“This in an UNauthorized party.  I’m only going to tell you to leave one more time.”

“I understand, but I was just wondering if there was a particular problem or offense? Maybe they could turn the music down a bit?”

“I’m just following my orders. What, are you…some kind of reporter?”

“No, I’m just a guy who lives in the neighborhood and was enjoying the party.”

“Because you’re asking questions like a you’re reporter.”

“We going home,” my neighbor said, defeated. “Home, sweet Home.”

Alright!

Earlier this summer I put together a project that I called “Wikimixing” for the Megapolis Audio Festival. Here is a blurb I wrote about it at the time:

“Mixing on a computer is usually a solitary endeavor: one person controlling one mouse and keyboard making one decision at a time. We’re going to try to fix that.  Part workshop and part experiment in “crowd-sourced” audio art, this is like editing Wikipedia but with sound instead of text. We’ll … collectively mix and manipulate sounds as a group in real-time using a bunch of colorful customized keyboard controllers, all connected to a single computer. The idea is to get as many hands/ears/minds at once collaborating (and competing) on the same soundscape, so that whatever strange, beautiful, or frightening noises that emerge are the product of our group’s collective will. Everyone is in control at the same time and yet no one is!”

You can read more about the ideas and technical aspects of the project here. But for whatever reason, I never got around to posting the final mixes on my own site…until TODAY.  So unless you’ve been to the Megapolis 2010 Archive, they’re NEW TO YOU!

Saturday Mix A

Sunday Mix A

Sunday Mix B

And here are some pics of the workshop, courtesy of fellow Megapolis presenter David Levin.

A few of us were hanging out in a hotel room after the festival and decided to play with it some more.

(Photo credits for above: Andrea Silenzi)

Who's obsolete?

It’s an Ensoniq EPS-16+ sampling keyboard from the early 1990s. Ok, so 1990 probably isn’t “vintage,” but it was one of the earliest (affordable) samplers capable of recording and playing sounds at 16-bit “CD quality.” For what it’s worth, it was RZA’s sampler of choice on the early Wu-Tang albums.What it was doing the basement, I can only guess. (Was my landlord in a band?) But when I found it sitting on the dirt floor of our basement it was spattered in paint, plaster, and caked with dried mud. You could hear sand sifting through the circuit boards whenever you shook it. It didn’t power up.

For the better part of this past weekend, I was the music-geek version of an Amelie character: tearing the keyboard apart down the circuit boards, cleaning each part individually (scrubbing off all the paint and plaster), and carefully putting the pieces back together.

After cleaning

Then I flipped the power switch.

Hmm...

Did I mention this thing has a floppy disk drive? Turns out you have to load the keyboard’s operating system from a floppy disk before it can boot up, just like an old PC! Luckily, I found a disk image of the OS floppy on a German website (thanks, Google Translator), copied it to my old Windows machine (the only other thing I own that still has a floppy drive), and popped it in the keyboard. The disc spun, beeped, spun again, and ground to a gritty stop. (Turns out I forgot to clean the inside of the disk drive.) A few more minutes with a screwdriver and a handful of cotton swabs later, I was back in action.

Woot!

Whatever you say...

Because it’s a sampler and not a synth, there aren’t preset or built-in sounds; you have to record your own. And because you have to store sounds on a floppy disk, you can only record about 40 seconds at the lowest audio settings and about 11 seconds at “CD-quality.” It’s clearly obsolete. Almost all modern audio recording programs (Pro Tools, Logic, Live, etc.) include software-based sampler plug-ins that can do everything this keyboard does and more. Anybody with a 5 year old laptop can do exponentially more complex sampling than RZA circa 1992. (From a purely technically standpoint, natch.)  So why should anyone care about this relic of music production?

For one: the sounds! Record a drum loop, for instance. (Credit: Floex – “Pinky Pong,” straight from my iPod into the sampler)

Original Loop

Now I’ll pitch it down a 5th.

Loop Down a 5th

Pretty groovy. How about lower still and a little reverb for a DJ Shadow kind of vibe?

Penumbra

I sampled a piano at the lowest quality setting.

Fake Eraser

Listen to those awful, grainy harmonics! How cool is that? Kinda Thom Yorke-y, right? Now I’ll add that piano to the previous loop.

Penumbra Piano

Or with Rhodes…

Penumbra Rhodes

Nothing you can’t do with a software sampler (and a bit-reduction plug-in), but there’s something about doing the whole thing with outdated technology that really appeals to me. And that sound…

But here’s the real reason I love this thing: it slows me down. Waaay down.

It’s so quick and easy to make (relatively) decent-sounding music on the computer that I sometimes find myself clicking through a piece of music I’m working on, making little tweaks and changes faster than the pace I’m actually thinking at.  This serves me well when I’m working on other people’s music; I can get a mix “in the ball park” much quicker, and then spend more time focusing on the more subtle elements that can take a project to the next level.

