| Vocal session |
[Feb. 24th, 2008|09:49 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  productive | ] |
Vocal session: What Do You Think Of Yourself? 07:21
This recording started off as a quick demo in 1999, with Garrett and myself playing acoustic guitars and singing. I forgot it existed, and then "discovered" it a few years later, and used it as the foundation for this version in progress. This is me re-doing the lead vocal.
When you see dissolve transitions in the video, that's because this is a composite of a few takes (not my usual seventeen billion, mind you). In most cases you're seeing the same take you're hearing (or at least one of them when the voice is doubled up). Occasionally, though, the audio compositing involves "stealing" a single word or syllable from an alternate take, so forgive me for not rapidly switching between shots every time that happens.
Thanks to Coke Bear for moral support. |
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| Leave of Absence 2 has been remastered |
[Sep. 30th, 2007|09:25 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
See this post at KeithHandy.com.
I'm not demanding that everyone buy it, so much as absorb into your collective consciousness the fact that It Exists and that You Eventually Need To Have It. :) |
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| Bass sessions 9/13/07 |
[Sep. 14th, 2007|09:45 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | productive | ] |
Bass sessions for three of my songs, "What Do You Think Of Yourself?", "Selling Purple to the Blind", and "Soul Peer".
I have the bass relatively prominent in the mix for this video, so you can hopefully hear it clearly, but I can't make any promises if you're watching on a laptop or have tiny speakers. |
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| Wild mouse and fancy mouse living together harmoniously |
[Aug. 17th, 2007|01:50 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  amused | ] |
For anyone who doesn’t already know: little brown Ralphie stalked the cage for several weeks this past winter, and finally moved in. The other one is Emily Junior, a “proper” pet fancy mouse. See how well they get along despite their divergent backgrounds?
I’m sure there’s some political lesson in all of this, but considering that Ralph actually barged in uninvited, I think I won’t go down that road. |
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| Guitar session |
[Jul. 20th, 2007|11:03 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | productive | ] |
Sorry, it's strictly rhythm in this one, ain't makin' it cry or sing. But you get to spend a few minutes staring at me, and that's worth the price of admission. |
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| Samplin' tute |
[Jun. 28th, 2007|12:02 pm] |
Haven't seen y'all in a while, livejournalpeeps! Let's sex! |
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| Just because I can |
[Apr. 27th, 2007|12:16 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  creative | ] |
I don't know why it hasn't occured to me to post these here:
Above: "I Like To Swear" by Keith Handy (aka "openreel").
If this vastly improves my hits, I'll resurrect my LiveJournal just to embed more of these YouTube performances for all you lazy, lazy people. :) If you want to actually read what I'm sayin' these days, though, a reminder that I actively maintain keithhandy.com and would love to see y'all leaving comments there. |
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| keithhandy.com update |
[Aug. 27th, 2006|03:44 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | enough about me! how are YOU? | ] |
New (refurbished, actually) song uploaded to keithhandy.com, AND wait wait wait it gets cooler, after you enjoy the song you can spend an intimate moment with me picking at the overdubs! It's almost interactive! In a way!
Don't forget, if you use Bloglines or any kind of RSS aggregator, then this whole "I can't keep up with some external website, I need to have a self-updating friends page" thing becomes moot. RSS is like a friends page for the outside world. You can even include LJ journals on it! |
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| Tiny numbers |
[Jul. 19th, 2006|08:56 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | cheerful | ] |
Compiled and ran without error. In your FACE!
(Can't say that for the html in this post, ironically enough.) |
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| More fresh goodies from the coding department |
[Jul. 18th, 2006|08:49 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
See the piccy above? (Of course you do, you just can't see anything else anymore because you've just been blinded, hur hur hur.) It's a graph of the spectral energy of an entire song. Actually it goes out quite a bit farther to the right, but when you get into extreme highs you're actually dealing with a large number of bands each containing a very small amount of energy, so this is the interesting end of the picture. The "ugly wallpaper" is actually a color coding so you can see exactly what frequency every one-pixel-wide band is at without having to print really tiny numbers. That said, I think I'll still make it display some tiny numbers at significant peaks and valleys. That will be a little tedious to code, but make it less tedious to read the graph.
The red area is the peaks, the yellow area is the median, and the green area is everything below the median. Notice how low the yellow part is: it means any given band is actually really quiet at least half the time, even though this is a very loud song overall (King Crimson's Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With).
