Listen to Gryner

This started as a place to post my music, but I'd like to see just how far the rabbit hole goes...

[gryner]

Taking down my Soundcloud

Dear readers,

I would like to announce that I’m shutting down my Soundcloud page.

There is a large number of posts on this blog with links to that page, and unfortunately, by tomorrow, those links will no longer be available.  

I will do my best to relink all the media, but I don’t know for sure if all links can be restored.

It’s the end of an era for me, but also the start of a new one. Hang tight because there are great news in store for next month!

See you then ;-)

[gryner]

Is demand for music = zero?

The word ‘demand’ is generally understood as the desire for a particular item or service. In this sense the answer to the title of this post is a resounding NO. Saying that the desire for music is zero is absolute nonsense, people still dance at weddings, the radio hasn’t been taken over by spoken word programs and most people would agree that having a haircut in complete silence is an awkward experience. However, if you think of ‘demand’ in purely economic terms, then the title of this post seems a lot less far fetched.

"DEFINITION of 'Demand' An economic principle that describes a consumer's desire and willingness to pay a price for a specific good or service."

The key difference in this definition is the willingness to pay a price. 

Imagine you are at a garage sale and among the pots, pans and general bric-a-brac there’s a USB stick with the album Dark Side Of The Moon in it costing £4.50. On the one hand this could be a great deal considering the same album costs £8.99 on the iTunes store, plus you would be getting a USB with it; on the other hand, this could be a rotten deal as £4.50 is really expensive for a used USB stick. Which reaction is more likely? 

The reason why most people would consider only the USB stick and dismiss the digital copy of Pink Floyd’s masterpiece, is down to the fact that music nowadays has become a public good. To illustrate this concept imagine a restaurant, on a busy high street, charging 5% for the presence of street lights outside their place. The customer would most certainly feel outraged! Street lights are public goods and one would be right to refuse payment in this case. Unfortunately nowadays music is seen in the same way as street lights, and a lot of people feel it is their right to refuse payment.

If you're interested in this kind of discussion, here’s a really interesting article that expands on the idea of what kind of good music is: http://otoomet.blogspot.com.br/2012/02/music-as-public-good.html

[gryner]

Logic 9 compressor (urgh)

Recently I had to deliver a mixing workshop entirely based on Logic 9. The course was aimed for budding artists and producers with only a couple of years of experience. What made it really interesting was that I couldn't use 3rd party plug-ins, it had to be all 100% Logic 9.

I hadn’t used Logic’s native plug-ins for a while, so I wasn’t quite prepared for the shock I got from that weird compressor. I tried it on a number of things, dialled in many familiar settings and nothing, I mean NOTHING, sounded like what I was expecting. After a couple of minutes I was already feeling like a fraud, I started questioning my own skills, “how can I deliver a Logic mixing course, if I can’t make it sound any good!” and just when I was about to loose the will to live, I noticed this little thing on the top of the plug-in window which says: “Circuit Type”.

I have no idea what Platinum is, but I can tell you it is totally useless for mixing drums! As soon as I changed the circuit type to VCA everything made sense, I backed away from the ledge and was able to work normally.

I don’t know if this tip is of any use to anyone at this point in time. Logic X is out and most people nowadays have a dizzying array of compressors to chose from, but for what it’s worth, keep an eye for that Circuit Type menu.

[gryner]

[gryner]

Andrew Scheps is definitely one of my audio heroes. Not only is he an amazing producer/mixer he’s also an incredible communicator. On this talk he discusses the topic of audio quality in the digital world, and does it in a way that doesn’t make it sound arcane or pointless.

Actually, the subject of audio quality is slowly creeping back into the picture with access to higher bandwidths and new services such as Tidal, Jay-Z’s high fidelity streaming service.

The loudness war is over and Andrew Scheps won it with the infamous Death Magnetic by Metallica. Loudness normalisation is a reality. There’s no need to mangle our mixes with extreme limiting.  Bandwidth is going up and things just might be looking up for sound quality in the digital world.

[gryner]

Dynamic illusion

Compressors are without a doubt the hardest piece of kit to get your head round. Carlos Fuchs, owner of Tenda da Raposa studios in Rio de Janeiro, used say that you need a license to drive a compressor, and I have definitely been guilty in the past of ruining mixes for driving a compressor without a license!

The main reason why it's quite so complicated is down to the fact that a compressor has the potential of producing wildly different outcomes. Depending on how you use it, you can either reduce dynamic range or give the impression of enhancing it. On the screenshot below there are three Moog bass tracks, the first two are the original recordings and the third is a compressed version of the original.

By setting a low threshold, slow attack and fast release, the compressor chops off the sustain of each note, making the attack portion of the envelope more noticeable. This effect is very visible on the waveform as the compressed version looks more "pointy" than the original. The overall effect is that the bassline becomes more percussive.

