How I Got Matt Sorum To Play On My Tracks

After walking away from years of playing and working the Seattle rock scene, I was looking for a way to record music, without having a band to take in the studio. As an old school, tube is better, analog is better, snob of a musician who's shared the stage with bands like Alice In Chains, and as a sound engineer who has worked with members of Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Nirvana, it was less then satisfying to have anything other than a real, live, warm blooded person behind a drum kit in the same room as me, to get my groove on. It was disheartening to try and record 'inspired' tracks. I knew I could, in theory, do full multi-track recording on my computer, but it just SUCKED! Until I found Riffworks Recording Software with it's built in 'InstantDrummer'.  

It's as if I can pick up the phone, dial up Matt Sorum or Jason Mcgerr and set up a studio session on the fly! How about John Tempesta, Terry bozzio, Alan White or Sly Dunbar sitting in on your living room recordings any time of the day or night? 

The folks over at Sonoma took a loop based recording software and stuffed it full of professionally recorded drums to place in your music. In fact, Sonoma has muscled in on the digital drum-loop space, buying out several well-respected company's in the last few years and really asserting their dominance in the market - and are doing it in a way that gives snobby guitar players like me, a quick and simple interface to add real human sounding drum sessions to my recordings without having to spend moths searching for drummers and teaching them your songs. There are products that exceed Sonoma in quality, but the intuitive and quick, simple use of InstantDrummer make it my choice over other products which require a lot to tedious programming that, in my experience, really kills the inspiration. For me, a decent drummer is my muse. When someone gets behind a kit and starts laying down a good groove on drums, I can write new riffs out of thin air all day long. I missed that when I started practicing to drum machines and drum loops. Now that I have InstantDrummer, It's inspiration on queue - FINALLY! 

So I highly urge you to look into Riffworks. They even have a free version with limited functionality, but it does have some free InstantDrummer sessions too. 

The guitar-centric Riffworks/InstantDrummer software is powerful music creation tool with a whole library of famous drummers that you can instantly have backing you up in your recordings. Bravo, Sonoma Wireworks! You hit a home run guys! 

You Rock Guitar Synth Live Rig

You Rock Guitar as a live rig!

I put together a live rig based around the groundbreaking new Guitar Synthesizer called the You Rock Guitar.




This guitar is the first full-fledged midi synth, in a guitar form factor, at an entry-level price. I own the first generation - there has since been a 2nd Gen that has even more features.  It looks a lot like the plastic guitars used for games like RockBand and Guitar-Hero. Although it can indeed be used for "Advanced Mode" on those two games, it is also a powerful midi instrument that can be used in any computer based studio with ease.  I myself use one and it has opened up an entire world of midi for me that I could not utilize prior due to the fact that I'm proficient with guitar, but not keys.  I can use midi in my studio, but with limited skills on the keys. Now the world of midi is at my fingertips with the YRG (You Rock Guitar). It was literally plug-and-play with my Windows and Linux Studio computers (I run Windows7 and also Studio1337 which is a linux based Multi-Media OS).

So, now that I was using it everyday in my Studio, I began to really enjoy the YRG and started bringing it to work and practicing on my lunch break.  I did not like the built in guitar based "synth" sounds built in to the YRG, but I could live with a few of the default sounds.

I was surprised when I decided to mess around with an old Zoom GFX-707 guitar pedal with stereo effects. I plugged the YRG with a standard Fender tone (guitar patch #7) into the Zoom pedal and was blown away that I really couldn't tell I was playing a plastic guitar!  I'm not saying it will satisfy some tone purists out there, by no means, but for me, it's close enough to use. So, I only use a handful of distortion and clean tones out of the pedal, as well as the Wah effect. Like I said, I know it's not going to be good enough for some, but for me I can use it mixed with the YRG's other synth controller capability!

The YRG is capable of controlling other MIDI Synths. Most everyone is using the YRG to be a Midi controller via USB for Midi hosts on computers and iPads. I'm doing the same. But the YRG can also control legacy (a new word for OLD) MIDI Synths via the standard MIDI cables. So I picked up an old standard from the late 80's and 90's, an Emu Proteus1+Orchastral rack mount MIDI synth.

I run the stereo output of the Zoom pedal and the Emu synth into a Beringher mixer - something similar to a standard synth rig anyway. I can blend both together and have found some radical tones I wouldn't have been able to produce with either by themselves.

I can also run my own vocals - still have 2 mic/instrument channels to use up, so why not add vox?  EV-664

Basically I've got a small synth-rig / vocal PA.

How to make a free Android or iPhone app for your band!

(Download my own app, as an example and NOT a devious ploy to get you to listen to my own music!)

