Geeking OUT: Logic 9, Gourmet Pizza, and Turntables on the Hudson’s DJ Nickodemus

WEST SIDE, MANHATTAN: For partygoers seeking a culturally diverse event where dancing and music takes precedent over pretension, and where the DJ seamlessly weaves urban and world music through clever intersections of house, funk, jazz, and dub, the legendary “Turntables on the Hudson” parties founded by NYC’s DJ Nickodemus are a dance oasis reaching global audiences.

Fresh from his recent tour across Asia, we recently caught up with Nickodemus to see what the DJ, music producer, event producer, remixer, and pizza connoisseur has been Geeking OUT to in the music tech world — in addition to learning about his exciting upcoming plans to add “NYC restaurateur” later this year to his many credentials.

Career Inspiration
“It’s one of those things that’s your hobby and the thing you love to do the most that starts generating money, so it becomes your business! With that came lots of traveling and sampling pizzas from all over the world.”

Geeking OUT Back in the Day
“Well, it all started with the Technic 1200 turntables! They really gave me my start by being able to play all the records I would collect. Eventually, I started scratching and learning rhythm with them by cutting on beat and looping parts in songs. From there, I bought my first sampler, an Ensoniq ASR 10. For me, sampling and looping was the best thing since mozzarella!”

Geeking OUT In 2011
“I really love Logic! I just upgraded from 4.8 — which a friend gave me a crack version to try in 2002. I must have made over 100 songs and remixes on that baby!  Out of pure guilt, I went and bought Logic 9 and I have been really enjoying all its preset sounds and AMAZING effects! The sounds and effects really help give  ideas you may not have thought of before. It’s really a big upgrade… like going from Ellios frozen pizza to Lucali’s gourmet pizza in one day.”

The Here & Now & What’s NEXT
“We do a party every first Friday at Club Cielo in NYC where we get to test all our new productions on a well-tuned Funktion One sound system and a busy dance floor. I’m also currently building a new restaurant/lounge in Chinatown called Louie & Chan with three partners. It has a surround sound Void system… go figure, we have the sound system before the restaurant equipment. We’re hoping to get the doors open, pizza piping and booties dancing by June/ July 2011!”

Words by Shamita Carriman – Entertainment lawyer, founder/ managing partner of Carriman Law Group PLLC, Board of Director of Women In Music, and music tech enthusiast. She can be contacted at info@carrimanlawgroup.com

Composer Peter Nashel On Scoring Rubicon, Lie To Me & The New Golden Age of Television

Tribeca, Manhattan: Watching AMC’s serial thriller Rubicon this past Fall, our ears perked up big time. The original score — composed by Peter Nashel — brought the picture to life in such an exhilarating and unexpected way as it advanced an often dialog-free puzzle of a plot, uncovering a secret society and murderous conspiracy. Cool show, amazing music.

And what was so amazing about it? For starters, the music was authentic and you could hear it: the live instrumentation and ambient space, the smallish ensembles, the soloing cello and piano, and the surrounding room sounds. Combined with tastefully appointed, undulating and accenting electronics, Nashel created a kind of electro-chamber music and, well, we needed to know more.

We discovered that Nashel, partner at Duotone Audio Group in Tribeca, was composing this music and recording it with small ensembles each week at Avatar. After Rubicon wrapped, we scored an interview with him and when we visited, found him already hard at work on a psychological thriller of another flavor, Fox’s Lie To Me. He’s also scored a couple high-profile documentaries this year: Client 9 and Freakonomics.

Read on for our conversation as Nashel fills us in on his world and the opportunities he’s discovered in the new golden age of television…

You popped up on our radar via Rubicon. The music, especially in the first few episodes, really made the show in my opinion. Well done!

Thanks! I’ve gotten a lot of really great feedback. I’ve been hearing from all kinds of people steadily — fans of the show, composers and even post-production houses who want to use it as temp music. It’s been really great to hear such positive feedback!

I bet. And I know you’ve been at this awhile — co-founding Duotone back in the mid-90s. Tell us a bit about your background: what’s your primary instrument and where are you coming from as a composer stylistically?

I originally started as a jazz saxophone player years ago, and what I got out of my years of study was a working knowledge of the keyboard. I’m not really a piano player, but I have arranger’s chops on the piano. I can kind of piece things together; that’s how I conceive of everything.

Stylistically, I’m most interested in music that combines real instruments with electronic elements. There’s so much immediacy that you get from real musicians, and air in a recording, and the breath and vibration that you get from real instruments that you just cannot get from synths, particularly when synths are simulating real instruments like sample libraries. Getting a performance out of real players, there’s still nothing like that.

Combined with electronics — when the electronics are done well — it can really take on a quality that people cannot quite place. They’re not sure what they’re listening to. For instance, a lot of the score of Rubicon would be mixtures of sine waves with real instruments, and I’m not sure that people were necessarily able to separate the two because it just kind of created this cool palette. I love how that sounds.

To me, the overall impression it made was more organic than electronic and yet  hard to describe — modern-classical, electro-chamber music?

Yes, well I’m also really moved by music whose genre you can’t quite figure out. And I think that stems a little from my love of watching actors who I’m unfamiliar with inhabit a role. I felt that when I watched The Wire, Sopranos, Mad Men. These aren’t huge movie stars that I’ve seen a million times so there’s a part of my brain that can really believe in those characters.

Musically, I like that as well…instead of ‘oh, yes this is that thriller movie score,’ you’re thinking ‘what is that music?’ It’s something unique and somewhat new to you.

In the case of Rubicon, what kind of direction were you given? I’m curious because sometimes it’s what the producers or music supervisor think they want musically that pushes a composer into a genre. So what were those initial conversations about?

In my earliest conversation with the music supervisor, Thomas Golubic, he described Rubicon as a smart series a la Three Days of the Condor. It was such an opportunity for me as a composer because it was very British in the way it was made — with these massively long stretches with no dialog and a plot that moved slowly.

And it was kind of a dream job in that it was really talked about in kind of an abstract way – we talked about the fact that the music could almost be a character, but there wasn’t a ton of incidental background music. The music had to telegraph the interior world of the character — what is the struggle and what is going on — because the character wasn’t necessarily doing much in the scene. Maybe he was just looking around, or looking at some papers.

So it had to do a lot of heavy lifting. And we talked a lot about the music fulfilling that role. But we didn’t talk a ton about what the tone of it should be. I was the one who suggested it have a purely modern feel to it but at the same time bridge that gap between the somewhat unglamorous world of information gathering and the excitement of what they were discovering.

So the music really had function beyond underscoring whatever feeling or emotion the scene was conveying.

Oh big time. It had a couple of different roles. There was the interior world for Will – the main character – I had a very high, half-step two-note theme that signaled the conspiracy whenever we witnessed that in action, and there were a couple iterations of that. There was music that pertained directly to Katherine Rhumor’s character and her journey.

