Alas, the Alien Mind Redux

I've done some remixing and replaying and Marc Schmied has done some replaying and then there was some editing and now the songs The Ghost of Marius the Giraffe and Alas the Alien Mind have new mixes and I know there's still some clicks I haven't redrawn and overall it's just too compressed. My that's just what the Alien Mind tells me. Personally I have no idea.

Earlier today when I was listening and mixing I was not that super happy with the overall effect. I went a little too overboard with things. We may have gone too acid rock. I don't know. That Dm, Fm, Ab, E thing still blows me away. Did I make it too crazy? Maybe if I edit the 22-minute Marius down it'll be more sensible.
The guitars on their own don't sound too bad. I'm splitting them fairly equally between Lindell and Neve preamps. The bass is exclusively through a Lindell.

One thing which really makes a big difference is the Gallien Krueger (I refuse to look that up to learn to spell it correctly) VST amp emulator. Now some of the distorted basses are done with Marc's stompbox, but the "bass amp" sound is mostly the GK emulator. 
Yeah, now that I listen to it again, the noisy section goes on too long and too loud.
This is a strange album. Not one I would have expected. But then again, what do I expect?
I'm always surprised at how hard rock things get. I also love the built-in delays, flanges, and choruses in Samplitude. We'll see how this all pans out. Ha. See? I do a lot of autopanning...

Red House (Live San Diego Sports Arena, May 25, 1969)

Just because, you know, Jimi. Red House.

The Big Bucks

I made $9.11 through CDBaby this year. That's nine dollars, baby. The big ones. USD. I think this is all for Tyrannosaurus Mouse. You know what? The rest of the band is gonna have to sue me for their share! Ha! It's all coke parties and yachts for me from now on! I don't care who I step on on my way up 'cause I'm never comin' down!

I have a feeling that all the Spotify listens are just me listening to the record. But the other part of this experiment is paying ten bucks a month to promote the record through radioairplay.com. The possible "real money" (and by that I mean a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty bucks) will be through BMI.


$4.91 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through eMusic
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$0.01 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through JB Hi-Fi
$0.01 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through Spotify
$0.01 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through Spotify
$0.01 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through Muve Music
$0.01 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through Beats Music
$0.01 for DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION SALES through iTunes Match - Americas
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Because Everyone Needs to Chime In on the Robin Thicke Controversy

Joe Bennett discusses the case from a music and a legal perspective. Judith Finnell is a musicologist who did a report for the court.

Click

So the last two recording sessions with Marc have resulted in a really irritating artifact. And by "irritating" I mean I should have known better. I freaking HEARD clicking while we were recording. I heard some strange broad-band noise too. Both sounds were intermittent. But I couldn't immediately trace either sound while we were recording and I had hoped it was just the monitor system.
It wasn't.
Intermittent clicks. And yup, they were there on playback too. I tried applying de-clicker plugins and they did nothing. Absolutely nothing. That was super unusual. So I found one of these clicks by ear and zoomed in on the wave. Normally a click indicates a huge spike which is easy to see. But these clicks weren't like that. So I went in to the sample level.
And hoo boy. There is was.

This wave bothers me.

That's what, maybe 9 samples long? Just complete dropout on the wave.
This is on the bass track. And there are scores of 'em. Through testing and comparisons I think I isolated the problem: my relatively new Countryman DI box. [UPDATE: it is not exclusive to the Countryman. It may indeed be an issue with the Lindell preamps or the Scarlett A/D converter. Although it seemed I could replicate the issue by swapping in and out the Countryman it now seems there are multiple clicks and noises which occur from different problems. That waveform above seems to come either from the Lindell or from the A/D converter. I won't know for several days.
But there are other sounds which clearly come from the Countryman, including some of the clicks. So there's more than one source for the mess.

Hoof. The Countryman 85 is the standard DI box. Reasonably priced. Been around for quite a while. Is it the finest sounding DI box? No. But for price/performance it's certainly a market leader. Something inside is blown. Maybe a cap? Sure. I don't have any idea but if say "I got a blown cap in the '85" with an authority in my voice it sure sounds like I know what I'm talking about, right?
So now I have to fess up to Marc that we need to do some re-recording. I'm sure he'll take it okay.
But with the Countryman out of the mix what do we do? Well the Neves have DI inputs. And so do the ART tube preamp channels.
Thing is, I've been liking the Lindells. I've been enjoying them on guitars and on bass. But there are no DI inputs on the Lindell preamps, hence the Countryman 85 DI.

For when you needed to balance a signal but only had a handful of cash and a Radio Shack. Even worse we used to use the in reverse. But hey, they worked.

Remember these things?  Radio Shack Hi-Z to Lo-Z balanced converters. "How do they sound on bass?" you ask. Compared to the Countryman? They sound... pretty good actually. The Countryman definitely sounds better (I mean, when it's not being noisy and then intermittently cutting out the signal) and has some prettier high end, seems more "airy" (and other malarkey audio buzzwords.) Would you be able to tell which DI was used when listening back to a recording? No. But if recording is the "accumulation of subtleties" then there will certainly be a bit of a quality boost with the Countryman. Not noticeable on its own but if you A/B'd between the Countryman and the cheapo Radio Shack DI you'd certainly notice.
But will it be better to record bass through a Lindell preamp using the Radio Shack DI or will it be better to go direct into in the DI input of the ART? I dunno. And it's kind of guesswork for me to play bass through one path and then play it through another to figure out which sound better. I mean, I might be able to do it but my bass playing skills are less than stellar and I can't really get the sound I want anyway. I mean, maybe I can get close. Who knows? We'll do some tests. Find out. Wish me luck.
Also I'll hit up Countryman and see what they can do.

