5 More Lists

Everyone says that lists are really popular on the Web and it's really true. Yesterday's post of some previous lists that we've posted over the last year was a smashing success, so here are a few more. Back to business on Monday.

5 Reasons Why Trade Shows Are Obsolete - You know they are and hate them as much as I do. But did you ever think exactly why?

20 Most Popular Facebook Artists - From earlier in the year so it's probably changed a bit, but still an interesting look.

5 Reasons To Hate The Live Nation/Ticketmaster Merger - Some of the predictions did not come to pass, but a lot has to do with the flagging economy and the general decline of the concert business in general.

10 Pieces Of Technology That I Hate - Just reread the article and still hate everything there except the last one, since I've learned how to love and respect social media.

Top Ten Websites - This is from January of 09 so it'll be interesting to see how it's changed in a month or so.

A Review Of The Best Lists

Happy Thanksgiving to those readers who celebrate it. I thought it would be a good time to review some of the past posts that feature lists. Here are five of the most popular.

5 Lies Indie Musician's Tell Themselves - Who else can you believe if you can't believe yourself first?

5 Criteria For Video Stardom - It takes more than a camera, a nice smile and a Youtube account.

9 All-Time Bad Tech Predictions - Even smart people can be way off base sometimes.

5 Reasons For Bad Concert Videos - Can't watch concert videos because they make your head spin? Here's why.

5 Reasons Why Concerts Sound So Bad - Was the concert you just left a jumbled mess of incoherent audio? The reasons might surprise you.

The Overlooked Recording Variables

Most recording engineers (both those learning and experienced) place way too much stock in the kind of gear they're using. It seems like if the gear is not vintage, a name brand or high priced, it's automatically shunned, but the major variables that go into making a good recording always lie in other places than the gear itself.

Here’s a list of recording variables that you must be aware of when recording just about anything. While you can’t really quantify exactly how much each variable contributes to the way something ultimately sounds because each situation, even within the same project, is unique, you can generally break it down to something like this:

• The Player and the instrument contributes about 50% to the overall sound. Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less – but always the greatest portion. You can prove this to yourself. Get a player who’s not yet that accomplished and record him with his equipment. Chances are it will sound pretty mediocre. Then get a great player to come in and play on the same equipment. You’ll be shocked how good the gear suddenly sounds. It’s not as dramatic going the other way around sometimes, but you can definitely hear the difference when a mediocre player goes from mediocre equipment to finely tuned studio gear. When I was the musical director for former Rolling Stone's guitar player Mick Taylor for a tour (here's a nice picture of us on the left), Mick didn’t travel with any gear, preferring to use whatever his fans could provide him at each town. He frequently played with some really big stinking heaps of crap gear, but every night he still sounded just like “Mick Taylor.” The gear never mattered.

• The Room contributes about 20% to the overall sound. Even on close-miked instruments, the room is far more responsible for the final sound than many engineers realize.

• The Mic Position contributes about 20% to the overall sound. Placement is really your acoustic EQ and is responsible for the instrument’s blend in the track.

• The Mic Choice contributes about 10% to the overall sound. This is the last little bit that takes a good sound and makes it great.

Therefore, if something doesn't sound right, there are a lot of things to consider changing before you even think about twisting an EQ knob. Try the following in this order:

• Change the source, if possible (the instrument and/or amplifier you are miking)
• Change the mic placement
• Change the placement of the instrument in the room
• Change the mic
• Change the mic preamplifier
• Change the amount of compression and/or limiting (from none to a lot)
• Change the room (the actual room you are recording in)
• Change the player
• Come back and try it another day

Frank Zappa And The Black Page

As we were finishing guitar overdubs on the latest Snew album last night, we were talking about musicianship and I was reminded of another Frank Zappa story. Frank was a historic stickler for great musicianship, but if you didn't play with heart and have a great natural feel, that didn't work for him either. But more than anything else, Frank hated anyone with an attitude.

Frank was looking for a piano player, but he needed someone who was a particularly great reader. Steve DeFuria (his then Synclavier programmer and now VP of Corporate Strategy at Line6, and one of my oldest friends) and I knew a piano player from our Berklee days who just moved out to Los Angeles, and we gave Mr. Piano a hearty recommendation. Frank once again cautioned us that he "had to be a great reader" and we told him that Mr. Piano was a former Berklee teacher and could read a fly running across a page. Trouble was that Mr. Piano had a bit of a superiority attitude, which we assumed he would tone down in the presence of someone so esteemed as Frank Zappa.

