Holy Drum Fill Mother Of God!
Recording Hacks has up an awesome video from 1997 of John Good from DW showing how their drums timbres are matched. A very cool watch to see some of the craftsmanship that goes into making classic drums.
If you are not familiar with SoundExchange, they are some of the people who collect your royalties. As we have told you in the past that half of the royalties SoundExchange collects never get paid since they don't have the artist's address. Thankfully it just got a lot more easy to get that money from them since as of Friday, you can sign up online! If you are getting played on anything from online radio to satellite radio make sure you sign up with SoundExchange today to get the money you are due. Here is where you do it!
The story behind a snare drum that is turning a lot of heads.
It's a summer Monday, so the news is slow. Below we linked up all the breaking news and will do that if any more comes up today. In the mean time we are working on some new features we think everyone will enjoy. As always check out the Table Of Contents or read some articles below.
While we only put in a 4 day week, but we think we really made it count this week and tried to give as much good info in as little time as we could. Here were the highlights: - What Do Record Labels Do? Part 1 - Tour Support And How To Do It Without A Label
- How To Get Your Phone / iPhone To Stop Ticking Through Your Speakers And Guitar Amp
- Re: How To Get Your Phone / iPhone To Stop Ticking Through Your Speakers And Where To Find The Bags
- From The Readers: Hear Your Vocals Better Live When There Is Bad Sound Using A Splitter
- Managing Your Band - Set Up "Practices" To Get Work Done
- You Can't Be In A Listener's Bedroom To Tell Them How Cool It Was In The Studio Part 1
- If You Plan On Giving Your Songs Away For Free Don't Forget To Make A Simple YouTube For Them
- Don't Fear The Recorder - Why You/ Your Band Needs To Be Recording More Than A One Take Live Demo
- If You Are Doubting Your Band Name And You Don't Have A Big Following Yet It's Worth A Change
- What Radiohead Is Really Saying Is You Need To Adapt To The Times With Smaller Releases
- PayPal Quietly Rolls Out Shady New Service Changes That Affect Musicians
- How To Setup Your New @myspace.com Email Address And Why You Should
- Re: Myspace Email - Your Away Message Doesn't Work AND You Have To Check It
One of the things that can destroy your next recording from the start is an inappropriate cymbal sound. When making a record if you build on a structure of cymbals that are too bright, dark, broken or noisy you will be aching throughout the process and never able to get the result you want. Here are a few ideas on how to make sure you don't have a cymbal problem when it comes time to record drums.- If you have broken cymbals you need to borrow cymbals. Unless you are going for some serious avant garde cymbal sounds you are going to hear the break whether it is the cymbal not resonating and sustaining properly or a full on clanky noise. Borrow or buy new ones.
- Make sure you are realistic about the tones you want. If you have K's and you want a bright polished pop song you may be in trouble. Where as AAX's are not going to give you a jazzy sound. Yet again, borrow and buy cymbals appropriate to the sound you want since EQ and micing isn't going to get change it.
- While your 16" crash may sound awesome live, if you play beats on it and crash on it with 8th notes it can sound thin and brittle in the studio. If you plan on taking one to the studio make sure you listen to the difference of a 18" and 16" played in this context before you go in to the studio. This is one of the things I see drummers regret all the time.
- Discuss the cymbal situation between drummer and engineer in advance, it can kill hours of time and money if you need to run to the music store when you arrive at the studio with an unusable cymbal. The studio may have cymbals or someone you can rent/borrow from. Discuss in advance and you will be more happy with your next recording.
Note: When this blog first started we had a lengthy debate on this over a post over on Music Machinery comparing tempos of various tracks this is a good read before jumping into this one.
Tempo and feel are often misconstrued. There are countless musicians who fear that if the tempo of a song is steady it will be lifeless. On the other side there are musicians who want there songs to be one constant tempo and are horrified at the idea of their music speeding up 2 BPM in the chorus to give it some kick.
Both sides are right but there is a misconception on both sides that either of these aesthetics will ruin a song. The truth of the matter is you need to let the song and groove dictate what to do tempo wise. In reality everyone of us loves a song that has one locked in BPM all the way through and other songs that are all over the place. The mistake people make is making a decision that no matter what happens they are on one side of the debate. If you want to do what is right for your song you have to do what it tells you to. Some songs need to speed up in the chorus to give them energy where as others sound rushed if you do this. Having a steady tempo through a song doesn't mean it will be dead and lifeless. The way you play to these tempos will be what determines the life, simply trust the tempo for each part and what feels best by experimenting and if you use your ears instead of a theory on what is wrong or right your song will come out much better.
We have lost a legend on the drums today in the form of Mr.Rashied Ali. Cause of death is still unclear but his talent was clear to anyone who ever heard him play. I had the fortune of recording him many years ago in a live performance and he was a great person with a strong presence that will be missed.
