audiot

working on “traitor”, my 2nd album (listen to the 1st one “corner” in the blue player to your right) provoked some thoughts about the future, actually the present as well, of the album as such.

looking at websites or profile pages of independent artists creates the feeling that’s it’s just about single songs instead of albums. songs are uploaded as soon as they’re finished and more often than not, they don’t even seem to be related to some kind of album anymore. now, is this so?

it would make sense, because people listen to music on their mp3-players, create their own playlists and pick single tunes from download-sites. so is this the switch from rug to patchwork-quilt? and if yes, would it be wise for an artist to jump on that train? there’s another point to this, it would be more web2.0-ish if an artist would release each song as soon as it’s done because that would mean more frequent updates to his/her page or profile. one more advantage might be that each song would be noticed and listened to equally (at least at first). with the release of a whole album there’s always songs that draw more attention than others.

but on the other hand, i do like the concept of albums. to me it’s a lot less confusing, especially if someone covers a wide variety of styles with his/her music. so the albums would be like folders on your desktop that keep the songs together that belong together and give you a better view at what the artist did so far, because you see the different phases of his/her work. and the artist has the possibility to group songs together, so the album is more than just the sum of its tunes.

that leads to another thought. is this just triggered by the market? do artists simply react to the new era of consuming music? or do they welcome this and like the idea of thinking in smaller units? as for me, i’m not sure. right now, i’m in the middle of creating what i thought of as my 2nd album. but as a matter of fact, it’s more like 2. one of them very much related to the first one, stylewise. and the other one a straight hardrock record (about 8 songs each at the moment). now, there’s a decision to be made – should i do 2 albums, write more material for both and release 2 full records when they’re done? or should i just mix it together and do one album with those 16 tunes, even if they don’t really fit together? or, should i just go ahead and release every single song once it’s finished and don’t care about albums at all? or do the latter and then group the songs together once all of them are out? but who would be interested in an album if all the songs were already released? or, release some of the songs, so people already know half of the records, but have to wait for the records themselves to hear the other half?

i guess the main question here is: does the rug really tie the room together?

at this point, i have no idea. and instead of helping me to get closer to a decision, writing this confused me even more. damn!

yeah, i stole this line from Billy Ward, an awesome drummer and producer – go check him out! his stuff’s unreal!

since i’ve just returned from an off-weekend and am already about to record some vocals, i have little time to write. when inspiration hits, you gotta run, so here’s just a quick tip for you guys.

microphones are NOT ears! sounds like a no-brainer, right? but it isn’t. we tend to believe that what gets in (and therefore out) of a microphone is the same as what our ears would hear. but that’s not the case. and i’m not even talking about the fact that lots of mics color the sound, so what goes in is not necessarily what comes out. mics work a lot different than our ears, so don’t be fooled by the fact that both pick up sound. there is a lot of trial-and-error involved before your mic spits out exactly what your ear would pick up – and to make matters worse, to your ear it might sound very unnatural at that moment. i hope i haven’t lost you – it’s a bit difficult to explain. imagine a gun that’s not perfectly “adjusted” and therefore shoots to the right. you could either set it right or aim to the left to hit your target. now, you can’t tweak a mic until it is an ear – but you can change your “aim” until you hit the right sound. and once you have, you might just think “hey, that’s exactly how it should not work at all” – but it does. like aiming to the left and still hit the middle.

so there is logic involved, but then again there isn’t. messing around might be as good as any other approach, but it surely helps to know a bit about mics and placement alternatives – as long as you keep in mind that mics are just stupid. good luck…

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• song no. 7 (audiot.eu)
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recently i mentioned that during recording, i prefer to do full-takes rather than punch-ins. if the tune plays from beginning to end and i’m laying down a complete track to it, i consider that a full-take.

now, lots and lots of musicians – the vast majority i guess – don’t do it this way. they do a full-take or two and the rest is kind of damage control or cosmetics or similar. so if the second half of the third chorus is not to their satisfaction, they punch in a few bars before, do the rest of the chorus, punch out again and then tinker it in there somehow. why? there’s usually two reasons: it’s supposed to save time and/or the musician is actually not able to do it all in one go and therefore needs to puzzle his track together, creating kind of a best-of-take…

back when i worked as a financial advisor (i’m serious!), i first learned about vibes – they did call it different though. in a nutshell: if you’re calling a customer to discuss business and you’re wearing a shell suit while lying on the couch, there will be no deal. i think it’s an interesting point. if you’re working, you’re working. imagine you’re going to a bank to invest some of your hard earned cash (i know, but there might be some non-musicians reading). what would you do if the banker was in a shell suit, probably hadn’t shaved in a week and was clipping his toenails behind the desk? yes, me too. of course, on the phone you wouldn’t know what he’s wearing, right?

