Falling, a Nightmare in Three Acts

So as I mentioned earlier, my SpinTunes 4 round 1 song is a bit... unusual. It's almost five minutes long, in 3 "acts," with no chorus, with piano, fretless bass, environmental sounds, no percussion whatsoever. It's sort of artsy... like "Natural Science" on the album _Permanent Waves_, or something from a Pink Floyd album, or Thomas Dolby's "Mulu the Rain Forest," or an extended Kate Bush track from Aerial. Not exactly what I set out to make, but this is the song that asked me to make it...

Here's the track on Bandcamp.

This is the first time I've had someone else master one of my tracks. I sent Rich Wielgosz a .WAV file at 24-bit, 96KHz and he dripped it through some nice analog vacuum tubes and iron transformers (I think; I'm not entirely sure what he did) and sent it back mastered. Mastering involves compression, EQ, and maybe other tweaks to bring the file up to snuff as far as hearing as much musical detail as clearly as possible -- basically, it makes it sound louder, and clearer, and when it is done right it should do this without ruining what nuance is present in the dynamic range. He did a great job -- the remaining deficiencies in the audio are mine, not his. More info about Rich can be found here

My notes, the "song bio" if you will:

So, the SpinTunes 4 Round 1 challenge was to write a song about "a childhood nightmare." I think some people might just be able to pick a nightmare and write about it, but I don't really remember any details about my childhood nightmares. I remember one very vaguely - I was being chased, and at the end I was falling, and when I landed I woke up with a violent muscle spasm, my heart pounding, soaked in sweat.

I did experience a real-life nightmare, though. My parents divorced when I was three years old. My father left, and my mother moved my one-year-old brother and me from Seattle, Washtington, to Pennsylvania. I saw him rarely over the next ten years; for most of that time, he was only an occasional letter or voice on the phone. My mother's father became a sort of surrogate father for me, and role model, but he died of cancer when I was ten years old.

So, that's the material I've got to work with. With the original dream so vague, I'll need to "take it and turn it." What if I misunderstood the nightmare? What if I wasn't being chased at all, but I was chasing my father, and the nightmare is that I can't ever reach him, and fall? So this song is about that nightmare of separation, and waking up and realizing that it is not actually a dream.

Maybe that's a lot to try and convey in a song, although there is probably a single word for it in German. But I hope it works in some sense.

These lyric concept started with one very long and extremely fast first draft, although I have trimmed and revised it. I realized as I wrote it that it was actually a bit like _Green Eggs and Ham_ -- Dr. Seuss wrote that book with only fifty words, on a bet. Similarly, as I wrote this I realized that there seemed to be a special power in repeating a few words and phrases and varying them, almost as if it was the vocabulary of a child chanting a rhyme. In that context a truly consistent rhyme scheme also seemed somewhat unimportant.

I had imagined a very dramatic song with a heavy metal-style guitar accompaniment, and I messed around with a grinding heavy-metal guitar sound, but when I tried singing it, the song started to come out much, much differently. So it's been a process of heavy revision. I've never tried a serious multi-track project that didn't have a fixed beats-per-minute count, or recorded instruments without a click track. To employ "rubato," part of the challenge, I had to be able to vary the tempo freely over the course of the song.

To get pieces lined up I would play a piano sound with a guitar synthesizer, to produce a MIDI piano part, and then record bass and vocals to accompany that, part-by-part, in a very painstaking and time-consuming way, recording take after take, looping parts over and over in my headphones while recording in order to get a precise feel for the timing. There is very little use of the "flex" feature in Logic because I felt that it would be too tempting to spend hours and hours of my limited time tweaking parts rather than recording better takes.

Some of the audio directly from the guitar synthesizer can be heard as a horn part. There's a MIDI piano, and a MIDI Turkish oud lute, and then my unusual Steinberger Synapse 5-string fretless bass. The guitar I use to trigger the guitar synth has a piezo and humbucking pickups as well, so it is possible to record the audio from the guitar synth, MIDI notes, and two different audio signals from the guitar all at the same time. Then of course these can go into different amp models and effects. In practice I only ever used two or three of these at once. For vocals I got out my ribbon microphone, which I haven't used in quite some time. The environmental sounds I recorded in 2008 in Grand Marais, Michigan.

