AudioMinds Newsletter:
Issue #5 - October 9th, 2004
Contents:
Cyprian's Sick Sick
Being a musician
Seeing, Hearing, Not Seeing and Believing
When a song is born
SEPTEMBER DEMO SONG CONTEST WINNER is member "roman615", aka Johnny Friedman from Memphis, Tennessee USA. Congratulations to Johnny on a job well done!
Last month's contest winner resides in Spain, which didn't exactly rule out a personal interview about the song's production, but since Gabriel Aulaga had already provided Audiominds with a great description of the project in
this thread from the Recording Review Forum, we have chosen to let that stand as the information and how to concerning his winning entry.
Look forward to one of pete's interviews with roman615 in next month's newsletter.
The OCTOBER DEMO SONG CONTEST IS OPEN, everyone is encouraged to submit their song entry and also to participate by listening, evaluating and participating in the user poll for next month's finalists.
It is not that my brain isn’t working, but this month I have to give it a rest. Seems to be that the gears get overheated sometimes and start smoking. Been that way for about a week now. So, in the meantime, I’d like to offer Google’s Gmail invites to the first six people that PM through the AudioMind’s forum. Gmail gives you one gig of email storage. That means you can get those big attachments and have an universal email address. Right now, the service is in beta stage, and the only way to get a Gmail address is through an invite. So PM away.
With that said, I’d like to introduce an excellent article by Pete. I think he captures the thoughts that we all have about music. Hit it Pete.
It was as if somebody had fired a shot. The crowd fell silent. All eyes turned to the stage. The bartender froze with his towel in mid-wipe and gaped.
“about...”
An infant started screwing up her face, preparing to wail. A fierce warning glance from mom stopped her cold before the first squawk emerged. The water running in the kitchen was cut off. The clink and rattle of silverware and glasses stopped. As the blanket of tense silence fell, a collective breath was held in tingling anticipation.
“music.”
A snort was heard from the back of the room, followed by a growing wave of laughter as the tension was drained. How absurd! How obvious! Of course he was thinking about music. He's a musician, for heaven's sake! What else would a musician be thinking about?
Of course he was thinking about music. It is what we musicians always think about. Being a musician is not something we do, it is something we are. We might refer to it as a hobby, yet it encompasses us. Music defines us.
The arts provide many beneficial things to society, but I don't believe it is benevolence that drives most artists. I think the benefits to the artist are the real driving force behind most artistic expression. Being an artist requires sharpened perception to start with. The graphic artist must learn to see, rather than to draw what she thinks she sees. The poet must learn to see the structure of the written word and hear the patterns and rhythms of speech. The writer must learn to observe the details of existence and be able to translate them into language, in order to effectively convey the subtleties that lead the reader into another consciousness and reality.
As musicians, we learn to hear and recognize how sound makes us feel. Music is amazingly powerful in its ability to directly express and influence emotion. It is an effective way to communicate at a level that common language cannot approach; to convey awe, grief, joy, and even love in all its mysterious glory. While these things are in all of us, being a musician provides the rare ability to express these most powerful aspects of living in a way that others may experience and appreciate. The universal appeal of music is testimony to this appreciation.
Being an artist sharpens us and brings a deeper awareness of and appreciation for the gift of life. Art really departs from craft with an acute awareness of emotion and the use of our skills to communicate rather than just amaze. We aren't just people who enjoy music or do music, we are Musicians. We are musicians because music is a way to freely transcend the boundaries between the physical, emotional and spiritual, while leaving a path for others to follow.
Whether in writing songs, composing, performing, directing or teaching, the only way to blaze that path is to share our music... and thus OURSELVES... with others.
Seeing, Hearing, Not Seeing and Believing - by Mac
Awhile back I played a piano jazz gig at a school for blind children. What a gas that was. Piano, bass, drums, guitar and sax, plus a couple of us added our vocal renditions of a few tunes apropos for the event. Any school assembly gig at all is usually fun business where we can get the chance to talk directly to the teachers and students about American Classical Music, its roots, direction and the excitement of listening to it and playing it, but let me tell you that what I noticed in this particular situation left me thinking for a long time.
We were playing the old Fred Flintsone theme song as a bebop tune, that wonderful little ditty in F major that was written by Hoyt Curtin for Hanna Barbera cartoons, nuthin’ but the rhythm changes but somethin’ that just about anybody on the planet just has to love. That song is like ice cream. My late mother-in-law used to say that it would take a pretty mean person not to like ice cream. Be that as it may, while the sax player was makin’ speech expounding on the wonders of the many melodies that can be invented over the one-six-two-five/three-six-two-five changes and most all of their possible subs and chromatic passings, sittin’ there compin’ tritones gave me a few minutes to look up from the piano and take a look at the audience.
What I saw almost stopped me from playing for a second. All those sightless children sitting out there lost in the passion of the music were bobbing and weaving and grinning from ear to ear and making body movements not in time to the music as a sighted dancer might, but simply moving joyously. About this time I noticed that a few of the sight-impaired adult teachers were doing exactly the same. Those teachers in the audience who had the “gift” of eyesight were sitting ramrod straight upright.
