Epistemic Ingemination

:: Art, Science, Politics, Humor, Geekery: Randy Kirchhof's Weblog

NOTE: this blog is no longer active as of 12/07. New one: http://blog.kirchhof.com

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.

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Fri, 30 Jun 2006

"It's very broad, it's very significant, and it's a slam."

Ouch. And that's a Bush administration lawyer talking. Here's more on the rebuke to the administration's broad interpretation of its own powers. Bush will likely go to congress seeking approval for the military tribunals. LAT's Rosa Brooks thinks yesterday's Supreme Court ruling could open the door to war-crimes prosecutions of US officials.

*Blink*

Did I just see the world's most respected journal of international diplomacy bring up the spectre of seeing the President and Vice President of the United States doing a perp walk at The Hague?

Phew. There are quiet rumblings of great powers in movement happening right now, gang, and we will never see even the tip of the iceberg. Pick any secret-society ancient-brotherhood conspiracy theory you like; or none at all. You don't really need one; the Bush family has powerful and well-connected adversaries, even in broad daylight. This should be exceedingly interesting.

Posted at 12:45 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink] [Reload all] [E-mail]

Thu, 29 Jun 2006

Why Conservatives Can't Govern

There's a great, snarky, thoughtful article by that title over in the Washington Monthly's current issue.

The money paragraph:

If government is necessary, bad government, at least for conservatives, is inevitable, and conservatives have been exceptionally good at showing just how bad it can be. Hence the truth revealed by the Bush years: Bad government – indeed, bloated, inefficient, corrupt, and unfair government – is the only kind of conservative government there is. Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well.

Posted at 15:00 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink] [Reload all] [E-mail]

Wed, 28 Jun 2006

Christian?

If you're the type who is hypersensitive to hypocrisy in religion — I am — then you may enjoy this thoughtful article.

Posted at 17:58 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink] [Reload all] [E-mail]

Tue, 27 Jun 2006

One Foot In Front Of The Other

Okay, okay. Sorry for the silence.

My three or four mini-jobs have all conspired to become one double-job over the last week. And I am not complaining; I swear, the feast or famine aspect of all of this can become less than entertaining at times. Looks like that is finally stabilized now.

I've accepted the production position at Threadgill's WHQ, and will be there Thu-Fri-Sat and sometimes other days for the duration of the season. It's a happy thing; kind of a heart-string-tugger too, as I was the guy who rolled up the last cord at the old Armadillo concert hall here in town, and Threadgill's is the de facto successor. A lot of old familiar faces, all of us now with a quarter century of tire marks across our backs. Good people, extraordinary music, and a lot of sweat out in the Texas summer heat. I worked 20 hours out of the 24 between Thursday at 3:00 and Friday at 3:00; I consumed about five gallons of water, none of which ever made it to my kidneys. I am probably as toxin-free as I've been in years; I'll be in great shape by the time the season ends in October. You ladies can start booking your Christmas party escort now if you need one; I'll be presentable. Heh.

So, anyway, I'll write something substantive when the muse starts screaming in my ear and needs to be shut up again. In the meantime, enjoy life, do something nice for some unsuspecting person, and go feed your brain.

Posted at 12:44 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink] [Reload all] [E-mail]

Thu, 22 Jun 2006

Brazen

If you get your Internet connectivity through AT&T (formerly SBC, formerly Southwestern Bell, formerly AT&T) or surf on your Cingular or AT&T phone, or use your Comcast cable modem, your life changes tomorrow. That's when their new service agreement goes into effect.

SFGate:

The new policy says that AT&T—not customers—owns customers' confidential info and can use it "to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process."
The policy also indicates that AT&T will track the viewing habits of customers of its new video service — something that cable and satellite providers are prohibited from doing.

