Category Archives: Rock School

Trichordist Bookshelf – Essential Reading for Artists Rights

“WHO OWNS THE FUTURE” by JARON LANIER – BUY AT AMAZON:
http://www.amazon.com/Who-Owns-Future-Jaron-Lanier/dp/1451654960/

The Dazzling New Masterwork from the Prophet of Silicon Valley

Jaron Lanier is the bestselling author of You Are Not a Gadget, the father of virtual reality, and one of the most influential thinkers of our time. For decades, Lanier has drawn on his expertise and experience as a computer scientist, musician, and digital media pioneer to predict the revolutionary ways in which technology is transforming our culture.

Who Owns the Future? is a visionary reckoning with the effects network technologies have had on our economy. Lanier asserts that the rise of digital networks led our economy into recession and decimated the middle class. Now, as technology flattens more and more industries—from media to medicine to manufacturing—we are facing even greater challenges to employment and personal wealth.

But there is an alternative to allowing technology to own our future. In this ambitious and deeply humane book, Lanier charts the path toward a new information economy that will stabilize the middle class and allow it to grow. It is time for ordinary people to be rewarded for what they do and share on the web.

Insightful, original, and provocative, Who Owns the Future? is necessary reading for everyone who lives a part of their lives online.

“FREELOADING” by CHRIS RUEN – BUY AT AMAZON:
http://www.amazon.com/Freeloading-Insatiable-Content-Starves-Creativity/dp/1935928996

“A wonderful book that catches an encouraging shift in the zeitgeist. Ruen’s epiphany regarding the effects of his own piracy and freeloading of the bands he loves was eye opening.” – David Byrne

“Fascinating.” – The Village Voice

“The original slacker’s dream of free everything may have been realized by the Internet-but along with it came the slacker’s nightmare of never getting paid for one’s creativity. Freeloading seeks-and to a large extent succeeds-to wrestle with the collapse of the commons and the possibilities for a renewed social contract.” – Douglas Rushkoff

“Brooklyn’s Chris Ruen is one of the most compelling and forward thinking critics of our current download culture.” – M3 Music Conference, Netherlands

“A book…that promises to contribute greatly to copyright debates.” – Terry Hart, Copyhype

Author Chris Ruen, himself a former dedicated freeloader, came to understand how illegal downloads can threaten an entire artistic community after spending time with successful Brooklyn bands who had yet to make a significant profit on their popular music. The product of innumerable late-night, caffeine-fueled conversations and interviews with contemporary musicians such as Craig Finn of The Hold Steady, Ira Wolf Tuton of Yeasayer, and Kyp Malone of TV on the Radio, Freeloading not only dissects this ongoing battle-casting a critical eye on the famous SOPA protests and the attendant rhetoric-but proposes concise, practical solutions that would provide protection to artists and consumers alike.

“FREE RIDE” by ROBERT LEVINE – BUY AT AMAZON:
http://www.amazon.com/Free-Ride-Parasites-Destroying-Business/dp/0307739775

“A book that should change the debate about the future of culture….With this stylishly written and well-reported manifesto, Levine has become a leading voice on one side of our most hotly contested debate involving law and technology.”
—Jeffrey Rosen, The New York Times Book Review

“Turbo-reported….Free Ride is a timely and impressive book–part guilt trip, part wake-up call, and full of the kind of reporting that could only have been done with a book advance from an Old Media company.”
—Businessweek

“[A] smart, caustic tour of the modern culture industry.”
—Fortune

“Brilliant…A crash course in the existential problems facing the [media].”
—Richard Morrison, The Times

“The most convincing defense of the current predicament of the creative industries that I have read.”
—James Crabtree, Financial Times

“With penetrating analysis and insight, Levine, a former executive editor of Billboard magazine, dissects the current economic climate of the struggling American media companies caught in the powerful fiscal grip of the digital industry…. This incisive book is a start at an informed dialogue.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Can the culture business survive the digital age? That’s the burning question Robert Levine poses in his provocative new book. And his answer is one that will get your blood boiling. Rich with revealing stories and telling tales, Free Ride makes a lucid case that information is actually expensive – and that it’s only the big technology firms profiting most from the work of others that demand information be free.”
—Gary Rivlin, author of Broke, USA

