Okay, that’s all well-and-good, but he goes on to use some frankly asinine examples.

The first is about a woman who runs a mail-order company, who got a vitriolic email to customer service that made her cry.   This is one of those things that makes me wonder if said person is really suited for the kind of job that requires dealing with customers.  Sivers uses this as an example of how people overreact on the internet, sending angry emails whose bloviating far outclasses the infraction.  I think Sivers needs to get out more.  He’s been an internet gazillionaire for a decade now, so I suppose he doesn’t have to mingle with us peons anymore, but anyone who’s spent time in an airport has probably seen some sweaty, balding businessman from Schaumburg ranting and raving and berating some poor 19-year-old ticketing clerk at the gate because his plane is snowed in in Rochester.  Or perhaps, since it’s been so long since Sivers has worked in traditional customer service, he’s forgotten about the frankly bizarre  angry letters addressed to the “president of the company” or the abusive phone calls demanding to talk to a manager over some perceived slight, like not allowing a customer to pay their bill 5 months late.  The internet may make it easier to send an angry screed to customer service, but it is hardly the only method, and by no means is the angry tirade a new web-2.0 phenomenon.

I also ask…geez, how long have you been on the net now, Derek?  I mean, even when I got started, back in the pre-boom early 90’s, the flame war, the angry message, the name-calling, the invocation of Godwin’s law…these were well-known things.  The third email I ever read was aimed at someone on a Star Trek mailing list I had just subscribed to – “Brent Spiner is not [expletive] German, you [expletive] [expletive] [obscene gerund].”  It became clear very quickly that incivility was sort of the stock-in-trade of internet communication, and it was to be taken with a grain of salt.  This is not to say that this is a good thing, per se, but…geez, it’s 2010, we should all be aware that this is just the way things are and this touchy-feely “remember there are real people out there!” thing that Sivers is advocating seems sort of naïve.  If you can’t handle a flame war, perhaps the internet is not the best place for you to be hanging out.  All the Derek Siverseses in the world are going to have a hard time changing the behavior of a few million people,  so until they do, it’s either grow a thick skin or unplug the laptop.

His other example (he only had two, really.  Statistical analysis, this is not) was of a friend who was trying internet dating, but only lukewarmly, and was deleting a lot of messages from “losers” without reading them.  Sivers saw this as callous and unfeeling, since these guys had clearly spent a lot of time crafting messages to her, hoping to win her attention and her heart.  Um, dude?  Internet dating?  That’s your example?  Yeah, it’s a step up from Craigslist’s “no strings” section, but still, you can’t be so naïve to think that every one of those guys read her profile and decided she was Their One True Soulmate and their fragile self-esteem is riding on her response.  He also can’t believe that she was the only one they sent messages to.  The whole point of an internet dating site is to provide a larger pool of potentials, and get the ball rolling by offering a method of safe, reasonably anonymous contact.  I’m guessing most of these guys have gotten ignored before, and have done their share of the ignoring as well.  And…hell, even in the real dating world, “uh, yeah, I’ll call you!” is the way of the world.  Nobody walks into a bar and politely informs every guy nearby on the dancefloor “gosh, you seem like a nice guy, but I’m really not interested in you” or agrees to go on a test date because a guy clearly put in enough effort to come by and say hello.

I’m not even trying to sound cynical.  I’m not saying civility and politeness are dead.  I’m quite fond of them, myself.  But the cold hard fact of the matter is that in a lot of situations, people act uncivilly, or it’s just not appropriate to do so, and those of us on the receiving end – especially those of us who create subjectively-perceived things open to criticism like art and music – simply cannot expect to be glad-handled by every internet user, customer, consumer, listener or patron in every situation.  It’d be great if everyone in the world were unflinchingly polite and measured in their responses, but never in human history has it ever actually happened, so why Derek Sivers thinks imploring people to “remember that there’s a real person on the other end” of the computer is going to change a few thousand years of social conventions.