So, your name, address, stats, viewing habits, passwords, sites you visit, data you download, people in your address book, people who visit your web page, text messages, and everything else you do online can all be used "to protect" AT&T's "legitimate business interests." That's carte blanc to do anything that they damned well please with your life to further their own ends, and to hand whatever they feel like over to the government whenever they want. It is essentially you ceding all of your constitutional rights to AT&T so that you can use their network.

It can even be construed to mean that if you are using an AT&T ISDN line for your broadcast remote, they own your content.

If you use their service, you agree to their terms.

You might want to rethink your broadband or dialup connectivity. And be careful what you say in that text message until you find another provider.

[ Addendum: more here. ]

Posted at 09:23 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink] [Reload all] [E-mail]

Wed, 14 Jun 2006

Housekeeping

I collect quotes as I roam around this world; I took the time to add the latest batch to the collection today. If you like that kind of thing, enjoy.

Posted at 12:10 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink] [Reload all] [E-mail]

Tue, 13 Jun 2006

Checkpoint/Recap/Thanks

I want to thank all of you. Those familiar and those new.

The birthday piece that I wrote on Friday-week-ago generated quite a bit of traffic from like-minded people, and the response has been very kind. Many, many kindred spirits of all ages are out there, and it has reinforced my contention that none of us are alone, no matter how much we feel that way. We simply don't communicate enough to realize how much alike we are. I guess that the lesson is, to paraphrase Reagan (the only sane thing that I remember him saying): "Tear down that wall." If you have a moment of lucidity and state who you are and what you know, you just might immediately find that you're, well, normal. Those around you will likely breathe a sigh of relief and excitedly tell you that that's what they feel too. We're all, most of us anyway, very much the same way, silently.

My lord, we are strange clammed-up creatures. Always a moment away from peace of mind.

The audio engineer musings, though, have generated a response that has been really surprising, and surpassingly fulfilling. I guess that people are copying it and sending it around; the website has seen a bit of traffic, but the response has been utterly out of proportion to that; I've received emails from every continent except Australia and Antarctica. I've received communications from musicians that I worked with long ago on tours that I've long forgotten. I've received phone calls from audio people and musicians. The common response, again, has been essentially "I knew that." I guess that maybe another illusion can fall as well. That'd be cool, eh?

It has been the best possible birthday party, and I thank all of you.

So, anyway, please don't look for Daily Wisdom here; I am much more practiced and better at daily folly. My fingernails are just as bloody as yours from trying to hang on.

But the fingernails have had a ten day respite, and have had a chance to heal a bit, and I am very grateful to you. I bet that I can hang on better now. Maybe I'll be able to articulate some other insight sometime. But if I do, I can absolutely guarantee that it will be nothing original, and it will be something that you already know, and something that you should be talking about matter-of-factly every day. We're human beings. This means that we are all damaged, and we are all brilliant, and we are all flawed, and these things mean that we are all wholly normal.

The bottom line is that it all comes down to communication. We're only as melancholy as our secrets make us. If there are no secrets, there is no place for The Uneasiness to take root.

Go out there and have a big heart today.

Forward.

Posted at 01:33 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink] [Reload all] [E-mail]

Sun, 11 Jun 2006

Whew...

A Japanese computer animation of a large meteor striking the earth. Fascinating. Horrifying.

Posted at 21:44 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink] [Reload all] [E-mail]

Fri, 09 Jun 2006

Now This Is Cool....

Using perspective to create objects that are not there.

Posted at 14:22 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink] [Reload all] [E-mail]

Sun, 04 Jun 2006

On Being A Sound Guy

I received a really nice note from Jeremy of Turbo 350 over on MySpace recently that asked an interesting series of simple questions. Questions that could be answered with a series of books if answered in fullness.

His are basically:

How can I make life easier for the sound man?
It sure seems to me like none of them give a sh*t. What should I expect from them?
What bugs you about musicians that we can improve?

To those, I'd add:

What bothers me about sound men in general?
How can they improve?

Whew. Big series of questions. (And BTW, when I use the term "sound man" it is gender nonspecific. Women are rare in the field, true, but some of the best of the breed happen to be sportin' ovaries. And bad female audio engineers don't exist in my experience. So they already win on points.)

