I'm sold on Blogging!

I'm sold on blogging.

What I didn't realize about blogging until I did it, is that it's a very self-indulgent experience. And who doesn't like some self indulgence from time to time?

Until recently, the publishing of “works” was typically reserved for people with credibility, but now everybody can do it, including me.

It's not necessary, but it's still pretty special when someone you know has read your work, and it's really cool when it can become a conversation piece.

It's not easy to write all the time, and really hard to be consistently interesting. So blogging has helped put that into perspective as well.

The MP3 file is your parent's digital audio format

The MP3 file is as old as the Bangles, the soap opera Dallas, and the first Friday the 13th movie.

I just did a bunch of research for a pretend essay that would compare and contrast the MP3 file to the CD. I've never been a fan of the MP3 and this research gave me even more reasons to believe that there are much better alternatives to what is now deemed "the worldwide standard" for music consumption (ISO 1991).

When people think about CD's they often associate them with the 80's. Well I got news for you, the audio compression technology that was first developed, and essentially resulted in the creation of the MP3 file, started in the 80's. You can now start associating the MP3 file with the already lengthy list of 80's memories, that includes hair metal, guitars that shoot lighting bolts out of the end, and cheesy mustaches, just to name a few. The point is that the MP3 is just as out of date as CD's are.

Let me be clear... I am all for the creation of the digital audio file. I do, however, take exception to the fact that the MP3 is the most popular type.

Technology has evolved to the point where it's not a burden for people to use uncompressed wave files (PCM), even for P2P sharing. If downloading wave files is inconvenient because it takes too much time, FLAC (stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an excellent alternative.

FLAC encoding technology compresses audio files using a “lossless” method that renders the file smaller, but without audio degradation. I believe it compresses the files at a 6:1 ratio, whereas an MP3 is compressed at a 10:1 ratio (and is not truly stereo separated). FLAC just sounds way better than MP3, and it's almost half the size of an uncompressed Wave file. To put that into perspective: a 4 minute song in MP3 format compressed at a sample and bit rate of 44.1-128 is approximately 5 megabytes (MB) in size. Which means that the Wave file is around 50 MB and the FLAC file would be around 8 MB.

Glaven!

I know most people can't tell the difference between MP3 files, CD's, or Wave files, but most people can't tell the difference between the "handling" of a BMW and a Buick, but that doesn't mean there isn't one, and that we shouldn't all want to drive BMW's if we could... Okay, so that's a terrible analogy. I don't even want a BMW.

The point is that, so long as you agree that the available technology makes downloading FLAC files just as convenient as MP3 files, than it serves to reason that the worldwide standard should be the newer, better technology.

In case you're not convinced about the FLAC file yet, this might help. FLAC is an open source file format, which means that you don't have to pay licensing fees to use it. So if you wrote a piece of software that has an audio component to it, you could use the FLAC source code and codecs without having to pay for it, and it's totally legit. OGG VORBIS is another example of an open source file format, and it too sounds better than MP3.

The MP3 was developed by a company called Fraunhofer (in conjunction with AT&T), and any company that has MP3 encoding technology built into the core of the product has to pay licensing to Fraunhofer (EG: Microsoft Windows, Apple operating systems, Pro Tools, Adobe Audition, essentially any application that can trans-code to and from the MP3 format etc...).

So even at a developmental level the FLAC file makes more sense. I hope that consumers smarten up and demand a higher standard of audio enjoyment. In this case, we can have both the convenience of digital audio (compact, portable, liquid), without sacrificing sonic quality.

I'm sure most people still don't care, cause they are listening to The Pussycat Dolls, and who the hell wants to listen to that in high fidelity?

Matthew Good Show Review

Matthew Good

Saturday November 21, 2009

Burton Cummings Theatre

Matthew Good keeps banter and frills to a minimum and lets tunes from his new album do the talking.

Good rolled into town to perform at the Burton Cummings Theatre on November 21^st with his band, comprised of guitarist Stuart Cameron, drummer Blake Manning and bass player Milos Angelov, in support of his latest CD, Vancouver.

The band took the stage at 8:30 PM sharp, and without so much as a greeting to the sold out crowd at the Burt, Good grabbed an acoustic guitar and began strumming the opening riff to the title track from his 2003 release, Avalanche.

The band performed a seamless transition from the melodic Avalanche to On Nights Like Tonight, an equally down-tempo and melodic track from his latest album. Blake Manning's backup vocals provided an added layer to the choruses of the tracks, helping to fill the void left by the missing keyboards that accompanied Good during his last performance at the Burt in June 2008.

Picking the level of energy up just slightly, Good switched to electric guitar and rocked through two more songs from his latest CD; Great Whales of the Sea and A Boy Who Could Explode. A third of the way into the set, he finally addresses the crowd with a humble, “How's everybody doing?”

