The right set of barbarians...

Someone, elsewhere, was despairing that a new musical revolution like the rock and roll, Brit Invasion, pyschedelic, or punk waves of decades past had become all but impossible...

I'd say the 'last' music revolution (arguably the grunge thing -- unless you want to count the so-called 'modern metal'/screamo thing) was pretty much pre-owned by the establishment. I was really excited going in but the boring/retread angle there for most of the bands (grunge, seems to me, needed a few more Nirvanas with their pop hooks or Alice in Chains with their adventurousness). I went up to Seattle in '89 looking to connect up with grunge. I walked away decidedly unimpressed.

Look, revolution is far from impossible. But the palace guard want you to think it is.

They've been quite scientific -- and even somewhat flexible -- in maintaining -- with the assistance of the cohort of bought-and-paid for shills who have the overweening gall to call themselves "music journalists" -- the current commercial music Pax Romana.

But all it takes is the right set of conditions -- and the right set of barabarians -- to topple the empire once again.

Lining up for the Big Cookie Cutter

This article spawned this discussion elsewhere, in which I (more or less) wrote:

The distressingly boring, stamped out, streamed out, spewed out product of today's music business is the culmination of trends that have been in the works since I was a kid...

Demographic analysis and targeting of radio audiences really started kicking in in the mid-60s, with the formulation of Boss 30 Radio (from the old RKO General radio network). Before that, choices about programming were largely informal and based on hunches, word of mouth, charts from other stations and cities, and, oddly enough, the tastes of the DJs.

In the 70s, the labels got involved in targeting the format requirements of Boss Radio, similar formats, and the album oriented rock format that evolved (many would say devolved) from the late 60s underground radio scene. In the early 60s and again at the end of the decade, there were explosions of interest in making music instead of just consuming it (first, the folk revival and then the hippie/alternative culture movement). Many learned a few chords and lost interest, but more than a few maintained music as a hobby, often supporting that often expensive hobby with day jobs.

As amateur musicians matured and their earning potential increased, they spent more money on gear and music production expenses, mostly subsidized by those precious day jobs. Periodicals -- supported mostly by adverts for "pro" gear used overwhelmingly by non-pros or moonlighters -- sprang up and were often packed with glossy ads for gear and services. There had to be something between the sexy pictures of guitars, amps and keyboards and all those ads... Articles on 'honing one's professionalism' an shaping one's career came to the fore. Some of the people writing those pieces were actually journalists (could happen) and actually managed to start digging up pertinent educational info.

Meanwhile, by the late 70s, a tiny handful of community colleges had begun to experiment with offering courses of instruction in video and audio work and expanding commercial music programs (themselves quite new at the time) to cover the technical sides of music production, as well as career aspects. (I'm a product of that era and two of those programs, both at then-nearly-free community colleges. I'd do anything for 'free' studio time.) Often, even in those early days, the emphasis was on best practices and how to deliver the kind of product that labels and radio (and the then growing field of music video) wanted to see.


As a consequence, bands got very good at following all these highly specific recipes for "success." But, of course, not everyone can be successful... and the convergence of all those trends had created veritable armies of well trained wannabes, their heads all filled up with nearly identical cookie cutter personal styles and musical approaches...

The damnedest thing from my point of view?

The musicians mostly seemed fine being just like all the other wannabes. It never seemed to occur to them that in a crowded marketplace, you really, really don't stand out by being just like all the other market dross waiting forlornly for Joe and Mary Consumer to walk by, clucking their tongues in disdain. "Look at that hair. What is it with these musicians that they all have to dress the same and have the same haircuts. How lame."

Changing Recording Roles

A newb somewhere was hazy on the actual duties and roles of engineer, producer, and mastering engineer...

Traditional roles have broke down as the biz has been flooded by newbs but here are the traditional roles:

• Producer -- he's the chief executive officer of the project; he's the one with the purse strings; he's often the one who picks the talent and material. In the traditional biz, he worked for a label, typically, often working hand in hand with label A&R (artists and repertoire). He's the chief talent and tech wrangler.