Musicians and Bands, create and distribute your own Android App for free!

One of the best ways to engage fans these days is through a smartphone app. Once your app is installed on someone's phone, they can have access to all of your material, stores, gig info, and you can even send them pop-up messages to inform them of new information in real time! If you're like most musicians, though, figuring out how to design, program, test and distribute one is a bit too much for us to accomplish - although with some time and dedication, also not completely out of the question, but we'll focus on a fast track to getting an app out to your listeners and potential fans, bypassing all the hard work of setting up a "design environment" and building an app from scratch. 

A new product has emerged called ibuildapp.com, which takes all the hard work of learning how to design and create app's for iPhone and Android out of the equation. They have a workflow of  simple drag-and-drop / point-and-click actions, making it within anyone's reach to design an app to promote their music.

Once you've created your free ibuildapp.com account, you can get right to designing you new app. Although there is a somewhat limited selection of templates, I found one that I could use with a little modification to make work for me. (more on that later).

As you start designing, there are a few things to consider. You will be able to design and distribute your own Android, iPhone and "web app", but not all of this can be free. If you require distributing your app on the iPhone/iPad/iPod, you will need to pay to be able to distribute through their official store. In order to distribute on the official Android market, you will also have to pay a yearly fee, but you still have the option to distribute your Android app by yourself as long as the end user allows "non-market apps" to be installed on their device. In comparison, the Android Market (Google Play) is significantly cheaper at $25 per year compared to $200 per year for the Apple/iTunes distribution. Also, on the Apple/iTunes market, they have strict design concepts and may reject your app and request revisions before it will be allowed on the market.

If you just want to get a cool, free, smartphone-enabled website, you can do that using ibuildapp.com's "Web App" feature, which allows you to create what looks and interacts like an Android or iPhone app, but is simply a hyperlink that is opened in the smartphones browser - (and it will actually work on iPhone because it does not use Flash, which an iPhone simply can't do, despite the claims that the iPhone is "cutting edge" and "technically advanced" - for some reason it still won't do Flash - oh, that's right, because Apple refuses to pay the licensing for it...) - so for free you can give your listeners an Android/iPhone experience on any web-connected smartphone by just passing out a hyperlink.

Another thing to consider as you start designing your first app, is that although you can make your app for free using ibuildapp.com, the free accounts will have some ibuildapp branding as well as advertising in some of the design elements you may decide to use in your app. If you want to avoid those things, you will have to pay for a yearly ibuildapp account.

Next post I'll walk you through a detailed example of how to create your own app on ibuildapp.

(Download my own app, as an example and NOT a devious ploy to get you to listen to my own music!)

Chris Olson is a veteran of the Seattle Grunge scene of the late 80’s and 90’s as both a musician and a sound engineer. He has shared the stage with members of Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Soundgarden to name just a few. Spanning multiple genres, it’s hard to quantify in one statement, but here’s a shot:  “If Johann Sebastian Bach, Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, Mark Knopfler, Ottmar Liebert and Kurt Cobain formed a band together, you’d get the genre bending collection of tracks found in Chris Olson’s discography!”

Music Needs More Fuck-Ups!

 Musicians these days are finding it easier than ever to create music.  Digital recording has stepped up and in some cases surpassed analog recording. As a musician and studio engineer, I’m amazed at the technology available and how much the price is coming down every day, allowing us to come pretty close to the quality we will find in a studio with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of outboard equipment. We now have the ability to lay down “the perfect track” for every song we record. There is no worry about the number of available tracks you can use to record. No worries about the amount of money you are going to shell out to record in a pro studio because we can get nearly the same results in our own homes with just a little bit of knowledge and persistence in honing our mixing/engineering skills. If a guitar riff is a little out of time, we can micro-edit the performance and put it right in time.  We can loop a couple bars worth of music and use it for the entire song. We can pretty much make our tracks..... PERFECT!  No off-time beats. No flubbed guitar lines. No cracks in our vocals or a missed note on bass guitar. These days, it’s like artists are expected to Auto-Tune the vocal track..

    But, is that better? Is a perfect performance, every little nuance being in time and in tune really... REAL?  How many of us can lay down a “perfect” track in 1 take?  20 takes?  NOT ME!  But I can go back and fix it later. With the tools available to us musicians now, we CAN cover up our mistakes and create a flawless product that will compete with studios that would cost us thousands of dollars to reach the same results.  
    The question I ask - “Is a flawless recording REAL?”  

    To answer this, let’s take a look at the way music was and how it is now.

    Back in the early days, there was no going back and overdubbing.  There was no way to record multiple tracks. It was all live and if you screwed up, oh well, it made it into the recording. If the engineer messed up the balance of the mix, guess what - that’s what made it into production unless the performance could be repeated again by every musician involved from the beginning to the end. As the art of audio recording developed, we got multi-track recording and the ability to go back and overdub and fix mistakes, but we were still limited by time and money! Even though an artist could go back and fix their performance, many mistakes were left in the recordings due to the constraints of time and money being spent on the studio project. Take a listen to songs from the 50’s through the 90’s and in almost any recording you can find something that would be considered a flub - a drum strike slightly off beat, a guitar note that gets dampened to early or rings out too long, a vocal line that was slightly out of tune - you get the idea.  

    These days, since the late 90’s and prominently into this millenium, we musicians can play god. We can create our art as closely to the image of perfection we hear in our minds. No out of time notes. No out of pitch notes. Everything -  PERFECT!
   
   I recently had my studio computer crash and have been forced to find different ways to record my music in order to get my creative fix. I downloaded a 4-track recorder app for my Android Phone and within a few minutes had recorded an acoustic guitar backing track and a lead solo on acoustic as well. The song is just two tracks, recorded on a cell phone, and was licensed to publishing library. Whether or not it makes it into a film or tv show through the library is another story, but it was signed! The track has mistakes in it (at least I hear mistakes), is not in “perfect” time and each take was done on the first try. If you strap headphones on and listen closely, you can even hear my clothes dryer going in the background at one point! My point is, that this is the way recording used to be done. Listen to old Elvis or Buddy Holly or James Brown. Listen to Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Led Zepplin, Black Sabbath - they are humans, slightly in and out of time, and it sounds REAL!  

    Dave Grohl and his band Foo Fighters said it best in the documentary they released about the making of their latest album. Dave decided to go back to basics and record fully analog, something not too many bands do these days. In some of the interviews, they were basically describing that when you have the luxury in digital to micro-edit a musicians performance, it squeezes some of the life out of it. We are human, not robots, after all! We don’t strum in perfect time. We don’t sing in perfect pitch. We all fuck up, and without that in our music, we all sound, well....  a bit stale and a bit rehearsed!

    So I hereby challenge my musician brothers and sisters to challenge themselves for at least one song, put down the click track and record in the time that your heart feels when you are playing your song! Don’t stop when you mess up, just pick it up at the previous bar and keep on recording! Let your heart and soul pour out of you and into your recording, with complete disregard for a slightly off-tune note you sing. Record in one take. Record your guitar and vox at the same time. Do what we don’t do anymore in the art of music - make it sound REAL!

........ Oh, and please, please, PLEASE - shut -  off -  that - fuckin' - auto-tuner! talk about fuckin' LAME!! Invest in some singing lessons instead of an auto-tuner.  Trust me! 

RiffWorks Recording Software

                           --Hear what it can do!

Riff Rumble 18 Song Contest Entries

I've been using Riff Works by Sonoma WireWorks for 5 years now. It's "Riff" based recording is very intuitive to musicians and allows you to create and edit quickly and with ease!

My standard workflow now involves recording initial guitar parts in RiffWorks, either to a metronome or to a built in Instant Drummer track. Once all the parts are recorded (Intro/Verse/Chorus/Bridge etc), I use the powerful arranging features in RiffWorks to "move" parts of the song around, rearranging on the fly until I have a solid song structure. I could finish everything in RiffWorks, really, so it is powerful enough to use from start to finish, but I do find the that mixing and adding mastering effects can be tedious in RiffWorks, but it is completely doable. Since I want to have a little more control over my mix, at this point I export all the wave files and can build the song out in Reaper or most any other DAW, to take advantage of a better workflow for mixing than what RiffWorks offers.

Although I tend to complete my projects outside of RiffWorks, the software as a stand-alone, can land musicians a radio-ready hit! Just listen to 10 of 73 songs above, any 10, and tell me you don't hear at least one spectacular piece of work! 


Peace! 

Advice for New Bands - Part 1

Hey, A bit of info from my own experiences. This is in reference to starting a new band, picking up at the part where you have songs ready and want to play gig's or tour and/or start recording.

This is a basic's kinda approach. Please, if you are a "pro", which I'm not, chime in and give your advice to! I've had plenty of experience in the trenches.

Please don't take this as the end-all advice. Use what you can. Discard what you can't.

So....


