I was going to post this week about microphones, but I’ve been fighting some sort of nasty head cold all week, and really just have no brain for writing right now. So, next week in DIY: microphones!

Fortunately, I have something easy and short to write about.

Last week I had a guest post from a spambot. Okay, no, it wasn’t a guest post from a spambot. It was a spambot’s comment, however, that was not merely on topic, but useful, relevant, interesting, and started a valid argument.

Instead of approving it, I elevated it to top level (spam content graphically blocked out) and said “your move.”

I should’ve kept my mouth shut.

In response to this post on acoustic sound dampening for your DIY home studio, the same spambot – and from the blanked out material, it’s clearly the same bot – has this to contribute:

Text:

I recently finished a 10 x 18 room, with some guidance from ReadyTraps (they will help with cad design and useful advice for small dollars, nice products too). In a nutshell, I doubled the drywall with “Green Glue” in-between, added about 12 2×4 by 2″, 6 2×4 by 4″ panels of 703, some on the wall, some spaced. Then two wall to ceiling superchunks. Is it acoustically perfect? NO, but it sure is predictable for monitoring, and dry enough to get very clean live tracks that do not have the boxy home studio sound. My room still booms in the sub 100 range, but its not hard to mix around. In my mind, a workable room that can be had for a couple grand, in combination with the great DAW’s available now, is what is bringing recording to the masses. Yeah, we all get to play now! I think the article would be more aptly named “Why your bass traps don’t work perfectly”.

I want to note for the record that the spambot’s actual spam content had nothing to do with Ready Traps or GreenGlue.

Really, I don’t have much of anything bad to say about this at all. Corning 703 is a good rigid sound-absorber, and you’ll find plenty of DIY centred around using it for sound panels. It’s good material, and not very expensive for those 2″ sheets they’re talking about. More expensive than my carpet baffles, but you’re not gonna break the bank.

The only thing I’m not sure about at this point is how a spambot does physical construction, but then again, I’m making assumptions. Maybe this is in the virtual world. In which case, hey, Smartbot! Say hi to Tron and Ram for me, would you? It’s been a while. ^_^

i did not come from a human mother
i am the speed, the information i collect
and i can do anything i want

Remember this XKCD?

I am staring at Mission. Fucking. Accomplished. in my spam queue right now. In response to my post last week about studio monitors and the importance of flat frequency response curves:

The text:

Why have I included a frequency-response curve here? I mentioned earlier that the frequency-response curves in a sales brochure are typically meaningless in terms of providing information that’s useful to an end user. Actually, though, I’d go further than that, and suggest that in many respects making any judgment about the worth or likely value of a monitor by examining its frequency-response curve is not far short of pointless. I often read opinions on the SOS Forum arguing that to be of any value monitors require a ‘flat frequency response’, but numerous recordings made during what many would consider the golden age for musical sound quality (the ’60s and ’70s) were monitored on speakers that were all over the place in terms of frequency response — and I don’t know why recording engineers seem to believe so strongly that a monitor should be anechoically ‘flat’ when so much end-product evidence suggests that this isn’t particularly important.

Constructive. Relevant. Interesting. Starts an argument. And the blocked-out information reveals it to be a spambot.

I kind of want to approve it! I’m not. I’m going one further: elevation to top of post, and addressing the spambot’s point, since it had one. Congratulations, spambot, well done: you’ve earned it.

My response, I suppose, would be that the nonflat monitor speakers of the time were reasonably accurate representations of average home speakers, which were nowhere near flat either.

And once you got into the era of flat response curves being achieved, followed by an era of goosing-by-design (rather than nonflat-by-technological limitations), it became necessary to move to a neutral reference base for studios. Simply put, you can’t try to guess all the many ways that people intentionally-off-flat-response systems, so don’t try to optimise for any of them; optimise instead for the average of all of those systems.

I’d also argue that the late 60s weren’t my idea of a golden era of recording. There are some fantastic jazz and classical recordings from the era, absolutely, but a lot of rock and pop was still very fuzzy and often kind of muddled. To my ear, recording continued to improve up until the Loudness Wars – with a hiccough as everyone learned to deal with digital equipment – and that’s fashion, not technology.

So that’s why I still argue that in the current era going for flat – or reasonably close to it – is the best idea.

Your move, spambot. I’ll be checking the queue.

it’s not your fault… or is it?

Woo! We’re Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Festival official photos page. Wait for it and you’ll see Anna and me both! Front page! 😀 We’re in fact in several photos here – one where I’m performing solo (my extended version of Ten Finger Johnny) and later with Anna in session. 😀

(Sadly, the photos – by Rick West – were taken down in when they redid their website)

Newfoundland music on Newfoundland soil. That’s called the correct way Even if I do have an uncanny ability to blink just in time for the photo. XD

But now, back to business.

Last time, we talked about monitor speakers; what to look for when you have no money, characteristics to seek out, simple mods to improve their behaviour, and so on.

But unless you went with powered monitors, you’re going to need amplifiers to drive those monitor speakers. Since you’re reading this, you probably aren’t going to just go out and pay full retail for some very nice new equipment; let’s talk DIY!

First, I need to repeat something I said last time:

The cheap but rebuildable equipment you want mostly comes from the 1970s… There are a couple of key reasons for this: 1. By this time, transistor audio technology had settled down, and no longer sounded like ass. 2. The state of the art was finally good enough (in transistors) that the then-goal of broad and equal frequency handling – meaning, flat audio reproduction curves – became realistically attainable, and people were still trying really hard for it.

This is true in amplifiers, too. Some would argue that in amps, you want to stick to the early 70s. I don’t particularly agree, but be careful when you get into the early 80s, just because of audio fashion trends being what they were.

