I attended a showcase last night at the Cutting Room in NYC for a really awesome new singer named Ryan Shaw. His music is old-style soul and he just belts it out. His material is really catchy, his stage presence is very good, and his voice is awesome–very rangy and powerful.

He was accompanied by a 5-piece band, which only had 3 instrumentalists: a solid drummer; a bass player named “Tiny” who was about 6′5″ and grooved steadily on a 5-string throughout (and then blew away the audience with a virtuosic slapping-and-popping solo); and a guitarist who played lots of little three-and-four-note, high-voiced chords that were a throwback to Stax and Steve Cropper. The other two band members were male background singers who provided harmonies and counterpoint to Shaw’s vocal stylings.

Shaw’s CD will be coming out on Columbia in early April. Definitely watch for this guy, he has the talent to really go places. I’m also glad to see a resurgence in old-style soul music (check out James Hunter who’s another soul revivalist). Shaw will be touring soon with Robert Randolph, so check him out.

I read an interesting story this morning on MSNBC‘s Web site. It was written by a reporter who made the switch from Mac OS X to Windows Vista. You might enjoy reading about his experience. Just don’t skip to the end, though, or you’ll spoil the surprise ending. The URL is http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16873608/

One of the high points of last weekend‘s NAMM show was a concert by the Tony Levin Band. Tony Levin is one of the most sought-after bassists in the world. He has recorded with such luminaries as Pink Floyd and John Lennon, and he spent many years as a key member of Peter Gabriel‘s band and of King Crimson. The outstanding musicians he‘s played with are literally too numerous to mention. He‘s also well known for his mastery of the Chapman stick, and he‘s one of my musical heroes.

The band played on Friday night at the Clarion Anaheim Resort, a hotel just down the street from the Anaheim Convention Center. Passes were free from beyerdynamic. The Orangewood Ballroom in which the stage was set was almost too small to accommodate the standing-room only crowd that was lucky enough to catch the performance.

Another Peter Gabriel alumnus, Larry Fast, has been part of Levin‘s band since it began in 2000. He held down stage left, playing a Kurzweil 2661. Fast is probably best known as the pioneering recording act Synergy, who had a run of electronic music success in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Once upon a time, he was a regular contributor to EM, and in 1986 he wrote the foreword to my second book, The Rock Synthesizer Manual.

Also on keyboards, stage right, was Tony‘s brother Pete Levin, whose playing credits range from Gil Evans to Korn. Like Fast, he has been part of the Tony Levin Band since its inception. Jesse Gress, a member of Todd Rundgren‘s band for ten years and the Tony Levin Band since 2001, proved his mastery of the Fender Stratocaster. I was especially pleased to see and hear Jerry Marotta on drums. He was a member of Peter‘s Gabriel‘s band beginning with the latter‘s first solo album. Marotta has played with Paul McCartney, the Indigo Girls, Sarah McLachlan, and others too numerous. He‘s another of my musical heroes.

The concert began with an impressive set by Marotta Griesgraber, a duo consisting of Marotta and virtuoso stick player Tom Griesgraber. The music was genuinely amazing, and the audience definitely dug it. It was almost difficult to believe that so much sound came from a duo performing live. With its complex textures and intelligent rock arrangements, Marotta Griesgraber won over many converts.

Then came the main act. The Tony Levin Band took to the stage with a barbershop quartet composed especially for NAMM, followed by “Break It Down,” the opening track from their latest album, Resonator. The band rocked their way through most of that album‘s songs and eventually included Peter Gabriel‘s “On the Air,” King Crimson‘s “Sleepless,” Synergy‘s “Phobos,” and “Back in N.Y.C” from the 1974 Genesis album, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, all of which members of the band had played on the original recordings.

Todd Rundgren joined them onstage about halfway into the set, whipping the crowd into a frenzy with a few of his hits, and then left the stage. He returned again for the encore, for which he sang a rousing version of the Call‘s 1984 cult hit, “The Walls Came Down.”

The evening‘s music certainly met my expectations, which were very high to begin with. A splendid time was had by everyone present. Unfortunately, the Tony Levin Band was so loud that from my position near the front of the audience, their entire performance was audibly distorted. Nonetheless, the concert was an experience I will remember for a very long time.

