audiot

to come back to yesterday’s question: ‘are you able to just listen to a song without thinking or analyzing at all?’

i’m not sure if i am. it seems i can only turn off the brain when i already know the song well and like it a lot. but sometimes it’s hard even then. on the other hand i guess this is perfectly normal for a musician. it’s what i do. i’m pretty sure it’s the same with other professions. as soon as you get into a situation that’s somehow related to what you do – you begin to think. and this can be a good thing because it tells you not only that a song does or doesn’t work but also why. and this is crucial information. why is nothing more funky than the meters? you won’t find out if you’re only shaking your body as soon as you hear them. of course, to a ‘standard’ listener the ‘why’ is of no interest, so they don’t bother and that’s fine. but to a musician it’s important to find out about the ‘whys’ in music. so it’s kind of a good automatism that helps us getting better at what we do. and by the way, the fact that ‘normies’ don’t think about music instead of ‘just’ listening has one huge advantage: they can easily be fooled! HA!

but every once in a while, turn off the thinking and just feel…

really short one for the musicians among you: are you able to just listen to a song without thinking or analyzing at all? this question is not as easy as it sounds…..

well, i wanted to write something meaning- and thoughtful with great wisdom – the mother of all posts about music one might say. then i found this here and thought ‘ah, to hell with it !!!  i’m gonna post some handfarts….’

i know, it’s going downhill…

unbelievable, i really dig the solo :-)
and to continue the mario-theme-played-in-weird-ways-series, here’s another one…

just to let you know, the online-vocal-teaching-experiment is about to start. huh? look it up here. i think i’m able to handle 2 or 3 more students, so if you’re interested, drop me a line fast.

that’s it. i’m thrilled as hell – this will be so much fun, woohoo !!!

hopefully you can read this. i was glad to experience such a smooth and perfectly working move from one internet provider to the next due to my change of hometowns a few days back. but for some reason, i’m having troubles with my connection right now after it already worked….

so anyway, yesterday i rehearsed with a band of mine that hasn’t done much in the last 2-3 years. when i joined the group in 2000, we did about 30 gigs a year and in 2006 we were down to 4. problem was, the gigs usually came to us, so we never really had to do anything except play. but times got harder for bands everywhere and suddenly (well, ‘suddenly’ is barely the right word…) the gigs were gone. now, what usually happens if that happens is, the bandmembers find other priorities. maybe a 2nd or 3rd band, maybe something else. so we left the whole thing drifting away.

now we met again, played again and want to gig again, bring us back on the map. the funny thing is, people didn’t forget us – in fact, it seems they cared more about ‘us’ than we did. and that’s really embarrassing i have to admit. finding out now that there is a newsgroup about us for quite some time makes me want to put a paper bag over my head. but on the other hand it’s of course good news that we weren’t forgotten and that there are people who still care.

so now it’s about kind of a reset. we know we want to do gigs and this time we want to do it right or, at least, better. so there will be updates of our website on a regular basis (it’s not really open yet – i’ll let you know…) with recordings of our rehearsals. there will be stuff on youtube and pages on those sites bands should be on. this already led to some discussions because i believe the internet needs to be one of the top priorities and in my opinion this is at least one of the reasons why lots and lots of bands are going down these times. the others think that sending demo-cds via snailmail everywhere is more important. well, either way, both of it has to be done so at this time it’s mostly about who’s doing what.

it’s interesting to see kind of a ‘dinosaur-band’ that always worked without having to worry about anything changing into something fit for the future – even if i’m part of it and having to deal with this all. it’s still interesting and i really wonder how this turns out… but one thing is clear: better late than never. so here’s to changes, y’all!

