Five More Gone

Yesterday I took five more guitars to Guitar Center to sell. They were this beautiful Peavey T-60, a less photogenic and slightly older T-60 with an oil-finished ash body and rosewood fretboard, a Peavey Limited VT with a tiger's eye flame maple top, my Firenza with Duncan P-90 pickups, and my Ovation 1778T Elite with the purple, orange, yellow and green "Tribal Flame" finish.

I also sold my Boss DD-20 digital delay and my old Digitech Talker. I tried to unload a couple of Grunge distortion pedals but they didn't want to give me more than $5 or so each for them, so I kept them. I might have use for them eventually. Guitar Center didn't want my Radial JS-3 microphone splitter, although it's a nice piece of gear, because they just don't move items like that. I also sold my matched pair of Rode NT-5 microphones.

It's hard to get excited about selling off gear. The things gone are a load off my mind -- I don't have to store them, don't have to worry about keeping them in the proper temperature and humidity, or getting stolen, or getting broken. But some I will miss. The Limited VT is a very scarce guitar with incredible tone -- made in the Peavey custom shop in Leakesville, Mississippi, with 3 hand-wound single-coil pickups. And yet these guitars get very little respect. But the flame finish isn't my style -- it's too flashy for my taste. The T-60s are starting to become vintage and arousing interest from collectors, but although I wanted one very badly when I was about sixteen, and they are beautifully crafted guitars, built like tanks, with classic looks, I have to acknowledge that I no longer really like the way the skinny necks actually feel in my hands. The Firenza (C profile) and Ovation (soft V) and Limited (C-ish, asymmetrical, flat fingerboard) feel a lot better. The Ovation is actually kind of garish -- the finish doesn't really fit my personality all that well, especially as I get older. And while the Talker is cool, I just wasn't using it, because I haven't been performing live. All this stuff was made to be used, and it should be used more than it has been.

Oh, I've used it all some. The Synapse fretless bass provided the bass line for several of my songs: "Polly," "I.O.U.," and "Falling." The Firenza and one of the Venus guitars were on my parody of Jonathan Coulton's "Re: Your Brains," called "Re: Your Grains." The Firenza also provided the main guitar riff for "I.O.U." The Parker Fly was the lead guitar tone for a couple of songs, most notably "War Criminal" and my cover of "Today's the Day." The Limiteds have been on various tracks going back to my early collaborations with Joe "Covenant" Lamb. The Ovation acoustic is in several of my covers and instrumentals and it always gets comments because of its flashy finish.

Of course, it wasn't strictly necessary to have all those different instruments to chose from, to make those songs. Honestly, I had too many, and the guitar-collection-as-investment idea wasn't actually going to fly, at least not the way I put it into practice. It also fed into some of my less wholesome personality traits; it felt uncomfortably close to hoarding, and maybe a little compulsive. But it was a lot of fun, and I really liked being able to pick up a few guitars and try them out while recording a song, and let the particular feel and tone of a specific instrument tell me what to play.

While I was waiting for the staff at Guitar Center to process all this stuff, I toyed with a few modern instruments. It mostly served to remind me of what I liked about my older instruments. While modern USA-made Stratocasters have decent fit and finish, the wood hasn't aged to that point where they resonate beautifully -- they just don't have as much tone or as much mojo as the old T-60s from 1979, or even the Limited VT, which isn't yet truly "vintage."

What's sad about all this is that this load of gear, re-sold, won't even pay for one month's expenses. It'll cover a mortgage payment and part of a heating bill. I got out of this gear well under half of what I put into it. I might have been able to get a little more on eBay, but I just don't have that kind of time to put in. And it's just hard to get excited about being able to pay Consumer's Energy for another month.

There are a few pieces left. I'm not guitar-less yet. There are a few more in salable condition, and then some "fixer-uppers" that might be harder to unload, which I might have to list on eBay as "project" or "parts" guitars. There's even one ukulele.

If I have to sell almost everything -- if I only can keep one -- I'll (sadly) sell the Babicz acoustic (made in Indonesia), the USA-made Steinberger XP and the American/Canadian Godin nylon-string SA, the sparkle blue Super-Sonic, and the flame-top Peavey Limited, and keep the American flag Limited.

I don't want to let that one go, because all the American flag guitars you see these days are made overseas, and I could never bring myself to buy one. I'll keep it in memory of a time when people like me were paid to make things here in America.

And if I can't keep even one -- if I still don't have an income again, and we're selling off everything we possibly can just to get through the winter -- well, then God help us.

I leave you with this.

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!)

Leaving Ann Arbor

I'm in the SpinTunes 2 songwriting contest, and I've completed the first challenge: a little ditty called "Leaving Ann Arbor."

You can find the tune on BandCamp, complete with lyrics, here. I made a quick lip-sync'ed/finger-sync'ed video for YouTube which you can find here.