Just to be sure that Mr. Piano had a fair chance at the reading part of the audition, Frank gave him 2 pieces of music to work on a week before the audition was to take place. One of these pieces is called "The Black Page" which was pretty dense with notes and a real challenge to play. Challenge enough that Mr. Piano kind of gave up learning it as precisely as needed and decided he was good enough to wing it during the audition instead. Fatal mistake #1

When the audition started Mr. Piano gave Frank a little of his natural superiority attitude - fatal mistake #2! Frank's acerbic side reared up and about 4 bars into The Black Page he stopped Mr. Piano as said, "Can you play the song backwards?" Mr. Piano now starts to sweat a little bit as he realizes that he's in for more than he expected.

After about another 4 bars of playing Frank stops him again and says, "Can you switch hands so that the right hand is playing the bass clef and the left hand is playing the treble?" Mr. Piano is now really obviously nervous since he's way deep in unfamiliar waters (Frank Zappa's natural environment), his playing is completely inverted, plus he's still attempting to play the song backwards (from end to finish). As a result, his attitude comes back to earth in a sudden crash, just where Frank wants it.

After another rather limp 4 bars Frank comes in for the death blow. "Can you play the song without using your thumbs?" Now Mr. Piano is a quivering mass of jelly and can't even get a bar through when he stops and says to Frank, "That's impossible. No one can play it this way!" To which Frank replies, "You're a pretty good player, but you're not that good. I know 3 drummers who can play this with no problem."

And with that, Mr. Piano player was on his way, his ego definitely in a different place than when the day started.

But to show the other side of Zappa's love for musicians, Frank was playing a gig at the Cobo Arena in Detroit when one of the janitors came into the green room with a guitar before the gig. "I just have to do this," the janitor said with an "Ah, Shucks" kind of attitude. Frank gave him the go sign and Mr. Janitor did a couple of songs. Frank thanked him and asked for his card. The band chuckled, thinking that would be the last time it would touch Franks's eyes, but six months later Mr. Janitor Ike Willis was on an airplane out to Los Angeles to sing on a record with the esteemed Mr. Zappa. And he sang on almost every record Frank made until the end.

Music 3.0 Book Released

My latest book "Music 3.0 - A Survival Guide For Making Music In The Internet Age" has just been released and is currently available in book and music stores and online.

Although we've touched on some of the issues here in recent posts (the book was actually born from a post here about Guns n' Roses almost a year ago), I've decided that the subject needs a blog of its own. Therefore I'm devoting an entire new blog to the subject called appropriately "Music 3.0", that will cover more of the business side of the music business. This blog will cover more of the production and music side of things from here on.

Music 3.0 is an aggregation of concepts on the new music business that I’ve been following for some time. These concepts include Seth Godin's "Tribes", The Theory of 1000, Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail", and "The Economics of Free" among others. The book looks at how these concepts pertain to the marketing and distribution in the business right now.

It also contains the guiding insights of some of the music industry’s brightest minds about where the industry has been, where it is now, and where it’s going (see tomorrow's post on the Music 3.0 blog for a list). With so much information currently available, I wanted to do what I do best - collect it, organize it, and present it in a way that hopefully everyone can understand.

I'm really proud of this book, and I hope that its readers find it as helpful as some of my other books.

Horned Audio Territory

Now for something completely different.

Acousticians have known since even before the beginning of speaker design that horn loaded speakers are the most efficient way to amplify audio That's because, unlike most of the cone loaded speakers that we're used to, horns are very directional and don't waste energy pointing sounds in a direction other than where the audience is seated. Who cares if the spider on the ceiling is hearing a playback as well as you are?

While horn-loaded speakers come in and out of style, they're always with us in some form. The latest foray into horned audio territory for the home is the La Grande Castine speakers (pictured left), designed by the French company Musique Concrete (can't find a website for them). Their large size and acoustic shape allow them to deliver sound in the 108dB range with a mere 3 watt amplifier. Now that's efficiency! They'll cost you though - about $100,000 per pair.

While we see speakers like the La Grande Constine occasionally used in the home (not that often because they tend to be on the large size), horn-loaded speakers are usually found in a professional setting. The reason why horn-loaded speakers have such a place in our sonic history is the fact that when film's first changed to "talkies" in the 20's, amplifiers were in their infancy and only rated around 5 watts at best (by comparison, today's theater amps are usually over 1000 for just the woofers in a large theater system). In order to cover the entire theater with sound, the speakers had to be the most efficient possible, which is why horn-loaded ones were chosen. Altec was the leader at the time (although RCA made the first ones) with their "Voice of the Theater" line (pictured left).