yay, i’m gonna make me some of those – coooooooool :-)

this one’s pretty cool as well…

enjoy…

hehehe, i took this from an episode of ‘Fawlty Towers’ about germans…

there is a new page on this site which is completely in german. don’t panic, it has nothing to do with the rest of the blog. it’s just a shameless plug of my awesome teaching abilities. just to let you know (and don’t you mention the war !)…

deutsch:

es gibt eine neue seite hier, da die unterrichtsoffensive ’09 an den start geht. und damit ich mit der bilingualität meiner seite herumprotzen kann. na? beeindruckt? hab’ ich mir schon gedacht……

yeah, right on. i got this question in a comment to my last entry and wanted to throw some thoughts about this out as well…

i remember a time when quality didn’t matter at all. back when i started listening to music (the post-vinyl-era…) it was all about tapes. nobody cared about copyrights (exactly like nowadays…), not even the record companies (not quite like nowadays…). we all created our own mixtapes from radio or other tapes we got before. and with each copying the quality got worse. did we care? did you? think back, it was the time of the walkman…

when the cd came, i still didn’t care about the better quality. the main advantages – for me – were: no more switching sides (i never liked the auto-reverse feature because i never knew where the tape was and which button to press for fast forward – horrible) and having the beginning of any song at the push of a button. coooool. the better sound quality was more like a side effect. then i bought my first car and my first car-stereo. the latter was about ten times as much as the car itself and i began to think about quality because at the volume i used to play this thing, bad quality would have killed you – between the songs, not during them. so i kind of cared about quality but for other reasons. even in my first 5-10 years as a musician, soundquality (in listening!) never came first. it gives me cold chills to remember the tapes and cds i got from other bandmembers with new songs/ideas to learn. today i wouldn’t even bother trying to get something out of them. but why, when did this change take place. well, i guess it was a process rather than a cut but did something trigger it? i don’t know. the cd didn’t (for me) because that change happened later, maybe it took time to get fully used to the cd, though. maybe it was the moment when the jump to the cd was complete, meaning cd-players everywhere and no more tapedecks… the minidisc had to do with this as well, i really love it (still) and in my opinion it’s a shame that it didn’t really make it. but i guess for the ‘normal’ listener the advantages it has compared to a cd are rather irrelevant. so in a nutshell, i don’t know when i became obsessed with quality and why for that matter.

but what i realize right now is, that the same thing happens aka happened not so long ago with video. and i’m not only talking about the switch from vhs to dvd. it’s more like today’s race for the better flatscreen or beamer or the fact that an unbelievable amount of people have 5.1 sound in their living room, even those – hands down – who can’t tell a bird’s whistle from a chemical-factory-explosion. at the same time we see the exact opposite in music. my walkman had a great sound back then and it was ridiculously far superior to what the kids listen to today. they walk around with no headphone-earplug-thingies but with their cellphone speakers turned up instead and i’m trying very hard to not laugh out loud while typing this. so it becomes kind of an widespread desease because not only they get polluted with this crappy sound but innocent bystanders as well. how evil is that? i don’t even know why they prefer the worst sound since wax-cylinders to some 99-cent headphones, maybe to show off the cool things they listen to mmpfrzHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA (sorry, couldn’t hold it any longer…). ok, i did the same thing with my first car but that was great music – yes, i can tell – so i was kind of a missionary who tried to bring the good stuff to the stupid masses. needless to say: i failed miserably…………and i feel bad about it.

now, what i wanted to say in the first place (…) is, i’m glad youtube came along to spread some sh!t around. this makes the whole thing more relaxed. musicians don’t need to worry about sound quality too much (this can be misunderstood, i know…), but can make their stuff available to the public without working on it an entire year or spending thousands of euros and i (and i’m certain lots of others like me) am less obsessed about quality when it comes to watching a dvd or listening to an album. and being less obsessed is usually a good thing…

for some reason, this thought just came to me while i was thinking about how to make a new demo for one of my bands. we didn’t take the band serious ourselves in the last couple of years, so the gigs got fewer – rehearsals too and we didn’t even see each other in months. the whole thing kind of fell asleep. but now it’s time to get started again, we need to get used to the idea first, i guess…

anyway, i was thinking about different ways to make a demo. should we do the real thing with lots of time and effort put into it to make a fine, slick sounding demo? on the other hand, it seems demos that sound like someone used the built-in-laptop-mic to tape it with garageband are today’s favorite. and, as ridiculous as this may sound, it has its advantages. it’s not only cheaper and less time consuming than a professional recording, it’s also capable of showing the difference between a good and a bad band. now why’s that, you ask. but first, back to the cheap-and-fast-point.

