Epic Tales of Epic Epicness Award
Florence and the Machine – Ceremonials
Another big, brash, over-the-top album from Florence Welch and company.  Big drums, lush orchestrations and arrangements, wailing vocals, but surprisingly much more cohesive and “album-like” than her debut.  It holds together well, but still manages to have single material like “What The Water Gave Me.” Also, the bonus tracks and demos on the limited editions are nearly as good as – in some cases, even better than – the album tracks.

Epic Tales of Epic Epicness Award II: The Epicness Strikes Back
M83: Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
This album is exhausting.  It’s great, in small doses.  Big gorgeous walls of sound, much more confident vocals than on previous efforts, catchy tunes, but at 22 tracks, it’s the sort of album you really need to set aside a block of time for.  Also the newfound love of vocal yelps and embellishments gets a little much after about 7 tracks. Still, it’s kind of an insanely breathtaking endeavor.

Rainbows, Suns and Moons Award
Above and Beyond: Group Therapy
A&B has always put out solid chunks of big room trance, from their collaboration with Oceanlab to the excellent Ajunabeats mix series.  But this is something…different.  It’s big, expansive trance, yes, but the instrumentals maintain a filmic quality (not the least of which is the track “Filmic”) and the vocal tracks do something rare for trance music: spotlight the vocals.  Instead of random Hawkshaw-esque sopranos dreamily singing about dreaming dreams over 4-on-the-floor beats, we instead get the sultry alto of Zoe Johnston front-and-center, and the crooning of Richard Bedford. It’s refreshing, and catchy.

If This Is Selling Out, I’ll Take It Award
Camo & Krooked: Cross the Line
C&K jump to the awesome Hospital Records for their full-length debut, and in doing so took a lot of flak from critics accusing them of commercializing their sound.  Yeah, their older stuff was harder, more neuro-funk stuff, and their new stuff is poppier and more in-line with what’ll get play on Radio One, but you know, I’m okay with that.  The title track is catchy as hell, “All Fall Down” dabbles in dubstep without devolving into bass-wobble cliché, and “Breezeblock” has an offkilter jump-up beat that helps keep the track interesting while guaranteeing hours of entertainment watching drugged-out club kids fall over.

Okay Music, Good Plugin, Awesome Advertisement Award
Dada Life
Dada Life has been making some waves in the electrohouse community, and they do write some bangers.  I wouldn’t consider them doing anything groundbreaking, but they’re fun.  However, they’ve teamed up with a software developer to emulate their processing chain to produce a plugin called “Sausage Fattener” (well, they ARE Austrian, so you knew a sausage was going to surface eventually).  The plugin is great, but likely to be overused to suck the dynamic range out of basslines for years.  Better still, though, is their promo video for the plugin, which shows racks of outboard gear patched into what I believe is a knockwurst.  Brilliant.

South London Party Music Award
Toddla T: Watch Me Dance
I don’t even know how to classify this album.  Elements of house, reggae, rock, old-school rave, breaks, grime, 2-step all sort of collide into a bunch of bangers, there’s not really a bad track in the bunch.  Not every one hits it out of the park the way the title track does, but every track would be at home on a boombox at a house party.

Dance Savvy Award
Katy B: On A Mission
The full-length by Katy B finally got a US release this year (even though it’s been out in the UK since mid-2010).  It’s all straight-up dance music.  A lot of it feels a bit calculated – hey look, here’s a UK Funky track with everything that entails – but whatever, it’s well-calculated, and she’s got a soulful diva voice that belies her young age and small stature.  She’s been smart enough to recruit top producers like Skream, Benny Ill, Benga and Geeneus to put together one banger after another, even if some of them are sort of cliché.

Next Best Thing Award
DJ Fresh Feat. Sian Evans: Louder
I’ve wanted a new Kosheen album for a while.  And I’ve wanted one with as much punch as their debut, but they’ve been busy trying to write rock songs and pop songs and the like.  So now their frontwoman is collaborating with dubstep/dnb artist DJ Fresh, and I couldn’t be happier.  “Louder” takes us through a range of tempos, glued together with Evans’ soulful croon.

Best Remix Album I Was Involved With (long player edition)
The Dark Clan: All My Ghosts
I mean, for real.  I was particularly pleased with the mix I was involved with, partially because I got to coin the term “Chaalstep” – but there are some mind-numbingly good mixes on this disc, including a frenetic stormer by a resurgent Boole, and mixes by Ego Likeness and Wade Alin that are mindblowers.

Best Remix Album I Was Involved With (extended player edition)
Little Red Wolf: If Only We Were Remixed
A sweet, all-girl country-folk-pop-americana band happens to have a fondness for electronica and related dance musics. So they recruit their friends in the genre to remix their tracks.  It’s kind of a brilliant move.  In the five tracks on the album, they cover indie-tronica, dubstep, bolllywood, symphonic metal, and industrial noise.

Production! Award.
Caustic: The Golden Vagina Of Fame and Profit
Matt was savvy on his debut for Metropolis, recruiting a number of his friends and connections to co-produce his tracks.  There’s still the manic energy and usual mix of rage, introspection and goofball humor, but with more polish than previous releases, thanks to Faderhead, Dan Clark, and others.

