Listening With New Ears

Many musicians don't like music theory and as a result avoid trying to learn about it.  We've all heard this rationalized in various ways with statements about rules and breaking them, or about losing the magic...  so I'm not going to talk about that.

I will say, though, that working on music in the studio on the production or mastering end has changed the way I hear and listen to music.  Of course, right?

For me, though, it's not about losing the magic.  Rather, it's totally cool to hear things in a new way and wonder about how they were done.

So here's a blast from my teens in the 80s.  Pretty sure it was Steve Lillywhite on production duties... it certainly has his signature big drum sound.

It starts big and loud and around three minutes in, all the musical sections have happened and there's really no way to build it up anymore.  Or is there?  At around 3:30, there's a drum fill and somebody hits the knob to widen the stereo field (at least I think that's the main thing happening) for the big final chorus/outro.

Techniques like this occur elsewhere.  Radiohead's Let Down being an obvious example and I'm thinking it speaks to a tiny part of the real craft among professional producers and mixers.

Something to think about for my future work.

Unhappy Coincidence

I learned this past weekend that a friend had taken his own life.  That's not what this post is about, it simply serves as context.

Obviously, I'm sad and I find myself listening to music in the usual way (full collection on shuffle). What's different is that I'm skipping everything but the sad and moody stuff.

Moments ago, an African piece came on. I knew nothing about it. It came to my collection from a friend that lent me a world music compilation CD. This one track has been haunting me for years but never did I look it up. The non-English lyrics meant nothing to me and I was ...  afraid of learning that the song might be about something trite.

How wrong I was.

So now I still know nothing about the song other than that it is about Death.

I wonder if I knew that all along.

LCR Mixing

I, like many home recordists, track a pile of music and audio recording sites, blogs, podcasts, etc. And now, having done this for a few years, I am starting to notice that there are some subjects that keep coming up in peoples questions of the experts. Recently, on The Home Recording Show, somebody asked about LCR mixing. Now for those that don't know, LCR mixing is a technique where the mixer will pan things either hard Left, Center, or hard Right. No half measures here! Now my personal opinion is that anything applied that dogmatically is retarded. But people keep asking if that's what they should be doing.

To me, to LCR or not to LCR is not the question.

 To whit, here are a couple of tracks that have (by today's standards) weird panning:

Now, the intro seems relatively normal.  But then the left side just kind of drops out, rhythm section on the right, then Nancy starts singing (in the centre).  Eventually, the horns come back in the left.

Clearly, some extreme LCR but some interesting choices about where each element is placed in the stereo field (as though you're sitting somewhere in the middle of the band, rather than in the audience facing the band).

Here's another:

Here you have rhythm section occupying the left.  Guitar solo on the right.  But some twists.  The reverb and delay returns are sent to the opposite channel (at the two minute mark, it's pretty obvious).
As the track progresses, there are other games played but this was the first time I heard a dry signal in one speaker and a full wet signal in the other.

To sum up, your pan knobs are creative tools.  Use them.

Did I do that?

Today, @TaraBusch tweeted a link to video of Jefferson Airplane performing White Rabbit at Woodstock. In the typical meandering that seems to be an essential part of the YouTube experience, I soon ended up on the video below.

At 1:30 she talks about her varying reactions to her own work. The surprised, "did I do that?" And, of course, the inevitable judgment.

I have that reaction all the time. I certainly don't think it's a unique feeling but I have to admit that I am surprised that a lifelong career artist would still feel that way about her own work.

Which I guess is really cool. That the joy and surprise of creating doesn't have to dim with age.

Odd Path

When I was younger, I used to get a little frustrated that those older than me weren't up on new music. Even if they were a musician or claimed to be very into music. Now I am that older person and while I track much I accept that I cannot track it all. Even if I'm a "big fan" of a particular artist. Case in point.

I love the music of Jose Gonzalez. You may know him from his solo work, you may know him from his appearance on Zero 7's "The Garden" or you may remember this:

I have been listening to his two solo albums for a bunch of years and I almost drove three hours to a show of his but was stopped by a snowstorm. But I hadn't heard anything lately until...

One Saturday morning before anybody else was up, I was flaked on the couch catching up on an episode of Elementary. At the end of the episode, a song is playing and it doesn't quite get through until the fade to black and the credits roll. Huh, I know that voice. Rewind. Shit, yeah, that's Jose. So now I Google Jose along with some of the lyrics that I can interpret and I'm led to discover that he's got a new act called Junip. And this song has been on soundcloud. And reviewed by Pitchfork. All of which didn't get through until I stumbled on it at the back end of a TV show.

