November 17 sees the debut release by Them Crooked Vultures, the new rock supergroup project from Josh Homme of Queens Of The Stone Age, Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters (and, of course, Nirvana previously), and Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. Lead single "New Fang" is a Queens-style mud pit (meant to refer to Homme's other band there, not the NYC borough, although that too, I suppose) which I must confess just makes me think of that riff from Johnny Winter and Rick Derringer's hilarious "Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo."

Funny thing about the word "supergroup," though -- it seems to imply a certain longevity, mostly because it feels a little silly to still use the term decades hence if the band hasn't really gone anywhere (consider The Firm, or, uh, The Firm). Here, then, are some other current projects to which you can apply the term for at least the next couple months without feeling like an idiot.

Blak Roc

God-awful name here, but this would be former Roc-A-Fella mogul Dame Dash squishing his new favorite rock duo The Black Keys up against rappers including Ludacris, Wu-Tang's RZA, and most amusingly, Jim Jones of Dipset.

Monsters Of Folk

Earlier this year, Rolling Stone music biz correspondent Steve Knopper released Appetite For Self-Destruction, a birds-eye view book documenting the implosion of the record industry since its high point in the late 90's. That story is something I've been following for years myself, bit by bit and blog by blog -- kind of hard to miss if you're a musician, right?

I'll nix the urge to get into a sermon on the same here -- Knopper gives it a full 320 pages, so you can go read his take if you're in the mood -- and instead just point out the latest development: has book has been optioned by HBO for a new series helmed by the producers behind The Wire, the universally beloved drama about the gritty underbelly of Baltimore which wrapped up in 2008.

Now, it's hard to imagine this project seeing the light of day unless it's recast as fiction -- lawsuits from the major players would abound, I'd think, if they were to see their stories told out of their control on national television. I've had a very hard time getting into Mad Men despite its general and current hipness, in large part because it focuses on the advertising agencies of the 60's, a world that's totally foreign to me. But the prospect of watching banal party scenes featuring Tommy Mottola and Suge Knight is oddly intriguing, so I think at the very least this has the potential to engage the musicians who grew up when there was still enough of a record industry to write about, and even -- depending on how far they stray from Knopper's vision -- teach us a few things along the way.

In the meantime, I recommend Glee.

by Vijith

I'm having to start from scratch with a lot of workflow issues after jumping ship from Digital Performer to Logic, and during a project I worked on last week, I was forced to re-learn an old trick that's definitely worth passing along here.

In part because I use a lot of MIDI, I generally try to adhere to a click track unless there's an artistic reason to drift -- rubato, and even rushing, have their uses, but I've always felt strongly that DAW-based composition gets much easier when you can visually see and edit the relationships between beats, bars, and whatever musical content you've input, and -- not insignificant, this part -- snap your musical phrases around in musically useful increments. Trying to slide a keyboard riff back by one bar comes much more naturally than trying to move it back by 191,387 samples, and having to calculate the latter every time you want to move something around is, in my opinion, one of the quickest ways to kill a productivity buzz.

Where I depart from a lot of people, I think, is that I think this same reasoning also extends from matters of composition and arrangement and into production. Delays and modulation effects, in particular, can be incredibly effective when anchored to the tempo of the piece, and even compressors can be made to pump in and out in musically useful ways (though you'll rarely see any sort of beat-oriented controls on those plugins). This means that I can quickly turn quite surly when I have to calculate millisecond values in order to get a basic quarter-note delay or swirl a flanger around symmetrically on every bar -- again, it always feels like I'm screeching to a standstill to address some stupid procedural hangup (not unlike doing excessive paperwork, actually).

Most people, particularly when focused exclusively on mixing, don't seem to worry about this -- in fact, I'd wager that an overwhelming majority of the Pro Tools session documents in the world have the metronome set to the default 120 BPM no matter what they actually contain. I've heard arguments that unpredictable tempo asymmetries can make the effects more interesting, and also that locking things in too tightly makes it easier to forget that such details are usually just meant to be frosting. Both are valid points, but I'm not convinced, because if you want the asymmetry, you can always flip your plugin back into millisecond mode. Properly placed beat and bar reference points give you a very powerful new way of addressing your time-oriented production effects, but there's nothing forcing you to use it.

The obvious problem here: playing to a metronome is hard! And even assuming that I've already won you over here, if any of the material is tracked without you around to play resident click stickler, chances are this line of reasoning will be dispensed with, and the project tempo will be set to that dreaded 120.00 when you see it next.

