I’m going to try to power through my 3 posts for the week today. Fair warning though, I am sleep deprived. Any sanity that I may seem to exhibit is purely coincidental. I figured I’d do a post giving some background on my current sleep madness before subjecting you all to it.
For my new job I’m on a rotation to do releases which happen in the middle of the night to avoid inconveniencing our customers. I needed to be at work between 11:00 on Friday and 6:00 AM on Saturday. It’s not as bad as it sounds, as long as it goes smoothly it’s not very involved and then I get to take a day of real work off.
I got to sleep around 7:00 AM yesterday and slept until about 4:30 PM. My sleep schedule has a very strong tendency to want to fall asleep and get up later over time. I find that trying to fix my sleep schedule by forcing myself to wake up at a certain time just results in me getting less sleep and being more tired and miserable. I am not a morning person.
Since I have trouble keeping a sleep schedule under good circumstances, there’s no way I was going to get to sleep last night. So, my method for getting back on schedule for Monday is to stay up as long as I can today. My mother does not approve of this method of fixing my sleep schedule. Morning people don’t understand night people. So it has always been.
I’ll probably go to bed late afternoon or early evening and get 12 or so hours of sleep tonight if all goes according to plan.
This one is really pretty! I think this one came out really well. We had how to do this figured out a little better by this point. Also, the rest of our demos were mixed in GarageBand, this one was mixed with Pro Tools since Jeff and his mac were out of town when we started to lay down tracks for this one. Pro Tools definitely gives a little more precision, I think that comes out in this.
Music by Brandon, lyrics by Jeff on this one. If I recall correctly Brandon came to us with a potential song but we ended up splitting what he was proposing for the verse and chorus of one song into two. This got the chorus, the Jeff suggested we do a underwater sounding song with lots of chorus effect. Then Brandon wrote the verse and bridge.
This is Jeff’s favorite bass part that I’ve written. It’s also the first song we put together where I wrote an interesting bass part through the whole song. Sometimes Jeff or Brandon already have a bass part in mind when they write a song, such as Broken Umbrella. Other times all the song really calls for in a section is pounding root notes or following the guitar. The bass does its own thing all through this one and it was all me.
This isn’t an overly complicated or hard to play bass part but it’s a weird one. Musicians tend to have a certain vocabulary which strongly informs how they put a part together. On my post about Dream Sequence I talked about how I expanded my vocabulary to include contrary motion. I can tell you exactly how I put the Dream Sequence bass part together. I can’t really do that with this one, it doesn’t really correspond to my normal vocabulary on bass. This was just a sort of out of the blue part where I got an idea for what the bass part should sound like and then worked out which notes that corresponds to. After I hit the initial root note, why is the second note I go for here an augmented fifth? I’m really not too sure other than that I think it sounds right. I guess I could explain why this bass part works for this song in an after the fact sort of way, but really, sometimes you just have to go with your instincts.
Obsession is the great strength and weakness of nerds. Stereotypically, at the extremes, we end up billionaires or more often, living in our parents basements playing WOW all day. The common thing in both cases is a certain driving, probably unhealthy, obsession.
There are many reasons I might write a computer program. Most often it’s for my job. Sometimes I do so for my own convenience. Sometimes it’s just for furthering my knowledge of computer programming. As much as I want it to work so I’ll get paid or be able to use it or whatever my actual end is, in the moment I’m figuring it out because it eats at me to not have it figured out. I got an interview for my current job because I solved a puzzle they give to potential interviewees. I was a really hard problem and I probably wouldn’t have gotten it done if I didn’t have that compulsion to figure it out. I got my job interview because they nerd sniped me.
I’m not a normal person and I recognized and came to terms with that fairly early in life. Still, I get that it is a disadvantage as much as it is an advantage. At a very simple pragmatic level, it’s hard to shut off. I’ve always suffered from some mild insomnia. Similarly it makes it hard to live in the moment. I think a lot of the idea that nerds are stuck in their own little world comes from their tendency towards obsession.
I’ve taken a lot of steps over time to try to overcome the worst parts of my obsessive nature. Perhaps in doing so I’m also failing to take advantage of it fully and maybe found the next big software company, who knows? I’m happier this way though. I’ve always tried to keep my interests many and varied to avoid getting my whole life sucked into anything completely. When I was looking for colleges I made a deliberate decision that I did not want to go to a purely technical school even though I knew I wanted to study computer science. I also don’t spend much time playing video games anymore. I’m too prone to say just a little longer and sink more time than I really wanted into them. I can’t just get into an interest just a little bit and in ten years, I think I’ll prefer to have spent that time working on music or other things.
