Success

So my internet's down at home and all of a sudden life gets about five times more complicated. Emails don't get received or sent. Artists don't get their mixes. YouTube sees a sudden unexpected dip in its views...

Actually, it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things at all. But it does mean that you, dear reader(s), have been denied your daily doses of my wit, wisdom and whimsical meanderings. For that, and everything else, I humbly apologise.

So in the vague hope my iPad comes into the realm of a free wifi zone before my landline is resurrected, here's a collosally witty, wise and whimsically meandering update on what has been big in Hi-Sonorous land in 2013 so far.

Alun Leppitt's record is big. And great...5 tracks of beautiful, vital, epic, worshipful rock. I'm really proud of it and, happily, it's going to be available sooner than you might think. A loose deadline of the end of the month is looking possible. Tom Gregory (drummer extraordinaire for Mr Tommy Eye and good friend of Alun's) joined us at the studio for a great percussion session which culminated in him laying down some parts played on the side of chair and the top of a music stand. And the best part of this is they're not even gimmicks we'll push to the back of the mix on second thoughts. The EP also has a really good name and LOADS of cool sounding guitars. I guess it's not hard to understand why I'm so into it!

Byron Gold is very soon to announce big news on a brand new release. I don't think I'm allowed to give anything more away yet but it's the track we've been waiting to write for Byron for about two and a half years and it's basically a stonker and Sanj and I are both well pumped about the news. Expect clips, vids, facebook spam and general twitter hype madness within the month!

Our tax returns got filed. OK this isn't news. But how else do you account for my chipper and lackadaisical tone?

I set my guitar up in stereo and jammed on my looper for two hours in Wednesday morning. This isn't really news either, apart from the fact it may well have spawned the basis of an amazing idea we've come up with a remix for Byron's single but haven't yet had a chance to work through properly. The remix involves an incredibly cool patch we made up on the MPC where we sample spliced one of the hooks from the tune and built a beat out of the various ensuing vocal samples. Great fun to play with and prime remix material. We even shoehorned a tiny element into the single mix!

Anyway, before I get down to how many socks I've washed so far in 2013, let me get onto the subject of my blog...success.

Am I alone in thinking that the creative industries have much less definable measures of success than some? If you're a doctor and you correctly identify their illness, prescribe the right drug or treatment and they get better, job done, no? If you're a lawyer defending someone who's innocent and you argue their case well and the jury returns the correct verdict, again, good job. OK, so I'm sure GPs and barristers the world over will be writing in in uproar at my crass oversimplification of their roles, but compare it to the creative equivalents...

I'm a web developer who gets hired to build a website for a company. At the end of the design process the site looks great, functions well and you get your cheque for a job well done. But the site's far from being a success at this point. It has to get seen by search engines, it has to build awareness, it has to attract customers, it has to sell a message. Ultimately, it has to make money for the company. As a designer, you won't probably stick around to know if any of these things happen.

Take another example even closer to our patch...making records. Any contemporary artist who's made an album will tell you the same story...albums are a songwriter's symphony; their film or novel. They are the final and most eloquent medium of expression for the contemporary musician, where the weeds are mercilessly picked, where every microscopic detail is analysed and questioned and reasoned into existing. Great albums are given everything by the artist to be what they are. But, as an artist you don't ever really know the impact your music has on the people who receive it. You don't even really know the impact for the people who love it, who go crazy for it. You speak clearly, precisely, but what you get back isn't an equivalent response. It's either an inarticulate and meaningless jumble of superlatives - "it's so amazing, you're so great, I love you", or more in my case a deafening silence.

Some will say don't be so vain. Do it for the art. Do it for fun.

But making music as an end in itself has never really been it for me. I've always had this daring dream that music can change people. That it can be about people, rather than about 'art'. Or at least that art is helpful and good when it's concerned with people and not just itself.

But this is a really hard dream to hold on to because it's nigh impossible to know when you've done anything worthwhile and even when you have, it's an incredibly expandable vision - there's always this desire to reach more people and have things on a bigger scale.

