Recent Articles
The Other Side of the Coin
Jun 24, 2008 Waiting Leave a comment
Or not. The dissenters have finally found their voice.
The other day, I linked to an old blog entry. It’s too bad that, at the time, I didn’t actually bother to read it. It was about looseness, the importance of flaws, and, at the root of it, the difference between greatness and perfection. (Hint: strive for the first, the second only leads to crap.)
I think that the heart of my desire to get this EP mixed by someone else is a desire to make it sound “professional.” To be able to put my album up next to other albums, and declare that it fits among them. To put out something that, ooh maybe, please please, fingers crossed, might get played on the radio, or, do I dare to dream, on the television.
And goddammit, that’s a bunch of bullshit. This is not some sonically pure, big studio effort. I didn’t go to some fancy engineer who knows about the best mic placement to avoid phase problems. I didn’t record in a well-treated room with bass traps in every corner. You can hear me take breaths because I left them in. You can hear the hi-hat bleed from the headphones on some of the vocal tracks, because I left it in.
Back before I was part of FLS, I remember going to a bar with some of the boys and their college friends. We were all just hanging out, and of course, someone suggested that they start freestyling. So we all crowded around, I banged out a beat on the table, and they went at it. The rest of the bar was still talking; I think there was even music playing from the speakers. But it was awesome. Because it was real. No tricks, no smoke, no mirrors, just crazy talented kids doing what they do in the middle of a bar for shits and giggles.
Why should I blow my savings on some hotshot to make this record sound like chocolate pudding with fresh organic strawberries in a golden bowl? I want it to sound like your stupid friends banging on the table and singing on a Saturday night, with the fan blowing, and people talking, and cars passing in the street. But they’re really, really good.
Because that’s what I do. I make real music. It’s not shiny. It’s not professional. It’s not perfect. But it’s fucking great. And I need to respect that.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t lead me to a decision. But it’s a start. More as it develops.
Doin’ It
Jun 22, 2008 Waiting Leave a comment
Thanks for all your advice, everyone. At final count, I had 7 votes yes and 0 votes no. So I spent Saturday figuring out how to export tracks for La Da Da Dee so that they still have all my little tweaks, and they don’t take up too much room.
5 hours, and 1.5 GB later, I realize I shouldn’t have used a song with 30 vocal tracks. Oy. So back to the drawing board; I’ll probably put Far Side up there later today. Well, all the individual instrumental/vocal tracks, and then just a snippet of the full song. I don’t want to leak my own stuff!!
In other news, I know I haven’t been adhering to my usual standards of blogging excellence recently. Not enough of the slightly self-indulgent deep digging I’d become so fond of. Hopefully, things will return to normal soon. In the meantime, thanks for reading!
The Contest – ?!?!?!?
Jun 21, 2008 Waiting 1 Comment
I have been mixing this record for quite some time. A couple months actually, because it’s so hard to put enough time in every day. I’ve been neglecting my friends and family, working alone in my lair to revise and recolor something that I put together myself in the first place. Going a little stir-crazy. Nonetheless, I thought it had been going pretty well.
Until I got home last night from a great meeting with Mec, who runs Rock Slinger Incorporated, and Rick, who is designing the art for If We Were, and found a CD waiting for me in the mail. I’d sent my final mix of Far Side out for a “ballpark master” from the mastering engineer I’d been planning to use, to make sure I wanted to go with him.
I popped in the CD. I put it up next to my final mix. I listened; I compared. I was not happy.
Right at that moment, as if I’d summoned him with my mind, my friend the record producer popped onto Facebook chat to tell me he liked our Radiohead cover, and I sent him the two versions. He reminded me of something I’d forgotten:
No amount of mastering can save a bad mix.
There’s a relevant idiom I can’t quite remember, something like: You can put makeup on a horse, but it won’t make him pretty. (Isn’t there something like that? If not, well, you’re welcome.)
So record producer friend tells me he is going to change my life, and he makes a suggestion:
Take one song, put all the individual vocal/instrumental tracks in a zip file together, and post it on renowned sound engineer forum gearslutz.com as a contest. Throw it up on Craigslist NY and LA as well, and anywhere else I can think of. Whoever gives me the best mix of that song within a limited time frame gets to mix the whole EP with the money I was going to pay for mastering, plus some extra. But they have to turn it around in a week, so I can still make my deadline.
He thinks the promise of a nice wad of cash with a quick turnaround, given the current state of the big studio system, will entice much better engineers than I would expect. They will certainly be better than I. And a well-mixed song with passable mastering will sound MUCH better than a passable mix that’s well-mastered.
I like the idea, but I’m not sure. The idea of relinquishing any measure of creative control, even to a pro who I’ll choose because I like his/her work, and who I’ll constantly be giving commentary to, is scary. But it seems to make so much sense!