I just got back from NAMM, where–along with a lot of new gear (look for a full report soon on emusician.com)–I saw a cool Pro Tools trick for adding color to the parts of the Mix and Edit windows that are normally gray. (Please send me a comment if you’ve already heard of this.) According to Digidesign, this is not an official Pro Tools feature, but rather an “Easter Egg” put in by one of their programmers. However, they think it’s a cool thing, and had this feature turned on in all of the sessions I saw open at the Digi booth.

I tried this in Pro Tools LE v. 7.3, and I know that it works in the latest version of HD as well. I’m not sure about earlier versions. I tried it on a Mac, but I assume it also works in Windows XP versions of Pro Tools, although I haven’t had a chance to try it yet (the keys to press would be slightly different, obviously).

Here’s how you do it: open the Color Palete, hold down the command, option, and control keys, click inside any color, and then drag your mouse upward. You’ll see all the tracks fill in with color corresponding to their original color selections. The higher your drag the mouse, the more instense the colors. If you decide you want to revert to normal, drag downward. Turning the colors on is global, and will affect all of your session files. Turning it off will do the same.

This shows parts of the Mix and Edit windows,side by side, with the colors turned on.

It has been two months since I first complained here that iTunes 7 wouldn‘t let you view or delete podcasts located on your first-, second- or third-generation iPod. Since then, Apple has done nothing to remedy the problem, and I‘ve been unable to find any third-party utilities that would do the trick.

In “Trouble in Paradise, Part 1,” I suggested that the only obvious solutions were to reformat your iPod–which I was unwilling to do–or remove iTunes 7 from your computer and reinstall iTunes 6. Weary of waiting for another solution, I decided this morning that the time had come to revert to iTunes 6. As I soon discovered, though, deleting iTunes 7 was easier said than done.

Because Apple doesn‘t provide a utility for removing iTunes 7 from your Mac, you need to manually:

1) Delete iTunes from /Applications.

2) Delete iTunes.pkg, iTunesX.pkg, and iTunesPhoneDriver.pkg from /Library/Receipts.

3) Delete com.apple.iTunes.plist from /Users/[name]/Library/Preferences.

4) Move your iTunes folder from /Users/[name]/Music to another location.

5) Restart your Mac and empty the Trash.

6) Download iTunes 6.0.5 installer from Apple and run the installation.

If you try to install iTunes 6 without taking the prior steps, when you reach the installer‘s Easy Install step, it will say, “You cannot continue. There is nothing to install.” If you choose Customize, all the installation options will be grayed out, and the only action displayed will be Skip.

After iTunes 6 is installed:

7) Run iTunes and connect your iPod to view its contents. (Don‘t worry that iTunes will indicate there‘s no music on your computer‘s hard disk.)
Delete the podcasts from your iPod‘s Music Library (finally!).

9) Quit iTunes and update iTunes to version 7.

10) Replace your iTunes folder back into /Users/[name]/Music.

If you replace your original iTunes folder before you update to iTunes 7, iTunes 6 will say, “The file ‘iTunes Library‘ cannot be read because it was created by a newer version of iTunes.” If you don‘t replace it after the update, iTunes will lose track of your music library‘s contents, and rebuilding it could take a very long time.

If someone (preferably Apple) comes up with a more elegant solution, I‘ll be grateful. In the meantime, I‘m unlikely to listen to podcasts on my iPod again, knowing how difficult it will be to remove them. That‘s a real same, because I really preferred listening to podcasts on my iPod to listening to them on my Mac.

My main recording drive failed on me this weekend. It was only a couple of months old. Although I am pretty fanatical about backing up, it croaked in between the time I recorded a session on it (on Saturday afternoon), and when my automatic backup was scheduled (1 AM on Sunday morning). As a result, I lost the entire session. Ugh!

This has caused me to rethink my backup strategy, which relied too much on those daily automatic backups. Although I’ll continue to have the software perform automatic backups once a day, I’m also going to run a manual backup at the end of every session. Had I done so Saturday when my session finished, I wouldn’t have lost a day’s work.

