The Null Device Blog

We head to SLC tomorrow for ADD Fest 06.  And as such, I have about 6.0221415 x10²³  things I need to accomplish before then.  Consequently, today is turning into the slowest work day ever.

On the upside, thanks to the lovely Lisa Q at Quadraphonic Press/Shirts for Robots I got a short run of some lovely new ND shirts to take along. Woohoo!

I just need to pack, get the appropriate amounts of sleep, get up early enough to catch a 10:40 flight out of ORD, and hope all our gear makes it to SLC in one piece. Oy vey!

Man, I hate those nights where my brain wants me to get up and do things,
full of ideas and great ambitions, but I’m too burnt-out from the day to do
anything but lay on the couch and stare at a TV (or my
laptop).

Anyway.

Now that things have settled down around the ol’
homestead – cats are adjusted, micro-tour over, etc, the bulk of my mastering
contracts done, etc etc – I can get back to writing music. That’s the plan
anyway.

This album has been a long slog. On the one hand, I’m so much
more pleased with the quality of the output than I have been with previous
works. On the other hand, I’m a lot less forgiving in my mixes. In the old days,
because of workflow limitations and general lack of processing power, it was a
lot of “well, what else can I do?” when I’d hit a wall. Now it’s “hmm…the
vocals need more punch. Different reverb? Different EQ? ” for hours. It’s kind
of a mixed blessing. I lose hours doing stuff like that. But, as I said, the
output is a lot cleaner and punchier than before.

It’s also taking me a
lot longer because I’m more ambitious than I was before. I think. It takes a lot
longer for me to record a bunch of violin overdubs than it does for me to just
use a sampled string pad.

I’m having a surprsingly hard time recording
vocals. The new preamp is unforgiving in its clarity, and subsequently I find
myself not entirely satisfied with my own voice. I’m in tune, my articulation is
much more natural now, but still no matter what I do I always think I end up
sounding kind of bored. Not always bad – Erlend Oye’s made a career of it, after
all – but not always what I’m looking for. I may have to play with the
preamp settings a bit and see what some extreme tube-amping can do for
me.

It’s also exceptionally difficult for me to take a step back and see
how the album is fitting together. I know how each track sounds, and I kind of
feel where things are going, but if I listen to the searing guitars on “Choir”
and then the pretty laid-back nordic funk of “You’re Not Charming” I kind of
think “okay, wtf, man…what am I doing here?” And then throw in tangents into
bhangra and persian-influenced drum-n-bass and it’s kind of a hodgepodge. I’m
fairly confident that all I need is the right track order and everything will
make sense, but…it’s just hard to see sometimes, and that can be a little
disheartening.

On the upside, I think I’ve finally kind of settled in on
a direction. And it should surprise nobody that it’s pretty much the direction I
was going in the first place – ethnically tinged, breakbeat heavy, fairly poppy
structure. I’ve dabbled with a more rock sound, with a more indie-synth style,
and with more straight-up dance styles, but what I write always sounds sort of
amateur. I leave the rock to Dan, he’s a pro at it. And lotsa people do dance
better than I do. So while I will probably continue to have asides into other
territories, I think the core will probably stay the same. A little limiting,
maybe, but it is nice to know that at least I’m doing something where I’ll like
the output.

So what’ve I got done so far? There’s…

• Entwined – big, string-and-synth-heavy breakbeat. We’ve been playing this
  one live.
• Choir – lotsa guitars and meaty synths, and about 12 vocal overdubs on the
  chorus. It made Matt pee himself. Our “rock” song.
• You’re Not That Charming – mid-tempo breakbeat funk.
• Racing – a ballad. Lots of strings.
• Wonderland – bouncy technopop.
• Triangular – Bhangra-riffic!
• Down the Line – our shortest song ever, at just over 3 minutes. Very dubby.
  But with tablas.

In progress…

• Snow and Joy – Dan rocks the flamenco guitars while I write smacky
  4-on-the-floor drums
• Under the Gun – Drums. Lots of Drums. And an oud.
• Think About It – Breakbeats, dumbeks, political overtones
• Patriarch – I’ve got lyrics and a vocal melody but haven’t written the rest
  yet.
• New, as-yet-untitled – breakbeats, duduks, a santoor, and I don’t know what
  else yet. I think I need to write some chord changes.
• Another new as-yet-untititled atmospheric thingy which may or may not ever
  see the light of day.

I’ll probably end up selecting
the best 11 or 12 or so from that bunch and save the rest for B-sides, comps,
etc.

So much to do, if I want to get this album out this year…

It’s not cheap to be a violinist.

I suppose it’s less cheap being a string bassist, since they’re bigger.. Anyway, it’s not cheap to be a string player.

