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The modern recording engineer, producer, musician, and songwriter is forced to know and do way too many things. This blog will focus on the random set of skills required to make a living in the ever-changing world of music.

Just take it

The “music marketing” hat is one of the new ones I’m forced to wear. I avoided it like the plague for years. I would work, work, work on other peoples projects until I felt that I had given all that I could, then pass the project along to the client. When I started writing songs I soon realized that there weren’t any hands to take the project from me when I was done.

In the beginning, the only thing people knew about me was that my name was spelled very similar to the “Your Body Is A Wonderland” guy. Expectations were low, which wasn’t the worst thing in the world. That meant that I didn’t have all that much to mess up. I made some CD’s, sold them to my friends, and made between $.03 and $70 per month from iTunes sales. Not bad for a nobody.

A couple months ago I started a project that I call Third Wednesday. On the, you guessed it, third Wednesday of each month, I’m digitally releasing a new song. Owning a studio keeps my costs low, so the only thing I’m required to pay for each month are musician fees and mastering costs. I’m a bit of a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none, so I play most of the parts myself. It doesn’t take all that much effort and cost for me to create music. I do, however, lack motivation. A monthly deadline is a good way to keep me on task.

Is this the best way to create and release music? Probably not. It’s hard to switch between the creative and marketing hats. I love and cherish albums. I always prefer a 10 to 12 song album that tells an artist’s story. It makes it easier to connect. I made one of those a couple years back, so this monthly song delivery process makes a little more sense for me at this time.

In today’s “everything is free” internet, nobody pays for music that they have not heard. I decided, at least in the beginning, to give these songs away. I chose Noisetrade.com.
Here are my observations. The first song was downloaded, for free, about 150 times. Not bad. The same song was downloaded on iTunes roughly 140 times! My digital distributor allows me to track the zip codes of the downloaders. Much to my surprise, the songs were downloaded all over the country. I even had a few international downloads. I’ll take it!

My best guess is that users auditioned the song on noisetrade, but preferred the ease of delivery that iTunes provides. Currently, Noisetrade does not have a way to download directly to iPhones and other mobile devices. There’s also the possibility that radio stations are playing my songs, but I have no evidence that I’m getting spins on the airwaves.
It’s hard to give my music away for free. I believe there is value to the theory that no one will place value on your project if you don’t place value on it yourself. However, in my case it seems that giving it away has opened doors that would never have opened if I was only interested in making a buck a download.

My sample size is low, I know. I’m sure that future releases will shed a little more light on what works and what flops. I’ll keep you updated. Perhaps in the midst of my marketing failures and time wasters, I’ll stumble upon some info that will help you effectively get the word out about your next project.

studio to stage

I love my job, but sometimes my studio cave gets a bit too claustrophobic for my tastes. Summer always seems to offer a bit of a reprieve. I’m currently at youth camp number three, with one more to follow next week.
I’m changing things up a bit this go around. Week 1 and 2 were on the bass. This week I’m trying out the multi-instrumental thing, adding some keys, electric, and acoustic. I know enough about each of these things to get myself into trouble. Please don’t tell the fine folks of Addison Road that I’m walking a tight rope with each note I play!
Every producer should play live music. Only recently has this started to sink in. The controlled environment of the studio is great for focus and detail, but sometimes you just have to play. Making mistakes is part of the deal. Obviously you can’t play wrong notes all night, but often the beauty and inspiration is found in the recovery.
In some ways I’m the anti-musician, because all of my analogies are sports related. Athletes make hundreds of thousands of decisions in a game. Good coaches seldom pull great players from games after they make mistakes. Confidence is everything in sports. Lose it and your worthless. It’s the same way on stage. Lose confidence in yourself and your abilities and you might as well turn your amp off and retire your guitar to it’s case. I’ve learned to smile and laugh when I hit wrong chords or drop notes. The next note is the one that matters most.

Use What You Got.

Who doesn’t like the million dollar studio? They look great, they sound great, and they inspire. In the past, big time records were only made in big time studios. Gear was too expensive for the average Joe.

Our ears learned to love the sounds that came from these beautiful rooms. Then the 80’s happened, and everything turned upside down. Recording equipment got cheap. Suddenly, even novices could make a decent record.

Great songs were recorded in lousy rooms. It didn’t take long until we started liking the sound of those “lousy” rooms.

A great song recorded in a lousy room is ALWAYS better than a lousy song recorded in a great room.

