The Light of Day

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.

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.

Follow-through

I suspect that my blog would be a more effective tool (CATEGORY ALERT!!!) if I followed through by consistently providing updates of the things I wrote previously. This would also make me appear to have an attention span of more than a few seconds.

Without even peeking at my blog, I’m going to pull a number out of some dark and dirty place, and that number is…

Five! Ah, the comforting sound of men and women singing an octave apart… and when we’re little kids, we don’t notice how thumpy the tom toms are. (Why do I suddenly have an urge to listen to Hair?) So anyway, without further ado, here are quick follow-ups to my five most recent posts, from oldest to most recent…

1. First “final” mix of Rival Big Bang. I’ve noticed that, within my album tracklists, there are some things that are more absolute than others. Within those lists, I’ll often find pairs of songs that are, in my mind, absolutely inseperable. You know the kind: Heartbreaker and Living Loving Maid. We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions. Well, in my case, one such pair would be What Do You Think Of Yourself? and Rival Big Bang. Those two songs are married to each other. So what I should be doing is making videos of these pairs as “mini suites”. And just think, these “mini-suites” will fit into the YouTube ten-minute limit (which for some strange reason doesn’t apply to everyone… hmmm…).

2. Open letter to Republicans. Some masochistic force within me made me watch a thirty-second Mitt Romney campaign promo tonight. By the six second mark, he had already said something negative about Democrats. By the 15 second mark he did it again. Only 30 seconds to talk, and at such loss for something constructive to say that the time has to be padded out with broad insults. But the greatest insult was that his voice was dubbed. You know the sound of a hollywood movie, where every time someone talks, it sounds like the microphone is a few inches in front of the actor’s mouth, even though there’s no microphone anywhere in the shot? Makes you wonder what else was fake about it…

3. I’m so tired. The “night crew” paid a visit to Cats and Critters this evening, because Emily Junior is gonna need to get fixed up, and she’s gonna need to take some meds for at least a week beforehand. I took the whole darn cage along, so Ralphie had a chance to check out the scenery too. Em Jr. is still acting sociable and energetic — but nonetheless, now would be a good time to send some positive energy her way. Thanks!

4. Possible video: creating drum parts. Maybe I can go ahead and shoot this. The main thing holding me back is how to get the camera to pick up the sound as I’m working, so I don’t have to sync it up after the fact… I suppose I can just turn my speakers on. Can’t do that for vocal sessions though. Other videos that I want to do: a video at the Fender Rhodes where I discuss chords, and a video at the desk of improvised doodling, cutting shapes out of colored paper, making some kind of “paper puppets”, and generally making images inspired by music without knowing ahead of time what they’re going to be.

5. My results on the equal loudness test. I finished doing what I had to do to create my vocal limiter/de-esser effect, which is both functional and theoretical, in that I’ve tested it, but not on vocals. Don’t forget, that post links to a site where you can test yourself to see how you perceive volume at different pitches. It’s useful stuff to be aware of when you produce audio of any kind.

Well, that certainly felt responsible! Let’s do this again sometime.

My results on the equal loudness test

I’ve got a neat little application I wrote, which, for simplicity’s sake, I call “louden”. It’s like a cross between hard limiting and distortion. Unlike hard limiting, there is no “attack” or “release”; the effect is virtually instantaneous, working on half a wave cycle at a time (if you consider a “wave cycle” to be a period of time where the wave goes below and above the center line exactly once, the part it works on is from the lowest point below the line to the highest point above it — and, alternately, vice-versa — and only does anything if one or both go out of range). Unlike ordinary distortion, which is what you wind up with when you set extremely low attack and release times on an ordinary limiter, “louden” doesn’t flatten the tops or bottoms; it maintains whatever curved shape was between them.

All this surely sounds like I’m full of shit, and in a way I’m sure I am. There’s no reason why the above idea/algorithm should have any merit. But this is one of those lucky times when it actually kind of does. When I push audio through this code, and test how far I can mangle it, the end result to my ears is like tape saturation; a kind of “gentlest of distortions”, which, despite having this non-digital character, happens to be extremely compatible with digital, because of how it reins more sound into a smaller space (yes, loudness war, I’m a bad, bad boy) and keeps those tops and bottoms inside the lines like a good kindergartener.

