Mare Spumans – Ray Toler

Preface: The first part of this post is largely about my mood, being unhappy, and what I did about it. And there’s no mention of the music. The first bit is important in that it documents how I ended up with the track I did, but if you just want to read about the production process (and I wouldn’t blame you), you can skip to that section. I do think there’s value in the first part, though.

I ended yesterday’s post mentioning my declining mood. It’s due to a lot of things, some internal and some external. Probably more external than internal, and that’s a good time to exercise the old serenity prayer. So what can I change?

Mare Spumans Ray Toler 10:04

Can I change a bunch of power-and-money-hungry politicians in Olympia who seem hell bent on doing what they want¹ despite a reasonable majority of the entire state voting against things² multiple times?³ No. I can’t. There’s a mob in Olympia and I mean that in the organized crime sense of the word. There’s no point in doing anything other than starting to shop for the state (or country) to which we’ll move. Neither can I do anything about anything at the national or global level, or celebrity suicides, or cartel violence in another country, the cyclical stampede toward collectivism and completely irresponsible fiscal policies that we keep insisting on trying despite all of recorded history demonstrating quite clearly that they don’t work in the long term or at scale.

I can’t do a thing about those things. And yet, I am inundated constantly by a barrage of information insisting that it’s imperative that I get outraged and do something! We are biologically hard-wired to react to threats, and too many charlatans have started using that against us for even the most mundane things. The news, social media, even Song-A-Day. I’m not criticizing what anyone’s posted or their positions on issues with this statement, only noting that it is impossible to not be hammered constantly with negativity, anger, outrage, xenophobic tribalism, and victimization tactics that often defy common sense without going almost full ostrich.

But you know what? That’s what I’m doing.

Full Ostrich

I don’t mean that I’m withdrawing from the world, only that I’m (once again) cutting out of my loop all of the people trying to manipulate me into being unhappy so that I can instead focus on things that are wrong that I can do something about. My fence repair.Looking for meaningful work to take some pressure off Mary. Getting the yard and beds cleaned up and ready for Spring.

I think I’ve told this story in a previous post, but it bears repeating. Around 2011-2012, I realized one day that I had become addicted to the news. I was checking The Wall Street Journal and other news sites multiple times a day. Sometimes multiple times an hour. And I was similarly getting increasingly despondent and unhappy with life. I realized that there is nothing – nothing – that is going to happen that I need to know that I won’t find out about in very short order. There are too many other people addicted to the news that will breathlessly rush to tell me about things that I don’t need⁴ to know.

What really precipitated this soft-mental-break was recognizing that while I was doing production work on Malfunctioning Lullaby, I was picking up my phone and checking some form of online site every single time I hit a pause. It takes 15 – 30 seconds to render a track most of the time, but I was spending five minutes looking at Facebook because I couldn’t just sit there for the bounce to complete. And then I hit the actual trigger.

Ironically, it was a Facebook video from John Stossel⁵where he was interviewing a privacy and security expert on his channel. She was going through his phone and identifying all of the spyware that he had installed. Google Search. Chrome. Google Maps. Waze. Gmail. Facebook. Big-box store apps. Gas station apps. Alexa.⁶ The combination of having a wire-tap in my pocket at all times combined with my recognition that I’d again entered that pattern of checking multiple times an hour for updated information that I don’t need led to me deleting a lot of things off my phone, starting with almost all social media.⁷Convenience apps. Shopping apps. Almost everything that my phone had offloaded because I haven’t used it in a long time… The only Google app I had was Waze, but I’ve moved entirely to Apple Maps, so it got canned as well.

I won’t say that I had some miraculous weight lifted off my shoulders by doing all of this, but there was definitely a bit of pressure release. It only took me about 20 minutes of reaching for my phone and remembering that there was nothing to check to break my social media habit. I suspect it will remain an impulse for another few days, but I already feel better.

I Thought This Post Was About Music

It is. But even if you started playing the track when you started reading this, I doubt it’s finished yet, because Mare Spumans is my longest track this month, and one of my longest Song-A-Day tracks ever. I woke up, tried to check Facebook, remembered I wasn’t doing that anymore, had coffee, then went upstairs to get to work on today’s track. I’m “behind” so let’s do something manageable. I was still feeling “darkish” so decided to do ambient or maybe some ominous electronic. Rather than start with sounds and hoping for inspiration, I started with working out a chord progression. I extended the progression so that each chord was multiple bars long. I repeated it into structure. Only at this point did I start looking for sounds.

Selection wasn’t too difficult. I needed a couple of pads, a couple of things that move, and maybe some spices. This time, it all flowed pretty easily and I actually spent the majority of my time programming the patches to do interesting things over time. I used a variety of tricks including LFOs, MIDI controllers, and tying effects to things like volume to give the track variety and movement. It seemed a bit fast, so I dropped the tempo from 75 to 60. That makes it ten minutes long. Fine. It’s ten minutes long. People will skip it if they don’t like it, but I’ve got some other ten minute tracks and I’ve learned that they end before I want them to when I’m listening.

