Music Biz Outsider Report

The right set of barbarians...

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 17:20:00 +0000

Someone, elsewhere, was despairing that a new musical revolution like the rock and roll, Brit Invasion, pyschedelic, or punk waves of decades past had become all but impossible...

I'd say the 'last' music revolution (arguably the grunge thing -- unless you want to count the so-called 'modern metal'/screamo thing) was pretty much pre-owned by the establishment. I was really excited going in but the boring/retread angle there for most of the bands (grunge, seems to me, needed a few more Nirvanas with their pop hooks or Alice in Chains with their adventurousness). I went up to Seattle in '89 looking to connect up with grunge. I walked away decidedly unimpressed.

Look, revolution is far from impossible. But the palace guard want you to think it is.

They've been quite scientific -- and even somewhat flexible -- in maintaining -- with the assistance of the cohort of bought-and-paid for shills who have the overweening gall to call themselves "music journalists" -- the current commercial music Pax Romana.

But all it takes is the right set of conditions -- and the right set of barabarians -- to topple the empire once again.

Lining up for the Big Cookie Cutter

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 04:37:00 +0000

This article spawned this discussion elsewhere, in which I (more or less) wrote:

The distressingly boring, stamped out, streamed out, spewed out product of today's music business is the culmination of trends that have been in the works since I was a kid...

Demographic analysis and targeting of radio audiences really started kicking in in the mid-60s, with the formulation of Boss 30 Radio (from the old RKO General radio network). Before that, choices about programming were largely informal and based on hunches, word of mouth, charts from other stations and cities, and, oddly enough, the tastes of the DJs.

In the 70s, the labels got involved in targeting the format requirements of Boss Radio, similar formats, and the album oriented rock format that evolved (many would say devolved) from the late 60s underground radio scene. In the early 60s and again at the end of the decade, there were explosions of interest in making music instead of just consuming it (first, the folk revival and then the hippie/alternative culture movement). Many learned a few chords and lost interest, but more than a few maintained music as a hobby, often supporting that often expensive hobby with day jobs.

As amateur musicians matured and their earning potential increased, they spent more money on gear and music production expenses, mostly subsidized by those precious day jobs. Periodicals -- supported mostly by adverts for "pro" gear used overwhelmingly by non-pros or moonlighters -- sprang up and were often packed with glossy ads for gear and services. There had to be something between the sexy pictures of guitars, amps and keyboards and all those ads... Articles on 'honing one's professionalism' an shaping one's career came to the fore. Some of the people writing those pieces were actually journalists (could happen) and actually managed to start digging up pertinent educational info.

Meanwhile, by the late 70s, a tiny handful of community colleges had begun to experiment with offering courses of instruction in video and audio work and expanding commercial music programs (themselves quite new at the time) to cover the technical sides of music production, as well as career aspects. (I'm a product of that era and two of those programs, both at then-nearly-free community colleges. I'd do anything for 'free' studio time.) Often, even in those early days, the emphasis was on best practices and how to deliver the kind of product that labels and radio (and the then growing field of music video) wanted to see.

As a consequence, bands got very good at following all these highly specific recipes for "success." But, of course, not everyone can be successful... and the convergence of all those trends had created veritable armies of well trained wannabes, their heads all filled up with nearly identical cookie cutter personal styles and musical approaches...

The damnedest thing from my point of view?

The musicians mostly seemed fine being just like all the other wannabes. It never seemed to occur to them that in a crowded marketplace, you really, really don't stand out by being just like all the other market dross waiting forlornly for Joe and Mary Consumer to walk by, clucking their tongues in disdain. "Look at that hair. What is it with these musicians that they all have to dress the same and have the same haircuts. How lame."

Changing Recording Roles

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 15:14:00 +0000

A newb somewhere was hazy on the actual duties and roles of engineer, producer, and mastering engineer...

Traditional roles have broke down as the biz has been flooded by newbs but here are the traditional roles:

Producer -- he's the chief executive officer of the project; he's the one with the purse strings; he's often the one who picks the talent and material. In the traditional biz, he worked for a label, typically, often working hand in hand with label A&R (artists and repertoire). He's the chief talent and tech wrangler.

Engineer -- he's a technician, tasked with keeping the studio running and fulfilling the producer's instructions. He's usually the one with his hands on the controls. In recent years, new roles have developed around specialized editing that was not possible in earlier days, so that you end up with people now who specialize in vocal editing (retuning and re-timing) and drum editing (re-timing).

[Obviously there are many in the industry, particularly in Nashville, who are incredibly bad vocal editors. It's one thing to T-Pain a vocal if the artist and producer want it -- but if the singer wants it to sound natural, I shouldn't think there could be any excuses left for the utterly clumsy and obvious vocal retuning that 'graces' the recordings of many big stars.]

Mastering Engineer -- traditionally, this was the highly trained technician who did the very difficult task of trying to squeeze as much fidelity (and in the case of singles, particularly in the 50s and 60s, when singles had to compete with each other in jukeboxes and on the radio -- loudness) into the narrow grooves as possible. The variable groove spacing lathes these guys operated were complex, and very tricky to run well. In those days, a mastering house really earned its money.

At first, the bar for mastering in the digital era was very high -- meaning that established mastering houses still had a valuable franchise. But then the advent of the CD-R and other new technological approaches meant that virtually anyone could prepare a CD master for replication -- crisis time in the mastering biz!

But musicians are a gullible and mostly clueless lot. They turned out to be quite easy to gull into continuing to pay as much as hundreds of dollars an hour -- not for the highly technically demanding craft of a disk cutting engineer -- but rather for an extension of the last-emergency-fix-it stop repairs that had long been a possible adjunct to the grooved disk mastering process.

And, with the explosion of inexperienced recordists and shoestring studios there really were problems to be fixed, no question.

Problem was that the right place to fix many of them was back in the mix.

But many in the music biz don't like to let cold-headed reality get in the way to make a buck.

So we had a group of vested interests promoting the quite new idea that tracks had to be "mastered" -- but now, by that misused term, people actually meant a sort of post-facto final sweetening, typically focusing on adding more compression and then trying to fix the dullness that results from overcompression, often by aggressive use of finite impulse response (linear or 'mastering') or other EQ.

A bright future in recording? Maybe not so...

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 18:13:00 +0000

Someone wrote about his difficulties finding a job after completing a course at a commercial recording school. I initially posted this in the thread he started -- but I quickly realized it was pretty much going to be the bummer post of the year for this guy and nuked it. But... for the hardy realists among you, I offer this cautionary mini-essay on recording school and starting a career in commercial audio, c. 2010...

Folks have been warning for years now to not go into debt at a school whose real business model is selling student loans, to keep their options open, keep Plan B not just handy but ready to implement at any time... yes -- even keep the day job.

