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From crunk to snap music, Southern rap has reigned supreme over the charts for the last half decade. When ATL stole the crown from NYC as the Mecca of hip hop, aspiring rappers and producers made the pilgrimage from all over to find a better, more trill existence. (Most would fail upon realizing it’s not enough to simply rhyme ‘grind’ with ’shine’ as many times as possible.) After everything Lil Jon and TI did for Atlanta’s growth, the Georgia Department of Tourism should write them monthly checks.

For my fellow Atlanta natives, I should point out that what old school ATLiens may think of as Southern rap is not really what I’m talking about in this article. The OutKasts and Goodie Mobs of yore are not what made the Atlanta Braves hat the new Yankees cap. What I’m talking about here is a little more, well… basic. Let’s have a look:

Characteristics of (Mid-2000s Era) Southern Rap

• Party-oriented lyrical themes including sex, alcohol, dancing, strippers, and nightclub activity (a shift away from violent or macho ’street’ lyrics of 90s rap)
• 808 kicks
• Claps & snaps on the backbeat (more on this: Claps & Snaps: The Death of the Snare Drum)
• Single note or nonexistent basslines
• Slower tempos (70-78 BPM)
• Synth-based instrumentation (versus sample-based)

Pop music is often scoffed at and generally regarded as simple by music buffs, but obviously these music buffs have never gotten their swerve on at The Cheetah. Simplicity works especially well in club settings. The reason behind this can be explained using a maxim that (FYM blog cowriter) Phil first posited to me many years ago, which is that in order for something to be big, something else must also be small. Put another way:

The less stuff you have in a mix, the bigger each individual thing can be.

And of course in rap music the quest is always for tighter and deeper low end, whether that be a kick drum or bassline. An 808 kick sound is special because it’s somewhere in between the two in terms of its role. The drawback is that an 808 is so deep that it usually cannot be heard on smaller speakers and headphones that do not produce sub-bass frequencies. The benefit is you don’t have two instruments competing for that all-important frequency range where a mix can easily get cluttered. When the only other stuff you’ve got going on is a snap, vocal, and single-note synth line, huge low end is in the cards. The result is a hypnotic (post-apocalyptic?) dance sound that can be baffling to the uninitiated but works like magic in clubs because of their better low end reproduction capabilities.

Key Songs

“It’s Goin Down” – Yung Joc

“Get Low” – Lil Jon feat. Ying Yang Twins

“Yeah” – Usher feat. Lil Jon

“Crank That” – Souja Boy Tell Em

“Laffy Taffy“* – D4L

Today, it’s hard to say that Atlanta is still the international capital of rap. Over the years, rap has traveled back and forth from East Coast (actually the Northeast) to West Coast, and eventually to the South. With collaborations between people like Kanye and Young Jeezy, you could say we’re overdue for a shift back towards the East Coast sound. But history rarely repeats itself so directly.** No, I believe Top 40 rap is taking a step in a macro direction: away from regional sounds and towards pop crossover.

The Decline of the Southern Rap Empire

Right now, we are in the middle of a shift. The South isn’t dead yet–many of its calling cards and idiosyncrasies are still in effect. But hip-hop is shifting away not just from the South but regional sounds altogether, with even the hardest, street-est rappers going in a homogeneous pop direction (blame it on the Goose economy). Contrary to what Jay-Z wants you to believe, things are not going back to the New York sound. Here is the current state of affairs:

• There’s no doubt the snare drum is making a comeback, particularly syncopated patterns and rimshots (see: Drake’s latest “Forever” feat. Lil Wayne, Kanye, & Eminem).
• Basslines are now back in full force but are often used in conjunction with 808s. This was one of my main qualms with crunk and snap music; a bassline is what gives a song its soul.
• Arrangements are becoming more dense and musical.
• Auto-Tuned, sung choruses are taking the place of repetitive chant hooks.
• Examples: “Fire Burning” by Sean Kingston and “Blame It” by Jamie Foxx feat. T-Pain

Am I missing anything? I want your input on what typifies the Southern rap genre and where music is headed.*** With a new president and the turn of the decade steadily approaching, music almost certainly has more surprises in store for us and I’ll be reporting live from the trenches every step of the way.

*This song is bewildering even to me.

**I believe I’m paraphrasing Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond but I’m not entirely sure.

***Many of the changes listed in this article also reflect the return of R&B, but that’s a story for another day.

If you spend a lot of your time around artists and musicians, you’ve probably heard this more than once:

“Nothing is original. Everything has been done before.”

If someone makes this statement in a group of people, one of two things will happen:

1. Everyone agrees and gets a sheepish look on their face as if to say, “Yeah. I guess we suck.”
2. Frustrated with the idea of their aspirations hanging in the balance, someone references a specific work or artist as a counterargument. The two people then volley back and forth ad infinitum. Or worse, someone defers to the age old bore-fest “…but what is art, really?” Usually in these cases I just keep my mouth shut. If I’m feeling playful, I’ll chime in with something about collage art and sampling or ask for opinions on how tools affect originality.

