Take Three

Back in the dawn of the Internet, circa 2001, I wrote and recorded a rather satirical, surrealist song called “Have You Seen My Website?” It was a sort of homage to Laurie Anderson; the verses were spoken and devoid of rhyme, but the choruses were sung and had a slightly tricky rhyme scheme.

Years passed. In 2012 I decided I hadn’t done a very good job of recording the song, plus I had some new lyrics I wanted to add. So I did it again from scratch.

This week I decided the second version also sucked. Principally the mix. At the age of 70 I’m finally trying to learn how to do decent mixes. Given the existence of age-related hearing loss, this is a bit of a challenge, but I may be starting to get the hang of it. For years I’ve been sort of studiously ignoring Reason’s mastering effects, but I’m now switching them on, boosting the level of the drums, adding highpass filtering to some tracks to get rid of the mud, employing more EQ and compression — stuff like that.

Not to keep you in suspense, here’s the result:

I managed to extract the vocal track (the second version) from Cubase. I also exported the MIDI tracks, but they arrived in Reason in a rather ragtag condition, for unknown reasons. Some of them were incomplete, and the organ track somehow had a MIDI mod wheel setting of 127 in every note clip, even though there was no mod wheel data. Probably an obscure Reason bug. But no matter; I wanted to redo some of the MIDI instruments in any case, and because I had the mp3 of the existing mix, I could listen to it and figure out pretty much what I had played.

After a couple of days of work, the thing is sounding a lot better. I simplified the bass part, added a couple of beats (ambiguous term; what I did was transform a bar of 4/4 into a bar of 6/4), and added four bars in another spot.

I decided I needed to change four words in the lyric — four lousy words. Fortunately, I still have the same microphone. I did short recordings in loop mode, five takes in quick succession, then choose the one that sounded best and dragged it on top of the vocal track. The original vocal was heavily comped, so adding patches is a very natural thing to do.

With respect to the instrumental arrangement, I have to remind myself that less is more. I tend to toss in ideas that sound swell at the time, but that collide with one another, producing sonic mush. Not that there’s anything wrong with sonic mush, necessarily; the Rolling Stones get an enormous amount of energy by layering tracks until the result is — well, it’s not mush, exactly, but it’s certainly a thick stew of sound. But I lean more toward ’80s synth-pop, and that type of sonority demands clarity. Every note has to count. The Stones’ approach to track layering works, I think, largely because it’s all guitars, drums, a little piano, stuff like that. (Well, except for the Mellotron in “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”)

All music — certainly all European and American music, and probably all music, period — lives in the dynamic tension between repetition and change. In my song, the vocal line in the verses is in a constant state of change, so a highly repetitive backing track seems to be just what’s needed.

Or at least that’s my current theory. Pop music is heavily repetitive. I may resurrect a few more of my old songs. I’m sure the backing tracks will be groove-centric too.

Inspiration

Sometimes it helps to have an external source of ideas to get you started. I haven’t been doing much music lately (though that may be about to change), but yesterday my friend Dan Brown — no, not the author, a different Dan Brown — sent me a link to a new piece of his called “Sigh of Exasperation.” I liked the vibe and the stately pace, and I had a couple of ideas about things he might have done differently — so I redid it. I call my version “Dan’s Sigh”:

 

For comparison, you can listen to his piece on bandcamp: https://theorganizm.bandcamp.com/track/sigh-of-exasperation

It’s in the same key and has much the same groove. But I tend not to want to repeat a single chord progression clear through any piece, so I had to devise a few variations. I don’t usually work this quickly — this was all done within 24 hours. Maybe I should give myself lessons.

SOB@50!

This October marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Wendy Carlos’s landmark synthesizer LP Switched-On Bach. There may be official celebrations in the works; I haven’t looked into that yet. For now, what I’m proposing is an entirely unofficial celebration. If the right people jump on board, it could maybe turn into a bit more than that.

At the moment, my concept is preliminary and subject to change. If you have ideas or concerns, let me know! (email via midiguru23@gmail.com works well.) I don’t even guarantee at this stage that the concept is going to fly at all — it just seems like the right thing to try.

My basic idea is this: Anybody who wants to can submit a recording for possible inclusion in a compilation. At the very least, we’ll put up a soundcloud channel for the collection. Possibly YouTube, possibly a Facebook page — who knows?

I don’t tweet, but if you do, I suggest the hashtag #SOB@50 for discussions and publicity. (I don’t even know how hashtags work. If that doesn’t work, please suggest something different.)

What follows are not ground rules — they may change. This is just what I’ve thought about so far:

1. All submitted music should be drawn from the classical repertoire, and must be in the public domain.

2. Faithful note-for-note renditions are not required. Elaborate rearrangements and mashups are certainly allowed, but we have to be able to hear the classical piece, and it has to be a principal part of your creation.

