It occurred to me over cooking lunch for my boys just a minute ago that, a week before my 33rd birthday, I've been in the music business for half of my life. I'd like to share a couple of things that I've come up with.

First of all, to get anywhere in this business, to get anywhere sustainably that is, takes a really long time. There is no short circuiting this process, short of selling your soul to the devil. Even bands like the Black Eyed Peas who are on top of the world right now in 2011 have been doing this since I was just getting started. Acts like Ke$ha stand out in my mind as pure product, and this post isn't addressed to acts like her. This is addressed to bands like the Dusters or Yarn or any of the other top-notch acts out there busting their asses in a van every day of the year.

There is a sustainable livelihood to be made in this corner of the music business. What it takes more than anything is time and hard work. I've seen and worked with other musicians who acted as if their success were a God given right, that their talent would ensure them a livelihood whenever the proper magic hit-maker type came along and granted them the keys. These musicians are generally bitter, bad drunks and best avoided. You may be able to shave a certain percentage of time off your ascent by being smarter and by putting forethought into your career path, but by and large it's game of patience and being pleasant to work with. “If you sit at the table long enough, you will get fed.”

Second, and this primarily applies to sidemen, it's good to cultivate an aspect of your playing that is considered mainstream. That is to say, if you are a bluegrass bass player with a penchant for Airto-era Return To Forever, it's okay to slip those leading samba-type Stanley grace notes into your 1-5-1-5. Just make sure that you don't do it all the time and if the very well respected banjo player that is sitting in with your band looks at you funny, that's a clue. If you are a classically trained musician turned bluegrass player, by all means slip as much of that style in there as you want, but know how to chop that thing, too. Keeping this in mind as you make your rounds will render you much more hirable for your next gig. You are thinking about your next gig, aren't you?

Fin for now.

#music #bluegrass #business

Well unsurprisingly, even after several minutes of Google searching I'm unable to dig into the real article on this one, only countless verbatim reposts on countless web-scraping sites.

Anyway, here's an example. I don't hate on Jon Bon Jovi, but I do hate on the misrepresentation of facts. Steve Jobs didn't kill the music industry, the music industry killed the music industry. Here's how.

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Some time in the early 80s record companies and stereo manufacturers (then known as HiFi) found themselves with a problem. Record sales and HiFi sales were both flat. The somewhat endless parade of new media formats, the same on that continues today with Blueray, had not found a new winner in a while. People were still buying vinyl and cassettes.

It was at an AES convention that the CD was introduced to the world for the sole purpose of reviving back catalog and HiFi sales. “But it sounds like a turd” was the general consensus among the crowd of professional audio engineers at AES. Analog to digital conversion was in it's infancy and most early CDs sounded really brittle and really thin compared to their vinyl counterparts. Sound familiar? Anyway, because marketing is often more powerful than the truth especially when aimed at teenagers, the record companies got to work. “It's a perfect copy”, “It'll never wear out” was the message and it worked like a charm. By the late 80s the CD was the dominant format and back catalog sales were humming along.

Presumably nobody in marketing foresaw an age where digital information would be so easy to transfer, or more likely they figured by then it wouldn't be their problem.

Not going to get all Lefsetz about Napster and the subsequent reaction from the industry, but suffice to say that it was all coming down anyway and Apple was the company that put together a new model for distribution of a medium that was inevitable. They didn't kill the music industry, you idiot. You really think people would still be driving to Tower records to pick up this shit”)?

#music #business

#3 Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

I've never listened to these guys before. I'd been getting my indie rock fix from Death Cab and the Decemberists for the last couple of years and had never felt the urge to get any of their previous albums, but when their web video for “We Used To Wait” came out I couldn't stop watching it. It's one of the most amazing things I've seen done with the internet so far, and the tune behind the video was really good, too.

After a couple of weeks I bought the whole album, listened to it a few times and put it away. It's only been over the last 6 weeks or so that I put it on repeat, and this is a fantastic record. It's got the right mix of tunes that get you immediately and tunes that take a while to realize that you love (like every great album). The Month of May in particular is custom made for setting record times on your jog...