Even though I didn't measure the final dynamic range with the parallel layer, I don't believe this technique makes the mix more dynamic. However, this combination gives a real sense that the bassline is more percussive and louder.

[gryner]

Actually, listen to Bob

My biggest struggle in audio production is reverb. I love bold use of effects like on big dub tracks, or Robert Plant's vocals on Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd's stylish use of long plate reverbs, and even the extremely hyped "moody-verb" on James Blake, Bon Iver and Caribou - tracks so wet you have to listen to them with a snorkel!

Sadly, when it's my hands on the desk I can never find it in me to push those faders up - I suffer from chronic reverb shyness :-(

For this reason I don't even have a reverb send on my writing sessions. During the production stage I use only insert delays and for me that does a good enough job. Slap delays provide a decent room-sounding effect and longer delays are useful when you need to prolong a sound. However, wether I like it or not, every mix needs a little reverb.

Watching Bob Clearmountain's interview on Pensado's Place I was really surprised with how he uses room/chamber returns. He said they sound "really bright"! Never in my life have I thought of making a bright chamber return, if anything these returns are as dull as they can possibly be on my mixes.  Nevertheless, he is one of the biggest legends in mixing and if he says that's how he does it, the least I can do is to give it a try.

The result stunned me, it actually works really well. It had a particularly positive effect on the inserted delays, as every repetition received a little bit of room, creating a nice ambiance without eating up the mix with messy reverb decays. The screenshot below shows exactly how I'm using it at the moment.

I know that boost looks crazy, but trust me, it really works, or better yet, trust Bob Clearmountain! I’ve been using this return more often than my other usual ones. It’s also worth mentioning that all my effects go to an effect bus. where I’m knocking off everything above 12kHz.

[gryner]

RTFM!

I've always had mixed feelings about the V-Comp by Waves. Everyone raves about it, but even though I could always recognise it's value, 9 times out of 10 I would end up changing it for something else, usually the H-Comp.

This week I decided to give it a proper go and I downloaded the manual to get some insight on it. Giving credit where it's due, Waves does an amazing job with their manuals, I've always learned a lot with them and it wasn't any different with the V-Comp - check this out:

In the analogue domain, ideal levels tend to fall between 0 and +5 dBU. Translated to the digital domain, which is measured in dBFS, 0 dBU = -22 dBFS. This means that ideal input levels to the V-Comp range from -22 to -17 dBFS. This may take a bit of getting used to, since those accustomed to the digital world often seek the hottest level on each track. However, Waves engineers chose to model the V-Comp precisely after the original hardware, so it is preferable to provide input levels similar to those expected by an analogue master bus compressor.

This information changed everything. As soon as I made sure the input was exactly at 0VU, the plug-in sang like an bird! I've been using it a lot on percussion parallel chains, boosting everything under 2kHz. The screenshot below shows exactly how I'm using it at the moment.

[gryner]

Colour Coding

Labelling the desk is an age old tradition in audio. Many engineers have special markers and colour coding schemes, some studios even decorate their walls with old desk strips. Wether you're in or out of the box, everyone has their own special method of organising sessions and they're always infinitely superior to everyone else's!

The way I setup sessions vary depending on the project, but my colour coding scheme is definitely the best and I would like to share with you guys.

I've gone through many phases, from a fixed colour-to-instrument correspondence (e.g. drums are always red, and so on), to aesthetically pleasing combinations that make the screen nice to look at, or even colouring regions and clips according to the track colour.

Nowadays I've given most of it up and only use colours as a means to group tracks visually. My scheme is all about differentiation. Contrast is key and in order to make sure that the sequence is as contrasting as it can possibly be, I use the colour wheel to guide my choice of colours.

Colours which are diametrically opposite each other present the most contrasting relationship, in this sense, orange is "opposite" to blue . The screenshot below shows exactly how effective this can be. Even with very small track sizes, the distinction between groups of tracks is very clear.

So whether you're an obsessive compulsive session tidier, or a chaotic producer, you can always make use of the colour wheel ;-)

[gryner]

The good guys won!

[gryner]

Thanks to The African Rhythms Drum and Dance Troupe from the University of Pennsylvania, a student based group started in 1993, and their teacher Cachet...

[gryner]

Enough with the "feel-of-the-song"!

Before I start on my little rant, I’d like to go on the record and say that I’m a huge fan of this audio renascence that seems to be coming about. The amount of incredible useful online resources, insightful video tutorials, interesting interviews, willingness to share experiences online, are probably the greatest things that happened in music and audio over the last decade.

Just the fact that you can now tailor your Facebook newsfeed to get interesting, relevant information about the topic you love, instead of pictures of cats and food is awesome. This surge of information is making a really positive impact in the industry because, contrary to what I thought would happen, most of it is genuinely useful, well researched stuff!

However, there’s one thing that really puts me off which is all this nonsense about “the feel of the song”. Every single guest on Pensado’s Place, Mix with The Masters, countless online articles and tutorials, use this mythical “feel of the song” as a cop out and end up saying nothing at all.

So, this is my appeal to all audio tutors and engineers posting content online: “stop using the feel-of-the-song as an excuse to offer vacuous, useless advice!”. Try harder, explain what the feel-of-the-song means, go deeper into what elements actually make up the “mood of a record”, let’s raise the bar and bring this discussion to a new level!

[gryner]

Instead of shooting arrows at someone else’s target, which I’ve never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bullseye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.

Brian Eno

[gryner]

Unhinged

Talking about his own creative process, a friend of mine inadvertently gave me the best advice ever:

"If a painting is pretty, you know you have a problem." 

 He's obviously a painter, not a musician, however, this serves perfectly well for any creative endeavour and it's particularly useful for music. 

 Since then I've been very aware of the importance of having strategic loose ends in structure, unhinged elements in the mix, or maybe a blatant lack of something which every other song in the universe has. It's hard to put this in words without sounding like pseudo-intellectual a-hole, but it does make perfect sense. 

We're in the business of generating meaning and creating memories, so it follows that repeating an expected behaviour or reproducing a well established pattern will only work against that. As a part of our job we're constantly referencing other people's work, striving to keep up with our contemporaries, we long desperately to part of something, to be equaled to those we admire, but will all this ultimately help us create the unforgettable? Maybe not, perhaps it will induce us down the exact opposite path. 

 It's definitely a hard thing to do, and I certainly don't pretend even for a second to possess such lofty artistic qualities, but I do believe it's worthy goal to aim for. 

 So remember folks, you know you have a problem if your painting is too pretty!

[gryner]

Music Industry in Numbers

Being an artist and trying to make sense of the music industry is an absolutely daunting exercise. Stats are downright confusing and more often than not they are aimed for investors rather than creators. Over the last few years we've seen, on the one hand, encouraging prospects for media companies but on the other exasperating numbers in artist's revenue.  

In order to shed light on the matter and help us guerrilla creators find a way through this incredibly challenging period in the cultural industries, I have two excellent recommendations:

1. This is the single most important article that came out last year: "The Death of Long Tail, The Superstar Music Economy" 

2. The Music Industry Blog is great source of information and their article on "The Great Music Industry Power Shift" is very insightful.

This data is important because there's no revolution waiting for us artists, no Bonaparte who will free us from the tyranny of the middle-man industry, change will be slow and gradual and rests entirely on our understanding of the situation.

[gryner]

White noise to the rescue!

I'm not a huge fan of Daft Punk but if there's one thing they seem to be able to do better than most is programming kicks and hats. There are few people who could make a 5 minute track with nothing but kick and hi-hat and still make it sound amazing - Revolution 909 is a great example of this.

(By the way, watch the full video because it's quite a cool clip!)

I was working on this track and I simply couldn't get the main hat sounding like I wanted to, it was miles away from Daft Punk. I tried everything: distortion, phasing, brute compression, chorus, agrresive gating, sidechaining, slap delay and nothing seemed to work. In a last desperate attempt I decided to layer it with some white noise and the result really blew my socks off.

Actually it wasn't white noise, I used the sound of a snare played with brushes, a sample from a very slow jazz ballad that had a beautiful brush sound. Generally speaking it's similar to white noise in that it's a wide band sound, but it has a lot more character than just plain old white noise.

The idea couldn't be simpler, get a wide band, white noise(ish) sound and automate the volume to play with the hat. It takes some time to get the curves swinging just right but it's quite fun doing it.

It's also crucial you tune the noise just right so that it doesn't conflict with the hat, you can tune it above or below your main hat, whatever suits your song, in my case it was it was slightly above.

There's an incredible array of sounds you can get with this technique, you can make it sound airy, or give  the illusion that you're saturating the hat and most impressively, depending how you draw those curves, you can actually achieve a reverb sounding effect!

It's really useful and I totally recommend it.

[gryner]

A little confession

I’m working on this track and for some reason I thought it would be cool to start with a very slow build, starting with pads only and gradually layering rhythmic elements, seamlessly building up to a point where the tension and expectation reach an impossible pitch and dropping the beat becomes inexorable.

It turns out this is one of the most difficult things to pull off because slow gradual builds are probably the cheesiest things in the whole universe! It’s really hard to make a build-up to a beat that doesn’t make me curdle inside in cringy desperation.

I wasn’t aware of that before I started down this path, but I figured now that I’ve spent so many hours working on this I might just go all the way - but I ain’t doing that ever again!