The SnowGhost Music Blog

The Greatest Listening Session Ever

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 23:57:00 -0400

Ted used to have vinyl, but he now admits that he rarely listened to the old LPs, EPs, and singles that he used to buy.

“Well, for one thing, they look cool. Nothing ever looked cooler or will ever look cooler than vinyl,” says Ted, adjusting his hands so he can flip the record he’s holding in his hands. “But they sounded like ass compared to CDs. At least they did on my shitty Technics whatever it was. And I definitely never washed my records…”

His voice trails off as he studies his reflection in the absolutely spotless ebony 12-inch disc. Maybe he’s thinking about the first time he heard Back In Black, which he has just removed from its jacket. Or maybe he’s thinking about how he’s starting to look too much like the drummer from the Black Keys. Either way, we have selected our selections for the evening, and it is time to begin.

“Let’s do this, Black Keys drummer,” I say, heading for the listening room.

“I should get different glasses.” Ted says, following me through the soundproof doors.

As we wait for the amps to warm up, we cue up the digital player to the song we want, and prep the same track on the vinyl on the turntable. I’ll admit that I am still somewhat skeptical how something as old as wax could possibly top the sonic technology of digital Super Audio CDs, especially through a pair of speakers as good as any that exist on Earth. If anything, I think, I might not notice that much of a difference, but surely I will like the digital reference better. I mean, maybe we’ve lost our way - the idea of a good mix now caters to your earbuds. But the recordings we’ve picked were mixed to sound good on anything. Talking Heads, old Tom Petty, new Radiohead, AC/DC, Soundgarden, Graceland, Off the Wall, and even the Queens, I mean Kings of Convenience will surely sound a tiny bit better digitally enhanced, right?

It takes two minutes. That’s it. It’s not even close.

“I bet Thom Yorke has never heard his songs sound this good.” Ted might be right. We’re blasting Bodysnatchers at relatively uncomfortable levels. It didn’t sound this good live. Probably not even in the studio. We’ve already stopped bothering to switch back to the CD, or the full res computer player, or whatever else we will no longer be using ever in this room again unless we have to.

We move on to Stop Making Sense.

“Jesus,” yells Ted, now standing. “Close your eyes! It’s unreal!”

“I think it’s actually the realest thing I’ve ever heard,” I say, but I don’t think Ted is paying attention.

It’s not until we get to Back in Black that we mutually realize that we are experiencing The Greatest Listening Session of our lives. It is confirmed not with knowing looks or conversation, but with high fives and smiles rarely found on anyone other than a person who just scored a date with someone they never thought they’d ever be able to even talk to. At some point, Ted begins dancing, despite the fact that no drugs or alcohol are involved.

Afterwards, we have a beer. Our ears have just been taken to the mountaintop. The view is indescribable, so we don’t say much other than simple cuss words and superlatives. If there were girls around, they would be using the word amazing, but in this case, it would finally be appropriate. We sip slowly and ponder our listening futures.

“Well, CDs are kind of fun to throw,” says Ted as he looks at the shelves stocked alphabetically with every CD we’ve ever listened to. “We could have CD fights.”

“Yeah, while we listen to records,” I say.

We're Freak

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:08:00 -0500

So after a bit of a holiday away from working on my record, I decided to ramp up again. With all of the drums and bass parts really solid, I felt that it was time to build the weirdness, or soundscape stuff. You see, because I already hear the rhythm parts in my head, I have a different philosophy about building songs. If you fill it up with noise, for lack of a better term, and have to work the rhythm parts around that, you don’t risk having key anchor parts step on each other. It’s a bit backwards, but sometimes noise is the only thing that keeps you from adding too much. This time around I invited my good friend from Portland, musician, producer, and engineer extraordinaire, Cory Gray. He also has his own project called CarCrashLander. We share the same love for production - all things weird and noisy. There is always some serious back patting going on when we blow up a tube or transformer. We’re Freak is the first installment of the session I had with Cory.

I’ve Really Let Myself Go…

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:25:00 -0500

Ah, a much-needed return to the world of writing. The last song I wrote was a song called Peace and Harmony, to be sung by a chorus of 4th to 6th graders at a school function. The theme was harmony. We nailed it. The last story I wrote was a two-paragraph number about a famous hobo. It was followed by five questions asking about main ideas and details and sequence of events and what not. These are the things I find myself writing these days because I am an elementary school teacher.

