Somebody's Dad

I posted some tracks from "Somebody's Dad" (Seamus, Coming Home, Daffodils, and Nighttime Feedings) on Soundclick.

How I came to be stuck in audio mixdown limbo - Part 3

I finished recording in 2001 and called the album "Somebody's Dad", because while I was recording it I did become somebody's dad and I found (and still do find) the whole concept slightly unbelievable. The recording quality on "Sombody's Data" was a little better than "Four Track Mind" - I had learned some valuable lessons: don't atttempt to record on the cheapest tapes from Radio Shack, don't attempt to bounce tracks to and from the cheapest tape recorder from Radio Shack, do record at the highest possible signal volume.

But there were still some things I wasn't happy with. Editing on cassette tape is a process fraught with peril - every time you try and fix something you introduce more noise into the signal - so to keep the noise down I kept edits to the absolute minimum. While this technique allowed the album to sound slightly less like mud, it made me leave some things on the tape which, with the charity of hindsight, I can only characterize as fuckups. Also, while I was investigating different, noisier, sounds on the guitar, the 128 midi voices in the Roland were not cutting it any more ("ugh, Japanese Koto again?"). The drums on the Roland were particularly poor and if you don't have drums, you simply do not rock.

So I decided that for my next album, I had four engineering goals:

1) No audible fuckups
2) No more tape hiss
3) Better instrument sounds
4) Real drums

Doesn't look overly ambitious, does it?

Four Track Mind

I posted a couple of songs from "Four Track Mind" (Falling in Love, Roach Motel) on Soundclick.

How I came to be stuck in audio mixdown limbo – Part 2

I recorded an album on the 4-track, called “Four Track Mind” (I know, I know. I thought it was clever at the time, apparently so did every other schmuck sitting in his bedroom with writers block and a 4-track recorder in front of him). I converted the tape to mp3 a while ago and I might post it somewhere on the web for documentary evidence, but it’s pretty hard to listen to. The sonic palette is quite limited: an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar with the distortion pedal in the on position AND an electric guitar with the distortion pedal in the off position, vocals through an instrument mic (SM 57) and ersatz percussion noises from things like me banging on a Quaker Oats can with a wooden spoon. The recording quality is atrocious (cassette tape is a horrible recording medium AND I had no idea about what I was doing) but by the end of it I had accomplished my main goal: to learn about overdubbing and parts – how to write them and how to play them, how to leave space and fill space.

However, I was kind of unsatisfied with what I could accomplish with just guitars, so I bought a Roland midi keyboard with 128 built in voices. I spent some time getting the rust off of my piano skills and listening to the various sounds that the Roland could make - "ooh, a Japanese Koto?!?!" plus stupid sound effects like the sounds of rain/static and breaking glass. But undeterred, I dialed in the "Piano 2" sound and recorded another album on the 4-track, adding the Roland to the basic setup from “Four Track Mind”.

How I came to be stuck in audio mixdown limbo – Part 1

I am a creative/artistic type person. One of the ways that I express that creativity is by playing and composing music, and I have been doing that, not exclusively but pretty consistently, for over 20 years. I started with interminable shuffle-blues jams in High School, progressed rapidly to non-remuniterive attempts to busk in the Paris Metro and quickly graduated to banging out prospective jingles for coffee beans and public transportation on an out-of-tune grand piano in my college fraternity house.

As you can see from my GAS list, musical equipment costs money, and as a young man on my own in the world I didn’t have any. My priorities were paying the rent and getting laid, and the only work I could get (as a temporary office assistant) really didn’t cover much more than the essentials outlined above. There was a period of time where I focused on attaining a slightly more elevated career path than “that kid in the typing pool”, so most of my time (and the little money I had) went to education and training and working long hours at apprentice rates. But by the mid ‘90’s I was making a good salary (essential 1) and married (essential 2), so I started spending a little more time with music.

I had a bunch of songs that I would play at my local coffeehouse on solo acoustic guitar, and a (small) group of accommodating friends who would come down to hear me play, but I wasn’t really happy with what I was playing. The songs were OK, but there were things about the songs that I was just not able to convey on solo acoustic guitar. So I got an electric guitar, a distortion pedal, and a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder.

MARSH

I've been hangining out in some online musician forums for a while now (mostly Harmony Central) but nothing comes close to these two archived threads from MARSH.