But the answer is simple:

Yes, everything has been done. But not everything has been done well.

Now go create.

When you have as extensive of a mic closet and gear list as I have, it’s easy to get caught up in the pissing contest of gear sluttery.  I’ll see your C12 and raise you a 47 (ORIGINAL tubes mind you…the ones with the schwastikas on them).  I’ll see your GML and raise you a Pultec; I’ll see your Pultec and raise you a K&H.  We marvel over the beauty and fidelity and richness of high-dollar recording equipment, but it’s easy also easy to forget that if something is truly the highest of fi, the end product can only be as good as what you put into it.

Hi-fi, otherwise known as high fidelity, is a term that was adopted in a time when most recording technology could not physically reproduce sound in a veristic way.  For instance, carbon microphones from the 1870s had very low sound quality, limited frequency response, and a whole lot of noise.  These were the most common microphones in the early days of AM radio—Reginald Fessenden, the Canadian inventor who pioneered transmitted voice and music along with Guglielmo Marconi, used carbon microphones for his first audio transmissions.  These mics were considerably low fidelity and contributed to the desire for more high fidelity equipment.

In 1973, a standard for noise, distortion, and frequency response was established by the Deutsches Institut fur Normung.  The DIN 45500 standard was meant to be a guideline that set out the minimum requirements for audio gear to earn the “hi-fi” label.  Of course, once the term became popular marketers for audiophile equipment began applying it everywhere since there was no governing body to regulate the use of the label.

“Fidelity” itself is defined as “the degree of accuracy with which sound or images are recorded or reproduced.”  “High-fidelity” then implies that reproduction can be achieved with a reasonably true approximation of the original source.  Note that this does not indicate that hi-fi gear will make the original source sound better.  That presence bump in the upper-mids on your SM57 is not, strictly speaking, “high-fidelity” because it adds extra stuff to the original sound.

If you are a weak singer, you won’t make yourself sound better by having a super hi-fi tube microphone.  On the contrary, hi-fi gear will accentuate every shortcoming in your vocal performance: from mouth-noises to mucus in your sinuses, hi-fi mics can hear it all.

Oh, and they won’t fix your pitch either…

In choosing the right microphone for the job, I draw a distinction between two types of recording gear: smart and dumb.  A “smart” piece of gear is one that picks up everything around it.  These are usually condenser or ribbon mics that take very little energy to excite the diaphragm into inducing electrical current.  In common application, these mics are best for room mics and distance miking soft acoustic instruments like acoustic guitar or strings.  For vocals, they can be great for show-stopping performers who sound so great in the real world that you don’t want their reproduced sound to be impeded by the recording method.

But the vast majority of instrumentalists, vocalists, and performers of all varieties are not seasoned pros and this is where a “dumb” piece of gear can be a lifesaver.  Dumb microphones do not pick up every little noise.  The best example is the all-purpose SM7 vocal mic.  This dynamic microphone has a very heavy diaphragm that requires a lot of energy to excite.  As such, the little ticky noises of smacking lips and glottal buzzes don’t get picked up as readily.  SM7s are generally renowned for their work in broadcast voice and for screaming vocalists.  But this workhorse is supremely underrated for intimate, breathy vocals where extracurricular noises are commonplace.

When talkie movies took over in the late 1920s, many silent movie actors found themselves out of a job because their voices (which were unnecessary in their trade previously) did not suit the new medium.  Now that most of the country is switching to HD, have you seen an actor and just thought, “This guy really shouldn’t be filmed in HD”? 

I was at the first game at the new Cowboys stadium with that mammoth HD screen mid-field.  When they cut to a close-up of anybody, the audience got an unfavorable view of every physical abnormality of every football player, coach, cheerleader, and drunken fan. 

Never let anyone you love be made that big in that kind of detail.  Ever.

In ivory tower versions of audio engineering, the end goal is generally said to be creating high-fidelity recordings.  But in the real world, the truest reproduction of a sound source does not create the best overall sonic experience to the listener. 

The snare drum is an instrument that receives a lot of interest in the mixing stage.  Prince famously said that the most important things in a mix are “the boom and the slap.”  Many people like their snares “thuddy” while others prefer “punchy.”  One term that I hear a lot is “poppy” and unlike the previous terms, poppy implies a very specific effect.

First, let’s agree on our nomenclature.  I use the term poppy to mean something that sounds like it is popping, i.e. “I want this snare to really pop here.”  This is not expressly talking about the kind of snare drum found in typical pop music (although many of the snare drums in pop music might be described as poppy).

What sonic qualities do you think of when you pop a balloon with a needle?  It’s loud, it’s sudden, and it’s short (that’s what she said…).  So in terms of an audio waveform, something described as poppy should theoretically contain a lot of initial transients and then go away relatively quickly.