There's a really elegant solution to this with most major DAW platforms, though. No, not yelling at your drummer, although there's often a reason for that too, in which case, have at it, Cowboy.

Rather, you can retroactively move the beat and bar lines of the metronome's "grid" around to match up the musical content in the audio recordings. Thus, it's not actually a grid at all in the end, instead pulsing subtly over the course of the session to match up with the musician's natural pacing. Or even wildly, for that matter -- who cares? I just want to beat-sync my plugins, remember, so if the wildly fluctuating tempos (rubato, incompetent, whatever) are considered acceptable at this point, my cognitive flow has been restored and we can move on.

This is not beat slicing or quantization or Live Warping or time stretching or any number of other terms that might have just jumped to mind. Most of those processes are ways of conforming deviating performances to a rigid tempo grid. Here, we're conforming the grid to the performance, and through it all, the audio is absolutely untouched (for better or worse).

In order to set up your sequence for this, you'll have to do a bit of prep (which I must sheepishly admit might feel a bit like doing paperwork) but for me the payoff comes in never having to stop making music to switch to a calculator.

Platform-specific:
Logic
Digital Performer
Pro Tools
Cubase

I was once again gearing up to write about some interesting developments in the digital music business (as I've done numerous times before) but -- spoiler alert -- in the end it turned out that's not really where this is headed.

The news that grabbed me, specifically, was that DIY music hub Sellaband recently made some major changes to their service. Their site essentially gives bands the infrastructure needed to get their fans to invest in future recordings, sort of like buying them before they come out so there's money in the recording budget, but with some cool bells and whistles along the way (profit sharing of the proceeds with the investors, for example). The biggest change here is the removal of the $50,000 minimum the bands had to hit before cashing in. It has now been moved to $10,000, which seems to me to be a much more reasonable baseline. With professional studios getting walloped these days by the impressive dollar-to-performance ratio of prosumer equipment (and, yes, that pesky economy thing everyone keeps carrying on about), budgets for even large-scale productions are dropping dramatically.

Public Enemy is the most recent big-time band to go indie, a phenomenon which I think people have (astonishingly) already stopped paying attention to for the most part (this conclusion largely because I heard nary a peep out of anyone when Counting Crows kicked their label to the curb a few months back). The twist -- and there must be a twist, else nobody will pay attention, as the Crows had to learn the hard way -- is that P.E. is doing it via Sellaband.

This time, however, the piñata threshold is set at a $250,000 collective whack. This is, of course, unnecessary on several levels.

The first problem is that it's clearly just a publicity ploy, since there's no way these icons could actually be so strapped for cash that they'd need to preemptively milk it from their fans. (Not without gross mismanagement, at least, though you won't have to try too hard to convince me that Flava Flav may have pissed away his fortunes on clocks and women.)

The second -- and please, let's just squash the accusations of rockism at the outselt -- is that I have trouble envisioning why it would cost that much to record an album's worth of hip hop, which is inherently cheaper to record than anything involving a drum set, and doubly so if you're willing to swallow your pride and get your 808 kicks from Kontakt. (Caveats to this include that you might be also covering some marketing costs, they might be buying beats from expensive big-name producers, etc.)

But here's where I went wrong with that last part: I made that calculation from the perspective of a DIY musician, which I am, and which these guys are apparently not, DIY financing approach notwithstanding. Thus, that quarter-mil budget -- though still excessive, possibly -- comes from paying through the nose for every second of potentially productive studio time with expensive expert engineers in high-dollar studio rooms. They're paying for the clock to tick while they think creatively, and even Flav's ample stash can't help get that under control. I just realized that's a calculation I've never had to make, and probably never will.

For obvious reasons, most readers here can record themselves, so if you're reading this, congratulations -- you have already figured out the financing problem Sellaband is trying to solve. $10k, if that, should more than cover your record. Should you be so lucky, you can spend the other $240k on a house to make it in.

Say hello to the Indaba console's long-lost cousin. Or, well, pet hamster, at least.

Tweet A Sound is a standalone desktop program for Mac OS X built in Max/MSP which uses Twitter to send synthesized audio. Best I can tell, it's a collection of states for each of the controls in the simple integrated sound design environment, which, when captured as discrete numbers, fall below Twitter's 140 character limit and can thus be broadcast just like any other message. The app includes a login panel, so thanks to Twitter's extensive API, you don't even need to alt-tab your way into Firefox.

