STARTHIEF

I’ve gotten some pretty wild, strong compliments on The Light of Day, one person even saying “The production quality is perfect!”

This is not only really nice for me to see, it’s an interesting counter to audiophile fetishism, the constant barrage of people saying negative things about various technologies.

I originally recorded those tracks 12-14 years ago. I definitely did not have the production skill then that I do now. At that time I didn’t use EQ much, relaying on voices to sound OK together. I didn’t worry about highpass filtering before certain types of effects for clarity. I didn’t worry about stereo phase correlation / mono compatibility. I didn’t really know how to use a compressor properly. Dynamics were mostly a matter of setting volume levels on synths and calling it good, avoiding clipping. I didn’t scrutinize every plugin to see if it caused aliasing. I did pretty much everything at a 44.1Khz sample rate, and didn’t think about oversampling. It was all recorded using VST plugins (and at the time it might have been all 32-bit)… and it was all done in FL Studio, you know, that program that the techno and hiphop kids used cracked copies of but no self-respecting “pro” would use.

And you want to know the real kicker? I didn’t have the original DAW projects or stems, or in fact even lossless WAV files. These were all remastered from lossy MP3s, some of them as low as 128Kbps.

Also, I did this all on headphones. Both originally, and the rework. Not expensive nearfield monitors in an acoustically treated studio. The very idea probably causes some folks to break out in hives.

Yes, I put a little work into making them sound nicer — with more plugins, and still at 44.1kHz (*). A little cautiously targeted saturation, some EQ nips and tucks, the trusty MagicDeathEye compressor which hasn’t let me down yet, and judicious limiting and boosting and oversampled clipping. A bit of fake tape mojo here and there. Slightly more radical work in a couple of places. But the fact is, I didn’t need to record at 192Khz or use analog tape and tubes, or consult an actual mastering engineer, for people to think it sounded “perfect.” Granted, these are synthetic soundscapes, with a sound intentionally ranging from dark to sandpapery — I’m not trying to perfectly preserve the sizzle of cymbals or every detail of a vocalist, or make a bass guitar and a kick drum hang together with a perfect groove. It’s noisy, ambient/drone/soundscape stuff. What makes it “perfect” is not quantifiable. So I’m happy to have reached it, at least for a few folks. 🙂

(*) when recording now, I use a 48kHz sample rate because that is what BoredBrain OptX supports if I want to use all 8 channels. Sometimes this gets converted to 44.1 during editing — I’m not sure why — and sometimes it doesn’t, but it doesn’t really matter as long as I don’t accidentally paste a snippet between different sample rates.

So of those 18 tracks I was considering, I approved four. Their centerpiece is called “Sarah: A Dialogue” — snippets of conversation between two pre-ChatGPT era chatbots through two different smart speakers, with woozy ambient accompaniment..

A dialogue… I could have a dialogue, or call-and-response, between the old tracks and new interpretations of them. Bingo!

It seems like an interesting creative challenge: remaining true to the “following my muse” technique which is the only thing that works well for me, while also crafting responses to music I made 9-10 years ago.

The initial triage phase I did for The Light of Day Vol. 1 yielded 15 tracks, of which I decided to continue with 12 of them.

For Vol. 2 that triage gave me a list of 18 tracks. But at this point I’m thinking I am not going to have enough for an album — I’m just not feeling most of them that much. A short EP with just rereleases feels weird to me. And one of the ones I like is fun and silly in a way that may take people completely out of the mood of the rest.

I’m deciding what to do with this.

The notes are here. Not as much in detail to say, since I don’t have a list of the plugins that I used a dozen years ago.

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Today is Wep Ronpet (Opening of the Year) on the Kemetic Orthodox calendar — the most important festival, and culmination of a few days of rituals, celebration, fellowship, little seminars etc. All online these days, but still, very nice, and great to just hang out with folks, reminisce and share. It has felt really good. (I even dabbled a little in poetry, with one that I was fairly proud of, and one that failed to come together because I think I was trying to do too many things with it. I think drumming is more my speed.)

I greatly miss some folks from the old days, both those who are in the temple but not online, those who went their own way, and the few who have gone to the Beautiful West ahead of us. But it’s good to see a couple of old familiar faces again, at least virtually.

Tomorrow it’s back to work as usual, which might feel a little strange after all of this. But as a new person, refreshed and with new perspective. And maybe a little groggy from a weird sleep schedule. 🙂

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I picked up my third plugin of the year, so that’s it, no more buying music-making stuff (except Xaoc Budapeszt)… unless there’s some truly exceptional reason to make another exception.

