Musicians and lyricists in olden days were able to keep ownership of their material due to the lack of printed copies of their work. Access was also limited because of rampant illiteracy and poverty. But this is the twenty-first century. Digital media and the Internet have not only made it possible to make a seemingly unlimited number of copies of lyrics, notes and performances, but to distribute it across the world in an instant as well. Here, within Rifflet’s online community, the creative commons licensing system helps people maintain ownership of material they post while still affording them the benefits of sharing ideas in a vast online community.

Problem solved, right? Well what about the people who find their work on the internet without their permission? Anyone can take audio or video of someone with a smartphone and post it to the net on the spot. Many venues have now banned the use of camera phones and digital cameras for certain performances to control the distribution of media.

In some cases, giving permission for one entity to use your intellectual property does not prevent it from being picked up by someone else. One American Idol audition by a General Platt has become an overnight Internet meme sensation with numerous remixes. Jimmy Fallon performed and posted a version of General Platt’s song within a day of the original song airing. So who owns the song? And who has the right to make money off of performing it? I’m pretty sure that General Platt signed away the rights to his original performance when he auditioned for American Idol. Does Simon own ‘Pants on the Ground’ now? Does General Platt deserve royalties? These are the questions that concern me with music and ownership these days.

Historically, minority cultures have found themselves robbed of valuable cultural material. Dominant societal forces such as white artists and corporations appropriate other peoples’ work and commercialize it for their own monetary gain. This can’t be right. How do we call people out on this and make sure that everyone receives their proper recognition and compensation for their own artwork, especially in an ever expanding and hungry global ‘marketplace’?

I don’t have the answer right now, but I suggest we start by adopting the Creative Commons perspective for all media across all channels. If we always allow people to decide what others can and can’t do with their intellectual property, we’ll always have respected the rights of ownership, making our long revered modern, western concept safe for everyone to enjoy. (If that’s what we want.)

In the app world, synth software  tends to either mimic a  real-life instrument or act as a kind of abstract, rub-your-finger-here noisemaker.

Bebot, for the most part, manages to do both in a fun package.

The interface is beautiful, in a retro-future-ish kind of way, and the Bebot’s “dancing” while you play is kickass without being distracting.

One of the most important parts of playing an iPhone synth is repeatability; it’s easy to make cool sounds, but can you play them again and again? Fortunately, Bebop has an optional “note grid” that shows exactly where to press, and you can zoom in or out to either show more notes or make a smaller group of notes easier to press.

It’s a real instrument, too

Click to view larger

Bebot is highly customizable. Double-tapping an icon in the bottom-right corner brings up an options screen that makes adjustments to effects (echo, chorus, and a warm, buzzy  overdrive) or the scale itself (see image). Being able to customize the scale makes it easier to play along with other instruments and lets you change the feel of your music without altering your playing style. An adjustable Autotune even snaps your finger presses to specific notes, and multi-touch lets you build chords.

After you’ve built a custom scale, you can save the preset for quick recall, although it doesn’t save your effect settings, which is annoying.

Even better, if you want to just mash your chubby hand down on the screen, turn off the Autotune and enjoy a full chorus of R2D2-style robo-bloops.

Bebot is fun to use, sounds great and makes a great tool for laying down synth tracks.  Here’s a quick track I recorded with Bebot: (I ran Bebot through the izotope Trash distortion plugin, so the sounds are slightly different.)

Bebot was created by Normalware and is available from iTunes for $1.99.
The video below is an in-depth Bebot walkthrough by the talented Jordan Rudess.

About 2 years ago, I set out to make an epic warrior-metal opera multimedia album and music project. Now that the album is nearing completion, I can reflect on my experiences. Among the obstacles that I knew I would face right from the beginning:

1. Limited financial resources
My lack of finances meant that this album would be extremely labor-intensive. This would be one of the lowest-cost-overhead multimedia projects ever made given its scope and absolute minimum requirements. In some cases, I had to wait for technology to catch up so there would be a free tool available that I could use to solve a particular production problem. In other cases, I had to accept hard truths, including that the final quality of my work was never going to be that of a professionally-recorded album due to the limits of my equipment.

