First Listen Through of Most Recent Mixes

Today at the pool, while working on my tan, I listened to the mix downs I made last night of what I chose as the most "current" mixes of the album. Overall, VERY good, and I'm quite proud of where we stand right now. It really has come down to the nitty gritty. Here are the notes I took as I listened:

April - Very last beat is sloppy.

Armageddon - Intro is messed up. Could be an export problem. Overall, too loud. Vocal clipping in many parts. Bass drum too heavy. Bass guitar too quiet. Very end of song is sloppy. "nobody left" vocal part has some problems.

Big Tin Truck - Timing problems on "Drop a few shacks" Vocal dissonance on "think about"

Bordered In Black - no issues

Come my Way - Bass could use some timing tweaks, throughout. "No one knows" vocal volue spike/clipping

Drinks - Intro high hat, not sure if it should be there. If so, it needs some timing fixes.
Overall, vocals are low in the mix. Keyboard is too high in mix. Overall, more vocals compared to all other instruments. "Shine your shoes" verse has some sloppy vocal stuff.

Friend - Some sloppy drum fills. Guitar solo too low in mix

Girl 134 - More bass. Tad more piano. Drum error at the very end of the song needs to be corrected

On The Road - Deedles at the end louder

Second Time Around - Intro guitar needs more volume. Louder overall. "You were just beggin" line needs some clean up. Overall, more volume.

I'm still totally in the dark about Guitar Player, but I'll get to that eventually. Overall though, there really isn't that much work to do. Some technical clean up, and some minor adjustments.

iPhone Is Loaded

I output almost every song, and have transferred it to my iPhone. This will allow me to listen to the entire album in a reproduceable environment.

The only song I did not transfer over is Guitar Player, as I suspect that the most recent version of the CuBase file is not the version Bill wants included on the album. It seems more like a work in progress. Same is true for Armageddon, which had the drum tracks muted. I unmuted them and output, but that is not very reassuring. I will definitely need to confirm with Bill which versions of the files he wants used for final mixes.

Next steps: listen to all of the mixes, take notes, and go from there.

Sorted Out

I made some good progress on the logistics of the album tonight. I have installed Cubase, and went through all of the song folders to find the most recent version of each song. I've also updated my spreadsheet so I can keep track of which file is the version I'm doing to be using for the final knob-turning.

The question that remains in my mind, which I feel I should get a solid answer for before proceeding is this: are Bill's most current versions the ones he wants used on the album? Or could it be the case that for some of the songs, the most recent version is just a tangent he was pursuing? A less traveled path that ultimately did not work out??

Music Video Proof Of Concept Under Way

Another thing I'm sort of dorking around with in the background is preparation for the first official music video to go with the release of the album. Though I am unsure which song will be the opener, I'm doing some technical tests to see if I can accomplish certain effects using Adobe Premiere Elements 9. The reason I'm using Elements instead of CS3 is because Elements 9 supports the HD files that come straight off my camera. CS3 does not. And while I'm more familiar with CS3, and it's feature set is richer than Elements, I have yet to find something in CS3 that cannot be accomplished in Elements. I think this is a fine application of the 80/20 rule. For all of the functionality that is required by a novice editor like myself, it is easily covered with the functionality of a "light weight" program like Elements 9.

I'm sure there are a number of advanced things that cannot be done in Elements, but for my purposes, it works just fine.

I recently made a video for a convention I attended the other week named "Wizard World," which was my first successful test of true HD video for YouTube. It took a lot of work, patience and trial and error to get to this point, but I'm really excited to finally be able to edit HD video without having to down convert it to SD. And the video quality is just stunning, so I'm very happy.

The effect I'm trying to duplicate right now is something that is very common to music videos. Basically, the trick is that they speed up the music, and then play it back during filming. Lip sync is done to the sped up music. Then, in post production, you slow the music AND the video down to normal speed. The end result is a sort of ethereal looking video that seems sort of out of phase with reality. If you're unfamiliar with the effect I'm describing, I'm confident that you will recognize it when you see it. It's totally over used. Which is why we simply MUST have it in our first video!

I'm also testing the effect in the opposite direction. What happens when you slow the music down for the play back and lip sync?

So far, I've prepared a number of sound clips that are either slowed down or sped up to a number of different speeds. Now I just need to film some footage and see how it all works out. I will of course post a link to the final results once I have some test footage filmed.

