Thinking Different - What it means to the world

On hearing of the death of Steve Jobs, I asked myself what his legacy meant to me. It's not the Mac, or the iPod, or iTunes or Pixar or the iPhone, though most of those products have greatly influenced and enhanced both my business and personal life. It was, after all, on a Macintosh that I met Tara Zucker, who became my wife.

For me, his greatest legacy has been to inspire critical thinking. As his (or Chiat/Day's creative director Ken Segall and art director Craig Tanimoto) put it...Think Different. Use your brain to expand the horizons of reality. Dream of what could be and finding a way to execute it...beyond and despite what anyone tells you. Create a new path and look at the world from a different point of view. It's not following trends or trying to be trendy. It's thinking long term and taking risks. Make a positive difference not only in your own life, but in someone else's.
Steve Jobs was not a man without fault. None of us are. He made many mistakes and created a few technical dogs, but he moved pass them and kept going.  As far as I know he was not overtly political, nor was he of mind that, at least in his lifetime, charity or philanthropy was a mission of his company. From what I've read, he could be tough to work for and a bit brash. Others describe those traits as extremely passionate and perfectionist. Some of Apple's factories in Asia are accused of exploiting their workers. As I said, none of us are perfect and there is always room for improvement.

So what does Think Different really  mean? How can we implement it in our own lives, in the attitudes of our government, business, educational, medical, technological, creative and social leaders? Why should we even bother? After all, it's much easier, safer and usually more profitable to think short term. Think Same is often the course taken by most of us. "The ad worked for them, it should work for us". "If removing one government regulation created some jobs, removing a whole bunch will create more jobs". "Social Security and Medicare should be there for everyone we can't change it" "If I read the same book or follow the same leader, or take the same pill the result will be the same". "If you work hard, you will find wealth". "It worked for me, so it must work the same for everybody" That's same think.

Real life or real innovation just does not happen that way. There are too many variables. The old saying, "you can't judge a book by it's cover" is still a wise one. You have to open it up and explore it's depths. Take a look under the hood and tinker a bit. There just might be some hidden gems in there.

At the age of 56, I'm being inspired to think different. Technological and demographic changes have forced me to morph my career a few times in my life and it's happening again. At this stage in the game, starting a new career once again was seeming like a very uphill challenge and one that I really was not all that gung ho about pursuing. I'm thinking different now.

Currently I'm taking some classes at UCLA Extension. I have a great instructor named Freddy Nager who has a marketing strategy company called Atomic Tango. Marketing is something that I've never really been interested in. I actually had somewhat of a visceral aversion to it. Marketing always seemed like having to listen to a used car salesman give me a pitch. Marketing has actually sort of creeped me out. Then, I took a look under the hood, ignored the guy in the plaid pants and found that marketing could be real, honest, ethical and even inspiring fun. It's  definitely something that keeps the wheels of commerce oiled. My instructor Freddy has managed to open my eyes to all sorts of possibilities and just how prevalent marketing is in our lives. It gets people to donate to public radio and other non-profit organizations and causes. It helps individuals get jobs..after all, your resume is marketing. And yes, it is also used to sell glitter lipstick to tweens and weapons to world despots. What you choose to market is up to you. He has stressed that if we get nothing else out of his class, it's to always question how, why and so what in addition to being creative.



Luckily, with the help of an encouraging wife, family and an inspirational teacher, I'm enjoying the road. I don't know where my new schooling may lead me. It may be that I'm not becoming a marketer of somebody else's dream, but of my own. Who knows. I may just make a difference in someone else's world. We should all strive to Think Different.

RIP Mr. Jobs.

Labor Day - Give Thanks

Today is labor day. Sometimes we forget what it means. I'll remind you. Labor day is a day to say thank you to all of those who came before us, who sacrificed and worked to improve the quality of life for all working people. The people who built our railroads, our highways and the infrastructure we so often take for granted.

It is a day to say thank you to the police and firefighters and first responders who protect us. A day to remember the teachers & mentors who inspired us, often working long hours for low wages and few benefits.

We want to thank the people who fought to improve working conditions and job security and safety. We want to thank those who grow and harvest our food. It's low paying, back breaking work, often in harsh conditions and sometimes while handling dangerous pesticides.

