Pribek

Death Cab For Cutie is raising pitch correction awareness. From MSN…

The indie rock four-piece turned up to the Grammy Awards wearing blue ribbons pinned to their jackets, which they said was to raise awareness for their campaign.

“Autotuning is a digital manipulation, a correction of a singer’s voice that is affecting literally thousands of singers today and thousands of records that are coming out,” said the group’s frontman, Ben Gibbard. “So we just want to raise awareness while we’re here and try to bring back the blue note… The note that’s not so perfectly in pitch and just gives the recording some soul and some kind of real character.

OK, now it’s good that Death Cab is coming out against “digital manipulation”. And, it’s good to know they stand for soul. Even though it probably didn’t win them a lot of friends at the Grammy throw down, it was kind of jokey.

While you are at it boys why not take the plunge, go off the grid and do your part to…

Save The Drummers!

I pretty much live like a hermit. Maybe, I’m anti-social; I don’t know. I’ve been accused form time to time. It’s not that I don’t enjoy interacting or, I’m unfriendly; I just don’t feel the need to constantly be around people.

At some point, I realized that I was not the Master of the Universe. This wasn’t a sudden revelation rather, a gradual awareness. As my awareness increases, my ability to control decreases. I seem to be more of an observer than participant, in a lot of respects. Maybe, that is the natural order of things.

Tell you what though, I’m glad I’m not in control or even under the delusion of being in control because, the more I observe-things look strange.

I look at the news every day, probably more than most people do. And, even though I haven’t been writing about a lot of it, I’m aware of it.

Still having “morning” coffee right now, rock and roll hours, you know? So, I’m still in the introspective stage of my Sunday routine.

Then, give us a few few thoughts and observations please, Jack. Thank you, don’t mind if I do, voice inside my head.

The Economy:
How in the hell would a 44 year old songwriter/guitar player who has never had a pot to piss in and, if he did, there isn’t a window in the Winnebago big enough to throw it out of: How does that guy have the nerve to say anything about the economy? One thing I have is nerve.

In the news this morning, I saw that mortgage defaults are up 57% over last year.

I saw that some guy from the U.N. is accusing all of western civilization of murder because of, high food prices.

I paid $3.41 a gallon for gas yesterday.

Last night, driving home from the gig, I heard some guy on the radio saying that, at some point, maybe when diesel reaches $5.00 a gallon, the trucking industry will shut down, that this was a plot perpetrated by “globalist” corporate types, as a result, “the grid” will totally shut down for years and, we should all start raising chickens and growing hydroponic gardens, it’s the only way we will survive.

Yeah well, I’m not going to raise any chickens.

If you got into some variable rate mortgage that, some guy in a polo shirt with a receding hairline, sold you on and now, you can’t afford to pay for it-you can’t pay for it. That seems pretty simple. But, I keep seeing this stuff in the news that always has some greasy economist laying a collective guilt trip on home buyers for their irresponsibility. It’s a crock. The irresponsibility is the baggage of the lenders.

You and I aren’t killing people because the price of wheat is high. The price of wheat is high because oil was $117.00 a barrel yesterday.

I’m driving less, are you?

Politics:
I grow more and more apolitical every day. I don’t have a dog in the hunt. Here’s one I see a lot, “The growing number of the disaffected”. I have to say a big “blow me” to that one.

I don’t even know if I’m going to vote this time. Does that make me a bad person? No.

Maybe, I am “disaffected”, I don’t know. I would look it up but, I don’t care.

“Dancing With The Stars” is a better T.V. show than the ceaseless, ongoing election coverage. I would rather see Priscilla Presley do a jitterbug than watch another debate.

Here’s the thing, this election cycle already seems like it’s been going on for 20 years and it really hasn’t even kicked into gear yet. November is a long way away. When you are talking to me about November, you might as well be talking about the year 2052 when we all have robot maids and groovy personal space copters.

I don’t care about John McCain’s wife’s financial records, I don’t care what Bill Clinton says to a bunch of college students, I don’t care what Bill Maher thinks about the Pope and I don’t care that Jeremiah Wright has a $10 million line of credit and, I don’t care about analysis of how far Obama should have or, has, distanced himself from him. Get back to me on all of that around the third week of October and, I bet I can sort through all of it before noon. Then, I may have a dog in the hunt.

Speaking of Mr. Wright, here is what is important; When he says “God Damn America”, there is a room full of people hanging on every word. Further, I have been around a bit and I have met a lot of people that feel that way and even agree with the opinions of Louis Farrakhan. I don’t want Jeremiah Wright to shut up about it and, I don’t want anybody who feels or thinks that way to feel the need to keep quiet about it either. I want to know why they think or feel that way. We got to figure that out. See, I heard Sean Hannity, on the radio the other day, repeatedly calling Wright “crazy” and a “nut”. That kind of stuff isn’t helpful because, anybody who agrees with Wright is a “nut” by proxy. That is a type of suppression. I figured out a long time ago that if tell someone they are crazy, you aren’t going to change their mind. The best you can do is make them want to avoid the subject. We need to encourage these people to speak about this stuff.

