Author: By Mr. Bonzai
May 14,2012
A few choice words from Mr. Bonzai's MUSIC SMARTS -- The Inside Truth and Road-Tested Wisdom from the Brightest Minds in the Music Business, a Berklee Press and Hal Leonard music field guide...
Author: By By Clive Young.
May 14,2012
I believe it was the noted Canadian socio-economic theorists Loverboy who once said, “Everybody’s workin’ for the weekend.” Thirty years later, someone else is
almost doing that—monitor engineer Andy Ebert, currently on tour with a more recent Canadian act: The Weeknd (note the missing third “e”). Ebert dropped us a line to fill us in on the artist’s current world tour.
Author: By By Clive Young.
May 8,2012
John Cooper has mixed plenty of household names—Lionel Richie, Sheryl Crow and Ringo Starr to namedrop only a few—but for the last 10 years, most of his time behind an FOH desk has been spent mixing hundreds of Bruce Springsteen shows. The guy knows his stuff, so when he offered his advice on how to get ahead in the mixing biz, we listened.
Author: By By Clive Young.
May 3,2012
Zambri recently released its debut album,
House of Baasa, but the collaborations stretch far back for the duo. As sisters, Cristi Jo and Jessica Zambri have created music together for years, gaining a firm command of their ethereal mix of electronica, ambient, goth and pop in the process. Now, with the release of the album and their recent
Glossolalia EP, the pair have garnered raves from the
New York Times, NME, Spin, Under The Radar, Fader and others. Self-produced by the pair of New Yorkers in their respective Chinatown and Greenwich Village apartments, the music itself is imbued with an off-kilter yet epic majesty, developed in part from such disparate sources as toys, dusty cassette demos and old-fashioned vocal manipulation. With that in mind, we talked with Cristi Jo and album mixer Rick Kwan to discover how
House of Baasa was built.
Author: By By David Schober
May 1,2012
Recording Tip 33: I’ll often listen to a mix playback outside of the control room...mostly with the door closed.
This is a tip is another of those happy accidents. I was working on a mix one day when a client arrived to hear what I’d done. As he sat in my chair to hear the mix, I hit play and then stepped outside the control room to grab a drink. As the door closed, I decided to remain outside, mostly so he’d listen to the entire mix before picking it apart (The minutia this guy would tweak is legendary in this town). But while outside the closed door, I began to hear the mix differently. Author: By By Clive Young.
April 27,2012
A TV news theme we’ve heard a thousand times is arguably more
deeply enmeshed in our lives than the songs that we more readily define as art,
and yet we don’t value it on the same level. If all art has value, then it’s
fair to say that we should—or at least could—find the guitar used to write a
CNN theme just as fascinating as the one used to write “Welcome To The Jungle.” And if that notion seems unlikely, then you may want to page
through
A Story of Six Strings, a new book by Stephen Arnold.
Author: By By Rob Tavaglione
April 24,2012
"Today I delivered 26 files, spread across six discs (or folders), to my client for their four song project. Hmm, I remember when that would've been a single 1/4” reel ..."
Author: By By Clive Young
April 23,2012
The Thread, the blog of Duke University’s Duke Performances department, recently interviewed Ken Jacob, chief engineer and director of the Bose Live Music Technology Group, on a variety of topics regarding live sound. In a conversation that ranges from over-amplified concerts across a broad spectrum of genres to the trade-offs of speaker size versus audio quality, here's some of Jacob's thoughts on the classic notion of the “invisible” FOH engineer.
Author: By by Frank Wells
April 18,2012
The Pro Audio Pit at NAB has been bringing some of the industry’s sharpest minds together. It’s been a great venue for highlighting the issues facing broadcast audio. The panelists have been both entertaining and informative, from Frank Serafine talking about the tools and techniques for capturing location effects sounds to Jonathan Novick (Audio Precision) and I discussing modern audio test procedures.
Author: By By Clive Young.
April 9,2012
For most people, the big shopping holiday every year is Black Friday,
the day after Thanksgiving. For vinyl record fans (and its safe to say
prosoundnetwork.com has plenty in its readership), the big day is Record
Store Day. For the fifth year running, indie record stores around the
world will throw open their doors on Saturday, April 21, to be greeted
by throngs of avid record fans, who will be looking for some of the 300+
limited edition releases from artists ranging from the biggest names in
the world to bands that even their own members might not have heard of. Bruce Springsteen, The
Black Keys, multiple members of Pearl Jam, Iggy Pop, Paul McCartney,
Foster The People, Branford Marsalis, Fleetwood Mac, Gorillaz, Of
Montreal, Afrika Bambaataa, Pete Townshend, Metallica, Mastodon, The
Flaming Lips, M83 and Taking Back Sunday are just a handful of the acts
that will be issuing vinyl that day.