You can achieve this effect in a number of ways.  One way is to use single-ply heads on the snare drum.  A thinner drumhead takes less energy to excite and has less dampening.  Of course thinner heads, especially on snare drums, aren’t well equipped to take the kind of beating most rock drummers would apply and not everyone wants to go to the trouble of changing drumheads every time they want a certain effect.  Furthermore, thinner heads tend to ring longer so it doesn’t create the sudden shortness that we are after.

Another way might be to use an exciter or transient shaper.  These are somewhat more obscure pieces of audio gear and not everyone has access to them or would know how to use them properly.  A much simpler way is to simply use a compressor.

As you are probably aware, a compressor is a form of Automatic Gain Control.  If are in charge of managing the volume of the track, you’d sit at the mixer with your finger on the fader and listen; if the sound got just a little too loud, you’d turn the fader down just a bit.  When the sound returns to normal, you push the fader back up to the starting position.  If the sound got wayyyyy too loud, you’d turn the fader down a whole bunch, then go back to the starting position.

Compressors can do all that for you.  But as in the example, there is going to be some amount of time between your ear recognizing something is too loud and your finger being able to execute the gain control on the fader.  Compressors generally have the same problem in reaction time.

Of course nowadays we have all kinds of cool things in the digital domain like lookahead limiters which can actually see what’s coming from an audio level standpoint and apply the proper compression necessary so that the compression is relatively inaudible. 

But in the analog world, no compressor is a look-ahead (without using a whole lot of analog rigmarole involving delays and such that I won’t go in to).  That means that there is ALWAYS window between the initial sound getting to the compressor and the compressor kicking in that passes signal through the compressor untouched by the AGC.  This window is adjusted by the “Attack Time” knob on the compressor, but no matter how fancy an analog compressor is, the Attack Time is always going to be greater than zero.

So if you imagine patching a compressor into a snare drum track with the threshold relatively low with the ratio relatively high, the snare drum will sound and for a brief moment the attack transients will get through untouched, almost as though there is no compressor in the chain, before the compressor snaps in and reduces the level.

This has an interesting effect because those first few transients will always be at full volume since no analog compressor can operate fast enough to catch them.  No matter how hard you squish and flatten the snare drum, in the analog world some will always get through untouched.

Of course you don’t need to have analog gear to accomplish this, any analog compressor emulator will do the trick as well as any digital compressor not set in look-ahead, soft limit, or brick wall mode.

So this window provides that initial explosion of attack transients.  When the compressor kicks in, the snare drum suddenly drops in level making the snare drum appear to be shorter in duration.  You can add in reverb or even make the threshold higher so that the snare drum doesn’t drop drastically in level, but the point is to use the compressor to accentuate initial transients.

This effect was popular in the 70s and 80s and can really make a snare drum cut through the mix without overtaking it.  Instead of focusing the ear on a grand legato snare drum with a half second decay time—which might sound over the rest of the band—the mind is instantly focused on those first few transients that occur in literally hundredths of a second and then get out of the way.  Like I mentioned in my comments on Keith’s blog post about Claps and Snaps, shorter rhythmic sounds focus the ear on the exactitude of the beat causing your attention to snap suddenly to the meter of the tune rather than rounding everything out and blending many things together.

If any of you dear readers have any sonic descriptors you’d like me to analyze, feel free to comment below and I’ll do my best to sort it out for you.

Key Signature: C minor
Special Songwriting Devices Used: V minor chord, starting the chorus on a chord other than the root

Note: This post requires a basic knowledge of intervals, solfege syllables, and voice leading. If you don’t understand a term underlined with dots (like this), move your mouse over it for the definition.

The other day I was messing around with “Amazing” by Kanye West on guitar and noticed that it uses an often neglected chord in modern pop music, the V minor. Before we get into why the V minor is unusual (and what Kanye has in common with Coolio), here’s the chord progression:

Verse: C minor (2x), G minor, C minor
Chorus: Ab major, C minor, G minor, C minor

Or in Roman numeral analysis form:

Verse: I minor (2x), V minor, I minor
Chorus: bVI major, I minor, V minor, I minor

In “Amazing,” G minor is the diatonic V chord–the triad built on the fifth note of the scale. But V chords in today’s minor key pop songs almost always have either a major third (making it a V major chord borrowed from the parallel major) or no third at all. The diatonic V minor chord is rarely used.

Origins of the V Major Chord in a Minor Key Context

Most American pop stems from jazz or blues harmony, but if there’s one songwriting device that has carried over from classical, it’s borrowing the V major chord from the parallel major key in the context of a minor progression.* In these situations, there is a non-diatonic note: the V chord’s major third, which will always be the leading tone of the key. This note has a very strong tendency to resolve up to the root note by a half step. The result is better voice leading back to the root than a V minor chord would provide. Since a V chord resolving to I (or more specifically, ti going to do within that resolution) is considered the strongest tendency in any key, the voice leading is (apparently) so important here that composers have been using this non-diatonic chord for ages.

But Kanye doesn’t swing that way.