the first demo i ever made took weeks, maybe even more than a month. the playing about a week and then the discussions about every small detail ate up the rest of the time. we were some third-class-backyard-band in some third-class-backyard-studio, i may add… today, the ‘production’ of a recording that good takes barely longer than the playing of the actual songs. you put up two mics in the rehearsal room, set up your laptop, record the band and do some software-magic afterwards. that’s it. it’s not pro-quality alright, but ‘economy-class-studios’ don’t necessarily offer that either. the big, or should i say huuuuge, advantage is: it’s fast. which means, you can do it once a month, or even better, at each rehearsal. put it on your website and there’s fresh material about once a week. i won’t even mention the motivation- and playing-quality-boost that comes with a permanently glowing recording button. who cares about a perfectly crafted demo-recording that’s 15 years old and doesn’t even feature the actual bandmembers anymore? or maybe there’s songs on it, you threw out of your repertoire a decade ago… the cheap’n'fast way shows what you’re doing right now, and that’s what people are interested in, especially in these fast times. we have to thank youtube for that, it made bad quality chic and that’s imo a good thing. okay, i don’t really believe bad quality is a good thing – but i do believe 1. it makes things a lot easier, 2. provides equal possibilities for everyone and 3. like it or not, it’s what time brought us – so we need to embrace it. anyone trying to fight time is a bloody moron.

there’s something i want to add. about 95% of the people i ever gave demos to have no idea of quality, so why bother? we have a saying in germany: it’s like giving pearls to the pigs. ok, maybe you shouldn’t give such a bad recording to the big record-company-boss in order to get a contract. but updating your page with fresh audio content on a weekly basis will get you a decent amount of fans and traffic and that might impress mr. recordguy a lot more… and, it seems to me, the giving-demos-to-the-big’uns-to-get-a-deal-and-become-rich-and-famous-days are over anyway.

now, why is a bad quality recording able to tell a good band from a bad one (or the recipient for that matter)? easy, even the worst band in the world could make a fine sounding, high quality recording. it’s not about the band (ok, it’s a little about the band), but about the engineers, the equipment, the room, the producers, the money etc. a great qualitiy recording doesn’t necessarily say the artist is great. first of all, it says the crew, the surroundings and the cashflow is great. but here’s the interesting part: you can turn this around. in a bad quality recording there’s no way to hide behind the work of great craftsmen. think actors or better, models. i think it was Cindy Crawford who once said something like: ‘millions of women want to look like us without knowing that we don’t look like that either.’ i love that quote because it’s so spot on. with a two-mics-in-the-rehearsal-room-laptop-garageband-setup you can’t hide behind the roomsound of a hollywood mansion or behind the tone of a Massenburg eq. the people get to hear what it did sound like right there – and this can be good or bad news. i experience this with my students on a regular basis. the first time someone hears his/her voice on a recording is a quite precious moment :-)

but that’s what it’s about. if you’re able to sound good under these circumstances, then you really are good. i have unbelievably crappy recordings from a 20-bucks-mic and a portable-minidisc-device i took during various clinics and masterclasses. believe me, someone like Billy Ward sounds awesome, always, no matter how he’s recorded. and that’s a noble goal: to get to the point where surroundings don’t matter anymore…

alright, i’m trying to not shed any tears over this. as mentioned yesterday, some of my gear just has to go. so here’s the link to my Sandberg guitar on ebay. Sandberg is a small german company known for building great basses. guitars are only build by them on a custom-order basis or, like this one, as part of a mini series. this one here and the nylon-string-model of it is the only mini series of Sandberg guitars i know about. the serial no. is 33 (maybe it’s 88, hard to tell…). it’s handmade, beautiful and has great feel and even better sound. active electronics with lots of power and round, balanced tone sum it up.

the auction is in german, but feel free to contact me about anything. shipping might become expensive, depending on where it goes – keep that in mind. and now, check it out…