A day to say thank you to those who package our goods, drive the trucks, planes and trains that bring them to the stores we shop at. The janitors who clean our offices and hotels. The nurses and technicians who care for us and the people who build our homes and workplaces.

Time to say thank you to the creative people and technicians who create and bring us entertainment. Those names in the credits you will never see. The mechanics who fix our cars and those who remove our trash, cut our lawns, serve our food. Say thanks to those workers in the oil fields and mines and who install our wind turbines and solar panels.

Today...say thank you and remember how blessed we are because we have those millions who work hard every day to make our lives just a little bit better.

The Ramifications of Free - Spotify - iCloud - YouTube - Rhapsody

Spotify hit the streets of America this week and suddenly the world got even smaller. I can now listen to over 15 million tracks for free on my computer, my iPad or my smart phone. I have to listen to some commercials, but that's called commercial radio.  Unlike commercial radio, I don't have to listen to the obnoxious banter of a bad DJ or songs I don't like (the good). Unlike commercial radio, I don't have the opportunity to have a great DJ introduce me to largely unknown yet brilliant artists (the bad)....and unlike commercial radio, I have the choice to pay a subscription to eliminate advertising (for a marketer..that may be the ugly).

Will it work? That is probably a few years from being known. Without subscription revenue, I'd find it difficult to believe that advertising revenue on it's own could sustain it. Unfortunately, once the price point is free, it's difficult to go up from there. Lady Gaga's limited $0.99 album download gave us a good indication of what happens when you offer something for virtually free, then try to raise the price. What happens with Netflix after their recent significant price hike is something to keep a close eye on.

Since this post is about ramifications, what happens to radio? If we can get any music we want, when we want it for free via our wireless devices, can traditional radio survive and if so, what do they have to offer to compete? What about paid satellite radio? I guess talk radio could be a substitute, but how much blather can a population endure? That's going to be an interesting scenario to watch.

Earlier this week ASCAP announced a U.S. licensing deal with Spotify. That is a good thing for the thousands of artists who are having their music streamed to millions of listeners, though the rate is so small as to be relatively useless to all but the most highly listened to songs.

But how big a deal is Spotify and will it be a significant impact on the way music is distributed? Even before Spotify, I've been able to go online and listen to millions of songs for free. YouTube videos of rarely seen concert, film and television performances by many thousands of artists, both known and unknown have been a wonderful and welcome form of entertainment. Would I pay for it? I'm not sure that I would..at least on the level that I tend to use it. Are the artists getting compensated? That is very debatable, but generally I'd lean to the no/low compensation side of this argument. Yes, the artist is getting some free promotion, but often not under any sort of control or measurable form and in a field of 15 million and growing, creative marketing is more important than ever. With Apple's iCloud coming, YouTube, Rhapsody, Turntable.fm and many other music sharing services, the music lover's world is our oyster. For the folks who make their living in the music industry, life is going to be in flux for a while longer.

Marketing Mojo - What You Need To Do

How do I get my music heard? It's a million dollar question, I'm asked this one a lot and it has no simple answer.

Writing a great song, arranging, performing, recording and mixing it well is is no easy task, but for now, let's assume we've done all that and have a burning desire to unleash the music to the world. For someone like Lady Gaga, at this point in her career, getting a song promoted is as easy as sending out a tweet to her legion of followers, but believe me, her marketing genius did not happen overnight. It has been honed and developed over a number of years and expanded to include some of the best professionals in the business. One also has to consider that Gaga is arguably more of a celebrity persona than a singer songwriter. Take away all of the show, glitz and controversy and a lot of that goes right out the window. That said, love it or hate it, she's a master at what she does.

For Artist X working out of their bedroom / studio in Lawrence, Kansas it's going to be one small step at a time.

It's time to take off your creative musical shoes and change into your  creative marketing shoes. For many artists, marketing is the last thing they want to be involved with. "I just want to make music" is a common refrain when it comes to artists getting their hands dirty in promotion. Unfortunately, unless you have deep pockets or someone with deep pockets supporting you, be prepared to work very hard in the trenches for a while.

The first thing you should do is come up with a game plan, which includes a realistic budget, schedule, goals and a list of potential free or inexpensive resources.

Who is your audience? Where do they spend their time? How do they get their information? Who do you know that can help you reach them?