This challenge had its own challenges. I actually took three full days off of work, in order to give myself some time without distractions, and went into the studio like I usually go into my home office. But the extra time just seemed to encourage me to do something more ambitious, and there were plenty of distractions: our hot-water heater failed, and the subwoofer for my studio monitors failed (it was replaced before due to a design defect). Fortunately, and somewhat surprisingly, I used Logic heavily for days and days without any of the usual crashes, and bizarre behavior was minimal. Apple seems to have Logic reasonably well debugged by now, at least the features I rely on. As I write this I'm winding up day 3, and I still need more time. There's never enough time! And so everthing winds up a compromise, full of flaws that make me grit my teeth, but hopefully good enough to make someone else like it; and maybe I'll even like it, once I can get some distance from it, and come back and listen with fresh ears.

If I had to cite some specific influences for the style of the song, I'd pick out Peter Gabriel's song "Family Snapshot," as well as some Kate Bush sounds from her album _Aerial_. I've always loved the sound of fretless bass; for some of what I was trying to achieve, take a listen to "Mulu the Rain Forest" by Thomas Dolby.

I've never written, or really spoken much, about my parents' divorce, or talked about it with a therapist. As I worked on this song I found myself going through an emotional tunnel, and feeling far more tense and upset than just the song deadline could account for. I see this process as somehow therapeutic, although I'm not sure the result will be very pleasant to listen to, and I don't think as some sort of great breakthrough. My father and I are on good terms now; he is still alive and living in California. But my understanding, and my lived experience, is that it just isn't possible to ever truly "heal" this sort of early loss, or replace those years of parenting; the experience reshapes a child's whole being. There's a great lyric by the band Everclear, from their song "Father of Mine" that really captures this:

I will never be safe 
I will never be sane 
I will always be weird inside 
I will always be lame

If you don't know the lyrics, look them up; they are terrific. That song, though, is angry, and for me the feeling has never really been anger, although I've had a lot of people express anger on my behalf. It's more a sort of mourning.

Paul R. Potts, aka Common Lisp
Saginaw, Michigan
25 January 2012

Act One: The Dream 

Ambient nature sounds (wind) 

Spoken: 

"Sleep that knits up 
the ravelled sleeve of care 
The death of each day's life 
Sore labour's bath; 
Balm of hurt minds, 
Great nature's second course, 
Chief nourisher in life's feast." 
- Shakespeare 

Note: guitar is down-tuned 2 half-steps, so I play these 
chords on guitar as Dm, Gm, Dsus4, Gm, Am7, C and Bbmaj7. As heard it is in the key of C minor (relative minor to Eb)... I think. I'm not so great with the music theory. 

1a. 
Cm 
I've been here before 
Fm Csus4 
I can't see where I'm going 
Cm Fm 
There's darkness behind me 
Gm7 Bb Cm 
Darkness ahead 

1b. 
Cm Fm 
There's a man in the shadows 
Gm7 Fm 
I can't see his face 
Cm Fm 
I thought he was chasing 
Gm7 Bb 
But it turns out I'm running 

1c. 
Cm Fm 
It turns out I'm chasing 
Gm7 Bb 
The man in the shadows 
Cm Fm 
But my legs are so tired 
Gm7 Bb Cm 
I know I'm not strong 

1d. 
Csus4 Cm 
Why won't he wait? 
Bb Gm7 Abmaj7 
Did I do something wrong? 
Cm Fm 
I can't catch my breath. 
Gm7 Bb Cm 
Don't leave me alone. 