And for most of that time, there have been a seeming unending supply of people saying things like, Hey, don't rain on my dreams, man, I'm going to make it, I'm not like all those other flakes, I have to record or life won't be worth living... etc, etc, etc.

Even as the population of the commercial recording schools exploded, and as community colleges all added media programs to try to rope in the preterliterate supposed media mavens of the future, even as the bottom fell out of the studio job market, as bedroom and garage studios employing only their own owners popped up like mushrooms after a Seattle rain, even as these forums filled with posts like those above... even as changes in the US bankruptcy law made during the Bush2 era meant that you could no longer get out from under a student loan, even by bankruptcy -- people kept signing up for recording schools, often also signing up for huge loans going far enough into debt that they could have bought a nice little house somewhere instead.

Me, I went back to my day job more than a decade ago and I haven't regretted it. I still have to record, to be sure. But now, I do it for myself, and make money in a field where I'm not working for burger flipper wages. (Mind you, things have been tough all over. I certainly have not been getting rich -- by a long stretch -- lately. But at least I don't have to sweat it out listening to music I've grown to hate for 8 or 12 hours at a time and then do the math and think... damn, I just can't charge enough to make this thing work. Now when I'm recording, I may not be making money -- but I'm making my own music.)

On songwriting, creativity, and personal experience...

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 01:04:00 +0000

Someone elsewhere remarked that he was getting tired of all of his songs being about the same broken, now long ended relationship and wondered if others had confronted similar issues...

I think a lot of us find our songs chewing over sometimes troubled pasts.

I have to say that writing has seldom come so easy that I had the luxury of turning away the muses... I write what comes -- and if only a few bits and pieces come, then I'll try, sometimes heroically, sometimes doggedly, often futilely, to try to flesh the song out by force of will and intellect... but that dogged effort often translates into doggy lyrics... the kind of thing that doesn't necessarily stop you in your tracks because it's bad --but which nonetheless often fails to light up in the listener's mind.

If the only inspiration that comes to me is another broken hearted threw-it-all-away swim in bathos, even if that was exactly what I wrote last time... I go ahead and write it and do the best job I can finishing it out if there's any spark there at all.

The way I figure, writing is a natural process and, like other natural processes, you don't stop in the middle just because you don't like what's coming out...

Interesting Googling...

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 02:11:00 +0000

At music recording and production website, Gearslutz.com, there is usually a ban in the Music Computers forum on Mac v. PC discussions. It's been in place as long as I've been going there, and, by and large, I've come to the conclusion that it's a good idea.

But, as a sort of seasonal present to the scrappy and contentious among Gearslutz denizens, the powers that be there started what they titled: the ultimate Mac vs. PC slam death fest.

It's overall been great fun. Loads of humor, most of it more or less good-natured. But, after over 400 separate posts, and like all wonderful, but ephemeral things... it's winding down. A few straggling arguments have drifted somewhat lazily across the last page or two, including some sort of contention about market share that has seen both sides, with refreshing sheepishness, citing Google ranking/listings as admittedly speculative evidence.

That got me to thinking it was time for me to hall out the Sucks Index.

In the simplest form of the Sucks Index, one Googles mac sucks and windows Sucks and draws whatever conclusions one might try to gin up. Ludicrous mathematical constructions involving market share are allowed. Since it's meaningless, anyway. (But for those counting nonetheless: about 1,190,000 for mac sucks.; about 2,000,000 for windows sucks. Make of that what you will. BTW, it's the same with or without capitalization.)

But, unsatisfied with the limited knowledge that raw data provided -- you don't even know who is saying what, maybe it's Windows supremacists accounting for the much higher than marketshare-warranted numbers for mac sucks -- I decided to both drill in a little -- and to make things more interesting.

Check out these Google search results (about an hour or so old as I write this), testing on exact phrases (quotation-mark-delimited):

about 659,000 for "I hate my mac"

about 504,000 for "I hate windows"

about 188,000 for "I hate my PC"

I was blown away. Clearly, anyone saying I hate my Mac is a Mac owner (or possibly some sort of lying agent-provocateur --no doubt there are some folks who falsely claim to own a given this or that in order to diss it with greater implied authority).

And, just as clearly, someone saying "I hate Windows" could be a Windows user or former user or a Mac partisan. (The PC thing is trickier still, I just threw it in to see what would happen.)

Thought provoking, huh?

When did music stop evolving...?

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 18:17:00 +0000

Musical paradigm burn-out can be a serious issue. Styles get explored. Every nook and cranny gets poked and prodded -- especially over the course of two or three decades...

We're used to the oft-expressed idea that styles and fashions change quickly these days --but I think that's more fantasy than reality in today's world of hyper fine-tuned marketing and market sector exploitation.

In decades past, styles really did come and go quickly. Now, they seem to stick around forever, long past the point of ongoing returns in terms of fresh creativity and vitality.

I think the reality of this hits home pretty hard when we look at some of the "newer" styles like rap/hip hop, punk, and electronica.

Anyone doing a 2009 survey of those fields will find things distressingly similar to the scene in 1999. And, in many ways, and particularly for hip hop and punk but still for electornica and dance, it's not really much different than what was going down in '89... throw in a little heavy handed Auto-Tune, change a few superficial stylistic tics, and it's pretty much there.

And it virtually goes without saying that the same, in spades, can be said of various forms of rock, which it seems to me, has clearly joined the classic moribund forms of country, folk, blues, bluegrass, mainstream jazz, and so on. Nothing wrong with that -- it's a natural progression. It just seems folks don't want to acknowledge that there haven't been two new ideas in any of these fields to rub together in years if not decades.

Maybe it's just that having seen the tail end of the big band swing era in my early years, the explosion of R&B and then R&R, the big folk revival of the early 60s, the Brit invasion, Motown, the rise of folk rock, and then the evolution of folk rock and blues rock into acid and hippie rock, the ascendance of funk and re-emergence of R&B, the first wave of early 70s disco, the rise of the singer songwriters, the emergence of whitebread disco targeted to mainstream audiences in the late 70s, the emergence of punk, no wave, and proto hip hop in the mid and late 70s -- all before I was even thirty years old -- and, I'll admit it, musical change is something that's all but worked its way into my musical DNA...

Hiding in plain site...

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:47:00 +0000

Someone in a songwriting forum I'm involved with asked if he should be worried about sending his unpublished songs to friends via unencrypted email and went on to ask about the difficulty of filing a proper copyright and the likelihood of theft...

The copyright process is not too bad. You can now do it online. That said it is not free. (How about an advertising supported US Copyright Office? Can I take out a patent on that? With the clueless crop of bozos in the USPTO, the answer may sadly be yes.)

