Red Hot Rock and Soul - Dani Paige Band - Blog

Thoughts on albums vs. singles

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:06:56 -0800

Everyone knows the music industry is in upheaval right now. Almost everything is changing, and there's endless talk about what it all means, so allow me to contribute to the endlessness.

Because of the growth of online digital sales of music, more and more people are opting to buy individual songs rather than entire albums. Bob Lefsetz opines that albums as a concept are on their way out; you can read his thoughts on the subject here. I halfway disagree, so I wrote him back, and my response is below.

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I agree, the new technology has allowed us to take a hard look at the album model. And at the moment it looks like you're right, most people don't want albums, especially because most artists can't come up with more than one really great track.

But I don't see the album completely disappearing because there's nothing wrong with the concept, and it has a lot to offer devoted music fans. If you really like an artist or band and they're able to produce 45 minutes of great material, you want to hear it all. The paroxysm happening in the record business right now may cause many people to throw the album baby out with the filler track bathwater, but once we get past the initial stage, maybe we'll be back where we were in the early 60s: singles will rule pop, but artists who have more to say and want to go deeper will still make albums, and their fans will buy them. I'm happy to pay $10 for an album from iTunes if it's good stuff.

There are analogies. The most obvious one is vinyl -- back in 1992, who in the industry thought that vinyl sales would be growing rapidly (even if absolute numbers are small) in 2010? Probably nobody. But after almost everybody got away from vinyl for a while, some people realized that it still had something to offer, so they went back to it voluntarily. I saw a bunch of LPs for sale at Borders the other day, for cryin' out loud. Here's another: vacuum tubes. They were in everything in the 50s, and then transistors came in and for a minute it looked like they would completely replace tubes because of cost and convenience. To a very large extent that happened, and there are virtually no consumer electronic devices that have tubes any more. But Fender never stopped making tube-based guitar amplifiers, and in the last 10-15 years there has been an unbelievable renaissance in tube audio gear for the professional market, because it's a classic sound you can't get any other way. At this point, there are SCADS of people making a living by building boutique tube amps, studio signal processors, etc... which means there are even more scads of people buying this stuff. Admittedly, these are people who are devoted to performing and recording music, but the analogy holds because I'm interested in having my music reach people who are devoted to listening to music.

So albums may be going out of style right now, but they'll be back, even if the excesses of the 1990s won't be.

Jesse DeCarlo

Analog-Digital Converter Test (geek alert)

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:39:51 -0800

So we're getting ready to make a new album, and I've decided to do most or all of the tracking myself. We'll probably hire a mixing engineer at the end, because we really like the guy we worked with last time (shout-out to Chris Chase/Chasesounds).

I did some of the tracking for our last project with the equipment that I had at the time, and the results were fine but there was definitely room for improvement in the mic and preamp department. Since then I've upgraded that stuff, and like any good gearhead in 2010, I'm now on to worrying about converters. Currently I have a Presonus Firepod, which I suppose is regarded as the Honda Accord of 8-channel Firewire interfaces: Presonus sold a bazillion of them, they get the job done, and at the time of release it was an unbelievable value. (Obviously there's more competition now.)

In considering whether I'll wish I had better converters after the project is done, naturally one possible course of action is to buy a couple of other units and do a shoot-out. But then I thought of another option. I loaded a professional stereo mix into my DAW and ran it through the DAC/line outs on the Firepod, and then straight back to the ADC/line ins. Then I took that re-recorded stereo file and looped it out and back in again, and again, a total of 6 times, so the stereo AIFF that I ended up with had gone through the Firepod's DAC and ADC 6 times each, for a total of 12 format conversions (and, I would assume, 12 trips through the unit's analog line amp circuitry).

My thinking is this: if the Firepod is adding any audible distortion or coloration during conversion, it should be totally obvious by the time the track has gone through the process so many times. Kind of like making 6 successive generations of tape copy back in the analog days.

I'm not going to tell you my conclusion. Instead, I've posted the original clip (which hasn't gone through the Firepod at all) and the "looped" clip (which has gone in and out 6 times). One is labeled A and the other is labeled B and I'm not saying which is which. I'm looking for all of you fellow sound enthusiasts to listen to both and give your opinions.

The song I used is "Fight Outta You" by Ben Harper, because I like the way it was recorded. The files posted here are uncompressed AIFF format, about 16 megs each. You'll probably want to right-click on each and select the option "Download linked file," or something like that.

Test A

Test B

Nikka Costa live video -- we were at this show!

