Keith Handy 1.999

String binding

After a quick Googling of “keep guitar in tune”, it seems like there are too many incomplete answers out there, so I’d like to address a specific case of the problem that I’ve put up with for years.

If the guitar’s intonation is basically decent overall, and the strings have already been stretched, but a.) strings shift flat immediately after bending, and b.) strings shift sharp immediately after pushing down the tremolo bar, this is a problem called “string binding”. It means there’s just enough friction in the grooves of the nut to prevent the tension from completely evening out on either side of it. When you bend, a tiny bit of string slides away from the headstock towards the body and “sticks” there. The reverse is true for a whammy dive. It’s not subtle; in fact, it can make the guitar outright unplayable unless you just strum chords and stop trying to play rock star.

For those of us who want to play rock star, Sound On Sound has a great little paragraph tucked away in an obscure article from a zillion years ago. Scroll down to “NON-STICK GUITAR NUT”. Key points: 1.) It’s not supposed to stick. (I actually wasn’t sure if it was supposed to “not stick” or “stick better”, but the former seems more logical, since we do actually have to turn the tuning pegs now and then.) 2.) People with graphite nuts are lucky. And last but not least, 3.) you can lubricate your nut — on your guitar, gutterbrain — by “placing a single layer of plumber’s PTFE tape over the nut before you fit your next set of strings”.

(You can of course trim the tape if you’re vain and superficial.)

To all the people out there who list “strings being too old” as a cause of bad intonation, what universe are you living in? Strings may lose a lot of their timbral majesty when they get old, but in my experience they don’t become harder to keep in tune. Maybe it’s harder to hear if they’re in tune or not because they have such a dull sound?

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.

Three coats… or actually one coat with three coats…

Like Chevy Chase says just before jumping in the pool, “this is crazy, this is crazy, this is crazy.”

One great thing about life at the Village Gate is that you can walk out to the parking lot with an old jacket, and stand there spray-painting it silver, and no one bats an eyelash. This, my friends, isn’t just a jacket from the Salvation Army with three cans’ worth of silver spray paint on it. This is a MISSION.

Again, I ask… why aren’t you doing this?

The sound of somebody not actually singing something

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make ciggysinkers, not disease

Awesome quote alert:

We only pretend to be addicted…
Until we become addicted to pretending.

What brought this on? I mean, in all total seriousness, I was one of the lightweights. A couple of these things a day. Maybe a couple more than a couple sometimes… and every so often a couple more than that. I’ve never been physically addicted, and never actually jonesed for the nicotine. In fact, I don’t even like the feeling from the nicotine. The only thing I liked was the way the activity divides time into smaller (and smaller) chunks. And the way it gives you an excuse to watch strangers walk by without looking creepy.

Being diagnosed with high blood pressure today was a swift kick from reality. In a way, I’m glad to have a tangible thing to work on. I could never get into “doing things for my health” without there being a specific problem. I don’t even really know what the main cause is, or if it’s partly genetic or whatever. Maybe I would be just fine as long as I take the meds and avoid salt, but I’m not comfortable with “maybe” these days.

I had just bought a fresh pack the day before, and I think in a way, the ceremonious act of destroying the vast majority of a pack in full public view (and documenting it videographically) might seal the deal better than saying “I’ll just finish this pack”. The trouble with the latter is that a pack of cigarettes is a “circular” experience, with the end of one pack being psychologically linked to the beginning of the next. You have to find a more vulnerable point at which to upset the pattern and break the chain.

Of course, as not everyone’s mind responds equally to the same motivators, you might resonate more with the ancient wisdom of the masters:

…or maybe I should say “the ancient wisdom of an array of ethnic stereotypes”.

I promise I’ll get back to the music stuff soon here. I’ve had a lot of interesting and inspired thoughts and ideas in that department, and hopefully I can stick around long enough to follow through with them.

Good health to us all!

Death, taxes, and nazis

I have to admit, Turbotax has made leaps and bounds in the enjoyability department since my rantings of a couple years ago. Not only didn’t they take all my money, they managed to not take all my time either. Great jaerb, guys! New York state is a little weird, though…

So, are they asking if I got paid to be persecuted by Nazis? Or paid to persecute Nazis? In either case, I don’t think this pertains to me. Yes, I’m sure there’s a serious, non-funny explanation for that one, but, like, don’t harsh my buzz, man.