This is nuts. Crazy. Loco.
…the UK-based Performing Rights Society — the Brit equivalent of ASCAP or BMI — wants to make listening to music loud enough for anyone else to hear an offense punishable by hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.
Robotic drums! Pretty soon they’ll make something that threatens the lives of actual musicians (rimshot) (h/t brother Ross)
Everybody go to Sean’s page and take his 2 question quiz. He’s doing some personal research and needs input.
what a great story.
Barry Brake and Ken Slavin get a great write-up in the San Antonio Current. Barry just finished producing Ken’s CD “I’ll Take Romance”. It’s a wonderful romp through some good old standards re-imagined with lush Brakeish harmonies and instrumentation. The production is top-notch and Ken’s vocals are smooth as Hennessy. Congrats to them both.
Like many people, I tend to put off difficult stuff until later. Luckily, I can do a bunch of easy work now and let the other stuff slide until closer to deadline. I work really well when under a tight deadline, so I know that the shorter time will add motivation later on.
I’ve been putting off doing a difficult arrangement for several weeks now and finally got up the motivation to tackle it. It was partly the weather- a rainy day always puts me in a productive mood. Give me rain and a hot cup of tea and I can sit happily at my desk for hours.
As is usually the case with these things, once I got into the music I discovered that it wasn’t very hard at all. The whole thing took me about four hours to knock out and I loved every minute of it. Typical.
One day I envision doing all of the (supposedly) hard stuff first and then really feeling “off the hook”.
Now after working on it for the last four hours I just have to get the music out of my head. That usually only happens when something else comes along to take its place.
I really like this sentiment, and I find that I use it as a subconscious guide in much of my professional and personal life. To me, life is about simplifying as much as possible so that you don’t get lost in a morass of unnecessary details. Musically, I find that reducing the amount of clutter, sound, and instrumentation very often leads me to my desired result: to connect emotionally with the listener. It’s become a sort of unspoken mantra for me: what can we get rid of? What can we do without? What is just getting in the way? Some of the most profound and memorable musical moments I have had have been in near silence, because when there is very, very little going on, the audience is able to hear their own thoughts and responses to the work. And if I’ve done my job right, that moment is when we connect.
Now, I have definitely written my share of huge bombastic wall-of-sound moments, and they’re great in the right context. There is a time for triple fortissimo, and I love those moments, but I find that I have to always be on my guard not to over complicate things.
As a solo performer I tend toward business in my playing, always trying to do everything on the piano that the bass or guitar or whatever would be doing if they were there. That’s okay when it’s just me, but I have to consciously turn off that tendency when there are other musicians playing. It can sometimes be hard for me to get out of the way and let another instrument speak. I think I can be difficult to play with because I’m always trying to fill the gaps that other musicians are occupying, so I keep having to tell myself to simplify, simplify, simplify. My hope is that this bad tendency of mine has led to the happy result that my music will connect with the audience more often because I try and make it easy to hear everything.
In life, simplicity can be very good when it causes you to decide what is really important and what’s just in the way. I jokingly say that this is why I grew a beard and keep my hair short: because I don’t want to waste an irreplaceable asset (time) on something transitory (shaving/messing with my hair). Yes, it’s a joke, but there’s a point. We all spend so much time living life on automatic (commuting, cleaning, paying bills, taking out the trash, etc), that it’s very, very easy to miss what’s important. And yes, I still clean and take out the trash (and vacuum, and cook, etc, etc), but it’s in the attempt to be aware of time and life even in the midst of mundane daily activities that I think we really live. Those things are necessary, but if we just go on autopilot we can find ourselves like Adam Sandler’s character in Click. Yes, I did just use Adam Sandler to illustrate my point. Seen the movie?
And just because I know some people are thinking it, I’ll address the point: simplification of life doesn’t necessarily lead to a simple outlook. Yes, some things, like prime numbers and political discussions, are irreducible. Life is complicated. There are often many shades of grey. I’m just saying that if you can chuck what’s extraneous and decide what’s important you can have more time to concentrate on what matters.
So go live at Walden lake and tell them a sophomoric thinker sent you.
Who knew that guitarist Brian May (of Queen fame) was once an astrophysicist? He finally completes his PhD today at the age of 60. The topic is “Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud”
“I didn’t want an honorary PhD. I wanted the real thing that I worked for,”
BBC has the article.
Do you have any idea how to approach the release of your next album?