wrong. enter the vibes. this is – among other things – about attitude. no one takes you seriously if you look like a trailerpark-inhabitant. you won’t even take yourself seriously – and that’s what the other one will know because of, tadaaaa, the vibes. on the phone, in a letter, on the moon – everywhere. is it wrong to judge someone by his outfit? maybe so, but who cares? it’s common practice.

anyway, back to recording. take it seriously. the audience will know if you did it right or if you just chose the fastest and easiest way. if you’re not capable of doing the whole tune in one continuous piece, how ’bout practicing some more? or doing it a little different? noone will miss that one guitarsolo-part where you’re playing a 20-notes-per-second-tapping-arp, believe me. what they will miss though, is a strong impact caused by your performance because it’s the work of a tinker rather than a craftsmen.

i tell my students that the song starts with the first sound there is. no matter what instrument it is, the song starts right there – for everyone. even if there’s no vocals at all for one whole minute, the song starts there. they have to dig in right there, not just a few seconds before their part starts. and they have to stay in until the last sound has vanished completely. i can get quite angry at them if this rule is not obeyed, because it is very important. the vibes are very important – and way too often underestimated. so if you record something, take it seriously.

and by the way, doing the whole track again just takes about five minutes – time well spent…

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

once again i found a great discussion over at music think tank right here. especially the comments are very cool. the discussion started with the question if great songs ever go unheard and after reading through it all, my sick mind kind of turned this question around…

so here’s what i wrote about it. i didn’t think this through, just wrote away and in the end wondered where i ended up :-)

“Without these utilities we would drown in an ocean of songs.”
…but we do, Bruce – we do. and i think that’s exactly the point here. first of all, how can we talk about great songs if ‘great’, even ‘truly great’ means something different for everyone? we’d have to differentiate between a variety of ‘greats’. if great means popular (imo it doesn’t), then the answer to the original question is ‘no’ – that’s a no-brainer. but if great means a true work of art in terms of composing, performing, producing etc. then i guess the answer would be ‘yes’, because works of art are not good as background noise. but that’s what music often – maybe mostly – is. these days, who buys himself a record (in whatever form), sits on the couch and really listens? really concentrates on the experience? who does that anymore? who has the time and the calmness? and as a side note: we lower the quality to make the songs smaller. we wouldn’t do that if it was for the experience and there were times when this was the other way round. we do that for quantity – i’ll get to that in a moment…
people are preoccupied with all sorts of things, so they need some ‘easy listening’ they can do on a bus, maybe during work, while doing the dishes or while dancing in some club. but those are not works of art, those are fast-food. and that’s exactly why those songs are popular or even big hits. they have no rough edges or anything one could think about. they’re flat, that’s why they work. a hamburger is no culinary masterpiece – that’s why it’s such a success. the only thing you need to concentrate on while eating it, is to not drop half of it. it doesn’t distract you, but that’s the core idea of a great meal. two different worlds or two oppositional meanings to fulfill.
that would lead to the question: is it even possible for a great song to be heard? we could argue about what ‘being heard’ is. how many people are needed to turn a tune into a heard one? if it’s a huge crowd, then it’s only possible for songs tailored for a huge crowd to be heard and that almost automatically leads to a not-very-artful-song because it has to please the masses and therefore has to be kind of slick, without edges, one-size-fits-all. there might be exceptions of course but the more people it pleases, the less great it is.
when we talk about songs that are decades old but still known, heard and loved by people – we usually talk about songs people connect to certain experiences of their lives. but decades ago, it was a lot easier for a song to get there because people bonded more with a song than they do today. why’s that? time’s weren’t that fast. a song like, ida know, ‘life is life’ (or is it ‘live’?) or ‘the final countdown’ or whatever was played for months at every single event back then, so lots of people had a chance to connect. not that these would be great songs in any way except being as one-size-fits-all as it gets. today a song lasts how long? a week? and of course the people themselves have changed but getting into that would lead too far beyond the scope of this place… and let’s not forget, today quantity is worth more than ever before. how many songs fit on an ipod? i piled up about 800 cds before i had my first real computer and i knew every one of them. that’s not even a third of what you can pack on a classic ipod. and i’m a musician, someone for whom listening is part of the job aka a full time activity. when the internet opened the possibility of sharing songs illegally, it was about songs. later it was about whole albums and now? it’s about discographies. tomorrow it’s what? whole genres? we do drown in songs. people hear more songs today than ever before but as a result they care less about every single one. maybe today listeners connect more to a band than to a song?
today we need tools that search and pick songs that we might like for us, because we drown in songs. productive? hell, yeah – but since when is productivity even ballpark with greatness?
and who could even think about a single waterdrop while swimming in the ocean? i have no idea where i’m going with this, for i already got ideas that could keep me writing for ages. sorry if this is of no help for your research, i just wanted to add a short (!) note to your ‘drowning in an ocean of songs’-picture and that’s where it went.
truly great thread here. i do think though, you might be going at your research the wrong way or with the wrong goal. and as soon as i hit the ‘create post’ button, you might want to reconsider about the follow up note below the title of your post :-)