Are your fans facebookers, tweet followers, gamers, blog readers, youtubers? Do some research. Ask them? Do an informal quiz at your next gig. Ask them to friend you. Give them your website address. Start a YouTube channel where you can post videos.

What do you need?
Unless you have deep pockets, you may need some lessons in how to update posts, photographs, videos, and developing the discipline to respond to your fans quickly and keep it all going. Lynda.com is a resource I use extensively to learn new technical and software skills. Everything from wordpress tutorials to Logic, ProTools, Avid, Final Cut Pro and Quickbooks tutorials are just a logon away. $375 for unlimited use for a year is the best education deal around for creative types.

A good graphic artist can be a huge help in developing visually captivating artwork, logos and layouts. KEEP IT SIMPLE. Make it easy to navigate. ALWAYS make it easy to find your next gig with time, place, address and phone numbers of the venues and if there are special deals for tickets. Make sure your fans or potential fans know it.

You'll need someone who can build a web site. If you have a little money, it would not hurt to find a copywriter who can help you express your ideas simply and effectively.


All of this is marketing. Some of it can be fun and entertaining, and some can be tedious and time consuming, it can be VERY creative..so come up with a plan and stick to it. The plan will expand, contract and morph as both needs and technology develop, so be ready to respond to changing needs and resources.

Start slowly or it will overwhelm you. Probably the easiest thing you can do is create a fan page on Facebook. It's not too difficult to do and there are many online resources that can offer you tips and tricks.

You'll also want to get your music onto iTunes and sell physical CDs. The local retailers in your area can be a great friend if you work it right. You can do this with the help of any number of well known and reliable services.  CD Baby to Ioda  are two of the oldest and best known. There are many new and extremely innovative ways to distribute your music. If you are willing to put in a little legwork, this it relatively painless to do.

Now it gets interesting.  Beyond iTunes, facebook, myspace and your own branded web site, there are dozens of other companies both online and retail who distribute your music to the world. You can tweet, develop  an iPhone app, blog, post personal videos, sell merchandise, develop ring tones and link to your favorite instrument and clothing companies and start to develop relationships with possible sponsors. You might even find a local or regional business to help sponsor you. Get to know your local club owners or talent bookers. If they don't know you, they can't hire you. Get yourself known to music supervisors and advertising agencies. License your music for TV, video games, films, commercials and on-line  ads.

LOVE YOUR FANS!!! - They will be your biggest promoters if you treat them with respect and bring them into your family. Find out what music blogs they read and then get your music to the blogger. If your fans like the blogger, chances are, he or she will like you too. If you are in a college town, seek out the DJ's at the local broadcast or online college radio station. Give them a CD. Invite them as a VIP guest to one of your shows. Offer to do interviews with the local school newspapers.

To do this takes lots of time, and either some money to hire specialized marketing firms or lacking promotion capital, a very energetic friend passionate about marketing and your product who is willing to put in the time and effort to help you out. If you are lucky enough to have this relationship, don't abuse it and make sure you take care of them should success follow.

A few notable companies doing innovative work in music for both indie and major artists today are: Reverbnation, Tunecore, turntable.fm and Topspin. Turntable.fm is a new one to me and is still in beta testing, but it's very interesting and has the potential to be a great marketing tool.

If this information does not spark some ideas, then you might not be in the right business. If it seems overwhelming, it is; but it does not have to be. You don't have to do everything at once. Start with a facebook page and a one page website with a song and a link to your facebook page. Make a plan and stick with it.

The Many Faces Of The Creative Artists

If there is any single truth in the world, it's that things change. Some things quicker than others, but nothing stays the same. The creative arts are on the express train of change and if we don't accept it, we will either miss the train altogether or get off at the wrong stop and miss the announcement to get back on.

This train is fueled by changes in technology, the consolidation of big business and the glut of information and forms of entertainment available today.

In the music business, I first noticed it in the early 1980s when midi, drum machines, programmable synthesizers and smpte time code first became common. A non-drummer could sound ALMOST like a real drummer. Mistakes could be corrected quickly and easily and you could purchase interesting sounds instead of having to create them from scratch. The world was speeding up and dumbing down.

Then came DAT, CDs, ADATs, DATs, Sound Designer software and samplers. Next came computers with sequencing software, Digital audio workstations and the music marketing game changer....Napster. In true major label fear factor tradition, just as they had done with cassette recorders and CDs, the power players tried to intimidate people who used digital distribution of music instead of embracing the new technology and finding a way to use it as a new tool. They played the tough guy one time too many and the new generation of music listeners had finally had enough. The digital distribution revolution was on.

