audiotthoughts on music

a while back i posted a youtudeo of this playing-the-super-mario-theme-on-two-guitars-simultaneously-guy. to be fair i should post the bass-version as well. so here goes:

enjoy…

alright, in part one i told you about some basics, things to go for and things to avoid…

so what is the actual workout?

it’s as easy as singing the album and concentrate on one thing at a time. for example: always a good topic to focus on is precision. sing the album and concentrate on singing every single note, every single syllable as precise as you can. i do that at least 2-3 times a week to stay on top of things but if you need to build up precision first, it should be more like once a day. another thing is breathing. again, do the whole album and this time fully concentrate on breathing. do you breathe in the right spots? do you breathe in too much air? or too little? is all air gone before you breathe in again? is there a breathing-rhythm?

power, stamina, height are things that should be practiced very carefully! don’t ever overdo it with those! this could cause damage to your voice! that being said, it’s ok to push yourself a little – but concentrate on how it’s feeling. your body knows when it’s too much. and if your throat hurts, you’ve gone too far. power is not loudness (but you knew that already, right?). it comes from precision, efficiency and clearness. and there’s a slogan (i think it’s from some car-tires-ad…): “power is nothing without control” and that is it! you might get carried away, that’s fine – and one reason why you should do whole albums. if you get carried away too much, you’ll notice by not being able to do more than a few songs in a row. when that’s the case, practice on controlling the outburst as much as necessary. usually this is about volume, you got too loud – but loudness is not power, always keep that in mind. for all three (power, stamina, height) you should use a record that’s a tiny bit too high or too tiring for you, so you can stay motivated. but again: don’t overdo it. if it’s getting too hard, take a break. it will come, don’t worry.

then there’s two kinds of speed you could practice: i’d like to call the first one ‘attack’ because it’s similar to the attack we have with instruments (ask your local guitarist). this concerns the beginnings of notes/words. be there on the spot as fast as you can. i’m not talking about pitch here, although this is another thing you can work on (whole album, try hitting the notes – what a surprise…). be quick at starting notes – fast attack. and be quick at changing notes, when it comes to multiple notes in a row: think stairs, not ramp. this is an important skill to work on. the second kind of speed is the more obvious: be able to talk and sing fast in case this ever comes up. for this, sing the album without playback (just your voice) and speed it up, as fast as you can and even faster – this can be quite funny. choose lyrics with lots of words and off you go.

and then there’s whatever you think you’d need to work on….

the order of above things is not coincidence. as you might have noticed, precision does not only stand for itself, it’s also a factor for all others. without precision, you’ll always sound like….well, just bad. by the way this goes for any instrument – ask any pro. and breathing is everything anyway. so those two are the important ones, the priorities. once you got them down (hint: you’ll never really have ;-) ), the others are the topping. but work on them all to prevent boredom. if something is boring, do something else – that goes not only for music :-)

that’s it for now, the next part will be an inside look at my own workout. wooooooooooooooo…..

Image by audiot.eu via Flickr

of course there is! but since that had to be a personal workout for every single guy, i can only make this up for my students, or at least for someone whose voice is familiar to me. what a bummer, right?

ok, i’ll give you a different answer: of course there is! just make one up for yourself :-) here are some tips on how to do this right. first of all, you are the one who knows your voice best, so act accordingly. a workout is something that should fit you, meaning always keep in mind what you can and cannot do. it’s supposed to bring you forward, so it should 1. enhance or improve the skills you already have and 2. broaden your horizon or push your boundaries in order to develop new skills. that sounds a bit technical, i know. the point is, repeating something you already can do over and over and over again (as lots and lots of people do), is boring and inefficient – at least to your brain (your learning-organ). to your ego it’s pretty cool for it gives you reassurance about how great you are. but you want to learn something or get better (yes, that’s possible), so it’s important to focus on something that can be improved or newly achieved.

that being said, it’s of course wrong to set your goals too high – that would become frustrating pretty fast. so where to begin? it’s easy, just take a record that you’re familiar with. you should know the songs including lyrics. because a workout should keep you motivated, it makes sense to use a whole album instead of just one song. there will be parts that you like and don’t like, parts that are easy and parts that are harder to do – that’s perfect. i have a bunch of albums that i know inside out, meaning i can sing the whole cd from the first to the last word without pause and – if it’s live – even the passages in between songs. this makes it easy to dive-in and be less distracted.

