as the horse-bot says

So, yes, we are back in the temple now. I expected having to do some refreshing of my memory, getting used to a new forum organization, catching up on some minimal number of changes (many of them social) and getting to know a lot of new people and catching up with old friends.

What I didn’t expect was a big change that happened about a year ago, which affects the structure and traditions that had been firmly established. Some of these traditions need something new to replace them, and no rush decisions are being made. So things are in a state of transition. It’s a lot to take in, but that means everyone is disoriented, not just newly returned old folks.

Also speaking of chaos, they use Discord now. The internet is quite a different place than it was in the late 90s or even 15 years ago. I’ve mostly been ignoring Discord in other contexts since I find it a sort of weird hybrid semi-persistent chatroom with some awful interface choices, and forums are just better for certain kinds of things. (Particularly for catching up with long-running topics.) But now I have sufficient motivation for dealing with it and I’m starting to not be completely lost there. It definitely does have advantages over IRC or AIM chats, but… holy cow does it need a “jump to first post” button somewhere. I don’t want to read an entire 3-year long discussion backwards.

Also I have an album to release. I’m really happy with how it turned out! I just need to spend the time concentrating on writing up the info and then publish it.

tab A slot B

My “Mastering Chain 9-24” template that I’m currently (literally right now as I type this) using for the next album release looks like this:

I’ve mentioned TB Equalizer Pro before. It’s become my go-to equalizer, and it’s getting more use than I ever had for all my EQs combined thanks to its Transient/Sustained, Direct/Ambience and various dynamic options, as well as a very effective brickwall highpass filter. So it’s no surprise I prefer it for mastering as well as on individual tracks. That said, so far it’s had very little to do because everything’s already in pretty great shape.

Just released yesterday, Waves Curve Equator is a dynamic auto-EQ tool in the same neighborhood as Gullfoss, Soothe, TEOTE, Wavefactory Equalizer and others. Despite the marketing speak, none of the tools in this category is as effective at fixing truly obnoxious resonances as manually setting up EQ is. But many of them successfully add a bit of polish and clarity. You may or may not be able to consciously notice a difference between the “before” and “after” but things just sound 5-10% nicer. Equator, so far, has been doing a great job at this (offering a bit more sculpting than many and some handy additional options.

DDMF MagicDeathEye is an official emulation of the coveted Magic Death Eye tube-based compressor. I like it because it’s basically foolproof, or “respectful of the source material” as they say. Unless you just crank it up too loudly and it distorts in something further down the chain, you can’t make it sound bad. Sometimes, like with Equator, stuff just sounds better after having run through it. The goal though is to get a bit louder. In my recording process I tend to record at safe levels, quiet-but-not-too-quiet, and normalize to -3dBFS true peak as a starting point. Having done that, I can typically just use some default settings on the compressor and it’ll be good.

SideMinder Max makes sure the stereo image isn’t too wide anywhere (phase correlation issues) while letting me enhance or restrict the width if I want to across four different frequency ranges. My goal is a good stereo image in headphones. Usually by this point though, I have already taken care of any real issues so this is just a last safety measure.

Elephant is my limiter. A chance for a small bit more volume boost perhaps, and more importantly, a guarantee that the peaks of my signal stay below -1dB to make sure whatever compression algorithms Bandcamp uses don’t glitch out.

Span, Correlometer and Youlean Loudness Meter are visual tools for analyzing the results, making sure levels are right and I don’t have anything weird happening. These are no substitute for using one’s ears of course, but still helpful.

Not shown here: OVC128. More often than not I run the output of Bitwig’s mastering pass through this one in Sound Forge. It oversamples 128 times, boosts the signal, clips the peaks and then re-cuts — all of this lets me increase the overall volume some more without introducing anything nasty.

Yes, there’s a lot of redundancy here in terms of getting levels and EQ right. But this is a process that works well for me, and most of the time I can do it on autopilot with my saved template settings. With the music I make I am very much not looking for “pure” sound — I don’t worry about converters, EQing too many times, noise floor etc. but I am picky about certain things, and this setup lets me get it right.

I do have a name for the album — I realized there was a certain theme to some of the titles and sounds, connected by an obscure quote from another musician, and a general vibe. The cover art is really not my mental “picture” of the scene I associate with all of this, but I think it works.

What does not work is the Kickstarter for Aodyo Loom, the ribbon-style MPE controller I was so looking forward to. They have spent all the money, they have found that manufacturing costs are out of their reach, and they’re very likely to just go bankrupt and be unable to refund their backers, unless an investor swoops in to bail them out, which seems unlikely.

