04.26.10
Posted in Music, technology at 9:17 am by Steve
I have long been a fan of Metric-Halo and their products. I was an early-ish adopter of their Mobile I/O device, which has been my go to interface for recording both in the studio and on location for the better part of 6 (maybe 7) years now. My MIO 2882 has been the most reliable piece of equipment I’ve ever purchased. Add to the the incredible sounding converters and analog front end and you can understand why I have nothing but praise for this company.
I recently setup a MIO 2882 2d Expanded for a local church, transitioning them from the Tascam digital board they had bee using, and I have to say that the results are stunning. It’s hard to believe that a 9 year old design can still be so incredibly current. A very refreshing paradigm shift from the “planned obsolescence” mentality most companies adhere to these days. Easy to use, small footprint, minimal power requirements and great sound.
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01.25.10
Posted in General at 3:43 pm by Steve
Great music is an epiphany that reaches deep into the soul and turns the listener into a prophet who must share that epiphany with everyone they come across.
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11.27.09
Posted in Music at 10:40 pm by Steve
When my students stumble over chord fingerings in a lessons I often fall back on a trick I learned while at Berklee College of Music. It’s a simple method for training your muscles to get into and out of a chord form smoothly and quickly.
You set a metronome on the slow side (54-60 bpm) and let it begin counting off the time. Now, since most chords are not played in a musical vacuum you will want to approach your trouble chord with another chord, preferably the one that precedes it in the piece you are playing. So, if you were struggling with an Emi7(b5), for instance, and the preceding chord was a G7 you would use those 2 chords for this exercise.
So, with your metronome happily clacking away get yourself ready for the approach chord (in our case the G7) and count off 4 beats to get you to your first measure. On beat 1 of that measure play the G7 chord, and then immediately release your fingers and use beats 2, 3 & 4 to set up the next chord (the Emi7(b5) in our example). On beat 1 of the next measure you will play that Emi7(b5) and then immediately release it, using beats 2, 3 & 4 to get back to your starting chord.
You would go back and forth between these chords, hitting them only on beat 1 of the measure and using beats 2, 3 & 4 to position your hand for the next chord. After a couple of minutes you will feel your hand finding its way without much effort. At this point bump up your tempo a notch or 2 and continue until it’s smooth at that tempo and keep going and bumping up the tempo until you are at the tempo you will actually be playing those chords.
If you aren’t using a metronome in your practice routine, here is one more reason to go buy one. The simply help you become a better musician.
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11.24.09
Posted in Music, Studio Log at 11:03 pm by Steve
I just finished mastering an album for children’s performer Marcia Louis entitled Goin’ To Kindergarten. As well as the mastering, I engineered, mixed and even lent a helping hand with the instrumentation. This marks the 3rd album I’ve done for Marcia and, while they have all been fun, this one has been a real treat. We started this way back in February of this year and finally nailed down all 13 tunes.
If you have young kids, keep an eye out for it next month. We covered a lot of musical ground on this album. My 2 year old has had the thrill of hearing this album several times over that past months as we recorded, mixed & mastered this. He’s already singing along with most of the songs.
I wish I had taken a picture during one of the recording sessions to post here, but I was too busy thinking about the task at hand to think ahead to ‘a picture would sure be good for when this is all done’. Oh well 
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11.13.09
Posted in General at 1:21 am by Steve
A thought I had while arguing a point & thought I would share. The point presented was that we crave drama in our lives, drama that mimics a fairy tale.
What we want out of life are tangible sign posts along the way of our life’s journey, not drama. We want moments of sublime importance to usher us into our next life phase. Drama is a poor man’s substitute that doesn’t quite fit the bill.
Plus – I think many of us have had too much drama in our lives and that doesn’t make our lives any more like a fairy tale. It certainly doesn’t fill any void either.
What we are genetically (physiogenically that is) predisposed to needing are the “magical moments of threshold crossing”. Or, to use a more universal term, rites of passage.
The drama is a substitute for the fact that the predominant religion of the 20th Century and beyond (that would be Science), has stripped us of those all-important rites of passage that our psyches have relied upon for hundreds of thousands of generations, leaving us adrift is a sea of primordial subconsciousness desperately looking for signposts.
What we want out of life are tangible sign posts along the way of our life’s journey, not drama. We want moments of sublime importance to usher us into our next life phase. Drama is a poor man’s substitute that doesn’t quite fit the bill.
Plus – I think many of us have had too much drama in our lives and that doesn’t make our lives any more like a fairy tale. It certainly doesn’t fill any void either.
What we are genetically (physiogenically that is) predisposed to needing are the “magical moments of threshold crossing”. Or, to use a more universal term, rites of passage.
The drama is a substitute for the fact that the predominant religion of the 20th Century and beyond (that would be Science), has stripped us of those all-important rites of passage that our psyches have relied upon for hundreds of thousands of generations, leaving us adrift is a sea of primordial subconsciousness desperately looking for signposts.
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10.13.09
Posted in technology at 11:54 am by Steve
So…have you been blown away by the new media revolution?? Neither have I. In fact, there’s really not all that much ‘new’ about New Media. Delivering a commercial to me as a pre-roll to an online video stream is not ‘new’. Sorry. Banner ads are certainly not new either. Sorry. Rich media? Again, not new. Animation dates back to the early 1800s with ‘flip books’. Sorry.