“One of the great issues of the digital age is how people who create content will be able to make a living. Robert Levine’s timely and well-researched book provides a valuable look at how copyright protection was lost on the internet and offers suggestions about how it could be restored.”
—Walter Isaacson, President/CEO of the Aspen Institute and author of Benjamin Franklin

“This book thoroughly documents a wide-spread outbreak of cyber amnesia. Despite libertarian delusions, industries often get Free Rides, especially in their early days, but they eventually give back. Taxpayers build roads, then get hired to build cars. The Internet gives back a lot in exchange for its Free Ride, but one thing it defiantly isn’t giving back is a way for enough people to make a living. No matter how amusing or addictive the Internet becomes, its foundation will crumble unless it starts returning the favors it was given and still depends on.”
—Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget

“Free Ride is a brilliantly written book that exposes the dark side of the Internet. A must read for anyone interested in the horrific undermining of our intellectual culture.”
—Edward Jay Epstein, author of The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood

“Robert Levine deftly dissects the self-serving Orwellian freedom-speak being served up by Silicon Valley’s digital new lords as they amass fortunes devaluing the work of artists, journalists and other old-fashioned ‘content creators.’ Free Ride begs us to remove our blinders and take a hard look down a cultural dead-end road.”
—Fred Goodman, author of Fortune’s Fool: Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis

“Without being a Luddite, Levine makes the phony digital media gurus of our day seem as simple-minded as their slogans.”
—Ron Rosenbaum, author of How the End Begins and Explaining Hitler

“YOU ARE NOT A GADGET” by JARON LANIER – BUY AT AMAZON:
http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-Gadget-Manifesto/dp/0307389979

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A programmer, musician, and father of virtual reality technology, Jaron Lanier was a pioneer in digital media, and among the first to predict the revolutionary changes it would bring to our commerce and culture. Now, with the Web influencing virtually every aspect of our lives, he offers this provocative critique of how digital design is shaping society, for better and for worse.

Informed by Lanier’s experience and expertise as a computer scientist, You Are Not a Gadget discusses the technical and cultural problems that have unwittingly risen from programming choices—such as the nature of user identity—that were “locked-in” at the birth of digital media and considers what a future based on current design philosophies will bring. With the proliferation of social networks, cloud-based data storage systems, and Web 2.0 designs that elevate the “wisdom” of mobs and computer algorithms over the intelligence and wisdom of individuals, his message has never been more urgent.

The Making of Le Noise: the new album from Neil Young (9-14-10)

It’s Friday.

Sometimes, ya just got to appreciate the artist, the process and the music to put everything in perspective. Neil Young + Daniel Lanois = Awesome.

ITUNES:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/le-noise-deluxe-version/id393716373

And, for those who may have missed it, this awesome post from http://adland.tv:
http://adland.tv/content/brand-banners-pirate-sites-whose-fault-it-anyway

Neil Young Exploited by Ford, Cooper Mini, Target, State Farm, Adobe, Alaska Air, ATT, Boy Scouts, DIRECTV, LG, Princess Cruises, HP, Westin, Charmin, RapidShare

The Return of Orphan Works: A Review of the 2008 Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act Part 1

Reblogged from MUSIC • TECHNOLOGY • POLICY:

In the aftermath of the Google Books debacle, we are starting to hear noises that Google will back a new orphan works bill in this Congress.  There are some commentators—truly misguided in my view—who are calling for Congress to bring back the failed legislation from 2008 known as the “Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act”.  (The late Shawn Bentley was a tech industry lobbyist and former Senate Judiciary staff counsel.)  Let’s review that legislation in light of what we now know. 

Read more… 1,728 more words

The orphan works issue is back and being jammed through the UK Parliament right now

Musician’s POV: Five Things Spotify (and others) Could Do Today to Level the Playing Field for Independent Artists

We’ve talked about piracy, but now let’s change that conversation to talk about the “New Boss” licensed services.  One of the problems for artists selling their music, films or books in the legitimate digital space is getting a fair deal from the New Boss distributors.  And that is exactly what they are–digital distribution requires artists and labels to outsource what are essentially manufacturing and distribution functions.