The band kicked in to the uptempo radio hit, Born Losers, from the 2008 album Hospital Music, but continued with songs from their latest album; prompting some fans to holler requests for older songs, some dating back as far as 1995. Although be didn't oblige immediately, fans seemed happy to hear new tracks like Fought to Fight, and Silent Army in the Trees, which are reminiscent of Good's more anthem like tracks that helped propel his career.

After performing an extended version of the sombre track, Black Helicopter, the band switched gears to round out the set with a good mix of upbeat tracks both new and old, like Last Parade, Apparitions, Weapon and Volcanoes. The band returned to the stage for an encore, and performed the songs Giant, Us Remains Impossible and Empty's Theme Park.

Good's voice was powerful and captivating and showed no sign of strain, despite years of smoking and frequent throat issues; one of which involved a surgical procedure to remove a node from his throat. The band sounded tight, adding extended intros and outros to a few songs throughout the set.

Good's introverted on stage demeanor reflects the struggles he has had in recent years in his personal life, including a breakdown that landed him in a psychiatric institution and a split from his wife. Any other behavior from the self-described pessimist might seem contrived to his devout fans.

The biggest reaction Good received from the crowd of 1642 was at the end of the encore when he faced the crowd and applauded. The sincere gesture inspired the crowd into one last cheer before he disappeared behind a black curtain at the side of the stage.

Vancouver band, Mother Mother, opened up the night with their brand of dance-pop. The band performed a high energy set that included their latest single O My heart, the title track from their 2009 release.

Twitter: Not in my top 6, yet...

I'm still trying to decide if Twitter actually offers an alternative way for people to get information about people or things they are interested in. For years, people and companies that are worth "following" have had websites. There is also usually a ton of information about important people and topics published online by unofficial websites. So what's Twitter's USP?

As far as I can tell, it's the immediacy of receiving information. It's much easier to send a tweet than to update a website or wiki-page. Immediacy of transmitting information is something that until recently, radio was best known for.

Of course, the big problem with Twitter, unlike radio, is accountability. Where is the information coming from? There have been a few instances where imposters have used Twitter to slander or tarnish the reputation of important people; Chef Michael Smith for instance. Radio, however, uses typical journalistic practices to report on information, so people can generally trust it more.

I imagine that as Twitter progresses, administrators will improve the process by which they screen users, and in turn that might improve the quality and reliability of information that "followers" receive.

I have noticed that my group of friends have not embraced Twitter to the degree that they have embraced Facebook. But I think the services are quite different, so I'm not even sure it's relevant to compare the two.

When I boot up a web browser, like most people, I have a hit list of at least a half a dozen websites that I check routinely. I won't really give Twitter props until it can crack my top 6.

How my rock band changed Canadian law... sort of.

I was standing at my bus stop in front of the MTS center today and I saw a nice young lad putting up a poster on a pole. His technique was ok: he was using allot of tape and he was sure to cover the tops and bottoms of the posters (preventing edges from being exposed; edges that make ripping down posters quite easy). I remember when I was a poster rookie, and I used tape to fasten posters to poles. That was until I learned a more effective and somewhat more asinine method.

When my former rock band, the Velvet Pill, did a tour of southern Ontario, we brought along hundreds of posters. The posters were generic enough that they included a picture of the band and our website, but left a portion at the bottom completely blank so we had space to fill in specific concert information for each city/town.

We made our way east, through Dryden, Thunder Bay, North Bay, Ottawa and eventually ended up in Toronto. As soon as we got to town, we hit up Queen Street to start promoting our shows. A couple band members were in charge of bringing flyers to the two venues we were playing at later in the week, and the rest of us set off to put up posters.

We put up nearly 100 posters in the first day we there; which is an impressive feat even for experienced posterers (it’s my word, back off!).

The next day we went downtown to get a coffee and noticed that all of our posters had been taken down already. Even though we likely used a half a dozen rolls of tape, the posters were gone!

Later that day, while reapplying posters to essentially the same places we targeted the previous evening, we ran into a fellow who gave us a sound piece of advice: “You should use wallpaper compound, those damn things will never come down,” he suggested.

Still feeling pretty pissed off about having all of our posters ripped down, we drove to Mississauga immediately to find a hardware store that sold this mystifying compound. Sure enough, we found the stuff; it was a powder compound that simply needed to be mixed with water. Now we were rally excited to get postering. At this point, we didn’t even care about promoting our show; we just wanted to redeem ourselves.

So we spent the rest of that evening postering (and pub hopping, along Queen and Jarvis… cuz that’s what you do when you’re a naïve rock-star-wannabee and you’re in the T-Dot for good times). The technique worked great. Not only was it easier to apply posters to pretty much everything, but the posters were practically plastered to the poles… you’d need a steamer to get them down. We certainly felt a sense of redemption; and we had a shit load of that compound left over too.

The rest of our tour took us to London, Hamilton, Sudbury, back to Toronto (for reasons I won’t explain here) and then eventually back to Thunder Bay.

