Tribrix - I make stuff

Don't Kill Yourself (honestly, that's all this is about)

2012-08-24T11:53:00.000-04:00

I just learned of the suicide of yet another close friend of mine. I'm mad, hurt, and so, so, so sad. Part of me thinks, "I don't get it, how do you get that low? How does not existing anymore seem preferable to your troubles?"

Of course, my two friends who killed themselves believed in God and an afterlife. So, in their minds, they were not ceasing to exist, but just changing planes in the great jetway of the cosmos. But I don't get that either. Doesn't every belief system preach that killing yourself is a one way ticket to pain and suffering. Surely an eternity of suffering is worse that trying to figure it out here. Right?

I'm back to where I don't get it.

Obviously, after you learn something like this, you mind goes looking for clues, "could I have foreseen this?" prevented it? Were there signs?

Of course there were fucking signs. Everyone has their bad days, the key seems to be getting past the bad days. A super long string of bad days or a few super bad days seems to bring out the urge to live no more. I'm sure everyone has had at least that in their life, even if they never thought of taking their life.

I never got to say good bye.

In 2008 I learned that one of my dearest friends, O, had killed herself in 2007 after a long bout with Schizophrenia. We'd been estranged for many years, but I always imagined us together as old people, as friends or lovers, once all the other stuff was out of the way, careers, kids, the things that can get in the way of living.

I'd been searching for O for a long time and the internet always held promise, but I never figured out how to use it effectively. She was private and paranoid, even when I knew her, so it was always going to be hard to find her, plus at least one other person shared her name and career path, making searches more difficult.

I eventually had the idea of looking for her sister and was talking to said sister on the phone within a day of finding her. If I'd thought of that a year earlier, I could have spoken to my friend, as she would have still been alive. It was my belief in Facebook that lead me to look for O's sister. I truly feel, in the Facebook era, you can locate anyone, as long as their name is unique enough. By contrast, good luck finding the John Smith you're looking for.

Hearing of O's demise I felt robbed of my future with her. She was a fighter. I couldn't believe she, of all people gave in. Still, there were those signs, the paranoia. Part of me was not surprised at all. It seems 911 was the trigger for her downfall. Evacuated from her home she took the attack personally, internalized it, and never really came back to reality, at least the reality we all accept and know. It seems she'd never forgot me either, meaning, I could have made some difference, maybe not "the" difference, but some.

Yesterday, I learned of the death of my mentor, who killed himself decades back, though, as I said, I'm only just learning of it.

G was my counselor at camp the last year I was able to attend. He was magical and magnetic, everyone was drawn to him and uplifted by his optimism and good cheer. Being the oldest of his campers he made me his unofficial assistant counselor, since he hadn't been assigned one. I'd always wanted to get to know G better, but fate put us in the best possible position to become friends. In time my great respect for him was returned as he seemed to take a liking to me too. My camp session ended and I left, but my little brother was attending the next session, meaning I'd return a few days later, only to say hi really, but it allowed for another turning point.

One issue G had helped me cope with was a girl named L and the demise of my relationship with her. He didn't have a high opinion of her, so I couldn't figure out why I liked her so much. She was beautiful and she showed an interest in me, need I say more? But I didn't see it like that then, so in the day between my session of camp and my little brother's session of camp, I wrote out a seven page, college ruled, history of my relationship with L (which had spanned two summers and letters in between).

When we went to pick my brother up I asked G if he'd read what I wrote and our friendship took another turn because he was, as he described it, dumbstruck with the quality of my writing (I'm not going to say I've maintained that quality, as I haven't kept practice, lol). Not only that, but regardless of what he thought of my ex, L, he now understood why the relationship had meant so much to me. (On I side note, I now believe that my relationship with L was sabotaged by one of my closest friends who actually wanted to be my girlfriend, as she often relayed messages between L and myself, but that's another whole post which I'm not likely to write).

I think those seven pages convinced G to be pen pals with me, and we remained in regular contact for years, right up to his death, as I now know, but back then, his letters just stopped. I assumed we just lost touch, because I was moving a lot at the time (my father was in the Army) and I changed addresses three times the year he died, so it was easy to imagine letters getting lost when they stopped.

In those letters, G helped me so much. It was the darkest time of my life (isn't adolescence the darkest time in everyone's life). And I came the closest to suicide I ever did while we were writing. He's the one who first suggested Lao Tzu to me, and it helped so much. But now, I'm looking back on that, realizing, while he was helping me to stay alive, he was within months of taking his own life. Read on.

And this is the ultimate irony. G was the first one to tell me "it gets better", long, long, long before it was an internet meme. And, having guessed at the circumstances which lead him to take his life, I only wish I'd had the chance to tell him, "it gets better". Because it does.

Don't kill yourself!

Don't kill yourself!

Don't kill yourself!

Loops or No Loops with that EDM (part 1)

2012-08-07T12:18:00.000-04:00

Hate starting with an unattributed quote, but it's so good, I can't let it pass. Some designer in some documentary I watched once said, he didn't really know what he had designed until years after the fact. Because, he explained, for the first year a woman owns one of my garments, she wears it the way she thinks it should be worn, or the way she believes I think it should be worn. It's only after it's been in her closet a year that she begins to wear it the way she wants to, and it's only then, when I see it on the street, that I really know what I have designed, when my customer stops caring what I think.

I don't design clothes, but this characteristic he's talking about is pervasive when engaging in any creative endeavor and I think it is closely related to the 10,000 hour rule. I think it's especially true when it comes to new technology for creativity.

I first opened the music making program Garageband in 2005. I hadn't really made any music in about 7 years, when the PC running my midi system died. I had purchased a guitar in 2001, not with the idea of making music, but with the idea of learning how to play guitar. I practiced on and off, leaning scales and chords, not songs.

I opened Garageband because I needed music for a video. Once again, video was driving me to make music. I was curious to try Garageband, because I knew that even non musical people could make "original" music with it, and I was curious to see how that worked.

I had seen other programs for non musical people to make music with, but they were all too limited, in the sense that, everything sounded like it came out of that program, not like it came out of the "composer". I could quickly see how, in Garageband, you could make music with no skills at all, and how you could make something really original if you made unusual choices (say, mixing a classic rock acoustic guitar riff with a reggae drum pattern and a jazz organ loop).

At the time, I'd recently launched a business designing iPod products, but before that I'd really been concentrating on painting and photography. I had no plans to start making music as my primary means of creative expression, but I really liked Garageband and wanted to delve deeper into it, to see how good it could be, using it as it was designed to be used by non musicians.

I built a jazz track, using jazz and "non" jazz elements. Taking midi loops designed for one instrument, and assigning them to a different one. Using the same midi loop between two different instruments to have them "talk" to each other. As I built more tracks, my imaginary "band" started to take shape, the leader played the sax, the talented drummer played all styles (jazz, rock, electronica, reggae, you name it). The bass player played all three types of bass, acoustic floor, electric, and keyboard. And the guitarist could also double on the keys when needed. I knew where each member of the "band" would stand during their shows and placed them there in the mix when making "my" songs.

Funny to call these "my" songs, since I didn't write a single phrase of music for them. Thought I transposed and rejiggered some of the loops into new musical phrases, mostly they were melodies written by others, but in my songs, they became the leaping off point for some "improvisational" jams my virtual band performed.

I have a friend who really likes jazz, so I decided, at some point, I would do an entire album of these loop based jazz songs for him as a Christmas present. A one of a kind CD that he would have the only copy of, in the world. If Garageband was the designer's garment in my closet, the jazz album was my first 6 months with it. I was trying to use the program to the very limit of how I thought it was intended to be used.

The next 6 months saw me realize a dream I'd long had of doing a Christmas album that blended Rock and Electronic Dance Music. I love non-traditional Christmas albums and have a little treasure trove of them.

Now I felt like I was going to take Garageband a little bit outside of it's intended use. Employing the same methods I'd used making the Jazz album, I began to build my Christmas tunes. Of course, I couldn't use the musical loops in Garageband this time, because I needed traditional Christmas tunes. However, once I had the main melodies in midi form, I constructed the tracks exactly the same way I'd constructed the Jazz tracks, but leaned the style towards the rock/EDM hybrid I was aiming for. I was still using Garageband's loops for drums, though I had also found some additional sources of drum loops, which I was using as well. When I finished the Christmas album, I felt I had really used Garageband up to and past the point of its intended use. And that was important.

Because, along the way, painting and photography had become impossible to pursue, owing to the state of my apartment at the time. The business designing iPod products had reached a successful conclusion. And I had decided to try devoting all my free time to the making of music. I could see the possibility of doing original music in Garageband, and getting very good results, but I had to exhaust the program first. I had to use it to it's very limits before I could begin to go beyond its scope, which was necessary if I was to create some truly original music. Almost more importantly, this time, video would not be driving me to make music. It would exist for itself, a departure for me, a scary one.

To be continued.