Okay. To my eye, it takes talent in three broad-brush areas to be "good" in the craft. Technical, production, and artistic.

And every engineer who reads this is going to agree heartily with some aspects and disagree vehemently with some. The world will, nonetheless, keep on turning, and we'll all keep doing what we do.

I already had a good sense of gain structure and signal flow when I gravitated towards audio engineering, because I was a synthesizer geek. (The old analog kind, with the patch cords, that played one note at a time. A great way to learn audio theory.) But this was only technical knowledge. And technical-knowledge-only often makes for a very poor sound man.

So let's give some credit where it is due. I had the good fortune of going to work for a man named Jim Finney at the Armadillo World Headquarters in the late seventies. He taught me how to roll cords. He taught me how to advance a show. He taught me how a professional production happens. He taught me to heed the clock. And he taught me the pleasure of working my ass off in service, not only of the musician, but of the Industry and of the Art. Jim is one of two or three people that I can truly say have influenced my life profoundly for the better. He's the road manager for Asleep at the Wheel these days, if you ever want to lay your eyes upon one of the very best of the best production managers on this planet. He taught me how to work.

And finally, it takes a good ear. This can't really be taught, except to oneself. But the point is, you can have it, and it can be learned and improved. The secret lies in listening to the production of every piece of music that you hear: radio, live, dance, TV, movies, etc. Especially commercials, oddly enough. Advertisements are designed to invoke a feeling. I know; I did 'em.

Listen to the EQ on the instruments; their place in the mix; the type and settings of the effects used to enhance the recording; the spacial mix; the tonal quality. The feel. The style. Pretty soon, you'll begin to realize weird little things. Like Hanna-Barbera cartoon soundtracks from the sixties were recorded with a very big band in a very small room, and Pink Floyd liked to track in a very large one.

If you really want to be excellent at this craft, bite the bullet and sign on with a good cover band for a while. Make every song sound exactly like the record when it comes out of the speakers. That is sound man boot camp, and if you graduate, you can have a career and never have to work for a cover band again. Unless, of course, you want to. I sometimes do.

So, regarding the questions at hand.

I don't mean to be denigrating or harsh here, but the fact of the matter is that most sound men come to be such because they wanted to be in the music business and drink and get laid, and be near the creative process, but they couldn't play an instrument. So they got a job as a roadie and worked their way up the food chain. Some of the finest I know followed this path. And virtually all of the crummy ones I know did, too.

It drives me nuts as a musician (I am a keyboard player, too) to walk into a club and find six almost-broken mic stands, a board with three bad channels and a surly son of a bitch controlling it all. And, sadly, this can sometimes be the norm when you're playing small places. It is not necessarily so, but if a club is watching pennies, the PA/sound costs are going to be the first pennies that typically get watched. If the owner can get his unmarried pregnant daughter's slacker ex-musician boyfriend to "do sound" for $35.00 and free beer, well... sometimes you're going to see exactly that. But on the whole, you are going to see someone who is well intentioned, and who is trying to get better at his craft, just as you are at yours. Which means "be on the same page."

So here's rule one, the Über-rule, for everyone:

Advance the show. Always. Call the club three days before the gig and ask for the sound guy. Make them track him down and call you back. Tell him what your instrumentation is, what your stage setup is like, your style of music, how many pieces your drum kit has, and what time you will be there for load-in. Tell him if you jump around a lot, or if you run out into the crowd a lot and need a long mic cord. Warn him if your style of music includes a particularly loud stage volume. Ask him what he needs from you. And if you already know him, even if you've played there 30 times, advance it anyway. It establishes a professional bond and gives you a leg up.

If he is a pro, he will be impressed and work his ass off for you. If he's a slug, he will be intimidated and get off of his ass for you. It's win-win. Do it.

How can you make his life easier?