You can save money by collecting a (potentially large) group of songs together and copyrighting them as a collective work. But make sure you file an individual addendum listing each song individually or, I'm told, the CO cannot search on the individual titles in a collective work otherwise and that supposedly hurts your chances in court. Like you're going to court. Trust me, you can't afford to go to court (if you're like most of us).

Anyhow... with regard to folks stealing stuff...

In my long experience hearing musician horror stories -- and I've heard thousands -- I've only heard of a tiny handful of folks who've had their non-hit, unpublished songs appropriated. And that was almost always by folks in the songwriter's ex-band or former musical/writing partners.

OTOH, I've heard scores of folks who got screwed over on their songs/publishing by their own erstwhile publishers, managers, and agents -- to be sure. But in those cases, the crucial paper involved was typically in the form of contracts and legal agreements that the artist had signed or otherwise entered into with those entities (usually knowingly).

The thing with the generally unimaginative dorks who feel driven to steal songs is that they don't usually have enough imagination to steal an unknown song but often, instead, steal something that's already had some sort of success (maybe something on what they think is a lesser known older record).

But, you know, humans always proceed to amaze at the depths they can stoop to, so there's no saying for sure.

Me, I decided after watching for quite some time to not drive myself crazy. I hide my songs in plain sight. Or plain site, maybe. I post each new song on my songwriting blog, with the lyrics on the blog and the media file going to the Internet Archive. (www.archive.org)

I mean, most folks -- and I mean 99.999+% -- make music that will almost certainly go almost entirely unheard. Why add to the likelihood?

more discussion

MySpace plunders dregs of Snocap/Imeem. Musicians the losers... Imagine.

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 03:39:00 +0000

This killed me...

From Wired:

MySpace/Imeem Deal Leaves Thousands of Artists Unpaid

Independent artists who sold their music through imeem’s Snocap music storefronts on MySpace and other sites won’t be paid what’s owed even after MySpace Music’s acquisition of some — but not all — of imeem, Wired.com has learned.

MySpace Music bought “certain assets” from imeem, and they do not include imeem’s liability to more than 110,000 independent artists with Snocap storefronts, according to a source with inside knowledge of the deal. Those artists’ contracts mandate they be paid each month if they’re owed more than $20. Some artists have been owed money for more than a year, and the chance of them seeing any money now is, for all intents and purposes, zero, the source says.

[Read about the whole sorry mess at Wired.]

Despite the fact that MySpace has always been heavily involved in promoting Snocap and pushed them as the only way to sell music through MySpace.

When it looked like Imeem and Snocap were circling the drain, MySpace rushed to buy what few assets their fairy godchild had left -- apparently intent on making sure that the bankruptcy courts would have little chance to convert those assets into payment for some of the bundle owed musicians for MySpace related sales.

Nice, huh?

More discussion at Gearslutz.

Magic wires...

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:19:00 +0000

Back to hardware... for about two seconds.

The subject of "designer cables" costing sometimes hundreds or even thousands of dollars (instead of five or ten dollars) came up, as it has over the years, in a forum I was recently participating in...

The audiophile victimization industry has got a lot of mileage out of the basic human trait of cognitive bias, which can lead people to incorrect interpretations of their own experience and presumed preference.

Behavioral scientists have found -- and recent brain scan studies have given sometimes dramatic support to the idea -- that humans allow a number of non-objective modes of thinking to color what they believe are uncolored perceptions. Humans want to believe in what they've previously believed. Uncertainty produces elevated anxiety in most people (backed by brain scan studies) and the human drive is to come to a conclusion, any conclusion -- and it is much more comforting if that conclusion is consistent with prior beliefs and belief frameworks.

IOW, most humans do not like their personal paradigms shifted.

Problems with the interference of personal belief and perceptual cognition pushed the scientists who specialize in the study of perception, beginning more than 100 years ago, to realize that simple blind testing was not enough.

In simple blind audio testing, the subject does not know what he's listening to, but the test giver does. Over and over, it was found that the test giver could contaminate the findings by giving subtle, typically unconscious cues about the source material. Eventually, the practice of double blind perceptual testing was established as absolutely necessary in much perceptual testing.

By keeping the test giver and taker in the dark over which of two sounds was which, more reliable, less biased results could be derived.

Music that makes you cry...

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:33:00 +0000

Someone asked elsewhere about music that makes you cry...

The day before soul-funk great Curtis Mayfield's near fatal accident that paralyzed him from the neck down, he played a free show in a downtown amphitheater in my adopted home town of Long Beach.

I'd been working on some (now forgotten) recording project all day long and kept putting off stopping and leaving to get down to meet friends at the amphitheater.

When I finally got there, there were only two songs to go, but the crowd was in near-ecstasy and the band was absolutely cooking. The songs got extended with some great grooves and solos by a number of the players. I was simultaneously 100% in the groove still kicking myself for being late to the groove when they brought the main program to a glorious close. The crowd clapped just about forever and it was clear they were coming back for an encore. I don't remember the first encore number except that it grabbed the audience back in and started taking them back up.

And then, for the last song, they did "Move On Up."

Now, I knew the song and liked it OK but it had never really cut a big swathe in my consciousness. But this version started with a slow build and just kept building... winding the audience and the players up together in a big upward groove spiral, the back line laying down a thunderous, galloping groove and the front line latin percussion just smokin'... higher and higher... until finally... it was over and everyone just sort of collapsed... a moment of silence and then a thunder of applause while the band finally left the stage.

The next day, a lighting stand blew over in a heavy wind at the prep for a show (in New Jersey, I think) and it hit Curtis and basically broke his back. Paralyzed from the neck down, it looke like he might not survive. Certainly, few thought he'd be able to continue to make music. But, through what must have been sheer force of will, "sipping" from an oxygen tank in between punched vocal lines, Mayfield managed to continue recording.

The day his death was announced, I put on the album version of "Move On Up" in my old project studio and cranked it. For those minutes -- and they seemed to stretch a supernatural amount of time -- I was transported, memory of that last performance flashing in my mind, the ever-tightening groove of the record sweeping me along... 2/3 of the way through the song I realized there were hot tears streaming down my face... I was grinning like an idiot, all but dancing in my sweetspot, crying like a baby, joy, grief, everything swirling around in a vortex of groove...

Curtis Mayfield was a pretty deep guy in a lot of ways. Like many black artists of his generation, he got his start in church music.

When he was picked to create the soundtrack for the story of a super-fly, super pimp gangster, he somehow managed to create in the Superfly soundtrack a body of music that both celebrated this new, grittily urban version of the classic American outlaw -- but which also -- like a chorus in a Greek tragedy -- kept up a running moral commentary that ultimately underlined the classic notion that the film's anti-hero had sewn the seeds of his own fate and ultimate demise. All while laying down some of the funkiest grooves of the 70s or any era since.