The Foo Fighters have a great new album, which was recorded on tape. (Whether or not you care about how it was recorded, it’s awesome and you should go buy it) After all the work that went into our demos (all digital, of course) it really blows me away that people still do that in this day and age. While I’m really grateful for the convenience of digital recording, I get that something real has been lost in a lot of modern music because of it. Analog has a certain sound but I’m not primarily concerned with that. The major advantage of analog is that it keeps you honest. Anything which can be done in analog can be done digitally more easily and cheaply. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. As a result, analog recordings have the advantage they will often end up being more natural.
One big example is that a lot of modern music is very lacking. I’m not talking about bad rock bands that don’t understand dynamics and just want to play at 11 all the time. There are certainly plenty of those, but the issue plaguing music today is record producers want all songs to be as loud as possible all the time so they’ll stand out when they get played on the radio. The phenomenon is known as the loudness war. A digital audio workstation like Pro Tools or GarageBand make it stupidly easy to over-compress your whole track and completely ruin it.
Another thing is that as much as musicians strive for perfection, perfection is not very pleasing to the ear. There’s a reason pretty much everyone I know who cares about music hates autotune. Midi isn’t going to replace guitars any time soon. We even like the sound of guitars distorted. Drum loops and drum machines can keep time perfectly but I’d much rather work with and listen to real drummers. When recording pure digital the marginal cost of another more perfect take is near zero for a professional musician. That in addition to everything that can be done to the tracks in mixing to get them even more perfect, the music can become soulless.
I’m not going to be doing any analog recording in the near future but I think it’s important to realize upsides and keep them in mind when recording and mixing. I’m also in awe of many things that have been done with limited recording technology. When The Beatles recorded Sgt. Pepper they were using the state of the art technology of the time, a four track tape machine! With all those elaborate arrangements, whenever they wanted more than four tracks, they had to bounce three to 1, losing quality. Listen to that album again and think about that. Even more impressive, on their song Strawberry Fields Forever, George Martin presented John Lennon with two backing tracks which were in different keys and at different tempos. Lennon liked both so he said “You can fix it, George”. The resulting recording isn’t in any A440 key, it’s somewhere between A and B as a result. George Martin reconciled the takes entirely by speeding up and slowing down tapes. See if you can spot the edit point where it goes from one take to the other. (answer here)
Our prog song! Time signature changes, irregular time signatures, polyrhythms and atonal guitar riffs, this is a weird one. The style isn’t normally my taste but it’s actually one of my favorites that we played. Jeff had this written prior to us forming as a band and is one of the first things he threw at us. Jeff, Brandon and I had been jamming together for a while before Jared joined us on drums. When we first started out this was a really tough song for me and Brandon for obvious reasons. Interestingly, this was the song that really sold us on our drummer Jared. There was some uncertainty about him on his first jam session with us but he picked this crazy song up right away and really impressed us. He’s been great and we’re very glad we stuck with him.
In addition to being a complex song that needs to be really precise this was our most difficult demo to mix. All our demos are self mixed, not professional done. Jeff, Brandon and I are all good at different things when it comes to mixing and between the three of us, I think we generally do a pretty good job. On this one we had to enlist the help of our friend and the head of our label, Ken Kato. We got some good lessons on mixing heavier music. It was also a lesson for us in making sure you’re happy with your raw tracks because there’s only so much you can do in mixing. Ultimately I think it came out very well and I think the demos we recorded afterwards are even better for having that experience.
The bass part mostly follows the guitars during the distorted parts. When that’s all the song calls for I’m happy to do that. It’s always my goal to serve the song and never just play notes for the sake of doing so.
I was mostly sticking to root notes for the verses as well for a long time but wanted to do more with that part of the song. I couldn’t figure anything out that I liked better until I stumbled on the BBC’s “How Music Works” series on youtube. Specifically I saw the part about contrary motion in bass parts. Up until that point all my bass parts moved in the same direction as the guitar part. I watched that and said to myself ” what if the bass moved in the opposite direction of the guitar on Dream Sequence?” The basic part wrote itself from there, although I’ve added some little things to it since. I’m very proud of that part and definitely want to get into writing more parts along those lines in the future. I guess my band likes it too because they left it really high up in this mix. Interestingly, it’s mostly roots and fifths, so it goes to show how far that can take you in writing bass parts if you don’t get too corny with it.
The post topic for the week: pets. Also, let’s all welcome Kas to the blogenning!
What would my ideal pet be? Whenever my parents ask me or my brother what we want for a gift for our birthday or things like that, we tell them a pony. Obviously this a running joke, we all know how that turns out. I don’t really want a pony.
Well, honestly, I don’t really have any desire to have a pet of any kind currently. Unfortunately there’s not really much for me to say on this topic. I’m allergic to cats and dogs. My personal association with pets is mostly negative at this point though. Sneezing, itching, wheezing, watery eyes.
