Anyway, I prefer substitute jobs and ad hoc projects of many reasons. The biggest one is that having a band together is like a marriage, you better like each other and understand how things work. Otherwise there’s just a lot of drama rather than musicianship.

I do think think that in the current situation having loose bands work much better. You put together the music, have a pool of musicians that could be configured in various configs. It resembles how the jazz bands operate in NY or LA. If the musicians know each other, how they play, it’s just a matter of re-assembling bands for various purposes. You could even get more gigs as you have more ‘cards on the table.’

There are bands like U2 that just seem to work year after year, and they also had their internal drama. The worst that could happen is that the band members show up for the obligatory show or album recording. After that they again part their ways. So it’s really an artificial band situation, as well.

This of course works if there’s some kind of monetary outcome from the work. Or if you are/were someone like Frank Zappa, just playing in his bands lead to lifetime fame.

Still. You could easily get into the rut of constant blues playing, pentatonic scales, stuck to blues formula. At the extreme here in the San Francisco South Bay we have all these blues bands with elderly good musicians that crank out the same music evening after evening. Nobody is exactly enjoying it.

What I suspect happening is that when you get really well-versed in a style, you want to stay there and enjoy the woodshedding results. Instead of growing as a musician and try other styles and expand your mind.

There are other similar cases like all the DeadMau5 wanna-bes in bedrooms who crank out techno track after techno track with the same formula. Recently I’ve noticed that even in genres like tech house, things have become very stagnated and boring. You learn how to program the tech house drums and bass lines and you are stuck there…

There’s really a simple solution. Just do something totally different. If nothing else, think of the poor audience that really wants to enjoy new music and will get the same dessert evening after evening.

Personally I like artists and bands that surprise me year after year. Even if there’s sometimes a hit-and-miss case, just the effort to try something and expand is what counts.

• Unkle – Heaven — How ambient voices should be produced.
• Stevie Wonder – Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing — Take complex chord progressions and turn it into a pop hit.
• Metric – Help I’m Alive — Good pop song, good arrangements, what else do you want…
• Boards of Canada – I Saw Drones – Ambient could be short, too.
• Howard Jones – Another Chance – You could do pop songs with arpeggiators.
• Steve Vai – Aching Hunger — Wish I had that kind of vibrato technique.

Which is good. And also bad.

What happens with such reconstruction jobs is that without really knowing how compositions work someone ends up with a very bland productions. Things come and go but there’s really no dynamic content, or thinking behind it, or even much inspirational parts. The closest I could think of this is doing microwaved food for a four-star restaurant.

Well, you could always learn and improve. My suggestions is to either look at classical composers such as Debussy and Stravinsky, see how their minds tick when they compose larger bodies of work, how themes come and go, how various parts play unexpected roles here and there.

A couple of modern day bands/artists that have a similar know-how, I suspect based on hours and hours perfecting this, is The Orb or System 7. Actually there’s even  a cross-over such as the Art of Noise album where they re-interpret Debussy — highly recommend this one to get a feeling how to compose music with any sample you have around.

So back to the drawing board. Here is version number two! This time the iPhone (or iPod Touch) is hooked to a RadTech SLAM clip case that I got online for $7. This has a clip in the back that could be hooked to various possible support structures.

What I figured out concerning the boom stand mics and the single straight ones is that there has to be one single place where to attach the support structure. Well there is one — the XRL connector for the mic cable! What I tested out was using a document clip, those you use to clip together lots of paper, the big size. I attach that to the XRL connector, bend the clip pins over and hook the SLAM clip case to the top one. I use the bottom clip pin to support the case so it’s nicely aligned. I think the second picture shows how it all works.

So the end result is a system that is cheap, quick to set up (sometimes, as with jams, important), robust enough and also as invisible as you could have it concerning lyrics in front of your eyes.

Which leads to eye sight. Most of us that are somewhat, eh, older, we lose the short sight over time. My son could easily read the text in the iPhone from the distance close to the mic. I could barely read it. What’s the solution? Well, it’s cool to have sunglasses on-stage when performing and now I have a real need for them. In other words, from CVS and similar drug-stores you could get sunglasses that are bi-focal, the lower part has reading-glass strength lenses. The upper part is transparent.

The last thing I’m still working on is the lyrics delivery system. I set up a special email address on my ISP so I could send lyrics to an IMAP server — rich text emails. These I could then arrange in folders online and then sync these over to the iPhone. This means I have backups out there and could download them to any iPhone or iPod Touch in case I need to do it. As well as constantly sending over and updating my lyrics setup.

I’m sure I will be working on version 3 based on the experiences I have with this setup, but as the Japanese know, kaitzen (constant improvements.)

Post – Psy Punk by Kent Sandvik  
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post-psy-punk.mp3 (338 KB)

Short un-mastered snippet of the work I did tonight for the third
song. Post-psy punk. Album should be ready end-February, that’s the
plan, get it done, out through the door.

