Archive for November, 2007
Anyway, this is about record collecting. The biggest thing I miss from the vinyl days — and those days are over — is that you could collect all kinds of obscure records. There’s still something like that around, see this YouTube video with the most amazing cellar full of old records. Anyway, the biggest problem with digital distribution is that if a band or a label cease to exist, of many reasons, and there are many, the digital material might no longer be available. You can’t find it on garage sales, in the basement of old record stores, at a friend’s house, scavenging through your parents’ old records, and so on. It means that as we speak a lot of of music is disappearing from this universe, in forms of web sites closing down, hard disks accidentally or deliberately being destroyed, and so on. Especially concerning net labels this is not a good thing. I actually finally realized the biggest benefit as a netlabel for using archive.org as the content server. Yes, the downloads are somewhat slow, but if the netlabel or artist will disappear, at least the material is still around. As such, I really recommend using archive.org for any free material you are creating. The other thing is just to scavenge and find free material, and keep it around on hard disks and DVDs as backups. At some point you might be the only one who has access to this material. As we get more and more mass distribution of commercial stuff, it is really nice to have small nuggets of special music that nobody else remembered to put aside. The other, somewhat sad part, especially after I watched High Fidelity the Nth time last night is that there’s something special about big vinyl sleeves, the artwork, listings, and so on. The CD half-way killed this part of a release, and now with digital releases, if we are lucky, we could get a PNG/JPEG image from some server out there. But the whole thing of a tangible part that you could put in a shelf, that’s now missing. I hope something new and exiting will arrive so that music is again tangible. However, if one is pragmatic, with this digital age and cost cuttings, I don’t see anything happening. Unless any of you reading have a scoop. I nearly thought of burning CDs of material I’ve downloaded from the netlabels and put those into a nice shelf, but then again it’s just a big pile of transparent CD packages…
The classical transition is to merge two tracks so the audience does not notice where one ends and the next one starts. In the progressive house movement this was taken to the extreme where it could take minutes before the new track took over. In this new age of easy beatmapping tools such as Ableton Live, various CDJs, Traktor, and so on, long, seamless transitions is something that anyone could do, as long as they select tracks that easily merge together — either the key or the production sound should be similar to achieve this. Which leads to my point. I don’t really see that special to even have long, orchestrated transitions nowadays, of many reasons. First, it’s just so boring, as anyone could do it, there’s really nothing creative behind it. Secondly, with the tools we have today one could swap in and out various tracks or sub-tracks all the time, so there’s maybe no need to have a special transition, just a continuous show with some breaks here and there. Thirdly, it might even be in a DJ session that such transitions will steal energy from the dance floor, maybe it’s better to do something like ‘kicking in the third gear’ now and then to suddenly chance the pace, and the audience mostly likes to be positively surprised compared with being slowly bored. One reason I started to think about this during my morning bike ride to work was that when I did the rough mix for the next BioWaves episode, the transitions were somewhat different, not the normal ones. I was thinking about if I should change the ordering and line up another set of tracks. But then the light went in my head: it’s good to show different kinds of transitions instead of the normal fade out/fade in ones. So I will stick to the current order and ‘think different’ transitions — I’m sure someone will complain and state that they are not professional, but they are indeed different. I rather have some interesting surprises here and there in a mix, compared with a longer period of mixed-together uniformity. PS: Here’s a creative challenge, take eight tracks or so, totally random ones, if possible different styles, and either live or by using time line tracks make transitions between those totally different tracks. By being forced to do unexpected transition techniques you might get insight into new tricks you will then use later.
So next is to pack down the clothes and take the whole family down to South California for a couple of days. It’s so easy nowadays to travel and keep a smaller studio with you, it’s just plain, plain amazing — and I was born and raised with a cassette recorder where I taped over the recording head for weird overdub experiments. And then later I had a Fostex 4-track that was worn down by weird experiments. Nowadays you could do 24-bit, even 5:1 productions, just using a laptop. It’s then another matter if something happens during a vacation, I’ve had both positive and negative experiences of working with music during such a period. Anyway, it beats watching boring TV channels in a hotel room!
