The title is a lyric by Kanye West on Common’s track “They Say.” A hundred percent of my musical energy right now is coming from and going into sampled music. Just about every music purchase I made in the past year was just to get high-quality samples. I now recognize my CD collection as a valuable hard-copy backup of a vast, well-recorded sample library. For just about any song except the major masterpieces, I’d much rather listen to the hook repeated endlessly over a hip-hop beat than the song itself, and Reason and Recycle are only too happy to oblige me. Being able to effortlessly homebrew my own dance music has given me some insight into how good it must feel to make your own cheese or wine or shoes or sushi or computer programs.
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Gawker is the start page on Anna’s computer, and I find myself reading it five or seven or seventeen times a day. My mom recently asked me what it is about Gawker Media that makes me love it so much. Their editor-in-chief Nick Denton answered the question for me in a PC Magazine article, Succeed At Blogging The Gawker Way. Like a Gawker article, it’s short, funny, brutally frank and packs maximum useful information into a minimum number of words:
“Get specific. Pick something that interests you. Revel in weird topics. Don’t be afraid to get conceptual. Keep it friendly (and human).”
Also inspirational is Gawker’s list of blog media clichés, for which they graciously shoulder their share of the blame:
“Best. [ultimate thing or experience.] Ever/Evar. [negative experience, situation, or description]; I just threw up a little bit in my mouth. [purposefully non-ghetto statement], yo. [undesirable conclusion]. Oy. [amazed paraphrase of opposing position]. Seriously? Seriously? What’s next? [outlandish scenario]? I’m looking at you, [example of complaint]. Um, [condescension]? [Undesirable experience] made my [sensory organ] bleed. [x] is the new [y].”
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To understand all the fascinating sonic manipulation you can do with a computer, it helps first to understand how you get sounds in and out of the computer to begin with. The first thing you need is a digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital converter. Your computer’s sound card has one built in, though it’s not a very good one. For professional audio purposes, you want a specialized piece of hardware located outside the electrically noisy environment of the computer case. I use an Mbox 2, which I bought because it comes free with Pro Tools, as of this moment the industry standard digital audio recording and editing platform. Be advised: Digidesign, the maker of Pro Tools, is the Microsoft of the audio world. Their market dominance has made them lazy, arrogant and indifferent to customer service. Pro Tools has a primitive and kludgy interface and is a buggy nightmare with ongoing compatibility problems. I’m rapidly approaching the point of moving to some other system, maybe Apple’s Logic.
At the physical level, a sound is a rhythmic vibration of air molecules. Your ears can detect subtle changes in the air pressure, and can reconstruct remarkably good guesses about what might be agitating the air to produce those changes. When the air pressure fluctuates in a steady sine-wave pattern, you hear a musical pitch. The faster the fluctuation, the higher the pitch. Microphones work a lot like your ears. They contain pieces of metal that vibrate in response to the vibrations of the air, generating a fluctuating electromagnetic disturbance. The central miracle of digital audio is the way the computer can read the rhythmic fluctuations of electric current on a wire and store them as plain old numbers. (more…)
Babsy and I met via Craigslist in 2003. She posted in the Musicians section about this gig she had at the now-defunct Korova Milk Bar in the East Village, and how she was looking for a guitarist or some other instrumentalist. The idea was this: she would mix beats on a Roland MC-909 groovebox and sing, and I would improvise textural sounds on top. Her repertoire was a set of pop songs in a variety of genres, sung in a flat, affectless voice thickly coated in digital abstraction: delay, harmonizer, distortion, peculiar reverbs. We also did a fair amount of free improv, jams with a beat and a key and Babsy’s improvised lyrics or wordless vocalizing and no further structure. We tried several different iterations of the band over the next five years. I played guitar, regular and baritone, and sometimes heavily processed harmonica and mandolin. We had a bassist, Chris Luard, playing acoustic, electric, and a little electric upright. Sometimes we had a trumpet player, Jesse Selengut, who came equipped with his own array of digital effects units and a sensibility informed by seventies Miles. A few other musicians drifted in and out. We did one show as a trio with a banjo player, which I thought was a big success, but evidently the banjo player didn’t because we never heard from him again. We continued to get together in a noncommittal way to play and record, and experiment in open-ended ways.
Then a few things happened in my musical life. Guitar gigs dried up. Laptop DJ gigs appeared slowly in their place. I got deeply into Reason, then Recycle, and the production possibilities of Pro Tools. I wrote and recorded a lot of spacy R&B with Love Child that got increasingly posthuman and electronic as we went along. Nicole is a legit singer with great chops, but we still did some pitch correction on her using Melodyne, for instance to organize her melismas into definite melodies. Melodyne is designed to make the singer still sound human at the end. It doesn’t do that perfectly quantized, hard right angled robot sound we were hearing on the radio. So I shelled out for Autotune. I tried it on Nicole and it was rad. Then I tried it on Babsy and it was even more rad. Filtered through Autotune, her voice took on a keyboard-like quality that we realized was the missing ingredient in the sound we’d been after for five years. And thus was born Revival Revival. We recently did our first show in this configuration, using Autotune live through Babsy’s laptop, and I don’t mind telling you, it raged. My experience with Autotune has felt like stepping out the door of a rocket ship to explore a whole new sonic planet. Want to come explore it with us?