The Challenge of the Challenger

2012-07-25T11:20:00.001-04:00

I just recently finished the video for I See You (I am Empty) and the making of the video went very smoothly, for the most part, hence I have very little to write about the experience. The most obvious problem I had making this video, which was obvious long before I even started, was that the main source was analog audio without a time code. This was exacerbated by the fact the the video was produced as a videoSong, meaning, the actual recording of the song had to be incorporated into the video. I didn't stand a chance of getting true sync for this footage. The sync is okay though, not actually too bad. I had to incorporate some cuts that weren't part of my original plan, because some of the imagery started to creep out of sync with the audio. By making a cut, I could re-align the errant images.

Another thing that was not part of my original plan was to make visual references to the lyrics (like when I say "Yugo" you see a Yugo on the screen). This came about because, after I started cutting away from the performances, I thought the video got a little dull. My original idea was that you would see each of the four tracks performed in their entirety, to really see how the song was made. Once I started cutting, I became selective and started cutting away more, to "justify" the necessary cuts and make them look more intentional.

Most of the added imagery was pretty much predictable and workman like, with one exception, the Space Shuttle Challenger. It was challenging, for sure.

You can actually download footage of the tragedy on NASA's website. I watched it a few times and considered including it. But it seems so wrong to me. I know I included a reference in the song, and that felt genuine, I mean, I remember it, it seems valid to talk about my experience of it. In contrast, it would be weird if I wrote a song about experiencing the Kennedy Assassination, since I wasn't yet born, unless I was working in some historical fiction context.

In referencing it, I'm still telling my story. But if I was to use the footage, suddenly, I'm no longer telling my story, I'm telling an American story about people who are not with us anymore. It stops being about the witness. And it seems wrong to do that in a song about a guy dating a robot. And if it's not wrong, it's very distracting, overshadowing the fictional drama I'm writing about with events that actually happened.

Since many of my visual cues are still images, I decided to go that route and the image of the shuttle I chose is not even the Challenger, but the Space Shuttle Atlantis. And rather than give it an abstract "flight" path like most of the other sprites in the video, I gave the still image of the shuttle a realistic path. However, at the top of the screen, when the lyrics describe the explosion, the image of the shuttle just fades away and disappears and it's so much more effective than the real footage would have been. IMO

They say necessity is the mother of invention, and I explained why I couldn't use the actual footage. But as a result of not using the real thing, I came up with something even better, for my purposes. The challenge of the Challenger, resolved.

Dave Smith and Roland are Geniuses

2012-07-19T16:37:00.002-04:00

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm going to midi convert my Korg Monotribe. Anyone who's not a musician probably just though, "what the hell does that mean"? The Monotribe is this really cool little analog synthesizer from Korg, whose main drawback is a tiny keyboard that is all but unplayable by adult fingers. Fortunately, the good people at Korg put a midi interface on the circuit board of the Monotribe, which allows you to modify the unit and connect a full sized keyboard, making the whole instrument much more useful.

It still doesn't get to the question of what mid is though. Using computer terms, midi is both hardware and software that allows musical devices to communicate with one another. The name comes from Musical Information Digital Interface. What makes it so useful is the amount of event based data that midi can transmit, almost instantly. And, although it was developed for musical instruments, it can be used to control any time based equipment, even old analog devices.

For example, years ago, if you went to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, mid day on a Tuesday and wanted to hear the organ, they would play you a little tape of the organ being played. It did not convey the scale of the instrument at all, only a vague approximation. Now, however, the organ is fitted with a midi controller, so they can record not the sound, but the performance data of any one who comes in a plays the instrument, and then they can play back that performance and the actual organ creates the sounds. With your eyes closed, you would not be able to tell if a human or the computer was playing the instrument. That's a big improvement over a silly tape recording.

If you ever saw the original production of Les Miserables, with that giant spinning platter of a stage where the action occurred, believe it or not, midi was controlling that platter. Midi is great for providing time based event data with extreme precision. If you've ever been on a motion ride at an amusement park, they are also controlled by midi. Some have speculated that one day it will be revealed that the space shuttle was midi controlled (but don't hold your breath on that one).

Of course, people who played computer games in the 90s have a very bad feeling about midi, perhaps with good reason. A lot of bad video game sound tracks in the 90s relied on midi and the default musical instruments that shipped with the computer or sound card. I have heard some of these and they leave a lot to be desired. However, midi is unfairly blamed as the culprit. I would say the fault lies more with poor orchestrations and poor instrument quality on the sound cards of the day. The beauty of the midi interface is you can apply the performance data to any instrument, a good one or a bad one, the instrument it was intended for or a different one.

Midi was developed jointly by synthesizer engineer Dave Smith and the engineers at Roland Musical Instrument corporation in Japan. There had been precursors to midi, which allowed data to be transfered between musical devices, but there were different standards and the amount of data was limited. The development of midi standardized the information so the equipment of different companies could be connected together. It also expanded the amount of event/performance data that could be captured. Now the system could not only request a Middle C note, but it could specify how loud that note should be, and request it to come from any number of available channels (different devices or instruments). Almost overnight musicians gained the ability to connect a bunch of electronic instruments together for a live performance controlled by a computer, which allowed previously impossible compositions to be realized.

As I mentioned before, back in the 90s I had a robust midi setup running out of my desktop computer. The sequencer (which typically manages and deploys midi data) controlled three different devices I had, two synthesizers and a Rompler module that played sounds sampled from real instruments with often surprising realism. I could compose in the computer by "writing" out notes, or I could input the notes by playing them on a keyboard. The sequencer could control all three devices simultaneously, allowing me to make rich music without playing a single note.

At the time even experts agreed it was a bad idea to run music through your computer. The power supplies and boards inside were very "dirty" and would create a lot of audio noise. Yet with midi, I could produce super clean sound, because the computer was only controlling the data, not the actual audio. I never really understood how this was possible, why the noise inside the computer didn't infect the instruments connected to it. Until I started to learn how to modify my modify my Monotribe for midi.

One of the items you need to perform this mod correctly is an "optocoupler", which I had never heard of, but understood instantly, it uses LED light to transmit data, and it's part of the original design of midi, as I understand it. Completely brilliant. Using light isn't just fast, but it also isolates the devices from each other, to avoid contamination of noise, hum even dangerous spikes that can damage expensive musical gear. This is why my post has the title it has, because the cleaver use of the optocoupler is one of the key elements that makes midi as good as it is, and less talented engineers would have skimped or skipped that crucial step.

I should tell you, I don't use wikipedia to write these things, so the facts I get wrong are facts that are wrong in my head. If I remember where it was I picked up one of these tidbits, I'll tell you, but for goodness sakes, don't assume any "facts" in these posts are actually true. My version of other people's lives may be wildly inaccurate, but generally, I'm here to tell a story or make an observation based on that understanding (true or not), and hopefully the veracity doesn't really alter the observation all that much. The previous story may not be true at all, I haven't verified it, not because I'm too lazy, but mostly because I'm too busy at the moment. Obviously, if large portions are untrue, it kind of blows the whole thing out of the water. Apologies if that is the case.

I Thought I Missed the Boat

2012-07-13T11:29:00.001-04:00

I love synth pop. For as long as I can remember. The first album I ever bought at a record store was Yellow Magic Orchestra's debut, which, being a Japanese import, cost almost three times the normal price of a record. My mom asked if I was sure I really wanted it. I still have it and still listen to it regularly. One of my all time favorite albums is Dare, by The Human League. It's one of the few albums I've owned in the three formats of my life (cassette, LP, and CD). However, I always felt I was born too late to make synth pop myself. By the time I started to make music in 1989, that ship had sailed, and I had only begun to learn my craft.

Flash forward 23 years, and I'm still a novice (but getting better, I hope). And my desire to create synth pop is as strong as ever, but with a twist. Thanks to Mr. Simon Holland's Bedroom Tapes project, I was thrust into the production of a synth pop tune. I was almost reluctant at first, because he'd precluded the use of guitar, and since I'd always thought I was too late for synth pop, I'd always included guitar in my pop songs (with rare exceptions). It's funny to say now, because I'm so on board with the "no guitar" aesthetic, but at first I was apprehensive.

Of course, the fact that it's 2012 means I would have a hard time convincing myself to create a whole album devoted to a genre that pretty much fizzled out almost 30 years ago. I kind of view it as a waste of time, we should live in the moment, the present, experience zeitgeist. But therein lies the true genius of Mr. Holland's project, at least as far as I was concerned.

What Simon really wanted was tape recordings made in the 1980s, not 2012 facsimiles. It was only out of kindness that he let such deceptions into his compilation, but he made a caveat, which was, he wanted it to really seem like the contemporary tracks had been made in the past. Not just sound like they were old, but also have a faux history and (if possible) old cassette box art for the submitted song. In short, he was requesting that even 2012 facsimiles of 1980s songs appear to be the real thing, in sound, pictures and provenance.

For some people, this might be an inconvenience. If all you want to do is make an 80s tune, it might be off putting to have to make some 80s style art to go with it. But I loved that part of the project too. In the end, it's was gave me the justification for producing a whole album of songs created in this manner.

Because, while it's a waste of time, to me, to make a group of 80s songs in the synth pop style in 2012, it's actually an interesting challenge to create an album that pretends to be from the actual 80s. For most people this would be some semantic difference, a trivial thing making no difference. Obviously, to me, it makes all the difference in the world. From "waste of time" to "worthy pursuit".

