Comments (0)

By jdb, April 6, 2009

(I originally posted this in 2002)

We’ve all seen the pictures of the mega-studio complexes of the 70′s and 80′s – huge consoles, multiple treated recording rooms that sound great, racks of real tube preamps. Some major label artists still work in those studios. Along with the great sound, however, came a tight structire that artists had to learn to work in, and a whole bunch of people that expected the music to be a certain thing. The best thing about being able to get high qualitygear for less money in the last decade is that it affords more people the chance to work however the hell they choose. Some people choose to work alone, like the musical composers of hundreds of years ago.

Fact is, there are lots of reason someone might choose to work alone. Artists often feel the need for control. a desire to see something through thats THIER baby. They can do that more easily now. Collaboration just isn’t appropriate in some cases, because the artist has a complete ‘vision’ and is able to execute it on his own. In all art forms besides pop music (and film) the work is most often the vision of one person. That ‘personality’, the style, is one of the things that makes a book or painting great. However, in music as in film, youve got this whole entertainment structure to carry along with you, and you end up basically financially beholden to all of them in one way or another. How does this make art better?

There is also personal preference. Some people prefer to be in bands, some people prefer to sit on a stool and play guitar, some people are singers who need a thousand people to work with them, some people sit at home making finished soundtracks or dance music all by themselves. To each thier own – my record collection is full of artists who either work alone or understand and control most aspects of record making. many of them at home. Some are very young. all of them are good and non-boring. A lot of them put music first. What I’m saying does not preclude the great things that can come from collaboration. Perhaps most people should collaborate. But it’s good that they don’t HAVE to.

One very important issue is sound quality. I don’t mean ‘quality’ as if theres some kind of objective standard, I mean the character of the sound. Unfortuneately, the last twenty years are littered with the remains of bands that had really great records until they signed with a major. After which their records sound like shit. There is absolutely no aesthetic reason to subject your music to the kind of manipulation that big record companies will foist upon you. ive heard this a lot from musicians, who are like ‘we dont want
that compressed sound’ or ‘we dont want polish’. Most musicians i know think the compressed, reverby studio sound is shit. To use a classic example, I personally think pearl jams ‘ten’ would have been a hell of a lot better if it hadnt been put through the wringer. you can hear live tapes and understand this. I absolutely don’t blame any of them, I don’t know what I would do if someone waved money like that in my face…

The fact is, because of the the proliferation of recording technology and computers, musician and audio engineer are no longer two mutually exclusive professions. What stopped this from happening more in the past was basically the exorbitant cost of studio gear and a misunderstanding of recording techniques that work well in ‘non-professional’ environments. Just as the hype surrounding new recording gear may be a little misleading, the hype surrounding the professional recording environment is equally so. Even though that perfectly controlled sound can’t be dupicated inthe bedroom, some living rooms sound really fantastic!

On a personal note, I remember at some point being very interested in the whole ‘artistic group effort’ concept… i think it was before the fall of communism and the berlin wall. There are technological changes that have happened in the last fifty years that have changed music forever, just as musical notation did in medieval times. What comes out of the studio onto the commercial plate isnt music as we understand it anymore, it’s a recording – not even a recording of music, but something all it’s own. You have an entire generation (or two) brought up on favorite albums that are more recording than music. Recordings are their own medium now, the ‘object d’art’. They aren’t music any more than a movie is necessarily drama – a recording can have music in it, just like a film can have drama, but the mediums have forked off into new territory – the recording contains and transcends the musical experience, making it concrete in the way that music has never been, making it more like a painting. And painters tend to work alone. We don’t need a bunch of people looking over our shoulders, we can make the thing by themselves. Our art. Our baby.

