More Canadian Music Week

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Day 2: If you don't have anything nice to say...

Day 3: I finally got to see Bend Sinister at a place called Comfort Zone. I say finally because for over a year I shared a jam space with them while working with Marty Zylstra on various music projects, but of course that means we never were there at the same time, though based on the instrument setup I'd been curious about them from the start. They have a nicely curated modern-but-classic-rock glam-prog sort of sound, and as a keyboard player I am doubly interested in how they use various keyboard sounds in their very high-energy upbeat show. I'll be seeking them out again soon here in Vancouver, from where they also hail!

I think the main thing working against them was the venue they drew in the CMW stage lottery. The sound system there was quite good, I'm not sure how much of it was supplied by CMW - but Comfort Zone, while not quite shit-hole status, had too low a stage and almost no lighting, so any band playing there would have trouble shining, or even being seen. Also I walked by the bar several times while looking for the bar, because it was covered in signage hawking cigarettes, wristbands, glowsticks and other junk, I thought it was a merch booth (no taps??).

After CZ my mate Dan from The Record Room and I went to the Dakota Tavern - which somehow I forgot how much I love - to see a few more acts. I was happy to meet and see The Sumner Brothers, a band fronted by two Vancouver brothers that take turns sounding like Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen. Very laid back set from them, excellent songwriting and a very accomplished, intentional sound with a bit of that American roots twang (paired Strat and Telecasters, lovely.)

My personal highlight, however, was The National Parks from Utah. These guys were FANTASTIC! With keys, fiddle and acoustic guitar in the band the are well-placed in any mixtape alongside Lumineers, Mumford & Sons, Of Monsters & Men, etc - but they are no emulators. They have superb arrangements and songwriting, and they have crafted a sound and show that really shines. A five star pick. Look them up.

 

Sadly I probably won't get to see much else of CMW this year as I have to return to Vancouver to play my own shows this weekend. So many of the people I know are jsut getting into town for the week, I think they've been missing out!

Notes from Canadian Music Week

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‎CMW‬ Day 1 notables:

Caught the tail end of the set from Machines Géantes at the Central - most clearly described by three words in their bio: "riffs and fuzz." These Montrealers rocked out nice and loud on the little stage they had to work with, but were really groovy and fun. Kind of like a French Monster Truck.

Archie Powell & The Exports: WOW! These guys were fun. They swayed from a slightly more raucous Weezer all the way to the borderline rock crazies of the Vines or Jet. Five piece energetic rock from Chicago. They used every spare decibel The Piston had to offer. Super fun - and they're doing another set on Wednesday at Bovine Sex Club. Kickass.

Inspirations / Distractions – Gordon McGladdery

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There was a very inspiring and motivating post over at Designing Sound today from a great young sound designer who I've had the pleasure of getting to know via the Vancouver Sound Design meetups named Gordon McGlattery.

I’ve learned there is a distinct difference between hobbyist/personal inspiration and professional inspiration with deadlines and accountability.

I’ve lived through both and prefer the latter.

I enjoy insights into the journeys people in indie media have taken. They are often solitary journeys in which they have had to find their own support and drive. Gord's is a good one as he's had his hand in many awesome projects already!

You can follow Gord on Twitter at @ashellinthepit

TrueNuff Comic is updating!

I don't want to jinx it, but my team at TrueNuff Comic (most notably artist Threeboy) has been very productive of late and is putting out regular comics again!

Writing with my friends and having Threeboy realize the final drafts is a super satisfying experience. Producing comedy is such a joy. Taking the silly events of our regular lives and turning them into wacky cartoon adventures is so much fun, especially when we get the greatest emails of all time: fan mail!

There are many way to subscribe to TrueNuff Comic, or just check in regularly at www.truenuff.com

The Unwonted Sasquatch

A friend of mine who recently finished a round of crowd-funding to wrap up production on a years-long passion project of his about the cryptozoological phenomenon known as (many names, including) Sasquatch reached out recently because he wanted to re-master his final cut for submission to film festivals.

The film festival business has always interested me since a previous film I worked on, Kayfabe (2007), was a contender in many indie film festivals and won a handful of trophies (woo hoo!). Today, it's a much easier process to submit - there are services like Withoutabox which, as long as you have the festival submission fees handy (not a new phenomenon), allow you to easily submit to the big banner film festivals and the niche festivals that suit your style of film-making best. It's a brilliant yet elegant solution to the challenges for filmmakers to get their creations in front of interested audiences.

