This is by no means the end-all-be-all of how-tos on the subject and I invite all of you readers out there to contribute to the body of knowledge with your personal expertise. As for me, I can only speak from my own experience as a professional audio engineer (plus a couple years in Information Technology, but we don’t like to talk about those years…). So please offer your opinions or questions in the comments below if you are so inclined.

I should admit right off the bat that I am a supporter of Macintosh computers and Pro Tools in the professional environment. The realities of the professional world decree that this is how you must go if you wish to have a successful career. I do swing every which way: I have done high-profile professional projects on Microsoft computers, Nuendo, Logic, Cubase, and tape. By and large, however, contemporary creative demands as well as the desire for portability and universality demand a Macintosh and Pro Tools combination.

Mac or PC:
Forget the I/Os, forget the gear (for now). Heck, even forget about the talent. In today’s music production world, you cannot record anything of any kind without a good computer. For the audiophiles out there, I too am a tape guy when the opportunity presents itself. However, the availability of the medium coupled with budgets and real-world artist demands often preclude the use of our beloved reel-to-reels.

So before you choose between Pro Tools and Logic and Nuendo, you have to pick the optimum machine to support those programs. When the question is posed to me there are three main distinctions that I like to draw:

1)  This one is kind of arbitrary but is necessary exposition because, when talking about technology, you will often get the conscientious objector who takes issue with the nomenclature: a Macintosh computer is a PC.

PC stands for personal computer, so the question really comes down to Macintosh or Microsoft. That kind of has a nice ring to it, so I’m curious why the debate is framed in such a manner. Apologies to those Linux supporters out there, but Linux isn’t even a wildcard in this tournament.

2)  A much more substantive and important distinction to draw is that Macintosh produces an operating system so that it can sell its computers. On the other hand, Microsoft produces computers so that it can sell its operating system.

This is a subtle difference, but very important. When your Macintosh computer crashes and you need to rebuild from scratch, you can use any OS installer on your computer. Mac doesn’t even ask for a serial number. That is because Macintosh is in the business of selling computers and the OS itself is simply a construction so that they can sell them machines themselves. That means that every component that is in the machine has an express purpose, specific to the operating system. Likewise, every line of code that exists in the operating system has an express purpose in the functioning of those components.

On the other hand, when your Microsoft (or rather Microsoft-based) computer crashes, you’ll need to have your officially sanctioned serial numbers and identifiers because Microsoft’s sole desire as a company (for our purposes) is to sell an operating system. Not the computer. If you actually go to the Microsoft store, you will not see a single computer “made” by Microsoft. The actual computers that run Microsoft Operating systems are produced by Dell, Asus, Lenovo, and *shriek* even Macintosh. Of course, the high competition for producers running a Microsoft-based platform means that the price can be significantly cheaper, but ultimately that means that the company creating your computer has little at stake in how the operating system functions with the computer itself.

3)  The third distinction deals more with what your computers are actually doing: The computer and the operating system itself has no idea what operations you are performing.

Whether it is a Mac or a Microsoft or Linux, no computer has any real idea whether you are watching a movie, editing a family video, touching up a photograph, or recording death metal. It is just doing calculations. The real question when dealing with music production is how quickly can VERY LARGE chunks of information accessed, transferred, and put to use.

Macintosh realizes this. For a very long time, the talking point about Macs was that they handled big calculations and files better than Microsoft. While this may be true from an OS standpoint, a processor or hard drive or stick of RAM doesn’t know whether it’s running on OSX or Vista. The real distinction is that with Macintosh, you can accept as a given the fact that the components within your machine are top of the line and designed to handle tasks that require large computations and throughput. Macintosh knows that their demographic has long been “creative” types rather than business professionals, so the OS and machines are all designed to handle labor intensive processes.

Microsoft on the other hand, after a certain baseline, frankly doesn’t give a damn about the components that are in the computer. There are Microsoft computers out there on the market that are designed only for web-browsing and word-processing. And rightly so, Microsoft has a huge and broad market that caters to businessmen and soccer moms and even creative types, so some machines handle large computations and have max throughput while others do not.