The Hell With Oversaturation Award
Ellie Goulding: Lights
It’s kind of fluffy, she’s got a vibrato that can cut glass, and she’s becoming ubiquitous enough to have toured with Katy Perry.  But dammit, “Lights” is just a hooky album. Good songwriting, good production, good performance.

Compilations I’ve Really Enjoyed
UKF Bass Culture (drum-n-bass, dubstep)
Hospitality Drum & Bass 2011 (drum-n-bass)
Shogun Audio Presents: Way of the Warrior (drum-n-bass)

The Bad:

Skrillex Fatigue
I like Sonny Moore.  I really do.  He’s getting a bit repetitive, yes, but he’s entertaining to watch, and knows how to write (for better or worse) the kind of twitchy bass drops that get the dancefloor moving.  But he’s EVERYWHERE, and not in a good way.  It doesn’t bother me if he’s remixing La Roux, but when he’s collaborating with Korn, well, that’s a bridge too far.  And he’s on the cover of Spin, Mixmag, and everywhere else.  Yawn.

“Complextro”
Did we really need a name for this?  It’s electrohouse guys who like chopping bits of basslines up.  We get it.  I think we’re on the 5th name for this genre in 15 years.

Katy Perry is a Brand
And not just Russell Brand.  The fact that she can host Saturday Night Live and NOT be a musical guest, despite any discernible acting talent, pretty much says it all.  Plus she was on the Simpsons making oral sex jokes.  Really?

Justin Bieber Has a Perfume
WTF.

“Friday”
Further proof that nobody has any idea why things go viral.

The Ugly:

The Resurgence of Twee Pop:
Look, I spent much of the 90’s listening to pop bands fronted by pixie-ish british girls, and the first decade of the new millennium with Imogen Heap and others like her, so I’m generally okay with the twee.  But it certainly feels like every new indie rock band is some guy with a sensitive neckbeard, a cardigan, and a ukulele trying to be “quirky” and writing painfully delicate, breathy, sugary, wispy melodies about nothing in particular.

Justin Vernon’s Goddamned Cabin.
I’m not a huge Bon Iver fan.  They’re decent at what he/they do/does, I admit, but it’s just not my thing.  But for the love of god, I cannot bear to read another piece of press about them, because it is rare to find one that doesn’t dwell on the fact that he recorded the album in a “cabin in the woods of northern WI.”  Oh my god, a guy recorded something in a home studio.  Quel surprise!  First off, they do have things like “power” and “internet access” and “indoor plumbing” in the outskirts of Eau Claire – just because he’s not recording in New York City doesn’t mean he’s in a Unabomber shack.  Second…so what?  Is that the entire narrative?  It was recorded in a cabin?  That’s all you got?

“Witch House”
Conitnues. To.  Be.  The. Worst.  Genre.  Name.  Ever.  Additionally, I generally dislike genres that as a rule spend an awful lot of time and effort sounding like they spent no time and effort.  Basically it’s a bunch of hipsters who found a 12” of “In The Flat Field” thinking that nobody else has done this since.  What’s interesting is that they seem to be reinventing goth and industrial from first principles, seemingly unaware of the existence of the years between 1980 and 1997.

Korn Invented Dubstep
No.  No they didn’t.  Just because you use half-time drums doesn’t make you relevant.  You still suck.

This might lead you to believe I’m some sort of an Apple fanboy.  This isn’t strictly accurate. The fact is, I’m an Apple Fanboy the way I’m an Indoor Plumbing Fanboy – it’s simply something that’s been an omnipresent part of my life for so long that it almost doesn’t register anymore.

I learned how to use and program computers in 1980 on an Apple ][+, and ever since then, I’ve used and/or owned a variety of Apple products almost continuously, from the first golden era, through the dark Scully/Amelio times when even “The Simpsons” mocked their near-demise, through their second renaissance to today. Without the Apple II, I wouldn’t’ve discovered that I love programming, which led to many opportunities for me down the line. Without the Mac, it’d be a lot harder for me to write the music I do. Without the iPod, it’d be a lot harder to distribute the music I make. None of it would be impossible, but all of it would be a lot harder.

So to say Steve Jobs has had some impact on my life is pretty much a large understatement.

I’ve never aspired to be like Steve. He’s not really a personal hero to me. But then, neither is Thomas Edison or Henry Ford. They’re each guys who had many personal quirks that made them disliked or even feared, and they probably aren’t necessarily personalities to model oneself after. Nonetheless they each made huge contributions to the shape of modern technology and industry. They may not always have personally been the innovators coming up with the great ideas themselves, but they knew how to pick and choose ideas (and pick and choose colleagues and employees to develope those ideas) and bring them to the masses in a way that made the ideas seem self-evident, the resulting products ubiquitous, and their own names immediately recognizable. There were cars before the Model T; there were mp3 players before the iPod. The singular vision was not to respond to the needs of the market, but to anticipate them; to take “niche” ideas and use them to transform society as a whole.

One of Steve’s peculiar gifts was to not merely make these products, but make people excited about them.  What other company gets major-network news coverage from a new phone rollout?  When was the last time CNN speculated on a new laptop that wasn’t an Apple?  Somehow, he could make the ordinary seem extraordinary.  His much-ridiculed “reality distortion field”, that strange mix of charisma, geekish enthusiasm, and laser-like intensity, attracted interest in ways no mere list of product features ever could.