Posted via email from Kent Sandvik’s Posterous

Extract From Wz – 11 by Kent Sandvik  
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WZ-11.mp3 (1805 KB)

Cleaning up a lot of old projects for licensing purposes later this
week, here’s one, I didn’t have a title so I called each one WZ, from
1 up to 16 the weekend I did those. This is section 11.

Posted via email from Kent Sandvik’s Posterous

Choral Music From The 31Th Century by The Saratoga Transfers  
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Choral Music From the 31th Century.mp3 (3005 KB)

Had to test my Apogee One with an external cardoid mic….

Posted via email from Kent Sandvik’s Posterous

It is of course natural to reflect that things were much better at that time. We had the first MIDI-controller synthesizers and the field was wide-open for any kind of experimentation. The New Wave movement in England produced Simple Minds, Ultravox and similar bands with a new style. And yes, we had plenty of hair.

Well, to be frank things were neither that utopian. Synths cost a fortune. Today by getting Logic Pro (or Logic Express) you get thousand-times more synthesizer options than long time ago. Not to speak of really having the chance to do the whole production in your home studio rather than using a Fostex-4 track as the scratch pad and moving it to an expensive 16-track analog studio for final production.

To release music you had to press singles or maybe an album; that itself was an investment. And 7″ 45RPM singles don’t exactly sound that nice.

To get any kind of decent media attention you had to work via a label that had the connections and money for decent PR. No Internet and web sites, exactly.

If you wanted to play a cover and learn the chord structures you were sitting by a tape player and moving the song back and forth to sort things out, rather than typing a string into Google and get the full tablature from N different sites. Not to speak of all the YouTube videos showing any kind of technique, or AudioTuts.com and similar sites that have tons of tutorials, rather than sitting long nights in the studio trying to figure out how to do things. And no forums, you had friends you might ask for advice, provided they knew something.

Sometimes I feel that this age makes it too easy to do music — one reason why fewer professional musicians and producers bubble up as it it no longer an arcane art known by the few. Then again we live in the age of empowering all consumers with media production.

10cc – I’m Not In Love

You could read more about this recording in the wiki entry. But basically this was an attempt to use a 16-track recorder as a huge sampler before the age of samplers. Anyway, the end result was this ethereal wall of singing voices. You could easily do it today with DAWs but this was one of the first doing this kind of technique, back in the seventies.

Kraftwerk – Autobahn

This was for me the first record I got (my third) with just synthesizers doing mostly used in the production. Especially drums were all electronic  It was Kraftwerk’s fourth album, but they got very famous by the Autobahn track. This was then influencing a lot of other bands to move towards are more synthetic sound. Same with the arrangements, simple and to the point, style rather than substance.

Phil Spector – Wall of Sound

Anyone producing should take a listen to any of the Phil Spector productions using his ‘wall of sound‘ method, singles such as Ronettes’ Be My Baby, The Crystals Then He Kissed me and many others. This then influened other bands and artists such as Beach Boys (Good Vibrations), Bruce Sprinsteen Born to Run (some tracks had 25 guitars!) and many others.

Basically the sound is produced by using multiple musicians/instruments paired up, multiple pianists, multiple bass players, multiple guitar players, even multiple tambourines. The end result is a wall of sound where you can’t really recognize any original instrument lines but it all works well together. It even sounds good over an AM transistor radio! This is another technique worth testing out today as it’s very easy to achieve with DAWs.

Todd Rundgren – A Wizard  A True Star

For a long time albums were just a collection of songs on vinyl. Bands like Pink Floyd started to work on conceptual album formats with themes. I guess I should have mentioned Dark Side of the Moon. But I took instead Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard a True Star as the example, this because it opened this up even more, to  a pure stream of consciousness album where one style is weaved into the next track. There was certainly a lot of tape splicing going on! Today you could achieve this easily by just taking individual tracks and making a master with track cross-overs and so on. It also requires a multi-instrumentalist, arranger and a very open mind to make something like A Wizard A True STar.

Frank Zappa – Merging Live and Studio Takes

Frank Zappa pioneered a lot of studio techniques. For me the most exotic one was to merge studio takes with live takes on the same track. To some degree this was dictated by economical needs; it was cheaper to take a bunch of musicians, train them for live songs, play these live and then record them as raw material for later album releases. But with the technologies of the seventies it would have been tough to match together studio takes with live takes seamlessly. Sometimes a solo was lifted from a live recording into a studio recording, or all kinds of other combinations. This made the final result very ambient, you could not pinpoint it as a live recording or a studio recording.

If you worked with the first generation of home computers in the early eighties, they had 16-bit addressing. A CPU is fetching memory parts from the RAM and in these early day systems the CPU could just load in something that could be addressed within a small range. If you look at all the addresses you could generate with 16 bits it is 64 kilobits. Not much but programs were small.