Comments (0)

By jdb, April 2, 2009

If you want to learn to record music, here are the three beginning steps:

1) Buy a little tape deck and a little microphone. A tape deck is better than a digital recorder because it takes longer and is less forgiving – you can’t just drop it into soundforge and edit it. Practice by recording accapella voices, acoustic guitar, or speech – things that you can easily control and take from place to place. You can learn how to make your tape sound as good as possible by moving the mic and the sound source and controlling the environment. Try recording everywhere you can get away with it and find ways to make it work as well as you can. All of those things are more important for recording quality than the equipment. Forget about technology, just listen to sounds for a while. You will learn a lot more by making crappy equipment sound pretty good than you will making nice equipment sound like crap.

When you understand how to manipulate everything that is going on and make it “sound pretty damn good for a cheap cassette”, you can go to step

2) You should drop a few bucks on a 4-track cassette and buy some actual mics. An sm57 or a cheap clone is good, that and a battery powered condenser will get you started. It will take a while to learn how to make the 4-track sound as good as it can. You will learn how to listen for noise and the effect of the noise on the signal by using old school dolby. You’ll learn basics of Equalization and balance – how to balance the highs and the bass, how to balance the sound field.  You can learn how to edit new elements into existing tracks in a real time and musical way, by ‘punching in’. It requires timing and reflex, and being in tune with the music itself.

By this time, you have the concepts and a little experience and technique. You have a developing ear for all the basic and crucial elements of the recording process and you haven’t spent a bunch of money doing it.

3) The next step is to get a stand alone recording box. All of these come with effects (if you’re tired of using guitar pedals, spring verbs, and that first stereo tape deck you bought) so this is where you start to learn how to sculpt sounds and really build a modern sound field. The stand alone boxes are sufficient for everything except very professional commercial release, and tend to be much more stable than a ‘roll your own’ DAW.

The philosophy behind this course of learning is that limitations are good. Limitations make one creative. For a student, they keep you from getting ahead of yourself. Why would somebody need 128 tracks when they don’t know what to do with eight? Theoretical issues aside, why should a newbie spend $1k+ on an laptop or DAW? That money buys an awful lot of microphones that don’t turn to garbage in 3-6 years, which is they way of all computers. By the time you learn all the stuff you can learn with simple, inexpensive  tools, you’ll know what you need to spend the real money on and why you need it.

Note: Obviously this little course doesn’t apply to making or producing/constructing electronic music like dance or  pop/R&B. That’s a whole other course that can be parallel but it’s not the same thing as recording music. Anything in my basic course above does help with production, though.

Comments (0)

By jdb, March 25, 2009

I’d like to elaborate on my reply to this post:

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php

I think this theory is a little bit wrong. I think the principles sound good on paper, but the economics in several of the examples are off. There are certainly some good ideas for self promotion in there, it’s something that a lot of musicians that want to remain independent think about (myself, I tend to think more along the lines of ‘five good fans in every big city’) it’s just a little optimistic in terms of the number of fans you actually need. I understand that Kelly is trying to help people survive in the type of ‘long tail’ economy he believes we should and do live in, but it is VERY hard for a musician to get even his truest fans to spend a hundred dollars a year.

More like twenty or thirty, really, which is the price of a couple of cd’s or dvd’s. Maybe they’ll come to a show if you can afford to get close to where they are. Those ARE true fans. Casual fans buy one of your cd’s and that’s it – for their entire life. Now, obsessed fans may spend a hundred on merchandise a year, but even the most established indie bands with twenty or forty year careers have a limited number of those. They acquired them through years of patience and dedication and one more thing – a type of financial deal known as ‘the front’. As in, ‘I am an agent or producer or record comapny and I will front you some cash so you can make it to the next show/make the next album/whatever, because I believe you will make my money back and then some’. That’s how the business works. I’m sure there are exceptions that prove the rule, but all of those artists got the insurance payed somehow.

Granted, Kelly does say “But in fact the actual number is not critical, because it cannot be determined except by attempting it” which is not really true. I know what it costs to pay a mortgage and the amount listeners will spend on music is a pretty well studied topic.

