Music Biz Outsider Report

2010-10-26T14:33:00.000-07:00

We've moved to

www.tkmajor.com/mbo/

Why you shouldn't let the music biz spoil your love of music...

2010-09-24T19:58:00.000-07:00

One of the burdens of being "young and talented" is the potential for getting confused about why you are pursuing your efforts. People can fill your head up with a lot of making it big nonsense.

It's usually put there by both well-meaning folks who don't get it and, all too often, by 'music biz pros' intent on exploiting the artist's ambitions and dreams -- often for the short term goals of simply extracting money for various production an promotional services -- it's a dirty little secret that that is considerably more than a cottage industry within the larger music business, and that it is also a steady ancillary source of revenue for 'legit' service providers in the industry, too -- as a former studio engineer at the low end of the food chain, I can tell you that the attitude of "If they're stupid enough to spend the money, I'm smart enough to take it" is a highly prevalent one.

That can really get in the way of having a clear relationship with your music and your writing -- and then the burn-out from that and from all the usual lilttle unpleasant brushes with the user/loser denizens of the music biz can sometimes drive a wedge between an artist and his work.

Which is a damn shame, because the problem is not with music. The problem is often with people. Both ourselves, if we're unclear about why we're pursuing music and writing, and, of course, with those who would, knowingly or not, lead us down the garden path to "big dreams" of success, a life of glamor, wealth, and no day jobs...

If musicians keep their heads straight about their relationship with music and love of it, they can survive with their love of music intact. But I've known far too many people who, one day, sometimes in their late 20s, sometimes in their 30s, just put the guitar in a closet and forget to pull it back out for, sometimes, years...

And that is a very sad.

A reader shares info on getting an indie band into Apple's new Ping social media site

2010-09-06T10:08:00.000-07:00

After readung a post elsewhere on Apple's exceedingly rocky launch of Ping, the new social media extension to iTunes, a correspondent sent this into my KS2 Problema news blog -- sharing a post he had made offering info on getting independent bands into Ping:

“I had fundamental questions more related to how the independent musician can actually make use of the system as we all had hope Ping might replace MySpace.
I finally have gotten some actual directions from Apple about how to proceed getting a profile approved for an Indie artist and I have a contact email for people to write to. I’ve also gotten a comment back from one of TuneCore’s founders:
http://gulture.com/wordpress/?p=792
Whether they actually develop this into something significant or not, at least everyone needs to be able to come to the party. Apple needs to be more open about what they are doing for the musicians, the engines that will help drive the service.”
Please pass the info on to your musician friends.

Special thanks to Frank Colin and his Waist Deep in the Media Swamp blog!

More on DAW latency...

2010-09-02T10:01:00.000-07:00

Q: I tried using a computer for recording around 10 years ago and didn't like it because of the latency. Now I want to try to get into it again but I hear Cubase still has big latency problems but that Sonar is better... is that true? Is latency still a problem?

A: First, any digital audio system has latency. It takes around a ms each for the A/D and D/A processes and almost all multichannel devices use a digital cue mixer (analog mixers would be prohibitively expensive for most interfaces). So even onboard cue mixing -- often inappropriately labeled as zero latency monitoring when it should be near-zero latency.

For instance, when MOTU introduced their popular 828mkII, they properly labeled the onboard cue mixing as near-zero latency. But when many of their competitors labeled their own near-zero digital cue mixing as zero latency, MOTU did what all the other kids were doing and started lying about latency. This is marketing lie is nearly universal among the makers and they all point to each other's prevarications as the justification. It's a sham an disgrace.

But, hey, it's only a couple milliseconds, right?

Except that by the 5-10 ms (and certainly by 15 ms or so), most musically critical listeners will begin to detect serious problems with timing mismatches in the monitoring. And there are reports of discomfort from some over as little as a 2 ms latency. These are very small amounts of time -- but they are right at the threshold of perception and it's not just absurd for the makers to call that zero latency -- it's an outright lie.

But -- it might not be enough to bug you -- particularly if your POD's own latency doesn't bug you (for clean tones, it's probably around that latency; as more FX modules get brought into a patch preset, the latency goes up, not unexpectedly). So if your POD's delayed output doesn't bug you, the near-zero latency from an outboard device's onboard cue probably won't.

(I realize you're not in the market for such an unit right now. But since you're a little hazy on latency issues, I thought it was important to get some context.)

So using either near-zero onboard monitoring -- or outboard analog monitoring through a mixer if that's a problem -- should be fine for you as far as that goes.

But... what if you want to hear what you're tracking into your computer with?

That is a whole 'nother can of bees.

You will start appreciating the timing efficiencies that the makers of a dedicated all in one device like your POD can build in -- since they know what all the performance variables out in front and can build a sort of just in time signal delivery efficiency into the device -- while a desktop PC, with its numerous subsystems from multiple parties and unknown performance characteristics must typically use a large amount of buffering for both data transmission to and from the hardware interface (hardware buffering) as well as (typically user-set) variable monitoring buffers.

Monitoring buffers are typically the big hold-up. If you're not making your DAW do heavy lifting, such as convolution reverbs and fancy FX or having heavy live virtual synth playback while you are tracking, you can probably get away with minimal monitoring buffer size, possibly little more than that of the hardware buffer size. But if you've got a bunch of heavy duty plugs and v-synths going while you're tracking -- you're going to find that you may have to increase that monitoring buffer so far that the delay between the live sound and the realtime-but-latent cue monitoring from the computer is noticeable, even so much as to give an 'echo effect.' (And when it gets that noticeable, at least you know you have a problem. It's the not-quite noticeable stuff that gets into your tracks, subtly mucking up your player's timing when they overdub.)

Now, with regard to Cubase, Sonar, et al.

Who told you that? (Rhetorical. Don't answer. )

'Cause, as much as I love Sonar (and I do, been using it since '97), it is not as efficient as Cubase, as measured by the ability to carry a heavy load of plug ins with low latencies.

And Cubase is not as efficient as Reaper.

(I'm speaking of Windows machines, here. I don't have any performance figures for Reaper on the Mac [Sonar is Win-only] but Cubase is considerably less efficient on the Mac, presumably because of problems with the foundational architecture of OS X with regards to multithreaded communications within that OS's various cobbled together parts. The third party Mach kernel at the core of the OS was designed for modern, multiple, parallel messaging whereas the open source Darwin Layer 'above' it is an older paradigm, a monolithic system oriented to serial messaging. The results appear to be ongoing problems for Macs when it comes to scaling processes across multiple cores -- not important for workstations when OS X was developed, since most were still single core -- but one of the main reasons that OS X Server has been one of the worst performing network OS's in the modern arena, with Linux and Windows blowing past it in terms of supporting network effiencies to multiple users. That said, Apple has apparently been working to shore up performance in this area and the latest DAW benchmarks show a considerable improvement in Cubase's performance on the latest version of OS X.)

You can see shootouts between the big 3 on the PC, Sonar, Cubase, and Reaper here: http://www.dawbench.com/dawbenchdsp-x-scaling.htm

And you can check out the Cubase Win vs Cubase OS X benchmarks here: http://www.dawbench.com/win7-v-osx-1.htm

Now, on to getting latency down... there are a lot of things you can do to make your host PC or Mac more efficient. (I'm a PC guy, of course, so I'll leave the light side to the experts in that quite different platform.)

In fact, it can be a detailed subject, but here's the broad overline: you want your hardware buffers (audio interface buffers) set as low as they will cleanly function. (If -- with your monitoring latency set way up to take that out of the picture for now -- you get glitches, stutters, etc from your incoming or playback audio, the HW buffering may be set too low. Check your maker's specs -- but they often have the very lowest that could possibly work as their spec [for the types of reasons cited above] so you may well have to set it above their spec'd minimum.)

You'll be able to keep both HW and monitoring latencies down if your host machine is running as lean and mean as possible.

That typically means making sure no other applications are running -- but you're probably also going to need to look at background operations/services/applets... the kinds of things that show up on the Task Manager's Services tab.

That's usually the province of background programs like system utilities, always on anti-malware software, but also, annoyingly, many things that just should not be running in background, often vanity/promotiuonal programs designed just to put 'quick launch' icons in the systray -- yet they can take up many megabytes of memory. Another prime offender are 'updater' programs. Apple is notorious for having buckets of background programs installed with their apps. (Got iTunes? You got background services up the backside. And try to get rid of them. Ha!) Quicktime itself has components it tries to install as always running. The Sun Java Updater (now owned by evil empire Oracle) can take as much as 12-15 MB of your precious RAM just sitting around waiting to phone home every once in a while to check for an update.

Many -- most on many consumer machines -- of these background processes are absolutely unnecessary, except for possible tiny gains in load time for the individual apps or for just getting a corporate icon into your systray.

Responsible software makers give you a way to tell these services and applets not to load at startup -- but, unfortunately, many more do not. And many will load those services when the app runs and then not remove them when the main app closes. It's just irresponsible software design. You're paying for their incompetence, vanity and arrogance.

A lean, mean, XP machine (for instance) might have as few as 10-20 background processes at startup and load in a RAM footprint as small as 100-120 MB -- but many consumer machines will have 70 or 80 background processes and their RAM footprint will be 300 or more MB just sitting there.

And more if you run background anti-virus, which often does little to protect careful users who don't do the stupid stuff like opening unexpected email attachments, visiting (and even worse downloading -- but sometimes just visiting is all it takes) porn and warez sites, using uncontrolled p2p softare (torrentz, etc).

In fact, a study a couple years ago found that major anti-malware from companies like Norton, McAffee, and even the respected Trend Micro (maker of the normally very good, free online scanning service, HouseCall) typically miss as much as 80% of current threats -- (which is typically all you really need protection from if you keep your browser, OS, and net-using programs properly patched).

For that reason, many wised up power user types eschew background A-V software.

But they do follow the best practices that everyone should follow: keep your browsers, OS, and net-using programs (which, these days, may be most of them) patched and up to date, and avoid known transmission vectors like porn and warez sites and torrentz, or installing untested/unknown software, making sure your system has thumb drive auto-run turned off,* and so on.
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* The early editions of XP had thumb drive auto-run defaultto on -- that's how 1/3 of the US private and military PCs in Afghanistan got infected back in the mid decade, GIs would buy cheap thumbdrives in the marketplaces -- most of them with factory preinstalled spyware from our friends at China, Inc., who like to make sure they know what other military powers are doing near their borders and has the technology to put it over on the US Pentagon -- which is long on particle beam weapons mounted on satellites but apparently quite short on everyday technology common sense.)
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And finally, the other place where you can cadge a little extra efficiency, if you're a bit tech savvy, is in disabling unnecessary Windows system background processes (or setting them to start manually). That's well beyond the scope of a BB post but you can find various optimization strategies for the Windows flavors around the web.