This is a known risk for Kickstarter, Indiegogo etc. and in my experience, things do usually work out pretty well. (I’m a little more leery of backing indie game developers this way because I’d rather have a playable demo to know I’m going to enjoy the game, but still, a good majority of them do release something.) So I’m not super upset about losing the money this time — it wasn’t that much — just disappointed in not being able to have this seemingly ideal controller.

What I want in a controller is:

  • not hideously expensive (this eliminates several “Serious Instrument” options)
  • compact, preferably in the 12 inch wide range.
  • full support for pressure control; I usually want to use pressure rather than gated envelopes to control levels/filters/etc.
  • allows smooth pitch glides.
  • reliable.

I guess my hopes are now on the Erae II, which was running under its own Kickstarter and is supposed to be released Any Day Now. There have been public demos and several YouTubers actually playing them, so unless they’ve reached the same manufacturing wall that Aodyo ran face-first into, the outlook seems to be pretty good. This is fancier, and at the non-Kickstarter price, more than I would have liked to pay (but maybe I could snag a used one) but seems worthy from what I’ve seen so far. I might decide that I just don’t need it though… we’ll see.

walk like a Kemetic

Operation Write Stuff In Ink has been a great success, not just in that there is ink on paper forming words, but in that I’m finding spiritual clarity and inspiration. I am making connections between experiences and insights from years ago, and some of those connections are to more recent stuff as well.

I’ve decided to reintroduce myself to the temple again, at least on the forum. I was officially part of it from 1998 to 2011, so I’ve been out again as long as I was in. I don’t know yet to what extent I’m going to commit, and don’t feel a need to rush into it.

In that previous phase, I wanted to connect to the Divine and to the Unseen, and I wanted to make myself a better person with a better life. This time, I feel like I have the connection, I just need to do things with it. One can always keep fixing oneself of course, but right now what I’m thinking about is connecting my spiritual practice more deeply to my music in some way that makes both better. An interesting challenge.

Speaking of music… album #41 is now at 53 minutes, assuming I keep all of the material (so far, I think I will). I do still want to record at least one more thing for it though. Preferably to release before we go on our vacation…

yup

Digital platforms mix “digital water” and “sewage” in the same pipes, polluting our information systems and undermining the foundations of our culture, our public health, our economy, and our democracy.

from “Stop Drinking From The Toilet“

I wrote rants against “bad information” and calls for media literacy on my blog before Facebook even existed. People making shit up so they could sound like experts, or to support a pet theory or mindset. Mistakes and guesswork with the disclaimers filed off, presented as fact. Old science, poorly done science, or outright fraud, since disproven but echoing on regardless and finding new ears. Conspiracy theories, whether benign or bigoted. And intentional disinformation.

The situation absolutely got far worse when companies began to profit off of “engagement.”

And I feel like it s gotten a notch worse in the AI era. There are far too many people who are all too trusting of AI — they are language models, not truth models. It’s another disinformation tool that is absolutely exploited and multiplied by bad actors. People want to believe the politicians they support, who they are maybe only supporting because of the lies in the first place.

Be careful out there.

Album #41 (that’s the only name it has so far) has been hopping along. There’s 33 minutes of material, and I have a plan for the next bit. It definitely has a flavor, with a lot of noisy/glassy digital oscillators and some resonant filters introducing spectral movement, though those words of course don’t adequately describe the sound.

One of the spices in that flavor is the Decadebridge Sn (Tin), a pocket-sized 3-op lo-fi FM drone synth with simplified controls. It has CV control, but a good bit of latency on its pitch and FM inputs but none on its VCA, so if you plan to sequence it, it might call for a gate delay to keep pitches and envelopes aligned. It makes some lovely growls — not really something I couldn’t do with Algo or Spectraphon or a bit of fumbling in software — but it puts inspiration on tap at an almost toylike price.

The past couple of weekends, I’ve gone for walks around Mallard Lake. It’s 2.6 miles, so it’s decent exercise that I can recover from fairly swiftly instead of feeling wiped out for days. It has a paved section (with many bicyclists, joggers, dog walkers and families with strollers) more exposed to the sun until it runs in the shadow of a tall highway bridge across the river valley, and a dirt/gravel section (pedestrians only and much less traveled) that runs alongside a cliff with little trickling waterfalls, and a moderately heavily wooded, swampy area before emerging into a small tallgrass prairie. It’s a lovely place to walk.

