Archive for the ‘music’ Category

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Back to the 80’s

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

A couple lifetimes ago, I was a full time professional musician. I played the Albuquerque club circuit in the 80’s and the scene was such that a good top-40 cover band could make a good living and have a lot of fun. Playing helped fund college. Eventually I graduated and set out to have a “career” in engineering which somehow ended with programming computers. I boxed up my guitars, keyboards, amps, and floppy disks with songs I had written and pretty much didn’t dig them out until last summer.

Last summer I bought a Mac dual quad, a Digital Performer upgrade, and some Audio Unit virtual instruments, dug out my old material, and began transferring the stuff to DP through a fairly laborious process. The goal? Make that great album I’ve always been meaning to do. Heck, I’m over 40 now. If not now, when?

I also hooked up with a bunch of geezers with a similar history and we’ve started a cover band (average age in the band is something like 48). So I’m splitting my time between learning current songs (and lots of oldies) and polishing my live chops, and getting up to speed on modern recording technology. Lots to learn. It used to be all about the hardware. Now all that gear I used to use in the 80s is available in software for about one tenth the price. Cool. No more tape machines either. All digital. Unlimited tracks and takes.

But it all takes time to learn so I think I’ll start blogging about that a bit.

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Switchers

Tuesday, June 27th, 2006

Mark Pilgrim is going off about how he’s moving away from the Mac OSX and onto Ubuntu because he’s unhappy with the amount of work involved in data preservation.  Tim Bray is also discussing this.
That’s all well and good, but this isn’t remotely related to the Mac itself.  It is a universal problem.

I did a lot of song writing in the ’80s and have a lot of original music as sequences that were built using an Ensoniq ESQ-1 keyboard/sequencer and dumped as MIDI sysex data to a Mirage sampler and saved on floppy disk.

I still have the Mirage (although its getting more and more “quirky”) and the ESQ-1 and I’m “converting” the data by actually loading it into my old synth stack and “playing” it while having Digital Performer “record” the data stream in slaved sync mode.

This is the original source material.  I used to have versions of this material in Studio Vision format.  However, while I was off exploring the world and had my stuff mothballed, Gibson bought Studio Vision and promptly killed it.  Macs moved to Mac OS X from MacOS, and Studio Vision is copy protected (like all music production software apart from Garage Band).  So the Studio Vision versions were lost.

The Digital Performer file formats are proprietary too.  If you want to maintain total data fidelity, you have to archive the program, the OS, and the original machine.  Otherwise, its all lossy conversions again.  Switching to Ubuntu won’t mitigate this.

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Home on the dynamic range

Thursday, March 16th, 2006

This was on digg today and I have to say I agree with it.

“The music available to the consumer today isn’t musical at all. It’s best described as anti-music. It’s anti-music because the life is being squashed out of it through over compression during the tracking, mixing, and mastering stages. It’s simply, non musical. It’s no wonder that consumers don’t want to pay for the music that’s being produced today. It’s over priced and sounds bad. Our musical heritage is being threatened by this anti-music.”

On of the great oxymorons is “Music Business”. Strange bedfellows indeed.

The compression (a technique in which the softer parts are made louder and louder parts made softer to make the whole thing “even”) is necessary to compete – to stand out. A compressed track will sound “louder” in relation to uncompressed tracks and so it tends to stand out. Ever notice how advertisements on television seem louder than the program content? It is because they compress the bejeezus out of the audio to make sure that EVERY SINGLE UTTERANCE COMES ACROSS AT FULL MAXIMUM VOLUME.

Of course, if everyone does that, then nobody stands out. A tall man at an NBA allstar game will look average to below average in height.

But who can afford to quit? It takes courage to choose not to compete on a business level and focus on the music. It can be done though. Nora Jones has one of the softest sounds out there and yet she stands precisely because she is the roaring silence in the deafening noise.

I’ll be working on trying to expand the dynamic range of some of my songs in the next go-round. Given that I no longer need to please the record companies to get distribution, we should start to see the emphasis begin to move from “Business” back to “Music”.

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