Super Power

Is it a superpower, the ability to be surrounded with love and good things and still feel an underlying ... sadness, or melancholy?

It's neither a happy Christmas nor a blue one, but both at once.

I saw that a dead friend's just-bereaved husband was signed on to another web utility this evening. Were the feelings of worry and regret that it's his first Christmas without his partner really about him, a man I've only met once? Or am I just casting about for something to justify or make sense of a sense of loss or bereavement that was already there, that I brought in with me? And was that sense of loss about my friend? Or something else entirely?

People have been dying for millions of years. I've lost loved ones before. And yet this year it's as if I *just* woke up to mortality. And it has colored this whole season. Even the joys are in relief against it.

I think some good comes of this. I suspect I will take this and allow it to sharpen my sense of what's good in the world and how precious it is.

Right now, however, I'm all too conscious of how precious things feel that way partly because there is a deep, bad emptiness yawning under us.

I don't know whether I'm foolish for thinking about this so much, or whether I should be thinking and feeling about it even harder.

So this is Christmas.

Snow

The snow is coming down gently and beautifully today.

It was unexpected and I'm not sure I like the fact of the storm. But as a visual experience it's nice.

Routine

It's good, every now and then, to vary the routine.

I'd have to check to be sure, but I suspect I was starting vacation out of town, this time last year. Now I'm here in the office, and each day the place fills up with people a little later. The early mornings are a little quieter. It's a good thing.

Seismic, Quantum

A number of my LJ pals are feeling a need to step back from it lately.

Could just be the season. Lot of people with SAD.

I can't help but recall, though, my mother, and how after her father died ... that seemed kind of like the beginning of the end of my parents' marriage, in retrospect. Death sometimes brings a kind of focus. Figure out what's important and see if you can do better at holding onto it. Figure out what's damaged more than your power to fix it, and see if you can let it go.

I know I've lost patience with a number of things about internet interactions that I used to have very large patience for.

Some of it is definitely the season. I know my own cycles.

I've seen a lot of death this year, though. I suppose it's made me more patient about some things and very much less patient about others.

I dunno. Feels like a seismic, or quantum shift going on.

Snow Blower

I think research into more eco-friendly snowblowers would be a good thing. The new one we got makes lots of noise and I'm sure it's burning all kinds of nasty things into the air.

On the other hand, in the course of the last forty-five minutes I cleared our walkway, at least a car width in our driveway, and the sidewalk in front of not only our house (which has a long frontage) but the next two or three houses down the street. Thus enabling our legally-blind housemate, or the new mother next door, and various other people (the mailman, etc) not to kill themselves, which also has social costs. This snowfall is supposed to turn to sleet and rain by later today. It may be a solid block of ice by tomorrow. A snowblower, even one putting bad gases into the atmosphere, feels preferable to heart attacks or massive head injuries or dangerous falls of other kinds.

Yay technology.

Leading

The idea of leading by example is doubly presumptuous.

It presumes people need to learn something.

It presumes they can.

I don't know if my behavior is *consciously* guided by this principle much, but I know it's an element of many things I do, if I stop and inspect my motives clearly and dispassionately.

I need to stop it.

LiveJournal

Well. Seems LiveJournal has been acquired by a company based in Russia.

Although I am partly of eastern European/Russian descent, I'm not entirely sure that this bodes well.

So, la la, here's a post on my OTHER blog home. Which I will see about linking to from LJ.

Hm. ;-)

Work In Progress

Events conspired to slow me down a bit since my last post; my studio (which is also a guest bedroom of sorts) was getting overcrowded and I had to put some time in reorganizing it. It's all too easy to obsess over the work and spend a lot of time without making significant progress, so sometimes a break for other priorities is a good thing. I moved one major piece of furniture out of the studio, which opens up more space, and finished painting it (a job I started several months ago but was completing in slow stages; this time I made sure to *finish*).

Also lost a couple of days due to weather; the studio's on the third floor, we've never finished adding all the additional wiring we need, and thus we have to be careful how many air conditioners we run on that floor so as not to overload the circuits. The studio doesn't have one of its own yet, so on really hot days it's too much to deal with.

Oh, and I've been rehearsing for an upcoming gig with my band Lilac Ambush. That takes priority.

That said, I've gotten a few things done over the last couple of days, including re-tracking guitar parts for a song I wrote a couple of weeks back called "A Lesser Mistake." This tune's in 3/4 time and is my attempt at an anti-romantic song, i.e. the kind of song that takes love as a serious topic but also pokes a bit of fun at it. A friend of mine who's heard it said it reminded him of Andy Partridge from XTC; I won't say who *I* thought I was ripping off but Andy Partridge is certainly in the same general arena. So that's a compliment.