If you’ve ever studied classical music, you know that the concept of proper voice leading is meant to make things sound “smooth.” But smooth can often turn into boring, particularly in the context of non-orchestral music. By using the V minor chord, Kanye adds some much needed harmonic interest to a relatively sparse arrangement.

So rare is the V minor chord in pop** that hearing it played on a single instrument (piano in this case) sounds a bit unusual, even medieval. The expectation of that leading tone over the V is so strong that, even for me, it was difficult to sing the minor 3rd instead of a major 3rd.

Combined with a dragging groove of an upright piano, it ends up sounding more like something to be played in the background of a saloon shoot out scene from a Western/Cowboy flick than a hit single for a mainstream rapper.  In fact, if you remove the characteristic elements from this chorus–play V major instead of V minor and change the first I minor to IV minor (more on this below)–you’ve got Gangsta’s Paradise, choir and all:

Chorus Root Chord Placement

As I talked about in my analysis of “Kids” by MGMT, starting a progression on something other than the root automatically sounds more intelligently written. While pre-choruses and bridges often start on other chords (in order to build tension for the inevitable release into the section that follows), choruses almost always start on the root chord. When one doesn’t, it almost always ends there. “Amazing” is no exception and falls into the latter category.

But what’s interesting is that the chorus also has another root chord: the second one of the progression.  So to expand on what I said in the previous paragraph, here are your root chord placement options for choruses with four chords or less, listed in order from most to least common:

• Option 1: Starting on the root chord. This option solidly establishes the key from the outset, allowing the chords that follow to create new flavors and define the overall emotional content of the chorus in relation to the root. By far the most common option.
• Option 2: Ending on the root chord. In these cases, the beginning chords lift the listener up, create tension, and eventually resolve to the root–using the harmony to create dynamics. This is a fairly common option, but also very powerful and can be a good way to shake up your songwriting or cure writer’s block. Examples include “My Hero” by Foo Fighters and “Go With The Flow” by Queens of the Stone Age.
• Option 3: Using the root as chord #3 out of 4. This technique tricks you into thinking that it’s going to be a three chord progression, then adds a fourth chord which says “nope, it’s still going, the thought/feeling isn’t done yet.” Can create a cyclical feeling. This option is not totally unheard of but it’s rare. MGMT’s “Kids” is one example.
• Option 4: Using the root as chord #2 out of 4. By far the rarest option and probably for good reason. I have no idea how to characterize what this option does emotionally, but in the case of “Amazing” it’s a defining characteristic.
• Option 5: No root chord at all. I can’t think of any pop choruses that do this, so if you can, leave it in the comments!

(Note: Although the above is applicable to most choruses, obviously the emotional results may change with different combinations of these options or a greater number of chords. And by the way, you won’t find this list in a text book.)

So not only does the chorus start on a chord other than the root (in this case the bVI major), but the progression goes back to the root on the second of four chords, which is highly unusual. The result is a unique, signature chord progression (in pop you only have to be unique within about 10 years).

Well folks, that about wraps things up. As with all of my analyses I expect some good counter points (ha…) and a healthy dose of “this song sucks” / “this song still sucks” comments. But before we part ways I want to answer a question that Phil posed in his latest blog post:

“When was the last time you at home got a record, sat down, and listened to it? Really listened to it. Didn’t put it on while you clicked through Facebook or checked the local news. Just listened?”

My answer to his question is 808s and Heartbreak. And when “Amazing” came on for the first time, I had no idea Young Jeezy was going to come in because he wasn’t listed in the song title. I’ll be honest, I’ve had mixed feelings about Jeezy since day one, but when I first heard his voice come in over this strange track with the reverse reverb, I thought it was the hardest shit I’d ever heard.*** I got chills. And the fact that I wasn’t expecting it made it 10 times more powerful, supporting Phil’s theory that the less we know and see about the music before we listen, the better.

Purchase “Amazing” by Kanye West on iTunes.
Purchase “Amazing” by Kanye West on Amazon MP3.

Read more posts from my Compositional Analysis series.

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*Actually, classical music**** tends to use a V7, which is based on a V major with a minor 7th on it, forming a tritone between the 3rd and 7th of the chord and creating an even stronger pull to I. Though we typically think of classical music as triadic, this is the one 7th chord that classical composers used regularly.

The V7 chord is dominant-functioning, which in layman’s terms means our ears hear it as having a very strong pull to another chord, in this case back to the I major. This movement is called dominant resolution. The V chord builds tension while the root chord releases it. Since we have this strong expectation of resolution from listeners, the voice leading used for this transition is considered to be particularly important.

**The only other recent V minor example I can think of offhand is “Clocks” by Coldplay, although in this case the V minor is used to help establish the song’s Dorian tonality. The opening piano arpeggio can be analyzed as follows: I/3, V-/5, IV/5 or in other words: I major (1st inversion), V minor (2nd inversion), IV major (2nd inversion).

***This transition is shortened on the YouTube version.

****Yes, I’m using the term “classical” in a colloquial manner here; I’m not referring to the Classical period. This is terrible… even my asterisks have asterisks.

