The re-kindled interest in the Killers got me thinking about the eighties music scene. The VH-1 Cable channel some time ago showed a whole weekend of eighties music videos. Most of the videos showed American bands and artists.
And oh my goodness. Hair bands with screaming singers an cliche lyrics, or then artists with costumes singing poppy songs and dancing badly. No wonder the eighties is considered a bad time for music if you just focus on the American scene.
Meanwhile, in Europe we listened to Ultravox, early incarnations of U2, Simple Minds, New Order and a lot of similar bands that were pushing the boundaries concerning synthesizer use as well as still providing strong melodic lines with very interesting arrangements. And no 200bpm guitar solos, that’s for sure.
It’s kind of nice that bands like the Killers and Keane re-introduces this more interesting music style from the eighties. My background is first listening to a lot of seventies music and playing that in high school bands, but then I was mostly active in the early to late eighties and was involved in bands doing this kind of European eighties music. It was fun, very much pushing the limits and was still commercial.
It’s not good to always copy-cat past styles but this would be an exception to make the music scene interesting again — unless I start sounding like and old-timer wishing for the good times. Or, alternatively, just start another interesting music scene, that’s as valid. If nothing else, please get the synthesizers back as arrangement tools and not designed to do staccato techno lines all the time.
I saw Killers Live on the FUSE cable channel today and actually got their latest album a couple of days’ ago. I really start to dig their sound, always liked them as they are very unique in this otherwise bland pop/rock scene today.
Maybe it’s also that they take a lot of elements from the eighties sounds that I was part of, too…
So I went to my studio today for just plain jamming purposes and of course ended up doing a base track that sounds half-way like Killers, speak of influence.
Here’s the current rough mix after three hours of quick takes and mixes: .
So what are the ingredients to get to a similar Killers sound? Well, you have a definite rock drumming with some accents that the eighties drummers used a lot, a driving kick. I recorded all the drums from beginning to end using a Yamaha DD-65 just to get the MIDI information based on real drumming (instead of programming) and then used various EXS24 and Ultrabeat sounds to trigger the kick, snare, hihats and so forth.
Before the drums I recoded a pick-played bass with a gnarly sound (using a click drum loop) — I’m using Line 6 PodFarm Ampeg SVT simulation. Also play a lot of eight notes with the bass.
Then I added two eighties-kind-of sounding synth pads. As well as two tracks of distortion/phaser guitar stuff. This is still work in progress, tomorrow I need to put in a couple of synth-pad lead melodies and then a guitar chord that is played in an arpeggiated style.
Finally I need to figure out how to sing like Brandon Flowers, add a little bit dramatic flair to the singing style.
Hopefully it will not become a real Killers copycat — they have their definite style and it’s fun to see what one could do from it but then take it off to another direction.
I downloaded and tested DJay from DJay Software last night, just for fun and it was an interesting experience. The few times I’ve DJ:ed in recent years was using Ableton Live; nowadays I don’t even consider myself a DJ any longer as producing music takes any spare cycles I have in addition to being a session musician here in the Bay Area.
Anyway, DJay is very much a typical two-turntable DJ UI that hooks to iTunes and has the basic features plus some more. So there’s really nothing different from the other players with the exception of the much lower price. The beat-matching was somewhat working but not perfect, it takes a lot of effort to easily get transitions working. A nice touch was the option to use USB headphones to cue; means you could really use a laptop’s audio output as the only audio interface.
The integration with iTunes was fun, I could search all kinds of tracks from my library and see what happens. As for the transitions, they had some effect-like transitions such as speed-down, backwards loops and so on. For some kinds of music that is icky to mix together such as rock and other types of less fixed rhythm tracks those did the job.
I would think that for anyone who does not want to spend time doing all the necessary work for Ableton to work with tracks a package like this works just fine. You miss maybe 30% of the other features you need. Then again, I have a feeling DJs now will go back to the idea of spending more time finding the right tracks and play then than spend ages mixing things into small pieces. As such a simpler package like this works just fine.
During the tests I got the idea to find all tracks in my iTunes library shorter than two minutes and exclusively using those to a mix, that was very interesting, might do more experiments with such micro-scale music parts one after another.
