or you will lose definition.

3. The drums and the bass together are one instrument. I don’t care that rationally, we know otherwise; for production purposes, they are one instrument. If they don’t sound like one instrument, they’re not tight enough.

4. We hear timing both horizontally and vertically. Before you adjust the timing of a particular note relative to the other instruments, be sure it’s going to feel good relative to its own previous and subsequent notes. If you’re not sure, solo the track. A track will sound better if it’s consistently lagging (or consistently rushing) than if one perfectly timed note stands out in the middle of a string of lagging or rushing notes, messing up its “horizontal” rhythm. If you’re using editing to tighten rhythms, just be sure to check both the vertical and the horizontal.

Incidentally, I don’t think of using software to fix performances as “cheating”. I think when you do multitrack recording, you actually have some handicaps that you have to make up for. For one, you’re initially playing without hearing all the instruments (you have to hear them in your mind), so it is much harder to get into the right vibe right away. Besides that, you don’t have the energy of an audience to feed off of, so at first you feel like what you’re doing is “fake”. Recording is its own artform, though, more like painting than theater, and some of the talents it will showcase are your abilities to listen well and make good-sounding decisions.

5. As listeners, we’re more fussy and demanding at the beginning of the track. (To a lesser degree, we’re more fussy and demanding at the beginning of an album, but you never have a guarantee that people will listen to your album in sequence.) Make sure things are super-tight and super-in-tune when it kicks in. Then it’s okay for it to loosen up a little as it goes along — not sloppy, just a little looser — because hopefully by then we’ve “accepted” the song, and have an internal beat and tonal center going on in our brains. First impressions, and all that.

6. If you feel like you’re playing/singing a good take, you probably are. Use the take you feel best about while playing/singing, even if it has a few glitches that need to be fixed.

7. Every little thing you fix will make progressively smaller flaws more noticeable to you. Sometimes it’s good to “under-fix”, meaning adjust it only part way. Modern sequencers, for example, let you select a percentage when you quantize. This means you can compromise, retaining some of your original feel. Even if you know you’re going to quantize a keyboard part, play it the best you can, so you have the option of quantizing at a lower percentage. Besides, if you play really badly, the quantization will push some of your notes in the wrong direction! Check by first quantizing 100% to make sure it’s interpreting your performance correctly, and then undo-ing and experimenting with smaller percentages to taste.

8. Everything you add will make your previous tracks sound different. So when you’re putting down the first few tracks, yes, fuss over tuning and rhythm, but don’t spend too much time adjusting the sound (EQ and effects). At this stage, shoot for “dry and clean” (some effects like distortion and delays are of course “part of the sound”, but don’t get too deep into perfecting compression, EQ, or reverb before the rest of the instruments are there for context). Once you have more instruments down, you’ll have a better idea of what needs to be adjusted on the earlier tracks — or, as you play with the mute buttons, you might even find some of them superfluous and leave them out altogether.

9. The extra steps you take to make your basic tracks tight, clean, and in tune will pay off thousandfold when you get further along in the tracking. The little extra flourishes that you occasionally put into those tracks will make the finished product more lively and interesting, even if they’re “in the background”, as long as you don’t overdo them.

10. “Nobody’s gonna really be paying attention to this part” is a bad attitude. Remember you’re playing not just to the listener’s conscious mind, but also to the subconscious. Every little thing adds up.

11. There are good flaws and bad flaws. Yes, I know it’s a challenge to know the difference. Resist the quantizers and the autotunes for a minute, and listen with your heart.

12. Simply having more experience of going through the whole process will improve your confidence and your ability to “trust the music”. If you’re three-quarters of the way through your first project, and stuck in that awful love/hate relationship with it, the sooner you finish it up and move on to something fresh, the saner you’ll be. The first project will not be perfect. Do your best and move on. Even if you’re not ready to wrap up that first project, start sketching out some ideas for the next one, and imagine the future you, looking back at the first one as “ambitious and endearingly naïve”, and happily having bigger fish to fry — this will give you a healthy sense of perspective.

13. Do not judge yourself harshly, if your project got off to a bad start and is headed in a direction you don’t like. If you do enough recording, you will like at least some of what comes out of it. Pay attention to what works for you, and don’t get hung up on what doesn’t work.

14. There’s a series of DVDs about classic albums. In fact, it’s called “Classic Albums“. I’ve only seen three of them, but I want to see them all. Even if you’re not into most of the bands featured in the series, you should pick a few you don’t mind and check them out. Quoting Wikipedia:

The music, and its production, is dissected by the musicians and/or producer playing the multitrack recordings and singling out tracks that one does not usually consciously hear when listening to the music, giving insight into the way the sound is built up.

This is probably your best bet for getting a feel for what kind of basic tracks will lend themselves to creating the “overall sound” that you’re looking for in the end. Beyond that, the programs will simply give you extra inspiration to fight lethargy and circumstance, and simply go forward. I can’t recommend this strongly enough.

15. Everything you do will one day be “old”.

16. Everything you do matters. Have a noble spirit. If you have a total audience of three people, show them your appreciation by creating a fantastic performance for them. And besides, you’re not just playing to a present audience, you’re playing to a future audience as well, including people who may hear it long after you’ve moved on to another plane of existence.

17. “Perfect” and “wonderful” are on two different axes, at 90-degree angles from each other. They have nothing to do with each other. Aim for wonderful, and if you can make it perfect too (without sacrificing wonderfulness), make that your second priority.

18. I do this kind of thing because, when I put down one track, and get it the way I like it, even if it’s just a basic part that’s going to be in the background, I get excited about it. I hope you get excited about each little step too.

19. Make recordings that will inspire other musicians to make recordings. Pass along pointers and advice that you pick up along the way, in your own words. Yes, you’re making history, but it doesn’t end at you.

20. At any given time, someone out there, someone you’ve forgotten, or someone you’ve never met, could be listening to your song while driving, or walking, gardening, or who knows what. They might even have a rough mix or early demo that you weren’t totally happy with. But they kept that song in their rotation, because they got something out of it; it meant something to them. Someone, somewhere, is listening. Remember this any time you get discouraged. Keep going.