Because, for the months it will take me to complete this record, I will imagine it is the time of the early 80s again, immersing myself in only that music. It will be hard to ignore all the music that has come since, and it's influences, so I will not expend too much effort doing so. Instead I will just think about the music of the day and the days that proceeded (50s, 60s, 70s . . . ). And I will try to imagine, if I had been an adult then, what interests I would have had lyrically, and how to realize them in song form.

When you consider this approach, you can see it's very different than trying to make synth pop from a 2012 perspective. If I was making synth pop for 2012, it would have elements of Trance and Dub Step. And lyrically, I would have to reference the web and smart phones and all kinds of cultural things that didn't exist in the early 80s. And then, in being more of a handshake between past and present, it becomes a bit quaint or nostalgic. In making a "fake" artifact from the 80s, a collection of songs pretending to be from that time, it becomes less about being nostalgic and weepy for a past that is gone and more about trying to travel to the past in my present body, to be in the moment, when that moment is long ago.

If I was to make a sports analogy: It's not sitting around on the sidelines, drinking a beer with your high school teammates, remembering the good old days. It's more like suiting up with them and convincing the members of your old rival to do the same, playing the game, and keeping score. Not to pretend it's high school all over again, but to enjoy the game, fresh. (This is a thought experiment only, I am not responsible for the injuries of people actually attempting this and don't recommend you do so. Music is not a contact sport, so I am safe.) Like many analogies, this one is imperfect. Apologies.

But the real beauty of it all. I get to make synth pop. Ignore the mental hoops I'm making myself jump through, I finally get to make an album of synth pop without being self conscious of doing something "dated", because it's completely, intentionally "dated" and I'm not pretending otherwise, lol.

Teenage Dream or Four Month Nightmare?

2012-07-09T15:51:00.001-04:00

One of my friends recently asked how long it took to make my Teenage Dream VideoSong. It's so easy to answer, but it opens a whole panoply of memories for how it all transpired. I decided to record Teenage Dream because I'd been working on a video for Dancing with Myself for a year . . . and I was frustrated.

I started work on the video of Dancing with Myself in the Spring of 2010. One day on my lunch hour, coworker and fellow movie maker Stephen and I traveled to Spanish Harlem to shoot with my friend Cherie, who plays "the one who got away" in the video. The location was great, Cherie was great, the shoot went great, all was rosy.

When I was planing the shoot for Dancing with Myself, I was trying to figure out how to make an HD video without an HD camera, since I didn't have one and didn't want to borrow one for as long as it would take to shoot the video. I realized I could use still images in the beginning of the video, especially if they were still images of people being very still (naturally, sitting, etc). But I really wanted some live action too, so I came up with the idea of doing some rescan, as if one of the characters were watching the video on an old TV. Of course, this is only literally what we see.

In the Video, the TV is supposed to symbolize a kind of "box of memories" for this girl he lost. It's a technique I've used before, but this is the first time I had the character watching the TV, usually the TV is next to their head, like a thought bubble. I have to admit, the way I used it this time is a little more confusing, in terms of communicating what's going on.

Once the shoot in Spanish Harlem was finished, Stephen and I made the still shots for the opening sequence. A cardboard box stood in for the TV until the screen and dials were added later in Photoshop. Reverse shots of me watching the TV were also put in the screen as "reflections". Later still, footage of Cherie was added. Although lots of people could tell the footage was added, most mentioned the lack of a power cord as the element that clued them in, not the fact that it was merely a cardboard box on the ground.

So, I had the guy in the factory watching the TV, I had Cherie and I in Spanish Harlem acting out a little drama, but I really wanted something more, a performance element, the band, actually playing the song. But since Tribrix is essentially a one man band, the idea of a band performance was out . . . or was it.

I didn't have a green screen at the time, but I conceived of a way of using black screen to composite 3 moving images of me, to represent "the band". I wanted to mimic the lighting on the Police in their video for Every Breath You Take. If you set the shots up correctly, you can layer the three images together and create the illusion of having a whole band.

In the amount of free time and space I have, it was tough to arrange all of this, backdrop, lighting, camera setups. But I managed to shoot all three moving images of myself, playing drums, bass, and guitar. It had taken a few months but it looked like I'd be finished soon.

When I was working on my first music video, for the song Vice, I had discovered something interesting: digital devices have made time coding almost obsolete. In the old days, if you shot sound and images at different times, you could use time code to sync them up later. The time code would ensure that everything was chronologically stable. Without it, the audio and video tracks would drift apart in time, and people's lips would start to look like random rubber bands, almost like watching a movie that has been dubbed, except, it's not supposed to look dubbed, it's supposed to look synchronized.

My original plan for Vice was to do a flash animation, but there were so many delays getting that off the ground I had to forget it. Cheney's term as Vice President was coming to an end, and I wanted to do this video before that happened. I can't say if flash would have made the video better or not, but it wasn't an option. Instead of flash, I decided to go with a paper bag puppet for the singing and two After Effects animations for the "action" shots.

From a content perspective, it's a much more interesting choice. But I quickly learned that puppeteering is much harder than it looks. And ones hands and arms start to hurt quickly over multiple takes. Eventually I got some usable footage and started to edit it together.

I had not worried about time coding because it was a puppet, and I assumed if the lip sync was off a little, no one would notice, since it was a puppet. So you can imagine my surprise when I lined up the song and the visual puppet performance and they stayed in perfect sync for the whole song. I was shocked. It shouldn't be possible, yet it was working. I imagined Nagra was going to have a much harder time selling those $2000 tape recorders used for recording sync sound on movies.

The sound source for the puppet performance on Vice had been the cheapest little MP3 player you could buy. Not exactly "professional", sync ready, design. When it came time to record "the band" for my Dancing with Myself video, the most convenient source to lip synch to was a sony CD player I had laying around (the battery on my iPod needed replacing and the cheap MP3 player was MIA). CDs are digital, so I imagined the same rock solid sync ability as the cheap MP3 player. But I was wrong.

I don't know how, I don't know why, but the CD player drifted all over the place, chronologically speaking. It wasn't just playing the song too slow, it was playing the song with a completely inconsistent speed. Slowing down, then speeding up. I still wasn't worried though, remember, I was only working with guitar, bass and drums, so a little drift probably wouldn't be noticed. As long as I did a sync at the start of each lyrical stanza . . . or so I thought.

I spent weeks and weeks and weeks massaging this footage (which was easier than a reshoot), all to no avail. It was a mess, and not getting any better. Further more, for Christmas that year I got an HD camera and a green screen. A reshoot was in order, but I was in no mood to go back an work on it anymore. I decided I needed a change, some quick project to take my mind off the chaos of the current project.

Katy Perry's Teenage Dream was gaining traction and I really liked the song. Not just as a listener, but for some reason, I really wanted to record it. Who knows why these feelings hit us, but it hit me hard, and I wanted to do it while the song was still current.

I'd first heard the term "VideoSong" listening to an interview with the male half of Pomplamoose. I was intrigued and thought my Katty Perry cover would be perfect for doing a VideoSong. I mean, how hard could it be to record video while you recorded the song? Because, I had learned nothing from the Dancing With Myself experience.

My Teenage Dream video started off okay. I set up the camera and started performing the various tracks. It was actually going almost a quickly as a regular audio song. I figured, given the genre, I aught to work on the video simultaneous to the audio. And that's when I hit the first snag.

The footage was so, so, so boring. I mean snorzeville.

I had to start over.

When I first moved to New York, my roommate-to-be had a disco ball. We hung it up and I put a couple of lights on it. Then I added some Christmas lights, then some police flashers and a lighting controller. By the end we had gobo scanners and a huge assortment of other lights, all in our living room, all on with a single switch, computer controlled to pattern on and off with the music. It was like our own private nightclub, which was the point.

I decided to pull out the old lights and controller for my Teenage Dream video. If nothing else, at least I could spice up the video footage a little. I took a long time, but eventually I came up with a set up for the vocals. Other times, I used one of the gobo scanners alone.

Of course, setting all this up and re-recording, and making sure to wear something decent, and do something with my hair meant, recording a VideoSong takes a lot longer than recording an audio only song. In the end, my little side project to distract me from Dancing with Myself took four months. But I learned things doing it, so when I returned to finish the first video, it was completed quickly and I had the benefit of HD and green screen for creating my "band". I said I'd never do another VideoSong, but I'm already working on one for I See You (I am Empty). Look for it soon.

Lao Tzu and Copyright

2012-07-01T09:24:00.001-04:00

I'm not going to rehash a lot of info I've covered in previous blog posts. Regular readers know I am working on an analog tape project, recording songs on an old cassette four track, which will be an album or EP tentatively titled Retro Grade. I previous mentioned I had lyric ideas for about five songs so far. One of them, is a song based on the writings of Lao Tzu.

I'm not usually one to use existing works as the basis for my work, but I make an exception with very old and/or public domain works. Not only because I won't get into any legal trouble, but because I cannot possibly harm the artist, who must have been dead over 75 years.