The Daily Adventures of Mixerman

Slipperman's Recording Distorted Guitars Thread From Hell

Mixerman is a funny writer and the Daily Adventures are a traditional episodic narrative/workplace sitcom setup like "Tales of the City" except set in an LA recording studio. Slipperman is like the best teacher you never had in High School who can say "fuck" in every other sentence and smoke a cigar while he is standing in front of the class pontificating. It helps to be interested in audio mixing (which is where I am stuck right now) but I think anyone can enjoy these two guys. It's like listening to "Car Talk" (Mixerman and Slipperman apparently tried doing a radio show at one point but I cannot find a link); you don't really need to be interested in fixing cars to enjoy the show.

The Price of GAS

GAS = Gear Aquisition Syndrome, a common ailment afflicting musicians, but also prevalent amoung the general population of middle aged men.

Item	Year	Cost
Aria Acoustic Guitar	1997	300
Shure SM57 Microphone	1998	100
Frankenstein Electric Guitar	1998	300
Tascam 4Track Analog Recording Hardware	1998	300
Boss Guitar Distortion Effect Pedal	1998	50
Dunlop Crybaby Wah Guitar Effect Pedal	1999	50
Roland XP-10 Midi Controller	2000	400
Cakewalk Home Studio Recording software	2001	100
M-Audio Delta 44 Audio Card	2002	200
Line6 POD XT Amp Modeler	2003	350
ImageLine FLStudio Recording Software	2003	200
M-Audio 1x1 MIDI Adapter	2004	50
Digidesign Mbox Audio Card	2005	200
Digidesign ProTools Recording Software	2005	300
Propellerhead Reason MIDI Instrument Library	2005	500
Epiphone Elitist Les Paul Electric Guitar	2005	1000
Squier Telecaster Electric Guitar	2005	200
RODE NT-1 Vocal Microphone	2005	200
Behringer Truth Near-Field Monitors	2006	350

And don't even get me started on what it costs to run my car...

Recycling Bin Overflow

7 Washington Post
7 New York Times
1 New Yorker
1 Economist
1 Science

plus
Smithsonian, Audobon, FONZ, junk mail

equals
1 overflowing recycling bin

The Smartest Person in the Room

As a consultant, your livelihood depends on showing up at meetings and being the smartest person in the room. Say the average meeting has 10 people in it and you go to 10 of these meetings per year for 10 years. That puts you in the top 99.9%. But before you get too cocky, consider that there are 10,000,000 people in the Mid-Atlantic region and your next meeting just might have one of the 10,000 people out there who is smarter than you are.

A Very DC Day

This morning I found out that Chief Justice John Roberts' child plays in the same 5 and under soccer league as my son. This evening I went to "Thank You For Smoking" with my friend Linda, who is a PR flack for the nuclear power industry.

What a city.

Freddy King

Steve Cropper (and in his blues playing, Robbie Robertson) owe a huge debt to Freddy King.

Punk Pop

The number of punk pop bands on myspace astounds me. I was sort of keeping track of the genre without much interest or enthusiasm.

"Oh yeah, Green Day. They sound just like the Ramones"
"Oh yeah, Blink-182. They sound just like Green Day"
"Oh yeah, Fall Out Boy. They sound just like Blink-182"
"Oh yeah, Panic at the Disco. They sound just like Fall Out Boy"

I guess I've been missing something, because according to the myspace music charts punk pop is the only viable sound for a working rock band in the mid-Atlantic area.

I'm gonna go back to listening to "53rd and 3rd" now.

Guitars and Amps

The Les Paul through a Marshall stack has a lot of good sounds - I'm not sure that there are any bad sounds with this combination. For a clean, jazzy lead sound I was using a Roland Jazz Chorus with the neck pickup and a sine chorus, but lately I have replaced that with the Marshall with the gain and drive turned down. For crunchy rhythm I was using a Fender Reverb Deluxe with everything turned up to 10, but I have been playing most of these kind of parts on the Telecaster.

The Telecaster through a Soldano head and Marshall cab is a great, hi-gain sound. For straight blues the Fender Bassman and a TS-808 tube screamer is an excellent sound (the screamer is not nearly so effective with the Les Paul), and with the pedal clicked off I can get that Keith Richards crunchy rhythm sound. The Telecaster sounds good through the Marshall stack as well, but whenever I go there I realize, "yeah, this is good, but it would be better if I was playing the Les Paul right now".

Guitar book recommendations?

I'm an intermediate player and know some theory. I want to improve my playing but don't have time, money, or any desire to take lessons from someone.

Can anyone please recommend a book for self-teaching? What's the best book you've used? I don't want to be steve vai. I'm an indie-rock-blues type player, looking for improvement in that vein.