#2 Infamous Stringdusters – Things That Fly

After I quit my last gig, I was feeling a little burned out on acoustic music. I didn't listen to much besides hip hop and dance music for the first several months of this year, but then a strange thing started happening. Larry Keel would end up on repeat for several listens through his whole catalog. I started going through Tony Rice's records, Bill Monroe's records.. I was having an urge I'd never felt before – an urge to listen to and (gasp) play bluegrass.

I'd gotten the Stringduster's latest record and listened to it a few times while planting the garden, but at the time it was too produced for me. It occurs to me now that maybe they're just too good and that's what I didn't really like at the time.

I've had this record on repeat for the last 4 months straight, and haven't gotten even close to burned out on it.

It'll Be Alright from the Beachland Ballroom. I love how these guys stalk the stage when somebody's soloing. That'd be so fun, but I'll never get to do it. sigh...

#1 Big Boi – Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty

Going back and listening to some old Outkast I've think I've figured out that this is some sort of alter ego that he has in his tunes. I never really got into Outkast except for a few tunes here and there, the big ones. Hell, I probably only buy a hip hop record about once a year or so, so this is this year's entry.

I first heard about this album on the NPR show “Sound Opinions”. I don't have much regard for music journalists in general (I don't mean you Tyler), but these guys have a really great show. This record was featured on their show sometime over the summer and I liked what I heard, so I bought it. It got it's hooks in immediately. The first half of the album was the part that's immediately catchy on first listen, so I put it on repeat and rarely made it to the back nine.

The back half is where I spend much of my time lately. This whole album is fantastic from front to back, maybe the best hip hop record for me since Kanye's Graduation. The beats are awesome, the lyrics are hilarious, dirty, intelligible.

Hustle Blood. I had no idea that was Jamie Foxx on there singing the other part...

#music

I was having this conversation on Saturday...

I'm hanging with my new musical buddy George Kilby. He's decided to upgrade his website so we're doing a consult to get a feel for what direction we're going to move him in (pardon my grammar). He said something at one point about a friend of his who'd decided to totally forgo having their own website in favor of just managing their presence through Facebook and a couple of other social sites.

I'm kicking myself for not having a canned response as to why I think that's a bad idea, but I guess i hadn't really thought about it too much in a while.

In my humble opinion...

I can totally understand why an artist would do that. It's a hassle to manage your own website. There's tons of traffic already happening for free over on Facebook, they already have most of the goodies that a band website needs to have built for you, and you've got to spend half your life posting all this crap there again anyway. Why not just skip the middle man?

To me it's two things – branding and informational liberty.

Branding

If you fold up your own website and just manage your presence through mySpace or Facebook or Reverb Nation, you're effectively subordinating your brand to theirs. I don't mean to suggest that you are bigger than Facebook, but to me it almost implies that Facebook or MySpace owns you if you send your potential fans there instead of a property of your own. Would a “normal” business send people to MySpace instead of having their own site? No! They want to make money...

Informational liberty

I have some friends in a band. They've moved their main website onto a platform called Ning. Ning is a well funded company that aims to make the process of building a “social network” something that anyone can do. It's sort of like the old days of having your own message board on your site, except with the features one would expect of a modern social network. They have a pretty decent system for listing their tour dates, and maintaining the info is pretty easy. It doesn't cost that much and it works well, so what's the problem?

What if they every want to do something different? What happens when the day comes that they want to do something that Ning won't let them do (or won't let them do at a price they can afford), like maybe host and sell their own digital downloads or build a design template that's outside the parameters of what Ning allows?

They're faced with a tough decision. On the one hand they don't have access to tools that they'd like to use to promote their band. On the other hand they shutter a social network that they've asked their fans to join and be a part of, one that has been a definite success so far. Maybe it's not an issue right now and maybe it won't be that big of one ever, but by inviting their fans to create a community around them using proprietary software that they'll never fully control they're rolling the dice that Ning (or whoever ultimately buys Ning) will continue to do them and their fans right.

In summary

Better to build your own site and use that as the hub around which you organize the rest of your social accessories.