Now on to a trickier, thornier issue:

A somewhat separate issue that arises out of various hardware and software system latencies is the problem of timeline (sometimes called tracking) misalignment.

This is a much more common problem than many people realize or than some commercial interests would like to admit.

And it was a problem where the industry was slow coming to the table, with DAW makers pointing at hardware makers (and the HW maker's driver programmers) and the HW makers sometimes pointing back at the DAW makers.

The problem was that many DAWs and driver systems either did not accomodate for HW latencies at all, or drivers misreported actual latencies. And that resulted in overdubs that were placed incorrectly on the timeline. (Usually by a stable amount, but in the case of some devices -- I had a USB mic with the issue -- the latency of incoming signals varied from 25 ms late to 40 ms late. If it had only been constant form session to session, one could have simply slid all new tracks x ms toward the timeline. A pain, but doable. But this device had a different effective latency every session. Fortunatley, I was able to use Mackie's old (abandoned) Tracktion DAW to record using it, and Tracktion had an quasi-automated ping-loopback timeline/tracking calibration tool that you could use to set a new compensation every time.

But not every DAW had that and some came to the table late on that. My own, beloved Sonar, only added a way to compensate for such tracking misalignment around 2006, IIRC, and a pretty minimal one at that, that forces the user to do his own measurement and calibration to adjust for unfixed latencies under either the advanced WDM-KS kernel streaming drivers or under ASIO drivers, which have some compensation but are usually not accurate in my experience.

A lot of folks will say things like, Oh, what's 5 or 10 ms? -- the time it takes sound to travel about 5-9 feet?

It might not seem like a lot, but at 10 ms, most folks can start to tell things are off -- they may not know how or why, but it's there.

And even less timing misalignment can become multiplied when a number of overdubs with such misalignement are made and summed. It's not too bad if all your overdubs pay strict timing reference to a central reference (like a drum or clicktrack) but if the overdubbers start taking their timing cues from other overdubs, you're wading into a sea of potential rhythmic confusion and imprecision as what was once an unambiguous rhythmic center becomes 'smeared' by numerous, seemingly arbitrarily off time overdubs.

Tech junk: On radio interference...

2010-07-04T10:02:00.000-07:00

I know there's a lot of text below, but the upshot is that I'm trying to save folks money -- or at least hopefully keep people from spending money on 'solutions' that probably won't be effective, money that can be put to more effective use inother ways, so it may be worth at least glancing over...

Quote:

Originally Posted by --------

Yes, we have Monster cables going from mics to our interface. I'll try Mogami cables.

I heard from a friend that buying a power conditioner can also help reduce interference. However I'm reluctant to buy a $100 power strip...

First, regarding radio interference specifically -- if the problem is related to cabling -- it's not so much that you don't have high enough quality cabling -- it's that you have a defective cable.

Radio interference typically comes from a connection that should be solid but which, for some reason, has become reduced to something like a strand or two of wire (which may even be intermittent). That can form something that acts like the cat's whisker capacitors that were at the heart of early, very simple radio receivers.

That usually means a bad connection at a solder or other connection point or, as sometimes happens, a broken solid wire lead that is being held together in intermittent or minimal contact by insulation. You found that last in older gear with point to point wiring.

In modern gear it's usually found where wire leads or other components contact the circuit board. Stress points around connectors are another place to look (particularly where there are external connectors mounted in a case that are also mounted on the circuit board -- as in many laptops and other pieces of modern, low production cost gear). In such cases, a circuit board often becomes broken and can be held together -- such as it is -- by the actual conductor substrate, potentially tearing and stressing micro-thin printed circuit conductors which then may begin acting like cat's whisker capacitors.

So, your problem could be cable-related (a defective cable -- likely a bad connetion at the connector), but it could also be from a large piece of gear.

On radio interference in general: I think you said you were a mile and a half from a transmitter. If it's the source of your problem, my guess is it's a 50 KW AM station. At that distance, interference is likely only if there is a problem in your gear -- ie, a defective piece of gear/connection.

But, if such a transmitter is in your backyard, it may so thoroughly saturate the area with transmitted power that signal is jumping everywhere, and interference is not limited to gear made vulnerable by defect or poor design. Nearby illegally high powered CB or ham radio transmitters may also cause problems.

When dealing with radio interference issues, remember this: radio power from a non-directional antenna, like sound from a single point sound source, diminishes with the square of the distance from the source -- in other words, a radio signal will be 9 times weaker at 3 feet from the source than it is at 1 foot; 16 times weaker at 4 feet compared to 1 foot, etc.

Because FM radio is not amplitude modulated, it does not typically present the same sorts of contamination issues.

With regard to premium cable, quality and expectations...

Mogami makes good cables but they're very expensive.

You can also buy good cables very inexpensively. It's not that Monster is too cheap. Many would say they tend to be overpriced, by many measures, even when they are of adequate quality.

If there's a respected pro shop oriented to commercial recording and sound reinforcement in your community and they make their own cables, as many do, I would suggest that, since they will very likely be competitively priced and will likely provide a solid bargain, since the shop will likely stand behind them.

Paying premium prices for good cable (like Mogami) is OK if you're willing to shell out as much as 3 or 4 times the commodity rate for equal quality cables for the 'assurance' that the reputation provides.

But the job of wire is very simple. As long as the cable is made of standard materials and appropriate configuration for your purpose, has insulation of an appropriate material (which is not necessarily expensive and that will not build up static charge and so produce the crackling microphonics associated with improper insulation choice) and has well made connectors attached appropriately, it should perform fine and last a long time.

And with regard to the outlandish claims of the "magic cable" people -- fuggedaboutit. Paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars for short runs of cable, whether it's speaker leads, power cables, digital signal cables, whatever -- is hooey. Nonsense. Nonsense bordering on fraud.

With regard to power conditioning and people's expectations...

Power conditioners are largely not effective for most of the purposes people want to put them with regard to improved sound quality. There are a lot of reasons for that that others can explain better.*

Uninterruptible power supplies can provide protection for your power failure, allowing you to shut down your gear within a safety window. But they are often not effective at other uses people want to put them to (like 'conditioning' the power for better sound). The ability to provide protection against power surges/spikes may not be nearly as effective as one might like; I suggest further reading on that subject.

Some people do buy into the notion that power conditioning is likely to improve the sound of their gear's operation. Suffice it to say that there's little chance of that with modern gear, which tends to have its own internal regulators, for the most part -- unless one is spending serious money (not talking mere hundreds here) for a system which essentially provides a regulated supply from a bank of continually recharging batteries, completely isolating the power supplied from that coming into the building from the power company.

*For further reading, try Googling something like power conditioning myths.

PS... you can probably expect people who have a large investment in supposedly high end cables or in power condtioning (and likely both) to pop in here with some strident defenses of their belief system. Since the claims they often make are extraordinary, I would suggest asking them for empirical evidence to support any extraordinary claims. (Expect to get the ol' Well, if you can't hear the difference, you must be deaf! routine. )

Tech Time: Signal Phase vs. Signal Polarity

2010-06-25T09:25:00.000-07:00

Someone elsewhere asked about double miking snare drums, it raised (but) one of my pet issues -- proper terminology when talking about issues of signal phase and signal polarity...

You reverse polarity in order to get the two signals from mics on opposite sides of a drum head to reinforce each other instead of (potentially) partially canceling each other out.

By contrast, when someone suggests moving the mic to change the relative distances from the drum head of the mics, he is talking about changing the relative phase relationships of the two signals, vis a vis the sound emanating from the head.

But phase is a term strictly relative to the frequency of a wave. Since the cycle period of every frequency is different, those phase relationships are strictly related to the frequency of any given wave component of the aggregate sound. And that is something a lot of folks who spend a lot of time talking about recording either don't get -- or simply are too lazy to address correctly.

With a single skin drum, by moving one mic far enough away from the struck skin so that the signal reaching the mic is now delayed by precisely 1/2 the wavelength of the fundamental, we achieve a change in that phase relationship equivalent -- in a sense -- to reversing the polarity -- but only at that fundamental. Other frequencies will have varying amounts of cancellation or reinforcement when the two signals are summed, often leading to the familiar 'comb filter' effect.

So, under that latter scenario (moving one mic), if we consider the fundamental of the drum to be our primary concern with regard to phase (assumptions are often dangerous in audio) and the fundamental to be 800 Hz (to pick a number I've heard a few times, though, of course, the fundamental tone of a drum, and the concentration of energy at a specific frequency depends in large part on how -- and how well -- it's tuned. (Info on snare drum physics: The Snare Drum)

Here's a (simple) wavelength calculator (it assumes 'standard' values for temperature and altitude/air pressure): Wavelength

From that we get a ballpark figure of ~17 inches for the WL of our 800 Hz fundamental. So, to change the phase of that signal in such a way as to invert an 800 Hz tone 180 degrees, you would move that mic ~ 8.5 inches farther (or nearer) the drumhead, vis a vis the other mic.

But it's important to remember that that snare sound is not only comprised of its fundamental pitch -- drums -- and particularly snares -- have a tendency to produce extremely complex waveforms with a lot of different frequency components. There are the myriad of issues revolving around the complex character of the snare drum, particularly the fact that (while many drummers remove the bottom skins from most of the drums in their recording kits) the drum will generally have two skins. At lower frequencies, the skins will tend to move in the same direction. But at the higher mode formed by the enclosed space, the skins will actually be moving apart, making the sound quite complex. And then there is the snare 'spring' itself.

So, in all likelihood, moving one of the snare mics may produce pleasing results in the sum of the signals but it will not be that much like what would be accomplished by having both mics equidistant from the drum head and reversing signal polarity of one of them.

The 3:1 relative distance rule of thumb will help save your sanity. Keep in mind it's a relative guideline ballparking the relative levels of a given signal reaching each mic. (You're basically trying to get the level of a given drum loud enough in its own mic that it will dominate when that mic is summed with other mics, and relative effects of cacellation are minimized.)

When considering phase relationships in complex drum miking scenaria, another sanity-saver is to focus on one drum and its relationship with its mic vis a vis the other mics around the kit at a time.

Since sound radiating in a free space is basically inversely proportional to the square of the distance, we know that if mic X is one unit of measure away from a single point sound source and mic Y is three units away, the level of the signal reaching mic Y will be nine times (3 squared) less than that reaching mic X. (However, there is a lot more chaos there, though, since a drum head is certainly not a single point source.)

What mastering is for...

2010-06-01T08:45:00.000-07:00

Talk about a bad penny topic...

Someone was asking recently about a problem he was having with his mixes sounding good in his studio -- but falling apart in the car or on other playback systems. He asked if that was a problem or if that could be fixed in mastering -- and someone helpfully answered, Yes, that's what mastering is for.

In today's paradigm, I'd make that a highly qualified maybe.

