The Story of a Sound

I've never liked like the idea of using reference tracks. I listen to a fair amount of music and figure that I know what it sounds like, and know when it sounds good, and I don't need to check my answers in the back of the book. But I'm forcing myself to do it with this album, so I grabbed a few CDs that I had lying around and imported them.

Looking at them in waveform made me feel a whole lot better. These CDs have been mastered completely differently, but that doesn't stop people from loving them the same. So there are no right answers, although Bob Katz argues there should at least be standards and I think his argument is a good one.

I used the Izotope Ozone 5 Mastering plugin to measure a few parameters that I could compare across my sample CDs. I compared the loudest moments (M), the average loudness (I), the loudness range (LU), and the meter peaks for the left and right channels. The unit is LUFS, for what it's worth.

The loudest tracks are the newest. The Old Canes' "Flower Faces", from 2009's Feral Harmonic, is going for lo-fi and plans to misuse your stereo equipment to achieve a very dirty sound, which is great and suits the music just fine. The contemporary Arcade Fire, Coldplay, and Said the Whale tracks I picked were also very loud, but fairly clean. The Deer Tick album is an exception. It's more in line with the 90's albums (Built to Spill, Fiona Apple, REM) in terms of loudness, as is the Jam's "That's Entertainment" which was digitally remastered in 1997. The Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun", remastered ten years earlier, is by far the quietest.

The loudness range isn't very comparable since it's dependent on song structure and dynamics, but they can be guessed pretty easily by looking at the waveforms. The Arcade Fire, Old Canes, and Said the Whale songs almost have a binary dynamic range; they come on and there is music (loud) or there is not music (off).   The Built to Spill song I happened to choose has the clearest dynamics, but the rest of the album behaves much like contemporary late 2000 releases, at least on my tiny sample size.

The highest peaks show us that only the Old Canes and the Said the Whale tracks exceed 0 by any appreciable margin, while the Arcade Fire and Fiona Apple tracks achieve a L/R sum of zero at their loudest moments. The Beatles remaster leaves a lot more room than any other track.

All in all, I think even with my small sample I've learned that CD mastering is different than it was ten or twenty years ago, and I know what loudness to shoot for when I try to master mine, but that I shouldn't equate "modern" with "correct".

Top Album Is Delicious

Mixing is getting done, I suppose. I've been doing a morning listen, noting everything I want changed, and taking the day to do those fixes. Of course one change may necessitate another, or reveal problems that were hidden before. I feel like I'm trying to move a house of cards across a room. Each round of fixes is getting shorter and shorter though, so it won't be long now.

I've been doing some art direction things to give my ears periodic breaks during mixing. I made a bandcamp page for myself and am experimenting with different colours and fonts. They allow track-specific art so I'm preparing a series of photos, each captioned with a judiciously chosen couplet. For the header I'm using the "Marquisette" font right now, overlaid on a picture of my wall and ceiling meeting. The imperfect line of paint is supposed to contrast with the clean lines of the art deco font, demonstrating that the execution of an idea always falls short of imagination. Or something. I really hope the White Stripes haven't copyrighted the colours red, white, and black.

You think you're right/NO! /You are wrong!/WRONG!

Principal recording has been done for awhile. The tracks are nearly mixed, for pete's sake, but I still get sucked in to vocal reshoots. Change a word here, change an inflection there, see if I can hit that note this time, so on. Some vocalists don't even like to re-record anything less than a verse, but I don't mind redoing a syllable if my ears tell me it's better that way.

I'm all about lyrics, and sometimes changing a word can change the song's whole message. I mean, if Hendrix meant us to excuse him while he kissed this guy, we'd probably have Purple Haze poppers by now. Oh wait, apparently we do. In any case, the two verses that I've been most hesitant about happen right in the middle of my (ever-changing) prospective track order: the last verse of track four and the intro to track five. This isn't a concept album and the songs are independent entities, but it's still a critical moment in the album and I'm vacillating between saying a couple of different things. I have to decide what kind of stories I want to tell, what conclusions I want to draw.

