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  After all that, the album tanked. NoisyVid and radio wouldn’t touch the lead single, “Dictator/Dicktaster.” Besides, everyone knows Gillian’s shtick by now. It’s just not shocking anymore. If you’re going to ditch musical content and rely on shock value, you’re not going to be able to compete with gangsta rap. Make-believe evil doesn’t cut it. If you want to be a star these days, you have to commit real crimes and brag about them, and wear a big gold crucifix to show your spiritual side. If you can get yourself shot and killed in the process, so much the better.

  Apparently, Jasmine idolizes that freak. Madness and suicide aren’t part of my job description, but I’ll see if I can keep her distracted until this album is in the can.

  4. Saint Jimmy

  by SCOTTY

  mook

  A person with no taste or judgment who controls the dissemination of art.

  —The Music Industry Lexicon

  We’re going to mix “Whoredumb” on Monday, to see if there are any issues before we proceed to the next song. Blenderman wants something extra-special for the mix, so he sent me over to Jimmy’s Place to borrow something with “vibe.” He’s throwing me a bone, because I’m always bitching about SonoViz’s sound.

  A lot of big-name producers use SonoViz—for editing. Not for mixing. When it’s time to mix, they use a large-format analog console and a lot of outboard EQ’s and compressors, preferably vintage tube equipment.

  If they’re really dedicated, they might record to analog tape before transferring it to SonoViz. Analog tape provides a gentle compression that increases with recording level, smooths out the harshness that results from modern close-micing techniques, and makes it much easier to get a good sound.

  But the real purists ditch the computers altogether and plug the tape machine straight into the console like it’s 1979. The proponents of this method are viewed as dangerous lunatics, all three of them.

  Tragically, almost no one is using analog tape anymore. Used 2" machines are severely undervalued, and new machines haven’t been made in 20 years. Come to think of it, nobody has made any full-size analog consoles for a while either.

  SonoViz is advertised as an all-in-one solution that replaces a room full of analog gear for one-tenth the price. But if you take planned obsolescence into account, it’s not a bargain at all. You have to replace the entire system every five years if you want to use the latest software or exchange projects with other studios. Computer hardware isn’t designed to be repaired; when it breaks, you have to throw it away.

  Nor is it faster. Even with the $50,000 control surface, the ergonomics are fatally flawed: you don’t have dedicated controls and readouts for each processor. Troubleshooting is a nightmare, because you’re running your entire studio on a single computer. There’s no modularity or redundancy.

  And then there’s the fun of mixing in SonoViz. You have hundreds of different compressors, EQ’s, and effects to choose from, but none of them sound very good. You have to spend hours tweaking parameters and recalling mixes. They keep promising that the next breakthrough in digital modeling will sound “just like analog”; they’ve been making this claim for the past 20 years.

  As for the ability of SonoViz to edit and manipulate sound in all sorts of magical ways, anyone with a computer and a $60 piece of software can do the same thing at home. And what do we use these capabilities for? Creating revolutionary new forms of music? No, we use them to fix bands who can’t play their instruments and don’t belong in the studio.

  SonoViz is inferior to analog in every way imaginable. How it became the industry standard is beyond me.

  I’d like nothing better than to go the old-school route and work with bands who can actually play their instruments. Alas, I’m not that privileged. Thanks to Kasugi and its addiction to false economies, I have to record and mix completely “in the box,” a frustrating and depressing undertaking at best.

  But then there’s the anti-Kasugi…

  Jimmy’s Place, in Long Island, was built in 1962 and is one of the oldest studios in the NYC area. The owner is Jimmy DuBusky, but everyone calls him Saint Jimmy: high priest of an arcane religion of electrical currents and magnetic fields.

  There’s nothing in Jimmy’s Place made after 1968. His tape machine is an old 3M with military-grade construction, germanium transistors, huge transformers on the inputs and outputs, and the biggest, fattest sound imaginable.