I've seen that time and again even bands who've had all the success in the world still want to be number one again. 'You're only as good as your last single'. Success is pretty insatiable when you're chasing that version of it.

And in the main I'd say I don't need all the success in the world. And by my own logic it seems it would be folly to desire even an ounce of all the success in the world because it would never be enough.

So where does that leave me then? How do I reconcile the ambition I have for what I do with the knowledge that success won't ever satisfy?

I guess the best answer I have for you now is to try and make all the music making about people. To make it about having good relationships, building people up, having integrity, being honest, being positive, being an example etc etc. I think even a little bit of this can make you feel really good about what you're doing and become a really positive way to channel all the ambition.

Chris

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Glorious tech

Hey all,

Here's just a couple of cool things I found this morning whilst browsing the apple store which caught my eye. This is seriously cool...

Yes people, that is a real instrument with a light up touchscreen table and play blocks!! What's even better is that you can get a digital version for the iPad. Amazing!!

Every once in a while manufacturers like Korg and Alesis concoct little serieses of cheap and cheerful audio effects boxes which hang around for all of about six months until their extravagantly undercutting Chinese supplier goes bust or gets put in jail for human rights abuses, or something. A few back there were Alesis's modfx boxes which I absolutely loved and nearly caused me to shed tears when I had them stolen out of a bandmate's car. Then of course there was the ubiquitous stylophone and theramin.

Now, happily, korg have a new one, which is kinda like a hybrid of all of them, called the Monotron...

DV lists it at £34. Don't think I can refuse to be honest!!

Whilst I'm in the tech zone, I can't fail to mention apple. I, like many others, have grown to really appreciate their obsession with design and user experience. Their hardware (such as the iPad I'm currently writing this with) is amazing. They have designed and marketed so effectively over the last 10 years that many of my friends who have apple products won't hear anything negative said about them.

But I have to say, the latest iPhone and iOS release is disappointing. Not because I seriously want a new phone (my old, old Nokia still calls and texts thanks very much), but because of what these announcements say about the company. Many well-reported features that could have been added to the new iphone squarely seem absent simply because they don't need them for the phone to sell well, while the only reason I can see for their decision to ditch a perfectly great mapping app for their own inaccurate, bug-ridden one was because they dislike having anything to do with google.

I only go on about this because I think it's great when companies like apple give us technology that makes us go "wow" (see above examples) and when they are obviously designing and building products in a spirit of co-operation and with a passion to give people useful things that improve their lives. It's just a bit sad to see them so obviously isolating themselves and putting profits before everything else.

Chris

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The Great Ticket Scandal

Did anyone else see this week's Dispatches on Channel Four? If not I recommend it if you're a fan of live music. It's on 4od catch-up now.

For starters, it was great to see the medium of television actually being used to achieve something positive - a rare, but certainly news-worthy occurrence, as readers of our past eulogies on the subject will recall.

The show focussed on two major ticket reseller websites - viagogo and seatwave - exposing the huge, hidden industry of what essentially boils down to legitimised ticket touting, where the companies, posing as fans with tickets for shows they can no longer attend, sell large amounts of tickets for gigs at hyper inflated prices to desparate fans muscled out of the face-value sales.

Anyone who's been to a large gig will be familiar with the hell on earth that is Ticketmaster.com. It is, by far and away the most horrible way to spend money. But do you know what, I don't want to dwell on thinking about it. I'm kinda uptight just recalling the four-pronged pincer attack I staged with friends to secure tickets to see U2 in 2005.

On the whole done I've OK buying tickets for shows in recent years, but many thousands of people lose out, largely thanks to companies like the aforementioned (here on in referred to as vianono and seatlame), who according to the show basically buy up hundreds of tickets (or in many cases are spared the trouble and sent an allocation by the promoter) only to post them up for resale within minutes of the show "selling out" at massively hiked up prices.

And when I say hiked-up, in one case there were two seats for Coldplay at the O2 for over £2,000.