Thinking about this on the drive home from the gig, I was reminded of an old friend of mine, a musician blind from birth. We used to sit and listen to recordings in his home together and he would rock and weave to whatever passions the music we listened to dictated to him as he just grinned from ear to ear, thoroughly and obviously enjoying the magic of the moment in a fashion that certainly looked to be like he was getting more out of the listening than I was. This was the picture of the sheer innocent joy of nothing but the music and how it was making him feel coming from a middle aged man. I remember the first time I noticed him doing that. For some reason it touched my heart. In a good way. And this was exactly what I saw in that group of children earlier in the day.
That led me to wondering why sighted people don’t enjoy music in the same fashion. I’m certainly not one to launch a study on such things, perhaps someone will and perhaps someone has, but I came to the conclusion that there was indeed a time in my life when I also really enjoyed hearing music in much the same fashion. As we grow up around others, the peer pressure and the want to not stick out of the crowd must surely have an impact on what we do and how we act at any time, listening to music would not be an exception. Because we can see others sitting and listening without moving, we assume that is the way to do this thing at some point in our lives. So that is what we do. But in doing that we may be shutting down our senses to the full listening experience.
Have you ever removed the sight sense and then listened to music? Not just closing your eyes, but fully blindfolding yourself and listened to the music? I tried that once a long time ago, and after the experience at the aforementioned concert I decided it was time to try that again.
So here I am sitting in the listening room in the big comfortable chair I have placed at a measured distance from my equi-distant pair of old but reconed AR’s with the added subwoofer, wearing a blindfold.
Truthfully, the first thing I noticed was… nothing out of the ordinary. Yeah, yeah, that’s the Pat Metheny group, yadda, that’s Jack McDuff, then comes Erroll Garner, but… wait a minute, as Ray Charles hollered in his classic recording of "America the Beautiful", something changed. In the middle of Erroll’s great live rendition of Poor Butterfly, it happened to me. That pure wonder and joyful thing was starting to happen. No longer was I thinking about the changes or the technique or even the name of the piece or who was playing it, all of a sudden nothing but the feeling that such joyful playing can evoke was indeed being evoked. Again. No thoughts about mic placements, Mastering or mix, either. Just the music. Just the joy.
Working hard at being a musician, entertainer, singer, recordist, a purveyor of the joy rather than the partaker of that joy can put you into another place regarding that which you do every day.
It really is special.
Don’t take it for granted.
Study it, work it, get better at it every day that you are alive, for it never ends.
We are the providers of that special joy, and it is indeed a serious undertaking.
It's all a dream, an illusion now.
It must come true some time soon somehow
All across the land dawns a brand new morn
This comes to pass when a song is born.
This or something like it must be the feeling of a songwriter when he begins to work on a new song. If you can, listen to the Boney M song "when a child is born".
When is a song born? When the first idea enters your head? When you start laying down the tracks? In my opinion it's like with real babies - a new song is born when all the work is done and you can sit back and relax. For me this special moment came today. It all began when...
Once upon a time there was a keyboarder, (you-know-who,) who was happily playing without any serious intent other than having a nice time. This was maybe three weeks ago, and I came up with this hooky bass line. One important thing for me when working on new song is identifying with the song, to get familiar with it and make it a part of me. This happens best when playing it, so I programmed a simple drum loop in the MIDI sequencer and jammed. This helps me to remember the song even when I'm not thinking about it. And believe me, I barely did.
The next three weeks, nothing special happened. I consider it good luck that a cold freed my from all those scary obligations that keep me away from concentrating on music. As soon as I felt better, I was back in the studio searching for a task. Well, I thought, there are four keyboards, one sampler, one master keyboard and the DAW. But I can only access one device at a time with the DAW. That's a pity. Imagine all the possibilities you're missing. What? The MIDI cables are too short? Hand me the soldering iron.
I carefully removed the plugs from the MIDI cables and freed the wires. Typically, MIDI connectors are five-pole DIN connectors with only three wires connected. My cables have all five wires connected, of course. I guess the manufacturer decided 'better safe than sorry'. The ohm-meter says that the white and the black wires can be removed. I did so. But imagine my surprise when I next noticed that two connectors didn't have red, yellow and green wires but purple, yellow and green! No problem there though. The next step was taking an old phone cable, (I have lots of old phone cables for tasks like this,) and laying it out it on the ground the same way the MIDI cable would be installed later. Twack, twack, twack. All connectors were removed and the cables cut at the right spot. Ok, let's soldier the connectors.
