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By Dennis Albro
There have been many discussions on the merits and deficiencies of both analog and digital recording and reproduction of music. I believe that each have their place in today’s music scene. When I was in the music business during the 70’s, analog ruled the recording industry, and the ‘Holy Grail’ was to record and reproduce music in the most accurate manner without distortion.
ANALOG My first introduction to a professional recording studio was in 1969 at American Recording Company on Ventura Blvd in Studio City, CA. The producer was Richie Podolor (stage name: Richie Allen) and the Engineer was Bill Cooper. In my humble opinion, that was the best production team in the music business during the late 60’s, through the 70’s and into the 80’s. It is almost unbelievable the body of work that this team, both together and individually, created. The albums listed for American Recording Company at the allmusic website says it all.
My point is that I learned analog sound from the best. Richie and Bill showed me how recorded audio should sound and what the analog equipment was capable of reproducing. American Recording Company was all tube amplified (Mcintosh), mixed with an analog board (rotary pots) and recorded on tape. Many of the songs that we still hear today were recorded at American Recording Company and they all exemplify the epitome of analog sound.
I have a collection of reel to reel tapes. I play those tapes back through the Sony mixing board (discrete) and amplified by a tube amp driving vintage JBL and Altec Monitors. The sound quality is excellent. The sound is warm with a feeling of softness that lulls you into spending hours just listening. I put on the Moody Blues - “A Question of Balance”. I close my eyes and I can easily visualize the sound field (The placement and apparent location of the various instruments and vocals). Each is clearly defined and sounds “warm” due to the overtones and harmonics that are present within all analog processed musical waveforms. I feel relaxed and safe and I drift off to another time and place: All is right with my world.
Analog audio signals are made-up of complex sine waves. The components in the audio signal path (mic, preamp and power amp) each contribute qualities that make-up the ‘Analog Sound’. Analog sound has been described as “warm” and digital has been labeled as “sterile”.
DIGITAL In the 1990’s I was introduced to digital recording through a Sony CD Walkman. It had small transducers that were called ‘Earbuds’. This combination was portable and the sound was clean and crisp. This was great for listening to music while going about my daily activities. When I finally added a CD player to my home system I could not immediately hear any difference. This probably was do to the level at which I was listening to music. Gradually, I was indoctrinated into accepting the digital sound. This was subtle: analog sources were disappearing, trade magazines and consumer advertisements touted to benefits, and superiority, of digital sound products. Many of the professional recording studios were removing the old analog equipment and replacing it with cleaner and more ‘accurate’ digital equipment. Millions of consumers, like me, were now convinced that digital processing and reproduction of music was the new standard of quality. The mass consumer market had abandoned the old analog standard.
In my quest to satisfy my vanity and to return to the 70’s glory days of Rock-N-Roll, I began collecting professional analog audio equipment to assemble the ultimate home stereo system. I found a recording studio in Sacramento, CA that was liquidating their equipment as the owner was retiring. Among the items that I purchased was a pair of Altec 9844A studio monitors. I hung these monsters on the wall, hooked up my reel to reel tape machine and que’d up Cosby, Stills, Nash & Young - “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”. The speakers were separated by about 12 ft and I sat center about 10 ft in front. I closed my eyes and the sound field unfolded. As the song ended, I realized that I had not heard music like that since I sat in the control room at American Recording Company over 35 years ago.
When I wanted to add a multi-track tape machine to my collection, the only person I knew that was an expert on analog tape was Bill Cooper at American Recording Company. When I called him, he told me that they had switched to digital but were in the process of acquiring a tape machine from Otari as the digital recorders did not have the ‘Headroom” that tape had. The Pros were now realizing the limitations of digital processing.
I an avid reader of Mix Magazine and Sound on Sound Magazine, and when I look at the advertisements in the back, I am finding that there is a resurgence of analog and tube equipment for studios. What amazes me is the quality of sound that came from analog equipment. Recordings like Bing Cosby “White Christmas”, Beatles “Sgt. Peppers”, Jimi Hendrix “Purple Haze” were all processed using analog equipment.
By Jason C Diggs
What is referred to as a “slide guitar” is actually a technique, not an instrument. Slide guitar is played two ways: the player can hold the guitar normally or horizontally. If it is held normally then the player puts a covering on one of the fingers on his or her left hand and makes sound by sliding the left hand up and down the strings. The object covering the players’ fingers is often referred to as a bottleneck because that was the first material used. If the player holds the guitar horizontally then the player uses a steel, which is similar to a bottleneck but, not surprisingly, composed of steel. To play the guitarist will slide the steel up and down the frets of the guitar. This is referred to as playing a “steel guitar”.