but if you shouldn’t choose something that you already can do? how can that…i mean….ain’t that a contradiction? no. for two reasons. one, practicability: i find it important for my workouts to be usable everywhere, especially (for me) in the car. that means sheets i’d have to look at, lines i’d have to think hard about to even remember, melodies or passage orders i’m not certain about are k.o. criteria. you’d only need to listen to this record more often to achieve those things, that has nothing to do with a workout. and the second reason is: you take that, what you already can do, only as a starting point to begin your workout with. then go from there in terms of concentrating on an aspect you want to improve/learn and try to push yourself in that direction.

to be continued…

if you’ve been to new music strategies, you might already know this one. but since there is an interesting change going on, i find it appropriate to point you there anyway. the site is new music ideas, it’s hosted by the same guy who hosts above mentioned site and is meant as a source for reviews of websites that might be helpful to anyone in the music business.

until recently, a bunch of music industry professionals looked for new sites, checked them out and wrote reviews about them. the change that took place now is, the site’s host points to a website and the readers write their thoughts about it in the comments. so there’s more points of view, more authors, mo’ better – at least that’s the idea. i guess we’ll have to see how this turns out but in my opinion it has a good chance to become an even better source for finding new, interesting and helpful sites.

give it a try…

Image via Wikipedia

some of you might know about the advantages of having a riser to put a drumset, a bass or a guitar amp on. it’s mostly about getting a clearer sound with less standing waves. huh? ok, i’ll point you to a thread in some forum right here, which i think explains it nicely. i found this through a search engine though, so i have no idea if the forum itself is any good. yes, this thread is about subwoofers in a home theater, but the basics about sound waves are quite the same…

now, a little over two years ago i found a tutorial for building a cheap but great drumriser in a german drum magazine called Drums & Percussion, so i built it, loved it and now am sharing this with you

you need 4 things:

1. oriented strand boards or osb. i used 18 mm thick ones, how many depends on how big you want the whole thing to be, obviously :-)
2. thingies to connect the osbs. i used small metal-plates with lots of holes in them, no idea how those are called in english – any diy-store should have them. don’t forget the screws and a screwdriver.
3. a bunch of pipe-isolators. those are made out of foam and are used to isolate heating or water pipes. the bigger the diameter, the better.
4. some contact-glue if that is the right term for it. you need it to attach the foam-thingies to the osbs.

first, cut the osbs to size, if necessary. then, cut the pipe isolators in even pieces of about 10 cm length – but no longer than the diameter is or they’re not stable enough. turn the osbs around and glue the isolator pieces to them. don’t be cheap, that foam things don’t cost much and you want it to be strong and solid in the end. if it’s meant for a drumset, use more foamies where you will sit and at the corners of the riser. as soon as the glue dried out, turn the osbs around again, lay them on the floor, assemble them (careful, the foamies don’t glide very well on some surfaces) and that’s it.

this whole thing cost me less than 40 euros, was built in no time and it’s surprisingly robust – carrying a 6 piece drumkit for over two years now without any problems and providing a good sound.

now, here’s a link to the tutorial i was using. it’s written in german (that’s why i explained it all above), but the pictures (about half way down) are very informative. and here is one more picture (again about half way down) that shows a complete riser lying on the back so you can get the idea how this should look like when finished.

one more thing, you might not even know there’s a problem with your sound until you use a riser. maybe you know someone who has such a thing a lets you check it out…

hey, it’s time again for some youtubism…

here’s a video of Shakerleg, the groovy guy from new york’s metro-underground-subway-tunnel-system-whatever-thing:

check out his website as well.

Image via Wikipedia

well, this entry is not meant as a guideline or a review or something similar. it’s more like some thoughts about gear needed to do some decent recording.

when i first got into recording i was somewhere around the age of 15 and a friend of mine asked for my help with some tunes he wanted to do. he was a techno-fan back then (ugh), had lots of equipment from an Atari ST (yay!) to multiple synths and samplers – things that were needed back then. he knew how to use these things but had no idea about music, some kind of techie one might say. so he wanted me to do the other half. anyhoo, today i sometimes think about those ridiculous amounts of gear filling whole rooms and causing nothing but trouble. we usually spent one half hour creating music and 5 hours solving technical problems, what a nightmare.

