Tracks on a Map

Tracksonamap.com is a new interface for interacting with music from around the world. It’s definitely worth a quick go-round to get a feel for the timbres and rhythms that make up the global sonic landscape right now.

For more on the soundscape concept and defining locales by their sounds, check out my related post, “Travelsong“

Dreams as Art as Business

“Everyone must begin to trust their dreams because out of that trust is born the artist, and the artist is the role model for the entrepreneur we now need.”

- Ernest Hall (entrepreneur and musician) from The Creative Economy: How People Make Money From Ideas

Your First Song

It’s my life.  It’s my pain and my struggle,

The song that I sing to you it’s my everything.

Treat my first like my last, and my last like my first

And my thirst is the same as when I came.

It’s my joy and my tears and the laughter it brings to me

It’s my everything

– Jay-Z, “My First Song” from The Black Album

Always treat your first project like it’s your last, and your last project like it’s your first. This guarantees quality.

Context

I was in a meeting recently with some members of my company’s executive team. It was a brainstorming session regarding the “big picture” roadmap and how we can effectively drive our customers to use the more advanced features and options our product has to offer in order to improve their businesses.

My two cents amounted to this: we need to think more musically.

When you begin learning about melody and harmony as the organizing principles behind the establishment of a key, you begin to realize that notes, in and of themselves, don’t mean anything. A note only begins to make sense when there is another note before and after it. And, in harmonic terms, a note only begins to take on “meaning” when additional notes are added on top of one another. An E played by itself does not suggest anything. It could be a note of any number of millions of melodies, and it could be either the root note or the add9 of any number of chords. It could be the V or the I, the ii or the VII…

Until you give a note context, you have not actually created anything. A note by itself is nice, but it is only when you combine it with certain other notes that you have created something of value. Context creates the music.

Don’t give customers features, give them several features that combine to create a solution. Play them chords.

On i

There is little doubt that Apple is not just a company, it’s a zeitgeist. Apple products inspire brand loyalty that rivals Harley-Davidson’s (Exhibit A), with a reputation centered on quality and innovation.

But there’s something more insidious going on, and it has nothing to do with Apple Fanboys: Apple has taken our identities. Not literally of course, but it has taken our own identifier, “I.” For those interested in the philosophical implications of the self and what it means to be conscious and self-aware, “I” holds great importance. 18th century philosopher David Hume famously explored the concept of the self over time, and the book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is a Pulitzer Prize-winning 800-page tome centered around defining the Self as a “strange loop,” and explores this concept through a wide range of analogies and examples. These are just two of hundreds of works based on “I”.

But what of “i”?

Apple’s iPod has relegated the proper noun “I” to the ranks of standard noun, and instead gives Pod the distinction. The Pod is the Thing, not us. The iMac, the iPhone… iWork, iLife… What happens when we start to use the lower-case “i” to refer to ourselves?:

i think, therefore i am not.

i don’t think this was an intentional move by Apple, but simply an unintended consequence. My feeling is that they used “i” because it looks like an upside-down exclamation point—a purely aesthetic choice. But perhaps they are playing with the use of i to represent imaginary numbers in mathematics, and used this to embed the concept of “imagination.” Or maybe “innovation” is the suggestion. But the connection between the imaginary and the self is a dark philosophical notion, one that we are all familiar with after having watched The Matrix.

At the end of the day the concept works brilliantly from a marketing perspective. To get someone to fall in line and do your bidding, you must first break the will. You must destroy your subject’s sense of importance and worth. “I am nothing.” Or, rather:

iThink, therefore iBuy.

The Loudness War

A war has been raging and you can hear its noise grow louder, but you may never have noticed it.

It’s called The Loudness War: “the music industry’s tendency to record, produce, and broadcast music at progressively increasing levels of loudness to attempt to create a sound that stands out from others.” For the past few decades, mastering studios have been tasked with baselining singles and albums at ever increasing volumes in order to keep up with, and attempt to exceed, the efforts of competing artists and radio hits. Airplay is at stake, and sheer volume is seen as the easiest method to get to the top of the charts. (The hardest method, by the way, is to write pop songs that strike an an irresistable balance between catchyness and pretension, so as to straddle the teeny-bopper hunger for the hook and the more mature sensibility of nuanced and thought-provoking performances, all laced with passion and youth and drive. So, you have to admit, you can see the appeal of the easy out here…)

The problem is not merely the immaturity of watching rival companies spending time and money shouting their way out of an argument. The fact is, this Decibel Inflation has what most consider to be an unacceptable side-effect: distortion. As volumes are increased with each mastering and re-mastering session, you lose definition and contrast between the highs and lows. In effect, the lows become high and the highs become higher. So you’re left with a more one-dimensional result than is likely desired. As Bob Dylan lamented:

“You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like—static.”

The Loudness War’s collateral damage is dynamic range. Modern records are set in a world where there is little difference between black and white, red and yellow, green and purple. It is instead a compressed landscape of shades that lack distinction. Dark gray and pale gray, rose and salmon, jade and lavender… The Loudness War is the reason your older albums sound softer than the one you bought last year, and why classic records are constantly being remastered. The old standbys can’t keep up in the current marketplace without a little lift.

If you want to hear an example firsthand, check out this YouTube clip: The Loudness War.

Of course, the matter does come down to preference. Some argue that the louder baseline volume of current recordings are in keeping with the increased sources of noise occurring in daily life, and the prominence of music playback devices that let listeners bring their music outside into these noisy environments. This is in stark contrast to the listening of LP’s in a reverb-friendly and relatively quiet room.