Despite its usefulness in ambushing the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I think there’s also a way to mold this into a useful limiter and de-esser for vocals. I read somewhere online (scroll down to “The Highs Have It”) that half the reason we need such a thing as “de-essers” in the first place is because the compressors we’re using aren’t responsive enough to the higher sibilance sounds. A typical old-skool compressor or limiter responds to the sound as it measures it… not as our ears would measure it.

So the key to making compression sound more like it’s working right, to us, would be to trick it into hearing more similarly to the way we hear. A lot of testing has been done to find what are called “equal loudness curves”, first by Fletcher and Munson in 1933, and then by Robinson and Dadson in 1956 (not sure why it always takes two guys to do the research). Apparently testing on this has continued since then, and today the current standard is called ISO 226. There’s no absolute way to determine how “accurate” any of this is, because it’s essentially a test of human perception.

With so much conflicting information — and of course, all the data changes drastically when you test people at different volumes — I decided to just test myself, using a simple online tool, and come up with my own damn curve. The results are undoubtedly biased by the type of headphones I use, the volume I tested at, and various childhood traumas percolating in my amygdala — but I seriously think this is better than looking at a bunch of pre-existing charts and trying to decide which one to rely on.

Although there are exceptions, I see that large parts of my graph look like a downward slope at 6 dB per octave. That means, twice as high = half as loud. Which brings me to a question: with all this supposedly being about “perception”, isn’t there also a reality that higher pitched sounds at the same amplitude would naturally have more energy? I know when I mix music, I’m more than happy to see kick drums and bass guitars with waveforms that nearly hit the top and bottom of the track, but I wouldn’t want to see a flute doing that. Yet, if we hear the flute as being loud enough to compete with the bass guitar, doesn’t that mean the flute is putting out just as much “energy”, only doing so by vibrating faster instead of wider? Why is our only measurement of sound energy — decibels — based on width (amplitude) alone? Why don’t we have a unit for width and frequency combined?

I’m not saying that our senses aren’t distorted; I’m just asking, shouldn’t the “distortion of our senses” be judged relative to that diagonal slope instead of a horizontal line? Shouldn’t “higher is louder” be accepted as an objective reality? I’m not joking.

By the way, I originally put the 12K and 16K where they are in the above screenshot because I simply couldn’t hear them. As I check again now, I realize I can hear the 12K, but I have to really crank the bejeezus out of it, so I’m not going to take the chance of over-interpreting that. I am, after all, approaching 40. I suggest you try the test yourself, but be sure to heed Warning #1 in large text at the top of the screen.

The point of all this, for me: if I make two EQ curves — first, one to simulate the exaggerations that our own ears/minds apply to sound, and then one to reverse it — and stick my “louden” effect between them, I should wind up with a nice “instantaneous” vocal limiter that is not as scientifically correct as it is psychoacoustically correct…

…which is what we want, because, we’re not scientists… we’re, uh, psychos.

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.

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.

I bought some paper.

I feel a little healthier than I did yesterday.

It also lifted my spirits to buy some colored paper today. If I knew exactly what I was going to do with it, you’d be the first to know. Well, no, actually, you’d be the second, because I’d be the first.

And if words aren’t enough for you, here I am in the picture shows, telling you the exact same thing. Roll ‘em!

Add this to the list

Y’know something I want for Christmas next year? A globe. I haven’t seen a globe in something like twenty years. How can you be sinister, and plot world domination, and go “bwahahaha”, without a globe to furiously spin and poke at with your crooked finger, indicating all the territory that one day will aaaalllllllll be yours? Nothing against Google Maps, but I don’t think it has quite the same effect.

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!

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.

White screen syndrome, on Freelance Switch

Here’s a short but well-articulated article about overcoming writer’s block, or as it’s referred to in the article, “white screen syndrome”. I think the general ideas are applicable to writing music and lyrics too. (We could call it “blank tape syndrome” or something.)

