Top 12 Highest Earning Musicians

Here’s the the Top Twelve highest earning singer/musician list for the period spanning from June 2008 to June 2009:

1. Madonna: $110 million
2. Celine Dion: $100 million
3. Beyonce Knowles: $87 million
4. Bruce Springsteen: $70 million
5. Kenny Chesney: $65 million
6-8. Rascal Flatts: $60 million
6-8. Coldplay: $60 million
6-8. AC/DC: $60 million
9. Eagles: $55 million
10. Toby Keith: $52 million
11. Bon Jovi: $50 million
12. Dave Matthews Band: $45 million

I expect that the year-end totals will be substantially different, since it'll take into account the summer touring season, which the above list does not. Still, it's pretty interesting that the same names keep popping up year and year.

Lawsuit Claims Guitar Center And NAMM Fixed Prices

According to a post on Hypebot, a nationwide class-action lawsuit has been filed against Guitar Center and the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) claiming the two conspired to fix retail pricing on guitars, allowing the music retail giant and other major retailers to reap higher profits and squash competition at the expense of consumers.

The suit filed earlier this week by the firm of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro claims that retailers met at NAMM in 2001 and voiced concerns that gross margins would erode from the then-current 27 to 32%. According to the suit, the NAMM meetings played an instrumental role in creating agreements between Guitar Center, other leading retailers and product manufacturers to impose 'resale price maintenance' agreements designed to raise and maintain retail prices and according to the complaint, the cabal's actions were successful with 2008 margins holding steady at 30%".

Although Guitar Center is truly the 800 pound gorilla of the musical instrument business and would probably love to fix prices where ever possible, I find it hard to believe that this actually happened. It's true that they fixed prices in their stores and longer have the wild "sell at any cost" policy of old, but there's no love lost between GC and it's competitors and suppliers, so any type of collusion seems remote. Still, all the facts haven't come out yet, so it will be interesting to discover more info as it becomes available.

When Things Just Don't Sound Right

I'm currently in the studio producing the band Snew. Here's a picture on the left of the nice old Neve found in Village Recorders studio A where we're holed up with the great Ed Cherney engineering.

Everything has sounded great right from the start on the this project, but there are times when you're recording when that's not the case at all. It's not uncommon to find that a part doesn't fit well in a track, or fits too well where it can't be distinguished. Here's a list of things to try in order of importance the next time you run in to either situation.

Change the source (the instrument you are miking)

Change the mic placement

Change the placement in the room

Change the mic

Change the mic preamplifier

Change the mount of compression and/or limiting (from none to a lot)

Change the room (the actual room you are recording in)

Change the musician

Come back and try it another day

Improve Your Band In 3 Easy Steps

When you’re making records, you get to listen to everything under a microscope, and after a while you begin to understand that there are a few universal truths about making your band sound tight and professional. Here’s a brief summary of perhaps the 3 most important steps to improving your band’s performance and taking it to the next level. I promise you that if you spend even a little time on each of these items, you’ll see positive results immediately.

Dynamics - Playing with dynamics is the greatest key to making your band sound great. It’s an improvement that both you (the band) and your audience will notice immediately, and will automatically separate you from about 90% of other bands on the planet.

So what are dynamics? Simply, it means playing quietly or with less intensity in certain places in a song, and louder or with more intensity in other places. Most bands are oblivious to dynamics and play at one volume throughout the entire song, song after song, set after set. This gets boring and tedious for the audience very quickly.

There are a few byproducts from playing dynamically too. The vocals can be heard better because there’s more space and fewer loud instruments to fight against (easier on the singer as well). Songs become more fun to play because there’s true interaction with the other players to make it work, and as a result, the band automatically gets tighter. And the audience perceives dynamics in a way that you wouldn’t expect - suddenly they’ll start telling you how tight you sound.

Attack and Releases ( or articulations) are one of the most overlooked, yet most important elements in playing together. Attacks and releases usually refer to a phrase that you’re either playing or singing. The attack part is usually easy - everyone starts to play or sing at exactly the same time in the same way. The releases are what’s overlooked. A release is how you end a phrase and it’s as important as how you start it. Once again, everyone has to end it at exactly the same time in exactly the same way. Getting your attacks and releases are one of the essential parts of making a good record (you hardly ever hear one off anymore) and they’re essential to making you sound tight as well. Listen to a song that everyone knows, Hotel California, for a great example of both attacks and releases (and phrasing) of both the guitars and vocals.

Turnarounds - Another often overlooked portion of a song that needs to be tight is the turnaround between sections, like the one or two bars between the verse and chorus, chorus and verse, verse and outro, chorus and bridge, etc. This part requires a lot of focus because it’s usually played a little differently from the rest of the section of the song. For the drummer, it’s usually a tom or snare roll into the next section, but unless it’s a build, most of the other players usually just randomly play something over the roll. If you’re playing a song that you’ve written, chances are that you’ve not thought about the turnaround too much, so now is the time. Make sure that every player has an exact part to play and that all parts work together and sound tight (a good idea for the rest of the song as well).

