Yesterday, Adam Yauch from the Beastie Boys did something that I consider to be bold and courageous. Something you would really not expect from the likes of such an artist. Something that will garner respect and appreciation from his fans. He announced to the world, via Youtube, that he had (treatable) cancer to jutify the post-poned tour dates:
Why would he come clean like that? The announcement is very natural, even got me thinking I knew him a little. I’m not a huge fan of the Beatie Boys but that got me connected. Such and honest way of updating the people who truly ‘want to know’ is a sign of respect. He is respecting his fanbase in an extremely delicate way, and just for that, I’m going to check out his tunes today.
Yesterday, Youtube delivered “the world premiere of the Tan Dun composition “Internet Symphony, Eroica” as selected and mashed up from thousands of video submissions from around the globe”. They call it “The Internet Symphony” Global Mash Up.
Richard is a professional musician and arranger who has compiled one hundred theme songs into one big medley and performs it under 10 minutes.
I challenge anyone to work them all out in the right order. I will give a prize to the first person who can name all 100, in the right order. Contact me through Youtube or via the contact page of my site.
Very short post to announce that the YSO (Youtube Symphony Orchestra) has chosen its winners. Check them out here.
The concert, that will present a composition of Tan Dun, is taking place at Carnegie Hall under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas on the 15th of April 2009, and will be hosted on the YSO’s youtube channel on the 16th.
Mruff to all the winners (some heavy cats in there).
For a couple of years now, the musician community as a whole witnessed the uncompromising rise of the DIY era. Not so long ago, almost every element in the production, promotion and distribution processes of an album cost non-negligible amounts of money and time. Now all that has changed thanks to advancements in technology and the growth of sharing communities. Music recording and production is probably to most notable example. Needless to say that booking a recording studio for a couple of days is a fortune – depending on the studios it can amount to easily 500 to 1000 bucks for 12 hour sessions. Add some mixing time and your budget is gonna be making you eat pasta for the rest of the year. Now with decent audio knowledge and a reasonable set-up (lets say about $2000 without counting the computer) you can work wonders.On the video front, with the development of Youtube we are seeing an increasing number of bands hosting their music videos.
What astonishes me the most I suppose is that the sentences I just wrote above sound cliche to me, as if I had already read about and witnessed these evolutions many times before – we all know about this DIY phenomenon, but taking a step back helps us realize that, damn, all this stuff is only a couple of years old.
Let’s see. In the music production field, communities started sharing software only about ten years ago, but “a cubase in every home” started maybe no more than 4 to 3 years ago, and now even your grand-ma is probably producing music.
Home-made music videos and youtube uploads of live gigs on the other hand is something much newer (due to digital camera prices plummeting these past years). I remember that, a year and a half ago, I was delighted to see a band have an embedded youtube vid of a gig on their Myspace. It was still something pretty uncommon to see on a band’s profile. Now, only a dozen months later, it’s the exact opposite – bands that don’t have vids fall into the uncommon category.
To stop my blabber-mouthing and to get to the point the point of this post, I introduce to you www.99dollarmusicvideos.com. Founded by Fred Seibert, ex-director of MTV’s Network Online and founder of Next New Network, it’s a site that encourages any band to send their home-made music videos produced for no more than $99. The idea is for bands and directors to collaborate on something original and creative and to submit it to the site for a weekly feature (subscribe to their Youtube channel here to be notified of the releases. I think there is one every Tuesday and every Thursday).
Here are the simple set of rules bands and directors must follow:
It must be made for $99 (or less).
It must be shot in one day (24 hours).
It must be edited in one day (this doesn’t include rendering, digitizing, or exporting — just the creative part of editing).
It must be a collaboration between the band and the filmmaker.
Verizon is also in the picture – probably sponsored the servers and the website’s creation in exchange to capitalizing on up and coming bands or something (oh, and also to promote their FiOS cable connection:-). They have been very active these past years integrating the music scene. They have their successful V Cast digital music store with whom they promote monthly subscriptions for phones and computers to downloaded unlimited music. Last year they gave a bus fully loaded of audio equipment to Timbaland so he could roam around the US in search for the next big hit. They partnered with many top selling artists such as Timberlake, Shakira, Prince, Madonna, AC/DC etc. for album and concert promotion deals.
