Stupid Software Tricks

Yesterday I wasted a couple of hours trying to install Native Instruments Absynth 5 on my Windows PC. I have no doubt that it’s a great instrument — and overall, I’m consistently knocked out by NI. The installer for this particular synthesizer, however, left a bit to be desired.

I told it to install on the L: drive. That’s where I install all my software now, because C: is basically full. But it insisted that it needed a bunch of space on C:. Like, 2.5 GB in order to run a 650 MB installer. Weird. So I cleaned out a bunch of stuff from folders called Temp. Still not enough space. Next, I drag-copied a bunch of stuff from Program Files over to the M: drive temporarily and erased it from C:. Now I could run the installer.

At the end of the process, I found that Absynth had installed a 1.0 GB library of samples to the C: drive, even though I had specifically told the installer at every available opportunity that I wanted to install on L:. That meant I wouldn’t have enough room to copy the stuff from Program Files back onto C:.

Regretfully, I gave up. I ran the uninstaller for Absynth. But that’s not the end of the story.

The uninstaller did not remove the 1.0 GB library. If I were a less sophisticated computer guy, that huge folder would just sit there gathering dust forever, because I wouldn’t know where to look for it. Also left on the C: drive

Indemnity We Trust

Until today, I was planning to start teaching cello this fall at a sort of high-end private music studio. Unlike the three teaching studios I’ve been associated with most recently (including Ingram & Brauns in Pleasanton, where I still teach), this new place wanted me to sign a contract.

They didn’t bother to tell me about the contract last November, when I initially agreed to teach there; they only emailed it to me two days before my first scheduled lesson. This was perhaps just a wee bit unprofessional on their part, especially considering that the student whose lesson I was scheduled to teach had already paid for a full month’s lessons on the mistaken assumption that the studio had a cello instructor on the roster; but never mind that.

The contract, while sensible enough for the most part, included this charming language: “Instructor shall indemnify, defend and hold harmless [the studio] from any and all damages, claims, liability, unpaid taxes, and expenses, including attorneys’ fees, arising from and related to Instructor’s obligations under this Agreement and any services provided by or activities of Instructor.”

This is pretty typical of contracts drawn up by lawyers. I’ve rejected contracts in the past because of indemnity clauses that the company in question wasn’t willing to strike. The trouble with an indemnity clause is that it asks me to push my life savings into the middle of the poker table and BET that nothing bad will happen. Since my life savings is also my retirement plan, you may imagine that such a wager might not seem entirely prudent to me.

Let’s suppose, for instance, that an insane parent decides to sue the studio because they feel (quite wrongly) that a representative of the studio promised them that little Bobby (who is tone-deaf, dyslexic, and has

Bull Sheet

The demise of the brick-and-mortar sheet music store is one of the lesser-known but keenly felt tragedies of the late 20th century. Perhaps not quite on the scale of Serbian atrocities in Kosovo, but the degradation in quality of life is nonetheless palpable, to those who are paying attention.

Once upon a time, you could walk into a great big barnlike sheet music store (Byron Hoyt in San Francisco, for instance), paw through rack upon rack, and find whatever you needed, be it ever so obscure. But finding it wasn’t even half the point. With popular works, you could compare half a dozen different editions and choose one that you liked.

Today this material — a huge slug of our cultural history — is available only online. And the people who prepare online catalogs of sheet music have neither the time, the expert knowledge, nor the motivation to provide the kind of information prospective buyers need.

Tonight I went searching for an edition of the Brahms B Major Trio, Op. 8, revised edition. I found a Dover edition of the complete Brahms trios on Amazon, with both the original and revised versions of Op. 8. It said that on the cover, that’s how I knew. But nowhere on the Amazon Web page, nor in either of the customer reviews, could I find any mention of whether the edition was strictly a piano score or whether it included the violin and cello parts.

That’s a stark example, and it’s the norm, not the exception. Amazon has a product in stock, and I’d like to buy it from them, but I can’t, because they don’t give me enough information. The reason they don’t is because they don’t give a damn about classical sheet music. It’s not a big enough or profitable enough market for them. They want to sell me a Kindle (suuure…).

Even if they ponied up the essential information, though, shopping at Amazon would be nothing like shopping at Byron Hoyt in its heyday. On Amazon I can’t leaf through the music, decide if the print is large enough to be readable, decide if I like the editor’s markings, and also (with an unfamiliar piece) decide if it’s technically within my grasp.

I buy a fair amount of cello sheet music from cellos2go.com. It’s a great site for cellists, and Ellen Gunst, who is a cellist herself, recommends products (books, cases, whatever) that she feels are superior. But most of her sheet music listings have almost no information, just a scan of the cover, the composer, author, or editor’s name, and the price. With five books of scales and arpeggios to choose from, how do you know what to buy? Answer: It’s a crap shoot.

And here’s a sonata by L. Auerbach for cello and piano. It’s $69.95. I’ve never heard of Auerbach. Am I going to pay that kind of price without looking at the music? Of course not.

