Keith Handy 1.999

6/7/09

I’m hopefully writing.

That’s what I appear to be doing.

Now I must poo.

A guy’s gotta poo what a guy’s gotta poo.

This is so much better, yes. Ahhhhh… now, what was I going to type about? Whatever I want to, so here we go.

I’ve been working in the archives, where I have years and years worth of recorded musical stuff that “only needs a little bit of love” as they say on the Peanuts.

OK, where was I…

Only needs a little bit of love, right.

So the little anemic Christmas tree of the day would be “(She’s a) Rag Doll”. I had already fixed up the second half to be both a.) better and b.) truer to the original. This isn’t a reversion, though; it brings back more of the Episodes version, but at least for the instrumental outro, simply speeding it up has given it the energy it was lacking, whereas my mid-90s “remake” of that section was kind of chaotic. That section was sort of supposed to feel like a cross between the Kinks’ “Lola” and the Beatles’ “Hey Jude”, and hopefully it succeeds at neither while still being what it was meant to be in its own right.

Working my way backwards from that, the quiet part at the beginning of the outro needed significant cleanup, primarily to do two things: 1.) to put in the ride cymbal pattern that I had painstakingly worked out, where each beat-four hit was preceded by one more sixteenth note than in the measure before it, until the entire space between beat two and beat four was filled by sixteenth notes, and 2.) to cover up the rhythmically awkward CZ-1 “organ” with a re-do of the same organ part, using a sampled hammond.

Back from that, is the fanfare section. I think of this as the “Bad News Bears” section, even though I could not for the life of me tell you what the theme music to “Bad News Bears” sounded like. It’s also reminiscent of the mellotron fanfare arrangement from Richard Wright’s “Summer ‘68″. Anyway, the trick with this one, which I did while I was still living at Cedar Commons with Christy, was to extend it by a bar in order to pitch the whole bit up a whole step and still land on the correct ending chord. I’m sure I spent a few weeks on that, knowing myself, though I can’t say for sure.

The fanfare section did not exist before the mid-90s version (or not as a part of this song, anyway); this was partly “orchestrated” on the keyboard-slash-workstation I was borrowing from Paul Gaspar, using Cakewalk on the old Zenith computer (no GUI, no mouse). I don’t remember the make or model of the keyboard, but it was a fairly large thing, and I used it extensively on Unfinished Business. Anyway, I had this section still split between a few tracks, unlike the Episodes stuff, so that gave me a little flexibility to reconstruct it. The reason I pitched it up a whole step in the first place was to accommodate a resurrection of the 3/4 part that had been dropped altogether in my mid-90s version.

It’s not that I was planning to drop it. I started work on this part, but the monitor on my computer gave out. Not being in a position to buy anything new, I committed what I had to tape by blindly using the shortcut keys for “rewind” and “play”. I had been in the middle of working on an extension to the 3/4 part that would have hopefully segued into the fanfare bit. The original end of the 3/4 part modulated briefly to A minor and had to go through another modulation to get it back to G. I was going to rework this to get to G minor instead, which the fanfare was originally in, but at that point I had cut my losses and scrapped the 3/4 part altogether. Now that I was going to bring it back, of course, I decided to shift the fanfare up to A minor, and add the extra bar to get it back to G. The fact that the pitch-shifted fanfare sounds clean and continuous is a small miracle, and doth please me.

So this weekend’s work was on the aforementioned 3/4 part. I’m using the mid-90s backing track, but trying to import some of Garrett’s vocal from both the GFI mix and a crude recording of a live show. Neither of these is isolated, but what I’ve done is “cut around it”, added delay to the last syllable of each phrase, and a swelling-up of backwards reverb at the beginning of each phrase. It’s not so much an illusion as a nice effect; we are in one universe, and then another universe “whooshes in and out” without losing the beat.

