The Nightmare of Mixing Audio

In drummer Jacob Slichter’s excellent book, So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star, he examines the music machinery behind the rise and fall of his 90s band Semisonic.  When discussing the release of their ubiquitous hit, “Closing Time,” Slichter reveals how the song went through several mixes and how each was devoted to a different audience:  Bob Clearmountain handled the initial mix, but Jack Puig remixed it to give the song a heavier edge for alternative radio, Don Gehman did a pop mix, and Puig returned for an acoustic mix.  Depending on what radio station you listened to, you might be getting an entirely different sound to your favorite song.

With the advent of streaming services, I have to believe that alternate mixes are employed less often today, but Slichter’s story illustrates just how important – how defining – mixing is to a song, no less than the musical performance.  In the hands of a gifted engineer, mixing can push a decent song into the stratosphere.  In the hands of an amateur, a really good song can end up sounding merely adequate.  I’m more the latter than the former, but I’m getting better.

I’ve sent mixes for my new album, The Human Form Divine (available on streaming services in a month or so) to a mastering engineer in Chicago, and I’m praying that I’m still happy with them when I get the tracks back.  We shall see.  I’m allowing myself a few weeks of distance from what was an arduous process filled with second-guessing, self-flagellation, irritation, bewilderment, resignation and – ultimately – some degree of satisfaction .  I am not a natural mixing engineer, and it shows; I started mixing my new album last October and finally finished in March!  It’s a good thing I don’t do this for a living.

Part of the problem is that I’m dealing with imperfect recordings.  For example, when we recorded drums and bass in the studio, we couldn’t get the snare to stop rattling whenever my son Sam hit his toms, so at home I had to go back and substitute every tom hit with a sample tom hit that we recorded in isolation (thank goodness we did this as a fail-safe tactic) and mute the snare accordingly.  I employed a similar technique on the snare when raising the volume wasn’t possible due to the accompanying hi-hat and cymbal interference. 

In the studio I also didn’t notice that the bass was drastically out of tune on two tracks, mostly because we were only recording drums and bass and there wasn’t a reference track that allowed us to easily recognize off-the-mark pitches.  Oops!  NOTE TO SELF: TUNE YOUR INSTRUMENTS BEFORE EVERY RECORDING! The bass performance on the title track of my new album was so good that I didn’t want to lose it because of tuning issues, so I ended up copying the bass tracks (one amp and one direct) six times, changing the tuning differently on each grouping to end up with one relatively in-tune performance.

But mostly the mixing process is challenging because my ears don’t pick up on subtle distinctions.  I’m good at broad brushstrokes – volume, panning, and basic compression, for example – but the nuances of slight variations of compression or EQ are largely lost on me.   Luckily, with a lot of trial and error, over time I used a few techniques that I was able to employ across the board.

Thanks to my bassist friend Johnny’s suggestion, for the first time I used saturation to help bring out a track rather than using a lot of compression.  This was a tricky balancing act, and one I’m not sure I mastered it, but I was able to get bass and snare to cut through mixes a touch better without having to squash the hell out of them. Even so, on some busses I used parallel compression a bit with good results.

I also utilized sidechaining extensively.  With the help of a couple of tutorials, I ended up doing the following:

1)      Ducking the bass slightly to make room for the kick.
2)      Ducking the overheads slightly to make room for snare and toms.
3)      Ducking guitars and/or synths to make room for vocals or solo instruments.
4)      Ducking a vocal delay bus with the original vocal track so that the delay can only be head at the end of a syllable.

The above helped enormously, as getting the vocal and snare tracks to sit in a mix has always been a challenge for me, as has the kick/bass relationship. 

Also helpful was being aware of accentuating frequencies in the 300 Hz range to allow bass guitar to be heard on smaller speakers.  I’m amazed at how the bass disappears on many professional recordings from long ago when played on tiny speakers such as those on a cellphone.  Today, mixing engineers are more cognizant of this inevitability.

I also used a high-pass filter on multiple tracks, boosted my vocal a touch at around 1800 Hz, and used a high shelf boost on overhead busses for a bit of sheen. Eventually, I created a kind of EQ blueprint that worked for these particular recordings.

Even with all the above and more, I had to go through mix after mix after mix of each song, listening on five different sets of speakers (studio monitors, stereo speakers, car speakers, a decent Bluetooth speaker and my phone) plus a pair of headphones to get a sense of what was and what wasn’t working.  And once mixes were complete, I got additional feedback from my son and two of my musician friends, Johnny and Anthony.  Luckily, by the time I sent them the final mixes, they agreed that the songs were in a good place, requiring just a few minor edits.