The slide or steel guitar is an essential part of popular music. While it is true the genres of soul, country and jazz have had their share of great slide guitarists throughout the years, legendary slide guitarists always seem to gravitate towards the blues. Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, for example, Name a blues luminary and chances are he is an accomplished slide guitarist. So if you want to play blues guitar or soul or country or any of a number of other genres you’d best learn how to play the slide guitar.
The slide guitar can be played on either an acoustic or an electric guitar as long as it doesn’t have nylon strings. For a slide guitar to play correctly it must be set up differently from a traditional guitar. The instrument must be strung with heavier strings (no super-slinky) and a high action. With respect to tuning there are two options; standard and open. A player who has enough guitars to dedicate one exclusively to playing slide should experiment with open tuning. Otherwise it is easiest to use standard tuning for slide playing.
Through the years different musicians have made their slides in many different ways. The most common materials are glass and metal though some early musicians used a bone or a knife. Different materials make different sounds; it’s a matter of preference. Slides can be purchased from your local music store or they can be made at home. Copper tubing and the tops of glass medicine bottles are the most popular homemade slides. Duane Allman, considered by many to be the greatest slide guitar player ever, used a Coricidin medicine bottle. The company and medicine are now defunct but replicas are still made for guitar players.
The slide can be placed on the second, third or pinky finger. The second finger is the largest and gives you the ability to hold down all the strings with the slide. If you play with the slide on the second finger you have hold the third and pinky fingers in the air, which makes it unnatural to most guitarists.
By Heidi MacLean
So you play guitar and you want to get creative? Are you sick of practicing scales to where you lose sense that your fingers are even attached to those hands of yours? Do you want to actually come up with songs that no one else ever wrote, songs that you wrote?
Coming up with new licks, new melody lines, and new song ideas is not too difficult. While some guitarists have little problem devoting themselves to perfect their rendition of Crazy Train or Villa Lobos’ second prelude and yet cannot come up with an original song idea to save their fingers, others can churn out new ideas just by putting their finger tips down on the fret board . The same may yet dread having to beat out something as trite as Spanish Romance for the umpteenth time just to get that key change right.
As someone who strongly associates with the latter, I am here to give out the basics on how I come up with a new song idea just about each time I start strumming away.
1. Chords. Play around with what chords you know. Switch them around. Play them in different voicings and just switch between that Bb Maj7 to that Am7. Learn new chord types. Do you know all of your major and minor inversions? Good. Now learn the major seven and minor seven inversions. Don’t neglect those delicious diminished, diminished sevenths, augmented, augmented sevenths, and the like. The more chords you know, the more colors you have for your palette.
For those who get easily discouraged by simply churning out songs written by others, this will help you gain greater competency with chords and will help train your ears and hands to find ear-pleasing harmonies by switching chords. Sometimes, you go to that one major sixth to that diminished seventh and it sounds so right. Then you try to find the next chord that sounds perfect after that diminished. You will probably find a melody being spelled out on the higher strings, meaning the E and B open strings especially. With various voicings, you can develop chord melodies that sound great.
2. Scales. Learn new scales. Learn the chief formations. Learn the notes. Scales aren’t just good for solos. Scales can be an effective way to generate new licks as well as full-fledged melodies. Of course, the primary scales you will want to know all along the neck are your Ionian and Aeolian scales which, simply put, are your major and natural minor scales. You’ll went to know the harmonic and melodic minors, the Dorian and Phrygian modes, blues scale, and such. As you simply play around with the scale formations, you’ll probably find yourself developing little leads. Don’t trash them. Keep them in mind, make note of them.
A site that has an extensive amount of information on mainline and exotic scales is http://www.looknohands.com/chordhouse which I have found innumerably useful. Not only will you be learning scales, you will, hopefully anyways, be having fun doing it and find that scales are easier to learn and are easier to utilize in playing in general.
3. Play around with single notes. Sometimes you are playing around with simple single notes on the fret board without thinking in terms of scales, though hopefully you will know if you are playing in a major or minor key and which key at that. However, as someone who is also a keyboard player, I find it much easier to come up with melodic lines on guitar than on any other instrument I play. Playing with single notes serves as a great opportunity to train your ear and hands to create coherent leads. It also allows room to work on slides, slurs, and string bending. But as mentioned previously, single notes can be a reservoir to generate beautiful melodies.
If you don’t know how to play a keyboard instrument to match up a harmony with that melody, you can try to work chord voicings to carry both the melody and harmony, thus creating a chord melody. If full chords become too much trouble, you can simply play two notes at a time, one being the melody and the other to be the bass line or harmony. Listen how different harmony notes change the mood of the melody. The results of this process can be quite rewarding.
