Music / Business

Posted on February 8, 2012 by admin

A the risk of stating the obvious, I’m going to have to conclude that It’s rather difficult to make a living in the music industry.

I know a great number of musicians who have more then enough talent to do this thing for a living – and would dearly love to be doing just that – yet they’re languishing away in boring day jobs, working in cover bands playing music they don’t like to punters who don’t care. My mate Brett (with whom I’ve just recently started playing again) writes amazing, complex, clever music, but his bills get paid from singing Cold Chisel and Bryan Adams songs to inebriated North-Westerners. More exciting than collating TPS reports I suppose, but perhaps not so much once you get to the three hundredth rendition of Summer of 69 for the financial year.

So is it just a matter of tenacity? Being in the right place at the right time? That’s long been a bit of an albatross for us Taswegians. I’m not sure how long it’s been since we saw the last Tasmanian music star, but I suspect it’s been a good while. But then, I’m not talking “stardom” neccessarily – I’m talking about making a living, getting by, being comfortable, and not having to rent your soul to the corporate world or the government for 38 hours a week to achieve it.

I couldn’t even begin to speculate on a remedy. Just keep plugging away I guess – the problem is it’s a great big Catch-22. If you tie yourself to a “real job” (and you pretty much have to if you want to enjoy those little luxuries like a car, somewhere to live, or nutritionally adequate food) then the majority of your productive hours are lost in the name of, oh I don’t know, calculating some other fellow’s tax returns, or taking pictures of people shaking hands with suits on, or explaining to supposedly intelligent people over the phone where the on-button is. It’s unlikely that you’ll be in the right place at the right time for that big musical break when the majority of your time is spent at work. Unless of course the right place happens to be where you work, which (let’s face it) is unlikely.

umbrageous dissertaions

Posted on November 30, 2009 by admin

Clare & I jetted off to Melbourne this weekend to see the delightful miss Kate Miller-Heidke play at the Forum. It was a lot better than I expected. I knew she was talented and had a great band, plus I’m automatically predisposed to like anyone who sings a song called “ducks don’t need satellites”, but I didn’t realise quite how seasoned the whole group were as performers and entertainers. A pleasant surprise, and at only $50 for the ticket, a very reasonably priced one (plane trip notwithstanding).

Line-up wise, it was a pretty standard rock-show. Drums, bass, two guitars, piano, every one but the drummer sang, and not a hint of a backing track so far as I could tell. Stylistically, it was harder to pin down. I suppose you could broadly describe it as “pop”, but only if you’re comfortable with that definition encompassing liberal doses of operatic singing and shades of live theatre alongside moments of head banging, all executed with a healthy sense of humour, but not the the extent of undermining its sincerity.

OK, so I sound a bit like that old advertisement with the art critics (“an existentialist hurdy gurdy spinning around and around in a double negative reinversion”) but my point is that it wasn’t trying to be anything in particular. It was just being – very convincingly and unabashedly – itself.

I was struck by the contrast with some of the lyrics and music I’ve been trying to write lately, and realising how contrived I’m driving myself to be. Philosophical and overly wordy, and “deep and sensitive”, and it’s all just, frankly, a bit pants. Earnest and insightful lyrics are great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s all too easy to pick a topic which has the patina of “meaningfulness” (politics, war, addiction, mental illness) and then find yourself writing unbelievably trite, sophomoric, codpiece wearing “one foot on the foldback wedge” lyrics about it. Do I really have to rail on in painfully forced verse about the estranging denouement that our reliance on media and technology are conveying us toward, when I could just say “ducks don’t need satellites”? It’s the same message, but that song is pretty, whimsical, and makes me smile a little bit, at the same time as gently suggesting that it’s possible to be content without the trappings of modern life. Yeah yeah, ducks are silly and boring and not worthy metaphors for our lofty subject matters, but… you know what… arseholes to all that. I think I’d rather aim to be authentic – perhaps even insightful – about the mundane, than to end up like this guy:

"Hey guys, I think I just figured out a rhyme for 'disaffectation'. Can you get me a pen?"