This incident also reinforced to me the utter fragility and unpredictable nature of hard drives, in general. The drive that went down had a name-brand mechanism and should have lasted several years, not a couple of months. Needless to say, it’s under warranty and will be replaced by the manufacturer. However, it goes to show that you should never depend on the reliability of your drive, and you should always backup, preferably as soon as you’ve finished recording.

For more on backup strategies, see the article “Better Safe than Sorry,” in the May, 2006 issue of EM.

As I write this, it‘s late Thursday night, and soon it will be Thursday morning. I‘m on a plane over the Pacific Ocean, fast approaching the International Date Line, typing away on my notebook computer and probably keeping the Brazilian turn-signal salesman sitting beside me awake. My 70-hour visit to Japan has been glorious and all too brief, but I look forward to returning home. I‘ll arrive in Charlotte on Thursday afternoon, of course.

Wednesday was the second and final full day that Korg hosted an international group of MI-industry journalists and distributors, many (including yours truly) visiting Japan for the first time. Japanese companies have a reputation for being very private about how they run their businesses, and Korg has demonstrated genuine corporate bravery by breaking the mold and letting so many outsiders have a protracted peak behind the curtain. I had a chance to bond with product reviewers and editors from the U.K., Italy, China, Australia, and several other countries I can‘t remember at the moment (though I‘ve asked Korg to send me a list). The other two U.S. magazine editors were my friends Ernie Rideout from Keyboard and Craig Anderton from EQ, Harmony Central, et al. The entire group stayed at the Century Hyatt Tokyo, a hotel I can easily recommend if you ever find yourself in the Shinjuku district and in need of comfortable lodging.

After breakfast at the hotel, the group gathered for our second bus ride to Korg HQ. Once back in the presentation room surrounded by top-secret gear, we spent the morning asking questions and getting answers about the wealth of new products Korg will publicly unveil on January 18. Until then, however, we are all sworn to secrecy. Like the previous day, Jerry Kovarsky and John McCubbery led the session (after all, it was those two guys who dreamed up and planned this mass invasion). The only two products I can tell you about right now are the MR-1 and MR-100 1-Bit Mobile Recorders, which made their debut at the AES show in October. The MR-1 has just begun production and is expected to be available in the U.S. in February, with the MR-100 following soon thereafter. I suppose I could also tell you that I wanted to own literally every new product I saw.

Korg‘s original plan was to set up interviews with selected employees immediately after the Q&A. I expected that would be my best opportunity to record conversations I could post on emusician.com as podcasts. I was hoping to interview some instrument-design engineers and members of Korg‘s international synth-voicing team about the product-development cycle–for example, exactly what are the stages leading to a new synthesizer‘s introduction? (And lest you think I‘m hinting that one new product is a synth, I planned the questions before I arrived in Tokyo, and I had no idea what I was going to see.) I had all my questions ready, and I also wanted to learn more about 1-bit recording. Unfortunately, the Q&A ran long, and Korg had planned too many activities to fit into a single day. As soon as the Q&A was over, it was time to get back on the bus and begin a guided tour of Tokyo. Mr. Katoh, the founder of Korg and our illustrious host, joined us on the bus for the remainder of the day.

Our first stop was a lunchtime banquet at an American-themed restaurant serving Japanese food and called, oddly enough, Christmas. Afterwards, we journeyed across town to visit an ancient Buddhist temple called Senso-ji. During the trip, our tour guide pointed out various Tokyo landmarks such as the full-size Japanese version of the Eiffel Tower called Tokyo Tower. And even though the area leading up to the Buddhist temple was full of small shops selling tourist trinkets, the temple itself was pretty cool and I enjoyed taking photos. It was raining and beginning to get dark by the time we reached our next destination, a sprawling and brightly lit shopping district called Electric City. It was just how I‘d always pictured downtown Tokyo from what I‘d seen in movies, like something from Bladerunner but all shiny and new. Every kind of consumer electronics, software, music, and movies were being sold. Our tour guide gave the group an hour to go exploring on our own. I ended up in a store selling new and used MIDI gear, but nothing tempted me to take it home.