I’ve walked it occasionally before — usually only a few times per year while the weather is cooler, usually in the Halloween to Christmas range. Until this year I haven’t seen wildlife other than birds (lots of birds!) and bugs, but these last two times there have been deer.

please remain stationery

Back in those journaling days, I went through lots of notebooks with nice paper that could stand up to a fountain pen, etc. I wasn’t really a stationery geek, though I did love pens.

But for taking notes on the go, I had a Mead Five Star Fat Lil’ Planner. I replaced the silly planner stuff with a plain Fat Lil’ Notebook — spiral-bound and fairly thick, with perforated 3.5″ x 5.5″ sheets that could be torn off if you wanted to. A Cordura-or-something-like-it case that zipped closed securely, the spiral made a good place to tuck a pen or two, and there were a couple extra pockets and enough space to temporarily stash small items inside. Perfect for my needs. And they stopped making them almost 30 years ago, but you can still find a few on eBay.

I almost just bought one to recreate what I had then. But since pocket journals have become much more of a thing since then, what with Moleskine and Field Notes and so on, so I poked around a bit first. Field Notes happens to be 3.5 x 5.5, and there are several other brands in the same format with different types of paper, covers, and price ranges. A6 seems like a nicer size to me and there are several Japanese journal brands that use it, but after reviews and price comparisons, I went for the FN format with a relatively cheap, waxed canvas zippered cover and small Lochby notebooks which use Tomoe River paper that’s supposed to work well with fountain pens. Though I’m not sure yet whether I’ll want to use a favorite rollerball (Lamy Al-Star or Rotring Core) or a (probably Pilot or Lamy) fountain pen.

scribblings

I want to start journaling again, and I don’t mean blogging. Literally writing with ink on paper. I once did a lot of this as a devotional practice while I was Kemetic Orthodox. I often used a dip pen, or sometimes a fountain pen, and though it wasn’t calligraphy, the pace of writing was more deliberate and meditative. What I wrote was between me and God(s), and I destroyed all of those writings when I left the temple because there were some oathbound secrets, as well as some personal history that didn’t need to be preserved anymore. And this is fine, I have no regrets about doing that.

To keep this short and general and not too personal, I owe a lot to my first several years in the temple. It dragged my self-esteem out of a pit, got me taking care of myself at least somewhat, spurred me to be more serious about music, conspired to get me together with my spouse, and taught me a lot of things. But eventually, I both burned out with the work of being a reverend (while also being a socially anxious introvert) and came to the conclusion that I needed something else for my mental health and personal growth, even if I didn’t know what that was yet. I wasn’t looking for different gods (still loving the same ones), or a different organization (but very likely no organization).

I’ve certainly gone through some phases in the intervening years where I wasn’t sure what I believed or perhaps how I believed, but always disqualified from atheism by my experiences. (I feel like if I have to doubt certain things then I immediately have to doubt everything and that’s just impractical.) I’ve always believed that religion is an art, rather than a poor substitute for science, and now I feel the push to make that kind of art again.

big Friday

As I’ve said, I was looking forward to yesterday’s Bandcamp Friday for quite a while. I had a big haul of 9 new (to me) albums and one old.

And since I had also picked up one Heilung album a few weeks ago without waiting and have been obsessing over them a bit, I will bring it up here too.

But first I’ll mention Nine Treasures. This was an album I listened to many times when I was a Google Play Music subscriber, and it’s on Bandcamp as a free/pay-what-you-want option so I wanted to grab it (and throw a few bucks at them for giving me something I’ve already enjoyed so much). Mongolian metal with violin solos, and it’s just fun.

Also on the fun side: music for synthesizers and orchestra, inspired by Archimedes. It was written during the pandemic but a lot of it is very 60s-70s in composition style and in the timbres used, and there’s a charming lightness about the whole thing.

For a much more creepy and somber mood (but you know I love this sort of thing), we have Stuart Liebig’s dark ambient music with synths and percussion samples. I think it speaks well of him that the drums, rattles etc. don’t feel like samples but like it was all performed specifically for this music, it just fits so well. On my first listen, my wife was also listening to a podcast about creepy mysterious encounters with aliens, ghosts etc. and there was a whole mood there.

Also dark and “ambient” but abstract, tense and inscrutable, I found that little mermaid is a bit too intrusive at times for trying to get to sleep — the opposite of Eno’s description of ambient music. But I’m very much enjoying a proper listen this morning — good stuff.

While we’re in the shadow lands, how about some doomgaze? If that’s really the right term; this is really neither as doomy or as shoegazey as many other things. Regardless: good band, music that works for relaxing or in the car or working, I don’t have a deep analysis here.