Bit of background, quickly about myself if you haven't read my mile long posts over the years already.
I'm a guitarist for 35 years, classically trained, a proud father, loving husband and veteran of the Seattle grunge scene. I've rubbed elbows with members of Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and countless other rock stars from Seattle and many other national acts in my years as either a musician or mostly as a sound engineer. Alice N' Chains opened up for my band (their choice, not ours) when I was 19, the night they kicked off their FaceLift tour. So, I'm no "Rock Star" but I sure was close. I never took advantage of my proximity to it all and I'm kickin' myself for not doing that...... but I'm alive and I don't know if I would be, otherwise.
I've lived the scene, done some things correctly and a ton of things wrong. Most of the advice I will spout is in hindsight, but some of it I was fortunate enough to do right and see how it paid off.



First tip for a band or musician just starting out - as in you've never played in front of a crowd or maybe only a couple times...

Sounds so 'duh' to say, but PRACTICE ALL THE TIME!

practice your instrument(s) at home every day
practice together as a band at LEAST once a week for several hours
work out your set-list and practice it over and over as a band until you can play through it without f'n up. Pretend you are playing the set at a club. Think about things you will say (or not say) in between songs. Think about how you can "bleed" two songs together if you want - maybe 2 or 3 songs in your set list end and start on the same note.... try to finish that song on E or whatever, hold out the last note for a few seconds then bust into that next song that starts in E... you know the one.
Point is, even if you are not playing gigs yet, you need to go through the motions as if you are playing a club when you are reherasing, at least for some of the time.


So, assuming you've got your set tight as hell and you've either recorded all of your tracks or are working forward to do that, it's time to start thinking about playing live.
I can't stress enough the need for your band to be prepared. Practice breaking down and setting up as fast as possible! As many of us can say in our experience, there may be times that you have to set up and sound check in 15 or 20 minutes. Be ready and know you're gear in and out and have it organized so you can set up in minutes if you need to. The drummer is usually the weakest link as far as that is concerned so have the singer help them set up or whoever can get set up the fastest. You guys are a team so work together like one.
You NEED to make a first impression at every gig you pay.

1. The club is going to judge you immediately. If they say to be there at 6:30 for soundcheck even if you don't go on until 10pm, be there before or by 6:30 and be quick and efficient loading your gear in and getting it set up.

2. BRING A CROWD OF PAYING FANS! That is your number one judge. Can you bring people in the door, first and foremost. It's always up to you. The club is not going to fill it for you. Nothing will tell them what type of draw you have when they put you on first on a tuesday night. If six people are in the room, guess what, that's your draw! FLYER AND PROMOTE THE HELL OUTTA YOUR BAND/SELF!!! (another post in itself)

3. Don't do a "pay to play" unless you can fill the venue! 50 people in a 500 person venue is a bad show. 50 people in a hole-in-the-wall cafe or bar that holds 40 comfortably is a HUGE show!!

4. If you don't like another bands music, DON'T LET THEM KNOW! Feign support if you have to (but never take any sh*t either!!). Treat everyone in the club with respect. During your set, say things like "Don't forget to tip your bartenders and staff" or "let's hear it for that band weren't they great?" -- sounds cheesy, but it's gonna make you look like a pro

5. Remember, the majority of clubs you play in are going to also base your success on how much your "draw" drinks alcohol. That is their bottom line - the door and the bar. The venue and bartenders will love you if you try to sell a little alcohol during your set.

6. You will usually have anywhere from a 30 minute to 1 hour set. Be aware of the time on stage and make sure you adjust to play your most powerful song last and leave your best on the stage!

7. If you've got merch at this point, you gotta pedal it in a fashionable way. Have a friend (best if it's a hot chick in a tight shirt!) at your booth or table or whatever.

8. Have a mailing list for people to sign up for. You might think about having a free download if they sign up. (This is all part of that promote the hell outta yourself -- meaning you gotta do it all yourself man! Have someone going around in the audience and helping people sign up... be proactive without being pushy or rude)

Authoring RockBand game using Reaper in Linux!!

I've had some major success with using Reaper as a recording platform. I can get my instruments recorded using my line6 usb guitarport interface at 16bit 44.1khz (cd quality)

I recently started learning how to Author for the hugely popular game RockBand. It uses Reaper for the entire process, so I figured why not try it on my old laptop running a stripped down linux based on ubuntu, called Puppy Studio.

The entire install is like 160mb or something and comes with Reaper pre-loaded and set up to use most usb or firewire external soundcard devices.

I just downloaded the RockBand Reaper plugin and it installed seemlessly (remember it's a windows program/plugin running on a windows application under a free linux operating system)

I've been able to successfully download and use the Reaper project I had started on my Vista Desktop. I have been able to successfully add authoring gems (the notes the stream down the screen in the game) and preview them in Reaper on my Puppy Studio linux OS!!

Very cool indeed!

:)

Peace,
Chris