Voice leading is a common songwriting or arranging technique which (traditionally) results in smooth-sounding chord transitions.

To use smooth or ‘proper’ voice leading when arranging a chord progression for an ensemble, write each instrument’s part so that the performers will make the smallest note jumps possible or no jump at all if the note occurs in both chords (”common tones”).

This technique is particularly important when writing harmonies for background vocalists because smaller jumps are easier to hear and sing against a melody.

Soloists and lead singers are expected to break from this principle, since larger melodic leaps provide interest and can make a melody more memorable.

IMAGE

I had almost thought about skipping this week’s article because I’m just so damn sick of talking about American Idol.  I think I might have talked more at length about it in the past few blog posts than I have my entire life.  But I just can’t fight the natural progression…

A quick look at the Billboard Pop chart is disturbing.  With Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Keri Hilson, Lady Gaga, and Jordin Sparks making up half the top ten, there is a stern indication that today’s music industry is focused squarely on image either at the expense of or in addition to the music.  Even the #1 hit that at first glance bucks the trend—The Black-Eyed Peas’ “I Got a Feeling”—still features the walking tabloid circus that is Fergie.  Also one of two rock acts in the top ten, Cobra Starship, features Leighton Meester from Gossip Girl in some fabulous TV/Pop Music synergy.  In fact, just looking at the chart in a cover-flow makes me feel more like I’m reading Teen Vogue or Perez Hilton than an industry trade.

In regard to last week’s article, there is indeed an emphasis on star singers as opposed to star musicians or star songwriters.  However, that is nothing new to this industry.  Michael Jackson, Madonna, Elvis, and all kinds of artists throughout pop history have relied on songwriters.  Generally speaking, behind anybody who has a plehtora of hit records and songs is an army of songwriters helping to sustain the artists’ commercial magic.

More unique and insidious than this is American Idol’s emphasis on the look and style of their contestants, which is emblematic of the larger music industry.  Could Kelly Clarkson have won with her current Rubenesque figure that seems to be generating so much negative buzz?  If you take Ruben Studdard off the scales (and many conspiracy theorists would have you replace him with the decidedly more svelte Clay Aiken) it looks like the seven remaining contestants might weigh a thousand pounds, tops. 

It is an indication that the physical attributes of a pop artist are at least as much a part of their celebrity as their music.  I now recognize many artists from television and the trades who I’ve never even heard a song from—instances where the image has both superceded and preceded the music.  Can you believe that there was ever a time when America thought Madonna was African American?  Her first single, 1982’s Everybody, was an R&B hit and the label, Sire Records, left her image off the cover and instead put images of urban minorities playing in the streets so as not to eschew her then-primary demographic.  I can’t even imagine somebody having a #1 hit today without knowing what they look like, let alone their race!

We have grown accustomed to seeing our pop stars in candid environments, fashionable moments, and compromising positions.  Given the headlines that have been generated by the nude pictures of Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Greene, I almost expect new pop stars to have lingerie shoots before ever releasing their first single.

All this is just to say that the music landscape has changed.  It has been said that radio is the theater of the mind because radio engages the imagination in a way that spoonfed images never could.  Instead of a mysterious everyman/everywoman disembodiedly singing a tune that could be about you or me or anybody, we are given very distinct images of who is singing to us and the meaning is colored by our perceptions of that person.  Would Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” have been such a tantalizing pop sensation if a bald and toothless paraplegic sang it instead of some new age sex symbol?

Music has become a footnote to the image, the background music to a film sequence, the atmosphere to a car commercial, and a novel dabbling for celebrity playtime.  The purity of the art form seems to have been lost in the mainstream and that is where the rise of indie labels has taken up the slack.

Maybe on some level, in some small way, the flight toward indie rock has been a means of escaping the mass-market approach to the music business.  In the same way twentysomething hipsters might reject owning a TV, they find solace in the magic of an unknown artist and the possibilities of a song without a face.  I couldn’t buy an Animal Collective poster with the band members on it if I wanted to and I am eternally grateful for that.

The kind of synergy that is currently emphasized in the music business has been a long time coming.  Starting with Billboard and other music rags, expanding to MTV, and finally culminating in the media saturation of pop icons on network television and major media.  This has been good for the music business on some level because it is free marketing and promotion.  The bad thing is that music is no longer its own unique industry with its own idiom and no longer focuses on what it does best. 

Additionally, an image-centric music marketing approach puts the industry in an unsustainable position as artists fade with the passing of a fad.  Then Big Music is stuck scrambling trying to find the next fashion to capitalize on and exploit.  Lady Gaga’s voice and music will forever be married to her image and therefore the timeframe in which she operates.  As such, there isn’t even the slightest chance that her music will live on beyond the prime years of her own life when either she or her demographic grows up.