#theidea #music #business

#4 – John Digweed

So this one's might need a little explaining. I've said it here before, but it's likely that you weren't here for that – I went through a phase in college where I traveled all over the southeast going to see shows. I didn't go to Phish shows except for a few times, and String Cheese was a bit after my time. I and my buddies went to go see DJs. This was the golden age of Keoki, Rabbit in the Moon, Simply Jeff, the Dubtribe Soundsystem, Scott Hardkiss.. My first party was to go see the Dubtribe at some club in Raleigh. I couldn't figure out where the music was coming from the whole time, but it didn't matter because I danced my ass off all night long. It was awesome.

After a year or two of this and getting more established in the Boone music scene as a bassist, it occurred to me one night that perhaps I should pick up a pair of decks and figure out how to rock the crowd like these guys do. It was DJ Icey running the show at that particular time. From another post -

I still remember this one record he played that night – the vocal hook was “can you feel the BASS”, and when the record said ‘bass' there was this note that came out of the subs that can't be related verbally. It shook the world. It made my hair stand up. It made the entire party, all 5000 of us, stop dancing and look around at each other.

So anyway, pretty much like this whole software quest but somewhat more informed, I began groping about for a style and a sound.

Local influences

I had two good buddies in Boone at the time that really helped inform my direction and encourage me to go for it. Most of these style of music probably don't really exist anymore or have come to be called by different names, but Matty”) was into the breakbeats (careful, that link is pretty hard). My other buddy Breckenridge was more into downtempo and deep house. Those two areas being covered, I began to search around for something that wasn't already being done. There was quite a lively DJ scene in the the NC high country in the late 90s, and there were lots of drum and bass DJs around, so I turned the tempo down a bit. I still wanted to rock the house, but in a smoother more subtle way. Wasn't long before I found a mix CD by John Digweed.

The build

I'd attribute most of my love for music that “jams” to the crop of progressive house DJ/producers that England was churning out 10 years ago. The main thing with that style of music is to lull your crowd into a trance (not like that circuit-housey gay bar trance, but an actual state of hypnosis). After about an hour or so of playing with them and giving them alternate chances to rest and whatnot, you start building over the course of a few records to a HUGE record. This is where you kill them with your best bass line.

I learned two things from DJing – how to build a set over the course of a night and a metronomic sense of time and tempo. The whole idea of mixing two records together without anyone else even noticing it's happening is something that really appealed to me, and requires a hell of a lot of skill to do well. Your sense of time has to be perfect, you have to listen harder than almost any live musician has to (just realized that while writing this) in order to achieve the right blend and keep your records together, and you have a to have a good ear for pitch so that you don't clash two records together that are a minor second apart. There's also quite a lot of acoustic theory to delve into on your mixer so that your two kick drums don't cancel each other out. Good times. So help me, some day I'm going to get back over that way musically.

Other notable prog house influences – Steve Lawler, Dave Seaman, Danny Tenaglia, G Pal, Gui Boratto, Deep Dish, Sasha of course...

God, this blogging shit takes forever. No wonder I've been so off this year. Later y'all. Thanks for reading...

#music

Well, here we are. It was a tortuous migration, but IgnoredByDinosaurs (the blog) has reached version 5. I think it's version 5, let's see there was Blogger, then WP, then Drupal, then back to WP, then back to Drupal, and now this bad boy, so I guess you would call this one 6.0.

This blog is now run by a system called Jekyll, a “site generator” that's written in Ruby. What it does is take a bunch of text posts and runs them through a couple of different templates and spits out a full site of static HTML, since that's mostly what a blog is anyway. It's a compiler for your website. No webforms, no databases, no security updates. Just plain old HTML, like back in the good old days, but less hassle and more fun! I would have stayed with Drupal but honestly, it was just way too slow. This being just HMTL, without 119 database tables being joined by 200 different queries to display a blog post will be about a thousand times faster (literally).

So anyway...

Bass influences

I've been reading Kyle Hollingsworth's recent blog posts with great interest. It's always fun to see if who you think was an influence was truly such, but nobody ever posts these kinds of lists about themselves. Now that I'm on the verge of no longer being a defunct bassist, but rather a funct bassist, I thought I take a look back and see if I could boil it down to five bassists who pretty much wrote my play book.