You can also step back a bit into the 1960s, if you’re willing to learn vacuum-tube equipment. In some ways, that’s easier to work on, and you’ll get fantastic bang-per-buck. Look for EICO, Dynaco, Harmon-Kardon, just for examples; and research tubes first, to see what’s back in production.

Tube equipment has downsides, though: you can’t tip them on the side, they use a lot more electricity, need more ventilation space, generate a lot more heat, and most importantly of all, the power rail tends to be hanging out in the 450 volt range. Careful with those pliers!

Think of it as the advanced class

So unless you’re okay with that, stick to the transistor era.

If you poke around, you can find a pretty good number of old 70s component-stereo-system amplifiers for very little money. Don’t buy the combined units, with turntables and tape decks built in; those were junk then, and are junk now. You’ll see nostalgia for some of that era, and entertaining tho’ that might be, it’s not our goal. Look for something that’s just amplifier and pre-amp – preferably a unit without even a radio.

Undeniably groovy, but still kinda terrible

Pioneer is usually a good, safe bet, as brands of the era go; it’s right in that sweet spot of quality and commonality. So is Harmon Kardon. Sansui, Kenwood, and Marantz are often excellent, but tend to cost more even now. My general approach is to keep an eye open and when I see something of the right sort, then search the web for it and see what people have to say. AudioKarma and Gearsluts are both pretty good data sources in this regard.

My current studio monitor amp is a Pioneer SA-5200. It was made for all of three years (1972-1975) and I picked it up at a thrift shop for all of $5. They go for under $35 on eBay, working to various degrees.

Not mine, but same model. Not so groovy, but far more competent.

It has no power to speak of (20w), but you don’t need it for this application; most importantly, it’s noted for being a very clean amp; very low distortion and very low noise, at least as it shipped from the factory. And it has enough power to drive all my mains, and reference headphones.

That said, it sounded pretty terrible when I bought it, and got worse over time. This is where you need to know something which may and may not make any sense to you, depending upon how much you know about electronics: electrolytic capacitors age and die. And every audio chain you’ll find in any of these amps uses lots of them.

You’ll have to rip out and replace every one.

I’ve talked often about how the most important item in your studio toolkit is the soldering iron. Amps of these vintage can be rebuilt, without complex tools. The parts are large and relatively easy to access. You’ll want a low-wattage soldering iron, so you don’t damage the board with too much heat. You’ll want direct-value replacement swaps on those capacitors, in terms of uF rating. (You can go higher in voltage if you want; that’s a matter of how much the capacitor will tolerate, so replacing with higher voltage is safe.)

The electrolytic capacitors look like this, on the circuit board:

Or Doctor Who. Are you The Doctor? No? Don’t reverse polarity.

Coming out of the bottom of each of those cylinders are a pair of metal wires. Those go through the circuit board and are soldered into place, making contact with the printed circuit on the other side of that board. You’ll need to de-solder those connections, pull up the capacitor, and replace it with caps of the same capacity.

As a side note, these are not the only kinds of capacitors. You’ll see many flat discs; those are ceramic capacitors. Barring physical damage, you’ll never need to replace one. Similarly, you’ll occasionally find flattish rectangular capacitors. Those are usually film, and again, leave them alone, they’re fine.

Doing all this is kind of a pain in the ass, but you generally need to do it in equipment of this vintage. Here’s a bit of a map:

It’s dangerous to go to Toshi Station alone! Take this.

Any stereo amplifier is really two amplifiers combined together into a single box, one for the left channel, one for the right channel. You can see above how this results in symmetrical layout of components! Anywhere you have that kind of symmetry, you’re dealing with the left and right channels, duplicated. Anywhere you’re not seeing symmetry, you’re probably looking at power circuits.

Advanced students will want to bypass the tone controls. There’s no single way to do that, so I’m not going to post pictures. But I will explain why: it’s because, as with the monitor speakers, you don’t want help. You want flat response, or as close as you can get to it. The ideal studio monitor amplifier would be a wire, with gain – that is, a wire that magically changed nothing about your sound other than volume.

Tone adjustment knobs and systems, by definition, deviate from flatness. They’ll also add noise, so just bypass them. It’s also one less set of components to rebuild, so saves you time!

And that’s how to get a quality monitor amplifier on the smallest budget – at least, that I’ve found so far. Next week: I dunno! Microphones, or possibly digital audio workstation software and computers to run it on. One of those. Happy rewiring! ^_^

ps: Let the kitty help!

No, no, not wire snips – can opener! Here, I’ll get it.

This post is part of The DIY Studio Buildout Series, on building out a home recording studio.

Building out home studios has become de rigueur for musicians of all kinds of levels. This is part two on a series of doing it on the really cheap.

Last week, we talked about the room itself. That’s important, so if you missed it, start there.

But this week, let’s talk monitoring. You already know you need microphones and a sound interface and some sort of recording kit (In free software, I suggest Ardour, if you can make it past the learning curve), but hearing what you’ve recorded being played back is just as important.

Despite this, a lot of people – including me – will try to work off studio reference headphones. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll need those, particularly for listening to tracks you’ve already recorded while playing out the next track you’re adding. Shure makes a nice pair, the SRH-440s, occasionally discounted as low as $50ish.

No joke here; just decent basic headset

But you’ll also want speakers. The audio experience is simply different, and it’s different in important ways. Ideally – particularly if you can’t afford a mastering pass but want to come as close as you can – you’ll have a bunch of different kinds, from crap laptop and computer desktop speakers (critical, given how much people listen on those horrible things) up to some genuinely good pairs of different quality levels.

But this can be a many-thousands-of-dollars project! If you can’t spend any money, what do you do?

The easiest and arguably best thing to do, if you have some money, is to research and buy a good set of self-powered studio monitors. These are speakers with built-in amps, and they’ve become rather the standard. The amps can be tailored to the speakers, which can in turn be tailored to the cabinet in which it’s all mounted. It’s your plug-and-play solution. Hie thee off to a good equipment seller and have at.