If the industry could only refocus its efforts on recreating the special environment where music can be appreciated in its own right, without all the hype and celebrity, they’d be well on their way toward a sustainable path.  When is the last time you at home got a record, sat down, and listened to it?  Really listened to it.  Didn’t put it on while you clicked through Facebook or checked the local news.  Just listened?

When more people can say that they honestly sit down and appreciate music for music’s sake, not as an accent or embellishment to something else, that’s when we’ll know that the music business is surefooted once again.

Today the Wizard of Waukesha passed away at the age of 94.  The father of multi-track recording techniques and a pioneer in musical technology, Les Paul was really the start of the modern music industry.  Anyone who has ever plugged a guitar into an amp or put sound on sound owes Mr. Paul a huge debt of gratitude.

I remember my first trip to New York—the first thing I did when I got off the plane was catch a cab to the Iridium Jazz Club on Broadway to get a glimpse of the man who started it all.  I had purchased the tickets weeks in advance.  Over the phone, a surly and quick New Yorker told me that he played two sets every Monday and the first one had sold out.  For the next few weeks, I had nightmares in which I stepped off the plane, turned on my phone, and got a message notifying me that Paul had died during his early set. 

Well fortunately for me that didn’t happen and I had the honor of witnessing one of the greatest figures in the history of the music business toward the end of his prodigious life still doing what he loved best.

You can read his awe-inspiring story anywhere:  how he revolutionized the guitar, how he created sound-on-sound, how his experiments with multi-track recording techniques changed the face of popular music.  This post is not meant to be a biography chronicling his achievements in the music world.  Instead, this is a celebration of a man whose relentless pursuit of his own passions allowed him to achieve those innovations and whose spirit, like gravity, drew crowds of professionals and amateurs alike toward him.

Surely if Les Paul had never been born, somebody else would have perfected the electric guitar.  Leo Fender and Adolph Rickenbacher both created and marketed their own solid-body electrics during the 30s.  And surely if Les Paul hadn’t been around, Bing Crosby would’ve found somebody else to tinker with the Nazi tape recorder brought to him from The War. 

But the fact is, Les Paul was around and his enthusiasm for all things musical made him the prime target for anybody with anything music related.  Ultimately, that is how one man could have been at the center for all the activity in the early music technology business—people simply wanted to be around him.  They knew that he was the kind of guy who could and would milk a musical idea for all it was worth.

His early career was a time when you couldn’t go to Guitar Center and get an hecho en Mexico Telecaster for $130.  You had to carve an electric yourself from a plank of wood.  You couldn’t just walk in to Best Buy and get some portable Japanese hard disc recorder.  You had to invent your own recording device from scratch, solder it up, and test it out. 

There were no books on multi-track recording effects, no blogs, and no degrees in audio engineering.  But by the time he was 10 years old, he was already learning about radio electronics at the local radio station.  He first experimented with overdubbing by adding new bumps to his mother’s piano rolls.  He was building crystal radio kits before he learned how to drive.  Despite his life of innovation, Les Paul never even graduated high school.

Les Paul’s story is a great American tale of a man driven by his passions to create, innovate, and perfect.  Even toward the end of his life in that dim club on Broadway, his fervor was palpable.  His set at Iridium was a captivating hour-plus of storytelling and jamming.  Interspersed with music, Paul regaled the audience with brilliant anecdotes of his life in the music business: things he had done or people he had met.  He then invited numerous guest musicians (amateurs and pros alike) onto the stage and played through songs with them, smiling and laughing all along the way.

In 2005 Paul released his first recording since the 1970s.  Les Paul & Friends: American Made, World Played earned two Grammys and featured guest performances by Peter Frampton, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, and many more.  Like his sets at Iridium, the record was a testament to a long and fruitful life at the epicenter of modern music.

Surrounded by friends and family, Les Paul died today of complications arising from pneumonia and left behind a long and inspiring legacy not only of accomplishments and innovations, but also proof positive that when talent and passion intersect anything is possible. 

Les, you will be missed.

Discovery

Last week’s post on the word “pitchy” got a little bit of a discussion going on American Idol which was an excellent segue into one of the many topics I had hoped to address in my series on re-thinking record labels.  It’s a little bit out of order from the schedule I had originally planned, but when the public demands something I oblige myself to deliver!

However, despite my original outline it seems more appropriate for this post to lead off our discussion on how record labels have changed in the past few years because today’s topic deals with the discovery of new artists—the very beginning of the whole music business process. 

By “discovering new artists” I mean finding those artists who are worthy to be put in the great music apparatus that, through the alchemy of the industry, churns out radio hits and gold records.  Note:  this is not the process by which the general populace discovers new music for consumption.  That is something I call avataring and I will delve further into that in a later post.

Now, discovering new artists to feed the music machine presents a paradox in our discussion.  Because we are trying to think of how the industry has evolved from the classic paradigm, some may surmise that we don’t need to feed the machine anymore because the machine is dying/dead anyway.  In other words, is it worth discussing how we find new music to put into the industry works if the industry is no longer necessary?  Chicken or egg, etc…

Well, for the time being anyway record labels are still around and for the sake of compartmentalizing this aspect for discussion, let’s assume that there is a machine to feed.