At any rate, the work Darcy (Weir, the director) and I did was brisk, essentially he had no sound post done in the final cut he had released to his crowd-funding backers and so we we able to put the multi-track into the edit and make some repairs, re-mix various scenes and interviews and add some voice-over. There was also a bit of music added and remixing of tracks he had acquired from producers Lee Lustig and Trevor Browne. It was a real trip.

You can see Darcy's Kickstarter page here or visit his website at Occult Journeys.

 

Don't fear the REAPER

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(note: I am fully aware that the majority of blog entries on this topic share the same article title)

There is so much to learn about REAPER!  The scrappy DAW alternative that has been slowly building is reputation over the last 10 years is so incredibly modular, customizable and flexible that to go into it without having a goal in mind of how you want it to work for you is almost counter-productive. It's best to bend it to your will, to mould it in the image of the DAW you want it to be, the DAW you'd like to use.

There are plenty of useful (and some not terribly useful) resources but I can't see anything more valuable or educational that Jon Tidey's The Reaper Blog with articles, tutorials and inks to workshops and personalized training - it's the gateway to a community of power users that revel in sharing their expertise. It's worth any price, and secondary to buying yourself a proper REAPER license (which is kinda sorta not totally necessary but HOT DAMN should you ever do it - SUPPORT)  it is wholly deserving of a contribution to the tip jar. Jon was good enough to visit a meetup I attended at the Centre For Digital Media a few weeks ago and do an intro talk to REAPER. He's an excellent sales pitch and makes it all seem very accessible.

And who doesn't like a good acronym? 

REAPER: a Rapid Environment for Audio Production, Engineering, and Recording. 

Heh. Sure.

Location Sound: Get It Right The First Time

I have had a limited run in production sound (working on set) but have almost always been in the post-production seat or team of those projects. This has taught me the tradeoff in time it takes to get the sound on-site correct (or as good as it can be) vs. the amount of time to fix in post-production. 

The understanding is that on large productions, doing another take of a particularly large set-up means that much more time to pay the talent, camera department, support teams, craft, the location and also push back whatever is next on the shooting schedule, and that time x all those people and costs adds up fast. Directors often check with big-"s" Sound if they got what they needed and then weigh the possibility of recreating the best take with the best sound against hoping it can be repaired in post-production, either with edits from other takes, angles or looped in new recording. Having a budget helps, even if it is frustrating for the sound editor to receive all this beautifully shot and executed footage with completely unusable soundtracks. That's business...

 

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Pro Tools: First and 12 (Not about football)

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Pro Tools has announced that the new Pro Tools 12 will have another new edition: Pro Tools | First.

Some people may remember the last time Pro Tools did this in the year 2000 (cue Conan O'Brien) with Pro Tools Free (v5.01). The Mac version worked relatively well and the Windows Me version... well it was a Windows Me version. It did, however, let me learn how to use Pro Tools and allowed my university (which no longer exists, so I can admit our possible breach-of-user-agreement without fear) to put a copy on every computer in our lab giving all the prospective sound geeks continuous access to Pro Tools.

Pro Tools | First seems to take a similar approach (back then it was by Digidesign, before Avid bought and since re-coded the entirety of the software) but can be confident of their improved cross-platform performance. Also, it should give them a good opportunity to load-test their new cloud-based project storage system, which is a new feature of the version 12 family. If that became widely used before they iron all the bugs out, they'd only have to lose a couple of big projects before the flaming bags of poo started to fly.

In talking with several other Sound Designers at our Vancouver Sound Designers meetup over the weekend however, the prospect of the new pay-per-month licencing system unsurprisingly has a lot of people turned off; and in some cases downright livid. Discussions immediately turn to what systems current users are thinking of switching to. 

While a monthly licence fee has been gaining ground in the professional media development world (See: Adobe Creative Cloud) and the costs can even be less in some cases for staying up-to-date, it's a daunting prospect for the independent / small-time designers that perhaps only upgrade every-other version or stay behind because, say, they spent $5000 on a digital console that still works perfectly fine but for some reason the new version decides to not support any longer (what do you mean that one sounds personal?)

Contenders around the bar table were Nuendo, Cubase, Logic and REAPER, that last one being new to me but apparently a choice pick (and also there was a brief ironic mention of Audition CC). Different users all seemed to argue the strengths of their favourite over the others, but the prime concerns in switching from Pro Tools generally seemed to be: Keeping your plugins, not having to get an additional hardware licence, and most importantly being able to preserve your workflow. That last one is a challenge because of course because everybody uses their DAW differently, from Old Habits That Die Hard to codependence on other external softwares (I personally can't imagine removing Sony's Sound Forge from my toolkit, I know and love it so well).

A lot of the early emotional reaction to this seems to be that someone else will come and take the lead among the defiant who don't want to be held to a monthly contract - but how many will cave and just add "software" to their monthly operating costs?

