Inaugurating a new category of posts.
I like microphones. I confess I’ve been accused on occasion (mostly by drummers) of using too many microphones. But this is ridiculous. I think…
"Now patch the 421 through the Neve... Nope... How about the 57..."
My buddy Keller Glass recently posted an amusing reaction on his blog to a December NPR piece on the Loudness War. In his post, Keller offered a succinct differentiation of dynamic-range compression and digital compression—two often-confused audio concepts. (The part where he compares encoding MP3s to excoriating flesh is especially nice.)
I’d actually heard the NPR essay and had planned on writing something in response. What follows, then, might be considered a companion piece to Keller’s writing, and perhaps the beginning of a friendly dialog between blogs on this and other subjects.
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There is a penchant in popular discourse for using language of conflict to characterize our reaction to any pervasive cultural affliction. It’s a tendency shared by politicians, pundits, and common individuals. We’ve embarked famously on a “war on drugs,” a “war on poverty,” a “war on terror,” and now (with appropriate anticlimax) a war on…“loudness”?
Such phrases are supposed to be inspiring, as they tacitly cast us in a heroic struggle against an insidious—if frustratingly abstract—foe. The problem with such rhetoric, however rousing, is that it isn’t particularly useful: How exactly do you wage a war on poverty—or loudness for that matter—anyway?
This is hilarious—although I’d thought all A&R guys had been canned in the destabilizing of the recording industry.
WARNING: There’s ample profanity in this video, so put the kiddies to bed before watching.
Enjoy.
I’ll probably get slammed for this, but I couldn’t resist. Watch the attached video and try to figure out if Spoon (I love Spoon. I really do. Let me rhapsodize about them for a moment…) got their most recent record (the wonderful Transference) mastered by renowned Masterdisk engineer Howie Weinberg (who has done projects for, um, U2, Nirvana, The Clash, and The Chili Peppers, to name a few)—or by Joe Pesci.
In all seriousness, it’s priceless. My favorite part is when Weinberg asks “How do you leak a record? Do you have to put it on a web site to do that?” Or perhaps when he explains how his photo ended up on the back of a Public Enemy record.
Good fun. Enjoy.
Calling all ProTools users, there’s a new (well, to me, at least) blog out there dedicated to Digidesign’s (err, Avid’s) “Advanced Instrument Research” group—the folks responsible for designing and updating the company’s latest virtual instruments and plug-ins.
Here’s their home-page greetings:
Welcome to the AIR Users Blog, a huge community for users of Pro Tools and AIR. Over the last months it has grown to bring an even greater remit and advice to the community, expanding into other areas of software and instruments used by the music community.
We get around 40,000 visitors a month checking out over 500 free patches for Structure, over 100 HD FREE videos and much more, so welcome.
Go check it out.
“We should also remember that no machine is a wizard, as we are beginning to think, and we must not expect our electronic devices to compose for us.”
— Edgard Varese (The Electronic Medium, 1962)
Greg Kot, music critic for the Chicago Tribune and author of two great music books of the past few years—Wilco: Learning How To Die (2004) and Ripped: How The Wired Generation Revolutionized Music (2009)—is one of the best chroniclers of contemporary music culture. His blog, Turn It Up, is always a great read.
While wandering casually across cyber-land over the past few days, looking for interesting retrospectives on the past decade in music (as opposed to all the perfunctory, self-important, vacuous “Best Of” lists), I came across Kot’s December 18th blog entry. Like Jon Pareles’ piece today in the Times, it’s an apt compendium of the salient music trends of the last ten years. Enjoy.
Jon Pareles, one of the fine music critics at the Old Gray Lady, has a concise, astute retrospective in today’s Times on the the digital revolution underpinning the music of the “aughts.” Enjoy.
In today’s music-making climate, to suggest that the recording studio should be considered an “instrument”—no less a compositional tool than the piano or guitar—is a bit like saying the world is round, digital files will supplant CDs, and the demise of the traditional record industry is imminent. It’s one of those blithe claims someone makes at a cocktail party—like “isn’t it cold of late”—to which everyone within earshot inanely nods.