Keith Handy 1.999

Tracktion 3

I write about Tracktion a lot, because it’s affordable, has a cool (dare I say “fun”) interface, and it’s what I use when I’m doing my stuff. So basically, I can’t not be writing about it. But, I’ve been putting off upgrading from 2 to 3. The upgrade doesn’t cost all that much, and since this is something I use all the time, I might as well.

I haven’t had time to really dive into it yet, but just from playing with the demos, one thing I like right off the bat is the “text” plugin. It’s a plugin that doesn’t actually do anything, except that you can write notes to yourself in it. You can insert as many of these in as many relevant places as you need, sort of like leaving 3M stickies all over the project to remind yourself what you were doing. Yes, I’m sure the developers spent a whopping 20 minutes implementing that feature, but still, I think it’s great.

I suppose I will either amend this post or write follow-ups if I discover any other goodies.

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.

My first tera

My first tera…

Hooray!

Homegrown spectral analyzer

I whipped this spectral analyzer up this weekend. Unfortunately, like everything else coded in Handyland, it doesn’t run in realtime; it has to be rendered as a movie first and then re-synced to the music. I think it’s fun to sit and watch when it’s done, though. Sometimes, if you look hard enough (or sniff enough glue), you can see which peaks correspond to which sounds.

The featured instrumental here is Kid in a Candy Store, from Leave of Absence vol. 1, currently close to being ready for reissue. It was created by slapping a backwards orchestra track onto a drum track, relishing in the serendipity, and then coming up with bass, guitar, and piano bits that would glue it together a little more. This is the music I want playing when the aliens come to pick me up.

Maybe a graphic as simple as this, in combination with lyrics and/or factoids, would lend itself to my earlier idea of using YouTube as an audio player. My only gripe is that I would have to use a workaround if I want the music to be in stereo — at least until YouTube realizes it’s not 1950 anymore.

“Everything tech”: continuing thoughts

I was asked by a faithful reader (where would I be without my faithful reader?) to elaborate on my “low tech/hi tech/everything tech” train of thought. Which I was going to do anyway, but it’s good that the peasants have voted in favor of the king’s will, because I just haven’t been in the mood to behead you folks lately. I know, I know, you’re saying “King Keith has lost his spunk”. Hey, we all grow older. It’s time to move on, man. Besides, this is the age of psychological cruelty. Either catch the wave, or leave your board home, brah.

When I think of an idea that has both specific and general implications, I tend to ramble at length about the general, without actually explaining what it is I’m thinking about in the first place. The general is very important to me, because I want you to run with it — I want you to find your own specific implementations of the general, not necessarily use mine (unless of course you really want to copy me). But if I don’t tell you my specific idea, then I’m not giving you a concrete illustration of the general idea, which would probably help to loosen up your tangled synapses. One little idea which, by itself, any idiot could think of — but which comes with a thousand “potential ideas” attached to it, if you zoom out and ask why it was interesting.

After all this build-up, it will sound really stupid and primitive. But that’s what low tech is, on the surface. Yet, for all its backwardness, it’s something that could not have been done well or cheaply more than about ten years ago. So, yes, it involves the computer. But it requires letting go of some basic assumptions about “what happens outside of the computer” versus “what happens inside the computer”.

After the bazillionth combination of keywords, I found a decent illustration of rear projection on images.google.com. I don’t mean as a type of home entertainment device — those turn up in vast quantity — I mean as an ancient technique for superimposing actors against a fake, moving background, before the advent of chroma keying. The accompanying text for this picture referred to “one of the worst ’street traffic’ rear projection shots I’ve ever seen”, while the image file itself was contradictorily called “sybluescreen.jpg” — just to be sure, had this been blue screened, rather than actually projected behind the car, the horizontal lines behind the windshield wouldn’t appear bent by the glass.

Now, this effect doesn’t exactly look real, as I’m sure you’ve already seen for yourself while watching various old-timey movies. But as someone with an interest in the surreal and experimental, particularly things with a “cartoon-y” or “puppet-y” tinge or texture, it’s not a technique I would run screaming from.

Today, the sane way to composite video elements — live action with live action, live action with animation, animation with animation — is to use computer software to merge your layers together. You wouldn’t want to actually use a first movie playing on your LCD monitor as a background, while taking a second movie of yourself manipulating little objects in front of it… yes, physically in front of your monitor… and then perhaps use the resulting movie as a new background, onto which you can add more foreground objects the same way… repeat ad infinitum…

…or WOULD you??

You wouldn’t achieve the same kind of effect. Not even anything close to it. You’d achieve a very different effect, which would be the whole point. And if you did this repeatedly for a while, you’d start to develop a vocabulary of techniques specific to the approach. You would become an expert at a previously non-existent art form.

Like I said, this is just one little example of hi/low tech mix and match.

Come up with your own!

How low tech can be cutting edge

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

Ow, ow, ow. *shakes wrists*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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