But when it comes to making my own music, lately I feel overwhelmed by the possibilities of all the creative things I could do, that it’s much harder to make a decision and commit to working with it. I sort of miss the days when I knew less about engineering and production, and everything I did was based on sound and intuition. When my friends and I spent hours crowded around a four-track tape recorder in my parents’ basement in high school, we didn’t know what all the knobs and switches did.  All we could do was experiment and listen.

In a similar way, this keyboard lets me play with digital audio without being in front of a computer screen.  I have the benefit of all my engineering and production experience, but squeezed though the various limitations of the instrument.  (E.g. how many different sounds can I create from 11 seconds of sampling time?) Instead of simply stumbling upon interesting sounds by accident (which I often do on the computer), this forces me to think more carefully about the sounds I actually want to make.

For any New Yorkers reading this, The Lakes are a chain of beautiful tree-lined lakes circumferenced by public parkland and nestled in a mostly residential neighborhoods of Minneapolis. Lake Calhoun is a mile or so from where Joel, Ryan, Charles, and I all grew up. Running around a lake is roughly equivalent to a lap around Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, which, by the way, is something I haven’t done in a very long time.  Lake Calhoun is about three miles around–not that far at all, but a fair distance if you’re not in shape (which I am not).

Anyway, I agreed to go running with Charles and Ryan, two guys who (to the best of my knowledge) didn’t stop exercising after college like I did.  And while I might not look out shape (sure, I walk and bike all over New York) I’m nowhere close to being as fit as these guys.  I don’t go out of my way to exercise these days and while I guess I feel a little guilty about that, that’s not enough to convince me to run.  But my friends certainly didn’t try to convince me to run, they just invited me to join them.  I didn’t even feel like I had to keep my promise. I could have easily backed out. I certainly had a few reasonable excuses. For one, I only packed dress shoes, sandals, and my Chucks… Did I mention I’m out of shape?

I decided I’d go if for no other reason that to kick my own ass and maybe use the opportunity to start a new routine back in New York.  So I laced my Chucks (weren’t they originally basketball shoes? how bad could it be?), threw on a pair of swim trunks (I didn’t pack any shorts?) and waited on the front step of my parents’ house for my friends to pick me up.

I miss Minneapolis, I miss The Lakes, but it turns out I don’t particularly miss running.  I used to play soccer and I even cross country skied in high school—certainly the peak of my physical ability even though I was somewhat mediocre at both sports.  Though I’m out of shape now, at least I’m used to the idea of running.  But both then and now, I’ve always had serious difficulty with the idea of running for its own sake.

I don’t know if I’ve ever truly felt a “runner’s high.” I know it has something to do with endorphins, which I’m fairly sure don’t kick in during the first few yards.  But I will say those first few yards felt great!

“I’m doing this, yeah!” I thought, keeping pace with my buddies.

“Let us know how you’re feeling by the time we reach the boat house,” Ryan offered. “We don’t have to do Lake of the Isles, too, if you don’t want. We can just do Calhoun.”

“*Huff* ‘K.”  I sprinted to make up the few feet I already lagged behind them.

By the time we made it to the restaurant at Lake Calhoun’s boat house (which I’m a little disappointed to have just discovered is a national chain)—the half way point around Calhoun—my friends didn’t have to ask.

“You’re looking great!” Ryan encouraged as I lapped, red faced, at the drinking fountain, my body somehow gasping for air and water at the same time.

“How about you take the lead?” Charles offered, “Or we can leapfrog? That way we’ll all keep the same pace.”

My friends wouldn’t kick my ass (though they easily could), but they helped me kick my own.  I’m glad they invited me, and I’m really glad I went.

-

I often feel the same way about running and writing. (And this may be doubly true of writing for it’s own sake, when it’s my own.)  So when Adrianne announced The Yo La Tengo Late Summer Blog Challenge, I felt the same mixture of looking in the mirror and seeing that I’ve “let myself go” and also hope that I could use this as a chance to whip myself into shape. I know doing this thing is good for me, that I am out of practice, and that the only way to get in the kind of shape I want to be is through discipline, exercise, repetition… But damn if I don’t feel red-faced and winded right now.  (Oh, it’s already September 1st already? It’s still before midnight! Also I’m reserving the right to E-D-I-T after the time-stamp.)

Like exercising, tonight it’s the shame of being left in the dust that compels me to produce.  But this will change, right?

(Cute outtake from a project I’m working on.)

But first, the plug: it’s available now for download from the iTunes store for $1.99.

In short, it’s The Onion’s parody of what news delivery will look (and sound) like in the future based on extrapolations of current trends in news production.  And mainstream media outlets–CNN, the New York Times–seem to be paying attention…