No Business in Music

So, I just ran across an article; and it has opened my eyes to the harsh reality I have already been slowly acknowledging over the years. 

It's not just this one.  There's a ton of bloggers and articles online and in print talking about the chaos of the music industry; the business of music has completely collapsed and is all but dead.  Today, fewer than 40% of the worlds most renowned studios stand the test of time; and I'm not talking literally.  I'm sure the buildings are probably still there.  However, their facilities, equipment, and treatments have probably disappeared quicker than the experts that ran them.

D.I.Y. killed professionalism.  Internet killed TV, and global commerce killed personal freedom.  If you belong to any of these groups, please stand up.

I'm disheartened at the lack of fight; not by the music industry; not by the film industry...  No, they've been the ones fighting hard to cling to their old business models and trying to continue the way of sucking every last penny they can as the business model - along with them, slowly dies.  I'm talking about you, the uneducated; naive individual.

I just learned a new word today and that word is Googlization. I dare you to post a comment with at least one way you can't get to youtube; and I bet if you find one, that device or method is old and obsolete anyway.

The music industry needs to die already.  I'm serious.  There's no such thing as a patron of the arts anymore.  Hell, there probably hasn't been since the Renaissance.  Let's recognize facts: Businesses don't just give money away. They expect money in return.

It's no surprise then that the music industry has gone belly up.  Music is like ideas.  An idea should be free to share.  Music is either priceless... or worthless. The revolution of sound recording is nothing more than a really, really long fad that's finally reached maturity.  Think about that one long and hard, from your smartphone... while you're on the toilet.  Don't forget that courtesy flush.

I sound pretty cynical I'm sure by now.  I have good reason.  People don't care about ideas anymore, they care about dollars. They care about the bottom line.  There's a war going on, a silent... stupid one.  And by stupid, I mean education.  DIY revolution was instigated by the amazing trickle down effect of technology over time to the point where now not only is software capable of producing sounds for you, but the hardware it takes to run everything is super affordable.  If you need a history lesson, a cost analysis map, or even a comparison: read my previous blog post - Figuratively Speaking.

I share a similar sentiment to Rob Tavaglione, in his article "Music Production Biz in '12" (see first link).

" Major label budgets are now indie-sized; indie budgets are now “go make it yourself and we'll distribute;” and unsigned artists are making their own records with friends on laptops (or tablets, or phones, etc.)."

That empowering freedom has fallen into the hands of the uneducated, unaware, and uncaring.  "Let's all go make our ideas" with little to no respect for the process of how to do so properly.  It's no wonder indie musicians are skeptical about "studios" especially when anyone with a few scraps of recording gear, a room in their house, and an internet connection can advertise themselves as an "affordable studio".


A message to everyone: stick with your own recording gear. You're not going to get signed and the labels are probably going to be all the worse for you anyway.  Stop caring about your music already, no one else does and that's because they're one step ahead of you, probably trying to sabotage your audience and stealing your fans.  You really need to get off your high horse, and get your head out of the clouds about how "the people still do care and love good music".  The club scene has killed traditional venues, no one wants to go just listen to someone play live.  The music business is dying so expect to give away your music for free, at least be happy when people listen to it and actually like it.  Cd's and Vinyl? So last century, they're like Disco; they just don't know it yet.


And lastly, but most importantly... don't give up.

The McClure Sessions

Yep, it's finally here!  We spent quite a while mixing and mastering and editing everything for this 5 song EP and still keep the "Raw" sound the artist wanted.






Troy and I had a lot of fun.  The stress was minimal but it also included more things than just the EP project.  I've been working around the clock on several little things.  This video was one of them, as well as starting our website and getting our services and a pricing map for our business...  Fun times ahead.

I'd love to share more of my business plans with you, but there's some production things I'd like to cut to the chase on.

If one notices carefully in the video, there are the "driving" scenes which is us going to and from our studio location to grab all the gear so that we could set everything up at my place to track drums.  I wanted to 'motion stabilize' those shots but the clips are long.  So, in Premier my first step was rough blocking to get the content on the screen i wanted, and then how i wanted it to fit in the mosaic of video that would be constantly shifting.

My first problem I ran into (probably just lack of experience and not taking the time to hunt around on the web for people's solutions / suggestions / workarounds) was when I would replace the cut I wanted with an After Effects link and go in and motion stabilize it.  If you pay more attention to the opening sequence you'll notice some of the driving shots are super steady and others are not.



In After Effects after creating the After Effects Project File, the footage clips I used are segments of the same video file and they show up in After Effects exactly at the times I have them in Premier.  I only wanted to motion stabilize that clip I wanted to use seeing as how that would cut down render times and playback issues.

However, once you create an AE Linked project, whichever one was newer in the link replaced the older one.  If I were to exit out of Premier Pro and only open the After Effects project, it would show the correct clip.

My next step was trying to render out the motion-stabilized footage using Adobe's Media Encoder tool.  The same problem occurred because it still uses the dynamic link manager as well; which apparently has permanently replaced the link to the original clip segment and only does the latest one.

What gives, Adobe?  Is there a way to create multiple After Effects compositions working on the same video file but still retain their clip-based references from Premier?


The other (and not nearly as perplexing) problem is dealing with OMF Export to work in a DAW with.  I've noticed for a long while now that stereo tracks in Premier Pro, upon importing into a DAW will come in as independent mono left and right tracks.  Note, I've been working exclusively in Sonar for doing my picture audio work, however I have tried the same OMF imports in Pro Tools and the same thing occurs.

Both DAW's are perfectly capable of working with stereo interleaved files, and creating stereo tracks.  I just find it a bit funny this information gets parsed in the export process (or translated as such on import) this way.  Has anyone else noticed or perhaps figured out a fix for this?

