songblog

A.I.C.D.L Part 7 -Live music is best

Its Sunday morning, and I have just about recovered from my crazy long week. Most of this recovery has to do with me actually going out to see live music for a change, which is good for you.
A few weeks ago I saw that Meat Beat Manifesto was coming to town, with the Dub Trio as the openers. Years ago I missed my only chance to see Meat Beat as I left the club they were to play at before they took the stage. That’s a whole other story I won’t go into here, but suffice it to say that I really didn’t want to miss them this time.
I may not like everything that Jack Dangers puts out, but I have a few of his Meat Beat albums and no doubt the guy is hugely talented. A bigger draw for me was that my old friend and bandmate Mark Pistel was going to play with Meat Beat – at least I was pretty sure he was still with them, had not spoken with him in a year or so. Time goes by quick when you move away from San Francisco.
Mark and I played together in the early 80s in Social Fabric, a band destined for obscurity, but we did play a lot of shows and had some very crazy times. From the first day I met him Mark was not only an excellent bassist, but new lots about sound reinforcement, which is helping him still as he runs his studio in SF. Needless to say, he’s a great guy.
But lets go back in time a bit. The Meat Beat show was Friday, but earlier in the week Jeff called me and invited me to go to a show with Paulette and him and some Gypsy Caravan dancers (right, you know Paulette teachers belly dance, since you have avidly read every single line I have ever posted on this blog.) The other week when Jeff had been playing me stuff he liked, he played me some cuts by Ganga Giri, which is the first didgeridoo music I have ever heard that I liked.
This was supposed to be an early show, start time at 8:00 pm, which on a Wednesday night seemed OK by me.
I rush home and Barbara, who takes care of my soul as well as my body, had some quick meal for me, and I ran out the house down to the club.
Now I know that shows never ever start on time, so it was 8:30-ish before I got there into a totally empty club. Well, not totally. The warm up band, Luminous Fog from here in Portland, were doing their sound check. I didn’t see anyone else I knew, and after downing a quick beer for medicinal purposes only, bagged it for awhile but not before I thought, oh crap, an off nite and no crowd, how many times I have been in this situation, only much worse cause I was in the band!
When I came back Jeff, Paulette and some belly dancers were back. At least there were a few people in the crowd now.
Abut 9:45 Luminous Fog begins to play. There are a bunch of people in this band, and the suckers can really play well, its like a mixture of reggae, funk and some 70s rock/funk stuff that, as Jeff said, none of those in the band were even alive when this stuff came out. My fave song: “Your tax dollars go to build a police state”.
At one point, Paulette coaxed me out on the dance floor. Lets get this straight: I am not much of a dance, especially when I am just wearing sandals, but I hope I don’t look too retarded. I always figured hey, I am in the band, I can dance with my instrument around my neck, ain’t that good enough?
We danced thru a bunch of tunes and took a rest. Paulette and I were checking out the dancers, some real good ones as it turned out, and then one skinny guy with a little pointed beard. He looked like he was kinda having spasms and being pulled by some guy with strings like a puppet, at the same time. Sad. That’s what I am afraid of, I will look like that when I dance!!!!!
And the band played on. And on. And on. Forever it seemed like. I mean, I do like what they do, but I have to get my ass out of bed for work in the morning, ya know?
Finally the set it over, and Ganga Giri gets set up. Here’s the deal: he plays amplified and effected didgeridoo, along with a DJ that spins not tunes but sounds, a bassist that also has stuff happening on a laptop, and a drummer with big ethnic tom-toms and flute.
It’s a happening thing, a great bunch of grooves and Ganga is fun to look at, shaved head, a million tattoos and several didgeridoo of different sizes. He dances around these things, some of which are probably 10 feet long.
Good stuff, but man its late by now. I dance a few more numbers and bag it. A good show but way too late for a work nite.
The Meat Beat show on Friday was way, way later than that. Surprisingly, it did start on time, about 9:30 or so. The Dub Trio was playing when I got there at 9:45. They are an interesting band, with a great drummer, but not as dubby as I would like. The drummer had a Bad Brains t-shirt on, and I can see why with some of what they played. Good, but in my opinion, not worth the buzz, since lots of what they play isn’t dub but more punkish, and god I am so over that……..