I realize there are lots of other pets that wouldn’t cause those symptoms in me. I never really had a pet growing up and pretty much any friends I knew who had pets had cats or dogs. My parents were never really wanted to keep pets.
I never really managed to get attached to any animals and pretty much lost the desire to do so. My brother eventually persuaded my parents to get a hamster and them some gerbils. Curiously my mom actually became very attached to them but I never did.
If everyone is a cat person or a dog person I’d probably be a cat person if it were possible. I’m much more the loner, do your own thing type and I respect that in cats. Also, kittens are adorable. If I weren’t allergic and had grown up under different circumstances I would probably have a cat. As of right now I don’t really care that I can’t.
Warning: if you don’t know anything about computer programming this post will make no sense whatsoever to you.
I once had a conversation with Brandon and mentioned my skepticism about design patterns. I tend to think with a few notable exceptions they fall into one of two categories: wrong and obvious.
I think the best example of a really silly design patter is the adaptor pattern. If you have 2 interfaces that you need to convert between and you need to read that in a design patterns book to figure that out you’re hopeless as a programmer anyway. It’s not even the case that the design pattern people were providing a name to something people were doing. It was a shim or a wrapper before anyone came up with “adaptor”.
When I mentioned those categories, Brandon initially said that he thought of the Singleton pattern as being in the obvious category but I claimed it falls into the wrong category. We never had a chance to finish that conversation so I thought I’d get back to it here.
The stated reason for wanting a singleton is so that there will only be one instance of a class. The real reason for using a singleton is because you want a global variable. We all know global variables are bad but giving global access to an object through static method is good and clean design because … why exactly? You know that you don’t need to do anything special to have exactly one instance of a class, right? You just make one instance and then you don’t make any more of them. If there’s a good reason to think that things will go horribly wrong if there are 2 instances (there usually isn’t IME) you can keep a static count and have the constructor throw an exception on all calls after the first to be paranoid. I just don’t see why global access is necessary or desirable.
Any code that depends on your singleton being a singleton has an implicit static dependency. That makes it less testable and it’s behavior less predictable. It’s better to just pass the instance around as an explicit argument so you can mock it out for testing. Dependency injection is your friend.
Furthermore, I know you’re very sure it’s the right thing that should only be one instance of the class you’re making a singleton for. Think back to your experience programming, how often are you right about things you’re very sure about? If you’re anything like me, not very often. If it turns out you’re wrong think about the impact on the code-base of using a singleton vs if you had just made one instance and passed it around. If you were wrong and you didn’t make a singleton, you probably don’t actually have to do much of anything to accommodate the change. If you made a singleton you need to track down every single call to getInstance and figure out what needs to happen there now.
Are singletons that bad? Well, no. If using the singleton pattern is the worst thing about your code-base you’re doing pretty well. Depending on how your code-base looks it may be worth continuing to use it out of consistency. Even if I’ve convinced you, you’re probably not going to have the time to factor them out any time soon. Just realize that you’re using glorified global variables and if you get attacked by raptors for it I’m not responsible.
A lot about music this recently! It’s very much at the front of my mind, for obvious reasons. It will continue to be a major subject that I talk about on this blog but I’ll be mixing it up more going forward. Plus, prior to starting the blogenning, I did say that I’d write a post on each of these demos.
This one is our opener and would probably our hit single. Music by Brandon, lyrics by Jeff. Lyrically I really like the way Jeff goes against the normal idea that the singer “needs” the person that they’re after. “I don’t need you/but I want you”, refreshing in a happy pop song!
Musically, well, the main thing to talk about here is the bass line. It’s a very bass driven song and a reminder of both how far I’ve come and how far I have left to go as a bass player. Brandon brought this song to us with the bass part for the verse written, only a few months into picking up bass for the first time. I was still struggling much, much simpler bass parts at that point. I really like it and it makes the song, but it was very frustrating.
At the same time, I’m very glad we we’re the kind of band where I’d get that kind of stuff thrown at me. We stretched each other and gave each other opportunities to shine. Lots of bands will tell the bassist to just play root notes, and I didn’t know what I was doing at the time and couldn’t play very well at that point so I wouldn’t have been able to blame them. That’s not how I want to play and I’m glad to play with people who challenge me.
Despite being much more up my alley than a lot of our other songs, it took a long time for me to really be able to appreciate this one. I had to focus too hard on playing it. In the spring I finally got to the point where I could actually enjoy playing it and it was really nice breakthrough.
I can’t deny that I’ve come a long way since the and people seem to like the song and like my playing on it. Yet, when I listen to it, I can’t help but hear all the little imperfections in my playing and realize I’m still not happy with it. I guess most musicians are that way about their own recordings, even those who are much better than I am. I hope you enjoy it and I hope I will be a much better bass player by the time Jeff gets back!