  I’d go to work for Jimmy in a millisecond, but it’s strictly a one-man operation. Every time I see him, he’s rewired the whole place to realize some revolutionary concept that came to him in a dream, and he’s waist-deep in patch cables and oscilloscopes.

  Jimmy met me at the door. He’s a tall, bony, long-haired guy, who dresses in colorful, flowing robes and talks like a surfer dude.

  hey scotty

  whats up

  I said, “We’re doing a mix on Monday and we need a sound-fucker-upper.”

  i have one of those

  i think its called a gromko

  “You have a Gromko?” I said in amazement.

  now dont get too hyper

  they found it at the bottom of a lake in russia and its in real bad condition

  it was tied to a dudes leg and there were fish living in it

  if you can fix it up its all yours

  or i could just loan you a fairchild

  “I’ll go for the Gromko.”

  youre a brave dude

  He went into his back room, and brought out this huge, rusted thing on a hand-truck. It was the size and color of a cast-iron coal furnace, and it was festooned with ominous-looking knobs and switches. We loaded it into the trunk of my ’76 Impala.

  Gromky are something else. They were manufactured in Soviet Russia between 1958 and 1970. The portable version weighs over 300 pounds, not including the separate power supply with military-grade bootstrapping capacitors. The earlier units have fewer knobs and are slightly less radioactive.

  The Gromko was built for the Radio Moscow network. It was used to overdrive the transmitter and produce wildly overmodulated signals that generated sidebands all over the radio spectrum and jammed everything else. Gotta get that “pravda” to the comrade workers. It had a tendency to explode without warning, taking the transmitter with it, and radio engineers had to be forced at gunpoint to use it.

  Some units were re-engineered as electro-sonic torture devices and used on people suffering from anti-Communist mental disorders.

  Every Gromko is different, and you need a schematic to decipher the control markings. That’s precisely why it’s highly coveted by American record producers. It has personality. Voodoo. Aura. Mojo. Balls. Cachet. Vibe. Whatever.

  The secret of the Gromko’s sound is a mysterious circuit sealed in black epoxy. It contains a dereciprocator, a hypothetical component first proposed in 1948, which uses the Graffenmuller effect to inversely transduce the electrical majestance. To build this hypothetical component, you need a hypothetical transuranic element that doesn’t exist on Earth. Luckily, the Soviets retrieved a quantity of a mysterious glowing green metal from an asteroid crater in Siberia, and they were in business. It also took care of that imperialist lackey in the blue tights who kept stealing their nuclear missiles and throwing them into the Sun.

  The most sought-after Gromky are marked “Stalincold, People’s Republic of Vodka.” The ones marked “Electrocutiongrad, Soviet State of Terror” have less Graffenmuller effect.

  A programmer who called himself Erik the Genius tried to create a software emulation of the Gromko. When Newtonian physics failed to explain its behavior, he hired a staff of quantum physicists to analyze it. They wrote up their findings in a paper titled “Expectation-Induced Quantum Function Collapse in Audio Circuitry,” proving that a Gromko always does the opposite of what it’s supposed to do. Erik took to showing up at trade shows ranting about a “quantum supercomputer” that would perform 7×10*24 calculations per second and collapse into a black hole the instant it was turned
on. Soon he was sucked into the dark underworld of avant-garde physics and post-modern mathematics, and was never seen again.

  Every profession has its Gromko, an elaborate inside joke used to prank outsiders. Electrical engineers have the Turbo-Encabulator, biochemists have Resublimated Thiotimoline, computer programmers have Intercal, economists have Keynesianism, Boy Scouts have the Left-Handed Smoke Bender, and so on.

  I wrestled the Gromko into the Kasugi Studios building, and wheeled it to the lab of the staff technical engineer, a severe, grey-haired man named Bill Morgan.

  “How’s our young Alan Blumlein today?” he said ironically. He thinks I’m a lazy oaf, because I dropped out of school halfway to an Electrical Engineering degree. It was mandatory in the days when audio engineers were expected to design and build the studio’s equipment from scratch; but it seemed less than relevant in Kasugi’s Digital Recording Banjo Mart World of the Future. One of these days, I’ll work up the nerve to get off the Kasugi treadmill and finish my degree, if I can find a school that still teaches analog circuit design.