These tweets, collected under the #tas hash tag (which, sadly, is quite contaminated because of its application to other topics -- there aren't as many sound designers in the world as there are, say, teaching assistants) can then be fed back into the program to set the controller states at the other end, effectively reproducing a sound in Austin moments after it was programmed in Osaka.

A little nutty, sure, but in a way this makes perfect sense -- "Tweet" is onomatopoeia, I think, right?

While Tweet A Sound creator Andrew Spitz doesn't seem to use the phrase "proof of concept" himself, I'll go ahead and apply it here simply because this points vaguely toward internet music sharing in a way that's quite different from what we've seen so far. Specifically, it's capturing sound in an extremely raw state -- synth settings, even before they're rendered to audio at all -- and then disseminating it using a platform predicated on immediacy. There's podcasting, yes, but here we're transmitting sound that isn't in a sound file yet. That's a quantum leap.

Now consider that the app is written in Max/MSP, which has pretty badass integration with Ableton Live on the horizon. Imagine running this as a plugin in a DAW; another quantum leap there, possibly.

Regular RSS can hold more content than tweets and there's no inherent delay any more than there is with a Twitter post (every account renders to RSS, in fact), which means that the leap after that would take us into plugins with RSS I/O functionality, which wouldn't be limited by Twitter's character limit and could be used to transmit things like MIDI in much larger chunks. (Note that we're not yet talking sample-accurate audio, though I've heard of academics with access to the Internet2 network getting usable latency for remote audio -- ie, black box with 1/4" audio input, CAT5 ethernet output, and then the same in reverse on the other end.) Server configuration to allow them to publish outgoing feeds probably won't be trivial for right-brained musicians, at least at first, but a fair number of the kids who are going to spend their graduation money on microphones this coming May won't be intimidated at all, and if the plugin makers host the feeds the way Ableton recently started hosting collaborative session repositories, configuration can pretty much be automated.

Once we're there, Osaka programs the sounds, Austin arranges them into chords, and the world gets a little bit smaller once again. Better get started on that staff paper notation wiki.

--

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Yours below, we hope.

Although male musicians have always been able to milk a staggering amount of mileage (mostly artistic, but also sometimes financial) out of writing odes to lovely females, Dutch theatrical and film composer Jurriaan Andriessen's Portret van Hedwig goes much farther than usual -- the score to the piece is a portrait of the lucky lady.

Not surprisingly, it took him five years to finish, the bulk of which was presumably spent trying to get notes to conform to the image in a musically sensible manner. This is a triumph of old-school pen-and-paper brute force, because for all their strengths, I'm fairly certain that modern scoring programs like Finale and Sibelius would choke on something like this.

As a modern analogue, there's this track from Aphex Twin's 1999 Windowlicker EP -- it's known informally as "[Equation]," because the title is actually this:

Hidden images pop up when you run it through a spectrum analyzer.

(Aside: the action really starts around 4:36, but personally I think it's interesting to listen to the whole song for context. Also, since I have the track as an MP3, I muted the crappy YouTube audio just now and listened via iTunes as the video followed along; at the end, the Grease soundtrack came up in the shuffle queue, which, for a moment, was very confusing.)

The track title is misleading -- the visuals weren't actually programmed, but rather generated using the image-to-audio sound design program MetaSynth. Other people have done this sort of thing too, but it feels a bit cheap in the face of Andriessen's thing, doesn't it? All the same, it's interesting to watch the visuals unfold from 4:36 on as you listen to the results and consider the mental and philosophical game of Twister that must result from creating art of one format in a medium meant for another.

by Vijith

Wired Magazine's recent article on what they're calling "The Good Enough Revolution" posits that technological advancement has largely outpaced consumer needs, and the name of the game is no longer upping the product specs, but rather finding the sweet spot regarding what kinds of performance compromises consumers are willing to eat in order to keep the price down. As a case study, it focuses largely on the popular low-end Flip digital video camera, which has proven quite successful with broke YouTubers despite its technical shortcomings. (Stick with the article all the way to the end and you'll even be rewarded with the theory that Predator unmanned aerial drones constitute the same phenomenon in the military, which feels totally gross.)

Even in the professional media production world, one might consider the Red camera that set the video world on fire a couple years back a sort of high-end analogue to the Flip, and a few years back there was a huge increase in the number of affordable condenser mics available to budget-conscious musicians. I am, of course, reluctant to dismiss the at-times-quite-oppressive cost of musical equipment, but at the same time, I do know that making a record is considerably cheaper now than it was twenty years ago, even if I'm not really old enough to have any perspective on that firsthand.

