I blipped this song yesterday and decided I should write a post about it… LOL! Anyway…

It was in my freshman college years when I bought Joe Satriani’s Not of This Earth, and in that album there’s this one particular track that always bothered me. It’s a very strange song (with a very strange melody) called “The Enigmatic”. Click on the YouTube link below if you’ve never heard it yet.

We will not analyze the song itself here, or discuss any of those trademark whiz-bang guitar techniques, but rather focus on the scale that inspired the song. If you think our Lydian-dominant lesson from last time was quirky, wait till you hear this one!

I can feel that Joe was trying to stretch the boundaries of conventional melody and harmony in this song. The melody is carried mainly by doublestops on an E pedal point, accented by some eerie arpeggios. And what makes it sound so strange is primarily the scale he used to build the entire song. This scale is known as the “enigmatic” scale, and was originally used (at least according to Wikipedia) in the late 1800s by the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi.

The enigmatic scale is actually an artificial or synthetic scale, being that it is not based on any of the traditional major, harmonic or melodic minor modes, and at the same time is also not rooted on any of the ancient, traditional or cultural intervals (such as the Byzantine, the bebop, or the various Japanese pentatonic scales). It is more an artificially-constructed scale built on an arbitrary interval of notes.

On C, the enigmatic scale is spelled C – D-flat – E – F# – G# – A# – B. Thus you would notice immediately that the scale lacks a dominant (the G-note) and subdominant (the F-note), and this is what primarily gives the scale its stinging character. Add to this the Phrygian-like flatted 2nd, which relative to the major 3rd, gives a wide interval of three semitones. And then add some more quirky elements like the Lydian-like raised 4th, and the raised 5th and 6th, and you’ve got one really twisted-sounding scale.

As originally used by Verdi in his “Ave Maria” of 1898, the scale ascends as is, but when descending, the raised 4th (i.e., F#) is replaced by the natural (F), which gives another three-semitone interval, this time relative to the raised 5th. In contrast to these wide intervals, there is a long four-note chromatic “section” too, which begins with the #6, going to the major 7th, and then the tonic, all the way to the minor 9th. It’s so enigmatic indeed!

Further analysis will lead you to think that the scale is somewhat a derivative of the “hexatonic” or whole-tone scale (again in C, spelled as C – D – E – F# – G# – A#), like a whole-tone scale with a major 2nd and missing a leading tone.

In a construction or soloing context, it would be difficult to think of anything traditional with the application of this scale, except for the fact that the raised dominant hints us of trying out this scale over an augmented chord progression. One different way of looking at C enigmatic is in the context of an E-major, C#-minor or an F#-major triad, but be careful about adding the chromatic notes that result when you use the scale like this. On the tonic, it is possible to use this scale over altered chords such as the major-flat-5th, the augmented-major-7th and the major-7-flat-5th.

Most of the time, I find it best to use the enigmatic scale as a substitute for an altered scale in a freer vamp setting. That is because the chromaticism that is introduced by the scale does not disturb anything in context.

I will try to come up with some audio examples when I get home, so please try to come back to this post in a few days.

Practice, persevere and conquer!

Just now I finished listening to an album we did in the Studio with heavy metal artists Ammunition. The music was heavy indeed but at the same time was very nice to the ears. Myko and Allan tracked this project in 2003, while I mixed it much much later. This project really was a quick low-budget but fully multitracked production, with rarely a second take done during tracking. Thus a typical song was completely recorded in an hour or less, and on most of them, there was only one rhythm guitar track present. Meanwhile, the mix for the whole album was completed in about four hours, all ten songs of it, and because I put a limiter (plus some other mojo stuff) on the two-buss, it was quasi-mastered already during mixdown. I did what I could because I wanted the songs to sound like it was a major release, and if you get to hear the album, I think you will notice that the fine musicianship of the band, the intensity of their performance, and the quality of the recording reflect none of the constraints I just described at all…

The guitar sound on this album reminds me of an audio “secret” that I’m going to share with you today. While we usually multi-mic the guitar amp on most sessions (even for demo recordings), for some reason, Myko used only one mic on many songs here. I was going for a dry and massive guitar sound, primarily because the arrangements were very sparse, and so I wanted to really push it as far as it can go. And so the main problem I had was to create a good, convincing stereo sound from this single source, and because I really hate these pseudo-stereo processors (because they all sound like a bad ice-cream headache, and collapses really bad in mono), I went old-school and used the Haas effect while I crafted most of the guitar sounds.

Here is the song “Against the Wall” off the album for your listening pleasure. Try to focus on the guitar sound and how its stereo image is presented. (With special thanks and permission from Rodney, Sidhart, and Barry of Ammunition.)