I have aspirations of one day hiring all of this out and getting someone who I trust to handle the entire mixing process so that I can free myself of this nightmare.  But then again, what fun would that be?  As much as I say I hate the process, I also love the challenge.

New album forthcoming!

Journey's "Too Late"

For a couple of decades, it was in vogue to trash the band Journey.  With their at-times schmaltzy lyrics, histrionic videos and sappy ballads, the band were easy targets and critics were quick to dismiss them, but I’ve always felt that Journey were a cut above their arena rock peers; their musicianship alone took them beyond bands like Head East, Def Leppard, Loverboy, Foreigner and April Wine.   And during the transitional period from their fusion prog-rock roots to radio-friendly AOR during 1978-1980, they achieved – in my mind – rock gold with the studio albums Infinity, Evolution and Departure.  Subsequent years would bring the band greater success, but I love the period when Steve Perry shared vocal duties with keyboardist Gregg Rolie, culminating in 1981’s live Captured, which I received as a present for my thirteenth birthday that year.

It’s this live album that came to mind recently as I drove from Chicago to Cincinnati, where during the commute I spied the exit sign for “Dixie Highway,” which also happens to be the title of a song off of Captured.  For the next hour of my drive, my mental jukebox went through the entire album track by track, and then replayed a song that I’ve always loved but is largely absent from radio these days, not to mention Journey’s setlists.  Journey may have experienced a resurgence over the past decade in a half, perhaps even garnering some respect that had been denied the band early on, but along the way some of their old radio standards have gone by the wayside.  One such song is “Too Late,” one of my favorites off of Evolution, and while I replayed the song in my mind several times during my trip, I noticed a nifty melodic trick that the band employs.

The song’s verse has a simple chord pattern – D A  Bmin  F#min G  (I V vi iii IV) – and the chorus continues in D, employing the non-diatonic flat-7 chord, C major.  It all works well, with Perry’s singable melody working nicely on top.

What elevates the song is twofold:  first, the solo section has some fun with the chords, first transposing to the key of E and then leading us to the key of A, eventually building on a sustained E chord, begging to resolve back to an A. 

But then the second interesting thing happens.  Instead of the next verse starting on A and continuing the verse in that key, we hear the same chords as in the first verse: D A  Bmin F#min and G.  But they now sound like the song is in the key of A, so instead of hearing it as I V vi iii, we hear it as IV I ii vi.   When the band hits the A chord, it sounds like the tonic, and by the time they get to G, we’re back in the key of D, and the song resolves to the chorus as heard twice before.

How?  How the heck does this work?  I’ve tried figuring it out and it isn’t a no-brainer.  It all seems to stem from the altered melody.  If Steve Perry had sung the same melody as in the first verse, our ears would quickly adjust and accept that the band is now back in the key of D.  Instead, Perry does a wonderful melodic variation:

• The original verse has the melodic motif: F# A B A F# D F# E.  D pentatonic.  Cool. 

• But AFTER the solo Perry sings A A B B B C# B A. 

And THAT is all it takes to make the verse sound like it’s in a different key.  Why does this work?  After all, all of the notes are diatonic to both the key of D and the key of A.  What the heck is happening here?

Truthfully, I don’t know.  I’ve sung the second melody over some different chords in the key of D, and it isn’t required that our ears hear it in the key of A, but they do.  Part of it is the fact that the solo ends on an E chord, which at that point sounds like the V chord.  But dang, I find it all a bit baffling.

It just goes to show how melodic alterations can totally flip a chord progression around, and I have to give guitarist Neil Schon and vocalist Steve Perry credit for employing this technique, whether it was by design or by pure chance, and whether or not they could articulate why it works.  It does work, and that’s what matters.  I wish I could understand it enough to employ the technique to my own songwriting, but I’m not sure I’d know where to begin.

And this is one little example of why Journey was not your average arena rock band.  And why seeing a sign that reads “Dixie Highway” can take you down a long ‘journey’ of musical discovery.  Rock on.

Learning the Guitar - Again

For some keyboard players – me included – the guitar is a very mysterious instrument.  The visual logic of a piano, with its repeating 12-note pattern of black and white keys, each key corresponding to a unique note, is lost when trying to decipher the fretboard of a guitar.  (“What do you mean middle C can be played here…and here…and here…and here?”)