Even the best ME can't turn a sow's ear into the proverbial silk purse. If a track is mixed badly or has fundamental flaws, you can try to put sonic band-aids on it, but it's always going to be fundamentally compromised -- and it will be likely to cost you more money as the ME struggles to overcome problems with tracking or mix.

In the old days of then-high tech, computer controlled cutting lathes, creating a master for pressing disks required very expensive gear and a lot of skill and knowledge to use -- making the process quite expensive -- fixes at the cutting lab were for last minute and emergency fixes.

Also, in those days, mastering labs were seldom outfitted as high quality mixing rooms. Not only was it wildly expensive to do a fix there, but it was entirely likely that if you tried to make decisions there, they would be compromised by far less than ideal monitoring.

That's why mastering jobs were, by accepted practice, submitted with an edit list of any EQ or other fixes one wanted imposed. The ME might change the sound (say rolling off bass) in order optimize the signal for the rigid requirements of vinyl (narrow dynamic range, limits on bass levels) but there were other things like phase content that he typically had little control over (unless it was simply a polarity error).

In those days, the ME was expected to not make aesthetic decisions but only apply the requested changes or those absolutely necessary for the format.

But mastering changed with digital -- but the cost of entry was even higher at first. But as CD-R masters became acceptable at rep houses, it became entirely possible for the average home recordist to prepare his own replication masters.

And at that point, mastering houses -- and those who had simply noticed that mastering houses had traditionally commanded hourly rates sometimes 5-10 times higher than studios -- realized there was a challenge but also an opportunity -- to expand on the traditional last-minute-fix aspect into something oriented to corrections few would have made -- or wanted made -- in the old days and to plant the idea that was 'normal practice' and that a mix was not 'finished' unless it had been 'fixed again' by an ME.

So is recording history rewritten to help shore up demand for what is often an unnecessary -- and sometimes aesthetically disastrous -- step.

Now there is another aspect to mastering for those putting together album packages. It's also one where the traditional role of the ME has been expanded. That is in last minute fixes to help try to give some consistency in timbre as well as level to album tracks that may have been recorded in different times and places by different production staff, as so often is the case these days.

When one is putting together a package for replication and commercial release, it may well make perfect sense to use an ME in order to assist in producing a package that fits together well.

And in an era when many of those recording do not have long experience, necessarily the greatest gear (and likely not the knowledge of how to get the most of it), that court of last resort at the ME's may well make some kind of sense. Do make sure that you have chosen an ME that is not just experienced but thinks like you do. There are a lot of different approaches. Validity of approach is contingent on the nature of the project/genre.

But when there is no budget, when you are releasing the music for free or as one-off sales through online stores, I recommend at least trying to do it oneself.

Really, the right place to get things right is in tracking and mixdown. Learn to get that right and, even if you always have everything externally mastered, you'll still be helping to make sure that things end up sounding as close as possible to what you want and that the ME has to make as few of his own aesthetic/corrective decisions as possible.

An ocean of music...

2010-05-29T19:41:00.000-07:00

To paraphrase some poet or prophet -- or maybe I lifted it from a standard funeral homily:

People make oceans of music and only a tiny, tiny amount ever rises up for a few moments like a wave, visible from the shore.

And then it's gone, too, back into the bottomless sea of forgotten music.

The right set of barbarians...

2010-04-18T10:20:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-13T21:37:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-08T08:14:00.000-07:00

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...

2010-04-01T11:13:00.000-07:00

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.)

On songwriting, creativity, and personal experience...

2010-01-26T17:04:00.000-08:00

Someone elsewhere remarked that he was getting tired of all of his songs being about the same broken, now long ended relationship and wondered if others had confronted similar issues...

I think a lot of us find our songs chewing over sometimes troubled pasts.

I have to say that writing has seldom come so easy that I had the luxury of turning away the muses... I write what comes -- and if only a few bits and pieces come, then I'll try, sometimes heroically, sometimes doggedly, often futilely, to try to flesh the song out by force of will and intellect... but that dogged effort often translates into doggy lyrics... the kind of thing that doesn't necessarily stop you in your tracks because it's bad --but which nonetheless often fails to light up in the listener's mind.

If the only inspiration that comes to me is another broken hearted threw-it-all-away swim in bathos, even if that was exactly what I wrote last time... I go ahead and write it and do the best job I can finishing it out if there's any spark there at all.

The way I figure, writing is a natural process and, like other natural processes, you don't stop in the middle just because you don't like what's coming out...

Interesting Googling...

2009-12-24T18:11:00.000-08:00

At music recording and production website, Gearslutz.com, there is usually a ban in the Music Computers forum on Mac v. PC discussions. It's been in place as long as I've been going there, and, by and large, I've come to the conclusion that it's a good idea.

But, as a sort of seasonal present to the scrappy and contentious among Gearslutz denizens, the powers that be there started what they titled: the ultimate Mac vs. PC slam death fest.

It's overall been great fun. Loads of humor, most of it more or less good-natured. But, after over 400 separate posts, and like all wonderful, but ephemeral things... it's winding down. A few straggling arguments have drifted somewhat lazily across the last page or two, including some sort of contention about market share that has seen both sides, with refreshing sheepishness, citing Google ranking/listings as admittedly speculative evidence.

That got me to thinking it was time for me to hall out the Sucks Index.

In the simplest form of the Sucks Index, one Googles mac sucks and windows Sucks and draws whatever conclusions one might try to gin up. Ludicrous mathematical constructions involving market share are allowed. Since it's meaningless, anyway. (But for those counting nonetheless: about 1,190,000 for mac sucks.; about 2,000,000 for windows sucks. Make of that what you will. BTW, it's the same with or without capitalization.)

But, unsatisfied with the limited knowledge that raw data provided -- you don't even know who is saying what, maybe it's Windows supremacists accounting for the much higher than marketshare-warranted numbers for mac sucks -- I decided to both drill in a little -- and to make things more interesting.

Check out these Google search results (about an hour or so old as I write this), testing on exact phrases (quotation-mark-delimited):

about 659,000 for "I hate my mac"

about 504,000 for "I hate windows"

about 188,000 for "I hate my PC"

I was blown away. Clearly, anyone saying I hate my Mac is a Mac owner (or possibly some sort of lying agent-provocateur --no doubt there are some folks who falsely claim to own a given this or that in order to diss it with greater implied authority).

And, just as clearly, someone saying "I hate Windows" could be a Windows user or former user or a Mac partisan. (The PC thing is trickier still, I just threw it in to see what would happen.)

Thought provoking, huh?

When did music stop evolving...?

2009-12-18T10:17:00.001-08:00

Musical paradigm burn-out can be a serious issue. Styles get explored. Every nook and cranny gets poked and prodded -- especially over the course of two or three decades...

We're used to the oft-expressed idea that styles and fashions change quickly these days --but I think that's more fantasy than reality in today's world of hyper fine-tuned marketing and market sector exploitation.

In decades past, styles really did come and go quickly. Now, they seem to stick around forever, long past the point of ongoing returns in terms of fresh creativity and vitality.

I think the reality of this hits home pretty hard when we look at some of the "newer" styles like rap/hip hop, punk, and electronica.

Anyone doing a 2009 survey of those fields will find things distressingly similar to the scene in 1999. And, in many ways, and particularly for hip hop and punk but still for electornica and dance, it's not really much different than what was going down in '89... throw in a little heavy handed Auto-Tune, change a few superficial stylistic tics, and it's pretty much there.

And it virtually goes without saying that the same, in spades, can be said of various forms of rock, which it seems to me, has clearly joined the classic moribund forms of country, folk, blues, bluegrass, mainstream jazz, and so on. Nothing wrong with that -- it's a natural progression. It just seems folks don't want to acknowledge that there haven't been two new ideas in any of these fields to rub together in years if not decades.

Maybe it's just that having seen the tail end of the big band swing era in my early years, the explosion of R&B and then R&R, the big folk revival of the early 60s, the Brit invasion, Motown, the rise of folk rock, and then the evolution of folk rock and blues rock into acid and hippie rock, the ascendance of funk and re-emergence of R&B, the first wave of early 70s disco, the rise of the singer songwriters, the emergence of whitebread disco targeted to mainstream audiences in the late 70s, the emergence of punk, no wave, and proto hip hop in the mid and late 70s -- all before I was even thirty years old -- and, I'll admit it, musical change is something that's all but worked its way into my musical DNA...

Hiding in plain site...

2009-12-15T12:47:00.000-08:00

Someone in a songwriting forum I'm involved with asked if he should be worried about sending his unpublished songs to friends via unencrypted email and went on to ask about the difficulty of filing a proper copyright and the likelihood of theft...

The copyright process is not too bad. You can now do it online. That said it is not free. (How about an advertising supported US Copyright Office? Can I take out a patent on that? With the clueless crop of bozos in the USPTO, the answer may sadly be yes.)

You can save money by collecting a (potentially large) group of songs together and copyrighting them as a collective work. But make sure you file an individual addendum listing each song individually or, I'm told, the CO cannot search on the individual titles in a collective work otherwise and that supposedly hurts your chances in court. Like you're going to court. Trust me, you can't afford to go to court (if you're like most of us).

Anyhow... with regard to folks stealing stuff...

In my long experience hearing musician horror stories -- and I've heard thousands -- I've only heard of a tiny handful of folks who've had their non-hit, unpublished songs appropriated. And that was almost always by folks in the songwriter's ex-band or former musical/writing partners.

OTOH, I've heard scores of folks who got screwed over on their songs/publishing by their own erstwhile publishers, managers, and agents -- to be sure. But in those cases, the crucial paper involved was typically in the form of contracts and legal agreements that the artist had signed or otherwise entered into with those entities (usually knowingly).

The thing with the generally unimaginative dorks who feel driven to steal songs is that they don't usually have enough imagination to steal an unknown song but often, instead, steal something that's already had some sort of success (maybe something on what they think is a lesser known older record).

But, you know, humans always proceed to amaze at the depths they can stoop to, so there's no saying for sure.

Me, I decided after watching for quite some time to not drive myself crazy. I hide my songs in plain sight. Or plain site, maybe. I post each new song on my songwriting blog, with the lyrics on the blog and the media file going to the Internet Archive. (www.archive.org)

I mean, most folks -- and I mean 99.999+% -- make music that will almost certainly go almost entirely unheard. Why add to the likelihood?

more discussion

MySpace plunders dregs of Snocap/Imeem. Musicians the losers... Imagine.

2009-12-12T19:39:00.000-08:00

This killed me...

From Wired:

MySpace/Imeem Deal Leaves Thousands of Artists Unpaid

Independent artists who sold their music through imeem’s Snocap music storefronts on MySpace and other sites won’t be paid what’s owed even after MySpace Music’s acquisition of some — but not all — of imeem, Wired.com has learned.