I feel like I’ve recently reached an interesting point in my life where I’m thinking a lot harder about what I really want to do with it. I grew up in a middle class family and had the typical experience that much of the beginning of your life is charted out for you. You go to school, you go to college, you get a job. Check. So what now?
I guess the cliché next step would be get married and start a family. Well, maybe at some point. That seems to be happening later and later with my generation. There’s also the minor technical point that I haven’t found the right person, whose willing to put up with me, yet.
Yet at the same time my current freedom to do what I want with this stage in my life has made me more engaged with what I’m doing than I have ever previously been. There aren’t enough hours in the day, in a way that I didn’t have that issue when I was going through the motions, trying to meet my obligations. Don’t get me wrong, I found things that interested me and had hobbies I enjoyed. They were “extracurricular” and I always had to focus on where I was headed. I have a job I like and believe in now. I love where I live and have a killer apartment. I don’t have anywhere to “go” in any grand sense I can focus now a lot more on giving my life it’s own meaning.
I want to travel. I’ve never been outside North America and I want to fix that.
I want to keep myself in good physical shape. I want to run more. I want to bike to work more. I want to start taking my Yoga practice more seriously.
I want to keep myself in good mental shape. I want to keep up with what’s going on in the software development and computer science world. I want to write (hence the commitment to blog again). I want to read more again. I want to philosophize.
I want to become a better musician. As much of my time as my band has taken and as much as I’m looking forward to the reprieve until we start up again, to catch up on all this other stuff, I can’t wait until we get back to that point. There’s nothing I’d rather do. I play three instruments and I’m not happy with my abilities on any of them. I want to find the time and discipline to really work on them. I want to start writing my own songs and helping more with the writing process. I want to listen to more music and broaden my horizons.
I want to keep a balance and not burn out. I want to just hang out with friends sometimes. I want to be by myself and veg and recharge when I need it. I want to play games, watch movies, even some TV. I want to get reasonable amounts of sleep.
And that’s just for starters really. Perhaps none of those are traditional, ambitious goals. I want to play in a band and have fun and make great music but I don’t have any real goal to hit it big and become a rock star. I think these are the better sort of goals to have and still plenty to do anyway. I’m not sure how much of that I’m actually going to manage but above all I’m want to make sure I enjoy the ride.
I don’t know where getting older in the future is going to take me. If you had asked me years ago, what my life would be like at this point, I don’t think I would have been anywhere near the mark. I think so far it’s worked out pretty well, I think my life is a lot more fun and interesting than I thought it would be. Hopefully that will continue.
I will leave you with a song again. Jonathan Coulton is best known for making nerdy and comedic songs and releasing them on the internet. Unlike most of his work this is a serious one, although one with a strange premise. George Plimpton walks up to you in a bar and give you some advice about how to live life. For those of you who don’t know who he is, as I didn’t prior to the song, he did a lot of things. While I find most inspirational songs schmaltzy, I think this one really works partly because subcounsiously, JoCo was really giving himself a pep talk, trying to get himself through is “Thing a Week” project.
My band, Far From There, will soon be put on hold. Our lead singer and lead guitar player, Jeff, will be moving out to Berkeley, CA to go to seminary. Yes, the frontman for my band is studying to become an Episcopal priest. It is a strange world and Jeff is a strange person. Tomorrow will be our final practice together before he goes. He will be moving back in 3 years and will will get back together at that point, as well as whenever he’s back in town. After he leaves, Brandon, Jared and I will try to start a new project in his absence. We will definitely be looking for a new singer and we will possibly want another guitar player as well.
I think I can safely speak for the three of us when I say that this is going to be a scary time for us. I’ve never played in a rock band before but I really feel like we have something special. There’s a chemistry in the way we write together and play together and with Jeff gone, something will be missing, something beyond just missing a singer and guitar player. There’s a big part of me that’s worried we won’t be able to find that again. We will not find, nor are we looking for a direct replacement for Jeff. Hopefully our new project will be just as awesome in a different way. At the moment the prospect of finding someone talented, who gels with us musically and who gets along with us feels a bit daunting.
Both in the context of the band, and otherwise, Jeff has been one of my best friends over the past 2 years. I wish him all the best in Berkeley. I hope he will keep making awesome music while he’s there and we’ll try to return the favor.
The following is a song by Ben Gibbard about his band breaking up. Obviously on less amicable terms and obviously they got back together to play it. I think it captures that uneasiness of not knowing what the future holds better than any other song I’ve ever heard. More amazingly, it also captures the beauty in that. Enjoy!