Whatever the reasons and the means behind $99, I’m happy to see such a website launch and am planning on following-up on their growth and activity. Even thinking of producing a $99 video of one of my tunes. I don’t have a band at the moment, nor have I even opened up my Nuendo these past months, but I do got a dozen completely produced tracks I would love to visually illustrate, even if I don’t count on extensively promoting myself with it.
What I particularly like about the idea is that it doesn’t really help you do anything (well $99 does have a creative team that will produce one video a week) yet only the concept that promotes the idea that it is possible to produce a music video for les than 100 bucks, and that people can do it, is enough to get people to do it. Because of that, $99 has great potential (this kind of makes me think of Songpull.com’s concept – it’s just a website that encourage musicians to write a song in less than a month, get together for a house-concert and record the show, and it works).
Here’s the making-of of the very first $99 video of the folk Brooklyn-based band, La Strada:
MTV 2.0?
mruff.
Side-note: I think $99 probably would benefit going down the social network route. Done tactfully, a classified-ad site/social network for bands and film-makers could have the potential of creating a big niche in no time. A penny for your thoughts?
I’m four days late on this, but better late then never: votes are on for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. They started on Feb 14th and will on go till the 22th. Over 3000 contestants applied and submitted their videos to youtube and now only 200 semi-finalists have been selected for the public voting phase. Absolutely anyone can cast a vote and play a role in the elaboration of the YouTube’s first ever orchestra that will perform a Tan Dun composition at the Carnegie Hall on April 16th.
When I did my first post on this event, I guess I didn’t really have an opinion besides the fact that it would probably be successful. I don’t see it failing, but I now ‘feel’ a certain level of absurdity behind the recruiting method. I’m listening to a pianist performing some Beethoven while I’m writing this post. Before that, I listened to some flutes, violas and violins, and all in all I’m having a pretty hard time voting down :)
I have been playing music for quite some years and know people who make a living out of it. I also know some people who are trying to make it in the classical scene. I have extensively worked as a sound engineer and composer on different projects and have been surrounded by musicians all my life (some of which I consider to be true geniuses and others average amateurs). Well even with my musical background and my understanding of the art, I find it hard to be properly subjective in the time frame I allow myself to spend on this Youtube orchestra thing. I don’t believe people that know nothing else about music than the top-40 charts will willingly spend time listening to these classical pieces, but some will, and I truly think many voters will be more influenced by the pretty face of a girl participant than by the quality and subtlety of her playing. And if there aren’t any pretty girls or young prodigy’s, people will tend to listen only to the videos that are on top of their list (the lists of vids hopefully mix-up everytime you refresh the page).
Speaking of misleading criteria, by the very nature if the recruiting process participants recorded their performances with whatever recording material they could get their hands on. Well some recordings are crappy and distorted. Now you have to truly be passionate and a real adept of classical music to feel the subtle differences between an orchestra directed by lets say Karajan and Furtwngler. Well the same basically applies for the musicians – how can one cast a proper vote with audio glitches, slow buffering and horrible audio compression? Well they can’t.
Maybe I’m a little too extreme here and maybe the large majority of the voters will be true musicians from the classical realm, and maybe this whole recruiting 2.0 process is all mighty and revolutionary (argh! again in the extremes). Ok, simply put, maybe the chosen artists will make up for a beautiful orchestra and their performances will be a true success. After all they all sound like frigin’ pros.
Actually I’m more confused about my opinion after having written this post than before. What’s your take on this?
I’ll leave you to the performance that impressed me the most:
Ok, it looks bad, really bad, as if a smruf or a snorky produced it. Well first off, maybe I’m the exception but I can’t get it out of my head and have watched the ad more than once. They wanted it to go viral, and they succeeded marvelously.
My first feelings about the product were mixed – I found it to be a cool idea of course, imagining how complex the algorithms to make it work were, and I knew that yet again we had broken down another boundary towards our musical demise with robots generating music and all, but still, it looked so childish that I didn’t give it much thought.
