It was a bittersweet gig for us, though.  After 7 years in the band – almost to the day – our valiant bassist and donut-finder-general Chuck is going on an indefinite hiatus to work on a new project with his wife.  Namely, a baby.  We wish him a bon voyage, although it’s not a goodbye kind of thing because I see him every week.  But it’s been fun.  Chuck was the first guy recruited for the live band, and he’s stuck with it through a lot of really unusual gigs, long drives, and strange occurrences.   We’ll miss you, Chuck.

Snif.

Okay, moving on.

First band was Little Red Wolf, who do a sort of alt-pop-country-americana-folk-rock kind of thing.  Hard to explain.  They had vocal harmonies to die for and catchy, catchy tunes.  They could switch from sweet, airy ballads to rock on a dime.

Next were veterans German Art Students, who have been playing brainy, jangly new-wavy pop music for well over a decade.  I’ve seen these guys live a number of times, and they’re always a lot of fun.  This was their first gig since the departure of their bassist – I know how they feel – so they were rocking as a trio.  It changed the sound of a number of their songs, but “Civil War Reenactor” and “Steve Vai Boyfriend” were still pretty badassed.

Third was Guante and Big Cats, a hiphop collaboration from the Twin Cities. They were…wow.  Just…wow.  Big Cats had some really excellent glitchy hiphop beats, and Guante’s politically-charged spoken-word was hard-hitting and incisive.  Really, really dig this.

We were up last.  We had a few problems.  Like…I forgot the words to a song I’ve song nearly every week since 2004.  And the drum mic on Elizabeth’s big darbuka kept feeding back.  But we soldiered on, and had a dhol party for “Blow My Mind” with the ever-entertaining Emily Mills from Little Red Wolf being our ersatz dholi.  Lots of fun.

So, happy birthday to Dane101, bon voyage to Chuck, and thanks to Jesse and the other bands!

It gives me hope, though – the guy’s in his early 50′s and he can still just bring it onstage.  His voice sounds as good as ever, he’s still bounding about the stage like a 19-year old, and he’s still doing his crazy bendy dances onstage.  Okay, it looks a little weird to have a 52-year-old skipping around a stage to a Bauhaus song, but aside from that, he still has an enviable amount of stage energy and presence.  His backing band seemed to be roughly half his age, too.

He also did possibly the best cover a Joy Division song I’ve heard.

Sadly, the show was not particularly well-attended.  The venue did a fairly piss-poor job of promoting the show, which was sad.  Still, it was also nice that even given the low attendance he didn’t just phone it in.

I admit I haven’t been the rabid Peter Murphy fanboy I was back in the mid 90′s, but I still have a healthy respect for the dude, and damn can he perform.

A few notes:

1) Rode gave me a tshirt.  They assumed I was a “large.”  While I’m flattered, I am not a large.  Sigh.

2) Moog gave me a tshirt.  They were out of anything other than XXL.  So it’s a bit big.  Oh well.  But the “Keep Your Hands Off My Theremin” slogan makes me giggle.  Okay, yeah, I’m a nerd.

3) The Moog Music pocket protector  is simultaneously the most useless and incredibly awesome giveaway ever.

4) Ableton and AEA both gave out mousepads.  They know their markets.  I already have an Ableton mousepad, though.

5) Sweetwater themselves gave us bags to keep it all in along with catalogs and schedules, and as a particularly nice touch, loaded the bags with candy.  Sadly, my candy was limited entirely to Tootsie Rolls and Bit O’Honey, while Dan scored a few rolls of Smarties, which is free-candy gold.

6) Have I mentioned how awesome free chilled bottled water was?

7) it’s not schwag, but I found it beyond hilarious that the SSL demo played Peter Gabriel.

And some blurry cameraphone photos (more on my flickr):

Dan tries out a Herman Li  guitar, and gets his inner Dragonforce on:

Dan, lost in gearland.

Blurry, but you get the idea of the scale of this place

With the toilet paper of tomorrow!

Linda, at the Moog booth, gives the Etherwave Plus demo:

The guys giving the mic workshop

A comical sandwich:

Next year, I’m bringing a better camera.

Never having been to one before, I wasn’t sure what to expect.  Would it be just a lot of glorified sales pitches by Sweetwater staff?  Would it be a big meet-n-greet?  Would it be like NAMM or MusikMesse where vendors trot out their big upcoming products and try to impress you with their marginally-functional experimental stuff?  Would it be a big tradeshow?  Would it be a lot of beardy guys standing around arguing about tube manufacturers?

