I considered titling this post "Music quality vs selling music online", as there has traditionally been a trade off in audio quality for mass-marketed music online. 

While there have long been alternatives to the common online music marketplaces of iTunes, Amazon, and the assortment of relatively low-quality audio streaming services, consumers have generally been satisfied (or through other technical or bandwidth limitations, made to be satisfied) with convenience and accessibility over audio quality when purchasing or streaming music online. 

However as there is evidence that online music sales are now in decline, and streaming and on-demand audio services are really taking a foothold, high-quality audio streaming seems to be the new competitive battlefield. 

Streaming services like Deezer Elite and Tidal have emerged which offer significantly higher quality audio than the likes of Spotify and other common streaming platforms. However the bandwidth currently required to support such high quality audio streams is currently limiting their ability to work for mobile (i.e. smartphone) listeners. 

However, as the article Going Hi-Fi To Compete With Spotify (And Google And Apple) concludes, "If the mainstream on-demand music services make their huge catalogs of music available to everyone in lossless format at the same price — as Bandcamp has done for indie downloads — then the distinction between audiophiles and the rest of us will finally erode".

And wouldn't that be a great outcome?

-
Looking for an extra something in your music? Need help with composing your song? I provide keyboard recording tracks for bands and solo artists. Contact me know to talk about YOUR song!

Back in October 2012 I wrote about a Japanese site called Songle, which enables you to input a link to a song and have it work out the timing, chords, melody, and display this online. When I first looked at the site there had been 4,865 songs analysed with the tool. As I write, the number of songs analysed is 718,884!

Needless to say, online chord recognition tools are popular. And now we have Chordify. 

In their own words, "Chordify is a free online music service – made for and by music enthusiasts – that transforms music, from YouTube, SoundCloud or your private collection, into chords. Our service automatically recognises chords from the audio signal, and aligns them to the music in a simple and intuitive player. Chordify is a cutting edge service that helps both novice and trained musicians to play the music they want to play, making state-of-the-art music technology available to the public at large".

In my original post about Songle chord recognition I uploaded to my track Night Gliding - you can see the results here. 

I tried the same with Chordify and sure enough, the basic chords and timing were extracted without issue. And, as with Songle, you can share a link to your chord charts once created - you can see my Chordify results for Night Gliding here. 

While the technology behind these two tools seems similar (judging by the accuracy of the results), the interface of Chordify is certainly a lot friendlier and there are a few neat additional features. Aside from some paid features such as enabling you to transpose the track (useful if you need to learn an existing song in a different key) and change the speed of the track (useful if a performance is too fast for you to work out), it also offers neat guitar, ukelele or piano chord fingering charts to show you how to play the chords if you're unsure. That's a great feature for beginner players who would enjoy getting to know an instrument by learning songs they would like to play. 

Another cool point is that if you submit a YouTube link to a track to analyse, it will display the video onscreen in time with the chords beneath. A nice touch and possibly helpful in cases where you want to see the performance at the same time as trying to play it. 

For a small cost, the site will also enable you to download to PDF the chord charts it has analysed for your song, or a midi file of the chords to use in further audio editing. 

Boiling it down though, this is a tool for working out the basics of a track. Even a track with simple timing but some unusual harmonies (such as my composition Something's Wrong) is stripped to its basic root notes in terms of identifying chords played. 

Not great for more advanced players needing help with tricky melody runs or detailed scores, but for quick and easily help learning the basic chords and structures of a song, Chordify and Songle are pretty cool. 

-

Paul Doolan provides keyboard recording sessions for bands and solo artists. 
Tell me about YOUR song!

It's amazing when you find something new in something so familiar. Like finally understanding the real lyric in a song you've listened to for years, or noticing something in the background of a movie you've seen a thousand times. 

Enter the world of hidden treasures in music. Now in my time I've stumbled across a few of these. A band I was in years ago even recorded a "hidden track" many minutes after the end of the last song, which was actually an out take of an alternative acoustic version of one of the songs on the album. Nothing hard to find - just let the CD play rather than hitting stop at the end, and there it is. 

But there have been some absolutely remarkable secrets hidden in music over the years, 10 of which have been collated in this article. 