So now let's squish this up alongside Avid's debatably-earth-shaking announcement last week: Pro Tools has officially gone ultra-low-end with the new Essentials bundles, which hover around the $100 mark for a super-light version of the industry-leading DAW and your choice of USB peripheral -- either a condenser mic, a MIDI keyboard, or for a few bucks more, an M-Audio Fast Track interface.

Packages like this are old hat in the digital recording world by now, of course, nor is it any secret that Pro Tools has been moving toward ever since computers became powerful enough to outmode the process cards that allowed it to hit the market first and hardest in the 90's. Rather, my interest in this one was piqued largely by Create Digital Music's point that this puts genuine, legal industry-stardard audio production software -- no doubt quite capable for a beginner's needs despite the lack of multitrack recording and whatever other bells and whistles have been omitted -- in the hands of aspiring musicians for around the same price as Guitar Hero.

Not that it wasn't possible to get started for cheap before -- there's GarageBand on Macs, the free Indaba Console, and actually even Pro Tools had their old free version up through the Mac OS 9. (In fact, for years, Deerhoof used to record by syncing up three copies of that running on different machines, though that probably testifies more to their kookiness than any particular democratization of music production.) Branding and marketing matter, though, and for years Pro Tools has been getting sustained coverage in the mainstream media to a similar degree as the trendy Auto-Tune stuff has of late. To the layman, Pro Tools has come to be synonymous with audio production, Kleenex/Xerox style. Disregarding for a moment Avid's bottom line, for the sake of fostering creativity in our culture, hitting a two-digit price point with that is a very, very good thing. Or Good Enough, at least, which may be all that matters anymore.

News items tangentially related to Jay-Z, who 1) just performed on Friday at the All Points West Festival, taking the place of the Beasties, who had to sit this one out after Adam Yauch was diagnosed with cancer:

2) The album artwork for the highly anticipated Blueprint 3 has been released. You may find it strangely familiar; the Secret Machines influence is especially striking, I think, but they forgot to include The Borg's cube ship in the list.

3, which may be a stretch) Barrelling evermore toward overexposure, Episode #7 of "Auto-Tune The News," which is the sort of thing that should never, ever, be taken past an Episode #4, has hit YouTube. I haven't watched it myself; I decided to boycott after Episode #6 addressed Sarah Palin's resignation, simply because I don't like the implication that she can somehow be made more comical.

3a, still a stretch) ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! Here we have Episode #2 being performed on keyboards, quite possibly by the same guy who Auto-Tuned Jay's "Death Of Auto-Tune" the week after it came out.

As you may remember, we've looked at this sort of cyclical stupidity before, specifically with REAPER's ability to use video game controllers for MIDI input. Oh, who am I kidding -- this is actually kinda brilliant.

3b, where "b" stands for "back on track") Said extermination campaign isn't going so well, by the way, as Antares says sales are up as a result of all the hype over the track.

You're welcome -- I bet you're sure glad to have your street cred back! Tune in next time (HA GET IT?), when we'll check in with Das Racist to get the latest, unless I think of something else to write.

So I've spent most of my free time for the last couple nights tweaking the integration of my keyboard with Logic, and while that certainly may be pathetic, it's not as monumentally so as you might think at first. Said keyboard is  one of the formidable Novation ReMOTE SLs, which means there's a diverse array of built-in knobs, faders, buttons, drum pads, a joystick, and even an X-Y touchpad much like you'd find on a laptop. That in turn means it's actually a fairly intricate piece of hardware to interface with, and even though there are backlit LED scribble strips with which the functions of each bit can be labeled, at the setup stage that's just one more thing you have to program before you can start making music.

Novation, to their credit, foresaw this problem back when they were designing them, hence the Automap host software, which essentially wraps around your plugins and automatically assigns their parameters to the MIDI messages the keyboard is sending. In practical terms, this means that as soon as you click on, say, a delay plugin, the extra controls on the keyboard are properly labeled and ready to do something useful. Cool, huh? (When it's all working properly, at least, which mine is not, though at this stage in the troubleshooting process I must sheepishly admit that the problems I'm having are probably my fault rather than the keyboard's.)