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The sounds of silence

Let’s set aside the song for a while… Close your eyes for a minute and listen intently to the sounds you hear all around you. There could be a lawnmower coming from the outside the window, to your right, while you could hear your dog barking somewhat to your left, at 10 o’clock, and your TV is airing the news dead center. How do you know exactly where all these sounds are coming from? And how do you know how far they are from you?

Well, we have two ears separated by our head by about 18 cm facing opposite directions. And when sound comes from a certain direction, it reaches our ears at different times, and with different intensities. If the sound was coming from the median plane, like the TV, then it would arrive in both ears simultaneously, at almost the same loudness. If it was off to the right, as with the lawnmower, the right ear would receive the sound before the left (and vice-versa as with the dog barking), with the louder side obviously coming from the the ear facing the sound source. It really gets a lot more complicated that this, but this knowledge should be sufficient for our topic today.

In the perception of sound, we can think of our ear-brain system as some kind of audio processor. And in the 1940’s Helmut Haas found out that when two identical sounds originate from two sources at different distances from the listener, the ear will only recognize the sound that arrives first, and will combine the second source as long as the delay between them is around 40 ms or less. Any other sources of the same sound arriving within this time window (for instance, the reflected TV sounds from the room walls surrounding you as in the example above) will fuse with the main initial sound, and thus we essentially hear just “one” sound, and only a loudness enhancement occurs. Only reflections arriving later than 40 ms will be heard as distinct echoes.

Down deep into the pain

In the audio recording world, depth, or the three-dimensional image of a mix, is one of the hallmarks of a great mixer. It is one of these things that separate the seasoned professional from the amateurs. Depth is this wonderful listening experience where each instrument seem to occupy a distinct location within the sound field, all the while realizing that this feat is done in stereo, that is, with two speakers only.

And here is where the notion of sonic depth comes in… The Haas effect allows echoes within 40 ms to enhance the original sound without confusion as to where it’s coming from. While all these sounds and reflections coming in from different directions are fused, our brain continues to recognize the location of the initial sound as *the* source without confusing its directionality.

Dolby Labs use this trick to create what they call the “magic surround”. They found out that when a stereo source was duplicated in the rear speakers, and delayed by a certain amount, the ambience within the stereo recording became more prominent. It seems as if the natural reverberation from the original source was extracted into the rear speakers when the delay was introduced. They use some other mid-side tricks as well, but this is the essential gist of the technique.

The sound of one hand clapping

When a snare drum is hit, the sound picked up by a mic placed over it will be the combination of the direct sound and all the reflected sounds from the room (i.e., the walls, ceiling, floor, and other furniture and objects within the room). All these reflections, within the Haas limit, are directly correlated with the original sound, and supports the initial direct hit, without interfering with its left-to-right orientation. The longer reflected sounds (e.g., reflections if the room was sufficiently large, or secondary reflections, and so on) beyond the Haas limit are uncorrelated, and this is what we call the natural ambience of the room. This group of early reflections as it’s also called is what gives us the perception of distance, a sense of space, but they don’t help us locate the original source in space.

This is the reason why the sense of location of the original sound is usually destroyed when synthetic reverb is added to a single-miked source. Compare it to a stereo-recording of the same source, where early reflections are now binaurally captured, and you’ll see that when the same reverb is added, the sound remains convincingly natural and the spatial location is preserved.

Frequency response also affects our sense of distance. Air absorbs high frequencies, such that the further down a sound source is, the more its high-frequency content is reduced. And our ears have been trained to interpret distance like this. As with our lawnmower example above, the direct sound coming into our right ear contains more high-frequency content, than the softer sound coming into our left ear. The combined Haas effect is thus interpreted in our brain as a lawnmower that is as far right of our sound field as can be.

Back to the egg

And thus with this newfound understanding of this particular aspect of the psychoacoustics of hearing, and its myriad possibilities, we come back to our mono guitar example. What things were done to the original guitar sound that resulted into the mix you heard above?

Ok, for starters, there were a few things, such as adaptive noise reduction, EQ (to sculpt the basic sound) and compression, that are totally unrelated to our topic (but had to mention as well, so there!). As far as creating that stereo sound, the original track was hard-panned on one side, and duplicated onto the other side, which was hard-panned as well. This duplicate track was then delayed by a certain number of samples, corresponding to a certain time delay within the Haas specification. How much exactly depends on the resulting spread and tone in stereo, and how the stereo sound behaves (or misbehaves) when collapsed to mono. I find that there is no general rule we can follow here, because the nasty comb filtering effects vary with the program material, and in the case of guitars, these things actually change the timbre and tone as well.

A common mixing trick you can further try out (prior to delaying the duplicate track) is to detune the duplicate track (using a pitch-shifter) by a certain amount, usually no more than 10 cents. This increases the stereo perception even more. I sometimes do this with vocals, but in this case, this technique was not employed.