This is where you folks come in. What do you think? Should I do this?!?!?!
T minus 96 Days
Jun 11, 2008 Waiting 1 Comment
I really was planning to post once a week. I have all kinds of drafts in a folder called “Blog” on a variety of insightful topics ranging from the Dirty Projectors show I saw in April, to the unreleased classic Stevie Wonder snippets that have been floating around the blogosphere recently and the general “Woe to the music industry” reaction around them, to a list of the albums I love from the 21st century, and why I love them. But there just hasn’t been time to polish anything off. Why?
I’m in what I like to call “lockdown mode.” I have been mixing my ass off, to the neglect of basically everything else. Every day, I go to work, come home, take a nap, and mix. Dinner, sleep, repeat. Weekends, I wake up, mix, go out at night. It’s a good time, but I don’t think I could do it for very long.
Luckily, I won’t have to, as my mixing deadline is June 30th. From there, I send it out for mastering and duplication, and release If We Were on September 16th through Rock Slinger Incorporated.
The release show with the Geniuses is planned for September 20th19th. And if lady luck will have me, I’ll be off to Barcelona the following day on the 21st for Red Bull Music Academy (cross your fingers!!).
That’s where I’m at for the next few. What’s up with you?
MUTO: A Wall-Painted Animation
May 21, 2008 YouTubes 1 Comment
Why is this piece so amazing? It’s not just the “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” style intersection of imagination and reality. Don’t get me wrong; that combination gets me every time. It’s what fascinates me so much about computing – the way that such abstract patterns become part of what we call real life, without any kind of physical grounding.
But it’s more than that. It’s the sense that the work, like so many great things, comes from a big question. Not a philosophical one, not some kind of discourse or analysis, not a commentary. Just a big “Holy shit! What if I….?!”
Talent + wide-eyed willingness to explore. Does it ever fail to produce good work?
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
Mixing
May 10, 2008 Waiting Leave a comment
I’m mixing. I’m putting out an EP in a few months called If We Were, and for the past few weeks, I’ve been mixing. I’m making such a big point of it because I used to HATE mixing. As soon as I was done writing and recording, everything else would become a chore. All I wanted was for someone else to be able to step in and do it. Someone who could mix as well as I do the other things I do, cause I certainly can’t.
Why is it so hard? Well, mixing is kind of like therapy. When you mix your own music, it’s like trying to analyze yourself. You know something’s wrong, but you can’t get out of your head long enough to figure out what it is.
So you think about bringing someone else in. But it takes them forever to even begin to understand you, and man, the whole thing is so frustrating! Aargh!
Luckily, I’m into self-analysis, and I’ve begun to understand how to step out of myself, and gain a little perspective. And after working on my perfectionism a little bit, I’ve actually come to really enjoy the mixing process! It’s really rewarding to bring something down just .5 dB and feel it lock in. It’s that last frontier of getting the sound you want, making sure that things happen just the way you hear them.
With that in mind, I’ve come up with some Rules of Mixing. Really, I’m posting them for myself when I inevitably run into trouble again, but you can read them too.
1. Mixing is easy.
Doing things you have no proven skill at can be terrifying. But if you've got good ears, and you like to learn, putting together a mix that does what you want it to do is easy. Making a great mix is harder, but that comes with time.
2. Make decisions away from the mixing desk.
Every day when I leave the house, I listen to the work I did the night before. I write down the things I notice in a little notebook I carry with me, maybe listen again, and that's it. No pressure to actually make it happen, so I'm free to write anything I hear. And when I get home that evening, I have a nice to-do list written out for me.
3. Isolate the problem and fix it.
I do tech support for my day job, and I like to code every once in a while, so I have a strong bug-fixing mentality. I've already done the creative work on these songs, so the mix doesn't need to add anything new and creative. I'll listen to a section, ask myself what I was going for, and then ask myself how it's different. Sometimes it's easy, like "I want to hear all the individual harmonies more clearly." So I'll pan them all out a little more, maybe carve out EQ niches for them, and mess with their volumes. Sometimes it's something more complicated, like "this doesn't flow well from the chorus to the bridge." But by listening to different groupings of tracks together, I can tell which parts flow nicely and which ones don't. Maybe I'll edit a part, maybe I'll just change the levels. There's always something specific I can isolate and fix.
4. Take it piece-by-piece.
When I'm just about to start mixing a new song, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the mountain of things to fix. So I make a list. And I work on one thing at a time, checking them off as I go. Just the 1st verse. Just the drums. Just the drums and the bass. Etc.
