Pete Doell - Artist Story & Production Gear Doell is a mastering engineer at Universal Mastering Studios. But his background is quite diverse. He was a recording engineer and mixer at Capitol Records, and he did scoring for Sony Pictures. He has mastered well over 100 albums and worked as a recording engineer and mixer on even more. As a mastering engineer, Pete Doell is often faced with the challenge of making the client's record appear loud, primarily to compete with other music on the radio, and to achieve a sound that is both musical and pleasant, despite the loudness war. “The TC System 6000 has a lot of tools that are so musical, that it’s hard to imagine life without them, once you’re used to them. It’s this precision control that keeps Doell coming back to the System 6000. “Every once in a while you’ll have a mix, that doesn’t make sense.
How Much Is Music Really Worth? But wait: Recordings and concerts aren’t the only ways for musicians to make money. Publishing—that is, the rights to a song’s sheet-music composition, rather than the finished track—brought in revenues of $2.2 billion in 2013, according to the latest trade group report. That’s relatively flat from an inflation-adjusted $1.9 billion in 2001, the last year for which numbers were available. But treading water is still significant given the precipitous decline in the record industry over a similar period. ASCAP, which licenses composition rights, posted a record-high $1 billion in revenue for 2014, buoyed by streaming. The history of publishing rights suggests musicians would be unwise to count on those as steady income, though. To this day, the rate for publishing sheet music is up for negotiation between songwriters and publishers, with a commonly reported figure in the handfuls of cents per page. Another way of cashing in on music is by cashing in on everything but music.
Inside album leaks: how do they happen, how do we stop them, and do they even matter? Digital album leaks have been happening for more than 20 years, but it’s been a long time since they were this prominent in the news. Two of 2015’s biggest records – Björk’s Vulnicura and Madonna’s Rebel Heart – leaked several months before their planned release dates, with different consequences: Björk’s label have stated that they will not take legal action, while Adi Lederman, the man who leaked demo versions of Rebel Heart‘s tracks, was tracked down and arrested in Israel. But if leaks are nothing new (and in fact, people being arrested over leaks and artists rush-releasing albums to counter leaks is nothing new either), why are they currently being debated so furiously – and not just in terms of the processes and morals behind them, but related issues such as whether music publications should acknowledge them? Are records leaking further in advance than they used to? An ex-staffer at Warner Music Group, however, thinks that things are getting better. Where do leaks stem from?
Led Zeppelin founders Robert Plant and Jimmy Page must face trial in a copyright row over the song Stairway to Heaven, a US court rules. Image copyright Reuters Led Zeppelin founders Robert Plant and Jimmy Page must face trial in a copyright row over the song Stairway to Heaven, a US court has ruled. A Los Angeles district judge said there were enough similarities between the song and an instrumental by the band Spirit to let a jury decide. The trial has been scheduled for 10 May. Stairway to Heaven, released in 1971, is widely seen as one of the greatest rock compositions of all time. The copyright infringement action has been brought by Michael Skidmore, a trustee for the late Spirit guitarist Randy Wolfe, who played on the same bill as Led Zeppelin in the 1960s, and claims he should be given a writing credit on the track. Led Zeppelin guitarist Page and lead singer Plant are reputed to have written Stairway to Heaven in a remote cottage in Wales. However, Mr Skidmore has suggested the song came about after the band heard Spirit perform the instrumental Taurus while the bands toured together in 1968 and 1969.
Official Music Videos & Live Performances Six of Our Favorite Bits of Sound Design Advice - Public Radio Exchange Prompted on Twitter by our friend Wayne Marshall, we’ve put together a list of essays and radio episodes that focus on contemporary radio sound design. Here are six of our favorite bits of advice: – The Truth’s Jonathan Mitchell wrote a Transom feature on the difficult choices a producer makes when using music in their pieces. Whenever I have a hard time deciding what music to use or where to put it, usually that means I don’t really understand why I’m putting music there in the first place. – HowSound often touches on sound design. Loading – Sound Design from Hell. – One of my favorite pieces discovered on PRX is from Paolo Pietropaolo, and while this one doesn’t directly comment on sound design, it boasts excellent design as Paolo explores the story of his tinnitus which affects his ability to enjoy silence. – John Biewen praises the pause. Conceptual density is something that should obey the same rules as loudness dynamics. [contextly_auto_sidebar id=”7qGXlN5kDBZfpsRefMSBMtAwsByIltZn”]
Science Shows Why Drum Machines Will Never Replace Live Drummers The live drummer is an endangered species in much of today's popular music. Modern post-production makes it supremely easy to substitute programmed drums for an imperfect human performance, or even to buff out errors from a live take. Increasingly, a good drummer is simply an afterthought for producers. But this trend is definitively misguided. Listeners crave imperfection. "The offsets are typically small, perhaps 10 to 20 [milliseconds]," wrote researcher Holger Hennig in a 2012 Physics Today article. Many electronic music programs understand these principles and feature "humanizing" — aka "randomizing" — functions to help producers add imperfections back into the music. These kinds of long-range rhythmic variations have been used to great effect by some of our culture's greatest drummers. But it's more than just feel. "[T]he main advantage is improvisation, especially in a band context, as it makes for a much more exciting performance," Wood told Mic via email.