That’s fine if it creates efficiencies, but what it also has done is create a huge dodge for the “New Boss” who tries to say that any problems that artists have with them is a problem with the “Old Boss” who made the deal the artists don’t like.

That gloss doesn’t work for independent artists, though, because there is no “Old Boss” to point the finger at.  Even if there were, the Old Boss is usually a union signatory under a collective bargaining agreement that allows a negotiation team to air grievances directly with the labels.  That doesn’t happen with the New Boss.  There’s a reason why Senator Rockefeller said that the big tech companies (pretty clearly meaning you know who) were worse than the monopolist Standard Oil (which was run by John D. Rockefeller, Senator Rockefeller’s great grandfather).

As far as we know, there is no New Boss who is a union signatory.  In fact, the old joke goes that tech companies know so little about unions that they think collective bargaining is venture capitalists setting a target’s valuation.   For example–YouTube refuses to be audited by independent publishers.  That would never happen at a record company–they might take an edge in other ways, but if they ever denied an audit right there would be a revolt.  In fact, the New York Attorney General sued major labels over “unclaimed” royalties and California has laws about transparency in record company statements thanks to Don Henley.  The sheer indifference and arrogance from the New Boss companies is startling and leads to one answer–they do it because they can get away with it.  And nothing says Internet Freedom like getting away with it, right?

Nowhere is this indifference to artists more apparent than in subscription services.  (We have some thoughts on a la carte download services, too, but that’s a subject for another day.)

We tried to think of five things that Spotify (and their competitors in the subscription business) could do today to level the playing field for independent artists.  These are things that wouldn’t cost them much, but that would be very helpful to artists making less than say $2500 a year from the service.  Leave a comment if you have other ideas or if you disagree.  (And you’re welcome, Spotify, Rhapsody, Napster, Google this is free market research for you.)

1.  Remember, nobody ever negotiated royalty terms with independent artists, it was just presented as take it or leave it.  Make the royalty rate more fair and transparent in two ways:  First, stop deducting out of pocket costs for advertising sales commissions (and all other advertising-related costs) off the top from independent artists.  Spotify and the others shoud eat those costs out of their revenue share rather than making independent artists bear 50% of these costs.  Second, pay artists a per-stream minimum across all your products.

2.  Spotify can start linking from Spotify’s internal artist profile page to places that actually might help the artist, like artist websites or tour information.  As Zoë Keating said “I wish Spotify would do more to facilitate the connection between listeners and artists — i.e show that the artist is playing nearby, or add links to buy music.”  We think she’s got a great point and we’re sure that most artists would be happy to reciprocate with a link to Spotify.

3.  Promise to pay each independent artist on the service a fixed amount of money as a bonus if Spotify goes public or is sold.  $5,000 each sounds good to us, and if Spotify has a $1 billion valuation now…. They will certainly be able to afford it if their valuation is high enough for a firm commitment underwriting (aka IPO).  This promise will not cost Spotify anything right now and won’t slow down its growth–which seems to be the most important thing to Daniel Ek.   Spotify would only pay it at the liquidity event, i.e., when they have the money.  Remember–sharing is caring.

4.  Let independent artists sign up for Spotify for free.  Either give the artists access to upload their music, or cover the costs of forcing artists to use an aggregator by grossing up their royalty split.  Please don’t charge us to make you rich.

5.  Contribute something to music education foundations, like Instruments A Comin’ (Tipitina’s Foundation) or to a musicians health care organization like the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians.  Would this really be so hard?  Start with 1% of revenue, even 1/2% of revenues.  And please don’t set up your own charity so you can have parties and give yourselves awards every year.  We already have those.  Save the money on the back patting and give it to people who are already doing the good works.  It would make a big difference in the lives of the next generation of artists and to families.  Good PR for Spotify, too, you could use some.

It feels good to do some good.  If that’s not enough reason, think of it as preserving your supply chain.