But if you’re reading this, you’re probably more of a hax0r, and want to DIY it. Or you just have to, because you have no money to speak of.

Or possibly YKINMK, but that’s okay.

Okay, first, let’s start with an overall tip: the cheap but rebuildable equipment you want mostly comes from the 1970s and early 1980s. There are a couple of key reasons for this: 1. By this time, transistor audio technology had settled down, and no longer sounded like ass. 2. The state of the art was finally good enough (in transistors) that the then-goal of broad and equal frequency handling – meaning, flat audio reproduction curves – became realistically attainable, and people were still trying really hard for it.

Seriously, “reproduce all frequencies, high and low, the same amount” sounds obvious? But that was difficult. People would even print their equipment response curves on packaging.

what you want

what you don’t want

And this last bit is really important, because once reproduction technology really got under control, manufacturers started realising that they could make their systems sound better by not having flat response curves across all frequencies of sound. They’d intentionally boost attractive frequencies a bit, nudge characteristics around – all to make the system sound better.

And that’s great, unless you’re in a recording studio, where you really want that flat response curve. If you sound good on that, you’ll sound good all kinds of places. When you’re recording, you want accuracy, not help.

So. If you have virtually no money and want to do the best you can with a single pair of speakers, look for a pair of these little beauties on eBay:

hey kids, did you know radio shack used to make radios?

These are the Realistic Minimus 7, introduced in 1978. These particular speakers look like they’re from the 80s; the originals had wood cases, not metal. You’ll also see white metal cases, instead of black, and they tend to be cheaper for no functional reason.

And they are the best audio devices Radio Shack ever made. Seriously, when introduced, they showed them off in stores by discreetly placing them atop a pair of massive fuckoff four-way monster speakers on one of their best kits, blasting, with a sign saying ALL THE SOUND COMES FROM THESE —> pointing at the tiny speakers.

This isn’t to say they’re perfect. Far from it. Sound response drops way off after 70-90 hz and there’s nothing to speak of under 50. But in new condition, they are probably the most precise speakers you will ever hear for under $500.

So get a pair of these. You’ll spend $20 if you look around enough.

But there’s a catch, of course. Notice I said in new condition above. These won’t be.

just walk away

The original crossover design in the Minimus 7 is ultra-minimalist (hence the name), which is part of the brilliance of their design. It also used something called a nonpolarised electrolytic capacitor as part of the sound circuit. These components age, and age badly.

So once you have your Minimus 7s, start googling around for “minimus 7 crossover upgrade kit.” One kind will be a direct replacement of the capacitor with a new film capacitor pair; these sound awesome, are really cheap, and leave the speaker with its original response curve. But it won’t be completely flat. Another will be a more complex and expensive kit, which will include a coil; it’s usually called something like a Zobel Network Crossover. That will get you your flattest curve.

And you get to make a decision here which way you want to go. Either way has its advantages, and the decision’s up to you.

If you have a little more money, do the direct-replacement upgrade on the 7s, and then also look for a pair of Minimus 11 or Optimus PRO-x77 speakers. The 11 was a larger version of the 7; it has a bit better bass range. The 77x was an attempt to merge the two product lines; it was not very successful, but can be salvaged.

takes some work, tho’

You can find both of these, too, for around $20, but be careful with the x77; the foam on the woofers can degrade over time. (Which is what that picture above was about.) The 11 didn’t have this problem.

For either the 11 or the x77, however, get Zobel-type crossover replacement kit. Both of these have better low end response than the 7 series, so you’ll get a wider area of flat response curve. A completely upgraded PRO-x77 (with the degrading foam replaced, in particular) or 11 make lovely, lovely studio monitors.

Then grab a pair of cheap computer speakers from RePC or free from Craigslist. It doesn’t matter what you get, as long as they work as originally designed. You won’t mix for or on these, but you’ll test against them occasionally to make sure what you’re doing can still be heard.

yes, yes, too easy

As is probably unsurprising, I have a setup kind of like this. I have a pair of AFCOs rather than Minimus 7 speakers, but they’re similar devices, and have been similarly modded. I have a pair of Optimus PRO-x77s that needed new woofers but now have nicely flat response curves; they’re becoming workhorses.

I also have a pair of Bose 301 that I mostly use for checking out bass, because even modded, the x77s aren’t awesome on the low end. (But the Bose are not good monitor speakers overall – they “help” – so I don’t rely on them.) And finally, I have a pair of junk powered computer speakers that I fixed and modded to interface with my studio monitor amp while still using their built-in amplifier.

I got the AFCOs for free; no, wait, it was better than that. I found them, abandoned, outdoors, in Seattle’s U. District. The mod kits were $12, and now they’re two of my favourite listening speakers. The computer speakers, I’ve had since my Amiga. The x77s – I don’t even know. I’ve had them sitting around in a box as spare/junk speakers for just forever, not even realising that with a few mods and a few hours work, they’d suddenly turn awesome.

So now I have a four-sound-profile mini-mastering setup, all for on the order of $150 out of pocket, including speaker wire. Is it BEST SETUP EVAR?! Hell no. But it’s genuinely pretty good, gives me a variety of listening models, and I sure wish I’d had it while recording Dick Tracy Must Die. You’ll hear the difference that a better setup can bring on Din of Thieves.

Next time: if you didn’t go with self-powered speakers, you’ll need a monitor amp! As always, I have some suggestions. Ja ne!
 

This post is part of The DIY Studio Buildout Series, on building out a home recording studio.

Building out home studios has become de rigueur for musicians of all kinds of levels. Some people are building out new rooms, converting garages, spending lots of money and basically going the pro route, often without expecting to make any money at all. If you have that sort of dosh: well done.

But if you don’t, the good news is that you don’t have to spend that much.