I cannot deny, ever, the profound effect Steve Jobs and his company have had on my life in particular. I owe a lot to Jobs (and Woz, too.  And Linus and Bill and Dennis and Bjarne, and…). Love him or hate him, cast him as angel or devil in the silicon valley story, nobody can deny the fact that Steve Jobs managed to make profound changes to the way we think about computers, helping transform them from intimidating beasts in the domain of eggheads in the back room to friendly appliances we hold in our hands.

Goodbye, Steve. It’s been Insanely Great.

First, he kinda seemed a little hurt that they comapred him to a “snuggie” – you know, one of those blankets with sleeves? – due to the fact that he was characterized as having a sucessful product marketed primarily as a novelty item. He hems and haws about that a bit, but that seemed to wound him slightly. His fans seemed even more wounded by that fact. But you know what? He is. I mean, all pop music is kind of snuggie-like when you come right down to it. I’m a snuggie. We’re all snuggies. We make the product that nobody really needs, but some people want because they think it’d be fun to have. The intent of the artist is sort of beside the point – I’m sure the inventor of the snuggie was thinking he was really on to something useful, too, just as I think my songs express something interesting. It doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, since it’s entertainment at the end and we don’t have any final control over how people perceive it. It’s probably a poor metaphor, but at the core, the Planet Money people grasped one of the painful truths about pop music. We’re not, generally, changing the world. JoCo gets that, to a degree, when he says that the Grateful Dead, Nirvana, and Madonna are also all snuggies. Well, right. Difference between them is, while Nirvana may have appealed primarily to Seattle grunge kids intially, they crossed over into the mainstream because they had a fairly broad appeal.  JoCo writes the kind of folksy alt-rock about DNA, supervillians and giant squid that makes TMBG look downright accessible – the subject matter is specific enough that it will always exclude a larger audience, with a nod and a wink to those that get it. It’s what I call the “XKCD effect.” It’s a very specifically targeted sort of act, and it happens to be towards a fanbase that is both rabidly protective of their pop culture signifiers and also one that is generally underserved in that specific kind of medium – there just aren’t a whole lot of geek-specific singer-songwriters. He’s got himself a stable set of fans for the rest of his life, but  as much as they’re a lot of fun, “Code Monkey” and “Ikea” aren’t about to become the next “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

I say this as a guy who owns a lot of JoCo stuff and likes it, and have seen him live. He’s a good, engaging performer, and I can respect him as a guy who gave up his 9-5 to basically bang out solid songs on a cheap mic and a laptop. That’s cool and all. I wish I had the guts to pull something like that off. However, as awesome as that is, it’s not exactly a lofty vantage point from which to stand and make pronouncements about the music industry. Anyone with a blog can do that. I’m doing that right now.

More tellingly, his blog post turned into a “JoCo’s rules for success!” sort of post. He comes out and says

“I make songs that are good and then I sell them (and concert tickets, and Tshirts) to the people who want them – that’s my business model, and it’s patently obvious that it’s replicable because I stole it from every other recording artist in the world. “

Well, um…DUH. So the business model is “make good stuff people want and sell it.” That’s about as meaningful as…well, it’s not really meaningful.

Dan Clark wrote a lovely response to this.

Coulton downplays the assertion that he “won the Internet Lottery” because “It’s accurate but unhelpful, because it fails to draw a meaningful distinction between me and anyone else who has had success in this business.” The Beatles, after all, won the British Invasion lottery, he says.

That’s where it all falls apart, and comes down to something I rant about constantly. Success in most artistic endeavors depends heavily on one thing: circumstance. Success as an indie artist doubly so. It’s always about winning the proverbial lottery, whether you’re The Beatles or Jonathan Coulton or Rebecca Black. If Brian Epstein hadn’t gone to the Cavern Club on that specific night, the Beatles might never have gone beyond playing german strip clubs.   To assert that chance and timing didn’t play an enormous role in the success of any artist is arrogant.  Sure, talent plays a part – it doesn’t matter how lucky you are if you suck so badly nobody wants to hear you.  Still, you can be incredibly talented and unlucky, too.

This sounds remarkably cynical, I know, but think about it; how many excellent songwriters and artists have you heard or seen over the years that have entirely failed to “succeed” (for some undefined value of “success”, but that’s a different rant of mine)? Rarely can anyone tell me that [really awesome band] wasn’t trying hard enough or wasn’t talented and wasn’t writing songs that people want to hear. It could be anything – they weren’t playing the right bar on the right night, or the guy who would kick off some viral revolution on the internet showed up two songs too late, or something. No matter how awesomely talented you are and how hard you work, you can still never get the lucky break you need. The uniquely transient nature of music and art pretty much ensures that sort of time-based dependence.  

You can go to bandcamp.com and go through page after page of great bands following the same sort of “business model” of Mr. JoCo – indie distro, performer-owned rights, open-source creative commons, etc – who will never sell more than a few thousand albums in their lives. Hell, I’m one of them. The business model will work, to an extent, for anyone, but nobody will ever quite replicate it again, because what got many of the successful artists the press coverage needed to really break was the fact that they were the first ones doing it. Slashdot picked up on Code Monkey because it was a nerdy song about a coder released like a piece of open-source software, and that exposure got Coulton a ton of basically free promotion and downloads. Anyone who tries that now? They’ll get a big “yeah, and…?”