I hadn‘t even finished digesting my lunch when it was time for dinner, the grandest feast of all. Words could barely describe such a cross-cultural culinary experience; suffice it to say that two master chefs were also the entertainment and the servers, thanks in part to their loud shouting and long paddles on which they could balance food and drinks from seven or eight feet away (if anyone is interested, let me know and I‘ll upload some photos and video clips that captured the moment). I‘ll say one thing about the Japanese: they sure know to throw a party and make their guests feel welcome. Many thanks to Korg for showing us all a very good time and patiently answering all our questions about products past, present, and future.

Oh, and about all those new products I can‘t tell you about? Let’s just say that next month’s NAMM show will be particularly exciting for Korg and its customers. I promise to spill the beans about everything on January 18, so stay tuned and don‘t forget to climb back on The Bus.

I‘m writing this from Japan, where 14 journalists and an equal number of musical-instrument distributors from around the world have gathered at the invitation of Korg. We spent yesterday visiting Korg‘s impressive new facility in the outskirts of Tokyo. After a short bus ride and a brief tour of the building (the lower floor of which contains a museum of Korg instruments from the annals of history), we settled down to a full day of new-product presentations, directed by Korg USA‘s Jerry Kovarsky and Korg International‘s John McCubbery. Also taking part in the presentation were Korg USA‘s Jack Hotop, along with additional members of Korg‘s international sound-design team and several in-house developers from Korg Japan. This is the first time Korg has staged an event like this, and it‘s going very well.

I‘m pretty excited about most of these new products, and I‘d like to share news of them with you, but I‘m sworn to secrecy until they are introduced at January‘s NAMM show. Today the journalists will have a chance to do a question-and-answer session with Korg employees. I‘ll be flying back home to Charlotte on Thursday, and you can expect to read (and hear, and see) some of the results of today‘s sessions after I‘ve returned. In the meantime, Korg has us on a tight schedule, so I‘d better be going now.

Sometimes in the rush of doing projects and generally being busy, it’s hard to have perspective about how you’ve set things up, and how you function in your studio. But over the Thanksgiving weekend, I had a little more time than normal to muse about those issues, and I realized that there were a number of things I was doing inefficiently.

For one, I was not using sequencer templates. Because of my job, I have to work in a number of different sequencers, and I was wasting a lot of time setting up tracks and auxes and so forth each time I started a project. I even had a couple of occasions where I accidentally started a project with my sequencer set to 16-bit rather than 24-bit resolution–a distressing thing to discover once you’ve already started recording. I know that using templates is a better way to go, and I used to have them setup for my various programs. But after having to trash preferences in one app, and reinstalling another, I no longer have my templates available, and haven’t found the time to set them up again.

I also took a closer look at how I had my outboard gear setup and saw some ways to improve things. (Yes, I still have some outboard gear, although mostly input-related devices like mic pres.) For one thing, my PODxt was sitting on a rack shelf where I couldn’t easily see its display, and it was too far from my patch bay. So I moved it to a more convenient location atop the back of my keyboard controller. In retrospect it was an obvious change to make, but in the heat of working I hadn’t thought of it.

Probably the most annoying part of my studio, though, is its constant state of clutter. Because it also functions as my office for my EM work, and it’s where I keep all my financial records and files, it’s an ongoing challenge to keep it from looking like a complete disaster. Cables are strewn about (despite what seems like a never-ending effort to coil them up and put them away), papers–especially the dreaded Post-it Notes–litter my desktop, my shelves are overflowing with books, and there are instruments all around.

Could I do a better job of organizing? Yes. Do I have time? No. I kind of feel like one of those old cartoon characters with the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. The angel is saying, “A clean and well set up studio is a more efficient place to work.” The devil is saying, “Screw that, just start recording. “

Well, at least I do think about it constantly, and try to improve things where possible. I will go on record with an early New Year’s resolution to try extra hard to make my studio a leaner, meaner, more efficient place to work. As the devil on my shoulder might say, “Yeah right.”

I teach an introductory course on recording at a local college, and the days I cover microphones are always the most exciting for the students. Because the course is set up around Digidesign Pro Tools and a 2-channel Mbox, I spend one of the class sessions on recording a drum set using 1- and 2-mic configurations.