Why Live Music Sucks B/W The Electric Bass Guitar

There is no target audience for Dude In Hat Spilling An Entire Beer On You, and yet that’s what we built this entire discipline of art upon.

This essay is hilarious.

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You know what instrument is hard? The electric bass guitar.
Just to back up for a minute, one odd thing about be bass is that there is no centuries-long established technique for it*. As an instrument it is very roughly similar to the upright bass but has a vastly different scale (length), is held differently (more horizontal like a guitar than upright like an acoustic bass or cello) and has only been around for what, 80 years? Maybe not even that long. But one can easily see why it became as popular as it did -- large, acoustic, double-basses are a huge pain to lug around and let's face it they're never as loud as you really want them to be.
But while I feel that I might have the most tenuous grasp on what I don't know about playing other standard rock instruments like guitar, or keyboards, or even drums; the ability to even think about how to play a bass guitar simply escapes me. I don't even know what I don't know. The electric bass guitar is rather uncontrollable. Getting the dynamics to be even is a nightmare. Even with a pick it's just not something legitimate humans want to become involved with.

Mouse seems to use a left-handed technique.

Now I realize that much of this is prejudice. I've not put in as much time as I should, certainly, on the electric guitar, but I've put in enough time to have some remote and conceivable (if not achievable) sense of control over the instrument.
But the bass is flippin hard to play. I simply cannot make it sound professional at all when I play it. Rather than do something rash like practice, I'm just going to quit. No more bass for me.

*This is also true of the trap kit (notice that there are "traditional" style drummers and "two-fisted", or whatever they're called, drummers) as well as the Hammond organ and electric guitar. But with organ and guitar there are some older traditions, and with drums... well I don't know if I would qualify this whole thesis of mine with drums. Let's just pretend that everything I say is true and leave it at that shall we?

Todays things

Naiant Studios makes a bunch of neat audio adapters. In particular they make inline attenuators. As I'm having an obnoxious time dealing with the outputs of preamps being too hot for my Focusrite A/D's. With 24dB of attenuation I think I'll be able to push the preamps any way I like. I look forward to that.

Delano is a bass pickup manufacturer.
Peter's is the best chocolate manufacturer in the world.

Alas, the Alien Mind

Marc has been blowing up with great musical motifs. And it's all stuff I wouldn't have thought of in a million years. Thursday was fretless bass night. In order to not embarrass me, Marc had lines painted on his fretboard. But he also brought a little digital multi-effects pedal. You can hear the impact of such things in the following recordings.
It's interesting to me to see what happens in creating a band. In this case we fall into a particular sound. Obviously we go in the acid rock direction with little or no prompting. Hard but psychedelic. Marc is a remarkably controlled player. I mean, he plays bass as his job so you'd think he got plenty of practice in all this time but really, his dynamics are very smooth. I'm liking the languid yet clearly "rock" direction we're taking. There are, surprisingly, no keyboard overdubs.

The drums are either played by me or they're MIDI version of other songs or Oddgrooves. These are both "laptop mixes" but I suspect we're going to want to expand on these musical ideas in the coming weeks. Dm to F to Ab to E. Man, that is just awesome. To me at least.
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The chords to Any Color You Like.
Nick Mason makes his own drum sound library.
Presumably a whole MIDI library of Pink Floyd songs can be found here.

My Three Things Today

GK Amplification is a VST virtual bass cabinet by Gallien Krueger. The demos of it online seem very cool. It's $40 for the "light" version. I've already blown my software budget for 2015 though.

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MT Power Drum Kit is a free VST drum kit with MIDI patterns. The snare and kick are not to my taste but the hi-hat is controlled and so is the top end of the rest of the cymbals. And it's free.

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Right now though I'm digging Groove Monkey for MIDI patterns. Their free loops are pretty fine.

Let Me Mansplain That for You

I have never been into the "great man" or "auteur" theory of art-making. It's mostly nonsense. Almost everything that's any good was made with, by, or at the behest of some sort of group of people.
But this thing where we ignore the talent of, say, Taylor Swift, is just absurd. Could Taylor Swift's only talent be that she's good at choosing her collaborators and then good at editing what they do into pop songs? Yeah... it could be that. And if it were that it would still be pretty cool because knowing who to work with and getting the best out of them is a huge accomplishment.

Unrelated: puffin

But let's face reality, the current crop of "female solo artists" has a lot of talent in them. Yeah, they collaborate with songwriters and producers. But here's the thing -- everybody collaborates with songwriters and producers. Some producers are really song co-writers who don't take credit.
But the freaky-deaky Beatles had Mal Evans and George Martin.
And come on, how much do you think David Bowie really does? Give the gals a break.

Two for Pleasure

On Wednesday Marc and I played together. No drummer. We did some loop experiments.
Bass is going direct into a Lindell with a bit of EQ. Had some issues with the whole signal chain being way too hot so I had to turn the gain AND the output all the way down. Still working on that. The A/D's don't appreciate it.
Guitar is split left and right with a Lindell on the left and a Neve 1272 on the right. Most of the guitar is my SG with P90's.
Drums are by Groovemonkey. The grooves are actual drums played by someone and then the sounds are Abbey Road late 60's kit. I did all the compression and suchwise in an archaic version of Samplitude.
Marc's playing is very smooth so I never have to worry about compressing for level, just for, you know, the "sound".
I may need some passive pad to go between the output of the preamp and the input of the A/D. Or just a limiter. I don't know. It's way too easy to smack these Focusrite inputs too hard.
The loop experiments came out very interesting and we made a sound unlike anything I would have expected.