Here's approximately what my studio-in-progress looks like now:

On this track, I played the Applause ukulele, the black Steinberger XP bass, and added a few accents in the form of chorused guitar chords played on the Parker Fly. All the guitars went through the Radial JDV direct box, which did just what I was hoping it would do -- loaded the pickups, both piezo and electric, the way they should be loaded, and made the instruments sound the way they are supposed to sound. I haven't been able to do a direct comparison between this box and some other direct boxes I was considering -- for example, the Summit Audio TD-100, which also has a variable load control -- but I definitely don't have any regrets about buying the Radial box. I'm very satisified with the way the instruments came out.

As for the vocals -- well, I think they are still kind of my weak spot. I did as many retakes as I had time for. My recording time is very limited. If the kids are in the building, and awake, I can't really record vocals. I did most of my tracking very late at night, after the kids were in bed and there were no lawnmowers, jackhammers, or leaf blowers running in the neighborhood, and no traffic on our street. I had to give up a lot of sleep working on this song. I've discovered that singing (or playing) when I'm very tired really doesn't produce the best results, but that's the time I had to work on it, and it is what it is.

It didn't help that I chose some intervals in my melody that were a little tricky for me: for example, on the line "One cafe was all I needed," there's a minor second interval on the word "cafe." Apparently I'm terrible at singing half steps, at least in that note range, and I just couldn't hear that bit of melody in my head correctly in order to sing it accurately. I finally had to put together a track of MIDI keyboard just to listen to in my headphones, as a pitch reference, to get it anywhere near correct, and it's still pretty loose. And all this is double-tracked, so I had to sing it twice, synchronizing the takes as well as I could.

The instrumental accompaniment was kind of picked out by ear -- I'm not even really certain what key the song is in, and there's something that is, to my ear, not quite right about the way they fit together. Had there been more time, I might have been able to fully write out the melody and chords and listen to them as MIDI parts to make sure they fit together the way I wanted. But again: tight deadline, late-night recording, and a lot of takes; it is what it is.

If you're interested in the process, my scrawled notes kind of illustrate some of how it went. First, I had to pick a town. I was born in Seattle, but only lived there for three years. spent the ages of 3-10 or so living in North East, PA, then moved to Harborcreek, PA and lived there until I left for college. I spent four years of college in Ohio, then most of a year in an internship in the same place, then moved to Ann Arbor in (if I recall correctly) June of 1990. I lived in Ann Arbor until June 1st of this year. So I've lived in Ann Arbor longer than anywhere else, and having just left, it was definitely uppermost in my mind -- and I was full of mixed and conflicting feelings about my time there, viewing it both warmly and with disgust, and seeing it as both a success and a failure.

I started with the beginning of the first verse in my head. The silliness of the first verse was intentional -- I wanted to do the silly wordplay and artificial word breaks to force a rhyme:

Ann Arbor / You haven't got a harbor
But you've got a big arbor-
etum... and enormous U-
niversity...

So I had the first few lines in my head. Every Sunday we take the kids over to my mother-in-law's house, and I usually bring a guitar. This past Sunday I took the ukulele, since I had the vague idea that I wanted this song to have uke accompaniment. I got an hour or two where the kids were mostly out of my hair, with the ukulele, to try to come up with a melody and an accompanying ukulele part. I wrote out that riff and some chords (just picked out by ear, written down in ukulele tab, without really knowing what chords they all were), and that's my first page of notes:

Then, basically, another session or two of scribbling ideas for possible lyrics (both literal rhyming phrases and words/phrases that didn't fit but which I hoped I could eventually make fit). I think I wrote some of these out while waiting for my son to finish his Hapkido lesson. (As a parent, I've got to take what down time I can). Note that at this stage I feel that it is pretty important to write things down on paper, in pen, instead of typing them on the computer -- for one thing, I can do that anywhere, and for another, there is no deleting -- although lines are scratched out, they are still readable. You never know when you might want to go back to one of your original ideas and refine it. If you delete that line on the computer, doing editing on the fly, it is gone. (Of course I'm ignoring the idea that you might use version control, but most people don't do that, and you want to resist the temptation to delete anything you wrote even if you deleted it immediately, on the fly, between saving separate versions).

The first thing I recorded was the ukulele, and the first vocal part I finished was the chorus. I recorded a separate ukulele track of the melody for the chorus for reference when singing. I didn't have a melody for the verses for some time. In a later evening session I finally picked out a melody and recorded the first verse on ukulele for reference. The song sat like that until the next night, then I did a scratch vocal of the second verse with the kids screaming in the background, and of course realized that the second verse didn't exactly match the first verse. Despair, editing backing uke loops, retakes!

Then in preparation for actually recording the full vocal, I started transcribing what I had into a text file on the computer and editing that:

A few lines got cut: in the chorus I was considering using the lines "I once adored you / I now abhor you" before "I just can't afford to love you anymore," but it didn't really work. I had some extra verse lyrics: "I didn't have a lot of cash / At the Fleetwood, I ate hippie hash / I grew long hair / I was full of hot air" but the second verse was getting too long, but yet I didn't feel there was justification for a third verse.