I certainly don’t mean to say that weighty lyrics are always bad, or that irreverent, personal writing is prima-facie good. But I do know that I’ve been censoring myself without even realising it. And I’m going to stop. Because I don’t much care about being cool, or about fitting into a specific and arbitrary sub-category of a genre. Bring on the real

The whirligig of time

Posted on September 29, 2009 by admin

After the new-job ridiculousness, and with the assurance that bills can be met for a bit longer, things are starting to settle back into some sort of music-allowing pace. I’ve been simmering on some brain-ideas for T3E album #2, and I’ll be getting them down on tape/disk/flash in the near future. But that’s not what I want to talk about today.

I’ve been participating in CAPE again this year. If you’re not aware, it’s a really cool online collaborative recording/songwriting/performance “competition”. I put “competition” in the golden squirrels because it’s not really competitive in any serious sense – rather we all get together virtually at the end of the process, listen to each other’s work, comment, and gain a bunch of cool new tracks for our iTunes playlists. It’s a great social activity as well – I’ve “met” some great musos, producers, and engineers through the event, and projects are in the works (for a given value of “in the works” which have grown out of CAPE collaborations.

Anyway, after a few stints in a row as just a vocalist, I’ve decided to throw my hat in the ring as a songwriter for the first time. Also doing lead vocals, harmony vocals, and apparently (fake) mellotron and (fake) string quartet. And possibly mixing, and editing some of the parts for cohesiveness.

But I’m not a control freak. If you find anyone who says I’m a control freak, send them my way so I can tell them what they should be thinking instead.

Ah, mirthfulness….

The editing of takes is a funny thing.I’m normally a bit of a stickler for authenticity of performance and all that jazz. Actually that’s not entirely true – in the right genre I’m all for some judicious DAWsomeness being applied (see Frost‘s “Black Light Machine” at about 7:50 for a good example of some Command-D and grid mode Pro-Toolery). But the song I’ve written for CAPE is a pretty straightforward Beatles-y ballad-y kind of thing, and while yes, it does have two mellotrons and a string quartet and an everything-including-three-kitchen-sinks crescendo, the core instrumentation should sound something like a drum kit, piano, bass and guitar playing in a room, just like John, Paul, George and Ringo used to do.

"Paul, stop sniffing my chest"

Of course playing in a room you have all sorts of cues to work with. You can see each other, you’re all listening to each other play at the same time, and so on. On the other hand, the nature of an online collaboration means everyone’s laying down parts individually to a click and a guide track, and they’re all being shoehorned into a timeline at the end. Even with good players and a good click, it’s challenging to get things to “lock”. “The whirligig of time brings in his revenges”, as Shakespeare once said. Granted, he was basically talking about Karma, Vis-à-vis having people locked up for grinning like idiots whilst wearing yellow stockings and cross-garters, but the quote still holds some relevance I think. At the very least it gives me an excuse to post this picture:

Hey baby - how you doing?

Where were we? Oh yes, editing.

So with my nifty portable copy of REAPER on a USB drive, I’ve spent a rainy lunch-hour at work applying nip here and a tuck there, and our kicks, pianos and basses are all lining up nicely.

I should give an example.

Here’s a bass, piano and drum track in their raw, pre-edited state:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I’m not inclined to say that any of the parts were “wrong” by any objective measure – it can be great to have parts which push and pull against the click. These ones are just pushing and pulling in different ways, by virtue of the fact that they were performed without the performers being able to hear each other. It all contributes to make the total result less than the sum of the parts played.

Chop and slide the parts around a bit, and you end up with something more like this:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I haven’t done any sort of cynical audio-quantise malarkey (and definitely NOT any pitch correction), and I think it still sounds like humans playing instruments. But now they’re playing in slightly better time. A bit more like they would if they were in the same room together, rather than continents apart.

Ideal? Probably not. Cheating? Ahhh, well, that’s more of your philosophical sorta question. Is it cheating if you’re in another state, it doesn’t really mean anything, and you do it standing up? Well, yes actually. But as far as editing, I’m inclined to think not so much – at least no more than the whole recording process itself is a cheat.

