I bought a Zoom H4 which is a portable digital recording device.. which allowed me to create a podcast that was kind of.. well recording “out in the field.” So the idea was to go out there and record an episode while I live my life, so to speak..

There was also this idea of… “capturing the moment.” You go out and record a lot of stuff… take it back into the studio.. and sorta put together the moments that you think really work.. to create the podcast in post production. This is sort of a radicle departure to the way we’ve been making the podcast..  and I hope this leads to making it a whole lot better… This is a new beginning for the Asymmetric Biz Cult.. it has evolved into a whole new animal.. this being the first episode of this new animal.. I thought it might be best to start off on the subject of who we are, who I am, etc…

Who am I?

Allan Watts on the subject:

On the hero’s Journey:

A video from Joseph Campbell:

On Modes of Being:

Heidegger.

I should probably also note that a lot of my thinking on the subject of “modes of being” comes from the Philosophy 6 - Spring 2007: Man, God, and Society in Western Literature Podcast out of UC Berkeley.. well its actually the lectures from this class. You can sign up through iTunes by clicking here. What you end up having in our podcast is something like a synthesis of eastern mysticism and philosophy with… well western philosophy, certain schools of psychology, and modern business theory…. And I guess I’ll leave the show notes at that.

 

 ABC 12: Out In Left Field: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This episode takes us into the music production of the asymmetric biz cult podcast, as well as my more personal sound work…. It’s another flawed struggle at trying to make a good podcast.. Though I believe it is not without it’s virtues and redeeming value.

Today’s show notes will include 2 things. #1 Links to resources, #2 A talk about process and technology.

Resources:

The BAM Audio School

Podcasts I recommend:

The Project Studio Network Podcast — Intermediate to Pro Music production podcast.

Home Recording Odyssey Podcast — Music production on the cheap.

Magazines: (many of which you can read for free online)

Keyboard Magazine: Though it’s called “keyboard magazine” its pretty good for anyone dealing electronic music production.

Electronic Musician: Was a favorite of mine for a long time.. on electronic music production

Virtual Instrument Magazine — This is a fairly new magazine that I’m rather fond of as it really goes much deeper into many aspects of electronic music then any other magazine I’ve found.

Sound On Sound: I subscribe to Sound On Sound, its probably my favorite.. A good well rounded music production magazine.. glossy and big.. and just a pleasure.

Mix Magazine — Good magazine on mixing (surprised?)

Free Plug in Database

On process:

The main sound project that went into this episode was the intro. The intro, as I listen to it now, points to where the production of this podcast should be going..

I think of the process like film making: A film maker goes out and shoots a lot of stuff.. and then goes back into the editing room and puts the film together. The editing is where the film emerges.. is really made.. it is here where we discover what we have.. the shooting, to some degree, is a process by which we gather our ingredients for our film.. we are collecting colors and what not..

For the intro I had two main recording sessions where I captured raw materials.. The first was a jam session that happened right around the time of the recording of episode 1.5…. The second was recorded a couple weeks prior to putting the intro together.. where Evan, myself, and Mark, all improvised these little descriptions of what Asymmetric Biz Cult might be.

Now I should tell you that I have a crazy amount of hard disk space on this computer. . I have content on here that goes back to… I don’t know.. 2000? I have my college work on here.. which may go back as far as 95? So I have a huge library of stuff, from which, I can use as building blocks for new projects.. This is an important idea.. that you can reuse your old work, when you work digitally.. and there’s a strange sort of surrealistic continuity that it can add to your work.. (you get this, like with Frank Zappa, when you see a lot of the work together with different treatments of the same materials, concepts, and compositions… etc)

One thing to think about in relationship to this sort of thing is copyright: If you do work for clients.. if you want to reuse source material that you created doing projects for clients.. you need to make clear, in your contracts, that you intent to hold on to the right to make future derivative works from these files.. you need to communicate with your client about this sorta thing.. you want them to feel comfortable in knowing you’re not going to reuse this stuff in such a way that would undermine what you’ve done for them.. and of course.. you work a little cheaper if retaining a little more of the copyrights.. and I would advice you, in all cases, to at least hold on to the right to use your work in the context of a portfolio..

Anyway.. so what I find powerful about the recording sessions was there energy.. How alive they felt.. A mad enthusiasm… How they capture certain qualities of the asymmetric biz cult vibe, if you will.. This is in stark contrast the way my music usually works:

My music creation process.. is like a painters in the sense that it’s this lonely introverted kind of journey. A painter just goes out there somewhere.. and paints, and that’s it.. just the painter and the canvas. And that’s what my production is like: Just me and the tools of my trade.. So my music is, in a certain sense, a kind of chamber music.. a kind of labyrinth of secret things.. its like some deep investigation of “the metaphysical this that and the other things”.. explorations of consiousness.. thoughts on organizational principles.. aesthetics.. and on and on it goes….

So what is special about the intro in the scheme of my larger body of work, has to do with the raw materials for my music creation… Which is a very exciting new twist to my work.. because my work can be as deeply self reflective, analytical, self critical, and whatever else.. as it ever was… but it also can be full of life.. So it can have a kind of balance between introversion and extroversion psychology types..