It turned out to be a none of those things.  Oh, sure, there was a tradeshow aspect of it, and that was alright.  Vendors were there in spades, but they were pretty much only showing off what they had, not their upcoming stuff.  The sales staff was not pushy at all, and was more than accomodating to questions.  The only really esoteric flamewar I saw was a brief bit of the Manley reps casting aspersions on solid-state gear by tossing off some facts about linear harmonic distortion.

Since we have day jobs, Dan and I left for FW on friday night, missing the entirety of Day 1.  In retrospect, that was probably alright for us, since it meant one less night in the hotel, no need for vacation time, and so forth.  Also, while I would’ve loved to see a few more of the workshops, I don’t think there was a enough in the vendors tents to occupy me for two full days.  There was a lot of gear, but since my budget is limited, I could really only salivate on the Neve stuff instead of actually buying it.

We got into our fabulously jet-age hotel at around 1am, crashed out, got up at 7 local time, had a ridiculously cheap but tasty hotel breakfast, and sallied forth.

The Sweetwater complex is ridiculously big.  I had NO idea just how big it was.  The main building is gorgeous – all LEED certified,  open and spacious, with lots of amenities for visiting clients (it has its own arcade.  Seriously).  I don’t know where they put the salespeople, though, because this place was very much geared towards clients and customers.  We wandered a bit thoguth the gear tents, I talked briefly to a rep from Rode and Dan got giddy over the “TUBES RULE” schwag from Manley.  The Manley dude liked my Front242 tshirt.

We then filed into the main auditorium for the first session, “Microphone Techniques for Acoustic and Electric Guitar.”  Everyone got a handout – an XY graph showing where most major mic brands fall on a transparent/colored bright/dark multi-axis.  That was rather helpful.    The two salesguys giving the presentation were fillins, since the original presenter had taken ill, but these guys knew their stuff.  Even being unfamiliar with the slides and filling in at the last moment, they did a pretty complete job.  Of particular interest to me was the fact that yeah, I was pretty much on the right track with my own techniques for a lot of this stuff, so hearing a professional say “this is how to do it” was reassuring.  They also hammered home the points that hours of mic fidding isn’t going to fix a bad room or a bad performance.

We skipped out of the end of that workshop to hit the “Mastering like a pro” session.  That was run by the dude who writes most of SW’s magazine articles.  It got off to a bit of a rocky start, since his video settings were mucked-up, making it painful to watch his protools session on the big screen.  He also was stumbling a bit in protools itself.   Someone in the audience was kind enough to debug his video troubles.  Dan and I had our Nerd Moments when he mentioned setting a baseline volume of 85db and we both whipped out SPL meter apps on our respective iPhones.

A mastering demo in a big room without fancy speakers and such is always going to be a little dodgy, since you can’t hear the subtleties.  I got the impression that in the process of trying to condense a lot of information down into an hourlong session,  a lot of meat got cut out and a number of things I found less useful got highlit.  As an example, he spent a lot of time showing how to pinpoint frequencies in an EQ plugin, using the Anderton-sweep method.  While that’s all very well and good, if you’re in a room full of people who want to learn how to master, I think it’s a fairly safe assumption that they’re familiar with EQ practices – and if they’re not, they need a separate class before they try to tackle mastering EQ.  Also, he was a big proponent of “Reference Mastering” – using other recordings as a reference for comparison.  I understand the popularity of that, since you can easily say “make that sound like a Linkin Park record” or whatever and work from there.  But that doesn’t really help you much if you have a starting mix that has problems that need to be fixed.   It also requires a pretty large corpus of existing tracks for comparison, since no two artists are going to be the same and you’ll need a lot of familiarity across a lot of genres to even get started.  Yeah, it has a lower learning curve than “absolute” mastering, but I think it also has a lower ceiling too.   I was quite surprised that in his discussion of lo-cutting, he never brought up spectrum analyzers.  I live by those, since even with a good set of speakers and sub and all, you just can’t hear a lot of the rumble going on at super-low frequency, so sometimes you need to work visually.  Dan said almost the exact same thing to me as we left the presentation.

So that was a little bit of a bummer.

