Keith Handy 1.999

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.

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.

Insertable bits #1: Crutches, puzzles, and originality

Originality. It comes out of nowhere. You’re happily living a normal life, and suddenly, one day, bang, you write your first song. From that day on, you’re never the same again.

You probably realized this immediately, but just to be safe, I’ll clue you in: it doesn’t work that way. The road to originality is long, incremental, and fraught with subconscious plagiarism. It’s possible that the reason some of us fear “going all the way” with our originality is not that we’re afraid we won’t be good enough in the end, but rather that we don’t want to cross all the legal land mines on the way there.

The familiar phrase, “good artists copy, great artists steal” is too cynical for my liking. I don’t buy it. But I’ll tell you what I do think: all artists use crutches. And crutches, despite having a bad name, are not a problem.

For some reason we tend to think that if we could only rid ourselves of all our needs and dependencies, then and only then we can pursue the great art, and the highest levels of consciousness, and blah blah blah. In other words, take off all your clothes, jump out of a high window, and improvise your song a capella on the way down. Anything else you do would not be “pure”.

There is no absolute definition of “pure art”. Many people think you’re selling out or crossing a line when you rely on certain technology (and this line falls in any and every place you can possibly think of along the technological spectrum, depending on who you talk to). For others the line of purity may have to do with style of performance, or choosing between improvisation and composition (which are the same thing, just spread differently over the dimension of time).

In a similar manner, people will pass moral judgement based on how “original” you are. Like any other aspect of your skill, though, you get there gradually, in small steps. Some of those steps may seem impure to armchair critics looking for a reason to stigmatize you, but remember, as with any other skill, we learn to walk before we learn to run.

Why do some of us perceive a need to “jump out the window naked”, metaphorically — the feeling that we must somehow magically conjure up pure originality right out of the gate, in a total vacuum? If you think other artists do this, then they have done a good job of tricking you, just as you will do a good job of tricking your audience. (The audience only ever hears your end result, never your path; although bootlegs, interviews, or “making of” extras can give them a peek.) Artists who develop their own voice and style have essentially accumulated a vocabulary or “tool box” of elements they’ve come to associate with themselves — and which their fans, as a result, associate with them as well. Most of this vocabulary is picked up in bits and pieces from other artists; and what little isn’t, is usually acquired by happy accident.

The idea of a crutch is that you use an existing song as a reference point for your own. It can be on any level where you’re lacking experience, apart from the lyrics and melody. You may, for example, associate a song you wrote with a popular song that’s already out there in the world, and try to “steal” the popular song’s production style — the instrumentation, how it’s mixed, and so on. In your naive attempt to copy the sound of another song, you won’t quite succeed, but be sure to keep your ears open for serendipity. It’s a pretty good accomplishment to copy a sound decently, but it’s an even better accomplishment to notice when you’ve accidentally found a piece of your own unique sonic puzzle.

I’m in danger of making overcooked metaphor soup here, but bear with me — your toolbox, or vocabulary, starts out as a fully-assembled puzzle which you “stole” or copied from someone else. As you discover new tools, you replace the other person’s puzzle pieces with your own (or at least mix in pieces from another puzzle, so that at least the combination is unique). Sometimes you will replace a puzzle piece more than once, and sometimes a fan of yours will adopt the intermediate orphaned puzzle piece and run with it in their own way. Sometimes you shake things up by going avant-garde, which means you replace as many pieces as possible, in the strangest way possible. (You can always change back the ones that don’t work.) It’s also likely there will still be some pieces that never get replaced. (You might, for example, be perfectly happy with 4/4 beats where the snare drum is always hit on beats two and four. Hey, it’s a perfectly good beat, so why mess with it?)

All the pieces that have not been replaced yet — or never will be — are your crutches. The object is to ultimately use few enough crutches that your music has its own identity. Listen to albums by your favorite artists in chronological order, and pay attention to how their puzzle evolved over time. The earliest albums are generally easy to categorize as examples of a particular style that was popular at the time, and most of the puzzle pieces are easy to cross-reference with other artists; the later albums are more identity-focused. Even an artist who has achieved some transcendent and definitive height may continue to play with new ways of reconfiguring the puzzle, hoping to achieve the same or greater height in a fresh way.

Summing this up: supreme, transcendent originality is an awesome thing to strive for; but if you demand too much of it too soon, you won’t permit yourself the necessary baby steps to actually get there. So don’t be afraid to get your feet wet by, initially, being only somewhat original.

It worked for everyone else. ;)

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.