I don't want people to listen to the songs and think that I haven't fleshed my main character out enough. Because that's me, and I get enough of that in real life anyway. I look at my songs as a place to work out and  concretize my emotional reactions, and in fine-tuning I'm molding words and music into something that resembles my internal feeling and memory as closely as I can. I direct my writing by using memory-images: situations and moments in my past that are tied to the specific emotion that I am trying to channel in the song. I'm not Capote and I don't have 94% recall, so the imagery and dialogue I lift from my real-life situations (sometimes I write scraps down in a notebook) is usually filled in somewhat with imagination and invention, with the only rule being that it doesn't stay unless it 'feels' right to me. I think it's possible to tell an emotionally true story which differs on some key factual points from real life, as long as the diversions are in line with what I felt at the time, representative of the forces I perceived were at work. That's artistic license.

But that's just me describing the method. Wait 'til you get the madness!

Returning As A Hologram

I have a working computer again. Hooray! And all it took was a new motherboard. It took some time to figure out, but I'm glad I worked it out myself. Speaking of which, here are some (no doubt elementary) ways I have improved my workflow while working on this album:

• I've started aggressively multi-tracking parts. I realized that as individual instrument dynamics change from section to section in a song, a new fader balance is usually needed. So now if I decide I want the acoustic guitar 3db quieter on all of the verses, it's easy.
• I've also started using multi-tracking to apply special effects to only certain moments of a part. For vocals, I'll set up an identical track where I'll just put the words I want delay or reverb applied to. Then only one instance of the plugin has to be run as opposed to a new instance for every clip.
• I've started sending these multi-tracked parts to a single bus. Having individual busses for each major instrument part is great, because you have a fader for the whole instrument and if you want to limit the whole bass part, you can use a single instance of a plugin on the bus. Additionally, it also makes it super easy to export mix stems, if you solo the appropriate bus beforehand.
• I've started panning reverb. Never did that before, for some reason. But it goes a long way towards creating a believable stereo image.
• I've started using the nudge function. I used to always line up waveforms by hand but now I've customized the nudge lengths to times that work for me. I have them mapped to my number pad so that 1 means nudge 1 left, 3 means nudge 1 right, 4 means nudge 2 left, 6 means nudge 2 right, etc. It takes me a while to realize when I need hotkeys for things, but I'll get there.

Sweating On His Vibraphone

How I feel about my music varies wildly. Sometimes I don't think I can ever make it sound like it should, and trying to improve it bit by bit feels futile, like painting the mouldings in a hopelessly jury-rigged building. I worry that if I invite everyone else over, the roof might fall in on them. But sometimes when I'm alone, I can turn it up, take off my shoes, and rattle the walls. And if they fall down, I can always build something new.

Glyphs of Joy

Today is crack #2 at rhythm editing for what I now think will be the title track of the album, "5 Best Songs". It's a title which defies the ten songs I'm working on, and the temptation to release an EP of just my favourite five. That might actually happen if someone likes this material enough to remix it professionally and release it properly, but as this is essentially just an album of inexpertly-polished demos I'm fine with the listener picking which five I'm referring to and which I should have left out.

Besides, I'm not a huge fan of EPs. Even my favourites, like Jens Lekman's An Argument With Myself, still frustrate me with their brevity. Albums in the 35-45 minute range are my ideal length, from Wire's Pink Flag to Okkervil River's Black Sheep Boy. 'Course, Lifter Puller squeeze more plot than either of those onto Fiestas and Fiascos. These aren't rules. But I can always make my own personal EP out of any of those records if I don't feel like putting them on in their entirety, and more often than not I do. So that's why 5 Best Songs will have ten tracks.

Cigars and the Shoe-Licker

My computer is in parts, and I'm reassembling it. So are my songs; today I'm working on timing for what I suspect will be the opening track of the album. It's an odd rhythm track with huge potential but equally huge issues. So I'm cutting it up and putting it back together.

It's the groove that I'm after. Small mistakes are easy to fix, but rhythmic harmony is a delicate and elusive thing. It exists in the interaction of rhythm instruments the way a chord exists in the interaction of separate strings, like Plato's tripartite soul. And when it's missing, everyone can tell.

So if I have five hundred clips of handclaps that I've individually lined up, it's okay. That's just some forensic groove-enhancement. I've created a monster, and now I've got to make it dance.

You Asked About Young Chop

The girl in my painting is right to yawn. Mixing does not make for exciting pictures. But it is exciting, I swear, in all of its fiddly glory. I get a song to the point where I absolutely love it and it is the best thing I have ever done, and then ten minutes later the same mix is terrible and how did I ruin the song so utterly. I understand why people are happy to hand off projects they've engineered to be mixed by someone else, because it's so much more difficult to be objective if you were there recording it. And look at me, I wrote, rehearsed, performed, and engineered this crap. I hear a thousand previous and imaginary versions instead of the take I'm supposed to be listening to. I'm screwed.

