Prometheus

Transistors for me. When one technology supersedes another, it's usually for good reasons like functionality, versatility, reliability... In the 1990's when I was first getting into sound engineering, a lot of engineers over the age of thirty, old f*cks much like I am now, told me that digital was shit and tape was warmer and would never be replaced by computers... Now, I don't know anyone who would want to swap their Pro Tools rig for reels of tape, brass scissors and a tube of glue. Going for the "magical" qualities that the inadequacies of valves introduce to a sound seems to me a bit like deliberately inducing aliasing errors while encoding an mp3 out of a sense of nostalgia for the early days of the algorithm.

Graeme... I couldn't agree more. Everytime I get back in the studio I feel I've returned to my spiritual home, much as a young bird returning to the nest, often with a nice Rioja to help push the faders to unity... Rock and Roll!

To treat it as a laugh and not put a lot of emotional investment in it. All get rich quick scams, even legal ones, have one thing in common. It's the person who invents the scam who gets rich, not the person who falls hook, line and sinker for it.

The only problem with the "do or die attitude" is that out in the real world, there are bills piling up, mortgages to be paid, families to support et cetera. It's hard to build a career while you're focusing all your time and energy on being the next David Bowie.

I think a lot of these people are shot down in flames by their friends who out of misplaced kindness set them up for a fall by giving them a thoroughly dishonest perception of how, shall we say marketable, their performances are. If I had a quid for every time some young rascal, or often even middle aged rascal, had told me that he or she was going to make me famous I wouldn't have to work for a living. In the spirit of honesty I always explained to them that: a. This was a song that I'd heard a thousand times before and fame and glory still await. and b. If they did get involved with a record company, the first thing that would happen to the sound engineer who produced the demos is that he'd be dropped like a hot brick.

I've actually been involved in producing a backing track for a reality television show act. I can't discuss details yet, because the show won't air until January. What have I learned? I think it's very important to see these shows for what they are. They don't push the envelope, they don't produce anything of Earth shattering artist merit or value. They're essentially a television based cabaret or karaoke. I enjoyed working on this because it was fun and I'm looking forward to hearing my work, a few seconds of it at any rate, on national television. That said, I am not taking the matter at all seriously, these shows are about having fun, and that's what they should be about. I very much doubt that I'll be retiring on the royalties anytime soon or be harangued by overzealous, sexually adventurous groupies over this, although if either of those things does occur, I shall do my best to be stoic about it. On another point, the guy who sings in Snow Patrol is pretty average looking and not the best singer in the world, but I absolutely love their song Run. I'd much rather listen to them performing it their way than listen to an over performed and over produced cover where Leona Lewis absolutely f*cking massacres a great piece of art. I can't even understand how she won X-factor, she's the vocal equivalent of a whirling dervish.

Led Zeppelin kept constantly changing their sound and sound engineers, apparently because Jimmy Page would not tolerate anyone other than himself being credited as the sound of Led Zeppelin. That said, each album did have a sound... It's important to have some kind of consistency across an album. Or is it? I don't know. You can find compilation albums that work very well where there is no real connection between the artists on them.

If fame is the goal rather than making some kind of constructive contribution, unremitting hard work and constant gigging pales by comparison to applying for a vapid reality television show where you'll be selected for or against on the grounds of God knows what basis... Either way, at least you're guaranteed to be famous for five minutes.

I think fifteen years would be acceptable. If a company genuinely does invest in an artist, they deserve a chance to get some kind of return on it.

I'd agree... It sounds like bad news to me. I don't think this is being done to protect artists. I think copyright should end when the artist dies... If I write a song and die tomorrow, I think it should go into the public domain tomorrow.

It's the things they feel they're entitled to do though!

Sorry if the above post is a little bit of a rant. I do try to detest all human beings equally, but I can't help reserving a special place for the music industry aristocracy.

