The Null Device Blog

I did this once before, a looooong time ago, and it seemed fairly interesting.  Or maybe vainglorious to the extreme, but whatever.  I’m trying it again.

While I’ve always tended to maintain a pretty open-information policy around the band (the website is a bastion of useless trivia), sometimes, those burning questions you might have just never come up.  So here’s your chance.

What would you like to know about Null Device?  If I can’t answer it directly, I’ll send the question on to a bandmember/former bandmember/collaborator/guest vocalist who can.

Fire away!

Usually I get really bored by the 14 hours of musical montages and numbers durin an oscar telecast, but this year, I was actually pretty chuffed. Okay, the “Musicals are back!” number seemed gratuitous, but…the best song nominees? A.R. Rahman, Peter Gabriel and A.R.Rahman (again?). That was soooo coool.

I mean, yeah, they had John legend instead of Peter G, due to some silly protest over song length (seriously Pete?) but…damn. Taiko drummers! Dholis!

I never, ever expected to see dholis, or for that matter, A.R. Rahman, at the oscars.

Jai ho, indeed!

I came home from work the other day, and discovered Wendy asleep in front of the TV, surrounded by cats.  This in itself was pretty entertaining, but she quickly woke up.  The TV was tuned to a random station, and on it, Oprah was showing off some “talented kids.”

One of the kids was a 13-year-old violinist who stood up and performed Pablo de Sarasate’s mind-bendingly difficult and flamboyant “Gypsy Airs.”  This kid was good.  Really really good.  Sarasate is challenging for full-time professional violinists, so to have a 13-year-old kid playing it is extraordinary.

More than that, though, I watched his movements and facial expressions, and somewhat surprisingly, I recognized them.  First came the studious brow furrow as the song started and then after a few moments into the piece, the ever-familiar thousand-yard stare of an enraptured soloist.

Wendy noticed this too.  “He’s somewhere else now, isn’t he?” she asked.

“Oh yeah.”

He finished up a nearly flawless performance and the crowd went nuts, and Oprah walked over to condescend to him for a bit.  Wendy asked just what goes through your mind when you’re performing.

Well, that’s a good question, innit?

It must’ve been, because Oprah asked the kid the same thing. 

It’s weird and hard to explain.  Performing on the violin (back when I was, you know, good) and to a lesser extent performing with the band is entirely like anything else I do, mentally.  If you’ve ever heard someone get hyperbolic about being “lost in a moment” well, that’s the kind of thing they’re referring to.  It’s this weird combination of complete calm and a laserlike focus – and when you do it right, you don’t think about what you just did, or what you’re about to do, you think about what you’re doing right then and there.  You’ve practiced this, you know this inside and out, you know almost instinctually what’s going to happen next, and you know what adjustments you need to make for intonation, tempo, expression just sort of reflexively.

I’ve discovered that the moment you break that concentration to think “oh crap I just missed that note” or “there’s a hard part coming up” – that’s when you make mistakes and your performance can go pear-shaped. 

With the band, the focus is a little more spread out, partially due to the fact that there’s more to worry about with technology and mixes and all that, and partially because nothing I write is going to be as technically or emotionally challenging as “Partita No. II in d”.  Every once in a while, though, I can feel that state creeping in and that’s when I know that yes, this is a good performance, and I’m on the right track.  I don’t know if the audience sees it that way, or perhaps they just see a singer suddenly go glassy-eyed onstage and assume some rockstar-wannabe drug habit has just kicked in. 

Whatever.  It’s such a strange and interesting feeling.

I’ll be the first to admit that album #4 is taking a lot longer than Excursions did.  But the reasons aren’t all negative.  Oh, sure there’s the usual bad ones – day job exhuastion, last year’s basement flooding, etc – but there’s been a fundamental shift in a lot of techniques I’ve been using that eat up a lot more time, but in the end I think will provide superior results.  Or at least, I hope they will someday. 

I’m doing a lot more acoustically than I used to.  In the “old days” (read: 2007) I’d grab a dhol loop and call it a day.  Oh, sure, I still use loops and samples like crazy, but now I’m actually to the point where I can record real dhols, or dumbeks, or whatever and not have it sound awful.  The upshot is I can get a specific sound or riff suitable to the track, instead of having to write the track around the samples.  This is a huge improvement.  I still have problems with my dhols sounding like someone throwing a trashcan down a flight of stairs, but I’m getting there.  This also takes longer because I actually have to practice these things.  I’m not a natural dholi so I have to woodshed the parts a lot more  than the (admittedly zero) amount I used to.  If I’m not the one doing the performance, I need to schedule the guest performer which is never a spontaneous task. 

I’m also doing as lot more processing than I was before.  A recent track has pretty much everything run through either an amp or an amp simulator.  In some cases, the effect is very subtle, just a little extra in the way of harmonics.  In others, it’s full-blown, fuzzed-out distortions and saturations.  There’s a lot of effects twiddling and adjusting going on to get it just right and not turn the whole thing to mud.  That particular track is an extreme example, admittedly, but I’m getting more comfortable with this sort of technique.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m being pickier about vocals now, too.  That eats up a lot of time.

Of course, being the tech nerd I am, I find all this stuff entertaining.