As few surprises as possible. See "Advance the show." Let's just say that if you are a fourteen piece Earth, Wind, and Fire tribute band that shows up an hour before stage call, he will not be predisposed to go the extra mile for you.
Tell the club's booking person to give your number to the sound man when you book the gig. It'll impress all concerned, and flag them that you care about such things. It's perhaps the single most simple thing that you can do enhance your professional image with the club owner.
Try to identify what you need and articulate it to the sound man. This is a toughy, because it's his job to anticipate your needs. But if you're not hearing enough drums from the mains, if you're not getting the "feel" that you need, try to talk to him about it. Some will be a horse's ass and say "that's my mix, man." Not much you can do about it. But the good ones will bend over backwards to make it right for you within reason. Conversely, make sure that your requests are reasonable and about the music. Make requests of the sound man, but make them as a musician, not as a rock star. He'll already know how to deal with rock stars, believe me.
Do what you say you're going to do. Show up on time, or call if you're significantly hung up. If you have to cancel, do it at the very earliest possible moment after you find out. Keep your home life at home, and your boot out of the sheetrock in the band room. Drop your ego at the door, and if you like to get drunk, that's fine, but try to mitigate the process until after your set is complete. Simple professional courtesy.
If you need to get offstage to make way for the next band, do it immediately. Pull everything off the stage and then disassemble it. That babe that stared at you through the last half of the set will still be there five minutes from now, and she'll be that much more creamy because of your professionalism. And when you do start to chat her up, please take it away from the stage area, of course. Other people are still on the clock...
Trust the guy until he proves otherwise. Work with him. The fact of the matter is, sometimes your guitar is too loud, and he's having trouble getting your vocal heard above it on the P.O.S. $800 sound system that the club owner has foisted upon him.
Work on your stage volume and balance. It is a truism that great bands mix themselves. Work on your mic technique. Work your volume controls. Turn up only as loud as is necessary to get the tone that you are seeking. Some music has to be loud, and that's fine. But remember that the quieter you are from the stage, the more of a recording-quality mix he can give you out front. A good sound man will cover your back, enhance your work and bring out your genius, even if you're not quite there on your own yet.

The bottom line here, as with all things in life, is "be a thoroughbred, and you get to hang around with other thoroughbreds." It really is as simple as that. If doing things right is what you're about, people who like doing things right are going to gravitate to you, and doors will open to you everywhere you walk in this world. Especially in the music industry, because it is rare enough that it will be immediately noted.

Now. Sound men. Let's all take a deep breath. I want to have a little chat with you. Come on over here and sit down. Comfy? Good.

First off, if you have no interest in audio engineering, then step away from the board and become a bartender! You'll make more money, you get a lot more free alcohol, you get to embezzle cash, and you get laid far, far more often. People like you can make my world infinitely more difficult, and I see it almost every day of my professional life. I have to debrief and rehab the band that you butchered last night, and it shouldn't be necessary. Fade away from the faders, my friend. You'll be happier and wealthier and more sexually fulfilled, and you won't be so cranky. You might actually get to listen to a good mix of a band playing your club. It's a win-win for all of us.

Okay. I feel better. Group hug.

I can't teach anyone to have an ear in a blog post. But here are some other things. On the Technical side:

Mic everything possible, even if you're in a tiny club. You may only use a miniscule bit of many of 'em in the final output, but it will train your ear to hear subtleties and whet your appetite for detail, and you will learn how to mix. Sometimes, amazing recording-quality work happens in rooms no bigger than your average convenience store, but it is only possible if you're set up to take advantage of it when the stars align. Magic can happen; you and the musicians can become a single process of creative art. But not with just a kick, an overhead, and two vocal channels.
Be wary of compressors. They are a very advanced concept, and require a deep understanding of gain structure, phase, and amplitude vs. tone. They're tricky, and can be treacherous. (Look, they used to be a must. But these days, every amp on the market has overload protection and they won't put a square wave into your speaker stack. You are not constrained by the limitations of any recording medium, and the dynamic range of your PA is quite up to the task. In many ways, not all mind you, compressors in sound reinforcement are archaic. And they can exponentially increase the likelihood of feedback.) If you're the type who has a compressor on every channel, and one on every sub, and one on the mains, it does two things. It insures, 95% of the time, that your mix will be uncontrollable, muddy, and awful. And, generally and light-heartedly speaking, it marks you as immediately suspect of either being a gain-structure god (5%) or a hardware nerd who reads too many advertisements (95%). There's a place for compressors (they're indispensable in the studio) but that place is not everywhere and it is not always. If I see a system with no compressors in a sound reinforcement situation, it bothers me not at all.
Feedback is easily controllable. Go into the club when no one else is there, fire the system up, crank it to levels that you'll never use in a performance situation, put a mic onstage center and start making it feed back. Find out where the room rings. Find out where the monitors ring. Be aware of the magic numbers - virtually every room in the country has rings around 160Hz, 1.6kHz, and 4.5kHz. Keep a favorite CD with you, one that you know exactly how it is supposed to sound, and put it on loud, and adjust the mains EQ until it sounds right with that mic open onstage at the edge of feedback. You will often end up with a perfectly tuned system. (I have tuned arena-sized systems perfectly using this technique. It works.)
Putting a mic on the the bass cabinet will sound better than a D.I. 90% of the time. Especially if you have a large diaphragm dynamic to work with. It makes a big difference in the quality of your mix; the bass (with the kick) is the foundation of everything. (When the room has an unusually low resonance, or the bass player has an unusual no-bottom-end tone or low stage volume, I pull out the D.I.)
Keep your final-stage EQ's as near to zeroed as is reasonably feasible. Every time you pull a frequency down, you are causing phasing anomalies and making your amps work harder. I can't stress this enough. If you don't believe me, do a simple test. Pull every other one of the mains EQ gain sliders down to the bottom, a full cut on alternating bands. Put on a CD and turn the system up. Your amps will thermal after five minutes of trying to push that mess through at even a moderate volume. If you have a scope, look at the output waveform - you will see Very Ugly Voltage Swings around the zero axis as the varying frequencies and phases cancel and augment one another, and you will understand. That is the trace of an amp that is working 16 times as hard to give you 1/4 of the real volume output; its power supply is not going to like you very much over time, and its filter capacitors even less. So, get in the habit of zeroing the mains and monitor EQ's regularly and starting over from scratch. Tread the mains and monitor EQ's lightly, only enough for feedback and tonal control. Your entire system will love you and cherish you and make your life easy, your amps will run cool, your speakers will not be trying to push near-D.C. voltages, and you'll learn EQ techniques that will serve you for your entire career.
Graduate school happens when - and this will happen - the band's studio engineer who has only peripheral clues about sound reinforcement brings in $20,000 worth of precision large diaphragm wide-cardioid German condenser mics and wires your stage with them so that he can capture the delicate sonic nuances of the 120dB four-guitar Next Molly Hatchet that he's going to be mixing. Better be able to tune your system on the fly. Enough said.

On the production side:

Advance the show. Rule one. You get the same advantages from it that musicians do. You are flagged as a pro, and they are already primed to go the extra mile when they load in.
Make stage plots of every band you work with, and have their contact numbers, and make technical and qualitative notes regarding the band on the sheet as well. I have about 250 of these, many from long-dead bands. Besides the obvious archival value for your memoirs, they make your professional life infinitely more simple; they say good things about you, and they impress the ladies. (Well, okay, technically, no, they don't impress the ladies. They make the ladies say "dork" and wordlessly turn to talk to the band's roadie in an act of immediate and irrevocable dismissal.) But stage plots do impress the bands when they walk in and see a stage already wired up and tuned for them. And the bands give you kudos from the stage, and tell the crowd that you "rock," and the ladies will eventually filter back over to the sound board with a new and shallow respect for you.
Mix the show. There's nothing more irritating than a sound man who spends half of the first song getting levels and then walks away to go drink at the bar. Every song is different. They each require different effects, different balances. People do solos. Be there. Do your job.
When you have to request something of a musician, explain that you are doing so in service of giving them the best presentation out front. Because you are. Everyone gets asked to turn down occasionally; they rarely get told why, and you'd be amazed how eager they are to work with you if you articulate the correct reason. This is their profession and their livelihood, after all.
You are there in service to the musicians. If that is a problem to you, then you are in the wrong business. Be a pro, even in the face of the worst that this industry can throw at you. Look in the mirror tomorrow morning and smile at the advanced human being that looks back.
You are not the "sound man." You are the producer of the show, You are George Martin. You and you alone determine what comes out of the speaker in its final presentation. People are entrusting you with their professional careers, because they have no choice. It is an awesome responsibility, and you should treat it as such.