Organizational Announcements

With a lot of logistical details behind me, I'm finally settling in for the final stretch on the production and eventual release of the Black and Blue album.

It has definitely been a long road, one much longer than I originally anticipated. I'm sure Bill feels the same way. As has been mentioned before, both on this blog and off, I think the real lesson learned here is that the old saying about "out of sight, out of mind" applies to BNB. My departure to Ohio definitely put a kink in the plans. I truly believe that had I remained in Orange County, things would have materialized much faster.

Spilled Milk.

With that mea culpa behind me, work begins.

Last weekend, I swiped/swooped all of the cubase files from Bill that he has worked on. I recently transferred them all to my PC. I also started a spreadsheet to track progress on each song. I call it a "Change Control Log." This will help me keep track of the things I do to each song, and also which file is the most current version. Right now, we have multiple copies of songs floating around on my hard drive, and I want to make sure I'm using the most current version.

For this I will be making some assumptions. I'm basically going to be using all of Bill's files as the benchmark. If there were songs he did not make any changes to, this simply means that the mixes we have to date are the ones we are going with, minus any adjustments to the master volume. I will also assume that the most recent version of Bill's files that he DID make changes to is the one that he wants included in the album. If this assumption is incorrect, it will need to be corrected quickly.

My sincerest hope is that the primary effort here will simply be one of adjusting master volume. I may need to do some retro corrections to things where perhaps Bill did not understand what I was hoping to accomplish, and accidentally undid. Of course, these will require a BNB T-Conf to remediate.

My last deliverable for tonight is to install CuBase on my PC. I recently did a full Hard Drive wipe after I started experiencing problems. Maybe it was just getting old, I don't know, but it's back up to speed now.

Speaking of Video, Watch This!

Here's some video I shot when we were picking up the Caprice. This is the closest thing to a band reunion in years.



Cross posted from the Project Workbench.

Operation: ViddyCap is Complete!

A project that has been on the Book of Work for MNI Heavy Industries (LLC) for MANY years has finally been complete.

The goal was to transfer the entire Stickmen/MNI video archive from tape to PC. When I moved to Ohio two years ago, I took the entire archive with me, along with my trusty Digital8 camera and a firewire cable with the dream of doing this in my free time. After all, surely, within two years, I would find the time to do a simple task like transfer a few dozen tapes to the computer.

Wrong.

So when I returned to SoCal, I was hit by a new wave of enthusiasm. I dedicated myself to finishing the project, and sure enough, within a couple short weeks, it was all done.

Yes, the ENTIRE video archive is now digital. It all fits on a 1.5 tb hard drive. I really think a lot of it was just the timing. Had I started this two years ago, I probably would have needed to spend an additional 500 dollars on storage. But today, for 80 bucks at Costco, you can get that huge drive that houses the entire thing.

This means that the first barrier to the production of "Stickmen The Movie" has been relieved. Where we go from here, time will only tell.

The Two Bills

Last Friday, multi-talented entertainer/engineer Bill Beverley and I finally joined “lead guitar” forces for a Moog Engineer power-jam.

Bill Beverley and I work together, sometimes pretty closely, but I generally keep my musical lantern under a hood whilst pulling down my paycheck (having learned years ago that the admixture of rock and roll with aerospace engineering is not without real professional risks).  Eventually Bill got wind of my musical background, and obtained the full briefing, while I also got filled in on his activities. 

Bill Beverley

Bill B. has led and/or fronted a few bands in the LA/Long Beach area, gigging most recently with Cocteau and Black Market Smile. He also maintains a parallel career as a minor game-show legend with successful runs as a contestant on Hollywood Squares and The Newlywed Game, and a possible upcoming appearance on Million Dollar Money Drop.

Game show laurels notwithstanding, electric guitar is Bill Beverley’s primary entertainment focus.  Until recently, he was almost exclusively an electric guitarist, favoring a hard-rock and/or heavy metal style, but also with a lot of more sedate, acoustic influences. 

Then, recently, Bill B. got the unplugged bug, and before long picked up his first stage-ready acoustic guitar.  Spurred by that event, he and I decided it was time to get together and test out our common ground.

