Happy Monday –
In exciting, scary AI news: A fully AI feature film has been released in China! Sanxingdui: Future Past!
Made for under $2 million and employing hundreds, Sanxingdui: Future Past bombed at the box office! It brought in less than $200,000 so far. Less than a Kevin Sorbo film!
Moviegoers are staying away in droves. Watching AI videos on phones is very popular in China, but it seems the Chinese moviegoers don’t want to pay anything to see an AI movie, so they’re simply not going to the theatre to see it. So that might be the problem.
Or the problem could be the plot: an archeologist battles to save humanity, which has been enslaved by… an ancient, evil AI!
Good god! Indiana Jones and the Data Center of Doom! Releasing direct-to-smartphone near you!
Actually… have your AI assistant lock out December 4th, so you can stand in line perhaps all by yourself to see Gods Don’t Give Gifts, the first USA-made AI feature film! Prompt in the USA!! (Sing to the tune of the Bruce Springsteen song.)
It’s the work of YouTuber Gossip Goblin, and it appears to be further riffing on a bunch of shorties he’s made featuring old-looking human characters kitted out with all sorts of high-tech body extensions while sitting around talking to each other. Think Tilly Norwood meets the Borg at an old age home during a fetish party with no motorized wheelchairs. From the press release: “where bodies are disposable and consciousness has been commoditized.”
Oh gosh! Can’t wait! And can’t wait for the AI reviews: “It wasn’t good. It was bad. Quietly. Like it couldn’t smell victory through the screen door.”
These AI movies seem to be eating themselves thematically. It’s like if the film industry started off back in the 1900s and the first film made was The Harvey Weinstein Story.
Handoff
Well-produced, well-mixed records have something about them I call “Handoff.” Think of the listener’s attention as the baton used in a relay race, and one runner hands it off to the next, then to the next. On a recording, we listen and our ear is caught by one part, like the lead vocal, then a drum fill catches it, then a little reverb tail off to the left, and by the end of the song we’ve been on a cool journey through it.
Handoff can, and really should be, a function of arrangement, how parts are figured out and fitted together to maintain interest and yet familiarity (diverse in unity, unified in diversity). Good players also contribute to handoff by listening and reacting to each other. And of course, the production should put all of this together, bringing out moments in the arrangement, highlighting communications between the different players, and then mixing to maintain all this and guide the listener through the record.
Sweet Child o’ Mine
This is a great song, superbly played and put together. There’s not a wrong note on it. It’s like a Beatles record, it’s so well done. The handoff on this is aces.
Before we listen, I’m going to break down the introduction of the song. Here’s the handoff as I hear it: there’s the guitar riff, which plays all by itself one time through so we can memorize it, then there’s some strumming on an electric guitar to the left, then the drums and bass crash in. The riff drops in volume (because we learned it, we don’t need to hear it loud), and our attention goes to the bass, which has a chorus effect on it for a little bit extra “listen to me.” The rhythm guitar grabs us for a moment, and there is some interplay between the bass and it at about :24sec. The groove kicks in, the rhythm guitar gets louder, the bass drops under, and the drums are the dominant element for a few bars until the guitar line finally does something a little different, the drums react to it, and the lead vocals come in. And then it all changes again, the drums going a little bit under, the vocals on top, and guitars on the left and right sort of communicate with each other. And that’s just the beginning—there’s almost six minutes of a journey to go.
If you squint listen on this, it’s actually easy to hear fader moves all over the place, especially on the rhythm guitar part on the left channel, which I assume is Izzy Stradlin. Drum volume changes a lot, as well as the whole sound of the kit: compare the drums at 1:30 to about 10 seconds later when the second verse begins—very different drum sound, like the room mics lifted in the mix, or more likely the overhead mic levels were lowered. There are rides all over the overheads to control the cymbals, I think.
The “Where Do We Go Now?” part is radically different from the rest of the song. Things get wetter, the drums at one point are overwhelmingly up in the mix.
Listen to “Sweet Child o’ Mine” here.
This song rewards a couple of close listenings, perhaps not a bunch in a row, but one now, and then in a few hours. A pass where you just listen to the rhythm guitar, and what pulls you away from it, will teach you a lot. Likewise, the way the drums are mixed is incredible. And hats off to the drummer on this track and the whole Appetite for Destruction album, Steven Adler. He had a superb, sloshy bucket sort of swing to everything. His snare seems to be… longer than anyone else’s. After he left the band and was replaced, it really doesn’t sound like Guns N’ Roses to me anymore.
Yes, this song is overplayed, but sit through it, follow the way the parts interconnect, and you’ll hear what a masterpiece this thing is. Kudos to producer Mike Clink (who was also responsible for “Eye of the Tiger”) and mixers Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero.
Hold Me Now
Note that too much handoff in a song stops being handoff and becomes distracting. Another issue is predictable handoff. I always go back to the Rabbit Trick analogy. A magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat. If he goes to pull something out of the hat again, it can’t be a rabbit, it’s got to be something bigger.
There has to be contrast.
“Hold Me Now,” a big hit for the Thompson Twins, drives me nuts. It has both too much and it’s predictable. There’s SO much little crap everywhere that it’s distracting. And then it gets predictable. That last verse has something filling after every vocal line. To their credit, there is an attempt to make each filler different from the others, but that’s like pulling out different colored rabbits. It’s still just rabbits.
Too much contrast is no contrast.
Art, and music production, can be like visiting a hoarder. The first moment is a shock, and after a bit it’s simply a boring mess. Again, contrast. What would be cool in the midst of the chaos of a hoarder would be a totally empty, perfectly clean room, or an area of the house with the roof removed and there’s a grassy meadow, surrounded by garbage. Something, anything.
Listen to “Hold Me Now” here.
Feel free to disagree with my opinions. They are, after all, only that.
New Plugin
There’s a new Korneff plugin out this week. It’s killer good and super useful. When is it coming out? Well, I don’t want to be predictable… you’ll get an email when it is time, but it is this week for sure.
Feel free to write me and guess what it is. Only one guess per email and only one email per reader. We don’t want redundancy in the inbox. Correct guesses get it for free. And once it is released, it will be too late to guess, so GUESS NOW.
Have a wonderful day and week.
Warm regards,
Luke