Enter the nineties with 32-bit addressing CPUs. Now the CPU could use addresses up to 2 raised to 32, or 4 Gigabytes. Quite a difference. To be fair, that was and is the theoretical size. Depending on all kinds of overhead the more realistic number is just above 3Gb in most cases. Generally it means that an application could had addresses for memory up to that range for buffers and similar things. You could install more than 4Gb into your computer as this is just a limitation per application. The operating system and other parts have so called wired (fixed) memory as well as other memory used so it was still good to load the computer with more memory.

However, inside a single application you could just address this much. If you load lots of big orchestral samples they need memory, buffers, plus other buffers needed for audio processing. All together, with larger projects someone could hit the memory limit. When the application run out of address space you could get all kinds of strange memory errors resulting in crashes.

Now, with 64-bit addressing the individual application could have an address space of memory up to terabytes. There are still limitations depending on the CPU architecture and the operating system, but one could safely say that it will take ages before any audio application is now running out of address spaces for projects.

In the case of MacOSX you really need 10.6  to fully use the 64-bit runtime. It was available in 10.5 but it is best to use the latest OS version. Note that the 10.6 kernel is still running in 32-bit mode. That’s quite fine, it is the runtime for applications that is important. You also need an Intel Core Duo 2 or Intel Xeon CPU process. Also, to really make use of this address space you need RAM over 4Gb, so for some laptops you can’t upgrade them beyond 4Gb. Anyway, new systems should be 64-bit capable, most likely.

Accessing memory via 64-bit spaces should provide more optimizations as the CPUs internally like to use 64-bit registers and similar things. There’s some overhead in reading more data such as virtual memory over the system bus and the disks but it should not be a burden, unless the swap space on the main disk is very small, of course.

With Logic you could turn the application to 32-bit only by opening the application with the Command-I shortcut and enable the 32-bit checkbox. There are some cases where you want to still run Logic in  this mode, consult the tech notes and release notes for things that are not available in 64-bit mode, especially anything related to QuickTime as the native QuickTime APIs are not supported in 64-bit mode.

What the third party industry now needs to do is to port plug-ins to 64-bit mode. Logic could run 32-bit plug-ins in s separate process so they are supported but you don’t get the benefits of the 64-bit addressing space.

So what are the possible limitations now for applications? CPU power. With more cores and smarted programming (threading) that issue should be somewhat resolved. But knowing the audio processing companies and engineers, they want to do just more and more CPU-intensive but fun algorithms.

Phases (Part 1, 2 And 3) by The Modem Collectors  
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Phases (Part 1, 2 and 3).mp3 (4068 KB)

A side-tour while mixing and finishing my guitar album.

Posted via email from Kent Sandvik’s Posterous

• Deerhoof – Believe E.S.P – Deerhoof is my solution every time I get too analytical with music making
• Thin Lizzy – The Rocker – the ultimate rock song
• Radiohead – Everything In Its Right Place – if more bands could do electronica like Radiohead
• Mike Keneally Band – Pride is a Sin – oh if I could play guitar and make songs like Mike Keneally
• Isley Brothers – Climbin’ Up the Ladder — oh if new bands did funk like this
• XTC – Poor Skeleton Steps Out – ultimate melody makers
• Tim Fuller – Naked – one of the few that makes good tech house music
• The Cure – Fascination Street – me thinks Cure’s best single ever

At that time live music was something new and interesting, you could pave the way for all kinds of new innovations. Just owning a polyphonic synthesizer had it’s edge.

Today with Logic you have thousand times more power than most producers in the eighties. With YouTube you could learn any kind of esoteric guitar lick; long time ago you have to listen over-and-over to a track. Or if you were one of the lucky few you could attend a concert, front stage and check out how guitar players did certain techniques.

Enter today. What I think is that the only big thing which differentiates anyone in the music world is originality. Let’s say someone wants to enter the world of dance music. If this producer takes the path of emulating DeadMau$ or something similar, or even worse, just taking the same trance patches that millions of tracks have used already, they immediately end up with limitations. Long time ago it took special skills to program external synths and make trance tracks — today it’s a trivial exercise.

Compare this with just inventing a new style, something close to the heart. Yes, it is an unpaved path but there’s a better chance to be heard in case this is indeed very interesting. Remember that there are hundreds of dance tracks released each day, do you want to sound like the most of them?

As for musicians. The amount of live events have shrunk. People stay home and play video games or watch DVDS/Blue-Ray/Netflix streaming/cable TV. This was not the case 30 years ago. In order to generate any interest to actually go out and check out a band you need to really go out there and make sure that people know of you. In addition, being on stage is more than just playing something perfectly — it has to be an event that people want to attend. Something they could blog or twitter about. So just being technically brilliant does not cut, unless you are marketing your music to a crowd of music lovers who like complex stuff — usually that’s another bunch of musicians and that’s not a big market. Then again, if you like doing that, go for it.

I might write more about this later. But shortly: be unique and you should get your fan base. If unsure, think of Radiohead.