The good news is, by searching the Web I was able to find a downloadable PDF of the trio, complete with the violin and cello parts. It was scanned from an 1891 Simrock edition, and while the edition was in mint condition and the scan carefully done, the PDF is kinda gray and fuzzy. But that’s okay. I’ve got the music, and it cost me nothing except the printer paper and ink.

What I don’t have, online, is the ability to browse through music that I don’t know. And that’s a real loss.

Not Fiction

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing another novel — poking at a few plot outlines, drafting a few scenes. Today I’m coming, reluctantly, to the conclusion that I’m not likely to be able to pull it off.

Technically, I could do it. I know how to sit down and write 500 pages of characters, action, and dialog, and because I’m a professional, they would be of publishable quality. The lurking problem is that I just don’t like people enough. Novels are about people, and I no longer care about people — neither my characters nor my (possible) readers.

The Rush Limbaugh/Sarah Palin Republicans have soured me pretty decisively, that’s part of it. I’ve also been musing lately about a few failed romantic relationships. (The failed ones would amount to precisely 100% of the ones I attempted.)

And then there’s the amateur music on Broadjam. I got a free membership to Broadjam laid on me (I may be doing some writing for the site), so I’ve been listening to tracks uploaded by other musicians. Now, these are the people who care enough about their music to record it, to finish recording it, to join an online site that provides networking with other musicians, and to upload their recorded tracks to the site — presumably with the idea that someone may want to listen. So basically, they’ve self-selected as the upper 50% of aspiring musicians.

Unfortunately, the distribution of clues among the participants is haphazard. Very few of them are entirely clueless: To paraphrase Lincoln, many of them

Jam Bourree

Musicians, and especially pop musicians, are desperate to get heard. Lately I’ve been poking around in a website called Broadjam; it’s a place where musicians can upload their tracks and get heard, both by other musicians and potentially by buyers — people who are looking for music to license for TV soundtracks or whatever.

Broadjam has been around for ten years, which makes it practically a doddering ancient in the world of Internet music. Founder Roy Elkins seems to have a good sense of how to keep a website in business. Reportedly the site has more than 90,000 members.

I may be doing some writing for Broadjam starting next month. Right now I’m just another musician checking out what my colleagues and competitors are up to.

One of the features of Broadjam is anonymous peer reviews. You get to listen to a random song and fill in a Web form with comments, without knowing anything about the artist. In my first few reviews, I’ve tried hard to be constructive, not brutal, but it’s a challenge. The tracks left a bit to be desired.

What’s interesting about this process is that it helps me improve my own composing and mixing. I can see the difference already. I’ve seen the same effect in fiction-writing critique groups. When you read a published novel by a solid professional, the writing seems effortless. The craft is invisible, even though it’s right there on the page. But when you read stories submitted to a critique group, the mistakes are immediately obvious — and that means you can learn from them!

Same deal in Broadjam: After criticizing a track for a mix that was “thick and muddy,” I start listening to my own mixes more critically. Are mine thick and muddy? How could I make them more transparent?

Multiply that by twenty different criticisms and you have a measure of how useful Broadjam can be.

Happy Mixing

Here’s a music technology story with a happy ending. I did a brief sketch this morning in Steinberg Cubase 4.5. The main synth I was using was Spectrasonics Omnisphere. It sounded lovely — but when I exported the audio mixdown as a new stereo file and listened to the file, the results were decidedly glitchy.

I downloaded and installed the latest version of Omnisphere. That didn’t help. I tried bouncing the same MIDI track with a different synth; there were no problems. Figuring there might be a compatibility problem between Omnisphere and Cubase, I tried bouncing the same MIDI track in Ableton Live 8 using Omnisphere as the sound source. It was still glitchy.

So I went to the Spectrasonics support page on their website. I quickly learned that when a synth is streaming audio from the hard drive (which is what Omnisphere does, because many of its presets use really large audio files), a normal track bounce won’t necessarily work. The bounce is being done faster than real time, which means the data streaming from disk gets hung up.

I had never before noticed the checkbox in the Cubase Export Mixdown dialog that says, “Real-time export.” When I checked that box and did a new export, the mix was flawless. And it took me less than two hours of head-scratching to solve the problem.

I’m still learning stuff, even after all these years. And one of the things I’ve finally got nailed down (more or less) is how to troubleshoot technical problems. Download the latest update. Try to isolate the problem by changing some aspects of the environment. Go to the manufacturer’s website and search for solutions. And don’t start sending nasty emails until you’ve tried everything else!

Fleshing It Out

The creative process is mysterious, but Rule #1 is, follow your nose. Go with the flow. Do the next indicated thing. Sometimes you may have a fairly definite outcome in mind, sometimes not. Even if you think you know where you’re going, you may be surprised.