Or maybe not. Even listening to it with other people in the room changes how I perceive it, as I imagine what it would be like to hear it for the first time. It reminds me that it's all about the bottom line, what people hear first. The questions are then, is THAT the best part of the song, and does THAT sound good? If it isn't, I won't get anyone to notice the cute pun in verse two on their second listen, let alone the pinched harmonics in the third violin on the tenth listen. If I'm lucky.

While it can be difficult and frustrating, the best thing about mixing my own music is I already have a deep understanding of my aesthetic intention for each song, and I can try to achieve it without subjecting a studio employee to poor metaphors, references to Steely Dan, and wild gesticulation. Because I'm saving that stuff for the live show!

Roulette This Weekend

I've been wading in drum sounds the last couple of days, so to stop myself going crazy I started working on sequencing the tracks. I decided to do this with colour-coded bits of carpet. I enjoy working with pieces of carpet.

I always put a lot of thought into putting songs into the right order, but it doesn't come to me easily. As I see it, it's about being able to conceptualize the album as a whole, as a statement, which I don't always have in mind when writing the songs. So I have to eke it out later by examining what themes reoccur in the songs.

The themes that I address represent a snapshot of my concerns at the time of writing, but I think that such a strongly point-of-view album should also have a dynamic protagonist. The songs are in first person, so the protagonist is me. Simple enough. Like any character, I have experiences and gain insights over the course of the album, hopefully having learned something by the end of it. Track sequencing is about timing these insights, making this journey intelligible and compelling.

Or maybe it's about not putting all the slow ones in a row.

Serious Business, Right Out of the Gate

Right after I finished the bass recordings, my computer started acting up, quickly progressing from intermittent to incessant hangups and finally refusing to boot entirely. After a few days of very annoying troubleshooting, I decided it was probably the hard drive. A new hard drive helped for one morning's worth of recording before being overtaken by the same problems. Now I'm pretty sure it's a motherboard thing, as it has a weird salty-looking patina on the underside. A word of advice: never drag your computer through snow drifts.

So I have my drives hooked up to this computer until I get a new motherboard. And I've gotten almost all of the recording done, unless I decide to add more instruments. I started with the violin parts.

I used my violin for the recordings. It was my great grandmother's, a Sears catalogue violin from the 1920s which was disastrously (in the opinion of a luthier I took it to once) refinished by my grandfather with what appears to be house paint. Having once played a quarter-million dollar violin alongside it in a blind test, I'm still convinced it's a great instrument. I recorded it with the Rode NT1a placed about a foot above it. The low ceiling meant I couldn't get crazy with the bow, but maybe that was a good thing.

Accompanying the violin on most of the lead lines is my Yamaha YSL354 trombone, which I bought at the age of eleven with money I'd won for playing the violin, coincidentally. I tried it on the NT1a, but found I preferred it with an AKG D310 that I had laying around. I remember seeing it used as a podium mic in videos of eastern European leaders during the cold war. If only Tito had played trombone.

I threw tambourine on when I felt the rhythm track needed something to drive it forward, or when I needed some high end to counterbalance the floor tom. This one's supposed to mount on a hi hat. I believe it belongs to freelance writer Matthew Kassel. I don't think he knows I have it.

I used a DX7s on one of the songs for its great imitation-Rhodes sound. I also used it as a midi trigger for Sonar's native True Pianos piano soft synth, since I don't have a piano worth recording.

The lyrics to one of the songs mentions "toy keyboards," so I added a Casio VL-1, which doubles as a handy calculator. The entirety of its range is only accessible by using an octave switch at the top of the keyboard, so to play the arpeggiated part I had in mind I had to sample the individual notes and stitch them together afterward. Hope it was worth it.

I had said no electric guitars at the outset, but I decided one of the songs could use a slide guitar, so I played my Stratocaster. I painted the pickguard in high school to look like a Costa Rican ox-cart wheel. Guess I was into them at the time or something. I used it between the standard middle pickup and the DiMarzio X2N in the bridge position, to the clean channel of a Fender Blues Deluxe Reissue with the reverb cranked. There's an SM57 somewhere near the speaker cone. I'd never played slide guitar before and the action on my guitar is low, so it was pretty fiddly, but I think it turned out all right.

Next? Fine tuning vocals, then editing and mixing. Stay tuned.