There’s nothing new about online media. Oh, sure, the delivery is new, but the media itself hasn’t changed any. And the control hasn’t yet shifted from the few to the many. The internet has not been the liberator of media. In fact, the threat of what the internet & internet media could be has scared the you-know-what out of those in control of “old media” so much that the backlash of lawsuits (ahem..RIAA, are you listening) has just become a farce, a circus, a comedy of errors. The only problem is that no one is laughing.
The ‘old media moguls’ are akin to the blacksmith in the early 1900s, who upon seeing the automobile, decided to try to pass law saying the automobile should not be allowed on the road with horses & people and control it proliferation and how it could be used by the general populace. And they then hire a great law team who goes on to show how dangerous these new automobiles are and how the increase in pedestrian deaths is enough to pass these laws. For example, in England, it was once law that you had to have a pedestrian walk in front of your car waving a red flag and blowing a horn to warn everyone that a car was coming. It was a law that was repealed in short order. It impeded the progress of civilization by limiting the use of the technology at hand. A meme that seems to be cyclic in history.
The problem is lack of vision. Rather than seeing the advent of new technology as a boon to civilization and a chance to make money in an entirely new market, the blacksmith simply can’t get past the fear that his livelihood is in jeopardy. With people buying automobiles there will be fewer horses on the roads. Fewer horses on the roads means less need for new horseshoes. This is a rather short-sided view of life and is usually the direct result of a business model that has no extensibility or leadership that has no vision, even for those things right in front of their faces.
And what’s all this “research says x% of people under y watch online video”, or whatever the technology du jour is. Why do we rely on the general populace to ferret out where everything is going. Are they not just taking advantage of what’s here, now. If they were so good at defining the future of technology, wouldn’t they all be millionaires. It was Henry Ford who once said, “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse.’ “
My advice to the blacksmiths of today: learn to make tires.
So…have you been blown away by the new media revolution?? Neither have I. In fact, there’s really not all that much ‘new’ about New Media. Delivering a commercial to me as a pre-roll to an online video stream is not ‘new’. Sorry. Banner ads are certainly not new either. Sorry. Rich media? Again, not new. Animation dates back to the early 1800s with ‘flip books’. Sorry.
There’s nothing new about online media. Oh, sure, the delivery is new, but the media itself hasn’t changed any. And the control hasn’t yet shifted from the few to the many. The internet has not been the liberator of media. In fact, the threat of what the internet & internet media could be has scared the you-know-what out of those in control of “old media” so much that the backlash of lawsuits (ahem..RIAA, are you listening) has just become a farce, a circus, a comedy of errors. The only problem is that no one is laughing.
The ‘old media moguls’ are akin to the blacksmith in the early 1900s, who upon seeing the automobile, decided to try to pass law saying the automobile should not be allowed on the road with horses & people and control it proliferation and how it could be used by the general populace. And they then hire a great law team who goes on to show how dangerous these new automobiles are and how the increase in pedestrian deaths is enough to pass these laws. For example, in England, it was once law that you had to have a pedestrian walk in front of your car waving a red flag and blowing a horn to warn everyone that a car was coming. It was a law that was repealed in short order. It impeded the progress of civilization by limiting the use of the technology at hand. A meme that seems to be cyclic in history.
The problem is lack of vision. Rather than seeing the advent of new technology as a boon to civilization and a chance to make money in an entirely new market, the blacksmith simply can’t get past the fear that his livelihood is in jeopardy. With people buying automobiles there will be fewer horses on the roads. Fewer horses on the roads means less need for new horseshoes. This is a rather short-sided view of life and is usually the direct result of a business model that has no extensibility or leadership that has no vision, even for those things right in front of their faces.
And what’s all this “research says x% of people under y watch online video”, or whatever the technology du jour is. Why do we rely on the general populace to ferret out where everything is going. Are they not just taking advantage of what’s here, now. If they were so good at defining the future of technology, wouldn’t they all be millionaires. It was Henry Ford who once said, “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse.’ ”
My advice to the blacksmiths of today: learn to make tires.
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09.30.09
Posted in General at 12:49 pm by Steve
I have become convinced that technology has done more to hinder focus and excellence than it has done to help. Technology injects our lives with too much information at once and forces us to switch gears quickly and frequently. Neither of those things are known to be healthy or productive in our everyday existence. But, I can’t blame technology. It’s simply the tool. You can’t blame a hammer for your clumsiness when you miss a nail and hit your finger.
I recently took a step back and examined the way I use technology. I realized I was contributing to my own lack of focus by always trying to accomplish several tasks at once. Email, checking a website, writing some code, writing a score, updating social media sites, IM, twitter, et al. I was attempting extreme multitasking, and it really wasn’t working. As we all know, multitasking is a simply doing several things poorly rather doing one thing well. So, I had to ask myself why I was doing this to myself. Unfortunately I didn’t have an answer other than “because I can”.
I decided to end the madness. No longer to I leave my email client running all day. I check email when I have time to check it, read the messages waiting for me and then respond (or act accordingly) to the messages. I even turned off the scheduled email check on my iPhone. I no longer let a phone call interrupt my flow. If I can’t stop to take a call I let it go to voice mail and will call back when I can focus on the conversation. And being both technical and creative I have found that they are mutually exclusive brain modes. I no longer try to code while trying to design, write or compose. It simply doesn’t work. I set aside time for each and focus solely on that task.
In the 2 weeks I’ve been doing this I have found it to be very liberating. I am more present when I am doing any single task and I find that the organization that is imposed by a single task approach has made me more productive and has helped give me more time for myself.
Perhaps Albert Einstein was right when he commented that, “technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.“.
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