Just Add Piano...

A friend of mine in Detroit fired me off a quick .mp3 of a new tune her and her wife had written for a friend's ordination. It was a quick take - vocals, guitar and shaker egg.

For fun, I thought I'd throw down a piano track and mix it with the original take. I decided to use HalionOne's included Yamaha S90ES piano patch, since I don't have my Bosendorfer 290 yet. The signal from this patch is quite dry, so you add reverb to taste as an insert (which I prefer).

There are three hazards in recording over someone else's audio mix.

1) You muddy it. If there's a lot already going on in the tune, more is usually not better. Fortunately, this mix was sparsely done, and the vocals were forward enough that adding another instrument could be done without nuking them.

2) Pitch. They might be tuned to something other than A440. You might need to adjust the pitch of the source track. Hopefully this isn't much of a shift and doesn't wonk up the tone too much. Again, not a problem in this case - bang on concert tuning.

2) Rhythm. An imported audio file doesn't have a natural alignment with the bars and beats in Cubase, so you can't just turn on a click track easily. A pox on folks who don't hold to a beat reasonably firmly, or have long sustained sections without any evident count or cue as to when to come back in.

This particular tune featured a reasonably rhythmic and percussive guitar patch in standard 4/4 time so keeping track of the beat wasn't too tough. The guitar did have several key rhythmic figures that needed to be tight with the piano for the tune to hold together. I wanted to tighten up the hits on a couple of these figures.

I can't use the bar/beat markers as a reference (they aren't aligned to the audio material). What I did instead was use the graphical view of the audio (Sample editor) in one window, the Midi editor on the piano in the other window, both zoomed in. I would then move the current time (vertical line) to the start of the audio hit in the sample editor, which also moved the line in the midi editor.

It was then easy to drag the note starts to the start of the hit and tighten up the timing on those key bits.

Word Files in the Wake of the Storm

It was not a fun time for me this weekend. We can all relate to those internal crises we bring on ourselves that rage away below the surface. I often get great ideas and lyrical images coming at me when that stuff is going on.

Today a bud of mine suffering some romantic heartache sent me a note, and this excerpt stood out:

... its amazing what can be done when I'm in that mood. I found a couple of new progressions which I'd never used before. I'm not going to write it down. It seems inappropriate to do so.

I'm familiar with the creative energy that comes with angst. It's why there are so many poems written in high school. What caught my eye on this was the "I'm not going to write it down. It seems inappropriate to do so."

Why is it inappropriate? I'll weigh in as thinking that when life sends you something and it stimulates a creative response, it's one of the upsides of such times and hold on to it.

Holding On

It's tough to preserve the output from such moments. In my case, I'm hardly in a position to work effectively on lyrics when I'm crashing emotionally.

What I do is open a word file, give the feeling or moment a title and quickly jot down whatever is coming to me. Sometimes it's only the title, which will serve as a reminder that I can use later to pull out the original moment and record it more effectively. A good example of such a work is Shell Shock.

I then save it off to an "ideas" directory to be worked on sooner, later or never again. Output from this weekend are two empty files, titled "Meltdown" and "Death by Introspection."

Word files in the wake of the storm.

Random-oke, Improvisation and Collaboration

On Saturday, I attended a cool table reunion with Dog and Pony Sound, a karaoke service I used to kj (and continue to photograph) for. The "cool table" consists of the some great singers and ultra fun folk from the early days many years ago. I'm happy to report that major fun was had!

The first round of tunes turned out to be a game of random-oke. That's where someone else cracks the book for you and puts their finger down - and you're expected to sing whatever they hit. If you know the tune, you repeat until you're utterly clueless.

I managed to draw the Rolling Stones' "Not Fade Away." I had a bout of anxiety and actually filled in an alternate card on "Jumping Jack Flash," but the sense of fun beat out my insecurities in the end. Up I went to the stage and the mic to sing a tune I'd never heard before.

What's interesting was my knee jerk reaction to hedge the game. It struck me that a barrier to freshness and freedom in music making is the fear of failure and the pursuit of safety. Improvisation on stage in front of a live audience (or even laying down licks on your own in the home studio) requires a measure of abandon and fearlessness to avoid falling back into the familiar.