There was some decidedly whacky, spastic guitar playing all over my mid-90s version, which I made even whackier with electronic re-harmonization, etc…. but it seems that the more of that I cut out, the better I like it. It was interesting in its own right, but with everything else, it’s obnoxious, and it keeps fighting everything else for the spotlight. Hence, for now, the 3/4 part has no spaz-guitar. And I think it breathes better that way.

As it is now, the whole song can be mixed down and nothing is either missing or slated to be cut, as far as I know, although I should probably come at the verses and choruses with a fresh ear.

Vocal session, 7/12/08: Bemoaning Moments

Vocal for “Bemoaning Moments”:

I’ll start embedding higher-quality versions instead when I figure out how. These look so much better when I play the Quicktime right on my computer…

Questions from internetland: amps and mics for lead guitars?

Reader and musician/music enthusiast Jordan Hoek chimes in with a question:

I really like the lead guitars in workers theme, undue strain, and broken wheel. What amp do you use, and what kind of effects do you use? Could you go into more detail in how you record it? Just stuff like, mic positions you generally use, how loud you put the amp, and whatever else.

I almost never use amps or mics for lead guitars! I know it’s sacrilege, but I have a lot of fun simulating amps. There’s such a diverse range of tone you can get with a few effects and adjustments. I’ll tell you one trick that I use a lot, to make it a little more “live” sounding: I use a good deal of compression BEFORE the distortion and/or cabinet simulator. This gives it more sustain and almost feedback-y sound. Also you can have more sustain with less actual distortion this way, and have long, sustained notes without turning the tone of the guitar into a total square wave (i.e. still have some guitarish “character” to it and not need to make it “metal”).

My current chain of effects for lead guitar tracks in Tracktion: multiband compressor set to only compress the midrange, resonance filter (with resonance set to zero) to act like a noise gate with a more interesting roll-off at the end of notes, an equalizer to give a pre-distortion midrange boost (inspired by Brian May), the amp simulator (includes distortion), and finally, subtle touches of chorus and reverb.

For Workers’ Theme, since it’s a remix, the lead guitar was done within the last year or so and I used a special stored combination of effects I have set up within Tracktion. There’s a YouTube video of me playing it, too, and I punched in a short section using slide instead of fingering… and I had a capo on the first fret, because I guess I wanted to be able to occasionally hit open strings, and the music is in F minor.

For the last part of Undue Strain, I actually used my Crate amp (80 or 100 watts, not a huge amp), probably at a medium-ish volume, and an SM57 hanging in front of it. Using an amp is extremely unusual for me! This was about ten years ago. I’ve never been careful about mic placement, so I’m not the person to go to for tips on that; I’m guilty of just putting the mic “somewhere close” and then using EQ to get the tone where I want it.

For Broken Wheel, I was recording on one of those digital portastudios, and used a built in amp simulator, but probably tweaked it a bit. And I think I used one or two foot pedals before the input; I know I at least had a slow phaser on it. Sometimes it’s interesting to put an effect like that before the distortion, because it puts some randomness on which harmonics get emphasized by the distortion. I did takes both with a slide and with regular playing, and made a composite from bits of both. I remember sort of trying to go for a “Momentary Lapse of Reason” sound there, though I don’t know if I pulled it off. ;)

How I simulated amp tone in the mid to late ’90s

Before I had access to good amp simulator effects, I got reasonably passable tones just using an equalizer after the distortion. The main thing you have to do is completely filter out the upper frequencies, anything over 4K or so (so it doesn’t have that “buzzing bee” tone), and scoop out a big chunk in the middle somewhere too, so you’re left with an emphasis somewhere in the higher midrange (anywhere from about 2K to 4K), and then another lower one somewhere. Sort of an “M” shape. Even using a wah-wah pedal left in one position will kind of give you an interesting tone.

Thanks, Jordan, for letting me post your question!

P.S. - in the early 1990s, when I was struggling through my first solo project, I borrowed one of these and used it for most guitar parts.

Guitar overdub: Bemoaning Moments

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

Gotta record the vocal for this soon, dammit…

Enjoy!

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”.