Trading music with friends was easy, fast and convenient. Simply stealing it and giving it to the masses became a new game led by both outlaw computer wizards and just new thinkers. Once the high school and college crowd,  got wind of a massive library of music available 24/7 for the price of a medium speed internet connection, they got used to getting creative content for free very quickly.

The record companies were at a loss as to how to deal with this new technology and the trends of the consuming public, so they used lawyers to intimidate and tried to develop copy proof CDs. As fast as the majors could come up with a new idea or a technology, the hackers cracked them. The downward spiral of brick and mortar music retailers, CDs and big budget records had begun in earnest and the major labels were falling into digital depression.



It would be a number of years before the iPod and iTunes came on the market and slowed the death spiral of the music business, but by that time, video games and DVDs were in wide distribution and were eating away at the home entertainment market share. Live concerts had become prohibitively expensive and even the artists were getting their own ideas on how to make their own way.

Recording, marketing, tour support, A&R and signing budgets were slashed for even the biggest artists and the majors over a 15 year period have become catalog and licensing businesses more than innovative creative idea farms.

Today, the same thing has happened to print publishing, journalism, copy writing and is rapidly devouring  content creation in the film and television worlds,  post-production, commercials and even education.

If you want to be creative today, you best learn a few skills other than your art. You have to learn how to market yourself, your talents and your persona. You have to switch from being an artist, to being a marketing wizard, a publicist, an intellectual property and licensing guru and feel comfortable in all of these areas.

You have to network, don't burn bridges and learn something new every day. It's not easy and often not fun, but without at least a general working knowledge of all of these things in addition to your skills as a creative artist, you will be lost in today's world..and most likely broke.

On the positive side, you don't have to be an expert in all of these areas. Don't let the prospect of it all overwhelm you. If you can't or won't learn the business side of things, then you'll need to find someone who can. Look for a mentor or a partner who is passionate about your work and who you trust and going beyond trust, write out an equity sharing agreement and have it checked out by an attorney.

Next week, I'll talk about some of the new companies and individuals who are paving the way for the future generations of content creators. It's the wild west out there and it's not an easy task, but keep an open mind about it and there just may be a light at the end of the tunnel.

Auto-Tune This

OK, I've had enough of Auto-Tune. It's been 12 years since Cher's Believe was a hit song and I admit, the effect was mildly interesting in 1998, but enough is enough already. We are done...quit it.

According to urban legend,  Groucho Marx once interviewed a woman with an extraordinary amount of children on his TV show.

Groucho: Why do you have so many children? That's a big responsibility and a big burden.
Woman: Well I think that's our purpose and I love my husband.
Groucho: Well I love my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.

Well said Groucho...and that same philosophy can apply to those producers and artists who love them their Auto-Tune.

Don't get me wrong, I love my effects as much as the next guy and have no problem using them to enhance or alter the sound of a voice or instrument, with one very big caveat.  Using it MUST HELP TELL THE STORY!!!!

Now I own a large number of effects processors and plug-ins, including pitch correctors. The problem I have with Auto-Tune is not that it's being used, but in the way people use it. It's become a crutch used to prop up not only bad or mediocre performances, but even for perfectly healthy and talented singers.  In the same way that drum machines have sanitized the natural ebb and flow of tempo, Auto-Tune is ripping the life out of otherwise GOOD vocal performances by some very talented performers. Grow a set you all!!!

Everyone from Manhattan Transfer to Black Eyed Peas to Faith Hill to the producers of Glee (Ryan Murphy...I'm talking to you) are using Auto-Tune in what I believe to be the antithesis of creativity. For example; although Glee is a well written and clever comedy, it's ultimately a story about the struggle of a bunch of outcasts finding redemption in music....as great singers. In truth, at least some of the cast members are extremely talented vocalists, yet the producers have made the decision to pitch correct each performance to within an inch of their lives. What is the point? They take some great, albeit ultra-commercial songs and make them sound like Up With People inhabited by robots. It's the musical version of pornography. Stale, clinical, boring, a bit creepy and supremely tasteless.