 I was in the studio, fussing endlessly over some vocals, while Nori sat purring loudly in my lap.

I was struggling with how to get a vocal take to sit correctly in a mix. I could get it to sit right but it would become very nasal-sounding and harsh, and if I removed some frequencies then the vocal sounded odd over the song. I was very, very precisely adjusting the knobs of the PSP classicQ equalizer to try and find a happy medium.

Nori sprang into action and mightily headbutted my mouse hand, sending the onscreen knob wildly careening to some random extreme setting…

…and damn if it didn’t sound pretty good. How does she keep doing that?

Scene 2:

“Mrow?”

“Mrph.”

 ”Meeow? Prrrrrrrrrrr.”

“Buh.” It’s 4:48am. Nori is standing on my chest desperately trying to get my attention.

 ”MEE-YOW.”

“Bleaarrgh alright alright I’m up I’m up!”

I assume the food dish is empty and I’m being alerted to this fact. I get up, and Nori dashes to the bedroom door. Sure, food dish.  Must be. I follow her.

Surprisingly, instead of heading upstairs to the food dish, she tears down the stairs into the studio. I think this is cute. But I’m tired, and go back to bed. A few hours later, I get up to get ready for work, and go downstairs to grab some laundry from the dryer. I note that my screens are not in powersave mode, and there’s a status bar up on the screen. I walk over to investigate, and see that Logic is cheerily recording audio, and has been since about 4:50am.

Nori has figured out how to press “record.” She’s bucking for an engineering credit, I just know it.

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: Goths on a Boat, Nerds in a Van

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: The Exchanging Recipes Tour

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: I Think We Left The Bassist at a Dunkin Donuts in Somewhere in Ohio

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: We Were On Time for Sound Check, Even Though Nobody Else Was

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: 100% Grass-Fed, Free-Range Organic Band Members

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: We Hope The Venue Has Enough Outlets

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: Hey, Douchebag, All Our Female Band Members Are Spoken For, So Stop It
Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: If You Don’t Like The Music, Eric And Dan
Could Talk About Microphones For An Hour Instead

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: Completely Oblivious to Your Scene Drama

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: Gassiest Tour Vans In The US

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: Sorry, We Don’t Drink Rail

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: WTF Is a Dholak and Where The Hell Is New London?

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: Increasingly Inappropriate for Goth Clubs

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: The Only Reason We’re Playing This Town Is Because Eric Heard There Was a Great Vietnamese Restaurant Here

Null Device/The Dark Clan 2010: We Brought Our Own Beef Jerky, Thanks

Some things have gone quite well, of course.  I’ve re-engineered backing tracks to make them cleaner and punchier in the live environment.   I’ve been able to do this quickly and efficiently with the new machine, since I don’t have to freeze tracks to be able to play back my mixes.   I’ve also got a new rack of DI’s en route, thanks to a lovely tip from Mr. Wade Alin.  They’re not Radials or anything, but they look to have better build quality than the ones I’ve currently got.    Also there’s a new ATA rack to put them in coming.  I decided that the 6-unit full-depth rack I’ve got is entirely unnecessary for my 3 units of shallow-depth gear, so I’ve got a 4U Gator on the way.  Also, being ATA, I feel a little safer about it than I do about my current rack.  Plus that extra space leaves a little room for expansion.

The things that haven’t gone right?  Well, yesterday I opened a newish track that I had recently transitioned over from the old system.  I hit play and…it sounded really weird.  That wasn’t right.  I popped open a few of the plugins I was using and noted that every.  Single.  Instance of PODFarm Plat had switched back to its default setting, which happens to be an emulation of a Fender Jazz amp with reverb.  Basically, the entire song sounded like each part was being played from inside individual cardboard boxes.  And I used PODfarm a LOT on this track to get grungy synth distortion, so the track was pretty much hosed until I could fix it.  I spent much of the afternoon switching as much as possible over to Logic’s native Amp Designer.  It doesn’t always sound quite as nice as PF for some of the emulations, but I can at least be assured it’ll work next time I open it.  I get to look forward to the next few days of recreating settings and rebuilding tracks.  Grumble.