A hell of a musician, role model, and mentor-by-example.

I love Curtis Mayfield. May he rest in peace.

More on muses and memes...

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:08:00 +0000

I continue my digression on the meta-musical...

I've even got an information-theory based paradigm that encompasses notions of reincarnation -- however, when I try to lay it out for a lot of folks, it generally seems to prove pretty unsatisfying for those who vest themselves in what I might presume to call illusions of ego, identity and unitary consciousness.

Still... I think I could preach a good case to the choir.

One thing that I think is interesting is that, possibly because I probably seem to many on some level to have a pretty, let's say, flavorful sense of self/identity, when I come out and talk about what I describe as the illusion of unitary consciousness/self/identity, it seems on some level to them like some form of contradiction.

But that's a misunderstanting of my position seemingly born of lack of full understanding of it. For me, the myth of my identity is as as real as anything else. And as imaginary.

You know, Plato had his cave. Each generation and culture has its own set of analogical tools. Today, some of us find it worthwhile or at least amusing to put metaphysical/ontological considerations into an info theory context. But, I gotta tell you, it works for me...

My own ideas about an information theory-based model for reincarnation start looking a lot like the web concept of data persistence -- but they started long before I'd ever heard the term or even used a computer except via a job stack of punch cards.

It was actually trying to draw a set of behaviors out of stacks of anecdotal reports of shade (ghost) phenomena. To me the classic characteristics of such reportage -- a somewhat indistinct, seemingly 3 dimensional apparition, reported by multiple, independent observers to be performing, typically, the same actions over and over made me think of one then, still relatively novel thing: holograms.

As I learned a little more about holograms, I tried to imagine how a human or animal (I've seen what appeared to be a human shade as a child and have, on at least one occasion, and several possibles, seen what appeared to be animal apparitions) might leave some sort of imprint on its physical surroundings.

That one will have to keep on waiting, I guess, but when I began dealing with computers and really thinking about information in its many aspects, it wasn't much of a jump to apply the notion as sort of information holograms... multiple fragments of often redundant information which interact to create a sort of memetic matrix.

It's usually a struggle laying it out to most folks but I was able to get it across to a fellow database programmer friend of mine (a seriously religious Christian who reads a lot of sci-fi, mind you, so not exactly someone unaccustomed to operating on multiple levels at once) in just a few minutes the other night.

On the existence of the muses...

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:44:00 +0000

I'm kind of an ontological relativist... I figure any paradigm that satisfactorily describes a given reality in a coherent, self-consistent way without breaking its own internal rules or denying self-evident reality is a fair choice.

No paradigm is perfect. You're looking for an analogical handle to mentally manipulate complex conceptual interrelationships. Whether you talk about subconscious autonomic intellectual processes or the muses, it's having a good grip on what you're talking about that counts.

From that perspective, I often talk about the muses because that's really how it feels. Now, mind you, my notion of the muses is based on information theory -- but then, so is my notion of sentience, identity, sense of self. Since I don't, in a very real sense, believe in me, as some sort of unitary entity, it's pretty easy for me to be flexible about the muses.

It's not who ya know in the music biz, it's...

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:55:00 +0000

Elsewhere, a beginning songwriter asked about the possibility of coming out of nowhere to sell a hit song, perhaps elevated by a popular YouTube video, wondering if it was possible, or if the admonition to build and cultivate relationships with music biz insiders was still the reality...

Business relationships are key to doing anything in the music business. It is all about making connections and exploiting connections.

It is how the business works. The music business is -- with painful obviousness -- no kind of meritocracy.

It is all about who ya know and who... ahem... you help out.
That doesn't mean that all those interconnected people like each other -- far more often the contrary.

But they know each other. They know what to expect. And, when the song or album flops -- as is most often the case -- they can hide behind the reputation of the "known quantity" they hired to perform each key function. ("Well, they can't blame me, I hired a well known producer fresh from a number one, a top engineer with a bunch of gold, the same back up crew that worked with Joe Superstar on his big hits... the fact they're all my in-laws is immaterial.")

Are there occasional rags-to-riches stories? Sure. Are some of them true? Sometimes.

Often, they're just p.r., because one of the number one fantasies sold to pop fans is the rags-to-riches fantasy.

Because most pop fans are not, let's say, at the top of the economic spectrum. And the fantasy of having someone discover your genius and pluck you out of every day life and pop you into all the trappings of success and popular recognition of your gifts is hugely appealing to those caught up in the mundane struggle to survive.

But the reality is that most folks who get anywhere have been working long and hard to get there. That story is often rewritten to make it fit the standard rags-to-riches/Cinderella fantasy framework, but the reality is usually far less exciting -- or marketable.

And, all too often, the folks who haven't come up the hard way through lots of hard work, experience, and building connections, the folks who really do shoot to the top, find out the unfortunate truth of one tireless show biz maxim:

The faster you come up -- the faster you'll go down.

Biggest studio mistakes and 14 ways to avoid them...

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:17:00 +0000

Number one for those without a lot of experience: not knowing the material.

When I was in school and engineering bands for free, I thought they were disorganized and confused because they weren't paying money. Then I saw folks doing the same thing on their own dime and I thought... wow.

Now, mind you, fooling around in the studio can be a lot of fun when there's not a time/money budget to deal with.

But if you need to get something done?

the band should know its material and have it arranged -- no, really
the band should have thoroughly practiced and have multiple practice recordings of the song in precisely the arrangement they will be recording it in
no last minute re-arrangements
no last minute lineup switch ups
there should be a hard, fast plan for what will be tracked live and what will be overdubbed
the band should give the engineer and producer, if any, lead sheets or lyric sheets with section notations already legibly on them so that he and the band can communicate about what's what and where they are in a given song
the engineer should talk to the band and figure out how they want to be arranged in the studio given his own understanding of the studio floor, drum room, gobos, localized acoustics (there's often a good/bad place for different instruments, even in a well-treated live room
the engineer should know what mics he's going to use on what and have them on stands, cabled up, signal-checked, out of the way at the edge of the room more or less so they can be brought in with a minimum of fuss
the engineer should have headphones ready to go with rough cue mix(es) for the musician
the engineer should have aligned and calibrated any tape machines that will be used
the engineer should make sure that the gear is warmed up and stable
the engineer or producer should try to assure that the musicians are relaxed and comfortable and should avoid making them self-concious or nervous
the engineer or producer should keep an eye on the attitude and attention of the band; don't let them get frazzled; don't let them go too long without food or fluids -- dehydration in the studio, particularly a hot, sweaty studio can be a real problem that sneaks up on everyone
the engineer or producer should keep an eye on any, ahem, performance preparations to make sure that no one, for instance, drinks too much coffee, smokes too many cigarettes, et cetra (and a half)

Music Biz Parasites

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:13:00 +0000

I can get a good head of steam up talking about the business side of the music biz.

