I was reading this interesting blog entry by Marc Andreessen about how startups should be flexible with the initial product plan, and he quoted a really cool article from Randall Stross’ book The Wizard of Menlo Park, about Thomas Edison and the early days of the creation of the Phonograph.

Anyway, the press had a hard time figuring out what the usage model of recorded material would be — here’s the sample from the book:

[A description of the phonograph in Scientific American in early November] set off a frenzy in America and Europe. The New York Sun was fascinated by the metaphysical implications of an invention that could play “echoes from dead voices”. The New York Times predicted [in an eerie foreshadowing of their bizarre coverage of the Internet in the mid-1990’s] that a large business would develop in “bottled sermons”, and wealthy connoisseurs would take price in keeping “a well-stocked oratorical cellar.”.Such was the authority of Scientific American’s imprimatur that all of this extraordinary attention was lavished not on the first working phonograph made for public inspection, but merely a description supplied by Edison’s assistant.

…By late November, Edison and his staff had caught onto the phonograph’s commercial potential as a gadget for entertainment… a list of possible uses for the phonograph was noted [by Edison and his staff], assembled apparently by free association: speaking toys (dogs, reptiles, humans), whistling toy train engines, music boxes, clocks and watches that announced the time. There was even an inkling of the future importance of personal music collections, here described as the machine for the whole family to enjoy, equipped with a thousand [music recordings], “giving endless amusement.

Pretty funny, or what. Anyway, the whole new world of all-digital content has in the same way shuffled the decks concerning music distributions. I would not be surprised if we all five years from now would scratch our heads about the idea of distributing music as MP3 files.

There are so many issues totally unresolved: how is really any commercial value tracked in digital bits that could be endlessly copied, even with DRM? How to find content easily as digital content could be massively distributed and even created? Do people really like to have hard disk content rather than an object they would like to look at, collect in a book shelf, and so on?

Sorry about all the rhetorical questions and no answers — I just tried to show that we all are still in the very, very early days of the digital music revolution.

I give you one prediction. People like to share music in forms of showing their personality and what they like, if possible even in a creative and personal way. So let’s make it very easy for non-DJs to put together mixes of the music they like just now and would like to share with their friend, software like this will appear, maybe even in the form of Web services. If the produced content had meta-info about the musical parts, key, bpm, and then we had tools who could read this info and provide easy ways to remix it — style Ableton Live but very user-friendly… That would also mean an attempt to make an open format (most likely XML format) that defined song structures, parts, keys, warp points, and so on.

I spent most of yesterday converting the PlanetoidPark web site so it’s solely based on WordPress. WordPress is a blogging server solution, open source, but it’s very much now usable for any kind of database back-end web sites.

I’ve been thinking about this for a month, and when I got back from vacation it was one of my todo action items. Why? Because after over two decades of programming, there’s a time and place to stop doing custom solutions and just take something that is done by hundreds of other programmers and extend it yourself, or then help out and give back patches and features to the source base.

With WordPress now I could quickly update any entries and create new ones, and associate images with posts. Also I could add tags, write custom pages, and do all this via a web-interface.

Some notes for anyone else interested in doing this. I changes the permalink (the URL where the postings are found so it’s a direct link with no timestamp using the /%postname%/ construct, for example here’s where all the releases are. This way the web site looks like any other web site, and not directly like a blog site.

I also found this cool audio player widget so I could put promos into each posting using a simple construct. There are other plugins I use, such as the Google Sitemaps widget that automatically makes new sitemaps for search engines each time a new posting is created or updated. I actually expect to find more interesting widgets along the way, or I could write some myself in case I need special solutions.

There are so many ways to customize the CSS via the templates, so there’s no problems with extending and changing the look and feel along the way. There’s also an RSS feed as part of the web site — I do think that’s better long term than mailing lists, as the end users could decide when to read new posts, rather than getting clutter into their mailboxes.

Anyway, in case you are working on a producer, band, or label site, or something similar, and have access to an ISP account with MySql (most of them have it), I really recommend looking into WordPress. Most likely I will turn this web site to a WordPress site, as well, but I need to worry a little bit about avoiding broken links, and do some preplanning before this will happen, but maybe within a month or so. This blog is already using WordPress, so it will be a manner of just changing the rest to this service, and put in symbolic links to avoid possible existing links out there.

Hooks are these small patterns of music that gets stuck in the listener’s head. It’s always been the trademark of good songwriters to write hooks that become memes, spreading like a mind virus, resulting in more people purchasing the songs, of course.

Recently, the whole notion of hooks have changed with contemporary electronic music. It’s no longer a matter of writing an interesting small piece of melody, a guitar riff, or a three part chord that sticks. It’s becoming a matter of finding an interesting/odd loop that is the hook. As an example, a lot of Acid music is really trying to figure out interesting hooks in forms of acid loops.