I’m neither incredibly talented nor incredibly lucky, but I attribute what limited success I’ve had to my moderate talent and my being lucky enough to have met the right people at the right times.  I’d love to say “yeah, I sold a few thousand CDs because I am totally awesome” but that’s not it.  I’ve sold what I’ve sold because I happened to meet people like Matt the promoter and Kristy the label manager or Dan the guitarist at times when that benefitted us both.

Those artists that have grapsed that brass ring of indie success?  Sure, talented folks. Your Coultons, your Reznors, your Keatings, your Radioheads. But every single one of them could’ve basically missed it by a day – Trent Reznor could easily have been just another weekend warrior instead of an Oscar winner. There’s the whole Beatles/Epstein thing I mentioned before. Sure, JoCo and Zoe Keating tour incessantly, which helps spread the word, but then, a lot of great indie bands tour incessantly, so it’s no guarantee. “Code Monkey” went viral on the internet – but so did cats asking for cheeseburgers, the trololo guy, and Wil Wheaton, so it’s not exactly something easily predicted and replicated. Maybe someday social science might have a grasp on that, but until then, it’s pretty much luck. Trent, Radiohead and OKGo could go all indie becasue they had the advantage of already being well-known and established.

Basically, lots of this could be applied to pretty much any endeavor, especially when money is involved. At least something like “opening a McDonald’s” has the benefit of market research and demographics. You can’t really do that for a song, not with any degree of meaning. Pretty much ANY advice you’re going to get about the music industry will boil down to “work hard, be talented, hone your craft, and promote.” That’s not exactly a really specific recipe for anything. Beyond that, it’s probably best to be skeptical of anyone who tells you they have some great tips for succeeding in music. Especially if they tell you that the trick is to “go viral.” Yeah, well, if we knew how to do that, we wouldn’t be reading “how to succeed in music” blogs.

What the talent and hard work really get you more than anything is the ability to notice the opportunity when it arrives and take advantage of it at that moment. That’s all. Does that kind of suck? Well, sure. Then again if the only reason you’re putting your talents out there as an artist is to just acheive some ill-defined rock-star paragon of success, ur doin it rong.

Pundits tap dance around it. There are hundreds of music blogs that tell you all the Important Things You Need To Do To Make It Big, but they all noticably ignore one big thing.

Luck.

Obviously, nobody wants to talk about it, because frankly it’s depressing as hell. But 99% of success in the music world isn’t about how great you are or what gear you use or how awesome your live show is or how many followers you have on twitter. It’s pure. Stinking. Luck.

Circumstance, being at the right place at the right time, call it what you will. It is a testament to the power of sheer chance that there are many, many really great bands out there, touring constantly, working hard, playing the game, exploiting the long tail that will never even have the chance to grab the big brass ring. Meanwhile some ingeneue with a smattering of talent will get a platinum record because she happened to sing in front of an A&R guy who liked her “look.”

The easy way out is to blame your label/distributor for not pushing you hard enough, or the public for not recognizing your appeal and talent, or a promoter for putting you in a crappy venue, whatever. That’s a dodge. Success in music follows no predicatble path, and all you can really do is just keep at it and hope the right opportunities come along.

No, it’s not fair. But then, if this were easy and straightforward, few of us would be doing this, right?  And certainly there wouldn’t be blogs devoted to success tips.

Lots of those success tips boil down to “work hard” and “tour a lot” and “don’t be a jerk to people.” This is all good advice. It’s not particularly specific advice. Nor is following it to the letter any indication that you’ll do well, build a fanbase, etc. Stuff like “stay tuned-in online” is a little more specific, but only just. This sort of stuff has its place, as it’s good to be hard-working and focused and have a plan and all that. It is not however, a direct means to an end. Hard work, talent, and planning alone do not equal success at any level. What they do equal is preparedness and awareness, so when a good opportunity does come along, you can recognize it for what it is, be ready to grab it, and then have the skills to mkae the most of it. That’s really the trick.

It’s kind of both depressing and uplifting to consider, because it means that all your hard work may not amount to much, but it also means that even if things look grim something amazing could happen around the corner. The odds aren’t necessarily in your favor, but still.

Of course, if you’re in this game for fame and fortune and opportunity, not for the sheer joy of creating art, you might want to look for an easier path to fame.

You’re on stage.  This show is great.  The crowd is eating it up.  This will be the defining moment of your musical career.

Hey, what was that popping sound?

Where did the vocals go?

Oh…oh, hell.

It’s an inveitability.  Play enough gigs and something catastrophic will happen.  Laptops will crash, mics will short out, cables will die, the monitors will explode, the guitarist will have a  strobe-light-induced seizure…something is going to go wrong eventually. 

In these cases you have two choices: stop the show and get offstage, or deploy a backup plan.  I’ve always preferred the latter, although there are cases where the former is really your only option.

