TheCapitalClinic

[Note: This blog was updated on Feb 29, 2008 [Leap Year!] to add the Tooker/Marqui Adora Essay on Gig Math Part II][Commentary on Part I posted in June, 2007]

To: Tooker/Marqui Adora [and readers of my blogs]:

"Your blog on Gig Math [found at the left nav "NEWS" section of your Band Blog] is a fantastic piece on the musicians' reality. It's specific and documented in detail and deserves greater exposure [like your music] so the larger [Fuzz] community can share your dilemma as artists who always seem to be "on the cusp of discovery" but never quite get to where you need to go. Fuzz and those who care about the future of music should try to develop some solutions to the fundamental problem you pose. To that end, I will repost "Gig Math" on my own blog [with proper attribution to Marqui Adora, of course] and I hope others with a growing readership will do the same and comment. TCC"

[Marqui Adora's Blog on "Gig Math Part 1 follows]

Gig Math Part 1

Hey there people! I've got some questions to throw at you guys so please take the time to read this whole post and respond with any thoughts you have as comments below.

So the boyz and I have been Marqui Adora in one way or another for 2.5 years now and we are still proceeding at a steady but slow pace to being big rock and roll gods that we feel certain we are destined to be. (At least we feel we should be, your milage may vary.) As it happens reality is a cruel heartless bastard when it comes to having the time and the money to ROCK and additionally ROLL.

We, like most people working in the music industry, have day jobs that take a lot of time and energy that we'd prefer to invest in our music creation and performance. We'd all love to quit these great time grabbers but we are (like most Americans) in dept to credit cards and cars and have rent to pay and food to buy.

This has caused me to try to asses the best way to use our spare time to work on new music and recordings and to promote the ones we already have. So what follows is full of capitalist ponderings and questions you might help us answer. So all you communist and socialist "do it for the love of music" types can fuck right off. We already have invested time and energy into making good music that we've played for free or worse had to lose money on. Now we'd like to do it as a profession and move beyond music being our very loud hobby.

To start with here's something I'll call Gig Math Part 1

--One burbon, One Scotch, and One Beer--

Recently we played a show in south Miami. We did it in part because we like the guy who asked us to play and liked the band we'd be playing with. We didn't do it for the money. But that doesn't mean we think of ourselves as a charity so we were playing for a set dollar amount (we'll call it X) and three pitchers of beer as well. No problems with the show. The audience was polite and attentive but I don't know if we added many more fans like Su, Joga, or Cereal Killer Steff to the pile of megafans. But you can't win 'em all I guess.

So here's the math part:
We received a cash payment=X
We drank three pitchers of Miller Lite=Y (How is American beer like sex in a canoe? It's fucking close to water!)

Sound good so far right? That's what most bands would think in our place since we did get payed and did get free beer both without any hassles.

But that's not the whole story...

--It's just a question of tiiime--

To play the show we got together 3 times for 2 hours each to practice the songs we'd play that night and tidy things up on a couple of new ones.

Math again:
4 (band members) x 2 (hours) x 3 = 24 man hours (or woman hours if we had different naughty parts)

Loading our gear, the drive down, drinking 1st pitcher of beer, set up, play for our 30 minute set, breakdown, load out, drinking more beerz, driving back home, unloading, putting gear into playable condition adds up to 8 hours each or 32 total man hours.

So playing one show equals 56 man hours or 14 hours each spent over one weeks time. With that in mind you can see that we had the equivalent of all four of us working at a part time job for the week of that show. At a McJob that might've earned us about $75 bucks a piece or $300 dollars total which I will tell you X + Y does not equal. In fact it falls well short of that.

So far we've earned less then minimum wage. But I'm not done yet...

--I would walk five hundred miles--

The drive to the gig was 45 mile each way and we took three trucks for the drive.
45 (miles) x 2 x 3 = 270 miles driven.
270 miles / 15 Miles per gallon = 18 Gallons of gas
18 x $2.50 = $45 dollars in gas or what we'll call G.