I am here to tell you that if you learn to do it right, there is no respect that surpasses that of a good band for a good sound man. And vice-versa. It is an incredibly fulfilling profession, if you treat it as such.

This hardly scratches the surface. I have a quarter century of this stuff under my belt, and if I were to truly let the chickens run free here, I'd be writing until December. But this will get things started, I hope.

Thanks, Jeremy, for jump starting something that I have considered doing for a while now.

Posted at 12:47 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink] [Reload all] [E-mail]

Fri, 02 Jun 2006

On Being Forty Eight

Just like Jerry Mathers, Thomas Hardy, the Marquis De Sade, Martha Washington, Charlie Watts, and Tex Schramm, I was born on June 2nd. Ninety three years to the day after the Civil War ended when forces under Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered at Galveston, Texas, in 1865, becoming the last garrison to do so.

First of all, it's weird. Forty Eight years in this world undeniably puts me squarely into "middle age" territory by any sane measure. Well, to hell with that. I am enjoying my youth far, far too much. I'll just skip straight from adolescence to death, if it's all the same to you.

I have the good fortune of being a musician, and a writer, and, yes, a stubborn fighter and a lover, a romantic and an idealist. Such people, if they survive, often do their best work after the age of fifty, and it's looking more and more like I might make the starting gate on this one. That's the goal, after all: to have the energy and the hungers and the fascinations and the enthusiasms and the simple joie de vivre of a teenager, combined with the wisdom of someone who has fifty years of bonehead self-inflicted mistakes under his belt. And believe me, friends, I qualify in both areas. To live a full life, one must be a fool many times over.

And, often, many times over again. Often with us, hearts get hurt; a conservatism of the spirit begins to advise our life decisions, and caution becomes a guiding voice. This is called growing old.

I view it differently. My understanding tells me that the very best way to avoid a broken heart is to create one that is too big to break. Then you can be free, and well, and when the reaper comes, he is not grim.

So don't bother "respecting" this elder; he is your contemporary and your peer. I am turning around the clock and going the other direction. I know people in their twenties that are older than I am; I know people in their eighties who are younger. The latter are the ones to watch.

Thanks for letting me be here, Great Spirit.

Posted at 13:10 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink] [Reload all] [E-mail]

Thu, 01 Jun 2006

Plans O' The Day

Hey all of you Austin folk; I turn 48 years old on Friday. But Saturday is a busy work day, as is Sunday, so Friday is really better spent acting my age. Thusly, I am going to go and hear Kris Brown play at the Troubadour Saloon (503 E. 6th) Thursday night, and do what little bit of birthday acknowledgement that I care to do for the year. My present to myself. I'll be up there around 11:00.

If you have the freedom to do so, come on by and hang. The music will be great; Kris is one of my favorite guitar players, and the band is one that I hope to be hooking up with in the near future. As the clock strikes midnight in its inexorable march, you can point and laugh at the Olzheimer, as he marks one step further into the lonely and tragic dwindling twilight of his years. And, verily, he will point and laugh back. :)

Posted at 01:16 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink] [Reload all] [E-mail]