A nasty headcold coupled with my usual overactive sinus-based ick has kept me from recording any vocals for the past week and a half.  This is particularly annoying, since I have stuff stacking up I want to record/rerecord/fix.

Aaand finally, I plugged in my MOTU 828 (mk1) yesterday, to test out my backing tracks and…kernel panic.  I rebooted, and…kernel panic.  I unplugged it and…kernel panic.    Some online searching demonstrated that hey, whaddya know, the new MOTU drivers under snow leopard don’t like the old 828 all that much.  I dug out one of my archived installers and put an older driver on, and it seems stable.  For now.  Nonetheless, this makes me kind of twitchy about relying on a nearly-10-year-old audio interface.  I do have plans to get a new one but…not for a while yet.    I just bought a new car, I’m a little low on petty cash.

Sigh.

Anyway, they posted a challenge: if it’s so easy to record these days, then record a song in a weekend.  They issued the challenge on friday afternoon, and closed it sunday evening.

Surprisingly, I decided to give it a go.  This is surprising because I’m usually the kind of guy who will spend weeks tweaking a track, and certainly several hours re-re-re-recording vocals.

I pulled it off.  The track isn’t great – the lyrics are awkward, the vocals aren’t especially strong, and it needs a bridge, but it still sounds recognizably Null Device-y.  I’m kind of astonished that I pulled it off.

Whether it’ll ever see the light of day beyond this “challenge” is another matter.

Friday was mostly given over to meat. And beer. Courtesy of our bassist-in-residence, Mr. Chuck. However, in the evening Wendy and I went to the CTRLSHFT/Caustic/Babyland show. It was Joe and Maggie’s bon voyage, as they leave for higher altitudes. I’m gunna miss those kids.

Saturday I spent a large quantity of time mucking about at Home Depot. For a while I’ve been of the opinion that I need new/better acoustic treatment for my studio, since my previous attempts have been 1) ugly 2) not as acoustically useful as I’d hoped and 3) did I mention ugly? My previous attempts have been first to wrap OC703 in landscape fabric, which was ugly and hard to mount. Second attempt was to wrap them in canvas and glue them to a board. Problem was they looked silly and the canvas was not especially acoustically transparent, meaning they didn’t really do as good of a job as they could, and they looked funny in the process.

So I bought a bunch of 1x3x8′s – construction grade, not furniture grade, for a savings of about $7 a strip – some angle brackets, and 16 yards of unbleached muslin. The lumber got cut and bracketed into 2′ x 4′ frames. I grabbed all my myriad pieces of 703, many of which I’d cut into smaller traps and the like, re-assembled them, jammed them into the frames and wrapped the whole deal in muslin. The end result looks pretty decent and sounds much better. I made 5 acoustic panels from the bits I found. Then I discovered a sixth piece in the back of the garage, so I have one left over that I now intend to use to make a portable hinged microphone isolation baffle.

I think overall, even with the 703, each panel cost me about $15.

Saturday night, Wendy and I hit Summerfest in Milwaukee, where we got our prerequisite grilled corn, hung out with the one and only Robin (without whom I’m pretty sure Summerfest would collapse into a smoking, chaotic ruin). We had some side-stage passes to Flogging Molly, which was pretty excellent. I was only passingly familiar with them before (“If I Ever Leave This World Alive” showed up on a few shows I watched) but having seen them live, they’re awesome. It’s impressive that they’re all pretty consummate musicians, all the more impressive that they can remain as such without sacrificing any onstage energy. That’s rare. Their opener was a DC fiddle band that was also surprisingly good – and also surprisingly capable of doing “rock leaps” while playing violin, which made me giggle.