Then, there were incidental themes that pertained to the other characters along with some surveillance / conspiracy themes. There were definite themes that occurred throughout the series. It was great to be able to work this way, almost treating each episode like a short movie – but where I had my palette and my themes that I could return to each week. But it was also a TV show in that the music would signify the interior lives of the characters [as they developed over the season].

And I think that’s the main difference between long form serial TV as opposed to feature film or even as opposed to procedural TV. Working in TV in this longer-form, you have 13 hours as opposed to 2 hours to let the story unravel.

Yes indeed: it’s one, long story arc. And I’m curious — what do you think made you the right composer for this gig? Were the producers or music supervisor interested in you from anything in particular that you’d done previously?

They’d known I’d worked on this documentary No End In Sight and I think that, combined with some of the atmospheric music that I came up with for The Deep End or The Night Listener and my most recent feature at that point, Carriers, which was in the vein of 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead but more of a Lord of the Flies where the people become their own worst enemies, a psychological thriller…I think it was that combination of music that made the people who were running the show, the folks at Warner Bros and the music supervisor feel I’d do a good job with Rubicon.

The thing that really struck me about Rubicon was how you could hear the real instruments with the air and space around them. It almost sounded like they were playing it live right there behind the scenes on the set! Did you have to sell the producers on the idea of doing the music this way? And can you tell us about the process?

It was completely my idea to produce the music this way and record each week. I had this idea early on that Will’s main instrument was going to be the cello, and I thought of it like this thinking man’s instrument that I could do a lot of really cool stuff with and I was right. I utilized it and it really stood out.

I figured out that I had the budget to do a small section — we started with 10 string players and went to about 12 — and we recorded them each week in a three or four hour session at Avatar. And incidental overdubs were done down here at Duotone.

Ahead of time, I would get everything sounding the way I wanted it to sound, programmed in Logic, and then once it got to a point where I would play it for [executive producer/writer] Henry Bromell and the folks at AMC and they liked it, I worked primarily with Eric Hachikian who would take down what I’d programmed onto paper and we’d go up to Avatar to record. Christine Kim was the contractor extraordinaire — she put together the players every week for me.

It was an awesome process. We worked mostly in Avatar Studio C, and the recording and mixing duties were split between Roy Hendrickson and Lawrence Manchester, both of whom were incredible to work with.

The show theme is awesome as well. Tell me about that.

That was an interesting process because it was done in conjunction with Imaginary Forces who created the visuals for the title sequence. We bandied about a couple different approaches to it and I wrote 2 or 3 versions of it and one of them just jumped off the screen. When I showed it to Henry it was a no brainer. So I recorded that with 40 pieces in the A room at Avatar. It was a total thrill to be able to do that.

And now you’re working on Lie To Me, which is in its 3rd season, but this is your first season scoring. That right?

Yes. I had previously worked with the guys at Fox on Life On Mars, which was a show about this modern day cop that ends up finding himself back in the 1970s NYC and doesn’t know if he’s alive or dreaming or what. A great deal of that music was live as well – a lot of live brass and rhythm section. It was done as this kind of testosteroned-out 70s TV show score. It was really cool. The guys at Fox were impressed and wanted to give me another shot. I’ve done a bunch of pilots for them…

How do you manage to pitch for all this work that I assume is based out of LA? Curious how you make it work!

I think what makes it possible to do the work is two things — one is that I have a setup in a live/work space out in Santa Monica which my main assistant, Dan Morocco, works out of. So when I go out to LA, I can take meetings and park myself there for a couple weeks or however long is necessary.

Lie to Me has been interesting because I only went out for the first spot to meet the team and everything since has been done over the Internet, which I don’t think is that unusual these days. I do spotting sessions via Skype and then we talk down the show over the phone, and the music editor is there taking notes and Dan is there on-site, and then I write and post, and we continue the back and forth. It’s a little unusual, but it totally works.

What’s the music production process like for Lie To Me? This is more programmed stuff?

It’s a lot of programming and then there will be incidental overdubs — guitars, winds, etc. — that I’ll do here at Duotone. If I do drum recording, which I haven’t for Lie To Me so far, it’s done out in LA with Pete Min who I’ve worked with for years. I’ll post a cue for him and he’ll pull it in with the picture and then we’ll have a conversation and he’ll work with 2 or 3 drummers to cut it and send it back.

Life on Mars was done like that, with everyone working remotely. I would write it and send it to everyone and they would send back their parts and Brian Deming, a great writer/engineer/programmer here at Duotone, would put it all together here.

There was just no other way we could have done it that quickly. The process and schedule just sometimes doesn’t allow for it. You’ll be spotting on a certain day, you’ll start writing, you’ll deliver, you’ll spot, comments will come back, etc. and there’s just too many parts of the production chain.

What’s different about writing for Lie To Me vs Rubicon?

With Lie To Me, it’s more gestural music meaning there are no themes for characters because they change every week. It’s more ‘these are the tension gestures, and these are the emotional gestures and this is the palette that we work with when Cal and his daughter are in the room together and this is the palette for when Cal is debunking somebody and seeing through them, catching their lies, etc. So it’s a broader stroke that you’re working with.

Tell us about Duotone. Do you collaborate with other composers here? Do other of the Duotone staff work together? What are you guys working on?

I work really closely with Dan Morocco in LA and Brian Deming here in NYC and the three of us are the team that take down Lie To Me. Brian recently did music for Swamp People on the History Channel and The First 48 on A&E. And Dan just finished his first feature, Brotherhood, which will be coming out beginning of next year.

Jack Livesey, who was my original partner in Duotone, is an incredible writer and he and I collaborated on the transitional music for the film New York, I Love You last year. He is also a fantastic songwriter – he recently collaborated with this artist/writer Jeremy Fisher on a song that just got placed in the upcoming David Frankel movie, The Big Year.

Duotone is a collective. Also in-house is Aaron Mirman who’s written some music that will be used on Bubble Guppies on Nickelodeon. We do a lot of TV. We also do documentaries and features, and about 50 percent of the business is still for advertising. But I really feel like it’s a great time in television, there’s more amazing stuff on TV now than ever.

And do you feel opportunities for composers are getting better and better?

They really are. I originally set out to do film after working for so many years in advertising. And starting in 2000, which was my first feature – The Deep End – there were a lot of great opportunities and I worked on some fantastic features, through this last decade.

But what really happened toward the end of the decade with the economic crisis was that a lot of the money that was funding independent films kind of went away. And so indie film is struggling like crazy to get the movies made, get them distributed. You’ll notice a lot of the majors have folded their specialty divisions. Now it’s not uncommon for an indie film to go straight to video-on-demand. It’s really a brave new world in terms of independent film.

And what, for me as a composer, has replace that, has been television. There’s such great quality TV work out there.

