Welcome to the Sea of Echoes

So I just finished another three hour session putting Tycho to bed.  I’d say that these are rare and that a more typical time is 45minutes to an hour, but sometimes when I try to shorten it things spiral out of control.

The doctor says that he should be able to fall asleep on his own without us lying down with him, but we’ve simply never trained him to do that, so he gets quite anxious trying to sleep alone.  He can be really really tired, but when I try to leave, he just starts getting upset that I’m not doing my job and taking care of him.

Here’s where the crucial decision in parenting style comes in.  I think the popular child-rearing strategy these days is to be a little tough, and use the crib or other techniques to just draw an absolute line, and then let the baby adapt.  I have no doubt that after a few days or weeks of something pretty strict that Tycho would adapt.

But here’s the rub.  Up until now, I think Tycho has been a remarkable open and well adjusted little boy, mostly because I think he knows he has so much love and people are always watching out for him.  My fear is that part of Tycho’s adaptation to a solitary bed-time would be to pull away a little, and maybe to view the world as a slightly more cold and lonely place.

So tonight I experimented with a strategy to gradually make him more comfortable being on his own, which almost worked, though it does take a lot of patience.

Keep in mind that there are many outcomes I’m looking for in this process:

• I want him to feel safe and cared for going to bed.
• I want him to know that he can depend on us when he needs us.
• I want him to be able to relax and get to sleep in 10-15 minutes, assuming we put him to bed at a reasonable time.

I’ve been doing some mixing on headphones and getting awkward results.  To try to get to the bottom of it I thought I should see how bad the phones are coloring the sound I’m getting.

First I tried recording a white noise sample played through mac speakers and headphones thinking that there would be some pretty big differences.  There are, but mostly what you see is the loss of low-frequencies (<600Hz) and anything about 12kHz.

It turns out that a chirp is easier to measure and repeat.  Here are two spectrograms, first the mac laptop speakers:

Followed by the response of the headphones:

Both are flatter than I would have expected, with deviations under 10dB.  The phones actually have a pretty big notch near 2kHz, while the mac speakers are more erattic.

Here’s the prius:

The verical scaling is a little weird.  Iztope reads out the delta band as +/-2db or so, but I can make 10 or 20db changes in the input faders and not move these meters much.  Hmm…

Bottom line:

• Headphones drastically underestimate the amount of 2kHz and have some other weird frequency holes.  Mixing in the car might be a good solution.
• Checking peak hold plots might be a good way to tell what is happening.

So we went through our final pass of mastering last Monday and have been letting the album sit for a while.

Here’s quick preview of ‘The Scar’ after mastering.

Does this song work for you?

Should we include it in the album?

What about the details of the sound?  Anything we should re-track or re-mix?

“The Scar“ (mp3 4:30)

Please leave comments down below, text
or email me directly.  :)

Just got back from Tycho’s first “festival” show - Lilith Faire at Shoreline.  The crowd there was decent sized though not sold out and the music was pretty good.  We heard a couple of new acts and some older ones as well.  Here are some thoughts on the show, what worked and what didn’t.

Ann Atomic - an older songwriter turned singer.  We only caught a few minutes of her in the ABC lounge after her main set.  She was ok - nothing special.  I thought her guitar player and band seemed to be putting on a good show of being in it, but the vibe wasn’t really happening for me.  Clean sound, but no soul.

Kitten - flips side of Ann Atomic - she’s like 15 or something and jumps around on stage like she’s high on pop-rocks or something.  Twice she stood on amps and had to be pulled down by roadies, and then while she was doing spinning jumps she fell and twisted her ankle, which I am sad to say, was a little funny.  A few minutes later she was up again like nothing happened so maybe it was just a World Cup moment.  All that crazy energy worked with the crowd and the band was pretty tight.  She had a pretty good voice, and a sound that could be compared to Paramore.  I’m sure all that energy and attitude will get her somewhere, but again, the soul seemed lacking.

Colbie - I was actually not looking forward to her set much, but was pleasantly surprised.  She’s got a fair number of hits that I forgot about and her sound is so mellow and poppy it’s the perfect compliment to a sunny afternoon on the grass.  Also, her voice and comments seemed to convey that she was totally into the gig and her and the band blended really well.  Hats off.  :)

The Bangles - their first number (one of their rockier songs which I dont remember) sounded great, but the set was uneven.  When they were relying on their hit songs with nice vocal harmonies and support from keys things sounded good, but the stripped down punkier songs just sounded harsh.  Part of that was that the kit sounded bad - a snare that was too bright and no warmth from the kick, toms or cymbals.  They were in good form over all considering how long they’ve been around, and the vocals were solid all around.  But again, for some of the songs, the soul was missing.

Heart - We only caught a few tunes, but I was impressed by the band and the girls can still sing just like 20 years ago.  Wow.

All in all a great afternoon on the grass with mama Anne and baby Tycho.  Happy days.

Listen to “Drunk” (mp3)

Rate:  Awesome! —-  It’s Ok —-   Needs work

Or please leave comments below!!!

So many things happening today, but baby Tycho is starting to learn words much faster so I thought it would be fun to write some down.

His first word was “kitty” at about eleven months.  After that he used a bunch of non-word sounds to communicate and he’s been able to understand words like “ball” for a few months now.

Now at 15 months he knows: kitty, ma, apple, ball, up, orange, tea.

And in chinese: juitsu, bao bao, chin chin, tso tso, shieh sheih.

Last night around 1am we finished mixing the album!  Now is the time to share some of the demos around befure putting on the final touches.  Here’s one of the tracks from the album that means the most to me.