Spoken: 

To sleep, 
perchance to Dream; 
Ay, there's the rub, 
For in that sleep of death, 
what dreams may come, 
When we have shuffled 
off this mortal coil, 
Must give us pause. 
- Shakespeare 

Act Two: The Nightmare 

2a. 
I will not cry 
I'm running, not crying 
I can't catch my breath 
My lungs, they are aching 

2b. 
The man in the shadows 
Is gone and I'm calling 
Not crying but screaming 
Screaming and trying to 

2c. 
Run and I'm slipping 
The path it is crumbling 
I'm screaming and gasping 
Falling forever 

2d. 
I scream in the silence 
Too frightened for crying 
Falling for ever and 
Ever and falling 

2e. 
I'm sitting bolt upright 
And sweating and shaking 
Down the hall mom is crying 
Her heart must be breaking 

2f. 
The man in the shadows is 
Gone and I'll always be 
Missing his love, I'll 
always be aching 

Act Two: The Waking Dream 

Ambient nature sounds (beach) 

Instrumental break: shifts key to C major, I think. 

Cm Fm Csus4 Gm7 
Abmaj Gm F7 
Cm Fm Csus4 Gm7 
Abmaj7 Gm F7 
G7 Am7 E F 
C 

3a. 
F C 
When I was small, so small 
C G 
I rode on your shoulders 
F G 
My hands felt your beard 
C F 
It was scratchy and warm 
C 
When I was small 

(Ambient sound: wind sounds return) 

3b. 
F C 
Now you are gone, gone, gone 
F G 
In the sun on the beach 
F G 
We were laughing and playing 
F G 
In the grass on the dunes 
F G 
You ran and I chased you 
G F 
On a day long ago 
C 
And then you were gone 

3c. 
C G 
Gone from your children 
F G 
Gone from your wife 
C G 
Gone from my brother 
F G 
Gone from our lives 

3d. 
G 
And though I've awakened 
And though I've awakened 
I'll always be aching 
I'll always be aching 
I'll always be runing 
I'll always be runing 
I'll always be chasing 
I'll always be chasing 
I'll always be falling 
I'll always be falling 

Spoken: 

All men whilst they are awake 
are in one common world: 
but each of them, when he is 
asleep, is in a world of his own. 
- Plutarch

Spintunes 4

I'm participating in the SpinTunes 4 songwriting challenge. My round 1 song is due January 29th. My intent is to post "song bio" material here as I'm able. Last time, I had to drop, because real life was just too crazy to allow me any free time at all to work on a sing. I'm trying to make things happen differently this time, but whether I'll really be able to do this or not remains a bit unclear. Stay tuned. Song Fu is also running again, but in a very different form than it did before. I was considering trying to get a song done for Song Fu's "bioluminescence" challenge as well, but I just don't think I can get both done.

Say That We'll Be Nemeses

I've been falling behind again! I haven't posted anything here in quite a while. I have been playing guitar, but not as regularly as I'd like.

It was a hell of a summer and fall and we're heading into a holiday season, and what will likely be a harsh winter. Our home gets quite cold, and to avoid thousand-dollar heating bills we are keeping the temperature set low, and supplement with some small space heaters, wool socks, long underwear, and hats. I typically wear fingerless gloves I made by cutting the fingers off of knit glove liners. It can become difficult to play guitar with cold fingers, and we've been dealing with a string of minor but annoying viral infections that make my singing voice even worse than usual. It's time to seal up the windows, get the humidifiers going, and put all the acoustic guitars in one room with a humidifier going, to make sure they will make it through another winter without needless shrinking or even cracking.

Anyway, you may have heard that Jonathan Coulton released a new album, and since he is sort of an unofficial, unknowing guitar teacher of mine, there's new material to learn, and with each song I learn, I get a little better at accompaniment playing. His song "Nemeses" is short and sweet, but there's quite a bit to work with, in addition to an extremely clever lyric.

For my starting point I'm taking his more-or-less live video version, which is simpler than the album version. It's pretty clearly written around a guitar riff. The chords don't involve any particularly difficult fingerings; it's sort of an "easy intermediate" song in that respect. But it's fast, and the strumming hand is very active. Note that in the chorus as he plays the chord "walk up" the neck he's heavily syncopating the guitar line (hitting upstrokes on the offbeats).

