DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The first thing I have to say about Macworld Expo is that Caltrans can lick my buttocks. They closed a lane on highway 101 but didn’t actually do any work on the road as far as I could see. I would have asked a member of the crew what they were repairing except that there weren’t any crew members present when we finally got to the so-called “construction area” after 40 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. That’s your tax dollars at work, or mine anyway.

Nine years ago I worked a booth at Macworld. The show seemed huge. Both halls of Moscone were filled, and it seemed that every Macintosh software maker had a presence. My employer wasn’t selling Mac software at all; the fact that we were there is a testament to the buzz surrounding the Expo.

In the intervening years, the show floor seemed to shrink. Curtained partitions hanging just beyond the last row of booths couldn’t mask the fact that the room’s walls were pretty far away. Neither could the 1000 square feet of “user group area” tables and chairs, right on the show floor.

This year, for the first time that I’ve seen, the entire expo was packed into one exhibition hall. And Apple’s demo area was huge, disguising the fact that dozens of Expo regulars declined to participate this year. If the show gets any smaller they can just hold it in my basement, and save me the hourlong drive.

I saw two exciting and unexpected things at the show, and neither had anything to do with Apple. One was at the Nikon booth. I regularly check out Nikon’s newest digital cameras, in hopes of upgrading my old Coolpix. I was getting hot about the D70, which appears to have won most of the awards there are to win, until the sales rep showed me the Coolpix 8800 — 10x optical zoom, 8 megapixel, vibration reduction, hotshoe, and an LCD that flips out and rotates (enabling the user to preview shots even when the camera is held overhead). Just so you know, I do have a birthday coming up.

The other exciting thing I saw was the Spin Doctors. This was like running into an old friend at the airport — you never expect it to happen. I sure didn’t expect to see the Spin Doctors, who last I heard broke up six or eight years ago. What would they be doing on a tiny stage in a corner of Macworld Expo, playing V-drums and MIDI guitars? I would have expected them to have a schedule conflict — as the house band in the “Where are they now?” file.

Their breakout album was huge: Pocket Full of Kryptonite sold something like 8 million copies. Everybody knows those songs. I haven’t played the album in years but I could sing every word.

Aaron Comess was fun to watch; he is a phenomenal drummer. I remember reading an interview with him about his technique. His teacher didn’t let him touch a drum kit for the first two years, so as not to distract him from good stick control on the snare drum.

As a result, he has a very light touch, even on the kick drum. It was a good lesson for me (i.e. “let the amplifier do the work”).

I couldn’t help but think that Macworld Expo is a pretty lame gig for a big rock band. The crowd of nerds and journalists was underwhelmed — like me, more interested in documenting the event than participating in it. Check out how many cameras were being aimed at the band. Add two more: mine, and the one held by the guy next to me who was shooting a movie of the whole thing. (Pirated concert MPEG at 160x140 resolution and 8-bit, 12 kHz sound!)

I admire the band for continuing to play music professionally, as that’s something I wanted but failed to do. Still, I think after headlining big shows and getting tons of radio play and selling millions of records, it’s gotta be a downer to land a gig at the Cincinnati Chili Festival.

Since 2000, U.S. hybrid sales have grown at an average annual rate of 88.6 percent.

I think that’s great news. Either there are a lot more ecologically-conscious people in the country than I previously suspected, or hybrids are appealing to the mainstream. Are there any other classes of vehicle that exhibit 88% growth?

One quote from an analyst strikes me as short-sighted:

[Anthony Pratt, an analyst with J.D. Power and Associates] says he thinks demand for hybrids will peak around 2011, at 3 percent of the market, because there’s a limit to the number of customers willing to pay more for a vehicle that will save them a few hundred dollars a year on gas.

I follow his math; the difference in fuel cost between a 53 mpg hybrid (53 mpg is what I measured in my Prius test drive) and a 30 mpg non-hybrid is less than $500/year for most drivers. Over the typical ownership period of a car, most drivers would not recoup the additional money spent on a hybrid.

But won’t gas prices go up? Worldwide oil production will peak next year. Who believes the oil companies will lower prices when overall production declines annually?

Won’t hybrid prices come down, as manufacturers realize economies of scale?

Won’t the price premiums evaporate when consumers have a dozen models of hybrid to select from, rather than two?

Won’t the poor air quality in cities inspire health-conscious people to look for vehicles that pollute less in traffic?

