Something/Everything

The more I work with especially rock-centric tracks and guitars, the more I’m worried about the low-end muddiness. Guitar amps, even amp simulations, generate a lot of low end stuff that might in many cases just be rumble and not sound good. Now, it’s easy to EQ out that part, however there’s another aspect I think it’s good to know about.

It’s about also filtering any reverb and delay output. For example, Logic’s Space Designer has a dedicated EQ section where you could filter out any areas (or boost). In my case, to get that shiny guitar sound so over-used in the eighties, I’m removing the low end for the bus where guitar tracks are beeing fed to the Space Designer dedicated with a plate reverb.

Similarly, Logic’s Tape Delay also has this, some use it for those spacy dub feedback loops with high-end only, but it could also be used for other purposes. Also, Izotope’s Ozone reverb has a similar way, you could even carve out a specific spectrum where the reverb operates — a little bit like doing shoe-polish finish with a high-end reverb in the final mix.

Another feature good to explore is that many of these reverbs also have a pre-delay setting. If you use that one the reverb will not kick in immediately. The benefit is that the original instrument has the attack sound preserved so the initial starting part sounds clear and then the rest could have more or less reverb.

As with anything else, experiment with your ears, but I hope you take a closer look at the EQ options available in reverbs. In my case I’m on a constant battle against rumble frequencies that does not make sense for the final production.

I was watching Miles Davis: A Different Kind of Blue documentary two days ago. You could always learn something new by learning more about Miles Davis, whether you like jazz or not.

One is the spontaneous creation of music — Miles Davis and his cats (musicians) just showed up at the recording studio to record. There was even this story in the documentary how he fired one player when he found him rehearsing solos in the hotel room.

I’ve fallen so many times into the trap of getting to the studio to write a specific kind of song or track; then feeling miserable when it does not happen (of some reason.) There’s nothing wrong to have a general idea where to go, but then the outcome should be what it should be.

So in honor of Miles Davis I took a one-hour session here and tried to write songs how Miles Davis would do if he had access to something like Logic Pro 8.0 today.

This was an interesting experiment as I first made a very complex drum pattern. This exact same MIDI pattern became the bass line. After that 18 different Zebra synths with different settings use the same MIDI pattern!

To shuffle it up, I took selected MIDI regions in the bass and drum sections and used the Logic MIDI function editor to reverse the MIDI notes or otherwise random shuffle them around.

This is a rough mix, from beginning to end this took one hour, but it shows the general idea of just going with the flow when doing music and not worrying about details. Tomorrow I will worry about those when finishing this up — don’t know where to use it, though, unless I do more jazz-centric music. Maybe jazz musicians should use more DAWs to make interesting music instead of getting stuck with their instruments?

Here’s the song, Made in Japan (Miles Davis-like, Rough Mix):

I’m at an age where I don’t want to even look at a calendar anymore, but to say thanks to all the readers, may you all have a productive and good year.

There’s something good with affirmations, if you set out for something, it will happen.

So may you all get lots of equipment for the studio, hours of inspiration making cool music,  meet new interesting people, musicians, friends, get your music heard, have a fun time with music, find new gems you want to listen to.

In addition, may you all be healthy, have good food, sleep well and have plenty of resources so you could dedicate your life to something meaningful.

Hopefully that covers all.

The picture is from the north side of Golden Gate, if you ever visit this place, drive under Hwy 101 and turn left and drive for a while up the hill and you get a really nice view of the incoming bay. Get there late afternoon to avoid the fog.

It all depends on the musician/producer but some of us create too much material. For a long time, every time I sat down at my DAW tinkering, I saved the results — just in case they would get better later. Well, in 999 of 1000 cases that won’t happen.

I noticed that today when going through my project folder with material to see if I could fix or reintroduce any of that material, just now going back to 2007, the rest is stuffed in archives.

Shortly, I have a very simple directory structure for projects:

• Attic — anything that is good to have but just needs to be stuffed aside resides in there
• Work in Progress — This is where the work is happening
• Released — Released material
• Private — all kinds of private material I need all the time but will never release it.