Improvisation

A couple of days later my in-laws came to visit. My mom-in-law loves to play the piano (she plays from classic music notation). She didn't have her music along, but sat down at the piano to give "Ave Maria" a stab from memory. She'd get into the tune, then bail and start over. It prompted me to sit down and gab about improvising to her briefly, outlining the basic mental processes behind it.

"Don't think in terms of notes as much as the relative motion of the chord progression. Don't think of where your feet are being placed, think of where your steps are taking you."

I started outlining basic triad and seventh chord progressions, the underpinnings of basic harmony. It made me realize that there's a lot of thinking and practice behind getting the instincts worked out.

That wasn't the best place to start. Time to switch gears.

Abandon Expectation. Embrace Exploration.

"Play without music more. Just leave it in the bench. Keep trying ideas until you like what you hear."

Collaboration

One of the things I like about the karaoke crowd at Dog and Pony is the sheer number of good singers there and the diversity of styles they represent. I have a lot of admiration for their music sense, so I'm hoping to warm up some collaborations on the album.

I gabbed with a couple of them Saturday night and mentioned my blog. **waves hello**

Too Much Information on Suspended Chords

I went over to Peter’s place last night to help him work on a friend’s website. While I was there, I was asked by a fellow musician why suspended chords are called “suspended.” I had had a bit too much brandy at the time and didn’t deliver a coherent response. I thought I’d answer that question today.

Suspension

The term "suspension" describes a technique used in counterpoint where a note is carried over from a chord to the next chord. So if I move from an F chord (F,A,C) to a C chord (C,E,G) but still play the F note, I have suspended the F.

A suspended chord is a chord where the third of the chord is replaced by either the fourth (most common) or the second. Csus4 (C,F,G) and Csus2 (C,D,G) are examples. These chords were named suspended chords because they were usually arrived at by using the contrapuntal technique of suspension.

Thus, a Csus4 chord can be arrived at by suspending the F in the movement from IV-I or V7-I while the Csus2 can be arrived at by suspending the D in the movement of V-I, ii-I, or iii7-I.

Antici………. pation!

The opposite of suspension in counterpoint is anticipation. In anticipation you introduce a tone of the chord to follow prior to actually moving to that chord, thus anticipating the chord to come. You can used suspended chords to anticipate – so for example, I – Isus4 – IV (C – Csus4 – F) introduces the F prior to playing the F chord.

I suppose in such circumstances, one might call it an anticipation chord… (C – Cant4 – F), except no-one ever does and “can’t” is such a discouraging word.

Final Thoughts

“sus4” is the most common suspended chord and is often simply written “sus.” Thus, Csus4 and Csus are considered to be the same chord.

Suspended chords are also called “sustained” chords but “sustained” is technically incorrect.

Typically a suspended fourth or second replaces the third of the chord. When this occurs the chord is neither major nor minor.

The suspension can also be played as an added tone chord in which the third is kept and the second or fourth added. This results in a much more dense sound.

Probably one of the most famous uses of the sus4 chord is in the opening of the tune "Pinball Wizard" by the Who.

Bsus - B - Asus - A - Gsus - G - F#sus - F#

The use of suspensions can also be heard in the piano playing of Bruce Hornsby. “Every Little Kiss” is a good example - lots of the chords have added or substituted a fourth or second.

Spectral Analysis - TrueRTA finally sorted.

I've alluded to some complications on the equalization of my room. Here's the tale so far.

I picked up TrueRTA to do the noise generation and spectral analysis end of the job. I also picked up the Behringer ECM8000 measurement microphone to get the audio measurements as flat as possible (TrueRTA ships with a mic calibration file for the response curve on the ECM8000).

I install TrueRTA on my main machine and try to measure audio fed in through the Presonus Firebox. Hmm... no response. Double check that the Presonus inputs are configured in control panel to be the default recording feed. Yes, they are. Use Cubase to verify that the audio is getting fed. Yes it is.

