audiot

this is filed under reviews but it’s really an order. in fact, it says ‘BUY THIS RECORD !!!’, well with a few more words, but basically that’s the message.

this is about the new Bill Champlin record called “No Place Left To Fall”. you may have already heard or read about it, depending on where you live i guess. here in germany, Bill Champlin is not as big as he should be. but anyway, you can find all sorts of information about this new album anywhere on the net. what i’d like to say about it, since i’ve had the chance to fully listen to it yesterday, is quite simple. this album is outstanding. it’s a great piece of songwriting, arrangement, craftsmanship and let’s not forget a lot of fun to listen to. but since this blog is for people who are somewhat more into music than the average listen-to-some-radio-while-driving-to-work-in-the-morning-kind-of-guy i’d like to give you some good advice you might not find in another review. this album simply is one awesome lesson for every musician. you’ll find songwriting with some edges and corners you wouldn’t expect and still it all runs smoothly like a bar of soap covered in babyoil on an airhockey-table…….ermmm, oh well, you get the idea.

and then there’s of course the playing itself – and wow! you can learn so much by closely listening to this masterpiece. there’s nice voiceworks by Bill and his mates and even if Bill’s voice is not really my favorite, soundwise, he’s just doing a great job. there’s outstanding performances by all of the musicians, topped by the ridiculously awesome creative greatness of Billy Ward, who’s simply drumming this album to the all-time-must-haves. sorry for this, but it would seem i’m kind of short on superlatives :-)

this record is a perfect example for ‘being in the moment’, which is (or at least should be) every musicians priority. you’ll find the right thing played at every single moment. and that’s a great lesson in itself…

so before i write myself into tears of joy, i’ll say it again. go and buy this album. if you do, naked women will have sex in your backyard – or men, whatever floats your boat…

now that this program was mentioned here quite a few times, i thought i should talk a little about it. although i’m in no way involved with the guys making it, i really like it and became a huge fan over the last years. the software is called ‘Reason‘ right now it’s up to version 4, the company is called Propellerhead and they did another fine release that goes by the name of ‘Recycle‘.

anyway, what is reason? when i checked it out the first time (version 1.0, must have been somewhere around 1999-2001) i was mostly into recording audio and did know little about synthesizers, samplers, drummachines etc., so it didn’t strike me at once. and it wasn’t until version 3 when i started really thinking about it, got into it, actually read the manual and another book on advanced tips, tricks and techniques (powertools for reason 3 by Kurt Kurasaki aka Peff). the more i used it, the more i loved it. and now, running on both versions 3 and 4 (depending on which mac i’m using…), i use it almost exclusively when it comes to music. i’m tracking audio with Cubase LE 4 (sometimes GarageBand), then import it into Reason and stay there for anything else.

Reason is best described as a virtual studio rack. you actually see the rack itself and even the screws that attach the devices to the racksides. so you start with an empty rack and have a whole list of devices you can create in it. first, there’s two different mixers, then various synthesizers, samplers, a loop player and a drum computer as sound sources. you can choose between a whole bunch of different effect-devices including 5 different master effects and then there’s little helpers like mergers and splitters for both audio and control voltages and a pattern sequencer as well as an arpeggiator. and believe me it’s all you need – most of the time even more. the amount of devices you create is only limited by your computer… besides the rack itself you have another window that shows the sequencer where you see the different tracks (of different devices) and can move slices, cut, copy, draw etc. – the usual.

you can create patches for most of the devices and save them, in- and export them to be used in another one of your projects. there’s so called ‘refills’ you can download from the net, lots of them are free, to get a bunch of new sounds or effect patches. you can copy and paste complete devices and, i believe, even combinations of devices from one project to another. if you’re done with a tune, you’re able to export it as an audio file or as a published reason song, that means other users can open it, look at what you did exactly, make changes but cannot export or publish it in their name. so there’s a cool way to learn from others…

but one of the most interesting features is the do-it-yourself-option, or however one could call that. with the push of a button you can turn the rack around and see the rear of it. now you might think in good old monty-python-crunchy-frog-sketch-manner: ‘now where is the pleasure in that?’ because the devices are created to look and work like the ‘real’ ones, with knobs, buttons, little displays and such, they also have derriéres where you see power cables, don’t open warnings and cooling slots. AND cable connections! that means you are able to make your own cable connections between different devices to create whatever frankenstein-device you want or even a feedback loop :-) you actually see the cables hanging around and even moving right after turning the rack around – that alone makes for hours of entertainment, trust me on that….

