Monthly Archives: April 2006

David Gilmour pushing satellite radio; WHY?

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I was reading a bit over at Brain Damage about Pink Floyd axe man David Gilmour and his “secret” Manhattan concert that’s going to be recorded tomorrow night.  Apparently, tickets to the event were given only to XM radio subscribers.  Now, I guess if you’re David Gilmour, you really aren’t concerned with growing your audience. Not half as concerned as a truly independent, wet-behind-the-ears, hole-in-the-wall guitarist who is happy just to have his tunes played on the local 500 watt college station. But, I gotta wonder why David chose to get in bed with XM, who has a questionable long-term future and is losing money hand over fist. Your thoughts?

No freq. response on Bose speakers. Are we not surprised?

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I was reading a piece by Alice Hill about the amazing brand trust position of Bose, the company that makes speaker systems for home stereo listeners.  Apparently, consumers trust the Bose brand so much that even Sony and Nintendo can’t roll with ‘em as brands.

Then it occured to me, if their brand is on par with their quality in terms of clarity and frequency range, why don’t you see Bose speakers in studios, in use, perhaps, as console monitors?

Very simple–Bose has a niche, and there are about thousand times more uninformed audio consumers out there than there are studio owners, and it’s easier to sell to a larger group of customers.

Interestingly, Microsoft is at the rock bottom of the brand trust-o-meter. Can’t say I didn’t see that coming. What kind of speakers do you use as monitors? Anybody out there using Bose?

O’Malley plays the MIDI bagpipes on eJamming

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A few weeks back my wife and I went to Johnny Rocker’s for green beer and St. Patricks’ Day merriment. Low and behold, between the deejay’s selections (please forgive me for not attending a live music venue), some members of the local police department had formed a bagpipe trio and were marching around Rocker’s playing old folk numbers. Two pipers and a snare drum player, marching through the bar to everybody’s delight.

Well, becoming a bagpiper just became a lot more geeky and a lot less green-dye-in-your beer cool. That’s because Master Gaita has just introduced a bagpipe MIDI controller! This USB-compatible controller has the same fingering positions and note duration control technique as a standard bagpipes, although the fluffy checkered bag is conspicuously missing. I guess, with all that technology, who needs a bag anyway? Check out the deets from Master Gaita:

The instrument is strongly made on a PVC tube with nine extremely sensitive tactile devices, so only the smooth contact of a finger resting on any of them is needed to activate them. A semi-rigid cable and a little plastic box make the chanter to get firm in a fixed and confortable position as if it were in its stock. A 2.5 meter long cable leaving the plastic box carries the MIDI singnals to the computer or sound module the Master Gaita is connected to.

Get one of these bad boys, and all you need is a subscription to eJamming in order to form your own Internet-based bagpipe band! Green beer not included.

Use EQ, not panning, to remove low-end mud

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Drum-kit.com has a great little tutorial answering this question: Is it OK to pan low-frequency instruments to the left and to the right in order to restore clarity and get rid of that mid-low muddiness that always seems to be such a nuisance.  The answer is essentially “no”, for a number of reasons:

  • Bass isn’t as directional as treble, so panning doesn’t have the same perceived effect on the stereo image with low-freqency instruments as it does with high-frequency ones.
  • Certain analog media–especially vinyl–just don’t deal well with low-frequencies that are too far to the right or left. In fact, some producers master vinyl with certain low frequencies at dead center, regardless of how they’ve been mixed.
  • EQ is much more effective in bringing clarity to the low-end. Check out these tips:

Rule number one is to to cut the bass below around 100 Hz for any instrument or sound source that has not been specifically included in the mix for its bass content. Anything else is just mush, and should be filtered out.

In many cases, that will be enough to provide clarity in the bass. However if you wish to combine several bass instruments, you need to carefully EQ them so that each has its own little space in the frequency spectrum.

For example you could tune and EQ a kick drum to say 80 Hz, then cut the bass guitar slightly in this region while boosting it in the 150 Hz -200 Hz zone. These are not hard and fast figures, just instances.

The Sad but true story of Payola.

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Payola is the detested technique of paying radio stations to air certain songs in the hope of selling more records, instead of the proper payment flowing from the radio station to the artist, which is how groups such as ASCAP and BMI stay afloat. These firms are essential clearing houses for collection of airplay (and insertion) royalties. Their members consist of artists like you and I, people who produce and compose music. The idea is, if you join BMI, you’ll have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting paid if your song gets played on the air, which is better than not getting paid at all and releasing your music, copyrighted though it may be, without a royalty license.

So how does one get one’s songs on the air in order to get paid?

Continue reading →

Microtonal piano music

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I am listening to a microtonal piano music performance right now, via the Microtonal Podcast Blog.  What IS microtonal piano, you ask?  Well, take a regularly tuned piano and then retune each key using the “in-between” pitches not normally employed in most popular piano music.  The result can be aurally flustering but also downright gorgeous, depending on the ability of your ear to hear the intervals used in a standard-tuning-predisposed manner. You may have to listen for a while before it stops sounding “out of tune”. Listen for yourself.  Thanks to Prent Rodgers, who commented the other day and shared the link to his site–he’s the one performing the pieces in the podcast, if I’m not mistaken.