There's probably no big message here. Except perhaps, that the ways in which new music is discovered are myriad, changing and highly personal. How does it work for you?

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't share my "discovery".

Little Magic Box

Sometime last year, Geoff Thorn (guitar player and teacher extraordinaire) showed me a new toy. He described it as the preamp circuit from an echoplex (one of those mythical hardware things I had heard about but never seen or used). He was unable to explain exactly what it did but summarized with a vague, "it just makes everything better." This seems to be a common theme with this device, everybody that I know that has one raves about it (and in most cases, end up never switching it off).

Not wanting to feel left out, I recently got one of my own. It's difficult for a geek like myself to admit but I have no clue what this thing does. But it is good. And since getting it, I have recorded no guitar part without it engaged.

Started On A Path, Got Lost, Found A New Place

Sometime last year, the owner of a certain netlabel (who I'll happily name if he gives permission) asked me if I would have material ready for a near future release. After I got over the, "Holy shit! I'd be honoured!" I asked a few questions, pushed back a bit, asked some more questions.

Since I've been making interesting noises for a few years now, the feeling was that I would simply draw from my "catalogue" and put together a collection for release. Of course, this involves actually listening again to all that stuff and with an ear to the proposed new context. It also means,or just offers up the opportunity, to revisit/cleanup mixes. So far so reasonable. Until you actually start doing it...

It didn't take long for me to hate it. To quote my new favourite show, Californication, "the self loathing is strong."

So I decided the best course of action was to make entirely new material. And around that time, I developed a renewed interest/appreciation for more drone-y material. Of course, in my mind, that better fit this net-label's sound anyway so why not make some drone tracks and see what happens.

Things started pretty well and I posted early rough mixes on Soundcloud. This apparently simple act had an unexpected ripple. I was contacted by a rather prolific drone/ambient/post-rock artist, 6LA8. They are a duo from Karachi, Pakistan. Now getting comments from far afield is nothing new in these halcyon Internet days but in this case it was a little weird to be asked if I was still in Mississauga (where I live) because one of them was in Waterloo (which is only one hour away by car). Weird or not, I jumped at the opportunity to meet and play with a like minded artist...

And thus, I had my first internet musical blind date.

Two guys from very different places with laptops and guitars got together, improvised for hours, recording everything onto a pocket digital recorder... ending up with Minimal Wanderings

We are both deeply indebted to Al Gore for inventing the Internet and making this magic possible.

To be continued...

Lazy Man Video

Increasingly, musicians seem to be using video hosting sites as places to show their wares; almost like "video, or it didn't happen". If you're like me, you don't have a video bone in your body and you wonder if there's a way to follow the herd...

One day, I was blissing out, staring at the iTunes visualizer when it hit me that I could be a cheap bastard and simply record that playing one of my tunes and I'd have a video.

The next question was how... Turns out that the Quicktime player app can record your screen and soon, after a couple of false starts, I got a video of the visualizer running in full screen on my tune Polyphasic. Next, I used iMovie to attach the audio to the result (and get it all synced). After I was happy with that, I had to wait forever while the whole thing rendered and uploaded to youtube. The result:

What Does It Want To Be

Every now and then I start on a piece, inspired by some idea or some process. And like many pieces it grows from there. And it grows and grows.

The ideas come fast and furious and just pile on.

Pretty soon it's a big blob of swirling, gurgling sound.

And I change from an artist with a blank sketch pad to a sculptor attempting to find beauty in a large hunk of rock.

Sometimes I despair that there is no beauty in the mound of sound.

Should I leave it behind, move on to the next piece? Will I be able to find this place again? Is this place even worth revisiting?

I have no answers. Only similar, perhaps more naive, questions that many, much wiser before me have asked.

Fancy New Machine Blues

I was planning on writing about my fancy new machine and how much I love my life. Instead I have an appointment with an Apple Genius to look at a dead hard drive. Boo. But let's start at the beginning.

Six days ago, I received a big, shiny, new Macbook Pro. Giant, bright 17" screen, smokin' i7 processor, etc. Awesome right? Would have been more awesome if I had received one of the improved models that quietly came out the Monday after receiving mine but I digress.

Awesome until you get to the migration assistant part. It demands that you leave your two machines alone to do their thing. Completely alone. Like, kill all your apps, disable the menubar. The only sign of life as it's doing it's thing is a changing estimate that occasionally veers into terrifying territory (I saw numbers as high as 20 hours). Nothing to do but cuddle up with a book.
It's worth pointing out that the old machine ran Snow Leopard and the new machine came with Lion. While I was in no hurry to enter the lion's den with the old machine, I figured it worth a try on the new one. So after dorking around for a while figuring out how to live with the new state of affairs (I'm still not sure about Mission Control) I figured I'd try some music apps.