Sure, learning the basic open chords is easy enough.  Back in the late 80s I borrowed my friend Shawn’s acoustic guitar, bought a chord book, and pretty soon I was playing songs like “Driver 8” by R.E.M. and the similar jangly “I’m Looking Through You” by the Beatles, my fingertips pulsing painfully with each passing hour.  I even figured out open E tuning so that I could play Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.” 

But dang, it got hard after that.  Like, REALLY hard.  As soon as I placed my fingers further up the fretboard, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.  Over the past thirty years, I’ve made a concerted effort to improve my guitar playing at least a half a dozen times.  I’ve taken lessons.  I’ve watched videos.  I’ve learned songs.  But each time my efforts have fizzled out after a few months.

But not this year.  I recently started to break down the guitar in ways I hadn’t been dedicated enough to do before.  It started with a terrific set of tutorials on YouTube by guitar instructor Mark Zabel.   This guy is terrific, and I like his instruction techniques.  Of particular help to me were his videos on “Playing the right notes” and the CAGED system of instruction.  CAGED may not work for some people, but it helped me to better visualize the fretboard, and I can now work my way up and down the guitar neck (slowly) to play different chord intervals. I also enjoyed this guy’s video:

Despite CAGED being helpful, in a way it overcomplicates things.  There are really only three shapes for major triads:  D, A and E.  C is basically the same as D.  G is basically the same as A.  At least that’s how I’ve looked at it, and it’s been helpful.   It’s similar for minor chords.  I learned the shapes for D minor, A minor and E minor.  G minor is basically the same as E minor.  C minor is basically the same as D minor. 

These videos put me on the right track, but just as important has been my commitment to learn how to shape chords depending on where the tonic is.  If the tonic is on the second string, how do I shape a major chord?  A minor chord?  A dominant 7 chord?  What if the tonic is on the fourth string?  I’ve worked hard at this, and gradually I’ve better grasped the different chord shapes. 

With the above tools, as long as I can follow where the tonic is, I’m able to play whatever triad I want.  (for CAGED 7th chords, I like this guy’s video). I’m gradually figuring out the proper hand position no matter where I am on the fret board, and over time patterns have emerged.  I’ve found it helpful to do the following:

1)      Go from a major chord to its relative minor, and vice versa.
2)      Play a I, IV, V blues patterns.
3)      Play chords over descending roots of the major scale (think the “Piano Man” by Billy Joel, and see my blog about this musical cliché here.)

Now, none of the above is going to make me a great guitar player, or even a good one.  Hell, just a few days ago I tried playing the opening lick to David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel,” and I could not get my left had to cooperate!  I may never play a lead line that anyone would like to hear.  But my goal for the foreseeable future is to be able to play major, minor, dominant 7, major 7 and minor 7 chords from anywhere on the guitar.  If I can do that confidently by the end of year, that will go a long way towards making me moderately competent at the guitar. 

A good start, anyhow.

Organizing, Records and Discogs

When the pandemic started last March, much of the nation went into house-organizing mode, as people gathered never-worn clothes from bedroom closets and outgrown toys from playrooms, making room for other purchases that will one day need to be discarded.  The pandemic may have facilitated this organizing trend by forcing people to spend countless hours inside their homes, but I think a lot of it came down to control: giving us some semblance of power in a world that increasingly seemed to be careening towards a path of its own demise.  I think that’s what most organizing constitutes: a chance to regain control in an otherwise uncontrollable world.

While others were discarding, I was adding.  Just as the state of Illinois was shutting down last spring, I made regular trips to Home Depot to build three record racks for my growing collection of vinyl, and while the racks achieved their purpose of properly displaying my albums in all their glory, I soon wanted even more control.  I wanted them cataloged.

Enter Discogs.

Websites aimed to catalog aspects of our lives are nothing new.  Letterboxd tracks the movies we’ve seen (or haven’t seen yet), Goodreads does the same for books, Untappd for the beers you’ve sampled.  As someone who has made lists all his life, who when asked what my favorite movies are can immediately rattle off ten titles, I find these websites to be a Godsend, a way to transform scraps of paper or poorly organized spreadsheet files into fun, interactive activities that facilitate sharing content with others who relate to my obsessions.

