I just recently finished the video for I See You (I am Empty) and the making of the video went very smoothly, for the most part, hence I have very little to write about the experience. The most obvious problem I had making this video, which was obvious long before I even started, was that the main source was analog audio without a time code. This was exacerbated by the fact the the video was produced as a videoSong, meaning, the actual recording of the song had to be incorporated into the video. I didn't stand a chance of getting true sync for this footage. The sync is okay though, not actually too bad. I had to incorporate some cuts that weren't part of my original plan, because some of the imagery started to creep out of sync with the audio. By making a cut, I could re-align the errant images.
Another thing that was not part of my original plan was to make visual references to the lyrics (like when I say "Yugo" you see a Yugo on the screen). This came about because, after I started cutting away from the performances, I thought the video got a little dull. My original idea was that you would see each of the four tracks performed in their entirety, to really see how the song was made. Once I started cutting, I became selective and started cutting away more, to "justify" the necessary cuts and make them look more intentional.
Most of the added imagery was pretty much predictable and workman like, with one exception, the Space Shuttle Challenger. It was challenging, for sure.
You can actually download footage of the tragedy on NASA's website. I watched it a few times and considered including it. But it seems so wrong to me. I know I included a reference in the song, and that felt genuine, I mean, I remember it, it seems valid to talk about my experience of it. In contrast, it would be weird if I wrote a song about experiencing the Kennedy Assassination, since I wasn't yet born, unless I was working in some historical fiction context.
In referencing it, I'm still telling my story. But if I was to use the footage, suddenly, I'm no longer telling my story, I'm telling an American story about people who are not with us anymore. It stops being about the witness. And it seems wrong to do that in a song about a guy dating a robot. And if it's not wrong, it's very distracting, overshadowing the fictional drama I'm writing about with events that actually happened.
Since many of my visual cues are still images, I decided to go that route and the image of the shuttle I chose is not even the Challenger, but the Space Shuttle Atlantis. And rather than give it an abstract "flight" path like most of the other sprites in the video, I gave the still image of the shuttle a realistic path. However, at the top of the screen, when the lyrics describe the explosion, the image of the shuttle just fades away and disappears and it's so much more effective than the real footage would have been. IMO
They say necessity is the mother of invention, and I explained why I couldn't use the actual footage. But as a result of not using the real thing, I came up with something even better, for my purposes. The challenge of the Challenger, resolved.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm going to midi convert my Korg Monotribe. Anyone who's not a musician probably just though, "what the hell does that mean"? The Monotribe is this really cool little analog synthesizer from Korg, whose main drawback is a tiny keyboard that is all but unplayable by adult fingers. Fortunately, the good people at Korg put a midi interface on the circuit board of the Monotribe, which allows you to modify the unit and connect a full sized keyboard, making the whole instrument much more useful.
It still doesn't get to the question of what mid is though. Using computer terms, midi is both hardware and software that allows musical devices to communicate with one another. The name comes from Musical Information Digital Interface. What makes it so useful is the amount of event based data that midi can transmit, almost instantly. And, although it was developed for musical instruments, it can be used to control any time based equipment, even old analog devices.
For example, years ago, if you went to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, mid day on a Tuesday and wanted to hear the organ, they would play you a little tape of the organ being played. It did not convey the scale of the instrument at all, only a vague approximation. Now, however, the organ is fitted with a midi controller, so they can record not the sound, but the performance data of any one who comes in a plays the instrument, and then they can play back that performance and the actual organ creates the sounds. With your eyes closed, you would not be able to tell if a human or the computer was playing the instrument. That's a big improvement over a silly tape recording.
If you ever saw the original production of Les Miserables, with that giant spinning platter of a stage where the action occurred, believe it or not, midi was controlling that platter. Midi is great for providing time based event data with extreme precision. If you've ever been on a motion ride at an amusement park, they are also controlled by midi. Some have speculated that one day it will be revealed that the space shuttle was midi controlled (but don't hold your breath on that one).