Usually you'd find a set of three of these speakers set behind the screen. The bigger the theater, the larger the speaker. In fact, in many large theaters that project Sony's SDDS format films, you'll find an array of five sets, although they'll probably be from JBL since Altec has regrettably left this area of the business some time ago.

When I was a kid in a few of my first bands, we used a pair of Altec A7 speakers (pictured left) in our PA system and always got raves for how great they sounded (the speakers sounded better than the band sometimes). Altec has now reissued the venerable A7, but at a $4000 per speaker price, which is totally ridiculous. They were good, but not that good, and there are a lot better choices available today for a lot less money than an old A7.

Probably the most widely revered and sought after horn-loaded speaker is the oldest - the RCA "Ubangi," which was used in the original theater sound systems until about the 60's and latter utilized as the primary piece of Allen Sides famed studio monitors of the 80's and 90's. Since almost all theaters that used these have either closed or upgraded to newer gear long ago. If you have any pictures of a Ubangi, please send it along.

I'm not sure how this post became the brief history of horn-loaded speakers (very, very brief), but it sure was fun, and I didn't even get into some of my very favorites. We'll leave that for a future post.

The Copyright Time Bomb

If you are a record label or publishing exec, you knew this day was coming. Still few made plans for what would happen when some of the provisions of the U.S Copyright Act of 1976 came due until now.

What's the problem? Only that the act gives authors or their heirs the ability to terminate copyright grants, which means that the lucrative catalog income (the only major income stream for some record labels these days) could come to a crashing halt.

So why does a law passed way back in 1976 strike fear into the hearts of industry execs today? Under the Copyright Act, if an artist or author sold a copyright before 1978, they or their heirs can take it back 56 years later. But if the artist or author sold the copyright during or after 1978, they can terminate that grant after only 35 years. That means that record labels could lose any sound recording copyright they purchased in 1978 beginning in 2013. For music from 1953 and before, those grants can already be terminated.

Many superstar acts (including the powerhouse The Eagles) are already preparing termination notices that they intend to file by the end of the year, according to Law.com (there's a five year window in which you can file notices). While superstar acts may be better off going it alone without a record label since many already have distribution infrastructure in place, many B and C level acts will probably just renegotiate for a better deal and leave their copyrights in place, which is what the labels are hoping for. Still, it's going to cut into their income stream big time, just when they can least afford it.

The Copyright Act isn't just about music though, it covers any type of copyright, so every facet of the entertainment industry will be affected. But the entertainment lawyers are already smiling since their big payday is just beginning. If you ever wanted to go to law school, now is the time.

The Two Secrets Of Soundproofing

While much of the art of acoustics is found in the design finishing touches that determines how a room sounds and feels, the hard science is in the basic construction which starts with some acoustic principles that provides the soundproofing ("isolation" is the more scientific term) that every studio needs.

Because most musicians and engineers aren't able to hire a real acoustician to design their rooms, they usually apply the only the finishing touches when they attempt to do it themselves while overlooking the basics, and their room never meet their needs in terms of isolation as a result.

That leads to the first question that both musicians and engineers ask regarding acoustics, “How can I make sure that my neighbors won’t hear us?” Here are the "secrets" of soundproofing, although they're really some basic acoustic principles.

First, all it takes is mass, which is our first principle. Simply put:

Acoustic Principle #1

The more mass your walls have between you and your neighbors 
(that includes walls made from cinder block, brick, wood, drywall, etc), 
the more you’ll be keep the outside sound from getting in, and the inside sound from getting out.

One of the ways that most pro studios accomplish soundproofing is by building a room within a room, which is done by putting the floor on springs or rubber, and building double or triple walls with air spaces in between on top. Needless to say, this gets really expensive and is impossible to do if you start out with a small space like a 10 foot x10 foot to begin with. But there are other ways to improve your isolation that can really be effective (though never as completely soundproof) that are quite a bit cheaper. All it takes are some construction tools and a little time, so here we go:

Step 1 - Add some mass to the walls and ceiling to increase your isolation. The least expensive way to do this is with 3/8” cement backing board. This is the same thing that’s used in showers and is sometimes called “Cement Board”. Home Depot sells 3 or 4 kinds and it does a great job for just a little bit of money. Plus, it doesn’t take up a lot of space and is way more efficient than regular drywall. It usually comes in 5’ x 3’ panels, but they weigh about three times what a panel of 4’ x 8’ drywall weighs (and you want all that extra weight to increase the mass, and therefore, the isolation). Make sure that you both glue and screw the cement board to the existing wall, since anything that isn’t absolutely tight will either rattle or give the room an unwanted resonant ring later, and defeats the isolation (see Principle #2).