The two guitar tracks are then fed to a stereo-buss where further EQ (this time to complement the vocal track) and compression are added. A tiny amount of plate reverb was added at the very end, just enough to glue the elements, but whose amount you can barely hear. It is also important that the reverb doesn’t wash away the attack transients of the guitar.

And so there you have it folks. A mono guitar track turned into rich stereo. Have fun everybody!

For additional reading, please check out the following:

• The article Haas effect – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia discusses the basics.
• Haas Effect (Precedence Effect) is another good introduction to the topic.
• In Stereo Perception, the various listening perceptions related to our anatomy are dissected. Things such as front-to-back and elevation perceptions are also explained.
• In Depth and Dimension, mastering engineer Bob Katz discusses the various psychoacoustic phenomena (including the Haas effect) as it relates to our sensation of depth.
• The paper ASC, The World’s Best Studio Acoustics – SOUND FUSION AND THE ACOUSTIC PRESENCE EFFECT, discusses the complex differences between the Haas effect, early reflections, comb filtering, and the phenomenon of masking.
• In The Birth of the Array: Part 5, knowledge of the Haas effect is used extensively in speaker placement and delay compensation in big concert venues that use multi-array loudspeakers.
• An excellent Haas effect mixing tutorial described in step-by-step detail may be found in the article Turn a mono track into rich stereo « benvesco.com.
• Another ultra-cool mixing tutorial may be found in this article Pro Mixing Series: Episode two: The Haas Effect | EMusicTips.
• TAP-plugins hosts a nice freeware Linux plugin Tap Stereo Echo that achieves the Haas effect (among other delay capabilities). Too bad I’m using Windows!
• Another great freeware plugin HaasCheezburger may be found in this article Native Instruments Kore, Komplete, Reaktor @ Create Digital Music » I Can Haas Stereo_ Lolcat Reaktor Delay FX.

I caught this fascinating post at BoingBoing.net about a YouTube video showing how J.S. Bach’s Musical Offering (from 1747), specifically the Canon 1 a 2, could be played forwards and reversed, twisted and turned upside-down, split and played simultaneously inside-out by some crazy mathematicians, as a never-ending melodic movement. Well, if that’s a bit confusing, just watch the video below and you’ll get the idea…

J.S. Bach is perhaps the greatest composer of the Baroque era. He was widely regarded for the intellectual depth, technical facility and artistic beauty of his compositions. His output of works was prolific, and he was often commissioned to compose a lot of music for the Church during his time. He also paved the way for the next generation of giants that included Mozart, Beethoven, Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelsshon and even Frederic Chopin.

Bach was also the greatest proponent of the sophisticated art of the counterpoint, and specifically the canon and the fugue, which incidentally I first heard from the Swedish guitar virtuoso Yngwie Malmsteen’s compositions (although I had been listening to classical music too (and Bach specifically) since I was in high school).

The canon is a compositional style whose foundation is in fact the counterpoint but with some very strict and specific requirements. J.S. Bach’s Canon 1 a 2 is an example of an infinite or perpetual canon that is also a retrograde canon (and hence the nickname “Crab Canon”) because it can be played forward or backwards in time indefinitely. I will not go too in-depth about the anatomy of contrapuntal composition and the canon itself as it’s too intricate and technical. Just click on the links below if you need a deeper explanation.

Now, many mathematicians (and some others like Xantox, and John Leys who did the YouTube illustration above) became very intrigued by this melodic snippet, because aside from being a strict canon alright, and an infinite and retrograde canon at that (which means can be played endlessly and backwards too), it is also possible to play it simultaneously forwards and backwards in time. In their own words,

In each of these canons a musical line is played twice (or four times in Canon 10). The second version is always transformed with respect to the first by shifting in time, but it may also be shifted in pitch, turned upside-down, stretched, or played backwards. Each of these transformations occurs in the mathematics of elementary functions; they are examples of how new functions can be made out of old and of how a function can be tailored to fit a new situation.

If you listened intently on the amazing combination and interaction of the contrapuntal melodies, you will realize why it becomes so mind-boggling. The fact that it can be played indefinitely (as in the Möbius Strip transformation) makes it all the more appealing to mathematicians. It’s as if Bach himself composed this seemingly simple piece with the very intention of it being discovered later on (after centuries in fact!) of all these amazing possibilities.

For additional reading:

• Wikipedia: Canon
• The Canons and Fugues of J. S. Bach
• Math and the Musical Offering

I saw this cool website in my RSS feeds and thought I might give it a shot. It works a lot like Twitter I guess. And so for starters, I “blipped” some of my favorite songs, and immediately I got some feedback from other users (whom I suppose are also music lovers), which the site calls “props” and “credits”. Well, this is still all too new for me now. But it looks fun so far, so why not give it a try too?