We hit the gear tents again and I nearly dropped money on NI Komplete, since it (like much of their other stuff) was being sold for insanely slashed sale prices.  Also of note was the awesome fact that many vendors had their gear out on display for test.  I gave a listen to the new Event Opals, their higher-end monitors.  They’re big, kinda ugly, but man do they have nice tight bass response.  I thought the highs were a little harsh, but given that we were listening in an open-air tent with a TON of ambient noise, I really couldn’t judge accurately.  I also got to try out a big ol’ AEA R44 ribbon mic (oh drooooool..and only $3600!) .  I tried a little bit of vocal through them, and while it was tough with the ambient noise being picked up, I still could tell it was a nice, creamy sound.  Just across from AEA was the Lauten Audio booth, so I tried out a much cheaper Horizon cardiod tube mic.  That also sounded really nice (not as nice as the AEA, but it’s also 1/4th the cost).  The Lauten booth also was showing off Summit amps and the Bricasti reverb – the Bricasti was a dreamy, dreamy dedicated reverb unit.  Just gorgeous.  Also very expensive, but really nice.

We bugged from there to go to the “Microphone techniques for Vocals and Drums.”  This was, for me, the single most useful part of the day.  Again, a lot of it was confirmation that my techniques were on the right track, but it was really nice to see someone doing it, and hear examples of the various differences in techniques from people with mic lockers much larger than mine.  Particularly on drums – while the demonstration was mainly for kit drums, most of what they talked about could apply to my crazy collection of ethnic percussion just as easily.   Hearing the effect of mic position on phase was really eye-opening, too.  I’ve only recently pruchased enough microphones to multi-mic drums, so I hadn’t thought too much about it before.  Also, hearing someone with hardcore gear experience say “I think a preamp is in many ways more important than a mix” surprised me – I’d always thought that, but figured I was just missing something important.  But he’s right – a good mic pre can make a bad mic sound better (not great, but better).  A bad mic pre will make the best mic sound terrible.

I was really impressed by that one.

Dan and I vegged for a bit after that, grabbed some beverages (the guys handing out chilled bottled water all over the fest was a really nice touch) and music-nerded out for a while.  We went to the guitar tent then, so Dan could get his guitar-geek on.  And guitar-geek he did, on the Herman Li edition Ibanez.  Dragonforce ho!  The Ibanez rep liked me Front242 shirt.

We wandered through the flea market tent, which was kinda cool, since I got to see a lot of the gear I’d lusted for 15 years ago.

We went back to the main tent gear.  The Moog booth was small, and lots of people were trying out the Moog Guitar.  I mentioned my onwership of an original Big Briar Etherwave, so the saleswoman/rep/whatever showed off the capabilites of the new Etherwave plus.  Aside from looking a bit nicer, it has CV outs, so it can be used to control other moog gear.  Watching her manipulate a Moog Little Phatty monosynth from a theremin was so.  incredibly.  dope.

The final workshop we went to was the Ableton Live 8 clinic.  Oh wow.  I’d read about a lot of the new features but it was impresive to see the new warping and groove extractor in practice.  Houston, the guy giving the demo, was really  capable, especially given the previous workshop had run long and he was short on time.  It was interesting that Dan and I apprached Live from diferent angles – he saw it as a great tool for sketching out ideas and quickly workflowing new songs, heavily using the sequencer timeline, whereas I see it as a great way to mangle samples and loops in the session window.  Either way, I’m ecited about the new version.  And the new Akai APC40 is etrememly well-designed.  I’m usually quite skeptical of “dedicated” application controllers – they’re usually just fancy MIDI controllers, but there are just a lot of nice integration touches with Live.

Craig Anderton was sitting behind us.  OMG OMG OMG.

At this point we were starting to flag, so we got lunch at the Sweetwater cafeteria.  I had a “pork tenderloin sandwich” which was comical – the pork was about 3x the size of the bun.

One final pass of the gear tents, where Dan bought some auralex and I had a chat ith the guy from Arturia (and nearly bought a lot of softsynths).  I hoped Focusrite would’ve had a presence (I was hoping for a really nice discount on a Liquid Mix) but they didn’t, and Sweetwater was out of the speaker stands I was planning on getting.  Nonetheless, there were still some really nice prices on gear.

After the final pass, we headed out and began the long drive back home.

It was really nice to see other professionals doing the kinds of thing I’m attempting to do, and it was particualry important to me to figure out how to prioritize my studio purchases over the next several months.  Room tuning, mic locker, production tools…it’s helpful.  And the mic placement workshop was particualrly helpful.  I think for next year,  I’m going to save up in advance.

Some people respond with fawning praise, some with tasteless jokes, others with wailing agony, and others respond by shopping.

