The Null Device Blog

Based on my iTunes pruchase history, I fear that my pirmary source for new music is…iPod commercials.

Hm.

Really, I don’t know how to sing.

Well, kind of.  I mean, I know how to sing, in a standard definition of the word, but my formal training is restricted to a few impromptu vocal lessons in high school and my parents loving choral music.  So far, that’s served me just fine.

The problem is I tend to sing with a “head voice.”  It’s been great at giving me a vocal quality that one reviewer compared to “Neil Tennant’s husky-voiced younger brother”,   a voice quality that’s worked pretty well with electronic music.

I’m starting to encounter limitations, though.  As my recording and mixing technique improves, and as my recording gear gets better, I’m starting to find it harder and harder to hide the spots where my voice is lacking.  For a good portion of my life I’ve been plagued with chronic sinus issues, and while for the most part I’ve been able to record around them, it’s getting to the point where I can’t drown out adenoidal consonants with reverb, and no amount of Flonase or Claritin seems to clear it up.  I’ve seen a few doctors about it, and there’s only been so much they can do before they get to the cure-worse-than-the-symptoms issues.

I’ve been experimenting with singing with a more chest-voice style, and while I can get quite good results from the recording chain, a timbre I’m quite pleased with, and a fairly decent “punch” in the actual output, there’s a maddening loss of nuance and a persistant problem of me ending up sounding like I should be fronting a band called “Marv and the Mel-Tones” (playing the Holiday Inn every night from 10-1, two-drink minimum!). 

I have no doubt that I can eventually puzzle this out.  I figure if I can go from my never-singing, angry growling industrial days to a Chris Isaak cover literally overnight, I can probably figure out how to succesfully sing without sounding like either a Pet Shop Boy with a headcold or some guy wearing a green velvet tuxedo.   And it’s not like I’m trying to perform Lohengrin (or, god help me, Wozzek) – the stuff I write for myself doesn’t require any special vocal acrobatics or a deep understanding of vocal technique.  I need to learn just enough to get by. 

It’s just incredibly frustrating to have to do midway through our fourth full-length album.

Actual screaming teenage girls.

This is…new.

This was the first non 21+ show we’ve played since the Burnsville Debacle, so it was a chance to play to an audience that hasn’t already seen us play 600 times.  This resulted in a knot of people in the audience who were very enthusiastic about our performance.  VERY enthusiastic.  Given that the “act” we were opening for was the return of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, there may have been a bit of a predilection in the audience toward enthusiasm.  Hey, we’ll take what we can get.

I can’t cast any aspersions – they bought CDs!  About 5 of them raided my merch bin and bought a whole mess of stuff, so I’m exceptionally pleased with that. 

Everything ran well from the laptop.  We had our dry vocals pumped through the monitors, wet vox front of house, submixed synths/backing (which the FOH guy still had a bit too low – the standard peril of an electronic band), all our monitor levels seemed pretty good (and now that I’ve got a dedicated mix bus for that, I can do funky in-ear things someday).  We did have one Audio/MIDI sync error popup during the last track but there were no ill effects to that.  I should probably set my buffer up from its current 128 samples to something a little less…dangerous.  The latency at 512samples is likely well outside the range of human detection.

Only major technical glitch was that sometime during the show, the set screw on my 58Beta fell out, leaving the xlr assembly dangling dangerously.  I’ve got some replacement screws on order.
In other news, I finally finished my Xuberx remix this weekend – I’ve been promising it to those guys since December.  It’s…different.  For one thing, it’s an effective 59bpm, and it’s all dubsteppish.  With violins.  It gave me a chance to mess around with running the fiddle into the ULN-2′s high-z inputs, and oh my god does that sound nice, especially with the character plugins giving it a bit of extra warmth.  Some effects-chain tweaking with  an ampsim and some reverb gave me the L. Shankar-ish tone I was looking for.  Now that I can get good electric violin tone again, I can record more violin parts.  All I need to do is, uh, write some non-crappy violin parts!

I’ve wired up some new technology for the live rig. 

Risky business, that, given we have a whopping week until our next show.  I’ll be keeping the backup in the car just in case.

A few bits are quite cool.  Aside from the homemade laptop shelf I built by bolting a 1-U rack shelf to a keyboard stand mount, I’m actually using a laptop and Logic Pro to control live tracks.  I’ve got separate wet and dry mixes for the vocals, auto-program switching for the keyboard parts,  we’ve now got a decent keys/backing submix so I no longer have to deal with soundguys messing that up, vocal effect automation – when I need that tape delay effect, it’s right there! – and I’ve managed to pretty much pre-wire up all the DI connections I need.   No more crazy cable patching during setup!

The downside is that…well, we’ve got a week to go, and I’ve got a lot of levels to tweak in that time.  And I’ve got to make sure Jill is up to speed on the start/stop/advance keystrokes.  Rehearsal was a little bit funky because of that, and there’s the additional problem that when I would start twiddling settings on the laptop it would shut off the record-arm for the synth tracks.  Not a real issue, as I won’t be trying to re-edit tracks during a live gig, but it did disturb the flow.  And caused Chuck to make fun of me.

My next attempt will be to try and get a cup-holder built into Jill’s keybaord stand.  That’d be awesome.

Not long ago, I did a recording session with Ms. Raya Merenkov, a talented grad student I know through a number of confusing connections.  (well, mainly through William, but it involves classical greek, and is thus more complicated than a simple friend-of-a-friend thing).  Raya is multi-lingual, multi-talented and has as many obscure interests as I do.

It was hard to focus, because we’d get distracted talking about something completely off-topic instead of recording, but nonetheless we got some stuff accomplished.

First off, we recorded some greek.  Classical greek.  Euripides, actually.  Raya was not only able to use the reconstructed prononuciation and apply some heuristics I didn’t fully understand  to determine a melody from the flow of the poetry.   We melded this with a dubstep track I’ve been working on.   Once I get everything sorted from a mixing perspective, this has the potential to be very cool.

We went down to State Street at one point to both sightsee (Raya had so far really only been treated to the grand tour of Eric’s Favorite Madison Restaurants) and come up with some more musical ideas.  Unfortunately we got caught up in talking about epistemology or somesuch and never really got around to brainstorming.

Instead, when we got back, we knocked out some arabic poetry.  When I say “we” I mean “she” while I pressed buttons and made lights blink.   We applied it to poetry, specifically that of 8th century poet Rabia al-Adawiyya.  It’s a typically overwrought love poem, and is pretty awesome.   Of course, Raya was far more aware of the subtleties of it than I was, since she actually understood the words, but nevertheless there’s a lot of vocal subtlety in it as well that I could pick up on.

The tricky bit will be dealing with the rubato.   It’s a fluid form of singing, and the kind of dance music I make is a bit more rigid in timing.  Okay, a lot more rigid.  But I’m pretty sure I can make it work.

Overall, it was extremely cool, and another big educational smack-to-the-head for me.  I hope to work with Raya more in the future.