The Null Device Blog

Random musings, rumblings, and what-have-you from an indie electronic band.

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State of the Device, 2009

January 01st, 2010 | Category: Personal Notes

Interesting year.

We played some shows.  We played some really, really fun shows.  The band is working together pretty damn well these days, and I’m really pleased with that.

We took a few breaks for various reasons.  Chuck got married.  Elizabeth got married.  I tried desperately to finish up “Recursions” – and in fact, did.

That was the other big deal.  We released Recursions, which on the surface seems like “just another remix album” but it’s one where we decided to kind of dive into the wide world of “new media” – fully electronic distribution, multiple formats, etc etc.  Rather DIY, but it’s the first album we’ve ever had that recouped its production costs in a matter of weeks.

Also worked with a large number of very talented people this year.   Some of the usual co-conspirators were involved for remixes and randombess – Mr. Shwadchuck,  Dan “Shred, Dan, Shred!” Clark,  Matt Fanale, and some new ones – Ryan from Stripmall Architecture, Shawn and I-Li from Bloodwire, and the cats from Claire Voyant.  I also finally managed to wrangle the talented Raya Merenkov into the studio to record things in a Arabic and classical Greek (because she happens to speak those languages).  I’m really excited that we’ve gotten to work with these people.

Things continue on our next release.  We’ve got about 6 tracks in the can, 3 more nearly done, and plenty of ideas.  We’ve already booked a few shows for 2010, and we’re trying to put together a tour for mid-year.

It’s been a good year.  2010 looks pretty excellent already.

Happy new year from Null Device.

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Stradivarius, Guarnarius, Klavins, and Me.

September 06th, 2009 | Category: Personal Notes

Last week, my mom mentioned to me that Eriks Klavins had passed away.
This probably wouldn’t mean much to anyone who didn’t follow the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.  He’d been principal of the second violin section for a few decades, and had performed as a soloist with them on a few occasions.
He’d also been my violin teacher for many years.   He’s the guy who elevated me from “violin-playing kid with a modicum of talent” to “actual musician.”   Under his tutelage I developed skills beyond the basic technical ones,  and learned that pretty much anything in the violin repertoire, no matter how “basic” it was deemed by standard pedagogy, could be made into a personal showpiece.
My first private violin teacher was the same guy who had been the string instructor to my 3rd grade class.  He was an…odd…guy.   Former military, deeply fundamentalist, with an outspoken approach to string playing.  As I progressed under his instruction, it became increasingly apparent that while he was a decent player, he was not an especially strong teacher.  One evening he suggested to my mother that she physically discipline me if I didn’t practice.  We agreed as a family that he was crazy, so we quickly began to search for another teacher.
A piano-playing cousin of my mother’s had two teenage children who were also taking violin lessons.  Their  teacher was a woman who was a substitute violinist for the MSO and who also taught in a local school district.  She was, at the time, full-up on students, but through a little persistence, she was convinced (whether by my mom, my mom’s cousin, or just luck I never did find out)  to take me on as a student.   This was Mrs. Arlene Klavins.  She was an excellent teacher, especially for a kid like me – one who was clearly interested in playing but had been bored and, frankly, damaged by an earlier teacher.  She was a great teacher and a very nice person.
Of course, me being me, after getting comfortable, I got ambitious.  After listening to a record (yes, an LP, it was still the early 80’s) of Anne-Sophie Mutter performing Bach’s Concerto No. 2 in E, I decided I was going to play this.  This was not a piece that was usually in the standard string pedagogical path (as defined by the “Suzuki Books” that dominated so many schools) so this was a bit unusual.  But still, I grabbed my lawn-mowing money (the only income 12-year-old me had), got my mom to drive me to Beihoff Music, and I bought the first score I could find.  I brought it in to Mrs. Klavins, set it down, and said “I want to play this.”  She looked at me, sighed, and said “Well, okay.”  By the end of the year,  I could play the entire concerto, and play it rather well.  Mrs. Klavins either decided (it was never made clear to me which) at that point that I had gone off the rails and needed someone to reign me in, or that she’d taken me as far as she could.  Either way, she suggested that we switch teachers, to her husband.
Eriks was a large figure in almost every way.  He was a tall, somewhat cherubic guy with a big personality, a deep voice, and an nigh-unplaceable accent that came from both his heritage and a rather multi-national life.   He seemed to dwarf his Guarneri violin, although whether that effect was physical or merely psychological I don’t know.  His playing style was fiery and emotional, but not especially ornamented.
In short, he was an imposing and intimidating figure.  This guy was a real violinist, a real musician, passionate about his instrument, and demanding of his students.  This was a big step for me.  Training with this guy said “I’m going to play the violin.  Really play.  There is no slacking here, because it will not be tolerated.”  Certainly, at the price per hour for a lesson,  I couldn’t afford to slack off.   He was demanding, but thankfully also friendly and really quite funny – in a very dry way, of course.  He would say things like “that was perfectly in tune.  Now play it more in tune.”  Or, after  I had decided to ornament a particularly boring set of whole notes in a concerto, as I had heard Itzhak Perlman do once, he looked at me and said, flatly “that was lovely.  Now don’t ever do that again.”
His passion for his instrument was infectious.  It had to be, otherwise there was no way anyone in their right mind would devote that kind of effort to practicing.  I would get up every morning at 5:45, practice for an hour before school, practice for an hour again during study hall, then come home and practice some more.  I didn’t always like doing it, and my parents often heard me grouse about having to spend an hour playing $%^@#$ Kreutzer etudes while most normal humans were still asleep, but I did it.
At one point, we started running through Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for unaccompanied violin.  Only got through some parts of the partitas, but to this day they remain some of my favorite pieces of music, and certainly whenever I need to burn off some energy or frustration or, well, anything, I’ll grab a violin and plow through the Allemande and Sarabande from Partita No. 2.
One lesson, he announced that I was going to learn, and perform, Mozart’s 3rd Violin Concerto in G.  I’d heard this piece played a zillion times – it was one of the Suzuki standards, and it was one of the Suzuki standards that was usually taught at a much earlier level.  I wasn’t much of a fan of Mozart to begin with, and that concerto in particular always struck me as rather banal and grating – and I’d already heard it butchered by waves of high school freshmen.   I weakly protested, but he was insistent.  He simply picked up his violin,  tore through the first few pages of the first movement, and it was revelatory.  I admit that to this day I’m still not a huge fan of that concerto, but at that moment I understood what this was all about.  It wasn’t about learning the music for the sake of the music, it wasn’t about showing off techniques (it’s far from a showy piece, except for the cadenza) it’s about demonstrating that you have the chutzpah to extract something visceral from the music.   After that, I stopped complaining.  We practiced that for months, including the finger-spraining-ly difficult Sam Franko cadenza.  With that piece of “intermediate” violin music, I found myself placing at young artists competitions, performing it for large audiences at concerts (well, larger than any I’ve played to since).  It was…well, it was about where I peaked as a performer.   I think Mr. Klavins expected at that point that I would go professional, and I admit, I briefly considered it.
I hadn’t seen Mr. Klavins much since I left for college, other than a few random meetings and seeing him at the occasional MSO performance.  I’d heard that recently he’d retired from performance for health reasons – he’d been plagued by tendonitis for years – and was focusing on teaching.   Then last week I’d heard he’d died.   I can’t say we were ever good friends, or ever had anything beyond a teacher-student relationship, but every time I play a note of music to this day, regardless of whether I’m scratching out something on the violin or two-fingering notes on a keyboard, the lessons I got from him about music are there.
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Why I Do It, Too