That’s fine. My problem is that such hooks don’t stick as well into the mind compared with melodies. I myself have a hard time remembering odd non-musical hooks. Maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s a bigger problem.

Some classical composers, such as Claude Debussy, just ignored the whole notion of a memorable hook, and did their own thing. A lot of contemporary techno is also going along this road. Then again, most of the population would recognize any of Mozart’s most famous compositions, while fewer might recognize Debussy’s works — Clair De Lune being of course the big exception.

There are some interesting exceptions in the electronic world, Daft Punk and Chemical Brothers being those I think of (and of course Kraftwerk, Underworld, and the electronic music by New Order, of which Blue Monday is one of the biggest electronica memes ever). Hmm, what’s in common with these acts? Memorable hooks?

Here’s my current soundbank configuration. When I do tracks, I will always sooner or later save the original stems such as drum loops, bass lines, pads, and so on, as 24-bit 44.1kHz AIFF or WAV files that I could use later for various other configurations, remixes, new tracks, and so on.

The soundbank has the following main sections. atmos is atmospheric loops such as pads and abstract sounds. bass is of course bass lines. drhihats are all kinds of hihats, open and closed in separate folders. drkicks are the kicks, and drsnares are snares, claps, and abstract snares. drum-hits are all kinds of strong percussion, of which a large part are cymbal hits. effects are of course effects, loops all kinds of drum and sound loops in different folders — I do have the full drum loops and percussion drum loops (usually no kick in those) in separate sub-folders. melodies are some kind of melodic content. patterns are rhytmic loops. voices are of course voice material.

The first New folder is a special case where I drop in fresh loops with the same sections as the ones mentioned before. The reason is that I like to go through new material and I could quickly find them. After use they will end up in the normal folders.

Why this configuration? In my case I’ve learned over the years, that these are the most common musical elements I work with in my tracks. When I do something fresh, just for fun, I could quickly drag in drum loops, a bass line, some atmospheric stuff, patterns, and hey, something is happening where I could then add new content and extend the material.

As for the actual audio files themselves, they also have a special code. In the beginning I try to put in the major or minor key (for example A is A major, and a is a minor), and somewhere in the name I also repeat the sub-name, such as atm (atmospheric sounds) or pat (pattern). The first is obvious, it’s good to get a rough idea what the key is for the loop. The second is for possible quick searches of all loops of a certain kind inside Ableton Live’s browser.

Yes, it takes some house keeping from time to time, but it’s then nice to have everything organized. If I do a DJ mix or something similar, I could quickly find elements I could mix into the track just by going through the specific folder content, same even in a live setup.

I’ve been toying with converting these to Apple Loops as well, but usually I could get by with just dragging in specific loops and converting them on demand. But they all do have the Ableton Live .asd files available with the proper warp mode and possible warp markings in place.

Yes, this is not a music-related posting, I will send that one out tonight, but it’s a good topic for any creative person sitting most of the time in a studio, and noticing their waste line go up over time. Overweight is bad, bad, leads to all kinds of side-effects, higher blood pressure, triggers other kinds of things the body can’t handle. And you want to make music until you are super-senior, right?

If you work within 5-10 miles (7-10km or so) distance from work, use a bike. If you bike 40-60 minutes every day, and stop at traffic lights, and again pedal quite a lot, it’s like going to the gym every day for close to an hour. But you need to get to work and back, anyway, and you do two things at the same time, saving time for studio work!

The more you walk around at work, the better. Take lots of breaks. It’s interesting that if you work standing, you move more around, loosing more calories, than constantly sitting. It helps with your back, too. Always use stairs rather than the elevator, unless you work in a high rise, not fun walking 20-40 levels of stairs. When parking a car, place it the furthermost from the office entrance, plenty of space, and forces you to move more.

If you eat a big lunch, or dinner, it will just cause it harder to get rid of such calories, not to speak of being tired after the lunch. Take smaller portions.

Drink a lot of water, the stomach is happy it’s full and does not complain. Carborated water a.k.a soda is full of calories, by the way.

And never, never do what I did, went back to Finland and tried to remember my childhood days by eating candy I used to purchase when I was a kid…

Taking a step back, some might not like organizing their material, and rely on just search tools such as Spotlight with MacOSX. That’s just fine, as well.

I’m just now reading David Weinberger’s interesting book Everything is Miscellaneous, where he points out the new way of looking at information that  Internet is defining, in other words there are multiple ways to find information, using tags, search urls, listings, categories, and so on.

My point is that it’s somewhat good to rely on some mind of organization. The least I want is to sit and hunt for material when suddenly the creative spirit kicks in. But I do think that creating organizational models is very personal, so the more you put in from your own side, the better chance you will use it long term.

One last note about projects. I always, always try to render out temporary material. This way if I’m not sure what a folder contains, I could quickly play the rendered file and know what the folder contains.

OK, here’s the current system how I organize my projects on the disk, and I’ve used it for over three years, and sometimes deviate from it a little bit, but hey, nobody is a robot. I learned it from an article I read long time ago, and it was modified, and I suspect if someone else wants to do something similar, you will make a variation of it.

The whole idea is to keep track of the project status in folders with clear sub-folders, and move them from one state to another during the lifetime of the projects.

I have a top level folder called Recording. Inside this one I have four top-level folders called: 1-Attik, 2-Production Material, 3-Work In Progress and 4-Shelf (the others are for Live and Logic temp recording material). Attik is where I place things that will just gather dust and I might or might not need it in future. Production material is anything I really think is interesting and should be moved to work in progress soon. However, that material could easily get back to the Attik, too. Work in progress is where the active projects reside. Shelf is the final resting place for finished projects.

Inside each one I have the exact same sub-folders, DJ Mixes, Interstitials (short one minute tracks, Performances (DJ recordings), Remixes, and Tracks, There’s also sometimes a Film and Effect section. Biowaves is a forthcoming podcast series, hint hint.

Inside these I have each project with a running number and a prefix, I use KX<four-digit number>, KX is from prefixes I’ve used in private programming projects.

When I then work on individual projects, when I do backups I just drag this same sub-folder to another hard disk, the KX<zzzz> number is the one that will indicate the project. I now also put a short name after it as it’s easier to remember project names than numbers.

Anyway, the trick is to move the projects from one state to another, and also be brave and move things to the Attik in case you know certain projects will certainly just gather dust in the future.

Oh, one last note, inside the project folders I also have a small info folder called “Samples not archived”, so I know which project I have gone through and archived into my SoundBank. Maybe I need to explain how my Soundbank looks like next!

Most of us working with audio projects have lots and lots of leftovers. There are few I know of that will release all the material they have put together, of many reasons. For example it simply does not sound interesting, or is such a different style so it’s hard to release it for many reasons.

It’s usually easy to know when something is not working out; if you work on the track for a longer time period, days, weeks, and is still sounds dull or not interesting, that’s such a track.

One school of thought is to just delete the material and go on. I think it’s a little bit drastic, but the idea has some merit. Time is short, and if you can’t rescue such a track, the statistics is against you. There could be a small possibility that later the track would work out. But if you have a long list of unreleased material, psychologically it kind of wears you down. So put them aside, into a separate folder or something similar.

The other option I use all the time is to reuse any samples, loops, drum material, and so on from unreleased tracks. I just export them to my sound bank, and there has been many times such recycled material shows up in unexpected configurations.

Another option is to export selected stems as possible raw material for something else, let’s say just the drums and bass. You could always later reuse it in combination with other samples, or as a starting point for a remix.

Finally, if you still really like the material, or can’t publish it of some reason, use it as parts of a personalized mix in combination with outside material, or then as exclusive private releases with published tracks. I do think such cases will be more and more common in future.

I should maybe go next and show my project folder setup for others to get ideas how to organize unpublished or published material.

Ok, back home, and it will take me another day to get used to the California time zone as well as the lifestyle.

A couple of comments about traveling. I actually got inspired at the Helsinki airport and worked out 35 minutes of a forthcoming Pretty/Gritty/Strange mix. It also helped to have access to a power outlets.

Over in Stockholm I could not find any, I suspect they were locked behind the walls. As for Chicago, that place is just so super-busy and crowded, no way to do much work.

All said, it’s a shame that airports hide or don’t provide power outlets to travelers. We do pay aiport fees as part of the ticket, after all. Even the issue of paying big bucks for a short time of WiFi is silly, but with WiMax I think that issue will be quickly resolved.

I don’t mind the security checks and so on, not even that most airlines don’t provide much on the plane if you fly economy. But power outlets to charge iPods, laptops and so on, please… I even think all seats on all the airplanes should have power outlets, it should not be so hard to put those in today.

So Helsinki Airport is for me one of the top airports now, and Arlanda one of the worst.

Homerecordingnetwork.com lists a lot of podcasts related to studio recording. I have not had time to check them out, as I’m still trying to finish all my to non-heard SonicState podcasts, but after that I will check out some of the others listed on this page.

Anyway, I’m now a firm believer in music technology podcasts, video podcasts are even better, but audio ones work out really well, as you could just play back various samples and tell what’s happening in general. And you can’t watch video podcasts while you bike.