2. Limited time availability
This would not be my full-time job. In fact, I would have many other obligations needing to be met on a regular basis. I would have to optimize the value of whatever little time I would be able to spend on this album in order to make any progress whatsoever. At first, I tried to spend every free moment on the project, but I discovered that the ramp-up time overhead of this approach was wasting what little time I had. Instead, I decided to wait until I had at least certain minimum blocks available, and then I broke up the existing to-do items so that I could finish all of one type in a certain block. This scheduling trick allowed me to achieve significant time savings thanks to an assembly-line effect. For example, I would do lots of drum tracks all in a row, rather than trying to finish each song completely (the ‘finish a song and move on’ approach did work sometimes depending on the amount of available time).

3. Virtually no direct assistance
I have attracted no other people who were interested in directly helping with the project. I have been lucky to have some indirect assistance from website projects such as rifflet.com. Having a way to listen back to my own stuff off of the Internet has yielded lots of opportunities for me to rearrange the works and therefore to come up with a much more cohesive final concept. I had to tear down and re-setup my equipment frequently due to having to use those rooms of my home for family stuff, so even if my equipment couldn’t be setup, at least I could listen to my stuff on rifflet.com and take notes on new ideas.

4. A shockingly negative public response
I have encountered little other than disinterest or doubt at best, to being straight-out told I’m a terrible musician, crazy, stupid, a loser/failure, etc. In order to complete this project, I have to ignore the deafening roar of these ever-increasing and unstoppable insults. My own comprehensive notes (musical composition, story work, drawings, etc) helped me to keep the project on track. Whenever I felt down from people ragging on me about this project, I would look back over the notes and consider that it made sense to me, and that’s all I really needed in order to decide that it was worth my time and effort.

I have come as far as I have on this album not because of a miracle, but as the result of my unwavering constitution in forcing myself to be content with achieving hundreds of seemingly insignificant milestones spaced out over several years’ worth of effort. Each step did make a difference and now they have accumulated into a nearly finished project.

The sound of the album is different than what I originally envisioned, but I ended up with a multimedia/musical product that I feel is unique. I am satisfied that I am about to achieve at least one significant accomplishment while I am still near the top of my game.

I am not trying to make money on this because that is not my goal. My goal was to make this compelling story/vision come to life for me and for anyone else who cared to experience it.

I expect to eventually make a few versions of the album “Melodius and the Soulforge”, with the initial V1.0 release currently targeted for 1/1/2010. Thanks for your support.

Official site for the MATSF project: http://www.devinmoore.com/matsf.html

Image credits:

You see, I have this thing about music with lyrics that are obscured, unintelligible, nonsensical or vulgar. I think it has something to do with my love of words and the fact that I can’t read music very well at all. Because it takes me a lot of time to pull apart the various layers of music and truly appreciate the elements and how they work together, I tend to focus on lyrics and melody right away. This is why I can have a hard time with rap. Sometimes. I just can’t catch the words quick enough. So, all of this has me thinking. If I’m predisposed to hearing certain parts of music first, or even seeking certain musical structures first, other people must do the same. (Duh!)

Perhaps this is what drives our personal preferences regarding music entirely. If I could play an instrument, read music well, and didn’t have years of choral training under my belt, what would my music tastes look like? My friends always tease me for being such a rabid Brandy fan. Her harmonies, smooth, low tones and sappy subject matter lull me into a comfortable state of mind that I try and visit frequently. I know that I’m missing out on a lot of different music styles by feeding my preferences when I consume music, but I can’t help it. Maybe none of us can.