I don't know if it's a matter of my own timing, or the playback not being quite in sync with the recording track (I can imagine the hardware and software creating a bit of a lag), but on the guitar track I laid down with strums on the "one" beats, about 90% of the strums were just ahead of the beat, almost always by the same amount. Late last night I decided to go ahead and listen to how it sounded if I shoved them the 1/32 or 1/64th later (I didn't check--it was a very small adjustment and I had to turn off grid-snapping in order to accomplish it--maybe it was 1/128th) that they needed to go. Yes: a discernible difference, they now fall in line with the drums and the vocals just a little better. Strangely, the strums were a little *late* during the first chorus. This was all one take, so I had to split the track and adjust that timing separately.

Part of me thinks "cheating with studio trickery, I need to get my timing down." The other part of me notices, "Hey, I did an entire song in one take, and even if my timing was off, it was mostly CONSISTENTLY off." Would not have been true six months ago. Although I did have to go back and fix one entire bum chord as well--but it was mid-song and I recovered from it. I'm definitely getting better.

For posterity, here are the lyrics to the song in their current incarnation. The verse chords are B, E, F#, A (twice); the choruses are B, G#m, F# (twice), and the break is ... um, B E Db twice, then B E Cm (I think--it's meant to be a strange chord, it supports the line about singing out-of-key, ha ha) and then B E F#.

"A Lesser Mistake"

Love is romantic
And terribly brief
Love is gigantic
Quite beyond belief
You blow it a kiss
It disappears in a puff
You fill it with dreams
And it stomps off in a huff

But I'm looking for
Something slightly less boring
And not quite so huge
I'm on the make
For a lesser mistake
And I want it with you.

What if love could be smaller
Less easily bruised?
What if love was recycled
Reduced but renewed?
No calamity could touch it
It would be much too quick
It could weather the seasons
When I'm kind of a dick

So I'm looking for ...

I'm taking the piss
Out of domestic bliss
'Cause it's really a chore
When your mate comes home late
And wants dinner at eight
And commences to snore
There's no heaven in love
And the angels above
Cannot sing in its key
So abandon all hope
Gimme just enough rope
And come move in with me

I will make you a promise
Only good for today
I'll be something like honest
Yeah, quite true in my way
And if you like me tomorrow
I might promise again
We've such time as we borrow
Beg, steal, iron, or lend

'Cause I'm looking for
Something deep and enduring
One day at a time
I'm on the make
For a lesser mistake
More concrete than sublime
Yeah I'm looking for
Something slightly less boring
And not quite so huge
I'm on the make
For a lesser mistake
And I want it with you.
I want it with you.

Past Weekend

I did a bunch of recording over the past weekend, mostly vocals. The house is currently empty but for me (the rest of the folks are on vacation) which made it a good time to get things done. Once or twice, the ring of a phone a couple of rooms away was faintly audible, but it was never in a take I really wanted to keep in the first place, so no harm done.

There are times when I wait for inspiration to strike before getting into the studio; more often, when I don't get into the studio it's because I've had a long day at work and don't feel motivated about anything, rather than lacking creative inspiration specifically. I mention it because one thing I keep learning is this: the work itself constitutes one form of "inspiration." There's a pretty clear pattern in which working tirelessly on a vocal track for Song X or Song Y, or a guitar track for Song Z, eventually bogs down, and suddenly the creative juices *demand* [with appropriate foot-stomping] to be let loose on something else. Quite often, the resulting noodles or experiments wind up being the nucleus of the next song. Sometimes, those are the songs that come together the quickest and fastest .... and sometimes songs written quick and fast turn out to be the best ones, as well.

There's an obvious risk to allowing oneself the freedom to go off-task in that way: one might find oneself continually distracted by the latest shiny, new chord progression or melodic/lyric fragment, and never really finish any of them. I suppose I court that risk: I have a *lot* of unfinished songs, many of which were the Obsession du Jour a few months or a few weeks ago. The purpose of getting into the studio this past weekend, with the family away, was to get closer to finishing a few of them (although "finishing," when one is an amateur producer/engineer, is akin to Zeno's Paradox: six months from now, my best efforts to date will probably sound "unfinished" to me. but that's okay)

Since I was getting quite a bit done--having planned ahead and made a LIST of songs I intended to work on, and then marching through those songs in an orderly fashion, laying down better guide vocals and/or takes I intend to keep, consistently through the weekend--I let myself go a few times.

Not surprisingly, I have a new "favorite song I'm working on."

The best thing is that it's in 3/4, and while working on it I think I've figured out another song (the new favorite from two weeks ago) whose timing was confusing me.