What constitutes an onstage backup plan?  In an ideal world, like the world that a lot of larger bands live in, you just have identical gear you can just swap in when something goes wrong.   Open up any of the big touring band interviews in SoundOnSound and you’ll see rigs that have two of everything, and there are copanies that make gear specifically for the purpose of sycnhronizing for seamless failover.  Unfortunately, most of us don’t have that luxury.  I certainly can’t afford to keep a second cloned laptop at the ready if mine goes out.   However, I do keep an iPod with all the backing tracks and the appropriate patch cables at the ready.  It’s not optimal, but it’s to my mind better than not performing.   I also keep things like backup mics, backup DI’s, extra batteries, and spare cables in a bag just offstage.  While the soundman may have a bunch of these things, he may also not.  I prefer not to take chances, and these are reasonably cheap investments.

I also keep needle-nosed pliers, electrical tape, a small screwdriver, and a soldering iron in the bag.  This is obviously not something one can use onstage – “hang on, let me resolder this broken adapter…” – but quite often technical problems manifest during setup or soundcheck, and you have some extra time to rectify them.  Not everything can be fixed, of course, but it never hurts to have some tools ready.  A screwdriver can be the difference between a great show and not performing at all.

For the electronic artist, it is good to remember that hard drives are cheap.   Stuff happens on the road that is generally not conducive to the proper functioning of a laptop.  Keeping a cheap backup drive with all your important stuff on it handy is a Good Thing.  Again, not something you can do on the fly (“GOOD EVENING CLEVELAND!  Are you READY TO give me a few hours to RESTORE from this BACKUP!?!  WOOOOO!”) but it can at least mean the difference between cancelling a gig and cancelling a tour.

So what about the band members?  You can’t keep a spare singer handy.  You can, however, keep throat lozenges, decongestants, ibuprofen/asprin, pepto, imodium, and other such OTC rememdies around.  They don’t take up much room.  And when you need them, you’re really, really glad they’re there.  While it’s not the greatest thing in the world to perform with a band stuffed with indigestion meds, the alternative is far worse.

I’ve also learned – the hard way, mind you – that all this preparedness does you no good whatsoever if you can’t get at it in a hurry.  If you’re in the club about to go onstage and something breaks, or you suddenly feel that imodium is necessary (ahem), it won’t do you any good if those things are locked in the van in a parking garage behind the venue.    This also raises the issue that every band member on the road should have extra underwear packed.  Just sayin’.

I SAID, A NEW STUDY CAME OUT THIS WEEK SHOWING…

Ah, okay, easy joke, I’m sorry. But seriously, musicians spend an awful lot of time going over the minutiae of gear – microphone fidelity, montiors, acoustics, instruments, strings, etc etc but it all means jack and squat if you can’t hear any of it anymore.

As a musician, your ears are the most important asset you’ve got.   As you age, things will start to go south on their own – you’ll experience some HF loss. This is natural – I remember as a kid being able to hear the high-pitched whine of the burglar alarms in the mall, now I pretty much can’t perceive much about 17khz (which, for someone my age, is still pretty good). So there’s that. It’s important to keep these suckers functioning properly, because it’s hard to mix and perform properly if you can’t *hear* properly. It’s like having bad speakers – if your speakers can’t reproduce high frequencies with any fidelity, the instinct is to turn them up to ear-shattering levels; the same is true with hearing loss.

In our era of earbuds and loud iPods and louder shows it’s really terribly easy to wreck your hearing even more. It’s an easy thing to do, especially if you’re a performer, because stages are loud, shows are loud, and rehearsals are loud.

It’s taken its toll on me. Like 25% of the people in my age bracket, I suffer from tinnitus, the ever-present ringing in the ears. It’s not debilitating or even really noticeable most of the time, but it’s there, and it’s a sign that somewhere along the way I messed up.

I’ve taken to travelling with a small pill container attached to my keychain, containing a pair of earplugs. I don’t have the fancy injection-molded ones – those are pricy and I’d lose them far too often – but I keep a reliable pair of 27db foam earplugs handy at all times. I’ve forgotten to wear them on a few occasions and paid for it, or I’ve lost one of them in a darkened club and felt ridiculous swapping an earplug back and forth between ears, but when I do wear them, I am incredibly glad I did.

As awesome as everything sounds cranked to 11, your ears only go up to about 8.

One thing non-obvious about hearing health is diet, exercise and alcohol. Elevated blood pressure can exacerbate (or even cause) tinnitus. Poor diet or alcohol can lead to quicker ear fatigue, and when your ears are fatigued, they just don’t hear important things as well. Worse, they don’t respond correctly to loud noises, so that pain that warns you that “these sounds are doing ear damage” might not be there. That’s bad. Of course there are obvious measures you can take too. Don’t crank up your iPod to Awesome Levels because it will do damage. Riding with the window down on your car can not only kill your gas mileage, but the low frequency wind noise is surprisingly loud and yet hard to notice.

Take care of your hearing, because once it’s gone, it’s gone…and if you’re a musician, that’s the worst thing that can happen to your music.

While maybe it’s true that the mastering engineer *can* indeed fix these things, the smartest policy is to fix these things in the mixing stage first.  Any fix in the mastering stage comes with a cost, whether that cost is monetary (extra engineering time means extra $$$) or just the cost to the overall quality of the track.  That kick drum too boxy in the 200hz range?  The mastering engineer could do a very precise reduction on that frequency…but anything else with harmonics at that frequency would also be affected.  Vocals need to be louder?  A little middle-band compression may help tighten that up, but at the expense of the overall width of the track.  It may be subtle, but it’s going to hurt.