First, start with the room. You need to make your room sound good. I can’t stress this enough. In fact, I already have, back in June, in a big post how rooms affect sound. If you missed that, you should check the link. Go on, we’ll wait.

Back? Good. For those who cheated and didn’t click, the picosummary is simple: if the room isn’t quiet – if it’s reflective, if it has angles and does weird muddying things to sound – all of that will show up in the recording, and no amount of good equipment will fix it.

In fact, as Jeff Bohnhoff is fond of pointing out, good recording equipment will make a bad room worse, because your better equipment will pick up all the flaws and present them to you in perfect clarity.

Don’t record here

So start by finding the least bad room you have. It should be quiet, and not strangely shaped. Play music in it – what you want to record, and existing recordings that sound like what you want to record – and find the room in which it sounds as good as it can, given the equipment you’re using.

Then you have to realise that even your best room won’t actually be good for microphone-based recording. Walls and ceilings are reflective; they add reverb, echos, strange sound bounces, all sorts of artefacts in the sound. In playback, that sometimes can make things sound better! And sometimes, you’ll capture a room’s sound on purpose. Great Big Sea did a bunch of recording in a Louisiana chapel for parts of their last album, to capture the sound of that room.

But you’re not Great Big Sea, and most of the time you don’t want that. Particularly on our kind of budget, it’s best to get “dry” recordings.

“Dry” recordings are recordings that sound only like a capture of the instrument. No reflections, no room-reverb, no sound wave interference, no anything else. It should ideally sound as if the instrument were played in an infinitely large room with no reflections at all.

The reason you want to do this is that it’s simply much easier to add room-like effects in software than take them back out. A dry recording lets you add reverb and phase shifting and such with ease, and also with whatever flexibility your digital audio workstation will afford you. A wet recording – well, you’re just stuck with it. Want less reverb? NOT FOR YOU!

Therefore, most of your room prep should involve dampening the room’s native sound down as far as you can. Part of that is eliminating all noise sources, of course (including your computer’s fan and your cell phone’s RF noise), but just as much, it involves damping down all kinds of sound reflections within the room.

The expensive way to do this is line the room with sound-absorbing foam.

We can’t afford this, either.

That sort of thing is great, but expensive, so I go with movable sound baffling panels that I can build instead.

Sound baffles are semi-rigid panels that absorb sound. They can be fairly expensive if you buy professional studio versions, but, of course, that’s not how we roll here. Conveniently, I already have a video on how to make ultra-cheap sound baffles! Enjoy:

I also don’t try to panel the whole room. Instead, I semi-surround myself with large sound baffles, positioned opposite and around me, with the mic between me and them. I’ll have another panel behind me. If the first thing your primary sound waves hit is a sound-absorber, there’s dramatically less left over to bounce around the room, and another panel directly behind tends to finish off the remainders. Your milage will of course vary, dependant upon how your individual room behaves.

If you’re having problems with bass reflectivity and standing-wave effects – common in corners – you can make highly effective bass traps. Bass traps are bass-specific sound baffles, and can be really important in corners where you get weird standing-wave action going on.

It can manifest all sorts of ways, but if your low end sounds distorted or wibby or just odd? It’s probably manifesting, and you need to dampen it down until the room sounds good.

Jeff has a recipe for cheap bass traps: buy some Corning 703 rigid fibreglass and wrap it in a couple of layers of thin, non-reflective fabric. The fibreglass itself is pretty rigid, so holds together well without the necessity of a frame. Place these in corners, whereever walls meet.

This is one approach:

Again, click the image for more math

Another approach is to make columnar bass traps and stand them vertically in the corners. They’re more work to make, but easier to set up and move around. Pick your approach based upon your circumstances.

In the end, this will take some experimentation. You’re customising for the room you have, and that’ll just take some fiddling. But eventually, you’ll find you’re starting to get recordings that sound right. Then just keep dampening and improving until you have the room sound – or lack thereof – that you want.

And voila! You’ve built a really good foundation for recording. It’s a bit tedious, but it’ll pay off in saved time and better sound throughout.

Next time: studio monitors! Which is to say, speakers for your studio. You don’t want to do all your mixing on headphones, kids, and we’ll talk about why, and how you can DIY yourself up some pretty damn good monitors.

This post is part of The DIY Studio Buildout Series, on building out a home recording studio.

Over these six articles, we have started to scrape the surface of new music business models in the post-scarcity era. And while we’ve covered quite a bit of ground, don’t expect that this is even the complete first word on the subect, much less the last!

The common themes here have been reinvention and DIY; they’re the hallmarks everyone must show in a period of critical flux. Musicians and artists have long had to reinvent themselves throughout their careers; we’re just in a particularly acute period for it.

This installment is a bit of potpourri; several topics, all of them are important, but none quite substantial enough to merit individual posts.

First, the long-tail theory.

yeah, like that

The long-tail theory of making money, which emphasis the value of holding your own recordings and rights, isn’t nearly as important as when proposed back in 2004. It is still a valueable insight, and you still see people talking about it, and the value of residuals over long periods of time. But, well…

If people don’t buy recorded music, the long tail value of zero is still zero.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care about holding your own rights, doing your own recording, and so on. Where it does have value is in liscensing for other commercial works in new productions, such as soundtracks. A song I recorded on Dick Tracy Must Die is going on the Bone Walker soundtrack, in new form; that’s actual value.

There’s also potential value in having more than one thing to sell – and getting a higher percentage of those profits – to new fans. Keep your old stock around. But the primary late-discovery late-sales argument you see bantered around strikes me as already out of date.

The thousand fan theory, the second item I want to hit today, holds up great in this new environment. To elucidate, this theory postulates that if you can build a thousand dedicated fans who are vested in, who buy everything, you’re set.

