Required Viewing.

Sound City: Real to Reel.

This movie produced by Dave Grohl of Nirvana/Foo Fighters should be viewed by every aspiring musician/"producer"/engineer. There are things here that can only be explained by the people who etched their mark in the history of music.

There is something to be said for performance. Interaction between musicians. Grohl keeps mentioning the human element. It's so true. When people are playing off of each others vibe there is something in the air that you have to experience. It's not tangible but it's real. If you've ever been in a small club with a band that just mesh so well together. Their performance is so good you wish you had a bottle to capture it so that you could experience it again and again. That is what Sound City is about.

There's something else. There is the Neve console. No ordinary console. This is one of 4 in the world. I've had the privilege of having touched one but unfortunately, as my mentor said it, I was unable to appreciate it at the time. He was right. Now having heard and compared Neve pres and eqs to other more current  products, I wish I had been able to spend more time with that desk.

They take the time to isolate the drums in the video. They do sound so sweet. You would be hard pressed to get that sound out of another console. Not without some work would it come. That console and two inch tape. It's a magic formula that could not be easily attained.

But, these are not the only components to the Sound City vibe. It was the producers who made the atmosphere and the musicians who performed their music together in that sound stage.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against technology. I think it's great that the average joe can go into his bedroom and "produce" a song with almost zero budget. Let's face it. 95% of those kids don't buy their software. They steal it. Never the less, just about anyone can cut and paste a song together these days. The problem I have with that is that it's sterile.

Where is the talent? Put that kid in front of a piano, a drum kit, give him a trumpet, a mandolin and what can they do? Is their talent there?

Maybe.

Sneaky Buggers!

I'm getting tired of it. The internet is full of snoops and infiltrators. Does anyone respect your privacy anymore? I'm talking about those add ons, extensions, toolbars, information harvesters that install on your computer when you are not paying attention.

The internet is rife with these pests. It used to be that there were options. You used to be able to deselect an install or deny acceptance of a term of service so that a particular software would not get installed onto your computer with your intended software. Not so much anymore. Many freeware downloads force you to install these malware. They claim it's not malware but I consider it malware. If it installs on my system without my permission, it's unwelcome.

I realize that freware may come at a price. There are chances you take. Some companies offer an option to donate, which I am more than willing to do if I find the software useful. And, I have in the past for software that I have felt was exceptional. The problem is that there are companies out there who are taking what otherwise is freeware and attaching them to installers which have these kinds of malware.

Software like Spybot Search and Destroy, Hamster Free Video Converter among others. DO NOT DOWNLOAD SOFTWARE FROM ANYONE OTHER THAN THE DEVELOPER. I realize this should be second nature but even CNet(previously download.com) has these malware on their site. It's frustrating to say the least.

I'm talking specifically of:

• Babylon (translator)
• Whitesmoke
• Mystart

I know that there are others and these are growing. The internet is turning into a minefield of spyware and malware. Be alert! I have loaded sites which automatically try to make you save a file that you may not have even clicked on. Don't click save. Don't click ok. Sure anyone doing so would be stupid right? No, it can happen and I am pretty diligent about keeping my computer clean.

These extensions can be extremely difficult to get rid of and if you are using Google Chrome, good luck. Chrome doesn't have about:config (a deep configuration profile that you can access via the address bar of FireFox). Even more difficult to remove in Internet explorer.

Educate yourself and stay alert. Some very innocent looking sites can have these kinds of malware.

Check these pages out:

Babylon hell
Undwanted Extensions
Whitesmoke Hell
Mystart Hell

Safe surfing folks. 

Celebration Day

It's been a while but life has gotten in the way.....or life has taken place and the things in the way had to move over.

I went to watch the screening of Led Zeppelin's Celebration Day. The show was sold out at the Scotiabank Theater in Downtown Vancouver. The Blu Ray will be out soon but I had to see this on the big screen.

Essentially it's just concert footage of  "Led Zeppelin's" performance in 2007 in tribute to the late Ahmet Ertegun: founder of Atlantic Records. Almost the original Lineup consisting of Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and the late John Bonham's son, Jason.

I have never seen Led Zeppelin live but I've always wanted to. You know that if they were to tour today with that lineup, it would be thousands of dollars for nosebleeds. This was my one chance to see them up close and personal via the big screen.

I've seen The Song Remains the Same but this was so much better. Just concert footage. No extras. At least not in the theater. The picture is crystal clear and in many ways it's far better than I could ever hope to experience in a real concert. So much detail that I would never be able to see from a seat in the bleachers or from the floor for that matter.

Performance wise, I swear they are in better shape musically than they have been in a very long time. Not since the early eighties when Page was doing his thing with The Firm and Plant had his own band. True, Plant couldn't hit those high notes as easily anymore but his technique was impeccable.