--New car, caviar, 4 star day dreams, think I'll buy me a football team--

Joe and I also got some large bottles of water, ice tea and redbull before and after the gig.
=W

Ashe bought some bar food and Howard grabbed a few real beerz for us after the gig.
=Z

Math:
x + Y - G - W - Z = a loss of $10 to $30

But hey, we got free beer! Oh wait no we didn't! FUCK!

We lost money and worked for free for 56 hours (14 each) in order to have the fun of playing 30 minutes for 50-100 people who at most MIGHT remember our name and some of those that do remember our name MIGHT decide to find our music and MIGHT decide to fork over some cash for our record. (I feel I need to mention again we are capitalists and the idea of working for 56 hours to lose money is more than a little disturbing.)

--Me love you long time--

First of all, hookers don't fuck for free. Hookers don't give you one for free with the thought that you'll give them a big payoff the next time. But this is exactly what clubs and other venues expect from musicians that want to perform before an audience.

"Play at this party with the 12 other bands and you will be reaching new audiences (made up mostly of the other bands)", they will tell us. "You can sell your merch!" they will offer. "Play this party with these three really good bands and you'll see a great audience response. Oh and the next one I'll be sure to pay you..." "Your set starts at 11:45 sharp, or 12:30, or 1:45AM or just before 3AM. What do you mean you've got to go to work in the morning the audience will be filling up anyminutenow!" "Sorry we've overbooked the bands so you won't have a chance to soundcheck and you need to get on and off stage in 10 minutes and only play for 20."

In the minds of the people running these clubs, you in the audience will not only spend 5-20 dollars to get into the club, you will also spend money on parking, you will pay 5-15 dollars per drink for you and your date or friends drinks, you will then be moved to reach in and fork over your remaining money to the musicians playing that night. That's what really happens right?

Call me crazy if you'd like but I think you might think of the band as the reason you already paid 5-20 dollars at the door. Like maybe they will get that money? I certainly don't blame the audience for think that, but with a few notable exceptions most clubs will be keeping that money for their own profit or to pay the guy in the DJ booth (most DJs understand that they need to get paid now and not sometime in the nonexistent future.) So the next time you are at a show remember that it is unlikely the bands are getting paid that night so if you really like what they play either buy something that night or sometime later online to show that you like what they did. (And bands stop playing for free unless you know you will have a real result from all of your hard work.)

--Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day--

Playing music is a lot of fun. Playing in a band can be fun but it's not a sure thing. It's a job. A fun job but still it is work and at times hard work. I have a bass rig that weighs about 200lbs. How often do you lift a full refrigerator onto a four foot tall stage? Would you want to do that just before and right after doing a math test in front of an audience for 45 minutes? That's what it can be like every time you play a gig. Oh and you are also hoping that none of the equipment your band has spent thousands of dollars on doesn't get stolen (most venues are in a lovely place called cracktown) or broken in the process of moving them. (Oh and the lovely smell of beer, smoke, and if you're lucky vomit won't leave your stuff and your body for a few days.)

Sorry if I got grumpy in those last sections. So far we've I've talked about what happens with a band playing gigs next time I'm going to do the more dangerous thing and start to consider the things we could've done instead of spending time and money to play a show...

Stay tuned.



-Tooker

Marqui Adora

Here is Tooker/Marqui Adora's Gig Math Part Two:

Thursday, October 25, 2007 Gig Math Part Two - Sound instead of picture

The last few weeks I've been thinking a lot about the process of making music recordings and why I am finding it less satisfying now then I did when I was a teenager with a 8-track cassette recorder and a few guitar effects pedals.

I think I have may have an answer to not only my dissatisfaction with my own recordings development but also the general state of the music industry.

Part 1:
Why music is boring when it stays in it's safe little holes:

When you first hear a new song on the radio or a podcast you have no frame of reference, you have no idea what will happen next in any given song and that can be very exciting for a listener. But the minute you listen to music with no surprises your mind is bored. It gets nothing new to experience and no joy of discovery.

