Visualizing Sound

1:01 What's good, everybody?Scoobert Doobert here.Welcome back to love music more.Today I want to talk about visualizing music.I think that this is an important way to love music more is to think about it and closeyour eyes and try to picture where all of the instruments and frequencies are living.This isn't just about panning.This is about thinking about music in three dimensions.

1:24 And it's also about trying to apply real world concepts that are we are evolutionarilydesigned to understand and try to apply them to digital frameworks that are inherentlynot like the real world.So the easiest example is to think of a live recording and particularly one that is using

1:45 Dolby Atmos or one that is paned off in a way that makes you look out and see the stage.So for example, you have a drum kit and you're looking at the drum kit and as it goes around,you hear it moving from side to side or you have a guitar say next to the ride cymbaland so the guitar is panned over to the same area that the ride cymbal is where you have

2:10 a lead singer that's in the center of the stage so he's in the center of the mix.Or you have a keyboardist and she is over to the left hand side near the high hat sayand you are hearing her keyboard coming as a mono signal, an individual signal fromthat one area.

2:34 It's super simple but I think that's easier to connect with because you're able to visualizewhat it's like to be at a concert and see the different musicians and I think that'spart of the reason why live music is so transcendent is that it's easier for those that haven'tbeen musically trained or worked on mixing a lot to be able to individually place and segment

2:55 all of the different musical choices because you're able to see the hands moving and you'reable to go oh okay like I can listen to the drums more clearly because I'm able tovisually see the drums being played but you can apply that same thing even when you'renot watching by visualizing it and trying to zero in on that high hat part or the kick drum

3:18 part and that's part of like what music appreciation is attempting to do is trying to teachyou the timbers and the history and the techniques of each of those individual instruments orinstrumental sections so that you can pick them out without having to be visually illustratedto you.However I think looping it back around and thinking about the visual aspect like almost

3:42 in a synesthesia type way unlock something really special with music because we are veryvisual creatures even though I'm a quote-unquote auditory learner having visual representationsare very useful and can simplify difficult decisions put another way I like to thinkof music as splashes of color and then the stereo field as my canvas so I have everywhere

4:08 from right to left but then I also have a depth and that's where things like reverb andspatializing effects come in it doesn't have to just be reverb but the amount of presencethe amount of how would I say this the similarity that an instrument has to the human voice creates

4:30 a like that evolutionary side it creates a hook a spotlight and if you take away someof those human voice frequencies like 3000 hurts it starts to sound like it's a littlebit further away even though I'm close to the mic I'm just covering it up a little bitand you hear how the presence that presence has changed you can do that to any instrument

4:57 just through equalization or a bunch of different effects and that creates depth in thesame way that looking at early renaissance paintings where they're learning how to use depththey're learning how to use obscura and this like sense of looking through a veil or lookingdeep into the distance and as things get farther and farther on the horizon of a beautiful landscape

5:23 picture one of the reasons why it's beautiful is it draws you in through depth the atmosphereand the fog and the smoke is obscuring your vision and I like to think of presence as one of theprimary kind of knobs that we can turn to get that same visual effect auditorily auditorilyorally reverbs in other way placing something into a room and you can actually put on a lot of

5:51 reverb on things especially in the dense mix you don't want to put it on too many things thisgenre dependent but say for example you have a dense mix there's a lot going on and you want onething like a synthesizer or a synth string or a guitar that's playing up in a high register youmight want to douse that thing with reverb and you might not even perceive it as the listener as

6:14 having a lot of reverb on it you just perceive it as subtle or farther away because if the rest ofthe instruments have little or no reverb on them or if the reverb that they have is like a room reverba natural reverb and then you put something digital and intense on something else

6:32 it is going to create this depth of field and then based on where you place it and the widthif you want to listen to the panning episode the width of things also determines how much kind ofjumps out of the speakers because if you do things that are more natural we're again like kind oftune to hear natural things like natural reverbs natural panning if you do something unnatural it

6:59 jumps out a little bit and so that's one of the fun things about mixing is you're dealing with notjust volume or gain you're also dealing with psychoacoustic signaling of this thing has a lot ofpresence so even though it's pretty quiet that presence thing again is that even though it's kindof quiet it cuts through the mix like a tambourine oh my god especially if you listen to a live

7:24 recording from like the 60s or whatever somebody on stage picks up a tambourine it's the loudest thingin the room it's that's part of the reason why tambourines have historically been mixed really loudis that you can't hide them and that's also one of the reasons why I got a little tiny babytambourine it's like a toy I love playing that thing because it's so much quieter because there's

7:46 less jangles on it but it just for some reason that instrument out all the instruments just cutsright through in the same way that like a ripping electric guitar solo can cut right through it'sreally it sounds like the human voice or saxophone there's a reason why we have these differentinstruments that are traditionally the leaders or the soloists a trumpet they cut they have

8:10 presence but it's fun to play with the opposites and it's also one of the things we can do in thedigital realm where you can transform one instrument to another and so one of the other cool thingsthat we have is the harmonic series I've done a whole bunch of pods on the harmonic series I'm sureI will do a whole bunch more but basically what that is is it is the defining set of resonances

8:35 that makes my voice sound like my voice and your voice sound like your voice or my guitar sound likemy guitar versus your guitar you can adjust those things digitally so I can and I do this all the timewith saturation where you take up those second and third order harmonics and it beefs it up it makesa little richer I am using a little bit on my voice right now not too much all of those things

