"The phantom whistling seems to be distortion on the piano track due to Marc's equalization."
Ehem. NO! You are a dead wrong nigga! Please post the following as a 12.1.96 update from Marc:
The piano track is not distorted! The piano track will only be distorted if I want it to be distorted (like in our old song, "Grass Lick," for example). I didn't want the piano distorted, & thus the piano was recorded clean. And anyway, equalization would never lead to distortion. That is caused by the input level of my mixer. If I overdrive it, then the result is distortion.
However, Tom is not all false-minded. He was on the right track when he accused my EQ job of the whistling. You see, when Tom played the piano, he was causing the piano's hammers to hit strings inside the piano to produce notes. The strings that he hit caused sound waves to be produced in particular frequencies which like to make certain other strings in the piano vibrate, due to the related frequencies that they produce when vibrating. These cause what are known as overtones & undertones, I believe. Tom remarked that the whistling is in tune with the piano playing, & that is sensible because these tones are related in frequency to what he was playing.
I set up a parametric equalizer for the microphone that was picking up his piano playing to run through, and some frequency band that I accentuated must have included a couple of those overtones or undertones, and thus made them more audible in the recording. But there is no distortion. Tom is trying to make me out to look like an irresponsible recorder, as if I would spoil his Super-PopTM song.
That's the end of it. You can fix that "TM" so that it's little and high up.
Bye-bye-bye,
Marc
Tom's Reply to that
When I said "distortion" I was referring simply to the sound recording being changed due to Marc's EQ. I obviously did not mean the classic distortion-box distortion, nor overdrive, though I argue that my use of the word falls within the definition. So, um, there.