The above post is some of what you'll find in my band improvement book, How To Make Your Band Sound Great. I posted this a while back in the DIY section of Bruce Houghton's excellent music blog Hypebot, but I thought that it was worth posting again here since the advice really makes a difference in how a band sounds.

Album Preproduction

I'm currently in preproduction for a new album with the band Snew. If you've not heard them yet, they're a hard rock band reminiscent of AC/DC or Iron Maiden with some really great songs. I produced their first record last year and it met with a great deal of acclaim and success, so it's important that this one meets the high expectations of their many fans around the world, and that's why preproduction is really important.

Since it’s the little things, the nuances, that make a song sound great, I thought it would be a good time to list those things that a band has to have down before they hit the studio. They are:

• Everyone must know their parts inside out

• The starts and stops in the song are all played together.

• Everyone must play the same part the same way every time (except if it’s jazz or blues)

• Everyone has to know the dynamics of the song.

• All rhythms are in the pocket and the songs groove

• The turnaround between each song section must be defined.

• Attacks and releases for each part must be executed together.

• The sounds of each instrument must be layered so nothing clashes frequency-wise.

• The tempo must be right for the song.

• The band must be in tune (especially the bass, which is sometimes just tuned by ear).

• All vocals must be in the best range for the singers

• Background vocals must be defined and tight

These are all the things that you should be concentrating on during preproduction rehearsals in order to make sure that  your recording session not only runs smoothly and efficiently, but sounds great as well.

Live Nation's Club Passport

In yet another example of the severity of the slide in concert attendance, giant concert promoter Live Nation announced on Thursday the introduction of the Live Nation Club Passport, which gives attendees an all-access pass at specific clubs for $49.99 until the end of the year. The pass applies to a number of House of Blues venues, as well as all clubs promoted by Live Nation.

On the surface this seems like a pretty good deal if you go to a lot of club shows until you read the fine print and see that the Passport doesn't guarantee that you get in if the show is hot, meaning that you still have to purchase tickets to popular shows. So a seemingly great deal is really just a way for Live Nation to up the attendance at some of their less popular shows, rather than the real bargain that it's made out to be.

But it's the artist that always loses, and it's still unclear how an act will be paid if most of the crowd is made up of people with Passports. If you're dependent upon the door, it looks like you'll be out of luck if you expect to make any dough, but it's still better to play in front of people than to an empty house.

While this seems like a post that's down on Live Nation, it's really not, since you've got to hand it to them because at least they're trying new things to boost attendance, and that can't be all bad.

The Magic and Myth of THX

Anyone who goes to the movies is aware of THX, but not many people are actually aware of what it is and what the logo means in relation to a theater. THX is owned by LucasFilm and the brainchild of former LucasFilm chief scientist Tomlinson Holman (my friend and mentor), who is now a professor at USC and is the man that coined the phrase "5.1" surround sound. Tom is good at coining names that stick, and in fact, THX stands for Tomlinson Holman eXperiment.

So what is it? It used to be that movies theaters varied a huge amount in audio playback quality. A movie that sounded great in one theater would sound like it was coming out of a tin can in another because there was no real standard for playback quality. This came to George Lucas' attention upon the release of Star Wars, which was a very sound-heavy movie with a great score and lots of sound effects. As they followed the release of the film across the country, Lucas and his production team were frequently appalled at how many theaters had an inferior audio playback system and how bad their movie would sound as a result. If all theaters sounded equally as bad, you could compensate for that. But if the quality was hit or miss, that was a problem.

As a result, Holman came up with THX, which is a standard for playback quality between theaters, in 1983 before the release of Return of the Jedi. A theater that is THX-certified meets a minimum level of acoustic and electronic playback quality. Only speakers and amplifiers that meet the required quality level are certified, and only those pieces can be used in the playback chain. As a result, the overall playback quality of movie theaters has gotten dramatically better, and any theater that has the THX logo ensures the highest playback standard available.

Soon the THX company found that the market for theaters to upgrade had saturated, and being a company in search of profits, began licensing the concept for home screening rooms, and in 2005, home theaters, and this is where you have to scratch your head and think, "Is this really needed?"

For the most part, a THX certified home theater is more for the videophile with more money than sense, looking for bragging rights with his friends. Any gear that is THX-approved is a lot more expensive than the same piece that's not certified, even though there's little difference between the two. It would be nice if a home theater can be built to THX acoustic standards, but the majority of the time this isn't possible, except in the case of new construction, and that defeats the purpose of spending the extra dough on certified gear right there. And the chance of a room staying calibrated after your wife buys a new couch or moves the furniture around are just about nil. And, let's face it - most high-end home theaters don't scrimp on gear and sound pretty good anyway.

