Category: News

In randomized order, here is the best music Howie heard in 2021.

Abul Mogard, “In Immobile Air” – The varieties of ambient music continue to surprise me. Mogard (a pen name, almost certainly) combines simple pitches and noise like sculpture, crafting installations I seem to approach, wander around, and gently walk away from.

Nala Sinephro, “Space 1.8” – Sax and synth sound like they were made for each other in Sinephro’s cosmic, jazz-inspired explorations.

Nao, “And Then Life Was Beautiful” – Nao’s singular unification of vintage and modern R&B styles. Taking her debut EPs together she’s one record away from acing the Five Album Test, and I don’t doubt she’ll get there.

(more…)

Picking up from my last post, here’s my live-blog of listening to Crash after 13+ years of not listening to it.

So Much To Say – Been a minute. This feels good. Cool riff, love the horn lines.

Two Step – Classic. I’m realizing for the first time how different the production is from UTTAD. The hard-panned guitars are gone, the layers of morphing pads and sustaining violin and whatnot are gone. This sounds more like a big, clean, natural-sounding 70s record, but hi-fi. It’s probably a better sound for the band, though the immersive murkiness of UTTAD works in places. Fade out is a bummer, write an
ending you fools!

Crash Into Me – Unfortunately, this has not aged well. The song and recording are fine, but it’s not escaping its own overplayed-ness to my ears. My poor mom had to overhear me play this so many times :( :(

Too Much – Wow, and we’re jamming again, “Crash” really killed the energy.

41 – Dual electric guitars! Cool new atmosphere. That sax ostinato does it for me. It’s wild how much of this I hear in V for Voice, from the writing to the playing to the mix, which was not on my radar at all. Just that formative, I suppose. I was completely chasing this album in the V for Voice production and had zero idea that’s what I was doing.

Say Goodbye – Dave is such a cheeseball here but it’s a little charming. A little.

(more…)

This, from the recent Pitchfork review of “Crash,” hit hard:

Crash helped give a generation of upstarts permission to do whatever they wanted with their own music. That sort of broad philosophical inspiration was altogether different than what Nirvana, Pavement, or most every other rock act cooler than the Dave Matthews Band supplied at the same time.

I sent the review to Cory, who said:

I still listen to that and “Under the Table…” from time to time! Especially if I want some thoughtful serenity. “Under the Table” makes me feel straight-up better and think-ier and more hopeful which is why I like it better. “Crash” makes me feel kind of the same but also weirder? They were definitely the easiest band to clown on in the ’90s. SUPER successful hippies in a band who wrote radio-friendly songs that were seemingly un-scandalous but often pretty horny! But those records are great and unlike anything else I can think of.

Do you still listen to those guys from time to time? I’m going to put “Crash” on now and hike my skirt up!

I had not listened to either album since importing them to iTunes in 2008, so I started to, and I live-blogged my reactions, now posted below.

The Best Of What’s Around – Oh my god there is so much going on in this mix! Like a moderate number of parts, but they’re all busy AF, and the hard-panned acoustic guitars doing fairly different things is wild.

What Would You Say – This still sounds pretty good. Funky & poppy, like Toad The Wet Sprocket but also Prince could sound cool covering it?

(more…)

I broke the ice on lead vocals for Fight Songs over the long Thanksgiving weekend. Three songs down, eleven to go.

Practicing over the past few weeks has really paid off. (Shocker!) I was really struggling to find notes and maintain steady pitches when I started. Singing for an hour three or four nights a week for about three weeks has put me in a pretty good place at this point.

I’m starting with the songs that are lowest in my register, and will work upward. There’s no rush but I’m aiming to finish around New Year’s Eve.

From there I’m not sure what I’ll do next; organ, percussion, or backing vocals. We’re in year 13 of Fight Songs production, I guess there’s no rush.

During my first trip to Ghana, I bought and had shipped home a player-grade djembe made by a guy named Brain. (Yes, Brain, “a-i.”)

Mike Morris liked the drum and wanted one, I remember. I told him I could get one, and as I recall I took his money, and sent it to Brain with an order.

After that, my memory is unreliable. Over the years I’ve had a growing sense that the drum never arrived, to the point that I’ve wanted to see Mike and talk about it. As a younger person my attitude was that doing international business in cash transfers entailed risk, and this risk was disclosed; buyer beware. Now I feel more like I put my word on a deal and need to square up on it, one way or another.

But here’s the twist; I saw Scott last weekend (to return his Rhodes to him; whole other story!) and he has a drum made by Brain. One that I didn’t know about (or knew, and completely forgot – entirely possible!)