Now I see things differently. Songsmith is on to something big but that stupid yet very effective ad doesn’t honor it’s capabilities. The video Scoble shot of those two engineers really grabbed my attention as they explain in much more detail how it works. Granted that commercials can’t last 20 minutes, but in those 4 very long minutes composing the ad, Microsoft could’ve demonstrated the good stuff instead of ridiculing themselves. Like the fact that the algorithms can easily scale the music from major to minor, or that you can actually alter the chord progressions and re-work the produced music. Also, the system pre-populates a media section where all you have to do to send your song to Youtube with whatever video or graphic display you want as a background is to click on a couple of buttons.
Actually I think this ‘childish like version’, which is probably going to be more popular at drunken parties than at pre-teen sleep-overs, is a spin-off to some more complex versions, and possibly some heavy-duty pro-audio software. If they can generate harmonies and melodies by analyzing ones voice, they can surely generate an instrument’s score for a mix. In a pro-audio context, they could let the producer tweak the sounds, import sound banks, link it up to virtual instruments etc. Re-tweak the results with Melodyne’s Celemony or Direct Note Access and you could really start getting creative. Another thing they don’t show you in the ad is that we can actually export a generated song’s MIDI files, tweak them in an audio host like a sequencer, and re-import them into Songsmith. Not sure many people are going to use this feature with such chipmunk-sounding instruments, but I appreciate the attention to detail, and in further releases this might seem more relevant.
I’ve been playing around with the demo version and I must say that from a musician’s point of view, there are some major downsides, like basically having no control over the instrumentation. We can change basic stuff like the chords, the swing, the tempo and the mood of the song, but I still felt pretty limited after 20 minutes – all styles only have one instrumentation preset making the experience kind of dull after a while (everything sounds the same). Then again this version was never meant for musicians, on the contrary, and in the end that’s a good thing. It opens up music to the vast quantities of people who are absolutely positive they are tone deaf, kind of like that Beamz Music System we reviewed in September. Speaking of self-proclaimed tone-deaf people who could benefit from products like Songsmith, Andrew Dubber’s blog, ‘New Music Strategies’ has a very interesting post called ‘Amateur Nonsense‘ on the matter.
By youtubing ‘Songsmith’ you’ll encounter quite a few entertaining videos. Here are a couple I linked to my new Sqworl account (new bookmarking platform that enables users to create folders of bookmarks).
Here’s a cool and practical vocal production device.
The Voice Box Electro Harmonizer by Electro Harmonix, manufacturers and creators of the Big Muff to name their most renowned product, is probably one of the easiest and cheapest solutions to harmonize and vocode your vocals. I was very Impressed when I saw the video bellow:
For two hundred bucks this thing looks well worth the price, and to be able to harmonize in real-time by plugging in instruments is amazing. Upping the price a bit you fall in the Digitech line of vocal harmonizers like the Vocal Live 2 that only allows 2 part harmonies instead of 4 for the Voice Box.
Anyways, this little life saver for all singers who just feel obliged to add backing vocals on all of their tracks (and I am one of them – gives people the impression I’m not that off) is superbly demonstrated by no other than Youtube musician extraordinaire, Jack Conte (and Nataly Dawn that I had not heard of but that has a very beautiful voice).
By the way it’s great to see all these hyper active web 2.0 artists actually promote products like that. I’m pretty sure Electro Harmonix approached Jack and asked him to demo the box… hmmm, probably gonna ask him and get back to you on that one (beat most Vocal Live 2 demos to smithereenes for that matter. Here’s one I found pretty amusing (I’m totally gonna learn that chord progression though)).