  At least I didn’t go to some “Institute of Recording Arts and Sciences” that charges twenty grand a year to impart skills like “Certified SonoViz Technician” that have zero market value. I got my first studio job because I knew how to fix broken gear.

  “Guess what Saint Jimmy loaned us?” I said.

  He looked at the rusted hulk with distaste. “I give up.”

  “It’s a Gromko!”

  “Hm. This should be interesting.”

  We hoisted it up onto his workbench, and he pried it open with a crowbar and took a look inside. “What happened to it?”

  “It spent twenty years at the bottom of a lake.”

  “Oh, is that all.”

  “Is it salvageable?”

  “Well, that depends on whether it ever worked in the first place.”

  I said, “I really appreciate it, Bill.” I started to walk away.

  “Where are you going?” he said mildly.

  “Huh?”

  “I hope you don’t have anything planned for this weekend.”

  Dammit.

  5. Hideous Schmideous

  by SCOTTY

  HF: You recently mastered avant-garde composer John Cage’s lost masterpiece, “Ear Fatigue” (Kasugi Classical Cat. No. 11-4938). Tell us about it.

  Vlado: The piece consisted of a 3.5 kHz sine wave, precisely 74 minutes long. I was blown away. In 4’33" Cage explored the meaning of total silence, but in this one he explored the meaning of total anti-silence.

  HF: And the performer was a home studio hobbyist.

  Vlado: He created the piece on his laptop. Cage specified 3.5 kHz because it’s the peak of the Fletcher-Munson curve and the most irritating frequency known to science.

  HF: Did you expect it to be such a success? #1 on the Billboard Classical chart, DJ Skreechy’s techno remix, operatic soprano Tralaline von Piercing’s cover version…

  Vlado: What the record company discovered with this piece is that it’s impossible to ignore because it’s so irritating. After a while you become acclimated to the sound and you want to hear more of it.

  —Vlado Levitsky interview in Haute Fidélité

  Jasmine flounced into the Padded Cell. “OK, let’s mix. I want a producer chair like Blenderman has.” Mitzi and Sandy made themselves comfortable on the couch.

  Omega was sent to the third floor to requisition the chair, and soon the fun began. Jasmine suspiciously watched my every move and demanded to know what I was doing.

  Blenderman caught my eye and pretended to yawn. I got the idea. I soloed Mitzi’s toms and spent fifteen minutes making minuscule adjustments to the EQ and gates, until Jasmine got bored and went back to conspire with her minions. Soon they were whispering and giggling and I couldn’t hear the mix.

  Blenderman reached over and stopped playback. He grabbed a roll of duct tape, unrolled it with a loud zip!, and showed it to the girls meaningfully. They got the idea, and shut up temporarily.

  “Good mix,” said Blenderman. “It just needs a little more, ahh, whaddya call it, Graffenmuller effect.”

  “Oh, it’s got plenty of Graffenmuller effect,” I replied. “It might even set a new record.”

  Jasmine looked disgusted. “Is that even a real thing?”

  “Well, that depends on how you define real,” I said.

  “So how long does it take to learn SonoViz, anyway?”

  I rolled my eyes. “It’s easier than a word processor. The hardest part is the monotony.”

  “It’s the best, right?”

  “Of course. If it wasn’t for SonoViz, a band like yours would never be allowed inside a studio, and the world would be deprived of your genius.”

  “Thank you,” she said smugly.

  I played the mix through the huge soffit-mounted speakers that are good for overwhelming the talent. “Whaddya think?”

  “I like it,” said Jasmine. “But the mix is too warm. Our music is supposed to be harsh and painful.”

  Blenderman chuckled. “We have a special piece of equipment for that. It’s called a Gromko.”

  “Not the Gromko!” I said in mock horror.