He said his folks gave it to him as a surprise in the fall of 2003. That would have been right when I left for my second time in Ghana. So we have a mystery:

1. How many drums did the Morrises order? One, or two?
2. Did I never find out that one drum was delivered? I was out of touch for three months after it was delivered, then didn’t move back on campus, then graduated and moved to Minnesota. We practiced and played a few shows, but they were all electric, with a drum set (not djembe). We didn’t record. And it went to Scott, not Mike (who I’d taken the money from)
3. Or did I know, and forget entirely? I’m about 50/50 on never knowing vs. forgetting
4. Do I owe Mike anything?

(more…)

Here’s the song “Swell” from the Night Mode album Sea, with photos and a slide show that tell the story of the album.

When I first started recording, I got an inaccurate understanding of compression stuck deep in my mind. I only really started to exorcise it a few years ago, and I still think the way compression is often explained is confusing. (Maybe I’ll post a follow-up on The Compression Conspiracy, or maybe it will come out here.) I’ll attempt to explain compression clearly and simply, touching on limiting and clipping along the way.

Compression is automatic volume reduction, or “variable attenuation” if you prefer. Compression is not soft clipping or peak reduction*.

* Peaks will be reduced in the course of automatic volume reduction processing, but since the whole signal is being reduced it’s confusing to call that result “peak reduction”

Compression is like having a gremlin enthralled to your instructions, whose hand is on a volume knob. You can tell the gremlin how fast to turn the volume down when your input signal gets loud (compressor “attack” time), how fast to turn the volume back up when the input signal gets quieter again (compressor “release” time), how loud is “loud” to you (compressor “threshold”), and whether you want your gremlin to turn down the volume a little, or a lot (compressor “ratio”).

(more…)

The world of guitar (and synth, and bass…) modulation effects overwhelmed me at first, but I’ve learned that most pedals and plugins are based around just a couple of ideas.

	Time-based effects	Filter-based effects
Base version	Chorus	Phaser
Variations	Flange (chorus with feedback) Vibrato (chorus with no dry signal)	Uni-Vibe or “Vibe” (phaser with mis-matched filters)

Time-based effects are created by 1) copying the input signal, 2) delaying the copy by a small amount (a few milliseconds), 3) automatically changing the delay time (say, from 27 ms to 33 ms and back), and then 4) mixing the input (or “dry,” or “not delayed) and delayed signals together (typically at a 50:50 ratio). The resulting sound is a pseudo-doubling effect with a bit of pitch going up and down, some frequencies of the input signal enhanced, and others diminished. Boom; basic chorus.

Flangers operate on the same principle, with shorter delay times and feedback in the delay signal path (just like a delay or echo pedal), resulting in a more pronounced effect. Flangers with knobs for feedback amount are often great modulation pedals because they can cover a lot of territory from subtle near-chorus to crazy flying saucer flange.

(more…)

Cory & Mike did some Halloween raps & beats, check ’em.

For my own future reference, here’s the status of my DS-1s. I switched the battery covers and knobs to get them back to “stock.”

On the left is my first pedal ever, circa 2001-02 for use in No Front with a borrowed double cut Les Paul Jr. and AC30. Cole performed the Casper Electronics mod and did the battery cover art around 2014-15, I did further Casper-related mods in 2016, and recently I put a tone stack mod on a toggle hidden in the battery compartment. This unit will live on the synth minirig board.

On the right is the “DS-1 lab,” my research platform and repository of all of my favorite adjustments, from 2016. It’s a studio piece for guitar, mostly.

Been working on pedals for the past few weeks while I write Fight Songs lyrics.

These are all one-off builds for my own use.

• V4 MV – Passive master volume control for my Ampeg V4 amplifier. Ampeg used to sell these as an accessory but they’re dead simple to make; a single potentiometer wired as a variable resistor. The amp is incredibly loud so this will help bring it partially under control
• DS-1 mods. This pedal is literally my first, from around 2002 (except for the battery compartment cover donated from the “DS-1 lab” unit). At my request Cole modded it years ago with the Casper Electronics gated feedback/oscillation mod. I added my flat + LPF tone stack mod, tucked away on a toggle in the battery compartment
• 404 M 2 ST – A passive mono-to-stereo passive pan box mostly designed for use with my SP-404 sampler. The 404 can record in mono or stereo, and has stereo effects, but doesn’t have any type of simple pan control to move things around in the stereo image. With this I can pan stuff as it’s being sampled
• R2-T2 – Breakout expression box for the Pigtronix Rototron rotary speaker simulator (which mostly lives with my Roland VK-1 organ). The footswitch and toggle engage the Brake function. The knob can be plugged into either the Low or High Rotor Control to defeat the on-board Speed control for that “rotor.” If it’s reminiscent of anyone’s favorite droid, well, that’s a happy coincidence

(more…)