So, you’re based here in NYC and you’ve managed to transition as a composer from doing mostly advertising work to a lot of television and film. A lot of people would assume you’d have to move to LA to make that happen. If you’re enormously talented does it just not matter where you are?

I think it matters. There are more opportunities in LA. In the same way that the finance or publishing world may be in NYC, I think the entertainment biz is in LA. But I think there is an entertainment biz in NYC and there is some great stuff being done here. That said, most of what I have going on emanates from Los Angeles.

I think that what has made it possible is once you get a few credits going, you can take a meeting and you’re legit. And really, it goes by project to project whether people are going to be more comfortable with me being in LA. I think talent trumps everything. If you’re delivering something people really want, I think they’re willing to bend for it.

You said that over the last decade, Duotone has morphed into a 50-50 business of music for advertising and TV/film. Can you fill us in a bit on how the facility is setup for that spectrum of work? You mentioned the Vienna Symphonic Ensemble…

When you work on a commercial, it is :30 or :60, and when you open a sequence, you don’t close the sequence for a long period of time. In a TV show or in a film, you might have 21, 24, 26 or 30 cues in an episode so you’re constantly opening and closing and you need a much more sophisticated setup that can handle opening and closing all those sessions with the sound libraries, so a lot of our stuff is managed offline in these meta frames that the Vienna Ensemble creates.

That network is configured for three systems to have access to it. And then we also have identical setups — all the sessions can be identically run in the different rooms. We have three proper 5.1 writing and mixing control rooms here and then two proper writing rooms.

Is there any other technology that you’d consider indispensable to the way you and the Duotone team work? Do you have favorite sample libraries?

We actually make a bunch of our own libraries — every time we do a recording, we record things wild while we’re there and have the musicians in the room, so we have this massive internal Duotone library. And, every time we do a drum session, we’ll take the recordings and REX them and turn them into Apple Loops for our own drum library. And we’re also always exploring all the new libraries that come out on the market. There really are a lot of incredible libraries out there — I’ve liked the Omnisphere stuff, and the Quantum Leap Piano is unbelievable.

What I can say above all is that I would not be able to do what I do without our server system being setup the way that it is. And the other thing that has been very beneficial to us is WireDrive. We post all of our work for review and then deliver via WireDrive for the music editor. It’s very stable and very user friendly.

For more on Peter Nashel and Duotone Audio Group, visit www.duotoneaudio.com. And tune into Lie To Me Monday nights at 9PM ET on Fox. Unfortunately, Rubicon, was canceled (Boo!), but you should Netflix it like I did!

Alto NYC Presents…An Evening of Real World Recording Featuring Vaughan Merrick, Adam Day & The New Apogee Symphony I/O System

This coming Tuesday, November 16, Alto NYC and Apogee Electronics are staging an interactive demonstration of real world recording with the new Symphony I/O system. And you’re invited!

This two-part event will take place between Mad Pan Studios and Alto NYC and will kick off at 6PM. Both studios are located in the same building — the group will meet at Alto NYC: 146 W 29th Street, Suite 4RW, between 6th and 7th Ave.

At Mad Pan, engineer/producer Vaughan Merrick (Amy Winehouse, Mark Ronson) will track indie rock artist Adam Day and his band live using Apogee’s Symphony I/O connected to Pro Tools HD.

Then, the group will travel a few floors down to Alto NYC, where Merrick will connect the Apogee Symphony System to track overdubs in Logic.

Dot Bustelo of Apogee will be on hand to walk the group the through the many possible configurations and deep feature set of Symphony I/O.

Space will be limited, so please RSVP to: shane@altomusic.com.

Hope to see you there!

Avid Launches New Mbox, M-Audio MobilePre, Oxygen Keyboard

Avid continued its blitz of new product releases this week. Most significant is the introduction of the next generation Mbox, joined by a new version of the M-Audio MobilePre, as well as the weighted Oxygen 88 keyboard controller.

The Pro Tools Mbox family is now in its third generation. For portable recording, mixing and production with Mac and PC, users can choose between the Pro tools Mbox Pro ($899), Mbox ($679), and Mbox Mini ($399). New features of the Mbox include:

– Redesigned hardware — The Mbox has been redesigned from the ground up, and according to Avid delivers best-in-class audio quality. New workflow enhancements include a professional-grade soft clip limiter that improves overall audio quality by letting users capture hotter signals while recording; and a multi-function button allowing Pro Tools Mbox and Pro Tools Mbox Pro users to control software parameters without using the computer mouse or keyboard.

– Greater flexibility for composing with Pro Tools LE or DAW of choice – the Mbox now has seamless support for Pro Tools LE (of course!), Ableton Live, Apple Logic, Fruity Loops, Steinberg Cubase, and more, ensuring greater session compatibility. New drivers include ASIO, Core Audio, WDM, MME and multi-client drivers.

Mini and Mbox ship this month, while Mbox Pro will be available in Q4.

Next, the second-generation M-Audio MobilePre ($179) has been released. For Mac or PC, it allows easy recording for guitar, vocals, keyboards and more directly into the computer.

Lastly, Avid also rolled out the M-Audio Oxygen 88 ($749.95). A USB MIDI controller keyboard, it features:

– DirectLink technology — Automatically maps keyboard controls to common mixer and virtual instrument parameters, giving users hands-on control over the mix and music, without complicated set up or user configuration required. DirectLink works with several DAWs including Pro Tools, Ableton Live, Apple Logic Pro and Steinberg Cubase.

– 88-note hammer-action keyboard.

– 32 assignable buttons, knobs and faders — For greater control over virtual instrument and DAW parameters. Dedicated Track up/down buttons allow focus on the creative flow of recording and mixing music, intended to minimize back and forth between the QWERTY keyboard and MIDI controller.

Andrew Maury On Ra Ra Riot & The Road To “The Orchard”

NEW YORK, NY: For young producer-engineer-remixer Andrew Maury, the last few years have been a whirlwind tour both on and off the road with Ra Ra Riot.

Between touring as their FOH engineer and co-producing their latest record, The Orchard (released yesterday!), Maury has become that indispensable “fifth Beatle” kind of co-producer for Ra Ra Riot — an “in-house engineer” that can be accountable for the band’s sound on and now off the stage.

In the barely three years since he joined Ra Ra Riot on the road to tour ’08′s The Rhumb Line, Maury has pinballed through his own personal crash course in remixing, sound reinforcement, recording and production. On tour in ’08, he buddied up to Death Cab For Cutie guitarist and producer Chris Walla and landed his first recording gig on Tegan and Sara’s Sainthood, then bounced to his first record production with The Static Jacks, remixes with RAC (Remix Artist Collective) and onward to his latest work on the beautifully-rendered The Orchard.