Of course, people who played computer games in the 90s have a very bad feeling about midi, perhaps with good reason. A lot of bad video game sound tracks in the 90s relied on midi and the default musical instruments that shipped with the computer or sound card. I have heard some of these and they leave a lot to be desired. However, midi is unfairly blamed as the culprit. I would say the fault lies more with poor orchestrations and poor instrument quality on the sound cards of the day. The beauty of the midi interface is you can apply the performance data to any instrument, a good one or a bad one, the instrument it was intended for or a different one.
Midi was developed jointly by synthesizer engineer Dave Smith and the engineers at Roland Musical Instrument corporation in Japan. There had been precursors to midi, which allowed data to be transfered between musical devices, but there were different standards and the amount of data was limited. The development of midi standardized the information so the equipment of different companies could be connected together. It also expanded the amount of event/performance data that could be captured. Now the system could not only request a Middle C note, but it could specify how loud that note should be, and request it to come from any number of available channels (different devices or instruments). Almost overnight musicians gained the ability to connect a bunch of electronic instruments together for a live performance controlled by a computer, which allowed previously impossible compositions to be realized.
As I mentioned before, back in the 90s I had a robust midi setup running out of my desktop computer. The sequencer (which typically manages and deploys midi data) controlled three different devices I had, two synthesizers and a Rompler module that played sounds sampled from real instruments with often surprising realism. I could compose in the computer by "writing" out notes, or I could input the notes by playing them on a keyboard. The sequencer could control all three devices simultaneously, allowing me to make rich music without playing a single note.
At the time even experts agreed it was a bad idea to run music through your computer. The power supplies and boards inside were very "dirty" and would create a lot of audio noise. Yet with midi, I could produce super clean sound, because the computer was only controlling the data, not the actual audio. I never really understood how this was possible, why the noise inside the computer didn't infect the instruments connected to it. Until I started to learn how to modify my modify my Monotribe for midi.
One of the items you need to perform this mod correctly is an "optocoupler", which I had never heard of, but understood instantly, it uses LED light to transmit data, and it's part of the original design of midi, as I understand it. Completely brilliant. Using light isn't just fast, but it also isolates the devices from each other, to avoid contamination of noise, hum even dangerous spikes that can damage expensive musical gear. This is why my post has the title it has, because the cleaver use of the optocoupler is one of the key elements that makes midi as good as it is, and less talented engineers would have skimped or skipped that crucial step.
I should tell you, I don't use wikipedia to write these things, so the facts I get wrong are facts that are wrong in my head. If I remember where it was I picked up one of these tidbits, I'll tell you, but for goodness sakes, don't assume any "facts" in these posts are actually true. My version of other people's lives may be wildly inaccurate, but generally, I'm here to tell a story or make an observation based on that understanding (true or not), and hopefully the veracity doesn't really alter the observation all that much. The previous story may not be true at all, I haven't verified it, not because I'm too lazy, but mostly because I'm too busy at the moment. Obviously, if large portions are untrue, it kind of blows the whole thing out of the water. Apologies if that is the case.
I love synth pop. For as long as I can remember. The first album I ever bought at a record store was Yellow Magic Orchestra's debut, which, being a Japanese import, cost almost three times the normal price of a record. My mom asked if I was sure I really wanted it. I still have it and still listen to it regularly. One of my all time favorite albums is Dare, by The Human League. It's one of the few albums I've owned in the three formats of my life (cassette, LP, and CD). However, I always felt I was born too late to make synth pop myself. By the time I started to make music in 1989, that ship had sailed, and I had only begun to learn my craft.
Flash forward 23 years, and I'm still a novice (but getting better, I hope). And my desire to create synth pop is as strong as ever, but with a twist. Thanks to Mr. Simon Holland's Bedroom Tapes project, I was thrust into the production of a synth pop tune. I was almost reluctant at first, because he'd precluded the use of guitar, and since I'd always thought I was too late for synth pop, I'd always included guitar in my pop songs (with rare exceptions). It's funny to say now, because I'm so on board with the "no guitar" aesthetic, but at first I was apprehensive.
Of course, the fact that it's 2012 means I would have a hard time convincing myself to create a whole album devoted to a genre that pretty much fizzled out almost 30 years ago. I kind of view it as a waste of time, we should live in the moment, the present, experience zeitgeist. But therein lies the true genius of Mr. Holland's project, at least as far as I was concerned.