So from these three distinctions, it should be clear that you buy a Microsoft computer, and with the right tweaks and customizations, it can perform equally to a Mac. However, it will require more thoughtful consideration on the part of the consumer than buying a Mac with a very small set of top-of-the-line variables.

In my next article, I will examine some of the specific functions of Mac and Microsoft operating systems themselves.

Anyway, here’s what I’m really getting at: you wouldn’t eat breakfast and dinner at the same time, would you? That’s gross. To this end, the absolute top of the top mixers (i.e. the ones that charge $10K/song–there are about 20 of them in the world) make sure all of the editing is done before they begin by having their assistants prep all their sessions.*

And that’s how it should be. Not only is it gross to mix and edit at the same time, but multitasking is actually less productive than doing things one at a time. (My freelancer readers will know what I’m talking about here.**) Technical difficulties are the arch-rival of creativity. They will throw you off track and kill your creative flow. So get rid of them ahead of time. But many times you don’t hear things that need editing until the mixing process has already begun.

So whether you’re a mixing a project yourself or handing it off to a mix engineer, the following technique will save you time and headaches by enabling you to quickly simulate a mix and get all the editing done beforehand:

1. Before you begin editing, put some compression on each track you’re working on and mess with the settings until you’re really, really hearing the compressor work (try using the fastest release and a ratio of 10:1 or higher).
2. Boost the treble on your master fader with an EQ plugin. A lot. Particularly the 8 to 13kHz range.

There are two reasons why we often don’t find noises and bad edits until the mixing phase. The first is that these noises are generally very quiet and occur during a section where that particular instrument is not sounding. Since compression effectively makes quiet sections louder, the mixing stage can bring noises to the front of the mix which were previously inaudible. For example:

• The guitar part hasn’t started yet, but the noise of the guitarist putting his hand on the strings makes it onto the recording.
• The drummer has stopped playing but he moves and his throne squeaks faintly.
• While editing vocal takes together, you’ve made an edit in the middle of a breath without realizing.
• You’ve edited guitar solo takes together and made an edit in the middle of a note without cross-fading, creating a pop.

These noises are often audible only in the very highest frequencies, which is why I’m also advocating a treble boost.

More Editing Tips & Common Mistakes

• I’ve found that rap producers who work in Pro Tools like to edit and consolidate everything exactly to the downbeats, sometimes for looping purposes but other times it’s just an obsessive compulsive thing. DON’T DO THIS. I know it looks gorgeous and symmetrical and all that, but it’s not worth it. Musicians and samples rarely start and end exactly on a beat, so you’re usually harming the attack of the first note and the decay of the last. And by consolidating those edits, you’re also making it impossible to remedy the problem later by cross-fading.

• Before you consolidate regions in Pro Tools, cross-fade at every edit or cut point, even if only for a fraction of a second. Pro Tools automatically adds tiny cross-fades on edits during playback that are not preserved when consolidating regions.

• One of John Mayer’s engineers recommended that instead of cross-fading, you should make cut edits by aligning the two sound files at a zero crossing***. I haven’t found that to be effective most of the time, but it’s something to try if cross-fading isn’t working out.

*This includes pitch correction (in the rock world, Melodyne is the tool of choice, not AutoTune), Vocalign for getting background vocals tight, Beat Detective for drums, and fades. Some mid-level producers do their own editing for creative reasons, or sometimes no editor is listed at all (the band must be perfect!)

**Why multitasking is bad: http://freelancefolder.com/5-creativity-killers/

***A zero crossing is that middle line on a waveform that represents 0.

So before we arrived at the Palladium Ballroom to see My Bloody Valentine on their 2009 reunion tour, I decided to be a good friend and buy a big jug of earplugs for my group of audiophiles in case they forgot to bring any.  Sure enough they did.

It turns out that it didn’t matter because as we walked through the gate, the ushers handed each and every person their own individually packaged set of earplugs.  That’s how you know a band is going to be loud—when the venue makes a special effort to put a set of plugs in every concertgoer’s hand before the show.  I’m used to seeing a jar of cheap plugs at the bar, but this was a clearly a very different animal.

It was ungodly loud.  Perhaps the loudest thing I had ever experienced.  My dad was an airline mechanic and on Bring Your Son to Work Day I got to experience just how loud a jet engine is.  My Bloody Valentine was louder.