MySpace Music bought “certain assets” from imeem, and they do not include imeem’s liability to more than 110,000 independent artists with Snocap storefronts, according to a source with inside knowledge of the deal. Those artists’ contracts mandate they be paid each month if they’re owed more than $20. Some artists have been owed money for more than a year, and the chance of them seeing any money now is, for all intents and purposes, zero, the source says.

[Read about the whole sorry mess at Wired.]

Despite the fact that MySpace has always been heavily involved in promoting Snocap and pushed them as the only way to sell music through MySpace.

When it looked like Imeem and Snocap were circling the drain, MySpace rushed to buy what few assets their fairy godchild had left -- apparently intent on making sure that the bankruptcy courts would have little chance to convert those assets into payment for some of the bundle owed musicians for MySpace related sales.

Nice, huh?

More discussion at Gearslutz.

Magic wires...

2009-12-02T08:19:00.000-08:00

Back to hardware... for about two seconds.

The subject of "designer cables" costing sometimes hundreds or even thousands of dollars (instead of five or ten dollars) came up, as it has over the years, in a forum I was recently participating in...

The audiophile victimization industry has got a lot of mileage out of the basic human trait of cognitive bias, which can lead people to incorrect interpretations of their own experience and presumed preference.

Behavioral scientists have found -- and recent brain scan studies have given sometimes dramatic support to the idea -- that humans allow a number of non-objective modes of thinking to color what they believe are uncolored perceptions. Humans want to believe in what they've previously believed. Uncertainty produces elevated anxiety in most people (backed by brain scan studies) and the human drive is to come to a conclusion, any conclusion -- and it is much more comforting if that conclusion is consistent with prior beliefs and belief frameworks.

IOW, most humans do not like their personal paradigms shifted.

Problems with the interference of personal belief and perceptual cognition pushed the scientists who specialize in the study of perception, beginning more than 100 years ago, to realize that simple blind testing was not enough.

In simple blind audio testing, the subject does not know what he's listening to, but the test giver does. Over and over, it was found that the test giver could contaminate the findings by giving subtle, typically unconscious cues about the source material. Eventually, the practice of double blind perceptual testing was established as absolutely necessary in much perceptual testing.

By keeping the test giver and taker in the dark over which of two sounds was which, more reliable, less biased results could be derived.

Music that makes you cry...

2009-11-16T12:33:00.000-08:00

Someone asked elsewhere about music that makes you cry...

The day before soul-funk great Curtis Mayfield's near fatal accident that paralyzed him from the neck down, he played a free show in a downtown amphitheater in my adopted home town of Long Beach.

I'd been working on some (now forgotten) recording project all day long and kept putting off stopping and leaving to get down to meet friends at the amphitheater.

When I finally got there, there were only two songs to go, but the crowd was in near-ecstasy and the band was absolutely cooking. The songs got extended with some great grooves and solos by a number of the players. I was simultaneously 100% in the groove still kicking myself for being late to the groove when they brought the main program to a glorious close. The crowd clapped just about forever and it was clear they were coming back for an encore. I don't remember the first encore number except that it grabbed the audience back in and started taking them back up.

And then, for the last song, they did "Move On Up."

Now, I knew the song and liked it OK but it had never really cut a big swathe in my consciousness. But this version started with a slow build and just kept building... winding the audience and the players up together in a big upward groove spiral, the back line laying down a thunderous, galloping groove and the front line latin percussion just smokin'... higher and higher... until finally... it was over and everyone just sort of collapsed... a moment of silence and then a thunder of applause while the band finally left the stage.

The next day, a lighting stand blew over in a heavy wind at the prep for a show (in New Jersey, I think) and it hit Curtis and basically broke his back. Paralyzed from the neck down, it looke like he might not survive. Certainly, few thought he'd be able to continue to make music. But, through what must have been sheer force of will, "sipping" from an oxygen tank in between punched vocal lines, Mayfield managed to continue recording.

The day his death was announced, I put on the album version of "Move On Up" in my old project studio and cranked it. For those minutes -- and they seemed to stretch a supernatural amount of time -- I was transported, memory of that last performance flashing in my mind, the ever-tightening groove of the record sweeping me along... 2/3 of the way through the song I realized there were hot tears streaming down my face... I was grinning like an idiot, all but dancing in my sweetspot, crying like a baby, joy, grief, everything swirling around in a vortex of groove...

Curtis Mayfield was a pretty deep guy in a lot of ways. Like many black artists of his generation, he got his start in church music.

When he was picked to create the soundtrack for the story of a super-fly, super pimp gangster, he somehow managed to create in the Superfly soundtrack a body of music that both celebrated this new, grittily urban version of the classic American outlaw -- but which also -- like a chorus in a Greek tragedy -- kept up a running moral commentary that ultimately underlined the classic notion that the film's anti-hero had sewn the seeds of his own fate and ultimate demise. All while laying down some of the funkiest grooves of the 70s or any era since.

A hell of a musician, role model, and mentor-by-example.

I love Curtis Mayfield. May he rest in peace.

More on muses and memes...

2009-11-13T14:08:00.000-08:00

I continue my digression on the meta-musical...

I've even got an information-theory based paradigm that encompasses notions of reincarnation -- however, when I try to lay it out for a lot of folks, it generally seems to prove pretty unsatisfying for those who vest themselves in what I might presume to call illusions of ego, identity and unitary consciousness.

Still... I think I could preach a good case to the choir.

One thing that I think is interesting is that, possibly because I probably seem to many on some level to have a pretty, let's say, flavorful sense of self/identity, when I come out and talk about what I describe as the illusion of unitary consciousness/self/identity, it seems on some level to them like some form of contradiction.

But that's a misunderstanting of my position seemingly born of lack of full understanding of it. For me, the myth of my identity is as as real as anything else. And as imaginary.

You know, Plato had his cave. Each generation and culture has its own set of analogical tools. Today, some of us find it worthwhile or at least amusing to put metaphysical/ontological considerations into an info theory context. But, I gotta tell you, it works for me...

My own ideas about an information theory-based model for reincarnation start looking a lot like the web concept of data persistence -- but they started long before I'd ever heard the term or even used a computer except via a job stack of punch cards.

It was actually trying to draw a set of behaviors out of stacks of anecdotal reports of shade (ghost) phenomena. To me the classic characteristics of such reportage -- a somewhat indistinct, seemingly 3 dimensional apparition, reported by multiple, independent observers to be performing, typically, the same actions over and over made me think of one then, still relatively novel thing: holograms.

As I learned a little more about holograms, I tried to imagine how a human or animal (I've seen what appeared to be a human shade as a child and have, on at least one occasion, and several possibles, seen what appeared to be animal apparitions) might leave some sort of imprint on its physical surroundings.

That one will have to keep on waiting, I guess, but when I began dealing with computers and really thinking about information in its many aspects, it wasn't much of a jump to apply the notion as sort of information holograms... multiple fragments of often redundant information which interact to create a sort of memetic matrix.

It's usually a struggle laying it out to most folks but I was able to get it across to a fellow database programmer friend of mine (a seriously religious Christian who reads a lot of sci-fi, mind you, so not exactly someone unaccustomed to operating on multiple levels at once) in just a few minutes the other night.

On the existence of the muses...

2009-11-13T00:44:00.000-08:00

I'm kind of an ontological relativist... I figure any paradigm that satisfactorily describes a given reality in a coherent, self-consistent way without breaking its own internal rules or denying self-evident reality is a fair choice.

No paradigm is perfect. You're looking for an analogical handle to mentally manipulate complex conceptual interrelationships. Whether you talk about subconscious autonomic intellectual processes or the muses, it's having a good grip on what you're talking about that counts.

From that perspective, I often talk about the muses because that's really how it feels. Now, mind you, my notion of the muses is based on information theory -- but then, so is my notion of sentience, identity, sense of self. Since I don't, in a very real sense, believe in me, as some sort of unitary entity, it's pretty easy for me to be flexible about the muses.

It's not who ya know in the music biz, it's...

2009-11-10T12:55:00.000-08:00

Elsewhere, a beginning songwriter asked about the possibility of coming out of nowhere to sell a hit song, perhaps elevated by a popular YouTube video, wondering if it was possible, or if the admonition to build and cultivate relationships with music biz insiders was still the reality...

Business relationships are key to doing anything in the music business. It is all about making connections and exploiting connections.

It is how the business works. The music business is -- with painful obviousness -- no kind of meritocracy.

It is all about who ya know and who... ahem... you help out.
That doesn't mean that all those interconnected people like each other -- far more often the contrary.

But they know each other. They know what to expect. And, when the song or album flops -- as is most often the case -- they can hide behind the reputation of the "known quantity" they hired to perform each key function. ("Well, they can't blame me, I hired a well known producer fresh from a number one, a top engineer with a bunch of gold, the same back up crew that worked with Joe Superstar on his big hits... the fact they're all my in-laws is immaterial.")

Are there occasional rags-to-riches stories? Sure. Are some of them true? Sometimes.

Often, they're just p.r., because one of the number one fantasies sold to pop fans is the rags-to-riches fantasy.

Because most pop fans are not, let's say, at the top of the economic spectrum. And the fantasy of having someone discover your genius and pluck you out of every day life and pop you into all the trappings of success and popular recognition of your gifts is hugely appealing to those caught up in the mundane struggle to survive.

But the reality is that most folks who get anywhere have been working long and hard to get there. That story is often rewritten to make it fit the standard rags-to-riches/Cinderella fantasy framework, but the reality is usually far less exciting -- or marketable.

And, all too often, the folks who haven't come up the hard way through lots of hard work, experience, and building connections, the folks who really do shoot to the top, find out the unfortunate truth of one tireless show biz maxim:

The faster you come up -- the faster you'll go down.

Biggest studio mistakes and 14 ways to avoid them...

2009-10-31T11:17:00.000-07:00

Number one for those without a lot of experience: not knowing the material.

When I was in school and engineering bands for free, I thought they were disorganized and confused because they weren't paying money. Then I saw folks doing the same thing on their own dime and I thought... wow.

Now, mind you, fooling around in the studio can be a lot of fun when there's not a time/money budget to deal with.