Pro Tools 12 is expected to be released in summer of 2015.

How to hide a lavalier mic

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I found lav mics to be the best and worst things when shooting entertainment. I love them for close up sound, the versatile wireless set-and-forget functionality and dynamic range, but the few ways I knew worked for hiding them were sometimes problematic and usually awkward. Usually it involved some method of taping the mic to the inside of the actor's shirt (which you could usually see the tape from the outside) or right to the chest of the actor (I've ripped more chest hair off of strangers than a first-year esthetician). Then, of course, when working with performers of a female persuasion, I get all stammery and sweaty (not because of any problem on their part, they're always pros) but where else would the best place to hide a lav mic on a lady be, than... right... in.. front?

At any rate, once again No Film School has found me the expert tips that I could've used long ago in the guise of one IzzyVideo.

I look forward to having a better relationship with these little sound ninjas in the future! Thanks fellas!

Basics of audio post-production

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No Film School shared a video created by the brains at Filmmaker IQ on The Fundamentals of Sound in Post Production. It does a good job of introducing the basic tools that sound editors and mixers use to work with production audio (it doesn't really go into any track-editing tricks, just mixing tools.)

At first I thought it was a little too basic because host John Hess does spend a lot of time on EQ (which of course, as the fundamental sound modifying tool, other than volume, I thought everybody already knows)  but he does a great job of explaining what all the tools are, how they work and how they can be used. He covers EQ, Compression, Limiters, FFT and noise reduction and even some time-adjustment stuff like delay, chorus and reverb.

It's time to open up the digital audio workstation and look at the basics of common tools used in post production audio from Equalizers, Compressors, Noise Reduction, and Delay effects.

One Of Us: Episode 3

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Episode 3 went live quite some time ago, I am posting about this now, as this is the new blog page!

Billy The Kid is a long-suffering touring performer of which a great many wonderful and complimentary things have been said, particularly in the year or so since this podcast went up since her latest album has been released to much friendly acclaim and she has been performing all around Europe and North America with the likes of Chuck Ragan, Northcote and Billy Bragg when she's not hanging out with the likes of Ryan Adams and Frank Turner (stories within!)

Please enjoy the attached interview with Billy, and check out her latest record (referred to within) at billythekidonline.com!

One Of Us is available on iTunes

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades by Billy the Kid is available on iTunes

One Of Us: Episode 2

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Episode 2 is now up, with what is arguably (audience wise, certainly) the most successful creative project I've been involved in to date: TrueNuff TV!

Moze, James, Cranston and I reminisce about the genesis of the project PRE-YOUTUBE (yes, there was a time) and what going viral is like (or was like back in 2006 before CNN ever learned what the term meant.)

There's a lot of talk about learning by doing, learning by doing the wrong thing, and learning by going along with other people when they assume you know what you're doing. The key lesson here is doing, which is something that when left to my own devices I forget.

These guys, plus Brando & Rob from TrueNuff Comic (Episode 1) have been my closest collaborators and and strongest supporters (and harshest critics) for too long now to fathom. I would be happy knowing that I would get to continue working on fun projects with these guys, even if the final product never got seen by anyone.

Hope you enjoy!

Also, One Of Us is now available via iTunes.

One Of Us: Episode 1

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New project! I'm now venturing into the podcast realm with a new series called "One Of Us" - a discussion with an in-group of people so you can get inside! That makes sense, right?

The first episode is with my longest-running creative endeavour of TrueNuff Comic, which just turned 12 (YEARS OLD!). As this was my first one, I'm learning the challenges of the mix and directing the conversation (animated discussion among friends turns into a lot of talking over each other) but I'm happy with how it turned out! I'm hoping to get a feed on iTunes soon and the new website www.oneofuspod.com is still updating but should be online in a day or two one the name records on the domain server update.

Feedback is much appreciated! Listen now at One Of Us.

Correlation does not imply causation

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I had to laugh - the day after I decide to try talking more about what I'm doing to keep me going, I read a short article about a long-standing premise that people who talk about what they're doing are less likely to actually to the thing.

Lifehacker: Shhh! Keeping Quiet May Help You Achieve Your Goals

Am I worried this will hinder me? No. It seems like they're saying that it's a personality type that does one and the other, not that the sharing of your intentions makes you less likely to complete them.

Also, I'm not entirely confident my brain functions like a normal person's anyway.

World building

Grandview-Woodlands, Vancouver, BC, Canada
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Things have been comatose around the blog of late. I wanted this to be central to the creative projects I’m working on so that’s pretty indicative of how things have been recently- but I’m going to start the development of my next ‘Thing.”