The Black Eyed Peas are a band that at one time used Auto-Tune in creative ways, but what once was an interesting effect used cleverly by them has become a "let's use it on every song" bore. 

I've heard from engineers who tell me that young singers are coming in and imitating the beat you into submission perfection of Auto-Tuned vocals. No slurs, no vibrato,  no dynamics. They are getting so used to hearing vocals that have been Auto-Tuned that they no longer accept the reality or emotional value of a real performance. Is the art of learning a craft and taking pride in being good at what you do is becoming a thing of the past. Are we beyond quality on only care about building a facade or quality?
The McMansion of Mediocrity has taken over the world. It seems to be what we strive for.

We should be very grateful that the producers of the likes of Otis Redding, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, the Beatles and thousands like them never had these tools or there is a good chance we would have been deprived of some legendary performances.

To add insult to injury...the engineer who created Auto-Tune was Andy Hildebrand an engineer for that great music institution Exxon. Filler up with an A Sharp please.

The Loudness Wars

Anybody who has been working in audio for more than 20 years is acutely aware of the loudness wars in all of our lives. From music production, to broadcast to film, dynamic range has been reduced while overall real and perceived levels have increased.

Some argue that this is not such a bad thing. It's a tool to get your music heard by more people. I have just the opposite viewpoint. The public may not be cognitively aware of the loudness wars, but the consequences are obvious. Whole industries have been spawned from the public's inate hatred of the loudness wars. TIVO is a prime example. When a commercial comes on 6 to 10dBFS louder than the show you choose to watch, what do you do? You jump for the remote to either mute the audio or fast forward through the commercial. Marketers, producers and corporate executives have insisted on turning their pitches up to agonizing levels. Almost all mixers have heard the mantra to "Make sure our commercial as loud as the other ones"...just so that the intended audience can turn them off.

In the music world, which should be immune to the loudness wars, it's even worse. Not even country and acoustic music have been spared the reduction of dynamic range. Many a country song starts with solo acoustic guitar and ends with a full band including drums electric instruments played through Marshall amps all the while staying within a 2dBFS dynamic range.

We've managed to almost completely eliminate one of the greatest tools in the audio/music toolbox...dynamics. How did this happen? Simply put; we got lazy.

In the old days (like 30 years ago), we used to do two versions of a mix. If not that, at least two versions got mastered. One was for the album, which kept the original dynamics of the song/arrangement, and one was for the radio. We allowed and even encouraged the mastering engineer to put the squeeze on a mix in order for the radio station to get their full signal as far as possible within their legal broadcast range. It was simply a compromise we were willing to make in order to expose the greatest amount of radio listeners to our music. The good mastering engineers could do this very well.

Then came the CD. Most of us were excited that at long last, the physical dynamic limitations of the vinyl disc were a thing of the past. Listeners could now hear music as it was intended to be heard. That idea went away quickly as the marketing departments discovered that not only has dynamic range been extended overall, but that you could simply turn everything up and overpower the competition. The beginning of loudness wars had almost nothing to do with audio quality. It was a sales gimmick, pure and simple. Then as budgets went down, the "singles' mix" became a thing of the past and everything was mastered with loudness in mind.

The good mastering engineers did not like it, but for a while, they managed to keep it under control. Then came the home studios, even smaller budgets and the "why do we need mastering engineers?" phenomenon. The squeeze turned into the squash and rather than using compression as an effect to achieve a unique sound, it became a mandatory component of mixing, mastering and marketing music.

Today, heavy compression is used almost as a starting point and not as a tool to enhance a musical composition. That leads to the question; have dynamics in music become a quaint tool of the past? If so, it's a sad era in the creative world. We are losing one of the key elements of emotion and feel that make music unique. Music becomes Muzak. It loses its spark, its element of surprise, its ability to draw them into another world vs bludgeoning them with it . It becomes something used only to sell cereals, cars, clothing lines and Viagra.

Does it have to be this way? No...absolutely not. Especially since the main stream music business is now, more than ever, in the control of the musicians, producers and engineers. We can market our own music, not over the radio, but over the internet. We can control what we put out and re-educate our listeners. We can give them something many of them have never heard. A big dynamic range. Beethoven knew it, the great film composers knew it, the best jazz, rock, blues, R&B and country musicians knew it. Dynamics is one of the greatest tools in a musician's or a mixer's arsenal of tools. Let's use it...not lose it.