Personally I think hybrids make good sense for some drivers right now, and they’ll make even better sense over the next 3 years when driving a hybrid (like installing PV) becomes a financial win. Pratt seems to think, based on the quote above, that hybrids will be luxury option for a tiny percentage of drivers. I disagree.

Is the week of MacWorld Expo the wrong time to trash-talk Apple?

The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition’s iWaste campaign is a clever effort to inspire Apple to make some smarter decisions about end-of-lifing their iPod products.

They’ve copped the iPod advertising look and feel… they’ve lampooned the classy blue Apple logo… and they’ve got a great challenge: Really “Think Differently.”

Sign the petition. Or, at least, make sure your iPod gets recycled properly when you upgrade.

A crew at the Discovery Channel strapped a miniature TV camera and microwave transmitter onto a golden eagle and collected some amazing video imagery. (A tip of the feathered cap to Bim for the link.)

So, I spent last November recording drums for five songs, and then over Thanksgiving I engineered a two-day session in which my ex-bandmates overdubbed guitars — lots of guitars — bass, and vocals. I have not written about those sessions yet, but plan to, just as soon as I write about the 2nd half of my Utah parks trip (December 2002), the 2nd half of my Greek Islands trip (Sept. 2003), or the middle of my British Columbia trip (July 2004).

I won’t be mixing all these tunes, but I’ll definitely be mixing the drums for all of them. I started with the hardest song of all, my own tune Ode to Soup, because (as reported previously) it was recorded in sections. This means I had two tracks of snare drum, two of kick drum, two hats, four toms (two stereo pairs), and four overheads. Attempting to EQ, compress, and reverb all 14 tracks was killing my workstation’s CPU, because essentially I was trying to do twice as much work as I needed to. Two possible answers were evident:

• buy a dual-processor G5
• combine redundant drum tracks to halve the amount of processing required

Needless to say, I queued up store.apple.com right away… no, actually my G5 Upgrade fund has been appropriated and renamed, something about gradeschool tuition? Fortunately my workstation isn’t a complete dog. I recently upgraded the CPU to a 1 GHz model and added another 512 MB RAM. The CPU upgrade came with a tiny bumper sticker reading, “Don’t Laugh; It’s Paid For.”

Pictured is my ProTools session before combining the individual drum tracks. In most cases I simply solo’d each pair of tracks (e.g. the two snare tracks), set the faders to 0, and used Bounce to Disk to create and import the resulting mix.

In a few cases I applied gating and EQ as well, in an effort to reduce some of the processing I’d need to do later. The problem with applying filters in two passes like this is that fixing mistakes can be time consuming. I had to re-bounce two of the tracks multiple times when I later discovered that some of my filter settings were whacked. Given that I have not completed the final mixdown yet, I may again discover that some of my filter settings were whacked. The beauty of nondestructive editing is that I can always go back and redo this stuff, assuming of course I have the million years necessary to iteratively tweak every picosecond of audio in this song.

During playback I realized that I’d inadvertently achieved a different snare sound during the choruses, because I was playing more of a rimshot. As a result I re-mixed the snare channel with plug-in automation, enabling additional EQ during the choruses to reduce the nasty ringing sound the mic had picked up.

I did some editing too. I had captured pretty clean takes, but there’s always room for improvement. One downbeat in particular was killing me; it was a couple hundredths of a second late, and absolutely murdered the groove coming out of a fill. The repair was easier than I expected… and would have been even easier if I’d discovered the Nudge tool in Pro-Tools.

Then, left with just one set of drum tracks, I replicated the session setup advocated by David Franz in his DigiZine article on Phase-Coherent Drums. The final drum sound will consist of a dry submix, a heavily compressed submix, and a reverb track… 13 faders in all.

I need to play with EQ and compression levels still, but some of that has to wait until I’m ready to mix the bass and guitar. You can hear what I have thus far; the following clip contains an alternating 2-bar phrase to illustrate the change. I’m pleased with my progress, but I think I’m not done yet.

Ode To Soup Drum Excerpt (2 bars dry, 2 bars wet, repeat)

The ‘dry’ sections sound closed and boxy as compared to the ‘wet’ sections. The ghost notes in the dry sections are completely buried, in fact inaudible at low playback levels. The snare sound is much improved — check out how anemic it is, dry — but I’d like to get more of a crack out of it. I experimented with an additional snare track, created by running this track through a sound-replacer plug in (aptrigga, ~$46), but the results didn’t justify the cost. I’ll revisit that decision further in the mixdown process.

The next step is to extract a single guitar track from four takes plus an overdub (plus two harmonies and a powerchord track too!).