Lao Tzu certainly qualifies, since his works are believed to have been written about 2500 years ago, though the exact date an authorship remain questionable. The Lao Tzu writings are useful in another respect too. They have been very important to me since I first read them when I was 14, so they fit the whole "retro" nature of the project, from my perspective, as they represent a part of my past.

I liked the Dao De Ching so much, I looked for potential companion works to read. Having discovered a (potentially apocryphal) story about Lao Tzu conversing with and teaching Confucius, I mistakenly thought the Analytics would be a great companion to the Dao De Ching. I could not have been more wrong, especially when Confucius writes so much about obedience to parents. This is not what a rebellious young teen wants to read.

That said, unfaltering obedience to parents doesn't pass the western philosophy smell test. What if your parent is a sociopath? Are you still supposed to be completely obedient. In Confucius world, you could have escaped a Nuremberg tribunal if the illegal and lethal order came from your dad. "I had to torture that queer, my father told me to do it." And you can't disobey your father. I exaggerate and I digress.

Unfortunately for me, I don't read ancient Chinese, so I am reliant on translators to access the Dao De Ching. And this is my Achilles heel. Because my whole life the translation of the Lao Tzu writings I've kept close has been the D. C. Lau translation from Penguin Classics. Unfortunately for me, this translation is only about 50 years old, too new to be in the public domain. Although the original text is free for everyone, a modern translation is not.

However, I suspected, given the ancient nature of the work, that it had been translated into English before. It might not have Lau's poetic touch, but it would still get the job done. I started at project Gutenberg, a great resource for public domain texts. But I found something even better. This site, were you can read 23 English translations at the same time. I'm totally blown away by it. I've never felt closer to the actual Chinese, which is a really good thing, if my plan is to turn ancient philosophical text into song lyrics. As it is. actually.

I love the Rashamon effect. In the movie, it leads to chaos, no one knows what has happened, because there are too many conflicting accounts. But what happens in Rashamon is an outlier. Normally, mutliple accounts get you closer, not farther from the truth. This is the genius of the wiki, though wikipedia manages to get it wrong, IMO.

Guessing how many jelly beans are in a jar, the crowd will be more accurate than any one individual. Unfortunately, the architecture of Wikipedia gives individuals the ability to edit the opinion of the masses. To say nothing of the fact, that the masses often misremember history.

But in the controlled world of translation of ancient texts, the different views get you closer, not farther from the truth. Which is perfect for me. If I'm to turn the writings of Lao Tzu into song lyrics. I need to know the "truth" of the starting point, before I start inventing and editing.

Tape 2

2012-06-21T04:30:00.000-04:00

The tape based album/EP has a name now: Retro Grade. Please weigh in if you love it or hate it. I love feedback, especially negative oriented, not because I'm some kind of masochist, but because disagreement is an opportunity to learn, and I hope learning is my greatest addiction. Keyword: hope.

And, I've started the second track, called "Tape 2" for the moment. A riff on "take 2", lol. Lame I know, I won't be booked in the Catskills for my comedy act anytime soon.

Basically, I have 6 lyric ideas for Retro Grade, and only two of them are wedded to melodies at the moment. Tape 2 may or may not be paired with one of those lyric ideas later, because, it started kind of by accident this evening.

Unlike I See You, which relied completely on "period" instruments I owned in the 80s, Tape 2 (so far) uses only modern instruments that sound (intentionally or otherwise) like early 80s instruments.

I'd been programming a rhythm and melodic loop on a Korg Monotribe. However, having not yet modded it to accept Midi in, I was very unhappy with the melody part. Incidentally, if you've ever wanted an analog monosynth, you owe it to yourself to check the Monotribe out. I was really looking forward to the Arturia Minibrute, but $500 for a single oscillator seems ridiculous and I reconsidered the humble Monotribe, which seems to do much of the same, plus it has a 16 step sequencer with three drum sounds. The midi mod is super easy, making it a "real" analog synth module for a tiny price.

All that is academic, what's interesting about the Monotribe is that it sounds so much like an early 80s drum machine if you use the drums sounds and the step sequencer. Like the Echo of Echo and the Bunnymen fame (okay maybe that one sounds more expensive), it totally has that vibe to it.

Fast forward. Tonight, I was playing around on the Micron, in my continuing effort to know my synths better. Going over the preset sounds again, I started to tweak a few, thinking about which ones might be useful on Retro Grade. In doing so, I was playing little riffs on the key board. When I got to a certain sound (I think it was "closet bass" whatever that means), I really liked the phrase I was playing and knew I had to record it before I forgot it (I'm still unable to write my ideas down in standard musical notation). But I needed a drum track to go with the bass line, and thought of the rhythm track I'd been working on using the Monotribe. I turned that on, got it going and played the bassline. A marriage made in heaven. They complimented each other so perfectly, and sounded so 80s, despite the fact that the instruments were decades too late for the party. With only a little effort, I laid down the rhythm track for Tape 2 and felt like the project was really on it's way, the sophomore effort having been launched and sounding really good so far. IMHO.

You Can't Do That (says who?)

2012-06-15T10:29:00.000-04:00

I started bar hopping when I was 15, mostly so I could go hear live bands. But I loved the social interaction with strangers that bars afforded too. Back in the 90s, I was sitting in a bar with a friend of mine and a bunch of his acquaintances, several of whom were in local bands.

At one point, one of them asked me, "Are you a musician too?"

I said, "no, I'm more of a composer."

He looked like I punched him in the face, "What do you mean?"

I explained, "I make music, but I don't actually play any instruments."

By that time, he was thoroughly confused, "How can you make music without playing an instrument?"

"Well," I started, "I use a sequencer inside my computer, which controls a synthesizer that outputs sound." (It wasn't really a synthesizer, it was a Rompler, but I didn't want to confuse him anymore than I had to).

"You can't do that." He was emphatic.

"What?" Now I was confused.

"You can't do that. You can't make music if you can't play an instrument." It was like I beat up his mother or something, he was so hurt and angered.

"Why?" I said, because not only could I do it, but I had done it, many times.

"It's not right. You can't make music if you can't play an instrument."

I didn't bother to point out to him that I could play an instrument, if I wanted. Nor did I point out that I could imagine compositions more complicated than what I could play, begging the question, are they destined to remain only in my head, locked up in the trash can of time, never to come out. His attitude, then as well as now, seems so foreign to me, I just can't understand it. Why does he even care what I do in the privacy of my bedroom (and we're not talking about sex here, lol).

Ultimately, a computer is a tool, like any tool. I suspect he thought the computer was doing the composing and I was just pressing buttons or something. To me that's like suggesting the hammer builds the house and the construction worker is just there to keep the hammer from falling on the ground. It's absurd, right?

On the other hand, the computer is a tool like no other. It can't create or think for you, but it can help you out immeasurably. It freed that music from my neurons. It didn't write it, but no other tool could have helped me get it out. In that sense, it's much more powerful than the hammer I mentioned before. And, as such, I started to get very suspicious of it, lol.

In spite of the incredulousness of that guy in the bar so long ago, I did decide to go back and start playing instruments again. There is a human quality to playing that computers lack. I love the mechanical drone of a drum machine, but I equally love the power and presence of live drums.

Anyone telling you you can't do something should make you ask "why"? But I guess sometimes when they tell you that you can't do something, what it really means is, you should just rethink it.

P.S. When I started writing this, I did not expect I would come out even slightly on the side of the jerk. Strange.

Analog Boy in a Digital World

2012-06-08T11:35:00.000-04:00

I have finished recording my first analog tape track in over a decade. I have even posted an early mix if you are interested:

<a href="http://tribrix.bandcamp.com/track/i-see-you-i-am-empty">I See You (I am Empty) by Tribrix</a>

I have learned so much, doing this project and I am committed to doing at least a few more analog tape songs.

Ihave previously mentioned how much more planning one needs to do, working with tape than with a digital audio work station. In fact, one of the things I'm least happy with, regarding this song, relates to a lack of planing:

Listening, you will note that the glockenspiel, once it comes in, continues to play, without rest, until the song is complete. I did not plan that. It's a result of how it was recorded. You may also notice that the glockenspiel shifts from the right side to the left side and back again. Each shift represents and different performance, which will be made clearer when I post video of the making of this song. As I recorded, I felt like I took many rests on the glockenspiel, but as a listener, it sounds like it plays continuously, because the different performances are all playing at the same time and the breaks were arranged to give it a continuous sound, I just didn't intend it to be so continuous. So, you might ask, why not fix it now? Well, except to fix it in the mix, as they say, there is nothing I can do, because all the synthesizer parts are on the same tracks as the glockenspiel (not including the bass synth, which is on the same track as the drums). This is very hard to describe in writing. I hope it is clear.

Another thing I noticed, recording the vocals: I forgot how frustrating it is to wait for tape to rewind. It's a short song, but it takes almost a minute for the tape to rewind each time. I made many fatal mistakes when I was recording the vocals, and my hand just got into the old habit of hitting "stop" then "rewind" instantly, as the mistake occurred. The rewind delay was like a punishment for bad behavior, and really motivated me to "get it right". Twice, I thought it was "good enough", only to listen on playback and hear something terrible. That was crushing, to think it's done and realize it's not even close. I stopped getting excited when I thought I had a good take, and just practiced patience. I tried to use the rewind time to take deep breaths and collect myself, but not my thoughts.