For reasons I did not understand, I decided that MainStage was the first thing I'd fire up. This led to the gates of hell. Almost immediately, it asked me for my serial number/license key what-not. So I dig out my Logic 9 box and rummage around, find the paper and hand transcribe a very annoying string of characters (it's times like these you wonder how high the tech actually is at Apple). Then I'm told that this key was for an upgrade, please enter the original key. Seriously? Dig out the much larger Logic 8 box, and hand transcribe another string of characters. Annoyed but still calm, I watch as MainStage starts to check my plugins. Now this is the thing I was dreading and my dread was not ill founded. Soon I found myself re-authorizing and in some cases (AudioDamage) I had to re-download and re-install (as a way to do the re-auth)... For Native Instruments, I fired up Service Center only to find out that not only did I need to re-auth but that I needed to download a pile of upgrades (presumably fixes for Lion).

I don't remember how I noticed but I found out that many of the instruments that come as part of the Jam Packs were not present. Looking closer (using my killer UNIX skillz) I found that the new machine had 12,000 files in /Library/Application Support/Garageband and the old machine has 41,000. Clearly something didn't get moved. Ask the Googles and get told that I should reinstall Logic. I outsmart the Googles and install only the "content" but not the programs (since they'd been upgraded bunches of times by Software Update I didn't see any value in installing the .0 versions of everything). After that, I'm still a few thousand files short. On my list of crap to figure out.
A metric tonne of work for a program I have not used all that much... and short of loading every track I ever made with it and fixing the problems I don't know of a better way to ensure that old tracks continue to be loadable than brute force making sure I never lose any of the 1000s of files that are part of these packages.

So on to the program I do use, Ableton Live. It comes up, makes me reauth, tells me that I've just used up my last one and then starts checking VSTs (Logic only supports AUs we haven't had VST fun yet). For some odd reason, only 6 of the 12 AudioDamage plugins I own are visible in the library. Rescan doesn't. I send of the "WTF" email but it's Friday night and I'm not seriously expecting a response.  In the end, I solved this by blowing away the Live preferences file which triggered a "real" rescan.

Somewhere along the way, I saw a complaint about my Focusrite plugins. When I tried to reauthorize them, it would fail. Eventually I got to a webpage that told me that Focusrite would no longer hand out authorizations for those plugins. WTF?!? It did have a form to fill out which I did with minimum venom. I saved that for Twitter. This subplot does have a happy ending though. The following Monday, Focusrite hooked me up with their new plugins which are way way better. Good save.

So now I'm getting settled in, things are mainly working; I still have to figure out which 5,000 files I still need to migrate over from the old laptop's backup disk. Then I can reuse that disk to back up the new laptop. My stress level is receding.

That was until today. When I came back from lunch, unlocked my screen and was met with a grey screen of death. After letting that go nowhere for about 10 minutes, I power cycled. Only to be met with grinding noises from the hard drive...

My point in sharing this tale of woe was not really to make myself feel better (didn't work). Rather, it is to highlight some vulnerabilities that we have and think about ways to mitigate them.

• if you buy software and you should, it is probably locked to your machine in some way.  When you get a new machine you may find yourself wrestling with licensing, begging for help. As much of a hassle as this is, it goes easier during the week. As a side benefit, you'll have your weekend free for making music instead of fuming about software licensing
• software ages; that's not to say it gets old but rather that the people or companies supporting it decide for various reasons to stop or upgrade or go out of business
• must of the music you produce in a DAW is not music at all but rather a pile of data. Some of that data is in the form of references to external sources like plugins, sample files, etc. Some of it is parametric data like automation, MIDI notes, signal routing. If any of these piece change or stop working, you will not be able to recreate your music. It seems that the only way to completely future proof tracks is to not simply save your rendered masters but also each track as an audio file (at least that way you'll be able to load those files into an entirely new DAW)
• disks fail; back up all the fucking time. The odds of having a catastrophic disk failure in 5 years are pretty high. I naively thought that I was safe (6 days, come on!)  As it turns out, I get to repeat my tale woe because I did not have a backup of that 6 days of effort.

This just sucks.  Don't do as I did. Be smarter.

Photo by flickr user doegox

MBOX Pro Audio Challenge

Early this morning, while scraping the sleep out of my face and squinting at my twitter feed, I saw reference to this:

Think you know Mbox?  Take the challenge.

Being a sucker, I had to try it. I grabbed some caffeine and my best cans and sat down for a listen.