I guess I'm not surprised to hear that this stuff goes on in the industry. But I am sad about it. And I do wonder how the artists themselves react to news of this nature. About six months ago, me, Sanj and Tommy were in the studio trying to recall a beat from "Lessons...". After some poor attempts at jogging our memories, Tom reached for google and discovered for the first time in all of our experiences over a dozen download sites where you could get the album for free. It left a strange feeling that was about half anger (that people were stealing our work), and half pride (that our music was obviously considered worth stealing by all these unknown sites). Looking back I think in a way we felt like we'd just been through a little rite of passage - having our music ripped off was just one more step along the road, just like playing your first gig or getting your first radio play. But isn't that a sad state of affairs for the modern artist to feel like that?

But I can't believe this can be true for artists like Coldplay or U2. If I was them, I'd be seething that my fans were being so royally screwed over. (As an aside I'd also be many other things if I were Coldplay or U2 - but seething will do us for the purposes of this blog). Vianono's defence of their practice mentioned the fact that by returning the lion's share of the profit to the promoter, customers ought to be glad in the knowledge that the premium they paid would be going to the artist and not to a middle man. Because, lest we forget, gig promoters come from the same trusty breed of honest, transparent music industry executives as record labels, who can always be relied on to pay their artists fairly and in full, and not take any more than an appropriately minor commission for the relatively small role they play in the creation and development of their artists' work.

What gets me is how long this has taken to come out, and why there hasn't been more of a fuss made already by those who have a voice (ie the artists, their managers, fan associations and the government). There's something grossly naïve about the notion that only legitimate fans will make use of the opportunity to buy a ticket for £50 and then sell it for whatever the demand values it as. In those genuine cases where a fan can no longer make the show, why should they expect to get any more than what they paid originally? In what other scenario do you expect a refund of more than you paid?!

I'd really like to see some government legislation preventing the resale of tickets at more than a single figure percentage increase on the face value. And I'd really like to see artists makings fuss about this kind of thing more - come on, stop being so chilled out and speak up!

And if I ever hear of any of you lot buying tickets on vianono or seatlame...

Chris

Ps. Happier blog next time I promise!

Pps. Tommy eye's vid on YouTube racking up the hits. Keep em coming people!

 

Inspired

Read this amazing piece by Jon Foreman today, whilst listening to the latest Switchfoot album, "Vice Verses". Man, can this guy write.

Whilst his words and the strength of his vision make powerful, thought-provoking reading, the really amazing thing for me is hearing how well he expresses all of this vision and attitude in his band's (and solo) music. He's so on it.

Makes me really want to practice more!!!

 

Happy new year everyone!

Happy new year and all that to you, avid Hi-Sonorous reader(s). Hope you had a good one. So, what does the new year look like for you? Same old, same old, or major changes in store? Or is it the middle one...inevitable change, but the who, what and when - total mysteries?

 

2012 is shaping up to be a make or break year for Sanj and I. We've got a bunch of really amazing things happening in the next few months - the release of Tommy Eye's single and later on, the album, plus some really cool collabs with Byron, Ebonie, Aimée and others tbc! It all adds up to some really cool music that really could go places.... or it could not.

 

And that's the pinch. After four years casting our net wide and making things work by having loads of different fingers in loads of different pies, now we're kinda simplifying things - whittling it all down to a handful of projects that we really believe in and want to see go places.It's a different attitude for us, to be sure. Perhaps in many ways, it's a much more classic approach - write loads, work hard, and just keep doing what you do, until you get a break.

 

It's certainly scary ground for control freaks like us to leave so much to chance (or fate, God, luck, whatever term you're most comfortable with).But the nice thing is that I think we both feel much freer as a result. Freer to write what we want, and freer to make choices for artistic reasons rather than financial ones. And there's a weird confidence you get from letting go of the reigns a little bit.

 

So, who knows what this will all look like in another year's time? Not the same, that's for certain. But beyond that, we'll just have to wait and see!

 

Chris

Coldplay - Myloxyloto, the scissor tool and how to be relevant.

Ahhh, there's nothing like it when you're a closet rock fan in a rap world. The way the cymbals sparkle, the way the vocals soar, the teles crunch through vintage valves, the melodies...oh the tunes!! Yes sir. Nothing like buying rock music after a month of producing hip-hop.