5. Don’t be afraid to break the rules.
If it sounds good, it is good. Even a little bit of reverb on the vocals makes them sound washy? Get rid of it. Out-of-tune harmonies more emotive than the tuned ones? Keep 'em. (But never ever release the stems. Seriously, yikes.)
6. Mixing is refining, not building.
This is the most important one for me. I've already built these tracks; I already love them. All mixing has to do is bring out the things that need to be brought out - help tell the story that the music is already telling. Make sure you can hear everything clearly, make sure all the arrows go in the right directions (both the little track-sized ones, and the big flow-sized ones.)
It’s been going well for me; I just finished mixing La Da Da Dee, and it sounds great! It might need a few tweaks here and there, but all in all, the bits that need to sing are singing, and the bits that need to bounce are bouncing. And most importantly, the transitions are transitioning. Whoo-hoo for mixing!
Google, I Miss You
Apr 28, 2008 Interwebs Leave a comment
For a while, this domain (arthurthefourth.com) redirected to my Myspace page. Google was cool with that, and was nice enough to save my Myspace page in its cache. Then I put the site back up for real, but it was more of a “personal” blog, so I disallowed the whole site in my robots.txt file. Google said it was OK with that, but I got the feeling it was more hurt than it let on.
So a few weeks ago, when I put the site up for real, and asked Google to come back into my life, well, it wasn’t so obliging.
Listen, Google, I was wrong. All that Myspace foolishness? That wasn’t me. I’ve changed, and I want you to be with me – the real me. I don’t believe you…people don’t change….you’ll always just be another Myspacer to me…. But…but… And then you just cut me off? You DISALLOWED me?! Google…please…people are looking…. No! You had your chance, and you blew it. We’re through!
Please, Google, I’m sorry. I never realized how much you meant to me until you were gone. We had such good times together. I need you back in my life.
Maybe we could start over? Forget all the bad stuff that happened between us, all the caches and links and redirects? Just remove it all from your index? Think about how great it could be.
Well, I guess all I can do is ask. I can see you’re not ready to take me back yet, but I’m hoping maybe you will be someday.
Preferably within 90 days.
[Update 4/29: I'm an idiot. It was a setting in Wordpress all along. I'm hoping all will be well by week's end. -A]
Arthur and the Geniuses – Live at DROM 3/16/08
Mar 29, 2008 Shows Leave a comment
We had a show at DROM two weekends ago with Jon Braman and Miché Fambro. We had a blast, and we were lucky enough to get some high-quality video, thanks to our friend Osmany Tellez. Thanks, Osmany!
Here are my favorites from the gig:
Subterranean Homesick Alien
A cover, from Radiohead’s OK ComputerFar Side of Town
Something Beautiful
A new song, still in progress.Credits:
Arthur Lewis: vocals, piano Marie Lewis: vocals, tambourine, glockenspiel Kyle McEneaney: guitar, vocals Matty Fasano: bass, vocals Brady Miller: drums
Back On Track
Oct 29, 2007 Waiting Leave a comment
Well folks, it’s been a long time. Which is not to say that I haven’t been working. Oh, I have. Instrumental parts, vocals, harmonies, lyrics. The usual struggles. Just behind the scenes.
Incognito.
But I’m coming out to show my face. Maybe it’s the showy spirit of Sexyween. Or maybe it’s because I miss performing, and I need some sort of audience to listen to me ramble. But most likely, it’s the seminar I listened to yesterday on “How To Make Yourself Do Just About Anything,” and the new Statement of Purpose I’ve drafted as a result.
You see, all this time I’d been working on this album, and claiming it was my number one priority, but I was fooling myself, because I wasn’t following the most important rule for getting what you want:
“Take what you want, as long as you pay first.”
Sure, I knew I’d have to make sacrifices, both creative internal ones and external ones, but I didn’t have a handle on what those were. Every time one came up, I had to decide – is this more important than the album? And each one of those decisions cost me a little bit of willpower and eroded a little bit of the importance I’d assigned to this project.
But that changes starting today. I’ve thought long and hard about what sacrifices I’ll need to make to get this project finished, and I’ve accepted them. I’ve made a list, signed it, and put it up on my wall, a few feet away from my newly signed Statement of Purpose, my new daily schedule, and my new timeline.
This is not to say that I have nothing to show for the past few months. La Da Da Dee is done, and if I do say so myself, it is awesome. Silly Pop Song has a new breakdown section, inspired in part by all the Aretha I’ve been listening to. (Actually, it’s been mostly You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman over and over again. That song is a triumph of arrangement, performance, and composition. The piano intro is sheer magic) If We Were is so close; I just can’t get my falsetto to operate the way it used to.
More to come, more to come. And if anyone’s interested in the science behind these changes, check out Phillip J. Eby at dirtsimple.org. Brilliant stuff.