There are plenty of options for music collector, but Discogs appears to be the site of choice for the folks I know.  It has its quirks and limitations, but after spending a week or so entering data, I’ve managed to inventory all of my records, CDs and concert DVDs nicely in the cloud and I’ve organized them even better on a spreadsheet that I can manipulate however I choose.

A few details.  If you’re a vinyl collector for whom its important to properly identify the specific pressing of each record you own – and there are reasons why this might be important – the endeavor of cataloging your collection is going to cost you loads of time.  For me, I was happy just to note that I owned a particular album and not that it was a particular reissue of a particular year.  This posed a problem, however, because Discogs attempts to estimate the monetary value of your collection – a nice feature – and to have this estimate somewhat accurate, it’s important for me to at least note that my 1974 Genesis release isn’t a first pressing, but a reissue.  And, truth be told, this is a pain to do on Discogs for several reasons:

1)     When searching for a basic record – say, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours – 538 versions of the album pop up, and even after filtering for country (U.S.) and format (vinyl) you’re left with over 90 options to choose from.  Which one do you choose without wanting to spend a great deal of time?  If you’re like me, knowing that I didn’t have a highly-valued first pressing – I chose the first reissue I could find.  But this leads to another problem…

2)     I want to be able to track my records based on the year they were released.  My mental timeline is part of what helps me navigate my world, and knowing that The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway came out in 1974 is one of those facts that anchors my historical timeline.  Unfortunately, if I want to properly recognize that I don’t own a valuable first pressing but rather an inexpensive reissue, it’s the year of the pressing that pops up when I chronologically order my collection, NOT the year the album was released.  I hate this.  Others hate it too, as a quick Google search confirmed, but while there are many likeminded people out there, there’s apparently only one solution to the problem:  download your collection, load it onto a spreadsheet, and physically change the dates to their original year of release.  That’s what I did.  Not ideal.

3)     Unless I’m missing something, I can’t set filtering defaults like searching only for vinyl releases in the U.S.  I have to tell Discogs to search only for “vinyl” and for “U.S. releases” every time search for a new record.  EVERY fricking time!  If I’m missing something, shame on me.  But this made entering data much more laborious.  And using the website is no better than the android app, as it takes a long time to even load the filtering page.  To date, there isn’t a Discogs app for PCs.  You have to go to the website if you want to make changes via your computer.  (I tried using “Disko for Discogs” which is supposed to be a way to use Discogs via an app, but this failed to even link up to my account).

These issues aside, Discogs is still a useful way to inventory of your collection, and if you own more recent CDs and albums, it’s easier still, as you can simply scan the barcode rather than typing in information (I entered my entire CD collection in less than a day).  Now that I’ve got everything entered and up to date, going forward when I purchase a new record, I’ll enter it separately onto Discogs and then onto the spreadsheet I’ve made to my preferred specifications.  Luckily for me, I only purchase 30 or 40 records a year, so this isn’t such a big deal.  If you’re a big collector with a lot of changes in inventory, this could be a major headache.   In addition to editing “year released” on my spreadsheet, I also manually edited the format of my items into basic categories (LPs, CDs and DVDs) and added a genre column (rock/pop, jazz, classical, spoken, humor).  This way I can sort my collection in any way I choose. (A question might be raised as to why I would feel compelled to sort my collection in multiple ways.  Again, it’s all about the illusion of control.)  The spreadsheet also serves as a way to enter albums that Disccogs can’t find – limited releases or self-released CDs that friends of mine have given to me over the years, for example. 

With everything entered, I’ve got upwards of 900 vinyl records and 500 CDs.  That’s a lot for sure, but each item is neatly arranged in the racks I built last spring, and as a result my mild obsession doesn’t seem like such a crazy endeavor.  When my records were stacked in boxes sprawled out on the basement floor, then I wondered if my collecting was getting out of hand.  Now if I ever feel this way, I need only look to a collecting friend of mine who’s amassed more than 5000 records.  Compared to him, my hobby seems downright sane.

Music Geek-Out Moments

Goodness gracious, it’s been a heck of a long time since my last entry.  The longest in fact since I started this nonsense over a decade ago.  I keep mentally writing the beginnings of blogs, but for reasons that probably have something to do with the exhaustion of living through a pandemic and an election simultaneously, I haven’t been able to pull the trigger.  That ends today.  I’ve got a bunch of things to write about, but since it’s been a while I’ve decided to ease back in with a bit of music-nerd nostalgia.