I dunno. Whatever you thought of his music or his person, he was an inescapable part of the childhood of really anyone in their 30′s – the guy racked up so many hits in the 80′s and was so omnipresent on MTV and the radio it was hard not to be exposed to him over and over again. The guy was a megastar by 1980, and a downright cultural phenomenon by 1985. He was also stunningly talented – a gifted singer and songwriter, a groundbreaking dancer, and was visionary enough to see the possibility of the music video in an era when most videos were just “pretty haircuts on a soundstage.” Thriller was a rare recording that managed to bridge many markets at once, incredibly successfully – it was funky enough for urban markets, comfortable enough for the conservative suburbs, and featured guest spots by both veteran Paul McCartney and (relatively) newly-minted rock royalty Eddie Van Halen.   Much like every home in the 70′s seemed to have a copy of Frampton Comes Alive , seemingly every home in the 80′s had Thriller on vinyl or cassette.

Everyone my age has a Jackson story.  I remember riding the bus to school, singing “Beat it” and “Thriller” at the top of my lungs with the other kids.  I remember a nebbishy kid in my 5th-grade class trying to win popularity with his screener copy of the long-form Thriller video.  I remember painstakingly trying to recreate the Thriller cover art on a cassette J-card for my tape dub of my neighbor’s record.  I remember the only good thing about Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” being Jackson’s cameo.  I remember seeing those 4 steps of the moonwalk with my jaw hanging agape, and then spending the next week trying to duplicate it in my stocking feet on the kitchen linoleum (and failing repeatedly).

The guy was a Performer with a capital P.

But the guy was human.  Really, really human.  I suppose that having a weird childhood before you became and international pop star at the age 11 is going to warp you a bit.  Add the aforementioned stardom before puberty, a near-un-toppable feat in the entertainment industry when he’s barely in his twenties…there’s nowhere to go but weird and down.  His odd manchild antics, his truly bizzarre alleged  personal life, his slow transformation from an babyfaced kid to what Robin Williams described as “a photo-negative Katherine Hepburn”, his sad and desperate self-appointment of “King of Pop,” his even sadder attempt at creating a family life, the decline of his music into irrelevance and near self-parody – a guy at the top has a long way to fall, and he was about as high as anyone ever got.

The sideshow is over for him now, mostly.  I’m sure there will be wrangling and conspiracy theories for years to come, but I doubt we’ll see the kind of “he’s really still alive!” hysteria that followed the death of Elvis – that the oddest man in pop music died a strange and unexpected death somehow seems even more plausible than the death of the drug-addicted, deep-fried Presley.    There were always glimmers of a comeback, just as there had been for that other King, but the never really congealed, emerging ill-formed and half-baked.  Now, there won’t be a comeback, but he can’t really sink much further into weirdness.

It’s been a long, very strange trip.  Pop culture will probably not see the like again.

http://www.knowthemusicbiz.com/index.php/BIZ-BLOG/Why-Bands-Should-Avoid-the-Myth-of-the-Rockstar-by-Nick-Fitzsimons.html

It’s ludicrously true.  And needs saying.  Hell, if only so I remember periodically.

Anyway.

Last week two things of note happened – I received a matched pair of M-Audio Puslar II small-diaphragm condenser mics in the mail (thank you eBay), and I recorded a session with the Natyarpana dance company.

The Natyarpana gig was unusual in that it was an entirely different way of recording than I’m used to, and frankly one I was a little unprepared for.   I’d like to think everybody learned enough in the process that further sessions will run more smoothly, and I’d also like to think the resulting output was pretty dang good-sounding.  It helped that all parties involved were pretty bogglingly talented.  It’s humbling when a young kid comes in, sits down at a keyboard and just bangs out complex  passages in a dual-manual configuration, while working pitch bend and mod wheels like a seasoned pro.

I also learned that brass chimes will dominate any mix, no matter how far from the mic they are.

So while I wasn’t recording any specific ND stuff there, it was educational, and I learned a few things I may try to carry over to my own recordings.

Meanwhile.

The Pulsars are filling a gap in my mic locker – I’ve needed a good stereo pair of mics, and a good mic for handling percussion and various acoustic instruments, and these fit the bill nicely, doing double-duty.  While I’d love a pair of nicely modded MK-012′s or SM81′s, the price point on those has gotten kind of ridiculous, and I snagged the Pulsars off eBay for a ludicrously good price.  Using them as drum overheads I can make a dhol sound pretty thunderous, assuming I can play it well enough and don’t accidentally get too enthusiastic and smack into the mic stand (this happened.  Twice).  Certainly I get better results than I did with a 57 and my somewhat “eshy” large-d condenser in mode.  Also, in a stereo x-y config I can get the acoustic fiddle to not sound like a 4th grader is playing it.   These are good things.