Anyway, then we got LPs and the record companies of course liked that much more as they could charge more for such products, and with the advent of CD players they could make even more money by just re-releasing their album catalog in digital format. Those were the days when the record companies drowned in money, and it explains their dismal situation today as the consumers have taken control again, and they demand much more, such as again cherry-picking single entries. A typical album release usually had one or two filler tracks so the product could be released, and that can’t be done today. So sorry record execs, you can’t get you leased BMW any more. The single lived on, mostly thanks to DJs using 12″ singles and remixes. There was this odd thing called an EP, 3-4 track version, that co-existed, it was somewhat invisible during the CD days, but it’s doing a come-back, and that’s what this article is about. I do think that EPs are an excellent release format, for many reasons. If you release just one track, or a track with let’s say three remixes, you could get something out but it might not maximize the purchase power of the consumers. If they like your style then they are very tempted to purchase more at the same time. I don’t know if multiple remixes really cuts it, for me it would be boring to purchase the same track with three different variations… An album is a nice thing to put together, but today albums are no longer max 45 minute long as in the vinyl days (excluding Todd Rundgren’s Initiation that has a vinyl running length of 68 minutes!). CD album releases run up to an hour or more and that means a lot of material — it could take many months to put this together. And remember again, no filler material, thanks. So, an EP is a good compromise, let’s say three, four or five unique tracks. Usually the turnaround for such a product is a couple of months max. The consumer is not that worried about getting let’s say all four tracks for .99 times four, compared with getting the whole album. Anyway, this is the reason why a many of the PlanetoidPark releases since last summer have been EP releases (especially the forthcoming ones yet to be announced!), and most likely it will continue this way. I won’t say that this will always be the case, but just now it’s a nice compromise. It also means that eMusic and iTunes releases are nice, compact releases rather than singles or long term albums, and happen more frequently. There could be new formats out in future. For example, I would really like to see at some point a format where multiple tracks are included, and the DJ or consumer could remix their own versions by just using and balancing various tracks — and who was a pioneer concerning this concept, again, Todd Rundgren with his interactive CD No World Order. I have that CD, alas I’m not even sure I could play it on the latest computer setup I have. This shows the problem, for something like this to take off, we need a technology agreement across the audio software products, consumer players, and especially an agreement amongst all the labels to use such a format. It also means that there’s enough interest from the consumers for this to happen. Somehow I doubt the big record labels are that much interested in new formats, it looks like they are battling a battle they will lose, anyway, i.e. protecting digital material that can’t be protected. I would rather like them skating where the hockey puck will be next.
Feedback is always welcome - place blog comments below, or email me. Also, you could also refer to me pointers to netlabels, or you producers, send me emails with interesting music. And spread the word. Jock Dynamite’s Mellow Tubs and Fakin Hipi’s Grafitti in Rovaniemi shows the possibilities with taking human voices and elastically change it to something very electronic, still human. Audioglider’s Crystalline continues with sporadic voice use, as well as provides a laid-back background with somewhat jam-session centric productions. Motionfield’s The Document is taking us to another parallel level of existence with wobbly sounds use to achieve this. Denoize with My Sk-1 Circuit Bend again shows how even hardware hacking with circuits could generate a a pulsating, modern shamanistic experience. John Cicada is attacking the world of game music by using the style to generate whole thematic albums. Audiokontrukte with Sensitive Poem shows how using a trip-hop beat could be used to describe poetic visions. Gastón Arévalo with Gourmet has a bossanova flavor with experimental offsprings here and there. Paul Kaiser with The Taxi of Buenos Aires feels like one takes a late night taxi trip in a foreign city, still sleeping. Mystic Beauty with Madstyle is it targeting the inner beauty of the huge ecological system where we humans are just one of a billion entities. This same theme is explored by I-Rob and Birds Watching, a fine production resembling Community Border releases. Finally the episode closes with off the sky and gyges and the track Polaroidmanteaux, showcasing again how plug-in effects and digital editing with voices and sparse arrangement could indeed create a mystical and exploring soundscape. BioWaves 006 Track Listing:
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My goal is to spend 80 hours of doing anything related to music, mixing, new tracks, uploading promos, just all kinds of things on the backlog… To make it more challenging, we are off for a Southern California vacation four days next week, too. Anyway, you could do a lot of work with a laptop. Yes, that also includes posting more entries to this blog. Even if I don’t reach the goal of 80 hours work, at least there was an attempt. Sometimes it’s good to set huge goals, and see what will happen. Another outcome is that I need a lot of 80% done material so I could fix them up during December and January and release tracks, so it looks I’m very busy, while it’s just a lot of material already cooking. It’s a good trick to always keep something around, close to being finished, and you could this way have a steady release cycle.
Oh, I know the voes of balancing those out, making sure they work together, having a cohesive track, and it would be much, much easier to just use one single bass line, one bass sound, and get the job done. But no, something in my brain forces me to just sit another night up and tweaking and tweaking until I tamed the three or so wild bass line horses so they work together from beginning to end. Usually one starts, and there’s two at the end, I’m not so crazy to overlap them (unless I use a doubling track to get the bass lines sound better.) Maybe one reason it happens for me is that I seldom hear production with multiple different bass sounds and lines, and it just sounds different. Or then, the Blue Monday virus is stuck in my mind forever. To make things interesting, in today’s techno-flavored dance music, the bass lines are somewhat abstract, FM-sounding, with no clear lines, so then it should not even be an issue if I’m working on such tracks. Anyway, if you never tried to put in three or even four bass lines, check it out: it is an interesting problem, as someone from the East would say.