I like Rikky Rooksby. He is very prolific, but he basically just rewrites the same book, "Rock Music Theory by Example", over and over again so pick the one that seems to relate the best to what you want to accomplish. The books have no music scores and minimal tablature (sort of like leaving the equations out of a science book) but use prose and song examples to teach and illustrate basic music theory.

HTH

Bands and Sounds

Belle and Sebastian
Subjunctive mode character lyrics
Major 7/Minor 7 chords
Piano or retro keys
Acoustic or small electric guitars

Death Cab for Cutie
"I" pov thought feeling lyrics
Electronica drum loops
Synth bass
Piano or retro keys
Acoustic or small electric guitars

Killers
"I" character pov melodramatic lyrics
80's analog synth
Electric rhythm guitar

White Stripes
Electric blues lead guitar riffs or piano
Drums - bass snare hi hat ride primitive

Everything But the Girl
Electronica drum loops
Acoustic guitar
Alto vocals
"I" feeling lyrics

Steely Dan
Character pov lyrics
Major 2 and jazzy minor chord voicings
Piano/retro keys or bright electric lead guitar
Double tracked vocals
Drums - bass snare hi hat funky
Background bass

Prince
Synth drums drum loop
80's analog synth stabs
Bright electric bass
Electric funk guitar stabs
"I" want lyrics

Rolling Stones
Electric rhythm guitar riffs or piano/sax/vocal chorus
Electric blues lead guitar or slide
Small drums swing
Background bass

Stevie Ray Vaughan
Electric blues lead guitar
Backing organ
Small drums swing
Background bass

Jeff Beck
Electric blues lead guitar or 80's analog synth leads
Electric bass
Big drums

Bootylicious

Yes Beyonce, you are bootylicious. It's indisputable. No Beyonce, you're right, I can't handle just how bootylicious you are. Now, will you please take that hook out of my head?

The Killers

I have been listening to Hot Stuff by the Killers. I don't exactly like it, but I have listened to it, by choice, several times already. I may listen to it again. It sounds just like all those 80's English New Wave bands like New Order and the Smiths, except that the songs are all told from the point of view of a sociopath. Maybe the sociopath is what I like about it.

One thing I don't really like is that The Killers, like Franz Ferdinand, are totally gay while remaining sexually coy. I never thought it would come to this, but I much prefer Morrisey's Queen Bitch persona.

I am good with the following chords : E, Em, A, Am, G, D, C, F. Are there any popular songs which deal with just those chords? Someone recommended some songs to me before but when I looked them up online they had complicated chords (and some involved putting that clamp on the guitar) others had a lot of obscure chords which are difficult to play like B chord.

An example of a song which is really simple to sing is the Beatles' "Hide your love Away" it just has the basic A, G, D, C chords and that is it. I am looking for more songs which just deal with those chords. Would someone be kind enough to point me to a few urls?

You should probably start with songs that you like/are familiar with/sound easy to play. Then look up the simplified tabs (.crd) on a site like www.olga.net or www.harmony-central.com (Search Results). If the tab has a few chords in it that you don't know, try just skipping those chords and picking up again when you do know the chords. If the tab has a "slash" chord in it (e.g. D/F#), pick one of the chords and play that instead of trying to combine the two chords (which is what a slash chord is indicating). If the chord is not a major triad (G7, E5) just play the version you know (G, E).

If the tab has a lot of chords you don't know, you might try transposing it (a little music theory will help here). Basically, most of the useful chords you know are in the key of C major (C Em F G Am). A very common rock chord progression is I-IV-V, which in C major would be C-F-G. If the song was in the key of E major (a very common guitar key), a I-IV-V progression would be E-A-B. If you can't play a B major chord, you could transpose the song to C major and play it as C-F-G.

If you are looking for examples, most blues based songs use a I-IV-V (C-F-G, D-G-A) progression. If you are a Beatles fan, your might try "Get Back" or "Revolution". Another very popular progression is I-VI-IV-V (C-Am-F-G), which is used in most doo-wop songs. Many rock songs use a variant of this progression, such as "Let It Be" (C-G-Am-F) or the chorus of "She Loves You" (Em-A-C-G).

Keep practicing.

Digidesign Mbox Factory Bundle

I'm thinking about purchasing this:Digidesign Mbox2 Factory Bundle

Check out the musicansfriend postings. Lots of useful information there.

Does anyone have experience using the Mbox 2? The factory bundle comes with a ton of programs which are appealing.