Image by taivasalla via Flickr

alright, i managed to create an account on one more site: soundcloud. i already love this page because it’s ridiculously easy to use and offers nice advantages. in a nutshell, it lets you up- and download, distribute and share audiofiles without sizelimit. and it’s free, well, with some limitation to how many songs can be uploaded per month – there’s pro accounts as well….the usual. but that won’t be a problem at the moment. setting up and understanding how to use an account there took about 5 minutes, way to go. i’m gonna use this account to work on my collaboration projects and furthermore to distribute and share any other stuff that i come up with.

and there’s one more cool feature. it’s called a dropbox and maybe you’ve already seen it. it’s the widget-kind-of-thingy below the feed-subscription-button in my sidebar and – now the cool part – you can send me songs, pieces, loops – actually any audiofiles, by simply clicking on it – wow!

so here’s the link to my page over there – it’s almost empty….yet, but the material will come.

go soundcloud !!

a while back i wrote something about imitating your favourite artists to gain insight and learn from them. one thing i should add is that you should never be afraid of ‘losing yourself’. you will always sound like you, so it’s just cool to figure others out, add them to your toolbox and therefore create an own style out of all sorts of mixtures between the tools you already have.

i’ll give you an example. Tuck Andress (one half of Tuck & Patti), an amazing guitarplayer with a completely unique style and sound developed this very style by trying to imitate whole band arrangements on his guitar – not with freaky sound effects but just his way of playing.

enjoy and become motivated :-)

…and check out his/their other stuff as well. it’s really worth it…

Image by audiot.eu via Flickr

this word has kind of a negative taste, right? but i guess it’s time to stop that because we need a term for it and this one seems appropriate. what i’m talking about is once again the awesome possibility to work together through the internet, which is – sadly enough – not used to the extent it deserves.

so i’m stepping forward and dare you to do the same. of course there were others before me and i won’t accept any credit whatsoever for this idea, because it simply wasn’t mine, but it’s a great one and anyone interested should stop couchpotating and be part of it. what i’m talking about here is a cooperation between artists – an artistic-penpalship-thing (we might have to work on that term though :-) ). if you would like to create something with me, drop me a line. easy as that. i don’t care if it’s ‘just’ music or if you’re a video-, photo-, paint-, or whatever-else-artist. i don’t care about a genre or some other stereotype. i just love to work something out with someone else somewhere. so if you are creative and kind of a free-thinker, we might give it a shot and see what happens…

come to think of it, “guerrilla” is also one of those words in need of a less negative rating. recently this has become a term for people who try to do things on their own, musicians without a label who try to make do with the resources they have for instance. and that’s a great thing, at least in my book…

hopefully, yesterday’s entry was understandable to you. i’d like to add some points though. it’s possible that you encounter a song well within your range but you still have problems singing it. maybe you play this song at the wrong position in the set, you might still be recovering from the one before… maybe it’s a new song for the band, so you play it five times in a row during rehearsals and that’s why it becomes a problem… maybe the band plays the song higher as planned because it’s easier to do for the others and you might not even know this – it’s been known to happen. or maybe the song itself is just hard to do, apart from the height. there’s a bunch of songs that are very hard for me heightwise although other, even higher, songs are a piece of cake…

you can try to eliminate as much problems as possible by simply drink enough (water!) while you’re singing, take deep and calm breaths during guitar solos, between songs etc., by not forgetting to breathe in the song’s rhythm, by wisely placing the song at a good position inside the set. make sure you play the song in the key planned. find ways to pitch a song a few steps up- and downwards without changing it’s tempo (today that can easily be done on a computer) to be able to provide correct material for your bandmates. it’s a lot easier to hand them a copy of the song in the key to be played than giving them the original version and telling them what to change. musicians are stupid, so make it as easy as possible for them :-)

it sometimes can help to pick the highest note of a problem-song and compare it to the highest note of a song you’re able to do. use a guitar, keyboard or whatever to identify the note. you might find out that the problem-note is lower than the other one and that can be a motivation. as i mentioned, some songs seem to be very high but compared to others they aren’t, they’re just hard to do…

certainly, this doesn’t work for every song. sometimes a song really is too high and then you have no other choice than to sing it your way or not at all. come to think of it, finding your way should have its own entry sometime.