4.5 Hz Bass Solo Felt From 200 Miles Away

Bass! How low can you go?

This morning at around 4:30 AM, I experienced my first earthquake, courtesy of the downstate Illinois New Madrid Fault. I woke to a dark bedroom and a low but regular thumping sound. My first thought was that one of our cats was doing that scratch-the-ear-with-hind-paw thing, as the thumping had that regularity to it.

Then I noticed that the whole house was gently, but insistently swaying north-south in time with the thumping. Probably a couple of inches each way.

If this was a cat, it was twenty feet tall.

It lasted about one minute - one supremely weird minute. The thought “earthquake?” did occur to me at some point, but right when the shaking ended, I heard the furnace fan also shut off by coincidence, which let me shrug off the whole thing and get back to sleep.

What was most striking about the quake was its creepy, regular oscillation. I don’t know why I thought this, but I always assumed a quake would be more irregular / noisy than this one was. It was downright pro forma and mechanical. The ground tugged and released the house at what I reckon to be a steady 4.5 Hertz (shakes per second) for about a minute, making maybe 270 total oscillations.

I measured the frequency later in the day by firing up Audiomulch and dialing a low frequency oscillator until I found what seemed like the right frequency. The exact reading is 4.6273 Hz, but I rounded because I’m not a geek.

News and USGS reports called the quake a 5.2 on the Richter scale, centered in a small town about 200 miles south of my house.

Whenever the ground you’re occupying acts like a fluid, it will get your attention. Like waves on a calm surface radiating outward from a thrown pebble, an utterly enormous volume of dirt was bunched and stretched into hundreds of waves that reached as far north as Michigan and as far south as Atlanta. Our house rode these waves - four and a half of them a second. Wow.

Also, let me take the time to debunk a myth about animals during an earthquake. Supposedly, animals are able to hear crazy events like quakes and freak out a little bit before they hit. We hear this a lot from our friends in California.

Uh huh. Put down the bong, Peace Bear. Not even the neighbor’s dogs — who will bark at grass — uttered a peep.

The Agonies Of Earbud Jesus

Photographer Antonio Perez’s Good Friday coverage in the Chicago Tribune shows a closeup of a crucified Jesus, portrayed by one Rafael Melendez.

Apparently, in order to extract maximum emotion from Mr. Melendez, at some point after crucifixion, his personal stereo or cellphone earbud was removed. It can be seen dangling on the ends of Mr. Melendez’s hair, at the bottom right.

Some may take this as an opportunity to mull over the role of showbiz in worship. Others might simply wonder how much of Mr. Melendez’s pained visage is good acting and how much is reaction to what was playing on the other earbud.

In other words:

What Was The Big J Listening To?

Poll: What Was Jesus Listening To?

• ‘You Have Killled Me’ - Morrissey
• ‘Easter Parade’ - Fred Astaire
• ‘Te Quiero’ - Flex
• Sprint Customer Service hold music
• White Sox broadcaster Ken Harrelson

Status:

Who’s Right Slap-Fight

I wrote that VH’s keyboards and not Eddie Van Halen or his guitar tech were the culprit in this clip. For the sake of argument, let’s hear and evaluate the technically possible reasons the keys and guitar are clashing.

Reasons AGAINST the 44/48 explanation:

1) The keys aren’t wrong, Eddie’s guitar was “knocked” out of tune before the song started. Untrue: this doesn’t make any sense because in the clip, Eddie’s whole guitar, all the strings - are in tune with themselves. Therefore, a bonked headstock or a broken string can’t be the reason, it has to be systemic. I received many comments insisting that this was the case. I maintain it isn’t - not even with a Floyd Rose bridge, as many have sworn.

2) Eddie’s guitar tech gave him a guitar tuned incorrectly for the song. If this is true, then it’s the biggest coincidence in the world that (i) the guitar’s tuning is correct for the album’s tuning of “Jump” and (ii) the tech tuned the guitar to a pitch that somehow couldn’t be transposed with the allegedly in-tune keyboards. Highly unlikely.

3) Many posters have claimed that VH has a keyboard player onstage (which we don’t see in the clip), so why use a recording? Even if there were a live keyboardist, if he was playing the part live through an improperly-set digital audio interface, he would still experience the sharpened, non-western-scale pitch. See (Reason FOR #5 below).

4) VH are intentionally playing the song in C# as opposed to the C it was originally recorded in on the 1984 album. The problem there: as far as I can perceive, that keyboard pitch is not C#, it’s north of C# but south of D.