I’ve often heard of mastering referred to as a “surgical” process.  That may be true to a point, because the tools are usually precise, specific, and often dangerous for the unpracticed to play around with.  The analogy sort of breaks down at that point.

A better analogy would be perhaps one of a car detailer.  The guy’s got special tools – an orbital buffer, polishes, hammers for pounding out dings, stuff that an average car owner probably doesn’t keep handy.  The detailer’s job is to make your car look as good as it possibly can, buff it to a high gloss, maybe smooth out some scratches and chips.  But you wouldn’t ask the guy who details your car to fix a problem with your head gasket or your muffler.  The mastering engineer is like the detailer – he’s got the tools to make your track shiny, polished, and professional-sounding.  And while he may have the ability just by chance to fix a mix problem (much as the detailer probably knows how to change your oil) it’s not the sort of thing you really want him to be doing.

It’ll save you, the artist or producer, time, money and headaches to address any mix problems at the mixing stage, and not the mastering stage.

So what about the case where the engineer hears a problem you missed?  A good mastering engineer would likely tell you about it.   In the world of the radio-hit machine, maybe not, because it has to be done yesterday and ready for the radio, but there it doesn’t come up as much to begin with because your track is mixed by Mark Stent or Tony Maserati and it’s just not an issue.  For the rest of the indie pro-sumer crowd, though, the option is usually there to send the engineer a new mix with the fixes in place, and any resulting charge will be minimal, if there’s any charge at all.  I know that when I master an album, I listen to it first so I know what I’m going to do before diving in, and I’ve on more than one occasion said “hey, the bass is a little loud on track 3” or “that lead synth has some weird phasing, is that intentional?” and if it’s a problem and not an artistic decision,  I’ll gladly take delivery of a new mixdown before I start mastering  (there are limits, of course – eventually I’ll want to get to mastering and not waiting for the 8th upload of a new mix, and sometimes the engineer does have the right to say “look, I don’t know how to fix it or I just don’t want to – do what you can with it.”  But these are rare cases).

In short, the strongest recommendation I can make to anyone about to submit their music for mastering is “give them the best mix you can, and don’t expect the mastering engineer to fix what you didn’t.”  A strong mix will need less processing in the mastering stage, leading to a cleaner, better-sounding master and a better experience for the listener.

I’ll admit know that I’ve written some bad ones.  I’ve certainly read some bad ones, and some even worse ones.  I have also read some good ones, and what follows are some tips I’ve gleaned from those.  I don’t know if I’ve written a good one yet, but I’m trying.  I’ve written a lot of resumes, though and the same sort of tips apply.

1. Be direct. You’ve got a page, tops, to say who you are, what sort of music you make, maybe a few press clippings.  If you spend half of the page exclaiming that you’re the most awesome band ever before anybody has a clue why they should even care, you’ve lost.
2. Good grammar costs nothing. Seriously, people, do you want the primary representation of your musical endeavor to read like it was written by a 7th-grader?   You may be tempted to pepper it with l33tspeek or try and sound like PsychicTV by using “thee” and “ov.”  Don’t.  It’s not cute anymore.  It might be genre-appropriate to use some colloquialisms or slang – if you’re a dubstep act, using the word “wobble” is fine, for example, or if you’re Dizzee Rascal, you can occasionally use the word “wiv.”  Still, it’s dodgy.  Some promoters and the general public may catch on, others may just think you can’t use a spell-checker.
3. You are not a genre-defying, uncategorizable, one-of-a-kind band. Nobody, nobody believes that when they read it, so don’t bother to write it.  Even if, on the off chance you are a genre-bending totally unique act, it’s just not something you can come out and say.  You are not redefining anything, recontextualizing anything, or reinventing anything.  You can describe what you do.  If you can describe your sound well, that’s a stronger advertisement for your work than any “reinvention” BS.
4. Nobody cares who mastered or engineered your last album, or what gear it was recorded on – unless of course those people or gear are coming with you on tour or are always going to be working with you.  This is a reasonably new development, and I’m not sure where it came from.  I’m starting to see a number of acts who spend far too much time detailing exactly what sort of mixing board or synthesizer or producer or engineer was involved.  Trainspotters like me may think it’s cool, but unless it somehow contributes to the overall perception of your band, it’s not worth the space.  The rare exception to this is the producer, since they can have a direct impact on your sound, but even then they have to be established enough for it to make a difference.  For example, if your producer was, say, Brian Eno or someone of that stature – those guys don’t need your money, they have to like you first.

   Basically, you don’t sell your house by listing the plumber.

