Category Archives: Digital Music

On GB and JD

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While visiting my folks this past weekend, I snagged the 20″ iMac that my step-dad had, to his dismay, found no use for after buying it sometime in 2007. I got it for a beyond-fair price, and the Megabus, despite other shortcomings I won’t get into here, did allow me to load the big white box with the plastic gray handle as a technically-extra checked bag.

The thing looks absurd on my desk, but maybe that’s because it’s got my 2004 iBook flanked to the left, while I try to keep track of what needs moving over, and figure out how. Many questions remain, but what I’m sure of is what I’m most psyched about: that everything on it, including my iTunes library, Garageband files, and AIF’s for burning Zapruder Point CDs, will fit EASILY, and it will ALL back up onto a single external drive.

Even before I got the iBook, I knew I’d have to play storage games, knowing my music would never fit on the 40 (really 30) GBs. Lately it was getting even more headachey (!!!), with me offloading some musical stuff onto thumb drives, etc. What a relief to say goodbye to all of that, even if my dreams of wireless keyboards and mice are deferred. (Hey: If “settling” for a slightly less shiny-and-new computer is how the economic crisis trickles down to me…then I have a lot to be thankful for.)

In other news, while I was driving around Cleveland, I borrowed a more-80′s-than-70′s John Denver mix I’d made for Mom about a year ago. I was floored not just by how many words I still remembered, but by how perfectly within my range all the vocal lines fit. Singing “Some Days are Diamonds” at the top of my lungs while cruising 480 was a blast.

Now that I write that, it occurs to me that whenever I put on John Denver at home, I can’t resist singing either. Makes sense, even if it’s not the coolest thing to admit to. I was raised on this stuff. Aww yeah:

Manic-Compressive

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Beginning with the sinking feeling balancing out the gee-whizzery that came with my first iPod, and culminating with Nick Southall’s excellent Stylus piece from 2006, I’ve always looked down on compression. Whenever I make mix CDs, I try to use uncompressed files whenever I have them, and I make note of the fact on the mix artwork itself. Same when I copy whole albums for people: I re-rip the CD in an uncompressed form, then re-burn it and delete the files. By the same token, when people give me discs, I’m always wary of the source. Call it snobbery if you will, but in some listening configurations, it’s glaringly obvious when you’ve got a rip of a burn of a compressed rip (etc.).

Now when I record music, I take this suspicion with me. I even made an arch comment in the notes to my last CD, something about how the files have not been compressed, so “I leave that to you.” (Yep, like my version of Queen’s “no keyboards were used” disclaimers from the 70′s.  What a nerd!) Still, I’ve recently been reminded that I’m actually conflating two different things here. There’s the compression of audio files, and all the gains HD space / loss in sound quality that comes with it. There’s a consumer level of this kind of compression, like when you rip a CD to ACC or MP3 format. There’s also the, erm, “producer” end of this, where, say, Metallica or Oasis compress holy hell out of their albums at mastering time in order for the end product to bore into your eardrums–oops, I mean grab your attention–upon first listen. It’s basically the same principle that makes television ads sound louder. They are in fact louder because they’re compressed.

Anyway, the articles linked above and below say way more than I could on that subject. Getting back to the conflation of compressions… Maybe a better way to put this would be to say that I have a blanket fear of compression that’s proven inappropriate and impractical in a recording scenario. I’m talking here about applying compression to individual tracks, like I did with Scott while he was here, and like I’ll probably do on my own projects going forward. In old bands, I’ve heard compression applied successfully before, and I was trying to do this to some of the wilder, dipping-and-cresting instruments Scott brought to the table (hello, accordion!). Only Garageband, in its consumer-level-ness, only has so many compression settings, and during my first mix, I couldn’t find any that sounded natural. “Natural” meaning without losing too much nuance.

