wire to the ear

My friend Rich who happens to work at Apple Cupertino (yes I have friends in high places!) wants me to get an iPhone. He knows to appeal to my vanity so he sent me the screenshot you see here of my MySpace page on the iPhone. Once you install the free app you can do pretty much most of the things you can on the real site including send and receive messages, browse friends, bands, share photos and post bulletins.

However, all is not well with this application. You see my dear friends there is no Flash on the iPhone hence you can’t play videos or MUSIC. You can look at this with the half full or half empty mentality… The app is free and you can accept new friends and messages which is great. Or… What? It can’t play music? Isn’ this supposed to be a mobile MySpace? I suspect we will see an update when the Flash, Silverlight, SproutCore war settles down.

Get MySpace Mobile: click here

I blast myself with a 500 watt worklight when I sing my vocals live. The sunglasses I wear go from no tint at the bottom to dark at the top. This lets me see but also allows me to make eye to eye contact with the audience. I’ve played massive events with over 40,000 people but my favorite gigs are small clubs. Whatever the size of the venue or festival your core fans will make it close to the stage. Take the time to acknowledge them. If your not entering the stage by a curtain call before you begin your audio onslaught shake the hands of a few people who you can tell are there to see you. This is especially important if your playing a venue where your just one of many acts and the crowd is only a small part yours. Why? Because if you get the front moving the rest will follow.

In the 90s on one infamous night at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City I jumped into the crowd in a drunken state and ended up getting clocked. I was pretty trashed and my pre-show comments on the mic pretty much sealed my fate. After my eyebrow grew back and the stitches healed I gained the confidence to get close to the audience again. Today of course I’m always sober and my fans have had ten years to multiply!

My favorite part of the gig is when I get a chance to jump into the crowd with the work light. Get close to your fans. They like your music because on some level they are similar to you. They know your lyrics and relate. Go and greet them face to face!

The video above is from this Saturday night’s gig at the Ground Zero Festival in Bussloo, The Netherlands. You can see it was easy from me to jump down into the crowd but I had to run around the back to get back on stage! For a photo set (without the bad video noise): click here

I did a bad thing and I apologize. What did I do? I designed this blog without ever checking it in Internet Explorer. I use a Safari and Firefox on a Mac. The thing is even though I’m not a professional web designer I know better. It must have just slipped my mind.

I discovered that everything on the site looks fine in IE expect the lower half of the title “Wire to the Ear” is cut off. I know it’s not really a big deal right? Content is king anyway right? I was in Amsterdam performing yesterday at “Ground Zero” (bad name) and although I was happy they put me in the Sheraton Hotel; to get 24 hours of paid internet in the room would have been 19€. Instead I just used the lobby’s Microsoft Center which was free but the OS was locked down and I didn’t have the choice of Firefox. As it turns out that was a good thing because it let me see the error.

That got me thinking about what browser’s people are using to view this site so I checked my Google Analytics. I was surprised that only about 20% of you are using IE. You can see the rundown of all the browser percents in the little screenshot.

I’ve been planning to install Parallels, Vista and MS Office on my Macbook Pro and this is another good reason to do it. For those IE users please be patient as I think it will take me a few weeks before I actually get around to installing the MS stuff and fixing the title. A good website to know about which I just discovered today is IE NetRenderer which will render any site in IE and display a screenshot:
http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/index.php

Discogs has started using it’s API and has released a seller widget. Many of my friends say Discogs is the defacto place to sell electronic music vinyl, more so than even eBay. So this is good news for those of us clearing out our mother’s basements or trying to stop paying overpriced storage fee’s somewhere.

These widgets allow you to show your Discogs data your blog or other websites. Just copy/paste the HTML code into your website where you;d like your data to appear. - discogs.com/widgets

For more info about Discogs check out my post titled, “Discogs is a great music database and community.” You can find my label on Discogs: here. And my artist page: here.

Weepr Official Demo from Weepr on Vimeo.

I came across this video of Weeper. It’s from an Italian company. Fast forward two years and put this on my Mac “TouchBook” Pro.

Out with the old, in with the new. When Ableton released Live 7 they simplified the way to bring in audio and midi from an external device such as a hardware synthesizer or drum machine. If you use external hardware and your not using the Live’s new External Instrument Device read on.

So let’s take a look at the old way of bringing an external instrument into Live. You would have to create an audio channel, select it’s input and arm monitoring. You would also have to create a separate Midi channel, choose then Midi Interface (Midi To) and Midi Channel.

Now for the new imporved method. Go to the Live Device browser (upper left side of the interface) and under Intruments drag an External Instrument device to a Midi track. On the device you can choose all the parameters that were previously spread over two channels: Midi To, Midi Channel and Audio Input. You also have the additional Latency parameter which is usefull if you notice your hardware synth or drum machine notes are coming in a little late. The best part of the External Instrument Device is now that you set it up you can save the preset and your now one click away from adding any hardware you have into your current song. I have seperate presets for all my hardware synths and drum machines.