A smaller number of REALLY big fans might also work

Don’t aim for a mass market that’s coming apart; aim for the sliver most relevant to you. If you can get a thousand people to buy in, well, you have to work to keep them happy, and making new things they want, but that’s a career.

Just remember you always have people falling off the end of that – it’s completely natural – so you can’t just get there and relax.

Finally, I have very little idea what to do about eBooks. eBooks, god. eBooks don’t have shows, eBook writers don’t have tours (and readings don’t count), but on the other hand, they’re often naturals at blogging! And that helps build community. But it’ll still be all about preloading payment if the book publishing industry is dumb enough to follow the RIAA lead.

YARRRRRRRticles!

Right now, publishers still have a nice amount of goodwill, and readers are often more atuned to the idea of supporting their writers, so those are both big advantages. But if the industry doesn’t ditch DRM and device-dependency right now, they’re going to burn all that away.

One potential solution is going back to Dickens’s pay-per-installment model, publishing in chapters. Lawrence Watt-Evans is one midlist F&SF writer doing this already; it seems to be working for him. I’m also pretty sure the thousand-fan theory applies well here. But the hindrance is that most people read most books that they do read exactly once, so you have your one shot, unlike music, where they’ll replay it later and maybe decide to like you enough to pay you then.

If you have any ideas, let me know, because eBook people may need them even more than musicians do!

So that’s it for this week. Next week I’ll wrap this up, and start a new series – you guys interested in the studio buildout series or How Facebook Destroys Everything? I’m thinking studio buildout, some nice DIY to leven all the business noise.

AND! TORONTO! I AM IN YOU! And I have a show tomorrow night, 7pm, house concert north of the Beaches. Email for details or check the show page!
 

This is Part Six of Music in the Post-Scarcity Environment, a series of articles about, well, what it says on the tin. There are no barriers to availability now, and copying is free. What’s a musician to do now?

I’m not sure what to say when a series intended to be two parts runs over five long and some of those parts have two parts on their own. Probably, it means I must learn to write shorter posts.

To recap: the old touring model became a problem, particularly for bands, which are are expensive. We talked about the instaband/hive band model in response; go here to refresh your memory.

Of course, all that said, you still shouldn’t turn down paying old-school gigs when they pencil out. Take those! Money matters!

I’m rich! I’m wealthy! I’m comfortably well-off!

But building a career that way is much more difficult than it used to be. Concert culture is really kind of at a nadir right now. It’s not that there aren’t standalone concerts in traditional venues – of course there are! I go to some! But it’s not a thing, like it once was, and more importantly, it’s not a way to build fans like it once was.

I don’t know what killed that culture – the reputation for expense, the hassle venues and labels put you through in the 80s and 90s to prevent bootlegging¹, cowardice over “terrorism” and crime – despite crime declining steadily for three decades people talk about “how bad it is” out there – or maybe it’s all this woman:

Or maybe it’s the industry again, with their crackdowns on unlicensed venues, and the cost involved in being one. I know venues around here who were shut down over licensing issues.

It could be any or all of the above, or something I haven’t even listed. Regardless, the culture is not what it used to be. I know too many musicians who have seen their incomes drop 50-70%, and too many who have just dropped out entirely, to think otherwise.

So what to do now? Where do you get started?

The first thing to talk about the house concert. These aren’t new; folk musicians have done these for a long time. But in other genres, these used to be mostly college neighbourhood excuses for drinking and party riots – if you haven’t seen the Runaways biopic, you might, there’s a good example of what they used to be in that film. Spoiler: they sucked.

Not just Kentucky

Over time, however, they’ve become civilised. There are house concert circuits, there are house concert providers who host and take care of you, and do this on a regular basis. Terms are all over the place, of course. Most don’t charge, some want a percentage of the suggested donation, but even that’s generally just to cover expenses.

So what do the hosts get out of it? They get an event, and social credit – a key currency in any post-scarcity environment. They get to be part of it; people who do this like music and care about it, and want to be a part. This is one way.

Meanwhile, you’re offering an experience they aren’t going to get in any other venue. You’re offering something that’s close and personal and right there. And at the same time, you are getting a venue and a chance to make fans.

Seriously, a crowd of 6-12 people in a living room gives you your best shot of doing the most important thing you can do starting your career: making that personal connection, becoming meaningful to somebody, and through that, re-establishing the value of purchase that we talked about way back in Part Two of this series.

I mentioned these aren’t new, right?

Start by getting people who’ve heard you on the internet to host. If you’re lucky you can get fans to do it (hi guys! ^_^ ). Even if the turnouts are tiny, you’ll need the experience and the references. Once you’ve done some of those, you might be able to get the attention of people who throw these regularly. And from there, maybe you can get onto the circuits, if that’s where you want to go.

But don’t do them if you hate them. Don’t force yourself. People will know.

Event shows are another break-in point. Anything where there’s already an event that you can join is an opportunity. You gain cred by showing that other people are interested in your art. You get a crowd already there for something; you don’t have to overcome the stay-at-home inertia.

For example, I’m a musician, but I’m also a venue – I run nwcMUSIC, a mini-music-festival under the auspices of the Norwescon science fiction convention. I don’t have a budget; I don’t pay; but like a good house concert venue, we take good care of you. You get to play in a good environment to a lot of people who are already out at an event and therefore a lot more likely to check you out, stay and talk with you later. You end up with four days of meet-and-greet. You get to do panels; hopefully, you impress people.

The Doubleclicks at nwcMUSIC 2012/Norwescon 35

See also: Sakuracon, PAX, any kind of multi-modal event that’ll draw people in on several fronts and also let you get personal with potential fans. Hell, Clallam Bay Comicon, where I was last weekend? Exactly the same thing.

Because that’s what you have to do: build that connection, and through that, re-establish the idea of value in purchase. Maybe it’ll be merch. Maybe it’ll be CDs. No matter how you count it, it’s about getting people invested in you, and therefore caring about what you do.

