So we got on a train from Toronto and went to Montréal! I hate airplane travel but love train travel, and this was quite a bit like the Cascadian rail that I take from Seattle to Vancouver all the time, with two minor differences: 1. the foot was much better, but 2. no lounge or separate dining car, which means I was essentially just in a seat for those hours.

For most people, they’d take the better food – and it was fabulous – but I’d rather have the ability to get up and walk to another car. I hate sitting that long.

Taking pictures from the train didn’t work very well because the sunlight was on the wrong side. But we saw this:

hi lake!

And this:

seems familiar

Which reminded me of this:

oooooh rite

And then once we got there we saw this:

unf

…and I went Hel-LO, Montréal! And then we went to dinner with Vicka and Pywaket! And I determined that in fact, rabbit is super tasty, as was the gelato and chocolate at Suite 88 up on the Plateau, which is where we spent most of our time.

Montreal looks a lot like this!

And also has this, which is where Anna and I would buy all the things if we lived there:

home of the bass ukelele, which I desperately want

Next day was up early for Festival Mémoire et Racines in Joliette! And Em picked us up from Hotel Lord Berri and took us to her favourite Quebec poutine-and-steamed-bun-hot-dog place on the way. I realised I’d forgot my phone so most of this are sadly just off my phone. But!

Anna was particularly happy to see these guys:

Les Charbonniers de l’enfer

…because they never travel all the way out to Cascadia! So she got to see them live. In a tent! And sang along like this:

i did not understand the lyrics

The big OMG SQUEE for me was that some of the musicians were having little pickup sessions, and they’d get together and play at this one building outside the green room, and other people could sit in on this ring of tables around them if you wanted, and play along. So of course I did that, briefly playing with the new spoons I’d just bought:

Picture courtesy Em F

…and then with my zouk, which I had of course brought up from Montréal.

And that went over so well that I got called up to the main circle to play.

O.o

Honestly, it was one of those, “…me?” and “is this really happening?” moments, because this is one of those bullshit daydream fantasy events that doesn’t ever actually happen in real life, except hi, it was happening right then.

It was epic. I played along for a while and eventually introduced a set that featured my Mystery Tune and got a round of applause from the core group over that. They liked both the tune and the whole set! But didn’t know it either – until now, anyway. 😀

Anyway, once that broke up, we went over to the crafts area and bought dinner and I had a kind of hilarious language fail moment. Apparently there’s a thing in bilingual people where your main language is Language A and the second language you speak is Language B and All Other Languages become Language B.

So if you walk up to a vendor you discover is Francophone-only but you didn’t know they were Francophone-only you might just panic and spew, “chotto matte gozaimasu, atashino tomodachi furansugo hanashima ANNA-CHAN!”

And then they ask if you have any English and you go O.O and “…I have some English” and you ignore the question about your native language like you don’t understand it and run away.

so embarrassing XD

The evening concerts were great! I wish I’d had my proper camera; the iPhone doesn’t do well in low and evening light. But this is what Bernard Simard et compagnie looked like:

only, you know, larger

And this is what … I think these are still they, anyway, I’ll edit this when I’m sure… Belzebuth sounded like, recorded on an iPhone!

you can hear Anna in this next to me 😀

And that’s a whole lot of photos! Next: MOAR TRAINS! Only with better photographs, and a surprise concert ON A TRAIN, and Moncton!

Today’s post was supposed to be about Montréal, but I’ve been too busy on Things What Aren’t Music, and that post will take a while! So it’ll be on Monday.

Until then, I have some cool things for you!

Bob Ludwig of Gateway Mastering talks about the loudness wars. If you don’t know what the loudness wars are, this article will tell you. I hate them and did not participate with Dick Tracy.

Glitch Textiles is an art project to create interesting images with broken digital cameras and turn those into fabric art. I think this is awesome. It’s a Kickstarter project, but the video, and many of the images in it, are really cool.

Stained glass dice lamps! On Etsy. I want the d20.

Meet Trapwire. Trapwire already knows you. And everything about you. Check page 19 for how proud they are about diligently investigating people for not taking the same tourist photos everyone else does.

Finally, if you’re in central Cascadia, this weekend is kind of amazing with bands which have played nwcMUSIC playing big shows:

• Heather Dale and Ben Deschamps are appearing with SJ Tucker and Betsy Tinney in Kenmore on Friday night. Kenmore Community Club, 7:30pm. This is pretty much down the hill from my house, which I find kind of hilarious. lol, something to do in Kenmore. XD
• The Doubleclicks (who went over GREAT last year and I hope to have them back) are teaming up with Vixy & Tony and playing Geek Girl Con on Saturday at 8:30. That’s downtown Seattle, at the convention centre.
• Leannan Sidhe is playing with Heather and Ben at RoseWind Commons, Umatilla at Haines St., Port Townsend, Sunday at 7pm.
• Finally, Heather and Ben have a show by themselves at Vancouver Pagan Pride, next Saturday (the 18th), Surrey, 3pm. Plus there’s a house concert later, details here: http://heatherdale.com/shows/upcomingshows

What’re you doing this weekend?