If you are our Twitter follower you may have gotten fed up with our duplicate posts and lots of other annoying things in the stream. We now have everything solved and have found a way to make everyone happy!
- Our Musformation twitter just posts when we write a post to this blog. If we edit an old post for something aside from spelling grammar mistakes it also goes in to the stream as long as there is a relevant update. No more duplicate posts and no more updates every time we add an apostrophe.
- Our Musformationcom twitter has the same information as the Musformation one but with a whole lot more. There you can see our aggregation and links to lots of other cool articles you may like from other great music industry resources. It is also where we have @ conversations to keep them out of the Musformation feed.
- In the next few weeks we will have Twitter and RSS feeds aimed at more specific subjects on our site coming your way. Please let us know if you have any suggestions.
- You can now get daily mailing list updates from us by entering your email on the right side down below all those flashing ads. Thanks for the support and let us know if we can improve these things in any way.
There is an interesting thread over on DrummerWorld that says the following:
"Recently I have gotten an mp3 player and started jogging to music which I had never done before. Well, learning to keep time by running in time with music has DRAMATICALLY improved my rhythm and tempo. I read Keneally's book and he talked about encoding rhythm into different parts of your body and I feel like this is encoding rhythm throughout my whole body. When I play I can just *FEEL* the pulse so much stronger."An interesting idea and a great way to kill two birds with one stone. Especially if your bandmates have been complaining about your timing in the past.
Most bands understand that they should be recording themselves. The amazing perspective you get from a song when you hear it back loud and clear through speakers is much different than you can ever gain any other way. Even if you are going to a producer later, every producer loves a good quality demo that they can hear what you have clearly.
The thing that many people don't realize is the better quality you make this demo, the better you can hear where to take the song yourself and the easier it is for your producer to bring your song to be the best it can be. As a producer it astounds me how much better the songs are from bands who record themselves compared to those who don't. As well, the bands that do more detailed recordings - going past just recording themselves playing a song live by doing numerous overdubs and putting down every idea possible to hear how they sound come in with consistently better then the bands who do not. This makes it easy for me to hear what needs to improve and get great ideas on how to execute them.
While Garageband is a great tool and I do believe you can do much of what I am talking about in it, it is amazing how much it helps a bands creativity when they learn how to use a "real" DAW. Follow me to the jump and I will make some suggestions on what you can do to get started improving your recording quality and what you should strive to do when demoing out your material.
The thing that many people don't realize is the better quality you make this demo, the better you can hear where to take the song yourself and the easier it is for your producer to bring your song to be the best it can be. As a producer it astounds me how much better the songs are from bands who record themselves compared to those who don't. As well, the bands that do more detailed recordings - going past just recording themselves playing a song live by doing numerous overdubs and putting down every idea possible to hear how they sound come in with consistently better then the bands who do not. This makes it easy for me to hear what needs to improve and get great ideas on how to execute them.
While Garageband is a great tool and I do believe you can do much of what I am talking about in it, it is amazing how much it helps a bands creativity when they learn how to use a "real" DAW. Follow me to the jump and I will make some suggestions on what you can do to get started improving your recording quality and what you should strive to do when demoing out your material.
Ugh, bad news. Yesterday, we told you about Myspace launching a new email service where you could get your own @myspace.com address. We discovered a few things that are major bum outs (note: these are my own experiments and basing them on sending messages between a few accounts for the past 24 hours, they may change some of this).
ghost town site.
- If you already had set up a Myspace away message it doesn't work on your Myspace email. Just regular messages. This means you would have to actually sign in to myspace to get your mail since it won't bounce back with your away message. LAME!
- If you have your preferences setup to receive notifications of new messages it doesn't send them to you when you receive a new email. So you also have no idea whether you have received an email or not
- I tried to setup Myspace to send email to the Mac Mail app and Thunderbird and had no luck
- I checked my mail on the iPhone and Androiud App and it does show up there so for those of you who regularly check your Myspace in this way you are safe.
We have been giving you a ton of ideas on how to keep your
One of the stupid things I was very guilty of when I first started recording was wanting to do something cool with all my esoteric equipment. I had all sorts of crazy things like pieces of a console that recorded some of my favorite records, one-off guitar pedals, modded gear etc. I felt that all of this cool gear would shine through on my recordings and when people heard it they would appreciate all the time and research I put in to finding all of this cool stuff. In reality they were never going to be able to really hear what I knew was going on behind the scenes.
I can remember being 14 years old and loving Rage Against The Machine's S/T record. The sounds were innovative and new and when you read the liner notes to find out there was nothing but guitar, bass, drums and vocals on the record you had all the more admiration for it. The one problem is this only goes so far. Cool gear is great and doing something new and unique with sounds is even better, but it has to stand up with no explanation to the listener. I was able to hear their songs with no one telling me how it was made and still think it was amazing. Listeners have to be able to hear a song without you telling them why it is so cool or else it is going to be disposable.