It's also not so easy to sing along with, in that the accompaniment is often changing out from under the sung melody line in challenging ways; listen especially carefully to the way the guitar hammers on underneath the bridge lyrics, "The hidden blade, when you pretend that you don't even know my name -- well played." That's not so easy to sing and play, and will require some careful practice.

In the official video Coulton is singing harmony on almost every word, while hammering out the guitar part, which blows my mind just a little, with John Roderick on iPhone handling the melody. The song is in a bad key for my vocal range (I think it is in E, although it almost never lands on an E major chord), but given the way it is arranged around open strings, transposing it might not be so easy, unless you just wanted to down-tune a to D, or capo it up to G (I might try that, and sing the melody an octave lower).

It has a lot of very "acoustic-y" half-open chords: chord structures that are not in first position, and in fact move right up the neck, but feature open strings. To play it cleanly, which I don't do all that well yet, you have to do some careful muting, and make sure you are not hitting all six strings when you aren't supposed to, and that they aren't ringing accidentally. I use a combination of palm muting on the main riff, muting with unused left-hand fingers, and for some of those half-open walk-ups, wrapping my thumb around the neck to mute the E string (although I'm not very good or consistent about my muting yet).

For this to sound right, your guitar must be very precisely in tune. But not just in tune -- the intonation must be very accurate; if it isn't, it might sound right on an open C major, but a half-open chord well up the neck will sound off, or vice-versa, and the opening riff, which uses the open E string combined with the A string fingered way up the neck, will inevitably sound out of tune. This is also one of those interesting cases where, when you learn to trust your ear a bit, you might finding yourself bending the strings just a bit on the fly, to bring certain fingerings into sonority.

I recorded a doubled acoustic part, and made it into a karaoke video for YouTube. It's not too bad, and I especially like the way the doubled guitar sounds, although there are a few spots where my muting isn't perfect. I don't play the rhythm exactly like the estimable Mr. Coulton does; I'm still polishing it. And I accidentally left out a repeat of the opening riff between the bridge and the third chorus. Oops. I'll re-record it when I get a chance, and perhaps get the muting better and the rhythm closer to the live version.

Oh, there's just one more thing -- my own live cover. My singing is pretty bad in this, and my playing kind of rough, in part because Joshua was grabbing at my strings and would not sit still, but I thought it was still cute. And I really need a better webcam; the frame rate and audio synchronization I am getting out of the Blue Eyeball running into an Intel Mac Mini just doesn't cut it.

You can find Suuuupaadave's fantastic transcription here. Note that he also produced an instructional video, which is incredibly helpful.

A Little Instrumental: Different Strings

I had a few quiet hours this evening while my wife and children were out, and so I recorded this.

It's an instrumental version of the Rush song "Different Strings," from the Permanent Waves album. Permanent Waves is the less-famous cousin of its successor, Moving Pictures. Where Moving Pictures is more coherent and polished, the songs on Permanent Waves are a bit more varied, from the big rock anthem of "The Spirit of Radio" to the epic prog-rock "Natural Science" -- but there is also "Different Strings." It's an unusual track for Rush, a soft and minor ballad, with piano, and a slower feel; it's in a lower vocal range. It also features one of the loveliest chord progressions I've ever heard. I recorded this in an attempt to capture the feel of that progression from the original song. It isn't a complete song; there's no vocal; it isn't perfect, as there are some timing gaffes -- but I think I did what I set out to do.

There's a book I own called Guitar Techniques of Rush -- it seems to be long out-of-print and copies scarce, but it's great, and contains a perfect transcription of Lifeson's solo called "Broon's Bane," which is on Exit, Stage Left. The book's claim to fame is that it features transcriptions "prepared under the supervision of Alex Lifeson." The transcriptions are great. They are not the overly fussy, often obsessively detailed, yet often inaccurate, transcriptions you find in tab books; they are structured by and for actual musicians. They don't show you every note of every overdubbed track, but they show the basic parts in extremely accurate tab and notes. I've been struggling a bit with this song, particularly a couple of chord positions that are hard on my hands (I have relatively small hands).