Meanwhile the vocals I did over the weekend are decent, by and large. I have some production decisions to make before declaring the songs "finished," but I have much more to go on.

Vocals Week

I've got a show in a couple of nights (with my other band), but after that, it's time to hunker down and do some vocals. The rest of my household will be away for the next week and a half.

Since I record at home, it's sometimes convenient to wait until the house is empty before proceeding. I have gotten increasingly comfortable singing in front of others ... not only live, where there's a security blanket of loud sound around you, but when tracking songs, which is much like a capella for anyone nearby who isn't wearing headphones. Still, it's psychologically easier to try things out and experiment with an empty house. Fewer interruptions, too.

Time to consider which old songs might need better vocal takes and get the current crop into shape.

Acoustic Distortion

I plugged in my new acoustic/electric a couple of nights ago to fiddle with the sounds I can get out of it when it's plugged into my MicroCube amp. Not long after, I found myself strumming wildly and belting out some of the songs I'm working on lately at higher-than-usual volume and with timbres I don't usually bust out.

It has crossed my mind recently that I am likely to become a kind of singer-songwriter folkie who happens to feature more synth and programmed beats than normal. Add in the fact that distorted acoustic guitar can get slightly hardcore and hm.

I suppose I shall have to start denying that I am "emo" at some point.

Musical Taste

A friend of mine on another blog site posed a question about his own musical taste: was he okay for liking a pop group that is currently getting a lot of attention, or was he just giving in to media hype (even though he doesn't really tune in mainstream media a lot, he was still aware that this band would be in his face if he did). Was he just a sucker for certain choices of chord progression, instrumentation, or production? And so on.

I've redacted the name of the band so as to make my point more general. This is what I replied:

****

I think personal taste is a really good thing. Just because people can disagree about it doesn't mean someone's wrong. I used to get flak for my musical taste; these days I often get strokes for it. My taste hasn't necessarily changed--I'm more familiar with a variety of things than I used to be, but I'm still applying the same standards of "what I like" and "what pleases me."

As for music theory--a LOT of pop music is based on a limited palette in terms of chord progressions and so on. There is still room for tremendous variation. If we picked apart some of $band's songs, I bet we'd find they have the same chord progressions and instrumentation as other songs that sound NOTHING like that. Music is fractal: permutations of simple rules can yield very complex results.

As for marketing: I've played on the bill with a lot of bands working territory similar to $band. In general it's not my favorite thing, but there *are* noticeable differences between the bands who have a better knack for songwriting and performance and those that don't. The suck factor is that the very *best* band, musically, doesn't always get the industry push behind it. The saving grace is that the bands that do get turned into stars are usually at least second or third rate ... rather than fifth or tenth rate. And for all I know, $band really could be the best of their ilk.

It's true that a lot of bands get sent into studios without their songs finished or their skills honed, and studio trickery rescues them ... but even then, all that means is that *someone* in the food chain had musical talent. Even if it was the producer. ;-) You can't rescue music at the touch of a button if you don't know *which* button you should be using.

In short: like what you like. If there are *other* kinds of music you enjoy, listen to those too. And if it's crap, and even YOU decide it's crap after a while, well, treat it like an internet crush on a hot $person who turns out not to be "all that" once you get to know them. You're not wrong to be attracted to pretty surfaces, even if you also wind up wanting depth.

Progress

There's no short cut to making a good piece of music. What there are, are genres that take more or less skill as a player or composer, and audiences that will be more or less interested in untrained or semi-trained performers.

But one still has to put the time in. Even naive musicians who focus on simple song forms get better with practice. And all the tools in the world, all the shortcuts and technological tricks, don't entirely stand in for labor and sweat. It's more that they maximize what one's able to do with the labor and sweat.

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours laboring over a MIDI track for one of my bands. My band mate had composed the source track the way he often does: by playing a drum machine "live" into software and creating loops from it. He built up these layers and then put various synths and guitars over it. Eventually it fell to us to reprogram all that into the synth workstation we use for live performances. (Yeah, we could probably play it directly out of his software but he isn't entirely sure how to make that work. And we like the MIDI workstation better).

Problem is ... my band mate doesn't always quantize very strictly. The positive effect of that is that his work has a looser, more organic feel. The downside is, it's more difficult to work other stuff alongside it.

When we laid the tracks into the work station, he insisted (for simplicity's sake) on working out the exact time stamps where the beats occurred in the software and translating those to the synth. Which is great if the start points of the loops match up with the downbeats. In this case they didn't.

Upshot: once in the synth, *nothing* fell on the first tick of each measure. It was all offset by some amount.