So the Work In Progress folder started to get really full. I always prefix the projects with a running number as well, so I could follow the always increasing number of projects, sigh. Some of the material was just very much outdated, too. I’m in the middle of cleaning this all — and got an idea I will test out starting now.

There will be a new folder called “The Oven.” What this oven is that every time I start working on something new, it will start in the oven. If it does not work out well, the cake is badly cooked, I just salvage the little I can from it, AppleLoops and so forth. Then I just throw away the uncooked product. If it makes sense and it is baking well, I move it into the Work in Progress folder.

I think this will somewhat eliminate the huge amount of wanna-be products that should not even be saved as they don’t make sense.

Does any of you have similar schemes concerning avoiding drowning in half-made projects that most likely will never be finished? Any other ideas?

I’ve been working tonight on a psychedelic rock project that I recorded two months ago. The drums were basically two midi tracks, snare/kick in one and the hihat/cymbals in the second. This is a common format when I record drums when using a keyboard, makes me think like a drummer, as drummers only have two hands and two feet.

Anyway, part of the project I do then is to isolate the drums further so each of the drum sounds have their own track. It’s very easy, I just hit the +/file icon next to global tracks to duplicate an existing drum instrument track with all the plug-ins and so forth. Then I go into the piano editor and in one case remove all the kicks and in the second case all the snares. So I now have a separate kick and snare track. Do this with the rest and suddenly you have a nice set of drum controls in case you want to have separate drum sounds for each element. Yes, you could export all the instruments from Ultrabeat as separate tracks but this way I have more control of the instrument selection.

Which leads to the main trick. I had a hard time using the kick from the Ultrabeat’s Studio Tight kick, had some kind of booming sound that I could isolate with the the decay settings of the sample but I was still not happy with the actual kick sound.

Enter Ultrabeat’s Acoustic  Kick Bank patch. It has 25 different kicks mapped across the 25-key midi range. After selecting this patch for the kick track, all I needed to do was to increase the transposition in the top-left pane for the kick instrument track and circulate through all the kicks until I found one I liked in the actual mix — in this case Box Kick. So this is a handy way to key in the specific kick you want, if you don’t like the 25 in this set you could switch to another patch, or even load in another drum SW synth.

Needless to say, Ultravox has other similar collections of the same drum sound in the 02 drum banks sub-selection: snares,  hihats, acoustic, digital and so on. As you could also change the sound with those concerning the ADSR, filtering and so forth, you suddenly have enough options to spend your nights figuring out the perfect drum sound for the track.

As I switched over to a MacPro as my main studio computer I didn’t immediately install all the earlier plug-ins. Rather I put them in on demand, such as the mastering tools. The rest I kind of kept in the attic, and installing them with a fresh mind. It’s like picking up a guitar from storage and falling in love with the guitar again. Attics are nice, software attics, too.

This time I installed Massive as I’m looking at more electronic-centric film music as a project. It was indeed fun rediscovering this one. Here’s a quick sample I did as one of the first sounds:

Still with plenty of RAM and an Intel MacPro, Massive is still a massive CPU-eater, that’s for sure.

However, in most cases either freezing or bouncing is quite fine to do. I use bouncing quite a lot nowadays to render down material that could be played back later with less manipulations. It forces me to make production decisions on the fly so that I don’t get stuck in endless tinkering. I even re-configured the default key bindings so that Command-E in Logic is now exporting regions, not exporting whole tracks, as that’s the more common operations.

Another option is to save it as an AppleLoop and drag the green AppleLoop into an audio track. This way the saved 24-bit audio file is used rather than the midi file with the plug-in. And if you ever want to change the MIDI you could drag it into an instrument track and re-tweak. So there’s plenty of flexibility in the Logic environment. I tend to avoid freezing tracks as it takes a while to freeze a whole song track, but that’s always an option, too.

I should work on new material but have spent a couple of days refining my mixing/mastering skills, reading manuals and especially making all kinds of mini-assignments for solving. Tonight’s test was to create the FM guitar shimmering sound, used in pop music such as XTC, the Knack, Bourgeois Tagg and so forth.