This week a few blogs have mentioned Denon’s ridiculously priced $499 Ethernet cable. In fact one of my favorite cartoon strips User Friendly did a take on the subject: click here to read it Don’t we all know by now not to pay large sums of money for cables?

Made from high purity copper wire and high performance connection parts, the AK-DL1 will bring out all the nuances in digital audio reproduction from any of our Denon DVD players with the Denon Link feature. - www.usa.denon.com

This reminds me of the recent test at audioholics.com which pit a $60 Monster 1000 Cable vs a coat hanger. Guess which won?

The test was conducted. After 5 tests, none could determine which was the Monster 1000 cable or the coat hanger wire. Further, when music was played through the coat hanger wire, we were asked if what we heard sounded good to us. All agreed that what was heard sounded excellent, however, when A-B tests occured, it was impossible to determine which sounded best the majority of the time and which wire was in use. - audioholics.com

If you really want to improve your sound check out Machina Dynamica’s Brilliant Pebbles. These cost $129 but actually do make a real difference in your audio quality. You can see what they look like in the top photo of this post. Highly recommended.

A guy named Andrew from the band Creaky Boards is making a claim that Coldplay ripped off his song. The song was then used in an iTunes commercial. This video has subtitles that explains the controversy.

So what do you think?

If your a song writer you probably write hundreds or maybe thousands of songs over your lifetime. To avoid the Nickelback controversy it’s a good idea to arm yourself with an arsenal of tools and ideas to help yourself from self repetition. A good place to start is the beginning. How do you start your songs? What’s the first thing the listener will hear? Here’s five different ways you can kick it off:

1. Solo vocal. The human voice is the most powerful instrument of all. If you have a strong opening line having it solo will focus the listener on your message. You can even start with the chorus. Example: Killing me Softly by Roberta Flack.

2. Record the count in. One. Two. Three. Four. Say it. Say it in German. Put some guitar feedback behind it. Click the drumsticks four times. Record four finger snaps. Record your voice staying, “Start the tape!”. Example: Showroom Dummies by Kraftwerk

3. 16 bars of beats. If your music is headed for the dance floor is a nice thing to help the DJ out. How? Give him at least 16 bars of steady drums to help him mix in your song. In fact, by doing so your increasing the chances of your song being played at all.

4. Fade in. This is an unusual way to start a song especially in modern times. Before hard disc recording you heard this more often as producers would ride faders up in a song that was already in progress. Do you remember my related post titled “Bring back the song fade out.“?

5. Full on. A lot of times I start my songs by adding in one or two instruments at a time. Sometimes thats a sign of the amateur. Many songs just start off with most of the instruments and even the vocal already going. Load up an old song you did and just chop the intro off. Maybe it works better that way?

What’s your favorite what to start a song?

photo credit: Jon_Marshall

The Kurzweil K2000 is a classic synthesizer/sampler workstation. Everyone I know who ever owned one still has it in their studio hooked up and running. Every few months I hear someone and talk about it’s magic sound and abilities. One interesting tidbit you may not know is that the synth division of Kurzweil is owned by a Korean parent company. You could say Kurzweil is like the Hyundai of the keyboard world.

The K2000 uses V.A.S.T. (Variable Architecture Synthesis Technology) which allows you to take any multi-sample, noise or waveform and process it using just about any synthesis technique. The source of these multi-samples are from the 8MB of ROM which hold tons of authentic and superb quality samples. The internal processing is 32-bit with 18-bit DACs. The K2000 uses 31 sound-shaping algorithms to provide a variety of resonant filters, EQs, continuous panning, amplitude modulation, crossfade, distortion, digital wrap, waveshaper, pulse width modulation, high frequency enhancement, low frequency oscillators, hard sync oscillators and mixing oscillators, all with real-time MIDI control. - www.vintagesynth.com

Ray Kurzweil is also a well known futurist with a pretty interesting track record. This week the NYTimes ran an article about Kurzweil’s latest predictions titled, “The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least“. Kurzweil says we will soon have the magic eat whatever you want and don’t get fat pill, cheap solar energy and within a decade we will fuse with technology and live forever. He calls that last bit “the Singularity”. Check out his book, “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology”: click here.

About 20 years ago he predicted blind people would be able to read anything by using a mobile device. knfbReading Technologies, Inc. in partnership with Kurzweil now sells such a product. Check it out here: www.knfbreader.com

So a name we all associate with a special synth is jumping around in the future. Do you own a Kurzweil workstation keyboard? Do you like them? Did you own one and miss it now?

Kurzweil on ebay: click here
Photo by Michael Lutch. Courtesy of Kurzweil Technologies, Inc.