Long story short, I can't. There's a few non-bassists who have given me more ideas than many of the bassists I've grown up with. So here goes.

#5 Cliff Burton

I know, it's pretty fashionable to say Cliff instead of Jason, especially in light of the fact that it was Jason who actually inspired me to start playing the bass in the first place. After years and years of begging my folks to let me be Lars and buy me a drum set, and years and years of begging the band director to let me be Lars and play percussion instead of trombone, I finally gave up. I guess I figured the bass line on “The God That Failed” was pretty cool too, and strangely my folks were immediately agreeable to a bass in the house. So I sat in the basement and played along with every early 90's grunge and metal record that I had.

However, it wasn't until a lot later that I realized the depth of the influence that I had absorbed many years before I even began playing. “...And Justice For All” was the first tape I ever bought and the first CD I ever bought a few years after that. It was literally almost all I listened to for a four year period between 5th and 8th grade. I didn't know anything about music or it's place in my future life, but in hindsight I learned everything I ever needed to know about harmony from that record. Most of it was written either by Cliff when he was alive or in his memory shortly after his death and his highly educated, dramatic, baroque influence is all over it. “To Live is To Die”, “The Frayed Ends of Sanity”, and “Eye of the Beholder” are all masterpieces. When the black album came out and there was neither a double bass drum nor a multi-movement epic to be found on it anywhere, somewhere in my 8th grade brain I was deeply let down. It wasn't Cliff's bass style that sunk in so much as the style of composition.

It's so nice to write. Thanks for reading.

#music #life

I was always more of a Miles Davis man. I guess what I'm comparing it to is perhaps if someone were a Coltrane man. I'm not sure why you need to pick one or the other, hell you could like them both as much as you want, it's just that Miles' style always spoke to me so much more. His was so understated whereas the style that Coltrane made famous was one that seems to be embraced and expounded upon by many many legions of jambands, rock bands, jazz fusion bands, etc. Anyone that really liked a long jam with sheets and sheets of notes from the soloist. Not that Miles wasn't into big long jams either, but the period of his that is my favorite is somewhere between 1958 and 1965...

1958 actually saw him in a marvelous quartet with the aforementioned Mr. John Coltrane. Personally this is my favorite period of either artist. My all time favorite jazz record is one called “Relaxin with the Miles Davis Quintet”. There's a tune on there called “You're My Everything” that is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard. The piano player, Red Garland, starts the tune after Miles calls it (this is one of the four albums that Miles cut on the same day, there's lots of rough edges which is part of what I love about it. They keep a lot of the studio chatter on the master). Miles cuts him off and tells him to play it completely differently, which Red does with hardly a pause. It's heartbreaking. Coltrane's solo still gives me goosebumps after listening to this album for almost 15 years now.

Another amazing Coltrane solo is his from “Blue on Green” from Kind of Blue. I'm not a guy who ever sat around and really got off on other people's solos, but these two are very much worth checking out if you don't already own the recordings.

1965 saw Miles putting together his second “great” quintet. This is the one with a young Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter on the bass, Wayne Shorter on the sax and an 18 year old Tony Williams on the kit. My personal favorite tune of theirs is called “Madness” from the album Nefertiti. Miles was starting to get more than a little out there by this point. He was breaking down the traditional walls of form that he'd begun taking out with Kind of Blue. The level of talent and drive of this quintet took it way beyond where he was able to go with Cannonball and Bill Evans. I'm not really sure there is a form to the tune Madness, but it's worth a listen. I never consciously realized this in college, or even until recently, but Tony Williams doesn't touch a damn thing on his kit except the ride cymbal for the entire tune. If any jazz student out there wants to know what it sounds like to “swing”, start here. Most of the tune after the head is Tony's ride and Ron Carter's bass, swinging like a wrecking ball. The solos are nice, but what really kills me about how powerful this tune is is all the space, and how ballsy it is to leave so much of it there. Believe me, leaving space is way harder than filling it up, but it always leaves the listener more satisfied. Hearing this tune again this morning for the first time in a while reminds me of that and makes me wonder if I'm not in the wrong band sometimes...