Our second stay in Thunder Bay on this tour was an extended one. You see, in order for us to be able to tour accross the country as an original rock band, we had to play covers in certain towns (usually for 3 or 4 day stints), in order to be able to eat, buy gas and shelter. On this particular tour, we were scheduled to play the Inn Towner as Pelvic Thrill (the cover band) from Thursday to Sunday (that’s not a typo, it’s a four day gig and Sunday is the big night at the Inn Towner). Our Velvet Pill show was scheduled for Tuesday night at the Apollo (God bless your hearts, the Apollo).

That meant that, aside from sitting in on classes for free at Lakehead University (which Jer and I did), or checking out Centerfolds (which Guy, Jon and Doug did), we had ample time to put up posters.

For those of you who are not familiar with Thunder Bay, Ontario, it’s not a big town. One might even say that it’s a small town.

We began postering the first day we got into town. This was the last show on the tour, so we figured that we would use up the rest of our posters. We figured that because Thunder Bay was so small, if we put up a ton of posters our band’s name would become a household one, and that eventually we would conquer T-Bay and then the world.

About a month after we returned home from said tour, we got an email from a town resident. It was an email informing us that as a result of our insane postering, a law had been passed that prohibited bands from putting up posters in public places, other than the pre-designated spots.

I’m sure they wanted to sue our asses, or at least put us in jail, but without a law in place, they had no book to throw at us (other than the T-Bay constitution; which I think only has one rule, and that is “you can’t kiss your sister on Sundays”… which they all break religiously).

As stupid and naïve as this sounds to me now, I was actually pretty proud. It was somehow an accomplishment that we had littered the town with hideous posters, creating such an eye soar for the people who actually had to live there.

The next time we played Thunder Bay, we played the Apollo and there was roughly 5 people there, including the bartender. Our super-awesome-shitty marketing campaign was clearly a flop… but I sure have a cool story to tell!!!

CreComm Hamper Drive Begins

To borrow a quote from the Christmas Cheer Board Website: "We would like to invite you to an exciting and personal approach to Christmas giving."

If you are a Creative Communications student at Red River College (whatever year) and you want to help feed a family at Christmas, here is your chance.

This year, not unlike previous years, CreComm students are sponsoring a family through the Winnipeg Christmas Cheer Board's hamper program.

We need your help!

We've got a box setup at the CreComm office (W302 Princess Street campus) where you can drop off non-perishable food items that are needed to fill the hamper.

There will be a list of items that are required located at the item drop spot, and we have provided a list on a Facebook group (below).

Both lists will be updated regularly as the hamper fills up.

We are going to kick start the effort by pledging our commitment to taking care of all the required perishable foods for the hamper (we doubt that the instructors and administrators want to work in an office with rotting milk, eggs and turkey and chicken carcasses).

Please pass this along to all of your CreComm friends. We only have until mid December to fill up the hamper.

Here is the list:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?v=info&gid=199263257632

Whether or not to use in-line compression or EQ

I can't count the number of times I've heard from music geeks that you should never use in-line compression when you are recording. There is a good argument to back up this suggestion; specifically, you can always compress audio after the fact, but if you record the compressed tones, you're stuck with them. Here are few reasons why I still use in-line compression.

First of all, the audio interface that I use is the Focusrite Octopre Platinum (which I use in conjunction with a Digidesign DIGI003). It has 8 discrete mic preamps, and on each Pre there is a soft-knee/hard-knee compressor. One of the main reasons I chose this particular interface was because it had in-line compression and "limiting" capabilities. (The compressor can be turned off if you choose not to use it.)


When I'm recording, I do like to use the compressors on the Focusrite unit because the compression adds character to tone of the audio. I don't even have to add much, and I start to hear differences in the overall character of the tones.

Another reason I like in-line compression is for the "head room" factor. When I'm recording something very dynamic, like a rock singer, it's nice to have the compressor on just a bit, so it gives me just a bit more head room in cases where the singer is belting it. The threshold of the compressor is what adds that extra bit of head room.

And if the singer does clip the channel, the limiter kicks in on the Focusrite unit and usually prevents the audio from clipping when it's recorded in Pro Tools.

I don't think there's enough compression on the track that I risk altering it to a point where I'm limited in mix down. Yet, during mix-down, I have to be mindful that the track has been compressed once already, so it's not over compressed if I add plug-ins later.

I would also use compression, to the full extent however, if I was renting high-end gear, like an Avalon 737SP. I usually only have the gear available for the tracking process, because renting high-end gear is expensive, so I typically take advantage of the compression on the Avalon while the audio is being tracked. In this case, I use the compressor very gently, just to gain some added head room and character.

I don’t use in-line EQ when I’m tracking; I don’t see the advantages. I think that proper choice of microphone and mic placement can help you get around EQ’ing in-line.