The only way that I can enjoy music outside of my comfort zone is by forcing myself to find the ways in which my learned preferences and listening abilities meet and overlap with unknown territory. Before long, my right foot is tapping my comforter to the beat of Mr. Shady’s still garbled tirade. With time and an interpreter, I can even see myself being teased for listening to Mr. Mathers on purpose. But not tonight.

Image credit:

Possibility 1: You do end up doing music for a hobby or career

If you own cheap equipment and you are doing music for a hobby or career, you will just end up replacing the equipment with quality stuff at some point.  The cheap equipment will not yield any money back because no one really wants to buy or use it.  What cheap equipment doesn’t get sold will go into disuse or disrepair quickly, or at worst, will by its presence in your rig limit your musical ability.  Case in point: cheap distortion pedals.  Since they have limited dynamic range, you end up buying other things to make up for them, and then finally you replace the source of the problem.  Buying a good pedal up front would have avoided the other purchases plus the limited dynamic range in the first place, allowing you access to the good tones from the beginning.

Possibility 2: You decide music isn’t for you

If you decide not to continue with a musical hobby or career, any aspiring musician will be happy to purchase your used quality equipment.  In fact, it may even be worth more than what you initially paid for it if the local supply:demand ratio for your exact stuff is right.  You can rest assured that your good equipment will be put to use for many years by many other talented musicians, as the good stuff continues to sound good for a very long time.

Thus, I highly recommend purchasing quality equipment used.  That way, you are getting both the quality and a somewhat reduced price.  If you buy quality used and sell back quality used, you will recover close to 100% of the cost.  I have burned through a lot of cheap gear, and now with my current quality rig, I do not anticipate doing anything but repairs ever unless I have to replace a unit, in which case I will replace with an identical quality item used.

Also, cheap equipment isn’t usually serviceable, where quality equipment is serviceable.  Services are of minimal cost and can extend the life and tones of good equipment for many more years.  When cheap equipment breaks, service will not save it–you are forced to buy again.

Devin Moore
Principal Artist, Melodius and the Soulforge

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roadsideguitars/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

I have developed an extremely low-overhead (cost and time) way to produce music from scratch.  I acquired most of my gear used or many years ago when I had tons of money (long story), and I purchased the most tonally appropriate/flexible equipment I could for the sound I prefer. 

1. I prefer to buy good stuff used vs. bad stuff new, as I already have a good indication of the long-term quality of the equipment, and I am not paying more than I need to in order to get high quality equipment.

I also use a digital multi-effect unit rather than effects pedals. I use a generic tape-based 4-track for portable recording, and my official ’studio’ is just an ancient computer, a used 12 channel mini mixer (to pre-level the mic’s/instruments and minimize cord switching into the pc) with a stereo y-cable into the PC, and an open-source multi-track recorder to do all of my digital recording. 

I lay down melodies as rapidly as I can think them up, then I go back and put down a drum loop in order to orchestrate the melody into more of a song loop.  I have trouble completing songs due to my difficulties in generating natural-sounding drum tracks. 

2. I hope to get a set of electronic drums.  Even for an sub-par drummer, e-drums take mere minutes to get a quantized (bad drumming-fixed) drum track to a song, vs. the hours I waste now trying to program drum passages via synth-based or computerized MIDI drum machines.

My rig has other significant drawbacks; first, inspirational recording on a whim is hampered by a time-consuming boot of the computer.  Second, because I have to work the recording equipment and play the instruments almost simultaneously, changing instruments and tracks is highly time-consuming. 

3. I would be wise to enlist a friend as a “recording engineer” (i.e. hit the button).  Just having a separate person from me to work the controls would shave a huge percentage of time off of my production process.

I mix down anything interesting to mp3 format and get it either uploaded or burned right away so that it isn’t lost in case of a power outage, equipment failure, etc.  Aside from my hectic schedule, there is nothing in my rig that should prevent me from fully finishing my project album at some point.  However, because of my hectic schedule, I save all post-production for “later”.  I opt to focus first on getting as much music down as possible in raw form. 

