New Monday #54
Happy Monday, everybody.
Please excuse the all-over nature of this particular episode of New Monday. I'm in the midst of figuring out big things and I'm doing it publicly, and dragging you nice people along for the ride.
Great song to hear at the end. You can skip to it, of course.
Question
People say, "This compressor glues the mix together."
What do they mean? Or, what do you think they mean?
Glue implies that it sticks the mix together. Sounds like a good thing, but what the heck IS it? What does it mean in terms of physics, in terms of amplitude and waveforms? It's not enough to have a word to use. It has to mean something tangible, describable.
There are two things that I think might cause this "glue" thang to happen.
If you run the entire mix through a compressor, the waveform of the mix is going to trigger that compressor; specifically whatever element of the mix has the highest amplitude will sort of "control" the action of the compressor. In most rock, pop, hip hop, etc., the highest amplitude belongs to the kick and/or the snare, so those elements will tend to cause the compressor to clamp down and release, thus imparting their rhythm across the entire mix, such that the whole mix sort of "bounces" up and down together. Sounds tighter. Sounds more together. Might this be "glue?"
The second idea: if you mix all the waveforms of the separate tracks together and then feed them through something that causes or, more correctly, adds, some harmonic distortion, that harmonic distortion is derived from that combined, complex waveform, rather than some harmonic distortion from the vocal, some different harmonic distortion from the piano, etc. Might this "unified" distortion be our mysterious "glue?"
If you run a mix through a compressor, you get both the rhythmic squeezing of compression and the additional harmonic distortion (because compressors do generate this). So, is that "Glue?"
Seems dumb to me to walk around the studio tossing words like "glue" around without having some idea as to what is happening. As far as I'm concerned, saying, "I'll know it when I hear it" is another way of saying, "I don't know what I'm looking for."
So, what do you all think? Feel free to write me back if you agree, or if you disagree and have a better idea. How does a compressor "glue" a mix together?
Existential Crisis
I'm having an existential crisis, but given the times, who isn't?
My current existential crisis monster is... AI. Of course.
I'm sick of the whole AI conversation - I'm sure most of you are, too. On one hand, there are some powerful tools out there that make life easier and I made a total killing on NVIDIA stock.
On the other hand, I have friends who are very competent at what they do who are losing jobs in everything from mastering, to marketing, to design, to writing, to photography because AI is cheap and good enough.
I've been thinking about how I will survive, economically and creatively. And I'm older than most of you. I only have to last about another 10 years. Some of you have 60+ years ahead of you. That is scary. There's already AI that can outsing a human, write lyrics (albeit awful lyrics, but it will get better), make movies, etc.
How do you make money? How do you do what you love? How do you express yourself in a meaningful way? How do you thrive?
I don't have answers.
What follows are musings, presented in no particular order.
The Microwave Oven
The microwave oven and its dependent sub-technologies—heat and serve foods, most of what is at Trader Joe's, etc., brought a hyper-fast and convenient paradigm to cooking. Humans love that. You can throw something in a microwave, knowing nothing more than pressing a few buttons, and in a few minutes get something out that can be pretty darned tasty. It can be actually delicious. It can also suck. But if you know what to buy, and what buttons to press, you can whip up dinner fast and it can be good.
Or good enough, perhaps.
Good enough lowers standards as it becomes accepted, especially because it's faster and easier. Yes, a great handmade burger cooked on a flat top is better, but fast food is good enough and even when it's disgusting people still eat it.
There are still chefs. There are people that reheat stuff with a microwave and fancy themselves as chefs. Whatever. Microwaves make things faster and easier and cheaper.
Disruptive Technologies and the Arts
Technology has always been disruptive to the arts and creativity. When oil painting became a thing in the 1500s, Michelangelo hated it—he thought it was too easy. Real men painted fresco, which was using a water or egg-based paint on wet plaster. Screw up a fresco and you had to rip the wall down to redo it. Oil paint had a very slow drying time. One could scrape off a mistake or paint over, or otherwise move the paint around. Much faster and easier.
Humans are lazy. Fast and easier always wins. Oil paint came to dominate, and artists figured out ways of painting that went beyond what was possible with water or egg-based paint.
When photography rolled around in the 1800s, there was a general sense of "This will destroy painting." It didn't. It did take a chunk out of the traditional realistic painting of the time, but the Impressionists figured out how to incorporate elements of photography into paintings and modern art was born. And then other artists went beyond the Impressionists to come up with Cubism, Expressionism, Abstraction, Dada, action painting, etc.
The advent of multitrack recording was disruptive. At first, engineers were like, "What will we do with four tracks???" Well, how about we do Sgt Pepper's and Axis: Bold as Love? Sixteen tracks? Let's make "I'm Not in Love." Even more tracks? Someone will find things to put on them.
Drum machines? Same thing. MIDI? Digital recording? Pro-Tools? Same thing.
There is a tendency for the creative to adapt and conquer, and, more importantly, innovate. This is a good thing.
But under it all is always faster and easier and cheaper. Faster and easier and cheaper always wins.
Effort
AI, though, is fundamentally different from a multitrack or oil paint. You still had to have some sort of skillset. There was still effort involved. Retouching using Photoshop is much easier than retouching using a physical airbrush, but using a filter on Instagram is a piece of cake and requires nothing more than making a decision about what you want.
AI music starts with writing sentences and listening to the result. Now, you might have to do that iteratively, but compared to sitting there for hours practicing the piano, learning music theory, taking voice lessons, AI music making is a walk in the park.
Why practice? Why learn an instrument? How does one show up at a party and pull out a guitar and say, "I learned Here Comes the Sun," and sort of stumble through it, when someone else will pull out a smartphone and say, "I wrote a symphony this morning based on all the sounds a cat makes."
Risk and Taste
AI is statistical in nature. It repackages what has already been. It's unafraid to do the same old thing. It's fine with making something awful without apologizing for it. And when AI does apologize for a mistake, it isn't doing so from a sense of pain, shame or regret. It does it because it's expected. It's an apology from a psychopath.
One of the things I love about AI is that it will just do things with no thought to quality, individuality, originality. It has no comprehension of what is good, or what sucks. It just goes.
But we humans, we have taste and emotion. Our opinions are linked to our feelings and experiences. We don't like being wrong, doing wrong, letting others down. We need a tribe. Even artists as rebellious as Prince and David Bowie liked having fans.
By the way, I write New Monday entirely by hand and no AI is involved. So, when they are discombobulated and suck, like this episode, it's all me. And my word count thinger isn't working so I have no idea of the length of this. It feels too long.
LP
LP is short for Laura Pergolizzi. They're a singer-songwriter from Long Island (Yay! A hometownie). They've written things for Christina Aguilera, Rihanna, etc., etc. LP kicked around a few major labels in the 2000s, released a number of singles, and didn't make much of a dent as an artist.
In 2015, LP released a gorgeous tune, Lost On You. It flew up the charts in Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Israel, Poland, Romania, Turkey, Serbia. Mexico. Japan. Didn't do that well in England or the US.
It's a song with integrity. It's a break-up song—not a cliché, but a personal story— and you can hear that in the voice.
The title, which is a lyric as well, is a spidery thing:
Let's raise a glass or two
To all the things I've lost on you
Tell me are they lost on you?
Lost in someone? Lost without someone? A gamble that someone lost? And perhaps none of this is even understood because it's lost on you.
I don't think AI could write this song.
Lost On You
Now, here's them doing it live. LP can throw it down. I think I like this version the best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDjeBNv6ip0
Feel free to tell me how you're thinking about AI.
Thanks for reading.
Luke