We caught up with Maury earlier this month while he was out in Los Angeles recording with Princeton, and talked…EVERYTHING, including specifics on recording The Orchard. Check it out:

Man, in a short amount of time, you’ve moved pretty quickly from remixer to FOH engineer to recording engineer and producer. Let’s start with mixing FOH for Ra Ra Riot since this is kind of what led to everything else. How did you land this gig?

There was some luck involved! I’m a musician and played in bands and my college band in Syracuse played the same local venues as Ra Ra Riot. We became friends. When they left school, they’d come back through town to play shows and they’d stay with me. At that point, I was doing some remixes and taking audio classes at school. I was really into all that, plus I was a real cheerleader of the band. I just loved them.

They saw an opportunity to take me out on the road and have a sound guy a little earlier than they might have been able to given their budget at the time. So I went out with them and started learning FOH sound as I went.

So it was total trial by fire?

At the beginning I would go and make friends with the FOH guy at the venue and tell them I was just learning how to mix FOH — that they should feel free to give me some tips, and if they had any ideas how to improve the mix, I would dive into it. I picked it up pretty quickly. The concepts weren’t new to me, but it was a matter of getting to where I felt I knew how to handle the PA, which is like this big beast. You have to know how to cut frequencies and when you’re riding the PA at the right level — these are just visceral things you only know after doing it over and over again.

And how did this process prepare you for working with the band in the studio? Does being a band’s FOH engineer help or influence the studio work at all?

I don’t think the live work influences the studio work other than that it enhances the communication. You just get to know the band really well. We’re all comfortable with each other and we all have the same goals in mind and we all know what the band’s about.

I think the reason they went with me for engineering the new record was because they felt that comfort with me. They could have picked a producer, someone they didn’t really know, to come in and handle the album. But I think they got really into the idea of making it their own with me and that’s exactly what we did. It was just the band and myself at the studio tracking the album.

Makes a lot of sense, especially since you were able to get your engineering and production stripes so fast.  Seems like one of the milestones was probably working with Chris Walla on Tegan and Sara’s record, Sainthood. Tell us about that!

Yeah, that experience was really cool. I met Chris when Ra Ra Riot was opening for Death Cab For Cutie on tour in April of ‘09. I’ve been a huge Death Cab fan for a long time. So getting to meet them and hang out was exciting. Chris and I got to be buddies on the subject of recording and he asked me to come out to LA and help with that Tegan and Sara record.

He was producing and playing bass on it while Howard Redekopp (New Pornographers, A.C. Newman) was the producer who was actually running the console. That album was tracked live “off the floor” to tape and Logic simultaneously — so they needed an extra person in the control room to run Logic.

It was cool because I got to see Chris and Howard making all these decisions — as far as placing mics and setting compressors, etc. The record was made at Sound City, which has unbelievable equipment and an incredible history. It was a great experience.

Sounds amazing, and quite a workflow and crew to be rolling with. What was the takeaway for you? Is this the ideal way to work if you can pull it off?

I think about it often. I really have to hand it to Chris for really pushing that method because I think it’s so easy for bands to fall back on their own space and time to think about things and make decisions later. It was really inspiring to see them do it this way, where they’re all under the gun — it’s now or never — and I think the record sounds really cool as a result.

I’ve read Chris say that he can count on his own 10 fingers how many times something was digitally manipulated on that record, deviating from what was recorded to tape. It was definitely inspiring but not something every band could do.

You did go into your first producing/engineering gig straight from there though, with The Static Jacks and their EP, Laces. So what were you able to apply from the Tegan and Sara sessions to your next gig?

Yeah, I’d known I was going to be working on The Static Jacks even before I got the gig to work on Tegan and Sara, so it was great to be able to experience this super-pro session and then dive into this next project myself.

We recorded The Static Jacks in Westfield, NJ, the band’s hometown, in a cavernous church Sunday School room. This was my first real recording session with a band where I was fully responsible for making something happen and making it good. And, if anything I learned from the Tegan and Sara record, it’s that even though we were in this incredible studio, with an amazing history and all this amazing gear and musicians, it’s still just a group of people problem-solving. That was inspiring and made the process less daunting. I learned to just push through and in the end, everyone’s talented, so it will work itself out. We did not have exceptional gear for the Static Jacks record though…

You brought your own gear into that situation, setting up in this church?

Yes and this was last summer. I was still using my PreSonus 8-channel interface — I’ve since bought Apogee converters, some preamps, and more microphones. I’ve been investing almost all my money into my own rig to be able to do this better.

It’s funny though, I listen back to the Static Jacks EP and it still sounds good. It’s amazing how some of this inexpensive digital audio equipment still sounds relatively high quality.

We tracked that EP live and then went back and re-tracked a few parts. And then I mixed it in Logic.

You’ve also recently mixed a record by The House Floor, Warship. Tell us about that.

Right, they tracked most of that that themselves, really DIY. And it was recording over the course of a few months. I heard a couple of the rough mixes and I really wanted to get involved and help them do justice to these great songs.

I spent about a month mixing on my own in my free time, and then we got together for the last four or five days to collaborate on the final decisions. It was kind of a beast — there are tons of tracks and tons of things happening and the recording quality was a little dubious at times, so we were sort of hammering it into places we wanted it to be. I’m pretty happy with the way that turned out and I really think it’s a seriously brilliant album. I can’t begin to describe how heavy and moving that record is.

Did you mix it in a studio or on your laptop? What kind of setup do you have for mixing?

It was a laptop job. I’m almost at the point where I’m going to buy a better computer, but it’s funny — I keep doing these projects where I’m mixing or tracking on my Mac Book Pro, and I can’t believe that the thing gets the job done. This is a computer I got in 2006 and it almost never chokes!

It really is powerful enough to do what I need it to do at 48k. Even this Princeton record has like some songs with upwards of 60 or 70 tracks on it and it’s been cool.

And you keep it in-the-box, using the built-in Logic plug-ins?

Yeah, the plug-ins in Logic are great. The compressor plug-in has 6 or 7 different circuits, which are meant to emulate the classic gear – 1176, the Focusrite RED, LA2A, 160. They totally work for me right now.

I’m wary of investing in plug-ins. I have a few, but they’re expensive and there’s no resale value. My next move is to start summing out of the box and eventually building up analog compression. Chris Walla was telling me that the API DSM (Discrete Summing Mixer) is really cool. It’s a rack-mount, streamlined summing system and it sounds unbelievable.

But, I grew up doing this stuff in Logic, on a computer, being able to pull up a plug-in or automate anything is second nature to me, so to not have that is kind of scary. I think I’ll probably always be working out of a DAW just because that’s how I move quickly and know how to get it done, but sonically, I want to start feeding it into hardware.

RECORDING THE ORCHARD: BIG RHYTHMS & STRINGS, BIG CLASSIC POP

So now back to Ra Ra Riot and The Orchard, what was the band looking to accomplish sonically. Going into the studio, what was discussed?