For theaters, which have their share of problems because they're larger and have more people to deal with, it's certainly the way to go. For the home, I'd probably pass if my money was on the line.

By the way, Tom Holman never received a dime for his invention.

The Laser Microphone

Transducer technology (microphones and speakers) hasn't changed much in the last 100 years. Sure, it's evolved as the material and part tolerances became much smaller and the efficiency of the units grew much higher as a result, but the basics are still pretty much the same. But the laser microphone might become the first new transducer breakthrough that really has a chance to revolutionize the way we capture sound.

After watching the smoke from a candle waver as his wife spoke over dinner, inventor and theorist David Schwartz got the idea for the mic, which uses the laser as a measurement tool against a gas that acts as a traditional diaphragm. This is not to be confused with the laser microphones now used in surveillance by the CIA and KGB, where a laser is projected against a window to measure the fluctuations in air pressure when someone in the room speaks. Schwartz's mic still measures pressure fluctuations, but in a more controlled manner aimed at a much higher fidelity audio capture.

Although the mic is still in the early stages of development at Schwartz's company Schwartz Engineering and Design, it holds a lot of potential. Why? Because the laser mic can have a huge dynamic range way beyond that of even the best instrumentation mics that are in use today. And it can have an absolutely flat response with no coloration, unlike every mic currently on the market (although a lot of recording engineers might find this a flaw since the flaws add "character"). Plus, the mic has the potential to have only the lowest theoretical noise floor, a problem with many of the favorite mics that we use today. This means complete realism in the sound that's captured.

Now there are still plenty of places in every stage of circuitry downstream of the mic that will color the sound, but if the source is as high a quality as promised, the sound coming out the speaker ultimately will be better than ever, and the quality of all circuitry in the signal chain will get better as the flaws are more easily seen and correct as a result of using the higher quality source material.

So here's hoping that this technology comes to market in the near future. It's about time for a real breakthrough in an industry that hasn't had one in a long, long time.

The following video of the laser mic isn't that great, but it does explain the general operating principle.

Various New Items

Album sales in the US are down 18.1 percent in August from the same time a year ago. To make matters worse, compared to the same period in 2007, sales were off by 37.2 percent.

Want more good music sales news? Album sales are down 14.5 percent compared to the same point last year and 31.1 percent versus 2007.

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Regardless of decrease in album sales, it looks like The Beatles will sell about 500,000 in the first week since the release of their remastered catalog. That being said, you can bet that they are coming to iTunes, just not yet. I don't know why everyone expected this to happen last week because it's not to anyone's advantage to release the band's physical and digital product too close together, as it would cannibalize physical sales.

If both Apple computer and Apple records wait until later in the year for the digital release they can take advantage of the Christmas market with sales items like last minute iTunes gift cards, and use the iTunes release as a second launch of the physical product to take advantage of the Holiday.

Let everyone buy the CDs for now, see what the sell-through is, then release on iTunes. That's what I'm predicting.

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A new NPD study finds that U.S. video game sales fell in August for the 6th month in a row as sales were down 16% from a year ago to $909 million and 14% year to date. Hardware sales were down 25% as well.

Isn't the gaming business starting to look like the music business, as it's sales spiral ever downward?

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In yet another NPD report, kids 12 and younger account for 2% of video game industry unit sales and households with kids in this age group comprise 45% of total industry sales. The report also states that 57% of kids ages 2-12 play video games, and only 62% of them use a computer.

This means that there is some room for growth in this segment of the market if the industry can capitalize on it.

EQ Tips For Delays And Reverbs

It's pretty common for an engineer to have a problem with the sound of  a delay or reverb during mixing. Usually the engineer will spend a lot of time trying different presets in an attempt to help everything blend better, but just a little EQ added or subtracted to the effect could've made everything fit nicely in the first place.  Here are a few tips for EQing effects that will help everything blend without spending a lot of time experimenting.

• To make an effect stick out, brighten it up.

• To make an effect blend in, darken it up (filter out the highs).

• If the part is busy (like with drums), roll off the low end of the effect to make it fit.

• If the part is open, add low end to the effect to fill in the space.

• If the source part is mono and panned hard to one side, make one side of the stereo effect brighter and the other darker.

If your effects aren't blending, try the above tips before you change the preset. You'll be surprised at the results.

5 Recording Innovations By The Beatles

Since it's Beatles week, here are some interesting facts about their recording methods and the innovations that they (mostly engineer Geoff Emerick) introduced that are commonplace today.

• Multi-miking drums. Until Emerick began to experiment, the drum kit was picked up by a maximum of two mics - one on kick drum and the other as an overhead above the snare. In order to get a bigger drum sound, Emerick introduced a mic on each drum as well as one underneath the snare.