I can remember being 14 years old and loving Rage Against The Machine's S/T record. The sounds were innovative and new and when you read the liner notes to find out there was nothing but guitar, bass, drums and vocals on the record you had all the more admiration for it. The one problem is this only goes so far. Cool gear is great and doing something new and unique with sounds is even better, but it has to stand up with no explanation to the listener. I was able to hear their songs with no one telling me how it was made and still think it was amazing. Listeners have to be able to hear a song without you telling them why it is so cool or else it is going to be disposable.
Yep, some Dungeons & Dragons loving drummer with a lot of money coughed up big change for a one of a king Neil Peart drumset from Brooklyn's best music store Main Drag Music. Check the eBay auction and link to Main Drag's site for details.
If you are making money in the music industry odds are you are making money through PayPal. Unfortunately they are starting to get a little cocky with their near monopoly over the payment system and quietly unveiling some shady new features. Consumerist has the dirt on two new schemes these guys are up to that you should watch out for!
- PayPal Takes Bite Out Of User's Funds, Calls It 'Rolling Reserve' - Taking 20 percent off of monthly sales and keeping it in reserve in case a customer initiates a chargeback.
- Assessing A Fee of 2.9% On Purchases - Transactions marked "goods" or services" in personal accounts are now seeing a new fee.
I thought Myspace was dead? Yeah, Yeah, they are still fighting and despite this seeming like you are about to pet a dead horse, it actually can be helpful. What makes this good is how many times have you searched through some fancy Myspace layout to find the send a message button? Well now it is very likely that all you will have to do is type in the URL in the myspace profile and you can get right in touch with someone. Pretty smart? We like it and suggest you get on this new piece of oddly timed technology. Follow me to the jump and I will show you how to set this up in 5 seconds.
We're only doing a few articles today and getting some much needed rest. In the mean time enjoy our Table of Contents.
It's been a long week here at Musformation with the whole Twitapocalypse and Facebook of Revelations meltdown and the fact that everyone on earth is on vacation except us. This week was really slow and we did a lot less posts than usual and we imagine next week will be the same as well since everyone on earth is on vacation. If you guys get bored of staring at that picture looking for Lady GaGa's cock read these links below or head to our Table Of Contents and get to work!
- When Your Funds Are Low - Employ Your Fans For Cheap Volunteer Labor Part 2
- Getting Publicity - Use Hype Machine To Find Blogs That Will Blog About Your Music
- Putting The Hyper In Hyperbole: The Music Industry Will Be Over By 2018
- The Musician's Guide To Twitter: Making Your Followers Count Tools To Make It Faster Part 7
- If You Recorded A Demo You Are Already Dead In The Water
- Using A Netbook For Your Mailing List Is A Cheap And Great Idea
- Music Industry Red Flags: Having Bad Photos Talks About Your Work Ethic Not Your Look
- Don't Tighten Your Snare Stand Too Much Or You Will Pay For It
- Scheduling Time To Do Vocals Right In the Studio
- Get On 4G Cellular Internet On Tour To Get Things Done
Yes we have made this our weekend watching before, but I have to say this is one of the best movies I have ever seen and if you are not watching it you are missing out! It has some of the best insights into navigating the new music business you will see and could not be more entertaining. Head to Pitchfork where they are screening it for one week only!
Today The Music Think Tank wondered why Spotify is such a music industry changing App. We also had a few people confused why I touted it as such in my rebuttal to a dimwitted New York Times Column. Today Lifehacker shows you a tour of Spotify and why it is bound to change the world. This also is a good time to point out you better get your music on there ASAP. Check out their tour and see what the fuss is about.
We give out a lot of songwriting tips, but most of them are broad and not genre specific. Today, Metal Underground has some tips on writing better metal songs, that I personally could never write despite all the hours I have logged listening to metal. Check them out before you write your next track.
Tuning a snare drum can be a nightmare. There is one simple detail that you can avoid though to make your life much easier. While common sense would say you should tighten the part of the snare stand that hold your snare to a very high tension this is actually wrong. With too much tension the snare will bend in pitch and not tune properly. To make matters worse a lot of the new heavy duty snare drums can give you so much tension you can bend your rim making it impossible for the snare to ever tune properly again. Get a nice snug fit when you adjust the snare stands tension and leave it there. You will thank us later!
Most Popular Posts
Guide To Getting Your Band Somewhere
Esssential Music Business Knowledge
Esssential Songwriting Knowledge
Esssential Recording Knowledge
Recent Op-Eds
Esssential Knowledge for Vocalists
Essential Pro Tools Tips
Esssential Knowledge for Drummers
Esssential Knowledge for Guitarists
Blog Roll