Well, there was a lot of talk about 70s records. Sonically, I think the goal was to make a ‘classic sounding pop record.’ There’s influence from Fleetwood Mac, Michael Jackson, The Police, maybe even Elton John. There’s piano and Wurlitzer and they weren’t afraid to use synthesizers. The drums are also pretty huge sounding. I remember them saying they wanted to get away from that four-on-the-floor disco drum beat which there’s a lot of on The Rhumb Line. We just went more classic pop all around.

You guys recorded at Black Dog up near Albany. Was that after significant demo sessions?

The whole album process was done in two parts — the first part being at an actual Orchard (the photo on the album cover) of a family friend of Milo Bonacci, the guitar player. The band went and wrote/lived there while the house was on the market for sale. It was a period of writing and total experimentation.

We put together some comprehensive demos and also left with some not-yet-fully-formed demos for some songs. Then they did a Fall tour and following that, we went into Black Dog to actually execute the record.

The studio is located in a rural area in the middle of nowhere. And it’s a privately owned studio built at the end of the owner’s driveway. So we got to live there and have 24-hour-access to it. It’s a really great studio, really well designed and it had some cool gear. The coolest thing was that it was just the band and I working on the album and we could use it as much as we wanted.

There’s definitely a spaciousness about the production — how did you approach the production overall as far as tracking basics?

We hammered out all the drums in five days because Gabe was headed to Portland for a little while. We also hired a drum tech — Jon Cohan who was recommended by [producer/engineer] Chris Zane. He owns all these really cool drums: a lot of great snares, a bunch of old vintage toms and kick drums and a huge pile of cymbals. You just tell him anything you want and he’ll make it happen somehow.

I also took a bunch of cues from how I saw Chris and Howard engineer drums for Tegan and Sara. One tip I picked up from Chris is to place a mic just over the kick drum, where the beater hits, between the snare and the kick drum. He calls it the “crotch mic.” It’s a really good complimentary mic to have; it sounds really good.

We really went instrument by instrument, building it — drums then bass, then guitar then synth than strings and vocals.

There are some real stand-out bass lines early in the record, on “Boy” and “The Orchard” and awesome bass sounds.

Yeah, Matt [Mathieu Santos, Ra Ra Riot bass player] really shines on this record. It’s pretty cool how in the foreground he is on some of these songs. He has two basses — a Fender P Bass and another is a Fender Sting Signature model (he’s a huge Police fan) and he uses Flatwound strings on his basses, which is kind of the cornerstone of his sound. And he has an Ampeg SVT. We also tracked a couple songs through one of Milo’s guitar amps, a Fender Twin Reverb with a 15” speaker. I think bass on both “Boy” and “The Orchard” were tracked through that. [Stream “Boy” here: http://www.barsuk.com/shop/bark106]

He played every song about four times through and then we did a quick comp and it was done. Perfect. He is one of the most incredible bass players I’ve ever seen.

What else in particular did you spend a lot of time engineering? Are there other sounds that you worked especially hard to get?

I’m really happy with how the violin and cello sound on the record. We found a combination of microphones that really seemed to bring them to life and then we doubled or tripled them in every song, so it’s a really rich sound. They wanted bigger, fuller, more apparent string sounds throughout.

On violin, we used an old AKG C 414 in cardioid down by Rebecca’s chest to catch the underside of the violin for a warmer less immediate, full sound. And then we also had an AEA R84 ribbon mic over top. And it was pretty sensitive to placement. You have to really try and get the phase lined up and complimenting each other, but we found the right spot and just went with that for every song.

On cello, we did a similar thing. We used a Soundelux iFet 7, down by the F hole near the bridge. And then another mic in Omni up near the scroll of the Cello, which was Allie [Lawn]’s idea. She wanted to try miking it from where she hears her cello and it worked so that’s what we went with.

Sonically, “Massachusetts” stands out to me. The sort of reggae-chamber-pop feels really loose, but with a tight groove. Tell us about making this track.

“Massachusetts” was a really fun song to work on. Matt wrote this song and had made a demo of it on his laptop. They’d arranged it as a band but didn’t have a fully formed vision for it. And so when we started tracking that song, we set up this really cool Frankenstein drum set — a really weird kit with tons of toms tuned really high and cymbals resting on toms, a cowbell, just a huge array of weird drums set up in weird places. And Gabe improvised the whole thing, all the way through four times, and then we just ended up picking one of those to use as the foundation of the song.

From there we kind of built the song not having any idea exactly what it was going to be…it just came together on the timeline as we saw fit. We were all floored when we found our combination of parts and how it all worked together. I couldn’t be happier with how it came out.

Ultimately, as far as how the record sounds overall, I have to credit Chris Walla who mixed it. He did an amazing job!

Stay up with Ra Ra Riot via http://www.rarariot.com and buy The Orchard here: http://www.barsuk.com/shop/bark106 or on iTunes. Catch them live at Bowery Ballroom on 9/21-22 or Music Hall of Williamsburg on 9/23-24. For more on Andrew Maury and to get in touch, visit www.andrewmaury.net.

NYC Hip-Hop’s Next Wave: Brooklyn’s DotDaGenius on Kid Cudi, HeadBanga Muzik, and Genre-Bending Production

WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN: New York City hip-hop is no longer dominated by the mixtape artist / major label dichotomy. Flourishing in that space between the artist selling tapes out of his trunk and the international corporate superstar are rising multi-hyphenate artists like Brooklyn native DotDaGenius.

A classically trained pianist and obsessive beat-maker with a thirst for new sounds, Dot personifies the industry-wide shift away from the traditional label model. While most well known for his imaginative production on Kid Cudi’s “Day ‘N’ Nite,” to confine Dot to a label such as ‘producer’ would be to severely undermine his impact.

Ranging from television scoring on hit series such as HBO’s Entourage or MTV programming, to the creation of his own label and production company, HeadBanga Muzik, Dot has been able to take advantage of these recent changes. “I feel like the business model is changing in the music industry period,” Dot stated in a recent interview at The Brewery Studio in Williamsburg. “A lot of people won’t really need to go through a major label to do certain things anymore. People can do it by themselves, maybe not on a level that a major label can, but eventually, it’s going to get to that level.”

When an artist walks into The Brewery — the full-service studio Dot owns with engineer/producer Andrew Krivonos, and HeadBanga HQ — the environment is collaborative and consistent as far as production talent and support. The goal is to create the most effective environment in which artists will thrive.

Dot’s partnership with Kid Cudi serves as the consummate example of how a consistent relationship helps breed success. Instead of sending out demo tracks to low-level A&Rs and trying to hustle together some local momentum, Dot and Cudi worked together in Dot’s home studio while he attended NYU Polytechnic.