#music

Sitting here in the surprisingly nice Richmond VA airport, so I thought I'd check in. Cool cabby on the ride here. He saw my big PHP book and started asking me about what I was doing, so that pretty much filled up the 20 minute cab ride.

Last night's show was kinda just alright for me, personally. It's funny because Phil and Stacy both thought it was the best show of the weekend. It's just goes to show, you never know. I've learned through the years (you never let me down..) that I have absolutely the most subjective opinion about the quality of any given show of anyone in the listening world. It's the double edge sword that keeps us from putting out more LiveDownloads. Typically for me, the quality of the experience that I have on any given night is directly proportional to the frequency distribution between 40 and 150 Hz in the location on the stage at which I'm standing. That's a pretty specific requirement, but last night it just wasn't that happening. The theater we were playing in last night was Very Big. Very Big means a lot of air that you have to get moving before the entire room starts to feel right, which is what makes it sound good between 40-150 Hz wherever I am on stage.

I suppose that we probably wouldn't be as subject to the peculiarities of a given rooms acoustics if we were a more electric band. Let's just take my bass for example. My bass is a giant wood box that's designed to resonate. I stand next to a drum set. If you were to solo up the signal from my DI during a show and listen to what is making my bass resonate, you'd hear the notes I'm playing, but also the kick drum loud and clear. You hear a good bit of fiddle, or God forbid the electric guitar, and the rest of the stage, muffled. This makes my bass essentially the biggest microphone on the stage, with a frequency response that tapers off at about 100 Hz.

What this means to me is that if the room is shaped just so, and you never know until you start playing, there's the possibility of a 'standing wave' on certain notes. A standing wave is one that has a wavelength that's some multiple of the dimensions of the stage we're playing. Suppose I play an open D. Suppose that D vibrates at a frequency of 65 Hz. That means that 65 times every second that string is going to return to more or less the same place in space on my bass (nice). While that string is vibrating it's sending a signal to my amp and to Mikey out in front. That string is going to cause air to be pushed out of the speakers 65 times a second. The air being pushed out of those speakers is going to travel at the speed of sound and bounce off of hard surfaces and dancing bodies alike. The hard surfaces reflect the sound much better, and those soundwaves bounce off and travel back toward me. Meanwhile, other soundwaves have been continuing to come out of my amp and the PA. If the note that I'm playing at the time lines up in a certain reinforcing way with the note that's bouncing back toward me from the wall and the PA, you get a standing wave. That's when feedback begins, and my night starts to go downhill.

Other nights it's the exact opposite, and the note that's bouncing off the wall is totally out of sync with the note that I'm playing at the time. That's when you get 'phase cancellation', which means that the soundwaves are canceling each other out. That's even worse than a standing wave for me, because then there's really no balls to the sound. Phase cancellation is what makes outdoor concerts sound weird when the wind is blowing and you're about 100 yards away from the stage and the sound kinda shifts around and sounds, well, phasey..

And then some nights, the PA and the amp and my bass are all playing nice with each other and you get that nice even low end. A nice even low end means ceasing to consider the sound and actually listening to what my bandmates are playing. That's a good night.

And then some nights, the PA and the amp and my bass are all playing nice with each other, but we still can't get it sounding right. That was last night. It usually happens in a Big Room because the Big Room swallows sound waves and doesn't let them come back to you in time to be useful. It sends them back to you much later so that it sounds like a delay on your entire band being blasted back at you.

And then some nights the sound is so God awful that you just say fuck it, and those are usually really great nights. Blacksburg was one of those. It was in a tiny little basement of a club, my bass was acting up all night, but the crowd was blazing. You can't possibly have a bad time in that situation.

Now boarding. Later...