I still look at my guitar. I play it too sometimes. I recently performed even, in front of actual people other than students and parents. But mostly I wait. Oh, over the next break I’ll have time to record that piano track I’ve been hearing in my head. Dude, this summer will be just me, my guitar, a keyboard, and the microphone. Or at least I’ll re-string my guitar as soon as I finish reading these fabulous fourth-grade essays.

Basically I am the fat person who has gotten fatter, floating helplessly atop a sea of unfulfilled promises and intentions. I have let myself go, and I can only blame myself. I am busy. Utterly busy. Only a teacher knows the feeling. But like the fat-ass I once was, I need to stop making excuses and make music and writing a priority just like I made time to start swimming and stop eating four sandwiches for lunch. It is, after all, brain exercise. Exercise that I actually like. No gym membership necessary. Just an instrument or two, a moment alone, a good idea to write about, and see or hear what happens.

This is not a new year’s resolution. This is simply a reclamation of my mind and the things I need to do with it. I need to write music. I need to write about music. I need to do it now. Sorry, 2nd quarter science fair grades. You’ll just have to wait until tomorrow to get inside my grade-book. Mr. McGrath has some rocking out to do…

Goodbye CDs

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:12:00 -0500

I haven’t bought music in two years. I did have a span where I would mail order some more obscure CDs from my ear-to-the-ground friends at Aquarius Records in San Francisco (thanks Jim and Andee!). I would also buy my classic CDs, Sam Cooke to The Stooges, from Amazon. I’d get the discs in the mail, load them into my server, and file them away for safe-keeping. It sounded better at full resolution, and overall was cheaper per CD, rather than $1 per song off of iTunes - $1, for a low quality mp3 that seamlessly loaded on my phone – I’ll do the extra steps thank you very much. I have never bought an mp3. Wait, I take that back – I did buy the mp3 version of “Goodbye Horses” by Q Lazzarus from Amazon a few years back, in a pinch. Remember that creeper scene from Silence of the Lambs where Buffalo Bill blossoms into a beautiful woman? I usually spin it at the annual sweater party that I DJ here in Whitefish, which is a very big deal. You’ve probably heard about it, so I won’t bore you with the details.

So why would someone like myself, who makes their living recording music, not support the industry that pays the bills? Quality - the product and service has to be good. The disintegration of the quality of sound recordings has left me unmoved. The lack of knowledge of the staff at your typical Best Buy and Costco has left me unmoved. Now maybe I am a bit of a music snob, but come on, we have so much growth happening in art and technology right now. Yet we still can’t seem to get the music consumer experience right....? It seems to me that the passion that went into the records and record shops of yesteryear may have been overlooked with this generation. Maybe not, with specialty shops like Aquarius and Ear Candy at our disposal. These are the people I want to talk music with.

Last week I spent 2 hours and $200 at Ear Candy Music in Missoula - a hundred dollars an hour, people – I bought vinyl. Yesterday, I made a good sized mail order purchase with Aquarius. I bought vinyl. In most cases I get the download for free - but I probably won't download them... too much work ;) Am I dinosaur? Nope, I’m forward thinking. For people who want to experience the music, touch it and feel it, get the vinyl – then get the mp3 along with it for your phone/music server. Yes, that's right, the cell phone is the new digital music media server. And now companies like Wadia with their 171i, are making digital converters to bypass the audio electronics in the iPhone - we're cooking with gas! Add the cloud concept to the mix, with services like Spotify and Mog going mobile, I don’t see any reason why labels and musicians won’t make their digital content available in the cloud as per a subscription, or even better, for the people who bought the vinyl. Better sound, and no downloads? Seems like a win win to me. Goodbye CDs.

Leave It Alone

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 23:08:00 -0500

This is the latest demo of my song ‘Leave It Alone’, which has been on the back-burner for a long time. It took two days for Producer Mike to pry it out of my hands and turn it into something I felt good about. I knew that there was a good song in there – it was always a favorite when I played it with my acoustic guitar. But as soon as I started mucking with a band feel, it almost always went cheesy…. at least I thought so. After some meandering in the drums and piano areas, I feel like I have made some peace with the song. Add the super-smooth backing double harmony vocals, panned left and right, and you’ve got a poor man’s Steely Dan. It also doesn't hurt that Garry Tallent from the E Street Band makes an appearance on bass.

