oh you are not going to BELIEVE this...

[solarbird]

When I recorded the chimes on the 6-track (complete) version of Outbirds today, I knew they were off, but I thought they were off in an interesting way, and I figured "okay, I'll fix these later when I do the final version." I wasn't really going for dissonance in this song, but it's absolutely in theme, and I thought it was kind of neat. (Have I mentioned that I spent a lot of time listening to noisemusic and can sometimes really get into microtonal dissonance? No? Well, I have, and can, and even when I'm writing my own stuff for more general audiences, I will write quarter-tones. Just so y'know.)

Then I threw the recording at some people who are not into microtonal dissonance, which is to say, "normal people." And they said "this sounds awesome except the chimes which make me want to DRILL MY BRAINS OUT." So I was confused about a synth being as off-pitch as this one apparently was, but I have a pitch shifter, and this instrument was never intended to be on the final recording - I want real chimes, properly tuned - so fine, I'll go ahead and fix it in the DAW.

But it wouldn't fix. Not even a little. I could fix some notes, but others would be off. I fix them, and the rest went pear-shaped. We brought in some other friends and got more and more confused, until E. figured out that it was the harmonic overtones, which were pretty much completely fucked. This is a common problem with bells and chimes, particularly fake ones. So I threw a big low-pass filter over the whole thing, got it down to the low notes I'd most wanted, and while they were still not quite right, and still couldn't all be completely fixed (just like above!), they were reasonable.

At this point, I'm thinking, 'well, this synth is junk. Or at least this voice is.' But by then I had the six-track recording in listenable form for people with good senses of pitch and less... esoteric... musical tastes. (K. says it sounds like the bell part sounds like the equivalent of a prepared piano now.) And that's what I needed. I also have a five-track recording without the chimes that serves mostly to show you how desperately important those chimes are to the song.

Then I powered back up the synth to see what was going on. I sat down to play the same part again and see what it sounded like on the built-in speaker, and it sounded completely different, and by completely different, I mean, as in not the same voice, not the same notes, and not even the same octave. The synth in this voice doesn't even go down that far. I checked all the settings against my notes and yes, they were right. (There aren't that many settings available! It's a simple machine.)

So at this point I'm thinking, 'wow, I got the last performance out of this thing, apparently.' And I plug in my studio reference headphones to see what it sounds like in those, and it sounds mostly the same as on the built-in speaker. Completely different to what I recorded... except... way down below all the other tones, below all the intended-by-the-maker tones, I hear my notes, and the voice I had been looking for and had recorded.

And right about then I'm realising that I hear the presumably-intended tones in both ears of my headset coming from a mono instrument. And I'd used a mono cable for the recording, since it is, after all, a mono instrument. Sound people will know what happened now, but for everyone else ("normal people"):

The left and right channels are out of phase. The engineer behind this thing decided to get the second signal for the stereo headset users by subtracting the intended signal from ground and throwing that out into the second ear. When I used a monophonic cable, I recombined the two mostly-phase-inverted channels, which cancelled out most of the sound. ALL I WAS RECORDING were the non-phase-cancelled lower harmonics created by the interference between the note pairs I was actually keying in.

And somehow, this was a reasonable approximation of what I'd wanted. Once I hammered on it with a pitch-shifter, anyway.

I will, of course, re-record this correctly - later. But I'll keep this version too. It's kinda awesome, if you know the story.

Comments

Oh, and for the record

[solarbird]

The synth is working fine. Or, at least, to design spec. It's not broken. Not even a little. It's just... dumb.

[unexpected_finn]

What it sounds like to me is that there was an industrial design engineer who was given a very tight cost limit for the circuitry, who realised that a pseudostereo effect could be created in just such a way, and who had absolutely no working musicians in his group of test users.

"Well, the Boss likes it, and we're on-budget with it, so let's ship it."

Anyway, well done!

[403]

I enjoy noise music, but around two years ago I started getting more sensitive to high-frequency sound... So now I can't listen to most of my collection without getting a headache.

[solarbird]

Ouch, unfortunate! I'm sorry!

[solarbird]

I am of course presuming that's how the two-channel mono is derived. They could be doing all sorts of things. I didn't open the case.

Turns out some of the notes are out of tune, too. In both voices I tried, even. Up to 15%, 20% sharp, just at kinda random. No idea why - I'm sure they had a reference book - but I suspect something in the "touch response" software, since it happens even on the default piano voice.