The word bitter may well surface in some readers' minds.

It may not be an unfair characterization of some of my attitudes but I want to hasten to point out that I'm not bitter about my own career/participation in the industry. (For the most part. One label still does still owe me for engineering an album from 1984 that I'm pretty sure I'll never see, but I was working for a pittance and the album was done in a very short period so it didn't amount to much at all, ultimately.)

I made my own choices and I had a lot of great experiences and really few personal disappointments.

But what really pissed me off was seeing how musicians and songwriters get screwed as a matter of standard practice among many in the biz.

People make money in the music biz. Some people make a lot of money. Some people only get by. But by and large, everyone working in the biz makes sure he gets paid... except the musicians.

Musicians are the host animal that the parasites feed off.

My first up-close experience with the music biz was long before I had any personal involvement with it. Some friends got signed to a major label. First, though, the people engineering the signing had to engineer a "cutting of dead weight" -- ie, most of the band. It was a progressive rock band with a horn section and they were really interesting -- and really popular in their market. They were making a lot of money running hall shows on their own.

The producer (a very well known guy at the time who apparently still keeps a finger in the industry) who engineered the label deal started to work on them, trying to get the three main singers to 'fire' the rest of the band. (I was friends with the main singer. These three singers were also the bass, drums, and guitar -- but they were only allowed to play on a couple of 'throwaway' tracks as the producer brought in his own cronies to play almost everything -- padding that recording tab nicely.)

They were being pressured to 'fire' guys they'd played with since jr high, for the most part and resisted bitterly. Ultimately, though, the word came down, it was either fire the rest of the band or kiss the contract goodbye. So they did and it caused some real upheaval in what had once been a very close-knit group of old friends.

These three guys considered themselves serious songwriters.

But Mr Famous Producer had other ideas. He started penning tunes for them working with his pet lyricist. The stuff they came up with was beyond peurile. Treacly love songs with insipid rhymes. This had been a hard-rocking, jazzy, progressive rock band. And they were reduced to singing drivel. Ultimately, they were only allowed to write two songs and one of them was only on a single B-side, not on the actual album. (It was arguably the best song in the project, so I guess that was only natural.)

Somehow -- well, I think we can presume it was a liberal appliation of independent promotion money, ie, payola -- the designated single from the album ended up a number 2 single in Detroit for a short period, but failed to break from there.

The band was contracted for five albums but wanted out. They couldn't get out so made the best of it and went back into the studio. But Mr Famous Producer's attentions had moved on to other projects (he was getting married around this time to the sister of a then-white-hot rock-pop singer and was managing her career), even though he was locked in as producer. The album somehow got recorded, and, probably because Mr Famous Producer wasn't paying much attention, it was actually a little better, a little more credible as for an early 70s rock band.

Not what the label thought they wanted. They sat on it. Finally shelving it and telling the band there'd be no future sessions.

But the band was still signed to the major label. They couldn't record under their band name or even their individual names -- not even as far as sitting in on pal's records under their own names.

And then there was the money.

The label wanted a lot of the advance money back. All those padded recording costs? Right out of the band's pockets.

After all that crap, the label sued the band for $18K (about $93K today)... but the guys, two of whom had little babies and had reluctantly taken day jobs, were all but penniless. So the label was awarded their PA, some amps, and their gig van by the court. They got to keep their own instruments.

So, you know, that was my first up-close view of the industry. When I got into it as a knobber, I was happily working on my own songs in my funky little 4 track rig on my own -- but after a couple of classes as part of my commercial music certificate confirmed that my friends' experience was hardly unusual, the very last thing on my mind was putting myself in the maw of such a beast.

And, sadly, working with a lot more struggling musicians, I saw the same things over and over. (In fact, one of my non-music-biz clients is a guy who was signed to two major labels and a major publisher who was a pretty big deal in the late 80s and early 90s in this market; albums were partially recorded, never released; his publishing and hundreds of his songs were completely tied up by the publisher for years until, right at the end of the 90s, the publisher sent a small packet of stuff to him and said, Well, your free, have a nice life.)

As a consequence, I've never sent so much as a demo of my own music to a label or publisher and I seriously doubt I ever will. As a consequence, I have never been screwed over by the music biz.

Small victory.

Sitting on a rock in the sunshine playing guitar... musing on what it's all about

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:37:00 +0000

A long-time, part-time musician -- one of those sensible guys who kept his day job -- recounted recently in a recording bulletin board a short history of his long musical efforts, his recordings, the sensible limits he'd tried to place on his aspirations, but seemed to wonder, ultimately, what it was all for...

I've wrestled with many of these questions... ultimately, it depends on what you want out of music. If it's money -- there are a lot easier ways of making it, for the most part. Money isn't a very good reason to get into making music -- or engineering/production at this point, either, studios are closing and the ranks of un- and under-employed recordists is swelling every day.

It's similar to the period in the 50s when good, affordable professional-grade camera equipment became available. Suddenly, photography schools were popping up like flies, usually tied to government GI/student loan programs. It produced a big explosion of interest in more advanced forms of photography -- but the economic activity was typically restricted to fly by night schools taking advantage of government loan programs in a "glamorous" field, and the burgeoning ranks of under-employed photogs and would-be photogs simply devalued the services of the experienced, seasoned pros who had been making some kind of living.

I think you've got to look at some of the underlying value equations in your post... You find yourself wondering if it's all worth it... and, reasonably enough, you're looking for a measure of that worth. In this society/culture, one of the first places we have tended to look for valuation is in monetary.

If the search for valuation is restricted to money, I'm afraid the equation is pretty bleak.

But I'm betting that money was never the biggest motivator for you as you learned to play, write, and record. (Although, hey, you're human, you could dream, couldn't you? ;) )

But taking money out of the equation (at least partially) allows us to focus on other aspects of musical life where one does have a chance of finding satisfaction and a sense that it's not all wasted.

For some of us, just the simple act of playing is a big reward. Some folks bowl. Some folks do crosswords or watch TV. Musicians are lucky in that, at least sometimes, other folks may enjoy their efforts from time to time as well.

But becoming too focused on that external, social aspect can lead us away from the fundamental zen -- and the simple joy -- of simply making music. There's the satisfaction of learning and honing one's skill... and there's the uniquely satisfying pleasure of doing something / making something that brings pleasure.

I remember one of the first times when I was learning to play when I sat on a rock in the sunshine and just played for the simple joy of it. There I was, for one of the first times, it seemed like, doing something that entertained me and I wasn't paying anyone an hourly fee or a subscription or sitting through a bunch of advertising. I was plunking on my $20 guitar and music was coming out. That was really something.

