While my Xbox gently weeps

I feel like discussing this morning’s announcement of a Beatles music game a la “Rock Band” or “Guitar Hero”. If you read my blog or don’t live in a submarine, then you probably know that Apple Corps. and Harmonix have banged out a deal for (what I expect) a Beatles game that will be a lot like “Rock Band”. There are few details, but Paul, Ringo, Yoko, and Olivia (Harrison) are reported to be involved.

What interests me is that Giles Martin is also involved — the same Giles that worked so lovingly with his Dad George to remix Beatles songs for a Las Vegas show based on the Fab Four’s music.

There has been a lot of stuff flying around lately about the quality of the music in a “Rock Band” or “Guitar Hero” version of a song versus the quality of the original recording. What helps a band like Metallica have a better sounding record in a video game is that video games don’t have the processing power (yet) to apply advanced signal processing to the final “mix” in a game.

This means that without the aggressive dynamic range limiting done in the studio, the songs will have a different (you can decide if it’s better or worse) sound. So…

This and some other factors mean that Giles and co. are gonna have a tough job in the following areas:

• Believably pulling separate instrument and vocal tracks out of four-track mix/master reels (God help them if they re-record)
• Applying (pseudo?) real-time compression and limiting to give listeners/players the same flowing, pumping sound that makes many of the Beatles’s records so distinct-sounding
• Pulling in an older audience that enjoyed the Beatles in the first place
• Pulling in a newer audience that would rather listen to Limp Bi

Oh well, I’ll buy the game. I’m excited to see what they come up with.

Making little jewels

A quote from an interview with Brian Eno in The San Fransisco Chronicle — I enjoyed it because it applies in part to my daily work.

Q: How did you come to compose “The Microsoft Sound”?

A: The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, “Here’s a specific problem — solve it.”

The thing from the agency said, “We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said “and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.”

I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel.

In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.

Bash ‘em for no reason

I really like the magazine Tape Op. It is a magazine that provides interviews with some of the most overlooked and creative (mostly working-class) music and recording people — folks who do it for the love and not bling. I have several gripes with the magazine (editor Larry Crane writes like the bullish and trouble making kind of guy you’d hate to have on your web forum, the editorials seep with pretentious and self-serving references to studio culture, drugs, and vinyl records), but the variety of interviews is awesome, and it is definitely one of the most informative resources I know of when it comes to music and audio, especially considering that you can subscribe for free.

Anyway, I was seriously irked by the latest issue’s interview with Lewis Durham. He’s from a group called Kitty Daisy & Lewis, a family band from London that only makes sense in the same sort of way that Cherry Poppin’ Daddies or Royal Crown Revue made sense fifteen years ago. In the same post that I’ll praise Tape Op for interviewing people who really make a difference in recorded music, I’ll criticize them for including Durham’s poorly-written (not to mention typewritten and scanned-in?!) history of recording. A following interview explains the confusion regarding the quality of the article — Durham turns out to be not more than a kid who’s likely obsessed with zoot suits, lucky strikes, vargas pinups, and fifty-year-old 4-track recorders for all of the wrong reasons (namely that by liking them he can recreate the sound of rockabilly and mid-century swing pop — this is clearly mirrored by the fact that using a typewriter to write your Tape Op article doesn’t make it a good article).

Why would I criticize this kid who’s just doing what he wants and trying to make the music that he likes? Well, I don’t know. Maybe I’m jealous — I too had an obsessive streak when I was eighteen, and if I had the success of his group, I would have probably taken it farther than him. I think that what he and is group are doing is fine, but that Tape Op buying-in the way that they did is annoying.

One of the things I like about Tape Op is the “it’s not the tools that matter, it’s the person using them” frame of mind. The inclusion of this article and interview go against that mentality in a very rigid and glaring way.

In the end, I won’t complain — the magazine’s free and it’s all cool — I didn’t have to read the articles. But since I decided I can complain about the absurdity of Sarah Palin ever having held an office higher than notary (and ultimately the possibility of becoming vice-president), I can criticize other people as much as I want.

The blair self-indulgence project, or: The ghost in the pro tools machine

Last night I was getting some work done while half paying attention to the Grammy awards on TV. It’s nice to see people being recognized who deserve extra recognition. One of those people is Rich Costey, who mixed the phenomenal-sounding new Foo Fighters record (Echoes, Silence, Patience, & Grace).

Anyway, Mr. Costey’s been on my mind lately because the new Mars Volta release (The Bedlam in Goliath) also sounds really nice, and I was reading an interview the other day in which he described his usage of Kyma for sound manipulation. So I went on a little Google bender to see if I could find more articles where Costey discusses his techniques, and stumbled upon a gem from MP3.com on the making of The Bedlam in Goliath. It’s an interview with Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, where he describes how mixing sessions went wrong thanks to a cursed Ouija board:

“And these things keep happening and they happen in front of Rich Costey, my mixing engineer, who’s a very scientific man. So he’s the type of person that you tell this story to and he says, “No, it’s your imagination. You’re making connections that aren’t there.” And he sees it finally. Throughout the process, tracks disappear before his very ears or before his very eyes, however you want to look at it. And we go backwards into the older playlists and it say that the track never existed and there’s no history of it. We go backwards into the older drives and there’s no history.

And he just can’t understand it. He goes home and he does research and he comes back the next day. He says, “You know what it is, I figured it out. I looked it up. It’s quantum entanglement. It’s not a curse. It’s quantum entanglement.” So for Rich, he needs a scientific explanation, which is quantum entanglement, whatever the fuck that is, and for us we see it as the curse. It seemed evident that there was so much fighting against [making] the record that the only way to lift the curse was to actually finish the record. This became my everyday battle with tracks disappearing and going through three different computers and 16 different drives that this insanity of wanting to give up on the project and just start fresh with something else and wipe my hands clean of it, but understanding that if I do that things won’t be right and we’ll just keep having this bad luck. And so that’s the long version there.”

I really just had to laugh at that one.