Neva: Acoustic Enjoyment, Electronic Enhancement
Last Thursday evening at Cottonwood, and again Saturday morning at Tahoe Truckee Earthday, I caught sets by local musician Neva Dettling. Although Neva sometimes performs with a band, she was solo on these two particular occasions; just her and an acoustic guitar, both amplified. I’d never seen her perform before, so I didn’t know what to expect, although reviews I’d read were quite positive. Here’s a representative clip from one of her past performances:
Notice how about 3 minutes into the clip, she breaks into what sounds like harmony, even though she’s the only one on stage? Perhaps the night this particular video was recorded, she had someone off-stage with a separate microphone. But both times I saw her, she was definitely the only one singing. So how’d she accomplish this nifty trick?
I was sitting to one side of the stage Thursday night, so I was able to see that she’d hit one or both pedals of a foot-activated mechanism below her, both right before and right after each multi-voice portion of each song. At first, I thought she was doing a simple reverb effect, but the more I listened the more I became convinced that I was hearing distinct harmony accompaniment. When I talked to her at the break between sets, she confirmed what I’d already figured out.
Neva pre-recorded harmony parts for appropriate songs, in both high and low versions, and had them stored as digital samples. The right pedal activated the sampler, while the left pedal selected the upper, lower or both harmony versions for simultaneous playback along with her voice. Neva admitted to me that she initially struggled with the setup, but seven months after beginning to use it, she was getting the hang of it. On the one hand, her approach seems a bit non-spontaneous to me (though not nearly as prefabricated as the Depeche Mode concert I attended a few years ago…), along with being prone to potential mishap.
What happens if you forget to hit the pedal, or do so at the wrong time, or if the tempo you’re currently playing at is a bit off from that when you did the initial recording? On the other hand, the harmony notably enhanced the performance, and in a way that wasn’t at all obvious and garish. Neva’s techniques remind me of past solo performances by Kaki King and Keller Williams that I’ve attended. Not only do both artists leverage pre-recorded samples to supplement their live voices and instruments, they also on-the-fly capture and play back song snippets, iteratively assembling them into multi-piece musical masterpieces.
When I described Thursday night’s Neva show to my neighbor Mark (an on-hours wood craftsman and off-hours musician) the next day, he also made me aware of a piece of performance gear called a harmonizer. Most of them are pretty expensive, although as with anything else fueled by Moore’s Law, prices are on a definite downward trend with time (as quality correspondingly increases). Check out, for example, Electro-Harmonix’s Voice Box, which sells for only a bit over $200:
Here’s a clip of the Voice Box, which Boing Boing brought to my attention, in action:
Note that the unit employs not only the human voice but also the accompanying guitar as inputs, using the latter to appropriately adjust its harmonic output as the guitar chords change. The Voice Box also implements vocoder effects, which this fan of techno music appreciates, and which you can listen to here:
And in a somewhat related fashion, check out Songsmith, a product from Microsoft Research that, after you sing a melody (or alternatively play an instrument) into it, generates musical accompaniment. This particular video, the only one I can find from Microsoft on YouTube, is admittedly pretty painful to watch and listen to (and the stickers on the little girl’s laptop are a lame attempt to disguise the fact that it’s an Apple MacBook Pro):
But the videos available for viewing and download off the company’s website are much better. And regardless of the cheesiness of the end results, you’ve got to be at least a bit impressed with the product’s technological underpinnings…even if you’re not a Microsoft fan.
Any time some new technology comes out and begins to receive notable use, purists predictably decry the ‘death of music’. I’m not so cynical. Sure, some folks won’t be able to resist over-using new techniques to the detriment of the end result; the same thing could be said, of any number of Hollywood directors over-enamored with CGI, or of photographers who employ Photoshop to excess). But other artists, exemplified by Neva, Kaki King, and Keller Williams, will exploit the new tools available to them to create innovative music never before possible.
Neva commented:
