I got a noticed from Jingle Punks that my music might be used on The Voice.
In watching a guitarist walk through how he achieved his great sound I realized there was a lot of money in his sound. It wasn’t really over the top, but the latest amp head, a few other items such as two EchoPlexs, and it was at least $3,000+. While this isn’t $10,000 it is a chunk of change to 90% of us musicians trying to make ends meet.
Thanks to the digital age it’s able to help the 90% of us who can’t spend $3,000 to get the sound through the means of an analog signal. While I feel that I’m compromising by embracing a digitizing guitar signal, I am embracing my wallet at the same time. The obvious benefits of DAW has made digital sound imaging more acceptable. Paying $100-$200 for a multi-effects raises the spending ceiling for adding other items to our musical arsenal, which I had done.
I hope in the future I could play around with a $3,000 guitar signal path, but until then I’m working hard to tweak the digital.
It’s a few days after Thanksgiving, but I’m thankful for all that I’ve been blessed with.
The follow songs Ending Session, Another Today, Movie Trailer, U Know, Bone Crusher, and Adrenaline were used in the following shows or networks.
US shows:
- Auction Kings
- Wreck Chases
- Flipping Out
- UFC Countdown
- Pimp My Ride
- National Cable TV Association
UK shows:
- Flipping Out
- Pimp My Ride
I’m glad to see my music being used outside of US boarders.
For many years I’ve vacillated on purchasing Ozone mastering plugin. I’ve downloaded the demo, played around with it, and opted to not purchase. My rational was that I had enough plugins that I could do a good enough job myself.
I downloaded version 4 about a month ago and never installed the demo. I finally installed it, applied it to the master buss, selected one of the options and I was amazed. This elevated the song up a few levels. Here I was listen to a brand new song. It was how I wanted the song to sound like.
I updated a few of my songs, listened to them in my “mastering room” (the car) and had a hard time keeping the volume down because they sounded so good.
This was no cheap purchase. But the return on investment (ROI) is quickly recovered. If I were to send my songs out to be professionally mastered I’d reach my purchase price in no time.
The best mastering location I’ve found is in the car. I’ll isolate tracks, listen through headphones, listen in mono, etc. It’s when I burn the CD and listen to it in the car is where I hear that there’s too much or not enough of something. This is the idea of giving your mixing or mastering ears a break. You’ll continually read it in postings, books, and so on, you need to take a break from mixing or mastering to give you ears a break. For me, it’s taking a break from my DAW.
The car stereo for me is the true tale of how the it’s going to sound. I listen to the home stereo also, but the car seems to be the place that something stands out when something is wrong. Many times I hear a break and I realize the transition is lifeless, or there’s too much bass or not enough.
When I think the song is about done…it’s time to take a ride in the car.
I received an email from Jeffrey P. Fisher regarding his frustration about how some people leave voice mails. I can relate, which got me soap-boxing. My soap-boxing was two fold. One was about leaving messages where people don’t utilize the “advance” (facetiously stated) technology of a voice mail box. Leaving a message of “call me” is a complete waste of time. Give some info, because when I call back I will most likely get your voice mail, and the phone-tag begins. A better scenario than phone-tag is the caller giving the reason why they are calling, “I’m calling regarding scheduling you to play August 26th at 6:00PM, are you available?”. I call back, get his voice mail, “I’m returning your call regarding playing…” you get the idea.Viola, the gig is close to being booked because the caller left the reason why they called.
The other soap-box issue was about common sense, which kind of goes along with leaving the reason you called on voice mail. It seems that common sense is lacking in today’s society. A simple test is to turn the situation around. For example, someone called Jeffrey with music blaring in the background. Jeffrey couldn’t hear what the caller was asking, so he stated that the music was too loud. The caller seemed to have turned away from the speaker and cupped the phone and repeated his statement, something about if there were any jobs. Let’s turn the situation around, does it make sense to make it difficult for the receiving caller to hear you? Another example was a business that made smoothies (think Jamba Juice). The smoothies were pretty unique and tasted good. The problem was the business never had set hours – HELLO? The sign would say open from 10:00 – 5:00. We’d stop by at 11:00 with the door locked and with nobody home. No, this didn’t happen just once, it was a continual problem. I understand that circumstances arise, but if they scaled back their hours and were consistent, I would say they would still be in business.
I’ll be the first to say that common sense isn’t the secret ingredient for success, but I can say that it’s stone soup without it.
…stepping down from the soap-box.
In our overly processed world, which includes music, sometimes raw is refreshing. Raw vegetables are good for you, so why can’t raw music? There’s a radio station that plays old blues or bluegrass on the weekends and it’s refreshing to hear. It’s basically a mic and the band or sometimes it’s just a man and his guitar.
What comes through is the heart of the music and there in lines the refreshing part. You can also see, and sense, where the heart of our music comes from.
I recall sitting in a coffee house where two musicians were going to play SOS by the Police. I laughed under my breath, because it was an acoustic guitarists and a conga player; one conga mind you. I’m thinking, how are they going to pull this off. As they started to play, I was thoroughly beside myself because they sounded great. It wasn’t that they nailed reproducing the song, but they played with such passion and feeling that any “spit-and-polish” would have ruined the performance.
Blues has a way of showcasing feeling over ability. I might be able to “play” the blues, but as I’ve heard often, you never “play” the blues, you feel it. Or as it has been stated, “if you don’t feel it, don’t play it”. It only tasks a quick listen to John Lee Hooker or Muddy Waters to see what I mean. You don’t listen to this music thinking that they need to fire the person who mixed and mastered this song. It’s more like, you touch the console, you’re fired!
I knew that with DAW there is a lot of things you can do, but it hit me yesterday just how much. I wanted a new snare, hit-hat and kick drum for my latest song and I was able to pick through, what felt like, an endless amount of choices, the right word is plethora. Plethora’s definition is, overabundance; excess. I’m not sure if I would say that there is ever an “excess” of options (seems like we always want just one more…), but it did hit me that way back when, I would be lucky to get one snare sound. Now I have what just about amounts to an endless amount options, and very professional sounding options I might add. I’m very thankful for those options and choices that I have at my finger tips.
Time for a blog change, at least the look. I’ve had this theme for a while, but haven’t committed to using it. No reason for the decision except I thought it was time.