DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

My guitarist friend Steve recorded four takes of the main guitar track for my song, Ode to Soup. Then he recorded two harmony tracks for the second half of the chorus, plus a “powerchord” track for two of the verses. It’s an awesome arrangement, and really took the song to the next level.

But it left me with about twenty tracks of guitar to mix down. (Remember that the guitar was recorded with two microphones, doubling the amount of data to manage as well as the number of edits needed.)

The fourth take was labelled the “keeper” — meaning that at tracking time, we felt it was the best of the lot. But no single take is perfect, and even more importantly, what seems perfect in performance rarely stands up to the scrutiny of repeated playback. When I was finally mentally prepared for the task (read: I’d futzed with everything else for a week without making any substantive progress) I listened closely to all four takes and made notes about what I liked in each. What I found surprised me: I had indeed captured guitar magic, but it was spread evenly across all four takes.

Combining them was a challenge. I used a technique advocated by ProTools book author David Franz, whose Digizine article about creating a comp vocal track describes the process. It can be used for any instrument, including multi-tracked instruments. It could even be used to edit drums, although you’ll develop RSI in the process.

The trick is selecting exactly the same material from two tracks and pasting it into two other tracks. Selection accuracy is key; if I pasted the chorus from the Beyer mic even one sample off from the position of the SM57 version of the chorus, the guitar sound would change, or could even be out of phase. I needed the comped SM57 track to be identical, in terms of edits and transitions, to the Beyer track.

Of course, it’s not as easy as simply copying and pasting. Each such edit brings an opportunity for a bad transition. Crossfading between passages fixes many such problems, but in several cases the notes didn’t line up — Steve improvised some of the sections, and the basic material was different. I used ProTools’ TCE — time compression and expansion — widget to stretch out some passages to compensate for notes I’d clipped out.

The longest such edit happens right before the first harmony section. I needed to replace about a half-second of audio to make the edit work. Stretching a note that long with TCE seems to make it go flat. Also, because I had to repeat the edit for the Beyer mic track, the stereo image moves around. The combination is either a neat effect or a mistake. But I guess that happens a lot in recording, and you don’t know until the 100th listen which it is.

Pictured is my workspace in the midst of the guitar comp.

So the plan was that I’d host a 2-day recording session for my old bandmates.

My wife would be 38 weeks pregnant at the time. This is no minor consideration, as anyone whose wife has ever been 38 weeks pregnant can attest. Extrapolating from the strength of her nesting instinct a few months prior, we realized it would be a bad idea to try to host this session at home. There’s no low-impact way three guys can record music in the basement; she’d be uncomfortable and disturbed, which is generally considered a bad thing by all the experts (where by “experts” I mean spouses of women who at any time have been 38 weeks pregnant).

Fortunately my band’s studio is just 10 minutes away. There, we’d have lots of space to work and the freedom to make as much noise as we want. But once I’d set up my gear there I realized we’d be miserable (for a variety of reasons noted previously, so the last-resort option came to be the only option.

Next I needed gear. My band bailed me out in world-class style: Norm offered his entire inventory of vintage guitars, amps, and combos. One Dave offered a nice acoustic guitar. The other Dave offered his Marshall TSL (“triple super lead” !) head and a 4x10 cab. Suddenly I had more guitar gear than I knew what to do with.

I would also be recording vocals. Ask 10 engineers the best way to record a vocal and you’ll get 10 different answers, each citing some esoteric microphone and tube-preamp combination, plus a complicated chain of compression, EQ, expansion, and pitch-correction devices. I’d have no such gear, but I’d be recording vocals anyway, one way or another. My total investment in a high-end vocal chain amounted to $15, for a pop filter. But: it’s a really nice pop filter.

I bought a Shure SM-57 too. I don’t like to use them on my drums, because they’re too big to fit anywhere, but I figured any real engineer would have at least one (if not six) in his bag. I’m not a real engineer but to the extent that I can afford the bag of gear, I hope to sound like one.

The Marshall gear went into the nursery, the same room the drums had occupied for six weeks. I lined one corner with seat cushions and Auralex foam, pointed the cabinet into the corner and dropped two mics over the top: my new SM57 and an old Beyer M-380, a big bidirectional mic that has great, round low-end response and a distinctly different sound than the 57.

In the next room, we set up a large work table to hold my laptop — it’s still astounding to me that a midlevel G4 Powerbook can drive a recording studio — a spare CRT, Andrew’s nearfield monitors, and my rack. The idea was to get some separation between the console and the tracking room. Or, in another sense, to turn the nursery into an iso booth for the guitar cab.

I wired two C-1000S mics on boom stands, for vocal and acoustic guitar. If I were a real engineer I would have sound-checked two or three other mics for both applications, but we wouldn’t have time.

Finally, I ran all the mic cables from the nursery into the den, and a daisy-chained series of headphone extension cables from the den into the nursery: instant recording studio. We had no window between the rooms, but we found that shouting through a closed door worked just as well.

Although this session was primarily to record Steve’s guitar and vocals, Andrew brought 11 strings worth of Ken Smith basses, which I photographed just because they look so cool.

This isn’t news to anybody who has been paying attention, but still eye-opening to have proof:

The Honeynet Project released a report saying that Linux is not being hacked. Test systems have an average life expectancy — time before they are successfully hacked — of three months. This is much greater than that of Windows systems, which have average life expectancies on the order of a few minutes.

(Source: Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram, January 2005)

Here’s the actual quote from the Honeynet report:

Data from the Symantec Deepsight Threat Management System indicates a vulnerable Win32 system has life expectancy not measured in months, but merely hours. The limited number of Win32 honeypots we have deployed support this, several being compromised in mere minutes. However, we did have two Win32 honeypots in Brazil online for several months before being compromised by worms.

Here’s the thing that’s either hilarious or pitiful, depending on whether you use Windows: Two years ago this week, Bill Gates announced that “Trustworthy Computing is the highest priority for all the work we are doing.”

He defines his new buzzword:

What I mean by this is that customers will always be able to rely on these systems to be available and to secure their information. Trustworthy Computing is computing that is as available, reliable and secure as electricity, water services and telephony.

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.