5) “Wolfy is in tune.” This is pretty funny since I can’t, and I challenge anyone to hear - any bass in this cellphone recording. Nor would I expect to - it’s a cellphone recording. I sure can’t hear any Michael Anthony. Oof!

Reasons FOR the 44/48 explanation:

1) The difference in pitch between the keys in the clip and the keys in the original 1984 recording is the same.

2) Eddie never gets back to in tune. If the pitch difference were just a semitone instead of about 1.5 semitones off, he certainly could, but he can’t - the difference in pitch does not lie in the western scale, it lies between the notes of C# and D. He can’t get in tune (without twisting all the tuning pegs of his guitar) because there’s no fret between C# and D.

3) The tempo of the song as compared to the original LP recording is also sped up to just about the degree that a 44.1 recording would be at if it were played at 48K.

4) If, as many have said, Eddies guitar was out and the keys were on, and their difference was just a semitone apart, why in the world wouldn’t one of the most virtuosic guitarists in the world not be able to transpose after a few bars? I say he didn’t because he couldn’t. (see reason FOR #2)

5) This video below demonstrates the principle at play with the difference between 44.1Khz and 48Khz, it actually shows the button, the clips and the match between EVH’s tuning in the clip and the tuning on the 1984 record.

Add these together and then show respect for the simplest explanation and you come up with screwed-up keyboards.

Since it’s not obvious, I should make it clear: I was not there, I was not backstage, and I did not witness the problem’s specific cause. I used my ears and experience and came up with the best explanation.

I Wasn’t Kidding, I Like It Better

This Van Halen video clip is finding itself in a lot of places, and creating lots of typing. Unfortunately, most of this comment and message-board chatter is kind of dumb. Especially the sanctimonious blah-blah from the many pony-tailed inhabitants of various guitar/gear sites. To hear them tell it, this is some kind of moment of failure for the Van Halens and isn’t it a shame?

Listen up, shreddy: It is not a shame, it is transcendent.

While I like VH’s Fair Warning a lot, it’s true that I have always hated 1984’s “Jump”. Thanks to the song’s intense and enduring popularity it has stubbornly refused to fade from my memory as so many REO Speedwagon and Styx songs obligingly have. When I first saw this clip, my jaw dropped as all of yours did, but mine dropped because finally, this song was coming out of the speakers the same way I had always heard it.

Let me explain: this song’s ridiculous, obvious major-key swells, as used for the the ground under guitarist Eddie Van Halen’s histrionics are intended to be stirring and uplifting. Indeed, this is how most appreciative listeners experience these moments. I’m just not that lucky.

This is the clip’s genius: when the anthems’ most triumphant peaks arrive with an alarming leviathan groan instead of the intended sound of angels gently urinating arcs into the sky, it throws, finally, the overt phoniness of this wretched song into sharp contrast. The dissonance highlights exactly where you were supposed to be most elated, most manipulated by greeting-card level sentimentality — but instead leaves you appropriately laughing. Bless you, Van Halen.

The dissonance itself, well, that’s no crime at all. On-stage dissonance is in fact pretty goddamn cool, as the following clips clearly prove.

(Fred Willard introduces the lead guitar stylings of Mark Mothersbaugh)

(A tender ballad from a skinny bunch)

(The late, great Brainiac)

Where’d All These Dudes Come From?

Seeing as the spike in traffic at RW370 is due mainly to my October 5 posting of this YouTube clip showing a Van Halen stage mishap, it looks like we’re knee-deep in dudes around here. Sup, dudes?

The thing about dudes is most of them can appreciate a mullet and a pointy guitar, and so can I. Once, I wrote some comedy for a gear website and I appreciated all over some 80s and 90s back issues of Guitar Player. Scientific tests prove it’s nothing less than dudertainment: Eddie Van Halen fans are, on average, 65.4% more receptive to comedy based on guitar string ads. So dudes! - enjoy these selected humor pieces in the Gearwire Gallery:

Saigon Kick unaware of their limited future

A dude, his lady and a broken axe

Jag Panzer’s Joey Tafolla gets raves in The Shred Zone

Damn Yankees shill for Tom Morello’s effects pedal

One for the brits

Testament guitarist bravely gives his life for science

DHS Finally Does Its Job, Strained Quotes Result

Nobody’s more surprised than I am at today’s news that US Department of Homeland Security managed to intercept and seize questionable materials bound for the United States, protecting the public from another terrifying spectacle. Sure, preventing the import of a Death Cab For Cutie guitar-player solo record isn’t the stuff of history, but it sure is appreciated. From today’s Chicago Tribune:

Death Cab for Cutie fans may be waiting even longer for a long-promised album by guitarist Chris Walla.