Rather than distribute the track to some label (whereat an executive might assign producers to craft more ‘hit’ tracks) in hopes of eventually receiving a release date for physical album sales, Dot and Headbanga provide a more updated approach. In the case of Cudi and “Day ‘N’ Nite,” after two years spent perfecting the track, the two worked together to share their vision online, through Myspace and other social media outlets, allowing the music to speak for itself.

“The internet plays a huge part,” Dot allows. “Literally, without anybody behind us pushing the music, we were putting songs up on Myspace and getting immediate feedback from people all over the world.”

It’s this multi-dimensional approach that Dot sees as the future of the industry: “I feel like, creatively everybody has their direction, and once a couple people create a synergy together where they are in sync creatively, that’s where the best music is made.”

INTER-NETWORKING & TALENT SCOUTING

With the rise of the internet age, artists and producers like Dot, Cudi, Freddie Gibbs, and Drake have been able to utilize online resources to their advantage, pushing their newest work on Myspace and genre-specific blogs in 2DopeBoyz and NahRight.

As Dot explains: “It’s going to get to that point where just through the internet and networking online, you can set up opportunities to tour and link up with other established artists.”

As a result of his web networking, Dot has been able to expand his artist and producer rolodex: “I linked up with [producer] Benny Blanco, he reached out over the internet. I linked up with the Clipse in Hawaii. Even with producers, on a day to day basis I get hit up by producers that, say, ‘Oh you inspired my music, can you check me out?’”

From a business standpoint, this attention to personal relationships is a stark contrast from the model that some major labels have followed, where producers are often chosen for efficiency or name-recognition over quality. Rather than purchase contracts of established artists with an already developed sound, HeadBanga is looking to the greater community for young, raw talent.

Between local showcases and quality internet mixtape artists, Dot and his crew are constantly on the lookout for potential: “I have an A&R team, we’re fully stacked like most labels have, but we’re young. We’re looking for whatever we like, not so much the industry standard.”

GENIUS LOVES COMPANY: HEADBANGA & BLURRING GENRES AND PRODUCTION STYLES

Dot sees HeadBanga’s defining characteristic in its versatility, from both a sonic and business standpoint — serving as more than just a production studio or hip-hop record label. Stocked with photographers, directors, and a public relations team, HeadBanga is essentially able to handle any need relative to entertainment, beyond music production and scoring.

“We are also a media company: we do film, photography, event marketing and promotions,” he points out. “It just doesn’t stop at the music; we’re definitely trying to take over most aspects regarding the entertainment industry. I feel like we need that in order to be the entity that stands out from everybody else.”

Dot also brings this versatility to his sound production, exhibited in the minimal-electro production on “Day ‘N’ Nite.”

Asked about this sound, Dot relays: “If you listen to Cudi’s album, it’s definitely not like most hip-hop albums; I think it’s more musical. Being classically trained, and having the knowledge of theory and music contributes to it. The other producers that we work with all have their different levels of musical knowledge that blend, and there’s no area [of music] that’s not covered.”

Arranging music that lends itself to other genres has quickly become the trend in hip-hop, with rappers like Kid Cudi and Kanye West, as well as hybrid DJs like A-Trak blurring the lines between hip-hop and other genres, especially electronic music. Dot’s ability to produce an eclectic sound can be equally attributed to his classical training as well as the use of feedback mechanisms.

As evidenced by his approach with Cudi, the expanding social media market is an extremely useful tool in reaching out to large, young audiences, many of whom are willing critics: “People from Paris, people from Germany just responding [on Myspace] saying, ‘I really like your song, is there anywhere I can download it?’ That immediately told us that were on to something.”

Due in large part to his willingness to look to the internet for commentary and inspiration, Dot developed “Day ‘N’ Nite” into a track that can be appreciated by fans of all types of music, from all over the world. The amount of international remixes of “Day ‘N’ Nite”, spanning a number of genres, is ultimately what propelled it to its chart-topping position. This merging of genres has resulted in an influx of new sounds, with hip-hop at the forefront of the experimentation.

As a result, the other members of the Headbanga staff also infuse myriad styles into their work, making it difficult to define a distinctive feature in their sound, other than simply its quality.

“I pride myself and my team on being able to tackle all genres, not just hip-hop,” Dot shares. “Most people would just expect me to come out with a hip-hop artist or an R&B artist, but honestly if I come across a good alternative group or rock group, I‘m with it, because I appreciate all that music and it’s definitely something I want to tackle more of.”

Dot’s business partner, Brewery co-owner Andrew Krivonos, voiced a similar sentiment about their ability to diversify the sound of their work, which ranges from rappers like JoJo Pelligrino and Raekwon, to pop singer/songwriter Brian Hong and Latin band Junior Rivera: “We are all kind of young dudes who are very much in it, so we are able to service a broad range of needs. That’s why I think we get so much variety in our clientele.” This unique ability to cloud the lines between genres has been a huge factor in both the Headbanga group and Dot’s personal success.

With his current work on the upcoming Kid Cudi sophomore album, Man on the Moon: The Legend of Mr. Rager (tentatively due out October 26), Dot has yet again found a way to work with an artist on developing a new sound, rather than settling for the status quo:

“The album is different from Man on the Moon, the music is really going to speak for itself. I feel like Cudi has really stepped it up himself; as an MC, he’s always working, always trying to make something better. When you have somebody who doesn’t settle for ‘let’s just rock with this,’ it’s better for the music. The process is tedious, sometimes it can get a little hectic, but it’s always rewarding when the music comes out, and the music is sounding great.”

From his first hit with “Day ‘N’ Nite” to his scoring for television and advertising to the upcoming Kid Cudi follow-up release, we can continue to look forward to the one constant in Dot’s work: unique and quality sound production.

“I pride myself in trying to diversify,” he explains. “If I have a beat CD with ten tracks, I want somebody to listen to it and think all ten tracks came from somebody different, but with the same quality. I think with the influences of New York and the other genres of music, I’m just trying to implement it and make it my own.”

– Alex Edelstein

On The Record: Franz Nicolay & Jim Keller On “Luck & Courage”

DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN: At 5AM, multi-instrumentalist Franz Nicolay woke up from a dream with a full song and lyrics, newly formed, in his head. He grabbed his laptop, wrote it all out, and went back to sleep.

“Usually when you wake up later on and look at what you’ve scribbled down in the middle of the night, it reads like some kind of stoned epiphany: ‘Blue is blue,’ or something,” Nicolay relays. But not this time…

The keyboard/accordion/banjo, etc.-playing former keysman for The Hold Steady woke up to more than a song. What he had was the ill-fated love story of two characters named Felix and Adelita. “I don’t know anyone by those names, so I Googled them and it turns out that in Latin and Spanish the names mean Luck & Courage,” Nicolay explains. “And that’s the name of the [new] record.”

Nicolay is quick to point out that Luck & Courage is not a concept record, however. “I wrote a couple songs about these characters which are then mapped loosely against these other songs which are about a plague,” he describes. “So it’s the story of the troubled relationship of Felix and Adelita writ large on this story of a country that’s ravaged by plague.”