Meat Beat came on about 11:00 and gave a long and intense show. There was so much stuff on the stage that they couldn’t set up correctly – it’s a tiny stage after all. Its pretty much this: three racks of synths and computers, a couple of rear projection screens and a drummer with an electronic kit.
Mark was one stage near the back, and as I found out later, was running the whole show using Live on his Mac (I have to point out, in strict fairness to PC users everywhere, his Mac crashed at one point. Lucky they have a backup, but the point is: all computers crash, got me?)
The most fascinating thing about the show to me was that two of the musicians on stage were actually running some custom made software that allowed them to mix clips from movies, complete with audio and effects, in with all the rest of the music. Wild stuff, to see all these horror film clips and hear the highly effected sound merging with the – lets get it clear – massive wall o’ beats that were being produced. All these clips were triggered live using Korg Microkontrol boxes. This is real, honest to god improvisational electronic music, what I have been trying to get to for ages and ages now! How could I not be impressed? Well, if the mix bit big time, that’s how. Its really distressing to me how bad the in house sound crews can be in clubs. With this show, I just don’t think they knew how to handle electronic music, since the more traditional Dub Trio sounded fine. In any event, it was a distraction, since all I could hear, thru my you-bet-your-ass-mandatory ear plus was bass – actually I could feel that vibrating the whole floor, and this huge mush of mids and some ear piercing highs. At one point I loosened the ear plugs a bit to get a better sound, and it helped a bit but the sound was loud to the point of distortion and so I put them back in. Very disappointing! I was carefully watching the drummer, and many times could not actually distinguish what he was playing in that awful mix.
Be that as it may, it was an impressive show and the crowd loved it. Its nice to see that not everyone likes bland pop music in the world. I had a great time afterwards hanging out with Mark and the band, and was most pleased to meet Jack Dangers. He seems like a really nice guy, and we had some time to talk some shop about flutes and other wind instruments. He even plays bass flute and bass clarinet. I am jealous of that, and of his amazing synth collection, which includes a Roland System 100 modular system. Jack told me it used to be owned by the Human League. Don't you want me baby? You mean, your synth collection? No shit! Thinking about when he bought it, well, Jack has been at this for some time. Way, way ahead of the curve!
Best of course was time to catch up with Mark, and getting some info about mutual friends of ours. I am so pleased that at least one person I know is making it at some level in the music business, doing challenging and original music.
I drank too much, stayed up too late and had a bit of a hangover – not bad for an old geezer like me!
Wait, you say, what has this to do with the mixing of the CD? Here is the skinny: on Friday, before I went out, I had about an hour and decided to tackle one of the two remaining songs. This is an instrumental called Water Wheel, which I totally re-recorded from my first shot at it, to get rid of some awful recording artifacts and replace the drum sounds. Now that I have a bit of a method, and a bunch of presets that I am using for various signal processing, things are really speeding up. You might note that I am using Battery for the real drums sounds, so that its easy for me to pick a kit that I like and its easy to process this kit for mixing. So now I will put, say, a compressor on the kick, and listen to what presets I have already made for other songs. Then I modify a preset that is close, and save it as songname – kick. Makes it really easy! And I do this on the snare, cymbals, all that.
Its not like a cookie cutter approach, since each song is different and on some drum kits, I don’t need to do much at all, especially if the cymbals are recorded with some ambience. Bottom line is that I got an OK mix in about an hour.
Yesterday I mixed the last song in about an hour and a half. One thing I am doing now, is copying the vocal line as many times as needed, putting effects on the secondary/tertiary tracks, and using the mute tool in Sonar to only allow thru the parts that I want to effect. This is so damn handy!
The other thing is that I falling in love with the effects in Reaktor. These are so amazingly flexible, I mean to say you can get the strangest sounds from them, but also very nice traditional reverbs and delays. I most certainly will have to upgrade to version 5, since I understand that amongst all the other changes, the effects sound better too.
So the big news: I have rough mixes of all my songs! I have 12 more days to finish up to hit my target deadline of my birthday. My next step is to go back, listen to all the tracks and do some fine tuning of volumes on each track. Then I am going to dump some tracks from commercial releases and compare the sounds I have with someone who presumable knows what they are doing. This should take my crappy speakers out of play. Last as always is play the finished songs in the car, the ultimate test! Stay tuned……………….