I say this because I’ve just heard back from the local music mall. I took my cheap bow in for a rehairing – it’s the bow I use with the steinberger electric – as gigging has torn off much of the hair. I don’t bring my good bow along because things have a tendency to get bashed around during gigs and I’m not going to risk a bow worth that much in some smoky club in Cleveland or wherever. But I digress. They called to tell me that in addition to rehairing it, they need to replace the tip plate, as “it looks like it’s been repeatedly smacked into something.” Yeah, that would probably be the innumerable times that the bow has fallen over onstage, gotten caught in the case hinge, etc.

So now my $50 rehairing has about tripled in price. And this is the cheap bow. I wouldn’t trust the good bow to these guys, that’d have to go to a violin maker, and that’s never cheap, even for the basic maintenance.

(I need to get some more rosin, too, come to think of it.)

The electric is an expensive instrument, but it’s built for gigging. I’m hesitant to bring Gottfried (that’s the good violin) or even Max (the less good acoustic violin which is currently strung baritone) onstage or on the road just because I fear they wouldn’t last a gig without a chunk taken out of them. Gottfried has been in the family for nearly a century now (my great-aunt Gertrude bought it and as far as I know didn’t play it all that often) and is about 60 years older than that at best estimation. Taking that onstage regularly at some electropo festival is tantamount to heresy. It’s just not built for that kind of environment.

I remember my old violin teacher’s Guanari violin. Damn, that was a beautiful instrument – and it was worth more than his spacious suburban house…

I stopped by a local music store to get a violin bow rehaired, and I took the opportunity to mess around with a few new keyboards they had in their “combo” (read: everything that’s not a piano or band instrument) room. This included Roland’s new “Juno-G” and “SH-201″ synths.

Roland is no stranger to trading off thier past. In the late 90’s they released their first groovebox, the “MC-303.” It looked like a TB-303, had a similarly incomprehensible front panel, and sounded nothing like its predecessor. Which I suppose wasn’t the point, but if you’re labelling a box an “x0x” there’d better be a little similarity.

They’ve now released the SH-201, which is supposedly in the line of the classic SH101, SH02, and SH09 synths. It’s…it’s okay. It has a few nice features, although one woulda thought they’d spring for an LCD display of patch locations, rather than the retro pushbutton switches. The filter was rather reedy and nasal, and high resonances seemed to have some volume attenuation going on. I suppose it’s fine for some applications, but it really lacked presence, even with the “super-saw” oscillator engaged. A shame, since the SH series back in the 80’s was reputed as a beefy, in-your face kind of synth.

After being thoroughly disappointed with the SH-201, I poked at the new “Juno-G.” They had a “Juno-D” too, but the Juno-G is getting all the press now. Gosh it looks like an old Juno-60, all retro-80’s color bars and the trademark sliders. A nice, big LCD tells you what patch you’re on. Now, the Juno series – the 6, 60, and 106 and the subsequent alpha-juno’s – were legends. Low-cost “budget” synths with monster tones. The alpha-juno’s “hoover” sound drove the rave revolution of the early 90’s, the Juno-60’s fat analog pads and basses underscored everything from synthpop to new age throughout the 80’s. So why on earth they bothered giving a fairly generic rompler a Juno-style design, name and interface is beyond me. Lots of glassy pads, generic presets, nothing outstanding from an out-of-the-box standpoint, and the juno interface seems to limit tweakability a bit.

It’s a bit disheartening that Roland seems to be just recycling old names to sell lackluster new products, especially since they’ve shown countless times that they can do cool stuff – the V-Synth is a monster of a sound-warper, for example.

Sigh.

I hope I can get my hands on a Korg RADIAS. That looks pretty sweet.

Hotrodding a Dholak

Originally uploaded by nulldevice.

I was faced with the problem of integrating a dholak into our live setup. It’s a nicely portable instrument, owing to the briefcase handle on the side, but it requires the drummer to kneel in front of it when playing. It would be unpleasant and bit awkward to expect our percussionist to roll out a drum and drop to her knees during a song, and probably uncomfortable considering the venues we play.

I had a vague recollection of seeing a band with a dholak on a stand. I could be wrong, as it’s been 8 years since I saw the performance and I was not as intimately familiar with indian percussion at the time, but nonetheless I had fuzzy memories. After searching the internet for weeks looking for dholak stands and finding nothing, my last recourse was to build something.

This didn’t go well. I had all manners of pipes and hanging things and none of them worked especially well.

It then occurred to me that, a dholak being made of wood and being shaped approximately like a big tom, maybe a tom mount would work. Sure enough, screwing a tom bracket to the body and affixing it to a tom stand did the trick.

Now our percussionist can remain standing and just switch over to the dholak when needed. This has started a small avalance in my dholak hotrodding arsenal, though. I’ve also got some sheetmetal prongs sticking up on the back for the purpose of holding drum mics. Those need some refinement yet.