Excerpt:

My favourite method of getting something on the white screen is to just write what’s going through my head on the subject – then revise afterwards. I see it as a combination of stream-of-consciousness writing and Ann Lamont’s “shitty first draft.”

You know the subject matter, so just write. Usually it can be modified into something useful at the end and who knows, maybe you’ll find a few great sentences you wouldn’t have written if you were trying to stay professional.

I’ve written a few articles entirely like this and only had to edit out all the obscenities.

Here is the Anne Lamott (not “Ann Lamont”; hopefully FS will correct that soon) passage they’re referring to: an excerpt from Bird by Bird, which I hadn’t heard of before, but was curious enough to do a search on. (It’s awesome, by the way — except that as a mouse person, I would prefer she used something other than cruelty to mice in the visualization part at the end — regardless, don’t skip this one!)

And here are some notes that a fellow named Kyle took, summarizing Bird by Bird. Don’t sit back and let authors reap all the benefits of this stuff; how can you apply it to your music?

Cutting edge systems - how’s that workin’ out for ya?

The board…

…she’s a-fillin’ up with stickies.

And check marks too. Just to remind myself, lest I feel overwhelmed, that several of the songs are already, in fact, done. I can just double check the mixes on those, and then archive them.

There’s another important part of my system that I left out, which is so simple and obvious that it’s easy to neglect: when I’m done working on a song for the time being, unless it’s in some editing stage where a track is chopped up in little segments and not completely synchronized to the rest of the song (which I try to avoid leaving that way), I run off a working mix as a .wav file, and put that in a directory called “Most up-to-date mixes”, which contains sub-folders for each album, plus one sub-folder called “Not backed up yet”. This way, if I want to refresh my memory on how a song is sounding lately, I don’t need to launch Tracktion and load the whole darned project.

These mixes will initially go in the “Not backed up yet” folder, until they’ve been FTP’ed to my new Amazon S3 account via Transmit. In the event of a burglary or fire, this feels safer to me than using CDs or DVDs. Hopefully I will never need to download them.

So you want to make an album? (part 18)

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

Installment 18: All your bass

One of the nicest perks of being an independent recording artist is that your bass player has no ego. Sure, some of your own ego will come through in the bass parts you play and/or sequence, but for the most part, your allegiance is to the song, not the instrument.

I could probably rattle off another laundry list, similar to the opening of my drum slut post, only this time of “ways I’ve recorded bass parts”. But, this series is not about me anymore, it’s about you — using me as a metaphor for you, of course, since my writing snaps back into first-person if I stop consciously thinking about it for more than two seconds. Suffice to say, depending on the style of the music, you will most likely be using an electric bass guitar, or some kind of keyboard. I like the sound of a real bass guitar best, or at least I like my simulations (when necessary) to be as believable as possible. Generally, if I use a keyboard and sequencer, it’s to work out a “sketch” of a bass part, so I can experiment with changing certain notes and see what sounds best before actually learning to play it on a real bass. I always start right off with a real bass guitar on slow songs, though, because they’re easy enough.

Bass parts, oft thought of as a dull chore, can actually be very stimulating if you let yourself get just playful enough. You don’t have to keep the part totally interesting through the whole song, but you can work in little variations here and there to keep the song “alive”. There’s rarely a practical reason to record the bass first, so by the time you do so, you’re generally past the stressful stage of needing to create the song’s framework and worry about its tempo — so it’s easy to do multiple takes and punch-ins, which means you can try something a little different in bar 38 without committing to anything.

What makes it extra fun is remembering that you’re playing to the listener’s subconscious; nobody actively listens to the bass line (besides other musicians), and small changes can have a surprising impact on the song’s overall effect. Have fun with these. Try changing the rhythm just a little by syncopating/anticipating one of the notes (playing it a half beat early). Try using a different pitch on one of the “inbetween” notes (one that isn’t on the chord change). Try leaving a hole on a certain beat, so that the notes you do play are that much more defined. Try mimicking something from a bass line you heard in a jazz, disco, reggae, country, or polka song. It won’t change the whole style of your song, but it will hint at something. To most listeners, it will be subliminal; but if you drop it in stealthily enough, even your musically savvy friends may not pick it out until the tenth listen.