The Weather:
I don’t know about you, but we sure have been having some screwy weather here in the Ozarks.

Global Warming or Not Global Warming? Tell you what; I don’t know, you don’t know, Al Gore doesn’t know, the U.N. doesn’t know, NASA doesn’t know; nobody knows for sure.

I can tell you this though, carbon offsets are a con game and whether or not you use those silly straw light bulbs isn’t going to tip the balance. If you feel like using them though, go right ahead on. If you want to buy carbon offsets, go ahead; I bear no ill will to people that send money to T.V. evangelists either. Whatever gets you through the night.

Might be best to drive a little less, just to be on the safe side-no Atheists in a foxhole you know? Might bring the price of oil down a little and get the U.N. off the back of the Western World and, at the same time, cut down on suburban chicken farming.

Once again, the whole deal comes back around to my continued, comprehensive gripe with the “news” media. The “news” media is hell bent on laying a not so subtle guilt trip on collective humanity while, at the same time metaphorically and collectively, stumbling around Central Park with a rope tied around it’s genitalia and a pocket full of crank.

That’s my rant for the day. Aside from all of the above, I feel pretty good.

While having coffee this morning, I listened to “Canadian Sunset” from the Danny Gatton record “Redneck Jazz“. Gatton’s playing never fails to stun me. This particular track features Buddy Emmons on steel guitar as well. The two of these guys seemed to have a special musical interplay. It’s a nice piece of music. Emmons plays a lot of shimmering harmonic stuff on the head; very subtle, ethereal.

I made a trip to Branson yesterday to buy some jeans. I made an attempt to listen to music on the radio. Sometimes I will just keep hitting the seek button ’til something catches the jaded ear.

It occurs to me that in most every type of mainstream music; the drums sound boring to me. To me, if the drums are boring the rest of it will be boring as well.

Everything is “on the grid”.

In most music editing software, a recorded track is represented by a horizontal picture of a waveform that looks kind of like a fuzzy pickle.

Each instrument or voice has a different looking fuzzy pickle that is determined by the timbre, length, frequency and loudness of the notes being played or sung. The bass part is usually a fat fuzzy pickle, a flute part would normally be skinny. If you look at the computer screen as the music plays, the fuzzy pickles all dance and move and go by from left to right. They are stacked horizontally as well. 1 fuzzy pickle for each track you record.

So, you have all these fuzzy pickle moving horizontally and you also have vertical lines that appear. They correspond to the tempo of the song. The vertical lines are “the grid”. The grid is used for editing. If one of the fuzzy pickles is in the wrong place (if somebody sings/plays to soon or to late), you just move it to the correct vertical line on the grid.

In order to use the grid in this manner you must first establish a rigid tempo structure. Once you have the rigid tempo structure in place, you can have the humans play along with the rigid structure. You can have them play to beeps, clicks, groovy ersatz drum sounds any number of things.

The grid is not human. The grid works on principles of zero tolerance-zero variation of a basic pulse.

Once you have all of the fuzzy pickles placed in their proper spots on the grid, you can then start manipulating each one in a number of other ways in order to make the collective group of fuzzy pickles more pleasing to the discerning ear of the modern consumer. Some pickles are too loud, some too soft. Some go on too long, others aren’t long enough. Fuzzy pickles generated by humans are often a little out of tune; this can be corrected as well.

The main thing is to get them on the grid. The grid is useful for orgnization as well as manipulation of the fuzzy pickles.

The grid is everywhere. It is in places where you would expect, like techno, rap and hip-hop music. These are types of music where you wouldn’t necessarily expect to hear a human being playing drums. The grid is present in places where you would expect to hear a human playing drums too, like rock and roll, country, blues and jazz (especially “smooth” jazz).

The trick is to just have the human drummer aware of the grid while he is playing. You have the drummer play along with a version of the basic pulse that the grid is aligned to. If the human drummer is a little off in spots why, his fuzzy pickles can be moved around same as anybody else’s.

You can also have the drummer hit each drum and cymbal really well one time. The idea here is to get one really nice fuzzy pickle for each drum/cymbal, then you can copy/paste said fuzzy pickle and place it wherever you desire on the grid. If you use this method, you can avoid spending a lot of time with the actual drummer too. If you don’t like this drummers kick drum pickle, you can replace it with another pickle from another drummer. The possibilities are endless as long as you are on the grid.

As a result, some records that sound like there is drummer back there smacking away, don’t have an actual human playing at all. Nobody is actually hitting anything. It’s touch football.

The grid is here and it’s here to stay. Evidently, most people like the grid. People are accustomed to the grid. They are comfortable with the grid. If you took the grid away, it would cause unrest and possibly, chaos.

There are musicians, recording engineers and even record producers that resist the grid. There will always be a small percentage of those who do not wish to conform. The grid doesn’t worry about them; their numbers grow smaller, day by day.

The grid presses on without cease. Click Click Click Click………

The grid is digital, it knows no emotion, it will not falter. Click Click Click Click….

The grid will not succumb to mere forces of nature. Click Click Click Click………

The grid is all powerful. All knowledge is contained within the grid. CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK

All hail the mighty grid. CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK