Last Wednesday I posted about The Flaming Lips documentary The Fearless Freaks, and in that post I cited a few memories in my life around the time I was first turned onto The Flaming Lips.

Yesterday I came across two pieces of media that featured Terry McBride, CEO of Nettwerk Management. 1) A Be The Media interview, and 2) A YouTube video of Terry’s TEDxVancouver speech. In both of these pieces of media Terry talks about the emotional power of music and its ability to bookmark moments in our lives that we can return to whenever we choose. Immediately I thought about my post from Wednesday, so I had to share:

The Be The Media interview:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/be-the-media/2010/02/03/terry-mcbride-ceo-nettwerk-music-group (kinda long, but worth it-1hr total)

TEDxVancouver speech:

For the last few years, I’ve looked to Terry McBride as a major source of inspiration. The principles upon which I founded Radical Notion (independent media) are very much non-traditional, outside the box ideas. And ever since I founded this company, I’ve been searching for new ideas, finding inspiration everywhere I could, and seeking to better understand what these new ideas and inspiration I have are. This search of knowledge for what the future of the music business looks like is what ultimately led me to Terry McBride and the ideas he shares.

Terry McBride has an understanding of this subject matter which is astonishingly articulate. I hope one day I can understand all of this half as eloquently.

Having knowledge of the tools-understanding them-is an important part of your artistic process.

The results and character of what you get with pen and paper is certainly different from what you get with keyboards and electrons.

Recording to tape using a collection of vintage tube mics is not going to make your art any more or less compelling. But there is a specific inspiration you get from recording to tape, and another specific inspiration you get from recording to a DAW. And neither one of these is “better” than the other-they’re just different.

Make sure you understand the tools. Don’t ignore one thing because it’s too “new” and another because it’s too “old.”

Utilize a collection of tools throughout all your creative processes, whether recording, writing, taking photos, or anything else creative. You will be pleased with the way it changes your style and character, and the different nuances within the results you get.

So yesterday I published my first blog post of 2010, and I’m happy to be posting once again. I believe when I made the announcement that I would need to be taking time away, back in October, I mentioned that I would be getting rid of the regular posting schedule of publishing new posts every Wednesday. Instead, I’m going to simply post whenever I can. And my intention is for posting to happen often.

I think that by doing away with a regular posting schedule, and writing posts relatively on the spot (rather than taking days to prepare a post), I’ll ironically have more freedom to post more often. From best I can tell after running this blog for two and a half years, all the work and thought I was putting into preparing weekly posts was too much of a challenge to balance into my daily work.

In addition to this new posting routine, I’ve diversified the range of topics I’ll be creating a dialogue within (see category descriptions below). I think exploring these new topics will help me learn and become better at my craft (which is one of the main reasons I run this blog), as well as make it easier to come up with content to post, and giving the blog an even more human feel-as I hope my personality tastefully shows through a little more.

New categories:

• Contemplations-Me learning out loud; working to understand new (to me) perspectives and epiphanies, relevant to record making
• Inspiration-Things I’m generally inspired by (different from the Music Business Inspiration category)
• Recollections-Career and autobiographical stories

I hope these changes do indeed serve as an improvement to Producer Notes. I hope it makes you enjoy the blog even more. I hope it brings more value to the blog. I hope it brings more discussion to the blog. And I hope it leads to more learning experiences for both you and me.

I Hope this new year has been good to you so far, and I look forward to the conversation we have on Producer Notes in 2010.

Thanks again for being loyal readers.

Cheers!

Since last Friday I’ve been battling a terrible cold, and have not been able to get much sleep. Out of frustration I gave up, and decided to just watch movies on Hulu instead. Last nite I came across The Flaming Lips: The Fearless Freaks, which is obviously a documentary about the band The Flaming Lips.

Although I’ve never collected or listened to a lot of The Flaming Lips music, I’ve always been very interested in and inspired by the band. I remember being turned onto the band by my older sister, who is responsible for turning me onto a lot of the now legendary bands which shaped rock music from the late 80’s through the early 90’s.

I think it was 1994, and my sister was all about this new song hitting the independent radio airwaves-I believe back then there was this really cool station in Nashville called Thunder 94, which played some of the most fantastic underground indie/grunge rock-the song was She Don’t Use Jelly.

She came to me and told me all about it, “You have to hear this song!” She put it on a mix cassette tape, and we would listen to it in the car on the way to school.

Shortly after, I went out and bought the CD, Transmissions from the Satellite Heart. I listened to it, tried to like it, didn’t get it, and ultimately traded it to my sister for The Smashing Pumpkins record Pisces Iscariot. A few years later, when my sister went off to college, I went digging through the CDs she left behind. I was so excited when I found that she had left Transmissions from the Satellite Heart. I listened to the CD from start to finnish, and this time I understood the appeal. I loved the guitar tones, the timbre of the lead vocal, the riffs, and the instrumentation.