Sometimes people record the bass secondly, so they can be sure to lock their rhythm tightly with the drumming. But without other instrumentation there, and all that apparent “space” in the sound, you might have a tendency to overplay. If you record some of the other instruments first, you’ll know where you can just keep the bass part simple, and maybe even leave some holes in it.  Also, if you first get everything else to sound as good as possible without it, you’re more likely to end up with a final product that sounds good on smaller speakers where the bass part can’t be heard quite as well.

I generally put the bass part down after there are some guitars and keyboards already recorded, so I can hear it in context; but, then when I’m editing and polishing up the bass track, I’ll leave those other things muted so I can make sure certain bass notes line up perfectly with the drum hits, especially the kick drum. If a bass note happens to be between two drum hits, I usually nudge it to make sure it’s exactly between those hits. (Our eyes are more critical than our ears, so if it looks good in the editing software, it probably is good. Listen to be sure, of course.) Melding your bass and drums into one synergistic monster will help give your song a solid backbone, and subsequently a “professional sheen”, even if your other instruments occasionally flake out.

Idea: try recording two very different versions of the bass part. For the first version, keep it simple, minimalistic, and safe — just lock to the beat, define the chord changes, and give some semblance of “bottom” to the music. For the second version, improvise ambitiously and dangerously, at the outer edge of your skill level. You’ll flub a lot, but you might manage to get in a few “golden moments” where you sound better than you actually are. Just keep the good parts, and erase the corresponding parts of the “simple” version, to make a great composite.

If you need something precise, you need it done quickly, and it doesn’t need to “rock” in the strictest sense of the word, sequenced bass will do the trick. There are plenty of sampled basses available that will satisfy your need for a realistic tone, and synthesizers can generally do a reasonable “fretless” sound; the only thing you’ll be missing are some of the performance nuances and inflections — like the gliding of the fingers, and the natural variation in timbre from note to note. Sequenced bass will serve it’s most essential purpose, mind you, supporting the chord changes and establishing the bottom of the spectrum — it just won’t get anyone “air bassing”, so be sure your song gives the listener something else to do with their hands.

When sequencing a bass part, you will probably want to quantize it. If your drums are sequenced too, this will make locking the bass to the drums a one-step no-brainer. Also, try to avoid letting notes overlap; it will generally stick out and kill the illusion, and multiple pitches don’t blend well in the lowest register unless they’re really simple intervals, like octaves. (If your tone generator/sampler/synth can be set to monophonic, as in only one note at a time, this keeps things simple.)

Whether the bass is real or not, it usually sounds good to put some compression or limiting on it. This smooths out the volume and helps it “sit” more with the drums. EQ is useful too; by adusting the upper midrange, you can control how much it “stands out” among the guitars and keyboards, as opposed to just turning the whole instrument up and overpowering everything. Most other effects are not good for bass, in general, unless you want to be experimental. I’ve met bass players with racks of digital effects the size of refrigerators, and it’s kind of silly. Like it or not, the bass serves a musical purpose, and a wonderful one at that — and serves it best with a clear, simple tone. If you ache to transcend the degrading stereotype of “bass players playing low notes”, and you feel your time has come to shine as a musician… listen… is the thing surgically grafted onto your body? When you arrived into this world, did the doctor congratulate your mother on her bouncing baby bassist? Have you ever met a carpenter that only uses saws? Set it down and pick up a different instrument.

In closing, here’s a bass. It lists at $4,546.00, but hey, it’s worth it, because it’s all pre-banged up, and you don’t have to go to all that trouble wrecking it yourself.

