Music biz hopes to profit from consumer content
Rather than just suing YouTube and its ilk for how their sites are used, the music industry can now profit from them, not to mention reap the promotional benefits.

Musical mash-ups, once fought by record labels, are going mainstream
Some record companies are moving from suing mash-up artists to offering their own “official” mixes. And simple software is making homegrown mash-ups easier than ever to create and circulate via the Internet.

Music industry may do more with mp3
Because consumers can potentially make unlimited copies of MP3 songs, the major record labels have seen the format as a threat to their business. But instead of continuing a battle that many think the industry is losing, some analysts think the labels are about to embrace the technology and figure out how to make money off of it.

Music of the Hemispheres
The subtlest reason that pop music is so flavorful to our brains is that it relies so strongly on timbre. Timbre is a peculiar blend of tones in any sound; it is why a tuba sounds so different from a flute even when they are playing the same melody in the same key. Popular performers or groups, Dr. Levitin argued, are pleasing not because of any particular virtuosity, but because they create an overall timbre that remains consistent from song to song.

Tags: newsdigest

Equalizers are mysterious beasts for beginners. And the advice most commonly offered, “try different things” and “use your ears,” is meaningless when you don’t know what you should be trying, and what your ears should be hearing.

John Vestman’s EQ Settings That Will Make Your Mixes Come Alive has just those types of getting-started tips. Advice like “Add 2 to 6dB at 2.5k to 5K, cut 2 to 8dB at 300 to 500hz, add 50 to 100hz.” for kick drum, and “the bass should have more mid-bottom from 150 to 200hz, and from 1K to 3K for clarity.”

John also outlines some of his general miking and mixing philosophies.

A great sounding kit starts with the player who knows how to dynamically balance his or her drums with the cymbals. BIG LOUD cymbals make your kic, snare, and toms sound softer… if you want the drums to sound BIG, hit the cymbals significantly softer.

Previously: Instrument-frequency chart

Tags: EQ, miking, mixing

Digidesign (makers of Pro Tools software) published an extended special on recording vocals in 2004. The series focuses on using Pro Tools to produce polished vocal tracks, but 2 of the articles deal with plugin effects, and the techniques are much more generally applicable. You can use the advice from these articles with any DAW or recording platform, even without the specific plugins described.

The first article Adding Effects to Vocal Tracks looks at compression and gating to clean up the vocal sound, with a good overview of various approaches to reverb.

Gates allow an audio signal to pass through them if the signal is above a specified threshold. When the signal is below the threshold, the gate closes, attenuating the signal partially or fully. Gates are utilized to allow the desired (louder) signal to pass through to the output while denying unwanted (softer) signals. They’re useful for eliminating unwanted noise on tracks (like headphone bleed or even the singer’s breathing), for creating cool effects like cutting off reverb tails, and many other applications.

The next article, Adding Ambient Effects to Vocal Tracks, delves more deeply into the use of reverb, delay, and chorus to add depth and character.

Putting your delay effects in stereo can really make your mixes sound wide and deep. You can pan your source track to one side and a delayed signal to the other side. Or you can put the source in the middle and pan delayed copies of the source to each side. For this to be effective, select different delay times for each side of the stereo field. A good technique for thickening a vocal part is tripling the original track by using single delays panned left and right with delay times of 16 ms and 32 ms

Tags: delay, plugins, reverb, vocals

Bob Lefsetz has compiled his predictions for the music industry in 2007, covering ground from Rhapsody, to Bono, to the future of the Grammys

Sometime in the next twelve to eighteen months CD sales are going to decline so precipitously as to cause the major labels to rethink their digital strategy. With the iTunes Store no replacement for discs, they’ll be forced to authorize a new method of distribution, just to maintain their bottom lines.

His thoughts are generally aimed at professional producers and A&R folks, but as the industry adapts its business model to accomodate the Internet and iPods, independent producers and artists become increasingly important. If your interest in recording is more than a hobby, knowledge about the business (even in the form of expert prognositcation) is crucial.

And David Geffen, apparantly, is done.

Tags: business, predictions

AllofMP3.com Ignore RIAA Suit?
AllofMP3 countered the music industry’s claim, stating the service is completely legal in Russia as all necessary fees have been forwarded to the Russian royalty collection firm, ROMS

Year’s chart-topping album fails to crack 4M sales
… in a sign of how piracy, a la carte single sales, the closing of retail stores and a host of other issues have eaten away at the music industry’s core product – consider that [this year’s best-seller] wouldn’t even have cracked the top five in 2001.

Oldies but goldies benefit in digital revamp of charts
OCC chart director Omar Maskatiya said it changed the rules in consultation with the record industry once digital downloads began outselling physical releases in November.

Tags: newsdigest

What is “harmonic balancing” and why should I care? (Or more appropriately, why should I ignore the hype?):

Peaks and valleys in your spectrum don’t determine what’s “good” or “bad,” your ears do… And what causes records to sound different in different listening environments is a poorly balanced mix, again something you fix with your ears, not your eyes.