Ableton Live

The intro’s production took place in Ableton’s Live. I’m not a master of Live yet: I’m to some extent fumbling around in the dark. Live is in some respects a kind of tool of aliens, and my job is to figure out what it might have to offer my art.

To some extend “music production is music production.” What I mean by this is that there’s a whole lot to music production that is universal and doesn’t change just because you’re working in a different area of music production.. or a different style, or a different digital audio work station. Right now.. a lot of my sound production efforts are directed into thinking about mixing / the mix engineer’s roll. So some of the first things I’ll try and get a handle on in working with a new DAW is EQ, Compression, Reverb’s and Delays.. and the various effects that you’ll normally use to try and carve up your mix.. And if we where to explore in much depth where I’m at as a mix engineer, we’d probably also want to explore where I am as a composer, musician, or just all around sound artist.. and how all these things interrelate.. and come together in the production.. at any rate, more or less, this is the “music production is music production” and our job, when stumbling around in the dark, is to figure out how to breath this stuff into a live production.. so that it might benefit from what we know.. and where we’ve been in the past.

But Live is a very strange tool. It works in ways that are counter intuitive for someone coming to live from other DAWs… which is part of why I fumble around in the dark so much.. There’s a way to approach new tools, or at least there’s my way: You start out with “the basics” that you need to operate.. “What do you need to know how to do in order to be able to do what you want to do.” Once you get that worked out, you can start working on projects.. and along the way you can start experimenting with learning other features, and kind of expanding..

There’s what I’d call “The Uber Hard Core.” This happens where #1 You know all the key commands.. so that instead of going to menus you’re hitting key commands to make stuff happens.. #2, When there are multiple ways of achieving something you know which way is fastest, and perhaps whatever pros and cons might go along with whatever route you might take to achieving whatever it is you are trying to achieve. When you are at this kind of level you are able to work in a way that is a lot faster / more efficient… and the faster you can work, the more you can get done in less time.. and the greater your level of craft can then be…. and the higher the level you’re work will be at. So to some extent.. when you start with a program you have “Uber Hard Core - dom” in your mind as where you might like to go with this, and this helps to set your trajectory.

With Live, for now, I’m struggling with.. well mastering the basic basics… I’m pretty sure that Live is more powerful that I’m really fathoming right now.

Day or two latter:

Live is designed from start to finish to operate effectively as a live performance tool.. which is a little different from how you normally work with DAWs.. So I basically end up working with Live as if it where a conventional DAW.. Part of this is because I have a slow computer that’s not really up to taking full advantage of Live, particularly not in a live context…

Days latter:

This is getting pretty long, ha? Well I suppose this is sorta good enough for now.. lets just end it here….

 

 ABC 11: Prophetic Music Production Part 2 [81:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I don’t know that this was our most successful episode… but basically what I try to do is give you an overview of the wonderful world of music production… from a somewhat “prophetic” perspective.

For starters, what sorta tools might you use? Here’s a list of what you’ll find in my studio:

DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations):

Cubase SX3 Digital Performer 4 Live

Other music production software:

Reason (kind of a synth work station) Storm (somewhere between Reason and ReBirth)

Digital Instruments and Effects:

Native Instruments Komplete 3 (Bundle of Software Instruments and Effects) Model E (old analog synth) Waldorf Attack (percussion synth) LMR-4 (drum sampler)

Hardware:

Motu 828 (audio interface) Alesis 5.1 surround sound monitor system. Sennheiser HD 280 Pro (Head Phones)

Also in my studio is a 16 channel digital mixer, a digitech guitar effects processor, 2 hardware synth modules, a couple mxl microphones… and a few other odds and ends…

============

I thought for the show notes I would talk about equipment from the standpoint of my studio.. and from the stand point of my collaborators. This is about building a kind of road map to where we want to be moving forward.

————-

Currently I suffer from having a computer that just isn’t fast enough… I don’t really have a lot of money to pour into a new system.. so I’m feeling stuck with making do. At the same time, Mark and Evan are in the same sorta boat in that they don’t really have enough money to invest in the sorta equipment they would like to invest in..

One of the ideas for this podcast, and other projects, is… what if we all had the equipment to put together segments… What if we all had the equipment to edit, mix, produce, etc.. stuff. Also there’s some thought of “wouldn’t it be great to put together a CD” and to do that, my feeling is, we all need to be able to work on the production end of things, as well as the other ends.. Not only this but.. but we may be doing video work and I’ve been thinking deeply about rethinking sound design for video.. particularly stuff for the internet.

So.. currently in my studio is the following (with little clips that show you into aspects of the software):

Cubase:

Digital Performer:

Reason:

Live (this is probably one of the best of the clips, as it give you the quickest overview the fastest):

Native Instruments Komplete (Bundle):

Dwezil Zappa playing with Guitar Rig (a fav as his dad is a huge hero of mine):

FM8:

Absynth:

Battery (drum sampler):

Reaktor (one of the coolest tools in the bundle, but hard to find a video on, in here they’re just basically playing around with some ensembles):

Also worth mentioning is Kontakt:

There’s whole lot more to this bundle, and more to this studio, but lets move on, shall we?In terms of sound work.. the biggest current limitation to my studio is my computer hardware, which is to say that it generally doesn’t make much sense for me to continue upgrading software as long as my hardware is so far behind that its not really able to take advantage of the new software.. (do you feel my pain?)The above software probably retails for a little under $4,500.. (the street price is much less then that), but then that doesn’t include things like microphones, audio interfaces, and all the other stuff that can go into you’re studio..