3. The use of samples is allowed, but not encouraged. Using an orchestral sample library for a faithful recreation of a symphonic piece will not earn you any gratitude unless it’s extremely well done.

4. This will be a curated collection. What this means is, I’ll listen to everything I receive and pick out what in my opinion are the 12 or 15 best pieces. Yours may or may not be included. This restriction is necessary for several reasons. First, audio quality does matter. Second, you might choose the same piece that someone else does. In the interest of variety, there will probably be only one version of any given piece. Third, pieces that diverge too far from a recognizable classical source won’t qualify unless you’re so amazingly brilliant that we can’t resist. Fourth, you’ll need to sign an agreement allowing us to use your recording. If we don’t get the paperwork, we’ll have to toss your track.

5. I may enlist the help of a few other people to decide what to include. The use of the words “I” and “my” above is not intended to be definitive.

6. Instructions on how and where to send your submissions will follow shortly.

7. It would be very, very useful to have a couple of people involved who can help get the word out when the compilation is released. I’m not an expert on online publicity. I could use some help!

8. No, there’s no money in it. (Unless something changes, and if it changes the paperwork requirements will go through the roof.)

9. No, I haven’t mentioned this to Wendy yet. Nothing here should be read as implying an endorsement on her part. This is just for us, for the synthesizer-loving community, and it’s just for fun.

10. Your entry may earn a few extra points in the judging if it was recorded using an actual modular synthesizer (either hardware or software).

Sweet Dreams

Did this last fall. Not sure why I set it aside when it was 99% finished, other than the fact that it’s not really a very creative arrangement. Well, I was thinking of doing some other pop tunes too, and this was one of two that I finished — all except the last flourish. I had ended it on the A-flat chord (it’s in C minor), and that was obviously not right.

It’s definitely harder-edged than the original hit song. Not better, necessarily, just more aggressive. This was inspired by an instrument called SynthMaster 2. Believe it or not, the full bass line (heard clearly at the beginning of this track) is just a single note in SynthMaster. Hold down one key and it plays the entire riff. So how could I avoid filling it out?

I don’t usually use this much compression, but a dance mix seems to call for it. Enjoy, if possible.

Thankin’

Our local Unitarian Church is making an effort to attract a younger and perhaps more diverse clientele. As a peripheral participant in the music part of the service, I got to thinking, “Yeah, the music here is awfully white, isn’t it? Awfully New Englandy.” The lyrics of the hymns are secular humanist (though the G-word does appear from time to time, much to my disgust), but the whole presentation — standing up and singing together, with or without the help of our somewhat ragtag choir — is straight out of 19th century Protestantism. And not the Southern Baptist kind of Protestantism, either. The Holy Spirit (speaking metaphorically here, and not a little sarcastically) is wearing a stovepipe hat.

So why not a little hip-hop, for Pete’s sake? (I worship Pete, actually.) Most of the services end with a short hymn called “We Give Thanks.” This song was written by Canadian folksinger Wendy Luella Perkins, and I’m a little nervous about asking her permission to use it. Folksingers don’t always appreciate synthesizers! Plus, judging by the bio on her website, she probably doesn’t worship Pete. Nevertheless, I did an instrumental arrangement of the tune:

Truth be told, I’m not sure it’s hip-hop anymore. The snare sound in the drum loop I chose was a lot more street, but it didn’t fit the vibe, so I replaced it with that pretty new age stick-tap. Even if it’s a lame-ass attempt at hip-hop, though, this is hipper (and hopper) than what you’ll hear on Sunday. Don’t get me wrong: Some of our music presentations are quite nice. But they’re nice in a thoroughly white, New Englandy way.

Not always. Last Sunday a young woman sang “De Colores” in Spanish. That part was terrific. But then the choir came in and sang the same tune in an English translation.

Diversity — still a work in progress. I’ll do my bit, but you know, I’m awfully white and New Englandy myself.

Keeping Score

When I was growing up, music meant notated sheet music, pretty much. Sure, jazz players improvised, but nobody was teaching improvisation (or jazz anything) where I went to high school. Someone handed you a page of dots, and you played the dots.

How times change. These days, I still use pages of dots if I’m playing cello or piano, but my composing is done in a computer sequencer. There’s no notated score, and no need for one. It’s all MIDI tracks or loops. The old-line MIDI sequencers (Cubase, for instance) have notation editing and printing facilities, but that’s all legacy code. Very few people would ever touch it. Newer sequencers such as Reason and FL Studio, which are mostly what I use these days, don’t do notation. Nor does Ableton Live.