• Close-miking instruments. Once again, in order to get a different, fuller sound, Emerick violated the EMI standards of distance miking each instrument. Surprisingly, he almost got fired for this practice except for the great power of The Beatles. Emerick close-miked all sorts of instruments to the horror of the suited EMI execs, from drums to amps to brass to strings to Indian instruments. Of course, this is a practice that we take for granted today.

• Padding on drums. A lot of the sound of the later Beatle records came from the fact that Ringo put light "tea towels" across the drums as well as a sweater inside the kick drum at the behest of Emerick to dampen the ring. While the towels never caught on, kick drums are routinely stuffed with all sorts of soft material today, and for a time during the late 70's and 80's, a wallet taped to the snare drum (which you can consider another version of the towel) was pretty routine as well.

• Using a speaker as a transducer. A speaker and a microphone are basically the same thing - a transducer - except that they're designed for different jobs. With Paul McCartney always asking for more bass, Emerick got the idea of using a speaker as a microphone and it worked great, as can be heard on "Paperback Writer" and "Rain". Today, an 8 inch NS-10 speaker has become pretty standard for capturing the extreme bottom of a kick drum, but it took about 40 years after Emerick's experiment to become a standard.

• Vocal double-tracking. This is more of a George Martin trick to cover up an iffy vocal track, but the boys (especially John Lennon) loved it so much that they used it whenever they could to make the vocal sound bigger. The Beatles might not have been the first to do this, but their influence was so strong that double tracking has become a standard procedure for generations of vocalists and their producers.

As you can see, not only was The Beatles music perhaps the peak point of pop music during the last century, but they influenced everything from fashion to the sound of records for decades to come. With the release of their remastered albums, it will be a lot easier to hear and study those sounds and techniques for a long time.

Some Of The Beatles And Me - Part Two

My next brush with a Beatle came at a Ravi Shankar concert, which should give you an idea of who it is right away.

I was offered two tickets to a concert at the Pasadena Community College auditorium from Ravi's tamboura player and wanted to take my girlfriend at the time, but as things happened, we broke up the day before the concert. There I was, stuck with an extra ticket with a face value of $15, so I sold it to a kid outside the venue before I headed in. I figured I was up 15 bucks, since the ticket didn't cost me anything to begin with.

The ticket said the seat was in row "OO" and when I showed it to the usher after not having much luck finding the seat, she pointed towards the balcony and said, "You're way up there." It was a freebie ticket, so I couldn't complain too much about the location.

When I finally made it up to balcony, another usher began to take me to the back row, just about as far away from the stage as you could get. Even in such a small venue (maybe 1500 seats), you still felt isolated up there. But the usher couldn't find row OO either since the seating stopped at NN, so she called over another usher who immediately said, "I know where you're supposed to be. Follow me."  Before you know it, I was in almost the best seat in the house, in the first row, almost dead center of the stage.

Needless to say, I was a little stunned, and so was the kid who bought the ticket for 15 bucks. Boy, did he get a deal! Shortly after, the lights came down and Ravi started his first spectacular raga that lasted about 45 minutes.

I was pretty much into Ravi's masterful performance during this time, and didn't pay attention to what was around me too much, but during the 2nd raga, I began to notice the guy sitting next to me. He had longish brown hair and was dressed in a very plain green t-shirt and a red plaid shirt on top of that. Very ordinary - perhaps a bit too ordinary considering the location of the seats. It began to dawn on me - Ravi Shankar in Los Angeles, George Harrison has a house in Los Angeles, George brought Ravi to the masses. Could this be George sitting beside me? What took me so long to figure this out?

At the end of the second raga, I got my answer. As we were applauding, he turned to me and smiled that smile that you've seen a thousand times on the news, television, record albums and the movies. We smiled at each other in mutual appreciation for the greatness we were experiencing together. And still I was stunned it was him.

At the end of the concert, George leapt up and ran to the stage to meet with his mentor. I wasn't fast enough to speak with him, but I didn't know what to say anyway. What do you say? Living in Hollywood for almost 30 years, I know enough that celebrities want their space. If you don't have anything to say to them that you wouldn't say to a non-celeb, it's best kept to yourself. They are just people, but they're hassled way more than the rest of us. Why add to it?

But what was interesting was that virtually no one noticed, or cared to notice him. George Harrison, one of the world's best known and wealthiest musicians, was so comfortably dressed, so down to earth, so of-the-people, that he could've been a regular in Lazarchick's Bar in my hometown of Minersville, PA. It wasn't a put-on or a disguise so he wouldn't be noticed, it was just him. How cool is that?

Since this seems to be Beatles week, we'll continue the theme on the next couple of posts with a bit on their recording innovations and sound.