It was an interesting experiment. I loaded a home made guitar loop that was clean and created a Fender amp simulation with Line6 PodFarm. The drums were done with Superior Drummer 2.0 which I just love. And the bass I recorded quickly in and run it also through a Line6 PodFarm bass amp simulation.

I eq:ued each track heavily, the guitar track I took out the bottom end and made the mid-range somewhat more present. The bass I used the 100Hz as the main range to be heard. The drums were very much Superior Drummer with more ambient reverb added.

As for the actual mastering. First I boosted the mid-range with VintageWarmer. After that I loaded in Izotope’s Ozone — been reading those manuals a lot recently as Ozone has so many interesting gems here and there. I went through some of the presets, including the nice ones other Ozone users have uploaded to the Ozone site and found one that had nice exciter settings for the pop-feeling as well as the multi-band compressor worked fine for the low end. So it always makes sense to go through presets and figure out new avenues.

I also used reverb quite a lot, the plate versions. For guitars I used Logic’s Space Designer with plate impulse reverb settings. Both guitars had a common bus for this. The guitars are the same but with two tracks, pan:ed out in stereo and a -7/+7 delay so they are somewhat out of sync. 7 is a nice number, but you could try out any millisecond delay differences. I also added Ozone’s Plate reverb to the final mix to get more ’shimmer’ to the total sum of all the audio. Not much, one could easily get overboard with reverb.

Finally, to get the matching FM sound, I took Bourgeois Taggs’ Waiting For The Worm to Turn, loaded it into a separate audio track, took the matching EQ values from this using Ozone’s Matching EQ feature — Logic also has a similar EQ plug-in. The Ozone and Logic documentation has all the details so it’s not worth repeating it here.

I keyed in about 40% matching from the original, you can’t go 100% as the eq curves are very fine granular and it will just make it all sound metallic so you need to slowly get towards the original EQ setting. You could even fine-tune it more to your liking.

Here is the result: .

I spent 2.5 hours on this and I’m sure it could be done better but now I have the recipe if I ever need to produce similar guitar-centric power-pop in future.

Google Calendar is becoming more and more my default place where to register all kinds of information — not just events such as gigs and so forth.For example, today I changed strings in two of my guitars and I made a quick all-day appointment stating this. So if I’m not sure when I changed strings in the guitars since last time, all I need is to do a quick search and find out the dates. Same with placing batteries into effect boxes and active electronics units in guitars and bass guitars.

Yes, I don’t need to change guitar strings every week, fortunately for the environment and my wallet. I don’t sweat that much when I play, or then I seldom play in places where there are megawatts of lights on stage.

Now for the sake of batteries, again to save the environment I know roughly the maximal lifetime of a battery in active electronics and I take out 30% of that time range (as well as keep spare batteries with me in case of emergencies). So by keeping track of the dates I know roughly when to switch in new batteries. Save the planet.

As for any other Google calendar usage, in addition to gigs and similar things I also keep track of how many times I have been on stage, jamming, playing with a band, at least 15 minutes. So far the count this year is up to 138 events which is good as I really wanted to get back into the live playing comfort zone.

You could add any information you want, entries are cheap. As the online calendars work from any computer online you could always go in and check for stuff. And the data is also backed up!

The article by Bob Harris about visiting the border between North and South Korea was interesting reading. Which lead to me writing about borders and a specific border. Somehow I have a fascination concerning country borders. There’s something interesting about someone drawing a line with a ruler that separates from place from another. Unless it’s a real demarcation concerning a river or an ocean, most borders are artificial. The place will stay the same after the borders are redrawn over and over again in future.

I’ve been to Berlin while it as divided into east and west. That border was spooky. Even more scary was the real border between West Germany and East Germany, a mile-wide line full of mines and without trees. I suspect the current border between South and North Korea is a similar strange place.

Anyway, the border I visited last summer was the one between United States and Mexico. More specifically is is the most south-western corner of United States. So it was interesting just to get to this point. This border resides in south San Diego, in a place called Border Field State Park. Yes, it is a real park. But what a park (more later.) Until I got my United States citizenship I actually didn’t even dare to go to places like this in order to avoid any odd notes in my file over at INS. But now as a US Citizen I have the right to visit any place unless it’s a restricted military installation or something similar.

