One of the lesser talked ways to have a chance to become a successful artist or band is to be part of the first wave using a music technology product or shift. This goes back to the very early days of rock&roll. Those who understood the paradigm shift of using amplified guitars, bass guitars, even the new role of the kick drum finally being heard through amplification, they were part of the early day rock&roll circuit and the rest is history. They even play today for big crowds.

The same also happened with introduction of electronic instruments such as synthesizers, the whole new romantic style introduced by cheap synthesizers. Human League, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, it was just a bunch of musicians in England who saw the promise of using them in combination with pop tunes. Instead of using guitars, they switched over to cheap synthesizers. They are world-known today, and the royalty checks will make their grandchildren very happy.

It’s been one of my pet things to follow such technology trends, disruptive paradigm shifts as we call them in the computing business. I still remember when Yahoo had 20 pages of bullet-listed web links, same with the early day Google web page — not that it’s still classic and to the point. The web revolution was huge, and we are very much in the toddler stage concerning Internet.

Which leads to today’s situation with music technologies and opportunities. I was hoping that the combination of Internet and easy-to-use recording technologies would break the label monopoly - anyone could release anything they wanted. And it happened. However, the amount of boring music is staggering, instead of doing something unexpected, everyone copies each others so going through Mypage page after page reveals the same mush of electronic music. Or in the case of songs in general, same kinds of arrangements and songs, over and over. So it really lead to self-publishing but not in the sense of being unique and have a voice, rather sounding like everyone else.

Someone with a unique sound will have a chance, but being heard is tough compared with the early days, getting a synth and being the first made it possible to become recognized.

I don’t really foresee any huge technological shifts in the music industry just now — I could be wrong — but we have cheap instruments, cheap and easy to use recording gear as well as cheap ways to publish. If someone invents a new synth paradigm, it will just drown in the rest of the synthesized sounds out there. Few consumers are willing to buy specialized audio for pure audio experiences. Games is really the domain for music just now.

I could of course be wrong, and I hope so. There’s something very inspiring to be in the pioneering group of musicians that jump on something new, go with it and get recognized. Please show me something that you think will start another revolution. Meanwhile I will keep my ears and eyes open. Somehow I suspect the revolution will happen in the ‘live music’ arena, especially custom live shows for smaller audiences providing unique experiences.

Recently when I’ve been listening to music, I’ve been trying to set the music into two kinds of categories. If the music is technical, very clever, lots of ideas and concepts, it is done with the brain in mind. If there’s a message, something that makes me feel very different, it is done for the heart.

There are of course mixtures of it all. Anyway, to take an example, a lot of angst music, you know that kind of contemporary rock music with songs about girlfriends new and old, stupid parents et rest, it is really targeted towards the heart. Punk music was very much such a style, as well.

As for pure brain-music, we are dealing with technical material that usually only musicians dig, Spiro Gyra style technical jazz, lots of progressive/complex rock music (Steve Vai et rest), and so forth.

As for mixtures (this is where my musical taste navigates to), for example Peter Gabriel’s albums such as So is a good example of music that is both technically interesting as well as moves the heart. Believe it or not, same with Frank Zappa, he was a brilliant composer but at the same time he had a message, if nothing else, a funny one. There are extremes here, too, such as sugary ballads that are mostly template work.

Concerning contemporary electronic music, dance music et rest, I think the we  are absolutely dealing with content that has very little emotions, with some exceptions such as Matrix-style anger-electronica music, or what NIN has done.

Same with technical skills, there’s really not much about using loops and sequencers today, some programming skills were needed ten years ago, not today. So it fits, sorry, into a very sad place.

It sounds controversial but I do think that if electronic music really has a chance to become something tangible long term, it needs a big dose of both. To start with, electronic music has to move the heart, you have to feel sad, happy, angry, surprised, inspired and so forth.

Secondly, there has to be something that separates the artist or band from the rest concerning musicality — just adding loops and plug-ins does not cut it, it has to sound personal. It does not mean that someone needs to  study the piano for ten years before releasing something. Rather find your very unique voice using the instruments or tools, so that if anyone keys in on a radio station, they immediately know who this is. Good example is Daft Punk.

Feel free to comment.

