There is a bartender at a bar about four blocks away. I like to go there and read on Sunday afternoons. I want to fuck his brains out. His voice sounds like he had a laryngectomy, he has no tact and he's only a couple inches taller than me.

Damn.

It's been a while since I've posted. I'm sending guilty vibes out into the universe, though I know ultimately that the only person who gives a shit whether or not I write is me. Consider this an apology, oh inner voice. I didn't mean to cut off your flow.

At Clatter and Din, the studio where I am lucky enough to have been chosen, handpicked really, to get people coffee and wipe down counters, there is a small faction of video artists.

These artists work mostly on footage recorded and sent in by small businesses. Marketing attempts.

Carly, the whip-cracker, pulled me aside. "I need you".

She didn't emphasize the "you" as in, I need you, not him or her. But I could sense that it was implied that she needed ME- and I jumped at the chance to do something that didn't require 409 and a coffee grinder and did, maybe, require some semblance of skill.

Headphones on, I immediately recognized the problem. Whoever recorded the audio on this project had, to put it kindly, fucked up. The man's voice, timid and shaky, was masked in a thick layer of noise. I doubt that they had placed him in the middle of a hurricane to record him, but natural disaster in its loudest form is what this audio file suggested.

"Can you fix it?" she asked.

Could I fix it? Absolutely not. Was I going to say yes and give it a try? Yes.

After two hours of knob tweaking, it sounded less totally awful. But not good. All I could think was, "how could someone think this was OK?"

Possible theories:
1) Laziness. No one bothered to check the setup or the result of the recording.
2) Deafness. That one's self explanatory.

Let's be fair. Audio is my area of expertise. If it wasn't, I might make a sub par recording and think it was usable. Not as heinous as the recording in question, but it's plausible that the result wouldn't be too easy on the ears.

Audio is something I get. And this recording was obviously bad. But it makes me wonder what I don't get. What have I screwed up in my life and not even realized? How many "bad audio files" have I recorded? How many engineers have quietly cleaned up after me? How many unpaid interns does it take to eliminate the excess noise in our lives?

Let's get our analogy on, shall we?

In my earlier production days, I would use all clean sounds. Synthesizers with smooth volume envelopes. Shimmery sounds. And something always sounded wrong. The tracks felt thin and lifeless.

Then I discovered bitcrushing. You take a sound and warp it until it's unrecognizable. It sounds crunchy and fuzzy and awful on its own, but in a mix, it transforms the track. It gives it lungs and a raspy, real voice, and a past and a soul.

Like life. The rough patches are necessary.

Yawn. I know that's no new insight, but the tumult in my stomach is easier to tame when I remind myself that Everything Sucking is an entirely necessary concept and that it always, without fail, passes. Eventually.

Purposeful noise, used judiciously. That's the goal from here on out.


[If you have fifteen minutes, you should check out this amazing short film. All the sound design was done by my friend Eric Johnson at C&D. Starring Rider Strong (Sean from Boy Meets World). He showed it to me yesterday, and I was beyond impressed. It got me re-amped on sound design. Much love]

Your Lucky Day from Dan on Vimeo.