Sinusoidal Run Rhythm is actually a pair of plugins — one that generates (and/or processes) MIDI, and one that processes audio directly (amplitude, pan and filter), based on overlapping sine waves at different frequencies, with adjustable phase offsets etc. Not something I couldn’t patch otherwise, but a convenient set of controls for the task — and also, it does conversion to pulses which can then drive a function generator or can morph with the mixed sines. After playing with it a little I decided it was neat enough to go for it.

I’ve already started work on The Light of Day Vol. 1, the rerelease of some of my older work.

All of Vol. 1 is from before my Starthief days, so it’s more than 10 years old. So far everything on the track list was done 100% in software, but I just realized I have an archive of even older material yet to preview and triage, and some of that was from the era when I had a small amount of secondhand MIDI gear.

Vol. 2 is going to be drawn from my 2016-2017 experiments, proto-Starthief music, the hundreds of quick recordings I made while learning modular and trying to develop what I thought of as “my sound.” It turned out that I had that sound all along, it was just that I was not focused on it, wanting to explore multiple genres. Perhaps then it was a sonic identity that I was forging at the time. I definitely recorded a lot of bouncy sequences then, and a fair amount of weird noisy experiments that were more interesting to make than listen to, and/or don’t really fit in with my the more ambient, droney weird noise that I am dedicated to now.

For both volumes, I’m only including what best fits me now, rather than representing the full spectrum of what I was doing then. It’s not a documentary.

My production skills (in the technical sense) have grown considerably since these recordings were made, and several of these tracks need a lot of work to be up to my current standards. In some cases it goes beyond remastering, but not quite all the way to remixing. I’m not being at all shy about additional effects beyond the usual EQ, dynamics and spatialization tweaks.

Enjoy 🙂

I spent some time deliberating over whether there should be an “e” — Zeroes or Zeros? According to various sources including Google NGram, the no-E version is more common in both UK and US English. The OED says the with-E version is correct; AP style says no-E is correct, and M-W says both are fine. To me, the no-E version looks odd, and I took a poll of family members (including my once-a-copy-editor spouse) and they said the same thing. So you get an E.

I spent a lot more time mastering this album than considering spelling, though. I’m quite happy with the results, but in a couple of cases I had to fight for them.

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I’m 95% certain that my next project will be re-releasing older work. Probably as two volumes: one with some of my pre-Starthief, software-only material and one with the best of my early modular “churn and learn” recordings.

But I already have an idea for the next batch of new material. I’m calling it “Serial Play” for now (as opposed to parallel play, where people sit together enjoying being in each others’ company while doing different things… my spouse and I do that a lot) — a set of single-voice (or at least, “concerto” style with a very clear lead) pieces that feature different sources/techniques.

I also have a couple of unrelated bits of material sitting in folders ready for some kind of use. These are the sorts of things that accumulate between projects and often get folded into the next album in some form.

I’ve replaced the final genAI album art, this one for ∞↻ (aka Infinite Loop).

This one is actually fancier and more detailed than the original, abstract one. First, I painted in black on a transparent layer over the top of the original, and then did a circular blur to make it perfectly circular. I did the same with the orange and white.

Applying a polar-to-Cartesian transform turned my circle into a line, which I could then attack with the pixelization filter and Glitch Effect Maker — the chromatic aberration effect was especially useful — and then transform back into a circle and circular-blur it again. A bit more picky work with layers and blends got the edges and background the way I liked — including that unusual blue highlight on the orange section, a happy accident I chose to keep.

The central text was in my original version but at the time, I decided to just hide the layer. As you can see, I changed my mind.

The big version is at https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a1154118496_10.jpg

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I had plenty of extra time today, since my internet connection went out and I couldn’t work. (Spectrum claimed it was a power outage, but it wasn’t one that affected my house…) They kept pushing back the ETA for restoration, otherwise I probably would have driven in to the office to finish my workday. Instead I made some delicious-smelling chocolate/butterscotch bread, started a load of dishes, and recorded the final piece for Zeroes.

The genAI artwork for Daydream Network was pretty abstract. Monochrome smoke (or something) overlaid with some thin angled lines reminiscent of an phosphor vector display like you’d see on an old-school oscilloscope, except black instead of green or white.

I liked that art well enough, but decided to be thorough about ditching the genAI. So here’s my new version:

The grey/pink features were generated from random noise, blurred and processed and zoomed in and blurred and processed and… etc. until I had some really interesting texture. In full saturation it was crazy psychedelic and I almost went with that. Toned down, it was somewhat reminiscent of the deep maroon/pink and green blobs that I mostly see when I close my eyes, and I almost went with that. But splitting the image into separate RGB channels, the green was this lovely grey texture, and after some deliberation I decided that was mostly what I wanted. It better matches the original monochrome and grey/pink is reminiscent of the brain. I softly erased a little of that layer on the bottom so some of the color version could come through.