Celemony will soon release Direct Note Access to their Melodyne Plug-in. This will be big. You could break down an instrument into separate parts, such as a guitar comp, and edit each one differently. Or make new chords. Fix sloppy playing. Add sloppyness to tight playing. Fix a badly tuned guitar. Fix one note wrongly played on a recorded electric piano chord…
The video here explains it inside out. Also, check out the interview with the Melodyne developer/mastermind Peter Neubäcker as he talks more about the ideas with DNA. For example, you could then extract MIDI information from the audio material.
This is like the holy grail, you could move between the recorded analog signal and a pure MID-based data world, back and forth. Not to speak of all the functions you could do with Melodyne in general to generate singing backtracks with any kinds of harmonies, create brand new solos from a single take of let’s say a saxophone melody line and so forth.
Yes, it’s on my radar screen to get the Melodyne plug-in now. Yes, I know, real musicians to takes until it sounds good. But time is money, it’s kind of fun to do such sessions the first week, then it gets boring. As for singing fixes, if famous singers do it nowadays what could you do? The problem with recorded material is that it is a time stamp, it will live forever compared with a live situation. It’s a matter of singing the same lines over and over until it sounds good, but again it takes time and effort.
Just to be clear: I don’t support the idea that musicians, singers and producers totally rely on such tools of many reasons. To start with you could never do any live playing (unless you are prepared to do playback from tape/DAT/computer file.) Secondly, there’s something good about sloppy and unpredictable playing from time to time, gives the recording character. But as with all other kinds of spices in the studio, it is just another one to be used.
It used to be clock-work to get new major Ableton releases, a pre-announcement in mid-summer, first betas end summer and the final version in the autumn time frame. This year it is different, no announcements from Ableton about anything so far.
Most likely the Ableton engineers have done a big rewrite, bigger than what they expected. So I would think Ableton Live 8 — or whatever the new Ableton version will be called — have a new paradigm in the UI, or even a new paradigm shift.
I’m not a beta tester for Ableton, neither have any inside information, so all this is speculation, based on looking at DAW application development since the early dawn of DAWs (I wrote a simple MIDI sequencer in Motorola 6802/6809 assembly back in 1983 when the MIDI spec was released, buy I’m no expert on this all.)
Ableton has announced joint efforts with Serato and Cycling (MAX/MSP.) The first has to do with DJ control surfaces, so I would think that there’s a new layer inside Ableton that makes it easy to hook all kinds of controllers to Ableton Live. The second has to do with the MAX environment where you could put together all kinds of synthesizer modules and effects. So I would expect that either you could run the MAX patches directly in Ableton Live as maybe have a limited way to re-route and reconfigure patches, where getting the full MAX environment would be the transition path.
Ableton has always had the dilemma that it really started as a sequencer/playback system for audio and it has evolved into a DAW recording system. But unlike Logic/Cubase/Pro Tools, the recording section is very weak, it takes a lot of efforts to put together environments such as recording multiple takes and so on. The MIDI editing is also weak compared with Logic. As the other DAWs have caught up to the elastic audio section Ableton had, even bypassing Ableton concerning the quality of elastic audio, I think they have to make a decision where to go. You can’t be a jack of all trades. The DJ people already scream about lesser and lesser support for their needed features such as multiple waveforms displayed at the same time.
I like working in Ableton Live, it’s like working with movie editing, but using audio instead of video clips. But I end up using Logic for the actual raw material recordings. And now especially with guitar-centric recordings I end up staying inside Logic for the whole production.
There’s also something limiting by just using loops over and over, it becomes a very stale production by having just loops.
I’m sure the Ableton engineers and product marketing has looked into this all — and they will come up with a surprise solution for us soon. As long as I have an easy way to move between Logic and Ableton, need better support for importing/exporting whole projects, I will be happy. But anyway, it would be good if they start mentioning about their new product soon, as the clock is ticking and new customers might migrate to other solutions in case nothing new is told by Ableton.
I wrote some time ago that I avoided using Logic’s Quick Swipe Comping for guitar tracks. Well, I changed my mind based on some work today.
I ended up doing multiple tracks for both guitar and bass work — started to actualize the songs I did in a hotel room in Napa Valley. So I just recorded guitar and bass tracks with Create Take Folders, to save time.
Then I tried out selecting various parts from each take for the final comp. There are two benefits: If one take had a small mistake, I could quickly fix it by taking something from another take.
The other benefit I didn’t realize was that I could mutate the the recorded region; I copied the verses and choruses to final positions, did some quick swipe comp changes so that they sounded somewhat different — and job was done. So it’s a big time saver as there’s so much I need to record for the next month or so. Needless to say this is perfect for doing multiple solo takes and select the best parts — no need for razor blades!