this is in my opinion what makes Reason one of a kind, the possibility to create any freaky combination of whatever your even freakier mind can come up with. yeah! the disadvantage, however, is getting lost in the sheer mass of possibilities is quite easy if you don’t really know what you’re doing. but on the other hand that’s quite common with other programs as well and for Reason there are nice sites, forums, databases with all kinds of stuff to help you out or help you expand.

the only thing i do not love about reason, and that’s really the only thing i can come up with, is that the rack-window has a fixed width. that means on a widescreen there’s wasted space, it would be better (in my opinion) to be able to make it the whole screensize. in case of a macbook for instance, the single knobs, letters and displays get quite tiny…

but apart from that it’s an awesome piece of software that should be checked out by anyone who’s trying to make music on his/her own. i wouldn’t want to do without it anymore and if they don’t suddenly start screwing up things, i’ll buy the next versions as well – guaranteed.

what i’d like to pass on to you is one reason why i love the internet so much – learning. it never ceases to amaze me what sources are out there, at the click of a button. and although i’m not sure how far online teaching can go, what it’s capable of and where the limits are, there’s still so many things to suck up before you get to the point where only a real-life-flesh-and-blood-teacher can help you. not to mention that lots of those real-life-flesh-and-blood-teachers are not really helpful at all…

so this time here is a guy i recommend. maybe you already heard of him, it seems he’s quite famous on youtube. his name is Justin Sandercoe and this is his site. you can find lots of video lessons on ‘da tube’ (yeah baby, can i do cool talk or what), but i think the best place to start is his website and going from there because there’s over 100 video lessons of him and it’s kind of easy to get lost…

i’m not a guitar-beginner but there is a certain amount of important things i found in Justin’s lessons that my teacher did not teach me. so i’m kind of polishing my guitar-playing with Justin’s help. and i learned a lot in no time.

if you think about learning to play guitar or maybe you already play but not to your own satisfaction – qualitywise, or you’re just bored and a new hobby would do the trick then you’d want to check out justinguitar.com. it all is completely free, however there is the option of donating, so you can pay for what you use…

check it out

it’s review time again :-)

quite some time ago i mentioned a book i was going to read and i wrote this entry about the question if high end gear makes any sense for the non-studio-pro-guy. anyway, the book i’m talking about is called Guerrilla Home Recording by Karl Coryat. the subtitle goes as follows: how to get great sound from any studio, no matter how weird or cheap your gear is. and that’s about it. thanx for reading, good night.

hehehe, just pulling your leg. since i wrote that last entry about this subject, i read this book twice and i still like it a lot. the author is – like me – convinced that someone with the right know-how is able to make a decent and professional sounding recording even if he/she has to make do with obsolete or amateurish equipment. i’m going to quote a brief passage of the introduction which makes the attitude quite clear:

…it’s all a huge lie, fabricated to get you to spend your money. look at it this way: the best-stocked kitchen with the most professional pots and pans won’t magically turn you into a brilliant chef. you need to learn the basics of the craft first. and even though i’m not much of a cook, i’d swear that if i knew what i was doing, i could whip up one hell of a soufflé with 20 bucks’ worth of thrift store pots and pans and run-of-the-mill ingredients from a discount supermarket.