To do this, you have to be there, not just show up and take off. You have to be on the whole time, not just on stage. You have to be part of the event, because you’re selling not just your music, but an experience, and a bit of glamour.

If you’re doing a convention or a show and only doing the concert? You’re missing opportunities. Get onto some panels. Be lively and entertaining and prepared. No panels you care about? Propose some. Make a god damned impression.

People also like event souvenirs. CDs can be souvenirs. Even download codes can be merch can be souvenirs – this is why my download code slips are shiny gold tickets, and not just pieces of printer paper. People react to that. Yes, I know, you first and foremost want people to care about your music! I’m in this because I want people to hear my stuff, not because I thought, “I know! I’ll GET RICH by MAKING MUSIC!”

Because that trick always works.

But if they don’t get your CD, or your download code, they can’t listen to your downloads or CD. So stop worrying about why they bought it and just hope they do. If they like you, if they liked the experience, they’ll want the token of being there, and once they have the CD or the download code, you’ve improved your odds.

Similarly, doing a house party on a house party, or house concert tour? Don’t just play and leave; go to the party. Then build in some time between house shows where you can hang out after the party with your hosts in a relaxed and fun manner.

preferably sedated

It’s work, being “on” for hours at a time like that. It’s new and unfamiliar to many, including me. But people are doing music this way, and some are building careers, in this post-scarcity environment. It requires a gregariousness that you or someone in your band have to have, or be able to cultivate.

But it can be done. It’s one way forward from where we are now. Not the only way; but one way.

This time next week I’ll be in Toronto! I’ll be practicing some of what I’m preaching here. There will also be a Part Six of this supposedly-two-part series, which I’ll do my best to post from the road. I do want feedback and suggestions; we’re all making this up as we go along, and there is no well-trod path here. If you spot a landmark, give us a yell! Otherwise, I’ll see you on the road.

1: Which is to say, the kind of youtube video you see from phones at shows now? They used to clamp down on that so hard. Even still photos were often prohibited, and gods help you if you had a cassette recorder or microphone. People used to make special concert-taping equipment, like glasses with hidden microphones and wires that ran down your back. So crazy.
 

This is Part Five of Music in the Post-Scarcity Environment, a series of articles about, well, what it says on the tin. There are no barriers to availability now, and copying is free. What’s a musician to do now?

Over on his Tumblr blog, Mike Doughty lead an article on touring with this paragraph:

Radiohead wouldn’t exist without early major-label funding. The future won’t bring new Radioheads. All I want to say here, truly, is: let’s get used to it.

This far, I agree. Hell, I started with something damn near identical in Part I of this series, which came out before his, so I didn’t steal it. XD

He follows with this:

This means that there will be fewer bands.

I strongly disagree, but not in the obvious way.

A bunch of things I was going to talk about today – the way that old-school touring doesn’t work – he covered, just after I’d finished outlining this article. Go read his, if you’re curious. But to summarise: less money, fewer traditional venues (by which I mean live-music bars and clubs), the dissolution of concert-going culture (and it is mostly gone), much higher travel costs, and more. Lodging’s no picnic either.

Take that as read; they are the facts on the ground.

It’s kind of like this

One of Mike’s answers is: don’t have a band. They’re too expensive, it’s too much money, it’s $6000 a week for bare-bones, you can’t do it. Sound amazing as a soloist or duo.

I disagree strongly with that dollar figure, but leave that aside for now.

“Don’t have a band” is a solution, and it does work. And in fact you’ll have to do that to some degree – or most of you will, there are always exceptions. As part of that, you have to find new kinds of places to play and new ways to book and so forth; we’ll get to that, I swear to you.

But he’s absolutely wrong about fewer bands. Fewer bands is not actually the answer. More bands is the answer.

Here’s how it works:

You want to tour. A lot of musicians don’t want to tour, but do want to play. They’ll have day jobs they like, but they’ll want to play out and put serious work into it.

So you tour around as a solo or duo at first. As you’re doing that, you network the living fuck out of all the good local people you can, and build enough contacts to have a band in every town. Or, at least, have one in the central towns within an area that’s a day-trip away from shows.

This has actually been my game plan with CRIME and the Forces of Evil. A lot of people seem to think I want to be a solo act. Were that the case, I wouldn’t have a band-style name.

This isn’t bad planning; it’s a strategy. And that strategy has been: work my act up, play far above where my few years of experience would indicate (which involves a lot of catch-up in skills), write an assload of songs, get attention, get known…

…and start attracting Forces. An ever-shifting cloud of supervillains musicians, non-travelling or even travelling musicians with whom I get to play in different towns and venues. We meet up, we practice a couple of times together, we do a few shows, it’s awesome, we go our separate ways until we come back together again.

Not entirely unlike this

The best part is, everyone get something out of it. Touring musicians who want bands get bands without the travelling expenses. Limited-touring people get a chance to step up, play with more people, build into however much mobility they want. Non-touring musicians get to be a part of it, for reals, without any of the touring stress.

Alternatively, there are still a fair number of cover bands out there. This can and should be a new lease on life for them. They’re already all about covering other bands; now they can do it with the actual act.

And what makes this workable is the same technology that upended the old system: cheap, easy, reproduction. You make a scratch recording of how you want a song to sound live. Channel left is everything from the song except the musicians you’re meeting up with; channel right is the part they need to learn. Play both, you get the whole song.

When you get into town, you rehearse a couple times as a unit, mostly to practice timing, and then you do your shows.

Everybody wins.

so much win

Now, it’s a skillset, as with everything else. But it’s a skillset people can and will learn. I know they will, because I didn’t invent this. It’s already happening. SJ Tucker was my gateway for this, but it’s all over the place in both filk and nerdcore, two of the big forms of geekmusic.