and nowadays the world is more complex, we’re not far away from fridges that only let us open their door if we haven’t crossed our personal calory-barrier for the day and already use wordprocessing software that patronizes us beyond belief. but who would have thought that recording music would be so much easier almost twenty years later than above mentioned teen-memory. certainly, the need for know-how hasn’t vanished (and in my opinion that’s a good thing), there are however lots of people who underestimate this. probably because the very process of producing music has become so much simpler.

back then, to record a standard band setup, you would have needed lots of microphones, at least one guitar amp, one bass amp, a mixing console, maybe preamps for the mics, compressors, gates, maybe expanders, reverbs, other effects – and i haven’t even talked about the actual recording device yet… today you need a laptop and some software – and if you’re really going at it, two mics, a midi controller and an interface. that’s it. no more need for large spaces, no more need to wait until your neighbors are not home. of course, more gear can be helpful in terms of streamlining or more possibilities, but let’s face it, with a good laptop and a program like Reason, you can achieve results far better than even some professional productions from 10-20 years ago.

so how does my setup look like? right now, it’s much more gear than necessary – simply because i piled up stuff during the last decade when those things were still needed. some of it will have to go, but some items will stay, for i use them not only to record but maybe to play live or for other non-recording-reasons. and i’m afraid i couldn’t even list all of it without doing some archeological excavation first….

but i can list my future setup which will be complete before the end of this year:

1. one of them new aluminium macbooks, yummy
2. Reason 4
3. a Motu 828 audio interface
4. some new Ultrasone headphones
5. and some new nearfield monitors, not sure which ones yet…
6. - 759. all the stuff that’s lying around here and that i use occasionally

but almost all of the work is done with the first two pieces (and some listening-device).

the only question left is what do i do with the extra space?

Image via Wikipedia

once again, i’m sending you to a blog entry on another page (and again it’s the music think tank…). although i might not agree wholeheartedly with every little detail, i consider this to be a standard piece of information that everybody should print out and lay under the pillow during journeys to sleepland…

so go read here

about ten years ago a guitarplayer and i did some acoustic stuff. we found a cool version of Fleetwood Mac’s “Big Love” we wanted to do but couldn’t figure out how they played it. today i know, because i found some videos and guitar tabs online that explain it perfectly well. now it’s up to me to just learn to do this. not an easy task, for i never played guitar without a pick…. but as i mentioned earlier, once you know what to do, it’s just practicing mechanics from there.

anyway, here’s the original. enjoy:

do you like old movies? i do, most of my favourites are somewhere around 1970. almost any new movie i have seen doesn’t really catch me. now why’s that, you ask. i’m not exactly sure because lame stories existed back then as well. i’m coming out of the closet right now by telling you the name of one of my all time favourites (and i seem to be the only person who can stand this flick). it’s called Mr. Majestyk and features Charles Bronson as a melon farmer. although the story is quite lame (see?) this movie is very cool and i do believe it’s because of the music. Charles Bernstein did a great job with this one – i love the opening title tune. to me there’s film composers like the great Lalo Schifrin for instance who can make a movie (or a tv-show for that matter) thrilling, even if the story sucks. there might be a lot of reasons why Star Trek is the most successful science fiction show ever but in my opinion the music is one of the most important. in a dvd-special-features-documentary from either ‘the next generation’ or ‘deep space nine’ (can’t remember), they show this in some detail. did you know that those shows have scores for each single episode? so they recorded a soundtrack for everyone of those episodes with an orchestra in a studio. i always thought tv-shows were given one soundtrack, recorded in a few different ways, and used all over the whole series and most of the times (if not every time) that is how it’s done. and if you really concentrate on that, you can hear (or feel) a difference between this show and any other science fiction series…

but back to soundtracks in general. what bothers me about more recent movies is, that they don’t seem to have real soundtracks anymore. there’s some loud-and-compressed-to-death-more-soundeffects-than-music-crap for action sequences and some sweet-violin-and-other-string-stuff for the more relaxed scenes. then they have a song from the charts plastered all over the film and that’s it. ptui!

do yourself a favor and watch, or better: listen Bullitt or Dirty Harry or M Squad or Two Mules for Sister Sara or anything similar and you’ll see what i’m talking about: perfectly tailor-made music for that very movie/show that not only gives it its own feel and character but also makes it kind of timeless. having a top-ten-hit sticked to a movie because of monetary reasons on the other hand might ruin the movie and it surely will be ridiculous in a few years or even less…