Most folks can’t explain why they like something. I can promise that 99 times out of 100 we like a song because it’s a GREAT song, and not due to the fact that the drums were recorded in a pristine 2000 sq. ft. wood floor tracking room through a vintage Neve 8036 console. Would you walk 5 miles to work instead of driving your 1991 Ford Taurus because you would rather be in a new Mercedes?

My point? Don’t let your gear and environment keep you from making music. Use what you have. Maybe one day you will have that dream studio, but you can never get back the years of creativity lost wishing you had something better. Make your own song with what you have. Perhaps one day some kid will hear your music and ask me to help recreate YOUR sound.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

It’s a rule of mine to only share completed work, but I thought you might like a glimpse into the process of how one of my songs is born. I’m often overwhelmed when I hear finished works from my favorite artists. It’s hard for my brain to break down what seems to be so dense and complicated into a basic idea, but I know that the artist had to start somewhere. This track is a ways past it’s starting point, but still far from completion. I’ll post future “in-progress” versions of the tune that will hopefully demystify the process and inspire you to do your own thing.

I was watching a video of one of my recent live performances in the Quicktime player on my Mac when I accidently played the clip in reverse. Something about the way my guitar sounded backwards intrigued me, so I recorded the audio output of the quicktime player with a freeware program called audiohijack. It places an audio file into a specified folder, which I then loaded into protools and started editing away. I found a beat that fit my mood, then time stretched the guitar to fit the groove, using elastic audio. I listened through the guitar tracks until I found moments that interested me. I chopped them into loops and placed them on the timeline.

I’ve been trying to be more intentional with my songwriting these days. I spend quite a bit of time outlining ideas and creating a vision. This song, however, is more of a “shoot from the hip” process. One decision leads to the next, and so on.

Once I had a basic arrangement of the reversed guitar/vocal parts and the drum beat, I decided to introduce some different elements. The beat and guitar are both choppy sounding, so I reached for some legato-ish elements to smooth things out a bit. I’ve already started recording a studio version of the song that inspired this track, so I loaded in the steel guitar and picked a few moments that fit the best. I added fade-ins/outs as well as some long delays and reverbs so that the instrument enters and exits without being too noticeable. Cello sounds good on EVERYTHING, but I had to find a creative solution since I’ve yet to record cello for this tune. I found another song I had previously recorded with cello parts that seemed to fit the vibe. I imported the tracks and used autotune to “transpose” the cello into the proper key. While doing so, something interesting happened. The autotune messed up in the coolest way! It added a tremolo/vibrato effect to some of the notes that I could not have created with any of my other plug-ins.

At this point I had a fairly interesting sounding track, but the arrangement lacked interest. I eventually plan on adding words, so I extended the “verse” sections to leave space for future vocals. And, oh yeah, I added bells, because I add bells to everything!

There is still plenty of work to be done. I’m by no means finished. I will probably add in some different chord changes to break the monotony. Perhaps I’ll add more traditional elements in certain sections. The eventual lyrics and story line will no doubt shape the way the song builds and develops.

I went as for as I could with this tune before I had to take a break. After a while perspective is lost, so I need time to get it back. Eventually I’ll sit back down and work until I lose that perspective again. I’ll share my progress.

If you write songs and hope to play them for people, then you need to have perfomance videos to share on the web. Song clips are great, but they’re not enough. HD video is cheap these days. This video was recorded on a pretty fancy camera, but you can get by with an iPhone or a flip cam. In this case I recorded the audio from the front of house console using the usb recorder on a Yamaha LS9. I had a band for half of the concert, but it’s almost always difficult to get a good band sound from a live event. Acoustic songs, however, have a better chance of working well. Most of my opportunities to play my songs are solo events, so videos of guitar and vocal performances make the most sense.

First, import the video into iMovie (or any other editing software). Pick the section of video that you want to use. Make the appropriate edits, fade in’s, and color correction. Don’t go overboard with this. Let the video tell the story.

Export the video and load it into your audio editor. Most of todays audio editors can also simultaneously play video along with the audio. Add basic EQ, compression, etc. Take the audio from the board and line it up with the audio from the camera. Use your ears to do this effectively. Sometimes the waveforms can be a bit misleading. The room sound from the camera can be very useful. Mix in as much as you can until it sounds bad, which is my basic methodology for almost everything! Export the video and upload to Youtube, Vimeo, facebook, etc.

Most live performance videos on the internet sound awful. It doesn’t take a whole lot of work to improve the quality exponentially. It doesn’t have to be great, it just needs to be a little better than everything else that’s out there. Shoot for perfection in other aspects of your life and work. Whether or not people want to watch is primarily dependent upon the song and performance, but you might as well do as much as possible to give yourself an edge.