It even has names. Sometimes it’s called the Instaband concept. I think of it as the Hive, but that’s my Teen Titans fandom showing, or rather, the AU fanon where…

Right. Sorry. Topic drift.

Regardless, I saw this happening and thought, I want that. I’m adapting it to my own needs, and I’m trying to build on it and improve it, of course, and I write about things because I’m one of those people who sees a problem and a possible solution and starts waving their hands wildly about going GUYS GUYS GUYS OVER HERE OMG!

Which I like to hope is a contribution as well.

Also, I recognise the connection to pre-recording-industry town bands and orchestras. If you don’t know; every little town, even really little ones, used to have a little band that played all the events – holidays, parades, whatever. It’d be made up of all the local people who had businesses or farms or whatever, but who liked playing music. Touring musicians would utilise them, too.

St. Pepper reporting for duty, ma’am!

But it was much harder in many ways, because while you could have sheet music, you couldn’t know what it should sound like. So quality was lower, and it was supplemented by touring bands as that became more possible. With large touring bands becoming economically unviable, we’re kind of going back to that system, only this time, with far better tools – and better quality.

In short, all of this can happen, because it is and has done before. Given the correct circumstances, it will again.

And we’re over 1000 words already, so that’s all for today. We’ll talk about where to play out in a post-concert culture, and ways to make money at it, next time.
 

This is Part 4 of Music in the Post-Scarcity Environment, an ongoing series of articles about, well, what’s on the tin.

In parts one and two, we’ve described how the music industry has destroyed itself. That’s pretty straightforward; look around and the facts are just sitting there. Acknowledging reality sounds trivial, but we can watch tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars being burned as people try desperately not to, so clearly it’s not as easy as you’d think.

It’s more difficult to build something new than to blow up something old, and those of us on this side of the line have the difficult job. So I really want to hear from you guys. I don’t have all the answers here. I have some ideas, and some experience, but it’s going to take a lot more than just me.

One quick item before I get started, though:

I have a show on Friday! Westercon 65, Seattle Airport Doubletree, Friday, 8pm, Evergreen – the same place as nwcMUSIC’s shows. It’ll also be webcast by @omnisti at http://sjnk.tv/ (note that’s .tv NOT .com!), live! So come in or tune in! But not both please, that would be confusing and feedbacky. 😀

Okay, back to business.

First, you have to know that there’s no one way to approach this. There never has been, really, but for some decades there was a dominant model. People wrote books about it and everything.

Throw that away. If you’re reading this, the commonality you share is that you don’t get to do that.

You instead must turn some of your creativity and inventiveness to the business side of things. Either that, or have someone on your team who can do that for you, because there isn’t really a career path here yet. There’re the makings of several, but it’s all pioneer all the time now.

Try not to go all Donner Party on your friends.

In many ways, the wilderness is quite freeing – particularly if you have a good BBQ sauce if you can shake your fear of failure. You either need to be or get to be a goddamn research scientist of music career, always trying new ideas. I try to look at it as “get to be,” and opportunity, but since I’m kind of terrible at the business part, I don’t generally succeed. But I’m still sluggin’ away! XD

For many, the hardest problem with this will be overcoming the sunk cost fallacy. It’s a real problem. For others, it’ll be coming up with things to try. For still others, it will be the emotional grinder; this really is a game of failing and being rejected, and that’s hard.

Whatever you try needs to be focused on overcoming the triple-threat of problems:

1. fan alienation from the music industry
2. a generalised end of perceived value in paying for recordings, and
3. something we’ve not talked about as much: the death of bar-and-club touring. We’ll get to that next week.

Were it only that easy

The good news it that the first two problems are overcome the same way. The way to have people give you money for music and recording now is to get them to buy in, rather than just buy.

What’s the difference? To buy in, they need to see themselves as partners in the music’s creation. Minor partners maybe, but partners nonetheless. There has to be a personal connection, or at least the perception of one. They have to be interested in your music, but they also have to be interested in you. They need to be invested in you and/or your art.

This is very different to the old-era “buy” model. Once upon a time, you’d hear something you liked on the radio or at a friend’s house, and you’d buy the recording. That no longer has perceived value, as we talked about in Part II.

But the personal connection – that has worth. Get them interested, get them emotionally involved, share the experience; that gives value. That lets you start to build a base of fans.

How to do that is worthy of its own post, and you’ll get one! But I promised some talk about making money today, and I’m going to hold to that.

So let’s talk recording, and how to make money from it.

In recording, front-loading the money is key.

no, no, no!

If something doesn’t exist yet, it can’t be downloaded, so raise money to record a project before you even start to record. I don’t mean “advances,” either – I mean payment, at least of costs.

Money can come from all sorts of places; IndieGoGo, Kickstarter are examples of crowdsourcing patronage combined with pre-order and unique gifts. They get something first, or different, something not so easily copied, whether physical or not. That makes it of scarcity value again, and worth paying for.

Traditional patronage also works. It’s been important for me. I’ve a few fans who are particularly interested in what I do with music, and they’re interested enough to say, “here, I will help you do this.”

Plus, there are other venues. In Canada, at least, you can get grants from arts councils; I suspect such things will become more, not less, important as a percentage of money, over time. Soundtracks are an option, particularly book soundtracks; commissions never hurt anything either. Just keep rights to perform and record.

However, none of that will fly until you have credibility. You need a track record of being able to do your art, sure, but even more importantly: you need to show the ability to get other artists interested in making your art with you. You need to demonstrate the ability to draw others in on a project.

This gets back to the whole idea of crowdfunding and making your fans part of the process. Bear with me, I promise you this makes sense.

Once upon a time, you could gain a lot of artistic cred in doing it all the parts of your art by yourself. That used to be showing off your talent; being able to do that credibly impressed people. Prince, the 80s superstar, got a lot of attention from other artists and the like by doing his first two albums entirely solo; the general reaction to that was, “…how? You must be a music god.”