Once I have all the tracks in raw form for each song on the album, I can dedicate a whole day to getting each song ‘just right’ and crank out all the finished songs in a row. 

4. I try to keep my mind separated into “create the music” and then “finalize the music” so in the finishing stages, I’m not trying to make major changes to the songs.  That may be doable (albeit under protest from the A&R guy) using big record company money, but I don’t want any of that.

If I focus on one song per day, it should be doable not counting mastering or other post-production stuff that big studios waste weeks and thousands of dollars on.  I say “waste” because unless I know for sure I am going to ship millions of cd’s, I do not need a perfect mix. 

5. I always felt that most bands’ most popular or creatively interesting works are nonetheless very listenable on their cheaply mixed early albums.

Anyhow, I could always get a remaster later when the album goes multi-platinum (HAHAHA!)

Devin Moore
Principal Artist, Melodius and the Soulforge

Why did it take so long?  Shouldn’t it be easy to search for one stinkin’ property with the most powerful open source content management system on the planet? (Sorry Wordpress, with which I’m writing this very post.) Sadly, the answer is no. To simplify the problem, Drupal records the CC license attached to each song, but it doesn’t allow that information to be accessed by the search function (the Views module, if you’re a Drupal-er).  With a ton of help from a great book and the larger Drupal community, I was able to write a quick module that makes the CC license searchable.  It doesn’t sound like much (and it isn’t), but it took a crapload of time for a guy who is functionally illiterate in PHP.

My hope it to have it available as a real, live module available from drupal.org, but I want to make sure everything is kosher before I try to release it. If nothing else, I want to give a tiny bit back to the open-source community that has given all of us so much.

courtesy http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses

Even if I started studying today and worked on a PhD in music history or whatever it is that the conservatories are offering these days, there would always be some corner of the world where a new type of music was being born without my knowledge. It’s presumptuous and foolish to think that one person can know all the world’s music. Usually, people categorize music by placing works in groups that share the same “basic musical language.” But event that simple rule can be hard to follow because of subject matter, style preferences and marketing tactics. Genres give way to sub-genres, styles and forms of sound collide and splinter off into sub-subgenres. It can be very confusing.

I’m not even going to get into the huge international list of music genres that I dug up on Wikipedia. So how do we / I go on knowing that there is a whole language and descriptive narrative that I’m not privy to when listening to different and new forms of music. The simple answer is…nothing. You don’t have to know the name or history of a piece of art to enjoy it. Pinpointing origins, names, dates and people can even get in the way of just listening to something and either liking it or not liking it. So many lines get drawn in the sand around ethnicity, ownership, sub-culture and commercialism when it comes to music taste. Who needs that? My opinion: Dig as deep or as shallow as you like when it comes to your pastimes. That’s what helps to make music such a universal element of the human experience. It speaks to people whether they know what they’re hearing or not.

Image courtesy carolyn.will

Hydrogen
(http://www.hydrogen-music.org)

Hydrogen is an advanced drum machine for GNU/Linux. It’s main goal is to bring professional yet simple and intuitive pattern-based drum programming. If you are a windows user, it’s going to take some tweaking to make it work on your PC, but if you use Linux, say Ubuntu or a mac, you are in luck.

For a full review of Hydrogen, check out this Softpedia review. Find a similar positive review at Linux Journal.

orDrumBox
(http://www.ordrumbox.com/)

The orDrumbox is an open source drum machine that works on almost all platforms. This drum machine is designed to be a creative pattern based way of drum programming with automatic music composition capabilities.

You can compose beats even with polyrhythms, bass line and complete songs using included drum kits with the audio sequencer functions.

The interface is easy to use and you can try it out online before you download it. I had a fun time playing with it, however it’s not quite as advanced as other drum machines. So if you are looking for something beyond simple, orDrumMachine isn’t for you.