This conversation about ultrasonic frequencies (those above the range of human hearing) is technical, and does nothing to settle the debate about whether recording at 192KHz really yields improved transparency. But it’s interesting nonetheless:

if you do record all the way up to, say, 100 kHz, you will be capturing signal that can foldback and alias into the sub-20 kHz regions. If you take care of these things prior to the decimation, there will be less energy to foldback.

How do I get a big thick guitar sound? (The best advice is on page 2)

Drop any distortion simulation like a hot potato. Forget about it….you will thank me later. I tried to do “professional” recordings with it, and it just doesn’t work….though I do actually rely on sims for pristine cleans. The whole thing is that emulation hasn’t got to the authentic stage, because it doesn’t sound like it’s pushing air, and it’s using transistors, which add a 3rd harmonic in the distortion, which is not pleasant to the ears. For single notes it’s okay, but transistor distortion just sounds unpleasant when you have multiple strings playing, especially on an open d or g chord….it’s a whole bunch of these harsh overtones. I just don’t think that transistor power amps can process all the information in a way that it’s pleasing to the ears….it’s trying to process numbers, where the ears are processing overtones.

Joey Moi, who co-produced and engineered Nickelback’s The Long Road shows up on this thread at Gearslutz to offer his thoughts on recording the band.

whats noted is pretty close to the set up we used on “The Long Road” give or take a mic or 2…or 4. Its alot different now that we have moved to the barn and our Live room is smaller. For the record…the SSL we have is great, it is the old board from the A room in Little Mountain, we have a lot of fun using it and it has never let us down. (We thinks it has magic)

Tags: guitars, professional-engineers

From PCRecording.com (though the advice applies equally to recording on a Mac,) here are some basic things to consider when mixing:

One major mistake many make is to mix by addition rather than subtraction. That is, if you cannot hear one track well enough you turn it up. In addition, the level changes are oftentimes in increments that are too large. Take it easy, make small changes. Try bringing down some levels rather than just boosting them. Even changes as small as .1dB are significant and can be easily discerned.

The article also touches on hardware latency and software buffers, which are often overlooked as part of the mixing process, but can be a source of frustration for beginners and experts alike.

Previously: The Big Page of Mix Tutorials

Tags: mix-tutorials, mixing

Music labels have to prove sharing
With today’s ruling, it appears that the record labels will have to demonstrate that someone actually infringed on their copyrights by downloading music from Lindor’s computer. That’s a step beyond the RIAA’s argument that making files available for download constitutes infringement.

Beatlemaniacs publish books on their own
Now, if mainstream publishers reject their work as too specialized, even the most Beatles-obsessed authors are finding audiences for their books by publishing them themselves. But don’t even think the phrase “vanity press.” Many of these self-published books are lavishly produced and packed with original research that makes them invaluable to Beatles scholars

American PTA Seeks Ban on 1970s Porn Music Composer
Angry American parents of high school, and some middle-school, students hope to take a 10-million-name petition to the United States Congress in an attempt to ban a music-download website which sells the music of the iconic German porn composer, Klaus Harmony.

(Here’s Klaus Harmony’s Myspace page. Chicka-chicka-wow.)

Free Music Next Year?
SpiralFrog […] drew attention in August, when it announced plans to distribute music downloads from Vivendi’s Universal Music Group for free, via an ad-supported Website.

Tags: newsdigest

While a cheap reverb can hurt your recordings, some of the best-loved reverb sounds in history were happy accidents. Electronic Musician has a great article on finding your own distinct reverb sound in the space around you:

… for all its wonders, digital reverb is not indispensable, nor is it always the best way to impart a convincing sense of space to your recordings. Does anyone really think that, for example, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue would sound better if PCM70s had existed in 1959? Would Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” still hold up today as a zenith of rock drum tones had the kit been close-miked and swathed in digital reverb?

Hot-water heaters, it seems, make great reverb tanks, and a washer or dryer can make a distinctive-sounding reverb chamber.

Tags: diy, reverb

If you made your first recordings on a 4-track tape machine before migrating to a computer-based DAW, chances are you have dozens of old cassette tapes lying around.

These tapes won’t last forever … Magnetic tape degrades over time, and if you keep them long enough, those old 4-track masters, and the mixed tapes you created from them, will be unplayable.

If there’s any chance you’ll want to hear the old recordings in 20 years, it makes sense to transfer the recordings now to a digital medium, which should be permanent. Lifehacker has a short feature, How to Digitize Cassette Tapes, that details how to accomplish this with Audacity (though obviously, you can substitute your favorite DAW.):

There’s more to this idea than a trip down memory lane. Now that tape decks have all but disappeared from car stereos and Walkmans are a thing of the past, there’s really no other way to listen to cassettes, forgotten or otherwise. You invested big bucks in these things, so why not get your money’s worth? Here’s how to bring your tapes into the digital age.

The Lifehacker article is specific to 2-track stereo tapes (i.e. your mixdowns,) however it’s certainly possible to transfer a multitrack recording to your computer:

The problem is that the Portastudio has four tracks, and most people only have two inputs into their computers. Four into two doesn’t go, so how can these recordings be transferred? The simple answer is to record two at a time. Transfer two tracks, then wind the tape back and transfer the other two tracks.

Tags: tape