What Came Before the Phonograph?

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Portable Recording Equipment to Grab Your Brilliance

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Study Up on Recording Guitar and Work It Like a Pro… Baby

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Great Articles on Home Recording

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Get the Best Sound From Your Room

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New Frontiers in Pitch Correction

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Can You Make a Record In One Month?

Go ahead … what’s stopping you? That’s the tag-line of The RPM Challenge; a one month, one album challenge in the vein of NaNoWriMo. This takes place in February so you have a little over two weeks to get your mojo going.

This is the challenge: record an album in 28 days, just because you can.

That’s 10 songs or 35 minutes of original material recorded during the month of February. Go ahead… put it to tape.

Don’t wait for inspiration – taking action puts you in a position to get inspired. You’ll stumble across ideas you would have never come up with otherwise, and maybe only because you were trying to meet a day’s quota of (song)writing. Show up and get something done, and invest in yourself and each other.

Anyone can come up with an excuse to say “no,” so don’t!

For a complete description of the challenge read more …

 

Canadian Songwriting Contest With a Cash Prize

You have just over two months to get your award winning song crafted. Astral Media Radio and Canadian Music Week are presenting the 16th Annual National Songwriting Competition.

The deadline is on Friday, December 12, 2008, but don’t take my word for it read the rules and regulations. I must admit it’s a sweet Grand Prize too:

• $10,000.00 in cash (first runner up receives $2,500.00 cash)
• TASCAM 2488 NEO PortaStudio – 24-track Self Contained Audio Work Station
• NEUMANN TLM 49 Professional Studio Microphone
• 30 hours of mixing and mastering time from METALWORKS, Canada’s #1 Recording Studio
• Complete Website Design & One Year Web Hosting from J.E.T. MEDIA AND DESIGN
• $5,000.00 National Radio Promotion Package from dB PROMOTIONS & PUBLICITY INC.

Just what you need to kickstart your burgeoning music career.

 

5 Big Steps in Music Technology

Here is a neat little list of 5 important developments in modern music technology brought to you by New Scientist. I never new there existed such a machine as the phonautograph. Cool stuff indeed.

The last two hundred years have seen huge advances in music technology, such as electronic music and even home recording software. Here are five of the key advances, in chronological order.

Read more …

 

Get Your own Edison-Style Phonograph

The fine people at Maker Shed, the storefront for Make magazine, have on offer an Edison-Style Phonograph. All I can say is that this is damn cool. What I would do with it is anyone’s guess. I’m sure it would be great for getting that lo-hi effect into recordings. It also would make a great party accessory. Make silly recordings of your drunk friends with the cups they were drinking from.

 

Improve Your Music Through Restraint

Some time ago I went plugin happy. Actually it was more plugin mad. I trolled through sites like VST Planet and Audio Mastermind searching for the elusive plugin that would make my recordings sparkle. Just the faint promise of breathing life into the guitars, or polishing the vocals was enough to sell me. Soon my plugin folder was awash with oddly named effects that rarely did anything discernible. Most I never use, but I was comforted by the thought that I could if I wanted to.

The tyranny of choice. That’s what it comes down to. I played around in a local music shop with a Line6 Pod and was struck by the number of combinations available. With 32 amps and 60+ effects that is over 1920 distinct combinations. It would take quite a while to plough through them all. Pretty soon you’re not playing, but rather playing around, trying to settle on the right sound.

If I had to offer advice to those who are looking to jump into the effect market to tweak their music it would be this: Think of how you want to sound first, then limit your choices to put you in that direction. Good recording and good production may dupe people briefly into liking what is otherwise flat material. One can spend great amounts of time getting the right sound to liven up that which is flawed by bad playing, recording, composition, expression, or whatever. The audience is infinitely more forgiving of sonically imperfect experiences than we are apt to believe, provided the performer can entertain that is.

So forget the giant multi-effect boxes with their plethora of distraction. Instead polish what you have. Learn to compose a song that will stand on its own, without the aid of high production value. Learn how to perform in a way that is expressive without the use of an expression pedal. You will waste less time flipping through presets and twisting knobs, focusing so intently on the quality of your sound, and will spend more time focusing on the quality of your music.