Unfortunately there are no checks and balances here. I don’t know when the breaking point will be reached, but I hope it’s not our eardrums…

Interference

The summer grabbed hold of me in August—interference of the highest degree—so instead of writing about creativity and music I decided to live it for a bit. This Interference may have interrupted my routine and writing schedule, but it also fostered a restless mental energy that I’m finally getting around to scribing.

The Interference led to the following thoughts and discoveries I accumulated during the hiatus. They are scattered but pertinent…

I discovered Capo thanks to Michael over at Daily Exhaust, and lamented never having it a decade ago while learning guitar. Dubbed “a musician’s best friend,” Capo lets you “slow down your favorite songs, so you can hear the notes and learn how they are played.” This is exactly what I sought after while struggling to learn music, but always had to settle for a MIDI-based guitar tablature playback program. Capo lets you change tempo and pitch (!), and incorporates markers to “bookmark” the portion of a tune you’re attempting to learn. You can even export your adjusted track and upload it to your iPod, for portable practice sessions. It’s a bit pricey ($49) but I would have bought it in a heartbeat if it meant bringing down Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Little Wing” to a manageable speed and tuning while learning it in college. I probably could have saved hundreds of hours in frustrated practice sessions…

I’ve be evaluating and re-evaluating the fate of the music industry these days. It is truly an Industry in Decline, and this NYTimes Op-Ed piece makes this clear. The article is concise and prescient (“…This is part of a much broader shift in media consumption by young people. They’re moving from an acquisition model to an access model.”), but it’s the graphic outlining music sales that is particularly sobering. People just aren’t buying music in physical format anymore. They’re barely buying at all. It makes you wonder if there is an industry for music outside of the live performance space. I’m beginning to doubt it…

As long as you’ve read the Op-Ed piece above, check out the following, also on the NYTimes website: Artists Find Backers as Labels Wane.

The Father of the Electric Guitar, Les Paul, passed away on August 13th, 2009 at the age of 94. Despite the minor resurgence that arose in the wake of his death, his contribution to music is still vastly unappreciated and unrecognized. You must realize that this man not only pioneered overdubbing, reverb, and phasing effects, he invented multitrack recording. For those unfamiliar: multi-track recording is recording as we know it today. Those large consoles in recording studios, and Garageband, would not have been possible without Les Paul’s innovations. He also has his name on one of the most popular electric guitars ever: the Gibson Les Paul. Living in New York City, I had the chance of seeing Les Paul play at his legendary weekly gig at the Iridium Jazz Club in Times Square. I never bought a ticket—the price seemed too steep for someone just starting out in such an expensive town—but now it seems like an absolute bargain. There’s a lesson in there I’ll never forget…

I’m gearing up for another ramp-up of QuikCallus marketing, as more and more users are sending positive feedback my way. Looking to bring QuikCallus to the next level in 2010, and I’m laying the groundwork now. Also syncing up with colleagues to launch a new entrepreneurial initiative centered around budding business owners. I’ve been digging the promise of Creative Entrepreneurship these days, and am looking to bring it to the forefront. Exciting things to come…

The iPhone has changed my life. For all you guitarists out there: download the Guitar Toolkit. Tuner, metronome, fretboard, and chord dictionary all in one. It’s cheaper, more robust, and more portable than any tuner you could buy in a guitar shop. And at $9.99 you can’t beat the price.

If you aren’t on Twitter yet, get on it. I’m posting there more frequently than BlogSounds, and am always looking for feedback and suggestions from followers. Fire up an account and start following stockyturtle (@stockyturtle). I’ll make it worth your while.

Literary Soloing

From the GuitarPlayer.com post, 99 Ways to Play Better:

“Think of a guitar solo as a paragraph. You need a clear beginning, a middle, and an end. Look at musical phrases like sentences, and make sure you break them up using punctuation—or space. You pause naturally when conversing, right? If you don’t, you’ll bore the listener. The same thing will happen with your audience if your solo is one dimensional. You’ll wear them out and lose their attention.” —Tom Principato

99 Ways To Play Better

99 Ways to Play Better – A great post over at the Guitar Player website, which includes quotes from famous guitarists about ways they keep their playing fresh, inspired. Some of my favorite quotes form the list:

“Moving into uncharted territory is a key ingredient to making your practice sessions a success. Playing the same stuff over and over will only take you so far.” – Joe Satriani

“If you’re in a rut with your electric playing, pick up an acoustic. There’s something about playing the acoustic guitar that makes you think about songs.” – Buck Dharma

“Learn everything you know in all keys.” – Joe Pass

“In the long run, it’s more important to look at paintings than to listen to the way somebody plays bebop lines.” – Jim Hall

“Over-indulgence in anything is wrong—whether it’s practicing 50 hours a day, or eating too much food. There’s a balance with me, as there should be with everything and everybody.” – Jeff Beck

“Keep your guitar out of the case and handy. Practice short periods—anywhere from five to 45 minutes—many times throughout the day, rather than for one prolonged period. Often times, five minutes is enough time to work on a technique or musical passage. The whole idea of practice is to get your reflexes working like a gunfighter’s, so you can pull out that gun and be instantly hot.” – Barney Kessel

“Play a new thing every day.” – Ry Cooder

I would add that it’s also important to seek out quotes like these, to read guitar magazines, to take part in message boards full of guitar players… you need to find resourcs like these that can keep feeding your desire to learn more, to practice more, and to stay interested.

Boredom and familiarity are the enemy, and you need to actively beat them away.

Music from a Tree

“Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.” – Rollo May

Diego Stocco is a man who once saw a tree and decided to make music with it. Armed with some microphones, a modified stethoscope, a bow, and a Pro Tools LE system, he composed an entire piece of music using only unmodified sounds formed from the tree itself. Check out the final result here: Diego Stucco’s “Music From a Tree”

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