#music

So Eminem's old producers sued Universal over royalties. For those of you who have never been signed to a record contract, they are shadier (pardon the pun) than you probably imagine. The whole point of getting a record deal is to try and make some money off of selling your recording, right? Well, over the last decades, the industry (and by industry, I mean the lawyers and label heads in charge of finding ever more inventive ways of scamming inattentive rock stars (which is generally easier than shooting fish in a barrel)) has come up with some novel ideas about how your royalty rate should be calculated. They subtract the cost of all manner of promotional charges for the posters you see in the window of the record store, and then things like “breakage” (which hasn't been a real issue since records were made of shellac), and then just arbitrarily lop off another 10% for this, and 10% for that, until by the end you're not getting paid for the 1 million records you sold, you're getting paid for maybe 500k of them, if you're very lucky. Then they charge you back for some more (usually bogus) stuff. The whole game is to keep you, the artist, in the hole. It's easy. Oh, the label is sending a limo to pick you up at the airport and take you to the Grammy's! Great! Do I need to tip the driver?

Add into this that their lawyers have seen fit to jump on digital distribution by making your royalty rate 75% (again, if you're lucky) of what it would be if there were a physical medium being sold through a store (and this is in addition to subtracting for “Breakage”, etc.), and the margins for the artist get even lower. It's pathetic, honestly. Even more pathetic is that artists are usually in a big hurry to sign these pieces of shit.

So, when I read things like this, it really makes me wonder. To sum up, Em's old producers sued over the fact that there were so many absurdly non-justifiable, pre-royalty charges added up before they got their cut. They argue, and rightly so in my mind, that since you can't “break” a digital download, and the distribution costs are virtually nil, and that the labels aren't paying for in-store promotional material to market the download, that those charges shouldn't apply to their royalties. They argued that the deals should work more like commercial and movie licensing agreements work. That'd bring their cut up, as producers. It'd also bring down the labels' cut, obviously. The jury found for Universal, unfortunately...

So when I read articles like the one that I posted earlier today, I wonder why music label execs think we're all so stupid. By “we”, I don't just mean artists because there's plenty of empirical evidence that we are in fact, but the entire music listening populace. Why do we want to consume the crap that they sell, ripping off artists in the process, ignoring or suppressing good music along the way?

Time to get back on my musicTech thread...

#music #business

Now, this part won't be any news to anyone, but will mainly serve to help organize the thoughts in my brain. First, the old way:

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The old way involved the “record industry”. The record industry used to exist because recording was very expensive. It was expensive to record a song, it was expensive to reproduce the recording of the song, and it was really expensive to warehouse, distribute, and sell the recording of that song. Thus a whole industry cropped up to take advantage of the fact that the barrier to entry for your average recording artist, say Ma Carter out of the hills around Bristol VA, was so astronomically high that nobody really thought about releasing their own music. Show up, play my tunes, get paid for them? Okay! This worked great for long enough for the basic oligarchic framework of the major label system to rise to power.

A moment now to reflect. It's extremely popular to bash record labels, and with good reason. Let us now take a moment, however, to reflect on the cultural purpose that they've served...

I take it for granted that America is, on balance, the coolest nation on the face of the earth, in the history of humanity. Citizens from other countries would doubtless dispute this claim, but I would submit to you that even those societies that profess to hate everything America stands for only hate so strongly because they don't enjoy the liberties and luxuries that Americans have long grown accustomed to. Now, imagine if the record business never existed, that there was no such thing as an LP or a CD, and the only way to enjoy music was to go listen to it live. There were no Beatles, except for those of you lucky enough to be in the Cavern Club, no Elvis, unless you went down to the BBQ shack to see him in Memphis, no Chuck Berry, no Led Zeppelin, no Pink Floyd, no Eagles, no Neil Young, no Bob Dylan, no Coldplay, no U2. I know, a lot of these bands are from the UK, but I consider the give and take of the UK and the USA to be part of the competitive exchange that has pushed the limits of musical creativity for the better. And we can safely lump all these bands into the category of Western Music. Now, imagine if Western Music never existed. How would we export our culture abroad? At gunpoint, probably. How would generations of kids be incited to stand up and make change happen? At gunpoint, probably. My point is that exactly at the moment in human events that the USA and the UK became 2 of the dominant political powers in the world (1946 or so), rock and roll made an appearance. It moved legions of Japanese kids just like it did American kids. The cultural service that the major label system provided these kids and us to come later is therefore immeasurable. And the world danced together...

Now, back to the point, to be covered in another blog, because really long blogs are fucking boring...

#music #business #the-idea