A dotted sixteenth, I'm pretty sure.

Rehearsing the song has thus been a bit of a chore. It's not that one "can't" sync to a rhythm that doesn't fall right on the measures, it's just that it puts you to extra work. The synth does this really nice thing of flashing a red LED on the "1" beat and a green for all others ... so in 4/4 you get "red green green green" and you know where you are. Except on this song where red meant "something will be happening in a little bit." ;-)

Anyway, yesterday I worked it all out, and as I suspected, the rhythm patterns were mostly in a simple 4/4 time, in fact a lot of things fell on ordinary quarter or eighth-note intervals, barring some syncopated cymbals and some toms in funny places. There was a definite kick drum pulse and putting the first of those beats on the "1" beat forced everything else into place rather neatly. Exactly what we probably would have realized long ago, if I'd won the "argument" with my band mate about moving his loops around in the software so that something--anything!--lined up with "1."

:-)

Funny how much easier it is to play my synth part live over the rhythm track, now that it's nicely laid out.

Once done with that, I set to work on a backing track for my solo project. The melody is in F, kind of, but mixolydian mode, or maybe it's really a G aeolian--and that's a result of my time in a melody composition class via Berklee College of Music a few months ago. It's not that I couldn't have stumbled on a Gm-Bb-F chord progression on my own, but fact is, the training I got in that class has made composition a lot faster and smoother. I had some of the main chord progression pads and rhythms for the verses and choruses already programmed, so I moved on to working on the bridge, repeating the verse and chorus where needed, and making the drums more interesting.

I'm getting a better sense for when to add additional instruments and when to turn things down or subtract them, also. The bridge has some nice piano filigree now, added pretty much spur of the moment. Not only is coming up with such a thing on the fly a bit of an advance, so is laying it down so quickly. Yeah, I used the input quantizer, but my playing would have been decent without it.

I even worked out what the chords ought to be for an old bass line I put down on the synth ages ago .... which should both let me work on melody next, and clues me in about where to go with the chorus.

Nobody would mistake this work for that of a highly-schooled musician, but it's credible considering where I started. The tools definitely help me make the most of my efforts, but the difference between what I could tell the tools to do for me now, versus what I could have done even a year ago, is noticeable. That's the difference time and practice make, even with all this technological assistance.

How Music Sounds

What's the old line: writing about music is like dancing about architecture? ;-)

The one big fault I can find with Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life, which I finished t'other night, is that it didn't give me much clue about how any of the bands sounded. I am familiar enough with hardcore and punk and emo and postpunk to catch the flavor of it. But what Azerrad's most interested in is the social environment bands existed in and/or created around them.

Writing about the music itself would be much harder, and potentially less rewarding. But it's too bad one doesn't see that kind of writing more often. I suppose part of the drawback is that you might have to use more music theory geekspeak, and so many people aren't really familiar with that any more. I certainly wasn't up until a few years ago.

For instance, who knew that so many songs on 69 Love Songs were in very standard 1-4-5-style chord progressions. Not me. If I'd sat down and thought about it, I might have realized: that intense singability that many of them have might have suggested that Merritt was using a lot of standard song architecture. But the variety of instrumentation and melody and the different voices he builds on that has the effect of concealing or distracting from it, at least for me.

Someone on the web (I'm not going to paste the link, being lazy--it's easily Googlable) has created a chord archive for a big chunk of Merritt's work, so I downloaded the pages for 69 and i a while back and printed out some of my favorites. Which is what got me thinking about the standard-pop chord progressions therein.

Funny: this song with a 1-4-5 or 1-6-4-5 chord progression is a country song, while this other one, same or similar chords, is cabaret, and this one is synthpop.

Off the top of my head, I guess Azerrad got me most interested in Husker Du, Beat Happening, and maybe Minor Threat and the Minutemen. My brother was heavy into The Replacements, so I've heard more by them .... I can honestly say, I feel like they "should" grab me more than they do.

But since it IS hard to talk about how music sounds, and since Azerrad only does that fitfully, I guess I may have to dig up some actual albums by those folks.

Smarter Drums

A friend turned me on to the 33-1/3 series of books about classic rock albums; I'd heard about them in general but hadn't had time to check them out until he gave them high marks. I can't locate a copy of the one I most want yet (the one on 69 Love Songs) but I picked up the ones on Unknown Pleasures and Doolittle, which are both good reads.

The Joy Division one, in particular, is helping me think through some production issues with my own music, particularly with drums.