I recorded this using my Godin nylon-string SA guitar, one of the models with the narrow neck, and my Adamas 12-string acoustic. The bass is my Steinberger XP bass from 1985. All the instruments are run into a Radial JDV direct box, then to an Apogee Ensemble, and put together in Logic using Izotope Alloy and Ozone, and I think that's about it. The play-throughs are pretty rough. I had to chop up and edit the nylon string guitar far more than I would have liked, but I'm working on it. The 12-string is buzzing here and there because my left hand was too fatigued to get a good grip. Oh well. I gauge my progress, sometimes, by recording.

Note that the original song is copyrighted and so I am probably breaking all kinds of laws. This is why I normally record only Creative Commons-licensed material... I just don't want to deal with trying to record covers of copyrighted material. It's just too fraught with peril, especially after recent incidents in which someone used our public Wi-Fi and gained me a DMCA warning letter from my ISP. Sigh.

The Start of Songwriting Season

So life has been busy. Crazy busy. We had a new baby. That's kid number five. I've been working crazy hours for the day job. I took only one day off for the birth of the new baby because I was working on such a critical deadline, that is all I felt I could spare. We've been trying to keep up with a house we're barely getting used to; we haven't even finished unpacking. Money is tight; things keep popping up to derail my plans, like car breakdowns. Part of our back fence collapsed due to the blizzards. The kids keep damaging stuff I wouldn't have even imagined they could possibly break, like tearing wallpaper off the walls, plugging our footing drains and flooding the basement with the garden hose, peeing in my shoes, or ripping keys off a keyboard. Our two-year-old is really a handful.

Et cetera, et cetera, Peter Cetera even.

Many days go by where it wasn't even really a question to get some quiet time for recording. I've been fortunate to get any time to practice guitar at all.

In the midst of all this I made the decision to sign up for the SpinTunes songwriting contest again, because it has been so valuable to me to have this incentive and occasion and support group. It's been invaluable, really.

The first challenge was announced 09 June 2011 and was due the evening of June 19th. The challenge was to "write a happy song about death." I thought I'd certainly be able to find a few hours during that week. I had been working a lot of overtime for the previous ten weeks or so, and was working very hard to hit a second deadline. If I had hit it, I would have tried to take three work days off in comp time. It was going to take me practically a full day just to get the office and studio cleaned up enough to work in there, leaving me a couple of full days to record a song. I had managed to get a simple lyric written and had a couple of very rough ideas.

That didn't pan out; I didn't get my build working, due to both my bugs and other people's bugs; I had to do two all-nighters; I had to travel to Lansing twice.

On Saturday (the day before the deadline) I blocked out about four hours. I thought that might be enough to record a sketchy demo. What happened instead was that my Apogee Ensemble went crazy. It had been behaving in a degraded manner. The week before it would occasionally reset itself, or start spitting bursts of ear-splitting noise through the speakers. But this was worse; Logic was locking up and crashing; the software meters wouldn't show any input data; the controls in the Ensemble control panel inside Logic showed crazy levels, like -454 dB. Apple's Audio MIDI Setup application was locking up and crashing; the Apogee Maestro application wouldn't talk to the Ensemble; I was seeing a non-stop string of errors in the Console. I reinstalled its firmware, and reinstalled its drivers, and rebooted. In this manner I managed to use up my entire time window in frustration. Apogee tech support is not available on weekends.

I thought that it was likely my Ensemble had fried itself in the extreme heat in the studio -- early in June we had a crazy heat wave and it was baking in there. I'm fortunate I didn't lose a hard drive. Our central air conditioning just doesn't get up there, apparently; we have to figure out how to improve the airflow. It's quite an old house, and many of the vents that we ought to be able to open or close can't actually be adjusted. The whole system needs some attention from professionals.