So let’s say I’m a record label executive and I need to find some new talent to make my quota for this quarter.  In the 1970s, I’d have an army of A&R scouts scouring local clubs and local radio nationwide trying to find that one group that had that certain something that might make them a hit.  Maybe they don’t need to produce a hit record right away, but the right chemistry in the band might mean that with some development a hit might be in the future.

Fast-forward to the 2000s.  Record labels are losing money year over year and downsizing considerably.  A&R scouting departments no longer have nearly as many feet on the ground combing nearly as wide of an area looking for the next big thing.  Furthermore, the places where they would go if they had the personnel are disappearing too.  Small local clubs that support local musicians and undiscovered artists are disappearing by the boatload.  Forget about local radio, how many Jack/Bob/other friendly neighborhood syndicated satellite radio programs are there now?  When’s the last time you heard a local act on your radio?  Instead it’s a 40-minute loop of Katy Perry and Lady Gaga and Kanye.

Also, the record labels are not in the mood to sit and wait for hits to develop.  They need results and they need them fast.  That means that they are looking for pre-packaged artists that come with their own prefab audience.

Enter American Idol, this is the template for how new music has and will come to the great machine of the music business.  Television pseudo-celebrity creates a readymade national market for the consumption of music.  America’s appetite for celebrity is insatiable and everyday we lower our standards for what makes someone a celebrity (when all else fails, lower your standards).  I was watching TV the other night and there is this show called “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.”  They did a run-down of everybody in that show and I turned to my girlfriend and said, “Who the hell are any of those people?”  A celebrity used to have to do something worth celebrating to become a celebrity, not just be a media whore on some ridiculous “reality show” making out with another chick in the hot tub or losing 40 pounds in a week.

But I digress.  If Americans see a celebrity on TV and they have a CD out, by god somebody is going to buy it!  At least the chances are higher that some Suit at a record label will give a talent-less hack a shot over a decently talented band who maybe a hundred people had actually been able to see when they opened for the Bodines at Main Street Days.

That’s why Warner Bros. took a chance on Paris Hilton’s atrocious debut album Paris, Casablanca took a chance on Lindsay Lohan’s equally atrocious debut Speak, and why Koch Entertainment (affiliated with Universal for distribution) took a chance on Idol reject William Hung.  All of these people got airplay on radio stations world-wide because “Hey guys, you saw them on TV last night!  Check out their new single!!”

Television is great because it buys into the cult of celebrity and brings new music passively to record label decision-makers.  They can sit in their office or eat dinner in front of the TV, catch a song or two by some pretty face on Idol and know that if they signed them to a deal, they’d have something that could promote itself.  And that’s the key: these are actions to reduce costs in discovery and promotion.

Of course TV isn’t the only medium where decision-makers can find musicians with built in audiences.  The Internet (did you really think I was going to make an entire article about this without addressing the Internet?) has its own ways of getting music to the powers-that-be with its own specious ways of inferring a built in audience.

The new movie Funny People has this great bit in it where Adam Sandler’s character is doing stand-up at a MySpace convention and says something like “I have 10,000 friends on MySpace…that equates to how many in the real world?”  It couldn’t be more true, just because your site is heavily trafficked and you have thousands of MySpace fans, how many of them actually translate into real ticket-buying, CD-collecting, T-shirt-wearing bona fide fans.  Anybody heard anything from The Arctic Monkeys recently?  Because Billboard surely hasn’t…Still labels have interns who do nothing all day but scour MySpace looking for bands with a decent sound and a good following.

All of these are ways of managing costs:  cutting A&R scouts, reducing national travel and show expenses, minimizing promotion expense, and dismissing development expenses.

Despite all of this, nobody has the ability to discover new music to bring to a national audience like the record labels.  Regardless of how bad they are at their jobs, there are still people being paid to do nothing but “discover” new music.  What we have is a serious misallocation of resources and a steadfast refusal for a dying industry to invest in its own future.  Rather than looking for the next Beatles who can still move records 40 years after they break up or the next Rolling Stones who have spent 40 years performing sold-out tours (and probably will continue for 40 more), the labels are content with forgettable fill-ins plucked straight from Best Week Ever who then fade into afterthoughts with a good night’s sleep.

The technological revolution still has not produced a certified way for anyone to bring great new music to the attention of major labels.  Perhaps that’s due in part to willful ignorance on the part of labels themselves, but labels could still have the market cornered on discovering worthwhile music that will stand the test of time if they’d simply shift their focus away from yesterday’s losses and today’s easy dollars.

I am a big fan of the English language. When I was little and the teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, the first thing I said was “A DINOSAUR!” (Mom always said I could be anything I want to be…). After that, my childhood ambition was to be an etymologist. I discovered rather quickly that that isn’t much of a growth industry, so I pulled the plug on that dream. But people who know me know that I like to speak colorfully but precisely and so certain words really get my goat.