Admittedly, Page has lost a bit of edge. It took him a little while to warm up. His playing was a bit stiff at first. Attributed to arthritis I would have to assume but once he got warmed up, he was unstoppable. There were a few points where he was blatantly out of key but he slipped back in just fine. This wasn't a jazz "out". They were mistakes but dealt with skillfully. Professionally.

Jones was and is an amazing musician. It's hard to imagine how Zep would sound without him. Not just his bass playing but his keys and mandolin. He's an incredible multi-instrumentalist. The movie just cements this fact. There would be a large hole in the sound without him. It just made me appreciate him even more.

Jason's not his dad. He doesn't pull off those super fast triplets like his dad. He cheats using a double bass pedal. Nevertheless. His father would be proud. He's a worthy substitute.

You'll have to watch the movie yourself to really appreciate how good they really are as a band.

What was really interesting was the showing. For the first twenty minutes of the show, the volume was really low. I mean we were whispering and it was louder than the sound of the movie. People were complaining. Every few minutes there was the chanting of Turn It Up!

Eventually they stopped the film and the manager came out and tried his best to explain to us that they had the sound cranked and that the quality of the digital file was just bad. That's right, Jimmy Page(producer) and John Paul Jones(producer) who had a cumulative career spanning nearly eighty years were able to produce this fantastic movie but were not able to make it loud enough. "The audio quality is just bad" said the manager. What?

Then the audience started chiming in on what they thought the problem was. Some guy behind us saying that they didn't master it properly. Yeah, what would John Paul Jones know about mastering? He's only been producing for the past three decades. What would he know.

There was obviously something wrong with the speaker system. I had the suspicion that they had a problem with the surround sound. There was no sound from the side and rear speakers and the sub woofers were out as well. I looked over at my wife and said "when they get the surround sound going the volume will be back".

The manager was very apologetic and  offered everyone two movie passes but they would continue to play the rest of the film. About thirty people left the theater. After about ten minutes into the show, the volume was suddenly dramatically louder, there was sound from the concert audience behind us and reverb from the sides. Surround sound was back up and all was good. Now, I'm not saying that I was dead right but I don't think I was far off.

That all being said, I have to question if it was a mistake at all. The movie passes don't cost the theater anything. In fact, if we do come back for a movie, we'll be paying the outrageous prices for popcorn and drinks. I mean that's almost the same as the price of the movie! Popcorn and a drink is nearly eleven dollars.

Was it a mistake? If so, someone got fired that night. If not, smart marketing.

Every Day Sunshine

Just watching this documentary about Fishbone.

Great band. These guys were an anomaly. At a time when people were getting pigeon holed into "styles" out comes Fishbone. They weren't black enough for the blacks. They weren't quite punk or ska and they weren't metal. But somehow they incorporated all of those things and more.

What struck me though was their "discovery". I don't even remember who it was that caught the show and signed them. Yeah I suppose I could rewind but at this point, I just want to maintain my focus on this. They started talking about how everyone in the music industry was scoping the scene looking to sign the bands that the kids were into.

To get to the point, where has that ideal gone? The one and possibly only good thing about big record companies is that they were a filter. They sifted out the tripe and found the music that really hit home. The music that mattered to people. They developed that. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. But at the least, they took the time to try and filter out the dregs.

That's gone now. Now it's up to us to sift out the crap to find something decent and new. There's the odd thing you'll find on youtube but it's few and far in between. I have bought a cd from a guy on the tube. It's rare but it happens. But the work is tiresome. I find myself relying on word of mouth but often it's touch and go.

I welcome the home studio revolution but I long for the days when a band would build it's fan base on merit instead of "likes" on a youtube page. There's too much crap out there. Fine. Can we put the control in the hands of smaller indie labels? Can we forget the big boys but still keep some sort of filter?

There's Candyrat . Is there an indie label for Rock? Metal? Jazz? World? We need that.

Studio InSession

Watching Studio In Session. I've passed by this show so many times. I don't know why. I wish more people would watch this to see what a real band with real musicians is like. Not some dude on a laptop with loops and a sequencer. People who practice and are tight when they play together. It's not something you can get from a program. It's personal, communal.

I appreciate that there is something to be said for a well programmed techno dance tune but it's not about music. Listen to the radio and you can pretty well substitute lyrics song to song and they will fit. When you are in a band, you're not confined to the box. Maybe it's a symptom of the genre but 99% of dance tunes don't stray far from a very generic formula. There might be a few variations but you can almost anticipate how each song will progress.

With a band, you're not bound to that. Just the fact that you're dealing with a group of people makes the possibilities so much more vast. Everybody hears things in different ways. When you get a bunch of people with different ideas together, some real magic can happen.....if they can get along on anything. Sometimes the conflict foments creativity.

I know some people find organic music boring. Is it the music or is it the listener? Are you really listening? Are you bored because you're not hearing what you expect to hear in the format that you want to hear it? sometimes you just need to listen a little deeper. A good song can take time to develop. Sometimes there's some background to give. Some time needed for the story to build up.

