The Null Device Blog

We had a lot of rain this weekend.

Enough to cause the practice space to flood. Pretty much all our gear sat in about a foot of cold water overnight. Backing track DVD player, DI, amp modellers, amps, PA, electric gutiar and bass, electric violin…all very very wet.

Most of the electronic stuff is shot. The guitar and bass need to be assessed by their respective players. The electric violin isn’t dry enough for me to tell.

Ugh.

I’ll start by saying I had no idea Madison could have a venue this well-thought-out. It’s got cleaner sight-lines than most theatres I’ve been in. It’s really quite amazing. The bars are well-positioned, there’s no lack of seating, and praise be to the gods they have really tasty pizza available.

The show itself was all kinds of fun. Soundcheck ran pretty smoothly, and the band and I headed over to a cheap chinese restaurant for an assortment of deep-fried chicken dishes (Sesame, General Tso, and Hong Su respectively). We generally sat around chattin shit and feelin like an indie band.

Wandered back in time to catch the Gothsicles, which was for me highlighted by the lines:

I was faced with a choice
At a difficult age
should I bake a cake?
Or design a web page?
But in the back of my head
I heard distant feet
Depeche mode and kraftwerk
to a bhangra beat

“Left to my Null Devices, I probably would…” Brian Graupner is a sick, funny man. He also changed Coolio’s “Fantastic Voyage” to “Stochastic Voyage.” They’re complete goofballs onstage and are a lot of fun to watch.

Stochastic Theory went on with their new lineup and they were fan-fugu-tastic. Chuck has really, really come into his own as a performer, and he just commands the audience. They were pretty tight, the new tracks sounded great, and their cover of “Dance Along the Edge” sounds even better live than on the album.

Then we were up. we kicked in to Sad Truth, as usual, and that went well, although I couldn’t hear much guitar in my monitors and there was a popping noise in the mains. Adam swapped out my mic before Easier and that didn’t seem to help. Easier ran well, though, Dan was as always just on fire with the wah guitar, and right before the end there was this odd noise coming from the speakers, although I just assumed it was a sound problem. As Footfalls kicked in I saw Chuck waving frantically and holding up a shredded bass string. I killed the backing, and Chuck ran offstage to get the backup bass. Dan started some time-killing banter while Chuck got ready again and I restarted the backing tracks. We were rolling again, and it was fine.

Fourth track was our debut of Travelogue, in which I played the fiddle. It came off pretty well, although Dan couldn’t hear the backing tracks in his monitos (and I could only just barely) so I think there was a little drift towards the end. COnsidering most of the violin bit in the song is essentially me just jammin, I didn’t drop too many notes or play anything out of key. Then we intro’ed “Hourglass” which sounded big and symphonic as usual. ALthough at the intro I lost the backing tracks form my monitos and thus mistimed my bi aerial leap. I probably looked like a moron just randomly leaping into the air. Luckily Dan nailed his, proving he’s much more of a rock god than I ever could be. It sounded cool, the eBow bits worked well, and in general I thought it came off nicely.

Last two tracks were as they always are. Electrified I think got muddy in the middle cuz I couldn’t hear the backing again. I could at the beginning, but couldn’t later for one reason or another and during the parts without a strong beat I was kinda guessing. I think we did okay, though. “London” went well, although I oculd hear my voice starting to get a little strianed by the end. Which also makes me wonder why I picked the most vocally-challenging song to do last. “Wicked Game” started up, I thanked the bands, and started singing. I hit – or at least was close – on most of the choruses, that I could tell anyway as I was getting exhausted by this point and couldn’t concetrate too well. I was not to exhuasted to note that on chorus 3 I completely killed the falsetto. Oh well. I still nailed that last held note.

I’m impressed that Chuck was rockin out enough to rip a string, and as usual Dan was tearin it up. Sound was flaky, but Adam did the best he could and we got by. Club staff was friendly, extrememly generous with drink tickets (free pints of Huber!), turnout was good, the crowd seemed to be gettin into it…all in all, not bad…

I’ve now begun the first non-remix since the release of “A Million Differnet Moments”

It’s all starting to come back to me.

Of course, I’m tring a few dozen new techniques, instruments, and software on this. I’ve already brought my machine to its knees more than once with automation. Possibly the 9 vocal overdubs with the two convolution reverbs[0] are responsible…

Speaking of: Emagic’s Space Designer reverb is the damn sexiest thing I’ve heard in a long time. The urge to drown everything in lush creamy reverb is strong. The urge to make a shoegazer album so I can do this is also strong. The urge to buy a faster computer to run all this is also strong. Hell, I’ve got a home equity loan, maybe a dual-proc 2ghz g5 is closer than I thought. I’ll be paying it off over the next 30 years, but…

Anyway.

The song itself started life as sort of a big room trance affair (since buying an Armin Van Buuren CD I’ve been enamoured of the phrase “Big Room Trance”) but since the addition of many, many vocals and the overall subject matter of the lyrics it takes a dangerous turn towards futurepop. I had to add dumbeks just to be safe. It does have a very nice big-choir hands-in-the-air chorus, though. And a big fuzzy synth line that overloaded the polyphony on every softsynth I’ve got (although in retrospect my samplers probably coulda handled it).

I’m still not happy with the hi-hats or the tone of the kick drum, and I think the chord progression is one I’ve abused too many times, but at least I’m back in the swing of production again.

In terms of remixing, I’ve been busy. Since March I’ve delivered mixes for Blind Faith and Envy, Stochastic Theory, Attrition and most recently Armageddon Dildos, who got a bhangra[1]-meets-Underworld kind of thing out of the deal. I’m enamoured of bhangra and desi-hop these days and as such a lot of what I’m turning out has an underlying dhol[2] or dholak[3] rhythm. A mix I’m working on for B! Machine may come out as stright-up desi-hop. This may or may not be a good thing – I’m a pasty guy from Wisconsin trying to write music in the style of an urban-american/panjabi traditional hybrid. There’s a bit of cognitive dissonance there. But I bought a tumbi[4] – and even though they sent me a tenor tumbi instead of the soprano I ordered I’m still happy with it. I’ve now got a fleet of esoteric instruments that I can only sort of play at my disposal. This pursuit gets more eccentric and more expensive at every turn.

Hopefully something listenable will come out of it.

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