so that’s where he begins, by first telling what guerrilla home recording is about – basically it’s about improvising, about specifying your goal and reaching it with the tools available. he then gets into the nuts and bolts of sound and recording, but only the things one needs to know – nothing more and that’s fine with me. there’s basics about soundwaves, dynamic range, frequency spectrum etc. about equalizers, compressors and so forth. he gets into the different cables and plugs one will encounter, explains the signal-to-noise ratio, midi, ground loops and gives a complete tour of the signal chain – in my opinion a very important chapter that every musician should read before getting the hands on the first instrument. experience taught me that there are some areas on a mixer a lot of musicians never understood, like the insert for instance or what exactly the ‘q’ at he knob in the eq-section means. you can find some examples for efficient board setups as well as lots and lots of workarounds for common problems, like channel-shortage for example….

there is a chapter about effects and one that’s called ‘how to record almost anything’, in which the author talks about miking amps, recording bass, various guitar sounds, synths, lead and backing vocals etc. followed by a chapter about drums only. i was a bit disappointed about his opinion to use sampled drums. i love playing drums and recently got into the recording side of that great instrument. on the other hand though, he’s absolutely right because recording drums on your own is a very difficult task. it’s not only about good microphones, phase-parties, correct pan-positions but also about the right room to record in. and hands down, the options of someone without a pro-location are very limited. i came up with a cool sound i still like a lot, with four mics and a lot of patience during the mic-placement-trial-and-error-phase. the problem is, that is the sound. i won’t get another sound out of it because of the room – meaning if i find a song that embraces this sound, fine. but for anything else it just won’t be right. so sampled drums might be the only option for a professional sounding production. i’m not perfectly sure about it yet… by the way, the author is against quantization and such, instead he recommends playing the drums through a midi interface to keep them human. i agree.

the last chapter is about mixing and mastering and there’s an exercise as well that i didn’t try yet, but i’m convinced it will teach you/me a lot…

just to be clear about this, he does not by any means say that you could drive a pro studio out of business with just know-how and an old 4-track-cassette-recorder. it’s just about getting the best out of your gear, whatever your gear is. and to be honest, i was waiting for something like this…

all in all i strongly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in making his/her own recordings. there are a lot of things in this book that will help you create a better product than most of the others. i don’t think it’s the only source of information one should consult when getting into this interesting topic but it sure is a great way to start…

go to backbeat books to check it out. they have other nice books as well, maybe i’ll post a review of another one soon…

the audiot empire is growing :-)

i just joined twitter, although i’m not sure yet if this site really is as great as everybody tells me. anyway, it should be worth a try but since i’m not on facebook, myspace or whatever other sites one has to be on, chances are nobody’s gonna be interested in my twittering…

it’s kind of hard to not lose track of it all. now that i have a blog, a flickr-site, a twitter-account and have joined reverbnation, there’s still so much left to sign up to, join, update and one has to provide some sort of content for all of it. if one’s doing everything on his/her own, it quickly becomes very time-consuming. yesterday i noticed that almost a week went by without me working on my little garden…. so i’m gonna compensate for that by finishing the drumtrack for one of the songs right now. off to recording-land….

alright, now here’s two songs of one of my students – recorded in my living room. i did a little equalizing, a little mixing, threw some reverb on it and here they are. please remember, this is not album-quality, just two raw songs for your listening pleasures :-)

No.1 is called “stranger”, a nice and simple tune:

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No.2 is a well-written song about a lost love, i like that one. it’s called “judy’s last one”:

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enjoy

for some reason i always feel tired and demotivated before a gig, same this time. while i was driving up there i got the call from our bassplayer – they wanted us to start an hour early. we were booked to play from 20:00 until midnight and now we had to start on 19:00 but still play til 0:00. great. we really weren’t sure if we’d be able to do the set as planned in the first place because – as i mentioned before – we hadn’t seen each other in eight months. so basically this meant to put together an additional set of songs out of thin air. usually no problem but with such a long pause…quite a challenge.

so we stalled them until 19:30 :-) played our show and in the end did another five songs to close the time gap. this worked out pretty well, no one noticed and we could finish without losing our faces. hey, creativity is part of the job and besides it’s just not ok to want an additional hour without paying for it. but those guys book us more or less frequently so no chance of letting them down…

anyway, the gig was a bit harder than usually because we had to fight memory loss the whole evening. look at this picture to see what i mean. so not only caring about saving energy to last 4.5 hours, precision and power but also standing the heat around and on the stage (i drank only 6 bottles of water, for some reason not as much as usual) plus remembering all those lines. i’m used to sing free and kind of improvise because usually i can count on my memory but after so long…. it was thrilling alright, i felt like a newbie again – ok, not quite. maybe an experienced newbie…..uhm…..oh well.