August 14th, 2009 | Category: Personal Notes

Matt made an interesting blog post today, entitled “Why I Do It (Short Version)” about why he makes music.

I’ve got an even shorter version.

“Why I Do It (Shorter Version)”

Because I can’t not do it.

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Losing Les Paul, Losing a Legend

August 13th, 2009 | Category: Personal Notes

I am not a guitarist.  I have no real vested opinion is Les Paul’s guitar designs, although I have heard from reputable sources that they’re quite heavy.

But Les Paul died today, and even with me not being a guitarist, I honor his memory.  He was a tremendous musical innovator whose work broke the ground for the eventual democratization of music that lets a guy like me record the kind of stuff I do.

Yes, the Les Paul guitar was an innovation – solid bodies were uncommon at the time the LP came out.  The popularity of the Gibson Les Paul led to all sorts of other solid-body guitars and, importantly for me, violins too.  But that wasn’t the half of it.

Les invented multitrack recording. He did it the hard way, with homebuilt acetate disc cutters.

Let me say that again: Les invented multitrack recording.

The modern digital audio workstation, with its insert effects and 1024 channels, has lineage right back to Les Paul and his homemade acetate cutter, sitting in a studio made from his garage.  I guess you could say he was a pioneer of the home studio too.  Hm.  Never really thought about that before.

I also learned he was the father of the delay effect.  I had no idea until recently.  Given how integral delay is to modern recording, it kind of floors me that it’s from the same guy.

He also gave us the technique of close-miking.  Seriously?  The same guy?  Almost every vocal is close-mic’ed now – it keeps the singer from having to sing like they’re on a big empty stage all the time.  It allowed singers to record in rooms instead of giant halls.  It made the ballad possible.

Any one of these achievements could represent a momentous change for the recording industry.  And he was responsible for all of them.  That’s stunning.