(Parenthetical aside: All of this sound-talk is as squishy and subjective as wine-tasting, in my opinion. “Punchy,” “warm” and “wet” are just like “peppery,” “buttery” and “notes of peach,” each set of phrases having equal potential to describe as to elude…or infuriate. In fact, due to the high volume of wine I was drinking when my old band was mixing The Problem with Fun, I still sometimes think of tannin-rich reds as having “a lot of high end.” But anyway…)

When I went for a second pass at mixing Scott’s stuff, I found a compression setting (“basic vocal,” I think it was called) that, to my ears at least, did exactly what it was supposed to do. It took some of the jump-outy-ness (!!!) of Scott’s more dynamic vocal takes and smoothed them out without flattening them like a pancake. Ditto that pesky accordion and those unfortunate cases where we had to record the voice plus one instrument in a single go. These tracks, placed alongside closer-miked, UNcompressed ones (electric guitar, keyboards), maintained their character without getting lost, or riding obnoxiously over the top. A happy discovery.

Of course, when I listen back on my iPod, such distinctions aren’t exactly noticeable. So is it a fool’s game? Meh.  All I know is that it’s fun, and on the off chance anyone wanted to blast the stuff through proper speakers, or some Bose headphones, I’d like to think it helps with the immersion. Now if someone could get that message to the Killers…that’d be great.

Meanwhile, here’s some further reading on the “loudness wars,” if you’re so inclined. Includes fascinating graphs that display just how compressed music has become in the last 20-odd years:

http://www.cdmasteringservices.com/dynamicdeath.htm

iThings Being What They Are

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I wish I could tell you why I feel so awfully ambivalent about my iPod. I’ve taken to calling it a “glorified walkman,” but that’s just a cheap shot; it doesn’t come close to articulating my lukewarm feelings. Back when the Cubs were still playing well, I thought I just wanted the thing to have a radio, but that would merely make it a glorified AM/FM walkman. No, there’s something else, and I’m not sure I can summon it up.

I guess I expected that having this thing (along with the iBook and iTunes and the Chicken iNuggets) would cause me to slap my head in the same V-8 style I used when I first started downloading mp3s (legally) at work. But just as in my twenties, with my handful of failed attempts to graduate from alcohol to pot, I’m left here shaking my head. It’s kind of cool in kind of the same way…but what’s the point, really?

It’s anticlimactic, and for weeks now I’ve been unable to put my finger on why. Mp3s, as flawed as they are, have revolutionized the mobility of music. And in their wake, any music geek such as I will open the floodgates to a current of songs old and new–the likes of which I haven’t been submerged in since college. This in itself is cause to celebrate, as I’ve already said in these, erm, pages. Now assuming (unsafely, in my opinion, but let’s just go with it) that having these compressed little files is the same to me as having a proper CD or album…

But there I’ve given myself away. Calling an uncompressed CD cut a “proper” version of a song is a sure way to show my age, eh? And that’s what I really think this is all about, why I’m not enthralled with the iPod and the rest of it: my age and the irreversible, undeniable way it informs my understanding of music. It’s one thing to be, thanks to new technology, suddenly exposed to a lot of music. It’s another thing entirely to expect that same technology to organize your music in any way similar to the Gutenberg-old idea of record spines peering out from the shelves.

Which is not to say I don’t enjoy my iPod, that I’m not impressed with its ability to carry around 90 albums (I’ve got the mini) at a time. And I don’t want to knock iTunes completely; as a data organization system, it’s terribly efficient and outrageously pretty.

But that’s just it. No matter how sexy the interface, no matter how deviously swapped or stolen, we’re talking, here, about files and data. And with files and data, with naked digital bits you title and sort on a screen, there seems to be a hazy layer of anonymity between you and whatever comes out of the speakers.

And as the store component of iTunes demonstrates, the ease of buying these things is strictly a consumer perk, not an aesthetic one. Indeed, the line between checking a band out and buying their product has practically disappeared, since the line between the files at a download store like iTunes and the files on your hard drive is merely two or three clicks thin. My God, man! Before I buy your album, is it too much to ask for dinner and a movie first?

But seriously. I think what I’m getting at here (aside from a gob-smacking culture-wide willingness to stomach a HUGE plummet in audio quality–but that’s another rant), is a disappearing thing-ness to music appreciation. And I know we’re getting into a slippery area here, that it’s easy to denounce any object as product, any worshipping of that object as consumerism. But in my short lifetime I can honestly say I’ve experienced CDs, records and cassettes as so much more. Whether we acquire them in a brick-and-mortar or slip them to each other at parties, whether they’re stacked on the edge of our desk as we’re working late at night or they’re held in our laps as we read the lyrics–they’re things that matter. And in a way they cease to matter if they’re not…well…things.