To find out more about the dynamics war, check out these resources.

1. Turn Me Up!
2. Overproduction
3. Why Music Sounds Worse
4. Anti-Loudness Day
5. The Future Of Music
6. An audio/visual example of light and heavy compression

Doing Our Jobs..That Boring Metadata

Over the last few months, I've been working on a project archiving old analog music masters for one of the major record labels.

It's been quite revealing. I've found that unlike the studio where I was brought up, many studios and even record labels took very little care in aligning their tape machines, printing project tones and keeping complete, accurate and well organized notes on the boxes and paperwork.

I get a great many tapes with no project tones or tones way out of whack when compared to MRL reference level tapes. When they do have tones, often the frequencies are not NAB/AES or any European standard..or they are mislabeled. I get Dolby encoded tapes with no Dolby tone or worse, not even marked as being Dolby encoded. I get tapes marked mono that were recorded using a stereo head stack. Many tapes with leader cutting off the end of fades. Some with very audible bias rocks caused by poor alignments or machine maintenance. There are truncated or misspelled song titles, incorrect song times and tapes that have been stored so poorly that there is mold growing on them.

These were all firing offenses at some studios and I held the mistaken belief that not providing proper alignments, project tones and complete accurate project information with the tapes was tantamount to a capital offense for a recording engineer.

Oh how wrong I was. This was from an era when there WAS paperwork. There were boxes to write on, stick on labels, track sheets and in the later years, floppy disks with automation data.


Unfortunately, things have gotten worse, not better and though there have been some attempts to educate the creative and technical public about the issue, it's still not something that most recording schools prioritize.

Today we have ProTools, Logic, Digital Performer, Nuendo, Cubase and other applications. We have .wav, .aif, mp3 and some older file formats (SDII for example) in many different resolutions. Paperwork is no longer needed, yet most if not all of these applications leave out some boilerplate and in my opinion VERY important best practices.

There has been an attempt to make project sharing between different applications easier, yet it's far from perfect. The biggest problem is in documentation. How often have you received a project that is labeled Track 1, Track 2, Track 3, etc, without ANY qualifying information on what that track was or what alternate or selected takes should be used. I receive a group of mixes where none of them are labeled MASTER...or where two or more takes of the same song are labeled MASTER.

Most of these applications allow you to enter notes and relevant track and take information, but none of them FORCE you to do it, and few, if any allow you to export and print this information easily and in a form that is discernible by a secondary user.

Most people are lazy, or simply don't have the time to enter the information needed to fully document a project so that future generations, or even the mixer can make sense of the dozens, hundreds or thousands of bits of useful information needed to decipher what "original intent" of the artist or producer was.

These are also things that are not stressed in many of the overpriced recording schools of the day. They teach you some techniques, but real world useful information is relegated to an hour or two of afterthought during the course of a two year program.

This is growing problem that needs to be addressed before it becomes a crisis. All it takes is a little forethought and some planning.

Credit must be given to people like Charles Dye, Bob Ludwig, Maureen Droney, Eric Schilling, the P&E Wing of NARAS and others who have been working diligently to get some standards going. You can download some of these guideline documents on the P&E Wing Website. We've got to do more. Coming up with a standard that is taught to the new generation of engineers and producers is something we all need to consider...and soon.

Bring Back Hi-Fidelity

Over the last three or so years I've noticed a rapidly growing trend to use .mp3 encoded music and sound effect cues in trailers, promos, commercials television and film. Now I love the convenience of .mp3 files for my iPod, iPhone and Blackberry, but I hate the sound of them, especially if I'm trying to mix it into a spot with narration and sound effects. Everything gets this haze of mud and grit over it. It's sort of the audio equivalent of doing a high-definition picture finish using VHS source material.

I do understand the workflow considerations for why .mp3 files make it into a project in the first place. Everything today has to be faster and cheaper. It's the nature of business in the first decade of the new century. The one thing that gets moved to the back of the bus is quality. Quality; it's one thing that we, as a country used to hold in very high regard and took much pride in. Today it seems to be an annoying afterthought.