For my money, the more pertinent question is “does it do a better job of presenting the song?” And I think the answer is undoubtedly a resounding “yes”.

And as Shakespeare might well have said, had be been a composer rather than a playright, “the song’s the thing”.

Sorry Steve

Posted on November 11, 2008 by admin

I’m sure nobody at Cupertino will be losing sleep over it, but Nick’s great Mac experiment of ’07-08 is showing early signs of being officially over. My once-revered white revision 2 Macbook, having moved from “a couple of teething problems” to “inexplicably temperamental” (with a diversion to “warranty-replaced hard drive” land) has finally reached what I now believe to have always been its ultimate destination of “useless piece of crap”.

I wanted to love it, I really did. The user experience when the machine is working is absolutely second-to-none. Intuitive, smooth, streamlined, easy. But the caveat to the dumbed down user interface is that when something breaks you get very few clues as to what has actually gone wrong. Shiny shiny isn’t much help when you’re looking for an error code or some other information that might actually help you to, oh I don’t know, maybe diagnose the problem. As it is, you’re left with trying various combinations of words describing your symptoms into google, usually to find nothing but other hapless users with the same problem, and no more idea than you of how to resolve them.

And that’s the thing – for an allegedly superior platform which, in the words of Apple’s own marketing spin, “just works”, there are an awful lot of users out there griping about their shiny machines NOT working. And not an great deal of wisdom out there to help them. So we wander through about a million different sites which regurgitate the troubleshooting mantras ”reset your PRAM” or “repair disk permissions”, and ultimately resolve on “Oh, I took it to the Apple store and they replaced my hard drive/RAM/logic board”. I applaud the no-questions hardware replacement, but why not just design and build the things to a higher standard in the first place?

Look, I never really bought in to the “just works” thing, I’m not unrealistic in my expectations, I realise that personal computers are complicated devices. But I’ve got two Dell laptops at home and they both run pretty much without a hiccup. One is six years old, and the other is NINE years old. And they’ve NEVER not worked. The Macbook has run about a year, probably about 10% of which was spent in some state of disrepair.

Eh?

Posted on October 7, 2008 by admin

Christmas is coming…

Well actually it’s not due for nearly a quarter of a year just yet, but it hasn’t stopped the retail centres of Hobart from starting to put trees and decorations on the shelves. I made an anticipatory joke about it as we got back from our honeymoon, and was a little surprised to see that reality had overtaken my sarcasm.

But what Christmas in the city tends to remind me of is carols, and the cacophony of musical dissonance. I’m not talking about dissonance in the sense of any specific christmas ditties – Silent Night and Jingle Bells are hardly replete with tritones – but the surreal wash of conflicting tuneage that you get as you walk past shop after shop, each blasting its own choice of holiday cheer. I’ll never really know what ADHD feels like (actually some people might take issue with that) but I can imagine that it might be something like the feeling you get as your brain attempts to track 5 familiar but unrelated melodies, diverting any additional computational power it might need from other activites like, oh… intelligible speech, or not running into walls.

I had a similar moment this-morning on the bus. The drivers tend to play 7HOFM, which is the local middle-of-the-road commercial station. Nothing too objectionable music-wise, and the “zany morning show banter” is just shy enough of completely mindless that it keeps me from wanting to jump out the window onto the highway. I generally read a book anyway, and there’s nothing on the radio that’s so distracting as to cause any problems there.

Except occasionally – like today – you’ll get someone who decides that an appropriate volume for their iPod headphones is the one that allows everyone within a 4-seat radius to hear what they’ve decided to listen to. He was three seats away from me, and across the aisle, and the leakage from his headphones was actually drowning out the radio in the speaker directly above me.

At the risk of sounding like a bit of an old fart (actually, I think I may have crossed that threshold somewhere in the last couple of paragraphs), WHY do people have to listen so loud?! I mean, hey… I’ve been playing in live bands at pubs since I was 16, and I absolutely understand the appeal of volume and dynamics when it comes to the enjoyment of music. But there comes a point of diminishing returns, and I’d say if your earbuds are running hard enough they can actually function as heating elements to keep your head warm, you’ve possibly passed that point.