Recording Tips for the Loudness Wars: An Interview with Bob Ludwig of Gateway Mastering

[Chris Castle interviews Bob Ludwig, the legendary mastering engineer.]

Introduction

Mastering is the last and probably the least understood step in the audio recording process.

Mastering engineer Bob Ludwig is one of the true living legends of the music business. In addition to being a Grammy winning engineer, he has received many TEC Awards for excellence and was the first winner of the Les Paul Award from the Mix Foundation for setting the highest standards of excellence in the creative application of recording technology.

Bob is a classical musician by training, having obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Eastman School of Music. Inspired by Phil Ramone, Bob ended up working with Phil at the legendary A&R Recording Studios in New York. After a few years at A&R Recording, Bob moved to Sterling Sound and then to Masterdisk as Chief Engineer. In 1993, Bob and his wife Gail built Gateway Mastering in Portland, Maine, a state-of-the-art record-mastering facility where he still masters records by top artists.

Chris Castle: Given how many people listen to music on portable digital players, do you find that producers are mixing for earbuds? Is it common to find an “iPod mix” that you master separately?

Bob Ludwig: No it isn’t. Dr. Floyd Toole (of Harman International, makers of JBL speakers) showed that averaging all the different consumer speakers (some bright, some with too much bass or midrange etc.) one ends up with a very flat curve which is empirical proof that mastering with an extremely accurate and flat playback system yields a product that sounds correct on more systems. Like speakers, earbuds run the gamut from the old stock Apple earbuds that sounded tinny and lacking warmth to top-of-the-line Shure earbuds that are extremely accurate, to “hip-hop” earbuds that are overly bass heavy. One must master to sound as good as possible on all systems.

Almost all pop mixes are mixed with the bass and kick drum panned to the center which is proper as many people will be listening on boom boxes which have limited power and having a powerful center channel bass available to both speakers is ideal. Very early recordings of the Rolling Stones and The Beatles (to name two groups) were totally intended for mono and were recorded on 2-channel or 3-channel tape decks solely for creating a mono-only mix. When stereo became popular these early multi-track tapes were re-purposed for stereo and the bass and kick drum were typically locked into either the right or left channel.

With earbuds and headphones this is very unnatural sounding and sometimes it is decided to filter the low bass into the center by mono-ing the signal somewhat. This sounds much better. This is definitely a decision based on current widespread use of earbuds, and it remains an important philosophical question when doing re-issues of old recordings with this problem.

Chris Castle: Can you explain how the “loudness” of a mix becomes a factor in mastering? Can you explain compression and how it affects you at the mastering stage?

Bob Ludwig: Compression uses a piece of hardware or software plug in which either enhances or most often limits the dynamic range of the music being fed into it. Compression is crucial to pop music. Live pop music is almost always performed at hearing damaging levels, way above the 85dBspl OSHA threshold for start of possible hearing loss. In order for this immense power to be even somewhat realistically reproduced on consumer systems the pop sound pipeline must be compressed so that musically the performance has the extra energy that the live performance had. For pop music, this translates as a very musical thing.  (“The Loudness Wars” video illustrates.)

This problem starts from the fact that human beings, when hearing two examples of the exact same musical program but with one turned up only +0.5 or 1dB, almost all listeners who don’t know exactly what they are hearing choose the louder one as “sounding best.” Fair enough.

So through the years, the louder example is eclipsed by a yet louder example winning the hearts and minds of the artist, the engineer and the A&R person. At some point, the music is so loud and unnaturally compressed that the aural assault on the ear, while very impressively loud, has sucked the life out of the music and makes the listener subconsciously not want to hear the music again.

At an Audio Engineering Society workshop I was recently in about loudness, Susan Rogers from Berklee College talked about the hair cells in our ears that receive music and she pointed out that loud compressed music does not “change” as much as dynamic music and notes that “we habituate to a stimulus if it stops changing. Change ‘wakes up’ certain cells that have stopped firing. This is cognitively efficient and therefore automatic.” In other words, there are very physical reasons why too much compression turns off our music receptors. Every playback system ever manufactured comes with a playback level control. If one is listening to an album, one should be able to turn that control anywhere you want and the absolute level on the CD should not make a difference. Another place level on a CD does not make the difference one would think is on radio broadcast. It can be shown that in general, loud CDs sound worse and less powerful on commercial FM radio than a CD with a moderate level that lets the radio station compressors handle the loudness problem. Non-classical radio station compressors make soft things loud and loud things soft.