I'll spare you the suspense, I couldn't tell the difference, so I just clicked semi randomly on the test.  Got a B on the input test and an F on the output test.

After I got over the initial, "I must completely suck as a listener" and "this test is stupid, how they possibly expect to demonstrate anything", I began to realize that was the whole point. They wanted do demonstrate that they all sound pretty much identical while subtly reminding us that the Mbox is way cheaper than that other stuff.

But there's another conclusion I jump to. And that is that buying an audio interface using sound quality as your main criteria is wrong. And of course, if you've been playing around in this space, chances are that you have already intuited this idea.

So what is the criteria for audio interface shopping. Here's my list (in no particular order):

Basic features:

• # of ins/out - I want at least 2 ins and 4 outs
• the ins should be switchable between instrument/line
• easily grabbed volume knob on the front (to save me from blowing my head off)
• MIDI (to provide midi clock to my GT-10)
• more front panel knobs the better, driving a separate mixer app with a mouse is a pain
• two headphone jacks with separate volumes is a nice to have

Software:

• special drivers? as a software guy (by day) that has done lots of device driver work, I am very suspicious about this one
• latency? could you play live through this thing
• are there timely updates to match your specific OS version

What's your criteria?  And does sound quality factor in or is it simply assumed?

Drum Programming Pro Tip

Ok, who am I kidding. Amateur tip. But here it is...

So you've got built an awesome groove, you've layered all kinds of superb music overtop, you've done your arranging, you take a break and you come back and you feel the whole thing is kind of muddy. Your super cool electro kick or snare are fighting with the synth pads. And you feel that familiar self-doubt creeping into your session.

Most mix tutorials concern themselves with making space in a mix in the frequency domain by subtractive EQing your tracks. This is still very important but...

A simple way to make a little more space is to shorten the drum samples. Think about it. If your big kick drum rings through for a 200ms, chances are it's eating a big chunk of your spectrum right up to time the next percussion hit is played. If you twiddle knobs on your drum software to make the decay faster then you'll can retain the sonic/musical characteristics of the drum hits while making space in your mix in the time domain. Now you have space between the hits for your musical genius to come through.

RIP Steve

I got the news this evening that Steve Jobs had passed. Hardly surprising, I coldly replied. I never had any dealings with him personally and the press was full of info/speculation about his health or lack of...  just another of the rich and powerful.

But that's grossly unfair...

As I sit and reflect on his legacy, I realize that his company's products have quite literally changed my life. That's not hyperbole.

Before my first Mac, I was a Linux guy. There were two Windows machines in the house (my wife's and my daughter's). One day, I received an email from my ISP saying that my machine was spreading viruses. That's impossible, I thought. I run Linux, dammit! So I setup a network trace and left it to run for a day.  Once every now and then my daughter's PC would email some virus to what read like a veritable who's who of open source (one of whom was the sender of the original complaint). I was mortified. And my response was harsh. From that day, the Windows PCs started running Debian. Oh the whining. Boo hoo, I want my Windows back. I can't play Windows Media. I can't this; I can't that. But I rulez with a ir0n f1st!

I am not a patient man. Supporting my family running Linux sucked giant donkey balls (thanks to my friend SM for that metaphor). But I soldiered on. Until one day...

I got a Mac. It gave me what I needed. A combination of a usable machine and terminal windows with a UNIX shell when things got weird (complete with useful developer tools).  Suddenly, I hacked on what I wanted instead of what was broken by a random upgrade.

It didn't take long to figure out that this was a supportable environment for the family. So as finances allowed, we became a Mac house. And I became a more relaxed patriarch; one with more free time.

Which leads to my profound finding of GarageBand on my first Mac... With that I again found a voice that I had thought was long lost. I am again making music. Started learning to play guitar. Pushed and enjoy my kids' playing (to the extent they allow [insert teen eye-roll])

And for that, I am forever changed.

To Steve and the incredible team that carries on, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I don't believe in heaven but if it's there, here's hoping that guys like Steve are shakin' shit up rather than resting in peace.

Random Surprise

Had a busy weekend came back to a message from a friend pointing me at this link, in which fellow alonetoner and great musician Joshua Wentz spotted one of my tracks playing on a website that mashes together police scanners from a user selected city with ambient music from Soundcloud.

Creative commons luminary Lawrence Lessig (and others) talk about remix culture. We typically think of that as something that is done deliberately by a human that carefully (or not) curates artistic sources for their  creative works. Personally, I hadn't considered that there might not be a human involved.  In this particular case, I think it works quite well. In fact, I've picked up my guitar and started making accompanying ambient noises...  a weird hybrid of a generative system and a human improvisor.  Neat.