So I went for a walk with my Sony PCM-D1 digital recorder and recorded this podcast episode. I put that together later in the evening on the Mac Mini in the family room. Sunday was booked solid, with plans to have guests over, and a big backlog of basic chores I needed to catch up on, like grocery shopping. I pretty much had to announce I was going to be eliminated in round 1 by forfeit. It wasn't a good feeling. I knew that I had done everything I could, but still, it felt like establishing a work/life balance is what I had failed at, not just missing a deadline.

I put in some more work time and managed to get my code debugged. I was not working at peak efficiency and making dumb mistakes due to simple overwork and lack of sleep. Yesterday I got permission to take those three days off as comp time, a week late. And so the plan was to try to do what I had wanted to do a week ago.

Today I started by getting on the tech support chat with Apogee to see if I could get an RMA# for my Ensemble. The plan was to remove the Edirol FA-66 from the downstairs computer and bring it upstairs. I wasn't sure I'd be able to afford the out-of-warranty repairs for the Ensemble, and that was making me nervous. That box cost almost $2,000. If I had to shelve it because I couldn't afford to fix it, that would be a lot of money tied up in something I couldn't even sell. My head became filled with backup plans -- could I pay enough to have it fixed, then sell it on eBay, and track down an older Rosetta 200 with a PCI card to use instead as a simpler but perhaps more reliable and higher-quality setup? But the Apogee support person asked me to try uninstalling the Ensemble driver completely using a separate utility, then reinstalling it, not just running the installer again.

I thought I was just going through the motions to try to prove that the device was exhibiting a hardware failure. But for reasons not entirely clear to me, that worked. I'm not sure just what might have happened to the existing driver, but there it is; if you have an Ensemble, and it starts misbehaving, give that a try. Years ago I wrote a MacOS X IOKit audio driver, so you'd think I'd be able to diagnose a problem like this myself, but no -- it really seemed to me like it was very likely to be a hardware failure.

I've got a ventilation fan in the office bathroom window, pulling some cool air from the rest of the house, and that helps a bit. The plan is to get a portable air conditioner that vents to the window as soon as I can. Of course, if I'm going to record vocals, I have to shut everything off, and the heat builds up pretty quickly.

I often start to feel like I'm failing to do creative work for various reasons -- due to my day job, or due to the family. That mindset tends to lead me into thinking of my day job and my family as problems. That's a painful over-simplification. I didn't quit my day job like Jonathan Coulton, to produce songs. I didn't, and still don't, have the performance and songwriting and recording experience that had gotten him to that point yet. My life is not his life. I'm supporting a family of seven. My wife is a stay-at-home mom and we chose that arrangement.

Merlin Mann likes to ask the rhetorical question "what couldn't you ship?" He's asking people in business, particularly in software, to ask themselves how and why they've failed, and to address the root causes honestly. He talks about people who never ship anything -- who think they have big ideas for software projects, or writing projects, or music projects, but who are too busy, who have too many other priorities, and a lot to juggle, but still have time to watch TV every night, and don't even consider that to be negotiable.

I've shipped a hell of a lot. My entertainment time is highly negotiable. In the last ten weeks or so I negotiated away a lot of things, including a great deal of sleep and a great deal of time with my family. I wrote a server, in about five thousand lines of C++, to a rapidly changing spec, without the ability to debug it on the hardware platform it was designed to run on at all. It features three hierarchical state machines, a dozen threads, several message queues, and something like 70 methods. We shipped that (well, version 1.0 at least; there will no doubt be more features, more bugs, more maintenance).

I also completed a substantial revision to a piece of DSP code written in C. In this revision, through some simplifying and refactoring of a complicated piece of state machine code I managed to add features while removing almost 500 lines of code, or about 10% of the total program. I struggled for a few days with dumb bugs (most bugs turn out to be dumb, but occasionally I run into a bug that is truly fiendish). My boss happened to have possession of the debugger that I might have used to catch bugs right on the hardware, and it wasn't available for me to use this time, so debugging this involved some gritted teeth and a helpful co-worker with fresh eyes who read the code with me. I finally managed to extract the last obvious bug with the help of a separate test bench program, written in Visual C++, that allowed me to exercise most of the features of the program in an environment with a source-level debugger and the ability to log exactly what is happening. So that's shipped. My weekend was almost relaxing after over two months of this.