4. Hum and play. For some reason, the voice seems to have a better comprehension of melody than our fingers and intellect do. Perhaps this is why I have often been told to hum and play. Play what you hum. Hum what you play. Through this process, melodies should come much easier for those who struggle with the above method. Melodies developed through this process should also sound fresher than when just fishing for notes. Your voice will get worked on a bit, especially when challenging your vocal range, but in this way there will be presented a prospect of unity with the voice and the instrument which can be of a valuable asset for the guitar especially.
5. Improvise over chords. Some computer programs, like Band In The Box, allow the user to create a chord progression for the program to play for them. They can then solo over the accompaniment. There are also MP3s and MIDI files across the internet that are just harmony. If you know the chord progression or even just the key, or if you know how to find the key, you can also improvise your own melodies and licks. Even with songs you have that have the lead and the works, you can still improvise a lead if you know the song’s key at least. If your ear has not been trained to fish for notes until you find the note that the song resolves to, there are ways to accustom your ear to do this at whim. However, the point is that this is a good way to practice improvisation as well as come up with song ideas aside from training your ear.
6. Play around melodies of songs you like. Perhaps there are songs that you enjoy playing. You enjoy the melody or whatever and know how to play the song or can read the notes off of tablature or sheet music. Play those songs and gradually veer off from the actual melody into a melody that sounds similar but is yet original. I have done this on not only guitar but piano as well where I recently came up with a full fledged song and chord progression by playing the first two or three notes of the song and then venturing into a melody entirely my own that still captured the mood of the original piece. Many great composers have created their own opuses by being directly inspired by a predecessor. Music is about creating possibilities by arranging and rearranging basic elements as it is in visual art. This is not plagiarism in that it is more like creating a rather unrelated idea from a phrase, a quote, or a thematic element in a literary work or television show. Being inspired by another’s work and producing tangible results of that inspiration would be far more a compliment to the artist than anything else and is how art trends develop through decades and centuries. Art is unique and yet is interconnected. Don’t forget that. You could be someone’s inspiration in years to come, after all.
7. Be passionate and have fun. Enjoy what you are doing. Often I hear that if you do what you love, the rest will follow whether the rest means money, success, acclaim, whatever. Life is too short to waste it on selling dreams to be so security seeking that you lose the richness of experimentation and exploration. But whatever it is you are doing with your instrument, it should be meaningful to you. Doing what you want to do versus what you have to do yields better results more quickly, often. So while music requires discipline and hard work, don’t be afraid to once in a while step away from the instrument for a day or two when you feel locked in a senseless routine. Always keep your creative juices flowing, but above all, love it and have fun with it.
By Mike Shaw
Music memorabilia has always been popular for keen collectors of merchandise from famous music artists. Now, with the help of online auction sites, collecting music memorabilia is fast becoming a popular hobby for brand new collectors.
If you want a piece of music history these days, just search the internet. There’s no need to check out music shops and second hand shops. You can find virtually anything you’re looking for, some of it very desirable. Items such as Elvis Presley’s Piano, John Lennon’s autograph or maybe a concert ticket from years ago are all available. Of course, this is just a tiny example of what’s available. At the time of writing this article there are over 1500 items for sale on eBay, and that’s just in the UK.
The older the artist the more valuable the merchandise
Music artist such as Elvis, obviously, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and ABBA are among the many popular artists that are creating thousands of memorabilia sales. I would have to say that Elvis memorabilia is the most popular. Although this changes from one month to the next. I have seen Elvis memorabilia for sale on eBay for as much as a Million Dollars. The Beatles memorabilia can fetch this kind of money too.
Learn to be a serious collector
There is obviously an art to collecting the more expensive items available for sale. As a new collector of memorabilia, you wouldn’t want to be spending thousands of dollars without knowing what you are doing. Fortunately, there are many items that are very cheap, all right they might not have been owned by the artist, but it’s a start.
By Cathy Miles
The age old question of whether a person is born a singer or learns to sing can readily be answered through singing software. Those looking to learn to sing online have found that there are many types of software, vocal coaches and other tools that can help them in their journey. The internet is used to deliver a variety of instruction, education and now singing lessons. Vocal coaches and other professionals also provide lessons, tips and techniques to help just about anyone to learn to sing. The only rule or restriction with online lessons is that the person be able to speak! That’s right, speak! That proves the point that anyone can learn to sing and create beautiful music, it just takes the want too!
Singing lessons can give a person the insight and techniques that they need to become a successful singer. Just like any other sport or talent it does not fall in the persons lap. They must first learn the basics, and then continue perfecting their talent. This is all offered through online lessons and singing software.
Most people believe that if they are not born with a natural talent to sing that they are simply doomed. This is not true and in fact many professional singers were accidentally stumbled upon, not even realizing that they could sing. Online lessons can teach a person how to express themselves through their voice, control their voice and make sounds mesh with the melody. Granted learning to sing online is no walk in the park and it takes as much or more dedication than learning in any brick and mortar office.