  “Nothing less will suffice.” Blenderman leaned over and flipped the power switch, and the unit emitted a tooth-vibrating hum and the smell of ozone.

  “What is that thing?” said Jasmine. She looked impressed despite herself.

  “It’s the most legendary piece of gear in recording history,” said Blenderman. “This is the fabulously rare ’68 version. There are only three in existence, and one of them is currently in space.”

  “What does it do?” said Jasmine in awe.

  “We don’t know yet. Every Gromko is different.”

  I patched it into the SonoViz, buffered by a hefty transformer box to prevent it from blowing something up. “Now, which knob do we try first?” said Blenderman.

  I picked a knob at random and gave it a spin. The results were dramatic. It warped the stereo image, boosted the highs and lows, and smashed the dynamics flatter than Kansas. It sounded like a commercial radio station.

  Jasmine jumped up and down excitedly. “That’s it! It has too much everything!”

  I grimaced. Blenderman said, “Tell you what. We’ll add the Gromko during mastering.”

  “Why can’t you master it now?”

  “Well, it has to be loud to compete with other records. That’s Vlado’s job.”

  “Who?”

  “Vlado Levitsky, Kasugi’s top mastering engineer.”

  “Also known as Vlad the Impaler,” I added.

  “He takes Scotty’s finished mix and–”

  “Crucifies it.”

  “Shut up, Scotty. He makes it radio-ready.”

  “Mastering” means enhancing the mix prior to duplication. The current fashion is to make CD’s as LOUD!!! as possible. Stupidly, ridiculously, absurdly loud. Unfortunately, due to the nature of digital math which sets an absolute limit at 0 dB, the only way to make it that loud is to destroy all the dynamics with compression, limiting, and clipping. The result is similar to a car that’s been driven at 90 mph into a brick wall.

  Quality has gone out the window. Why bother getting good performances out of the band, when it’s easier to fix it in the computer with quantization and pitch correction? Why bother with vintage analog gear, when mixing in the box is more convenient, and it will just get converted to MP3 anyway? It’s not like anyone will notice the difference.

  Well, these music fans who don’t care about performance and don’t care about sound also don’t care enough about the music to pay for it. They’re not emotionally involved. It’s just background noise to them. Treat the listeners with contempt, and contempt is what you’ll get in return.

  I would like to state for the record that MP3 is the worst thing that ever happened to music. Analog artifacts like noise and distortion blend with the music; but MP3 artifacts like chirping and pre-ringing are unnatural and grate
on the ear. I can listen to lo-fi blues records from the 1920s, but I can’t listen to MP3 for any length of time.

  “Why don’t you use the Gromko to master it?” said Jasmine.

  “Try the big toggle switch with the safety cover and the radiation warning,” Blenderman suggested.

  I flipped the switch. Whatever it was doing, my eustachian tubes didn’t like it.

  “Now it sounds even better!” Jasmine enthused.

  I recorded the result back into the SonoViz. The waveform looked like a brick. “Hmm,” I said. “According to the analyzer, we’re getting a phenomenal RMS-to-peak ratio.”

  “English, please,” said Blenderman.

  “It’s louder than ‘Ear Fatigue.’”

  “Reeeeeeally. We may be on to something.”

  “It sounds hideous.”

  “Hideous schmideous. Kasugi is gonna love this. It’s more Vlad than Vlad!”

  “Did I mention that the Soviets used the Gromko as a torture device?”

  “So?”

  “Now we’re using it for pop music.”

  “I find it intriguing that you still think there is a difference.”

  6. Prester John

  by BLENDERMAN

  I never told you how I got a name like “Ezron.” I’m named after a self-styled Messiah of the First Century, renowned for his extraordinarily good looks, his ability to imbibe enormous quantities of wine with no ill effects, and his habit of personally demonstrating God’s love to his female followers. The followers of that other guy were none too impressed with his behavior, so they ran him out of town. The memory of Ezron was kept alive by his descendants, who celebrate his birthday by drinking, whoring, and gambling. At least, that’s what my gran’daddy told me.