One example was a project I worked on where they licensed a Who song for 6 advertising spots. Now a Who song does not come cheap, and an ad campaign that has a budget to use a Who song is one that lasts a number of weeks, if not months. This song was the music bed for the whole spot...a key element in the "sell" of the spot. The familiarity of that song that will draw people in. The song was available as a CD at any Best Buy, WalMart, Amazon, or local indie record store, yet after months of editing and production, not one person thought to send a $12 an hour production assistant on a 30 minute trip to buy a $15.00 disc. They sent me the spots to finish using a .mp3 file; of a Who song!!!. You cannot convince me that they had no time to go out and buy the CD and overcut the music or request a high fidelity copy from the publisher. They could spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to license the song, but not the $100 or so it would have cost to get a hi-fidelity version of it and cut it in? That is absurd. At the very LEAST, the publisher, who is making a small fortune for licensing the song and have the best interests of the artists in mind should have required it. Have they NO SHAME?!!!

Music libraries, publishers, producers, sound and music supervisors, editors and mixers are all guilty, though some have a lot more say in what we will settle for than others. We all have the deadlines and budgets to deal with, but at some point we really have to stand back and make some value judgments. Do we really want to settle for mediocrity just to save $15 on a multi-million dollar movie or advertising spot?

What can we do about it? We can set some standards. We can all make calls to the production music companies and insist on a minimum of 44.1 16 bit files. We are paying them good money to license their songs and they give us crap quality files so that they can save a bit of drive space on their servers.

We can remind producers that using .mp3 files make their spots sound muddy, grungy and take longer to mix because of that fact. .mp3 files just don't blend in as well and downmix horribly.

We can remind editors that .mp3 files are great for auditioning music and sound FX, but should NEVER EVER be imported into a sequence. Grow a set my friends and just say no.

Let's take some pride in our work and strive to make our projects sound better, not worse. We have 24bit 192k available to us and we settle for a product meant to be played through a pair of sweaty earbuds? That's how far we've fallen in the quest for quality? Time for a change.

Penteo and Surround Sound

Much of my work over the last few years has been in broadcast and consumer (DVD/Blu-ray) promos and trailers. After years of procrastination, my clients finally pulled the trigger on mixing spots in surround sound. The problem I'm finding is that unlike the film world, where music score is often recorded and mixed in LCR or 5.1, the great majority of my source material is stereo only.

This was never a problem with stereo only mixing, but when it comes to 5.1, many times the only thing that ends up in the center channel is the voice over and dialog bites and the odd sound effect. The music was losing it's punch. Since much of the production or popular music that's used in today's promos has heavy phantom center information, you end up having to ride the music bed into oblivion to make room for the dialog or VO. I wanted to be able to dip the center panned information to clear that hole without having to also remove all of my left/right information.

I've tried the T.C. Unwrap and the Waves UM225 and UM226, and though all of these did take my stereo sources to surround, I was never too pleased with the results. All of these solutions did take stereo to surround, but none to gracefully. There was always a center that swam a bit and a phasey artifacting. Once you "unwrapped" your source, it would not downmix to stereo or mono without sounding like it was mixed in a swimming pool.

Then I got a call from Chris Stone, my old boss from the Record Plant days about Penteo. With John Wheeler at the helm, Tom Scott and Tom Kobayashi all invloved in the company, it had some great minds behind it, so I had to check it out.

At this point I have to say that since trying Penteo, I've become one of their evangelists here in Los Angeles, though I am not a paid employee of the company, nor have they flown me to Hawaii for a golf outing or given me center court seats to the Lakers.

After they sent me a set of .wav files that included the original stereo files and a Penteo processed LCR extraction. It was pretty impressive. Not only did it create a solid center channel from the existing phantom center, but a nice Left Right minus the center panned information.
Better yet, when I mono'd out the LCR extraction, it sounded exactly like the mono'd original stereo version. No swimming center or distracting phasing artifacts.

Quentin Tarantino even sent his vinyl collection to Penteo to process it for use in the Inglorious Basterds soundtrack.

For me, other than the obvious advantage to having LCR music cues available in a mix, the folks at Penteo can turn around music cues very quickly. In my trailer and promo world, where it seems we have to turn around spots in hours, quick turnaround is essential. Television and film mixers have also joined the ranks of the "get it done NOW" world, so having a team that can jump on a job is a great advantage.

Penteo is worth checking out. Give me a call at Post Haste Media and set up an appointment to come hear it or we can come to your facility and let you hear it on some of your own projects.

Traktor Music