I don't know if you heard the thing I heard recently (probably on This American Life) about slumps, where great athletes and performers suddenly start to suck, and once they suck have the hardest time getting good again. What's interesting is the relationship of slumps to thinking. Psychologists believe these people can't get out of their slumps because they can't figure out how to turn their brain off, how to stop thinking. This seems so counter intuitive, on its face, but actually confirms something I've long, long, long believed.

I first took up golf in 1995. I should also mention, I haven't played it since 1997. What blew me away about the game, aside from the fact that it's got this huge proportional curiosity about it (a giant field with a tiny goal), was the only way I could play, was to clear my mind. If I thought for even a second about hitting the ball, I would miss it. If I thought about hitting the ball hard, I would miss it more spectacularly. The only way to hit the ball was look right at it, but stare past it and erase all conscious thought from my head. It was so Zen-like. I instantly understood why it was so popular. It's better than alcohol for making the worlds problems go away, never mind that one often drinks during or after play.

What was interesting to learn on This American Life was that the same holds true for Pitchers in Baseball and many other high performance physical tasks. If our brains start working, our performance suffers. Try to remember that the next time you see a post-game locker room interview. I always felt there was a huge amount of truisms and nonsensical BS in those conversations. I'm more sure of it now. If the athlete is doing their job, they shouldn't really be able to describe how they were able to achieve or miss their goal. Asking them to do so is really an insult. However, it's expected behavior, so most of them acquiesce, lest they appear rude or arrogant. It's a dance that I have a very hard time watching without cringing. But I digress.

As a musician, I find my golf strategy serves me well. The more clear my mind is, the better I perform. Of course, doing things this way, I may be closing myself off to emotional nuance that more seasoned performers (ie: people who know what the hell they are doing) are able to evoke. But, anytime I think about my performance while I'm doing it, the whole thing falls apart. Like thinking about fingering and strumming a guitar simultaneously. As soon as I allow the idea in my mind, I can't do it. I can only do it by ignoring what I am doing.

One could say that the analog tape is actually making me a better performer on more levels than one. I have to perform entire songs without mistakes and I have to maintain my clarity even as the tape rewinds, which would be the easiest time to "leave the zone", if I let it happen. Working in digital, you don't get the chance to "leave the zone" because you can keep recording, even after you make mistakes. A fact I've often used that to my advantage. The best part of my performance is usually in the middle of the song (I have inertial anxiety, I get nervous at the beginning and the end of the song). So, in a digital environment, I often record the lyrics out of order and combine different takes for the final cut. I'll put each part of the song (beginning, middle and end) in the middle and use a series of "middle takes". It's not remotely possible with analog.

to be continued . . .

P.S. If you haven't already, consider subscribing to this blog using the subscription tool on the right, then you will never miss any of these tremendously exciting posts.

A Compromise and Delicate Balance, Maybe, and That's Final

2012-06-06T10:46:00.002-04:00

As I wrote before about what I've been calling The Retro Project but which is actually an entry for Simon Holland (aka Carrillion)'s 80's Bedroom Tape Compilation my original intention for this cassette based song was to only include vocals by the Speak n' Spell.

Currently, I have used up 3 of the 4 tracks available to me. I like the song so far, but it sounds thin on content when I'm used to using 20-30 tracks for a song. If I worked with 4 tracks everyday, I'd have a different attitude, but considering what I'm used to, it's hard to adapt.

The only thing I had planned for track 4 was the Speak n' Spell. I've decided to crank up the Casio MT-540 again, which has a peculiar "sound effect" section, in that it contains sounds identical to the video game "Galaxian" in addition to the "natural" sounds that don't sound natural at all. I'm thinking to add at least one sound effect from there to the vocal track with the Speak n' Spell. But I still don't think it's enough. So I'll probably end up adding vocals of the traditional variety. I was originally going to use an old poem, but with the lyrics from the Speak n' Spell, I need something different.

As such I started working on some lyrics. I want to fill it with 80s references, to suit the theme of the project. Having recently seen Cars 2 for the first time, the first thing I thought of was the Yugo. Although the car was around for a little while longer, it's really a kind of mid 80s phenomena, meaning, my song is going to be a faux mid 80s song.

So, of course I had to have a shopping mall reference and I couldn't leave New Coke out, and given people's negative feelings toward that product, it's a negative reference. Keeping with the beverage theme, we also have some wine coolers.

I struggled to figure out which band to name check. I considered the Smiths and New Order, but settled on the Cure. I'd have preferred to go with New Order, but I needed something with two syllables. Such is the way with song lyrics (and poetry).

I didn't have one, because my family had an Apple IIe, but I knew a guy who ran a BBS at the time, using one of two Commidore 64s he had. BBS was a kind of proto internet for those who don't know. He also had two phone lines, one was dedicated to the BBS. Not to get too Geeky, I also included a cyborg reference, because the first Terminator movie had been recently released to much popular acclaim.

This stuff is all fine and dandy but I wanted to punch up the drama a bit, and what was more dramatic in the mid 80s than the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. I set the song's dramatic conclusion against the doomed space flight. Like Kennedy for an earlier generation, Americans always remember how they heard about the Challenger explosion.

One thing I really wanted to avoid was the kind of self-consciousness I witnessed in the movie The Wedding Singer, which did things like referencing a Van Halen breakup in retrospective faux foreshadowing. Nothing takes you out of the moment like those kinds of hindsight induced references. In contrast, I wanted to write lyrics that sound like they could be from the mid 80s but super timely. I did not want lyrics that sounded like they were written in 2012, as they were.

It's a delicate balance, actually. Of course, you'll be the ultimate judge of my success.

Why Tape?

2012-06-01T13:37:00.000-04:00

I was talking with one of my co-workers the other day, a younger guy who may have missed the days of cassettes and I was telling him about the retro project (see previous posts, like here). I told him I'd forgotten how difficult it was to work with tape and he asked the very logical question, "then why do it?"

Even as I've been reveling in the sound of analog audio, it's been in the back of my mind that no one is going to hear the difference. In fact, I'm sure a lot of people will be turned off by the hiss of the tape itself in the background.

I was talking to another friend, who's getting her masters in Electronic Media, someone infinitely more plugged in than I am, and she was lamenting the loss of film in movies. She could see why digital would be preferred for blockbusters, since it's so much cheaper and convenient to shoot, but wondered why it was losing ground on art films as well. She had actually been having the same conversation with her professor at school, days earlier and he told her it just wasn't economical anymore. And she said, "but it looks so much better" But he was ready for that too, "Young people can't see the difference, like you or I can. To them it doesn't matter."

I remember when DVD and MP3 first landed in the late 90s. I was slow to adopt each. People kept raving about the higher quality of DVD over VHS. But even expensive machines back then had serious artifacting issues, which annoyed me. I preferred the analog noise of VHS to the digital compression issues of DVD. Same with MP3, it sounded like someone sucked the life out of the recording, though it was hard to put ones finger on what had changed. MP4/AAC was such a relief when it came along. But I digress.

Now with the prevalence of flash video, especially from YouTube, much of which is awful quality, DVD and MP3 seem like super high fidelity formats. Which is ironic to the core. But if YouTube is what you're used to, you really will have trouble seeing the quality difference between HD video and Film, they're both going to look so spectacular you'd be hard pressed to identify one being better. But I'm not here to complain about young people. I'd happy join their ranks if it weren't a quantum impossibility.

Why work on tape?

It's unforgiving. It has quality issues (hiss). It has severe limitations (very limited numbers of tracks and dynamic range).

There were two important thrusts in my education:

• critique (and self critique)
• process

Both are about making your work better. The second is also about overcoming creative blocks.

The thing about tape is it radically alters my process for making music. It throws so many wrenches at me I often feel I will fail before I even start. It's a hurdle, to get up the courage to even lay down an analog track. So much can go wrong (and does), and as I've mentioned before, each additional take diminishes the sound quality slightly. When I record on the computer I have the most lackadaisical attitude to the process, and I record anywhere I have my laptop, train, car, park, etc. If I make a mistake, I keep playing and edit it out later. Not so at all with tape. I rehearse, get comfortable, and leap into the abyss. Often I lose my way out of nervousness and have to repeat the process.

Additionally, I usually try to play more than one instrument at a time, to maximize my 4 limited tracks. I would never bother to do that on the computer, where I have limitless tracks. I also have to plan what is going to go on each of my 4 tracks and how I eventually plan to mix them together (something that needs to be center mixed cannot be recorded on the same track as something that needs to be panned right or left). On the computer I don't even think about the mix when I'm recording.

All these little things change the process dramatically, and by changing the process, you change the music.

Will it be good? Who knows.

But it will still sound like Tribrix. Regardless of what process I use, at the end of everyday I cannot be someone else, I'm forced to be me. I can evolve and change over time, but my DNA is always the same (transcription errors not-with-standing). We can't help but be who we are, even if we try to be someone else. But changing our process, our routine, our geography, anything significant will awaken something new in us and take us down a different path. That is why one works on tape.