The mutation part makes the regions sound somewhat different so they don’t sound like a typical copy/paste operation with exactly same guitar lines playing, same tonality and so on.
I was originally just planning on using it for song tracks but this will be handy for all kinds of incoming recorded tracks. I don’t mind doing a region wiht create take folders, four-five different takes in a row and then puzzle together the final version. Wow.
The TuneCore blog had today and interesting posting about how to succeed in the music business — the Cobain factor. Yes, I thought it would be the normal bla bla bla about “work hard and be everywhere so you get opportunities” article. But it actually had a different spin, all together.
A lot of results come from the inside — a belief in what you do is important and could be heard. Yep. That separates any attemps from those who are just happy to have recorded an album, released it and that’s it, from those who have ideas and want to spread the musical ideas around.
It does not help that during mid-age we all get family obligations and so forth. So it’s just a matter of setting priorities during different stages in one’s life.
Here’s another thought I had recently about production work. Chefs and music producers have a lot in common.
You have a multitude of ingredients, but it does not make sense to put everything in with any kind of combination or rations. There’s a certain pattern that will work well. Through hard work and practice someone will get this in place.
Also, chefs have good taste so producers should have a good ear. They should know when something is missing, there’s something too much of something, or otherwise is balanced or wrong. Usually it is best if you know exactly what you want as the final product — not that experimentation in the beginning makes something interesting later.
That’s really it. Make sure each and every element of a track has its meaning. Sometimes less is better than more (note to myself.) Sometimes more is needed. Think of the final result. Serve something good.
I found this Radio Caroline article a couple of days’ ago and it was fun reading. Internet is great as a lot of historical information is finally available. You could also read about the background related to Radio Caroline in this Wikipedia article, too.
Imagine being this kid growing up in Northern Europe, and at the end of the sixties and early seventies there were not really much rock music in the local radio. You ended up wiring huge antennas above your room in the house to pick up faint interesting stations such as Radio Caroline in order to get your daily dose of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Yes, Pink Floyd and similar band acts.
Compare this with growing up today in any corner of the world, if you have Internet, you could listen to anything. It is my own opinion but this plethora of music has deflated the pure fun of being able to listen to interesting music. Compare downloading thousands of songs to an iPod versus struggling to listen to a boat that might or might not send a signal if the sea is rough, in addition to having battles of East European stations taking over the frequencies with propaganda drum rolls. Or even if the AM signal could reach quite far, sometimes the athmospheric conditions were bad so you could not pick anything up.
Anyway, that was my weekend fun, staying up until 6am or so listening to Radio Caroline and similar radio stations with an ancient tube radio.
It is even better, with Nicecast you could start any station you want and broadcast your own music, world-wide. Again, the supply is so big so it’s a matter of being picked up from the huge amount of broadcast:ed music, instead of being one of the few. Still, it’s one of my goals to set up my own Internet radio station with own music — just need to work hard in the studio this incoming holiday season. This in honor of the old pirate radio stations that broadcast:ed cool music to music-starving young people around Europe.
I got the SFXMachine ST last night - they’ve had a special sale on this one for $25 (group buy) for the last couple weeks (normal price is $99) so it was a no-brainer to get this one just for fun. And it’s indeed a fun plug-in, as the effects, besides the normal ones, are quirky, reminds me of early seventies effect fun. The backwards effects are interesting, especially with voices, gettin that “Electric Ladyland” production sound. So this plug-in will be useful for more psychedelic experiments.
I looked at the big brother, SFXMachine Pro, but then again the RT is fine for me, as I have so many effect plug-ins already in addition to all the goodies in Logic Pro 8.
Another part that I liked was the FM and Modular Synth sections. They are really generators, always on as an effect, producing various plastic synth sounds. I could control the volume via automation as well as other parameters, so it’s useful for strange electronic drones — already used in a track I did last night similar to Todd Rundgren’s “I Think You Know” with those bubbly synths here and there. And yes, I added a couple of arpeggiators, too, to make it more realistic in getting that early-seventies synthscape sound.
There’s this rule of ten thousand hours that I’ve seen more and more mentioned in all kinds of books related to self-improvement, talent and similar publications. The point is that in order to get really good at something you need to spend ten thousand (10,000) hours at it. With a normal pace it means 8-10 years of practice before this is achieved.