This is where I failed on Dick Tracy Must Die. I treated it too much like an art project, doing everything myself, from note one on track one all the way through to package design. It was very much an art-school approach, which makes sense, given that, well, I went to art school.

But I discovered that no longer impresses. If people actually know you actually played all the instruments, you get multi-instrumentalist cred, and other musicians might care, but in general? Not so much.

Try not to react this way

In the previous era, that kind of complete-skills-package alone would’ve been enough to get people to hit play and give you a listen.

Now, it’s not. Not with Garage Band, not with looped music, not with sampling, not with all kinds of other tools lowering the required skill level to make a song. Even if you do it all the old-school way, playing all the instruments, nobody’s going to know that unless they already care.

You still need a lot of DIY to start to succeed; but it’s necessary, not sufficient.

So what impresses now?

What impresses now, what stands out in an ocean of output enabled by technology, is that ability to draw others to your art. There are no gatekeepers anymore, at least not in an absolute sense; that also means there’s no pre-screening.

The resulting flood of art and music means people get far more discriminating about even being willing to try you out. People are far, far less willing to hit PLAY. There’s simply too much; they need some kind of pre-screening.

Seeing that you’ve drawn others to your art is one form of that pre-screening.

This is especially true in music, where there’s a time commitment and often barriers to play. You can glance at fanart for a quarter or half a second to see whether it might be your kind of thing; music, you may need to get headsets (if you’re at work or school), you may have to fiddle with something you aren’t always using (like the screen), you may need to turn other sounds off – all those are barriers keeping peoples’ fingers off that PLAY button.

And that’s where has to start. That’s why nwcMUSIC, the little geekmusic festival I run at Norwescon, has a tagline and a graphic.

press PLAY

Get past that barrier, and you can build from there.

More to come.
 

This is Part Three of Music in the Post-Scarcity Environment, a series of articles about, well, what it says on the tin. There are no barriers to availability now, and copying is free. What’s a musician to do now?

I was going to write about making money in a post-scarcity environment today. But something’s come through in comments so very clearly that I have to write about it first, because you need to understand this before you can even think about trying to make music for money.

Last time, I talked about how the record companies had brought a lot of the current situation upon themselves. I wrote about how their insatiable greed and desire to attain a we-own-everything and you-pay-for-every-play system had ruined any chance at some sort of DRM-based continuation of the old way.

NO MUSIC FOR J00

But it’s worse than that. Responses to my first article made across the web – Facebook, Livejournal, other places – have clearly illuminated that they did far more than just fail at rent-seeking. They have successfully convinced everyone that people do not own the music they “buy.”

The record companies would, of course, be the first to affirm this. They’d correctly say you own certain very limited “use rights,” and that’s it. They’d suggest even those could be revoked. You most certainly don’t own the music, and there’re things you can and can’t do with it, mostly on the side of can’t.

Their former customers now agree. They totally get it. Congratulations, RIAA! Congratulations, MPAA! They get it! They pay you and DING! They don’t own the music! You won!

And in doing so, you have destroyed the value of purchase. You have destroyed the value of ownership. And you destroyed yourselves, and everyone else with you, because nobody is going to pay good money for something they don’t get to own.

People not only see music “ownership” as meaningless, they see themselves as being played for suckers and contemptible rubes. They see examples being made of people like them in court. They hear clowns from the MPAA talking about how leaving the room during commercials is stealing from TV networks. They post a family video with music from an album they bought and paid for in the background, and get a DMCA takedown and threatened with loss of internet access.

Music fans see constant haranguing from the industry telling them what they can’t do. And they see other people saying fuck that, and doing it anyway.

I want to grab industry people by the ears and say, LOOK, GUYS: before all this, before even cassette tapes, people shared recorded music. Sharing is part of the point. In the past it was portable record players, or going over to your friends house and playing songs there, or if you had enough money, even a record player in the car. You’d trade albums and borrow and return and not care.

And that didn’t start with the transistor, kids

Now all of those sharings are replaced by throwing the songs across the net, since a lot of your friends aren’t physically close. Conceptually, to much of the public, it’s the same thing. And they’re not just being told “no, you can’t do what their parents did,” they’re being told “not only can’t you do this, we will fuck you up and destroy your family.”

Honestly, there’s nothing funny about this

So guess what: people aren’t buying music so much anymore! Is it surprising that people won’t pay for something they do not see as having value? It’d be far more surprising if they did. Forced sales through threat and intimidation only get you so far. “Here, give me $5 for absolutely nothing. Oh, I might sue and destroy you, but it’s even more likely if you don’t pay.” “Fuck you, no! Oh hai, bittorrent.”

Once you’ve shattered that money-for-value association – and it’s good and shattered – even DRM-free music files become clutter. They’re something to have to keep track of and back up and worry and think about. And with little to no ownership value, who wants to bother?

It’s arguably not even zero value. It’s arguably negative value.

As a result, many people are turning to supposedly-universal subscription services. But even there, it’s the same dicking-around-with-rights games. Subscribers see songs appearing and disappearing as companies fight about licenses, and gods forbid you try to use the music for anything. Same story for the MPAA and studios and Netflix and such – same idiocy, different media.

So people get tired of it, and we’re back to OH HAI BITTORRENT, because the industry has destroyed the value of both ownership and paying. In the process, it has destroyed itself, and indies trying to leverage recording income are being taken down as collateral damage.

But there is a saving grace here, for musicians: this rejection isn’t about the music. Download estimates alone show that.

It’s about rejecting the current recording model.

Get ahead of that curve, and you can guess about half what I’ll be writing about next. Spoiler: it’s not all about playing live.
 

This is part two of an ongoing series of articles about music in the post-scarcity environment.