Edit 8/14: in post-closing, here’s a bass track I recorded years ago and just finished editing:

This is a song I originally recorded with Episodes in a proper studio in the late 1980s. We never finished mixing it, and the original tapes are gone forever. Towards the end of the 1990s, we had a half-hearted stab at reuniting, with Garrett being the most reluctant of the four of us, and did a rudimentary session for two songs in my home studio, including a remake of Phone Booth. The drumming is by original Episodes drummer Thom DeLooze. A rough guitar part exists, played by Garrett, which I still plan to sift through and assemble the best bits of into a (hopefully) complete guitar track. The three of us played together for about three and a half takes, and this is a composite of the best bits from Thom’s and mine, carefully edited to still sound natural, but without the mistakes.

Notice that the bass by itself (or with just the drums) sounds simplistic, naked, even “dumb”. That’s fine, though, and it’s good to get comfortable with that sound, because in the context of everything else, every little inflection or variation helps carry the music along.

Cutting-edge systems

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

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

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

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

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

Our cushions never clash…

I made my vocal pitch graphing a little easier to read visually by de-saturating the quiet parts, i.e. graying the spaces between notes where the line on the pitch graph doesn’t mean anything and is just connecting the dots. So the bright colored columns are where the syllables happen. The idea will be that you can then open it in a graphic editor, mark it up where you want it tuned, re-save it, and have another program “read” your squiggles and go from there. The meta-idea being that I’ll have an alternative to Autotune to rein pitch into the general vicinity without flatlining it (killing the nuance and vibrato, and destorying emotive pitch scoops and fall-offs). I’m already doing this anyway, but this should help make it less tedious. Of course, you can do this with Autotune if you’re not lazy. But I’m not just lazy — I’m also poor.

Ethics? Learn to sing? Practice more? Do more takes? Bah.

I did have a fairly productive week last week, as I promised, and now I’m extending that promise to have a productive week this week too, even though it’s half over. Well, that’s okay (it being half over), because the pitch thing should be useful. In my remixing projects I keep coming to these points where my ears are fatiguing too quickly to be confident of the vocal pitch. I never have a problem getting it to sound good on big, loud speakers, when I have all that bass and stuff to support me; it’s the little, quiet speakers that taunt and heckle me.

But I digress! Last week, did a halfway decent rhythm guitar part to my ode to selling out, Curtis’ Classic Collection of Comforts — which is meant to evoke a train wreck without actually being one — and video’d it for posterity. I may also revive a similar but much older rhythm guitar take, from an earlier attempt at the song, back when I was a Stratocasterist, to combine with the newer take (dueling me’s!). It was a different version altogether, so if I do that, I’ll no doubt have to Frankentempo it (Feel that vocabulary s-t-r-e-t-c-h!), as in cut it up and slide bits to and fro.

Tip for the intermittently depressed: the thing that will make you feel better may not be a completely new idea or epiphany, 180 degrees away from whatever you’re whining about focused on — it’s more likely something about 20 to 30 degrees off the edge of your peripheral vision, something you’re aware of but haven’t been consciously thinking about. Beyond that, there’s always the next weather change to look forward to. (Thunderstorms are cool.) In the meantime, drink water and eat something healthy.

Chronically depressed: you’re on your own. Get pills.

If you build a better vocal pitch grapher…

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

So you want to make an album? (part 17)

Note #1: the word “band” in this installment refers not to a hodge-podge of long-haired freaks, but rather to a slice of the audible spectrum, as in “ten band equalizer”.

Note #2: I’m thinking about how to do re-do the image for this post. Obviously most of the images in this series are temporary placeholders, for copyright reasons. But this one in particular might be a real turn-off, even just for the blog. (Not to mention the faux-pas of having the salad fork on the inside.) Just be aware that I was primarily trying to merge some of the concepts in the article, using simple images, and the overall effect is a little more gruesome than I expected.

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

Installment 17: Dissecting the spectrum

Why did we all dissect frogs in biology class? We couldn’t have forseen it at the time, but in retrospect, it turned out to be a real advantage once the time came to build a GIANT DEADLY LASER-TONGUED ROBOT FROG to unleash on our enemies. Would you want your master plan to backfire on you just because you put the cloaca where the glottis was supposed to go? I didn’t think so.