So I do ship, but the problem is that I'm often not able to ship what I'd most like to ship, and not able to work steadily on the projects I'd most likely to work on -- my creative projects. The creative projects have to fit into the cracks and between the teeth of the gears, without actually jamming them. That can be tricky. They're a luxury and yet I'm considering them to be more and more of a necessity as I get more burned out on this kind of work, and wonder how much longer I can keep doing this as a career. It seems now that there is not likely to be an upgrade path, if that makes sense.

So, with all that as prologue, today I recorded a song. I started with the snare drum that I was unable to record last week. It came out better than I expected. I used my matched pair of Rode NT-5 microphones in an X-Y pattern. With such a loud sound source, the exhaust fan in the other room didn't really matter much, so I left it on. I don't really know how to play drums, but I've manage to sort of teach myself just a tiny bit of stick work on a snare. That actually started with playing upside-down food storage buckets as drums during protest marches, particularly marching in solidarity with striking Borders bookstore workers in 2003.

I also recorded three improvised guitar parts on my Adamas 12-string, into the Radial JDV direct box, and then into the Ensemble. I put the capo on the fifth fret to make it sound a bit like a mandolin. It did not turn out at all like I had heard it in my head last week. I had been imagining something upbeat and Celtic-sounding, like a reel, with a dance-like beat. It didn't sound much like that -- it sounded minor and Middle Eastern. But I was trying to do a one-day wonder, so I had to press on.

I shut off the fans, improvised a vocal melody to my lyrics, recorded a few takes of that to get a reasonably clean one, and then did a few more takes to double it. I sang into the Oktava MK-219 at close range without a pop filter and it didn't seem like it needed one. I used Alloy with various presets on each channel. Now it definitely wasn't Celtic per se. Instead of a reel, it came out more like a dirge, even with the basic rhythm at 130 bpm. The combination of a fast beat with a very slow-moving vocal is odd. Still, like all my songs I at least like how bits of it came out.

I decided to ship it anyway. Sometimes you have to get a not-so-good song out of your system so you can listen to it and think it over and perhaps learn something from the attempt and try again, or just move on to something different. I haven't and written recorded very many complete original songs yet; this is number six, or thereabouts. If I get to a dozen I'll start to feel like I'm beginning to accumulate real experience at this.

I'd like to buy a copy of Nectar, the new vocal processing plugin from Izotope, since I really like Izotope's audio-processing tools, but that will have to wait. I have to remind myself that the right plug-ins might -- emphasis on the might -- help me to tweak a vocal found until I like it more, but no matter what microphone or plug-in I use, it isn't going to be work miracles on my vocal performance. I enjoy the sound of heavily processed audio tracks, even putting things like ring modulation or spinning speaker effects on vocals, but a lot of folks are a little more basic in their approach.

Merlin Mann would probably ask me whether that is really going to keep me from "shipping" -- from completing the project. The answer is no. The presumed-broken Ensemble consumed some of my valuable time, but it didn't keep me from shipping either. In fact, it seems that there isn't much that will.

The song, Today is Not That Day, can be found on Bandcamp here. It's not great. I'm not quite sure what I think of it yet. It always takes me a while to figure that out. I'm calling this Version 1 because, depending on what happens tomorrow and Friday, there's a good chance I'll record another version. While I was recording today I shot some video of the takes I put in the song, so maybe tomorrow I'll throw together a quick video. Goodnight all!

The Right Leg Rest at Long Last!

I finally came across an eBay seller who was selling an original Steinberger USA leg rest. My 1985 XP bass now has the correct leg rest. Yay!

I'm going to try to be even more careful with it this time. These parts are just incredibly scarce and I'm all too aware that a young child can do a lot of damage in just a brief moment of inattention.