I know that many forms of music rely heavily on strict formulas and structures to fit into a mold set by the music that came before it. In classical music ideas about harmony and theme and variation don't allow for a sudden pop chorus to appear. In hip-hop a song must be in 4/4 at all costs even if the snare doesn't hit on the 2 and 4 the kick must boom loudest on the one. Blues must feature either a guitar or piano to express the songs mood in an instrumental fashion. Trace must have a drop in the middle so that a 16th note snare can build it back up. Pop music must have a chorus part that is bigger then the verses of the song and most likely will repeat the chorus twice at the end of the song. With a few notable exceptions Jazz requires someone playing a horn or someone playing an instrument as if it where a horn to play lead lines. (Why not a cello being played like a cello instead?)

Now think of the artists who's names outlive the genre they are associated with.

Johnny Cash sang gospel songs as if he learned them from the devil not from Jesus. When he sings "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die" you believe the character in the song did just that. But even more so the recordings themselves have a character of danger. The band clearly fuck up on some of the early recordings but it doesn't matter because the band self corrects and the nervous energy goes up and therefore the listener has even less certainty about where the song is going.

When a person first hears the early Public Enemy records they have no moment of rest and comfort. Horns squeak and squeal with out regard to meter, key or tempo. You are under assault from the first hit. You cling for dear life to those drum beats because without them you will be lost on that first listen. Now compare that to the more recent music in the hip-hop world. Do you every have that discomfort past the first listen? Or do you know the song so well the first time you hear it that you can sing the chorus by the time it ends?

Think of The Clash. They never let the audience determine what the next record sounded like. They always elected to be unpredictable. Now compare them to a more recent successful band like Linkin Park. Every song from them seems to have the singing chorus of earnestness no matter what album it is.

In the world of pop, a band like Maroon 5 does well because they make singles that sound like they where written by Lionel Richie and Hall and Oats in the 1980s. Again both very strong artists to emulate but why not mix it together with something different?

In the pop rock world we seem to be flooded by bands that what to be whiney versions of 80s hair metal. (In fact most of them seem to want to be the singer from Ratt at least in appearance.) And all of them are drowning in the same overuse of auto-tune that has already killed all the life in the newer country music songs.

Part 2
Auto-Tune

It's an idea and a product, like how any tissue is also a Kleenex regardless of the brand. Auto-tune is a product made by a software company called Antares. It's the way to make someone who is not a good singer sound like they are a good singer at least as far as pitch is concerned. You can really hear it over used here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy-nqyfR_w4

That should give you an idea of what it does but now here's a secret, it gets used by most pop and country stars today and more then a few hip-hop and emo rock guys as well. They just don't way over do it most of the time. Auto-tune is like salt, use only as much as needed because using to much and things will taste bad.

Part 3
Cut and Paste music

In bluegrass, blues, rock and a few other forms of music musicians learn songs by hearing other musicians play them. In classical music, older pop songs and jazz the musicians are likely to learn the songs from standard music notation and then adapt their performance of that music to fit the direction that is requested of them. In both these instances the musician is asked to interpret the song as they play it and the songs structure can undergo radical restructuring between each performance. Songs can be sped up and slowed down as needed. Note and whole key changes can be made by saying a few words to the musicians. In addition to that each of the musicians will adapt to what they hear from the other musicians for each performance. So it becomes very unlikely the song will be the same each time a band or orchestra performs it even with the same players.

When Sugar Hill Records achieved it's early successes with Rappers Delight and The Message it had a major advantage over the P-Diddys of the world. Sugar Hill had a house band. They used samples from records but usually the foundation of a song was played or programmed by musicians.

In current Hip-Hop, dance and pop music things are very different from that. Today one person who may or may not be a musician programs most of the music alone or with one or two others. When they write tracks they usually are working from one single musical idea repeating constantly for the 3-6 minutes of the songs length. They will drop things in and out and introduce new themes but you can fast forward most pop songs and not notice a difference musically from one verse to the next. The song may be great but it is almost never alive and dangerous to the listener. Their will not be an extra bar added to a verse for no reason. You can count on each chorus being almost exactly the same, only slightly bigger, as the song goes on.