What Simon really wanted was tape recordings made in the 1980s, not 2012 facsimiles. It was only out of kindness that he let such deceptions into his compilation, but he made a caveat, which was, he wanted it to really seem like the contemporary tracks had been made in the past. Not just sound like they were old, but also have a faux history and (if possible) old cassette box art for the submitted song. In short, he was requesting that even 2012 facsimiles of 1980s songs appear to be the real thing, in sound, pictures and provenance.
For some people, this might be an inconvenience. If all you want to do is make an 80s tune, it might be off putting to have to make some 80s style art to go with it. But I loved that part of the project too. In the end, it's was gave me the justification for producing a whole album of songs created in this manner.
Because, while it's a waste of time, to me, to make a group of 80s songs in the synth pop style in 2012, it's actually an interesting challenge to create an album that pretends to be from the actual 80s. For most people this would be some semantic difference, a trivial thing making no difference. Obviously, to me, it makes all the difference in the world. From "waste of time" to "worthy pursuit".
Because, for the months it will take me to complete this record, I will imagine it is the time of the early 80s again, immersing myself in only that music. It will be hard to ignore all the music that has come since, and it's influences, so I will not expend too much effort doing so. Instead I will just think about the music of the day and the days that proceeded (50s, 60s, 70s . . . ). And I will try to imagine, if I had been an adult then, what interests I would have had lyrically, and how to realize them in song form.
When you consider this approach, you can see it's very different than trying to make synth pop from a 2012 perspective. If I was making synth pop for 2012, it would have elements of Trance and Dub Step. And lyrically, I would have to reference the web and smart phones and all kinds of cultural things that didn't exist in the early 80s. And then, in being more of a handshake between past and present, it becomes a bit quaint or nostalgic. In making a "fake" artifact from the 80s, a collection of songs pretending to be from that time, it becomes less about being nostalgic and weepy for a past that is gone and more about trying to travel to the past in my present body, to be in the moment, when that moment is long ago.
If I was to make a sports analogy: It's not sitting around on the sidelines, drinking a beer with your high school teammates, remembering the good old days. It's more like suiting up with them and convincing the members of your old rival to do the same, playing the game, and keeping score. Not to pretend it's high school all over again, but to enjoy the game, fresh. (This is a thought experiment only, I am not responsible for the injuries of people actually attempting this and don't recommend you do so. Music is not a contact sport, so I am safe.) Like many analogies, this one is imperfect. Apologies.
But the real beauty of it all. I get to make synth pop. Ignore the mental hoops I'm making myself jump through, I finally get to make an album of synth pop without being self conscious of doing something "dated", because it's completely, intentionally "dated" and I'm not pretending otherwise, lol.
One of my friends recently asked how long it took to make my Teenage Dream VideoSong. It's so easy to answer, but it opens a whole panoply of memories for how it all transpired. I decided to record Teenage Dream because I'd been working on a video for Dancing with Myself for a year . . . and I was frustrated.
I started work on the video of Dancing with Myself in the Spring of 2010. One day on my lunch hour, coworker and fellow movie maker Stephen and I traveled to Spanish Harlem to shoot with my friend Cherie, who plays "the one who got away" in the video. The location was great, Cherie was great, the shoot went great, all was rosy.
When I was planing the shoot for Dancing with Myself, I was trying to figure out how to make an HD video without an HD camera, since I didn't have one and didn't want to borrow one for as long as it would take to shoot the video. I realized I could use still images in the beginning of the video, especially if they were still images of people being very still (naturally, sitting, etc). But I really wanted some live action too, so I came up with the idea of doing some rescan, as if one of the characters were watching the video on an old TV. Of course, this is only literally what we see.
In the Video, the TV is supposed to symbolize a kind of "box of memories" for this girl he lost. It's a technique I've used before, but this is the first time I had the character watching the TV, usually the TV is next to their head, like a thought bubble. I have to admit, the way I used it this time is a little more confusing, in terms of communicating what's going on.