I used these techniques to record some loops and riffs for a track I’ve been struggling with for a while.   It’s one of those tracks that always had potential, had good lyrics, a good hook, and some good ideas, but I just couldn’t get it to gel from either an arrangement or performance standpoint.  My vocals were always weak and thready, the drums were flabby, and there just seemed to be no propulsion to it.  Using these new recordings and a few of the tricks I learned on the Claire Voyant remix, I think I’m on my way to something a little more cohesive.  I think when I try to write something “just so” for a certain genre, for example when I try to write a straight-up drum-n-bass track, I tend to end up with compromised mixes – when I stick to my brand of big, sweeping ethno-tronica I think I do better.    I also need to concentrate more on writing songs that fit my vocal strengths – I have this tendency to write stuff that matches a certain sample or something, but turns out after the fact to be in part of my vocal range that sounds weak.  So I’m fixing that.  Even though I’ve only got about a minute of the track written and recorded, I’m already liking it better than all my previous attempts.

Bummer, becasue we had some new stuff in the pipe to play.

The most obvious is Depeche Mode’s “Sounds of the Universe.”  It’s pretty decent.  The sounds are very old school – if “Playing the Angel” resembled “Violator” in structure,  this one almost resembles an old OMD album.  Lots of modulated bleeps and buzzy analog sounds.  With every album, Gahan’s vocal delivery gets a little more effortless.  And with every album, it becomes harder to forgive some of Gore’s lyrical tropes, which he tends to reuse quite often.  The leadoff single “Wrong” is undeniably catchy, as are tracks like “In Sympathy”, “Fragile Tension”,  and “In Chains.”   There’s really not a bad song on the album – the worst are just sort of bland, but the good ones are rife with hooks.  It also displays many of the hallmarks of an album that will grow on me.  There’s also a 5.1 mix of the album that may sound pretty cool.

Also, the iTunes bonus Trentemoeller mix of “Wrong” is all kinds of cool.

I’ve only had PSB’s new album “Yes” for a few hours, but it’s so far probably the most unabashedly pop PSB album in years.  Where “Fundamental” came close, flirting with some edgier techno mixed in with the PSB wry-observational mold, “Yes” goes over the top right off the bat, with the Xenomania-produced “Love, Etc.”  It reminds me of the opening track “Can You Forgive Her” off “Very”, with the sort of hands-in-the-air chorus hooks and the midtempo, headnodding backbeat.  I’m sure I’ll have more on this album as it sinks in.

Dubstep as a genre has been for me, somewhat problematic.  I love it conceptually, and there are many individual tracks that I adore, but I can only take the whole genre in small doses.  The artists for the most part are all fantastic at creating brooding moods and building lots of musical tension…except for the most part, that tension never gets released and after a full album I feel deeply unfulfilled.  This is why Caspa’s new album “Everybody’s Talking, Nobody’s Listening” is so intruiging to me.  It has all the hallmarks of dubstep – deep, wobbly basses,  frenetic hi-hats, sparse percussion, loads of ambiences – but for a change he breaks up the electro-dread by throwing vocalists and MC’s back into the mix under a verse/chorus structure.  A few tracks shed the doom-and-gloom for more chilled-out tracks, like “Lon-Don City” which sounds like the kind of R&B you’d hear on the radio in a dystopian future UK (gratuitous autotuning notwithstanding).

Since Galactica went dark a few weeks back, I’ve been digging into the soundtracks by Bear McCreary.  It’s both incredibly impressive and kind of disheartening to me that a 27-year-old dude with little prior experience could so effortlessly write soundtracks involving a full orchestra, uillean pipes, a taiko ensemble, and a bunch of duduks.  I’d want to be him when I grew up, if I wasn’t already a decade older than he is.   Anyway, while most soundtracks sound like wallpaper when separated from their source material (or, in the case of Williams, Goldsmith, et al, are all brassy neo-Wagnerian bombast), these work pretty well on their own. 

In the cheesy techno category, I’ve picked up anotehr single by the Breakfastaz.  “Crazy/Method of Doubt” is a unapologetic nu-breaks, but damn is it fun.  If it were warmer out right now, this’d be great for driving fast with the top down.  If I had a convertable.  Which I don’t.  But the effect is the same.