Start with spending an evening or two and generate lots of audio material, atmospheric sounds, melodies, bass lines, drum loops, mashed loops, effects, patterns and so on. Classify those with type and key, and also place them in specific folders on the disk. 20-50 entries in each should be fine. Remember to export them with the best possible audio quality, 24-bit. If you use Logic, make Apple loops, otherwise, with Ableton Live, just dump them out. Or export Logic audio and use Live for the second phase. Then, when you are traveling or starting to work on the second phase, drag in various parts into Logic or Live, just pseudo-random, build tracks, and see what happens. If you have audio material consisting of drum sounds, melodies, patterns (sequencer loops), atmospheric stuff, odd loops, effects, you should always be able to get together something that has enough content to become a track. If you have voice tracks, or snippets of singing, even better or more intriguing. With Ableton Live you could easily change the pitch if needed, or you could try to only write in phase one material in few keys, let’s say a minor/minor and e minor/major. With Logic it’s also doable for changing the pitch, but you need to use the built in tools to achieve this. Sometimes these tracks evolve over time, I add new kick drums, replace the bass lines, and so on, but it’s good to have something to start with. And if this does not work, just start another experiment! Sight, now I gave out another secret so others could be very productive…
There are two things that will happen with the result (if not more). First, depending on the digital to audio converter, it might cause all kind of strange artifacts when dealing with such long full pulses of digital info. Secondly, the loudspeakers won’t move. Those dealing with dance music will know this, it means that the kick will not pump in and out, less air will move, as sound is really pushing air molecules around. The end result is actually less energy, and duller dynamic sound. So what to do? First, after you finished your track, take a graphical look at the output to notice if this is happening, accepting the facts is really the first and most important step — based on that you could go in and fix it.
What I also do nowadays is to control the level going into the master plugins, I could use plug-ins such as the really badly named Utility plug-in from Ableton Live, but I’m using the FreeG plug-in from Sonalksis, as it shows RMS values which are more interesting than peak values, even with numbers. This way I restrict the signal going into the master-ing plug-ins very quickly instead of decreasing the individual track levels. The plug-ins then will again raise the levels so I compete within the realms of the loudness wars, but I could avoid the nasty blobs of full bytes going into the DACs and ultimately the loudspeakers. Now, I’m going through a lot of netlabel material, and usually this is the biggest problem I see when including material for my next podcast, the track is good, but the signal has such blobs everywhere, resulting in a very loud/dull sound. You could read more about this issue and problems with the documents that are part of the X-Ism download.
Click here to get info how to subscribe to the podcast series, and there’s more general information available at that page. Feedback is always great - place blog comments below, or email me. Also, you could also refer to me pointers to netlabels, or you producers, send me emails with interesting music. And spread the word. BioWaves 005 Track Listing:
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One of my favorite movies if 
DJ transitions are those parts between each individual track where the DJ is connecting one song to another.
Ok, I have close to half a Gigabyte of freshly made snippets of audio, loops, bass lines, patterns, all kinds of weird Reaktor experiments, and much more. It’s a snap to copy over this new sound bank to my MacBookPro’s hard disk, and pack down my midi controller, DVD with the latest audio SW that I have (in case I want to install something specific), a couple of cables, my headphones, and that’s it.
Long time ago, actually when my dad was a teenager, nearly everything was released as 45 rpm singles. I still remember when I inherited his pile of classical singles as a small kid and managed to destroy most of them by experimenting with them, melting them over a stove and so on. My kids behave much better.
BioWaves episode six showcasing netlabel and unreleased produced material available on Internet is now available. This is a special edition celebrating the producer talent creating mystical and shamanic material using electronic tools, whether is is voice slicing, dub-centric pad drones, circuit bending or any other tools available for the modern producer.
I got the whole next week off. Typically I get a vacation, have big plans, and then I just goof off, reading books, watching old movies and so on. This time it will be different.
I suspect every producer has their own pet idea, or production part, that they want to include, whether it works or not, but it’s just something that they want to have in there. In my case it’s multiple bass lines.
Here’s a technique I’ve used from time to time, especially when I’m traveling, as it’s an easy and interesting way to create new compositions while you don’t have a lot of tools and focused time available. I will use this in a week as our family will take a short trip to southern California, so that’s why I reminded me of this technique.
Something that I’m a big sinner of, and I suspect many other producers, is that we tend to rely a lot on the compressor/limiter plug-ins in the master track, and let it just limit and clip long peaks of loud material. See picture here. This is an example where the limiter did it’s job and tried to clip a loud peak, but for a very long time. What happens is that the resulting output, let’s say in 16-bit mode, has all sixteen bits set for a longer time period for that sound wave.
What I use now from time to time is the 
Episode five of the BioWaves podcast series is now now available - electronic film/dance music, beatnik poetry and drum machines, sliced piano music, and much more! Now the series is one hour long.