So I've been eagerly awaiting Coldplay's new album since their glasto set back in the summer, and it's great to finally have it on the stereo. It's a great listen - full of hopeful, uplifting tunes and none of that default mid-tempo stuff that put so many people off.

Anyone who's familiar with U2 will instantly recognise the influence of Brian Eno, not just for his trademark keyboard/sampler sounds that litter the soundscape but also the tightness and variety of the arranging which is the new album's greatest aspect.

So it seems whilst epic music (aka The Big Music) is very much alive and well, the days of the 70-minute epic are over. No one has the attention span for it any more. Even Radiohead's latest album was, by conventional standards, EP-sized. People just aren't keen for more than 45 minutes of one artist in one go.

But this may be no bad thing in general, and I definitely think in Coldplay's case, it's a great thing. In the space of three albums the band have learnt how [slash been forcibly made...] to massively reduce the amount of time it takes for them to say what they need to, and in so doing, learnt to say a lot more to boot.

This is something I greatly admire in an artist - the abililty to be concise and to be articulate, which often requires a willingness to strip things right down to their core - a producers' job that artists often squirm at and requires a huge amount of trust to even begin. You see nothing is a given in the music world. You're only as good as your last single. You have to keep ahead of the pack if you want to stay in the race at all. Most bands fade away into obscurity after 3 or 4 albums because they stop saying new things and stop reaching out to an audience beyond their committed fans. Chris Martin said recently he's not interested in being 'relevant', and that may well be the case as far as he's concerned. But his band have done exactly the thing they needed to do to remain so and I expect the album sales will reflect this come Christmas time.

And I reckon there's something profound here... Music is a very revealing art form. People need no formal training to appreciate it or to criticise it, and can see through any kind of fakery. They can tell if you're lying because the music instantly loses its credibility. They can also tell when you're trying too hard or trying to pull the wool over their eyes. You can't fake this stuff. The only way you stay relevant is to stop trying to be relevant and just be yourself. Find whatever it is you were trying to say all along and then say that and do that with every ounce of your energy. Then the music reveals the honest artist behind it and draws you in, which, especially in this obsessively inquisitive age, is what the punters want.

But here's the crunch. In our time-concious, attention-deficit-disorder world, who has the time to wait 5 albums over 11 years for an artist to find their voice? You need a lot of people on your side if you're to be given that opportunity for that amount of time. Chris Martin can count himself blessed to have been given that chance when a huge number of other bands have found themselves dropped from labels or been bound up in crazy licensing fights or had albums shelved indefinitely like diamonds to stop them saturating the market before they ever got a chance to move on from their one top 10 single. And in some ways the worst offender of all is the listening public themselves, where music is like fashion and its a fad one day and old news the next.

But it's encouraging to me that there are examples at the very highest peaks of the music industry of this kind of trust and endurance, development and redefining in bands. It keeps me determined to follow in their manner and to try to be every ounce the only thing that offers me the chance of thriving in this world - myself.

C

Tommy Eye Update...

Well folks, Sanj and I are a week into our latest (and hopefully final) stage of producing Tommy Eye's forthcoming album 'The Fall of Icarus'. Here's a taste of what we've been up to and some thoughts on the nature of pop production that have been taking shape recently...

This past week saw us experimenting with a relay style approach, with me doing the day shift, and Sanj taking over for the evening. In that way we ended up covering a lot of ground, and still with the benefit of two pairs of ears - just not simultaneously.

It's a strangely effective way to work - not something I'd want to do all the time - but it means that when one of you tries something out, the other comes to it totally fresh later on, and is afforded a much fresher perspective on whatever it is that's been tried. Most of the time, it's repeated listenings that dull your appreciation of whether something really works or not, so this way, we're hoping that it takes less time to find the perfect arrangement and mix for each of the album's tunes.

