The Mouse Goes Back to the Studio

 Last night we recorded an "acoustic" version of the Mouseverture. We went to Stanley John Mitchell's studio in his house in Brooklyn.

 We recorded all in one room (the room with the piano, which Arie is sitting at but that you cannot see in these pictures. We experimented with a number of different ways of recording the 40-seconds of music we were trying to get, including playing in 6/8 and playing (I hope you're sitting down) quieter.

We recorded onto a Roland VS1680. This means we'll have to get the tracks off of it. Which will be a tad exciting. We suspect two tracks at a time rolled off onto a CD or another computer but we don't know yet.

On seminal British 1970s prog rock band Gentle Giant

There's a band out of Stanford, teachers actually, called Glass Wave. They put out one CD. They do a very groovy thing. They sound like an older-fashioned early prog rock act. One difference is that they have a female vocalist, Christy Wampole. Yeah, they kind of do an It's a Beautiful Day thing.
This is a podcast with the guitar player of Glass Wave, talking about Gentle Giant.

Glass Wave is basically the West Coast version of Tyrannosaurus Mouse. But with a better guitar player and singer.

I love Wampole's sound. What's funny about this record is that although it feels like '68-'72 somewhere I can't actually come up with an analogous singer. Not Savage Rose, or Renaissance. She does an interesting thing where she sounds very close (miked) but kicks in her vibrato late in held notes. Hmm... I guess if there were one artist she sounds the most like it would be Donovan.

The guitar sounds are old-fashioned-ish and sound fantastic.

It's okay if I have a crush on the singer, right?*

*True story: Tommy Rowen put that op-ed up on Facebook before I'd even heard of Glass Wave.

Groove it.

Groovy. Here's an article on Nat Cassidy's new opera. It's coming to the Kennedy Center.

E Flat

So I just cannot get an Eb major chord to sound in tune on any guitar. I never have.
Over the years it's bugged me so much that I've either avoided music which has an Eb (forcing a transposition to another key), or re-tuned for the Eb chord and punching in and out on that chord while recording.

My Les Paul has a tiny sliver of bone on the G string that was put on there by Matt at 30th Street. But tomorrow I'm going to go beg him to put my Earvana nut on my new SG. I have two reasons to want that, first of all my issues with D chords and Eb chords in general and then also the fact that my SG feels more irksome than either my LP or the Blattocaster.
Wish me luck.

The Tyrannical Things for Today

The Legion Bar is a venue in Brooklyn.
So is Spike Hill.
I got one of these Standard Leather Guitar Mounts from Guitar Ideas. It's tres groovy. I got turned onto these kinds of mounts from Mandolin Brothers, because that's how they hang their guitars. The only guitars it won't work with are those which have the tuners all on one side of the headstock. But as we all know those kinds of guitars are completely irrelevant anyway.

I don't quite understand what this opera is that Nat Cassidy is working on but it has something to do with Dunsany's Charon, which is fairly high on the awesome scale.
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I think I know the answer to the question of what we're going to do as far as any sort of organized promotion of Tyrannosaurus Mouse, et al. We're just going to use Taxi. We'll submit for whatever we're eligible for and suchly. There. It'll cost about $500 for the year including the costs of delivering things and so forth. All done like that.

So that and CDBaby. That's our promotional plan. Taxi, CDBaby. There ya go.
+++++
The Sweatshop is another rehearsal studio in Williamsburg. Their website is pretty obnoxious though.

Bandcamp lets you upload 24-bit files! Tell me that isn't the sexiest thing you've heard all day.

Here’s what you can upload:

• lossless WAV, AIFF and FLAC files

• 16 and 24-bit samples

• 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4 and 192kHz sample rates

• stereo and mono

Eventually I'll Get This Right

We rehearsed as a power trio (bass, drums, guitar) last night. This notion of rehearsing things as a power trio before we add in Arie on keys has some degree of merit in that we can get the rhythm section tight before adding keyboard parts.
If you're not actually in Tyrannosaurus Mouse you'll find the following very boring. But here's a link to the recordings from the rehearsal.

You really really do not want to listen to this. It really is just a raw rehearsal where we're trying to figure out what we're doing and playing 3-minute songs for 15 minutes. And listening to me try to figure out "Alphabet City" is right painful.
So, things we've agreed upon:
1. We're making an album called "Love Songs for the Apocalypse".
(I suppose it could be "Love Songs of the Apocalypse" if someone decides or wants.)
2. When we play louder, the three of us (Ethan, Lou, and I) play better. We each suffer from the same fault in that we spend a lot of effort listening to the other players in the band. I know, in most bands this wouldn't be a "fault" but rather "Thank goodness someone is actually listening." But the three of us do it so much that we tend to play tentatively if we're playing quietly.
If we play really loudly though we all play with more authority.
All of the material we played at this rehearsal was being made up on the spot. We had zero notion of what the structures were going to be for anything we played. We frequently had no idea what chords we were going to play. So seriously, sometimes Ethan or I would shout out chords to one another. Sometimes he and I would just guess correctly. Most of the time we guessed wrongly. But I'll tell ya, it's really hard to improvise a harmonic structure in an ensemble situation and ever get it right. So yay for us.

3. We can't rehearse in Greenpoint until the gas shortage is over because Ethan can't get fuel for his car.
4. My new SG sounds fantastic. Now, it is getting my Earvana nut on it (you'll notice I throw it way out of tune by the end of each song). Other than that it's a fantastic guitar. Fantastic. Even Ethan thought it had a great neck, and he's very persnickety about his guitars.
That's the SG through an MXR analog delay and a Vox AC30. The bass is Ethan's Music Man fretless. Lou is playing the Tama kit there in Room C.
5. I really like Looming rehearsal studios. Their place is about the best value in Brooklyn.