Part 4
Seeing is not hearing

Okay so that gives you an idea of where I think the problems lie but what do I think is the root cause of all of these problems with newer music?

Throughout the evolution of music you can see several stages that are defined by a piece of music technology and it's adaption into various musical forms. The possibilities of the piano over the harpsichord moved classical musics into more dynamics. The electric guitar takes the blues into rock n' roll. Cheap horns in New Orleans give ragtime the push into Jazz. The multitrack tape recorder and mixing boards give us records fill with a "wall of sound" in the 60s. The cheaper drum machines give techno it's rhythm. The digital sampler and turntable give hip-hop it's foundation. Synthesizers give us the romantic sweep of songs called New Wave.

The latest technological innovation to alter music is the timeline that is available in most recording software. A timeline is a graphical representation of the music as waveforms or blocks that represent the sounds recorded. With this timeline you can edit sound like you can with a word processor, you can copy and paste like you could words and sentences, rearranging the structure of a piece of music and correcting problems much like you can with a spell checker. Both timing and pitch can be altered and whole sections of music can be repeated endlessly with no additional musical effort.

At no other stage in the evolution of music could one minute earlier also be then, now and a few seconds in the future. When a musician plays a song with a band or reading from sheet music his mind is usually in the moment or thinking of the future. He or she will not be thinking of a moment that has happened in the past as happening again in the future. They might think how they'd like to play that part better or differently but they are not thinking about how to bring the past into the present. When I record myself or others today that is exactly what I am thinking about. I wonder if I can copy that part to the next section if I screw it up. I am not locked into the immediacy of the moment. I am thinking of the timeline that stretches left to right on my computer screen showing me every perfect and imperfect part and how I can improve them with a few clicks of a mouse.

Editing audio like you can edit text can be a very creative endeavor. You can create things that are physically impossible and strikingly beautiful or disturbing. You can pretend you can play an instrument that you really can't. But the more I think about it the more I think that the beauty of some songs are the flaws and unintended moments of musical inspiration.

Watching Pink Floyd record Dark Side of The Moon on DVD recently served as a reminder to me that these guys had no idea what the waveform of the keyboard part looked like they just wanted it to sound good. I have recording equipment at my disposal that rivals in quality anything available then yet I still don't have an album that comes near that level of musical expression. Now admittedly I am not writing and playing music just to make a record like Dark Side but it is certainly one of many motivations for me as a person. I don't think that seeing musical performances is solely to blame for my falling short of my goal but I think it contributes a fair bit to it. Instead of listening to the notes that are played I'm watching to see if the waveforms line up. Instead of playing it ten times I'll play it five and make a combination out of those parts that I find satisfying even though that might take as much time as playing it another five times. I don't have to put my whole self into a performance since I can always just fix any mistakes out of existence.

I think that the solution to this problem is for musicians to use the timeline in software as little as possible and only to accomplish a very specific goal. They shouldn't live there. Instead keep the mixer window upfront since that is where more musical changes can be made. Instead of overusing auto-tune spend the time to track a great performance and then leave it alone. Try not to use copy and paste as a way to save time and effort. Put your fingers on your instrument and play instead. That goes for engineers as well. Faders are more musical then mouse clicks so use your ears and not your eyes.

...or not.
-Tooker
Marqui Adora

[NB: a note to readers of blogs, comments, and reviews at thecapitalclinic: the text of all of my commentary at this site will be an organic "moveable feast" and, thus, evolve; and I hope yours will as well. Our contributions to the "knowledge-space" of the web [such as they are] should not be frozen in time. We should use the power of real-time, web-based music discovery to generate "wiki-[capital]." In this way, the time we spend here will be value-added building-blocks in our quest to advance capital formation, individually and collectively.]