I kind of got a rekindled interest in Indian dance music, modern Bollywood music, maybe it was after watching two episodes of So You Think You Can Dance with Bollywood choreography that just blew my mind concerning creativity.

So I checked out more contemporary material using YouTube — YouTube is an excellent way to find out more about various artists, in this case contemporary Indian ones.

There’s also an excellent article over at Wikipedia concerning Bollywood Songs. I especially liked the concept of using the nine rasas to define the dominant emotion of a song. In case you have a writer’s block concerning writing music or lyrics, use that as one of the tools to break the ice.

Anyway, the fun part with Indian music are the tempos that are not standard, even if 4/4s are more and more used. Also, the use of percussion is very different and exciting. Sometimes it’s really the upfront part in combination of singing — the rest of the instruments take a supportive role which is not that common in contemporary Western music, unless we talk about hiphop and similar drum-centric styles.

As a bass player I checked out the bass lines; use of bass synths are more and more in place, which is also interesting. As there’s a growing population of Indians here in Silicon Valley I would not be surprised to see more and more Indian party bands appearing, actually.

I saw a couple of Indian music streaming channels in iTunes, under the International section (such as Bollywood & Beyond) so tune in and get influenced.

Here’s a good YouTube tutorial concerning how to use Logic’s Vocoder with a bus sidechain.

There are so many non-traditional uses for Vocoder, not just the simple voice-animation, sometimes I feel one could spend days exploring vocoders for something totally new audio experiences.

Using a vocoder is also one way to break out from the current style of electronic music with no vocals and lyrics — sometimes I think it’s a shame that we don’t introduce human voices or elements into electronic music, just instrumentals. Vocoder use is one option. Also, if your voice is not that good, it does not matter, just sing, process it and otherwise make it sound interesting and different.

There’s indeed something interesting happening over at Amazon MP3 concerning cheap deals on MP3 album downloads. This Digital Audio Insider blog entry talks more about the pricing structure and maybe what’s behind it all. I’ve picked up some of the Amazon MP3 album deals from time to time, such as a collection of James Brown hits (20) for $1.99 or a similar ridiculous low price.

Personally I think that if the price for albums would indeed be $5 for any record older than five years, the whole idea of the long tail of Internet marketing would really take off. It’s quite OK to take down the price for a product that has already been distributed as vinyl and as a CD, no need to try to squeeze out even more money from consumers. There are many contemporary releases where such a lower pricing structure would generate more downloads and ultimately more revenue compared with keeping prices high.

I saw that Native Instruments is now selling Traktor 3 the DJ sofware for $119 ($99 over at Guitar Center) so I wanted to check it out.

I have this strange relationship with Traktor. Every time before I tried the demo version, it crashed at some point, so it was not auspicious. If there’s something a DJ software has as a requirement, it is rock solid performance, not fun rebooting computers during a big.

Anyway, this time it worked just fine. This was just a 15 minute check. My litmus test was to open up various 80ies and earlier dance tracks and see if it was easy to mix and match those.

Traktor 3 finds suitable locations for the beats along the way, so it’s seldom a need to do pre-warping. Or, the automatic warping works really well. That’s a plus. However, the starting point for the beats were always very much something that I didn’t like or want. It means that there’s always a need for cue:ing, and I’m so used to pre-warped tracks in Ableton Live that I know where they start from, so I don’t even need to cue that much today. So that is a nuisance.

The warping algorithms in Traktor sounded really good, even with moderate pitch changes. With extreme pitch changes with same tempo there were indeed artifacts, I think even more than in Ableton Live’s complex mode. But I must say that the default warp quality values were somewhat more pleasing in Traktor.

As for the user interface, well it took a while to find out how to change the global tempo. The UI is still cluttered, even if it has been cleaned up since the early days. There are too many semi-modal boxes to jump back and forth with.

The integration with iTunes was a good point, Ableton should introduce that in their next version, too.

All together, I’m still happy with Ableton Live. They should just introduce a better quality complex mode warp algorithm.

It helped to fix the studio. I just uploaded a first take on some new stuff I’m working on to myspace, see my myspace account for Celestial Cookies - Lunar Conspiracy Remix.

This is an attempt to make a 30+ minute podcast with new music as well as break out parts and get them released as tracks and so forth.