Walla, who was working on the “very political” record in Canada, told MTV that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security confiscated his master hard drive, which held all the song files, at the U.S. border.

["It] could be a whole lot worse,” he said, laughing. “I still get to play music. I mean, I’m not at Guantanamo or anything like that. … My drive might be. They could be waterboarding my drive for all I know.”

Is this country’s sad slide into a corporatist state any excuse for a lax attitude toward indie rock solo albums? I think not.

Popular Science, April ‘33: Build a Proto-Stylophone

The always-cool Modern Mechanix ran this 1933 Popular Science story reprint yesterday. The message: chase away the blues of the Great Depression by building, tuning and playing an inexpensive monotimbral “electric organ”. If for no reason other than the one-note, tuned-resistor characteristic, I thought right away of the electrical and likely tonal similarities to the much-later Stylophone - and its good works in the hands of Kraftwerk (”Pocket Calculator”) and Bowie (”Ashes To Ashes”). No matter what decade, it’s always a miracle when you can make music from the sound of a crappy apartment building door buzzer. Plans here.

Jump (in pitch)!

So what happens when you’re Van Halen, the last song in your set list is the million-seller “Jump” with its synthesizer-keyboard opening…and the recording you’re using to play back the synth is accidentally run at 48K instead of 44.1K?

What happens could be this (recorded in Greensboro, NC four days ago):

I can’t tell which is funnier, this long-hated cheesebag-anthem turned into a much more interesting, atonal mess in front of thousands of paying customers or the hilarious soldiering on of the Van Halens as they look at each other from inside the trainwreck. Eddie tries to transpose on the fly and match the wildly fucked up keyboards but the great thing there is the difference in pitch is non-musical - about 1.5 semitones sharp. So there’s no frets he can choose to fix the problem!

I know I’m courting my own on-stage disaster by making fun of this. But so what, it’s not like you’re going to be there to see it.

UPDATE: For a technical discussion of what is going on in this clip, click here.

Mayfair Workshop Opens Doors

What do Jeff Parker from Tortoise, Brian Wilson’s arranger, and the guy doing the music for the new Wachowski Brothers film Speed Racer have in common?

Each is part of the new Mayfair Workshop, a Chicago-based music composition house led by composer/producer/Coctail Mark Greenberg.

The Workshop is the next evolution of Mark’s much-cooler-than-it-needed-to-be Mayfair Recordings business providing “music for use” - soundtracks for TV spots, multimedia, video games, what have you.

While the contract composition arena is too often plagued with the worst ad-agency dross and hackery (and I speak from the experience of an aborted career in exactly that) Mark and company just cut better tracks - always listenable without picture. Their demos are akin to what you might hear if someone put together a spot soundtrack composition talent pool that had some.

What I can’t fathom is how these intrepid people at MW get around the clients. When I was similarly employed, I sure couldn’t. When some dork from BFD/Pissant would intrude on our sessions with helpful directions like “take the twangy guitar out of the surf music”, I rolled my eyes — couldn’t help it. I held out for almost two years, then gave up.

So instead of working on the Wachowski Speed Racer movie music in 2007, I’m a Warmowski who covered the theme from the Speed Racer TV show in 1984 with my obscure surf/punk band. See what happens when you can’t get over yourself?

Godspeed to the good ship MW!

Linux Audio Appliance: Just Add Appliance

The pro audio world and Linux/open source software world have been trying to find a way to fit together. Looks like they may keep trying. The latest effort, launched by a former executive of a legendary 1970s digital instrument maker, is linuxdigitalaudio.com. The site strikes me a bit like venture capital in the reverse; instead of nerds petitioning professional capitalists for funding, this is investors pitching the open-source community the promise of “economic incentive” if they would just be so kind as to, you know, conceive, design, prototype, integrate, and deliver the Pro-Tools-killing portable box. When I asked the executive in question about the problem of driver development, which I consider to be the far biggest hurdle if for no other reason than hardware sure isn’t any more, I got a response that boiled down to “the community will do that.” Then he told me how he sold his instrument to Frank Zappa back in The Day. Shrug. We’ll see if the open source community is more or less discerning than Frank was.