Acoustic Principle #2

Think of air like water.

Any space between any construction joint lets the air out (or in)

and acts the same as if the room was filled with water,

so the idea is to make sure that there are no air leaks.

Step 2 - Get the thickest solid oak door that you can afford, then make sure you get a doorjamb. The trick here is to make sure that there are no air spaces around the door, and you do this by applying weather stripping around it on both sides. Most commercial studios use a double door “airlock” with a door attached to each side of the wall to maximize the isolation. You might get by with just a single door as long as you eliminate all the air spaces around it (see Principle #2).

Step 3 - Glue and screw some strips of ¼” low grade inexpensive industrial plywood to the cement board, and then glue and screw ½” regular drywall on top of that. The drywall is there primarily so there’s an anchor to attach the wall treatment outlined in step 4 in a later post.

As you've noticed by now, these 3 steps just aren't possible in a lot of home recording situations, but they're the only way that you can ever hope to truly isolate yourself from your neighbors and them from you.

Are Music Game Sales Coming Back To Earth?

Last week's video game sales report had many in both the gaming and music industries thinking what was once thought to be unthinkable - music games have finally run their course. Not a single music game could be found on the top twenty in the game charts, a far cry from when Guitar Hero and Rock Band ruled.

In October 2007, when the Guitar Hero craze was at its height, Guitar Hero III moved 1.4 million copies in six days, then sold another 1.9 million the next month. Compare that to September 2009, which saw the launch of both Guitar Hero V and Beatles Rock Band, where the combined sales of these two games sold just a tad less than 1.1 million copies over nearly a full month.

But there’s another completely new game missing from the October charts that's a big surprise to many people — Activision’s DJ Hero. During its five days of availability, the game sold a mere 120,000 copies across all four platforms. Considering how widely anticipated and marketed this game was, its feeble sales comes as a surprise. So why did a game that supposedly had so much going for it meet with such weak sales? Many theories abound but it seems like industry insiders agree on a few things:

• It isn't a great party game. It's a game for single players. The DJ culture is not collaborative in the first place, so the game isn't conducive for multiple players.

• It's expensive. As Ken Kuchera states in his post on ars technica - "The Renegade Edition of the game was $200. The standard edition, $120. That's a tough sell in a market where price point is so important. For $80 more you can get yourself a Wii or an Xbox 360 Arcade model. Right now at GameStop you can spend $20 less and pick up a game, a guitar, a microphone, and drums with the $99 Rock Band 2 Special Edition. The music is more accessible, you can pay with friends, and you get more hardware for less money. The turntable included with the $120 DJ Hero release is a high quality accessory; you won't feel ripped off if you buy the game. The trouble is that at that price, with only one accessory, not many people are going to be willing to find that out."

• You probably don't know the songs because they're all mashups. DJ Hero has name artists, but they were free to chop up the tunes they worked with at will. Innovative maybe, but not exactly what the average game player wants. What fun is playing a music game if you don't know the songs?

• Does the average person know how a turntable works? Everyone knows how a guitar or piano is played even if they can't play it. Not so with a turnable.

• None of the famous DJ's are even featured on the box. Why spend money on big names if you're not going to take advantage of their brands?

Game revenue has become an important income stream for many artists, so a slowdown in sales of music games is the last thing anyone needs. Are we witnessing a true waning of interest in the genre, or is the market just waiting for a new evolution in music gaming? Only time will tell.

The Most Revolutionary Musical Instrument In 60 Years?

According to the company, the Eigenharp Alpha is “the most revolutionary musical instrument of the last 60 years.” Don't know if that's true, but the instrument is truly unique and one of the most unusual that we've seen in some time. It combines breath and finger input in the form of a bassoon, but with the extended physical control that comes with having a computer interface and custom software.

That being said, the Alpha doesn't have an internal sound source of its own. The breath input comes from a mouthpiece just like a bassoon, but that's nothing more than a controller (remember the DX7 mouthpiece?). When combined with the finger control from either the touch strip, a fretted light-up keyboard, or keys, it's said to have much more expression than a physical instrument.

At about $6,500, I don't know how soon we'll be seeing the Alpha show up on a stage near you, but it's about the only instrument worth a notice in a long, long time.

Here's an interesting piece on the Alpha from the BBC entitled Do you drum it, strum it or stroke it?