Another example Kelly uses, about Lawrence Watt Evans, doesn’t work for me either. Evans has been a working writer for something like thirty years, and has had all that time to build a good following of ‘true fans’. In the meantime, as Kelly points out, he had contracts and promotion from great, big, evil, greedy, bloody, top-down, traditional publishing companies. Now, I don’t know his finances and I don’t want to presume, but after thirty years in the business, just the advance he makes from a book that shows up in a store like B&N or Amazon ought to far outstrip what he made selling each chapter for a hundred bucks. It does sound like a good way to publish stuff your publishers don’t want, though. Publishing is still one of the areas in art where the contracts are actually OK. I couldn’t see a writer at this point wanting that to be his writing income unless he has a nice side job.

The ‘thousand fan’ model seems to say ‘make a thousand friends and they will support you’. Outside the world of parent-funded communes and hereditary nobility, and even there it’s an iffy proposition, I just don’t think this works in the real world.

Kevin Kelly updates his own message with information from a working ‘long tail’ artist:

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/04/the_reality_of.php

Other artists chime in, largely pointing out that no one is making a living doing this:

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/04/the_case_agains.php

Comments (0)

By jdb, February 24, 2009

I know there are psychological theories floating around about the creative process where part of the motivation for a writer is supposed to be that little mental jolt, the aesthetic coming together, a rush of endorphins or adrenaline that combats the inherent mental illness of all writers.

None of this increases my faith in psychologists. If nothing else they are reducing a very complex act with a very specific goal (creation of an object, a piece) to a kind of therapy process, and of course they would because they do therapy. You don’t see me calling psychology a kind of ‘collaborative oral writing’ wherin therapy is incidentally created.

On top of that, I think they might be describing almost anyone, it could apply to salespeople, or psychologists for that matter (ooh! that feels nice! I just validated my existence by helping someone with a problem they didn’t know about), but for some reason in our culture writing must be akin to madness. Either this is a gross romanticization or a gross prejudice, or both.

The mechanism here is also doubtful. I’m not sure there is necessarily some kind of adrenaline rush, in the way that athletes or performers get them – not as consistently anyway. I think the process of getting things done is just as easily unrewarding. To be honest, it can be like chewing sand. There is however, always the prospect of a paycheck. There’s a psychological boost!

Comments (0)

By jdb, December 15, 2008

(Originally from 2007)

For the last twenty years, there’s been this supposition that ‘interactive’ forms of art will replace older, more static forms. It’s arguable that there are new forms of art, but it doesn’t seem like new forms supplant the old so much as coexist, at least to date. Photography alongside Painting, Drama alongside Film, now Books alongside Hypertext.

In the realm of fiction, there may or may not be something evolving and what it will end up being is still any one’s guess. will iFiction come from video games? There are some beautiful video games out there, but RPG’s and MMORPG’s aren’t much like fiction, bound by the simplicity of ‘traditional’ video games. It’s all still running though a maze and shooting stuff, or slicing it up as the case may be.

There are some people extending their table-top and live action role-playing games onto the Internet in shared spaces. This could be a type of interactive, collaborative fiction and people often talk about ‘shared narratives’. The thing that most resembled ‘interactive fiction’ however were the text games from Infocom back in the eighties – written by one person, and navigated by means of text. Unfortunately it was a dead end in evolutionary terms – over time the worlds could have gotten deeper, and the programs more intelligent at taking instructions and giving feedback.

The kind of gossip, rumor-mongering, scapegoating and self-reinforcement that happens on Internet forums and in blog comments could be a kind of interactive fiction but really I think it’s more a mythologization, where an intrinsic group creates it’s own reality regardless of ‘real-world’ fact. That kind of group think might be the Internets primary gift to social discourse and forms unique to the Internet, like public journals, might be the art form that flourishes in the Internet space.

In the end if could be that ‘iFiction’ if it even happens won’t be the kind of direct transfer of form that happened from Drama to Radio and Film, for instance, but something that just contains story elements and bits from other arts, something genuinely new, leaving ‘fiction’ without the ‘i’ to continue it’s meandering journey.