All that is almost a side note to me, though.  I respected Paul because of who he was,  not just what he achieved.  He was a consummate music nerd – composer, producer, engineer, performer, all rolled into one.  He was the first of us, the studio geeks who dominate indie music today with their bedroom studios filled with gear and heads full of minutiae.  He was also performing right up to his death (despite his advanced arthritis), and even released an album at the age of 90.  I am awestruck and envious – I should be so lucky to be able to be vital enough, healthy enough, and non-whiny enough to be cranking out tunes until the day I shuffle off my mortal coil (hell, some days I wonder if I’ll be able to keep making music next week, much less 50-some years from now).

Ironically, I don’t really know much about him as a person.  Rumour has it that he was kind of a badass, and his stage persona was fairly flamboyant.  But that’s almost irrelevant to a guy like me – his professional achievements pretty much defined everything a guy like me aspires to.

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State of the Device, 2008

December 31st, 2008 | Category: Personal Notes

Another year has come and gone.  I know things happened in it, really, but I’ll be damned if I can remember what a lot of them were.

It started on a decent note, as we broke in our brand new vocalist/keyboardist, Ms. Jill Sheridan.  She’s performing with us now like she’s always been part of the group, and is mostly up on all the stupid inside band jokes.  We’re still trying to explain LOLcats to her, though.

“Decent” turned into “annoying” and “soulcrushing” pretty quickly when some water leakage and heavy rainfall damaged a chunk of the studio.  Luckily, nothing terribly important was damaged beyond things like “carpeting” and “furniture” but nonetheless it made things incredibly inconvenient for a while, as all the gear had to be struck, moved to a drier location, and the room slightly re-engineered to prevent further damage.  The new 5-inch raised floor should prevent more damage, short of a major flood (and just in case of that, all the major electronics and instruments are another few feet off the ground – if those get damaged, I’m likely in all sorts of other worlds of hurt too, since it means a large portion of my house is underwater).

As a result, the studio has been officially rechristened “Submersible Studios.”  I should have a website up for it eventually.

Speaking of Submersible Studios, our mastering business had a few interesting and unusual clients this year, as well as the usual suspects.

Album 4 is well underway, although currently very little of it is in any state resembling “finished.”  As my musical ambitions increase, it becomes harder and harder to just blow through a song the way I used to – wrangling guest vocalists here, scheduling oud players there, figuring out how to properly mic a dhol so it doesn’t sound like a trashcan…that sort of thing takes time, and time is always the resource in shortest supply.  I did manage to re-arrange a few tracks for live use in rather dramatic ways, and in so doing ended up basically making new mixes for eventual release.  I almost have enough of those for a proper EP of reworked material.

We had some big shows this year too.  Not a LOT of them, mind you, but some good ones.  We opened for De/Vision in Minneapolis, played a remarkably well-attended benefit gig at The Inferno before the MAMAs, and as a particular highlight for me, opened up for bhangra legend DJ Rekha.   Aside from the fact that I’m a big DJ Rekha fanboy, it was also a big chance for us to play for a distinctly different audience than we usually do.  That was a big deal.  We’ve debuted a little new material this year, and soon I intend to change the way we do things technically and hopefully procedurally that will shorten our setup and teardown time, improve our live sound,  and hopefully make us more flexible for various venues.

Picked up a lot of new gear this year, stuff I’d been saving for since last year.  My big prizes are the ADAM monitors, which are freaking crystal in their clarity, and the Metric Halo ULN-2 2d.  The ULN is awesome and powerful and sounds fantastic although I’m still intimidated by the vast DSP and routing capabilities it has, and already have once screwed it up badly enough to require a reboot.   I also grabbed an Oktava 219 from eBay, which currently sits un-modified in my mic locker until I can work up the dough to get it fixed up – currently it sounds a lot like a really good mic recording from inside a large metal tube.  The combination of good preamps and some decent microphones has opened up a number of possibilites for me for recording instruments and vocalists – and it’s also allowed me to record with a level of clarity that is somewhat unflattering to my vocal and microphone techniques.  That’s another thing that’s slowing down my production – now that I can hear very clearly that a particular vocal take isn’t “good enough” to just hide beneath walls of reverb and effects, I need to actually, you know, practice.

What of next year?  I say this every year – more shows.  I have a GPS now, so I shouldn’t get lost on the way as easily (as I do at every show outside Madison).   I hope to expand my mic cabinet a bit for a wider variety of purposes.    I want to make more headway and maybe even release a new full length – at the very least I want to finish the EP.  I’ve already recorded with some new collaborators, and I’ve got more in the wings, and all those things look to me to be very surprising from a musical standpoint – if you’d asked me even 4 years ago if I’d ever be recording sufi poetry with an honest-to-goodness trained arabic singer, I would’ve looked at you and said “tajwhat?  Is that that stuff made with ground lamb and parsley?”  I wouldn’t've expected to have multiple guest musicians at our side, singing  in a variety of languages, performing in different ragam and maqam,  and all coming from wildly different  backgrounds.

It’s an exciting time.

So here’s to a good 2009.  From all of us at Null Device Media Industries and our attendent family of companies (that’s my little joke there, see) have a happy and safe ‘09.

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