Once the shoot in Spanish Harlem was finished, Stephen and I made the still shots for the opening sequence. A cardboard box stood in for the TV until the screen and dials were added later in Photoshop. Reverse shots of me watching the TV were also put in the screen as "reflections". Later still, footage of Cherie was added. Although lots of people could tell the footage was added, most mentioned the lack of a power cord as the element that clued them in, not the fact that it was merely a cardboard box on the ground.
So, I had the guy in the factory watching the TV, I had Cherie and I in Spanish Harlem acting out a little drama, but I really wanted something more, a performance element, the band, actually playing the song. But since Tribrix is essentially a one man band, the idea of a band performance was out . . . or was it.
I didn't have a green screen at the time, but I conceived of a way of using black screen to composite 3 moving images of me, to represent "the band". I wanted to mimic the lighting on the Police in their video for Every Breath You Take. If you set the shots up correctly, you can layer the three images together and create the illusion of having a whole band.
In the amount of free time and space I have, it was tough to arrange all of this, backdrop, lighting, camera setups. But I managed to shoot all three moving images of myself, playing drums, bass, and guitar. It had taken a few months but it looked like I'd be finished soon.
When I was working on my first music video, for the song Vice, I had discovered something interesting: digital devices have made time coding almost obsolete. In the old days, if you shot sound and images at different times, you could use time code to sync them up later. The time code would ensure that everything was chronologically stable. Without it, the audio and video tracks would drift apart in time, and people's lips would start to look like random rubber bands, almost like watching a movie that has been dubbed, except, it's not supposed to look dubbed, it's supposed to look synchronized.
My original plan for Vice was to do a flash animation, but there were so many delays getting that off the ground I had to forget it. Cheney's term as Vice President was coming to an end, and I wanted to do this video before that happened. I can't say if flash would have made the video better or not, but it wasn't an option. Instead of flash, I decided to go with a paper bag puppet for the singing and two After Effects animations for the "action" shots.
From a content perspective, it's a much more interesting choice. But I quickly learned that puppeteering is much harder than it looks. And ones hands and arms start to hurt quickly over multiple takes. Eventually I got some usable footage and started to edit it together.
I had not worried about time coding because it was a puppet, and I assumed if the lip sync was off a little, no one would notice, since it was a puppet. So you can imagine my surprise when I lined up the song and the visual puppet performance and they stayed in perfect sync for the whole song. I was shocked. It shouldn't be possible, yet it was working. I imagined Nagra was going to have a much harder time selling those $2000 tape recorders used for recording sync sound on movies.
The sound source for the puppet performance on Vice had been the cheapest little MP3 player you could buy. Not exactly "professional", sync ready, design. When it came time to record "the band" for my Dancing with Myself video, the most convenient source to lip synch to was a sony CD player I had laying around (the battery on my iPod needed replacing and the cheap MP3 player was MIA). CDs are digital, so I imagined the same rock solid sync ability as the cheap MP3 player. But I was wrong.
I don't know how, I don't know why, but the CD player drifted all over the place, chronologically speaking. It wasn't just playing the song too slow, it was playing the song with a completely inconsistent speed. Slowing down, then speeding up. I still wasn't worried though, remember, I was only working with guitar, bass and drums, so a little drift probably wouldn't be noticed. As long as I did a sync at the start of each lyrical stanza . . . or so I thought.
I spent weeks and weeks and weeks massaging this footage (which was easier than a reshoot), all to no avail. It was a mess, and not getting any better. Further more, for Christmas that year I got an HD camera and a green screen. A reshoot was in order, but I was in no mood to go back an work on it anymore. I decided I needed a change, some quick project to take my mind off the chaos of the current project.
Katy Perry's Teenage Dream was gaining traction and I really liked the song. Not just as a listener, but for some reason, I really wanted to record it. Who knows why these feelings hit us, but it hit me hard, and I wanted to do it while the song was still current.
I'd first heard the term "VideoSong" listening to an interview with the male half of Pomplamoose. I was intrigued and thought my Katty Perry cover would be perfect for doing a VideoSong. I mean, how hard could it be to record video while you recorded the song? Because, I had learned nothing from the Dancing With Myself experience.
My Teenage Dream video started off okay. I set up the camera and started performing the various tracks. It was actually going almost a quickly as a regular audio song. I figured, given the genre, I aught to work on the video simultaneous to the audio. And that's when I hit the first snag.