More On Mistakes (who are our friends)

2012-05-31T12:52:00.001-04:00

I love Bauhaus architecture. I mean droolingly love it. And one of the things I loved the first time I went to Ikea was that I could afford modernist design. Having grown up on a diet of faux American colonial Ethan Allen furniture that my parents loved, finding Ikea was like heaven.

The only dent in my love of modernist design came from my best friend in college, Jiannis, who pointed out that it doesn't age well. And he's right.

Jiannis is from Athens and having been there, I can really appreciate his perspective. The thing about classical buildings and all manner of complex, organic, intricate, and ornate architecture is that it ages really well. When you look at the Acropolis, battered and crumbling, it's still so beautiful, not "was" beautiful, "is" beautiful. The marks of time only seem to enhance the design, not detract from it.

I don't know if you've ever seen the Guggenheim up close (in my home city of New York), but it's not been aging well at all. Over the years I've seen small cracks drip rust onto the smooth white facade, completely spoiling the utopic icon of a building. When rust drips into the detail of a neo classical building, the colors enhance the design, they don't destroy it. So the question becomes, given that rust is going to form and roll down a building, is rust the problem, or is the design the problem, or is it a question of craftsmanship? By which I mean, are the older building methods not better, but just better at hiding weakness and age.

These are important considerations for artists and lead right back to my previous post about mistakes.

The neoclassical model of architecture accepts the inevitability of rust and change and makes it a feature, not a bug, in the design. But what it also does is give cover for mistakes, because, in a way, the rust is a "mistake" imposed by nature.

And what I mean by "cover" is that a more organic working mode allows more mistakes to be hidden and incorporated into the work than tight/robotic/anal retentive and yes, bauhaus styles do.

Mistakes in Kraftwerk's music would stand out, because it's a music which is about perfection, cold, calculated, machine-like perfection. There is no room to be loose in something crafted that way. Just as there is no room for rust on the facade of the Guggenheim New York.

I'm not actually arguing with the post I made previously. I believe this whole subject is very nuanced and a ready field for many shades of gray. But there is a point.

Mistakes can even be beneficial, as long as you work in a style that lets you capitalize on them. It won't help your bauhaus building to have undulating lines, but if you can take the unintended results of your endeavors and incorporate them into the work, the work will grow and be better for it. And sometimes, mistakes even communicate, telling you you're on the wrong path to start with, encouraging you to go back and take a different route. Mistakes are your friends. Welcome them and treat them as such.

Don't Offend the Gods

2012-05-29T16:22:00.001-04:00

This Memorial Day weekend was very productive. I managed to lay down two more tracks on the retro project, with two instruments for each track. I decided to start making a video document of the recording for use in a videoSong of I C U. It could be entertaining to watch the rapid bounce from synth to glockenspiel and back again. The production is really shaping up and sounding nice.

I also laid down several more instrumental tracks for the Orange album. Because of the rapid work style, I plan to organize that project on the shotgun approach. I will create 3 or 4 times as many tracks as I need, and then pick the best ones for the album. I love that I have a whole music production studio in my pockets right now. Granted, I'm wearing cargo pants, but still, I can really make music anywhere, lol.

One thing I noticed working on the retro project is, it's going to be almost impossible to record without making any noticeable mistakes. Not because I couldn't do it, I mean play the song without noticeable mistakes, but you can quickly get to a point of demising returns, literally. Each time you record and erase the tape, the quality is suffering a little bit, so, you want to record and erase as few times as possible. Eighth inch cassette tape is much less forgiving than half inch reel to reel, so I don't feel like I have the luxury of doing as many takes as I want. Obviously, if I lose my way in the course of recording the song, and can't remember what to play next, that take is shot. Similarly, if I make some glaringly bad note strike, I have to start over. But there are at least three mistakes in each track I've laid down so far for the retro project and I'm okay with them. They are not glaring and I worry if I try to go back and make a better take, I'll never get one as good as the ones I have already. So I rest with what I have.

I've heard it said that South American Blanket weavers always insert at least one mistake in their work, so as not to offend the gods by trying to replicate the gods' "perfection". I can't say I'd ever consciously insert a mistake in my work, but I do like a loose and gritty feel. Perfectionists might call this kind of loose style "mistake riddled". But to me, it just seems more human, which reminds me again of those blanket weavers, being consciously human and consciously not god-like.

In these digital days, it's so easy to produce a "mistake free" performance. When I say easy, I mean, you don't really have to know how to play at all to deliver something that sounds "perfectly played", depending on your level of patience and dedication. Of course, things that seem perfect also sound robotic (to these ears). Overwrought is another way of putting it.

And I like plenty of music and art I'd put in this category, Boston and Beethoven for example, pretty tight stuff.

I'll even go so far as to say I can be as guilty of it as the next person. It's kind of easy, if you don't know what to do, to work really hard at making indecision look intentional by making it nearly machine like in its precision (try saying that three times quickly). In fact, getting "loose" has been very hard for me for most of my life. I was always very tight knit, when it came to my endeavors, and had to be broken of my "perfectionista" ways, become less anal retentive, more free to fail.

I'm not a perfectionist - and have not referred to myself as one anytime in my memory. I don't think I've ever produced anything where I couldn't point out a bunch of mistakes, going all the way back to high school and further. I do my best to incorporate those mistakes or gloss them into unobtrusiveness, but I'm usually aware of them. In my experience, "perfectionism", as practiced, is usually not anything like "perfection", because I can often detect mistakes or in-congruencies in the work of "perfectionists", which seem very imperfect to me. But, maybe I'm misunderstanding the term "perfectionist".

My own attitude is that imperfections are unavoidable, so better to discover an acceptable level of them and keep working, than live in denial. Working too hard to smooth all of them over can suck the life out of art. Because life is a messy affair and art, to me, should be more like life and less like a robot.*

*with a few exceptions. Take Kraftwerk, where the intention seems to be for robotic perfection. I have a hard time finding any thing in Kraftwerk that seems out of place. Those guys seem "perfect", in terms of their art.

Juxtaposition, continued (sort of)

2012-05-25T11:16:00.002-04:00

Back in my student days, I used to make these surrealist movies (I did say I liked surrealism). Mostly they were short, like 3-6 minutes. I had to make at least 6 per semester, but there were no other requirements, no assignments, no specific hoops to fly through. But if I start the story there, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The first video I ever made, with a borrowed video camera, contained music I borrowed too. Better to say, music I stole. Jazz, Classical, Avant-garde Electronica, all blended together with the "live" sound thanks to a borrowed mixer. It was okay. The first version was way too long at 18 minutes, so I had to cut it down to 6 minutes and it was almost watchable at that length, just don't ask me to watch it now, lol.

What I noticed though, was that the music really carried the thing. Take away the stolen melodies and the whole thing would fall flat on it's face. There's a quote which I first heard attributed to Kubrick, but which I've never been able to verify, "Film is 90 percent sound." I keep that quote close because I agree so thoroughly with it. I would also amend it to say, "And film is 80 percent music."

If you have ever seen the 1984 production of Dune, Produced by Dino De Larentis and compare it to the 1980 production of Flash Gordon with the same producer you can kind of see a petri dish of this phenomena. Without getting too far into it, I consider Flash Gordon to be a successful, if flawed movie, and Dune to be a failure, without flaws. I'll go further and say Dune is a much better made movie than Flash Gordon, but Flash Gordon is much more enjoyable to watch. The reason the better film is not as good, in my opinion is in the scores of the two films. Queen's score for Flash Gordon improves a weak film and really drives it forward. Toto's score for Dune brings the film down and wrecks a superior effort.

Recognizing that the strength of my first video relied so heavily on music, music that I didn't produce, I decided, if I was to make any more video, I would have to start producing my own music. So, with no training at all, and no clue, and being kind of tone deaf, I started to make music.

That early stuff is worse than any video I ever made. It's not just unlistenable, it's downright annoying to hear, it grates on the ears. The event I credit most with helping break me out of the terrible musical rut I was in was learning about John Cage's compositional process, casting sticks using the iChing. His process was completely random. It liberated me because it made me believe I couldn't make any mistakes, if random chance could be used to write music, then mistakes were an impossibility. As soon as I wasn't afraid of making mistakes, I got more adventurous and the music I produced became more interesting.

I continued to do my little musical experiments (that's really what they were), and record them to tape. I produced hours and hours of material. On rare occasions, I produced something I liked, and anything I liked would be cataloged on a series of "Master" tapes I began to make. By the end of this way of working, I'd produced three 90 minute "Master" tapes containing music of various lengths, tempos, and moods. I would describe most of it as Avant-garde Electronica with contemporary classical ambitions. There were a few pop oriented tunes as well, but not many.

The only time I have ever visited a large film production facility, one of the more interesting things to me was the music room, essentially, a room with a sound system and two walls filled with CDs (this was a while ago). The room existed so directors and producers could go find music for their projects. I always wondered how they picked which CDs to include in the room, if it was dependent on some licensing agreement. The only time I tried to arrange legal borrowed music for a video I was producing, the record company sent me a large package of CDs from their second tier artists. Artists who would love to be included in a movie sound track, even for very little money. The exposure is often invaluable to them and hence they are willing to come cheap.