Even though the peaks are jagged, if you relax your eyes enough you can see a pretty smooth overall curve. I'm hoping that by looking at graphs of my own recordings versus other people's recordings, I'll be able to take some of the guesswork out of mastering. I've already toyed with mapping a spectrum from one song to another, and it's promising, but it's not the whole answer.
In other news, it's dropped into the frosty 80s today, and everyone is wearing sweat jackets. BRRRR!!! |
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| Syd: Round 2 |
[Jul. 15th, 2006|01:51 pm] |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) happydog barks back about the 'cap!
(They don't pay me enough to come up with these cheezy one-line summaries.) |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 13th, 2006|09:10 pm] |
[8:27pm] <acousvnt> Your last post on I Am A Bug was pretty good btw
[8:27pm] <acousvnt> It seemed to end kind of quick though like you ran out of things to say
[8:27pm] <acousvnt> But in a way, that's fitting, isn't it
[8:28pm] <ash`wyrk> heh
[8:28pm] <ash`wyrk> well, i am no expert on matters RKB
[8:28pm] <ash`wyrk> so i guess i did
[8:28pm] <acousvnt> You did well considering that
[8:28pm] <ash`wyrk> :)
[8:32pm] <iMooBook> I Am A Bug?
[8:32pm] <ash`wyrk> the Blog
[8:33pm] <acousvnt> Vic is a blogosphereonaut
[8:32pm] <iMooBook> hmm
[8:32pm] <ash`wyrk> did a quickie Syd send off
[8:33pm] <ash`wyrk> it is pretty fascinating to realize just how much PF owes to him, if that is the right word
[8:33pm] <ash`wyrk> and how completely fucked they really should have been after he was gone
( ... )
[8:37pm] <acousvnt> For me the mystery about Syd is what he actually wanted, if anything, because he never got a chance to even say it ... how far he wanted to go as a musician or what he wanted to do
[8:37pm] <acousvnt> Like if he was basically pushed into it or driven to do it
[8:38pm] <iMooBook> I think from what I read he wanted to do more pop songs
[8:40pm] <acousvnt> You get the sense that he at least partially wanted to destroy his own success
[8:40pm] <acousvnt> He didn't come around in his clearer moments and say "damn, I gotta do something about this, I'm really sabotaging everything"
[8:41pm] <ash`wyrk> yeah
[8:41pm] <ash`wyrk> it does seem like this was all a lark and a giggle
[8:41pm] <ash`wyrk> and then when it exploded he was kinda "uhhh, shit"
[8:41pm] <iMooBook> Then it became a job to him
[8:42pm] <acousvnt> AND HE SLACKED OFF
[8:42pm] <ash`wyrk> and, forgive me for saying so, but those two solo albums to me seem like somebody who didn't know what else to do with his day
[8:43pm] <ash`wyrk> i get the idea that they were pulled from him more than they were created, but i don't know the whole story behind them
[8:43pm] <acousvnt> I agree with that
[8:43pm] <acousvnt> That they weren't driven by a vision of his
[8:43pm] <acousvnt> That he was basically being propped up like Weekend At Bernie's
[8:45pm] <acousvnt> That said I think there are slivers of melody in there that the average schmuck couldn't write
[8:45pm] <ash`wyrk> sure
[8:45pm] <ash`wyrk> i admitted to liking a few tracks here and there
[8:46pm] <ash`wyrk> but slivers is a good word
[8:46pm] <ash`wyrk> those are very tough albums to like |
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| Have You Got It Yet? (for Syd) |
[Jul. 11th, 2006|07:36 pm] |
I didn't know the guy or anything, but this is vaguely how one of his songs went. (Nothing new here for the old-timers, sorry.)
I don't think I can put this under a Creative Commons license (because it's a cover), but I hereby release my little guitar embellishments into the public domain -- so if you wish to podcast it, you'll only have one army of lawyers after you, not two.