A couple of days ago, for reasons that I don’t want to go into quite yet, I decided that it would be a good idea to have notated versions of the melodies of some of the music I’ve done in Reason. This turns out to be possible, but it’s a bit of a scramble.

First I tried pencil and paper. That works, but it’s a punishing regime for the hand holding the pencil. So how about extracting MIDI files from Reason and importing them into a notation program? The pages would be easier to read, and also easier to edit — for instance, if I decide I need to add eight bars in the middle of a piece.

For the benefit of anyone else who may be contemplating such a quixotic venture, here’s what I’ve learned.

First, for basic notation you don’t need an expensive notation program. MuseScore is free, and it works very well. It will load a MIDI file and interpret the data so as to produce notated pages. But that’s not the end of the story; it’s just the beginning.

If you just want to export a melody from Reason, the first thing to do is save a special copy of your song called something like “MySong Melody.reason.” This is so you won’t accidentally destroy the song data! then select all of the other tracks except the melody, right-click on one of the tracks, and choose “Delete Tracks and Devices.” When you’ve done this, you’ll be exporting only a single MIDI track — the melody. If you export the whole song, you’ll have a multitrack MIDI file. MuseScore will import this, but editing it would take days.

If you’ve recorded a melody on a monophonic synth, you’ll probably never notice if a few notes overlap here or there. (If you’re using a preset that has legato enabled, you’ll probably want some overlaps, in fact.) But MuseScore handles overlapping notes by assigning them to a different voice on the staff. Voice 2 may have only one note in a measure, so MuseScore will strew rests across the rest of the measure and use conventional stem directions for what it thinks are the two separate voices.

Reason has a nice editing command for introducing a small, fixed-size gap between notes in a legato line. Use this before exporting the MIDI file, and most of the Voice 2 notes will drop back to Voice 1. But this command has to be used with care. If two notes overlap significantly (again, this will be inaudible if your preset is monophonic), the editing command will make the first note longer rather than shortening it, so there will still be an overlap. Also, you can’t do a select all on the track before using the command, because then all of the notes at the ends of phrases will be lengthened, perhaps radically, so that they reach almost to the first note in the next phrase. The way to use this command is by selecting one phrase at a time, clicking the button to use the command (the button is in the F8 tool kit), and then inspecting the whole track visually before exporting the MIDI file.

Even then, you may miss a couple of overlaps. You’ll see them when MuseScore imports the file, at which point you can go back to Reason, edit the offending notes, re-export the file, and re-import it into MuseScore.

And then we’re ready to print out the pages? No, not yet.

MuseScore analyzes MIDI files to figure out what key signature to use. This is a nice time-saver if your music is simple, but if you’ve changed key in the middle, or are using an exotic scale (as I will sometimes do), MuseScore may make a bad guess. The first piece I tried to import ended up in G-flat major when notated. This resulted in a whole big bunch of B-double-flats, among other enharmonic anomalies. Getting rid of the key signature didn’t change the way notes were displayed, other than adding a slew of new accidentals. From a quick trip to the MuseScore user forum, I learned about the Respell Pitches command. That took care of most (though not all) of the spelling problems. With the ones that remain, it’s click on a note, hit the J key. Click on another note, hit the J key.

The lengths of notes at the ends of phrases are not always easy to read. I had to delete a few sixteenth-notes that were tied to the previous note. Other notes had unnecessary staccato dots.

For some reason, MuseScore didn’t see my printer. I had to “print” to SnagIt (a screen-capture program) and save from SnagIt to PDF in order to print.

The next melody I tried extracting was deliberately recorded without quantization, and the tune has a gentle shuffle groove. Figuring MuseScore wouldn’t like that, I went through the track and quantized everything. The results were still a mess:

With this one (which fortunately isn’t too long) I’m going to have to transcribe using a pencil and then enter the data into MuseScore by hand. That’s almost bound to be easier than trying to thrash through that tangle.

I think I’m starting to get the hang of it, though. And the good news is, as you can see in the above clip, Reason exports time signature changes as part of the MIDI file. MuseScore happily inserted time signature changes in all the right spots.

I’m sure I’ll run into a few more snags along the way. The output is easier to read than pencil and paper, though, and I don’t have to worry quite so much about writer’s cramp.

Looking Backward

Here’s the latest installment in my expanding set of odd arrangements. You may possibly recognize the tune, but in order to avoid nasty paperwork, I’m not going to say what it is. If you recognize it, please do buy your own legal download of the original version on iTunes or Amazon.

I call my version “Vera, Chuck, and Dave”:

This arrangement is possibly a bit more ironic than some. It seems to have a subtext, at least, bearing in mind the fact that when the composer originally wrote the tune he was not yet 30 years old. The opening 32 bars are one meditation on the topic of the song, but the middle section … well, I’ll let you discover it for yourself. Enjoy, if possible.