But if you need to get something done?

the band should know its material and have it arranged -- no, really
the band should have thoroughly practiced and have multiple practice recordings of the song in precisely the arrangement they will be recording it in
no last minute re-arrangements
no last minute lineup switch ups
there should be a hard, fast plan for what will be tracked live and what will be overdubbed
the band should give the engineer and producer, if any, lead sheets or lyric sheets with section notations already legibly on them so that he and the band can communicate about what's what and where they are in a given song
the engineer should talk to the band and figure out how they want to be arranged in the studio given his own understanding of the studio floor, drum room, gobos, localized acoustics (there's often a good/bad place for different instruments, even in a well-treated live room
the engineer should know what mics he's going to use on what and have them on stands, cabled up, signal-checked, out of the way at the edge of the room more or less so they can be brought in with a minimum of fuss
the engineer should have headphones ready to go with rough cue mix(es) for the musician
the engineer should have aligned and calibrated any tape machines that will be used
the engineer should make sure that the gear is warmed up and stable
the engineer or producer should try to assure that the musicians are relaxed and comfortable and should avoid making them self-concious or nervous
the engineer or producer should keep an eye on the attitude and attention of the band; don't let them get frazzled; don't let them go too long without food or fluids -- dehydration in the studio, particularly a hot, sweaty studio can be a real problem that sneaks up on everyone
the engineer or producer should keep an eye on any, ahem, performance preparations to make sure that no one, for instance, drinks too much coffee, smokes too many cigarettes, et cetra (and a half)

Music Biz Parasites

2009-10-30T12:13:00.000-07:00

I can get a good head of steam up talking about the business side of the music biz.

The word bitter may well surface in some readers' minds.

It may not be an unfair characterization of some of my attitudes but I want to hasten to point out that I'm not bitter about my own career/participation in the industry. (For the most part. One label still does still owe me for engineering an album from 1984 that I'm pretty sure I'll never see, but I was working for a pittance and the album was done in a very short period so it didn't amount to much at all, ultimately.)

I made my own choices and I had a lot of great experiences and really few personal disappointments.

But what really pissed me off was seeing how musicians and songwriters get screwed as a matter of standard practice among many in the biz.

People make money in the music biz. Some people make a lot of money. Some people only get by. But by and large, everyone working in the biz makes sure he gets paid... except the musicians.

Musicians are the host animal that the parasites feed off.

My first up-close experience with the music biz was long before I had any personal involvement with it. Some friends got signed to a major label. First, though, the people engineering the signing had to engineer a "cutting of dead weight" -- ie, most of the band. It was a progressive rock band with a horn section and they were really interesting -- and really popular in their market. They were making a lot of money running hall shows on their own.

The producer (a very well known guy at the time who apparently still keeps a finger in the industry) who engineered the label deal started to work on them, trying to get the three main singers to 'fire' the rest of the band. (I was friends with the main singer. These three singers were also the bass, drums, and guitar -- but they were only allowed to play on a couple of 'throwaway' tracks as the producer brought in his own cronies to play almost everything -- padding that recording tab nicely.)

They were being pressured to 'fire' guys they'd played with since jr high, for the most part and resisted bitterly. Ultimately, though, the word came down, it was either fire the rest of the band or kiss the contract goodbye. So they did and it caused some real upheaval in what had once been a very close-knit group of old friends.

These three guys considered themselves serious songwriters.

But Mr Famous Producer had other ideas. He started penning tunes for them working with his pet lyricist. The stuff they came up with was beyond peurile. Treacly love songs with insipid rhymes. This had been a hard-rocking, jazzy, progressive rock band. And they were reduced to singing drivel. Ultimately, they were only allowed to write two songs and one of them was only on a single B-side, not on the actual album. (It was arguably the best song in the project, so I guess that was only natural.)

Somehow -- well, I think we can presume it was a liberal appliation of independent promotion money, ie, payola -- the designated single from the album ended up a number 2 single in Detroit for a short period, but failed to break from there.

The band was contracted for five albums but wanted out. They couldn't get out so made the best of it and went back into the studio. But Mr Famous Producer's attentions had moved on to other projects (he was getting married around this time to the sister of a then-white-hot rock-pop singer and was managing her career), even though he was locked in as producer. The album somehow got recorded, and, probably because Mr Famous Producer wasn't paying much attention, it was actually a little better, a little more credible as for an early 70s rock band.

Not what the label thought they wanted. They sat on it. Finally shelving it and telling the band there'd be no future sessions.

But the band was still signed to the major label. They couldn't record under their band name or even their individual names -- not even as far as sitting in on pal's records under their own names.

And then there was the money.

The label wanted a lot of the advance money back. All those padded recording costs? Right out of the band's pockets.

After all that crap, the label sued the band for $18K (about $93K today)... but the guys, two of whom had little babies and had reluctantly taken day jobs, were all but penniless. So the label was awarded their PA, some amps, and their gig van by the court. They got to keep their own instruments.

So, you know, that was my first up-close view of the industry. When I got into it as a knobber, I was happily working on my own songs in my funky little 4 track rig on my own -- but after a couple of classes as part of my commercial music certificate confirmed that my friends' experience was hardly unusual, the very last thing on my mind was putting myself in the maw of such a beast.

And, sadly, working with a lot more struggling musicians, I saw the same things over and over. (In fact, one of my non-music-biz clients is a guy who was signed to two major labels and a major publisher who was a pretty big deal in the late 80s and early 90s in this market; albums were partially recorded, never released; his publishing and hundreds of his songs were completely tied up by the publisher for years until, right at the end of the 90s, the publisher sent a small packet of stuff to him and said, Well, your free, have a nice life.)

As a consequence, I've never sent so much as a demo of my own music to a label or publisher and I seriously doubt I ever will. As a consequence, I have never been screwed over by the music biz.

Small victory.

Sitting on a rock in the sunshine playing guitar... musing on what it's all about

2009-10-29T09:37:00.000-07:00

A long-time, part-time musician -- one of those sensible guys who kept his day job -- recounted recently in a recording bulletin board a short history of his long musical efforts, his recordings, the sensible limits he'd tried to place on his aspirations, but seemed to wonder, ultimately, what it was all for...

I've wrestled with many of these questions... ultimately, it depends on what you want out of music. If it's money -- there are a lot easier ways of making it, for the most part. Money isn't a very good reason to get into making music -- or engineering/production at this point, either, studios are closing and the ranks of un- and under-employed recordists is swelling every day.

It's similar to the period in the 50s when good, affordable professional-grade camera equipment became available. Suddenly, photography schools were popping up like flies, usually tied to government GI/student loan programs. It produced a big explosion of interest in more advanced forms of photography -- but the economic activity was typically restricted to fly by night schools taking advantage of government loan programs in a "glamorous" field, and the burgeoning ranks of under-employed photogs and would-be photogs simply devalued the services of the experienced, seasoned pros who had been making some kind of living.

I think you've got to look at some of the underlying value equations in your post... You find yourself wondering if it's all worth it... and, reasonably enough, you're looking for a measure of that worth. In this society/culture, one of the first places we have tended to look for valuation is in monetary.

If the search for valuation is restricted to money, I'm afraid the equation is pretty bleak.

But I'm betting that money was never the biggest motivator for you as you learned to play, write, and record. (Although, hey, you're human, you could dream, couldn't you? ;) )

But taking money out of the equation (at least partially) allows us to focus on other aspects of musical life where one does have a chance of finding satisfaction and a sense that it's not all wasted.

For some of us, just the simple act of playing is a big reward. Some folks bowl. Some folks do crosswords or watch TV. Musicians are lucky in that, at least sometimes, other folks may enjoy their efforts from time to time as well.

But becoming too focused on that external, social aspect can lead us away from the fundamental zen -- and the simple joy -- of simply making music. There's the satisfaction of learning and honing one's skill... and there's the uniquely satisfying pleasure of doing something / making something that brings pleasure.

I remember one of the first times when I was learning to play when I sat on a rock in the sunshine and just played for the simple joy of it. There I was, for one of the first times, it seemed like, doing something that entertained me and I wasn't paying anyone an hourly fee or a subscription or sitting through a bunch of advertising. I was plunking on my $20 guitar and music was coming out. That was really something.

Still... man is a social beast. And we musicians may be driven in ways that crossword puzzle aficionadi and weekend bowlers are not.

Twenty-five years ago, one could set up a home recording setup for the equivalent of a couple thousand dollars today... but getting the music into folks' hands was pretty difficult. Distribution was largely tied up by big labels or sometimes equally thuggish indie distributors. You could put your tunes out on cassettes -- but that was slow and expensive and distro was typically hand to hand or maybe through personal relationships with local record stores who would take a few cassettes on consignment (out of friendship or just to keep you off their back).

Now, we have amazing avenues of replication and distribution. With a few clicks you can put your latest work right up on the web and folks can be hearing it right away. The trick once you're out there, though, of course, is as it has always been, getting the audience to meet you halfway... getting them to click -- and hopefully stay tuned through the whole song.

(Getting them to engage in an economic transaction, particularly in the current music paradigm, is a far more difficult proposition. It's an uphill slog and I think we can all see the shape of the bottom line in the mist: almost no one is really making much money at this outside of hard-working touring bands [point-of-performance sales are still one of the big drivers for sales of non-popstar music] and the heavily packaged and promoted product that the big companies gamble on pushing into the distro tube, typically at great cost in terms of advertising and "promotional considerations" [various forms of kickbacks, bribes and payola, not-quite-legitimized by the notion that they are standard music business practice].)

Some folks will listen, most won't. A percentage of those who listen may like one's music, others won't.

In the new online world of micro-indie music distribution, raw numbers aren't hard to come by, as a rule. But making any kind of reasonable sense of them can be.

I have a folkie blog/podcast filled with mostly quite impromptu (and often quite sloppy and occasionally really bad) versions of my songs. It's been going since 2005. When I started, I posted every day and, at the peak, I had 30-50 people visiting a day. Over the years, I accumulated around 400 recordings and those have been downloaded something over 300,000 times. Does that mean 300,000 fans? No, of course not. (It may well mean 299,999 folks screwing up their faces and stabbing at the skip button.)

In fact, over the years I've collected a number comments from visitors and listeners and readers. (My blog/podcast is a two-pronged fork,a little write-up, often in the form of a vignette or anecdote related to the song, an image, and links to the song in various forms). But you can count that feedback in the scores of comments or messages, certainly not even hundreds.

Still, we know most folks tend to listen anonymously. In the so-called Golden Age of Television, network execs used the reckoning that every letter that actually came into corporate offices represented about 35,000 viewers. (This was before organized letter-writing campaigns and particularly latter day email campaigns made those equations all but meaningless.)

So, for those of us not getting out into the clubs and coffeehouses, putting it out there may be something of an act of faith.

As I paused writing the passage above, wondering where to go from there, Neil Young's "On the Beach" came up in my randomized playlist...

[quote]... I went to the radio interview
I ended up alone at the microphone...[/quote]
Young repeats the line 3 times in a sleepily spooky voice, referring to a long-ago incident early in his career when, as I heard the story, he ticked off a late-night underground radio DJ supposed to be interviewing him.

I'm left with that image of Young... late at night, alone, talking into a mic to... maybe no one.

To paraphrase one of my own, old songs, I don't want to go cosmic on you baby... but ultimately, isn't all communication ultimately based on faith? -- Faith that, somehow, someone will pick up the signals we're sending out and maybe, somehow, against all odds, suss out something vaguely parallel to what we meant to say?