Speaking of good bands, this Vollte album. Post-rock, a bit prog. Enjoyable. I totally imagined a scene from a heist movie that turned into a chase during “Lightning strikes us.”

Garmarna is a group I’ve enjoyed for quite some time, but I didn’t keep up with them. Swedish folk rock with electronics, it all just fits together so well. think after listening to this one, Vittrad (my first exposure to them and a tie for my favorite hurdy gurdy-focused album) is still my favorite, but this is still extremely good. Produced by Chris from Heilung (you can hear it especially in the ambience of “TvĂĄ Systrar”) and an understated guest vocal from Maria, which is how I happened to stumble into this.

I almost dismissed this group as copycats of Heilung, and they don’t have the same intense impact. But they are very good in their own right and I will be listening to this album a lot more in the near future. I’ll probably end up getting their others as well.

For my understanding of Heilung songs I can thank lyrics-translate.com and a few interviews and commentaries that I’ve read online. It’s not a necessary step to enjoy the music but for me it deepens the experience.

The overall theme of Heilung’s first studio album, Ofnir, is the story of a peaceful village forced into war, made into bloodthirsty killers seeking vengeance. Then about halfway through, it shifts to mysticism with a poem about a forest and a 30-minute long triptych based on the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem. So we have a kind of conversion of the bad into the good, which seems to very much be a theme for Heilung overall.

The band says that while “Ofnir” is a very masculine album, “Futha” is feminine. To me, it’s very much about overcoming dangers and fears, and healing. It starts with the end — Ragnarok — and turns it aside with chanted incantations against every kind of evil spirit. There are songs about protection (including my favorite, “Othan”, executed so well that you can hear the love in it) and healing, but also a poem and chant about ice that leads to a rousing chant about life-sustaining fire. Overall, the theme makes this my favorite album. It’s close though…

Drif is a little more difficult to sum up, with a bit of less easily translated material to start, and ranges from the most ancient song lyrics in the world in an Ugarit dialect to the puzzling two-dimensional palindromic Sator Square, to an actual Roman marching song that’s a scathing satire of Caesar. But it opens with a song of love and well-wishing, and there’s a healing song and a song where a curse is transformed into a blessing. Overall I would say this is the most beautiful of their albums to listen to. (Though the spoken-word piece about a Gaulish tribe defeated by Romans includes the Wilhelm scream, and “Tenet” — which the band knew people would play backward to confirm its palindromic nature — includes some silly phrases in backwards English.)

festivities

If I remember right, it was 2010 the first time we went to “JFest”, the St. Louis Japanese Festival at the Missouri Botanical Gardens every Labor Day weekend. We watched St. Louis Osuwa Taiko twice that day and I lit up when they mentioned having beginners’ classes. I probably would have shied away from it but the friends we were with encouraged me to give it a try. I did it, persisted though it was physically tough and I lacked in endurance, and then qualified to join the performing group. I performed at two JFests and an early Spring event there called “Sake & Sakura”, which would be my last, as I left to concentrate on my own creative pursuits.

Anyway, right at the end of summer, the weather is often still quite hot and often humid. In one evening show as I played a shaker in the back during the finale, I could see steam rising from the sweating performers in the front line. As I recall, we spent the majority of our time that weekend when we weren’t performing, just sitting in the air-conditioned green room.

Since those days I haven’t been very physically active, and my spouse isn’t either. I also sunburn easily and my eyes are sun-sensitive, and it has been known to trigger anxiety (though I think the mere recognition that it does that, and wearing a hat and the right glasses/sunglasses, helps a ton). So a day at the festival, wandering the extensive garden grounds in hot, sunny, humid weather, with no good place to sit other than the ground for performances, is a lot for us.

We skipped it the last few year due to that hot weather. But with slightly more favorable weather this time, we went for it. It wore us out but we had a good time. Happy to say though I’m a little stiff (probably from standing in one spot for too long while watching the Eisa and taiko performances) I’m not too sunburned or too wiped out today. The gardens themselves were either nicer than ever or I appreciated them more, and I was lucky enough to snap a half-decent photo of a hummingbird visiting some nifty star-shaped flowers.

We had both been looking forward to the koi that swarm a footbridge in Seiwa-en, the Japanese garden around a lake that is one of the place’s main features. But there was an algae bloom and few fish; we speculated that on the third day of a very crowded festival they’d already eaten more than enough kibble from the vending machine and were sleeping it off.