8:59 are cool but you can even go further where you can just remove harmonics why don't I do that to myvoice right now I'm gonna do a little test this is my voice with its normal harmonics this is myvoice without its first order harmonics this is my voice without its first and second order harmonicsthis is my voice without its first second and third order harmonics do you hear the cool effects we

9:25 can do with that I do it all the time I do it to I usually do it in a little bit of doses

9:30 I am leaning towards potentially starting some experimental music but no one's gonna listen to itbut I kind of want to make it I just don't really have time yet but someday I really want tohopefully someday soon that explores that specifically that like that becomes the identity of themusical project uh yeah again I don't know if people want let's do a bit of be fun to make

9:51 and to be fun to explore and sometimes it's good to explore in a side project or a weird littlething to spill over to your main project um because I use that stuff a lot for transitions so when I'mgoing from one section to the next and I want an interesting push that isn't just a drum fill likethere's enough drum fills going from section to section in the world like do we really need another

10:13 sometimes we do but it's really cool to be able to have like say for example a noise push likeshsh like that but instead of the noise just going up getting louder the noise is fundamentallyaltering over time so it's going like it's doing some weird stuff because I'm manipulating the harmonicsbecause I can you know do it because you can a lot of music uh just didn't have that tool in the

10:38 toolkit and we do now and so that's one of the one of the ways that I think you define musicalperiod periods and eras and genres is like the Beatles figured out how to do phasers and flangersand so that's part of the reason why psychedelic music sounds like that it's like this tape basedeffect and now our phasers and flangers a little bit different because they're digital uh it's a

11:00 little bit more perfect but that's part of what makes it sound like now I don't necessarily wantto just nail what the Beatles did they already did it but because we have other tools and we have

11:15 weird facimales of those previous tools we can combine them in a way that feels nostalgic and feelslike it's of the genre but maybe we're getting there through a different means I'm really excitedabout that kind of stuff that stuff goes back to Les Paul on my history of rock series that Ihighly recommend checking out on my sub stack love music more dot sub stack dot com and across the

11:35 podcast but that that stuff I think it shows the spirit of exploration in studio recording thatlike Les Paul and Led Zeppelin and I'm trying to have you know Beatles had like all these peoplethey've had it um but you want to keep it alive and it's so easy to think everything's alreadybeen invented but I don't think that could be further from the truth like yes we have simple

12:00 building blocks 12 notes but in reality we can slide in between all of those notes we can domicrotonal stuff so it's not really just 12 it's mostly 12 and in the same way we only have

12:11 frequency amplitude over time but at the same time like that's a lot of vectors we got the wholefrequency spectrum that we're able to hear and how do you manipulate it we can manipulate it fullybecause we have the digital tools it's all math so when you convert music into math you can nowapply anything you want to it that's the way that a lot of these plugins work is uh fast

12:36 Fourier Fourier Fourier Fourier ffts as they call them very scientifically the ffts fast Fourier transforms fast anyway that is uh it's basically is a set of transformations that you applyto any mathematical signal to change it from one to the next and so this is basically applying

13:00 a delta a change across each of these frequency um frequencies over time so changing one wave toanother wave and that's how we do like in the box saturations that's how we get analog models ofcircuits um if you want to hear more about that you can listen to somebody that knows a lot more

13:20 than i do in my conversation with Musik Hack um where we get super into the actual like what'sactually going on when somebody makes a plugin uh it was a great conversation so definitely recommendthat but all that to say that we actually have a lot of control and a lot of little things that wecan tweak and i think we hold ourselves back because we hold ourselves back from that visual

13:48 standpoint of organic visuals and what i'm trying to advocate for is to disambiguate to go

13:55 go beyond what you can just visually see and then see if you can take the same lessons frompeople on a stage across the frequency spectrum and see if you can transform one instrument to anotheror into something completely brand new something truly alien put it into a truly alien space and

14:18 use the lessons of like there's a role that a kick drum plays it's the heartbeat of the songbut it doesn't need to be a kick drum that is playing that role it doesn't even need to be in thesame frequency area to play that role there's a role that the high hat plays to subdivide

14:39 but one of the great things that happened with the electronic revolution is you can have a synththat is perfectly subdividing or imperfectly subdividing and it's playing the role of the high hator you can have the vocal play any of those individual roles or you can sample your vocal and turnit into a kick drum to mixed effect i've done some of that it's it can be cool it's usually

15:06 cooler to turn your vocal into something else whatever you know like a synth vocal to synthusually works a little bit better than vocal to drum i've done it yeah maybe you'll figure out abetter way email me if you do or DM me on instagram scoobertdoobert.pizza but yeah this is just likethe kind of conversation that i'm trying to have that i'm trying to get out more into the public

15:26 musical consciousness and i think it's important be you a listener or a creator to i don't knowlike the word or a musician um to take all this into account because it opens up some doors it opensup ways of thinking and ways of experiencing that i think add richness to both the creation andconsumption process of music as an art form and i hope you enjoyed this episode if you did i'd love

15:52 to invite you to share it with your friends rate it five stars like it on youtube and follow alongfor the ride if you'd like to hear my music you can go to scoobertdoobert.pizza if you want tohear here if you want to read my writing and some great writing of some guess that are alsocontributing to the substack go to love music more dot substack dot com and enjoy it join me on

16:17 the history of rock and roll that has gotten pretty deep and is going to keep going deeperand i'll see you next week for a great conversation thank you