We're all parallel lines... in theory, we'll all meet at infinity.

Until then, I'm sitting on this rock, in the sunshine, strumming my guitar...

Appropos of Just About Nothing: Vivaldi Bassoon Concerti

2009-10-28T15:34:00.001-07:00

So I'm listening to a baroque mix on Rhapsody (it was supposed to be undistracting background music -- the joke's on me, apparently) and I hear this very neat thing (it's identifed only as "Allegro" and from, like, Vivaldi's Greatest Hits or something) that, after a second of triangulating (it's a double reed, not an oboe, probably not an english horn, probably not a contrabassoon) I figure it's a bassoon. And it's featured through the 5 or 6 minute movement, so I figure it's a concerto (which form Vivaldi, a little animated info box helpfully informs me, helped promote the popularity of).

Now, I've always liked Vivaldi, but I'm not one of those folks who studies up much on the composers. I'll scan the program notes at the symphony but, you know, I'm pretty much about the music. Once you've read about one great composer dying penniless and alone in squalor, you've pretty much read 'em all.

So I google 'vivaldi bassoon ...' And before I get much farther, Google's 'assistant' or whatever suggests "concertos" -- I'm thinking plural?

How many people write multiple bassoon concerti? Must have started out as a bassoonist.

I go a little farther, I finally find a listing for bassoon concertos, volume 1 and I'm thinking, well, probably more than two, even, then.

I go a little farther...

... and I see the phrase "Vivaldi's thirty-seven bassoon concerti..." I don't think I saw whatever it said after that...

Thirty-seven bassoon concerti.

Now my interest is whetted.

Wikipedia is my friend. It confirms the seemingly ludicrous 37 figure.

And I get to the bio... he was a priest ("il Prete Rosso" -- The Red Priest -- they called him, which has a rather sinister ring to me... but then I think anything to do with The Church is kinda sinister. Okay... musta been one of the celibate ones if he found time to write 37 bassoon concerti... Wait... the Red Priest is celibate? I dunno. Seems unlikely, somehow. But that's neither here nor there.)

Oh, wait... he was a violinist?!?

Well, if he wrote all those bassoon concerti, how the hell many violin concerti did he write?

Two.

What. The. Hell.

[Continue on to the comments immediately below for a little intrusion of factual reality into my WTH moment... turns out my whole post above turns on a whopper of a factual error. Hint: Vivaldi's arguably most famous work, The Four Seasons, which is comprised of four violin concerti, blows that violin concerto count out of the water right off the top -- and it doesn't stop there, by any stretch... Oh well. PS... The erroneous info in Wikipedia has since been corrected. And that is the beauty of Wikipedia. If that erratum had been in a print encyclopedia, it would have been there 'til the pages turned to dust. But one does have to keep one's eyes open... that two violin concerti thing should certainly have caused me to poke a little farther.]

There's Out-of-Tune and Then There's Auto-Tune

2009-10-28T09:53:00.000-07:00

One thing that a lot of folks seem to continually miss is that the 12 Tone Equal Temperament intonation system is -- by necessity -- out of tune with itself.

Out of 12 equally tempered tones, eight are more than 10 cents out of tune from perfect harmony! (Depending on harmonic context.)

That's right -- that same 'perfect' little grid you see in A-T or other vocal retuners incorporates intervals which are all -- except for octaves -- varying degrees out of tune.

The upshot is that those particularly oriented to the slightly out 12TET intervals may interpret a technically accurate singer as being "out of tune" -- particularly if the musical arrangement is poorly crafted and juxtaposes equally tempered instruments with hold-tones (notably synths and organs) against a singer who might be singing the true interval. Contextually, most of us will leap to the conclusion the singer is out of tune when, in fact, the singer may actually be singing the proper interval.

12TET is an amazing accomplishment in some ways, allowing us to have 12 fixed tones that approximate the true tone relationships in any key. It made modern western music, including the piano and guitar and other 12TET instruments, possible and workable. (12TET is not the only intonation system available or possible, but it serves as something of a central standard.)

But it also means that all the intervals except the octaves are out of tune. Perfect fourths and fifths are only 2 cents out -- but a minor 7th may be seen as as much as 31 cents out. And, as I noted above, 8 of 12 tones are more than 10 cents out.

Here's a chart that shows the true ("just"), mathematically correct and purely harmonious intervals contrasted with the 12TET 'approximations' with the differences in the far right column:

Equal temperament - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

So... next time you're dragging what your eye tells you is an out of tune vocal snip onto the grid, keep in mind: you may be dragging that vocal out of tune with itself. (But then, you may have to -- in order to get it to play nice with keyboards or long guitar notes or chords. It's a tricky business, no question. But the bottom line is that most folks don't get it, don't have the first clue as to what really goes into intonation.)

Where did music come from?

2009-10-16T13:09:00.000-07:00

A recent thread at recording/music site GearSlutz indirectly seemed to ask the question of from just where did music come into human life and culture? I found myself writing this:

I think the answer, in part, lies with how our nervous systems evolved. The auditory system is in large part about spatial mapping... placing the organism within a given space, as well as tracking potential threats or prey within that space.

Watch an animal like a dog or cat and how they respond to their acoustic environment.

Introduce a new sonic element and they're on alert until they can determine whether it might represent a threat.

Reiteration of sounds -- and the rhythms of that reiteration -- are a key aspect that canny animals must be at least subconsciously aware of.

Rhythmic sounds tend to carry more weight because they typically signal that the source is animal, rather than environmental (the wind in the trees may have chaotic rhythms, but it's nothing like the threatening beat of a large animal coming toward one).

But pitch is almost equally important... what's more threatening, the low frequency roar of a lion, or the twittering of a meadow lark? (OK, cheap example, but you get the drift. )

As human circumstances improved and we had to be less attuned to sound for survival's sake, we were left with a big, under-used center of the brain... like a traveler doing crosswords in a terminal, early man probably tickled the auditory system in the brain by intentionally making various noises, particularly rhythmic noises.

The Death of Auto-Tune... Rumors of its demise greatly exaggerated?

2009-10-14T13:38:00.001-07:00

A long thread on the media's new found attention to Auto-Tune over in Craig Anderton's forum (The Death of Auto Tune), with hundreds of posts from the same people, going back and forth over the same positions (it's kind of fun, like watching a whole lot of lab rats -- one of them this writer -- with chemically induced OCD running interlocking repetitive patterns in the maze), provoked me to set my own, strictly personal perspective into a sort of bullet point thumbnail.

Without further ado, as though it mattered or anyone cares (it doesn't, they don't -- why are you even reading this?):

With regard to Auto-Tune and other forms of vocal pitch-correction, I...

consider it a form of correction (not enhancement like EQ or reverb), farther down, but on the same slippery slope as mutiple takes, punching, vocal "aligning," comping, even compression (after all, it makes up for lack of dynamic control, poor mic technique, etc)
despise the sound of it -- whether as an artifact of clumsy correction or from its use as an effect (T-paining)
think anyone who uses it for correction better not leave even the slightest wrenchmark, since it says to the listener: Someone either can't sing or is to lazy too bother doing a good job
think that folks who don't understand Equal Temperament 'out-of-tuneness' should definitely study up before they start giddily dragging everything smack onto the grid
have no problem with the general concept of correction although, informally, I share the what are we coming to response of many -- I mean, c'mon, people, it's just singing... it's almost always quicker to sing it right in a few passes or punches than it is to do a good job of pitch-wrangling it

__________________

2009-10-10T09:46:00.000-07:00

Recently in an internet recording forum, someone asked about an old Radio Shack mic they had found, asking what it might be good for, getting a range of responses. Mine was:

You can use it for anything it works for you for. (Sorry about that awkward preposition stack.)

By that I mean to suggest that the best way to figure out what it's good for is to explore its use yourself.

The rest of us here don't have this mic in their hands and probably have never used one, and while some might feel like they can make a summary judgment about the mic without actually knowing anything about it, based solely on its Rat Shack origins, I would say the best way to find out about it is to use and experiment with it.

That said, as you might surmise from others' comments, there's reason to believe based on the usual run of Realistic/Radio Shack products that it is highly unlikely to be what most of us might consider a good mic. But it might well be the perfect mic for some specific use.

First person experimentation and exploration the best way to learn about different mics.

To that, someone replied "Well said..." and I added:

I basically say the same couple of things over and over, so I've refined my message to some extent.

The internet makes it much easier to get a recording education (which is great because the explosion of super-cheap recording gear has meant an explosion in home recording by multiple factors of ten... much like the introduction of the simple box camera a century or so ago put photography in hands of regular joes and janes).

But it also has made it easier for understandably overwhelmed newbs to get bobbled and just throw up their hands and post myriad variations on the perennial Just tell me what to do! post. (Just tell me what preamp/mic/compressor/DAW/etc... How do I get the sound of this record? How do I make my recordings/mixes sound less small? How do I...? Etc.)

And it's my thinking that this is a Give a man a loaf of bread and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime kind of thing.

It is confusing and frustrating. But a lot of learning -- even for those going to school to learn recording (my advice: go to an affordable community collge; make sure you have a viable day job, you're going to need it) simply comes down to working and experience, trial and error and other experimentation.

I did go to school to study recording -- but what I was really doing was going to school to get access to recording gear and it was observation and direct experience which mostly taught me. (Good thing, too, since a year or so after I started, I, the teacher, and a few others from the recording program went to a nearby community college with a well-established program with a very good rep -- this was the early 80s and there were few -- and we all took the entrance test that would weed the several hundred applicants down to the 50 or so who would be admitted to the program. Both my teacher and I passed, though others did not. But I bested my teacher's score on the entrance test to the other school by more than a few points. A nice guy in many ways, he thought he knew more than he did. And it showed when he did things like try to teach people to mix with trim pots instead of faders.)

Brave new markets...

2009-10-09T12:15:00.000-07:00

From musician/recording/music biz site, Harmony Central:

Phil O'Keefe wrote:

Are magazine publishers making the same mistakes major labels did?

IOW, relying on outdated models and failing to develop new paradigms in the digital age?

I thought this article was interesting, and I think there are some similarities there.

http://blogs.moneycentral.msn.com/to...n-digital.aspx

Thoughts?

Others added their observations; I responded:

This genie don't go back in that little bottle.

I think folks who think the magazine industry can continue to cling to the all or nothing for a year subscription model are fooling themselves.

But until we as an economic system finally have a practical and efficient micropayment system in place, the true nature of the wired economy will be stymied and stunted.

Only when you can have a payment efficiency that makes very small transactions/payments possible and viable will a truly efficient wired economy take shape.

Of course, the implications and consequences of such a system are utterly terrifying to many interests vested in today's ineffecient and turgid transactional models.

Lee Knight responded:

Absolutely!

Ever the optimist, I added:

Well, be careful what you wish for.