Cavallo

Groove to my buddy Mike Kessell's band, Cavallo.

They're a heavy rock-instrumental outfit and I dig them. They recorded this album at Studio G in Brooklyn.
I ordered it on vinyl. Because vinyl is cool.

Thou rank unchin-snouted varlot

Or: Loudness Part II

Remember this Sound on Sound article about loudness?

Here's the "unofficial" dynamic range database. Note that "dynamic range" is exactly, er, not what the issue is.

Lou likes elephants.

The EBU measure of loudness range is a measure of the ‘three-second window, gated K-weighted RMS variability’ of audio content.

Keep that in mind.

At all times.

The really really weird thing is that applying a limiter can effectively increase the dynamic range of a signal. That is it'll increase the RMS dynamic range, not the peak dynamic range.
Which is a really interesting way to think about it.

Via.

Promotion

So then, when we release "TM01" (that's the code for the first Tyrannosaurus Mouse album), what shall we do with it? UPDATE: so far we have buy-in from half the band on the name "eponymouse" for our first album. I think our second album should be "disambiguation".
OK, so what do we do this this record?

We can do some radio promotion with it. I've done such things back in the early 90's. I spent quite a bit of cash on some albums that never quite charted on CMJ.
Peter Hay over at Twin Vision says that you have to think at least $1000 for a regional release and $2000 in order to promote a national release. I like Peter Hay. He's a real nice guy. Known for being honest. And although he never got any of my records to chart, they did get a buncha airplay.

Sonic Bids -- they cost $6.99/month. It's a... actually I have no idea what it is.

Oasis CD has a kind of cool thing where they have a sampler CD which goes out to radio stations. To get that though you have to replicate a CD. I estimate the cost of 300 CD's to be about $860 with jewel cases, barcodes, and their radio promotion program. (Note that replicating CD's with Oasis includes CDBaby which would otherwise cost $50/year.) Basically this would mean taking one song and putting it on their compilation CD. Nobody is directly "pushing" the song though, so it would be a matter of radio stations just wanting to play it (unlikely).

Loudness Part I

I have both a professional interest, and a Tyrannosaurus Mouse interest, in measures of loudness and dynamic range.
For the Pandora Machine we oftentimes struggle, or at least wonder, about the relative levels of signals and just how loud we should make our movies. Mostly this involves what level we should be setting the dialog at.
If I were to criticize my Pandora Machine mixes I'd say that I do mix them quite hot. I slam the dialog into limiters and then make the backgrounds too loud. I doubt I'm going to stop slamming the dialog into limiters -- after all dialog is king and making it absolutely the freaking clearest thing you've ever heard in your life is way in my best interest. But I could be a bit more delicate with backgrounds.

I'm trying to figure out if a blue strap is really appropriate.

For music my interest has a different direction. Ethan and I had talked about how we'd like this Tyrannosaurus Mouse album to sound like an older record -- have have an older record's "dynamic range".
We did a number of things to make the album sound more old-fashioned (meaning: late 60's/early 70's). We recorded 24-bit/44.1kHz in order to retain what we might call "depth" but with a bit of the graininess on the top end one might expect from recording in an analog format.
We also did not kittywhump the heck out of the 2-mix buss with a limiter. The mix went through some light SSL-style limiting and that was that.

• Now just remember that at first glance, or first listen, louder always sounds better. That's just a rule. The question is what happens when you've been listening for a while. 

[Let me sidetrack note for a bit. Early 70's were known for pretty dry drum sounds. I suspect that was a way to make the drums really loud because at the time it was perhaps a bit easier to make louder. This is just a theory of mine. It could be totally wrong. Honestly I'm more a fan of the wetter drum sounds like on Genesis' ABACAB or The Police or such.]

As it turns out, actually measuring "loudness" is a minefield of angry rattlesnakes. It's really freaking hard to do. This Sound on Sound article by Emmanuel Deruty explains much. And the conclusions are... interesting.
Now, we're all of the belief there has been a loudness war that went on in the 1990's and 2000's. Right? Brick wall limiters have been making popular music too loud. That's just a fact, right?
It turns out:

[C]ontrarily to what one can often read on the Internet, the loudness war did not cause any reduction in level variability. There is as much level variability now as there was in the ’70s or ’80s.

OK. So that's counter-intuitive. I mean, it doesn't sound right at all, does it?

In the end, it’s all about style. Reduced crest factor values bring a ‘compact’ aspect to the sound; Waves describe it as a “heavily in-your-face signal that rocks the house” on their MaxxBCL page. It may be suited to your kind of music, or it may not.

That article is very enlightening. And honestly I have to read it a number of more times to really understand what's going on. But that'll be next time. Maybe.

Testing the SG

Playing my SG today. The pickups are freaking loud. They're about as hot as the humbuckers in my Les Paul. I recorded a bit of things to be able to hear the difference between the neck and bridge pickup. I started out more happy with the bridge but eventually I learned a bit about rolling back the neck to make it sweeter. Yeah, the guitar goes wildly out of tune there in the middle.

The instrument plays really well. The amps I have respond very differently from the way they respond to other guitars. And that's just the truth of it.
I think it's interesting the way a particular instrument will lead you to play it in a particular way. Your feel and technique will change and adapt to (say) this particular guitar.
The clean stuff has a very nice chime to it. And it can certainly go into that hairy distortion of complete freak out.
I recorded into my Mutt with the 12" Celestion Alnico Blue. An AKG 460 microphone was a couple feet from the cabinet. I added some delay (you know, to be more like Live at Leeds) and some compression (but not much, most of that is just the sound of the whole thing). The volume pots are rolled back on the guitar (except for that one obvious place). And the Mutt was far from dimed -- it's at about 2 o'clock. Channels jumped.