‘The Scar’ relates a story of abuse and pain, seen from the outside…

Have a listen to the song and take a moment to try and feel what we’re going for.

Was the mix good?  How did the song make you feel?

Is it something we should be proud of, or do we have more work to do?

I’m really looking forward to hearing your comments.

Listen to ‘The Scar’ (mp3)

So what do you think?

• That was the best song I’ve ever heard!
• That was pretty cool
• Its ok
• Good try guys, keep trying

Here at the Stanford GSB Virality Bootcamp, part of the Power of Social Technology.

Key Thoughts:

Dave McClure

• ~A lot of people are trying for virality, but a great product that people like is better.~
• Paid user acquisition is under rated, especially since.
• The major value of TechCrunch is for investor valuation.

Ed Baker

• Example of growing too fast.  Should have rate limiting.
• V = X Y Z

Hendrickson

• “Bootstrapped marketing is all about personally touching people.
  (And helping them touch each other.)”
• Using twitter to reach people.
• Zynga - 30% of revenue acquiring new users.
• Best way to get featured in TechCrunch is to work at TechCrunch.

Benjamin Katz (failed investment banker, filmmaker, coveroo.com, cafepress)

• “Rolodex: smile, dial, and rile; you are Billy Mays”
• Celebrities: they’re just like you! [except that epople pay attention to them]
• Look big: sleep with Bill Gates, Leland and Yoko
  • coveroo.com
• Harness the groundswell: Press, video, social media, email
• People want to care about something - give them something to be excited about
• Call hundreds of people per day to get in front of them
• Jigsaw - rolodexes
• Having a PageRank 7 site link to us helps with SEO.
• Make videos because it’s just complicated enough that it keeps most lazy people out.

I’m reminded of my interest in using the internet to bring people together.  The best way to increase the amount of love in your life is to give love to someone near you who needs it.

Working on the album for the last umpteen months has taught me the importance of great tone especially for bass. We all know great tone when we hear it - it’s the essential element of music that distinguishes the various instruments in a band and yet it is hard to control because tone is not described with the traditional pitch/time notation of music.  Good tone sounds good when you play a single note.

So what makes great bass tone?  Bass is a tricky instrument because great bass is more often felt than heard.  And although loudness is important for this, there is a crucial element of not stomping on other instruments in the band.  A lot of concerts I go to see to solve this problem by pumping the bass through a hard lowpass filter set around 100Hz or so, so that all the punch and definition of the bass is rounded off.  This is great in a big band because the bass stays out of the way of the guitars.  Also if the attack of the bass is rolled off then the kick drum will totally dominate.

Still the recordings that I like the best in small band settings the bass plays an essential role, because it needs tone to fill in so the guitar can be versatile.

Some Examples of Great Tone

First let’s consider a couple recordings with what I consider great bass tone.  For each I’ll describe the bass tone with words and then look at it from a signal processing perspective to see what else we can learn.

Alice in Chains - Would

This is a good song to start with because it opens with a repeating 2-bar bass figure.  The notes used are low in the register of a four string bass with an sixteenth-note rhythm and melody that emphasizes first downbeats and then upbeats.

This bass tone is thick, with a fair amount of breathy or puffy sounding highs which give it an explosive, percusive quality even without the kick or toms in.  The overall emotional quality of the sound is urgent, tense, and growly. There is also a fair amount of reverb to give it fullness.  What does this look like in signal processing land?

“Would” - Time Domain View - First Note

The figure shows us the following basic characteristics of the sound:

• Attack:
  • peaks at +/-0.35 (-10db)
  • there is plenty of high frequency (2-4kHz) from the pick attack (-20 to -30db)
  • the pick attack precedes the low frequencies sound by about 1k samples (20msec!?)
  • the bass turns on with an impossibly steep step around 1k samples
  • initial bass risetime is 110 samples (2.5msec)
  • the compressor lets through only about 25msec of bass attack
• Sustained level is at +/-0.2
  • the compressor is on here and there is almost no decay here until the next note begins
  • there is a fundamental at about 40Hz, which matches the pitch of the low E string
  • there is quite a bit of second and third harmonic
• There are subtle differences in stereo imagning for the bass tracks

“Would” - Frequency Domain View - First Note

• fundamental of 40Hz is 15db down from the 2nd and third harmonics which are about even
• everything about 250Hz is 40db below the primary
• general signal rolls off around 40db per decade - some of this looks a lot like a reverb decay curve
• noise floor is around 80db down from main signal
• it appears that the band from 2.2-3.1kHz has about 10db of heat

In general the waveforms look a lot less regular than the comb structures I would expect to see for an single note from a stringed instrument.  In particular none of the peaks stand more than 20dB above their neighboring frequencies.

Let’s look at another song.

(more…)

This picture showing an emotional graph is simply beautiful:

I had the privelege of seeing Sep Kamvar talk about his new book on Friday and I feel inspired by the blending of engineering and art.  He spoke about the emotional nature of blogs and how some bloggers feel the need to put their feelings out there no matter how raw.  The project WeFeeFine.org is just beatiful, as is the piece IWantYouToWantMe, but both raise interesting questions.

• the web is increasingly about feelings and relationships.  Is google missing out by defining its mission as organizing all the worlds information?   Information is so impersonal, but even organizing thoughts would be much more personal.
• is the era of openness on the web just a fad?   Privacy concerns on the internet are on the upswing it seems, and this whole experiment of self disclosure may produce some undesireable results.  Already I see a trend of more experienced users of social networking sites being more conservative with their information.

Still an inspiring area of research and I’m excited to get my hands on a copy of the book.