As you could see the actual border by  the sea is just a lot of long poles down in the sand, anyone could go between them. This area is actually heavily patrolled. It’s not about illegal immigrants (even if that’s a problem), rather really nasty drug traffic that happens across this point. This is why I didn’t mind that while I walked along the beach to this point I was followed  by three or even four helicopters. When I reached the point there were even two border patrol agents with beach buggies following me.

That was actually very good as the people on the other side wanted me to come over and visit — me and my camera. I suspect I would have been mugged, even on the US side, but the border patrol that showed up from the shadows made me feel more secure.

This is a state park, but what a park. The Tijuana river dumps really nasty polluted water from Tijuana over on the other side, as it runs into US our tax payer money is used for maintaining some kind of pollution refinery trying to clean up the mess but it still arrives everywhere in the park. Poor birds living there. I would neither walk around anywhere in this area, just along the paths.

So the addition to illegal immigrants, drug smugglers and pollution makes this park one of the worst I’ve visited in California, maybe in the whole world. The noise from all the helicopters covers the whole park, most of the time, even at night. There are even big lights that I suspect are turned on during the dark hours.

The park was actually put in place as a friendship offer between Mexico and USA after the war where Mexico lost California. There’s even a small statue placed along the border, but what has happened is that people on the other side is slowly taking chunks out of it so it has become smaller and smaller. This is also supposedly a location for immigrants talking to their families on the other side without the need to go over the border and maybe not getting access back in. So you could actually find a lot of families here during weekends. There’s a big parking space even in this corner.

So would I recommend visiting this place? You have to be careful, that’s for sure. Don’t go there at dusk or otherwise at strange hours, you could get hurt, robbed or otherwise interrogated by border patrol or something similar. They are just doing their job and I think a good job based on the mess at the border. Better have a good reason why you are there as you will be asked your business. And you better clean your shoes afterward or just dump them!

Some time ago I got very much tired of loops of many reasons, of which repetition leading to very stale production was one big problem. Especially drum loops that repeat tend to make the production very factory-like — and I nowadays believe much more in organic productions where each part is a little bit different.

Still, there’s a lot of usage of loops in unexpected situations I realized recently. One is songwriting. If you have a big set of private loops that you have saved for a while, Apple Loops or in case Ableton Live, any kind of audio material, you could quickly put together new songs from pre-existing material.

If it sounds good, then you could just re-record all kinds of parts and remove the loops after a while. The green AppleLoops are especially handy as they contain MIDI information so you could go in and edit each loop so they are unique across the section.

Next I will talk more about AppleLoops and my current vacation strategy to once-and-for all solve my workflow and organization concerning saving and keeping track of looped material.

So I’ve been recording short guitar riffs, 4 to 16 bar ones, tonight. The work-flow was to record a vanilla guitar signal, no effects, into a Logic track with a drum playing so I could keep track of the pace. Then I edited the guitar riff with Melodyne so it had a nice fit. After that I bounced it out as a 24-bit WAV file to the Bounced directory and made sure it also showed up in the Logic Bin. Now I could use this riff in Ableton Live, for example.

After this I imported back the guitar riff into another track in Logic and now exported it as an Apple Loop so I could use it as an Apple Loop in Logic projects.

The idea is to have a huge set of guitar riffs and simple guitar melodies and then put together song structures using these riffs. The clean guitar signal is then processed with PodFarm entries so I could make the simple guitar sound to nearly anything. It’s a little bit like having MIDI files and use different software synths with the same MIDI file.

It actually works really well. The quick test showed that I could make a 3 minute arena-rock like track by taking three of the guitar stems, use heavy-distortion PodFarm patches, pan two guitars left and right and have something useful within minutes.

So, basically, having a set of private guitar riff parts makes it possible to quickly make songs and as they are tight  and as AppleLoops useful in all kind of places. It does not hurt to play real guitar tracks now and then but for exploration and making new songs this is a very interesting workflow I recommend. If you have 100+ riffs you could do nearly anything.

When reading Craigslist postings on the musicians section — the one where musicians look for new members — there are more and more postings about bands playing (in addition to all the guitar teachers but that’s another story.)

There’s nothing wrong with that. I assume the idea is that musicians like to go out and listen to other bands playing. Well, to start with that market is super-tiny, there are not that many of us. Secondly, many are playing at other gigs at the same time so they can’t attend. Thirdly, musicians are picky so I doubt they want to go out and check yet-another blues cover band.

Same with Myspace that seems to become a market channel for band announcing events on each others’ Myspace pages.

All together, me thinks this is focusing on the wrong marketing approach. It would be far better to use other channels that could actually reach the audience that the band or artist could ignite an interest  for going to the venue. It really depends on the music style.

I give you an example. I sub:ed as a bass player for a local blues band where the band leader is a DJ at a local channel playing blues music. Actually the DJs had their own bands. The did lots of promotion using their radio station, so when the event happened it was a very nice crowd attending. Even better, they liked the music as it was targeted towards their interest.

So targeted marketing is always more productive rather than spreading thin and posting event noticed on craigslist musicans section or similar places with a hit-and-miss ratio close to 100%.

This is one of those music-philosophical postings. A work flow that I use a lot just now is to record bass or guitar tracks in one take, from beginning to end. After that I open it up with Melodyne and tighten up the recording. Then save the track via Logic into the bin and load it back in to another track. This bass or guitar recording is very pure, not effects and so forth. I could then use that material with effects, PodFarm et rest. I could even chop it into small parts — I usually play a 20 or 24 bar section — and model the song based on the various chopped parts.

I must say, Melodyne Plug-in works really well. I set the grid view to 1/32 notes and nudge the entries along to the right positions. So far I’m happy with my playing, there’s some nudging needed but the less the better.

So why the philosophical spin? Well, what’s the difference between re-recording the bass line over and over, maybe with multiple takes and then put together the final version. This versus playing once and fixing the timing issues? I think it does not really matter. The problem is that a recording, not a live one, is a frozen moment in time. Most studios spend a lot of time fixing timing issues. Long time ago it was recording the same take multiple times and then a poor engineer had to splice together multiple tapes with razor blades and tape for the final product.

Ten years later it was a copy and paste operation in combination with nudging values inside a digital editing window. And now it is Melodyne and similar operations. Even recordings such as Michael Jackson’s Thriller went through thousands of re-edits, even with the calibre of musicians used for those recordings.

So I think this is just fine. It opens up so many avenues, especially with creativity. You record something down, fix it and then use it in various scenarios.

The other story is that you then later need to learn how to play it inside out for live purposes…

Well, if I put music like this on a CD and hide it somewhere on my property, maybe in 300 years or so they will find the CD, decipher the contents and realize that this musician knew what people like listening and dancing to at this point of time:

Big thanks to Adrian Belew that has totally messed my mind about how guitar should be played, in a good way actually.

Technical details: Line 6 PodFarm at its fullest concerning strange effect chain settings.

Of some interesting reason there were two things today that I read or saw on TV that has reflected a personal problem I’ve had for a couple of weeks’ time. I’ve had a kind of writers block in the sense of crawling into the studio and doing recordings but I had an internal pressure to go for a certain sound or outcome. There’s tons of material done, that’s for sure but it didn’t provide a cohesive outcome.

Meanwhile, today when I worked at the gym I was reading the latest Mix magazine where there was an article about the new Killer album. Basically the band members purchased a studio in downtown Las Vegas, and for the third album they just sat there and did lots of ideas they recorded daily, where many ended up in the final product. So there was no pressure to make something special, more of an attitude to see what happens.

Same when I saw tonight a documentary about Genesis. For one album in their later days they showed up in the studio with no material, just jammed along and after two weeks they had plenty of raw material for the album. In this case they didn’t own the studio so I suspect the studio bill was astronomical.

Anyway, what these indirect pointers showed me is that one should not have any predefined goals, that puts pressure on the creative side resulting in a mental block due to just this fixed goal-setting. In my case it’s even mentally lethal — suspect many have this problem.

I have plenty of stuff and it will be used but this time the whole future result is a blank canvas, let’s see what will be painted on it.