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.
So what do you think?
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
- 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.