(Quite frankly, though, their army is the one you'd have to worry about, since mine only has duct tape and Sharpie markers.) |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 8th, 2006|02:41 pm] |
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How come they don't have pride parades for people who masturbate? |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 28th, 2006|11:06 pm] |
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We have more patience for our own pain than we do for other people's. |
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| FFT experiments - review |
[Jun. 11th, 2006|04:40 am] |
A few months ago, I posted a list of random ideas that I wanted to try out once I'd gotten some code up and running that would do FFT transforms on audio. I actually got the core of it working within a few days, and did a lot of monkeying with it, but didn't really refer back to my list, so now I shall look over the whole thing and see how I fared.Fauxverb - a synthesized reverb-like trail off the end of a sound. For each bin, look at the previous frame, and if it is less than X% of the previous amplitude, bring it up to that. We could even extrapolate the phase change from the previous two to be more exact. Could be made more controllable by making the value of "X" dependent on the frequency. I have not tried that yet. I should. It wouldn't take me more than five minutes to write the function.Isolate - reject all sound that isn't panned within a certain region. Should be able to reasonably dissect stereo recordings into more than two channels. This actually worked better than I thought it would. I now have an app that I've compiled for both mac and windows which will slice a stereo field up into "regions" to make artificial 5.1 mixes. There are "stereo to 5.1" programs out there but I don't think they actually do this!Max-mix - mix two sounds together, then adjust the amplitude of each bin to the louder of the two originals. This should counteract phase cancellations, if you're trying to replace an instrument that's already there - i.e. you're doubling a bass line but you don't want it to get quieter and louder as the old bass and new bass go in and out of phase with each other. Haven't really tried.Overflow - if there is too much energy in any one bin, reduce it to a certain limit and carry what you removed over into higher multiples of that frequency. This should add a gentle "brightening" to tones that are a little too loud. A problem I can already see with this is that it involves pitch shifting, which is more complex than I'm ready to handle. (I actually tried some uneducated pitch-shifting, and it didn't work right.)Phase align - force the left and right channels to be in phase. Louder bins get more weight. I don't know what this would be good for but I'd be curious to hear it. This would be like "max-mix" but keeping the signals separate. You could then just mix them together for the same effect.Smart limit - same as "overflow" but just throw the extra energy away instead of carrying it over. I have done this to an extent, but it didn't seem to do much until I set it to a harsh amount, and then all it did was make it noisy because it brought out all the quiet frequencies. Useless. Gone!The twist - gradually shift one channel's phase by +90 degrees and the other by -90 degrees so that a sound goes 180 degrees out without changing the overall level of either channel. May have a small impact on perceived pitch in each channel. This actually works. The sound doesn't seem damaged or distorted, but in the headphones appears to "rotate" without actually panning. In mono, the overall volume changes but there is no flanging or phasing type effect. If I can figure out how to write plugins, this might make a good one. Using a constant shift value would make a sound quieter in mono without being quieter in stereo. (Is anyone ever going to hear it in mono nowadays?)The watusi - sorry, there will be no such thing as "the watusi". Unless you can think of something. No "el dorado" either. Take this, brother, may it serve you well. Since there's no list item for it, I could call my "shepard flanger" the watusi. Or I could call it "shepard flanger". It's a comb-shaped filter that moves up or down infinitely, sounding very much like a flanging effect, but which would be impossible to do with an actual flanger (unless you carefully crossfaded between multiple flangers so that only the rising is ever heard).Total separation - for two sounds that are recorded with microphones near each other, like an acoustic guitar and vocal. For any bin, if it is louder in the left, silence the right altogether, and vice versa. I've tried this out on acoustic guitar and voice, and would recommend trying to get as much natural separation as possible first. There were odd moments when one sound "swallowed" part of the other one.Transient - any bin that is louder in this frame than the one just before it and just after it is considered a transient - it can be removed by replacing this bin with an average of the one before and after it. (I might try to work this out so a transient can last for two frames, since it might fall right between two.) This doesn't really work. At all. |
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| $F,UCK,FUC,KFU.CK |
[Jun. 8th, 2006|12:36 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  infuriated | ] |
Okay, so you can't say "fuck" on TV anymore. I mean, I guess you couldn't before, right, but now you REALLY REALLY can't!
Is this such a bad thing? I see it as an employment opportunity. Start developing that quick reflex action, and maybe score that coveted position as mute-button pusher #2 (catching what mute button pusher #1 misses, of course). You don't even have to mute the whole word. "F[*quack!*]CK" is perfectly okay, just like it would have been okay if Janet's nipple ring had been 10% larger with a solid cap over the center.
It's hard to tell if the climate of fear in TV and radio will drive it to Amish levels of inhibition -- which would be really sad, since Amish people don't have televisions or radios -- or to an even denser collage of gutted swear words and pixelated penises than we're already being bombarded with. Either way, the poor unfortunate TV-landers are bound to grow increasingly jealous and resentful of alternate media's (satellite, internet, etc.) ever-greater monopoly on soul. Who will speak for them?? |
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