The three "Master" tapes I produced became my "music room" for my videos. Each time I finished editing a new video, I would peruse my music tapes looking for something interesting to include. Very rarely, I would score a specific music work for a specific video. Going back to that first video I made, using "found" music seemed to add depth to the work and I liked that process. The difference was, now the "found" music was music I had produced earlier, at another time and place.

And this gets back to the idea of juxtaposition. Taking music recorded months earlier in a different emotional state, different time, different place and adding it to a just completed video creates a moment of juxtaposition. Similarly, I have taken my own writings from years in the past, poetry and essays from high school, for example, and used them, word for word, to make new things, videos, songs, etc . . . Once I was doing this series of miniature photographs in my apartment. Obviously, I couldn't include a "real" sky, because I was indoors, but I remembered this series of cloud paintings I'd done with pen and ink, years earlier. I scanned those and used them as the "sky" in the miniature photo series. I once wrote a poem, years later, made an art book of the poem, years later, made a video based on the art book, and am now considering using the same poem as lyrics for a song in the retro project. I wouldn't call it a good poem either, but I like it, obviously, since I keep returning to it.

I think it's often the case, that our own creations from the past offer the easiest and most personal means of creating juxtaposition in current work. You could even say, past work is a treasure trove to be mined for value in the present. It enriches and adds depth. It's like working with an independent clone of oneself. All the benefits of "design by committee" with none of the negatives, after all, you can be a dictator over your past self, but I would say you, and more importantly, your work, benefit by being a benevolent dictator in that relationship.

Juxtaposition?

2012-05-21T12:47:00.002-04:00

I had this incredible idea. I mean, thought it was an idea for something new and different, by which I mean, an idea for a new and different song, or the starting point for one, but then, something else happened.

I'm still working on the Retro Project, which was originally going to be a single song for a compilation of 80s inspired/produced songs without guitar, but it's looking like it will be at least an EP and maybe a whole album.

In addition, I'm working on an album called: "The Orange Album, Kaossilator + Kaoss Pad". What's different about the orange project, from everything else I've done, is, it's all improvisational. There is no plan for any tune, just an unscripted jam using two instruments. I may later add vocals, but that too will be improvisational. The real beauty of this project is that it takes 3 minutes to make a 3 minute song. If I add vocals, it takes 6 minutes to make a 3 minute song. You can do the math for songs of other lengths. But the point is, it's a very fast way of working. And, like the retro project, it takes me out of my comfort zone, and uses process to redefine the way I make music.

The idea I had over the weekend was to apply some of the process of the Orange Album to the Retro Project. Since I am using the Casio VL-1 as a drum machine for some of the Retro Project tracks, I thought it might be a fun challenge to incorporate the most boring rhythm included in the machine; "March". BTW, you cannot program your own drum beats with the VL-1, you are limited to the pre-programmed ones. To make them interesting, you have to filter. The "March" is a 1-2 pattern of a bleep and some noise. It sounds like this: bleep, crunch, bleep, crunch, bleep, crunch, etc . . . Not very interesting, unless you can filter it to make it interesting, which is exactly what I intended to do.

In a previous post, I mentioned the Classic Albums episode for Fleetwood Mac's Rumours album. One of the more interesting songs, in terms of how it came about, was The Chain. It started life as a heavy up tempo jam between John the bassist and Mick the drummer, but that all it was, there was no intro, or opening. Stevie Nicks offered a song she was working on, to serve as the intro to their jam. If you listen to the song, you can hear where her contribution ends and the jam begins, but, if you don't know the story of the song, it flows so naturally, you can't imagine the one part existing without the other. They feel organically linked, even though they were authored by different people at different times in different places.

This is kind of what I was referring to, in the title, juxtaposition. When you take to completely unrelated things and put them together in a work of art. The surrealists did this most obviously, but their version of juxtaposition makes no attempt at reconciliation. Unlike The Chain, where the two parts are seamlessly tied together, in surrealism, the unrelated things maintain their distinctness. It's often compelling, and can be used to make very interesting arguments using metaphor, but one could also call it lazy. I'm not suggesting surrealists are lazy artists, but relying on shocking juxtaposition for the sole value in one's art certainly seems lazy.

One of my first experiences in "Art House" cinema was attending a documentary and retrospective of the collaborative film work of Dali and Buñuel. Based on my fuzzy memories, it seems Buñuel said they should make a movie together and Dali was up for it. Dali described a dream of Ants walking on his hand and/or a razor cutting open an eyeball, but complained it wasn't enough material to make a movie with. Buñuel dismissed his fears and said it was plenty to make a movie with. Watching the film right after that interview, I have to conclude, Dali was right, those two shots do not justify the whole picture, but Buñuel was right to think that they were enough of a starting point, because both images were very strong.

What the filmmakes completely failed to do, in my opinion, was to develop ideas springing from those images and incorporate them into some disturbing, but more logical whole. They might argue with me, that incorporating the images "logically" would undermine the whole point of surrealist film, and they might be right. But I think they would have a much stronger film if it could be both logical and surreal. I think the American filmmaker, David Lynch has got the mix of logic and surreal right a few times in his career, to very strong results. But I digress.

So I opened up my music software, Logic, to start a new project, an improvisational one, using the VL-1's rhythm section, but whenever you open Logic, it opens the last project you were working on. In this case, the first song from the Retro Project, which I have, for the moment, titled, I C U. And then it dawns on me, maybe, instead of doing this on a new project, maybe this with be the winning rhythm for I C U. And it was. So, something I was intending to use for a different song, wound up being incorporated into the current song, and making it so much better. I got rid of a bunch more temporary tracks in the sketch version of the song, and figured out what the bass line would be.

I finally was able to lay down the first layer on my old cassette 4 track, incorporating, VL-1 drums, Synsonics drums, and the bass timbre I described in the first post about this project. Listening to the playback in analog was so sweet. I hope it continues to go this well.

Going back to "less is more" vs. "more is more", if it's more of the same, then less is certainly more, but if it's something different, an inspiration from another place and time, more is more. I always try (but often don't succeed) in trying to have three distinctly different inspirations for each project. Putting them together, in the same project, is what I think of as juxtaposition, though I try to really integrate them, opting away from the surrealist model. But I love surrealism, though, that's a post for another day.

Editing

2012-05-17T17:41:00.001-04:00

I think it was in the first month of my freshman year of college that I first heard "Less is more" in a creative context. But I'm usually a "more is more" kind of artist, especially when it comes to music.

It's like I think adding a few more tracks (instruments) will hide my weak performance on some earlier recorded track. Sometimes that works. Sometimes two shoddy performances of the same thing smooth the blemishes of each since you rarely make the same mistake twice. I'll be the first to admit, I'm not the greatest musician from a performance perspective. In fact, I have turned in some really weak performances in some of my recordings. I didn't hear it at the time, but I certainly hear it now.

More than half my life I've longed for a good editor. Someone who will tell me when I'm fucking up my creative endeavors, and help put me back on the "right" path. I usually crave my editor most in the areas where I am weaker, writing and music making.

I remember finishing my first lengthy script and asking my coworker, Heather, to edit it for me. She was an English Major, bright and witty in person. She agreed and read my script. She corrected some minor mistakes here and there, but, sadly, there was really only one part she felt could be improved:

I had a scene with a homeless man and a detective. The homeless man had a stainless steel bowl under his hat, a fact I revealed early in the scene. She suggested saving that for the end of the scene, allowing the detective to believe he was getting valuable information, only to discover later that he was talking to a crazy person.

Heather's suggestion was hilarious, and never failed to get a laugh when people saw the finished movie. Unfortunately, Heather was a senior and moved away after graduation. And I've only rarely been lucky enough to find a comparable editor in the years since.

Which means, I usually have to self edit, which sucks but brings me to the point of this post.

If you have ever watched the "Classic Albums" episode about Rumours, the seminal Fleetwood Mac album, there's a single line I really like in the episode, relating to music production. "We build it up, and tear it down." Talking about how a lot of the songs on the album had lots of unused instruments tracks, recorded and abandoned in the final mix.

As I'm laying down tracks for the Retro Project (previously mentioned here), I'm kind of going through a similar process, but in a totally backwards way. Four track cassette recorders were designed as musical sketch pads for artists to develop ideas cheaply, at home, before going into the studio. Though some artists, like Bruce Springsteen, recorded his album, Nebraska entirely on a cassette 4 track. But what I am doing is using professional grade software, in this case, Logic, to sketch my the song for my retro project, which I will eventually record on a cassette 4 track, in a sense, not using it at all for its intended purpose.

You might ask what all this has to do with editing.

Well, I'm trying to plan out what I will eventually put on each of my limited 4 tracks. At most I can get 2 or 3 instruments on each track, if I can play them simultaneously. Some tracks will have only 1 instrument. So, at the moment, I building it up to tear it down. I have already laid down 9 individual instrument tracks of drums and synthesizers, trying to figure out where each one could go in the final recording and mix when I get to the 4 track. A wonderful benefit of only having 4 tracks is that I had to edit and remove some of the stuff already, and each time I did it, the song got better. So the 4 track has become an editor to rival Heather in my mind. It's forcing me to acknowledge "less is more" and forcing me to be a better musician. I don't have two tracks to smooth a crappy performance. I just have to deliver a good performance, every time. As a result, I can say, this retro project is going to be my roughest in years, not nearly the level of polish I'm accustomed to, but it will be much more honest, and I hope, in the end, better all around.