Now, we’re sitting in producer/engineer Jim Keller’s Brooklyn studio, sun streaming in through big windows over the mixing desk, as Keller cues up the album-opening track, “Felix and Adelita.” Freshly mixed just the day before, it’s Nicolay’s musical reverie come to life, and the church organ, banjo, slide guitar and brushed drumming set a sentimental, if not dark, tone.

“I wanted it to be a dark country record,” Nicolay describes. “One of the records I was thinking of when I was conceptualizing how I wanted this to sound is Lyle Lovett’s I Love Everybody.

“That record uses a simple drum kit with brushes, bass and Lovett playing guitar and singing. So there’s that sort of classic country rhythm section. And then a string quartet that’s playing the kind of arrangements you’d have on a big, lush 70s Nashville record, but compacted because they didn’t do it with a 50-piece orchestra they did it with 4 string players. I thought that was a really neat way of reinterpreting that sort of lushness, while retaining this really stringent, humble arrangement of the record.”

As Nicolay headed into the studio to record Luck & Courage other references he had in mind were American Music Club’s Mercury and 16 Horsepower’s Low Estate. “The banjo and accordion from 16 Horsepower, the pedal steel stuff from American Music Club and the string stuff for the Lyle Lovett record are like the three touch-points for this record,” he depicts.

WRITING & RECORDING LUCK & COURAGE: BROOKLYN to HOBOKEN AND BACK

Nicolay wrote the songs for Luck & Courage on piano and guitar, as well as banjo, which he’s taken up since his debut solo record, Major General, released in January of ‘09. “On one of the Hold Steady tours, I demo’d a half-dozen of my songs in a motel room in Boulder with the guitar tech who had Pro Tools on his laptop,” Nicolay shares. “I pitched them to The Hold Steady, but then ultimately left the band, so I took them with me.

“Then in the fall of last year, I was on a solo tour supporting Mark Eitzel of American Music Club and we were in Manchester, staying at this house that’s sort of a legendary rock crash pad that has a piano and a bunch of rooms for the bands that come through. I had a day off and the place all to myself; I spread out and had my headphones on and guitar out, and all in one day, all these lyrics came together to this collection of songs I’d been working on. That was the first day I thought ‘wow, this is what my record’s going to sound like.’ It was a really cool feeling.”

In the meantime, Nicolay had met Keller during the making of his friends’ record, the NYC rock band Demander’s album, Future Brite. “I was just blown away by how good that record sounded, and I knew I wanted to try to do something with Jim,” he notes. “So I came in here and we demo’d the vocals on those existing songs and banged out a couple more that I’d written in the meantime and lived with those for awhile before we officially started the record.”

Keller, meanwhile, set out to find the right studio in which to record Nicolay and band as a group and to capture the desired sound. They ended up at Excello Recording in Williamsburg to track basics. “It’s a great, huge live room with two or three huge windows,” says Keller of Excello. “And we came away with really good sounds. We tracked 11 songs in two days. Everyone was very well rehearsed and getting good sounds in that room was easy. The assistant, Nathan Rosborough, was also really great.”

Tracking Luck & Courage, Nicolay’s band included Brian Viglione (The Dresden Dolls) on drums, Yula Be’eri (World/Inferno Friendship Society) on bass and Maria Sonevytsky (The Debutante Hour) on piano. Other players on the record include Ben Holmes, Jared Scott (Demander), Mark Spencer (Sun Volt), Ken Thomson (Gutbucket), Emily Hope Price and Jeremy Styles (Pearl and the Beard), and Susan Hwang among others.

Keller captured a lot of “room” in the basic tracking sessions. “I put up a lot of different room mics, which is something I usually do when tracking a band,” he explains. “You get all the close mics and the main mics on the drums sounding good, and then you add the fun mics. You never know what you’ll get — especially in a room you haven’t worked in before — so I’ll put mics up in a couple random spots.

“This time, I took Excello’s old RCA 77, ran it through their Altec tube amp and just smashed it. Sometimes you’ll get something that could be just perfect to be featured in one section of the song.”

Keller made an exciting technical discovery at Excello one night after everyone had left. “Excello has this old Calrec board from the BBC, and we didn’t use the pre’s in the board (I used their Neve sidecar and the API pre’s), but at the end of the day, when I was printing roughs of the monitor mixes, I patched a couple of the board compressors in. These Calrec DL 1656 compressors that I’d never used before are awesome. Now I’m totally on a search to find a pair that I can rack up!”

After capturing the band sound at Excello, including drums, bar room-sounding upright piano, banjo, bass and guitar, Keller and Nicolay booked a couple days at Water Music in Hoboken to record strings, Hammond A100 organ, group vocals and grand piano. “We took the doors off of the piano booth there and put some room mics out in that big live room,” Nicolay points out.

Keller reflects on his spacious production approach: “The way sound behaves in a room is what makes a record exciting, which is what I hear when I listen to old records that I like. Spot- and close-miking things is great, but you don’t give the sound a chance to work around the room and build up its energy. When you put up a lot of mics in different places and you keep the pre’s pretty wide open, you bring those up in a mix and it’s like all of a sudden adding this energy to the track.”

“For the control and the dynamic element of the piano and drums, everything gets a spot mic, but the room mics are in almost all the way too,” he notes. “So you get the dynamic sense from the close mics and the sense of space and energy from the room mic.”

OVERDUBS & MIXING BACK IN BED-STUY

Nicolay’s commanding lead vocals were tracked at Keller’s studio back in Bed-Stuy. “We cut all the vocals, acoustic guitar, banjo, horns, cello and percussion here,” Keller explains, pointing back from the control room area to a small, glass-doored room he uses for overdubs.

On the day of our visit, Keller was mixing with hopes to finish before Nicolay left on tour with Against Me! He’d be out with the band all summer. “I’ve been a fan and friend of Against Me! for years so I’m excited to go on tour with them,” says Nicolay, who’s also been a member of the Brooklyn-based cabaret-punk collective, World/Inferno Friendship Society. “Plus, it’s coming at the right time — basically, the Against Me tour is paying for this record! (laughs)”

Prior to mixing, Keller had been having technical problems with the automation on his Amek Big 44 console and, ultimately, decided to mix the record in Logic.

“I’d been thinking about what would be the most efficient way to mix this record,” explains Keller. “I like faders, but the last two records I’ve done, I’ve mixed in Logic to surprising (for me) results! To the point where I’m second-guessing my setup here — do I even need this console and all this stuff?”

He continues: “For me, it’s all about the workflow. And I’ve gotten this thing down to where mixing in Logic is really fast.”