The taiko group was fantastic, as always. I only recognize a few people from when I was part of it. They have a new (to me) member who played an actual odaiko solo piece and she absolutely was killing it. That’s a staple of more “professional” groups’ repertoire but isn’t something that we ever did while I was in the group or the few years after, and I loved to see it. (Many taiko pieces do have brief, often very structured solo sections, so most performers do get a chance to solo a little bit.)

On a whim I went back and re-read the last few years of this blog. I don’t really have much insight, other than to laugh at the number of times I have changed my mind about things that I was sure of at the time.

Toneboosters released a new equalizer plugin (simply “Equalizer Pro”) that instantly became a new favorite. This is the first one I’ve tried where I’ve felt like dynamic EQ is worth using (instead of, say, ZPlane Peel or Bitwig Multiband Split with a dynamics plugin in its chain), and it’s also got options for bands that apply only to transients or sustained sounds (oooh) as well as bands that apply only to “ambience” (reverb) or direct sounds (aaaah). That last one can be cool as a creative effect even when the detection is wrong, and just in testing I’ve found that using it to emphasize particular ranges of reverb is pretty great. Not all reverb has good EQ controls built in, and even when it does, using this instead can kind of glue things together nicely. And for all that this plugin does, it’s cheaper than a lot of its competitors.

save Ferrous

So, Landscape Ferrous.

(Landscape’s photo, not mine.)

The first thing is, it’s not an eBow. Those use a pickup and electromagnet to create feedback to encourage and extend vibration — like pushing a child on a swing when they reach the apex, to keep them swinging further and longer.

Ferrous doesn’t have any sensors; it’s just 6 small magnets on a rotating disk. So it’s like pushing the kid at timed intervals. If the timing matches the kid’s motion (or is 1/2 the speed, or 1/3, 1/4, etc.) it will boost it, otherwise it will dampen it.

So you can’t hold it over strings and then play a melody on the frets normally. But you can hold it over a bunch of strings, tines, etc. and tune in different resonant vibration modes, and that’s what it’s all about. You can control the speed with a dial, a button, an inconveniently placed touch sensor (in most cases it’s going to be face-down above strings… hmm) or a CV input.

So it works best when you have a lot of vibration modes available in a small space and the subjects are eager to resonate freely — e.g. lots of open strings in a small space, like on our bowed psaltery, or lots of available harmonics in multiple pitches, such as a kalimba or acoustic guitar (with its relatively longer strings). It’d probably be fantastic with an autoharp, a hammered dulcimer, or a piano.

It’s kind of boring when there’s less to work with, as on a mountain dulcimer, steel tongue drum, or bass guitar. You can get sine waves and maybe simple chords, but not a whole panoply of potential frequencies to sweep through… and they tend to be fairly quiet too.

Holding it at the right distance is a bit tricky. You want it as close as possible without colliding — but it’s got magnets that want to pull toward the metallic object(s) you’re working with, and a vibrating string/tine needs a lot more space than an inert one. You also don’t want to hold it near an electromagnetic pickup unless you just want to hear the hum.

There’s a weird thing it does with the kalimba (and a lesser extent, other instruments) where if the frequency isn’t just right, it’ll still excite the thing but bend the pitch. So the low C tine on the kalimba might be happy to play Bb or D — and if you hit C dead on, the whole thing rattles like mad. It takes some finesse!

But what’s even better is that experimenting with this had me dusting off my old lap steel guitar. I bought a used Rogue Jersey Lightning several years ago out of curiosity, knowing that some other ambient musicians used them on occasion, but I found it was awkward to work with given my setup at the time. So it’s been sitting idle. But now, since I have things ready for a bass guitar or kalimba with minimal fuss, the lap steel is also no trouble. With reverb and other processing it is extremely suitable, so it’s going to join my stable of occasionally-used instruments.

There’s been some buzz about the new Waldorf Microwave 1 plugin, because it’s extremely similar to the original hardware. I gave it a spin, and though I do like some of the lo-fi sounds it produces I really don’t find its UI much fun to work with. And I don’t need another software synth…

But it did get me thinking about wavetables again. I used to be really into them for a while, first with Serum (and sometimes Massive), then Disting bridging the way to SynthTech E352/E370. Shapeshifter, despite using wavetables, got me a bit away from that because I saw its tables as a secondary feature, and of course more recently I moved to RYK Algo instead.

So I fired up some older plugins. Vital is awfully good for a free synth, and its spectral morph and distortion parameters offer some cool stuff. But I reinstalled Serum and found inspiration there, despite it not being much like Microwave at all. Whatever works!