Anyway, so in planning out a studio you want to think about a number of things: #1, What is it that you want to use that studio for, and #2, how much money you got.. along with this you might say.. well you might create a long term plan.. so that over the course of 5 years you’ll get to some place that you wouldn’t be able to get to in one year. Make sense so far?

Both Mark and Evan have some experience in music production but probably not enough so that they would take to modern tools like fish to water…. so in the short term, if we where to plan there studios we’d say “we want something that can both cover all the bases, not require to steep a learning curve to get into, they can grow into, and fits into a larger long term plan.” Oh yeah.. and there not as given to putting crazy money into there systems as I am.

My thinking is… for an album.. I’m kind of attracted to the idea that “everyone should have Live.” To explain this let me tell you the tail of both what what Live is and how it works in my studio:

Live is a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), but unlike other such work stations.. it’s designed to be played like an instrument, as well as work as a DAW… It’s a great DJ tool, a great way to play around with music.. And its very cool.. Also it has the best tools for working with loops that I have in my arsenal.. in practice this is kind of amazing:

I was just working on these new intros.. that I lost in a hard drive crash.. oh the pain of it! But a couple of weeks ago Mark and Evan came over to the studio and we played around with laying down some intros.. that could be the raw materials for intros and promos for the podcast… All this recorded in Digital Performer..

Now months ago we had a little jamfest.. where we all had instruments and decided to kind of make a podcast where we talked while we played.. and while this was a good deal of fun.. the results where.. not without there problems.. So I didn’t really feel comfortable in making that work public.. (although episode 1.5 is one of those recordings)

Anyway.. so what Live was able to do was to tempo match the jamfest with the project tempo.. I could very easily add in loops and other craziness to the jamfest.. I mixed this in with one of the intros.. along with some guitar and bass playing.. plus some drum loops.. and a whole lot of mixing / production stuff.. and came out with this kind of end product that really sorta blew me away..

What blows me away about Live is how easy it is for me to take audio content from all sorts of projects I’ve worked on in the past.. in many cases projects that I’m not really happy with.. and sorta use it as the basic building blocks of new projects. What seems to me to be exciting about this in the context of our group is how easy it would make it for us to collaborate together in productions where we are all creating stuff… and sending that stuff back and forth and what not.

In my view, one of the weaknesses of Live is it’s MIDI implementation.. It’s just no where near where Cubase or Digital Performer is at.. I mean its not where those programs where at 7 years ago! Which isn’t a bad thing.. it just highlights that the modern production involves the use of a number of different programs.. so… if you need sequencing, where should you turn?

I don’t even know the likely hood of Evan or Mark really getting into sequencing.. but its so fundamental to modern music production that you kinda feel like “well, we need it.” I don’t talk too much about MIDI sequencing in this episode.. but it is a pretty central thing to how I make music.. or I mean I program notes into sequencers that tell other stuff what to play..

The Major Daws., Cubase, Digital Peformer, Logic, etc.. that are the strong sequencers, tend to run close to $1000 on there list price… In many cases, however, there are “toned down” version of these programs.. that will run for just a few hundred dollars.. which also have an upgrade path to the more full featured versions…. And are very strong in there own right, so basically.. perfect for starting out. Also.. if you own some sort of competing tool to Digital Performer, there is often a “competitive upgrade” that you can get that makes it, in practice, as inexpensive as some of these toned down version… When looked at from this angle.. it seems like DP might be the best choice, particularly because we’d all be on the same tool.. I already know it to a certain extent and thus can help them along… and it is a great piece of software.

It’s also worth considering that they will need audio interfaces. An audio interface is how you get your audio into your computer.. Interfaces run from under $100 to over $1000… depending on any number of variables. They are also frequently bundled with software.. which is yet another thing to consider…. For the purposes of Evan and Mark, they can probably go with some of the cheapest interfaces on the market.. the main thing is they’d probably like an XLR in.. and maybe the ability to record more then one track at a time.. at a reasonable sample rate and bit depth.. So they don’t really need to spend too much money here unless we are thinking seriously about software.

One of the interfaces I find myself checking out is the MBox 2 on Musician’s Friend’s website. It runs for about $450 and comes with a sorta toned down version of Pro Tools, Reason, Live, Sample Tank, Amplitube, Tracks EQ, BFD, and other stuff.. which really makes it kind of ideal and cheap, in many ways… but again.. we don’t see really strong sequencing in there…. (Protools has historically not been strong in MIDI)

The Next Day:

Well.. I’ll continue on this rambling tale of thinking through studio issues on some of the upcoming show notes.. so stay tuned for that.

 

 http://cdn.libsyn.com/mattsearles/ABC10PropheticMusicProduction.mp3 [48:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download