As for the sonic processing palette inside Logic, Nicolay offers, “I’ve always been super impressed by the plug-ins that are bundled with Logic.” To that, Keller adds, “Yeah, and I’m using all stock plug-ins. The only thing I’m running out for is to go through my SSL clone compressor, a couple of dbx 160x’s and a 1/4″ tape machine for tape delay, but, for example, the Logic Silver compressor is great. It’s all really useable stuff, right there. I don’t need to buy thousands of dollars of plug-ins — it’s just not necessary for me.”

We’ll have to sweat out the rest of the summer before hearing anymore of Luck & Courage — Nicolay expects the record will come out sometime this Fall. After a spin of another album track, the horn-heralded lament, “My Criminal Uncle,” it seems Felix and Adelita’s star-crossed fate is sealed, and we are left captivated, wanting more.

Catch Nicolay on tour with Against Me! at a venue near you and visit him online at www.franznicolay.com. For more on Jim Keller and to get in touch, visit www.jim-keller.com.

Apple Logic 9 Composers Seminars At Alto NYC This Week

Alto NYC is holding Logic 9 Composers Seminars this week! The seminars will be held Tuesday-Wednesday (4/27-28) at Alto’s NYC studio-showroom, and Apple’s Bill Lee will be on hand to dive into a plethora of big topics, including:

- 64 Bit: Myths, facts and what it really means to you.
- Getting the most out of your samplers with Logic – EXS24, Kontakt, VSL, Play, Spectrasonics
- Flex Time: Treat your audio like MIDI
- Integrating multiple computers into a single streamlined setup for maximum performance
- Project Import: Mix and match your greatest hits
- Hardware: What do you really need and what would work best for you
- Drum Replace, Amp Designer, Pedal Board, Varispeed, Speed Fades, Bounce-In-Place and Drum Track Editing…

Space is limited so please RSVP to shane@altomusic.com for one of the following four sessions:

Tuesday, April 27:
3 – 4:30PM
6 – 7:30PM

Wednesday, April 28:
3 – 4:30PM
6 – 7:30PM

Alto NYC is located at W. 29th Street, Ste. 4RW.

Alto NYC Hosts Vienna Symphonic Library Clinic, Featuring VE Pro

Alto Music NYC is hosting Vienna Symphonic Library clinics on Friday, March 19, in three sessions at 12pm, 3pm and 6pm. Part of the VSL Technology Integration Tour, this clinic will delve into Vienna Ensemble Pro, VSL Choir, Imperial Piano and MIR, and the full VSL library will be on hand for demo and discussion.

Alto NYC’s studio-showroom will be setup with:

- Mac Minis running as Vienna Ensemble Pro Slaves over Ethernet — sending MIDI and returning audio, with NO hardware involved. (Keep in mind this works with third party plug-ins too!) Even if you don’t use or ever plan to use VSL instruments — VE Pro is something you should definitely check out.

- Decked-out PC running Vienna MIR in realtime.

- The new Vienna Symphonic Library Choir for demo.

- Paul Steinbauer from Vienna and Bill Lee from Apple on-hand to answer questions. Lee will discuss how VSL products integrate with Logic and Apple computers.

- Food & Drinks!

Seats are limited, RSVP today, to shane@altomusic.com, for one of the three seminars — 12pm, 3pm or 6pm.

Alto Music NYC
146 West 29th Street
Suite 4RW
New York, NY 10001
646-862-3999
http://www.altomusic.com/nyc

Flavor of the Week: Indaba Music Session Console 2.0 Online Recording Software

It’s been a bit of a languid summer for the world of music gear, as the modest showing at Summer NAMM 2009 will attest. While promises of a resurgence for new audio production goodies (and for the overall economic recovery) linger on the edges our consciousnesses, those hopes generally stay reserved for later in the fall or winter of this year.

Perhaps New York’s own 127th AES Convention, Oct. 9-12 at the Javits Center will be the bellwether for more exciting times for gear geeks. For now, however, the last month has been pretty thin. Looking back at it, Apple’s new Logic Studio, featuring Logic Pro 9, Soundtrack Pro 3 and Mainstage 2 seems like the obvious choice as the highlight. Each of those major updates includes an impressive array of new features, and the package still includes a giant collection of plug-ins, utilities and audio material at the same price of $499.

Extending the parallel between the music technology market and the larger economy, Logic Studio comes from a rare company whose profits and stock price are up this year, so what better flagship to lead the smooth sailing back to music gear Shangri-La? Well, for me, this economic trough presents a unique opportunity to transform business-as-usual in every way. After all, we’re nearly into the second decade of the 21st century, and lusting after gargantuan software packages that force us to eat pasta for two months and come in manual-filled boxes weighing twice as much as your laptop feels just a little old-fashioned.

In many other areas of our lives, innovative net apps are already affecting how we do everyday tasks, and for once, I’d like to see the music production community get in on the ground floor (or at least the mezzanine). That’s why I owe this past month’s best buzz to Indaba Music Session Console 2.0, a different kind of DAW that you never have to pay for or even download.

For those who aren’t familiar with Indaba Music, it’s a music-collaboration/remixing site where users can meet to work on and/or remix other users’ music with Indaba’s online tools or any offline third-party tools and then share that music with the community. Creative Commons licenses are encouraged to promote sharing and collaboration, and Indaba frequently holds remixing/mixing/production contest featuring signed artists, such as the current contest with Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo.

While Indaba Music is not the first start-up of it’s kind, it’s JavaFX-powered Session Console 2.0 takes some big steps forward for music production net apps and feels the most approachable both for experienced computer musicians and noobs.

With Session Console 2.0, you can record 16-bit audio files straight into the online session, use real-time effects, perform non-destructive edits, mix tracks and use Indaba’s royalty-free loops library. Of course none of that in itself is remarkable, but the fact that you do it all online without having to download, install or save any files on your own machine changes the game. Somewhat ironically, the Session Console interface looks inspired by Apple Garageband and Logic, which worries me a bit in the “sue-first, ask questions later” climate that still persists. But that means that it’s instantly familiar to use for millions of Mac and DAW users, as well as being user-friendly for beginners.

Besides taking advantage of Web 2.0′s social networking and Web 3.0′s net apps, Indaba Music has also latched onto the proven “freemium” business model (check out Chris Anderson’s free ebook “Free”), which means that you don’t pay a dime for Session Console 2.0 or to use Indaba’s site on a casual basis. Indaba’s free basic account gives you five online sessions and 100MB of storage, with two higher tiers of paid membership available for a monthly or discounted yearly fee.

So, call me a hypocrite — or at least old fashioned — but if I enter one of Indaba’s contests, I’m still going to download the files and load them up in Logic Pro, Ableton Live or Pro Tools; I’m personally just too stubborn not to have every feature I’m used to at my fingertips, and Session Console 2.0 leaves a lot of functionality to be desired for experienced DAW users… at least for now. In a couple of years, however, we may think of buying and installing huge DAW packages as something that’s sooooo 2000′s.