5. An aesthetic is a tricky thing to work with. If you’re a band with a specific visual identity, you have a tough line to walk.  What a band looks like won’t sell records, and while a stage act may bring bodies to a show, it’s really hard to sell that line to a promoter who’s only got a demo CD and a single photo to go on.   It’s even harder if your look doesn’t match the music – if by design you’re a techno band that dresses up in 14th-century Italianate costumes, well, that may be your thing but an unfamiliar reader is going to just see “schtick.”  Some descriptions are going to sound played-out or bandwagon-y no matter what you do, or no matter how true they are, too.  It’s best to leave that for later.
6. Who you’ve opened for needs to be relevant – and true. If you’re going to say you’ve played with U2, you’d better have opened for U2 and not just played the “Bob’s Grocery Local Talent Stage” at the same enormous music festival  as them.  It’s ridiculously easy to look this stuff up, and if someone can call bullshit on any small part of your presskit, the whole thing gets tossed.  Similarly, even if you did open for someone reasonably respected, it should likely be something that has some cache – opening for the “Pet Sounds” Beach Boys is a vastly different thing from opening for the “Kokomo” Beach Boys, for example.
7. If you’ve been a dick to someone, leave their name off your presskit. If you played a gig with another band, if you didn’t get along or they wouldn’t remember you, don’t namecheck them.  Unless we’re talking about the Rolling Stones, a promoter in your genre is probably going to have the ability to call up and check.  “Hey, yeah, Tom…these Null Device guys…oh, they’re asshats?  Thanks.”  Or worse “Hey, Tom, these Null Device guys…Null Device.   With an N.  No, Device.  So you don’t remember them?  They claimed to have played with you…huh. [click].”
8. Be consistent. A well-written onesheet can serve as a promotional tool in a lot of situations.  If you use the same, or at least very similar, language and content on your website, your myspace, your facebook, your demo, etc, you’re going to put forth a nicely professional and hopefully well-thought-out image.  Obviously certain media will require some tweaking, but the point is simply that tying it all together means you don’t ever have to worry about contradictory or confusing information anywhere a promoter, label honcho, distributor or even a fan might look.  It also saves you a lot of work.
9. A little informality is okay. While this is like a resume, this isn’t a resume.  You don’t have to write it like an insurance policy.  That said, you don’t want to go too far in the other direction.    You’re still trying to sell something, in this case your music, you’re not trying to get a pen pal.
10. Try to focus on the now. This is a tough one, since by definition your previous glories are what are making you attractive to a promoter or label.  There is, however, a limit.  It’s one thing to talk about your last album, or your last two albums.  To reference something you did 15 years ago?  Unless it was something massive that still has repercussions today (or this is a comeback tour for a band that was huge in the 80’s) it’s going to give the distinct impression that you’ve not done much noteworthy since.
11. Edit.  Edit, edit, edit, edit. Pretend this is your final term paper in high school.  It’s got to be spot-on.  Check it over a zillion times.  Have a friend read it.  Get opinions from people you trust.  Anything awkward-sounding, or poorly-written, is going to jump out and distract the reader.  There are still enough grammar fascists and orthography tyrants in the world that there’s a not-insignificant chance that one of them may be on the receiving end.  A misplaced comma or [gasp] quotes used for emphasis instead of facetiousness is going to jump out and be the Thing That They Remember.
12. Don’t expect everyone to know what the heck you’re talking about. While you can assume a certain level of commonality and familiarity on musical genres, if your references and definitions are so obscure or bleeding edge – or worse, you un-ironically coin a genre name for yourself – you’re going to get the promotion equivalent of a blank stare.  It’s the trickiest part of writing up self-referential press; you know what you do, but you have to write for the perspective of someone who has no idea who your references, influences, and baselines are.
13. Go easy on the comparisons. A few are alright, and in fact probably necessary if you’re just starting out.  It’s okay to say you’re influenced by Depeche Mode or Kraftwerk or the Beatles or whatever.  But don’t go nuts.  This is still about you, so a paragraph of your influences is probably overdoing it.  If your sound-description is clear enough,  you can reign back even further – everyone can pretty much take an influence to kraftwerk as read if you describe yourself as making minimal techno.  Too much and you’re wasting space that could be used for your own stuff, and additionally it could be setting the distinct impression on the reader that you’re just not that original.

Interesting film.  It’s quickly very clear why those particular three guitarists (Jimmy Page, The Edge, Jack White) were picked – they each represent a different era of guitar heroics, and they’re also the kind of guitarists who are known for their sound as much as any guitar heroics.  As much as there are many super-shredders out there who could outplay all three of them, probably only EVH would have the appropriate amount of crossover appeal.

It’s also clear what these guys did, in terms of their places in their respective bands – Page was a consummate Musician, joining bands after long stints as a studio musician and arranger; The Edge was a hardcore technician and sonic architect, showing up with a guitar and 4 giant racks of effects gear; Jack White was…well, Jack White’s a douchebag.

Okay, maybe that’s not entirely fair.  He has a very distinctive sound and manner of playing, and he’s probably the one of the three who’s got the closest ties to old blues, so there’s that, and he’s  admittedly a reasonably iconic axeman.  But he was also the only one with a lot of conceits – he had his special outfits, he had a sidekick of “12-year-old Jack White” which was a mini-me version of him, and he was busy showing off his playing in some tumbledown old Tennessee house as though he were some backcountry bluesman, and not the $37M-valued rockstar he actually is.  While Page and Edge were pretty frank about what they did and how they did it, Jack White spent about as much time espousing his personal philosophy about vintage gear, recording a song on a battered old plywood guitar into an ancient reel-to-reel (I noted that he  *was* using a like-new $3000 Coles ribbon mic).  He was frankly pretty annoying.