For today’s post, I give you some tid bits of info that have, up until now, made my day. Enjoy:
The RIAA has decided to no longer sue copyright infringers‘ pants off finally noticing that after ten years of capitalistic debauchery it was indeed a ridiculous move to bitch-slap their customers around. Bit them in the ass pretty hard. Now they have no ass left but they still have their integrity. Having partnered with ISPs, they plan to follow in the steps of the French by having those ISPs notify the lottery-winning pirates when they’ve illegally downloaded songs, and warn them they’re being watched. If the pirates persist, they will risk losing their connection. (Reuters)
Heavy-Metal seems to be making a good comeback in Egypt! The Cairo government had silenced hard-rock related music genres in the 90s due to the explicit ‘satanical’ lyrics, unbearable to Egypt’s conservative establish order. Now bands are gradually expressing their right to rock. (Reuters)
‘Coldplay’s Chris Martin has admitted that the band’s 2000 single Shiver was essentially a Jeff Buckley ripoff’
Why would he do that? No seriously. Satriani, the Creaky Boards, Alize, 80 year old italian composers…and now this? The intricacies of the music business’ deontology remain a mystery to me. Come to think of it, wouldn’t surprise me if Satriani’s team dug this up to throw it in Coldplay’s face.
Youtube has released a feature letting users see a how many unique views a video’s got. To access the feature, visit the YouTube Insights page for the video in question and click ‘Show Unique Users’ under the ‘Views’ tab. Pretty cool to finally know if the great number of hits you got from Japan or something are generated by a single fan or by a community. (Techcrunch)
This has nothing to do with this week’s music news but I can’t resist the opportunity to introduce yet another robot band. MeetThe Trons, a droid band created by musician Greg Locke who also loves to rock. Not as sophisticated as Captured By Robot! but still freakin’ awesome. Watch them jam in their basement. Also watch this very cool Captured By Robots!’s gig . Oh and, while looking for the two previous vids I encountered this other bad-ass robot drummer rockin’ with robot-stippers on stage. Just how damn cool is this:
In 1972 The Rolling Stones’ produced a documentary called CockSucker Blues during their American tour. Due to the very explicit footage (groupie-orgies and intense use of all sorts of drugs) the band decided to censor the film. Many bootlegs were released into the wild until finally someone uploaded the entire thing on YouTube.
Sex and drugs aren’t the only reasons this movie was considered inappropriate and misplaced at the time.
In 1969 The Stones were also followed by a camera crew as they engaged on a big American tour which culminated in a blood bath at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival in California. Members of The Hells Angels were hired as security, many of whom preferred to be payed in beer, and they caused havoc during the supervision of the event. The end toll was many injured and four dead. One of the altercations was lead by Meredith Hunter, a black man who got stabbed 5 times by one of the Hell’s for drawing a revolver near the stage. The Stones interrupted their concert a couple times due to the the apparent violence emanating from the audience but decided to finish their set, worried that the palpable tension would escalate into a riot. It is reported that Keith Richards got fed up and attempted to leave the stage only to be confronted by Hell’s Angel Sonny Barger who pointed a gun at his side and told him to “Keep on Fuckin’ playing”. The Altamont Festival turns out to be a very symbolic event viewed by many as the end of the sixties’ hippy era. (WoodStock was held only four months before).
The Stones waited until 1972 to return to the States for their second big american tour, with high hopes of making up for the 1969 fiasco, and it’s in this context that CockSucker Blues takes place. The controversial content was considered too inappropriate to be released to the public as The Stones wanted to consolidate a better image of themselves.
Thanks to YouTube we can finally see the documentary, that shows the backstage debaucheries and maelstrom of what is probably the most famed tour of the The Rolling Stones.
I compiled all nine parts in a WorldTV channel, which should display them in the right order:
For a couple of years now, the musician community as a whole witnessed the uncompromising rise of the DIY era. Not so long ago, almost every element in the production, promotion and distribution processes of an album cost non-negligible amounts of money and time. Now all that has changed thanks to advancements in technology and the growth of sharing communities. Music recording and production is probably to most notable example. Needless to say that booking a recording studio for a couple of days is a fortune – depending on the studios it can amount to easily 500 to 1000 bucks for 12 hour sessions. Add some mixing time and your budget is gonna be making you eat pasta for the rest of the year. Now with decent audio knowledge and a reasonable set-up (lets say about $2000 without counting the computer) you can work wonders.On the video front, with the development of Youtube we are seeing an increasing number of bands hosting their music videos.