Still... man is a social beast. And we musicians may be driven in ways that crossword puzzle aficionadi and weekend bowlers are not.

Twenty-five years ago, one could set up a home recording setup for the equivalent of a couple thousand dollars today... but getting the music into folks' hands was pretty difficult. Distribution was largely tied up by big labels or sometimes equally thuggish indie distributors. You could put your tunes out on cassettes -- but that was slow and expensive and distro was typically hand to hand or maybe through personal relationships with local record stores who would take a few cassettes on consignment (out of friendship or just to keep you off their back).

Now, we have amazing avenues of replication and distribution. With a few clicks you can put your latest work right up on the web and folks can be hearing it right away. The trick once you're out there, though, of course, is as it has always been, getting the audience to meet you halfway... getting them to click -- and hopefully stay tuned through the whole song.

(Getting them to engage in an economic transaction, particularly in the current music paradigm, is a far more difficult proposition. It's an uphill slog and I think we can all see the shape of the bottom line in the mist: almost no one is really making much money at this outside of hard-working touring bands [point-of-performance sales are still one of the big drivers for sales of non-popstar music] and the heavily packaged and promoted product that the big companies gamble on pushing into the distro tube, typically at great cost in terms of advertising and "promotional considerations" [various forms of kickbacks, bribes and payola, not-quite-legitimized by the notion that they are standard music business practice].)

Some folks will listen, most won't. A percentage of those who listen may like one's music, others won't.

In the new online world of micro-indie music distribution, raw numbers aren't hard to come by, as a rule. But making any kind of reasonable sense of them can be.

I have a folkie blog/podcast filled with mostly quite impromptu (and often quite sloppy and occasionally really bad) versions of my songs. It's been going since 2005. When I started, I posted every day and, at the peak, I had 30-50 people visiting a day. Over the years, I accumulated around 400 recordings and those have been downloaded something over 300,000 times. Does that mean 300,000 fans? No, of course not. (It may well mean 299,999 folks screwing up their faces and stabbing at the skip button.)

In fact, over the years I've collected a number comments from visitors and listeners and readers. (My blog/podcast is a two-pronged fork,a little write-up, often in the form of a vignette or anecdote related to the song, an image, and links to the song in various forms). But you can count that feedback in the scores of comments or messages, certainly not even hundreds.

Still, we know most folks tend to listen anonymously. In the so-called Golden Age of Television, network execs used the reckoning that every letter that actually came into corporate offices represented about 35,000 viewers. (This was before organized letter-writing campaigns and particularly latter day email campaigns made those equations all but meaningless.)

So, for those of us not getting out into the clubs and coffeehouses, putting it out there may be something of an act of faith.

As I paused writing the passage above, wondering where to go from there, Neil Young's "On the Beach" came up in my randomized playlist...

[quote]... I went to the radio interview
I ended up alone at the microphone...[/quote]
Young repeats the line 3 times in a sleepily spooky voice, referring to a long-ago incident early in his career when, as I heard the story, he ticked off a late-night underground radio DJ supposed to be interviewing him.

I'm left with that image of Young... late at night, alone, talking into a mic to... maybe no one.

To paraphrase one of my own, old songs, I don't want to go cosmic on you baby... but ultimately, isn't all communication ultimately based on faith? -- Faith that, somehow, someone will pick up the signals we're sending out and maybe, somehow, against all odds, suss out something vaguely parallel to what we meant to say?

We're all parallel lines... in theory, we'll all meet at infinity.

Until then, I'm sitting on this rock, in the sunshine, strumming my guitar...

Appropos of Just About Nothing: Vivaldi Bassoon Concerti

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:34:00 +0000

So I'm listening to a baroque mix on Rhapsody (it was supposed to be undistracting background music -- the joke's on me, apparently) and I hear this very neat thing (it's identifed only as "Allegro" and from, like, Vivaldi's Greatest Hits or something) that, after a second of triangulating (it's a double reed, not an oboe, probably not an english horn, probably not a contrabassoon) I figure it's a bassoon. And it's featured through the 5 or 6 minute movement, so I figure it's a concerto (which form Vivaldi, a little animated info box helpfully informs me, helped promote the popularity of).

Now, I've always liked Vivaldi, but I'm not one of those folks who studies up much on the composers. I'll scan the program notes at the symphony but, you know, I'm pretty much about the music. Once you've read about one great composer dying penniless and alone in squalor, you've pretty much read 'em all.

So I google 'vivaldi bassoon ...' And before I get much farther, Google's 'assistant' or whatever suggests "concertos" -- I'm thinking plural?

How many people write multiple bassoon concerti? Must have started out as a bassoonist.

I go a little farther, I finally find a listing for bassoon concertos, volume 1 and I'm thinking, well, probably more than two, even, then.

I go a little farther...

... and I see the phrase "Vivaldi's thirty-seven bassoon concerti..." I don't think I saw whatever it said after that...

Thirty-seven bassoon concerti.

Now my interest is whetted.

Wikipedia is my friend. It confirms the seemingly ludicrous 37 figure.

And I get to the bio... he was a priest ("il Prete Rosso" -- The Red Priest -- they called him, which has a rather sinister ring to me... but then I think anything to do with The Church is kinda sinister. Okay... musta been one of the celibate ones if he found time to write 37 bassoon concerti... Wait... the Red Priest is celibate? I dunno. Seems unlikely, somehow. But that's neither here nor there.)

Oh, wait... he was a violinist?!?

Well, if he wrote all those bassoon concerti, how the hell many violin concerti did he write?

Two.

What. The. Hell.

[Continue on to the comments immediately below for a little intrusion of factual reality into my WTH moment... turns out my whole post above turns on a whopper of a factual error. Hint: Vivaldi's arguably most famous work, The Four Seasons, which is comprised of four violin concerti, blows that violin concerto count out of the water right off the top -- and it doesn't stop there, by any stretch... Oh well. PS... The erroneous info in Wikipedia has since been corrected. And that is the beauty of Wikipedia. If that erratum had been in a print encyclopedia, it would have been there 'til the pages turned to dust. But one does have to keep one's eyes open... that two violin concerti thing should certainly have caused me to poke a little farther.]

There's Out-of-Tune and Then There's Auto-Tune

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:53:00 +0000

One thing that a lot of folks seem to continually miss is that the 12 Tone Equal Temperament intonation system is -- by necessity -- out of tune with itself.

Out of 12 equally tempered tones, eight are more than 10 cents out of tune from perfect harmony! (Depending on harmonic context.)

That's right -- that same 'perfect' little grid you see in A-T or other vocal retuners incorporates intervals which are all -- except for octaves -- varying degrees out of tune.