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:41:14 -0800

Okay, this is some crummy hand-held footage, but Dani and Jesse were at this show and it was freakin awesome! It was at The Independent in San Francisco -- the same stage on which we opened for Leon Russell. Looks like you have to click on the title of this blog entry to see the video.

Jesse likes tube amplifiers

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:42:01 -0800

A while back, one of my favorite musician friends sent me this email: "I'm interested in your ideas regarding the use of tube amps for guitar. I was hoping you could give me further insight as to your preference for tubes over using solid state or modeling amps." Since I had a bunch of work to do that I wasn't particularly excited about, I procrastinated by writing the following answer:

I guess there are a few reasons. First off, the kinds of electric guitar tones I'm into all have a certain amount of distortion. You've heard me play a lot so you know I don't go for the ultra-saturated or fuzzed out or overly compressed sounds (unless I'm playing a part in a cover song that demands it). In fact, most of the time I'm playing with a tone that the average guitar player wouldn't even call distorted at all. But the distortion is there: it smooths out some of the harshness and thickens up the natural sound of an electric guitar. As I'm sure you've found, if you plug an electric guitar into a keyboard or bass amp and play ultra-clean, especially with a tweeter, it's pretty thin and tinny sounding.

So if we can agree that a hi-fi reproduction of the guitar's output isn't what we're looking for, that narrows down the choices. You can go for a straight solid-state amp with no modeling or digital processing and get a little of that overdriven sound by clipping the transistors. But to my ear that's a pretty flat sound, even for jazz. A good tube amp set up correctly has a nice, complex, "round" sound, and even more importantly it's a dynamic, touch-sensitive sound. Meaning that if you play softly, you can get a cleaner chimey sound, and if you really dig in it gets fatter as it gets louder. To my ear, the solid-state amps that I've played lack that complexity and touch-sensitivity -- you set the tone and you can play loud or soft, but you're just getting loud or soft versions of the same tone.

As for digital modeling amps, I know many people are pretty happy with them and I'll be the first to admit that you could probably fool me in a blind listening test with some well-done recordings. But actually playing my instrument through a modeling amp is a different matter. It's analogous to playing a keyboard that has digital samples of (for example) a clavinet. The latest and greatest clav patches have gotten very sophisticated and would probably fool 99% of the listeners in an audience. But when you're playing it, does it really respond like a Hohner E7? Probably not, and that's going to affect how you play it, for better or worse. But it's a whole lot more convenient than bringing an E7 to a gig, so you accept the tradeoff.

For guitar, I guess the main advantages of modeling vs. tube amps are versatility and reliability. For me, versatility isn't a big deal. With a 2-channel tube amp, a 2-pickup guitar and a couple of (analog) pedals, I've got all the sounds I want to deal with. Sometimes I'll bring a second guitar if I need more. Anything else I find distracting. As for reliability, I'll tell you straight up: if you look at it a certain way, my tube amps have given me the LEAST trouble out of all the gear I bring to gigs. Cables go bad all the time. Output jacks on guitars go bad or at least get intermittent all the time. Strings break. Guitar volume pots get scratchy. Preamp and pedal batteries die. In the last year, I've had a Boss auto-wah pedal and an MXR phaser pedal die completely, for no apparent reason. Those are solid state pieces of gear made by reputable companies, and they're sitting in my cabinet waiting for me to find time and money to send them in for repair. My Presonus 8-channel solid-state mic preamp/digital recording interface died a few months ago and cost $85 to repair -- a relative bargain, because Presonus is known for good customer service.

In contrast to all that, my Zinky tube amp has a lifetime warranty, so if anything besides tubes or the speaker goes out, it will be repaired for free. And here's the thing: when a tube does go bad, it's easier to fix than almost anything else in my rig. I've had to replace 2 preamp tubes in the last couple of years. Fortunately, I paid attention and caught the problems early, so it didn't interrupt a gig either time. The tubes cost $10 each, and each time it took about 10 minutes for me to figure out which tube needed replacing. This is because the "old school" design of good tube amps is meant for easy servicing. Tube amps come from a time when stuff was meant to last for many years, so repairs are simple. Any tube amp from 50 years ago can be fixed by anybody who knows how to work on amps, and usually all that needs fixing is tubes and filter capacitors. Digital gear is totally different. If one of the chips goes bad when a digital product is 10 years old, it's likely that nobody will have any idea how to fix it and a replacement chip won't be available anyway. So you get some extra short-term reliability out of digital gear, but in my opinion the price you pay for it is a shorter lifespan. (Another keyboard analogy: people will be repairing Hammond organs until the end of time. Will anybody bother trying to fix a Korg Triton in 20 years? I doubt it.)