The lines atop it were generated in the software that I develop in my day job — I created a bicone, generated a mesh for it, viewed the wireframe, and zoomed the camera into its midst, finding a position I was happy with. Some edge processing and blurring got it where I liked it. I found I preferred it as a light overlay rather than a dark one this time.

The big image is at https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a3394782237_10.jpg .

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I haven’t just been remaking the cover art. Zeroes is one track away from being finished (plus the mastering, art, and the notes). I want to do something a little different with the notes, and talk more about technique rather than specific gear.

I’ve been reading Long Live Evil, an isekai where a young woman dying of cancer is given the chance to take over the body of a condemned villainess in a super-cheesy fantasy story. She’s not utterly without ethics herself, it’s just that she believes that the characters in the book aren’t real and therefore leaning into evil to get what she wants (the means to heal her real body and return) is totally fine. It’s mostly goofy and hilarious, aside of course from the cancer, which reads like bitter personal experience.

I’ve also rerolled another Guild Wars 2 character. My Asura warrior, Justice Upon Them, is replaced by an Asura elementalist, Synergist Staxi. She’s going for the Celestial Quickness Catalyst build on Metabattle, which should be nicely tanky for dealing with Champions. It’s a somewhat slow burn (…and freeze, and zap, and crush) while still using core specializations and no access to the Jade Bot enhancements; the defense is inconsistent. But a wizard who charges in and swings a warhammer… never let it be said that GW2 sticks blindly to fantasy RPG stereotypes.

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The end of the Kemetic calendar year comes approximately at the end of July, and the start of the next is a few days later (they used a 360-day calendar). The end of the year and the space between is said to be more chaotic and dangerous than usual as the world is kind of coming spiritually unwound. Those between-days are also holy days, and the temple has things planned for that time. I’m taking some time off work to be able to enjoy it (and also just relax).

As far as other summer plans go? People keep asking me this but I don’t really have anything. We want to do some kind of daytrip stuff with my parents, possibly in the fall instead of summer. My brother and his wife plan to plan a visit in September, and my in-laws also want to visit sometime in the fall. I’ll also take some me-time off around Thanksgiving as usual, whether or not we’re going anywhere.

I got multiple nice comments about the cover art for Closing Our Eyes And Pretending It Makes Infinity Go Away. But those gorgeous but weird eyes and koi-like rainbow swirls were AI generated.

Here’s the new version:

Something possessed me to check Pexels for “compound eyes” rather than a human eye, and this first result, by “Sai Pixels”, was geodesically fascinating. (I did try a couple of human eyes later, but preferred this. It’s particularly ironic that insects can’t close their eyes…)

I painted bright colors over the original color swirl layer, blurred and glitched it and so on, and twisted it… and it started to hint at the curves of an infinity symbol, so I thanked my muse and took it in that direction. I kept the space photo layer (already masked out in the center) and text layers from the original.

The big version is at https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a4030625194_10.jpg.

For these updates, in MusicBee I just edited the existing album to point to the new artwork. But this didn’t work well when I copied it to my phone’s music library, since the original artwork was still embedded. No problem, I updated in that app (Musicolet) as well. …and then on the next sync those changes were overwritten and it was back to the old art. One wonders why there’s a cover.jpg if the images are also embedded directly in the mp3?

As it turned out, the simplest fix turned out to be downloading the albums with new art from Bandcamp again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here’s the new artwork for Sinister Topography.

The old one was three layers of genAI, all very abstract… but one of those layers was in the style of a pencil sketch and I couldn’t help but think it was somebody’s style. Or an amalgamation of the styles of a few artists perhaps.

This one was from a royalty-free photo by Artem Zhukov on pexels.com. Color manipulation and that handy Glitch Effect Maker again.

My first thought was to use a topographic map… but those aren’t very sinister. After some suggestions from my spouse, I felt like the mood (sinister) was more important than the literal words. She thought of a particular drive through a state park at dusk that was especially spooky. I looked at some options, and then thought of Gold Camp Road in Colorado. It’s said to be haunted, and has some creepy tunnels, some of which just seem to swallow light. At least one of those is blocked off with a hefty iron fence that itself would feel right at home in Mordor. I drove that road on a family trip before it was closed off, and it was scary even then. (Poorly maintained, winding gravel road winding through mountains in the middle of nowhere, dark narrow tunnels (originally made for freight trains, not a road) that curve and have signs about not chopping the wooden beams for firewood; locals in pickup trucks drifting around corners at rally racing speeds while we limped along in a basic van pulling a camper, the sun threatening to set before we got back to civilization…)

Ultimately I chose not to use the photos I found of those tunnels because they looked too unreal. But I thought a mysterious “X” on a post on a trail leading to denser woods would work. I had a couple of different compositions ready but I preferred the one that was zoomed in more and reddened. You Shall Not Pass.

The URL for the big image is https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a1169507207_10.jpg