02021-01-10 | Uncategorized
I wonder how the amount of time I spend in the studio setting up and executing a mix compares with the amount of time I spend listening to the results. I do spend many hours listening to the music on headphones. While The Hours Between Night + Day was my first album of larger mixes, and Opium was the next step in my mixing development, I have to point to The Scent of Light as the first example of my “wide-screen” style of mixing. The guitars moved even further to the side, like arms enveloping the mix and guiding it. The rhythm guitars define the edge of the echelon of flight, while the bass controls the center navigation. The bass holds the entire echelon together. (((I never place the bass totally in the center. I always put the bass at -18 to -20 and the kick drum at +18 to +20. This makes it easier to hear what either is doing.)))
If the rhythm guitars on NF were at +50 and -50 (hard right, that is a sound coming only from the right speaker, is +100), by the time we recorded The Hours Between Night + Day the rhythm guitars had moved out to about +70 and -70. On The Scent of Light they were at +80 and -80 and since then they have often moved as far as +90 and -90. Decades ago I used to mix on speakers and only occasionally consult headphones but now that has been reversed. I mostly mix with headphones and only listen to speakers to make sure I am not going too far.
02021-01-10 | Uncategorized
As I am writing this I am listening to the latest mixes of vision 2020 (full version), the recording of additional instruments having been completed. JQ Whitcomb, as on Fete, wrote horn arrangements and recorded trumpet in the Summer. Robby Rothschild performed on cajon and djembe early in December and his brother Char played accordion on the last day of the old year.
Jon’s rules of Covid engagement are to record one person at a time and to allow no one into the control room. I could have attended the sessions via video link, but what’s the fun in that. Jon knows what he is doing, Robby tours with us and he has played on half a dozen of my albums and both JQ and Char delivered great performances for Fete. So I enjoyed sitting back and waiting for the recordings to appear in my Dropbox.
This week I added the last tracks to the recordings and worked on placing the instruments onto the sound stage. I have a very simple method of arriving at a mix I love: I listen and make notes about anything that bothers me. Then I make changes to the mix, whether it is an edit or a tiny change in a reverb setting, or raising the volume of an instrument by less than a db. It’s not that I try to remove any sharp edges, because some of those edges are like spices in a curry, it’s rather that some edges are good and others are not. I try to remove the ones that don’t work for me.
Today I listened to the album without finding a catch, a catch being a musical event that takes me out of the flow. I will listen a few more times and if I don’t notice anything that should not be there, then the album is done and will indeed be released this January.
02021-01-08 | Uncategorized
The following is a post I wrote a few months ago. After reading the comments to my last post I decided to post it now. I don’t believe most Americans have acknowledged racism the way Germans acknowledged the atrocities of the Third Reich. (((I heard somebody call it the Turd Reich and I think that’s pretty good))) As long as the real history is not taught in every school in the USA nothing will change and we are long way from that.
As a teenager in Germany in the mid-seventies I had to hear about our history’s darkest moments. In school I had to watch photos and films that showed the concentration camps and the emaciated and tortured bodies of Jews and Romani and political prisoners. I had to read how some people of my grandparents’ generation turned on their Jewish neighbors and denounced them. I remember sitting in class and weeping. I remember weeping at home before I fell asleep, because those images refused to stop flickering in my head.
Compared to the suffering of so many people under the Nazis my pain was like the momentary prick of a needle and, perhaps, it was like an immunization against that kind of discrimination and violence.
They were difficult lessons but I am grateful that I had to learn them. It is important to know what humans, even countrymen, can do in dark hours. It’s important to know what propaganda can accomplish in the hand of evil men and women.
I think many white Americans are scared to take a hard look at the systemic racism that exists in this country because they are afraid of the feelings they will encounter. They might feel a sense of shame for not having seen the extent of racism before, or for not having listened to the cries of injustice from the communities of people of color.
Yes, allowing yourself to empathically feel the pain that other people have had to endure will hurt, and it will hurt for a long time. The memory of that pain will become a tattoo on your heart, like the images of Auschwitz I carry on mine. It will start with letting events like George Floyd’s murder resonate with your heart instead of your head. Imagine that George Floyd was your father, instead of a man you did not know. Now the pain feels differently; it becomes a heart pain rather than a head pain.
This is a tempering of the heart, like the tempering of a hot iron in a tub of cold water. The tempering makes the iron stronger and likewise this tempering will make a heart stronger.
Recommended reading: A People’s History of the United States
02021-01-08 | Uncategorized
Newton talks to Bryce in a hotel in Chicago and admits to being an alien. There are less than 300 Antheans left and they have food and fuel to survive fifty years. Should they be brought to Earth, Newton wonders, when they might have less time to live here, because Antheans calculated that the earth will be destroyed by nuclear war within thirty years. The book was published in 1963 and America was in the middle of the cold war.
Newton and Bryce talk about bombs and art, with Bryce pointing out that the paintings were created by humans, too. Newton replies, but only a few humans make such beautiful things.
It can take years for an artist to create one painting and yet an arsonist can destroy it in moments.
It takes a long time to create a democracy and yet it takes very little time to destroy it.
Here is a collection of art that might put a smile on your face.
02021-01-07 | Uncategorized
I watched yesterday’s events unfold with the same disbelief that I watched events on that 11 September years ago.
Many have said that if the mob had been dark skinned, they would have been shot. While this is true, it is also true that a light skinned left-leaning mob would have been met with violence. We only have to look at the police force and/or national guard acting against protesters this year or during the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Particularly shameful is the attempt by some pundits to claim that yesterday’s mob was Antifa in disguise – see Reichstagsbrand for a historical reference.
Thanks to a quick thinking staffer the boxes with the certified votes were secured. What if they had been burned or looted?
Do I see historical parallels because history always follows similar patterns (and because German history taught me to be paranoid) or do I see it because some of the people involved actually studied the playbook?