I’m totally going to have to try to re-learn irish fiddling. I started once, long ago, and kind of forgot everything I ever learned. I have a book of fiddle tunes I bought in Galway and haven’t really cracked open since. I don’t know if I’m talented or coordinated enough for the crazy Donegal style, but maybe I can learn a Mayo style or something. Plus, I discovered that a jig can overlay a chaal beat quite nicely, so three cheers for cross-cultural fusion, eh?

Sunday, I finished the remix I started on thursday, and I’m very pleased with how it came out. It’s kind of big and orchestral. I like doing this sort of thing, and I think I’ll have to do more. It raises some vexing questions about how to pull this off live, but I’ll deal with that later.

I also spent about two hours playing with mic positioning techniques. For the first time, and only briefly, I got my dhol to not sound like a trashcan. I even got it to sound vaguely taiko-like when mic’ed appropriately. This opens up many possibilities.

Emily Mills, who herself is involved in a dizzying array of projects, tackles the oft-overlooked electronic music scene here in our little burg.  It’s nice to see that sort of thing, because while electronic players aren’t as prevalent in town as, say, folk-rockers, there’s still a lot of us. 

My only quibble with the article is the continued pairing of “industrial” with “electronic.”  While a lot of the movement in the scene is affiliated with the industrial and goth scenes, a lot of it isn’t, really.  I think in some cases that’s simply because we don’t have a ton of venues and bills available, and there’s likely to be a bit of fanbase crossover, so most bands will take what’s available to them.  In short, everybody’s gotta play the Inferno at least once.

Of course, it’s entirely out of scope of a 2-page article, but the history of the electronic scene in Madison is pretty interesting.   There used to be a fair number of raves in town (and nearby rural areas), Mr. Nick Nice was an internationally recognized techno and house DJ through much of the 90′s, the UW Union sponsored the fondly-remembered “Diversions” and “dmf” dance clubs from which many of the city’s bands and DJs sprung - there was a lot going on, and a nascent community buidling.  There was even a time, during that brief period when MTV was pushing “electronica” and NIN had radio hits,  when it looked like things could really blow up, so to speak – you could go to an industrial, house, or techno night at a club any night of the week, and often you had a few to choose from (while that may not seem like much, for a city of less than 200,000 that was fairly impressive).  Local electronic-music-centric websites cropped up and enclaves formed around those.  Some even had their own comic strips.

Lest I wax too rhapsodic, those days weren’t all halcyon and salad.  There was  of course scene politics, infighting, personality clashes, genre-purism, angry exes, etc etc.   Some clubs came and went, there were a lot of club nights that didn’t quite make it, or got subsumed by some other more well-established night.  For a while, the press was, if not unkind, largely ignorant.  But that’s just how it goes.

These days, things are considerably more chilled-out.   Some of our flagship bands have moved to other places, others have quietly moved on to other genres, the rave scene has dwindled since laws have come down opposing them.  Still, we’ve got that jovial bear of a man, Matt Fanale, working his jovial bearlike ass off.   Other veterans are throwing their experience behind up-and-comers with production and recording assitance (which is a bigger deal than it sounds – electronic bands tend to be bedroom-studio types, not rent-Smart-Studios-for-the-weekend kinds, meaning few have the benefit of a pro engineer on hand).  New bands are cropping up and doing different and interesting things.   I hope the scene remains as fertile in all genres and subgenres as it has been.

“Mph.”  I said.

“Mrow?” replied the entity that was pawing at my face.

“Mph.” I repeated.

“MROW!”

I sat up.  Usually at 3am, when there’s a cat desperately trying to get my attention, it means the food dish is empty, and I’m pretty much guaranteed a lack of sleep until I get up and fill it.

I stumbled out of bed, looked at Nori and said “Okay, Nori.  Show me what you want.”  She hustled out of the room, pausing to periodically check if I was still following. 

Instead of darting up the stairs to where the food dish resides, she ran downstairs.

She ran downstairs to the studio,  where she promptly jumped up into my studio chair, sat down and started purring loudly.

The cat wants studio time.  This is so cute I can barely stand it.