R N E S1GN4LZ CUMZ0R1NG THRU?!?!?!

(an email I just wrote)

Hi Garrett ...

Right now with the help of a small quantity of rum, I'm transporting myself through time back to the Episodes era. Actually the fact that I'm listening to the GFI version of Are Any Signals Coming Through probably has more to do with it, but the booze doesn't hurt.

What I'm doing, as always, is working on my humongous hard drive full of digital remixes of pretty much everything and anything that I've ever done, and the time has finally come around when some of them are actually DONE. It's like all these seeds I've planted are finally starting to grow into ripe fruits or grains or whatever the fuck would make a good analogy. For the most part, it's not new material (although there is some). Anyway, I'm going to be putting up mp3s on my personal website (keithhandy.com) under a Creative Commons license.

My question to you is this: I have my own version of Are Any Signals Coming Through, the one I put together for Leave of Absence. You've heard this version, and what I'm working on right this minute is just a tweaking of that version. I would like to include it on my mp3 page (not up yet, don't bother looking for it) under the same Creative Commons license. I don't know if you've heard of Creative Commons yet, but it's really starting to pick up and become a viable thing ... you can go to creativecommons.org and read up on it.

What it boils down to is a legal way of releasing stuff as "some rights reserved", and you can choose the license most appropriate to what kind of limitations you want. There's one that's specifically for music sharing; it means, yes, I'm giving the OK for people to distribute my mp3s to their friends. What they can't legally do is alter the music, distribute it without my name on it (or both of our names in the case of this song), or use it commercially without my permission.

Obviously, since you own half of that song, I would need your OK to include it (my version) on the website with that license. We would still own it, all we'd be saying is, "yes, pass this around to your friends without feeling guilty and give us a shitload of exposure".

Anyway, I was just listening to the GFI version for the hell of it. It's weird. No matter how far you go to make improvements on something and bring it up to date, there will always be little nuances from the original version that can't be replicated; certain inflections, the way lyrics are phrased while they're still new lyrics. Songs mutate over time. It's not that the old version was best, it's just that certain bits and pieces of it ... how do I say this without being corny. I'm just really moved by this old version. But I really like my version too. It's a whole different animal.

How are you doing?

-Keith

Neverending soda

It's 5:00 AM and I have absolutely no idea why I'm so wired. Sure, I had caffeine last night, but no more than my usual amount, and didn't even keep taking it in while working. Normally I keep drinking Coke through the night and pass out from exhaustion by 2:00 or 3:00. I was so wrapped up in working that I didn't even think of getting something to drink. It was incredibly productive, surprisingly even, since I didn't push myself or anything. And so now I'm wondering if the high that I'm experiencing right now is only from that. Or maybe I was so focused that I didn't even notice myself pouring a beverage.

Maybe I shouldn't be so amazed at what I just did. Maybe after some sleep, sanity will kick in and I'll realize it was no big deal. I guess for now I'll let myself enjoy thinking that I've just performed some kind of miracle.

Heheheh, I amuse myself so much

I opened one of my mixes in Cool Edit to see how far along it is and what I still need to do. I have some shorter "miscellaneous" wav files in there, just little effects and embellishments, and I guess when it comes to saving them it's not so obvious what to name the files.

In addition to obvious things like "Music Submix", "Vox", "Percussion", etc., this one has wav files named "Set Us Up The Bomb", "Great Justice", and "Neverending Soda". The last one makes sense because it's a vocal note that's stretched to infinity in the background, but I'm not sure what inspired the "all your base" references.

It would be a shame to not preserve the little jokes I make to myself along the way to completing these songs. I guess I'll write in here again when I stumble on some more!

16.5 seconds of shame

I'm prepping some songs to put up on my website. Meaning, these are songs that are already done and ready to go, I'm just doing some last minute micromanaging. Open the Window is intriguing and hypnotic, but something about the first sixteen and a half seconds of it sounds like it's going to lose me. It has to ease in like that, but it still needs something ... not sure what ... getting hung up on some detail like this is the story of my life. Yeah, I know, this probably makes me sound like a cheezy Power Producer -- "gotta grab their attention!" -- but believe me, this song is the farthest thing away from a potential hit; I just want it to start up with a little more allure.

The music of Keith Handy is VERY COMPLEX

This is just something I thought to do a mini-rant on after a short phone call with my friend Paul Gaspar, a phenomenal trumpet player who has always been impressed by the obscure details that I sometimes wedge into the corners of my music.

He mentioned that musicians have a tendency to do things that will only impress other musicians. And that's probably true. But this doesn't mean that has to be in conflict with making pieces of art or entertainment that speak to people on a more direct level overall.

There are some times, for example, when I know instinctively and instantly, without thinking hard about it, that I want a run of weird-sounding sixteenth notes in a certain part -- I don't necessarily want them to sound normal or even tuneful. The actual pitches of the notes may as well be arbitrary because I'm going for a shake-the-snowglobe-up effect at that particular moment, to make the "release" right after it all the more satisfying.

So I could just, literally, choose the notes at random. But my little game that I play with myself, for my own amusement only, when holes like these arise to fill, is to somehow derive the pitches from some kind of pattern, or from a theme found elsewhere in the song (or related collection of songs). I don't intend for the listener to recognize it, or analyze it and figure it out like some kind of puzzle. To me, that would be sick, because it would require exponentially more effort than actually coming up with it.

No, the end aim in those cases is usually just to have a bunch of weird sounding notes there. And occasionally using systems or derivations will give music a different emotional "fingerprint" than either doing something by ear or totally randomly. But what I do with background detail is meant to be just that: background detail. The songs themselves are still simple, and I go out of my way to make sure the "in your face" part of the song is still in your face.

Semi-wasted week?

Last weekend I went through a couple of nearly-complete remixes and finished them up. I think. (One can never be 100% sure of these things, especially when using such a delicate word as "finished".)

I soon, however, got stuck and sidetracked on one called The Cathedral Room. It's not a Great Song, and it never will be. It's a fairly short "linking" bit from the original long version of the rock opera.

What I really like about less-than-fantastic songs is the license they give me to experiment on them. I've chopped out beats and half-beats throughout to give it an odd meter it didn't originally have. I've altered the chords to make certain things fit together a different way. I changed the intro because I came up with something off the top of my head that I liked. It will still be less than fantastic, but hopefully with an extra "how the hell did he write that?" mystique to it.

It was an easy and obvious choice to cut this one for the CD version. I was sick of addressing religion, for one thing. But something occurred to me about it that makes me feel a little better: although I am attacking people's beliefs here, it's not about God, Heaven/Hell, or so on. It's about the way people turn other things, like money, college degrees, social hierarchies, the 40-hour workweek, and a multitude of other lopsided value systems into religions. Religion, in this case, meaning any belief that society treats as an unquestioned absolute, to the point where if you ask why, people will take deep personal offense and bark "that's just the way it is" at you.

The thing that annoys me is how much time I've dumped into playing with this one short track, relative to the amount of actual work that got done on it. I should have been intermittently cutting away to other things. I guess I just got kind of obsessive about it.