Michael J Fox's Hoverboard

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 01:26:00 -0500

It was always funny to me that the labels sold people on 44.1kHz CDs because of them being quiet and indestructible - really they were neither - their noise just lives in another frequency band, and they get dinged up pretty easily. In reality, as you may or may not know, it was the $.07 vs $7 production cost delta, while keeping the retail price the same.... I think Netflix just learned the same lesson about providing their customers a lesser product at a higher price, while further confusing them with two sites for their services. Talk about the classic example of adding insult to injury - now, I am paying more to Amazon to watch a la carte. The difference between the music industry and Netflix, you ask? Netflix learned their lesson at Space Balls' "ludicrous" speed, in this current digital information age.... it just took a lot longer for music fans to get the information they needed to come to the conclusion that the recording industry was duping them. It was the 80’s for crying out loud – the Michael J. Fox’s hoverboard blew our minds.

The Vinyl Bathroom

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 17:40:00 -0400

We just time traveled. It's guaranteed that History repeats itself, but in most cases with a new hair color. It is not all that common that History finds itself digging back into its closet to find an old turntable - I guess we never really bettered ourselves.

SnowGhost just bought a turntable for the studio, to showcase the wonders of the analog consumer medium, juxtaposed against a digital wallpapered world. In fact, this debate is not all that far off from comparing a nice plaster-textured wall to wallpaper. Wallpaper can get you there - or maybe it just keeps you from going crazy white-wall on everyone. There is something very soothing about textured walls. I don't know why, but it just feels like home.

Some of my friends got into vinyl because they inherited an enormous record collection (bigger than their own CD and tape collection combined) from their weird uncle who finally decided to get an iPhone. And then there are my friends who never left vinyl because CDs didn't smell right to them. I am one of those with a keen sense of smell, but figured that some day, CDs would just start smelling better. Well, here we are in 2011, and CDs still smell like a urinal. SACDs seemed like a they had a pretty good shot at making the digital bathroom experience something my more-vintage-than-you Grandma could enjoy, but ultimately they couldn't beat the convenience of the MP3 Port-A-Potty. So I say "TRUCE", buy the vinyl for home, so you can have family over for dinner, and get the mp3 download so that you don't have to stand in line at the ball game.

Acoustic in Studio: The Deal

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:54:00 -0400

Here's an in studio performance my song 'The Deal', which gets a lot more ambient treatment with backing vocals for the record. I'll post a rough of where we're at, very soon.

Well-oiled Artists

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 20:41:00 -0400

The well-oiled industry keeps artists together. They are their best self, in the eyes of the public...

As a engineer/producer in the current environment, I find that I am dealing with totally competent artists that usually come from educated backgrounds in the traditional science, business, and literature fields. They just happen to be really good musicians as well. Example: So Percussion (Reich-ish quartet), all college grads, all very savy, and all very capable of running their own business. In addition to making great artists, they find the time to continue their study of music, production, performance, and even business. They are tuning themselves. They learn where they feel comfortable cutting corners, DIY-ing it, and they learn where they are better off out-sourcing. They hire me to engineer their record because they find, through their own experiments in recording, that they are better off.... not because they're totally in the dark. We are now working with informed artists, as consumers, who care about every aspect of their art and career - they may not get it totally right the first time, or the second, or the third... or ever. No one's counting anymore. The good news is that we live in a world where the artists and the professionals are becoming one in the same, AGAIN.

Independent artist's business opportunity: It is hard for independent artist to make a living... it always was. Now, the only difference is that it is hard for everyone. In time, people find ways to create viable businesses and successes (the use of plurality connotes the idea of the successful artist's career being made up of many successful careers, not a single successful one). A personal example: In addition to engineering and producing, I sell my own music to local/regional businesses at a reasonable rate, and make the administering of licensing easy. Easy? How do you do that? Easy, I'm not in the music business. I'm in the best-for-business, where simple and easy wins. I don't have agencies of the music business administering my hypothetical career, confusing my hypothetical clients. I'm just selling music. My clients get custom music they never knew they needed to accompany their product - and I'm not waiting for a call, telling me that I missed scoring the upcoming 'Facts of Life' reunion series by a note. There are a lot of local businesses ;)

Beach House

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 01:29:00 -0400

Here is the Beach House edit with Brian Wright adding double tracked drums, and Jason Lytle on vocals and synths, as well as cutting it up with the razor-blade to make it more cohesive.