Some of the coolest examples:

• The track "Erased, Over, Out" from the Nine Inch Nails album Further Down the Spiral, if fast-forwarded on a regular CD player, will play the words "ERASE ME" over and over
• Monty Python's Matching Tie & Handkerchief album had one side containing two completely different sets of tracks, and you never knew which one you'd get until you played it. This was done on vinyl by recording double grooves, which is when the album's grooves are pressed in a way that makes it so you get a completely different set of tracks depending on where the needle lands
  
• Led Zeppelin's album In Through the Out Door appears to have relatively dull album artwork. However if you wash the inner sleeve with water, the album's black and white drawings become permanently colored. Many people have owned the album for decades without knowing this could be done, as it was never promoted as a feature of the album
  
• Even a band I have listened to unbroken for more than 20 years, Dream Theater, hid instrumental intros on half the songs on their album Octavarium in the pregap (a part of a CD track accessible by pressing and holding the rewind button at the beginning of the first track, until it can't go back any further). 
• And lastly, perhaps most creepily, Aphex Twin's fan-dubbed "Equation" track features a metallic, buzzing noise around five minutes and 30 seconds into the song. When you run that section through a spectrograph (a program that converts sound waves into visible images...as you do...), this image comes out:
  

What secrets within albums do you know about?
-
Paul Doolan provides keyboard recording sessions for bands and solo artists. 
Tell me about YOUR song!

There's a whole world of what could be considered internet time-wasting, but here's something I found fascinating. Audio visual experiments that enable you to manipulate sound onscreen in your browser. 

While there are all kinds of flavours of these things around to play with, a couple which I've found particularly fun are Keylight 01 and Keylight 03 from Swedish JavaScript coder and CSS tweaker, Hakim El Hattab. 

In Keylight 01 you play a synthy piano sound using the keys on your computer keyboard. Try pressing YRIZD for example (and hopefully with some memory of Close Encounters of the Third Kind...). 

The other one I've sunk some time into is Keylight 03, in which you drag a minimum of two balls around a 3D "room". The basics: 

• The further a ball is placed away from you, the lower the pitch. 
• The further apart the balls are placed, the longer the duration between the pitches playing. 
• You can drag them around once placed to play with timing and pitch, and it can really become quite hypnotic. 
• Dragging a ball off the side of the room will remove it. 
• You can copy the URL at the end to share your creation

It's very easy to imagine a huge beat dropping in behind something you've created very simply after only a few seconds of playing around. 

As an example, here's a link to my Keylight 03 quick take on the My Dying Bride track The Cry of Mankind - a random choice I know, but a great riff which came to mind as soon as I started playing with this tool. 

There's no shortage of stuff to play around with on his site, check it out at hakim.se. 

What riffs can you create?

Apps that will read your mind - is that really the future of music? Perhaps so according to this post on Fast Company.

My ears pricked up (pardon the pun) when I read some of these comment-worthy points in that article:

• "The music player of the future will know a lot more about you than just what music you'll like; it'll know where you are, who you're with, and more"

• There is a strong feeling that people's desire to listen to music is enhanced by having a "zero UI" music player i.e. a music playing experience with no user interface, as is the case with terrestrial radio, which is simply on when it's on. You don't have to open a search box, find an album you like, or type in a password.

• "The vast majority of people don't have any interest in thinking about music any more than hitting a button". This was a pretty big call to make and to me is quite sad. Sure, I'm all for convenience in music listening, by way of streamlining your access to what you choose to listen to, but man - can we take a back seat any further? Can we disengage any further from the experience of listening to music? Some of my previous posts have covered my feelings in this area i.e. the increasingly automated and background-like approach music seems to be taking in people's lives. For example: Are Younger People Tuning Out Of Music?, Do You Listen To Albums Any More?, Is Music Just Background For Your Eyes?, Listen All The Time Not Just When You're Logged In.
  

While I don't love the absence of the listener's cognition in the perceived future of music listening, I must say that as someone always interested in the evolution of technology, especially in the field of music, and as a metal fan, I found this prospect fascinating: 

"The ideal music player has zero buttons. When you get in your car, it automatically starts playing NPR. When you come home, it knows if your wife is home: if she is, it plays jazz on the stereo, and if not, it puts on death metal".

What do you think - is passiveness the future of music listening?

-
Paul Doolan provides online keyboard recording sessions for bands and solo artists. 
Want to add keyboards to your track? Learn more now. 

I recently enjoyed a presentation by Managing Director of Pandora Australia and New Zealand, Jane Huxley. Presenting at the DiG festival in Newcastle, Jane covered the topic "Video killed the radio star... Or did it?".

I forget how I first stumbled upon Pandora radio - it was around 2007 - but I remember being amazed by the accuracy and "in tune with me" songs it was playing. For the uninitiated, Pandora allows users to create a playlist by entering one song and Pandora then starts playing similar songs, with users able to press thumbs up or down to show their preferences. 