When such a system is finally in place (various micropayment-like systems are already in use in local economies in some parts of the world) and accessible to all, it will almost surely mean an end to much of the free content out there... as content providers vie to find new, sustainably viable market equilibria.

Brave new economies are coming... someday.

Measuring timeline alignment in a DAW

2009-09-29T10:28:00.000-07:00

How to measure for unadjusted tracking/timeline misalignment in a DAW:

Generate a 'ping' on one track. (I use a test tone that goes from -inf to, say, -18 dB -- don't use a full volume tone, in case it goes out over the speakers, which you shouldn't probably even have turned on/up for this.)

Basically you just want a tone where you can precisely identify the timeline position (to sample accuracy if you can zoom in that close), so a test tone, with its abrupt beginning, is perfect.

Making sure that your monitors are down and source monitoring is turned off (so as not to create the feedback loop from hell), take a cable and route the analog output of your audio interface/soundcard back into an input and (monitors down, source monitoring off) record that onto a new track.

Now you'll have two test tones on two tracks.

In a perfect world, these two tones would line up to the sample.

But in this world, unless you're otherwise compensating, it's very likely that the two tones will not have the same precise position on the timeline.

If you subtract the sample number position of the new track from that of the original, you'll have the amoung of tracking misalignment your rig is throwing at that point. (In my experience, most prosumer interfaces tend to have a fairly steady alignment offset. But I did have a USB mic whose misalignment varied from session to session, forcing repeated ping tests; it was purchased for location work, anyhow, so no biggie, but it would be a TPITA if you had to work around it on a daily basis.)

In previous loopback testing over a large handful of DAW based recordists, the closest to perfect was a single sample off (this is, IIRC, also the case if one ping loopback tests a PT HD rig). But most were more like 2-16 ms off, with a few as high as 35+ms off. (The latter is pretty much unusable in an overdub situation without correction, as you can imagine.)

Nowadays, most of the major DAW makers include some form of tracking alignment adjustment, from a simple manually determined timing offset (IOW, you have to do the ping loopback test and the sample position arithmetic and input it into the alignment offset adjustment) to a completely automated ping loopback calibration that, on your command, repings the system, measures the unadjusted delay and sets the alignment offset appropriately.

Sonar now has such an automated function, as I believe Cubsase, Logic, and, likely, others, are supposed to have as well. In some DAWs, it may be called hardware delay compensation, since the same techniques that measure timeline alignment of just the AD/DA routing can also be used to adjust for additional latency introduced by outboard digital signal processing gear.

I'm glad to see some interest in this. .

My hardware is now pretty old (the aforementioned MOTU 828mkII with an ~8ms turnaround and misalignment and an even older Echo Mia, which, being a PCI interface, has a lower roundtrip, only about 4.5 or 5 ms)... and the informal testing to which I referred was mostly done several years ago when I began realizing that other people had the same problem.

I'd like to know if it's still a widespread problem -- and I'm dying to know if many folks recognize it and take the steps to compensate for it.

Tech Beat: marking time digitally...

2009-05-04T08:19:00.000-07:00

I've been experimenting with this shareware tuner which I have hooked up to my 'everyday' Windows audio interface (a mobo based Sounblaster clone)... but I'd been frustrated because it seemed way 'out of tune' from my virtual synths or from guitars tuned to the tuner plug in in my DAW. (I keep the DAW (and v-synths) routed to my MOTU 828mkII.)

I figured this was because of presumed slightly different clock rates, as we expect from the crystal controlled clocks at the heart of almost all contemporary converters.

Now, crystals can be tuned with great precision, but the greater the precision, generally, the greater the cost. It's almost literally a matter of shaving off parts of the crystal to 'tune' it. I've never had a crystal controlled wrist watch, for instance, as accurate as the over fifty year old wind-up (actually 'self-winding' through motion) Omega I inherited from my grandfather. [And yet I gave up tape. Actually, when I was a kid in the early 60s, I think Nagra had an incredibly expensive portable deck where the transport was run by a wind up clock mechanism. It was a couple grand, back then, meaning the equivalent, I'm guessing, of about $25-$30K at 2009 prices.]

My goal was to be able to tune using the desktop mic always plugged into my machine's mobo card, since I don't always have a studio mic hooked to the MOTU.

And, helpfully, the tuner software has a calibration utility.

I used Sound Forge to generate a tone at 440 Hz and routed it out through the DA of the MOTU. I left the tuner connected to the mobo card (so I can use my desktop mic on an ad hoc basis).

I played the 440 over the MOTU and out the speakers and let the tuner do its analysis.

I knew the two converters' timing was off, still, I was surprised to find that it was 36 cents off! To hit 440 Hz (as 'defined' by the MOTU, that is) I had to recalibrate the mobo-connected tuner so that A had a value of ~ 449 Hz -- as rendered by my mobo-based SB cloen chip.

Of course, the mobo interface is basically just a lowball commodity chip and has no capability of accepting external clock sync -- and you'd like to think no one would want to try to use if for anything 'serious.'

But that really significant timing gap does, I think, illustrate why multiple converters must have a designated master clock (either one of the converters or an outside source) when they are run in tandem. This is a tonal/pitch difference that is very significant. Try to play with your guitar 36 cents out from your buddy's guitar and you'll see what I mean.

Of course, there are two timing issues with clocking. There is what we might call long scale accuracy -- analogous to a band beginning and ending on the same beat -- as well as short scale, internal 'interstitial' timing accuracy -- how regular the timing is between samples.

When we synchronize a formerly standalone converter to an external device, we're asking that converter's clock circuitry to do an extra difficult job of using a phase locked loop to keep sync with the exteranl clock source. But our now-slaved converter's crystal clock is still in the game, but now the PLL must continually readjust the circuit to 'mediate' between the external clock signal and the internal crystal-controlled sample timing.

For that reason, slaving to an external clock may improve long scale accuracy -- assuming the master clock is closer to 'standard' time (as measured, presumably by the Atomic Clock? ) but it will almost always tend to decrease sample-to-sample regularity, which we describe as increased jitter.

[Hmmm... this seemed much more interesting when I decided to write about it... oh well.]

Tech: Do I need "monitors" to record? Can't I use my stereo speakers?

2009-04-15T08:48:00.001-07:00

Q: I'm just getting into recording at home. What's so different about "monitors" from regular speakers? Don't they all do the same thing?

A: I kinda though you were kidding us around, too, but it looks like you're actually just getting started about to do some home recording, so let me just give you my thumbnail on this:

Consumer/home speakers come in many varieties and quality levels, as you probably have notice. Some have a lot of bass, some don't. Some handle the treble well. Some don't. Some are skewed this way. Some that way.

When you're mixing, generally accepted practice (not cut in stone but generally accepted) is to use accurate, neutral speakers with as flat an EQ response curve as possible (see my bit on the environment/room below).

You don't want them to have exaggerated, overly loud treble, for instance, since if they do, you'll have a tendency when mixing to push treble instruments down in the mix or maybe engage "corrective" EQ -- but you'd actually be "correcting" for problems in your speaker/mix environment.

Say you were mixing on a big ol' pair of consumer boomers, hyped sizzly highs and uneven bass that booms out in the upper bass range (where it's easy to move some air) and is missing down low where the actual bass note fundamentals may be. The result is that notes in certain ranges boom out and other notes disappear. (It's the sound of several generations of home music players.)

If you were mixing on those, you'd be likely to be compensating for the bumpily uneven response of those speakers. If they were hyped on the top and boomy in parts of the bass range, you might EQ in compensation for that, pushing some parts of the bass and pulling down others, pulling down the high end... and if you then play your mix on a good, flat system, it sounds dull on the high end and boomy in different parts of the bass range.

Worse, if you play your mix on some other consumer system that is equally tonally skewed -- but in different places, you could end up with the uneveness of your mix compounding with the unevenness of the listener's speakers and have a mess twice as bad as on the flat monitors. (But at least it would still sound 'good' on your original mix monitors. If you could buy a pair of those for all your fans... )

Now, why do so many people use near field monitors -- and how are they different?

Basically NFMs tend to be smaller speakers, typically with an 8" woofer or smaller. They're designed to be as flat as possible, at least down to the bottom of their bass extension, where theys will hopefully roll off gracefully. Some NFM's barely get down below 80 or 90 Hz. Others can go down almost flat into the 30s. Some folks like to use a pair of relatively flat monitors (like my Event 20/20bas) and a pair of 'spotlight' or 'magnifying glass' monitors like the famous/infamous Yamaha NS10m's that have gone from costing a few hun a pair when they were made to pulling down exaggerated amounts on eBay from folks swayed by a handful of famous producers who 'swear by' their NS10m's. The Yamahas are sadly wonting in bass (when run flat) and have an uncharitable high end emphasis -- but that seems to work out quite well for some folks. Me, I mixed on my pair for a few years and got some good mixes -- except that as I got more into styles with really low bass (particularly synthesized bass) I found the Yamahas -- which fall off rapidly under 80-90 Hz -- were just blind to it and so I added the Events (near flat to the high 30s).

One important thing about NFMs: while most consumer speakers are designed for a broad treble dispersion, to spread the sweet spot, NFMs are mostly designed to have narrow dispersion -- so as to not send treble out to the side where it can bounce off the side walls and come reach the engineer in his sweet spot early enough that they are not heard by the ear/auditory nerve system as separate sounds but rather are 'combined' in such a way as to distort and mask the direct sound you should be going by.

And that brings us to the monitoring enironment, the room.

Your speakers are crucial -- but so is the room.

They form a system.

Let's deal with the 'easy part' first. We already talked about side or 'early' reflections. In addition to tight dispersion on your NFMs, you want to put absorptive material (dedicated acoustic panels expensive but good ones cut reflections in a wide frequency range. Still, the right, loosely folded drapes can go a ways to help. A good rule of thumb is that sound reflects in much the same way that light reflects. High frequencies tend to be more directional. A given fabric might absorb some frequencies while bouncing other ranges. Soft, fuzzy, losely folded drapes probably work best at that end of things. But acoustic panels get the job done very well. They're not cheap but they may well be worth it. (Shop. But remember, they're not all the same. And those mattress pads at target may work somewhat in some ranges but... well... if nothing else... they're flammable. Still, I've used them in a pinch, even used to create ad hoc vocal booths out of them. (They don't shut out outside sound at all, really, but they can absorb a certain amount of reflection in the vocal range. They get pingy in the higher ranges, mid-treble and up, though. Put a set of cymbals where the sound can bounce off a mattres pad wall and you can often hear the ping of the reflection from the cymbals. Sorry... enough about trailer trash acoustic treatments. )

So, absorb on the sides. Absorp in the back behind the mixer/engineer. But a common design practice is to have a 'live' end in front of the engineer (behind his monitors -- where the studio floor window would be in a classic set up). The thinking is that direct sound from the speakers going past the engineer is absorbed to some extent by the 'dead end' and the 'live end' is relatively harmless or even beneficial, though, frankly, the logic on that has always escaped me, a little. Suffice it to say that there's no direct sound hitting the live end behind the speakers.