It came with aluminum inserts (not needed) and 7/16th Filister-head machine screws (pretty exotic and hard to find). Note, _machine_ screws, even though they are going into solid maple. They went in without too much difficulty, although a little flake of paint came off. But fortunately that spot is covered by the leg rest mount itself.

The main difference between these originals and the later ones used in the Spirits and Gibson-produced instruments seems to be the way the holes are drilled. The originals have a deeper carved-out hole that allows the entire head of the Filister screw to sit flush.

You can see an entry I wrote about the difficulties in finding and repairing these guitars here, The Steinberger Parts Dilemma. Here's a bit about the XP Bass. I am still hoping to one day get my hands on a matching XP guitar (not a Trans-Trem model, though; that's another parts nightmare I don't even want to contemplate!)

A Squier Super-Sonic Wiring Diagram

I had a request on YouTube for a wiring diagram for the Squier Super-Sonic. It just so happened that I had one I had made myself a while back lying on the floor of my extremely cluttered office, and had been stepping over it for weeks, each time thinking, "you know, I should scan that in case someone might find it useful, and then I can recycle the original." So here is a good excuse to finally get that done!

Anyway, there it is. Click for a larger version. I hope this is clear enough. The Super-Sonic is a bit odd: it has two humbuckers, a 3-way switch (neck, bridge, or both pickups), and two volume controls, but no tone controls. The volume knobs are in the positions opposite to the ones you might expect: the one closer to the bridge pickup controls the neck pickup, and vice-versa. If you don't like this, it ought to be a pretty simple matter to open up the control cavity and swap the two pots on the control plate (and that should be an easily reversible change if someone wants to put them back to the original "backwards" arrangement).

Anyway, the basic wiring idea is that the jack and the pots each have one two-conductor wire running to the toggle switch. At the toggle switch, all the shields go to the ground point and the other conductors go to the 3 other switch points. The jack has the shield ground attached to the inner (sleeve) conductor. The volume pots are wired like volume pots typically are wired, with a short bit of wire grounding the pot's 3rd connection point to a ground point on the pot shell itself, and the wires from the humbuckers and switch both connected to the first two connection points with their shields connected to that same ground point on the pot shell itself. It's not very complicated as guitar wiring scheme goes; I wouldn't want to have to diagram a Parker Fly with piezo and coil tap! Don't forget to connect the ground wire from the bridge to the first pot (the one that isn't next to the output jack). Don't worry, if you get a ground point wrong it will buzz terribly to let you know.

Both pots are both 500KΩ. The original humbuckers both use two-conductor cables, although I think if you wanted to substitute one wired with 5 conductors there is a way to tie the conductors together; if I recall correctly, replacement pickups from (for example) Seymour Duncan come with instructions on how to do this.

There are basically 5 wires in my Super-Sonics. Fortunately the body cavities are not super-small like on a Mustang, so there is a little room to work, and there is enough slack in the wires to wiggle things around. All 5 of these wires run through the hole between the control cavity and the pocket for the neck humbucker, so make sure they are threaded through there before you solder both ends. These guitars are not very well shielded and if you are doing one, you might consider shielding the cavity, although this tends to be more noticeable with single-coil pickups than with humbuckers. The original components aren't the best. The 3-way switch is a Korean part and an identical replacement is available from Allparts:

http://www.allparts.com/Korean-Toggle-Switch-p/EP-4366-000.htm

Note that many common toggle switches that would fit a Les Paul are too big to install without drilling. A short version of the Switchcraft 3-way might fit. If you replace the pots, which would probably improve the sound as the originals are pretty cheap, keep in mind that to fit the holes in the control plate you will need a mini pot. I don't have an exact part to recommend but I think if you look for "500K mini pot" on Allparts you should find some options.

I'd like to replace the pots and switches but I've been putting off this project because I know my soldering skills aren't great. The last time I did this to a guitar, I screwed it up so badly that I had to get professional help anyway and ruined some switches. I might try again -- if I do, I'll take pictures and let you know how it goes!