During their closer, an extended rendition of “You Made Me Realize”, the band chose a single chord and extended it for 17 minutes (I know because the person in front of me was recording it and had a timer on the LCD screen).  There were people wearing earplugs still trying with all their might to cover their ears with their hands.  There were people doubled over in pain.  Frankly, I couldn’t believe the sound system at the venue didn’t explode.

The experience alone made the show worthwhile, not to mention getting the chance to see one of my all-time favorite bands.  But there were a few things about the show that made me feel cheated.  If you see MBV play live, you’ll be sad to see that there is no synthesizer player.  All those great synth hooks are pre-recorded to a tape.  Without those melodies, you are pretty much left with two people playing rhythm guitar, a bass player, and a drummer.

Also, the vocals were buried to the point that sometimes I questioned whether or not anyone was actually singing (You might also wonder that from the decidedly un-engaging stage presence of the seminal shoe-gazers who seemed to exchange staring at the floor for hiding behind the microphone). In the world of live sound it’s almost cheating to hide the vocals that way—it is very easy to make a band loud if you don’t have to worry about feedback (or even hearing the vocals for that matter).

But to a certain extent that’s what Loveless sounds like.  It is a lush and thick wash of guitars with soaring synth lines against buried vocals and drums.  All this contributes to a very unique sonic texture that has extremely high average loudness, but subconsciously forces the listener to turn up the volume.

Prince famously said that the most important part of a mix is the “boom and the slap” (meaning the kick and snare).  Well, in Loveless, the drums are mixed so far back into the track that at normal listening levels they are barely noticeable.  In order to get the drums to a listenable level, the listener is forced to crank up the whole track.  By the time you get the drums to where you want to hear them, the unwavering assault of distorted electric guitars is screamingly loud.

Since I cut my teeth in the music world as a drummer, the drums are what I notice.  But many people site the same experience by trying to bring the vocals to a listenable level as well.  They pose the same problem, although to me the problem of audibility in the vocals is not remedied by additional volume since they are so legato, washed in reverb, and poorly enunciated.  But then again, lyrical content and vocal execution weren’t the primary objectives.  The point was to be loud.

For the most part, the synth hooks and even the snare drum cut by frequency content rather than relative volume in the mix.  They occupy higher registers sailing over the bed of guitars.

From a mastering standpoint, the drums and vocals have to be mixed this way so that they become part of the texture. If the transient content of the drums were any louder, the track would pump wildly as the compressor keyed on each drum hit.  Similarly, the vocals couldn’t stand out like most lead vocals do or else the mastering compressor would key on it instead as well.  The overall sound is accomplished by creating a bed that has very little fluctuation in average loudness despite any changes that might occur.

Of course I’m sure that none of this was explicitly sought after.  Like most indie bands, MBV probably tucked the vocals in because they didn’t like the sound of their own voice.  But nevertheless, the end is achieved masterfully, regardless of the means or the motivation.

I love the way Loveless sounds, but I will be the first to say that that record sounds terrible if it isn’t cranked way up.  The mix really only sounds reasonable if the volume is up, but that’s all right for pretty much anybody who wants to listen to that record anyway.

Everybody listening had to stop him before he made it through his first sentence:  A six-month contract to play at a venue?

We were stunned.

“Was that just the way they did it in Africa back then?”

“No, that’s the way everybody used to do it back then.”

Thirty years ago, young local groups were actually contracted to play at a venue for numerous dates at a time.  Allegedly, you could actually make a decent living doing it too.  You’d play a bunch of small gigs and build a local reputation for yourself or open for a bunch of bands as they passed through town and get some exposure to managers and label reps on the way.  

My wheels were spinning from his comment and I missed the rest of the anecdote (fortunately, like all great musicians, he’s prone to repeating his best stories so I got many other opportunities).  This just seemed so crazy in comparison to what is going on in the live music world today.   Another friend of mine, a very talented sax player, just got back from a gig up in New York and told me that insanely talented, well-connected musicians are playing at venues in New York for a free meal…

Look at the picture above from the Cavern Club: “THE BEATLES PLAYED HERE 292 TIMES”… 

The musical landscape has changed dramatically over the past thirty years.  Once upon a time, musicians were able to be musicians and support themselves with their music through a fertile, logical local system.  Now the clubs are gone, the gigs pay so little that they aren’t even worth the gas, radio doesn’t care about the local scene any more, and (as previously discussed) it’s pretty hard to make it big unless you are already big in the first place.