I bought the Mbox factory bundle, so you may want to check the specifics of the Mbox2 bundle. Reason Adapted is a MIDI virtual instrument/drum loop library. I wound up upgrading to the full version ($150 credit for Adapted version). Reason is a wonderful program, but it is only useful if you are doing MIDI. Live Adapted is an audio sequencer (again a cut down version). I already had FL Studio, and I am happy with that for sequencing, so I haven't really used Live. The Bomb Factory and Amplitube are RTAS effects which you can use to modify audio tracks in Pro Tools. I have a POD amp/effect simulator, so I really don't use the Amplitube plug ins (or really any post-recording guitar effects).

I have a Dell Inspiron, 2 Ghz Pentium M, 1 Gig RAM, so it should be able to handle the workload.

Be EXTREMELY careful to make sure that your computer is supported by Pro Tools (http://www.digidesign.com/compato). This is a VERY PICKY piece of software. I work with computer hardware for a living and I wound up with a setup where I cannot record through the Mbox using ProTools.

Also - it says it's powered by the USB port, but this thing have real-time sequencing? Can it/does it plug into the 1394 port?

It uses a USB port and gets power over the USB cable. It does not plug into a 1394 (firewire) port - I believe that some of the rack models do, but the Mbox
does not.

I don't know what you mean by real-time sequencing. If you mean that want to be able to play along with backing tracks, record overdubs, patch in, etc. you
can certainly do that. If you mean that you want to combine and loop smaller audio clips into larger audio clips, you want to use Live, not ProTools.

I play guitar and plan to record demos. I realize there are simpler programs, but I like the software package this one offers.

The Mbox is a high quality/low latency external sound card. With a 3.4Ghz processor and 800Mhz FSB I can record with 8 ms latency (which means that I really don't have to do any input monitoring). If you need to set a larger buffer size (higher latency), the Mbox provides direct input monitoring via a spin knob on the front of the box. If you have a mono audio input (microphones, guitar amps) the Mbox can mix the mono equally into both headphones.

I appreciate any comments/advice on this software package, and if there are other alternatives.

ProTools and Reason are both complicated software products - there are a ton of knobs to twiddle and options to choose. Expect to spend some time (weeks) reading manuals and how-to books. That being said, I don't think that ProTools and Reason are unnecessarily complicated. Digital Audio is a complicated subject, and these are powerful programs - you need to take some time to understand the tools at your disposal and how to use them.

The Mbox is a good piece of hardware. The mic-inputs are pre-amped. The monitoring features are extremely useful, and the drivers are excellent. If you are going to connect an electric guitar directly into the Mbox you need to get TRS (stereo) patch cables.

There are other alternatives. FLStudio (www.flstudio.com) combines MIDI/Audio/Effects/Mixing/Sequencing capabilities. If you are just doing audio Cakewalk Home Studio (www.cakewalk.com) is pretty good. Both of these programs can run (for better or worse) with almost any sound card. As far as sound cards, I had an M-Audio Delta 44 (www.m-audio.com) before I bought the Mbox, and I was pretty happy with it - drivers and latency are good, but it doesn't have mic inputs, pre-amps, or the stereo monitoring option.

Bottom line - the factory bundle has good versions of everything you need to run a home studio. Just make sure it works with your PC.

Have fun.

The Life Pursuit

The Life Pursuit:
"1. Act of the Apostle - Belle and Sebastian
2. Another Sunny Day - Belle and Sebastian
3. White Collar Boy - Belle and Sebastian
4. The Blues Are Still Blue - Belle and Sebastian
5. Dress Up In You - Belle and Sebastian
6. Sukie In The Graveyard - Belle and Sebastian
7. We Are The Sleepyheads - Belle and Sebastian
8. Song For The Sunshine - Belle and Sebastian
9. Funny Little Frog - Belle and Sebastian
10. To Be Myself Completely - Belle and Sebastian
11. For The Price of a Cup of Tea - Belle and Sebastian "

The new Belle and Sebastian album (suprisingly) kind of rocks. Not, perhaps, as hard as "Don't Fear the Reaper", but rock nonetheless. It's got a little bit of the Beatles, via Badfinger (the shuffle blues riff on "The Blues are Still Blue") or Imperial Bedroom era Elvis Costello (the keyboards, hand claps and skronk upstroke rhythm guitar on "Funny Little Frog" and "To Be Myself Completely").

My appreciation of "Funny Little Frog" is somewhat tempered by the consistent (and insistent) attempt to rhyme "poet" and "throat", but all in all I have been enjoying this album much more than I expected.