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.

…and we’re back! Hiya! Back from St. John’s and Torbay and Shediac and Moncton and Joliette and Montreal and Toronto! Working backwards, more or less. There is far too much, and I’m still updating my written old-school journal, but there are things! And I have proof!

I stood in a Great Lake in Beaches:

Yes, my feet are in the water, even if it doesn’t look like it.

And The Mighty If, who was at the house concert later, posted video he took with his camera from the show, which is probably the first recording anywhere of “Get Out”:

Not you, you can stay

We hiked all over Toronto, or at least, downtown parts. This was an Eyesore of the Month building in the drawing stages some years ago and I looked at the drawings and totally agreed, but this is one of those cases where the drawings – and also what it looks like from a distance – are totally wrong, because on the ground once you’re nearby? It works great:

Look at this insanity. LOOK AT IT!

Holy Shit, Bay Street!

No left turns, indeed

Also for some reason some of their street cars have Elfquest pr0n names:

Intersects with Softsheath

And we found out where Cabbages Guy went after he left CabbageCorp:

My Cabbagetown!

And apparently:

Inspector Spacetime got a double-wide

Okay, okay, enough fandom crap. XD Toronto was awesome. How awesome? This awesome:

Canada Doesn’t Hate You

Thanks again so much again to Cow for having me in for a show (and for crash space!), and to both Cow and If for posting videos and pictures and everything! 😀

Next up: Montréal! This is already too many pictures, so I’ll post about that on Friday.

Tomorrow, the first of the studio build-out posts! I’ve got a lot of catching up to do – in everything – but that’s okay. Time to get busy!

Hello from St. John’s, Newfoundland! Everything this tour has been such a whirlwind and awesome and I’m not even going to try to catch up for right now. But the last couple of weeks have been epic and there’s still more to come!

I’ll have some great pictures next week, and some stories, as well as getting back to regular schedule, but for right now it’s just this HI I’M STILL ALIVE AND ON TOUR post. Back to Seattle late on Monday!

If you aren’t following my twitter account (username solarbirdy), that’s the thing I’m most likely to update on the road, for obvious reasons. Say hi there!

Last call for tonight’s show! Toronto! Leslieville! Show page for details! C’mon out!

Also, a tidbit I didn’t include in Touring, parts one and two: this article on electronica shows. Notice the value here of event.

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?

“That’s flowers. That’s become flowers now. Is that a drink?” – me, a few minutes ago, looking in the refrigerator.

Airplanes hurt my brain.

Clearly, I am in no shape this morning to summarise the post-scarcity series, outline or no. I will write that later, instead. Hopefully tomorrow.

First: my condolences to everyone in Colorado affected by the shooting spree early this morning. I don’t have anything to say that anybody else doesn’t, so I won’t, other than to hope that all the injured will recover well.

To business.

Remember the Trad o’ th’ Month project that turned into the album Cracksman Betty? Which, if you haven’t listened to, you should? Well, Leannan Sidhe have started a similar project. Their lead singer and songwriter was up here at Criminal Studios yesterday, for recording. Ta da:

Ain’t modern technology somethin’? Studio approval to online in six hours, and most of that travel time.

That’s me on percussion, by the way. ^_^

Meanwhile, enjoy a poster! It’s the Musicians of Bronycon! I had no idea until recently how many musicians there were in MLP fandom, but look at that thing! And that’s just from one convention!

Finally, I’ve been working on restoring a bit of lost fanac from the 1980s. I got a video ripper a few weeks ago and have been pulling things off old VHS cassettes. One of these is a 1985(?) stage-production musical parody of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan called Wrath Side Story. It’s about 40 minutes long and was performed at a convention called BableCon.

It’s extremely silly, but I think also kind of hilarious.

Not this musical, but…

Through repeated rips and a lot of massaging, I’ve got what I think is a watchable beta release. The tape was at its best a third or fourth generation copy and is badly degraded, and there are still a couple of places where video is lost temporarily right up front. But it’s only a couple, and they’re brief. I still hope to get them back through more rerips and massaging.

I’d like to see what other people think, get suggestions, things like that.

Enjoy: Wrath Side Story (now on youtube).

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?