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I love everything about Flickr except its name. First of all, creative misspelling is so five minutes ago. Second of all, the word ‘flicker’ has no conceptual connection to a photo-sharing social network that I can think of, except, I guess, in the very literal sense that a computer image flickers thirty times a second to produce the illusion of motion. And there my griping ends. Once you’re past the name, Flickr is everything you could want in an image site and more.
As I develop my book, I gather a lot of images. I’m a visual thinker with an art background, and through playing with Flickr, I stumbled on the idea of a visual outline to complement the written one. (more…)
The most practically useful thing on the whole entire social web is Delicious. Its original point was to store your web browser bookmarks online. That’s reason enough to use it. But the real value of Delicious is how it connects the thoughts in your head to the thoughts in the heads of innumerable internet strangers. Even more useful is the way it stores, reorganizes and reflects your own thoughts back to you. Delicious feels less like a web site I look at and more like a new module of my brain. It’s also like a slow-paced but highly absorbing text-based computer game, a loosely organized internet scavenger hunt. (more…)
I find myself in the new and delightful position of writing for money, with an immediate goal of making a real living this way. The last time I tried to write something long, I was in college, using Windows 3.1 and good old Wordperfect 6. Then the Microsoft hegemony set in and I switched to Word, along with the rest of the industrialized world. Each successive version was a bigger and bigger drag, with more toolbars and menus and animated characters giving unwanted advice. Finally, it got to the point where I gave up on Word completely. I’ve been doing as much word processing as I can using plain text editors and HTML. But this year I wrote a book proposal and some other long-form, complicated stuff. It got to be difficult keeping track of which thoughts were in which text file. Then I read a blog post by Steven Poole called “Goodbye, Cruel Word” that hipped me to Scrivener, and I’ve never looked back. (more…)
I produce electronic music, on my own and with my bands Revival Revival and Love Child. We use a lot, and I mean a lot, of samples of copyrighted material. If you’re worried about our legal well-being, be at ease. We have yet to make a nickel from any of it, and if we ever eventually do, we’ll be sure to get the proper clearances first. It’s usually easy to get permission to use copyrighted works, you fill out a form online and pony up the fee, it takes ten minutes. The fee is often totally reasonable. This assumes that the copyright holder isn’t an uptight dork like Paul McCartney who doesn’t license samples. Maybe he and Michael Jackson will run out of money some day and be forced open up the Beatles catalog wide, that would be cool. They could release DJ vinyl of the whole catalog, vocals on one side, instrumentals on the other. Imagine the five years of top forty hip-hop following that release. Can we make this happen somehow?
Anyway, here’s my process for sampling and remixing. (more…)
If you use a Mac, that program is called TextEdit. You can find it in your Applications folder, under Utilities. If you use Windows, the program is called Wordpad, made, ironically, by Microsoft. If you poke around your Start menu among the various programs, it’s in there somewhere, depending which version of Windows you have.
Until I got Scrivener, I used TextEdit for pretty much all word processing. I use TextEdit to compose e-mails, Twitter posts and anything that’s going to wind up in a web form. Twitter had a few weeks where maybe a third of the time, you’d type a post, click Submit, and your thoughtful little missive would vanish, never to be seen again. Textedit lets you save. Also, I use it to write myself little post-it type notes. Macs come with a program called Stickies expressly for the post-it purpose that has the virtue of autosaving every keystroke. The thing is that the little stickies aren’t congenial to serious word processing, they’re more for phone numbers and other more durable reference material. Textedit is a better general-purpose scratchpad. (more…)
I used to have a jazz band. I was in charge of the sheet music, making sure everyone had the most up to date versions of their parts. There are some very nice computer programs that make music notation as easy as word processing, like Finale and Sibelius, but keeping track of all the printouts was a nightmare. Like most jazz bands, we had a lot of substitutions in our lineup, and we couldn’t always get everyone together in the same place before every gig. It would have been super convenient to be able to just email all the pertinent charts out to everyone. However, only one other person in the band had the same notation program as me, and he had a different and incompatible version.
This isn’t just a problem for exotic software like Finale and Sibelius. Any user of Microsoft Word has experienced format headaches trying to share a document between different computers. You work hard on your document, and then you send it off for someone else to read or print, and the fonts come out all screwed up, or the graphics run off the page, or the screen just fills with gibberish. Even if you and your recipient are both using the same version of Word, all the vagaries of email systems and operating systems and printers can easily bork your careful formatting. (more…)