According to Pandora's founder Tim Westergren, it's like "musical DNA" as Pandora tailors the tracks played to each individual listener - "It's basically an enormous musical taxonomy of over a million songs that have each been analysed for as many as 450 attributes per song by a team of trained musicians". 

Just as I was getting into Pandora years ago, Australian access to the site was pulled due to licensing issues (the site officially relaunched in Australia in December 2012). 

It is a remarkable music service. There are countless arguably-competing offerings such as Rdio, iTunes Radio, Spotify, Deezer etc etc these days, but even years ago Pandora's ability to recognise quite obscure songs input by the user and return really great recommendations of music you might like was a great experience. 

Admittedly, I do not frequently use Pandora or any other streaming music service much at present. This is largely as I am not short of other ways to discover new music (through connections on social media, with bandmates, through composition work, email lists such as Noise Trade, etc). I have also felt that family life leaves me less free to immerse myself in music discovery than I would like. I touched on this in a short post some time ago titled "A Fascination With Music is to be Indulged, Not Forgotten".

Interestingly, Jane noted that unlike iTunes, Spotify and others, Pandora is aiming to satisfy the desire for a passive listening experience. i.e. Not about selecting a particular track or album and streaming it, but about being the best at recognising the music you like and playing tracks you may have never heard of that it perceives you will also enjoy. Indeed it was said that Pandora aims to bring you "the music you listen to when you're doing something else". I found it interesting to hear this as the squarely targeted aim of the service - over a year ago I reflected on the question "Is Music Just Background for Your Eyes?".

Furthermore I loved the comment that in Jane's own home music is often playing, and one of her children once asked "What did we do before we played music?". What a great question - especially now when many kids are more wondering what life was ever like before the internet. Gees, many of us who grew up before the internet took over our world find it hard to recall what life was like before! 

A few final points and stats I found fascinating from the presentation: 

• Pandora has over 200 million registered users, 75 million active per month (Spotify by comparison has 24 million active users per month)
• 72% of all internet radio listening is done on Pandora
• 1 in 3 smartphones have accessed Pandora radio in the last 30 days
• 70% of the music in Pandora is by independent artists
• 95% of music in Pandora is spun at least once a month
• 70% of new Holden vehicles will have Pandora on-board by the end of 2013
• The average Australian Pandora listener listens for 2 hours and 3 minutes per day

Whether via Pandora or any other means, what a great thing it would be if more kids asked their parents "What did we do before we played music?"...

-
Paul Doolan provides online keyboard recording sessions for bands and solo artists. 
Want to add keyboards to your track? Learn more now. 

Following my previous post, "Is Technology Replacing Human Musical Creativity?", I have read a somewhat related article from Hubspot - "Analog Values in a Digital World: Are We Moving Too Fast for Our Own Good?".

On reading the Hubspot article, the parallels here with the music industry are many. The increase in use of technology can enable those with little "traditional" musical talent to produce broadcast quality music consumed by the masses. 

The greater the number of people using the available technology to produce songs, the less considered musical craftsmanship overall goes into creating the music we hear every day.

In turn, the expectation of what makes a great song can be diluted as - over time - expectations are lowered and finding an original, deeply-connecting musical experience becomes more like a needle in a haystack for many. 

The purpose of my post was not so much about whether technology should be used in creating music, but to what extent it is taking over from human interaction in the creative process of making music.

What do you think - are we moving too fast for our own good?

-
Paul Doolan provides online keyboard recording sessions for bands and solo artists. 
Want to add keyboards to your track? Learn more now. 

I just finished watching Dave Grohl's documentary, "Sound City". While there has been some commentary that the film becomes a little pitchy towards the end in promoting some of Grohl's more recent recordings, much of the film resonated strongly with me. 

There is a sense of nostalgia and times past, such as reflections on the fact that in an internet age there is really no longer a sense of the local record shop or library...

The film also shone light on the environment in which many classic albums in my collection were recorded. From the 70s, 80s, and 90s a lot of what I know very closely was recorded at Sound City, something I hadn't previously appreciated. 

However what resonated most with me was the discussion around three quarters though the film, where focus turned to the struggles of Sound City as a tape-based recording studio in an increasingly digital and Pro Tools-based music production world. I loved the commentary surrounding this, such as reference to the way Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails used digital technology to manipulate sound in new ways, rather than simply using the available tools to emulate or correct poor original recordings. 

The phrase "we'll fix it in the mix" was in my mind as I watched. The essence of Sound City as presented in the film was that it was a place of music creation, where humans interacted and enjoyed the process of making music together. This is something increasingly lost in the digital age, as the ability to create broadcast quality music is able to be done in isolation as an individual with a laptop and a pair of headphones. 