Reading biographies of musicians is a hobby of mine. John Randall Taraborrelli very candidly details how Madonna payed her early producers like John "Jellybean" Benitez and Patrick Leonard by f*cking them in the literal sense and then when she was finished with them f*cking them in the metaphorical sense. He also describes thinking her a petulant self involved brat with limited talent on their first meeting in 1983. To be fair, he does detail how she mellowed and became deeper and more thoughtful with age. I guess even an addiction to a mind altering brew like power can be controlled by a clever addict. I don't doubt that Lady GaGa, despite still being a slip of a girl, has already forgotten more than I know about the music business. There isn't a day goes by when I'm not thankful for that because what experience I've had with the industry has left me feeling rather cross. What I think is sad is that artists and musicians can't concentrate on making the music and people in gray suits can't stick to doing business. If there were a principle like the US separation of Church and State between music industry executives and performing artists, I can't help thinking the mainstream music we hear in the Western World might not be such an exclusive conformist club for dross mass appeal nonsense calibrated to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The rather cynical penser occurs that this is because the human race is composed almost exclusively of shallow imbeciles who spend their lives being circled by be-suited sharks who want their money. This is the kind of talk that sends me into such a fit of depression that it makes me want to reach for my revolver and blow my own head off to the sound of Kirlian Camera's Ascension, which is possibly the most beautiful song that nobody wants to pay for that I've ever heard. It wasn't always like this though. In the past there was something in the mainstream for people who wanted to hear music with some kind of artistic merit to it. We've witnessed an historic first in the people who run the performing arts industries, the metamorphosis of butterflies back into maggots.

I would go for a Shure SM58 if I were you... It's a good quality dynamic mic, very rugged and versatile and good value for money. To give you a benchmark you can listen to, the vocals on "Never Mind The Bollocks" were recorded using an SM58, so if you follow it'll give you an idea of what can be done with them.

Speaking of Lady GaGa, I actually saw a thing on Youtube where she played one of her songs the way she writes them, with her voice and a piano. Her musical knowledge and skill is absolutely phenomenal. I don't know whether she's self taught or not, but she can certainly play to Grade 8 level, possibly beyond. What the public end up hearing is a a dumbed down version of the songs that focus on gimmickry rather than music. Now, I have nothing against her videos, I think they're rather fun to watch and I find her flagrant use of her sexuality rather stimulating, but I do think it's a shame she can't play her songs in accordance with her own vision of them. When it comes to Madonna on the other hand, I'd question whether she's even really all that interested in music. From reading biographies of her I don't think she particularly cared about the details of how she achieved fame and power, as long as she did. What she could do was sing passably and act quite embarrassingly badly, but like Lady GaGa she could work some real magic with sophisticated dance routines and stylized sexuality in videos. That was the formula that worked for her. That and the fact that in her youth she was vain, shallow, self obsessed and without principle... She would walk over anyone and anything to get where she wanted.

I concur with this 100%...

One of the big problems these days is that the goal is no longer to produce a great product or to generate positive critical acclaim or to push the envelope. We're in a situation where fame itself is the goal and to achieve it people don't care whether they sell their soul and release dross, mass appeal drivel. Looking back at some of the great artists of the past, the stuff they created resonated emotionally and hit a nerve because they actually had something to say. This does not seem to be appreciated in the modern age, and I'm pretty sure it's not human nature that has changed greatly in the last twenty years. It's the method statements of the performing arts industries that have.

There's a huge misunderstanding about mastering, the difficulties involved in it, the need for specialists to do it et cetera. Back in the good old days of tiny dynamic ranges, ridiculously miss-managed stereo fields, acetate and physical cutting needles, it was necessary to have a specialist master a disc because any phasing problems in the low end could damage the cutting equipment, which was a very expensive piece of kit. Frankly, in this day and age we have stereo mixing so clearly understood and well in hand that any recording and mixing engineer worth his salt should never have low end phasing problems in a mix. You'd have to seriously not know what you're doing to allow that to happen. Still, this mystique remains, perpetuated no doubt by mastering engineers, that ordinary human beings can't handle the process and that you should never master something you've mixed and that all mild mannered mastering engineers are actually from Krypton. It's absurd. Anyone who studies the processes involved in mastering and practices doing it can become good at it, and whether you've recorded and mixed what you master makes absolutely no difference as long as you have a reasonable process and follow it diligently.