The inspiration is psychedelic electro music with no drugs involved, just a crazy mind.

It seems using a blank canvas such as making a podcast with whatever bubbles up in the mind a good approach in my music writing. The stuff I like I will release, the rest will be released via the podcast. It resembles a little bit what FSOL and The Orb has done over the years. Plus it’s just plain fun to compose in Logic and Ableton Live and see what happens.

This is how my studio looked like last Thursday (July 3rd 2008). It was full of hardware, guitar and bass amps, bass guitars, electric guitars, cables, effect pedals, synths, carry bags with equipment inside, and some odd brown stuff from one of our cats’ stomachs, too. In other words, a typical scenario where all I did was do dump stuff on the floor when coming from a gig and just picking it up later.

It certainly needed a cleanup, badly. Also, the desktop was a mess, controllers here and there. It didn’t help that I had some new hardware available including a new screen that was just gathering dust in one corner. Somehow it’s hard to switch gears, you always worry about incompatibilities and issues with projects when you switch from one computer to another.

Here’s the room July 4th 2008, a day later. All the amplifiers et rest have their own specific location in the room. All guitars and bass guitars are in a certain location, too, close to the practice amp and the audio interface so they could be quickly hooked in if needed.

I found an unused stand for music where I put my UC33-e controller and an USB mike. Finally have the MacPro up and running with a new monitor. And yes, the floor has been cleaned up from odd stuff found.

As part of this operation I got inspired to make more electronic music, have 15+ minutes in the pipeline. I hope to release a “Something/Everything” podcast soon, as well as take selected parts and release them as tracks or something similar. More about that later.

I’ve had this ancient Alesis Quadrasynth as my controller in the studio, think by now it has been paid off even if it’s just been used as a controller, not as a synth. Actually I wanted to do keyboard playing at a jam last Friday so I took apart the synth to clean it up inside, too much cat hair — as I expected.

I’m always surprised over how little stuff is inside hardware synths. They look bulky but inside all you have is a couple of PCM boards and cables. The same was with an PPG Wave 2.3 that I used long time ago. Those synths were heavy, but when you opened up the synth chassis, all you found inside was an even smaller PCM board than the one in  the picture above. But the chassi was heavy. It’s another marketing trick to make it look like the inside is expensive. But it’s not good for the keyboard player’s back, that’s for sure.

Anyway, vacuuming the inside as well as using canned air fixed a lot of dust and other nasty stuff inside (like the mentioned cat hairs…) I remember when I did some stunts now and then repairing synths at a keyboard store in Stockholm, usually all it took was to open up the synth, clean up parts (or hook back in cables) and it was working.

If you ever want to get good deals, purchase a ‘broken’ synth, open up the inside, clean it up or check if cables are loose or something similar. And you get it fixed. Same with external effect boxes, pedals and so on.

Just now I’m saving money for an Edirol PCR-500, most likely that will be my next main keyboard controller, both for gigs as well as keeping it in the studio.   

This is what the waveforms look concerning importing and autowarping George Clinton’s Atomic Dog.  This was a huge hit for George Clinton back in 1982 and it’s a good representation of the P-Funk sound, not to speak it’s pretty hilarious, too. I think I even DJ:ed that track once very long time ago, like in the early eighties.

Anyway, this is a good example of the dynamic range of tracks up to about late nineties when the dynamic range wars started.

What I do across all my DJ tracks, now covering from obscure funk 45 rpms done in the sixties to whatever today is to make sure that the gain level is the same across all the tracks. I defined 7dB headroom as a nice compromise — seven is a lucky number and it does not really matter as long as you keep a standard. The dynamic wars tracks I just decrease the headroom so it’s in the 7dB range.

The tool I use is Sonalksis FreeG plugin. It’s a free plugin and it monitors the levels. I place this plugin on my master track and set a nice loop of 24 bars or more in a place that seems to be the loudest part in the track. Then I observe the RMS values, this is the average mean that is more interesting than peaks here and there. Looking at the existing values I could decide how many dBs to increase or decrease in the clip view (don’t use the plugin itself to increase the value.) When done I just save  this information as part of the .asd file saved for the track/clip. 