At one time I did a fair amount of composing in a computer-based home music studio. In recent years, not so much (and that’s a story for another time). This week I wanted to give myself an incentive to get off the dime and actually finish a piece rather than let yet another sketch gather dust on the hard drive. So I thought it might be fun to document the process of turning a sketch into a finished piece. As of today, it isn’t quite finished, but it’s far enough along that I can share the process step by step. I’m not even sure of the title yet, but I may call it “Casual.”

This is not, I hasten to add, a profound or deeply emotional piece of work. My personal view is that it’s just sort of mildly cool. It’s a flexing-my-rusty-muscles sort of piece. I decided up front that I would use nothing but Propellerhead Reason 4. I’ve done a couple of all-you-need-is-Reason pieces in years past, so I knew I wouldn’t be shortchanging myself in the sound resources department. Giving yourself some artificial boundaries for a given piece can help the creative process by reducing the choices to a manageable set.

I launched Reason and soon came up with a modest little groove in 7/4 that I liked. This initial sketch used

See Sound

After wrestling with Csound for a couple of days on my PC, last night I found a way to do what I want to do. Or at least I think I did. It may be weeks before I know for sure.

Csound started life, many years ago, as a command-line program. In those days, command-line programs were state of the art: computers with mice and windows were still a laboratory curiosity. In recent years several people have built “front ends” for Csound with the idea of making it user-friendly. But of course the authors of the front-end software are unpaid volunteers. Sometimes things break. Sometimes things are released without being rigorously tested on a variety of systems. Depending on the details of your computer system, using a front end, or attempting to, may actually make your life worse rather than better.

I had sort of forgotten about blue. Blue is a very nice front end for Csound … in Windows, at least. Though it’s theoretically cross-platform, having been written for the Java Runtime Environment, in the MacOS blue is a little cranky. This is because developer Steven Yi doesn’t have a Mac to test it on. Blue is his personal composition system — he makes it publicly available as a gift to the Csound community.

So now I can get Csound to respond, in real time, to MIDI inputs from a hardware keyboard and play notes out to my Firewire interface with acceptably low latency.

The next step is to figure out what sort of music I want to make with it. This is not a simple question. Every music software system has certain biases built into it. It will encourage you to consider things that it does well, and discourage you from considering things that it does badly. The trick is to understand those strengths and weaknesses well enough to work with them, while simultaneously keeping your hand and eye firmly on matters of musical expression. If you let the software dictate the music to you, the results will almost certainly be dismal.

Down in the Trenches

The trouble with free software is, sometimes you get what you pay for. Today I’ve been trying to get Csound to read real-time MIDI input (from a physical keyboard) and play notes or respond to slider moves. No luck whatever.

Just to be clear — the reason I’m tying myself in knots over this is because Csound is incredibly powerful and produces amazing sounds. It’s just user-hostile, that’s all.

I posted a long “help!!!” message to the Csound mailing list, and got a couple of suggestions from seasoned Csounders, but the suggestions only sent me wading deeper into the quagmire. “Try running Csound from the DOS command prompt,” I was told, “instead of using the GUI front end.” So I tried that. I know barely enough about the command prompt to launch Csound at all, but I managed it. A variety of non-musical events ensued.

With one test file, I could play the keyboard and see messages in the DOS window that indicated the notes were being received — but I didn’t hear any output. And while this file is supposed to run for an hour, allowing uninterrupted real-time input, it closed after a few seconds. Another test file kept running, but failed to respond to MIDI at all. I don’t know what the relevant differences were.

When I went back to the GUI front end, I found I had a new problem. I had created a musical sketch, which played just fine yesterday from the GUI. (This sketch had no real-time MIDI input — it was just rendering to the computer’s audio output interface.) Today, the same file produced only horrible

What’s Old Is Made New

Many years ago, I owned a Serge Modular synthesizer. It was an amazing beast, and I wish I still had it. Purely for nostalgia and sex appeal; I doubt it would still be in working order, and even if it was, I doubt I’d ever turn it on.

It was great fun to play with, though, because it was totally patchable. To make sounds, you connected physical modules with patch cords. One of the modules was a full-featured step sequencer. I spent many happy hours setting up odd patterns on the sequencer that would then play by themselves, producing trancelike variations that never quite repeated.

Being, this week, in a slightly demented mood, I decided to recreate the Serge step sequencer in Csound. Csound is less tactile, to be sure, but it’s also infinitely cheaper (assuming you own a computer) and ultimately a lot more powerful.

After a couple of days of tinkering, I have a musical sketch that isn’t too bad. (The mp3 doesn’t sound nearly as crisp as Csound’s native audio output, which is amazingly clean. But it’s not too bad.) If you’re a Csound programmer and want to know how I did this, here’s the code.

All of the intervals in this sketch are mathematically pure — that is, it’s an example of Just Intonation. Tuning on the Serge was always haphazard at best. And of course it didn’t have a reverb or a delay line. No, on the whole I don’t regret that technology has moved on.