Try the TrueRTA signal generator to feed output out through the Firebox. That's getting out fine.

Hmm. Try other inputs to see if anything is getting into TrueRTA. Ahh. My cheapo USB headphone mic is feeding it fine. Maybe other inputs will work. I rummage through the closet for some adapters and repatch my mixer to feed audio into the 1/8 inch standard mic jack on the computer. No dice.

At this point I fire off a note describing my issues to the support email at True Audio and continue to try stuff. I decide to install TrueRTA on my laptop (good old 32 bit XP versus 64 bit Vista), dig a mic pre-amp out of the basement (the ECM8000 requires phantom power) and lo! The laptop works.

I'm just about resigned to using the laptop to do the equalization when a note comes in from True Audio. Make sure the drivers are WDM and that the sample depth/rate is 16 bit / 44.1 Khz. Back to control panel. Set the drivers up as instructed.

Bingo! (Thanks John)

So now all I need to do is find the 9VAC power adapter for my equalizer (which had been on the shelf for a few years) and I'm ready to level the room.

SQL Server - A long day and a longer night

This isn't music related, this is my software job. I had to uninstall Microsoft SQL Server 2005 yesterday because the default instance became corrupt. Now, I won't get into a lot of detail on it, but suffice to say that if an instance becomes corrupt, the uninstall won't remove it completely, and the re-install won't install over top of it.

You end up in this "you can't get there from here" space.

Well, you can get there. Basically, you have to uninstall as far as you can, and then start crawling through the registry removing references to SQL server, going into the Program Files directory and removing files. The final trick was how to remove a Vista service that doesn't show up in msconfig - and this article should help you should you have such an arcane requirement in the future.

So now I'm back up and running where I was yesterday at noon, only backlogged. I'll be getting to the equalization shortly.

Clear sounding monitors.

I fought Saturday afternoon shopping crowds to get myself off to the local audiophile store and consult the truly snobby regarding sound. They had Puresonic cone stands in stock for getting the monitor speakers up off the shelf (pictured left). It's a good thing the shelf is cheap pine, because those stands are NOT kind to wood.

But - oh my, the clarity in the sound from the speakers now. I'll edit this shortly with an update later in the evening - I'm off to get a mic stand and the measurement mic - time to start fudging connections and get the room equalized.

Headphones, Monitors, Line6 and Guitar Port

My ears don't like using full cup headphones for hours. I switched over to my studio headphones a couple of weeks ago and recently I've noticed my ears are feeling a tad uncomfortable. I don't have the volume cranked. My working theory is that the full cup headphones seal against my head and the vibrating air has nowhere to go but against my ear drum. Over time listening fatigue sets in.

Full cup headphones are great for removing distracting sounds and preventing your monitor mix from spilling out into a mic when recording. I won't want to use them for hours and hours for all my digital playing, though.

I was using the headphones because my studio near field monitors currently sound like crap. They are churning out way too much sustained resonance in the bass and low mid-range frequencies. Everything sounds boomy. The reason for that is where I have them. Audiophiles will cringe. They are currently weight bearing supports between two shelves in a brick and board bookcase. The boards essentially become resonating panels, similar to the wood top of a guitar. (Did I mention I haven't been recording for awhile?)

So I need to get my monitors pumping out pristine sound. Step one will be to decouple them acoustically from the shelves. Space is at a premium, so I'll likely keep them on the shelf but isolate them acoustically from the wood. Things like the Auralex MoPad Monitor Isolators should do the trick nicely.

Spectral Analysis

Once the major boomy stuff is eliminated I can get to work with the equalization of the room. I've loaded up TrueRTA and taken it for a spin. The sound/noise generation gets out through the firebox fine, but the inputs don't seem to feed the spectrum analyzer. Ideally, I'd plug my Behringer measurement mic into the firebox (it needs phantom power) but I might end up routing through the Mackie mixer and using a dual 1/4 inch phono plug to 1/8 inch stereo plug adapter cable I have to feed the PC's mic input. It's sub-optimal but better than nothing. I fired off a tech support question about it to the TrueRTA vendor, but no answer yet.

