Dance Music Editing, other stuff

Let's see...what has been going on these days...?

Dance Music and JaSmix

I guess let's start off with what is probably most interesting (?) to the majority of readers.  March JaSmix is only 1.5 weeks away!  You'll be hearing more reminders and announcements from me in the near future as I wrap up all of the logistics, but in the meantime I've been trying to put together music for the night, as well as going through a bunch of new music and editing it accordingly.

I'm quite particular with not only my music selection but also my music quality and editing and I'd like to think that it really makes a difference in the quality of dance events when that sort of attention to detail is taken.  Given that I'm relatively well-versed in both dance AND music (as in audio production, not just music in the general sense) I've always felt that I have a bit of a unique perspective on curating music for dance.  (Not to mention some of the songs are tracks that I produced myself...)

Let's talk about a couple of different things:

Tempo modifications
We're all familiar with it.  Often times it becomes necessary (or even "interesting/exciting") to raise or lower the tempo of a song to better fit a social dance form.  The track may (probably) have not have been written explicitly with dance in mind.  Or the dancers you are catering to might be more comfortable with a certain range of tempos.  This presents a unique dilemma as you are forced to make some compromises between "danceability" vs song feel and the original intent of the song.

First things first: I'm firmly in the camp of timestretching without pitch-shifting.  As a composer and producer it just gives me a really weird feeling to alter the pitch of a song, *particularly* if I'm not doing it in musical increments.  Okay, I get it, most people probably won't notice if you resample a song so that it's 50 cents off (i.e. halfway between "normal" notes).  But it still just gives me a really icky feeling, and can you imagine being someone with absolute pitch who is bothered by off-center tuning?  Ugh!  I admit this is probably not a huge deal, but really, unless you have a specific reason to change the pitch of a song, just don't do it.  PLEASE do not just change the playback speed of a song and call it a day, use a quality timestretching algorithm.

There is one unfortunate exception to this rule which is if you aren't going to use a quality timestretching plugin or algorithm in the first place. =( For small adjustments, I'd rather hear something that's just resampled with an odd pitch than something that's poorly timestretched.
There are several very good timestretching algorithms out there these days.  Unfortunately you aren't going to get the best quality without using a proprietary solution, but for example the Elastique Pro algorithm comes =standard= in most DAWs (FL Studio, cubase, etc etc).  If you are going to just run your edits in Audacity, at the very least use the higher quality SBSMS algorithm, please!  It's worth noting that you can download the demo version of a DAW like FL Studio for free and do all of your editing in that -- the demo limitation is that you can't save your project files, but you won't need to!

Ok, but before the actual execution of the tempo modification, we also need to decide how much we are going to shift the tempo.  This is where =your= judgment comes in, and this is a compromise that I find really interesting because I'm constantly struggling to balance different factors:
- What tempo most people would find fun to dance to
- What tempo I personally would like to dance to
- What tempo allows less experienced dancers to comfortably dance
- Staying true to the original "feel" of the song

The first common problem here is tempos that don't actually work well for dancing.  This is really common for less experienced dancers/DJs who have a hard time visualizing a dance.  Or even more experienced dancers who are picking out songs for a dance form that they're unfamiliar with.  If you've never touched west coast swing in your life, it's going to be really difficult for you to know what a good tempo for that dance feels like, (let alone what makes for a good WCS song).  If you are having this problem, you probably ought to really try and dance to the songs yourself (or at least pretend?), or ask a partner-in-crime if you don't have the feel for it.

The second and in my opinion more sinister problem is a tempo that is perfectly danceable but kills the spirit of the song.  This is especially prevalent for songs which have been shoehorned into a dance form that they weren't intended for, the most common example of this is "let's take this fast waltz and turn it into a cross-step waltz".  I really hate this because it commonly flies under people's radar and leads to a really sluggish or unnatural song that is really disappointing to hear and/or dance to.

If your approach to tempos is to say "oh, cross-step waltz is supposed to be 114BPM, right?  So let's make this song exactly 114BPM!" I'd strongly urge you to compromise more towards the original tempo of the song.  I will always strive to modify the tempo as little as possible in order to hit a good compromise because I think the further you go the less fun a song becomes.  As a composer, I write my music in such a way to fit the BPM and feel that I'm going for, and going significantly astray is really going to muddle up the intention of the song.  There is plenty of dance music out there -- if you want a slower cross-step waltz, you can find a different song...don't just shoehorn a track into a given tempo.

That said, I understand I'm also a more advanced dancer and as such might feel more comfortable with a wider range of tempos than others.  In the end it's all up to your discretion, just don't forget that you should always be trying to make a compromise.

Of course, if you happen to also be the composer of the song, you can just edit the original project file itself and reconstruct at the new tempo directly without any time-stretching.  Woohoo!

Music editing
I pretty much edit all of my own music, regardless of whether I have a version on hand which has already been edited by some other source.  I wish I could settle for trusting other people's edits but there are just too many faults which I see commonly:

- Low quality timestretching and/or awkward tempo (as described above)
- Obvious and/or awkward cuts
- Low quality source or resulting render (this isn't the year 2000, 128kbps doesn't cut it anymore!)

I also have a bunch of other things that I like to do, including:
- Trimming leading/trailing silence
- Adjusting fadeins and fadeouts.  For fadeouts, I like to use nonlinear fadeouts so that it's obvious that there is a fadeout starting at that point. (ease out)
- Manually automating volume adjustment if the different sections of the track have levels that vary too much for the dance floor
- Dynamic range compression/bringing volumes in line with other tracks in general (think about of those classical tracks with tons of dynamic range that are way too soft compared to all the pop songs)

Some of this is getting into territory that is harder to do without a working knowledge of audio processing.  For example, you can't just "turn the volume up" on a soft piece of music (if it is already normalized) as that will just lead to a bunch of clipping.  So there you need to understand what a limiter/compressor does and how to apply one.  Of course, this is extremely standard stuff in the world of music production, so it's as simple as dragging around a single slider in my izotope ozone mastering suite.  If you are still working in something like Audacity this is going to be a lot more cumbersome.  ReplayGain is another option, of course.