And whilst we're on that topic of tunes, let me reveal a little of what you can expect on the album...There's a huge scope to this project. The main thrust of the album is Tommy's already 'classic' sound of heavy, straight-up hip-hop beats laced with a rock/alternative mid-range - guitars, piano, strings, and overladen with a perfect blend of rap and sung vocal. Overall, we're working hard to convey with seriousness a strong and, at times, sad message, but whilst keeping the music engaging, energised and fun.

It's a tricky balancing act, especially for what is effectively Tommy's debut release. If, overall, you press the seriousness too hard then the album becomes bleak and moody. If too light a touch, you run the risk of losing the message of the album and everything feels trivial and trite.

In many ways, this has been our ongoing lesson as producers foraging into the pop world - how do you present music of substance to a world that appears to demand superficiality? And when music is such a powerful force for influence (as I've previously blogged about here) are people willing to embrace music that sends a message that is contrary to their expectations or beliefs, or in the end, do people simply consume the art they agree with? In the alternative and niche scenes I think the latter is more likely to happen, but in the pop world, which represents an amalgamation of all the most popular music around, I think actually you do have a platform and an audience that will at least give you a chance.

For us, the question is how far can you go before you've blown your opportunity to communicate - when you've come on too thick, and in so doing turned people off?

With Tommy, the thing I admire most about him as an artist is is honesty and that he's the genuine article - in 'Wings' he tells the story of two kids who face neglect and abuse at home, who face an impossibly tough life ahead of them - whose wings have been tied - because of circumstances and situations often beyond their control. But the song is more than just musing on these issues - it's pure observation - because in his day job Tom works with these types of kids. He sees these lives for real, not just on TV.

This I think is the key to the question we've been asking ourselves - if you want to tell a good story that people will listen to, you have to be in the story. Not my words, in fact, but someone else's.

And it helps if your tune has a sick beat, which 'Wings' most certainly does thanks to some classic Sanj drums, a never-to-be-discovered-again slide guitar sound and a mother-load of compression.

But right at the heart of the song is an idea that's bigger than these elements, and that's hopefully what people will hear and respond to.

Chris

Is hip-hop to blame for the riots?

During my bank holiday's slumberous morning in bed I read Libby Purves' opinion piece in The Times entitled 'Of our 99 problems, rap lyrics are a big one', and was very interested by the internal debate that began in my head surrounding the idea that hip-hop might be to blame, in part, for the appalling behaviour we've seen in recent weeks. But let's be clear from the outset - I'm going to try steering clear of any outrageous statements here of my own, but in and amongst all the various outrageous and opposing things being said at this testing time, I believe there are strands of truth which we need to pull out from these people's comments, without the obvious backlash of being seen to endorse the whole message.


So, for example when David Starkey announced on newsnight that 'whites had become black' there may well be some truth in that, in the sense that many white teenagers in Britain have adopted the language and conversational style that finds its origin in Black American culture, and that has been most obviously exported to our fair shores by the likes of Jay-Z and the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. But of course, the other thing he communicated was that he considered this to be a form of degradation for these white teenagers, and thereby implied that white culture is better than black culture.


And that's why Piers Morgan called him a 'racist idiot'. Which was generous of him.


The problem is that David Starkey made an interesting point, which I have some sympathy for, but then blew it up with an unacceptable one, which I have no sympathy for. So, what happens is everything gets thrown out together - the truth, and the lie - and one assumes a dangerous position when trying to claw back and make acceptable again, the truth in what was originally said.


But let's try and do that.


I am a hip-hop producer. I am hugely influenced by a lot of MOBO (Music of Black Origin) - hip-hop, rnb, soul, jazz, funk. Albums by The Roots, Common, Marvin Gaye, Lauryn Hill, Stevie, Miles and 'Trane sit happily alongside my U2, Massive Attack and Stravinsky. I love the culture of freestyling, dj-ing, boom-bap beats and amazing energy hip-hop has.


But there's plenty of hip-hop artists that I don't like, nay, even detest, for their lyrical content.


There will be plenty of people in the hip-hop community who will feel rather abused by the backlash to their genre, with, dare I say it, in many cases, white journalists and commentators pointing the finger at the genre and accusing it of feeding the rioters with role models who promote and provide a justification for the violence we've witnessed.