The plan is not to teach them the correct way to record drums, but to give them the critical tools needed to find the correct way. The sound an engineer looks for depends on a variety of factors, such as the drum kit, the recording environment, and the song.

A bonus is that this lecture demonstrates how different each model of microphone sounds when used on the same instrument — drums are the perfect subject for mic comparisons. It’s an opportunity to break down expectations, especially when the students have preconceived notions about particular mics.

First, I create a Pro Tools session with a click track and ask a student to play a simple drum beat using hi-hat (or cymbal), kick, and snare. I ask the drummer to play the same beat for several takes, and I change mics and their positions after each. Typically, I start with one mic placed a couple of feet in front of the kit, about waist high. Next, I may set up a stereo pair a few feet in front and above the kit. Next, I’ll place one mic on the snare and one on the kick drum. Which mics I use for each setup depends on what the students are interested to hearing.

When we listen back to all the takes, I selectively mute and solo various mics to hear how they color the sound of the drums. The results are always an ear opener–even for me.

This semester, I brought in some extra mics–a prototype of the omnidirectional Rode NT55 and a Joemeek JM27–and compared them to what the school already has in its mic cabinet (which includes a Neumann TLM 103, a pair of AKG C 1000s, an AKG C 3000, and a Studio Projects T1 tube mic, among others). And, of course, we have pairs of the most widely used dynamic microphones in the world, the Shure SM57 (still in production after 40 years) and SM58.

With a frequency response of 40 Hz to 15 kHz (+/- 10 dB), and more than a 5 dB rise around 6.5 kHz, the SM57 is tailor made for recording certain instruments, such as drums. (Come to think of it, except for the frequency bump, the SM57’s overall frequency response resembles that of many ribbon mics. Interesting…) Nonetheless, this ubiquitous transducer often gets a bad rap, probably because, at some point, nearly everyone has worked with a beat up SM57 running through a cheap preamp onstage or in a studio.

It’s interesting to compare the reaction of the students when they first hear the SM57 as a snare mic to when they hear it again after listening to other mics in the same position. The SM57 offers a band-limited, controlled “thonk” that says Rock Snare Drum like few other microphones do. However, this time around, we found placement was also critical: about four or five inches back from the snare head, rather than right on top of it, gave us the best snare sound, considering the dead acoustics of the classroom.

With an SM57 on the snare and the dynamic portion of the Audio-Technica AT2500 dual-capsule mic on the bass drum, we captured a tight and punchy drum sound. That was a pleasant surprise, because in the room, the kick was boomy and had a long ring to it. We were recording an 18-inch bass drum that had both heads on it, with no opening in the front head and no internal dampening. Not your typical rock bass-drum sound.

On the other hand, the TLM 103 (placed waist high a few feet in front of the bass drum) gave us a wonderfully live and balanced full-kit sound that would be perfect for a jangly pop song or a big-beat rap sample. The overall vibe was reminiscent of Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life.” And it took us only five minutes to set up.

But I keep thinking about the much maligned SM57 and how versatile it can be in the studio. I recently edited Michael Cooper’s “Six String Strategies,” the December 2007 cover story about recording acoustic guitar. In it, a couple of the engineers he interviewed suggested that the SM57 would work well on acoustic guitar in certain situations.

For example, world-class engineer Richard Dodd noted that an SM57 “only sounds like an inexpensive microphone when it‘s paired with an inexpensive preamp. You pair it with an extremely sensitive, musical preamp, like a Telefunken V76 or Neve 1073, and the balance of the two is a wonderful thing to be heard.” (Dodd’s credits include engineering and mixing for Johnny Cash, George Harrison, Green Day, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, and Sheryl Crow, among many others. In other words, he knows how to record acoustic guitars.)

It just goes to show you that, when it comes to microphones, you have to keep an open mind and let your ears guide you (rather than spec sheets or price). For some historical background on the SM57, visit Mix magazine’s TECnology Hall of Fame. For info on recording drums, check out Brian Knave’s article “Capturing the Kit.”