I’ve been playing with the idea mentally for about a year now without any real development. I think everybody has “that idea” that they always think they’ll do someday and I’ve had a lot of those, some which I forget about and others that just get old and are no longer interesting. Everything I’ve read from people who actually get pen to paper to write say that the important is to actually get down to it, whether your idea is “ready” or not- so I want to start getting this one out while I still have the means to do so.

Here’s my project outline (reserving the right to change any of it later!)

  • “Radio drama” style production
  • Episodic format, (one story per episode but a longer story arc per season)
  • Styled in a type of neo-noir detective story
  • Hopefully I can make it funny too, but it may not be purely comic.

Anyway, I’m starting a development phase to get the ideas refined. I was linked to a great blog post on Pinterest via Marsha of WhyTheFace. I thought it looked like fun and a good way to get the ball rolling while I get set up in my new Vancouver home with a productive space, so I've signed up and am using it for building a kind of idea-board space. In the coming weeks I'm planning on trying to formalize some of the structure of the first stories, and I hope to go to a bulletin board and cards system to try breaking it. 


No, I've never done any of this before. No I'm not sure how to do it. But I'll let you know how it goes!


Until then: Pinterest: Defiant Robot

Toronto, it's not you, it's me.

Hey, Toronto.

I would’ve liked to have told you this face-to-face, but I guess it’s just easier to write you. I don’t think we should see each other anymore.

You’re great, really. It’s just that I don’t think it’s going to work out. When we first met, things were great: all was new, we went on some crazy adventures- it was exactly what I needed at the time. So much potential. Now though, I don’t think things have changed so much as the more we learn about each other the less of a chance you and I really have. We don’t click.

You’ve done a lot for me, I’ll admit. You got me into doing shows again, taught me the power of a community of super-talented and smart people. And you have the coolest friends! I’ve met the greatest people through you, and though I think they’ll probably side with you in the split, I’m hoping they’ll still keep in touch. Also, thanks for getting me that job.

The thing is I just don’t see us together long-term. Your style and mine are ultimately incompatible and though it sounds cold it does sadden me to rationalize it so. I wish I were more flexible, I do! But if I don’t follow my heart/guts/cojones, well then anytime we fight and let each other down I’m just telling myself “I told you so!”

It's... well it's Vancouver. We've always been close and yeah, I've been seeing Vancouver a little bit here and there and I guess I never really got over it. We just work so well together. I’m a west coast boy. I need greens and blues, I need my temperate climate and my buckets of rain. My family’s almost all there, and I never get to see my old friends anymore… I know, I’m making excuses. The basic underlying theme is that I’ve never felt any sense of permanence in this whole thing, and I think it’s time for me to move on. I know you’ll be fine without me. Maybe after some time has passed we can still hang out.

You’ll always have a special place in my heart.

Love, J.Rai

P.S. I hope it's okay if I stick around for a few more months while I find a new place.

Today's existential crisis

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Usually when I start into a train of thouhht like this, I start to worry I'm going to blow a blood vessel in my brain because it just starts to feel like feedback. What follows is a chat session I had after my lunch break today. I figure a transcript is as good as re-writing it.

 
me: What a great lunch-walk.

Nat: Where did you go?

me: Just through Trinity Square, to the bank and back.

I overheard some middleschoolers discussing ESP and karma and then I had my own existential crisis and now I can't stop smiling.

Nat: Tell me about your existential crisis! I feel like it could make my day (Not the crisis aspect.)

me:  Well there were three middleschoolers, girls walking behind me chattering away.

As we passed a psychic reading place, one iof them asked "Do you believe in ESP?" and the other two responded "yeah" without hesitation.

Then before the end of the block one of them said "Karma!" about something I don't remember.

And I thought it was funny being at the age where you just believe those things because... I guess you want to, or you don't question things or whatever.

Then I thought about my own list of things like that I would create in order of descending believeability, putting ESP above Karma

And then I thought about where God would go on that list, the very top or the very bottom

Because if you put God in there then you must credit God with the creation of teh universe, which I don't

So if you eliminate that, then there's just the universe's natural existence

But why does the universe exist?

And why does anything exist at all?

Like, why is there... anything?

There could literally be nothing anywhere at all on any plane of existence.

In any dimension.

At all.

Why is there stuff?

But

There IS stuff.

There are quarks and atoms and waves of energy and as a result there are these three middle school girls, on a School day, at 1 pm, with a skate board and rollerblades in downtown Toronto having some little personal adventure

Or just a ditch day

And I get to wear a polyester sweater and use the internet.

And go outside and the wind blows in my face.

And that's pretty sweet.

Nat: Exeunt.