The upshot is that those particularly oriented to the slightly out 12TET intervals may interpret a technically accurate singer as being "out of tune" -- particularly if the musical arrangement is poorly crafted and juxtaposes equally tempered instruments with hold-tones (notably synths and organs) against a singer who might be singing the true interval. Contextually, most of us will leap to the conclusion the singer is out of tune when, in fact, the singer may actually be singing the proper interval.

12TET is an amazing accomplishment in some ways, allowing us to have 12 fixed tones that approximate the true tone relationships in any key. It made modern western music, including the piano and guitar and other 12TET instruments, possible and workable. (12TET is not the only intonation system available or possible, but it serves as something of a central standard.)

But it also means that all the intervals except the octaves are out of tune. Perfect fourths and fifths are only 2 cents out -- but a minor 7th may be seen as as much as 31 cents out. And, as I noted above, 8 of 12 tones are more than 10 cents out.

Here's a chart that shows the true ("just"), mathematically correct and purely harmonious intervals contrasted with the 12TET 'approximations' with the differences in the far right column:

Equal temperament - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

So... next time you're dragging what your eye tells you is an out of tune vocal snip onto the grid, keep in mind: you may be dragging that vocal out of tune with itself. (But then, you may have to -- in order to get it to play nice with keyboards or long guitar notes or chords. It's a tricky business, no question. But the bottom line is that most folks don't get it, don't have the first clue as to what really goes into intonation.)

Where did music come from?

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 20:09:00 +0000

A recent thread at recording/music site GearSlutz indirectly seemed to ask the question of from just where did music come into human life and culture? I found myself writing this:

I think the answer, in part, lies with how our nervous systems evolved. The auditory system is in large part about spatial mapping... placing the organism within a given space, as well as tracking potential threats or prey within that space.

Watch an animal like a dog or cat and how they respond to their acoustic environment.

Introduce a new sonic element and they're on alert until they can determine whether it might represent a threat.

Reiteration of sounds -- and the rhythms of that reiteration -- are a key aspect that canny animals must be at least subconsciously aware of.

Rhythmic sounds tend to carry more weight because they typically signal that the source is animal, rather than environmental (the wind in the trees may have chaotic rhythms, but it's nothing like the threatening beat of a large animal coming toward one).

But pitch is almost equally important... what's more threatening, the low frequency roar of a lion, or the twittering of a meadow lark? (OK, cheap example, but you get the drift. )

As human circumstances improved and we had to be less attuned to sound for survival's sake, we were left with a big, under-used center of the brain... like a traveler doing crosswords in a terminal, early man probably tickled the auditory system in the brain by intentionally making various noises, particularly rhythmic noises.

The Death of Auto-Tune... Rumors of its demise greatly exaggerated?

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:38:00 +0000

A long thread on the media's new found attention to Auto-Tune over in Craig Anderton's forum (The Death of Auto Tune), with hundreds of posts from the same people, going back and forth over the same positions (it's kind of fun, like watching a whole lot of lab rats -- one of them this writer -- with chemically induced OCD running interlocking repetitive patterns in the maze), provoked me to set my own, strictly personal perspective into a sort of bullet point thumbnail.

Without further ado, as though it mattered or anyone cares (it doesn't, they don't -- why are you even reading this?):

With regard to Auto-Tune and other forms of vocal pitch-correction, I...

consider it a form of correction (not enhancement like EQ or reverb), farther down, but on the same slippery slope as mutiple takes, punching, vocal "aligning," comping, even compression (after all, it makes up for lack of dynamic control, poor mic technique, etc)
despise the sound of it -- whether as an artifact of clumsy correction or from its use as an effect (T-paining)
think anyone who uses it for correction better not leave even the slightest wrenchmark, since it says to the listener: Someone either can't sing or is to lazy too bother doing a good job
think that folks who don't understand Equal Temperament 'out-of-tuneness' should definitely study up before they start giddily dragging everything smack onto the grid
have no problem with the general concept of correction although, informally, I share the what are we coming to response of many -- I mean, c'mon, people, it's just singing... it's almost always quicker to sing it right in a few passes or punches than it is to do a good job of pitch-wrangling it

__________________

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:46:00 +0000

Recently in an internet recording forum, someone asked about an old Radio Shack mic they had found, asking what it might be good for, getting a range of responses. Mine was:

You can use it for anything it works for you for. (Sorry about that awkward preposition stack.)

By that I mean to suggest that the best way to figure out what it's good for is to explore its use yourself.

The rest of us here don't have this mic in their hands and probably have never used one, and while some might feel like they can make a summary judgment about the mic without actually knowing anything about it, based solely on its Rat Shack origins, I would say the best way to find out about it is to use and experiment with it.

That said, as you might surmise from others' comments, there's reason to believe based on the usual run of Realistic/Radio Shack products that it is highly unlikely to be what most of us might consider a good mic. But it might well be the perfect mic for some specific use.

First person experimentation and exploration the best way to learn about different mics.

To that, someone replied "Well said..." and I added:

I basically say the same couple of things over and over, so I've refined my message to some extent.

The internet makes it much easier to get a recording education (which is great because the explosion of super-cheap recording gear has meant an explosion in home recording by multiple factors of ten... much like the introduction of the simple box camera a century or so ago put photography in hands of regular joes and janes).

But it also has made it easier for understandably overwhelmed newbs to get bobbled and just throw up their hands and post myriad variations on the perennial Just tell me what to do! post. (Just tell me what preamp/mic/compressor/DAW/etc... How do I get the sound of this record? How do I make my recordings/mixes sound less small? How do I...? Etc.)

And it's my thinking that this is a Give a man a loaf of bread and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime kind of thing.

It is confusing and frustrating. But a lot of learning -- even for those going to school to learn recording (my advice: go to an affordable community collge; make sure you have a viable day job, you're going to need it) simply comes down to working and experience, trial and error and other experimentation.

I did go to school to study recording -- but what I was really doing was going to school to get access to recording gear and it was observation and direct experience which mostly taught me. (Good thing, too, since a year or so after I started, I, the teacher, and a few others from the recording program went to a nearby community college with a well-established program with a very good rep -- this was the early 80s and there were few -- and we all took the entrance test that would weed the several hundred applicants down to the 50 or so who would be admitted to the program. Both my teacher and I passed, though others did not. But I bested my teacher's score on the entrance test to the other school by more than a few points. A nice guy in many ways, he thought he knew more than he did. And it showed when he did things like try to teach people to mix with trim pots instead of faders.)

Brave new markets...

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:15:00 +0000

From musician/recording/music biz site, Harmony Central:

Phil O'Keefe wrote:

Are magazine publishers making the same mistakes major labels did?

IOW, relying on outdated models and failing to develop new paradigms in the digital age?

I thought this article was interesting, and I think there are some similarities there.

http://blogs.moneycentral.msn.com/to...n-digital.aspx

Thoughts?