I've known for a long time that drums get multitracked in interesting ways in professional studio recordings. The thing is, programming drum tracks can be kind of hard, especially if you're a non-drummer and/or programming neophyte, as I am. Old-school drum machines like my Roland DR-570 (I think that's the one I have) have clunky interfaces by modern standards, and if you aren't skilled enough to lay down beats live-ish, then you're stuck quantizing them in beat by beat, instrument by instrument. Tedious!

As good as you can make the results, they're better suited to live performance than to studio tracking. Unless you want your drums all on one track.

Modern platforms like my Roland Xa have a bewildering plethora of percussion samples ... maybe too much. The programming interfaces are better. But it still helps if you know what you're doing, and if you don't have to lean too heavily on quantizing. My live playing has gotten better, but I'm still not great. I've picked up a little knowledge here and there but I'm not a great beat programmer.

It's still easiest to do it all one one track, too.

If you move over to a laptop/desktop, as simple a tool as GarageBand will get you up and running with nice MIDI drum loops, or with longer (non-re-programmable) rhythm samples. Because they're loops and because the programming interface is loop-oriented, you can lay out long drum tracks much more easily. Copy/paste, or drag a loop to repeat, and you're in business.

It's still tempting to do it all on one or two tracks, pan them a little, and rush off to all the other instruments you're dying to record, though. You know: the instruments you understand better and can play more accurately. ;-)

Even so, GarageBand has proven to be a great tool for figuring out what to program on my Roland, for live performances. For my recent live show, all of the best beats were just matters of my taking GB tracks (mostly MIDI loops, but some of the sample loops as well) and reprogramming them, quantum by quantum, with similar-sounding Roland samples. Some of them came out really great.

Still, I've known for a long time that sooner or later, if I wanted my recordings to sound better, I was going to have to tackle rhythm programming and recording more systematically.

The Unknown Pleasures book talks a bit about Martin Hannett's various studio manipulations of Joy Division's sound. Among other things, there's talk about his use of digital delay (then a newish tech) and of his running Stephen Morris's drums through mikes that fed a single amplifier far away in a bathroom and thence into another mike, to get a particular quality to the sound.

Without going that far, it just confirms some of the stuff I've been hacking with lately, if not in the details, then at least in the concept: play around with it, take risks, listen to the results, hear what you get.

It's dead easy to pull a drum loop around in GarageBand and let it run, but after a while it sounds repetitive in a bad (rather than good) way. What to do? A couple of weeks ago, I multitracked a loop I liked, copying it into the same measures on four or five tracks. Then I deleted all but one instrument from each track. Then I panned and set levels on the tracks individually.

Just as one suspects they do in real studios when they have enough tracks.

It made an immediate difference to the track by opening up the aural field left to right. It seems as though things like the hi hats or shakers and such, are particularly good to pan harder left or right, they open up a good deal of space.

So I've been spending some time taking some of my favorite GB loops (or even ones I don't much care about) and dis-articulating them into pieces, instrument by instrument. Next I'm mixing and matching them, seeing what pieces that didn't originally go together might nevertheless work nicely together.

I'm also assigning them to different sets of samples than they usually start with, just to hear the difference it makes. Some things that sound like really boring 1980s rhythm tracks (and hey, I love the 80s, I always go for those ... but they can sound a little dull) sound much fresher with hip-hop or techno-style instruments.

Music and Gender

I've been reading Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life, about several bands in the punk/indie scene of the 1980s.

It's funny how gender does and doesn't make a difference in music. Not to mention how we define gender.

Azerrad finds it worth noting that Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon was one of the few women in the indie scene at the time SY started. He's entirely correct to do so, too.

The scene featured a lot of loudness, a lot of aggression, and fair amount of anger. In part, that's because the bands were all reacting to the world around them, which was definitely anger inducing. But it's interesting how the anger and aggression dovetail with the fact that the scene was so heavily by men and for men, too.

Azerrad notes that Bob Mould and Grant Hart (of Husker Du) being gay was an open secret in the indie world, but it didn't matter because a) they played loud, and b) they didn't foreground their sexuality in their music (at the time). What if they'd played loud and foregrounded being gay, though? Would it have been as bad as being .... straight and quiet and not angry?

Azerrad also notes that one interesting thing about Steve Albini's Big Black was that although drum machines were not new, most bands used them in ways that made them sound wimpy. Whereas Albini made them sound .... not wimpy.

It's hard not to read all of this as: don't be "girly." Even if you're gay, be a tough guy. Worst thing you can be is soft. If you're a girl, be one of the tough ones.

I have almost half of the book still to read. The bands Azerrad profiles are all interesting and different from each other; maybe when we get to Beat Happening, it'll be okay to be "soft."

Every now and then Azerrad talks ultrabriefly about production techniques various bands used, and I make mental notes for future reference.

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