Whilst I feel for the fans, as I myself feel partly abused by this sweeping accusation, let's be honest - when 50 cent preaches "get rich or die trying", irony aside, he's not exactly helping sway the argument in hip-hop's favour. I'm sure we can think of many more.


I cannot find a reasonable excuse for this kind of mentality and I would definitely go as far as to say I think these kind of songs and attitudes are partly to blame. But hear me out - I would also say that you can find plenty of other bad messages in other parts of the music industry. Take for example Beyonce, or Rhianna, or Britney gyrating in underwear, or duct tape (lol), or er, nothing - and tell me they don't either promote or at least give in to the idea that sex sells and that women are to be used for this purpose alone. ("Slave for you", anyone??)


The real problem is that we have a music industry that is rotten in many places. And rot comes out all over the place. And I don't believe that the rot is benign and doesn't infect other things. It has to. We're all influenced by things, and we all replicate and repeat what others have done. I see it all the time when I work with upcoming musicians whose voice is rather too obviously just a copy of the artists they love. That goes for whiney singers thinking they are emulating Thom Yorke as much as it does for obscene rappers who talking about things they barely understand.


So, is hip-hop to blame for the riots? No, not hip-hop. Because hip-hop is a genre of music containing thousands of artists, of whom many make valuable artistic contributions to our world. But there are some prevailing attitudes within the genre, such as the objectification of women, the glorification of violence and the pursuit of monetary wealth, and a good number of hip-hop artists who promote these attitudes who I believe should definitely do some serious rethinking, and get real about the influence that they could be having on their listeners.


And Britney's writers should as well.


Chris

To buy or not to buy...

There are always moments of weakness in the life of a record producer where you come to your senses just as you're about to purchase some obscenely expensive mic or pre-amp from dv247.com and you think, "flip, how did I get here??", before hastily hitting the X and rushing downstairs to make some tea. Usually these things happen when a perfect storm of little work, dismal weather, slight self-doubt and an uninspiring CD collection combine, but thankfully, such an experience hasn't occurred to me for some time now, for which my bank account (and wife) is certainly very grateful.

It's a scenario you don't get taught to protect yourself against at uni, and certainly never on the internet, on producer forums like gearslutz.com (lol), 99.9999% of the posts are people ranting on about such and such new tube-stocked it's-so-warm-i'd-heat-my-house-with-it compressor or other meaningless bla and in so doing making you feel totally ill-equipped for the task of making great recordings.

It's just like girls and shoes I guess - we humans all have a weakness for new things and advertisers, shops, manufacturers etc just know how to push those buttons. And in no field is this phenomenon more prevalent than in the world of production.

But I learnt a refreshing lesson recently working on a string recording with a guy called Chris Poulter from this place. He ended up bringing a pro tools rig and various mics with him. One of these mics was a Brauhner something or other. It was worth about a £bejillion, and yes, it was a very nice-looking mic and I was quite jealous.

But once we'd rigged it up and started recording, what did we actually hear through it?

Well, I heard a reasonably accurate version of the slightly dodgy strings that were being played in the room above us. Certainly, it was a good reproduction of the sound that was going on in the room, but did it make the two violins it was trained on sound like a section? No. Did it correct all their tuning errors? No.

The simple truth revealed was this - your gear only sounds as good as your musician.

It seems such an elementary lesson when you put it like this, but it's amazing how well wound the industry's thumb we all are that we forget this stuff so readily...to the extent that I'd readily consider spending £1000 on a new mic and pre-amp to record a guitar or snare with, rather than go with the meeks and 57s I already have, and spend the money on a couple of great snares and a new tele. Or just spend some time practising.

We were joined at the studio a few months back by the head A&R guy from a label. This is a guy that I respect greatly, but what was virtually the first thing he asked us - "what mics do you have here?". Perhaps it was just small talk - a way to break the ice, but perhaps also it betrays something deeper - that the reason we all spend so much money on studio gear is because we all secretly think having great gear is the true mark of a great producer.