the mixman was a real pro, woohoo. it’s hard to find people who know what they’re doing (not only at mixing boards). he did an extraordinary job. we had a perfect stage sound and some neat effects as well…

but the audience was the same as always, not people-wise…moodwise. you start to play at 19:30 when there’s not many people there and those who already found the way to the venue aren’t really motivated at this time of the evening. so you’re playing maybe two hours until they finally begin to warm up, maybe longer. now when they’re as hot as you want them to be, the gig is almost over and they won’t let you stop because for them it has just begun – that’s when you’ve played for four hours already…

we were lucky this time though because it was open air and the permission to be loud expired at midnight. the crowd was really satisfied, we gave some autographs (don’t ask me why, we’re as unfamous as it gets…), some women hit on us – business as usual ;-)

i’m looking forward to the next gig on august 30th, it’s a wedding so no official crowd but better food :-) i have to say though, i’m feeling kind of tired and demotivated already…

once again the work on ‘my little garden’ will be delayed as a friend/student of mine and i decided to record some acoustic-guitar-plus-vocals-duets. he wants to try making gigs on his own so he asked me if i would record him for kind of a demo cd. we’ve been playing together for quite a while now and so it seemed logical to not only record him but us as well…

yesterday i did some pilot tracks (no idea if that’s the right term in english…), meaning i tracked some rough playing of the songs which will be on the headphones during the real recording. actually we wanted to do a live recording, just playing along and recording but we don’t have the right room for it anymore. so we will record single tracks and mixing them together. hopefully not much feeling will be sacrificed due to this type of recording. the live session will happen as well, but we have no date yet, so it seemed a good idea to do this now…

as soon as i finish writing this entry i’ll record some more pilot tracks and tomorrow we’ll do at least one guitar, maybe more – we have only a few hours.

oh boy, i can’t wait to move back to my hometown on the 01.01.2009 and have a decent setting to record again. it’s kind of cool doing everything on the mac (i learned so much through this) but on the other hand, the real stuff is deeply missed. it’s possible to make it all electronically but when it comes to rock music for instance, i feel detached in a way. even if it sounds real, it feels a little weird…. but that won’t stop me from working on my little garden – it’s just a great experience, somewhat weird but still great. yay!

so it’s nice to be playing acoustic guitar again this few days, we’re doing that in my apartment. real strings…wow. then saturday morning off to gigland, returning on sunday and finishing the acoustic thing next week as early as possible so i can go back to picking sounds for the new album. guitar sounds are done, drums are next…

listening to Billy Ward’s “Two Hands Clapping” right now makes me write this entry. it’s not easy to describe this album and i hope Billy forgives me if i’m babbling around…
first of all, Billy Ward is a session drummer from New York – he played with Joan Osborne, Bill Champlin, The Knack, B.B. King and many others. you can find out about him on his website. there’s a discussion forum with a bunch of very nice people, mostly drummers, but still an interesting place…
the album was recorded in 1998 and produced by himself. it’s in HDCD-format, meaning you can play it in every cd-player but if you happen to have an HDCD-player you get more depth.
interesting about the record is the way the 10 songs were played. All are live-duets without any rehearsals or overdubs – this is all real. And the musicians among us know what that means… i’m not going into describing each track because i don’t want to spoil anything. the guests are: Joy Askew, Jim Beard, Bill Champlin, John Patitucci, Glen Phillips and Chris Whitley. So here is a true listening experience, a collection of moments in which great musician did what every musician should do: just play!
this album is a one-of-a-kind-thing, check it out here

p.s. although i’m proud to call Billy a dear friend, i’m not getting paid for this ad-like entry nor am i getting threatened in any way… it truly is one of the best albums i’ve ever heard.