A band is the ultimate human interaction that is not sexual. It's people feeding off of each other's vibe and paying it back. That can be a very sweet thing.

A sequencer plays everything back perfect but it only plays things back one way. Sure there are programs like Ableton's Live! that allow you to do some very limited improvisation but it's not like you're playing every note. You're triggering sequences or loops. You can't make one trigger more expressive than another really. Not like you can with any manual instrument. And let's face it, one "DJ" on stage setting off triggers isn't really a performance. It's Aural masturbation.

Lesson Learned

I got an email from my ISP the other day saying that one of my computers was being used to do a denial of service attack. Apparently somebody managed to hack into one of my computers and use it to attack someone else's server or whatever. The strange thing about it was that they were using an old virus. Really old. Something that had been dealt with may service packs ago in XP. I'm on Windows 7 x 64 now.

Strange. It kind of made sense. I suspected that my laptop had been hit by a virus I couldn't figure out why my laptop drive was 95% full. So I had to do some serious work just to get my laptop useable again. That was before I got the email from Telus. It took me a good day just to get the hundreds of gigs of gibberish off of that hard drive. It was painful.

So the next logical thing to do was to scan for viruses. I did and found nothing. Shortly after that was when I got the email from Telus. They gave me a whack of links to try and clean my computers from any infection. I scanned both of my computers with every tool they suggested and found nothing. Seriously. Not a single thing.

I figured I was good. I emailed Telus back and told them that the problem had been dealt with. A few days go by and I get another email from Telus telling me that my IP was suspected of doing another denial of service attack! What? So I go through another day of scanning and updating and nothing. I changed all my passwords for everything. I change the settings on my router and hope that that settles it. Maybe someone was using my wirless to do the DOS attack.

I walk into my bedroom and look over at my old laptop. Man I had to get rid of that thing. I set it up to see if I could find a way to make it useful. At the least for the kids to surf on. I tried Damn Small Linux, Lubuntu, Windows 2000 and finally settled back with Windows XP.  I took the thing into the living room and opened it up. Lo and behold it was running. I had no idea. That thing had been on probably a good month  or so. I didn't even realize it. No wonder neither my desktop nor my new laptop scanned positive for viruses. They were clean! And, the issue with my new laptop? It seems my old laptop was being used to attack my new laptop. HUH? That's just weird. I used DBan to flatten the hard drive and finally pitched that thing into the recycle depot.

Avid are ditching the 003 line. The Digi interfaces are being dropped. No more support. If you own a Digi, it's time to sell or you can wait for the next thing. The next thing you say? Yeah. I know this is going to cause an uproar when it get's released. We've seen the video. Here it is:

"This is a prototype" but it exists. They could put it out this year but for now they are pushing the Native cards. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with the Native cards. They are a nice bit of hardware. I don't know if they are the holy grail for home studios that Avid claim that they are but they do offer some nice interfaces and then there's HDX and compatibility with their future 64 bit release(finally).

What I fear is that in the very near future there will be this new TB interface which will not only be as close to latency free as an external peripheral could possibly be but, I suspect that this new interface will very likely be able to run both Pro Tools as well as PT HDX. It's also highly likely that this interface will have built in DSP a la UA's Apollo. I have a strong suspicion that the Apollo is in fact a fore gleam of the new interface if they did not take part in the development altogether.

In fact, I can't help but think that the next iteration of Pro Tools will be further unbound. What do I mean? It's very likely that you will be able to buy Pro Tools ....let's call it "11" or HDX1. Yes. Just like Steinberg have Cubase and Cubase Studio or more like Nuendo and Cubase. HD 10 as it is will run without their hardware. That's right. You can run HD 10 on any machine so long as you have the license on an iLok. So, it just stands to reason.

I know a lot of people were saying before Pro Tools 9 that Avid would never let go of that grasp. They would never unleash their software from their hardware but there it is now. Ever since Pro Tools 9 they have given you the choice. I think they are trying to do this in baby steps. It's kind of retarded but I can understand their reasoning.

Let's face it. The world of media production is full of snobs. Not the least of whom are Pro Tools certified engineers. I'm not talking about anyone in specific but I can tell you that the air at those Avid presentations is thick. Thick with testosterone and knowitallism. They've got to let them down easy or they will be choked. They're gonna be choked anyway but at least this will lessen the blow.

I wanted to go on about how they are leaving the Digi owners in the lurch but that just seems petty. Why bother continuing development and support for an interface that has never worked all that great in the first place if they're just going to dump it in the next year? They've got to get those upgrade dollars somehow.

Nothing against the Digi interfaces either. They are really nice units. It's the drivers that really suck. If they could just get those drivers up to par, they would sell a lot more units. I was on the verge of buying one the other day.

Anyway. Just trying to stir the pot a bit. Maybe create some discussion.