Writing Challenge

2012-05-15T14:05:00.004-04:00

This is a follow up to my post:

The Retro Project

Originally, as I was thinking about this song, I imagined I would sing, as I often do, for the majority of my songs. But then I had another thought.

I was thinking about Kraftwerk and how much I like when they use speech synthesis in their songs. While I would not be breaking any rules using a speech synthesizer (since they existed in the 80s), I didn't have one, so I'd be breaking my own rules, to only use instruments and tools I had in the 80s.

While I didn't have a speech synthesizer, I did have a Speak 'n Spell. I was a terrible speller, so my parent's bought it for me in the hopes it would improve my spelling, and it did, but not nearly as much as auto correct has in the days since.

Now, you cannot dictate language to a Speak 'n Spell, right? I mean, it won't say whatever you want, it will only say what it is programmed to say from the factory. With one exception.

It says all the letters of the alphabet, and the names of some letters can be combined to make sentences:

I C U

And this created a very interesting challenge to me, could I write song lyrics like that, only using letter names to make sentences. The answer is yes, but I'm not going to reveal what I came up with (after all, there should be some mystery, even as I explain how the sausage is made). It was both challenging and cool to be forced to write this way, but I cannot see getting more than a single song out of this method.

Set in the present. Inspired by the past.

2012-05-11T17:21:00.001-04:00

Though everything I do (creative wise) is grounded in and fully aware of the awesome present, it’s also completely rooted in the past.

Whatever I liked as a child or teenager or somewhere in between, is far more inspiring and instructive than anything encountered recently. This is only partially a choice, actually. I trust younger me much more than I trust older me. Younger me did not have ulterior financial or political motives bending taste and aesthetics to meet some other aim.

I’m not saying culture today is not as good as it was when I was younger. In many, many cases it’s so much better, TV for example, I can barely watch the shows of my youth and I love a lot of current TV. However, old stuff has the chance to put deep roots in you. If you can get past the nostalgia and see the thing with fresh eyes (almost impossible, but one must at least try), you can start to reverse engineer it and see what made it work so well. You can also use it as a building block to create something fresh (without violating copyrights, of course).

I can't say for certain, but according to my high school English teacher, Shakespeare did not write a single original story. Not only were his stories adaptations, they were adaptations of stories his audience already knew, and knew well. Therefore, his genius was not in creating fiction, but of adapting it better than anyone else before him had. Are you familiar with any of the previous versions of Romeo and Juliet? Me neither.

And it was none but the master himself, of many trades, Da Vinci who said you should always copy when you endeavor to make art, but only copy from the old masters, never from your contemporaries.

Time is an insurmountable arbiter.

The Retro Project

2012-05-09T12:28:00.002-04:00

A long time ago, between 2005 and 2007, when I was starting to make music again after a long hiatus, I thought it might be fun to do a song (or two) only using instruments I had back in the late 80s. At the time, I actually had to re-aquire some of them, like a Synsonics drum set:

http://www.burnkit2600.com/synsonics-drums/

After a little poking around the web, I abandoned my idea. Here's why. What I was planning to do was to use only vintage gear to make a song using a modern DAW (digital audio workstation), but what I discovered were people going much more extreme than what I was planning, making my effort seem pale and moot.

What I did do, though, was use some of those old instruments to add flavor to my "modern" recordings. Flash forward: last week.

Last week I was surfing around, reading tutorials about creating complex bass synthesizer sounds. It's something I've been working on for a few weeks. Trying to create "live" playable versions of popular contemporary bass timbres. But I stumbled on something very interesting, to me and I wish I had a link to share (see comments when I find it), but someone had rediscovered their cassette 4-track recorder in their attic, and decided to make a recording with it, and had posted said recording on soundcloud.

I was so curious to hear this track, and I was so happy to hear a modern recording done with something so completely obsolete. I didn't imagine I'd ever follow in that guys footsteps . . . but,

I had also recently dug out my own 4-track (see above) because someone who once performed in a video of mine asked to see the finished video. Nothing sexual, but the video wound up being a little to personal to post on the web, so no link, but I digress. I had long ago lost the finished edit of the video, so the only way to share it with my friend was to make a new master. I located the edited video and then set about marrying it to the 4-track audio tape containing the music and narration. So my 4-track has been set up in my studio for months. But that alone didn't get me interested in actually using it to make music. Perish the thought. What a pain it would be, to use that old thing to record a song, to say nothing of the crappy quality of the output. Read on,

I could not get that guy's retro track out of my head. It was so cool to hear the sound of tape again, the kind of warm smooth sound digital can only aspire to, with its crisp precision and perfect replication. I started to think, it might be interesting to try and record something with the 4-track, just to break the monotony of the way I normally make music now. But then I remembered all the trouble my 4-track was having when I stopped using it. The erase heads don't work as well as when they were new (meaning, you can't fix mistakes you might make while playing), and how the machine will not stay in record mode without some strong packing tape.

I then remembered, the last time I checked, you could buy a new cassette 4-track for about $80, so maybe I should just replace mine, if I was serious. However, a little sleuthing clued me in to the fact that production of these machines ceased several years ago, and the price, has, of course, gone way up as a result. The cheapest "new" one is now about $240, best I can tell. Way out of my budget for something I may use only once or twice.

However, I became kind of obsessed with seeing if I could find one cheaper and wound up discovering a lot of people who, beyond being nostalgic for these old devices, were actually waxing about the benefits of using them, today:

http://yearoftheboy.com/2011/04/03/4-track-cassette-recording-a-few-thoughts-on-why-older-recording-techniques-are-sometimes-better/

I started reading more and more about analog 4-track recording, it's history, demise, all the while, thinking, I really want to give this a go, at some point, feeling like I was just getting the dominoes lined up for some future knock down show. Until I found this:

I am attempting to create a compilation of like-mi...

Simon Holland (a.k.a. Carrillion) is creating a compilation audio project of music recorded on or using the techniques and instruments of old cassette tape 4-track recording, with a single rule, no guitars. Now this is a little different than anything I'd been contemplating before, as my retro track plans always included a spot for some guitar. But I'm totally up for this challenge and it changed my future looking into present action.

As such, last night I dug out both my old casio keyboards, a VL-1 and Casio MT-540. I had an idea to lay down a click track using the built in rhythms of the VL-1. If you are familiar with the Trio song: Da Da Da:

Trio - Da Da Da

You already know how the drums on this little synth sound. Here's what it looks like:

I connected the VL-1 to an old delay unit from Roland/Boss and started to created the feel I was looking for. I ended up adding a flanger to the loop too, to give the synth sound a little more dimension. I also had an idea for a "sequence" type melody.

Recently I've been trying to get a handle on being able to actually play all my instruments, especially the synths. I was recently working with my Korg Kaossilator:

And noticed it was set to "Ionic" scale. I was not familiar with "Ionic" scales, so I consulted my friend, wikipedia and wound up also looking up pentatonic scales, which I had heard of before but never bothered to learn more about. On reading about pentatonic scales, I thought they would be very useful for a novice like myself, because it's very hard to get discordant in that mode.

After coming up with a nice sequence melody. I set about making a good bass timbre. Remember, learning how to make cool bass timbres was how I wound up going on this whole retro journey in the first place. I took the Casio MT-540:

Blended the Brass Ensemble (an old favorite) with the Funky Clav sounds but ran it through my old Roland Boss Octaver, which creates bass sounds one octave lower than what you put in, and the sound was fat and rich. Now, I have no idea what the eventual bass line of the song will be, but that timbre is going to be great.

I have yet to decide on a voice for the main melody, but there will be additional drums provided by the Synsonics (and maybe a 'real' tambourine). And I started to develop some lyrics, though, given the retro nature of the project, I'm tempted to grab some of my old poetry instead, and edit it to fit the song. Time will tell.

First Post

2012-05-09T10:22:00.000-04:00

Few people know that Van Gogh became famous not, initially, for his paintings, but for the letters he wrote about his paintings to his sister. It was only after the letters became well known that people wanted to see the images he'd created. He was a most unsuccessful artist, in his life time, hardly known at all. Now of course, his paintings fetch among the highest prices in the world. But what's important about this story is not that his writings made his paintings famous, but that his writings made paintings (which no one had seen) be interesting, compelling. There was something in describing the struggle of painting that was compelling in it's own right.

Thinking about that, I'd long thought it would be nice to document my thoughts as I work on things, as I make stuff. Not to become famous, lol, but, as much to see if writing about the work might actually improve it, or motivate me to work faster. There's nothing like publishing the fact that you started to work on a new song and realize, 4 months later, that you never finished it, a fact easily missed if you don't write it down.

So, with any luck, I will write down the things I'm up to and describe the struggles in interesting detail. You'll be the judge of my efforts.