During an interesting segment on NPR’s All Songs Considered, Carrie Brownstein and a panel of music bloggers discussed whether or not labels were useful in discovering new music.  In a brief aside, Carrie mentioned that the label Kill Rock Stars almost passed on her band, electroclash darlings Sleater-Kinney, because they thought it was “just a side project”.

Now in Brownstein’s case, the group was a side project to her other band Excuse 17, but there is a prevailing philosophy among the decision-makers at labels that there should be some considerable measure of success derived specifically from the band in question in order for it to merit consideration.

That’s pretty difficult to do in today’s musical climate.  I’ve always encouraged people to not define themselves by their day job—do enough to pay the bills and support your passions.  The music business is now saying that that’s not enough.  You have to be professional before going pro.

The problem is that we no longer have a system where amateur musicians can cultivate and support themselves in the process of turning professional.  The issue is partly one of supply and demand.  Back in the 60s, venues wanted bands and there simply weren’t that many out there.  It was more difficult to even get an instrument, let alone be good enough at it to play for two hours.

All their success aside, Ringo Star and Mick Fleetwood would each tell you that they are not the most talented drummers (Mac Fleetwood doesn’t even know what 4/4 time is and he labored to explain that fact in Ken Robinson’s The Element).  The fact is that they were the guys in their local area with a drum kit.  Drums at the time were exceptionally expensive and too large for most in urban England to store.  If you had the instrument, you were in a band.  If you were in a band of any caliber, you were likely to land a gig playing at some venue with some regularity.

Every band needs somewhere to play.  Unfortunately, these days venues are so financially strapped that they’d often rather put the iPod on shuffle than hire four teenagers and a sound guy.  Consequently, the venues with live music are overrun with demos of musicians willing to play for peanuts.

In a world where it is virtually impossible to support yourself as an amateur musician, labels are left looking to people who are already famous to fill out their rosters: solo artists from previous hit-making bands like Gavin and Gwen, celebutantes, and contestants from reality TV.

Some amateur bands are lucky enough to catch a label’s attention and they land one of the precious few spots on a national tour playing a hundred dates with one band.  Obviously these gigs are rare, but they also reduce exposure to only the fans of a certain band.

It has been said that all business is local.  In the Digital Age, there is such a focus put on national and global considerations that the local concerns fall by the wayside.  But ultimately, a return to a fertile local music environment is what will repair the music business.  Labels have an interest in seeing musicians cultivated in their home environments, winning over a local demographic, and climbing a logical ladder toward regional and national success.

This was the model that worked thirty years ago and I believe it can still work with some adjustments for the digital age.  In many ways and to their detriment, record labels are stuck in the old ways of conducting business.  In this instance, I fear that they have overlooked a useful lesson from the past.  Emphasizing a fertile local music scene and a logical progression from there toward a national spotlight is what encourages a diverse and creative musical landscape.  There is no one better suited to make this happen than the labels themselves.

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.

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.

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.

Introduction

You don’t have to have a career in the music business to know that the industry climate is changing rapidly and drastically.  The Internet has forever changed the ways in which artists create and disseminate their music.  As a result the business models that held strong for practically all of last century no longer apply.  Not too long ago, the objective of every daydreaming, shaggy-haired garage band was to sign a contract with a record label—my how the times have changed. 

In the days of yore, you’d purchase instruments from the local music shop, gig at local venues, buy time at a recording studio to get a demo recorded, work the local radio ladder to get noticed by the industry, sign a record contract, then get your singles played nationally, and get your album in record stores.

These days the mom and pop music stores are gone, so are most of the locally owned live music venues. You can record in your parents’ basement, and you can post your music on your myspace.  With social networking, bands like the Arctic Monkeys were able to bypass the radio ladder altogether.  You can put your music on iTunes and CD Baby for free and promote it at the grassroots level.  Suddenly a record label’s ability to get your CD into every Wal-mart in America becomes less appealing.  Some artists can have fruitful careers without ever seriously touring or having radio play of any sort.

