wire to the ear

About a year ago I was looking for a way to sell MP3’s directly from my record label’s website. I had two requirements. First, I didn’t want to pay a percent of each sale to anyone. Second, I wanted the process to be automatic. For example, someone comes to the website, clicks “shop”, fills his cart with MP3s, pays, and then without me doing anything the download links are sent by email.

Surprisingly, there were not many options. Building my own store in Paypal was over my head. I could get close to what I wanted but I ran into issues. Every time I tried to get support help from the Paypal developer forums I was spammed by people trying to sell me their finished stores (none of which were elegant). There is Payloadz which starts out as free but if you sell more than $100 worth of music in 30 days you need to upgrade your account to a pay version. I sold more than $200 in the first week so it’s a good thing I didn’t go with them. Snocap gives you a flash store you can put anywhere on the web and its the only store that will attach to your MySpace page music player. However Read “The easybe.com MP3 store for your own website.”

See that photo above? Thats me on the microphone this past Tuesday night in Stuttgart, Germany. Now here’s the first main point of this post: I get to show off now. I get to post photos of the live show all over the internet. Easy self promotion. And for months before the gig happened my name was on flyers and websites promoting this event. But thats just one of the reasons it’s vital as a musician to perform live.

Money makes the world go round. Let’s face it music has been devalued. Just last week the going rate of a song dropped to .89 (thanks Amazon MP3!). But Live performances are still top money makers and they are not going away anytime soon. You can make even more if you sell some merchandise.

Want another reason? You get to meet your fans face to face. After all isn’t that the entire reason your making music? Don’t you want to say hello to who is supporting you? Don’t you want to tell them thank you?

But here is the most important reason and if you take only one thing away from this post Read “Be a performing artist. Your career depends on it.”

A new version of my favorite sequencer Ableton Live has been announced today! It will be available “sometime in 2007″. Looking at all the new features on the Ableton website it’s clear this is a major upgrade. Once again they have listened to it’s users and addressed many of the feature requests I have been hearing. I’m actually very surprised at all these additions. Here are some of the standout new features:

• Enhanced Audio Engine
• New Compressor
• Sidechaining (Built into the new Compressor, Gate and Auto Filter)
• All new Drum Rack
• High Quality Modes for Saturator, Dynamic Tube and Operator
• Improved EQ Eight
• Spectrum - a new spectrum analyzer
• Time Signature Changes
• Multiple Automation Lanes
• Rex Support
• Tempo nudge
• Better hardware integration

Ableton also announced new Ableton Instruments called Analog, Tension and Electric. These were created with various partners and is available separately or in a new product called Ableton Suite.

I highly encourage everyone to go over to www.ableton.com and check out the new features up close. There is already a video for the new Drum Rack which really explains everything it can do.

Here’s one of my favorite tricks. The screenshot above is Ableton Live but you can use any DAW, drum machine plug-in and arpeggiator. Take a drum machine plug-in and put it on a channel, add an arpeggiator and make a one bar long note at the beginning of your kit (usually the kick drum). Play the bar (looping) and play with the arpeggiator. Initially you may only hear the kick stuttering along so start experimenting. Adjusting the arp’s parameters like rate (1/8, 1/12, 1/16th), steps, and distance will start to give you variations.

I used this system to come up with the drum patterns on the song You Are Disturbing off my new album. You can also hear a lot of songs which have similar drum patterns by the 80s EBM band The Klinik.

Another thing to try is dupicating the entire channel and set the duplicate’s steps and offset differently than the original channel. In Ableton Live you can control-click the channel and select “Dupilicate” or even easier hit command-D. Combined the two channels let you hit more of the drum sounds. Adding more one bar notes on top of the kick (withing the drum machine’s sample ranges) will also pick up more sounds and effect how the arp reacts. Here is an audio sample that took me a few minutes to create using a Roland TR-808 and TR-606 sample set:

This post is dedicated to my father. For years my brother and I made fun of him because he always had large amounts of rubber bands on the gear shifter of the cars he owned. His reason for doing this was “In case he needed one”. Well dear father revenge is yours because for the past 5 years I have been addicted to rubber bands. If you are a performing musical artist with any electronic gear you bring to your live shows you should be addicted too!

Being an actual live performer with vocals in the techno scene means you have to show up at an event with every cable you need. About half the time there won’t be a sound man in sight. Also be prepared… very prepared to do set up in total darkness with people on drugs screaming things into your ear (in a foreign language) and music blaring at about 180 decibels.

As you can see in the photo above it a simple process and after a few months the cables start to keep their rubber banded form. Read “Use rubberbands as cable ties.”

I miss the song fade out. It was implemented in the age of recording to tape as a solution to song without an end. I feel fade outs worked really well on many songs. Modern DAWs let us choose our song length right down to the split second. Why not finish your next song with a fade out? With today’s computer automation it’s as easy and drawing a line on your master channel.

A recorded song may be gradually reduced to silence at its end (fade-out), or may gradually increase from silence at the beginning (fade-in) For example, the songs “Born to Be Wild” by Steppenwolf and “Hey Jude” by The Beatles both fade out. However, “Born to be Wild” fades out in a matter of seconds, whereas “Hey Jude” takes over 2 minutes to completely fade out. Fading-out can serve as a recording solution for pieces of music that contain no obvious ending. - Wikipedia.org

Come to think of it why not try a fade in? This makes your listener feel like he’s entering a situation already in progress. Great for songs that have a live or street feel to them. The album Stella by Yello is a good example. Do you have any favorite songs with a fade in or out?

photo credit: Martin Deutsch

I got my latest issue of EQ in the mail a few days ago and on page 71 is an advertisement for their video site Music Player TV. I had to scan and post the ad here because I found myself laughing and staring at it for a few minutes. This is possibly the worst graphic design I have ever seen. I know these guys are probably all musicians but come on. Check out the vertical striped bars on the left site. Who the hell was creating this ad and thought… hmm… some bars would look good there. It looks like a Corinthian column next to a 1992 Netscape Navigator home page.

That said and out of the way there is some cool stuff when you visit the site. It’s basically videos for the magazines Bassplayer, Guitarplayer, Keyboard and EQ. I don’t Read “Music Player TV. Great ad! My thoughts.”