Line6 Pod Farm

I was crawling around on amp modeling and discovered a forum site where the afficianados hang out... guitarampmodeling.com ... they seem pretty bent on the metal and heavy rock sounds though (as do many amp modeling vendors, at least in their demos).

I was looking for setup ideas on the Carlos Santana sound for a guitar, and caught a mention of Line6, and the fact that they have a Mesa Boogie amp in their model lineup (the amp used to produce that distinctive sound). So I blitzed over to see what they had, and they are launching a new plugin product, Pod Farm, that is Cubase compatible. It's priced the same as Amplitube 2 in the platinum version (the version that includes the Mesa Boogie amp).

They seem to be much broader in their focus than simply metal. They make a whole line of innovative guitars and amps and guitar processing hardware. I was impressed. Their community seems active and they appear to ship regular expansions on their products.



Guitar Port

They also have an affiliated "learn to play guitar" site that I thought was particularly cool. Check out guitarport.com - it's a mix of tips and articles, lessons, tabs and tracks you can jam to that have various guitar parts lifted out. I might join just to practice my virtual guitar chops on the keyboard. It also seems they also have amp model presets engineered around the guitar sounds of specific artists and tunes.

It's been... one week...

... since I wrote. It's been a fun week, a busy week.

The Firebox is working fine. I need a longer fire wire cable to get it up on the shelf with the mixer, but never mind. Following its installation, I got started with Cubase LE 4. I had been working on Wendy's tune on paper, so I decided to get the basic framework of the tune recorded.

I laid down a basic Piano/Strings line to just get the chords outlined and dropped in a tempo change as I moved out of the intro. I'm pretty rusty with Cubase so I was off to the manuals to look stuff up with regularity.

I then used one of the better patches in the included HalionOne sample playback library, a flute, to lay down the melody. Except I wasn't done writing the verse yet - so it just abruptly stopped in the middle of the verse.

Now, I've done this "recording of songs" stuff before. I'm itching to get to something new, so I download the RealStrat demo which also installs Amplitube Duo. Now I've got a Stratocaster with some amp modeling and an overdrive stomp box (all virtual, of course). This is too much fun to be bothered with finishing the verse on the tune. I bring up various songs (Sultans of Swing, anyone?) and jam to them. At first I'm all thumbs, but then I start to relax, throw some modal licks around and generally have fun. The demos are stripped down so there was a lot that couldn't be done - but it was enough to sell me on the virtual guitar idea.

Back to the tune after a couple of days of just goofing around with the virtual strat. It's recorded as MIDI streams which makes it easy to go in and tweak notes. I use Cubase like a word processor, changing timing and melody lines around much as I fine tune wording on the lyrics in Word. I need to finish the verse, so I start playing around with melody ideas. I realize as things progress the lyrics I've written are missing a line. I want to inject an extra phrase. We can rework the lyrics later - in the phrase goes. Now I've got a finished outline, melody and chords, for the intro, chorus and verse (no bridge, but it'll come).

I start wondering about the virtual acoustic guitar so I download the RealGuitar demo and start seeing if I can lay down some acoustic picking and strumming behind the tune. This is harder to get sounding natural than the virtual strat but eventually I've got something half decent. I wish Vir2 offered an Acoustic Legends HD demo so I could try it.

It's time to step up to the real recording software I want to use. I'm already tweaking preferences and such in Cubase LE, which are sure to be lost in the upgrade. Steinberg Canada sells an upgrade to Cubase Studio 4, so it's nip to the webpage and order it! It arrived this morning and is installed and running fine, after some head scratchy moments on the upgrade of HALionOne.

So, now I'm looking through the lists of new features and plug in documentation, trying them out . Some of the effects processors like the included compressor and reverb have come a long way since I last used this software. More reporting on Cubase Studio 4, I'm sure, in the coming weeks.

Barrack Obama

This isn't a political blog, but I can't let Obama's election pass unremarked. You have to admit he has brought back to politics excellence in rhetoric and oratory. It is a wonderful thing to have leadership with the ability to inspire.