The Edge was, to me, fascinating.  He was pretty spare with words, but he was also surprisingly humble.  He fully acknowledges he’s not an incredible player, but he also displayed almost boyish glee showing off his electronics gear and effects processors.   It was also interesting to see that a good portion of his “U2 sound” was in the way he voiced his chords.

I’ve never been a big Zeppelin fan, although I acknowledge their impact on the development of rock and roll.   And Page was a capital-M musician.  He certainly makes playing look effortless.  His callbacks to those heady, experimental days of the late 60’s when Zep recorded in manor house stairwells with cables running out to a mobile truck were fascinating.  It was also interesting to note his early career – as a kid in a skiffle band, then as a fill-in session musician, then a regularly gigging studio aguitarist doing everything from rock songs to muzak before he finally got fed up and joined the Yardbirds.  He also seems to be the godfather of Rock Face.  Most intriguingly he said he wept while watching Spinal Tap – not because he didn’t think it was funny, but because he said it was hardly parody, accurately portraying the ridiculous excesses of the 70’s rock band.

A lot of the actual music in the film was surprisingly sub-standard.  You’d think that three iconic players in one room jamming would lead to some crazy sessions, but it was really just three dudes sitting on couches halfheartedly strumming their way through the Led Zeppelin backcatalogue, each with a wildly different guitar tone clashing with the other two.   The exception was when Page played something by himself, and it was obvious that neither the Edge nor White could really conceal their joy at watching Jimmy Freakin’ Page cruise through a legendary rock song.

Overall, from a music-nerd standpoint, it was a fascinating film.  Other than U2 I can’t say I’m a big fan of the artists involved, but they did represent three very distinct points of view and approaches to musicmaking.  Also, the “early years” footage of each of the bands in question was often hilarious.  A big-haired, macho-rocking embryonic U2 from the early early 80’s was hysterical, and a 14-year-old Jimmy Page playing “Momma Don’t Allow No Skiffle” on British TV was rather cute.  Footage of the White Stripes obviously doesn’t go back as far, although what was most interesting was how much Meg White’s drumming has improved in the intervening decade.

Sadly, during the film, it never really did get loud.   It did get interesting.

We did “Footfalls” as a giveaway, to see if it would boost album sales for “Sublimation.”  It did, kinda.  We did something similar for “London” and it too gave AMDM a little bump – helped probably by the fact that this time we got the label on board to help out.  We also printed a number of CD versions of it to sell at shows, and those, surprisingly sold out quickly.

When we conceptualized “Recursions”, we decided to take the idea to its logical conclusion – this wasn’t going to be just another “hey download some free tracks from the internet!”, we were going to treat this like a full release.  That is to say, full distribution channels, available downloads, tracking, etc.

In terms of both marketing and money, it’s been our most successful release to date.  It hasn’t sold as many copies as, say, Sublimation, but unlike our other releases it’s completely recouped production costs, making a small profit even, given us a mess of contacts for promotion and “fan relationship” building, and the bulk of promo has been entirely word of mouth.

Production costs were kept low, mainly due to the fact that we didn’t produce a large run of CDs.  We had 100 run up at a cost of roughly $130.    Okay, sure, costs would’ve been higher if I didn’t happen to have a small mastering business that I could just use for my own purposes, but still, the upshot is we DIY’ed the whole thing.  I cut costs here and there – bartering, begging, promising beer to people.  I probably could’ve spent another $100 if I had to shell out retail prices for things like UPC codes.

Next step was to throw this all on bandcamp.com.  I really, really like this service.  It’s incredibly flexible and consumer-oriented, and I really want them to thrive.  They’ve really hit upon something good for a distribution model – give the consumer the formats they want, while giving the artist the ability to control how things are distributed and what information is collected.  Using their system, we gave away Recursions with an optional “enter your own price” field.  Not only did people enter their own price, but they were awfully generous about it.  I expected maybe a few people to throw a buck at it here or there – instead, an awful lot of downloaders spent $5-$10 (usually, the people who downloaded the high-quality FLAC or AL versions gave more).    Better yet, we collected a lot of email addresses – people willingly signing up to our mailing list in exchange for downloading, meaning the next time we have a show or a release, we’ve got a significant number of new people to tell about it.

We spent another $35 to use TuneCore to put the album on Amazon, eMusic, iTunes, and elsewhere.  I know, why bother when it’s free?  Well, to see if people who don’t go to bandcamp.com find it and buy it anyway.  Or to see if people who love the iTunes interface – I’ve heard they exist – buy it.  The more places it is, the easier it’s to find.   This should hit those stores in a few weeks yet.

All told, so far, this release has managed to make a small profit.  Barely enough to, say, buy a hearty breakfast after a show, but still, this is an accomplishment that in over 10 years of writing and releasing music, hasn’t really happened before.  Certainly not within a month of release, anyway (I *think* Sublimation may have finally sold out its first run.  I haven’t seen sales figures on that in a few years).

The upshot is that DIY releases can work.  Maybe not well enough to make a living on, but certainly well enough that they can pay for themselves.  This isn’t news for some people, but for a band like ours, with a low profile and lower album sales, this is a Big Deal.