The rap part was originally going to be sung, but essentially I wasn't having any luck coming up with a melody for the bridge. When it came about, I did it very rapidly, with only one or two takes of both the spoken voice tracks and the bass line, and assembled in an hour or two. The drums were Apple Loops. The keyboard part I never actually played -- I is just not even true chords, for the most part, mostly just two-note intervals, drawn in Logic's MIDI score window after picking out a cool-sounding synth sound. When I pieced it together I removed that "You'll be a renter once more" line because it had the wrong tone, but also because the section was getting too long. I liked the rap section quite a bit, but it was lacking a good sense of transition into and out of it. I eventually patched that together with more drum fills, tightening up the editing.

In one of these evenings I tried to add a 12-string guitar part, and that was the point where I tried to write out some chord names (and, I discovered later, screwed some of them up). The chord names below the arrows are transposed into my 12-string tuning, which is down a full step. So this is the closest thing I've got to a lead sheet for the song, and I know it's at least partially wrong. (That "Still Needs" checklist at the bottom rapidly expanded on the last day).

There was supposed to be a third verse, but the song was getting pretty long, so I improvised the outro part instead. The kazoo idea had been in my head from the beginning -- I went out and bought a kazoo especially for this song -- but the kazoo and shaker were recorded very late in the process. The kazoo came in a kit with shakers, a wood block, spoons, and a little tambourine and I recorded all those, but would up using only the shaker and kazoo.

I uploaded a "finished" track for safety, in case I screwed it up badly. After it was supposedly done, though, it took at a twelve-hour session hours of just cleanup and tweaking: mixing, mixing, mixing, setting volume envelopes on each track, adding bass line to the parts where it was lacking, coming up with an electric guitar part, re-tracking vocals, aligning vocals, re-tracking vocals again, aligning vocals again, tweaking plug-in effects, choosing mastering settings, bouncing some test tracks. During this time, I also went out and recorded Grace driving the van away. I also dug up the clip from one of our podcast chats.

This part is a bit of a blur. Basically, I worked until I was dizzy with exhaustion and had to stop. I uploaded one more version that I called "Final," and tried to pick up the remains of my weekend with the family -- and despite being so tired, slept very badly and started out the week feeling like death warmed over.

And I screwed it up in one respect: the final version that went to the judges had levels set way too low. I had been playing with the mastering plug-in settings, and had taken compression ratios way down so the quiet parts would sound more open, and so there would be a big volume difference between the verses and the rap section. I also set the downward expansion ratios in the multi-band compressor settings to unity, because I didn't want quiet ukulele bits to be faded downward when there was nothing else happening in that EQ band -- I wanted there to be some quiet space that wasn't silence, if that makes sense.

But when I did this, I brought down the overall volume of the track, and I was neglecting in not actually compare it, level-wise, to the way most pop tracks are mastered these days, even ones where limiting is used more judiciously than, say, in Metallica's famously loud mixes. Compression and limiting has been a bit of a thorn in my side -- I don't like a lot of modern pop mixes because there is no dynamic range left -- but when I have to listen to a CD in the car, I appreciate the fact that I can actually hear the details over the engine and road noise. So I try to walk a middle ground.

In the listening party I realized my experiment had resulted in a mix that was just way too quiet -- people just wouldn't expect the track to have such a wide dynamic range. So I had to quickly bounce a new one with more usual compression settings and with gain added going into the multi-band compressor, and with the final limiter stage (Izotope's "Loudness Maximizer") set to start working a few dB lower.

Now the rap section has a "haircut," without being totally squared-off buzz-cut, while the verses are still not hitting the limiter to speak of, which I suppose is a compromise I can live with, since I do want people to be able to listen to the track in real-world environments (in the car, on their iPods while riding the bus, etc., instead of just in soundproof listening rooms).

But of course I was very upset during the listening party and for hours afterwards, feeling like I had done so well until I blew it with a mix no one could hear. Had I gotten more time, I might have tried to do more of the volume correction on the original tracks -- but then again, maybe not, since it doesn't quite make sense to me that a delicately picked ukulele should be as loud as a snare drum hit.

It was too late to get that revised version to the judges, but it is the one on my Bandcamp page and in the SpinTunes album.

That's kind of how it goes with me: there's an idea, and a few words. It seems to be very important to my process to capture something at this stage, and then sleep on it. There's an expansion, and then a contraction. it's important to get out as much as I can before I start editing it down. The process for me is very much like writing an essay or short story.

Grace sees me stress out about this, and asks me once in a while "are you at least enjoying this?" To which I really don't have a satisfactory answer. It is stressful, it is exhausting, and it is miserable. But it is also very gratifying at times. The best I can say is that I enjoy having done it, especially when I can go back to a track after a few weeks of distance and assess it a little more fairly, and think, hey, there's some good-sounding stuff in there!