Two areas where producers get upset about not having enough level is the iTunes Shuffle, or even comparing songs on the iTunes software itself, and that moment at the radio station where the PD is going through the week’s new releases and deciding which two or three songs will be added to his playlist. Here, sometimes having a little extra level can make a lesser song seem a little more impressive, at least at first listen.

A great example of a contemporary recording that has full dynamic range is the Guns N’ Roses Chinese Democracy CD where Axl Rose wanted all the textures of the original mixes to come through and he got his wish! A good example of one of the loudest most distorted CDs is the Metallica Death Magnetic CD where apparently 10,000 fans signed a web petition to have the album remixed because they got to hear how good it sounded on “Guitar Hero” which did not have all the digital limiters the final CD mix had.

Chris Castle: I’m sure you don’t master with freeware, can you give an overview of the kind of technology you use?

Bob Ludwig: We have great state-of-the-art gear and we also have some classic gear like the 5 different sets of tape machine playback electronics we have to reproduce the client’s tape with the very best sounding playback for that particular recording.  It makes a big difference.

We have Esoteric Audio Research tube amps, Aria Class-A solid state electronics, ATR Services tube amps, souped-up stock Class-A electronics and Studer tape machine electronics…they all sound different.  We have all kinds of equalizers and compressors, but we often use the Manley Massive Passive Equalizer which is tubed as well as the George Massenburg solid state equalizer, My SPL (Sound Performance Laboratories) German console has 124-volt DC rails in the Class-A electronics making it probably some of the most advanced electronics known to man!

We run our entire studios off huge batteries so we create our own 60 Hz. AC, the power is as clean as you could imagine.  Using bridged Cello Mark II Performance Amplifiers which are capable of outputting 4,000 Watts of power into my 790 lb. Eggelston Works “Ivy,” one can put one’s ear right up to the tweeter and you can hardly hear a peep with no signal fed to the speaker.

Chris Castle: Is there a top 3 “don’ts” that you have to fix in mastering?

Bob Ludwig:

1. The most common big criticism I have is not paying enough attention to the vocal. The vocal is everything to the success of a song. Make it loud enough to be able to hear the lyrics. The problem is, if the vocal level is too high, all the energy of the track disappears, if it is too low, you can’t understand what is being said. If you want to be able to hear every word and you are mixing it, be sure to have a friend who does NOT know the words come in and tell you what is being sung. Once you know the lyrics, you can mix them very low and still understand them, but everyone else might miss some important words. It is hard, but crucial to get the right level.

Always cover yourself by doing one or two extra mixes with the vocal raised +0.5dB and another +1dB. Some languages need extra vocal level as more nuances of the language can easily get lost. Louder vocals are usually found on country music mixes, French and Japanese mixes.

2. Vocal sibilance not contained is a problem. As in item “1″, some producers will make the vocal as bright as musically possible in order to have it be intelligible yet tucked into the track. Sometimes the vocal is simply too sibilant. These days where most big projects are being cut for vinyl it is even more important to control sibilance as it creates high amplitude, high frequency grooves that are beyond the ability of all but the best cartridges to reproduce and one gets a “spitting” sound on the sibilance. Controlling sibilance in the mix is by far the best place to do it as the de-esser will only affect the voice while de-essing during mastering necessitates compromising the brightness of the entire track.

3. A mix with a bright vocal and a dull drum sound is really a problem. The all important snare takes up a lot of spectrum and trying to brighten it with eq will make the bright vocal even brighter and quickly become unacceptable. It is a real trap that can only be helped by mastering from the TV track with a separate vocal a cappella track, something that most often is not an option.

Visit the Gateway Mastering site for more information on Bob and his team.

[The Trichordist says: A version of this interview post originally appeared in MusicTechPolicy and in the Huffington Post.]