Bypassing all the hair-yanking buggery for the moment (thank goodness -- I could use a break), I'm also looking forward to their next release: an Automap iPhone App. I just searched the App Store a moment ago and couldn't find it, but basically it's going to give you unlimited pages of two faders and eight buttons apiece, all of which do the aforementioned intelligent mapping. There's really no reason for that to be the only control configuration, though, and one hopes that Novation will make additional interfaces available later (I realize that's a big fat "if" once they already have your money) or even allow you to create your own, at which point it could basically become a poor man's Lemur.

I'll be keeping my other MIDI controllers, obviously, but as a secondary way to actually touch the music, I think this is a really cool use for a device which otherwise would just be at best sitting silently in its charging dock, and at worst ringing just in time to ruin a take. If you don't have a Novation keyboard, you're in luck, in a way (beyond the troubleshooting, I mean) -- in order to use multiple Automap devices, you have to shell out for the pro version of the host software, at a cost of about $30. I'm assuming you'll be able to toggle between active devices, but even though that's pretty steep for what is essentially a glorified MIDI driver, I could probably be talked into shelling out if all the flipping back and forth gets to be sufficiently intrusive.

So that then brought to mind another cool DAW gizmo integration tidbit. We're in the throes of hype over Apple's recent release of Logic 9, but one of the oft-forgotten capabilities added in the similarly epic upgrade to version 8 back in late 2007 was the ability to use the little white Apple remotes as transport controls. You know, these guys:

For those who still don't know what I'm talking about, it's a little wireless infrared device about the size of a pack of gum which has been included with most Macs for the past few years in an attempt to make media playback programs like Front Row and iTunes more comfortable for living room use. (Mac Pro users, you're out of luck, as you don't get the remote, nor do you even have an IR port with which to use one if you were to spend the a la carte $29.) Since they're included with several different Apple devices (iPod docks, for example, which you already know I have), I actually have a couple of these things lying around, and Logic can use them out of the box with no configuration necessary. The up and down buttons map to track select and record arming, forward and rewind scroll through the timeline (including larger jumps if you hold them down), "Menu" starts recording, and Ima smack you if you can't figure out what Play/Pause does.

This is totally awesome as a poor man's Tranzport -- which, to Frontier Design's credit, is far more robust, includes an informative LCD which even does live input metering, probably has a larger wireless range, and works with hosts other than Logic. Unfortunately, it'll also set you back three figures. In this economy, I'd rather save that money for rent, taxes, groceries, and rainy days. And maybe Automap Pro.

by Vijith

Guitar Hero Custom Cover by ~Bruss on deviantART

Look, I swear I'm not out to inundate you guys with video game news, so we'll make this one quick and file it under "Business Strategies for Independent Musicians" rather than, say, "Toys."

A couple months ago we looked at a brief history of download sales with particular emphasis on exactly when and where the doors opened to those without label representation. Now, some more promising news on that front:

Harmonix, the game studio that originally developed Guitar Hero and now pays the bills with Rock Band, has announced the Rock Band Network, a new portal slated to open for beta testing in August through which bands can submit their own songs to be sold to gamers. Submitters will be required to script out the various performance lanes first, most likely at multiple difficulty levels, but those are based on MIDI, so at least it'll be easier for the heavy sequencers. That part can already be hacked, albeit obviously without the payment infrastructure.

MTV's game division will act as the gatekeeper, and while all approved submissions will be available on the Xbox (apparently because Microsoft provided some of the technology that's making this whole endeavor possible) and selected highlights will be ported to the PlayStation and Wii.

One rather significant catch: although songs can vary in price between $0.50 and $3, there's a $99 annual fee and -- gasp now, please -- bands only keep 30% of the gross, which is substantially lower than you'd get from most other download sale outlets. CDBaby just tripled their charges, and they still pay out more than double what Harmonix is offering. You'd break even at somewhere between 110 and 660 sales, depending, of course, on how much you decide to charge. That may seem like a lot, but the odds aren't insurmountable for a sufficiently popular touring act, I think, especially when you consider that Rock Band and Harmonix sold 2.5 million downloads in two months back when the game was first released.

It's tempting to dismiss this as a silly novelty, but I think that any previously-exclusive doors which are opening to independent musicians should be welcomed, draconian service charges or not. Remember, back when CDBaby first struck their deal with Apple in 2003, we had no idea just how big the iTunes Music Store would become. I'm not saying that Rock Band is the next major music distribution platform; good Lord, that would be depressing -- I'd only want to listen, but the damn thing spits out clams every time you miss a note. Just, you know, don't rule it out.