I might have written about this before, but my iTunes and Ableton integration has evolved over time, so here’s the latest work flow. The reason I’m using iTunes with Ableton Live is that even if Ableon Live’s browser has evolved over time, it still does not have a lot of features that are really good to have when working with multiple tracks, especially when scaling up to hundreds and hundreds of tracks.

To start with, you could select a specific iTunes library when you hit the option key as part of starting up iTunes. This will give you a dialog box to either create a new library or select an existing one. This makes it possible to have a separate DJ music library. I have actually two as I changed my playlist to have old seventies/eighties funk and good disco tracks, but I keep the other one around in case I suddenly want to play tech house and so on. Anyway, this is not necessary, you could have one huge DJ library, or even use the one and only library you use for iTunes. Anyway, it also makes it possible to keep the DJ library on an external disk, only copy this library to a laptop and so forth.

Secondly, you could just drag and drop audio files from iTunes to the Ableton Live browser. I wish they will fix the issue of using the clipboard for copy/paste between the applications in Ableton Live 8. Then this would be even easier, including copying over multiple entries.

Next thing to remember is that Ableton Live picks up the .asd files with warp info from a corresponding .asd file with full same name as the original audio file. If you have already warped your audio file and drag this file into iTunes, iTunes does not know anything about this dependency so it does not copy this file over. If a future Ableton Live embedded the .asd information inside audio container formats that support meta information, such as MP3, CAF, AAC and so forth, then this would not be an issue.

Anyway, what you need to then do is to select the audio file in iTunes, and with a right-click or control-key click get the context popup menu. One of the entries there is to Get in Finder. This will get you a window with the location where the iTunes managed file resides. You could now drop in your .asd file and things are fine. Just remember that iTunes sometimes renames the audio file so double-check that your .asd file has the exact same starting file name including any extensions such as .mp3 and that the .asd is added to the end.

Now, another approach is to first just get the audio file into iTunes. When you want to warp, drag this file into Ableton Live. When you save the .asd file via the clip panel it will save the .asd file into the location where iTunes has the audio file.

There’s even a third approach, iTunes could refer to audio files outside it’s library folder, see iTunes documentation for more information in case you don’t want iTunes at all to manage your audio files.

So now we are at the point to discuss what is so good about iTunes… To start with, as part of warping I figure out the key, major/minor and so forth. I also register the BPM speed after the initial  auto warping. I then add this information into the file info inside iTunes. Again right or command-click and select Get Info. You will get a dialog box such as the in the image above. BPM has its field. I use the Grouping field for the key information as there’s no default key field in iTunes. Also add or modify any other information as you wish, including creating your own Genre by just typing into the Genre field (in case the pre-existing ones are not your liking.) If you don’t like to register BMP for a lot of existing tracks inside your iTunes library, check out Tangerine.

When this is in place you could do sorting in the iTunes view based on these values, provided you activate any missing columns — again right or command-clicking in the column header section is your friend. You could sort based on key, or bpm, or artist, genre, date added and many other values.

I even use the rating star system; my approach is to register the level of ‘energy’ in the track from one star (ballad), two (moderate dancing), three (normal), four (sweaty) up to five (energy-drink level.) This way I could also do sorting or searches narrowing down the style so I don’t place a slower paced track in the middle of a sweaty section.

What else? I could make play lists with recommended sets and save those in the iTunes database, do all kinds of interesting searches, just by typing a couple of letters I could quickly find all my Isley Brothers tracks and so forth. I could even make smart play lists that find things based on key, style, date added and many other values.

Also, it’s fun scrolling through the entries using the cover flow and see covers… Data backup of the file to DVDs spanning multiple DVDs is also easy. And that’s just a tip of the iceberg when you could do all kinds of interesting things inside iTunes itself before you get the track to Ableton Live.

Now, if Ableton Live in 8.0 could synchronize to iTunes libraries in forms of showing playlists and smart playlists there might not even be a need to drag-and-drop any longer…

I’m sure there’s even more to it. Yes, it takes a little bit time to add tracks to the database including registering meta information, bu I see more benefits from this all from this work. Feel free to add your own comments in case you have other cool ways of using iTunes and Ableton Live, I could always pick up a new trick or two.