I don't know how other people go about doing their edits, but for cuts, repeats, and crossfades, I really believe in taking the effort to make the edit seamless.  This requires some level of understanding of the underlying music, but mostly just knowledge about how to edit precisely.  "Guess and check" isn't good enough here, you want to actually line up the waveforms:

This is even easier for songs with prominent drum transients, but even for more acoustic works you can quite visibly line up the beats as shown above.  This will ensure a seamless edit.  If you're working in Audacity you have the benefit of being able to be sample-accurate with your splices -- use it!  In FL Studio unfortunately you're limited to the midi timebase, but setting PPQ to 960 and using a high tempo is definitely good enough.

Of course, in the cases where you can't directly splice together two sections, you'll need to crossfade them together, but the same thing applies -- line up the transients and waveforms visually before adjusting the crossfade.  You'll know if you have things lined up if you can hear a proper "phasing" effect when overlaying the two tracks on top of each other.

I realize this is mostly just me ranting about how music editing ought to be more precise, but if anybody actually wants anything explained in a more instructive way I can do that too.

Snowboarding

Went to Tahoe with a group for some snowboarding action this past Sunday!  It was quite fun, though also extremely exhausting.  I brushed up on some things beforehand that I wanted to work on and I think it really helped, and the powder was super nice as well which was nice.  Of course that doesn't mean I didn't fall on my face + butt a lot, actually I had quite some epic wipeouts as well as I was getting a little more confident.  I felt like I was really getting the hang of turns more, especially turning to toe side for some reason (I had an issue with over-rotating and not being able to control speed for my heel side turns, maybe just need to lower myself more and be more in alignment), and even worked on linked a few of them together, though I think I would need to just be better at controlling speed before getting more confident and successful with it.  Overall though I was pretty happy with how I progressed, despite sort of worsening as the day went on (not to mention being super bad at getting off the lift this time for some reason).

The trip really took a lot out of me though, I feel like I've just really recovered from it, eugh.

Cooking

Made pizza again!  This time with premade pizza dough, which was much easier.  Tried to really pile on the toppings this time, to good success:

Um...I haven't really made too much other exciting things so I donno why I even had a section for this, but ok.

Edit: OH that's right!  After some mishaps with my shoddily-seasoned carbon steel wok I've finally sat down with it again and reseasoned it for real, this time using the oven again, as well as cooking some scallions in it afterwards.  The color looks quite promising this time around, so hopefully this time it'll fare a bit better, though we'll have to see how it fares against the usual tough suspects of not-completely-dry-rice and eggs.  Will remember to not throw any tomatoes at it though, that's what did in the seasoning last time.

Gaming

Quite a lot of progress here!

First off, I finished normal difficulty of Dead Cells!  I haven't unlocked everything yet (still need quite a lot more cells to do that), but I did go through the different biomes afterwards and visit each one at least once, as well as getting all of the different runes, so that was fun.  If I decide to keep playing the next thing to do will be trying to do runs on higher difficulties...we'll see.

I also finished Mega Man Unlimited!  Quite a fun fan game, and it really felt quite true to the spirit of Mega Man, while still offering up some new things here and there as well.  Rainbow Man's stages (with the Quick Man-like beams) felt a bit BS but once you know them they're fine...I guess quick man's stage is sort of like that as well, but this felt a bit more obnoxious since at least with Quick Man's stage it's more instinctual ("just get to the next screen as quickly as possible") whereas Rainbow Man's stages are much harder to read at a glance so it feels almost impossible to survive some of them on a first try.  Regardless, it was a fun experience overall!  There are more game modes to go through but I think I'm done with the game.

As of now I've moved onto mostly playing Unavowed, which has been pretty enjoyable so far!  (I just got to the "twist").  I wouldn't say anything has really floored me yet, but it's been overall a great package when considering it all put together.  Some things I've appreciated:
- Optional exposition through hover text is an interesting idea that I think works well for the genre
- Being able to customize your experience by both choosing your background, dialogue choices, and team has been great
- The moral / philosophical dilemmas presented at the end of the chapters have been interesting to compare and contrast with each other, and I think being put into somewhat similar "choice" situations with very different contexts is elucidating in terms of what factors into these decisions in my mind.  Cool stuff.  Unfortunately none of the choices have really felt "impactful" in terms of game effect so far, which is something that we only really saw in Life Is Strange, but that is also something that is quite difficult to pull off, so I understand.  Still, there are some really pivotal points in the story where it would have been really interesting to see a choice given instead of being forced down a specific path.

Our group also started playing Wandersong!  What a great energy and spirit to have in a game.  I think it's something that a lot of developers and designers could learn from.  We've only just started, but I think it's been pretty inspiring so far.  Super fun!

Sleep (or lack thereof)

Been having troubles with my sleeping schedule these days (though last night was not too bad).  I guess it's a bit difficult without a job forcing me to maintain a regular schedule no matter what, but I'm hoping to fall into some good habits again hopefully, as it's really annoying/unfortunate to not be able to sleep at night sometimes.  Half of it is getting back onto a good rhythm and the other half is trying not to stress out about really random silly things like "I should really try to dye my hair in the next week do i have enough time to do that" ...
Hopefully I'll find some success...