Shiny

Posted on October 6, 2008 by admin

Ok, so Pro Tools 8 was announced at the AES show over the weekend, and they’ve been busy lads indeed. Lots of extra plugins, increased track counts, lots of MIDI love, notation editor, elastic pitch, and a very pretty revamped interface. Look at it up there, looking all smooth and metallic and… well, a lot like Logic 8, really

I’ll upgrade, if only to keep current with my knowledge of the platform, but I must admit that once the excitement wears off there appears to be a lot of catch up being played here.

I have this constant love/hate thing with Pro Tools. If I’m being honest, I’ll have to say that to some degree it’s just tall-poppy syndrome. It really rankles when people who don’t really know about the alternatives won’t look at you seriously unless you’re using Pro Tools. You’re not going to veto a writer because they use a certain brand of pencil, or a photographer who uses a Nikon rather than a Canon, or whatever. But people seem to have this raging love for Pro Tools to the detriment of some (arguably superior) competitors. Which is not to say it’s a bad product, which it absolutely isn’t. But it’s not the only product.

Is it because it has “Pro” in the title?

I don’t know.

And despite my little diatribe there, every time a new version comes along, I still feel compelled to take a look. Ah Digidesign, you seductive little minx.

Procrastination

Posted on February 8, 2007 by admin

That’s very droll, isn’t it? I’d like to remove the “congress” from the door, as it’s not exactly pertinent in this example, but frankly I feel bad enough stealing some poor bugger’s cartoon and not giving him any credit for it – let alone modifying it as well.

I actually had a dream last night that a couple of rather large people in suits paid me a visit and recquisitioned my CD due to a plagiarism accusation. Apparently they weren’t concerned with the melody or the lyrics, but rather the drum sound. I was halfway through explaining to them that drum sounds are not exactly copyrightable as part of a composition, but then it all shifted into some sort of spaceship flying around thing (with monsters in pursuit – although the suit people were more frightening). I remember waking up hoping it was portentious, and now here I am blithely appropriating other peoples hard work. I just don’t learn.

So, where was I? Procrastination, yes. I’ve done absolutely nothing music-wise since the last entry, and time is starting to seem like it’s moving a bit faster. I had expected the house to myself the second half of this week, but Clare has come down with something, and so she’s stayed home from work. So I’m working hard to try and overcome this slight sense of self-consciousness about working on songs while there’s someone in the house.

That does sound very silly, I know. Clare knows I play and write music – this is not something I’m ashamed of. It’s just that it’s a slightly messy, scrappy process, and to a person who is used to hearing finished, fleshed out compositions, seeing the foundations being dug and the frame going up – well, I’m sensitive about that. Actually in my case, it’s usually a matter of the roof and windows first, then try to jam some walls and a slab underneath – which is even more embarrasing.

Nevertheless, this is something I’m going to have to overcome – so today I will finish another song. Definitely. Yes.

For sure.

All I want for Christmas is a new PC

Posted on December 10, 2006 by admin

I’ve been working on the audio & video recordings from this gig last weekend, and my poor aging PC is feeling the brunt. It’s a shade over three years old now, a humble Athlon XP 1900+, and while it has served me admirably, it has always had a penchant to run rather warm. I think it actually may be the motherboard (a Gigabyte GN400Pro) – I’ve read about a few problems with inaccurate temperature readings on this particular board, so it may be that it’s not infact overheating – it just thinks it is. Nevertheless, it brings my audio work to a spectacular halt each time. Processing slows to a crawl, audio stutters, the poor machine starts emitting a series of strangled beeps, and then has to go for a bex and a good lie down before it’s good for anything. Now I’m not one to deny my PC the right to its R & R – it’s getting toward the twilight years in PC terms after all, but I still need to do my work.