If anyone reading this has had similar experiences and even possibly solutions they've found for these things, I'd love to hear your thoughts.  Likewise, I'd love to hear any comments, questions, suggestions, anything at all; about the video, the questions I posed regarding After Effects and Premier Pro; or OMF Exporting.

Keep an eye out for our website launch, and if you don't already; follow me on Twitter, or facebook.  as well as our studio page on Facebook.

Subject to Change

It's been a long few weeks working on a big studio project.  At this current juncture, Troy and I are in the main mix and master phase working on a 5 song EP for Chris McClure.  Both Troy and I have been working very hard on this project.  We both have a passion for bringing the best sound possible to the music.  Just what is "the best sound"?  This question has so much subjectivity that even today is always a relevant and somewhat controversial debate amongst mixing engineers and recording artists, mastering engineers, even musicians and artists that care to delve into this realm.  Let me start by sharing a very interesting (at least to me) video with you:

(View the conversation page here: www.ted.com/talks/david_byrne )

As I stated already, what "sounds best" is highly subjective.  Subjective to the listening environment, the genre of music, the intended audience.  Just as David Byrne talks about in the beginning of the video, it's no accident that the west African music sounds the way it does or is written in such a way that compliments it's listening environment (free field), or that early band music used instruments that could project well in a small venue to be heard well above the ambient noise of the audience dancing and yelling and whatever else it is one would do there.

Fast forward to today and we have such amazing technology to allow us to create, simulate, emulate, even overcome obstacles in achieving just about any type of sonic impact we want, which makes it all the more critical and complex on just about every "job" in this industry.  Everyone, even professionals in the industry - have personal tastes when it comes to what sounds pleasing to them.  Not just musical genres, but the particular mixing and mastering styles, "sonic signatures" if you will.

Imagine the sound capabilities and quality of the earliest phonograph recordings being the particular sonic signature a modern band wanted to encapsulate their music.  I can't vouch for anyone else, but I would assume today's audience would not be pleased by a recording of a modern band that sounded as such. 

As a mix engineer, there is a true and mysterious art to getting the recordings to sound the way we expect them to.  Today's music is so heavily processed there is rarely any concept of the natural or "raw" sonic impact of what the instruments sound like.  I usually hear people say (and I've said it myself too) that when we do our job right we become invisible.  Our jobs aren't actually transparent anymore, it's quite the opposite.  The post-production desired and even required by modern tastes have created a huge demand for a certain level of "polish" to be recognized by the "mainstream audience".

Take a listen to your favorite band's album.  Go ahead, pick one.. take a listen, and tell me if you've heard that band sound EXACTLY the same live.  I'm not talking about imperfections in live versus recorded performance, as I'm pretty sure everyone is aware of auto-tune and "time correcting".  What I'm referring to is the particular sounds of instruments, their presence in the mix and the ability to hear every instrument clearly.

Live performances have a very very different sound to them.  Whether it's a tiny band performing without any PA system in a garage venue or a popular band playing at a huge arena venue, the mixes differ greatly.  The sounds between those environments also are very different.    Lets take the recording you listened to and imagine hearing that same song performed live.  It's almost impossible to get the exact same sonic signature out of each and every instrument, even the performance has to change.  Where once a vocalist might have been just above a whisper in your ear in the recording now has to sing much louder to achieve unity and harmony with the song in the context of a live performance.  The impact is as David Byrne mentioned: A product of the environment.

Even deeper however, the live performance is still subject to the technical and creative abilities and tools of the mixing engineers; both Front of House: who creates the mix for the audience, and the monitor engineer - who must often create individual mixes for the various performers on stage to hear what they need to perform at their best.  The original sound source may sound almost nothing alike when comparing the "raw" to the processed. 

So here we are today, with recording technology more easily accessible and available to more of the public than ever before.  The landscape of the music world shifting greatly as the industry that arose from it is now subject to change according to the freedom of the masses now able to "do it yourself" where once access and resources were save for the select group of those chosen based on their "sell-ability".  The sea of music online and available in stores now is so vast it is almost as if the magic of the impulse buy has left us.  People hear demos online of bands that are "less than polished" and it has become so saturated that the likelihood of the audience connecting with it puts them off to the possibility of spending money on a product when they feel it is inferior. 

That particular magical allure has faded and people spend less on the impulse buy to pay homage to the artist for their ideas.  It may not be the artist's fault at all in fact; the idea may be a great one.  However, it may have been poorly executed, or just not right for the particular sonic signature that was achieved.  Music is highly emotional, and the sonic impact it has is the driving factor that must be executed precisely or else the emotional impact is lost.

An individual can pick up an instrument, a microphone, and a recording interface to a computer and easily make their ideas into a product available on a global market.  That's a lot of power.  However, the expectation of the modern audience has also never been higher.  We expect to hear perfect music.  The best possible representation of the idea or concept that lets the listener transcend the medium and connect with the idea internally - emotionally, intellectually, or otherwise. 

I've heard the phrase "loudness war" many times since I've pursued the audio engineering path and today i'm less and less convinced it is simply about that anymore.  The revolution of independent freedom from the tradition of the market being closed doors has also put a lot of scrutiny on it.  It's both helped and hurt it.  I'm more convinced the loudness war isn't as relevant as is the war on education.  The technology may be available to just about anyone now, but the education and understanding of how sound and music work are still (if not more) important and no more or less available than before. 

I just thought I'd post something in between all the jobs I've been busy with.  There will be more updates coming soon as we head in to the final days of the EP project, and should have several video updates for them soon.

I pose a question, and I hope everyone who wishes to leave their answers in the comments below be unafraid of criticism for it.  It's your opinion and it is most welcome.  Do you think that audio engineers are as much a part of the music now as the artist who wrote and/or performed the material?