But... that's the easy part.

The hard part is bass.

Because most of us are in rooms with parallel walls, bass from the sound bouncing, essentially, back and forth between the two parallel walls in such a way that certain notes combine to get louder while others end up having phase cancellation issues and get softer... These resonance peaks can be extremely pronounced in an untreated room, causing variations from 10-15 dB in a somewhat treated room from just moving a mic a few inches -- to well above 40 dB in an untreated room. We use what are called bass traps to help break up these standing waves.

Anhow, acoustic treatment is way too complex to get into here. But just remember that monitors are only half the equation. A bad room will make it almost impossible to avoid bad mixes.

Tech track: science and fantasy in recording education as reflected in gain staging practice

2009-02-25T10:54:00.000-08:00

A rather plodding title for this brief point-to article, I'll admit. But the thread below raises not just some interesting practical considerations, it reveals a glimpse of the sorry state of recording technology education as practiced at some institutions:

Mixing Console Gain Structure

I'm posting in this thread in the recording tech BB at GearSlutz as theblue1

Q: I'm getting into the music biz because it's so lucrative...

2009-01-05T08:22:00.001-08:00

... I'm in my early 20s and in the United Kingdom.

A: I can't speak to conditions for musicians in the UK, but here in the states, the music biz is lucrative for the few -- not the many.

Most musicians I know -- folks with a number of albums under their belts and continuing contracts who go out on tour -- have to work day jobs of varying kinds when they're not out on tour.

One pal has three bands, two of which regularly tour the US and Europe, where he just got back from a month or two ago. His biggest band often plays to crowds in the tens of thousands. But more than half the year he's back at the trendy used clothing shop, selling 'new old stock' (marked up through the roof -- but he's just an employee so he doesn't see any of that).

Another friend finally was able to quit the record store he'd been working in for years because the major headlining act he's been part of since their beginning is finally paying enough that he could give it up. He finally even bought a car. A used car, but a car. But he worked at the record store up through their third album. (This band is definitely one you've heard of. Maybe even seen, if your taste runs to the arty/progressive side of things. They came out of the ashes of another very popular modern rock band.)

At that record store, he worked along side one of the hippest producing DJs in LA, a guy who has been flown around the world to spin parties, but who also produces for some of LAs better rappers. He still has a couple of dayjobs, and fills in at the record store.

The music biz is very lucrative for one sector -- the people dedicated to making money off wannabes and dreamers.

Sometimes it's legitimate-enough services or products (whether they are needed or worthwhile or not); more often it's stuff cooked up simply to separate wannabes from their dough.

A prime example: the recording/music production diploma mills that have sprung up in the US and around the world. Here in the US, they work by lining up huge student loans so that students -- with little or no entrance qualification -- end up with huge loans (that, here in the US, due to changes in bankruptcy law, they probably would not even be able to escape in personal bankruptcy, the debt following them into their 'new' post-bankruptcy life). The education may be OK -- but many graduates report very mixed satisfaction with the education and many end up working as unpaid interns or for a pittance under the table (black market, as it were) simply because there are so MANY people just like them who thought they could be 'smart' making it in the music biz by trying to work the technical side -- only to discover that half of everyone else with a small studio has also hung out his shingle.

Big, once busy and prosperous studios are folding -- sometimes when they're still busy because they've had to lower block rates so deeply to stay competitive that it's simply cheaper to sell off the gear and close up.

Q: I've got some well-written songs -- what are my chances of making a living as a songwriter?

2009-01-02T15:04:00.001-08:00

A: Let's just put it this way, my standard advice to everyone is to keep the day job.

There are folks who make a living off songwriting but they are few and very far between and tend to be both extremely disciplined, extremely dedicated to making a living rather than any sort of artistic impulse, and very well connected.

People think that it may be easier to get somewhere as a songwriter than as an entertainer -- but, perhaps ironically, it may well be easier to get somewhere as an entertainer. For some. The business is very much oriented to marketing.

It cares very little for artistic merit; it views craftsmanship through a very narrow lens, basically just as something that may help assure financial success, which trumps all other concerns.

The music business is absolutely filled with vampires, conmen, scammers, and victimizers and, to the extent they are successful, they are lauded with praise. If not, they're typically tolerated. Why? Because so many people in the biz know that they are only a few steps away.

The number of people with creative talent in show business is very, very small. But the number of people employed in the business, or making money off the business and those creative people are legion. So, in a sense, many or maybe most folks in the biz are dependent on the skill or talent of the few.

The music business has a much larger shadow industry which is dedicated to preserving the myth that you, too, can make it in the biz. Music superstore chains do not get by on the money spent by actual working musicians -- it's all about the wannabes.

Ditto many/most recording studios: they sell dreams, castles in the air. (One of the reasons I don't run a project studio, any more.)

If that sounds jaded or cynical, maybe. It's just that I've been paying attention to what I've heard from friends and acquaintances since the late 60s, even before I played or wrote music.

Yes, I do know some people who have done OK, even pretty well in the biz. (Mostly because I know a lot of people.) But, overwhelmingly, most folks who pursue getting over get shafted.

There is one very good reason to make music.

Because you love it.

Creating music can be one of the most rewarding of human endeavors, it seems to me. But I've known a lot of folks who walked away from music in bitterness -- some people who were very good at doing what they were doing -- because what they wanted was not something music itself could give them.

Me, I finally decided I loved making music too much to let my creative spirit be drained or twisted by the music biz.

I went back to my day job. It didn't hurt that I could charge more for my dayjob services than I could have charged for a studio with five times as much gear, mind you. But, really, it was just getting depressing dealing with people's cockeyed dreams of fame and success.

Off topic: LA underground radio

2008-12-28T12:46:00.001-08:00

As I would call it, the lineage of hip radio in LA was something like this:

KFWB with B. Mitchell Reid, mid 60s, nights (they went all-news in the late mid-60s)
KPPC -- broadcast out of a church basement in Pasadena, arguably the hippest station in LA history, birthplace of Radio Free Oz and the Firesign Theatre. Reid showed up there, too. Another key figure was Tom Donahue, as well as Steven Clean (Segal, not the actor). The license eventually ended up as KROQ around a decade later but the hip part of its history ended in '71.
KMET -- Once again, Reid was involved, this time, as the guiding light. It turned 'underground' in 1969 and for a number of years was actually close to worthy of the name, even though it was owned by a media conglom. The Firesign were a frequent presence, DJs were encouraged to be irreverent but eclectic -- it was common to segue from edgy then-contemporary rock to cool jazz or Billie Holiday or outlaw country. But by the second half of the 70s, KMET had become a lot more conservative, becoming, for a lot of folks, the archetypal dinosaur rock station, playing a safe blend of mainstream 'classic rock' which they continued to play for many years hence.
KROQ -- In the late mid-70s, around '77, when the once-cutting-edge Steven Clean was saying he'd quit if KMET ever made him play any more of that new music like the Sex Pistols -- the moment is burned into my memory because he was still a sentimental favorite, but I was really excited by the new music scene -- KROQ was struggling to make a name for itself at the far edges of LA pop concsiousness. One of their key DJs at the time was the legendarily oft-fired Jimmy Rabbit (AKA Eddy Payne) who was there for various shifts from '76-'78. He was notorious for drinking his way through his afternoon shifts. He would occasionally tell listeners to keep an eye out for him as he hitchhiked home from Pasadena to Santa Monica, since the courts had relieved him, once again, of his driver's license. There were outlandish stories about some of his RTD bus rides, too. KROQ called itself "the rock of the 80s" several years before that decade and played a not always coherent blend of punk, heavy rock, and the outsider synth pop then known as new wave. In 1979, program director Rick Carrol came onboard and transformed the station into a formatted, commercial station. excluding the 'dinosaur' rock elements for the most part, mostly eschewing anything actually punk (exept for the historical oddity of Rodney Bingenheimer's late Sunday night shows) and began focusing on British mainstream synth pop and its American imitators like Missing Persons, et al, as well as carefully targeted, guitar-oriented safe 'new wave' like the Police, Romantics, and U2.
KCRW, KXLU, KSPC, KUCI, KPCC [for a while], and other college stations - in the 80s and into the 90s, the only beacons of hipness of any kind on the radio seemed to be the college stations. Each had its own niche, which they served with varying degrees of success.

Q: Are all powered monitors as noisy as mine?

2008-10-23T09:26:00.000-07:00

Q: I have a pair of powered near field monitors in my recording rig. But there's a lot of his and a more than a little hum, all the time, no matter how I set the volume from computer recording software. What's going on? Are all powered monitors this noisy?

A: A crucial aspect of this issue is the level at which your powered monitor trims are set. (The monitor trim is the monitors "master" volume, as it were, which you'll typically find as a small potentiometer on the back of the monitor, sometimes a nylon screwdriver-slot stem in a recessed hold.)

If this is all the way up, your monitors are running at full amp power all the time.

If this is the case, you'll get the full self-noise of the monitor's power amp.

It would be just like running a standalone power amp into a pair of passive speakers with the amp at full volume. (Try it with no input to a standalone power amp some time. As you get into the 'loudest' part of the amps range, you will no doubt notice a marked increase in self-noise, both white noise and possibly hum.)

An additional problem is that, with the monitor's trim all the way open, unless you are using an intermediary "volume control box" like the Mackie Big Knob or perhaps running through a mixer to control the control room monitoring level, you will likely be turning down the output volume in your DAW/computer in the digital realm.

And that will 'starve your DA for bits/resolution' -- in the sense that you will be hitting DA with a lower level signal.

For that reason, when using powered monitors, it's crucial to set a 'maximum level' at the monitor's trim (that is as loud as you will normally need) and then control the CR monitoring level with some sort of analog volume control between the DA converter and the monitor input.

Side note: 24 bit DA will help mitigate the latter issue to some extent; but if you turn your output level down to -40 dB from inside the digital realm, and your converters are pretty good, say having an effective signal to noise ratio of 105 dB, you're going to be reducing their effective S/N to 65 dB, which was medium level hi fi in the 1960s.

[I picked -40 dB as an example, because the modest 65 w/channel power amp I drive my everyday listening NS10m's is often set to around that level for moderately loud listening. But, check it, many powered NFMs can have considerably higher power amps -- my Event 20/20bas are 200 watts/side -- I have the trims set to the 'halfway' mark -- and with a full level signal -- that is very loud. Now, I'm not sure if it's even informally calibrated/marked with a dB value; keep in mind not all NFM trims are 'full range' -- like some board trims they do not close all the way to -inf dB.]