Like a lot of bands, though, for some very strange reason I didn’t continue to follow The Flaming Lips, or buy any more of their records. Throughout the years there have been a lot of bands I’ve really enjoyed, but never bought their records. Best I can tell, this all had something to do with my obsession with The Smashing Pumpkins-I was too busy studying their records to pay much attention to anything else.

The Flaming Lips have always held some kind of special inspiration for me, and throughout the years, as the band periodically popped up on my radar-one of the Batman movie soundtracks; when they hit critical mass around 2002 with Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots-it’s always stirred an excitement in me that I can’t quite put my finger on.

And watching The Fearless Freaks last nite helped me understand a little bit more about what the excitement and inspiration that comes from The Flaming Lips is. It reminded me of a time in my life when I was first realizing how important music was to me, and it reminded me of specific memories for which the band’s music served as the soundtrack.

The Fearless Freaks served as an intimate window into the lives of The Flaming Lips, and made me realize that through all these years this band has been astonishingly forward-thinking, lead by risk takers who are pure artists, and visionaries-always remaining true to a specific set of ideas.

I’ve always been inspired by The Flaming Lips, but watching The Fearless Freaks I saw that I’m now inspired by the band on another level-an entrepreneurial level-as they more or less have been doing for around 20 years, what I’m attempting to accomplish now. Building something that is remarkable.

www.fearlessfreaks.com

Over a continued period of time, as I continue to author Producer Notes, it will grow in audience, participation, and value (hopefully!).

Over the course of this timeline you will be able to watch me become more skilled as a writer, blog editor, producer, and music business professional.

And as that happens you will certainly be able to dig into the archives and uncover old posts which contradict newer posts.

Paradigm Shift
As you grow as a person and as a professional, and as you learn more and sharpen your skills, your understanding of things and your paradigm will continually shift. And somewhere along the line something you do or say is going to contradict something you did or said a few months ago.

I love sharing information with people, which is definitely one of the main reasons I run this blog. But I also run this blog as a way for me to learn things, myself, by sharing information. It’s the way I’m wired. I don’t fully understand and learn things until I both put it into practice, and teach it to someone else.

Which means that sooner or later (I probably already have) I’m going to contradict myself in some form or fashion here. But that’s a good thing, because if I’m doing that it shows I’m learning. And if I’m really doing things right I’ll continue to share ideas through these contradictions in a way that keeps straight any potential confusion.

Any time you keep an open mind, welcome in new ideas, and work to shift your paradigm when appropriate you’re going to come to a point where there is contradiction. But embrace this contradiction, as it’s a sign that you’re learning and growing.

Thanks for 2009
Hey, this will likely be the last time I post on Producer Notes in 2009, so thanks to another great year (can’t believe this blog has already been around for almost three years!). Thanks for being readers and helping me learn. Looking forward to where our conversation goes in 2010.

I’m going to be taking a break, once again, from the regular schedule of my weekly posts on Producer Notes. There is a lot going on with Mother/Father (namely their upcoming show w/ Kings Of Leon) at the moment, and I need to offload a few things so that I can take care of those responsibilities.

Although I will be off the regular schedule around here, I do expect to drop in a bit with some posts here and there-just not on a weekly basis. I’m not sure how long this is going to last, or if this relaxed schedule may become a permanent change for Producer Notes.

If you’re interested in following Mother/Father, you can jump over to their website here: thisismotherfather.com. There’s a lot of developments taking shape, which we’re all excited about, and two of which are happening next week:
Mother/Father Grimey’s in-store (win tickets to Kings Of Leon): Thursday, Oct 15th 6pm
Mother/Father with Kings Of Leon: Friday, Oct 16th 7:30pm
Details here

As always, I do appreciate everyone who reads this blog. Hope that you continue to find value here. Thanks for understanding my need to take a break.

Disclosure: I am in no way connected to the Mellowmuse company, or the Auto Time Adjuster plug-in. No one approached me to write a review. This is not an advertisement. I am in no way getting any form of compensation for writing this blog post. I’m simply excited that there is a finally a tool that will allow us Pro Tools LE users to have a form of automatic delay compensation, and that this tool is inexpensive.

Here’s something I’m pretty excited about. Auto Time Adjuster (ATA). I was flipping through the latest issue of Tape Op when I came across ATA in the gear reviews section. If you spend a significant amount of time working in Pro Tools LE (like me), I’m sure you’ve grown frustrated many times when dealing with plug-in latency. The lack of automatic delay compensation in Pro Tools LE can create so much extra work and stress.

While ATA isn’t perfect, it’s definitely worth it in my opinion. Using ATA in your sessions will further complicate the signal flow, unfortunately. But that’s still not even close how complicated things can get when having keep track of manual delay compensation times, or how many samples you nudged specific regions. Save if anything changes.

No more manual plug-in latency compensation. And it’s only $49.

Take a look at the website, which has some tutorials. http://www.mellowmuse.com/ATA.html

Compression is a great tool. And I love the way it sounds when applied as an effect of sorts.

But I think everyone can agree that compressors have been used pretty generously in record making over the last fifteen years. If the amount of people who hit Producer Notes because they put some term relating to dynamic compression into Google is any indication, I’d say compression is the number one thing people are interested in regarding recording and mixing music (Buss Compression is one of the most viewed posts on this blog). And I’m not even going to start up on the loudness war.

But why not trade out the compressor for automation? Most DAWs and consoles have fantastic automation capabilities these days. Why not simply turn up the track when it needs to get louder, and turn it down when it needs to get quieter?

I understand that there are particular contexts in which automation can’t do the job (which is really a very specific amount of contexts), but for everything else, why not automate it?

From my experience I find this approach lends to a much more musical, open, natural, and, (not so) ironically, bigger sounding recording/mix overall.

Any thoughts?

Have you read Unleashing the Idea Virus or Tribes by Seth Godin? Or The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell? All very inspiring books about how truly great ideas can spread and gain traction when the right people are rallied around the idea.

Jackson’s Science Fair Project is the current living example of these books. I met a band from Canada a few weeks ago-Oceanship-through a friend of mine. Turns out there is a 7th grader, Jackson, who really likes this band, and has decided to connect people together by creating a tribe on Facebook. It’s all a part of a science fair project assignment he is completing for school.

This is a perfect example of how new marketing can be very powerful for the music industry. Jackson’s Science Fair Project has been very successful very quickly because it creates meaning, tells a story, and connects Oceanship fans to one another.

www.facebook.com/powerofonekid.

Here’s a few quick ideas for crafting your tone when recording electric guitars. Because many of us working at home in our project studios don’t have access to a lot of outboard EQs (I sure don’t), I’ve left the use of EQ out of the equation. Personally, I’m of the mentality that you should work with the source you’re recording to craft the tone, then use microphone selection and techniques to further craft the tone you’re looking for. There is certainly a place for EQ, but I’m a believer in not only keeping things as simple as possible, but also holding out on EQ as much as possible-using it only as the last coat of shine to a source that is already great.

Multiple Mics
Using multiple mics allows you to blend the response curves of the mics together, creating a tone full of warm nuances. It’s kind of like taking a photograph with several different lenses at the same time, and then blending the qualities of these lenses together to create a picture with a unique look.

Multiple Amps
Grab an amp splitter or A/B/Y pedal. There are lots of companies that manufacture these. You can get a simple two-way splitter (A/B/Y pedal), or if you’ve got a little more cash on hand you can get more sophisticated with a multi-way splitter.

In any case, split your guitar signal through two or more amps. Then blend the tones together just like in the technique above. You can use the same type of mic on every amp, or try different combinations for more complex tonal shaping.

Layering parts with different tones
One of my favorite things to do is to have the musician perform the same part multiple times, but change different parts of the setup, such as the guitar, the amp, the pedals, the mic, the pre, or all of it. This way, you’re not only getting variations in the tone of the guitar, but also in the nuances of the musician’s playing. Really makes the overall track have a big sound in the end.

*EXTRAS*

So there’s three fairly basic and widely used techniques to capture a great guitar tone in recording, but I thought I’d throw in a few extras as a bonus.

Phase Alignment
There is some great outboard gear, as well as some software phase alignment tools on the market. These tools allow you to play with the phase of the signal-continuosly sweeping it from anywhere between 0 deg to 180 deg in phase adjustment. When it comes to electric guitars (especially in rock) playing with the phase of signals can create some really interesting and inspiring tones.

Mic Placement
Another way to play with the phase of signals is to simply change the placement of two or more mics in relation to one another on a source signal. Equally as interesting and inspiring as above. When positioning microphones, play around with their position and distance on an individual speaker as well. Mic’ing directly in the center of the speaker (mic pointed at the dust cap) will get you a tone that has a lot of high frequency content (but could sound thin). As you move the mic to the edge of the speaker the highs will begin to roll off. Playing with the distance of the mic to the speaker will cause the proximity effect to come into play.

Using Pedals
My favorites are fuzz and octave fuzz boxes, clean boosters, and chorus/short delays. But distortion boxes, EQ/filter pedals, compressor pedals, and phasers/flangers can all be great as well.

If you try some of these techniques out, please come by and share your thoughts or links to sound clips in the comments. Got any of your own techniques? Feel free to post those in the comments too.