Twenty minutes later the two new MIDI cables were installed and ready for a test-run. Not so fast... What did I do to connect everything up? I took the MIDI connection from the DAW and plugged it into the first keyboard. Then I connected the second keyboard's input to the first one's MIDI-thru jack, and so on. This ensures that every keyboard receives the same data from the DAW. But wait - I don't want to play them all in unison. I have to assign them to different MIDI channels. I used paper and pen to out a simple plan for assigning 16 MIDI channels to five clients. (For the non-MIDI guys out there. Every MIDI connection contains 16 channels. If you happen to own a synthesizer rather than a "keyboard," you can tell it which channels it should respond to. Other than that, MIDI channels can be seen the same as audio channels in your sequencer mixer. Next, the keyboards have to have their MIDI options set to match.
Short test sequences showed me that everything worked fine. Woohoo! I decided to try it out on a new song. New song? New song? Yes, new song, hooky bass line, drum pattern. Remember? The next step was bringing the drum pattern from three weeks ago back into the sequencer and multiplying it several times. Then I recorded the bass line and multiplied it. The good-old DX-7 has a nice bass patch which I had in mind for this from the beginning. The bass is on channel one. This bass sound needed an analog-like drum sound, and the 808-patch from the S30 seemed like it would be a good fit. Ok boys, drums on channel 10. Make sure you always dial in the correct program changes and stuff so that you don't have to re-set the patches by hand! Like I told you, it is very important to identify with a song before working on it. As a result of that, coming up with new ideas was more like a game than like real work. The following night was spent sequencing until 7 am. I slept nearly six hours during the day, so it's no wonder that I didn't feel sleepy for the night. Fortunately, it was Saturday morning and I could go to bed.
I woke up at11 am, still feeling ill but with the desire to continue with the song. First, I needed to call the girl-friend and have breakfast. Back in the studio, I tried some things that really worked well. Sometimes it's just a little detail like a drum fill or a contra melody that make the song so much better. At that point it was like roadwork. Measure after measure, the song got longer and longer. The good thing about MIDI sequencers is you can simply take a part and and copy it on a new track at a later spot. This makes for some interesting arrangements. Of course one should consider that no performance sounds the same twice. Little changes should be done carefully. For me this includes minor melodic, timing and velocity changes. Suddenly I was at a point when the road was too long. I had to chop the song somewhere. I listened to it and and asked myself when it started to get boring. These later became the spots where I removed measures.
In the evening, Dominique (my girl) arrived, curious about the new song. I played it for her. As you probably know, wives and other kinds of girl-friends soon get angry when you don't devote all your spare time to them. It was time for a half-day break.
On Sunday I listened to the tune and was quite pleased with the arrangement. Now all I had to do was convert the MIDI tracks to audio tracks step by step. The ability to record eight audio tracks at a time was time saving at the beginning, but didn't help later when I was at a point where I had to record seven tracks from one keyboard. In n-Tracks, (my preferred audio sequencing package,) I noticed that all the tracks had a relatively small amplitude. Maybe you've heard Mac talking lately about having the gain-stage right in the first place and not to record all tracks as hot as possible. As you know, I'm also in this camp. During playback, all the tracks summed up to -1.7db on the VU, with everything sounding like it was being played back by sequencer.
If there's a definition of "creative chaos," I might be a candidate for it because I suddenly felt like dusting and cleaning the studio. For the record: At 3pm I dusted and vacuumed the studio. Then I was hungry again. But back to the song. Because of how things were done to this point, mixing was not too difficult. Since I decided to record the tracks wet, (including any kind of effects the keyboards might have applied to them, most often reverb,) all I had to do was place each instrument in the sound-stage. The bass track was a bit complicated to handle because it seemed to vanish in the mix as soon as other tracks played. Volume envelopes helped to work around this. Effect-wise, I went very easy. Some tasteful reverb here and there (on three of twelve tracks) and EQ on one was all it needed.
Again, it was time for a break. Sometimes there's nothing better than some fresh air. Back to the mix... not bad, but a few changes would make it better. Yes, now it sounds good. But,(as if there wasn't always a but,) where is the sparkle - the high frequency content? Why does it sound so dark and dull? Realizing this, I listened to many different songs while watching the FFT graphs. While the sound-stage of my song sounded right to me, I noticed that the high end seemed to be heavily under-represented compared to other songs. Can this be fixed with mastering? After a lot of analysis and head-pounding, I decided to at least give it a try. The tools to determine what was missing were my ears and C_FFT (freeware). Finally a high pass filter at 80Hz and a rather aggressive high shelf seemed to sound best. You know, the ears should always be the final arbiter in any case. I spent some time making comparisons between before and after and other songs. I came to the conclusion that after the heavy but simple equalizing, (never overdo anything in the audio-field,) the song really sounded better. I also realized that it has a rather dark sound by nature and that no equalizer or filter can change that.
I could have then turned to compressors and limiters in order to max out the volume of the song, but I don't feel the need for this at the moment. To my ears, the RMS (average volume) is high enough. The only thing I did in this regard was opening the final mixdown in Goldwave and cutting the beginning and end of the song plus razor shaving the very high peaks by hand. This is the process where you zoom in on a very high peak of maybe a few ms and use volume envelopes to fade it out and in again. Besides that, I did nothing except siting back and relaxing, because - A new song is born.
Yours, Elwood
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