I wouldn't mixdown to Mp3 if I were you... It's a lossy format. You want to make your final master at 16 bit dynamic range and 44.1KHz sample rate to keep it above the human Nyquist Rate. Apart from that, the equipment you're using and the way you're routing it sounds reasonable. It just depends what you're doing with it.

That would be the American Government and Military Industrial Complex, who also have to be credited with the Priority Driven Interrupt Request and the Micro Processor Revolution among other great things. I've actually noticed that there is still a lot of great underground music on Myspace and Youtube for people who can be bothered looking for it. I would love to see the people behind that kind of stuff get a bit more recognition. If William Blake, Lord Byron, Pink Floyd or The Who had come of age today, they'd never have made it past Simon Cowell.

You'd be swimming against a current so strong that if it's ever tried a lot of musicians will drown trying... I suppose with the industry in a creative meltdown as it is at the moment and turning it's attention to bland cheaply produced reality television, someone will come along who will fill the void sooner or later.

I don't think the people at the helm of the music industry are inherently any worse than the people at the helm of any other industry. I think the problem is that the performing arts industries seem to be overlooked for any of the kind of sensible regulation that other industries are subject to. In the industry I currently work in, if they were to con me into doing a job for them on a false prospectus and then decide not to bother paying me, I could take them to town over it. They'd be forced to compensate me financially and the media would crucify them. In the music industry, that kind of thing is par for the course. Strangely, I haven't heard so much as a whimper about it from the Musicians Union, although there was an article in one of the national newspapers here about the BBC and ITV engaging in this kind of practice earlier this year. The ITV's spokesman made some kind of weasel worded excuse about a miscommunication and I don't recall that the BBC even commented on the matter.

This brings to mind the infamous phone call from Madonna to Jackie Onassis when she asked Onassis "Do you know who the f*ck I am?" I have, and would again, reply to that with "Yes, I know who you are. You're the pompous ass who shall never set foot in my studio again." You made yourself quite clear. I mean absolutely no disrespect, I just have a very different outlook to yourself. Not necessarily better or worse, just different. One of the great things about no longer having to rely on the music industry for money is that I do not have to be a shill for people I have no time for any more. I only take on the projects I want to nowadays. One thing I have noticed is that just about everyone involved in music agrees that the industry is shit until you actually start talking about really campaigning hard to change it, and then they suddenly cross the floor. I guess we would all rather sit is a boat that's full of gaping holes than risk swimming to a better boat.

In my experience there are very few people in the world who wake up in the morning wondering what evil they can do today. Most people do what they feel they are entitled to do. The sad thing is that they forget to send the lift back down to the people who come after them. They often forget that they are privileged to be where they are and that they gained the rights and the skills they enjoy through the help of other people who were on the upper floors before them. I include myself in this. There was a time when I had a lot of people saying "yes" to me a lot. As such, I constantly remind myself that I am the same as everyone else who's switched on a PC tonight, no better, no worse. I do take your point though... "Former ass-kisser who has just absolutely had enough and turned lone wolf who plays by his own rules and sees the status quo with total and utter contempt seeks gainful employment" just does not open many doors in the higher echelons of the degenerate and contemptible performing arts industry that we have the despondency inducing misfortune to be working under the domain of. I am also aware, painfully aware, that every time I point at any problems with the status quo of the recording industry, I cause deep offense to people I don't even know. That is not my intention.

I agree with Iain, that there's too much effect used... If I could make a suggestion it would be to take the video track there with the effect on it, overlay it on top of the dry track and mix them using the transparency on the overlay until you find a compromise where you can see clearly and have the desired effect on the track, in much the same way that was done with sound in the old days to balance dry and wet signals. I think the guitar playing is excellent and the basic idea is a good one.