[corvi]

I kinda want to hear it now. :)

[solarbird]

It's on the CD, flaws and all. Gonna be at Conflikt?

[corvi]

Sadly, no.

[tfabris.livejournal.com]

Another thing that some keyboards will do, and I hate this, is:

Some synths deliberately slightly detune the notes the farther you get off from middle C. This makes chords sound really nice and fat and lush... for most of the chords you'd play on a normal keyboard.

But if you, like I was, happen to be doing bass notes from a one-octave floor MIDI pedal, and using these synth patches in octaves they weren't originally intended, then by the time you get down to those lowest notes, you end up REALLY far off pitch, like a quarter of a semitone or more.

[solarbird]

Good to know! I see my general plans to use MIDI instruments for these things (and not built-in keyboard sounds) are on target. (I just don't have any of the right instruments for this particular sound I want yet.)

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

Heh. Reminds of when, as a kid, I would play with my Grandmother's electric organ. I quickly figured out how to set it so that by holding down adjacent low-end keys I could get awesome beat notes which would literally shake the house, annoying the adults no end. :-)

[solarbird]

This morning I checked with my tuner, and it turns out that really, it's not in very good tune. Some notes are fine, some are up to 20% sharp, on both the voice I was using and the default piano tone. And there's not much of a pattern to it, tho' the highest and lowest notes seem a little more likely to be off, if they are.

Unless it's my tuner acting up, but it doesn't normally.

[tfabris.livejournal.com]

That also tends to depend on the patch. I've got a Kurzweil (high end) piano in my studio which has dozens of piano sounds, each one subtly different. And only the first one, patch 1 bank 1, is perfectly in tune. The others are all deliberately detuned by various amounts on various notes.

[solarbird]

Hee, excellent. ^_^

[kathrynt.livejournal.com]

There's a bit in a Bach organ piece where this is actually *required.* He's written a note that's below the range of a standard organ; you have to press two other pedal notes to generate the overtone.

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

I expect that's because that's how actual pianos get tuned -- if you make the octaves perfect up and down the keyboard, the ends sound wrong.

[quen-elf.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm. I've never had this happen, but... is this just a balanced audio output? I never really needed to know the details, but if I remember right, balanced audio uses a stereo jack for a mono connection, putting opposite phase on each channel. It's mono, but you need to use a stereo cable. The intention is that any interference will affect both channels roughly equally and therefore cancel out (assuming you plug it back in to something that does balanced audio; if you don't, as long as you still use a stereo cable, it will be ok because the connector is on a particular place on the plug and therefore picks up one or other channel). If I remember right, that's pretty standard for high-quality synths.

Could be completely wrong (about how balanced audio works, etc) as I never experienced this personally.

[tfabris.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but I've sometimes seen that note-relative-detune feature enabled on synthesizer-sounding patches of rack mount synths. In other words, not a piano patch but a synthy-sounding patch (and ones that sound good as synth bass notes, to boot), where you really wouldn't want the detuning.

[quen-elf.livejournal.com]

Oh, and not related but amusing, it used to be fairly standard for anime DVD producers to botch the (stereo) audio so that the two channels were out of phase. It sounds okay on headphones but on speakers, when you move your head around it sounds weird (it doesn't really cancel out because of room reflections) and the stereo effect is pretty much killed.

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's just poor thinking on someone's part.

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

That's why masses of TVs in stores sound so strange- the sound is always off a bit.

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

I'm perched on the peripheral of this conversation and am listening intently. I wonder if sampled sounds have the same problems?

(I'm considering building a music-dedicated computer and purchasing some music making software to work with.)

[solarbird]

but... is this just a balanced audio output?
That's pretty unlikely, I'd think. Mostly because it's line-level. Isn't balanced always mic level?

[solarbird]

They can. Phase problems are always a big deal. Read Sound Advice: The Musician's Guide to the Recording Studio by Wade Wadhams. I was pointed at it by Russ, and except for the tape section (which isn't relevant because I'm recording digitally), it's been really pertinent to everything.

[quen-elf.livejournal.com]

'Balanced audio' is/was used in high-quality synth outputs. Again to note, I don't know anything about it, whether it was 'really' balanced in the same way or some other thing, but I'm pretty sure that phrase was used... Here's a couple of google result examples:

http://www.peachandblack.com/synth.htm
http://www.gigasonic.com/alesis-micron-synth.html

[solarbird]

Huh! Okay. THE SHIT YOU LEARN

(this is btw Not Quality. It's a Radio Shack!)