I enjoyed the reflection on how music should be a human experience. A live experience. 

Music should not be an exercise in tweaking and editing.

The same day I watched this film, I had a conversation with a friend about what seemed a completely separately matter. We were discussing Adobe Photoshop and how it is used i.e. those with little creative talent but with access to the tools can make an average image appear great. This parallels with the ability of a digital studio, via AutoTune, quantization, sampling, and endless multi-tracking to achieve a good result (to many ears) when the input itself may have been quite poor. 

Digital tools, when used considerately and with a creative vision, can be fantastic and achieve amazing things. However, technology should not replace creativity. 

In conversation with my friend today, I mentioned how I have moved away from processes of loop-based composition and data-based recordings, and returned to the increasingly niche musicology of recording live performance and getting the feel of the live recording right. Not a "fix it in the mix" mentality. 

I once sat down at a piano in a music store, only to have the owner of the store overhear me and comment "Oh, you're a real piano player". He had become used to the window-shoppers who liked to scroll through soundbanks and samples, and hear what the technology could offer them, rather than see what they could do with a responsive instrument. 

I do feel that playing live, by feel, and with others in a room is becoming increasingly uncommon. What do you think?

-
Paul Doolan provides online keyboard recording sessions for bands and solo artists. 
Want to add keyboards to your track? Learn more now. 

Today I was challenged by a good friend of mine asking an opinion on the video below, featuring a performance on dual Novation Launchpads. Specifically, he wondered whether or not I would consider this musicianship. 

My initial response was that I didn't see this performance as being any better an example of musicianship than computer gaming or typing at speed - given the extent of pre-programmed trigger sampling (to the point that chords are triggered in sequential rather than pitch order, see the pattern played in the first 16 seconds as an example).

My friend replied that he disagreed, stating that if the performer was merely pressing play on a sampling that he had programmed you could say he was a composer without musicianship. However, as the performer was playing it live, he didn't think it was fair to make sequential pitch the criterion for musicianship. 

I then responded that if rhythm, creativity and accuracy were all that I considered great musicianship, I'd agree. But this was a solo performance to a robotic tempo, with no live appointment of dynamic light and shade, improvisation, or real time pitch choice. I agreed that this was a skillful performance, and the outcome is music, but I struggled to consider the performance a great example of musicianship.

Now, that's the background. Since this friendly discussion I've considered this further. What's IS musicianship? Something about the term "musicianship" to me implies an ability to musically collaborate with others, outside of the self. But then I questioned myself - would I argue that a great solo acoustic guitarist, for example, was not displaying great musicianship when performing? No.

Then what was it...? Was I apprehensive about the sample-driven, high-tech nature of this solo performance? Did it lack a character or warmth I deemed necessary in an example of musicianship? 

I'm still not entirely sure. With the internet at my disposal, I wondered whether this uncertainty was a case of semantics. Did the answer lie in a dictionary definition of the word "musicianship"?

The first two results I found were as follows: :

The Free Dictionary: "skill or artistry in performing music"
Dictionary.com: "knowledge, skill, and artistic sensitivity in performing music"

It was something about this second definition which resonated with me - artistic sensitivity. There is something about a computerised tempo, pre-programmed samples, lack of dynamics, and overall "in the box" performance which lacks this sensitivy - that's what I feel is missing and essential to my own understanding of what it is to display musicianship. 

In saying all this, I appreciate that "musicianship" will mean many different things to different people. I can only conclude that it is as open to interpretation as the notes on a piece of sheet music. Two people could view the same input and read it and recite it different ways. 

What is your opinion?

-
Paul Doolan provides online keyboard recording sessions for bands and solo artists. 
Want to add keyboards to your track? Learn more now. 

When I first saw the Roli Seaboard keyboard I thought it was a glorified Haken Continuum. I thought to myself "I've been seeing Jordan Rudess of Dream Theater play something like this for years". 

The Seaboard is a new musical instrument that uses a soft-touch, custom-built, pressure-sensitive interface that allows players to manipulate the Seaboard Grand's sounds. As seen in the video demo from Roli below, the keyboard make all manner of modulations of the sound directly via the keys. 

This in itself is a lot like the Haken Continuum. However I did like the fact that the Seaboard follows a raised "black notes" layout, as opposed to the completely flat interface of the Continuum. 

I was also intrigued to find that Jordan Rudess, who according to Wikipedia is "a major proponent of the Continuum in contemporary music", is listed as "Head Of Music Experience" for Roli, developers of the Seaboard. 

It seems Rudess' instruments of choice will continue to evolve, as may the format of the traditional keyboard.