The latest word that really irks me is “massive.” I can’t watch the news or listen to NPR or read a newspaper without this word appearing several times. I understand that everyone intends for this word to mean “really big” but as a student of language and physics, I just can’t accept certain uses. In quantum physics, massive means anything that has mass. An elephant is massive, a feather is massive, Cowboy stadium is massive, a molecule of oxygen is massive. At rest, a photon has no mass. It is a zero-rest mass particle and is therefore non-massive.

Granted, this is a bit of an esoteric definition and not everybody is well-versed in quantum physics, but I still think massive should only apply to real things that have real weight. Like what exactly is a “massive earthquake” or a “massive heart attack”? What part of those things are massive? An Earthquake can have lots of destructive power, but in the end there is no mass to the earthquake, it is a seismic consequence of earthly phenomena, but not a tangible thing. A heart attack can be serious, but there is no substance to it, it is a biological event.  I know that the dictionary says these are acceptable uses, but it’s a bit like calling something a “basic acid.”  Yes, that is technically correct, but there is a certain level where that phrase is laughable.

These are the things that keep me up at night, waking suddenly in a cold sweat.

Yes, I have a girlfriend…

Well in the music business we have another term that is way overused and now saturates common parlance due to the disturbing popularity of American Idol. “Pitchy” is often the epitome of inexact speech in the music business and it usually serves little purpose other than being a polite way of saying “Hey, you sang that wrong.”  But just what the heck are they intending to say?  I mean, anybody who sings should be pitchy in that they have pitches.  You certainly wouldn’t want to sing without pitch.

There are three real uses for the term pitchy.

I’m a producer and I know that you sang that out of tune, unfortunately I don’t know whether your were flat or sharp so I’m going to use a vague term that could mean either. I don’t have time for proper ear training or simply didn’t pay attention to know what exactly you did, so I’m going to send you on a wild goose chase for the next few takes and let you figure it out on your own. Thank God you paid me all up front!

This is typical producer-speak that you’ll hear in the studio numerous times through any vocal session. Many producers don’t like to admit at any time that they don’t know what’s going on. They’ll take shelter in vague terms like this so that they can appear to be in control while getting the artist to do the leg work for them. Clever indeed.

You’ll often hear this application of the term from non-singing producers and those who gained their musical credibility by playing set-pitch (like a bass a la Randy Jackson) or non-pitched instruments (like drummers).

This usage is sometimes permissible because musicians are very delicate people, especially singers. Many, especially those who focus on live performance, prefer to just get behind the mic and wail, not really caring for a critique on their performance. In the studio, they’d just prefer the producer to say, “Nah, do it again one more time with feeling!” Eventually they’ll get it. As a producer/engineer it is our job to decide when it is proper to be delicately oblique and when it is necessary to be unapologetically exact.

I’m a singer who is having to do a little bit more vocal acrobatics than I am used to. So I’m a little under on those high high notes and a little over on those low low notes.

Despite all the explanations of the term “pitchy” that try to make it sound overly technical, this is probably the best use of the term. This is when the singer kind of varies between being flat and sharp.

For instance, I am an awful singer and my comfortable range is probably about a perfect 4^th. But hey, people don’t pay me to sing on their records. If I were to try and go beyond that range my pitch center would naturally pull anything beyond that range back toward the center. Therefore, all the notes higher than a 4^th might be flat and all the notes lower than a 4^th might be sharp. The opposite might be true for someone who in their mind is trying to overcompensate by overestimating the distances on highs and lows.

In these instances, it isn’t really prudent to go out and say “Ok, you were sharp here, here, and here and you were flat there, there, and there.” So instead someone might say that you are pitchy, but I think that statement needs to come with a footnote saying that you are undershooting the highs and overshooting the lows.

You’d probably encounter this kind of pitchiness with singer/songwriters, indie musicians, and people who aren’t overly confident in their voice. Present company included…

I’m a singer singing in genre and I like to bend notes! It’s ethnomusicological!

This is common in blues and jazz and is the ivory tower version of pitchiness. For example, on the last word of the song, the band lands on the tonic and the singer starts just under the pitch and bends so that they are in tune, ultimately winding up on the desired pitch.

Of course in this instance, the flatness and sharpness aren’t necessarily undesired and there would be no reason for a producer to call it pitchy. They’d just say “Wow, what soul!” It might be necessary for someone to ask if you could do the scoop a little quicker or slower so that it doesn’t sound like a mistake, but ultimately it’s just character.

I suppose I should talk about the ethnomusicological underpinnings of this kind of inflection. Jazz and blues are rooted in an African (American) tradition that is historically grounded in untrained singing. Bending may have originated simply from common singers initially missing the note, but improvising a way to get to the right note and sound artful in the process.

Ultimately, I think that Randy Jackson is utilizing the first kind of pitchiness in his commentaries in order to stylishly obfuscate and not embarrass himself on national TV. But in his own explanation found here, he seems to side with definition two.