Check it out for yourself at http://youarelistening.to/chicago.

Embracing Failure

Through the magic of twitter, I watched a video this morning that was by itself inspiring:


Milton Glaser – on the fear of failure. from Berghs' Exhibition '11 on Vimeo.

Even cooler is that this video is part of a series in which various accomplished people wax philosophical about the "fear of failure".

Now the specific wisdom imparted varied from speaker to speaker but one theme emerged and that was that failure was a good and useful thing that can aid in your personal development.  But as I watched these videos, I started reflecting on the word failure itself and how it applies in music (or perhaps in any art).

Indeed, how do you fail when nobody is listening?  Without an audience, how do you define failure?  Is it simply falling short of your "killer taste"? (thanks Ira Glass)  And let's say you invest some energy in finding and developing an audience.  Is failing to find fame and fortune a failure of your art or a failure of your marketing efforts?  I have no answers (but it's a good thing I'm not seeking fame and fortune).

When my thoughts start to meander on these big subjects, a little voice in my head says, "just shut up and make some music."  As for failure and the lessons it brings, I'll get back to you when I've learned something.

April Fools?

So I haven't really advertised them but I do have some basic principles for this blog.  One of them is to not be (too) negative. The world is full of haters and I don't need to add to it.

Today, I'm going to break that rule and perhaps simultaneously ensure my gear reviewing career never starts.

I receive a bunch of gear spam from a bunch of gear makers because I, like you, lust after gear. But today I got something very... well you decide:

(full product link)


Seriously? What the fuck. And iLok required?

...

Now that my jaw has recovered from its meeting with the floor I find myself asking, who is the target market for such products?

Really, I'm curious. Obviously, there's another corner of the planet that I never knew existed let alone knew anything about.

Radiohead - Part duh.

A while back, I wrote about the new Radiohead record (Of Limbs and Kings) and made the observation that it always takes a bunch of time to appreciate their material. Corollary to that it that appreciation can often come in surprising ways...

Yesterday I was browsing around in a used record store, on the shops sound system, Thom Yorke was singing. Was really groovy. The song... couldn't place it. Walked over the the section with the Radiohead CDs, thumbed through them. Only one expensive thing I didn't recognize. Already own everything else. What was it! It continued to drive me crazy and finally I approached the counter and asked the young hipsters there, "Okay, I feel like a complete loser even asking this so go easy on me but what are we listening to?" The answer was polite but shocking nonetheless. It was the last track on the King Of Limbs record. Gah! Something I pre-ordered, prepaid and downloaded the day it became available!

Sigh. #latetotheparty

My iTunes listening history did provide a hint. Prior to today, every track but the last two had received 7 listens. The last two had only 4. Hmmm.

Oh well, better late than never. Thanks to the nice guys at The Beat Goes On for not being too snotty about my mental acuity.

Sad Day

Today I heard some news that I knew was coming but was shitty all the same.

Yesterday, Derek K Miller, known to me as a co-host of the Inside Home Recording podcast, passed away after a knock down drag out brawl with cancer.

In the end he tapped but not without a touching farewell.

Death sucks giant donkey balls.

But That's Cheating!

The haters...  I've heard haters hating on singers because of their use of technology.  Not fair, really.  Why should instrumentalists have all the fun.

The video above, part of some marketing fluff (but interesting and cool nonetheless) by tc electronic shows what's possible in real time with vocals.  Holy crap.  I knew about pitch correction but real time harmonization (playable!).  Colour me impressed.

Hate all you want and when you're done accept that this is pretty cool.

Wonder what it would sound like on guitar?

When Two Worlds Collide

For a long time, I have had a split personality when making music. I either start playing with synths and go wherever that leads or I start with my guitar and explore that. Of course, guitar occasionally garnishes the electronics. But the approaches feel very different and separate.

Intellectually, I know this needn't be the case. Intellectually, I know that synths have oscillators (or some other sound source) that gets heavily processed. And I know something about that processing.

About a month ago, in a chat I verbalized that a guitar is really just six oscillators that get passed through a similar (but constrained by convention [and superstitions/biases/etc]) set of processing tools or modules.

Until recently I hadn't actually acted on that line of reasoning. One day I was fooling with Absynth (prodded by some tutorial ware that floated by in the RSS stream) and I remembered that you can use it as an effect. So in the preset browser, I selected effects, picked up the guitar and started exploring. Wow, some really out there stuff. A completely different and new pallette. I then tried the same with FM8.  And then Reaktor. And then my head exploded.

I have years worth of things to explore. And I'm stoked.

So look in again in your toolbox. Maybe there's a way to connect things that you hadn't considered before.