I’ve noted this in previous posts, but one of the problems with working on very long tracks is that it takes a very long time⁸ to do things. Even doing an offline render of a single track can take three minutes or even longer if it’s a complex patch. So the final mix of this didn’t get posted until nearly 10:30 pm, despite me having finished writing and selecting sounds mid-afternoon.

This image depicts the volume fader automation for Mare Spumans, including multiple sine wave shapes with differing periods to create a variety of audio mix scenes. — Fader volume automation for *Mare Spumans*. There’s a lot more happening under the surface with MIDI controllers.

A lot of the craft in these ambient pieces is taking all of the things I’ve done and then removing large sections, creating a lot of fader automation, falling out of love with that one bit and reducing its volume to the point where it’s almost inaudible… I also realized something about my approach to these when I was spot-skipping through one of the last mixes: if you randomly click around on the song, I never want two places to sound the same. I haven’t done this as a conscious thing, but because of the way I do my periodic controller movements, you will rarely get the same combination of sounds happening in any repeating way. So if you randomly click on the song position, it will nearly always be a different mix of things. I finally listened to the final final mix that got posted to the Song-A-Day site (and above) and realized that some of my distortion / bit crushing on one part had gotten heavy handed. Back in. Re-render that part. Re-bounce the whole mix. Much better.

I did decide that it needed a lot more low end relatively late in the process. I duplicated the chord progression, eliminated everything but the lowest notes, then went through and corrected a few places to make it sit better. In early versions, I decided it seemed thin and dropped several notes by another octave, but this ended up being muddy. When I went back to the original, it sounded fine. One amusing (to me) technical mistake is that I had the bass cranked in the mix and it just wasn’t really hitting. It turned out that the reason it sounded thin is that I had it routed directly to the main output fader instead of going through the mix fader with everything else. It wasn’t hitting any compression or EQ. When I corrected this… well, let’s just say that the bass was very loud for a few seconds.

An interesting thing (again, to me) about these lunar sea pieces is how I name them. The first year, I just chose nice names without really trying to match them. The second year, I was a little more considered and tried to match name with content. This year, I have seven remaining names to choose from, and have almost written the music to match the name. Except that I changed the name of this one almost literally at the last minute. Up until the final bounce, this was Mare Humorum because the day was wet, overcast, and misty. But as I heard what I’d done in the final couple of listen-throughs, I realized that it wasn’t wet, it was moving. There’s fizz in places, and the interplay of the woodwinds and marimba-ish ostinatos provided some really cool chaos. I decided that the overall vibe seemed more like watching the waves on the shore when they crash and leave a lot of foam and bubbles all popping and moving around. So Mare Spumans it is!

This entire piece was written, recorded, and produced without a single check of a social media site or news article. I was a lot more relaxed for the entire process and while I’m not necessarily out of my funk just yet, I do already feel better for having taken some action to remove something harmful from my life. My ultimate test for these pieces is: when I’m laying in bed listening, do I sink into it or am I bored?

I sank, and pretty deeply. If you remove your own irritants and just lay back and listen to it, I bet you will also.

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Pigments, S+A Colours, Choreographs, & Spectres, Hyperion

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

Valhalla, FabFilter, Gullfoss

Source Image Credit: NASA

Notes

1
Or their master’s command
2
Like excessive automobile fees, removing parents from being included in their children’s education and health care, continued graft disguised as “helping the poor” who never see a dime and, most recently and infuriatingly, trying to implement an unconstitutional income tax AND writing into the law that the people aren’t allowed to hold a referendum to overturn it (!!).
3
Which, given their supermajority in both houses of Congress means that they’re acting against the wishes of a sizable portion of the people who actually voted for them.
4
I don’t need to know that some mentally unstable person killed a lot of other people in North Carolina. I don’t need to know that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has amassed a suspiciously large net worth in a very short time for being a failed business-school grad turned bartender turned populist agitator politician. I don’t need to know that Donald Trump once again successfully trolled an entire population segment with a mean tweet. I don’t need to know that Tim Walz oversaw some of the most egregious corruption in recent history. I don’t need to know that powers with a vested interest in keeping us divided and at each other’s throats have successfully turned someone who committed attempted murder of a police officer into a freaking national martyr.
5
Who is one of the last sane voices in media.
6
You may have noticed that one company is slightly over-represented in that list. De-Googling is a project I’m starting in Q2.
7
I left X/Twitter on there because it’s useful when I need it, ties in to Grok, reactivating my account was a hassle, and I don’t really enjoy using it that much. It’s not a temptation.
8
Much like saying anything in Old Entish