Here’s my BLIP.fm page btw… Blip.fm | Blips by AjiCoronel

Oh boy, you knew this one was coming right? Back then, and that was about a decade ago, nobody (well, except us music producers and studio engineers) knew about this thing, but now it has been unleashed big-time, just about a week ago in fact, courtesy of an iPhone application that is being endorsed by the American rapper (and heavy Auto-Tune user) T-Pain. And apparently a hilariously stinging YouTube video (watch it below) brought this all into the public limelight, and today it has even made big headlines in CNN!

So what is this all about? Auto-Tune is actually a computer software made by Antares that is used in many studios around the world to correct out-of-tune recordings of *anything*. It’s most important application however is with what is perhaps the most delicate and important component in any typical song: the human voice. Auto-Tune made its popular debut with Cher’s megahit “Believe”, where a very extreme setting was used not for pitch correction, but to create that characteristic keyboardy, robotic effect on her voice.

When it first came out, it has been hailed as the “holy grail of the recording world”, because finally it became possible to fix singing imperfections without adding any distortion or artifacts. If you don’t realize how powerful this software is, imagine asking somebody to sing “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, and being able to change the melody that was sung into… uh… let’s say… “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”.

Well, the “without any distortion or artifact” clause is not totally true, because I think the trained ears of producers and audio engineers will always be able to detect a vocal track that has been Auto-Tuned, however subtle and skilled the processing was. I cringe whenever I get to hear “that” sound on the newest top ten hit, and I can’t help but laugh whenever some kid would sing this artist’s song and try to imitate “that” sound. When a recording is all very well-done however, the mere fact that the vocal performance on this new song was perfect makes me think immediately that is was Auto-Tuned. I know it’s wrong, but I would never give credit to the singer’s brilliance right away.

And in case you’re wondering why I would tend to think this way… It’s all simply because pop music that has been released (for the last five years especially) *all* use Auto-Tune. (Believe it or not!) It has become *the* sound of this generation, whether you like it or not. The obsession about perfect pitch is just too much now that producers cannot accept even a single microscopic, momentary, microtonal dud.

It is no secret that some big music artists have a problem with their singing technique. For instance, Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon, while being a talented songwriter and brilliant performer, had a problem with controlling his vocal pitch. That is why if you listen closely to his recorded vocals, you’ll almost always hear “something” done to his voice to “hide” this fact, such as mixing in several pitch-shifted tracks of the same vocal take, or some weird reverb or mangling effect.

Auto-Tune used to be a well-guarded secret in the audio world (or at least we thought!), simply because the listening public would be shocked if they would get to know that their favorite singer in fact cannot sing (or sing worse than they do)! (Did somebody say Britney Spears?) Well, for those that *can* sing, Auto-Tune is still very useful in some ways, because, for instance, instead of wasting so much studio time to do so many takes of the same song, we can make do with just a few. Should there be that one elusive high note that just cannot be nailed properly, Auto-Tune can instantly be called to the rescue!

Truth is, every human being, no matter how skilled, will not be able to sing perfectly in tune. This is just fact. Just listen to any great singer, from Enrico Caruso, Placido Domingo, to Frank Sinatra. They will mostly be in the pocket, but you will inevitably hear pitch imperfections. One sliding blue note here, one slightly sharp note there… I guess it’s also intended in the performance too.

When we did U.P. Madrigal singer Joy Gain’s project in the Studio, I got goose bumps during the recording phase. I couldn’t believe how much control she has on her voice. She was just on-pitch all the time. (And consider how I sensitive I am with pitch and intonation on the guitar!) Well, it’s no surprise really, considering her classical upbringing and that level of talent she got. But later on during the mix, just out of curiosity, when I tried to put her vocal takes on the grid, I realized the takes weren’t that perfect after all. (I didn’t Auto-Tune her BTW!) For all our ear-brain’s pitch sensitivity, there was still way more stuff that only the computer can detect.

For me personally, I think it’s all just a fad. Since those times I banged my head in disbelief listening to Rod Stewart’s The Complete American Songbook album, or even James Hetfield’s vocals on Metallica’s Death Magnetic and how they all got Auto-Tune-infested, I hope the day will come when we return back to our artistic sensibilities when we create music. Would-be pop artists should all learn how to sing, or at least live with what they can do vocally. Bob Dylan comes to mind… While he is not the greatest of singing voices, he has become like a musical prophet of our age, and his vocal performances while not perfect, carry his complete message across to us, intellectually, philosophically, emotionally.

And coming back to Auto-Tune, I think we should all try to learn to use it wisely. For starters, why not just apply it to those sections where it’s obviously needed?

And now, the cat is out of the bag…