The footage was so, so, so boring. I mean snorzeville.
I had to start over.
When I first moved to New York, my roommate-to-be had a disco ball. We hung it up and I put a couple of lights on it. Then I added some Christmas lights, then some police flashers and a lighting controller. By the end we had gobo scanners and a huge assortment of other lights, all in our living room, all on with a single switch, computer controlled to pattern on and off with the music. It was like our own private nightclub, which was the point.
I decided to pull out the old lights and controller for my Teenage Dream video. If nothing else, at least I could spice up the video footage a little. I took a long time, but eventually I came up with a set up for the vocals. Other times, I used one of the gobo scanners alone.
Of course, setting all this up and re-recording, and making sure to wear something decent, and do something with my hair meant, recording a VideoSong takes a lot longer than recording an audio only song. In the end, my little side project to distract me from Dancing with Myself took four months. But I learned things doing it, so when I returned to finish the first video, it was completed quickly and I had the benefit of HD and green screen for creating my "band". I said I'd never do another VideoSong, but I'm already working on one for I See You (I am Empty). Look for it soon.
I'm not going to rehash a lot of info I've covered in previous blog posts. Regular readers know I am working on an analog tape project, recording songs on an old cassette four track, which will be an album or EP tentatively titled Retro Grade. I previous mentioned I had lyric ideas for about five songs so far. One of them, is a song based on the writings of Lao Tzu.
I'm not usually one to use existing works as the basis for my work, but I make an exception with very old and/or public domain works. Not only because I won't get into any legal trouble, but because I cannot possibly harm the artist, who must have been dead over 75 years.
Lao Tzu certainly qualifies, since his works are believed to have been written about 2500 years ago, though the exact date an authorship remain questionable. The Lao Tzu writings are useful in another respect too. They have been very important to me since I first read them when I was 14, so they fit the whole "retro" nature of the project, from my perspective, as they represent a part of my past.
I liked the Dao De Ching so much, I looked for potential companion works to read. Having discovered a (potentially apocryphal) story about Lao Tzu conversing with and teaching Confucius, I mistakenly thought the Analytics would be a great companion to the Dao De Ching. I could not have been more wrong, especially when Confucius writes so much about obedience to parents. This is not what a rebellious young teen wants to read.
That said, unfaltering obedience to parents doesn't pass the western philosophy smell test. What if your parent is a sociopath? Are you still supposed to be completely obedient. In Confucius world, you could have escaped a Nuremberg tribunal if the illegal and lethal order came from your dad. "I had to torture that queer, my father told me to do it." And you can't disobey your father. I exaggerate and I digress.
Unfortunately for me, I don't read ancient Chinese, so I am reliant on translators to access the Dao De Ching. And this is my Achilles heel. Because my whole life the translation of the Lao Tzu writings I've kept close has been the D. C. Lau translation from Penguin Classics. Unfortunately for me, this translation is only about 50 years old, too new to be in the public domain. Although the original text is free for everyone, a modern translation is not.
However, I suspected, given the ancient nature of the work, that it had been translated into English before. It might not have Lau's poetic touch, but it would still get the job done. I started at project Gutenberg, a great resource for public domain texts. But I found something even better. This site, were you can read 23 English translations at the same time. I'm totally blown away by it. I've never felt closer to the actual Chinese, which is a really good thing, if my plan is to turn ancient philosophical text into song lyrics. As it is. actually.
I love the Rashamon effect. In the movie, it leads to chaos, no one knows what has happened, because there are too many conflicting accounts. But what happens in Rashamon is an outlier. Normally, mutliple accounts get you closer, not farther from the truth. This is the genius of the wiki, though wikipedia manages to get it wrong, IMO.
Guessing how many jelly beans are in a jar, the crowd will be more accurate than any one individual. Unfortunately, the architecture of Wikipedia gives individuals the ability to edit the opinion of the masses. To say nothing of the fact, that the masses often misremember history.
But in the controlled world of translation of ancient texts, the different views get you closer, not farther from the truth. Which is perfect for me. If I'm to turn the writings of Lao Tzu into song lyrics. I need to know the "truth" of the starting point, before I start inventing and editing.
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