The recording & video itself are in fair to moderate shape. Some of the problems reflect those on the night – Cornel’s vocal parts are virtually inaudible, and the pitch is pretty wobbly (due to the fact that they were virtually inaudible on the night as well, so he couldn’t hear himself). The acoustic guitar was a bit out of tune for a couple of songs (again, we didn’t catch it, because we couldn’t hear it). Nothing irreparable, but then you start to encounter the slippery slope of concert recording post-production fixes. The acoustic is out? Well, let’s just grab the Maton & plug it in, we can re-do that one easy enough. Hmm… except now the vocal doesn’t quite sit with the acoustic for a couple of lines. Ok, where’s my SM58, I’ll just fix that up… oh, but the sound is a little different, I can’t quite match the EQ, and it’s really obvious where all the bleed drops out in the new section, so I’d better re-record the whole song – just so it matches sonically of course – I’ll reproduce my performance on the night, flubs and all, so it’s honest. Oh, well, except for that note, and this one here… and ohhh that one was quite bad. I know I can sing them correctly, so I’ll just do them here, and it’ll be more of a “hypothetical gig recording”.

The next thing you know, you’ve got INXS’s Live Baby Live, which while it has the word “live” comprising a full two thirds of its title, ironically contains about the opposite ratio of actual live recorded material.

Now, where’s that autotune plugin?

Journalisticism

Posted on November 30, 2006 by admin

Well, if a single column write up in the local paper is any barometer of rock stardom, we have arrived. Or, should I say, if a single column paraphrasing of our press release is any barometer…

Still, it says reasonably nice things about us (which it would want to, considering we basically wrote it ourselves) but I’m sure I didn’t say any of the things they’ve quoted me on. I’m not sure about “Local Lads” either – I feel like we should have scuffed knees and be playing conkers, or making lemonade to sell at 5p a glass or something.

I must admit I find myself a bit disillusioned with the state of the local scene vis-a-vis recognition. We rate nary a blip on most peoples barometers, but I would imagine we’ve outsold a number of more recognised artists in terms of CDs. It was a conscious decision to skip the local bar scene and concentrate on a great recorded piece of work and the ensuing securing of a distribution arrangement, and it seems to have worked pretty well.

But it’s still a tad bit frustrating being marginalised by the local “taste makers”.

All you need is a DAW

Posted on November 29, 2006 by admin

I picked up the “latest” Beatles album the other day as a Christmas present for Dad, but I couldn’t resist giving it a spin myself before I wrapped it up and stuck a ribbon on it. Now I think I’m going to have to get another – this is a rather intriguing musical journey into Beatles-land.

Mind you it’s certainly not one for the purists – there are some pretty huge liberties taken with the material here – but as far as the “how is it to listen to?” test (always the most important one, I think) it passes with colours of some sort.

George & Giles Martin have mangled & recontextualised this incredibly familiar material (as well as some lesser known and unreleased snippets) into something that’s great fun to listen to. The orchestral crescendo leading up to Get Back brought a huge smile to my face, and the acoustic/orchestral version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is worth the price of admission all by itself.

Caveats – it’s a bit odd hearing the Beatles recordings sound so clean. I’ve been reading some griping on this front from audio engineering folk who feel that it doesn’t have the character of the originals, and that it’s basically tantamount to trying to cut the Mona Lisa into little circles and re-assemble it as pointillist art. I suppose they have something of a point, but I must admit I find the simile is a bit troubled. For starters, you haven’t actually destroyed anything; the originals are still sitting safe and sound on the shelf, so at worst it’s a poor derivative work which you are fully at liberty to not listen to!

For me? Well I grew up listening to the Beatles (thanks Dad!) and I don’t see this as a betrayal of the material at all. Is it a cynical marketing/moneymaking exercise? Well… maybe. Do I care? Not really in the slightest. I’m enjoying the music too much.

In other news, we ran through all the covers for the T3E gig last night, and it seems I had managed to forget large swathes of my keyboard parts. Not good. Nose to the grindstone today then, as we’ve only got one more rehearsal before Saturday (although we’ll probably have a little bit of time to run things in soundcheck). 24-track recording appears to be the order of the day, so hopefull there will be something to show for all this…

…now we just need to play halfway reasonably

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