Well, I do believe it, after all these years. Takes a while to grasp this due to the long distances of time. Whether you aspire to be a singer, producer, DJ, roadie or whatever, you need all that time doing the task until you reach a high level of talent.
Now, some might mention Mozart as an example of a young talent with no need to practice. Well, to start with listen to any of his very early symphonies and other pieces of music. They are OK but nothing extraordinary — it is seldom symphony orchestras play those works. I would not even be surprised if his dad helped him out here and there.
Secondly, you need to read his biography and understand what happened, his father trained him in all kinds of musical styles, coached him every day, moved to different cities to hear different kinds of music and play with other musicians, provided other opportunities and so forth. So he easily clocked the necessary 10,000 hours of music making. This also points out that the more variations is done, the better use of the 10,000 hours.
I will actually add two more rules to this set:
100 hours — this is what it takes for someone to figure out if they are interested in the talent they want to cultivate. This could be done in less than three months if someone is focused.
1000 hours — this is the level needed to get to a point where someone is familiar and confident in the talent. It means you could go up on stage and do what you want to do without stage fright, or otherwise being worried about the outcome. This takes 1-2 years of focused activity.
10,000 hours — this is where you maximize your talent. You really know what you are doing, you could experiment, have fun, stretch out, try whatever you fancy and you feel you could do it. This takes 8-10 years of focused work.
Now, it’s important to realize that we are not taking about becoming a super-virtuoso such as playing guitar as fast as Yngwie Malmsten or singing like Elvis. There’s a personal limit and extension that will be filled — and that’s fine. We need more interesting voices and expressions, no more copycats or pure mechanical playing showing how fast or accurate someone is. Even if it’s good to develop those skills, too. I would add that as part of the 10,000 hours, developing your own style is essential.
Going back to studio work, the same rule apply. Put in the hours and good stuff will happen. Same with song writing. Or going to the gym :-).
And you thought Peter Frampton or Jeff Beck were one of the pioneers of the talking box effect? Here’s a strange video just posted via Boing Boing where Peter Drake is using something similar for a steel guitar. I must say, it sounds psychedelic even if the intent was not that. Note that the fun stuff starts way into the video…
If anyone knows if there’s a way to get Logic’s Vocoder to work nicely with a guitar track, let me know, not sure how it all will work as it’s the EVOC synth that is the generator…
I’m just back from a mini-vacation to Napa Valley and Sonoma here in Northern California — one reason was to find Californian cross-roads (long story, more later.) Anyway, it’s one of first times I’ve not packed a laptop or anything fancy with me on a vacation, just a guitar and a hand-held recorder.
And it was fun. Sitting in the hotel room with the guitar, trying out various chord progressions, when something interesting happened verse-chorus-wise, hit the record button — no worries about record quality and timing, main thing the idea was recorded down. I have six entries to look into later this week, that after a short less than two-hour jam session.
There’s something special about not worrying about equipment, cables, plug-ins, just record ideas. Another danger with working in a studio is to get so fixated on cool sounds and arrangements, so the song writing side is limited or weak. So this is one of my main working systems now, when I have interest, I just pick up my acoustic guitar and the handheld recorder, go to my pool house and spend some time jamming and experimenting.
The re-kindled interest in the Killers got me thinking about the eighties music scene. The VH-1 Cable channel some time ago showed a whole weekend of eighties music videos. Most of the videos showed American bands and artists.
I saw 
I downloaded and tested 
It used to be clock-work to get new major Ableton releases, a pre-announcement in mid-summer, first betas end summer and the final version in the autumn time frame. This year it is different, no announcements from Ableton about anything so far.
I wrote some time ago that I avoided using
The 
Here’s another thought I had recently about production work. Chefs and music producers have a lot in common.
I found this 
I got the 
There’s this rule of ten thousand hours that I’ve seen more and more mentioned in all kinds of books related to self-improvement, talent and similar publications. The point is that in order to get really good at something you need to spend ten thousand (10,000) hours at it. With a normal pace it means 8-10 years of practice before this is achieved.
I’m just back from a mini-vacation to Napa Valley and Sonoma here in Northern California — one reason was to find Californian cross-roads (long story, more later.) Anyway, it’s one of first times I’ve not packed a laptop or anything fancy with me on a vacation, just a guitar and a hand-held recorder.
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