• Engineer -- he's a technician, tasked with keeping the studio running and fulfilling the producer's instructions. He's usually the one with his hands on the controls. In recent years, new roles have developed around specialized editing that was not possible in earlier days, so that you end up with people now who specialize in vocal editing (retuning and re-timing) and drum editing (re-timing).
  
  [Obviously there are many in the industry, particularly in Nashville, who are incredibly bad vocal editors. It's one thing to T-Pain a vocal if the artist and producer want it -- but if the singer wants it to sound natural, I shouldn't think there could be any excuses left for the utterly clumsy and obvious vocal retuning that 'graces' the recordings of many big stars.]

• Mastering Engineer -- traditionally, this was the highly trained technician who did the very difficult task of trying to squeeze as much fidelity (and in the case of singles, particularly in the 50s and 60s, when singles had to compete with each other in jukeboxes and on the radio -- loudness) into the narrow grooves as possible. The variable groove spacing lathes these guys operated were complex, and very tricky to run well. In those days, a mastering house really earned its money.
  
  At first, the bar for mastering in the digital era was very high -- meaning that established mastering houses still had a valuable franchise. But then the advent of the CD-R and other new technological approaches meant that virtually anyone could prepare a CD master for replication -- crisis time in the mastering biz!
  
  But musicians are a gullible and mostly clueless lot. They turned out to be quite easy to gull into continuing to pay as much as hundreds of dollars an hour -- not for the highly technically demanding craft of a disk cutting engineer -- but rather for an extension of the last-emergency-fix-it stop repairs that had long been a possible adjunct to the grooved disk mastering process.
  
  And, with the explosion of inexperienced recordists and shoestring studios there really were problems to be fixed, no question.
  
  Problem was that the right place to fix many of them was back in the mix.
  
  But many in the music biz don't like to let cold-headed reality get in the way to make a buck.
  
  So we had a group of vested interests promoting the quite new idea that tracks had to be "mastered" -- but now, by that misused term, people actually meant a sort of post-facto final sweetening, typically focusing on adding more compression and then trying to fix the dullness that results from overcompression, often by aggressive use of finite impulse response (linear or 'mastering') or other EQ.

A bright future in recording? Maybe not so...

Someone wrote about his difficulties finding a job after completing a course at a commercial recording school. I initially posted this in the thread he started -- but I quickly realized it was pretty much going to be the bummer post of the year for this guy and nuked it. But... for the hardy realists among you, I offer this  cautionary mini-essay on recording school and starting a career in commercial audio, c. 2010...


Folks have been warning for years now to not go into debt at a school whose real business model is selling student loans, to keep their options open, keep Plan B not just handy but ready to implement at any time... yes -- even keep the day job.

And for most of that time, there have been a seeming unending supply of people saying things like, Hey, don't rain on my dreams, man, I'm going to make it, I'm not like all those other flakes, I have to record or life won't be worth living... etc, etc, etc.

Even as the population of the commercial recording schools exploded, and as community colleges all added media programs to try to rope in the preterliterate supposed media mavens of the future, even as the bottom fell out of the studio job market, as bedroom and garage studios employing only their own owners popped up like mushrooms after a Seattle rain, even as these forums filled with posts like those above... even as changes in the US bankruptcy law made during the Bush2 era meant that you could no longer get out from under a student loan, even by bankruptcy -- people kept signing up for recording schools, often also signing up for huge loans going far enough into debt that they could have bought a nice little house somewhere instead.


Me, I went back to my day job more than a decade ago and I haven't regretted it. I still have to record, to be sure. But now, I do it for myself, and make money in a field where I'm not working for burger flipper wages. (Mind you, things have been tough all over. I certainly have not been getting rich -- by a long stretch -- lately. But at least I don't have to sweat it out listening to music I've grown to hate for 8 or 12 hours at a time and then do the math and think... damn, I just can't charge enough to make this thing work. Now when I'm recording, I may not be making money -- but I'm making my own music.)