Although it will benefit your album to conduct similar experiments on songs that already exist, the tools for dissecting music don’t work quite the same way. You can’t, say, carve out the funky rhythm guitar and set it neatly on a paper towel next to the song. Equalizers dissect the music in cross sections, as if you sliced your frog cross-ways like a salami. Some organs may be small enough to remain intact in a single slice, but larger organs will be split between two or three slices, and then things like the spine, muscles, and skin will be distributed among all the slices. (If all this is making you sick, just pretend this frog is actually the guy who invented car alarms, but he’s been put under a terrible thousand-year spell by a sleep-deprived witch.)

The first equalizer most of us ever played with only had two bands (regions of the spectrum that you can adjust); many home or car stereos, in lieu of something actually labeled “eq”, have a pair of knobs labeled bass and treble — which is still an equalizer. There’s generally a large gap in the spectrum between these two bands, so you can effectively adjust the midrange by turning both bass and treble up and down together, and then re-adjusting the overall volume. Hopefully, you already have a feel for how to use these. If not, play with them. And not conservatively — set them at extreme positions, and listen for a while.

Done with that? Good, now take off your training wheels and hop onto the ten-gear, er, I mean, ten-band. Let’s look at a typical set of bands again (the exact frequencies on yours may deviate from this):

30 - 60 - 125 - 250 - 500 - 1000 - 2000 - 4000 - 8000 - 16000

Each number tells you the frequency in the center of that band, but that slider will affect frequencies below and above it to progressively lesser degrees, somewhat overlapping the range of the next band over. On a ten-band equalizer, the spectrum is divided up into about one octave per band. That’s because our hearing range is approximately ten octaves. As I said in the last installment, each octave is double the pitch of the octave below it, so as you go from band to band, the frequency approximately (if not exactly) doubles. Some equalizers of this type split the spectrum into more bands: 15, 20, or even 30. While easy to understand visually, these are more time-consuming to adjust. So other types of equalizers and filters have been invented, such as parametric equalizers and FFT filters, to give you more precise control with fewer parameters — but since those require more experience to use effectively, we’ll stick to an ordinary ten-band for now.

Most musical sounds will be spread over several of these bands. This is partly due to the range of the instrument, but also due to its harmonic content. A single note on an instrument, played all by itself, doesn’t just contain energy at one frequency — that note contains many harmonics, also called overtones, which are higher than the note itself (the fundamental), and give the sound its color, character, or timbre. In most cases, these overtones are exact whole-number multiples of the fundamental, and they don’t sound like extra notes, because you just hear them as part of that note’s sound.

If you’re a guitarist, you might know that you can isolate harmonics by touching the string at certain points while you play it. It’s important to realize that those higher pitches are actually in the note regardless; if you listen carefully while alternating between playing the harmonic and playing the open string normally, you can hear that those higher tones were in there all along. All you’re really doing is muting some of the harmonics, including the fundamental, so that other harmonics are now more prominent.

So if you have a recording with an unwanted note in it, at about 250 Hz — this would be close to the open B string on a guitar — you could try to remove that note by cutting the 250 Hz band on your equalizer, but that would still leave its overtones at 500 Hz, 750 Hz, 1000 Hz, 1250 Hz, and so on. Just from hearing all those harmonics, your brain will fill in the phantom fundamental and you’ll still perceive it as the same note, albeit more trebly. This is not to say you could never use filtering to soften a ringing open string on a sloppily-played guitar track, but its use for that type of thing is limited and difficult. (I’ve done this in extreme circumstances, by making four or five very narrow cuts on an FFT filter, right where the first few harmonics are, since they’re generally the loudest.)

The best way to think of equalization, though, is as an overall sound-shaper. When you split the sound into those ten (or however many) bands, you can think of them as “parts of the sound”, but you have to think of those “parts” in a different way than as specific instruments. There are no “good parts” and “bad parts” — though the average consumer is more likely to buy a stereo (or a CD) if they hear proportionately more extreme bass (below 50 Hz) and extreme treble (above 8 KHz), the meat of your music — melody and harmony (remember those?) — is always somewhere in the middle, and you do more or less want to give your listener a balanced meal, right?

Get to know the spectrum. I’ll introduce you to a few slices of it, but then you need to go and play with an equalizer and form your own mental relationship with it. All the numbers below are “general areas”, and there is no hard-fast cutoff point where one really begins and another ends, so don’t try to memorize so much as get the general idea.

Like I said, below 50 Hz is super-low bass, the kind that some drivers like to generously share with us while they still have their hearing. The 100 Hz area is still bassy, but not so bassy that most males couldn’t sing it. If you have a track with a higher pitched instrument, like a flute, and that same track has some unwanted rumbling on it, you can cut these lowest frequencies to get rid of the rumbling without hurting the instrument.

100-300 is what I might call upper bass or low midrange, important because a lot of fundamentals are happening here, as well as the “oomph” of the snare drum (its lowest tone, the part of it that you can almost “feel”, although snare drums have energy across pretty much the whole spectrum). Too much of this will sound muddy, but too little will sound hollow.

Going from there to about 1000 Hz will take you to the tippy-top of the female singing range, and many of the highest notes on ordinary instruments such as a guitar.

Most of what you hear above 1000 Hz are overtones from lower notes, which are very important to the character of those notes. If you listen to speech through a band centered at about 2000 Hz, it sounds like it’s through a bullhorn. Through a 4000 Hz band, it sounds more like a telephone. These are important “parts” of the voice, though, and if you removed them, the voice would sound muffled. These upper-midrange areas are what we normally think of when we say “tinny” or “mid-rangey”, and the “bite” at the top of an electric guitar is generally in here.

When you get to about 8000 Hz and up, this is where the cymbals mostly are, the sibilance (”ssss”) and breath on vocals, and the clarity of acoustic guitars. Some darker or more mid-rangey sounds, like bass guitars and electric guitars, don’t have much going on in this range, so it’s easy to remove annoying hiss from those tracks just by cutting the highest frequencies. Also if you took the sound directly out of a distortion pedal without using an amp, you might cut these highs just to make it warmer and less fuzzy. You can sometimes liven up a dull sound by increasing this, but watch out for hiss.

In the actual practice of recording your own music, you will first want to try to get your sounds right as you go. But we all make mistakes, and in those cases you can sometimes improve a track by equalizing it. Equalization is also used on entire mixes, subtly and carefully, as part of the mastering process.

Your homework is to go on a date with an equalizer, with hopefully ten bands, or close to it. It can be an old-skool physical beast, or it can be the one that comes with iTunes, Winamp, or whatever. You’re not going to use it on this outing, you’re just going to get to know it. Bring your favorite romantic music — preferably something with drums and electric bass, and then maybe some acoustic songs on it. Turn all the bands down low, and then one at a time, turn a band all the way up by itself (if it’s too loud, turn the overall volume down) and just listen to it. What’s in there? What part of the sound is in that part of the spectrum? What does it mean to you aesthetically, and how does it make up part of the big picture? Leave that band on long enough to hear how much of the drums come through, and how much of the other instruments come through. Then turn it down and go on to the next band, and do the same. Don’t be in a hurry… just listen, and sort of meditate on the “slice of sound” that you’re listening to. Don’t play favorites or give preferential treatment; remember, they all go together to make up the music you know and love.

Next, set all the bands to their normal position, and this time, cut one band at a time. If you’re wearing headphones or have small speakers, you might have trouble hearing the difference when you cut the very lowest one — if so, don’t worry about it too much. Then bring it back to normal and cut the next one. What’s missing from the overall sound now? Do this for all the bands. Get a feel for what it’s like when energy is missing in each part of the spectrum. As you do this, there may well be times when you find yourself actually liking some of the cuts better than the original sound. Please don’t say you’re going to cut that band out of every song you ever do for the rest of your life! You may have a tendency to get emotional, but you and the equalizer are just friends.

When the date is over, thank the equalizer, and in a polite, rational way, say “I plan to use you from time to time, but I’m going to be using other tools as well. It’s nothing personal.” The equalizer will actually respect you more for this, and your recordings will reflect the sophistication of this relationship.

The song that you sliced up like a salami may not be quite as happy. Hey, what can I say, that’s science for you.

*Ribbit*