Niche Marketing and the Primordial Ooze (Part 2)

July 6th, 2009 § 2

Just Because You Can Does That Mean You Should?

In the aftermath of this great digital armageddon, we are left with a most curious world; the world of DIY, where Sally in DeMoines can sell her handmade quilts from her bedroom, Frank in Knoxville broadcasts his radio show of his favorite new indie artists from the local Starbucks in town and Lola from Louisville Tweets chocolate chip cookie recipes from her Blackberry, while riding the bus to work.

In the new DIY music world, the most advanced technologies are now available to any musician with a dream and a credit card that can buy them recording studio quality tools once available only to the kings and queens, dukes and dutchesses who ruled from behind the great castle walls of the old music and recording industry.  It’s all been reduced to tiny, affordable little digital boxes and software plug ins you or I can run on a laptop that model new and vintage analog equipment costing many tens of thousands of dollars; amplifiers, microphones, recording consoles, even promotion teams! all just a mouse click away for anyone who can play three chords, and has the most rudimentary understanding of music and a Myspace page to upload their songs to. And so everyone can now have a music career. Everyone can record a CD. Everyone can have a record label. Everyone can promote themselves. That’s really great isn’t it? Or is it?

The Beatles, Dylan, Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, The Who, Pink Floyd, Nirvana, Radiohead. Amazing artists and writers all, they still worked with a great team of professionals who helped them to realize their artistic vision and allowed us to enjoy some of the most seminal recordings in all of popular music. Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, The Jackson Five; they didn’t even write those songs. So if these amazing artists knew enough that they needed just as amazing a team behind them to get them where they needed to go, what of the DIY artists today who must go it alone, without that team or that great big money train, flush with all this amazing technology but no one to really guide them? And what of the quality of the music and the level of artistic development in the new DIY culture?

I produce my group, Citizens Of Contrary Knowledge. I also play guitar, co-write a large portion of our material, engineer and mix. So by definition, I and we are very much a part of this DIY culture. But this is not entirely by choice. It’s largely a function of economics in the absence of major funding. But there is at least a basis for my band-appointed position, in the absence of that option for now.

I cut my teeth at one of the finest New York recording studios, Right Track Recording, where I started out at the very bottom of the heap making coffee and running packages around the city. Meanwhile, artists like Kiss, Foreigner, Bowie, The Stones, Billy Idol were coming through our studio. In that time I got to meet and learn from some of the greatest engineers and producers in the business. These were highly skilled and talented people who were proud to wear one hat, the one they were really good at, not the sixteen others people seem to wear in this new DIY world.  But even with knowledge and experience with all this technology, I would still love to kick back and let Bob Clearmountain take a crack at mixing my stuff. Why? Because I can admit that he’s a giant in mixing and could probably elevate my music to a higher place.

Yes, economics have forced many musicians to become engineers, producers, arrangers, web designers, promoters. And certainly some out there can and do wear those hats proudly and do create great work. But really, for a lot of the “content”  out there, do we actually think that if you can hammer a nail straight into a piece of wood that you can go out and start building houses?

Recently, I went to visit my brother out in Colorado who makes teeth with his partner, Ray. Ray was once upon a time a bit of a guitar prodigy back in the jazz fusion seventies. Not long ago he rediscovered his passion for music, kicked his wife out and turned his mountain home into a studio and bought some gear on eBay. I went to see his place and, having known that I spent a long time in recording studios, he told me he was having problems with a recent recording he was working on. He asked me why no matter how loud he tried to make the drums, they kept sounding small. I smiled, knowing the answer immediately. ‘They’re out of phase’, I said. ‘What’s that mean?’ he asked. I tried to explain to him that when you use multiple microphones, say on drums, each one “hears” the drum from the other mic’s position.

There is a mathematical relationship of distance that determines when that sound wave reaches each mic. If you have that relationship wrong and put up all your drum faders, you might find that one sound wave for, say, the kick drum starts on an upswing and the other on a downswing (or 180 degrees out of phase). In the ocean, when the crest of a wave meets the trough of another, they cancel out and the wave is leveled. Likewise, in recording. So, no matter how much you push up the kick drum fader to try to make the track thump, it just gets smaller. So I told him to bring up all the waveforms for each track on his computer. I then showed him visually that kick drum and how its own mic had a soundwave starting on an upswing but the tom mics that also “heard” that kick drum, showed its wave upside down. The beauty of digital recording is you can tell the computer to invert a track (or turn the waveform upside down). I had him invert the tom tracks where you then saw that kick drum wave starting in the same direction on all tracks. When I had him play the drum tracks back, all of a sudden they came pumping out of the speakers, all fat and beautiful, like they were supposed to.

‘How did you know about that?’ he asked in shock. ‘A lot of coffee’ I said. You got to make an awful lot of pots before you learn how to brew a good record.

Peace,

Mark Hermann

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