The urgency ticked up a notch when Bill B. accepted a long-term assignment to Bremen, Germany to work on the Airbus A350-1000.  So it was time to stop talking and start rocking. 

We had kicked around a few ideas, but with time running out, we settled on the last possible day and decided to meet up in my hangar at Torrance Airport.  It was after work on a Friday, the day before Bill B. flew to Germany.  Bill’s charming wife, Ashley (constituting the fairer half of this game-show power duo), came along to witness the whole affair. 

Ashley, owing to the circumstances of her birth, is an absolute metal maniac, and proved remarkably receptive to the rock-and-roll meanderings of the two Bills.  As long as we kept things on a headbanging level, that is.  When we strayed from that path, we got a cooler reception.  But more on that later.  So, built-in audience, and definitely a refreshing change from the usual eye rolling that you might expect when somebody’s significant other comes to band practice.

The original plan had been to do an acoustic jam.  So of course I brought my full electric rig, and so did he.

Bill B. unloaded and plugged in his massive Line 6 with 4x12 cabinet and then unlimbered his custom Schechter.  I had the home-field advantage, having arrayed my sound reinforcement gear the night before, with the wall of speaker cabinets in the middle of the hangar, facing the lounge.  So I just powered up my Mesa-Boogie Dual Rectifier through Don’s old 2x12 cab, and tuned up briefly with my Nashville B-Bender Telecaster, before changing over to my Martin D-1 acoustic, which I stuck with for the rest of the session.  The acoustic-plus-electric texture is extremely flexible and things sounded good right out of the box.

I opened the proceedings, leading us through a warm-up version of “Sweet Jane” by the Velvet Underground.  Bill Beverley hadn’t heard it, and I was faking it, but it broke the ice.

Being engineers, we had exchanged autofiltered song list spreadsheets well before the session, but we hadn’t really nailed down any surefire material, except for a vague intention to try out “Across the Universe.”  This was a song which I had never played, but was thoroughly familiar with as a dyed-in-the-wood Beatles fanatic. 

Bill Beverley, inspired by the 2007 film Across the Universe, had learnt the film version of the song, and also had the tablature in his “acoustic guitar phone book.”  This ponderous tome was a phonebook-sized collection of tablature which Bill had brought along.  Once Bill had produced this artifact, songs were flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup.

After a few runs through Across the Universe, we hit our stride.  Bill showed me the chord changes, and I already knew the melody, but the song features a few bars in 5/4 time, which threw me at first until Bill demonstrated.  I picked up the introductory acoustic line pretty easily from the tablature, and did the vocal mostly from memory, supplemented by squinting at the phone book. 

A solo acoustic arrangement would have been historically accurate, though not too exciting.  However, the electric-plus-acoustic really made the whole sound pretty gorgeous.

Bill is a very fluid, technical guitar player, and very adept at getting the sound he wants from his instrument and amplifier.  This is an area that has always been a challenge for me.  Usually I just plug in, grimace, and twist knobs until it sounds good enough.  So one of the things that was fun playing with Mr. Beverley was how easily we moved between good sounding sonic landscapes.  That flexibility in turn opened doors for types of songs that would not usually hold much interest for me. 

Bill Fischer

Unfortunately I forgot to turn on my recording device, and took no notes, but here is an approximate list of the songs covered over the next hour or so:

Sweet Jane [The Velvet Underground]
Freebird [Lynyrd Skynyrd]
Across the Universe [The Beatles]
Silent Lucidity [Queensryche]
Angie [The Rolling Stones]
Run-Around [Blues Traveler]
Hold My Hand [Hootie and the Blowfish]
Sympathy for the Devil [The Rolling Stones]
Black Hole Sun [Soundgarden]
Down in a Hole [Alice in Chains]
Sweet Child o' Mine [Guns ‘N’ Roses]
Over the Hills and Far Away [Led Zeppelin] 
Wonderwall [Oasis]

Run-Around and Hold My Hand were mid-90s staples that I really didn’t get into at the time, but which were fun to play.  However, Ashley was definitely not impressed, and we of course try to please the crowd.  Mrs. Beverley being the die-hard metal head, it was fun to play up the the heavy side of the material in Bill’s book.

At some point I turned on my leslie speaker effect (on my old Quadraverb GT, through Vic’s Peavey bass combo amp), which led us into stuff like Soundgarden and Alice in Chains.