What Do Tree Rings Sound Like When Played Like A Record? We all know that the Lorax speaks for the trees, but what do they sound like when they speak for themselves? Rings on a tree can give information about the age of the tree, as well as indicate environmental conditions such as rain levels, disease, and even forest fire. Light colored rings indicate quick growth, while darker rings indicate times when the tree did not grow as quickly. Slices of trees are not uniform, and they all tell a story about the tree’s history. Bartholomäus Traubeck created equipment that would translate tree rings into music by playing them on a turntable. How To Run A Record Label Janet Jackson recently announced that she will release her first new material in seven years on her own brand new BMG imprint, Rhythm Nation. In the ‘90s, Jackson was known for signing two multi-million dollar deals with major label Virgin that made her the highest paid artist of her day; the fact that in 2015 she would choose to self-release on her own label could be seen as a sign of the times. Today, with plummeting record sales, the increased importance of streaming, and the relative ease with which anyone can self-promote and distribute online, it seems every other artist is announcing their own record label.
Google Pays Respect To Clara Rockmore On Her 105th Birthday With Doodle New Delhi: Celebrating the 105th birthday of Clara Rockmore, an electronic music pioneer, Google produces an animated musical doodle. A Lithuanian virtuoso performer, Clara Rockmore was born on March 9, 1911. Clara studied violin under the virtuoso Leopold Auer, but due to bone problems, a result of childhood malnutrition, she had to quit playing it. However, this led her to discover the newborn electronic instrument the theremin, a gesture-controlled instrument, and become perhaps its most renowned player. In 1977, she released a commercial recording called The Art of the Theremin. Today's interactive doodle is created by artist Robinson Wood, interaction designer Kevin Burke, and engineers Will Knowles and Kris Hom (with support from the larger Doodle engineering team). The doodle involves the user through musical lessons trying to explore how theremin actually functions.
Composer David Cope and the computer that composed music Composer David Cope has a knack for describing music in the least romantic terms possible. Whenever Mozart heard something, Cope says, "He was able to digest it and store it in his database. He could recombine it with other things so that the output would be hardly recognizable." Mozart has been called many things— plagiarist, potty-mouth, politician —but rarely do you hear him accused of being a computer scientist. There's a reason Cope talks about composing this way: He is the inventor of the world's most musically creative computer program, whose latest album came out a few weeks ago. The current version of Cope's software is named "Emily Howell," and it is the successor to an earlier effort he called "Emmy," an almost-acronym for "Experiments in Musical Intelligence." The results were predictably unlistenable. Cope built a huge database of existing music, beginning with hundreds of Bach chorales that he tediously coded by hand.
PREMIER REVIEW: I’ve Seen the Future of Music, Again! Forget everything you know about serving digital music files. No matter what you are using, it’s irrelevant. A bold claim indeed, but spend a few minutes with Roon and you’ll find yourself getting up from the listening chair hours later. So, where did Roon labs come from? A bit of history We featured the original Sooloos music server on the cover of issue 11, proudly proclaiming it was the future of music – at least the future of digital music delivery. The guys at Sooloos weren’t sleeping. Meridian continued to improve the sound quality of the Sooloos Control units, and paired with their flagship 800 series disc player/DAC, serves up good sound. Fortunately, this system no longer needs tens of thousands of dollars worth of specific hardware to run; it’s equally at home, running on mac and windows platforms, with tablet support due shortly after release. Speaking of storage Surveying the landscape It’s like spending all day in the record store