Every step along the way has changed: from the source of the materials to produce a record to the methods of getting noticed by the industry, from getting the attention of the consumer to the demographics of the consumers themselves.  Along the way, the resources have been democratized to such an extent that in many ways the monolithic labels of old are not necessary to accomplish the task.

These days the vast majority of stories regarding record labels are none too positive.  Labels are portrayed (and many times portray themselves) as obsolete behemoths desperately clinging to a Golden Age ideology that has long since become irrelevant.  They sue their own customers, alienate artists, wage their battles in Washington and in the courts, and despite ever decreasing clout still have the gall to think they own all the cards in the deck. 

However, there is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Record labels have provided a whole host of services to artists and many of them are as relevant today as they were 50 years ago.  Simply because the average person now has access to some tools and can attempt to make his own career without the help of some larger entity, it doesn’t mean that labels wouldn’t be better suited to do it with their deep(er) pockets and entrenched connections.  Who wouldn’t want the input of an expert who has been around the block a time or two?

In many ways, record labels aren’t as irrelevant as they are popularly depicted.  Perhaps all they need is a little update in their philosophy.  In this series, I hope to enumerate the specific services that record labels provide, the way current technologies have impacted those services, and perhaps find some middle ground for future development in the industry.

Over the past two weeks we have been discussing items pertaining to the audio spectrum at large.  In this article we’ll begin breaking down the audio spectrum into its component parts.  Though we disagree a bit on our subdivisions, Jay’s primer has excellent listening examples to hear each section individually.

Generally speaking, sounds can be lumped into three basic segments of the audio spectrum:  Bass, Mid, and Treble. 

The associated ranges would be approximately:

Bass 25 to 300 Hz.

Mids 300 to 2.4k Hz

Treble 2.4 to 20 kHz

Additionally, they can further be broken down in numerous ways depending on how people want to define sections:

Sub 25 to 45 Hz

Bass 45 to 300 Hz

Low-Mid 300 to 600 Hz

Mid 600  to 1.2k Hz

High-Mid  1.2 to 2.4 kHz

Treble 2.4 to 15 kHz

Super Treble 15 kHz to ~ 100 kHz

This Interactive Frequency Chart, much like the Carnegie Chart in the earlier article will help you understand how the frequency ranges match up with practical instrumentation.

For practical purposes, Sub-Bass should be anything that sounds below the lowest fundamental note of your song.  This can include percussion and any sub-harmonics, resonations, formants, and room tones.  These are frequencies that would really only be reproduced by sub-woofers and large format PA/sound reinforcement systems.  Some of this is undesirable—if you’ve ever watched an NFL game on windy day with a system that has a sub, pretty much everything is a big bass wash because of low-frequency wind noise.  We’ll go more in depth on that next week.

Bass should be reserved for the fundamental notes of the changes.  That is, the lowest sounding note of each chord progression.  This typically would include all the notes that would normally be played by a bass (Victor Wooten excluded).  This would also include bass playing synths and the left hand of the piano in many instances.

The Low-Mids and Mids include fundamental notes for melodic instruments as well as the first few orders of harmonics.  Harmonics help us distinguish sounds from each other and play a very important role in presence and clarity.  More on this when I examine the mid frequencies in two weeks.

The High-Mids deserve their own category because these frequencies contain sudden transient content.  For percussion, this would be the sound of sticks or mallets hitting the drum heads and cymbals.  For guitarists, this would be the sound of picks striking strings.  For vocalists, this would be the sound of hard consonance and sibilance.  All of these can be problematic, but also contribute greatly to impression of presence.

The treble portion of the audio spectrum contains almost nothing but upper harmonics of treble instruments and room tone.  This helps lead instruments and vocals sound present and full, but also adds brightness and clarity to a mix.

Over the next few weeks I’ll go into greater detail on problems with each part of the frequency spectrum.

More from Phil’s Audible Spectrum series:

• The Audible Spectrum, Part 1: Introduction

• The Audible Spectrum, Part 2: Capture and Reproduction Limitations
• The Audible Spectrum, Part 4: Sub-Bass Issues
• The Audible Spectrum, Part 5: Harmonics, Overtones, and Formants Primer