As I’ve written before, there’s a place for even more specialized audio podcasts in the music business, for example related to dance music production.

Now, this entry should be posted while I’m flying back to California, so let’s see how the future posting feature works in WordPress!

Logic’s channel strips are a really nice feature. A channel strip is a super-preset of various plug ins and other settings that you could define to a specific channel via the Inserts popup menu. Logic Pro is shipping with hundreds of channel strips, including already define bass lines, pads, and so on. It’s very common for me to start a project by keying in a channel strip for a kick drum or a bass sound, and then change the actual software synth preset or switch to another software synth, while keeping in place the channel strip effects. This way I could for example have a nice compression setting in place and go from that forward.

Now, a couple of days ago I was working on drum loops, and I had the default Apple loops installed on my MacBookPro. So I wanted to make the default loops sound more interesting and unique. I was hunting around and noticed that the 08 Effects channel strip grouping had lots of really cool effect setup with multiple plugins working together. So I took a default drum loop, and then run it through various effect channel strip presets, each one creating a very unique and interesting new drum loop.

This is where a podcast would make sense — I will make a sample setup in a future podcast showing what happens with a plain vanilla drum loop, and how it sounds when applying various effect channel strips to this one.

OK, here’s a zip file with 22 hihat samples (right mouse click on a Mac to download), 11 are open hihat ones and 11 close hihat ones. They are packetized as an Ableton Live 6.x project, but inside you should find the samples themselves as AIFF files, as well.

They are 24-bit 44.1kHz samples, most of them are four-bar long samples. The reason is that I usually create variated four-bar drum loops, and then with various loop points and edits I could make more variations from the same material.

I also edited the blog tags, so now all my free samples are available from the Audio Samples tag, or via this link.

Have fun with the material! The loops I selected are not exactly of the normal kind, so it might inspire you trying to use them.

I was listening to the special SonicState Freeware AU Plugins Postcast last night, and it was an interesting ten minutes, of many reasons. Mark Tinley did an excellent survey of existing free plugins, and showed various samples of how they sounded. If you have those and let’s say the iLife GarageBand, you could with little means do a lot of music.

Anyway, it was not just the information that was interesting, it was the podcast itself. Mark tweaked his voice left and right with various plugins, and made the whole podcast a weird and interesting audio journey using effects and all kinds of edits. Just listening to that presentation was a reward.

Which leads to my current vacation deep thought thinkings — it happens when you relax that you start to get insights you don’t usually get when the brain is in high gear.

In this age of mixes and music available in the hundreds of releases each week on Internet, you really need to stand out from the massive crowd. Doing an interesting podcast with information, spoken words, and more radio-entertainment centric and personalized would most definitely help in this regard. My bold prediction is that more producers and DJs will start doing personalized podcasts with them speaking about music, music making, music business, and so on.

I will start something similar shortly, as well, stay tuned.

Here’s an image of the current summer studio I have set up at a small cottage by the sea here in Western Finland.

My MacBookPro is in the middle, and the little else I have connected is a Novation Remote LE, two speakers, a headphone set, and a mouse.

The laptop is on top of a Podium Coolpad. I really recommend those, keeps the laptop nicely elevated, and less heat is also generated. Those are good both in the studio, or for DJ setups.

As for the speakers, those were a cheap set of Viewsonic computer speakers I picked up at Frys some time ago, mostly as I saw that their power supply handled 110-240V. The problem is the low end, very minimal. A small woofer would be nice, but then those increase the weight, when traveling. I would actually now look for another set that are light-weight, but have a built-in low-end woofer or decent low-end.

The issue that bites me, every time, is that you can’t just set up an environment, and espect that creativity happens based on the nice views, or the weather. I ended up just going to the sofa and, eh, relax for a while.

Then, the times I’ve been really creative are in sudden places like let’s say a return trip from Boston to San Francisco, then all I need is to grab the laptop and start working. So, the best is to have a really good laptop, and just go with the flow.

Something that I use from time to time in mixes, and also in live DJ cases with Ableton Live, is to put in a very fat house dance loop on top of material that really does not have any strong beats, let’s say world music.

I really like the Kaskade Sound Library Volume 1 that is available from various places, and I saw that Volume 2 is now also available. The only drawback I have with those loops is that they are 16-bit, but they still sound brilliant.

Anyway, with those loops, the drum ones, you could get anything to swing really well, even when doing DJ work.

Yes, I could build my own drum programming, but it takes a while, and it’s not always that interesting to do yet another classical house drum loop. Doing odd drum loops is another story.

Now, if you still want variation, use various settings in Ableton Live with these loops using Beat Repeat, especially with the variation parameter (use small values, though). Or the chop it using envelopes and other effects, to make them sound unique.