“I’ve have one record left that I owe a major label, then I will never be seen in a situation like this again. If I could do what I want right now, I would put out my next album, you could download it from my site at as high a bit-rate as you want, pay $4 through PayPal. Come see the show and buy a T-shirt if you like it. I would put out a nicely packaged merchandise piece, if you want to own a physical thing. And it would come out the day that it’s done in the studio, not this “Let’s wait three months”
Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails
…there can be no loud.”
Why music is sounding worse today than 20 years ago. A short lesson in overcompression. Compression is a great thing. It helps to smooth out a jagged performance or poor microphone levels, but taken to an extreme, overcompression causes a loss of clarity. Check out the video for a good explanation.
The use of compression is a subjective thing. I try and keep my compression usage to a minimum (technically, around 2.5:1 or so). I’ve seen the “big boys” compress at 4:1, 5:1, or even 10:1. Doing so can squash the juice out of any track. You’ll have a loud sound, but there’ll be no detail or contrast in it. Ick.
They do this to get the most out of the radio bandwidth, and to compete with every other track that’s overcompressed. It’s an arms race where the loser is your ears.
A few years ago I was asked to do a hymn arrangement for a friend’s wedding. She had three specific hymns that meant a lot to her that she wanted arranged into the introit to the ceremony. I concocted a fun mix of all three of them and wanted to post it here (I finally got the ceremony DVD- 2 years later!).
The piece was sung by five very good sight-readers who had only had a few days to prep it. As is the case with most weddings, we only got about thirty minutes before the ceremony to rehearse it so there are some tuning issues which I hope you will forgive and the audio is from a crummy little camera mic about eight feet from the singers.
Considering the time constraints we were under I’m really happy with the performance. I hope you like it too.
Hymn Medley, by me.
I was interviewed a few months ago for Austin’s Caught in the Act magazine, the magazine for the Austin film and television trade. They interviewed me as a composer and audio guy and I got to share about the importance of (quality) music and (understandable) audio. You can check it out in this month’s issue.
A young child returned from his first music lesson on the tuba. “How did it go?” asked his father.
“Great,” said the child. “I learned how to play a ‘C’.”
The next week the child took another lesson and his father asked about the lesson.
“Terrific,” said the child. “I learned how to play a ‘G’.”
The following week the child didn’t come home. The father was frantic with worry when he finally got home at 2:00 AM.
“Where have you been!?!?” screamed the father.
“I had a gig!!” answered the son.
For all of its faults, Dale Browns The DaVinci Code has some intriguing locations. I remember reading about the Rosslyn Chapel in the book, described here, as a magnificent chapel of carved stones. Each surface full of intricate and obscure carved figures and shapes. In Brown’s reality, the carvings had a lot to do with the resolution of the book, but in the real world, scholars have labored for centuries to try and decode the meaning of the shapes.
It looks like someone has finally succeeded. The Rosslyn Stave Angel purports to show the decoding of the symbols into a musical language. How they did this is revealed in the video and I won’t ruin it, but it’s an incredible bit of cyphering- just the kind of thing that I love. Check it out.
The Inbox of Nardo Pace, the Empire’s Worst Engineer.. Don’t read unless you’re a complete geek. I read it.
Sean, in a not-so-rare show of thoughtfulness, gave me a gift certificate to the iTunes music store for my birthday last September. Not wanting to waste it on mere television shows, I have waited and thought about what I wanted to get with it. I finally decided tonight on John Rutter’s magnificent Requiem Mass. I got this recording, which was performed by the City of London Sinfonia & Stephen Cleobury. Erin and I went to an Easter service last year where the choir was performing the Requiem interspersed throughout the service. It was a wonderful hour and I fell in love all over again with this moving work. This piece makes me jealous of famous people and national heroes who actually get this kind of thing performed at their funerals. (wait- jealous of a funeral?)
Anyway, I have my great new Sony 7506 headphones on and am listening to the first movement- Requiem Aeternum. I looked down a moment ago and noticed my pulse beating faintly under the scar on my left hand. It’s beating in exact time with the music.
Thanks, Sean.
Thanks to Sean for posting this hilarious Pacelbel Canon rant from YouTube.
I can’t remember if I posted this before or not, but it’s worth a repost. Go see Raul Midon over here on YouTube. What an amazing performance.
“An elderly Japanese bar manager and performer has been arrested for playing copyrighted songs on his harmonica. From the article: ‘Investigators accuse Toyoda of illegally performing 33 songs such as the Beatles’ songs “Here, There and Everywhere” and “Yesterday,” whose copyrights are managed by the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers. He allegedly performed the songs on the harmonica with a female pianist at the bar he operated between August and September this year.’ This is for all those kids who are learning chords on their guitars — be ready to pay fees for practicing ‘Smoke On The Water.’
via Slashdot