If you’re really into music you can probably identify a few times in your life when you connected with a fellow music lover on a visceral or intellectual level.  You met someone who “gets you” or “gets it.”  In my museum of recollection, I could probably find dozens of worthy events to exhibit, but allow me to share just two with you today.  They’re nothing earth-shattering, but they’ve stayed with me all these years and I get a kick out of them.

Alpine Valley Music Center parking lot (i.e., a big grass field), East Troy, Wisconsin, probably in 1989 or thereabouts. 

I walked with my friends from the field packed with cars where people had spent the previous hour tailgating to the gate entrance to see Elvis Costello or Rush or Billy Joel.  (Or maybe Jimmy Buffet?  I didn’t have many Alpine Valley concerts left in me – my last time there was in 1991.)  For some reason I was explaining to my friend that although I was excited to see whomever we were there to see, that I would love, just LOVE, to see Yes on stage and have them announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, ’The Gates of Delirium.’”  Well, you would  have thought I’d just announced that Jon Anderson himself was walking behind me, because some nutjob (as in, fellow music-nerd nutjob) in cutoff jeans and a t-shirt turned toward me and shouted “Oh my God!  Yes!”  He ran toward me and literally – I’m not making this up – knelt down in front of me and prostrated himself in mock adulation.  “I bow to the altar of Yes.”  When he righted himself, his right knee was badly bloodied – he’d knelt down on broken glass!  A little remnant from someone’s tailgating a little too hard with glass bottles.  The bloodied fan looked down to examine his knee and said, “Ah well, Yes is worth it.”  We spent the next five minutes or so avoiding going to our seats and instead exchanging our thoughts on Yes, who at the time were either on hiatus or completely defunct.  I shared my opinion of the non-Jon Anderson album Drama, and we both agreed that it was good but that it shouldn’t have been called Yes.  (I’ve since changed my mind about that.  I believe that not only is it Yes, but it’s among the band’s best six albums).  We wished each other a good evening, but I’m sure we also wished that we were seeing a different band, like being stuck on a date when the woman you really want is on the dance floor with another guy. 

Fortunately, I got to see Yes five more times after this interaction, and they played “Gates of Delirium” at two of those concerts.  They even brought out “Machine Messiah” and “Tempus Fugit” from Drama on one of those tours.  I imagine that my bloody-kneed Yes friend was at some of these shows front and center.

A gas station in western Wisconsin off of Highway 94, en route from Milwaukee to Minneapolis, probably in 1992 or 1993. 

Minnesota may border Wisconsin, but going back and forth between Milwaukee, where my family lived, and the University of Minnesota, where I was in grad school, was getting mighty old.   I found that I’d regularly have to pull over at a rest stop north of Wisconsin Dells and take a 20-minute snooze just to stay awake.  It didn’t help that I couldn’t make it all the way on one tank of gas in my Toyota Tercel, so more time was wasted having to fill up along the journey.  On one such stop, I filled up my tank and walked in to pay the cashier (automated pumps weren’t a thing yet, or at least not at this station), a young guy with dark, long curly hair and a black t-shirt.  While I was waiting for the transaction to be completed, I noticed a song playing on the radio playing next to him, and the music bounced around in my brain for a bit, jump-starting old synapses in need of a good lube job.  I titled my head, nonplussed, certain that I was about to make a fool of myself, but I tentatively proceeded.  “That isn’t…is that Michael Schenker?”  The cashier froze, looked at me in eye with no emotion whatsoever, and then in one fluid motion, opened the till, took out a bill and slapped it down on the counter in front of me, as if he were jubilantly showing his winning straight-flush over an opponent’s full house.  “That, my friend, deserves a dollar!”

I’d gotten it right.  I wasn’t a fan of Michael Schenker.  I wasn’t even aware of him, really, but I remembered a song that had gotten a bit of radio play on WQFM back in 1981, and since my older brother had purchased it (the vinyl record is now in my possession), the album cover and name were somehow stamped on my brain.  Why I was able to remember this, and not, say, the name of a woman seconds after introducing herself to me, was a question better left to that great DJ up in the sky.

But damn, I was proud of that one.

So there you are.  Two geek-out moments.  I hope there are many, many more, but of course these types of interactions that make life richer aren’t possible in 2020.  Here’s hoping in 2021.  In the meantime, I’m going to get cracking at writing another blog entry.  Stay well out there!