Alas, before we knew it, the time had flown.  We chatted a while in the chilly wind out on the airport ramp, and then Bill and Ashley headed out for Sushi, and thence to Germany.

It was a fun session, slightly rough due to the unrehearsed nature of the material, but with all kinds of potential there.  Add more musicians and stir.

Stickmen-REM Summit

After years of accusations that the Stickmen/My New Invention "sound like REM," members of our two bands finally got together this past Saturday to hash things out once and for all.  Victor Allen spoke for my band, LA-based My New Invention (formerly known as The Stickmen), while Peter Buck graciously represented Athens Georgia's finest, REM.  The meeting took place on musically neutral ground: Seattle, Washington.

Victor tells the story:

Lisa and I were walking home from our favorite breakfast spot, which takes us past our local record shop: Easy Street Records. Lisa remembered that Record Store Day was this weekend, so we popped in to support our shop and pick up some music that were hadn't gotten around to purchasing yet. The place was packed. I was reminded of hanging out at Tower Records in El Toro before they folded.

After browsing a while I found myself standing in front of the display for the new R.E.M. album Collapse, trying to decide if I wanted to buy it. As I was pondering this decision, the store manager came on the PA system and announced, "Thanks everyone for coming out for Record Store Day! We're very happen to have Peter Buck working the registers again. We're his home away from home here, so make him feel welcome. Be sure to stop by and say hi!" That made my decision easy.

While standing in line waiting for my turn, I watched Peter interact with other fans. He's a really laid back, friendly guy. The gal in front of me in line brought a big pile of LPs and he signed them all without any sign of irritation. She apologized for bringing so many things and he shrugged it off, "Don't worry about it, I don't have anywhere I need to be."

When my turn came up, he shook my hand and asked who to sign the album to, I told him and then admitted, "My band in college started out practically as an R.E.M. cover band."

Peter: "That's really great. I love to hear things like that. I have younger friends in the industry and they've told me the same thing. I think its cool. What did you play?"
Me: "We played everything we could learn off of Document and Fables... plus a couple of La's songs."
Peter: "The La's are great."

After signing the album, we had our quick photo op. Turns out he's at least 6' 2".

Peter Buck and Victor Allen

As I was turning to leave, he said, "So... you want a poster?" Then he signed and gave me a poster.

Sometimes you meet someone that you've admired or emulated and the experience is really disappointing, this was the opposite. Peter Buck is a great guy and genuinely enjoys meeting his fans.

So that's it.  Well done, Peter and Vic.  I think we can consider the hatchet buried.  REM is "cool" with the Stickmen sounding like REM.

For the record, I still don't really hear the resemblance.

Gimme Shelter Isolated Tracks

I have been fascinated by the process of creating and recording music that really gets to your guts for like 20 years (I should try doing it then; ha ha), but I don't know if I have heard anything that sheds quite this much light in a long time. Someone bootlegged the individual recorded parts of one of my favorite Rolling Stones tracks:

http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/deconstructing_gimme_shelter_listen/

I have NEVER heard what the guts of a recording of this caliber sound like, from beginning to end. (I mean other than ours, of course!)

The individual tracks are impressive, but there are numerous mistakes and clunky bits, which they didn't fix because they didn't have Cubase back in 1969. And who cares, because you can't really detect them in the end result.

There is a lot of layering of little guitar licks that sound totally lame on their own, but are perfect in context. Not that that is a foreign concept, but it is really interesting to hear it stripped to the bone for a track I thought I knew inside and out many years ago. Until Don sent me this (courtesy of Zach Baker). Don's take is that the underlying ("rhythm") guitar part is what makes the song, but the rest fills in perfectly on top of it. But he can't wrap his brain around how they (Keith) knew to add all the weird sounding fiddly licks. Like,

KEITH: Hey Mick, while I was having some chips and beans, I thought of another guitar part for Gimme Shelter! Right in the middle of the harmonica solo, it will go: dip-dee-dip deeeee.


MICK: Great, that will be really superb, Keith. Let's go round to Olympic and put it down on tape.

I personally find this dissection encouraging and inspiring. I am also kind of amazed at the amount of reverb when you hear the tracks in isolation. I guess I have been too much of a reverb scrooge on High Desert Mystery.