Others added their observations; I responded:

This genie don't go back in that little bottle.

I think folks who think the magazine industry can continue to cling to the all or nothing for a year subscription model are fooling themselves.

But until we as an economic system finally have a practical and efficient micropayment system in place, the true nature of the wired economy will be stymied and stunted.

Only when you can have a payment efficiency that makes very small transactions/payments possible and viable will a truly efficient wired economy take shape.

Of course, the implications and consequences of such a system are utterly terrifying to many interests vested in today's ineffecient and turgid transactional models.

Lee Knight responded:

Absolutely!

Ever the optimist, I added:

Well, be careful what you wish for.

When such a system is finally in place (various micropayment-like systems are already in use in local economies in some parts of the world) and accessible to all, it will almost surely mean an end to much of the free content out there... as content providers vie to find new, sustainably viable market equilibria.

Brave new economies are coming... someday.

Measuring timeline alignment in a DAW

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:28:00 +0000

How to measure for unadjusted tracking/timeline misalignment in a DAW:

Generate a 'ping' on one track. (I use a test tone that goes from -inf to, say, -18 dB -- don't use a full volume tone, in case it goes out over the speakers, which you shouldn't probably even have turned on/up for this.)

Basically you just want a tone where you can precisely identify the timeline position (to sample accuracy if you can zoom in that close), so a test tone, with its abrupt beginning, is perfect.

Making sure that your monitors are down and source monitoring is turned off (so as not to create the feedback loop from hell), take a cable and route the analog output of your audio interface/soundcard back into an input and (monitors down, source monitoring off) record that onto a new track.

Now you'll have two test tones on two tracks.

In a perfect world, these two tones would line up to the sample.

But in this world, unless you're otherwise compensating, it's very likely that the two tones will not have the same precise position on the timeline.

If you subtract the sample number position of the new track from that of the original, you'll have the amoung of tracking misalignment your rig is throwing at that point. (In my experience, most prosumer interfaces tend to have a fairly steady alignment offset. But I did have a USB mic whose misalignment varied from session to session, forcing repeated ping tests; it was purchased for location work, anyhow, so no biggie, but it would be a TPITA if you had to work around it on a daily basis.)

In previous loopback testing over a large handful of DAW based recordists, the closest to perfect was a single sample off (this is, IIRC, also the case if one ping loopback tests a PT HD rig). But most were more like 2-16 ms off, with a few as high as 35+ms off. (The latter is pretty much unusable in an overdub situation without correction, as you can imagine.)

Nowadays, most of the major DAW makers include some form of tracking alignment adjustment, from a simple manually determined timing offset (IOW, you have to do the ping loopback test and the sample position arithmetic and input it into the alignment offset adjustment) to a completely automated ping loopback calibration that, on your command, repings the system, measures the unadjusted delay and sets the alignment offset appropriately.

Sonar now has such an automated function, as I believe Cubsase, Logic, and, likely, others, are supposed to have as well. In some DAWs, it may be called hardware delay compensation, since the same techniques that measure timeline alignment of just the AD/DA routing can also be used to adjust for additional latency introduced by outboard digital signal processing gear.

I'm glad to see some interest in this. .

My hardware is now pretty old (the aforementioned MOTU 828mkII with an ~8ms turnaround and misalignment and an even older Echo Mia, which, being a PCI interface, has a lower roundtrip, only about 4.5 or 5 ms)... and the informal testing to which I referred was mostly done several years ago when I began realizing that other people had the same problem.

I'd like to know if it's still a widespread problem -- and I'm dying to know if many folks recognize it and take the steps to compensate for it.

Tech Beat: marking time digitally...

noreply@blogger.com (TK Major) — Mon, 04 May 2009 15:19:00 +0000

I've been experimenting with this shareware tuner which I have hooked up to my 'everyday' Windows audio interface (a mobo based Sounblaster clone)... but I'd been frustrated because it seemed way 'out of tune' from my virtual synths or from guitars tuned to the tuner plug in in my DAW. (I keep the DAW (and v-synths) routed to my MOTU 828mkII.)

I figured this was because of presumed slightly different clock rates, as we expect from the crystal controlled clocks at the heart of almost all contemporary converters.

Now, crystals can be tuned with great precision, but the greater the precision, generally, the greater the cost. It's almost literally a matter of shaving off parts of the crystal to 'tune' it. I've never had a crystal controlled wrist watch, for instance, as accurate as the over fifty year old wind-up (actually 'self-winding' through motion) Omega I inherited from my grandfather. [And yet I gave up tape. Actually, when I was a kid in the early 60s, I think Nagra had an incredibly expensive portable deck where the transport was run by a wind up clock mechanism. It was a couple grand, back then, meaning the equivalent, I'm guessing, of about $25-$30K at 2009 prices.]

My goal was to be able to tune using the desktop mic always plugged into my machine's mobo card, since I don't always have a studio mic hooked to the MOTU.

And, helpfully, the tuner software has a calibration utility.

I used Sound Forge to generate a tone at 440 Hz and routed it out through the DA of the MOTU. I left the tuner connected to the mobo card (so I can use my desktop mic on an ad hoc basis).

I played the 440 over the MOTU and out the speakers and let the tuner do its analysis.

I knew the two converters' timing was off, still, I was surprised to find that it was 36 cents off! To hit 440 Hz (as 'defined' by the MOTU, that is) I had to recalibrate the mobo-connected tuner so that A had a value of ~ 449 Hz -- as rendered by my mobo-based SB cloen chip.

Of course, the mobo interface is basically just a lowball commodity chip and has no capability of accepting external clock sync -- and you'd like to think no one would want to try to use if for anything 'serious.'

But that really significant timing gap does, I think, illustrate why multiple converters must have a designated master clock (either one of the converters or an outside source) when they are run in tandem. This is a tonal/pitch difference that is very significant. Try to play with your guitar 36 cents out from your buddy's guitar and you'll see what I mean.

Of course, there are two timing issues with clocking. There is what we might call long scale accuracy -- analogous to a band beginning and ending on the same beat -- as well as short scale, internal 'interstitial' timing accuracy -- how regular the timing is between samples.

When we synchronize a formerly standalone converter to an external device, we're asking that converter's clock circuitry to do an extra difficult job of using a phase locked loop to keep sync with the exteranl clock source. But our now-slaved converter's crystal clock is still in the game, but now the PLL must continually readjust the circuit to 'mediate' between the external clock signal and the internal crystal-controlled sample timing.

For that reason, slaving to an external clock may improve long scale accuracy -- assuming the master clock is closer to 'standard' time (as measured, presumably by the Atomic Clock? ) but it will almost always tend to decrease sample-to-sample regularity, which we describe as increased jitter.

[Hmmm... this seemed much more interesting when I decided to write about it... oh well.]